The Times Literary Supplement Feb 5, 2010

Emelyne Godfrey H. G . Wells and the hatpin Bharat Tandon Martin Amis's 'Pregnant Widow' Dinah Birch The wonder of Frank Kermode Simon Armitage 'A Chair' and 'A Table' FEBRUARY 5 2010 No 5575

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THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

UK £2.70 USA $5.75

Who was who in Ireland? Roy Foster

ILS

REFERENCE BOOKS

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

" What would it mean to train the young in an art form that encourages them to tolerate, even enjoy, the most unusual opinions - and to understand the means of persuasion being directed towards them? What can be salvaged of a historically specific set of practices so well understood by the classicist . ?" With this wistful line of questioning Thomas Habinek ends his review of two new reference books for the study of ancient rhetoric, wondering whether, of all engagements with the world of 2,000 years ago, this is the one we now need the most. A Dictionary of Irish Biography should have room for many a rhetorician and, as Roy Foster explains this week, the nine new volumes from the Royal Irish Academy offer a fest of word-spinners for anyone prepared to pay £775 for the privilege - as well as a scholarly disentangling of different Marianus Scottuses and pseudonymous poets. But there is no room for W. E. Gladstone, the man who devoted more great words to Ireland than most: never having held office there, he misses the cut.

What gets in, what stays out and what gets in but in the wrong place are staple issues for those reviewing reference books. Arthur Freeman finds outright errors " mercifully rare" in the magnificent new Oxford Companion to the Book, jointly edited by Michael F. Suarez and the bibliophile most familiar to TLS readers, H. R. Woudhuysen. He does have a few problems with when a "sex manual" should be an "erotic book"and some imprecise differentiation of nineteenth-century booksellers. Dinah Birch considers the life and work of the ninety-year-old master critic Sir Frank Kermode as it might be seen by future writers of guides and companions to the literature of our time. Readers may see a career defined by "brilliantly agile" argument. Kermode himself points to personal and professional defeats as defining moments. Current scholars may reasonably envy a university life in which greatness could be unapologetically addressed and no concern need be shown for impact of research on the economic wellbeing of the nation.

PS

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Roy Foster

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Arthur Freeman

POEMS

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Derek Mahon Simon Armitage

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

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HISTORY

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James McGuire and James Quinn, editors Dictionary of Irish Biography Michael F. Suarez SJ and H. R. Woudhuysen, general editors The Oxford Companion to the Book At the "Butler Arms" A Chair. A Bed Intelligent design, Latin in schools, Queens consort, etc

Howard Temperley Nicholas Rankin

Seymour Drescher Abolition - A hi story of slavery and antislavery Ben Macintyre Operation Mincemeat - The true spy story that changed the course of World War II

SOCIAL STUDIES

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John Warrack

Madeleine Bunting The Plot - A biography of an English acre

ESSAYS & LITERARY CRITICISM

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Dinah Birch

Frank Kermode Bury Place Papers - Essays from the London Review of Books. Concerning E. M. Forster

LITERATURE

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Fiona Gruber

Nicholas Jose, general editor The Literature of Australia

MEMOIRS

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Sudhir Hazareesingh

Jacques Chirac Chaque Pas doit etre un but - Memoires 1

COMMENTARY

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Emelyne Godfrey

Uses for a hatpin - Self-defence for women as pioneered in the fiction of H. G. Wells Royal Milton Freelance TLS June 13, 1975 - J. D. Salinger

Sarah Knight Hugo Williams Then and Now ARTS

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Roz Kaveney

George Baldessin (TarraWarra Museum of Art, Healesville, Victoria, Australia). Harriet Edquist George Baldessin - Paradox and persuasion Christian Boltanski - Personnes (Grand Palais, Paris). James Ensor (Mu see d'Orsay, Paris) Glee (E4)

Patrick McCaughey Judith Flanders

FICTION

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Bharat Tandon Kate Webb Henry Hitchings Michael Caines Kathryn Sutherland

Martin Amis The Pregnant Widow Jon McGregor Even the Dogs Jonathan Buckley Contact Robert Winder The Final Act of Mr Shakespeare Maria McCann The Wilding

POETRY

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Stephen Burt Andrew McCulloch

Samuel Menashe New and Selected Poems; Edited by Christopher Ricks Fred D' Aguiar Continental Shelf

POETRY IN BRIEF

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CLASSICS

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AMERICAN HISTORY

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IN BRIEF

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ARCHAEOLOGY

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John HartIey Williams Cafe des Artistes. Carrie Etter The Tethers. Lorraine Mariner Furniture. Will Alexander The Sri Lanka Loxodrome Chana B10ch Blood Honey Thomas Habinek

Lynette Mitchell

James D. Williams, editor An Introduction to Classical Rhetoric Essential readings. Erik Gunderson, editor The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Rhetoric Adrienne Mayor The Poison King

Simon Akam

Stephen R. Ortiz Beyond the Bonus March and GI Bill Shelley EmIing The Fossil Hunter. Ray Jenkins A Pacifist At War. Fergus Hanna Bell, editor A Salute From the Banderol. Marina Belozerskaya To Wake the Dead. Celestino Deleyto The Secret Life of Romantic Comedy. Marcus Gray Route 19 Revisited. John D. Staines The Tragic Histories of Mary Queen of Scots. Angela Kershaw Before Auschwitz

Paul Mellars Richard Bradley

Robin Dennell The Palaeolithic Settlement of Asia. AIice Roberts The Incredible Human Journey Katina T. LiIIios Heraldry for the Dead

MEDICINE

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Druin Burch

John Nichol and Tony Rennell Medic

ART HISTORY

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Theodore K. Rabb

John Brewer The American Leonardo This week's contributors, Crossword

31 NB

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J. C.

J. D. Salinger' s " lost" stories, The unexpurgated Catcher, Four-star reviews, an unseen Pound

Cover picture: National symbols of Ireland © Historical Art Collection (HAC)/Alamy; p2 © Mike Wilkinson; p3 Vasiliy Batanov/AFP/Getty Images; pS © The Bridgeman Art Library; pS © lonathan Wolstenholmel Bridgeman Art Library; pll © Basso Cannarsa/OpaJe; pl2 © The Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation/Bridgeman Art Library; p13 © Associated Press; pl4 © Museum of the City of New York/Byron Collection/Getty Images; piS © Mary Evans Picture Library 2010; pI? © Estate of George Baldessin ; pl8 © Didier Plowy; p28 © Courtesy of Museu Nacional de Arqueologia and University of Texas Press; p29 © Richard Pohle 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 FEBRUARY 5 2010

REFERENCE BOOKS

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After Abbadie Saints to singers, politicians to painters: a work set to transform the world of Irish scholarship he definition of Irishness is notoriously contested, which is perhaps the reason why the Irish have had to wait so long for a dictionary of national biography, Individual and rather scrappy volumes have long circulated, notably by Alfred Henry Webb (1878), John S. Crone (1928) and Henry Boylan (1979); but otherwise, prosopographical guides tended to be organized by genre or subject, such as Padraic O'Farrell 's useful Who 's Who in the Irish War of Independence 1916- 1922 (1980), later extended into Who 's Who in the Irish War of Independence and Civil War 1916- 1923, Waiter Strickland 's venerable but invaluable Dictionary of Irish Artists (1913), or Brian Cleeve's three-volume Dictionary of Irish Writers (1967-71: updated, with Anne Brady, asA Biographical Dictionary of Irish Writers in 1985). The standard of biographical entry became a good deal more demanding with the appearance of Oxford University Press's large-scale Companions to Irish literature and to Irish history, edited respectively in 1996 and 1998 by Robert Welch and Sean Connolly, but the people whose lives were covered were necessarily selective. Now, at last, we have a large-scale multi-volume Dictionary, available online (dib.cambridge.org) or in nine thumping volumes. It is packed with detailed entries, all of them signed, and accompanied by guides to sources; the trawl is laudably ambitious, and the editorial labour Herculean. This project has come in triumphantly on time; and many of the entries incorporate very recent scholarship, though some do show signs of having been composed some time ago. Previous compendium-projects in Irish academe have not always proceeded smoothly, with histories of running badly behind schedule and producing work that is inconsistent in approach or outdated by the time it is printed; the Dictionary of Irish Biography has vindicated the format. It is safe to say that it will transform the world of Irish scholarship. The obvious comparison is with the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, published five years ago, and this Cambridge project can stand the test. Though the online version does not have the ODNB's lavish visual material and the range is necessarily

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far narrower, the authoritativeness , halance

and eye for a telling detail are of the same order. The new Dictionary of Irish Biography is also similarly user-friendly. Online searching is both flexible and sophisticated; besides text-search, subjects can be tracked by date (or place) of birth and death, floruit dates, gender, religion, profession or career. The ODNB, of course, includes many entries on Irish subjects, up to independence and slightly beyond; in fact, the new DIB opens with the same person as Leslie Stephen 's old DNB, a seventeenth-century Dean of Killaloe with the hard-to-trump surname Abbadie. (It

ROY FOSTER James McGuire and James Quinn, editors DICTIONARY OF IRISH BIOGRAPHY Nine volumes. Royal Irish Academy! Cambridge University Press. £775 (US $995). 9780 521 63331 4

ends with the balladeer Michael Moran, aka "Zozimus".) However, Irish incursors into the DNB in both its previous incarnations tend to be people whose lives impinged on British consciousness and experience, whether through politics, war or culture. The wide range of people covered in the DIB provides a profile of life within the island from the "earliest times" to 2002. As with the ODNB, the editors, James McGuire and James Quinn, have clearly made a decision to take in those often excluded from "official"

Irish history, for reasons of disreputability or gender. Their introduction makes clear that "achievement" rather than "position" has been taken as the benchmark; election to the House of Commons or Dail Eireann, or religious preferment, is not an automatic passport to inclusion. "Our abiding criterion has been to include those names which seem most likely to be the objects of enquiry in the twenty-first century." There are many entries on women and artists, conveying a great deal of unfamiliar and valuable information ; criminals and black sheep also feature, and a fair number of boxers, hurlers and footballers have shouldered their way in. The worlds of Irish academe and intelligentsia are generously treated. And not the least attractive feature of this enterprise is its adherence to the tradition of Irish historical scholarship (as reflected in the Committee of Irish Historical Sciences, or the journal Irish Historical Studies) which embraces the whole island: there is an evident wish to pay close attention to

29.01.10 Yalta, Ukraine This year is the 150th anniversary of Anton Chekhov's birth. He died in Germany in 1904, and was buried in Moscow, but he had made plans shortly before his death to return to YaIta, his home for the previous five years, to the dacha where he wrote Three Sisters, The Cherry Orchard and "The Lady with the Lapdog". The house, having survived a Revolution, two World Wars and an earthquake,

has been a museum since 1921, but it has now fallen into disrepair. It is "in a deplorable state", according to Oleg Zubkov, a local politician, and the museum's director has complained that there are only funds to pay running costs, while the building itself is threatened with subsidence: "We are in danger of sliding onto our neighbours' heads or ending up being trapped in the ruins of the museum".

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Northern Ireland in its various spheres of activity and achievement. Taken all in all, it cannot have been easy. Starting in those earliest times, particular difficulties of identification and confusion are inseparable from medieval Irish history, especially where saints and scholars are concerned: two Marianus Scottuses flourish at exactly the same time, and there are three different entries for "Mo-Chua, Cr6nan, saint in the Irish tradition", spanning the sixth and seventh centuries. Their respective cults and activities are briskly sorted out by Ailbhe Mac Shamhrain, who also deals with a horde of Vikings and minor kings. Irish pseudonyms also create problems. A search for Mary Anne Kelly, who wrote poetry for the Nation in the 1840s under the pseudonym "Eva", yielded no cross-references under "Kelly, Mary Anne" or "Eva" ; she turns up rather illogically alphabeticized as "Kelly [Mary Anne], Eva" (an excellent entry by Brega Webb and Frances Clarke). This is just one instance where looking up entries online probably yields a quicker result than doing so in print. The approach to who "qualifies" is also engagingly broad. Those who were born in Ireland but achieved fame elsewhere find their place, even when their parentage was for instance - English. The painter Francis Bacon is a good example; an Irish childhood in County Kildare horse-racing circles qualifies him for a long entry, ending with the point that his legendary South Kensington studio is now a permanent installation in Dublin 's Hugh Lane Gallery. This brilliant coup de theatre by the gallery's director reclaimed Bacon for Ireland at a stroke, and the process is confirmed by his inclusion here. Margarita Cappock' s useful entry is less racy than recent Baconian commentary by John Richardson and others; sexual masochism goes unmentioned, though the concept of "conscious sadism" turns up unabashedly in the long entry on someone else not often seen as primarily Irish, C. S. Lewis. Lewis's biography here is one of several tours de force by Patrick Maume, who has contributed many entries distinguished for their intelligence, imagination and concise but thought-provoking judgements. Lewis the Ulsterman is given his due: Prince Caspian's di scovery that he is the descendant of pirates who conquered Narnia, massacred the native population and pretended that they never existed is not simply a critique of ahistoric rationalism. It is occasionally suggested that a Hibernocentric Lewis seeking the "Celtic Twilight" instead of the Nordic myths might have been a greater arti st, but he might also have been a provincial crank, as were several of his intellectually frustrated relatives.

Editorial inclusiveness is also practised concerning people who were born and largely lived outside Ireland but exercised a notable influence on the country. There are excep-

4 tions (no Casimir Markievicz, though he was active in the theatre movement with his wife Constance) and the principle immediately raises some knotty problems, especially where politicians are concerned. British people who held office in Ireland qualify for an entry, but not those politicians who made Ireland a special interest or cause. Thus William Ewart Gladstone is missing; though he only visited Ireland once, he arguably left a more lasting impression on Irish policy than any other British politician. (Oliver and Henry Cromwell do receive authoritative and absorbing entries, by John Morrill and Toby Barnard respectively). By the same token, the long-forgotten seventh Duke of Marlborough qualifies for an entry because of his stint as Viceroy in the 1870s, but not his son Lord Randolph Churchill (whose disgrace at court precipitated the appointment). However, Lord Randolph spent much of his short but meteoric career absorbed in Irish affairs, actually lobbied to become Irish Chief Secretary (no doubt seen by some as an early sign of the dementia that killed him), and famously travelled to Ulster in 1886 to endorse Unionist resistance to Home Rule. It is true that Lord Randolph is, to a certain extent, smuggled in under his father' s entry, a strategy also employed elsewhere - as with the Maxwell family , where the entry on the tenth Baron Farnham segues neatly into an account of his successor, or with whole clutches of socialite Guinnesses. Families of painters such as the Mulvanys or the Robertses also sometimes share entries; thus the promotional material can boast "9000 entries", but "9,700 lives". All this extends the trawl usefully, but is not an aid when using the Dictionary by strict al phabetical order. Politicians are generally given a good deal of space. The lengthy entries awarded to Eamon de Valera and Sean Lemass (both by Ronan Fanning, both excellent) were rather preeningly highlighted by the current Taoiseach, Brian Cowen, at the Dublin launch of the Dictionary; perhaps fortunately for the purposes of Fianna Fail's continuing enterprise of self-congratulation, Charles James Haughey died too late for inclusion. One eagerly anticipates his entry in a future volume. More obscure figures are often treated generously: eighteen columns, for instance, awarded to Timothy Michael Healy, antiParnellite and first Governor-General of the Free State. This is contributed by Healy' s biographer Frank Call an an, who also writes thirty-two exemplary columns on Parnell; full of interesting quotations and with a lengthy coda summing up aspects of his career, it stands as a Brief Life in itself. The other giant of nineteenth-century Irish politics, Daniel O'Connell, receives eighteen columns by Gear6id 6 Tuathaigh - a model of judicious concision. Rut less-estahlished politicians get their due too. The protean Patrick Maume contributes a fascinating entry on Daithi 6 Conaill (1938-91), foundermember of Provisional Sinn Fein/IRA; the sources employed involve a wide range of obscure journalism, and the text even directs us to a roman a clef by Eugene McCabe about a character based on 6 Conaill. And due space is given to people who laboured less glamorously in public life, such as the priest John Hayes, who founded the agricultural organization Muintir na Tire - one of several strikingly informative biographies

REFERENCE BOOKS of early twentieth-century figures by Diarmaid Ferriter. A similar project of reclamation is represented by James Kelly's entries on the luminaries and opportunists of the eighteenth-century Irish parliament. The entries on Irish writers significantly mirror the burgeoning of Irish literary history, particularly in reflecting literary production in the eighteenth century at a wider level than Swift, Goldsmith and Sterne, and in including popular but now forgotten writers of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The long and judicious entry on the novelist Kate O' Brien includes a useful paragraph detailing the rediscovery of her work by femi-

nist presses and critics from the 1980s, and the deservedly high status she now holds; it is also refreshingly matter-of-fact about her personal life, introducing a tone unfamiliar to previous Irish biographical dictionaries ("[her husband Gustav1Renier was probably bi- or homosexual; O'Brien was lesbian and not domesticated and the marriage only lasted eleven months"). Edwina Keown's entry on Maria Edgeworth similarly ends with a useful appraisal of her reputation and its recovery; the main part of the entry contributes to this by concentrating on the underrated novel Ormond at the expense of Edgeworth's many other productions. The

At the "Butler Arms" No boats this week, too choppy, so we watch from a spread table beneath a Charlie Chaplin photograph who often came here for a holiday ; or we drive over to Finian ' s Cove to study the eight-mile stretch of water between here and Sceilig Mhichil where the old anchorites and monks who chose the place and raised a church, two oratories and six drystone huts, survived on dulse and mackerel out in the haze. No pleasant woodland there, no grazing deer such as the others knew above fly-bubbling salmon streams ashore, in field and forest beneath oak and yew not calm , contemplative ease but violent seas. Six hundred years of plainchant and response, gannet and cormorant; six centuries of the "crude bronze crucifix"

in Finian's church, wine cup and canticle, prayer book and reading candle, thistles, sea campions. How could you get inside their bony heads? Wrapped up in mystic mists, they spent the hours and years wrestling with the hot flesh in their cold beds, their backs to Europe and the wars, talking to ghosts. What news of the great world, of Gaul and Rome, Iona and Cappadocia? Some, but late; prostrate at Easter in the nave they listened to the whistling wave and saw the sun sink in an infinite ocean world of its own. Strong winds continue, so no trip this time. Still, it could be predictable to climb to the immense height and the whole shocking reach of the Atlantic (with special care since there's no handrail there). No going back, is there, to that wild hush of dedication, to the solitude, the intense belief, the last rock of an abandoned civilization whose faint lights glimmered in a distant age to illuminate at the edge a future life. DEREK MAHON

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lives of some writers are drawn so as to parallel their creations, as with the roistering William Hamilton Maxwell, clerical novelist and author of Wild Sports of the West (1832): "He usually passed his days fox-hunting, shooting and fishing, often with the 2nd marquess of Sligo, who made him his personal chaplain , perhaps for expert advice on misdeeds". The giants of Irish writing receive their due; Joyce, Yeats, Shaw and Wilde are the subjects of impressive essays by Bruce Bradley, Terence Brown, Nicholas Grene and Owen Dudley Edwards. Appropriately, there is also a provocative assessment of the great critic of Yeats, Joyce and Wilde, Richard Ellmann, by Diarmaid Ferriter: "His admirers saw him as providing a critic commensurate with the Irish authors' capacity for complexity, a skill lacking in native critics, and suggested that while he was born into an age of new criticism and died in an age of critical theory, he never fully belonged to either group, being too sophisticated to be labelled categorically" . The wide variety of authors drawn on for the entries on literature adds to the interest (Colm T6ibin on Francis Stuart, for instance) - though, oddly, the adjacent entries on Sean O'Casey (by Robert Lowery) and on his wife Eileen (by Lawrence William White) give different dates and circumstances for how the couple met (the latter seeming more circumstantially exact). Due attention is also given to creative artists in other genres, such as the designer Eileen Gray (who spent most of her life in France) and the adoptively Irish film director John Huston - though curiously, no judgement is passed on his films , in marked contrast to the analytical tone adopted where most novelists are concerned. Singers and actors feature interestingly: Derek Walsh's fascinating entry on the great tenor John O'Sullivan makes clear just how celebrated he was before James Joyce took his cause up in 1929, though it is perhaps through his friendship with Joyce that he is now most vividly remembered. The entries on Irish painters indicate the rapid developments in art history over the past three decades or so, notably in Peter Murray's entry on James Barry - though the contribution on Daniel Maclise, clearly submitted some time ago, inevitably missed the re-evaluation (and the magisterial catalogue) associated with a major exhibition in 2008. But the Dictionary provides far more than an updating of Strickland; artists of the early and mid-twentieth century are fully covered: there is a great deal of useful information about painters such as Jack Hanlon, Charles Brady, Laetitia Hamilton, Norah McGuinness and Colin Middleton hitherto only accessible in sources such as back numbers of the Irish Arts Review. These sometimes apparently draw on personal knowledge and experience, clearly hard-won. The character sketch of the marvellous portrait painter Edward McGuire (1932-86) carries a heartfelt ring: "A complex, paradoxical, highly-wrought personality, he alternated bouts of bohemian conviviality with long periods of monkish solitude; handsomely patrician, courteous and impeccably mannered, he could turn rude and bitterly sardonic when so moved".

Overall, though, the national stereotype of creative, quarrelsome, undisciplined Celts receives a much-needed corrective. The entries on business people and entrepreneurs

REFERENCE BOOKS reflect recent historiographical reassessment of this under-valued aspect of Irish experi ence, and take in not only the shipbui lders of Belfast and linen barons of DeITY, but the brewers and bakers of Cork and Waterford. There is also a wide representation of engineers, medics and scientists, male and female. Here, the intentions declared by the editors' introduction have been impressively realized. Overall, the tone is remarkably readable, partly because the editors have wisely allowed a certain quirky dryness of tone to creep in, and perhaps contributed to it themselves . Mariga Gu inness, co-founder of the Irish Georgian Society, is described, with some restraint, as "'an exotic and sometimes glamorous hostess" . Ruth Dudley Edwards affirms that the distinguished journalist Brian Inglis refused to become Director of Programmes for RTE, "knowing that it would have been hell to deal with pressure-groups and that like all high-profile returning Irish he would be savaged by the Irish media" . And Patrick Maume (again), refining faint praise to an art form , suggests that James ChichesterClark, briefly Premier of Northern Ireland, " should not be seen as devoid of abi lity". Larger themes and conclusions about a biographical approach to Irish history suggest themselves as one peruses these vol umes. There is the prevalence of certain families, dynasties and extended tribal groups, some producing professional middle-class politicians and academics (Gwynns, Dillons, Webbs), others soldiers and statesmen (But-

NATURAL EXPERIMENTS OF HISTORY ED. JARED DIAMOND & JAMES A. ROBINSON Many important questions in the natural

and social sciences cannot be answered by laboratory experiments, and so one has to devise other methods of observing, describing, and explaining the world. This book looks at a range of alternatives in the form of eight different comparative

studies from a variety of subjects.

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"Hibernia Regnum Vulgo Ireland" (detail), 1635, by W. Blaeu lers, O' Briens), and others, such as the Moores, scientists, doctors and writers. The venerable nationalist notion of the exemplary individual life reflecting that of the nation at large is subtly subverted by much that we read here. The Dictionary of Irish Biography represents, overall , a triumph of imaginative scholarship as well as painstaking generalship on the part of the editors, whose commitment is above praise. The editorial principles followed are sound, sensible and consistent, but not to the point of obsession. Very long entries are usefully subdivided, many

(though by no means all) ending in the DNB style by listing extant portraits as well as archival and secondary sources; in the case of St Patrick, the bibliographical guide is immensely long, and much of the actual entry is concerned with problems of evidence. One oddity concerns the titles of the nine volumes themselves : Volumes 2, 5, 6, 7 and 8 are designated by names of the first and last subjects, in the old DNB style (as in VoLume 2. Burdy- Czira); Volumes 3 and 4 appear under alphabetical letter only (as in VoLume 3, D - F); Volumes I and 9 mingle the two

approaches (as in VoLume 1, A- BurchiLL). The admirably informative yet crisp introduction gives no rationale for this inconsistency. In any case, it does not intervene between the curious reader and the riches within the individual volumes. As one closes them, a remembered phrase from rural Ireland comes to mind. After a long visit spent discussing friends , relatives and family interconnections, it was sometimes remarked "We had a great evening, tracing". Many such evenings can be promised to those fortunate enough to have access to this wonderful series .

DARKER THAN BLUE

LOST ILLUSIONS

THE IMPERIAL MOMENT

On the Moral Economies of Black Atlantic Culture

The Politics of Publishing in Nineteenth-Century France

EDITED BY KIMBERLY KAGAN

Physiognomy in Nineteenth-Century Britain

In a provocative study on comparative empire, noted historians identify periods of t ransition across history that reveal how and w hy empires emerge . The authors indicate the domestic political, social, economic, or military institutions that made empire formation possible and add ress how intentiona l the transition to empire was. May 2010 • 978-0-674-03587-4 • £36.95

SHARRONA PEARL

PAUL GILROY

CHRISTINE HAYNES

Gilroy seeks to awaken a new understanding ofW. E. B. Du Bois' intellectual and political legacy. At a time of economic crisis, environmental degradation, ongoing warfare, and heated debate over human rights, how should we reassess the changing place of black culture? Jan 2010 • Belknap • 978-0-674-03570-6 • £16.95

linking the study of business and politics, Christine Haynes reconstructs the passionate and protracted debate over the development of the book trade in nineteenth-century France , The modern literary marketplace is the outcome of a political struggle both within the publish ing world and betw een the book trade and the state. Dec 2009 • 978-0-674-03576-8 • £33.95

Jan 2010 • Bel knap • 978-0-674-03557-7 • £22.95

ABOUT FACES

Pearl revea ls the way that physiognomy, the study of facial features and their relationship to character, shaped the way that people understood one another and presented themselves. By show ing how physiognomy gave people permission to j udge ot hers, Pearl holds up a mirror both to Victorian times and our own. Ja n 2010 • 978-0-674-03604-8 • £36,95

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WO RLD

INCEST AND INFLUENCE The Private Life of Bourgeois England ADAM KUPER Incest and Influence shows us how the political networks of the eighteenth-century aristocracy were succeeded by hundreds of in-married bourgeois clans; in finance and industry, in local and national politics, in the church, and in intellectual life. It brings out the connection between private lives, public fortunes, and the history of imperial Britain. Nov 2009 • 978-0-674-03589-8 • £20.95

JEWISH RENAISSANCE IN THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

BYZANTINE SLAVERY AND THE MEDITERRANEAN WORLD

KENNETH B. MOSS

YOUVAL ROTMAN

Offers the first comprehensive look at the 'Jewish Renaissance' in Russia between 1917 and 1921, exposing a radically new vision of Jewish culture pred icated not on re ligion, but on art and secular individuality. Sept 2009 • 978-0-674-03510-2 • £29.95

Translated by Jane Marie Todd Compares the Byzantine concept of slavery to more familiar forms of slavery, which although no longer exists as a legal institution, can still be found in many forms of nonfreedom in contemporary societies. Nov 2009 • 978-0-674-03611-6 • £25.95

MACAULAY

DOMINION OF GOD

The Tragedy of Power ROBERT E. SULLlVAN On the lSOth anniversary ofthe death of the

Christ endom and Apocalypse in the

English historian and politician Thomas Babington Macaulay, Robert Sullivan offers a portra it of a Victorian life that probes the cost of power, t hepractice of empire, and the impact of ideas, and presents an unsurpassed study of an afflicted genius w ith a thoughtful meditation on the modern ethics of power. Dec 2009 • Belknap • 978-0-674-03624-6 • £29.95

This engaging and beautifully written book explores the compelling belief that Christendom would spread to every corner

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of the earth before the end of bme. Whalen offers a window onto Western religious view s in the past that continue to haunt modern times. Sept 2009 • 978-0-674-03629-1 • £22.95

HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS

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WWW HUPHARVARDEDU

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EMAIL CS-BOOKS@ WILEY.CO M

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TLS FEBRUARY 5 2010

Middle Ages BRED EDWARD WHALEN

TH +44(0) 20 7306 0603

6

Latin in schools Sir, - I was delighted by the warmth and generosity of Lucy Beckett's review (January 29) of my History of Christianity: The first three thousand years, particularly since as readers will quickly appreciate, we have very different perspectives on that story. I hope, nevertheless, that you will allow me to correct one serious misapprehension in that review. To my puzzlement, Beckett says "In an outburst of anti-Roman irritation he blames the Church for the presence, ludicrous in his view, of Latin in the academic curriculum of the West until ' within living memory"'. I find the teaching of Latin in schools neither irritating nor ludicrous. It is the basis of our Western cultural tradition. It is a tragedy for our young people that state schools in particular have marginalized the teaching of Latin, and I applaud the current efforts being made to reverse that marginalization. DlARMAID MACCULLOCH Faculty of Theology, Annexe, 41 Saint Giles, Oxford.

