The Times Literary Supplement Feb 12, 2010 No 5576

Christopher Benfey Love for Robinson Jeffers C. J. Tyerman Going back to the Crusades Leon Plantinga From Mozart to Beethoven Jane Jakeman The tangled history of knitting THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

Once again, C6line's hour George Steiner

UK £2.70 USA $5.75

ILS

LETTERS

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George Steiner

Celine Lettres; Edited by Henri Godard and Jean-Paul Louis

BIOGRAPHY

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Justin Beplate

Carol Mossman Writing with a Vengeance - The Countess de Chabrillan's rise from prostitution Eric Ives Lady Jane Grey - A Tudor mystery

Diane Purkiss

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

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his has been a good week for businessmen and politicians in Britain who doubt the force of man 's malign influence on the climate and distrust the scientists who provide the data. Those with no doubts about human responsibility for melting glaciers make dark accusations of dirty tricks by polluters. Lauro Martines likens modern climatechange deniers to those sixteenth-century Venetians who desperately did not want their city to be stricken by plague and produced apparently scientific arguments to prove that it was not. He is reviewing a "brilliant study" that shows that despite the economic self-

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HISTORY

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David Armitage Lauro Martines George Garnett C. J. Tyerman

Gordon S. Wood Empire of Liberty Samuel K. Cohn, Jr Cultures of Plague G. J. Toomer John Selden - A life in scholarship Jonathan Phillips Holy Warriors - A modern history of the Crusades Thomas Asbridge The Crusades - The war for the Holy Land

SOCIAL STUDIES

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Lucasta Miller

Brian Dillon Tormented Hope - Nine hypochondriac lives

POEMS

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Robert Nye Simon Pomery

At Delphi Eulalia

LETTERS

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Christopher Benfey

James Karman, editor The Collected Letters of Robinson Jeffers With selected letters of Una Jeffers: Volume One, 1890- 1930 Friedrich HOIderlin Essays and Letters; edited and translated by Jeremy Adler and Charlie Louth

Ben Hutchinson

COMMENTARY

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The American poet Robinson Jeffers had his own solution for intellectual preciousness, moving and cutting rocks. He had failed his medical examination for First World War service and spent the time instead building a fantasy house inspired by Yeats and a tower with a dungeon and secret staircase to inspire his children. Christopher Benfey reviews the thousand-page first volume of Jeffers's letters, a publishing project considered by some to be as excessively demanding of effort as his masonry work. Jane Jakeman examines weighty cultural claims made for the lighter activity of knitting garments from wool. "The revolution will be knitted" is one of the sectionheadings in a book that finds the reviewer somewhat sceptical, despite the pleasing idea that Miss Marple stands in the tradition of the tricotellses.

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James Fountain Zinovy Zinik Then and Now

To a group of nurses - The newsreading and documentary poems of Joseph Macleod Freelance TLS October 29, 1954 - Runciman 's Crusades

ARTS

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Joshua Billings Toby Lichtig Peter Parker Jonathan Keates

Euripides Medea - In a new version by Tom Paulin (Oxford Playhouse) Tamsin Oglesby Really Old, Like Forty Five (Cottesloe Theatre) A Single Man (Various cinemas) Christopher Hogwood Haydn's Visits to England

FICTION

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Michael Sheringham Charlotte Bailey Heather O'Donoghue Tadzio Koelb Frank Burbage Patrick Denman Flanery Ruth Morse

Marie NDiaye Trois Femmes puissantes Atiq Rahimi The Patience Stone Henning Mankell The Man From Beijing Laurent Mauvignier Des Hommes Mati Unt Brecht at Night T. C. Boyle Wild Child Sara Paretsky Hardball

MUSIC

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Leon Plantinga

Daniel Heartz Mozart, Haydn and Early Beethoven, 1781 - 1802

HISTORY

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Jane Jakeman

Giorgio Riello and Prasannan Parthasarathi The Spinning World Joanne Turney The Culture of Knitting

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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James Fergusson

Judith Adamson Max Reinhardt - A life in publishing

PHILOSOPHY

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Brian Leiter

Frederick Schauer Thinking Like a Lawyer

CLASSICS

27

Mark Griffith

Myles Lavan

Aeschylus Persians. Seven Against Thebes. Suppliants. Prometheus Bound. Oresteia. Agamemnon. Libation-Bearers. Eumenides. Fragments. Persians and Other Plays Philip Parker The Empire Stops Here

Jonathan Mirsky Robert Carver

Frances Wood The Lure of China John Ure Shooting Leave - Spying out Central Asia in the Great Game

interest and preference for ancient truths in

Counter-Reformation Italy, great strides in understanding were made, advances which made possible the gains more often attributed to the Protestant scientists of the next century. As long as causes of plague were subjects of debate, less attention, quite reasonably, was given to hypochondria. The word that the Greeks used for gastric problems and Charlotte Bronte brought to depression, reached its modern apogee in the examples of Andy Warhol and Glenn Gould, cases studied in Brian Dillon's Tormented Hope, reviewed by Lucasta Miller this week.

Alyosha Karamazov, 'The Arabs ' , 'The Pregnant Widow' , etc

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

TRAVEL

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IN BRIEF

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MEMOIRS

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David Hajdu Heroes and Villains Howard Campbell Drug War Zone Sara Wheeler The Magnetic North Richard C. Sha Perverse Romanticism Christopher Lloyd What On Earth Evolved? T. W. Pritchard St Winefride, her Holy Well and the Jesuit Mission, c 650-1930 Adolfo Garcia Ortega El Mapa de la vida J. A. }'roude The Reign of Mary Tudor Terri Apter

Antonia Fraser Must You Go? - My life with Harold Pinter This week's contributors, Crossword

35 NB

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J. C.

Interviewing Oscar, The Catcher in the Rye, Gellhorn and Hemingway

Cover picture: Louis- Ferdinand C€iine, in Meudon, c 1955 © LipnitzkilRoger Viollet/Getty Images; p2 © AP Photo/Richard Drew; p3 © Reuters/Len Steckler; pS © Bridgeman Art Library; p9 © National Portrait Gallery, London; plO © Bridgeman Art Library; p12 © Bettmann/Corbis; pl7 © Donald Cooper/Photostage; piS © AP Photorrhe Weinstein Company; pl9 © Reuters/Finbarr O' Reiliy; p21 © Jean Luc ValietlOpale; p22 © imagebroker/A lamy; p23 © akg-images; p24 © Victoria & Albert Museum, London; p26 © The Bridgeman Art Library; p27 © Marilyn KingwilllArenaPAL; p28 © RezalGetty Images The Times Literary Supplement (ISSN 0307661 , USPS 021-626) is published 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, NYIII01-3113. Periodical postage paid at Long Island City NY and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: please send address corrections to TLS, PO Box 3000, Denvilie, NJ 07834, USA

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LETTERS

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Le Grand Macabre The constant voice of a pivotal writer in the history of the modern novel, who pours out inhuman tracts nce again, it is Celine's hour. As it was in the winter of 1932-3 when the Journey to the End of the Night exploded - there is no other word - altering crucial aspects of the French language and of the compass of fiction in Western literatures. Books by and about Celine crowd the displays of Parisian bookstores. Re-editions, paperback versions teem. Reportedly, Sartre, whom Celine loathed for his political opportunism and second-hand philosophy and whom he savaged in A l'Agite du bocal in 1945, declared not long before his own death, "only one of us will endure: Celine". A verdict to be enlarged and qualified by the realization, now a banality, that two bodies of work lead into the idiom and sensibility of twentieth-century narrative: that of Celine and that of Proust. Celine professed contempt for Proust's "Franco- Yiddish", for his involuted syntax and homosexual mundanities. He is "the Homer of the perverts". In a letter to Lucien Combelle on February 12, 1943, Celine defines Proust's style as Talmudic: "Le Talmud est a peu pres bati, con~u comme les romans de Proust, tortueux, arabesco"ide, mozaique desordonnee - . Mais au fond infiniment tendancieux, passionnement, acharnement .... enrobage des elites pourries, nobiliaires, mondaines, inverties en vue de leur massacre. Epuration" (note the barbed punning on "arab", on "Mosaic", and the use of epuration two years before that term was to assume its murderous connotations). Celine makes one concession only: Proust's rendition of his grandmother, reussi and justly marvelled at by "all Aryan critics". Celine senses that the Recherche is his only true rival. But as he informs Claude Gallimard (November 3, 1952), it is he, Celine, and not Proust who has inspired Joyce, Faulkner, Henry Miller, Jean Genet and lesser fry. All of "Midnight' s children" were to be his. In his invaluable Dictionnaire Celine (2004), Philippe Almeras lists twenty-seven different lives in one protagonist. Many of these have been studied and recounted. From the outset, Louis-Ferdinand Auguste Destouches is a traveller. The schoolboy visits England and learns English in which

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he will write letters. He is sent to Germany

and acquires a halting familiarity with the language. Conscripted in 1912, marechal de logis and cavalryman Destouches is an unsparing witness to the ensuing catastrophe: "Il y a une quantite enorme de viande et de sang repandu qui prete reflex ions ameres". He is mesmerized by what he foresees as "the agony of the German empire" and by the hell of combat. The severe wound that Celine suffers on October 27 , 1914, will affect him for life. Henceforth, decorated and partly maimed, he will define himself as a victim , invalidated in body and soul. Both the French

GEORGE STEINER Ceiine LETTRES Edited by Henri Godard and Jean-Paul Louis

2,034pp. Gallimard. €66.50. 9782070116041 nation and homicidal mankind owe him reparation. Women, beginning with the nurses in the army hospitals, are destined to look after him, to be pliant to his needs. In these, the erotic plays a complex but often marginal part. Disgust at those who elude military service, at profiteers and patriotic politicians, is boundless. The first "Celine" dicta begin to surface. "J'ai horreur des Noirs"; "Certain beings are predestined to be slaves". Though outwardly victorious, France faces a diminished and corrupt future. Having studied infectious

diseases and public hygiene, qualifications that will lead to a distinguished thesis on Semmelweis, Destouches, as he still names himself, spends several years in French Equatorial Africa. His medical activities alternate with the supervision of cocoa plantations. His experiences and the letters in which he reports them are similar to those of Rimbaud in Ethiopia. The years that follow find Dr Destouches studying problems of public health on behalf of the League of Nations, missions which take him to Geneva and the United States, where he falls in love with Elizabeth Craig, the first of many dancers who will people his volcanic career. Women and ballet come to crystallize Celine' s ideal of lightness within action, within meaning. If there is a conventional bite of anti-Semitism in a letter of late October 1916 - French literature is sentenced to being Jewish, which is to say " morbid, mercantile, hysterically patriotic" - there is at the same time an attach-

12.1961 New York "So many with a peach bloom of young years on them and laughter of red lips and memories in their eyes of dances the night before and plays and walks". Carl Sandburg's evocation of "Working Girls" (1916) seems to be brought to glamorous life forty-five years later, in this photograph of Marilyn Monroe with the poet himself. The meeting took place in the photographer Len

Steckler's apartment. The film star was "three hours late, but had an excuse. She had been at the hairdresser, trying to get her hair colour to match Carl's". Steckler has kept the photographs in a private archive, but is now releasing a selection in limited edition as The Visit, with Eagle National Mint. Sandburg was eighty-three, Monroe thirty-five. She died less than a year later.

TLS FEBRUARY 122010

ment to the philosophy of Bergson. Far more emphatic is Celine' s professed detestation of marriage, his strident resolve to be alone. Before long he was at work on Voyage au bout de la nuit. Composition most probably can be dated as from the end of December 1929. Gallimard's rejection of the manuscript, an editorial howler ironically parallel to its initial rejection of Proust, and the lastminute failure of the leviathan to obtain the Prix Goncourt, confirm Celine' s darkening misanthropy. "I rejoice only in the grotesque and at the frontiers of Death." But his certitude as to the stature and future of his book never wavers. It is "une oeuvre sans pareille" and "the great fresco of lyric populism" beyond anything in Zola. Its very punctuation, those famous dashes and exclamation marks, constitutes a revolutionary act. Sales, moreover, were mountainous. Here, also, Celine' s clairvoyance is almost eerie. As early as April 1933, he predicted that Hitler would come to dominate Europe. "Tomorrow all Europe will be fascist and Celine will be imprisoned." The prophecies become more graphic after a visit to Berlin: "Il se prepare la-bas (et pour ici) d'autres infections, d'autres immondes diversions sadiques monstrueuses. Des peuples entiers affames et masochistes" . In order to prevail, Hitler would have to invade the Ukraine. This in 1935. What Western statesman or political scientist, what Churchill or what Keynes displayed any comparable foresight? Celine's comments are like reasoned hallucinations. His insights into the "opaque sloth" and terminal pathology of the European spirit remain haunting. Glints of anti-Semitism persist, but are as yet fitful. It was during 1936, after Celine had found the USSR to be "an ignoble bluff', that his Jew hatred became obsessive and nauseating. The Jews are infecting the world and will be victorious everywhere. New York is nothing but a ghetto fuelled by their plutocracy. Zola was an Italian Jew in the pay of the Dreyfusards. Celine now begins spitting out his loathsome "pamphlets" which are in fact interminable tracts denouncing all Jews. It is they who brought on, and profited from, the First World War and the Bolshevik infamy. It is the Jews whose international intrigues will renew Armageddon and prevent that Franco-German entente which alone could safeguard Europe. "I am writing an abominably anti-Semitic book" : Bagatelles pour un massacre. After which there will be L' Ecole des cadavres and Beaux Draps. Quotation from any of these screeds is sickening. They are the pornography of hatred. Philippe Sollers, who has been writing enthusiastically about Celine since 1963, knows that these texts are "a la mesure, verbalement" of the mass murder they invoke and will help generate. He poses the bewilder-

4 ing question: how are we to grasp the fact that Celine' s deranged racism did not negate his literary genius? How can it be that Celine's nihilism "sous sa forme de passionnalite vociferante antisemite" produced masterpieces? A contradiction which a case such as Ezra Pound's crackerbarrel attacks on Jews does not parallel (ugly and infantile as these are). The sources of Celine's mania remain somewhat obscure. Memories of his wartime anguish had become cancerous. The Jews were self-evidently implicated, an appalling irony, in the possibilities of a recurrent horror. "Rather Hitler than Blum" was a slogan and sentiment shared by numerous Frenchmen. The descent of Western values into frenzied financial speculations, the adulation of the pure and applied sciences, the salient role of Jewish messianic instincts in Marxist socialism (some of whose therapeutic ideals he actually shared), warped Celine's judgement still further. But even this witches' brew falls short of an explanation. The demonic derangement reaches deeper: "le fanatisme juif est total et nous condamne a une mort d'espece atroce, personnellement et poetiquement rotale" . Celine has come to abominate the human species. La juiverie is not the bottom line: "l'homme suffit!". But the inextinguishable Jew somehow embodies the contagious vitality, the pandemic of the human species as a whole. As the acid witticism has it: "the Jew is like other men but more so" (there will be echoes of this reading in Sartre's essay on the Jewish question). Thus extermination may be the only logical conclusion. Celine's conduct during the Occupation was characteristically idiosyncratic . He authorized the publication and reissue of his infamous tomes. Together with other literary collaborateurs he accepted an official invitation to Berlin in March 1942. His monomania worsened: Racine's plays Berenice, Esther and Athalie are nothing but a "vehement apologia for la luiverie". Stendhal is manifestly a Jewish freemason. Marx's Jewishness is preferable to Montaigne's (who may, possibly, have had marranos antecedents). Even Maurras turns out to be a crypto-Jew. Celine informs the fascist leader Doriot that Jews must be swept away like faeces. Simultaneously, Celine took no part in German-commandeered cultural displays or propaganda, and voiced private disgust at the fate of individual Jews and resistants (who had quarters, of which he was perfectly aware, in his own apartment building). These antinomies climaxed in a scene which, if true, almost defies imagination. At a soiree in the German legation, he leaps to his feet and performs a dazzling imitation of the Ftihrer's voice and gestures, and instructs his terrified hosts that Hitler will lose the war because he is not anti-Semitic enough! The assembled dignitaries are said to have scattered in panic. This episode exactly counterpoints the grand macabre of Simone Weil's refusal of Catholic baptism because the Church of Rome was "still too Jewish" . Celine and his wife fled Paris on June 17, 1944. After a spell at Petain ' s phantom court in Sigmaringen, they made their way through the charred apocalypse of the collapsing Reich, reaching Denmark in March 1945. The years there proved purgatorial. Celine's spell in prison was harsh, as were the psycho-

LETTERS

"Nuages de Mars" (March Clouds), 1957; from tlie Lascaux: A painter ofpoetry (287pp, Flammarion. £50; $85; €60. 978 2 0812 2578 7) logical and material constraints during his enforced exile on the Baltic coast. At every stage, Celine fought like a cornered wild cat against the persistent threat of extradition to France where he had been sentenced in absentia and would, he was certain, have been executed like Brasillach or assassinated like his fascist publisher, Robert Denoel. Celine raged against the suppression of his writings and would-be piratical pubishers. He sought to refute the howling testimony of his detractors. He denied any involvement in Nazi atrocities, and even strove to obscure his antiSemitism. Gangsters, profiteers, masters of ambiguity such as Gide and Sartre were flourishing while he, Celine, infirm, gagged and near destitution, was being made a scapegoat for France' s hypocritical attempts to lie its way out of defeat and self-betrayal. The Lettres de prison and the Lettres des annees noires display Celine's rhetoric at its most resourceful. Efforts at rehabilitation began as early as 1948. Very gradually, Celine's name could be mentioned without automatic anathema. More or less covertly, some of his writings inched their way back into circulation. Amnesty came in April 1951. By July, the Celines were back in France. Now began the fierce struggle against continued ostracism, against the silence of retribution that stifled Celine's writings. His demands for repuhlication, for ohjective critical recognition, became clamorous. In 1956, the walls began to come down. The Voyage was issued in paperback, proving to be a revelation to younger readers and would-be imitators. Gallimard announced that the Voyage and Mort a credit would enter the Pleiade, a consecration for which Celine had striven tirelessly. His status as a "classic" was in sight. It was during these bitter years that Celine, isolated in Meudon, largely sequestered by contempt and organized oblivion, produced a trilogy of fact-fictions which towers in modern literature. D 'un Chateau l'autre,

Nord and Rigodon match, if they do not surpass, the force, the stylistic mastery of the Voyage. They contain scenes which, using the word with care, can be qualified as "Shakespearean". Too deaf to hear the approaching RAF fighter, Petain strides along on his morning constitutional with seeming heroism and sovereign indifference to danger. The sleazy buffoons of his retinue, aware of the swooping plane, do not know whether they should scatter for their lives. We are in the realm of Falstaff, though darkened. Bebert, surely the most famous cat in twentieth-century letters, leaps from the northbound train in terror. The entire horizon is that of a city in flames. Celine bounds after his beloved pet, desperate for rescue. The episode rivals Dante's Inferno, albeit with a touch of tenderness. Sollers entitles Celine "a specialist of Hell", one who in his own words knew death to be his "permanent mental horizon". Rigodon is the name of a quick-step dance, popular in the Baroque. Here Celine aims to enact that lightness and adroit elegance which had always drawn him to ballet. The old Celine still hisses. Gallimard is "a ghetto of pedegaulloresistants". He wishes to hear more about the negationnistes, the deniers of the Holocaust. The politics, the editorial practices, the books being produced around him are mostly garbage. But he is now confident that history will place him "between Rabelais and Dostoevsky". Celine completed Rigodon on the very eve of his death on July I , 1961. A major part of Celine's correspondence has already been available. It includes his letters to the Nouvelle Revue Fran,aise and his loyal supporter there, Roger Nimier, to his cherished translator Marie Canavaggia; to Albert Paraz, to Lucien Rebatet, to his lawyers in Denmark and France. Further letters have appeared in various memoires and cahiers. The Pleiade selection features all the editorial annotations and chronologi-

TLS FEBRUARY 122010

cal material emblematic of that monumentalizing imprint. Such voluminous erudition would both have exasperated and flattered Celine. His views on literary scholarship were less than amicable. The principles of inclusion are not altogether clear when so much has been previously published though often in truncated versions. Unlike Flaubert or Proust, Celine did not make works of art of his letters. He writes them as he breathes. The constant is his voice: argotic, raging, derisive, imperious, sometimes strangely gentle. As the editors note, this gentleness emerges most distinctly in the letters to the three most important women in his life. What takes shape across the 2,000 pages of this collection is a biography in motion, an inventory - both fascinating and repellent - of "works and days". Nevertheless, the obvious dilemma persists. Or Destouches was a caring physician, devoted to the poorest, most infirm of his patients. His love of animals, strays included, became legend. Celine's Jew-hatred is monstrous. Indistinct analogies lie to hand: Wagner's racism, Proust' s resort to sadistic voyeurism, Heidegger's engagement with Nazism, Sartre' s mendacities in respect of Stalin and Mao. Aesthetic, philosophic eminence is no guarantor of humane liberalism. The Celine case differs. Here is a writer of decisive stature, pivotal in the history of the modern novel, who pours out inhuman tracts. These are couched in an idiom whose yawping vulgarity, whose infantile, scatological filth make quotation emetic. Inferences of some mode of schizophrenia are facile. At some level the same magma is churning in the dynamics of Voyage au bout de la nuit and of Nord as in the Bagatelles. The man of incensed compassion summons the butchers. What memories begot this amalgam? "Je n'oublie pas. Mon delire part de la." The Celine case is, I believe, a singularity. (Praise be.)

BIOGRAPHY lisabeth-Celeste Venard had the kind of improbable career that even her friend and literary patron Alexandre Dumas pere might have hesitated to commit to the pages of his more exotic adventures. Born into poverty in 1824 and registered as a prostitute with the Prefecture de police by the age of sixteen, the young Celeste made a name for herself through her legendary dancing performances at the Bal Mabille, quickly rising to become one of the more celebrated courtesans of the Parisian demi-monde. Dubbed "La Mogador" by one of her admirers, who joked that it would be have been easier to defend the North African city against the French siege of 1844 than to ward off the attentions of her many suitors, she moved through some of the most powerful and well-connected circles of mid-nineteenth century France. In 1854, she scandalized respectable French society by marrying Count Lionel de Chabrillan, a handsome but hopelessly spendthrift young nobleman, and immediately embarking to Australia, where Lionel had accepted a post as the first French Consul to Victoria. If the newly ennobled Countess de Chabrillan had hoped for a clean break, she was to be disappointed: even on the other side of the world her reputation preceded her. The harbinger of her notoriety was the publication of her memoirs, Adieux au monde: Memoires de Celeste Mogador, a limited number of which had, despite her best efforts to halt its publication, rolled off the press in 1854 and arrived in the colony around the same time as the Chabrillans. She was snubbed by colonial society, the more antagonistic elements of which openly referred to her as the consul's "harlot spouse". The aversion was mutual. As Celeste de Chabrillan's diary entries make clear, the first glimpse of a land "fresh and green like new hope" soon gives way to antipathy as she dis-

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Harlot spouse JUSTIN BEPLATE Carol Mossman WRITING WITH A VENGEANCE The Countess de Chabrillan 's rise from prostitution

224pp. University of Toronto Press. Can $50. 978080209691 3

embarks in a world of mud and grimacing "ape-men", with dead animals scattered on the ground and rows of "misshapen trees" lined up "like a regiment of hunchbacks". Despite the conditions, her time in Australia was a fruitful one. Isolated and bored, she embarked on a course of self-study in the hope of bettering herself in the eyes of both Lionel and the social milieu in which he moved. Carol Mossman, in her absorbing Writing with a Vengeance: The Countess de Chabrillan's rise from prostitution, suggests that the Countess may even have sensed a shared identity with those tainted by the stain of transportation, given that the Australian convict remained, in social terms at least, "essentially unrehabilitatable" . (Such sympathetic identification did not extend to the colony's lowest social stratum, the Australian Aborigine, for whom the Countess felt uncomprehending revulsion.) Life in Australia was to provide a rich vein of imaginative material for the aspiring romanciere; when she finally returned to Paris in 1856 to sort out Lionel's increasingly messy financial affairs, she was carrying the manuscript to her first novel, Les Voleurs d'or, a racy melodrama set in the Australian goldfields that would later be adapted as a play by Dumas pere. With the publication of her

novel, Celeste de Chabrillan launched herself on a literary career which, according to Mossman, sought to realize in writing what she would never fully achieve in life: revenge and rehabilitation. More immediately, however, writing would be her primary means of support. The death of her husband a few years after their marriage left her in a vulnerable position, exposed to the hostility of the powerful Chabrillan family , who had been implacably opposed to the union from the outset, as well as a society only too eager to see this impudent demi-mondaine put back in her place. In the thirty years following the death of her husband, Chabrillan was to write some twenty-six plays, ten novels and a handful of libretti, as well as a second set of Memoires in 1877. (A third set of memoirs, covering her life up until a couple of years before her death in 1909, was completed but never published, and the current whereabouts of the manuscript are unknown.) While this prodigious output earned the Countess a measure of literary celebrity in her own lifetime, it was primarily as Celeste Mogador, author of the scandalous Memoires, that her reputation as a writer would endure. Writing with a Vengeance is a neat blend of social history and literary criticism. As a study of prostitution in nineteenth-century France, it examines the legal and cultural contexts in which the grand courtesans of Paris's demimonde rose to assume such a prominent role in the public imagination. As literary criticism, it offers a reading of Ch ab rill an' s oeuvre in which writing becomes a kind of therapy, a way of working through the potentially paralysing effects of guilt and remorse. If

5 the young Celeste Venard, indentured to a brothel as a flUe inscrite, was quite literally "redeemed" by a wealthy patron who paid for her release, the tantalizing promise of a wider social redemption would never be fulfilled in her lifetime. Neither her marriage nor her literary career conferred on her the social respectability she so craved; she would never be forgiven her early transgressions. Social ostracism is one thing, but it is difficult to square Mossman's assertion that Chabrillan was "a woman whose writing has remained draped in obscurity due largely to her ill-repute" with the sense that, but for her ill-repute, her writing would have long since sunk without trace. Lacking the ironic detachment or aesthetic refinement of female contemporaries such as George Sand and Olympe Audouard, she wrote about what she knew; and yet she was read, in large part, because of what her readers knew about her. By Mossman's own account, Chabrillan's novels were melodramas of guilt and revenge conveyed in rather pedestrian prose. Whatever the shortcomings of her individual works, Chabrillan, an all too rare example of the venal woman speaking rather than being spoken of, was uniquely placed in the literature of the period. Unfortunately, the deeper contradictions and inconsistencies of her writing are too easily glossed over in Mossman's writing-as-therapy reading, neatly aligning her decision to stop writing, more than twenty years before her death, with a kind of psychological closure. Writing with a Vengeance does honour to Celeste Venard, a remarkable woman who rose from a childhood of poverty and illiteracy by sheer dint of will , yet reading her literary works en bloc as a coherent master narrative, where "each act of writing moves her further along the trajectory of self acceptance", does little service to Celeste Chabrillan the writer.

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ecently the historian David Starkey called down wrath upon his head by saying Tudor history was "feminized". Eric Ives' s new book is evidence of the opposite tendency. Just as Eamon Duffy's book on the Marian burnings (Fires of Faith , reviewed in the TLS on July 24, 2009) is really a reassessment of Reginald Pole, so Lady lane Grey: A Tudor mystery is not a study of Jane Grey but a book on her chief supporter John Dudley, with additional essays on Jane and Dudley's son Guildford. Ives wraps Dudley in Jane's romantic skirts. Ives did a splendid job of showing that Anne Boleyn was not a pretty face but a serious political player. He cannot quite achieve the same for Jane, though this is a sympathetic portrait. The chapter on Jane' s imprisonment is particularly moving. The amhivalent relations with Lord Guildford Dudley, and their meetings in the garden of the Tower, spring to tragic life. However, what we learn does not make as much difference to mid-Tudor history as Ives promises. The book is really a series of essays. All are worth reading, all raise important questions, but some of the answers are better than others. Ives sees the attempt to make Jane Queen of England as entirely legitimate. He makes brilliant use of Dudley's pitiful postscripts in letters to the monarchs he served. He was insecure, fearing inadequacy, needing approval, indecisive in a crisis. But Ives neglects the

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Queen briefly DIANE PURKISS Eric Ives LADY lANE GREY A Tudor mystery

392pp. Wiley-Blackwell. £19.99. 978 1 4051 9413 6

possibility that insecurity might have been what led Dudley to place Jane on the throne. Later, Ives himself grows unsure about his hero. Dudley is abruptly a man of "justifiable" self-confidence and "high courage" . If Dudley was neurotic and confident, does either trait explain his ahrupt retreat from

Mary? Mary had artillery ; Ives shows that it came from the fleet sent to prevent Habsburg support from reaching her, but why did the fleet bend so quickly to "Catholic agents"? All such changes of heart become difficult to explain if everyone outside Mary's household saw Jane as legitimate. Ives often dismisses signs that Mary had supporters. The "huge crowd" that turned out to hear Mary proclaimed, the roars of approval that followed the reading ofMary's name - in stark contrast with the silence that greeted Jane - lead Ives to speak of "all this treachery". But probably

most of the crowd had never accepted J ane in the first place, since the "devise" to engineer the succession towards Jane that Edward VI created was very unlike Henry's proclamations on the subject. Henry's stuck to the usual law of primogeniture, and merely tried to overturn his own previous attempts to exclude his daughters. Edward's "devise" tried to bypass his sisters, his aunts and their progeny, and his elder cousins, to confer the throne on the young wife of the son of an unpopular chief minister. Edward's "devise" was plainly a fix , Henry's an attempt to resolve unusual problems. Historians now accept the "devise" was Edward's idea rather than Dudley's , hut Dudley was prohahly an infl uence, and the betrothal of Dudley' s son Guildford to Jane in April 1553 is crucial. Ives dismisses this as business-as-usual for the aristocracy, but it cannot have been accidental that Jane's older female relatives were bypassed for the succession in favour of the girl who had married Dudley's son. Ives says that while modern analysis shows "the real John Dudley", "masses of common people" didn't like him, and in East Anglia he aroused "vitriolic hatred" because of the suppression of Robert Ket's rebellion. But this makes it hard to see Jane's proclamation

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as successful with ordinary people, however much support she had among nobles. Jane's own refusal to try on the crown and the row she had with "King" Guildford are signs of her unwillingness. His mother's ugly insistence that Guildford deny Jane marital sex until Jane agreed to make him king is telling. Ives portrays Mary unenthusiastically "skinny", with a "loud and rough" voice, and "myopic" . Her birth was a letdown, and her education more so-so than Jane' s. Her love of dancing is ridiculed. Her courage is lauded, but as part of her religious fanaticism. Mary ' s reign is dismissed in 1066 and All That terms: "a legacy of burnings, domestic division, and foreign humiliation". Why didn't Jane' s government get hold of this worryingly unattractive menace? Ives suggests that Dudley thought Mary would crumble in a crisis "unless the mass was involved". But the mass

was involved. And therein lies the problem. Ives's brave though ultimately unpersuasive reading might help achieve a via media. Mary was not evil and Jane not a pawn. Mary was not sustained by a popular mandate, and Jane was not bound to fail. Despite themselves, last year's histories have successfully drawn our attention to the amazing fact that the protagonists here were women, both trying to do what no woman had ever done before; become monarch in her own right. Eric Ives and Eamon Duffy together might lead dialogically to a truth.

