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ancing in the Dark" is one of those song titles that divides the generations. Do we mean the Bruce Springsteen hit from Born in the USA (1984) or the Bing Crosby hit (1931) from the Schwartz and Dietz revue score for The Bandwagon? Both are classics of their kinds and both Springsteen and Crosby feature in Morris Dickstein ' s book of the same name, reviewed this week by John Gross. Crosby's recording of a song that reached out from a darkened ballroom towards the outer limits of the Great Depression is treated "effectively and affectingly"; but how precisely the
LETTERS & FICTION
3
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
6
CULTURAL HISTORY
7
John Gross
Morris Dickstein Dancing in the Dark - A cultural history of the Great Depression
BIOGRAPHY
8
Paula Marantz Cohen Ramona Fotiade
Cari Beauchamp Joseph P. Kennedy's Hollywood Years Richard Brody Everything is Cinema - The working life of Jean-Luc Godard
The ' prebiotic soup', Orientalism, Wotcher, etc
10 Amanda Vickery
Maureen Wailer The English Marriage - Tales of love, money and adultery
POEM
10
Harry Clifton
Marriage
HISTORY
11
Jonathan Clark
Gabriel Glickman The English Catholic Community 1688- 1745 Politics, culture and ideology Steve Pincus 1688 - The first modern revolution Trevor Royle The Cameronians - A concise history
Allan Mallinson COMMENTARY
14 Cairns Craig August Kleinzahler Then and Now
ARTS
17
Kelly Grovier
Guy Dammann
Jonathan Barnes
FICTION
19
Leo Robson Alexander Starritt Paul Binding Jess Chandler Priyamvada Gopal Holly Kyte
E. L. Doctorow Homer and Langley Xiaolu Guo Lovers in the Age of Indifference Ketil Bj!)rnstad To Music Simon Lelic Rupture Raphael Selbourne Beauty Laleh Khadivi The Age of Orphans
BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIRS
22
Alan Taylor
Tim Neat Hamish Henderson - A biography; Volume Two: Poetry Becomes People Lavinia Greacen, editor J. G. Farrell in his Own Words - Selected letters and diaries
DIARIES
23 D. J. Taylor
George Orwell Diaries; Edited by Peter Davison
LlTERAR Y CRITICISM
24 Barton Swaim
Crawford Gribben and David George Mullan, editors Literature and the Scottish Reformation Nicholas McDowell Poetry and Allegiance in the English Civil Wars Marvell and the cause of wit
Neil Forsyth
PS
The last Romantics - How the scholarship of Herbert Grierson influenced Modernist poetry Freelance TLS March 8, 1991 - In a brown study Constantinople, or the Sensual Concealed - The imagery of Sean Scully (Ulster Museum, Belfast) Steve Chibnall and Brian McFarlane The British "B" Film Sherlock Holmes (Various cinemas) Richard Strauss Elektra (Stockholm)
Patricia Craig
William Styron also has a small part in Dickstein's book - as one of the Southern writers who had to struggle to escape the legacy of William Faulkner. James Campbell reviews Styron 's Letters to My Father and finds in these early texts the keys to the novelist's future depression that were "hidden from the author and discernible to readers only with the benefit of hindsight". George Orwell walks briefly into Dickstein's world too - as a writer whose observation of the poor and attitude to his privileged education can profitably be compared with the less successful career and self-lacerating complexity of the author of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, James Agee. D. J. Taylor reviews Orwell's Diaries, all eleven books published consecutively now for the first time though still without the twelfth "and possibly even a thirteenth" that were taken by Soviet agents from a Barcelona hotel room in 1937. While Orwell and Crosby confronted the cultural consequences of the Crash, Joseph Kennedy was attempting to impose his own cultural consequences on Hollywood, exerting his genius, as Paula Marantz Cohen describes, in ensuring that when a big film of his mistress, Gloria Swanson, lost money, she alone paid the bills and he took a profit.
William Styron Letters to my Father. The Suicide Run - Five tales of the Marine Corps
SOCIAL STUDIES
connection is made between plangent songs
and economic collapse remains no more than "suggestive". Springsteen himself appears as a follower of one of Dickstein's greatest Depression heroes, Woody Guthrie.
James Campbell
POETRY & MUSIC
25
Glyn Paflin Wendy Moore
Nick Strimple Choral Music in the Nineteenth Century Suzanne Cole Thomas Tallis and His Music in Victorian England Caroline Grigson The Life and Poems of Anne Hunter - Haydn's tuneful voice
IN BRIEF
26
Andrea Gillies Keeper - Living with Nancy Christopher Hibbert The House of Borgia Timothy Egan The Big Burn Irene Khan with David Petrasek The Unheard Truth Jonathan Swift The Wonderful Wonder of Wonders Peter Burke Cultural Hybridity Kenneth McAlpine We Died With Our Boots Clean Margot K. Louis Persephone Rises, 1860- 1927
COOKERY
30 Paul Levy
Vicente Todoli and Richard Hamilton Food for Thought, Thought for Food
31
This week's contributors, Crossword
32 J. C.
Fiction in translation, Literary anniversaries, The birth of the blues
NB
Cover picture: William Styron in 1952, aged twenty-six © Bettrnann/Corbis; p3 © The Kobal Collection/Films du Losange; p4 © Michael Abramsonffime & Life Pictures/Getty Images; p7 © 20th Century Foxffhe Kobal Collection; pS: © Bettmann/Corbis; p9 © Photos 12/Alarny; pll © The Bridgeman Art Library; pl3 © The Art Archive/Alamy; pl4 © 2002 APlTopham; pl8 ©A lex Bailey/2008 Warner Bros; pl9 © Bettmann/Corbis; p23 © The Bridgeman Art Library; p2S © Granger Collection. NYClTopFoto 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, Denville, NJ 07834, USA
TLS JANUARY 15 2010
LETTERS & FICTION
3
Styron's voice The early letters that show the literary capital from which the author of Darkness Visible was still drawing at the end of his life hen William Styron and his daughter Alexandra discussed the plot of a novel she was writing in the 1990s, he offered the opinion that "a great novel must have a great theme". The advice, symptomatic of the "major/minor" complex that afflicted many American writers of Styron ' s generation, is wrongheaded, unless of course you count as great themes love, lust, work, romantic muddle, ageing, ambition, grief and other forces that bless and bedevil the majority of novels (and lives). They might or might not be; it' s the way you tell them. Styron himself was ever a hunter in search of big game: the decline of the old South in his first novel, Lie Down in Darkness, the evils of slavery (The Confessions of Nat Turner) , the Holocaust (Sophie 's Choice) , and the ordeal of the soldier in wartime. The last formed the background to the novella The Long March (1953), Styron's second substantial work of fiction, based on his experience as a Marine reservist recalled to duty at the time of the US mission in Korea (he had originally served in the Marine Corps between 1943 and 1945). Styron never saw frontline action - his company ' s preparations for the invasion of Japan during the Second World War were annulled by the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima - and his military experience consisted largely of discipline and discomfort. "Lately the regiment has embarked on a series of hikes, one of which I participated in", he wrote to his father in July 1951 , during his second stint in the Marines, about the exercise that gave him The Long March. "It was 36 miles long, took all night, from 8.30 to 7.30, and left me with blisters on my feet the size of half-dollars." A month earlier, the reservist had corrected the proofs of his first novel while in training, cursing his unexpected recall to fatigues. By the end of the summer, however, he had been discharged because of a genetic cataract in his "shooting eye", and for the next two years Styron enjoyed the charmed life of an American abroad. Lie Down in Darkness, set in his native Virginia, became a bestseller. The poet Louis Simpson, then an editor at Bobbs-Merrill, which published the novel, recklessly told the twenty-six-year-old author that Lie Down in Darkness was "outside of Faulkner, and prohahly with Faulkner too. the finest novel in English written in a long time" (quoted in the excellent biography by James L. W. West Ill, William Styron: A Life). For his excursion into Southern decadence - the Faulknerian strain is scarcely present elsewhere in his writing - Styron received the Prix de Rome, entailing a year' s stay in the Italian capital. Extending his good luck to include a sojourn in France, he made the acquaintance of George Plimpton and Peter Matthiessen, and until his death in 2006 was listed among the contributing or advisory editors of the Paris Review. He was an early
W
JAMES CAMPBELL William Styron LETTERS TO MY FATHER Edited by lames L. W. West III 238pp. Louisiana State University Press. $28;
distributed in the UK by Eurospan. £16.99. 9780 807 134009 THE SUICIDE RUN Five tales of the Marine Corps
208pp. lonathan Cape. £14.99. 97802240877384 US: Random House. $24. 978 1400068227 candidate for the magazine' s "Art of Fiction" series of interviews (issue 5): Q. Your novel was linked to the Southern school of fiction. Do you think the critics were justified in doing this? A. No , frankly .... Critics are always linking
writers to "schools". If they couldn ' t link people to schools, they'd die. When what they condescendingly call "a genuinely fresh talent" arrives on the scene, the critics rarely try to
point out what makes him fresh or genuine.
After putting his half-dollar blisters to use in The Long March , Styron wrote a novel based partly in Europe, Set This House on Fire (1960), which, though not welcomed by the despised critics (Styron never ceased holding reviewers in contempt), nevertheless secured his place in the team of American galdcticos: Saul Bellow, Mary McCarthy, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, James Baldwin, Truman Capote. Odd as it seems now, several players, including Styron and Mailer, regarded James Jones, author of From Here to Eternity and The Thin Red Line, as the most gifted of them all- war, in which Jones had known more brutal experience than any of his contemporaries, being the greatest of all great themes. Styron published only two more novels in the forty-six years of life remaining to him. For The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), he used the true story of a bloody slave rebellion in Southampton County, Virginia, not far from his native locale. About sixty people were killed when Nat, "property of Benjamin Turner" , led an insurrection on the night of
August 21 , 1831. After making a confession, which was recorded and sold as a pamphlet, he was executed and his body symbolically skinned. Styron's 400-page extrapolation of Turner' s brief account introduced many themes of his own devising, including the slave' s desire for a white woman, Margaret Whitehead , whom eventually he murders. "Oar! She gone!" Will roared, gesturing with his broadax to the other Negroes, who had
begun to straggle across the yard. "Does you want her, preacher man, or she fo ' me?" Ah, how I want her, 1 thought,
and
unsheathed my sword .... "Shut your eyes", I said. 1 reached down to search with my fingers
for a firm length of fence rail and I could sense once more her close girl-smell .... Then when
I raised the rail above her head she gazed at me, as if past the imponderable vista of her anguish , with a grave and drowsy tenderness such as 1 had never known and, saying no more, closed her eyes upon all madness, illu-
sion, error, dream and strife.
The historical Nat admitted killing Margaret, the only victim to die by his own hand, but there is no evidence of a sexual interest. In his Confession , he said: Miss Margaret, when 1 di scovered her, had con-
cealed herself in the corner, formed by the projection of the cellar cap from the house; on my approach she fled, but was soon overtaken, and after repeated blows on the head, with a sword,
I killed her by a blow on the head, with a fence rail.
Paris 11.01.10 Of all the French directors who made up the legendary 1I0uvelle vague it was Eric Rohmer, who died this week, whose films were most imbued with Gallic lightness, wit and grace, and Curthermore spoke most feelingly to a generation just leaving their own adolescence along with the codes and conventions oC their parents' post-war world - behind. After a period spent editing Cahiers du cinema, the house journal of the New Wave, Rohmer established a personal style and vision in Claire 's Knee (above)
and My Night with Maud, the most renowned in his first "cycle" of films, the "Six Moral Tales". These and nearly all his work thereafter bore the stamp oC a highly literary sensibility, one alert to the ironies and confusions of sexual attraction, to the vanities and self-deceptions of (often infuriatingly immature) young men and mostly even younger women - but never left either characters or audience without the possibility of redemption or the consolation of beauty in the world around them.
TLS lANUARY 15 2010
For his perceived acts of appropriation for a start, the title of his book is taken from Nat's pamphlet - Styron endured heckling and other forms of harassment when speaking before audiences with a black contingent. The novel caused outrage among the African-American intelligentsia, resulting in a book of essays, William Styron's Nat Turner: Ten black writers respond (1968). The title of one essay sums up the charge: " You've taken my Nat and gone" . "The whole thing soured me in being a friend of black people", he told me when I interviewed him in 2002. But he had some cause to feel proud: it is a rare novel that provokes a riot of fiery speeches questioning its right to exist. Styron ' s grandmother had owned two girl slaves when she herself was a child, and the future writer was mesmerized by her recollections of this peculiar inheritance. Not every Southern writer approaches the subject of what one of Styron's autobiographical narrators calls "the mighty grip that black people had on my heart and mind". Baldwin, who by the time of the Nat Turner affair, had become a close friend, spoke up for him - "He has begun the common history: ours" - and the book earned its author a Pulitzer Prize, a film deal (though no film was ever made) and a European readership. Styron was particularly gratified by his success in France. By contrast, he harboured
4
LETTERS & FICTION
what Rose Styron in her foreword to Letters to My Father calls a " nearly lifelong Anglophobia", which derived partly from the fate of Set This House on Fire in Britain. Hamish Hamilton would not risk publishing the novel in 1961 with its four-letter words and blasphemous outbursts. "Triple bleeding God!" and "Thrice-punctured Christ!" were among the phrases to be excised. The altered text of his second full-length novel has continued to be the version offered for sale in British bookshops. The author' s anti-English feelings were softened, Rose Styron adds, by the reception of an opera by N icholas Maw based on Sophie's Choice which was mounted at Covent Garden in 2002. Both the resentment and its mitigation seem misplaced: Styron has more of a reputation in Britain than many American writers, due in part to his being recognized by critics and readers alike as a member of a "school" not the Southern school that he complained of in the Paris Review, but the New York group comprising Mailer, Baldwin and others; moreover, most of his books have been kept reguWiIliam Styron, Connecticut, 1990 larly in print - even if a bowdlerized edition is unsatisfactory - while those of deserving Brit- jail, only to end by degrading himself. The heiress from Baltimore whose mother was book includes two sections of an uncom- initially so disapproving of her daughter' s ish contemporaries have not been. The dozen years following the succes de pleted novel called "The Way of the War- choice that she put a private detective on his scandale of Nat Turner were occupied with, rior", begun in 1970 but put aside in favour tail. Their marriage plans were announced in if anything, an even grander theme. Sophie's of Sophie 's Choice. According to James advance to Styron ' s father - "I think it will Choice draws together the Second World L. W. West's introduction to Letters to My probably interest you further that I am going War, Auschwitz, the uprooting of popula- Father, which draws together a decade's to get myself married to the girl named Rose, tions, agonizing personal dilemmas involv- worth of correspondence dating from January second from the right ... the most wonderful ing survival and betrayal, and an autobio- 1943, Styron attempted to resurrect the novel girl in the world" - but not to Rose' s mother, graphical portrait in the shape of Stingo, a in the years before his death. The excerpts who, however, accepted the outcome "with horny young Southerner who lives in and a long section from a separate but similar equanimity", according to West. With the Brooklyn (as Styron did), works briefly in unfinished novel, "My Father's House", are backing of Burgunder money, abetted by the publishing (ditto), before turning his mind to autobiographical and written in characteristic royalties from his first books, Styron never writing - when he can get it away from sex Styronic mode: adjective- and adverb-heavy had to rely on teaching to make ends meet. for long enough to write a tolerable sentence. sentences, often clumsy and lacking a settled Yet again unlike Mailer and others who had Sophie 's Choice deploys carnal riot in a register, which nevertheless cluster together begun to treat journalistic writing with a seriBrooklyn bedroom as a thematic contrast to to form a readable surface. Unlike Baldwin, ousness hitherto reserved for fiction , he was the purposeful murders carried out in whose smooth cadences lull the reader into inclined to turn up an artistically fastidious Europe's death camps. Stingo is often in too confronting fearsome declarations; unlike nose at left-hand work (a collection of much of a hurry to consider treating the Mailer the proverbial volcano who throws off articles and introductions appeared in 1982 matter with tact or taste. As Sophie climbs a showers of heat and light and a great deal of as This Quiet Dust; another, Havanas for staircase early in the novel , he considers "her rubbish besides; unlike Vidal, master of illu- Came lot, was published posthumously in body in its clinging silk summer dress": mination by disdain - Styron lacks a style. 2008). For over fifty years, the family lived The odd quality proclaimed itself through the He does have a voice, however. He writes as on a fourteen-acre spread in Roxbury, Conskin. It possessed the sicki sh plasticity ... of if tacking down his own train of thought, necticut, decamping during summer months one who has suffered severe emaciation and word for word, including hesitations and to Martha's Vineyard, with occasional trips whose flesh is even now in the last stages of false starts, finally creating a natural, garru- to New York. The Styrons had glamour. Alexandra being restored. Also, I felt that underneath that lous idiolect. In one section from "The Way healthy suntan there lingered the sallowness of of the Warrior", the narrator explains his love Styron remembers peeking in at Frank Sinatra a body not wholly rescued from a terrible cri- of country music, as a prelude to complain- in the outdoor shower (her engaging memoir, sis. But none of these at all diminished a kind ing about the "abomination of synthetic published in the New Yorker in December of wonderfully negligent sexuality having to rhythms" blaring from his bunk mate's 2007, will be expanded in due course to make a book; her novel, All the Finest Girls, about do at that moment, at least, with the casual but phonograph: forthright way her pelvis moved, and with her Perhaps one has to be southern-born to truly growing up as the daughter of self-absorbed appreciate this homely, untamed genre, but parents, one of them a writer, was published in truly sumptuous rear end. Despite past famine, from the time I was a boy I found in the music, 2001). There were friendships with most of her behind was as perfectly formed as some fantastic prize-winning pear; it vibrated with at its best, a woebegone loveliness and simplic- the leading American writers of the day, as magical eloquence, and from this angle it so ity of utterance, a balladry - sometimes wrench- well as with politicians - "How did they get ingly haunting and sad - that was an authentic you here?", John F. Kennedy is said to have stirred my depths that I mentally pledged to the echo of the poor soil from which it had sprung, greeted him and Rose at an official function. Presbyterian orphanages of Virginia a quarter and I cannot even now hear the voices of In 1982, he wrote the introduction to a translaof my future earnings as a writer in exchange for that bare ass ' s brief lodging - thirty secErnest Tubb or Roy Acuff or the Carter Family tion of Fran90is Mitterrand's memoir, The onds would do - within the compass of my or Kitty Wells without being torn headlong Wheat and the Chaff, in which he declared cupped, supplicant palms. from my surroundings and into a brief bitter- himself "cleansed, at least briefly, by the The drudgery of soldierly life is again the sweet vision of the pine forests and red earth, notion of such grace and tenderness dwelling theme of The Suicide Run. The longest of its the backwoods stores and sluggish tidewater together with the exigencies of power". Styron "five tales of the Marine Corps" runs to rivers, the whole tormented landscape of that shared the sense of awe that other members of seventy-five pages, the shortest (the sole the star team experienced in the presence of strange world below the Potomac . Styron differed again from the writers power - Bill Clinton was a later acquaintance unpublished item) four. Only one of the pieces, "Blankenship", written in Styron's mentioned above, in not leading a public or - a weakness which their English counterbrimming youthful period, is a finished story. even a busy life. In Italy, while enjoying the parts, when they have it, reserve for titles. Warrant officer Charles Blankenship tries to privileges of the Prix de Rome, he met Rose Alexandra also recalls her father' s temper: humiliate a truculent prisoner in the military Burgunder (stress on the second syllable) , an At times querulous and taciturn, cutting and
TLS JANUARY 15 2010
remote, melancholy when he was sober and rageful when he was drinking, my father inspired fear and loathing in his children more often than it is comfortable to admit .... In the time it took to sweep up the remains of a toy
left foolishly in his line of vision, your day could turn as splintery as a thousand shards of
bright-coloured plastic. Without her mother's restorative good nature, she adds, "I doubt that anyone (his children included) would have stuck around". It all contributed to, or emerged from , the great theme of the last twenty years of Styron's life: depression. His brief, potent account of his chronic condition, Darkness Visible (1990), became the unwished-for hit of his later years, a period of which he said, "I was in a shutdown". There are hints of a general fussiness about his condition, mostly physical , in Letters to My Father. West writes that the letters "demonstrate how Styron, as a young writer, built up a fund of literary capital on which he drew for the rest of his life". They reveal an intention to explore the Southampton County insurrection as early as 1952: "I've pretty much decided what to write next - a novel based on Nat Turner' s rebellion". There are many references to the composition and publication of Lie Down in Darkness, and flickerings of the themes of Sophie 's Choice. But the secret of these youthful letters - hidden from the author and discernible to readers only with the benefit of hindsight - is Styron's depression, and its roots in his childhood. In Darkness Visible , he stressed that the most "significant factor" in the illness that hospitalized him, throughout a period that began in 1985 and lasted until the end of his life, with remissions, was "the death of my mother when I was thirteen; this disorder and early sorrow appears repeatedly in the literature on depression". He concluded that he had not sufficiently mourned his mother, who had become ill with cancer when her only child was four, but had carried his grief inside him until it detonated some fifty years after the event. The loss might also have guided the tone Styron adopted to address his father, at once self-consciously literary and sincere: Yet with all my complaint, often, at the times, and at life in general, I somehow know we sha1l endure and that all this striving is not at
all in vain. The very fact that you and I have worked together, no matter with what unspoken understanding, represents a partnership of the spirit, and if that is love it will prevail forever and ever.
Both these books will be welcomed by admirers of Styron' s work. Letters to My Father is beautifully produced, with illustrations and eighty pages of additional material, including six early prose works. The jacket of the British edition of The Suicide Run shows a company of American soldiers wading through waist-high water towards a distant conflagration. In fact, none of the stories is concerned with that kind of blood and thunder. The tales offer a suggestion of what "The Way of the Warrior" might have been like if a different suicide run, domestic in origin, had not opened up abysmally before him. "We've had our war, for Christ's sake" , a fellow reservist in one of the stories exclaims. For Styron, the lucky one, about to be discharged only a few months after recall , it was both true and not true.
st New Left Review
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Orientalism Sir, - Susanne Kord's interesting review of S uzanne L. Marchand' s German Orientalism in the Age of Empire (December 18 & 25 , 2009) rehearses what I believe to be a common oversight in analyses of the ongoing dialogue between Edward Said and his critics. Kord notes as Said's "two central claims" that: Western knowledge about the East is based mainly on the notion that all Eastern societies are "profoundly" similar to each other and different from Western societies; and that knowledge is power and is used to subjugate others. What is missing here is Said's use of his dissection of the Western canon to show how the "East" has served as a mirror in which Western authors, artists and literate adventurers have told the rest of us Occidentals how to view ourselves. I do not know if this was "central" to Said - both he and Bernard Lewis tread lightly on this topic in the famous debate between them (that partisans on both sides found disappointing in its civility). Nevertheless, the issue is relevant in thinking about the contrast between German and other orientalisms. British fascination with India, the Muslim world and the rest of the "East" proceeded from a general confidence in the power and preeminence of their empire. For the Germans, on the other hand, considerations of the Orient were shaped by philhellenism. Starting at least with Winckelmann and inspired most beautifully by Holderlin, public intellectuals led the German public to believe they were the direct descendants of classical Greece and were, like their Hellenic ancestors, burdened by the problematic conjunction of a sublime sensibility, fractured politics and powerlessness in the face of superior forces. Here, then, is one context for the controversy sparked by Georg Friedrich Creuzer' s views on Greece's intellectual debts to earlier oriental cultures, as discussed by Kord and Marchand. This debate may be seen as part of the conceptual wrestling over who "we" Germans are, and what will be "our" role in the world. If Greece is not as original (or important?) as we thought, what happens to German pretensions to be the torchbearers for Classical thought, theatre and other supposedly Hellenic inventions? I have not yet read Suzanne Marchand's book, but I look forward to seeing if she takes on the relationship between the German view of the Orient and German philhellenism. DA YID B. KANIN 10743 Mist Haven Terrace, Rockville, Maryland 20852.
