The Times Literary Supplement Jan 29, 2010 No 5574

ILS

SOCIAL STUDIES

POEMS

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

obert Darnton's essays collected in The Case for Books should be read not only by those concerned at the technological threat to the printed page but by all the younger "digital natives who know 'text' primarily as a verb". Thus does H. J. Jackson begin her review of a nuanced and subtle collection which. while addressing anxieties about the present and future of Google, is less alarmist than others of the older generation have been. There is further consolation for the anxious this week in J. K. Elliott' s celebration of the British Library's extraordinary achievement in uniting in digital form one of the oldest biblical manuscripts, the Codex Sinaiticus. The story of how schoolchildren and the unemployed contributed to buying the British sections from Stalin was told in an exhibition last year; the on line version, which brings together parts scattered in four physical locations, is already being studied in new detail and by millions who would otherwise have struggled to see it at all.

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3

Michael Saler

5 D. Nurkse 15 Patrick McGuinness 24 Kim Moore

PS

In Canaan from Blue Guide The Rabbit and the Moon

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

6

Animal rights and ethics, Regius professors, Olivetti, etc

POLITICS

8 Jeremi Suri

Alistair Horne Kissinger's Year - 1973 Mario Del Pero The Eccentric Realist - Henry Kissinger and the shaping of American foreign policy

HISTORY

9 Lisa HiIton

Stuart Carroll Martyrs and Murderers - The Guise family and the making of Europe

BIOGRAPHY

10 Jeremy Brown

Jay Taylor The Generalissimo

RELIGION

11

Diarmaid MacCulloch A History of Christianity - The first three thousand years

COMMENTARY

14 J. K. EIIiott

Lucy Beckett

A. S. G. Edwards August Kleinzahler Then and Now ARTS

17

Guy Dammann Leo Robson John Mole

FICTION

19 Tom Shippey Alison Kelly

FICTION IN BRIEF

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LITERARY CRITICISM

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Codex Sinaiticus online: a gold standard for ancient texts in the digital age Medieval bytes Freelance TLS January 25 , 1980 - Segal on Lowell Hans Werner Henze Phaedra. "Total Immersion" (Henze Weekend, Barbican) Up in the Air (Various cinemas) Robert R. Faulkner and Howard S. Becker Do You Know ... ? - The jazz repertoire in action Peter Carey Parrot and Olivier in America Joyce Carol Oates A Fair Maiden. Little Bird of Heaven Donald Harington Enduring David Toscana The Last Reader; Translated by Asa Zatz Shirley Jackson The Lottery and Other Stories Storm Jameson Love in Winter John Christopher The Death of Grass

Nicholas Shrimpton Bart van Es

Henry Kissinger was "a profound synthesizer of realist and idealist impulses in his efforts to build a better world" , concludes Jeremi Suri in a review of two new books on the man with whom "anyone serious about writing the history of the past half century must grapple". President Nixon's bouts of drinking and depression made Kissinger's leadership indispensable, according to the historian Alistair Horne, although the record of Or K was eventually as mixed as his motivations. Visitors to the Western White House in San Clemente, California, during the Nixon years might conclude it to be the perfect place to brighten away anyone's Washington Blues. But Michael Saler's account of the Golden State draws on two books that paint a darker picture of "psychic divisions", environmental degradation and political paralysis. Saler concludes his review of Imperial by William T. Vollmann (above) and Golden Dreams by Kevin Starr with relief at being able to praise Lawrence Ferlinghetti ' s City Lights bookshop in San Francisco, the view also of Freelancer August Kleinzahler.

WilIiam T. Vollmann Imperial Kevin Starr Golden Dreams - California in an age of abundance, 1950-1963

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst and Seamus Perry, editors Tennyson Among the Poets - Bicentenary essays Phillip J. Donnelly Milton's Scriptural Reasoning - Narrative and Protestant toleration

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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MUSIC

24 Paul Griffiths

Peter Kivy Antithetical Arts - On the ancient quarrel between literature and music Jeanette Bicknell Why Music Moves Us

TLS CHRISTMAS QUIZ

25

Winners and solutions

IN BRIEF

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EmiIe Zola Dead Men Tell No Tales, and Other Stories Stephen Martin Penguin Sarah Hibberd French Grand Opera and the Historical Imagination Victor Suthren The Island of Canada - How three oceans shaped our nation Jean Baudrillard Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared Melissa Katsoulis Telling Tales - A history of literary hoaxes Ernest Hemingway A Moveable Feast - The restored edition Pierre Michon Les Onze

MEMOIRS

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Duncan Campbell-Smith John Forfar From Gold to Omaha - The Battle for Port-en-Bessin, 6-8 June 1944

CULTURAL STUDIES

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Nancy Campbell

H. J. Jackson

31 NB

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Robert Darnton The Case for Books - Past, present, and future

Cordon Burn Sex & Violence, Death & Silence This week's contributors, Crossword

J. C.

Styron unexpurgated, RIP Erich Segal, What does "curmudgeon" mean?

Cover picture: Sunset, Pacific Beach, California © Scout J. Photography/Getty Images; p2 © Ulf Andersen/Getty Images; p3 © Chris Radburn/PA; p4 © Bob Peterson/Seattle/Getty Images; pS © Bettmann/Corbis; p9 © Bridgeman Art Library; plO © Beumann/Corbis; pl7 © UlIsteinbildffopFoto; p23 © lean-Rohert Dantou/Picturetank; p28 © MPlfGetty Images The Times Literary Supplement (ISSN 0307661 , USPS 021-626) is published weekly by The Times Literary Supplement Limited, London UK, and distributed in the USA by OCS America Inc, 49- 27 31st Street, Long Island City, NYII 101 - 31 13. Periodical postage paid at Long Island City NY and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: please send address corrections to TLS, PO Box 3000, Denville, NJ 07834, USA

TLS JANUARY 29 2010

SOCIAL STUDIES

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By the Salton Sea Lessons from California that extend beyond the Schadenfreude produced by its present economic problems he novelist Wallace Stegner once defined California as America, "only more so" , a statement whose restraint better expresses his own roots in Iowa than it does the seismic character of the Golden State. Its dynamism, whether in the direction of boom or bust, has commandeered the world's attention for at least a century: more than any Hollywood epic, California is its own best box office. From the singular plenitude of its Native American cultures, to the extravagant dysfunction of its current government, California residents like to vie with the sublimity of their natural surroundings, doing nothing by halves. Writers hoping to uncover the state's essence are more likely to strike quicksilver than gold. Yet commentators continue to see California as a beacon, for better or for worse, of the future, even as it remains stubbornly sui generis. When it became the most populous state in the nation in 1962, the media celebrated it as a global bell wether. Like the hot rods roaring out of the Mojave desert, however, California left others in the dust as it enacted three ambitious plans that saw fruition in the next two decades. The California Water Plan (I957) initiated the greatest water storage and distribution system in human history; the California Freeway System (1958) extended a massive freeway construction programme across the state; and the Master Plan for Higher Education (1960) ensured that all citizens had access to higher education whose sterling quality was in inverse proportion to the negligible fees students paid. The multi-campus University of California soon became the finest public university in the world. The immediate post-war years were California's best of times. Now, as it faces perhaps its worst of times, the state continues to be cited as a symbol for the nation and the world, albeit in less complimentary terms. Its political gridlock appears to be replicated by divisive partisanship at a national level, leading the economist Paul Krugman to wonder "if California's political paralysis foreshadows the future of the nation as a whole". Its budgetary deficits (currently projected at 21 billion dollars), decaying infrastructure, high

T

MICHAEL SALER William T. Vollmann IMPERIAL I ,344pp. Alma Books. £20. 978 I 84 688096 4 US: Viking. $55. 978 0 670 02061 4

Kevin Staff GOLDEN DREAMS California in an age of abundance 1950- 1963 564pp. Oxford University Press. £22.50 (US $34.95). 9780195153774

on legislative acts and constitutional amendments, only California prohibits its legislature from modifying or overriding their acts. Citizens freely engage in "ballot-box budgeting", especially after the passage of Proposition 13 in 1978, which capped property taxes.

Intricate economic and social initiatives are thus subject to a simple yes or no decision by voters. They may not be fully aware of what they are voting for because of ambiguous language on the ballot paper, or how propositions will contradict existing legislation. The State Constitution has been modified more than 500 times by this system of direct democracy, in several instances locking in spending allocations and revenue limitations that leave elected representatives little room to manoeuvre - aside from proposing their own ballot initiatives. Direct democracy, California-style, would seem a political disaster - if its form of representative democracy did not compete for that distinction. Budgets in California cannot be passed without a two-thirds majority in both houses of the state legislature. Two other states have this " supermajority" requirement, but only in California is there the additional requirement, thanks to Proposition 13, that all tax

26.01.10 Flatford, Suffolk

unemployment and cuts to puhlic services

are often interpreted as the unfortunate but widely shared fallout of the global recession. Even in its misery, however, California hates company. It is true that its budgetary woes and political paralysis have been exacerbated by the contemporary financial crisis, but the state has been increasingly difficult to govern for the past three decades because of its unique political structure. If California is a "failed state", as some have claimed, it is because it has a failed constitution. While there are other states besides California that allow their citizens to propose and then vote

increases also be passed by a supermajority in both houses. Because taxation and the budget are determined separately in the state, these requirements lead to repeatedly delayed budgets and extraordinary difficulties in raising taxes when revenues drop precipitously, or unexpectedly, or both. A determined minority in the legislature frequently negates the will of the majority over tax increases and other budgetary matters. In the meantime, unemployment rates rise, vital social services are cut, education funding per pupil drops to nearly the lowest in the nation and cuts to higher education restrict student access and threaten to destroy the unusual excellence of its university system. And if all of this weren ' t bad enough, California voters have instituted the most severe term limits for legislators in the country. No legislator can serve more than a handful of years before being banned for life. Managing a state the size of California, which has one of the largest economies in the world, can require a steep learning curve, but Californians have found a way to retire their elected representatives just as they start to become seasoned. While California is more of an outlier than a trendsetter, it remains relevant well beyond the shiver of Schadenfreude provoked by its present collapse. Its lessons are diverse and conflicting; the challenge for writers is how to encompass them without being either reductive or confusing. Given its geographical and social variety, California could be represented as an unusual social laboratory. It is divided into three regions - Northern California, the Central Valley, and Southern California - each of which could exist autonomously (or so some aggrieved separatists like to argue). Numerous different ethnicities inhabit these distinct geographical locales, not always harmoniously. While California is the most culturally diverse state in the nation, historically it has been no more tolerant than many other places. Its monuments to oppression include the dispossession of Native Americans by successive waves of Spanish, Mexican and Anglo-American settlers; the Chinese Exclusion Acts of the late nineteenth century; the Japanese internment camps of the Second World War; the Watts riots of the 1960s; and the current habit of profiling Mexican Americans as " illegals".

"As long as I do paint I shall never cease to paint such Places." Visitors to "Constable Country" have long been promised that the artist painted "scenes which remain easily recognizable", to quote a National Trust guide. One exception to that rule was "The Stour Valley", where the familiar SuffolkEssex idyll is enlivened in characteristic Constable style by his portrayal of labourers digging up a dunghill for fertilizer. The industriousness which

features in even the most apparently placid of landscapes is not the only thing to have changed in the intervening years. The landscape itself, including hedgerows, field placements and tree plantations, have all been transformed, making it apparently impossible to reconcile past and present views. Now, however, an NT land agent, Martin Atkinson, claims to have solved the puzzle of where exactly the painter stood, with reference to contemporary local maps.

TLS JANUARY 29 2010

Nature and culture have also been at odds. California is distinguished by its majestic scenery but also by its Faustian attempts to control the environment through technology, including the statewide irrigation and highway networks that have created environmental degradation and social divisions. Yet these networks have integrated the state physically, a reminder that it is not only a laboratory of diversity but a crucible of unity , transmuting disparate elements into a rich medium. The future promises a state constituted in radically different ways from its

SOCIAL STUDIES

4 founding in l850: non-Hispanic whites are no longer the ethnic majority, and the sizeable populations of Latino, Asian and African Americans have been joined by Indian, Russian and Polish immigrants, From the perspective of the post-war boom in its economy and social services, California' s current economic bust can be read as the beginning of the end. But from a vantage that sees the twentieth-century white majority being replaced by a multicultural one, California in the new century may be experiencing the end of the beginning. (Here, at least, it can be seen as a model for a more cosmopolitan global order.) Modern writers have long been intrigued by another set of contending oppositions thought to distinguish the state, that between imagination and reality - an especially salient concern in our increasingly virtual age. California is said to be as much a state of mind as a geographical state. Its expansive size, bountiful resources and pioneering traditions attract dreamers, encouraging them to turn their fantasies into actuality. Historically, it has been the epicentre for modern virtual worlds, from Hollywood to Disneyland to Silicon Valley. Noir writers have been drawn to the psychological fissures emerging when utopian longings collide with dystopian realities, but the genre that best captures California today is science fiction (and not simply because Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is currently playing Terminator to the California Dream). It is no accident that so many exemplary science fiction writers are associated with California, including Robert Heinlein , Ursula K. Le Guin , Philip K. Dick, and Ray Bradbury. Kim Stanley Robinson said that he started reading and writing science fiction after witnessing the agricultural areas of Southern California where he was raised being changed "absolutely" within a decade. For him, the genre simply "described what I experienced" . Both of the authors under review, Kevin Starr and William T. Vollmann, are cultural historians, intrigued by the interplay of fantasy and actuality that constitutes California's history. Each associates the unusual state with the unconventional genre. Starr likens California's phases of history to the layout of Disneyland , in which Frontierland and Main Street culminate in Tomorrowland. Vollmann links Imperial County, which adjoins Mexico, to one of Bradbury's novels: Recently I reread Ray Bradbury's [The} Martian Chronicles and realized that the Martians speak and behave in an eerily familiar ornate fashion - why , of course! They're Mexicans ! We conquered California from

them, expelling their laws and ways ; California, Imperial California, is our Mars, but the Martians are coming back!

Starr and Vollmann acknowledge California's complexities and hope to do them justice. Each indicates that California has never been a symbol of the future, but rather of multiple futures. Where the authors chiefly differ is in the direction those futures might take. Vollmann's Imperial depicts California as up shit creek without a paddle. He literalizes the adage when he navigates the New River, said to be the most polluted waterway in the country: "Near a million people's raw sewage thickens it; unregulated industrial runoff spices it". (He does have a paddle, though it

Bay Bridge, San Francisco is coated with "lumps of reeking black paste".) This is only one of several escapades that enliven his I,200-page account of Imperial County, a region in South-eastern California adjoining Mexico. An awardwinning novelist and journalist residing in Sacramento, Vollmann is well qualified to comprehend California's self-representation as a place commingling fiction and fact. His own work tends to focus on cultural confrontations and marginalized individuals. He hopes to "promote love and understanding for people whom others with my background may despise or fail to know" . Vollmann's broadly defined "Imperial region" extends beyond the county to include northern Mexico; he also detours into neighbouring Tijuana, Los Angeles, San Diego and Riverside County. This " arbitrary, semiimaginary area" represents in microcosm many of the fundamental issues facing California. It is a clever strategy for addressing the state and its history as a whole - particularly in its mutually constitutive relationship with Mexico. He devotes as much attention to the Mexican side of the border as he does to the Imperial Valley, in order to illuminate the ways in which the region became artificially "delineated" by politics and culture. ("Delineation is the merest, absurdist fiction , yet delineation engenders control.") Imperial is primarily concerned with the county' s twentieth-century rise and decline as an object lesson in the state's "imperial" attitude towards minorities and nature. Vollmann also wants to expose reductive narratives and replace them with more complex and amhivalent accounts. Thus it can he difficult to distinguish his central narratives from his many digressions, although three interrelated strands recur. The first, which subsumes the others, involves the replacement of the county's small farms by large-scale agribusiness. Vollmann insists that Imperial's shift represents, in miniature, the terrible triumph of Western imperialism as a whole: "Imperial is a sermon of capital ... an object parable of short-sighted greed". The region was a desert when American settlers arrived in the late nineteenth century, hoping to reclaim the land for small, independent farm-

steads. Land was cheap, as was water, which could be brought to the region through irrigation canals from the Colorado River. The settIers ' dreams of agrarian independence and democratic government were expressed in utopian tracts such as Harold Bell Wright' s potboiler The Winning of Barbara Worth (l9ll). Vollmann cannily observes that Imperial was an imaginary world before it became a real one, testifying to the power of extravagant dreams to become improbable realities in California. Wright's bestseller "reified Imperial into something he could adore". By 1925, Imperial County had been transformed from a parched desert to an agricultural paradise. It was the most productive farming area on the continent as well as one of the richest counties in the United States. The early homesteaders imbued with civic republican ideals were accompanied by businessmen and speculators, whom Vollmann blames for the decline of Imperial , and by extension California. They destroyed the democratic, agrarian ideology of the homesteaders by concentrating farm ownership into the hands of a few. In the second half of the twentieth century, agribusiness owners found it more profitable to sell scarce water to the sprawling suburbs of San Diego and Los Angeles than to use it to produce food. As a result, large areas of lush Imperial reverted to desert. Farmers also capitalized on the availability of inexpensive migrant labour, turning the once prosperous county into the poorest in the state. Vollmann ' s second strand examines Californians ' use of technology to literally "terra-

The final strand knits Mexico into the history of Imperial. Vollmann refuses "to claim that Mexico is ' better' [than] my country, or at least the country that it wishes and occasionally even tries to be". He details downsides of the Southside, including poverty, crime and prejudicial attitudes comparable to those of the Northside. Mexico could be as inhospitable to Chinese immigrants as California was, leading some Chinese residents of Mexicali to dig tunnels under their homes to escape attacks and socialize in safety. (Vollmann thought these tunnels were urban legends until he rooted around people' s basements and found them.) There is no doubt, however, that he prefers Mexico and often romanticizes it. Always attracted to outcasts, he finds "everything in Mexico was lower, dirtier, truer and above all, more alive" than across the border. The homesteaders' dream destroyed in the Northside is alive in Mexico, he claims. "Ejidos" , or communal farms , remain, although he fears that transnational capitalism may undermine them in time. Still, "I never met as many happy people, at least by their own definition, as in the ejidos". He even finds a few good things to say about maquiladoras, the notorious foreignowned factories that exploit the native workforce. Vollmann can't gain access to them (although he tried, with a hidden camera), but those workers he interviews indicate the workplaces are at least air-conditioned, which he finds an improvement over the oppressive heat afflicting migrant labour in the fields of Imperial County. Vollmann spent ten years on Imperial. He

form" their environment, just as contempo-

interviewed scores of people, engaged in

rary science-fiction writers were imagining the transformation of other planets. The consequences he describes are closer to the horror genre. After navigating the fecal New River, he investigates the Salton Sea, a body of water created accidentally at the turn of the century as a result of a flawed irrigation cut along the Colorado River. Pesticide runoffs, pollution and increasing salinity have killed most of the fish , but Vollmann spots one, "split open like a sack; beneath the strips of its putrescent flesh , vermin were nuzzling like babies" .

archival research, and immersed himself in the secondary literature. His book has many insightful and provocative observations, as well as arresting formulations by a gifted writer. For all that, it is terribly flawed. Part ofthe problem resides in the author' s ambivalence about how to write history. After condemning "delineations", he is understandably reluctant to make them, and anxiously insists that his judgements are provisional: "Imperial is whatever we want it to be" ; "this book also forms itself as it goes". Yet he also knows that he cannot tell a story without

TLS JANUARY 29 2010

SOCIAL STUDIES some definitions and conclusions. His solution is to fragment his multiple narratives to make an ungainly collage, undoing his own delineations but forcing the reader to reassemble pieces spread over a thousand pages. The reader's patience may also be tried by Vollmann's self-indulgence. He is shamelessly repetitive ("In our introduction ... the point was already made, and out of laziness I quote myself verbatim that ... ", and so on). He is also reluctant to leave out any of his research: "I don't care to exclude any detail; everything is precious to me". How much easier it is to decry delineation than to do the difficult work of selecting illustrative facts and illuminating stories. Early on , he provides a " W ARNING OF IMPENDING ARIDITY", where he apologizes in advance for an onslaught of statistics; later he writes, "If you wish , I can make this chapter even more tedious". And if he wished, he could also make it less. Kevin Starr's Golden Dreams is a bright contrast to Imperial. He describes his thematic work as a "mosaic" , depicting California's boom years during the 1950s and early 60s. Given the range of material covered, this history is marvellously cohesive and concise, and Starr's engaging style makes it a pleasure to read. Golden Dreams is part of his sevenvolume sequence devoted to the history of California, but it can stand alone thanks to the author's care in placing topics within their broader contexts. The period was one of unprecedented economic dynamism and population growth in California, stemming from the state' s military and industrial importance during the Second World War. In the post-war years a particular variant of the "California Dream" became possible for many. It was a white, middle-class ideal whose elements were amenable to glossy photospreads in Sunset Magazine, celebrating family values, home ownership, car culture, outdoor life, consumerism, and social mobility. The state emerged from its provincial cocoon to become a national exemplar as well as a vital economic and political presence. Those years established "once and for all the American dimension of California and the California dimension of America". Starr presents bountiful evidence, touching on the major political , economic, social and cultural developments, as well as looking at more specialized areas, ranging from the antiquarian book trade to baseball to West Coast jazz. Even English expatriates are called as witnesses for the prosecution. Rayner Banham praised the state's car culture as "Autopia"; Christopher Isherwood, Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard celebrated its alternative lifestyles and religions. (Raymond Chandler, however, mocked San Diego in his novels despite his evident enjoyment in living there, rousing Staff's ire: Chandler "satirized in that affected

English Public School style of his that allowed him to reject the country in which he was born and the scenes in which he set his fiction" .) Of course, it was also an exceptional period in the state' s history, as Starr relates. The actualization of the California Dream was funded largely by Cold War-related defence industries, federal grants and subsidies. His largely celebratory account does not ignore the grid lock and pollution resulting from the state's short-sighted decision to emphasize automobiles over public transport. Nor does he underplay the discriminatory

practices against minorities. Like Vollmann, he documents the hostility directed against Mexican-Americans and Mexicans by those unwilling to confront the imperialist origins of the state and its intrinsic ties to Mexico: "No border - on an abstract level- was more problematic, even illusory, than the border between Mexico and the United States, between brown and white, Spanish and English speaking, affluent and poor". Much of Starr's book is of necessity devoted to "California cool" , as a middle-class majority constructed the utopia they felt they deserved after the privations of the Depression and war years. Nevertheless, he concludes with a look at the rising undercurrents of dissent among those who found the prevailing California Dream to be exclusionary, superficial , and even dangerous. David Brower's shift from serving as director of the moderate Sierra Club in the 1950s to his founding of the more militant group Friends of the Earth in 1969 is representative of the more confrontational turn taken by Californians after 1963.

Starr remains a booster for a particular version of the California Dream , one that he imbibed as a youth during the period he now recalls with insight, fondness and, at times, exasperation. He tends to single out for praise certain individuals whose actions expressed a social-democratic spirit, one that resulted in a "fusion of personal and civic actualization" . Private faith in the common good spurred these citizens to act despite political obstacles, financial difficulties, or public indifference. Dorothy Chandler, for example, spearheaded a drive to build the 3,250-seat Chandler Music Center in Los Angeles. She funded it through a publicprivate partnership after an initial state bond issue was rejected by the voters. Starr argues that the Center appealed to hitherto separate classes and ethnicities, achieving "cross-town reconciliation". Similarly, William Wurstler, Dean of UC Berkeley ' s School of Architecture, proselytized for the social functions of art; the Bay Area developer Joseph Eichler pursued his progressive beliefs by selling

In Canaan We lived among clapboard houses sealed by Levolor blinds, glossy hedges, trilling doorbells, yards with round deflatable pools where immense clouds passed slowly, then broke into a net of wrinkles like a vanished smile; a dog barked yearningly all night but he was not ours; we owned a garage whose door lifted by remote control from the corner of Fig and Vine, a basketball net tacked to a rafter, a dismantled tricycle, three iPods, a huge screen where a face winked, a freezer that hummed louder when we kicked it, four cloudy mirrors we waited with our teeth on edge until the children napped, then we undressed very silently, in desire and argument, hoping to be fucked and have the last word. We counted seconds until that chord of breath was slack and strong, we descended towards each other, only to freeze because the boy was talking in his sleep, recounting the battle of Thermopylae in a strange loud metallic voice, and the girl was sobbing, calling an unknown name, so we held fast, hands on each other' s sex, the definitive argument on our lips, eyes scanning the ceiling, noting a faint bloom of mold forgive us, you who come after us, we did not know ourselves, our lives were all delay yet we decimated forests, built the last radiant cities, launched the survivor ships towards Mars, and now wait naked, side by side, on the blue ticking of the mattress, arching our backs against the flat buttons, as if twilight on the ceiling were the face of a long-dead father.

5 homes to minorities at a time when many developers didn ' t, and building communal swimming pools, meeting halls and nurseries. Clark Kerr, the visionary President of the University of California, was devoted to public service from his youth - he wrote his PhD dissertation on self-help cooperatives and he convinced California citizens that higher education was worth supporting for civic reasons as well as for its contributions to California's growing economy. Starr also commends the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who as a student at the Sorbonne studied the beneficial relations between Parisian poets and the city. On arriving in San Francisco in 1951 , Ferlinghetti expected "more from an urban environment than a mere delivery of goods and services" . He soon established City Lights Bookstore to encourage interchanges between the city and its poets, in the process helping to launch the San Francisco Literary Renaissance. What kind of California dreams are these? They are best summed up by Starr's evocation of the public ethos behind the works of Lawrence Halprin and Thomas Church, two landscape architects who championed the provision of well-designed public spaces. They insisted that, " if California should neglect or trash its public landscapes, the private garden would become a flight from reality, a retreat into unearned privilege, a mode of self-deception". Their altruistic vision remains a lingering legacy of California' s last Golden Age, when so much else it bequeathed lies in ruins.

In Memoriam

Perez Zagorin 1920-2009

Author, Scholar, and Historian

Perez Zagorin's final book,

Hobbes and the Law of Nature will be published by Princeton University Press in February.