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'The Arabs' Sir, - In his review of Eugene Rogan's The Arabs: A history (January 22), Francis Robinson abandons the expected role of an objective commentator and takes sides in a controversial issue. By stating as a fact that Israel, in the "Cast Lead" operation, targeted UN agencies, hospitals, schools and residential areas, he implies that obviously civilian objects were deliberately attacked, and espouses some of the claims appearing in the Goldstone Report. These claims are the subject of a present and ongoing dispute between Judge Goldstone and the Israeli government and are, so far, unresolved. As reported recently, the Israel Defence Forces have started legal procedures against individual commanders found to have disregarded the rule that no civilian target should be hit. As Professor Robinson is certainly aware, warfare in urban areas bears the risk of innocent people being hurt, and I shall not engage in the argument of whether, in thi s conflict, civilians were used as human shields. This , however, is a far cry from purposefully inflicting damage to nonbelligerents. Francis Robinson is a Professor of History at the University of London. One would expect a historian not to rush into judging very recent events prematurely; after all, the difference between a historian and a journalist is the expectation that the former will relate to the subject with scientific rigour and

Intelligent Design Sir, - Stephen C. Meyer and Thomas N age I are both sceptical of the chemical theory of evolution (Letters, January 15). Nagel suggests no alternative, but Meyer advocates a theory known as Intelligent Design, which proposes that certain features of living things were introduced by a supernatural being at various times in the past. He has also written a book about it. Nagel initially puffed the book using quasi-scientific quotations, but now confesses that he took "the presentation of the data largely on trust". The theory of Intelligent Design makes some outlandish claims about DNA and proteins. Concerning DNA , the theory makes the following assertions (despite much evidence to the contrary). (I) ancient molecules of DNA were introduced on to the Earth by a supernatural being (not necessarily God) ; (2) all of the chemical components of the modern cell evolved uniquely from this original DNA; and (3) modern DNA sequences are, in the main, too complicated to have arisen by natural selection. Concerning proteins, the assertions are even stranger. In contrast to the Bible, which tells us that God has intervened on Earth on very few occasions, Meyer's book tells us that the Intelligent Designer intervened every time a new gene or a new protein appeared. Well, human beings have 23,000 protein-coding genes. That is a very large number

letters@the-t1s,co,uk of supernatural interventions. Among bacteria, which live in soil and which outnumber human beings by trillions to one, it follows that the Intelligent Designer is actively intervening every few seconds. It seems there really are fairies at the bottom of Meyer' s garden. In the prologue to his book Signature in the Cell, Stephen Meyer states that it is an attempt to make a comprehensive, interdisciplinary argument for the Intelligent Design view of the origin of life. But as the author himself concedes (in an appendix on page 496), the discovery of a precursor to DNA (such as RNA) would demolish the whole edifice. A "key prediction" is that "Future experiments will continue to show that RNA catalysts lack the capacities necessary to render the RNA world scenario plausible". It is Stephen Meyer's bad luck to have published his book in 2009, the very year that the RNA world scenario became eminently plausible. In

February of that year came the discovery of the self-sustained replication of an RNA enzyme, by Lincoln and Joyce (Science, Vol 323, ppl ,229-32) . In March came the identification of the prebiotic translation apparatus (a dimer of self-folding RNA units) within the contemporary ribosome, by Yonath et al (Nature Proceedings, Posted March 4, 2009). Finally, in May came the discovery of the synthesis of activated pyrimidine ribonucleotides in prebiotically plausible conditions, by Powner et al (Nature , Vol 459, pp239-42). I am afraid that reality has overtaken Meyer' s book and its flawed reasoning. Scientists do not yet have a detailed model of how primeval RNA came into being, or how it evolved. They are, after all, trying to reconstruct molecules that disappeared from the face of the Earth about 4 billion years ago. Nevertheless, they have already shown that one tiny part of the ancient "RNA world" didn ' t actually disappear. It survived and evolved into our own human protein-making factory , and continues to make our fingers and toes. Think about that the next time you bounce a baby on your knee. Genuine science makes discoveries that fake science can only dream of. STEPHEN FLETCHER Department of Chemistry, Loughborough University, As hby Road , Loughborough.

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emotional detachment, attributes not necessarily required from the latter. EDGAR PICK Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv.

Sir, - Reviewing Eugene Rogan's The Arabs, Francis Robinson comments that " it is hardly surprising that Arabs, and Muslims elsewhere in the world, danced in the streets at the news of the 9/l1 assault on the USA". It is worth remembering that Iranians did not. They held spontaneous candlelight vigils of sympathy in the streets, and President Khatami sent his condolences to President Bush, as did the mayor and fire chief of Tehran to their opposite numbers in New York. Subsequently, Iran assisted the US in the overthrow of the Taliban, and in setting up a new government in Afghanistan. Its reward was to be included in the Axis of Evil. DA VID MORGAN 302 Orchard Drive, Madison, Wisconsin 53705.

Queens consort Sir, - Mark Bostridge is quite wrong to say (in his review of books by Alison Weir and Tracy Borman, January 8) that Anne Boleyn was a "regnant queen" and "crowned in her own right in May, 1533" . She was, of course, crowned as a queen consort on June I , 1533. Bostridge (or else Alison Weir, in the book under review) was most likely misled by St Edward's crown being used in that coronation; a fact never satisfactorily explained, but which cannot have had the significance now being placed upon it - if, indeed, it had any significance at all. It was not unusual for queens consort to be crowned separately from their husbands: Matilda of Flanders was crowned as soon as her husband thought it safe to bring her to England (in 1068), while Elizabeth of York was not crowned until late 1487, despite marrying Henry VII three months after his own coronation in October 1485. Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon were crowned together in

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June 1509, shortly after their marriage. That Anne Boleyn was the last queen consort of England, Great Britain or the United Kingdom to receive a separate coronation is purely accidental: subsequent queens consort were either crowned with their husbands or not crowned at all. (Anne of Denmark received a Scottish coronation in 1590 but not an English one; Henrietta Maria was never crowned.) None of Henry VIII's subsequent wives was crowned, for perhaps understandable reasons. JOHN W. BRIGGS 38 Crofton Close, Purbrook, Waterlooville, Hampshire.

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One's got it Sir, - I had no idea, until I read Peter Hacker's review of my book Selves: An essay in revisionary metaphysics (January 22), that the letter in which Mozart supposedly claimed he could hear "as it were, all at once" the whole of a piece of

music that he was composing in his mind was a " notorious forgery". I found the letter quoted (in all innocence) by William James in his Principles of Psychology (1890); it turns out that it was invented by the critic Friedrich Rochlitz (1769-1842). How could anyone do such a thing? The fact that Goethe was duped (and very moved) by the letter doesn' t make it any better. The fact that Rochlitz knew Mozart, and presumably wouldn ' t have wanted entirely to misrepresent hi s views, doesn't make it much better. Rochlitz's mock-Mozart describes a point in the process of composition when the piece "is actually almost finished in my mind , so that even if it is a long piece I can see it as a whole in my mind in a glance, as if it were a beautiful painting In my imagination I do not hear the parts successively, as they must come out, but, as it were, all at once". In his review Hacker protests, understandably enough, that this can't be true, and suggests, in a Rylean phrase, that it is at best "a misleading description of the sudden dawning of an ability, not a description of its amazing high-speed exercise". I think there's more to it than that. James 's translation of "iiberh6ren" as "the hearing of it all at once" is perhaps too temporally specific, but the word is being used to describe an experience of somehow grasping the work as a whole (it is formed by analogy with "iibersehen", a word which was fashionable among the critics of the time). I stand by the view that this corresponds to something experientially real, especially in a musical genius. Something similar can happen with a complicated idea. There's a sense in which it is experienced - cognitively experienced - in a flash. One doesn ' t just know that one's got it; one is in some manner acquainted with its content. GALEN STRA WSON Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, Massachusetts In stitute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139.

Sir, - Peter Hacker's refutation of Galen Strawson's arguments for the material existence of the self gains an extra layer when one considers that Strawson himself is the editor of your philosophy pages. In his readiness to bite the hand that feeds him, was Hacker being selfless, or merely selfassured? GUY DAMMANN 11 Point Pleasant, Flat 6, London SW I 8.

REFERENCE BOOKS

Rare, cheque and bath The end of a daunting project that escapes the curse of Wikipedia he idea of a concise "reader' s companion" to literature, or aspects of literature within any given area of interest, is at once ancient and (for good reason) fashionable. For synoptic commentary, it goes back to late Classical epitomes, medieval manuals, and countless early modern guides and vademecums, from Diogenes Laertius, Photius and the Byzantine Suda, to Balbus and Bartholomaeus Anglicus, and latterly from William Nicolson (of the "Historical Libraries", 1696- 1724) to the prescriptive canons of "best books" and works - beginning with Gabriel Naude, if not the Alexandrian pintakes - on "how to assemble a library". For terminological and technical exegesis it stems from ancient specialized word-lists and summaries of practical arts, of which James Harris 's Lexicon Technicum (1704) is a developed example. But in our times, in Britain, "companion" suggests above all the series of one-volume handbooks in alphabetical order published by Oxford University Press, beginning with the Oxford Companion to English Literature in 1932, and subsequently treating some seventy wide-ranging areas from philosophy to jazz; ideally, as the publishers advertise, these "combine the functionality of a subject dictionary with the breadth and scope of an encyclopedia", all whittled down to a portable format. In 2009 we had the Companion to Architecture, swollen to two volumes, and now - far longer yet, at well over one million words in 1,408 double-column A4 pages the Oxford Companion to the Book. Its length, with fifty-one extended essays, followed by just ten times that many A- Z entries, some 170 illustrations, and two indispensable indexes, was in part dictated by the somewhat amorphous nature of the subject. "The Book" - which the editors define simply as "shorthand for any recorded text" is a new categorical label or buzzword (and a red flag to some traditionalists) implying an approach to the written word at once historical, mechanical and sociological; and while its popularity as a conceptual catch-all has generated a vast literature of its own in the past few decades, the discipline is still in the process of defining its contours, with respect to philology, social and technological history, and aesthetic or moral criticism. It is here to stay, however, and the time has come for a standard compilation of hard facts and consensus opinion to underpin future

T

work.

Rut any such " accurate, halanced ,

comprehensive, and authoritative view of a large subject that is still developing" - as the editors promise - can no longer be a livre de poche. It calls for clear descriptive accounts of the artefacts themselves, i.e., manuscripts, printed books, scrolls, incised tablets and engraved stones, ephemera and electronic manifestations, and also for entries detailing specific technical processes, materials employed, places of origin and dissemination, genres of composition, exemplary authors and works, scribes, printers, publishers, illustrators, binders, booksellers, collectors, libraries (and their

ARTHUR FREEMAN Michael F. Suarez SJ and

H. R. Woudhuysen, general editors THE OXFORD COMPANION TO THE BOOK Two volumes. I ,408pp. Oxford University Press. £195 (US $275). 9780 19 860653 6

patrons and abusers), and the reading public in all ages. Furthermore, while not exactly doubling as a dictionary (like Glaister's Glossary of the Book or John Carter's idiosyncratic but endearing ABC of Book Collecting), OCB incorporates definitions of bookish terminology and discussions of associated activities (conservation and cataloguing, censorship and suppression, private presses, organizations and awards, plagiarism, fabrication , propaganda and devotion). All this is in an effort to create a self-contained work of first resort for the general reader in search of clarification, or onward reference. Clearly the scope of the project was daunting to begin with, and the execution correspondingly arduous. An initial effort, instigated by OUP in 2002 , stalled in 2004, and the present one really began in 2004-05 with the appointment of the new general editors Michael F. Suarez SJ and H. R. Woudhuysen. These two were largely responsible for establishing the 5,500 "headwords" for entries (they inherited a few lists from their predecessors, but no usable text), and for recruiting twenty-eight associate and assistant editors and 368 further contributors, from twenty-seven countries. The associate editors have provided nineteen of the fiftyone general essays, and have taken intermediate charge of such areas as national book history, printing and reproduction technologies, evolving scholarship and "the physical book", while the contributors have given us the rest of the essays, and most of the A-Z text. Among the most impressive of the longer entries are "The Ancient Book" by Craig Kallendorf, "The Technologies of Print" (lames Mosley), "Printed Ephemera" (Michael Hams) and "The Sacred Book" (Carl Olson, treating the five most widespread religions), in which the available knowledge is admirably condensed. Other generic summaries are perhaps accessible elsewhere in more comprehensive or readable form, but even the well-grounded Anglo-American hihliophile will welcome the essays on more unfamiliar topics, notably those on book production in Eastern Europe, Central and South America and the Far East. Among the shorter articles, I was particularly taken with the crisp descriptions of lithography, composition and imposition, intaglios and cancels, and the fluent accounts of calligraphy (Nicolas Barker), encyclopedias (Richard Yeo), bilingual and monolingual dictionaries (Vincent Giroud), grammars (Federica Ciccolella), books of hours (Alixe Bovey), the samizdat (Martin Dewhirst), and (required reading) Marcus

Walsh on the "history of the book" and Graham Law on "reviewing in relation to consumption". I found the quality as well as the quantity of contributions by David Pearson, Karen Attar, Neil Harris, Margaret M. Smith, John Lane and (for medieval manuscripts) A. S. G. Edwards outstanding. The general editors have reconciled the material, and generated the elaborate "thematic" and "general" indexes - both essential, for we cannot always know where to look in the alphabetical structure, despite helpful internal cross-references. (Sometimes only persistence or serendipity will serve: Woudhuysen ' s brief but cogent definition of "rare book", a vexed term, is found under "secondhand-book trade" , and for "courtesy book" you must guess "conduct book".) Not the least of the editors' achievements is the remarkable internal consistency regarding events , dates, persons and rival opinions - as opposed, one must say, to ODNB, which, while sixty times as extensive, had a solid precedent to work from, and a fully responsive database lamentably underemployed in the proof stages. Inevitably, any such work as OCB will be subject to leanings, superfluities and omissions. The principal slant here, as the editors concede, is towards anglophone content: over one-third of the treatment of national book production is devoted to Britain and its former colonies, although Caribbean presses

7 (notably in Barbados) receive next to no notice. When early printing in Constantinople, where a sequence of Hebrew presses flourished from 1493 onwards, is given just half a line (unindexed) in "The Transmission of Jewish Knowledge through MSS and Printed Books", one wonders about the twenty-four pages devoted to Australia and New Zealand. In most instances there is nothing wrong with the anglophone emphasis, if you expect it, but in some the results are distorting: the essay on "Children's Books", for instance, pays only preliminary lip service to European material, and that only as didactic, illustrated, or refashioned in England, while such an obvious Continental source as the Gumuchian Catalogue is never cited nor, save for a 1918 adaptation of one tale, is Charles Perrault, nor Pinocchio , nor Struwwelpeter. "The Economy of Print" deals exclusively with Britain, mainly in the nineteenth century; while "book auctions" and associated entries (inadequately cross-referenced) mention only one early sale catalogue issued at the greatest of European markets, Paris, the Bibliotheca Cordesiana (1643), which is actually not for an auction. The " newsbook" , we read disbelievingly, "was invented in November 1641 [by1the London bookseller John Thomas", and "anonymity" devotes three lines in three columns to "many European countries", never citing Querard's magnum opus. (The good entry on "jest books" reverses the perspective, being surprisingly short on English specimens.) Worst of all is the slipshod notice of "forgery and hoaxes", which is almost entirely restricted to eighteenth-century British examples, apart from the silly episode of Denis Vrain-Lucas and his mass production of fraudulent auto-

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TLS FEBRUARY 5 2010

REFERENCE BOOKS

8 graphs in the I 860s. Hence there is no mention here, or elsewhere in OCB, of Classical and Jewish precedents (Onomacritus, Ctesias, Hekataios, Aristeas), of Annius of Viterbo (the most influential literary forger of the Renaissance, if not all time), Trithemius and Erasmus (as such), or the astonishing Constantine Simonides, nor of the Slovo 0 polku Igoreve and the best-selling Gospel of Barnabas. Some omissions of less sinister book men may also reflect anglophone insularity: where is Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, the consummate seventeenth-century scholarbibliophile and conduit of new learning (John Evelyn was celebrated as "the English Peireskius")? Where are the supreme nineteenth-century palaeographer Leopold Delisle, the revered incunabulist Paul Schwenke and the indefatigable codicologist Remigio Sabbadini? Some but not all of these may be best left to the ongoing revision of the German Lexikon des gesamten Buchwesens, and the in-progress French Dictionnaire encyclop
"A Fine Library", 2004, by Jonathan Wolstenholme for naming only a popular Holocaust website for documentation of the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion when two excellent modern monographs are widely available, nor - for "biography" - a single article by Michael Holroyd in the Guardian, 2002. Any attempt to be up to date must now involve the World Wide Web, and several of

the entries in OCB refer backwards to the essay "The Electronic Book", and forward to "World Wide Web" in the A- Z section. But although solid enough descriptively and historically, these longish pieces fail to address the practical matter of book-buying on the internet, one of the commonest concerns raised by bookpersons, and one of the strong-

Two Poems by Simon Armitage A Chair All on its lonesome. Itself solitary. Hieroglyph of the detainee. This dining chair, the four bare legs, orphaned foal, turned to the wall. An armchair slumps, exhausted, tired of the wait. This highchair implores to be lifted, held. Compare the sofa or corny settee, the cushioned togetherness, the chummy repose. Then pity the chair. The meal for one. Throne of the jilted. After the enquiry. Hooded and bound, fully confessed. The policeman takes off his helmet. The consultant closes the door. Yourself only. Sit down. A chair.

ABed Unmade, mid-morning. A dress where it fell , where you snaked from it. The slab of the bed sheet, marbled with creases. These pillows washed up along the strand-line. Plunder. Salvage? The end of the world beyond its edge. The patch of grass where we took down the tent. A gift - the gift-wrap disturbed, the present taken. The quilt rolled back, the wave not broken , always breaking. The book left open, the page you were reading.

TLS FEBRUARY 5 2010

est overall links between "The Book" and the cyberworld itself. Meta-sites such as AddAll and Via Libri, for example, which are the standard port of embarkation for any knowledgeable internet bookhunter or valuer, go unmentioned; this would leave the unwary, if dependent on OCB, to the mercy of separate entries for AbeBooks, the cut-price behemoth Amazon, the auctioneers eBay, and a South African website unknown to me - a direly inadequate choice. Outright errors are mercifully rare in OCB. A few definitions need instant repair: for "holograph", "a document of any kind copied in the hand of the person writing it" is a baffling tautology, and "editio princeps" does not normall y mean "the first appearance of a text in print", but of a text in print (often a century later) in its original language. The otherwise excellent entry for "collational formula" is betrayed by the failure to use superscript where necessary, and the thumbnail sketches of nineteenth-century English booksellers and bibliophiles, nearly all compressed from ODNB, are disappointingly undifferentiated and riddled with imprecise data. The Earl of Ashburnham did not "purchase en bloc the Libri collection" in 1847, and the library of Thomas James Wise was by no means "bequeathed to the British Museum" (his widow sold it to the nation for a huge sum, and threw in the bookshelves gratis). Fanny Hill was not "published" in America in the eighteenth century, but suppressed before issue, and the headword "sex manual", for an article that fail s to mention the first modern one (by Nicolas Venette, 1696) and cites no sources, is a careless misnomer for "erotic book" . Lesser slips: the bejewelled copy of the Rubdiytit (Sangorski's masterpiece) that went down on the Titanic did not belong to poor Harry Widener, the Wood berry Poetry Room is not in Harvard' s Houghton Library, and the Quaritch run of marked sales catalogues is in daily use at Quaritch , and not in the British Library. It hardly needs stressing that most reference books good enough to survive (like OCEL, and now ODNB) benefit enormously from successive corrections and updates, as no doubt OCB will, if the "second edition" the editors envision comes to pass. For this is a very healthy matrix, conceived and executed from scratch as well as one could expect from so distinguished a body of collaborators: nothing in it, as far as I can see, is simply parroted from an unverified or unacknowledged source - the curse of Wikipedia and most online cribs, which also affects OCEL. It will prove a godsend to challenged librarians, and to teachers of classes on any aspect of "the Book" , and a rich lucky dip for the general reader. A searchable online version is in prospect, which may suffice for most re fe rence e nquiries and may appeal

to readers who jib at the price, even at Amazon ' s pre-publication offer of £131.25. But with internet access alone, the highly attractive browsable feature of the two handsome volumes will be virtually lost: OUP has taken to touting the heavily discounted sixtyfive-volume hard-copy ODNB as "a modern classic ... impervious to technical change", in which " many readers still prefer to read longer articles" . Special pleading, perhaps, but with OCB as a database only, I and many others would probably never encounter Cheikh Anta Diop.

HISTORY eymour Drescher has given us the most comprehensive account to date of the rise and fall of modern slavery. In Abolition he shows how Europeans, in order to exploit the new lands opened up by the voyages of discovery, enslaved their inhabitants and subsequently replaced them with slaves brought from Africa. Drescher also seeks to explain why, some three centuries later, Europeans decided to do away with a form of labour that had hitherto proved so profitable. In a final section he deals with the emergence within the heartland of Europe of slave empires employing modern organizational methods and technology to pursue ambitions far surpassing those of previous slave regimes. The book is the fruit of a lifetime's work by a scholar whose interests have ranged over the entire field of slave studies. It is unlikely that we will see another study of this scope and calibre for a long time. Slavery has, of course, been a feature of most societies of which we have record. In fact it was not until early modern times that there began to appear, first in northwest Europe, a handful of countries where slavery was not woven into the social fabric. Britain' s labour laws might be restrictive and its criminal punishments draconian, but at least those living there had the reassurance of knowing they could not be routinely bought, sold and compelled to perform unrequited labour, which was more than could be said for those living elsewhere in Europe. Particularly around the Mediterranean, slavery remained, as it always had been, very much a fact of life. In addition to captives taken in war, there were slaves imported from the Slavic lands to the north and from beyond the Sahara. Throughout the region they constituted a significant part of the labour force, some being employed as domestics or farm workers, others as galley slaves or labourers on sugar plantations. Although Old World bondage lacked the racial associations of its New World successors, there were similarities enough to provide a substantial degree of continuity. This is the point at which Drescher takes up the story. To the Conquistadores, veterans of their nations' struggles against Turks and Moors, it seemed only natural to apply the methods learnt in the course of centuries of Mediterranean warfare to the peoples they conquered. When the supply of these ran out, as it rather quickly did, they had no qualms about replacing them with slaves purchased from Africa. They could, of course, have attempted to make up the deficiency with fellow Europeans, either criminals or captives of war. That, after all , was how they obtained crews for their galleys. But galley slaves were in short supply. Besides, as most captives and criminals were male, a work force so constituted would require continual replenishment. There were also religious ohjections to the enslavement of fellow Christians. Putting them to labour was one thing, but designating them hereditary slaves and demanding the same services of their children was another. Enslaving prisoners of war would give rise to other problems. All things considered, it made sense to stock the new lands with Africans, whom they could classify as heathen and on whose behalf no rescue missions were likely to be launched. When, in due course, it became the turn of the English and French to establish colonies in the New World, it seemed only natural to

S

Home and away HOW ARD TEMPERLEY Seymour Drescher ABOLITION A history of slavery and antislavery 472pp. Cambridge University Press. £50 (US $95); paperback £ 15.99 (US $26.99). 9780521841023

follow in the footsteps of the Portuguese and Spaniards. Even in New England, in spite of its rocky soils and long winters, settlers able to afford slaves had no scruples about purchasing them. Further south, in Virginia and the Carolinas, where tobacco became the principal crop, the demand for slaves was greater. Overall, however, only some 5 per cent of the slaves carried across the Atlantic wound up in North America, the rest going either to the Caribbean or Latin America, which is hardly surprising considering that what Europeans principally required from the New World were tropical products, in particular sugar. Before the advent of cotton, North America's contribution in terms of goods exported was negligible. As late as the I 770s, exports from the mainland amounted to only £1.60 per white resident as compared with £74 for each white resident of the Caribbean. The traditional view of New World settlement as essentially a European achievement needs modifying to take account of the fact that for over three centuries, that is to say up to 1820, Africans arriving in the New World outnumbered Europeans by a factor of five to one. Europeans provided the initiative, capital and transport, but the driving force behind the entire enterprise was black slavery. Some planters earned great fortunes, but others, too, benefited. New England farmers, shippers and manufacturers profited by shipping livestock and foodstuffs to the Caribbean and turning molasses into rum. All around the Atlantic there were those, big and small, bankers and insurers, shipwrights and seamen, retailers and consumers who, directly or more commonly indirectly, made money from slavery - almost everyone, that is to say, apart from the slaves themselves. To no small degree the prosperity of early modern Europe - and so, by extension, our own well-being today - derives from the involuntary labour of African slaves. But while it is easy to see why slavery was adopted, it is harder to explain why it was done away with. Marxist theories based on the notion of its having been abolished because it was uneconomic simply do not hold up. As Drescher demonstrated in Econoride: Rritish slavery in the era af Ahalitian (1977), profits had never been higher. Why deprive planters of labour, reduce production, increase prices and open the way for the rise of Spanish Cuba, when all Britain need have done to ensure its further enrichment was maintain its position as the world's leading provider of both sugar and slaves? To have taken that course, however, early-nineteenth-century Britain would have had to be a very different country from that earnest, moralizing nation known to history. So perhaps the question that ought to be asked is how a people that prided itself on its

commitment to liberty had got itself into the position it had. According to Drescher, the explanation is to be found in the distinction people commonly make between what it is permissible to do "at home" and what is done "beyond the line", namely in a place where quite different rules apply. So long as the two remain apart, separated in this case by wide oceans, this is less of a problem than when they begin to converge and intermingle, as in the course of time they are frequently apt to do. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the first notable anti-slavery victory, the freeing of James Somerset, concerned the right of a slave who had been brought to England not to be forcibly returned to servitude in America. Similarly, the differences of interest and perception dividing slaveholding and non-slaveholding communities in the United States made it a political issue there. Once launched, the crusade against slavery followed a logical course. The slave trade, because of its peculiar horrors and because the regulation of trade was an accepted function of government, was the obvious first target. Dealing with slavery itself, which could be represented as an assault on the rights of property holders, presented more of a problem. It was one that Britain, thanks to its strong centralized government, was able to

9 solve by paying off the planters with £20 million in compensation. In the United States, where the slaves were more numerous and political power was more diffused, the effort almost destroyed the nation. As the Nazis and Soviets were subsequently to demonstrate, slavery is by no means incompatible with modern technology and organizational methods. On the contrary, these have vastly increased the ability of those in power to impose their will on others. Given that British and American slavery were vibrant dynamic institutions with ample potential for further growth, there is no telling how, left to their own devices, they might have developed. Their association with wooden sailing ships and bales of cotton is no indication that their days were numbered. Had the Confederacy emerged triumphant, it is easy to imagine its becoming a militaristic power with expansionist ambitions. All the same, it is plain that the two systems dealt with in the book's final section were in an altogether different league from those that went before. Whereas these had evolved gradually over time, it took Hitler a mere two years, 1939-41, to proclaim and start implementing a scheme which designated something like half the population of Europe as eligible for deportation, enslavement or elimination. The Soviet Gulag system lasted longer and was scarcely less brutal. The fact that both were eventually overthrown should not make us complacent. Slavery has a long history; it is unlikely that we have seen the last of it.

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HISTORY & SOCIAL STUDIES

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He was a Welshman " T h e most spectacular single episode in the history of deception" , said Hugh Trevor-Roper, "was the now famous 'Operation Mincemeat' of 1943," This was the British stratagem of planting the dead body of a supposed officer, by submarine, off Spain, carrying (faked) top-secret letters falsely indicating that the Allies were going to invade Greece, rather than their true target, Sicily, This ghoulish variant of the haversack ruse, laying bait for Nazi Intelligence, was first revealed covertly in 1950 in Duff Cooper's only novel Operation Heartbreak, and then quasi-officially in Ewen Montagu's The Man Who Never Was (1953), itself published as a spoiler of Ian Colvin's freelance investigation The Unknown Courier, which appeared in the same year. Among the 50 million corpses of the Second World War, the courier cadaver still exerts a singular fascination. Who was he? Last year, Cardboard Citizens, a homeless people's theatre company, revived their play Mincemeat in an excellent promenade performance, moving through the floors of a deserted Shoreditch warehouse. The play shone an uncomfortable light on the life of the civilian "ne'er-do-well" or "pauper lunatic" whose snatched body played a vital role in military deception after his lonely death from eating rat poison. Roger J. Morgan, the researcher who first revealed in 1996 that

Zigzag three years ago. Certainly, Macintyre is following that successful formula in this, his eighth book; it is another well-researched, Ben Macintyre entertaining confection, rich in the odd characOPERATION MINCEMEAT ters and hocus-pocus of the spook world. The true spy story that changed the course of World Operation Mincemeat is more an eccentric WarlI detective mystery than a gory war story, con400pp. Bloomsbury. £ 16.99. cerned with the anxieties of thinking rather 9780747598688 than the traumas of killing. Macintyre the journalist-historian follows Winston Churchthe tall body of "Major Bill Martin, Royal ill's advice that "strict chronology is the Marines" was actually that of the Welsh secret of good narrative". He organizes his labourer Glyn Michael, has written about the material well, taking the reader step by step production for a recent issue of the magazine from the original idea, through all the practiAfter the Battle. He refutes the claim that the cal problems of obtaining a dead body, of body floated off Spain was that of a seaman creating an authentic persona with an identfrom HMS Dasher, drowned when the con- ity, a private life and "pocket-litter" , of converted aircraft carrier accidentally blew up in cocting a briefcase of high-level documents March 1943. A discussion of this corpse con- that have to speak volumes without saying spiracy also continues on ARRSE, the British too much. We then follow the strange submarine journey of "Major Martin" to his final Army Rumour Service website. Now, after more than fifty years, we have destiny in enemy territory. Macintyre's sifting of the archives and conthe first of two new full-length books on Operation Mincemeat. Professor Denis Smyth of tacting of the families of the British, German Toronto University, an expert on Franco' s war- and Spanish participants have added colour, time Spain whose book on the subject is due to depth and detail to all previous accounts. He be published in June, has been beaten to the restores the eager, gangling Charles Cholmondraw by Ben Macintyre of The Times, and in dely of MI5 to his rightful place as co-author the shoot-out of the shops Smyth may reprise of the ploy; Montagu, an acerbic barrister, the role of Nicholas Booth, whose book on the mostly wrote Cholmondely out of The Man wartime deceiver Eddie Chapman was out- Who Never Was , a highly self-serving work. gunned by Macintyre's faster-selling Agent Montagu did admit to being "a selfish shit",

NICHOLAS RANKIN

and the contrast that Macintyre draws between the wealthy Montagu and the wretched Glyndwr Michael is pointed and poignant. What is new? Though it is not right to call the Naval Intelligence Division, as Macintyre does, "a section of the British Secret Service" (nor to call a Royal Marine a soldier, for that matter), the "true spy story" of the subtitle has some startling ramifications. Macintyre asserts that the younger brother of Lt-Cdr Ewen Montagu of Naval Intelligence, the cineast and Communist Ivor Montagu , was at this very time an active agent of the Soviet secret services (and identified as such in the Venona decrypts), with an MI5 file running to hundreds of pages. On the other side, Macintyre also suggests that the German intelligence officer Freiherr Alexis von Roenne may have been helping the Allies by deliberately accepting their order-of-battle deceptions because he was an anti-Nazi Christian. The Spanish section of the espionage saga is well told, with more names and details than I have seen before. Macintyre describes how the false letters were extracted from their sealed envelopes, how their strategic disinformation moved up the food chain of enemy intelligence, from Huelva via Madrid to Berlin, and he tracks the operational consequences after the German high command swallowed the dodgy dossier. Operation Mincemeat, patterned like a novel and alert to its own fictiveness, suggests that the spy game is close to fantasy. The danger, for intelligence officers and their political masters, is always blending "yesmanship" with "wishfulness": the desire to please and believing what you want to believe.