6

Universities Sir, - I feel both Tim Nau (Letters, January 22) and Michael Howard (January 29) have misunderstood the thrust of my argument. Things seem to be happening to higher education in this country without any proper debate on the large philosophical and moral issues at stake, but entirely in terms of whether this or that individual or department or university can or should "survive".

Politicians debate the number of "university places" that exist and that they want to make available, but there is no debate about the kind of education universities will offer in the future. I hoped that the Sussex example might allow us to have a national debate about the very thing Nau and Howard take for granted: Are we going to allow market forces to determine the nature of British universities in the twentyfirst century? There's a perfectly serious proposition which says that the country can no longer afford classicists, historians, philosophers and literary scholars. After all, none of these subjects is going to bring the country any immediate tangible rewards. Perhaps, too, universities should be treated strictly as businesses and those departments that do not attract enough students should be discontinued in the same way as Tesco or Marks and Spencer will discontinue a product that is not selling. On the other hand, does any country wish to forget its history entirely? To cease to read its great writers or those of the Europe of which we are a part? Research into price fluctuations in Kent in the wake of the Black Death , or Ronsard's relation to Petrarch, might seem very far from the concerns of most British citizens in the twenty-first century, but the history and literature that get taught in schools are dependent on such research, which in time alters and refines our understanding of the past. Were university departments of classics, history, philosophy and literature round the country to close, as many seem in danger of doing, because they could not pay their way, this would lead in the end to the disappearance of those subjects from the national consciousness. France, Germany and the United States seem to feel that it is important for these subjects to be researched into and taught at university level, and are pumping billions into higher education. Britain is cutting its higher education budget and squeezing those departments of classics and the rest that have survived the depredations of the past thirty years in favour of business and media studies. Is this something that every political party supports, however reluc-

'The Pregnant Widow'

Alyosha Karamazov Sir, - Two letters in the January 22 issue respond to my Commentary on The Brothers Karamazov (January I). Diane Oenning Thompson is apparently not familiar with my documented publications, the most recent of which is cited at the end of the TLS Commentary. I have never said or written that Alyosha Karamazov "would become a revolution-

ary terrorist". I say that Dostoevsky could have intended "any number of paths and plots" to a tragic outcome for Alyosha. For example, he could assume the guilt of the boys with whom he has bonded, and they could misconstrue his words, as Aglaya and Ganya misconstrue Myshkin (The Idiot) and Shatov garbles Stavrogin (The Devils). Informed sources suggest this turn of events in the Karamazov sequel. Pathology of course does not explain everything in Dostoevsky's fiction, but it is ubiquitous and certainly does explain many puzzling actions and traits that were always meant to be puzzling, but have often become incomprehensible without clinical history. In a famous but quite mystifying passage in The Idiot, Myshkin indeed struggles to explain his own pathology to himself (Two, 5). Presumably, fourteen years down the road (in the sequel), Alyosha would have gained important insight into the complex illness he has inherited, most strikingly from his mother. In a letter that I quoted from the Procurator of the Holy Synod,

[email protected] Thompson misreads the Russian word zhizn to mean " life" (in general), but in context it means "the vita; the life story" (of Zosima). And she misunderstands what Strakhov said about Dostoevsky's sporadic impulse to discuss sexual perversion in art and life, a topic still in need of careful study, for which new materials keep turning up. I suggest that Dostoevsky is in need of a new and knowledgeable biographer. For the time being, my choice would be Leonid Grossman, well translated into English in one volume with a good index. Joseph Frank wrongly says I claim that pathology explains Dostoevsky's "soaring themes". All the major characters are endowed with pathological stigmata Golyadkin, Raskolnikov, Myshkin, Stavrogin, Smerdyakov, the Karamazov brothers. Much of my work has sought to gain some insight into them in the light of medical history.

For the two heroes with the profoundest spirituality - Myshkin and Alyosha - the novelist meticulously describes their illnesses in textbook terms of the era, but their complaints provide no ultimate "clue to understanding" , only enhanced mystery. The virtuoso passages in which these figures briefly achieve "a higher state of being" are terminated (short-circuited) by irony (The Idiot, Two, 5; The Brothers Karamazov, Seven, 4). Finally, Professor Frank quotes the famous letter to Fonvizina (1854, not 1857), omitting the unequivocal opening statement: "I will tell you about myself, that I am a child of the age, a child of unbelief and doubt thus far and even (I know this) until my coffin is closed over me". The business that follows, about believing in Christ even if the truth is proven to exclude him, is pure sophistry and pointless bravado, since the matter can never be "proven" . This passage is parodied word for word by Dostoevsky sixteen years later in the pathetic faith of Shatov , reduced to absurdity by defending a Christ "mathematically proven" to be outside the truth (The Devils, Two, I). The complexity of this author, cunning and at times perverse, does not lend itself to the simple formulas of Joseph Frank and Diane Thompson. lAMES

L.

RICE

70 Grand View Drive, Eugene ,

Oregon 97405.

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tantly? That every vice-chancellor accepts? If not, we need to hear from them. GABRIEL lOSIPOYICI 60 Prince Edward 's Road, Lewes.

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'The Arabs' Sir, - In his letter commenting on my review of Eugene Rogan's The Arabs: A history (February 5), Edgar Pick accuses me of rushing to judgement by stating that, in Operation Cast Lead, Israel targeted UN agencies, hospitals, schools and residential areas. My sin was to have espoused the conclusions of the UN Commission into the Gaza War, led by Richard Goldstone, which Israel disputes. With regard to the Commission and its report, I note the following: that Richard Goldstone is an international jurist of great distinction who is a self-professed Zionist and lover of Israel; that Goldstone reinterpreted his UN remit to ensure that the actions of Hamas were inves-

tigated as well as those of Israel; that Israel, probably unwisely, refused to cooperate with the Commission; that the methodology of the Commission was as thorough as Israel's noncooperation permitted; that the language of the report's 575 pages was measured; and that its conclusions found both Hamas and Israel to have breached Geneva Conventions. I also note that, a year after Operation Cast Lead, the Israeli government has yet to launch an investigation into its conduct, and that recent reports of Army investigations and the views of some Israeli soldiers support some of Goldstone's conclusions. The object of Rogan's book, and my review, was to demonstrate that over the past 200 years, the great powers in the Middle East, the British, French, Americans and Israelis, have tended to place a low value on Arab life. From the evidence available, Operation Cast Lead was part of this pattern.

Kein Mann Sir, - The caption to the 1918 New Year's greeting card (January 22, p3) draws our attention to "the trident that the helmeted man in the Union Jack skirt was burying in the neck of the feral foe"; but this supposed "man" not only has a skirt (and some pretty feminine ankles), but is also wearing a breastplate moulded to fit prominent coned breasts. Surely the figure is derived from the warrior-maiden Britomart (i.e., "martial Britannia" - the subject of the greeting card) in Spenser's Faerie Queene, Book Three. This misunderstanding of the sex of the "helmeted man" is paralleled by the only (unintentionally?) funny line in Wagner's Ring, when Siegfried "disarms" what he takes to be a sleeping armed knight, and, on encountering his first female bosom, cries out, "Das ist kein Mann!".

Sir, - Bharat Tandon ' s review of my last novel (February 5) was reasonably fair, but I must admit that I was puzzled for quite a while by the following: It is as though [Martin] Amis has lived with the ideas so long that he can't let anything go - including some wincing thigh-slappers about

which

even

Thomas

Pynchon

might hesitate ("Sexual intercourse

had come a long way"; "Spin this out, Scheherazade"). wearily suppose that Thighslapper I caught Mr Tandon' s eye because of the imagined play on the word "come". The sentence reads, "Sexual intercourse had come a long way, and was much on everyone's mind" , where the verb calls no attention to itself. If I had written "come on a long way", would I have been spared Tandon's imputation? Maybe. I'll change it. And I'll go through this 470-page novel and make sure that that verb is never used in a way that would confuse your reviewer with a non-existent innuendo. Thigh-slapper 2 caused me more difficulty. At first I thought that, for Tandon, "spin" is a salacious double entendre. Then I realized that all he meant was that " Scheherazade" was "spinning something out". He doesn't say, but Scheherazade is in fact being asked to prolong an anecdote. So what? How else would you put it? Again, I was not attempting a witticism. So the only thigh being slapped is Tandon's. I wonder how often this happens to him; but novelists, surely, cannot be asked to control their more excitable readers. MARTIN AMIS c/o Random House, 20 Vauxhall

Bridge Road, London SW I. -------~,------

The pheasants Sir, - The late Or A. N. L. Munby, then librarian of King's College, Cambridge, recounted an anecdote concerning the British Museum's acquisition of the Codex Sinaiticus in 1933 (seeJ. K. Elliott's Commentary, January 29). King George V visited to view it. He was handed the book, and hushed officials and guests awaited his pronouncement. After some thought, he turned to the Duke of Devonshire: "How are the pheasants at Chatsworth doing this year, Devonshire?" (John Gretton, Essays on Book-Collecting, 1985). Now we can all play the king.

DA YID GREETHAM FRANCIS ROBINSON

PhD Program in English ,

MICHAEL YALLELY

Department of History, Royal

City University of New York , 365 Fifth Avenue, New York 100 I6.

9 Blatchington Hill, Seaford ,

Holloway , University of London.

TLS FEBRUARY 122010

East Sussex.

HISTORY he early years of the United States are surely the best-documented and most thoroughly analysed moment of state-formation in world history. In the four decades after 1776, the creation of state governments, a national Constitution, Congress, the Presidency, the Departments of State, Treasury and War, a federal judiciary and a new capital city foreshadowed the efforts of other newly independent societies to forge the instruments of self-rule. The same inventive ferment that produced the cotton-gin , the torpedo and the submarine also bred most of America' s enduring national symbols: the Declaration of Independence and the Liberty Bell, the Capitol and the White House, the Star-Spangled Banner and the Great Seal of the United States. Americans congratulated themselves on being the creators of "the greatest political phenomenon that all modern ages have produced", in the immodest words of the republican poet Joel Barlow. As the first successful modern instance of anti-imperial secession, the United States has had longer than any other postcolonial society to compile its archives, fabricate a heritage and generate historiography. Precocious, persistent and prolific though American historians have been in recounting their national origins, outsiders have been less captivated. Foreigners such as Tocqueville and James Bryce looked in the early American mirror to find a reflection of their own societies. Few social scientists, even in America, took the early United States as a model for theories of economic development or nationalism, with Hannah Arendt' s On Revolution and Seymour Martin Lipset' s The First New Nation (both 1963) the rare exceptions. Even the literary and cinematic heritage of the Founding remains meagre. Where is the American Tale of Two Cities or Danton, its Ten Days that Shook the World or Battleship Potemkin? At once undeniably epochal and imaginatively unengaging, the early American republic presents a formidable challenge for historical reconstruction. No one is better prepared for the task than Gordon S. Wood, the doyen among historians of the American Founding. Professor Wood' s major monographs and extended essays on the period comprise an oeuvre greater than any since George Bancroft' s in the late nineteenth century. A talent for narrative, a staunch commitment to political and institutional history and a well-made case for America's novelty, uniqueness and modernity have won him a wide general readership in the United States. His latest book, Empire of Liberty: A history of the early Republic, 1789- 1815, is the culmination of an interpretation Wood first unveiled forty years ago, and which he has pursued with amendments and additions ever since. Tt will stand as this generation's grand historical synthesis on the turbulent beginnings and dynamic development of the Early Republic. Wood sprang fully armed into the conflict over the meaning of the American Revolution with The Creation of the American Republic, 1776- 1787 (1969), a book that is both prequel and precondition for Empire of Liberty. In that dazzling debut, he argued that the Revolution "was meant to be a social revolution of the most profound sort" , but that its unintended consequences far outran the intentions of the Founders. The social contradic-

7

expansion. It is also a story of destructive tensions and potentially fatal conflicts, among them the bitter partisan strife between Federalists and Republicans, the beginnings of North-South sectionalism, slave-revolt and and Hamiltonian proponents of America's popular insurrection, the divisive responses future as a European-style centralized fiscal- to the French Revolution and the struggle military state. Wood rightly notes the irony to break free of British influence. Though that "the Revolution of 1800" brought the Wood does not note the fact, it is remarkable anti-modernizing Jefferson to power as the how often the rhetorical threat of civil war first President in the new federal city on the recurs in the period, as variously a response Potomac, as the head of an empire of liberty to the rise of democracy, an independentjudidesigned to spread American principles along ciary, the election of Thomas Jefferson, slave with legal and cultural pluralism to a whole emancipation and the secession of New England from the Union. All this testimony supcontinent. In a series of masterly thematic chapters, ports Wood' s judgement that "the last several Wood gives equal attention to westward years of the eighteenth century were the most expansion and the origins of judicial review, politically contentious in United States histo America's emerging civil society and tory", when the new nation could have come its entrenchment of slavery, to republican unstuck under the pressures exerted from religion and republican diplomacy. A penulti- within and without. mate chapter on "the strangest war in AmerYet, by 1815, the Union was still intact, ican history", the Anglo-American War of thirteen states had become eighteen (along 1812, resumes the chronological narrative with five territories), the Louisiana Purchase before the book ends, like The Radicalism of had doubled the country's size and the the American Revolution, with a pen-portrait United States was by the standards of its of the "bustling democratic world that time a tiger economy, enjoying twice the required new thoughts and new behavior" on growthrate of most contemporary European which the surviving Founders, especially nations. However, slavery remained a festerJefferson, looked with equal amounts of ing wound between an increasingly abolitiondisappointment and apprehension. ist North and an economically dependent Empire of Liberty is a chronicle of waning South. Wood concludes his account with a Enlightenment and waxing democracy, and dash of determinism: "The Civil War was the a narrative of social transformation, eco- climax of a tragedy that was preordained nomic commercialization and demographic from the time of the Revolution". It would

13 to 18

T

DAVID ARMITAGE Gordon S. Wood EMPIRE OF LIBERTY A history of the early Republic, 1789- 1815 800pp. Oxford University Press. £25 (US $ 35).

9780195039146 tions unleashed by American Republicanism generated a democratic energy that could not be restrained. Classical politics gradually withered in the years after 1776, to be replaced by an incipient liberalism, with the Constitution representing "both the climax and the finale of the American Enlightenment". Even as Wood traced these fundamental ideological innovations, he dealt less with the accompanying social transformations. Those would be the subject of his next major book, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1992), which was a salve for the revolution envy American historians experience vis-avis their French, Russian or Chinese counterparts. The American Revolution - bewigged and relatively bloodless, constructive rather than self-consuming, offering little in the way of liberation for subaltern groups such as women and the enslaved - could hardly pass muster alongside the great upheavals of 1789 and beyond. Au contra ire, Wood argued, the Revolution was "as radical and revolutionary as any in history": maybe more so if judged by its relative rapidity, its anticipation of all later revolutions and the scale of the social change it unleashed. In barely half a century, a hierarchical, deferential colonial society had given way to "the most egalitarian, the most materialistic, most individualistic - and most evangelical Christian - society in western history" , "the most liberal, democratic, and modern nation in the world": the United States of the late twentieth century, perhaps, seen in early-nineteenth-century embryo. Empire of Liberty absorbs the achievements of these earlier works, even to the extent of adapting whole sentences and paragraphs from them, though not always with a footnote to alert the unwary reader. At a little under 800 pages, it also substantially outweighs Wood' s previous books. If the length seems daunting, consider the alternative. Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick's The Age of Federalism: The early American Republic, 17881800 (1993) covered a dozen years in as many pages and was rejected for the multi-volume Oxford History of the United States, leaving a conspicuous gap in the series F:mpire of Liberty has now comprehensively filled. The book begins where The Creation of the American Republic left off, with the Constitution ratified, a new Congress elected and the first President installed. Wood's first eight chapters cover much the same ground as Elkins and McKitrick in a well-paced highpolitical narrative that peaks with Thomas Jefferson's ascent to the presidency in 1800. He portrays the political battles of these years as fundamentally ideological, with Jeffersonian Republicans and emergent Democrats arrayed against the aspirant Federalist " aristocrats"

not been previously compiled, combined engagingly forthright sociological analysis." -Katherine Hirschfeld (University of Oklahoma) in Human Rights Review

"Like Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, to whose memory the book is dedicated,Horowitz once stood faithfully in leftist zones of a political spectrum which is too often eager to blame America first for Castro's crimes. The Long Night of Dark Intent provides a factual and analytic presentation. Despite efforts to delegitimize Horowilz's independent outlook, he is rightly regarded as a dean of Cuban studies. He exemplifies Raymond Aron's realization that even though objectivity might be impossible for the human species, by making rigorous distinctions and comparisons, and by concretely defining terms, fairness is not ... Horow-

itz's vast sociopolitical canvas will rank always as a trustworthy and necessary

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HISTORY

8 take another 800 pages to substantiate such a gnomic claim, which sits uneasily with the generally more upbeat story of American democratization - at least for free white Americans - that Wood has consistently told throughout his career. The question-begging note on which Wood ends does not reflect the judiciousness of his whole vast volume. A synthesis of such scope necessarily depends on the work of a great many other historians. Wood deftly reconciles the interpretation of the early Republic as an incipient market economy with the seemingly anomalous fact that the United States was still overwhelmingly rural and agricultural in 1815. He also shows how the population of a country which publicly affirmed in the Treaty of Tripoli (1797) that its government was not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion" could have been so rampantly religious even before the Second Great Awakening of the early nineteenth century. As in his earlier work, Wood makes clear his disagreement with neo-Progressive historians who would organize the politics of the period around class conflict, but he does not belabour the point. His aversion to cultural history - a booming field in studies of the period - is expressed more by elision than by direct engagement. And for a work of such length, there are remarkably few slips, the most egregious being the description of the Swiss jurist Emer de Vattel- perhaps the most globally influential European writer of the late eighteenth H

century - as a "sixteenth-century thinker". Empire of Liberty will not soon be surpassed for its comprehensiveness or for its erudition. Yet whether it represents the climax or the finale of Gordon Wood' s interpretation of the Founding remains to be seen. The demands of a series telling a national narrative constrain him from making essential Atlantic, hemispheric and global connections, despite the assertive comparisons that pepper his work: for example, that the United States was "the most thoroughly commercialized society in the world", or the American press "the most important instrument of democracy in the modern world". The French Revolution, the slave revolt on SaintDomingue and the opening of American trade with India and China all have their place in Wood's narrative. However, links with Iberian America, the dynamics of commercialization in Asia, and even the indifference of Tokugawa Japan to developments in North America do not. These more radical shifts of perspective will be needed to place the infant United States within the broader regional and global patterns of imperial morphology, commercial development and statist resurgence, in what John Adams called in 1815 "the age of revolutions and constitutions" . Such cosmopolitan contexts might in turn bring the early Republic into discussions outside American history and beyond American historians. Until then, the very scope and solidity of Empire of Liberty may make it hard for others to see the trees for the Wood.

CHURCHILLS Based on never before seen family archives, this is the true biography of one of Britain's greatest dynasties. n:I.IA

L~:I.

A:-Itl .JOHN I.n:

'Essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the Churchills' - Randolph L. S. Churchill

Exact symptoms n this brilliant study, a leading expert on the history of plague finds the origins of our understanding of the disease not in the science of seventeenth-century Protestant Europe but in the heartland of Catholicism, Counter-Reformation Italy. Here, in the upper part of the peninsula, the epidemic of 1575-8 gave rise to passionate debate, issuing in a stream of writings that would challenge the tenets of classical , Arabic and medieval views of plague. Learned doctors in Milan , Padua, Verona and other cities continued to cite Galen, Hippocrates, or Arab authorities. And religious processions - cocking a snook at the idea of virulent contagion - were allowed to take place. But knowledge of the ancient authorities, and the idea of striving to placate God' s wrath by means of orchestrated prayer, did not stymie close empirical observation of the symptoms and pathology of plague. Old and new ways of thinking proceeded side by side. Yet in the teeth of plague, doctors and medical workers were revolutionizing the approach to it by rejecting Galenic and other mistaken assumptions about "corrupt air", humours and the malign configuration of the stars. They chose, instead, to concentrate on exact symptoms, contagion, the movement of people, poverty, filth of all sorts, water pollution, the sequestering of the infected and the intervention of the state. Tracts and other forms of discourse about plague had been a near monopoly of the university-educated physicians. But these savants were now joined by "surgeons, druggists, gentlemen magistrates, merchants, notaries, lawyers, judges, petty procurators, [city-] gate-officers, clerics from parish priests to the pope, and even artisans". It looked at times as though the barber-surgeons and other people in the front line of plague work were the true empiricists, battling against the physicians and university professors - men supposedly in thrall to the ancients and to the bunk dished out by the Neoplatonist Marsilio Ficino in his Consiglio contra la pestilentia (1481). But this was not so. The professors were themselves sharply divided, with some at the vanguard of the call for direct observation of the onset, symptoms and path of the disease, while others went on voicing the old theories concerning "pestilential" air and the mortal influence of heavenly bodies. In a report commissioned by the Venetian senate (1576), a panel of distinguished physicians from the University of Padua concluded that the current disease was not "true" plague, because " it did not satisfy Hippocratic or Galenic criteria". Later, after the epidemic had wiped out a quarter of Venice' s population, the star of the group, Girolamo Mercuriale, slyly recanted. But it must be emphasized that the group had met under a juggernaut of pressure. Like many in denial today, in the face of climate change, no Venetian in the 1570s really wanted official confirmation of the fact that the city was in the clutches of plague. For the senate and health authorities would then have had to step in with draconian measures, bringing trade to a halt. Shops would be shut down; thousands of artisans and workers, who lived from hand to mouth , would suddenly be out

I

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LAURO MARTINES Samuel K. Cohn, Jr CULTURES OF PLAGUE Medical thinking at the end of the Renai ssance 342pp. Oxford University Press. £65 (US $99). 9780 199574025

of work; plague-stricken houses would be barricaded, with surviving family members locked inside; the infected would be corralled into large quarantine facilities (lazaretti) or special plague-huts. And with food supplies sharply curtailed, famine would soar, especially among the many thousands of men and women without the wages to buy bread or other comestibles. Violence, moreover, would snap all controls, and the poor would be likely to revolt. How could the authorities stand up to all this? Nevertheless, at different times, health magistracies in Milan, Venice and other cities were driven to impose brutal strictures, having first organized the charitable distribution of food for the destitute.

"St Charles Borromeo Administering the Sacrament to Plague Victims in Milan in 1576" by Pierre Mignard (1612-95) An energetic concern with public health, more than with individual patients, edged into the forefront of medical thinking. The primary signs and symptoms of plague had been charted: explosive contagion, swift death, the household clustering of victims, continuous fever, headaches, vomiting, glandular swelling and buboes or other bumps. Poverty, filth and malnutrition were now consistently seen, for the first time, as the chief promoters, if not the causes, of plague; and this gave the lie to Galen ' s claim that the malady was not "true" plague if it failed to cut a swathe through the ranks of the rich and privileged. This elite, in any case, had usually abandoned the stricken cities long before the disease had raced out of control. Thanks to translations and direct influence, Northern Europe would learn from the change in medical thinking that issued from Italy's experience of plague. By 1598, Joachim Camerarius, for one, a prominent Nuremberg doctor, had issued Latin translations of five of the principal publications that came out of the years 1575-8. Floating fascinating detail on relentless research, Samuel K. Cohn's Cultures of Plague is a tour de force.

HISTORY

9

A great admirer of antiquity ames Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh, prodigious biblical scholar and " living library", said in his funeral oration for John Selden that he was " so great a Scholar, that himself was scarce worthy to carry his Books after him". Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, thought Selden ' s learning "stupendous". William Camden, "the Pausanias of Britain", regarded him as "our Scaliger" . Even Thomas Hobbes, normally so stingy in acknowledging the merits of other scholars, was effusive in his praise. Nor was Selden's reputation confined to Britain: Hugo Grotius regarded him as "the glory of the English nation" , This is an awe-inspiring list of admirers, but the breadth of Selden's learning was greater than any of theirs. His first works dealt with English legal history , but his interests expanded into history on a European scale, Classical antiquity, international law, philosophical jurisprudence, and thence into scriptural scholarship, and Middle Eastern languages more generally, including Arabic. As Clarendon pointed out, the range and abstruse nature of these interests might lead one to expect someone who had " never spent an hour but in reading and writing". Nothing could have been further from the truth. Selden became a key figure in the parliamentary opposition to Charles I, and was imprisoned because he had advised men who were "too fond of their country's liberty". But his political influence, then and up to his death in 1654, was much greater than that of a learned adviser on historical and legal precedents. In 1640, he was offered (and declined) the Speakership of the House of Commons. His scholarship informed the political stances he took, and the problems he investigated were to some extent determined by those stances. He tried to establish the true antecedents of current issues, "shedding light on our ancient law (whence also a completely new illumination is kindled from all sides on more recent law)". But he was no (mere) controversialist like William Prynne, who deployed his expertise in the public records to polemical effect. Selden' s works have endured. Many of them can still be read with profit. They are a chastening reminder of how much intervening generations of scholars have achieved , on the basis of the material that Selden and his generation did so much to unearth and edit. As in the case of that other seventeenthcentury English intellectual with a panEuropean reputation, Thomas Hobbes, recent historians have begun to pay Selden the atten-

J

GEORGE GARNETT G. J. Toomer JOHN SELDEN A life in scholarship Two volumes, 1,016pp. Oxford University Press. £ 120 (US $240). 9780 19 920703 9

of the history of mathematics, has , and in the space of a little more than a decade. He seems almost equally assured in all Selden's many fields. Few books can be written nowadays that require the typesetter to use Greek, Hebrew, Syriac, Samaritan, and Arabic fonts. Not unlike that of those who were personally acquainted with Selden, G. J. Toomer's admiration for him knows few bounds. That he can draw the bounds with such precision demonstrates his qualifications to judge. As a critic, Professor Toomer can be very severe - so severe that Sir Robert Cotton's few efforts are dismissed with nearcontempt. In Selden ' s youth, his prose style tended to be pretentiously ornate. His jejune attempts at verse are execrable, as Selden himself came to recognize. His arithmetic is sometimes slipshod. His Arabic vocalization always left something to be desired. Very occasionally he failed to exploit contemporary comparative philology to best effect. He sometimes took short cuts, and used misleading printed editions rather than manuscripts which were accessible to him. Even Homer nods. If Selden could somehow have read this book about him, he might have responded in kind at one or two slips in medieval history: for instance, Toomer repeatedly states that Magna Carta was "signed". The minor nature of such glitches serves to underline the magnitude of the achievement. It is not only in this respect that scholar and subject have, as often happens, developed a certain resemblance. The book's focus is, as its subtitle suggests, overwhelmingly on Selden's published scholarship. Within the various categories of that oeuvre (which disrupt the chronology a little, for Selden remained active in all his fields), Toomer's approach is to present an analytical summary of each of Selden's publications. Selden was quite different from Hobbes in that he had little inclination to present overarching, systematic explanations, founded on first principles which he had attempted to establish for himself. He preferred to pick texts apart, even when not writing commen-

tion he deserves. They have tended to concen-

taries. His method was discursive, even

trate on his interests in English legal history, both because they are disposed to find this subject congenial, and because it has the most obvious bearing on Selden' s career in Parliament. There has been a subsidiary move to present Selden as a political philosopher. But although law is the unifying theme in all Selden ' s writings, these two fields represent only a part of his scholarship. If its range staggered his contemporaries, now it seems inconceivable that anyone scholar could aspire to encompass it. Yet the author of the work under review, a retired professor

digressive. That is not to say that he had no clear ideas about how history should be written, or what a society's law could reveal about it. Clearly he did, and he tried to provide models for how such scholarship should be undertaken. But he revels in the minutiae of the evidence, usually written evidence. For instance, his Uxor Hebraica, which concerns ancient Jewish law on relations between the sexes, establishes that whereas the norm for sexual intercourse between a married couple was once a week (preferably on the Sabbath night), a camel driver's conju-

John Selden (by an unknown artist) gal obligation was restricted to once every thirty days, a sailor's to once every six months, and scholars studying the Torah to once every two or three years. In commenting in his turn on these luxuriantly detailed works, Toomer inevitably adopts a similar style. Many passages of his book read like densely argued footnotes, unashamedly writ-

ten in the first person. This is the only way in which justice could be done to the quality of Selden ' s learning. Selden's Table Talk, published long after his death, suggests a man whose conversational style was quite different from the prose of his scholarly works, which even his friend Clarendon characterized as "harsh and sometimes obscure". It is not Toomer's brief to explore this aspect of Selden , who began to enjoy a relationship with the Countess of Kent - some years older than Selden, who was accordingly described by one wag as "a great Admirer of Antiquity (even in my Lady Kent)" - during her husband ' s lifetime. After the Earl's death, this union seems to have produced illegitimate children, about whose existence Toomer is discreet to the point of coyness. Selden , it appears, did not avail himself of the indulgence permissible to a latter-day scholar of the Torah. Doubtless the Countess also gave him the jewelled hatband that he bequeathed to his Oxford college (Hertford). But we can only catch fleeting glimpses of this convivial , jovial Selden, whereas Selden the scholar has left a body of work which could be assessed only by a scholar as formidably learned as himself. He has been fortunate indeed in having at last found such an interpreter.

