The Times Literary Supplement Jan 22, 2010 No 5573

Barbara Heldt

Will Self

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

here were moments of audible shock during Will Self's lecture after the TLS Translation Prizes earlier this month, not quite outright gasps from our sophisticated audience of literary translators but some clear intakes of breath as the novelist examined W. G. Sebald 's understanding of the Holocaust and our British understanding of Sebald. Implicit in Sebald' s work, said Self, was the idea that human mass murder was only an internecine form of the holocaust we are perpetrating on the natural world. Sebald himself (below) never visited a concentration camp and viewed Theresiens-

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HISTORY

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Polly Jones

Stephen F. Cohen Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives - From Stalinism to the new cold war Miriam Dobson Khrushchev's Cold Summer - Gulag returnees, crime, and the fate of reform after Stalin

BIOGRAPHY

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Barbara Heldt Nicholas de Lange

Sofia Tolstoy The Diaries of Sofia Tolstoy; Translated by Cathy Porter Joel L. Kraemer Maimonides - The life and world of one of civilization's greatest minds William Shawcross Queen Elizabeth - The Queen Mother

10 LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

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POLITICS

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'The Brothers Karamazov', I. F. Stone, Ariosto abridged, etc Francis Robinson Jane Jakeman

Eugene Rogan The Arabs - A history Finbarr B. Flood Objects of Translation - Material culture and medieval "Hindu-Muslim" encounter

Peter Hacker

Galen Strawson Selves - An essay in revisionary metaphysics

PHILOSOPHY

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SOCIAL STUDIES

12 Norma Clarke

Adam Kuper Incest and Influence - The private life of bourgeois England

COMMENTARY

13 Will Self

The good German - Absent Jews and invisible executioners: W. G. Sebald and the Holocaust Freelance TLS December 23, 1960 - Tolstoy's last testament

Hugo Williams Then and Now ARTS

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Leo Robson Michael Caines Toby Lichtig Ruth Morse

tadt as " only an extreme and specialized

form" of something occurring "everywhere and at all times as civilization marches on". And, "if we read him rightly" , Sebald ' s message is that we British have no need of a Holocaust Memorial Day; only, perhaps a "Refusal to Grant Refugee Jews Asylum Memorial Day", or an "Iraqi Civilians Memorial Day", some atonement for "deaths that more properly belong at our door" . An edited text of the lecture, which may provoke more questions than were possible in the hall, is our Commentary this week.

Jane Ridley

FICTION

19 Sean O'Brien

Trev Broughton Sameer Rahim Henry Power David Coward RELIGION

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Steven E. Aschheim

James Sharpe LITERATURE

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Olivier Burckhardt Frances Wood

Polly Jones examines life after the Soviet Gulag for those who managed to survive Stalin's camps. Some became dissidents, while others rose up the nomenklatura ladder. Some adapted smoothly to life in "the big zone". Many did not. The authors of the two books under review reach very different conclusions about how victims and perpetrators

Seamus Perry

PS

Stella Rimington Present Danger. Peter James Dead Tomorrow. Aly Monroe Washington Shadow. C. J. Box Three Weeks To Say Goodbye. Alan Glynn Winterland. Neil Cross Captured. Peter Temple Truth. Robert B. Parker The Professional. Michael Crichton Pirate Latitudes Angelica Garnett The Unspoken Truth Neel Mukherjee A Life Apart Simon Robson Catch Rebecca Stott The Coral Thief Benjamin Lazier God Interrupted - Heresy and the European imagination between the World Wars Ernst Bertram Nietzsche - Attempt at a mythology P. G. Maxwell-Stuart Satan - A biography Simon West, editor The Selected Poetry of Guido Cavalcanti - A critical English edition Lu Xun The Real Story of Ah-Q and Other Tales of China - The complete fiction of Lu Xun

LITERAR Y CRITICISM

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IN BRIEF

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NATURAL SCIENCE

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Jennie Erin Smith

Lee Alan Dugatkin Mr Jefferson and the Giant Moose Keith Thomson A Passion for Nature

MEMOIRS

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Patricia Craig

Joseph Hone Wicked Little Joe

NB

David Simpson Wordsworth , Commodification and Social Concern Norman MacCaig The Poems of Norman MacCaig Mario de Sa-Carneiro Liicio' s Confession Alison UttIey The Private Diaries of Alison Uttley, 1932- 1971 Peter Hames Czech and Slovak Cinema - Theme and tradition Eitan Bar-Yosef and Nadia Valman, editors "The Jew" in LateVictorian and Edwardian Culture Gary R. Bunt iMuslims - Rewiring the house of Islam James Roose-Evans Opening Doors and Windows Michael Rothberg Multidirectional Memory

reacted subsequently to one another. James

Sharpe looks at the problem of defining evil in P. G. Maxwell-Stuart' s biography of Satan. One of the "great neglected themes" of England's social and literary history, according to Alan Kuper, is the preference among the bourgeoisie for marriage with relatives. Norma Clarke reviews a book which sets out the loving fascination that Wedgwoods, Quaker bankers and Bloomsbury Group artists held for their nieces, nephews and cousins. The propriety of marrying a deceased wife's sister was a great Victorian debate.

Nine (Various cinemas). Cy Coleman and Neil Simon Sweet Charity (Menier Chocolate Factory) Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton, etc, attrib. A Yorkshire Tragedy (White Bear, Kennington) Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll. Nowhere Boy (Various cinemas) Eleven and Twelve (Bouffes du Nord, Paris; Barbican)

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This week's contributors, Crossword

32 J. C.

Cross Kingsley Amis, Literary anniversaries, Francis King' s fiftieth book

Cover picture: Sofia Tol stoy; detail of a double portrait by lIya Yefimovich Repin , 1907 © culture-irnages/Lebrecht; p2 © Press Association; p3 © Cambridge University Library/PA Wire; p4 © akg-images/RIA Nowo sti; p4 © RIA Novosti/Lebrecht Music & Arts; p7 © Art Media/HIPffopFoto; p9 © Private Collection/ Archives Charmetffhe Bridgeman Art Library; plO © Tim Graham/Getty Images; pl3 © Bridgeman Art Library; pl5 © Gerhard Richter 2010; pl6 © Mary Evans Picture Library 2008; p24 © The Art Archive/Galleria degli Uffizi Florence/Alfredo Dagli Orti ; p25 © Jeff Greenbergrrhe Image WorksrropFoto; p28 © Historical Picture Archive/CORBIS 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, NYIIIOI - 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 22 2010

HISTORY

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Odds of freedom How different groups of Gulag survivors fared and fought in the world beyond the wire n November 1954, nearly two years after Stalin's death, the celebrated Soviet children ' s author Kornei Chukovsky described a striking encounter in his diary. " She was in rags , she had a bad eye and a hoarse voice and she is wasting away with a goiter - one of hundreds of thousands of Beria' s victims. I'm glad I managed to pull her out of hell." The woman in question, Katya Boronina, was a friend who had spent several years in the Gulag, and Chukovsky had successfully petitioned for her release. Although Gulag returnees haunt the pages of many such Soviet reminiscences, their stories of survival and adaptation have rarely been told, much less incorporated into our understanding of how the Soviet Union changed after Stalin. These two books look back, some five decades later, on the changes to the Gulag that Chukovsky recorded, but only partly understood. In a single decade of Soviet rule, from 1953 to 1964, several million people were liberated from the Soviet camps and forced exile. Even the first amnesty of prisoners, announced weeks after Stalin's death, cut a swathe through the Gulag. Several more amnesties under Khrushchev successfully transformed it from the pervasive "zone" of brutality it had been under Stalin into a much diminished network of prisons. This reduction entailed a truly vast movement of people, and posed an unprecedented challenge for the Soviet system. The Gulag population was diverse in ethnicity, age and social background, and in terms of the identities imposed by the camp system. "Politicals" and "criminals" received different sentences, endured different privations, and faced different odds of release, under Stalin (when criminals were regularly freed through amnesties) as under Khrushchev (who started by releasing criminals before moving on to "politicals"). Given this variety, capturing the experience of life after the Gulag remains a daunting task. Both Miriam Dobson and Stephen F. Cohen opt for detail rather than generalization, drawing on rich biographical material. Cohen's chapter on returnees rei ies on memoirs and testimonies. Dobson ' s book, Khrushchev's Cold Summer, mines recently opened archives, evoking the texture of

I

returnees' lives from documentation of their

interactions with the state - their petitions to Soviet authorities, and their investigation by police and prosecutors when some again fell foul of the law. The different types of sources themselves reveal some of the diversity of life after the Gulag. Some former inmates acquired, or regained, enough fame after returning from the camps for their memoirs to be deemed worthy of publication, while others suffered a different form of inscription - back into the criminal justice system. Neither author attempts to quantify the chances of success in rehabilitation and reintegration;

POLL Y JONES Stephen F. Cohen SOVIET FATES AND LOST ALTERNATIVES From Stalinism to the new cold war 288pp. Columbia University Press. $28.50; distributed in the UK by Wiley. £ I 9.50. 978023 I 148962

Miriam Dobson KHRUSHCHEV'S COLD SUMMER Gulag returnees, crime, and the fate of reform after Stalin 288pp. CorneII University Press. $45; distributed in the UK by NBN. £30.50. 9780801447570

records are simply too patchy. However, both decisively debunk the notion of a single "returnee" identity.

Some returnees never overcame the trauma of imprisonment, while others adapted smoothly to life in the "big zone". Some became dissidents, while others rose some way up the nomenklatura ladder. Many remained too scared or disillusioned to engage in politics at all. Certain problems, however, were common to all returnees. Almost all faced delays in achieving rehabilitation, albeit of varying length depending on bureaucratic whim and access to powerful patrons; and all had to go through wearying negotiations with Soviet officials in order to acquire basic housing, benefits and employment.

The dismantling of the Gulag also forced the Soviet population and authorities to ask hard questions about the legacies of Stalinism. Both authors quote Anna Akhmatova' s famous dictum about two Russias - victims and perpetrators - coming face to face in the wake of the Gulag amnesties. However,

Cambridge 19.01.10 The words "spies" and "Cambridge" occur together most often in tales of treason and treachery. This New Year greetings card from the early days of MI5 is on show at the University Library as a part of an attempt to give a more balanced view. "Secret code" is the 1917 seasonal theme - with Mankinds Immortal Victory, later to be replaced by Malevolence Imposes Vigilance, as the clue for recipients not quite certain which branch of the King's service had placed them on their Christmas list. Any lucky agents taking a longer look could apply their knowledge of Roman numerals to the V in the centre of the trident that the helmeted man in the Union Jack skirt was burying in the neck of the feral foe. The design was by Eric Holt-Wilson, who had entered the service in 1912 after seventeen years in the army and some immaculate letter-writing to his clergyman father during the Boer War. The execution was by Byam Shaw of the Artist Rifles, fashionable painter of the sad and stirring "Boer War 1900, Last Summer Things Were Greener". The title, "The Hidden Hand", fruitful for later spy writers, was the name of a silent film series in that last full year of the First World War.

TLS JANUARY 22 2010

they reach quite different conclusions about whether, and how, this confrontation occurred. Cohen stringently distinguishes between victims and perpetrators of repression, expressing disdain for the latter and making a moral case for their punishment. Further, he presents the Khrushchev era as a time when that case very nearly proved persuasive, as the Soviet Union came tantalizingly close to holding its own "Nuremberg trials". Cohen credits this remarkable shift to the fact that some rehabilitated victims persuaded Khrushchev to expand his revelations about Stalinist terror and to radicalize punishment for those responsible. He thus perpetuates the traditional view of Khrushchev as an essentially liberal, moral leader, one of very few "repentant Stalinists" in the Communist Party elite. He also concentrates on that already wellknown segment of the intelligentsia who pushed de-Stalinization forward in the 1950s and 60s. By contrast, Dobson suggests that Soviet politicians and society never even came close to the recriminations envisaged by Akhmatova. Shifting the focus away from the cultural intelligentsia, she lets other parts of Soviet society speak. Using citizens' letters and reports of party meetings, she reveals popular anxieties about Gulag liberation. Post-Stalinist society was gripped by fear of crime and lawlessness, some of it well founded , some of it part of a pervasive " moral panic". Citizens were therefore reluctant to dispense altogether with the Stalinist rhetoric of "enemies" , applying it and its concomitant penalties both to Gulag returnees and to criminals (though the two were not always mutually exclusive). As Dobson acknowledges, there is no way of knowing how representative these letters were, since less outraged citizens probably had no reason to put pen to paper, while most of those favouring any kind of radical liberalism would have kept their counsel. With the exception of a few sweeping claims, however, Dobson handles her public opinion sources with great dexterity, preferring close analysis of individual statements to extrapolations about the public mood in general. She also rightly stops short of a complete reversal of the conventional identification of hottom-up forces with liheralism (and, hy extension, of party leaders with conservatism). Instead, she reveals the complex intertwining of elite and popular anxieties, which undermined an already fragile belief in rehabilitation. In the most fluently argued and groundbreaking section of the book, Dobson shows that liberalizing reforms to criminal justice reached their peak at the end of the 1950s, but almost immediately started to decline, "freezing" official attitudes towards rehabilitation and crime well before the end of the so-called "thaw" of the Khrushchev era. By 1962, the same year that Khrushchev took the extraordi-

HISTORY & BIOGRAPHY

4

A wife's tale L

A maximum-security barrack in a Gulag camp in the Kolyma area, East Siberia nary step of authorizing the publication of Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, he was also reneging on his earlier commitment to "'correct" offenders within the community, and he was further honing "anti-parasite" legislation to be applied arbitrarily to punish "un-Soviet" conduct. (Had Ivan Denisovich committed an offence in the Khrushchev era, he would have faced dramatically different chances of imprisonment, depending on the timing and definition of his crime.) In her last chapter, Dobson argues that Ivan 's story elicited in some ordinary readers (though, again, we cannot hope to know what proportion) a sense of repulsion from, rather than sympathy for, Gulag inmates. Thus, popular and official suspicions towards rehabilitation coincided with, and perhaps informed, one another. Dobson suggests that it was the very desire to purge society of its traumatic Stalinist past that generated the urge to rid it of wrongdoers in the present. She risks taking this argument too far: "purging" still carried very different implications under Khrushchev from under Stalin, and terror was irrevocably abandoned after Stalin's death. Nevertheless, Dobson's attempt to confront, rather than to evade, the paradoxes of the "thaw" is refreshing and thought-provoking. The thaw is held to be an appropriate metaphor only if it encompasses variations in temperature and the ever-present possibility of freezes. The commitment to liberalization was so I ukewarm, she argues, that the Khrushchev era was at most only a "cold summer". For Cohen, by contrast, the thaw perfectly evokes the growing fervour of Khrushchev's (and the intelligentsia's) rejection of Stalinism and their embrace of liberal principles, in criminal justice as in their rethinking of Stalinism. For Cohen, the "freeze" came only after Khrushchev's fall , with the conservative rule of Leonid Brezhnev. If Dobson 's combing of the archives and subtle periodization reveal nuance and complexity within a single decade, Cohen aims to define leaders and their eras in more monolithic terms, before comparing periods one with another. His analysis of the Gulag reforms is part of a panoramic study, ranging from the 1920s to Putin , that charts a series

of swings between conservatism and reformism. His depiction of the liberal , morally upstanding Khrushchev is sandwiched between even more hagiographic depictions of the Soviet century 's other two outstanding liberals, Nikolai Bukharin (on whom Cohen is the foremost Western expert) and Mikhail Gorbachev. All three represent " lost alternatives", visions of humane socialism that ought to have been seen through, but were stymied by their opponents: by Stalin, Yeltsin and American foreign policy-makers. Exploring the lost potential of Gorbachev 's reforms (and, indeed, of the Soviet Union , which he believes could have survi ved), Cohen provides an original and copiously referenced critique of Yeltsin' s venality and megalomania and of American policy-makers ' self-interest. However, he fails to subject the "alternatives" represented by Bukharin, Khrushchev and Gorbachev to similar levels of moral scrutiny. Bukharin and Khrushchev might have dissented from Stalinist socialism, but they still favoured the basic economic, social and cultural controls that made even a reformed Soviet Union fundamentally illiberal and undemocratic. Even Gorbachev, whose reforms to Soviet socialism were so sweeping, only imagined the possibility of full democratization and marketization several years into his rule, and then perhaps reluctantly (the ongoing debate about the strength of this "conversion" is summarily dismissed here). Several years after Khrushchev' s death, his grave in Moscow's Novodevichy cemetery was marked with a statue by the sculptor Ernest Neizvestny. Famously the target of Khrushchev's illiberal fury at an abstract art exhibition in the early 1960s, Neizvestny made sure to infuse a sense of dualism into the statue by rendering one half black and the other white. These two provocative books begin with a similar outlook, and similar findings about release from the Gulag, but diverge as they expand into the Gulag reforms' broader implications, with each emphasizing the different faces of post-Stalinism symbolized in this monument. Both invite us to consider anew what "socialism" could and could not have been - as well as what it wasafter Stalin.

iving life with Leo Tolstoy was not like walking across a field, to paraphrase the Russian saying. In his lifelong search for Truth, he imposed often paradoxical constraints on himself that inconvenienced or upset those around him. As he became more of a world figure, not simply as a novelist but as a powerful social, moral and religious critic, he held open house for hundreds of followers and admirers from all over the world and spent less time with his family. But someone had to organize the rest of his life. The woman who married him when she was eighteen and he sixteen years older had been chosen well by him , years after another young lady who could not stand his philosophizing broke off their engagement. Sofia Andreyevna Behrs came from a happy family , the model for all the good families in his later fiction. Her diaries show just how much Tolstoy used his subsequent life with her to nourish and inspire his imagination. As she noted: "He had never had a real family and had grown up without a father or mother". Before their wedding both had kept diaries. (Many diaries and other unpublished writings by Russian women still lie dormant in Russian archives.) Tolstoy notoriously obliged her to read, and later copy, his own diaries, including passages concerning his debauched past, so that there would be no misunderstanding between them. His confession (influenced by Rousseau) became her hurt. She, a well-brought-up young lady, had no past at all. They also had different views on love: 1 copied Lyovochka's diaries up to the part

BARBARA HELDT Sofia Tolstoy THE DIARIES OF SOFIA TOLSTOY

Translated by Cathy Porter 609pp. Alma Books. £20. 978 I 846880803

former life. Not wishing to own property, he turned all financial and business matters over to her. As their children grew up, she had to divide the various estates and houses among them: some followed their father in renunciation; others asked for more. As his wealth increased, Tolstoy remained pure. He occasionally gave royalties to a particular publisher or cause, overruling Sofia. The most famous instance was his championing of the pacifist Dukhobors ("Spirit Wrestlers"), helping them emigrate to Canada. Tolstoy refused the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1897, saying it should go to those who risked their lives in non-resistance. Sofia felt that peasants con-

where he wrote: "There is no such thing as love, only the physical need for intercourse and the practical need for a life companion". lonly wish I had read that twenty-nine years ago, then I would ne ver have married him.

Copying his words, she countered with her own , in diaries written from 1862 to 1910, when Tolstoy died, and on into 1919, a month before her own death at the age of seventy-five. Sofia was her husband's first reader, discussing his writings with him as she copied them. (Dostoevsky, it may be noted, achieved his aims even more directly: in the age of the typewriter he married a woman at the top of her class in typing school. And Dostoevsky, who wrote about disturbed families , came to enjoy a much more peaceful family life than Tolstoy.) Eventually Tolstoy turned over to Sofia all responsibility for publishing his works, which she did in eight complete editions as well as separately in journals , and

for the staging of his plays. This meant dealing with the censor, including that ultimate censor, the Tsar, with whom she had a personal conversation, finding the ruler well briefed on Tolstoy's affairs (his estate had been subjected to a police search even before their marriage). The diaries mention bargaining with the censor by letter to restore the full text in the Complete Works, so that only the few who could afford these would have access to the deleted passages. The list of Sofia' s responsibilities expanded as Tolstoy renounced more and more of his

TLS JANUARY 22 2010

Leo and Sofia Tolstoy, September 1910 scripted into the army were a more deserving object of pity and support. Much of her life was spent in nonresistance to her fiercely powerful husband. In her diaries we see her afraid to anger him by expressing her views, while maintaining an equally fierce but also loving presence in the household. After their wedding they set off immediately for Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy's estate. She soon discovered that there was a peasant woman living on this estate whose child Tolstoy had fathered and who reappeared in his fiction as late as 1909 under her real name, Aksinya. Their liaison had obviously been unforgettable.

BIOGRAPHY The newly wed Sofia dreads taking a walk ("I may even meet her") and suffers from the fact that every reader of Tolstoy will know about his intimacies, which are there in his fiction "for all to see". The diaries are candid about Tolstoy's sexual needs: Lyovochka is in an extraordinarily sweet, affectionate mood at the moment - for the usual reason, alas. If only the people who read "The Kreutzer Sonata" so reverently had an inkling

of the voluptuous life he leads, and realized it was only this that made him happy and goodnatured, then they would cast this deity from the pedestal where they have placed him! Yet I love him when he is kind and normal and full of human weaknesses. One shouldn't be an animal, but nor should one preach virtues one

doesn' t have. (March 21 , 1891) These words were written long after 1863, when their first son was born and Tolstoy began to write War and Peace, which Sofia would copy many times over, while bearing thirteen children, three of whom would die in infancy, two in childhood, and two more predecease her as adults. Her last-born child, Vanechka, seen by all as particularly loving and spiritual, remained a benchmark of grief for his mother. Meanwhile the other children grew up, causing the usual parental anxiety, writ large because there were so many of them. Tolstoy, largely exempt from family worries, set his sights on the larger Russian and world situation. Both parents were activists: he for political and religious causes, she for the children's education and the welfare of the villages surrounding the estate. There were two famines. The older children, especially the daughters, worked hard to help out with food distribution and medical needs, and Sofia worried about their exposure before marriage to the coarse world of the village. After home tutoring, the girls remained on the estate, while the sons were sent to Moscow for their lycee education. Although she would have preferred to remain in the country, Sofia was obliged to move to Moscow to supervise her often wayward sons during the school year from 1881 to 1901, when she moved for most of a year to the Crimea to nurse her husband through a severe illness. By then her childbearing years were over, but her charitable works continued. She became the patron of an orphanage, raising money while wondering if it was worth saving children damaged by heredity or circumstance. Her diary occasionally reflects the nastiness of her time and class: eugenics and anti-Semitism. Her actions, however, are tireless for the good of others. Religious in an orthodox yet practical sense, she sees her husband turn from following slavishly the dictates of the Orthodox Church to railing against it and eventually being excommunicated, which only made him more popular. In her diaries, Sofia perceived other hypocrisies in her husband, who in his writings condemned the blandishments of music, but was himself an excellent pianist. He understood first-hand that Beethoven's "Kreutzer Sonata" meant sexual danger. Music was among Sofia' s few independent joys. Her friendship with the composer Sergei Taneyev led to an unreasoning jealousy on Tolstoy's part and its expression in extreme form for all to read in "The Kreutzer Sonata" (I 890), in which the narrator murders his wife and cannot understand why she should mourn a dead child.

5

When Sofia's diaries were first published in English in truncated form in 1929, there was general indignation, expressed most sharply by Rebecca West. How could Tolstoy, who gave so much time to others, have turned Sofia into his servant and nurse? It was left to D. S. Mirsky, then living in London, to try to present a fuller picture of the clash of egos that was the Tolstoy marriage (his article is reprinted in his Uncollected Writings on Russian Literature, 1989). The present volume is a most welcome reissue, in revised and abridged form, of the generally literal translation by Cathy Porter first published in 1985. It uses the excellent footnotes of the Soviet edition of 1978 and has a three-page foreword by Doris Lessing, a longer and more useful one by Porter, and italicized headings to each year describing some of the turbulent events of the era. Also included are some of Sofia's well-composed and produced photographs of family and surroundings. While the decision to cut the diaries by half is undoubtedly justified, one regrets certain abridgements, which weaken the rhythm and style of the original. For example, in 190 I, when she senses, wrongly, that Tolstoy's death is imminent, Sofia writes: "Something terrible is approaching, and although everyone always expects it, it is still completely unexpected when it is truly about to happen: the end of life" . Porter renders this as: "Something frightful is drawing near, and it is death" . In addition to her diaries, Sofia was the author of petitions, children's stories and an autobiography, all of which were published and reprinted. Both she and her husband were acute observers of the people around them, but I don't think he ever wrote anything like this diary entry of September 4, 1887: "I try and try, but I cannot stretch life far enough. Every member of our family feels isolated, however friendly we may appear to be". The last few years of the marriage were famously horrible. Sofia battled not so much her husband as his proxy and acolyte-inchief, Vladimir Chertkov, whose name, as she delighted in pointing out, had the devil (chert) in it. He had returned from exile in England, bought a neighbouring estate, and taken charge of explaining Tolstoy to the world. The battle of the diaries began in earnest: Tolstoy hid his from Sofia, she searched for and found it. The children took sides. All the while the outside world pressed in, eager for a view of Tolstoy. Nursed through various illnesses by his wife, he banished her from the presence of his followers while they were having serious discussions. Just before dying, he ran away from home, to die in a railway stationmaster's cottage. Sofia lived on, dealing with what she had dealt with all her life. Her children were always a worry, one son a compulsive gambler, another abandoning his family and fleeing to America. She tended the house and the grave, which thousands visited. She survived the war, when all the peasants were conscripted and peaceful Tolstoyans were jailed. A third, post-tsarist famine affected her ability to provide, though she had been given a generous pension first by the Tsar and then by Lenin. She remembered, and kept writing, almost until the end, needing very little nursing, and worrying that the winter glazing had not been put in and the stoves hadn't been mended.

On the

Spartacus Road A Spectacular Journey through Ancient Italy

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'Beautifully written, musing and far-sighted, it's an astounding success' Literary Review

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6

Universities Sir, - Gabriel Josipovici may be right to oppose the changes being proposed by the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Sussex , but he is wrong to suppose that they would mean "the end of universities as they have been known since the Middle Ages" (Letters, January 8). In fact, universities have always changed with the times (although often with a lag). Those of the Middle Ages were closely aligned with the needs of contemporary society in that their primary purpose was to produce clergymen who could staff higher-level positions in the Church and in government. None of the schools in which the ViceChancellor is now "seeking financial savings" - Engineering and Design, English, History, Art History and Philosophy, Informatics and Life Sciences - existed in any medieval university. Departments like these were only added to universities in the nineteenth century and after. If Sussex wishes to expand its Business, Management and Economics schools at the expense of the liberal arts (and engineering), it is departing from the Victorian, not the medieval, model of the university. TlM NAU

21 East-York A venue, Toronto.

Sir, - Gabriel Josipovici is right. There should be a national debate about the future of British higher education. With all the major parties committed to serious cuts, we need to decide what kind of university system we need. These decisions should not be left only to politicians or vice-chancellors concerned primarily with saving money and communicating too often in jargon. There will be widespread cuts. The question is what should be saved and why. DA YID HERMAN 23 Crediton Hill, London NW6.

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Ariosto abridged Sir, - Doireann Lalor claims that David R. Slavitt's new translation of Orlando furioso "opens it up to a wider anglophone readership" (January 8). We may all hope that she is right; but surely she should also have mentioned that what Slavitt actually offers that readership is no more than a mutilated torso of Ariosto's poem. In his version, fourteen of the Furioso's forty-six cantos are omitted completely, while nine others are abridged. Slavitt' s publishers are similarly coy about admitting this crucial fact (though Slavitt himself defends his choice, to my mind unconvincingly, in his translator's preface). Perhaps "Slightly More

'The Brothers Karamazov' Sir, - In his article on Dostoevsky's unrealized sequel to The Brothers Karamazov (January I), in which his hero Alyosha was to play a leading role, James L. Rice rightly points out that Dostoevsky left no notes for the novel's continuation. All we have are some alleged remarks of Dostoevsky, reported by witnesses of varying reliability, according to which Alyosha would become "a Russian socialist", that he would commit "a political crime" and "be executed" . Building on these reports and his own fanciful speculations, Rice claims to discover Dostoevsky' s covert intentions and confidently predicts that in the sequel Alyosha would become a revolutionary terrorist. Nothing in the novel supports this claim. Rice has long been preoccupied with diagnosing the psychopathology of Dostoevsky and his fictional characters, drawing on a plethora of medical textbooks, psychiatric studies and psychoanalytic theories, applying their ideas to Dostoevsky' s texts and thereby distorting them to make them fit. Thus, Rice is determined to construct an image of Alyosha as "a textbook case of hysteria" , who suffers the "most severe mental affliction" of all the Karamazovs. He asserts that Dostoevsky deferred "explaining" Alyosha's "medical problems" to the sequel. Nothing would be more contrary to his art and thought than "explaining" his protagonists by their medical pathology. Rice calls Bakhtin's ideas on Dostoevsky' s art "reductive schemata". He has sent this statement to the wrong address. His whole essay is a sustained exercise in reductionism. Rice calls Dostoevsky's last novel his "greatest fiction" , but there is nothing in his arguments that would give us any clue as to what makes it a masterpiece. Does its grandeur inhere in the pathology? While there is pathology, there are also episodes of loyalty, compassion and love in which Alyosha often significantly figures. These Rice ignores. Questions of the novel's poetics are not addressed. This is partly down to Rice' s failure to engage with Dostoevsky's Christianity, which was utterly central to his life and art. But Rice, leaning on Freud, is intent on presenting Dostoevsky as a " secular thinker".

[email protected] This emerges in his attempt to undermine Zosima. He quotes Dostoevsky as saying that the elder's portrayal is "full of 'triviality' , full of 'comicality"'. Dostoevsky said " life", not Zosima, " is full of comical things" (komizma), and so he had "to touch upon even the most commonplace [poshlovatykhl aspects" in Zosima's biography for the sake of "artistic realism" . The clearest indication of where Dostoevsky would have taken his hero in the sequel lies in the novel we have. Father Zosima prophesies to his beloved novice that he will undergo many trials in his life, among which a temporary temptation by revolutionary ideas cannot be excluded, before he finally "comes back" to the monastery. Dostoevsky would hardly have so compromised his image of a wise, saintly Christian, whose mystagogy (Book Six, "The Russian Monk") he wrote with "great love" , by totally subverting his prophecy. Rice cites Nikolai Strakhov's gossip about Dostoevsky's "habitual" talk about "child molestation" and "sexual perversions", adding "sometimes even about himself', thereby insinuating that Dostoevsky had engaged in these activities. Rice's correlations of Dostoevsky' s conversation about a necrophile with I van' s accounts of child abuse and Zosima's odour of corruption are typical and without interpretive merit. Readers are best advised to consult the studies of Jacques Catteau or Joseph Frank on Dostoevsky for judicious and insightful discussions of all the issues raised by Rice.