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he "plot" is a scrap of land perched on the edge of the North York moors, T overlooking the Vale of York and with far views to the Pennines. It is set in what is known locally as Scotch Corner. Here Robert the Bruce humiliated and routed Edward II at the Battle of Byland, and here there now stands a chapel built on the bit of land bought in 1957 by the author's father, John Bunting. He was a sculptor, a talented but unpredictable teacher at nearby Ampleforth, a man admired but feared by his family for the rages that so often consumed him. Most of his children left when old enough to take wing; his wife eventually also fled , far from Yorkshire. Madeleine Bunting's book is a return journey, to the father she could not fathom in his lifetime, and to the land she always loved.

HORTUS The Gardening Quartedy

Other idylls JOHN W ARRACK Madeleine Bunting THE PLOT A biography of an English acre 304pp. Granta Books. £ 18.99.

978 I 84708085 I

The two draw closer together as she follows her memories of him and walks old trails. From him, no doubt, she has inherited a sculptor's eye and a tactile sense of place, but she writes with a poet's ear that is her own. She is drawn along the old drove roads that still score the landscape, tracks with wide verges to graze the cattle moving across the country to market, especially the high road crossing the Hambleton Hills leading from Scotland. Here, she recounts, William the Conqueror nearly

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returned from harrying the North. Old farmers can still be heard to complain, on a bitter winter's morning, "By, I'm as cold as Billy Norman". History and place are closely interlocked. Bunting writes of the moorland sheep who have marked the landscape and shaped its economy, with the sympathy of all children who have grown up with them - of the errant tracks they form through the heather, their reek of wet wool, the bloody rites of lambing, their toughness and aloofness yet the uncanny closeness of their sounds. Walking alone through the mist, one can be

The church at Scotch Corner, as featured in The Plot startled by the distinctive hack of a human cough , and turn to meet nothing hut the gaze of a solitary ewe. Madeleine Bunting is more of a realist than her father. She knows farmers, and the straits as well as the lure of farming in this hard moorland, and understands why the merciless conifer plantations were installed and half-killed tracts of land but are now receding. Her father' s response to the failure of an ideal was always fury , at humans when heroes like Eric Gill proved fallible , at events when his beliefs, especially in a Catholic communality for England, eluded realization, at the landscape when it seemed to confound

TLS FEBRUARY 5 2010

him. Hence his almost single-handed building of the chapel on his plot, where he set his own sculptures: a fallen soldier grasping what looks like a rosary, on the outside a tympanum with Noah welcoming the dove. Family visits, especially in summer for picnics, were much enjoyed by the Buntings. But their father would stamp down the molehills that heaved up through the turf, and he sprayed a hive of wild bees who were confusing his picture of the idyll. An incident that clearly haunts his daughter still more was when a basking adder which the family had become used to passing, at a distance in every sense respectful , and to admire for his "tawny yellow scales glinting in the sun", suddenly alarmed their dog: the danger would have passed, but their father took a spade and, convulsed with fury, attacked the now hissing snake, thrashing at it until "it lay limp, pathetic, no more than a piece of waste to be tossed into the undergrowth; a beautiful, dignified creature whose species had happily coexisted with us for two decades was dead". Finding the reconciliation she wanted with the whole of her background was inevitably a long, slow process. She writes beautifully of the country, open-eyed to its harshness as well as its strength. After many attempts, she succeeds in getting herself taken up in a flight from the glider club at the top of nearby Sutton Bank, and, terrified but thrilled, at last watches below her, in a new perspective, the places of her childhood. She has tried also, with a touching account of his decline and death, to settle with the distance of time her relationship with her complicated, gifted father. It is harder to do; but the difficulty is part of this original and moving book.

ESSAYS & LITERARY CRITICISM ir Frank Kermode' s career is a wonder. More than forty volumes have appeared since he began to publish in the 1950s, together with a wealth of articles and reviews. He has held senior posts in universities up and down the land, including a notable term of office as King Edward VII Professor of English Literature in Cambridge. Retirement has done nothing to slow his publication rate. Now there are two new works, a thoughtful study of E. M. Forster and Bury Place Papers, a selection of some of the best essays he has written for the London Review of Books. Kermode' s learning and insight seem indestructible. His recent ninetieth birthday has been marked with affectionate tributes, and these books show how much there is to celebrate. Despite these claims to distinction, it is not easy to pin down Kermode's contribution to literary culture. His turn of mind is brilliantly agile rather than polemical , and no identifiable Kermode school has emerged. This is not because his criticism is bland. The writing frequently crackles with hostility, or glows with admiration. Nor is he afraid of a row. He played a vigorous part in the convulsions of the early 1980s, when the Faculty of English at Cambridge tore itself apart over the merits of literary theory. Kermode was a defender of Colin McCabe, at that time a beleaguered young theorist denied promotion by traditionalists. Nevertheless, he refused to be identified with a theoretical approach to literature, either in general or in particular. He is an interpreter, not an evangelist. One of his most perceptive books, The Genesis of Secrecy (1979), speaks of Hermes as the patron of hermeneutics: "He is the god of going-between: between the dead and the living, but also between the latent and the manifest. and between the text and the dying generations of its readers". The spirit of Hermes, subtle and stealthy, is never far from Kermode' s work. If his reserve is not timid, neither is it grand. Not Entitled, a memoir published in 1995, exhibits all the modesty that its title implies. Kermode points to a series of defeats, personal and professional , as defining moments in his life. Perhaps his instinct for enigma has something to do with being brought up on the Isle of Man. Unshakeably convinced of the right to their own identity, most Manxmen stand at a wary distance from the values of the mainland. His detachment might also suggest the pressures of social class, for Kermode was not born into privilege. His father worked in a dockside warehouse, and he was a grammar school boy. He graduated from the University of Liverpool, where the connection is still remembered with pride, and was in his fifties when elected to his Cambridge chair. Michael Wood's shrewd introduction to Rury Plar:e Papers notes that "the thought of failure, or at least the thought of what happens to happiness, is never far from his prose" . Kermode has long been a member of the cultural establishment, but he is also an exile, in the mildest sense of that term. He has removed himself from the world he knew as a child, which might account for the faint air of melancholy that characterizes his work. Exiles may be driven, but they are not usually inclined to expose themselves as ebullient power-seekers. Their deepest loyalties lie hidden. Kermode tells us that E. M. Forster

S

Plasticity the disengagement of those "calm intellectuals, who know a myth from a fiction and a fiction from a fact". One of the finest of the Frank Kermode Bury Street Papers is a response to Philippe BURY PLACE PAPERS Aries's seminal The Hour of Our Death Essays from the London Review of Books (1982). Aries argues that the intellectual 272pp. London Review of Books. revolutions of the seventeenth century led to Paperback, £14.99. a radical change in our understanding of 978 I 873092 04 0 mortality. Death ceased to be "tame"; instead, its arbitrary cruelty became "a scandal". CONCERNING E. M. FORSTER Kermode's view is different. As he under180pp. Weidenfeld and Nicolson. £ 14.99. 9780297851165 stands it, death has always been scandalous. "That is why the human imagination has a "wanted to write books that would please cre- plasticity in regard to death no less admirable ative people but be bought by all the others, than what it displays in its dealings with sex." those who might recoil from the complicated Much of Kermode's plasticity draws on this if not from the passionate". This is not quite order of resourcefulness. Kermode's position. He does not retreat from For all these reasons, the unassuming complication, or from the theoretical , when perseverance of E. M. Forster is attractive to occasion demands. But he shares Forster's Kermode. His new study brings together his wish to connect. Reviewing matters to him 2007 Clark lectures on the novelist, with because it promotes the wider communica- an added "causerie" which meditates more tion of serious ideas. Some of them turn out broadly on the novelist' s life, and on his relato be his own. His complex encounters with tions with contemporary writers. It is not a William Empson, the subject of three of the eulogy. Forster is "occasionally scolded for essays reprinted from the London Review of not being altogether the kind of author I Books, are instructive. Empson's capacity should have preferred him to be". It is in his for searching engagement with textual particularity, combined with an impatience with criticism that is "too fancy", wins Kermode's applause. So too does his insistence that literature makes high demands of its readers. Kermode sees Empson' s fierce dismissal of the critics he termed neo-Christians, figures "with no sense either of personal honour or of public good", as "heartwarming". Yet this spirit of belligerence will not in the end do for him. Waging war is a distraction from the critic's proper function of thinking about literature. "There must surely be a sense of loss." The observation is characteristic, speaking of what Kermode believes to have been a fault in Empson's work, but also suggesting the deeper certainties of loss. A stubborn refusal to compromise made Empson heroic, perFrank Kermode, 2000 haps even tragic, in ways that Kermode admires but would not have wished to emu- limited thinking about class that Forster fall s late. His own choices are more accommodat- most culpably short. Kermode is irritated by ing. And yet, thinking about the willed isola- the patronizing treatment of Leonard Bast's tion of the old warrior's last days, Kermode aspirations in Howards End. "Forster was acknowledges that Empson was "incompar- probably incapable of providing a fairer able". "He never loses class. And take him all account of Bast, for in general he saw the in all, we shall not look upon his like again." poor as different from ' us ' , unless they qualiThat peroration dates from 1986, when fied as boys who might be available for sex Kermode was in his mid-sixties, thinking or were Italian peasants or Indians, and he back over the decades in which he and Emp- had no real understanding of them." As a son had shared the stage. It is a particularly departure from a habitual urbanity , this is retrospective moment, but it reveals a persist- refreshing. Critical severity is sometimes ent direction in Kermode's thought. This is called for. But Kermode is just as persuasive DINAH BIRCH

more than a taste for elegy. An interest in end-

when he honours those aspects of Forster' s

ings sharpens Kermode's perception of what gives value to life. The first of the essays collected here deals with J. F. C. Harrison's 1979 study of apocalyptic thought. The hunger for finality seen in generations of millenarian sects is for Kermode an authentic horror. Here analysis briefly flares into anger, as he considers what ideological zeal can do: "Much practical wickedness may flow from the mistaking of figure for fact, and attempting to order the world into conformity with the figure. Belief in myths can be devastating". It is far better, he maintains, to cultivate

fiction that are closer to his own allegiances. He sees the nature of Forster's creativity in terms of the strategies of Hermes, ambiguous and inspired. Readers must be alert to Forster's secret rhythms, "occult tunes" like those of music, to understand the capacity of his fiction to guide both characters and readers across difficult boundaries. These include the boundary between life and death. "Coming to terms with death, he believed, was a necessary element in the idea of greatness". This is not simply an echo of the Christian memento mori , for it has to do with art rather

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11 than virtue. Forster claimed that the transcendence of art is based "on an integrity in man's nature which is deeper than moral integrity", an assertion which, in Kermode' s judgement, " may be his most important dictum" . Like Forster, Kermode has "no occasion and no need to express these notions in any very definite way - or perhaps he had a need not to do so - but their importance is undeniable". We may take the remark as an unusually direct encapsulation of Kermode' s own critical position, developed over a lifetime of "worrying about death and greatness".

Reflecting on Kermode's career is a sobering business for critics who share his commitment to literature. It is tempting to think that the nature of his achievement is in itself the end of something. Writing a stream of books and articles that unapologetically address literary greatness, with no apparent concern for interdisciplinarity, grant capture, or collaborative projects, and no anxiety about the potential impact of his work on the economic welfare of the nation, might seem to represent a lost intellectual freedom. Perhaps this is true. And yet Kermode' s passage has not been an easy one, and succeeding generations have been spared some of the conflicts he has had to endure, not least in six years of wartime service in the Royal Navy. A young academic's fear of being blown out of the water by a departmental research review is not a trivial matter, but Kermode and his fellow sailors had to face a rather more direct kind of threat. Here the long perspectives of Kermode's thought might be heartening. In The Sense of an Ending (1967), the book that is beginning to look like his most enduring work, Kermode observes that " it seems to be a condition attaching to the exercise of thinking about the future that one should assume one's own time to stand in an extraordinary relation to it .... We think of our own crisis as pre-eminent, more worrying, more interesting than other crises". It is commonplace to think of our own situation as uniquely terrible. Such apocalyptic imaginings permit us to find significance, or even a kind of privilege, in our lives.

But can it really be so? [t seems doubtful that our crisis, or relation with the past, is one of the important differences between us and our

predecessors. Many of them felt as we do. If the evidence looks good to us, so it did to them. Perhaps if we have a terrible privilege it is merely that we are alive and are going to die, all at once or one at a time. Other people have noticed thi s, and have expressed their feelings about it in images different from ours.

This is a quietly eloquent reminder of why we should study the literature of the past, whether or not we can secure public funding in order to pursue our investigations. For Kermode, the processes of vigilant reading are always what a critic's work comes down to, amounting to a duty calling for dedicated patience rather than a sense of mission. It would be pleasing to believe that his kindly last words on William Empson, the critic who more than any other was his equal and his opposite, could serve as a comment on his own life: "enjoying the fun but capable of intense and rewarding work; not immodest but conscious of his own truly exceptional powers" . It is our great good fortune that we have been able to profit from his powers for so long, and that they continue undiminished.

LITERATURE

12 n 1973, when the Australian novelist and playwright Patrick White won the Nobel Prize, the committee could praise itself for having " introduced a new continent into literature". In fact, the history of literature in Australia is one of repeated introductions, from the first forays into print by colonial authors onwards. Writers knew to begin with that they had an audience, and readers who were prepared to be impressed. Here was a land with an extraordinary flora, a dramatic landscape and improbable animals. Or, as the unfortunately named Barron Field put it:

I

Dream time FIONA GRUBER Nicholas Jose , general editor THE LITERATURE OF AUSTRALIA An anthology I ,464pp. Norton. £35 (US $49.95). 9780393 07261 7

Kangaroo, Kangaroo!

Thou spirit of Australia That redeems from utter failure From perfect desolation

And warrants the creation Of this fifth part of the Earth. Field, a judge of the New South Wales Supreme Court, published his ode in First Fruits of Australian Poetry , the first collection of poetry to appear in the colony, in 1819. By then, Sydney was a thriving town and other parts of the continent were being settled; Field nevertheless captures the colony 's sense of unease when he describes the land as an "after-birth" not "conceiv'd in the Beginning" but "emerg'd at the first sinning". Part of that sinning was of course its convict's stain, now a stamp of authenticity though for a long while an embarrassing blot. Another was its treatment of the indigenous inhabitants, whose 60,000-year-old way of life was about to come to an end. Field's is not the first voice in The Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature (published in the United Kingdom and the United States as The Literature of Australia), however. That honour goes to George Worgan (1757-1838), naval surgeon on the HMS Sirius, the First Fleet's flagship. Worgan's letter to his brother in England, dated June 12, 1788, outlines the journey to Australia and the first six months of the penal colony ' s existence. It contains a long description of first encounters with the native inhabitants - "The Governor held up some Beads, Red Cloth and other Bawbels and made signs for them to advance but they still were exceedingly shy." - but the voice of excited discovery speaks, too, of entitlement and possession, confidently expressed by sailors who "Displayed the British Flag [while] each Officer, with a Heart glowing with Loyalty drank his Majesty ' s Health and Success to the Colony" . The nineteenth century dawned: land was taken up, cities rose, convict transporation dwindled. The twentieth century brought with it the grouping of the disparate colonies into a federation of states in 190 I and the creation of the Commonwealth of Australia. Post-war migration, post-colonial and republican sentiments, and a complex and nuanced national identity

have all followed. In recognition of this variegated history, Nicholas Jose, general editor of The Literature of Australia, has brought together letters, journals, petitions and songs, poetry, fiction and drama - "a jostling variety of genres and styles". The many stories encapsulate the changing face of settlement and conquest as well as the evolution of taste in literary subject matter. The result, at 1,464 pages, gives more space than previous collections to the marginalized voice and reproduces the whole of the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Aborigi-

Menzies's speech underlines the fact that class has always meant something else in Australia, its divisions apt to be expressed by the gulf in values between urban and rural populations or, earlier on, between Protesvi lie, sometimes in very brief extracts. Poetry tants and Catholics. Another influential gets its share of the space, with generous selec- prime minister, Paul Keating, is less happily tions for, among others, Judith Wright, Dor- represented by an informal, rather shallow othy Porter, Gwen Harwood, A. D. Hope, Les talk on the importance of the song "Waltzing Murray, Lionel Fogarty and Peter Porter. The Matilda" to the national psyche, although it is migrations from Europe and Asia over the instructive to compare Keating's portrayal of past sixty years are explored in the work of rebelliousness as a core Australian trait with writers such as William Yang, Christos Menzies's progressivism. In such company, Tsiolkas, Bernard Castro and Chi Vu, all of one might have expected something from whom evoke an Australia that is edgier and Gough Whitlam, whose government founded less benign than many would like to believe. the Australia Council (although its predecesThe "heritage" has a hinterland, too, of sor, the Australian Council for the Arts, was a course. Few today read Ada Cambridge; creation of a former Liberal government). Katherine Susannah Pritchard, a staunch In their different ways, Menzies and Communist; or Tasma, the pen name of Keating encouraged characterization of the Jessie Huybers, whose tales of bad marriages national culture as an aid to social cohesion, and the nouveaux riches were popular in the or at least the fostering of a sense of belonging. But that, arguably, has been there from the start; the settlers, from Worgan onwards, were aware of the importance of myth-making, and of creating a narrative that not only explained but also legitimized their presence. They knew they were important pioneers forging a new society. Early accounts of Australia tended to concentrate on its dangers and privations; readers back "home" lapped up tales of hardship and bravery, whether in Watkin Tench 's best-selling Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay (1793) or in A Voyage to Terra Australis (1814), Matthew Flinders's record of maritime travels and coastal circumnavigation. Convict laments made the English shudder; explorers ' stories, such as those by Charles Sturt, conjured visions of bleached bones lying in the desert sand; and letters from settlers either painted pictures of an upside-down Eden or evoked a hell of dust and flood , failed crops and sickly sheep. The feeling of having something important to say was magnified by the discovery of gold, first in New South Wales in 1851 and then in huge and easily accessible quantities in the new colony of Victoria a year later. Mass immigration ensued, and Ellen Clacy ' s account of her auriferous adventures, A "Dawn Arrival, Purnululu" (1999) Lady's Visit to the Gold Diggings of Ausby Robert Maclaurin tralia in 1852- 53, fuelled the image of Australia as a sort of land of Cockaigne, a place 1880s and 90s. Another rediscovery is Eve where anything might come to light. Langley, a strongly lyrical voice, whose outWith half a million new arrivals, many of put in the middle of the last century went them well educated, inside a decade, a publargely unpublished and who in 1954 rashly lishing industry became a reality and writers changed her name by deed poll to Oscar were able to make a living, albeit mainly Wilde. There are also extracts - inadequately through journalism. Lurid works such as representative of a flourishing genre - from Marcus Clarke's tale of penal hardship, His ten Australian plays; from Louis Esson's Natural Life, appeared first in serial form , as political satire The Time is Not Yet Right did Ralph Boldrewood 's Robbery Under (1912) to Hannie Rayson's Hotel Sorrento Arms, about bushrangers in the goldfields. (1990). Two of the most theatrically influenSuch stories were informed hy the tough tial texts of the post-war era also feature: Ray living conditions and lawlessness of the bush, Lawler' s Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, a their sensationalism rooted in truth. But the landmark in 1957 for its naturalistic dialogue most shocking example is also one of the and Alan Seymour's The One Day of the shortest: the Jerilderie Letter, written by the Year (1960), a raw drama about Anzac Day, outlaw Ned Kelly in February 1879 and family disruption, war and nationalism. planned as an apologia and manifesto to be Politicians to make an appearance include distributed to the townsfolk of the settlement Robert Menzies, whose "Forgotten People" he intended to raid and rob. It remains a blazspeech of 1942 was a championing, by ing epistle, angrily listing the ills that have the country's longest-serving prime minister, befallen the bushranger's poverty-stricken of the middle classes - the farmers , business- family. It has volcanic style, too. Kelly ' s men and professionals who stood for description of the constabulary as a "parcel Conservative values and material progress. of big ugly fat-necked wombat headed big-

nal Literature (2008). The incorporation of this selection of indigenous writing has caused a certain amount of controversy. Most of the early indigenous texts are letters or petitions, included for their historical plangency rather than their literary merit, and are the most obvious instance of the refashioning of the literary canon by the editorial team. They crop up throughout the chronologically arranged collection, clumsy and vital, in a series of arresting, morally stark juxtapositions. An extract from Manning Clarke's A History of Australia, for example, which charts Captain Cook's voyage of discovery in an era of idealism for the rights of man, immediately precedes a petition from the Yirrkala People of Arnhem Land, delivered less than a hundred years later, which protested at the forced leasing of Yirrkala territories for bauxite mining. But it wasn ' t until 1924 that the first book by an aboriginal writer appeared: David Unaipon ' s collection of myths, Aborigines, Their Traditions and Customs: Where did they come from? And it would be another forty years before a second writer, Kath Walker (Oodgeroo Noonuccal), published We Are Going (1964), the first Aboriginal poetry to come to the public's attention and the first work in print by an Aboriginal woman. We are the corroboree and the bora ground We are the old sacred ceremonies, the laws of

the elders. We are the wonder tales of Dream Time, the

tribal legends told. We are the past, the hunts and the laughter games, the wandering camp fires.

We are the lightning bolt over Gaphembah Hill Quick and Terrible. Between them, Unaipon and Walker made it possible for a wide range of indigenous writers, including Alexis Wright, Bruce Pascoe and the poet Lionel Fogarty, to find a white audience (and, of course, an indigenous one). The Literature of Australia is aimed at school and university students as well as the general public. It springs from a sense of crisis in Australian letters, with other recent anthologies out of print and students, in particular, deemed to be unaware of the richness of their nation's literary heritage. So, alongside the little-known voices we find the ohvious names (although not always their best-known work). Authors from the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries include Marcus Clarke, Adam Lindsay Gordon (a single entry), Henry Lawson, Henry Handel Richardson, Miles Franklin, Ethel Turner, John Shaw Neilson, Martin Boyd, Christina Stead and Kenneth Slessor. Among the writers from the second half of the twentieth century are Patrick White, David Malouf, Peter Carey, Randolph Stow, Thomas Keneall y, Frank Moorhouse, Shirley Hazzard, Helen Garner, Tim Winton and Kate Gren-

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bellied magpie legged narrow hipped splawfooted sons of Irish Bailliffs or English landlords which is better known as Officers of Justice or Victorian Police" surely ranks as one of the best insults ever committed to paper, and a zoological grafting as improbable as a platypus. Peter Carey , 120 years later, won the Booker Prize for his version of the story, The True History of the Kelly Gang, but the original is inimitable. Kelly 's folk-hero status, together with that of other bushrangers such as Bold Jack Donahue and Ben Hall, formed part of the demotic tradition that identified with the underdog. The bush ballad was hugely popular. In the mid-nineteenth century, sentimental poems such as Adam Lindsay Gordon ' s "The Sick Stockrider" celebrated both the romance of the frontier and the voice of the ordinary man ; their success paved the way for writers such as Henry Lawson, C. J. Dennis and A. B. (Banjo) Paterson a few decades later. Paterson 's stirring, rhythmic "Man from Snowy River" and Barcroft Boake's "Where the Dead Men Lie" were written to be read aloud, as was Dennis's urban equivalent, " Songs of a Sentimental Bloke", which sold 65,000 copies in eighteen months in 1915 and found its way into the knapsacks of many diggers in the trenches. Australia's relationship to the bush has always been complex; its cities grew quickly and it is now the most urbanized country on earth, but the identification with the land was, and remains, a vital part of the nation's cultural identity. And though the bush continues to be romanticized, its use as a motif of gothic terror or unease has proved equally resilient. The fear of being lost to oneself as well as the world, through surrender to monsters both real and imagined, is constantly refreshed - and powerfully evoked, here, in Barbara Baynton's late Victorian short story "The Chosen Vessel", in which a young mother and child on a remote station are terrorized by a prowling vagrant. That fear of the unknown has been complemented in recent decades, by a fear of the known, one manifestation in writing of the famous "cultural cringe". The spectre at the barbie, it turns out, is what some see as security and others as suburban blandness, insularity, and a peripheral status in world politics. Peter Porter's poem "On This Day I Complete My Fortieth Year" (1970) echoes Byron 's on ending his thirty-sixth, but it is also a wry and ambivalent lament for the Australian quotidian, contemplated from the vantage point of a distant "European gloom": To have a weatherboard house and a white Paling fence and poinsettias and palm nuts

Instead of Newstead Abbey and owls and graves

And not even a club foot. A nd of course the worries persist: ahout

not having the full set of cultural tools, or mistrusting grandeur and magnificence as they apply to Australia, or thinking that life is being lived more richly elsewhere. Yet, in the 240 years since Captain Cook raised the Union flag on Possession Island, the continent has been successfully imagined in thousands of ways, by wave upon wave of colonists and indigenous peoples. Where on earth is elsewhere, if not here? The Literature of Australia is an impressive reminder of the nation' s literary vitality, then and now. The introductions continue.