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A CULTURAL HISTORY OF THE MODERN AGE, VOLUME III The Crisis ofthe European Soul Egon Friedell With a naw introduction by Allan Janik Volume three of A Cultural History of the Modern Age finishes a iourney that begins with Descartes in the first volume and ends with Freud and the psychoanalytical movement in the third volume. Friedell describes the contents of these books as a series of performances, starting with the birth of the man of the Modern Age, followed by flowering of this epoch, and concludes with the death of the Modern Age,

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HISTORY

10 n a letter to the TLS last year (July 10), R. I. Moore complained of the excessive attention currently paid to the "relatively small fields" of crusading history to the exclusion of what he regarded as " more serious or central aspects of medieval history" . While some might argue about the Crusades' historical importance, and others challenge the implicit hierarchy of value in Professor Moore's strictures, crusading's continued academic and popular resonance cannot be denied. Now we have two more general surveys, one a " modern history", to go alongside recent "Short", ""Concise", "New Concise" and even just "New" histories; the other simply The Crusades. They cover much the same ground, both focusing on the wars for the Holy Land between 1095 and 1291. They share the desire to alter what they see as popular misunderstandings and prejudices. While emphasizing the centrality of religious idealism in crusaders' motives, they take pains to embrace non-crusader perspectives, stressing aspects of negotiation and accommodation between the protagonists rather than parroting the sloppy ahistorical "clash of civilizations" motif popular among modern jihadist extremists and certain First World fundamentalists. Both insist, in very similar terms, on the absence of any genuine historical link between medieval and modern conflicts in the Near East or between faith groups. Each of these hefty new books in addition raises the issue of public history and its relation to academic scholarship. While "aimed squarely at the general reader", it is not immediately apparent, despite its title, what exactly is " modern" about Jonathan Phillips's engaging and sprightly book, Holy Warriors. Its focus on the Holy Land crusades, its narrative and descriptive approach and its "characterdriven" technique are all highly traditional. Modernity may lie in the detail. The work revolves around individuals and the events they touched or determined. This "profusion of voices" lends an immediacy - not all of it spurious or imagined - and an apparently accessible human dimension familiar from other media. Each chapter is telegenic, televisual even. We get vivid re-creations of places, personalities and events, complete with the "flickering candlelight" in Guy of Lusignan's tent on the evening of July 2, 1187. Motives and ideas are imagined and conveyed through narratives of experiences. In accordance with current fashion , beside the familiar stories of military conflict between Christians and Muslims and its cast of Western apologists and commanders Urban n, Godfrey de Bouillon, Bernard of Clairvaux, Richard I, Louis IX - there are spokesmen of twelfth-century Islam such as the Damascene promoter of jihad al-Sulami and the Spanish traveller ihn .Iuhayr, as well as Saladin. The Syrian nobleman, writer and poet Usamah ibn Munqidh of Shaizar is recruited to suggest that relations at least between local Muslims aristocrats and West-

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Cross and crescent C. J. TYERMAN Jonathan Phillips HOLY WARRIORS A modern history of the Crusades 424pp. Bodley Head. £20. 9780224079372

Thomas Asbridge THE CRUSADES The war for the Holy Land 769pp. Simon and Schuster. £30. 9780743268608

ern settlers were not always marked by apartheid , intolerance and incomprehension. One evident hero of the book is the Emperor of Germany and King of Sicily, Frederick n, who recovered Jerusalem in 1229 by negotiation not bloodshed, only to be pelted with butcher' s offal by disgruntled Christians in Acre and pilloried by the ecclesiastical establishment at home. Frederick represents an alternative view of the possibilities and complexities of the medieval wars of the cross. Another, equally fashionable and often neglected, aspect is sketched in the portrait of Melisende, forceful queen regnant of Jerusalem (1131 - 52). Other crusade fronts receive varying attention, from vivid recreations of the capture of Greek orthodox Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade in 1204 and by Mehmed the Conqueror in 1453, to a brief, lurid account of the Albigensian Crusades and perfunctory descriptions of crusades in Spain, the Baltic and against the Ottomans. All this is as much to say to Phillips's general reader: "so, you thought you knew about the Crusades, but there is so much more". Thomas Asbridge follows a similar trajectory of ambition. Many will enjoy his confident prose and unashamed storytelling. Although, like Phillips, he uses the supposed personalities of a number of central characters to bind his story together, his selling point is a Near Eastern Muslim as well as a Western Christian European point of view. The main effect of this is to bulk out interesting accounts of Muslim Syrian and Egyptian politics and to devote considerable space to the prominent opponents of the crusaders in the Holy Land - Zangi, Nur ai-Din, Saladin and Baybars. Now that many more primary Arabic sources are available in translation, which Asbridge employs to effect, this is a reasonable strategy. However, while it is bracing to see the section on the final expulsion of the Franks from the mainland of Syria and Palestine at the end of the thirteenth century headed " Victory in the East", the added perspective oddly fails to transform an otherwise familiar account. The narrative is lucid but at times superficial. For instance, there is little feeling for the experience of how crusaders were actually recruited, as opposed to how they fought. The account of the Fourth Crusade is banal and ignores not-that-recent research on those who did reach the Holy Land. The narrative frequently precludes wider analysis, a weakness Asbridge attempts to mitigate by regularly laying into

An illustration by Dan Escott (1928-87) for Look and Learn usually undifferentiated "modern historians" in an attempt to claim an originality of interpretation which, more than once, is unwarranted. Inevitably, perhaps, in any general book on the Crusades, there is a lack of balance. Even though Asbridge restricts himself to the familiar grand crusades to the Levant, 80 per cent of the text takes the story only to 1192; the Third Crusade (or "The Trial of Champions" as it is dubbed) alone comprises a quarter of the whole. This can partly be explained by Asbridge's engagement of the non-specialist through close-up descriptions of military campaigns , sieges and battles. Military history of all sorts, from weapons and warriors to grand strategy, is demonstrably popular and marketable, even if, perhaps especially because, it can sit comfortably outside serious historical analysis of deeper and wider causes and effects. To support accessibility, Asbridge employs a rather gaudy adjectival lexicon: sieges are "gruelling", battles "fearsome", fields "verdant", violence "ravening", Saladin "seismic", commanders "redoubtable", volleys of arrows "withering", etc. This colourful verbal palate is matched by some analytical short cuts. On at least one occasion it looks as if there has been a misleading trip to Wikipedia. Elsewhere, Genghis Khan forged his empire through "sheer strength of will". Apparently, Henry 1Il of England could not join a crusade in 1245 because he was "preoccupied with the business of bringing his over-mighty subjects to heel". Does accessibility need to be this crude? Roth Phillips and, in a shorter space, Asbridge include the increasingly obligatory final section on how the medieval crusades became a model for nineteenth-century colonialists, monarchists, Roman Catholic apologists, missionaries, do-gooders of all persuasions and, today, significant numbers of do-badders. While plundering some excellent recent secondary work on the afterlife of crusading, Phillips has less direct knowledge of the historiographic sources themselves. Thus he appears to have misunderstood, or simply missed, the significance of William Robertson ' s recasting in 1769 of the Crusades

TLS FEBRUARY 122010

as unwitting agents of progress or its intellectual ancestry. Both he and Asbridge seem unsure of pre-1800 historiography in general. In the nineteenth century, attention is distracted away by Phillips (but not by Asbridge) from the influential malign nationalist and Roman Catholic supremacism of writers such as the French crusade popularizer Joseph Fran~ois Michaud in favour of a jolly romp around the Middle East posturing of Kaiser Wilhelm n. Phillips 's excursions along byways of cultural history produce some unexpected bathos: "the Jarrow March has some interesting parallels with medieval crusading". No doubt. On more recent abuse of historical memory, both make similar, effective rebuttals of historical parallelism. Yet while castigating post-nineteenth-century invented Muslim memories, they ignore - as do most commentators - the fuel still being lent these powerful myths by modern neoWhig historians, Western supremacists and Christian literalist enthusiasts. A visit to the internet would reveal that manipulation of the Crusades is not one-sided. Both books invite consideration of their genre. What is its point? As professor in a department that now offers MAs in Public History, Phillips is well aware of its opportunities and pitfalls. However, not all are handled with discretion. Phillips at one point avoids a detailed account of thirteenthcentury Palestinian political troubles as it "would be complex". Precisely. The past is complex, as both authors seek to demonstrate. Yet their methods raise questions as to the extent the awkwardness of the past can be packaged, glossed over, distorted or simplified in the cause of popular history. It is hardly a new problem. Phillips excoriates Steven Runciman for his hostile judgement of the Crusades, a product we are told, in a revealing borrowing from the historian Jonathan Riley-Smith, of his being a Calvinist. Yet Runciman insisted his book on the Crusades was not a scholarly monograph but an accessible literary interpretation. Like Phillips and Asbridge, Runciman was a popularizer, even if his readership was not one fed on celebrity and poster historians. Presumably the purpose of history for the general reader is to transmit the findings of scholarship more widely and to make this palatable by presenting a coherent but not necessarily degraded view of the past; clear but not simple. Phillips and Asbridge try to do this; so did Runciman. That they disagree - about the religiosity of the crusaders for obvious instance - is immaterial. They are close in intent and technique, even though only Runciman invents whole scenes. All three paint landscapes, imagine thoughts , display cultural stereotypes and reduce intricate historical forces to the experience of individuals. Each creates characters to inhahit swashhuckling narratives. All attempt to provide an Islamic balance. These readable new surveys add little to scholarship and are hardly alone in their field. Perhaps driven by the new official demand for academic work to possess " impact" beyond the research community, in essence Jonathan Phillips's modernity and Thomas Asbridge's perspective, while accurate and up to date, are as much those of the 1950s and the age of Hollywood as of the twenty-first century and the digital age. Either way, Professor Moore might not be amused.

SOCIAL STUDIES

11

There are monks in my skull rian Dillon begins his book of hypoin the psychic consequences of real physical LUCASTA MILLER chondriac lives by appealing to the symptoms than in paranoid delusions of reader' s own propensity for medical disease. Prou st's fear of the asthma from Brian Dillon anxiety: " You were well one minute ago, and which he undeniably suffered fed into TORME N TED HOPE this minute you are unwell ... you type both his eccentric, reclusive late lifestyle; hi s N ine hypochondriac li yes your symptoms and the name of the illness of consequent self-neglect and self-medication 277pp. Penguin . £ 18.99. which you are afraid into a search engine, - contemporary cures offered to asthmatics 978 1 84488 1345 and inevitably there are hundreds of hits". included belladonna cigarettes, though Proust preferred to fill his room with smoke Such an experience may be far from unu sual , but the trouble with "hypochondria" is that it concentrates far more on these than on the from fumigation powders - may even have turns out to be as protean and indefinable as "Hypochondriack" essays - and Villette contributed to his death. The chapter on its victims' morbid fantasies. You think this instead describe, in vivid ex periential detail, Proust is one of the most successful because is going to be a book about irrational health what we today might call depression and it contextualizes his experiences in the light fears, but its subject turns out to be far less anxiety wrought to the pitch of a nervous of late nineteenth-century theorizing on the easil y diagnosed than that. For Dillon, it breakdown. neurotic origins of respiratory allergies. But seems to encompass everything from frank For the Greeks, hypochondria had been an when Dillon refers to his subject' s " sensitive, delusion to psychosomatic symptoms to unambiguou s disease, located in the "hypo- neurasthenic or hypochondriacal character" , psychological responses to organic illness, chondrium" region of the abdomen. The gas- his adjectival drift makes one wonder what taking in depression and body dysmorphia tric element was retained in Robert Burton ' s the author is actually diagnosing in the along the way. late Renaissance "Windy Hypochondriacal patient. In fact, only the two most recent case stud- Melancholy" , whose symptoms included This book re minds us that, though easily ies - Andy Warhol and Glenn Gould - "sharp belchings" and "ful some crudities" as tri vialized, hypochondria is a big subject. It exhibit unambiguous "hypochondria" as the well as grief and fear. The affliction con- goes to the heart of the mind-body problem. term is most commonly understood today, in tinued to res ide in the stomach for Victorian Dillon , however, seems to tiptoe around the the sense of imagining dangers to health sufferers of "hypochondriachal dyspepsia" , issue, as if afraid either to offer his own when in reality there are none. The reclu sive such as Thomas Huxley and hi s fellow scien- thesis or to establi sh hi s own workable definipianist Gould threatened to sue his record tist Charles Darwin , who was plagued by tion of hypochondria. Nor does he always company, believing that he had been seri- his irritable bowels and kept meticulous locate hi s case studies full y within the hi story ou sly injured after one of its employees gen- records of hi s flatul ence. It is Darwin' s of ideas; he does not quite explain , for examtly placed a hand on his shoulder; Warhol' s attention to detail as a diari st of his own ple, why the seat of "hypochondria" moved fear of catching Aids was such that he health which makes him such an appealing couldn ' t eat a sandwich prepared by a cafe subj ect for Dillon. Were Darwin 's symptoms physical or worker who appeared camp. Warhol and Gould would have roundl y psychological in origin? Was he suffering resisted appl ying the stigma "hypochon- the bodily effects of mental stress? Or had driac" to their own terrors; it would have his stomach been weakened by a bug he seemed to them a humiliating admission that caught on the voyage of the Beagle? Yet they were making a fu ss about nothing. By again, was he a malingerer exploiting his contrast, Dillon has clearly chosen his earli- "health" as an excuse to absent himself from est two case studies, James Boswell and Char- undesired socializing? On the whole, Dillon lotte Bronte, because they were unabashed leaves such questions open. This may be wise in using the term to describe themselves: - it has been justl y said that the onl y Engli sh Boswell wrote a series of periodical essays monarch of whose cause of death we can be under the name "The Hypochondriack" , definiti vely certain is Charles I - but it does while Bronte' s autobiographical novel Vil- make one wonder where thi s leaves hypolette offers an in-depth study of its heroine' s chondria, and where Dillon himself stands "hypochondria" . on the ontological status of hi s subjects' illIn this inspiring and original book, These earlier subj ects were willing to call nesses. TLS editor, Sir Peter Stothard, re-traces Like Darwin, Florence Nightingale could themselves hypochondriacs not just because they were more self-knowing than Gould or focu s ruthlessly on her work because of the journey taken by Spartacus and his Warhol (which they were), but because the the invalidi sm which allowed her to retreat army of rebels. term had not yet acqui red its modern mean- from social life. In the past, her symptoms 'Haunting, erudite and ing. For them, it signified a state of mind and have been dismissed as psychosomatic, but beautifully written' body less localized, and perhaps more inter- she is now believed to have suffered from TOM HOLLAND. THE SPECTATOR esting, than a specific health delusion. chronic brucellosis. In her case, and that of Boswell' s earl y diaries - Dillon surpri singl y Marcel Proust, Dillon seems more interested ,Fascinating '

B

from the bowels to the brain. There are some compelling, if unresolved, lines of inquiry, such as the suggestion that hypochondria can enable, rather than handicap, the subj ect's work. Is a psychological tendency to monomania a precondition both for hypochondria and for such feats as formul ating the theory of natural selection, or writing A la Recherche du temps perdu , admini strating the health of the Briti sh Army, or achieving virtuoso mastery of the piano? Dillon hints that the desire for control - either of one's unruly body or of one's work - is what lies at the heart of all these cases . Perhaps because hi s subjects are so varied - Darwin' s bowels seem very far from the full-blown de lu sions of Daniel Paul Schreber, the lunatic lawyer who believed that 240 Benedictine monks were living in his skull , and whose memoirs were studied by Freud - Dillon find s it hard to generalize. There is rich material in this book, and a host of interesting ideas, but it feels undigested, which the absence of footnotes and index only compounds. Condensing nine lives and organizing them into an argument is an ambitious enterpri se; and while full of insights, Dillon 's book confirms that themed multiple biography is the hardest form of life-writing to pull off.

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TLS F EBR U A R Y 12 2010

LETTERS

12 Obinson Jeffers, who, according to Randall Jarrell, preferred hawks to men and stones to hawks, met the love of his life in an advanced class on Goethe's Faust. She was named Una, like a heroine out of Spenser, and she was married to a Los Angeles lawyer who played the cello. It was the spring of 1906 and Jeffers was taking graduate courses at the University of Southern California, but he had no idea what to do with his life. The son of a Pittsburgh professor of Bible studies, he was, like the parade of disaffected ministers' sons who have left their mark on American literature, from Emerson and Stephen Crane to John Crowe Ransom and James Baldwin, formidably well prepared for the family business. " When Robinson was eleven", we learn from James Karman's biographical introduction to The Collected Letters of Robinson leffers, " he was enrolled in a school in Leipzig so he could study Greek and Latin while learning German." Such erudition allowed Jeffers to graduate from Occidental College, near where his father had retired in southern California, when he was barely eighteen, but his head start left him disoriented for the new century. He tried Old English and Spanish Romance Poetry, medicine, forestry , long-distance running and nights of heavy drinking. The one thing he knew he wanted in his future was Una; by 1910, as Karman notes in his oldfashioned way, the Faustian friendship had "blossomed into love". "I am yours," Una, three years older, wrote, "and I shall walk softly all my days until we can take each other's hands and fare forth for those wild red vivid joys we two must know together." Her oblivious husband, Edward Kuster, discovered the affair in 1912; Robinson and Una were married the following year, the day after her divorce was granted. Those wild vivid joys were evidently missing in Una's first marriage. She had read Havelock Ellis and Emerson and she knew that something was wrong. "I knew it was normal, my passion - I knew it was right it should be satisfied and I felt I was being cheated" , she wrote to Kuster in 1912. "I came to feel you were not my equal sexually and when later we discussed it and you laid the blame on the condoms I felt you were making the excuse that came most easily to your mind. Later still when you began to say that you felt that the deed must be done, only with the idea of children in mind, I felt like shrieking with laughter." The tangled triangle reeks of D. H. Lawrence. So does the tone of Jeffers's ebullient love letters, with their confidence in "defiant" love: "Dionysus is the wild sun, and rules our happiness. Aphrodite is the shy moon, and commands our love. Fortune is the gay Goddess who intervenes" , and so on. Hy 1914, .Ieffers had decided to give up forestry and, supported by an annuity from his family , roll the dice with poetry. Anglophile Una thought the town of Lyme Regis in Dorset would be about right for a romantic new start, but the First World War intervened and they travelled north to the artists' colony of Carmel-on-the-Sea instead. They never left what Jeffers called, a little ambiguously, "our inevitable place". With its 500 inhabitants, un paved roads, and a mixture of upscale bohemians and lowly shepherds, Carmel satisfied both Jeffers ' s craving for wildness and isolation and

R

Shoot the horse A lavish homage to a contested reputation CHRISTOPHER BEN FEY James Karman, editor THE COLLECTED LETTERS OF ROBINSON JEFFERS With selected letters of Una letters Volume One, 1890- 1930 997pp. Stanford University Press. $95; distributed in the UK by Eurospan. £80.95. 97808047625 I 9 Una's need for sociability. A poet named George Sterling had come down from San Francisco and built a house early in the century; his friend Jack London had followed; soon there was a vivid community of writers, photographers and theatre people. "Everyone here has ex-es" , Una remarked, "so I am quite unnoticed about that." Jeffers and Una bought a few acres on a bluff near the water and built from local stone their amazing Tor House, a fantasy dwelling, dreamt up from reading William Morris and Yeats, with a couplet from Spenser inscribed on the beam above the master bed: "Sleepe after toy le, port after stormie seas, / Ease after warre, death after life does greatly please" . Jeffers dragged up great stones from the beach to build the adjacent Hawk Tower, complete with a dungeon and secret staircase for the twins, Garth and Donnan, who had been born in 1916. The strenuous daily labour of masonry revived Jeffers (who had failed the medical exam to fight in the First World War), physically and spiritually, and gave him a stock of stony metaphors to last a lifetime, as in these alliterative lines from his early poem "To the Stone-Cutters": For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun

Die blind and blacken to the heart:

During his long career, extending from the first flush of the 1920s until his death in 1962, when Tor House was surrounded by the modernist dwellings he detested, Jeffers wrote two kinds of poems. He wrote short lyrics such as "Morro Bay" and "The Place for No Story", often with the abrupt turn and closing couplet of the sonnet, and sometimes with an ironic hauteur and historical long view that recall Cavafy (a comparison Czeslaw Milosz, an admirer of Jeffers, made). But Jeffers also wrote long, gothic narrative poems in a distinctive long-lined and heavily accented metre that sometimes suggests Swinburne's experiments with classical metrics or Kipling's Anglo-Saxon "Harp Song of the Dane Women". These poems of incest and murder among the hill people along the coast are easy to make fun of, but remain powerful enough to read.

Robinson Jeffers at Tor House, Carmel, California, July 20, 1926

Yet stones have stood for a thousand years,

and pained thoughts found The honey of peace in old poems. Dark thoughts about the human prospect dominated his poetry from the start, counterbalanced by an intense love for amoral nature red in tooth and claw. He looked forward to the time "after mankind is scummed from the kettle" ("Love Children"). He wrote of Morro Bay down the coast: "That Norman rockhead Mont St. Michel may have been as beautiful as this one / Once, long ago, before it was built on". "The Place for No Story" , a beautiful poem written around 1930, looks forward to Gary Snyder in its quiet praise for the inhuman landscape: The coast hills at Sovranes Creek: No trees, but dark scant pasture drawn thin

Over rock shaped like flame; The old ocean at the land's foot, the vast Gray extension beyond the long white violence;

A herd of cows and the bull Far distant, hardly apparent up the dark slope; And the gray air haunted with hawks: This place is the noblest thing 1 have ever seen. No imaginable Human presence here could do anything

But dilute the lonely self-watchful passion.

" Roan Stallion", Jeffers's "equestrian Pasiphae", as his friend George Sterling called it, is the moving story of a woman of mixed ancestry, named California, married to a drunken brute. One night he brings home a horse won at poker; on a previous night he had lost her in the same way: " You lost me once, Johnny, remember? Tom Dell had me two nights / Here in the house". She finds the horse dangerously attractive (though as Jeffers hastily pointed out in a letter, "the affection is platonic"). When her husband tries to force himself on her, she escapes to the paddock; he pursues her and is trampled to death by the horse. Only then, rather reluctantly - " moved by some obscure human fidelity" - does California lift the rifle to shoot the horse. The tale, as Una noticed, bore a certain resemblance to Lawrence' s "St Mawr", also published in 1925. Perhaps the two men were alike in other ways. Mabel Dodge Luhan, who tried to enlist Lawrence to write about the New Mexico landscape around her establishment in Taos, recruited Jeffers for the same purpose, and with no better luck, after Lawrence moved on. Luhan did succeed in

TLS FEBRUARY 122010

fomenting some temporary marital discord between Una and Robinson during the summer of 1938, a shadowy episode of jealousy, involving one of Luhan' s guests, which resulted, apparently, in Una shooting herself, ineptly, in the bathtub. " He has seemed like Heathcliffe in Wllthering Heights - remember? Savage", Una wrote of Jeffers after her recovery. The second volume of letters may help to clarify what really happened. It is difficult to recover the excitement that once greeted a new book of poems by Robinson Jeffers. Edward Weston's hawk-life portrait on the cover of Time magazine on April 4, 1932, was accompanied by the claim that Jeffers was widely considered "the most impressive poet the US has yet produced" . Lincoln Kirstein, that versatile poet, ballet impresario, magazine editor and museum curator, was a precocious freshman at Harvard when The Tower Beyond Tragedy, Jeffers's version of Agamemnon ' s violent return from Troy, was published in 1926. Kirstein told Jeffers that he was so interested in the poem - "more than in any book except Moby-Dick!" - that he had, as Jeffers reported, " built and colored a scene and moulded two hundred little clay figures to act it for him, with cut hat-pins for spears", along with "sheaves of water-color sketches and photographs". The lavish new edition of Jeffers's letters certainly weighs in like Moby-Dick, with a thousand pages in the first volume of a projected three, joining the five volumes of his collected poetry. At a time when public and private subvention of such scholarly editions has all but disappeared, Jeffers's star treatment may raise eyebrows, if not hackles. His reputation remains vigorously contested, with admirers thinning out the further one gets from California. The publication in 1987 of an excellent Selected Poems chosen by the Californiabased poet Robert Hass provoked a vitriolic attack by Helen Vendi er in the New Yorker, who argued that Jeffers wasn't really a lyric poet at all, but rather a declaimer of unattractive ideas and unexamined griefs. " His oratorical stridency", vendler wrote, "seems to me that of a timid man having to prove himself durable and masculine." The sheer violence of the poetry put Vendi er off, as did the recurrent incest. And yet, as Delmore Schwartz noted in an article on Jeffers in 1939, "other writers who came to young manhood during the war, William Faulkner, Eugene O'Neill, Ernest Hemingway, have been similarly obsessed with violence, cruelty, rape, murder, and destruction". And incest, one might add. Jeffers's long poem "Tamar" is inspired by the same Old Testament tale that Faulkner drew on in Absalom, Absalom!. Jeffers wrote verse every day, nervously pacing in his upstairs study, but he was at best a reluctant letter writer. As a collection of literary letters, this one hegins ominously: seven of the first eight consist of promises to "write a letter to-morrow". He once wrote of his "almost perfect inability to write a letter or kill an animal" - though one of his finest poems, " Hurt Hawks", describes an act of euthanasia. In a rare moment, capti vated by Carmel birds, he lets himself go in a letter, writing of sparrows and phoebes, red and gold finches. "The great blue herons are grand creatures too, and the night-herons, the various hawks, - I was forgetting the meadow-larks!". Except for the love letters to Una, and a few to George Sterling and others to Ster-

LETTERS ling's friends after his suicide ("you can't praise a man for going to bed early"), most of the letters collected here are dutiful , apologetic, or begrudging. "I work indoors in the morning and lay stones and plant trees in the afternoon, expecting always to write letters at night", he wrote in a typical dispatch to Harriet Monroe in 1926; "comes night and one of my little trees could write a more intelligent letter". The inclusion of many letters by Una - this would be a much shorter book without them - makes Jeffers ' s reticence even more striking. For Jeffers, travel was no more conduci ve to correspondence than staying home. During the summer of 1929, the Jeffers family embarked on a seven-month journey to Britain and Ireland. They bought a Ford in Belfast and rented a cottage in County Antrim, near an ancient stone circle. Then they motored through the countryside, logging 5,000 miles and visiting every county except Wexford , in search of towers and other relics and ruins. "We've been visiting places not people", Jeffers told his publisher. They had a letter of introduction to "Old Mr Yeats" , rumoured to be visiting at Coole Park, but made a pilgrimage to his empty stone tower instead. Visits to prehistoric sites inspired some of

Jeffers's freshest poems, assembled in Descent to the Dead (1931). Some of these, like "The Broadstone" , look forward to similar work by Seamus Heaney: We climbed by the old quarries to the wide highland of heath, On the slope of a swale a giant dol men, Three heavy basalt pillars upholding the enormous slab,

Towers and abides as if time were nothing.

Una kept up a chatty travelogue for friends and relatives back home, but Jeffers wrote only a few perfunctory notes. They had tea with Virginia and Leonard Woolf, his British publishers. "Very fine sensitive creatures", Una commented, "alive to the most subtle & attenuated emotions and interchanges of thought. They interested me very much. She was detached when we first went in but soon was all charm & warm interest." One looks in vain in Jeffers's letters for insightful remarks about contemporaries or for illumination of his poems. There are stray remarks about poetic rhythm and its tie to "the beat of the blood, the tidal environments of life to which life is formed", and some interesting if acidic speculations about the origins of free verse: You know that French translators , realizing the

13

next to impossibility of rendering verse worthily into another language, have these many years been translating foreign verse into domestic prose, but line for line, separating the lines so as to indicate the original form. Thus di vided, a prose paragraph acquires a pleasant

deceptive sort of jingle, and I think this must be the fountainhead of the free-versists. But 1

object rather less to such a senseless way of printing prose than to the effeminacy and hysteria, as of a tea-party gone mad that seems

to have infected all of them. The last sentence is characteristic: he liked modern poetry about as much as he liked modernist houses. There is no mention of T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore or Wallace Stevens. Even poets who seem on a parallel track barely register; reading Frost for the first time in 1925, he finds "The Runaway" "delightful". The poets he noticed - Masters, Teasdale, Millay were poets who noticed him first, and what he praised in them - "nobility" and "sublimity" - dodged the issue of anything important shared. In a little poem called "Let Them Alone", Jeffers remarked that a poet "can shake off his enemies but not his friends" , and adds, "that is what makes / Hemingway play the fool and Faulkner forget his art".

By 1930, when this first volume ends, Jeffers was already a poet of magisterial refusals and rituals of " shaking off'. He did not write for magazines. He did not do poetry readings. He did not write prose - in a weak moment, having agreed to write something other than verse, he eked out a statement explaining why he would never write prose again. He did not, except under grave duress and almost always with a delay of several months, write letters. He laid stone, planted trees and wrote poems. In future volumes, we can look forward to his opposition to the Second World War, among other obstinacies. Jeffers was late in finding his vocation, but once he found it, he stuck to it. He had made his Faustian bargain - Una and the twins, Tor House and poetry, and nothing else - and he planned to see it through. By 1932, with three decades of poetry and tree-planting still to go, he was already imagining his own stony death, and had chosen "The Bed by the Window" he wanted to die in. We are safe to finish what we have to finish; And then it will sound rather like music When the patient daemon behind the screen of

sea-rock and sky Thumps with his staff, and calls thrice: "Come, leffers."