The 'prebiotic soup' Sir, - I've been honoured by the recent attention my book Signature in the Cell has received on your Letters page following Thomas Nagel's selection of it as one of his Books of the Year for 2009 (November 27). Unfortunately, the letters from Stephen Fletcher criticizing Professor Nagel for his choice give no evidence of Or Fletcher having read the book, or of his comprehending the severity of the central problem facing theories of the origin of life that invoke undirected chemical evolution. In Signature in the Cell, I show that, in the era of modern molecular genetics, explaining the origin of life requires - first and foremost - explaining the origin of the information or digital code present in DNA and RNA. In his letters to the TLS (December 2 and 16, 2009), Stephen Fletcher rebukes Nagel (and by implication my book) for failing to acknowledge that "natural selection is a chemical as well as a biological process". Fletcher further asserts that this process accounts for the origin of DNA and the genetic information it contains. Not only does my book address this very proposal at length, but it also demonstrates why theories of prebiotic natural selection involving self-replicating RNA catalysts - the version of the idea that Fletcher affirms - fail to account for the origin of the genetic information necessary to produce the first selfreplicating organism. "Ribozyme engineering" experiments have failed to produce RNA replicators capable of copying more than about 10 per cent of their nucleotide base sequences. (Wendy K. lohnston et aI, "RNA-Catalyzed RNA Polymerization", Science 292 (2001): 1319-25.) Yet, for natural selection to operate in an RN A World (in the strictly chemical rather than biological environment that Fletcher envisions), RNA molecules capable of fully replicating themselves must exist. Everything we know about RNA catalysts, including those with partial selfcopying capacity, shows that the function of these molecules depends on the precise arrangement of their
letters@the-tls,co,uk information-carrying constituents (ie, their nucleotide bases). Functional RNA catalysts arise only once RNA bases are specifically arranged into information-rich sequences that is, function arises after, not before, the information problem has been solved. For this reason, invoking prebiotic natural selection in an RNA World does not solve the problem of the origin of genetic information; it merely presupposes a solution in the form of a hypothetical, information-rich RNA molecule capable of copying itself. As the Nobel laureate Christian de Duve has noted, postulations of prebiotic natural selection typically fail because they " need information which implies they have to presuppose what is to be explained in the first place". STEPHEN C. MEYER Di scovery Institute, 208 Columbia Street, Seattle , Washington 98104.
Sir, - Stephen Fletcher is surprised that I would recommend a book (Stephen Meyer's Signature in the Cell) whose conclusions I disagree with. I'm afraid I do that frequently; but let me explain this case. I believe that neither theism, nor atheism, nor agnosticism is clearly ruled out either by empirical evidence or by a priori argument: all are rationally possible positions. If one is a theist, the question arises, what belief about God's relation to the natural order is compatible with the scientific evidence? Deism, the view that God is responsible for the existence of the universe and its laws, but that He never intervenes,
is one possible answer. Defenders of intelligent design claim that the appearance of life as a result only of chemical processes would require accidents so improbable that an interventionist answer is more likely. I am interested particularly in the negative part of this argument - scepticism about the reducibility of biology to chemistry. Though I do not share the motives of intelligent design ' s defenders to identify problems with the reductive programme, the problems seem real. Atheists, too, face the question of what conception of the natural order is compatible with their beliefs. Fletcher says I have been duped, and his reference to Uri Geller suggests that Meyer' s book is a deliberate hoax - that he has offered evidence and arguments that he knows to be false. Like any layman who reads books on science for the general reader, I have to take the presentation of the data largely on trust, and try to evaluate more speculative arguments as best I can. Meyer's book seems to me to be written in good faith. If he misrepresents contemporary research on the origin of life, I will be grateful to have it pointed out to me. But the RNA world hypothesis Fletcher offers as a refutation is carefully described by Meyer, who argues that while it might help solve some problems (in virtue of the catalytic properties of RNA), it simply pushes back to a different molecule the basic question of how such an extremely complex replicator came into existence, thus allowing natural selection to begin. Fletcher's remarks don ' t address this problem. He should really hold his nose and have a look at the book. It also should be properly reviewed, since it can ' t be adequately assessed in the Letters column. I recommended it in one paragraph, speaking as a grateful reader, but the book deserves a review from someone with the relevant scientific credentials. THOMAS NAGEL 29 Washington Square, New York 10011.
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Samuel Johnson Sir, - Like Henry Power I enjoyed the biography of Samuel lohnson by David Nokes (reviewed in the TLS, December 18 & 25 , 2009), but I would take issue with his interpretation of the sentence at the foot of page 209. "From now on this biography accommodates not just one, but shortly a second biographer, each with a separate and utterly distinct agenda to perform." The suggestion
that this is a menage a trois between lohnson, Nokes and Boswell is surely wrong. Turn the page and Hester Thrale is introduced, another biographer of lohnson. She is the third element, not Nokes. She is not mentioned in the review, but plays a major role in this exploration of lohnson's life, as a glance at the index will show. Only she and lohnson are mentioned so often that they are abbreviated to their initials. Professor N okes did indeed seem irritated
TLS JANUARY 15 2010
with Boswell - who wouldn't be but to suggest that he found himself uncomfortable as part of a threesome is an unfortunate misreading. Especially so as one of the themes of this interesting book is the invention of biography: by lohnson on Savage and the English poets, and by biographers of lohnson and their relationships with him. HILARY COOL 16 Lady Bay Road , Nottingham.
Wotcher Sir, - A salutation in common usage in the East Anglian fishing communities in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, not least when boats of the fleets " spoke" to each other at sea, was "What cheer ho!" (see Michael Rosen's letter, December LL, 2009). This would undoubtedly have been introduced into the East End of London via the steam-powered "carriers" which, after taking aboard (by an unfailingly hazardous procedure known as "fleeting" or "trunking") the catches of the sailing smacks out on the fishing grounds, rushed them to the market at Billingsgate. The adoption and the corruption of this greeting by the Cockney are not hard to imagine. If such were indeed the derivation of the term, "wotcher", rather than "wotcha", would seem to constitute its closer expression in writing. MICHAEL CHARLES British Mercantile Marine Memorial
Collection. 1 Town Quay Apartments , Shoreham-by-Sea.
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'Orlando furioso' Sir, - I haven ' t yet read David R. Slavitt's translation of Ariosto's Orlando furioso, apart from the lines actually quoted in Doireann Lalor's review (January 8). I hesitate therefore to hazard an overall reaction to the choices made by Slavitt, in terms of vocabulary and register: it is certainly true that Ariosto should inspire variety of tone, including strategic moments of vulgar colloquiality. The quoted lines are enough, however, to show that Slavitt either has no concept of the metric scansion of an English pentameter, or else has deliberately renounced such considerations. Did Lalor not notice this? What is happening to our sense of rhythm? RICHARD ANDREWS 225 Olley Road , Leeds.
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Sir John Harington Sir, - I have been alerted to errors in my review of Gerard Kilroy ' s edition of The Epigrams of Sir John Harington (December LL, 2009). In the paragraph on Lynus, all the Nashe references should be to Strange newes or Foure Letters Confuted (I 592), not of course to Foure Letters, and certaine Sonnets. And Nashe did in fact praise Spenser, several times. Nevertheless I think the identification of Lynus as Nashe can stand. ALASTAIR FOWLER I I East Clarernont Street, Edinburgh.
CULTURAL HISTORY orris Dickstein was born on the same day, in February 1940, that Woody Guthrie wrote his most famous song, "This land is your land". Dickstein informs us of the fact in the course of Dancing in the Dark, his "cultural history of the Great Depression", and it is plainly something which gives him a warm glow. Woody Guthrie is one of his heroes. "This Land is Your Land" was dashed off in what was initially a mood of revulsion. It was conceived of as a populist counterblast to the soaring bourgeois emotionalism of lrving Berlin's 1938 anthem "God Bless America" - from which it might well seem to follow that Berlin is not one of Dickstein's heroes. But such an assumption wou ld completely misjudge the breadth of Dancing in the Dark. Berlin is in fact a powerful and admired presence in the book - the Berlin who wrote scores for Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in particular. One of his numbers, "Let's Face the Music and Dance", provides Dickstein with a key text, sounding as it does the warning that "there may be trouble ahead" . Elsewhere, too, Dickstein is heavily preoccupied with entertainment (or with what a cultural historian would once have classified as entertainment, as opposed to art). A good deal of Dancing in the Dark celebrates popular music, and a large portion of it is devoted to Hollywood - emphases which help to justify what might otherwise seem an unduly glamorous title for a book about hard times. Not that Dickstein is by any means in retreat from his original trade of literary critic. Despite all the allurements of showbusiness, more space is allotted to literature in the book than to any other form of expression, and many different writers are passed under review. There are rewarding accounts of topics as varied as the impact of the Depression on Tender is the Night, and the contrasting visions of the two foremost black novelists of the period, Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright. There are reappraisals of once-famous figures who have been halfobscured by time, such as James T. Farrell (of the Studs Lonigan trilogy) and Erskine Caldwell (of Tobacco Road). And we are led in some unexpected directions. Robert Frost, for example, may not seem someone with an obvious claim to a place in a book about the Depression, but Dickstein has some thoughtful and well -justified pages about him. They centre on an analysis of his poem of the mid-1930s, "Two Tramps at Mud Time". The tramps are looking for work on Frost' s farm. The poet refuses to hire them - it would mean sacrificing some of his independence if he did - and gets on with the job himself. All of which was very much in character. There was no virtue Frost prized more than self-sufficiency. But by implication the
M
poem was a lso up to the minute, a thrust at
the New Deal and the President whom Frost scoffed at in his correspondence as "his Rosiness". As a series of separate case studies, the literary sections of Dancing in the Dark are well worth reading. But it cannot be said that they add up to a particularly strong narrative. We zigzag around, without ever feeling that we have arrived at the heart of the story. The nearest thing to a commanding figure is John Steinbeck, singled out as "virtually the only proletarian writer who achieved enduring popular success". Tracing Steinbeck' s career
Sunset sails JOHN GROSS Morris Dickstein DANCING IN THE DARK A cultural historyof the Great Depression 598pp. Norton. $29.95. 9780393 07225 9
in the 1930s through its successive phases, Dickstein shows why this shou ld have been so. He pays persuasive tribute to the writer' s reportorial skills, his narrative power and his ability to dramatize "large, inexorable historical movements", but he seems largely untroubled by the mawkishness and the simplifications.
Henry Fonda in The Grapes of Wrath (1940) Meanwhile there is a conspicuous gap or near-gap in his survey of other novelists. Historically, John Dos Passos was as important as Steinbeck (or would have been, if The Grapes of Wrath had not reached a far wider audience than his own books after it was filmed). In literary terms, many would say that Dos Passos was a good deal more important. But although Dickstein doesn't positively ignore his trilogy, U.s.A. , he confines himself to a few passing references, all of which imply that it is irrevocably dated, and to a tepid paragraph about its narrative techniques. There is no attempt to convey the work's substance or flavour - not even a single quotation. Dickstein tells us at the outset of his book that he has not tried to be comprehensive, focusing instead "on work that genuinely engages me". Up to a point, you can only applaud. But you also wonder whether a cultural historian, as opposed to a critic at large, has a right to rely quite so heavily on his own preferences. And as with Dos Passos, so too, to a lesser degree, with the minor political novelists of the period. No one would expect Dickstein to say much, at this hour, about
such once well-regarded works as Jack Conroy's The Disinherited or Robert Cantwell' s Land of Plenty. But a portrait of Depression culture which doesn ' t mention them at all is surely a somewhat defective one. The exclusion of these writers, and others like them, makes one of Dickstein's positive choices seem all the more curious - not so much the choice itself as the prominence which it is given. The first novel which he considers at length in Dancing in the Dark he devotes ten pages to it - is Michael Gold's Jews Without Money (1930), an account of life in a Lower East Side slum which is at once ferocious (in its angry portrayal of squalid living conditions) and rhapsodic (in its invocation of the revolution which is going to cure everything). It is not much of a novel , and Dickstein doesn't pretend that it is. But he cannot help being taken by its fervour. He sees it as the missing link between "the plebeian Whitman" and "the youthfu l Allen Ginsberg". If Gold eventually achieved a footnote in history, however, it was not as a novelist, but as one of the American Communist Party' s most strident apparatchiks, laying down the party line year in, year out in the Daily Worker and elsewhere. Dickstein duly acknowledges and condemns his record in this respect - but only briefly, and with reminders of the early hardships that had helped to shape him. The effect is to make the Gold who wrote Jews Without Money the one who really counts. The remainder of his career, the overwhelming part of it, is seen as an aberration. The section on Gold foreshadows one of the most marked general aspects of Dancing in the Dark, a tendency to soften the edges of the political commitments and convictions which it records. Dickstein tells us that "when I finally looked into some of the ideological debates of the thirties, whose radical intensity I had admired from afar, I was horrified by the brutality of many sectarian polemics" . But can he really have been as naive as this makes him sound? It doesn't take long, even from afar, to appreciate the bitterness of the political warfare - above all as it involved attitudes to Communism - which raged among American writers at the time. The details can be found in innumerable studies and memoirs, while a coherent overall account has been available for almost fifty years, in Daniel Aaron ' s admirable Writers on the Left. Dickstein naturally knows a great deal about all this. But for the most part he keeps the manifestos and the concrete proposals at arm's length. He prefers to celehrate a vague radicalism, without asking too many awkward questions about what his writers' beliefs entai led in practice. He frequently praises the art of the Popular Front, for instance, most notably in his chapters on Steinbeck and Aaron Cop land. He also makes plain - it would have been hard for him to have done otherwise - that it was an art fostered by the Communist Party, as part of a change of strategy designed to win allies on the non-Communist Left. After 1935, the rediscovery of American traditions became, for a time, the order of the day. But
TLS JANUARY 15 2010
7 what we are not given is anything like an adequate idea of the international context with in which this shift took place. (The word ""Comintern" doesn ' t occur in Dickstein ' s index.) And while the phenomenon was a complicated one, which produced some good art as well as propaganda, the first thing we need to know if we are to understand it is that it was part of a worldwide manoeuvre on behalf of Stalin. Dickstein is equally inclined to tone down the views of the individual artists he discusses, at least when they are figures he admires. His account of the playwright Clifford Odets ("the great poet of Depression fear and Depression longing") puts too much weight on dreaming and yearning, and not enough on gritty political detail. And writing about Woody Guthrie, he says that "a perverseness drew him even closer to the Communists after the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939". In fact, Guthrie supported the pact (and the horrors that went with it) because he was already a Communist, and that is what good Communists did. To talk of "perverseness" creates the wrong impression: it makes it sound as though he was following a personal whim. When Dickstein turns to films and music, there can be no mistaking the pleasure he takes in his material. Sometimes, it is true, he slips into the routine language of showbiz adulation ("a lovely rendition by the great Gershwin aficionado Michael Feinstein"). But at his best, his enthusiasm is fresh and
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BIOGRAPHY
8 appealing, and it lends personal force to a paradox which others have felt before him, but few so keenly - the fact that the Depression, for all the misery it spread, "also left us with the most buoyant, most effervescent popular culture of the twentieth century". The commonest explanation for this apparent contradiction is that poverty and anxiety intensified the need for escapism. It is not a bad explanation, either, as far as it goes. But Dickstein is determined to dig deeper. He begins with crime or crime-and-punishment films (the gangster classics; 1 Am a Fugitive from the Chain Gang), and has no trouble in presenting them as social parables, which articulated public fantasies and frustrations. Moving on to the screwball comedies which were one of Hollywood's glories in the 1930s, he argues that they were appropriate romances for a conflict-ridden post-1929 world - tough-talking, hard-boiled and disenchanted (though not, it need hardly be said, to the point of spoiling the fun). His prime exhibit, however, is popular music - and here a positive connection with the Depression might seem harder to prove. Dickstein offers three different lines of approach. First, he cites a number of songs where references to the Depression were deliberate and unmistakable: the most spectacular example is Busby Berkeley ' s lavish number "Remember My Forgotten Man" (an unemployed First World War veteran), from the film Gold Diggers of 1933. Such songs certainly deserve their place in the historical record, but there were not many of them. Second, he detects a new spirit of community and solidarity in the songs of the period. It may be so, but such a generalization needs to be backed up by more evidence than we are given. Finally, he points to the plangency of many 1930s songs, and suggests that it had "a larger cultural resonance".
One such song is Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz's "Dancing in the Dark", and more particularly the recording of it in 1931 by Bing Crosby. Dickstein writes effectively and affectingly about this (and about Crosby in general - it is good to see him fearlessly praising "Red Sails in the Sunset"). Inevitably, since "Dancing in the Dark" is the song which gives him the title of his book, he asks whether the darkness refers to "the ongoing troubles of the Depression". But he also raises the possibility that it might refer to something else - to "our own darkest feelings", for instance, or to "the existential limits of the human condition" . And meanwhile we cannot help reflecting that plangency doesn ' t prove anything in itself - that there were lots of plangent songs in the 1920s as well as in the 1930s, and in many a decade before that. The idea that the Depression is taking place somewhere in the background of
Gloria and the power osePh P. Kennedy is known today for being the father of John F. Kennedy, the youngest elected and first Catholic President of the United States. A hundred years ago, however, he was known in his own right as the richest Irish-American and arguably the most financially savvy investor in the country. Cari Beauchamp provides a detailed chronicle of the crucial years in which Joseph Kennedy built his reputation and fortune. These were the years he spent in Hollywood, from 1926 to 1930, when he not only laid the foundation for his enormous wealth and his extensive network of powerful contacts but also honed a talent for self-promotion that would be instrumental in his son's political
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career.
As Beauchamp makes clear, Joseph Kennedy liked to present himself as a selfmade man when in fact he came from a wellto-do family. His father owned the bank of which Joseph, at the age of twenty-five, became president. Having at first billed himself as "the youngest bank president in Massachusetts", he soon amended the tagline to "the youngest bank president in the country". Given his instinct for showmanship and his ambition to make money, he was soon drawn to the new industry of the cinema, a huge vista of opportunity for the savvy financier: "Look at that bunch of pants pressers in Hollywood making themselves millionaires", he is quoted as saying. "I could take the whole business away from them." Briefly, at least, he did. He cultivated the influential movie "Tsar" Will Hays (appointed by the industry to project a more wholesome image), and in rapid succession took control of the careers of the vaudevillian Fred Stone, the cowboy actor Fred Thomson, and the "reigning queen of the movies", Gloria Swanson. Kennedy's most brilliant strategy for gaining a foothold in Hollywood was arranging for a series of lectures to be given by movie moguls at his alma mater, Harvard University. The lecture series served the dual purpose of legitimizing the industry with an elite East Coast establishment and flattering the studio executives (mostly immigrant Jews), for whom Harvard embodied the respectability they craved. Kennedy also understood how to get maximum mileage out of this promotional opportunity, publishing the lecture proceedings as a book, The Story of the Films (1927) , and then sending it with a personal note to members of the industry with whom he wished to ingratiate himself. He used the contacts he made and the financial reputation he had developed in the East to manoeuvre
"Dancing in the Dark" remains suggestive
his way into ailing companies where he
but vague. That the challenge of the Depression had a beneficial influence on many products of American popular culture seems beyond dispute. Exactly how far that influence stretched is another matter. We are dealing, mostly, with issues of style and taste that cannot be quantified. But it seems reasonable to argue that the qualities Dickstein admires in the popular culture of the Thirties owed more to the past than to the upheavals of the time; that they constituted continuing evidence of American energy, initiative and freedom.
quickly took control. At one point, as he made sure to trumpet far and wide, he was the head of four major film-related companies: FBO, K-A-O, Path." and First National. Admirers lauded him for his "duplex mind" his ability to operate in the two spheres of banking and show business. But Beauchamp makes clear that the description could also refer to a more sinister duality: his ability to separate appearance and reality, and to espouse values and loyalties that he did not practise or feel. Gloria Swanson is recorded as noting that "Joe Kennedy operated just
PAULA MARANTZ COHEN Cari Beauchamp JOSEPH P. KENNEDY'S HOLLYWOOD YEARS 506pp. Faber. £25. 9780571217366
like Joe Stalin. Their system was to write a letter to the files and then order the exact reverse on the phone" . He was a master at accounting tricks, hiding money in fa9ade companies, pushing losses into periods in which he was not responsible, and using set-asides and reserves to doctor the balance sheets, while always being careful to use other people's money and not risk his own. He was a chronic womanizer, but presented himself to the world as the consummate family man posing in magazines with his wife and nine children on the East Coast while setting up house with Swanson in Hollywood. He built lucrative alliances, lulling his victims into a complete belief in his support, then brutally cutting them off when they were no longer of use. Beauchamp describes a number of these betrayals - how he jettisoned the trusting Thomson when he had the opportunity to
It is hard to understand what lay behind Kennedy's ruthless behaviour. Beauchamp suggests that at Harvard he felt excluded from the highest bastions of privilege, and this so rankled that he became determined to beat his presumed superiors at their own game. Still , it is hard to see why someone with the many gifts Joe Kennedy had - a loving family , financial security , good looks, intelligence and personal charm - would be so focused on making money and gaining prestige at all costs. After Kennedy left Hollywood, he continued his financial investments and employed what he had learnt in movies in the political arena. In 1936, backing Roosevelt for a new term, he borrowed from the strategy he had used with The Story of the Films and had a book, I'm for Roosevelt, written for his own signature and distributed to important people. He finally got the reward he was after: an appointment as Ambassador to the Court of St James's, though his aggressive isolationism eventually become too great a deficit, and Roosevelt recalled him. It was the one instance where he seems to have mismanaged his public persona. But though his own reputation would never recover, he was able to channel his personal ambitions into the careers of his sons.
Joseph P, Kennedy and his family, New York, September 25, 1935 sign Tom Mix, a bigger cowboy star, and how he turned his back on his early business mentor, Guy Currier (the families of both Thomson and Currier said that Kennedy's hetrayal hastened these men's deaths). Even Swanson eventually received the same treatment. Initially infatuated with her, Kennedy hired the temperamental "genius" Erich von Stroheim to direct her in Queen Kelly, which was supposed to be a masterpiece but which became a debacle of false starts and profligate spending. Somehow Kennedy managed to walk away with a profit, leaving Swanson to foot the bill. His ability to duck ruin where others were destroyed was most dramaticall y seen when he prepared to leave Hollywood and pulled out of the stock market before the crash of 1929.
TLS JANUARY 15 2010
Joseph Kennedy was, as Beauchamp notes, an isolationist, both politically and personally. His loyalties were only to himself and arguably to his family as an extension of himself. He was shattered hy the deaths nfhis children , but it is not clear how much he mourned them as individuals or as the repositories of his own ambition. When Jack Kennedy was once asked what drove his father, his answer was " vanity". Joseph Kennedy's influence on Hollywood, however, was far-reaching , though hardly for the good. As Beauchamp concludes: "He had shifted the gears of an entire industry from one that took the creative long view to one whose guiding doctrine was the next quarter's balance sheet, unheard of then but taken for granted in today's multinational corporate Hollywood" .