LITERATURE & MEMOIRS

13

Iron enigma

cal with the truth. Chirac completely blanks out sensitive subjects, such as his alleged diversion of public funds into Gaullist party coffers during his mayoral tenure in Paris - a scandal from which he was long shielded through Presidential immunity, and which may yet come back to haunt him now that the case has been re-opened by French judicial authorities. Especially tendentious is the account of Giscard 's defeat in the 1981 Presidential elections, which is blamed entirely on the ex-President' s failings; Chirac forgets to mention here that the Gaullist hierarchy expressly orchestrated a "revolutionary vote" for Mitterrand on the second ballot. Yet there are also refreshing moments of lucidity. Chirac recognizes that he made serious mistakes during his political career: he did not always surround himself with the best advisers (especially his Pompidolian grey eminences Pierre Juillet and Marie-France Garaud, who tried to steer him towards aggressively conservative and sectarian positions); he was often too partisan, and insufficiently mindful of the general interest (a flaw which contributed significantly to his defeat in the 1988 Presidential elections). Chirac also pays a spirited tribute to his loyal (and forgiving) wife Bernadette, also acknowledging her increasingly influential advisory role behind the scenes; and he speaks with sensitivity about the anorexia of their daughter Laurence, which first struck during her adolescence; as a largely absent parent, he feels a burden of responsibility for her predicament. As he matured through experience (and adversity), Chirac increasingly found confirmation of his intuition that politics was essentially a matter of "men, characters, and sensibilities" ("une affaire d' hommes, de caracteres, de sensibilites") rather than ideologies. This humanist vision in many respects marked a return to his radical-socialist origins in the Correze, and in particular the values of his grandfather Louis, an active supporter of the Popular Front and ardent antifascist who had championed the Republican cause in Spain. As he drew on this heritage to launch his successful bid for the Presidency in 1995, Chirac thus finally came of age - as a classical French republican. What thus emerges from the memoir is a double paradox. Far from being a political weathervane, Chirac consistently took principled stances throughout his career. He supported the legalization of abortion, the abolition of the death penalty, the Left's entitlement to govern after Mitterrand's victory in 1981, and the ratification of the Maastricht Treaty; perhaps most importantly of all , he always vigorously opposed any compromise with the racist politics of Jean-Marie Le Pen's Front National. Yet these positions, based on his humanist intuitions rather than his immediate political interests , did little to alter Chirac's image as the iron man of the French Right. He thus realized by the late 1980s that he had become trapped in a public persona which did not correspond to his true self. And so it was only when he decided to cast off everything he had learnt from his ENA years and his formal political educators, and revert to his instinctive republican heritage, that this distinguished son of the Correze was finally embraced as a worthy Presidential candidate by his compatriots. Chirac sums up the lesson learnt in his characteristically understated style: "it is best to be wary of technocrats".

acques Chirac has been one of the big beasts of French politics for the past thirty-five years. No political figure can match his wealth of experience in high office: starting as a junior minister under General de Gaulle, Chirac served as Prime Minister during the Giscard d'Estaing and Mitterrand presidencies; he was elected three consecutive times to the mayorship of Paris; and in 1995, after two unsuccessful attempts, he won the supreme prize in French politics, the Presidency of the Republic, and was reelected until 2007. Yet even though there is enormous affection for him in France - his popularity ratings have continued to rise since his retirement - the man remains an enigma. He has always been reluctant to reveal much about himself, and indeed went out of his way to project a tough, abrasive image, and to conceal his sensitive side notably his encyclopedic knowledge of art and his love of poetry. His core political values seem equally inscrutable. The veteran republican statesman Henri Queuille, who met Chirac when he first ran for parliament in 1967 in the Correze, described him as a "chameleon" - and in many respects it is this changeability that appears as his defining characteristic. Chirac has been a rabid Eurosceptic and an enthusiastic advocate of European integration ; a believer in modernization and an enemy of technocracy; a passionate advocate of state subsidies and a champion of privatization; and an exponent of traditional conservatism and a scourge of France's "social fracture" . In producing his memoirs, the first volume of which ends with his accession to the presidency, Chirac has sought both to reveal more about his inner self, and to respond to those (and they have been numerous over the years) who dismiss him as an impulsive and unthinking empiricist, or (worse) a shameless opportunist, ever ready to adjust to the prevailing political winds. The public reaction to Chaque Pas doit bre un but has been remarkable: in its first month, the book sold more than 350,000 copies in France. In many respects the key to understanding Chirac is to appreciate that he came out of the stable of Georges Pompidou, Charles de Gaulle's loyal lieutenant and presidential successor in 1969. Chirac's vibrant homage to his " maitre" Pompidou is entirely fitting. It was Pompidou who took Chirac into his Cabinet in 1962 after he graduated from the Ecole Nationale d' Administration, and the two men were similar both in temperament and sociocultural backgrounds. Schoolteachers figured prominently in their families , as did a profound affinity with the values and interests of provincial and rural France. Pompidou ' s ordinary, introverted form of Gaullism also meshed perfectly with Chirac's unheroic self-image: even when he explains how he sabotaged German communication lines during the Occupation, or earned the Medal of Military Valour for bravery in action during the Algerian war, Chirac remains typically humble and self-deprecating. But this modesty was also combined with an extraordinary energy and resilience. Throughout his political career, Chirac has been a pugilist,

J

SUDHIR HAZAREESINGH Jacques Chirac CHAQUE PAS DOlT ETRE UN BUT Memoires I

500pp. NiL Editions. €21. 978284111 3934

and it is no accident that his favourite sport is sumo wrestling. He expresses his admiration for the political artistry of Fran~ois Mitterrand: the two men spent much of the 19705 and 80s locked in combat, and Chirac gallantly recognizes that he was the one who generally ended up on the floor; the Socialist leader proved far too nimble (and too devious) for him. Chirac is far less charitable with his associates who betrayed him. He rounds on his "friend of thirty years", the stodgy and

Jaeques Chirae, January 1997 dead-eyed Edouard Balladur, who ran for the Presidency in 1995 despite a tacit understanding that he would leave the road clear for Chirac. It was at this juncture, too, that the restlessly over-ambitious Nicolas Sarkozy betrayed Chirac (his mentor) and joined the Balladur camp - an act of treachery which was forgiven but not forgotten. But the real villain of the book, almost pantomime-like in his odiousness, is Chirac's old rival and nemesis Valery Giscard d'Estaing. The former President is excoriated for his vanity and self-importance, his social snobbery, his regalian conception of leadership, his pathological anti-Gaullism, and his frivolity; Giscard always seems away hunting big game in Africa when crucial affairs of State need to be settled. As with all such autobiographical exercises, there are contestable elements. They appear notably in Chirac 's analysis of the Algerian war, which concludes that France "did not deserve to be defeated, and indeed was not" : both highly dubious propositions, which reflect the inability of men of Chirac's generation to come to terms with that conflict. Predictably, the memoir is also economi-

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14 her at a crossing and suggestively whispers mysterious words in her ear: "Whither away?". Confused, she finds herself in the Burlington Arcade, a place notorious for prostitutes and their clients, where she watches a prostitute, dressed in " meretricious" finery , attracting a client. Ann Veronica is pursued by a sini ster blond man into a cafe, where he sits ogling her. She tries to shake him off, but which was published by Gollancz in 1941. he follows her outside, "crawling and sneakEMELYNE GODFREY Far from remaining in Wells's shadow , Mrs ing" towards her in the dusk. Her vulnerabilwatch committee to censor books before they Amber Blanco White became a figure in her ity dictates how she experiences the city. were disseminated. The novel was put on the own right and her life can be considered a "Against the sin ister, the threatening, monrestricted list of the Circulating Libraries real-life sequel to Ann Veronica. Inciden- strous inhumanity of the limitless city, there Association, which only added to its wide- tally, her daughter, Anna-Jane Kennard, born was nothing now but this supreme, ugly fact spread appeal among the general public, and in December 1909, has recently celebrated of a pursuit - the pursuit of the undesired, especially the young " new women". It sold her 100th birthday. persistent male." well ; my own first-edition copy of Ann Wells searched for intellectually and sexuWells was addressing the current topic of Veronica is the novel's nineteenth imprint ally liberated women , but he wanted to tame unreported offences, referred to by historians from the first year of its publication. them in the end. This is the case with Ann of crime as "the dark number" . Helena SwanMuch of Wells's writing is autobiographi- Veronica, who gives up her scientific studies wick, an active member of the non-militant cal, and the affair between Ann Veronica and in order to have children. The final scene of National Union of Women 's Suffrage SocieCapes was drawn from his own experience. the novel sees her married to Capes and recon- ties, describes in her memoir, I Have Been Ann Veronica herself is based on Amber ciled with her father. After such a racy plot, Youn g (1935) , the cultural silence that Reeves, the attractive daughter of the Fabian this is a disappointing ending. Wells was stopped her from talking about being the subsociologist Maud Pember Reeves. Amber reimagining the world according to his own ject of unwanted attentions. Both Sides of the was awarded a double first in Moral Sciences preferences, and he thought that childbearing Curtain (1940), written by Elizabeth Robins, at Newnham College and co-founded the was a woman's "chief public duty" . He revealed that Robins - an actress, playwright Cambridge Fabian Society. She was much seems guilty of attempting to fix women into and writer for the militant Women's more than a passing romantic interest. In his particular roles. Yet for all its faults , Ann Social and Political Union paper Votes for Women - had also suffered the same experiences: "It was, I think, partly the sheer ugliness of these manifestations that unnerved me, and largely the illusion that they ought not to happen to me. That they did happen was a disgrace. No one must know" (from Helena Swanwick' s book I Have Been Youn g). These memoirs were published long after the Edwardian era and we do not know if Wells ever discussed this issue with Swan wick or with Robins in the letters they exchanged after the publication of Ann Veronica. Wells would have been aware of their concerns, however. Periodicals, from the Strand to the Girl's Reader, featured stories in which attractive young women, often travelling or walking unaccompanied, were faced with the indiscretions of the opposite sex . While Swan wick felt compelled to keep quiet about her feelings, sexual threat was, in the 1880s, publicly acknowledged to be a problem. In 1887, the bestselling Pall Mall Gazette (famous for its expose of child prostitution) rang with debates on "male pests", and featured women's own accou nts of being stalked or sexually assaulted. The social purity campaigner Laura Ormiston Chant told Pall Mall Gazette readers that she too "A Lesson In the Womanly Art of Self-Defence", 1906 avoided Piccadilly. Strategies for coping with sexual threat forties, Wells started out on a quest to find Veronica is still an unsettling novel , and were proposed. Women could carry firearms , what he called his " lover shadow", a woman the physical confrontation between Ann but their use was increasingly criticized. who was his intellectual equal, which Amber Veronica and Mr Ramage that takes place Hatpins were a popular weapon of choice, certainly was . Pregnant with Wells's child, halfway through the book still has the power but they also had their critics. As one London she did not simply disappear into domestic to surprise us. magistrate warned, the hatpin " is as dangerseclusion with her new husband, Rivers Wells's description of Ann Veronica's first ous a weapon in the hands of a woman as Blanco White. After her affair with Wells, walk around London , emblematic of the a revolver in the hands of a man" . Letters she wrote a number of novels on women's novel's engagement with woman's role in to the Pall Mall Gazette suggested various issues. Among her earliest is The Reward of society, makes for unsettling reading. When solutions, such as wearing sombre clothing Virtue (1911), which deals with one wife's she arrives in the city, Ann Veronica is so and Salvation Army bonnets, and setting up perilous overspending as a compensation for captivated by her surroundings that she is vigilance committees. Mrs Chant's advice to her loveless marriage. As a civil servant in unaware of the effect of "her collarless ignore male followers might have sufficed the 1920s, Reeves had a keen interest in blouse", "pretty neck" and the way her dark in a busy street, but until the 1900s no one monetary theory. Her concerns over the hair falls " loosely and graciously over her offered any advice on how to deal with an emotional impact of the everyday struggles ears". Her appearance attracts the gaze of assault in a train carriage or behind closed of wartime on family life led her to write a men in the street, and she is startled out of her doors. Freud-influenced book, Worry in Women , reverie when an elderly man stands close to Ann Veronica's struggle with the threaten-

Uses for a hatpin

Self-defence for women as pioneered in the fiction of H. G. Wells ast year saw the centenary of the publication of Ann Veronica by H. G. Wells, a novel that caused a scandal in its day, stoking the gossip in gentlemen's clubs and literary societies and incurring the wrath of Fabians and churchgoers alike. Wells's fast-paced narrative depicts the struggles of a young woman, recently come of age, who is desperate to free herself from her father's control and escape the hypocrisies of suburban life. "All the world about her seemed to be how can one put it? - in wrappers, like a house when people leave it in the summer." Leaving her family home in the suburbs, Ann Veronica travels to London, where she meets Fabians, fruitarians and other progressive groups. She is befriended by an older man, a City magnate called Mr Ramage, whose financial assistance enables her to study biology at Imperial College, where she meets her future hushand. After an altercation with Ramage, she joins the Suffragette movement and is arrested after a raid on Parliament in 1908. She is a restless, curious but quite innocent heroine. As she fumbles her way to selfidentity, she gradually removes the "wrappers" to uncover the true desires of the people she meets. For instance, her chivalrous suitor, Hubert Manning, is shown to be a vain and shallow advocate of Ruskin's separate spheres; he also eats too many of her cakes. Ann Veronica's restlessness attracted the critics, who were largely sympathetic to her. It was neither her desire to leave home nor her joining the Suffragette movement that upset them; it was her choice of man. While studying at Imperial College, she falls in love with her science teacher, Capes, a married man. She is the first to declare her feelings: 'What do you want?' he asked bluntly.

L

'You!' said Ann Veronica."

Wells' s publisher, Frederick Macmillan, judged the scene simply not "amusing", and refused to be associated with the novel. Luckily, the emerging publisher, T. Fisher Unwin, took the book on. When it appeared in October 1909, Ann Veronica immediately became the subject of controversy. T. P. 's Weekly thought that the "danger" of the book was that it might encourage young women to become recklessly self-seeking, to abandon home and family and strike up relationships with "adulterers of the worst type". "Fallen women", in the novels of Elizabeth Gaskell and Thomas Hardy, were punished for their transgressions by death. By contrast, Ann Veronica survives and marries Capes. The most hostile criticism of the novel came in November 1909, from John St Loe Strachey, the Editor of the Spectator and a supporter of the National Social Purity Crusade. To him, Ann Veronica was a "depraved" and "poisonous" book; "The woman's a - , and there's an end on't", he wrote. As a result, the 300,000-strong Central Council of Mothers ' Union and the YWCA publicly supported Strachey and the influential circulating libraries announced their intention to set up a

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15

COMMENTARY ing male figures ofthe urban landscape culminates in a seedy hotel room. Ramage lures her to this "cabinet particulier" on the pretext of repairing their friendship after his impromptu declaration of love during a performance of Tristan and Isolde. He shocks her by once again declaring his feelings , pressing his lips to hers, and grabbing her by the waist. She in turn surprises him with her knowledge of jujitsu; shouting "How dare you!", she fights him off, "vigorously" and "effectively" punching him under the jawbone. She then threatens to smash all the glasses in the room in order to alert the hotel staff. Ann Veronica' s Victorian ancestors would have been shocked at her assertiveness. Surprisingly, however, contemporary reviews of the novel accepted this incident at face value. The Times Literary Supplement probably represents general opinion: " We cannot like her for her stupidity over the Ramage affair; but we cannot dislike her for using her knowledge of the arts of self-defence when Mr. Ramage was impervious to all other argument" . Ann Veronica's knowledge of jujitsu is not as outlandish as it may appear. Few methods of self-defence were available to middle-class women in the nineteenth century, but by 1909, the public was aware of martial arts and defensive techniques. Jujitsu had been brought to Britain from Japan in 1899 by an Anglo-Scottish engineer, Edward William Barton-Wright; based on the principle of using the strength and weight of the enemy against him, it was considered ideal for women. By the time Ann Veronica was published, there were a number of articles and manuals available, including Jiu-Jitsu and Other Methods of Self-Defence (1906) by the featherweight wrestling champion and jujitsuka Percy Longhurst; W. H. Collingridge's Tricks of Self-Defence (1914); and Ju-Jitsu: What It Really Is (1904) by the magazine editor and music hall wrestler William Bankier. The Text-Book of Ju-Jutsu As Practised in Japan (1906), written by Barton-Wright's Japanese assistant, Sadakazu Uyenishi, remained in print throughout most of the twentieth century. Emily Diana Watts, the first female jujitsu teacher to write a book in English on the subject, entitled The Fine Art of Jujutsu (1906), aimed to appeal to the wealthy connoisseur, yet she daringly depicted women wrestling with men at close quarters on damp lawns. Elsewhere, jujitsu was considered suitable for ladies because it was graceful, with some of the starting manoeuvres resembling the waltz. Soon, martial arts training for women was offered in a network of London dojos, or schools. Edith Garrud, who became involved in the suffrage campaign, was known in the British press as "The Suffragette Who Knew Jujitsu". She trained Emmeline Pankhurst's hodyguard corps, whose task was to prevent Pankhurst's re-arrest under the Cat and Mouse Act, and provided shelter for militant campaigners at her London dojo. For all his shortcomings, Wells nevertheless did address the problem of women' s safety. He voiced a common observation at the time, which was that no matter how accomplished a woman may be, she was still at a disadvantage. In Ann Veronica , he created a strong female character who not only chose her own man, but could escape from the clutches of Mr Wrong without having to wait for a hero to come to her rescue.

Royal Milton n the autumn of 1629, John Milton returned to Christ's College, Cambridge, to start his postgraduate studies. Milton began his MA as the university was planning an important event, which the biblical scholar and Christ's tutor Joseph Mede described in a letter of September 19: "The French Ambassador comes hither on Wednesday next, & they say our Chancellour with him. On Thursday we haue an Act for him at the Schooles. Whether the Comedy at Trinitie will be ready I know not. Some say they cannot gett their lessons". Mede's letter accurately depicts the frantic activity that usually accompanied the visit of monarch or court dignitary to early modern Oxford or Cambridge; he vividly evokes the panicky last rehearsals of a student comedy and the potential embarrassment of an academic orator fluffing his lines in the staged debates at the Public Schools. This 1629 visit would prove typically expensive for the university and the colleges: trumpeters and crowd-controlling bedells had to be paid, stages had to be constructed, and the expenses "for beare spent at ye comedies" were not inconsiderable. Organizers and participants always feared that the comedy would fail to amuse and the debates fail to enthral their powerful visitors: only three years later, after Charles l's visit to Cambridge, the Vice-Chancellor hanged himself, allegedly because the comedy had not been a hit with the King and Queen. The pressure of such visits was not just financial and artistic. The visit in 1629 of the French Ambassador, Charles de l' Aubespine, Marquis de Ch ateauneuf, and the Cambridge Chancellor, Henry Rich, Earl of Holland, occurred at an extremely sensitive moment in Charles l's reign, a few months after the King had dissolved Parliament and begun his eleven-year "Personal Rule" that would help move the country towards civil war. Sending Holland, one of his favourites, to Cambridge was a gambit to monitor the extent of Cambridge's conformity. What might be surprising to those who think of Milton primarily as a supporter of the Parliamentarian faction and defender of regicide is the student Milton's involvement in this royalist showcase. Milton composed two Latin poems specifically for the visit. This significant event in Milton ' s student career has not previously been documented, but substantiates the claim of his recent biographers, Gordon Campbell and Thomas Corns, that he was a "conservative" while at Cambridge, and that he was even "deferential to the aristocracy" at this stage of his life. We can find details of Milton's authorial involvement in an anonymous Latin manuscript miscellany held at Lambeth Palace Library, titled "Notitia Academiae Cantabrigiensis", probably compiled during the early 1680s. This manuscript states that Milton's two poems, "Naturam non pati senium" and "De Idea Platonica" - written while he was still a Bachelor of Arts - were "distributed among the assembly" and recited at the staged Philosophy debate on September 24, 1629 (their titles are those of two of the debate topics). The two poems can therefore be classified as "act verses" , synopses of

I

SARAH KNIGHT a publicly argued thesis which were printed as a handout circulated before the thesis was delivered. We learn that the poems were recited not by Milton himself but by John Forster, a Fellow of Christ' s, though the fact that Forster appears to have asked Milton to be a kind of ghost-writer suggests that Milton's literary reputation was growing within his college, at least, if not within the university more widely. The favourable reports of spectators would have enhanced this reputation: Joseph Mede wrote a second letter to the same friend a week later, praising "an Act at the Schooles well performed". The compiler of the "Notitia" was working after the Restoration, which might explain both the royalist slant of many of his notes and his unusual argument that Milton ' s early work was among his best: He was an exact Latinist, great Cri tick, &

commander of an exellent English style. But being made Latin Secretary to the pretended Commonwelth, he abus'd both languages against his King & Church . . . . Never was better pen worse imploy' d; he chose ye most unhappy & offensive subjects to write on, that ever was known. His first & last pieces are most innocent & useful.

tinkered with his student works later in life is already known: his own student orations, the Latin Prolusions, were delivered in the late 1620s and early 1630s, but not published until 1674. It is likely, too, that he polished the act verses, or at least "Natura non pati senium", and embellished it for the 1645 publication. We have seen that 1629 was a pivotal year in Stuart politics, marking the start of Charles 1's Personal Rule. Just as he sought to control national government, the King also tried to micro-manage the universities, through the direct censorship of controversial sermons and examination questions, the granting of many degrees by royal mandate (to the irritation of the scholars), and the appointment of court favourites like the Duke of Buckingham, then the Earl of Holland (after Buckingham's assassination) as Chancellors. Although he viewed the universities as "renowned Nurseries of relligion and learning" , Charles kept them under close scrutiny, aiming to "reduce all extremities to their proper course". We see evidence of this forceful royal control in the "Orders & monicions" for the Cambridge visit, on a smaller yet no less significant scale: preserved in the Cambridge University Archives, these Orders suggest a widespread institutional fear about student unruliness, expressly forbidding rude, and immodest exclamations

, nor

an ye humminge, hakeinge [going about idly), whistlinge, hisseinge, or Jaughinge. . , nor any stampinge, or knockinge, nor any other

uncivill ,

or

unschollerlike,

and

boyish

demeanor uppon any occasion.

The Orders create a picture of sedate, even uncannily immobile, students, holding their breath and restricting their movement until Chancellor and Ambassador have departed and they can hum, laugh and stamp again. Tacked onto public buildings, these Orders regulated conduct and restricted attendance at the debates in particular: "uppon the penaltie of ye law", it was stipulated That noe Scholler Under ye degree of a M: of Arts doe presume to enter into ye Philosophy Schools, at ye discputation, or to be within ye school yard, or to climb up into any window there within ye schooles, or without.

John Milton at the age of twenty-one The compiler suggests that Milton's pen was best employed when writing apolitically, preferring to see the polemical works of the 1640s and 50s as an "unhappy & offensi ve" aberration bookended by the pre-Interregnum and post-Restoration writing. Perhaps the compiler's eagerness to stress Milton ' s involvement in the 1629 visit, and the "innocent & useful" Latin poems he wrote for it, arises from this same perspective on the author's career. In the manuscript, the author goes on to explain that the poems were published in Poems, &c. upon several occasions both English and Latin and that "thirteen extra lines were added" to "Natura non pati senium" between the circulation of the printed act verses in 1629 and the publication of Milton's poems in 1673: these lines were presumably added at some point before Poems of Mr. John Milton, both English and Latin was first published in 1645 (here the text of the two poems is the same as that of 1673). That Milton hoarded and probably

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We do not know whether Milton, who had only just started on his MA, would have been permitted to attend the disputation at which his poems were read out, but this order makes his attendance unlikely. Unfortunately, that official effort to control potential student unruliness - an effort related to the stringency of the Caroline regime of the late 1620s and early 1630s towards the universities - may also have also blocked Milton from an early moment of public praise. In his prose polemic An Apology (I 642), Milton criticizes student actors for a lack of dignity "upon the Stage writhing and unboning their Clergie limmes", and "prostituting the shame of that ministery which either they had, or were nigh having, to the eyes of Courtiers and Court-Ladies". He distances himself from such indecorous behaviour: "There while they acted, and overacted, among other young scholars, I was a spectator; they thought themselves gallant men, and I thought them fools". Perhaps Milton's memory of the 1629 visit, and the recitation of his poems "to the eyes of Courtiers", helped animate his retrospective scorn.

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16 request by a friend for a handwritten copy of a poem to be sold at auction for charity seemed both flattering and gratifyingly easy to fulfil, although I wasn't so confident about doing a drawing for the poem. My friend had visited an orphanage in Kerala, in India, for children with cerebral palsy, Down ' s syndrome and autism, who would normally have been killed at birth or rented out to beggars. She' d looked in the school cupboard and found three sheets of paper and a tin of crayons. They'd had to throwaway the Play-Doh because it had glitter in it and the children ate it. Now she was trying to raise money to set up an arts project. I said to come round to my house and I'd do the poem while she waited. My friend arrived with a big sketch pad she' d been drawing in herself and we started looking through for a blank page for me to write on. There didn't seem to be any, so I suggested adding a poem of mine to one of her drawings: that way I'd have a better chance of not making a mess. She agreed and we looked through her sketches for one with room for some writing. I chose a blurry landscape and decided to copy out my poem about dam-making, " Washing my Hands", mostly because it was short. It was now that my friend had the idea to add some handprints to her work. Her rings were prised off with soap and water and brown oil paint applied to her palms, which she pressed down firmly on her drawing, more or less ruining it. I had to set about fitting my words between her fingers and thumbs, trying not to

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HUGO WILLIAMS trample on the original sketch, which was now practically invisible. The result had the awful conviction of an LSD-inspired vision in which the key to the universe lies buried in mud. A spelling mistake and several illegible words - impossible to go back over them without making it worse - completed the impression of an idiot savant. Even allowing points for spontaneity, it was hard to categorize it as a work of art. The buyer would have to be charitable indeed. "Let' s do another one", I said. "I'm just getting in the mood." This time I found an unfinished drawing of an urn and inscribed it with a grim poem about separation. I managed to follow the contours of the mostly absent urn and the resulting image looked almost intentional. Perhaps the loved one's ashes were inside the urn? I thought this was the end of my charitable contribution, but it seemed I was also required to attend the auction and read out the poems. There was to be a fund-raising event in the upper room of a pub in Islington. Comedians and musicians would make up the first half, then the poets would come on to read their works for auction. Would I have to auction my own poem, I wondered? Supposing nobody bid for it? If I started the bidding, might I get stuck with it? My friend said not to worry, she would take care of that.

I arrived at the pub on time, to find the evening well under way. The room was full of Islington types, all of an Islington sort of age, neither young nor old, but laughing supportively at the comedian, who was making jokes about them being mugged outside wine bars. "The only place in London where you can get mugged by someone wearing linen." When the next comedian also made jokes about this lovable aspect of Islington folklore I felt inclined to give my own appreciation of it, based on personal experience. He talked about Islington parents who walk around with those double-decker push-chairs. Were you supposed to put the ugly one underneath? He'd been in a gents with his young son. The pair muck about with the drying machine for a while, then the boy catches sight of the Durex dispenser and asks his father what it is. The father is stumped. It's a long story. He shrugs and says he doesn ' t know. "That' s what I was afraid of, Dad." It was one of those laughs that comedians like to leave on the crest of. I think he said he had to dash to a Salvation Army gig. A thinner audience returned for the auction after the interval. First was John Hegley, who wasn ' t there, but had promised to phone in his poem from a gig in Scotland. A mobile was hooked up to the microphone and we made out a few words. The framed version of Hegley's poem went for a fair £65.

IN NEXT WEEK'S

ILS George Steiner The old Celine still hisses

Jane Jakeman A tangled history of cotton

Christopher Benfey Letters from Robinson leffers

James Fergusson Publishers and gentlemen

TLS June 13, 1975

J. D. Salinger We look back to a review by David Lodge of The Complete Uncollected Stories of J. D. Salinger. Salinger died last week, aged ninety-one. To see the review in full, go to www.the-tls.co.uk

t is almost exactly ten years since The New Yorker published (on June 19, 1965) "Hapworth 16, 1924" by J. D. Salinger. That story, a further instalment in the saga of the Glass family which commenced back in 1948 with "A Perfect Day for Bananafish", itself broke a silence of six years following the publication of "Seymour: an introduction" in June 1959. Since " Hapworth" Salinger has puhlished nothing. Ten years in literature is not as long as ten years in politics, but it is a long enough time in which to be forgotten , especially if your silence is total. Salinger' s eremitic seclusion, his fanatical defence of his privacy, are of course well known-and while he was still publishing merely intensified public interest in him. Since he stopped publishing, however, his shunning of publicity has ceased to be noteworthy. To say he has been forgotten would not be quite accurate: his works are still in print and evidently sell steadily,

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especially The Catcher in the Rye, which seems assured of some kind of classic status. Rather, it is as if he had died. His name no longer sets off vibrations of expectancy and curiosity among readers of modern fiction. It seems to be generally assumed that his career is a closed chapter, belonging to the literary history of the 1950s: that his interesting and original talent fizzled out disappointingly in the 1960s and was swamped by a new wave of American fiction quite different in character. A few months ago, however, Salinger broke his long silence and revealed that it may yet prove to be a pregnant one. In a telephone conversation with Lacey Fosburgh of the New York Times he stated that he was still writing busily, though not for publication. "There is a marvellous peace in not publishing", he said. "I love to write. But I write for myself and my own pleasure" (New York Times , Novemher 3, 1974). What provoked his communique was the pirated publication in the United States of The Complete Uncollected Short Stories of J. D. Salinger, in two volumes. It is, of course, deplorable that a writer' s work should be reprinted against his will, quite apart from the financial robbery involved. With the exception of "Hapworth", all the uncollected stories are early work, and one understands Salinger's wish to let "them die a perfectly natural death". On the other hand, it is never possible to "unwrite" something that has

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Christopher Twigg's agreeable "Summer Coins" made rather more, but both were trumped by Wendy Cope's famous "Loss", which ends "His absence wasn't a problem / But the corkscrew had gone as well" , for which her husband Lachlan Mackinnon had done an illustration of a girl with a bottle and a "w" for breasts. Their collaboration sold for £370. When my turn came to speak, I stood there holding the framed handprints, but found that I couldn't decipher my own handwriting, and , to my horror, started apologizing for the mess I'd helped create, "Not one of our better ones" etc, which jarred on the evening' s well-intentioned mood. I think we cranked it up to £130. To my relief someone had put a reserve price on our other effort, which eventually went to him for £ 150. I felt I owed them both drinks. This was a very modern occasion, uncynical, and borne along on a wave of positive feeling for the orphanage in Kerala, which few of us would ever see and most could barely imagine. It surely partook of everyone's present sympathy for poor Haiti on the other side of the globe. I heard later that the auction brought in £3 ,500, a fair sum for a night in a room above a pub. But it happened that the very next day I went to see The Power of Yes by David Hare at the National Theatre, a documentary presentation of the financial crisis. The most striking image of the evening was the figure of two trillion dollars spelt out in lights across the vast Lyttelton stage, dazzling us with its full complement of eighteen noughts.

once been published (perhaps this is why Salinger finds not publishing so peaceful), and all the pirated stories are available for inspection in large libraries. Even the most immature of them have the uncanny, hypnotic readability that is the hallmark of his writing, while a few of them would not have disgraced Nine Stories. But perhaps the most interesting discovery to be made by investigating the uncollected stories is that from an early stage in his career Salinger was using the short story as a way of exploring a complex network of relationships between families of characters; and that although he is thought of as preeminently the literary voice of the post-Second World War younger generation, his earliest work (naturally enough when you recall that he was born in 1919) was written from a prewar or wartime perspecti ve. Holden Caulfield, the teenage hero of The Catcher in the Rye (1951), was first referred to, though he did not actually appear, in a story called "Last Day of the Last Furlough" (1944) which is ahout two young soldiers on the eve of a wartime posting overseas: John F. 'Babe" Gladwaller and his friend Vincent Caulfield, who has a kid brother in the Army who flunked out of a lot of schools. He talks about him a lot. Always pretending to pass him off as a nutty kid.

Whatever the reason, it seems a shame that so gifted a writer- probably the first since Hemingway to discover a wholly original mode of writing short storiesshould have retreated into silent selfcommuning.