Sir, - Like, I am sure, other readers of the TLS, I very much enjoyed the picture of Yul Brynner and Maria Schell locked in an embrace taken from a film made from Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. However, the text of which this was an illustration did not provide me with the same pleasure. It was written by James L. Rice, a scholar of Slavic literature who has done valuable work investigating the medical literature of Dostoevsky's day. Professor Rice has also persuaded himself that the clue to understanding the soaring metaphysical-religious themes of Dostoevsky ' s major works lies in linking them with the mental and physical ailments by which this great writer was afflicted. Professor Rice's erudition is enviably vast. But while it is impossible not to be impressed by its scope, an innocent reader - who has not, like myself, published five volumes on Dostoevsky's life and work - should be informed that it is employed in a highly speculative, tendentious and even reductive fashion. To take only one instance: he writes that after Dostoevsky's ten years in Siberia (where he did not, as Rice maintains, live entirely "as a convict", because six of those years were spent in the Russian army), one should not regard him as someone who underwent an "epiphany" or "conversion" as a result of these years. Let me cite in reply a letter that Dostoevsky wrote in 1857 to a woman who had laboured to ease the lot of the prisoners in the camp. "I have shaped for myself a 'Credo' '', Dostoevsky told her, "where everything is clear and sacred to me ... it is ... to believe that nothing is more perfect than Christ, and I tell myself with a jealous love not only that there is nothing but that there cannot be anything." It is true that no "conversion" occurred, because Dostoevsky had never ceased to be a Christian. But in the light of this letter, and other evidence contained in The House of the Dead, neither should he be characterized as being, as Rice puts it, only "a secular thinker of exceptional intelligence and often bawdy wit".

DlANE OENNING THOMPSON Department of Slavonic Studies, University of Cambridge, Sidgwick

JOSEPH FRANK 78 Pearce-Mitchell Plaza, Stanford,

A venue , Cambridge.

California 94305.

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than Half the Orlando furioso" wouldn't have looked good on the title page. STEYEN BOTTERILL Department of Italian Studies, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720.

The King's Bench Sir, - Even from so far away as Sydney, it can be plainly seen that the Seven Bishops were on trial, in John Rogers Herbert' s painting, as they were in reality, in the Court of King's Bench, not in the House of Com-

TLS JANUARY 22 2010

mons, where there were no trials (January 15, p 11). The question is "Why were they tried in the King's Bench and not in the House of Lords?".

1. F. Stone Sir, - James M. Murphy writes a measured review of D. D. Guttenplan's hagiographic treatment of the man who called himself I. F. Stone (January I). Thus he misses, by his very even-handedness, the central perversity of the Communist fellow travellers of the last century. Stone was a perfect exemplar of the group. Refusing to declare themselves openly Communist, yet unfailingly apologist for the Soviet regime during its darkest days, they (and he) ceaselessly denounced each and every mote of "'capitalist" society, rarely if ever noticing the beam of the Gulag. They (and he) were often genial , smooth, full of phrases that endorsed democratic values on such matters as race and peace and justice for the underprivileged. But their (and his) calculated blindness to the Gulag promoted moral disarmament vis-a-vis the dark forces of European totalitarianism, both "Left" and "Right". WERNER COHN PO Box 021591 , Brooklyn, New York 11202.

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'Rope' Sir, - In his long and thoughtful review of Roger Michell's revival of Patrick Hamilton's Rope at the Almeida (Arts, January 8), Adam Mars-Jones gives as his potentially influential example of "the obvious way to remake the play for a modern audience" - by building up the gay relationship between the two young murderers - Tom Kalin's film Swoon (1992), based on the same real-life crime that had inspired Hamilton. However, he fails to mention Keith Baxter's strikingly direct gay interpretation of the play at Wyndham ' s in 1994. This production , reviewed for the TLS by Sean French (April 29), opened with a tangle of three nude male bodies (the two murderers and their victim); later in the play, the homicidal couple, relishing their apparent triumph, almost make love on the chest in which their victim has been entombed. French concluded that the production "plausibly brings the play ' s repressed homoerotic theme to the surface" . Baxter may have taken his cue from Kalin, although he may also have decoded with ease the homosexual implications in Alfred Hitchcock's famous film adaptation of 1948.

JOHN P. BRYSON 4 Canisius Close. Pymble, New South Wales.

ALlSTAIR STEAD 124 Beckett's Park Drive, Leeds.

POLITICS

"It

is not pleasant being Arab these days" , declared Samir Kassir, a Lebanese intellectual and supporter of Rafiq Hariri, after the Prime Minister was assassinated in Beirut on February 14, 2005. Just over three months later, as if to make the point, Kassir was blown up in his Alfa Romeo. Eugene Rogan tells this story early on in his excellent book, setting its tone in two ways: it is about the Arabs in recent centuries when they had lost control of their history; it is also a story told not, for the most part, out of the archives of Western governments but by Arab voices; Rogan believes that Westerners might view Arab history differently if they saw it through Arab eyes. So Rogan's history begins not, as some notable histories of the past, for instance, those of Philip Hitti, Bernard Lewis and Albert Hourani, with the birth of the Prophet Muhammad and the five centuries of glory that followed - the time when, in Hitti's words, " around the name of the Arabs gleams that halo which belongs to world-conquerors" - but with the Ottoman conquest of Mamluk Egypt, and subsequently the rest of the Arab world, from 15 17. Ottoman rule did not change much, and therefore did not bring home the full meaning of the loss of power. The Ottomans ruled, as most empires do, in collaboration with local elites, and it is arguable that the process changed the empire more than it did Arab lives. The ambitions of some notables could come to clash with those of the empire, as did those of the Saudis of central Arabia, and their religiously puritan Wahhabi allies, who in 1802 drove northwards into Iraq, sacking the Shia shrine city of Karbala, and then in 1806 did yet further damage to Ottoman legitimacy by annexing the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Arab life under Ottoman rule in the pre-industrial era was not that harsh. All this changed as the West began to engage with the Arab world in the nineteenth century. North Africa bore the brunt initially. The starting point was Napoleon ' s invasion of Egypt in 1798 when for three years the French spoke the language of Enlightenment ideals to a bemused local population, until they were chased away by the British. But the beginning of a truly bitter engagement began when in 1830 the French invaded Algeria, seeking satisfaction after its Dey had hit their consul with a fly whisk. The war of conquest lasted seventeen years, left more than 100,000 Algerian civilians dead, and was accompanied by a major programme of French colonization. Growing awareness of European power led to programmes of self-strengthening. The most impressive was that led by Muhammad AIi and his descendants in Egypt. AIi , an Ottoman officer, rose to power in the disturbed conditions following Napoleon's departure from Egypt. He hegan a process of technological and industrial innovation, and most importantly developed a peasant army after the French model , which was able both to suppress the Wahhabis in Arabia and win victories over Ottoman armies as far north as Anatolia. His successors tried to develop the economy further by making concessions to Western business, of which the Suez Canal, built by a French company, was the greatest. The problem was that the costs of selfstrengthening made these Arab regimes bankrupt, placing them in the hands of European bankers. The last thirty years before the First

In reverse FRANCIS ROBINS ON Eugene Rogan THE ARABS A history 553pp. Alien Lane. £25. 9780713999037 World War saw the European powers partitioning the Arab lands of North Africa among themselves, the French adding Tunisia (1881) and Morocco (1912) to Algeria, the Italians taking Libya (1912), and the British Egypt (1882), where the Suez Canal had become a vital imperial lifeline. Events, during and immediately after the First World War, suggested that Arab fortunes might be about to change. British and Arab forces united to drive out the Ottomans. In 1918, the British and French announced their support for the creation of national governments in Arab lands through a process of "self-determination". This was in the context, moreover, of President Wilson ' s Fourteen Points, of which the twelfth assured the Arabs of "an absolutely unmolested opportunity of autonomous development". There

in Iraq. This Arab land as a mandate, along with Transjordan and Palestine, was added to the British Empire. "The Arabs", Rogan reminds us, "were never reconciled to this fundamental injustice." It is a recurring theme in the speeches of Osama bin Laden. The Arabs' experience of European empire between the World Wars only gave them further reasons for bitterness. In 1925, for instance, the French, in trying to impose their will on Damascus, shelled the city for three days, killing 1,500 people and destroying many of the city's finest houses. The British found themselves in a totally hopeless situation in Palestine, where they had undertaken in their mandate to support the development of a Jewish homeland without interfering with the rights of the Palestinians. Eventually the contradictions of this arrangement led to the Arab revolt of 1937-9, which the British suppressed so ruthlessly that 10 per cent of the adult males were either killed, wounded, imprisoned or exiled. The Nazi genocide of the Jews in Europe gave an extra push to the Zionist cause and the emergence of Israel out of the mandate in Palestine, a process known to the Arabs as al-Nakba, the disaster. In 1947, the Palestini-

The Algerian Army of Liberation parading along the Boulevard Carnot, Algiers, July 1962 were high hopes of a brave new Arab world. Then the French and the British, following their secret wartime Sykes-Picot agreement, decided that their imperial interests were more important than Arab freedom. In 1920, French colonial troops, many of them North African Arabs, drove the Arab nationalists out of Damascus, and so after they had been dressed up with the decency of mandates Syria and the Lebanon were added to the French possessions in North Africa. In the same year, the British used LOO,OOO of their colonial troops to squash a national uprising

ans numbered 1.2 million as compared with 600,000 Jews ; they owned 94 per cent of the land. It was not surprising that they rejected the UN partition resolution which gave them only half of their country. There followed a war between the Palestinians and the Jews, which saw 200,000-300,000 Palestinians driven, one way or another, from their homes. After the British left in 1948, war between the surrounding Arab states and the Zionists left Israel established with 78 per cent of the original mandate territory and 750,000 Palestinian refugees. Immediately, the defeat

TLS JANUARY 22 2010

7 sparked coups, assassinations and a revolution in the four Arab states surrounding Israel. It also meant the end of serious British influence in the region. The legacy was an enduring Arab sense of injustice. The background of the Palestine disaster, and the long history of Arab impotence, helps to explain the fervour which met the Egyptian revolution of 1952 and the subsequent rise of Nasser as the hero of the Arab world. His defiance of the British, culminating in his successful resistance to what the Arabs call the "Tripartite Aggression" but the British call the "Suez Crisis", cemented his position. Nasser' s prominence came to a peak when the United Arab Republic was formed in 1958 from the union of Egypt and Syria, which sent shockwaves through Arab capitals. "For one brief heady moment", Rogan tells us, "it looked as though the Arab world might break the cycle of foreign domination that had marked the Ottoman, imperial and Cold War eras to enjoy an age of true independence." But, as so often in modern Arab affairs, it was a false dawn. In 1961 , the United Arab Republic broke up. Nasser had been warned by a former Syrian president that Syrians were difficult to govern: "fifty percent consider themselves leaders, twenty-five percent prophets, and ten percent imagine they are God". And so it proved. As Arab states took sides in the Cold War during the 1960s, dreams of Arab unity faded. Arab troubles continued. In 1962, Algerian independence was won from France, but only at the cost of a million Algerian lives. Then there was the disaster, termed by Nasser aL-Naksa , "the reversal", of the comprehensive defeat of Syria, Jordan and Egypt by Israel in the Six Day War of 1967. Control of the West Bank, the last significant piece of former mandate Palestine, which might form a Palestinian state, was lost to Israel. The Palestinians now realized that they could no longer rely on Arab rulers to promote their interests, but must take their fate in their own hands. This era of Arab hope was brought to an end by the death of Nasser in 1970, which produced an extraordinary outpouring of grief, in which Arabs certainly wept for "the Lion", but also for themselves. The 1970s saw two new players make a major impression on Arab politics. The first was oil. By this time, the Arab states were the dominant producers in the world. This was a mixed blessing. On the one hand, oil wealth made them vulnerable and distorted development, but on the other hand it gave them , if they operated in unison, a weapon. The power of this weapon was demonstrated in the Yam Kippur War of 1973, when Arab action to quadruple the price of oil put pressure on Western governments to try to end the war while Egypt still had military gains. Not all Arahs regarded Anwar Sadat of Egypt's military campaign as a success, but more had been achieved than ever before by Arab arms against Israel; the Egyptians recaptured the east bank of the Canal and the Syrians a piece of the Golan Heights. The second new player was Islam. Arabs had been preparing for its political role from the foundation of the (Islamist) Muslim Brotherhood in the 1920s. The decline of Arab nationalism created the vacuum into which it was able to insert itself. The Iranian Revolution of 1978-9, in which Islamist forces helped to topple an American-backed

POLITICS

8 autocrat, sent a powerful signal. This was followed in November 1979 by the capture of the Great Mosque in Mecca by Islamist forces which threatened the Saudi state; in October 1981 by the assassination of President Sadat by a splinter group of the Muslim Brotherhood; and in 1981-2 by a brutal war between the Muslim Brotherhood and the government of Hafiz al-Asad in Syria. The Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, to drive out the PLO, created the conditions for the emergence of the Shia Islamist party, Hizbullah - a much more determined enemy. Through the 1980s, the Afghan jihad against the Russians, in which many Arabs participated, exercised a considerable influence; many jihadis returned determined to fashion an ideal Islamic order in their countries. December 1987 saw the beginning of the first Palestinian intifada against Israel, in which over one year 626 Palestinians were killed, 37,000 injured and 35,000 imprisoned. In this context, Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement, emerged out of the Muslim Brotherhood and quickly showed itself to be better organized and less corrupt than the secular PLO. By now Islamist values were coming to be expressed in Arab public space, which had once been strikingly secular, as young men wore beards and young women headscarves.

The end of the Cold War created a new context for Arab lives: but not a better one. The US was now the hegemonic power in Arab lands. Arabs quickly discovered what this meant when Saddam Hussein's occupation of Kuwait in 1990 was met by an assault on Iraq by the USA and its allies which left thousands of civilians dead. Arab states were evenly divided over the action, but for most ordinary Arabs it was another example of heartless Western imperialism. Their views were not changed by the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq of 2003, which was undertaken for specious reasons and which by 2009, according to the Iraqi government, had led to 150,000 civilian deaths. American hegemony also meant that its client, Israel , seemed to have a freer hand to bring misery to its Arab neighbours. In 1996, in the context of Hizbullah attacks on Israeli positions in southern Lebanon and missile attacks on northern Israel , Israel launched its Grapes of Wrath operation, which left 400,000 Lebanese displaced and much infrastructure destroyed. In 2006, Israel, irritated by a Hizbullah raid across its northern frontier, attacked again, destroying much of South Beirut, more infrastructure, and leaving a million Lebanese displaced. In January 2009, after a six-month ceasefire had led to no relaxation of Israel's control over Gaza's

frontier, Hamas began to fire rockets. Israel responded with a two-week assault on this densely populated enclave, targeting UN agencies, hospitals, schools and residential areas. An estimated $1.4 billion of damage was inflicted, 1,300 Palestinians were killed, and 5,100 wounded. There were thirteen Israeli dead and eight wounded. Let us repeat Samir Kassir's words: "it's not pleasant being Arab these days" . By their actions, moreover, the West and its clients have shown themselves largely indifferent to Arab suffering. It is hardly surprising that Arabs, and Muslims elsewhere in the world, danced in the streets at the news of the 9/11 assault on the USA. As little has changed since 200 I, it is to be expected that, if there were a similar assault today, the Arab response would be much the same. Eugene Rogan has written an authoritative and wide-ranging history. The text is easy to read, with useful summaries at the end of each chapter. Moreover, distinctive Arab voices make themselves heard, whether it be a Damascus barber commenting on the weakening of Ottoman authority, an Egyptian scholar noting the injustice of the British response to the Dinshaway incident, or the courageous resistance of Fatiha Bouhired and her twenty-two-year-old niece, Djamila, in the Battle of Algiers.

Furthermore, in a context where partisanship is the norm, Rogan is even-handed. Yes, we are told about the unprovoked attack by Jewish forces on the Arab village of Dayr Yasin on April 9, 1948, which left 250 villagers dead. But this is immediately balanced by an account of a Palestinian attack on a Jewish medical convoy in Jerusalem in which seventy-six Jews were killed. Rogan is meticulous in giving the numbers of Arabs killed and wounded by Western and Israeli action in Arab lands. But he also makes clear the brutal ways of the Arabs with each other: Hafiz al-Asad ' s levelling of the city of Hama as he tried to suppress the Muslim Brotherhood, Saddam Hussein ' s ruthless action against the Shias who rose against him after the first Gulf War, and the 100,000-200,000 killed in the fifteen years of Lebanon ' s civil war.

There is a school of thought which argues that, if Arabs have had a miserable time in recent centuries, it is largely their fault. There may be some truth in this. But Rogan makes it clear that the West has much to answer for. He also makes it clear that Arab societies, as opposed to their rulers, are increasingly finding the answer to their problems in political Islam. "In a free and fair election in the Arab world today", he declares, "I believe the Islamists would win hands down."

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When Hindu met Muslim bjects of Translation, by a respected young associate professor at New York University, is an extraordinarily uneven work. Its coverage of neglected areas is invaluable and its discussions often highly intelligent and original. Yet it descends at regular intervals into vagaries of debased semiotics. The formation of early Muslim kingdoms in Afghanistan and India, between the eighth and eleventh centuries, has rarely been previously considered. What tends to be spoken of as the "Muslim conquest of India" was a diverse series of events over five centuries and includes the Arab conquest of Sind, the Persian invasions of Afghanistan, and the territorial expansions of Ghaznavid Turks and Persianized Ghurids. As Finbarr B. Flood comments, these were "multiple, protean and highly contested", but he succeeds in giving a very clear outline of these entanglements. His intention is to look at "the shifting narratives through which new meanings are constructed", especially by the incorporation of such objects as architectural spolia and regalia into Muslim settings, including

began as early as the late seventh century. Within the unstable zones established by the early rulers, it is difficult to distinguish between gifts, taxes and tributes. There was clearly an interest in religious practices which went beyond the dispatch of booty to Baghdad and Mecca: al-Biruni described Indian religions in the eleventh century, and the Caliph al-Muizz specifically asked to be sent the head of an idol. These complexities are well brought out, though to view looting as "engaging with discourses" seems a ""discourse" too far - the conversation was pretty one-sided. The combination of cultures produced effects which Flood is perhaps too ready to

royal insignia such as parasols and hanners.

call "translation", with its implications of

Flood includes material rarely evidenced in cultural discussion such as coinage with legends in both Sanskrit and Arabic, clearly indicative of the polyglot nature of frontier towns. Clothing and "cross-dressing", especially the donning of Muslim dress by Hindu citizens or subordinate rulers, with connotations of the significance of the person of the ruler, body odours and all , is another valuable element. To early invaders, India was a land of wonders and a source of wealth: the remittance of booty or tributes back to the Caliphs

the translator' s understanding of the original. Sometimes they were perhaps merely unknowing incorporations or adaptations, and there is little point in speculating whether the rulers or the population were, as Flood has it, "doxy-minded" or "doxy-nalve". We simply don't have the evidence. Here lies one of the major problems of this book: Flood's extensive research has produced excellent accounts of cross-cultural events, but there is rarely much evidence of transmission of meaning. A primary rule of semiotic interpretation, that a sign should

O

JANE JAKEMAN

Finbarr B. Flood OBJECTS OF TRANSLATION Material culture and medieval "Hindu- Mu slim" encounter

424pp. Princeton University Press.

£26.95 (US $45). 9780 691 12594 7

have an interpretant, is often abandoned, or rather, Flood himself is frequently the sole interpretant. In his discussion of frescoes in Ladakh, for instance, he claims that the pseudo-Arabic tiraz armband worn by a royal rider provides confirmation of the "self-fashioning" of Ladakh elites to an Islamic model. But the fresco shows the rider traversing a battlefield strewn with skulls and crows: is this an "Islamic model" of victory or defeat? We need contextual interpretation. As for the claim that the adoption of Muslim dress indicated the "desire for legibility or visibility within the dominant modes of articulating authority" , was it not just as probable that Hindus in Muslim territory made themselves inconspicuous by wearing local garments, like the supporters of a visiting football team swapping jerseys? The term "self-fashioning" occurs frequently, and indicates another problem with Flood's analyses: the intentionalist fallacy is rampant, particularly in his adoption of the fashionable term "program" in reference to epigraphy. It cannot be said too clearly that evidence for a program must exist independently of the finished work: who knows what changes were wrought between concept and achievement? To collapse the whole question into the portmanteau "program" is to glide over the difficult question of whose decisions were paramount - patron, adviser or epigrapher? The Ghurid minaret at Jam, between Kabul and Herat, has an entire sura of the Qur'an, describing the birth of Jesus, inscribed around it. Flood identifies a decorative element, most unusually, as a mihrab or indication of the direction of Mecca. He has an excellent account of the beliefs of local Muslim sectarians, but argues speculatively

TLS JANUARY 22 2010

that the "program" has been arranged so that a particular verse dealing with the nature of Jesus falls over the mihrab, and is thereby emphasized. But was this deliberate? Again , in a discussion of removal of figural motifs from Hindu material incorporated in Muslim architecture, where some figures were carefully excised and others bashed off, Flood claims that "we are dealing with an orchestrated program of transformation" . But the alterations might have occurred at different dates and through different agencies. Smashing up images within reach can hardly be claimed as a "hierarchization of space". More assumptions occur in his discussion of lamp imagery, which he associates with the mihrab, though there is actually far more evidence that the image of a lamp in a niche indicates a Sufi tomb, the lamp signifying the light of prophecy. Flood sees lotus flowers depicted in arches as substituted by Hindu craftsmen for Muslim lamps. Possibly, but a simple mistaken substitution is not a "relexicalization", which implies a whole series of shifts. There is an extremely interesting discussion of an iron pillar originally dedicated to a temple of Vishnu and re-erected in the courtyard of the Qutb Mosque in Delhi by Sultan lltutmish, who appeared to be continuing a triumphalist practice of Indian kings. Yet again, we have too sweeping a conclusion: that this is a legitimating "construction

of fictive continuities". But what evidence is there that the contemporary Muslim audience understood the implications? The sequential nature of language and its "unit for unit" potential for translation make the vocabulary of semiotics inadequate for such paratactic momentary encounters of fragmented cultural history, no matter what has been claimed for "the science of signs" . When Finbarr Flood forgets about it, he writes with excellent clarity and wit. As a rising star in the field of Islamic art, he can afford to junk the jargon.

BIOGRAPHY

9

Wine, women and piety he life of Maimonides spans the Arabic-speaking Mediterranean lands of the twelfth century, and it is a life full of incident: flight from Spain to Morocco in a time of religious intolerance, and further journeys to Palestine and, finally , to Egypt. Thanks to his voluminous writings, including letters, legal responsa and successive drafts of his books, besides abundant references in Jewish and Muslim sources, we are better informed about his life and thought than about any comparable figure of his age. And yet the image that emerges from all these sources is perplexingly enigmatic and at times contradictory, and puzzles remain about quite basic facts of his life (such as the date of his birth or of his marriage). Here are some firm data: Maimonides was born in 1137 or 1138 - the commonly cited date of 1135 is wrong - and he lived for a while in Fez and briefly in Acre before settling in Egypt in the mid-1160s. It was here that he completed his commentary on the Mishnah (the codification of Jewish law) and wrote the other great works for which he is chiefly remembered today, the Mishneh Torah (a digest of rabbinic law containing a good deal of ethical and theological teaching as well) and the Guide for the Perplexed, a classic work of philosophical theology. Most of his works were written in Arabic, but the Mishneh Torah is couched in simple, clear Hebrew. The Guide was translated in the early thirteenth century into Hebrew and a little later into Latin (it influenced Thomas Aquinas, Albert the Great and other Christian scholastics). He wrote many other works (the exact number of his writings, extant and lost, is not known for certain): medical treatises, as well as rabbinic commentaries and numerous legal opinions. In Egypt he had success as a rabbi and jurist, medical practitioner and religious philosopher. It was a busy but satisfying life marred by the tragic death at sea of his brother, which left him (he says) bedridden with grief and sickness for almost a year. His fame spread far beyond the Jewish community of Egypt. He died in 1204. Beyond these basic facts the biographer must rely on inference, intuition or, as too often in Joel L. Kraemer's book, creative imagination. We do not know, for example, when or why the Maimon family settled in Fez, and whether they lived openly as Jews or nominally converted to Islam; we do not know how many times Maimonides was married, and whether he had other children besides his only son Abraham, whom he fathered in his late forties. Nor is it easy to

T

determine whether this man who was held in

enormous esteem by the Jews of Egypt held an official position in the community. The interpretation of his beliefs and teachings has given rise to enormous controversy down the ages. Views have been attributed to him that he certainly did not hold, and great uncertainty exists about some of his ideas. Leo Strauss, the University of Chicago political philosopher who became a guru of the neocon movement, argued that the Guide (a work that certainly demands careful reading and does not carry all of its message on the surface) is written in code, so as to conceal the true ker-

NICHOLAS DE LANGE

JoeJ L. Kraemer MAIMONlDES The life and world of one of civilization's greatest minds 628pp. Doubleday. £21.85 (US $35). 9780385 51 199 5

nel of its message from the uninitiated. Since some observers place Strauss's reading of the Guide at the heart of his influence on the political climate in Washington, that reading itself has become deeply controversial. No new biography of Maimonides can escape comparison with the magisterial work by Herbert A. Davidson, Moses Maimonides: The man and his works (2005). Davidson's study, a model of sober scholarship, sets out in orderly fashion the known facts ofMaimonides' s life, subjecting both life and writings to a careful and mildly sceptical scrutiny. So thorough and complete is his monograph that it is reasonable to wonder why anyone would want to write another book in English covering the same ground so soon afterwards. Part of the answer is that Joel Kraemer, like Davidson a senior scholar who has devoted most of his career to the study of Maimonides,

makes full use of his imaginative faculty: "Moses ben Maimon lived a few minutes away from one of the grandest mosques in the entire Islamic world. We can picture him standing before the edifice, overwhelmed by its vastness, peering at the arcades and multiple rows of high double horseshoe arches, sensing its allure and mystery". He shares his reader's surprise at his revelations: "We find it astonishing that rabbis combined wine, women and song with learning and piety" . He takes particular trouble to explain the medieval background, assuming no knowledge: "The Christians in the north [of Spain] were never reconciled to Muslim rule". These devices, particularly prominent in the historical introduction but found throughout the book, are no doubt intended to maximize the readership. Kraemer's outlook is very different from Davidson's. Like Strauss before him , he is keen to draw contemporary lessons from the life of Maimonides: "The Almohads, in their fanaticism, puritanism, and visions of world domination, call to mind present-day expressions of militant Islam". Kraemer uses the term "Arab" as a synonym for "Muslim": while not explicitly denying that Jews like Maimonides lived within an Arab society and spoke and wrote in Arabic , he contrives to

"Savants at the Table of Maim on ides"; a coloured lithograph from a Passover Haggadah (Hungarian School, twentieth century) began to write his book before Davidson published his. A sketch of Kraemer's book, using many of the same phrases, constitutes his contribution to The Cambridge Companion to Maimonides, edited by Kenneth Seeskin, which also appeared in 2005. Kraemer may also feel that his book reaches out to a wider public than Davidson's. He tries harder than his precursor to be intelligible to the general reader. He employs strong and highly coloured language: "Maimonides lived in tumultuous times, in a maelstrom of earthshaking events, when the clash of civilizations between Christianity and Islam was at a point of incandescent intensity". Purple passages abound. As mentioned , he

portray him as not really an Arab. He is unhappy with the current portrait of medieval Spain as a place of tolerance and openmindedness, suggesting that the so-called convivencia "was mainly an economic and cultural coexistence, accompanied by competition, mistrust, and hostility". The Jews are said to have "faced a concrete danger of physical and spiritual extinction". It is in keeping with this distinctive outlook that Kraemer disagrees fundamentally with Davidson on the question of Maimonides's conversion to Islam. Davidson portrays Almohad rule as harsh and arbitrary, but marshals examples of Jews living openly as Jews, and emphasizes the lack of evidence

TLS JANUARY 22 2010

for a conversion. On the contrary, he maintains, there is no evidence that the Maimon family was touched in any way by the Almohad religious persecutions. Kraemer's portrait of Almohad rule is much more uncompromising: he dwells on accounts of purges and mass killings, and gives greater credence to sources that support the case for accepting Maimonides's conversion than to the counter-evidence. Whereas Davidson is outspokenly critical of Strauss' s reading of the Guide, Kraemer' s position remains inherently Straussian. He writes warmly of his discovery of Strauss's book Persecution and the Art of Writing, and says of Maimonides: "His was a life of ambivalence, concealment, and inscrutable mystery". Perhaps a concern to redress the balance constitutes a further motive for the publication of Kraemer's book. A striking difference between the two biographers concerns the list of Maimonides' s genuine works. Davidson, a cautiously critical scholar, raises doubts about or rejects outright eleven writings that have been attributed to Maimonides. Kraemer accepts five of these as genuine, and cites them in support of his arguments; the other six he tacitly ignores. In no case does he engage with the doubts expressed about their authenticity, which is surprising considering that elsewhere, for example in reviewing the arguments about Maimonides's conversion, he subjects the sources to sustained critical scrutiny. Few people know the subject as Joel Kraemer does. His intimate familiarity with Maimonides's writings is evident throughout his book. It is an easy and enjoyable book to read (which is something rare in Maimonidean studies). It is all the more disappointing, then, to discover a study that, for all its erudition, is often uncritical and superficial, and compares unfavourably with that of Davidson. The historical introduction is sensational and historically unsophisticated, and contains many contradictions and inaccuracies. The writings are discussed in chronological order, so as to shed light on the life, but the effect is to preclude serious discussion of Maimonides's thought as a whole. The medical writings are added at the end, almost as an afterthought. Curiously, although the book is avowedly addressed to a wide non-specialist public, it contains a formidable apparatus of well over a hundred pages of endnotes: this implies a confusion about the intended readership. Two features make them even harder to use: they are arranged by chapter, with no running heads relating them to the pages they refer to, and they use abbreviated titles, which are virtually useless in the absence of a bibliography. (A prefatory note directs readers to a website that supposedly gives bibliographical information: I was unable to access the URL, which does not appear to exist). The title page claims that it is concerned with "one of civilization's greatest minds". Many would agree with that claim. Strangely, however, Kraemer does not take the trouble to substantiate it, by an assessment of Maimonides's greatness, or an account of his influence on subsequent thinkers.