~

D. NURKSE

TLS JANUARY 29 2010

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY P RE S S

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Regius professors Sir, - May I reinforce the point made by Tim Nau (Letters, January 22) that universities in the past have always changed with the times and been "closely aligned with the needs of contemporary society"? In this country, George I created Regius Chairs of Modem History (and Languages) at Oxford and Cambridge to equip the subjects of his new kingdom with the skills necessary for the conduct of international relations. I would not like to judge how successful their holders have been in this respect. But certainly the reputation of these two universities has rested as much on the diplomats, civil servants, professional men and women and political leaders they have produced as on their pure scholars and scientists.

Animal rights and ethics appears to have overlooked the fact that Mill was an early supporter of the then Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, which sought to prosecute cruelty, and that he explicitly included harm to animals within his utilitarian calculus. Scruton claims: "The sad thing is that Linzey either doesn ' t see, or doesn't care, where the use of this kind of argument [from public morality] is leading" , since people need "to be protected from ... prigs and puritans who dislike their way of life". Scruton's view that a way of life involving cruelty is a private matter that should be immune from legislation was best expressed by a Times leader in 1800. Commenting on the failure of the first bill to outlaw bull-baiting, the newspaper was adamant that the attempt was misconceived since "whatever meddles with private personal disposition of a man's time or property is tyranny direct". If The Times and Scruton had their way we would still be tolerating bull-baiting.

Sir, - When a fox hunter who writes spiritedly against animal rights is given a copy of Why Animal Suffering Matters to review, one might expect a partisan review , even a

ferocious one, but that shouldn't absolve Roger Scruton of the responsibility of presenting the arguments fairly (January 8). Scruton says: " [Andrew] Linzey does not really tell us why animal suffering matters ... " . Not so. The first letters@the-tls,co,uk long chapter (pp9-42) devotes itself to an examination of the six main differences - including rationality, Health and Animal Welfare of the language, moral agency - between European Union. humans and animals that have been Scruton claims that " Whether fox used to justify differential moral treat- hunters are to be condemned for ment. I show that, with only one poss- sins that cat-keepers somehow ible exception, none of these justifies avoid is a matter that is in no way regarding animal suffering as less settled by Linzey's arguments". MICHAEL HOWARD important, indeed the reverse. For The analogy might have credibility The Old Farm , Eastbury, Hungerford, what these differences incidentally if cat-keepers deliberately bred cats Berkshire. reveal are a set of considerations that so that they might hunt, and labori--------~-----should make such suffering ration- ously trained them for this purpose, ally compelling: animals cannot give actually preserving their prey for or withhold their consent, cannot easy hunting, and if, moreover, catSir, -In her review of The Diaries of represent or vocalize their own inter- keepers arranged regular meetings Sofia To/stoy, Barbara Heldt writes ests, they are morally blameless, and so that they could accompany and ANDREW LINZEY (January 22), "Her friendship with are largely vulnerable and defence- encourage them in hunting. But Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics, the composer Sergei Taneyev led to less before us. Scruton doesn't take since cat-keepers do none of these 9 I IffIey Road, Oxford. an unreasoning jealousy on Tolstoy's the trouble to engage with the central things, the analogy is false. Scruton says that I should "have part and its expression in extreme argument, or even describe it. Contrary to his attempt to cast me consulted the literature, from Sir, - Roger Scruton regrets the form for all to read in 'The Kreutzer Sonata' (1890)". Surely this is a mis- as a misanthrope, my conclusion is Plato and Xenophon to Turgenev, author's not having consulted writers take. The diaries themselves show that weaker, vulnerable humans as Sassoon, Masefield and Ortega y "devoted to the place of hunting in a Taneyev visiting Yasnaya Polyana well as animals deserve more, not Gasset, devoted to the place of hunt- virtuous life". I imagine Andrew ing in a virtuous life". Well , Ortega Linzey, like myself, finds it difficult (Tolstoy' s estate) in the summer of less, solicitude. Scruton pretends agreement by is instructive. He asserts that the to connect the ripping to pieces of 1895 and her referring to Tolstoy's saying that "it is not permissible to "intoxication aroused by the sight sentient beings by specially bred " morbid jealousy" in June 1897. impose heavy burdens on animals of blood" is an essential ingredient dogs with virtue. Indeed, it appears for some small human gain", but without which "the spirit of the hunt to me to be connected to quite the E. B. GREENWOOD then, illogically, goes on to defend disappears". Hunting "is the only reverse. I also have to express my Sa St Stephen' s Green, Canterbury. hunting for sport and fur farming normal case in which the killing of regret that such blindness to the true --------~-----for adornment purposes. And subse- one creature constitutes the delight nature of the practices referred to quently adds: "And why is it so sin- of another" . Does Scruton really was repeated in the picturesque little ful to breed animals for their outer want to maintain that such delight cameo of the Silverton Hunt 2000 Sir, - In her engaging review of layers, and not for the stuff characterizes a virtuous person? chosen as an illustration to Scruton's William Shawcross's Queen Eliza- inside?". While not defending tradi- Perhaps so, since he is not opposed piece. I could think of many far more beth: The Queen Mother (January tional slaughter, the answer is given to bullfighting. pertinent pictures - of the tom and 22), Jane Ridley alludes to the at length that confining free-ranging Scruton writes: "What happened dying hare, fox or stag, though the unanswered question of why the fur-bearing animals in small, barren to Mill's famous argument in On camera could not do justice to the Queen Mother only had two child- environments which cause abnor- Liberty that the coercion of the crimi- agonies of their last moments. ren. The answer, I believe, is that mal behaviours, including infanti- nallaw can be justified only in order her babies were delivered by Caesar- cide, prolongs suffering. That is not to prevent us from harming others, PAUL BINDING ean section, and in the 1920s and my opinion; it is the judgement of and never in order to force our The Hou se, Bull Street, Bishop's 30s, obstetricians considered it inad- the Scientific Committee on Animal compliance to a moral code?". He Castle, Shropshire. visable for a woman to have more than two Caesars. -------------------------------~------------------------------It has been suggested in the litera- conjugal pleasure) until 1958. ers to avoid making anti-Nazi ture of family planning that the We cannot know, but it would movies that might be construed as Queen Mother thus (perhaps uncon- be a reasonable presumption that propaganda for the United States sciously) played a role in advancing the Queen Mother was advised by to enter the war against Germany; contraception and its acceptance by her obstetrician to use contraception Sir, - Supporting Paula Marantz the actor Douglas Fairbanks Jr the Church of England, a continuing for health reasons after the birth of Cohen ' s comment that "Joseph (whose father was Jewish) comcontroversy at a time when "birth Princess Margaret in 1930. Other- Kennedy ' s influence on Holly- plained of the intimidation in a control" was regarded as distinctly wise it is likely that she would wood, however, was far-reaching, letter to President Roosevelt. (See racy and Marie S topes' s name have had more children, and quite though hardly for the good" (Janu- Steven Alan Carr, Hollywood and unmentionable in respectable cir- possibly a son, which would have ary 15) is the following incident. In Anti-Semitism, pI59.) cles. The Church of England came changed the course of the monarchy. 1940, a year before Pearl Harbor, to accept birth control to protect the Kennedy, speaking to groups of ROBERT PALTER mother' s health, although it did not Hollywood movie producers (most MARY KENNY 135H Brittany Farm s Road, fully accept the practice (to enhance of them Jewish), warned his listen26 St Georges Road, Deal. New Britain , Connecticut 06053.

Sofia Tolstoy

Royal births

Joseph Kennedy

and Hollywood

TLS JANUARY 29 2010

Calvin Sir, - James Simpson, in his review of Bruce Gordon ' s Ca/vin (December 18 & 25, 2009), asserts that Calvin "did not want the death penalty" for the Spanish antitrinitarian Michael Servetus. However, writing to Guillaume Farel in 154617, six years before Servetus arrived in Geneva, Calvin declared that if the Spaniard arrived in his city, he would never suffer him to leave alive. Calvin arguably did not wish him to be burnt at the stake for heresy, seeking the lesser punishment of beheading, CHRISTOPHER J. WALKER 62 BoIingbroke Road , London W I4.

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

Cool Sir, - Toby Lichtig, reviewing Antal Szerb's Journey by Moonlight (January I), writes that the translation by Len Rix of the 1937 novel contains the odd anachronism, such as "cool" used in its contemporary sense. But what was its contemporary sense? In The Moonstone, Wilkie Collins writes in 1868 about some skulduggery: "May I venture to suggest - if nothing was said about me beforehand - that [ might see her here?"

"Cool!" said Mr Bruff. DONALD CLARKE 708 N. 26th Street, AlIentown , Pennsylvania 18104.

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

Olivetti Sir, - J. C. has reported the sale of Cormac McCarthy's Olivetti Lettera 32, manual typewriter (1963), for $254,000 (NB, December 11 , 2009). I too possess such a typewriter, which I bought in 1963, or 1962, when I started to work for the United Nations. It is in perfect condition. I used it for this letter. Any bidders? Proceeds to the Bill Gates Foundation. GERARD DEKKER PO Box 24129, Karen 00502, Kenya.

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

What Cheer Sir, - Regarding your etymological excursions (NB, December 4, 2009): "Wotcher", which you trace to "what cheer", is more than a salu-

tation. A town in Iowa goes by that name and I always experience momentary pleasure when, driving across that state, I see the exit sign for What Cheer. JIM SEVERANCE S6596 Eli Valley Road , Loganville, Wi scon sin 53943.

LOEB CLASS CAL L NEW FALL 2009VOLUMES

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PHILIT AS. ALEXANDER OF AETOLIA. HERMESIANAX. EUPHORION. PARTHENIUS

THE HISTORIES

Edited and translated by J. L. Lightfoot

Translated by W. R. Paton Revised by F. W. Walbank and Christian Habicht

VOLUME I: BOOKS 1-2 VOLUME 11: BOOKS 3--4

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Polybius' (ca. 200--118 BCE) overall theme is how and why the Romans spread their power as they did. The main part of his history covers the years 264--146 BCE, describing the rise of Rome , her destruction of Carthage, and her eventual domination of the Greek world. It is a great work: accurate, thoughtful, largely impartial, based on research, and full of

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CICERO ORATIONS VOLUME XVa, PHILIPPICS 1-6 VOLUME XVb, PHILIPPICS 7-14

Edited and translated by D. R. Shackleton Bailey Revised by John T. Ramsey and Gesine Manuwald Cicero (Marcus Tullius, 106----43 BCE), Roman advocate, orator, politician, poet, and philosopher, lived through the stirring era that saw the rise, dictatorship, and death of Julius Caesar in a tottering republic. In Cicero' s political speeches and in his correspondence we see the excitement, tension and

intrigue of politics and the part he played in the tunnoil of the time. This Loeb Classical library edition of the Philippics replaces the previous translation by Walter C. A. Ker. Volume XV. I L189 I 978-0-674-99634-2 Volume XVb I L507 1 978-0-674-99635-9

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POLITICS

8

Twelve months with Dr K nyone serious about writing the history of the past half-century must grapple with Henry Kissinger. From the Middle East to Vietnam to China, he did more than any other figure to shape debates about diplomacy, war and the role of the United States in the world. He was the Bismarck of the twentieth century - although never the leader of his nation, he exercised power for decades from various official and non-official positions. At the age of eightysix, he continues to walk the corridors of government ministries, mingle with business elites, and dominate op-ed pages like almost no one else. No wonder the books about Kissinger continue to pour out of publishing houses. Some authors promise new revelations about the man and his policies, often from a close reading of newly available evidence. Others offer broad interpretations of his actions, with attention to lessons for the contemporary world. A few books even claim to provide a definitive moral judgement of his controversial career. Kissinger, in this sense, continues to shape our debates about international power. Alistair Horne and Mario Del Pero have entered the fray with two very different books - one a narrative of Kissinger' s " long 1973"; the other a reflection on the nature of Kissinger's realpolitik. Neither book treats Kissinger as an all-powerful figure, but both take his international dominance for granted. Most strikingly, both books were written by non-Americans, with limited knowledge of American society, who nonetheless claim that American politics, above all, explain Kissinger's actions. For Horne and Del Pero, Kissinger's global statesmanship was always constrained by the crises at home. His genius, according to both authors, came from his ability to harness domestic turmoil for international leverage, policy innovation, and, of course, self-promotion. Horne's book emphasizes the personal. He begins with a lengthy discussion of how he came to know Kissinger in 1980, and was subsequently approached by the great man in 2004 to write his official biography. Horne declined, then reconsidered, then proposed writing the study of one "big year" that now sits before us. Horne claims that Kissinger granted him "unique, unparalleled, and unqualified access to him personally and his copious archives". As if to prove this, throughout the book Horne regales readers with stories about his trips and meals with Kissinger, when they reflected on 1973. At the start of a chapter on European policy, Horne strikes a characteristic tone:

A

"Don't you think you were rather cheeky", remarked Lord Carrington, former British secretary of foreign affairs, provocatively to his onelime counterpart and good friend, Henry Kissinger, across the lunch table .... We were

lunching a trois in November 2006 in London's posh Wilton's Restaurant. I felt privileged to be included with a distingui shed former U.S. secretary of state and an equally distingui shed foreign sec retary of Britain.

Kissinger 's Year includes more selfimportant purple prose (including mention

JEREMI SURI Alistair Horne KISSINGER'S YEAR 1973 457pp. Weidenfe1d and Nico1son. £20. 9780297 85091 5 Mario Del Pero THE ECCENTRIC REALIST Henry Kissinger and the shaping of American foreign policy

208pp. Cornell University Press. $24.95; distributed in the UK by NBN. £16.95. 9780801447594 of how various books of his were studied by Middle East leaders) than the serious analysis Horne promises from his "unique" access to Kissinger and his archives. There are, in fact, no new empirical insights in his pages. Despite all the posh lunches, the author relies on Kissinger's widely used memoirs for more than half of his references, and almost all of his historical narrative. Horne offers a standard chronological account of events in 1973 that focuses on the many pressures confronting Kissinger as he sought simultaneously to end wars in the Middle East and Vietnam, pursue detente with

observing that at many crucial moments - particularly during the decision to raise the US nuclear alert in late October 1973 - Nixon was mentally incapacitated, perhaps drunk. The President's depression made Kissinger's leadership indispensable, according to Horne. It also excused, in Horne's account, Kissinger's tendency to over-invest in relationships with foreign figures who served immediate American strategic purposes but undermined long-term regional interests. With Mao Zedong in China and Anwar Sadat in Egypt, Kissinger found shrewd and valuable partners, for which he deserves all the credit Horne bestows upon him. With Augusto Pinochet in Chile, Kissinger'sjudgement was not so sound. Horne's chapter on the Chilean coup is the most unsatisfying in his book. It exemplifies the problems with his approach, even for someone, like myself, who agrees that Kissinger is not a war criminal. Instead of carefully assessing the motives and actions of the US Government, and their interaction with local events in Chile, Horne condemns Salvador Allende's poor governance, describes alleged American indifference (not persuasi ve), and then goes so far as to excuse the horrors of the Pinochet regime: If a hi storian can find any excuse, or explanation , for the excesses and abuses committed

Henry Kissinger at the White House, February 22, 1973 the Soviet Union, open relations with China, and reaffirm American leadership in Europe and Latin America. Horne emphasizes, persuasively, that the domestic unravelling of President Richard Nixon' s authority amid the Watergate scandal made it particularly difficult for Kissinger to maintain respect for American power at home and abroad. During every major crisis, the Secretary of State had to contend with further revelations of Nixon's wrongdoing, further sources of instability within the US Government, and further distraction of the President from pressing international issues. Horne joins other writers in

under Pinochet, it may be that history tends not to circle gently, but moves in strong swings

of the pendulum; a violent swing producing a violent reaction. AlIende's experiment in Marxism was no "small earthquake", and the shockwave in fear and hatred that it produced was, inevitably, of comparable force.

This is not serious historical analysis. The United States had blood on its hands in Chile in 1973. As Horne admits, the perpetrators of violence within Chile were encouraged, partially financed, and given international cover by the Americans. Any balanced assessment of Kissinger must acknowledge these dark

TLS JANUARY 29 2010

legacies, along with his shining triumphs in Beijing, Moscow and Cairo. As a substitute, Horne offers extended reflections on his own personal travels through Chile. Kissinger is not well served by this approach. Mario Del Pero's book takes an alternative tack. He tries to rise above the personal and focus on the big political ideas that motivated Kissinger and his critics. He ranges across Kissinger's career, and compares his subject's thinking with that of various contemporaries, especially his neoconservative detractors. Del Pero' s argument is simple, but important. He contends that after a series of American foreign policy disappointments ("the crisis of containment"), Kissinger led an effort to abandon false hopes and embrace a "no-nonsense hard-nosed" realism. He sought to "de-exceptionalize" the American experience, and convince citizens to accept the necessity for negotiation, compromise and injustice in a world where Washington's power was heavily constrained. Del Pero describes Kissinger as a conventional conservative who cultivated an image of sophistication from his German roots. He criticizes Kissinger for discounting the emergence of new power centres in the Third World that challenged the obvious hinges of East-West bipolarity. Del Pero argues that if Kissinger's foreign policy strategy was conventional, his efforts to build a new domestic consensus for realism, rather than idealism, were extreme. They were also misguided, according to Del Pero. Political adversaries including Senator Henry Jackson, Ronald Reagan and others condemned Kissinger in 1976 for becoming both weak in his dealings with dictators, and immoral in his renunciation of a global American mission. Kissinger's efforts to limit his nation's foreign ambitions only sparked a backlash from those who espoused a special moral place for the United States in the world, and blamed the country ' s difficulties on cosmopolitans who never understood the American calling. Like Horne's, Del Pero's judgements are simplistic and one-sided. Kissinger's realism included a heavy dose of moral mission. He always viewed the United States as a "saviour" nation, and he romantically believed it had a providential right to power that created both obligations and privileges. Kissinger' s unshakeable faith in America was why he believed the United States could not leave South Vietnam and accept defeat like a "normal" nation in 1969. Kissinger's deep commitment to an American-inspired way of life also holstered his unequivocal determination to stop the spread of Communist influence in Chile, Iran and Angola. New Communist regimes were unacceptable, in Kissinger's eyes, because they were morally depraved. Kissinger was a profound synthesizer of realist and idealist impulses in his efforts to build a better world, on his terms. His record was as mixed as his motivations. For all the books published about his monumental career, historians are still struggling to find the right words for Kissinger's complex legacy. Alistair Home and Mario Del Pero have not broken very much new ground.

HISTORY

9 FORTHCOMING IN FEBRUARY

Te stante

Beauty Imagined A History of the Global Beauty Industry GEOFFREY JONES

f the Guises are known at all outside France, it is as pantomime characters, the "wicked uncles" of Mary Queen of Scots. Stuart Carroll's lucid and comprehensive account, focusing primarily on the careers of the second and third Guise dukes, Fran90is and Henri, between 1519 and 1588, considers the dynasty's elemental role in the reshaping of Europe during the sixteenth century. Until the 1550s, the Guises had remained a prominent magnate family in northern France, but as their influence and ambition expanded they infiltrated not just the Church and the Army but the highest echelons of politics. Professor Carroll emphasizes their extraordinary capacity for creating a "corporate identity", fostering clannish solidarity over generations of service, a strategy in which the Guise women played a vital part and which contributed to the power base on which Henri de Guise was subsequently to draw in his confrontation with his erstwhile masters, the Yalois kings. The Guise role in the wars of religion that initiated this confrontation has been much misunderstood, not least by Calvin, and Martyrs and Murderers not only corrects the perception of the Guises as vehement ultra-Catholics baying for Huguenot blood but also succeeds brilliantly in disentangling the complex skeins of theology and faction which plunged much of Europe into ideological war. The motto of Duke Fran90is's brother, the immensely powerful Cardinal of Lorraine, tied the fortunes of the family firmly to those of the Yalois dynasty. Te stante virebo ("while you stand, I shall flourish") proved a prophetic legend, as indeed the Guise dominance in France collapsed with the accession of Henri de Navarre, but even as early as 1557, Fran90is emerged as a representative of those disaffected by what were perceived as dishonourable Yalois concessions to the Spanish at the Treaty of Cateau-Cambresis. Carroll dates the "black legend" of the Guises from the accession of Fran90is II in 1559, after which they began their Machiavellian ascent to the pinnacle of power at the expense of both the Protestants and the princes of the blood. Yet this exhaustive compilation of often conflicting contemporary sources presents the Guises as both moderate and loyal. In the period preceding open civil war, the Guise attitude to heresy was more complex and more tentative than either they or their opponents were later prepared to concede. Lorraine in particular emerges as more preoccupied with humanism, establishing one of the most significant intellectual courts of the French Renaissance at his palace of Meudon. The contemporary conflation of heresy and sedition complicated the issue of spreading Protestantism among the upper classes, creating what Carroll identifies as a cognitive dissonance which the moderates sought to evade by attempting a subtle legal distinction between private practice and public obedience without the technical promulgation of freedom of worship. The legal and theological questions involved in the proposed Gallican Reformation are necessary but difficult, yet Martyrs and Murderers succeeds in explaining issues such as the variant implications of the Eucharist with impressive clarity, enabling the reader to approach Lorraine's

I

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SOCIAL SCIENCES FROM OXFORD A sixteenth-century portrait of Renri I de Lorraine, Due de Guise

The Narcissism of Minor Differences How Europe and America are Alike PETER BALDWIN

achievement in repositioning the Catholic Church at the Council of Trent with confidence. Duke Henri's involvement in the St Bartholomew's Day massacre is equally carefully positioned, his motives being more opportunistic than fanatical. The extent of the violence remains a conundrum, but Carroll ' s casting of events as a curious alliance of medieval intolerance with harshly modern realpolitik is innovative and delicate. The progression of Guise policy from moderate to ultra, and from Habsburg opponent to Spanish client, culminating in the near-success of the anti-Yalois putsch which resulted in Henri's murder is also revealed as reactive, a series of responses to circumstance rather than a grand design. The only coherently expansionist strategy of the Guises was the proposed Franco-British empire, which collapsed with the execution of Mary Stuart; but, as the book demonstrates, this was ultimately an insignificant element of their legacy, as their most far-reaching contribution to French politics can be discerned in the events of 1789. Carroll is expert at filleting contemporary perception from retroactive judgement, and while it may be romantic to declare that "the duke's murder heralded an end to an older form of politics based on knightly chivalric values and ushered in a new ideological age in which political assassination was construed as an instrument of divine will", Carroll's assessment of the legitimization of such assassination as being an integral part of Protestant psychology is judicious. This is a courageous and innovative book, in both its scholarship and its methods. Stuart Carroll exposes the regrettable provincialism of much popular British history writing on the period, and establishes the significance of the French wars of religion in their European context with a dexterity that deserves to make it a standard text. Martyrs and Murderers lays the "black legend" to rest, and restores the House of Guise to its rightful place at the centre of Renaissance politics.