17

The deferred pleasures of George Baldessin

Figures, fugitives and feasts PATRICK McCAUGHEY

paired masterpieces which he exhibited at the Siio Paulo Biennial in 1975. The sculpture, "Occasional Screens with Seating Arrangements", consisted of a two-sided, folded screen with five large panels per side, etched and scored in low relief. One side has spectral images of a Magdalene figure, who vies for our attention with abstracted rooms full of broken blinds and fragments of still life. The other side mixes explicit images of a pier and a cloudy sky with oppressive, claustrophobic interiors. It is Baldessin's summa of enchantment, entrapment and escape. The other work, a huge etching of twenty-five, outsize panels, "Occasional Images from a City Chamber", elaborates the world of the artist's studio - the stairs, the stained walls, the props (such as the table for the mysterious banquet) and, sprawling across three panels, a voluptuous reclining nude. From this world

GEORGE BALDESSIN TarraWarra Museum of Art, Heaiesville, Victoria, Australia, until March 14

Harriet Edquist GEORGE BALDESSIN Paradox and persuasion

260pp. Australian Galleries. Aus$66. 97809805765 I I he Australian artist George Baldessin was killed in a car accident in 1978. He was thirty-nine. His death shocked and grieved his contemporaries and many older artists who saw in him the promise of a major talent on the brink of fulfilment. His career, principally as a sculptor and printmaker, was harely longer than fifteen years from his debut exhibition in 1964 to his premature death. When the National Gallery of Victoria mounted a memorial exhibition in 1983, opinion divided as to whether he had achieved enough to meet the claims made by his ardent supporters or whether he was a maverick, a figurative artist caught in his own time loop. Harriet Edquist ends her lively monograph, George Baldessin: Paradox and persuasion, with a sharp analysis of the division. The question has haunted Baldessin ' s posthumous reputation. Marking the thirtieth anniversary of his death, the TarraWarra Museum has made a bold attempt both to settle the issue and introduce his work afresh to a succeeding generation. Set in the bucolic Yarra Glen, a wine growing district some twenty-five miles north-east of Melbourne, the museum provides the perfect venue for this timely reconsideration. The entire space of Australia's only privately financed public art museum has been devoted to Baldessin. From the galleries, spectacular views across steep hillsides covered with green vines to the dun-coloured bush of the high country around Healesville reflect the two environments - the imported and the indigenous that Baldessin himself experienced and embodied. He was born in Northern Italy in 1939 and came to Australia ten years later. Although quick to assert his Australianness, he returned to Italy and trained as a sculptor in Milan at the Brem in the circle around Marino Marini - an influence that never wholly deserted him. Baldessin was a man between two worlds and one who moved easily in both. He drew early inspiration in his graphic work from European films such as Ingmar Bergman' s Sawdust and Tinsel (1953), and Luis Buiiuel's Viridiana (1961). His last important works were made during an extended stay in Paris from late 1975 to early 1977. The experience strengthened a natural independence of mind and sensibility. Baldessin was, at all times and in all media, a figurative artist throughout the

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neither

"Banquet", bronze, 1976 abstract wave of the 1960s and the conceptual tilt of the 1970s. Even in the forgiving atmosphere of mid-century Australian art, this went against the grain. He looked and felt different and he enjoyed a different kind of reception - generally extremely favourable - from that of his contemporaries. If his talent was of a major order, can the same be said of his oeuvre? The TarraWarra exhibition provides a solid basis for an affirmative answer. Yet the question is vexed by the nature of Baldessin's work. Although his major sculptures are well distributed around public galleries, Australian art museums and their curators are casual and careless when it comes to their display (they take more care with paintings). The National Gallery of Victoria is exceptional in displaying permanently an important early work, "Figure in Enclosure" , from his first one-man exhibition. Many of Baldessin's later sculptures are large, complicated to assemble and often in need of restoration. Impressive and varied as the sculptures are at TarraWarra, the curious fact is that they do not carry the narrative of his art. They read like a series of independent highlights. The graphic work, particularly the prints, tells the intricate and challenging story of Baldessin' s imaginative life. The combination of few major sculptures on view and the haphazardous display of prints in public museums have conspired to make him a fugitive presence in Australian art, hence the importance of the Tarra Warra show. One other factor that has worked against wide acceptance of Baldessin's majority status in the canon of Australian art has been the nature of his figuration. Edquist characterizes it well as "an internal narrative. Yet to the viewer who stands outside this process, [its)

meaning is completely obscure". The early etchings of performers, dancers and trapeze artists, of multi-figured compositions and gnomic and distorted humanoids, implied a secret narrative whose plot was withheld from the viewer. These gave way to an equally mysterious series of (sometimes sculpted) interiors with tables, occasionally with figures or stilllifes of pears, called "Banquet" or "Banquets for No Eating" , adding paradox to obscurity. Interspersing these narratives were vivid, memorable images of single women, both naked and costumed, with great manes of lank or spiky black hair, at once erotic and menacing. Baldessin knew by instinct that to survive as a figurative artist and produce an art of resonance and authority, he had to avoid the literal or the literary. The ambiguity of his iconography gave his art its power. Today, thirty and more years from the moment of creation, a pattern of meaning and suggestion emerges which makes him easier to "read" without detracting from his art. The viewer is continually invited to enter imaginary rooms in which a pair of brilliantly striped curtains might suddenly blow apart to reveal an illuminated window, a cloudy night sky and nothing more or, in "Personage and Emblems" (1972) a female nude toppled by a massive metal plate, revealing only her opening legs, left breast and arm, and shocked hair. In this last instance, the erotic invitation in medias res is thus denied, cut off and withdrawn from the viewer. It is a good example of what the Australian critic Peter Timms has called "the endless deferral of pleasure". The TarraWarra exhibition demonstrates how the dialogue in Baldessin' s art between the explicit and the inexplicit, between desire and its deferral, comes to a climax in two,

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Raldessin

nor

the

viewer

seeks

escape. The imagination has come home. The exhibition ends with the Paris work of 1975-77 and its cryptic aftermath in the prints of his final months. They remind the viewer that Baldessin's affinity with postwar European art lasted beyond his early contact with Marini and his studio assistant, Alik Cavalieri. The principal Paris works were a series of large-scale charcoal and conte drawings collectively titled "MM of Rue St Denis" . Their sexy ambiguity - Mary Magdalen as streetwalker, objects of desire and shame - recall R. B. Kitaj's graphic work and his persevering commitment to modern life and modern subjects. Kitaj and David Hockney were early enthusiasms on Baldessin's first visit to London in 1962, when English pop was breaking through the prevailing artiness of British painting. Hockney's "The Rake's Progress" (1961-3) must have struck home particularly hard: a major work in a twelve-part etching series tackling an ambivalent, ironic narrative; but the whole of the School of London influenced younger artists in Melbourne. In 1965 the Contemporary Art Society presented David Hockney's "The Second Marriage" (1963) to the National Gallery of Victoria where it joined Michael Andrews's epic on the Colony Room, "All Night Long" . Francis Bacon's " Study for the Human Figure" (1949) had been in the collection since 1953 and was universally admired. So Baldessin, the Melbourne artist, was by no means cut off from a broader current of European and British art, which in part accounts for why his work never feels provincial or marginal. The pattern of his art and of its imagery mirrored Baldessin's personality. Tall and elegant, courteous and good-looking, he drew artists and followers to him and his studio in a decaying Gothic office building in central Melbourne. But for all the symptoms of gregariousness, he remained aloof, selfcontained and enigmatic. There were no selfportraits; there was no need. His work was the unrestrained biography of his inner life.

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ARTS

Day of the not quite dead JUDITH FLANDERS CHRISTIAN BOLTANSKI Personnes Grand Palais, Paris, until February 21 lAMES ENSOR Musee d'Orsay , Paris

hristian Boltanski was fathered by a ghost, and has made his career by recording the dead, the disappeared, the might-have-been. His work dwells on his origins: his father, a Jew in Nazi-occupied Paris, spent the war years under the floor of the family apartment; his mother, a Christian, claimed to have been abandoned, even as she became pregnant with, and gave birth to, her half-Jewish, significantly named son. For Boltanski, the dead walk; frequently , it seems to the viewer, they are more present than the living. The annual Monumenta commission (awarded to Anselm Kiefer and Richard Serra in 2008 and 2009) gives an artist the run of the 13,500 square metres of the Grand Palais, thatfin-de-siecLe , gently decaying birdcage that broods at the end of the Tuileries. Boltanski has used the space to build a refugee camp for ghosts. On entering, the visitor is faced with a wall of some 6,000 rusting boxes, possibly files, each individually but not consecutively numbered, spotlit by desk-lights. They enclose, we presume, records of people's lives; perhaps they are deed boxes from the office of some eternal score-keeper. They are, writ large, the ephemera-filled boxes and biscuit tins Boltanski created earlier in his career to indicate finished, used-up lives. Now, by their invisibility, the lives are universalized, and their multiplying ranks oppress us. As we round the wall , an equally oppressive sound, an insistent thrumming, reinforces the mood. Perhaps a train? Not quite. The sound is a loop of 15,000 heartbeats, matching the unseen contents of the files with the pulses of the living, or the not-yet-dead. (This project is ongoing; visitors can record their heartbeats at the Grand Palais, or wait until summer, when the Serpentine will be staging Heartbeats, complete with recording-booth.) On the other side of the wall, the full extent of Boltanski ' s city of the dead becomes apparent. Across the floor sprawl regimented square encampments of second-hand clothes: sixty-nine squares, each approximately 9 metres by 6, extending into the far distance, the length of the great hall. All the clothes are

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"Personnes", detail, by Christian Boltanski "tops" - jackets, shirts, cardigans, coats; they lie flat, arms extended, like a never-ending crime scene. In the apse of the hall is another pile of clothes: 12 metres high, surmounted by a crane that picks at the garments and drops them back, the iteration of a bored child or an automated claw in an arcade. And these tops, too, re-create bodies that are no longer present: as they flutter down, the arms extend, catch the air, become the falling men - the "personnes" - of the show's title. But though the aims of Personnes, and the thinking behind it, are remarkable, there

remains an uncomfortable gap between ambition and fulfilment. On a gloomy day , the encampment of endless squares, each lit by a single-strip fluorescent light, is probably remarkable. I saw it on a brilliantly sunny day, however; through the glass roof one saw the tricolour snapping brightly in the breeze, a symbol of optimism and permanence. The sun made the squares cheerful , more marketplace than necropolis. And because they can't be seen from above, the squares blur and merge. (Notably, the excellent press photos are all taken from a point of elevation

unavailable to the ordinary visitor.) Only the great mound of clothes has a viewing space above it; and this part of the installation, in stubbornly resistant fashion , seemed diminished by height and distance. The lames Ensor exhibition, in its last week at the Musee d'Orsay, is similarly concerned with ghosts, although Ensor's skulls and skeletons have always appeared to me remarkably chipper. His grinning revenants seem to relish their extinction and this excellently organized show is a fine retrospective of the Belgian artist' s work, from the very early, sub-Cezanne still lifes and the dayglogaudy Turnerish landscapes, to the late, dull respectability, with the always thrilling miracle decade of Ensor's innovative peak thrust in between. The show contains many favourites, including a series of sketches for the cycle "Christ's Entry into Jerusalem" . "Skeletons looking at Chinoiserie" is funny , bizarre and accurate: Ensor' s flat, highly decorated surface mimics Vuillard's quiet interiors, but in an acidulated colour register, with a slumped skeleton replacing the younger artist' s tranquil domesticity. There are also a number of rarities from private collections: "Figure reveche" The Cross Woman , perhaps - is a tiny canvas of a woman, dowdy in black, hands folded concierge-like, with a red and gold trellis of wallpaper rising above her shoulder. What is superficially conventional becomes fierce and uncompromising as a result of miniaturization. The dress implodes into a black vortex, sucking the air out of the image. The greatest of Ensor's paintings are remarkable; many more can be hit or miss; but the drawings, of which the Musee d' Orsay has a fine collection, repay repeated viewings, displaying the more delicate facets of this unclassifiable artist.

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merican television and cinema are both keen on the confl ict between popular kids and outsider kids and the implied debate as to which of them is more cool; another central tenet of prime time is the idea that talent will out, that poverty does not matter - that we can do the show right here in the barn! Part of the strength of Ryan Murphy ' s hit show Glee broadcast in the United Kingdom on E4 - is that it makes no attempt to hide its roots or the extent to which it is a mixture of the rather cynical teen movies of the 1980s and the commercialized innocence of Disney's High School Movie series. A teacher at a rundown Ohio high school decides to relive his own glory days by taking over the moribund glee club - a group that performs close harmony and dance numbers based on a mixture of Broadway standards and current pop. He has to cope with his own emotional problems - his marriage is threatened by his dim yearning for a sweetnatured hygiene-obsessed colleague and by his wife's hysterical pregnancy, which becomes outright fraud when she arranges to buy the child of a pregnant cheerleader. The strident head of the over-funded cheer-leading programme is determined to break him as a threat to her own power and income. And then there are the actual adolescents in his charge - a crew whose improbably vast talents are exceeded only by their neuroses. What makes Glee interesting is its crea-

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Such, such are the joys ROZ KAVENEY GLEE E4

tor's sardonic and misanthropic approach to the characters - an attitude which, in Murphy ' s show about Miami plastic surgeons, NipfTuck, overheated and then backfired (the bleak became the merely hateful). For a protagonist, Will Schuester is remarkably morally ambiguous; he blackmails the football player Finn into joining Glee by planting drugs in his locker, and is deliberately careless of physical boundaries, with the result that he has to repel a crush on him by his female star, the egotistical Rachel, a Barbra Streisand in the making. The moral gap between Schuester and the cheerleading coach, Sue Sylvester - the excellent Jane Lynch - is as thin as the gap between their mutual tolerance and contempt, through which, naturally, an attraction crackles when Will teaches Sue swing dance for a date. The show is richly textured, because its direction allows us to see so much of what is

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going on in the background. It has been widely criticized on the web for concentrating on white protagonists and for reducing its Asian and African American characters and its gay and disabled characters, come to that - to a sort of backing-vocalist chorus. Yet the strength of that kind of performance, and in particular of Amber Riley who plays the aspiring soul diva Mercedes, lies often in the way it is allowed to steal scene after scene non-verbally. At least one major plot threadthe lesbian relationship between two cheerleaders planted in the group as spies - is conveyed entirely through glances in scenes ostensibly concerned with other matters. Nothing is said about it until a single line of admission in the thirteenth episode. Then there is the music - sometimes prompted by the emotional ferment of the plot, sometimes an exploration of the musical strengths of particular characters, and always driving, powerful, well arranged , less bland than its presence in such a format would suggest. (During 2009, the Glee cast had twentyfive singles in the Billboard Hot 100 - the most by any artist or group since the Beatles, with thirty-one, in 1964.) This is a show in which finding your voice is both a plot point and a metaphor - Will is reclaiming his life; the extravagant sissy Kurt is finding a way of coping with his schoolmates; and the overbearing Rachel is learning to play well with others. Perhaps predictably, but not tritely, Glee is all about creating an ensemble.

19

Martin Amis' s elegy to wasted opportunities

Up for grabs BHARAT TAN DON Martin Amis THE PREGNANT WIDOW 470pp. Cape. £18.99. 9780 224 07612 8 " W h a t can I tell you?" wrote Martin Amis in Experience (2000). " It was the Seventies: the joke decade .... It amazes me, now, that any of us managed to write a word of sense during the whole decade, considering that we were all evidently stupid enough to wear flares." It feels chronologically felicitous that a decade later, Amis should be casting his fictional eye back to 1970, to the personal and cultural rites of passage (or accidents of slippage) that went on to define the seventies and heyond. And if Amis was capahle of sounding curmudgeonly about the past then, his new, not wholly un-Amis-like protagonist, Keith Nearing, finds more than enough to complain about in the world that surrounds him: When he was young, people who were stupid, or crazy, were called stupid, or crazy_ But now

(now he was old) the stupid and crazy were given special names for what ailed them. And Keith wanted one. He was stupid and crazy too, and he wanted one - a special name for

what ailed him. A similar siege of contraries faces the writer of any historical novel: nostalgia can tidy the pain and inconveniences of the past into an unblemished object of longing, while fictional " Whig histories" shrink it into an unsuccessful but necessary rehearsal for the glorious present. Amis steers clear of both temptations: as befits a novel structured around a series of allusions to canonical nineteenth-century English fiction, The Pregnant Widow shares with George Eliot and Thomas Hardy a sense for how historical novels can also be historiographical ones. Past and present, 1970 and 2009, are repeated
y measured against one another, in order to answer the unspoken question that runs throughout Amis's narrative: just how did we get here from there? Unfortunately, there are points in The Pregnant Widow where the sound of the question threatens to drown out the conversations around it. Amis has been candid in interviews about

the novel's autobiographical genesis; but he has also stressed how the work grew beyond his original plans, and the reader is given such a mixture of details that correspond to Amis' s life with details that patently don't, that anyone trying to reduce the novel to a biographical cryptogram is going to look foolish. A more profitable way of reading the novel would be as a long critical dialogue with the works that Amis produced just after the period he represents - most notably The Rachel Papers (1973) and Dead Babies (1975), especially given the fact that both

"Ophelia" and "Firoza"; two paintings from the 1970s by Peter Blake; from Peter Blake: One man show by Marco Livingstone (240pp. Lund Humphries. £35. 9780853319801) Dead Babies and The Pregnant Widow feature characters called "Little Keith" . It is as if the early novels' scatological comedy of sexual misdemeanour were being interrogated by the voice of experience (and the voice of Experience). At the beginning of the novel, in the summer of 1970, Keith finds himself spending his university vacation in an Italian castle, mugging up on the history of the English novel while finding his affections, and his definitively male gaze, wandering between his on-off girlfriend Lily and the aristocratic Scheherazade ("Lily: 5'5" , 34-25-34. Scheherazade: 5'10", 37-23-33"); the former is ostensibly more street-smart about the impending sexual revolution , the latter a reformed do-gooder only beginning to become sexually aware in the new style. In a plot pitched somewhere between a Shakespeare comedy and an Iris Murdoch novel , Amis depicts his characters not only occasionally groping one another, but also groping awkwardly for a stable understanding of what is expected of them, at a time when values are in flux, but where the new rules are not yet set down ("New rules - and new and sinister ways of getting everything wrong. He acted like a boy, and so did Lily. But she was a girl, and could do more of it than he could"). Each character feels this mess of pressures and expectations differently, but since the story is focalized through Keith' s eyes and mind (if narrated slightly off to one side, by a mysterious character whose identity is only revealed much later), we are closer to his own anxieties as the story unfolds. In parti-

cular, he carries around the burden of what he would like to think of as chivalry, laden as he is with guilt over his treatment of Dilkash, an unworldly past girlfriend, and especially at his inability to save his younger sister Violet from a life of pathological promiscuity. Keith's confusion - as to whether he is a sexual revolutionary, or simply "poncing off the spirit of the times" - is exacerbated by everyone' s seemingly being unsure how to use the freedom that is now up for grabs, and unsure whether it really amounts to freedom anyway. In the extended absence of her boyfriend, who is on an evangelical hunting trip, Scheherazade experiments with her nascent self-confidence by encouraging the attentions of Adriano, a loaded Italian playboy who happens to be more "vertically challenged" than Keith: "Ah," he resumed. "I know how Tereus felt when he first spied Philomela. As a forest when a drought wind turns it into a firestorm. " It was not the voice of a small man, which was remarkable in its way. Because guess what. Adriano was four foot ten inches tall.

At the same time, Keith sees an opportunity to bend the inchoate rules of sexual engagement to his advantage in pursuit of Scheherazade, even (in an ill-judged impression of an eighteenth-century fictional rake) attempting to drug Lily in order to make a secret tryst with the new object of his affections. Into this thicket arrives Gloria Beautyman, slightly older and perhaps much wiser than the students. Gloria may be an object of amusement to the other women on account of her reported drunken sexual exploits, and her "farcical arse". ("It' s too

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big," said Lily. "Much too big." "I feel as if I'm seeing it for the first time," said Scheherazade. "And it's absolutely enormous, isn't it?" "Absolutely enormous.") Keith, however, rightly divines in Gloria something he can ' t quite read, can ' t quite put his finger on , until it suddenly puts its finger on him in the novel's central episode. It is in this light that the larger significance of the work's major allusions becomes clearer. Amis's title comes from Alexander Herzen's worrying thought, repeated more fully in the novel's epigraph ("what is frightening is that the departing world leaves behind it not an heir, but a pregnant widow. Between the death of the one and the birth of the other, much water will flow by, a long night of chaos and desolation will pass"). And as with the characters in Dead Babies, it is implied that Keith and his friends are as much victims as they are participants, the collateral damage of a socio-political shift that is still working itself out. Similarly, the parallels and contrasts Keith draws between his present and the fictional past return insistently to questions of sexual roles and power relations: " So Keith understood why the girls cried. But now the rules had been rewritten, and the generic proprieties no longer obtained. The question had to be asked again. What were heroines allowed to do?". It is apt that of all the nineteenthcentury novelists Keith co-opts, the most prominent is Jane Austen. At a simple level , she provides a field of debate, a means for Keith to map out the new territory of sexual mores with both Gloria and Lily: "Mm. Mm. 1 suppose you're in love with her now."

"Who?" "Emrna."

"Oh, definitely. She's a bit flash , Emma, but I fancy her, I admit. Clever, handsome, and rich. It' s a start."

An Austenian vein runs deeply throughout the novel , even surfacing at moments in the form of stylistic inflections (" his minimal handsomeness, his plausible tongue, his sincere enthusiasm, and a certain willed but invigorating coldness"). It may initially seem "wacky" to parallel the 1810s with the turn of the 1970s, but Austen was in her own way the documenter of the "pregnant widow", not so much a comedian of manners as the

comedian of a culture actively debating the very nature and existence of manners themselves; and as hinted at by Keith's misremembering the opening sentence of Emma , the limitations of his own critical reading also suggest the shapes around him that he can't fully discern ("Keith was good on the big picture. But the immediate situation ... this he often saw with unreliable eyes"). To depict protagonists who aren ' t wholly aware of the genre of story they are in has long been a staple of Amis ' s ironic art, and one of his notable inheritances from the

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FICTION

Nabokov of Despair and Pale Fire. For example, John Self in Money (1984) and Samson Young in London Fields (1989) are, despite their radically different attitudes towards books, united in their inability to "read"

their

own

circumstances.

The

Pregnant Widow, much the same length as those two large predecessors, makes its own use of the device, but to less significant effect. It is odd that a novel with so much to admire in it should fail to cohere adequately, but The Pregnant Widow feels more impressive in its moments than as a whole. This may have something to do with its long gestation, and its attendant change of focus , leaving it reading like a palimpsest of autobiographical novel, comedy of sexual misunderstanding, and the kind of pubby-clubby sociology familiar from Amis' s 1980s satires (compare some of the narratorial musings on the politics of dress and undress with the infamous "tight bright white underwear" sequence from London Fields). It is as though Amis has lived with the ideas so long that he can't let anything go - including some wincing thigh-slappers about which even Thomas Pynchon might hesitate ("Sexual intercourse had come a long way" ; "Spin this out, Scheherazade"). However, if the friction between the novel's layers doesn't always generate excitement, the conceit of layers does contribute to its greatest strengths. At the very beginning of the story, Keith in 2006 is described as entering "the great dig of London", and The Pregnant Widow works best as an archaeology of the ageing body, an analysis of what Helen Small has pointedly described as "the failure of a preferential version of the future in which one's own freedom was the overriding object". In this regard, the novel's multiple time frames give Amis the chance to measure Keith' s increasing physical frailty and stretchedness unsparingly against his younger self ("As you pass the half-century, the flesh, the coating on the person, begin to attenuate. And the world is full of blades and spikes"), raising the uncomfortable possibility that it may be worse for a man's ageing body to be parodically recognizable than changed utterly. Nor is this the only kind of wasting that sets Amis's imagination going: The Pregnant Widow stands alongside novels such as Ian McEwan ' s On Chesil Beach and Philip Roth's Indignation as part of a contemporary subgenre, the elegy to wasted opportunity. As in McEwan's novella, the last section of the story fast-forwards through the future lives and losses of some of the characters, a trajectory of unfulfilment and mis-fulfilment that is deliberately braced against the unsuspecting world of 1970, as if the sheer weight of narrative itself could somehow preserve the ghostly energy of what didn ' t go on to happen. "The revolution was a velvet revolution, but it wasn ' t bloodless; some came through, some more or less came through, and some went under" ; although much of The Pregnant Widow feels - like the period it describes pitched uncomfortably between two stools and styles, it also shows Amis growing into a new mode, as a chronicler of loss and uncomfortable metamorphosis. If his next novels continue in this vein, then this book's own awkward transition will have been worthwhile.

Fellow travellers s in all great detective stories we begin at the end. With a body and a mystery. A man lies dead in a flat, a bunch of unseen characters mass outside his door. Laura, Heather, Mike, Danny, the cast keeps growing and it is hard to tell who is who, or what they are up to. The police arrive, but still no one notices the huddled group: " We're used to that", says the narrator, "We' ve been used to that for a long

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time". It is worth trying to understand the narra-

tive strategy of Jon McGregor's new novel because his first-person plural narrator - the "we" telling this story - creates ambiguity of a kind rare in English fiction , still wedded to the order of realism. The reader is further thrown by the chaos of the opening scene where people and dogs tear up and down, scampering in and out of Robert, the dead man's, kitchen window. Only slowly do we understand: the unidentified voice belongs to a down-and-out, one of the shambolic, sometimes violent gang of addicts that gather in Robert' s grotty flat, a fixed point in their transient lives. Beyond his walls they are largely overlooked, shuffling between the day centre, chemist, waste ground, police station, flyover and high-rise squat. It is the world predicted by J. G. Ballard, told here, though, not as prophecy, but reportage. The narrator speaks a kind of national demotic, encompassing the sounds of the Scots, Irish, Liverpudlians ("Eh now then la") and Londoners, all the "cunts [that] have got no one" and have run away to the

KATE WEBB Ion McGregor EVEN THE DOGS 195pp. Bloomsbury. £ 12.99. 9780747599449

Midlands. The bald descriptions - "We see Laura; We see Danny; We peer round the corner" - emphasize that this account of Robert's life and death will be unadorned. It will not lie as Steve, the Falklands vet, believes "my country lied to me"; will not be euphemistic in the way of official jargon: "Let' s talk about your risk behaviour shall we?". The observation " We see", works also as instruction: as if to say, the script has already been written, leaving the characters abandoned, abused, schizophrenic, warbashed - little room for manoeuvre. "What else can we do", is a constant refrain.

The conceit that these are ghostly characters ("Get a good look at people's shoes while they' re stepping around you") lets the narrator and his cohorts accompany the body of their comrade, en masse but undetected, on its progress to the incinerator. Told in five parts - discovery, morgue, autopsy, cremation, inquest - the portrait that emerges, as one might expect of a tale from the gutter, is patchy and ironic: "Too many gaps, too many, fucking, known unknowns" . Yet it achieves an imaginative truth that the novel's many probing officials (keyworker, community warden, sergeant, doctor,

priest, coroner) are incapable of reaching. The narrator is a spectral reporter, flitting across time and place. In one passage we fall back to the beginning: Robert and his young wife bathing together in happy exhaustion after the first day in their new home. But even as he dries her pregnant belly, the rising steam seeps into the walls and the rot sets in, and McGregor creates an eerie vision of their council flat, moulding, yellowing, transforming "condensation into ice" . In a parallel montage we see a child's shoes in the hall , whisky under the sink, a fist mark on a wall, the wife stealing her daughter away in the night. It is a masterpiece of ellipsis, showing how narrative can glide through a life without the cluttering detail of realism. This process of decay - in Rober!'s flat, in his bloating corpse - is also answered in McGregor' s decomposing sentences. Most of the novel's questions are rhetorical and carry no question marks. Many sentences are fragments , the thought lost mid-stream, or abandoned because there is no need to complete it, no need for the ordering full stop. This broken-down language is a riposte to so many well-phrased platitudes about "our broken society". Indeed, in one hallucinatory passage a soldier's leg is blown off in Helmand as heroin is transported from Afghan fields to an English street where the amputated man now scuttles along, homeless and addicted. Even the Dogs has some of the avenging rage of Jez Butterworth's play Jerusalem, another recent exploration of outcast Britain, but it has an even greater sense of futility. The final sentence brandishes the threat of insurrection, but reminds us that addicts get up each day and "go on" only to score. "What else can we do, we fucking rise."

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Putting it nicely n his five previous books, Jonathan Buckley has quietly experimented with form and atmosphere. The word "quietly" is key: he is a writer who eschews clamorous effects and instead favours a style of storytelling that can seem careful , docile, even passive. He has written an epistolary novel and a state-of-the-nation epic, and his chosen locations have included 1820s Munich and post-war Greenwich, but the temper of his writing is restrained. In So He Takes the Dog (2006), he chose to make his narrator an exceptionally diffident detective - a decision that feels like a summary of his writing's calculated unobtrusiveness. The main character in Contact is Dominic Pattison, a languid middle-aged man who

I

owns a small chain of furniture shops. He is

a craftsman, and would sooner be creating elegant objects, but he has sunk into a cushion of material success and only occasionally raises himself from its muffling comfort to reflect on missed opportunities. Dominic's marriage, to the comfortingly camomile-scented Aileen, is secure, and he portrays his existence as one of "deep accord". This is disrupted when a young man arrives at his showroom on Tottenham Court Road, insisting on a meeting. Aggressive from the outset, this interloper will not take "No" for an answer. When Dominic grudg-

HENR Y HITCHINGS 10nathan Buckley CONTACT 256pp. Sort Of Books. Paperback, £9.99. 9780956003867

ingly agrees to meet him, the young man explains that his name is Sam; he presents himself as Dominic's son by a woman with whom he had a short, passionate dalliance early in his marriage. "All I need is five minutes", Sam insists. It quickly becomes apparent that he needs a good deal more. The bulk of the novel is taken up with the disclosure of Sam' s needs and with Dominic's awkward handling of them. Rven though Dominic does not believe Sam is his son, he is aware of his duplicitous past and of duplicity in the present, as he deceives his wife and behaves as though Sam' s intrusion is a dream from which at any moment he will wake. Our experience of Dominic' s discomfort is shaped by his tidy, businesslike mode of narration. He likes to itemize facts perhaps an innate characteristic, or, we may think, the strategy of a man intent on selfexculpation. Listing the items that sit on a shelf behind the television at home, he mentions a portable sundial " made in 1900 by the

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Ansonia Clock Company of Brooklyn" and found "amid a pile of junk at a market in Canterbury" . Details of this kind accumulate steadily, and the process is meticulous. These are the fragments with which Dominic shores up his life, half-aware of its impending ruin. The most powerful sequence in the novel occurs when Dominic and Sam are on their way back from the grave where Sam's mother lies. Sam succumbs to a fit of road rage and ends up clouting another driver and setting about his car with a wrench. What is striking here is the gulf between Sam's bluntly animal behaviour and Dominic's almost euphemistic registering of it, between Sam's blurted profanities and Dominic' s assessment: "the situation was in danger of deteriorating rapidly"; "a variety of consequences were running through my mind" . The blandness of Dominic ' s language, which seems at first a failure of imagination, is Buckley's knowing evocation of the middleclass habit of covering unpleasantness with the colourless lexis of middle management. The strength of Contact is its unfussily presented psychological acuity. Buckley's deceptively simple prose makes light of this. He has some of Nick Hornby's affection for the confessional narrative, and some of his aptitude for ventriloquizing a conventional, self-centred, male world-view. Like Hornby, he can seem infatuated with the textures of banality. But this is a thoughtful and unsettling novel, in which anxieties and insights slowly accrete.