BIOGRAPHY

10

The Queen Mother in Holkham, Norfolk, 1982

It's Her Majesty! ir John Wheeler-Bennett, the biographer of George VI, once remarked that royal biography, like matrimony, was an enterprise "not to be entered into inadvisedly or lightly; but reverently, discreetly, advisedly, soberly and in the fear of God". Writing the official life of the much-loved mother of the reigning monarch cannot have been easy. William Shawcross was given privileged access to the Queen Mother's archive. Her letters are never dull , often witty and always to the point - but, as her authorized biographer, Shawcross has had to pull his punches. He is unfashionably deferential, and makes a point of referring to his subject by her correct title. This has an oddly distancing effect. It undercuts the tension which, as Shawcross says, lies at the heart of royal biography: the story of how an ordinary person adjusts to an extraordinary position. The Queen Mother's life was certainly extraordinary. Born Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, she was the ninth child of the 14th Earl of Strathmore, a Scottish aristocrat who was not especially close to the Court. Her childhood, according to Shawcross, was "blissful" and sunny. But there are hints that it was both darker and more interesting. Four of her brothers fought in the First World War, one was killed, and Elizabeth 's adolescence was shadowed hy the trauma of war. Her two mentally ill nieces , committed to an institution as children, are mentioned only briefly in a footnote. As a debutante in London after the war, she was an instant success. Her letters from this period, written in a mixture of mock cockney and P. G. Wodehouse, show her to have been funny and flirtatious , and a gifted mimic. Shawcross's account makes it clear that Elizabeth was not in love with her future husband Albert (Bertie), Duke of York, the second son of George V. He was tongue-tied and neurotic, but he was determined to marry

S

JANE RIDLEY William Shawcross QUEEN ELIZABETH The Queen Mother I ,096pp. Pan Macmillan. £25. 978 I 405048590

her, and eventuall y she agreed. "I feel terrified now I've done it", she wrote, and with good reason. George V was an ogre, and he bullied the unfortunate Bertie, who was unable to stand up to his father's rages. But Elizabeth had no fear of the King and, as Shawcross confirms, she transformed Bertie. She helped him to control his own temper and partly to overcome his disabling stammer. She quickly forged a strong relationship with her mother-in-law, the shy, frigid Queen Mary. The King had a soft spot for her. He was a stickler for punctuality but Elizabeth was allowed to be late. "Ah, but if she weren't late", he said, "she would be perfect, and how horrible that would be." Elizabeth made a far better fist of motherhood than Queen Mary. She loved children and she later regretted having only two - why she had no more is a matter which Shawcross does not consider. Uneducated herself, she was indifferent to her daughters' education. As Shawcross shows, she was not supportive of Marion Crawford, her daughters' governess, and Princess Margaret regretted her own inadequate education. Paradoxically, Elizabeth's success in providing her husband with the normal family life he craved qualified him for the thing he most dreaded: succeeding his brother Edward VIII after the abdication. Elizabeth has sometimes been blamed for the deterioration of relations between the two brothers, but Shawcross insists that this was not her fault. The new King and Queen worried that they could

never replace the glamorous and popular Edward VIII. It was because she feared that he would eclipse her emotionally insecure husband that Elizabeth refused the request from the Duke of Windsor (as Edward became) to return to England. The war was the Queen Mother's finest hour. She refused to evacuate the princesses from Windsor, famously remarking that, "The children could not go without me, I could not possibly leave the King, and the King would never go" . She practised revolver shooting in the mornings and, wearing startling pink outfits designed by Norman Hartnell, she visited London 's bomb-damaged East End. She found these trips upsetting, but they certainly raised morale. When the war ended, the prestige of the monarchy was higher than it had been for a generation. George VI died aged fifty-six, worn out by the stresses of war. Lung cancer killed him, but Shawcross skirts over the matter of his smoking. The Queen Mother was always guarded about family issues. There was an invisible line, which you crossed at your peril. Shawcross is careful to observe this line, perhaps too careful. Whether the Queen Mother resented Louis Mountbatten 's pushiness over his nephew Philip's engagement to her daughter Elizabeth, for example, is one of the questions that Shawcross ducks. Shawcross gives an affectionate account of the Queen Mother's half-century of widowhood. At Clarence House the horse-racing widow installed a bookmaker's loudspeaker system to relay the results from racecourses around the country. There are quantities of booze in this section, and ample evidence of the talent of "Cake", as the Duchess of Devonshire called her, to make a party go. It is hard to resist a frail old lady who could remark, "Wouldn't it be terrible if you'd spent all your life doing everything you were supposed to, didn't drink, didn't smoke,

TLS JANUARY 22 2010

didn't eat things, took lots of exercise ... and suddenly one day you were run over by a big red bus ... you'd say, ' Oh my God I could have got so drunk last night! '''. Even at ninety-five that was her philosophy of life. Every morning the Queen Mother telephoned the Queen. " Your Majesty I have Her Majesty on the line", the Buckingham Palace receptionist would say. Much oftheir conversation was about race horses, but the Queen relied on her mother's support at times of family crisis. Shawcross does not speculate, but it is evident that this relationship was crucial to the matriarchy which the monarchy had become once more, after fifty years of chain-smoking Kings. Exactly what role the Queen Mother played over the divorce of Prince Charles and Diana will never be known. Much of the correspondence was destroyed by Princess Margaret, who sorted out her mother's letters, which she was in the habit of keeping in black bags and shopping baskets. But the Queen Mother's refusal to confront unpleasantness, which grew more pronounced in old age, makes it unlikely that she played a central part. The book is almost obese at over 1,100 pages. At times, Shawcross seems to be writing the history of the twentieth century through the Queen Mother, whose life does indeed span the entire century. This might he justified in the case of a figure such as Churchill, but the Queen Mother is not Winston Churchill. Shawcross's editor has done him a disservice by failing to cut the wearisome passages of potted history. There are too many charities, too many official engagements and endless royal tours abroad. But Shawcross gives a rich, authoritative and valuable account of the twentieth-century monarchy, and his book will be quoted by historians for years to come. What it lacks is grit in the oyster. Which is a shame, as the Queen Mother was grittier (and wittier) than most.

PHILOSOPHY he word "self' has a venerable pedigree reaching back to the tenth century. It was employed as a pronoun and pronominal adjective (akin to ipse) that evolved into "itself' or "the thing itself'. Together with a personal pronoun (as in "le sylf' and "he sylfa") it evolved into the reflexive pronouns myself, himself, herself. With the possessive genitive, as in "her self visage", it became equivalent in such contexts to "own" ("her own visage"). Used as an adjective, as in "this self knyght that" it became "same", and from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries "one self' had a use to mean "one and the same", which still survives in the phrase "the self same thing". The use of "self' as a noun originated in early Middle English, when "self', preceded by a possessive pronoun, began to be taken as a neuter noun governing the preceding genitive, rather than as a pronominal adjective in concord with it. So there was a natural drift from uses emphasizing identity or indicating pronominal reflexivity towards an independent nominal signifying "person". By the eighteenth century, "self' was also used to signify what a person is at a particular time, hence one's nature, character, physical constitution or appearance considered as different at different times. So we talk of our former self, one' s later self, and of being or looking one' s old self after illness. Concurrently with this diachronic use, the term was extended to signify a set of synchronic dispositions in potential conflict with each other within a human being - hence one's sinful self, one's natural self, one' s lowest self and one's best self. And from this it was further extended to one's selfish and self-interested drives, and also to what are the most fundamental characteristics of a person, as in "one' s true self'. All this was (relatively) harmless. To the misfortune of all, however, this generally inoffensive four-letter word fell into the hands of philosophers. Disaster ensued in the form of conceptual muddles and mysteries with almost irresistible charm. The major culprit, who sowed confusion that persists to the present day, was Locke in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690):

T

In one's head PETER HACKER Galen Strawson SELVES An essay in revisionary metaphysics

452pp. Oxford University Press. £32.50 (US $60). 9780 19 8250067 ceed each other with inconceivable rapidity" . To this Thomas Reid indignantly replied that "Whatever this self may be, it is something which thinks, and deliberates, and resolves, and acts and suffers. I am not thought, I am not action, I am not feeling ; I am something that thinks, and acts and suffers". So the self is a something we know not what, which resides within us but is distinct from our body, is the subject of our experiences, the agent of our actions and persists over time. The confusion is exemplary. It has dogged

problems, like childhood diseases, emerge again in each generation. And each generation must struggle with them by itself. For while knowledge can be transmitted from one generation to another, understanding is something that has to be won afresh. And philosophy is concerned with the achievement of understanding, not with the augmentation of knowledge. In his new book Selves: An essay in revisionary metaphysics, Galen Strawson offers a comprehensive defence of the notion and existence of selves. If one is given to the phenomenological methods of philosophizing, and taken by what is currently deemed to be metaphysics, one will welcome this spirited defence. It is as detailed and exhaustive a defence of a philosophical notion of a self as anyone could wish for. But those who find phenomenology at best no more than raw material for philosophical analysis, and at worst the articulation of conceptual confu-

everyone is to himself that which he

caBs self . ... For ... Consciousness always accompanies thinking, and 'ris that, that makes

everyone to be, what he calls self; and thereby distinguishes himself from other thinking beings .... it is by the consciousness it has of its previous Thoughts and Actions, that it is self to it self now, and so will be the same self

as far as the same consciousness can extend to actions past or to come.

"Self' rapidly sprouted definite and indefinite articles, and singular and plural forms. It was conceived to be the subject of experience, the possessor of experience and the core of the identity of a person. Indeed , it was supposedly the reference of the first person pronoun "I" . It was the self, thus conceived as an object of introspection, that Hume famously failed to find: "When I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other. I can never catch myself at any time without a perception, and can never observe anything but a perception". So Hume denied that there is any such inner object. Rather, he insisted, what we so misguidedly think of as a self is "nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions which suc-

"Row of Figures" by lan Fairweather, c 1970-71; from F airweather by Murray Bail (280pp. Sydney: Murdoch Books. Aus $125; £50. 9781 74196 356 4) philosophy for the past three centuries. The patient disentangling of the logico-grammatical muddles that make up the problems of the self was undertaken by various twentiethcentury analytic philosophers, such as Ludwig Wittgenstein , Gilhert Ryle, Peter Strawson, Elizabeth Anscombe and Anthony Kenny. In their view, it is a battery of confusions that rests on misconceptions about the use of the personal pronoun "I" and reflexive personal pronouns, on misunderstandings of the logical features of self-ascription of experience, on misconstruals of experiential predicates, of self-knowledge and of selfconsciousness. Their analyses were profound, and for a generation little more was heard about selves. Indeed, one might innocently have thought that the problem of the self would fade away. But the same philosophical

sions, will find much to quarrel with here. Those who hold that revisionary metaphysics in fact always involves paradox and perplexities and often rudimentary mistakes, will have good cause to examine Selves with great care.

According to Professor Strawson, the source of the problem is ordinary experience. Many believe that there is such a thing as a self distinct from the human being. They do so because they have a feeling that corresponds to the pronoun "I" - this experience being what Strawson calls "self-experience". Self-experience is a cognitive phenomenological term. What it signifies is fundamental to the daily experience of all human beings from childhood. It is the experience of oneself as an inner locus of consciousness, something that is essentially not the same

TLS JANUARY 22 2010

11 thing as the human being one is, but rather a specifically mental presence, a mental someone, a mental something that is a conscious subject .... The sense of oneself as an inner conscious presence, the early realization of the fact that one's thoughts are unobservable by others, the experience of the profound sense in which one is alone in one's head or mind, the experience of oneself as experiencing, as

having a "palpitating inward life" - these aspects of self-experience are among the deepest facts about human existence.

The task of cognitive phenomenological analysis is to extract the core content "of the non-sense-feeling experience structuring element SELF". The first half of the book is dedicated to this. In Strawson's view, the self is naturally conceived as having eight aspects: it is a subject of experience, a thing, single, persistent, mental , an agent, distinct from the human being as a whole, and has a personality. On analysis, however, four of these features are inessential , namely: persistence, agency, personality and distinctness. For the notion of the self, he argues, essentially has only four core elements: subject, thing, mental, single and their complex product: a subject of experience-as-single-mental-thing, for which Strawson coins the acronym "sesmet". For the subject of experience need persist only as long as the experience of which it is the subject persists. Agency is dismissed as inessential on the grounds that Strawson "can find no incoherence in the idea of a Pure Observer, a motionless, cognitively wellequipped, highly receptive, self-conscious, rational , subtle creature that is well informed about its surroundings" even though it lacks the conception of the possibility of, and capacity for, intentional action. (Stuart Hampshire, in his book Thought and Action, spent tens of pages showing the incoherence of this idea, and his arguments surely deserve scrutiny.) Personality is inessential , since the bare experience of a subject need involve no experience of any particular personality. And distinctness is rejected on the grounds that the self may well be (and is argued to be) a part (indeed a cortical part) of a human being. "Sesmets", Strawson holds, are selves. The sesmet properties enumerated are not themselves phenomenological thought elements, but metaphysically real properties. So far phenomenological analysis, which is supposed to demonstrate the coherence of the idea (or "thought-element") of a self, but not to prove the existence of anything answering to it. Strawson does not spend much time examining the arguments of analytic philosophers who held this conception of a self to be incoherent. Ryle's careful anatomization of the systematic elusiveness of "I" is dismissed with the words: "If Ryle had spent a little more time on disciplined, unprejudiced introspection or had tried meditation ... [he] might have found that it's really not very difficult ... for the subject of experience to be aware in the present moment of itself-

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12 in-the-present-moment". Ryle might have responded that the illusion of experiencing an inner subject of experience is indeed easy to generate - just empty your mind of all thought and repeat the first-person pronoun to yourself a hundred times with eyes shut. But that does not render it any the less illusory, or the idea of a "mental someone", a "'mental presence" and a "'mental something

that is conscious" any the less incoherent. And he would surely have remonstrated that while one may be lonely, there is no such thing as being alone " in one's head" or as having company "in one' s head" (although one may indeed "hear voices in one' s head"). Kenny argued that the idea of "a self' is an illusion one root of which lies in a misconstrual of the use of the first-person pronoun and reflexive pronouns. Strawson dismisses his argument (less than fairly represented) as "worthless" on the ground that appeal to the ordinary use of "I" to index the speaker is totally inappropriate, since ordinary usage reflects the public third-personal perspective on things. But this is bizarre, since the thirdpersonal "perspective" is that which is expressed by proper names, definite descrip-

tions and the third-person pronouns - not by the first-person pronoun in ordinary public use. According to Strawson, even if "I" is never used to refer to a sesmet, that "would have no consequences for the question of whether or not there are such things as selves" . But this is to misunderstand the thrust of Kenny' s arguments - which are not concerned with whether there are or are not such things, but rather whether the very notion of such a thing is coherent. And his arguments are not adequately addressed by Strawson. The task of fundamental metaphysics, according to Strawson, is to establish whether anything answers to the characterization of selves delivered by phenomenological analysis. Strawson is an avowed materialist, and in his view if something exists and is a thing, it must be a physical thing (so the American Constitution is not a thing, or does not exist; nor is Oxford University, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, or Hamlet). Sesmets must qualify as physical things , since phenomenology reveals that they are things. The second half of Selves is dedicated to fundamental metaphysics that purports to show that there are such things as physical

selves thus conceived. They in fact consist of a synergy of neural activity which is either part of, or somehow identical with, the synergy that constitutes an experience as a whole. So the thin concept of a subject of experience is of a process-stuff in the brain. But this suffices for being a sesmet. Hence there is an indefinite plurality of temporally passing selves. The thicker notion of a self as a persistent mental thing is merely a construction out of such a "gappy" plurality. And both thin and thick notions are, of course, distinct from the human being, the person , as a whole. So, contrary to all the evidence from the use of natural language, the pronoun "I" is polysemic - at least in the hands of a fundamental metaphysicist. But then, as Strawson emphasizes, fundamental metaphysics gives no special weight to ordinary categories of thought. Strawson's phenomenology and fundamental metaphysics will seem to some readers to be an advance in philosophical method, striving to add to human knowledge - just like the sciences. Others will view it as a regress to an earlier age of confusion and methodological incoherence. The dangers of phenomenologi-

cal impressionism are patent in Strawson's discussion of Mozart' s famous letter in which he claimed that he could hear in an instant the whole of a concerto that he was writing down. Strawson remarks: "1 can see no reason to doubt the accuracy of Mozart's description" . (It is, presumably, phenomenologically convincing!) Roger Penrose by contrast, in The Emperor 's New Mind, reflecting on the same passage, held that in order to understand this phenomenon we should need a correct theory of quantum gravity. Ironically, the letter is a notorious forgery. But even if it weren ' t, it would not be a phenomenological description of something given. It would be, at best, a misleading description of the sudden dawning of an ability, not a description of its amazing high-speed exercise. Phenomenology is no guide to the bounds of sense. Selves is repetitive, and would have benefited from substantial pruning. Its second half is decorated with hundreds of logical formulae contributing nothing to comprehension: Is "[TSx--7SESx]", for example, any clearer than "thin subjects are sesmets"? Good editing from Oxford University Press might have mitigated these flaws.

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hen Charles Darwin returned to England after his five-year voyage on the Beagle, he thought it was probably time to marry. He made notes under the headings "Marry" and "Not Marry". There were things to be said for and against, and important questions such as where to live and when to do the deed, but whom to marry (he was not in love) required less thought. One of his Wedgwood cousins, Emma, was still available. Far from being frowned on, cousin marriage - along with other versions of intermarriage among kin - was commonplace in the nineteenth century. Adam Kuper brings an anthropologist's understanding to what he calls "one of the great neglected themes" of social and literary history: the preference of the English bourgeoisie for marriage with relatives. Emma's brother Joe had already married Charles ' s sister Caroline. Wedgwoods and Darwins were to go on marrying each other for more than a century, producing a network of kin that offered "enormous collateral benefits": patronage, information, vocational assistance, capital. Kuper explores several of these kin networks, making a point of distinguishing them from the arranged marriages of the aristocracy (though noting in passing the importance of example, beginning with Queen Victoria, who was married to her cousin). He traces clans of bankers and merchants , dynasties of barristers, judges, clergymen, bishops, top civil servants, writers, scientists and thinkers - an urban elite. His thesis is that kin networks provided the basis for the consolidation of the bourgeoisie in the nineteenth century, and that marriage within the family was a strategy. What he offers in this entertaining study is less an argument than an important aper~u. The thesis can be demonstrated but not proved, except in the case of the Rothschilds. The House of Rothschild was the largest bank in the world, a multinational family business with five branches across Europe. Between 1824 and 1877, thirty male Rothschilds married cousins. Many of these marriages were systematically arranged to main-

W

Dark corners NORMA CLARKE Adam Kuper INCEST AND INFLUENCE The private life of bourgeois England

304pp. Harvard University Press. £20.95 (US $27.95). 9780674035898 tain the links between the branches, as James Rothschild explained in 1839: "I and the rest of our family ... have always brought our offspring up from their early childhood with the sense that their love is to be confined to members of the family, that their attachment for one another would prevent them from getting any ideas of marrying anyone other than one of the family so that the fortune would stay inside the family". Keeping the money inside the family was important to Quaker bankers too. Barclays and Gurneys married, while the Gurneys themselves strongly favoured endogamy: children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren married their cousins. Complicated relationships ensued: brothers-in-law became also fathersin-law, sisters became stepmothers-in-Iaw. Timothy Bevan, having first married a Barclay, next married a Gurney widow, and was described as his "wife' s husband's wife's sister's widower". Kuper provides diagrams which lend an appropriately manic quality as the lines linking triangles (male) and circles (female) go round and down and up and over.

Religious belief, campaigns and causes might also produce tightly knit coteries and a preference for marrying within the circle. The Evangelicals of the Clapham Sect, inspired by William Wilberforce, lived almost as a commune. They mimicked kinship bonds, called each other brother, and bequeathed the idea of intermarriage to succeeding

generations. In this book, the information that in 1809 Wilberforce took his six children on holiday "to the same house in which were now contained [Henry Thornton ' s] own wife and eight" is charged with expectation. Competition for pious daughters was intense. Sisters were in demand too, although this raised problems. When a wife died, her sister was often the preferred replacement, except that canon law forbade marriage with a deceased wife's sister on the grounds that man and wife were one, so a sister-in-law was a sister, hence marriage would constitute incest. This logic gave rise to one of the great Victorian public debates. To begin with, nobody was quite sure what incest was. In 1847, a Royal Commission was set up to investigate "prohibited degrees of affinity", and for the next six decades the argument raged. The radical John Bright appealed to common sense: on every "natural" ground, he

urged, the marriage of first cousins was more objectionable than marriage to a sister-inlaw. (On the evidence here there was a good chance the deceased wife's sister was a first or second cousin anyway.) The Bible gave contradictory guidance. Leviticus seemed to ban sisters-in-law, but then there was Jacob, married to two sisters, Rachel and Leah, who were also his cousins. It was not until 1907 that a Rill was passed permitting a man to marry his deceased wife's sister (although not until 1949 his divorced wife's sister). Meanwhile, natural scientists and medical men raised questions about inbreeding, and by the 1920s eugenicists routinely condemned cousin marriage. By then, families had shrunk and the First World War had wiped out a generation of male cousins. The last gasp of large bourgeois families and their strategic manoeuvrings comes in the final section under the heading "The Intellectuals". Through James Stephen, an early Claphamite, Kuper traces a path from Christ-

TLS JANUARY 22 2010

ian earnestness and activism (most notably and successfully against the slave trade) to the secular bed-hopping of Bloomsbury. This is well-trodden ground, and will be familiar to many readers, but Kuper's perspective casts it in a fresh light. Unexpectedly, the Bloomsbury Group's casualness about sexual intimacy can be seen as part of its Clapham inheritance, along with exclusivity and the conviction of superiority. When Angelica, Vanessa Bell's daughter by Duncan Grant, was born, Grant's lover David Garnett announced, "I think of marrying it", and duly did; it was not so very different from Edward White Benson, later Archbishop of Canterbury, putting his twelveyear-old cousin Minny on his knee and informing her that he had decided they would marry when she was old enough. The manipulation of the young is the dark underside of the story, though mostly we know little about it. Angelica later understood her husband' s motive to be revenge (see the review of Angelica Garnett on p20), while Minny's children (none of whom married) believed her to have been bullied and unhappy. Uncles married nieces; brothers were attracted to sisters and vice versa; Lytton Strachey tried to kiss his nephew in a dark corner. Writers who fell in love with their cousins were numerous (suggesting that unquantifiable numbers of non-writers had comparable feelings). Swinburne's great love Mary was his cousin many times over: their mothers were sisters, their fathers were first cousins and so were

their grandfathers. Novelists addressed the potent brew: the first sign of Mrs Norris's talent for being wrong in Mansfield Park is when she assures the Bertram family that there would be no danger to their sons in bringing cousin Fanny to live with them. Not only Austen, but also the Brontes, Dickens, Trollope, Mrs Oliph ant, Elizabeth Gaskell, Meredith and Thackeray all dramatized cousin love, as did Elizabeth Barrett Browning in Aurora Leigh. Even Beatrix Potter's Benjamin Bunny married his cousin Flopsy.

13

The good German Absent Jews and invisible executioners: W. G. Sebald and the Holocaust 1 have been asked if 1 was aware of the moral

implications of what I was doing. As I told the tribunal at Nuremberg. I did not know that Hitler was a Nazi. The truth was that for years

I thought he worked for the phone company. When I did finally find out what a monster he was, it was too late to do anything as 1 had already made a down payment on some furni-

ture. Once. towards the end of the war I did contemplate loosening the Ftihrer's neck napkin and allowing a few tiny hairs to get down his back, but at the last minute my nerve failed me.

ollowing Freud - himself driven into exile by the Nazis - there are some things too serious not to joke about. and this applies to Hitler. to the regime he initiated. and even to the murdersthrough war. mass shootings. extermination camps and forced marches - that that regime carried out: mass murders the true extent of which will never now be established with complete accuracy. Twenty million. thirty? What can such figures tell us about the reality of a single individual crushed beneath the Nazi juggernaut? I should qualify the above: some things are too serious for some people not to joke about them. I cannot decide whether or not W. G. Sebald would permit himself even the wryest of smiles in response to Woody Allen's parody of Albert Speer' s Inside the Third Reich. which I quote from above. After all. it isn ' t the Holocaust that "The Schmeed Memoirs" seeks to extract humour from; rather. Alien is savagely mocking Speer's claim that at the time it was taking place. he personally knew nothing of the murder of millions of Jews. By transforming Hitler' s erstwhile architect - who subsequently became his Minister for War Production - into a selfdeluding barber. Alien performs the essential task of the satirist: to expose the lie of power for what it was. is. and always will be. and to strip away the protective clothing - of idealism. of denial. of retrospective justification from the perpetrators of genocide. Ours is an era intoxicated by its capacity to reproduce history technologically. in an instantaneous digitization of all that has happened. But far from tempering our ability to politicize history. this seems to spur both individuals and regimes on to still greater tendentiousness. Among modern philosophers Baudrillard understood this development the best. and foresaw the deployment of symbolic events alongside the more conventional weaponry of international conflict. Sebald understood it as well: in The Rings of Saturn his fictive alter ego observes the Waterloo Panorama. a 360-degree representation of the battle warped round "an immense domed rotunda". and muses: "This then is the representation of history. It requires a falsification of perspective. We. the survivors. see everything from above. see everything at once. and still we do not know how it was" . To counter this synoptic view - which. again and again throughout his work. Sebald links to dangerous ideal isms and utopian fantasies

F

fUlly orchestrated liberal barracking. And on Austerlitz. the eponymous protagonist. an January 27 - the sixty-fifth anniversary of the architectural historian. circles the truth of his - the writer offered us subjective experience. Soviet liberation of Auschwitz - we will origins as he circles the terra incognita of This was not. however. reportage that relies have Holocaust Memorial Day. a national Germany itself. Through his study of such for its authority on witness; Sebald. as he commemoration of the victims of German buildings as factories. docks and fortificawrote with reference to the Allied bombing National Socialism inaugurated by Tony tions hypertrophied by nineteenth-century industrialization. Austerlitz is unconsciously of Hamburg in his essay "Air War and Litera- Blair in 2001. ture". mistrusted seeming clarity in the retellW. G. Sebald died in December of that homing in on the most monstrous disjunction ing of events that had violently deranged the year. but had he lived I doubt he would have of human scale: the exterminatory assembly senses. Rather. his was a forensic phenome- made any public comment about this. Never- lines of the Holocaust. Encrypted in Antwerp's Central Station nology that took into account the very lacu- theless. the message I take from Sebald' s nae. the repressions and the partial amnesias works and his scrupulous posture in relation Austerlitz finds a programme of social conthat are the reality of lived life. to the remembrance of the Holocaust's vic- trol . and remarks to the novel's narrator: Sebald. perhaps better than anyone. would tims. is that such events. far from ensuring a "The clock is placed some twenty metres understand the threshold we now stand upon. "Legacy of Hope" (the theme of this year's above the only baroque element in the entire Last year Harry Patch. the final remaining Day). shore up a conception of history. of ensemble. the cruciform stairway which British survivor of the trenches in the First humanity. and of civilization that depends on leads from the foyer to the platforms. just World War. died. and with his death another a view of the Holocaust as an exceptional and where the image of the emperor stood in the stratum of history was sealed shut. In the next unprecedented mass murder. It is not just in Pantheon in a line directly prolonged from two or three decades the same will happen in terms of the Zionist eschatology that the the portal; as governor of a new omnipotence it was set even above the royal coat of arms and the motto Eendracht maakt macht'·. In English "Union is strength". but in Flemish that motto echoes "Arbeit macht frei". Then. there is Speer' s awkward status as not only the pre-eminent German denier of Holocaust knowledge. but also its foremost passive resister. who. charged with Hitler' s scorched earth policy. saved as much industrial infrastructure as he could. Just as Speer refused the evidence of his own senses when he visited the slave labourers at the notorious Mittelbau-Dora missile factory. so we can imagine that Sebald ' s own father refused - at least in retrospect - to acknowledge the reality of what he witnessed as a career soldier in the Wehrmacht. Sebald said of his own parents that they were typical of German petit-bourgeois who "went into the war not just blindly. but with a degree of enthusiasm. they all felt they were going to be lords of the world". Sebald's father was in the Polish campaign. and in the family photo album there were pictures that initially had a "boy scout atmosphere" . but: "Then the order came and they moved in. And now the photographs are of Polish villages instead. razed to the ground and with only the chimneys left standing. These photos seemed quite normal to me as a child .... I look at them now. and I think. 'Good Lord. what is all this? .. •. It·s easy to see this as Sebald' s paradigmatic experience of the power of photography both to docuA tourism advertisment for the city of Dresden, 1936 ment and to dissemble historical reality respect of the Second World War and the Holocaust is deployed as a symbolic event; power he himself would make great use of. In Holocaust. Last November John Demjanjuk we also require it as a confirmation of our Vertigo Sebald ' s alter ego says of an album was wheeled into a Munich courtroom to own righteousness in the democratic and that his father bought his mother in 1939 as a stand trial on charges of being an accessory industrialized West. present for the first Kriegsweihnacht - or Albert Speer was. of course. the very per- Nazi-sanctioned " War Christmas": to 27.900 murders in the Sobibor extermination camp. and despite the statement by the sonification of an industrialization run amok. Some of these photographs show gypsies who Zentralrat der Juden in Deutschland that "All The Nazis. for all the twisted atavism of their had been rounded up and put in detention. They are looking out smiling from behind NS criminals still living should know that ideology. were nothing if not modernizers. there won ' t be mercy for them. regardless of So. Speer could be significant for Sebald the barbed wire, somewhere in a far corner of their age" . it is generally understood that this for many reasons - the grotesque giganticism Slovakia where my father and his vehicle will be the last Holocaust crimes trial of of his designs for the new capital of Hitler's repairs unit had been stationed for several any significance. The previous month Nick thousand-year Reich would seem the epitome weeks before the outbreak of war. Griffin. a Holocaust denier. in his guise as the of that distortion of Burke's "objects great And there. below the text. is the photograph leader of the BNP. appeared on BBCI's Ques- and terrible" which was the Nazis' vision of in question. which was. Sebald said in an tion Time. where he was subjected to care- art as the servant of social control. In Sebald ' s interview: "an indication that these things

WILL SELF

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14 were accepted as part of the operation right from the beginning" . Named "Winfried" from a Nazi list of approved names, and "Georg" after his father, Sebald preferred to be known as Max. He was born in the Bavarian Alps in May 1944 as the Reich was collapsing beneath the Allied onslaught, and his own literary achievement stands in almost diametric opposition to that of Speer. While Speer occupied himself exclusively with variations on the theme of what the psychoanalytic thinker Alexander Mitscherlich termed his Lebensliige, or "Great Lie", Sebald devoted his energies to exposing all the smaller lies of his parents' generation. He remained steadfast in his excoriation, when asked in the course of an interview with the Jewish Quarterly after the publication of The Emigrants, whether he could talk to his parents about the so-called Hitler time, Sebald replied: Not really. Though my father is still alive, at eighty-five It's the ones who have a conscience who die early, it grinds you down. The fascist supporters live forever. Or the passive resisters. That's what they all are now in their own minds. 1 always try to explain to my parents that there is no difference between passive resistance and passive collaboration it's the same thing. But they cannot understand

this. There is, as yet, no direct access to Georg Sebald' s war record, but sifting through the clues in Sebald's texts and cross-referencing these with his statements in interviews, it seems likely to me that his father ended up serving with the 1st Gerbirgsjager - or ""mountain huntsmen" -

who were indeed

stationed in Slovakia before the invasion of Poland, and whose record includes a sorry tapestry of war crimes, including the rounding up and shooting of Jews in Lvov. Sebald, inevitably, was not close to his father, who had been taken prisoner by the Americans in 1945 and only returned home when the writer was three. But while it's almost a cliche to say of a male writer's books that they are acts of parricide, Sebald's great achievement lay in not succumbing to Oedipal rage so as to forestall tragic sadness. In his writings and interviews Sebald never pretended that his artistic development was entirely sui generis; it' s more that the lamentable insularity of the English-speaking world has made us generally impervious to foreign cultural influences. (This cannot have been far from Sebald's own mind, not only when he rigorously collaborated on the translations of his own prose works from German into English, but also in his work as a pedagogue and as the founder, in 1989, of the British Centre for Literary Translation at the University of East Anglia.) The influence of Alexander Kluge - to name but one exemplar of the documentary literature of post-war Germany - on Sebald's methodology and concerns is difficult to assess for a nonGerman speaker, since none of Kluge' s key texts is available in translation. We can identify, to some extent, Sebald's affinities with Jean Amery, or with Alfred Doblin, the subject of his own doctoral thesis, but the point needs to be stressed that these are Jewish German writers, the former a Holocaust survivor, the latter a modernist whose sensibility was shaped during Weimar. What we cannot do is place Sebald within the German literary context where he might be said to belong.