'Both European anti-Americans and American anti-Europeans will be forced to think again by this hard-hitting, fluent, well-researched book: Andrew Roberts 336 pages, Hardback 978-0-19-539120-6, £14.99

The Idea of Human Rights CHARLES R. BEITZ

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Happiness Around the World The paradox of happy peasants and miserable millionaires CAROL GRAHAM

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BIOGRAPHY

10

Kill the dwarf pirates estern observers have often been rather unkind to Chiang Kai-shek. He has been caricatured as corrupt, a loser, and a fascist. Jay Taylor's biography aims to rehabilitate Chiang, who led the Republic of China and the Nationalist Party (Kuomintang, or KMT) for five decades, on the mainland from the 1920s to 1949 and then on the island of Taiwan until his death in 1975. Taylor succeeds in recovering a complicated man who was responsible for military and economic successes as well as stunning failures. The Generalissimo may go some way to correcting Westerners' (mainly Americans' ) negative perceptions of Chiang. To the Chinese audience themselves, however, Chiang's reputation needs no rescuing. Chiang' s popularity in mainland China has never been higher. After Mao Zedong and the Communists won the Chinese Civil War in 1949 and drove Chiang and the Nationalists into exile on Taiwan, propaganda and textbooks vilified the "Chiang bandits". Under Mao, anyone with ties to the KMT suffered persecution. But in recent years, mainland politicians have recast Chiang as a Chinese patriot who resisted Japanese occupation and pushed for state-managed modernization. Chiang's vision was to transform China into a prosperous, modern world power under authoritarian tutelage, with little attention to grand ideologies aside from vague statements about restoring the glory of traditional Chinese culture. China's current political climate would have suited Chiang quite well. Nowadays, many young people in China have a more favourable impression of Chiang than they do of Mao. Taylor' s engaging and sympathetic biography concentrates heavily on foreign relations and international politics. As Taylor sees it, Chiang' s reputation was irrevocably sullied during the Second World War by American military officials and journalists who depicted him as an unreliable ally because he withheld his best troops from battle against the Japanese, saving them for use against the Communists (Chiang once said that the Japanese were a disease of the skin, while the Communists were a disease of the heart). The Western press also savaged Chiang's dalliance with fascism in the 1930s and his bungled military decisions during the Chinese Civil War, when rampant corruption and economic mismanagement practically handed victory to the Communists. Taylor challenges all of these assumptions and lays blame for Chiang's image problem at the feet of one man: General Joseph Stilwell. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harhor, on December 7, 1941, Stilwell was appointed China Theater chief of staff, subordinate to Chiang Kai-shek. Stilwell and Chiang deeply disliked one another and clashed over military decisions. Stilwell openly referred to Chiang as "Peanut", and in reports to President Roosevelt disparaged Chiang and his commitment to the Allied war effort. In Taylor's account, Stilwell comes across as vindictive and unbalanced. The American tried to usurp command from Chiang, and he withheld US support during Japanese offensives. Chiang finally succeeded in having Stilwell

W

JEREMY BROWN Jay Taylor THE GENERALISSIMO Chiang Kai- shek and the struggle for modern China 736pp. Harvard University Press. £25.95 (US $35). 9780674033382

recalled in 1944, but Taylor regards this as a pyrrhic victory, because Stilwell was a better manipulator of public opinion: "Stilwell had won the battle of words, a loss from which the Generalissimo and his regime would never fully recover". It is strange to read a narrative of modern Chinese history in which the central villain is neither Mao nor Chiang, but an American general. Taylor is right that Stilwell's barbs may have unfairly detracted from Chiang's achievements in resisting the Japanese for eight years. When compared with the rapid surrenders of European colonial powers in Hong Kong, Singapore and Indonesia in 1941 and 1942, Chiang's refusal to submit to Japan after crushing defeats and brutal massa-

dealt the Nationalists a fatal blow gives " Vinegar Joe" Stilwell far too much credit. The mistakes leading to the KMT's loss of the mainland came after Stilwell had left. After the Japanese surrender in 1945, it was Chiang's decision alone to send the Nationalists' best troops to Manchuria, where they were defeated by the Communists. And Stilwell had nothing to do with KMT officials ' confiscation of property and corrupt behaviour when they returned to coastal China after VJ Day, nor with the regime's assassination of intellectuals and suppression of students who called for peace between the Nationalists and Communists. By the end of the war against Japan, Chiang had earned popular support. The mainland was his to lose, but lose it he did, thanks to his own mistakes. Taylor may dwell disproportionately on American perceptions of Chiang, but The Generalissimo is, nonetheless, now the best English-language biography available. Taylor has considerable narrative skills, and is the first Western biographer to have drawn on Chiang Kai-shek' s handwritten diaries, which the Chiang family deposited at the

President Chiang Kai-shek during a rally celebrating the fifty-ninth anniversary of the foundation of Nationalist China; October 10,1970, Taipei cres such as the Rape of Nanjing in 1937 looks even more impressive. And Chiang's troops bore the brunt of direct engagements with the Japanese: Communist losses during the war against Japan pale in comparison to the millions of casualties suffered by Nationalist troops. Taylor's overall assessment of Chiang's accomplishments in resisting Japan is admirably even-handed. But even if we accept that Western criticism distorts Chiang' s record, Taylor' s claim that one American general

Hoover Institution of Stanford University in 2005. Taylor was able to view entries from 1917 to 1955 , and the remaining volumes (to 1972) were made available to researchers earlier this year. Taylor skilfully weaves Chiang's diary entries into the narrative. In 1928, Chiang publicly apologized to the Japanese after KMT troops clashed with Japanese soldiers in Shandong province. But in his diary he resolved to write down every day "a way to kill the Japanese". This entry, along with his

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regular references to the Japanese "dwarf pirates" , suggests that Chiang' s policy of appeasement during the late 1920s and early 30s was not based on a personal affinity for Japan, where he had studied and lived, but rather on his belief that his army was not prepared for battle. Such nuggets appear throughout the book and enliven the story, but few of them are revelatory. The early writings from the 1920s are full of resolute but unsurprising self-criticism and calls for self-improvement. Entries from the 1930s touch on similar themes but with a more biblical flavour. More provocative is Taylor's assertion that Chiang was considering Taiwan as a refuge as early as autumn 1946, well before the KMT's loss of the mainland had become certain. In October 1946, Chiang first visited Taiwan, which had been a Japanese colony from 1905. He liked the politically "clean land", writing in his diary that he would develop the island into a model province. Depending on one's perspective, Chiang's musings about escaping to Taiwan were either a sign of sober realism or profound cynicism. He may have thought that the KMT was beyond repair and in need of a sound defeat. Only then could he carry out on a small scale what he had failed to achieve in China as a whole. In the end, Chiang was pleased with the stable society he was able to build on Taiwan. But if he already had his mind on Taiwan in October 1946, what was the point of continuing to send hundreds of thousands of troops (many of whom were forcibly conscripted from poor farming families who could not afford to bribe KMT recruiters) into battle against the Communists? Was it simply for show? The show was always part of Chiang Kaishek's decision-making process. During the war, in order to pressure the United States for more supplies, Chiang feigned being on the verge of collapse and implied that he might have to seek a separate peace with Japan. After his retreat to Taiwan, Chiang often declared that a counter-attack on the mainland was just around the corner. Western observers mocked Chiang for believing that he could defeat Mao's army, but Taylor convincingly argues that Chiang never thought that he had a chance to retake China. Chiang had privately accepted that he would probably never return to the mainland during his lifetime. His battle cries were a political ritual meant for domestic consumption. Chiang's political choices made a huge difference in the lives of many people in China, sometimes disastrously so. Hundreds of thousands suffered because of Chiang. His greatest crime was ordering the destruction of dykes on the Yellow River in 1937 in an effort to slow Japanese advances. The explosions shifted the course of the river and flooded parts of three provinces. At least 800,000 Chinese villagers drowned in the floods, a figure that is more than double the highest estimated number of Chinese casualties during the Rape of Nanjing several months earlier. Chiang also ordered a crackdown against anti-KMT protesters beginning on February

RELIGION 28, 1947, in Taipei. The suppression of the riots expanded into a brutal pogrom in which almost 28,000 Taiwanese were killed, or about 0.44 per cent of the island' s population. Thus, in relative terms the human cost of Chiang' s "regime consolidation" was he history of Christianity is the history LUCY BECKETT of what has been believed to be divine more intense even than Mao' s Suppression revelation through a person, translated of Counter-revolutionaries Campaign on the Diarmaid MacCulloch mainland in 1951 , in which 712,000 were into the lives of millions by means of a variA HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY killed, constituting 0.12 per cent of mainland ety of institutions (Churches), a variety of The first three thousand years China' s population. Taylor mentions and writings (the Bible) and a variety of teachI, 184pp. Allen Lane. £35. deplores the 1947 massacre as well as the ings and differing emphases (traditions). 9780713998696 deliberate flooding of the Yellow River, but Since, as this single sentence shows, there he only devotes about a page to each event, has been plenty of room for disagreement "And so to Beth lehem", and after a few far less space than he gives to disagreements everywhere and at all times within Christianity, and since its story has been unfolding more familiar words, "Or perhaps not". The between Chiang and Stilwell. Chiang was directly responsible for calam- already for 2,000 years, the writing of its second part of the book takes us from the ity on a huge scale. But the even bigger catas- history by one author is a tremendously ambi- mists surrounding the birth of Jesus to the trophes wrought by China ' s other "great tious project. It is all the more ambitious for Council of Chalcedon (451). What mattered man" of the twentieth century suggest that the fact that for most of these twenty centu- most to the earliest Christians, and still Chiang's greatest achievement resided in ries the story of Christianity is not separable matter most to many of their successors , were what he did not do. If there had been no from the history of power and the conse- the institution of the Eucharist and the ResurChiang Kai-shek, the Yellow River might quences of its use and abuse, in and beyond rection. MacCulloch without irony - and still have been flooded and KMT troops the Roman Empire, in its successor states and there is a great deal of irony in this book might still have rounded up and executed empires, and eventually in the whole world. places both in their historical and scriptural thousands of Taiwanese in 1947. It is likely Diarmaid MacCulloch has made an astonish- contexts. He notes on the way the dreadful that other KMT leaders might have done ing success of the project and his huge book consequences of the Gospels ' , particularly things the same way if they had been in is throughout enthralling to read. Matthew ' s, shifting of the blame for Jesus's In his introduction he describes himself as death from Pilate to the Jews: everywhere in Chiang' s rather conventional shoes. The "a candid friend of Christianity" , rather than his book MacCulloch is alert to Christian same could not be said of Mao Zedong. In a sense, Taiwan after 1949 is a test a Christian. "I remember with affection", he anti-Semitism (though he does not mention case for what might have been. Since 1949, says, "what it was like to hold a dogmatic Luther' s until he reaches the Nazi period). both Taiwan and the People's Republic have position on the statements of Christian And he brings out clearly the central question experienced remarkable economic growth, belief." In case this should sound, as it will of theology, which means the understanding coupled with political repression. But today, to some readers, a note of Enlightenment of God, for generations of early Christians: the two have strikingly different political condescension, implying that Christian belief How can a human being be God incarnate? cultures. While the mainland remains an belongs to the benighted past, he adds, "I still His short sections on Paul and John the Evanauthoritarian one-party state, Taiwan has appreciate the seriousness which a religious gelist (distinguished from the author of Revebecome a rowdy democracy, with open elec- mentality brings to the mystery and misery of lation) shed much light on essentials, and will tions, huge political rallies, and peaceful human existence, and I appreciate the solem- be helpfully informative to Christians, Jews (albeit acrimonious) transitions between nity of religious liturgy as a way of confront- and others. Of the many different reasons for administrations. In 2000, the Democratic Pro- ing these problems". The cautious distance of the eventual development of the papacy gressive Party (DPP) took power and ended this sympathy is confirmed in this important which he here calls, reasonably, "one of the KMT' s half-century of single-party rule paragraph ' s concluding sentence: "Maybe Christianity ' s most noble and dangerous on Taiwan. At first, this looked like bad news some familiar with theological jargon will visions", he picks at this early stage only two, for Chiang Kai-shek' s legacy. Visitors who with charity regard this as an apophatic form the shift of Christian weight to the West used to land at Chiang Kai-shek International of the Christian faith". "Apophasis" suggests, caused by the Roman destruction of JeruAirport outside Taipei suddenly found them- obscurely to most people, the positive lurking salem, and the tradition claiming, probably selves disembarking at the innocuously somewhere in the negative. It was defined in correctly, the burial of St Peter in Rome: the renamed Taoyuan International Airport. The the eighteenth century as a rhetorical device justification for what was made of this was imposing Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall "whereby we really say or advise a thing Jesus's commission to Peter, though there is became the "National Taiwan Democracy under a feigned show of passing over or dis- no evidence that anyone appealed to it before Memorial Hall". But after a rough few years, suading it". Coming clean, however, as to his the third century (and, of course, no evidence Chiang' s reputation in Taiwan has made an motives, Professor MacCulloch, with a well- that no one did). impressive comeback. In 2008, the KMT landed blow at Richard Dawkins, carefully When Christ's return, imminently expected recaptured the presidency and began to roll distinguishes kinds of truth and rightly for perhaps a generation, did not happen, back some of the DPP's "de-Chiangification" claims the historian's obligation to tell the the Church had to organize itself to survive in measures. Chiang' s memorial hall regained story, the "undeniably true" story, of Christ- the secular, transient but nevertheless endurits original name last year. ianity as part of human history, and also to ing world. This it did quickly and effectively, Taiwan's experience should negate claims "promote sanity and curb the rhetoric which using a good deal of Jewish precedent and that Chinese culture is inimical to demo- breeds fanaticism " . This is a brave and useful inherited Roman patterns (bishops on the cracy, free speech and the rule of law. aim. lines of town magistrates). It also had to work According to Taylor, Chiang Kai-shek Under his doubly provocative subtitle, The towards some agreement on orthodoxy, true deserves some of the credit for Taiwan ' s first three thousand years, MacCulloch teaching, so as to be able to recognize and progress. Chiang' s main contrihution was to hegins with a rapid sketch of what in the deal with heresy, which means choice of not obstruct his son Chiang Ching-kuo from Greek and Roman worlds provided a fertile one' s own. MacCulloch has considerable gradually opening up the island' s politics, seedbed for the rooting and development of sympathy with heresy and not much time though truly competitive elections only came the " newly emerged eccentric little Jewish for the concept of orthodoxy. Yet, on the after both men had died. sect" that became Christianity. He gives a development of the canon of Scripture, of uniThe People's Republic of China turned brief account of the importance of Socrates, versal creeds and of a hierarchy carrying sixty in October, 2009. If the loss ofthe main- Plato and Aristotle for the intellectual future, authority he is sensible and clear, while being land turned out to have been the best thing Christian and not, and adds an outline of the at least as interested in the penumbra of that ever happened to Chiang Kai-shek, per- history, law, wisdom and prophecy of the gnostic beliefs and charismatic gurus, espehaps that is what he has to teach those main- people of Israel, which amounts to a swift cially Mani. Christianity might have been land politicians who have approvingly reap- explanation of the complex layers of differ- led in any number of directions had it not praised him in recent years. Losing in a genu- ent kinds of writing in the Old Testament, been secured to its roots in Judaism and ine political fight might also be just what and of what in the Jewish Bible came to be developed as a coherent system of thought by today ' s Chinese Communist Party needs. integral to Christianity. Christians educated in Classical reasoning.

11

While Christ stayed away

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MacCulloch ' s pre-Christian history valuably supports the reader' s understanding of how the difficult concepts of the Trinity and the human and divine nature(s) of Christ were developed. (It is good to be reminded that Origen in the early third century firmly distinguished truth from facts in the reading of Scripture. Augustine made the same point, but when it comes to these two most intelligent of early Christian thinkers, MacCulloch is less ambivalently admiring of Origen.) For the ancient Churches east and south and north of the Roman Empire, in Syria, Armenia, Georgia, Egypt and Ethiopia, which never accepted the definition of the divine and human natures of Christ given by the Council of Chalcedon, MacCulloch has a special affection. They have suffered much and suffer still, and their existence is indeed "a necessary reminder of the sheer variety of Christianity from its earliest days: a vital lesson for modern Christians who wish to impose a uniformity on Christian belief and practice which has never in fact existed" . Rome, both imperial and papal, is MacCulloch ' s target. He dislikes, because they were called by emperors, the councils assembled by Constantine and his successors to unite a Church squabbling over both doctrine and discipline, though no one else in the fourth or fifth centuries could have summoned bishops from all over at least the Eastern Mediterranean to discuss anything. These councils found the (Greek) words for Trinitarian and Christological beliefs that united most Christians for most of the rest of Christian history. On Chalcedon MacCulloch says: "The new imperial church asserted itself as the one version of Christian truth for the world to follow, and, in the process, created a great deal of that truth for the first time". "Created" is a hostile word here, and unjust to a process that was one of trying to reach generally acceptable definitions, a more modest project. If " imperial" is bad in MacCulloch ' s view, "Latin" is worse. In a burst of anti-Roman irritation he blames the Church for the presence, ludicrous in his view, of Latin in the academic curriculum of the West until "within living memory", as if schoolboys used to be made to read Augustine rather than the Cicero and Virgil who might have been lost for ever in the chaos of the late Western Empire if Christians like Cassiodorus, unmentioned in this book, had not seen their value. MacCulloch praises the linguistic openness of the Orthodox, beginning with Cyril and Methodius, but there is a case to be made for the respect for legality and hinding documents which Latin brought with it to much of Europe. When the Grand Prince of Muscovy annexed the merchant city of Novgorod in 1478, the Hanseatic League "permanently withdrew the credit facilities which it had long extended to Novgorod and Pskov, for it did not trust the arbitrary rulers of Muscovy to be reliable financial partners" . If this sounds familiar, it is because certain things have changed little in half a millennium. The necessarily long section of the book that deals with Latin Christianity from Constantine to the High Middle Ages is called

12 "The Unpredictable Rise of Rome". No emperor lived in Rome after the end of the third century. MacCulloch explains well the complex relationship between old Roman priorities at the Empire's heart, more to do with a way of life than with belief, and the increasing institutional grip of the Church in this power vacuum. Figures like Ambrose in Milan and Gregory the Great in Rome were born to ancestral responsibility for public order and private culture; now they carried it as Christians. It was surely thanks more to Gregory's restoration of peace in a ravaged Italy than to Clovis's choice of Catholic over Arian Christianity for the Franks that papal authority was firmly established in Rome, though MacCulloch ' s penchant for the counterfactual prompts him to regard Clovis's decision as that without which "European Christianity could have remained a decentralized Arianism rather than a Roman monarchy". Like many of his frequently used phrases, "Roman monarchy" is heavily and unjustly loaded. In Byzantium there really was a Roman monarchy, the running of the Church at the behest of emperors: it is not self-evident that they were a better source of authority for Christian life and teaching than the institution of the papacy, however many individual popes have been weak, foolish or worse. But MacCulloch is as dubious about authority as he is about orthodoxy. An anti-Roman bias persists in MacCulloch's lively account of the conversion, a term he rightly qualifies, of England. The Irish mission to the north gets a glowing report, while Gregory's to the south is presented as a successful extension of Roman power to exact obedience in a new territory. The indispensable Bede takes his proper place in this story, but Benet Biscop, the Northumbrian abbot who brought books, liturgical singing, glass-making and the Rule of St Benedict from Rome to his Wearside monasteries, and made Bede' s scholarship possible, is not mentioned. The achievement of Charlemagne, nicely described as "this unwelcome Doppelgiinger" in the eyes of Byzantium, in establishing a new uniformity in canon law, monastic organization and accurate copying of the texts of the past, is allowed to have been a real renaissance, but the Romanness central to it is belittled. "Everyone wanted to be Roman - the memory of the empire stood for wealth, wine, central heating and filing systems." What people in the eighth and ninth centuries longed for was order, peace and good government: if they thought of these things as, however distantly, Roman, they had a point, and if they saw the Church as helping to build them, they were right. In his chapters on the Latin Christendom of the High Middle Ages, full of interesting detail and lucid explanation of much that has survived ever since in Catholic life, MacCulloch cannot resist giving the impression that greed for power, Augustine' s libido dominandi, drove almost everything. It is not fair to describe the early Cistercians only in terms of " militancy" and " new aggressiveness": they softened and humanized medieval piety - not all of which was engineered by the papal machine - and even Bernard of Clairvaux is most famous in some circles for defending the Jews of the Rhineland from Christian attack. Of the Requiem Mass MacCulloch says: "Nothing else has so effec-

RELIGION lennium, has led to the leakage of confidence in the very notion of Christian truth? This is a Eurocentric question , though much of the answer is properly global. MacCulloch' s helter-skelter account of the Enlightenment' s multifarious impact on Christianity is a splendid read, sharply perceptive in general and particularly in detail. It is chilling, for example, to find Rousseau, a century before Marx, writing: "Whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be constrained to do so ... he shall be forced to be free". MacCulloch is too kind to Voltaire, calling him "the Erasmus of his age" , and his version of Jansenism, like Louis XIV's, is too hard on the Port-Royal nuns. He does not mention Pascal at all , perhaps because he is rather surprisingly concerned to defend the Jesuits in almost all circumstances. There is - how could there not be? - a great deal of (mostly uncontroversial) judgement in these gather-all pages: the English Evangelical campaign to end the slave trade, liberation theology in Latin America, the triumph of Martin Luther King and the civil rights movePendant diptych ofSt Catherine (left) and St Agnes; Flanders or England, c1380; ment, and, eventually the triumph of Trevor from Medieval Jewellery in Europe 11 00-1500 by Marian CampbeIl Huddlestone, John Coli ins, Desmond Tutu (112pp, V &A Publishing. £19.99; US $30, 978 1 851775828) and the ANC in South Africa: all good. The post-war ecumenical movement: good but tively conveyed the fullness of the Church's the Council of Trent was a bracing and hon- ineffective. The nineteenth- and twentiethpower over the faithful", and on the "Purga- est acknowledgement of the faults of the century Catholic Church before the Second tory industry" , long before belief in Purga- Roman Church which had given the Reforma- Vatican Council: all bad. (Much of his scorn tory was abused by disreputable Renaissance tion its justification. MacCulloch says that here is deserved. Some is not: the papal propopes, he is similarly scornful. the Council began " in a mood of aggressive nouncements on the Immaculate Conception Orthodox Christianity has been no less confidence" which, largely thanks to Pole, it and the Assumption regularized for the involved than Latin Christianity in secular did not. But, due credit is here given to Pole West feasts celebrated in the East from the history, in Byzantium until Constantinople for his work to reform the English Church seventh and fifth centuries respectively.) The fell to the Turks and then elsewhere, particu- during the brief four years chance allowed Council (1962-5) and its aftermath are larly in Russia, where spiritual strength has him, and MacCulloch writes kindly of Queen judged mostly bad. Although MacCulloch rarely not been at the mercy of those contend- Mary, and with sudden warmth of the Eng- gives Pope John Paul II credit for his part in ing for power. Long before Peter the Great lish recusancy. He has a soft spot for the the collapse of European Communism, he is wrong to accuse the young Bishop Wojtyla of made the Russian Church a department of marginal at all times and in all places. state, the Byzantine controversy over icons He tells extremely well the often appalling finding "the whole proceedings" of Vatican II was an imperial power struggle: MacCulloch but sometimes heroic story of Catholic mis- "thoroughly uncongenial" . Wojtyla joined a describes it well, though with one or two over- sions across the world, in Spanish and Portu- drafting committee for the Council's docustatements. The " very few surviving icons" guese America, in anyone's Africa, in no ment on the Church in the modern world, from before iconoclasm may be evidence not one's Far East (except for the Spanish Philip- Gaudium et Spes, contributed to the broadenof "the high level of destruction" so much as pines), the humane successes contrasting ing of its perspective, and much impressed of their comparative rarity before the issue with the protracted horrors of racism and slav- such theologians as Henri de Lubac and Yves flared , and the Libri Carolini is a less Protes- ery. The early spread of Protestantism was Congar, by no means diehards. tant document than Calvin thought. It is cer- more a matter of the emigration of groups The book ends in a swift tour d 'horizon of tainly unjust to both traditions to say: "The oppressed in Europe: the Protestant record in how things now are in Christian, semimedieval Western Church became as fixated the Americas is no better than the Catholic, Christian and anti-Christian life worldwide, on visual images as Easterners". particularly when to the slavery in the South- the issues discussed petering out in current The disintegration of the Latin Church ern states is added the treacherous cruelty media excitements which should turn out to in the sixteenth century is MacCulloch' s own which almost completely destroyed Native be peripheral before too long. He comes to no topic and here he deftly traces the many Americans. MacCulloch's summary of the conclusion except the guarded hope that different circumstances that made Luther's origins of gospel enthusiasm in Ulster Presby- Christianity, the religion of a third of the rebellion possible. The combination of terianism, in "gathered" Calvinism, in Meth- world ' s population, may yet - and this Luther's intransigence and the rattled and odist and Baptist "awakenings", both white thought is Eurocentric, for all the book' s unimaginative defensiveness of Rome had and black in the slave states, explains much success in not being - produce a "message of by the 1520s turned what MacCulloch well that is peculiar to North American Christian- tragedy and triumph, suffering and forgivedescribes as the argument between Augus- ity to this day. He later includes accounts of ness" to counter the "polite indifference" tine's doctrines of grace and of the Church bizarre American institutions only remotely of the secular consensus. At last, having into "the division of Rurope". His ten pages

connected to Christianity - Christian Scien-

attacked Augustine's perception here and

on Renaissance scholarship could not be improved on and he writes sympathetically of Erasmus. This makes his irritation with Cardinal Reginald Pole surprising, since it was the same unintelligent bundling of ideas into two contrary packages that wrecked the last years of both. But MacCulloch is not interested in the Catholic opposition to Henry VIII' s careless break with Rome: John Fisher' s execution is frivolously dismissed and Thomas More' s not mentioned. Pole was a braver and intellectually tougher man than MacCulloch allows: his opening speech to

tists, Seventh-Day Adventists, Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons - whose proceeedings, together with those of anti-liberal fundamentalists and apocalyptic crowd-pullers who have turned from anti-Semitism to pro-Israeli millenarian hysteria without missing a beat, would have horrified the Founding Fathers. "God in the Dock (1492-present)", is the title of MacCulloch's final section. Almost a quarter of the book, it asks and answers the question: how and in what shapes has Christianity survived the array of people, ideas, ideologies and assumptions that, over half a mil-

there along the way, MacCulloch concedes that "original sin is one of the more plausible concepts in the Western Christian package". As his whole book demonstrates, people can and do make a mess of anything, including for 2,000 years the revelation of God in which Christians believe. But that a very great deal of good has been understood, thought through and done as the result of this belief even the most sceptical historian cannot deny, and Diarmaid MacCulloch, for all his ironic distance from the story he tells with such panache, does not.

TLS JANUARY 29 2010

A CALL FOR

ENTRIES BRITISH GQ MAGAZINE AND THE NORMAN MAILER WRITERS COLONY ANNOUNCE A NEW ANNUAL COMPETITION FOR NON-FICTION WRITING

THE WINNER will be invited to spend a month at the Norman Mailer Writers Colony, a residential educational centre based at the legendary author's former home in Provincetown, Massachusetts, America. All travel, accommodation and expenses will be covered. Plus a cheque for £1,000 and the chance to be published in a future issue of Britain's leading men's magazine.

RUNNERS-UP will receive cash prizes and the chance to be published in GQ.

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HERE'S HOW IT WORKS We are calling for submissions of published and unpublished work completed in the 12 months from 1 May 2009. Entries, which must be non-fiction, can be on any topic, but must be no less than 2,000 and no more than 4,000 words long and submitted bye-mail to [email protected], on or before 1 May 2010. Entries must be submitted as MS Word documents and should be double-spaced. All entries must include name, home address, name of college/university, e-mail address and phone number, including mobile phone. The competition is open to all undergraduates and postgraduates at UK universities. Entrants must be over 18 years old on 4 February 2010. FOR MORE INFORMATION, GO TO GQ.COM

The awards will be judged by a panel including GQ Features Director Alex Bilmes; Canongate publisher Jamie Byng; Conde Nast Managing Director and bestselling author Nicholas Coleridge; award-winning novelist and critic Geoff Dyer; GQ Editor Dylan Jones; bestselling novelist and GQ Contributing Editor Tony Parsons; publisher and investor Spas Roussev; Editor of the Times Literary Supplement Sir Peter Stothard; platinumselling singer-songwriter Lily Allen; and leading literary agent Ed Victor.

GOOD LUCK!

