The Times Literary Supplement Jan 01, 2010 No 5570

Patrick Carnegy Opera for costermongers James L. Rice Dostoevsky's unwritten sequel Joanne Parker King Alfred, war and spin James M. Murphy An American samizdat JANUARY 1 2010 No 5570

www.the-tIs.co.uk

THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

We like it here! Ferdinand Mount

UK £2.70 USA $5.75

ILS

MUSIC & SOCIAL STUDIES

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Patrick Carnegy Ferdinand Mount

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

Utopian labours, Finnegans Wake, RNA, etc

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

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BIOGRAPHY

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James M. Murphy Peter Fawcett Catriona Kelly

D. D. Guttenplan American Radical - The life and times of I. F. Stone Dominique Fernandez Ramon Mary-Kay Wilmers The Eitingons - A twentieth-century story

POEMS

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Kit Wright Anthony Thwaite

Beak At a Loss

HISTORY

10 Vladimir Tismaneanu Tim Kirk Nicholas Birch

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he suburbs, to the smart and fashionable a byword for boredom, smugness and small minds, are where a surprising four out of five of us live - and where most of the others would like to live, according to Ferdinand Mount, who reviews an "enchanting and persuasive" pictorial essay. From Tudor times to Dunroamin and Mon Repos, from Bedford Park to Milton Keynes, the 'burbs, "far from being sunk in unenquiring apathy, are in constant flux"; and offer a model of "positive planning" for a crowded future. Emma Cons and Lilian Baylis (below) had a dream of opera for everybody - suburbdwellers presumably included - and English National Opera was born. Nearly 130 years later, Patrick Carnegy writes, it has survived "innovative" directors, financial deficits, government funding cuts and Arts Council initiatives to present "opera as theatre in the vernacular" to audiences as varied as those envisaged by its founders.

John A. C. Greppin

13 Stephen Mulhall

Genevieve L10yd Providence Lost

COMMENTARY

14 James L. Rice

Dostoevsky's endgame - ' Astounding' rumours about the fate of the characters in the sequel to The Brothers Karamazov - which was never written Freelance TLS January 4, 1947 - Enter Becky Sharp

August Kleinzahler Then and Now ARTS

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Patrick McCaughey

Lucy Dallas

FICTION

19 Joanne Parker Toby Lichtig Tadzio Martin Koelb Mark Kamine Jess Chandler

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Ruth Morse Lucy Scholes Graeme Richardson

LITERATURE

24 Ad Putter Francis Robinson

AJ

Marta Petreu Diavolul ~i Ucenicul sau - Nae lonescu - Mihail Sebastian Guy Waiters Hunting Evil - The Nazi war criminals who escaped and the hunt to bring them to justice Christopher de Bellaigue Rebel Land - Among Turkey's forgotten peoples The Armenian Gospel of the Infancy - With three early versions of the Protoevangelium of James ; Translated by Abraham Terian

PHILOSOPHY

REFERENCE BOOKS & LITERARY CRITICISM

Not opera for all but socialism for all was the dream of I. F. Stone (born Isadore Feinstein). From radical left-wing beginnings, Stone " lived long enough and wrote independently enough", says James M. Murphy in his review of a biography by his fellow- TLS contributor D. D. Guttenplan, to become "something of an institution" and "America's most improbable celebrity journalist" . Stone gave the Kremlin "the benefit of the doubt" over the show trials and purges of the 1930s which would have delighted Leonid Eitingon, an "NKVD stooge", one of Stalin 's most trusted hit men, and one of the principal characters in a study of her colourful ancestors by Mary-Kay Wilmers, the Editor of the London Review of Books. Catriona Kelly enjoys some "appealingly dry" observations. The poet August Kleinzahler, in his first Freelance column, enjoys a Chinese Christmas lunch. For those contemplating their new year resolutions, the state of the economy, or simply how to avoid robertsmen and sneck-drawers, the Middle English poem Speculum Vitae , 16,000-plus lines of " morally edifying" matter, should prove helpful ; Ad Putter welcomes a medal-worthy new edition.

Susie Gilbert Opera for Everybody - The story of English National Opera Paul Barker The Freedoms of Suburbia

Bauhaus 1919- 1933 - Workshops for modernity (Museum of Modern Art, New York). Barry Bergdoll and Leah Dickerman Bauhaus 1919-1933 - Workshops for modernity Mike Evans, editor The Beatles: Paperback Writer - 40 years of classic writing Beatles to Bowie - The 60s exposed (National Portrait Gallery) Bernard Corn well The Burning Land Antal Szerb Journey by Moonlight; Translated by Len Rix Herta Miiller The Passport; Translated by Martin Chalmers Jonathan Lethem Chronic City Su Tong The Boat to Redemption ; Translated by Howard Goldblatt Barry Forshaw, editor British Crime Writing - An encyclopedia Herschel Farbman The Other Night - Dreaming, writing, and restlessness in twentieth-century literature Joshua Weiner, editor At the Barriers - On the poetry of Thorn Gunn Stefania Michelucci The Poetry of Thorn Gunn - A critical study Thom Gunn Selected Poems; Edited by August Kleinzahler Ralph Hanna, editor Speculum Vitae - A reading text Ghalib Lakhnavi and Abdullah Bilgrami The Adventures of Amir Hamza - Lord of the Auspicious Planetary Conjunction ; Translated by Musharraf Farooqi

IN BRIEF

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NATURAL SCIENCE

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Jennie Erin Smith

J. F. M. Clark Bugs and the Victorians Peter Milward, SJ The Secret Life of Insects - An entomological alphabet

MEMOIRS

3U

Solka ZinovielI

Emma Tennant Waiting for Princess Margaret

NB

Declan J. Foley, editor The Only Art of Jack B. Yeats - Letters and essays. R. S. Thomas Letters to Raymond Garlick: 1951- 1999 Napoleon Bonaparte Clisson and Eugenie: A Love Story; Translated by Peter Hicks. Tim Burrows From CBGB to the Roundhouse - Music venues through the years. Louis A. DiMarco War Horse - A history of the military horse and rider. Vita SackviIle-West Twelve Days in Persia Byron Rogers Me - The authorised biography. Clive James The Blaze of Obscurity - The TV years

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This week's contributors, Crossword

32 J. C.

The death of Tolstoy, Fugitive Eliot, Facebook unfriended by Lear

Cover picture: "The next move and take a season ticket", a London Underground poster by Hendy, 1927 ; from the exhibition Suburbia at the London Transport Museum until March 31, 2010 ©TfI from the London Transport Museum collection; p2 © Lehrecht Music & Arts; p3 © Boris Grdanoski/AP; p4 © Donald Cooper/Photostage; pS © Philippa Lewis/Edifice; p7 © Diana Walkerffime & Life Pictures/Gelty Images; p8 © Henri Martinie/Roger-Violletffopfoto; plO © Guy Waiters; pl2 © Ed Ka shi/Corbis; pl3 © AKG; pl4 © Kobal Coliection; pl7 © MaMA, N.Y; pl9 © Laing Art GalieryfTyne and Wear archives and museum s; p23 © Charles Hopkinson/Camera Press; p24 © Kharbine-Tapabor/Boistesselinffhe Art Archive; p25 © Bodleian Library Oxfordffhe Art Archive. The Times Literary Supplement (ISSN 0307661 , USPS 021-626) is published weekly by The Times Literary Supplement Limited, London UK, and distributed in the USA by OCS America Inc, 49-27 31st Street, Long Island City, NYIII01-3113. Periodical postage paid at Long Island City NY and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: please send address corrections to TLS, PO Box 3000, Denvilie, NJ 07834, USA

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MUSIC & SOCIAL STUDIES

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Blood on the carpet How English National Opera, established to bring 'wholesome amusement' to the people, has survived revolutionary directors and Arts Council policing ondon's English National Opera has been in existence in one guise or another for nearly 130 years. Its story, by and large, is that of operatic life in England since the Victorian era. Jeremy Sams, witty translator for today's ENO, once said that opera appealed to the British precisely because it was foreign and sexy. Don't spoil the musical magic and the frocks by compelling us to pay attention to the words: let's just join Or Johnson and revel in the "exotic and irrational entertainment". But that has never been the way with ENO. From Emma Cons and Lilian Baylis's idealistic dream in the 1890s of providing "opera for everybody" down to the business-model ENO of today, the idea has always been that opera is living drama, intensified by music, and that unless you get the words you're not getting it at all. This, as Susie Gilbert explains in her impressive chronicle, was important to the indomitable founding ladies. Cons and her niece Baylis were missionaries, with equal commitments to art, religion and social reform. They believed that the diversions of the wealthy should be stripped of their foreign mystique and opened up to all as recreation that would get people to examine and improve their lives. "Wholesome amusement" , wrote a campaigning journalist in 1861, would lift costermongers out of "the moral mire". For the first sixty years of ENO's life, Shakespeare, dance and lectures were equal partners with opera. The much-loved Old Vic theatre, just south of Waterloo, close to the tenements of Victorian London's workers (and now run with his own brand of idealism by Kevin Spacey) became the company's first home. Finance came from public appeals and from the private purse of Cons, until her death in 1912, and thereafter from Baylis. Wages and backstage conditions were abysmal, ticket prices kept as low as could be. The quality of performance was doubtless variable. Baylis asked little more of performers than that they stand and deliver. When the first combined Shakespeare/opera season was run in 1914-15, it was the greater popularity of Carmen , Lohengrin and Don Giovanni that paid for the plays. After the war there was a fresh momentum, with the Old Vic putting on all thirty-six of Shakespeare' s First Folio plays hetween 1920 and 1923. Raylis strengthened her hand by bringing in the conductor Lawrance Collingwood, Professor E. J. Dent from Cambridge to advise on opera repertory, and the baritone Clive Carey to enliven stage presentation. The derelict Sadler's Wells theatre in Finsbury, north of the Thames, was refurbished to become the home of the operatic part of the Baylis enterprise. Through the 1920s the "poorer classes" were gradually supplanted, so that in 1932 the Radio Times could report a knowledgeable audience of teachers, students and enthusiasts, "scores under their arms, waving their coffee

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PATRICK CARNEGY Susie Gilbert OPERA FOR EVERYBODY The story of English National Opera 703pp. Faber. £25. 9780 57l 224937 cups and arguing about the performance" . The Vic-Wells's great reformer of the 1930s, Tyrone Guthrie, kicked against Baylis' s faith in art as social engineering, insisting that theatrical professionalism was what counted. He disliked the still prevalent Victorian notion of the proscenium stage as framing an illusory other world. Following William Poel's antilrving initiative of the 1890s, he returned to the naked actualite of the Elizabethan stage while at the same time opening up a new world with his modern-dress Hamlet of 1937. Unable to go so far with opera, which he never saw as part of the "native cultural tradition" , he believed that the answer was always to direct it as living drama, just like a play, and not to allow it to become a concert in costume.

Dent' s mission was the opening up of German, Italian, French and Russian opera by performing it in translations that he himself supplied. Guthrie' s suggestion that Rudolf Bing might run the Wells was swiftly scotched on the urging of Dent who, for all his Continental leanings, had a deplorable anti-Semitic streak and was seriously worried by the prospect of German Jews taking over opera in Britain. Baylis's original aims seem to have come closest to fulfilment during the Second World War, after her death in 1937. There were no performances at Sadler' s Wells after September 1940, but public subsidy was granted for the first time in 1941. Guthrie managed to get no fewer than five Vic-Wells opera and ballet companies out on tour, typically with a tiny cast and "orchestra" of five, visiting small mill towns in Lancashire and Yorkshire. Well-attended children's matinees were given in Wigan, but hardly anyone turned up for The Barber of Seville in the Black Country's Dudley because, says Gilbert, "they were saving up for the Christmas pantomime". The story of how Sadler's Wells separated

27.12.09 Skopje, Macedonia The complex history of Macedonia includes a period as a Roman province, from the second century BC. This Roman bronze figurine, on show at the Museum of Macedonia, is one of 10,000 pieces in an annual exhibition dedicated to archaeological discoveries in the Republic. The show has a political

as well as artistic purpose for a country whose name is the subject of a long-running dispute with Greece. The Macedonian Prime Minister, Nikola Gruevski, declared pointedly at the opening that "Traces left by past civilizations are the only witness of our past and an inseparable part of our existence".

TLS JANUARY I 2010

itself from the Old Vic and thrived at Rosebery A venue after the war under the inspirational direction of, first, Norman Tucker and then Stephen Arlen is well, if perhaps too cursorily, told. Gilbert is always aware of the wider context in which the growth of opera and ballet at Sadler's Wells and Covent Garden was dependent on burgeoning public subsidy. Inevitably, demand kept well ahead of the available funding, Norman Tucker making sure that Sadler's Wells stayed in the red in order to suck as much as possible from the Treasury (where he once worked). The Arts Council, created by Maynard Keynes in 1945, was supposed to bring a degree of discipline to state patronage and to some extent it succeeded in this aim. The tentative claims of the "native cultural tradition" had received an enormous boost with the arrival of Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes at Sadler's Wells in June 1945. On this foundation, the 1950s and 60s were to become glory days for Sadler's Wells. Tucker pressed on with opera as "radical theatre" by bringing in Michel St-Denis, George Devine and Glen Byam Shaw from the Old Vic. Katya Kabanova with Amy Shuard, introduced to the company and conducted by Charles Mackerras in 1951, was a revelation to most critics (though not to the unimpressed Ernest Newman), but sold few seats. Tucker nevertheless persisted with Janacek, over time winning the public round so that the introduction of his operas became one of the company's most impressive achievements. I had my own first experience of live opera in 1959 when I bicycled the twelve miles from Rugby to see the Wells on tour at the Coventry Hippodrome. I still vividly recall the thrill of the violin figurations in the overture to Tannhiiuser heard from a seat very near the front, and then Ronald Dowd in the title role in Anthony Besch's traditional pictorial staging - quaintly described by Gilbert as "tactful". The conductor was Colin Davis, whom I was lucky enough to meet afterwards in the theatre bar. He said he was meant to be rehearsing Oedipus Rex during the mornings but had unfortunately forgotten his score. So the next day I biked over again, taking my own score for him to borrow and catching Rossini's Cinderella in the evening. Davis was touched and grateful, posting it hack to me some days later with a nice note. With hindsight I can't believe that the company wouldn't have themselves conjured up a score, but the ruffled pages of my copy suggested that it may well have served its turn for him on the podium. So Sadler' s Wells became for myself and thousands of others a gateway into opera, at affordable prices whether on tour or back in Rosebery Avenue. Michel St Denis's stunning production of Oedipus Rex opened the following year. Such repertory did not always go down well outside London. A

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MUSIC & SOCIAL STUDIES

Brigadier Hargreaves complained, "Why do we have to fill up the touring rep with things like Odious Rex and the Mackerras Case?" . I returned again and again for fine performances of the classic repertory and to be stretched by less familiar fare: Mahagonny, Attila, The Makropulos Case, From The House of the Dead and exciting works given by the New Opera Company, among them Henze's Boulevard Solitude, Szymanowski's King Roger and Shostakovich 's The Nose. This education culminated in the Reginald Goodall's Mastersingers in 1968, which I must have seen three or four times. It was a watershed in the fortunes of the Wells (1,499 seats), precipitating its move to the very much larger Coliseum (2 ,354 seats), where Wagner and the grander works of Verdi were going to sound so much better. Inevitably, this brought to a head the longSarah Tynan as Papagena in Nicholas Hytner's English National Opera production ofMozart's The Magic Flute, conducted by standing tension between the Wells and Nicholas Kraemer; London Coliseum, March 2004 Covent Garden, the latter now under threat because of the proximity of the two theatres. breaker's yard), Hansel and Crete!, Queen of Edwards became music director, there was a who' d directed festivals (Belfast and Perth) Gilbert unravels the tortuous story of how Spades and Lady Macbeth of Mtsenk. It was huge financial deficit. However nominally but had no experience of running an opera that tension was managed, and of the political farewell , meanwhile, to the old-style natural- appealing the idea of a "people's opera company. It was on his watch that the newly pressures to rehouse the company in a ism of ENO stalwarts John Copley and Colin house" may have been to Tony Blair's first established Lottery Fund came to the rescue, purpose-built theatre far away on the South Graham. Elder raised the lacklustre standard Culture Secretary, Chris Smith, the govern- enabling the Coliseum to reopen in February Bank. While the company remained at of the orchestra by replacing many of its ment couldn't bear the cost of funding it. 2004 at a cost of £41 million, of which £23m Sadler's Wells it was relatively easy for players. He and Pountney campaigned Smith revived the notion that Covent Garden came from the Lottery and £ 18m from pripeople to accept it as the London equivalent against opera as "a Fortnum and Mason should become a "hosting house" for perform- vate donations. Doran 's tenure, however, of Paris's Opera Comique and Berlin ' s window", insisting it should have a "healthy ances by the opera and ballet companies of was far from happy. His departure in 2005 Komische Oper, giving medium-scale works vulgarity and terrifically wide range of both the Royal Opera and ENO as "equal part- proved no less controversial than his arrival in the vernacular with British and Common- appeal". The bracing interrogation of the ners". Was he surprised when Richard Eyre's had been when, without advertising the posts, wealth singers, while Covent Garden did the Pountney and Alden productions (by no subsequent report, which he had commis- the Board replaced him with the twosome of grand stuff in its original language with inter- means always as popular as they hoped) was sioned, forthrightly rejected any such drastic Loretta Tomasi , former finance director, as national casts. The move to the Coliseum balanced with gentler but no less potent trans- reduction of ballet and opera provision in chief executive, and John Berry, formerly in compelled both companies to re-evaluate formations from Jonathan Miller (a Mafioso the capital? There was yet more government charge of planning, as artistic director. Since themselves, though the greater burden fell on Rigoletto, 1982, and a Savoy Hotel romp of a pressure to curb ENO's activities and move it then, and with Edward Gardner as music English National Opera (as the company Mikado , 1986) and Nicholas Hytner (Xerxes, to a smaller theatre away from the West End. director from 2007, things appear to have became in 1974). Its singers had to learn to 1985, The Magic Flute, 1988) which have Marks fought as well as he could, but retired steadily improved. Against all odds, both Covent Garden and ENO have managed to from the field in September 1997. make themselves heard in the largest theatre lasted to this day. Gilbert reveals that Pountney ' s confrontaNext into battle arrived the well-armed rebuild their beautiful theatres to near univerin the West End, and there was a loss of intitions with the "audience's susceptibilities" Nicholas Payne and the conductor Paul sal acclaim, however much blood may have macy for the medium-sized repertory. ENO's strategy under, first, Stephen Arlen were not always to the liking of his generally Daniel , who rallied the audience against the been spilt on their backstage carpets. Gilbert has a distinguished track record as (until 1972), then Lord Harewood (until supportive boss, Lord Harewood, concerned threat of possible closure with post-perform1985) and Peter Jonas (until 1993), was to as he had to be about the mounting cost of ance speeches from the stage. Winning a an archival researcher (working on her play to its strength of presenting opera as the revolutionary programming. Sharing his reprieve, Daniel proved a strong music direc- former husband 's biography of Winston theatre in the vernacular, winning laughter in concerns was the Arts Council, now under tor, though Payne's own quietly sage taste in Churchill) and her long book is meticulously comedies and visceral shocks in the more Thatcher's axe man, William Rees-Mogg, adventurous theatre (bringing in David documented. She has read every minute of violent works. In this there was an embodied which raised a very old and silly spectre of McVicar for Alcina and The Rape of Lucre- every management meeting and questioned censure of the Covent Garden audience's ENO and the Royal Opera sharing a single tia) deserted him when he hired the Spanish many living actors in the drama, though by taste for sumptuous undemanding entertain- theatre. (This was the critical moment when director Calixto Bieito for despoliations of no means all she should have. She gives a fair ment. ENO's provocative stagings were an the Arts Council swung from being the Don Ciovanni and A Masked Ball. It must picture of ENO's development and the probimplicit condemnation of the operatic taste defender of the publically funded theatres to have been hard for Payne to accept that the lems that have bedevilled it, much of it diffiof the wealthy in much the same way as the taking on the role of stern policeman.) Peter big successes on his watch were revivals cult to unscramble. The down side, unfortuseverely abstract Bolshevik stagings of Jonas, taking over from Harewood in 1985, from previous eras - Hytner's Xerxes and nately, is that the 700 pages are not an easy 1917-23 had been of the imperialist aesthetic was more in tune with the goals of what Magic Flute , and Miller's Mikado and Rigo- read. Too many of them are written in the lanof Tsarist Russia. Harewood wanted operas became known as the "Powerhouse" artistic letto. The deep trouble was that Pay ne, who'd guage of a judicious civil servant, concerned to be "made real in terms of contemporary directorate at ENO. At this time of great been forging ahead with the restoration of the lest any crucial fact be left out, although as it anxieties, taboos and shibboleths". So in financial pressure, Jonas had the courage to theatre, didn't get on with the investment happens, many of these are omitted: the list came German directors Joachim Herz and deride Fortnum and Mason productions such banker Martin Smith, who had been chairman of first performances is skeletal, lacking the Harry Kupfer from the Komische Oper, and as Comte Ory and The Pearl Fishers, which since 2001. To wide dismay, Payne was names of conductors, producers, designers British and American directors such as David had somehow crept into his nest and were ousted by Smith in the summer of 2002. As and singers, the latter all too seldom given Pountney and David Alden, excited as they enjoying full houses. Tarred with the same Gilbert observes, this marked a sea change in their due. A chronology would have been brush was The Magic Flute which, Hytner the direction of the company when it passed helpful. The reportage of board meetings and were hy what they ' d seen on the Continent. This heralded an overdue awakening of said, "delighted audiences, but backstage this from artistically knowledgeable bosses to political and financial negotiations hangs heavily on the narrative. British opera-goers to the radical reappraisal was a badge of shame". In Power House managerial accountants. There followed a period of serious demoralIt is always hard to recreate theatrical perof performance that had been going on (1992), the retrospective book celebrating abroad since Meyerhold in Russia (from their adventures, Jonas, Pountney and Elder ization and compulsory job losses, to which formance on the page. Gilbert does her best 1909), Toscanini at La Scala (from 1923) and wrote of having happily driven "the Mer- the chorus responded by staging a protest by quoting from press reports as she inevitaKlemperer at the Berlin Kroll (1927- 31). cedes on the wrong side of the road, put a few outside the office of Gerry Robinson, now bly must, even honouring "The Critics" with Things took off with the arrival in the early dents in the body work and filled the boot the Arts Council's chairman. They sang an appendix of their own. But few of the 1980s of Mark Elder as music director and with muddy Wellington boots (not to men- the "Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves" from performances that I can personally recollect Pountney, whose seventeen productions were tion suitcases, trilbies, wonky bedsteads, Nabucco and "Defend Our Homes and across the past half-century spring to life. Children" from Khovanshchina. Robinson Gilbert must surely herself be a fan of ENO to include iconoclastic versions of Rusalka, dark glasses and other gnomic properties)". A heavy price was paid for the Power- described it as "the most beautiful protest" he and have seen many of their productions. It is Orpheus in the Underworld (designed by Gerald Scarfe, who put Margaret Thatcher on house revolution. By 1993, when Dennis had ever heard. heard. Smith eventually a shame that she couldn ' t have given us some stage as "Public Opinion"), Carmen (set in a Marks took over from Jonas, and Sian replaced Payne in 2003 with Sean Doran idea what she thought of them.

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SOCIAL STUDIES

Life on the edge of things he late J. G. Ballard was famous for FERDINAND MOUNT living in suburbia, Shepperton to be precise. He thought it odd that anyone Paul Barker should think thi s odd. The suburbs were, in THE FREEDOMS OF SUBURBIA his view, the logical subject for any writer 240pp. Frances Lincoln. £25. seeking to track shifts in culture, for the 9780711229785 important post-war cultural trends had started there. The 'burbs were where it was at; they were socially as well geographically edgy, to in a more formal academic fashion. The book is sumptuously illustrated, givuse the sort of language he wouldn't have used. ing us on every page a marvellous range of It is hard to think of a more unfashionable semis, bungalows, villas, prefabs, shacks, claim. To the intelligentsia, the suburbs were chalets and mobile homes in every imaginaand always have been the place where noth- ble style - classical, Tudor, Queen Anne, ing happens, or nothing good. While the fates Gothic, Arts and Crafts, even modernist. of the city and the countryside vex every Nine out of ten of these dwellings sprang bien-pensant breast, nobody pays much atten- from a collaboration between the speculative tion to the people who live in between, builder and the client, without the sniff of an except to finger them as the Enemy. Lewis architect. From about 1830 on, after John Mumford, in his heyday as the urban guru, Nash built the cottages ornes in Park Village declared that the flight to the suburbs "carries East, the architectural profession largely withno hope or promise of life at a higher level". drew from the suburbs to await orders from D. H. Lawrence wrote in Kangaroo of the grander clients, such as the Grosvenor Estate "utterly uninteresting" suburbs of Sydney and the London County Council. Thereafter (where he had been for all of a fortnight): architects built town halls and lunatic asythose myriads of bungalows offered " no lums and company headquarters. They did inner life, no high command, no interest in not accept and were rarely offered commisanything, finally". From Byron to Graham sions for HDunroamin" or "Mon Repos", not Greene and Cyril Connolly, the "leafy middle- least because most of them believed such class suburbs" have been denounced as abominations should have been strangled at smug, small-minded and spiritually derelict. birth. Build up, not out, they chorus. HighArchitects and planners made common rise equals civilized, a theme recently cause with novelists and poets to deplore the reprised in Richard Rogers 's paper "Towards relentless advance of the little boxes and the an Urban Renaissance", which, as Barker little people who lived in them. Clough points out, is a plea for London to become Williams Ellis and his wife Amabel Strachey more like Lord Rogers ' s native Florence. launched two famous polemics between the Barker, by contrast, speaks up for Nonwars: England and the Octopus (I 928) - the Plan against Plan, for Jane Jacobs against octopus being ribbon development - and Brit- Lewis Mumford, for higgledy-piggledy plotain and the Beast (1937) - the beast being the lands against streets in the sky, for the human bungalow. The latter was a volume of essays and the individual against the machine a written by, among others, Maynard Keynes, vivre. But he does so temperately and with Cyril Joad, G. M. Trevelyan and Patrick Aber- a generous eye. He reminds us that architects crombie, the great planner and preserver, and and planners can build desirable suburbs: endorsed by a blaze of luminaries - Lloyd Norman Shaw's Bedford Park, Raymond George, George Lansbury and Julian Huxley. Unwin's Hampstead Garden Suburb and Every sword in Bloomsbury leapt from its Letchworth Garden City. So can benevolent scabbard to fight against the development employers and landowners: the Cadburys at of Peacehaven on the cliffs above Brighton. Bournville, Lord Leverhulme at Port SunAnd they did indeed make sure that such a light, the Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpes in thing never happened again, for the Town Edgbaston. and Country Acts of 1947 introduced state Above all, there is Milton Keynes. Here in control of land use on a scale that even the flattish bit of Bucks, the planners have William the Conqueror might have thought created a remarkable city which has now excessive. grown almost to the size of Nottingham and Even today when four out of five of us live whose inhabitants still love it and call it MK, in the suburbs, they are little studied, let on the analogy of LA. One of MK's charms alone defended in print. The publisher's is that it contains a variety of building styles: blurb introduces The Freedoms of Suburbia , from Bovis' s reed-thatched black-and-white Paul Barker's enchanting and persuasive pic- executive homes at the top end to cheap modtorial essay, with a nervous defiance as if the ernist bungalows designed by the Norman book were proposing free heroin for toddlers. Foster partnership in its early days. The This is not a systematic history like F. M. town's enormous grid, studded with roundL. Thompson's Rise of Suburbia. Barker, a abouts, is also enlivened by the occasional former Editor of New Society and a prolific ancient village centre which has long been writer on architecture and planning, proceeds swallowed up: Woolston and Wolverton, ambulando. These are Suburban Rides, Woughton on the Green and Shenley Church which in a gentler style echo Cobbett' s suspi- End. cion of people who take pleasure in bossing Those villages have been suburbanized, other people about. By this seemingly just as Thomas More's Chelsea and Pope's oblique method, Barker manages to convince Twickenham and Keats 's Hampstead were the reader of several propositions which turned from delectable villages into London might have made little impact if presented suburbs, as highly prized in their new role as

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in their old. Suburban change is remorseless and unpredictable. Islington was once the home of London 's dairies, and the playing fields where Thomas Lord turned out as a bowler for White Conduit Cricket Club; then it was developed as a "walking suburb" for city clerks, then it slipped downhill into bedsitshire and has spent the past fifty years climbing back to gentility. When Eric Hobsbawm, a newly demobbed sergeant, moved into a flat in Gloucester Crescent, Cam den Town, just after the war, he thought of it as "the western outpost of the vast zone of London's bombed and yet ungentrified East End". To think of this epitome of metro chic, the home of Mark Boxer's Stringalongs, as part of the East End takes some stretching now, as much as regarding present-day fashionable Hoxton as an extension of the West End.