Rather, let us resurrect him as a disciple of Amery, of whom Sebald wrote, " [His] existentialist philosophical position ... makes no concessions to history but exemplifies the necessity of continuing to protest, a dimension so strikingly lacking from German postwar literature".

Sebald is rightly seen as the non-Jewish German writer who through his works did most to mourn the murder of the Jews. He said that he felt no guilt himself - and indeed why should he? He was not responsible - but that there was an irremediable "sense of shame". Subjected at school, as all Germans of his generation were, to a film of the concentration camps without explanation or context, Sebald was jolted out of what had been an isolated bucolic childhood; it impinged on him from then on that, " While I was sitting in my pushchair and being wheeled through the flowering meadows by my mother, the Jews of Corfu were being deported on a four-week trek to Poland. It is the simultaneity of a blissful childhood and those horrific events that now strikes me as incomprehensible. I know now that these things cast a very long shadow over my life" . The shadow lengthened through his university career where, in Freiburg, Sebald found himself being taught German literature by academics he later described as "dissembling old fascists" . Only the returned exile Theodor Adorno offered any insight, and no doubt his remarks on the possibility of a postHolocaust literature must have been something the young Sebald took to heart: "To write poetry after Auschwitz", Adorno wrote, "is barbaric" . A statement he later amplified thus: "The so-called artistic rendering of the naked physical pain of those who were beaten down with rifle butts contains, however distantly, the possibility that pleasure can be squeezed from it" . Such "action writing" and any possible voyeurism were modes that subsequently Sebald carefully avoided. For a counterexample to his own meticulousness you need look no further than Bernhard Schlink's The Reader, a novel widely feted for its moving portrayal of the impact of the Holocaust - but on whom , exactly? Schlink's novel may present a schema of evolving Holocaust consciousness in the successor generation of Germans, but its effects depend on exactly the kind of "action writing" Sebald rejected. (In Schlink's case this consists in the portrayal of the protagonist's underage sex with a beautiful concentration camp guard.) Just as Sebald himself never visited a concentration camp. This was a pilgrimage that he believed was "not the answer", especially since such sites had become only waystations on the profane tourist trail. But he did assiduously follow newspaper reports of the Auschwitz-Rirkenau trials of 1963- 5, and said of the trials, " it was the first public acknowledgement that there was such a thing as an unresolved German past" . Further, "I realized there were things of much greater urgency than the writings of the German Romantics" . Sebald was struck both by the utter familiarity of the defendants - "the kind of people I'd known as neighbours" but still more by how the Jewish witnesses, initially strange and foreign , were in the course of the proceedings revealed to have been residents of Nuremberg and Stuttgart. For Sebald, awakening to the realization that

he had been living among tacit accomplices to the elimination of these people' s relatives made him feel himself to be a tacit accomplice as well, and so he "had to know what had happened in detail , and try to understand why it should have been so". In 1966, Sebald came to England, to Manchester University, as a teaching assistant. In 1966 - as today - Manchester had a thriving Jewish community. In post-war Germany it was, of course, only too possible never to encounter a Jew, but now Sebald had a German-Jewish landlord whose own parents had been deported to Riga where they were murdered. This man subsequently became one of the models for Max Ferber, the painter in Sebald's The Emigrants, and the encounter hammered out the template for his subsequent modus operandi. "To my mind", Sebald later said, "there is an acute difference between historiography and history as experienced history." The experience of real, live Jews was definitely important - and possibly equally significant was that these were English Jews; after all , if, as the old Jewish saying has it, the Jews are like everyone else but more so, then it can be inferred that English Jews are like the English - but more so. The uncanny portrayal of Or Henry Selwyn in The Emigrants is a function of his almost perfect assimilation to English diffidence, and since Sebald based him on a real-life model who the writer did not even realize was of Polish-Jewish extraction until told so, he stands as a sign pointing towards that earlier age when German Jews, with names such as Hamburger and Berlin - evidence, Sebald once remarked, of just how tragically close their identification with the Fatherland was - were quite as well camouflaged. osmologists talk of the "anthropic principle", which extrapolates from the coincidence of the physical laws of the universe and our ability to observe those laws, to the proposition that this is no coincidence but a necessity: the universe has evolved precisely to produce beings of our kind, QED, God. I suspect in our view of Sebald as the pre-eminent - or at least most widely and obviously revered - Germanlanguage writer in the English-speaking world, we are falling victim to a strong anthropic argument, when a weaker one will suffice. Undoubtedly, it was precisely Sebald's own exile from Germany and his exposure to living Jewish communities that made it possible for him to transform the inchoate mistrust of his "passive collaborator" background into an active literature of atonement. I suspect there is a degree of wishful thinking in the critiques of post-war German literature published in English, and the title of the most comprehensive of these - Ernestine Schlant's worthy if over-determined The Language of Silence - says it all. The literature of Holocaust survivors can tell us how it was, but it can do little to explain why it was. For that we have impotently required a fully self-actualized literature of the perpetrators; in other words: an impossibility. Hannah Arendt's much quoted subtitle to her study of the Eichmann trial, "the banality of evil", has become a shibboleth to be lisped in the nightmarish face of the Holocaust. In fact, Arendt avoided the term in the text, while stressing, in her private letters from Jerusalem during the trial , that after ploughing through the

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3,OOO-page transcript of Eichmann's interrogation by the Israeli police, what impressed her most was his "brainlessness". We cannot interrogate the brainless for their or our own self-actualization, we cannot look to those who have capitulated to a regime which made evil a civil norm for a moral re-evaluation. Instead, we have their sons and daughters, and we have Sebald; whose elegant, elegiac and haunting prose narratives reinstate the prelapsarian German-speaking world. His careful use of documentary sources places before the contemporary reader the actualit" of a culture in which Jews were an integral part, while his style is at once discursive -looping in historic anecdote and literary reference - and incisive: cutting away at the surface of reality to expose the mysterious interconnections of things-in-themselves. To read Sebald is to be confronted with European history not as an ideologically determined diachronic phenomenon - as proposed by Hegelians and Spenglerians alike - nor as a synchronic one to be subjected to Baudrillard's postmodern analysis. Rather, for Sebald, history is a palimpsest, the meaning of which can only be divined by rubbing away a little bit here, adding on some over there, and then - most importantly - stepping back to allow for a synoptic view that remains inherently suspect. I think it's this beguiling overview - which Sebald calls our attention to again and again in his writings by describing the works of Dutch landscape painters and English watercolourists - that explains in part our willingness to ascribe to him some specifically moral ascendancy, and by implication a historiography he explicitly denies. For the English-speaking world - and the English in particular - Sebald is the longed-for "Good German"; he is everything Speer wanted to become but never could. Sebald has recognized the taint and moved to erase it by a systematic bearing of witness. But if he had remained behind in Germany, might he not have succumbed to the same pressures as many of his generation, and been carried along on the tide of Marxist posturing to an equivalence between the Federal Republic and the Third Reich? It is hard to imagine Sebald subsuming the emotional reality of the Holocaust to an intellectual abstraction , just as it is difficult to see him falling for the victimology of many German writers of the successor generation, who, in their tortuous investigations of Oedipal hatred, revealed only that it was all about them. But then, recall that Sebald was no great believer in free will. "This notion", he said, "of the autonomous individual who is in charge of his or her fate is one that I couldn't really subscribe to." Nor, presumably, could he have subscribed to any view of his literary work as originating from a desire to do the right thing - that was then done. Indeed, he never did: he disavowed any particular philo-Semitism, explaining his resurrection of German Jewry as a form of social history as much as anything else - which does indeed make Sebald sound more English than the English. But the urge to project pious motives onto writers in a godless age is quite as strong as our desire to damn them to a hell no one believes in either. In England, Sebald's one-time presence among us - even if we would never be so crass as to think this, let alone articulate it -

COMMENTARY is registered as further confirmation that we won, and won because of our righteousness, our liberality, our inclusiveness and our tolerance. Where else could the Good German have sprouted so readily? If he had remained at home might he not have become - at the very least - a German version of Thomas Bernhard, a refusenik, an internal exile, his solipsism not modulated by melancholy but intensified until it became a cachinnating cynicism? Instead, Sebald's writing is anecdotal in feel , and furnished with plenty of English quotidiana - Teasmades and coal fires, battered cod and dotty prep schoolmasters, branch line rail journeys and modelmaking enthusiasts; enough, at any rate, to submerge any disquieting philosophizing. I might be doing the mittel-English readership of Sebald - if indeed such people exist at all - a disservice, were it not that I'm prepared to take the rap myself: I find Sebald's path into the charnel house of the twentieth century quite reassuring, especially when it takes the form of a hearty English walk. To read exclusively German post-war German literature is to find oneself in the position of the unnamed narrator of Waiter Abish' sHow German Is It?, who, on returning to his home town after the war, becomes transfixed by the way Germanness inheres in everything he sets his eyes on - even the rivets that secure the map of the town to the station wall. In too-German Germany Sebald is, of course, not quite German enough. In the eight years since his death, his stature in England already high - has grown considerably, while in Germany there has been some upgrading of his reputation, but Sebald would have needed to be alive in order to have benefited from the revelation of GOnter Grass's membership of the SS. As for Martin Walser, paradoxically it is his insistence that Germans have done enough atoning which - or so German friends of mine assure me - people find "boring". Sebald did enter the lists of the great controversies surrounding the history of the Hitlertime when in 1997 he delivered a series of lectures, posthumously published in English in an edited form , under the title On the Natural History of Destruction. When these writings appeared in Germany, Sebald's contention that the Allied bombing of German cities, which resulted in 600,000 civilian deaths and 5 million homeless, was singularly under-represented in post-war German literature, became a stick in the hands of both Right and Left, intent on beating each other. Sebald's reputation predictably suffered collateral damage. I suspect Sebald was not so much ingenuous as out of touch with contemporary opinion: to him the continuing and plangent shame Germans should feel for the murder of the Jews remained a given ; it

caust and stag horn buttons" while averring that "Something's wrong here .... Is it really possible to use the same model of archives to describe the search for your deported parents as the search for shells ... in a school friend ' s house? ... Is it persuasive to plaster the journey back to the places of expulsion, death and destruction with antique curiosities?". Then again, given that if you hail a cab outside Frankfurt's railway station its driver is very likely to be writing a doctoral thesis on the Frankfurt School, Sebald's metaphysical bent - so worrying to English empiricists - is viewed straightforwardly by this compatriot: Sebald is the same as those philosophers, of whom Kierkegaard said, all that they write about reality is just as confusing as reading a sign at a flea market stall that says "Washing

did not need to be restated in a thesis concern-

feel more and more as if time did not exist at

ing a different mass killing. Besides, he did state explicitly in the text that it ill behoved Germans to castigate the Allies for prosecuting the war in this fashion. You do not have to be an exile to be perceived as a Nestbeschmutzer (one who dirties his own nest) in the German-speaking world - but it helps; while it is exactly those Bakelite touches English critics find reassuring - even as they shade in the utter blackness - that German ones are dismissive of. Reviewing Austerlitz for Die Zeit, Iris Radisch described its lapidary style as "Holo-

all, only various spaces interlocking according to the rules of a higher form of stereometry, between which the living and the dead can

lay the ghosts of repetition that haunt me with ever greater frequency. Scarcely am I in company but it seems as if I had already heard the same opinions expressed by the same people somewhere or other, in the same way, with the same words, turns of phrase and gestures". If instead of conventional linear narratives Sebald's prose fictions are word-filigrees spun out of such atemporal coincidences, then they are also haunted by the congruence of the things-in-themselves that constitute the material world. In The Emigrants, Max Ferber returns to smoky industrial Manchester, understanding intuitively that while he may have escaped the Holocaust, it remains his destiny to "serve under the chimney". The echo of the Buna at Auschwitz is cer-

done here". You come back with your things,

hoping to have them washed, but instead you stand there like an idiot because the sign is

merely there to be sold. None of which is to suggest that you cannot also find plenty of praise for Sebald's works among German critics, it's just that what' s missing is the peculiar reverence which attaches to writings that - so long as they are not read too closely - seem to confirm us English in some of our most comforting prejudices. In The Rings of Saturn , Sebald cryptically alludes to Jorge Luis Borges ' s story "Tlon Uqbar Orbis Tertius", which plays with the idea of an idealist world created by eighteenth-century encyclopedists to bedevil their empiricist heirs. The passage Sebald had in mind was this: "Things become duplicated in TWn; they also tend to become effaced and lose their details when they are forgotten. A classic example is the doorway which survived so long as it was visited by a beggar and disappeared at his death. At times some birds, a horse, have saved the ruins of an amphitheatre". In the preamble to this same strange tale Borges's narrator recalls a dinner with a friend at which "we became lengthily engaged in a vast polemic concerning the composition of a novel in the first person, whose narrator would omit or disfigure the facts and indulge in various contradictions which would permit a few readers - very few readers - to perceive an atrocious or banal reality" . This is of course Sebald's own fictional methodology, and I believe only a very few readers have grasped the atrocious and banal reality that he wishes us to perceive, despite the myriad clues that are scattered throughout his texts. Consider this, from Austerlitz, where the eponymous survivor of the Kindertransport remarks, It does not seem to me ... that we understand

the laws governing the return of the past, but [

move back and forth as they like, and the longer I think about it the more it seems to me that we who are still alive are unreal in the eyes

of the dead. Again and again Sebald makes statements of a transcendental idealism, again and again he points to coincidence and deja vu as evidence of the unheimlich quality of subjectivity. This is Sebald ' s alter ego in The Rings of Saturn: " my rational mind is ... unable to

Gerhard Richter, 1965 tainly intentional, and just as willed by Sebald are the references throughout his books to Theresienstadt, the " model" concentration camp established by Reinhard Heydrich in the Bohemian hinterland. I speak not just of the extended passages concerning the camp in Austerlitz, but of tens and scores of other references to it - far more than to any of the other, more notorious nodes of the Holocaust. I believe that in Theresienstadt, where tens of thousands of "privileged" Jews were crammed into an eighteenth-century fortified town of one square kilometre, Sebald saw the very synecdoche of the Holocaust. With its theatre company and orchestra, its workshops and its newspaper, Theresienstadt was given a grotesque makeover by the Germans so that it could serve as a Potemkin village for a Red Cross inspection in 1944 designed to allay international suspicions. At the same time a film was made depicting the idyllic existence of those who shortly after the filming stopped were transported to the gas chambers of Auschwitz, or else forced east on the death marches that claimed 1.5 million more Jewish lives. Theresienstadt is for Sebald only an extreme and specialized form of a Holocaust he sees being perpetrated everywhere and at all times as civilization marches on. If there is any exceptional character to the German Holocaust it is only that it is German, just as Belgian genocides are Belgian, Rwandan ones Rwandan, Ser-

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15 bian ones Serbian and Croatian ones - albeit under German tutelage - Croatian. Describing Joseph Conrad's arrival in Brussels to take up the commission that would gain him the material for Heart of Darkness, Sebald wrote: " [Conrad] now saw the capital of the Kingdom of Belgium, with its ever more bombastic buildings, as a sepulchral monument erected over a hecatomb of black bodies, and all the passers-by in the streets seemed to him to bear that dark Congolese secret within them". While historians such as Daniel Goldhagen might wish to arrogate a unique exterminatory impulse to the Germans, Sebald resists this facile view at every juncture. In his doctoral thesis on Alfred Dablin, he was inclined to see aspects of Berlin Alexanderplatz as a shadow cast forwards , a kind of reverse memory. Commenting on Doblin's description of an abattoir, Sebald avers that "Far more horrifying than the chaotic destruction of the Apocalypse is the well-ordered destruction contrived by man himself'. Implicit in Sebald ' s work is the idea that human mass murder is only an internecine form of the holocaust we are perpetrating on the natural world. It is there in The Rings of Saturn where the description of the destruction of the European fisheries is juxtaposed with a double-page photograph of the naked bodies of the Nazis' victims lying among trees. It is there in The Emigrants where Manchester is described as a "necropolis or mausoleum"; in Vertigo also, when the vehicles crawling along the gleaming black roads out of Innsbruck are imagined as "the last of an amphibian species close to extinction". Encrypted in almost every line of After Nature we find the same message: "Ci ties phosphorescent / on the riverbank, industry's / glowing piles waiting / beneath the smoke trails / like ocean giants for the siren's / blare, the twitching lights / of rail- and motorways , the murmur / of the millionfold proliferating molluscs, / woodlice and leeches, the cold putrefaction". In conclusion then, Sebald had no need of a Holocaust Remembrance Day - and I believe that if we read him rightly nor have we English. In Germany a Memorial Day for the Victims of National Socialism is indeed an appropriate response - if not an atonement for crimes committed, but here Tony Blair might have done better to inaugurate a Refusal to Grant Refugee Jews Asylum Memorial Day, or an Incendiary Bombing of German Cities Memorial Day, or even - casting the shadow forward - an Iraqi Civilians Memorial Day, for these are deaths that more properly belong at our door. For Sebald and for those of us who hearken to his work, there is no need to remember, because the Nazis' Holocaust is still happening in an interlocking space, while before us are the poisoned seas, the glowing piles and the cold putrefaction of an environmental one. "More and more", the narrator of The Emigrants tells us concerning Or Selwyn, "he sensed that Nature itself was collapsing beneath the burden we placed upon it." And as Gerhard Richter's fusion of slow oils and photographic quicksilver so perfectly expresses, on that denuded foreground , Onkel Rudi is always posing for the camera, smiling, in front of the slave labourers' hecatomb.

This is an edited text of the 2010 Sebald Lecture, which was delivered in London earlier this month.

COMMENTARY

16

t's the coldest winter since 1963, the year of the great January-to-March freeze, always symbolized in my mind by the death of Sylvia Plath, The final scenes of her life in the film Sylvia were shot near HUGO WILLIAMS my house in London , with powdered paper coating the surrounding streets for snow, A cabin were "I've only got a pound" (meaning snowfall always reminds me of her and the apart from traveller's cheques), a phrase paper world which couldn't save her. I met which became the working title for a putative her daughter Frieda recently and we talked travel book. about the bird sanctuary she keeps in Wales, The first words of that book, published where she once had a pet magpie, Magpies, in 1966, were " Venice was cold and dark" . Frieda said, were the most intelligent of I had arrived there at midnight, prior to birds, showing jealousy, mischief and charm catching a boat to Israel in a few days' time. exactly like children. As I huddle here I had a piece of paper with "Communist Bicyagainst the cold, looking out at the snow, I cling Hostel, Isle of Iudecca" written on it. I see my own local magpie family bobbing stood on the deck of the vaporetto, shivering up and down in the eucalyptus trees outside with excitement as snow fell on the dark my window. The snow flatters their two-tone scene. The hostel was boarded up for winter, jackets. They're having one of their periodic but I rang and rang on the bell and the magpie parties, uttering their emphatic nightwatchman allowed me to stay for one football-rattle cries. People think they are night, providing I didn't need any sheets. I predators, but their nest was attacked by a had three days to kill, so the next morning hawk last year. I rang my Venice contact, a Greek artist In the winter of 1963 I was supposed to called Yanni Kardomatis, who had painted be setting out on the journey of a lifetime. my portrait as a child. I was told that he had Most boys of twenty would have leapt at the just left for his winter quarters in Greece. chance, but I was phlegmatic and indifferent Seen from my present perspective almost to the idea of travel and still am. I had a job fifty years on, that wintry morning with its and a girlfriend and I was just finding my empty snowbound future waiting to be made feet in London. I didn't want to go anywhere, up, seems bleak in the extreme, but there but I also knew that I had to. When our I go, off round the museums, tagging on to Sussex farmhouse was snowed in, I thought American Express tours, taking down notes I might escape my fate. We had an Isetta about all the great painters. How excited I bubble-car at the time, which formed a small was to see the machine gun invented by white mound outside our house. My mother Leonardo da Vinci for use against the Turks! The voyage to Haifa was scheduled to take was a resourceful woman and persuaded a snowplough to tackle our drive. I remember five days, via the Corinth Canal , but the seas it cresting the snowy horizon, heralding my were so rough and I was so sick that I decided exile. I climbed on board with my two suit- to get off the boat at Piraeus and maybe track cases and off we went to Haywards Heath down Yanni. "Staggered up the long staircase railway station. As I waved goodbye for from Tourist Class to the Purser's Office", I nearly two years, my last words from the wrote in my journal. "The purser was

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extremely angry with me for wanting to get off the ship and wanted to know why. I was in such a state by then with the purser holding my head over a basin and me sobbing, that I was taken to the doctor for an injection. I asked if the sea was very rough and was told that no, the doctor was very good at injections. I lay in my bunk in my suit with blankets tangled round my legs. One minute I weighed nothing, the next I was squashed downwards. At Piraeus I could hardly lift my suitcases. I hadn't eaten for three days. I got very excited about a basket of eggs in a cafe and tried to explain how I liked them cooked, but when they came the two eggs had different tastes. Oh well, I suppose the hens had different tastes. That afternoon, there was a boat going to Hydra, where Yanni lived, so I caught the bus to Athens to change some cheques. "Everything poverty-stricken and hideous" I wrote. The boat to Hydra turned out to be called "Hydra" , but went somewhere else entirely. I finally got to the island two days later, only to find Yanni about to leave for Athens. I couldn't very well follow him any more, so said I would stay on the island for a few days. After he left the weather closed in and I was stuck for two weeks, in the company of harddrinking expatriate writers - wild company in a little grocer-shop-cum-cafe, or writing poems in my freezing rented room - a forgotten, excitable time brought back to me now in the puerile pages of my diary. Eventually a boat was able to get into Hydra harbour and I found my way back to Athens and more cold calls. One of these was to Mark Ogilvy Grant, designated "fond of the young" in my address book, who asked me to

lunch in an Athens suburb. At my request for a Bloody Mary he yelled out of the window and a minute later a hand came up over the sill containing a tin of tomato juice. "That's why I love this country", Mark told me. George Seferis had been invited to lunch, apparently entirely for my benefit. I had to sit next to the poet in order to discuss my work with him, but he wasn't that interested. Worse, we talked about Eliot and Pound. Seferis said he was translating The Cantos. "Do you like them?" I asked incredulously. "Of course, don't you?" "No, I don't", I said, the effect of several Bloody Marys swirling in my brain. "I think Pound is a fraud." At this point the front doorbell rang. Mark went to answer it and came back saying it was the police and they wanted to speak to me. The intervention had come just in time. I prised myself from the outraged jaws of the poet and was told that some of Mark's neighbours had seen me walking through nearby streets and thought I looked like a student who had disappeared in Athens recently. Could I identify myself? I didn't have my passport on me, but managed to produce a number of membership cards to various London clubs, "The Smuggler's Snuff', "The Barn Twist Club" and the "Compton Cinema Club", a club for "Continental" type films in Old Compton Street, which Mark seemed especially interested in, all of which were carefully examined and their addresses recorded. Eventually, "The Smuggler'S Snuff', coupled with the reluctant endorsement of George Seferis, persuaded the police that I was who I said I was and they were gradually eased back out of the door and into the street, where a large crowd had gathered. My round-the-world adventure went on like this for the best part of two years, effectively curing me of the joys of travel for the rest of my life.

IN NEXT WEEK'S

TLS Michael Saler Vollmann's black California H. J. Jackson Darnton makes the case for books Nicholas Shrimpton Tennyson and the speculator Jeremy Suri Kissinger in 1973

TLS December 23, 1960

Tolstoy's last testament We look back to a review by Edward Hallett Carr of The Law of Violence and the Law of Love by Leo Tolstoy s is well known, Tolstoy in the last years of his life carried to its logical conclusion the creed of Christian unworldliness which he had long professed, and renounced his possessions, his family and his artistic creation in the name of a

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pure morality of love and non-violence, of

social and political anarchism. The Law of Violence and the Law of Love is a translation of one of his last essays written at the age of eighty, two years before his death. He was conscious of it as a sort of last testament to his generation and to posterity. It ends with the words: "This is what I wish to say to my brother men, before I die." Tolstoy's last years pose in an acute form the dilemma of the abstract Christian morality of the Sermon on the Mount, which stands outside history, and makes no compromise with the specific social and polit-

ical conditions of everyday life, and a practical morality, which, whether or not it retains the Christian label, sets out to provide a changing and commonsense guide to the problems of life in a world of constant social and political development. Tolstoy's penetrating intellect, his artistic sensibility and his extraordinary integrity of character enabled him to present perhaps the most powerful challenge the western world has produced in modern times to the "commonsense" view, which he exposes as sham Christianity and not merely wicked, but bad, politics. The thing most urgently required is "to liberate ourselves from the superstitions of pseudo-Christianity and governmental organization". But Tolstoy leaves no road open for social or humanitarian activities of the conventional kind. Understand it, especially you, the young generation of the future , and leave off doing what most of you now are doing-cease to seek for

imaginary happiness in shaping the welfare of the people by means of participation in Govern-

ment, in Law Courts, by teaching other people, and (in order to do that) by entering institutions that-by accustoming you to idleness, conceit

and pride-deprave you, namely, all sorts of

TLS JANUARY 22 2010

Grammar Schools and Universities. Cease participating in various organizations which appear to have for their aim the welfare of the common people; and seek only one thing. a thing always needed by every man, always attainable by everyone, and that gives the greatest good to oneself, and more surely than anything else serves the good of one's neighbours. Seek in yourselves for one thing- an increase of love by means of the destruction of everything which prevents its manifestation: mistakes, passions; and you will then aid the welfare of mankind in the most effectual manner.

This is the ultimate expression of the morality of the isolated individual, beyond society and beyond history. The dilemma which was illustrated by the last years of Tolstoy's life remains unresolved.