BIOGRAPHY self-absorbed and militant saboteur, Jean-Luc Godard has remained a controversial figure for nearly half a century. The proliferating number of studies in both French and English that have been devoted to the charismatic, yet hardly ingratiating, New Wave icon since his debut feature in 1960 would suffice to secure him a place among the greatest directors of all time. This most recent offering is a critical biography of monumental proportions that competes, in its scope and range of documentary sources, with Colin MacCabe's Godard: A portrait of the artist at 70, published a mere five years earlier. One could be forgiven for thinking that there is little new material such a short time after MacCabe's thorough account of Godard's professional life, written from the vantage point of someone who has been in a personal and working relationship with his subject since 1979. However, if only a couple of very recent productions, including Notre Musique (2004) and the retrospective exhibition at the Centre Georges Pompidou (2006), were added to the corpus of works already surveyed by Colin MacCabe, many welltrodden areas of research benefit from a refreshing change of tack in Richard Brody's study. The advantage here derives from the opportunity to look back at the New Wave through the eyes of American audiences, critics and film-makers. Unlike MacCabe, who can reel off his memories of a long-lasting companionship that started with an invitation to attend the shoot of Sauve qui peut (1979) and led on to several commissions for the Swiss-born director from British sources in between 1982 and 1998, Brody can only boast a three-hour interview with Godard in June 2000. Nevertheless, Brody more than compensates for his late arrival on the scene with an astonishing wealth of information on Godard's transatlantic reception, on his love-hate relationship with Hollywood and the largely unknown legacy ofthe French New Wave in the United States. An independent film-maker and a film critic for the New Yorker, Brody has firsthand knowledge of the polemics that raged in the American press between defenders of the French politique des auteurs, such as Andrew Sarris, and detractors of the auteurist ideology such as Pauline Kael. For those familiar with the French side of the story and the New Wave's infatuation with American studio directors, the lasting impact of Godard and Fran90is Truffaut's film writings and early features on the transatlantic critics and filmmakers may come as a surprise. While it is fairly easy to imagine the bewildered wariness aroused in and around the Hollywood film industry by the French reappraisal of " mainstream" directors such as Nicholas Ray, Douglas Sirk, or Howard Hawks , relatively few critics and memhers of the audience in Europe have ever stopped to consider Godard's, and more widely speaking, the New Wave' s influence on the younger generation of US independent film-makers including Martin Scorsese, John Cassavetes, Brian De Palma, Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas and Peter Bogdanovich. The "firstperson" cinema that Truffaut pioneered along with Godard's flouting of continuity-editing conventions, taught the young American directors of the 1960s that rules were there to be broken. But there is more than the American narra-
A
Flickers of truth RAMONA FOTIADE Richard Brody EVERYTHING IS CINEMA The working life of Jean-Luc Godard 701 pp. Faber. £30. 9780571212255
tive string to Brody's biographical bow. His other recurrent concern, hinted at in the aphoristic title, Everything is Cinema, refers to the close intermingling of the private and the public in Jean-Luc Godard's work. Predictable as this may seem when dealing with the career of a postmodern artist who has at times wilfully manipulated the press and cast events in his private life in fictional form to build the profile of an iconoclastic artist, Brody's strategy has undeniable advantages as well as some obvious drawbacks. Unlike his predecessor, who writes a full chapter from Anna Karina's point of view, when it comes to dealing with Godard's troubled love life during the 1960s, Brody - who interviewed Karina a year earlier than MacCabeprefers to give a rather uncompromising, if conjectural, account of the director's emotional tribulations, including his narrowminded view of gender roles, his irrepressible jealousy and disparaging portrayal of women. Admittedly, Godard can be said to have provided "cinematic responses" to moments of crisis in his personal life, whether to seduce Karina (as in Le Petit Soldat, 1960), to anticipate their difficulties (A Woman is a Woman, 1961), or to pass moralizing comment on their incompatibility and eventual break-up. The latter, according to Brody, applies for instance to Vivre sa vie (1962), an adaptation of Nana, Zola's tragic story about a prostitute and an anagram of Anna (Karina), or, indeed, to Contempt (1963), the adaptation of a novel by Alberto Moravia about a couple drifting apart, which, according to Godard ' s cameraman Raoul
Coutard, was a letter to Karina "that cost [the producer Georges) Beauregard a million dollars" . Compelling as it may at first seem, unravelling the autobiographical streak of each of Godard' s films featuring Karina (followed by a similar approach to his productions involving Marina Vlady and Anne Wiazemsky, his second wife) could become tiresome, if it weren't for Brody's awareness of the role that politics and philosophy have played in the director' s life. Sartrian Existentialism provides the constant term of reference right up to the events of May 1968; yet Godard' s increasingly virulent attacks on capitalist consumerism, which he blamed for the dissolution of traditional moral values (the rejection of monogamous love and marital contentment in favour of metaphorical and literal prostitution), was to become by far the most enduring ideological concern in his career. This led from the savage depiction of capitalist greed in Weekend (1967), chillingly anticipating the following year's upheavals, to the enthusiastic, if pastiche, portrayal of the Maoist youth in La Chinoise (1967), and - in the wake of the revolutionary break with the past in May '68 - to Godard's doctrinaire involvement in the Dziga Vertov group. Named after the Soviet director of Man with a Movie Camera , the group advocated the use of revolutionary aesthetics to attack conventional narrative character development and dramatic realism in a series of 16mm films during the 1970s. Compared to MacCabe's nostalgic look back at the period of his first encounter with Godard, Richard Brody has a considerably less complimentary view of the obvious tension between the director's newly found political commitments and his ongoing artistic allegiances. The American biographer does not hesitate to qualify Wind from the East (1970), the first film that Gorin and Godard made together, as an unremarkable exercise in propaganda art, "laying all the more bare
Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina in Jean-Luc Godard'sPierrot lefou (1965)
TLS JANUARY 15 2010
9 [Gorin's) and Godard's doctrinal presumptions, which ranged from catechistic to repugnant" . Attacked by the Situationists as a pillar of bourgeois respectability in the aftermath of May '68, Godard rushes into agitprop cinema with the eagerness of an "elder taking dictation from his juniors" . British Sounds (1969), a commission from the London-based Kestrel Productions that Colin MacCabe himself secured for Godard, has - according to Brody's sobering reassessment - "the stiff and self-punishing feel of a cinematic hair shirt". The film-maker's visit to Prague in April 1969 allows Brody to measure the extent of his subject's rigid indoctrination, as Godard reportedly dismissed the reality of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia by declaring: "Anyway Czechoslovakia had been invaded by American tanks from United Artists long before the Russians came in". The following year Godard and Gorin received a commission from the Arab League to make a film about the Palestinian struggle for independence, called }usqu 'a la Victoire (from a Fatah slogan). The project was not completed, but the 16mm footage became incorporated into the video experiment Ici et Ailleurs (1976), whose dogmatic stance on the Israelo-Palestinian conflict continued to inform Godard' s fictional work for the next three decades, resurfacing in his most recent film, Notre Musique (2004). Understandably, Brody has little sympathy for the "hectoring tone" of the film, in which Godard himself lectures a group of students on the political virtues of the classical shotcountershot sequence and illustrates the point by pairing images of Jewish prisoners in extermination camps with photos of Palestinian refugees. Notre Musique, Brody comments, "is a diatribe under the guise of a meditation, a work of vituperative prejudice disguised as calm reflection". Even Godard's arguably most accomplished philosophical incursion into the evolution and potential of visual discourse, Histoire(s) du cinema (1998), totalling more than 200 minutes of viewing time and countless filmic quotations, does not manage to dispel the impression of a compulsive autobiographical gesture, with all the jarring contradictions, ideological candour and provocative montage that one would expect from the artist who defined cinema as "truth twenty-four times a second". Yet, coming from a director who is also acutely aware that cinema is "the only art that films death at work" , this retrospective selfportrait exerts the irresistible fascination of a memoir or artistic will. Reading Richard Brody's biography of Godard, one has the impression of being privy to some of the most important moments in the confrontation between the moribund Hollywood codes and the New Wave revolution. Nevertheless, it is still perhaps ton early tn put Godard's ideas in a museum, as the recent exhibition at the Pompidou Centre, polemically entitled Collage(s) de France (a pun on College de France and a hint at Godard' s frustrated confrontation with academia) showed. The project was later scaled down and recast as Voyagers) en utopie, after a scarring disagreement between the director and the curators of the exhibition. But capturing this lurch between Godard's quest for respectability and his recourse to guerrilla tactics is what makes Brody's occasionally less than flattering account so refreshing.
10 espite the title, this is not an investigation of marriage per se, nor indeed a history of love, but a descriptive narrative of marital making and breaking, told through a tapestry of individual stories, from Margaret Paston in 1465 to Heather Mills McCartney in 2008. The dramatic episodes are drawn mostly from secondary literature (from the research of Helen Castor, Miriam Slater, Stella Tillyard, James Hammerton, and especially Lawrence Stone, among others) supplemented here and there with cases from the London church courts and the divorce court. The slow evolution of the laws determining the institution of marriage and its dismemberment provide the arc of this sobering chronicle, while ghastly individual experiences provide much of its colour. Today the average marriage lasts an estimated eleven years. Marriages in the past were no lengthier, but were divided by death, not divorce. As Maureen Wailer concludes, "it was all too easy to enter a marriage but virtually impossible to end an unhappy one". It was a peculiarity of English and Welsh church customs built on medieval canon law (unlike the Scots and other European states which introduced reform in the sixteenth century) that an exchange of vows between consenting adults (fourteen was the male age of consent, sixteen the female) in the presence of two witnesses was enough to create a solemn and binding marriage. However aggrieved the parents or aghast the community, the public promise "I take you for my wifelhusband" in a field, a lane or a tavern made an indissoluble contract. Any subsequent marriage by one of the parties, even with full clerical pomp in a cathedral, would nevertheless be deemed bigamous. Wailer cites the vicar of Tetbury's surprised discovery, when he drew up a census in the 1690s, that half his parish were "clandestinely married". Even the vaguer vow in the future tense "I shall take you for my wife/husband" (one day maybe, if I still find you attractive), could be binding if followed by sexual consummation. And how many men made empty promises on a dark night in the grip of lust? The room for misunderstanding was vast. Or as the Victorian legal historian F. W. Maitland sagely concluded: "of all people in the world, lovers are the least likely to distinguish precisely between the present and future tenses". Meanwhile, common law disregarded all that gothic canon law and refused to confer the usual marital property rights on couples who had not gone through a public church ceremony. The state had a vested interest in the proper procedures too, mooting a tax on marriages in the 1690s and levying a stiff stamp duty on marriage licences. Above all, rich parents believed they had the right to dispose their offspring as they saw fit and as rank , hlood and inheritance demanded. The rage of property owners when errant daughters eloped with penniless adventurers helped to fuel the passing of Hardwicke's Marriage Act in 1753, which made the marriages of those under twenty-one illegal without the consent of their guardians. The Act legislated that only a marriage in the parish church of one of the lovers performed by an ordained priest of the Church of England was valid. Jews and Quakers were exempt, but not Nonconformists, who had to swallow their denominational pride or be seen to live in sin. Famously, the Act had no
D
SOCIAL STUDIES
Brass and bliss AMANDA VICKER Y
Maureen Wailer THE ENGLISH MARRIAGE Tales of love, money and adultery 419pp. John Murray. £25 ($32.95). 978 I 848540545
purchase in Scotland, and inadvertently sparked a panting rush for the border to the accommodating vicars of Gretna Green. But it would be decades before older ideas of informal marriage would be stamped out entirely in England. There was no confusion, however, about the inescapability of the bond. In every century before the twentieth, people expected every marriage to be for life. Divorce by Act of Parliament was prohibitively expensive and exceptionally rare; between 1670 and 1857 there were only 325 divorces in England, all but four obtained by men. Annulments were extremely unusual, and to gain a legal separation in the church courts, without the right to remarry, a female petitioner had to prove adultery and life-threatening cruelty. Notoriously, men needed only prove adultery, and not until 1923 were the grounds for divorce equalized. Doubtless numerous private deeds of separation were drawn up, and informal "divorce" through desertion or mutual agreement must have been widespread. Still the social prohibitions against informal separation were powerful, and the penalties faced by an estranged wife could be grim.
Without the safeguard of a carefully worded deed of separation, a wife still suffered all the legal disabilities of marriage: any income from real estate, any future legacies or earnings, all personal property and total control of the couple' s children could be claimed by a vindictive husband. What is more, in strict legality, a wife could not leave her husband' s house without his permission and an affronted spouse had the law on his side if he chose to drag her back. Only the most desperate, or the most protected, woman could countenance leaving a marriage on such terms. Understandably then, church court records describe only the tip of a possible iceberg of everyday misery. The Divorce Reform Act of 1857 wrenched the business of dissolving marriage from the Church and empowered the secular divorce court in London. The Married Women's Property Acts of 1870, 1874 and 1882 restored a woman ' s legal identity in marriage, giving her access to her own property and thus making it technically possible for a wife to live apart from a husband and support her children. The Matrimonial Causes Act of 1937 extended grounds for divorce to cruelty and desertion, and from 1969 proof of "irretrievable marital breakdown" was sufficient, removing the necessity of apportioning moral blame. Wailer slyly notes that if two-thirds of the British population today think there is little difference between being married and living together, we are returned to the status quo ante. However, she regrets what has been lost
in the modern pursuit of self-gratification. "In a throwaway society we ignore the wisdom and experience of our forebears at our peril. For them marriage was for life. They had to work at it and find the means of living together in harmony." She especially deplores the rise of the idle "toxic wife" who spends her wealthy husband's money for a few years, before she takes him for half his yacht in the divorce courts - "about as far from Margaret Paston, Mary Verney, Emma Darwin, Mollie Butler and all the other loyal and devoted wives of the past few centuries as it is possible to imagine" . The ill-gotten gains of a few bankers' wives are not sufficient to make me regret the achievements and unintended consequences of feminism. Wailer's own case studies are testimony to the potential hell of marriages past, and the excruciation of female victims in particular. Mr Veezey starving and whipping his wife in a garret, George Norton scalding Caroline with a kettle, Aaron Stock driving Ellen out of Wigan, and the life of her little daughter, are unforgettable instances of the extremes of patriarchal abuse and the unequal price women paid. The challenge now, of course, is to find lifelong love within a framework of equality. It may be true that the cult of self is at odds with the "forbearance, consideration for another and unselfishness" that marriage demands - but it is worth remembering that for centuries women were trained up in self-denial and kindheartedness, yet had no grounds for complaint if these sterling virtues were missing in their men. Tabloid journalists may complain that greedy hoydens have made London the divorce capital of Europe, but it seems unlikely that female selfishness is the taproot of our malaise.
Marriage by Harry Clifton 'In the dim void bit by bit an old man and child' Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho I am becoming your father And you, my daughter, On our wandering through the world Must hold my hand now, Two black dots against the snow An old man, a little girl .
Mine was the black coat in the corner, Old, like myself, before its time, Yours the pinafore, convent hat You never grew out of. Two slow learners As the small hours chimed In the depths of the hallway, we set out.
All this started long ago. I was woken, from the bestial sleep Of ego-hood, by a strange glow Behind the bedroom door Where heterae with unbound hair Were the company I would keep.
Since then, snowscapes. Wilderness That takes to itself a dozen names Of countries, and is always the same. One day, you are my mother, I your son. Another With clouded specs, directionless,
A strange glow, and then the light As the door swung open And you stood there, at the dream-threshold, Ready. No more than a child In the eye of second sight, But the strangeness, the wildness,
You lean on me, as we stagger on. Do you ever miss the old days, Sometimes you ask me. The vie en rose? Old prostitutes with garters, stays, Young women ' s laddered hose? You my mother, I your son.
Inside you! Certificates Meant nothing. Scholarship? Forget it. But the double-weight One suitcase each, of useless books, Enough to keep us ill-equipped For a lifetime - those, my dear, we took.
You my daughter, I your father Darling, if they could see us now, Two black dots against the snow, Two fly-by-nights the morning after Over the skyline, managing who knows how, They would tell us where to go .
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HISTORY
11
Did Butterfield write in vain? f Herbert Butterfield was right to argue, in 1931, that the outlook of English historians had been largely that of the Protestant gentleman (he might better have said of the Protestant Dissenter), it may be that these attitudes have since been secularized rather than superseded. This would explain an important lacuna. Academics lament the fate of the marginalized and excluded, but make fashionable the Protestant Dissenters rather than the Catholic ones. Gabrielle Spiegel , a recent President of the American Historical Association, correctly points to the burgeoning field of diaspora studies; but secular historians foreground Protestant groups like the Huguenots, overlooking that larger and longer Catholic diaspora from the British Isles between the 1530s and the 1790s which created a lasting cultural and political network across Europe. Historians of literacy generally celebrate the spread of the printing press in the same breath as Protestantism and gunpowder, but (before Eamon Duffy) said less about the old religion and its international literature. Feminist historians honour their adoptive precursors who maintained themselves by their pens, but until recently passed over the much larger number who arguably achieved an independent voice, and insulation from patriarchy, as nuns. In these secularized scenarios, English Catholics were airbrushed out or appeared as stage villains, paying a historiographical as well as a political price for backing a series of losing horses: the Pilgrimage of Grace, the Gunpowder Plot, Charles I , successive Jacobite conspiracies. Of these the defining moment, and the most spectacular reversal , was "the Revolution": the events of 1688-9 that unseated that arch-villain and obscurantist Catholic, James n, from the throne. Debate about it has never ceased, from its immediate aftermath, through Or Sacheverell, Edmund Burke and Lord Macaulay, to an embarrassed tercentenary in 1988 and after. The tactical needs of insecure Whiggery then, and of secularized Protestantism now, acted to reduce the Revolution to a prudent, minimal adjustment. The books reviewed here are important correctives; they rightly stress that 1688 made a big difference, but Gabriel Glickman (from the perspective of Oxford) and Steve Pincus (from that of Yale) have very different ways of explaining how. As Pincus rightly sees, however, the eclipse of the I 640s since the days of Christopher Hill and Lawrence Stone has left the rival historical tradition of English modernization and revolutionary transformation heavily dependent on 1688: he is determined to reinstate its revolutionary nature. These deeply researched works demand attention ; but one of them allows the evidence to lead, while the other subordinates it to an interpretative framework that raises major problems. Pincus's marvellously learned book is the product of years of industrious archival labour. Yet despite the rich detail, assiduously assembled, the general absence of a sense of a quoted document's tactical purpose often makes it difficult to check the book's interpretations against the evidence
I
JONATHAN CLARK Gabriel Glickman THE ENGLISH CATHOLIC COMMUNITY 1688 - 1745 Politics, culture and ideology 306pp. Boydell Press. £60 (US $ 115). 978 I 843834649
Steve Pincus 1688 The first modern revolution 645pp. Yale University Press. £28 (US $40). 9780300115475
presented to support them. This absence also gives the impression that if someone said something he said it because it was so. Thus William Ill's published Declaration on war with France " made it clear that William did not intend to fight a war of religion" ; therefore he had no such intention. Again, Pincus interprets Catholic subscription to the Association of 1696, pledging support to William 1Il, literalistically as simple evidence of loyalty to the Williamite regime; Glickman is contrastingly aware of the coerced nature of much public utterance. Pincus often writes of "the English people" and the views of " most" of them, with no sense of the difficulty of demonstrating such a consensus; yet if "most" people were as militantly anti-French as he claims, it is less clear how a French model of government could have posed such a threat. Glickman has the harder task both in substance and sources, but his book is also a triumph of archival recovery. In the three centuries between the Reformation and the "second spring" of Catholic revival in the nineteenth century, the worst decades for
Catholics were those of his study. We can imagine the TV historian reaching for his alliterative revolver: what can there be to say about such ludicrous losers and recidivist reactionaries? Glickman demonstrates that there is much to be said, once the images of "Catholic cultural degeneration" are superseded. No longer an introverted remnant, cut off from the key developments of their age, the English Catholics of 1688-1745 emerge here as international in outlook. "Contrary to the image of seclusion, recusant lives were penetrated by debates that gripped the European mind: questions of monarchy and nationhood, the efficacy and limits of religious coercion, and the function of temporal and spiritual powers in human affairs." The "hidden diversity and sophistication of Catholic debate" is amply demonstrated. Far from retreating into silent disengagement, the Catholic community, as Glickman shows, argued over national politics, a minority even bidding for an oath of allegiance to George I in 1716. Where Pincus dwells on James n's Gallican absolutism, Glickman lays out the full range of Catholic opinion, much of it constitutionalist. Glickman reminds us that the "vast majority" of Catholics had not "engaged in any vehemently confessional project" under James, and were alarmed by his French-inspired "courtiers' programme". A dominant theme is that of allegiance: not to an absolutist vision, but within a language of "patriotism and moderation" . Even in exile, "Jacobite statesmen nurtured the Stuart ' Pretender' on a contemplative form of Catholicism, compatible with liberty of conscience, constitutional politics and greater distance between temporal and spiritual estates". Soon, Catholics in England could accentuate their national identity by defining it against the Whig regime. Pincus thinks the opposi-
tion Whiggery of the Walpole era carried forward the real, "radical" meaning of 1688; Glickman thinks opposition Whiggery "created the space for Catholics to accentuate their own national feeling in a stand against the government". Historians have recently agreed that "opposition to James was largely religious in nature"; but Pincus rejects them, and celebrates instead the revolutionaries' "transformative political or social agenda". He argues that James n ' s subjects reacted against his "very modern ideological agenda", but is usually in denial about this agenda's religious component. It might be asked whether this position remains as plausible after Glickman ' s recapturing of the wide dimensions of Catholic culture. Where Pincus interprets divisions among Catholics as evidence that 1688 was not centrally about religion, Glickman shows how religion underpinned much else as well. Pincus draws a distinction between previous historians' claims that the English reacted against James ll' s Catholicism, and his own argument that James stood for a "French-style Catholic modernity", so that "Whigs and Tories, Dissenters and Anglicans expressed most of their discontent in legal rather than confessional terms". But this is a distinction without a difference: confessional content could hardly have been resisted except through legal forms , as in the 1530s, 1640s and 1770s. Many things were at stake in 1688, including foreign and economic policy, beyond the religious issues that preoccupy recent historians, as Pincus rightly emphasizes. But he goes much further. He quotes individual after individual in the 1680s asserting that they sought to defend their liberties and religion; he then labours to
"The Trial ofthe Seven Bishops in the House of Commons during the Reign of James 11" (1844) by John Rogers Herbert
TLS JANUARY 15 2010
HISTORY
12 argue that religion was not really at issue since denominations were divided, and since European powers did not line up neatly in Catholic and Protestant camps. But this is a non sequitur, and looks doubly implausible against all those other conflicts, not examined by him, that long continued to have important religious components. Where Pincus wishes to turn religion into just one component of the identity of "revolutionary nationalists", Glickman moves in the opposite direction to demand a reconceptualization of "Enlightenment". It pointed, he contends, to religious pluralism, including toleration for Catholics, not to religious scepticism: in his vision , James II won in the end. Not for Pincus, for whom the "flight" of James subliminally showed the irrelevance of the Catholic option. For Glickman, James's forced "expulsion" triggered vocal Catholic debates in Continental Europe, often heterodox, which fed into the "Catholic Enlightenment", linked Jacobite with Jacobin, and openly aligned Catholics with reformers by the 1820s. In proleptic fashion , Pincus thinks that the Revolution separated Church and State; Glickman traces this separation to Catholic thought in the decades after 1688, especially in France, as Jansenism became the cult of the anti-monarchical parlements under Louis XV. The international dimension and the domestic predicament of Catholicism, according to Glickman, produced important debates on identity; Pincus treats Catholicism under
James II mainly as one route to " modernity", a route decisively rejected in 1688 by a consensual "people". Glickman eschews the simplifying category of " modernity", and gives a scholarly account of the phenomena themselves. For Pincus, despite his model of James II's policy, modernity was essentially Whig and commercial, driven forward by economic change; Glickman shows how the Catholic community itself survived by "participation" in a "'commercial world" which
was therefore diverse, not essentially Whig. Again, Pincus presents 1688 as "part of a broader struggle for European liberty" in which James n was against it, William 1Il for it: did Butterfield write in vain? Both books are restricted in their geographical remit. Despite his wider diplomatic horizons, in traditional fashion Pincus focuses on England and largely omits Scotland and Ireland; this helps him believe that his revolutionaries "sought to promote a religiously tolerant society". Conflicts in Scotland and Ireland, Pincus contends, " need to be seen" as part of the ensuing wars against France; but why not as part of the Revolution? Glickman also focuses on England, but without the need to lead us to a liberal modernity this restriction is less confining. Pincus's insistence on the tolerant, non-confessional nature of William ' s monarchy is Anglocentric ; Glickman's awareness of the scale of Catholic exclusion looks outward to Europe. "Modernity" is the key concept. The revolutionaries of 1688, argues Pincus, intended
to, and did, create "a new kind of modern state", a "participatory state" ; 1688 "paved the way for parliamentary democracy". Yet parliamentary historians have been showing for decades that higher voting figures in cl689-17l4 were the result of conflict between the Whig and Tory parties, not of the institution of a newly participatory democratic politics, and that this two-party conflict was primarily the unintended result of widespread disagreement over what had been done in 1688. Pincus sees the Revolution as the consensual act of "the people" acting on resistance theory, not passive obedience: "Rise, the English people certainly did". He does not note how much early support for William was on the basis of his promise only to reform abuses, or that William said nothing about seizing the throne until James was expelled; tactical intent is strangely lacking. The thesis of a "partici patory state" is matched by another: that 1688 made an " ideological break with the past" , Pincus rejecting John Dunn's contention that Locke's Two Treatises was only one work among many in the 1690s. This overlooks what historians have uncovered about the survival of the dynastic idiom on all points of the spectrum of political conflict, and the absence until many decades later of alternative discourses. Pincus equally presents his own book as reenvisioning "the nature of liberalism" and 1688 as an achievement of "radicalism"; it also took place in a "nationalist context" understood at the time "in remarkably
modern and nationalist terms" ; "nationalism"
indeed meant that "the age of religious wars was over". But liberalism, radicalism and nationalism were the proper names for new ideologies coined after cl815; they were no more present in 1688 than fascism, and to assume otherwise is to prefer a world of smoke and mirrors to the scholarly recovery of the history of political thought. "Liberalism", "radicalism" and "national-
ism" link with Pincus's vision of 1688 as integral to "the causes and consequences of commercialization"; "the growth in manufacturing in the seventeenth century was nothing short of transformative for England", which is a rhetorical response to incremental change. Financial, fiscal and commercial innovations there undoubtedly were, but they occurred under the Commonwealth , continued under the later Stuarts, and were continued again after 1688 despite successive changes of regime; any counterfactual argument that but for the Revolution the Bank of England would not have been founded would be difficult to sustain, and Pincus never quite goes that far. Nor does he ask, as economic historians have recently done, whether war helped or hindered the English economy; yet this is a genuine issue for the "second Hundred Years' War" to which the Revolution committed England. The Revolution is presented here as a profound break with the past, but the argument must be inconclusive since there is only the briefest comparison with the 1640s and none
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TLS JANUARY 15 2010
ILS
fOR LOVERS OF LITERARY cULlntt
HISTORY with 1776. Instead the Revolution of 1688, for Pincus, illuminates "the origins and contours of modernity itself'; even James II was "embracing modernity" . This is problematic if "modernity" was a project, not a process, and a project launched in the late nineteenth century: for James II and William Ill, ancients and moderns had to do with Rome and its successors, not with the "'radical" transformation of their own society. None of their contemporaries understood the presentday meaning of " modernity", and it cannot therefore explain their thoughts or actions. So although Pincus interestingly identifies James II' s Catholic programme as a modernizing one, this category confusion hinders its accurate analysis, and Catholic modernity strangely disappears from the book after 1688. Nevertheless, Pincus repeatedly claims that 1688 was the first "truly modern revolution", an idea clearly deeply congenial to the scholars who provide paragraphs of praise on the dust jacket. Since they all work in the United States but not on the Revolution, their reaction itself calls for historical explanation; for Pincus is clearly pushing at an open door. He offers a clue in acknowledging the American Crane Brinton's classic study of 1938, The Anatomy of Revolution, which at the high tide of modernism offered a socialscientific "systematization" of major revolutions between what he called the "English revolution" of the 1640s and the Russian Revolution. In Brinton's pages 1688 received only a dismissive mention as a mere aftershock of the earthquake of the 1640s. Historians of the long eighteenth century doubted this downgrading of 1688, and Pincus rightly seeks to rehabilitate it. But in oddly dated modernist fashion, he does so by locating 1688 as "a bourgeois revolution in a cultural and political sense" . Since Brinton, historians of the I 640s, 1776, 1789 and 1917 have all reinterpreted their own revolutions in ways that undermined his taxonomy. Pincus is therefore too late: he seeks to rehabilitate 1688 by restoring it to what he sees as its rightful place in a gallery of modernist statues that have, since the 1970s, been toppled from their plinths. Brinton's taxonomy also rested on a premiss of timelessness that proved on examination to be culturally specific: he assured his readers that "you only have to look at a page of Theophrastus or of Chaucer to realize that Greeks of more than two thousand years ago and Englishmen of six centuries ago seem in some ways extraordinarily like Americans of today". It is important to ask how far Pincus's book is subject to the same limitation; indeed its claim that 1688 was the consensual act of "the English people" echoes the received account of 1776 more than it embodies recent excellent scholarship on the last-
ingly contested events of the 1680s. Gabriel Glickman leads us to a much more unfamiliar world, in which the Catholics were not villains but victims, and often progressive ones at that. His novel monograph is likely to produce a significant shift in perspectives on this period: secularized Protestantism is no longer enough. Steve Pincus, drawing on American social science of the 1960s and 70s (Samuel Huntington, Isaac Kramnick, Barrington Moore, Theda Skocpol, Charles Tilly), has really issued a learned but perverse recall to the 1930s.