Hampstead Garden Suburb; from the book under review Far from being sunk in unenquiring apathy, the suburbs are in constant flux. Barker points out that H. G. Wells would scarcely have recognized a single building in the high street of his native Bromley. The old shopping parades of the 1930s have been eclipsed by the out-of-town hypermarkets. Colin Ward, the doyen of anarchist anti-planners, regards the unfinished, transitional nature of the suburbs as one of its great attractions for a child. There were secret places for solitude in the fields and copses that had ceased to be farmland and were not yet residential. This edge-of-things feeling is beautifully caught in Spies, Michael Frayn 's child's-eye novel. When asked to choose their preferred type of home, Britons always put the bungalow top, with the Manhattan-style loft and the tower block nowhere. The Bengali peasant hut, the banggolo, triumphs over the officially approved ziggurat. Anthony D. King, in his social history of the ultimate low-rise residence, declares that " in the first half of the twentieth century, the bungalow was the

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5 most revolutionary building type established in Britain" . It was the people' s choice, not designed, directed or even approved by the artistic establishment. Nor will it do to sneer at the suburbs as smug enclaves for the middle classes. There are working-class suburbs at Dagenham and Barking, as there are at the scruffier edges of most conurbations. There are plutocratic suburbs at St George's Hill and Wentworth and Winchmore Hill. Every morning a fleet of white vans swarms into the capital from the suburbs of Kent and Essex and Herts to minister to the plumbing, plastering and electrical needs of the bankers of Notting Hill and Chelsea. The suburbs themselves become workplaces, as back offices migrate to cheaper premises on the M2S , and Croydon becomes Edge City. Beyond the Green Belt, towns like Newbury become "ex urbs", the most desired places of all to live in, just as Lakeside and Bluewater are the most popular places to shop in. These malls are not to be put down as tawdry American imports, since they derive ultimately from the glassed-in galeries and gaUerie of Continental Europe - Thomas Jefferson was so impressed by the Palais-Royal that he wanted to copy it back home in Virginia. Barker begins his book by watching a tower block in Hackney being blown up. He ends it by reflecting that scarcely any semis have ever been demolished, except when they stood in the way of road-building schemes. The sourest critics eventually succumb. John Betjeman, after all, began as a modernist, but by 1940 had repented to become the laureate of the suburbs. Even Slough forgave him in the end. But the orthodoxy was strong. Stationed in the Middle East during the war, J. M. Richards wrote a homage to the suburbs, Castles on the Ground, but on his return to the Architectural Review he toed the modernist line. The planning laws in their present rigid state give rise to the only serious corruption in British politics: they enable landowners to capture enormous unearned profits; even in a time of prosperity such as we have just enjoyed, they cause crippling housing shortages. Above all, in an age when thousands of acres are no longer needed for agriculture, they prevent ordinary people from living where they would most like to live (and from fostering biodiversity in their back gardens). As the Treasury report on land supply pointed out in 2003, current policy is bringing about "an ever widening economic and social divide". Paul Barker does not press these lines of argument too far. He stresses that he is not proposing to "concrete over" the English countryside; he is as keen as anyone to protect the Lake District and the Yorkshire Dales. He argues only that "' positive' planning is hest done with the lightest of hands". He urges too a gentle bias towards preserving the streets as they are, for they are a city's memory bank. But none of these things should be achieved at the cost of preventing people living the life they wish to live. Planning either slows change down to a glacial pace, or it is swift and destructive, as we can see from the post-war history of Liverpool , Birmingham, Bradford and Hull, to name but a few great provincial cities that have had their hearts ripped out. Better to yield to the mild incursions of the suburbs, and to the preferences of the people.

6

Sud et Nord Sir, - A careful reader of my book Paris-New York et retour would have realized that my attribution of victory in the American Civil War to the South was the result of a proof-reading oversight, the words "du Nord sur le" after the word "victoire" and before the word "Sud" having been left out in the final printed text (Letters, December 11). Had Patrice Higonnet continued his quotation where he left off, he and your readers would have seen that the result of that victory was that " I'egalite des races s' accomplirait hardly the likely un jour" outcome of a Southern victory. Of greater consequence than the obvious misprinting of my text is Professor Higonnet' s notion that my attempt to argue against prevailing trends in art, trends which he himself regards as dubious, is " not helpful", or irrelevant. He seems to place himself squarely among the ranks of those whom Trotsky once aptly described as "the worshippers of the fait accompli". MARC FUMAROLl College de France, I 1 place Marcellin Berthelot, Paris 75005.

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Gases and growth Sir, - Towards the end of his review of five recent books on the future of the planet (December 11), John Godfrey relays Al Gore' s warning that "human reproduction makes solving the climate problem even more difficult". The emphasis is misplaced. No amount of tinkering with industrial effluents will benefit mankind if unrestricted population growth is allowed to continue. Malthus wasn ' t wrong, just premature. With the population at 6 billion, it is sustainability that will determine whether mankind will survive. One of the many exhaust streams, Green House Gases (GHGs) , has received undue emphasis. It is merely one part of the larger problem. How this wrong-headed priority came into being is curious. Godfrey writes that it is now "scientifically quaint" to doubt whether man is causing disturbing climate changes. It is not quaint: it is scientifically rigorous. Some earthly temperatures have risen over the past century, although there have been larger temperature swings in the history of Earth. Levels of GHGs have also risen. There may be a link, but correlation is not causation. The linkage might have been persuasively established (or disproved) over the past decade if many scientists had objectively studied the temperature patterns at various altitudes, latitudes and

Utopian labours, Abyssinian travels Sir, - Felipe Fermindez-Armesto's review of Thomas More's " Utopia " in Early Modern Europe: Paratexts and context (December 4) misrepresents the aims and achievements of our book. He asserts that, despite the "enormous investment of effort" that went into the book, "readers should expect only modest returns" . Perhaps: our aims were indeed relatively modest. Yet we provide the first complete map of the translations and editions of Utopia up to 1643, offer transcriptions (with English translations) of all the prefatory materials of the translations, and uncover innumerable local stories of transmission , such as the association of the 1524 German translation with the Erasmian city of Basel, the trajectory of Lando's translation via Sansovino's Il Governo to the pirated French version of Gabriel Chappuys, and the interesting cluster of Latin, Dutch and French editions printed in and around Amsterdam between 1629 and 1643. Many historians have written about Utopia , but none of them has attempted this task or had these materials at their disposal. Fernandez-Armesto also lists "a number of editorial blemishes or regrettable judgements". These are largely spurious. He accuses Vibeke Roggen of confusing the reader by offering two interpretations of a Latin phrase; in fact, she (not "he", as Fernandez-Armesto has it) provides the standard meaning of the phrase, then argues that it had another meaning in this case. He claims that Trond Kruke Salberg fails to make good a promise to decipher a cryptic signature; the signature is, in fact, deciphered two pages later. He says "The appendix

[email protected] omits Latin editions, except, curiously, for a Milanese edition of 1620", but, as we twice explain (pp. xii and 145), Milan 1620 has the only new Latin preface; all the others date back to the early Latin editions and are easily available in modern editions. He asserts that "the omission of the notes - which include some of the most revealing paratexts - leaves the work feeling truncated" . Yet, as everyone who has read early printed books knows, they are peppered with marginal indications designed simply to draw the reader's attention to important points in the text; to have reproduced all the notes in editions of Utopia would indeed have been an enormous labour with meagre returns. A few which are the subject of censorship are discussed in the relevant chapters of Part One. His remark that "The book's coverage of the Dutch editions seems disproportionately short" is equally misplaced. Since the Dutch translations of Antwerp 1553 and 1562 appeared anonymously and without prefatory materials, they do not lend themselves to detailed analysis or contextual study. The new editions of the seventeenth century carry an

anonymous preface to which we gave proportionate attention. Finally, Felipe FernandezArmesto's reference to Norwegian Romantic utopianism is relevant neither to the early modern Utopia nor to the situation of modern Norwegian academics. There is no "superficially curious concentration of utopian scholarship in Norway": the contributors to this book, as the preface and credits make abundantly clear, were (in the main) younger scholars from departments of literature and languages who had the requisite skills to do research of this kind but who had not previously worked on More's Utopia. A team of scholars in Spain or Japan might have done the same work, but they did not. TERENCE CA YE St John 's College, Oxford. Sir, - In his review of my "capricious little book" about Abyssinian travellers, Golden Legends, Felipe Fernandez-Armesto says I am often "sneering or snide" . If so, I regret it - but "capricious little book" brings to mind pot and kettle. As for the travellers, Fernandez-Armesto thinks I "traduce" them. I invite any reader to compare (for example) his description of Dervla Murphy, "deluded by the quest for the modern equivalent of the Blue Bloom - herself', with mine, in which she appears as " indomitable", and then decide who is the real traducer of character. W. B. CARNOCHAN English Department, Stanford University, Stanford,

and other conservation measures.

However, suggestions of trapping or converting industrial effluent GHGs are dead wrong because they would encourage the world's industrial blast furnace to continue roaring at full tilt. It is unfortunate that global warming has attracted all the attention, while population growth is almost an aside. This is partly due to media overplay of the lack of consensus among scientists on global warming. This is the normal state of

affairs in unsettled areas of science. But the media has portrayed this as a conflict for dramatic purposes. And too many scientists have taken the bait, abandoning good science for advocacy.

a sentence. Jespersen .

Some,

like

OltO

But need I go on? Let us hope Mr Jespersen does not mind the inclusion. It is, after all , a reasonable skip from those other "mammals" to him.

LOUIS HAROYITZ 453 Stewart A ve ,

A. E. SANTANIELLO

Staten Island, New York 10314.

280 Riverside Drive, 4K

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Many a skip. Sir, - What better title for John A. C. Greppin ' s review of Adam 's Tongue by Derek Bickerton than "A Skip of the Tongue" (December 4)? While skipping into the second paragraph, we are delighted to read: Animals, perhaps from bacteria to mammals, have always had a mode of communication, whether it is just a chemical odour, a chirp, or

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some readers convinced that I have read Finnegans Wake. But I must confess that I have not; I do read in it, from time to time, with great

delight until boredom sets in. Will someone, by the way, someone who has read this unreadable work, tell me whether that first "m" in the

first "brimgem" is a typographical error? You don ' t know? Or care? We are in trouble, you and I.

This is from The Rhetoric of Fiction (University of Chicago Press, 1961), page 30 I , footnote 26. DA YID F. STOYER 2970 S. Columbus Street, I B, Arlington, Virginia 22206.

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Van Gogh Sir, - In pointing out, in his review of Van Gogh's Complete Letters (December 18 & 25) , that the Germans were the first Van Gogh collectors, Frank Whitford seems almost over-eager, in the same parenthesis, to say they were also the first forgers. More to the point is that the first selection of Van Gogh's letters was collected and edited by Margarete Mauthner, a German-Jewish art historian and collector, and published in Berlin in 1906. The Germans were also Van Gogh's first serious exhibitors, with some twenty exhibitions (not all devoted exclusively to him) showing his work in Germany before 1914, and Van Gogh's first biographer (1912) was the German art historian Julius Meier-Graefe (English translation, 1933).

California 9430 I.

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longitudes, instead of seeking confirmation of their premature beliefs. The data already exists. We just need a Darwin to make sense of it. Instead we've got Trofim Lysenko. Some of the suggestions for reducing GHGs would also contribute positively to sustainability. This includes better auto fuel economy

1939, though fragments of Work in Progress appeared throughout the preceding decade. If I dropped the point here I could no doubt leave

New York 10025. ----~,--­

Finnegans Wake Sir, - Doubtless J. C.'s report (December 18 & 25) of Professor Knowles's difficult relationship with Finnegans Wake was a great relief to many of us. But there is a precedent for everything. No less an authority than Wayne C. Booth had this to say, almost fifty years ago: The novel was first published in

NICHOLAS JACOBS 26 Lady Margaret Road,

London NW5. -----~,---

RNA Sir, - In a recent letter concerning the prebiotic soup (Letters, December 18 & 25), I recommended that John Walton should read Thomas Cech ' s 1989 N obel Prize address, "Exploring the New RNA World". Unfortunately, that sentence was telescoped during drafting. It should have read "Thomas Cech ' s 1989 Nobel Prize address, or his 2004 essay 'Exploring the New RNA World"'. Apologies; the overzealous editing was mine. STEPHEN FLETCHER Department of Chemi stry, Loughborough University, Ashby Road , Loughborough.

BIOGRAPHY sadore Feinstein was born to a poor, immigrant family in the working-class district of Philadelphia but grew up in Haddonfield , New Jersey, an idyllic small town. But Yiddish was spoken at the Feinstein home where his mother kept a kosher kitchen, and according to D. D. Guttenplan, "even as a grown man, he never entirely lost the little boy' s awe for those who could sing in school the line ' land where my fathers died' without feeling awkward about it". In 1937, the same year Buchenwald opened its doors, he changed his name to Stone: as a rising young journalist, he later said, he had not wanted to turn an anti-Semitic reader off before he had even read his work. He felt uneasy about this, but eventually would convert " I. F. Stone" into a nom de guerre whose reputation as public scold probably turned off far more readers than his birth name would have. For the next forty years he created a unique place for himself in American journalism, writing against the grain of national political consensus and raising issues which governments of neither party wanted to hear: a one-man Greek chorus of dissent carrying on the Popular Front traditions of the 1930s. He lived long enough and wrote independently enough to end up, like Mencken, something of an institution. Guttenplan has given us a highly readable and well-researched biography, that draws on a considerable volume of unpublished material and personal interviews as well as Stone's own prolific output. Stone' s career began in the dark shadow of the Depression at the same time as anti-Semitic violence in Germany was sending a chill through Jewish communities around the world; Stone felt that there was reason to fear something more substantial than fear itself. He boasted he was a red, not a liberal, and while Guttenplan finds no evidence he ever joined the Communist Party, John Gates, once Editor of the Daily Worker, has been cited in the press as saying that he had been a secret member for a time. Moscow ' s actions often set its own sympathizers at each other's throats, beginning with Stalin ' s purge trials of the late 1930s. Stone gave the Kremlin the benefit of the doubt that time - a dubious start, perhaps, for someone later to make his name as the scourge of official prevarication and deceit. By 1939, ideological stresses within the American Left rose to the surface when the Committee for Cultural Freedom declared Soviet Russia to be as much a totalitarian regime as Nazi Germany, and warned liberals not to be beguiled into glorifying "the color and cut of one strait jacket rather than another". In response, Stone was one of 400 who signed an open letter defending the Soviet Union and appearing to lump such figures as John Dewey and the Socialist Party

I

leader Norman Thomas among "the fascists

and their allies". The letter appeared in the Nation two days after the signatories and everyone else had been stunned into confusion by the announcement of the Nazi-Soviet pact. When the winter of the Cold War drew on, Stone became a pacifist, and put the blame for growing international tension on his own country. He saw America as a failed experiment, rooted in the exploitation that defines capitalism and - as the Depression had already demonstrated - headed for inevitable breakdown. "The socialism we believe in is coming every-

7

Weekly outrage JAMES M. MURPHY D. D. Guttenplan AMERICAN RADICAL The life and times of l. F. Stone 592pp. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $35. 9780374 183936

where", he wrote: the Soviet variety, for all Russia's inherited backwardness and expedient brutalities, was part of its irresistible progress. "The average American capitalist is frightened", Stone argued: it was not George Kennan ' s brand of containment America needed, but the kind to "get the average American capitalist to contain himself'. The emerging states in Eastern Europe he saw as a natural consequence of the recent war, offering a new and promising beginning for those shattered societies, rather than evidence for the myth of Moscow's imperialist ambitions in Europe and elsewhere which underpinned the doctrine of containment. The invasion of South Korea came as a devastating rejoinder to such a reading of international affairs, rendering moot any debate about the reality of the Cold War and making containment look more like the defensive strategy it claimed to be than the gratuitous provocation which its critics alleged. Stone,

I. F. Stone's Weekly, a four-page mimeographed sheet of news and opinion which would for the next twenty years afford him the luxury of being the most independent journalist in the world. It was, ironically enough, both a capitalist venture and an example of American samizdat - although , unlike his Russian counterparts, Stone would acknowledge the courteous and helpful service of the local post office. Had the Russian Revolution not occurred, Guttenplan would have had an easier task of setting Stone in the tradition of Thomas Paine, to whom he is sometimes compared. As it is, allegations emerged after his death that he had a covert relationship with Moscow ' s never-sleeping intelligence service. Guttenplan's most persuasive rebuttal is that the FBI itself could not firmly identify Stone with BUN (translated as PANCAKE), the radical journalist described in the Venona decrypts as recepti ve to an approach by a Soviet intelligence officer in 1936. The notes which Alexander Vassiliev made from Soviet intelligence archives, however, are more damaging, and Guttenplan buries them in a footnote. There he cites Vassiliev's book (written with two US historians, John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr), Spies: The rise and fall of the KGB in America, and even gives the page references concerning

I. F. Stone, March 1983 however, was not convinced. In France at the time and relying on a close reading of the New York Times, he challenged the national consensus with his Hidden History of the Korean. War. Not quite claiming South Korea started the war, he suggested that the South provoked the fighting, partly encouraged by warmongers in Washington. Even if a valid analysis - and later revelations from Communist sources suggest it was not - it was one America did not want to hear in the year of the Rosenberg trial. Stone found himself unemployable, with no savings and a young family to support. Even the Nation could not find a job for him. Feeling, he said, like a ghost, he decided to build his own pulpit. With borrowed capital and an inherited mailing list, he launched

Stone, but curiously fails to mention that they identify PANCAKE as Isadore Feinstein. Guttenplan asserts, but does not demonstrate, that there are "ample grounds for skepticism" ahout

Vassiliev's

reporting

and

mentions

that "a British jury found against Vassiliev in a libel action", which could suggest that Vassiliev's credibility had been undermined in a court of law. In fact, it was Vassiliev who claimed to have been defamed and the jury agreed that he had been. The accusations against him, however, were described as the defendant's opinions, and as such, "fair comment" for which damages could not be awarded. (Guttenplan's extended comments on Vassiliev's material can be found in the Nation, May 25, 2009, or at www.thenation. com/docI20090525/guttenplan.)

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Charges like these against Stone can seem more significant than they are. It is hardly a surprise that a young radical journalist in Depression-gripped New York was flattered , never mind intrigued, by an approach from the curia of a faith he half believed in. The question for us is what to make of it all. Unlike Harry Dexter White or Alger Hiss or (to skip a few decades) Ph am Xuan An, who became indispensable to important American journalists in Vietnam, Stone had little to offer America' s enemies. He wore his radicalism on his sleeve and no one can believe that any relationship he may have had with Soviet intelligence exerted the slightest effect, one way or the other, on his highly personal journalism. (We might speculate, of course, with what pious outrage he would have exposed a covert relationship between an American journalist and the intelligence services even of his own country.) Objectively speaking, as Marxists say, Stone's journalism perhaps did Moscow some service by its relentless effort to discredit the policies and leaders of the United States. But to speak objectively, it is reassuring that during a time of amateur, often farcical war against subversion , the country had room for such an inconvenient and confrontational figure. What Stone stood for publicly, in the end, is a more rewarding historical topic than the interest which a foreign service took in him, and which we cannot fully evaluate. Over more than two decades of standalone journalism, Stone became expert in mining an alluvial flow of public records to find nuggets of contradictions, absurdities and distortions with which to hold official America up to ridicule. Guttenplan praises him as a pioneer of confrontational, investigative reporting, but some will question how much there is to be proud of in anticipating the modern newsreaders' fashionable conceit (in both senses of the word) that everybody in public life is lying to them - a conceit which, with rich irony, has become as much a mantra of radicals on the Right as of adversarial journalists generally. Stone was as much a polemicist as a journalist and one can be moved by his passion and transparent outrage. One can also be numbed by his relentless contumely and snide mockery meant to get a derisive chuckle from likeminded readers. His criticism of the Soviet bloc and its moribund leadership was sharp, if infrequent, but all the more effective given its source. In time, his repudiation of the Cold War and its foreign entanglements made him a particularly prominent critic of the Vietnam War, during which he found many of his old left-wing audience returning now accompanied by their even more radical New Left offspring. He hecame a valued contributor to the New York Review of Books, and was welcomed back to the National Press Club: the Nieman Foundation now awards a medal in his honour. After a screening of Jerry Bruck's I. F. Stone 's Newsletter as a non-competing documentary during the 1974 Cannes Festival , the sixtyseven-year-old Stone qualified as America's most improbable celebrity journalist. As he became in his later years "domesticated", to use Guttenplan's word, he was even reconciled with some old adversaries like Arthur Schlesinger, Jr, or those, like Isaiah Berlin,

BIOGRAPHY

8 who had once distrusted his radicalism. D. D. Guttenplan's study is obviously written out of deep personal respect for Stone and his work, and Stone admirers will regard it as a vindication, if not apotheosis. Others may be put off by the feeling they are being pressed to join in the celebration. No doubt, a biographer must be sympathetic towards his subject; but here he is something of a champion, and the reader is shown the world the way Stone wanted it to be seen. Stone's sometime rivals among the anti-Communist Left are marginalized, and we hear little about establishment liberals such as Dean Acheson or Averell Harriman whose policies Stone so passionately opposed. Guttenplan is so much on his sub-

ject's side that he has even imported some of the acrimony that once clouded the dinner parties of politically committed New Yorkers so many years ago. His dismissive quip, for example, that Lionel Trilling - surely one of the ornaments of American liberal culture - demonstrated the "rebirth of an American Jew as an English gentleman", strikes an unwelcome note of undergraduate spite. The narrative of the twentieth century did not turn out the way the young 1. F. Stone expected. His own country, where he expected the worst and found so much to criticize, secured an increasingly better life for the great majority of its people, and made genuine progress in remedying the crimes

and lesser cruelties of racial and other forms of discrimination. (To take an example close to Stone's own history: Jews, numbering around 2 per cent of the American population , account for 51 per cent of Pulitzer Prizes for non-fiction in recent years. It is unlikely that an Isadore Feinstein today would feel it necessary to change his name to get a hearing.) The Communist world, with plenty of time to adjust and reform, proved unable to do either: it crumbled away, its governments nowhere capable of establishing a viable democracy and everywhere imposing a life of want and repression on their peoples. Some were disappointed, even shamefaced, by this lack of parallelism and salvaged what

they could of journalistic self-respect by focusing attention on the lifestyle illnesses they saw in one system, rather than the genetic malignancy slowly killing the other. Stone was not one of these, always convinced that there was enough cant on both sides to go around. He died on May 21, 1989, before he could witness the anti-Communist landslide in Poland the following month, the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia and the opening of East Germany in November, or the collapse of the Soviet Union itself two years later. A minor voice, but a major figure of dissent in American political journalism during the last century, it might be said that he missed the biggest story of his lifetime.

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ver since, not quite fifteen , he led his father' s funeral procession through the streets of occupied Paris, the novelist Dominique Fernandez has lived with the knowledge that he was the son of a traitor. When he took his seat in the Academie fran9aise in December 2007, he made a point of evoking the memory of his father, who, he said, deserved to be there more than he did. Now in his eightieth year, Dominique Fernandez attempts in this full and frank memoir to understand what made one of the most influential left-wing literary critics of his generation join Jacques Doriot' s Parti Populaire Fran9ais (PPF) in 1937 and end up as a Nazi collaborator. Ramon Fernandez was born in Paris in 1894, the son of a future Mexican diplomat and a Toulon sugar merchant and minor poet' s daughter, whom Ramon's father met while riding in the Bois de Boulogne. Following her husband's untimely death in 1905 after being thrown from a horse, Jeanne Fernandez embarked on a highly successful career as a journalist, which led to her founding the French edition of Vogue and writing a daily column in Le Jour between 1933 and 1940. In her grandson's unforgiving portrait, she is presented as an inveterate snob and an archetypal genetrix, domineering and destructive in her maternal love. When her son emerged from the Sorbonne in 1916 with a degree in philosophy, she refused to allow him to train for any profession and encouraged him rather to live off a string of aristocratic mistresses. Apart from a brief spell teaching at the College du Montcel, near Versailles, Ramon Fernandez would never hold down a proper job in his life. If he always lacked the strength of character to match his undoubted intelligence, his mother was largely to blame. Equally harsh is the treatment Dominique Fernandez accords his own mother. Born into extreme poverty in the Auvergne, Liliane Chomette rose through the French educational system to come top in the concours d'entree to the Ecole de Sevres in 1919 and the agregation des lettres in 1923, before selflessly devoting herself to a lifetime's career in schoolteaching. While at the Ecole de Sevres, she had been the favourite pupil of the renowned humanist Paul Desjardins who, forty-two years her senior, conducted an impassioned and highly inappropriate correspondence with her during her first two years as a teacher. Between 1922 and 1939, the deconsecrated Cistercian abbey of Pontigny, near Auxerre, was the setting for a series of residential summer conferences, started

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Family demons •

• •

PETER FAWCETT Dominique Fernandez RAMON 807pp. Grasset. €24.90. 9782 246 73941 8

by Desjardins: the Entretiens de Pontigny, which brought together the elite intelligentsia of Europe. It was there in 1925 that Liliane first met Ramon. By this time, he was a regular contributor to the NOllvelle Revue Franraise and had a reputation as a playboy, famed for introducing the tango to France and for his love of fast cars. The attraction was mutual. Liliane was dazzled by Ramon's brilliance, whereas he saw in the austere Sevrienne someone who was not only extremely pretty but also capable of helping him resolve his personal contradictions, at the same time as freeing him to some extent from the dominance of his mother. Despite the latter' s fierce opposition and Liliane' s own increasing misgivings, they were married in December 1926. In her son's account, Liliane stands accused of failing to share her husband's instinctive joie de vivre, being emotionally repressed and incapable of communicating her feelings to others. Although he admired and feared her, her son never loved her as he did his father, who paradoxically took little interest in him. If Dominique Fernandez's resentment of his mother and grandmother is clearly apparent, his adoration of his father is no less plain. It has been the inspiration for many of his novels, which can be placed under the heading "Prestige and Infamy" . His own militant homosexuality even leads Dominique to attrihute a secret homosexual past to his

father on the basis of an early, unfinished novel. Ramon ' s first published work, Messages (1926), was greeted by Charles Du Bos as the most outstanding debut since the war. It was followed by pioneering studies of Moliere (1929) - seen by his son as not just his best book, but the best book ever written on Moliere - and of Andre Gide (1931). Only when his marriage began to fall apart after he won the Prix Femina for his novel, Le Pari, in 1932, did Ramon become actively involved in politics. Not having fought in the First World War on account of the Mexican

Ramon Fernandez nationality he renounced in 1927, he had joined the Socialist party in 1925 under the influence of his friend Jean Prevost, but remained essentially uncommitted until the right-wing riots of February 1934 drove him, first to proclaim his Communist sympathies and then, after the failure of Leon Blum's Popular Front government two years later, to veer to the Right, supporting Franco's Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War. According to his son, it was the collapse of his marriage - he and Liliane finally separated in 1936 - which left him completely at sea and looking for a strong leader to cure both the nation ' s and his own ills. Although he wrote a regular weekly column in Marianne, he did not produce a full-length critical study for over ten years until a late flurry in the final year of his life saw the publication of major works on Proust and Balzac and, less happily, the first volume of a projected two-volume study of Maurice Barres. As Dominique Fernandez explains, apart from some of its outer trappings and the uniform much beloved by his father, the Parti Populaire Fran9ais (PPF) was not initially an overtly fascist organization. Led by Jacques Doriot, a former Communist steelworker and the mayor of Saint-Denis, north of Paris, it chose a third way, equidistant from Berlin and Moscow, based on French nationalism. Only gradually did anti-Semitism become part of the mix and, after the defeat of France,

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the German vision of a new European order was enthusiastically adopted. Ramon joined the party in May 1937 and was rapidly promoted to its Bureau politique, becoming a kind of minister of culture, responsible for the Cercles Populaires Fran9ais designed to counter the Communist-inspired Maisons de Culture. What seems incomprehensible to his son is that he should have continued to regard Doriot, who was little more than a common thug, as a potential saviour even after the emergence of de Gaulle in June 1940. In the various articles his father wrote in praise of Doriot, Dominique Fernandez detects a deliberate irony where none is readily apparent. According to his second wife, the socialite Betty Bouwens, Ramon even thought of joining de Gaulle in London in October 1940, but was prevented from doing so by the intervention of his mother. In the final part of the book, Dominique Fernandez examines his father's war record in forensic detail and is gratified to find little that is truly reprehensible, other than his participation , as a late replacement for Marcel Arland, in the notorious delegation of French intellectuals to Weimar in October 1941, and his sharing a platform with the notorious anti-Semite George Montandon just three months before the round-up of Jews, in the Vel' d'Hiv' in July 1942, in which members of the PPF were active. After 1942, he more or less ceased his political journalism. He resigned from the Bureau poiitique of the PPF in August 1943 and from the party itself in October. He performed acts of kindness to individual Jews and insisted on riding in the last carriage of the Metro, reserved for wearers of the yellow star. At the same time, he seems to have determined to drink himself to death. He died of an embolism in August 1944. His name had been on the Resistance' s blacklist and, had he survived, as one of Doriot's principal lieutenants, he might well have faced the firing squad. Dominique Fernandez' s courage in confronting his family ' s demons with brutal honesty should certainly be admired. His work is extremely well documented and provides a rich panoply of French literature and politics in the first half of the twentieth century. At times, his own strongly held opinions obtrude too much and he indulges in gratuitous attacks on Sartre, Malraux, Claude Roy, Leon Werth, the nOllveau roman and all modern exegetes of Proust. Now that he has finally laid his father's ghost to rest, it is to be hoped that Dominique will go on to compose the autobiography he hints at once or twice in these pages.