-----------------------------------------------------~-----------------------------------------------------

he age of Romanticism produced some of the most important of allliterary letters. In part this is because it was the age of the great friendships: Wordsworth and Coleridge, Goethe and Schiller. Yet even figures who were more marginalized in their lifetime produced letters of lasting importance: Kleist's correspondence documents his so-called "Kant crisis" in vivid detail; Keats coined his doctrine of " negative capability" when writing to his brothers. Do Friedrich Holderlin's letters deserve to be spoken of in the same breath? The story of Holderlin's life, of his Wanderjahre as a personal tutor between Frankfurt, Switzerland and Bordeaux that culminated in the famous Umnachtung (derangement) of 1805-06, followed by the long coda of nearly forty years of diminished existence in the care of a carpenter's family in Tlibingen, is well known. So too is the proverbial difficulty of much of his poetry, including his groundbreaking translations from Pindar and Sophocles into a deliberately distorted German that was meant to mirror the original Greek syntax. The letters and essays collected in this new edition, the most extensive in English to date, will do little to dispel the reputation for difficulty, yet they provide a vivid insight into the intellectual context of Holderlin's work. Among the letters to his family and friends , all the great men of the period are present: Goethe, Schiller and Herder most obviously, but also Holderlin ' s fellow students Hegel and Schelling. Yet for all the big names, for all of Holderlin' s attempts to cultivate contacts in intellectual centres such as Jena and Weimar, the abiding impression is of an existence on the margins. Holderlin's letters document his failed attempts to launch a literary journal, as well as his doomed love affair with Susette Gontard, the wife of his employer, who would become "Diotima" in his novel Hyperion. From a modern perspective, there is an unintentional comedy to some of the letters,

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Rhythm of ideas

particularly those that display Holderlin's sycophancy towards Goethe and Schiller. He describes ignoring a stranger at a reception at Schiller's house in 1794, for instance, only to squirm with embarrassment afterwards on finding out that it was Goethe, whom he clearly hero-worshipped: "sometimes it is like having a father in front of you, full of affection". A letter addressed directly to Goethe flatters him mercilessly in an attempt to solicit a journal contribution: Holderlin's timid statement that "I put my request to you not quite without hope of a favourable reply" hardly inspires confidence in his ability to make a living as a literary impresario. That Holderlin was not made to be a man of letters, but rather a lyric poet, is amply attested to in this correspondence. Where his

Yet by 1797, Holderlin is moving away from philosophy, writing to Schiller that "I now consider the metaphysical mood as a certain virginity of the mind". In 1798, he writes that philosophy is a "hospital where poets afflicted as I am find honourable refuge", and by 1799 he goes so far as to claim that he has made himself unhappy by cultivating "activities that seem to be less well-suited to my nature, such as philosophy". He still insists, however, that "poetry and art and religion [are) the vestals of nature", and is happy to construct an elaborate system opposing what he terms the "aorgic" to the "organic" . Like the early Nietzsche, whose distinction between the Dionysian and the Apolline he seems here to anticipate, Holderlin looks to the Greeks to unite poetry and philosophy, speaking admiringly of the "strictness with which the ancient writers distinguished between the different kinds of poetry". The essays explore such ideas at greater length. Yet anyone expecting essays in the traditional sense should be warned: these are often more like prose fragments , where the tortuous syntax is performative rather than analytical. Hans-Georg Gadamer described them as "prose sketches" , bemoaning their

attempts to cultivate the right contacts seem

"endless

hopelessly naive, his thoughts on poetry become increasingly sophisticated and surefooted. The lesson of these letters above all else is that Holderlin's life goal was to reconcile poetry and philosophy. His philosophical tastes can be broadly divided into two main groups: in an early letter of 1794 to Hegel he writes that "Kant and the Greeks are virtually all I read". Particularly in the early letters, Holderlin is fascinated by the post-Kantian idealism that dominated German philosophy of the period. " Kant is the Moses of our nation", he writes to his brother Karl.

reflection that constantly postpone their goals, conclusions and outcomes", and indeed Holderlin seems to want to develop a new kind of essay, one that hovers somewhere between poetry and philosophy in pursuit of the "rhythm of ideas", as he writes in his "Notes on Antigone". His "Pindar Fragments", the last work included here, combine translation with an elliptical commentary to produce a suggestive but hardly scholarly text, one that can only be termed an "essay" in the original sense of "attempt". Moments of lucidity flash up like gold in a murky river:

BEN HUTCHINSON Friedrich Holderlin ESSAYS AND LETTERS Edited and translated by Jeremy Adler and Charlie Louth 41 Opp. Penguin. Paperback, £ 14.99.

9780140447088

self-entangled

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convolutions

Achilles represents for Holderlin the "ideal being", since Homer "profanes him as little as possible in the tumult" by holding him back from the battle. This is indicative of Holderlin's influential view of tragedy: "the tragic poem conceals the intimacy in the representation because it expresses a deeper intimacy, a more infinite divinity" . In developing a threefold scale a la Hegel from the "naive" through the "heroic" to the " idealic" - Holderlin moves towards what one might call his version of the Kantian categorical imperative: "Put yourself through free choice in harmonious opposition with an outer sphere". Holderlin's letters and essays are certainly not easy, but they remain a crucial document both of his work and his times. If there is something essentially solipsistic about his poetry, then that is certainly true of the letters and essays: "I'm writing all this for my own sake", he claims at one point. While one occasionally misses the other side of his correspondence (this volume does not include any letters to Holderlin), the translators Charlie Louth and Jeremy Adler have rendered the letters and essays with commendable fluency, and their substantial introduction and critical apparatus provide excellent support to the reader. It is to be hoped that this edition will help Holderlin ' s strange, elliptical, enchanting prose to get the attention it deserves in the English-speaking world.

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14

To a group of nurses The newsreading and documentary poems of Joseph Macleod he Scottish poet Joseph Macleod (1903- 84) was an important member of the movement collectively known as the Scottish Renaissance, which emerged in the early 1940s. Other poets prominent in it were W. S. Graham, Ruthven Todd and Norman MacCaig, along with those already established in the 1920s and 30s, such as Hugh MacDiarmid and Edwin Muir. Today, it is Macleod ' s voice rather than his work that is occasionally remembered, as that of a wartime BBC newsreader: one of various professions he undertook during his long and varied life. From 1940 to 1953, Macleod wrote under the pseudonym "Adam Drinan" , a name inspired by the first two initials of his closest friend, the art critic Adrian Durham Stokes. (Drinan is the town on the Isle of Skye where Macleod's ancestors originated.) It was enough to throw his contemporaries off the scent, and the pseudonym remained intact until Macleod revealed himself in 1953. Macleod published a first, difficult book of poems under his own name, The Ecliptic (1930), through Ezra Pound' s persuasion of T. S. Eliot at Faber and Faber (" ... And still the engine, untransmitting, sucks / Cyclic serial zeniths from the flux "). However, his next book, Foray of Centaurs, was universally rejected, though sections were published in Eliot' s magazine, the Criterion , as well as Poetry (Chicago), and Andr" Breton ' s surrealist edition of This Quarter (Paris) . Though its opaque, high-modernist versification was applauded by the poets Basil Bunting (writing in Poetry) and Delmore Schwartz, both men acknowledged that Macleod was isolating himself from his readers. Writing in Mosaic in Spring 1934, Schwartz argued that the poem existed "on a level which must make it too difficult for most readers" . He wrote that Macleod' s poetry represented a crisis in contemporary poetry, a "serious matter" which marked "a further step in the removal of ' the wider public' from serious literature. No contemporary poet is more ambitious than Macleod, only two or three are as able, and no poem is less likely to be read than The Ecliptic" . "Poets are responsible for obscurity", Schwartz added, "and to a certain extent they can do something about the problem of communication." Macleod determined to address this problem. By the time Schwartz's essay was published, he had begun the second of his three years as Director and lessee of the Cambridge Festival Theatre. He corresponded with Schwartz and steadily began to absorb his ideas, as is evident from their exchanges over the following two years. His productions at the Festival Theatre were highly stylized, yet regularly received good reviews from the London press, and attracted prominent playwrights and poets from all over the world, in particular from the United States and the Soviet Union. George Bernard Shaw came to watch one of his own plays performed, as did Ezra Pound. Nevertheless,

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JAMES FOUNTAIN audience numbers dwindled, and in June 1935, Macleod was forced to resign as Director. In his farewell speech on stage after the curtain fell on his final performance, he cited the lack of support from the people of Cambridge as the reason for his departure. From 1933 to 1935, Macleod published poems in the Festival Theatre programme, which he edited. These poems, appearing under the pseudonym "Taurus" , the astrological sign under which Macleod was born, became gradually less opaque. In 1936, his only published novel , Overture to Cambridge, adapted from his play of the same title, was described in the TLS as "Wellsian". Macleod and his wife Kit joined the Labour Party in 1936, and he became secretary of Huntingdonshire Divisional Labour Party later that year. He was an unsuccessful Labour parliamentary candidate for Huntingdonshire in 1937/8. His interest in socialist politics stemmed from his fascination with Russian theatre (during the 1940s, he would publish three books on the subject, including The New Soviet Theatre, 1943) and his commitment to

speaker from Sutherland, while his mother came from Perthshire. Macleod' s strong attachment to Scotland emerged for the first time in these books. The Cove (1940), however, the first book in the Drinan "series", was set in Cornwal l. Stokes lived at St Ives, and this played an important part in Macleod's initial success in camouflaging his identity, since many editors and poets became convinced that Stokes was Drinan. The Cove's thirty-three poems are in stark contrast to the opacity of The Ecliptic: Thyme-scented cleft of moor with water trickling under dangled grass

lathe-milk for shoes' bore; the grasshoppers zizz like field-telephones, jump like bullets. War creeps back into verse 1 can ' t keep it ouL

My fellows suffer and starve and I can't stay here any longer.

This hook was Macleod's first attempt at documentary verse. He incorporates natural description with the realities of his time gorse becomes a form of khaki , militaristic metaphors are used to descri be grasshoppers, humans suffer poverty and starvation. The

the first time, to prevent the Nazis from contaminating the news bulletins with propaganda. As a result, Macleod became a celebrity; his duties as an announcer included the presenting of live concerts conducted by, among others, Sir Adrian Boult and Ralph Yaughan Williams (both of whom became friends) , and Bible readings intended to boost public morale. Despite his popularity among the British public, Macleod was occasionally ordered to correct his "Scotch pronunciation", which ultimately prevented him from reading Victory Report, much to his frustration. The BBC took a dim view of his activities as a Soviet theatre historian and his support of Anglo-Soviet causes. He never joined the Communist Party, unlike many of his close friends, particularly from the theatrical world, such as Michael Redgrave and Paul Robeson. But, perhaps by association, Macleod was named as one of George Orwell's thirty-eight crypto-communists in a survey commissioned by MI5 in 1949. The Men of the Rocks (1942), the second Drinan book, is a sequence which incorporates Gaelic assonances and a seal motif which connects to ancient Gaelic myth. At the end of the long opening poem, a "crystal longboat" dissolves and the sou ls of the dead sea-warriors on hoard turn into sea ls : Ship of glass in water melting Under the bubbly lipper settling Heads bobbing in waves' swell Men that have been are seals. Men that have been are seals, swimming Save my friend on a rock , sitting. Tears his human eyes have dimmed.

We gaze at each other on the skerries.

A detail from a self-portrait by Joseph Macleod, c1970 socialism, to giving a voice to the silent or ignored, was an important aspect of the new style of poetry he was now composing. Having begun a job at the BBC as a radio newsreader and announcer in 1938, Macleod learnt the importance of imagining his audience, and accommodating li steners by tailoring his presentation accordingly. He said he would always imagine he was addressing "a group of nurses" , since one such group had written to let him know they particularly enjoyed his broadcasts. The five books of poetry he wrote as Adam Drinan were focused on small communities. Macleod's parents were both of Scottish origin, as was his wife Kit. His father was a native Gaelic-

Drinan verse focuses on giving a voice to the silent and oppressed, and Macleod experiments with his documentary style throughout the series in an effort to find the ideal mode of delivery. In accepting one of the poems for the March 1940 issue of Horizon , Cyril Connoll y wrote to Drinan, stati ng that he liked parts of The Cove " very much", but he felt the sequence needed tightening. He continued: "The feeling and the language are rather vague, and your genuine socialism is not enough to bind them" . After France was occupied by the Germans in 1940, Macleod and the other three London-based BBC newsreaders were asked to announce their names for

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Drinan's narration focuses on the locality of Sutherland, portraying the effects of the Clearances and the subsequently impoverished inhabitants, and incorporates natural description as in The Cove. The sequence ends as the narrator is chased off the land by fascists , and is then killed as his motorcycle hits a trip-wire set up by a fascist laird, or English landowner. He turns into a seal and is reco nciled with the sea-warriors. The action occurs in an eerie combination of past and present. The sequence was published by the notorious I 940s Fortune Press. Though its opening connects to the close of The Cove, The Men of the Rocks is the first of three books to be located in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, each of which forms part of a personal investigation into the mythology and culture of the land of Macleod's forefathers. John Lehmann included eight of the twenty-five poems in his third selection of Poets of Tomorrow (1942) for the Hogarth Press, which also included Laurie Lee and David Gascoyne. Lehmann wrote "a great deal of it

I like very much indeed", and T. S. Eliot was "very well impressed", later including selections in the Faber anthology Modern Scottish Poetry (1946). In Scotland, Drinan was widely applauded for this work, and published in all its major literary periodicals, including the important Poetry Scotland, which played a central role in the formation of the Scottish Renaissance. But it was Compton Mackenzie who drew most attention to the book. In his initial letter to Drinan in March 1942, he wrote: "I have weighed my words when I say this is the first time in

15

COMMENTARY in lochan-tanks, topaz-c%ur with the blood of you two cousins;

my reading experience that anybody has succeeded when writing in English in conveying the peculiar quality of Gaelic poetry .... I think you have put more of the Highlands and Islands into twenty-five poems than the last twenty-five years of novelists". Macleod and his wife were invited to stay with Mackenzie at his home in Barra, and they remained firm friends until Mackenzie's death. The Gaelic quality that Mackenzie refers to can be seen in the following section of poem XIII, which praises Tom Johnson's Highland hydro-electric power scheme: The falls sound: and sound is a shape The falls shape: and the shape is a changing The falls changing ever the same.

and with your story a-trickle in your fingers sprinklings that baptise against the tribal sin, your surname still cascades in patronyms with the blood of you two cousins While Sutherlands are still inwith or outwith Sutherland, where sad or glad the Cat mell slipped blood of a wild cat death, where cat life chose a new cat man to be himself and the clan, cats and men together. And the alder tree has camouflaged its older self, like a factory in its camouflage nets, under a net of crotal; as if it were not wood but stone; and no security here except for rock.

Clever men stand to be stunned by the fall of them Blind see laughter in the pounding voice of

them Dead stones rise from their grip on the force

of them the force of the people the voice of the people where water breeds no slavery of fish where earth jumps beyond service of writs where gravity wrests itself from the rich.

Gaelic assonances, occurring at the end of each line, are to be found throughout The Men of the Rocks. There is a consistent focus on the locality of Sutherland and its sociohistorical past. The hydro-electric power scheme is portrayed as representing socialist ideals, the Highland waterfalls utilized for the economic benefit of Highland inhabitants, at low cost to the natural environment. The Drinan poetry is indicative of the poet's increasingly leftist leanings. By 1942, he was much in demand as a speaker at AngloSoviet gatherings, where he gave lectures on the vitality of the new Soviet theatre. He read work by members of the Scottish Renaissance at gatherings in Scotland, and became acquainted with Hugh MacDiarmid and friendly with Naomi Mitchison, both committed Communists, also named on Orwell' s list. He also had dealings with the Indian People's Theatre Association (IPTA), a Communist initiative to improve Indian theatre. The Ghosts of the Strath , a verse-drama of seven characters, appeared the following year (1943), also from the Fortune Press. The Gaelic spirit of the previous volume is maintained through Macleod's continued experimentation with Gaelic assonance, the dialogue centred on Donald Sutherland, a young Canadian with Scottish roots, and Aonghus Sutherland, a "cultured" young Scot. The italicized speech of Macleod's omniscient narrator addresses what a TLS review termed "the evils of the past and present" , as they "confront one another" in Sutherland, as Donald and Aonghus wander through the countryside of their forefathers in search of an old schoolhouse:

The "factory in its camouflage nets" is a reminder of the ongoing war in which British factories were routinely disguised in the hope of fooling the German bombers. The natural camouflaging of the alder tree is symbolic of nature's covering up of history. Here, Macleod continues where he left off in The Men of the Rocks, acting as advocate for the importance of the history of the Scottish Highlands, giving a voice to the unpoken bitterness connected with them.

n his essay "Is Scots a Good Language for Poets?" (1949), published under his own name in the Scots Chronicle (which was edited by the Scottish poet William Montgomerie), Macleod distilled his thoughts on writing, and the method by which Scots to some extent lends itself to poetry: "The person who wishes to write poetry, the serious responsible poet, is constantly seeking accurate and concise phrases; phrases, that is, which will correctly carry not only the ideas in his mind, but the overtones or implications of these ideas also, and just as accurately ; and the more concisely, the better". Macleod's recognition of the importance of concision is directly linked to the accurate portrayal of a place and its inhabitants: the use of Scots in his Drinan verse, more prominent in The Ghosts than The Men, was seen as a means of achieving greater social accuracy, and thus a more authentic documentary verse. Scots Gaelic vocabulary was included not merely for its curiosity value. The essay revealed Macleod's passion for Scots as a language: "The contemporary Scottish poet ... has an enormous treasury to draw from. Most peasant languages have a rich vocabulary to describe human activities and characteristics: Russian, for example, and Spanish. But I have never heard of any language that has the wealth that Scots has". Macleod's study of "peasant" forms of RusBy the tree by the burn where the fens grimace through the spray your mothers were sian and Spanish - the first of these the chief influence, as Russia was the country he born visited regularly to study the developments and your fathers ' bare knees torn on the bracken blades; and brown is the water of its theatre - led to the socialist realism of his documentary style, and his desire accurunning rately to transcribe the spoken rhythms of with the blood of YOlt two cousins. the language of Sutherland itself. Macleod submitted The Ghosts to the EdinA drop on your lip and Cl sip burgh BBC, and Edwin Muir and James Briof generous hill-liquor die accepted it for broadcast. The producer from the bubb of peat distilled

I

Robert Kemp described it as a "considerable advancement" in style from The Men of the Rocks. The opening pages focus on Sutherland, as location is evoked through dialogue: AONGHUS: The sun goes in. The wind comes out.

[t is cold. DONALD: It is wet. It pierces AONGHUS: Like grief to the bone, DONALD: like the mud in camp. And a minute or two ago we were baked. My curse on this climate and on this clammy place.

on it, the men mostly at war, the women remaining behind: Neeps be sowing, neeps for their return,

globes that will gleam and keep for their return .

What if we have no sleep for their return; be oats wherever there was heather for their return;

what if the soil beneath that you prepare for their return

is hard to the fork as rubber?

AONGHUS: But what are the mouth 's curses on sudden chilling

For their return

If they are not a cheat's curses

would you not give your souls?

on the place of cheating? The latter speech in this section, by Aonghus, suddenly turns the Canadian soldier Donald ' s bemoaning of "cold" local landscape and climate into a metaphor for the "mouth's curses on sudden chilling" in Sutherland, described as a "place of cheating" . Combining a Canadian with a local Sutherland poet allows for natural sensory depiction to be bolstered by native folklore, precisely the tone Macleod would have wanted as an advocate, providing both an inside and an outside view. On occasions, the book focuses on an externalized view of Sutherland, seen through Donald's eager and interested eyes, those of a tourist, and yet, importantly, connected to the land by blood, as was Macleod. That he approached the Edinburgh BBC rather than its head office in London suggests that he saw the work as of specifically Scottish interest. Hugh MacDiarmid dismissed the work as "backward-looking", yet this appears a blatant, or wilful, misreading. In The Ghosts, there is constant reference to Scotland's industry, as in The Men of the Rocks, and to the Second World War and its recent atrocities. It is likely MacDiarmid resented the book because he disliked Scots techniques being adopted for poetry in which the majority of the vocabulary was English. Another key Scottish modernist, Edwin Muir, praised the book in his review of it for BBC radio. On November 7, 1944, Drinan received a letter from Gordon Bottomley, an important proponent of verse drama, prompted by his having heard the broadcast of The Ghosts on the Home Service. Bottomley was also an English-born poet of Scots descent, and wrote that The Ghosts had given him pleasure of a special kind. Scotland has been waiting for

For their return will you not give your bodies? For their return is the bed sweet to the soul and body that ache for their return.

W. S. Graham, who had been in correspondence with Drinan since 1941, wrote to confess that he had used Women . .. as the model for his latest, and first major publication , The White Threshold (1949), and felt that the poem had a " vivid masculine perception I associate with your name". The final book in the Drinan sequence, Script From Norway, did not appear until eight years later (1953). The germ of an idea for the project can be traced back to a letter dated May 11, 1949, from Macleod to Gordon Gildard, a programme producer at the BBC: Early in the war 1 heard a programme of Norwe-

gian folk-songs from London, in which [ was struck by several melodic resemblances to those of our own Scottish songs. This is not

surprising, as the speech lilt or "melody" of Norwegian is not unlike that of people in our

Western Highlands speaking English. The book is highly original, written in the form of a film script whose foundation is the link between Scotland and Norway, as a group of Scottish and English film-makers attempt to make a film about Norway and its people. The importance of capturing locality in documentary style is adhered to throughout, particularly in the accurate employment of dialect. The six main characters who make up the crew are all from different areas of the British Isles, and each speaks in dialect, demonstrating Macleod's respect for regional differences in language, both English and Scottish. The book's main concern is the interconsomeone to discover a new form for dramatic nectedness of what Macleod sees as a deeply poetry which is not outerform: but latterly politicized world. Macleod's first wife died several months everyone has been distracted by the idea that drama must imitate life, ignorant that poetry after its publication, and a subsequent elegiac distils life. You are the first to understand that book about their final vacation together, A rhythm and metre are inherent in the frame- Ship Round Africa (1954), was seen as overly sentimental by the publishers to whom it was work. Macleod's next poetic work, Women of sent, and never puhlished. In 1955, Macleod the Happy Island (1944), undoubtedly con- married the Italian sculptress Maria Teresa tains elements of dramatic form, though it Foschini , and moved to Trespiano, in the was intended for radio rather than the stage. hills above Florence, where he lived until his Published by William MacLellan and Co of death in 1984. A final collection, An Old Glasgow on Naomi Mitchison's recommend- Olive Tree, appeared in 1971: it is a book of ation, it contains forty-seven soliloquies, autobiographical poems, two of which were each introduced by passages of poetic prose dedicated to his oldest friends, Adrian Stokes which resemble poetic stage directions. The and Graham Greene. most accomplished of Macleod's books, it brings the reader as close to reality as any of Cyclic Serial Zeniths from the Flux: Selected his poetry , through the earthy simplicity of poems of Joseph Macleod, edited and with an the verse, which focuses on the landscape of introduction by Andrew Duncan was pubBarra, the sea around it, and the people living lished last year.

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COMMENTARY

16 he boundaries between civilization and barbarity are, as we all know, easily transgressed because they are frequently invisible. What could be more visible, though, than the mound in the centre of the cobbled roundabout of Arnold Circle in Shoreditch? The flight of steps leads to the top adorned by an old-fashioned bandstand in the middle of thick shrubs and tall trees. It is a landmark of Victorian London, surrounded by the first council housing project, the multi-storey red-brick Boundary Estate, built in 1890. "Today, despite the lack of some modern amenities", a council leaflet says, "the flats remain popular with tenants and there is an active community." It looks idyllic and quiet during the daytime. I happened to be in the area when darkness fell , for the opening of an art exhibition, in which some of my friends were taking part. Take a few steps away from the council estate at Arnold Circle and you enter a bohemian world of artists and art dealers. Some of the newly opened galleries in Shoreditch are owned by Russian oligarchs and run by their wives, providing not only a diversion for otherwise unemployable spouses of multimillionaires but also a reputation-laundering investment. The gallery Calvert 22 is an exception: its curators have successfully managed to cross-breed the British art scene with Russian ideas about art as a clash of political ideologies. The show Re-Imagining October was named after Derek Jarman's short film Imagining October (1984), which was about homophobia on both sides of the Iron Curtain. But the overall conception of the exhibition, as far as I understood it, was to ask modern artists what their creative responses would be, had the Russian Revolution happened today. Most of the works were video installations. On the day of the opening, the BBC World Service called me and invited me to share

quality of the sound. I heard, though , behind my back the sounds of a crowd. Up on the top of the mound, in the bandstand surrounded by tall trees, I could see shadows against the backdrop of the moonless sky. Voices were bragging and swearing loudly. A whiff of marijuana wafted through the air. When I indicated to the sound engineer that the gang might pose a risk to our broadcast, he reassured me. They were just boys, he would talk to them and ask them to be quiet for a while. I grew up in a rough area in Moscow and also lived in the East End for a couple years, so I had some doubts in my mind that these boys would suddenly go quiet when asked politely by a man with an Oxbridge accent. But there was no time to argue, because the earphones were already on my head, the microphone was in my hands, and I was about to be plugged into a worldwide discussion about vooks. Having sorted out the technical side of the event, the sound engineer left me and went to the bandstand to negotiate a minute' s silence with the boys. He came back almost immediately, saying that this time we should hope for the best because the boys up there suspected us of being police officers and of recording their conversation. At almost the same moment a large black man emerged from the darkness, towering over us. "Gimme money, man", he said into the microphone. "If you're not the police, gimme money." The sound engineer kept on telling him that we were not the police, we were the BBC World Service. If we wouldn't give him money, the other said, he and his mates up the hill would create a noise loud enough for the whole world to hear. I watched the two of them disappear into the darkness, arguing, while I was left to speak to

the world. In my earphones, I heard the presenter introducing me to the listeners, asking my opinion about vooks. I heard myself talking about rooks (reading books): how the emotional value of the traditional volume grows with time, as the book begins to bear the traces of the owner's personality, of the hands that touched it. Remember Pushkin, doodling his self-portrait in the margins of the Russian edition of Byron? Meanwhile, down below, I saw a police car pull up at the street corner. A policeman got out and stopped another group of hoodies. The corner was well lit by the street lights and therefore clearly visible also to the noisy company in the bandstand. Their suspicions about the links between the police and our activity would be confirmed. I saw in my morbid imagination the sound engineer tied to a tree, bleeding, and some lads arriving out of the bushes to deal with me. Would I be able to defend myself, wielding the heavy BBC microphone as a weapon? Should I interrupt the highbrow discussion about vooks and cry through the satellite dish for help right now, to the whole world? In my earphones I could hear the voice of the BBC producer congratulating me on the successful performance. At that moment, the sound engineer re-emerged from the bushes. He was unharmed. In fact, he was smiling. The boys, he said, gladly accepted £ to as a disturbance fee. Or should it be called an honorarium? With CCTV cameras everywhere, these boys were themsel ves a video installation of a kind, and they, like real artists, only expected to be paid for the performance. In this re-imagined October, they had played the part of the revolutionary proletariat, we of the corrupted capitalists. I went back to the gallery. My comrades and compatriots at the exhibition, having heard what had happened to me outside, were convinced that the whole episode was staged by the gallery curators as part of the show.

were of their company-many of them inwardly were as conscious as the Syndic of Rome that the medieval dream was not Runciman's Crusades dead. But equally they were conscious of We look back to Dermot Morrah 's review of the appositeness of the second and more prothe final volume of Steven Runciman 's saic message, which, if memory serves, History of the Crusades. Go to www.the- looked forward in matter-of-fact terms to their settlement in civil life when their wartls.co.uk to see the review in full. fare should be accomplished. And that also hen the Egyptian Expeditionary was a motive in the Crusades. Generation Force entered Jerusalem in 1917 after generation of men went out to the East General Routine Orders communi- filled with exalted aspiration to win and cated to the troops two messages which had hold the most sacred acres of Christ's earth been received by the Commander-in-Chief. for Christ; and also determined to make a So far as they are preserved in the memory living in the land. The romance and the of a junior officer they ran: "No. I. From self-seeking cannot be disentangled at any Prince Prospero Colonna. 'To General phase of the story ; they pervade it all, and AlIenby's ever-victorious forces, on the they are constantly manifested in the same deliverance of the Holy City, the greetings individual minds. The tragedy of it is in the of Rome, the eternal, the triumphant.' proof, exhibited on a gigantic scale of space and time, of the inability of men to sustain No. 2, From the President of the Early Closing Association. the grandeur of their own ideal conceptions. That kind of disenchantment, no doubt, is a Though the fighters in that famous campaign were cautioned not to speak of phenomenon of all wars originally directed to great causes; the late C. E. Montague their enterprise as a Crusade-and rightly, for King George V, in whose name they wrote a memorable study of its operation in the "war to end wars" of 1914. But in the marched, was the most important secular ruler in Islam and many gallant Muslims Crusades there was a special and classic

element of tragedy-that their destiny of frustration was inherent in the nature of the edifice they sought to construct. It is impossible to understand their political history without taking into account the commercial and financial needs of the settlers and of the Italian merchants. These needs usually ran counter to the ideological impulse that started and maintained the Crusading movement. Outre mer was permanently poised on the horns of a dilemma. It was founded by a blend of religious fervour and adventurous land-hunger. But if it was to endure healthily, it could not remain dependent upon a steady supply of men and money from the West. It must justify its existence economically. This could only be done if it came to terms with its neighbours. If they were friendly and prosperous, it, too, would prosper. But to seek amity with the Muslims seemed a complete betrayal of Crusader ideals; and the Muslims for their part could never quite reconcile themselves to the presence of an alien and intrusive State in lands that they regarded as their own. So, with characteristic lucidity and penetration, Mr. Steven Runciman defines the irremovable flaw in the design to set up a fortress in the name of the Prince of Peace, as he approaches the end of his nobly proportioned survey of the whole history of the Crusades .