ARTS

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f ever there was a film crying out not to be

made into a musical, Federico Fellini' s 8Vz (1963) is it. The original work was risky enough, There are few less promising subjects than creative block, but Fellini made it work, deploying dreams and flashbacks as dramatic devices. Unsurprisingly, since the musical is a genre inhospitable to stasis, Maury Yeston failed to repeat Fellini' s trick when he reworked 8Vz on Broadway as Nine (1982), the rocky foundation for a new film from Rob Marshall , a successful director of stage musicals whose adaptation of Chicago won six Oscars in 2002. Marshall ' s work on Chicago might charitably be described as uneasy - the Best Director Oscar that year went to Roman Polanski for The Pianist - but the film benefited from a crackerjack song book and an eager male lead in Richard Gere. (Gere has musical pedigree, and played Danny Zuko in the first London production of Grease.) Nine stars Daniel Day-Lewis, an actor of numerous strengths, none of them applicable here. There is always pleasure to be had in following his haunted, knuckly face, with its dartingly watchful eyes and pursed lips; but it is an earthbound experience watching him play a suffering artist in a musical besieged by mistresses and memories. Day-Lewis is Guido Contini, an Italian film director based on Fellini and on the Fellini-like Guido Anselmi, played by Marcello Mastroianni in 8Vz. Everything is lined up for Guido's next project - the set at Cinecitta, the cast and crew - but there is no

The whole 8Y2 yards LEO ROBSON NINE Various cinemas

Cy Coleman and Neil Simon SWEET CHARITY Menier Chocolate Factory

sign of a script. Past success, and the fear of future failure, are the main blocking agents. Guido is further troubled by the persistent Italian press (the word "paparazzi" originates from Fellini's La Dolce Vita , 1960), the complications of his busy love life, and visitations from his dead mother (Sophia Loren). Guido's thoughts turn to God, or anyway organized religion; but when he encounters a cardinal, he seems more interested in teasing than praying - one of many details that undercut the urgency of Guido's despair. The film represents the stirrings ofGuido's imagination as a kind of musical of the mind, a singing, strutting headache. This device proves strained. Many of the best musicals, like Cabaret (1972) or Sing in , in the Rain (1952) or Jean Renoir's Can-Can, take place in environments which render their procedures organic or seamless; any setting is legitimate for a song. But the songs in Nine have

no pretext at all, an effect that conspires with the film's atmosphere of heavy emotional weather to stifle those qualities - vitality chief among them - which we traditionally and justifiably expect from a musical. Marshall has made a strenuous effort to assemble an international cast, only one of whom - Loren - is Italian. So we have Marion Cotillard, the only decent singer given the only decent song ("My Husband Makes Movies") , playing Guido' s exhausted wife; Judi Dench as his seen-it-all costume designer, dispensing weary wisdom between puffs on her cigarette; and Penelope Cruz as his mistress. This last actress is exquisitely embarrassing in an early number ("A Call from the Vatican") where she slides around a stage in lingerie. Kate Hudson, playing a reporter for American Vogue , is similarly coarse, and pained-looking. It would be unnecessary to pass judgement on the physical condition of the film's actresses if the costumes and choreography weren ' t so intent on titillation. Sexy glamour is the quality to which the film aspires most keenly, and which it fails most flagrantly to meet. Before Fellini the fantasist of the unconscious, there was Fellini the neorealist, at his best in the sorrowful Nights of Calabria (1957), which was awarded the Oscar for Best Foreign Film, and turned into a musical ,

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" N o t so new as lamentable and true, promises the title page (1608) of A Yorkshire Tragedy - "Acted by His Majesty's Players at the Globe. Written by W. Shakespeare" . Scarcely anybody has taken the attribution of this brief and brutal play at face value, although John Pay ne Collier felt that "there are some speeches which could scarcely have proceeded from any other pen". Edmund Malone would have thrown Titus Andronicus out of the canon in its favour. Alexander Dyce was warier: "I by no means assert that it was the work of our author, but I am greatly mistaken if it does not contain passages worthy of his pen". Stanley Wells recently edited it for the Collected Works of Thomas Middleton. The plot is simple: a man commits familicide. A Yorkshireman of good prospects and gentle blood, he learns in London to gamble away his money, to live for pleasure, and to hate his wife. Then he returns to the family seat, where his neighbours make it clear that they do not approve of his bad behaviour. He is already possessed by what his wife calls a "fearefull melancholic ungodly sorrow" when the play begins, nursing a grievance against an unfortunate roll of the die, and carrying the threat of violence with him whenever he appears on stage. He is beaten up, and vows revenge. His killing spree, however, is inspired by a perverse and belated urge towards a quasi-Roman nobility: this father would rather have his children - literally, his "posterity" - die than live dishonoured by the beggary to which he is bringing them. At the White Bear, Tough Theatre present the play as "part of the Shakespeare Apocrypha" , rather than assigning it to one author or another, and the director, Andy Brunskill, has

'tis grim, i'th'north MICHAEL CAINES Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton, etc, attrib. A YORKSHIRE TRAGEDY White Bear, Kennington , London SE 11

staged it with a kind of editorial attention to context and detail. The performance begins with a general introduction, delivered by the actor who has grown the best attempt at a Jacobean beard, bringing the audience up to speed on the question of the play's authorship. Signs hung on the upstage wall set each scene. Minimal embellishments to basic, uniform costumes distinguish certain characters. Finally, there is an appendix. A mixture of news broadcasts fades in - lest anyone forget that men killing their own families is a modern possibility, too. These choices, and the decision to have the actors on stage throughout the performance, surrounding the action, create an atmosphere of detachment that, in some ways, suits the play. Even the opening, with its gossiping servants ("he calls his wife whore ... and his children bastards"), feels downbeat, and what follows seldom picks up pace. What might otherwise have been played as a sudden descent into hell comes across as a piece of ambling - but unnerving - solemnity.

As the murderous husband, Lachlan Nieboer renders repeated words and phrases unfortunately flat ("Ime damnd, Ime damnd" is difficult enough ; "Puh Bastards, bastards, bastards, begot in tricks, begot in tricks" completely defeats him), although he does put the man's bitterness and frustration into his body language. He makes a good pent-up monster to tower over his loving, suffering wife, played by Charlotte Powell. Encumbered by bare, black skirt hoops but no skirt, Powell tackles a tricky role with skill. She also has the advantage of playing a part that doesn't require her to affect a Yorkshire accent. In the end, in perhaps the most startling aspect of this production, the psychosis seems to be shared between husband and wife, evident in the loyalty she shows him in the final scene - a forgiving, blood-blind loyalty that inspires him to repent of his deeds. The wife has remained virtuously willing to suffer her husband's whims throughout the play, though he evidently despises and abuses her; now, with the corpses of two of her children nearby, there is room in her heart only to wish him well. "More wretched am I

17 with music by Cy Coleman and a book by Neil Simon, in 1966. A new production of Sweet Charity plays at the Menier Chocolate Factory until March, at which point it will probably receive a West End run. The plot centres on Charity Hope Valentine, "social consultant" - or, as a cynical policeman speedily translates, "dancehall hostess" at the Fandango Ballroom. Charity is a giving and gullible sort, good-natured but unworldly, a serial heartbreakee. Tamsin Outhwaite, a sporting actress, gives this broad-brushed part what it needs, showing how Charity is taken for a dupe without playing her as a fool , and giving a touching portrayal of Charity' s repeatedly dashed hopes that is free of any sense of moping defeat. The director, Matthew White, presents a version substantially shorter than Bob Fosse's Broadway production of 1966, and time-worn film of 1969. White has made some shrewd dramatic excisions - most notably, Charity' s humiliation at the hands of a careers adviser - while retaining all fifteen songs, of which a small handful ("Hey, Big Spender" , "If My Friends Could See Me Now", "The Rhythm of Life") are famous. He has also succeeded in individualizing the other dancers at the Fandango, a chorus-like mob in Fosse's film. As drilled by the wisecracking, whip-cracking choreographer Herman, the Fandango girls do not so much dance as (one of them points out) "defend" themselves to music. Simon ' s book is full of such quips, most hingeing on Charity's optimistic self-delusions, which are here redeemed from sentimentality by their delivery - sassy, knowing, clipped. The result is a swift-moving comedy of 1960s New York in which the songs explore Charity's fantasies of escape from her lonely, seedy life. She is assaulted and robbed by her (married) fiance, and endures a night of comically thwarted passion with an Italian film star (Mark Umbers). Escape seems within reach when Charity meets Oscar Lindquist (U mbers again), but it turns out that Oscar is a 50s boy (albeit one with a taste for alternative religions) and not ready for this 60s girl - a rare unhappy ending for a musical. Fellini was the most perverse of the great European directors - the least wise about his own strengths, and prone to folly as a result. Late in his career, he made a self-pitying comedy, Ginger and Fred (1985), about a pair of cut-price entertainers whose act is loosely modelled on Rogers and Astaire. Fellini was fond of American musicals, however, clumsy though his efforts to express that affection may have been. He missed Sweet Charity when it was on Broadway, and professed to be baffled by the film , but he would have enjoyed Matthew White's spirited production.

now in this distresse, / then former sorrows

made me", she cries, as he is frog-marched away. It is left to the one remaining voice of authority, a university man, to offer some consolation, rendered all the more hollow by the spectacle of her fantastic devotion: "Oh kinde wife be comforted, ... / You have a boy at nurse. Your joy' s in him" . A Yorkshire Tragedy was first performed as one of four plays in a single performance. The question of its authorship is perhaps incomplete without a consideration of what on earth a theatre company would find to play before or after it.

TLS JANUARY 22 2010

B FOUR COURTS PRESS The Ulster Earls and Baroque Europe T. O'CONNOR & M.A. LYONS, EDITORS Essays follow Irish migrants, including Hugh O'Nem, earl of Tyrone, through the labyrinth of confessional Europe, exploring their reception and their efforts to define themselves in the Europe of the 17th and 18th centuries. ISBN

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ARTS

18 ock biopics tend to give domesticity a significant but secondary role: home is where the millstone is, something for the rock star to transcend, or forget, or, more typically, annihilate. Two recent films plot a subtler trajectory. Stardom is put to one side; the performances happen on the hearth. There is plenty of drunkenness and cruelty in Mat Whitecross's inventive and chaotic study of Ian Dury, urban poet, vaudeville musician, polio victim and "housewives' favourite punk rocker". In Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll, Dury (Andy Serkis) denies being a singer at all - "I'm more of an entertainer". The iron caliper that traumatized his childhood is all part of the act, dedicated to "the outsiders, all the uglies, all the freaks". In the opening, he hobbles on stage, his face a blend of tortured clown and genial compere. But the music hall is empty and the scene soon cuts to suburbia, where the screams of release are those of Dury ' s wife in childbirth. And so we follow the unruly frontman from marital home to adulterer's flat in his guise as faithless husband, errant father, charmer and bon vivant, with a bit of couch-bound writing and rehearsal thrown in on the side. The successes of Whitecross's film are largely, though not entirely, due to Andy Serkis, who inhabits the lead role with such brilliance that it will henceforth be hard to think of the entertainer in any other way. It is all there: the charisma, the selfishness, the nihilistic vulnerability. The singer's contrariness is nowhere better exemplified than in his relationship with his withered limbs. The humour in his self-description as a "raspberry ripple" (cripple) is both sardonic and exuberant. Dury was prepared to speak out for the disabled, but had to do it his way. Asked to

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Be marvellous TOB Y LICHTIG SEX AND DRUGS AND ROCK AND ROLL NOWHERE BOY Various cinemas

write a new song for the UN International Year of Disabled Persons, he came up with "Spasticus Autisticus". "His weakness is $0 obvious he doesn ' t have to do anything about it", says his weary wife (Olivia Williams) to his weary mistress (Naomie Harris) - except, that is, "be marvellous", the mantra Dury carried to his grave. Many of the film ' s best scenes show Dury with his son , Baxter (sensitively played by Bill Milner), and there are flashbacks to Dury's own troubled childhood and to his awkward bond with the father tenderly evoked in the song "My Old Man" . Where Whitecross's film fails is in finding a coherent way of telling the story of Dury's musical success, influence, and celebrity. There are some fine individual performances, not to mention animated vignettes supplied by Peter Blake; but the wider picture - punk, the 1970s, political change and social upheaval - is hazy. Dury would doubtless have desired it this way: "If you want a message, fuck off down the post office". No linear deficiencies mar Sam Taylor Wood' s meditation on the teenage years of John Lennon. Her first feature-length film , Nowhere Boy is a delightful coming-of-age

Andy Serkis as Ian Dury story about a cheeky lad from Liverpool with a love of music and adventure, torn between two "mothers" and desperate for a sense of self. That he went on to become an icon of the later twentieth century is barely acknowledged. Taylor Wood ' s preparedness to be no more than playfully allusive is signalled from the start, when the first chord of "Hard Day's Night" rings out. We all know what happened next, so that is all we get. Taking occasional biographical liberties,

the film pits Lennon ' s respectable (and, here, somewhat overly middle-class) domestic life with his aunt, Mimi , against the bipolar energy of Julia, the mother who abandoned him. The casting is faultless , Anne-Marie Duff' s lively and rangey Julia the perfect foil for Kristin Scott Thomas as soppy-stern Mimi, all glassy-eyed anger and joy. The latter's exhortations to John to do his homework and wear his glasses are followed by an Oedipal day out at Blackpool pier, where Julia and John cavort to the strains of "Mr Sandman". " You ' re my dream", she tells her besotted boy, before whisking him off for a fireside guitar lesson. "She'll hurt you", warns Mimi, and she does - first by being erratic, then by revealing family secrets, and then by dying: a scene so abrupt it risks seeming trite. By this point, John has formed the Quarrymen and met George and Paul ("John, your little friend ' s here!", shouts Mimi from the foot of the stairs). Aaron Johnson as Lennon may not quite look the part (too muscular, too model-beautiful) , but he plays it credibly; Thomas Sangster's Paul is preposterously cute. "I'd love a tea" , he says when the gang offer him a beer. But we are reminded that the boy band written off by Elvis Presley as "a bunch of faggots" were cool at first as well as later. There are charming scenes of bus surfing, flirtation and being rude to teachers. Things get darker when family tensions come to a head. But Mendips (where Lennon lived with Mimi) was more ballast than burden. The film ends with the young musician heading off to Hamburg. John , we are told, phones Mimi on arrival "and thereafter every week for the rest of his life". Amid the sex, drugs and high jinks, ever was there time for thoughts of home.

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eter Brook's Eleven and Twelve is a rethinking and translation into French of his earlier Tiemo Bokar (2004). The adaptation, credited to Brook's long-time collaborator, Marie-Helene Estienne, is based on work by the francophone Malian writer Amadou Hampate Ba, staged as expository storytelling with inset scenes - not unlike Thornton Wilder's Our Town (1938) , and with the same nostalgic idealization of a lost past. A narrator, Amkoullel (based on Ba himself), recounts incidents from his own life, and from that of his teacher, the charismatic Sufi mystic, Tierno Bokar. As often in Brook' s creations, the empty space has little by way of set: red cloths, sand, some indicative trees on casters, a few chairs. Costumes, too, are stylized and minimalist, except when there are jokes. A man becomes a woman by twisting his boubou to cover his head. The pirogue of Amkoullel's journey to school is a twist of red cloth into a boat shape. But such moments of visual magic are rare. The most significant props are probably the village men's prayer beads. Amkoullel addresses the audience directly, as in traditional non-theatrical storytelling, and the characters have neither autonomy nor character. The company is seven male actors from different countries and original tongues; there is continuous musical accompaniment by Toshi Tsuchitori, another longtime collaborator, playing a variety of percussive instruments to create shifts of mood. Like many sad tales, the force of the narrative depends on a series of comic moments before the inex-

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Sermon on the count RUTH MORSE ELEVEN AND TWELVE Bouffes du Nord, Paris; Barbican

orable end - Tierno' s rejection by his family and friends and his death in exile. It is the selection of illustrations which raises the first problem: they are cliches, cartoon comedy. The narrator moves from his village youth and discovery of Bokar' s school, to co-option into French education and then into the colonial bureaucracy. In a show barely 100 minutes long, some of the comedy includes faux-naive schoolhoy japes about the colour and content of white men's excreta; cliches about the offensive behaviour of colonial officers to their subordinates; a comic anxious mother and a shrewish widow - the only women represented. So BiifAmkoullel is a good boy and a good man, who suffered from his experience of French disdain; whose honest desire was to reject his education and career; but who obeyed his master' s advice when Bokar instructed him to remain in his post. The parallel story recounts Tierno Bokar's involvement in a religious controversy in an

area of sub-Saharan West Africa only recently converted to Islam. Amkoullel begins by showing the audience a bead, a small thing which represents the growing divide over whether men should repeat a prayer eleven or twelve times. This serious part of the production focuses on deadly sectarian conflict, which begins in the cartoon register with an aged Master losing track of how many times a prayer has been recited. He dies without explaining or adjudicating, and his disciples come to insist on their extra repetition, while elsewhere the observant retain eleven; no compromise is possible; they come to blows; deaths; intervention by the French; and sentences of exile for the leaders. Gulliver 's Travels contains a similar desert storm in a teacup when Swift's Big and Little Endians divide over which way to open a boiled egg. Bokar's place is that of an honest mystic, willing to listen, and to act when convinced he is wrong. His ostensible rival, Cherif Hamallah, persuades Bokar that his home group have innovated and are mistaken, with the predictable result that Bokar's own faction disown him. These are men concerned with conformity, and the salvation of the individual soul, not with a just society. It may be argued that what matters is our experience in the theatre, and that mystics have concerns other than social justice. But Brook and Estienne' s stripped-down pageant has so little action that it is easy to imagine that we are watching a radio play transferred to the stage. It depends on the audience's will-

TLS JANUARY 22 2010

ingness to laugh at a series of stereotypes of colonial officers, worried mothers, shrews, fanatics , sages, and naughty-boy students. It is presumably a post-9/11 sermon about tolerance. Although audiences may be ignorant of Sufism, or African syncretic Islam, they will recognize religious intolerance over trifles. Brook invites us to take his simplistic fable as a true historical example worthy of our admiration. Decontextualized, Bokar appeals by virtue of his good-humoured confidence in his own individual conscience, without reference to institutional or personal responsibility or to compromises between different kinds of loyalty to family, village or tribe. Eleven and Twelve, also, appeals to anticolonial ideas of imposed institutions which are not indigenous; neglecting to ask about power struggles in proselytizing - and arguably non-indigenous - Islam. Brook has long taken an idea of Africa as crucial to the force of his examples. Eleven and Twelve, his " research" (as he characterizes many of his productions), concerns the importance, and perhaps the immortality, of Bokar's exemplary tolerance, humour, and dedication to peace. But if we imagine this story transferred somewhere more familiar, to the Irish countryside under English rule, perhaps, or to accusations of witchcraft in colonial New England, the narrative would look quite different; we would immediately see its limitations and ask different questions. The "authenticity" on which Brook' s fable rests amounts to an exoticist fantasy in the service of an overriding pedagogical purpose.

19

The social concerns of the thriller genre

Tell' em you've told' em here are those who would claim that the crime novel and the thriller have a more direct power than their literary cousin to depict a society's ills. According to this view, the crime novelist has the greater capacity to be, in W. H. Auden's words, "among the filthy filthy too". The sphere of crime, it is implied, is more powerful , more influential, in some sense more "real" than the ordinary life which most readers (and writers) occupy. The fact that it is also easier to read Ian Rankin than James Kelman tends to be set aside, and the tilt towards the dominance of genre fiction seems to grow steeper, a preference turning into its own justification. Generally speaking, however, the distinction between crime and thrillers on the one hand and " literary" fiction on the other lies in their attitude to language. Many crime novelists seem indifferent or unaware that it might be a good idea to have a view of the matter at all, and the result is work that suggests that the writer believes he or she can operate in some medium which exists prior to, or instead of, language. Paradoxically, the result may be needlessly wordy, because the realm of implication has been abandoned or unnoticed. Stella Rimington ' s Present Danger and Peter James ' s Dead Tomorrow arrive at this point by different routes: the contemporary "security" novel (irredentist Republicans in Northern Ireland) and people-trafficking and organ theft (Brighton) . Both writers are concerned to ensure that the reader understands clearly what is taking place; they helpfully point out the meaning of events and their future implications, so that there is little danger of unwanted surprise. James , in his fifth Roy Grace novel , includes a good deal of detailed information, for example about police diving methods, but without really absorbing it into the imaginative climate (as Mo Hayder does in Ritual, for example) . If Rimington, a former Head of MI5 , tells us that the Intelligence services work largely in an atmosphere of mundane sobriety, few readers are in a position to disagree, but Present Danger is a thriller, and a sense of threat has to come from somewhere. The methods of both Rimington and J ames recall the famous instructions to preachers on how to address congregations: tell 'em you're going to tell 'em; then tell 'em ; then tell ' em you ' ve told 'em. Rimington seems especially pessimistic about the capacities of her audience: an establishment view, perhaps. Unsurprisingly, there are no compensations to be had in the way of tone in either book. In Aly Monroe's historical thriller, Washington Shadow, the sense of time and place is, in contrast, ultimately more interesting and important than plot. It is September 1945 and Maynard Keynes is in Washington to plead for more loans on behalf of warimpoverished Britain. The OSS is being

T

SEAN O'BRIEN Stella Rimington

C. J. Box

Peter Temple

PRESENT DANGER 384pp. Quercus. £ 14.99. 978 I 847249949

THREE WEEKS TO SA Y GOODB YE 356pp. Corvus. £ 12.99. 978 I 84887 29 1 2

TRUTH 384pp. Quereus. £12.99. 978 I 84916 1534

Peter James

Alan Glynn

Robert B. Parker

DEAD TOMORROW 500pp. Pan. Paperback, £6.99. 978033045677 7

WINTERLAND 480pp. Faber. Paperback, £ 12.99. 9780 571 25003 5

THE PROFESSIONAL 304pp. Quereus. £17.99. 9781849160094

Aly Monroe

Neil Cross

Michael Crichton

WASHINGTON SHADOW 336pp. John Murray. £ 16.99. 978 I 848540347

CAPTURED 256pp. Simon and Schuster. Paperback, £12.99. 978 I 847373977

PIRATE LATITUDES 320pp. HarperCollins. £ 18.99. 9780007329083

broken up to enable the birth of the CIA. Peter Cotton, ohscurely co-opted to the security operation, tries to find his way between "an extraordinarily attractive girl from the US State Department" (is there any other kind?) and an assortment of competing interests as the Cold War gets under way. No doubt the author's research is as thorough as that of James and Rimington, but she recognizes that it must serve rather than govern the book's imagined world. The second in a series, Washington Shadow offers plenty of room for future developments. In Three Weeks To Say Goodbye , C. J. Box , though not exactly subtle, is vigorously concerned with narrative tension. The McGuanes are at the point of adopting a baby when a technicality enables a rich senator to gain custody for his loathsome son, the child's father, an amateur gangbanger and psychopath. Soon the whole weight of money and law bears down on the couple. Box works hard to marry their plight to other contemporary anxieties in the boom town of Boulder, Colorado, including immigration and sexuality. The pistol-packing intervention of a deranged mountain man who may be ever so faintly on the side of the angels signals an eventual renunciation of theme in favour of action, but McGuane's bootstrap heroism holds the interest. In comparison, Alan Glynn's timely Winterland moves at a rather stately pace in unravelling a government-level conspiracy in the Dublin building industry around a massive development on the Quays. The main device here is incredulity - the heroine's - at what is taking place. The reader may respond in kind, given that the scene is present-day Ireland , whose contribution to financial "feckery" has been spectacularly disproportionate to the nation's size. Winterland also raises an interesting formal question: can a conspiracy novel convincingly allow time off for the protagonist to shower, change and so on when the streets are crawling with assassins? Nei l Cross's Captured is a more original and thoughtful piece of work, a psychologi-

cal thriller sharing some common ground with Ruth RendelllRarhara Vine. When a struggling painter discovers he is dying of a brain tumour, he feels that he must put right the wrong he has done. His labile condition leads him - for reasons others might not grasp - in search of a girl he was at school with. Discovering that she has been murdered and that no one has been convicted, he goes in pursuit of the leading suspect, her husband. The events that follow are grotesque and terrible, while the deft plot has an inescapable gravity. None of this would be nearly so interesting without the complex ordinariness of the characters - in particular the suspect, his present girlfriend, the protagonist's ex-partner and a retired policewoman. The West Country setting is used to good effect as an everyday terrain through which the characters move with increasing desperation. Captured gives off an impression of power held in reserve, and it serves an authentic, unsparing vision of goodwill undone by misfortune. In some ways Peter Temple's Truth is a more conventional piece of work. It has elements of the police procedural novel; it features a detective hero with an impressive array of problems, including gambling, sex addiction and a vexed relationship with his nobly psychotic ex-soldier father; and it concerns a plot to cover up the murder of a prostitute on premises in Melbourne owned by a large, secretive organization wired in to the state government. Although the conspir-

is rich and terse, and if this were a television drama then agreeahly in siderish terms such as "Robbers" (the Robbery Squad) and Sons of God (Special Operational Group) wou ld soon gain the currency already enjoyed by perps and unsubs. For all this , it seems as if there is another book that Temple wou ld prefer to have written, one about the relation between father and son as the bush fires close in on the family farm the old man has refused to leave. This strand in the book provokes writing of a different imaginative order from the rest, and from all the other work considered here, with the exception of Cross's . With Robert B. Parker we enter the (it wou ld appear) hallowed precincts of classic American crime fiction, where the traditions of Chandler and Hammett and John D. McDonald are honoured in the person of Spenser, the Boston-based private investigator, here undertaking his thirty-seventh investigation. Private eye novels, stretchi ng back to Conan Doyle and Poe, are fantasies of competence in which the hero fulfils by proxy the domesticated megalomania of the reader. Spenser has achieved a condition of epigrammatic invulnerability which threatens to make him a spectator in his own alleged life. When he is not passing the time with his impossibly sexy and accommodating (yet crisply independent) girlfriend and swapping coolnesses with his equally Mencken-like black accomplice Hawk, various miscreants and losers and

acy sounds familiar, the arrogance and

self-righteousness with which it is conducted are convincing and at some points alarming: the incredulous reader-citizen knows perfectly well that money outbids the law and even the state, but it is disturbing to encounter characters for whom this seems always simply to have been the case rather than being a novel and heady breach in the decencies of the civilian world. Temple writes w ith great intensity: for Villani , the detective, the pursuit of criminals offers an inferno mildly preferable to the one provided by home and family. The language

TLS JANUARY 22 2010

THE EnWIl\' MELLEl\' PRESS Creating a System of Higher Education in Great Britain, 1850-2010: State Regulation vs Academic Autonomy G.R. Evans

39.95 from publisher only

UK 01570423356 / US 716-754-2788

I want to publish your scholarly book. peer reviewed / no subsidies

[email protected]

20

FICTION

morons parade their vanities for Spenser's regretful delectation. People, what are they like? Greedy, venal, dim, ill-matched, doomed, unrepentant. The Professional is beautifully scored and carries not an ounce of fat, but there is no air to breathe in it either, and after a while Spenser's wry self-satisfaction led this reader to wish him a good hiding from a wholly unpredicted source. De gustibus, Spenser might say, peeling an apophthegm. The late Michael Cri ch ton (1942-2008) did more than most to develop the high-

concept thriller, moving swiftly between science fiction, business and technology, producing some popular cultural landmarks on the way, including The Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park and ER. His interest in human rather than reptilian history gets an outing in Pirate Latitudes, which looks back to an earlier form , the tale of seafaring adventure. Set in the Caribbean in 1665, the novel tells of an audacious raid by an English privateer to steal treasure from the impregnable Spanish-held island of Matanceros. There is no indication of when this book was written,

but for once Crichton appears not to have been ahead of the game, since Pirate Latitudes appears in the wake of the box office success of the three Pirates of the Caribbean films, which re-invented the myth of the Spanish Main for several generations who have probably not read Treasure Island. Not surprisingly, Crichton ' s book is at least halfway to being a film: indeed, it is more interesting to read as an extended film treatment than as a book in its own right. It is in effect the "novelization" of an (as yet) unmade film, leaving language as the

temporary incarnation of a work intended for the eye rather than the page. When the privateer Captain Hunter recruits his officers for the mission, his methods resemble those of Yul Brynner in The Magnificent Seven and echo numerous other men-on-a-mission films from The Dirty Dozen to Inglourious Basterds, while his villain , the gloating sadist Cazalla, is Basil Rathbone in the age of steroids. It seems you can have allusions or texture but not both, though the tale scorches along in its irritatingly expository fashion.

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ust over a decade after its first publication in 1984, Angelica Garnett appended to the reissue of her award-winning memoir Deceived with Kindness a preface debating whether or not she would now write "this book in the same way" . The answer was on the whole " Yes" . Because she was unable to confront her dead parents with the shortcomings of her emotional education, writing it out - committing herself to "a definite point of view" - provided a necessary exorcism, a means of moving beyond accusation and blame, those "dreary props for the ego" . The preface ended on a note of unease; although she had focused mainly through the lens of her childhood and adolescent perceptions, she had occasionally been led "by the fascination of the subject" into the kind of speculation proper to adult analysis and hence into a different ethical domain. The other protagonists could no longer speak up for themselves, could not correct or contradict her theories about them. But the biographical element was important, she realized. Without its hard-headedness, there was a danger of getting stuck in " nostalgia and snob ism": a hazard shared between the writer and a public "always liable to over-identify with the members of an elite". As the granddaughter of Leslie Step hen, the niece of Virginia Woolf, the daughter of Vanessa Bell and of Clive Bell (legally) and Duncan Grant (biologically); as the erstwhile wife of one of Grant' s lovers, David "Bunny" Garnett, and having grown up surrounded by Stracheys, Mortimers and Step hens, Angelica Garnett faced a family tradition of life-writing, as well as a daunting intellectual milieu in which memoir was highly valued. The challenge - in which Deceived with Kindness succeeded triumphantly - was to navigate an artistically coherent and factually accurate course without being sucked into the whirlpool of Bloomsbury biography or washed up on the sands of Bloomsbury "heritage" . Bloomsbury was the matrix from which [

J

sprang,

in

many

ways

an

Even among artists TREV BROUGHTON Angelica Garnett THE UNSPOKEN TRUTH 296pp. Chatto and Windus. £ IS. 9780701184353

by a consciousness of timidity tricking itself out as benign neutrality ("I left with the impression that quite a lot remained to be said. But should it have been said by me, or herT); or by a recognition that a desire to please everyone can come across as coldness, even hardness. The reader of the stories in The Unspoken Truth must accept their structural ambivalence - a poetics of indecision - at every turn. The characters have been renamed; but an elder brother, now Jason, now Justin, remains identifiable as the beloved confidant Julian, obsessively sent off to die overseas; while Mischa, the dying father of "The Birthday Party", wears Duncan Grant's colourful woollen cap and bed socks. Although Bloomsbury is never explicitly identified here as the origin of the family life so probingly relived, or of the intellectual and

artistic legacy with which each story is suffused, the volume is subtitled "A quartet of Bloomsbury stories". The four tales experiment with first- and third-person perspectives, interspersed with letters and diary entries, and it is possible to read them as Kiinstlerromane even with a prior knowledge of Deceived with Kindness. The incidents recalled in "Aurore", for instance, are only dimly recognizable from a fleeting paragraph in the earlier, explicitly autobiographical volume. But a postscript tears away the veil of fiction, recounting the story's history as a piece written for the Memoir Club and abruptly exposing the pseudonyms. It is as if a fundamental selfmistrust is projected outwards onto the reader, in what sometimes seems like a gesture of aggression. "For you this is only a story, neither short nor long", accuses the prologue to "Aurore". In this the book reinforces the tenor of the tales ' psychological explorations: this is what it feels like to grow up without "oughts and shoulds", to be manipulated and manoeuvred rather than guided, to sense that one is not quite up to the mark. "Aurore", is a novella-length study of the impact on Agnes of her encounters with the Deloiseaus, a family of French artists and

extraordinary

advantage: but [ wished [ could have called it by

another name , and rechristened its characters, so that they might be seen for their psychological complexities and over-lifesize personalities without the label.