BIOGRAPHY

"D

isrespect for one' s ancestors is the first sign of savagery and immorality", says a character simply known as "the Russian" in Alexander Pushkin' s novel fragment "The Guests Arrived at the Dacha" (1828). However, Pushkin ' s own tributes to his ancestors brought him as much mockery as admiration from contemporary critics. For some exacting readers, those who chronicle earlier generations of their own family cannot win: the memoirist is suspected of snobbery if the ancestors are distinguished, and of blind family piety and indifference to the boredom thresholds of others if they are not. Mary-Kay Wilmers' s study of the Eitingon family goes some way towards disarming such positions. To begin with, the ancestors here are by any standards remarkable. Uncle Motty, born in 1885, relocated to Leipzig in 1902 and to New York in 1920, where he wheeled and dealed to win fur concessions from the newly fledged Soviet government. Later he became a purveyor to the American public of treated sheepskin, labelled "Bonmouton" which, according to its advertising, offered "the sleekness of nutria. . and the rich gleam of beaver". His companies made and lost fortunes. Slippery, yet able to expound with winning charm his schemes to investors - including Wilmers's own fatherMotty is easily the most memorable character in the book. Motty's brother Max, also a maternal great-uncle of Wilmers, shaped his life quite differently in terms of place and vocation. A philosophy graduate who became a pupil of Freud and a prominent figure in the psychoanalytic movement, he ended his life in Palestine where " he had a world map in his study on which little flags marked the exact position of every Freudian analyst in exile". Implicated in the disappearance of the emigre General Miller through his friendship with the suspects (the singer Nadezhda Plevitskaya and her husband Nikolai Skoblin), he may have been darkly associated with the Soviet secret services, but he comes across as more of a socialite than a politico - an almost smotheringly generous host and, as Wilmers's relations remembered, "a sweetie". The tritagonist, Leonid Eitingon, an employee of the Soviet secret police, is best known for his role as accessory to the murder of Leon Trotsky, playing a bit part in biographies of the Bolshevik leader. While Wilmers's account of the trio opens, rather opportunistically, with this murder scene, Leonid' s other assignments as an agent "licensed to kill", from Spain to China, were if anything even more lurid. Over the decades, he worked his way through a large number of mistresses as well as corpses. Wilmers suggests, quite reasonably, that the former may have heen useful camouflage, since a couple would have been less noticeable than a single person; but old adages about mixing business with pleasure come to mind. The prominence of these Eitingons, then, is not in question; indeed, in the case of Leonid, " notoriety" is more the word. At the same time, association with an NKVD stooge personally commended by Stalin (" As long as I live not a hair of his head shall be touched") is not the type of family connection most Western memoirists might be eager to flaunt. It is clear that Wilmers ' s decision to investigate her ancestors' history stemmed

9

Famil y romance CATRIONA KELLY

Mary-Kay Wilmers THE EITINGONS A twentieth-century story 476pp. Faber. £20. 978057123472 I

from genuine curiosity, not the desire to add retrospective lustre to her own, in any case distinguished, biography (since 1992 she has edited the London Review of Books). She remarks about her handsome and dapper father, "Even now I am pleased when someone who doesn't know him catches sight of him in a photograph, as if his being so goodlooking were an achievement of mine" skewering in advance pretensions to inherited stature. If descendants can take no credit for their forebears , then it is quite logical that they should not have to apologize for

This approach leads to a certain unevenness of tone. At times Wilmers makes claims to privileged knowledge of motive and reaction: "Argeloff wasn't glamorous and nothing in her life had led her to expect attention such as Mornard lavished on her" . On other occasions, she makes play of her bewilderment. Seeking out Leonid's surviving descendants in Moscow, she discovers that they are unwilling to break the code of silence that had so long been essential for survival. Blood relationship confers no insider knowledge. Indeed, it is not even clear where Leonid fits into the Eitingon family tree, and according to one tradition among some of Wilmers's relations, he may simply have used the name as an alias - though the espousal of such a strikingly non-Russian surname would have been an odd decision at any period of Soviet history. On meeting Leonid's relations in Moscow, Wilmers writes that Victory Day was cele-

Leonid Eitingon in the late 1940s with his stepdaughter Zoya Zarubina and her daughter them either (hence the absence of regret when Leonid' s work is described). At the same time, self-congratulation is not always eschewed, being displaced on to Wilmers's own admiration for her investigative project: "I was impressed with my own boldness in choosing to speak on the phone with the family of a high-level KGB functionary who was also a high-level killer. And a relative of mine". The Ritingnns is one of several " alternative" family chronicles published in the past few years to focus on the fate of assimilated Russian Jews after 1917. However, it differs from Masha Gessen ' s Two Babushkas (2004) and Igor N arsky ' s Fotokartochka na pamyat (A Snapshot as a Memento, 2008) in not dealing primarily with the immediate family. Max and Motty were a generation back even from Wilmers's mother, who in any case was not that interested in her family roots. Rather than a work of affectionate reminiscence, this is "history of an era" told through the lives of a few key figures.

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brated with "a great deal of food, laid out and eaten in no particular order: pizza, chicken, fish, caviar, crab salad (those dismaying tasteless sticks), other salads, bread, chocolate cakes, meringues, slices of orange, vodka, champagne, brandy and Fanta". The Eitingons offers a similarly startling combination of materials. Spy-story skulduggery is mixed with family gossip, passages of historical resume with first-hand reminiscence. Igor

Narsky handled his multifaceted project by using visual keys (like symbols on a map) to highlight passages of differing ambition: a miniature camera for meditations on family photographs, and so on. Wilmers, on the other hand, leaves readers to wander the labyrinth unguided. When she is speaking of her own experiences, Wilmers's style is often appealingly dry. She remembers how in Moscow in 1991 , during the contradictory and fractious period of transition, "No one on the street looked at anyone else, at least not in the eye. Doors slammed in your face; if you tried to buy something, the assistant barked". A plank over a puddle "seemed an outstandingly civic gesture" , yet "one of the surprising facts of late Soviet Russia ... is that the phone boxes always worked". There are endearing cameos: Aunt Mats, for example, whose cache of letters started up Wilmers ' s interest in the family's past, and Leonid's stepdaughter Zoya Zarubina. But the historical establishing shots are often of a "meanwhile in Europe" kind: "The centre of Shklov was looking trim, almost manicured" ; "Entire nations ... were transplanted from one part of the Soviet Union to another" . Early in The Eitingons, Wilmers represents her project as something rather like an act of filial defiance, imagining how her parents might have persuaded her to "drop the idea of writing about the Eitingons" in favour of " a professional". She herself takes the Sunday historian's proprietorial attitude towards the object of study ("a document in my possession"). Yet this is not quite a literary work. The backtracking between present and past makes it hard to lose oneself in the narrative, while the portraits given are often oddly unreflective. This is partly due to the book' s central characters: Motty and Leonid were both, in their different ways, energetically on the make, while Max must have been one of the least self-scrutinizing psychoanalysts ever to have walked Freud ' s earth. But the disengaged character of the depiction is also a result of Wilmers's own narrative preferences. While it was brave to eschew the hackneyed strategies of the "quest for the truth" or "voyage into the self', the main dynamic in the book becomes a constant worrying at the material ("I don't know what Max said", ''I'm sure Motty and Bess were there", "Do secret agents have address books that they leave lying around?"). At one point, Wilmers alludes to the Russian scholar Alexander Etkind's "unusual ability to romance the facts and still be taken seriously". Might this contain a flicker of envy from a writer who appears to have pondered so much on and round her ancestors' lives that facts and romance prove equally elusive?

Beak To the clicking of knitting needles, I fell asleep on the train And I dreamed of knitting, is this what they call woolgathering, Dreamed of my mother purling and plaining to patterns In Woman's Own and Woman. I woke to a woman Whose long mauve thumbnail was sharpened into a spike And she texted, texted, texted, with that pecking beak.

KIT WRIGHT

HISTORY

10 annah Arendt once wrote about the difficulty of passing judgement on various individuals caught up in the "intellectual storms of the twentieth century". She was right: what appear to us today as crystal-clear choices were, especially during the interwar period, maddeningly complex reactions to the crisis of liberalism and democracy. Mihail Sebastian, a Jewish-Romanian playwright, novelist and essayist, epitomized this dramatic, and often traumatic, situation. Born Iosif Hechter in the port of Braila in 1907, Sebastian yearned all his life to be accepted by his peers as a genuine Romanian intellectual. He desperately tried to become a Jewish-Romanian writer in a country where far-Right zealots (and some mainstream politicians) emphatically questioned the "Romanianness" of all who were not Orthodox Christians. One such guru was Nae Ionescu, a professor of metaphysics and pseudo-theological oracle who, especially after 1934, became the main intellectual voice for Romanian Fascism (the third-largest movement in Europe). Sebastian fell in love with Ionescu and from 1927 to 1934 served as an editor on Ionescu ' s paper, Cuvantul (The Word). This affiliation lasted even after the paper moved closer to the Iron Guard, the mystical revolutionary movement that hoped to cleanse Romania of foreigners and liberal "rottenness". Hitler's coming to power radicalized all political factions in Romania. As a testament to his tribulations, Sebastian wrote the novel For Two Thousand Years (1934) and asked Ionescu to contribute a foreword. The

H

A faustian pact VLADIMIR TISMANEANU Marta Petreu DIAVOLUL ~I UCENICUL sAu Nae Ionescu - Mihail Sebastian 287pp. Iasi and Bucharest: Editura Polirom. RON32.95. 978973 46 1492 9

professor did so, and the result was an egregiously anti-Semitic text based on time-worn theological dogmas. Attacked in left-wing, liberal and Jewish circles for accepting Ionescu ' s toxic preface, a wounded Sebastian responded with How I Became a Hooligan (1935), a passionate pamphlet against intolerance which described Fascism and Communism as equally inimical to individual freedom. In this and subsequent writings, Sebastian strove to present himself as a pristine democrat and defended his collaboration with lonescu at Cuvantul. During the Second World War, a victim of ignominious persecution, Sebastian kept a journal which was published in the 1990s to international acclaim, earning frequent comparison with the diaries of Victor Klemperer. He died in 1945 after being run over by a truck. One of his pre-war novels carried the prescient title The Accident. Marta Petreu has written an absorbing,

trenchant and truthful book. The author of An Infamous Past, a superb analysis of E. M. Cioran's Fascist youth (reviewed in the TLS, October 13, 2006), she is well qualified to deal with the divisive topic of Sebastian's early political extremism. Diavolul ~i Ucenicul si1u: Nae lonescu - Mihail Sebastian (The Devil and His Disciple: Nae Ionescu Mihail Sebastian) explores Sebastian ' s antiliberalism and anti-rationalism, and his attraction to Italian-style Fascism during the seven years he was Ionescu ' s most trusted lieutenant at Cuvantul. Petreu pierces the veil of half-truths and lies regarding Sebastian ' s early writings and his enduring infatuation with lonescu. The professor' s bigoted preface failed to shake Sebastian's loyalty towards a man he compared in his diary to the Devil incarnate. Indeed, the two seemed bound by a strange, unfathomable complicity. Ionescu, who would serve as the prototype for the Logician in Eugene Ionesco's play The Rhinoceros, died in 1940, but his image continued to haunt Sebastian ' s dreams during the Holocaust. Petreu's fundamental argument, carefully documented, is that Sebastian ' s youth was imbued with Fascist propensities which he later chose to conceal rather than examine. She has read hundreds of articles written by Sebastian in full agreement with Ionescu's

collectivist, religiously based vision of the ethnic community. Sometimes, she stretches a point, insisting on meanings that may not have been intended; and while it is true that Sebastian had lots of admiring things to say about Mussolini's Fascist state, it is also important to remember that, until 1938, Italian Fascism was not racist and some Jews (including Vladimir Jabotinsky) praised some of the Duce's policies. Nevertheless, this is a persuasive study which shows how ostensibly lucid intellectuals could fall in love with perverse ideas and grotesquely exclusive fantasies. It also has much to say about political demonism, revolutionary nihilism and religious fundamentalism - the three diseases that devoured Romania (and East Central Europe) in the 1920s and 30s. Sebastian ' s tragic encounter with Fascism was in many respects part of a general European trend to question the power and value of reason (a topic Petreu might have explored further). In How I Became a Hooligan, Sebastian wrote: "Critical spirit does not wear uniforms. Critical spirit is a civilian". He was right, yet, as Marta Petreu shows, before (and even after) he wrote those appealing words, he was himself all too ready to emasculate his critical faculties. In exchange, he received the disdainful blessing of a Mephistopheleslike prophet of the far Right. This necessary book does not diminish Sebastian's alleged stature, as some angry Romanian critics have hastened to proclaim. Rather, it justifiably questions the dubious iconic status of a "human, all too human" intellectual.

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U nforgotten if unpunished he persistence of Nazi hunters in seeking those war criminals who have defied both death and statutes of limitations seems to many to be increasingly anachronistic, more than half a century after the end of the war. Yet so much of what happened during and after the Second World War remains obscured by the "year-zero" consensus and the need for reconstruction and reconciliation, that the pursuit of the guilty is still a rewarding occupation. Guy Waiters's compelling and thoroughly researched account of the war criminals who escaped justice, the halfhearted attempts of the Allies to pursue them, and the unwavering support they received from sympathizers is a timely reminder of the many skeletons in Europe's cupboard. Exhausted by the effort of defeating Hitler, Waiters tells us, the Allies had neither the material nor the psychological resources to catch war criminals. The Central Registry of War Criminals and Security Suspects (CROWCASS), established towards the end of the war, was unable to publish its 80,000-strong "wanted" list because of a shortage of typewriter ribbons. The Canadian war crimes unit cabled London with repeated requests for copies of Cassell's German-English dictionary, while the American Counterintelligence Corps (Cl C), although better resourced, and reputedly more gung-ho, suffered from a lack of personnel because war crimes units were "seen as backwaters". Consequently most of the small fry - and many of the big fish - managed to slip through Allied fingers - in so far as the Allies' interest in justice was not

T

TIM KIRK Guy Waiters HUNTING EVIL The Nazi war criminals who escaped and the hunt to bring them to justice 518pp. Bantam Press. £18.99. 9780593 05991 3

eclipsed by the new expediencies of the Cold War. The ones who got away did so with more than a little help from their friends. "Poglavnik" Ante Pavelic, leader of the murderous Ustasha movement, benefited, like many Croatian war criminals, from the help of Monsignor Krunoslav Draganovic, who saw hundreds of his countrymen provided with safe passage to Argentina. Draganovic, who was himself involved in the expropriation and forced conversion of Serbs, could rely on the Vatican' s sympathy for Croatian "refugees", and Pius xn, naturally sympathetic to regimes that supported the Church, felt Pavelic was a "much maligned man and not guilty of murder". But the Croatian dictator seems to have had many friends: after his escape he was apparently sheltered near St Gilgen by a sympathetic Austrian, and was said (by Tito, Stalin and the Americans) to be working for the British, before making it to Rome, where he was rumoured to be a guest at the Pope's summer residence; or, according to American intelligence, living in church property in the Trastevere district. Much of the story of his escape - and that

The concentration camp guard Erna Wallisch at her flat in Vienna in 2007; from the book under review of many others - is a mixture of hearsay, disinformation and speculation. The Allies lied not only to each other but also to their own political masters about the war criminals they employed for intelligence purposes, and there is much debunking to be done as Waiters tries to get at the facts. The ODES SA network was less the sinister society evoked by thriller writers and conspiracy theorists than an aggregate of ad hoc organizations and sympathetic individuals, in Italy, Spain, the Balkans - and Britain, where Oswald Mosley and his wife were

TLS JANUARY I 2010

keen to do their bit. More gratifyingly, most of those who did manage to reach the welcoming arms of Peron's Argentina arrived not with Nazi gold but with little more than did the Jewish refugees they had driven from Europe over the previous decade. Waiters's withering scepticism is impartial, and its most high-profile target is Simon Wiesenthal, the very personification of the Nazi hunter. At the very least, Wiesenthal's own accounts of his past are conflicting and unconvincing; at worst they raise questions about his whereabouts at times during the war, and about his ability to survive, that recall Bruno Kreisky's accusations of collaboration with the Gestapo. Waiters does not reiterate the accusation directly, but he makes it clear that Wiesenthal lied, most significantly about his role in the hunt for Adolf Eichmann; whether for the good of the antiNazi cause, for personal glory or for other reasons will never be clear. It is unlikely that anyone would now dispute the ineptitude - to put it most charitably - of many of Wiesenthal's investigations, but he had a key role to play in the founding mythologies of the notionally anti-fascist post-war Europe that existed between the mid-1940s and the 1980s. His truth is not the only one that has unravelled with the passing of the post-war world and the rehabilitation of neo-fascists under the weaselly rubric of "post-fascism". A final vignette - the author's encounter in Vienna with the SS camp guard Erna Wallisch - reminds us that the Nazi hunters' work is not yet done. Waiters could do nothing about the Austrian government's refusal to prosecute her, but it was worthwhile making it clear to her that her crimes, if unpunished, are not forgotten.

HISTORY n 2001 , the New York Review of Books published an erudite, well-sourced essay by a British journalist living in Istanbul , Christopher de Bellaigue, about Turkey ' s passage from Empire to Republic. A Harvard professor, James R. Russell , promptly wrote in accusing him of denying the Armenian genocide. Rebel Land is de Bellaigue's delayed response to the controversy he unwittingly sparked. As such, it serves as a sort of double exorcism. In place of what the author calls his erstwhile "Kemalist" standpoint, it tells the story of Turkey's twentieth century from the perspective of Anatolia's underdogs, the Armenians, the Kurds and the syncretistic Alevis, peoples crushed or coerced by the great rollers of nation-building and modernization. Moreover, while de Bellaigue hasn't given up on books, as his extensive bibliography shows, they take second place to his determination to "go to the back of the vessel and mix it in steerage with the forgotten peoples", and to get the story of "their loves, their losses and their sins". It is an excellent strategy for writing about a country afflicted more than most by reams of birds-eye commentary and tired generalizations about bridges - or clashes - between civilizations. De Bellaigue has chosen his berth well too. A district of some 50,000 souls in mountainous eastern Anatolia, Varto is not just divided on ethnic and sectarian lines, with Sunni Muslims and Alevis, speakers of Kurmanji Kurdish and the distantly related Indo-European language Zaza. It is also the home of individuals whose lives have created ripples far beyond the narrow confines of their birthplace. There is Mesrop Mashtots, the fourth-century ascetic who invented the Armenian alphabet; Halit Cibran, a mastermind of Turkey's first great Kurdish rebellion; Mehmet Serif Firat, an "amateur historian, foul-mouthed bully, sycophant" whose Kurddenying history of Varto, later promoted by the leader of Turkey's first military coup, is an emblematic product of the eagerness of early Republican Alevis to throw themselves into

I

11

Back in steerage NICHOLAS BIRCH Christopher de Bellaigue REBEL LAND Among Turkey' s forgotten peoples 270pp. Bloomsbury. £20. 9780747586289

the embrace of the new nation-state; and Nizamettin Tas, a senior PKK commander who defected to set up his own party. Moulding oral histories into a narrative is quite an undertaking. Renowned among Kurds for their taciturnity, the people of Varto prove extremely unwilling at first to speak to this pale-faced, Turkish-speaking foreigner holed up at the dormitory for local teachers. When they do, they more often than not give diametrically opposed accounts of events from 100 years before or, indeed, from last week. Back in Tehran (his new home) after his first stint in eastern Turkey, de Bellaigue is reminded of E. H. Carr's dictum: "It does not follow that because a mountain appears to take on different shapes from different angles of vision, it has objectively either no shape at all or an infinity of shapes". "And yet that is what I saw: an infinity of shapes" , he comments ruefully. He did well to persevere. Rebel Land steps nimbly through the intricacies of a chaotic, bloodfilled century to create a chronicle that is gripping, moving and - with one significant exception - fair-minded. De Bellaigue's portrait of the most controversial period of Varto's recent history, the ethnic cleansing of Armenians in 1915, is exemplary. He describes how the Ottoman Empire, bereft of its former heartlands in Europe, flooded with refugees fleeing the violence of Bulgarian and Serbian gangs,

stumbled towards the First World War " scared and scabrous", primed for more bloodletting. In the pages that follow , he convincingly dismembers the claim touted by defenders of the official Turkish thesis that the mass murderthat began in May 1915 was the work of rogue gendarmerie units and unruly Kurds. There is space too for the bloody aftermath of the massacres, when Armenian militias who had entered the district in 1916 with the advancing Russian army exacted brutal revenge on Alevi villagers as they retreated. Like their Armenian former neighbours before them, de Bellaigue writes, the Kurds went to their deaths numb, listless or naively convinced no harm would come to them. The brief period of Russian occupation, he adds, left surprisingly positive memories in the minds of modern Vartolu: a just, red-bearded commander and sugar for the starving children. (The same is not true of neighbouring areas, where Russians haunt folk songs like ogres in a Scandinavian fairy tale.) Subsequent chapters on Sheikh Said's revolt of 1925, the shifting balances between Alevis and Sunnis in the interwar years, and the Alevi Kurds ' imperceptible slide from statism through leftism and Kurdish nationalism to a slow reappropriation of their disappearing religious heritage are similarly sure-footed. De Bellaigue is right to emphasize the role the junta' s new constitution of 1960 - with its contradictory mixture of Turkish nationalism and political liberalism - had in planting the seeds of Kurdish separatism in the 1980s. Still smarting from the torture they suffered from a much heavier-booted band of putschists in 1980, Turkish intellectuals of all stripes today have a tendency to view what came before as a time of Arcadian innocence. Where Rebel Land really warms up, though, is in its treatment of the Kurdish sepa-

Imagination URMILA SESHAGIRJ

ratist war since 1984. De Bellaigue seems just to have missed Aliza Marcus's rigorously objective Blood and Belief' The PKK and the Kurdish fight for independence, published months after he left Varto early in 2007. Yet, while his account is less detailed than Marcus's, its grounding in a place the reader has become familiar with gives it a particular plangency. We don't just hear PKK members musing abstractedly on the growth of the group from a hundred-strong band of hotheads to a guerrilla force of 15,000. We watch as they take the decision to drop everything and take to the mountains, we follow them on campaigns through terrain their fathers herd goats on, we eavesdrop as they creep home to visit relatives they haven't seen for years. De Bellaigue's account is full of resonant details. His observation that the senior PKK commander Nizamettin Tas is the grandson of the ostler of the high-born leader of an earlier Kurdish revolt encapsulates the way war and modernization have accelerated the corrosion oftraditional Kurdish society. The story of how a notorious state-backed hit man used to frequent a bar owned by a Kurdish nationalist deputy is strikingly suggestive of the thinness of the walls dividing sides in this double civil war: Turk against Kurd and Kurd against Kurd. De Bellaigue's book has one serious shortcoming, though: his even-handedness seems to dry up when it comes to Turks themselves. To an extent, this is understandable. He is at least partially right when he says that there are two Turkeys, a "soft one" and a "hard one": any reporter with a conscience finds shuttling back and forth between tourist-laden Istanbul and new excavations of ten-year-old mass graves in Cizre a morally disorienting experience. De Bellaigue doesn' t seem to have had much luck with the Turks he met in Varto either. The three snide, slovenly, sunflower-seed cracking teachers he shares digs with sound like nasty pieces of work. And then there is the gendarmerie captain, the real

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12 villain of the piece, as "fit and lupine" as he is contemptuously chauvinistic. But do these unhappy meetings really give him the authority to pass judgement, later in the book, on "the casually superior ruminations of the state's administrative class. . that familiar blend of revulsion and pity, refined by three years among the inferior dross of eastern Anatolia, that forms the attitude of Turk towards Kurd"? In the five weeks I spent late in 2007 travelling from village to vi llage across eastern Anatolia, not one of the scores of teachers I met struck me as fitting de Bellaigue' s description of his former rooming mates as "successors to the teachers who ... had beaten children for speaking languages other than Turkish", "the republic's eyes and ears [who] would be expected to inform the authorities of a spike in nationalist sentiment here, a nocturnal visit by a PKK guerri lla there". Instead I found young men and women who, for miserly wages, battled loneliness and prejudices of somebody else's making to perform a difficult job to the best of their abi lities. I recall the way one gallantly and angrily leapt to the defence of a little girl whose tattered shoes I had tactlessly remarked on. Nor am I convinced that it is fair to say that "It may help to look on Varto, in common with thousands of other towns and villages across south-eastern Turkey, as a place under occupation" . There are a lot of troops, but there is a war going on. And while ethnic and political differences undoubtedly do increase the distance between the governors and the

HISTORY & RELIGION

A Kurdish family living in Diyarbakir, Turkey, 2003, having been displaced from their village of Lice in 1992 governed in Kurdish areas, senior civil servants in western Turkish towns - also outsiders - are hardly model men of the people. De Bellaigue's eagerness to throw off the official ideology he claims once to have accepted almost unthinkingly seems to be behind the book' s occasional errors offact. He is right, for instance, to disparage the youthful district governor who denies there are minorities in Turkey, but not for the reasons he implies. A Sunni Muslim country despite its veneer of secularism, Turkey considers only non-Muslims to be minorities. Call it Stockholm syndrome if you will, but Alevis and Kurds don't like being referred to as minor-

ities either. They point out to well-intentioned Europeans who have flown in to sympathize with their plight that "We fought side by side with Sunni Turks to found this country". In many ways, Rebel Land is an accurate portrait of Turkey at the time de Bellaigue was doing his research. The years 2005 to 2007 were very strange indeed. Turkey had just begun European Union accession proceedings. Parliamentarians with a fondness for fisticuffs in the lobbies had settled down like diligent schoolchi ldren to pass one liberalizing law after another. And then suddenly, almost overnight, the country was engu lfed in malevolence. The streets seemed to be filled

with lynch mobs. A group of ultranationalist lawyers nobody had ever heard of opened dozens of insult cases against prominent liberals, triggering hate campaigns that led to Orhan Pamuk's exile and the Armenian-Turkish journalist Hrant Dink's murder on a crowded Istanbul street. Another lawyer sauntered into the High Court and gunned down a judge. Three hundred miles to the east, a mob of youths tortured a German pastor and two Turkish converts to death. De Bellaigue's bugbear, Yusuf Halacoglu, the nonentity in charge of Turkey's state-run History Foundation, made headlines with comments about how, "unfortunately", many Alevis were Armenian converts, while the "'uncircumcised" PKK hadn't even had the decency to convert to Islam. Small wonder Rebel Land is so pessimistic in its conclusions. True, these people and their minority ideology haven't gone away. But a sign ificant number of them are now in custody awaiting trial , some for membership of a group that prosecutors say was trying to trigger military intervention. The rest have sunk into oblivion. The novelist Alev Alatli once joked that Turkey was more difficult to predict than Schroedinger's Cat. But Turkey today does seem an infinitely sunnier place. The Turks who make up the majority of its population as well as being in many ways the truly forgotten people in Western accounts of these lands - deserve a little more slack than they are given in Christopher de Bellaigue's otherwise excellent book.

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hi s English translation of a littleknown apocryphal Infancy Gospel is taken from the Armenian version of a probable but otherwise unknown Syriac original. Apocryphal texts were initially presented as divinely inspired but were later deemed heretical by the early Church Fathers, and thus not part of the inspired canonical texts of the New Testament, most of which were established by the mid-second century. A reader of these apocryphal texts will find considerable differences by comparison with the familiar texts of the canonical New Testament. In addition to presenting new stories and narratives, they can on occasion show the Holy Family and the apostles in a different light: uncaring and even vindictive. There are also strong hints of Gnosticism. Gnosticism is a term from the early Christian period, referring to a philosophic movement starting most likely with Zoroastrian dualism. It was developed through Hellenistic philosophy. Gnosticism marched to a drumbeat slightly different from that of mainstream early Christian ity. Apocryphal writings often lack the humility and gentleness so common in the canonical New Testament; this is especially so in The Armenian Gospel of the Infancy , where the writing appears to be powered by a different engine, as if composed by imitators who misunderstood Christ's message. The apocryphal gospels include material attributed to Sts Peter, Thomas and Philip, among others. To give an example of their peculiarity, note the final verse in the Gospel of Thomas, verse 114: "Simon Peter said to them, ' Make Mary leave us, for females are not worthy of life'. Jesus said, 'Look, I shall guide her to make her male. So that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every female who makes herself

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Jesus's dark side JOHN A. C. GREPPIN THE ARMENIAN GOSPEL OF THE INFANCY With three early versions of the Protoevangelium of lames Translated by Abraham Terian I 89pp. Oxford University Press. £63 (US $140). 9780 19 954 1560

male will enter the Kingdom of Heaven '''. The other apocryphal books have simi lar surprises. The Armenian Gospel of the Infancy, which includes a solid commentary by Abraham Terian to complement his translation, tells the story, in considerable detail , of Jesus's infancy, childhood and early manhood. There are two principal Armenian manuscripts, one called "the shorter", and the other "the longer". Terian's translation is from a collation of both with reference to other small scraps sti ll floating around. There is little doubt that it was taken from a Syriac rather than a Greek original since the Armenian

translation reveals clear Semitic syntactic structures, especially in possessive and adjectival structures, for example, "sleep of depth" rather than "deep sleep". Another apocryphal Infancy Gospel attributed to Thomas has long been known, but is so brief that it could only be a skeletal reference for the Syriac text from which the Armenian is translated. The Syriac- Armenian text begins with an idiosyncratic description of the union of Mary and Joseph. Mary is a maidservant at the Temple in Jerusalem, to which she has been given by a couple,

Joachim and Anne, who are pious and charitable. When Mary reaches the age of fifteen , she is married off to a pious widower named Joseph. Before the marriage is consummated, Joseph has to go away to do a carpentry job. Some months later, he returns to find the young virgin Mary unmistakably pregnant. Joseph accepts Mary's explanation for her pregnancy (modelled after what is found in Luke 1:34-5), and Jesus is soon born. The Magi are there, and they see Jesus as an extraordinary figure, as do others present: kings and princes. When Jesus is two, an angel tells Joseph and Mary to flee Herod and go to Egypt. Here we get proof of Jesus's great powers: at Cairo there is a city gate which has statues of lions, bears, leopards and an eagle. As the infant Jesus approaches the gate, all the beasts begin to growl and roar; later, in the temple of Apollo, other clay and metal animals cry out that a great king is coming. These stories are nowhere mentioned in the canonical New Testament. Shortly afterwards, Jesus miraculously raises 182 people from the dead: those who died when the pagan temple crashed down. All have come to know of his powers. Later, and rather oddly, the young Jesus is blamed for the accidental death of a child with whom he has been playing. He brings the boy back to life so that the victim can say he was not harmed by Jesus . But Jesus keeps him alive for only three hours, and then tells him to "Sleep forever until the next resurrection" , showing a curious indifference. Elsewhere, when boys at play brush against him and knock him over, he

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strikes them all dead, only later relenting. On another occasion, Jesus is accused of causing the death of a three-year-old boy, and brought to trial. Having proclaimed his innocence, he urges the court to come with him to find the corpse. They do; Jesus brings the boy back to life long enough for him to say that Jesus had nothing to do with this; this being done, Jesus turns to the boy and says "sleep henceforth" . He falls asleep at once. In another section, a boy bothers Jesus, and Jesus blows a puff of air in his face , and causes him to become blind. The blinded child shrieks and cries, and Jesus returns his sight. These miracles are curious, and have little in common with those of the canonical gospels. Furthermore, Jesus is given teachers at the age of six, but shuns them because they cannot answer his questions about God. Elsewhere, Jesus meets a sick man. The man has heard of Jesus and asks him for a cure. Jesus demands gold, silver and precious gems. Jesus relents after the man renounces his pagan Roman beliefs and accepts belief in the Trinity. The brief final chapter tells the story of Jesus between the ages of fifteen and thirty. Jesus performs the standard miracle of healing; coming to the river Jordan he is baptized; the Father testifies from above that Jesus "is my beloved Son" . All in all, The Armenian Gospel of the Infancy speaks in a voice somewhat as we hear in the canonical gospels, but has an undertone that is sometimes frightening and cruel. It is clear that the writers are Christians but, as is true in the early phases of any religion, the dogma is in continuous flux. Abraham Terian ' s translation is mellifluous, and his commentary elaborate, reflecting wide study and knowledge. All libraries with a substantial ecclesiastical collection wi ll need this book.