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ZINOVY ZINIK with a worldwide audience my opinion of a new type of electronic book. This gadget represented a giant leap forward in the industry, alternating electronic texts with video clips, so it was named "vooks" - video-books. The producer who contacted me was convinced that I, as a Russian emigre in London, would be a staunch admirer of the old-fashioned type of book. A discussion between me and the author of one of the first vooks, from the US , was scheduled for the same evening. I didn't want to miss the opening of the exhibition at Calvert 22, but the producer insisted. He said he would send a studio engineer to the area with some sophisticated phone receiver, equipped with a satellite dish, which would connect us with the US , broadcasting as if we were all in the same studio, regardless of our position on earth. I felt humbled. Fifteen minutes before the arranged time of the broadcast, my phone rang and I was invited to meet the sound engineer outside the gallery. The street was empty. A lonely row of lamp posts silently marched into the darkness at the end of the street, and to the heart of this darkness I was drawn inexorably by a hand waving. Someone in a white shirt stood among the dark shrubs on the mound of Arnold Circle. I climbed the flight of steps and there he was - the BBC sound engineer. In front of him, I discerned a cosmic apparatus, a receiving box with satellite dish. I was slightly surprised that he had chosen such an inhospitable place at such an hour, but the engineer explained that this was the spot with the best reception, unlike the street where the signal could be interrupted by passers-by. I appreciated his professional dedication to the

IN NEXT WEEK'S

TLS Elaine Showalter Dorothea Lange exposed Adam I. P. Smith John Keegan's American Civil War Carolyne Larrington Merlin, political prophet Alex Clark Mavis Gallant and what we know

TLS October 29, 1954

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ARTS om Paulin takes sides. His two previous "versions" (adaptations from existing translations) of Greek tragedies have been unabashed celebrations of transgression against authority and principled martyrdom. In 1984, The Riot Act deployed Sophocles' Antigone as a polemic against the accommodations of Northern Irish politicians, portraying the state of Thebes as a soulless bureaucracy and its ruler Creon as a cruel tyrant. Seize the Fire, broadcast in 1989, treated the Aeschylean Prometheus Bound as a playful hymn to revolutions artistic, intellectual and political. Both pay homage to their central characters as forces for justice and reason in oppressive worlds, making no secret of their didactic aim. While Paulin is often hyperbolic in pressing his point, the visceral language of both works, spattered with dialect and profanity, gives their messages urgency and power. His version of Euripides ' Medea for Northern Broadsides, then, comes as a surprise. Paulin seems to be discovering a new, more formal and lyrical register for the Greeks. Though he has not given up coarse language, he confines it to moments of emphasis. Where the earlier versions pointedly deflated lofty expressions and classical pomp, Medea is full of inversions of normal word order and gnomic utterances. The text never becomes stilted, but it tends towards self-consciousness. This more distanced idiom allows some lovely, expansive language in the choral odes and messenger speech, but can also lead to exchanges lacking in pathos. In a play that thrives on confrontation, the even-handedness of Paulin' s version may be a missed opportunity. And Medea provides ample occasion for outrage. The title character has come to Corinth with her lover Jason, after saving his life repeatedly and helping him to win the Golden Fleece. When an advantageous marriage presents itself, he throws her over to marry the daughter of the ruler Creon. Medea

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A quieter riot JOSHUA BILLINGS Euripides MEDEA In a new version by Tom Paulin Oxford Playhouse, and touring

finds herself alone in a hostile land where her presence is a threat to the most powerful man in the city. The set, dominated by a menacing gate strewn with animal hides, emphasizes the harshness of life in a foreign land, and the vaguely modern dress of the characters implies that the scene could take place anywhere. To reflect the antagonisms of Euripides' Corinth, the director Barrie Rutter splits the Broadsides cast between mainstays of the

company and newcomers. Nina Kristofferson as Medea and Cleo Sylvestre as her nurse are both darker-skinned than the rest of the cast, and their banishment, announced at the start of the play, appears an act of pure xenophobia. The division into Greek and "barbarian" is the staging' s most effective touch, and incorporates the company's regional basis into the plot, appropriate in a production that will tour the UK. Without overplaying parallels, Rutter shows the play's concerns to be utterly contemporary. After a tentative start, Kristofferson rises to Medea' s outsized passions. As she transforms from wronged wife to brutal avenger, descending into murder and infanticide, Kristofferson gives the action an improvisatory quality that allows the ending to come as a shock (as it probably was for the ancient

Nina Kristofferson as Medea, and the Chorus

17 audience, who would have been familiar with the mythical background, but not the details of Euripides' version). In contrast to Kristofferson ' s highly emotive style, the Greeks are comparatively understated. Rutter is suitably slick as Creon, but his finest moment comes in delivering the messenger's virtuoso description of Medea's atrocities. Andrew Pollard plays Jason with the smug air of a colonial conqueror, and Fine Time Fontayne lends colour as two sympathetic characters, a tutor and Aegeus, king of Athens. The chorus, however, lets down the intensity. Its three statuesque women are too cautious in representing the moral dilemma of their role, as they both sympathize with and shrink from Medea' s actions. They appear uncomfortable in their bluesy interludes, and only once, in a cacophonous ode celebrating the power of women , manage to create a strong impression. Their spoken words are also rather tepid, delivered in unison and in a monotone that does little to convey some of the finest writing in the piece. Greek choruses reward strong directorial choices, and Rutter's vision here needs clarification and amplification. Rutter' s direction and Paulin's translation bring out the tangled identifications created by Euripides' work, which depicts Greek morality as a fa~ade concealing ruthless self-interest, and makes the murderous alien woman troublingly comprehensible. What to make of this juxtaposition is still a burning question , and a matter of considerable scholarly debate. Yet the production might have pressed these tensions further, particularly in the final scene, which loses energy in a clumsy set change, and does not manage the chilling bitterness of the unhappy couple's final dialogue. The vitriol in Jason's despair and Medea' s triumph produced titters rather than shivers in the audience. For all the wisdom in Paulin ' s less partisan approach to Medea, one wishes - surprisingly - for more anger.

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et in a Britain beset by Alzheimer's disease, Really Old, Like Forty Five is a black comedy about how to deal with an ageing population in a society that idolizes youth. Tamsin Oglesby' s title, while amusing, is actually misleading: the kids can relate to the oldsters; it's the oldsters who can't relate to themselves. Three siblings in the winter of their lives take differing approaches to their senescence. Alice is a kindly, grandmotherly type, the functional side of dotty. She takes whatever fate deals her and never dares to complain. Her older sister, Lyn, is rather more pugnacious; she'd sooner jet off to Brazil and fandango death away. Even less willing to act his age is their brother, Robbie, who dresses like a teenager and brags about his sexual conquests. Various younger family members must negotiate the awkward interaction between the three. On a mezzanine floor above the stage, a policy wonk presents his latest scheme for urban fluidity: " senior lanes" painted on pavements to separate ponderous geriatrics from the busy crowds. More menacing is his proposal to give every pensioner a "function". Those still capable will alleviate the country ' s childcare dilemma by "adopting" a grandchild. Those beset by mental

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Age shall wither them TOB Y LICHTIG Tamsin Oglesby REALLY OLD, LIKE FORTY FIVE Cottesloe Theatre

unravelling will be sent to a flagship hospital ("the Ark") for invasive testing. Those unwilling, or already too far gone, will be able to select "the increasingly popular option of Home Deaths". The wonk has also devised an empathetic rohot to save on staff-

ing costs. When the patients get upset, the robot responds by stroking them; pretty soon, they've forgotten all about it. Oglesby has a penchant for "social issue" plays, having previously tackled racism, child abuse and domestic violence. Her touch tends to be light, even if her interests are not; here the impression is one of breeziness: the opening scenes are let down by a slapdash approach to characterization. Through no fault of the actors, nor Anna Mackmin's direction, we are left waiting for the siblings to present themselves as anything other than

vehicles: for sociopolitical satire, domestic comedy, and a welter of middle-par jokes. Paul Ritter's wonk is very funny - but irredeemably Pythonesque. Marcia Warren's Alice is endearing - but she isn't given opportunity to transcend her mustn't-grumble functionality. And when it becomes clear that Lyn (Judy Parfitt) is succumbing to dementia, we worry that this is simply an occasion for comedic miscommunication. There is a pleasing dynamism to the tension between the production ' s twin "levels" (physical and symholic) of family and government, hut hy the end of Act One, we are left with the unkind suspicion that the robot (gracefully played by Michela Meazza) is the most convincing character. Things improve after the interval, exactly as the situation darkens. Lyn's Alzheimer's is aggressively accelerated and she is taken to the Ark where she dips in and out of past and present. Parfitt handles the transformation well , pitifully evoking the mood swings of a disintegrating mind, the bursts of aggression, compassion and self-pity, confusion and lucidity, the fixation on certain key memo-

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ries. Things become even more fraught when Alice and Robbie surrender to the perils of age (the latter in a genuinely shocking scene), and the next to fall victim is the policy wonk himself. Drawn into the hospital melodrama are the siblings' children and grandchildren, one of whom is pregnant. There are reflections on generational cycles, quality of life, euthanasia and profit-driven drug companies. There are many moments of humour, which, as a counterpoint to tragedy, now work rather better. But the production as a whole remains confused. There is nothing wrong with making a tragicomedy about Alzheimer' s: indeed, it is, unfortunately, a condition that lends itself well to dark humour. But Really Old, Like Forty Five is not quite a tragicomedy. Rather, it feels like a hyperactive sketch show: tense, bold, imaginative, even tender at times, but ultimately a dramatic disappointment. Oddly, for a play with such overt themes, it doesn ' t really know what it is about - beyond the fact that people are living longer and it's becoming a bit of problem. The conceits are intriguing - the sinister role of State Care, the grotesque effects of the contemporary death taboo, even the empathetic robot - but they fail to hold together on the stage.

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18

Supercaliforniagymfit PETER PARKER A SINGLE MAN Various cinemas

ereading his novel A Single Man a few months after its publication in 1964, Christopher Isherwood felt the pleasure that comes from observing a job well done. "It achieves exactly what I wanted it to achieve", he wrote in his diary. "I keep dipping into it and always I feel yes, that is exactly the effect I was trying for." The effect that the designer turned director Tom Ford appears to be trying for in his predictably handsome but wayward film adaptation is altogether different from Isherwood's. Asked in a recent interview why he had substantially rewritten his source material, Ford replied: "The book wouldn't make a film. It's a bereaved gay man's internal monologue with no plot" . This is a somewhat reductive description ofIsherwood's slender but searching novel. Although in part about bereavement, the book is also about middle age and social isolation, about how it feels to be part of a minority; the necessity of letting go of the past and, most crucially, what it means to be alive. Nor is it plotless: modelling itself on Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, it takes place on a single busy day in the life of George, a British-born professor of English at a Californian university, who has been left alone after the death of his lover Jim, killed in an automobile accident. It begins with George waking up and, as it were, reassembling himself from his unconscious state. He drives to college, where he gives a lecture on Aldous Huxley, visits a woman who once tried to take Jim away from him but is now dying in hospital, works out at the gym, dines and drinks too much with an old friend , and goes skinny-dipping in the Pacific with one of his students, Kenny. Afterwards Kenny invites himself back to George's house, where George passes out, waking to discover that the boy has gone, leaving a note. He masturbates and falls asleep. The novel ends with speculation (influenced by Isherwood' s Vedantan beliefs) as to what would happen if George died during the night. Taking the book "as a starting point", Ford dispenses with any such speculation: his George has decided to commit suicide. The day in a life taken by Isherwood as a sample, a day that could equally and arbitrarily end in sleep or death, therefore becomes what George knows in advance will be his last day on earth. As a result, says Ford, George is "really looking at the world and learning to appreciate living". This is a somewhat romantic view of how suicides spend their last hours, and indeed the entire film is suffused

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Colin Firth as George and J ulianne Moore as Charley with a romanticism that is highly seductive but has nothing whatever to do with Isherwood' s book. Despite the imprimatur of the Isherwood estate (Don Bachardy is credited as Creative Consultant and puts in a glancing appearance as one ofGeorge's university colleagues), the film jettisons the substance of the novel, dwelling instead on buffed and beautifully lit surfaces. Apart from a touching and spectacularly

shot scene in which George encounters a young Spaniard in front of a huge poster for Hitchcock's Psycho, nearly all the changes Ford has made to the story diminish it. George's furious assaults on heterosexual complacency and his murderous loathing of children, which provide some of the funniest moments in the novel, are feebly toned down and augmented by some ill-advised instances of fantasy. Kenny ' s Nisei girlfriend, repre-

ho was the anonymous author of Christopher Hogwood the article in a London newsHAYDN'S VISITS TO ENGLAND paper of 1785, which proposed 116pp. Thames and Hudson. £ 12.95. kidnapping Josef Haydn and bringing him 9780500514603 to England? The writer in the London Gazetteer & New Daily Advertiser for January 17 January 1791 caused genuine excitement. painted a depressing picture of "this wonder- "Everyone wants to know me", he told a ful man, who is the Shakespeare of music Viennese friend. "If I wanted, I could dine and the triumph of the age in which we out every day." Haydn returned this lionizlive", as little better than the slave of "a ing with his own omnivorous curiosity, miserable German Prince at once incapable jotting down details of everything from of rewarding him, and unworthy of the hon- urban sprawl, coal consumption and food our" . Haydn, "the simplest as well as the prices to recipes for rum punch and the spegreatest of men", was held captive by "the cial arrangements made for Quakers when domineering spirit of a petty Lord and the paying their taxes or attending on royalty. clamorous temper of a scolding wife". London audiences evidently took some Surely, reasoned the unnamed journalist, it getting used to. Latecomers blundering into would be "an achievement equal to a pil- the concert room after a heavy dinner "were grimage for some aspiring youths to rescue so gripped by the magic of the music that him from his fortune and transplant him to they fell asleep", while more wakeful listenGreat Britain, the country for which his ers took audible exception to Haydn's pracmusic seems to be made". tice of beating time when directing his own Though unjust to the composer's patron, music. The Exeter organist William Jackson Prince Nicholas Esterhazy, the article was condemned "the vulgarity this exploded accurate both as to Haydn's marital unhappi- Practice, which is unworthy of the supreme ness and in identifying a lively British con- excellence of the band and highly disguststituency for his music. The dramatic rescue ing to the Company". Nohody, least of all plan proved unnecessary when, following the master himself, seems to have objected, the prince's death in 1790, his son Anton on the other hand, to the encores demanded disbanded the musical establishment, grant- for such symphonic movements as the ing its kapellmeister a suitable retirement lyrical adagio of number 92 in G major. pension. Haydn was then at liberty to accept As a "German" composer, Haydn was an invitation to London made by the impre- courted by the music-loving King George sario Johann Peter Salomon, who had III and Queen Charlotte, but soon found arrived in Vienna with generous contracts himself dodging the crossfire in their feud for an opera and six symphonies, together with their eldest son, the Prince of Wales. with the offer of a benefit night at the The composer's new opera L 'anima del Hanover Square concert room. filosofo, scheduled for production at the The composer' s advent in England in Haymarket, a theatre under the Prince's

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senting another persecuted minority, is replaced by a Beatnik Bardot, and the crucial scene of George' s hospital visit is omitted perhaps because even Tom Ford would have a tough job making terminal cancer look pretty. Ford' s successful career in the world of fashion and fragrances has also resulted in a nouveau gay conception of George, who improbably for a fifty-something academic at a small Californian college in 1962 - is kitted out in very expensive designer suits and able to recognize at a single sniff that a secretary is wearing Arpege. If the film falls very far short of the novel on which it is based, it nevertheless has other things to recommend it. It is well paced and beautifully designed and shot, using a muted 1960s palette that warms as the film progresses. Colin Firth gives a wonderfully understated performance in the title role, and is more than matched by the young British actor Nicholas Hoult, who not only invests the part of Kenny with charm and intelligence but both looks and sounds convincingly Californian. The scenes between these two actors are by far the best in the movie, although Julianne Moore makes the most of the thankless and underwritten role of George's friend Charley, a maudlin British lush abandoned by her husband and son, while Matthew Goode gives Jim an attractive solidity, so that we feel keenly what George has lost. Fans of the Swoonerama school of cinema, with plenty of slow motion and decorous male nudity, will enjoy A Single Man for what it is.

special patronage, was almost instantly a victim when the King spitefully ordered a ban on all operatic performances. By the time Haydn returned for his second English visit in 1794, however, the family rift was temporarily healed. He played duets with the Queen, sang to her gaggle of daughters and received the banality of George' s "Or Haydn, you have written a great deal" with becoming politeness. With its excursions to Bath and Portsmouth, where Haydn went on board a newly captured French warship, the second journey was as profitable as its forerunner. To this period belong the late quartets Op 71 and 74, the mature piano trios and the group of canzonets to English texts which includes a setting of Viola's "She never told her love" from Twelfth Night. Yet despite the money and adulation, Haydn was reluctant to follow Handel's example and settle in England. Revealed nevertheless by Christop her Hogwood's delightful essay, originally published by the Folio Society in 1980 and reissued to mark last year's Haydn bicentenary, is the reciprocal affection between the composer and his English public. A single jarring note at the close is sounded, perhaps not altogether ironically, in a diary entry by the painter Joseph Farington for June 19, 1795. "Haydn", he notes, "has attended the King & Queen, and at other times the Prince of Wales, at least forty times, and been kept up, contrary to his usual hours, till one or two in a morning and yet never had the smallest pecuniary recompense from any of them."

JONATHAN KEATES

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Melodrama and fantasy in the fiction of Marie NDiaye

Space to change MICHAEL SHERINGHAM

born in Bordeaux, but had lived for a time with his French father in Senegal. The action takes place in Rudy's mind over the course of a single day in south-west France as his life unravels in the aftermath of a heated exchange with his Senegalese wife. How could he have told Fanta that " she could go back where she came from" , when it was his getting sacked from the Dakar lycee where they both worked after a playground fracas with a pupil that led him to persuade her to move back to France? (The incident cost him his job.) Terrified that Fanta might leave him (she had done so once before in the five years since their return to France) , Rudy keeps trying to telephone her, perilously delaying his arrival at the kitchen refurbishment company where he is an incompetent and supercilious employee. When he gets through to her, he is reassured by the familiar

Marie NDiaye TROIS FEMMES PUISSANTES

317pp. Gallimard. €19. 978207 078654 I

t is said that when Jerome Lindon, the celebrated publisher of Samuel Beckett, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Jean Echenoz, read the manuscript of Marie NDiaye's first novel, he waited outside her lycee with a contract and signed her up at the school gate. Quant au Riche Avenir, published in 1985 when NDiaye was eighteen, has been followed by eight novels, including En Famille (1991), Rosie Carpe (2001), Mon Coeur a l'erroit (2007), and Trois Femmes puissantes, which won the Prix Goncourt for 2009. In 2003, her second play, Papa doit manger, entered the repertoire of the Comedie-Fran~aise , with the brilliant Malian actor Bakary Sangare in the role of the wheedling father who exploits white hypocrisy about race. She is the youngest author ever to have a play staged in the Maison de Moliere. NDiaye was born in Pithiviers, just south of Paris, and brought up by a French mother, her Senegalese father having returned to Africa when Marie and her brother were very small. She did not visit Senegal , or see her father again, until she was an adult. Her work draws on her biracial identity and explores the social repercussions of this increasingly familiar condition, especially in the context of the family. Her books are full of dislocated fathers and mothers, nosy aunts, useless ex-husbands, older sisters gone to the bad, unreliable brothers, and unsuitable substitutes for errant husbands and wives. The sorry repertoire of family politics tyranny, favouritism , exclusion, dependence, back-biting, vengeance - is handled with verve. Yet the question of the family is consistently imbricated with issues of race and ethnicity in a way that enriches the vision of family dynamics as well as broader issues of social exclusion and cultural exchange. The fruitful ambiguities this creates are further enriched by a writing style which is sinewy and sardonic, packed with idioms from many registers, combining realism and fable in a way that mixes Kafka and Cinderella, as one early reviewer put it. NDiaye's novels are set in rural or suburban France, or in France's former colonies, among hypermarkets, hairdressing salons and petits commerces. But they also feature fantastic elements such as sudden metamorphosis (often human to animal), mutilation and haunting. Trois Femmes puissantes is in some ways more conventional than NDiaye's earlier work. The protagonists of the three separate narratives are slightly interconnected, and the lives she depicts involve a manifest

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weariness of her voice - so different from

A girl running down a street in Dakar, May 1, 2009 transformation of awareness. Elements of the fantastic are there, but they work symbolically and do not disrupt the consistency of the fictional world. In her previous novel , Mon Coeur a l' erroit, the extraordinary rhetorical performance of Nadia, a bossy Bordeaux schoolteacher, is designed to disguise the North African origins of which she feels ashamed. This deceit is supported by the narrative's fantastic elements, such as the sudden appearance of a horrific wound in her husband ' s abdomen, and her discovery that the parents she abandoned in the dismal high rise she had fled as a girl are now living happily in the Mediterranean sun. NDiaye broke new ground in that novel by making her character's journey redemptive, as if she were outgrowing the carapace she had constructed in order to make her way. The three powerful women of her new novel are all victims, and the power the stories reveal is that of self-knowledge, self-belief and endurance. In one of two shorter narratives, Norah, a lawyer in her forties, responds to the summons of her Senegalese father whom she has not seen in years, and finds herself called on to defend her brother Sony against a murder charge in Dakar. In the second, Khady Demba, whom we have previously met as a servant in Norah's father' s house, is banished by her parents-in-law when her husband dies, and forced to follow the migrant trail to Europe. Like most (would-be) migrants she never makes it, and after terrible suffering and years of prostitution in a desert

outpost, she dies in the attempt to cross the border between Africa and Europe. NDiaye allows a backstory to emerge as her characters come to a new understanding of themselves. As she feels once more the full blast of her father's egocentric coldness, Norah senses his underlying vulnerability. By taking the five-year-old Sony with him when he returned to Africa, the father scarred the lives of his wife and of his daughters, but Norah now sees that Sony is as much the father's victim as she is. Consenting to stay and defend her brother at his trial albeit on her own terms, which may implicate her father - she achieves a new purchase on her frustrated existence and a new understanding of her partner's fecklessness. She also rediscovers a sense of community. With Khady Demba, NDiaye brilliantly depicts the birth of new consciousness, through the shift from inchoate impressions to focused thinking in an uneducated woman confronted with extreme situations. At times

risking sentimentality, NDiaye wishes to convince us of Khady Demba's "inalterable humanite", even in abjection, as well as portraying her character's enduring conviction of her own inalienable individuality ("indivisible et precieuse"). This is articulated through the character' s repetition of her name - "elle qui avait encore figure et nom Khady Demba" (she who was still Khady Demba in name and appearance). In the central narrative, a novella of 150 pages, we meet Rudy, the husband of Khady's cousin Fanta. Fair-haired Rudy was

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that of the high-flying young woman who had once landed a prize job in Dakar. Rudy insists that he will collect their son Djibril from school; the boy greets this news with undisguised distaste. In the course of the day, Rudy's anxieties about Fanta are displaced by the transformation he undergoes, as buried memories force him to acknowledge his hypocrisy, and to understand the sources of his self-pity and self-disgust. These turn out to be melodramatic (melodrama now replaces the fantastic). He is overwhelmed by memories of his coarse, pragmatic father, Abel Descaves, a swaggering colonialist who killed his African business partner in a brutal attack when he discovered he was defrauding him, then committed suicide in prison. But the key to Rudy' s moral rebirth lies in his ability to acknowledge the real motive behind his wild attack on the black pupil in the Dakar lycee. Recovering the true memory promises to restore Rudy's lost integrity, delivering him from the moral confusions that have kept him trapped in a "reve penible et avilissant" (a painful and degrading dream) - this phrase recurs a dozen times, along with other phrases from "Pauvre Rutebeuf' (Rudy used to teach medieval literature) and from his mother's religious tracts. Unorthodox religion often provides an escape route for NDiaye's lost souls. What make this Fanta's story as much as Rudy's are the signs (made clear in the final paragraph) that her wintry self-isolation in France had a negative capability that gave Rudy the space to change and the family a chance of rebirth. Trois Femmes puissantes is a fine book, full of NDiaye's narrative gusto, stylistic virtuosity and command of tone. If it is less wild and strange than some of her earlier work, it is no less bold. It will be fascinating to see where she goes with her next novel. In the meantime we can look forward to the release this year of White Material, the film starring Isabelle Huppert which NDiaye co-scripted with the director Claire Denis.

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you can tell your sins until it explodes, delivering you of pain and suffering. The routine with which the woman replaces the saline drip and moistens the man's eyes, replenishing him with life, gives her control over something that once controlled her. T ADZIO KOELB The water is suggestive of the fertility her husband lacked; along with her fascination Laurent Mauvignier with pure and impure blood and with her own DES HOMMES desires, it seems to give her power over the CHARLOTTE BAILEY 281 pp. Minuit. € 17.50. essence of life. She uses it to her own advan9782707320759 tage, pouring out her love, hate, desire and Atiq Rahimi hope, but this is only a precursor to the revelaTHE PATIENCE STONE ernard is little more than a tramp, tion of her great secret. While outside "They Translated by Polly McLean shoot awhile / Pray awhile / Are silent known to the people of his home town 136pp. Chatto and Windus. £12.99. awhile", the woman fights her own mission to which he has returned in old age, as 9780701184162 within her home, determined to find justice. Feu-de-Bois, because of his smell. When he She begins to break out from traditional gives his sister an expensive brooch for her he nameless woman at the centre of restrictions, coming and going between her birthday, there is an uproar among their Atiq Rahimi ' s novel The Patience house and her aunt's, where she has placed family and friends, and he is accused of Stone , which won the Goncourt Prize her two daughters away from the city's having robbed his mother. Furious, Bernard in 2008, does not provide a straightforward fighting , and offering sanctuary to a young fixes his rage on a North African guest, Said account of life in an Afghanistan under boy in need of affection. Chefraoui , and goes on a drunken rampage Taliban rule. That appears as a backdrop to Pally McLean' s translation captures the in the man's home, terrifying his wife and her personal experience of Muslim society novel's use of linguistic experiment to children, beating their dog when it rushes to as she describes her life for the first time and convey self-exploration. The woman's voice protect them. The local police and the mayor is distant, yet trusting and candid. Her pay Bernard's cousin, Rabut, a visit; they discovers her true voice. The woman is in her home at the bedside frugal, fragmented monologue winds in and want him to come with them when they go to of her husband, "the man", who is lying in a around the calls to prayer and the sound of arrest Feu-de-Bois in the morning. coma after being shot in the neck by a fellow gunfire, twisting the conventions of a linear Although the story is ostensibly Bernard's, soldier. She is reciting prayers for his recov- narrative to allow for an exploration of a it is partly told by Rabut. The day's events ery, mesmerized by the twisting of her beads. new, freer voice. The text is rich in symbol- make him think of Algeria, where forty Consumed by her vigil, she is desperate for ism: indoor colours oscillate between serene years earlier he and Bernard were among the man to show a sign of life. As she sits, green and fiery red,; outside, the world has thousands of conscripts sent to fight the the passing of time is measured by the man's a grey, smoky hue. Windows and curtains fellaghas in a failed attempt to repress the breathing, the slow drip of the salt water conceal and reveal , marking the frontier independence movement; about half the keeping him alive and the calls to prayer in between public and private life, truth and novel is given over to their experiences there. the street outside. Looking back on her lies. At the end of the novel , the birds, which In these memories, Rabut himself appears marriage, she gradually finds the words to are frozen in a pattern on the curtain, take in the third person, the ensemble pronoun express herself uncensored. flight as the woman is delivered from her "on", suggesting that Rabut must objectify Her husband becomes her sang-e saboor, shackled life. All secrets have been told and himself in order to bear his own thoughts. Deepening the impression of recollections the mythical black patience stone to which the patience stone finally explodes. held at arm ' s length, the narrative in this --------------------------~,------------------------- section is highly generalized, describing

At arm's length

Behind the curtain

B

T

Media myths HEATHER O'DONOGHUE Henning Mankell THE MAN FROM BEIJlNG Translated by Laurie Thompson 367pp. Harvill Seeker. £17.99. 978 I 84655257 I

enning Mankell's latest novel begins promisingly. His new hero is Birgitta Roslin, a Swedish judge, and Mankell ' s great strength as a crime writer is evident: his ability to make normal life compelling. Roslin, a sensible, middle-aged professional with minor health problems and a difficult marriage, is completely helievable, and it is to be hoped that Mankell will write more of her. The crime - the massacre of all the inhabitants of a tiny Swedish village - is far from ordinary, but Mankell carries it off, juxtaposing Swedish pastoral with the sort of scenes of war seen on the television

R

news.

But when the narrative leaves Sweden, the problems begin. The story skips back to the middle of the nineteenth century, when the forced labour of Chinese immigrants laid down not only American roads and railways, but also, as this novel has it, fierce grudges

Mati Unt

which persist to the present day. Mankell's depiction of the Chinese as implacable avengers with infinitely long memories is a worrying stereotype, especially odd in a novel which is all about colonialism. There is a dramatic shift in time and place as the story then moves to Africa, where Robert Mugabe puts in an unexpected appearance as a leader doing his best for Zimbabwe though wilfully misrepresented by former colonials - that is, the British media - and as part of a neo-colonial project to repeople parts of Africa from China. Meanwhile, Roslin has gone on a visit to Beijing (a convenient bit of sick leave), and the plot stutters as, in a strange city and without any knowledge of Mandarin , she follows up some of the leads from the Swedish massacre. With its wide geographical range, and political rather than criminal central focus , it is perhaps no wonder that the plot is stretched and sagging. The Man from Beijing ends without that unmistakable click of pieces falling into place; there is no denouement, and the question of Chinese aid to Africa - clearly a burning issue for Mankell, who spends half the year living and working in Africa - remains infinitely distant from the Swedish massacre, connected to the opening scenes by the most tenuous of threads.

BRECHT AT NIGHT Translated by Eric Dickens 174pp. Dalkey Archive Press. Paperback, £12.99. 978 I 564785329

n Brecht at Night, which was first published in 1997, Mati Unt depicts the consequences of the Soviet Union's annexation of the Baltic States (following the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1940), juxtaposing an account of international events with an imagining of Bertolt Brecht's brief stay in Helsinki at around the same time. Brecht - a Jewish Communist - was on the run from Hitler, but Unt, an Estonian forced into decades of allegory and veiled reference hy Soviet censorship, has little sympathy for the German exile. This becomes increasingly evident as Unt employs Brecht's own dramaturgical techniques to stress the shortcomings of his subject' s grasp on morality and reality. He explodes some of the myths surrounding Brecht, and his ironic criticism of his subject's decadence reveals the chasm between Brecht's public persona as the proletariat's playwright full of Marxist hyperbole, and his private life of mistresses, cigars and bourgeois luxury.

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routine, discomfort, boredom and fear, and only briefly focusing on particular incidents. Laurent Mauvignier presents the war as something personal, the experiences of individuals; any political conclusions must be left to the reader. While a sort of story gradually emerges, it never entirely differentiates itself from the whole, implying that no single action can be removed from the novel's scenarios - of the war, or of the cousins ' lifelong mutual dislike. Mauvignier reproduces the patterns, variously abrupt and drawn-out, of day-ta-day language. This insistence on the conversational is sometimes at odds with the over-stylized representations of speech and with the occasional elaborate simile: "Et alors on verra des images et on sentira des odeurs et on aura des pen sees qui s'imprimeront dans la memoire aussi profondement que les lames des fells dans la chairs des malheureux" . Bernard's story has to wait for a 140-page flashback to achieve relevance, and an early sense that the author is overstating the incident of the brooch is never fully erased. This is a flaw in a novel that effectively evokes the past. In the end, Des Hommes offers no real resolutions; we never learn what happens to Feu-de-Bois, for example, or even to Rabut, yet the novel as a whole is satisfying. Rather than tell a story in the conventional sense, Mauvignier has chosen to stress the moment of recall over the remembered events themselves, a testament to the idea that memory has its own value. The author calls up our interest and sympathy and even creates a kind of suspense in this strange anti-novel whose main character is, in the end, not one man, but men in general.