Prefaces are almost always, paradoxically, afterthoughts, and as such they both enact ambivalence and orient the reader ambivalently. And ambivalence is Garnett's characteristic voice; one of the pleasures of her narrative style, and one of her bugbears as author. It underpins many of the episodes she recounts here, propelled as they are by a jealousy only belatedly acknowledged ("this forked tongue that leaped out of nowhere");

intellectuals with whom she lived for a few months before the Second World War, and with whom she kept up a friendship until the death of its last member, the father, Gilles, in the 1990s. Its core tragedy is the fate of Gilles and Juliana's only daughter, Aurore, a promising young actress, whose death, after months in a coma, is the result of a botched nose job. Its moral crux is a tactless letter sent by Agnes to Juliana in which she criticized the behaviour of Aurore. This is more than a mere breach of confidence by someone posing, if only in her own mind, as a surrogate mother (" a role that, in view of Juliana' s own existence, was obviously redundant"): it is a betrayal of the hospitality and generosity of a household which has provided Agnes with a functioning model of what family life - even among artists can be: selfless love and mutual support, combined with respect for each member's individuality and calling. The tale combines two narratives: that of the French family's hand-to-hand combat with war, exile, separation, illness, bereavement, a history told with bemused admiration and deep affection; and the narrator' s lifelong struggle to come to terms with a sense of moral failure which persists without the satisfaction of external consequences, without acknowledgement, retribution, or self-forgiveness. However far the narrator moves, in space or time, from the suffocating permissiveness of an inheritance which opens doors and removes obstacles from her path, it remains a "straitjacket from which I never succeeded in freeing myself. However much I wriggled, like a fish en gei
"Angelica at the Loom" by Vanessa Bell, 1937; from A Room of Their Own: The Bloomsbury artists in American collections, edited by Nancy E. Green and Christopher Reed (272pp. Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University. 97819342 60 05 3)

TLS JANUARY 22 2010

had flown and might fly again, and Helen wanted to fly with them. At least thirty years older than they were, she had never grown wings and even now hardly hoped to.

FICTION is father's death plunges Ritwik Ghosh into an eleven-day period of mourning. After nine days have passed, his mother collapses and by the end of the stipulated period she too has died. Although Ritwik refused to carry out the prescribed Hindu rites for his father, this time he does his duty. As his mother lies on a cheap stretcher in a Calcutta crematorium, he touches her face with burning faggots. It takes an hour and a half for the body to burn. Neel Mukherjee's first novel, A Life Apart, begins with these funerals. Over the course of the novel, which was published in India in 2008 under the title Past Continuous, we learn more about Ritwik's upbringing. Having escaped his poor family by means of a scholarship to Oxford, he is haunted by his mother (she appears in an armchair in his rooms) and by the memory of the beatings she inflicted on him. He is also tormented by his shameful origins ; for him, Calcutta was a "festering mediocrity" and he could not wait to get away. But his new life in England, so distant from that world, poses its own problems. During his first tutorial, he mistakes a fellow student' s regional accent for German. "God, they must be so clever, they all understand German, they're all laughing

H

21

Not quite straight SAMEER RAHIM Neel Mukherjee A LIFE APART 340pp. Constable and Robinson. £12.99. 978 I 8490 1101 3

at his jokes", Ritwik thinks to himself. His homosexuality makes him yearn for acceptance. Unfortunately, the golden-haired Oxford boy he falls for says things like "I love India ... all that mysticism and stuff, it's spiritual, like, isn ' t it?". In between Ritwik's story are chapters from a novel he is writing. Set in Bengal at the turn of the twentieth century, it picks out a minor English character from The Home and the World, Rabindranath Tagore's novel of 1916, and imagines her life beyond those pages. Miss Gilby is an outsider among both the Indians and the British. She works as an English teacher for a wealthy Bengali family - a servant in a land where her people

are masters. As such she is viewed as "unwomanly" and "unpatriotic" . Some of the novel's deftest moments come when Miss Gilby's story obliquely reflects Ritwik's. In Oxford, Ritwik listens to a Brazilian song sung by another attractive but resolutely straight boy; Miss Gilby and some fellow English women listen to an Indian prince sing a song in incomprehensible English. The bridge of understanding between all parties falls comically and sadly short. When we return to Ritwik's story, his sexual behaviour becomes the focus. Rejected and lonely, he spends his time in freezing public toilets waiting to be picked up. There are precise descriptions of the social codes involved in such encounters (who knocks on which cubicle door and when) which go on too long. Suddenly Oxford ends, and Ritwik, who cannot imagine returning to Calcutta but whose student visa will soon expire, becomes the carer for an elderly woman called Anne Cameron. She was born in India around the same time as

Miss Gilby was teaching there and so becomes a physical link to his fictional world. She also becomes something of a replacement mother and their relationship provides this novel's few moments of lightness and joy. Up until this point the plot has just about held together; but the last third of the novel collapses. For no convincing reason, Ritwik is led into picking fruit with some Eastern European migrants. Then he becomes a rent boy near King' s Cross and is caught up in a gangster turf war; luckily he is saved by a wealthy Arab who puts him up at the Dorchester. Complications arise when it turns out that the Arab is an arms dealer. A Life Apart contains much material not properly stitched together; characters drift in and out and plot lines disappear. This is a shame since Mukherjee has taken time over his prose, which is polished and often evocative. After his father's funeral , mourners buzz round Ritwik's home, for "grief offered such a delicious peek into the minutiae of other people's lives"; Anne Cameron moves in the bath like a "crab, graceless and pained" . But the novel's anxious protagonist and its earnest narrative voice combine to drown out any such felicities.

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Ata loose end HENRY POWER Simon Robson CATCH 262pp. Cape. £ 16.99. 9780224090230

atherine is frustrated. She wakes up alone in the cottage she shares with her husband, and goes downstairs. There, she is troubled by the presence of a piano which has been hers since childhood, but which she cannot play properly; "for however clearly she imagined in her head the music that she loved, when she sat at the piano and tried to reproduce it she failed" . This looming creative failure is matched by another. Catherine has left her job so that she and Tom, an outdoorsy human rights lawyer and a moral man, can move to the country and have a baby. No baby is immediately forthcoming , so she is at a loose end while Tom works. Catherine makes two cups of tea (she is an "epic, committed tea drinker"), scolds herself for not getting dressed, and takes a couple of telephone calls. We are now a hundred pages into the novel. Catherine's world is full of snags and enclosure. She drinks her tea and feels "the catch of the treacly miasma at the back of her throat". Reflecting on a bus ride, she remembers the "cling of diesel in her throat". She plays a chord on the piano, and it sounds like "a bee caught in the depths of an empty hive". Her husband's pet name for her, for reasons she cannot recall but which the reader may guess at, is "Catch". Plainl y, the trapped bee also stands for Catherine, who spends much of the novel

C

confined. But, after a time, we encounter other characters. There is the redoubtable Mrs Mountjoy, whose difficult daughter wants to study History of Art at university. Catherine is drafted in to help talk her out of it, and the resulting confrontation shakes her badly. There is Graham, a lecherous, retired army officer. And there is Maria, Catherine's great friend from university, bohemian, promiscuous and brilliant at the violin. She is, we are told, "a character like one of those figures who crop up in novels which the writer has written with particular, anecdotal energy, investing in his patchwork creation a vibrancy that makes them interestingly recognizable" . Energy is, in fact, the quality most conspicuously lacking from Catch, though the fault is repaired, to some extent, in the second half of the novel. Suspense builds as the day unravels. Simon Robson is on surer ground once he has got Catherine out of the house. He has a good ish ear for dialogue, and Catherine's conversations with the Mountjoys, with Graham, and with Maria are nicely paced. Sadly, they also provide an opportunity for Robson to rehearse some of the novel's central themes: isolation, belonging, commitment. Particularly jarring is the argument Maria and Catherine have about the writer Thomas Kershaw (invented for the purposes of this very debate), whose novel Albion Mansions is a favourite of hot-headed Maria's, but whose confrontational style displeases Catherine. Catch is longer than most readers will find comfortable, and it is overwritten. Robson has an undeniable gift for putting together words in unexpected combinations, but this technique soon grates. Metaphors come too thick and too fast, and mere description never goes unadorned. Sentences are often crowded, and their structure suffers accordingly. One might charitably ascribe such verbal excess to Catherine rather than to Robson. But the novel is still fatally weakened by it.

Fixed ideas DA YID COW ARD Rebecca Stott THE CORAL THIEF 233pp. Weidenfeld and Nicolson. £14.99. 9780 297 85137 0

papers and the two rare coral specimens which were to be his introduction to Cuvier. He reports the theft and comes to the notice of Inspector Jagot, a former thief-taker and the missing link between the paternalistic Lieutenant General of ancien regime Paris and Yidocq or Victor Hugo's Javert, those two faces of the modern investigative policeman. Jagot knows the Coral Thief as Lucienne Bouchard who, born a lady, escaped the guillotine in 1794, joined Napoleon ' s campaign to Egypt, and uses corals and other specimens, bought or stolen, to further her own transformist researches: she wishes to help Enlightenment reason to evolve into nineteenth-century positivism. Adapting to his new circumstances, Daniel becomes infatuated with Lucienne who, though twenty years his senior, not only returns his love but undertakes his philosophical education. Throwing in his lot with her and against Jagot, he successfully negotiates his rites of passage which are not merely romantic but scientific, for he too mutates into a man of the new century. Rebecca Stott's low-temperature, sepiatinted dramatization of a crucial moment in the history of ideas is set in a Paris that is brought to vivid life by detailed

n the summer of 1815, Daniel Con nor, an Edinburgh medical student, travels to Paris to take up a post as assistant to Baron Cuvier, the upholder of the immutability of species, on his great work: the classification of the entire animal kingdom. Daniel finds the capital less immutable than the implications of Cuvier's fixisme had led him to expect, for in the aftermath of Waterloo, Paris is in a state of flux. The glory of Empire has given way to the shame of occupation, Napoleon is already turning into a legend, the face of the city is being changed by a building boom, and the collections of the Louvre and the Jardin des Plantes are being repatriated by the Allies from whom they were taken as Napoleonic booty. Even before he arrives, a travelling companion - a darkly beautiful woman with a gravelly voice, "like limestone" - offers him startling, heretical knowledge of the programme notes on the sights, sounds and mutable productions of the history of smells of the restless streets of the capital. species, knowledge which applies the But the pace is regularly taken out of transformism of Lamarck both to the past the narrative by instructive asides and and to the processes which are shaping lecturettes, and her secondary characters are Daniel's new environment. If fixisme thinly drawn and functional. Even Daniel, appeals to the old, as standing for stasis, when trying to assemble the facts of convention and established institutions, Lucienne's past, is unable "to fit them transformism is for the young. It defines life together into anything that looked like a as a process of adaptation and improvement. life with a trajectory" . For all that, The Coral It speaks to liberals and republicans whose Thief scores heavily with the clarity it religion is progress. brings to a scientific debate which At first, Daniel does not know what to fixistes of various persuasions still insist on think. The woman in the coach steals his keeping alive.

I

TLS JANUARY 22 2010

22

RELIGION

Athens to Jerusalem " T h e best thing about religion", the Marxist metaphysician Ernst Bloch once declared, "is that it gives birth to heretics." Benjamin Lazier's elegant study of "Heresy and the European imagination between the World Wars" focuses on the philosophy of Hans Jonas, Leo Strauss and Gershom Scholem, three German-Jewish Weimar thinkers whose work extended well into the second half of the twentieth century and whose importance has grown with time. Their thought, Lazier writes, must be viewed in terms of a confrontation with Gnosticism and pantheism, two apparently opposed heresies. While Gnosticism removed God from a sinful world, rendering him absent and, like man , alienated from the material sensuous universe, pantheism - especially its Spinozan version - nullified the notion of a providential deity by rendering God and the world as identical. As Lazier succinctly puts it: "Whereas the gnostics had rid the world of God to save him, Spinoza had divinized the world - but in order to destroy him". Heresies, Lazier argues, represented an object of interest and inspiration. Yet his finely wrought analyses demonstrate that while all his subjects were indeed fascinated by the issues these heresies raised, they were less a source of inspiration than challenges in need of resistance, reworking and overcoming. Thus, in numerous philosophical guises, Jonas - who unveiled The Gnostic Religion (the title of his classic study of the spirit of late antiquity), and who later detected in Martin Heidegger' s existentialist nihilism a unique revival of the same dualism that defined alienated man as being over and against the world - insisted upon world affirmation and on retaining just enough of the dualistic insight to endow life itself as meaningful. Lazier sees Jonas's anti-mechanistic, philosophical biology and environmental ethics of responsibility as responses to Gnostic world estrangement, the Pauline denigration of the flesh and Heideggerian "Being towards Death". These may have been underlying factors , but Jonas himself connected the development of his thinking to his Second World War experience, as a member of the Jewish Brigade. He formulated his thoughts in a series of letters to his wife, Lore:

STEVEN E. ASCHHEIM Benjamin Lazier GOD INTERRUPTED Heresy and the European imagination between the World Wars 270pp. Princeton University Press.

£21.95 (US $29.95). 9780691136707 Ernst Bertram NIETZSCHE Attempt at a mythology Translated by Robert E. Norton 424pp. University of Illinois Press. $90 (paperback, $35). 97802520760 I 5 sought to insulate the claims of one from the other - even though he ultimately and, perhaps uncomfortably, sided with Athens over Jerusalem. For all that, Lazier holds that Strauss's philosophy was itself a kind of heresy, comprehensible only against the horizon of revealed religion. Strauss's response to the Spinozan critique of biblical revelation, Gnostic alienation and the perils of unchecked secular liberal self-assertion was to provide a "worldly surrogate for a lost God", in the controversial assertion of a pre-modern natural

nomian episodes of Jewish history, the invocation of heretical themes as grounds for modern Zionist and Jewish identity, are all well known. The philosophical and psychological sources of Scholem's thought are complex and manifold, but Lazier's contribution to their study is richly original. He demonstrates how, in formulating his own countermyth - critical of both liberal secularity and religious Orthodoxy - Scholem ' s Kabbalah incorporated both Gnostic and pantheistic heresies, at the same time as it radically transformed them: "Judaism could abide neither the gnostic divorce of God from world nor their pantheist conflation. But ... it did internalize gnosticism by positing a dualism immanent to the Godhead itself and it could countenance a ... pantheist scheme for which creation is understood as the selfemanation of the divine". Scholem's secular human affirmation was thus informed by God's world-enabling self-contraction, where creature and creator remain autonomous, yet allied. Out of the ensuing " nothingness" of creation, physis opens up a space for a kind of revelation (though modernity has submerged its meaning and significance). If he began as a Nietzschean Zionist of totalized Jewish will and unadulterated selfhood, Scholem also took on a sense of the tragedy of the Jews' uncertain existence, facil-

Far from books, lacking any materials for scholarly research, 1 was thrown back on the

question that should actually preoccupy every philosopher, namely the question as to the meaning of our existence and the existence of the world around us. So 1 began to wonder what it implies in ontological terms that there are organisms, and what significance the

nature of organic being holds for life. Lazier tellingly demonstrates that in varying ways, Jonas, Strauss and Scholem all returned to a kind of teleological Aristotelian emphasis on physis, purposive nature, as against nomos, the world of law and artifice. (Teleology, of course, implies design and thus maintains a certain theological resonance.) This, too, is evident in the complex ruminations of Leo Strauss. Strauss wrestled with both religion and philosophy, and respectfully

"Assumptio (from the whole sky)", 1997-8; fromIall McKeever: Paintings by Marjorie Allthorpe-Guyton, Michael Tucker and Catherine r ,ampert (208pp. r ,und Humphries. £35.9781848220379) standard of human judgement. While Jonas stressed the organic aspects of physis and teleological nature, Strauss set out its political dimensions, reviving the classic doctrine of natural right and justice as prior to convention and law. His provocative counter-myth, as Samuel Moyn has pointed out, was not antinomian but rather ante-nomian. Gershom Scholem's resuscitation of previously disreputable, subterranean Kabbalistic sources, his majestic reconstructions of anti-

itating, perhaps, his early recognition of Arab rights in Palestine. (The gulf between Scholem ' s passionate defence of the everyday realities of Israel and Zionism and his own esoteric revelatory expectations and disappointments remains to be explored.) Lazier argues that the attempts of these three "titans of scholarship, emigres, and friends" to formulate still resonant worldaffirming ecological and political countermyths in the light of the painful modern

TLS JANUARY 22 2010

twin exclusions of God and meaningful nature, cannot be understood outside their predicament and self-consciousness as Jews. Still, given their awareness of heresy and determination to create serviceable new myths, it should come as no surprise that in their intellectual worlds, Friedrich Nietzsche constituted a towering, if controversial , presence. Ernst Bertram' s seminal work Nietzsche: Attempt at a mythology (1918) equally a product of the German crisis of defeat in war and the search for renewed, salvific meanings - not only highlighted Nietzsche's own revival of the mythical dimension as essential to creative human activity but also sought, in the heroizing spirit of the Stefan George circle (with which Bertram was associated) to render Nietzsche himself into a latter-day prophet - a dynamic, living national myth. In presenting the intertwined nature of Nietzsche's life and thought - and in the spirit of the philosopher's "vitalist" conception of history - Bertram disavowed conventional positivist method for that of " legend ... the most vital form of historical tradition, its most primitive as well as its ultimate embodiment, simultaneously its oldest and deepest expression. Legend alone actually connects the primeval past with the present through a continuous dynamic bond; only it unites the saint and the people, the hero and the peasant; the prophet and posterity meet only here .... All that is living [wants] to become legend, all reality myth". Moreover, Bertram insisted on the dynamic, interactive nature of the reception processes. "A great man", he declared, "is always inescapably our own creation, just as we are his." We should be grateful to Robert Norton for his sensitive translation of Bertram's influential book (reissued seven times between 1918 and 1927), both for its intrinsic merits (and problems) and because of the book' s role in the right-wing annexation of Nietzsche during the Weimar period. That association is easy to make, given Bertram's later active identification with Nazism (among other things, he regretted that the notorious book-burnings were not spontaneous outbursts of youthful enthusiasm, but rather planned affairs). Yet, as far as Bertram's Nietzsche book is concerned, this judgement may be too facile. The patrician, lyrical nature of Bertram's presentation - Thomas Mann called some chapters "simply beautiful" - was far removed from brutalized Nazi vulgarity. As Norton points out, the work contains no racist or crude vOlkisch nationalism. On the contrary, Rertram's aesthetically crafted

Nietzsche is not a demagogic mover of the masses, nor an ideologue, but a deeply torn, irreducible, even tragic, figure, sensitively mirroring and responding to the conflicting impulses of his time. As Bertram put it, the aim of his panegyric was "to elucidate the intrinsic spiritual duality of this mind" by structuring the work in a pre-set pattern of complex, apparently irreconcilable polarities (North versus South, Being versus Becoming, Protestantism versus paganism, culture versus civilization). Yet Bertram resolves these dualities

RELIGION by mediating and crystallizing them into a super-German (iiberdeutsch) national essence. This is typically accomplished through a kind of casuistry, in which things are turned on their head and the great man's duality becomes an expression of "the unity of the manifold". Thus Nietzsche's assault on Christianity in reality expresses the noblest of Northern Protestantism, his hatred for his fellow countrymen becomes a form of love, his admiration for the South and Hellenism an inextricable dimension of SuperGermanness, the biting critique of German Being transformed into the most profound evidence of Nietzsche's deep Deutschtum. In all these permutations the life of this "last

great German" is portrayed as "perhaps the grandest confrontation of the German character with itself'. This certainly was not nationalist in the populist, rabble-rousing sense. Its appeal to higher realms - especially the classical tradition - may even have acted as a critical , regulative idea, a foil to other more violent vOlkisch tracts of the time. For all that, the almost obsessive, pious insistence on, and elevation to, a higher German essence contained an obvious "national-

ist" bent. In the context of Germany ' s darkest hours, perhaps it was inevitable that Bertram should stress paradox, process and duality (and also leave out large, more disturbing portions of the Nietzsche oeuvre.). But by

resolving and transcending the contradictions, Bertram made it easy to integrate Nietzschethe climactic German embodiment of Oberdeutschtum - into the framework of a rounded nationalist myth. In the midst of defeat and bewilderment, Bertram's Nietzsche - prophet of creative becoming and the longing for German self-realization at ever-higher levels - carried with him a galvanizing national message of will: transcendence was still possible and the intensity of suffering and despair part and parcel of the redemptive process. "Nietzsche", Bertram declared, "is the dazzling minute in which a people gained selfknowledge at the moment ... of its most pressing danger - and is simultaneously an awaken-

23 ing and an expansion of the instinct of selfpreservation and the will to salvation." It would be wrong to conclude that only the Weimar Republic, plagued by multiple crises, could produce, and be particularly receptive to, these self-conscious mythologizing projects. It may be, too, that in our own present disturbed circumstances, new variations will also take root. Perhaps Nietzsche was correct when he proclaimed that "without myth every culture loses the healthy natural power of its creativity". It may be difficult to give up on these redemptive searches but perhaps we should always accompany them with a few grains of ironic enlightenment salt.

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

ne of the problems of living in a secular society is the lack of any generalized conception of evil. The word is used often enough, notably when the headline - writers of tabloid newspapers wish to draw their readers' attention to a particularly heinous murder. But even here, "evil" remains ill-defined, and we are in any case accustomed to having the conduct of those of our fellow citizens whom we might,

O

in unguarded moments, describe as "evil"

explained in more familiar and accessible terms by social workers and psychiatrists. Evil behaviour is the outcome of social or mental conditions rather than some abstract or personalized force. Societies founded on a religious ethic, we might assume, would have fewer problems in developing a concept of evil. But here, too, there are difficulties. Cultures that believe in a plurality of gods have it relatively easy: some of the deities can be good, others bad, while some (and in certain cultures all) might, like human beings , combine a mixture of good and evil. But things are rather more difficult with monotheistic faiths, such as Christianity. If there is only one God, the presence of evil in the world presents a challenge: if God is presumed to be good, then evil needs explaining, as it must limit, compromise, or indeed seek to overthrow his goodness. The solution in Christianity was to create a great force for evil to oppose God' s goodness, the devil. And from the high Middle Ages (at the latest) the devil, or Satan, was a dominant figure in European Christian culture. His powers, as theologians were anxious to point out, were essentially subject to divine control; yet he acted as a constant tempter of Christians to forgo their faith , as a continual doer of evil in an uncertain and materially backward world. Such an important cultural construct needs his historians, and P. G. Maxwell-Stuart is a very appropriate candidate for inclusion in their ranks. Maxwell-Stuart is well established as a writer on magic, witchcraft and

the occult, has an in-depth knowledge of these matters over a long chronological span. One is therefore justified in turning to this volume with high expectations. But these expectations are challenged almost immediately by the "Author's Note" at the beginning of the book. What is being offered, we are informed, is not a biography proper, but rather "a series of snapshots, each intended to give some idea of how people in succeeding Christian centuries tried to grapple with the idea of personified evil". This, in what is a rather short book, is probably fair enough;

Devilish JAMES SHARPE P. G. Maxwell-Stuart SATAN A biography 224pp. Amberley Publishing. Paperback, £14.99. 978 1 84868082 1

but it does put rather a lot of weight on the choice of snapshots. Much of the time, this choice is apposite and informative. In the early sections, Maxwell-Stuart shows how the concept of the devil developed, from the deviant courtier at the divine court of those early Middle Eastern religions from which Judaism emerged through to the rebel angel of the Old Testament and the great opponent of Christ depicted in the New Testament. Here the author uses his linguistic skills to their full advantage, analysing the uncertain and unstable terminology from which "Satan" and "the devil" were derived. There is also a very clear exposition of how ideas on the devil developed in the early Church, when even very basic theological issues, the nature of Satan among them, were uncertain and matters of debate. The fullest treatment, however, comes in the period with which the author is most at home, the years between 1400 and 1700, when the devil's presence was at its most marked. This was the period of the construction of the model of the satanic witch, who entered into a pact with the devil and who (in some parts of Europe, at least) attended the sabbat, that great inversion of the Catholic mass, over which Satan presided. It was also the period when instances of demonic possession proliferated, and when many Europeans were convinced that they had met the devil , or that he was adversely affecting their health, their sanity, or their social and familial relationships. By the beginning of the fifteenth century, a number of cultural, political and theological currents had coalesced to give Satan a new significance, and, as MaxwellStuart admirably demonstrates, Satan was to enjoy that significance until a new set of intellectual and cultural movements removed him from the attentions of most educated Europeans around 1700. There are, however, other themes in the book which, despite being signalled, would

have benefited from being developed further. The first is the role of the devil in popular culture and popular Christianity. Here, the devil was not a personification of evil in the learned theologian's sense, but rather a trickster, tempter, general nuisance and folkvillain. Connected with this point, one feels that Maxwell-Stuart could have expanded his fascinating exposition of the ever-changing visual images of the devil that Christian art created, many of which, of course, would have been accessible to the population at

TLS JANUARY 22 2010

large in the stained-glass windows and other decorations of their churches. And, lastly, the snapshots become less frequent after about 1700: this biography does not have a lot to say about its subject' s old age and dotage. The fact that (to take a fairly obvious example) the Faust legend inspired works by Goethe, Heine, W. S. Gilbert, Paul Valery, Berlioz, Gounod, Turgenev and Randy Newman suggests that Satan and the notion of evil he personified, less scarily perhaps, was to remain an important figure in European culture long after witch-burning and demonic possession ceased to be accepted phenomena. It is a pity that this issue was not given more coverage in an otherwise learned and fascinating book.

LITERATURE

24 precursor and contemporary of Dante, Guido Cavalcanti was the acknowledged master of courtly love poetry in that mode which Dante was to label the dolce stil nuovo ("the sweet new style") , yet if his poetry could be encapsulated by a single adjective it would need the tension of the compound "bitter-sweet" to reflect both the subject of his songs and the tenor of his short life, Born some time between 1250 and 1259 into one of the most powerful and wealthy families of Florence, from youth Cavalcanti was embroiled in the acrimonious feuds between the city's political factions , the Ghibellines and Guelfs (with which his family was aligned). What little we know of Cavalcanti from contemporary sources portrays him as brave and courteous yet also aloof and disdainful , a natural philosopher who was prone to brooding among the tombs "as if in his own home". Following a skirmish in which Cavalcanti tried to avenge himself of an attempt upon his life, he was exiled to the malaria-infested town of Sarzana. Although recalled to Florence after a few weeks, he died some ten days later, probably of malaria, on August 29, 1300. In Cavalcanti the highly stylized medieval convention of chivalric love and etiquette, first developed by the troubadours of France in the preceding century, turns from the meshing of erotic desire and spiritual attainment through the idolization of the lady into an exploration of the darker psychological machinations of love. If the ritual of amour courtois is often portrayed, in medieval iconography, through the metaphor of the lovelorn couple facing each other across a chessboard,

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Love and war OLIVIER BURCKHARDT Simon West, editor THE SELECTED POETRY OF OUIDO CAVALCANTI A critical English edition 193pp. Troubador. £ 13.99 (US $22.95). 9781906510725

Cavalcanti strips the image back to the harsher realities of a battleground. In his most famous poem, "Donna me prega" (Because a lady bids me), which defines love in the rigorous scholastic terms of the day, he replaces Venus the goddess of love by the god of war in the line: "Love is given shape by a darkness born of Mars", and elsewhere refers to Love in the masculine as signor valente, "worthy or valiant lord": a title embodying the chivalric ideal that presides over the code of honour. The strength of Simon West's edition is the identification of Cavalcanti with the word sbigottito that appears regularly in his poetry. It does not have a single equivalent in English (dismayed, dumbfounded, amazed?) but implies a state of being unnerved; it expresses "the severe shock and bewilderment of the lover and his incapacity to react" when faced with even a single fleeting dart of a gaze from the lady. It is as if Cavalcanti has taken the bellicose imagery of courtly love to its logical conclusion; the breakdown and

Guido Cavalcanti by Cristofano (di PapiJ dell' Altissimo (d.1605) death-in-the-heart that the narrator experiences at the hands of Love and his lady in numerous poems reflects the lack of strategies open to one who faces love on the battlefield. The chivalric code requires one to be vanquished the moment one's lady appears. No armour or weaponry can counter the onslaught, the only sign of courage and valour that one can show is not to flee but rather to accept the strange "death" that the forlorn lover must live with. It is the exploration of such psychological traumas, along with a haughtiness that is not devoid of irony, which

makes Cavalcanti so modern and sympathetic to contemporary ears. The fifty-two sonnets, ballads, and songs of Cavalcanti that have survived bear ample testimony to the new and strikingly personal dimension that he brought to the courtly love poetry of the period. Of those, West has selected twenty-three poems that he deems "the very best" and arranged them thematically. But although the grouping of poems under such sections as "Love as Sbigottimen to" and "In Praise of Love" enable one to follow major themes, there are serious omissions, the occasional references to other poems in the notes notwithstanding. A poem such as "A me stesso di me pietate vene" (To myself pity of myself came) with its crueltyof-love theme needed to be at least discussed in the notes if not included outright. Were it not for the fact that the volume is subtitled "A critical English edition" one could accept the translations and notes as a poetical engagement with Cavalcanti and the various English versions that began with Dante Gabriel Rossetti ' s translations (also of twenty-three poems) in 1861 , Ezra Pound's idiosyncratic versions of the near-complete corpus of poems, and subsequent occasional and complete translations into English. As it stands, however, the critical edition and poetic translation do not mesh. The notes offer a valuable tool for engaging with the original Italian text on the facing page, but ultimately the critical and poetic approaches are incompatible unless each poem is also accompanied by a full literal gloss and a more extensive account of the relation of individual poems to the rest of Cavalcanti's corpus.