PHILOSOPHY lthough Genevieve Lloyd's Providence Lost is almost entirely devoted to relating the history of the concept of providence, from the Ancient Greeks to Hegel, its primary purpose is to attain a better understanding of contemporary culture. For she believes that many of the modern world's most damaging moral and political discontents are engendered by the ways in which the withdrawal of the very idea of providence from secular public discourse has reshaped our patterns of thinking and living. What is doing the damage is thus the absence of something rather than its presence; hence the need to investigate the past, in order to see what we currently lack. But Lloyd is well aware that concepts mutate over time: since their significance is partly constituted by the other concepts with which they are con figured and the broader social and cultural contexts they inhabit, their meaning shifts as those configurations and contexts evolve. Accordingly, her historical narrative is genealogical in form - it discloses "providence" as a site of shifting and contested significance rather than a notion whose identity can be captured in a neat and timeless definition. This makes for a sophisticated and interesting exercise in the history of ideas; but it also creates difficulties for Lloyd ' s primary diagnostic claim. For when we come to her final chapter on the ills of contemporary culture, those genealogical complexities make it difficult to be clear exactly what it is (which idea of providence, in which specific configuration with which other ideas) whose absence is supposed to be so profoundly damaging. Lloyd's narrative begins with Euripides, in whose plays she sees a transition from conceiving providence as a matter of divine concern and provision for human needs to conceiving of it as a higher necessary order (a mode of cosmic justice) to which even the gods should conform. The latter conception is central to the Stoic vision of the universe, and provides a bulwark against fear and vulnerability in a world subject to chance; but it is rejected by the Epicureans, who found an exhilarating freedom in the rejection of cosmic design and necessity, arguing that only the repudiation of divine providence allows us to hold ourselves responsible for what we do. And in a certain sense, this debate is re-enacted at the threshold of modernity, although in a distinctively Christian key, by Descartes and Spinoza. For Descartes also makes the notion of human freedom central, although he recasts it in terms of the will, understood on the model of divine will that he inherits from Augustine; and he sees our ethical responsibilities as a matter of working out the proper limits and orientation of that will in a world that operates in accordance with its own necessities, although

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To bear necessity STEPHEN MULHALL Genevieve Lloyd PROVIDENCE LOST 369pp. Harvard University Press.

£22.95 (US $29.95). 9780674031531

sian way of conceiving of these matters. According to Lloyd, the concept of providence allowed Descartes to draw a clear distinction between things that depend on human will and those that depend on the will of God, and it is this that makes bearable his emphasis on our responsibility for the orientation and exercise of our wills. The realm of our responsibility could thus be known to have determinable limits, and our vulnerability to forces lying outside those limits could be accepted in the knowledge that the world's unfolding was ultimately in God's control. But in late modernity, while the Cartesian concept of the will is ever more firmly entrenched, the associated concept of providence goes missing. And its retreat to the domain of seminary and sermon leaves us with a dual legacy of unlimited responsibility (who knows where, if at all , the reach of our

conclusion as an inherently ambivalent exemplar of what it might mean freely to accept necessity, as she strives to make something meaningful out of the ultimate necessity her own death. The elegant sweep and imaginative range of Lloyd' s narrative are undeniable, and they sometimes combine to deeply impressive effect - particularly in her pivotal assessment of Descartes' s attempts to accommodate the reality of the passions in his epistolary exchanges with Princess Elizabeth. Some qualms arise, even so, about the structure of her account. It isn't obvious that the Ancient Greek and Roman background to the Descartes-Spinoza controversy requires as much coverage as it is given (roughly half of the book); deism is barely mentioned, despite its enthusiasm for the idea of a law-governed realm of nature adapted to divine purpose that seems analogous to Lloyd's preferred Stoic model; and the claim that providence (in the guise of a purposive understanding of history) drops out of the philosophical scene after Hegel seems to overlook a variety of figures from Karl Marx to contemporary liberals such as Francis Fukuyama. But it is Lloyd's diagnosis of modernity's ills that raises the most fundamental questions - partly, perhaps,

"The Sacrifice ofIphigenia" (1757) by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo powers and our accountability, both individual and collective, might run out?), and unassuageable anxiety about the ways in which

always within the hroader context of God's

uncontrollahle

purposes. By contrast, Spinoza (despite his rejection of neo-Stoic visions) argues that freedom and necessity in fact converge; that all things happen of necessity, and that ethical wisdom is a matter of knowingly participating in the necessities that govern the whole of nature, of which we are merely one part. He thereby recasts providence as immanent, rather than as the expression of a divine will that stands outside both human nature and the natural order. But the fate of modernity was fixed by the fact that the basic parameters of its thought and practice were set by the Carte-

necessities might radically determine the trajectory and the value of our lives. Lloyd ends by wondering whether Spinoza - the route not taken into modernity - might provide a viable alternative here. Too much of his thinking remains alien to us, she admits ; but we might nevertheless learn from his central idea of shaping a life in accordance with necessity, and aim to take delight in the mind's fulfilment of its own nature insofar as it exercises its ability to perceive how nature must be, and to adapt its modes of existence accordingly. Euripides' Iphigenia is offered to us in

natural

contingencies

and

because that analysis is squeezed into the final thirty pages of her book, and so never receives the detailed elaboration that its significance for her purposes would merit. To begin with , why should the absence of a concept of divine providence make it impossible to draw a principled distinction of any kind between matters that depend on the human will and those that do not? Various wholly naturalistic accounts of human beings could surely view the world we inhabit as an independently existing domain, with its events unfolding in accordance with natural laws whose validity we might understand and exploit, but which represent external necessities from the perspective of our will. Furthermore, even if a belief in divine

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13 providence did mitigate our anxieties about our vulnerability to the world's vicissitudes, one might still regard it as a delusory source of false comfort, and the sense of exposure that results from its rejection as an all-toonecessary dose of reality. Indeed, in the work of a resolutely naturalistic philosopher such as Bernard Williams (whom Lloyd approvingly cites), Christian religious and ethical thought works to repress the reality of moral luck by distorting our conception of human agency, rather than being particularly wellplaced to accommodate it. Moreover, can Spinoza really provide even the beginnings of a viable alternative to these supposed ills? On Lloyd' s own account, Spinoza's way of dovetailing freedom and necessity exploits the thought that the distinction between them breaks down in the specific case of God (for whom will and intellect are inseparable). But if this really is Spinoza' s model for human attempts to conform their actions to the necessity of nature, its availability presupposes a theological perspective that Lloyd herself has no desire to resuscitate. Going behind Spinoza to the Stoics will not help matters here, either. For their idea of necessity embodies an essentially premodern notion of cosmic justice that looks equally inhospitable for her secular purposes. Once removed from either conceptual configuration , however, Lloyd's non-Cartesian moral alternative becomes hard to distinguish from the guidance offered by Niebuhr's Serenity Prayer - "Lord, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference". This may indeed be the beginning of wisdom; but if adhering to it counts as accepting providence, then that concept has surely shed much of its distinctive substance. More generally, we might ask: how much work is ultimately being done in Lloyd's analysis by the supposedly specific concept of "providence", as opposed to a correlative concept (at once more general and more complex) of religious belief? Insofar as it acquires concrete content through her narrative, "providence" appears to indicate either an idea of divine concern for human wellbeing in the world, or a notion of the natural order as intrinsically meaningful or purposive. But then the descriptive dimension of her genealogy - the claim that what Charles Taylor calls the "social imaginary" of modern culture is determined by the loss of the concept of providence - doesn't seem to involve anything more specific or controversial than the claim that we live in a secular age. And its evaluative component - the claim that, lacking any providential grounding, secular modernity's conception of the autonomous human will is simultaneously prone to huhristic expansions of its realm

of proper operation, and to paranoid interpretations of its vulnerability to contingency simply restates familiar elements of mainstream Christian critiques of putatively postChristian culture. Given that her tentative invocation of Spinoza and the Stoics fails to identify any genuinely viable way of mitigating our unhappy condition, Genevieve Lloyd's genealogy of "providence" threatens to dissolve into one more genuinely pained but ultimately unrevealing characterization of life in a decisively disenchanted universe.

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Dostoevsky's endgame 'Astounding' rumours about the fate of the characters in the sequel to The Brothers Karamazov - which was never written ome of the longstanding difficulties with The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky' s last and greatest fiction , stem from the fact that the novel is unfinished. The preface "From the Author", published with the first serial instalment (1879), unequivocally introduces a story to be followed in time by a sequel. Without the first novel, we are told, " much in the second novel would be incomprehensible", and the reverse is equally true, for the author proceeds characteristically with paradox, mystification, loose ends and vague foreshadowings. The future hero Alyosha, a reclusive eccentric living in a provincial monastery, is in time to become "a social activist", perhaps even a vitally focal figure of his epoch. However, the author suddenly died in early 1881 , from tuberculosis complicated by emphysema, having completed one novel hut leaving no draft or notes for the sequel. This poses insurmountable problems of interpretation for most readers, who hastily glance at the preface and lose sight of the projected sequel as they try to assimilate a massive novel full of cunning ambiguities and ingenious philosophical riddles. The problems were as real for some of the greatest intellectual figures of the early twentieth century. By the age of forty , Wittgenstein had read the book "an extraordinary number of times", certainly not for entertainment but in search of meaning that eluded him. Freud resourcefully contrived a measure of design in the Karamazov "family romance", but this was distorted by his ignorance of the author's own personality and complex medical history. Despite his extravagant admiration of the Russian writer, the father of psychoanalysis wryly suggested that Dostoevsky is in one respect a sadist: the way he treats his readers. Freud rightly saw that serious illness was at the dark heart of the Karamazov drama. (The family name connotes "a taint of black guilt".) However, he paid little attention to Alyosha, the author' s " main albeit future hero", declaring that he was the exception, the healthy sibling. In fact Alyosha's pathology, in the clinical understanding of the period, is the most severe mental affliction of them all. He presents a textbook case of hysteria, then and since antiquity considered "analogous to epilepsy" , especially in all the complex psychiatric aspects of the ancient morbus sacer - from which the author suffered all of his adult life. His writing is elaborately invested with his own symptoms, folk traditions, and the progressive medical literature of his age in Russian, German and French. (The range of his sources is indicated in my own Dostoevsky and the Healing Art, 1985.) In the medical history of the era, aspects of which are only now just emerging, one finds key symptoms that explain the puzzling behaviour of Alyosha and endow him with rich potentials of character that suggest a political destiny in revolutionary Russia. To

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JAMES L. RICE these discoveries we shall return below. Readers bring fabulous assumptions about Dostoevsky to their experience of his fiction , above all the belief that his innate piety blossomed into spiritual grace, thanks to an epiphany and "conversion" in Siberia - where he lived for a decade as a convict, sentenced (at first to death) for seditious conspiracy. There is no evidence of a conversion, and until some firm facts can be adduced, readers are best advised to consider him a secular thinker of exceptional intelligence and often bawdy wit, a rational military engineer by training, appalled but also obsessed by the atrocities of child abuse and sexual violence in "God's world" . And here I believe Freud got it right ("Dostoevsky and Parricide" , 1928): Dostoevsky was incapahle of overlooking a single difficulty to which religion leads.

Russian Orthodox spirituality). This novel , he says, is only a beginning, for the author died without finishing it; one major episode is brought to a conclusion, "but the matter of first interest, the entanglement of ideas, never gets anywhere" (my italics). Major characters endure abnormal mental states, yet also remain "intelligible and very recognizably human". Indeed, as is typical of all Dostoevsky's heroes, the Karamazov brothers suffer from forms of neurological taint and insanity - but only intermittently, until they meet their fate. These characters succumb to madness, suicide, Siberia: but Alyosha remains at the end, to face his destiny, uncertain whether it may be for good or evil. His bonding with the adolescent boys in the village, whose leader Kolya is unmistakably a future radical, points the way to the hero's role in the unwritten sequel.

Dostoevsky discussed his general plan for

Maria Schell and Yul Brynner in The Brothers Karamazov (1957), directed by Richard Brooks Unencumbered by the subsequent century of speculation and hearsay about Dostoevsky, in 1915 a young Edmund Wilson read The Brothers Karamazov with a profoundly lucid, insightful and accurate response. The novel (probably in Constance Garnett's translation of 1912) was thoughtfully chosen by a friend, as a curio by an author not yet in vogue in the West, unlikely to be known to the young scholar, then only nineteen years old. His "pithy dictum" is a useful guide to reading the novel, though none of the suspense is thereby lost. The book, he says, is a consciously calculated satire on the Russian people (and not, be it noted, a celebration of

the Karamazov sequel with a few people close to him, on different occasions with his

wife Anna Grigorievna, and the eminent publisher Aleksei Suvorin (a brooding and devoted friend who was later also a confidant of other complex writers, including Yasily Rozanov and Anton Chekhov). The author's concept found its way not only into their diaries and memoirs published after the Revolution, but also, through rumour " in Petersburg literary circles" , into the front-page report of an ephemeral Odessa daily newspaper on May 26, 1880 - when Book Ten of The Brothers Karamazov had yet to appear. The anonymous correspondent had attended the

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author' s public reading of bewildering excerpts from the forthcoming instalment. Despite great admiration for Dostoevsky' s genius, the critic complained that most of his characters were mental cases, who sometimes appeared to communicate by psychic means. Rumour in the tsarist capital had it that Alyosha would become the village schoolmaster, and by obscure "psychic processes in his soul" would arrive at "the idea of assassinating the tsar" (ideya 0 tsareubiistve). Although the Novorossiiskii Telegraf had a circulation of 6,000 and subscribers as far-flung as Kiev, Moscow, Petersburg, Warsaw and Paris, this astounding remark never reached the authorities. It tallies exactly with the diary of Suvorin published forty-three years later (1923), which directly quotes the novelist on Alyosha's future: "He would he arrested for a political crime. He would be executed" - very nearly the fate of the author himself in his youth. In the sequel there might have been, of course, any number of plots and paths to such a tragic outcome. In one plausible version, Alyosha retreats to the monastery as a clandestine revolutionary. The surest proof that The Brothers Karamazov was conceived with such a denouement in store is the very name Karamazov: it is very close to that of Dmitry Karakozov, whose point-blank shot at Tsar Alexander II on April 4, 1866, missed its target but heralded an era of terrorism in Russian politics. Karakozov was publicly executed in Petersburg on September 3, 1866. His deed, incidentally, had interrupted serialization of Crime and Punishment - its hero another deranged student dropout with murderous "Napoleonic" ambitions. The Karamazov plot unfolds at the end of August, 1866, so that Dmitry Karamazov's arrest for the murder of his father occurs at about dawn on September 3, precisely when in real life the would-be assassin Karakozov was led to the scaffold. Freud was, again, intuitively correct in equating the psychology of parricide and regicide in Dostoevsky ' s creative world. In the Karamazov courtroom scenes, the prosecutor makes the same point by citing other recent cases in which murders undermined authority in the social order. The novelist's orientation in theories of the (pre-Freudian) unconscious, and parapsychology of every stripe, explain a good deal in the behaviour of his fictive characters. Suffice it to cite a treatise he admired, by Or. C. G. Carus (Psyche, 1846, expanded 1851), a Swiss medical counsellor to the King of Saxony. Carus held that all human communication is fourfold, the unconscious and conscious minds both in touch with each of the interlocutor's levels of perception, not to mention signals from the animal and plant kingdoms and the cosmos (pace Bakhtin, whose reductive schemata are simply nowhere to be found in Dostoevsky's worldview). In 1852, Carus also published a pamphlet on "psychic epidemics of man-

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COMMENTARY kind" that generate revolutions (for example 1848). This theoretical background is indispensable to the putative Karamazov sequel, which was to resume Alyosha' s saga in the author's immediate and terminal present, 1880-81. The novelist died on January 28, 1881. The Tsar's actual assassination with dynamite bombs by the People' s Will group occurred a month later, March I, after at least six known attempts. The Russian people experienced the terrorist acts precisely as a psychic pandemic. Readers of today and indeed every era have been hard put to grasp the meaning of Alyosha's hysteria, although Dostoevsky meticulously establishes a hysteria motif at the outset: among the peasantry, in the hero's late mother, and in the girl he seems destined to marry (Lise), then in the hero's own convulsive seizures precisely like his mother's, in his abrupt character change towards "evil" (lust for the Oedipally compromised Grushenka, who also entices his father and brother Dmitry), and sublimely towards the Good in an ecstatic visionary hallucination (Book Seven, 4). In the first edition this climax concluded Part One (of two) in the novel we know, with its projected sequel never to be. The exceptional difficulty with "hysteria" in our day, apart from the recent vogue in feminist literary scholarship, arises because the psychiatric aspect of the convulsive disorder ("hysterical character") was overshadowed after Dostoevsky ' s lifetime by the sensational career of Charcot, then in the next generation by Janet, by Freud's fumbling (and misdiagnosis of Dostoevsky himself as hysteric), and at last by the termination of "hysteria" as a diagnostic category, around 1970. (See the richly documented medical history in Approaching Hysteria , 1995, and Hysterical Men, 2008, by Mark Micale.) I was intrigued by Dostoevsky's late acquaintance with Or Ivan Pavlovich Merzheyevsky (hitherto unknown in literary history), the president of the Petersburg Society of Psychiatrists from 1880, and, thanks to his postdoctoral studies in Europe, an early disciple of Or Richard von Krafft-Ebing of Graz, who was just launching his (later notorious) work on sexual perversion , Psychopathia sexualis (I 886). This subject fascinated Dostoevsky in his last decades. Krafft-Ebing published a massive " straight" textbook of psychiatry in three volumes (I 879-80), which was at once translated into Russian with commentaries by Merzheyevsky (1881-82). Volume Two contains a concise clinical overview of "Der hysterische Charakter" that elucidates all the multifarious complexities of Alyosha's personality, positive and negative, including the mysterious lapses of memory and moral commitment that are pivotal in the novel. A virtual template of the volatile young hero, it appeared just as the novelist (alerted hy the Petersburg medical community) arrived at Bad Ems, to begin drafting Book Seven ("Alyosha"). The most striking clinical symptom is "visionary ecstasy - analogous to epilepsy", and it invites comparison with Prince Myshkin from The Idiot and with the author himself. In the early drafts, Alyosha is indeed sometimes called "the idiot" . The details are complicated, of course, and exactly how the hero's pathology would have accommodated his destiny can only be imagined. The identical problem was posed, without a solution,

by the earlier major fictions in the sagas of Raskolnikov, Myshkin and Stavrogin, which ended respectively in Siberia, a Swiss asylum , and suicide. Prince Myshkin agonizes over the bifurcation and "dialectic" of his own psyche, and the novelist himself on the one hand saw his post-ictal paranoid hallucinations as " mystical horror" , yet also sought to assure his young bride that the terrors of epilepsy were " merely mechanical". (The couple defied the medical wisdom of their time, and Russian folk superstition, by having three children.) Alyosha too, as he lurches between his first encounters with "evil" and "good", advances on that thorny path "mechanically" (an adverb thrice deployed), yet heroically. Not the least part of Dostoevsky's greatness lies in his conviction that epilepsy, fused in his own identity as a kind of alter ego, was no obstacle to action or heroism: he extolled one historic figure with the falling sickness "who even overturned half the world in his own way". Here Dostoevsky was referring to the Prophet Muhammad, whose visionary experiences Western detractors had for centuries ascribed to epilepsy. (This subversive identification with Muhammad followed the example of Pushkin, whose militantly revolutionary poem "The Prophet" Dostoevsky declaimed at the Pushkin celebration of 1880.) It might be objected (and has been) that a medical-textbook "template" for Alyosha's behaviour smacks of something ominously deterministic, contrary to the author's vaunted belief in free will. But in his world, pathology only lends an exacerbating urgency and suspense to the frenetic tradition from which his art brings forth such strange fruit. Alyosha's first hysterical attack occurs in the ghostly pine grove outside the monastery hermitage (the site of dead Fr Zosima's cell). Alyosha changes character profoundly, echoing Ivan ' s cynical rejection of "God's world", declaring himself "evil and base", breaking his funeral fasting for the late Zosima, and lusting after the "cannibalistic beast" of a woman, Grushenka, whose erotic involvement with his father and brother Dmitry has set the murderous plot in motion. His last hysterical seizure is followed by ecstatic religious hallucinations, and the conviction that a vague but guiding Idea ("of some kind, somehow") has taken control. He rises up no longer weak but "a fighter for ever more" - with no foe yet in sight. Now Dostoevsky felt free to defer explaining the medical problems of this "main albeit future hero", and to postpone resolving the dual nature of

his personality until the romantic and revolutionary peripetia of the sequel. Meanwhile, the author could dwell on the trauma endured by his other characters, the legal outcome of a capital crime, nuances of the Karamazov family taint and their collective guilt, with ramifications in the body politic. A curious private letter, written from Bad Ems when the author was drafting and serializing Book Seven, gives us a welcome, rather comic grasp of the secular craftsman executing his creative plan under the usual duress from the Russian civic and ecclesiastical censors, and from the remote but continuing threat of a return trip to Siberia and ruin for his family. Now he had just been cautioned by Konstantin Pobedonostsev, Procurator of the Holy Synod, the lay agency appointed by the tsar to initiate excommunications, coordinate calls to arms from the pulpit, and generally to fret about public morality in the Russian Empire. Book Five of The Brothers Karamazov had appeared, Book Six - a profile of the monk Zosima - would be published in a week. The author hastened to agree: he had not yet provided an answer to all of Ivan's "atheistic views" - "that negative side". Hence his great "trepidation" just then, lest his indirect refutation prove "inadequate" . Artistic necessity had "obliged" him to portray Zosima as a humble figure "albeit inwardly exalted". Moreover, he had been " involuntarily forced" by those same artistic demands to portray this monk as full of "triviality", full of "comicality", his teachings "absurdly rapturous" - "in order not to violate artistic realism". Pobedonostsev, a person of limited intellect yet dangerous, was thus cunningly told, in so many words, that if he did not sense the inward and spiritual exaltation of comical, trivial Zosima, then the inadequacy was only his, because the artist had obeyed a still more exalted though arcane Law of Creativity. Evidently Dostoevsky's flimflam succeeded, for he remained at liberty, free to finish his novel as he wished. Ivan would shout to the public in the courtroom that "everyone wants to kill his father! " , and at the finale Alyosha, aware that a devil's spawn resides within him too, tells his beloved schoolboys: "Maybe later on we shall all become evil men. On his deathbed, Dostoevsky had the parable of the Prodigal Son read over him. This alone might caution us to regard him as a secular artist of subversive bent. But a full revisionist account waits to be given by the coming generations, when the more than 15,000 closely printed pages of his collected

At a Loss At a loss for the word invisible I tried bare, And the pictures all tumbled out Into the endless inconspicuous air. They floated up, away, and out of sight. My eyes followed, but could not see Because of the abundance of light. Strange how a word can turn a mood round, Forgetfulness bringing its own reward. The stars displace the sun without a sound.

ANTHONY THWAITE

TLS JANUARY 1 2010

works have been fully assimilated by brave new readers. A few symptomatic episodes will serve to close this account, perhaps to suggest a way to proceed. Dostoevsky deployed in real life as well as fiction a series of atrocities and sexual perversions seemingly to "test" his readers, friends and enemies, perhaps as pathological aggression and defence. Indeed, his doctor and close friend Yanovsky, likewise his erstwhile colleague and posthumously authorized biographer Strakhov, are in complete agreement that his intermittent outbursts of paranoia (mnitel'nost ') were his dominant personality trait. Dostoevsky told Strakhov that his primary creative method was introspection, which involved from the first a certain pathological ambience, not only informed by his epilepsy, but in myriad hypochondriacal modes, announced by his Underground Man (in a fiction almost overlooked by critics of his day): "I am a man who is sick ... I'm an evil man. An unattractive man am I". Strakhov, who was and remained a uniquely valued friend of Leo Tolstoy, was at first a journalistic co-worker of Dostoevsky, and helped him in recovery after grand mal seizures, so knew him in his severest bouts of "mystical horror" (as the writer recorded these episodes in his notebooks). Later he also bore witness, in his correspondence with Tolstoy, to the frequent reports of child molestation and other sexual perversions that Dostoevsky habitually purveyed, sometimes even about himself. Recently, one more such anecdote has surfaced, purposefully suppressed (in 1936) by Russian archivists of the Soviet era, and sufficiently grotesque to make scholars in the West now also wince (Novyi mir, 1992, no 8). A brilliant young university graduate, Evgeny Opochinin, often walked with Dostoevsky in Petersburg and applied his stenographic talents to recording their conversations in 1880, when the novelist was serializing The Brothers Karamazov. One night Opochinin, who thanks to Dostoevsky became the pri vate secretary of a famous bibliophile, was horrified as the novelist told him about a Petersburg necrophile who scanned the newspapers for open-coffin funerals of adolescent beauties, to attend uninvited and plant very long farewell kisses on the lips of their corpses. The smell, he said, with a Baudelairean flair, did not offend him: it was like "the scent of pressed flowers". With the raconteur's coaching, Opochin in exclaimed that such monsters have no rightful place in human society, whereupon Dostoevsky countered with the ethical difficulties of that punitive position. (The episode recalls The Brothers Karamazov, in Ivan's manipulative bludgeoning of Alyosha with the atrocities of child abuse, and in the smell of corruption from Zosima' s corpse that shakes A Iyosha' s faith.) At the close of this performance, Dostoevsky cited without comment the verdict of Strakhov (whom he often encountered in the small world of Petersburg literati, though they had fallen out years before) apropos the amorous necrophiliac: "Strakhov even tells me: ' All of that is your fantasy. You ' ve invented such people, and they give no peace even to you " '.

A longer and more and fully documented version of this essay appeared last year in Slavic Review.

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COMMENTARY

hristmas Day is as quiet as it gets in San Francisco, especially now, before dawn. On almost any other day I'd have already heard the streetcar rattle and squeal as it emerged from the Sunset Tunnel, only about sixty yards away, the first of the day, round about 4.30 or 5 am, making sure the track is clear all the way out to the ocean. And on any ordinary Friday, the garbage trucks, with their hydraulic whine and thumping, would already be at it not far off. But not today. It has become my custom on Christmas Day, when circumstances allow, to leave America behind and go visit the Orient, by way of Golden Gate Park; enjoy a lunch there, take in a movie, then repair to the sea, where I do not contemplate the year that has just passed by, nor my sins and inadequacies in the course of that year, nor the million bicyclists, nor even the belching satanic mills 5,000 miles over the horizon. I don't really think of anything at all, just take in the heaving, coppery waves and sea air, the little Snowy Plovers hopping about. In how many cities this size on earth can you go out to the ocean late on a beautiful winter's day and enjoy the sunset nearly all by yourself? As I lie in bed planning my day, I can hear the first street car of the day out of the tunnel - 6.54 am - and with it the first light. H. L. Mencken, who complained about much in America, found little to complain about in San Francisco, a town he visited in the 1920s. " What fetched me instantly" , he wrote, on his first visit here, "was the subtle but unmistakable sense of escape from the United States." In a subsequent essay, he wrote: "I confess to a great weakness for San Francisco. It is my favorite American town .... It looks out, not upon Europe, like New York, nor upon the Bible Belt, like Chicago, but upon Asia, the ancient land and the

Chinese from Hong Kong and the Mainland around 1965, the area became markedly Asian in character. Some 50 per cent of home-owners in the Richmond District are now Chinese. You want good eats of the Asian variety, this is the part of town to find them. On the way to the Dragon River, a Hakka Chinese restaurant, I pass a Jack-in-the-Box franchise with a handful of Caucasians sullenly picking at their french fries and burgers or whatever else was available that day on "Jack's Value Menu". I can understand why people eat that drek in Wyoming where there's nothing better to be had, but why here, where there are more marvellous, inexpensive restaurants per block than bars per street in Killarney? Hell-o, the Dragon River' s open , the woks are hot and the noodles are flying. Heaven. If I committed a heinous crime - say I dropped a piano from a helicopter on to Senator Joe Lieberman ' s head while he was walking down K Street, on his way to lunch with a health-care lobbyist - and was asked what I wanted for my final meal before facing the electric chair, I would almost certainly say, "Hakka wine-soaked, meatstuffed bean curd". And ten minutes later, here it is, coming my way. I tell you what, I was already having a merrier Christmas than Tiny Tim. I don't know when's the last time I had my Hakka bean curd. A long while, to be sure. And it was a long while since I'd been in a movie theatre, at least a year. I had a choice between Invictus and An Education. I don't know about you , but I find Clint the auteur more than a little strenuous going. I had

planned my day in advance, so had read up on both movies. As you will probably by now know, An Education is about a bright, very pretty sixteen-year-old girl from Twickenham who is seduced by a significantly older, Jewish con artist. Although I found the subject matter, well, rather inappropriate for Christmas fare, I decided on the latter. It just so happens that the last movie I went to was also about a young student, played by Penelope Cruz, having an affair with a much older man, her professor, played by Ben Kingsley. I don't recall now if his character was Jewish, as well. Certainly looked it, though, with that big honker. I had a date on that occasion with a woman close in age to myself. She clearly would have preferred seeing another feature that afternoon at the Cineplex and made that known, but I insisted that Ben Kingsley was a great favourite of mine. She muttered and tsk-tsk' d through the entire movie, presumably disgusted at the folly of older men in their pursuit of young women. It was very distracting. I, on the other hand, who have no opinion on the subject, would put the question to my fellow male or lesbian pedagogues: If you had Penelope Cruz in your Boolean Algebra or Urdu class and she plainly fancied you , would you not, quoting a line from a Frank 0 ' Hara poem, be "practically going to sleep with quandariness"? An Education turned out to be an excellent movie, on balance, I thought. Likewise the sunset out at Ocean Beach, which I just caught after hopping on a Geary bus to the sea: the vast, red molten orb sinking beneath the dark waves. Christmas was now over in Twickenham, and winding down quickly here. It seemed to me more or less safe at this juncture to get on the streetcar and return to America for a cocktail. Mencken, I feel certain, would have expected of me nothing less.