FICTION Obert Winder's Jacobeans know their Shakespeare remarkably well. From Sir Waiter Raleigh, imprisoned in the Tower of London, to John Donne's daughter Con stance, to the scholar Richard Stanyhurst, they can all quote him, and the boys in the street know his face; King James I himself takes notice, albeit in a decidedly unpleasant way. The Final Act of Mr Shakespeare opens with that "blustering glutton" of a monarch attending a performance of Richard III at court, with the playwright, "a prisoner of his own fame" , sitting close by. A little later, after visiting Raleigh in the Tower, Shakespeare is roughed up by the henchmen of Sir Edward Coke, and ordered, at the King's command, to write a new play for him: Henry VIII. To that the writer has only one possible response: "Serpent 's teeth!". Perhaps Shakespeare, too, has come to believe in his own myth (he has been welcomed back to London " like a Roman emperor enjoying a Triumph"). Perhaps it stung that the King fell asleep during Richard III (making it odd that James should want more of the same). Whatever the reason, in a rebellious mood, Shakespeare decides that he will revenge himself on those who have disturbed his retirement. He will write a play about Henry VII instead, and explode the state's hagiographical platitudes about kingship as he goes. He will leave the writing of Henry VIII to another hand, John Fletcher. For those who have wondered how Shakespeare wrote his plays, Winder has a lively answer. Substantial portions of his novel are taken up with scenes in which the playwright and a band of actors, mainly drawn from the loyal upper ranks of his own company, the King's Men, improvise a blank-verse history play into existence. Robert Armin ad-libs some malapropisms for comic relief, while Shakespeare himself pro-

R

Prisoner of fame MICHAEL CAINES Robert Winder THE FINAL ACT OF MR SHAKESPEARE 436pp. Little, Brown. £ 16.99. 978 I 4087 0206 2

vides the chorus (William Caxton, a printer rather than a poet) with some wise comments on the turning of the globe and the fall of princes. Instead of a boy player, Con stance Donne joins in and proves marvellously adept in various female roles. The teenage girl is warmly accepted by the actors used to an all-male company. Later, Shakespeare will take away the working script and transform it into a finished masterpiece - but the basis of that masterpiece will be the extempore speeches of Richard Burbage, Edward Alleyn, Shakespeare and company. So that is how he did it - Shakespeare might have written Coriolanus in a cowshed, as he here acknowledges, and As You Like It during the hay harvest, but they were merely the solitary refinements of a devised theatre process. Even as fiction , this process lacks credibility, and the Henry VII sessions themselves unfortunately lack drama, although they are meant to be excitingly secret, and full of dangerous revelations about the Tudors secrets that Winder withholds, with increasing awkwardness, from the reader, until the play receives a performance that takes up some hundred pages of the novel. The story that surrounds the play-making is livelier. In the wake of the Gunpowder Plot,

William Terris as the King in Henry Irving's production of Henry VIII at the Lyceum Theatre in 1892 London lives in an age of terror - a time of soldiers in the streets, paranoid arrests and religious strife. Hired ruffians overturn the contents of Shakespeare's rented rooms, and he fears that somebody in the company has betrayed him. Winder' s novel comments obliquely on its own moment of composition, as well as the era it portrays, in well-chosen period detail. But in the end, it doesn't quite know what to do with itself. The reader is nudged and re-nudged not to take the historical claims of the book too seriously: the phrase "why am

21 I not surprised" crops up, and when the subject of possible plots for plays is raised, there are knowing suggestions of an aristocratic libertine dragged to hell by a statue ("I can ' t see it catching on"), and a blood-sucking, night-dwelling count ("I've never heard anything so stupid"). There is also plenty of educationally inflected exposition - research deployed in the name of bringing the reader up to speed about early seventeenth-century eating or reading habits - and many venerable old chestnuts about Shakespeare's biography here come home to roast. One has to hope, however, that Winder isn ' t being at all serious in suggesting that the Shakespeare who wants "to paint rainbows on the sky", and who profoundly observes of the action of his play that "People like swords" , is the same Shakespeare who inspires such widespread devotion - and quotation. Winder' s poet plunders his own life for his art, including the death of his son Hamnet, but is also said to treat his characters as puppets for whom he cares little. He apparently maintains a curious double standard in factual accuracy, particularly dates. If nothing else, The Final Act of Mr Shakespeare demonstrates the impossibility of imagining Shakespeare imagining, because the attempt, as demonstrated by Winder, will inevitably succumb to bathos. This Shakespeare has a mind that is nothing if not attractive to desperate similes. It is like a "hunting dog" one moment then, with its quarry in sight on the same page, more "like a cat" . "Like a sculptor circling a lump of marble", Shakespeare circles an idea; his thoughts settle " like a bird in a tree" . It must help that he has a memory " like flypaper" . The fictional Shakespeare is likened to many things, yet remains inert - a composite of biographical elements and Winder' s potentially powerful notion of setting him against the Jacobean state.

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dients of Gothic fiction from any age. What marks The Wilding as a study in imagining the seventeenth century, more than its period detail and costume trappings, is the attempt to set historical limits to an awakening KATHRYN SUTHERLAND consciousness. Jonathan Dymond is a protagonist that a reader with passing acquaintance with Bunyan and some of Defoe' s characters Maria McCann might find plausible. Compelled against THE WILDING his inclination to look below the surface, he 336pp. Faber. £ 12.99. discovers surprising things about the world 9780571251780 around him and about himself. He is confronted with the uncomfortable notion that he centre of a known world: secure in his is a mystery to himself. family , in his community, and in his skill in History provides a shaping force and a cider-making. The varieties and qualities of source of energy that bring Jonathan to life. apples, their beating into murc, building the Literally so: The Wilding is told in the inticider press, stacking murc and straw into a mate form of a first-person narrative. The cheese, working the screw: these are the lim- fragment of a destroyed letter, the bundle of its and mundane reference points of his real- papers onto which Joan writes her tale, ity. He trusts such detail and routine to Jonathan's own need to "set things down, so explain him to himself when, in truth, its that I could think", all emphasize the way narrow reference exposes his vulnerability, writing promotes inwardness; but also how it as we discover at the end of his tale. Then, brings secrets to the surface. Jonathan' s the cider press lies permanently idle, replaced arrangement of external events as a personal by a more anxious form of self-accounting: journey from innocence to experience offers his memorandum of the events of 1672. a conceit for the origins of the novel as a What Jonathan writes and what we read is seventeenth-century genre. a tale of forbidden love, of family abuse and The writing is spare and compelling, heedless cruelty, of prophetic dreams, the slashed through with vivid details of food, power of heredity, and the relationship clothing, and especially smell. Stylistic tics, between identity and storytelling - the ingre- from the dampened record of banal detail to

False fruits Wilding is a wild apple tree, "a bastard tree, sprung up without planting", as the narrator of Maria McCann's new novel explains it. According to the OED, the term ' s figurative application to a person dates from 1621. Knowledge of apples, from the processes of cider-making to the harsh awakening from innocence to experience that the first apple tree symbolizes, is woven into McCann ' s second novel, a morality tale set in seventeenth-century Somerset. Its historical ingredients are formed from family secrets and personal accounts of the lives of others, cut across hy puhlic incident. Like her acclaimed first novel, As Meat Loves Salt (2001), The Wilding draws on the events, or rather the aftershocks, of the English Civil War. The year is 1672, war is a horrible memory beginning to fade, when into the complacent life of Jonathan Dymond, a young cider-maker, the past breaks in the shape of a mysterious request from his dying uncle. Unravelling the mystery, Jonathan is drawn into a dark underworld of violent passions, and into the lives of two vagrants, Joan and her daughter Tamar. As the novel opens, Jonathan exists at the

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the occasional note of melodrama, are all convincingly attributable to its taciturn narrator. A tale about the false appearance of things, it is nevertheless written in terms of minimal, literal reportage and reluctant inspection. In these circumstances, narrative proceeds by allegory, a daring device that draws attention to its own fictional clumsiness. The "wrinkle in the face of Mother Nature" that conceals the filthy cave where Joan and Tamar live, is both a precise underground location and a pointer to a more general social disease. "Our outward show was respectable and corrupt, like the times", is Jonathan ' s verdict. McCann has written a novel that is both satisfying and disquieting: a well-crafted plot, with twists and turns, it proceeds with a seeming authorial detachment. From the

beginning a gap opens between reader and narrator; we anticipate the story's revelations many pages before he stumbles on them. In retrospect, this critical distance contains the authorial voice. In retrospect, too, the thin statements of characters on one another' s behaviour become complex markers in a tale of deceits, prejudices and inconsistencies that overwhelm good and bad alike. All finally are vulnerable, to events and one another, in this clever book that weighs characters and actions only apparently dispassionately.

POETRY

22 hen a poet's best poems are as brief and memorable as those of Samuel Menashe, it is tempting to make a review just by explicating representative work. Here is "'Beachhead", entire: "The tide ebbs / From a helmet / Wet sand embeds" . Menashe, according to his own short preface, was "marked by death for life

W

To see, to know STEPHEN BURT Samuel Menashe

when 1 was nineteen", when he became " a

survivor of an infantry company" in the Second World War. "Beachhead" remembers, with grisly elegance, one who did not survive: the dead soldier's helmet of sand is a "beach head" indeed, "well met" (in a parody of chivalry) hours or decades after combat, with sand as a substitute grave, a final "bed". Here is another, happier poem, "Just Now": With my head down Bent to this pen

Which is my plow I did not see That little cloud Above the fieldUnfurrowed brow,

You are its yield. Like much of Menashe (like much of Emily Dickinson) it sounds at once self-conscious and naive: like much of Menashe's work (like much of Dickinson's) it is a religious poem disguised as a poem about writing, or else vice versa, though Menashe (unlike Dickinson) favours faith over doubt. The poet's Georgic labours have prepared him for the "little" epiphany from the air, for the "yield" (harvest) that is also a "yield" (relaxation, permission), as the poet looks up from his conscious semantic arrangements in order to let the numinous into his soul. These poems have attracted British admirers since the 1960s, when Kathleen Raine arranged for their publication, but only in this decade has the American establishment taken note. (This volume adds ten new poems to the selection published by the Library of America in 2005; that book made Menashe the first living author to join the Library's list.) Menashe' s champions - among them Christopher Ricks (who contributes an introduction to this volume) and Donald Davie (excepts from whose essay reappear here) have concentrated on his concentration,

NEW AND SELECTED POEMS Edited by Christopher Ricks 240pp. Bloodaxe. £12. 978 I 85224 840 6 and rightly so. There are other mystics in American poetry, other poets of gnomic suggestion, other memorialists, and others who do well with rhyme, but there is no poet after Dickinson who brings all those talents together as securely as Menashe. To describe the poems' uncommon limits - their raptness, their brevity, their indifference to the merely transitory - is just to say that they have the defects of their qualities: of contemplated proverbs, of religious inscription , of notated landscapes, set down with great skill. "I see a kind of unity in my life", Menashe tells Pamela Robertson-Pearce in her film Life Is Immense, "where other people see cleavages" in their own: indeed the life, and the poems, have not changed much over time. (The film, on DVD, comes with the book.) Menashe, now in his eighties, began writing poetry in post-war Paris; moved home to New York City; and simply continued, in an apparently solitary urban life, though one punctuated by transatlantic journeys. To judge by style alone, in Menashe's poems , it might as well be 1959, not 2009: the brevity, the reliance on common words, the intricate internal rhymes and euphonies, the gravity, the prevalent two- to four-beat lines, remain.

That is not to say that this volume is all of a piece. The first third comprises, by and large, poems of mourning and commemoration, often in memory of Menashe's mother; later pages bring more topics to the same techniques , while the last poems examine his own old age. (Poems appear in chronological order, though no dates or prior collections are cited.) Early elegies alternate an almost

marmoreal calm with twig-in-the-wind helplessness. "Root of my soul/Split the stone / That holds you - / Be overthrown / Tomb I own", Menashe says at his mother's grave. There Menashe presents himself as any grieving son, any mortal; afterwards, he can cast himself as a visionary explorer, discovering a phenomenal world beyond time: 1 left my seed in a grove so deep The sun does not reach through the trees

Now I am wed to the wood and lord of all leaves

And 1 can give the green blessing to whom 1 please Such testimonies of ecstasy come with sad undertones: here, the poet has become the Green Man, the independent prophet, and glories in the role, only because his "seed" has made no human child. "My charmed life / Harms no one - / No wife, no son", an earlier poem concludes. Menashe seems alone in the world in other ways, too. His poems can seem to have no tone at all: sometimes there is no imagined person to whom he speaks, not even himself, and no persona who does the speaking, only words arranged as if on an altar. No wonder critics have emphasized (to quote Davie) Menashe's "liturgical or devotional intent", his idiosyncratic but recognizably Jewish religious background and goals: "The neighboring hill / Where lambs graze / Lies ample and still / In its own haze" ("Haze" is Menashe' s milder version of the Psalmist's "shadow of death"). Like Dickinson, Menashe makes hymns' common metre his own by introducing irregularities in rhythm, in syntax , in rhyme; his choice of forms and his piety together make the poems resemble (or just make them into) belated Jewish entries in the centuries-long tradition of metrical Psalms. "Hallelujah" adapts a sentence from Psalm 149: "Let them sing for joy upon their beds"; Rejoice as you please Your Maker who made

This day while you slept, Who gives grace and ease,

Whose promise is kept. "As" means "while," but also "inasmuch as": no word is wasted, and no word means only one thing. Menashe has said, and Ricks agrees, that his influences are Blake's shorter poems and the Psalms: he can also sound like the Book of Proverbs - " What stumps compress / No axe can kill". His longest poem, not counting sequences and concrete poems, lasts sixteen lines; his shortest (Ricks calls it a "minimalist' s maxim") reads "A pot poured out / Fulfills its spout". Fulfilled: there is special Providence even there, and the words themselves seem to conform to predestined shape. If you think that lyric poetry ought to address, as tersely as it can, eternal veri ties, to present souls almost without particularities, to get all it can from just a few words at a time, you may find in these poems an essence of lyric - though they do not feel lyrical as much as they feel inscriptional, like couplets on gravestones. When they are songlike they are intently devotional, seeking clues to an immanent, aniconic God: "Whatever he saw / Receding from sight / In the sky's afterglow / Was what he wanted / To see, to know". "He" is the poet, the seeker, not the God sought: a seeker whose quest, renewed daily, will last as long as his life. If you read a lot of Menashe' s poems, one after another, you may find something frustrating , something limiting, in his art: something impervious to new experience, unchangingly rapt, or myopic. You might miss (what other miniaturists, from Robert Herrick to Lorine Niedecker and Robert Creeley, offer) the variety in other people's lives, the variety in buildings or in non-human nature, or else the variety in any poet whose moods and interests change over time. It is a relief - as in "The Reservoir" or "The Sandpiper" - to see Menashe devote his sound effects not to eternal questions, but to sites on this Earth. Menashe's poems have integrity, they reward patient reading, and they record an unmistakable sensibility, but they do not present a personality - indeed, their sometime aspiration to wisdom literature runs counter to any such attempt; it remains uncommonly hard to say, or hard to imagine, what it is like to be him.

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s one might expect from a writer who is a prizewinning novelist as well as a poet, Continental Shelf, Fred D' Aguiar's first full-length collection for eleven years, has a powerful narrative structure. It is built around a long elegiac exploration of the campus massacre, in 2007 , of thirty-two students and staff at Virginia Tech University where he teaches , but this is enclosed by two complementary outer movements in which he attempts to deal with this catastrophic dislocation by re-imagining and re-centring his world. As the collection's dedicatee, the Guyanese writer Wilson Harris, has said, " Unless one has the past in the present, one can't understand oneself'. The opening section, "Local Colour", is just such an attempt to relocate the past in the present but, as the title ambiguously suggests, it is a past that has been forever coloured by what d' Aguiar has experienced, no longer merely an imaginative refuge but a place of safety, a womb to which he craves return. He wants to go back to a time "when

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Under the sea ANDREW McCULLOCH Fred D' Aguiar CONTINENTAL SHELF 131 pp. Careane!. £9.95. 978 I 84777 043 I my grandparents , mere tadpoles / swished around in their parents as nothing more than wishes" while in "Tributary" he seems to mime the moment of conception itself when he almost swallows a tadpole while drinking water from a pool. These metaphors come more clearly into focus in "Elegies" where he has become so protective of his children he would "Rewind the clock until they were unmade / And separated in our separate bodies", happy that "all our children stayed in our head". The familiar political resonance

of origins is sharpened, here, into something far more acutely and personally urgent. The personal and the political are indistinguishable in this collection; amniotic fluid mixes with the seas between continents crossed in a more remote past by more distant ancestors. "Guyana" means "land of waters"

which, in D' Aguiar's below-sea-Ievel Georgetown, is geographically threatening as well as politically significant. In "Dara Singh", a poem about a visit to Guyana by the Punjabi Indian wrestler and film actor, he conflates the folk hero's defence of Guyanese identity with the town's "crumbling seawall" that holds off, for the moment, the tides that threaten to overwhelm him. But nothing can stop the events described in "Elegies" from washing the poet out to sea, leaving him adrift and struggling to recover his bearings. As the collection moves from dream to night-

TLS FEBRUARY 5 2010

mare, the fluidity of free verse, in which meanings unwind at a leisurely pace, gives way to a sequence of irregular sonnets, a collage of snapshots through which D' Aguiar tries desperately to order his thoughts. Poetic form , however, seems either inappropriate or unequal to the task of dealing with his demons. Artistic detachment sometimes feels like callousness - "Calling what he does art, while seemingly / Lacking a heart" - and in other lights looks more like madness - " What game are we in , psychopathology / Of the everyday, or serving the muse?" - while elsewhere he feels his grief being diverted into anger at political injustice - "Oh polemic . please let me be for one stanza" . In the end, though, art's power to heal works in the same way as the narrative shape of this collection, not through linear resolution but incrementally, like "a trowel smoothing concrete / Adding to those layers and smoothing / A thicker and thicker wall ... that's how / The lyric builds meaning in a deepening circle".

23

POETRY IN BRIEF John Hartley Williams CAFE DES ARTISTES 69pp. Cape. Paperback, £ 10. 978 0 224 08785 8

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"language I that lights a hubbub and a wineglass" - an image in "The Reader", a poem from John Hartley Williams's new collection, Cafe des Artistes - is not a bad description of Hartley Williams's own poetry. There's plenty of wine here - including a new translation of Rimbaud's "Bateau Ivre" - and a thrilling hubbub, of humour, bizarre incident, and verbal energy. In his plethora of zany scenarios, in his verbal fecundity , and in his acrobatic, surreal imagination, Hartley Williams is a kind of maximalist. There are poems about a polar bear devouring a cottage at the Wordsworth Trust; about an ageing Lady of the Lake who arrives in an electric wheelchair at her penniless former lover's house, where they "camp here on an edge beside a hole inside a pocket" ; about cooking up a commemorative stew for a deceased father ("Throttle the gas. Arrest those ladle-Ioopings. I Can't have that look of I told you so I floating there like Mrs Beeton's conscience ... ". There are various horn ages, to Ian Hamilton Finlay, Matthew Sweeney, Malcolm Lowry, as well as versions of Rimbaud and Sextus Propertius (superbly done). A Mitteleuropean spirit even hovers in the margins. " Wait for Daylight, that clever detective, to find your footprints in a flowerbed, reversed." The logic is tantalizing, palpable, yet just out of reach. There's also humour, though a poem such as " Your Life as an Automobile" is not only a splendid comic performance but also furtively tragic. Indeed, as one reads deeper, it becomes apparent that the centrifugal tendency of the multifarious styles and subjectmatter is deceptive: there' s an equally powerful centripetal force. The various surreal scenarios are all the spokes of a wheel whose hub is a stance on life, an urgent corrective to thoughtlessness and blindness. The bravura is a mask. Behind it there is a despair, the panic of loss, which in spite of the maximalism links Hartley Williams with, if anyone, Beckett. Many of the poems invite symbolic interpretation, but one accepts the invitation at one's peril. They tend to subvert symbolism into absurdism, then the absurdism is undercut by the plausibility of the speaking voice. "The Blind Dog" is a poem about the longterm guests of a surreal "Hotel Egalitarian" , where a bling dog "stops to pee at the open doors I of forgotten rooms that once held statesmen" : is the hotel political symbol , or absurd confabulation? It hardly matters; it is emblematic, like the Cafe des Artistes in the title poem, of the collection as a whole: brilliantly evoked, and weirdly convincing. HENRY SHUKMAN

Carrie Etter THE TETHERS 63pp. Seren. Paperback, £7.99. 978 I 85411 492 I

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igurative, metaphysical , rich in classical allusion, the poems in Carrie Etter' s distinctive debut collection (many of which first appeared in the TLS) are highly lyrical, but unlike some of her contemporaries, she avoids the anecdotal in favour of the abstract,

often adopting philosophical modes of inquiry. The "tethers" of the title are those we forge between our minds and physical matter, particularly the body: from the heart in "Biopsy" "standing aside like a child at the zoo", to Fanny Brawne' s engagement ring from Keats which she wore until her death; "a promise I unfulfilled" figured as "the past's persisting bruise" . But the inventive imagemaking that suffuses Etter's writing is nonetheless accompanied by a perceptive clarity of thought, threaded through a concise, fluid style capable of addressing a range of subjects while still sounding wholly individual. The opening poem, "Citizenship", exemplifies the diverse qualities of Etter' s work. Its surface play and humour, describing rural entertainments including "the cheese festival" and "an open air concert I by the village's has-been rockers", develop into a subtle meditation on art and contemporary society: "the man at his desk, giving up on Dostoevsky, I turning to plan the next amusement". Alongside skilful shifts in register (a defining feature of The Tethers is its mix of the poetic with everyday idiom), "Citizenship" also reveals Etter's descriptive gifts and a welcome strategy of suggestion. This is employed to great effect in "Fear of Lightning", a consideration of the spiritual and secular in terms of superstition, while "The Review" unpicks the frustrations and uncertainties of the literary life almost tragicomically in its overview of a revered literary journal. Etter' s real talent, however, lies in her ability to immerse the reader in - rather than merely convey - the sensory experience of a poem. This is perhaps best achieved in "The Sty", a dizzying portrayal of the body's vagaries, but also in "The Daughters of Prospero", where a girl placing paper boats on to a brook becomes a metaphor for creativity. In occasional moments of indulgence, Etter too "sets her boats on a fatal course". But overall , The Tethers marks the arrival of an original talent, and is surely one of the most ambitious and accomplished first collections of recent years. Lorraine Mariner FURNITURE 44pp. Picador. Paperback, £8.99. 978 0 330 458 25 2

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he title poem of Lorraine Mariner's debut volume tells the story of two young women in their twenties: one who has "acquired" a family, home and furniture , the other "who'd only ever known the fullyfurnished , I the three white goods". As both a metaphor for unrealized, misplaced aspirations and an emblem of modern life' s clutter, furniture in the broadest sense is ubiquitous in Mariner's poems. Many actually address such objects, intent on uncovering the social significance they embody , as in the complex staffroom politics of "Chair", or the collapsed wardrobe of "There is nothing wrong with my sister". Elsewhere, the cultural detritus of Littlewoods catalogues, CDs, predictive texts and London Lite newspapers grows irritatingly to litter the book with their almost programmatic contemporaneity, though frustration is usually offset by Mariner's natural , charming and engagingly chatty free verse. The best poems in Furniture tend to be the longest, affording Mariner room to unpick

everyday subject matter in often surreal narratives. In its study of human infidelity, "Feathers" sustains an impressive (if unlikely) extended metaphor based on birding, while "My beast" brings children ' s fairytale and adult reality into literal collision, the poet imagining her father' s " Volvo reversing into a beast' s carriage" while she "end[sl up at the castle as compensation". "Assertiveness role play" treads a similar line between contemplative seriousness and wry comedy. "Thursday" is an accomplished and original perspective on terrorism, detailing in a lengthy stream of consciousness the poet' s journey to work on the morning of the 2005 London bombings. It is in the short, first-person lyrics which dominate the collection that the shortcomings of Mariner' s verse appear. Too many of her poems fail to develop their slight subjects: in " Shop names", a brief discussion of retail puns yields nothing beyond mild amusement; "My wedding" sacrifices a more provocative engagement with the personal implications of our digital era to throwaway, crowd-pleasing effects. At its best, Mariner's work is surefooted , energetic, and often strikes an original tone; at worst, it exhibits prosiness and chick-lit triviality. But the strongest poems foremost among them the fully realized character study of "In my worst moments" successfully combine a witty light touch with intelligent reflection. BEN WILKINSON

Will Alexander THE SRI LANKA LOXODROME 117pp. New Directions. £8 .99 (US, $14.95). 9780811218290

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outh Central Los Angeles might be an unusual place of origin for a cosmic lexicographer, but Will Alexander is an unusual poet who likes unusual words, as might be clear from the title of this, his most recent book. To call these poems post-imperial is to do them an injustice; however, the poetic perversion of the language of empiricism (and empire), along with the exotic settings, not to mention the dedication to the recently deceased Aime Cesaire, is almost a recipe for a contemporary anthology of the genre. But it becomes clear that Alexander first and foremost enjoys words, letting most of his occupy a line to themselves, and furthermore, that he leans towards words from Latin: always multisyllabic, usually rare. In The Sri Lanka Loxodrome we find a wide range of Latinate terms, some appropriated from astronomy, others from geography, and many from field taxonomy. Cesaire' s influence can be seen in the fusion of various academic fields in Alexander's poetry. Some might also assume he shares, to use Alexander's own phrase, a "proto-indoctrination" with the master from Martinique; however, little overt political content can be found here. Whether or not this poetry creates stirrings of the heart seems irrelevant, for the poet's ingenuity is worth appreciating. In "The Bedouin Ark", Alexander juxtaposes typographically striking words in one stanza' s line-ends: Hbenezene", "phylum" and "typhoon". The title poem, a sort of global epic of the self, reads " & here I am by turns I nacreous I ferric I intangible". Luckily, there is a glossary. Stumpers like "Globigerina" and " skioptic response" are defined respectively as "Shells offalling radi-

TLS FEBRUARY 5 2010

olarians. Abundant. Make up large amount of sedimentary limestones" and "Response to a primitive type of vision". But for others like "blood eidolics" and "borosilicate glass" you must use your own dictionary. It should be mentioned that after a while, such phrases begin to create their own idiolect of staccato sound and visual presence. Some of this is reminiscent of the Fluxus movement of the 1960s. But, given Alexander' s lexicographical flair and our own period's very different literary gusto (in which brief is best), these poems look fresh and alien, if not intimidating. JESSE TANGEN-MILLS

Chana Bloch BLOOD HONEY 85pp. Aulumn Hill House Press. Paperback, $14.95. 978 I 932870 33 6

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hana Bloch' s poems are earthy, sceptical and grave, even as they prompt the reader, brought up short by the aptness of a phrase, to laugh aloud. Hers the "alliance of levity and seriousness (by which the seriousness is intensified)", to cite T. S. Eliot (on Marvell). Blood Honey, Bloch's fourth collection, comes eleven years after Mrs Dumpty, her tale of a marriage that broke, and like the earlier book, casts its warm and dubious eye over the lives and times offriends and family , including a cortege of ancestors bewailing the disasters of history: "In their hut on the Dniester I six children scraped the daily potatoes from a single plate; I each one held a bare spoon. 11. . I'm the daughter of your second son.1I have the spoons". Like Yehuda Amichai (whom Bloch has translated), Bloch favours a diction at once plain and pithy. "Brothers", which begins as a witch story, ends with an uncomfortable truth from the Brothers Grimm and yesterday' s front page: "I chased them screeching down the hall , I I catch you, I eat you! I ... what stopped me I even as I lifted my hand? I The stricken voice that cried: Eat him! / Eat my brother". The knotty relations between the sexes are a recurring motif, from the girl's glance askance at her mother' s "glittery blue" eyelids to female lust, "how it streaks from seeing to eating .... I am setting out now, now I to devour you". Nor is the post-coital Bloch a romantic: "A man , after sex I has that squishy thing ... I like a Claes Oldenburg vinyl drainpipe" . In Chana Bloch's compressed work, a great deal goes on between the lines, including shifts in tonality as the seemingly lighthearted gives way to something much darker; still , its appetite for life is more than equal to the tragic underside of both the personal and the historical. BEVERLEY BIE BRAHIC

THE EDWn\" MELLEl'i PRESS A Reputation History of John Dee, The Life of an Elizabethan Intellectual Robert Barone 39.95 from publisher only UK 01570423356 I US 716-754-2788

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CLASSICS

24 ublic speaking was the lifeblood of ancient politics. A substitute for the organized thuggery that otherwise ruled the streets, oratory - together with its pedagogical counterpart rhetoric - allowed for (relatively) non-violent resolution of internal conflicts and for the inclusion of multiple viewpoints in deliberation over policy. Nietzsche, whose early writings include extensive notes on classical rhetoric, got it right when he observed that rhetoric requires both speakers and listeners "to tolerate the most unusual opinions and points of view, and even to take a certain pleasure in their counterplay". The long and distinguished history of rhetoric makes the recurrent attacks on it much more puzzling. Why would one not want political leaders to be "good men, skilled at speaking" (or good women, for that matter), as Cato the Elder described the orator? Ifrhetoric creates only the skill, not the goodness, of course it cannot stand alone as a mode of education - but that is something no principled proponent of rhetoric has ever really denied. Perhaps the best that can be said is that repudiation of rhetoric tends to coincide with insecurity about one' s own position. It was a Roman senate nervous about newcorners ' potential prowess in debate that shut down the schools of rhetoric for a brief period in the 90s BC. Early church fathers, following the lead of their Platonist predecessors, drastically limited the scope of rhetoric by positing an unquestionable source of truth beyond the give and take of human deliberation. Nevertheless, it is in the context of modern nationstates that rhetoric finds both its strongest defenders and its most vigorous opponents the latter often providing cover for elites reluctant to defend their privileges via argument. Then, too, as the political philosopher Giulia Sissa observes, democracies have always been inclined to frame their foreign

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Speech notes THOMAS HABINEK James D. Williams, editor AN INTRODUCTION TO CLASSICAL RHETORIC Essential readings

544pp. Wiley-Blackwell. Paperback, £24.99. 9781405158619

Erik Gunderson, editor THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO ANCIENT RHETORIC 355pp. Cambridge University Press. £50 (US $90); paperback, £ 18.99 (US $34.99). 9780521 860543

relations in terms of struggles between absolute good and absolute evil, affording little room for unusual opinions or viewpoints. Although rhetoric alone does not a progressive make, in the United States, at least, the teaching of rhetoric tends to have a moderately liberal , or at least non-elitist, connotation. Rhetoric is most often taught not by classical scholars but by professors or lecturers in fields like communications, and more often than not at less prestigious institutions. A striking feature of the two collections under review - one edited by a distinguished Latinist, the other by a former director of a Writing Program - is the lack of communication between them, which seems characteristic of a professional division of labour more generally. Only one of the classicist contributors to The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Rhetoric (edited by Erik Gunderson) even acknowledges the possibility of bringing the principles of classical rhetoric to bear in the

classroom, while James D. Williams, the editor of An Introduction to Classical Rhetoric, gives no evidence of first-hand familiarity with the relevant Latin and Greek texts. This missed opportunity for dialogue and mutual improvement works to the detriment of both volumes. Williams ' s Introduction is riddled with errors and packed with interpretations that are often embarrassing when not merely superfluous. As a collection of old (in other words inexpensive) translations of key texts, the volume is serviceable, albeit inclined more to theory than practice. Readers should be warned that page after page of the editorial material contains misprints or statements that are wrong, disputed or inconsistent with other parts of the book. The Cambridge Companion is a much more responsible volume. It nicely meets the challenge of conveying the present state of scholarship, including reasonable differences in emphasis, approach and judgement. Not limited to the technical content of ancient rhetorical training, the essays consider the political, ethical and aesthetic dimensions of formalized public speaking and the education that accompanied it. Contributions range chronologically from an excellent discussion of selfaware speakers in Homer to a disappointingly partial account of the recovery of classical rhetoric in early modern Europe. There are stand-out treatments of Roman rhetorical education and practice and a valuable essay on the role of classical pagan rhetoric in the early days of the Jesus movement. The Companion's editor seems to have selected contributors in response to the two academic trends that have led to the ongoing revival of scholarly research on classical

rhetoric. The first is the not-yet-exhausted "linguistic turn" in the humanities, namely, the tendency to focus on the instability of all human communication and the impossibility of a perfect fit between utterance and referent. The other is the opening of historians and classicists to the whole world of bodily practices, performance and materiality - in other words, to all the aspects of historical experience that cannot be reduced to documents. Rhetoric and oratory are particularly fruitful areas for the latter sort of investigation in that they consist of language in action. The orator orchestrates a performance to cast out enemies of the state or suppress conflict between factions. The teacher of rhetoric disciplines the bodies as well as the minds of his charges. Rhetoric structures argumentation in seemingly non-rhetorical venues, such as history writing, scientific dispute or erotic seduction. Although the Cambridge Companion does not cover such material quite so fully as one might have hoped, it does a good job of pointing the reader in the right directions. What it omits is reflection on the contemporary potential of classical rhetoric or the risks and advantages of alternative approaches to it. What would it mean to train the young in an art form that encourages them to tolerate, even enjoy, the most unusual opinions - and to understand the means of persuasion being directed towards them? What can be salvaged of a historically specific set of practices, so well understood by the classicist, for the use of the teachers of communications who are pressed to fashion if not "good men" , then at least responsible citizens, skilled at speaking? This otherwise excellent volume's silence on such matters suggests that there is still work to be done in getting classical scholars and modern rhetoricians to speak to each other, not to mention the larger audience that might benefit from hearing both.