13
Scottish rifles "The tartan question" is one of the gravest character, far more important ... than the mainte-
nance of the Union with Ireland. All the thoughts of the War Office are concentrated on it, and patterns of tartans past, present, and future, fill our rooms. We are neglecting the
Transvaal , and the Ashanti for the sake of well weighing the merits of a few more threads of red, green or white.
ith these words in 1881 the Secretary of State for War in Gladstone's second administration, Hugh Childers, attempted to dismiss parliamentary unrest at his intended reforms to the regimental system. His predecessor in the first Gladstone administration, Edward Card well, had instituted a scheme of "linked battalions", whereby single-battalion regiments were paired, setting up a common training depot in a county town appropriate to the two regiments ' recruiting areas. One battalion was to serve overseas and the other at home (including Ireland and Gibraltar) , and home battalion reinforcements could be sent overseas to the other as the need arose. A dozen years on, Childers pressed the pairings to their logical conclusion, amalgamating the two linked battalions into a single new regiment with a first and second battalion. Agreeing a common tartan for the new regiment in the Highland regiments especially - was never going to be easy. Out of the Cardwell-Childers reforms came the ten regiments of what in time became known as the Scottish division (in order of seniority): the Royal Scots, Royal Scots Fusiliers, King's Own Borderers (from 1887 Scottish Borderers), Cameronians, Black Watch, Highland Light Infantry, Seaforth Highlanders, Gordon Highlanders, Queen's Own Cameron Highlanders, Princess Louise's (Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders) - omitting, that is (save for the Argylls), the many qualifying names in brackets which the regimental elders felt were necessary to resolve disputes between the antecedent regiments, or else to tie the name territorially. The Royal Scots, for example, carried in brackets "Lothian Regiment" . And with these new names the Scottish infantry fought two world wars and wound down the empire which their forebears had
W
ALLAN MALLINSON Trevor Royle THE CAMERONIANS A concise history 240pp. Mainstream. £ 12.99. 978 1845963279
of the Scottish infantry in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries provides the authorized narrative of this complex story. Eight slim volumes, which together are much greater than the sum of the individual parts, explain, extol and ultimately elegize the singular military tradition of the tartan regiments. The last of these histories is undoubtedly the most extraordinary - or rather, of the most extraordinary regiment, the Cameronians (the Scottish Rifles). From the outset they were different. The original Cameronians were Covenanters, adherents to the
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A detail from a watercolour showing the 1st Battalion Cameronians (Scottish rifles late 26th); by Richard Simkin (1840-1926)
won.
In 1959 there was another round of amalgamations army-wide, with a reduction of one regiment from both the Highland and the Lowland brigades (by this time the regiments had long lost their second battalions). The Seaforths and the Camerons formed the Queen's Own Highlanders, and the Royal Scots Fusiliers and the Highland Light Infantry became the Royal Highland Fusiliers. In 1968 there were further defence cuts, but the Cameronians chose disbandment rather than amalgamation, and the Argylls fought the axe and won a long stay of execution - until 2006 in fact, when all the Scottish infantry were re-formed as one multi-battalion unit, the Royal Regiment of Scotland, though the Queen's Own Highlanders and the Gordons did not quite make it to 2006, having been amalgamated in 1994 to form , simply, the Highlanders. Trevor Royle's series of concise histories
National Covenant (1638) and the Solemn League and Covenant (1643), strict Presbyterians pledged to fight for freedom to worship as they chose. When the Crown ejected ministers from their parishes for refusing to submit to the rule of bishops, the Covenanters followed them into the hills to worship in the open in what came to he known as conventicles, to
which they began carrying weapons and posting armed pickets to keep a lookout. When the Catholic James II renewed his fight in 1689, in Ireland, with William of Orange, who had taken the English and Scottish thrones "by invitation" the year before, the Cameronians were raised in a single day "without beat of drum" in their heartland - Galloway, Ayrshire, and Clydesdale - to fight for their Protestant King. Eventually , the regiment was mustered in the emerging British army as the 26th Foot and fought under the Duke of Marlborough
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in his great quartet of victories. Thereafter, their story is much like those of any of the hundred other regiments of the line which grew out of the eighteenth century and the Napoleonic wars, though they seem to have had more than the usual share of "characters" . In the Cardwell-Childers reforms, the 26th amalgamated with the 90th (Perthshire) Light Infantry to become the first and second battalions of The Cameronians, with the suffix "(The Scottish Rifles)" , and exchanged their red coats and brass buttons for green jackets and black horn buttons - an elevation in status which only served to increase the testiness of the former 26th. Of all the Cardwell-Childers amalgamations, this was the least tranquil, and it was not until the Great War that things settled down enough for the two battalions to think of themselves as two parts of the same organization - long after other parts of the army had got over their shotgun marriages. The regiment's record in both world wars and in the retreat from empire was second to none. Just before their demise in 1968, the Cameronians "earned" a nickname by which - if they are spoken of at all today - they are invariably known: Gi[tzwerge - "poison dwarfs". While they were stationed in Minden, West Germany, there was a mass fight in a local bar between soldiers of the regiment and German youths. In the subsequent investigation , the word was used by one of the locals, it got into the German press, and then the British, and the name stuck - not least, with a certain perverse pride, in the regiment itself, who were happy enough to be recognized as tough even if diminutive. To what extent their reputation contributed to their disbandment rather than amalgamation in the cuts of 1968 is still the subject of conjecture, but in any case it was never going to be easy to amalgamate a rifle regiment with one of "heavy infantry" of the Scottish Division, for someone would either have to take off their green jacket or else their "red" one (red had in fact been formally abandoned after 1918). Perhaps they ought earlier to have amalgamated with the Highland Light Infantry, but by and large the HLI were "Glasgow Celtic" - Catholics to the Cameronians' Protestants. Perhaps they could have amalgamated with the (very Protestant) Royal Ulster Rifles, who were combining with the Royal Irish Fusiliers and the Inniskilling Fusiliers at the time instead, but that might have been too lethal a cocktail. So the Cameronians became the first regiment since the Napoleonic Wars to dishand , not counting the Irish regiments at independence in 1922. And they remain the only ones to have done so ab initio: the York and Lancasters, who were culled at the same time, went into a curious military limbo called "suspended animation" until many years later the Army Board gave up the pretence of their existence, formally disbanding them and removing their name from the Army List. The Cameronians' is therefore a unique story, as well as a powerful one. Trevor Royle has done great service both to history and to Scottish military heritage with this wonderfully readable series.
14
The last Romantics How the scholarship of Herbert Grierson influenced Modernist poetry he impact of Sir Herbert Grierson on his students at Aberdeen University may be gauged by Nan Shepherd's description of him in The Quarry Wood (1928):
T
He spoke like a torrent. He digressed, recovered himself, shot straight ahead, digressed again. He forgot his audience, turning farther and farther round till he stood side on to them, gazing through the window Then
suddenly he would turn back upon the class with a wrinkling smile and swift amused aside; and a roar of laughter would ri se to the roof,
while the feet thundered on the floor. His theme was English Literature, but to Martha it seemed that he was speaking the language of some immortal and happy isle, so me fabulous tongue that she was enabled by miracle for once to comprehend.
CAIRNS CRAIG route to religious spirituality; rather, Donne uses the " intellectual, argumentative evolution" of the medieval love poets "to express a temper of mind and a conception of love which are at the opposite pole from their lofty idealism", one which celebrates the body rather than denying it. The result was, as Grierson wrote in The Cambridge History 01 English and American Literature, that "Don ne is the most shaping and determining influence that meets us in passing from the sixteenth to the seventeenth century. In certain aspects of mind and training the most medieval, in temper the most modern". In 1912 Donne became, effectively, the first "modern" poet.
cacy and subtleties of his imagination are the
lengths and depths of the furrow made by his passion. His pedantry and his obscenity - the rock and loam of his Eden - but make us the more certain that one who is but a man like us
has seen God. Looking back on his earlier work in Autobiographies, Yeats was to analyse its flaws as the separation of "subtlety" from the "common, wayward spirited man" , and to judge it by comparison with Donne: "I have felt in certain early works of my own which I have long abandoned a slight, sentimental sensuality which is disagreeable, and does not exist in the work of Donne ... because he, being permitted to say what he pleased, was never tempted to linger, or rather to pretend that we can linger, between spirit and
Next month marks the fiftieth anniversary of Grierson's death. He was born in Lerwick, Shetland, in 1866, was Professor of English Literature at Aberdeen University between 1894 and 1915, then moved to Edinburgh where he remained until 1935. His edition of John Donne (1912) and his anthology Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems olthe Seventeenth Century (1921) not only transformed the understanding of seventeenth-century literature, and raised Donne from an eccentric minor poet to one of the major poets of the language, but made the " metaphysical" fundamental to modern poetics as well. Grierson himself attributed this to a "reaction against the smoothness of Tennyson like the reaction against Pope by Wordsworth and others. The modems found inspiration in the ' metaphysicals'''. The real reaction, however, was against nineteenth-century conceptions of beauty. To those who questioned whether it was possible for love poetry to "speak a language which is impassioned and expressive but lacks beauty", Grierson argued that Donne's was a "'dramatic" poetry which "utters the very movement and moment of passion itself'. More like a novel, Donne's
And see all things despoyl'd of fallacies. From 1912, Yeats's would be the poetry of the "watch-towre", scorning those who had lost all sense of tradition, and, consequently, lost touch with the modernity represented by Donne. The image that crystallized that sense of tradition "came to him outside Urbino, when the sight of a medieval tower reared up against a stormy sunset summoned up the vision of Ariosto' s life dedicated to artistic perfection". It was Grierson who had advised Yeats to make the visit. Grierson's Donne was just as crucial to the development of the young T. S. Eliot. Indeed, one of Eliot's most influential essays, "The Metaphysical Poets", was written as a review of Grierson's anthology, and a famous passage from it takes Grierson 's account of Donne's poetic sensibility as the basis for a critique of the failures of English poetry: It is something which had happened to the mind of England between the time of Donne Tennyso n and Browning; it is the difference between the intellectual poet and reflective poet. Tennyso n and Browning are poets, and
they think; but they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose. A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility.
poetry mimics passion in a "vivid realism" The central theme of his poetry is ever his own intense personal moods, as a lover, a friend, an analyst of his own experiences worldly and reli-
gious. His philosophy cannot unify these expe-
The result was "a poetry of an extraordinarily arresting and haunting quality, passionate, thoughtful, and with a deep melody of its own". For a generation coming to terms with D. H. Lawrence and Freud, Grierson discerned in Donne's poetry "a new philosophy of love": unlike his great precursors Dante and Petrarch, Donne does not make love a
things see m great Below ; But up unto the watch-towre get,
or Lord Herbert of Cherbury and the time of
with profound psychological insights:
riences. It is used to record the reaction of his restless and acute mind on the intense experience of the moment, to supply a reading of it in the light now of one, now of another philosophical or theological dogma or thesis caught from his multifarious reading, de ve loped with audacious paradox or more serious intention, an expression, an illumination of that mood to himself and to his reader.
learned the thought the greater the beauty , the passion"; he would not be afraid of "obscenity" if that was what it took to acknowledge the body as well as the spirit; and he would not be afraid to adopt into his own poetry the language of a fallen world that deserved a poet's castigation. The Dublin audience's rejection of Synge confirmed that poet and audience - as Grierson suggested in 1915 in his essay "The Background of English Literature" - no longer inhabited the same world. The poet had to follow the advice in a passage from Donne's " Second Anniversarie" to which Grierson drew attention: Thou look' st through spectacles; small
Herbert Grierson (left) with P. G. Wodehouse on the occasion of Wode house's receiving an honorary degree ofthe Doctor of Laws at Oxford University; June 1939 W. B. Yeats was at Grierson' s home in
sense". Grierson's Donne became the model
Aberdeen on January 26, 1907 when he received the telegram announcing that the audience at Synge's The Playboy olthe Western World "broke up in disorder at the word shift". The meeting with Grierson and the confrontation with the Dublin audience in the following week were to transform Yeats's career. Grierson sent Yeats a copy of his edition of Donne in 1912; Yeats replied that
by which Yeats defined the genius of Synge: Synge, like Donne, was the writer who challenged a world which had "broken from the past, from the self-evident truths, from ' naked beauty displayed' ''; the writer who brought "the imagination and speech of the country, all that poetical tradition descended from the Middle Ages, to the people of the town". But Donne was also to be a model for Yeats's own development after 1912: he would no longer be afraid of "pedantry" - of invoking his own theories about the nature of the world - because "the more precise and
Poems I could not understand or could but vaguely understand are now clear and I notice that the more precise and learned the thought the greater the beauty, the passion; the intri-
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Eliot's analysis builds on Grierson 's insistence that "all great poetry is metaphysical" , and that the poet is as much engaged with truth as the scientist or philosopher, except "the poet's imagination differs from the philosopher's only in its love for the concrete, and in that it works at the dictation offeeling" . In "The Background to English Literature", Grierson also set out a theory of tradition which Eliot was to develop in that founding statement of Anglo-American modernism, his essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1919). The writer, Grierson argued, is connected with his audience by other links than that of a common language: by a body of common knowledge and feeling to which he may make direct or indirect allusion, confident that he will be understood, and not only this, but more or less accurately of the
effect the allusion will produce. He knows roughly what his audience knows , and what are their prejudices. A people is made one, less
COMMENTARY by community of blood than by a common tradition.
That "common tradition" is "formed by literature itself', making it possible for "the poet's words [to] waken a succession of echoes in the ear of the scholar", echoes which will go all the way back to ancient Rome and Greece. "Tradition and the Individual Talent" adopts the same perspective in its insistence that the poet must have "a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order". For Grierson, the contemporary audience' s lack of this traditional background means that the poet "who wishes to give his work a literary background" must write "necessarily for a limited audience, and to some extent he creates his own background for himself'. Eliot, an American who might well have been unsure whether he shared a "common knowledge and feeling" with his British readers, was to develop out of Grierson ' s anthology, and especially out of the lines that Grierson quoted in his introduction, an allusive tradition which he could adopt as the traditional context of his own poetry: Donne, 1 suppose, was such another Who found no substitute for sense, To seize and clutch and penetrate.
This reconnection with a tradition of English poetry steeped in reality and sexuality explains why The Waste Land is saturated with echoes of Grierson's Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems. When Eliot sent a copy of his Collected Poems to Grierson, it was inscribed "to whom all English men of letters are indebted". Scottish modernism was to be no less indebted. Grierson ' s account of Donne emphasized the tension in Donne's work between "the strain of dialectic, the subtle play of argument and wit, erudite and fantastic; and the strain of vivid realism". That opposition became, in G. Gregory Smith's Scottish Literature: Character and influence (1919), the defining element of the whole tradition of Scottish literature, which is shaped on the one hand by its "grip of fact" , its "sense of detail", its realism, and, on the other, by its enthusiasm for "the horns of elfland and the voices of the mountains". The characteristic tenor of Scottish poetry is an "easy passing ... between the natural and the supernatural", producing that "zigzag of contradictions" which Smith defined as "the Caledonian antisyzygy" . Determined to create in Scotland the "Renaissance" that Smith described taking place in Ireland, Christopher Murray Grieve adopted that characterization of Scottishness in his invention of his poetic alter ego, Hugh MacDiarmid. To MacDiarmid, Grieve attributed the antisyzygetical energy - the desire to "aye be whaur I Extremes meet" - which Smith identified with the Scottish tradition. Grierson's shaping influence was such that Grieve asked him to write an introduction for MacDiramid's first collection of poems, Sangschaw. In the the event, he declined. Grieve, however, dedicated a poem to him and the mark of Grierson's writing on the metaphysicals is stamped throughout MacDiarmid's early work. If Grierson had encouraged the notion that modern poetry required a return to Donne, Grieve went one better and insisted it was "back to Dunbar"; if
Donne represented for Grierson the continuity of a tradition linking medieval to modern, then, for Grieve, Dunbar offered the same, since Dunbar's "unique intensity of feeling" derives from "Braid Scots" as "a great untapped repository of the pre-Renaissance or anti-Renaissance potentialities which English has progressively forgone"; if part of that continuity was Donne's underlying Catholicism, then Scotland, too, had to rediscover its Catholic heritage - "the line of hope lies partially in re-Catholization", Grieve insisted in 1927. If "Metaphysical poetry" , as Grierson claimed, was poetry "inspired by a philosophical conception of the universe and the role assigned to the human spirit in the great drama of existence", then Grieve, through the medium of MacDiarmid, was instrumental in creating a metaphysical poetry in Scots. When working on A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, Grieve wrote to his former schoolteacher that he was trying to recast his material "into a series of metaphysical pictures with a definite progression", a "metaphysical" intent underlined when, in 1962, his editor in the United States asked for "titles" for the sections of A Drunk Man to make them easier for the American audience, and MacDiarmid entitled a key, culminating section - beginning "I tae ha'e heard Eternity" - "Metaphysical Pictures of the Thistle". Another of Grierson' s editions, The Poems of Lord Byron, published in 1923, was to be equally significant to MacDiarmid. In a lecture of 1920, Grierson had placed Byron not only in the line of Donne but in the line of Burns: "Byron was masculine and passionate, as Donne and Burns had been before him". After quoting passages from Chi/de Harold, Grierson asks, Is there any love-poetry of the romantics which vibrates with so full a life of sense and soul as these verses? Compared with it, "1 arise from
dreams of thee" or "A slumber did my spirit seal" are the love strains of a disembodied spirit or a rapt mystic. There is nothing like it in English poetry except some of the songs of Burns and the complex, vibrant passion, sensual and spiritual , of Donne's songs and elegies.
Grierson's Byron, who rescues poetry from a beauty "of things somewhat remote from life" by giving us " life and strength, passion and virility, wit and humour", is, for Grieve, the Scottish Byron, rejected by English literature because he challenged its moral boundaries: "The failure to claim Byron for Scottish literature - the deference paid to English standards of taste in that and other ' Scottish' anthologies - is a characteristic consequence of the Anglicisation of Scotland" . For Grieve, "the reason for the general dislike, misprizing and neglect of Byron in England is mainly due to the fact that he stands outwith the English literary tradition altogether. He is alien to it and not to be assimilated". The spirit of Byron is the true spirit of Scottish literature, because "unlike English literature Scottish literature remains amoral - full of illimitable potentialities". In this sense Byron, not Burns, is the " nationally typical" poet: "he answers - not to the stock conceptions, the grotesque Anglo-Scottish Kailyard travesty, of Scottish psychology - but to all the realities of our dark, difficult, unequal , and inconsistent national temper". Grieve's "' MacDiarmid", the antisyzygetical Scottish poet, is modelled on Byron, the Byron who
defies existing English tradition because he stands in the line of Donne. Writing to George Bruce in 1964, Grieve described his poetic persona as one designed "to erupt like a volcano, emitting not only flame, but a lot of rubbish". The image recalls Grierson's description of the third canto of Childe Harold, which has "the turbid flow of a stream of lava, choked at times with the debris and scoriae of imperfect phrasing and tortured rhythms, again flowing clear and strong but dark, and yet again growing incandescent in felicitous and magnificent lines and stanzas" . Grierson's Byron was to be equall y important to Yeats. Despite their friendship, Grierson compared the Irishman unfavourably with Byron, describing Yeats's work as the product of "the romantic and Hellenic revival" which produced "exquisite poetry", a poetry contrasted with the "scorn and mockery, the buoyant humour and splendid satire" of Byron. It was at this time that Yeats began to experiment with Byron's ottava rima stanza, a form which Grierson argued had allowed Byron "to write poetry as he talked or as he wrote racy letters to his friends"; it was a public, oratorical style, that of "a poet who was also ... a man of the world" and which fitted the expression of those "feelings which belong to us as ' political animals', whose source and sphere is national and civic life, the love of liberty, of justice, the passion of power, the hatred of oppression". Engaged as he was in the 1920s in Irish politics, these issues were also urgent to Yeats, but for Yeats the imperative was to find a form which could be used to link his public, political life to his private, increasingly welldefined mythology, as presented in A Vision in 1925. He needed a form that would capture the immediacy of the voice of the passionate politician and yet would not deny the tradition which Grierson had described in the Warton Lecture "Lord Byron: Arnold and Swinburne" (1920) as "the record of emotions begotten in the library, begotten of overmuch reading of Elizabethan plays and Greek tragedy and lyric". The word "begotten" in Grierson's essay is crucial: it was to inspire one ofYeats's greatest poems, "Sailing to Byzantium" , a poem that uses Byron ' s stanza in order to capture the immediacy of the voice of the public speaker - "That is no country for old men" but, at the same time, to revel in the value of those "emotions begotten in the library": Fish, f1esh, or fowl , commend all summer long Whatever is begotten, born, and dies. Caught in that sensual music al1 neglect Monuments of unageing intellect.