The novel that sets him, stripped of pseudonyms and initials, in the dryish air of reprinted classics, had a slow start. "It is doing everything except pay," he told a friend. Monthly publication may have made the Russell Square reader, who liked known vintages, cautious of mere strangers, though surely it was cheaper to taste the first month's shillingsworth and refuse the rest than to buy the thing in bulk, unsampled. Plainly there were readers who quickened when Amelia and Becky stepped out of Miss Pinkerton ' s academy into Mr. Sedley's coach. There was something new here. The solitary horseman, the lonely and lovely Orphan of many first chapters had been forgone. The Past-and the Regency was as dusty in the eyes of 1847 as Edwardian brilliantine in ours-was after all not a matter of being inside or outside the Tower of London. It was a breathing everyday in which-incredibly-one's parents and grandparents had once a lively, faulty being. The sparkle of life is in the very stones of Chiswick Mall as the Sedley chariot drives away and the Dixonary flies out of the window. It goes on sparkling, catching the light of ordinary days and the shift and break of their shadow, even in moraliz-

ing asides and what might now be called fireside talks. As month followed month readers were drawn in; to sit at Mr. Sedley's well-spread table in Russell Square, to adventure into Hampshire with Sir Pitt Crawley, to enjoy immorally Becky' s triumphs (what a spin of vitality there is in the scene where she hears of Sir Pitt' s death), to regret as immorally her defeats, to hear the sound of revelry by night in Brussels on the eve of Waterloo-does the modern reader think of Byron or of Becky and Jos Sedley and of Amelia "praying for George who was lying on his face, dead, with a bullet through his heart"? Not all his reticences, not even his resolute tilt of the scales against Becky-they keep flying up with her in spite of him-and his care to lay tiresome Emmy at last-at very long last-snugly in the arms of honest Dobbin can quench the life that stirs and lingers, drowses a while and then strikes full and fair just where it should. For the first time a novel had its being wholly in the sphere of common human character and of the event character dictates. We can touch hands with that Regency world and breathe in it as easily as in our own. He has shut some of its cupboards, but he leaves us chinks enough. In this he was at one with the convention of his age on which Victorianism was settling down with voluminous skirts.

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AUGUST KLEINZAHLER changeless. There is an Asiatic touch in its daily life". Mencken goes on to say that "The town is rich in loafing places - restaurants, theatres, parks. No one seems to work very hard .... Puffs of Oriental air come with the fog. There is nothing European about the way life is lived; the colour is all Asiatic". It' s getting hungrier and meaner among the homeless these days, not a few of whom live in the park. The poor and undomiciled would have been called something else in Mencken's day - bums, tramps, hoboes - but he makes no mention of them. Now it is impossible not to. I decide to keep to the paved trails. One hundred and fifty years ago, this part of San Francisco was called "The Great Sand Bank", nothing here but wind-swept dunes. There are a couple of police cars parked in Sharpe Meadow , out of the ordinary, near the tennis courts when I pass through, before crossing over to the Dahlia Garden, near the big glass Conservatory of Flowers, then past Fuchsia Dell and out by Clarke Gate into the Richmond District. Clement Street, six blocks north of the Park and the heart of the Chinese shopping district in the Inner Richmond, is hopping, Chinese shoppers thronging the sidewalks, every shop open. It looks like downtown Canton on a Saturday, or as I imagine it to be. This augurs well for the Dragon River, my destination on Geary, the next block over, being open. The Chinese began moving into this part of San Francisco when restrictive ordinances were lifted after the Second World War, and with the later influx of

IN NEXT WEEK'S

TLS January 4, 1947

Enter Becky Sharp

Wendy Doniger Sufferings of sacred India Roger Scruton Protect animals and people Jonathan Keates E<;a de Queiroz and Real Life Adrian Tahourdin A year in translation

We look back to a leading article by M ary Crosbie, on Thackeray's Vanity Fair. To see the article in full go to www.the-tls.co.uk ertain books are as much a part of England's economy as its climate, as much a part of an individual life as food and lodging. They may lie unread by the passing generation, but their stability is unshaken. Critics may find them wanting, yet their feet of clay do not crumhle. On New Year's Day, 1847, the first of twenty yellowcovered parts of Vanity Fair came into the bookshops. Its author was a Mr. Thackeray. "Do you know anything of a Mr. Thackeray, said to be a good hand for light articles?" asked the Editor of the Edinburgh Review, on the lookout for new talent, two years earlier. "One requires to be very much on one's guard in engaging with mere strangers." The mere stranger had been writing industriously for a decade under various pseudonyms, but so little under his own name that the Edinburgh's innocence was understandable.

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TLS JANUARY 1 2010

17

Function and factions in the Bauhaus revolution

The storm after the storm PATRICK McCAUGHEY BAUHAUS 1919 - 1933 Workshops for modernity Museum of Modern Art, New York

Barry Bergdoll and Leah Dickerman BAUHAUS 1919 - 1933 Workshops for modernity 344pp. Museum of Modern Art. $75. 9780870707582

" T h e Bauhaus will never calm down", wrote Paul Klee in the middle of his ten-year stint at the school. "If it does, it's finished. " The conflicts between its celebrated Masters and the contradictions of its changing programme from its hirth in Weimar in 1919 to its sorry end in Nazi Berlin in 1933 have long occupied historians of modern art, architecture and design. Such tensions, human and aesthetic, have added to its fame and were, as Klee suggests, endemic to the Bauhaus. It opened on a declamatory note with WaIter Gropius, its founding Director, declaring "The ultimate aim of all creative activity is the building! ... Architects, painters, sculptors, we must all return to the crafts! There is no such thing as ' professional art' .... The artist is an exalted craftsman" (Gropius's italics). Lyonel Feininger supplied a black-andwhite, woodcut frontispiece of a soaring Gothic cathedral to make good Gropius's rhetoric. The Museum of Modern Art's exhibition begins with this first Manifesto and, interestingly, shows the tamer preliminary designs for the frontispiece. Nothing but the full Expressionist rigmarole of beams of light and flashing stars would satisfy the midwives of the Bauhaus. Both the programme outlined by Gropius and the style of its presentation, however, were rapidly going out of date. The unification of the arts and crafts under the umbrella of architecture smacked of the nineteenth century, of William Morris and John Ruskin, of art nouveau and the Vienna Secession rather than the modern. Visionary pre-war Expressionism would mutate into the cool modes of Die neue Sachlichkeit in the 1920s. Yet that first phase of the Weimar Bauhaus produced some remarkable objects, such as the nineteen-year-old Marcel Breuer' s "African Chair" (1921). This unique object married the constructed and the primitive with the richly textured weaving of Gunta Stoelzl. Known from photographs, the object only reappeared in 2004 and is shown here for the first time in America. More importantly, those early years would set in train the pedagogical principles that would make the Bauhaus the single most influential art school of the twentieth century. Johannes Itten, one of Gropius's first and most controversial appointments, started the

"Fire in the Evening", 1929, by Paul Klee Vorkurs - Preliminary Course - in October 1920. It introduced students to the elements of three-dimensional form , shape, colour, texture and the properties of materials. Itten was a crank as well as a gifted teacher. He was a follower of Mazdaznan, a form of Zoroastrianism, which made him shave his head, wear monkish robes and maintain a strict vegetarian diet, consisting of a vegetable mush laced with garlic. Worse, he was a proselytizer: he persuaded the Bauhaus canteen to adopt the Mazdaznan diet and divided both faculty and student body alike. Gropius, who had unwisely made Itten Master of the carving, painting, glass and metal workshops, found him an irksome presence and pushed him out in 1923. But the Vorkurs remained a central tenet in the teaching of the Bauhaus and became increasingly refined and sophisticated in the hands of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Josef Albers. It proved to be something of a blueprint for art education throughout the Anglo-European world. Leah Dickerman, in her fine catalogue essay, makes the point that the Bauhaus was the first truly modern school to ensure that "all students should be instructed in the principles of abstraction before moving onto specific areas of study" . Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Moholy-Nagy and the young Master, Albers, were all members of staff. In the

MoMA exhibition, Klee is at his most abstract, suggesting that the atmosphere of the school influenced him just as his poetic and wayward artistic personality shaped the institution ' s sensibility. From his earliest watercolours of 1922, laid out in the subtlest of translucent grids, to two major paintings of 1929, "Fire in the Evening" and "Highways and Byways", Klee demonstrated how the severely abstract and the rectilinear could be infused with atmosphere - a sense of the world's movement and vibration. Although not as well represented as Klee, Kandinsky, in a series of designs for wall paintings (1922) , also reflects the stimulating effect of the Bauhaus on his art. He successfully transferred the rhythms of his earlier, overtly Expressionist abstractions into the clipped, " systemic" mode of the 1920s. Alas, these outsize works, which anticipate the scale of Abstract Expressionist painting, survive only in the gouache maquettes shown here. Albers comes across as the other surprisingly forceful abstract artist. His early glassand-wire constructions successfully marry the handcrafted object with the most austere, abstract design. His later glass panels and the weavings of his gifted wife, Anni Albers, look forward to subsequent developments in abstract art such as minimalism and systemic painting, and both meet the Bauhaus obliga-

TLS JANUARY 1 2010

tion of displaying a potential for industrial production in an architectural context. For Gropius in 1923, at the opening of the first important exhibition of the Bauhaus and its works, declared that the central task of the school was the union of art with technology. The workshops were, ideally, to produce prototypes for industrial production. Gropius organized an important adjunct exhibition of International Architects which included Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier alongside Gropius himself and the Expressionists Bruno Taut and Erich Mendelsohn. A model house and Gropius's Director's Office were fitted out with lighting, furniture and textiles made in the school's workshops. It was a dazzling display with the additional frisson of concerts of contemporary music from Hindemith, Stravinsky, Busoni and Krenek. The Bauhaus had laid down an important marker in the evolution of modern design and the international style. The exhibition was a bold attempt to show Weimar's city fathers and the government of Thuringia just how important and productive the Bauhaus had become within four years. But the very adventurousness of the display and of supporting events, such as the performance of Oskar Schlemmer's Triadic Ballet, aroused conservative forces in the city, sacred to the memory of Goethe and Schiller. The phrase "the Cathedral of Socialism" became associated with the Bauhaus. On the heels of the hyper-inflation of 1923 and the failed Nazi Putsch in Munich, a rightwing government took power in Thuringia in 1924 and the days of the Weimar Bauhaus were effectively numbered. Forced out by punitive reductions in funding, the school moved to the industrial city of Dessau in the spring of 1925. Constraint and compulsion may have driven the Bauhaus to Dessau, but the effects were entirely happy. "Gropius' s new Bauhaus building" , as Barry Bergdoll aptly remarks, "was a veritable demonstration of the call for an architecture born of functional analysis. Unified in the aerial view, its parts are experienced on the ground as a myriad changing effects of transparency and reflection, of continuous realignments." Unlike the later degradation of the International Style into the monolithic slab or the corporate glass box , the separate but linked units of Gropius's Bauhaus altered in scale and treatment according to the needs of the school, from the glass curtain wall of the Workshop wing to the cantilevered balconies of the student residential block, which exuded a lighter, even playful quality. Its gleaming glass and concrete cubes made the Bauhaus building the most powerful symbol of its own manifesto and its most memorable object. Oddly, however, the exhibition plays down its originality and lasting evocative power. This is all the more surprising because in December 1927, just a year after the opening

18

ARTS

of the new building, the young Alfred H. Barr, then ajunior professor at Wellesley College, spent three days at the Bauhaus, observing the workshops and meeting the major Bauhauslers: Klee and Kandinsky, Schlemmer, Feininger, Moholy-Nagy and Gropius himself, at his most reserved and severe. Two years later, Barr became the founding Director of MoMA and his Bauhaus experience quickly flowed into the curriculum of the museum. Departments of Architecture and Design, followed later by Film and Photography, were established in its first decade alongside the collections of paintings and sculpture, prints and drawings. MoMA's first building on West 53rd St, with its Philip Goodwin and Edward Durrell Stone facade, may have been a tame echo of Gropius's Bauhaus, but the vertical lettering down the eastern edge replicated Herbert Bayer' s graphics. (Barr despised the building and Goodwin in equal measure, loudly preferring Mies or even Gropius.) he move to Dessau created a new Bauhaus within as well as without. The Workshops were condensed from ten to five - cabinetry, metal, wall painting, textiles and printing - with an increasing emphasis on their architectural and industrial roles. At Dessau the most characteristic Bauhaus objects emerged, such as Marcel Breuer' s tubular steel chairs. The vintage examples on view at MoMA prove one of the highlights of the show. No matter how familiar, they have the double effect of being both redolent of the Bauhaus of 1926 and as up-to-the-minute as today ' s newspaper. Frederick Schwartz in the extended catalogue note calls the Club version "the perfect chairs ... light, easy to move ... [they1neither displaced space nor blocked views". Bayer's typography and graphic design, handsomely represented in the exhibition, were other instances of work that could only have emerged from the Bauhaus and yet retain a startling contemporaneity. The originality of Bayer's work started in Weimar in 1924 with his advertising structures, well explicated by Hal Foster, who notes "how boldly they juxtapose verbal and visual elements and representational and abstract modes". They presaged the theme of the building as the ultimate end of design, no longer the vehicle of arts and crafts but the habitable and technological exemplar of a thoroughly Modernist idiom. Curiously, it was only at Dessau as late as 1927 that a formalized Department of Architecture was added to the curriculum. Gropius now made a fatal mis-step. Turned down by Mart Stam, he appointed Hannes Meyer, a Swiss architect, to head the new department. Humourless and dogmatic, the Marxist Meyer openly despised Gropius's Bauhaus. It was a school, he claimed , "whose reputation greatly exceeded its ability to achieve anything". Worse was to follow. Gropius resigned in early 1928 and recommended that

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Meyer succeed him. Moholy-Nagy, Bayer and Marcel Breuer promptly left with Gropius, followed by Marianne Brandt, the most gifted of all the metal workers who was passed over for a promotion. Oskar Schlemmer went in 1929. With some irony, given his Marxist orientation, Meyer increased the profitability of the workshops, particularly the sale of wallpaper designs from the mural painting department and the metal workshop's lighting designs. The graphic department won advertising contracts from major German industries such as I-G Farben. But Meyer's chief boast was that "the Bauhaus today reflects an undeniable degree of proletarianization" . It would prove the undoing of the school. He alienated the Social Democrat mayor of Dessau, who had been the linchpin of the school's continuing survival. In addition, Meyer characterized Gropius's Bauhaus as the agent for bourgeois, luxury goods, comparing it unfavourably with his Bauhaus, where proletariat design for the needs of the people flourished. His politicization of the school fed into the hands of the increasingly right-wing government. Meyer was dismissed in the summer of 1930 and went down fighting, claiming that "incestuous theories blocked all access to healthy, life orientated design: the cube was

trumps and its sides were painted yellow, red , blue, white, grey, black .... As head of the Bauhaus, I fought the Bauhaus style". Mies van der Rohe took over as Director, damped down student activism and pushed the Bauhaus in the direction of a conventional six-semester architectural school. But he was too late: the Nazis took over the government of the state and the city. After visiting an exhibition at the Bauhaus in the summer of 1932, the city legislature closed the school and discharged the staff. Mies attempted to privatize the Bauhaus and moved it to a disused telephone office building in Berlin. The new Nazi regime of 1933 turned their attention to the Bauhaus early on and sealed it off in April. The Faculty voted to close it for ever in July, 1933. Schlemmer' s "Bauhaus Stairway", arguably the most evocative and familiar pictorial image of the school, speaks with a new power in the final room at the Modern. He painted it in 1932, three years after he left, as a work of reflection and recall. The anonymous, genderless students who flow bodiless up Gropius's re-imagined Dessau staircase are like ascending angels. Schlemmer' s invocation of the past acknowledges that something irreplaceable has been lost. Surprisingly little of this drama is allowed

into MoMA's sober and impersonal exhibition. Few portraits of the Bauhauslers are included, yet it was the fame of the faculty that broadcast its ambitions and burnished its achievements. Certainly the main periods and episodes from Weimar to Berlin unfold with telling objects and images. But what the exhibition desperately lacks is any sense of inspiration, style, electricity in its design. Here was one of the great moments in the evolution of modern European design including exhibition design - the effects of which are still felt seventy-five years after its demise. How could a museum shaped by the Bauhaus install such an exhibition so limply and lamely? It is not the first time that the "not-so-new" MoMA has shown a lack of imaginative gusto. Three years ago, its huge Dada exhibition pulled off the remarkable feat of making Dada seem dull. Drawings, prints, paintings, objects were plonked down on the wall or stuck in cases like any other conventional exhibition. Indeed the only principle that appeared to be followed was to hang it in the numerical order of the catalogue. Worryingly, the Bauhaus exhibition looks suspiciously similar. Somebody here - curator, designer, director - is responsible for this feat of creative indirection. But who?

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Richer than Jesus aul Theroux, Gloria Steinem, Kenneth Tynan, George Melly, Pauline Kael, Bernard Levin, Philip Larkin, Martin Amis - the list of people who have written about the Beatles is very long, and it contains some surprising figures. Paul Johnson hated them, R. D. Laing claimed they "sought without finding" , Leonard Bernstein fell in love with them and heard "the Dawn-Bird, Elephant-Trump, Fanfare of the Future" in their music. The Beatles: Paperback Writer: 40 years of classic writing does not deliver on the promise of its subtitle; much of the book is made up of hastily formed opinions, unremarkable childhood reminiscences, breathless Sunday supplement features. It is nonetheless fascinating stuff, as an overview of how the world - and the Beatles themselvesreacted to their superstardom. In early interviews, it is striking how obsessed and impressed they were by the money they were making, with the feeling that the bubble they had created would soon have to burst; this exchange, from a Playboy interview from 1965, is fairly typical: PLA YBOY: There' s been some dispute among

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your fans and critics, about whether you ' re primarily entertainers or mu sicians ... or perhaps neither. What's your opinion? JOHN: We're money-makers first; then we ' re entertainers.

PAUL: ... we'd be idiots 10 say Ihal it isn't a constant inspiration to be making a lot of money. It always is, to anyone.

In the same Evening Standard profile by Maureen Cleave that launched the "bigger than Jesus" controversy, Lennon describes himself as "famous and loaded" and goes on: "I want the money just to be rich. The only other way of getting it is to be born rich. If you have money, that's power without

LUCY DALLAS Mike Evans , editor THE BEATLES: PAPERBACK WRITER 40 years of classic writing

382pp. Plexus. £12.99. 9780859654265 BEATLES TO BOWIE The 60s exposed National Portrait Gallery

having to be powerful" . He must have been one of the strongest influences on young people in the world at that point; they worshipped him, screamed and wept for him and kept holy relics of objects he had touched, but he didn't see that as power. Later, when he was politicized, he tried to use his influence for political aims, but by then he was not a Beatle; and as Bernstein said of John and Paul , "the two were merely something, the four were It" . They tried to redefine how money worked by making capitalism groovy with their ill-fated company, Apple, and when that failed they kept on talking about money - with the lawyers who eventually forced the issue of the band ' s break-up. Another striking feature is how little anybody talks about the music: there are some insightful pieces on individual songs, by Giles Smith, Steve Turner and Nicholas Barber, but in the main writers are analysing the phenomenon and trying to get inside the heads - and hearts - of the men themselves. John Lennon is the dominant figure: hailed as a genius for his wit and his slight, inventive books, reviled for the gaps between what he preaches in song ("Woman" , "Imagine",

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"Working-Class Hero") and what he practises in life (abuse, adultery, neglect, selfindulgence, pretension), and constantly set in competition against Paul McCartney. The old saws - John is the hard-hitting one, Paul the softie - are repeated, despite the musical evidence of, for example, Lennon's "Julia" and "In My Life" on the one hand and McCartney ' s "Heller Skelter" and "Get Back" on the other. Nik Cohn says Ringo summed the Beatles up for America, Dave Laing and Penny Valentine state categorically that George was "the best-looking" . This last assertion can be put to the test at the National Portrait Gallery' s exhibition Beatles to Bowie: The 60s exposed. The early years were full of baby-faced Elvis lookalikes with nothing of his sexual threat (Cliff Richard, Billy Fury, Adam Faith). The bands who wrote their own music were not hired for their looks, so here the Beatles stand out again. More authentic than Adam Faith and better looking than the Shadows, the Fab Four have the best of both worlds. Most of this exhibition is made up of features and spreads from newly established magazines with wonderful names - Boyfriend, Salut les Copains, Honey , Mademoiselle Age Tendre. As a result, the large, beautifully presented portraits by David Bailey dominate the exhibition - Mick Jagger, full of haughty promise, looking down his nose at the camera; and, inevitably, John and Paul, waiting to be adored, rejected, interpreted. As Blake Morrison says in the thoughtful , elegiac essay on the Beatles which he wrote for the TLS in 1981: The story of the Beatles' lives and lyrics seems to suggest that their secret was to

be all Ihings 10 all men .... Sexual freedom, experimentation with drug s, political commitment, transcendental religion , counter-cultural activity of all kinds: their songs simultaneously incited us to try these things , and warned that

in the end we'd be disappointed, as they had been. The ambivalence was the appeal.

19

Fictional portraits of the king who burned the cakes - in the nineteenth century and the present day

Their favourite monarch JOANNE PARKER Bernard Corn well THE BURNING LAND 336pp. HarperCollins. £18.99. 9780007219742

t is difficult to imagine that just a century and a half ago King Alfred was celebrated as a national hero, the greatest of English monarchs, a "model Englishman" . Reviewing a new history of King Alfred for Fraser 's Magazine in 1852, the historian J. A. Froude hailed his life as "the favourite story in English nurseries". Froude was looking back across a century in which Alfred had been feted as the first "patriot king" by the supporters of Frederick, the son of George Il; had been celebrated in five epic poems (including one hy .John Fitchett which at 1,500 pages is still the longest modern English poem) ; and was the subject of plays, children's books, paintings and statues . It was over the next half century, however, that the ninth-century king of Wessex became a national icon. Works in every literary genre, including the "Alfredian" novel, became fashionable; in them Alfred was credited with the founding of trial by jury, the Royal Navy, limited monarchy and free education. During public celebrations in 1901 (a date believed, erroneously, to mark the thousandth anniversary of his death), Hamo Thornycroft's statue of Alfred was unveiled in Winchester in the presence of dignitaries from across the empire and spectators in their thousands. Within a year, however, Alfredianism was in decline, and during the next fifty years the Saxon king all but disappeared from British popular cu lture. At the end of the Victorian period the demand was for factually accurate historical fiction. The amount of source material available for Alfred ' s life left little room for invention and made him seem less attractive to novelists. At the same time, scholarship was busy discrediting the most appealing legends attached to him and the belief that many institutions were of Alfredian origin. In 1899, Frederic Harrison rationalized that Alfred was "too practical a man to let his own supper get burnt on the hearth". Some authors resisted: "Who would read your dryas-du st history, think you , if there was no ray of romance illuminating its pages here and there?" the novelist Gordon Stables protested in 1898, in Twixt Daydawn and Light, one of the last Alfredian novels to be published in the nineteenth century. But as the Victorian faith in progress began to wane in the early twentieth century, the triumphal shape of Alfred's life became less appealing to the national mood, whi le his success in personifying English national identity meant that he became less attractive to novelists who preferred flawed and psychologically interesting figures.

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A detail from "Alfred, the Saxon King, disguised as a Minstrel, in the Tent ofGuthrum the Dane" by Daniel Maclise, 1852 After the publication of G. K. Chesterton's Ballad of the White Horse (1911) , Alfred waited for almost a century for an author to remodel him for modern tastes. Bernard Cornwell's five-novel Alfredian project began in 2004 with the publication of The Last Kingdom , followed by The Pale Horseman, The Lords of the North and Sword Song, and finally The Burning Land, published late last year. In some ways, the series hearkens back to the nineteenth century; it draws on the body of legend which was so popular with Victorian authors. Cornwell's Alfred sits gazing into a fire , planning his retaliation against the Danes, whi le a batch of oat bannocks burn. He creeps into the Danish camp, disguised as a minstrel , to spy on the enemy - though here this is evidence not of the king's courage but rather of his foolishness. And his daughter is kidnapped by a dashing Dane, an incident with no medieval , but countless Victorian precedents. Finally, Cornwell's narrative also resembles a nineteenth-century work in its length. It has taken almost 2,000 pages for Alfred to progress from a green youth, not yet enthroned in The Last Kingdom, to an elderly man preparing for the grave in The Burning Land. And Corn well has not finished, but seems to be looking towards Alfred's son Edward, his daughter iEthelflaed and his bastard Osferth for future in stalments: each of them is more central than Alfred in this latest book, which ends by promising that its narrator " now firmly allied to iEthelflaed, will campaign again". Although the length of the series places it alongside the epic Alfredian poems of Henry J ames Pye and J oseph Cottle, or the serial

fiction of Charles Whistler, the focus of Cornwell ' s work is wider. Almost all nineteenth-century Alfredian narratives close with the king's victory at the Battle of Edington in 878, presenting it as the decisive overthrow of the Danes, and disregarding the invasions that continued over the next twenty years of the king's reign. Cornwell ' s narrative continues through the later battles and short-lived treaties, without offering any reassuring sense of progress or holding out a promise of success. His narrator Uhtred, an elderly man looking back bitterly on his own precarious career as a warrior during Alfred's reign, muses, "so long as there is a kingdom on this windswept island, there will be war". Cornwell's canvas is expansive. The third volume of his series, The Lords of the North (2006) moves the action from Alfred' s kingdom of Wessex to the wilds of Northumbria, while the fourth , Sword Song (2007) is set in Mercian London, effectively placing Alfred ' s local victories in a wider context of Danish immigration. In some ways this shift of focus from Athelney and Winchester follows in the traditions of Victorian Alfredi ana. In the nineteenth century, most of the writers who chose Alfred as their subject were motivated by local pride - Thomas Hughes, for instance, boasted that he grew up " in Alfred's own county". Precisely which county was Alfred's was a matter of debate, with writers from Berkshire, Wiltshire and Somerset all claiming association. Corn well asserts his own Alfredian connections by associating Alfred' s story with Bamburgh Castle - a fortification held by the author's own ancestors late in the medieval period and by focusing on the defeat of a Danish

TLS JANUARY 1 2010

fleet at South Benfleet in Essex, close to Thundersley where he grew up. Cornwell's background as a "war baby", the illegitimate child of a Canadian airman, adopted by an English family, seems to colour his choice of narrator. At the opening of The Last Kingdom, Uhtred, while still a boy, loses his ancestral Northumbrian home and title when he is captured by invading Danes. He spends the next four volumes battling to regain social status, first by plundering alongside the Danes, then by earning renown as a merciless warrior in the Saxon shieldwall , and finally as a powerful landowner in Alfred's Wessex. Throughout the novels, however, he wavers between allegiances and wrestles with issues of identity: "Northumbrian or Dane?", he wonders, "which was I? What did I want to be?". Such questions may have resonance not only for Cornwell - who since 1980 has li ved in North America - but also for many of his readers, living in an England that is again struggling to find an identity: English? British? European? Which are we? What do we want to be? Although Uhtred is bound by oaths to the cunning Alfred, his heart tugs towards the Danes. "To exchange Ragnar's freedom for Alfred's earnest piety seemed a miserable fate to me", he thinks. Corn well paints a succession of attractive Danish warriors who roar with delight on the battlefield, swear with mouth-filling oaths, revel in the saltspray soaking their flaxen locks, and feast with carnivorous joy. A fascination with Alfred's foes has a precedent in the work of Victorian boys' authors, including G. A. Henty, who admired the Danes' seamanship and prowess in battle, acknowledging their contribution to Britain's mixed heritage. Even in Henty, though, the Danes are made to repent of their alcoholism, and perhaps it reveals something about our current attitudes to drinking that the unquenchable thirst of Cornwell's Vikings is part of their heroic image. In contrast, his Saxons are nearly all rule-bound, temperate leek-eaters. In one of his scrupu lous ly researched, three-page historical afterwords, Corn well tells us that he wanted to escape the "fanciful imagery" that has become attached to the figure of the horn-helmeted Viking, but some cultural stereotyping remains in his depiction of the two peoples. A large part of Uhtred's contempt for the Saxons is directed at their Christianity - "a religion that sucks joy from this world" and even ruins the cheer of midwinter with "chanting monks, droning priests and savagely long sermons". This is what most strongly distinguishes Cornwell ' s novels from their nineteenth-century predecessors, in which the king was admired for his piety and sustain ing faith. Uhtred (who resists Christianity and remains a follower of Thor) deplores the propaganda put out by the Saxon Church and protests at the exaggerations of

20 the monastic chroniclers, their misattribution of victories to leaders who remained far from the front line, and their fabrication of saints' tales for political ends. In his own version of the martyrdom of Edmund of East Anglia, Uhtred relates: "children learn how brave Saint Edmund stood up to the Danes, demanded their conversion, and was murdered ... but the truth is that he was a fool and talked himself into martyrdom" . Such irreverence will please students of the AngloSaxon Chronicles, but Cornwell's account of how resistance to a Danish invasion in search of land and riches is rewritten by English monks, as a "holy war" has serious contemporary relevance. Cornwell's Alfred is also a twentyfirst-century figure, a politician who sees the value of spin. He has the foresight to commission the Welsh bishop Asser to write a flattering biography of him, and Uhtred learns that Alfred "had never been invested as the future king" but "to his dying day, insisted the Pope had conferred the succession on him , and so justified his usurpation of the throne that by rights should have gone to Aethelred's eldest son". Alfred's success does not derive from bravery on the battlefield; Uhtred scornfully describes him as "a pious weakling ... paralysed by fear". Instead, his power is that of "a spider spinning sticky webs" ; he is a canny ruler who deploys men as if they were chess pieces and secures the loyalty of followers like Uhtred through arranged marriages and land grants. Uhtred grudgingly comes to respect this " miserable, pious, tight-fisted king" over the course of 2,000 pages. Alfred himself also develops from the gauche regent whom we first see moaning and vomiting behind a tent: "It seemed Alfred had humped a servant girl and, immediately afterwards, had been overcome by physical pain and what he called spiritual torment" . This is a far cry from the monarch of the statue in Winchester defiantly holding up his sword; Corn well ' s portrait of a sinful young man who has to overcome temptation is more like Asser' s ninth-century Life of King Alfred. This is not the only way in which Cornwell's novels move away from the Victorian by returning to the medieval. They use Old English personal and place names, and are infused with an Anglo-Saxon sense of fate or "wyrd" ; their lurid descriptions of shield-walls and raven-circled battlefields could have come straight from the Brunanburh poem or "The Fight at Finnsburh" . Blake, Coleridge and Milton all considered writing on Alfred, but their plans never came to fruition. William Morris got as far as completing a pencil sketch of him , but no further. The Saxon king never found his Tennyson. "On turning to the treatment of [Alfred] in the literature of his country it is impossible not to feel disappointment", the historian Louis Wardlaw Miles complained in 1902. Even now, it is hard to see why the Saxon king was rejected by WaIter Scott and Charles Kingsley. The influence of Bernard Cornwell ' s characterization remains to be seen. Perhaps Alfred may yet give Arthur, his nineteenth-century rival, a run for his money. One thing seems certain. Corn well has reinvented Alfred and his world so aptly for the twenty-first century that it is probably impossible now to return to the heroic and pious image of "England's darling".