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

he life of Lu Xun (1881-1936) spanned a crucial era in China, beginning, as Julia Lovell notes in her introduction, in "the fading world of late imperial China" and ending in his struggles with the cultural wing of the Chinese Communist Party. As well as a history of Chinese fiction, he is known for his short stories and essays. He has been celebrated in China, particularly since 1949, "commandeered" by Mao, not a position he would have appreciated. His life, described by Lovell, was crucial to his literary output, for he set many of his stories in his boyhood home. Born into a once prominent family in the town of Shao-xing near the east coast, in the "land of fish and rice", Lu Xun saw the family fortune and reputation decline dramatically during his childhood. His grandfather, once an important official, was imprisoned for attempted bribery and his father, having ruined his health through "a weakness for opium and alcohol", died despite taking a series of expensive medicines such as "sugar cane thrice exposed to frost, monogamous crickets ink". To the despair of his mother, Lu Xun turned his back on the traditional Confucian educational system and studied English, political and natural sciences in a naval academy for a while where "climbing a mast a few times did not make me a sailor", before leaving for a medical school in Japan. Shown a lantern slide of the execution of a Chinese citizen during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05 watched by a silent Chinese crowd, he suddenly decided he "no longer

T

Silent China FRANCES WOOD Lu Xun THE REAL STORY OF AH-Q AND OTHER TALES OF CHINA The complete fiction of Lu Xun Translated by Julia Lovell 415pp. Penguin. Paperback, £12.99. 9780 14045548 9

believed in the overwhelming importance of medical science" and, wanting to rouse this apathetic nation through literature, he reinvented himself "as a crusader for cultural reform". The apathetic crowd, the individual crushed by circumstances and a failure to change are themes that run through almost all his stories, many of which are told by an "(implicitly) intellectual, upper class narrator" who is, as Lovell notes with reference to "The Real Story of Ah-Q", the tale of a tragic village idiot, a "condescending biographer ... a thoroughly compromised man who slips between the various worlds that he parodies: the flatulent Confucian literary tradition. the parochial the cannibalistic crowd". In the stories, Lu Xun makes use of his childhood , his father's illness and quack medicines, his own studies in the little school over the road from the family home, his friends, and memories of boat tri ps to see

travelling opera players, and he parodies himself as the narrator. Many of the stories are desperately sad: "New Year' s Sacrifice" reveals the tragedy of the life and death of Xianglin ' s wife, and in "Medicine", two bereaved mothers meet in a cemetery. The son of one woman was executed as a revolutionary while the other woman paid a huge sum of money for a bread roll soaked in the dead boy's blood in the vain hope it would cure her son of tuberculosis. Other stories are characterized by a painful nostalgia. In "My Old Home", the narrator returns to the family home which is about to be sold. He meets Runtu, whom he remembers with admiration and excitement as a fantastical child with tales of "sea-shells of every colour" , "jumping fish at the sea-shore with legs like frogs" and "dangerous goings-on around watermelons". But the grown-up Runtu is an impoverished farmer who addresses the narrator as "Sir" . It would be wrong to conclude that Lu Xun himself was the narrator, a dry outsider. The journalist Agnes Smedley , worried about the passion aroused by the execution of young fellow writers (like Rou Shi and twenty others in 1931), wrote that "His voice was filled with terrible hatred", and described how he refused to rest, although he was suffering from tuberculosis. Despite the despair, some of his most fascinating stories were written at the end of his life when he turned

TLS JANUARY 22 2010

to Chinese history and legend in his "Old Stories Retold" . These are clever and often funny. Laozi the Daoist sage, " still as a block of wood", is irritated by frequent visits from Confucius but he, in his turn, irritates the town guards with his philosophy, "The Way that can be spoken is not the eternal Way"; "same boring old rubbish .... I couldn't keep my eyes open. I was expecting a bit of kissand-tell , something about his love affairs". Zhuangzi, the other great Daoist sage, meets a Chinese Rip Van Winkle in "Bringing Back the Dead". Julia Lovell and Penguin have done Chinese modern literature a great service in bringing this passionate, witty and bleakly nostalgic work to what one hopes will be a wider audience. Lovell's introduction is excellent and, despite my nostalgia for the earlier translations by Gladys and Xianyi Yang, a comparison reveals more similarities than differences. I did miss Lu Xun' s wonderful description of himself as a child (endlessly sent either to the Chinese medicine shop, the wine shop or the pawnshop), "half as tall as the pawnshop counter" , which Gladys Yang used in her preface to Silent China: Selected writings of Lu Xun, published in 1972, the year she was released after four years in solitary confinement (a work unaccountably missing from the bibliography). One might also have wished for a compromise between Lovell ' s "barley sugar tower" and the Yangs ' "sugar candy pagoda" but, in general, Lovell has done a fine job and we must hope that Lu Xun will acquire a new readership as a result.

25

LITERARY CRITICISM avid Simpson is a critic to watch; while never remotely modish, his work always tracks the changing critical spirit of the age with careful attention. Irony and Authority in Romantic Poetry (1979) showed the impress of deconstruction ; Wordsworth 's Historical Imagination (1987) took up the timely call for a " materialist" literary criticism; and his recent books, moving away from the purely literary, have addressed contemporary questions such as the politics of group identity and the postmodern fate of social relationships. Situatedness, or Why We Keep Saying Where We're Coming From (2002) portrayed, in a sharp and pacy way, a culture founded on remorseless self-definition ("let me tell you where I'm coming from"): it took its lead from Adorno, for whom the question "So who are you?" articulated a terrible historical poignancy because we can none of us now properly claim to be coming from anywhere. It is, as Adorno said, "part of morality not to be at home in one's home" - a sentiment which Simpson explored in The Culture of Commemoration (2006), his humane and sceptical book about 9/11. His new book returns to Wordsworth: "I have been thinking and writing about Wordsworth more or less for thirty years" are its opening words. But, like Wordsworth himself in "The Brothers" or "Home at Grasmere", homecoming brings no simple solace, rather a deepened awareness of the complications of the idea of home. "Wordsworth is

D

Lonely as a.

• •

SEAMUS PERRY David Simpson WORDSWORTH, COMMODIFICATION AND SOCIAL CONCERN The poetics of modernity

292pp. Cambridge University Press. £50 (US $90). 9780521 898775

never quite 'there' when he says he is there", Simpson remarked in The Post-Modern Academic (1995), and this new book could be seen as a protracted treatment of that happy aper~u. Few poets can have spent so much time telling us just where they came from; but Simpson finds behind all the resounding declarations of self-knowledge "an underlying desperation". The book does not present a full account of the poet's career, but offers readings of a representative handful of poems, including "Gipsies" , "Poor Susan", and "I wandered lonely as a cloud" - the last of which, "one of the poster-poems of our Romantic ideology" , as Simpson puts it, nevertheless unpicks its own optimism to reveal the dark socio-economic conditions that underwrite and undermine it. Simpson writes attractively about the panorama of modernity, drawing on Derrida' s reading of Marx

to describe an imaginative space of ghostly half-presences and weird forces; but he can also be very good on the smaller scale, and he has well-tuned things to say about individual words ("Beat is one of those happy verbs that stays the same in present and historic tenses"), and is finely responsive to intricacies of Wordsworth's tone (as in his account of the "dramatic purpose" of "clunky locutions" in "Poor Susan"). Whether or not you accept the explanatory force of commodification as a historical phenomenon, the account of Wordsworthian bafflement in the book - the predicament of a poet who was " never sure that he knew what to say, or how to say it" - is both rich and compelling. The picture that emerges is dark: discussing some of "Wordsworth ' s best

poems" Simpson remarks, "Here ... nothing makes us feel better, or feel good". While a poem such as "Resolution and Independence" might have seemed, however tentatively, to entertain the possibility of some instinctive kinship between strangers, Simpson's Wordsworth finds in such encounters a revelation of mutual incomprehension. I suppose it might be possible to admire the way in which Wordsworth rejects the false consolations of easy communality or fellow feeling , without consigning him to a world where you never feel better or good: talk about "joy" might work to some end other than its own necessary defeat, even if it is not the simple joyfulness that Matthew Arnold was after. But, in truth, joy is not quite absent from Simpson's pages: for all the topical darkness it discerns, the book is clearly, and enjoyably, full of pleasure. "This is extraordinary poetry", he writes at one point; "Wordsworth at his fascinating best"; and in the closing pages Simpson speaks freely of "Wordsworth's genius". That is not the language in which Wordsworth has been historicized lately, and the book may show its finger to be on the pulse, not by its invocation of Marxist conceptions of corn modification, but in its readiness to regard Wordsworth not, say, as the pedlar of some "Romantic Ideology" but as its canniest analyst. As in Simon Jarvis's penetrating study Wordsworth's Philosophical Song (2007), Wordsworth appears in these pages as a great, sometimes difficult, poet: that seems a critical development worth celebrating.

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TLS JANUARY 22 2010

TLS

fOR LOVERS OF LITERARY cULlntt

26

IN BRIEF

Diaries Alison VttJey THE PRIVATE DIARIES OF ALISON UTTLEY,1932-1971 Edi ted by Denis J udd 316pp. Pen and Sword Press. £25. 978 I 84468 040 I

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Poetry Norman MacCaig THE POEMS OF NORMAN MACCAIG Edited by Ewen McCaig 532pp. Polygon. £16.99. 978 I 84697 1365 orman MacCaig is the possessor of possibly the most discreet nom de plume in literary history: he used "Mac" for writing, while sticking with the original "Mc" for all other purposes. Primary headteacher Mr McCaig by day; poet Norman MacCaig by night. MacCaig, who died in 1996, was the bard of common sense - but reflected in a mirror. His wit made the ordinary world surprising: "A hen stares at nothing with one eye, / Then picks it up"; "Landscape and I get on well together. / Though I'm the talkative one". Resident in Edinburgh, he spent his summers in the Scottish Highlands, which provided material for a large proportion of his work: "Pibroch, I make you a man / who could shake hands with Bach", he wrote of his beloved bagpipe music. " You would walk in, with your sack / of images .... " MacCaig wrote of salmon, frogs, wounded stags and, repeatedly, the blackbird, "charcoal philosopher / in his blazing study". Constantly on the alert for pretentiousness in his own work, he wondered what would happen if he fell asleep and awoke, like Thomas the Rhymer, "with a tongue / that could never lie": What would my friends say? And how could I bear

N

The triumphant cries Of my enemies?

The first Collected Poems appeared in 1985, and an expanded edition followed five years later. For The Poems of Norman MacCaig , his son Ewen has added ninety-nine unpublished poems from the hundreds left behind at the poet's death (asked how long it took him to write a poem, MacCaig replied, "Two fags"). The book contains an informative introduction by Alan Taylor on working methods and several pages of recorded conversation which show this most convivial of poets in good form: "There has not been an adequate definition of poetry. There never will be. Hurray, hurray" . Readers wanting the CD of readings spanning four decades will seek out the hardback edition (2005). The only cause for complaint about this admirable piece of publishing is that, in his obsessive attention to the month and year of the poems' composition, Ewen McCaig has left readers in the dark as to the nature of MacCaig's fourteen original collections. They deserve an appendix, at least. JAMES CAMPBELL

A nineteenth-century shadow theatre figure ofPhra Nara. (later reincarnated as Rama), part of a nang talung set from Patani Province, Thailand; taken from Musee du Quai Branly: The collection - Art from Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas edited by Yves Le Fur (480pp, Flammarion, £50, 978 2 0812 2579 4)

Portuguese Literature Mario de Sa-Carneiro U 1CIO'S CONFESSION Translated by Margaret Jull Costa 160pp. Dedalus. Paperback, £8.99. 978 I 8739 8280 8

M

ario de Sa-Carneiro was, with Fernando Pessoa, one of the group of poets and artists who created the magazine Orpheu, introducing Modernism to Portugal. He committed suicide in 1916 at the age of twentysix, leaving behind a small body of work of which Pessoa was the literary executor. The intellectual concerns of his short novel, Lucio's Confession, first published in 1913, bear a resemblance to those of Pessoa exploring the abysses of the fractured self and its imaginative world is fantastical (reflecting the influence of Edgar Allan Poe as developed in the atmosphere of the fin de siixle). It is an imaginative world of hallucinatory distortions and morbid mental states, its mood one of creeping dread. The narrator of Lucio's Confession has been in prison for ten years, for murder. He insists he is innocent and claims that he offered no defence during his trial because his story would never have been believed. He has not sought to make sense of his experience because to do so would be, he fears , to become " mad". The novel tells the story of

his friendship with a poet, Ricardo de Loureiro, whom he first meets in Paris. Lucio and Ricardo become close friends, with a rare understanding of one another, although Ricardo confesses to an inability to feel friendship except as "tenderness the desire to touch, the desire to kiss" . Ricardo moves back to Lisbon and gets married, and Lucio visits Ricardo and his new wife, who exerts a strange fascination over him. He begins an affair with her - of which Ricardo mayor may not be aware - and becomes increasingly jealous as he begins to suspect that she may be having affairs with others: in particular, an oddly "feminine" Russian friend of Ricardo. His obsession darkens. At the centre of the narrative is a sinister miracle. How much of all this is real? Are we enclosed in the delusory world of a man deranged by his unthinkable desires? Do the odd doublings of the self in Lucio's account indicate a psychic fragmentation - a mind unable to own its inmost impulses - or is there another mystery at work? The prose in this fine translation by Margaret Jull Costa - has the fearful, pressing clarity of delirium. Ludo's Confession , art wrought out of deep inner disturbances, imagines a limitlessness of artistic creation that disorients, a spiritual power that troubles the senses: spirit and body are never reconciled.

TLS JANUARY 22 2010

BERNARD MANZO

successful author, Alison Uttley disliked her illustrators, distrusted her publishers and resented the impertinence of reviewers and journalists. Over a period of nearly forty years, she kept a careful record of snubs, slights and disappointments. "We had tea in the Regal cafe. I felt appalled by the atmosphere of it, the ugly suburban women", she wrote in 1934 after an outing to the cinema. In 1941, she pinned down a guest, a friend's husband: "Or Wrigglesworth came late & was his usual dry, cold, rude self ... a detestable man", and as late as 1970, she was complaining "Hair permed for the big occasion, but what a bore. I hate it. Such a waste of time." Such discontents, together with accounts of money worries, gardening and housework, figure in her diaries alongside dreams, bursts of patriotism and expressions of love for her only son John, the constant object of her most passionate feelings who, two months after his mother' s death in 1978, drove his car into the sea off Guernsey. (His father James drowned himself in the River Mersey in 1930 when his son was sixteen.) From time to time in the diary there are moments of peace and stillness, a sense of work done, tidiness, money in the bank, as Uttley evokes a lamplit room in the dark winter, an image that recalls her Derbyshire childhood. Often she casually mentions a mystical moment - a glimpse of fairies , a nod to the moon, or an awareness of " a sacred fire burning in my heart" . Denis Judd , the meticulous editor of these diaries who wrote a biography of Uttley in 1986, places her as a historical figure, a farmer's child, born in 1901 and exiled to suburbia, who lived through two world wars and whose diaries provide an insight into her times. Ronald Blythe, in his foreword to this volume, sees her autobiographical books (A Country Child, Wild Honey and Secret Places) as belonging to "the best English rural writing". The reader who was brought up on Uttley's children's books and came to know that strange unequal household of Squirrel, Hare and Little Grey Rabbit may also find some enlightenment here. LINDSA Y DUGUID

Film Peter Hames CZECH AND SLOV AK CINEMA Theme and tradition

264pp. Edinburgh University Press. £60. 978 0 7486 2081 4

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eter Hames is to be commended for devoting years of study to the cinema of East Central Europe, a subject generally underrepresented in film scholarship in English. The author of The Czechoslovak New Wave (1985 , revised edition 2005), which is probably the best introduction to the topic, he has also edited a perceptive monograph on the animator and surrealist Jan Svankmajer (1995 , revised edition 2008) and a collection

IN BRIEF of stimulating essays on the most remarkable films from Central Europe (2004). In this book, Hames seeks to determine whether there are " long lived traditions" in Czech and Slovak film-making, and whether connections exist "between pre-war and postwar, Communist and post-Communist, cinema". He provides a well-researched and accurate survey, which is usefully, if arbitrarily, divided into eleven chapters: history, comedy, realism, politics, the Shoah, lyricism, the Absurd , the avant-garde, Surrealism, animation, and, finally , Slovak trends. This last chapter demonstrates one of the main shortcomings of the book: Slovak cinema is (still) treated by Hames as an appendix to Czech, being relegated to a mere twenty pages (with minor mentions in other sections of the text). Can the traditions of a national cinema be analysed in a mere twenty pages? Stefan Uher, who exploited Slovak cultural traditions in his films and established cinematographic conventions for subsequent generations of Slovak directors, receives only two-and-a-half pages. Peter Solan, another major Slovak filmmaker, fares worse, with no mention at all. Dusan Hanak is discussed in three pages. At no point does Hames compare Martin SUlfk, the only contemporary Slovak film director included in this book, with the New Wave. Overall, each chapter appears to be intended as yet another introduction to its theme, thus overlapping with Hames's previous work. The analysis of Czech and Slovak cultural and cinematic traditions remains rather superficial. Translations are used in referring to works written in Czech or Slovak; and while some major works in English on Czech and Slovak culture are included in the bibliography, their ideas have had little impact on Hames's thinking.

representations of the South African diamond trade to show how Jews (like jewels) were posited as objects of "perilous allure" , and Lara Trubowitz finds that the "civil" antiSemitism of anti-immigrationist Parliamentarians behind the 1905 Aliens Act left Britain vulnerable to the agitations of the 1930s. Jews were frequently characterized as carriers of disease and other, more moral , contagions, particularly in the slums of London's East End, where children were scorned as " street Arabs" . But they could also be perceived as inherently "civilized" and European. Essays by David Glover, Meri-Jane Rochelson and Eitan Bar- Yosef focus on Israel Zangwill , a keen proponent of the East Africa "Jewganda" proposal first properly hammered out between Theodor Herzl and Joseph Chamberlain in 1902. Though the plan was essentially "stillborn", Zangwill remained its champion, envisioning a Jewish-dominated sub-equatorial outpost equivalent to "our own Surrey hills" , noting "if Britain could attract all the Jews of the world to her colonies, she would just double their white population" . Ineffably "other", the Jew was also posited as the greatest hope for an African whitewash. While Zangwill remained sensitive to the claims of Palestinians, he was apparently oblivious to Africans, a stance later mirrored by Chaim Weizmann, who in 1925 reminded the Zionist Congress that "Palestine is not Rhodesia". This stimulating collection helps us to better understand the colonialism in Zionism as a phenomenon of its day. It also puts into context Zionist attempts to celebrate the Israeli independence of 1948 as the fulfilment of a specifically post-colonial venture. TOBY LICHTIG

Religion

CESAR BALLESTER

Gary R. Bunt IMUSLIMS Rewiring the house of Islam 358pp Hurst. Paperback, £12.99. 978 I 85065 950 I

Cultural History Eitan Bar-Yosef and Nadia Valman, editors " THE JEW" IN LA TE- VICTORIAN AND EDW ARDIAN CULTURE Between the East End and East Africa 241 pp. Palgrave Macmillan. £50. 978 I 4039 9702 9

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he Boer War (1899- 1902) presented a quandary for the Jews of Britain. Anxious to demonstrate their loyalty to the Crown , they boisterously celebrated British triumphs; and thus was anti-Semitism stoked: the conflict was widely depicted as a "Jewish" one, a product of "Jewish" greed and mining interests. As "The Jew " in Late Victorian and Edwardian Culture demonstrates, this was just one example of the complex and contradictory relationship between Jews and Rritish colonialism as the Empire tightened its grip on Africa. "The Jew", ever liminal, paradoxical and troubling, was perceived as both immigrant "alien" and colonial prospector, in search of wealth for the motherland, and of a breakaway homeland of his own. This did not necessarily mean Palestine: early potential sites for the Zionist project included Armenia, Cyprus, Argentina, Libya, Angola, Mozambique and, most credibly, Uganda. The early essays in the volume demonstrate the range of fin-de-siecle British chauvinism. Adrienne Munich considers literary

G

ary R. Bunt's iMuslims explores what has been happening to Muslims and the many strands of Islam since the rise of the internet. His central thesis is that the internet is having a profound impact on how Muslims perceive their faith and put it into practice. To support his thesis, Bunt, a senior lecturer at the University of Wales, Lampeter, marshals evidence drawn from the untold hours he has spent online watching how Muslims interact. The net, he argues, is a natural home for Muslims, because they have no central authority. The closest thing Islam has to an equivalent of the Vatican is a number of universities of the Middle East. Rut these seats of Islamic learning have struggled to keep up with the net and satellite television. The process of reinterpreting and recasting Islam has accelerated as a result. The entire corpus of Islamic knowledge is online, and is deconstructed thousands of times a day on innumerable websites, blogs and so-called fatwa portals, each with its own slant. Regimes depending on traditional religious authorities are being weakened in consequence. Internet-related technologies allow young Saudis to organize dangerous liaisons behind the backs of religious police. Iran ' s

27

prolific bloggers anonymously expose the flaws in the theocracy. At the more worrying end of the spectrum, Bunt documents how alQaeda spreads its jihadist message largely through technology that was pioneered by the American military. The spread of violent ideology is, however, matched by the emergence of virtual belief. Can one convert to Islam while online? Apparently so, if one keeps to the rules of the electronic form of the shahada or prayer of conversion. And so, where believers once identified with a particular mosque, they now identify with a website. Gary Bunt' s perceptive study concludes that the Islamic "brotherhood" is evolving into parallel online brotherhoods. The net is a marketplace, an "Islamic Internet Souq", in which there are many traders. And none has the monopoly on God's message to humankind.

event in his life. Not that it was easy - the bishops made certain of that. In the light of what went before, however, the outcome was clearly right. He concludes by speaking of himself as " interstitial" , a term coined by Jonathan Miller to designate a person "who stands at the cross-roads of society, at a frontier ... whose task is to stand at the intersection of paths and hold the tension of opposites within themselves" . RONALD BLYTHE

History Michael Rothberg MULTIDIRECTIONAL MEMORY Remembering the Holocaust in the age of decolonization 379pp. Stanford University Press. $70; distributed in the UK by Eurospan. £59.50. 9780804762185

DOMINIC CASCIANI

Memoirs James Roose-Evans OPENING DOORS AND WINDOWS A memoir in four acts 190pp. History Press. £18 .99. 978 0 7524 5406 I

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he doors and windows of James RooseEvans's title can never have been closed. The entire life of the author - an Anglican priest and distinguished theatre director - has been a bravura performance from start to where it is at this moment, divided between London and a small country church in South Wales. The flow , however, is held in check by some remarkably good writing, and by the mining of a well-kept journal. Thus the rich detail of half a century. Roose-Evans' s own experience is staged out, as it were, by a sequence of portraits of authors, rather than actors: Robert Frost, Enid Bagnold, Gabriel Garcfa Lorca, Leonard Woolf, as well as personal statements about subjects ranging from religion to army life to the countryside. The freshness and the variety are exciting. Theatre gossip, though inevitable, is held back by an underlying seriousness. Roose-Evans's youth in Gloucestershire resembled a non-lyrical version of Laurie Lee' s. Absent salesman father, hopeless mother, wild connections, but of another class. He came to both Church and stage by the side door, a route which contributed to his toughness and honesty. His achievements are part of post-war theatre history; the creation of the Hampstead Theatre, the founding of the Bleddfa Centre in Wales, and such unexpected triumphs as Helene Hanff's 84 Charing Cross Road. Names rain down as they must in a book such as Opening Doors and Windows, hut its shape and purpose prevent them from drowning the reader. Anecdotes are kept in their place by extended descriptions which display a passionate understanding of drama, criticism and writing. RooseEvans ' s description of his day-to-day work is structural, earthy and somehow inspiring. The same is true of his account of his relationship with Hywel Jones. Although RooseEvans can be seen to have been on some kind of Christian pilgrimage all his life, with the customary byroad towards Roman Catholicism, his ordination as an Anglican priest in Herefordshire is as dramatic as any other

TLS JANUARY 22 2010

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ultidirectional memory, as defined by Michael Rothberg, is a "countertradition in which remembrance of the Holocaust intersects with the legacies of colonialism and slavery and ongoing processes of decolonization" . Rothberg's book is focused on post-war France, which is rightly described as a " laboratory" where the differing histories of colonialism and Nazism overlap. The book is divided into four parts, encompassing testimony, film , art, literature and history. It begins with a fascinating comparison of Hannah Arendt and Aime Cesaire, who both regarded Nazism as a form of colonialism brought home to Europe. Both figures, writing in the early 1950s, exemplify a period when different forms of racism were not confined to separate spheres as they are today. Rothberg also goes back to W. E. B. Du Bois, whose visit to Warsaw in 1949 resulted in him qualifying and extending his abiding belief that the "colour line" is the main problem of the twentieth century. Rothberg is a skilful reader of a broad range of literary, artistic and critical works, from Andre Schwarz-Bart, Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin in the 1960s and 70s to Caryl Phillips and Michael Haneke in the 1990s and 2000s. While a good deal of the book reconstructs history, memory is also foregrounded because of its greater fluidity (" memory is the past made present"). It is the "power of anachronism" in Schwarz-Bart and Phillips, in particular, that is seen to challenge the rigidity of historicism. Rothberg's argument that the "emergence of Holocaust memory on a global scale has contributed to the articulation of other histories", such as the Algerian War of Independence (1954-62), is convincing. The focus on 1961 as a " site of memory", encompassing the atrocities committed by the French in Algeria and Eichmann's trial in Jerusalem , suhtly illustrates these intertwined histories. Where this path-breaking book is less persuasive is in its insistence on blurring " memory itself' with "historical relatedness". This is done in the name of the postmodern traversing of "ethnicity and era" which can belittle "history itself' (to coin a phrase) as majoritarian, inflexible and falsely authoritative. As the evocative "comparative thinking" in the book demonstrates, historical reconstruction need not be in competition with multidirectional memory. BRYAN CHEYETTE

28

NATURAL SCIENCE

Carnivores in America he story of Thomas lefferson's efforts to rebut the fallacy of degeneracy the eighteenth-century theory, popularized by France's pre-eminent natural historian Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, that the New World's cold, wet climate stunted and enfeebled its plants, animals and peoples - has proven remarkably durable over the centuries, a crowd-pleaser. It began to take on its legendary quality immediately after lefferson's death - indeed, it was recounted triumphantly at his funeral - and for some years afterwards retained the golden tones of eulogy. In 1919, the Virginia historian John S. Patton offered a fairly standard version for the time: lefferson, Patton wrote, "had the bones and skin of the largest moose obtainable, the horns of the caribou, elk, deer, spike-horned buck, and some other large animals sent to Paris. Buffon was convinced, and said to the Virginian: 'I should have consulted you, Sir, before publishing my Natural History, and then I should have been sure of my facts ' . It is scarcely worth while to inquire whether the great Frenchman was pleased by the revelation of the truth or irritated by defeat" . The truth, which the more recent histories have made plain, is that the defeat was lefferson's. Buffon had received the first evidence of non-degeneracy more than twenty years before lefferson's challenges, in the form of mastodon bones from Kentucky. These Buffon acknowledged as belonging to a real, if extinct, American species, but saw no cause to revise his theory. lefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia (1784) took the mastodon case straight to Buffon, arguing that the discovery of such a creature "should have sufficed to have rescued the earth it inhabited, and the atmosphere it breathed, from the imputation of impotence in the conception and nourishment of animal life on a large scale". Neither that, nor the long series of tables lefferson included to show Buffon that domestic and wild animals in America were at least as big as their European counterparts, made any obvious dent either, though by then Buffon had already begun, quietly and imperceptibly to most, to distance himself from his theory. Within six months of receiving lefferson's last-ditch plea, a crate containing a very large, very beat-up Vermont moose, Buffon was dead. There would be no corrective supplement to Buffon's Natural History, nor any public acknowledgement of his error. Lee Alan Dugatkin's Mr lefferson and the Giant Moose does a fine job of teasing apart the threads of thought that made the degeneracy fallacy too strong for .lefferson to hreak. The fault was hardly all Buffon's. Dugatkin, like lefferson before him, sees Buffon as having arrived at the theory fairly if mistakenly, in part from received wisdom and in part from over-confidence. Buffon had begun his career as a probability specialist, and was sure of his ability to distinguish patterns in nature, even when using the limited and flawed information provided to him by travellers. Buffon also had a personal aversion to swamps, which he believed the New World to be full of, and Dugatkin thinks that a fear of miasmas bore heavily on his reasoning.

T

JENNIE ERIN SMITH Lee Alan Dugatkin MR JEFFERSON AND THE GIANT MOOSE Natural history in early America

184pp. University of Chicago Press. $26; distributed in the UK by Wiley. £ 18. 9780226169149

Keith Thomson A PASSION FOR NATURE Thomas lefferson and natural history

148pp. University of North Carolina Press/ Monticello: Thomas lefferson Foundation.