Where Grierson attributes "begotten" to the arts of the library, Yeats attributes it to the inevitable passage of the natural world. There is no " hegetting" in the place " of unageing intellect". There, instead, is "such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make", the very image which Grierson had used in characterizing the tradition of the "Romantic Revival" , of which Yeats' s Irish Revival was a late echo: " Was it any wonder that these masters of cunning technique, goldsmiths who could carve and chase with the art of a Benvenuto Cellini cups and chalices of antique fashion ... were startled and indignant when commanded to do reverence to the crudities of Byron ' s earliest verses?". Grierson's image for the artificiality of Romantic
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15 poetry - "a beauty of things somewhat remote from life" whose "exquisite art. seems touched with decadence" - is reversed by Yeats in an acknowledgment that it is precisely such "masters of cunning technique" , those "sages standing in God ' s holy fire I As in the gold mosaic of a wall", to which his art remains devoted. Yeats's poem is infused with the language of Grierson ' s essay and at its centre - "And therefore I have sailed the seas and comel To the holy city of Byzantium" - is an echo of a passage quoted by Grierson from Canto 3 of Don Juan: Soft hour! Which wakes the wish and melts the heart Of those who sail the seas, on the first day When they from their sweet friends are torn apart
What Byron offers as the pain of a literal setting sail, Yeats transforms into a mythological departure for the past; where Grierson insists that the "appeal that the south, the Mediterranean, made to Byron ... was that of lands where passions are more intense and more unrestrained", Yeats answers with a Byzantium that rejects such passions for the "artifice of eternity"; where Grierson attributes Byron ' s success to "this strain of passionate improvisation", Yeats responds with a form of "hammered gold and gold enamelling" that is entirely bound by tradition. "Sailing to Byzantium" is thus at once a homage to Grierson's explication of the virtues of Byron's style and a challenge to his belief that Yeats's tradition cannot accommodate those virtues. For Grierson, the issue is between a poetry dominated by technique or by inspiration; a choice between "art and life". "Sailing to Byzantium" is on the side of art while, at the same time, adopting the style of inspiration, and thus performs the reunification of the divided traditions to which the modern poet is heir. In the end, Yeats may have accepted rather than rejected Grierson's account of his earlier poetic self, for the famous conclusion of "Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931", another poem that adopts Byron's favoured verse form, announces, "We were the last romantics - chose for theme I Traditional sanctity and loveliness". The much-quoted phrase is Yeats's contraction of Grierson ' s account of late nineteenth-century poetry, in which "a sense of echoing emptiness haunts the student who turns back on much of the exquisite, exotic, sensuous craftsmanship of these last of the romantics". If the phrase in fact turned out to be false to the real nature of Yeats's poetry between 1912 and 1939 - to Yeats as the first Modernist rather than the last Romantic - the credit was in part due to Grierson himself, and to the challenge which his choice of tradition, the physical, social tradition of Donne and Ryron, posed to the Yeats who had seen himself as inheritor of the visionary possibilities of Blake and Shelley. Given its impact on the three major early twentieth-century poets of Ireland, England and Scotland, it was only too appropriate for Rosamund Turner to enquire, rhetorically, in 1943, "whether any introduction to a scholarly edition of an early English poet ever had a more marked influence upon contemporary criticism of contemporaries than Grierson's of Donne had on ours" . It would be safe to say, none ever has.
COMMENTARY
16 he tenant upstairs is imitating a French horn. I can hear him in the hall up near the front room. I've heard worse up there in the twenty-nine years I've lived in this apartment. I thought maybe it was some sort of soifege exercise but it turns out that he's "singing through his mouthpiece", at least that' s what his fiancee, the trombonist, says. "We're getting married", she told me cheerily when I bumped into her on the sidewalk the other day after having been out of town for a few months. I have been listening to the two of them toodle away for years now, usually practising scales but sometimes playing together one or another of Telemann's Canonic Sonatas transposed for trombone and French horn. Sometimes they disappear for long stretches with this orchestra or that and someone else parks up there, usually a musician of some kind. Classical musicians, in my limited experience, are eccentric, in the manner certain science or mathematician geeks tend to be, rather quiet and inward, dwelling in a kind of bubble. My theory is that their brains are straining to remember countless scores at any given moment, but this is probably wrong. There is also now living upstairs a lady oboist. She, unlike the trombone and French horn, is very outgoing. "Hello, August" , she always says cheerfully, ''I'm the oboist upstairs." She is often outside in the backyard, chatting to the new tenant on the third floor, a tall, serious, bald young man with an Amish kind of beard who has taken over the garden and spends his days there, unencumbered, it appears, by other obligations. Years ago, another upstairs neighbour, having left his job as a stage-set designer for a TV show about a talking car and having nothing else to design, attacked the yard. ''1' m finding a lot
T
AUGUST KLEINZAHLER of interesting bulbs in the ground", the young bearded gardener tells me, rather sheepishly. He ought to be sheepish. How the hell does he know that what I wanted out there was a horticultural extravaganza? Maybe I liked it the way it was, with just the jasmine, two rather tubercular-looking oleanders and lots of dirt. " You didn't mess with the dead cat shrine behind the palm?", I asked him. I walked him over to the sacred spot. The gardener had dug two trenches, presumably for drainage or irrigation, either side of the sepulchre, but the resting place was undisturbed. "That's him down there", I said. "And that's where I want him, unhouseled , disappointed, unannealed." Landing this place may be the best stroke of luck to have befallen me in this life. It is a rent-control apartment in a neighbourhood that has become fashionable over time. The landlord would be well pleased if I were run over by a bread truck, as he might summarily triple the rent. This is why I look both ways very carefully whenever I cross the street. My semi-official backup plan is a trailer park outside Oklahoma City, where I'd spend my days watching Sopranos reruns and throwing empty half-pints of Jim Beam out the window at rattlesnakes. The woman who lived here for ten years before me would have agreed. When she left the place to pursue a "'serious" romance, she said to me, rather resentfully, "You know, you'll never leave". She was all about romance. It was romance that got me here,
hers and mine. She was a cartoonist and I was running with one of her workmates from the cartoon shop downtown. She, the workmate, and I came out here for a visit and the cartoonist was way out of sorts. Seems one of the romances had just been let out of jail and stopped by here to pick up a few things he figured he might need. Since the door was locked and no one was home, he broke a window and climbed in. She enquired if I would like to move in, just in case any other romances should come by unbidden. And that's how I wound up in the apartment, monitoring the romances, as it were. The penultimate one, before the "serious" one, looked like it would maybe get all of us on the eleven o'clock news. This romance didn't want to leave when she got tired of him after a couple of weeks. He set up shop in the side room, deciding he liked it here just fine. He wasn't a bad sort, really. Anyway, she took to waving a big steak knife at him. He waved a .38 at her. Many were the unkind words and dire threats exchanged in the kitchen and hallway when their paths crossed. I can tell you I slept fitfully in those days. Finally, Ms Romance went off to live with Mr Right. And there I was, which is where I am. I was about the same age as the musicians and gardener when I arrived in the Haight in January 1981. My first night here some poor soul in the park was decapitated and the "perp" stuck a feather in the bleeding stump. That was the headline that caught my attention in the next afternoon's paper. It was a rougher neighbourhood in those days. No one could say I've "done a lot" with this
IN NEXT WEEK'S
ILS Barbara Heldt Tough life for Mrs Tolstoy
Norma Clarke Incest behind the privet hedge
Jonathan Dancy Understanding Elizabeth Anscombe
Jane Ridley Her Majesty on the line!
TLS March 8, 1991
In a brown study We look back to Lachlan Mackinnon's review of Darkness Visible: A memoir of madness by William Styron. To see the review in full, go to www.the-tls.co.uk oughly one in ten people will suffer a clinical depression but, as William Styron writes in his account of his own suffering, the illness is "so mysteriously painful and elusive in the way it becomes known to the self - to the mediating intellect - as to verge close to being beyond description" . According to R. L. Gregory's F.ye and Rrain: The psychology of seeing (1966), seeing the colour brown, despite its commonness, " normally requires contrast, pattern, and preferably interpretation of areas of light as surfaces of objects": as a non-spectral colour, it escapes the eye' s simpler method of colour perception. Depression's "light", Styron says, is "a brown out", and only "a hint of the illness in its catastrophic form" is available from "the gloom, 'the blues' which people go through occasionally" . Like its characteristic colour, the illness is common yet unintelligible to the unaided, more simply spectral , eye.
R
The "contrast, pattern, and ... interpretation" Styron brings to the disease are narrative. He begins in medias res, with a story of his own bizarre behaviour when receiving the Prix Mondial Cino del Duca in Paris in October 1985 and his suspicion that, even after he had explained that he was psychiatrically disordered, he was still thought "a weird number". This troubling, helpless selfconsciousness is something Styron returns to later. He felt within himself, like many, a "wraithlike observer" whose "dispassionate curiosity" lent a "theatrical" quality to the whole experience. Robert Lowell noticed the same splitting of consciousness in mania, which Styron emphasizes he himself did not undergo. The phenomenon is widely attested, and tends to support Styron's humane insist-
ence that depression "can be as serious a medical affair as diabetes or cancer" and is morally neutral. It is astonishing that this point should still need making, but social attitudes, even among doctors, have not yet fully conceded that mental illness carries no "stigma". Styron was first treated by someone he calls "Dr Gold Yale-trained, highly qualified". He blames this character for the "platitudes" he drew from diagnostic manuals, his carelessness in prescribing drugs and his apparent failure even to realize, late in the treatment, that
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place. Assorted lady friends and a wife have certainly tried, but it still has the feel of a kind of "museum of arrested development" about it. Still, it's a sprawling three-bedroom railroad flat with a lovely south-facing view of Sutro Forest and the radio tower atop Twin Peaks, and with an ample backyard facing on to a pedestrian park. There' s a lot of green out there, and it's looking as if this coming spring the garden will be quite the spectacle. Actually, it' s terrific what the Amish has done and I'm delighted, so long as he stays clear of the shrine. He's planted all manner of succulent and cactus, flower and shrub, vegetable and herb, ground cover, and put down flagstones , making a little social area where the musicians sometimes gather to sit around shooting the breeze, drinking beer or wine and enjoying a smoke in the afternoon. It's so heartening to me that young people are still drinking and smoking in the afternoon. When young writers ask me, with that starry , glazed look they get in their eyes, what's the most important thing for a young writer to know or do, I tell them, without exception (unless their daddy owns Macy's), to try to find a rent-control apartment. Unlike the young aspiring artists and writers today, gathering in places like San Francisco' s Mission district and Brooklyn back East, working long hours in hateful jobs to make rent, I was able to pretty much fake it through my thirties, grabbing scut work here and there when necessary. Come to think of it, during that decade I spent an awful lot of time digging up blackberry roots and drinking beer in the backyard. I suppose that's the reason, as the trombonist upstairs goes through her scales this morning, a noise most would probably find intrusive or annoying, I find it to be music to my ears.
Styron's libido might have diminished. When the novelist sought hospitalization, this "doctor" cautioned him against the "stigma" that might be entailed. To be fair, it may be that what he had in mind was the effect such a step would have on the 1967 Pulitzer Prize winner's image, but if this was the case he was too blinded by his patient's fame to see him as a human being in torment. The fracas in Paris was the turning-point in Styron's illness, which had begun, he tells us, shortly after he gave up drinking, not because he wanted to but because his system rebelled against it. "A kind of numbness, an enervation, but more particularly an odd fragility - as if my body had actually become frail , hypersensitive and somehow disjointed and clumsy" were the first symptoms he felt together with an increasing, unfocused anxiety and concomitant restlessness ... Darkness Visible has an exhausted title and is not always very well written It has, though, an artistry of patterned enquiry which is at first imperceptible, and it is more than a simple human document for that aesthetic reason. William Styron's dignified story becomes an intensely powerful argument for the innocence of those against whom it seems society - largely because of ignorant fear - discriminates: the mentally ill. Reader, you can do nothing to prevent the depression which may attack you, but, thanks to this book, you will be better able to interpret the flat patches you first encounter as being coloured brown.
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The old inspirations that define Sean Scully
A painter earns his stripes KELLY GROVIER CONSTANTINOPLE , OR THE SENSUAL CONCEALED The imagery of Sean Scully Ulster Museum, Belfast, until February 13
alfway through the nine galleries and sixty paintings which comprise Constantinople, or the Sensual Concealed - a thoughtprovoking retrospective of Sean Scully's work - visitors are confronted by a largerthan-life photographic fresco of the artist in action. Spattered in paint, Scully scowls at us like someone interrupted while burying bodies under floorboards. For thirty-five years, he has built a reputation on repetitionon enormous canvases of cramped, abutting
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stripes, which refuse to confess connection to
any living thing. Yet beneath the shouldered planks of filthy ochres, slate clays, and scabbing reds, stirs an unexpected warmth of vision which aligns the works more to the humid golds of Byzantine icons than to Rothko's vaporous saturations, more to the muscular light of Turner than to the frenetic flinging of Jackson Pollock. The launch of the retrospective coincides with the reopening of Belfast's Ulster "Falling Dark", 2005, by Sean Scully Museum, following a three-year closure and multi-million-pound refurbishment. By electing to tie the rebranding of the museum to Looked at one way, the interlocking lines of a distinctive, abstract visual grammar. a show celebrating the career of a Dublin- symbolize Scully' s attempt to stem the seepA significant step towards its refinement born expatriate, whose work is linked more age - by braiding the angularity of American can be found in "The Bather" (I 983) - a reinto the cityscapes of New York, Munich, and Minimalism and the cold mathematics of Op vention of Matisse' s "Bathers by the River" Barcelona (where Scully has studios) than to Art into something softer: a safety net, a (1909-16). In Matisse' s mural-sized oil , four the Ireland that his family left when he was a gauze for the soul. Though the ghost of Mon- statuesque nudes, chiselled with sharp Cubist child , the curators are making an ambitious drian haunts the inert architecture of several edges, stretch like marble columns, canvasplay for international stature. The scale of of these early works, particularly the tene- height, against an insinuation of riverbank. the cathedral-sized spaces, in which Scully's ment-like "Crossover Painting" (1974), these Also undertaken after a visit to Morocco, mullion-less windows of brutal colour are pieces are crucial in establishing the patterns Matisse's "Bathers" revealed a new attitude able to sprawl, makes the bid more than and anxieties that Scully explored in the to the relationship between a figure's size credible and allows us a rare opportunity to decades and rooms which follow. and the picture space it occupies - an attitude meditate on the development of one of the The distance travelled on leaving the first which Scully pushes to an absurd extreme in most reproduced, imitated and beguiling room and entering the second is the greatest his homage. In Scully's work, a pun on his in the exhibition; from here on, the undula- own stark "strip" now overwhelms the masartists of the last fifty years. The starting point for the exhibition is tions in imaginative terrain are those of a sive linen in wide vertical navys and ficus 1974, the year that Scully, then twenty-nine, mapped country; the works no longer wrestle greens - trunk-like lines which replace any returned to Europe after studying art at with influence, but are inspired, gradually semblance of real body with pure feeling. To Harvard University. The England Scully refining an authentic vision. The break- amplify a sense of human weight and depth, inhabited, in a caricature of the struggling art- through, which came in 1981 after a trip to Scully has constructed boxy protrusions from ist's garret in Tooley Street, beside London Morocco, is vividly embodied in "Araby" - a the canvas ' s surface which invest the work Bridge Station, has been all but sieved out of colossal oil whose textured surface and dis- with an air of carpentry and craftsmanship, of the work by the rigid geometries which await jointed fields of vibrating stripes capture not things concealed in built cupboards. the visitor in the first gallery. Among the six only the bustle of a crowded bazaar, but the A sense of embedded architecture and large acrylics hanging here, the eye is drawn way one's own body buzzes amid such inten- hidden compartments, of the paintings invitmost readily to a criss-cross of taupe and sity. The work takes its name, Scully has ing access to spaces which they simultaneteal called "Tooley Street" (1974), which said, from a short story in Dubliners, and ously obstruct, becomes crucial in the work manages to create an Escher-like illusion of there is a sense in which James Joyce' s produced after Scully settled in New York infinite depth - a sleight of hand that con- description of adolescent bodies, which (and became an American citizen) in the ceals the artist's actual poverty in a mesh of played until they "glowed", is subsumed in early 1980s. Many of the most affecting masking tape and optical theories. Only the the rippling of Scully's strips. By blurring the pieces in the exhibition involve removable title locates the painting in the real world, boundary between line and body, where the insertions - canvases within canvases - leavwhere a leak somewhere in the ceiling former swells to become the latter, "Araby" ing the observer with the feeling of standing above Scully's studio opened a gaping hole resuscitates a disused Expressionism and before a sealed door or window, from which and eventually penetrated through his floor. introduces in Scully's painting the first hints only echoes of paint, seeping around the
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edges, suggest the drama unfolding inside. In "Darkness and Heat" (I988), a pair of small portrait-sized black-and-white-striped inserts communicate across a canvas of lacquered browns and dingy gold. The effect is strangely reflective, echoing, like voices beneath the wooden rafters of a church. By the mid-1990s, Scully was dividing his time between New York and the workshop he had established in Barcelona; a Catalonian light starts to seep into his pictures. One of the paintings finished just prior to the move, "Aran" (I990) - a small quadrate puzzle of chalky white and slate black - squats bleakly on the wall. Compare this to the warmth of Scully's sandstone stripes in the years following the shift. It is tempting to resituate Scully in the context of twentieth-century Catalan art - to project a whimsicality on to the continued repetition of stripes that might make the artist's neuvre sit more comfortahly alongside the exuberance of Joan Mir6 or Antonio Gaudf. But the spare foundations of Scully's art are closer to the simplicity of medieval Catalan symbolism. In " Uriel" (1997), the nine horizontal stripes of the Senyera - the gold-and-red bands of the coat of arms of the crown of Aragon, on which the Catalan flag is based - have been transformed into an insert of honeyed strips surrounded by wide blocks of black and white. The effect is one of jarring tonal intervention, of territories in tension; it's one of the more unsettling examples in the show of the struggle for harmony, of the artist trying to live up to his assertion that "art is the opposite of war". Scully's often abrasive eloquence and the surprising fragility of the brushstrokes with which he attacks his canvas are the subject of two new documentaries, The Opposite Way and Why This, Not That. The films coincide with the retrospective and are a sequence of vignettes captured in the artist's studio in the past three years. They reveal a figure of contradictions. Scully's physical stature is that of an ageing but still agile boxer (a sport he trained in before taking up painting full time), while his meditative conversation is that of a homespun philosopher, with a taste for aphorisms ("the paint loves to be loved") that best describe the late works. For the past decade, Scully has been working on a series of expansive works collectively titled Wall of Light, to which the last
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18 rooms of the exhibition are principally devoted. Though the signature stripe survives in these later pieces, the surface consciousness of paint seems more willing to admit of underlying layers of colour. The result is works of dense translucence, like blocks of amber elbowing bricks of peat. Paintings such as "Queen of the Night" (2003), " Wall of Light Yellow Plain" (2007), and "Cut Ground Coloured Triptych 6.08" (2008) continue to move shapes horizontally across their cramped surface, but their power builds geologically from below, from the compressed strata of texture and colour. The artist has returned to the illusion of depth that fascinates in his earliest pieces. But the effect, now, is achieved not through optical tricks but rather an appeal to something emotionally grounded; to a more sophisticated absorption of artistic indebtedness. Critics have seized on the all-over aspect of Scully' s work in a bid to declare him heir to Pollock or Helen Frankenthaler, but in the contemplative solidity of pieces such as "Barcelona Robe" (2008) and "Titian Robe Pink" (2008) we see instead an artist who harks back to an older tradition of painters who found substance in light and ghostliness in the earth. The shingles of coagulating gold in these works could have been prised loose from the panels of the Master of Flemalle, or cut from the muddy dusk of Turner's Petworth interiors. As Sean Scully moves forward he also moves back, and this retrospective offers an opportunity to stare between the planks of his achievement and consider how the bones of influence shift.
ARTS
Guyed and droll JONATHAN BARNES Steve Chibnall and Brian McFarlane THE BRITISH " B " FILM 356pp. BFIIPalgrave. Paperback, £1 1.99. 978 I 855473 196 SHERLOCK HOLMES Various cinemas
ere are the ghosts of British cinema. Here are the dead films , the vanished, the neglected. Here are such endearing relics as Death in High Heels , Nitwits on Parade , My Wife 's Lodger and The Trollenberg Terror. Here is My Hands Are Clay ("A terrible mad jealousy eating into his heart turned this young genius into a fiend bent on destruction!"); here is Womaneater ("The hideous Devil-Tree!"); here is The Man Without a Body ("Behind closed laboratory doors they brought this 400-year old head to life. And then it ran amok!"). All of the above are "B" movies made in Britain between 1940 and 1965 , shot cheaply and quickly with the intention only of plugging a gap in an evening's entertainment at the picture house - after the newsreel and the cartoon, before the interval and main feature
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Jude Law (Watson) in Sherlock Holmes - and descriptions of them are to be found in Steve Chibnall's and Brian McFarlane' s admirable new volume, The British "B" Film . Both an invocation and a loving catalogue, the book is rich in detail drawn from the history of the Bs before changing taste, alterations in the law and the irresistible rise of television rendered the species extinct.
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eminism has a difficult time with opera. The majority of operas are by men, of course, as well as being mostly conducted and directed by them. Operatic heroines also have a tendency to get killed off before the curtain. Still, a good case has been made, notably by the American musicologist Carolyn Abbate, that the way female voices preside over the musical texture in opera ensures that, at the level of performance, female experience is often centre-stage. There are few operas which the female voice dominates as much as Elektra. The title role is one of the most demanding in existence, and requires the singer to be on stage for well over ninety minutes. The three main women also encompass the range of dramatic perspective in the opera, while the maidservants - who approximate to Sophocles' original chorus, discarded by Hofmannsthal from his play - amplify the psychological spectrum and our sense of its instability. Moreover, the dramatic presence of both male leads is generated by their physical absence for most of the opera. For much of the time, Orestes might simply be a figment of the three womens' conflicting imaginations. And yet the opera' s protagonist is not Elektra but Orestes. The opera is about Elektra, but the female characters all lack the capacity to act. They are trapped, Elektra in her solipsistic blood lust, Chrysothemis in her maidenly dreams of escape, and Klytaemnestra, in fears she cannot even name. What the women control is representation: how actions should be interpreted, what rituals should be observed in order for their meaning to be absorbed. And in the psychotic context of the drama, it is this domain of rep-
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Fight for your rites GUY DAMMANN Richard Strauss ELEKTRA Royal Swedish Opera, Stockholm
resentation that matters. The problem is that when it comes to performing the one rite left to the citizens of Mycaenae - revenge - the women by themselves are powerless. The great strength of Staffan Valdemar Holm ' s new production for the Stockholm Royal Opera is its emphasis on the claustrophobia of a world in which action and thought are so effectively divorced. The stage, designed by Bente Lykke M\'iller, is reduced to a narrow strip at the front, the characters spending most of their time pressed up tight against the blood-red wall that reaches high above the proscenium arch. The only depth is a dark, airless corridor in the wall ' s middle. This is not a production for those in search of visual extravagance, but the staging has the advantage of concentrating our attention on Strauss's hyperactive music. The house orchestra were alive to the delicacy of Strauss's score, guided through its twists, turns and changes of colour by Pier Giorgio Morandi. While the stylized acting was also mostly successful - particularly the awkward, dizzy movement of the women, a
clumsiness that culminates in Elektra's final dance - the singing was quite wonderful , and clearly extremely carefully prepared (all the soloists were singing their roles for the first time). Marianne Eklof, who sang Fricka in Holm and M\'iller's Stockholm Ring in 2006, was especially notable for her sympathetic interpretation of Klytaemnestra (and for her youth - the part is often reserved for Elektras past their prime). But however good the staging and the playing, Elektra stands or falls on the credibility of its heroine. Katarina Dalayman was evidently born to sing the part, and is arguably even better suited to it than Susan Bullock, currently singing the role at the Met and more often cited as the heir to Varnay and Nilsson. Dalayman's merit lies not in the power and stamina of her voice but in the fact that it combines these qualities with a strange ability to retreat into a fragile , girlish tone from which both power and stamina are estranged. This allows us to see the damaged teenager behind the fulminating princess, and Dalayman to do justice to the shades of colour and emotion the role really requires. Elektra expires once her rites have been observed, but the music continues baying for blood through the reiterations of the Agamemnon theme, crashing like waves against the palace walls. The attention now fixes on her sister Chrysothemis, at last beyond the reach of her family ' s psychoses, but stranded by terror and loneliness. It is a portrait of the fragility of human freedom which demands that the character remain isolated. Holm has nevertheless decided she should be "rescued" by her brother. Has he a reason, or is the sense-destroying detail just an aberration?