FICTION

On the Venice train "Every educated Hungarian knows and loves this book." That is what Len Rix discovered in 1991 when he was introduced to Ulas es Holdivdg (Journey by Moonlight) , Antal Szerb's devastatingly intelligent novel of love, society and metaphysics in a mid-1930s Europe. The novel originally appeared in 1937; eight years later, Szerb was dead, a victim of fascism. We are fortunate that Rix and the Pushkin Press have, over the past decade, resurrected Szerb' s oeuvre for anglophone audiences, publishing three of his novels and a work of experimental history, The Queen 's Necklace (reviewed in the TLS, December 11, 2009). Journey by Moonlight opens with a cool mixture of wit and intrigue: "On the train everything seemed fine. The trouble began in Venice, with the back-alleys". The relationship between a couple on their honeymoon is about to disintegrate. Erzsi has left her entrepreneur husband in order to elope with Mihaly, an intellectual but ultimately petitbourgeois dreamer who has an "acute nostalgia" for his youth. "Italy he associated with grown-up matters"; the "trouble" is he cannot

play the required adult role. The back alleys are symbolic of his regressive introversion: returning to the hotel , he makes love to his new wife in "a roundabout way" , the kind "fashionable among certain adolescent boys and still-virgin girls ... avoiding all responsibility" . Both enjoy the experience; but Mihaly predicts the "collapse of his marriage". "He had failed as an adult." Getting down from the train and lingering too long on the platform, Mihaly abandons his wife ("involuntarily but not unintentionally"). He then embarks on a solo tour of 11 Duce's country, where he breezily considers his "quite amicable" conjugal separation and seduces an American art student. But depression outlives passion and he must visit the doctor. Along the way, he encounters various ghosts from the past. The happen stance is dreamlike; the mood hallucinatory. Mihaly was part of a boyhood set of Budapest friends ,

irst published in this English version in 1986, The Passport has been reissued following the award to Herta Mi.iller of the Nobel Prize for Literature. It tells the story of Windisch, who runs a mill in rural Romania. An ethnic German, he has the opportunity to escape to the West - but only if he can get a passport. Corruption has distorted the system, however, and any application demands extraordinary measures. For almost a year, Windisch has tried unsuccessfully to bribe officials with free sacks of flour. He accepts at last what others have told him, that he will have to surrender the only other valuable thing he has: his daughter. The measure brings new urgency , for failure would condemn his family to permanent humiliation. Little of this is stated outright. Naturally the priest and the militiaman have euphemisms for the sexual advantage they take of Windisch's daughter in exchange for their assistance, but the pattern is far broader:

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TOB Y LICHTIG Antal Szerb JOURNEY BY MOONLIGHT Translated by Len Rix 234pp. Pushkin Press. Paperback, £7.99. 9781901285505

marked by the intensity of their friendship. They frisked, drank and debated, all the while competing for the attention of the only girl in the group, the mysterious Eva, who, along with her brother, Tamas, formed the last line of a gothically decaying family dynasty. Eva's love is the love of annihilation; it hit her brother hardest: he committed suicide, and she watched. The other two members of the group, now grown up, meet Mihaly in Italy: Janos, another of Eva' s playthings, and Ervin , a hot-blooded Jew who has since become a monk (the better to deal with his unfulfilled desires). Eva is somewhere in the country, but remains just out of the picture, a kind of erotic Macguffin, luring Mihaly through a melancholy "whirlpool" of recollection. He catches glimpses, and then she disappears. When they do meet, it is, inevitably, an anticlimax. "That' s how it is. You yearn for someone, maniacally, mortally, to the verges of hell and death .... And then suddenly she appears just at the moment when you've pulled on a cheap pair of pyjamas ... and you'd actually rather this person ... were simply not there." What Mihaly really desires is the (imagined) past: "Because all that interests me is what she was then". His abandoned wife follows suit in the quest for the unobtainable, refusing to give up on Mihaly, while she in turn is pursued by her first husband Zoltan: a nouveau-riche businessman and roue, who, in Erzsi's absence, can finally commit himself to fidelity. The triumvirate chase their tails across Italy and France (there is a moving, amusing, all-too-brief reignition of ardour between the honeymooners in which Mihaly decides, after conquest, that

Herta MUlier THE PASSPORT Translated by Martin Chalmers 93pp. Serpent' s Tail. Paperback, £7.99. 9781852421397

euphemism becomes the very language of the novel. This is because The Passport is couched in the strange code engendered by repression: indecipherable because there is nothing specific to decipher, it is candid, but somehow beside the point, redolent of things unsaid. From odd observations the villagers sometimes make ("Man is nothing but a pheasant in the world"), to chapters titled after unimportant props ("The Pot Hole", "The Needle"), everything points to a strategy of displaced meaning that has not been lost in Martin Chalmers' s excellent translation. Such displacement is fundamental to Mi.iller's approach, whether following Windisch's pursuit of a new life, or

TLS JANUARY I 2010

Erzsi " lacked mystery"). Zoltan sends Mihaly a letter warning of Erzsi ' s foibles ("Don't let her eat scampi"); he is also an expert on capitalism, concluding that Mihaly's problem, as an intellectual, is that "he believed in money while at the same time calling everything else into doubt". Zoltan chuckles at his rival's naivety: "The [financial] quest is for a myth .... Even lyric poetry is more serious". Further complicating the kiss (and money) chase is the introduction of a shady Persian, who stands for the Blakean "tiger tiger" of non-bourgeois abandon. Erzsi is manipulated ("why do they all try to sell meT) and shocked when the "tiger" comes to see her in her room. She rejects him - and immediately regrets it: "Oh, if only the Persian were to return . As a study of erotic caprice, Journey by Moonlight is brilliant, but it is so much more than just a romp. It depicts a sick and corrupted Europe on the brink of disaster, trapped between capitalist drudgery, moral degeneracy and something far darker. Amid all the sexual intrigue, there is no fertility: a sign that humanity lacks the emotional maturity to advance. And if the nostalgia is personally restrictive, politically it is brutal: fascism thrives on the longing for a mis-imagined past. The coming war looms subtly, but ominously. "Perhaps I should never have come to Italy" , considers Mihaly. "This country was created out of nostalgia." As for so-called progress, Szerb posits a double-edged sword: "The stronger civilization becomes, the more our yearning for death thrives in the subconscious". This is a delightfully clever and enchanting novel , always entertaining and full of memorable aphorisms ("Life was not an art-form, or rather, it was an extremely mixed genre"). Rix's translation does its vibrancy justice, despite the odd anachronism ("cool" is used in its contemporary sense; a character telephones "Casualty"). Szerb was a writer of immense talent, never sharper than in presaging the calamity that eventually killed him. Happily for us, his memory lives on.

documenting the one he would leave behind. "The Fly" describes a funeral by tracking the insect's movements through a church; "The Shot" is a sound effect in the Russian film Windisch' s daughter sees with her lover when they meet for the last time. Even the passport at the story's centre, itself a kind of codeword for escape, is never seen, nor is the freedom it finally brings. Every such incidence of misdirection is the whole book in miniature, for although Ceau~escu is never mentioned, he is central to the story, and cannot be forgotten. The resulting sense that anything, indeed everything - whether spoken by the characters or described by the author - is potentially dense with tacit significance means this short novel expands in the mind to occupy an emotional space far beyond its short length or the seeming simplicity of its story. TADZIO MARTIN KOELB

FICTION is non-fiction collection of 2005 may have been titled The Disappointment Artist (after an essay about the writer Edward Dahlberg), but Jonathan Lethem himself is more of an enthusiasm artist. His early novels inhabit the forms of beloved genres - most rewardingly in the hysterical and moving detective story Motherless Brooklyn (1999), with its Tourette's-afflicted protagonist - and his more recent works incorporate his multiple pop-culture enthusiasms, spelt out in the essays. The characters in The Fortress of Solitude (2003) collect comic books and read science fiction , and obsess over Westerns and soul music. You Don 't Love Me Yet (2007) is about an indie rock band and the conceptual artists, DJs and rock critics in whose orbit the band members move. His new novel Chronic City is the overstuffed inheritor of all that came before. Lethem unloads the bulk of his private passions onto a character named Perkus Tooth, a brilliant odd ball who attracts the interest of the novel's principal narrator and a handful of prominent Manhattan residents. Perkus is a fan of Cassavettes, Brando and David Byrne. He is a former practitioner of street art and a former writer for Rolling Stone. The narrator, a retired actor named Chase Instead man (like science fiction writers and Thomas Pynchon, Lethem has fun with character names), bumps into Perkus in the office of a friend who works for the Criterion Collection (the source of oh-so-many films beloved in the Lethem universe). Insteadman's mission and the novel's chief (iftenuous) concession to narrative suspense becomes the saving of Perkus, jobless and without a partner, from his

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Beloved genres MARK KAMINE Jonathan Lethem CHRONIC CITY 467pp. Faber. Paperback, £14.99. 9780571 123567 marginalized existence. In spite of all efforts, Perkus goes on to lose his home and health and more. In The Fortress of Solitude, Lethem brilliantly embedded fantastical elements (a ring that gave its wearer superpowers) into a realistic setting (racially diverse and divided Brooklyn). Its youthful heroes struggled with recognizable problems, such as broken families and local bullies, that compelled interest. In Chronic City the drama is outsized and phantasmagoric. A mysterious smell of chocolate wafts through Manhattan, which is at the same time being terrorized by an enormous and possibly mechanical tiger and engulfed in an endless winter. Downtown, an immovable fog blankets the financial district. Meanwhile, Insteadman' s alleged fiancee floats above the earth in a space station stranded in an interstellar Chinese minefield. Perkus's home-delivery drug dealer, named Watt (he is Beckettian in his circumscribed purposefulness), appears from time to time to sell potent strains of marijuana which have plot-apt names such as Gray Fog, Giant Tiger and Chronic City. Watt's weed fuels the

characters' all-night rap sessions and sharpens their appetite for hamburgers and for the large ceramic vases known as Chaldrons that become the chief pursuit, for a while, of the Perkus-led cabal. Lethemites will eat this stuff up. The uninitiated may find it artificial and overheated. As if aware of the demands his novel makes on the reader's tolerance for hyperbole, Lethem laces a metafictional awareness of fictionality throughout, as an acknowledgement of the evasiveness of reality, the permeability of personality. Insteadman ' s astronaut feels herself " beginning to dissolve" . The church as seen from a window "acts on [lnsteadman'sl mind like an eraser rubbing away the words that might describe it". His friend Perkus feels "invisible and unknown". Lethem hits this note slightly too often, dissolving its effectiveness as tonic. Nevertheless the rewards of reading him are substantial. Chronic City brims with caustic and witty description, as when Insteadman has dinner with a couple of wealthy, pampered, well-preserved Manhattanites. " Rossmoor was a desiccated toddler, age floating unfixed; Arjuna's fifty-some years were pinned to her like a police-artist' s sketch, or an archaeologist's reconstruction of flesh on an unearthed hominid's skull." And, in spite of his far-fetched plot, Lethem manages to nail again and again uncomfortable psychological truths, including the welling up of life-force experienced

21 by his protagonist after a funeral. I'd been immune for three hours to the shameful survivor's lust that I'd known to sometimes

wash over me at funerals, the giddy, guilty apprehension of one's own continuing lucky freedom to feast and fuck and defecate, to waste hours flipping cable channels watching fragments of movies or half solving crosswords in ballpoint and then tossing them aside,

to do pretty well anything but sit and honor the memory of another whose lucky freedom had run ouL But now, three hours' worth of lust seemed to flood me all at once,

in retrospect. Lethem's portrait of municipal power and the celebrity circuit that surrounds it is persuasive. Chronic City's very Bloombergian Mayor Arnheim lives in tightly supervised splendour. Insteadman wants to see this "small Jewish man" as " nothing more than another graying operative in a suit". But he cannot resist the billionaire's "gravitational warpage effects, the way we all seemed denser and more luscious in his presence". An Arnheim operative, Bronx-born Richard Abneg, is shown to have the proper abrasive attitude and compromised ideals to straddle both Arnheim's and Perkus's world. Late in the novel Lethem provides a glimpse of Insteadman's modest and remote Indiana upbringing, and this delivers a necessary dose of reality before the final elaboration of Chronic City's extravagant plot. For those few pages Lethem places his narrator in a recognizable world where adolescents strive both to fit in and branch out. It is a world Lethem's novels have always kept one foot in, even as they reach up into outer space or back to mid-century noir. It is a world not quite evident enough in Chronic City.

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From man to fish ecretary Ku Wenxuan has lived all his life as the revered son of the revolutionary martyr Deng Shaoxiang. After a farcical investigation exposes this lineage as false, Ku is denounced and he retreats into exile to live among the boat people of the Sunnyside Fleet on the Golden Sparrow River. His wife, once the voice of Party sloganeering, remains on the shore, forcing their teenage son, Dongliang, to choose between his parents. Ostracized because of his heritage and haunted by the lurid sexual infidelities in his father's past, Dongliang is tormented by repressed sexual desire, forced to exist on the margins of the society he has chosen. Divided between two worlds, he is an intermediary who travels from river to shore, crossing boundaries, caught in an era of transition. This is Dongliang's story; he is a troubled narrator whose adolescent perspective enhances the strangeness and incomprehensibility of the adult world. The account he gives us is of the gradual eradication of individual identity and the erasure of personal and collective history. People become nobodies, just " rank-and-file" citizens in a country that " belongs to the Party and to socialism". There is a gradual retreat from "terra firma" into the detached and impermanent world of the river. The winner of the Man Asian Literary

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JESS CHANDLER Su Tong THE BOAT TO REDEMPTION Translated by Howard Goldblatt 362pp. Doubleday. £ 17.99. 9780385613446 Prize for 2009, The Boat to Redemption is a political fable structured around a series of dualities which highlight the conflicts and uncertainties of a tumultuous era. Set during the Cultural Revolution, it places social upheaval alongside its portrayal of the relationship between a father and son, exiled from their familiar world and set adrift. It is a tale of obsession, and of the tendency of the past to determine the future, however absurd its origins. Ku's quest for redemption self-destructive; his is extreme and castration is the first act in a gradual process of annihilation, until in the eyes of his son, he has become more fish than human. Su Tong, whose novella Raise the Red Lantern became an international bestseller, reflects on the impossibility of redemption in an impersonal political system in which the individual is rendered insignificant. Both father and son are gradually erased, exiled into obscurity and denied a history. Like many Chinese writers, he confronts the

troubling complexities of recent history by means of a simple parable that reaches far beyond the boundaries of its fictional world. The influence here of Gabriel Garcfa Marquez, who is Su Tong's favourite writer, is palpable, and the novel's imagery revels in the confusions of the surreal, at times approaching magic realism through the imagination of its narrator who, " wallowing in a space between reason and imagination" , is haunted by visions and illusions. Su Tong has described his novel as concerned with " the fate of people caught up in an absurd time" . A repeated insistence on the role of fate becomes a means of comprehending political events, as the absence of reason becomes a powerless acceptance. The particular agent of fate here is Mao's Cultural Revolution, which overshadows the novel, providing a context of general absurdity in which progress overpowers humanity. These are "critical times" , and while life on the barges retains a timeless continuity, each visit ashore reveals new signs of progress as Milltown undergoes "a spectacular transformation" . Revolutionary projects abound; developments "explode into existence" at a bewilderingly rapid pace, the work carried out by an "army of labourers". But there is a " bleak quality to the prosper-

TLS JANUARY I 2010

ous scenes on the densely populated shore", and Su Tong emphasizes the farcical aspects of such blind progress, where "one small step closer to the urinal is a giant leap for civilization" . The absurdities of his darkly comic narrative enhance an overall sense of randomness and futility. The metaphor of a chess game is used to assert the position of China's people as pawns in the Party's game. Like the story it tells, the novel is both a farce and a tragedy. Amid the ruthless processes of eradication and modernization, Su Tong insists on the power of language to retain the essence of cultural sensibility. The symbolism of the narrati ve, and the recurrence of proverbs in the text, are reminders of China' s past. Howard Goldblatt's fine translation captures the rich pictorial imagery of a language which defines through description, and where meaning is tied to a complex history of myth and metaphor.

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22

REFERENCE BOOKS & LITERARY CRITICISM

arry Forshaw's Rough Guide to Crime Fiction (2007) was an excellent introduction to the genre for readers curious to know where it comes from and how it has developed, or for those wondering what to read next. It ranged from the nineteenth century to 2007, with assessments of quality and influence, in prose, film and television. Now, with the aid of more than two dozen collaborators (not all of whom are identified in the contributors' notes), Forshaw has edited an 850-page, two-volume work of reference to British and Irish - crime writing. The title reminds us that national reference books bring more complications with them than the vexed question of what to call these islands now. This national friction is unavoidable when writing about crime writing, and nationalism , although it rates no entry in these volumes, is integral to any discussion (fear of foreigners is not explicitly addressed here: there is no entry on "yellow peril" or "colonial"). The entries include descriptions of individual authors, large- and smallscreen crime, and thematic articles; most are cross-referenced and end with suggestions for further reading. The book' s design (unjustified typesetting, good-sized print, wide margins) suggests that it is intended for readers as well as for library shelves. Forshaw's contributors, many of whom are members of the Crime Writers Association, are widely read, and if they round up the usual historical suspects, their coverage of contemporary crime writing extends to authors publishing now, with an unusually large number of entries about the living. Genre writers are traditionally great readers of the works of their fellow practitioners, and their novels are full of allusions to other authors. The disadvantage of inviting crime writers to write about other crime writers, as Forshaw has, is their need to accentuate the positive; there is a note

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In these islands RUTH MORSE Barry Forshaw, editor BRITISH CRIME WRITING An encyclopedia Two volumes, 867pp. Greenwood Publishing. £90 (US $149). 978 I 84645 022 8

of eulogy throughout the book. There are also some odd omissions, which suggest that the book has taken a long time to produce; the excellent historical writer Ariana Franklin and Ann Cleeves's recent Gold Dagger for the first of her Shetland series go unmentioned. A comprehensive list of pseudonyms would have been welcome. Subject categories are always a problem in reference works. Informative as they are in this collection, they seem sometimes arbitrary, and often inconsistent, and their lists of names favour description over analysis. John Buchan is sometimes a crime writer, sometimes a precursor. The "gay and lesbian" article discusses only women. The longest article is titled "The Shires" , and addresses English regions. Although there is one shorter one on Scotland, the idea of regions does not extend to independent entries on Ulster or Wales; given political devolution or the Troubles, these absences are puzzling. The articles by Jessica Mann and Carla Banks, on "Women Crime Writers" and "Feminist Readings", are especially interesting for their reflections on social change, including violence done to, as well as imagined by, women. But even here, "British" does not seem much to distinguish the islands' charac-

teristics from the anglophone continents. The apparent agendas of Golden Age crime fiction , which permeate these volumes, were in fact often adapted from non-English sources: Edgar Allan Poe's innovative locked-room mystery passed through the hands of the journalist Gaston Leroux (Le Mystere de la chambre jaune, 1907, with its early journalist detective) before the Cornishborn, half American and half Anglo-Irish Agatha Christie made it a hallmark. Her most original innovation, the murderer of Roger Ackroyd, came only in 1926. Clever "puzzle" plots and their trapped casts used roles characteristic of nineteenth-century theatre. What Golden Age authors had in common was an idea of Englishness (not Britishness) which is often pastiche and never far from parody. Their stereotyping came from authors who personally felt a sense of distance, if not exclusion. What made them successful was the fortunate combination of their individual talent, corporate weight and tacit agreement about their stock in trade, a stock which always included an acute sense of world events. "Thriller" was for many years the standard genre label. What we now call thri llers (categorized as such by their focus on public, political events which unfold with their plots) have always had the advantage of the context of national politics within which they unfold. From B uchan and B ingham, through Eric Ambler to John le Came, protagonists have struggled with history as much as against foreign powers. In mainstream crime fiction the evolution of what we loosely call class, relevant as it has been to the thriller, was more prominent in stories of detection. Sherlock Holmes never had to deal with the equivalent

of the Kalashnikov-wielding thug. In that context Buchan's four groups of novels assume their place, as Natasha Cooper argues in a well-judged article which explores the variety of his work and deals tactfully with his prejudices and snobberies. Her assessment is convincing, not least because her grip on the social history is sure. Forshaw's inclusiveness means there are individual entries on the immigrants Peter Dickinson, James McClure and Mike Phillips; the emigrants Peter Robinson (who has lived in Canada for many years) and Lee Child; the residents or migrants from beyond British boundaries Ruth Dudley Edwards (Ireland), Ngaio Marsh (New Zealand) and Charles Palliser (the United States). Given the fear of the foreign that marked the early years of the genre, this must be progress. Merely making "England" one's subject, however, is not a qualification: there is no entry on Elizabeth George. Empire appears in many articles, but neither colonialism nor postcolonialism do. Some individual television series appear, but there is no entry exploring the development of small-screen crime fiction. By contrast, Woody Haut's article on the movies is a masterly piece of compression. And claiming Raymond Chandler (as well as Lee Child) as a "product of Britain and Britishness" is shrewd, although Chandler was probably "ambivalent" about his nationality, rather than "ambiguous", as the article has it. Publishers are notoriously stingy nowadays about employing copy-editors: this is evidenced by many errors of expression and punctuation in the text. The contributors' repetitions and editorial inconsistencies such as missing dates of birth are exasperating in a reference book. Some readers may find the recounting of plots welcome, but they seem an offence against the spirit of the genre. There is no article on reviewing.

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What wakes when the I sleeps " D o you suppose", Sigmund Freud wrote, in a letter dated 1900 to his friend and colleague Wilhelm Fliess, "that some day a marble tablet will be placed on the house, inscribed with these words: 'In This House, on July 24th, 1895 the Secret of Dreams was revealed to Dr. Sigm. Freud ' ?" The date given on the marble tablet in Freud's imagination refers to the "other night" of "Irma's Injection" - the first of his own dreams that Freud submitted to interpretation during a period of intense selfanalysis in the mid to late 1890s, an account of which was combined with examples from literature and analysands for The Interpretation of Dreams. In the dream work that accompanies the examples, Freud declares that the latent content - the "dreamthoughts" which feed our unconscious thoughts - and the manifest content - the images of the dream we recall on waking are two versions of the same subject-matter, written, as it were, in two "different languages". The emphasis he places on the process of writing can be seen in the descriptive language he uses to recount his theory. Dream-thoughts, he declares, are "translated" into the manifest content we remem-

LUCY SCHOLES Herschel Farbman THE OTHER NIGHT Dreaming, writing, and restlessness in twentieth-century literature 152pp. Fordham University Press. $50; distributed in UK by Eurospan. £44.95. 9780 8232 28652

ber, but the "transcript" with which we are presented is written in a mode of expression "whose characters and syntactic laws" must he discovered in the interpretative course of the dream work. In recognizing that the dream content is not the seemingly nonsensical "pictorial composition" we relate on waking, but rather a "pictographic script", Freud refutes the commonly held view that the dream is an experience beyond human language, instead arguing that dreaming is a form of writing. In marrying dreams with the process of writing, Freud forged the basis of the relationship that is the focus of Herschel Farbman's study, The Other Night. Farbman combines Maurice Blanchot's division of the night in

which the dream is not a function of sleep but rather the "sleep-resistant centre" - the "other night" indeed - with Freud's premiss that the dream is a form of writing, in order to explore the relationship between dreaming, writing and authorial responsibility. Through a consideration of the work of three key figures, Samuel Beckett, Blanchot and James Joyce, Farbman explores the literary restlessness apparent in the first half of the twentieth century. The Other Night is as demanding as the literature it engages with, and is not for the faint-hearted. Farbman's strength lies in the rigorous and detailed linguistic analyses of these lengthy, complex texts, to which he brings both considerable and considerate knowledge. The study is bookended by chapters on the "epoch-defining dream-books" The Interpretation of Dreams and Finnegans Wake. For Farbman, each articulates the experience of waking in the very depths of sleep, where dreams are formed in the impossibility of ever fully resting. Turning to Blanchot's comparison of the kernel of restlessness that lies at the heart both of dreaming and writing, Farbman then explores the restlessness that lies in the incessant "writing" in Beckett's

TLS JANUARY I 2010

Trilogy: the narrator of The Unnameable , although lacking the implements to do so, is destined to "write" his own life eternally. This restlessness persists in the bright light of day as we discover that "what wakes when the 'I' sleeps doesn't sleep when the 'I' wakes". Such detailed and specific readings raise the question whether this study really encompasses "twentieth-century literature", as its subtitle states. Farbman neglects the output of Freud's Germanic contemporaries Arthur Schnitzler's novella Dream Story , in which fin-de-siecle Vienna becomes a dream city seeped in fantasy and dark desire; Thomas Mann's dream-dependent works The Magic Mountain and Death in Venice; and the writings of Stefan Zweig, to whom Freud wrote descrihing his use of language as " like the accumulation of symbols in a dream which allow what is concealed to come glimmering through with ever-increasing clarity". Freud ended his musings to Fliess with the conclusion that there was "at the moment. little prospect" of his marble tablet, but a century later, despite the technological advances that have accompanied neuroscientific sleep research and enable the imaging of a night spent in sleep, we still search for clarity in the elusive "other night" of our dreams.

LITERARY CRITICISM & POETRY

Plain style in the bath-house cademic work on Thom Gunn will prove to be difficult. His career is almost designed to thwart it. To begin with, he showed promise. Early Gunn was full of poses and parallels - with Marlowe, with Donne, with Marvell. But he was also self-consciously new and bold. He celebrated Elvis Presley: "Whether he poses or is real, no cat / Bothers to say". Homosexuality was disguised in a fascination with toughness, independence, the Outsider. It wasn't a very good disguise. There were easy pickings in Gunn' s first two books, Fighting Terms and The Sense of Movement, for any half-awake decoder or Freudian. Most excitingly of all, Gunn was supposed to belong to an important group ("the Movement"): he could provide a nice little chapter for someone more interested in Larkin and Kingsley Amis. Quite soon, however, Gunn disclaimed membership of any movement, or Movement. Living in the United States from 1954 until his death fifty years later, he ceased to be English, but was never wholly American. His style became less distinctive, abandoning absolute formalism and the rhymes that had once required some odd contortions of syntax ("A deadly world : for, once I like, it kills" "Lofty in the Palais de Danse"). Instead, he mixed precise forms with free verse, using syllabics as a bridge between the two. There may still have been poses, and masks. But syntax became plainer, queerness was, in every sense, out in the open, and Gunn ' s clear diction aspired to match an honest and uncluttered view of life. He concentrated on das ding an sich . Being "the less deceived" was as important for Gunn as for other 1950s writers . But while Larkin (only seven years older) stayed in Hull and moaned about life's deceptions, Gunn appeared to have achieved true freedom in California: "On fogless days by the Pacific, / there is a cold hard light without break / that reveals merely what is - no more / and no less . That limiting candour, / that accuracy of the beaches, / is part of the ultimate richness" ("Flying Above California"). Some found that this happiness wrote white. Anthony Thwaite, reviewing the collection Touch (1967) in the TLS, found the new concern with "thingness" disappointing: "the greater the particularity, the weaker the intensity" . And Thwaite was not alone among critics in feeling that Gunn had "gone off': the new subjects Gunn was so plain about - drug-use, orgies at the bath-house, surfers and rock music - alienated many former admirers. The hostility of the reviews

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GRAEME RICHARDSON Joshua Weiner , editor AT THE BARRIERS On the poetry of Thorn Gunn 344pp. University of Chicago Press. Paperback, $25; distributed in the UK by Wiley. £17.50. 9780226 89044 9 Stefania Michelucci THE POETRY OF THOM GUNN A critical study

Translated by Jill Franks 212pp. McFarland & Company. £35.95 (US $39.95). 97807864 3687 3 Thorn Gunn SELECTED POEMS Edited by August Kleinzahler I02pp. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Paperback, $ 14. 9780374258597

- the true proprietor, the poet, would not be delighted, not that you care, you are showing how smart you are is the same reason I detest Charles Manson, for his interpretation of songs on the White

Album. But he was less cynical than you, he believed in his interpretations, he acted on

them. So what would Gunn think of books which, in the name of lit-crit, unearth such wisely suppressed drafts? At the Barriers, edited by Joshua Weiner, is very well intentioned. It wants to rebut the charge of unevenness, and in many ways succeeds. But in its own unevenness - symbolized by the printing of this " literary critics worse than murderers" squib - this collection of essays may help less than hinder. Weiner introduces the essays with a quotation from Gunn himself: "My life insists on continuities - between America and England,

between free verse and metre, between vision and everyday consciousness" . "Since Gunn ' s death", Weiner continues, "his whole body of work has been gaining the status of legend; what one finds in it, if one attends to the whole, is a poet of ceaselessly developing sensibility." Fortunately, the essays that follow are not all as overblown. Eavan Boland, Neil Powell , Alfred Corn and Clive Wilmer write powerfully and sympathetically about the early work, its taut Elizabethan forms , and its sublimation of homosexuality in an ex istentialist focus on "the lonely man" . August Kleinzahler then takes over, with the difficult task of smoothing out that crease in the middle of Gunn's career. For Kleinzahler, there is no crease, no unevenness. Continuity across differing periods comes through Gunn's "plain style": "unembellished, lucid. . It doesn't call attention to itself, but serves the material of the poem". This recalls Robert Conquest saying of Gunn that "he' s one of the very few people who can read a poem without making a nuisance of himself'. The essays that deal with the second half of Gunn's career are less successfu l. John Peck's essay "Summation and Chthonic Power" is seriously out of control; anyone who thinks that "to drop acid may well mean to drop down the entire gravitational curve of human development before one can actually read it" may not be the best person to defend Thom Gunn against the charge of going soft in the 1960s. Brian Teare's essay, in which "Lit Critics 1994" is printed, is admirably thorough. But like Peck's, Teare's contribution is bloated with self-importance, stitched through with the capital letter "I" . He never considers that some critics of Gunn' s later work might have been, not homophobic, but bored. Robert Pinsky ends the volume with a reaffirmation that, for Gunn, "literary criticism was far from his favourite mode or metier". When Gunn realized Pinsky had had to write about his Collected Poems in the Nation, he sent Pinsky a note - " You poor man" - describing the book as a "paperweight" .

for Gunn's mid-career collections (some now

seem obviously tinged with homophobia) may have reinforced his distrust of academic criticism, and his determination to elude it. Critics acclaimed him again in the 1980s, finding a rediscovered toughness and control in elegies for friends who died of AIDS. But Gunn remained resentful. His poem "Hatchet Man: A Reviewer" has been revealed as a smack at Ian Hamilton. And an unpublished notebook draft, "Lit Critics 1994", reads: The reason I detest you, for your interpretations of poems you have made your own property,

Thorn Gunn, 2003

TLS JANUARY I 2010

23 What drew Gunn away from selfindulgent ex istentialist angst and towards a Rilke-like attention to detail was precisely this modesty. It's there in interviews he gave, such as the conversation with Jim Powell in PN Review in 1989: "Every now and again, I ask myself if I have any poetic theory. I suppose somebody could assemble one for me, simply on the basis of my practice. I think it would be full of inconsistencies ... ". That modesty has somehow been missed by Stefania Michelucci - a shame, because her book The Poetry of Thom Gunn ends with a very simi lar interview. Michelucci wants Gunn to be a " mouthpiece for his time" . What poets do is respond to their "age". So Thom Gunn showed an "open-mindedness and lack of prejudice towards the new tendencies and myths of his age" . In his poetry, he presented "the contradictions, problems, anxieties, and paradoxes of his age". His "art aimed at overcoming national and cultural borders". Thorn Gunn "has much to say to our age, tormented as we are by the plague of globalization which paradoxically goes hand in hand with medieval-flavored ethnic and religious conflicts". The book, and its translation into English by Jill Franks, is undoubtedly an achievement. Readings are conscientious, accurate and well researched. But somewhere along the line there has been this fatal misunderstanding Michelucci denies Gunn (even whi le she acknowledges) his individualism, his lack of political drive, his rather relaxed approach to movements and trends, his own refusal to be categorized. She sees him as struggling against nature, then heroically accepting it as "the foundation of a stoical ethics". The poet who said that "I'm a cheerful and rather superficial person most of the time" is simply not believed. Instead he is a genius: "the mouthpiece for a great cultural inheritance that he revives in the modern world" . So we come to her interview with Gunn in 1990, transcribed here as an appendix. Entertainingly, she and Gunn don't agree on anything; romantic cliches are lobbed up by Michelucci and smashed back quite genially by Gunn. Is writing for an audience limiting? No. Does analysing a poem destroy it? No. Do you write to be universal? No - I write about the specific. But isn' t the specific eventually universal? No sometimes it's just specific. Is the experience of reading poetry about knowledge or pleasure? The two aren't opposed. And so it goes on, an appalling mismatch. Confusion can be dispelled by returning to August Kleinzahler's slim selection of Gunn's work, made in 2007 for Faber and now republished in the US. As we've seen, Kleinzahler refuses to accept the "slump" theory; and while this may mean accepting that there were failures in every decade, what he counts as successes triumphantly hack him up. The over-praised I950s poems are largely absent, and the best of the 1970s more than compensate. I'm not quite convinced that even in LSD poems such as "At the Centre" there is "plain style" ; but certainly, even in the days of drugs and orgies, Gunn worked with an admirable tightness and control. There's a straight line from "Tamer and Hawk" in 1954, through "Rites of Passage" in 1971 , to "Still Life" in 1992. Gunn's gift was modestly to impose control on multifarious but unique experience. This selection presents that gift to a new generation of American readers.