14 ast summer, the British Library hosted a conference to celebrate its launching of the website containing all the remains of the fourth-century Codex Sinaiticus. This digitized form of the world' s most famous Greek biblical codex reunites electronically the whole manuscript, now scattered in four locations, for the first time since Konstantin Tischendorf identified it in the mid-nineteenth century. The originals are primarily in London but there are portions in Leipzig, at St Catherine's Monastery on Mount Sinai and in St Petersburg. The four holding institutions have collaborated harmoniously in this remarkable enterprise. Tischendorf had seen 129 leaves at St Catherine' s in 1844 and was allowed to take one-third of them to Leipzig; on a later visit to Mount Sinai in 1859, he was shown not only the eighty-six left behind after his first visit, but a further 261 leaves; these were eventually taken to St Petersburg and published as a sumptuous facsimile edition in 1862 to commemorate the millenary of the Russian Empire. The manuscript has seldom been out of the media since. Tischendorf was a great publicist, so in several writings, academic and popular, he made sure that a wide public was alerted to his discovery, namely that we now possessed parts of the world's oldest Bible. At that time, no earlier biblical manuscript, however lacunose or fragmentary, was known. It was registered with the siglum Aleph, the first letter in the Hebrew alphabet, to indicate its pre-eminence over all other biblical manuscripts, then identified by scholars with a letter from the Roman or Greek alphabets. Another important feature is that Codex Sinaiticus, the name by which it is now always known, included a complete New Testament (a rare enough phenomenon even nowadays, as only sixty of some 5,000 Greek New Testament manuscripts now extant contain the whole of the New Testament), together with what originally must have been a complete Old Testament in Greek, an even rarer phenomenon. (Tessa Rajak's study of the significance of the Greek Old Testament, the Septuagint, was reviewed in the TLS, August 21, 2009.) Could this manuscript have even been one of the fifty codices that the new Christian Emperor, Constantine, demanded of Eusebius in 330 to be copied out in order to demonstrate the contents and extent of the newly established Christian canon? In addition to the Old and New Testaments, two early Christian writings, the Epistle of Barnabas and the Shepherd of Hermas, which never gained canonical status, are also included in Codex Sinaiticus at the end of the manuscript, almost as an afterthought. The inclusion of those writings is yet another of its distinctive features. The sheer bulk of the book, measuring 17 by 28 inches per opening, and the fact that most pages were written out in four columns per page, are also unique characteristics. The manuscript is certainly no flawless or immutable version of the scriptures. There are thousands of scribal corrections in it, many of them described in Scribes and Correctors of the Codex Sinaiticus (1938), by H. J. M. Milne and T. C. Skeat, two librarians on the British Museum staff at the time when Sinaiticus reached London. Skeat continued to work on the manuscript throughout his long life (he died, aged ninety-six, in 2003), and

L

Bible united Codex Sinaiticus online: a gold standard for ancient texts in the digital age J. K. ELLIOTT I am honoured to possess his personal copy of the book. He would have heartily approved of the rigorous scientific investigations that accompanied the digitizing processes. With all the singular features of this codex, it is no wonder that sceptical voices were heard about the authenticity and, indeed, the antiquity of Tischendorf's discovery. One of the most vociferous was the wily Greek Constantine Simonides, whose name even now keeps emerging in relation to problematic manuscript discoveries (see the TLS, February 22, 2008, on the Artemidorus papyrus, and the ensuing correspondence about Simonides); he cashed in on this scepticism to claim in 1862 that he, a recently exposed forger, had himself as a teenager written Codex Sinaiticus. His preposterous story received generous attention and the literary journals of the time, the Guardian,

an acceptable scholarly edition by 1872, was seen to share many of the distinctive and shorter readings of Sinaiticus, these two manuscripts formed the basis of an innovative printed Greek New Testament that was to underpin the English Revised Version of 1881. (Many of the textual differences between the AV and RV are due to the latter' s dependence on the wording of Sinaiticus and Vaticanus, which regularly differs from the so-called Textus Receptus underlying the New Testament of the AV.) Not only were the age, extent and text of Sinaiticus controversial, but Tischendorf's dealings with the monks ' treasure and his bona fides were vigorously questioned. Overlooking Tischendorf's claim that he alone had been responsible for having rescued the manuscript from being used as fuel by the monks and the acceptance that he had successfully persuaded them to conserve what survived of the original 730 leaves, many commentators,

Codex Sinaiticus the Literary Churchman and the Clerical Journal, all devoted many column inches over several years to debating Simonides ' s regular pronouncements on this manuscript. Simonides was given a ready ear, mainly because of the very uniqueness of Tischendorf's claims about Codex Sinaiticus. Opposition to Codex Sinaiticus also arose because its New Testament text was revolutionary at the time. Its distinctive readings, often giving a text shorter than that familiar to readers of the Authorized Version, meant that some beloved verses were absent, and this unsettled many of the faithful , reluctant to accept the authority of this newly discovered dissident text. Later, when Codex Vaticanus, another fourth-century biblical manuscript that was eventually to appear in

not least the Greek authorities, cast doubt on Tischendorf's honesty in acquiring, first the forty-three leaves that remain in Leipzig, but, more particularly, the sizeable portion taken to St Petersburg. It was increasingly suggested that Tischendorf had hoodwinked the monks, despite his having promised them in 1859 the speedy return of the manuscript. Visitors to St Catherine's have been regaled ever since that time with stories of the perfidiousness of the German adventurer, and they may see his note on display there promising the return of the manuscript. This cause celebre is intermittently publicized by Greek cultural attaches who claim the manuscript as another ill-gotten Greek treasure, comparable to the Elgin Marbles held - wrongly, in their viewin London.

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Fortunately, the indefatigable researches of Christoph Bottrich, for many years at Leipzig University, have recently proved that the negotiations of Tischendorf and the Russian authorities between 1859 and 1869, when the manuscript was finally and formally gifted to the Tsar, were conducted entirely properly. Documents from the time that include memos revealing the diplomatic niceties, letters of permission signed by the Sinai community, and the legal documents from the Russian ministries, have been preserved in Moscow and St Petersburg. There is also the act of donation of the manuscript, superseding the notorious holding letter exhibited in St Catherine' s, which served only as a temporary receipt. (All these documents were published by A. V. Zaharova in the Russian journal Montfaucon 1 in 2007.) The legality, correctness and propriety of Tischendorf's actions in the 1860s are finally vindicated; his ennoblement by the Russians justified; and his continuing friendship with the Sinai community throughout his life seen as credible and explicable. Another event that maintained the prominence of Codex Sinaiticus in the public eye was the sale of the St Petersburg portion by the Soviet authorities to the British Museum in 1933. The British public contributed half of the £ 100,000 to purchase the Codex; as a consequence of the public's generosity, one of the two volumes into which the manuscript had been bound is permanently on display in the British Library. In 1976, yet another event brought the monastery and this manuscript media attention. This time it was the chance discovery of a cache of discarded manuscripts found during rebuilding works in St Catherine's Monastery. Among the discoveries were some twelve further leaves plus fragments that had originally belonged to Codex Sinaiticus. The delays in publishing those pages have given rise to mutterings of scholarly secrecy, comparable to that once blamed for the inordinate delays in releasing some of the later Dead Sea Scrolls materials. Such concerns can finally be laid to rest, now that everyone can access the whole of the virtual Sinaiticus, including these new leaves. By tapping into www.codexsinaiticus.org this biblical text is freely accessible in its entirety, 165 years after Tischendorf's initial discovery of the monumental manuscript. This splendid and easily navigated website shows everyone of the remaining pages under two different lightings that allow a clear display of the writing and the physical characteristics of the parchment. Technical details are available as well as transcriptions ; eventually each page of the biblical text will also be accompanied by translations into German, English and Russian. Links provide further facts and information. This magnificent achievement is likely to be followed up later in the year with a printed version of the digitized photographs and other related publications. Meanwhile, the digitizing of this famous manuscript has rightly been hailed during the first months of its existence as a major triumph. The site has recorded a huge number of hits. It has exposed the textual riches of Codex Sinaitius to a global audience, and has set a gold standard for other comparable enterprises in the future (see, for example, Jerome McGann's Commentary article, November 20, 2009).

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COMMENTARY igns in the British Library recently proclaimed "From papyrus to pixel", celebrating its digitization of the Codex Sinaiticus (see the discussion by J. K. Elliott, opposite). But, in common with many major repositories, the British Library has barely begun to digitize complete medieval manuscripts on any scale. Indeed, among English libraries, that of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, stands alone in having fully digitized all of its very substantial holdings in this field. Is digitization of medieval manuscripts a good thing? There are obvious arguments in favour: conservation of the originals; remote access; and ability to manipulate images to clarify details in ways that might be particularly useful to palaeographers and art historians. But there are also obvious problems. Digitization is not able to convey all aspects of physical and material structure, such as the difference between different grades of parchment, or between it and paper. And a computer monitor cannot convey the sense of size of the original. Such balancing of the pros and cons of digitization formed part of a public lecture by Professor Julia Boffey as a prelude to a conference in September, to mark the completion by the John Rylands Library of the University of Manchester of the digitizing of its col-

Medieval bytes

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lection of over forty Middle English manuscri pts. Before the Li brary (concei ved by John Rylands's widow, Enriquetta Augusta, as a memorial to her husband) opened its doors in 1900, it had already become a magnet for great books from noble collections: incunables from Lord Spencer's magnificent collection at Althorp in 1892; medieval manuscripts from Lord Ashburnham's collection in 1897; and many more manuscripts from Lord Crawford's library in 1901. By then it was already a major public research library. Mrs Rylands continued to add to it until her death in 1908, and there has been a programme of subsequent acquisitions. Much has changed over the course of a hundred years or so. The library is now a part of the University of Manchester. The original Victorian Gothic fa9ade (designed by Basil Champneys) has been complemented by a modern extension, including a new reading room, seminar room and other facilities. And now it has gone digital. The Department of Manuscripts has just completed the first phase of an ambitious digitization project, funded by the Joint Information Systems

from Blue Guide

Committee (JISC) (see http://www.library. manchester.ac.uklinthebigynnyng). One dimension of the Rylands Library's Middle English holdings is its representativeness in depth. The library has fifteen Wycliffite bibles, one of the largest single collections of this very popular work (nearly 300 manuscripts survive). Rylands also has six copies of the Brut chronicle (there are over 170 in all), and several manuscripts each of both Nicholas Love's Mirror of the Life of Christ, and the collection of didactic treatises, the Poor Caitiff, of which there are more than forty and fifty copies respectively. Digitization now offers new opportunities to examine the different material and textual forms of such popular works. The verse manuscripts are fewer in number, but individually more distinctive. There are two manuscripts of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, one complete and (untypically) by a named scribe, the other a very unusual fragment, containing an illustration, rare in manuscripts of this work. Another fragment of the same manuscript, also illustrated, is in the Rosenbach Library and Museum in Philadel-

by

phia. The intention is to link both fragments digitally, restoring through technology what time has put asunder. There are also two poetical manuscripts of popular works by Chaucer's chief disciple, John Lydgate (cl370-1449). The first, of his enormously long Tray Book, includes a magnificent series of nearly seventy miniatures, the majority unframed, which illustrate in delicate detail events in Trojan history. It is one of the triumphs of fifteenth-century English illustration. The second manuscript, of Lydgate's even longer (over 36,000 lines) Fall of Princes, is noteworthy as providing the setting copy for Richard Pynson's first printed edition in 1494. Printer's marks remain in the margins. Clearly "In the bigynnyng", as this project has been named, will offer wider (and free) accessibility to some important medieval manuscripts. It is hoped that this will be the first stage towards a larger Manchester Medieval Digital Library. As a step towards the fulfilment of this plan, the Rylands is now digitizing all the Middle English manuscripts in the neighbouring Chetham's Library, many of which are of considerable importance. Clearly, Manchester can overcall London in alliterative euphony: "From Manuscripts to Megabytes", perhaps.

A. S. G. EDW ARDS

Patrick McGuinness

Gare du Midi the funereal blush of marzipan fruit in the chocolatier's window, laid out in their crinkled doilies like Lenin in his mausoleum, and the ghost of their taste in my mouth: sugar dipped in formaldehyde.

Noon, the day's South Pole. On separate trains again: window to window, each of us learns our sense of movement from the way the other pulls away.

Jemelle Quartier-Leopold The station halves the town: on one side a Funerarium beside a shop that sells " Varietes" (of what?), and on the other the old station standing at our back,

Colonial moss and plumes of baroque fern . a station like a mouldy cake layered for a forgotten coronation: icing stucco, pillars of sponge,

a haunting in red brick with smoke effects of brick dust. Then the industrial-sized Rose window in the apse of the engine shed that' s tagged with graffiti and levitates

then a heart of darkness where the train stops, a spasm in the network: the doors stay closed , and the windows bead with tropical damp.

on a cushion of dry grass. Freight carriages rust to an autumn-coloured powder, their iron fine as gold plate, their wheels trellises for weeds to climb

A moment in the striplit shadows, Care de Leopoldville, then we ease back into Belgium, a barge sliding through diamond-studded blood and water.

in circles. One, half-way up the hill , has that shotwhile-escaping look of a boat dragged onto land along a pair of rails that just gives up, not

Schuman (The other Robert Schuman, one n, this one so anonymous they named a station after him where it's dark enough to cultivate endives,

suddenly, dramatically, but in increments of disappearance like lifeboat tracks dissolving in the surf. The telephone poles along the platform

breed bats and harvest mushrooms, where the only music is piped like choloroform from unseen speakers into Euroland' s conditioned air.)

beat out their twenty-metre intervals and each time cut across the station name: first je then elle, more than twenty metres between them now, between us,

Rruxelles-T ,uxemhourg each in our neutral, barely even melancholy place. Something is taking shape, a Leviathan fattened on damp and disregard: the bureaucratic Unconscious, with its pagers, mobile phones and trouserpresses, taking all our deepest

Luxembourg

desires and fears , our primal hatreds and our hardest drives, and making them fill in forms. A new language which has no name spreads along the billboards and the shopsigns - Euro Dago,

Le Y€S Bar, Het Leader Bowling - beside which the sign marked Liquidation totale seems full of Old Testament promise. Caught on the down-bound escalator the one time in my life I stopped here:

First, lunch on the Place d' Armes surrounded by men in vests with small angry dogs, also in vests - one who looks like Churchill, balls bullet-hard and straining at their sack; another, a poodle in paramilitary fatigues, a face like Milosevic, all bite then back to a flat on Place de Paris, so close to the station you can hear yourself miss the trains.

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COMMENTARY

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an Francisco is a " museum town", or so Raymond Chandler, who lived here before heading south to Los Angeles, referred to it in passing. Los Angeles is not a museum town, although the actual museums AUGUST KLEINZAHLER it has are much superior to those we have in San Francisco. Paris and Rome are museum Lights. Together they form the twin shrines cities; London and Berlin are not. My neigh- of Beatdom. It was to this very spot that I bourhood, the Haight, is a hippie museum. headed on my first visit to San Francisco One fine morning about twenty years ago, I forty years ago, probably with a copy of walked down to Haight Street to post a letter Gregory Corso' s Gasoline or Frank 0' Hara' s and found myself in the middle of a produc- Lunch Poems - both City Lights Pocket tion set for Oliver's Stone' s movie The Poets editions - in my pocket. Today the Doors. I didn't even realize it was a movie clerks at City Lights seem like children to me set until a guy in front of me on line dressed - children with an attitude, perhaps, but childas a warlock - not a terribly unusual look by ren nonetheless. Back then I would have been this area' s standards - volunteered: "Oh, far too intimidated to ask anyone who man, you shoulda been here a couple of hours worked in the store where this or that book ago. They was draggin ' extras off the might be. I went next door to Vesuvio' s, I street!". The dashing French television host remember, and sat over a drink for a long and writer Bernard-Henri Levy wrote in the time, hoping a beatnik would walk in. I'm not Atlantic Monthly of San Francisco: "This city sure what I would have said , if anything - I has become a conservatory of audacity ... a was far too shy - but I felt that the beatnik tomb for 300,000 escapees from the merry community should somehow be apprised of apocalypse of the Sixties". He also remarks my arrival. Perhaps I'd be spotted. The "night" Bernard-Henri Levy was referof San Francisco that it was the place where, "in one night, in a former garage at the ring to was October 7, 1955 at the Six Galintersection of Union and Fillmore, the lery in nearby Russian Hill. A number of literary generation was born that from poets read that evening, but what has renKerouac to Lamantia, from Michael McClure dered the occasion historically significant to Philip Whalen, Alien Ginsberg, and was Ginsberg's first public reading of the Gary Snyder, transformed the world, for half first part of "Howl". According to Ginsberg a century". himself, he delivered "a spiritual confession If the Haight is the museum of the to an astounded audience - ending in tears "summer of love", forever 1967, then North which had restored to American poetry the Beach, across town, is the museum of the prophetic consciousness it had lost since the Beats, 1950s hipster America. If you enter conclusion of Hart Crane's 'The Bridge"'. Alien Ginsberg, bless him , mixed the the neighbourhood from Chinatown, through the portal of "Jack Kerouac Street", you Kool-Aid, drank it himself, then passed it arrive, after not many steps, at Columbus around. The umpteenth edition of the City Avenue, with City Lights bookstore to your Lights Pocket Poets #4, Howl and Other left and Vesuvio' s bar to your right, widely Poems, having sold over a million copies, is considered the drinking annexe to City prominently displayed in the window of City

Lights today, beside Naked Lunch, Diane Di Prima's Memoirs of a Beatnik, and a dozen other famous Beat titles. Across the street, there really is a Beatnik Museum. Jerry Cimino presides over it, near the corner of Broadway and Columbus, amidst a clutch of strip clubs, and not far from another commemorative alley, Via Ferlinghetti. Mr Cimino has also drunk deep of the Kool-Aid. "As Elvis and the Beatles were to music", he said during a recent visit, pointing to an Elvis poster overhead, "and as Marlon Brando and James Dean" - pointing to another pair of posters - "were to movies, so the Beats were to literature." He is pleased with his analogy and the neatness of its construction. A genial, open-faced enthusiast in his mid-fifties, Cimino tells me he first read Kerouac at the age of twenty-three in 1977. He was living in Washington DC at the time and working in sales for IBM. After reading On the Road, he was smitten and descended, or ascended, into unrepentant Beat-o-philia. His wife, whom he met the following year, was perplexed by his fascination, but apparently thought no less of him on account of it. Ten years later, still in thrall to Kerouac and his associates, Mr and Mrs Cimino moved west to Monterey, apparently to be closer to the spiritual headwaters of Beatnik-dom. First with IBM, then with American Express, Cimino worked the precincts of nearby Silicon Valley, catching the wave of the dotcom boom. "I made a lot of money" , he told me. Meanwhile, in 1991 he and his wife opened a small bookshop and cafe in Monterey which featured works by Beat authors. They set up a website called kerouac.com specializing in Beat authors and

related memorabilia online. They also have a phone number: 1-800-Kerouac. The exhibits at the first Beat Museum on Upper Grant Street were housed in a glass display case: vintage paperback editions, an old Underwood No 5 typewriter, news clippings, photographs of the principal figures and so on. When the Broadway location came up in the summer of 2006, giving him two floors, Cimino grabbed it and proceeded to supplement his collection of memorabilia. The day I visited, he had just received as a gift from the woman who had long owned it a painting by Corso, in the "naive" style, showing a mother with a pram crossing the intersection of Broadway and Columbus. There are books and sweatshirts for sale, and all manner of Beatnik-related stuff on display - photographs, posters, clothing (a sporty Neal Cassady shirt) - but my personal favourite among the exhibits is a beast of a '41 Pontiac sedan sitting at the front of the Beat Museum as you walk in. Cimino would have preferred a ' 49 Hudson, the car Kerouac and Cassady (as Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty) drove across the country in On the Road, but the only one available was a bit spendy. Cimino telephoned Carolyn Cassady, Neal's widow who now lives in England, and asked if Neal had ever owned a '41 Pontiac. Mrs Cassady explained to Cimino that the late Mr Cassady, just between the years 1949 and 1951, "owned" at least two dozen cars (not all of them were bought), the implication being that at some point Neal Cassady was almost certainly careering around Denver and environs, cigarette dangling from his lower lip, in a vehicle that resembled the '41 Pontiac in the window of the Beat Museum. If a steam beer or two at Vesuvio has you missing the 1950s, then check it out. Five dollars is quite a bargain in comparison to Big AI's peekaboo club next door.

Greek, Richmond Lattimore. In Pythian 8, Pindar speaks of man being skias onar, "the dream of a shadow" . But in Lattimore he becomes "the shadow of a dream", a less powerful image of the ethereal, ephemeral quality of human life. More to the point, it is not what Pindar actually said. Such lapses are rare in Lattimore; in most versions they are rife. According to Aeschylus, Prometheus stole for man anthos pyros, "the blossom of fire". Yet the flower has been plucked in at least half the translations I have checked. Admittedly, Aeschylean style can at times be purple-patched and some of his imagery hyperholic. (Housman parodied an unfortunate phrase from the Agamemnon, "Mud ' s sister, not himself, adorns my shoes.") But the translator's task is not to sit in judgment. He should render what he sees and allow the reader to draw his own conclusions. Given the " metaphoraphobia" just described, Aeschylus has been an astonishing loadstone for poet-translators. Twenty years ago, a critic counted over sixty English versions of the Agamemnon , including one by Dryden with music by Purcell. Dozens more have been published

in the interim. Yet there has never really been a version which has moved readers to "look at each other with a wild surmise / Silent, upon a peak in Darien". But Aeschylus continues to attract translators the way a Himalayan peak draws climbers to its most dangerous face. He is tall and majestic; the closer one gets the more frightening the task appears. But if Scatt, Tennyson and Shelley could try, why not Lowell? This question is more than rhetorical. No critic denies Lowell a place beside the best poets of our age. Some even consider him an important playwright. But whenever he turned to translating anything, the pedants howled in protest. Homer may be allowed to nod, but Lowell must be forbidden to translate. Perhaps, in a half century, Lowell's fmitatinns (1961) will he granted the same critical tolerance now accorded Pound's Propertius. Surely when any artist attempts to English works ranging from Homer to Montale, there are bound to be infelicities. There are even likely to be felicities. Lowell was, in fact, a fairly good linguist, if no polyglot, and his Phaedra is as good a version as anyone is likely to produce in English. Curiously enough, when Louis Simpson praised the work, his one criticism was that Lowell ' s language was a bit too rugged for Racine, too much like Aeschylus .

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IN NEXT WEEK'S

ILS Roy Foster Who gets into Ireland's DNB? Arthur Freeman A new Companion to the Book John Warrack Madeleine Bunting's childhood plot Howard Temperley Slavery for ever

TLS January 25, 1980

Segal on Lowell Erich Segal, who died earlier this month, was a contributor to the TLS over three decades. We look back to his review of Robert Lowell 's The Oresteia of Aeschylus. To see the review in full, go to www.the-tls.co.uk. reek poetry was born in the similes of Homer, and reached its maturity - and surprising modernity - in the metaphors of Pindar and Aeschylus. This may not he ohvious to those who have read their classics only in English. Homer's style seems to pose no problem for the translators, all of whom faithfully describe Achilles charging the Trojans " like inhuman fire". But for some unfathomable reason they baulk at translating even the simplest of Greek metaphors. This is without justification either ancient or modern. To Aristotle, mastery of metaphor was the acme of art. This inexplicable uneasiness in the presence of metaphor has at times affected even America' s finest translator from the

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The lure of myth in the music of Hans Werner Henze

We're not out of the woods, yet he myths of ancient Greece still command our artistic attention. Part of the attraction comes from their archetypal status; they offer us proximity to the sacred sphere, yet are free of the kitsch that clings to modern religious art. That at least seems to be the view of the eighty-three-year-old composer Hans Werner Henze, who shares his long-standing interest in Greek myth with everyone else who has tried composing and writing opera. The genre was, after all, born in an attempt to restore what was believed to be the lost power of Athenian tragedy. One senses in Henze, however, a concern less with the idea of a perfected union of music and poetry than with the fluidity of borders between the mortal and immortal realms. Greek myths show man being buffeted by the desires of shallow and self-serving deities, but they also show mortals partaking in divinity, with the capacity to change the world and to recalibrate its relationship with the heavens. This interest is particularly evident in Henze' s latest opera. Phaedra, the tormented and venal wife of Theseus, has been the subject of surprisingly few operatic treatments, although Rameau's Hippolyte et Aricie (1733; adapted from Racine rather than from Euripides) is one forebear. But Henze's version, which concerns itself with the story' s philosophical implications, is quite unlike anyone else's. Its strange events and transformations are about the nature of human identity itself: specifically, the spark of spirit that turns flesh into person, matter into mind. The first act is orthodox enough, though sparing as far as the action is concerned: Hippolytus spurns his stepmother Phaedra's advances in disgust, and Phaedra then lies to Theseus (supposedly resident in Hades) , telling him that his son has tried to rape her; the result is the son's death and the mother's suicide, a kind of inverted Liebestod to which Aphrodite provides a Freudian preface: "Nicht allein die Liebe fUhrt Fleisch und Fleisch zusammen: Habt Geduld mit dem Tod" (Not only love may unite flesh with flesh: have patience with death). In the second act, set on the shores of Lake Nemi (where Henze has lived since 1966), it emerges that Hippolytus's body has been rescued by Artemis, stitched back together and placed in a cage. Phaedra, now a shade in the form of a bird, mocks him as she might a pet but still tries to lure him into underworldly communion: "Dein Korper und mein Schatten suchen sich" (Your body and my shade seek each other). Finally, after an earthquake, Hippolytus is resurrected a second time, this time in bliss as the King of the Forest. Henze's inquiry into the mutable nature of identity concentrates on Hippolytus - but Phaedra' s is still the title role; she is the psychological catalyst for her stepson's metamorphoses. Henze became ill while working on the opera in 2005 , falling into a coma that lasted nearl y two months. Friends and colleagues

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GUY DAMMANN Hans Werner Henze PHAEDRA " TOTAL IMMERSION " (Henze W eekend)

Barbican

assumed he would die, but one day he got up and, almost without delay, went back to work, completing the opera in time for its premiere in Berlin in 2007. Was this, in some way, Henze's own field trip to the underworld? Certainly the circumstances of the composer' s illness and the various stages of reincarnation and apotheosis undergone by the opera' s main character appear to be entwined. Musically, though, Henze is his usual mercurial self, sweeping through various twentieth-century musical idioms as if contemporary musical history were a kind of theatrical clothes rack or effects box. The

Frankfurt' s Ensemble Modern, guided clearly and unfussily by Michael Boder, is busy, colourful , always precise in its intended musical and dramatic effect. Driven by clear but fluid rhythmic structures, every so often erupting in an Expressionist frenzy, the music has moments of great tenderness, and moments of orchestral ecstasy, such as the Mahlerian whirl that launches Hippolytus on the sylvan chapter of his career. The prerecorded track, put together by Henze' s assistant Francesco Antonioni, adds an extra dimension to the transition scenes. The earthquake is no simple metallic rumbling, but a complex, dynamic episode which envelops the listener with seductive force. The communicative fluency that has won Henze many friends in opera houses around the world has often been viewed with suspicion in other circles. Although one of the first composers in Germany to embrace serialism after the war, Henze soon found himself out of step with the militant Modernism of the Darmstadt summer schools, which he

Maria Riccarda Wesseling (centre) as Phaedra at the Berlin Staatsoper, 2007 opening is a representation of the labyrinth from the point of view of Hippolytus, Phaedra, Aphrodite and Artemis (the huntress ' s role here given to the countertenor Axel Kohler); together they sing of the mystery that binds them together. A nagging rhythm from the timpani and subtle electro-acoustic track rise gradually to form a snaking melody, charming the rest of the orchestra. Phaedra, sung by the Swiss mezzo Maria Riccarda Wesseling, who created the role in Berlin, has the stature of a Straussian heroine, her lyricism at once a sign of her psychological power over others and her deep self-loathing. It's a vocal style that rather swamps the Stravinskian profile of the other major characters, but creates a truly tantalizing tension with Hippolytus, sung with measured intensity by John Mark Ainsley (also in Berlin). The orchestral score, distributed among a mere twenty-three players from

attended from 1946. Schoenberg, it should be remembered, saw his twelve-tone method not as a purge, but as a means of preserving some kind of authentic continuity with musical history; likewise, Henze never shared Stockhausen's, or Boulez's, view of "total" serialism as a clean and necessary break with a contaminated past. Henze's position may have had something to do with his intense dislike of being told what to think (a consequence, perhaps, of his father's Nazi proselytizing); it is at any rate striking that his first successful twelve-tone piece - Apollo et Hyazinthus, for harpsichord and eight instruments - followed an entirely extra-musical schema. Darmstadt never forgave him. Even today, there are many who view Henze as a kind of traitor, someone who turned down the chance to effect a deep cultural cleansing in music in favour of more immediate political and allegorical gains. But one of the advantages of lis-

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tening in the twenty-first, as opposed to the twentieth, century is that these old antagonisms have largely dispersed. Our ears are less self-consciously attuned to the exaggerated demands of history ; we are free simply to listen to music that rewards attention. Themes of revolution and renewal in fact run through most of Henze's works, from The Raft of the Medusa (1968), dedicated to the memory of Che Guevara, to Phaedra , in which the harmony between mind and body is re-established by violence. His most overtly political piece, Voices (1973) , was given a superbly committed performance by the Guildhall New Music Ensemble (conducted by Ryan Wigglesworth) as part of the BBC Symphony Orchestra' s "Total Immersion" day of concerts. It's a ninety-minute setting of poems chosen by the composer to reflect the spirit of post-Vietnam dissent, in which popular genres co-exist with a restrained classicism and Heine's soldier shares the stage with Brecht' s showgirl, offloading her mundane inner thoughts ("It's nearly 12. I'm going to miss my bus") to a caustic cabaret number. The sarcasm of Voices has little in common with the more general irony of leftist sensibilities today, which may be why the Barbican audience found it somewhat difficult to take seriously. Henze's recent essays in musical politics are more digestible. Fraternite, commissioned by the New York Philharmonic and Kurt Masur as one of their " messages for the millennium" , and subtitled "aria per orchestra" , is less a song than an attempt to forge the musical conditions in which a song of hope might be sung. From the glittering harp oscillations of the opening, the piece unfolds as a kind of breathless relay of melodic fragments which appear to point collectively towards some blissful cadence without ever quite reaching it. A blistering performance by the BBC Symphony Orchestra was one of the highlights of the evening concert superbly conducted by Oliver Knussen. We heard, too, an interesting selection of solo piano works - including the humorous Mozartian fantasy Cherubino (1980-81), played by Huw Watkins - as well as the Fourth Symphony, an interesting choice for the way it foreshadows, though with vastly different orchestral forces , the music of Phaedra. The concert was also the occasion for the UK premiere of Elogium musicum, Henze's requiem for his lover of forty years, Fausto Moroni , who died unexpectedly in 2007. The text is a quartet of newly commissioned poems in Latin by Franco Serpa. The result, for choir and orchestra but without soloists, is a restrained work in which extremes of emotion are avoided. The choral setting is reminiscent of the sacred cantata style, allowing the audience - which included the composer - to conjure their own private images of loss. In the final adagio, the ritual of mourning is absorbed with unforced grace by the benevolent movements of the earth.