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Monarch of medicine orn under a star from the East, a lightning scar on his forehead, King Mithradates was destined to do great things. He may not have brought about the prophesied destruction of Rome that some (including Mithradates himself) thought was his birthright, but this ruler of the Black Sea kingdom of Pontus, repeatedly challenged the power of the Roman republic - until he was finally defeated in 63 BC by Pompey the Great. Known in antiquity for his interest in drugs, Mithradates regularly took them himself both for therapeutic purposes and to increase his resistance to toxins. It is ironically appropriate that, when he had been betrayed and taken captive by his own son, Mithradates tried to commit suicide by taking poison in order to avoid becoming the prize exhibit at Pompey's Triumph in Rome. When the drug failed (for the long-term consumption of antidotes had worked), he is said to have been stabbed to death, either by his faithful servant, or by his son ' s soldiers. Adrienne Mayor' s The Poison King is the story of a man who built an empire and lost it again, who, in his struggles against Rome, was dangerous, ruthless and determined. It provides a thrilling account of Mithradates, Rome's

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LYNETTE MITCHELL Adrienne Mayor THE POISON KING The life and legend of Mithradates: Rome's deadliest enemy

472pp. Princeton University Press. $29.95; distributed in the UK by Wiley. £20.95. 9780691126838

most constant enemy during the nearly sixty years of his reign. Because there is little information from Roman sources, and no literary sources from

Pontus, to make the story easy to reconstruct Mayor tries to fill in the gaps, suggesting what " might have been" when the evidence for what Mithradates did, and what he suffered, is either lacking or obscure. She is eager to locate her book within the academic historiography on the king and has a good grasp of the modern bibliography, but her readiness to supplement the narrative with invention means that the boundaries between biography and novel, research and romance, are put under considerable pressure. She is particularly fanciful in the final chapter

where she suggests that Mithradates was not betrayed by his son, as numerous ancient sources state, but that he survived and escaped to Scythia with his Amazonian lover. It is not only the supplements which are disconcerting. Mayor knows, and is prepared to be critical of, the ancient sources on Mithradates, but she is disappointingly credulous or imprecise over some important background issues. She gives the impression, for example, that all Greece is democratic (and sometimes treats Athens as synonymous with Greece), and that Xenophon's semi-fictional Cyropaedia is an accurate account of the Persian king Cyrus. Mayor also reads Mithradates in modern terms, attempting to assess his psychotic tendencies on the basis of modern criteria. Yet, while Mayor's Mithradates is swashbuckling, he does not have the rich exoticism which the historical Mithradates must have had. Mayor does not acknowledge the swirling jealousies and power games of a polygamous court, and notes - but misses the opportunity to develop - Mithradates' dual heritage of Persia and Greece, through Cyrus and Alexander. For the first half of the book, the insistence

TLS FEBRUARY 5 2010

on Mithridates' interests in poison seems simply gratuitous, as Mayor waits until Chapter Eleven before explaining how he experimented with pharmaka and toxins. Yet, apart from his reported ability to withstand poison, which he would use to show off his superhuman strength, it is difficult to pin Mithradates ' experiments to particular historical moments - although Mayor enjoys finding occasions when he might have used them. She is also particularly interested in the recipe for his "Mithradatium", a cure for all poisons. The fact that the recipe is lost does not prevent her from speculating on what might have been included. At other times, however, the genres of biography and novel overlap more constructively. At the end of the story, when events seem to have taken the worst course, and

Mithradates and his close ally, Tigranes the king of Armenia, have lost all , Mithradates finds his friend lying beside the road and persuades him to go on and to defy Rome another day. Mayor here evokes vividly the image of Mithradates and his weeping friend , opening up the humanity of the struggles for survival (as well as for power) in ancient Pontus. Though not a book for the academic historian (and sometimes selling short the general reader), at its best The Poison King is at least a dramatic account of a very determined, and largely forgotten , enemy of Rome.

25

AMERICAN HISTORY

Help for heroes n 1924, the us Congress passed the Adjusted Compensation Act, which agreed to pay veterans a bonus for their war service. The justification was that they had received paltry pay while domestic industry boomed. As Stephen R. Ortiz puts it, "between 1917 and 1919 more than 1,000 new members joined the 'millionaires club' while doughboys earned less than a dollar a day in the trenches". There was a caveat though - the compensation would not come until 1945. Disgruntled veterans, arguing that many of their number would be dead by then, christened the deal a "tombstone bonus". With the onset of the Great Depression, their clamour for early redemption of the adjusted compensation certificates increased too. Ortiz argues that previous accounts of the New Deal have underestimated the consequent political role of veterans of the First World War in the United States in the 1930s. The Bonus March of 1932 - when an army of veterans travelled to Washington to petition Herbert Hoover's administration for early payment of the bonus - traditionally features in New Deal narratives among the Republican President's many maladroit responses to the economic crisis. Ortiz argues that the events of that summer - when Hoover allowed an overzealous General Douglas MacArthur to rout

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SIMON AKAM Stephen R. Ortiz BEYOND THE BONUS MARCH AND GI BILL How veteran politics shaped the New Deal era 264pp. New York University Press. $47; distributed in the UK by Eurospan. £33. 9780814762134

the "Bonus Expeditionary Force" with tanks, cavalry and tear gas, creating public outragewere just one aspect of active and long-lasting veteran political engagement. Moving beyond another well-documented example of activism by former servicemen the fury when Roosevelt's Economy Act cut millions of dollars from their benefits in 1933 - Ortiz traces the fortunes of the two major US veterans' organizations, the first the patrician American Legion, founded in Paris in 1919, the second the older, smaller and scrappier Veterans of Foreign Wars. He argues that the VFW ' s willingness to campaign vigorously for early bonus repayment - at which the Legion initially baulked - propelled it from being a moribund niche group to the status of a major political player. "The VFW had asserted itself as an important

national political actor by staking an unshakeable claim to the Bonus issue" , he writes, although membership numbers show that the American Legion remained a much larger organization. In Ortiz' s reading, the bonus dispute placed veterans in an unlikely political coalition that was potent enough to threaten the Roosevelt administration. This opportunistic alliance included Huey Long, the outspoken Louisiana senator, although there were inevitable strains in an alliance between veteransnotably susceptible to notions of loyalty and patriotism - and Long, the ebullient Southern " Kingfish" who once quipped that he had not fought in the First World War because he "was not mad at anyone over there" . A striking element ofOrtiz's narrative is the way that elected officials in the 1930s refused to regard veterans as a sacrosanct caste. He quotes President Roosevelt speaking at the National Convention of the American Legion in Chicago in October 1933. "No person, because he wore a uniform, must thereafter be placed in a special class of beneficiaries over and above all other citizens", FOR insisted. In a postscript on the 2007 VFW encampment in Kansas City, Missouri, the author points out how unthinkable such a sentiment would be today. At the event Hillary Clinton, Barack

Obama and John McCain all devoted more time to the issue of veterans' benefits than to the conduct of the war in Iraq - a reflection of the contemporary political scene, where support for former servicemen (and now women) enjoys bipartisan political backing. Veterans are venerated in the United States today, in part because of the drama of their personal stories, yet - fleshing out his case in official correspondence and the passage and failure of legislation - Ortiz unfortunately drains his subject matter of much of this human element. In his attempt to get beyond the Bonus March and make a greater case for veterans' wider political import, he has stripped them of some of their pathos. The attempt to draw veterans as a distinct political bloc in the New Deal raises - and leaves unaddressed - another issue too. As Brian Waddell has argued, although the 1930s changed the conception of the role of federal power, the eventual model that the expanded American government of the second half of the twentieth century would take was closer to a warfare state than a welfare state. Expanded federal power would manifest itself in the presence of troops in Germany in peacetime and the fleet in the Mediterranean, not in lavish social programmes at home. Beyond the Bonus March and Cl Bill highlights the activism of veterans in the 1930s, but passes over the point that the state that evolved out of that decade dispensed much of its largesse to the serving military, not the civilian society the soldiers had rejoined.

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TLS FEBRUARY 5 2010

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fOR LOVERS OF

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26

IN BRIEF

Biography Shelley Emling THE FOSSIL HUNTER Dinosaurs, evolution and the woman whose discoveries changed the world 234pp. Pal grave Macmillan. £15.99. 9780230611566

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ary Anning was born in 1799 to a parttime fossil hunter in Lyme Regis, where locals were used to regarding the fossilized vertebrae, ammonites and other curious remains that blanketed its shores mainly as trinkets. Mary dug ammonites and sold them to tourists, a pursuit that gained new urgency when her father died, in debt. By the age of twelve, with her brother's aid, Mary had excavated from a cliff face a complete skeleton of what would eventually be known as an ichthyosaur. She sold that, too. The fossil-weary local newspaper had dismissed Mary's find as a "crocodile", but the skeleton soon ended up in London, where it was better received. The discovery placed the young girl, a Dissenter with little formal education, reliant on her fossils for income, on the margins of an emerging science with which she would have a long, awkward relationship. Her discoveries continued as she grew up. Her sophistication as an anatomist increased, and geologists from London and Oxford visited regularly, regarding her rightfully as a peer, yet seldom crediting her publicly for her well-prepared skeletons and sketches. It is no wonder that Anning's story has been taken up mainly by children's book authors and novelists. She left no journals, aside from what amount to scrapbooks containing poems and religious musings. The temptation to resort to conjecture in filling out Anning' s biography would obviously be great, but it is unfortunate that Shelley Emling, in The Fossil Hunter, has given in to it so thoroughly. Emling uses made-up scenarios - none of them implausible, but none necessary throughout this work of non-fiction: "She decided to return to the beach. At first light she would have grabbed a pick, chisel, hammer and a small gray rucksack, then tiptoed past her mother". When it comes to the nevermarried Anning' s emotional life, Emling strains the hardest, linking Anning to just about every bachelor scientist who comes her way, imagining her grave disappointment as each one departs without proposing marriage. And yet from Anning' s few survi ving letters it seems clear that her closest relationships were with women, and her dog. Add to this a writing style stuffed with gratuitous adjectives and colloquialisms, and there seems a lost opportunity here, albeit one redeemed somewhat by Emling' s contagious affection and empathy for her subject. When Anning dies from breast cancer, still in

A flying fish, photographed by Geoff Jones; from Fishes of the Open Ocean by Julian Pepperell (266pp. University of Chicago Press. $35. 978 0 226 65539 0) her forties , spurned afresh by locals who mistook her use of pain-killing laudanum for a drinking habit, it is hard not to shudder at the callousness this very talented woman endured all her life. JENNIE ERIN SMITH

Ray Jenkins A PACIFIST AT WAR The life of Francis Cammaerts 324pp. Hutchinson. £20. 978 0 091 92557 4

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though we are directly hearing Cammaerts's relaxed style of speaking, as he recounts both his military and personal life during the war. Decades afterwards, Cammaerts was still deeply troubled by the fact that, shortly after D-Day, he had executed a member of the Vichy Milice, something he had hidden for years: " It was in total contradiction to my pacifism, my beliefs, but it had to be done. At what point one felt disgust, shame, I can ' t say. I've kept it from everyone. I only told Nan after we'd moved down here in the last seven to eight years". In the years after the war, the men and women of SOE were portrayed as heroes. Jenkins shows that the heroes were also human.

t the outbreak of the Second World War, Francis Cammaerts was a pacifist. A conscientious objector, he changed his attiMATTHEW COBB tude to the war in 1941, prompted by the birth of his daughter and the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. Through his friend , Harry Ree, Cammaerts got an interview with "an Fergus Hanna Bell, editor organization" that would be able to use his A SALUTE FROM THE BANDEROL French language skills. Absolute security The selected writings of Sam Hanna Bell was a requirement: he did not even tell his 186pp. Blackstaff Press. £20. wife, Nan, what he would be doing. Indeed, 978 0 85640 839 7 he did not entirely know himself. It was only after the war that Cammaerts learnt that he he title of this book is a quotation from had been working for the Special Operations Sam Hanna Bell ' s introduction to The Executive (SO E). Arts in Ulster, which he edited in 1951. In it, Cammaerts was involved in some of the he likens himself to the man carrying a bandemost notorious and tragic events of the Occu- rol at the head of some indigenous parade or pation. He encountered the deluded Andre other - grave and sober-suited, while all the Girard ("Carte" ; see the TLS, June 26, 2009), colour, noise and pageantry of the occasion miraculously avoided entanglement with Ger- unfold behind him. It' s an apt and humorous man counter-intelligence in the shape of image for an editor, if in this instance unduly "Colonel Henri" and betrayal by the double modest. It doesn ' t take into account Hanna (triple?) agent Henri Dericourt, and was Bell ' s own contribution to the arts in Ulster, present on the Vercors plateau when, lacking as a BBC man, novelist, critic, essayist and adequate military support, the maquis was general commentator on the foibles, flaws massacred by the Germans in June 1944. and graces of the province in which he spent Two months after this, Cammaerts was cap- nearly the whole of his life. Rut now, in his tured by the Nazis, but was soon freed by his centenary year, comes a selection of his writfellow agent, Countess Krystyna Skarbek, ings expertly assembled by his son Fergus aka Christine Granville, who told her superi- Hanna Bell, which provides an inkling of the ors that Cammaerts was "a magnificent per- flair and expertise he brought to every project son" ; the two became lovers, helping lead the he undertook. Allied advance up the Rhone valley. When A Salute from the Banderol opens with a they returned to the UK in September 1944, flourish - a foreword - by Paul Muldoon, and Cammaerts went back to Nan, whom he had continues on the same high note with a radio not seen for two years. script first broadcast by the BBC Home SerRay Jenkins, a dramatist, provides a clear vice in 1949. "This is Northern Ireland" garaccount, largely based on Cammaerts's oral ners the ingredients of a distinctive local and written accounts, although it disappoint- atmosphere and way of going on. It includes ingly contains no photographs. Often, it is as the voices of poets, playwrights, folklorists,

Literature

craftsmen, geographers, historians, all interspersed with native strains of music. When he wrote this script, Sam Hanna Bell was engaged in furthering a growing sense of Northern Ireland as a strong and pungent locality, and also making a plea for inclusiveness - an enlightened egalitarianism shines through all his writings, from his compelling novel December Bride (1951), to his defence of Sam Thompson's controversial, anti-sectarian play of 1957, Over the Bridge. A sentence of stifling was passed on this play by the board of the Ulster Group Theatre which had previously accepted it, but then developed cold feet at the prospect of offending "the religious or political beliefs or sensibilities" of anyone whatsoever. It wasn't a recipe for artistic advancement. Over the Bridge was finally staged, to great critical acclaim, at the Empire Theatre in Belfast; and Sam Hanna Bell, placing it within a lively tradition of drama in the North of Ireland, and also upholding it as a new departure, commends its author's " indignation, creative stamina and knowledge" - all qualities to be cherished. Among the essays included here is an appraisal of an earlier playwright, George Farquhar, whose Co Derry origin is emphasized ; and hailing from , or near, the same spot are John Steinbeck's grandparents and Florence Nightingale's right-hand woman Agnes Elizabeth Jones (here rescued from obscurity with due attention to her Irishness). And, confounding the common perception of cultural inactivity besetting mid-twentieth-century Northern Ireland , Sam Hanna Bell pays tribute to his outstanding contemporaries in various fields: W. R. Rodgers and Louis MacNeice, J. C. Beckett and Estyn Evans, Tom Carr and Joseph Tomelty. Reading his comments and assessments and immersing ourselves in his views, we're reminded of the observation of another of his great contemporaries, John Hewitt, that "Patriotism has to do with keeping / the country in good heart" - an endeavour exemplified here. PATRICIA CRAIG

Archaeology

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TLS FEBRUARY 5 2010

Marina Belozerskaya TO WAKE THE DEAD A Renaissance merchant and the birth of archaeology 308pp. Norton. £17.99 (US $26.95). 978 0 393 06554 I

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here is a fair case to be made for Cyriac of Ancona being the first Classical archaeologist: between 1420 and 1449 he travelled extensively in Dalmatia, Greece, western Anatolia and the Aegean, and recorded in surprisingly accurate drawings and laconic descriptions details of ancient architecture and sculpture now often lost to us.

Born in Ancona in 1391 into a prosperous mercantile family, Cyriacus de'Pizzicoli was apprenticed to Piero de Jacopo, and made his way in both commerce and Anconitan local politics. Largely self-taught, he was inspired by reading Petrarch, Dante and Virgil, and by voyages to Venice and then Alexandria, where he visited the Pyramids. From then on , his early biographer Francesco Scalamonti recounts, he was gripped by the past. Even when, later in life, he was engaged in diplomatic or espionage missions for Pope Eugenius IV (an early admirer of his acu-

IN BRIEF men), he noted whatever antiquities he came across. In 1418, a trading voyage to Constantinople gave him the chance to see, and sketch, the great church of Hagia Sophia, and on returning to Ancona he saw the Arch of Trajan, the most notable local monument, with fresh eyes. He felt that the gods (he adopted Hermes, protector of travellers, as his patron) had called him to resurrect the ancient world: his answer to a priest who asked what he was doing among the Roman ruins of Vercelli was, "to wake the dead" . Cyriacus was also the first to argue for the primacy of material culture over documentary history, claiming that "the monuments and inscriptions are more faithful witnesses of classical antiquity than are the texts of ancient writers" . He recorded what he saw in the Commentary upon Ancient Things, of which only fragments remain: most of his original records were destroyed by fire. Cyriacus himself, however, and several of his admirers, had copied many of his drawings ; Giuliano de Sangallo had copied a number of his architectural sketches, and compendia of his epigraphic records were much used (although he seems to have simply copied some inscriptions second-hand from sources as ancient as Herodotus). Much of what he recorded no longer remains: in Athens he drew the Parthenon before it became a mosque, and described the medieval ducal palace that had grown up in and around the Propylaea. As Marina Belozerskaya notes in this engaging (but irritatingly map-less) biography, his observations are still useful: recently Bente Kiilerich showed that the Little Metropolis, a Byzantine church in Athens, must date to after 1436, not the twelfth century as has been generally accepted. An inscription built into its wall had been recorded by Cyriacus in that year, but on the Areopagos. Kiilerich was thus able to argue that the church had been constructed after the Ottoman conquest of Athens in 1456 to replace the Parthenon as the main shrine of the Virgin, using spolia from the classical ruins. NORMAN HAMMOND

Film Celestino Deleyto THE SECRET LIFE OF ROMANTIC COMEDY I 89pp. Manchester University Press. £50 (US $74.95). 9780719076749

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he first film mentioned in Celestino Deleyto's study of romantic comedy is Steven Soderbergh's thriller Out of Sight (1998); shortly afterwards, two pages are devoted to Howard Hawks' s western Rio Bravo (1959). These unexpected starting points typify the author's approach. Romantic comedy, he claims, "has had a rich secret life underneath the canonical texts and the traditional classifications". Its role is "to select culturally relevant intimate situations ... and cast over them the benevolent mantle of the comic space", thereby "allow[ing] the spectator to glimpse a 'better world' ... characterised by a freer, more optimistic expression of love and desire" . Deleyto rejects the assumption that genres are categories. Rather, he suggests, they are sets of conventions on which films draw. Accordingly, he finds elements of romantic

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comedy in films traditionally assigned to duce London Calling because "Guy was legother genres - for example, Ernst Lubitsch ' s endary, and Joe wanted the Clash to be legenTo Be or Not To Be (1942) , a farce set in dary, too". For the rest of the band , likewise, Nazi-occupied Poland, and Billy Wilder's desire to succeed had long outstripped musisex satire Kiss Me Stupid (1964). He then cal competence: the bass guitarist Paul shows how romantic comedy infiltrates a Simonon, for example, only took up his Hitchcock thriller, Rear Window (1954), and instrument after being invited to join on the one of Woody Allen's darkest films, Crimes basis of his good looks and style. and Misdemeanors (1989). Lastly, he Both Strummer and the band's lead guitarexplores how Richard Linklater's Before Sun- ist Mick Jones had ambiguous, besotted relaset (2004) uses romantic comedy to show tionships with the America of their teenage how attitudes towards sex and commitment imaginations. Chuck Berry, Bob Dylan and have changed in recent times. Bo Diddley are among those cited here for The strengths and weaknesses of Deleyto' s influence or comparison's sake, but, as Gray book are most evident in his approach to Rear shows, London Calling is in other ways a Window , in which, he claims, the conventions decidedly London-ish record - written in part of romantic comedy interact with those of the on the bus to which the title of the book refers, suspense thriller. It is a critical commonplace and recorded at Wessex Studios in Highbury. that Rear Window dramatizes the hero Jeff's The album's cover famously shows Simonon fear of romantic commitment. But, as smashing his bass on stage, but lifts its typoDeleyto observes, " it is not the text but Jeff graphy from Elvis Presley's debut album of [who] thinks that men and women are incom- 1956. From Gray ' s website one learns that patible" . By focusing on elements of roman- Royal Mail have just included it in a set of ten tic comedy in the film, the viewer can gain "Classic Album Cover" postage stamps. access to his girlfriend Lisa's perspective on P. J. CARNEHAN relationships. Yet in the course of this fascinating analysis, Deleyto sustains his interpretation by misrepresenting Jeff's character. The acknowledgement of generic impurity John D, Staines is as old as academic film criticism; in 1976, THE TRAGIC HISTORIES OF MARY Robin Wood argued that "one of the greatest QUEEN OF SCOTS obstacles to any fruitful theory of genre has 278pp. Ashgate. £55. been the tendency to treat the genres as dis978075466611 0 crete" . Still, Deleyto never claims to have ven before Mary Queen of Scots met her invented his field, and indeed situates his end on the scaffold at Fotheringhay, she work within a formidable body of scholarship. His engagement with specific movies, had been depicted more than once as the submeanwhile, is fascinating , even when the ject of a tragedy. In 1567, after the assassination of her second husband, the Queen reader disagrees with his conclusions. ALEXANDER JACOBY appeared in Protestant ballads as a type of Clytemnestra: a cunning murderess who had betrayed Lord Darnley to maintain a tyrannous grip on the crown. These ballads, the earliest of which were produced by the Scottish Marcus Gray polemicist Robert Sempill, used the de casiROUTE 19 REVISITED bus tradition also used in England's Mirror The Clash and "London Calling" for Magistrates to depict the tragic fortunes 532pp. Cape. £20. of a lustful queen. Following her execution 978 0 224 08564 9 two decades later, Mary became the subject n 1979, CBS Records released London of more romantic portrayals. In 1589, the Calling, a double album (selling for the French Jesuit Jean de Bordes wrote his Latin price of a single album) by The Clash - an school play Maria Stuarta Tragoedia, which English punk band who here found them- defended the Queen as a martyr to the Cathoselves playing ska and reggae, among other lic cause. Others followed: over more than a things, while singing about being "Lost in the century, ri val "tragic histories' of Mary' s Supermarket" . Route 19 Revisited tells the death were batted between the competing story of the album's making, including a factions of Continental politics. song-by-song analysis of its lyrics and extenJohn D. Staines's book is a study of this sive biographical background; well written competition for control of Mary ' s story. He and thoroughly researched, it is also perspica- begins with the propaganda efforts of Scotcious and ambitious in its placing of an hour tish nobles and the English government of guitar music in the context of individual designed to discredit the Queen while she lives, post-war Britain, the heady power of was in English custody and still a potential American popular culture over British teen- threat. It was a collaborative pamphlet by agers, and - that redouhtahle cliche of the George Buchanan and William Cecil , Ane rock 'n' roll life - the trappings of fame. Detectiovn of the duinges of Marie Quene of Route 19 Revisited is, in a sense, one of Scottes , that was the wellspring of these antithese trappings, being yet another devotedly Marian writings. But Staines is also interdetailed book about The Clash to add to Mar- ested in the later use of Mary's history. In the cus Gray's earlier book The Last Gang in wake of the exclusion crisis, for example, Town, Passion 1s a Fashion by Pat Gilbert, John Bank's Island Queens was written with Out of Control by Vince White and Redemp- an eye to supporting the Duke of York's position Song , Chris Salewicz's biography of the tion and considered too inflammatory to band's lead singer Joe Strummer. This seems appear on stage. Right up until the demise of to be the kind of celebratory chronicling that the Stuart line, the tragedy at Fotheringhay Strummer himself, who died at the age of was alive with political resonance. fifty in 2002, might have welcomed - he This is an engaging and deeply researched wanted the "eccentric" Guy Stevens to pro- history. Staines pays attention to Latin and

History

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Music

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TLS FEBRUARY 5 2010

French versions of the story; he is also persuasive in his claims that plays on other subjects, such as Thomas Hughes's Misfortunes oj Arthur, were coloured by the events of Mary ' s fall. Above all , this book presents a productively expansive understanding of "tragic history" . It is a mode not restricted to drama and not straightforwardly governed by the dictates of truth. In the words of Staines's characteristically lucid conclusion, "tragic history" comes into being whenever an author "infuses the moral message of a tragic fall with a political argument". BARTVAN Es

Literary Criticism Angela Kershaw BEFORE AUSCHWITZ Irene Nemirovsky and the cultural landscape of inter-war France 233pp. Routledge. £70. 9780415957229

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rene Nemirovsky' s story is now familiar to many. Most of her novels, including a dark little children's tale called L 'Enfant prodige, have been dusted off and reissued in France, and several of them have now been published in English for the first time. Two biographies have appeared, both of which have tried to deal fairly with the ambiguous relationship Nemirovsky had with her Jewish identity, a subject which seems to be now considered intrinsic to any discussion of her literary output. Angela Kershaw's new study draws heavily on Pierre Bourdieu's notion that all literary production must be understood through sociological analysis as well as through close textual analysis, a dual perspective which Kershaw insists is essential in order to understand the value of Nemirovsky's literary output to her contemporaries and to readers today. This debate about Nemirovsky's position in French literary culture was already being rehearsed in the 1930s. As Kershaw illustrates, to be writing in France in the 1930s meant producing within a cultural landscape that is difficult for readers today to understand. Kershaw claims that after the fall of France, the choice for a writer was stark to publish or not to publish. Nemirovsky, having identified throughout the 1930s with the right-wing, Catholic literary milieu, was not in a position to change her literary allegiance and was thus obliged, if she wished to continue to publish, to adopt a position of professional accommodation with the Vichy regime. Nemirovsky's prodigious talents, her Jewish identity and the terrible circumstances of her death, make her story exceptional, yet, as Kershaw demonstrates, she was also highly typical of the time in which she was writing. Drawing too much attention to the exceptional circumstances of her life and death inevitably leads to too much focus on troubling ethical aspects of her career as a writer, and Kershaw's aim is to define Nemirovsky as a typical writer in the French cultural milieu of the time. Written in dense, academic language, this is not a book for lay readers, but for students of Nemirovsky it provides a welcome and enlightening perspective on a writer whose significance is still in the process of being defined. NATASHA LEHRER

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ARCHAEOLOGY

First into India here was a time when almost everything which seemed to be of interest in the earliest stages of human evolution appeared to have emerged from Africa - the evolution from chimpanzees to early forms of humans, the earliest evidence for stone tool manufacture and large-scale meat-eating, and the subsequent evolution of more complex "hand axe" technology. Recent research has not entirely changed this picture, but fieldwork in several regions of Asia has amplified and clarified this pattern in several critical respects. The results are summarized, with some important new insights, by Robin Dennell in The Palaeolithic Settlement of Asia. There is now clear evidence that the earliest human occupation of at least south-western Asia, and probably south-eastern Asia and Indonesia, dates back to at least 1.8 million years ago; not as far removed from the earliest stone tool manufacturing in Africa (at around 2.5 million years) as was once thought. Future finds could push back the colonization of Asia to a substantially earlier date. How these initial Asian populations should be classified in evolutionary terms is still debated (while finds of human skeletal material remain extremely thin on the ground), but most recent opinions would attribute them to an early form of Homo erectus. Dennell argues that this species could in fact have originated in Asia itself (from earlier African ancestors) before migrating back into Africa around 1.6 million years ago. Dennell also makes a strong case that the earliest Acheulian hand axe-making populations had spread from Eastern Africa to south-west Asia by at least 800,000 years ago

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PAUL MELLARS Robin Dennell THE PALAEOLITHIC SETTLEMENT OF ASIA 572pp. Cambridge University Press. £55 (US $95). 9780521 848664

Alice Roberts THE INCREDIBLE HUMAN JOURNEY The story of how we colonised the planet 384pp. Bloomsbury. £20. 9780747598398

(best represented by the sites of Ubeidiya and Gesher Banot Ya' aqov in the Jordan Valley) , and then evolved largely in isolation (owing mainly to climatic factors) for a further half million years. One of the greatest puzzles in Palaeolithic archaeology has always been to explain the apparent lack of typical Acheulian sites in the more eastern parts of Asia, beyond the limits of India - the muchdiscussed "Movius line" of Stone Age archaeology. Dennell offers only very cautious explanations for this, which he suggests could be due to a variety of interacting factors, ranging from sharply changing environments (and associated food supplies) across the Asian continent to (more plausibly) the effects of the general scarcity of high-quality, flakeable stone for tool manufacture over large areas of eastern and south-eastern Asia. One cannot, after all, make a silk purse from a sow's ear, and the same is evidently true of making large, highly shaped tools like hand axes from small and poor-quality stone nodules.