Unt makes use of Brecht' s distancing effect (Verfremdungseffekt), encouraging a sense of estrangement by interrupting the narrative with asides, historical documents and Brecht's poems, to ensure that the reader is constantly aware of the text's constructed nature. The narrati ve flows for only three words before the first of these qualifying intermissions interjects, and so the reader is ushered away from emotional empathy into an analytical mindset from where Brecht' s hypocrisy is starkly manifest. Throughout the novel Unt enjoys ridiculing Brecht's obsession with dialectics. Indeed, the very structure of Brecht at Night subverts our belief in the utility of dialectics as an interpretive model, because its genre is so unclassifiable. Perhaps Unt felt justified in his satire because of the parallels between his own life and Brecht's; both are innovative postmodern stage directors and writers. Unt's translator, Eric Dickens, describes the similarities as "a case of history almost repeating itself'; yet while Unt stayed in his homeland and allegorized, Brecht fled in search of capitalist comforts. This novel is a playfully ironic rebuke, but a rebuke nonetheless. FRANK BURBAGE

FICTION n T. C. Boyle's novel , The Tortilla Curtain (1995), illegal Mexican immigrants in Los Angeles inadvertently ignite a wildfire which threatens the gated community that is home to Delaney Mossbacher, a naturalist writing a series of essays about the dangers of invasive species. As the crisis tests his liberal bona fides , Mossbacher falls into a feverish xenophobia that ends with him hunting down the migrants, only to be thwarted by a mudslide, precipitated by the wildfire, which engulfs his community. Whether Boyle regards white Americans or illegal immigrants as the real invasive species is never entirely clear, but there is no denying that the Mexican characters are ultimately responsible for the novel's two major ecological disasters. Boyle's new collection of short stories, Wild Child, revisits the theme of the "exotic invasive", both human and animal , as well as the occurrence of wildfires and catastrophic mudslides. In "La Conchita", a Los Angeles courier delivering a human liver to a hospital finds his route blocked by a landslide that closes the freeway, inundating the town. The devastation forces him to reassess his myopic focus on the job at hand: "This was affliction and loss, horror unfolding, the houses crushed like eggshells, cars swallowed up, sections of roof flung out across the street and nothing visible beneath but tons of wet mud and a scatter of splintered beams". California has become an endlessly productive landscape for extreme human and natural experience. Boyle exploits this potential, and his knowledge of the Los Angeles area in particular, to place his characters in situations that have the flammability of a tinderbox. In "Ash Monday", he alternates narra-

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Feral folk PATRICK DEN MAN FLANERY T. C. Boyle WILD CHILD 304pp. Bloomsbury. £ 16.99. 978 I 4088 0480 3

tive perspective between Dill, a racist white adolescent living in the hills above the city, and his immigrant Japanese neighbours, professional Sanjuro, and his wife, Setsuko, who yearns for home. Like Mossbacher in Tortilla Curtain, whose dogs fall victim to them, Setsuko has seen coyotes nab her cat from ten feet away. Boyle seems to suggest that this, as well as landslides and wildfires, is the result of encroaching on formerly wild spaces. The more troubling message of the story - and of Tortilla Curtain - is that the "invasive" individual, here represented by the Japanese couple with their garden of exotic plants, will always bring about disaster. While Dill horrifies his neighbours by carelessly fuelling his barbecue with gasoline, it is Setsuko's well-intentioned lighting of incense that sets the hillside and her neighbours' house on fire in a landscape desiccated by the scorching Santa Ana winds. To emphasize what Boyle seems to regard as the madness of introducing the exotic, Dill reminisces about his mother's boyfriend breeding South American chinchillas. The animals had to be kept in an air-conditioned environment cooler than 80 degrees Fahrenheit and all of them died from heat exhaus-

tion when the electricity failed on a hot day. Similarly, in "Thirteen Hundred Rats", a widower buys a Burmese python as a pet and is warned never to let the temperature of the house fall below 80 degrees. There are other odd occasions of repetition: in the same story the narrator has shelties called Tim and Tim n, while in another a couple clones their Afghan hound, Admiral, naming the copy Admiral 1I; two stories feature twentyseven-year old mothers; two stories describe characters - a lawyer and a baseball player respectively - as "closers". If intentional (rather than the result of lazy editing), the import of such repetition is opaque. The other thematic pole of the collection involves repeated encounters with those who are radically "other" - whether the Japanese couple in "Ash Monday", or a child who can feel no pain in "Sin Dolor". In the latter story, set in Mexico, a doctor describes his treatment of the boy, Damaso Funes, whom he saw as his ticket to medical fame. The boy becomes a travelling sideshow, performing self-torture for profit. Like Borges's gifted protagonist

in

"'Funes

the

Memorious",

Damaso is a child with a strange ability whose promise remains unrealized. " Wild Child", the title novella, develops the theme of the "other" more comprehensively and more damningly. A fictional reworking of the historical case of Victor of Aveyron, previously the subject of books by Harlan Lane and Roger Shattuck (both of whom Boyle credits as sources), "Wild Child" hews closely to the established

historical narrative. After wandering into the village of Saint-Sernin in the winter of 1799, Victor was installed at the Institute for Deaf-Mutes in Paris, although he was not deaf himself. There he came under the tutelage of a young doctor, Jean-Marc Gaspard Itard, who published two reports on his interactions with Victor. Here, a third-person omniscient narrative voice allows us access to Victor's consciousness. This is not unproblematic since Boyle persistently and comprehensively constructs Victor as not merely other - "skin ... roughened and dark as an Arab's" - but as less than human , "feral", more "arboreal ape" than

man, "his mind lax and pre-lingual". Like Dill, who burns a rat alive, and like the feral cats that kill songbirds in the story "Question 62", Victor eats live animals - frogs, mice, a pet grey parrot. It was Itard's intention, Boyle tells us, to "test the thesis propounded by Locke and Condillac: Was man born a tabula rosa , unformed and without ideas, ready to be written upon by society, educable and perfectible? Or was society a corrupting influence, as Rousseau supposed, rather than the foundation of all things right and good?". As depicted here, Victor is neither civilizable nor noble. And the story is well suited to Boyle's theme, since Victor is an extreme example of the other, who can never be like us. In some stories the difference is cultural, but in "Wild Child" apparent intolerance is submerged in an exploration of nature versus nurture. With genuine connection and clear communication always thwarted, Boyle seems to suggest that the other is best left to his own devices, each of us isolated in our native environments. It is a bleak and lonely place to end.

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ardball is the thirteenth novel in the series starring V. 1. Warshawski, who first appeared in 1982 as a feisty left-wing private investigator and recovering RUTH MORSE lawyer, going down Chicago's mean streets, with a recognizable combination of intelligence and imagination; courage and physical Sara Paretsky fitness; local knowledge and tenacity. It is HARDBALL hard to recall now the invigorating effect of 446pp. Hodder and Stoughton. £ 12.99. rewriting the old American scenario with a 9780340 83915 7 woman at the centre. An educated Chicagoan with roots in the city' s old-immigrant Catholic community, was a lawyer disillusioned with the corrupWarshawski is not the dysfunctional self- tions of the Chicago police and criminal abusing private eye of tradition, and her justice system, autonomous, and with a drinking is well under control. Over the vision of social justice which distinguished years, facts about her background, family and her from the men with their characteristically friends have done something to fill out her idiosyncratic morality. Warshawski is temper and disappointments in love. Amer- nominally a specialist in financial fraud, but ican detectives are seldom celebrated for there is not a lot of techno-wizardry in her their steady relationships and child-rearing old-fashioned hunt for criminals. As the

H

Cold cases

success, but for a woman raised in Catholic

1980s wore on , the novels seemed to wear

South Chicago, there are also humiliations in being repeatedly told that she will never be able to hold a man. Although, like many of her kind, she has suffered physical punishment which would have scarred and crippled a lesser person, she can still attract attention and there are men in her life. But Warshawski's life is not the motor of the novels in which the important developments follow fashions in crime fiction in reacting to social and political change. Like other crime writers, Paretsky began with innovative imitation. Her female PI

out, especially as other writers developed Paretsky's breakthrough. Then, with Tunnel Vision (1994) , and Hard Time (1999), she capitalized on her original strengths, and that fire returned with a thriller-like concern for money, power and political corruption. Hardball opens with a flashback: a young cousin made use of her family connection to foist herself on a beleaguered Warshawski, and she seems to have been kidnapped by gangsters. The case appears at first to be a return to Paretsky' s earlier kind of plotting with a PI's cold-case hunt for a missing

person. As usual , V I's sense of honour explains why, having made one of her rash promises to a woman who was old, dying, black and poor, she must spend time looking under rocks for long-dead criminals, and finding worrying implications for herself. Soon she finds herself looking into a miscarriage of justice which took place in the summer of 1968, when Martin Luther King marched in the city, and Mayor Daley ' s political machine was called on to protect

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him, against the gut feelings of his racist police force. As secrets start to emerge, Warshawski discovers that they threaten to implicate her adored father, the long-dead honest cop. As all around - her family , her police and journalist acquaintances, and the people she interviews - tell her to leave it alone, she persists, despite threats of death to her cousin and herself, and discovers that things were not what they seemed. Paretsky has never been afraid of implausibilities, and this novel has its share. Like many crime writers, she employs a doubletime scheme in which the years pass but the characters are more or less unchanged. Warshawski herself remains the familiar hot-tempered maverick. She is that kind of internal migrant whose education has lifted her out of her social origins, with all the discomfort - but none of the confusion - that situation often creates. Unlike crime fiction's socially challenged male PIs, she is rooted in a social context. Paretsky has evoked - and celebrated - the multiplicity of Chicago's neighbourhoods, its old and new immigrants and its tragic history of race relations; and these years of America's financial and political decadence seem to have rekindled her passion for social justice. The socially mobile Warshawski belongs to that American dream also exemplified by the Obamas; but, as becomes the woman who is not herself mean, she remains dissident, and as tough on the causes of crime as she is on criminals.

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Before the trio Low notes and high musical society hen the twenty-one-year-old Beethoven left his native Bonn for Vienna to study with Haydn in 1792, Count Ferdinand Waldstein wrote in the young musician ' s album, "by dint of unremitting effort you will receive Mozart's spirit from Haydn ' s hands" . This seems to be the first recorded naming of this hallowed musical trinity. Two decades later, E. T. A. Hoffmann cited Mozart and Haydn as the "creators of our present instrumental music"; but the one who thereupon "penetrated its innermost being", he said, was Beethoven. All three, he continued strangely, "breathe a similar Romantic spirit" - music itself for Hoffmann being an essentially Romantic art, as it had no clear models in antiquity and worked its magic without explicit reference to persons, objects, or scenes. It was apparently another couple of decades before anybody claimed that this trio of composers represented - or, indeed, comprised - that familiar "classical" era in music. The first to articulate such a notion clearly was probably one Amadeus Wendt, Professor of Philosophy at Gottingen. In his treatise of 1836, Uber den gegenwiirtigen Zustand der Musik besonders in Deutschland und wie er geworden (concerning the present state of music, especially in Germany, and how it got that way), Wendt deplored "irregular and lawless" current musical practice such as that of Berlioz and the Parisian piano virtuosi, and looked back to Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven as models of reason and orderliness. On this Viennese trio he bestowed the handy laudatory name "classical", borrowed from contemporary literary debates in Germany, with its implications of "the best of its kind", "that which is lasting" , "the normative or exemplary". That there should be exactly three classical composers seemingly had more to do with Wendt's philosophical orientation than with his grasp of music history: his assessment of this musical trinity is explicitly aligned with the three stages in the historical progression of the arts as elaborated in Hegel's Aesthetic Lectures. From this shaky start, the notion of a classical period in European music consisting almost exclusively of the work of three composers working in or near Vienna has with the help of later critics fearful of other alarming modern isms - grown to become the standard view of the matter, a view much reinforced in the English-speaking world by

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THE EnWIN MELLE~ PRESS

The Theme ofPeace and War in Virginia Woolf's Writings Jane M. Wood, editor 39.95 from publisher only UK 01570 423356 / US 716-754-2788

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LEON PLANTINGA Daniel Heartz MOZART . HAYDN AND EARLY BEETHOVEN , 1781 - 1802 846pp. Norton. $75. 9780393 06634 0

Charles Rosen's influential book of 1971, The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. Daniel Heartz's big new book, the third part of his massive trilogy exploring European music from 1720 (marking the appearance of a lighter, more informal style, particularly in Naples) to 1802 (the effective end of Haydn's career and of Beethoven's earliest phase), brings these three composers together once more. But in assaying his subject, Heartz will not let the words "classical" or "classic" (installed, he says in the first book, as an act of "German cultural self-aggrandizement") pass his lips - though the self-aggrandizers were mainly Viennese critics from around

Heartz proceeds methodically, making his way in more or less chronological order through the various genres these three composers cultivated. Opera, the area of the author's particular expertise, gets a great deal of attention. There is, as we might expect, ample discussion of Mozart's final six, from Die Entfiihrung aus dem Serail of 1782 to La Clemenza di Tito from the final months of the composer's life in 1791. Proceeding at a leisurely pace, Heartz spares no detail as to the provenance of the librettos (the discussion of The Marriage of Figaro starts with a thumbnail biography of the somewhat disreputable Pierre-Augustin Beaumarchais, whose play was the ultimate source of the plot). He explores the mingling of politics and theatrical production, cabals among singers and managers, and reactions from audiences especially as recorded in the diaries of the Viennese operatic habitue Count Karl Zinzendorf, always a rich source of comment (he was often bored) and gossip. At times the plethora of surrounding detail threatens to engu lf the subject at hand. A

Mozart's La Clemellza di Tito performed at the Salzburg Festival, 2003 1900. For much of the repertory of the earlier part of the century Heartz favours the widely used eighteenth-century term "galant" , a name that ascended to the subtitle of the second volume, Music in European Capitals: The Galant style, 1720-1780. While these dates of course also encompass what we think of as the "high Baroque" , the glorious final decades of J. S. Bach and Handel, the word "Galant" hardly seems right for their music; thus Heartz's tour of European capitals conspicuously avoids Leipzig and London. And for the music of the mature Haydn and Mozart and the youthful Beethoven, the subject of the present volume, "Gal ant" again seems wide of the mark So Heartz leaves this music without a name, and, in fact, offers scant rationale for singling it out from the mass of contemporaneous repertory in the first place, other than that he, like many, considers it the best the period has to offer.

heading on page 235 announces a new topic: COS! fan tutte. But what follows is a halfdozen discursive pages about the singer Adriana Ferrarese (Susanna in the 1789 revival of Figaro), her relationships with other singers, her possible affair with Da Ponte, her high salary at the Rurgtheater, and Mozart's (and Joseph n's) low opinion of her singing. Eventually we get to COS!, in which Ferrarese sang the part of Fiordiligi. But after a trenchant remark about the centrality of duets in this opera, he is off on another excursus about the other singer in some of those duets, Louise Villeneuve, the first Dorabella. Then, at last, Heartz settles down to write cogently and instructively about this work, scene by scene, such that even those with little memory of the opera can follow (which cannot be said of his earlier commentary on either Figaro or Don Giovanni) .

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Beethoven's single opera, Fidelio, falls outside the chronological boundaries of this book. But Haydn's operas, hardly a staple of eighteenth-century or present-day experience of the genre, come in for a good bit of discussion. Not that Heartz even particularly likes them: only one, the opera seria Armida, premiered at Esterhaza in 1783, really meets with his approval. While concurring with the usual low opinion of Orlando Paladino from 1781, one of countless operas based ultimately upon Ariosto's epic Orlando furioso , he still cannot resist describing the work in some detail (including a novel plot twist in which the sorceress Alcina turns the raving Orlando into stone to calm him down). Another of Haydn' s ventures in the common stock of opera themes, the ill-fated Orfeo ed Euridice, planned for London in 1791 but never performed, gets even more coverage; here we have a scene by scene recounting of events and music that even Don Giovanni was denied. Heartz's encyclopedic knowledge of opera from this period enables him to make satisfying references and comparisons right across the genre. For example, he notes a fine moment in Die Entfiihrung where Konstanza' s music recalls that ofllia at a comparable dramatic point in 1domeneo; a bit later in that opera Belmonte seemingly refers back to Idomeneo and forward to Die Zauberflote; Haydn's Euridice for a moment sings almost the same music Mozart had given Fiordiligi at a comparable point in Cos!. But more importantly, Heartz' s understanding of operatic convention and keen ear for musical types - for those melodic and rhythmic patterns that by custom attached to particular dramatic situations or mental states - yield high dividends for the reader. The romance, the variou s dance types such as minuet, gavotte, and siciliano, and the two-tempo rondo all emit signals as to character and sentiment that Heartz is determined we shall not miss. His insistent chronicle of the keys in which things happen, sometimes in explanation of the very nature of an aria, say, or at other times as forming a scheme of tonalities governing a whole section or act, wi ll probably mean less to many readers. Eighteenthcentury composers, to be sure, put great stock in distinctions among tonalities. Of the many musicians from the time who wrote about "characteristics of the keys" , perhaps the best known was the colourful Christian Daniel Friedrich Schubart, who in 1785 (writing from prison) claimed that G minor expressed displeasure, unease, irritation , whi le C minor conjured up "a girl dressed in white with a red bow at her bosom" . The differences among the keys were heard in part because they really existed: equal temperament in instruments of fixed pitch, such as keyhoards, winds , and fretted strin gs, has since the late nineteenth century put an end to these distinctions, leaving those of us without absolute pitch (and without a score in hand) little reason to care much about keys. What we all can hear is the immediate juxtaposition of tonalities, the smooth passage to a closely related key, or the wrenching motion to a distant one. Composers of course paid careful attention to this, too (as at the point in the sextet in the second act of Don Giovanni where, on the entrance of Donna Anna and Don Ottavio, the music lurches - via an irregularly resolved augmented sixth chord - from

MUSIC Bb to D major, or in Beethoven ' s startling motion from C minor to E major to begin the second movement of his Third Piano Concerto) ; this is an area where our critical energies might be more profitably invested. The size of the operatic repertory under the purview of this book is daunting, but the music for instruments - 145 symphonies by Haydn and Mozart to begin with - is even more so. Heartz sets out boldly and seriously to give us something of an overview of this music. Interspersed with some biography of the composer and accounts of the circumstances of composition, he offers descriptions of a huge number of works. But opera still seems to be on his mind. The beginning of Mozart's "Haffner" Symphony reminds him of the great buffo leaps in Osmin's "Ha' Wie will ich triumphieren" from Die Entfiihrung , composed just before, and he likens the second movement of the Piano Quartet K. 493 to the "hat motif' in the second finale of Figaro. Less convincing is an attempt to connect the opening of Mozart's Symphony in G minor with an aria from Traetta's Sofonsba (1762): Mozart's theme belongs to a frequently recurring melodic type in this period, for example in the aria he gives Tamino in Die ZauberJlote, "Dies Bildnis ist bezaubernd schon". But for the most part the echoes of opera Heartz hears so often in Mozart' s instrumental music (not so often in Haydn's) are telling; comparisons to song with text and dramatic situation sometimes have more explanatory power than straight description can offer. The final two decades of Haydn's career covered in this volume begin with the String Quartets Op 33, those scintillating exercises in lucid construction and playful wit to which Haydn himself attached the promotional tag "written in a new and special way" . Though Heartz has interesting things to say about each of these six works, he seems to prefer lyrical expression to Haydn's famous sallies of wit. A favourite movement of his, the soaring Largo cantabile of the fifth quartet, reminds him of two places in Gluck' s Orfeo ed Euridice, which Haydn had conducted at Esterhaza a couple of years previously; here again, the comparison rings true, and offers new insights into the particular expressive stance of this music. The Quartets Op 33, published by Artaria of Vienna in 1782, are among the first fruits of Haydn ' s engagement with that anonymous, widely dispersed group of persons who in the later eighteenth century began to comprise a "public". This is because his princely employers, the Esterhazas, had only shortly before given him permission to compose for other patrons and to publish his work. The steady growth of his reputation with a wider European public after this point

Haydn Hall, Esterhazy Castle, Eisenstadt, Austria spelt English about the magnificent buildings and parks, the rowdy public behaviour of Londoners, the draconian English penal code, and, obsessively, the high cost of everything. Windsor Castle, he reports, "is a very old but splendid building; the high altar cost 50,000 florins". There is still something of the naive about this son of a rural wheelwright who as the world' s most celebrated composer moves among the highest echelons of London society. Heartz (like most writers on Haydn) misses this undertone to Haydn' s life in London; he was honoured for his supreme accomplishment, but his presence in the most exalted social circles must have seemed something of an anomaly. Even in so ample a book as this, an author cannot comment on all, or even a sizeable portion, of the inexhaustible Haydn's instrumental music. Sometimes the reasons for focusing on certain compositions while ignoring others seem extraneous: we hear a lot about the estimable "Grenzinger" Sonata (Hob. XVI: 49) of 1789-90, but almost nothing about the astonishing "Andante con variationi" (Hob. XVII: 6) of 1793. That is

because there is an exchange of letters between the composer and dedicatee bearing on the sonata (she objects to the hand-crossings), and nothing comparable for the "Andante". But Heartz finds room for satisfying commentary on a generous number of Haydn ' s big pieces from the London period, occasionally mixing in contemporary response such as the journal review likening the Andante of the "Surprise" Symphony to "a beautiful Shepherdess who, lulled to slumber by the murmur of a distant waterfall , starts alarmed by the unexpected firing of a fowling-piece". The Symphony No 98 in Bb is one of the London Twelve to receive the author's full attention ; he is particularly touched by the second idea in its Adagio, where Haydn alludes pointedly to the corresponding place in the final symphony (the "Jupiter") of his recently deceased colleague Mozart. This illustrates one of the more satisfying features of this book: its insights into patterns of reciprocal influence flowing between the two finest composers of the age. The young Beethoven comes across here almost as a leisurely afterthought. Heartz still

Eulalia That midsummer week of many marriages, many flowers thrown over the bright courts under our feet, what was it we felt we were made of, getting lost in the city? Light, air, the greenness of parakeets. The petals fell over a maze of lanes, my girlfriend, and the friend I no longer wish to know,

culminated in his two extended visits to

London - for two concert seasons each timein 1791-2 and 1794-5. Heartz writes interestingly about the composer's experience there in the largest city in the world with its incomparably vibrant musical life; of the whirlwind of activity that engulfed him, and the escape to rural Paddington to concentrate on his music. Members of the royal family received Haydn cordially. The public adored him. Much of what we know about Haydn's life in England we learn from his "London Notebooks", four diaries full of observations in a mixture of German, Italian and phonetically

over two women sharing a needle as if at a picnic, on cloistered grass by the Cathedral of Saint Eulalia, as one of them dropped, flat on her back. The petals went on falling past the other woman smiling as the sun came out of nowhere, and with the needle still inside her vein she raised her arms skyward, like a maenad or a saint.

SIMON POMER Y

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23 seems to have Mozart on his mind as he describes the picturesque Rhineland of Beethoven's boyhood, using Mozart family letters from earlier years as a travel guide. And opera is at the centre of his description of musical life at Bonn, despite Beethoven ' s limited role in the undertaking: he played viola in the orchestra. There follow some varied reflections about the music Beethoven composed, most of it for piano, during his first decade in Vienna. Heartz, perhaps predictably, has a taste for the more dramatic pieces: the introductory Grave of the Sonata Op 13 (the "Pathetique") as it passes into the Allegro main theme "takes on the character of an operatic scena presaging the anguished aria to follow". The coda of the growling and grandiloquent "Marcia funebre" of the Sonata Op 26 "has a respectable pedigree on the Viennese stage. This is how Gluck has the furies yield to the bard, ending the infernal scene of Orfeo ed Euridice". Towards the end, the book slows down for a fine appraisal, rich with detail , of Beethoven ' s Second Symphony. Heartz invokes convincing models for specific features of Beethoven's music, from Mozart's "Prague" Symphony and several of Haydn's London symphonies, finishing his work, thus, with a pleasing synoptic cod a of his own. For whom is this impressive book (and its companion volumes) intended? Their many analytical descriptions of music, especially in this third volume, with much description of harmonic and formal procedures, are useful mainly for those who understand these matters and who either know the pieces intimately or are able to consult a score. But there is much more that everyone can appreciate: reflections about the lives of these composers and the circumstances in which they did their work, accounts of the human interactions involved in operatic production, remarks about prominent patrons of music such as Joseph II and Nicholas Esterhazy, and more than a little entertaining gossip (Admiral Nelson and Lady Hamilton duly make an appearance). There is, however, little effort here to explore connections between such disparate things: to explain musical style itself (as is now, in exaggerated form, much the fashion) as shaped by its social , political and economic surroundings. Did European music change when, with the growth of public concerts and opera, it was increasingly addressed to the tastes of an anonymous middle-class public rather than to the known preferences of particular patrons? (The three composers who are the subject of the present volume all started out entirely under the patronage system and, in varying degrees, escaped it.) How did composers respond to the surge of amateur music-making late in the century? (Heart7. mentions that Haydn, short of money at one moment, composed some piano trios for the publisher Artaria; but why should it have been trios?) What effects did the rise of music criticism and advertising - the two not yet always clearly differentiated - have on the musical culture? How may the rage for technological advance in the incipient Industrial Revolution have affected instrument making, and hence the sound of music? Still, though this reader would have welcomed a broader focus - and others might well have different preferences - Heartz's achievement is a splendid one.

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Pink squares extiles have long lain in a dusty corner, seen as products of mere female toil or of despised mass production : in either case undervalued as major construction materials in the house that history built. Their re-establishment is due in part to specific scholarly examination, in part to the feminist movement's insistence on moving beyond traditional rankings of significant materials . These two books take corresponding approaches to this mass of unexamined material. The Spinning World is a collection of essays of high factual value and close scrutiny of process, its revisionism lying in its world-ranging approach to a subject which has largely been viewed from a Western perspective. Although there is some consideration of early historical factors and individual, " homespun", production, the emphasis is broadly on the rise and decline of the cotton industry, its trade and consumption. The book contains much new research. It deals with areas of manufacture: the Indian subcontinent, China and a reversal of the "silk route", Turkey and some European states, West Africa and South-east Asia. It covers trade and consumption and extends from Latin America to Japan. Finally, it deals with revolutions in production and their consequences, including the decline of Indian manufacturing. Each contribution is shored up by solid research and statistical fact. The discussions are not limited to economic determinism but include considerations of the luxury market, following Maxine Berg's work on " product revolution", which gave due weight to consumer taste. Thus Beverly Lemire comments on fashion as a cultural catalyst affecting production and trade, focusing on evidence from the great entrepot of Cairo, that mercantile axis between East and West, and notes the eclecticism of " fashioning the home" in Europe, where fabric designs might mingle Portuguese nautical motifs with Hindu mythology. John Styles does make an economic contribution, but takes an unusual stance: he has raided the records of the Old Bailey for references to textiles as stolen goods. Light-fingered handling of cotton shirts apparently reached a peak in the late eighteenth century. In West Africa, the cultivation and manufacture of cotton was an established industry as early as the eleventh century: there were already markets when the Portuguese first arrived. It is illuminating to understand cotton not merely as a trade material , but as a medium of exchange : the Dutch East India Company sometimes paid its employees in textiles. Pedro Machado, focusing on cloth from Gujarat, describes sophisticated consumption cultures where the fifteenthcentury African demand for Indian textiles indicated cultural status. The concluding essay by Prasannan Parthasarathi and lan Wendt not only summarizes the conventional view that the decline of Indian cotton production was due to Britain's favouring the home textile industry, but also notes that the evidence suggests that colonialism was not the only factor in that decline. Parthasarathi and Wendt ask some

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JANE JAKEMAN Giorgio Riello and Prasannan Parthasarathi THE SPINNING WORLD A global history of cotton textiles, 1200- 1850 489pp. Oxford University Press. £75 (US $150). 9780 199559442

Joanne Turney THE CULTURE OF KNITTING 274 pp. Berg. Paperback, £ 19.99. 978 I 84520591 I

important questions about the nature of history and evidence, noting that the perception of what happened in nineteenth-century India is, in Raymond Williams's phrase, part of a "structure of feeling" that has come to be both myth and history. The Culture of Knitting , meanwhile, focuses on the personal and particular, on hand-knitting in the female context. As .Ioanne Turney notes, feminism has viewed knitting as a sign of oppression, but now that it is generally seen more as a hobby than a necessity, it is seen as creative expression. There are some startling illustrations of postmodern ironic works of art such as Liz Padgham-Major's " Home Comforts", portraying a dustpan and brush in knitted covers, or Janet Morton's " Untitled" television covered in a left-over sweater, producing the same sense of unease as Meret Oppenheim ' s famous fur-covered cup and saucer. The relationship of knitted material to the female flesh is discussed from a psychoanalytic viewpoint and to the male body from a sociological one, throwing light on my memories of working for the Oxford English Dictionary, where the chairbacks always sported a fine

array of rather decrepit " cardies", used on at least one occasion for nursing stray ducklings. Knitting has recently made a re-appearance as a " heritage" product, and Turney delves deep into the antecedents of the traditional " Fair Isle" sweater, which stands nowadays in conscious opposition to the mass-produced garment as an individual piece of handicraft, evocative of the circumstances in which it was made. The revitalization of the heavy jersey is also seen as an aspect of the constant reinvention and dynamism of fashion , epitomized by Vivienne Westwood' s 1980s collections which utilized the Shetland sweater, adapted with computerized designs, to emphasize a national identity. There is much fascinating material here, though one is conscious that part of the interest lies in the incongruity that still exists in our minds between the soft and " cosy" subject of knitting and the serious treatment which it is accorded in this book. One section that perhaps takes this apparent dichotomy too far is "The Revolution Will Be Knitted" , which argues that contemporary knitters are communicating their political and social attitudes through what is essentially a devious activity. Calgary has a celebrated Revolutionary Knitting Circle, which promotes anticapitalism, and Marianne Jl'lrgensen, a Danish artist, has covered tanks with pink knitted squares as a protest against military involvement in Iraq - but this does not make the act of knitting in itself subversive. Yes, we know about the bloodthirsty tricoteuses at the foot of the guillotine who were celebrated by Dickens and Baroness Orczy - and Turney shrewdly suggests that the knitting of Miss Marple continues this tradition - but the flat statement "Everything that is created within a society is the product of the social institutions of that society" is too sweeping.