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ARTS

ndividualism once had serious democractic connotations, but is shorthand today for an approach to life that is narcissistic, megalomaniacal, ruthless, infantile, or just plain cold. A character in Jason Reitman ' s grey-toned comedy Up in the Air means to encompass all of these charges when she dismisses it as a "bullshit philosophy". That phrase is reprovingly directed at the film's hero, Ryan Bingham (George Clooney), a member of the corporate elite, but one with unusually monkish habits. He favours saving over spending, and renunciation over consumption. He rents a featureless one-bedroom apartment. He owns no clothes that are not business suits. He spends more than 300 days a year travelling at his company's expense, and his greatest ambition is to amass 10,000,000 air miles, though not as a means to further travel: "the miles are the goal" . Ryan's life is an aimless, zigzagging anti-trip . His most trusting relationship - conducted by phone - is with his personal assistant (Chris Lowell), whose primary task is to keep Ryan's relatives at bay. Ryan is protective of his independence, and lives by forcing independence on others. He is hired to fire - or, as he prefers to phrase it, to "set adrift". Timid MDs and CEOs "outsource" their "down-sizing", and Ryan is their hitman, conducting himself like a salesman for unemployment, speaking a language of possibility and opportunity, handing out "strategy packages" which put a happy spin on joblessness. To counterbalance this hatefigure day job, Ryan moonlights as a motivational speaker. He appears onstage with a backpack, and invites his dazed audience first to imagine this item filled with all of their possessions, acquaintances, and loved ones, then to imagine divesting themselves of the burden: ''It's pretty exhi larating, isn ' t it?". The film's screenplay (by Reitman and Sheldon Turner) is admirably resistant to judgement and explanation. Even a trip to Ryan's high school reveals no more than that he used to kiss girls on the fire escape and played point guard for the basketball team. There is no childhood trauma, no back story. Ryan is restless and rootless, and happy past the point of smugness with this state of affairs . So he doesn't take well to his company's new initiative, G local (" let our global become local"), which proposes replacing the travelling-salesman strategy with video conferencing. Less time on the road would mean more time "back home" in Omaha, together with an end to the air miles and the special treatment. Ryan's response is to feign moral indignation: "This job is brutal , but there's a dignity to the way I do it". Despite its drab premiss, Up in the Air is fleet-footed and breezy. The potentially odious central character, played by Clooney,

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Life of Ryan LEO ROBSON UP IN THE AIR Various cinemas

is endowed with that actor's familiar and oddly comforting mixture of gleam and gloom, his handsome face weathered by worry, his brow wrinkled, his chin thoughtfully grooved. Clooney transforms Ryan ' s mercenary professional activities into a noble venture, conveying the character' s self-belief with sufficient persuasiveness for us to believe it, too. A creamy sales-pitch voiceover - "To know me is to fly with me" locks us into Ryan's perspective on his abstemious lifestyle, the daily implementation of his bullshit philosophy. The film opens in 2010, a season of growth and prosperity for the firing business. And Clooney fits the bill as a crunch idol, a recession hunk - Clark Gable with a dash of Mervyn King - well-equ ipped as a pick-up artist in hotel bars, which is where Ryan comes across Alex Goran (Vera Farmiga) . The two compare car rental services, loyalty cards, air miles - and mid-air mischief. Their conversation recalls the scene in laws (1975) in which Robert Shaw and Richard Dreyfuss compare wounds and scars - only the dam-

age here is metaphysical. When it emerges that Alex has not on ly had sex in an aeroplane toilet, but has done so on a domestic flight, Ryan knows he has met his match. Up in the Air is Jason Reitman's third film as a director. It exhibits the cynicism of his corporate satire Thank You for Smoking (2005), as leavened by the optimism of his teen comedy luno (2007). Like the hero of the first film , Ryan is unrepentant about his destructiveness; like the heroine of the second, he is forced by circumstances to weigh the virtues of different lifestyles. luno involved a relationship between a married man and a pregnant teenage girl, and a simi lar dynamic is replicated here when Ryan is appointed chaperone to Natalie Keener (Anna Kendrick), a twenty-three-year-old graduate of Brown University, and the inventor of Glocal. Ryan objects to the assignment on the grounds that he is "not a fucking tour gu ide", though of course he is, and gives Natalie an unsentimental education in what he pointedly calls "my business". When passing through metal detectors, he advises, beware of families ("I've never seen a stroller collapse in less than twenty minutes"), Arabs ("I've got five words for you ' randomly selected for additional screening" ') and the elderly ("they never seem to appreciate how little time they have left" ).

"Asians", on the other hand, pack light and favour slip-on shoes. "I stereotype", he explains. ''It's faster." Ryan has a harder time interesting Natalie in the geekier aspects of the lifestyle. "Haven ' t you ever wondered why they call it the Spirit of St Louis?", he asks . "No", she replies. Rather than a gradual thawing, prickliness reigns. Platitudes go unshared; the generation gap remains unbridged. If the two of them start to get on better, then this is because they learn to accommodate their differences, not resolve them. The scenes between Ryan and Natalie are very effective, not least because Anna Kendrick is fully capable of delivering a line like "I'm dying to know" without showing the slightest evidence of curiosity. And their relationship is nicely complicated by the addition of Alex, who stands with Ryan on the matter of lifestyle, but has a special sympathy with Natalie for her mixture of idealism and ambition. The film's only difficulties arise from Reitman's uneasy mixture of the fanciful with the real. The film is punctuated with scenes of people responding to the news that they have been fired , some of them presented to Ryan, or Ryan and Natalie, others delivered straight to camera. The ones done " straight" are real people telling us what happened to them ; they are listed in the credits as "Terminated Employees". But they get chopped up in the edit with actors (Zach Galifianakis , Steve Eastin, J. K. Simmonds), and seem to belong to an entirely different film one on easier and, it must be said, less entertaining terms with its own seriousness.

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ome years ago I was leading a quartet on clarinet. We were "playing the room" for a rugby club dinner dance, in the kind of situation with which the authors of Do You Know. ? are all too familiar, when a very large and drunk diner positioned himself in front of me on the bandstand and kept saying "Excuse me, excuse me". Clarinet in mouth and unable to engage with him, I nodded him towards our bass player who managed, without losing the beat, to discover that what he wanted was for us to play the "Excuse Me Waltz". This was not in our repertoire, but after a speedy bit of negotiation we settled on a key, chords and melody, and kicked off in 3/4. We didn't feel comfortable but we got away with it, avoiding what is known in the business as a "trainwreck". "How do several people who haven't prepared a musical performance give one?", ask Robert R. Faulkner and Howard S. Becker, two jazz-playing sociologists, in their opening chapter. "How can they play together competently enough to satisfy the manager of a bar or the bride at a wedding or the mother of a bar mitzvah boy?" Or a drunk at a dinner dance. Do You Know . .. ? sets out to answer this question, covering every angle, and incorporating anecdotal accounts by fifty musicians between the ages of twenty-four and the high eighties who play a variety of instruments. None of them is named, since "while the tradition of jazz studies routinely identifies people quoted and discussed, the tradition of sociology typically doesn't". Indeed, the language, methods and etiquette of sociology inform the book throughout. This does tend to make the authors' investigations heavy-going in places but, as they explain, "sociological analyses focus on

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Key changes everything JOHN MOLE Robert R. Faulkner and Howard S. Beeker DO YOU KNOW The jazz repertoire in act ion 2 16pp. University of Chicago Press. $25 (£ 17.50). 978022623921 7

moments of tension and conflict, because that' s when unexpected events interrupt collective activities that ordinarily go unnoticed, and make us aware of everything that is going on at a moment when people would usually say ' nothing is happening"'. This discipline, combined with their wide musical experience, makes Faulkner and Becker ideally suited to exploring and explain ing the volatile dynamics of life on the bandstand. They are also alert to crisis humour, my own favourite example being the "apocryphal utterance" of a drummer, unfamiliar with the requirements of an avant-garde group and unable to find the first beat of a bar, who cries out "A One, a One, my kingdom for a one!". Much of Do You Know . .. ? concerns itself with changes and how they affect musicians. There are the chord changes, of course, familiar to those whose repertoire of standards is taken largely from the Great American Song Book (there's a detailed analysis

TLS JANUARY 29 2010

of the "circle of fifths" , a knowledge of which will get a group through a session where not everyone will have played all the tunes on the gig list before) but also changes in performance venues, and Hgenerational changes" which determine where, and how, musicians of different ages and musical backgrounds encounter the expanding repertoire. What an older musician, who has grown up listening to jazz on radio stations and classic recordings, wi ll have absorbed on the job, the younger generation wi ll often have gone to school to learn. As one of the interviewees puts it, describing his difficulties in becoming an instinctive player, "I always drew upon the blackboard to play music. It wasn't working out, man". Most significant and challenging of all, however, has been the change to improvising on the modal scale brought about by the postbop revolution, a change which has left many players of the old school floundering and disenchanted with the music. Acknowledging that there is now " no universal ' what everyone knows'" that can be counted on as a basis for playing together, Fau lkner and Becker show how the "constellation of musical behaviours" has become for many a galactic confusion, and that the question they set out to answer is more complex than it seemed at the start. In the end "what's best, we think, is to recognize the way people learned and then the way they put that learning to work in the company of others, without trying to find simple patterns that wou ld make prediction of outcomes possible". From the comfort zone of the familiar, by way of the fascination of what's difficult, to the collision of incompatibles, Do You Know . .. ? is a book that certainly covers the waterfront.

"'(.1~111--

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Reflections on a fledgling democracy

Birds of America TOM SHIPPEY Peter Carey PARROT AND OLIVIER IN AMERICA 453pp. Faber. £ 17.99. 9780571 253296

arrot and Olivier in America has the feel of a roman a clef where the keys don ' t quite fit. Olivier, in full Olivier-Jean-Baptiste de Clarel de Barfleur, is evidently calqued on Alexis de Tocqueville: both born in 1805, both members of the Norman aristocracy, and Olivier's eventual publication of Morals and Manners in Democracies inevitably recalls de Tocqueville' s Democracy in America. But there are differences too. Olivier' s family did not go into exile after the Revolution, but stayed on into the Napoleonic era, and were consequently only in limited favour after the restoration of the Bourbons: Olivier flees to America in 1830 because he is under suspicion from all sides. Parrot, meanwhile - otherwise John Larrit - has no obvious historical precursor, but is nevertheless mixed up with a kind of reverse Audubon. Parrot himself is the son of a printer, who joins a nest of radicals in the West Country near Dartmoor. Their sympathy with the French Revolution does not prevent them from forging assignats, intended to destabilize the currency of the new regime, but while they are at it they work on Bank of England five-pound notes as well, which leads to discovery, arrest, executions. The master engraver escapes, and birds are his passion, especially American birds. Parrot encounters him again much later, by which time Parrot has become Olivier's servant, and Watkins the master engraver is well on with what will become the immensely expensive and successful Birds of America - Audubon's title, but here created by an English exile in America, not an American exile in Britain. These resemblances, visible though they are, also feel like false leads. Olivier' s ostensible purpose in touring America is to produce a report On the Penitentiary System in the United States and Its Application in France, and this too has echoes of several European travellers, including Frances Trollope and Dickens, as well as Michel Foucault' s Surveiller et punir, while some will remember also P. G. Wodehouse's Wilmot, Lord Malvern, whose appearance in Blackwell's Island jail is explained away by Jeeves as deliberate self-incarceration to collect inside material for his mother's chapter on prison conditions in America. Olivier does indeed visit a jailor two, including the Pennsylvania Quakers' Easter Penitentiary, run on the " solitary system", clean, hygienic, and soul-destroying; while Parrot at one point finds himself in "the Tombs"

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"Pittsford on the Erie Canal - A Sultry Calm", 1837, painted by George Harvey, an Englishman who had settled in America in 1820; from Seeing America (336pp. Memorial Art Gallery, Rochester, New York. 978158046 244 0) prison in New York where the gibbet is kept in full public view of all the cell galleries. There is mention also of Elam Lynds, the famously cruel warden of Sing Sing, who demonstrated his power over the prisoners (so Parrot says) by giving a convicted murderer a razor and telling him to shave him. Yet none of this leads to any conclusion. Olivier' s report never gets written, and he seems in practice quite uninterested in what he sees: it is all just background. Foreground is the interaction of the two lead characters, opposed in almost every respect, but tied together by more than the traditional master-servant relationship of the picaresque novel. Olivier is very much the social superior, but his mother has arranged matters so that Parrot has to co-sign any draft on an American bank, which, since Olivier is incapable of earning any money himself, gives Parrot the financial upper hand. They compete also for the favours of Mathilde, Parrot's partner and mistress - it is never clear whether the images of her infidelity with Olivier are only Parrot' s jealous imaginings - and they are connected further through the figure of de Tilbot, a massive one-armed French aristocrat, with family links to Olivier and financial and business ones to Parrot. What makes the relationship a more even one than its many predecessors (Tom Jones and Partridge, Martin Chuzzlewit and Mark Tapley, etc) is the fact that they tell their conjoined story in alternate sections, often overlapping chronologically ; and as with other relationships, the balance of power and the degrees of affection or hostility keep changing. Both characters have the Revolution and the Terror in their minds. Olivier is haunted by the image of the guillotine to which his grandfather went, and Parrot obsessively draws the picture of Louis XVI's head,

but democracy and mob rule do not frighten Parrot as they do Olivier: he declares at one point that he would cheerfully have put his master's pinhead through the guillotine window, "and let him see the other side, as the saying used to be". Parrot' s financial success and Olivier' s romantic failure soften their feelings, though Parrot remains disgusted , in a resigned way, at the very end, when the weary, friendless and destitute aristocrat turns up at his former servant's new-built haven on the Hudson and automatically appropriates the marital bed: privilege is not easily washed out by experience. Whether Olivier quite comes to appreciate Parrot is less clear. But it is hard not to take sides in this intimate quarrel, and no one will see it in exactly the same way. The other quarrel in the book is about America, the de Tocqueville strand. Some reflections are familiar. Parrot observes the different attitudes of Europeans and Americans to servants and lawyers. Olivier notes that Americans feel free to invent themsel ves, creating crests and Latin mottoes to put on their business cards, which he thinks "a peculiar affectation". He benefits from it, though , for it is well known that no one loves a lord like an American, as long as the lord is prepared to play the role of "Old Europe Taught a Lesson by Young Democracy": see Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt, or for that matter P. G. Wodehouse's Duke of Chiswick meeting the Birdsburg Boosters. Olivier plays his part nobly, complimenting everyone on all he sees, and falling in love with an American maiden straight out of Henry lames: free, unconstrained (a lot more so than anyone in Henry James), but culture-starved, so much so that her passion to go to France and Olivier's determination to make a new life in America prove in the end incompatible.

TLS JANUARY 29 2010

Other reflections of America are more ominous. One character Olivier falls in with is the banker, Mr Peek. Why, Olivier asks him, is he prepared to lend money to Parrot's mistress so she can buy a house, although (unspoken) she is what we would now call a "ninja" - no income, no job, no assets? Can ' t lose, replies Peek, and comes up (this is in the 1830s) with two mathematical formulas to prove it. The reality behind the mathematics is demonstrated immediately by Peek, who drives off to watch a family being evicted after foreclosure, the man of the family heaving a brick through the window in despair and being answered by a musket shot from Peek. "Owning New York property", says Peek, "is a science." The comment must be anachronistic, but who knows when that particular rot set in? And of course Peek turns out to be wrong, even in the 1830s. Parrot' s mistress Mathilde takes him for a bundle by working repeated insurance scams, a poetic justice not available in the twenty-first century. A chronologically closer shadow is cast by Olivier's travels to the South. His prospective father-in-law notes that already there are men declaring that they will fight to separate from the Union, but Olivier, admiring America's lack of ancient schisms, sees nothing more serious than bickering between manufacturing and agrarian states over tariffs. He almost changes his mind in another "Martin Chuzzlewit" scene, when he sees an Independence Day float go by with the Goddess of Liberty on it next to a chained slave reaching out for emancipation - but, as he notes, only reaching. Does the American Goddess of Liberty need the help of her French counterpart, Delacroix ' s bare-breasted Marianne leading on the sans-culottes with musket and bayonet? And does that not lead inevitably, if not to the guillotine, then to Gettysburg? Neither Olivier nor Parrot can complete these reflections without evident anachronism, but they are set up unmistakably for any informed reader. Two further continuing strands in the novel are birds and technology, which could easily combine under another traditional American image, Leo Marx's "Machine in the Garden". Olivier's maidenly Amelia sees a corn-husking machine which her father has bought, and dissents from the general admiration. Previously the young people in the winter went from barn to barn to husk the corn, making a party of it: anyone who found a red ear to husk was allowed to kiss his or her sweetheart. Now there is just a machine standing alone in a December field , day after day. Earlier, Olivier's sense of security is bolstered, or perhaps corseted, by what we would now call a shoulder-holster, containing a four-barrelled pistol using percussion caps - not quite the six-shooter Samuel Colt was just about to invent, but near enough to suggest symbolic status. All it does here, is get Parrot consigned to the

20 Tombs on a false charge. The novel opens with another mechanical false trail. Olivier' s ceLerifere, France's answer to the equally unsuccessful velocipede, which Olivier sees as an image of his own Sterneian attempt to catch up with past time and explain how his life was framed even before his conception. The victims of the technological and political process are birds, especially pigeons. Twice here we see a pigeon holocaust, or the remains of one. First, Olivier discovers a pigeoncote mausoleum at his home in Normandy and is told that the birds were tried, after the Revolution, for the crime of eating corn, and sentenced to death just like the aristos. Later, the species is put to good use in the fledgling American democracy, when carrier pigeons advertise Mr Eckerd's drama on the assassination of Marat, with its happy ending and its coda on "the Free Birds of America". Elsewhere, the harmless and useful creatures are ruthlessly and publicly slaughtered; having made a stock market killing, the brothers who used the carrier pigeons wring their necks rather than return them to their owner, with whom they are in dispute. This is the other side of wealth creation, like asset-inflation and foreclosures: what is not useful becomes a liability. The Birds of America engravings, made to be sold to the rich men of Europe, are what save the day for Parrot and Mathilde in the end, but one has the feeling that the birds engraved are the avian aristocrats, sold to be admired by their human counterparts. Neither French Revolution nor American capitalism offers any protection to those designated as low life. Were the aristocrats more generous? This is a puzzling novel, in the end as at the start. It has a number of loose ends. Why did de Tilbot murder the clergyman on board ship? Bringing Watkins the engraver back makes a kind of sense, but why Mrs Piggott as well? Of course, in a real picaresque adventure, as in its American successor, the road novel , that is the kind of thing the reader should expect, and some of the puzzles must be provocations. Who is the " lawyer and comic novelist of some local renown" who gets Parrot out of jail in New York? He sounds as if he should be identifiable, and perhaps he is, but not by this reviewer. Parrot and Olivier in America is such a literary work, even fuller than its predecessors of allusion, contrast and comic contradiction, that there is always more to find: the more you bring to it, the more rewarding its insinuations, its unpredictable switches between satire, serious reflection , and plain fun. Like Oscar and Lucinda (not to mention Carey ' s other works), it demands and repays repeated reading. One final thought is that the master-man pairings, so fertile in the novel tradition and so often recalled by Carey, from Don Quixote and Sancho to Jeeves and Bertie, usually achieve a kind of balance. Parrot and Olivier ends with Olivier summing up furiously on the future of America, and getting everything at least 90 per cent wrong - notably the remarks about art being impossible in a democracy - and Parrot gently correcting him in a post-narrative "Dedication" to Olivier as his anti-patron. Perhaps that is the way an American Revolution works, not a dramatic turn of the wheel but a slow spiral, on the whole upwards.

FICTION

The female frisson " Gonna get you, baby." With these words the villain of one of Joyce Carol Oates's earliest and most notorious stories, "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?", announces his designs on his victim in an ambiguous tone half menacing, half kidding around. When he drives out to the girl's isolated home to claim her, the same teasing manner initially makes his rapacious and murderous intentions difficult for her (though not us) to read. Based on the serial killer Charles Schmid, ominously misnamed Arnold Friend, he is one of a series of predatory older men who imperil adolescent girls in Oates's fiction. The young Connie's petrified acquiescence in her fate established Oates's exceptional talent for the Gothiclthriller genre. Oates's two new novels, Little Bird of Heaven and A Fair Maiden , both , in their different ways, revisit this territory where pretty, pony tailed blondes are held in thrall by sinister, half-jocular males. In Little Bird the dangerous joker is Eddy Diehl, a carpenter in rural New York state who is suspected of brutally murdering his mistress. His teenage daughter' S steadfast belief in his innocence seems born of father worship and sexual attraction rather than good judgement ("a girl loves a Daddy, a girl does not judge a Daddy", the first-person narrator of Part One of the novel declares), but unease is generated by Diehl's volatile behaviour and erratic tone. Even when the Vietnam vet brandishes a gun, Krista hopes he is kidding: "A daddy can be so funny!". A Fair Maiden reconfigures that dynamic within a fairytale framework: Katya Spivak is a Cinderella figure, a misused working-class nanny in affluent coastal New Jersey, until she meets a rich, genteel artist and author four times her age who reinvents her as his model, muse and bride. Whether this fairy godfather figure is "a gentleman lover in an old storybook", or "a starving dog" driven by raw sexual desire, is difficult to interpret. His inscrutability is multiplied by his name, Mr Kidder. In scope and style, the two novels are strikingly dissimilar. A Fair Maiden is a short, slim volume (beautifully produced by Quercus), which can easily be read in one or two sittings. The jacket subtitles it "A novel of dark suspense" , and there is indeed an aura of dread about the book, a sense of impending violence. Internal references to magic, mystery, riddles and bedtime stories more accurately capture the overall feel of the narrative than the subtitle does, however. The darkness of the novel is mostly suhtle and marginal, and is offset by an air of enchantment surrounding Mr Kidder's beautiful house and possessions. His quaint, courteous way of speaking is echoed in the decorous, old-fashioned tone of Oates's prose, and if the novel makes compulsive reading, it is as much through the effect of its language as the suspense produced by the plot. There was something peaceful about this. There was something mesmerizing about this.

Though Katya still resented Marcus Kidder for coercing her into doing something she didn't want to do, yet how comforting it felt to give

ALISON KELL Y Joyce Carol Oates A FAIR MAIDEN 231 pp. Quereus. £ I5.99. 978 I 847248589 LITTLE BIRD OF HEA YEN 442pp. Fourth Estate. Paperback, £12.99. 9780007342563 in. How comforting, to be able to please a man

of such authority as Marcus Kidder - and how easy. You only have to give in.