Dennell is equally cautious about the remarkable, small-bodied and small-brained Homo jloresiensis ("Hobbit") remains discovered in 2004 on the small island of Flores in Indonesia. The prevalent view, he points out, is that these represent the relicts of a very early dispersal of Homo erectus-like populations from Africa about 1.5 million years ago, which were subsequently shaped by evolutionary isolation and "island dwarfing" in this small, isolated part of the Asian continent. Robin Dennell's book is comprehensive, authoritative and supported by a vast and impressive bibliography. It integrates the deluge of high-quality new climatic and environmental evidence emerging from various parts of Asia (and especially from the great loess sheets of northern China and Mongolia) with the archaeological evidence. It is perhaps not as theoretically adventurous as some archaeologists would like, but it will be the classic text on the early human settlement of Asia both for other specialists and for the increasingly large audience of university students in archaeology. Alice Roberts' s The Incredible Human Journey is a very different, but, in its own way, equally impressive undertaking. The book accompanies the recent BBC2 documentary series on the dramatic dispersal of the earliest anatomically modern human populations (i.e. Homo sapiens) out of southern Africa across most of the globe between roughly 60,000 and 40,000 years ago - the "Incredible Journey" of the title. Dr Roberts herself is a clinician, not an anthropologist, with a subsequent degree in Osteoarchaeology, and she has put this combination of skills to good scientific effect, lucidly and entertainingly. She uses archaeology and the

rapidly emerging field of ancient human genetics and DNA studies to show how Homo sapiens, evolving in the tropics of southern Africa, subsequently expanded across the vastly different Ice Age environments of Europe and Asia where they replaced the existing Neanderthals and related species remarkably rapidly. Her well-chosen emphases include the central importance of social cooperation and demographic " networking" systems in the contexts of intense territorial and demographic competition between the indigenous Neanderthal and incoming ("invading") modern humans. But she underestimates the role of the incomers' technology in all this, partly on the grounds that one can skin a reindeer as effectively with a Neanderthal Levallois flake as with a " modern" human blade. New elements of complex bone, antler and ivory technology, new forms of hunting equipment and the entire (virtually archaeologically invisible) component of wooden technology - which were evidently crucial components of the superior survival strategies of the modern human populations in Eurasia - must, however, have played an equal if not greater role than their (hypothetically) more complex forms of social organization. Happily, these points are dealt with much more fully in Roberts's book than under the time constraints of the television series. The Incredible Human Journey also gives a more cautious treatment of the modern human colonization of Asia than presented on screen, where Roberts argued that fully modern humans had colonized India by at least 78,000 years ago, and then pressed on to reach Australia by around 60,000 years ago both at least 15,000 years earlier than the bulk of the present archaeological and genetic evidence can support, and evidently reflecting the minority view of one or two of the specialists involved in making the programmes.

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ow do people who speak different languages explain who they are to strangers, and how can they express their relationships with other members of the community? One way is to wear a distinctive costume. Individuals communicate through a series of visual devices that state their position in society without resort to the spoken word. Katina T. Lillios explains that this was how knights in armour could identify one another on the battlefield. What if the people concerned were not the living but the dead, buried in stone-built tombs and visited when funerals were taking place? How could the mourners distinguish between the bones of different ancestors, and how could they interpret the relationships that had existed between them? Lillios suggests that, in prehistoric Iberia, this was possible because their remains were associated with decorated pendants which explained who they were. In her term, they provided "heraldry for the dead" . This is not a conventional catalogue of a group of prehistoric objects. Rather, it is a commentary on their interpretation and their significance for the inhabitants of Portugal between about 3500 and 2000 BC. It was a time of dramatic changes, including the expansion of farming, the development of fortified settlements, and the first adoption of

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Among the bones RICHARD BRADLEY Katina T. Lillios HERALDRY FOR THE DEAD Memory, identity, and the engraved stone plaques of neolithic Iberia 218pp. University of Texas Press. $60; distributed in the UK by Combined Academic Publishers. £40. 9780292 71822 7

metals. It was also a period in which the social distinctions were expressed through material objects in life as well as death. Lillios' s interpretation of the decorated plaques depends on three features. Although they were made in the settlements, nearly all of them have been found in burials. A few examples have drawings of eyes, suggesting the human body. These objects were usually in fresh condition, showing that they had been made specifically for the funeral and had not circulated for a significant period beforehand. Most important, the incised designs were of kinds that could easily be made by a weaver and might have been based on the costumes

A plaque from Olival da Pega; from the book under review worn by the living. Close examination of these patterns shows that they were composed according to strict conventions, for there are cases in which mistakes had been made and corrected. For that reason Lillios argues that it

TLS FEBRUARY 5 2010

was necessary that each of the plaques should provide accurate information. That happened even when such amendments upset the balance of the overall design. She also shows how the objects had been produced, based on experimental replication. The argument is plausible, but it is necessarily circumstantial. Lillios does not say enough about the use of heraldry in other societies or about the creation of similar objects in contexts that have been documented by anthropologists. Nor does she explain why comparable designs should be found in other media such as pottery decoration in the Iberian Peninsula. That would have been useful as it could shed more light on the character of these objects. On the other hand, her approach has much to commend it. She rejects the uncritical assumption that the plaques were depictions of a Mother Goddess, whose very existence remains hypothetical. Lillios sheds new light on how the objects were made, and how they might have been used when they were buried with the dead. Whether or not she has identified the original meanings of the decorated plaques, she has advanced the study of prehistoric Iberia by asking new questions. In doing so, Katina Lillios has written a book which is intriguing, engaging and almost entirely original.

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MEDICINE

Wars for life ar is full of good material , both for doctors and storytellers. This book is partly a sketch of historical developments in military medicine, but its heart is made of the real-life tales of combat medics over the past century. The improvements in technology and organization are interesting, but more striking is the way they result from a remarkable recent increase in the value placed on individual fighting lives. "Before", the authors tell us, citing a contemporary surgeon, " we as medics had to do the minimum for the most ... now it [is] a case of doing the maximum for the few. " Medical support for those in the Falklands was shockingly basic, with half-trained junior doctors and little equipment. Iraq and Afghanistan have seen enormous improvements. Mostly, though, this is not a history so much as a tumble through more constant themes of war. Gory stories of excitement, bravery and loss are told with a mixture of accomplishment and cliche. The Union Jack flies high. Foreigners appear to have little time for Geneva Conventions. We Brits respect them, although one can read here about certain incidents and wonder. "This was no time to be careless" explains an episode that might otherwise be described as a murder. When a medic with non-combatant

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DRUIN BURCH John Nichol and Tony Rennell MEDIC Saving lives - from Dunkirk to Afghanistan 422pp. Viking. £20. 9780670916047

status tries to kill he is simply "not averse to taking pot-shots". This is good British pluck, as is bayoneting injured foes. Our prisoners are inhumanely subject to horrors, but when captured Argentinians are killed, following orders to clear up an ammunition dump, it is their own fault. They were "careless", perhaps, or had booby-trapped the dump to begin with. Only politicians and commanders are treated worse, receiving more contempt even than the merciless Japanese. Bold, compassionate troopers are constantly let down by the complacent stupidity of their leaders. Credits go to the front line, discredits behind. Painting Tony Blair and Gordon Brown as cartoon idiots, though, is an ineffective way of holding them responsible for genuine failings. The morally criminal parts of recent British wars deserve more serious treatment. Enemies are "dealt with", "sent packing",

33 Field Hospital, northern Kuwait, 2003 "finished off'. Troops are "short-changed" by "some busybody" , the " brass hats" the " pen-pushers". Lives are saved by people being bullied and encouraged to " hold on" when they might otherwise close their eyes and drift off - a technique I have seen often in years of dealing with the critically sick, albeit only on television. The authors write of the "fine lines" between saving lives and taking them, but they ward off ambiguities

and ambivalence on all fronts. One soldier talks movingly of his personal mixture of cowardice and bravery, but his thoughtfulness is brushed aside as false modesty. Combat medics perform faultlessly , their morals and courage as spotless as their medical decisions. It must be more modesty, then, that makes them pursue " that time-honoured but pointless medic ' s tradition of beating [themselves] up, of wondering if [they] had done enough". John Nichol and Tony Rennell are badly wrong here. To anyone except the most over-familiar, traumatic emergencies are packed with things you could have done better. Learning from them is essential. It allows for improvement, but, sometimes more important, can allow you to forgive yourself for not having been perfect in the first place. Medics may need to project a sense of unwavering self-confidence, but only the worst kind believe in it. Snap decisions need to be followed by terrible reflections. Medic attempts no difficult exploration of human muddles. It is not interested in shadows and uncertainties but in demonstrations of British guts, camaraderie and fair play. It offers a barrage of bloody anecdotes, skilfully written for a popular market. Yet the copies that are sold deserve to be read. There is more here than an effort to make melodrama out of crises. The vitality of wartime experience remains unmistakable. For writers and surgeons alike, there is something fertile in the slaughter and the selflessness of war.

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TLS FEBRUARY 5 2010

30

ILS

ART HISTORY

A racket?

Telephone: 020 7782 5000 Fax: 020 7782 4966 [email protected] eonardo da Vinci has much to answer for. His name alone has lent stature to a meretricious bestseller, has prompted frenzy as well as satire whenever there has been the slightest chance of an encounter with his work, and has now diverted a distinguished historian of early modern Britain into an analysis of some of the snobs, dreamers, charlatans, plutocrats and provincial Americans who populated the messy art world of the twentieth century. As John Brewer notes, he would probably never have travelled to Omaha had he not been lured by the tale of a putative Leonardo portrait. Brewer's book, The American Leonardo, recounts the trials and tribulations that attended the optimistic attribution to the Renaissance master of a portrait known as "La Belle Ferroniere", of which another version has long hung in the Louvre. The latter has also suffered uncertain attributions, and it was this very murkiness that left room for the claim that the picture that surfaced after the First World War in Kansas was the original rather than the copy. This "Belle" became famous in 1929, when her owners, Henry and Andree Hahn, sued Joseph Duveen in a Manhattan court for having dismissed the painting's authenticity without having seen it. Despite the array of experts who supported Duveen, the hauteur of the art establishment evidently offended the jurors, and the result was a hung jury. Rather than go to a second trial, Duveen settled with the Hahns for the princely sum of $60,000. From then on, and to this day, the "Belle" has brought little but grief to those who have believed in her. She has been set, inconclusively, alongside her sister in the Louvre; she has been shipped back and forth across the Atlantic; she has been displayed to Hollywood stars such as Edward G. Robinson; and she has spent most of her time in vaults and storage spaces while those around her, vainly trying to sell her, accumulated vast debts, animosities and endless frustration. Brewer clearly enjoys telling this story, which gives him the chance to fashion vivid descriptions of a small army of colourful characters: the lordly Duveen and Kenneth Clark, a slick Dutch dabbler in art named Mau van Danzig and a scoundrel from Kansas called Leon Loucks. Drifting in and out of the saga are Harry Hahn himself, a hot-headed charmer, and notables such as Thomas Hart Benton and Bernard Berenson. Benton wrote an introduction to Hahn's book on the picture's history, The Rape of La Belle, a publication that brought the adventure back to life, not least because the TLS accorded it a favourable review in 1947. The central issue in all the quarrels the "Belle" engendered was whether the art establishment was capable of making reliable attributions, or whether in fact it was a "racket" run by a cosy group of "experts" who fooled museums and millionaires into parting with large sums of money on little more than their say-so. Brewer is noticeably less comfortable when he has to address this perennial dilemma of art appreciation and the art market. He offers obeisance to the importance of experience and the trained eye, yet he

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THEODORE K. RABB

John Brewer AMERICAN LEONARDO 390pp. Constable. £ 16.99. 978 I 84529872 2 also quotes Berenson's unwittingly selfdefeating comment that connoisseurship required a "sixth sense" granted to few, and he emphasizes the disputes over method and the changes of mind that have bedevilled assertions of expertise. He also gives full play to the notorious Vermeer and Van Gogh forgeries of the mid-century that embarrassed even the most reputable authorities; and, as a historian, laments the suspicion of documentary and scientific evidence that is often characteristic of the field. There is an X-ray of the jewel on "Belle" ' s forehead, for instance, which deserves much more attention than it has received. Brewer seems to sympathize with those who are sceptical about experts, though he deplores their overheated rhetoric, and retains

his respect for serious scholarship. Still, one cannot blame him for harbouring doubts. I recently heard two diametrically opposed opinions of an eighteenth-century portrait asserted with equal confidence by experts with comparable credentials. And the flood of de-attributions associated with the Rembrandt Research Project has prompted questions such as: "If they're not Rembrandts, where are all the brilliant contemporaries who are supposed to have painted them?". Since Brewer does not want to abandon his belief in scholarship and research, the result is an ambivalent tone that pervades the book. The uneasiness, the uncertainties, and the contradictions notwithstanding, The American Leonardo is a testament to the fascination the dramas of the art world can exert. Brewer takes nearly 400 pages to chart the ups and downs of nearly a century's worth of antagonisms, schemes, hopes and disappointments. But for all the deft portrayals of memorable characters, and the unravelling of the story's twists and turns, the book is at times repetitive, and the high level of interest it arouses at the beginning begins to flag by the finish. One has the impression that Brewer, caught up in an endless quest, often found himself unable to resist introducing yet another character and recounting one more episode. It is certainly worth having his views on the workings of an art market that stimulates the disposal of hundreds of millions of pounds each year. During the twentieth century it became a very different enterprise from the system of patronage, auctions, fairs, market stalls, and sidelines in shops that had survived since the fifteenth century. In describing that change, Brewer demonstrates his usual careful thought and keen intelligence, but he has picked, as a case study, a long-drawn-out entanglement that cannot quite carry the emphasis he puts on it. By the end, with most of the issues still unresolved, one feels that the author's absorption in the history of the "Belle" once more demonstrates how Leonardo's fatal attractions claim their devotees.

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TLS FEBRUARY 5 2010

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Simon Akam is a writer and photographer, and a Fulbright scholar to the United States in 2008-9, He lives in Istanbul. Dinah Birch is Professor of English Literature at the University of Liverpool. She is the General Editor of the new edition of the Oxford Companion to English Literature, published last year, and the author of Our Victorian Education, 2008. Richard Bradley is a Professor of Archaeology at the University of Reading. His books include The Passage of Arms: An archaeological analysis of prehistoric hoards and votive deposits, 1990. Beverley Bie Brahic' s most recent books are Against Gravity, 2005, and her translation of Francis Ponge's poems, Unfinished Ode to Mud, 2008. Druin Burch is a hospital physician and a teacher at the University of Oxford. His most recent book, Taking the Medicine, has just been published in paperback. Stephen Burt is Associate Professor of English at Harvard University. His most recent book is The Forms of Youth, 2007.

appeared in 2006.

Norman Hammond is Professor of Archaeology at Boston University. He is the author of Ancient Maya Civilization, second edition 1985.

His first book, A Critical Handbook of Nicholas Rankin' s most recent book, Japanese Film Directors, was published in Churchill's Wizards: The British genius for 2008. deception 1914- 1945, was reissued in paperback last year. Sarah Knight is Senior Lecturer in Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature in the Henry Shukman 's first collection of poems, School of English, University of Leicester. In Doctor No's Garden, appeared in 2002. She has edited and translated the accounts of Elizabeth I's visits to Oxford for the forthcom- Jennie Erin Smith is a freelance science ing new critical edition of John Nichols's reporter. Her book about reptile smuggling Progresses, and is editing the Prolusions for will be published later this year. the new Oxford edition of Milton. Kathryn Sutherland is a Fellow of St Natasha Lehrer is a writer and translator Anne's College, Oxford. Her most recent based in Paris. book, Transferred Illusions: Digital technology and the forms of print, co-written with Patrick McCaughey is a former Director Marilyn Deegan, appeared last year. of the Yale Center for British Art and of the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Bharat Tandon teaches at Lady Margaret Connecticut. He is the author of Voyage and Hall, Oxford. His book Jane Austen and the Landfall: The art of Jan Senbergs, 2006. Morality of Conversation was published in 2003. He has written the chapter on Henry Andrew McCulloch teaches English and Green for the forthcoming Cambridge Education at a College in Cheshire, and is a Companion to English Novelists. regular contributor to the English Review. Jesse Tangen-MiIIs is a freelance writer Derek Mahon's most recent collection of living in Bogota. poems, Life on Earth, appeared in 2008. His new book, An Autumn Wind, will be Howard Temperley is Emeritus Professor published later this year. of American History at the University of East Anglia. He is the author of Britain and Paul Mellars is Professor of Prehistory and America since Independence, 2002. Human Evolution in the University of Cambridge. His books include The Neander- John Warrack is the author of German thal Legacy: An archaeological perspective Opera: From the beginnings to Wagner, from Western Europe , 1996. 2001.

Sudhir Hazareesingh is a Fellow in Politics at Balliol College, Oxford. He is writing a book about Charles de Gaulle.

Kate Webb is a freelance writer living in London. She is writing a book on the impact of film on the literary imagination.

Roy Foster is Professor of Irish History at Hertford College, Oxford. His books include Modern Ireland 1600- 1972, 1988, and Luck and the Irish: A brief history of change 1970-2000,2007. Arthur Freeman is the author, with Janet Freeman, of a biobibliography of John Payne Collier, 2004. Emelyne Godfrey is Publicity Officer for the H. G. Wells Society and a writer specializing in the Victorian and Edwardian eras. She is working on a book entitled "Masculinity, Crime and Self-Defence in Victorian Literature", and is a regular contributor to History Today magazine. Fiona Gruber is the founding hostess of Gert's, a monthly salon in Melbourne. She is writing a book about Alice Corn well, the goldmine owner and former proprietor of the Sunday Times. Thomas Habinek is Professor of Classics at the University of California. His books include The World of Roman Song: From ritualized speech to social order, 2005, and The Politics of Latin Literature, 1998.

Michael Caines works for the TLS. Matthew Cobb is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Manchester. His book The Resistance: The French fight against the Nazis was published last year.

Asking

Patricia Craig's memoir, Trouble, appeared in 2007.

for

Bart van Es is a Fellow of St Catherine's College, Oxford. He is the editor of A Critical Companion to Spenser Studies, 2006. Judith Flanders' s Consuming Passions: Leisure and pleasure in Victorian Britain

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The sender of the first correct solution opened on February 26 will receive a cash pri ze of £40. Entries should be addressed to TLS Crossword 8 19, Times House, 1 Pennington Street,

London E98 I SS.

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Lynette Mitchell is Senior Lecturer in Classics and Ancient History, University of Exeter. She is the author of Greeks Bearing Gifts: The public use of private relationships Henry Hitchings's book The Secret Life of in the Greek world, 435-323 BC, 1998. Words: How English became English appeared in 2008. His book about Dr Theodore K. Rabb is Emeritus Professor of Johnson's Dictionary was published in 2005. History, Princeton University. Hi s edition of Das Standebuch and translation of Hans Alexander Jacoby lectures in Japanese Film Sach's verses was published as A Sixteenthand Manga at Oxford Brookes University. Century Book of Trades last year.

CROSSWORD

819

ACROSS

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1 Singer's favourite set in Warsaw (6) 4 lI ed prom - unbeli evab le as it may be, earnestly requested (8) 10 Greek hero protects uni versity for sel fsty led emperor (9) 11 Dramatist and pure dramatic character (5) 12 "A 500-pound incendiary something like the old Russian - Breadbasket" (Ted Lawson, Thirty Seconds over Tokyo) (7) 13 Verse form from palimpsest in Egyptian library (7) 14 The "honour of the house" was hi s weak point, and Stalky and Co. knew how to flick him on the raw (5) 15 Bathsheba, always with strange need (8) 18 Lord Clonbron y, for example (8) 20 Coalesce naturally, using section of opera (5) 23 Burney heiress (7) 25 Real set surpri singly see n in Hamlet film (7) 26 Roman horse on stage (5) 27 Our Altaic version of the author (9) 28 Conrad 's centre of obscurity (3, 5) 29 How Browning's si lk worker goes by, singing as she goes (6)

1 Useful guides for Two on a Tower (4,4) 2 For him , tragically, love leads to hell inside (7) 3 Name of section , like Bede or Lea,. (4, 5) 5 She was "able to do anything fro m a medley dance to Lady Macbeth" (4, ID) 6 Some stron g desires of Cl ark Blaise (5) 7 Huxley's Lawrence di sg ui sed in a bellftower (7) 8 Italian poet's count (6) 9 ".. certainly the most efficient - - - - fliers that ever appeared. They were the in vention of a Japanese artist" (H. G. Wells, The War in the Air) (7-4-3) 16 Betrayed wife shows spirit in ne w ed iti on of Sade (9) 17 It offers the conclusion in which not hing is concluded (8) 19 On account of preced ing the dark hours in Ellroy 's work (7) 21 "The so ul s of many Kings are vul gar - " (Peter Pindar, Odes to Kien Long) (7) 22 Such stress can be grave, or even acute (6) 24 Anthem composer suggests twisted yarn (5)

TLS FEBRUARY 5 2010

Ben Wilkinson' s first pamphlet of poems, The Sparks, was published in 2008. Hugo Williams'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.

32

T

he death of J. D. Salinger on January 27 , aged ninety-one, overshadowed that of another American writer the previous day, Louis Auchincloss. Separated by a year in age, they represented different worlds: one the voice of a new, loose-mouthed youth ("If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know ... "); the other a representative of New York ' s patrician elite ("Daddy was always spoken of as one of the best lawyers downtown, and was a rich man, too ."). Salinger was among the most famous names in modern literature, though he wrote only one novel. Auchincloss produced more than thirty, as well as numerous nonfiction works. Many readers will claim their favourite Salinger works were his short stories; but no obituary led with the information that "the author of Nine Stories" had died. The Catcher in the Rye was reviewed, briefly, in the TLS of September 7, 1951. Our reviewer, though put off by "the endless stream of blasphemy and obscenity", found Holden Caulfield "really very touching" and concluded, "One would like to hear more of what his parents and teachers have to say about him" . This is itself touching, and prefigures the tendency of cultists to regard Holden as "real", with a life beyond the novel. Auchincloss's British debut came two months earlier. Our review of The Injustice Collectors, a book of stories, perceptively noted the resemblance to Edith Wharton Auchincloss's grandparents were fri ends of Wharton , and he later wrote an appreciation

One hand clapping of her - and enjoyed the "unmerciful" tone in which the moneyed classes were described. It has been reported that Salinger continued writing after his self-concealment. Perhaps a clutch of books will emerge to amaze us. Of greater interest might be the twenty or so apparently lost stories, many of which survive only as titles of rejected items in the files of the New Yorker. They include "I Went to School with Adolph Hitler", "Monologue for a Watery Highball", and one that would thrill the cultist, "Holden on the Bus".

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he complaint about obscenity and blasphemy in The Catcher in the Rye by our reviewer comes as a surprise. We were under the uncertain impression that the book's British publisher, Hamish Hamilton , had airbrushed some of those offending terms, just as they did ten years later in the case of William Styron's Set This House on Fire (see NB , last week). The recollection was

reinforced by a note on the back of the 1994 Penguin which boasts "for the first time in Penguin books, the original American text" . Placing this beside the 1951 text, we set ourselves the task of earmarking the changes. But where were they? In the first paragraph, "all that David Copperfield kind of crap" survives, as do "serious as he ll" (p7), " shoot the old bull" (p 11), "sonuvabitch" (p21), "very sexy bastard" (p28) and "god dam" (all over; page nos refer to the 1994 edition). A quick search revealed no excisions, leaving us in the dark as to the value of reproducing "for the first time" the American text. We won't call you a Salinger cultist if you can supply a list of alterations. A footnote. Having heard a rumour that Salinger was a reader of the TLS, we asked our subscription department to check the list, and received the following reply: "We do have a subscriber with the name J. D. Salinger who lives in Cornish, New Hampshire. I'm assuming it is the same J. D. Salinger". He most recently renewed in October 2009.

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novel by John Muckle, London Brakes, arrives in this office, published by Shearsman Books of Exeter. On the front cover is a one-line quote from Harold Pinter: "More power to your writing hand" . Whether Pinter expected his direct address to the author to be brandished on the cover we may never know. A fair guess is that he did not. No sooner had we read that than we came across an article in the Guardian (J anuary 18), concerning advertisements for the film The Road. The ads cited a four- star review in the paper, and the verdict "superb". Several people protested that the Guardian' s regular film reviewer gave The Road only three stars and never said "superb" . It takes a certain sort of reader to spot these things, but for such readers we ought to be grateful. A day or two later, the subject arose again, in the letters column of Time Out: " Your review of 44 In ch Chest gave it two stars, but the ad for the film quotes Time Out awarding it four stars. Are you recommending it or not?" We felt a personal involvement in this fast and loose talk when spotting a copy of How To Mix Drinks by Jerry Thomas, published by Hesperu s in 2008 at £7.49 and now in a new edition. The latter uses a quotation from a review: "" Ho w To Mix Drinks is reissued at less than the price of two undrinkable g&ts at your once-tolerable local' - Times Literary

Supplement". We recognized this, because we wrote it. Unlike some, we have no objection to our words be ing used, but the information stands in need of updating: it should now be one undrinkable g&t at your quite intolerable local.

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he above drawing of Ezra Pound by Henri Gaudier-Breszka appears in the Bow-Wow Shop, the online " international poetry forum" and, according to the editor, Michael Glover, "has never been published before". The owner lives in London and estimates that the drawing was made in 1914, shortly before Gaudier' s death, possibly as one of the preparatory sketches for the famous white-marble "hieratic head" of the poet. It shows Pound "at an uncharacteristic angle to his own character", Mr Glover writes, revealing "an unusual softness" . Only a few preparatory drawings are thought to have survived. The Bow- Wow Shop contains a grand amount of stuff, including poetry, stories and reviews.

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he 2009 Costa Book of the Year award, formerly the Whitbread Prize, has gone to A Scattering, a collection of poems by Christopher Reid. It was chosen above four other category winners, including the novel Brooklyn by Colm T6ibfn and The Strangest Man, a biography of Paul Dirac, "quantum genius", by Graham Farmelo. A Scattering commemorates Mr Reid ' s wife Lucinda, who died in 2005. The author receives £30,000. Previous poetry winners of the Costa / Whitbread include Elegies by Douglas Dunn (1985) and Birthday Letters by Ted Hughes (1998) which, like A Scattering , are serial poems in memory of the author's wife. The selection of A Scattering is also a gratifying success for Arete, the smallest of small publishers. Craig Raine has been running the literary magazine Areu! since 1999, but A Scattering is the first book to appear under that imprint.

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