Paperback, $14.95; distributed in the UK by Eurospan. £ 12.95. 978 I 882886265

The writers who extrapolated from Buffon, particularly the French encyclopedist Guillaume-Thomas Raynal and the Dutch-born Cornelius de Pauw, were more culpable in their distortions. Buffon had characterized Native American men as effeminate - "the organs of generation (of the savage) are small and feeble. He has no hair, no beard, no ardour for the female" - and cowardly to boot. Raynal borrowed all this from Buffon, then added that native men "have sometimes milk in their breasts" . De Pauw credited them not only with lactation but universal venereal disease and "a stupid imbecility that is the fundamental disposition of all Americans" , one that, de Pauw and Raynal both claimed, would also befall European immigrants to America after one or two generations. Needless to say, neither de Pauw nor Raynal had set foot in the Americas. De Pauw, who had few interests besides degener-

acy theory, served as occasional adviser to Frederick the Great, who was so concerned about immigration from Prussia that he established a special office to prevent it. Frederick's patronage allowed for the many printings and translations of de Pauw's Recherches philosophiques sur les Americains. Raynal 's motives were more nuanced; he was fiercely opposed to slavery and the exploitations of colonialism, especially those aided by the Church, and was hard pressed to see anything good going into, or coming out of, the New World. lefferson "underestimated the Eurocentric appeal of the degeneracy hypothesis" , Dugatkin writes, and presumably so did John Adams, Alexander Hamilton and Benjamin Franklin, all of whom took active interest in refuting it at a time when they had a great deal else on their plates. Franklin, during his years in France, went to nearly the lengths that lefferson did to confront Buffon and Raynal (de Pauw was considered beneath contempt). And yet all that resulted, it seemed, were new degeneracy tracts from a third wave of writers - this time English and Scottish - who parroted de Pauw, and introduced his conclusions to a whole new audience. lefferson was still alive when John Keats wrote, borrowing from one such writer, of "that most hateful land" where "great unerring Nature once seems wrong". Even Charles Darwin was influenced by degeneracy theory in his youth, noting on his Beagle voyage that "the zoology of Patagonia is as limited as its flora" , having barely entered port. What's left unanswered by Dugatkin is why lefferson - who knew how far the degeneracy belief had metastasized - thought he could end it once and for all with a moose

for Buffon. Keith Thomson, in A Passion for Nature: Thomas lefferson and natural history, provides some clues by carrying the story past the point of the moose and Buffon's death. A Passion for Nature, commissioned by the Thomas lefferson Foundation at Monticello, is ostensibly a general picture of lefferson's scientific interests. While its title suggests nothing more, roughly half the book is concerned with lefferson's response to the degeneracy affront. Thomson ' s is the looser of the two books in its writing and organization, and contains at least one error, claiming that Cornelius de Pauw had travelled to America, when he had not (an ancestor of his had). And yet Thomson is the more intrepid in exploring lefferson's fixed ideas, his willingness to shade the truth, and the hint of monomania in his efforts. lefferson stuffed his tables in Notes with dubious and anecdotal measurements of American animals, Thomson shows, and even after Buffon's death, lefferson jazzed up new findings about a giant clawed sloth by comparing its features to those of a lion, as though a lion were somehow analogous, when lefferson knew well it was not. He was still battling Buffon, still seeking the ferocious American carnivore to debunk him with. As President, lefferson engaged Meriwether Lewis and William Clark in the search for live mastodons (Jefferson refused to believe them extinct), exposing himself to the ridicule of his political enemies. He deemed inquiries about the earth's age - a great interest of Buffon's and nearly everyone else's - to be a waste of time, a surprising and contradictory stance that Thomson calls "anti-intellectual", a phrase seldom used in conjunction with lefferson. Thomson does not concern himself with the legacy of degeneracy theory after lefferson. Dugatkin does, in a limited way. The idea had already begun to die, Dugatkin argues, with the American Revolution, which impressed Guillaume-Thomas Raynal enough for him to renounce the fallacy outright. Dugatkin also credits the rising economic power of America, the death of degeneracy's most committed promoters, and nineteenth-century American writers such as Henry David Thoreau , Ralph Waldo Emerson and Washington lrving, who felt the need to quash what remained of it until America's skies seemed the brighter, its leaves the greener, its wildlife the more vigorous in European eyes. But did degeneracy really die? Few forms of wishful thinking ever do. In conservative American political circles today, much is made of the legacy of Buffon's theories, which are credited as a root cause of French anti-Americanism. Oddly, meanwhile, a sort of reverse-degeneracy theory has embedded itself into the same circles, which view

"Moose" (1796) by John Frederick Miller

TLS JANUARY 22 2010

Europe's restrained population growth, its cautious financial structures, its generous government programmes, as signs of terminal decline. A lack of appetite for military adventure draws insinuations of effeminateness that would not have been out of place in de Pauw. "Cheese-eating surrender monkeys", in the end, are not a whole lot different from lactating Indians, and it's all the more surprising that such libels should persist, considering the low price of transatlantic flights. One can only wish for a lefferson, or a moose, headed the other way.

CLASSIFIED AWARDS & FELLOWSHIPS

UNIVERSITY APPOINTMENTS

UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD IN ASSOCIATION WITH TRINITY COLLEGE GORDON MILBURN JUNIOR RESEARCH FELLOWSHIP

Harvard University

Applications are invited for the above Research Fellowsh ip, in the field of

Byzantine History

the theolog ical or philosophical study of mysticism and religious experience, Candidates should normally be beyond or near completion of a doctoral degree, but shou ld not have completed more than seven years of research, The Fellowship will carry a stipend of £17,677 per annum, rising by the annual percentage increase in academic pay, with optional membership of the University Superannuation

The Department of History announces an open·rank search for a tenure·track faculty member or a tenured professor in the field of Byzantine history, specializing in the history of Byzantin e civilization from 400 to 1461,

Scheme, The Fellowship is tenable for three years with effect from 1 October 201 0 and will be held in association with a Jun ior Research Fellowship at Trinity College, Further particulars may be obtained from Elizabeth Macallister, Telephone: UK (0) 1865270797, or Email: [email protected]

The candidate's research and teaching must be broadly gauged so as to enrich the work of Harvard's wider community of scholars, notably Byzantinists, medievalists, and classicists within and beyond the Department of History, and including Harvard University's Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection,

Applications, including a full curriculum vitae and a summary not exceed in g

Teach ing duties will include courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels; a strong record of doctoral advising will be welcome, Applicants shou ld submit a letter of application, including brief statements of current and future research and of teaching ph ilosophy, and a curriculum vitae with a complete bibliography, to Byzantine History Search Committee, c/o Janet Hatch, Department of History, Harvard University, 201 Robinson Hall, Cambridge, MA 02138,

600 words of the proposed research with the names and addresses (postal and electronic) of three referees, shou ld be sent electronically not later than Friday, 5 March 2010, to Mrs EA Macallister, at the above email address, Candidates are asked to arrange for their referees to send their

references to Mrs Macallister, electronically by the same date, The University of Oxford and Trinity College are Equal Opportun ities Employers,

The deadline for receipt of applications is May 1,2010, Harvard is an eq ual opportunity/affirmative action employer, Appl ications from women and members of minority groups are strongly encouraged,

Armstrong Browning Library Visiting Scholars Program 2011-2012

Harvard University

The Annstrong Browning Library at Baylor University is accepting applications for research fellowships for the academic year 2011-2012. In addition to the world's largest collection of material on Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the library has a growing collection of nineteenth-century women poets, over 1400 nineteenth-century British sermons and religious pamphlets, and research holdings of Arnold, earlyle, Emerson, Ruskin, J, H , and p, W, Newman, Joseph Milsand, and other Victorian writers. The Milsand Archive contains over 50,000 items, mostly in French, relating to Browning, the Milsand family, and the AngloFrench literary scene from the 1860s to 80s. Additional information about the Library, its collections, facilities, and programs is available at http://www.browninglibrary.org. and http://www.browningguide.org.

Islamic Studies The Department of History announces a search to appoi nt a distinguished senior scholar in the field of Islamic studies with a fo cus on modern Central As ia, whose teaching has relevance for contemporary developments in the region, Teaching duties will include courses at the undergraduate and graduate leve ls, The successful candidate will have a strong publ ications record and experie nce trai ning doctoral students, as well as demonstrated competence in relevant research languages (e,g" Persian, Uzbek, Uyghur, Kazakh, Chaghatay, etc.),

The Library offers one-month fellowships to visiting scholars. Each Fellow is expected to be in residence and to conduct research in the collections during the majority of the award period and is expected to give a 30- to 45-minute presentation regarding some aspect of their research project. The stipend for recipients within the continental United States is 52,250 and for those from outside the U,S" $2,750 (to be used for travel and housing expenses).

Applicants should submit a letter of application, includ ing a brief statement of current and future research and teaching interests, and a curriculum vitae, to Islamic History Search Committee, c/o Janet Hatch, Department of History, Harvard University, 201 Robinson Hall, Cambridge, MA 02138. The deadline for receipt of applications is May 1,2010, Harvard is an equal opportunity/affirmative action employer, Applications from wom en and members of minority groups are strongly encouraged,

To apply, candidates should send a fonnalletter of application including preferred dates of study, a brief research proposal (not to exceed 3 pages), and a curriculum vitae to: Director, Armstrong Browning Library, One Bear Place #97152, Waco, Texas 76798·7152 (FAX: 254·710·3552), Two confidential letters of recommendation are also required and should be sent directly to the Director.

MISCELLANEOUS

Complete applications and letters must be received by May 1, 2010. Awards will be announced by May 31.

ANNOUNCEMENTS

For infonnation about how to advertise in the TLS, please contact

Essay Award

Jonathan Drummond on 0207 782 4975 or email

"A Theology of Beauty" St Michael's of Melbourne announces

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

[email protected]

the winner of the essay competition

'A Theology of Beauty", We congratulate Lesley Chamberlain of London who has been awarded first prize of $AUS8000 for her entry. Very high standard of entries were received from around the world and we would like to thank all entrants for their submissions, The winning essay can be found on www.stmichaels.org.au St Michael's Church, Collins Street, Melbourne Australia.

HOLIDAYS • Rome - historical centre - one bedroom apartment available for short term rental. Images on http://www.paulahowarth.net

Wayfarers of Fate A Novel of the Spanish Civil War By John Steinbacher ';4 delicate and dedicated work dealing with the most sensitive and highly explosive elements of life in our time - religion, faith, international communism and the Spanish Civil War. It sheds a welcome light into a dark chamber of recent history; and tells with passion and vivid detail the torture and torment of two Spanish brothers who fight on opposite sides. This novel is as fresh as tomorrows newspaper; and as old as time. Wayfarers of Fate has a stamp of greatness about it and should be read by millions,"

Marin County Independent Journal -

At

UK

bookshops and at www.amazon.cQ.uk

L·~ IS:B:N~9:7~8:'1:.8:4:7:4~ 8: .0~8:8:.0 ~_ _ _ _ _ _~~~::=~~~~~~~

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Independent Publishers feature, please email jonathan,[email protected]

ILS

MEMOIR

30

Lost boys

Telephone: 020 7782 5000 Fax: 020 7782 4966 [email protected] n his memoir of 2007, Eleven Houses, Christopher Fitz-Simon describes his arrival at Bennettsbridge station in Co Kilkenny, where Peggy Butler (wife of Hubert) met him with a pony and trap and drove him to the Butler family home, Maidenhall. Also present were the Butlers' daughter Julia, "and Joe Hone, who had been living with the Butlers since they left Annaghmakerrig". It was the middle of the war, "the Emergency" in Ireland. Joe Hone, born in 1937, wou ld have been six or seven. What was he doing with the Butlers? It's a complicated and in many ways disturbing story, recounted in Wicked Little foe with verve and dispassion. Joseph Hone was discarded by his parents in London when he was two years old and more or less dumped on the doorstep of his grandfather in Dublin. "Old Joe" (to distingu ish him from his grandson and namesake), biographer of Yeats and George Moore and

I

Joseph Hone, 1946; from the book under review co-founder of the Maunsel Press, belonged to an Anglo-Irish family which had made a name for itself in various branches of the arts. "Old Joe's" son Nathaniel (Nat), however, was distinguished only by his utter fecklessness and the speed with which he got through an early inheritance. In 1936, in London, Nat married a student nurse from an Irish Catholic, whitewashed-cottage background, and six months later their first son Joe was born. Clearly the parents couldn ' t cope, and when the elderly grandparents found themselves simi larl y unable to cope, the two-and-a-halfyear-old was passed on to Old Joe' s friends the Butlers, who agreed to take on the role of foster parents for a fee of fifteen shi llings a week. Thus began an unsettled and unconventional childhood for Little Joe Hone. When Hubert Butler died in 1990, acclaimed at last as an essayist and champion of all kinds of liberal causes, his papers went to Trinity College Dublin. Among them was a file marked "Little Joe". When Joseph Hone was invited to examine it, he did so with trepidation - and not without cause. The

PA TRICIA CRAIG

Joseph Hone WICKED LITTLE JOE 264pp. LiIIiput Press. £ 14.99. 978 I 8435 I 1472 file consisted of hundreds of letters of which the unfortunate Little Joe is the plaguey subject: what to do with him, how to pay for his upkeep, what treatment is necessary for his deep psychological problems, whose ultimate charge he is. The Butlers, who had offered to adopt Joe at one point, only to be turned down flat by his absent, improvident parents, constantly complained about being lumbered with responsibility for the boy while at the same time being denied the authority to make important decisions on his behalf. Many of the letters exchanged between them and the Hone grandparents are about money, each side insisting they have more pressing responsibilities and cannot afford to be out of pocket. (These are not poor people.) The cost of a tuhe of toothpaste for Joe is a matter of dispute. And at the centre of it all is the boy himself, described at various times as obstreperous, difficult, aggressive, heartless, boastful and "born corruptible". Eventually, at eight, he is packed off to a terrible boarding school in the Dublin suburbs, and partly as a consequence, his character deteriorates even further to the point where he takes to petty thieving. The decision to publish extracts from a correspondence enumerating his under-age, moral and psychological deficiencies can't have been an easy one for Hone. But he turns the business of his upbringing into a kind of rueful comedy, which takes the bitterness out of it. The book casts a new light on Hubert Butler, indeed, whose attitude to the boy is marked by exasperation and aggravation. But Hone maintains an affection and admiration for his foster parents and counts himself lucky to have grow n up in the "stimulating" atmosphere they engendered. They were a constant presence throughout his childhood, and to this extent he was better off than some of his sibli ngs, whose lifetime' s experiences are summarized towards the end of the book. Yes, siblings. The strangest part of this strange story is the behaviour of Joe's real parents, Nat and Biddy Hone, whose crazed procreative activity adds a note of wartime prodigality to the usual eccentricities of the Anglo-Irish. Having, in 1939, got one child off their hands, the younger Hones went on to engender a further six giveaways, all to be swiftly dispersed among friends and acquaintances . The effect for some was more auspicious than it was for others. Sometimes the story of the extra Hone offspring is cast in a farcical or a tragic mode. One of Joe's brothers was adopted by P. L. Travers (the author of the Mary Poppins books), a fairly unhappy arrangement for both. One died as an infant, probably due to insufficient care. Another has ended up living as a recluse on a cliff-top in Norway. As for Joe himself - his memoir stands as a testimony to his resourcefulness, integrity and capacity for survival.

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Steven Aschheim ' s books include The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890- 1990, published in 1992, and Scholem, Arendt, Klemperer: Intimate chronicles in turbulent times, 2001. Cesar Ballester is a Senior Lecturer at the Arts University College, Bournemouth, and the author of monographs in Spanish on Milos Forman, 2007, and Andrzej Munk, 2008, Ronald Blythe is the author of Field Work: Selected essays, 2007 , A River Diary, 2008, and Outsiders: A book of garden friends, 2008. The Bookman 's Tale was publi shed last year. Trev Broughton is Senior Lecturer in English and Related Literature at the University of York. She is co-editor (with Helen Rogers) of Gender and Fatherhood in the Nineteenth Century, 2007, and the editor of a collection of critical essays on biography for the Routledge Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies series, 2007. Olivier Burckhardt is Honorary Fellow in English Literary Studies at the University of Melbourne. He is currently working on Poetics East of West, a book of essays on cross-cultural poetics. His most recent collection, Rome River Poems, appeared in 2000. Michael Caines edited a volume on David Garrick in the Lives of the Shakespearian Actors series, 2008, and has contributed to the Oxford Companion to the Book, publi shed this year. He is writing a doctoral thesis on the plays of Nicholas Rowe. James Campbell is the author of a biography of James Baldwin, Talking at the Gates, 1991. A collection of essays, Syncopations: Beats, New Yorkers, and writers in the Dark, was published in 2008. Dominic Casciani is a reporter for BBC News.

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Bryan Cheyette has recently edited a special issue of Wasafiri on "Jewish/Postcolonial Diasporas" .

Rhyming Life and Death: The Amos Oz reader, 2009, and An Introdu ction to ludaism which appeared in a second edition last year.

Norma Clarke is Professor of English Literature at the University of Kingston. Her books include The Rise and Fall of the Woman of Letters, 2004, and Queen of the Wits: A Life of Laetitia Pilkington, published last year.

Toby Lichtig is a freelance writer and editor living in London.

David Coward is Emeritus Professor of French at the University of Leeds. His translation of Paul Morand' s Hecate et ses chiens was published last year. Patricia Craig is the author of a biography of Brian Moore, which was published in 2004. She edited The Ulster Anthology, which was published in 2006, and her memoir, Asking for Trouble, appeared in 2007.

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SOLUTION TO CROSSWORD 813 Fhe w illner of Crossword 813 is T. W. Ha IL, Epsom.

The sender of the first correct solution opened on February 12

will receive a cash pri ze of £40. Entries should be addressed to TLS Crossword 8 17, Times Hou se, 1 Pennington Street, London E98 I BS.

Ruth Morse is Professor of English at the University of Paris-Diderot. She has recently completed Imagined Histories: Fictions of the past from 'Beowulf' to Shakespeare. She is ajudge for the Crime Writers' Association International Dagger.

Will Self' s most recent non-fiction books include Psychogeography, 2007, and Psycho Too , 2009. Liver: A fictional organ with a surface anatomy of four lobes, The Butt and The Undivided Self: Selected short stories, appeared in 2008.

Sean O'Brien is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Newcastle. The Drowned Book, 2007, won the Forward and T. S. Eliot poetry prizes. His most recent book, Afterlife, a novel, was published last year.

James Sharpe is Professor of History at the University of York. His most recent books include Dick Turpin : The myth of the English highwayman, 2004, and Remember, Remember the Fifth of November, 2005.

Seam us Perry is a Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford. His books include Coleridge and the Peter Hacker is an Emeritus Fellow of St Uses of Division, 1999, and Alfred Tennyson, John ' s College, Oxford. 2004. He is co-editor (with Robert DouglasFairhurst) of the recently published Tennyson Barbara Heldt is Emeritus Professor of Among the Poets: Bicentenary essays. Russian at the University of British Columbia. Henry Power is a lecturer in English at the University of Exeter. He is writing a book Jane Jakeman is the author of In the City of about Henry Fielding and the Scriblerians. Dark Waters, 2006. Sameer Rahim works at the Daily TelePolly Jones is Lecturer in Russian at the graph. University College London, School of Slavonic and East European Studies . She Jane Ridley is Professor of History at the is the editor of The Dilemmas of De-Stalin- University of Buckingham. Her biography, ization: Negotiating cultural and social The Architect and His Wife: A life of Edwin Lutyens, received the Duff Cooper Prize in change in the Khrushchev era, 2006. 2002. A new biography of King Edward VII Nicholas de Lange is Professor of Hebrew is forthcoming. and Jewish Studies at the University of Cambridge, where he is a Fellow of Wolfson Francis Robinson is Professor of the History College. He is the editor and translator of of South Asia at Royal Holloway, University Hebrew Manuscripts of the Middle Ages of London. His books include The Mu ghal by Colette Sirat, 2002, and the author of Emperors: And the Islamic dynasties of

CROSSWORD

ACROSS 1 Hastin gs suggested his intervention at Styles (7 , 6) 9 Editing communist move (9)

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Bernard Manzo works in publishing.

Leo Robson writes regularly on film for the TLS and is the lead fiction reviewer of the New Statesman.

Lindsay Duguid is the Fiction editor of the TLS.

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10 Hol y picture initiates painter into early trecento art (5) 11 Consent to some midnight hag

re-entering in Scottish play (5) 12 Companion to suic idal queen is concealing artist (4) 13 Ever poetic at the end of the day, that 's weird (4) 15 Speech preceded by publicity is inescapable (7) 17 No n-smokers opposing Ghanaian language? (7) 18 What Bryant co uld do for Rita (7) 20 Author of Cakes and Ate (7) 21 Like Lodge 's work (if yo u can get it) (4) 22 The Annates Cambriae are partly a con (4) 23 Sort of rice, say, offered o n tri al (5) 26 Decree inacc urately quoted (5) 27 Amount reported ly pro vided for Panza (9) 28 Poquelin's Grumpy Old Man (2, 11)

India, Iran and Central Asia 1206- 1925 , 2007, and Islam, South Asia and the West, also 2007. The New Cambridge History of India: Islam in South Asia is forthcoming.

817

DOWN 1 Hunt 's account of Turkish sw imming eve nts? (4, 3,7) 2 Waugh hero reportedl y in the saddle (5) 3 Relative of le Fanu uses call in error (5,5) 4 Unexpectedl y lioni se syncope (7) 5 All articles offer mi scellaneous co ll ect ibl e items (7) 6 Secure 20s drama (4) 7 Go to th at pl ace in the Bible (9) 8 Contender for title acq uired by Scott's Ellen Douglas' (4. 10) 14 Sit well 's unlucky emperor? (10) 16 Tank for war correspondent (9) 19 Piece of Poulenc (Oresteia) gets repeat performances (7) 20 Novelist expected after storm (7) 24 Novelist with a mountain to climb (5) 25 Mighty small theme of Marie Corelli (4)

TLS JA NUAR Y 22 2010

Jennie Erin Smith is a freelance science reporter. Her book about reptile smuggling will be published later this year. Hugo WiIliams's most recent collection of poems, West End Final, and a new edition of his selection of John Betjeman's poems, were both published last year. Frances Wood is the author of The Silk Road, 2003, and, most recently, The Lure of China: Writers from Marco Polo to 1. G. BaLLard, which appeared last year. She is curator of the Chinese collections at the British Library. Corrections Commander of the Faithful by John W. Kiser, reviewed in the TLS of December 11 , 2009, is published, in the UK, by Archetype, at £14.95.978 I 90138331 7. Ramona Fotiade 's Conceptions of the Absurd: From Surrealism to the Existential thought of Chestov and Fondane, was published in 2001. Her book on Jean-Luc Godard is forthcoming.

32

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hen Valerie Grove interviewed Kingsley Amis for The Times, the journalist and the novelist fell out over the meaning of the word "curmudgeon". Ms Grove said it meant "a skinflint", while the author of The King's English insisted the definition was "cantankerous, irritable. Nothing to do with meanness". Ms Grove went home and consulted the dictionary - "avaricious, miserl y, niggardl y" - then got on the phone. The cantankerous (not curmudgeonly) writer was left with no choice but to keep on arguing ("I kno w you ' re wrong" etc). The interview is contained in Conversations with Kingsley Amis, the latest in the Literary Conversations series published by University Press of Mississippi. Ms Grove wasn't alone in being growled at. Ajournali st from the Evening Standard "re-read eight of his books in preparation" , only to be greeted with insults directed at Oscar Wilde - "an outrageou s poof' - Dylan Thomas - "a stage Welshman" - Graham Greene, and eventually herself: " Where is your list of notes? Where is your tape-recorder? I don ' t suppose you've read my book. Too bloody lazy" . When a man from The Economist mentioned Rimbaud' s suggestion that " madness was a spur to creativity", Amis replied: "There are a lot of answers to that. Bloody Frenchman is one of them" . The air between Ami s and Val Hennessy (Daily Mail) was sprayed "with spit" as he rehearsed hi s view that women were "hell. In lots of ways. A lot of the time". Like Dylan Thomas, perhaps, Amis played

AMES -LANE LEADING TO

JACK AND -Jlll HILL

Cross talk a stage version of Kingsley Ami s pretty well. There is more crossness here than we can fit in , on topics which nowadays tend to make other people cross ("When you can say to a coloured fri end ' You black bastard' , you' ve advanced in your relationship"). Judging by Conve rsations with Kingsley Amis, the best magazine for a writer who became more cantankerous as his success increased was Penthouse, "the international magazine for men". In 1970, they asked questions like thi s: Noam Chomsky, the MIT professor, has spoken of a trend to "totalitarian democracy", with nominal free speech but no real say in the decision making. Do you think it feasible to demand an indi vidual part in po litical decisions beyo nd choosing a representati ve?

In response, Ami s offered a measured refuta-

tion. The Penthouse interviewer, Harry Fieldhouse, went on to ask about Herbert Marcu se, then Marshal McLuhan. Amis seemed perfectly at ease.

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iterary anniversaries, part IV. We pledged to offer cunning ruses for the aspiring scribe plotting a route past the editor' s desk on to the page of one of the better newspapers or magazines . Last week, we wrote about Albert Camus and Richard Wright, Pari sian expatriates (and acquaintances) who died a few months apart, half a century ago. Anton Chekhov's sesquicentenary fall s this month, and a group of writers, actors and general enthusiasts have been gathering each night at Hampstead Theatre to celebrate his work. In Britain today, Chekho v commands devotion of almost Shakespearean levels, which is in one way problematic, since the majority of enthusiasts are dependent on translations as a means of judging his greatness. The aspiring scribe might profitably compare different versions of some short stories, while bearing in mind Coleridge's dictum that literature (not just poetry) is "the best words in the best order". Here is the opening of "New Villa" ("Novaya dacha") in the translation by Ronald Wilks ( 1986): About two miles from the village of Obruchanova a hu ge bridge was be ing constructed. Its

steel skeleton could be seen from the village, which stood high on a steep bank. In misty

T H E M AGAZINE OF N EW W RIT ING

weather a nd on calm winter days, when its thin iron trusses and surro unding scaffolding were covered in hoar frost, it made a picturesqu e, even fa ntastic sight.

For everybody who loves to read

rom the first issue in 1979, Granta has provided a pla tform for the very best new writing from distinguished names and new talents .

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With contributions from Salman Rushdie, Daniel Alarcon and Steven Hall, the latest edition Granta 109 : WORK contains 21 b eautiful pieces on the fascinating subject of work - largely invisible in modern literature, it is one of the most intimate and elemental activities at the centre of our lives . Subscribe now for just £29 .95* for five issues and you will receive your first issue Granta 109 : WORK for FREE, plus an elegant MOLESKINE® notebook with our compliments.

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acceded to hi s manor, the plum in question _

Another Somerset legend sets the story of Jack and Jill in the vill age of Kilmersdon, where the above sign may be seen. Why anyone would sink a well at the top of a hill , and how you would draw water from it, are questions in need of answers. Literary Somerset, edited by James Crowder (Flagon Press, £ 18.95), has 250 pages of dictionary-style entries, on people with intimate and remote connections with the county, from T. S. Eliot, now buried at East Coker, to Tennyson who " visited Clevedon on hi s honeymoon".

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The Constance Garnett translation differs from both ("Two miles from the village ... "). If that method of literary investigation isn' t tempting, you might think of pairing Chekhov with the once renowned but now little read American short story writer O. Henry, who died a century ago. The initial, perhaps chosen deliberately, stands for nothing - his real name was William Sydney Porter. Is there a case for O. Henry as "the Chekhov of Texas"? You might note a suggestive social contrast with the Russian doctor: O. Henry was a convicte d e mbe zzler w ho spe nt three

ers since the war contain so much ta le nt and

years in the Ohio Penitentiary. It can ' t harm your case that his first book, Cabbages and Kings, was publi shed in 1904, the year of Chekhov's death.

promi se" . Cold Snap, which begins just after the war, will be reviewed in a future issue of the TLS.

A huge bridge was under construction two mil es from Obruc hanova village. From the village, whi ch stood high on a steep bank , the tre llised skeleton could be seen: a pict uresque - indeed , a fantas tic - sight in misty weather. .

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wo nursery rhymes have their origins in the English county of Somerset. Little Jack Horner, who put in hi s thumb and pulled out a plum, is said to have been close to a sixteenth-century Abbot of Glastonbury. One story suggests that Jack conspired to have the Abbot hanged for treason, after which he

his week sees the publication of Cold Snap by Franci s King, the author's fifti eth book. As it happens, the action of the novel harks back to the mid-1 940s, when Mr King ' s first books were published. The TLS reviewed his debut, To the Dark Tower, on August 24, 1946. To the young author' s chagrin, no doubt, the welcome was rather chilly: our critic stonil y stated that King "gives evidence of some ability, but seems anxious to put cleverness to greater use than the purposes of fiction allow" . The review of his second novel, Neve r Again (April 7, 1948), seemed to contradict thi s view, however: it confirmed "the favourable impression made by [his first)". A third novel, An Air That Kills, was publi shed just fi ve months later, giving an early indication of prolific intentions, and by now our critics were convinced: "Few novels written by young writ-

Compare that with the same opening, in the version of 1975 by Ronald Hingley :

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T he T imes Literary Suppleme nt Limited. 2010. Pub lished and liee nscd for distribution in electronic and all other derivative forms by The T imes Literary Supple ment Limi ted. Times House. I Pen nington Stree t. Lo ndo n E98 lBS. England. Telephone: 020-7782 5000 Fax: 020-7782 4966 E-nmil: [email protected] k without whose express per missio n no part may be reproduced. Primed by Ne,,·sJlfinters (Koowsley) Limited. Kitling Road. Prescot. Merseyside. L34 9HN. Engla nd EU ROP EAN P RI CES: Belgium €3.50. France €3.50. Germany €4.20. Greeee€4.20. Italy €4.00. Netherla nds €4.20. Portugal €3.50. Spain €3.50. CANA DIAN PRICES: Toro nto $5.50. Outside 55.75. RO W: Denmark DKR30. Iceland lKR 625. India lNR400. Israel NlS34. Kuwait KWS I.25. Ma lt a MTL2.1O. New Zealand NZS7. Norway NKR 32. Singapore SG56. UAE AE$ 15. T LS suhsc ription rat es ( 12 months/52 issues): UK £1 15. Europe £140. USA $ 169. Canada (Air freight) $225. Re st of World (Airmail) £165. Please send cheque or credit card details to: TLS Subscriptions. Tower Housc. Sovereign Park. Market Harborough. LE87 4JJ. UK. Telephone 0 1858 438781. For US and Canada please send to: TLS Subscri ptions. P.O. Box 3000 Dc nville Nl 07834. USA. Telephone 1-800 370 9040 (new subscriptions on ly) and 1-800 783 4903 (genera l enquiries).

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