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The authors are droll on the post-war vogue for "B" documentaries which led to such desperate examples of the form as The Way to a Man's Heart (it " sounded romantic but turned out to be a study of Danish food production"), Whitstable Natives ("plenty of oysters and hardy fisherfolk") and Mind Your Step , which "assembled footage of birds and animals, dancers, mannequins, ice skaters and acrobats, as well as a visit to a stockings factory, all spuriously linked by the theme of walking". Later, they quote, wistfully, a BBFC report on Trouble With Eve (1960), in which it is insisted that a racy piece of dialogue be removed in order to avoid "a commercially damaging ' X' certificate". The line in question? "I spent all night with George in a turnip-field and all he would do was talk about his turnips." Most evocative are the memories of eyewitnesses. The producer Guido Coen ruefully admits that "style was of secondary consideration. It had to be made for a price. You had to live, that' s all"; the screenwriter Brian Clemens remembers how his scripts were required to involve sets that were already standing, often left over from earlier films an average demand might include "the Old Bailey, a submarine and a mummy's tomb"and , in her foreword to the book, the actress Rona Anderson ("Queen of the British Bs") recollects breakfasting with cast and crew on "tea and bread-and-dripping". There is a whiff of the Bs about Guy Ritchie's latest film , Sherlock Holmes; not, needless to say, in its budget (around $80 million) but in its unrepentant pulpiness, its cheeky disregard for its literary progenitor, its limber readiness to entertain. With its brawling Holmes (Robert Downey Jr, whose depiction of an athletic savant seems oddly but not inappropriately to echo his earlier impersonation of Chaplin), setpiece mayhem and incongruous dialogue ("Nut him!" shouts Dr Watson in the midst of one melee), there is little in the picture to detain the serious admirer of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's stories, even if Jude Law joins Robert Duvall and Ian Hart in a select society of screen actors who have portrayed Watson with a limp (inflicted, presumably, by his Afghan war wound). There is nonetheless plenty here to divert and amuse: Mark Strong pitching his performance as the villainous Lord Blackwood somewhere between Aleister Crowley and Oswald Mosley, Sarah Greenwood's sumptuous production design - a conjuration of an impossible London - as well as an intriguing cameo from the voice of Moriarty which seems to promise a still noisier sequel. In their book, Chibnall and McFarlane argue for the rehabilitation of the best of the "B" movies, suggesting that "the implicitly derogatory ' B' label" be dropped, claiming that they "provide a richly revealing social barometer of their times" and that they are "studded with critical insights about the nature of contemporary society". Ritchie' s Sherlock Holmes may well benefit from a similarly lateral reading. After all , in among the fisticuffs and pixelated pyrotechnics, what are we to make of the film's characterization of an English political leader - secretive, duplicitous, mysteriously devout - with a boundless hunger for imperial adventure who, in order to further his ambition, is prepared to go to any lengths to people the House of Lords with his disciples?
19
E. L. Doctorow' s old New York
Pipe dreams and piano music LEO ROBSON E. L.Doctorow HOMER AND LANGLEY 208pp. Little, Brown. Paperback, £11.99. 978 I 408702154
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L. Doctorow has advised against treating the past "as if it were preparatory to our own time". His dogged and dazzling body of work constitutes a serial attempt to find an alternative approach - one that catches history in its gritty splendour without closing off topical or allegorical resonance. The narrator of Doctorow ' s Gothic thriller The Waterworks (1994), a devoted myth-killer ("There was nothing quaint or colourful about us"), harasses the reader into giving the past its due: "I know what people of this generation think. You have your motorcars, your telephones, your electric lights ... and you look back on Boss Tweed with affection, as a wonderful fraud, a legendary scoundrel of old New York. But what he accomplished was murderous in the very modern sense of the term". Doctorow' s approach has evolved slowly, over half a century and a dozen books, but it has arrived at something like fruition in his absorbing new novel, about the Collyer Brothers, dubbed "the hermit hoarders of Harlem" by the New York press of the I 940s, and portrayed as a pair of visionary proto-hippies. It has been a process of tweaking and finetuning. A pungent pair of early novels, The Book of Daniel (1971) and Ragtime (1975), located Doctorow's thematic turf - the first, about the children of the Rosenbergs (here Isaacsons), by establishing his concern with the way history ossifies into myth, the second by throwing Harry Houdini and Evelyn Nesbit and J. P. Morgan into a tale of three New York families in the first decade or so of the twentieth century. Ragtime in particular exposed the dangers of beating history into fiction. "Patriotism was a reliable sentiment in the early 1900' s .... There was a lot of sexual fainting. There were no Negroes. There were no immigrants." The conjuring of period atmosphere is knowingly inflected with a sense of alienation - the alien being a novelist born in 1931 writing about Theodore Roosevelt's America for a 1970s readership. When the narrator explains that the immigrants taken to Ellis Island were tagged in "a curiously ornate human warehouse", we want to know: curious now, or then, or both? And when we encounter constructions such as "One day after a visit to the tombs Evelyn Nesbit happened to notice", we recoil from the incongruity of characters identified by their full names "happening" to notice things. The new novel avoids these bumpy effects by firmly establishing the source of its narration. Homer and Langley is a kind of slothful or stationary picaresque, in which Homer, a
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A room in the Fifth Avenue home ofLangley and Homer Collyer in 1947 blind pianist, recalls how he and his older brother cocooned themselves for decades in their inherited mansion, all the while amassing a large collection of junk: "Fifth A venue on the outside and something of an aspiring warehouse on the inside" . Langley, a mad schemer distinctive enough to inspire the adjective "Langleyan", passes some of the years developing his Theory of Replacements, which Homer describes as "a metaphysical sort of idea of the repetition or recurrence of life events" . Langley attempts to prove, or anyway test, his theory by collating the stories in every newspaper published in New York - a truly Doctorovian enterprise. Like Mcllvaine in The Waterworks, Homer is an elderly bachelor recounting a tale in which he played support to a wilder figure. Martin Pemberton, the missing freelance journalist in the earlier novel, is said to have "convictions" where others have "opinions", and the same goes for the irrepressible Langley, spurred to a perpetual mood of energetic despair by his experiences in the First World War. Again like Mcllvaine, Homer is a narrator anxiously vigi lant about distortion and misremembering, and conscientious about the needs of his reader ("the talkies had come along, you see"). In contrast to his brother, whose life is occupied by a succession of pipe dreams, Homer paints himself as sensible and decent yet muddled and saturnine, a man with "nothing to show for his life but an overworked consciousness of it". The novel is chapterless and moves at a brisk pace. One event haphazardly follows another, each conveyed by Homer with unflappable bluntness; the accumulated events cover most of the twentieth century. With a generous provision of detail, Homer evokes New York in distinct periods: before the war, when the Collyer parents enjoy a lavish, eventfu l social life; during Prohibition, when the brothers regularly visit
speakeasies; during the Depression, when they use their house for "tea dances" ; during the Second World War, when their Japanese cleaners are taken to a concentration camp; and during the Vietnam War, when they encounter and accommodate hippies, a " strange breed of citizen" who "seemed to understand acquisitiveness as an ethos". Doctorow has been the great centaur among American writers - a reporterdreamer or archivist-imaginer - his legs planted firmly either side of the fact-fiction border. It seems that he wou ld dissent from this interpretation. In an often-quoted defence of his method, he claimed that "there is no fiction or nonfiction as we commonly understand the distinction; there is only narrative", but he has not in fact made much use of that licence. Doctorow's work grants inner life to historical personages, and revives the past in fine-grained detail , but only in the extensively autobiographical World 's Fair (1985), whose narrator shares his name, address and date of birth, does he come close to disturbing categories. The "onlynarrative" line, a poisoned gift of critical theory, has been more liberating and perilous for historians than for novelists, who already possessed the solid nineteenth-century precedents of Quo Vadis? and War and Peace. There is nothing revolutionary or borderblurring about the use of fabrication in Homer and Langley. Homer was in fact the older brother, and he went blind in middle age rather than adolescence. More significant is Doctorow' s decision to bring the Collyer brothers' lives forward in time so that they come of age in the teens of the past century and survive to witness the counterculture they allegedly foreshadowed. Doctorow undertakes preliminary research - though " less than you'd think" - embelli shing and adapting what he discovers to make his tales shapely and plausible, on the familiar
TLS JANUARY IS 2010
grounds that unmanipulated reality rarely possesses these characteristics. His limber method, his mixing of invention, hearsay and recorded fact, has proved a benign, enabling force, influencing Don DeLillo, who has been eager to declare the debt, and Glen David Gold, whose novel Carter Beats the Devil features Harry Houdini as a secondary character. In his work since the plot-rich, impressionistic Ragtime, Doctorow has been eagerly engaged in producing visions of absolute clarity, but Homer and Langley imposes a challenge on this quest and this stimulates an emphasis on the other senses. The narrator of The Book of Daniel claims that hearing is "the same as seeing", and Homer boasts that he trained his hearing "to a degree of alertness that was almost visual". Blindness doesn't hold him back as a musician ("I took a joh playing piano for si lent movies"), as a reader ("I read all of Gibbon in Braille"), or as a narrator. The blind man's gift for onomatopoeia and aural mimesis elevates the novel's descriptions. Mcllvaine in The Waterworks describes "the violent chop, the insistent slap of the waves", and Edgar in World's Fair enjoys the "scratchy sound" of his father ' s shaving brush, but Homer, pricked to the task, hears the " scoot scut" of an iceskater and the "long scurratch as the skater spun to a stop" ; he identifies the "whiskeyed voice" of a policeman and the "superci lious Park Avenue diction" of a banker; he describes a thrown typewriter coming apart "with a silvery shatter, like a piece of china" and the " lovely music" of spoken Japanese, "the long vowels punctuated with sharp expulsions of breath". When Homer' s hearing starts to fail, it is as if he is losing all fi ve senses. Doctorow's prose is a thing of no great beauty, but it gets the job done - gets it done better, in fact, than would someth ing cleaner, less unruly. Certainly, he has refined his repertoire since the sweaty chaos of The Book of Daniel, at times displaying a metaphoric fluency that is more Jacobean than Jamesian. The new novel treats the reader to a full-throated voice, which aligns us completely to Homer's way of seeing, or hearing. Homer narrates in gentle gushes of thought and sensation, a regulated flow: I was a vigorous walker and gauged the progress of our times by the changing sounds
and smells of the streets. In the past the carriages and the equipages hissed or squeaked or groaned, the drays rattled, the beer wagons
pulled by teams passed thunderously, and the beat behind all this music was the clopping of the hooves. Then the combustive put-put of the motorcars was added to the mix and gradually the air lost its organic smell of hide and leather, the odor of horse manure on hot days did not hang like a miasma over the street nor did one now often hear that wide-pan shovel of the street cleaners sh lushing it up, and eventually, at this particular time 1 am describing, it was
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FICTION all mechanical, the noise, as fleets of cars sailed past in both directions, horns looting and policemen blowing their whistles.
In his more garrulously vocal novels, Doctorow has made a fetish of the long sentence. But he is strict on himself in this subdued and wintry work. We do not mind, sometimes do not even notice, the length of the sentences because they fulfil their brief of thickly detailed evocation. And like Doctorow's best-written earlier books, Homer and Langley prompts one to question the purpose of formal punctuation, familiar spelling and conventional grammar when this novelist can write dialogue without quotation marks and repeatedly change the subject of a sentence and deploy dead usages, without ever losing or confusing the reader. But Homer and Langley is perhaps most striking in its rejection of utopianism. Doctorow has been a convinced leftist in both his fiction and non-fiction, a distinction that might be permitted here, to differentiate Ragtime, say, from the lectures published as Reporting the Universe (2003). He is a great believer in the American Revolution and a disappointed critic of America since that time. The new novel seems to be colluding in the Collyers ' dissident deeds, their prankish jokes at the expense of the police, the bank and the water and electricity companies, but there are also gestures of surrender - if not to the virtues of state monopoly capitalism, then at least to the uncertainty of an alternative. The mischievous brilliance of Homer's claim that he and Langley were "paying bills in a desultory way as a matter of principle" is undermined by the later realization that: "Our every act of opposition and assertion of our self-reliance, every instance of our creativity and resolute expression of our principles was in service of our ruination" . This is the closest E. L. Doctorow will come to conceding, "If you can ' t beat them, join them" . Despite this prevailing sense of defeat, the novel remains a work of magical Langleyan preservation. As in Ragtime, World's Fair, Billy Bathgate (1989) and The Waterworks , Doctorow uses his imaginative powers to jolt New York into vulgar life. Homer remembers VJ day, reclaiming this long-past moment with present participles: Cars paraded along Fifth Avenue, drivers blowing their horns and shouting out the windows. Langley and I crossing the street to the park found strangers dancing with one another, ice cream vendors tossing Popsicles to
the crowds, balloon sellers letting go their inventory. Unleashed dogs ran in circles, barking and yelping and getting underfoot. People were laughing and crying. The joy rising from
the city filled the sky like a melodious wind, like a celestial oratorio.
Even here, Homer and Langley remain icily aloof, surveying the scene or logging its details as "strangers" have their fun. But a society of two is a vulnerable thing, and there comes a point at which Homer will be cocooned not only in the browns tone but in his own consciousness, shouting the panicked question: "Where is Langley? Where is my brother?". This is where the novel ends, somewhere in the 1980s - leaving a decade or so before the start of City of God (2001), now the only gap in Doctorow's patchwork panorama of the murderous, eclectic, lubricious, musical civilization that was New York in the twentieth century.
419 and after iaolu Guo's stories take place after ALEXANDER STARRITT the victory of the city over the countryside. Her characters, alone Xiaolu Guo and lonely in tower blocks, council estates LOVERS IN THE AGE OF and gated communities, are resigned to lives INDIFFERENCE encircled by a "concrete horizon" and among 224pp. Chatto and Windus. Paperback, 12.99. "obedient trees", most of them in a Beijing 978070118434 where "even the patches of grass seemed cut straight from a map". They are the vanquished, peasants who have left behind ter those who live according to the untheir paddy-fields to work as cleaners, changing seasons. New government fishing prostitutes or masseurs. The city is so inhos- regulations, for example, mean nothing to pitable that a lily bought two days ago is them. " If you live on the mountain, you eat "withered to the brink of death", and in this from the mountain. If you live by the relentless urban environment, the emotional water, you eat from the water. How else can lives of Guo's characters can consist of one live?" Juxtaposed with the confusion only the most delicate connections: a girl of the city, this constancy seems almost reveals her real name to her neighbour' s cat, appealing. But Guo is no rural idealist: a man meets a child in an airport; a servant the grass lands have been destroyed by overdevelops respect and affection for his use, and those who fail to leave do so only out employer. The lovers of the book's title of ignorance. appear in some of the stories, but the focus of Those who do make it try, and fail , to adapt the collection is wider than romantic love; it themselves to modern life. Whether in is the human need for contact, neglected and Beijing or London, they come to realize that amplified by the dehumanizing organization they are "the opposite of' modern women. In one of the wittiest and most affecting of the city. Guo's people are displaced and it is this stories, "'Then the Game Begins", a woman that establishes the contrast with the country- sees she has made a mistake in scorning side. Rural life, for Guo, is characterized her husband's modest virtues in favour of by its seeming continuity. In the story the big-city glamour of her boss. Disillusion"Winter Worm Summer Weed" , we encoun- ment binds together all of the seventeen
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stories in Lovers in the Age of Indifference with a deep sense of fatigue with the modern and the urban. Represented most tangibly by those symbols of the impersonal , Tesco and Carrefour, such things are deadening, and in this deadened state, the bonds between people have become so fragile that they form or come apart at the slightest pressure. Guo conveys this fragility , and the interpersonal distance that underlies it, attentively and with dry humour. Some of the stories consist of unanswered letters or emails, others of conversations by text message, offering a glimpse of the nearly anonymous correspondents as they tentatively send out their loneliness into the ether and hope for a response. The most innovative of these is called "Junk Mail". Its first five emails are variants on the well-known 419 scam, named after its designation in the Nigerian penal code. Sending out to random addresses, the emailers pour out their woes to a potential Samaritan, describing grasping relatives, dead husbands, millions of dollars in safety deposit boxes, and a request for bank details. The internet exists as a heightened version of the populous city: anonymous, impersonal and full of pitfalls for the unwary, a place where sympathy is exploited as a weakness. The last in the story is an email purporting to help the recipient deal with junk mail. But it itself also turns out to be a scam. Guo captures the fractured formality of these messages and turns them into a symbol of the way the modern world causes people to retreat from one another.
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Music lessons The fact is, we like each other. We want the
PAUL BINDING
best for each other. We talk about the future. The future that holds such terror, with the yellow platform that awaits us, the black grand piano, the critics and the public. And all in the
Ketil Bjprnstad
ksel Vinding is speaking about himself and his fellow entrants for Norway's Young Pianists Competition. What he says in the relaxed context of an impromptu party is only half true. Anja, Rebecca, Margrethe Irene, Ferdinand and he do feel bound together by the demands of the compositions they play and the events at which they perform them. But for all the mutual goodwill, there is no escaping the competitive nature of their vocation. Success for one has to mean the eclipse, if only partial or temporary, of the others. This is more acute in a small country like Norway, where the musical community is close-knit and self-protecting. Each of the young musicians here is driven by personal beliefs and ambitions. Anya has her domineering, guilt-ridden father's visions of her triumph, Rebecca her formidable, possessive teacher. Aksel feels musical success will help his loneliness and redeem him from guilt after a family tragedy that took place when he was fifteen. In addition, the five have their own needs and desires outside music, increasing now they are in their late teens. Margrethe Irene is strongly attracted to Aksel who long ago gave his heart to Anya, although he realizes that Rebecca is the most sympathetic of the girls.
A
TO MUSIC Translated by Deborah Dawkin and Erik Skuggevik
name of music.
303pp. Maia. Paperback, £9.99. 978 1 90455035 1 In the novel's mesmeric first chapter Aksel tells of the episode that haunts him. His parents decide, one August Sunday, to celebrate a truce in their constant marital warfare by going on a picnic by their favourite Tinker's Rock, where a river tumbles fast over boulders towards a dam. The mother, half-drunk (not for the first time), insists on swimming, and flounders. Her husband, usually ineffectual, attempts to rescue her, but Aksel grabs him tightly to prevent him endangering himself. "The waterfall takes every living thing down with it; tadpoles, little fishes , Mother. Mother's head is just like the head of a pin in the water, and she is barely fifty metres from the waterfall. I know she can see us. She knows I held Father back. She knows she is going to die." As in a piece of music, this description contains elements that the main narrative will develop. Stopped by his son from taking heroic action, Aksel's father, an unsuccessful property dealer who is living beyond his means, retreats further into life's irresponsible margins. Aksel's sister, Catherine, who would have let her father rescue the mother who didn't love her and perish
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in doing so, drops out of society and goes to the bad. Aksel himself walks out of school, deciding to risk disapproval, failure, even mockery, by devoting himself to the piano. The incident by the waterfall is itself representative of the struggle present in every endeavour: one life goes under that another be saved. Gentle, accommodating Aksel comes painfully to understand that the work of his most beloved composers late Beethoven, Schubert in his posthumous sonatas - acknowledges the principle of aggression in existence. And this principle operates in his erotic life as well as in his artistic. He is unable to resist Margrethe Irene' s advances, although her personality is unappealing to him. He turns away from the dark realities of Anya's home life, though he is too honest to ignore it completely. Curiosity and a youthful vanity lead him to try to attract Anya's mother, the brilliant fierce teacher, Selma. Ketil Bjprnstad, a composer and pianist of distinction, makes us appreciate that, while music may be the art to which all other arts aspire, it rests, like sport, on unrelenting
competition.
It
entails
an
exacting discipline, forcing its young aspirants into conditions which stifle other aspects of their lives. Bjprnstad portrays the musical life of Oslo in the 1970s with a wealth of colourful and convincing detail. Still more compelling is this powerful novel's profounder concern: a demonstration of the price society demands for the recognition of all outstanding gifts. The translators, Deborah Dawkin and Erik Skuggevik, have sensitively rendered Aksel's story of his hard, stumbling but resolute self-education.
FICTION
Verbal abuse JESS CHANDLER Simon Lelic RUPTURE 256pp. Picador. £ 12.99. 9780330511636 n the oppressive heat of a London summer, Samuel Szajkowski arrives at his school assembly and opens fire, killing three pupils, a fellow teacher, and himself. It is an election year, and political issues are sensitive. A police investigation collects disjointed testimonies and recollections, as different voices respond to omitted questions. Detective Inspector Lucia May is the silent interrogator, the only character here to exist through authorial narration rather than reported speech. It is through her perception of the endemic bullying and criminal negligence within the school, enhanced by her own experiences of abuse, that the complexities of the situation gradually emerge. To classify Simon Lelic' s debut as a crime novel is misleading. Its structure is formed by the accumulating testimonies of a criminal investigation , and its heroine is a detective, but it starts where most crime novels end, projecting beyond the identification of the villain to examine the wider social causes of an act for which many carry responsibility: "you don ' t have to be the one to pull the trigger to deserve a portion of the blame". Rupture is a novel about bullying and intimidation, and about the denial of responsibility which prevails in institutions that place success and profit above everything else. It emerges that Szajkowski was subject to horrifying levels of abuse, psychologically and physically terrorized by his students, his pleas ignored by those in charge. His story is placed in a wider context, seen as the consequence of entrenched social problems, and denied the tidier classification of individual aberration. The subjectivity of a single narrative is avoided in order to allow each story to tell itself; actions are propelled by complex, cumulative factors. Culpability is attached to parents, police, teachers, and to the government. The novel is full of the language of prejudice - discriminatory terms to which we have become desensitized. Repeated reminders of the heterogeneity of London society raise questions about the difficulties of assimilation for those who are seen as differ-
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Yobs and birds aPhael Selbourne's first novel, Beauty, is peopled by some rather familiar strangers who converge at various points on Wolverhampton's Prole Street. There is Mark, the angry, foulmouthed and casually racist thug with a handsome face and (it turns out) a heart of unalloyed gold who lives in a stinking "shit'ole" where he breeds fighting dogs. His new neighbour two houses down ("The Iraqis in-between didn't count") is posh Peter, an uneasy transplant from middle-class North London who is trying to get away from Kate, the inevitably neurotic girlfriend. Suffering a "What's the point? To anything. Everything?" crisis, and addicted to internet porn, Peter can't quite act on Mark's expert advice to "jooss tell her to fook off'. Into the lives and competing arms of the two white men descends Beauty Begum, a dark-skinned vision of the East in a headscarf. She is running away from an arranged marriage to an older Bangladeshi mullah, his "pervert brother" and her abusive male relatives who are, without exception, tyrannical ("These fuckers were crazy when it came to their sisters"). Beauty is functionally illiterate, devout and innocent, deeply attached to home and family , " ladylike" in ways that white women can't pull off, but secretly itch-
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PRIY AMVADA GOPAL Raphael Selbourne BEAUTY 321 pp. Tindal Street Press. Paperback, £7.99. 9780955647673 ing to know more about the world of white people in which she fearfully finds herself. The tensions, anxieties and affections generated by these encounters across worlds give Beauty some of its more compelling moments. For all its scripted inevitability and slight implausibility, the budding romance between "the fit little Paki bird" and "the racist bloke" who rescues her from predatory Asian males in a dark alley and protects her from her angry brothers, is not without humour and tenderness. Mark teaches Beauty to read, having learned in prison, cleans up his filthy flat to provide a safe haven, and starts saving money towards a new house for both of them. The transformation of the beastly yob into a "good bloke" for his virginal Beauty has a certain sappy charm, though the fairy tale could have done without the scene of shy unveiling. At its descriptive best, the novel evokes a bleak world of job centres, skills training, pawn-
shops and care homes, a world curiously devoid of any but the most casual racism. As an excursus into the Iife and heart of a young working-class Muslim woman, however, the novel falls short of its own aspirations. Despite the private thoughts (she says little) rendered in both English and Bengali, with running translation, Beauty herself never emerges as much more than a sketch, a wisp of an idea etched in Asian hues and London vernacular. The novel's attempt to trace the emergence of human connections across cultural fissures is worthy, but undermined by a failure to transcend superficialities, not only about Muslim cultures and women, but about its white English characters as well. If Muslim women are invariably devout and challenged by their own meekness, " self-obsessed" North London females make a hobby of depression and enjoy mood swings, nettle tea and psychotherapy. With sombre didacticism, one must come to renounce her vanities in the light of the "real, tangible" and "more serious" issues of the other: "Compared with what Beauty had been through none of her own crap mattered" .
When an obsessive preoccupation with the lives of others is matched only by a widespread contemporary failure to arrive at insights, good fiction can dig out labyrinthine caves behind tabloid headlines and reality TV pieties. Beauty considers this possibility but, like its protagonist, it never quite gets to where it needs to be.
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Boot to head he Age of Orphans is a bleak, bittersweet paean to Laleh Khadivi's birthplace, Iran. In a work which is as beautiful as it is violent, she tells the larger story of the nation ' s reinvention through the life of a single Kurdish boy. The novel opens in 1921 in the Zagros Mountains, where the boy spends his days leaping from the rooftops, longing "to soar in the enormous embrace of sky" like a bird. At six years old he is still suckling at his mother's breast, but when his family takes him into the wilderness and performs a ritual circumcision, he is deemed a man, and can march alongside the men against the Shah's army. The ceremony is richly drawn and, like many episodes in the novel , it demonstrates Khadivi's talent for making the world seem uncommonly lyrical. Brutality and sensuality mingle as the boy is restrained but also soothed by the men ' s "opulent touch" ; the blade that cuts him is lovingly " kissed" . When the sapling that receives his foreskin
T
ent; a Polish history teacher, a policewoman ,
as an offering hears witness and chants,
a ginger-haired schoolboy with a birthmark on his face, are all the victims of bullying. Lelic uses the voices of his characters to make us complicit in the process of assigning blame, reminding us of the divisive nature of spoken English, in which a slight reordering of syntax or odd choice of word engenders a complex set of associated identities. He combines social realism with experimental form; his narrative, which relies on characterization through voice, reinforces the social prejudices tied to education, and to language that are the novel's subject.