While Katya' s occasional obscenities erupt violently through this hypnotic surface, the narrative of Little Bird of Heaven intermixes polite and profane registers freely and contains far more of the "roughshod poetry" of uncouth speech. Over 400 pages long and describing the events of more than twenty years from multiple points of view, it is a powerful , ambitious novel driven by serious concerns with race and social class. That

terrain formed by prehistoric glacial forces and endowed with an ancient Greek name, and she is described as "Of that landscape, and of that parentage", as if inescapably predestined for tragedy: "All of Sparta was a spiderweb of ... connections. In the center of the web was the spider Death" . Always good at writing about masculine emotions and predicaments, Oates portrays the burden carried by the male heirs to violence. Krista's brother feels branded with his father's disgrace ("the name Diehl accrued to him like an obscene scrawl across his back"); and the murdered woman's son, Aaron Kruller - a mixed-blood Seneca Indian whose alcoholic father is also suspected of the killing - slides inexorably into delinquency and drug addiction: "This kind of family situation, you could call it an inheritance, you'd naturally need to get high and stay high as long as you could". Drink and drugs feature in both novels, most prominently in Little Bird of Heaven, and the idea of the narcotic - drugs, alcohol, sex, violence, or risk in general - fires Oates's imagination here as it does in much of her work. Back in " Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?", the ill-fated Connie was a fun-lover, "breathless with

One ofDuane Michals's photographs in his series The Fallen Angel; reproduced from PhotoBox, a selection of250 works by prominent photographers (512pp. Thames and Hudson. £19.95. 978 0 500 343841) Oates produced this at the same time as an daring", until Arnold Friend crossed her path. essai in a completely different mode is In A Fair Maiden. Katya succumbs to the evidence of the fertility and versatility of her thrill of the forbidden, while Mr Kidder is a creative genius. With some 125 works of beauty addict, a slave to proscribed desires. fiction, non-fiction and poetry to her Little Bird of Heaven abounds in illicit relacredit (including those published under her tionships, secrets and conspiracies. Fear goes pen names, Rosamond Smith and Lauren hand in hand with excitement and Oates's Kelly), Oates is the recipient of numerous characters are drawn as if by magnets to honours and awards and is regarded as one of the "frisson of terror". Krista admits that jeopardy is greatest "When it's your fault. America's most important living writers. Herself of working-class origins, and When you invited it". Catastrophe is visited having witnessed the racial and social unrest on the Diehls and Krullers when Zoe Kruller caused hy urhan deprivation and exclusion is fatally strangled and hludgeoned, hut what (in Detroit, where she worked in the 1960s), seems to fascinate Oates is their collusion Oates has frequently applied her mind to with catastrophe. the unequal distribution of life chances. Each In the course of a long career, Oates has of the new novels, in its own way, addresses ceaselessly experimented and developed, so the determining effects of environment and it is not surprising to find her exploring fatalfamily circumstances. Thus Katya' s destiny ism from a new perspective in these extraordiis influenced by a mixture of class and nary novels. The characters' complicity in family background (absent father and manipu- their own misfortunes has a flip side: the lative, immoral mother), gender ("A female power of choosing. The narrative tension is her body", she precociously observes), and which becomes almost unbearable at certain luck, as her habit of letting events be dictated crucial junctures - arises from the question by the roll of a dice accepts. Krista's life as whether they will resist prospective downfall the daughter of a murder suspect unfolds in and destruction or give in to it.

TLS JANUARY 29 2010

FICTION IN BRIEF Donald Harington ENDURING 508pp. Toby Press. $24.95. 978 I 59264 256 4

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onald Harington's final novel , the last instalment of a long series set in the fictional Arkansas hamlet of Stay More, is an overpowering narrative that never loses its humility, its humour, or its healthy distrust of institutions. It tells the life story of the prodigiously sexual and independent Latha Dill, one of the cornerstones of the Stay More books (most notably Lightning Bug, 1979, and The Choiring of the Trees, 1991) and a figure of some authority in her insular and incestuous Ozark community. Latha's childhood, shaped by poverty and inept schoolteachers, leads into a lusty adolescence. After she becomes pregnant, her parents send her to live with her trollish sister and her degenerate husband in Little Rock; they institutionalize her when she suddenly stops speaking. Her stay in the state hospital, with its ill-intentioned psychiatrists and desperate patients, offers the richest satire in the novel. After several years , she escapes from the asylum and returns home. Though no less wry and well observed than the sections that precede it, the final recounting of local scandals, squabbles, and Latha's marriage to her lifetime love seems rushed and obligatory, more a completion of plot than a site of imaginative energy. Harington's worldly mixture of high and low - from the language he uses to the counterpoint of grand and miniature plots - is the novel's most striking feature. Latha's sexual dalliances, in fact all of her sexual feelings , are described crudely and graphically, though Ozark slang terms like "dinger", "notch" and "tallywhacker" lose their vulgar edge here, softened by Harington's interest in character. Because the novel has a great capacity for variety of expression, personality and emotion, Latha can ask herself, "Is there no clear line between observation and imagination?" without requiring too much suspension of disbelief. Her inner progression towards maturity is made as captivating as any of the smaller misadventures of the Stay Morons (Harington's term for the village's inhabitants). Latha's world-view - her childlike puzzlement at human injustice, her poetically sensitive vision of her surroundings, and her erotic side - remains intact despite steady assaults and challenges. Readers unfamiliar with the author, who died in November 2009, will find Enduring a provocative introduction to a world that could be the brainchild of Flannery O'Connor and Robert Crumb; seasoned readers will find it a gratifying conclusion to a rarefied, highly original body of work. MAXWINTER

David Toscana THE LAST READER Translated by Asa Zatz 192pp. Texas Tech University Press. $26.95. 978 0 89672 664 2

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his is the third work by the Mexican novelist David Toscana to be translated into English, after Tula Station (2000) and Our Lady of the Circus (200 I), and it returns

to a familiar theme. In all of these novels the main characters are cultured people who use art to help them understand their lives. The Last Reader, which won several literary prizes, is Toscana's most successful exploration of this, and his strongest work to date. In the drought-stricken desert village of leamole, Lucio runs a library out of his home. He spends his days reading in order to determine which books should take up the small shelf space. When state officials receive the library ' s low attendance figures they cancel the funding. Lucio keeps the library open, even though the townspeople believe "leamole needed water and medicine, not more books" . Lucio's adult son Remigio is the only resident whose well is sited low enough to maintain water. Thus when the body of a missing thirteen-year-old girl shows up in his well he is reluctant to tell anyone in case they discover the water. He seeks help from Lucio, who offers fanciful advice. The situation resembles the plot of one of the library's novels, so Lucio believes that if Remigio studies the novel's conclusion he will learn how his own story will end. This literal interpretation of literature soon affects all of Lucio's actions and becomes risky when he applies it to dealings with the girl's mother and the police. Toscana' s strength as a storyteller lies in his ability to be appropriately sparse at one instance and expansive in the next. Asa Zatz's translation is unobtrusive; the basic diction quickens the narrative. Many scenes relate only the bare facts. But in others Toscana displays the elaborate prose style he once characterized as "'unrestrained realism" . This verbosity is often meandering but is summed up by astute observations. A threepage paragraph detailing an aspect of Lucio's life closes with his views on history: "If there are contradictions between two history books or two holy books, who decides which gets to be called fiction?". ANTHONY FuREY

Shirley Jackson THE LOTTERY AND OTHER STORIES 320pp. Penguin Classics. Paperback, £9.99. 9780141191430

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hirley Jackson's admirers include Joyce Carol Oates and Donna Tartt, two writers who share her sharp prose. This is on display in this collection which bears the title of Jackson's best-known story, first published in 1948. There is a succinct contradiction in almost every phrase, a turn which nags away at the reader; such is her skill, that the careless will come in for a nasty shock. Jackson is adept at creating a sense of the uncanny in conventional situations. A young wife feels " irrevocably connected with something dangerously out of control: her car for instance, on an icy street" , after a mild social embarrassment. The suffocating atmosphere of suburban Cold War America is palpable here; the young wives commit faux pas that in their worlds could prove disastrous. Although her protagonists often seem to be suffering from a serious degree of disassociation, we are made to feel that we too would feel adrift in these restrictive scenarios. In "The Daemon Lover", a young woman seems to conjure a fiance who will

marry her that day but whom she cannot locate; in "Pillar of Salt", a wife finds herself so adrift in New York that she is no longer able to cross a road on her own; and in "Tooth", another young wife is so disorientated by a dental operation that she cannot recognize her own face in a mirror. There is humour , and an appetite for the macabre; dismemberment is a recurring theme, but the violence only becomes explicit in "The Lottery", in which a woman is chosen by lot to be stoned to death. There is nothing gaudy about this; it is simply another warning to us not to sleepwalk through our lives. Jackson said that she hoped "to shock the story ' s readers with a graphic dramatization of the pointless violence and general inhumanity in their own lives" . ALEX PEAKE-ToMKINSON

Storm Jameson LOVE IN WINTER 407pp. Capuchin Classics. £9.99. 978 0 95596 026 0

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torm Jameson's first trilogy was based on her Whitby ship-building family , ruled by Mary Hervey, a Victorian battleaxe possessed of great certainty and power. Her second, Mirror in the Darkness, places Mary ' s stormy granddaughter centre-stage but, as part of the generation who have come through the barbarism of the First World War, the younger Hervey is a more ambivalent figure . With many of the men she encounters - wounded in war and now wary of manhood - she struggles to make sense of her life as a woman and writer. In Love in Winter, the middle part of this later trilogy (Jameson wrote an astonishing forty-five novels), Hervey is in awe of her grandmother, who "would have gone to prison rather than hold her tongue", but tells hersel f that to capture the man she desires, she must be quiet, "hoping that if she kept still he would not notice anything". She is torn between pride in her family's business and the knowledge that its drive to power has led to the disasters of war, imperialism and a humiliated workforce. Love in Winter, like most of Jameson's writing a self-descriptive work, was published in 1935 but looks back to an earlier self in the I 920s. There is a reflexiveness caused by this autobiographical time-lag (complicated further for those who have read her memoir, Journey from the North, or the later novels featuring Hervey), but this is managed without textual irony. Like Jameson, Hervey wants to write unfussy prose, and of the kind Engels prescribed, achieving realism by presenting a world in total. So the novel's large, improbably connected cast links Hervey to bankers, businessmen, politicians, writers, scientists, union representatives and factory workers, as well as to the destitute and children living in rat-infested basements. Even more ambitiously, Jameson extends Engels's "whole picture" to the realm of the individual: Hervey aims to "record every item in the tale of mistakes, joys, cruelties, and simple meannesses that make up our dealings with one another, then to write down the total". And Love in Winter does achieve a global portrait of sorts, one produced by an

TLS JANUARY 29 2010

21 accumulation of information and honesty to the truth of the matter - as far as the narrator can tell it - so there are blind spots, oddnesses, middling feelings , and a sense of life happening rather than narrative racing forward to a predetermined end. KATE WEBB

John Christopher THE DEATH OF GRASS 208pp. Penguin. Paperback, £8.99. 9780141190174 hen John Christopher's The Death of Grass was first published in 1956 it looked as if we would blow ourselves up with nuclear weapons. Now it seems more likely that the environment will wreak revenge for humanity's prolonged abuses, and it is a timely moment for the reissue of a novel of ecological apocalypse. It tells the story of John Custance, a successful London engineer, in the aftermath of a virus that has killed all the world' s grass crops. We first meet him as a child with his brother David, in a remote Cumbrian valley shaped " like a pair of cupped hands". Their grandfather decides that David, the more thoughtful brother, will inherit the family farm. The story then cuts to John as an adult, discussing the virus over a game of bridge in London with his wife and some friends. The Chung-Li virus has emerged in Asia, and millions are starving. The British flatter themselves that in the unlikely event the disease were to make it to Europe, they and the government would handle the situation much better. When the virus does arrive in Britain the country succumbs to a state of desperate panic. London is quarantined, and John just manages to escape from the city with his wife and daughter. They begin a long journey north towards the valley, where David has promised them sanctuary. On the way, they are joined by a small band including the enigmatic Pirrie, a gun-trader. Order breaks down almost instantly, and they take to robbery and murder in order to stay alive. It is a taut story whose most effective aspect is sticking to the experience of a small group of people, and showing the speed at which society can fragment in a crisis. The imaginative leaps are kept in the background: the horrors of this nightmarish scenario at times seem routine, almost mundane. In the introduction to this new edition, Robert Macfarlane identifies its connection with another 1950s classic of British social breakdown: Lord of the Flies. From the other end of the century we might add Cormac McCarthy' sThe Road. John Christopher' s novel bears the company of both.

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22

LITERARY CRITICISM

f the proprietor of a lunatic asylum invites you to invest your entire worldly wealth in a speculative business set up to revolutionize the decorative woodcarving industry, what do you say? Probably not " Yes", unless you happen to be Alfred Tennyson, who comprehensively ruined himself by embracing this proposal from his acquaintance Matthew Alien in 1840. The project had failed by the autumn of 1842, and Tennyson, in his early thirties, was on track to be a glamorous outsider: impoverished, marginal and dissident. The fates conspired to save him from that uncomfortable but fashionable version of the poet's role. Alien died young and, as a consequence, Tennyson got some money back from a life assurance policy. He was also willing to listen when a better doctor, James Gully, told him that his ailments were not a form of congenital insanity but gout brought on by too much smoking and drinking. In 1845, Sir Robert Peel's government awarded him a Civil List pension of £200 a year. In November 1850, he was, rather unexpectedly, made Poet Laureate at the early age of forty-one. Not quite overnight, but with a rapidity that nonetheless surprised many of his friends , Tennyson was transformed from poere maudit to pillar of the Establishment. His reputation has been in trouble ever since, not least because he performed the Laureate's duties so exceptionally well. A mainstream Whig in an era of predominantly Whig administrations, a latitudinarian Anglican who had intelligently registered the more tentative grounds on which the faith could henceforth be held, and a thoughtful imperialist in the Age of Empire, he was ideally placed to speak for England. More importantly even than this, he had forged an appropriate poetic manner for the business of the

I

The stupidest NICHOLAS SHRIMPTON Robert Douglas-Fairhurst and Seamus Perry , editors TENNYSON AMONG THE POETS Bicentenary essays 436pp. Oxford University Press. £50 (US $99). 9780199557134

public sphere: Wordsworthian in its use of the language of ordinary men yet Virgilian in its elevation and dignity. There can be no quarrel about Tennyson's success as Laureate. But what judgement could be made on his other poetry? Had he perhaps dwindled, rather than risen, into his public role? Was it not inevitable that an official function so amply fulfilled would crush the delicate Late Romantic sensibility which had made his early work exciting? Did he have anything to say that was not decorously conventional? As for his style, "Parnassian" was Hopkins 's regretful verdict in 1864, meaning that he had come to operate on a kind of elegant autopilot. At a time when artists were increasingly expected to be rebels, Tennyson did not fit the bill. For the 200th anniversary of Tennyson's birth last year, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst and Seamus Perry have produced a timely reconsideration of his achievement by assembling essays from twenty-three leading authorities on Victorian poetry (though Christopher Ricks's witty contribution is a very brief "Prefatory Note"). The theme is taken from Keats's famou s aspiration to "be among the English Poets after my death". Where does

Tennyson, in a modern estimation, stand among his poetic rather than parliamentary peers? What insights does a comparative inquiry, looking both back and forwards, yield? A useful place to start is Samantha Matthews 's essay "After Tennyson: The presence of the poet, 1892-1918", indispensable for its careful mapping of the process by which this once-great reputation declined. Essays by Angela Leighton, Helen Small, John Morton, John Fuller and Seamus Perry extend this account into the responses made to Tennyson by Virginia Woolf, Thomas Hardy, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden and John Betjeman. On the surface at least, those writers tended to be hostile or mocking, sometimes violently so: Hardy 's poem "A n Ancient to Ancients" ("The bower we shrined to Tennyson, Gentlemen, / Is roofwrecked") and Auden's claim that Tennyson "had the finest ear, perhaps, of any English poet; he was also undoubtedly the stupidest" are perhaps the most conspicuous monuments to this phase of rejection. At a deeper level , as these essays show, Tennyson held his place in the imaginative and technical procedures of twentieth-century writers. Helen Small transcribes Hardy's marginal annotations to his copy of In Memoriam, and suggests that in Poems of 1912- 1913 he admits as well as resists the influence of Tennysonian elegy. Fuller argues that Auden needed Tennyson as a counter-balance to the influence of Yeats, and perceptively points out that he " learned something about the piled-up sentence and the hyphenated or condensed epithet" from his supposedly stupid

predecessor. Perry engagingly describes Betjeman's role in the rediscovery of Tennyson, with its passage from affectionate parody ("camp" might have been a useful word here) to jovial admiration. These accounts of Tennyson' s influence on later writers are sure-footed and convincing. Repositioning him among the poets who are his own predecessors or contemporaries is a trickier business, and not always carried out with complete success. Aidan Day and Matthew Bevis make brave but ultimately doomed attempts to suggest that he was grotesque (like Browning) and comic (like Carroll). Other writers risk inclusion in Tennyson's dismissive category of " lice in the locks of literature" by continuing the sourcehunting of Churton Coli ins. This process is, without exception, subtly and ingeniously handled, and is never intended to damn the poet as a mere imitator. But it has a tendency to produce essays which have more interesting things to say about the predecessors from whom Tennyson was borrowing, or the contemporaries with whom he was competing, than about Tennyson himself. Daniel Karlin's valuable essay "Tennyson, Browning, Virgil" ingeniously combines the two inquiries. Though it has some fresh and interesting things to say about Tennyson's relationship to the poet he salutes (in the words of Dante's Sordello) as "Mantovano", it is the vivid account of Browning's uncharacteristic venture into Virgilian territory, "Pan and Luna", that is most striking. This volume brings the comparative study of Tennyson and other (chiefly English) poets up to date, for the most part in scholarly rather than evaluative ways. Tennyson has been well served: these are substantial and perceptive essays. But his status in the English Pantheon remains, as perhaps it must, undecided for the present.

----------------------------------------------------~.-----------------------------------------------------

n August 8, 1653, John Milton translated Psalm 2 in the form of a Dantean terzetto. In the English poet' s translation , the Psalm begins as follows:

O

Why do the Gentiles tumult, and the nations Muse a vain thing, the kings of the earth up stand With power, and princes in their congregations Lay deep their plots together through each land, Against the Lord, and his Messiah dear Let us break off, say they, by strength of hand Their bonds, and cast from us, no more to

Hope and logic BART VAN ES Phillip J. Donnelly MILTON ' S SCRIPTURAL REASONING Narrative and Protestant tol eration 267pp. Cambridge University Press. £50 (US $90). 9780521 509732

wear,

Their twisted cords: he who in heaven doth dwell Shall laugh, the Lord shall scoff them, then severe Speak to them in his wrath, and in his fell And fierce ire trouble them; but 1 saith he Anointed ha ve my king (though ye rebel) On Sion my holy hill.

There are multiple ways in which these verses would be relevant to Milton. In one sense, the conventional context was that of Old Testament history. The Geneva Bible attributed the psalm to King David and the princes who opposed him were Israel's earthly enemies. At the same time, as the Geneva glosses acknowledge, the anointing of a king was also "applied to Christ in his first coming and manifestation to the world". Yet for Milton in 1653, the psalm also had

personal and political resonance. The princes who " lay deep their plots together through each land" invite connections with the enemies of republican England. In Milton's Scriptural Reasoning, Phillip .I. Donnelly explores the way in which the poet' s works are structured in relation to biblical passages that have several layers of significance. Fragmentary allusions to the second psalm are found throughout Paradise Lost's description of Satan ' s rebellion. In Book Two, Satan complains of God's "iron sceptre" ; in Book Five, the Father "secure / Laugh'st" at the plots of the rebels; later, the angel Abdiel urges Satan to "hasten to appease / The incensed Father, and the incensed Son". These details and others are all taken from Psalm 2. In a sense, Milton's whole depiction of the rebellion in heaven is

an improvised expansion of the second psalm. It is this network of biblical allusion and imaginative reconstruction that forms the basis of what Donnelly calls Milton's "scriptural reasoning". An adequate reader's response thus depends on memory, both of earlier passages of the poem and of its biblical intertext. The relationship between the Bible and the poem is thus reciprocal: "rather than the poem being simply an interpretation of the Psalm, which it is, it also requires itself to be glossed by the Psalm". In all of Milton's great poems, Donnelly argues, we find this complex form of connection with the Bible narrative. This is something more expansive than mere typological correspondence . Readers could be expected to recognize Milton's additions to biblical narrative. They could also see where the poet engaged with existing traditions of religious commentary (for example, allegorical readings) that Milton himself did not endorse. This sense of the Bible as a text to be expanded through logic combined with faith , hope and charity makes for what Donnelly terms "poetic biblicism". Donnelly convincingly connects Milton's works to a Protestant culture that, within certain limits, allowed for "peaceful difference" on theological questions. His analysis

TLS JANUARY 29 2010

is closely supported by reference to the prose, above all Artis Logicae, De Doctrina Christiana and Areopagitica. Milton's position as monist and antitrinitarian is particularly important here. In a particularly dense section of this book, Donnelly distinguishes Milton's idea of reason from that of contemporary thinkers including Machiavelli , Ramus, Descartes, and above all Hobbes. In different ways, he argues, these theorists conceive of reason as a calculative capacity that violently imposes order on to chaos. For Milton, in contrast, human reason enables participation in creation's gratuitous goodness. According to Donnelly's argument, this triumph of reason is written into Milton ' s version of the heavenly conflict, where Christ emerges as the Father "substantially express'd". Inevitably, given the book's ambition, there is room for disagreement. Though Donnelly is a learned commentator, his reading of philosophy and theology can sometimes feel unrooted (there is little precision, for example, on the status of Ramus in the period). Donnelly' s insistence on Milton's investment in "peaceful difference" can also produce arguments that sound like special pleading. In spite of the author's self-awareness on this point, his treatment of gender politics, for example, does make him come across as an awkward apologist. But taken as a whole, Milton 's Scriptural Reasoning is both coherent and innovative.

23

BIBLIOGRAPHY eople born into the world of electronic media, digital nati ves who kno w "text" primarily as a verb, do not write books in defence of the book. Unmoved by its plight and unalarmed by prophecies of its death , they leave it to an older generation to express enthusiasm for the computer age and then launch reactionary jeremiads against it. They pres umabl y do not read such books, either. Thi s one is different, not at all peevish or nostalgic. They should read it and they might, because it addresses some issues that will affect them more than their elders. Besides, they have a choice between paper and digital versions of The Case f or Books. Robert Darnton made his name as a historian of Enlightenment France and a pioneer in the book-history movement in the Englishspeaking world, but he started out as a journalist and has served for decades as an effecti ve mediator between the academy and the general public. He believes in the ideal of a "republic of letters" in the sense of an open forum for debate through reading and writing which, as he reminds us, was a core value of the philosophes and hence also of many of the first leaders of the American Republic. Convincingly bi-technical him self (ambitextual ? ambitextrous?), he has solid credenti als as a champion of new means of communication. "Digitize and democratize" is his rallying cry - but he wants the digitizing process, which he sees as inevitable and desirable, to be open to public scrutiny. The Case fo r Books is a collection of papers publi shed in the past ten years (with one notable exception), mainl y in the New Yo rk Review of Books. The essays have been lightly edited to reduce repetition ; they come with a vestigial bibliography, a hit-or-mi ss index, and hardl y any footnote references for sources . (But then the great god Google is no more helpful about an alleged drawerful of unique copies of ballads at Trinity College Dublin.) The presumed audience is mixed the common reader struggling to come to terms with changes in the book business ; generali sts, which is to say specialists in other areas, who want to catch up with recent developments in book hi story; admini strators in universities and research libraries who might have to make important decisions about their collections; and the digital natives who will have to live with the consequences of those decisions. It is not a work of scholarship, though it refl ects scholarl y values and uses some great scholarly examples; rather, it is a contribution to current public debates . The essays are classified in groups as treating of the Future, Present and Past, in that order so as to use the most urgent, unresolved issues as a springboard for wider investigation. While he acknowledges that the past cannot provide

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answers to question s of the mome nt, Darnton

insists on the value of the perspective that it can offer. There is something for everyone in this book, though it is unlikely that anyone will want everything in it. The first section has a dramatic personal dimension. On taking up a new job as Director of the Harvard University Library in July 2007, Darnton found out that Harvard was in secret talks with Google about its digitization project (Google Book Search), which drew on Harvard's collection s, but which had been challenged by a class-action suit on behalf of authors and publi shers for alleged breach of

Read on H . J. JACKS O N Rob e rt Darnton THE C ASE FOR BOOKS Past, present, and future 256pp. New York: PublicAffairs. $23.95; di stributed in the U K by Perseus. £ 13.99. 978 I 58648 826 0

copyright. Negotiations led eventuall y to the proposed Google Book Settlement, still awaiting approval when thi s collection went to press. Since then, in the face of growing opposition, renewed negotiations led to the Amended Settlement Agreement, the subject of a further NYRB article by Darnton in December 2009. His earlier essays, reprinted here, are still valuable for their expression of basic principles and lucid exposition of complicated as pects of the Agreement that will continue to be relevant as the Agreement goes into effect, such as the provision for copyright holders, the statu s of "orphan" works, and the legal consequences of class action in thi s case. Darnton spells out the ri sks of the de facto monopoly that Google will in the future enjoy over digital versions of books published in most English-speaking countries, risks that ought to worry those who will come to depend on digital books or who believe that the world has changed because publi shing technology has. Many millions of books (the current goal appears to be about 15,000,000, of which about half are already available) might seem to mean all books, or at least books enough, but no serious student of any subject would think so. Google is selective about digitizing; good things, or things that we might find good if we knew about them, will be mi ssed. Mi stakes will happen in the digitizing process. Electronic files are subject to decay and, like microfilm, to displacement by superior technologies. Furthermore, Google has powers to censor the li st (to leave some things out) and opaque algorithms to determine what books and what copies come first to our attention. (The top choice for Johnson 's Lives of the Poets, fo r instance, is a Tauchnitz edition of 1858.) And who knows what the future holds for Google itself? Under the Agreement, if I understand the latest version correctly, works in copyright will be available onl y through subscriptions which will pay royalties to copyright holders, and that is well and good but it means that many desirable books are already not availahle for free. How long will the price re main reasonable; how much of the li st will forever remain free (and ad-free)? The Case fo r Books is not typically alarmist, however. The second section has to do with recent developments in scholarly publishing, particularly Harvard 's open access policy for articles by its faculty and the Gutenberg-e experiment, spearheaded by Darnton when he was president of the American Hi storical Association. It includes an elaborately detailed grant proposal together with a fascinating follow-up report. The idea was to publish a few outstanding di ssertations online

Robert Darnton, Widener Library, Harvard University, November 2008 each year, making sure that they were selected by a competitive process, rewarded with good prize money, and properl y revi sed for internet publication under the guidance of experienced editors. Darnton describes the result as a qualified success, but then his

default attitude is positive. Until the rules were relaxed, there were few applications. (It seems that bright new PhDs were suspicious of this unconventional mode of publication.) The winners did not all meet their deadlines, so fewer books appeared each year than had been projected. There turned out to be hidden costs to e-publishing, though the project seems to have broken even in the end. It seems the academy is not yet ready to go digital - not in thi s way - though surely in the end it must. The fin al section, "Past", includes three review essays that take a long view of the importance of paper, the value of bibliography, and the significance of the commonplace-book mode of reading respecti vely. It ends with Darnton' s classic essay of 1982, "What Is the History of Books?". Thi s is the section that seems least relevant to contemporary concerns, but it is justified by its accessible treatment of arcane topics, by its hi storical perspecti ve, and above all by the sense of interconnectedness that Darnton has always fostered in the realm of book hi story. When scholarly journals rai sed their prices, libraries moved fund s out of their book-acqui sition budgets, university presses slashed production or went out of business, and promi sing scholars unable to get their first books out lost their jobs. None of these di re effects need have happened; if deci sionmakers take a long view, perhaps we will be able to avoid such disasters, or some such di sasters, in the future.