Hanging cotton, painted and dyed, c 1700

WWUl press. uchicago. edu

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BIBLIOGRAPHY osmopolitan, affable, dashing, Max Reinhardt was an old-fashioned homme d 'affaires who came into publishing by chance and enjoyed it so much that he never left. He was born in Constantinople in 1915. His father, an Austrian architect, spoke to him in German. His mother, a nonpractising Jew of Ukrainian Italian origin, spoke to him in French. His first language was Greek but most of his schooling was in English, initially at the British Council's High School for Girls. He developed Anglophilia at the High School for Boys, where the chairman of governors was Evelyn Waugh's uncle, and he would have gone to an English university if he hadn' t been prevented by his uncle Richard. The Darrs, his mother's family, were rich international traders who endowed young Max with self-confidence and a business model. But Paris, where Oncle Richard was based, was no place for Jews, however nonpractising, at the end of the 1930s. In 1939, the twenty-three-year-old Max Reinhardt moved to London, set up an import-export firm , and joined the Baltic Exchange. Was his father's surname Reinhardt, Judith Adamson wonders, or actually Reinhard? At an early age, his son printed business cards to promote confusion with his theatre-director namesake. Lt was business contacts that got Reinhardt into publishing, but the theatre that put him into the mainstream. After being interned as an enemy alien, he joined the RAF, perhaps the only bearer of an Italian passport in the service. In the squash court below his Ken-

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Bodley's Head JAMES FERGUSSON Judith Adamson MAX RElNHARDT A li fe in publishing

220pp. Palgrave Macmillan. £50 (US $80). 9780230545427

sington flat, the junior aircraftsman met a lieutenant-commander who became a friend for life - the actor Ralph Richardson. In 1947, the year Reinhardt bought HFL, a textbook publisher, from his accountants, he also married Richardson's friend the actress Margaret Leighton. Richardson persuaded him to set up Max Reinhardt Ltd to publish theatre books, and Bernard Shaw became one of his authors. In 1952, he joined up with Francis Meynell of the Nonesuch Press to plan a Coronation edition of Shakespeare on India paper - an enormous project that cost £20,000. They got their money back. Reinhardt' s stamina and insouciance are impressive. When in 1957 he bought the Bodley Head (established in 1887), it involved an exhausting tussle with Sir Stanley Unwin, a much older hand in publishing. Reinhardt's friendship with the novelist Graham Greene, whom he brought on to the board, was rooted

in business savvy (they enjoyed in venting tax-avoidance schemes); the two embarked on a seven-year courtship with Charlie Chaplin (an obsessive tax avoider) in order to secure his autobiography . The advance was half a million dollars, and they sold as many copies within three months of publication. "The Bodley Head was Max's company", said his deputy Judy Taylor. She looked after the children's list, its most successful division. He ran his publishing house as though he was the host at a private party, a benign impresario. Even by the standards of the trade, his staff were underpaid, but he persuaded them that what they did mattered, and he was keen that they enjoy themselves. Never having had to worry about money himself, he spent lavishly on expenses, bought a house in the country, and took elaborate holidays abroad. His staff might live hand to mouth, but he commanded remarkable loyalty; his designer John Ryder, who shaped the Bodley Head look, was with him for thirty years . Given that Reinhardt was so adept at the business side of publishing, what went wrong? Was he undone by his craving to be an authentic, decent Englishman? Richardson had dressed him as a "gentleman", and put him up for the Savile Club; later, he joined the Garrick. Fredric Warburg, an Eng-

lish Jew with an establishment upbringing, entitled his publishing autobiography wryly An Occupation for Gentlemen. But "gentlemen" don't go into "business" and publishing was now big business. In 1969, the Bodley Head, seeking to save costs by pooling warehousing and distribution, joined forces with Jonathan Cape and Chatto & Windus. The new group combined big egos, and Reinhardt, who thrived on control, found that he had lost it. Tom Maschler of Cape and Graham C. Greene of Chatto (his old friend ' s nephew) plotted behind his back, and to his face, according to Carmen Calli l, "patronised" him. In 1984, when, with 44 per cent, Reinhardt was the largest shareholder in the group, Maschler and Greene asked him to sell them some of his shares. As soon as he had done so, he realized his mistake. After emergency rights issues had further diminished his shareholding, Maschler and Greene sold their own to Si Newhouse in 1987 without telling him. If Reinhardt hadn't sold to Maschler and Greene, he might have saved his beloved Bodley Head. Instead, Random House dissolved all but its children's book list in 1990. In 2008, cheekily, they announced its revival as an "entirely new" imprint.

Judith Adamson represents Max Reinhardt's last years - when, as Reinhardt Books, he carried on producing elegant sprigs of Graham Greenery - as a sort of triumph, but they make a sad coda. This is a painstaking, sometimes moving biography, marred (the "academic" publisher's fault) by misprints.

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PHILOSOPHY

Rule and reason here are, as H. L. A. Hart observed, BRIAN LEITER two ways of instructing others about the standards of conduct they are to folFrederick Schauer low: by example and by explicit linguistic THINKING LIKE A LAWYER instruction. So it is, too, with explaining what 239pp. Harvard University Pres s. it means to "think like a lawyer". The Amer£29.95 (US $39.95). ican classic An Introduction to Legal Reason9780674032705 ing (1949) by Edward Levi - late Dean of the University of Chicago Law School and former Attorney General of the United States - was of statutory interpretation, the distinction mostly an instance of the former: Levi intro- between rules and standards, and so on. Like duced legal reasoning involving case law, stat- Levi, Schauer is friendly to respectable Realutes and constitutions almost entirely through ism, and his book is a welcome complement extended examples. to Levi' s approach, as well as being easier for Levi illustrated the practice of reasoning the legal novice to understand. Yet Schauer's by analogy from prior court decisions book also offers the lawyer and scholar usethrough consideration of how the doctrine of ful perspective on what he or she does. "privity" - the requirement that the injured Those who have read Schauer's previous plaintiff must have had a contractual relation- journal articles (and his earlier book Playing ship with the defendant in order to recover by the Rules, 1991) will not find much new damages suffered because of the defendant's here, but it is very welcome to have his sensdefecti ve product - was weakened over ible reflections on these subjects collected in nearly a century of cases and then finally evis- a single volume. At the core of his account is cerated by Benjamin Cardozo in a famous a familiar worry about whether there is 1916 decision, which held that the manufac- anything genuinely distinctive in legal reasonturer of a defective automobile may, indeed, ing. Schauer notes the ways in which reasonbe sued by the injured individual who ing by analogy, or acting in accordance with purchased the vehicle from an intermediary, rules, are pervasive features of our lives, and the dealer. Before Cardozo, courts at least thus not distinctive to law, but he goes on to claimed that a product had to be " inherently suggest that the "special oddness" of legal dangerous" before privity could be waived, a reasoning is that "everyone of the dominant condition never before thought to afflict auto- characteristics of legal reasoning and legal mobiles. Yet as Levi 's examples show, that argument can be seen as a route toward reachcategory had little meaningful content: "The ing a decision other than the best all-thingsdangerous concept had in it a loaded gun, considered decision for the matter at hand" . possibly a defective gun, mislabelled poison, Rules, after all, are always under- and overdefective hair wash, scaffolds, a defective inclusive with respect to their underlying coffee urn, and a defecti ve aerated bottle. aims. If we let only those over eighteen vote, The not-dangerous category. . had in it a on the theory that we want informed and defective carriage, a bursting lamp, a defective balance wheel for a circular saw, and a defective boiler". Judge Cardozo effectively emptied the concept of its remaining content when he added automobiles to the list. When it comes to the transformation of a legal concept, Levi observed, " matters of kind vanish into matters of degree and then entirely new meanings turn up", and judges will, of course, pretend that "some overall rule" governs. Yet, as Levi added, "the rule will be useless .... The statement of the rule .. . is window dressing". Levi 's was an exercise in "respectable" American Legal Realism - not the wild-eyed version of Jerome Frank claiming that the judge'S unconscious psyche determined the decision, but the realistic understanding of how judges actually decide cases. Thus Levi showed that earlier court cases admitted of varying reasonable

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discerning voters, then many sage adolescents will be excluded from the franchise, while many foolish and irrational adults will be given the privilege. That means abiding by the voting age will often defeat the purposes underlying the rule in the first place. So why then should we ever abide by authoritative rules? As Schauer notes, "law remains pervaded - indeed, characterized - by the use of genuinely authoritative sources", that is, standards for decision whose claim to be binding is that they were laid down in the past. The puzzle of the authority of rules is perhaps the central jurisprudential puzzle about legal reasoning, and while it is well described by Schauer, he does not try to resolve it. Schauer's treatment of precedent illustrates another facet of the issue. Schauer takes precedent to be distinct from reasoning by analogy, even though reasoning by analogy is precisely the method by which we establish that a prior court decision is binding in the present instance (since two cases, as Schauer readily admits, are never exactly the same). Constraint by precedent is just an instance of constraint by authoritative rules: the court is bound by an earlier decision just because it is an earlier decision, and not because it exemplifies the good, true or beautiful. So why abide by precedent? Schauer suggests that lower courts obey the decisions of higher courts for the same reason that children obey parents, and a later court obeys the decision of its earlier "self' because of the virtues of stability. He nowhere mentions the familiar reason for being constrained by the past, namely, fairness: " like cases should be treated alike". That will not explain all cases of being bound by authority, but it is certainly important to

interpretations, and that how courts devel-

oped legal doctrines was responsive to changing social circumstances, such as the need to create incentives for the makers of massproduced products to ensure their safety. Frederick Schauer's Thinking Like a Lawyer is, in contrast to Levi 's book, primarily a case of instructing by explicit linguistic formulation. Schauer offers, to be sure, plentiful short and evocative examples to support his points , but mainly he aims to articulate, and thus instruct as to, the different aspects of legal reasoning: the role of rules, reliance on precedent, reasoning by analogy, methods

The Royal Courts of Justice, London (detail), 1994, by Judy Joel

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understanding the doctrine of precedent. Schauer's treatment of American Legal Realism, which he cabins off in a separate chapter, is pleasingly sensible, though it is so close to my own view of the Realists that this verdict will hardly be persuasive to specialists with contrary readings. (The fact that Schauer cites me for propositions about Realism that are the opposite of those I defend should not mislead on that score.) He correctly sees, for example, a split among Realists between the wild-eyed Frank, mentioned above, and the majority, exemplified by Karl Llewellyn, who thought that most judges applied "general but non legal norms" to distinct factual "situation-types" in reaching their decisions in predictable ways. Schauer also notes how the amount of indeterminacy in legal reasoning is exaggerated when we concentrate, as legal scholars do, on those cases that reach the stage of appellate review. There is a "selection effect" in appellate decisions for precisely those cases where the law is unsettled; the "easy" cases, with determinate answers, are disposed of much earlier in the legal process. This Legal Realism seems so reasonable that one wonders why it has had so little impact in the other major common-law jurisdiction, England. Peter Birks, late Regius Professor of Civil Law at Oxford, once said to me that the central problem with Realism was that it was "immoral", by which he meant it encouraged the idea that legal doctrines do not significantly constrain the decisions, at least of the appellate courts. Why is what seems commonsensical to American lawyers from Levi to Schauer so foreign , indeed offensive, to the English lawyer? Here are three hypotheses. First, the English system of higher education requires the young person to commit to a course of study at a very early age (late teens), while all American students take law as a postgraduate degree after completing a different course of study, which might be economics or history or psychology. One perhaps predictable result is that the English youngster who has given over so much of his life to the study of legal doctrine is more inclined to take it seriously than the person who has had some exposure to historical, economic, and psychological perspectives on human institutions. Second, the English judiciary is still largely a civil service system, with advancement predicated on professional competence as assessed by peers. That obviously has an important disciplining effect on the judiciary, restricting, one imagines, the freedom in argument and interpretation so characteristic of A merican judges, who are either elected or appointed for politically partisan reasons. Third, as Grant Gilmore argued long ago, the existence of a federal system in America means that there are fifty-one jurisdictions in one country - the federal legal system and that of the fifty states - with the result that almost any legal argument can claim a pedigree in some court' s decision. All this might explain why a realistic view of legal reasoning seems obvious to Americans and morally odious to Britons. The interesting philosophical question, of course, is whether it is correct.

CLAS SICS n 1903, battles broke out on the streets of Athens between police and Classics students (instigated by their conservative professor) protesting against the use of a demotically tinged translation for a production of Aeschylus' Oresteia. Three people were killed. Similarly ferocious (and fatal) disputes had attended the publication a year before of a demotic translation of the Gospel of St Matthew. Nowadays the stakes are not quite so high for translating Greek tragedy or even the Bible; but the market for new versions of Greek tragedy is still large and apparently wide open. Not only are productions and adaptations being staged all over the world, but new translations and bilingual editions continue to proliferate. Of productions one might say that there is always room for more, since plays only really come to life when performed, and every director, designer and actor provides fresh perspectives. Is this true of translation too? Maybe not - especially because a translation generally provides only words: no music, no costumes, no moving and speaking bodies (not even talking heads). Over twenty new English translations of the Oresteia have appeared over the past sixty years, and currently there are at least nine in print, though the other plays of Aeschylus are much less well represented. What is the reason (or market) for such a steady stream? What are all these translations aiming to do? The art of translation is a much-discussed topic, and deservedly so, especially in the case of Greek drama. Between the Scylla of literal word-for-word accuracy ("reliable", but dead) and the Charybdis of radical adaptation into a living and lively work of literature or theatre, every translator has to steer a course. What works for the classroom may not be at all suitable for the stage - and the general reader may fall somewhere in between. The language of Aeschylus in particular is extraordinary, ranging from the lapidary and direct to the most extravagantly creative, image-laden and dense; its peculiarities have elicited endless pages of scholarly interpretation and disagreement, as well as extensive textual emendation. So a responsible translator of his plays ought ideally to be both a scholar and a poet. Three scholar-poets who have stood out in translating Greek tragedy have been Richmond Lattimore, Anne Carson and William Arrowsmith, who in the 1970s launched the famous series, Greek Tragedy in New Translation. That series has frequently resorted to employing two co-translators/editors, one a classical scholar, the other a poet. Both Christopher Collard for Oxford World's Classics and Alan H. Sommerstein for the Loeb Classical Library have chosen the scholar' s path of accuracy and reliability (Scylla): neither makes any claim to be a poet. So they translate Aeschylus' verse dialogue into prose; and even the lyrics, though visihly distinguished on the page from the paragraphs of prose by indentation, are rendered into resolutely earth-bound, ordinary English. Of the two, Collard is a bit more supple and lively; but anyone who wants a poetically exciting and readable (and/or actable) Oresteia should go to Ted Hughes or Tony Harrison; or for a more conventionally reliable version that still suggests the tone and pace of its poetic original, J would recommend the versions of Lattimore, Hugh Lloyd-Jones or Peter Meineck. Some might indeed find it hard to imagine that anyone would ever want to read a prose

I

Unseen translations MARK GRIFFITH Aeschylus PERSIANS. SEVEN AGAINST THEBES. SUPPLIANTS. PROMETHEUS BOUND 576pp. 978 0 674 99627 4 ORESTEIA. AGAMEMNON. LIBATION-BEARERS. EUMENIDES 494pp. 978 0 674 99628 I FRAGMENTS 363pp. 978 0 674 99629 8 Edited and translated by Alan H. Sommerstein Loeb Classical Library/Harvard University Press. £15.95 (US $24) each. PERSIANS AND OTHER PLAYS Translated by Christopher Collard 286pp. Oxford University Press. Paperback, £9.99 (US $14.95). 9780 19283282 5

version of Aeschylus, any more than of Shakespeare or Keats. But Collard' s and Sommerstein's decision is consistent with the announced aims of both these series, for which scholarship and reliability must come first. The Loeb Classical Library, now almost a hundred years old and constituting over 600 volumes, has proven itself (like its French counterpart, the Bude series) an invaluable tool for scholars and students from all over the academic landscape. With Greek or Latin text on the left and English translation on the facing page, it provides quick, consistent and user-friendly access to a wide range of authors, and does not discriminate between those who want to read in the original and those who just want an English version. So a Loeb edition is necessarily pitched both to be an aid to those working directly with the Greek itself, and to others who may, for example, be conducting research on something quite other than Greek tragedy and who may

well be seeking not so much to absorb the niceties of this author's style, as to find some piece of historical or cultural information embedded in the text: Aeschylus' Persians, for example, is our earliest source for the Battle of Salamis and the Persian Wars, while Suppliants contains the first mention in Greek of "demo-cracy". For historians and political philosophers who may be more or less Greekless, it is crucial that the literal meaning of Aeschylus' words be made available to them - even if that may mean sacrificing the poetry. When the businessman and philanthropist James Loeb launched the series in 1911, with William Heinemann as publisher, he stated that its purpose and scope were "to make the beauty and learning, the philosophy and wit of the great writers of Greece and Rome once more accessible by means of translations that are in themselves real pieces of literature". At the same time, it was specified that these translations should be placed "side by side ... with the best critical texts of the original works" . An admirable ideal: but because the combination of talents required to produce simultaneously both joyous translations and first-rate critical editions is rare, in practice the Loeb series has fluctuated in its emphasis and quality. Up until the 1970s, many of its Greek and Latin texts were unreliable and uncritical (often based on old Teubner editions, with minimal independent editorial attention); and the translations, too, varied greatly in both style and accuracy (and degrees of bowdlerization). As a result, among professional Classicists they came to be regarded for the most part with scorn, and students were often forbidden to consult or use them. There were some particularly embarrassing lapses among these older Loebs. Excruciatingly bad (both unreadable and unreliable) were the editions of archaic Greek lyric poetry and of the dramatists, though B. B. Rodgers's Aristophanes had a certain Gilbert

David OyeJowo (Prometheus) and HayJey Atwell (10) in James Kerr's production of Prometheus Bound at the Sound Theatre, London, August 2005

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27 and Sullivanish flair. W. Weir Smyth ' s Aeschylus was not unreliable, but so antiquated in style as to be almost unreadable, while F. Storr's Sophocles and A. S. Way's Euripides were hopeless in all respects. During the 1970s, however, a critical reorientation took place, editorial standards were significantly raised, and the Loeb Library (controlled since 1933 by Harvard University) re-established itself on its new course, more closely in line with James Loeb's expectations, at least on the side of scholarly expertise and reliability. For students and amateurs of Greek drama, this new era has been a tremendous upgrade, with the appearance of Jeffrey Henderson's prizewinning Aristophanes, Geoffrey Arnott's Menander, Hugh Lloyd-Jones's Sophocles, David Kovacs's Euripides (over-bold, but still learned and valuable) and now Alan Sommerstein ' s three-volume Aeschylus, which is in many respects the best critical edition of this playwright available in any format. Sommerstein's authority as a linguist and expert in Aeschylean drama is second to none, and he has provided an up-to-date and carefully constituted text for the seven surviving plays, plus all of the fragmentary remains that are at least one line long. Important manuscript variants and modern conjectures are scrupulously recorded (making the page a little cluttered, but clear enough); and in addition he has provided copious notes, fuller and more numerous than is normal for a Loeb, on matters of myth, geography, history and interpretation. Particularly welcome is the well-documented and clearly presented volume of "Fragments" - for of course the seven plays we happen to possess are by no means all that Aeschylus wrote, and not necessarily even the seven best: the trilogies dealing with Achilles at Troy, or with Pentheus and the Bacchants, for example, seem to have been especially daring and influential. The facing English translation is a trustworthy guide for all who want help in figuring out what Aeschylus (probably) wrote and meant. But it does steer to the Scyllan extreme - prosaic, literal, wordy and reminding one not infrequently of A. E. Housman's famous "Parody of a Greek Tragedy" (itself drawn quite extensively from Agamemnon). So, for example at Agamemnon 1078-89, Sommerstein gives the words of the Chorus to Clytemnestra as: "Here she is again, making an ill-omened invocation of a god for whom it is in no way appropriate to be present amid cries of grief'. Collard (in his 2002 Oxford World's Classics edition) offers "This woman blasphemes again in calling on the god; / it is not his part to assist at lamentations" . This more succinctly captures the Greek blasphemei and goois) , as does the translation of Hughes, "Blasphemy! You cannot defile the name of Apollo with a voice of such agony" . A few lines later, one of Cassandra's lyric outbursts (1090-92) culminates in the vivid and resounding three-word line androsphageion kai pedorranterion, which Sommerstein renders accurately but ploddingly as "a place where men are slaughtered and blood sprinkles the floor". Tony Harrison ' s version is much closer to the Greek in tone and impact: " man-shambles babe-spattered abattoir" ; so too Richmond Lattimore' s " ... the shambles for men's butchery, the dripping floor" . Agitated choral songs of distress, abundant in Aeschylus, are routinely turned by

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CLAS SICS

Sommerstein (and to some degree by Collard too) into soberly detai led descriptions. For example, when the young women react to the threat of Capaneus' assault in Seven against Thebes (452-56), Sommerstein has, "May he perish, he who makes these great boastful threats against the city! / May the thunderbolt stop him / before ever he leaps upon my house / and plunders me by arrogant armed force / from my maiden abode!". Collard captures the tone of panic more powerfully, "Death to the man for his proud imprecations / on our city! May the lightning-bolt check him / before he bursts into my home / and drags me from the maidens ' rooms / in war's brutal ransack". But more economical and effective still is David Grene: " ... before he burst into my house, / before he ravish me from my maiden room". It is, of course, unfair to pick out isolated passages for criticism. But in general it must be said that Sommerstein's decision not to make any effort to convey the poetic qualities of the original is a drawback and often distracting; nor in his comments does he show much interest in the dramatic aspects of the plays, such as the dynamics of alternating song and speech, ritual incantation or the technique of entrances and exits. This is an edition for historians and serious Greek students, not theatre-lovers. Oxford World's Classics have been in existence even longer than the Loeb Library (since 1901), with over 700 titles - all mainline classic texts, as the name implies, from

many different languages and cultures. These editions of course do not include any Greek or other foreign language, and their main competitors in the field of Greek drama are series such as Penguin Classics, the Grene & Lattimore Complete Greek Tragedies (now published by the University of Chicago Press), and Greek Tragedies in New Translations, also published by Oxford. So what is the difference? Greek Tragedy in New Translations focuses on trying to recapture as much as possible of the original's fire and poetry. The World's Classics, by contrast, aims to be "recognized for its fine scholarship and reliability ... Each edition includes perceptive commentary and essential background information to meet the changing needs of readers". This certainly applies to Christopher Collard's excellent two Aeschylus volumes (following his Oresteia of 2002), which are indeed as scholarly and reliable as anyone could wish for: well balanced too, covering dramatic and stylistic issues as well as historical ones. The notes, essays and bibliographical references are copious, but clear and judicious. If the translations make no effort to be exciting or poetic, they are certainly less plodding than Sommerstein's and are sometimes quite effective and forceful. We are fortunate indeed to have so many ways of reading Aeschylus . But perhaps now it is time to say, "Enough! Please could we have translations of those classics that still have no good translations, if any at all. Some more Galen maybe?".

The Triumphal Arch of Septimius Severus, Leptis Magna, Libya, 2000

In a palm garden MYLES LAY AN Philip Parker THE EMPIRE STOPS HERE A journey along the frontiers of the Roman world 650pp. Cape. £25. 9780224077880

his book undertakes the monumental task of surveying what survives of the Roman Empire along its frontier zones. It takes the reader from the fort of Maia on the Solway Firth along the Rhine and the Danube to the city of Tomis on the Black Sea (immortalized by its grumbling guest, the poet Ovid); from Trapezus on the Black Sea coast of Turkey south along the Euphrates to the Arabian Desert; and from the upper Nile to the cities of Lixus and Tingi on the Atlantic coast of Morocco. Philip Parker has himself traversed much of that LO,OOO-kilometre arc. His book presents the fruits of his impressive travels, not to mention considerable reading. The core of the book is its meticulous inventory of the material remains of Roman civilization. Parker does not limit himself to the imposing or the well known. Town by town, fortress by fortress and sometimes even watchtower by watchtower, he determinedly tracks down even the most exiguous traces of the Roman past. One of the highlights of the book is its attention to the interplay between past and present, stone and man. Parker has a sharp eye for the very different ways in which Rome's legacy has been preserved, lived in , built upon and ignored: a section of city wall preserved in a hairdressing salon in Cologne, a watchtower jammed between two houses in a street in Boppard , Germany, a soldier's tombstone on the wall of a snack bar outside Budapest, a triumphal arch forgotten and collapsing in a palm garden in the Egyptian oasis of Bahariya. He also offers interesting insights into the wider political significance of the Roman heritage in some of the countries he visits. He explores connections between Italian imperialism and the excavation and reconstruction of Roman sites in Libya by Italian archaeolo-

T

CHINA'S LAST EMPIRE The Great Qjng

WILLlAM T. ROWE G EN ERAL EOITOR T IMOTHY BROOK

Challenges the standard narrative of Qing China as a decadent, inward-looking state that fai led to keep pace with the modern West. This original, thoughtprovoki ng history of China's last empire is a mustread for understanding the challenges facing China today. Oct 2009· Belknap Press· 978-0-674-03612-3 • £25.95

THE MONKEY AND THE INKPOT Natural Historyand ttsTransfotmations in Earty Modem O1ina CARLA NAPPI Nappi challenges the idea of a monolithic tradition of Chinese herbal medicin e and shows t he importan ce of debate and disagreement in ea rly modern scho larly and medical cult ure. She also illuminates how this contin ues to shape alternative healing practices, globa l pharmaceutical markets, and Ch in ese culture. Nov 2009 ·978-0-674-03529-4 · £29.95

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gists in the 1930s. He also discusses the complexity of narratives of national identity in Romania, where pride in its (relatively brief) history as the Roman province of Dacia jostles with idealization of the Dacian King Decebalus and his long resistance to Rome. Parker might have pointed to the wonderful incongruity of the modern monumental sculpture of Decebalus on the banks of the Danube (which he has photographed but does not discuss), on which Rome's great enemy is honoured with the Latin inscription "DECEBALUS REX DRAG AN FECIT" . Parker's catalogue of Roman sites is interspersed with accounts of the rise and fall of each settlement, their famous sons (and occasional daughters), and any moments of fame in the grand narratives of Roman history. He also pauses to describe the many tribes and kingdoms that bordered the empire and their often fractiou s relations with Rome. The result is a book that is rich in history on both the grand and the small scale, both political and cultural. It encompasses civil wars, heresies and barbarian invasions. But it also has a place for a Roman murder and cover-up in a village on Hadrian' s Wall. The city of Scrabantia in Hungary occasions a discussion of the amber trade route from the Baltic to Italy on which it lay. The ruins of the circus at Leptis Magna in Libya spark a digression on the importance of circus factions and their rivalries throughout the empire. Vats for the fermentation of fish sauce (garum) in Lixus introduce an account of the manufacture and consumption of that quintessentially Roman delicacy. All in all, the decision to focus on the frontier zones proves a particularly effec-

tive way of illustrating both the great diversity of the far-clung communities encompassed by the Roman Empire and the shared culture, practices and history that bound the m together. As with all long journeys, the progression of towns and ruins is not without a danger of monotony. Yet a formula that might have quickly turned stale in lesser hands is handled masterfully by Parker. The carefully interwoven digressions and the array of detail ensure that there is always something to rekindle the reader' s flagging interest.

TRAVEL ohn King Fairbank, the great Harvard historian of China, noted that many American (and he might have said British) families had Chinese objects in their houses that gave them the only images of China they would ever have. Much of Frances Wood's newest book is like that: charming illustrations flank narrow columns of text with usually slight observations about Chinese life. Chinese human beings were mostly glimpsed from afar. J. G. Ballard, who grew up in Shanghai, is quoted as saying that "my insulation from Chinese life was almost complete. I lived in Shanghai for fifteen years and never learned a word of Chinese .... I never had a Chinese meal". Wood, Curator of the Chinese collections at the British Library, is the author of, among other significant works, Did Marco Polo Go to China?, in which she showed (she was not the first) that he possibly, even probably, didn't. She repeats that good story here. It is one of her vignettes of travellers who heard about China, went near it, or even to it - and wrote about it. They capitalized on the fascination with China that reaches back at least as far as Herodotus and was well described in 1931 by G. F. Hudson in Europe and China. It was the Jesuits, Wood relates, who from the late sixteenth century, and for a century and a half, poured information about China back into Europe. Of these early Sinologues the greatest was Matteo Ricci, who came to Peking in 160 l. He and a succession of colleagues served in the Chinese court "as tutors in mathematics, map makers, imperial

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Tea and chopsticks

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JONATHAN MIRSKY Frances Wood THE LURE OF CHINA Writers from Marco Polo tol. G. Ballard 283pp. Yale University Press. £ 19.99 (US $24.95). 9780 300 15436 8

astronomers, painters and architects for over 150 years". Fluent in their adoptive language, they translated between Chinese and Latin depending on their audience. It was a Jesuit who persuaded the Manchu Emperor Kangxi (1661-1722) to take quinine for his malaria, and cured him. The Jesuits also learnt about vaccination from the Chinese. Their description of how Mandarins won their places in government by competitive examination impressed Voltaire, who observed, "What pleases me about all these Chinese courts of law is that none can execute even the vilest subject on the edge of the empire unless the case has been examined three times by the Grand Council presided over by the Emperor himself'. The current regime is rather less enlightened. It is in the chapter on the Jesuits that Wood's book shows the drawback that is remedied only in her final chapters. In her own commentaries she says nothing, or next

A detail from "Coca-Cola" (Da pipan) by Wang Guangyi (b.1956); from Outside In: Chinese x American x contemporary art (303pp. Yale University Press. £35; $60. 9780300 12208 4) to nothing, about the often tumultuous events convulsing the country in which most of her observers were travelling or living. In 1644, during the Jesuit period, for example, the Manchus conquered Ming China, establishing the last dynasty. The Taiping Rebellion, 1850-64, may have cost 30 million lives. In 1900, the Boxers drove the Empress Dowager from Peking and terrified the foreign legations.

There were plenty of foreigners who wrote about such events - Jonathan Spence' s The China Helpers is an easy source - but they are not here and Wood does not set the scene. But by the 1920s, Chinese people - as opposed to chopsticks, tea and wheelbarrows with sails - appear, for example, in the letters of Julian Bell, Vanessa' s nephew; while teaching in China, he had an affair with his dean's wife, and then fled to Spain where he was killed. Wood admires Edgar Snow, who in 1936 obtained the scoop of the century with Mao Zedong. Mao told Snow his life story, for the first and last time. Snow's account of his time with Mao appeared in Red Star Over China, which was, Wood says, "a problematic success". She doesn' t say why. The biggest problem was that the left-wing press in the United States ignored it. Snow wrote a letter to the Communist Party secretary in the US, saying, "Some weeks ago I voluntarily wrote to my publisher, asking them to excise certain sentences from any new edition of my book sentences which I thought might be offensive to the party". The nature of these changes, not cited by Wood, can be seen in the second edition of Red Star, which the Left now loved. Nor does she mention Snow' s books about his later visits to China, which revealed again his reluctance to ask his Communist hosts tough questions. I fear that Snow's inability to ask tough questions also applies to Frances Wood' s book. Charm and vivacity are not enough, especially when her subject has been thoroughly explored by other scholars.