"I am the boy and the boy is in me ... our fates will blow together in the end", the prose reads like scripture or ancient myth. Khadivi heightens the disturbing religiosity of this scene, and the result is epic, bold storytelling which elicits both awe and dismay. When the troops arrive to crush any tribal rebellion against the " new" Iran , a fierce battle ensues, and the boy is orphaned. Khadivi's blend of horror and poetry is even more potent here. In one scene, his father's severed head is dangled in front of
HOLLY KYTE Laleh Khadivi THE AGE OF ORPHANS 292pp. Bloomsbury. £14.99. 978 I 408802465 the boy like a toy and, uncomprehending, he chatters to it, delighted to see his "baba" . From time to time, Khadivi's style becomes florid, and she risks obscuring reality and weakening her prose. The romance far outweighs the rawness, for instance, when the bloody combat between tribesman and soldier is likened to "the precise choreography of flesh puppets, strung to a thousand stars and pulled as sparring lovers". Time leaps on to 1929 and, as the sole survivor of the fight, the orphan has been conscripted into the Shah ' s army, renamed Reza (after the monarch), and trained to hate his own Kurdish people. As Persia is replaced hy Tran, so the hoy is replaced by Reza. He speeds through the ranks and by 1940 is a celebrated Captain, married to a proud, educated Tehrani girl named Meena. His efforts to belong have paid off; the couple are considered model "modern" Iranians. But Reza has grown strangely remote - "a ghost", even to Meena. He has betrayed his people; he viciously raped a Kurdish girl in order to impress his peers, and once kicked to death a young Kurdish boy who recognized his "Kurd face" . This transformation is terrifying, and morbidly compelling, to behold. In killing the boy, Reza is no
TLS JANUARY 15 2010
different from the "automaton" who, years before, killed his father the same way; he is a soldier "made not of night or earth, but of a machinery bleak and unstoppable that takes boot to head, boot to head, boot to head" . To inject some much-needed humanity into the novel , Khadivi undermines this "demon" by punctuating the third-person narrative with different voices - among them Reza's parents, the boy he murdered, the girl he raped, his wife and children. Their testimonies open up a world beyond Reza, and reveal his true character as a damaged and pitiable man. Not until the last chapter, set in 1979, does Reza himself speak. Iran is now on the brink of an Islamic revolution, and he is a lonely old man, no closer to finding his place in the world. "I have marched, shah oh shah, once with the Kurds, once with you, once alone ... and still I am an orphan of this earth." The first volume in a trilogy that will follow Reza's descendants to America - where Khadivi's own family has settled - The Age of Orphans is an impressive and courageous beginning for the author's journey into her own, sometimes murky, cultural inheritance.
THE EDWI~ MELLEl\' PRESS The British Conquest ofAfghanistan and Western India, 1838-1849 Frank Wallis 39.95 from publisher only
UK 01570 423356 / US 716-754-2788
I want to publish your scholarly book. peer reviewed / no subsidies
editor@mellenpress,com
22 ituated midway between the School of Scottish Studies and his flat on Edinburgh's South Side, Sandy Bell's Bar could not have been better placed for Hamish Henderson as he made his way with his trusted mutt - also known as Sandy - from one to the other. In the 1950s and 60s, Sandy Bell's was the epicentre of Scottish folk music. Legend has it that the young Bob Dylan once visited it and volunteered to sing a couple of songs. Henderson, though, was the bar's bard, an uncomfortably tall figure with music-hall red nose, shambolic gait, jumble sale attire and the air of someone who had done his bit to repel Rommel at El Alamein. It would have easy on first acquaintance to see him as an inebriated eccentric, of which Edinburgh in those days was not in short supply. Indeed, Tim Neat, Henderson's idolatrous biographer, acknowledges that many did dismiss him as "a maudlin haverer or revolutionary hard man" . He was a hard and deep drinker who, as evening misted into night and the alcohol took its toll, could outlast Castro on the stump. Often, then, his audience would melt away. But when he sang, which he invariably did, in a voice that was at once sweet and powerful and passionate, they would return and join in, the songs more often than not written by Henderson himself. Neat's admiration for Henderson is endearing, a mark of loyalty and awe. When he died in 2002, at the age of eighty-two, the Scottish Parliament, for which Henderson had campaigned for decades, devoted an hour to his memory. His reputation was as a poet, songwriter, folklorist and provocateur. Few causes passed him by and fewer still went unremarked in song. He is best known perhaps for "The Freedom Come a' Ye", which he wrote in 1960 in response to the British government's decision to offer the Holy Loch to the
S
BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIRS
Drink as art ALAN TAYLOR Tim Neat HAM ISH HENDERSON A biography Volume Two: Poetry Becomes People
395pp. Polygon. £25 (US $40). 978 I 846970634
United States for use as its Polaris submarine base for the North Atlantic. His best poetry is to be found in Elegies for the Dead in Cyrenaica (1948), which emerged from his experience of the Second World War. Neat laments their neglect: "One problem for academics is that, although the Elegies are directly based on personal experience, they are also Miltonic in their ambition" . Even Neat admits that by 1952, when Volume Two of his biography opens (Volume One was reviewed in the TLS of March 7, 2008), Henderson' s career as a poet was largely over. Aligning him with his heroes - Antonio Gramsci, John MacLean, Nelson Mandela and Che Guevara - Neat talks of Henderson's "highly original cultural/political vision" . "Maverick" is probably a better description. Employed by Edinburgh University as an academic folklorist from 1951, Henderson took the role with "a pinch of salt". He liked to "risken things up", notes Neat, absenting himself from the office for long spells in order to collect songs from Travellers, among whom he was not just an observer but a performer. Consequently, in conservative academe, he and his colleagues were barely
tolerated and frequently derided, though it is hard to give much credence to Neat's theory that Henderson was employed by the university under pressure from MI5 in order to prevent him from fomenting trouble elsewhere. Like the American folklorist Alan Lomax, Henderson's empathy for those he recorded and "discovered" - the greatest of whom was Jeannie Robertson, whom he was "soon using as a flagship for his own cultural ambitions" was infectious and heartfelt. He first met Robertson in Aberdeen in 1953. When he knocked on her door she tried to turn him away, thinking he was a salesman. Henderson responded by bursting into song. "Come away in" , she said, "and I'll show you the right way of it!" (ie, the song). What followed was Henderson's eureka moment. "I had a fantastic feeling, a sort of Nunc Dimittis feeling - Good Lord, this is it. And by God she was a wonderful singer." Henderson regarded Travellers such as Robertson as the bearers of a tradition, which, though transmitted orally, deserved to be treated with scholarly respect. Neat puts it more romantically, describing Traveller life in the early twentieth century as "a mixture of hunter-gatherer wandering, the Celtic heroic, the pastoral idyllic and American West (with the Travellers in the role of the American Indians!)". Henderson, meanwhile, elevated Robertson as the Travellers ' "Champion and Queen" , acting as her unpaid agent and paving the way for her to appear at festivals , securing recording contracts and berating the BBC for its reluctance to make programmes about her. Neat adopts a similar position towards
Henderson, associating him at the outset with Lord Byron, W. H. Auden, Sigmund Freud, Shakespeare and William Blake. Those he is said to have influenced include Dylan, Bruce Chatwin (whom he "believed he had some role in transforming ... from a go-getting Sotheby's antiques buyer into a mould-breaking novelist of international importance") and Gordon Brown, whom he met when the latter was a student at Edinburgh. Much is made of Henderson's drinking and drunkenness. Henderson, we are told, "gloried in ' the art of compotation'; the passing round of drinks became a kind of baptismal immersion, a Celtic vanishing act, in which song, stories and enquiry became vehicles for a kind of public love-making in which the sensation of being alive became a transcendent reality". Neat also offers an aside on Henderson' s vomiting, which he witnessed twice and believes to have been "triggered ... by intense emotional ideological recognitions - not alcoholic excess". This, therefore, is in no way an objective biography. But what in Neat's first volume was revelatory and charming becomes in the second part vainglorious and evasive, especially in respect of Henderson' s personal life and sexuality. He was married to a younger German woman and had two children, both girls. When the marriage foundered in 1975 he lived alone, albeit close to his family. Thereafter, Neat identifies no other relationships. His homosexuality - or not - is dealt with at the beginning of the first volume, where we learn that as a young man in Paris he spent two weeks in bed with a male prostitute. "His Paris", writes Neat, adroitly sidestepping the issue, as is his wont, "was the world of William Blake's Proverbs of Heaven and Hell: ' the worm forgives the plough'."
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" L i f e is short. Life is very, very short. (Cliche of the week)", J. G. Farrell wrote mockingly to his new girlfriend, Bridget O' Toole, in October 1969. Ten years later he was dead, drowned at the age of forty-four when a freak wave came and swept him off a rock at Kilcrohane, County Cork. The rock, near his new home, was his chosen place to stand fishing for mackerel and pollack, and the date of this tragedy was August 11, 1979. In the spring of that year, Farrell had moved to Ireland, leaving the charms and agitations of London without too much regret, and installed himself in a stone-built farmhouse to practise a degree of self-sufficiency, and press on with his current novel. Barring "some unforeseen disaster", he wrote to his publisher on August 10, the book would be finished by the end of the year. These final letters, to George Weidenfeld , to his parents, to old and new friends, make distressing reading in the light of what is about to happen. For Farrell the move to Ireland was a kind of homecoming. Though he was born in Liverpool (in 1935) and educated in England, his family home was in Ireland (south County Dublin) from 1947 onwards. This was the place he returned to at the end of each school term, and from which he went up to Brasenose College, Oxford, in 1956. In sound health when he got there, he found himself, within weeks of his arrival, in hospital and in an iron lung (an experience recreated
Oh yeah? PA TRICIA CRAIG Lavinia Greacen, editor 1. O. FARRELL IN HIS OWN WORDS Selected letters and diaries 480pp. Cork University Press. £35 (€39). 978 I 859184288
in his second novel, of 1965, The Lung). Polio had struck him down, and although he made a good recovery, a certain muscular weakness of the arms and shoulders remained. It is possible that, twenty-odd years later, he simply lacked the strength to save himself when the sea rose up and hurled him into the depths of Dunmanus Bay. He left behind a final - unfinished - novel , The Hill Station, subsequently published along with the "Indian Diary" he had kept in 1971, during a research trip in connection with The Siege of Krishnapur (1973). What was confirmed in his mind at this time was the unfathomable quality of the subcontinent, as well as its diversity. "For the past few days I've been feeling that being a tourist in India one gets very little from the country - apart from the voyeuring of superficial curiosities and horrors."
Set during the Sepoy wars of 1857, The Siege of Krishnapur adds up to an exciting Boys'-Own-Paper stand-to, an ironic and detached account of an extreme situation, and a serious commentary on colonial imperatives. J. G. Farrell's other great novels, Troubles (1971) and The Singapore Grip (1978), are dense and sophisticated appraisals of social breakdown in particular colonial circumstances: Ireland in the run-up to partial independence, and Singapore before the Japanese invasion in 1942. What you find throughout these works is a faint and inspiriting mockery of pretensions and preconceptions. As Farrell said about V. S. Naipaul's An Area of Darkness, they are all very "amusing, interesting and alarming" - and they have a rare efful-
gence besides. Lavinia Greacen , Farrell's biographer (1. G. Farrell: The making of a writer, 1999), has put together an illuminating selection of personal writings, excerpts from letters and diaries, full of elegance and charm - and, occasionally, with an Anglo-Irish dryness and scepticism. "When I'm presented with characters called Lord Warburton and Caspar Goodwood an inner voice keeps whispering 'Oh yeah?' in me ear": thus is the Master put in his place. It is all good-humoured, with only one correspondent (Tom Maschler)
TLS JANUARY 15 2010
bringing out a curtness at odds with Farrell's usual epistolary manner ("It is, of course, more your intentions with regard to Troubles rather than the actual advance that concerns me, though I suppose the one might be an indication of the other"). We can take it with a pinch of salt when Farrell describes his audacious Troubles as "a vast and dreary novel" (it is anything but), and applaud when he declines to magnify the "hotel-allegory" aspect of the book, with the comment: "a little allegory goes a long way". By this stage he has acquired confidence as a writer, but his early letters are full of selfdoubt, money worries, anxieties of all kinds. Oh, and girls: droves of them. Many of the letters are to girls (some of whose names are appropriated for walk-on parts in Troubles)girls with whom he is currently entangled, or those, ex-lovers, whose friendship he has kept (and goes on keeping). He writes from Paris, where he lived for a time in the 1960s, from America, where a Harkness Fellowship had taken him, from Mexico, India, SouthEast Asia, and from various addresses in London. As a correspondent he is both direct and diverting. His singular voice is geared to conciseness, and to creating an entertaining effect. And an engaging exuberance in his letters is tempered by an urbane reticence: he is not out to bare his soul. "There was no one like him," John Banville says in a felicitous preface to the book, "nor will there be again."
DIARIES iaries brings together the eleven individual journals that George Orwell compiled between 1931 and 1949. The final entry, written in September 1949, describes the daily routines of University College Hospital, where he was to die of advanced tuberculosis early in 1950. All were published in the monumental twentyvolume Complete Works (1998), but now appear consecutively for the first time. There is certainly a twelfth diary, and possibly even a thirteenth, among the items taken from a Barcelona hotel room in June 1937 by Soviet agents and now gathering dust somewhere in the NKVD archive in Moscow. In his introduction, Peter Davison reveals that he once met a man - Miklos Kun, grandson of the Hungarian Communist leader Bela Kun - who had tracked down Orwell's NKVD file, but was unable to fillet it before the archive shut its doors to the public. Handsomely produced, illustrated with Orwell's own pencil sketches and footnoted with Davison's customary elan, this latest wave in the repackager' s tide invites two questions. Why did Orwell write diaries? And what do they tell us about him? Most writers' diaries are self-conscious affairs, where the reader ends up with a sneaking feeling that the real audience is only a remote posterity. Orwell's are notably unvarnished, often no more than a mundane domestic record, and yet this doesn't make them personally revealing. There is, for example, almost nothing in them about Orwell ' s literary techniques. Neither is there very much in the way of confidential remarks. When he notes in 1941, out of nowhere, that he is "thinking always of my island in the Hebrides, which I suppose I shall never possess, nor even see", there is a sudden glimpse of all kinds of things not often associated with Orwell - frustrated yearnings, sequestered retreats, the deepest of romantic chasms. If long stretches of the diaries are notably low-key ("All day clearing out strawberries, which have not been touched since last year. It seems one plant will put out anything up to 12 or 15 runners"), then Orwell's motive in writing them was equally prosaic. On one level he was affected by that primal diarist' s urge to set down the most basic details of his life. As the pre-war entries from his Hertfordshire cottage and the long recuperative vacation in Morocco make clear in sometimes painful abundance, no egg collector was more indefatigable and no observer of the customs of the Atlas Mountains more industrious. But to the Orwell who specialized in ground-level nature notes can be added the Orwell who was busy assembling raw material for his published work. The hop-picking diary of 1931 , the account of his journey around the depressed industrial North of 1936, and to a
D
certain extent the Moroccan journal of 1938-9, are full of reportage that would be worked up into, respectively, A Clergyman 's Daughter (1934), The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) and the essay "Marrakech" , which first appeared in New Writing in 1939. Each gives some idea of the refining process that produced the finished work. Orwell's sleight of hand with the Wigan slum girl seen poking a stick up a drain in a filthy back street is well known - in The Road to Wigan Pier she is glimpsed from a train - but a similar manipulation accompanies the Arab navvy given bread intended for a captive deer - one
Rats very bad D. J. TAYLOR
George Orwell DIARIES Edited by Peter Davison
520pp. Harvill Seeker. £20. 978 I 84655 329 5 of the defining images of "Marrakech", but here set down with a laconic "I gave it to him and he pocketed it gratefully" . But then reserve hangs over the proceedings like a fog. It extends to the symptoms of his final illness ("pain in side very bad"), the deaths of close relatives ("Last two days spent in neighbourhood of Newark", he writes in May 1946, omitting to mention that he has been attending his sister Marjorie's funeral) and even to the relatively small part of the diaries written with a definite readership in mind. The two wartime journals, the first running from May 28 , 1940 to August 28, 1941, and the second from March 14,
war being once again in a new phase") and, once or twice, the highly unusual sight of Orwell acknowledging something about his inner self. There is an intensely revealing passage from June 10, 1940, appended to an account of the Allied retreat from Norway: This afternoon 1 remembered very vividly that incident with the taxi-driver in Paris in 1936, and was going to have written something about
it in this diary. But now [ feel so saddened that I can't write it. Everything is disintegrating. It makes me writhe to be writing book-reviews ete at such a time, and even angers me that
sueh time-wasting should still be permitted .... At present [ feel as I felt in 1936 when the Fascists were closing in on Madrid, only far worse. But I will write about the taxi-driver sometime.
The incident, involving a "sordid squabble" over a three-penny fare, and eventually written up for Tribune in September 1944, clearly haunted Orwell through the years, leaving him "at the moment violently angry, and a little later saddened and disgusted".
A detail from "The Hop Pickers" by Tom Nash, c1930 1942 to November 15, 1942 were originally conceived as part of a joint publishing project with his friend Inez Holden. It Was Different at the Time, Holden's half, was published in 1943. She recalled that Victor Gollancz turned down her collaborator's effort "because he feared offending people". The war diaries offer the odd flourish , an occasional aide-memoire (14.3.42: "I reopen this diary after an interval of about 6 months, the
As to what the diaries tell us about Orwell himself, they confirm, if any confirmation were needed, his ineradicable grounding in the Edwardian world of his boyhood. To take a tiny detail, of the 297 press cuttings assembled in the "Diary of Events Leading up to the War" , almost half come from the Daily Telegraph. One may note, too, his fascination with reports of the annual Eton-Harrow cricket match. Adjectivally, we are back in
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23 the Edwardian nursery. The sexual life of tramps is "disgusting". Wolverhampton is a "frightful " place, as are the squalid interiors of the Sheffield slum houses and the route taken by the Wigan colliery railway line. Cold weather is "beastly" , while " monstrous" can be applied to anything from a slag heap to the remnant of a pie left in a lodging house pantry. From his upbringing, too, comes that infallible habit of trying to "place" people, generalizing about social types, and - for all the instinctive fair-mindedness - arriving at a judgement based on class or gender divides. Thus "Ginger", met on the hop-picking excursion, is "a fairly typical petty criminal". The crowd at a political meeting represents "a fair cross-section of the more revolutionary element in Wigan" . Introduced to an ex-miner, now elevated to the secretaryship of a working men's club, Orwell "would have taken him for a solicitor from his appearance". Socially, there is a part of Orwell that never quite shakes off the ancestral ghosts. A hoppicker' s union would be doomed to failure, as "about half the pickers are women or gypsies, and are too stupid to see the advantages of one". His fellow guests in a Southwark lodging house are "a pretty low lot - mostly Irish unskilled labourers, and out of work at that" . Not that Orwell, being Orwell, ever lost sight of his relatively exalted social status or the impossibility of ever sloughing it off. The description of the upper-class voices overheard at the Cotswold sanatorium where he stayed in the early part of 1949 is often quoted. "A sort of over-fedness, a fatuous self-confidence, a sort of bah-bahing of laughter about nothing ... people who, one instinctively feels, without even being able to see them, are the enemies of anything intelligent or sensitive or beautiful." Then comes the incriminating sign-off: "No wonder everyone hates us so". If Orwell the class warrior was fatally compromised by his upper-class accent and legendary tweed suits, then he was also let down by an eternal fastidiousness. Whether at large in the back streets of Wigan or Marrakech, Orwell was invariably led, as it were, by his nose. Staying with a family called Meade on the Road to Wigan Pier trip, he commends "the only house I have been in since leaving London that does not smell". Morocco looks set to defy some pretty considerable odds "smells not so bad in spite of the heat and labyrinthine bazaars" - until a trip round the Jewish quarter produces a "stench" which is "absolutely insupportable, people in the narrowest alleyways habitually urinating in the street and against the wall". A good quarter of the 500-plus pages is taken up by the diaries Orwell kept on Jura between 1946 and 1948. Amid the vignettes from his adopted son Richard' s early childhood lurks evidence of Orwell's well-attested rat fixation: "Rats, hitherto non-existent here, are bound to come when the corn is put into the byre .... Rats in the byre very bad. Caught rat under the house ... " ; "1 hear that 2 children at Ardlussa were bitten by rats (in the face as usual)" runs the entry of June 12, 1947. It can never be proved that the account of Winston Smith ' s ordeal by rats at the Ministry of Love was written at this time, but in the end the egg collector, the amateur naturalist and the author of Nineteen EightyFour seem very much of a piece.
24 t is not an age upon which Scots can reasonably look back with much pride", writes Maurice Lindsay in his History of Scottish Literature, about the century after the Reformation. "Indeed, it is one of the ironies of history that those issues which once seemed so important as to justify their defence with the sacrifice of life itself should in time come to seem to later generations irrelevant." As Crawford Gribben notes in Literature and the Scottish Reformation, Edwin Muir in his study of John Knox asked rhetorically what "Calvinist Scotland" produced during the century after Knox' s death in 1572. "In literature, the charming diary of James Melville, the letters of Samuel Rutherford with their queer mixture of religious feeling and Freudian [sic] symbolism, and the Scottish version of the psalms ; in philosophy, profane poetry, the drama, music, painting, architecture, nothing." Hugh MacDiarmid, similarly, referred to "that mock-serious poetic gibing at the Puritan regime which characterizes so many of Scotland's best poems (no matter in what tongue) throughout the whole range of our literary history". Thus a prejudice against religious verse combines with a reductive conception of Scottish history - the "Puritan regime", on the one hand, and a coarser, more irreverent, and more authentically "Scottish" tradition of poetic hecklers on the other - to form what the editors call the "Muir-MacDiarmid thesis" . I am not completely convinced that the "Muir-MacDiarrnid thesis" is as dominant as the editors claim. R. D. S. Jack, to whom this book's contributors refer in several instances, has done marvellous work in presenting a more nuanced understanding of Scottish writing during this period; and more recent histories of Scottish literature, in particular Robert Crawford's Scotland 's Books (2007), take a broader and more measured approach to the
I
LITERARY CRITICISM
Reasons for Latin BARTON SWAIM Crawford Gribben and David George Mullan, editors LITERATURE AND THE SCOTTISH REFORMATION 260pp. Ashgate. £55 (US $99.95). 9780754667155
such as George Buchanan, Mark Alexander Boyd, Thomas Dempster and Arthur Johnston - the last named was greatly admired by Samuel Johnson - did not compose in Latin in order to appeal to a small association of scholars but in order to transcend barriers of nationality. "The result", writes Allan, was a style of poetry that, although at its worst still perfectly capable of plumbing the depths of banality and of cliche, was in
Reformation and post-Reformation periods its finest moments characteristically rarefied than literary historians once did. Still, this is and abstruse, often giving rise to thoughtno straw man, and the view against which the provoking epigrams that were densely packed editors inveigh is especially apparent in the with classical allusions, with obscure tropes, mistaken assumption that early modern Scotand with stark contrasts, surprising inversions, and unsol vable paradoxes. land was monolithically Presbyterian. The Amanda Piesse argues persuasively that Scotland of Knox and Andrew Melville, as the historian David George Mullan shows, was far one of the strengths of David Lindsay's Ane more diverse than is often supposed, with Satire of the Thrie Estates is that it refuses to Roman Catholic converts from Protestantism, let the audience rest on either side of the Episcopals and other Arminians (whom Pres- divide between representational and allegoribyterians sometimes assumed to be Jesuits), cal writing, a quality which itself reifies the as well as Independents, Quakers, and other deceit inherent in worldly experience. What non-Catholic dissidents from the magisterial we really want to read in a book like this, Reformation. Mark Sweetman's chapter, "Cal- however, is a discussion of some new work vinism, Counter-Reformation, and Conver- we have not considered before. Accordingly, sion", illustrates the complexity of Scotland's Rudolph Almasy discusses Knox's A Godly theological landscape by treating the poetry of Letter of Warning or Admonition to the FaithAlexander Montgomerie, a member of James ful in London, Newcastle, and Berwick, and VI's Castalian Band whose devotional verse Kenneth Farrow places Knox' s notorious owes as much to his Calvinist upbringing as to First Blast of the Trumpet alongside the his adopted Catholicism ("The way is strait, works of the reformer's opponents , the the number small, / Therefor we may not entir Roman Catholic controversialists Ninian all"). Winzet (1518-92) and Quintin Kennedy The bulk of Literature and the Scottish (cl520-64). It is certainly true that Knox is a Reformation is given to re-evaluation. David far more sophisticated writer than his reputaAllan's superb chapter on the Neo-Latin tion suggests. But these works, however fascitradition in Scotland reminds us that poets nating as historical artefacts, can't be read as
"literature" except in the tendentious sense in which every important "text" is literature. The same cannot be said of David Reid's chapter on David Hume of Godscroft (l 568-cl 629). Between 1608 and 1610 Godscroft wrote twelve letters to James Law, Bishop of Orkney, six of which have been preserved in David Calderwood's History of the Kirk of Scotland (1842- 9). The letters treat the subject of parity - the doctrine that there is no higher office in the church than parish minister, and that no parish has authority over any other. The letter of April 10, 1610, writes Reid, " is a remarkable piece of writing, not just for its ideas about democracy, but also for the manner in which it argues". Reid's contention that Godscroft's letters to Law deserve attention is persuasive: they are almost alone among seventeenthcentury controversialist works in conveying a genuine sense of civility, even reciprocity, and Godscroft's unmannered style, with its traces of Scots, is surprisingly readable. Reid places Godscroft's defence of heterogeneity in politics, or the idea that political order can arise out of diversity, alongside three other passages making a similar case: from William Drummond of Hawthornden ' s Irene (1638) , Milton's Areopagitica (1644), and Marvell 's "First Anniversary of the Government under H. H. the Lord Protector". Not only did Godscroft pen his letters eighteen years before the earliest of these: his insights are, Reid argues, more penetrating than the others. Some of the essays in Literature and the Scottish Reformation are too long, and a book that argues for the richness and diversity of early modern Scottish culture shouldn't contain two chapters on Lyndsay, who is sufficiently well known already. But it goes some way towards putting a blinkered view of the period to condign rest, and for that reason alone deserves to be read.