LITERATURE

24

In debt to God the banker he Speculum Vitae, a Middle English adaptation (cl 370) of Laurent's Somme T le roi, is a long verse treatise on the basics of Christian faith. It is not a poem for the faint-hearted. Modern readers know what they are letting themselves in for when they see the line count (16,000 plus). Medieval readers and listeners were gi ven fair warning of the weightiness to come in the prologue, where the poet explains he is not going to waste time on "vain carping" - as do minstrels when they tell stories of Guy of Warwick or Bevis of Hamtoun - but will deal instead with morally edifying matter. Hearing a few yawns already, he urges us all to listen carefully: "And whyle I speke, kepe yhou from slepe!". I can't honestly say I managed this all the way through, but the work contains much that is of interest to students of medieval history and literature. The poet is anonymous; many (myself included) thought he was William of Nassington, but, as Ralph Hanna shows, the only basis for this attribution is the wild guess of a medieval scribe. One of his main characteristics is his love of order, and what C. S. Lewis in The Discarded Image said of medieval man applies pre-eminently to him: "He was an organiser, a codifier, a builder of systems. Of all our modern inventions I suspect that [he] would have most admired the card index" . Our poet would also have liked the numbered list. It pleased him that there are seven petitions in the Pater Noster, seven gifts of the Holy Spirit; and that each of these seven gifts can remove from our hearts one of the seven deadly sins, and so lead us to the seven beatitudes and the seven heavenly rewards allotted to them. And he was quick to see opportunities to create further septenaries. For example, one of the seven gifts of the Spirit, "pruese" (fortitude) has seven "degrees" (gradations) as well as seven branches - which is apt since there are also seven battles to be fought with the seven deadly sins. This number-crunching inspires moments of great invention: there are twelve articles in the Creed and there are also twel ve apostles: is this a coincidence? Not if we imagine that the Creed was composed by a committee of the twelve apostles, and that each apostle drafted one article of faith. The other trademark of the poet's imagination is his interest in literal and spiritual economics. "Honour" or "reputation", as we know from Boethius, is a false gift of fortune ; the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu tells us it is "symbolic capital" (ultimately convertible into more tangible rewards). Anticipating Bourdieu, our poet thinks it is the money the devil uses to huy up our good deeds: Thurgh Vayneglory to vndirstande The fende bicomes a marchande,

That he ha Ides his mone of prys, [mone = money]

Thurgh whilke he mas his marchandys. [mas = makes] He wen des obout on ilka syde [on ilka syde = everywhere] Thurgh the fayr of this werlde wyde The druryse of ilka man to bie [druryse = precious things] With the mone of Vayneglory. (3 ,789- 96; have modernised thorns and yoghs.)

AD PUTTER Ra]ph Hanna, editor SPECULUM V[TAE A reading text: Volumes One and Two

975pp. The Early Eng[ish Text Society. £70 (US $[50). 9780 19 95640 I 9 The poet' s point is that if we have already used our good deeds to purchase ourselves a good name, we can no longer use them to purchase the reward of heaven in the life to come. A similar argument is meant to persuade us not to mire ourselves in sin. Our sins are our debts , and those who take on debt must give a pledge ("wedde") to guarantee repayment. As a surety that we will repay our debts to God, we mortgage our soul ("that is the

a surety against future repayment; if that pledge is damaged or used by you, this depreciation should be factored in when the borrower comes to repurchase his pledge: If it be appayred, als I trowe, [appayred = damaged] In the pay hym bihoues allowe And stoppe als mykell and na lesse Als the wedde appayred than es. (6,289- 92) What exactly does "stoppe" here mean? Hanna follows the Middle English Dictionary by glossing "reduce (a debt or fine)" , but this invention by the MED does not provide the right kind of insight into the usage and semantic history of the word. We are not so very far removed from the primary sense of ME stoppen: to plug a hole, to make good a gap. When the value of a pledge is diminished, we have to make good that deficit by "stopping" it, that is, by making it good in the money owed to us. Not reducing the redemption price is an act of "oker" (usury) ; there are twelve such acts, naturally. Finally, the poem casts illuminating sidelights on "Iow life" in the age of Langland. The poet' s world is full of minstrels, jugglers, dishonest reeves, fraudulent vagrants who fake broken legs and beg for a living, "robertsmen" (thieving hooligans) and "sneck-drawers" (Langland's latch-drawers). It is also a world understood and explicated with the aid of homely proverbs. Those who don't flee temptations sooner or later succumb: For men says on aide [nglisshe A coman worde opon this wyse: Swa lang the potte to the water gase [Swa = so; gase = goes]

A twelfth-century painting of the ladder ofStJohn Climacus; St Catherine's Monastery, Sinai best wedde of the hous"). If we then commit deadly sins, we lose our credit rating with God and, being tied into an impossible interest rate, we shall forfeit our pledge and go to hell. Consigning the soul to hell is thus God's act of "usury" . This dazzling passage (2,909-22) is largely original to the English poem - though it is not correct to say, as Hanna does, that the translation mainly ignores the French. When Laurent discusses the sins which "auoms acreu sur nos almes", the French does not mean "we have gathered up in our souls" but rather: "which we have taken on credit against our souls" . The operative verh is ar.rnire (1. " helieve" ; 2. "borrow"), not acroistre. It is one of a number of words (cf the Middle English owen: I. be in debt. 2. have a duty) that yoke together the spheres of economics and spirituality and that make me think the poet is getting at a fundamental human truth when he sees connections between the two. Likewise, in his critique of proto-capitalist modes of transaction (for example, buying goods cheaply and selling them dearly when these same goods have become scarce), he insists on honest dealing. Imagine, for example, that someone gave you a valuable object as

That at the last it es broken in case. (9,819- 22) Not surprisingly, Hanna's glossing is occasionally inattentive: " in case" here surely means "by accident" rather than "for example". The occasional imperfections here do not detract in any way from Hanna's heroic achievement; on the contrary, they show his courage. Faced with a poem of 16,096 lines, extant in forty-five manuscripts, no editor can hope both to be unfailingly thorough and to finish the job. Hanna modestly calls his text a "reading edition" , but he has done much more than one could reasonably expect. Not only are the text and apparatus based on a full collation of the five best manuscripts, where necessary checked against another group of nine manuscripts; Hanna has also compared the Middle English against the French source, relevant readings of which have been transcribed from original manuscripts. It is fortunately no longer the case that Laurent's Snmme "has no modern edition": see Brayer and Leurquin-Labie, La Somme le roi (2008). But Hanna did not have the benefit of this edition, and even now his labour of transcribing Laurent has not been wasted: he shrewdly takes his readings from two early fourteenth-century manuscripts copied in England, which presumably transmit La Somme in the version most relevant to the English poem, which was not, of course, of prime interest to the French editors. The latter recently received a prestigious award for their work of many years. I think Hanna deserves a medal too.

TLS JANUARY I 2010

The Muslim Commander Bond FRANCIS ROBINS ON Ghalib Lakhnavi and Abdullah Bilgrami THE ADVENTURES OF AM[R HAMZA Lord of the Auspicious Planetary Conjunction Translated by Musharraf Farooqi

948pp. Random House. £33.99 (US $45). 9780679 64354 8 " These days Maulana Ghalib ... is in clover", wrote the great Urdu poet (and tutor to the last Mughal Emperor) to a friend in 1861: "A volume of the Tale of Amir Hamza has come - about 600 pages of it ... and there are seventeen bottles of good wine in the pantry. So I read all day and drink all night." Ghalib is referring to the first edition of his namesake, Ghalib Lakhnavi's Adventures of Amir Ham za (Calcutta, 1855). A second edition edited by Abdullah Bilgrami, which forms the basis of Musharraf Farooqi's translation , was published by the famed Newal Kishore Press of Lucknow in 1871. Later, between 1883 and 1917, a monster edition of forty-six volumes, each of 1,000 pages, was published. Ghalib is also referring to that remarkable moment in the movement from oral to print culture in South Asia, but also in the Muslim world, when the art of oral storytelling, cultivated as a prime form of human entertainment for thousands of years, came increasingly to be smothered by new media, first print, in particular in the form of the novel, then by film and now, dare one say, by the television soap. We tend to forget, although children are never slow to remind us, the high rank of oral storytelling in human pleasure. In the Muslim world, the storyteller was to be found everywhere: in the bazaars, in the coffee shops, around the campfire, at court and in the nobleman's retinue. Today you might just get the genuine article in Marrakesh's Djema 'a el-Fna. Amir Hamza is one of the great storytelling frameworks , open to elaboration according to the skill of the storyteller. As Hamid Dabashi tells us in his excellent introduction: "it speaks of the moral imagination of peoples and worlds extended all the way from North Africa to Central Asia, from South Asia to China". Tt is extant in Arahic, Persian, Balinese, Georgian, Malay, Turkish and a number of South Asian languages; it also forms an important part of the repertoire of the Javanese wayang shadow puppet tradition. Amir Hamza is one of those works of world literature which both stores collective memory and helps subsequently to shape it. It is on a par with the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Ramayana and Mahabharata of the Hindu world, BeowulJfor the Anglo-Saxons, Kalevala for the Finns, and the Arabian Nights. Amir Ham za tells the story of Hamza,

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LITERATURE paternal uncle of the Prophet Muhammad, who, an Arab, serves the Iranian Emperor, Naushervan, as a military commander, and in doing so falls in love with the emperor's daughter, Mehr Nigar. Among the connecting threads of the story are Hamza' s warlike deeds in lands from Egypt to India; the persistent enmity of Bakhtak, Naushervan' s vizier; the comradeship of Amar Ayyar, trickster and wit, Aadi Hamza, foster brother and gluttonous eater, and Muqbil, faultless archer; the watchful counsel of Buzurjmehr, a Merlin-like figure ; the timely help of Khizr, the legendary Islamic figure ; and the love of Hamza and Mehr Nigar. In this context Hamza defeats many enemies, converts many of the defeated to the true faith, loves many women (while always honouring Mehr Nigar), enjoys much ribaldry, and gets the better of the demons and fairies of the enchanted world. The action is played out against the central backdrop of Sasanian Iran with its court at Ctesiphon: the whole work, Dabashi tells us, is aware of and pays homage to Hakim Abu al-Qasim Firdowsi's Shahnameh. At the same time, it is linked to the rise of Islam through Hamza, who defends Mecca at the Prophet' s behest, and meets his end. This story has always been more popular in India than in Iran. There is a case for dating its reception in India from the time of the first Muslim invasions from the Persianspeaking world under Mahmud of Ghazni in the eleventh century. It certainly spread

Amir Hamza slaying a dragon; signed Nadir al-Zaman "in the city ofBurhanpur", probably during the reign ofthe Mughal Emperor Jahangir (1605-27) through the subcontinent wherever Persian was spoken. Amir Ham za was the special favourite of the great Mughal Emperor Akbar, who loved both to hear it told and to tell it himself in the harem. Indeed, he loved it so much that it was the subject of his largest painting commission of 1,400 pictures, on cotton backed with paper, to be shown as the story was related - an early film show. It is tempting to suggest that Akbar, the great military commander, identified with Commander (Amir means "commander") Hamza. In our own world Hamza' s equivalent is, perhaps,

Commander Bond, who plays in a similar fixed arena of women, treachery, violence, dangerous enemies and fantasy. What kind of world does Amir Hamza reveal? At one level, it opens up that of the storyteller's art. There are the tricks of rhetoric, repetition and suspense, laced with graphic action, humanity, death and denouement. For the listener, there are moments to cry out in fear, to tell Hamza not to go down that road, to laugh, to weep. At times we are caught up in a world of magical realism, where "sense-stealing enchantment" is in

play. One suspects the storyteller may have adopted a new style, rhythmic and hypnotic, as he brought to life a Tolkienesque world of demons, fairies and wizards. One could see that, if this was not killed off in the early twentieth century by the rise of the novel, it was certainly going to die at the hands of Islamic reform. At another level, Amir Ham za would have shaped a special geography in the minds of its listeners, with Iran at the centre, surrounded by China, India, Ceylon, Arabia and Egypt. It is a world in which much alcohol is drunk by men and women. It is one in which one of the finest set-pieces, for which there must have been many requests for repeats, involves Hamza and his schoolfriends in hilarious action baiting their mullah teacher. There are many technical details in this translation of the story which bring it up to date. So the vizier Buzurjmehr, in seventhcentury Ctesiphon, consults "Indian , European, Roman, Dutch and Gaelic clocks". So the warriors, among whom Hamza moves, at times use spy glasses and fire pistols, carbines and cannon. It is a testament to the quality of Farooqi' s rendering of the text into English that he both conveys a sense of the art of the "sweetlipped historians" and " nimble scribes of fancy" , and produces a real page-turner. Translator and publisher are to be congratulated on providing a new path into the popular culture of the pre-modern Muslim world and a whole new source of pleasure.

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TLS JANUARY 1 2010

TLS

fOR LOYERS OF LITERARY cULlntt:

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IN BRIEF

Declan J. Foley, editor THE ONLY ART OF JACK B. YEATS Letters and essays 224pp. The Lilliput Press. £24. 987 I 84351 1557

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ack B. Yeats is hard to pin down. The younger brother of W. B., Jack B. was a painter, sketch artist, cartoonist, novelist and playwright. Drawn in his work to pirates and pugilists, he could himself be spry, nimble and elusive. In a radio interview with Eamonn Andrews in 1947, this uncooperative spokesman for modernism told the future host of This is Your Life: "There is only one art and that is the art of living". Against the interviewer's appeals for clarity, he insisted "There is no alphabet, no grammar. No rules whatever".

The book borrows its (surely misleading) title from this quotation and, in one respect, is true to the non-systematic ethos of its subject. It gathers letters together with miscellaneous essays on Jack Yeats and his father, and is illustrated with drawings, reprints and reproductions. Apart from some early letters from Jack to family friends, richly annotated with sketches and doodles, almost all the letters here are from John B. Yeats to his youngest son. This correspondence, many letters hitherto unpublished, is the great value of this volume. John B. Yeats's letters from his New York home are variously enthusiastic, profound, insecure, confessional , admonitory, gossipy, philosophical, political, needy and wise. They tenderly bring out both the paternal pride and the inverted Oedipal rivalry of this energized and restless old artist. "The century-old oak puts forth leaves every bit as green as do the impudent young saplings springing up around the gnarled old trunk", the eighty-one-year-old writes to his son. The essays are, for the most part, illuminating exercises in art history and explication on both father and son (mostly the latter). Hilary Pyle, the biographer of Jack Yeats, offers an accomplished account of his use of stencils that makes resonant connections across his work. John Purser's "Frisky Minds: Jack B. Yeats, Bishop Berkeley and a soup90n of Beckett" makes a stimulating, if audacious, attempt to find an idealist watermark in the Irish mind by looking at some syntactical structures of the Irish language. Avis Berman gives an intriguing account of John Sloan ' s " Yeats at Petitpas" (1910), a portrait of John B. and his New York circle. Production costs have been controlled and not every relevant painting is reproduced. Yet this is, nonetheless, an attractive and finely illustrated book. Dublin ' s Lilliput Press continues its honourable tradition of independent quality publishing. RONAN McDoNALD

A detail from "Der Biicherwurm" (The Bookworm) by Carl Spitzweg, 1850; from The Infinity ofLists: From Homertoloyce by Umberto Eco, translated by Alastair McEwen (408pp. MacLehose Press. £35. 9781906694 821) R. S. Thomas LETTERS TO RA YMOND GARLICK: 1951-1999 Edited by Jason Walford Davies 206pp. Gomer. £16.99. 978 1 84323 826 3

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s the editor of the Welsh periodical Dock Leaves from 1949 until 1960, the poet Raymond Garlick, thirteen years R. S. Thomas's junior, was instrumental in establishing the older poet's reputation, and it was from the initial editor-writer correspondence that their lengthy epistolary relationship developed. There is a certain fascination in seeing Thomas's letters to his friend in extenso: the reader is invited to watch a friendship develop from flat formality ("Dear Mr Garlick, I enclose a copy of my last book for the kindness of a review. Sincerely, R.S. Thomas") to a kind of intimacy marked by deep concern and respect, but in which the personal details of Thomas's life are rarely dwelt on. Frequently Thomas vents his spleen about the condition of his native Wales, providing an interesting counterpart to some of the more famous poems: "English government has failed to give [the Welsh] employment in their own area. A perfect argument for home rule - but no" , he rails in his Christmas letter of 1967. "My respect for Welsh intelligence grows less every year." Unfortunately, though, many of the letters are so slight as to be hardly worth printing, to the extent that exceptions glow like freshly laid eggs: "Gwydion is home now", he writes in 1953. "We have just endured a pantomime for him. We go all the way to Shrewsbury to imbibe three hours of English proletarian culture". References to Garlick's poetry are frequent, and Thomas is both quick to praise and unsurprisingly forthright in his criticism: " You must get over your exaggerated regard for Dylan Thomas" . It would be interesting to see Garlick's responses to such comments,

but only one of his letters (included here as an appendix) survives. Nevertheless, Jason Walford Davies's scholarly introduction is particularly fascinating for detailing how Thomas' s letters had a direct influence on some of Garlick' s poems. But readers hoping for more from this small book - an insight into Thomas that is not found in either of the biographies, or in the poems - will on the whole be disappointed. Despite Davies's intimations to the contrary, these letters are more likely to reinforce than undermine the stereotype of Thomas as the obsessively nationalistic "Ogre of Wales", and tell us little that we did not already know.

career, but also by his waning passion for Eugenie-Desiree Clary , with whom he had enjoyed a largely epistolary romance. The previous year, he had been urging Eugenie to improve her music and conversation, while anxiously wondering whether she belonged entirely to her lover; in February 1795, he describes her as the " imperative" need of his soul, but by the end of the year, he writes plaintively to his brother " If I stay here. it's not impossible that I will be overtaken by the foolish idea of marrying". Ambition won over passion and Eugenie was history. It is tempting to see the text as exculpatory, as a case of Napoleon drawing on Rousseau and Goethe to transfer the blame for the end of the relationship onto Desiree while providing a suitably sentimental end for his hero. Though Clisson shares many characteristics with his creator - his passion for war and his perpetual petulance at the inability of others to appreciate his genius for it (a recurring theme in the early correspondence) - he is no alter ego. Napoleon might contemplate death for la gloire, but never for I'amour. And yet. In his excellent endnotes, Peter Hicks suggests that " Clisson and Eugenie is the last manifestation of an incipient Romanticism in a man who would go on to dazzle with his brilliant pragmatism". Perhaps the pleasure of the story is, rather, its revelation of Napoleon ' s enduring need to romanticize that pragmatism. In 1795, he wrote a novel, in 1812 he set off with the Grande Armee to the steppe. The scale is hardly comparable, but might not the doomed grandiosity of the Russian campaign owe something to Clisson's sentimental suicide? USA HILTON

Music Tim Burrows FROM CBGB TO THE ROUNDHOUSE Music venues through the years 272p. Marion Boyars. Paperback, £9.99 (US $17.95). 9780714531625

RORY WATERMAN

French Literature Napoleon Bonaparte CLISSON AND EUGENIE: A LOVE STORY Translated by Peter Hicks 77pp. Gallic Books. Paperback, £7.99. 978 1 906040 27 7

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espite a singularly pompous introduction from the thriller writer Armand Cabasson, Peter Hicks's terse, idiomatic translation of Bonaparte's most significant venture into fiction renders it a delight for fans of Napoleana. As a novel , Clissnn and F.ugenie could hardly be described as a success; the fragmented plot in which Clisson woos and wins his beloved only to die in battle believing that she has betrayed him with his friend , is cursory at best, while the couples' relationship is sketched in the derivative cliches of high Romanticism of the type parodied by Jane Austen in "Love and Friendship" . The fascination lies in the insights the novel contributes to the endless biographical speculation as to how Buonaparte became Napoleon. In 1795, the period of the novel's completion, Napoleon was preoccupied with his

TLS JANUARY 1 2010

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im Burrows has found an idiosyncratic way of retelling the story of popular music, both British and American, since the Second World War. From CBGB to the Roundhouse provides the reader with a light course in social history, revealing the tribal tendencies in a wide range of both bands and fans; at the same time, he suggests ways in which the right conditions for making a music venue successful depend on a combination of circumstances, amenable (or visionary) venue owners and the musicians themselves, the results of which have never been easy to predict. Take an example from Burrows' s title. "'CB GB" stands for "country, hluegrass and

blues", but this bar on New York's Lower East Side made its name for "OMFUG": "other music for uplifting gourmandisers". During the 1970s, Patti Smith, Television, the Ramones, Talking Heads and Blondie played there, attracting record deals, journalists and wannabes. Yet the place was a dive, situated beneath the Palace Hotel, "the largest flophouse on the Bowery". As one habitue points out, the "now-iconic Punk portrait of Debbie Harry" features a "zebra-print pillowcase" the singer pulled "straight out of a garbage can". Burrows necessarily draws on secondary

IN BRIEF sources for much of his information, and this is perhaps why the book becomes more engaging as he reaches the 1990s and 2000s , when personal gig-going experience becomes relevant ("Sitting politely in seats at Southend's Cliff Pavilion", and so on). Investigations in London reveal the sorry fates of the Rainbow in Finsbury Park (now a church) and the Four Aces in Hackney (closed to make way for new homes for young professionals). Burrows points out that the Lyceum Theatre in London, where Bob Marley once played, "today houses a seemingly endless run of The Lion King musical" . The 100 Club on Oxford Street is one of the few independent businesses left in Soho. Live performance and the qualities of individual venues receive less attention here than the overall story of commercial concerns taking over from amateur ventures, of ephemeral underground scenes giving way to the tin-eared, risk-averse activities of international corporations. The Roundhouse is open, but CBGB, where the rent was once $600 per month, closed a couple of years ago, when the rent was "reportedly" $65 ,000. The real creativity, Burrows reckons, will keep moving home - as it always has. P. J. CARNEHAN

Military History Louis A. DiMarco WAR HORSE A history of the military horse and rider 415pp.Westholme Publishing. $29.95. 978 I 594160349

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n one of his beautifully written articles for Blackwood's Magazine, later reproduced in Unofficial History (1959), Field Marshal Viscount Slim remarked on "the wartime infantryman's prejudice against the cavalry people who hovered about the edge of a fight until it really got dangerous and then went off and watered their horses". Certainly, one popular image of British cavalry in the First World War is that of David L10yd George. His memoirs condemned the "ridiculous cavalry obsession" of "cavalry" generals such as Douglas Haig, prepared to maintain useless cavalry divisions in Flanders, consuming vast amounts offodder while awaiting an elusive breakthrough. An alternative image is one of unmitigated disaster, be it the charge of the Union Brigade at Waterloo, or the Light Brigade at Balaclava. None of these ideas equates entirely with reality. As Louis DiMarco reminds us, the horse was the dominant factor on the battlefield for over three millennia, until the full impact of industrialization was felt. Even during the Second World War, Russian and German cavalry duelled on the Eastern Front. Far from the image of highly mechanized "hlitzkrieg", much of the German army was still dependent on horse-drawn transport, with over a million horses in service. DiMarco also brings the story of man and horse as weapons system right up to date, with US Special forces on horseback in Afghanistan in 2001, calling in air strikes from their laptops. There have been many histories of cavalry in the past. The evolution of chariot warfare in antiquity, the short-lived supremacy of the medieval knight, and the impact of Napoleon's massed cavalry are all relatively familiar. What separates DiMarco from these

previous accounts is an intimate understanding of horsemanship, and horse-breeding. Each chapter, indeed, follows a standard pattern, in which breeds and equipment are considered alongside cavalry organization, weapons and tactics. There are also case studies of the role of cavalry in particular actions. DiMarco recognizes that his account does not extend to Asia, beyond detailing the impact of the horsed warriors of the steppe sweeping into Europe in late antiquity, and the early medieval periods. The focus, therefore, is largely on Europe and North America. The book is also one of almost relentlessly dry analysis, which is a pity, as there is much of interest. Even DiMarco' s undoubted feeling for the suffering ofthe horse in war appears almost as an afterthought in the epilogue. lAN BECKETT

time as she explored the country, she was exploring her own personality: "The only goat-tracks one wants to explore are the goat tracks of the mind, running up into the mountains; the only sophistication one really wants to escape is one' s own". A year after this book was published, Sackville-West appeared in print again, this time as Virginia Woolfs Orlando. ROBERT IRWIN

Autobio graphy

Vita Sackville-West TWEL VE DAYS IN PERSIA I44pp. Tauris Parke. Paperback, £9.99 (US $17). 978 I 84511 933 I n the days before package flights to Istanbul, Cairo and Sharm al-Shaykh, most people learnt about the Middle East by reading travel books written by the aristocratic and the wealthy - Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Alexander Kinglake, Charles Doughty, Wilfrid Blunt and George Nathaniel Curzon. Many of this travelling elite (though not all) moved through the Middle East with retinues of dragomans, cooks and muleteers and they treated the natives they encountered with the same condescension that they showed to their social inferiors back in Britain. In 1926, Vita Sackville-West travelled out to Tehran to join her husband Harold Nicolson, who was stationed there as a diplomat. She wrote up her arduous journey as Passenger to Teheran, a book which has become a minor classic of travel writing. Twelve Days in Persia is a lighter-weight sequel and chronicles a difficult and somewhat dangerous journey made in the following year through the lands of the Bakhtiari nomads in southern Iran. She did it for a lark in the company of her husband, some English and American friends , as well as a retinue of muleteers, guards, a cook and a chauffeur, as well as an apparently indispensable wooden statue of St Barbara. It was quite a literary journey, for which she had prepared herself by reading Pierre Loti and Curzon. As she travelled, she meditated on the possible form of an ideal society and she reproduced a chunk of dialogue between Socrates and Glaucon from The Republic without bothering to attribute it, presumably confident that her readers would he familiar with the work. Even the chauffeur was reading Edward Gibbon (though the car soon had to be abandoned). When Vita passed by the ruins of Persepolis she meditated on the transience of all empires, including the British. She later became well known as the designer of the gardens at Sissinghurst, and it is therefore not surprising that there is a great deal about flowers and plant-collecting in her narrative. She excels at lyrical descriptions of the wild, mountainous countryside. Elsewhere she comments on the hardships and lack of glamour of the Bakhtiaris' way of life. But at the same

ter pots on the dresser left him by his mother" . Even those who make brief appearances are strikingly evoked. A man in a smart overcoat materializes at The Times, eager to talk about unemployment; he says his name is Primo "It is my only name. I am supreme in the Universe". Details are a strength of Rogers's writing. His precision is not showy. For the most part the style is genially, meanderingly demotic; its gems are those of a master anecdotalist with a reassuring fireside manner. HENRY HITCHINGS

Byron Rogers ME The authorised biography 336pp. Aurum Press. £ 16.99. 978 I 845134310