On the Spartacus Road A Spectacular Journey through Ancient Italy In this inspiring and original book, TLS editor Sir Peter Stothard re-traces the journey taken by Spartacus and hi s army of rebels. Stothard takes us on an extraordinary journey on a road that stretches through 2,000 miles of Italian countryside and out into 2,000 years of world history. The result is a book like none other - at once a journalist' s notebook, a classicist' s celebration, a survivor' s record of a near fatal cancer and the history of a unique and brutal war.

'Beautifully written, musing,and far-sighted, it's an astounding success LITERARY REVIEW

To order call 0845 271 2134 quoting KB767 For more books visit timesonline.co.uk/bookshop You can also order by post. Send a cheque or postal order (name and address on the back) in pounds sterling made payable to: TLS Book offe r KB 767. The Times Book shop. PO Box 60 He lston TRI 3 OTP.

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TLS JA NU A R Y 29 2 010

MUSIC

24 eter Kivy may well feel like someone in a shooting arcade, picking off what he sees as the mechanical lame ducks of music aesthetics - the idea that music arouses the emotions, the notion that it represents them - only to have these poor tin creatures pop up again for another round. Antithetical Arts is his sixth book on the nature of music, and to a large degree it extends and expands the argument of his fourth, Music Alone (1990), responding to critics and to others who have kept the ducks up and running. Describing his position as that of the "enhanced formalist", Kivy maintains that absolute music - the kind at issue here, music in the Western tradition that has no verbal content either within it, sung, or outside it, in the form of a narrative programme - is a play of sounds, and that musical experience is the cognition of those sounds and how they play. Some of the sounds may be expressive, but they do not necessarily arouse emotions in the listener (as Kivy points out, someone undergoing the mood swings in a Romantic symphony has "a problem"), nor do they represent the emotions either of the composer or of a persona voicing the music. Expression in music is rather, in an image Kivy borrows from his great formalist predecessor Eduard Hanslick, "as fragrance to flower". It is part of the pleasure of music - a pleasure on which, at the end of this book, Kivy will want to insist, mightily. One might add that it is also part of music ' s form, for the conduct of expressivity through a composition has to be just. But form , too, for Kivy is pleasure. That is part of what it means to be a formalist. Kivy ' s defence of his thesis is clear, resourceful, spirited and entertaining. It is not, however, unassailable. We may, for instance, be reluctant to discard the idea that music can arouse emotion when $0 many people for so long (at least since Plato, Confucius and the author of l Samuel) have been sure that it can. Kivy ' s riposte that people often hold irrational views (he gives the example of astrology) is suspiciously general; one wants a closer examination of why emotional arousal is such a persistent chimera, if chimera it be. Jeanette Bicknell, in her more informal investigation Why Music Moves Us, quotes many accounts from people powerfully affected by music, and though some of these concern music that is outside Kivy's purview, being vocal, and several can be understood as exemplifying a capacity of music he acknowledges, to move us by virtue of its creative genius, others point to immediate stimulus-response effects on the emotions. Perhaps the clearest example comes from Bill Donahue, writing in the Washington Post magazine in 2003, about a moment in the first movement of Mahler's Tenth Symphony:

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A single tone (a trumpet , if I remember it right)

Uncertain notes PAUL GRIFFITHS Peter Kivy ANTITHETICAL ARTS On the ancient quarrel between literature and music

288pp. Oxford University Press. £27.50 (US $55). 9780 19 956280 0 Jeanette Bicknell WHY MUSIC MOVES US

165pp. Palgrave. £ 18.99 (US $37). 9780230 20989 3 gesture at issue (summoned, indeed, by a lone trumpet) comes as a rip not only in the fabric of the piece thus far, but also in the whole language of diatonic harmony within which the music has been coming into being. To recognize it as cataclysmic needs no psychological quirk: only the ability to listen. We cannot imagine it was not meant to arouse an emotion, and "primitive horror" is a fair description of what that emotion was bound to be. One may note, too, that the case answers one of Kivy's objections to the emotional-arousal theory, that music cannot provide an object for an emotion, for in this searing, growing discord, it does just that. Perhaps we can go further and say that the discord is not only the cause of horror but the representation of it, rather as the open mouth in Munch's "The Scream" is both. Appalled by the screamer, we scream; Mahler's trumpet-detonated discord is probably the nearest that music of the period came to the sound emanating from Munch's figure. But who is screaming? Our enquiry may lead us to the persona theory, for which there is support from Bryan Magee on the next page of Bicknell's book. Like Bill Donahue, Magee makes his case with reference to Mahler, whose symphonies leave him with the feeling that he has "shared to the full in the existential depth of a personality, lived a life". This may be the point at which to consider Kivy's separation of absolute music from the rest. In discussing Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony, he asks what difference it would make if Solomon Volkov' s discredited Testimony had been authentic, so that we

knew the composer meant the work to be "about Stalin and the Stalin years", and he briskly concludes we would "have strong reason to re-classify it as a program symphony. It is as simple as that". Is it? Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony is not different in kind from his Fifth and Sixth because it has a declared programme and they do not. Nor is a listener bound to give a programme any weight. Moreover, it is a commonplace that a symphonic poem or ballet score has to stand up "as music" (the "absolute" being understood), irrespective of its subject or scenario. On the other hand, we are free - like Helen in Howards End at a performance of Beethoven's Fifth, "who can see heroes and shipwrecks in the music ' s flood" - to add imagination to cognition, and there may be absolute music which invites that, the symphonies of Mahler being great examples. Perhaps recognizing he is on weak ground, Kivy sets out several arguments against the persona theory, none of them invulnerable. For instance, he makes much of the fact that personae in music lack the individuality and depth of characters in Dickens and Jane Austen - but the comparison is misjudged. The musical persona is not a character in a fiction - rather, it is, ex hypothesi, the mouthpiece of that fiction. If we take the protagonist of Beckett' s Not I as our literary example, we have a character who is very poorly defined by Dickens-Austen criteria but who forces herself on our attention irresistibly. She also more than answers the charge that it is "very odd" for a character to "repeat the same utterances over and over again". Another of Kivy's prejudices about personae is that they would be unlikely to speak with four voices at once, and yet that very difficulty is addressed and surmounted by, say , Beethoven's Grosse Fuge. It would be unwise to press the persona theory too far, of course; as unwise as to insist on emotional arousal in explaining music's hold on us. There are, as Kivy accepts, many ways to listen. There are many sorts of music. Kivy defines his musical province quite clearly: it is the usual Western canon of absolute music, centred on the works of Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven

The Rabbit and the Moon Let me tell you the story of a high, lonely place where sight and sound carry with the pylon that gives its shadow to the hill, and the farm many fields away, and the long straight road.

is added with an endless number of different instruments from the orchestra, not unlike a huge organ where you pull out every organ

stop at random , a dissonance that pierced my very marrow. My brother and 1 reacted the

A bird calls kehaar, kehaar to the moon and trains are falling, falling into the night. The black rabbit waits outside the caravan and come morning, the booted feet of gulls

same [way]: we were both filled with such a primitive horror, almost prehistorical, that

[neither] of us could utter a single word. Kivy ' s response to such statements is that the effects they record are subjective, "due to the psychological quirks of individual listeners", and therefore "artistically irrelevant". But this seems inadequate. The musical

will be telling us to leave, but if we stay, the dogs will lie like rugs at our feet. Somewhere, there are other rabbits, and a river to sail away on. Somewhere, there's a boat.

KIM MOORE

TLS JANUARY 29 2010

and Brahms. Shostakovich is the most recent composer considered, and the only one from outside the Austro-German sphere. Bicknell is a lot more open (though at the cost of critical incisiveness), but her historical reach with regard to Western art music is even more limited, closing at Ravel's Bolero. Neither author ventures a view on music that, having abandoned the harmonic system that held sway in the West from the Renaissance to the early twentieth century, reshapes our listening, perhaps in ways relevant to the canon. It is not only in this neglect that Kivy and Bicknell come together, for all their differences in style and approach. They are both, also, reluctant to leave us without some words on music's moral operation and on its ultimate value. For Bicknell, who fully accepts music' s ability to arouse and represent emotions, music is of moral benefit in educating them. Taking the example of Mozart's G major Violin Concerto, she suggests listeners find that "the successful resolution of sadness which Mozart conveys challenges their own capacity to put aside negative emotion" . Kivy can have no such comfort. All he can say is that, because it enfolds us in the workings of great minds, music is elevating - but only for as long as it lasts. Bicknell also identifies music's value as social, a quality she repeatedly affirms. Music "has very deep roots in our upbringing and socialization, both cognitive and emotional", which is why all kinds of music have "the power to inspire strong emotional responses". Kivy remarks by contrast that music is empty pleasure: "For those who have experienced its ecstatic effects" effects, to be sure, of cognition , not of the trance states Bicknell discusses - "that is all the defence it needs, or can ever have". Even as he writes these words, Kivy feels they are not enough. "Where is the explanation for the power absolute music, in its highest manifestations, has over its devotees?". Perhaps an answer may be found in thinking about what music has the means to represent, if not emotions. Kivy has long been worried that music, uniquely among the fine arts, is left with no representational faculty once emotional or any other kind of narrative content has been ruled out. This is the nub of what makes it, in his view, antithetical to literature. Music can, as Bicknell points out, represent "train whistles, birdsong, babbling brooks perhaps" , and there are examples of all these in the repertory, especially the latter two. But that is about it. Her other instancesWagner's leitmotifs, kinds of rhythm or melodic profile indicating kinds of movement - are not representation but coding, and coding that needs a key. Facing this dearth, Kivy ponders on the edge of calling music a decorative art, and a visit to the Alhambra in Granada persuades him that this would not he a serious demotion: "My own reaction was one of awe, not unlike what I feel in the presence of a great work of absolute music". One wonders if we need go so far. Music has within it immense powers of representation on which neither Kivy nor Bicknell cares to touch, for it can represent - fast or slow, purposeful or aimless, unidirectional or tangled - the flow of time. The great works Kivy admires all concur in representing progress towards achievement, culmination, fullness , wholeness. How could such music not have us in its thrall?

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COMPETITION

TLS Christmas Quiz: Winners and solutions The winner of the TLS Christmas Quiz is Susan Woodman, of Watford. She receives a prize of £50. Runners-up prizes go to Pam Thompson, of Beckenham, and David Harris and Zoe Payne, of Edinburgh. Solution: Prologue i) Solomon Grundy. Nursery Rhyme ii) My grandfather. H. C. Work, "Grandfather' s Clock" iii) Catherine Earnshaw. Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights iv) Aunt Melissa Beall. James Thurber, "The Night the Bed Fell" v) Daisy Goodwill. Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries I a. Mr Bounderby. Charles Dickens, Hard Times b. Parolles. William Shakespeare, All's Well that Ends Well c. The Donkey. G. K. Chesterton d. Christian Cantle. Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native e. Robinson Crusoe. Daniel Defoe 2 a. William Shakespeare, Henry VI/I b. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein c. Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale d. George Orwell, Animal Farm e. Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier 3 a. Alec Waugh, The Loom of Youth b. John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany c. Graham Greene, The Heart of the Matter d. Alan Bennett, Forty Years On e. Paul Scott, The Jewel in the Crown 4 a. David Lodge, Changing Places b. Malcolm Bradbury, The History Man c. Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man d. William Golding, The Paper Men e. Pamela Hansford Johnson, Night and Silence Who is Here? 5 a. Middleton. Angus

Wilson, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes b. Welch. Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim c. Treece. Malcolm Bradbury, Eating People is Wrong d. Pnin. Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin e. de Worms. G. K. Chesterton, The Man who was Thursday 6 a. W. S. Gilbert, "The Modern MajorGeneral" b. G. M. Hopkins, "The Bugler'S First Communion" c. Lord Byron, Don Juan Canto I d. Robert Browning, "A Grammarian's Funeral" e. Ogden Nash, "The Firefl y" 7 a. Olivia. William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night b. Edward Rochester. Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre c. Michael Henchard, Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge d. Holden Caulfield, J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye e. John Worthing. Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest 8 a. Mary Swann. Carol Shields, Mary Swann b. F. X. Enderby. Anthony Burgess, Inside Mr Enderby c. Christabel LaMotte. A. S. Byatt, Possession d. John Shade. Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire e. "Ghurab" (aka Revd Wilfred Gaspilton). H. H. Monro (Saki), "For the Duration of the War" 9 a. Siri Hustvedt, What I Loved b. Paul Auster, The Brooklyn Follies c. Anthony Powell. A Buyer's Market d. Margaret Attwood, Cat 's Eye e. William Boyd, Any Human Heart to a. The minstrel. Sir WaIter Scott, The Lay of the Last Minstrel b. Mary Crawford. Jane Austen, Mansfield Park c. Tess Durberfield. Thomas Hardy, Tess of the

D 'Urbervilles d. "The noble ambition of matrimony". W. M. Thackeray, Vanity Fair e. The narrator' s mother. Edna SI. Vincent Millay, "The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver" II a. Mary Lindley. D. H. Lawrence, "Daughters of the Vicar" b. Fredrick Wentworth. Jane Austen, Persuasion c. Lily Bart to Simon Rosedale. Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth d. Madame Merle to Isabel Archer. Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady e. Ulysses. Alfred, Lord Tennyson 12 a. Miss Huddle. Saki , "The Unrest Cure" b. Mrs Carson. Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton c. Romney. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh d. Charles Wilcox. E. M. Forster, Howards End e. Alexander Pope. Samuel Johnson "Life of Pope" 13 a. Mary Wollstonecraft, Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark b. George Gissing, New Grub Street c. Tobias Smollett. The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom d. Thomas Love Peacock. Crotchet Castle e. John Updike, Gertrude and Claudius 14 a. Vic. Graham Swift, Last Orders b. That of "a substantial cheesemonger". Washington Irving, "Little Britain" c. John Keats, Letter to Taylor and Hessey, May 16, 1817 d. Lucy Snowe, Charlotte Bronte, Villette e. T. S. El iot, The Waste Land 15 a. John Fuller, The Illusionists b. Roger McGough. "Summer with Monika" c. Thomas Hardy, " One We Knew" d. Ter-

ence Rattigan, The Winslow Boy e. Evelyn Waugh, Vile Bodies 16 a. "Commander Hunt". lan McEwan, The Cement Garden b. Jerome K Jerome, Three Men in a Boat c. Mr Rochester. Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre d. Launce. William Shakespeare, Two Gentlemen of Verona e. Mrs Shears. Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the NightTime 17 a. Madame Lebrun. Kate Chopin, The Awakening b. Annette Cosway Mason. Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea c. Miss Rickard ("Mouse"). Angus Wilson, No Laughing Matter d. Silas Wegg to Mr Venus. Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend e. James Elroy Flecker. "The Parrot" 18 a. Samuel Johnson. James Boswell ' s Life, April 17, 1778 b. Samson. John Milton, Samson Agonistes c. Sydenham. C. S. Calverley, "The Palace" d. Mr Salter. Evelyn Waugh, Scoop e. Miss Brill. Katherine Mansfield 19 a. John Milton, Paradise Lost b. Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy c. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, The Devil and the Lady d. George Eliot, Middlemarch e. P. G. Wodehouse, The Code of the Woosters 20 a. General Grego. Aldous Huxley, "The Gioconda Smile" b. Henry Pulling. Graham Greene, Travels with my Aunt c. Prenlice McHoan. lain Banks, The Crow Road d. The narrator in Andrew Young, "Into Hades" e. The choirmaster. Thomas Hardy. "The Choirmaster's Burial"

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TLS JANUARY 29 2010

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French Literature Emile Zola DEAD MEN TELL NO TALES, AND OTHER STORIES Translated by Douglas Parmee Extra material by Larry Duffy 379pp. Oneworld Classics. Paperback, £9.99. 978 I 84749 1299

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lthough Maupassant is the best-remembered French Naturalist author of short stories, this collection of sixteen tales reminds readers of the Rougon-Macquart series that Zola too was drawn to this brief compass, first in short Parisian sketches for the French press, then in stories written between 1875 and 1880 for the Russian periodical Vestnik Evropy, which dominate this collection. Above all, it is hard not to be touched by the title story, given the fact that a fine young Zola scholar, Larry Duffy, completed this revised edition of translations by the late Douglas Parmee, first published in 1969. Appearing in St Petersburg in March 1879 and then in Paris a month later, the Russian translation thereby antedating the French original, it recounts the story of Olivier Becaille who escapes from his coffin, only to see that his "widow" has found happiness with a family friend. Duffy's twelvepage endpiece to the volume offers an empathetic introduction to Zola's life and work, unlike the style coupe which besmirches the micro biographies usually found in such volumes. Parmee (1914-2008) taught in the Cambridge French department from 1946 to 1981 and has left a considerable legacy, in the words of his Times obituary, as "a fine and wideranging translator", indeed perhaps one of the best, anglicizing Laclos, Chamfort, Flaubert, Maupassant, a range of poets, and Henri Michel's The Second World War, which earned him a share of the Scott Moncrieff Prize in 1976. His style was characterized by its "raciness", hence the pre-PC worldliness of the 1969 introduction reproduced here which lauds Zola's "wry playfulness": "the best way of entertaining males and more females than they may perhaps care to admit - is by the slightly scabrous or the quasi-erotically suggestive". Parmee had been an undergraduate in Modern and Medieval Languages at Trinity College between 1933 and 1936, before leaving for the Continent and then ending up at Bletchley Park. When he married for the first time in 1944, as his obituary revealed, "his best man was John Cairncross, later exposed as a Soviet spy and dubbed the Fifth Man by the press". But dead men tell no tales. NICHOLAS WHITE

"Prosthesis Bird" (detail); taken from Speed: Art, 2003-2009 by Julie Speed (188pp. University of Texas Press. $55. 978 0 292 719941)

Cultural History Stephen Martin PENGUIN 198pp. Reaktion. Paperback, £9.99. 978 I 1861893765 n 1898, the research ship Belgica became trapped in the ice around Antarctica. Men on board spied what they believed to be a mission group approaching, and dressed to meet their rescuers. The great polar explorer Roald Amundsen, sent out to greet the group, saw that the figures moving across the ice were penguins. In Penguin, a contribution to Reaktion Books ' prodigious Animal Series, the Antarctic historian Stephen Martin devotes only a few lines to this anecdote. Yet the central point, the mistaking of penguins for humans, echoes a theme Martin takes up throughout the book. The anthropomorphic tendency to see the human in the penguin is fuelled by the penguin's appearance and gait. These flightless birds are famously bipedal , and "with their streamlined shape and flippers they are the most human-like of all birds". Penguins in early accounts were likened to "young children with white bibs" and often made out to be vaudeville characters. Martin weights his book with history. He discusses the early confusion between auks and penguins; possible derivation of the term "penguin" (from the Welsh word for head, pen, and white, gwyn , perhaps, or the Latin word for fat, pinguis); the growing awareness of penguins as Europeans sailed to South America, Australia, Africa and Antarctica; and the horrible and lengthy practice of boiling thousands of penguins down to make

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(and sell) oil. Described, too, is the explosive popularity of the film March of the Penguins, 2005 (the second most-watched documentary ever in the United States) and its ensuing controversy about whether penguins embody traditional family values. The film, Martin writes, "quickly became a modern fable for groups determined to instil a fundamentalist Christian and anti-evolutionary message" into the American culture wars. Unfortunately, natural history gets shorter shrift in the book. The seventeen species of penguins, ranging from the 65-pound Emperor to the little black-and-white Adelie penguin, are each briefly described in an appendix. Reaktion's trademark illustrations add drama and beauty to the book, but fascinating behaviours linked to the birds ' vast social colonies are sparsely described. Given that penguins are not only "symbols of life at the edge of human experience and endeavour" but also intriguing creatures in their own right, more about the birds themselves would have been welcome. BARBARA 1. KING

Music Sarah Hibberd FRENCH GRAND OPERA AND THE HISTORICAL IMAGINA nON 278pp. Cambridge University Press. £55. 978 0 521 88562 I

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pera has arguably never been more dynamic or socially relevant than it was in 1830s and 40s Paris , when fashionable figures such as Giacomo Meyerbeer, Fromental Halevy and Daniel Auber competed to

TLS JANUARY 29 2010

generate thrilling crowd scenes and surprising effects. Their enthusiastic audiences largely but not exclusively aristocratic and haut-bourgeois - were drawn to the theatre in part by the promise of visual spectacle and technical innovation (the use of electric light to evoke the rising sun in Meyerbeer' s Le Prophete in 1849 was much acclaimed), but also, as Sarah Hibberd shows, by the representation of contemporary political debate which the operas offered. Political meaning in grand opera, Hibberd persuasively argues, is more ambiguous and elastic than generally assumed. She reinterprets much-cited works such as Le Prophete - more optimistic in its view of the Revolutionary ideal than its reception suggests - and Auber's La Muette de Portici, famous for its climactic eruption of Vesuvius, and shown here to yield divergent political interpretations in the varying circumstances of the productions in 1828 and 1837. Other operas examined are more obscure: Auber's Gustave Ill, for example, is best known for sharing a story of political assassination with Verdi's Un ballo in maschera, but Hibberd views it as an exemplar of "aestheticising ... as a political act", one whose ball scene, overloaded with contemporary references, challenged the deterministic view of history then in vogue. Juxtaposing grand opera with other influential texts, from Waiter Scott to Jules Michelet, Hibberd claims it as a "space" in which opposing political views, subversive as well as reactionary, could be subtly articulated. Her study arouses some regret at the absence of these operas from the contemporary theatrical repertoire: the rare recent attempts to revive them, such as Covent Garden's production of Meyerbeer' s Les Huguenots in 1991 , have generally been accounted expensive flops. But the neglect also finds its explanation here: by relating the genre so closely to the febrile circumstances of its heyday - "between two Revolutions, when French identity was ... in a state of becoming" - Hibberd unintentionally casts doubt on whether grand opera could ever be made stageworthy for the less politically sensitized audiences of today. MICHAEL DOWNES

History Victor Suthren THE ISLAND OF CANADA How three oceans shaped our nation 384pp. Toronto: Thomas Alien. Paperback, Can$24.95. 978 0 88762 40 I 3

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ictor Suthren's breezy account of the way three oceans shaped Canada punches a hole in the mythology that has grown up around Pierre Rerton's quip, that a Canadian was someone who "knew how to make love in a canoe" . Much blood stained the more than 36,000 miles of Canada' s shores - from the natives, known as skraelings to the Norse, who were killed by Thorvald Eriksson' s men in 1003 according to the sagas, to the thousands who died along the shores of Nova Scotia and Quebec during the first decades of the 1700s, when England and France contested control of New France. The fleet that carried General Wolfe to Quebec consisted of more than 146 ships. The waters of the Great Lakes saw an arms

IN BRIEF race during the War of 1812 and ran red with blood at York (Toronto), Oswego and Sackett's Harbor. Scores, including everyone who joined Sir John Franklin's expedition in 1845, died torturous deaths in the desolate wastes of the Arctic. Thousands who went to sea to fish never returned. Five thousand wrecks lie beneath the Great Lakes. Pirates like Bartholomew Roberts terrorized the east coast. The waters that pour out of Canada's mountains, the Arctic and Great Lakes explain, as has often been noted , how (and why) much of Canada was settled. Suthren shows how voyagers followed the St Lawrence and Ottawa rivers and went even further west to trap beaver. Natural ports became the site of villages, then towns and finally cities, where agricultural products could be shipped, first to France, then England and, today, the world. Suthren also rightly underlines Canada's all-too-often forgotten contribution to holding the line against Hitler's U-boats. Beginning with only a handful of ships in 1939, Canada put to sea hundreds of corvettes, frigates and minesweepers (some of these last clearing the way to the beaches at Normandy) that could not defeat the U-boat menace but, in the dark days of 1940 through 1943, kept it, albeit barely, at bay. Surprisingly, Suthren, who was once director of Canada' s war museum, makes no mention of the Battle of the St Lawrence, the only extended German campaign in North America, during which U-boats sank twenty-four ships, killing 367 men, women and children, most within sight of the shores lapped by one of the three oceans that girdle Canada.

ble phenomena, such as environmental degradation (a Baudrillardian metaphor), medial image overload and the subsequent " vulnerability" of the world to " minor events" . But every loss, for Baudrillard, is a palimpsest, leaving behind an "occult" trace. He compares Lewis Carroll ' s Cheshire Cat, whose "grin still hovers in the air after the rest of him has vanished", to God, dearly departed but for that rictus ghost, "his judgement" . If this essay reads like a potted summary of Baudrillard ' s late oeuvre (and influences) then this does not detract from its ability to stimulate the mind. And if we have to take certain passages with a trace of salt - the sombre invocations ("We must reinvest [disappearance] ... as an immanent dimension"), the aphoristic nonentities ("Things live only on the basis of their disappearance"), the apocalyptic anguish ("Soon there will no longer be any thought-sensitive surface of confrontation") - then this is all in the spirit of philosophic play. Baudrillard imagines "the supreme stage of reality": "a perfectly objective universe" in which "there is no one ... to see it". We must admire here his grasp of irony. "The world no longer has need of us", he speculates. As if it ever had. TOBY LICHTIG

Literary History Melissa Katsoulis TELLING TALES A history of literary hoaxes 328pp. Constable. Paperback, £8.99. 978 I 84901 080 I

NATHAN M. GREENFIELD

Philosophy Jean Baudrillard WHY HASN ' T EVERYTHING ALREADY DISAPPEARED Translated by Chris Turner 71 pp. Seagull Books. £ 11.50 (US $17). 978 I 906497 40 8

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eibniz wondered why it was there in place of nothing. Heidegger lamented that it had been forgotten (he termed the process " Seinsvergessenheit"). And in an essay written two months before his death in March 2007, Jean Baudrillard questioned what it was still doing there at all. " Why Hasn ' t Everything Already Disappeared" has since been turned into a handsomely produced post-structuralist booklet, translated into English by Chris Turner, and bulked out with appropriately disquieting photographs by Alain Willaume, including a selection of partially masked figures, obscured by railings, a visor, a superimposed forest, as well as scenes of industrial detritus. The effect is one of ohscurity, in all its senses; of reduction , of abstract disappearance caught in the act. Humans, avers Baudrillard, have invented an "art of disappearance" . By this, he means that the " real" has been shrouded, blotted, vanished by our inexorable pursuit of knowledge. Juggling binaries with characteristic elan, he finds that by understanding and transforming the world, we simultaneously take " leave of it": "the real world begins, paradoxically, to disappear at the very same time as it begins to exist". To "analyse", he reminds us, " means literally ' to dissolve"'. Other disappearances owe their existence to more tang i-

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elissa Katsoulis notes in her introduction that literary hoaxes fall into three categories: the "genuine" or straightforward forgery, intended to mislead without ever being discovered ; the "entrapment hoax" , perpetrated as a practical joke; and the more marginal "mock" hoax (essentially an experiment in literary persona). Leaving theory in the background, Katsoulis then does a breezy job of detailing over fifty literary hoaxes and impersonations from the eighteenth century onwards, pigeonholed into categories such as Religion, Holocaust Memoirs, Native Americans, and Celebrity Testaments, where she places the Hitler Diaries. America has its predictable share of fake misery memoirs, but the surprising revelation of the book is how fertile Australia has been in hoaxing, for reasons which can only be conjectured. Katsoulis points out that the halfdozen Australian hoaxes in the book - from Aboriginal to Ukrainian Nazi - all have an ethnic angle, although this line of argument also leads her to describe the celebrated Ern Malley modernist poetry hoax as "Jew-baiting" by the "Anglo-Saxon fogies" James McAuley and Harold Stewar!. She further claims McAuley and Stewart were motivated by a hatred for the poetry of William Burroughs and the "new Australian poet Kenneth Rexroth"; Rexroth was a San Francisco poet, and any poetry Burroughs was writing in 1943 he was keeping to himself. There is an element of sloppiness in this book, and it appears not to have been edited; an editor might have told Katsoulis what "'enervated" means.