A New Bilingual Edition of Tocqueville's Classic

Democracy in America

In Four Volumes

By Alexis de Tocqueville Edited by Eduardo Nolla Translated by James T. Schleifer Publication Date: December 2009 6 x 9. 3,360 pages. Cloth. ISBN 978-0-86597-719-8. $96.00 / £66.95/set. Paperback. ISBN 978-0-86597-724-2. $60.00 / £41.95/set.

~~

Liberty Fund, Inc.

n 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont spent nine months in the U.S. studying American prisons on behalf of the French government. They investigated not just the prison system but indeed every aspect of American public and private life-the political, economic, religious, cultural, and above all the social life of the young nation. From Tocqueville's copious notes came De la Democratie en Amerique.

I

This bilingual edition of Democracy in America contains Eduardo Nolla's historical critical edition of the French text and notes facing James Schleifer's English translation, with an extensive selection of early outlines, drafts, manuscript variants, marginalia, unpublished fragments, and other materials. Features include a translator's note, list of key terms, foreword, twenty-one illustrations, editor's introduction, footnotes, appendixes, a list of all works known to have been used by Tocqueville, a bibliography, and French and English indexes. Tel: (800) 621-2736 (USA/Canada) or (773) 702-7000 (SouIhAmerira, Cen1ralAmerira, Caribbean) Fax: (800) 621-8476 (USA/Canada) or (773) 702-7212 (SouIhAmerira,Cen1ralAmerira,Caribbean) E-mail: [email protected] Web site: www.libertyfund.org

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For all other regions:

6

Gazelle Academic TeI: + 44 (0) 152468765 Fax: + 44 (0) 152463232 E-mail: [email protected]

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p=-r-om-o--=C'-od"--e--:-L=FA=n:-::sC::29c-l1

IN BRIEF

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Drug War Zone is a valuable attempt to understand the causes and consequences of these statistics. TIFFANY BERGIN

Travel Sara Wheeler THE MAGNETIC NORTH Notes from the Arctic Circle 368pp. Cape. £20. 978 0 224 08221 I

Essays

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his belief that drugs should be legalized; a historian who recites the legend of La Nacha, who outwitted her rivals to become one of the most powerful drug dealers on the US-Mexico border; an innocent Lebanese Mexican who sold scuba diving gear to ambitious drug smugglers; and a "dyed-in-thewool Republican" from Texas who used to work for the border patrol but now believes that the drug war is futile. Campbell also seeks to familiarize readers with the complex vocabulary and culture of the drug trade. We learn that, in Mexico, the territories controlled by specific drug cartels are known as "plazas" , while "tienditas" are the shops, private homes, or street-vendor outlets where drugs are sold. "Narcocorridos" are the popular ballads written about the lives of drug traffickers and "narco-mantas" are the frightening placards which display messages from drug cartels in public places. Although Campbell clearly defines all of the unfamiliar terms used in the interviews, the inclusion of a glossary of key words and phrases would have been useful. More maps would have been helpful too. However, Campbell helpfully offers some context and

or her new book, Sara Wheeler conceived a series of visits to each of the Arctic countries in turn, starting in far eastern Siberia and working eastwards through North America, Greenland, and back to Lapland and the western Russian Arctic. Its many separate journeys have no connection, and the lack of a single trajectory can give the narrative a certain stasis. But what Magnetic North has instead is a meditative, often melancholy, quality that tells us a lot about what it' s like to simply be in the Arctic, rather than to travel through it: the sights and sounds, the ever-present insect annoyance, the subordination of all human activity to the exigencies of weather, the contrasting emphases of isolation and communal solidarity, and, yes, the sense of stasis, embraced for the Zen-like enjoyment of it, when you have no choice but to wait for others to take you from place to place. More overt themes recur as central strands linking the chapters: the mutually uncomprehending encounters between indigenous hunter-gatherers and nation-states, played out with dispiriting similarity from one country to the next; the Arctic as a mineral bonanza whose value those nation states have rarely failed to appreciate; the underlying spectre of climate change that greeted Wheeler at every place she stopped, and the related phenomena of bio-accumulation and polar amplification, which concentrate both industrial toxins and the effects of increasing temperature in the Arctic. Having set out as a climate-change agnostic, Wheeler admits to being convinced, at the end, of its sobering reality. Alongside these themes the author deftly weaves in some nicely crafted vignettes that illuminate various aspects of the Arctic experience as reflected in the history, politics, or exploration of each of the countries she visits. Some of her most successful digressions include those on the Alaska pipeline (the defining presence in the background of all discussions of that state), on the air-route pioneer Gino Watkins, on the anarchic characters of the Klondike Gold Rush, on the skiing prowess of the Sami and, at either end of the unfathomable Russian north, the horror of the Gulags.

hackground information hefore each inter-

JONATHAN DORE

David Hajdu HEROES AND VILLAINS Essays on music, movies, comics, and culture 336pp. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press. Paperback, £10.99 (US $17.95). 9780306818332

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avid Hajdu is a cultural commentator with a generous spirit and lightness of touch; but when it comes to mediocrity he lands a sucker punch. Empty posturing, artistic corn modification and media faddism must all face the force of his opprobrium, not to mention talent corrupted. Heroes and Villains is an entertaining collection of Hajdu's journalism from the past few years, incl uding book and album reviews, obituaries and opinion pieces, much of it first published in the New Republic, for whom he is chief music critic. Hajdu's "heroes" include an array of characters from the versatile actor-cum-rapper Mos Def to W. C. Handy, a band leader and composer who, at a Mississippi rail station in 1903, overheard a black musician strumming a guitar with a knife blade. "The weirdest music I had ever heard", wrote Handy "thereupon documenting the earliest known performance of the blues", writes Hajdu. The evolution of blues is a recurring theme in a collection that traces an arc through twentieth-century American racial politics. Hajdu reflects on the bebop pin-up Billy Eckstine, once "the most popular male vocalist in the country". Eckstine ended his life washed up and penniless, his brief star having been extinguished by a "white-controlled entertainment industry at once obsessed with and fearful of black male sexuality". Hajdu contrasts Eckstine's fate with that of "funny , sexless novelty figures" such as Louis Armstrong and Fats Wailer, and, in a later essay, with Ray Charles, sexualized but blind ("his RayBans shielded him"). Elsewhere, Hajdu pays (measured) tribute to various comic strip artists (loe Sacco; Will Eisner; Marjane Satrapi), the French-Italian pianist Michel Petrucciani, Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen (though not Philip Glass, with whom Cohen has collaborated), and the under-loved Warner Bros creation Elmer Fudd. Equally stimulating are the sketches of "villains" , a cast including Sting (in his "outsized smugness"), Starbucks's reductive "entertainment" division, MySpace (which "conspire[s) to inhibit originality while rewarding familiarity and accessibility") and Thomas A. Parker (aka "The Colonel"), whose "pitiless lordship" of Elvis Presley helped to stunt the performer's acting career and create today's mythological monster of garishness and rhinestone. Hajdu laments the decline of Brian Wilson and pours scorn on the White Stripes Ca two-person, one-man band",

The writer and performer Karen Porter Sorensen interviewing passers-by in New York aboutlove, in exchange for a red rose; taken from Love (Luv) n., by Karen Porter Sorensen (226pp, Adams Media. $10.95. 978 160550 359 2) whose tracks "sound like demos - or, occasionally, rehearsals for demos"). More provoking still are his gilded damnings. Here he is on the composer John Zorn: "an enigmatic provocateur with an outsize mystique who stirred acolytes to do work better than his own". The same, remarks Hajdu with airy sagacity, could be said of Erik Satie. TOBY LICHTIG

Social Studies Howard Campbell DRUG WAR ZONE Frontline dispatches from the streets of El Paso and J uarez 336pp. University of Texas Press. Paperback, $24.95. 9780292 72179 I

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ike the oral historian Studs Terkel, Howard Campbell - a professor of sociology and anthropology at the University of Texas at El Paso - aims to "record the voices of common workers". The common workers in this case are all intimately connected - as drug traffickers, law enforcement officials and innocent bystanders - to the drug trade between Mexico and the United States. By anchoring his work in both the US city of El Paso and the Mexican city of Juarez, Campbell is able to present lengthy, firsthand accounts of life on both sides of this violent, otherworldly "drug war zone". Few previous works have explored the complex dynamics and consequences of cross-border drug trafficking as absorbingly as this book. Among the fascinating characters we meet are a self-proclaimed anarchist dealer who cites Margaret Mead in support of

view, and his concluding chapter effectively brings together themes from all of the interviews, while adding more information and analysis. His introduction solidly grounds the research in anthropological and sociological theories and reveals Campbell's ample knowledge of previous work in this area. Campbell writes that, at the time his book went to press, more than 1,600 killings had been reported in Ciudad Juarez in 2008, making it the bloodiest year in the city's recorded history. Sadly, this record no longer stands, as 2009 saw more than 2,500 killings.

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Literary Criticism Richard C. Sha PERVERSE ROMANTICISM Aesthetics and sexuality in Britain, 1750-1832 376pp. Johns Hopkins University Press. $55; distributed in the UK by WiJey. £28.50. 978080189041 3

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erverse Romanticism is a vastly interesting but sadly flawed book. The past

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IN BRIEF decade saw a flurry of publications about the Romantics' relationship with science, from Alan Richardson's British Romanticism and the Science of Mind to Sharon Rushton's Shelleyand Vitality. Richard C. Sha's exploration of contemporary scientific and medical notions concerning gender, sexuality and reproduction promised to be an exciting contribution to this field. This promise is largely fulfilled. Sha produces a masterful account of science in the period, including Lazzaro Spallanzani's experiments with frogs in taffeta shorts, and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach's quasi-medical denunciation of the clitoris as an "obscene organ of brute pleasure ... given to beasts". If Sha had then gone on to show how contemporary controversies and concepts in the burgeoning scientific understanding of reproduction and sexuality had influenced Romantic writings, this book might have been a landmark in Romantic studies. Unfortunately, this is not what happens. Sha lets what Susan Son tag calls the "itch of interpretation" get the better of him. Rather than build a steady argument from historical and literary specificity, Sha erects a teetering hermeneutic edifice. Foucault, as you would expect, looms large. But Sha persistently uses the Kantian construct "purposiveness without purpose" as a key to understanding both aesthetic and sexual perversity in the period, to deeply unconvincing effect. To reach page 144 and be told, "Although none of the Romantics ascribed to ' purposiveness without purpose' Kant's original formulation does matter ... " , prompts the question of what theoretical tail was wagging which literary dog. It is a pity that Sha overloads his readings with extraneous philosophical posturing, because when his theoretical insights come together with acute readings and strong historical research - as in the final chapter on Don Juan and puberty - he illuminates afresh familiar texts. SHIRLEY DENT

Natural History Christopher L10yd WHAT ON EARTH EVOLVED? 100 species that changed the world 416pp. Bloomsbury. £25. 97807475 9962 3

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e may imagine that Christopher L1oyd, nephew of the well-known gardener of the same name, first discovered his passion for unravelling nature in his uncle' s shrubberies at Hixter in Kent. It is appropriate to a horticulturalist' s acquisitive mania to plant diverse species together for stunning effect, but whether the same approach applies to books makes you wonder if list-lit can prove a point. What on F:arth F:volved? (the third in the What . .. ? series) is an ingenious and entertaining effort to rank species in order of the difference they have made to the infinite vicissitudes of evolution. L10yd selects a hundred interconnected candidates, including Homo sapiens, from anthrax to the Norway spruce, from sponge to the honey bee, from tyrannosaurus to HIV. He splits them 50-50 before and after man, and links them all fascinatingly to humankind - revealing our mimicry of slime mould, olives as the sine qua non of Western culture, and how an Ice Age gave birth to eyes.

His purpose is to reject the anthropocentric , cultivating understanding of history through the lens of the natural world. Do we grow narcotics, or is it the other way around? Wherever we meddle in nature, L10yd teases our conscience. For example, we learn that one of the inventors of penicillin felt so guilty about boosting population that he turned to developing methods of contraception. Then there are the child chocolate farms of the Cote d'Ivoire; cotton , which pumped the Aral Sea dry ; and the rose, remorselessly sucking the life out of East Africa. Yet L10yd paints moral dilemmas lightly, arguing that evolution is bigger than man. A major difficulty in writing about nature is endowing it with an overarching narrative, and lists are no way to tell a story. L1oyd's breadth of understanding of the natural world is inspiring, but it does necessitate a fair amount of distracting cross-referencing. Similarly the rankings, while undoubtedly carefully crafted, occasionally feel makeweight. Overall the book is beautifully presented, with Andy Forshaw's artful illustrations suggesting the publisher's intent to develop new formats for popular science. Despite its lighthearted presentation, What on Earth Evolved? cleverly conveys a surprising and serious message: earthworms are number

ground", represented by charismatic Jesuits like John Bennett and Henry Garnett, who was later executed for failing to betray the Gunpowder plotters. Pritchard argues that although the cult was used for Catholic networking, Catholics mostly remained loyal to the Crown and reviled the plots. His story of the pilgrimage some of the Gunpowder plotters made to the well before their outrage reads like a thriller. What had survived the iconoclasm of the sixteenth century was to suffer under the Puritans during and after the Civil War. Witch-hunts initiated by Titus Oates in 1678 led to the execution of priests who had been closely associated with Holywell, but in 1687 James II gave the well to his Catholic Queen, Mary Beatrice of Modena, who promptly passed it on to the Jesuits. After James ' s flight, however, the penal laws against Catholics were again strengthened. Pritchard establishes the well - now advertised as "The Lourdes of Wales" - as one of the most important nodes in British Catholic history, but does not quite explain why it is not better known today. TREVOR MOSTYN

Spanish Fiction Adolfo Garcia Orte~a EL MAPA DE LA VIDA 539pp. Barcelona: Seix Barral. Paperback, €20. 978 84 322 1272 7

one.

PATRICK EVANS

Religion T. W. Pritchard ST WINEFRIDE , HER HOLY WELL AND THE JESUIT MISSION, c 650-1930 423pp. Wrexham: Bridge Books. £20. 978 I 84494 060 8

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etween 7.37 and 7.40 am on March 11 , 2004, ten bombs exploded inside the crowded carriages of four commuter trains heading for Madrid' s Atocha station. The carnage, which left 191 people dead and nearly 2,000 wounded, is clinically described in the opening pages of El mapa de la vida W. Pritchard ' s study of St Winefride' s ("The Map of Life"). In a manner reminiswell at Holywell in North Wales sheds cent of contemporary journalistic coverage of much light on the story of the survival of the tragedy, the novel presents a series of indiRoman Catholicism in Britain. His story viduals whose plans, ambitions and dreams begins with the growth of the cult of St Wine- in short, the maps of their lives - were fride - the beautiful girl decapitated in the abruptly ripped apart on that raw spring mornseventh century by the wicked lothario, ing. Thereafter, the book is mainly concerned Prince Caradog, and then restored to life by with the story of two wounded survivors of St Beuno. He traces the cult' s survival from the attacks: Gabriel, a designer of fairground 1536 and the dissolution of the monasteries rides, and Ada, an art historian. Gabriel and to 1829, when Roman Catholics in Britain Ada' s relationship begins with a chance meetwere finally emancipated. ing in front of Fra Angelico' s "AnnunciaFrom the Reformation onwards, St Wine- tion" at the Prado Museum, then develops fride became the symbol of a persecuted and deepens before reaching a tragic concluchurch. Nearby Basingwerk Abbey was dis- sion in the final pages of the novel. solved in 1536. Henry VIII' s injunctions El mapa de la vida is fresh , well written were aimed at the destruction of Winefride' s and flawed. Its originality derives largely standing as a saint, the devotion of the Welsh from the bizarre and spontaneous manner in faithful , the pilgrimages, the offerings, the which its main characters behave. At times images and the stained glass. Worse was to they seem to have escaped from the pages of come during the reign of Edward VI, whose Alice in Wonderland. This deliberately antiinjunctions against pilgrimages and relics realist take is hest exemplified hy the scene brooked no compromise. Although Pritchard where Gabriel's reaction to Ada' s news that classifies the well ' s survival as a miracle, she has been raped by her ex-husband is to he recognizes that it was too popular locally grasp the severed head of a conger-eel - the for officials, often related to the cult's devo- couple are standing at a fish-stall at the time tees, to destroy it. They tended to turn a blind and kiss it on the mouth, then exclaim: "I eye, not least to the song and dance which the think I feel an enormous sadness. And a fair well attracted. amount of anger". Adolfo Garcia Ortega is an Under Mary Tudor' s revival of Catholi- energetic creator of vivid scenes with the abilcism, Holywell flourished. Under Elizabeth, ity to find humour in the unlikeliest places. pilgrimage was again forbidden. "God ' s hor- But he has a weakness for prolixity. Like so rible wrath", she said, would fall on those many other books published in Spain today, who followed the cult, but it survived thanks El mapa de la vida cries out for more rigorto what Pritchard calls "the Catholic under- ous editing. Pruned of about a third of its dis-

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tracting minor characters and scenes, it could have been a much better novel. MARTIN BEAGLES

History J. A. Froude THE REIGN OF MARY TUDOR Introduced and selected by Eamon Duffy 168pp. Continuum. Paperback, £9.99. 978 1441186850

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ontinuum Histories aim to attract new generations of readers to narrative history. An adroitly chosen selection of passages from Froude's History of England, a book that has long been gathering dust on library shelves, fully deserves this revival. And who better to introduce selected passages on the reign of Mary Tudor than Eamon Duffy, with his recent persuasion that by 1558 "the protestant hydra was being decapitated" ? His twenty pages of introduction give readers all the guidance to Froude and his work that is needed. When it comes to the chosen passage of text, however, things are very different. The apparatus is mimimalist even for such a slimmed-down paperback. The new headings supplied for the reprinted sections (including "The Unhappy Queen", and "The End of Catholic England"), are not listed in the table of contents. There is nothing of, or on, Froude' s annotation. Some of his sources can be deduced, but this is a missing dimension that matters, given the question mark that hangs over Froude' s accuracy, described in the introduction. His amphibious standing as a man of letters who delved deeply in the archives, wrote for readers at large, and finally spent two years as Regius Professor at Oxford was unusual. That Froude made use of a wide range of sources is clear (though not to readers of this edition). The readability of his prose depends in part on reported speech, and, in general, he seems careful to observe the propriety of inverted commas for known utterances. But the vitality of his narration depends on interpolations that are nearer to what we think of as fiction than history. One readily verifiable example may seem suggestive. Froude's borrowings from Foxe's "Martyrs" include his account of Cranmer' s trial, which he misdated, while he turned Cranmer' s response to the opening charge into direct speech, and has the Archbishop being called to "uniformity" instead of the "conformity" of the original. As it was, in the very year that Froude was elected professor, 1892, he was taken to task in the English Historical Review, for having "gone beyond his authority, even such as it was" , for his description of Philip II. But the readers of these pages are being lured primarily hy the narrator' s skill. Here they may relish passages like that in which Froude describes the first meeting between Mary and her bridegroom, Philip. The Queen, impatient to see her appointed husband, called Philip to her presence. "Let the curtain fall over the meeting." But Froude was not deterred. This encounter at Winchester, a scene "too deep for words", presented an opportunity for him to reflect on the miscalculations of the "haggard bride", whose cold husband was to break her spirit and leave her to spiritual consolation. MARGARET ASTON

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Snake pits here is a scarcely concealed sense of sati sfaction in Lord Salisbury' s tone in a letter to the Viceroy from the India Office in 1876, as quoted by Sir John Ure: "It is the natural right of a Briton to get hi s throat cut when and where he likes" . High Victorian admiration for the order and stability of their Indian Empire swelled many a noble breast but the Empire could also seem a trifle dull. Adventure, with the real ri sk of an earl y grave, lay outside Briti sh dominion, across the border, somewhere between the Ri ver Indus and the Russian outposts on the Caspian. In the wilds of Afghanistan, Baluchi stan, Persia and the Khanates of Central Asia, a British uniform and a letter of accreditation meant little or nothing for much of the nineteenth century. Guns, gold sovereigns, fl attery in classical Persian, the ability to pretend to be an Afghan horse-dealer just might, however, do the trick. " Shooting leave" was the euphemism for such unofficial , semi-clandestine cross-border expeditions, often carried out by young Briti sh arm y or civil officers in disgui se. The ir mi ssion was reconnaisance, map-making, espionage - and adventure. The Ru ssians were doing the same in the direction of India, an early, imperial version of the Cold War, kno wn in St Petersburg as the "Tournament of the Shadows", and in England as the Great Game. If the participants profiled by Ure in Shooting Leave seem familiar, it is probably through fiction rather than history. Famous in their day and lions of a London season or two, Captain Fred Burnaby, who rode to Khi va, or Alexander Burnes, who got into the even more dangerous Bokhara, are now largely fo rgotten. Their world, however, has been ce lebrated in the Flashman novels of George MacDonald Fraser, in Philip Glazebrook' s Captain Vinegar, in Kipling' s Kim

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ROBERT CARVER John Ur e SHOOTI NG LE A YE Spying out Central As ia in the Great Game 275pp. Constable. £ 16.99. 978 I 8490 I 0405

and "The Man Who Would Be King", and the novels of John Masters. Almost as potent a literary property as the Raj itself is this louche, off-stage Wild East of large turbans, outsized villains, and Briti sh derring-do. It pro vided the backdrop for Kim, perhaps the greatest novel of Briti sh India. Colonel Creighton, Lurgan Sahib, and the Afghan horse-dealer Mahbub Ali all belong to the world beyond the frontier as much as they do to Lahore or Simla: the Great Game of Anglo- Russian ri valry in Central Asia is the fulcrum on which they all turn. At the heart of Ure' s study is the ambi valence of identity. "We completely metamorphosed ourselves, shaving our heads, and adopting the entire native costume", wrote Lt Henry Pottinger, of the Bombay Native Infantry, describing hi s mission into Baluchi stan in 18 10, aged twenty-one. In Indi a since he was fourteen, Pottinger had spent years as a cadet, studying Persian "and other nati ve languages", under the direct patronage of hi s fellow Anglo-Irishman Lord Castlereagh. While in di sguise, questioned as to whether he was Sunni or Shia, Pottinger was "fortunately able to recite the Sunni creed, and so escape discovery" . Later, in Persia, when he met his fellow adventurer Captain Charles Chri stie, with whom he had started out, neither of them recognized the other, so good had their Persian and their costumes become. Thi s is the world of Kim (published

in 1901 ) ninety years avant la lettre. Effecti ve di sguise and e legant Persian were no guarantee of safety. Alexander "Bokhara" Burnes was murdered outside his own house in Kabul, in spite of all hi s diplomatic skills. It was the Briti sh-Indian Army of occupation the mob objected to, 16,000 of whom were killed on the di sastrous retreat to India, just one man, Dr Brydon, getting back alive. In Orientalism, Edward Said claimed that Europeans disguised as " nati ves" could never have fool ed anyone, that it was all part of a dressing-up fantasy of the East in thrall to Western guile. Ure's evidence contradicts thi s: many of the early nineteenth-century Britons undercover in Central Asia passed as Orientals for months, years - even, in the case of the arm y deserter who called himself Charles Masson, for decades. Ure sticks to the successes: the failures usually died obscurely, murdered by hands unknow n for their guns, boots or watches. The hapless, stiff-necked envoys Stoddart and Conoll y, sent to the suspicious and probably insane Emir of Bokhara, are two failures we do know about, and whom Ure mentions briefl y in passing. They were beheaded, after months in a pit of live scorpions, snakes, rats and other vermin , refu sing to the end forced conversion to Islam. It is a pity that Ure omits the details of their ill-conceived and maladroitl y executed mission, as we often learn more from failure than success. The East India Company required its European officers to study the East and its languages with diligence and respect: after the Mutiny of 1857 , imperial government became increasingly Eurocentric, and often insensiti vely ameliori st. Ure's later adventurers no longer speak Oriental languages flu ently, nor have they the fl exible, often engaging manners of their predecessors. The Russians

always used disguise less, weapons and main force more. Caucasian soldiers of the Tsar and aristocrats in disgrace such as M aksud Alikhanoff also had the advantage of local languages . The city-states of Khi va, Merv and Bokhara were of great interest to the Ru ssians, as the Tsar was bent on absorbing them into hi s empire. By the 1890s, this had been achieved, and two latter-day British agents, Sykes and Coningham, were able to get to Samarkand by steamer and train, via Baku on the Caspian. Their "disguise" consisted of "long cloaks and fl at-topped caps that looked remarkably military". They booked into a modern hotel, employing a local Armenian to actually do their espionage for them. Ure doesn' t tell us if this amateur espionage gave real value as intelligence, nor does he provide any analysis of whether the Great Game itself had any basis in serious geopolitical reality. Any tsarist invasion of India would have involved immense logistical problems of supply, and even if initially successful , have exposed a vulnerable line of communications thousands of miles from the nearest railhead and to what conceivable advantage? When the Tsar's successor state, the Soviet Union, did make the strategic error of occupying Afghani stan in the 1970s, it found itself in a quagmire, fi ghting an un winnable war of counter-insurgency against guerrillas funded and armed by the Pakistani s, British and Americans. Had the Tsar been un wise enough to try the same tactic, hi s forces might have found themselves in a simil ar situation. Easy to invade and occupy, difficult to subjugate and rule, Afghani stan remains a poi soned chalice for whichever of the great powers takes it on. The Russian empire failed to digest the portions of Muslim Central Asia and the Caucasus it did swallow during the nineteenth century: most of Russia's contemporary problems with terro rism stem from those acqui sitions. " You can rent an Afghan, but never buy him" still remains the traditional local aphori sm most applicable to would-be Central Asian conquerors.

CLASSIFIED CONFERENCES "Historical Memory'" Foundation, Central Museum of the Great Patriotic War with the support of the German Historical Institute in Moscow and The "Holocaust'" Foundation invite reseachers for the conference

--rHI WAR OF IXTIRMINAnONI IHI NAZI OINOCIDI IN IASnRN IUROPI"'. The conference is focused on the history of the realization of Nazi extermination policy: historiography, methodology and historical sources for to study Nazi extermination policy; Nazi plans concerning the extermination policy and their realization; Holocaust in the context of Nazi extermination policy in Eastern Europe; man in the face of genocide (from the sociocultural aspect); the memory of the Nazi genocide and it's reRection in the Post-Soviet and East European social consciousness.

" - - ... de 11IIDr.lltitM l1li de .Jt. hllplll_·h.....,.........._.ru/lntle___ •...P D....II_ for P ......_ .... 12th . . .aNh, 201 0·.

Durham oivcrsi LY

Arts & Humanities Research Council

Drawing out Shakespeare: Shakespeare and Education, Then and Now.

NATIONAL WORSHIP IN INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVE

Australia and New Zealand Shakespeare Association Sydney. Australia, 16·19 June 2010.

An international and interdisciplinary conference at Durham University, 12·14 April 2010

Plenary speakers Lynn Enterline, Evelyn Trlbble. Gordon Mc Mullan.

Many early modern and modern governments ordered occasions of special worship in

Cfp and registration: www.anzsa.org

periods of great crisis or unexpected prosperity, arta mark calam ities or victories. They were significant occasions, reg istering peaks of public anxiety or celebration, ill um inating Chu rc h-

State relations and shaping national identity. Th is conference brings together experts on special state-ordered worshi p in different countries and different periods, in order to explore

similarities and contrasts and to develop new interdisciplinary approaches. We welcome proposals for papers from scholars in any discipline as well as delegates who do not wish to give a paper.

For more information go to: http:;jl/llWVll,du r,ac, uk/historyj researchj research_p rojectsj brit ish_state_prayers/ conference/ Or contact: Or Natalie Mears, Department of History, Durham University, 43 North Bailey,

Durham, DH1 3EX, United Kingdom; [email protected]

The booking deadline for reserving classified advertising space in the Times Literary Supplement is always noon on the Friday before publication. Copy must be submitted by noon on the Monday before publication. Proofs are available on request. For further information, or to reserve space, please contact Jonalhan Drummond on 0207 782 4975 or email [email protected]

TLS FEBRUAR Y 122 010

THE 'WIND OF CHANGE' FIFTY YEARS ON Britain and the end of empire in the 1950s and 19605 A Conference to mark the 50th Anniversary of Harold Macmillan's landmark speech 26-27 March 2010 University of East Anglia For further infonnation and a registration fann , go to: http://uea.ac.uk/hisJeventsnews/ events/wind+of+cbange

CLASSIFIED COURSES

ACCOMMODATION POETRY & WRITING COURSES IN FRANCE

Newcastle

University

Chateau Ventenac is delighted to announce new writing courses & retreat weeks for 2010

CENTRAL LONDON: Friendly B&B in historic Bloomsbury. Rooms from £5 1 to include full-English breakfast. Free wireless access. Close to British Museum and Library. Direct Underground to Heathrow and Kings X for Eurostar. Quiet, safe, secure, ideal for those travelling alone.

The Penn Club, 21 Bedford Place, London, WC1 B 5JJ +44(0)2078384718 [email protected] www.pennclub.co.uk

CREATIVE WRITING SPRING SCHOOL 22nd March - 26th March 2010 Join us for readings by Caryl Phillips, Sindiwe Magona and Kachi Ozumba and improve your writing skills in a week of writing workshops run by Sindiwe Magona, Laura Fish, Kachi Ozumba and Tina Gharavi. Fee £300 (to include lunches, refreshments and evening events) For further information about the Spring School, as well as postgraduate opportunities in creative writing, including AHRC studentships, please visit our website: http://ncl.ac.uklncla

To book call Melanie Birch on 0191 222 7619 or email melanie. [email protected]

SCHOLARSHIPS

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www.chateauventenac.comlcourses email: [email protected] Call: +44 (0)7773 206344

EVENTS

General information on the project is available at: http:/jwww.ucl.ac.uk/german/aboutusjstaffjfulbrookres.htm . For informal enquiries, please contact: [email protected] or [email protected] For further details and to apply, please go to: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/hr/jobs/

Financial Assistance for Writers Grants and Pensions are available to published authors of several works who are in financial difficulties due to personal or professional setbacks.

Applications are considered in confidence by the General Committee every month. For further details and application fonn, please write to Eileen Gunn, General Secretary, The Royal Literary Fund, 3 lohnson's Court, London EC4A 3EA, telephone 020 7353 7159 or email: [email protected]

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