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oetry and Allegiance in the English Civil Wars is an excitingly speculative book about the links between poetry and politics in the seventeenth century. It sets out to solve the mystery of why Andrew Marvell, future MP for Hull and political activist, seems so isolated, at least as a writer of lyric poetry, from the rest of the literary and political culture of England in the years immediately preceding the regicide of 1649. From that initial question, the book goes on to cover a great deal more ground, sketching an elaborate network of literary and political connections among writers and patrons. Much of the case Nicholas McDowell builds is, he admits, conjecture based on resemblances and literary echoes, but from someone who has been immersed in the material for years, conjecture is worth listening to. Three strands hold the argument together. One is the connection between literary patronage and political allegiance. Marvell had links, McDowell proposes, with the circle of writers around the wealthy young man Thomas Stanley, himself an aspiring poet. McDowell shows that, in spite of its Cavalier associations in the later period, the members of this circle were not homogeneous in their Royalist allegiance. John Hall of Durham, admirer of Milton, is a key witness here. No record survives of a friendship between Marvell and Hall, but there are many indirect links, such as the mutual friendship with
P
Echoing songs
Richard Lovelace. Second, a sign of the coherence of this group is that it preserved much of the discriminating wit associated with Ben Jonson and his "tribe", which often overlaps with the influence of Donne. There
poets is well argued. Though McDowell makes rather heavy going of what he takes to be the significant allusion to Dante in the sonnet to the Royalist Henry Lawes, perhaps sent to Lawes with a presentation copy of Milton's Poems of 1645, the overall point deserves extended and sympathetic attention: perhaps Milton was not, after all, as virulently opposed to Humphrey Moseley's Cavalier wrapping of those poems, with its notorious portrait of Milton as frontispiece. Indeed, he may have been trying actively to reconnect with the circle of cultivated readers in which he had moved before the civil war. The title page does, after all, include a
are also many resemhlances, even overt or
reference to Lawes 's setting of the songs to
covert allusions among the poets of the I 640s , as McDowell demonstrates through several fine analyses of specific poems, including Marvell 's most famous lyric, "To His Coy Mistress" and its "echoing song". The third strand is that the main threat to liberty of expression in the late 1640s came from the Presbyterians' efforts to insist on clerical power, and this created a kind of united front among writers with diverse political views, such as Marvell , Hall and Lovelace, and even Milton. The link between Milton and the other
music, and Lawes's commendatory letter on the Masque is in the same volume. In a similar vein, McDowell argues that Marvell' s "Horatian Ode" , in which an earlier generation of critics found an opportunist flip from Royalist to Cromwellian cause, gets a richer reading in the light of the more detailed and complex social context, crossing uncertain political boundaries, that recent historians such as Blair Worden have uncovered. McDowell makes a good case, but it will not dispel the doubts his own scrupulous honesty provokes. Marvell still does not fit
NEIL FORSYTH Nicholas McDowel1 POETRY AND ALLEGIANCE IN THE ENGLISH CIVIL WARS Marvel! and the cause of wit
312pp. Oxford University Press. £53 (US $99). 9780 19 927800 8
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very well into any prolonged relationships in the period. There is, for example, no mention of Marvell in the unpublished "Register of Friends" of the 1640s that Stanley put together after the Restoration; Stanley does mention both Hall and Lovelace. The simplest explanation for Marvell not having published his lyric poems in that period (leaving them to be discovered in a drawer by Mary Palmer after his death) may be that he had not yet found the patron Fairfax was to become after 1650. McDowell, however, wants circulation in manuscript to replace print publication, as indeed it did for many contemporaries - and in view of the strong case he constructs for the network offriends who would have been reading and responding to each other in these years, perhaps this provides a more plausible image of the poet as part of that network. Marvell's elegy " Upon the Death of Lord Hastings" was indeed included, first as a postscript and then in a more prominent position, among the poems by the Stanley group of Lachrymae MlIsarum (1649), as if Marvell's reputation had now grown so rapidly in these circles that the enigmatic "Horatian Ode" of 1650, though still an extraordinary achievement, does not come out of the blue. Within a very few years this poem, along with "Tom May's Death", was being widely read and echoed among contemporary poets, whether turncoats such as John Dryden or committed Royalists like Lovelace and Abraham Cowley.
25
POETRY & MUSIC nyone wondering what a generation gap feels like in musicological circles could not do better than read these two books. To take the more general of the two studies first, Choral Music in the Nineteenth Century by Nick Strimple, which follows the author's earlier volume on the twentieth century, meets the need - surprisingly unmet before - for a comprehensive single volume devoted to this field. It will spare the lover and animateur of choral music a great deal of dipping into the New Grove particularly anyone who wishes for horizons broader than Western Europe with its "dead white males". There is, in fact, scant evidence of this wish in plenty of large choirs' concert programmes, in part no doubt because of linguistic obstacles. Strimple, however, is a director of several ensembles, and "minister of music" at Beverly Hills Presbyterian Church, as well as a member of the faculty at Thornton School of Music in the University of Southern California. He is, therefore, well placed to guide those whose main interest is practical music-making. It is this - as well as the decline of the generalist - that gives his book its old-fashioned feel. He is not afraid to quote Donald Tovey or J. A. Fuller-Maitland; and it is a patriotic pleasure to find him praising the "astute observations" of Stanford and Forsyth 's A History o/Music (1925), and quoting its relative estimations of Stanford's works and their long-term prospects. The author adds some homely touches of his own: "Frankly, Missa solemn is and the Ninth Symphony would be much bigger surprises had Beethoven been some kind of saint; a monk or priest unblemished by any scandal, for instance, or a happily married gentleman with perfect kids and country cottage resembling something from a hideous Thomas Kinkade painting". There are other statements that sound odd to anyone schooled in the restrained, if not
A
Praeter in te GLYN PAFLIN Nick Strimple CHORAL MUSIC IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 286pp. Amadeus Press. £18.95 (US $24.95). 978 I 57467 1545
Suzanne Cole THOMAS TALLIS AND HIS MUSIC IN VICTORIAN ENGLAND 232pp. Boydell. £50 (US $95). 978 I 843833802
positivist, ethos of English musicology in the 1980s: "This antiquated technique [the telescoping of text in Haydn's Missa in tempore belli] at the beginning of the Credo vividly portrays a sense of doubt and confusion that all must have felt at this critical time in the Napoleonic Wars, when French troops were already camped on Austrian soil". But all this helps to enliven a survey that must inevitably make much use of secondary sources some comments on minor figures and their works are little more than an exercise in namedropping - as well as include the author's own reflections on works of which he presumably has performance experience. His enthusiasm for Central European repertoire comes over, and, as expected, he has an insider's feel for the United States. The works lists at the back of the book are a helpful feature , and there are a few black-and-white photographs. Tovey never dizzied his pre-war Edinburgh concert-goers with thoughts too high for them about "concretization" ; and I do not recall that, even in the 1980s, it was a term that had
Thomas TalIis, engraved by NiccoIo Francesco Haym (c1729) yet strayed from the philosophers' quarters into the music faculty at Oxford. Reception history, too, was little studied (beyond the recognition of audience or critical hostility to premieres), and indeed the question what constitutes a "work" was not raised in my hearing
as an undergraduate. In her new book on Thomas Tallis, Suzanne Cole, a research associate at the Faculty of Music of the University of Melbourne, suggests a surge in philosophical self-consciousness in such places. She demonstrates that, however recondite, such reflections can bring genuine rewards to a music historian and her readers; for she pursues an intriguing trail to discover exactly what past generations meant by "Tallis's music" and how much (at times very little) this had to do with the music as we would understand it. Since Tallis was a composer of liturgical music, this question is bound up with
ecclesiastical partisanship, and it is no surprise to read that it was English Catholics' efforts that really put paid to the idea cherished by Victorian Anglicans of Tallis as "the Father of English Church Music" - reflected in his depiction on the Albert Memorial in Hyde Park. There, three musicians can be seen perusing a scroll: "What is in the scroll we do not know, for the sculptor will not condescend to the trick of writing on it; but it is grasped by Gibbons and held open by Lawes, while Tallis places an admonishing finger on it, and at the same time lays a gentle expostulating pressure on the hand of Gibbons that holds it" (quoted from an essay by J. L. Tupper, written in 1872). The sculptor had no real idea what Tallis looked like; and therein lies a parallel with those who esteemed, above all, his Preces and Responses (brief choral settings used for the morning and evening offices in the Book of Common Prayer) as the basis of his exalted reputation. This basis was a slender one indeed, as the editorial standards on which it was based were not those of twentieth-century scholarly editions, though, as the author reminds us, it remains true that "there is no version of the Responses that can be unequivocally attributed to Tallis" . According to critical opinion in the 1840s, one of the very few other works for which he was known - the forty-part motet Spem in Alium - was a historical curiosity whose reputation depended on its never being put to the test of performance: the Spectator's reviewer called its virtuosic polyphony "this mistake of a barbarous age". Students of Tudor church music will find much scholarly detail in Cole's vignettes of editorial history. Anyone with an interest in the Victorians will enjoy learning about this interaction of national , religious and cultural identity, and glimpse the sense of adventure that some of them felt in the quest for musical treasure from England's glorious past.
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here are many obstacles to the lyrical life, from poverty to writer's block, but few poets have struggled with the difficulties encountered by the eighteenth-century bluestocking Anne Hunter (1742- 1821). She was married to the surgeon and anatomist John Hunter, as famous for his skills with the knife as he was infamous for his relations with body-snatchers; for Anne, the problem was not so much the pram in the hall as the corpses in the attic. At the couple's house in Leicester Square, Anne welcomed guests such as Horace Walpole and Elizabeth Carter to her weekly literary parties, but when the last carriage had departed the activity switched to the back door, where each night fresh bodies were delivered by professional grave-robbers.
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Mrs John Hunter, as she was known , suc-
ceeded in keeping these two contradictory worlds apart even if the sights, scents and sounds of her husband's visceral occupation surface like lingering bad odours in the melancholy lines of her poetry. Celebrated in her lifetime as one of the most successful song writers of the late eighteenth century, Anne Hunter wrote lyrics for Joseph Haydn - his "VI Original Canzonettas" - when he visited London in the 1790s. Her poetry, which prefigured the Romantics, inspired her betterknown niece Joanna Baillie and was held up as a model for Robert Burns to emulate. She
Bodies of work WENDY MOORE Caroline Grigson THE LIFE AND POEMS OF ANNE HUNTER Haydn 's tuneful voice
286pp. Liverpool University Press. £65 (US $95). 9781846311918
outlived her remarkable husband by nearly thirty years, but her achievements have long been overshadowed by his notoriety. In this tenderly written and carefully researched hook, all of Anne Hunter's known work is brought together for the first time, and published alongside a biographical essay by Caroline Grigson. Anne was the eldest daughter of an army surgeon, Robert Home, and enjoyed little formal education: the family followed her father around the British Isles before settling in London during the 1760s. When Anne's sister Mary married the architect Robert Mylne, his horrified sister described the Homes as "a family whose pride, poverty, and Show renderd them contemptible to all that know them". Struggling to make ends
meet, the Homes took in lodgers, including the artist Angelica Kauffman. Rather more impressed than the snobbish Mylnes by her friendly landlords, whom she described as "excellent good people", Kauffman painted a portrait of their strikingly beautiful eldest daughter. Although the portrait is since lost, it was later reproduced as an etching with verses composed by Anne herself. An accomplished writer despite her interrupted education, Anne published her first known poem, "Adieu ye Streams" in an Edinburgh anthology in 1764. Written to the music of a traditional Scottish air, "Flowers of the Forest", it appeared anonymously like all her work before her husband's death, and like the work of most of her female contemporaries, for whom literary ambitions were deemed vulgar. Despite her good looks and literary flair, without a dowry Anne faced few prospects in the Georgian marriage market. So the family must have been relieved when she was courted by the brash and ambitious Scottish army doctor John Hunter. Romance may have flowered in the unlikely setting of the sickroom since John treated Anne when she became seriously ill in 1764,
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recording that she was " much troubled with wind".
Fourteen years her senior, Hunter was short, stocky and often coarsely spoken. In his slow ascent of the Georgian medical ladder, he devoted long hours to dissecting dead bodies, experimenting on live animals and treating venereal disease. Yet their marriage in 1771 proved a perfect partnership in which both participants allowed the other freedom to pursue their divergent interests. But the spectre of death that hung over their house plainly haunts Anne's poetry, too. Whether deeply personal , such as her poem "To the memory of a lovely infant" about the death of her baby son James, or sharply political (she wrote a number of poems about the French wars), her verse is preoccupied with destruction and decay. There is no mistaking
the gothic horror of the "yelling ghosts" in "November, 1784". After her husband's death in 1793, Anne was poor again and obliged to seek work as a governess and chaperone. Yet she continued to write, collaborating once more with Haydn when he returned to London in 1795, and publishing works under her own name for the first time in 1802. In collecting Anne Hunter' s verse, scattered through anthologies and archives, Caroline Grigson has taken a significant step towards restoring the reputation of this unfairly neglected poet.
26
IN BRIEF
Memoirs Andrea GiIlies KEEPER Living with Nancy - a journey into Alzheimer's 283pp. Short Books. Paperback, £11.99. 978 I 906021 658
W
ithout memory, how is the self constructed? What is consciousness? "Is there something else that encapsulates the self, something extra, indefinable, that we call the soul?" In Keeper, Andrea Gillies worries over such questions, searching for a key to unlock the "truth" of the mind and the nature of the self, at the same time as she worries over her young family and her live-in in-laws: Nancy is in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease and her husband Morris is disabled. Out of economic necessity and a naive search for the healing balm of the Sublime, the Gillies family move into a large Victorian house in the remote north of Scotland, where two self-contained families can be accommodated. Quite quickly, however, it falls to Gillies to shoulder the responsibility of caring for them all. Compiled "from diaries, scribbled notes, books about the mind and concentrated bouts of introspection", Keeper is intelligently written and impossible to classify. Part memoir, part biography, it overflows with history, literature and chunks of information gathered from books or culled from the internet, threaded together in a free-associative narrative. A meditation on "the romantic view of the brain as an interior landscape", for example, summons Coleridge's "intellectual breeze", Wordsworth's "caverns . .. which sun could never penetrate", Erasistratus' "vital spirit", Galen's
work on "the pneuma" and J. K. Rowling's "pensieve". Gillies discusses daily activities such as weeding, housework and caring for family, paying guests, domestic pets, horses and chickens in the same engagingly frank conversational tone as she recounts flashes of raw emotion, moments when anger and guilt burst through the veneer of capability. Keeper, the winner of the inaugural Wellcome Trust Book Prize for 2009, has close affinities with Margaret Forster's Have the Men had Enough? (1989). Gillies wonders whether "Nancy would be happier with a man in my place. She'd get to flirt with him. She'd probably be more respectful - her generation have a natural deference, the kind that feeds men first and takes the leavings". Like Forster, Gillies is wary of and annoyed by social care assistance and learns that the outside carers bring new problems, creating both a "bridge and a wedge" between the families. A relevant and important book, this compassionate account of "mothering somebody's mother" will be required reading for carers caught up in the "tidal wave of dementia coming our way". JANETTE CURRIE
Untitted (detail), 1953, by Roberto Crippa; taken from Space-Age Aesthetics by Stephen Petersen (320pp. Penn State University Press. $75. 978 0 271 03342 6)
History Christopher Hibbert THE HOUSE OF BORGIA 328pp. Constable. £18.99. 978 I 84901 0696
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he late Christopher Hibbert returned to Renaissance Italy, familiar ground for him, in his last book, The House of Borgia. Minor Spanish nobility, the house was catapulted on to the proscenium of history by Rodrigo Borgia, Pope Alexander VI (1492-1503), pleasure-lover par excellence. He acknowledged six illegitimate children, and plundered the Church's wealth to hoist them to high place by means of strategic marriages. The best known of his offspring, Cesare and Lucrezia, had beauty, pluck, imagination and surpassing intelligence. Lucrezia ended as the Duchess of Ferrara. Cesare, a warlord, was one of the models for the craftier traits of Machiavelli' s Prince. Pope Alexander owed much to his uncle, Pope Calixtus Ill, who made him a cardinal. But as Hibbert shows, he also possessed amazing charm, a flair for administration, and finally enormous wealth, which he piled up as vice-chancellor of the Holy See, the Church's most lucrative post. Shameless bribery got Rodrigo the papal tiara, and he was soon selling cardinalships (thirteen at one point), or doling them out to family , to servitors and as political bargaining chips. Cesare and Lucrezia swan through Hibbert's book, beguiling presences around whom men and women meet violent deaths.
Alexander VI lived by two nostrums: one held that a strong dynasty was the way to supreme success in Europe; the other enshrined the fact that money could buy the brute force (mercenary armies) to guarantee the survival of dynasties. This was why he sought the best dynastic marriages for his children , and why, with money and arms, he undertook to make Cesare the Lord of Romagna. Meanwhile, the miasma of turpitude in the college of cardinals and in the papal curia provoked a storm of anticlericalism, graced by a stream of violent Italian and
Latin epigrams that skewered every leading cleric in Rome. In northern Europe, the Reformation lay just around the corner. Treating us to chronicle-like outlines and succinct descriptions, Hibbert tells a good story by shunning historical analysis and slipping around questions concerning the condition of the Church, the culture of the age, politics, war, public finance, and the governing social structures. Instead, he looks for colour, anecdote, gossip, moments of intrigue and violence, and swank in dress, banquets, palaces and public display. This, however, is the way of bestselling biographers. The results show that the aims of historians and biographers may radically diverge. LAURO MARTINES
Timothy Egan THE BIG BURN Teddy Roosevelt and the fire that saved America 336pp. Houghton Mifflin. $27. 978061896841 I
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owards the end of Timothy Egan's book about the Big Burn, the name given to the fire that in August 1910 destroyed some 3.6 million acres offorest in the Pacific Northwest (and on into Canada), we read that Elders Koch, who headed the National Forest Service charged with fighting the fires in three national forests, considered the effort to battle that fire "a complete defeat". It wasn't just that the fledgling National Forest Service and 10,000 other men, including the 25th Infantry, one of the few black regiments in the tiny US Army, were overmatched by walls of fire moving at hurricane speed, that they failed to save scores of towns and villages or that approximately 200 men, women and children died on - and, in some small caves and dugouts, literally in - the scorched earth. Rather, he considered it a defeat because, despite the heroics of men like Ed Pulaski, who, at the cost of severe burns and the loss of one eye, brought forty of his fortyfive men through the firestorm by taking refuge in a cave, the policy was wrong.
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Koch realized that, left to themsel ves, forests burn. But. by preventing smaller fires , which consume fuel (ie, dead limbs and trees), forest services, ironically, established conditions for huge conflagrations. Preventing fires also robs the forest of one of the forces that ensures their renewal ; some species of tree spread their seeds only after fire has burst the trees' pods. Now considered orthodoxy, Koch's view was anathema to men like Gifford Pinchot, who shows up early in this book wrestling with the then governor of New York, Theodore Roosevelt, and who is credited by Egan with being the puppet master who in 1905 directed President Roosevelt's establishment of the National Forest Service. Pinchot's mistake takes nothing away from the glorious story of his (and Roosevelt's) epic battles with western senators, who fought against and then starved the NFS. Nor does the futility of the battle against the fire (and the Service's quixotic 10 o' clock rulethat once spotted a fire must be out by 10 am the next day) take away from the story of gallant men and women whom Egan rightly honours, with passages that evoke their almost Homeric struggle against Prometheus' gift gone wild. NATHAN M . GREENFIELD
Social Studies Irene Khan with David Petrasek THE UNHEARD TRUTH Poverty and human rights 254pp. NorlOn. £15.99. 9780393 337006
W
hen a woman becomes pregnant in Sierra Leone, friends come from far and wide to say farewell, so high is the rate of female mortality. This is one of the anecdotes that Irene Khan uses in her talks to show how world poverty comes less from a lack of income than from "voicelessness", particularly of poor women. While infant mortality has been dramatically reduced worldwide, maternal mortality has barely changed in the past decade, and 70 per cent of the world's
poor are women.
Khan was brought up with her brother in Dhaka. While her own career has flourished , her brother has fallen victim to poverty. A political activist, he was badly beaten by the police and he now lives in a shanty town with his children and grandchildren. His plight illustrates Khan's main premiss, which is that poverty should be considered a human rights violation which can only be addressed by giving the world's poor a voice against both local and international injustice. Drawing on her personal experience as a Bangladeshi and as Secretary General of Amnesty International, Khan argues that poverty traps people in a vicious circle of deprivation, insecurity and exclusion. She illustrates her arguments with cases from countries throughout the world. In South Africa, a woman was unable to escape her husband' s violence because she could not afford the bus fare to visit the magistrate' s court. Meanwhile, as the lot of the people of Ciudad Juarez in Mexico has improved, their security has deteriorated. In the past decade, hundreds of young women have been abducted, raped and brutally murdered, walking home from work or night school, their bodies dumped in
IN BRIEF empty scrubland. A single photograph of their graves - marked simply "Brenda, Lupita, Esmeralda, Veronica" - tells its own haunting tale. "Each of these cases shows how we can create a virtuous cycle of rights to end the vicious circle of abuse", says Khan. The solution to world poverty lies in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the world sixty years ago, an argument echoed in Kofi Annan ' s introduction to Khan's powerful book. TREVOR MOSTYN
Literature
little point in trying to repackage the same works under the name of Thomas Sheridan or Edward Ward. But then, Swift's name has always been useful ; it certainly helped, in the 1720s, to be known as "Dr S---t". MICHAEL CAINES
with a concept that is universally applicable and politically neutral. Aside from repeatedly stressing the important (though hardly original) insight that all cultures are hybrid, this book does little to develop a critical perspective on the ways in which cultures interact. MATTHEW TAUNTON
Cultural Studies Peter Burke CULTURAL HYBRIDITY 142pp. Polity Press. £45 (paperback, £10.99). 978 0 7456 4696 I
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Military History Kenneth MeAl pine WE DIED WITH OUR BOOTS CLEAN The youngest Royal Marine Commando in World War Two 190pp. History Press. Paperback, £12.99. 9780752451893
We Died with Our Boots Clean will be cited as crucial evidence. IANCAWOOD
Myth Margot K, Louis PERSEPHONE RISES , 1860- 1927 Mythography, gender and the creation of a new spirituality 171 pp. Ashgate. £55. 978 0 7546 6455 0
U
nusually for a myth, the story of Persephone centres on a mother--