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Travel

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yron Rogers has had several literary guises. An apprenticeship on the Sheffield Star - for which, aged twenty-three, he wrote as many as 10,000 words a week - was followed by a stint at The Times ("a very strange newspaper") and then at the Daily Telegraph , but he has also been speechwriter to the Prince of Wales, and more recently a biographer of J. L. Carr and R. S. Thomas. When Rogers took up his royal office, the Telegraph reported the event in a single sentence: "The Prince of Wales has appointed as speech writer Mr Byron Rogers, a colourful Welshman". The description irritated him; it was "as though being a colourful Welshman was a job, like a bus driver". The apparently gratuitous "Me" of the book' s title is explained early on. In May 1981 , Rogers began receiving letters from women keen to relive the wanton nights they had spent with him. Or rather, they had spent nights with a man who called himself Byron Rogers and who carried around a briefcase full of his printed articles. The letters were of a graphic nature - "my legs opened as if they had a will of their own" - but when Rogers went to the police, the matter was not taken seriously: "I mean, all he's ever done is go to bed with women. And their only regret is that he's stopped doing it. The only complainant is you" . Accordingly, Rogers' s autobiography is in part an attempt to claw back a sense that he has title to his life. Yet he is hardly proprietorial about his existence. He characterizes his life as "a series of disappearances" : from his workingclass roots, from being predominantly a Welsh-speaker, from Wales and later from London. The epigraph to Rogers's biography of R. S. Thomas is a quotation from one of the poet' s classmates, who comments, "I remember him well. He was part of the background". Rogers seems to have adopted this as a principle of autobiography: he tells his story through the lives of others, keeping himself in the shadows. The book abounds with picturesque characters. Some are familiar. Rogers writes of how when he was at The Times he might "look up over the cuttings, like a man in a fairy tale watching from a thicket the passing of a fabulous beast, as William Rees-Mogg glided towards his lavatory". Others are novel. An acquaintance from his school days metamorphoses into a landlord whose car is carpeted with "the remains of old Cornish pasties, rotting radish leaves and empty milk bottles". Each night, after a long session in the pub, this seedy figure "pissed in the line of antique pew-

TLS JANUARY I 2010

Memoirs Clive James THE BLAZE OF OBSCURITY The TV years 326pp. Picador. £17.99. 978 0 33045736 I

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udging by current bestseller lists, the gap between the glitterati and literati gets narrower every year. Clive James has occupied both camps for longer than most, as a witty and articulate television presenter and as a poet, essayist, novelist and critic. Yet, as this fifth volume of his memoirs shows, he is more than a little sensitive about his showbiz image. Even the title reads like a pre-emptive strike, an ironic warning that despite long years as a famous face, the serious writer has emerged undazzled by the experience, wishing only to explain to his bookish peers just how much time and intelligence it takes to make a halfway-decent television programme. However, money is clearly important, and in occasional asides about his television earnings he is shocked by the miserable royalties paid to authors. As he says, the sales of one of his poetry books would "keep my family alive for about a week and a half'. That tendency to hyperbole is a Clive James trademark. Lippy irreverence was a rare quality in television when he moved there from journalism in the 1970s, establishing him as a household name in mediating celebrity to the masses. That facility meant he could go on writing books "with a low financial yield" intellectual works which, despite an occasional critical mauling, sold in far greater numbers than is usual for such publications. The Blaze of Obscurity will attract those readers, too. Yet its stories of meetings with the rich and famous are curiously peremptory, with names remembered like a flick through diaries from another age. So Hugh Hefner was "boring" , President Reagan was "touchingly willing to take direction", and Leonard Bernstein "showed no signs of disappointment" when James refused his sexual advances. Further insights are dismissed with the claim that such encounters "didn ' t go deep, but television interviews rarely do. They give an impression". Something of that shallowness may have infected the interviewer, too, in a world where "you get to know people well and then never see them again". Someone Clive James did see off camera, quite often, was Diana, Princess of Wales. He clearly mourned her death (and shared his feelings in an obituary published in the New Yorker). Though "childish", she found him funny and he, just for once, was entranced. This book may similarly amuse the aspirational non-celebrity culture at whom it is aimed. AISLING FOSTER

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NATURAL SCIENCE

he world knows two main kinds of entomologists - the relatively rare E. O. Wilson types who enlighten us about ants, and the majority, who labour in government agricultural offices or for extermination firms, seeking just the thing to poison them with. Nowhere clearer is the divide than in Florida, where several public institutions are devoted to entomology, including an elegant moth-and-butterfly centre at the Florida Museum of Natural History, and the downright depressing Center for Arthropod Systematics, pall of the state' s agriculture department. The Florida moth-and-butterfly people guard over their enormous collections in a new, hyper-designed space open to the public, where lectures on the diversity of Malagasy moths, for example, are a regular feature, and where the stated mission is to "explore, interpret, and preserve the global biodiversity" through old-fashioned taxonomy and field work. Down the road in a dark, dated, labyrinthine compound, an army of state entomologists gets on with the nastier business of destroying the mole crickets that menace golf courses, or the Mexican weevils that cause decorative bromeliads to rot. No lofty mottoes govern these entomologists' labours, and they gripe that their colleagues working on citrus pests get all the grants. For her book Broadsides from the Other Orders (I993), Sue Hubbell interviewed both types of entomologists, the lovers and the killers, but left the reader with the impression that the former were more to her liking. It is understandable: as interest in natural history has increased in recent years, with museums expanding and countless new books exploring the subject's nineteenth-century heyday, the applied science of entomology, with its agricultural and medical focus , does seem less pure, less rarefied and romantic than the other sort. And yet, amazingly, as J. F. M. Clark argues in Bugs and the Victorians, the Victorians saw things very much the other way around. It was the push towards professional recognition and legitimacy, and away from what was considered a dilettantish tradition of bug-hunting and bug-naming, that turned ento-

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Lovers and killers JENNIE ERIN SMITH

J. F. M. Clark BUGS AND THE VICTORIANS 322pp. Yale University Press. £25 (US $55). 97803001509 19

Peter Milward , SJ THE SECRET LIFE OF INSECTS An entomological alphabet 143pp. Transaction. £31.50 (US $34.95). 97814 12810 11 I

mology into what it largely looks like now. Clark' s story exam ines with great care how Britain's earliest bug-hunters were either co-opted by, or eagerly lent their talents to, myriad political and philosophical movements. They saw pro- and anti-slavery arguments in the hierarchies of ants; the Creator or the absence of one in the endless variety of beetles ; socialist utopias in beehives, or beehive-like constructions to prevent the poor from "swarming". The idea that bugs could be used to promote whole world- views makes sense only when considering how wildly popular entomology was in the midnineteenth century, when new bug books could sell 100,000 copies in a week. The major schism in Briti sh entomology occurred when a few of the bug men threw their weight behind "agricultural improvers who wished to preserve the political power of the landowning elite" , Clark writes. They protested against imports of North American wheat, lest it harbour a harmful fly. This not only aligned the bug men with landowners; it pitted them against their taxonomist colleagues, who, they sneered, would just as soon import harmful insects to pin them in drawers. The divisive strategy, aided by agriculture's embracing of technology, proved a success: by the end of the century, Britain's

"economic entomologists" , who cared far more for discovering pesticides than for discovering new species, were considered essential to the prosperity of nation and empire, and rewarded with prestigious appointments. If Hubbell seemed partial to non-lethal entomologists, Clark gives the economic types their historical due, most poignantly in the story of Eleanor Ormerod, a wealthy, serious, unmarried woman who made her life' s work the management and eradication of various pests, becoming Britain's first de facto government entomologist. Ormerod was a tireless advocate of Paris green, an arsenic-based insecticide, and Clark presents her zeal as a byproduct of her sex. As a Victorian woman of no small ambition, Ormerod needed more than anyone to distance herself from the perceived dilettantism of the bug hunter; that much is obvious. But can we be quite sure that by promoting Paris green Ormerod "conjured up images of a female poisoner" , one of those ladies who fed arsenic to a tiresome husband? Or that, in writing her matter-of-fact reports about maggots, Ormerod was "defiantly contradict[ing] accepted norms of femininity" , as Clark also asserts? Clark's excursion into gender studies is brief, however, and it is refreshing to see Victorian entomology through so unsentimental an eye. Entomologists who spend their lives keeping worms out of apples, or mosquitoes out of tropical bedrooms, might appreciate Clark' s nod to their craft. And while it is wonderful that today's natural history aligns itself closely with conservation biology, it's worth remembering that conservation, too, is an applied science, and one not necessarily immune to politics either. The dilettante strain of Victorian entomol ogy, meanwhile, sti ll lives - at least in Peter Milward's The Secret Life of Insects, whose first sentence, "I make no claim to entomological expertise", echoes Maurice

Maeterlinck's introduction to his The Life of the Bee (I 90 I): " It is not my intention to write a treatise on apiculture, or on practical beekeeping ... Nor is this book to be a scientific monograph ... I shall say scarcely anything that those will not know who are somewhat familiar with bees". Milward, a Jesuit and professor of literature, wou ld probably be offended at being classed as a dilettante, but he is not kidding about his lack of entomological expertise. At one point, for example, he assigns the pronoun "he" to a biting mosquito for an entire chapter, when the biters are always female. His ski ll s as a natural historian are duller than those of the Victorian bughunters he (apparently unwittingly) channels. The Secret Life of Insects, organized alphabetically in chapters with titles such as "Bees in the Bonnet" and "0 for an Oil-Fly!" is shamelessly anthropomorphic when it comes to its subjects, revealing more about the secret life of Peter Milward than about them. This curious book is catalogued by the Library of Congress as "Insects in Literature" and "Insects in the Bible". Taken as conduits to these, Milward's insect observations can be delightful. Of the grasshopper, Milward writes : "Even in his ephemerality he grasps eternity, what T. S. Eliot calls ' the timeless moment' . In a word he stands for the famous definition of eternity proposed by Boethius, 'The total, simultaneous and perfect possession of unlimited life!"'. Peter Milward doesn't sound much like an entomologist, but his work might fairly be called entomology anyway. As J. F. M. Clark makes clear, the early entomologists, many of them also theologians, spent countless hours debating the qualities of the "insect mind" qualities that roughly corresponded to whatever was happening in their own minds. With a million species of insect described, millions more to go, and an alleged 10 quintillion of them alive on earth, the spectrum of entomological thinking would sti ll be very wide, with much room between the bug-loving and bugkilling poles. The Victorians saw what they wanted to in bugs, and apparently we have not advanced too much further.

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LONDON RARE BOOKS SCHOOL 2010 28 June-2 July: The Book in the Ancient World; The Medieval Book; The Printed Book in Europe 1450·2000; A History of Maps and Mapping; An Introduction to Bibliography; Children's Books, 1470·1980, The Early Modern Book in England. 5-9 July: Type and its Uses 1455·1830; European Bookbinding 1450·1820; Modern First Editions: Dealing Collecting and the Market; Mapping Land & Sea before 1900; The Italian Book to 1600; An Introduction to Illustration and its Technologies; The Electronic Book; History of the British Postal System. Contact: IES, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU T: 020 7862 8675: E: [email protected]: W: http://ies.sas.ac.uk Quote Ref.: TLS10·01

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Expelled from paradise mma Tennant's latest volume of memoirs is " imagined as a work of fiction" in order to get closer to reality. Her previou s memoirs mined rich seams: her uncon ventional , high-society forebears in Strangers (1998); the contradictions of being a doubtful deb and young, wayward wife in Girlitude (1999); and London' s literary Bohemia in the 1970s and her affair with Ted Hughes in Burnt Diaries (1999). Waitin g for Princess Margaret revi sits some people and places already encountered in her writing, and, fashionably unchronological, jack-knifes boldly back and forth across time. The central "character" is Glen, the beautiful Scottish castle which may be a nineteenthcentury, mock baronial "show-off chateau", but which obsesses the Tennant family like a spe ll and a curse. Princess Margaret' s visit to Glen in the summer of 1954 provides the central thread of a slim, elegant book with short chapters (some of only a page or two) and lon g, intricate sentences. Although the title and cover photograph feature the demure ly pretty Princess, this is not a peep show for royal watchers; nor, however, is it Waiting for Godot - the eponymous guest does arrive. The point is how the event reveals preoccupations and tensions in a family where what is not said is frequently more significant than what is. Tennant' s writing is intimate though not confessional , and impress ioni stic, with a tendency to the caustic. She writes sharp ly about less favoured characters, including her older half-brother, Colin, whose "eccentric" lifestyle and escapades on the Caribbean island of Mustique are written about in the Daily Mail with "hideous regularity" . Colin's unnamed wife features as the usurper of a childhood paradise and as chatelaine of Glen: "the M arble Fiancee" and "a snob' s delight". Tennant also examines her own ambivalent re lationship with a much-loved home that has tormented her. Despite the cool detachment she shows to wards her clan, she is preoccupied with its members and its history and at certain points in the book famil y detective work takes over. Tennant investigates the mystery of her grandmother's adopted son and her mother's famil y with its troubled relation to a doublebarre lled name (always considered by them to be a horrifying middle-class pretension). Born in 1937, the author spent much of the war isolated at Glen , cared for by servants while her parents, Lord and Lady Glenconner, were in the Middle East. These early years provide the bedrock for an intense famili arity which emerges in her lovely evocation of the place: the "Hollywood purple heather", the icy black loch, the hall fill ed with pictures of dead animals, the drawing room with its " invas ive stink of gin", the cold bedrooms with their William Morris wallpaper, and old retainers like Mrs McKay. When Princess Margaret was in vited to Glen by the "older half-brother" (as Colin Tennant is normally referred to), it was widely

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97807043 7183 5 reported in the press that they were about to become engaged. This had potentially huge (not necessarily positive) ramifications for the famil y; the Princess was, after all, the celebrity star of the era. The engagement didn't happen, though the pair remained close friends; Colin's wedding gift to the Princess was ten acres on Mustique; the Marble Fiancee (now wife) was made a ladyin-waiting. At the time of the legendary visit, the author was an awkward fifteen-year-old; "down" (as in "for dinner"), but not yet "out" (as in "presented to the Queen"). There are marvellous images of the " famou sly demanding and bad-tempered" Princess being served "fat game birds" at the dinner table, with her plump, pale back, plunging bosom , "royal blue eyes" and " metallic tones" . The postprandial "ball" consisted of an ill-assorted collection of self-conscious people dancing in the drawing room to young Emma's Dansette gramophone. In his wonderful memoi r Cold Cream , Ferdinand Mount also describes an overlapping section of that "raffi sh subdivision of the upper class" know n as "Hobohemia" , and touches on the fate of younger sons in a system where the oldest male inherits all. Younger sons, he suggests, are "expelled naked from the Garden of Eden". Tennant shows how thi s fate can be just as humiliating for the daughters. When Tennant's parents moved to Corfu in the 1960s, nobody told her that Colin was now the laird. Suddenly her rights in the parental home disappeared. During what the author calls the longest day of her life, she is asked by Colin to cut short her holiday at Glen so he can be there with his famil y. As she waits to be driven to the Edinburgh night train, even the photographs of Colin ' s children on a familiar old desk are interpreted as di sturbing - jostling for position. Similar sentiments of alienation remain years later, when Tennant attends her father's funeral at Glen but does not return to the house afterwards because of famil y quarrels. She is constantly torn between belonging, not being allowed to belong, and refusing to belong . "I am nothing to do with the highcoloured, money-obsessed life which generations of Tennants have been proud to lead. My life is different, I tell myself." The author's great-aunt, Margot Asquith, called Glen "the most beautiful place on earth" , but Tennant's mother was also right when she said "Glen is poison" . Home may be where the heart is, but Waiting for Princess Margaret shows that a family' s relationship to place can be just as complex as the bonds between the people themselves .

Mary Beard ... .. ........................... C1assics, Ancient History ([email protected]) ....... Website, Bibliography, Reference, Theatre ([email protected]. uk) Michael Caines ......................... American Literature, Scotland ([email protected]) James Camp bell ................................... Website, In Brief ([email protected]) Lucy Dallas. .. ..... Editorial Assistant, Syndication ([email protected]) Roz Dineen .. ................................ Fiction, English Literature (fiction @the-tls.co. uk) Lindsay Duguid. .. .. Music, Theatre, Architecture, Art History ([email protected]) Will Eaves ........ ............................. Archaeology (ndch I @cam.ac. uk) Norman Hammond ....... History, Asia, Sport (history@ the-tls.co. uk) David Horspool .. .... Middle East, Islam (alhambra2 @gmail.com) Robert Irwin ..... .. ........... Commentary, Poetry, English Literature ([email protected]. uk) Alan Jenkins .. ... Bibliography ([email protected]) David McKitterick Maren Meinhardt ....... Germany, Science, Psychology, Medicine ([email protected]. uk) Catharine Morris .................................. Deputy Production Editor ([email protected]. uk) Redmond O'Hanlon ........................................................... Natural History ([email protected]) Robert Potts.................. .. .. Managing Editor, Production Editor (robert.potts@ the-tls.co. uk) .... Russia, Central and Eastern Europe ([email protected]) Oliver Ready................ .. ....... Africa, Australasia, Anthropology [email protected]) John Ryle .................... .. Rupert Shortt ........ _ ......... Religion, Latin America, Spain ([email protected]. uk) . ...................... Pictures (i rn [email protected]. uk) Martin Smith........ .. ... Politics, Classics ([email protected]. uk) Peter Stothard ...................... . Galen Strawson ........................................ .. .. ..... Philosophy ([email protected]) Adrian Tahourdin .. France, italy, Linguistics, Letters to the Editor ([email protected]) Anna Vaux ........... Biography , Social Studies, Learned Journals, Travel (anna.va ux@ the-tls.co. uk)

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lan Beckett is Visiting Professor of Military Hi story at the University of Kent. His latest book is Wolseley and Ashanti: The Asante war journal and correspondence of Major General Sir Garnet Wolseley, 1873- 74 , 2009. Nicholas Birch is a freelance journalist based in Turkey. Patrick Carnegy was dramaturge of the Royal Opera House, 1988-92. Hi s most recent book is Wagner and the Art of the Theatre, 2006. Jess Chandler studied English Literature at University College London, and is now working as a freelance writer. Lucy Dallas is the editor of the TLS website and In Brief pages. Peter Fawcett is the co-editor (with Pascal Mercier) of Andre Gide, Pierre Louys and Paul Valery ' s Correspondances a Trois Voix: 1888- 1920, published in 2004. Aisling Foster is the author of the novel Safe in the Kitchen, 1993. John A. C. Greppin is Professor of Linguistics at Cleveland State University and editor of A Medieval Arabic-Armenian Botanical Dictionary, 1997 . Lisa Hilton is the author of two biographies, Athenai's, the Real Queen of France: A biography of Madame de Montespan, 2002, and Mistress Peachum 's Pleasure: A biography of Lavinia, Duchess of Bolton, 2005. Her most recent book is Queens Consort: England 's medieval queens, 2009. Henry Hitchings' s most recent book is The Secret Life of Words: How English became English, 2009. Robert Irwin ' s For Lust of Knowing: The

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SOLUTION TO CROSSWORD 810 Fhe will ner a/Crossword 810 is L. Ashley and S. CharmGIl,

Shoreham-by-Sea.

The sender of the first correct so lution o pen ed o n Janu ary 22 will receive a cash pri ze of £40. Entries should be addres sed to TLS Crossword 8 14,

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Mark Kamine recentl y co-produced Neil Young Trunk Show, a concert film by Jonathan Demme. Catriona Kelly ' s Comrade Pa vlik: The rise and fall of a Soviet boy hero was publi shed in 2005. Children 's World: Growing up in Russia, 1890- 1991 appeared in 2007. She is Professor of Russian at New College, Oxford. Tim Kirk is Professor of European History at the University of Newcastle. He is the author of Nazi Germany, 2007, and co-editor (with Lud'a Klusakova) of Cultural Conquests, 2008. August Kleinzahler lives in San Francisco. His latest book of poems, Sleeping 1t Off in Rapid City: Poems, new and selected, was the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Poetry Award in 2008. A collection of essays, Music I- LXXIV, was reviewed in the TLS of December 11. Tadzio Martin Koelb recently completed the MA in creative writing at the University of East Anglia. His first novel, Fate's Lieutenant, won the Faulkner Society's William Faulkner / William Wisdom award. Toby Lichtig is a freelance writer and editor living in London. Patrick McCaughey is a former Director of the Yale Center fo r British Art and the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartfo rd, Connecticut. R6nan McDonald is Director of the Beckett International Foundation and Senior Lecturer at the University of Reading. His most recent

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Orientalists and their enemies was publi shed in 2006. His book on the Alhambra appeared in 2004 and his most recent novel, Satan Wants Me, in 1999. He is the Middle East editor of the TLS.

CROSSWORD

ACROSS 1 Williams play ow ing nothing to Malraux in translation (6, 4) 6 Fielding character (4)

9

Arti st gives directi ons to Trollope's

doctor, a composer ( 10) 10 For seventeen years a friend of Lear, though unacq uainted with the Owl (4) 12 Writer rev ised with spirit (4) 13 Warner's sort of pursuit (9) 15 "Ort ter 'aye bin a - - , you o rt" (A uden and Isherwood, The Dog Beneath the Skill) (3,5) 16 Where Caravaggio provided supper (6) 18 Early king wi th article in attracti ve surro undings (6) 20 " Is thi s the noble Moor whom our full Senate I Call all in all sufficient ?" he asked (8) 23 One Nott ingham Forest nove list (9) 24 Auguste tree (4) 26 Snare dev ised by Jacobson (4) 27 It takes a so lid view of the abstract ( 10) 28 Uni versity lock (4) 29 It views the altar wi tho ut altering the view (ID)

book is The Death of the Critic, 2007. Ruth Morse is Professor of Engli sh at the University of Paris-Diderot. She is a judge for the Crime Writers' s Association International Dagger. Ferdinand Mount' s most recent novel, The Condor 's Head, was published in 2007. A memoir, Cold Cream: My early life and other mistakes, appeared in 2009. Very Like a Whale, his first novel, is reissued in a new edition thi s month. Stephen Mulhall is Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy at New College, Oxford. He is the author of The Conve rsation of Humanity, 2007 , and The Wounded Animal: J. M. Coetzee and the difficulty of reality, 2009. James M. Murphy is a retired intelligence officer and a freelance writer on international affairs. Joanne Parker is a lecturer in Victorian Literature at the University of Exeter. Her books include England's Darling: The Victorian cult of Alfred the Great, published in 2007 , and Written on Stone: The cultural history of British prehistoric monuments, 2009. Ad Putter teaches Medieval Literature at the University of Bristol. He is the co-author of Studies in the Metre of Alliterative Verse, publi shed in 2007 , and co-editor of the Cam bridge Companion to the Arthurian Legend, 2009. James L. Rice is Professor Emeritus of Russian Language and Literature at the University of Oregon. He is the author of Dostoevsky and the Healing Art, 1985, and Freud 's Russia, 1993. A memoi r, Joseph Brodsky: 1976- 1996, is forthcoming. Graeme Richardson is Chaplain of Brasenose College, Oxford.

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DOWN lOne of the pack from Waugh's

cast le? (4) 2 St Ronan 's Well was not we ll , d uring hi s tenure as laird (7) 3 Novel message impli ed by sign on hotel door (3,2,7) 4 Cast le o n fore st edge reveals deeds of notorio us highwayman (8) 5 Hi s G ulli ver was o n leave (6) 7 Were overtures made to thi s Edgeworth heroi ne? (7) 8 Somethi ng owned by A. S. Byan ( 10) 11 Board meeting reported by Eliot ( 1,4,2, 5) 14 Theme of Sartre 's Le Scenario Freud an attempt to support new medicine? ( 10) 17 Odd comrade I assoc iate with o ne who lost a pound , yet became ri cher (8) 19 Speech fro m Mex ican hi story book (7) 21 He won a wager concerning reportedly posthumous wife (7) 22 Florentine hero ine produces zero lire in capital (6) 25 "The poor bishops are gone upon their travels, and their chere - :s upon the town" (Charlotte S mith , Desmond} (4)

TLS JA NUARY 1 2010

Francis Robinson is Professor of the Hi story of South Asia at Royal Holloway, University of London, Sultan of Oman Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies and Visiting Professor in the History of the Islamic World, Oxford. His most recent book is Islam in the Age of Western Domination, the fifth volume in the New Cambridge History of Islam , 2009. Lucy Scholes is a doctoral student at Birkbeck College, University of London. She is writing on sibling relationships in twentiethcentury literature and psychoanalytic theory . J ennie Erin Smith is a freelance sc ience reporter. Her book about reptile smugg ling is forthcoming in 20 I O. Anthony Thwaite' s Collected Poems was published in 2007. He is the co-editor of Japanese Verse , which was published in a new edition last year. Vladimir Tismaneanu, Professor of Politics at the University of Maryland, is the author of Stalinism for All Seasons: A political history of Romanian communism, 2003 , and editor of The Revolutions of 1989, 1999, and Stalinism Revisited: The establishment of communist regimes in East-Central Europe, 2009. Rory Waterman is studying for a PhD on modern British poetry at the University of Leicester where he is writing a thesis on R. S. Thomas, Charles Causley and Philip Larkin. Kit Wright' s collected poems, Hoping 1t Might Be So: Poems 1974- 2000, was published in 2000. Hi s most recent collection is The Magic Box: Poems fo r children (illustrated by Peter Bailey), 2009. Sofka Zinovieff' s biography of her Russian grandmother, Red Princess , was published in 2008. She is the author of Eurydice Street: A place in Athens, 2004.

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t is our custom, at the start of a new year, to dispense advice to aspiring scribes hoping to get a piece past the literary editor's desk. A fruitful approach is to link your article to an anniversary: centenary, sesquicentenary, bicententary; of birth, death , publication of masterpiece, and the like. In the coming weeks, we will highlight some potentially eye-catching anniversaries and offer possible hooks. First, keep your numbers round. The pitch that begins, "One hundred and six years ago, the forgotten short-story writer O. Henry published Cabbages and Kings . .. " will sink without trace. The one that starts, "0. Henry, the Texan Chekhov, died a hundred years ago this month" (ie, June 1910), might float. The most noted literary anniversary of the coming year is likely to be the centenary of the death of Leo Tolstoy, who departed this world on November 10, 1910. He was by then a celebrated personage. A leading article in the TLS two years before his death (September 10, 1908) ranked him "with the masters of all ages .... Michelangelo himself had not a higher eminence while he lived nor one more certain not to be abased by time" . Tolstoy 's renunciatory views had interested British newspapers even before his demise in the railway station at Astapovo. The TLS thought it fitting to note the first anniversary of his death: "He left his home upon October 28 , 1910, because the night before he thought he heard his wife searching among the papers in his study [for his will]". Tolstoy ' s works provoked much discus-

The new word sion in our pages over the following years. Among the more curious items to appear was a letter from his translator Aylmer Maude, who had come upon a "remarkable notice Dostoevski wrote of Anna Karenina" , which had never been published in English. Maude appended his translation, which the TLS published on March 6, 1924. Dostoevsky's purpose was to rescue his compatriot from Western acclaim, and preserve him in a Russian embrace: Karenina ... appears most opportunely as a thing to which European literature of our

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epoch offers no equal. Its idea is something of our own, native to us , distinguishing us from the whole European world - it is our national "new word" ... such as one does not hear in Europe, yet which, for all her pride, she badly needs.

Dostoevsky stated, by the way, that "evil lies deeper in Society than our Socialist physicians imagine". That was in 1877. By 1924, the physicians had taken over the surgery.

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puzzle enthusiast

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he Winter issue of that handsome periodical the Book Collector contains an article on a fugitive collection of verse by T. S. Eliot and others. Noctes Binanianae was privately printed in 1937, in an edition of twenty-five copies. It contains sundry "Voluntary and Satyrical Verses and Compliments as were lately Exchang'd between some of the Choicest Wits of the Age", namely Eliot and his friends John Hayward, Geoffrey Faber and Frank Morley, the last two, like Eliot, directors of Faber and Faber. They amused themselves by apostrophizing each other in rhyme, using nicknames, in a style by turns arch, learned and occasionally suggestive "the form "C--t" appears more than once, though the in-joke is that it refers to Faber's nickname "Coot". Writing in the Book Collector, A. S. G. Edwards says that Nocres Binanianae conveys "an impression of middle-aged chaps" with "too much time on their hands". Nineteen copies of the booklet can be accounted for, leaving six to be rediscovered. Mr Edwards writes that its very existence constitutes, for the editor of Eliot's verse, "a small problem that needs to be tidied away". Which it no doubt will be in the multivolume edition of Eliot's work now underway. In addition to Faber the C--t, Hayward is the Vesperal Spider, Morley the Whale, Eliot Possum and also "the Elephant" (Hayward: "The Elephant remembers, / The Whale cannot forget"). Mr Edwards has sent us one of Eliot's verses from Noctes Binanianae, in which the poet himself appears as a "hard working churchwarden": His name is not Spender or Auden, And his pleasures are simple and few.

These include drinking, sailing on the river, and "a view of the gnu in the Zoo". Copies of Noctes Binanianae change hands for large sums nowadays. One, inscribed by Eliot and Hayward to Anne Ridler, Eliot's secretary at Faber, is offered for sale by Lucius Books of York at £ 12,500.

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his drawing of George Psychoundakis by Patrick Leigh Fermor appears in a new edition of Psychoundakis's The Cretan Runner, published by the Folio Society. The book, first issued in 1955 in Fermor's translation, tells the story of the resistance against the German invasion from the point of view of Psychoundakis, a shepherd from Asi Gonia in Western Crete. He is described by Fermor as " lithe and agile and full of nervous

energy". As a runner, he was charged with carrying news through the "merciless mountains", between the andartes (Cretan guerrillas) and the English members of Special Operations Executive (SOE) who were assisting them, and who included Fermor. The sketch is one of six of andartes by Fermor in the book. "They have only survived because they were smuggled out early on a timely submarine", he writes. "They are inscribed with made-up names put there in case they were captured by the Germans." The splendid Folio edition of The Cretan Runner (£22.95) contains photographs newly retrieved by Fermor and a letter from him to the Athens Academy recommending the shepherd's translation of the Odyssey into Cretan dialect (it was published in 1979). George Psychoundakis died in 2006; Patrick Leigh Fermor will be ninety-five in February.

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xford University Press has chosen "unfriend" as the Oxford Word of the Year, in view of the fact that it has recently gained currency as a verb - as in "I had to unfriend my roommate on Facebook after we had a fight". Unfriend, says OUP in that annoying look-how-unstuffy-we-are way, "has real lex-appeal". Lex, as if you needed to be told, is a contraction of lexicographer. We prefer to say that unfriend has Learappeal. It occurs as a participle in the first act of Shakespeare's play, when the troubled king tries to foist Cordelia on the Duke of Burgundy: "Will you, with those infirmities she owes, / Unfriended, new-adopted to our hate .... Take her, or leave her?" A few lines later, the Duke of France utters another lexy word, employing "monster" as a verb. This usage is not recorded by Chambers, but is current among the Facebook generation, as in "X's blog was monstered by Y" . In King Lear, the Duke of France suggests that Cordelia's offence, which has put her father in a rage, "Must be of such unnatural degree / That monsters it" . Cordelia herself wishes her father were in "a better place" .

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