Telling Tales is often entertaining, however, although it is a pity to have no source notes or bibliography in a compendium so obviously cobbled together from other

27

accounts. Particularly entertaining entrapment hoaxes include the Alan Sokal affair and Bevis Hillier's joke at the expense of his literary enemy, and rival Betjeman biographer, A. N. Wilson. After beautifully pastiching a Betjeman love letter ("Tinkerty-tonk my darling. I pray I'll hear from you tomorrow. If I don ' t I'll visit your office in a fake beard"), Hillier then had it "discovered" in France so Wilson could include it in his biography, oblivious to the fact that the initial letters in the main body of the message spelled "A. N. WILSON IS A SHIT" . What japes.

for the first time: the final draft of "Winters in Schruns" and an unfinished sketch entitled "The Pilot Fish and the Rich" . The latter, a painfully raw piece of writing, shows the extent of Hemingway's feelings of guilt about his treatment of Hadley, something the version of 1964 deliberately obscured. Although there can never be a definitive version of A Moveable Feast, this restored edition is perhaps as close as we are likely to get. BRENDAN KING

French Fiction

PHIL BAKER

Pierre Michon LES ONZE 137pp. Lagrasse: Editions Verdier. €14. 9782 86432 552 9

Literature Ernest Hemingway A MOVEABLE FEAST The restored edition Edited by Sean Hemingway 256pp. Scribner. $25. 978 I 41659131 3

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t has long been known that Ernest Hemingway ' s widow, Mary, subjected the manuscript of A Moveable Feast to a number of questionable editorial changes before it was published in 1964, three years after its author's death. However, the decision to publish a "restored" edition of the book has provoked some angry criticism, most notably from Papa' s friend and biographer, A. E. Hotchner, who accused the Hemingway heirs in the New York Times of frivolously tampering with the original work' s integrity. Hotchner's statements about the book were not just misleading, they were demonstrably untrue and it is hard to believe he actually read this edition before he made his complaints. In fact, Hemingway's grandson, Sean, does a commendable job in explaining the raison d 'etre for the restoration, which essentially reproduces the last draft that Hemingway worked on in 1961. This manuscript, now held at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston, lacked only an introduction and a final chapter. The editor's decision to include ten additional "Paris Sketches" in various stages of completion (as well as a number of draft "Fragments") is perhaps more contentious. Although these pieces are separated from the main body of the text, it could be argued that they blur the line between material that should or shouldn ' t be considered part of the book proper, and are more appropriate to a "critical" than a "restored" edition.

While the bulk of the chapters that made up the edition in 1964, with its memorable anecdotes about Ford Madox Ford, Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald, remain relatively unchanged, the whole book has benefited from the editor's decisions, both at the textual level and in the way the individual pieces have heen restored to their proper order. The most significant change is to the piece that served as the final chapter of the original edition, "There is Never Any End to Paris", which contained a somewhat vague allusion to the events surrounding the break-up of Hemingway' s marriage to Hadley. Despite its resounding last line - "But this is how Paris was in the early days when we were very poor and very happy" - it never really made much sense. The restored edition shows why, the whole chapter having been cut and pasted together by Mary Hemingway from two separate pieces, presented here in their original form

TLS JANUARY 29 2010

I

n the "Preface de 1869" to his Histoire de France , Jules Michelet explained that the mission of the historian was to bring back to life the silences of History , and that History engendered him more than he engendered it. This Romantic ideal also defines Pierre Michon ' s work. He has a predilection for relics of the past, archival material and family lore. Michon's most recent book dramatizes the making, the life and the afterlife of a painting by Fran~ois-Elie Corentin, described as the "Tiepolo de la terreur". On display in the Louvre and titled "Les Onze", it represents eleven members of the Comite du Salut Public, with Robespierre conspicuously absent. Michelet, the narrator tells us, saw in it a secular "Last Supper", a celebration of the values of the Enlightenment. Michon begins by depicting Corentin' s childhood in the Limousin. Like him he has had a father who left the family for a failed literary ambition and he has known the delights of exclusive maternal love. And like him, he has been acutely aware of the arbitrariness of birth and class as well as the arbitrariness of artistic inspiration and success. Michon also comes back to his obsessive questionings about the nature of art, its relation to history and religion. What fascinates Michon is that the Revolutionaries depicted are all men of letters. They are the first generation to believe that art and politics, rather than religion, hold out the greatest promise of happiness. "Dieu a change de nid", observes the narrator ironically. Jean-Marie Collot, who commissioned the painting, was a dramatist, actor and translator of Shakespeare, although better known for the massive bloodshed for which he was responsible in Lyon as a member of the Committee of Public Safety. Corentin ' s commission not only entails a portrait of identities in the making; the picture is also the embodiment of fraternity, and therefore a lie. For Michon, politics is an atavistic fight for differentiation and for a role to play. And when these are exhausted, "Ies freres ne trouvaient plus rien it mettre entre eux que le distinguo de la mort". The last chapter stages a coup de theatre: neither the painting nor Corentin ever existed. Both were inspired by a chapter in Michelet's Histoire de la yt'volution franraise , the content of which Michon appears to have invented as well. Blurring fact and fiction in Les Onze, which won the Grand Prix de ]' Academie Fran~aise for 2009, Pierre Michon delivers his very own meditation on how we construct and invent History. HENRIETTE KORTHALS ALTES

28

MEMOIRS

n a wall of the Anglo-American Supply Headquarters in London in 1944 was hung a cautionary copy of the six-line verse, "For Want of a Nail" . In the logistics for D-Day, there must have been a long list of items as tiny as they were potentially crucial. The provision of petrol for the Allied armies after the landings was never in much danger of being overlooked. With about 6,000 vehicles set to disembark over the first twenty-four hours, attaching a crossChannel pipeline to the French shore was obviously going to be vital to the success of the invasion. But securing the pipeline's landing point was a task delegated to a relatively tiny force of Royal Marine commandos. Their mission ran into serious trouble and seemed likely at one point to end in disaster. It was rescued by an act of great courage by one officer and a handful of men. For want of their bravery, the aftermath of the landings might arguably have been a different story. John Forfar's From Gold to Omaha is a slip of a book - lavishly illustrated, but scarcely longer than the potted guide one might buy at the entrance to any of the Second World War museums that dot the Normandy region. But it provides a valuable and moving first-hand account of an episode that has received little or no attention in the blockbuster histories of Operation Overlord published over the years. In 1944, Forfar, at the age of twenty-eight, was the medical officer with 47 Royal Marine Commando.

O

in memoriam

Between beaches DUNCAN CAMPBELL-SMITH John Forfar FROM GOLD TO OMAHA The Battle for Port-en-Bessin, 6- 8 June 1944 95pp. Les Gens du Phare. €15. 9782911924446

This unit, against heavy odds, captured the small harbour town of Port-en-Bessin in the eleven-mile stretch of cliffs that separated the British and American beach fronts. As the first Allied trucks and tanks were rolling onto the beaches, a pipe-laying vessel was already making its way from the Isle of Wight to Port-en-Bessin, designated by Project PLUTO (Pipe-Line Under The Ocean) as the initial petrol port of the campaign. But the town had heavily entrenched German defences. Lessons having been learnt from the disastrous Dieppe Raid of 1942, a frontal assault on the harbour from the sea was ruled out. Instead, 47 RM Commando went ashore early on June 6 with the first of the main British forces. It then struck inland immediately, marched twelve miles to the west and attacked Port-en-Bessin from the south on June 7. By the time the assault was launched, the unit had already lost three of its four wireless sets, much of its ammunition and almost a quarter of the 420 men who had left England. Unknown to its officers, the supposedly empty harbour was occupied by two wellarmed German flak ships. Overlooking the town were headlands to either side, both topped with defensive bunkers and guns trained on the port. An attack up the steep western headland by sixty men drew fire from the flak ships and left half the men dead or seriously wounded. Other setbacks fol-

lowed. By the evening, and now at the end of their third day with virtually no sleep, those still fighting knew the Germans had regained control of the exit road and cut off the town. The men at the first aid post set up by the commando outside the town were busy destroying all their maps and papers in anticipation of being taken prisoner. As Forfar remarks with typical understatement, the tide "was running seriously against the commando" . What turned it was an assault on the other headland. In the dying light of the late evening, one of the commando' s officers, Captain Terence Cousins, led a party of twenty-five men up a zig-zag cliff path towards the German position at the top. Taking just four of them with him, he launched a charge at the bunker. Cousins himself was killed, and the others were badly injured. But this desperate act of courage seems to have so impressed the occupants of the bunker that when the rest of the assault party ran forward and shouted for their surrender, a white flag appeared. As darkness fell, other pockets of German defenders along the cliff-top followed suit. Though outnumbered four to one, the commando fighters cleared the entire headland. This prompted a general collapse in the morale of the port' s defenders. The two flak ships were abandoned - and by dawn on June 8, Port-en-Bessin had been taken. Montgomery turned up there the next day to congratulate its captors. Forfar, who later became a distinguished professor of medicine in Edinburgh, tells his story in the third person, with a modesty that has fallen out of fashion. He must have spent time talking to the French inhabitants of the town after the war, and describes events from their perspective in almost as much detail as the experiences of the fighting men. In both

cases, it is the detail that counts. The book has been produced - by a small publisher in Port-en-Bessin itself - towards the end of its author' s long life, but is far from being an old man's hazy recollection. Forfar evidently noted down everything he saw at the time. This account is able to trace the action almost hour by hour, giving the reader a sense of what happened with an immediacy that only a direct participant could have captured. The horrors of serious injury and the difficulties of tending the wounded are given meticulous attention. The strangeness of being in action behind the front line is also well caught. As they make their way to Porten-Bessin, the commandos pass a French farmer "unconcernedly ploughing a field with two horses and apparently paying little attention to the historic events unfolding around him". Further on they encounter a fat German sergeant, cycling to a village brothel to say his farewells. A striking feature of the account is the tenderness with which it describes the dying moments of other Germans taken by surprise and shot on that extraordinary June morning. One senses their deaths have stayed with the author just as vividly as the sufferings of his own comrades in arms. As for the commandos themselves, they were mostly volunteers in their early twenties. They had been highly trained, but had never been tested in battle. Their self-belief had to overcome the physical advantages enjoyed by German defenders from the same 352 Infantry Division that fought back hard against the Americans at Omaha Beach. That so many of these were induced to surrender at the port was remarkable. No doubt the different circumstances gave smaller groups of men more time to weigh their options. But the collapse of the port's defences must also be a tribute to the determination of its attackers, celebrated now as part of an active campaign within the town to ensure that those who liberated it in 1944 are not forgotten.

ERICH

SEGAL 19J'

LUIU

HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS

A painting by Joseph Gary Sheahan showing the shelling of Omaha Beach by the US Navy on June 6, 1944

TLS JANUARY 29 2010

CLASSIFIED AWARDS & FELLOWSHIPS

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ANNOUNCEMENTS

International Writers Project Fellowship

RUSI

Brown University seeks applications and nominations

www . rus i. org .J

for the 2010 - 2011 International Writers Project Fellowship.

BROWN The Fellowship provides institutional, intellectual and artistic support to writers who face personal danger, oppression, and/or threats to their livelihood in nations throughout the world. Each academic year, the fellowship is granted to one writer who is unable to practice free expression in his or her homeland. Deeply practical in nature and intention, the academicyear fellowship covers the costs of relocation and the writer's living expenses in the V.S., and also provides an office on the campus of Brown University for ten months . IWP founder Robert Coover points out that while the Literary Arts Program at Brown has been providing freedom-ta-write fellowships since 1989 and has a long history of engagement in freedom of expression issues, "not in recent history has the basic principle of free expression been under such worldwide threat as right now, making fellowships like this one a top priority for any writing program or university. Not only does the fellowship provide needed support and sanctuary to an individual wrier, it also signals a commitment to the principle of freedom of expression and, through its association with cultural programs, seeks to heighten awareness of that principle' s vulnerability and the need for international solidarity in its protection." The IWP Fellow for 2009 - 10 will take up residence at Brown once the writer is able to leave a current location. Until that time, the fellow's identity is being kept in confidence. Past IWP Fellows have included Bunnese novelist Thida; Zimbabwean novelist Chenjerai Hove; Iranian novelists Moniro Ravanipour, Shahryar Mandanipour, and Shahrnush Parsipur; and Congolese playwright Pierre Mumbere Mujomba. The IWP Fellowship was established with support from the William H. Donner Foundation and is open to established creative writers (fiction writers, poets, or playwrights) who are persecuted in their home countries or who are actively prevented from pursuing free expression in their literary art. Writers interested in applying for the fellowship should send a case history, providing publishing history and explaining need; a writing sample; and a resume to the Graduate Program in Literary Arts, Box 1923, Brown University, Providence, RI 02912, or they may email materials to [email protected]. Persons wishing to make the IWP aware of a writer in need. or wishing to nominate a candidate. should also contact the program as noted above. The IWP will be accepting applications until February 15, 2010. More information about the Fellowship is available on the Literary Arts Program website, www.brown.edulcw (click on IWP).

THE DUKE OF WESTMINSTER'S MEDAL FOR MILITARY LITERATURE 2010 Created with the support of His Grace, The Duke of Westminster' s Medal for Military Literature has been awarded annually since 1997. The award is given to a book by a living author, regardless of nationality, gender or age, which makes a notable and original contribution to the study of international and national security and defence. The winning author will be presented with the Medal and a cash prize of £1,000 and invited to deliver a lecture on their work to an invited audience of peers at the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies (RUSI). The 2009 Award was presented to Sir Lawrence Freedman for his book: A Choice of Enemies:

America Confronts the Middle East. Nominations for the 2010 award are invited from authors, agents or publishers, as well as members of the Armed Forces or the Institute. If you would like to submit a title for this year's award, please send two copies of the book to Professor Michael Clarke, Director, Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies, Whitehall, London SWIA 2ET by Friday 15 January 2010. For further details and submission forms for the Duke of Westminster Medal for Military Literature, please go to www.rusi.org/westminstermedal

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CULTURAL STUDIES

30

Text from Tracey Telephone: " T here's just so much shit isn't there? With art writing. So much bollocks. People who've swallowed dictionaries. All that crap." Damien Hirst dismisses the practice of criticism in his introduction to these essays by Gordon Burn, although he may be thinking of his recent detractors rather than Vasari and Ruskin. Conversely, he acknowledges his friend Burn as "an artist in his own right .... [He wrote] almost like fucking carving it out of marble". Others agree: Burn, who died last year, won a Whitbread Award for Alma Cogan, a novel based unapologetically on post-war cultural icons. Sex & Violence, Death & Silence collects Burn's "encounters" with the Pop Artists who rose to stardom in the 1960s, and the Young British Artists of the 90s. "Encounters" is Faber's cool coinage for occasional pieces. It seems to imply that all these writings were composed on cigarette paper as the author abandoned parties at dawn. Yet Burn is always erudite, and his prose has a beauty that many of the YBAs deliberately eschew in their work. Burn intended his writing to occupy "the gap between art and life". Because he believed the media presentation of public figures to be a kind of fiction, he had no qualms about using fiction himself. An essay on David Hockney begins as a story set in the artist's li ving room. Burn imagines the curator Henry Geldzahler "sleeping, slumped into the coffee-cream leather settee, his mouth open and his belly rising and falling inside a tasseled and faded extra-large size, grey and green old-time cowboy shirt". Hockney is introduced like a flustered Mrs Dalloway, "pushing a way through the press of people in the market, two awkward brown boxes strung together under his arm, weaving and dodging" a path to his flat, at which point he meets Burn and the fiction becomes an interview . Burn the novelist was intrigued by character and motive, and viewed art obliquely through lifestyle. Hockney's work is portrayed as a domestic mise en abyme: "On the fireplace wall, a large monochrome. print of irises in a slim pewter vase is hanging over a single, flaccid yolk-yellow tulip, propped up in the very same vase". Sir David Webster sat for his portrait in a tubular chair, which Burn spots tucked under a table. Hockney is surrounded by sketches of himself by his contemporaries. Burn's approach insouciantly combines the curiosity of Hello! and The World of Interiors with the pathological probing exemplified by the critic David Sylvester in his interviews with Francis Bacon. An early interview with Gi lbert & George is transcribed as if it were drama, inspired perhaps by a comment from the artists themselves: GEORGE: We would like to do plays. GILBERT: We'd do good ones. Very good ones, I'm sure.

As the long conversation unfolds in an East End room, the scri pt generates a menace reminiscent of Pinter's writing during the same period. The claustrophobia evokes

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the obsessively self-referential nature of the pair's work, without one word from the critic. "I sometimes feel I have nothing to say", Hirst's favourite aphorism goes, "[and] I often want to communicate this." Burn strove to resolve his friend's nihilism in his writing. Realizing that Hirst was "always pushing towards full disclosure", he played an indispensable part in promoting the persona that secured Hirst's success. Surprisingly, the writings on Hirst included here are comparatively lacklustre; anecdotes that originally appeared in print over a period of fifteen years become repetitive collected in fifty pages. There are no reproduced images of YBA installations, perhaps for a similar reason. Who is not familiar with the works summarized here as "the bricks, the bed, the tent, the shark, the blood head, Myra, the cows"? The essays need no illustration. Instead, the images are drawn from Burn's archive: manifestos scribbled on pub menus; a scattering of party invitations; maudlin postcards from health spas. These private artefacts tell the tales behind the tent. Burn also writes about the art world in its wider financial and cultural context. He views the sale of Elton John's collection of "Happy-Happies" at Sotheby's, and stroll s down Cork Street. Prompted by a text message from Tracey Emin, he muses over the ashes of the MOMART warehouse fire, in which many iconic works were incinerated . He compares Francis Bacon to the reality TV show Big Brother. Luc Tuymans's paintings "Child Abuse" and "The Murderer", and Marcus Harvey's "Myra", shown at the Royal Academy's Apocalypse exhibition in 2000, are discussed in the context of the murder of the schoolgirl Sarah Payne. Burn is perturbed by the comparable outrage that the art and the tragedy provoked in the tabloids, and particularly objects to the hypocrisy of the Sun's readers, one of whom threatens to come to the Academy to "stab the first person I see" if "Myra" is not removed. Amid general media scepticism, Burn's commentaries kept the reputation of the YBAs riding high, like the stream of air precariously balancing an inflatable beach ball above upturned knives in Hirst's telling installation, "History of Fame". (It is a pity there is no acknowledgement of where these essays were initially published.) The author quotes Alan Bowness, who believed that "most truly original new art is the result of group activity". Perhaps so. And given that Burn was as much an exemplifier of the High Morbid Manner as the artists he wrote about, it is not surprising that this last collection reads like a riotous wake.

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31

Phil Baker is the author of The Devil Is a Gentleman: The life and times of Dennis Wheatley, published last year, His book Beckett and the Mythology of Psychoanalysis appeared in 1997.

Textual Criticism at the University of Being with Animals: Why we are obsessed Leeds. His books include The Apocryphal with the furry, scaly, feathered creatures who Jesus: Legends of the early Church, 1996, populate our world will be published this and, as co-author, Art and the Christian year, Apocrypha, 200 l. Brendan King has translated several of J.-K. Lucy Beckett's books include In the Light of Bart van Es is a Fellow of St Catherine's Huysmans's novels including La Bas, 2001, Christ: Writings in the Western tradition, College, Oxford. He is the author of Marthe, 2006, and A Rebours, 2008. 2006. Her novel, A Postcard from the Spenser's Forms of History, 2002, and the Volcano , was published last year, editor of A Critical Companion to Spenser August Kleinzahler lives in San Francisco. Studies, 2006. His most recent collection of poems, Jeremy Brown is an Assistant Professor in Sleeping It Off in Rapid City: Poems, new the Department of History, Simon Fraser Anthony Furey is a freelance writer living in and selected, was the recipient of the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Poetry Award. University. He is the co-editor, with Paul Toronto. Pickowics, of Dilemmas of Victory: The A collection of essays, Music I-LXXIV, was early years of the People's Republic of Nathan M. Greenfield's Baptism of Fire: reviewed in the TLS of December 11 , 2009. The Second Battle of Ypres and the forging of China, 2007. Canada, April 1915, appeared in 2007. His Henriette Korthals Altes teaches Modern Nancy Campbell is writer-in-residence at new book, The Damned: The Canadians French Literature at the University of at the Battle of Hong Kong and the POW Oxford. Upernavik Museum, Greenland. Experience, 1941-45, will be published later Duncan Camp bell-Smith is a Senior this year, Toby Lichtig is a freelance writer and editor Research Fellow at the Institute of Historical living in London. Research. He is the author of Follow the Paul Griffiths is the author of A Concise Money: The Audit Commission, public History of Western Music, 2006. His The Patrick McGuinness's collection of poems, money and the management of public Substance of Things Heard: Selected essays, Jilted City, will be published later this year. services (1983-2008), 2008. reviews and occasional pieces appeared the His first novel, The Last Hundred Days, previous year, appears next year. He teaches French at St Ed Cumming is a writer based in London. Anne's College, Oxford. Lisa Hilton is the author of two biographies, Guy Dammann teaches at the Guildhall Athena;s: The real Queen of France, 2002, John Mole wrote the libretto for a School of Music and Drama. He writes on and Mistress Peachum 's Pleasure, 2005. Her community opera, Alban, performed in St music and other subjects for the Guardian, most recent book is Queens Consort, a study Alban's Cathedral last year. His Counting the New Statesman and Economist. Chimes: New and selected poems appeared in of England's medieval queens, 2008. 2004. Michael Downes is Director of Music at the H. J. Jackson teaches English at the University of St Andrews. His first book, a University of Toronto. Her most recent book Kim Moore is a poet and peripatetic music study of the music of Jonathan Harvey, was is Romantic Readers: The evidence of margin- teacher living in Cumbria. published last year, alia, 2005. D. Nurkse's most recent collection of poems A. S. G. Edwards is Professor of Textual Alison Kelly is an academic, writer and is The Border Kingdom, 2008. Studies at De Montfort University. He edited editor based in Oxford, and is the author of the fifteenth volume of English Manuscript Understanding Lorrie Moore, published last Alex Peake-Tomkinson is online editor at Studies 1100-1700, published last year, and year, Portobello Books. his Companion to Middle English Prose will be published in paperback later this year, Barbara J. King is Chancellor Professor of Leo Robson writes regularly on film for the Anthropology at the College of William and TLS and is the lead fiction reviewer of the J. K. Elliott is Professor of New Testament Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. Her book New Statesman.

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The sender of the first correct solution opened on February 19 will receive a cash prize of £40. Entries should be addressed to TLS Crossword 818, Times House, 1 Pennington Street, London E98 I BS.

CROSSWORD

ACROSS 1 Confucius he say he write the Chinese one (10) 6 Final notice (4) 9 Composer awkward as ten in crack unit (5-5) 10 Practitioner holds a right to lrving hero (4) 12 Thrice great Neoplatonist (12) 15 Some of play recreating the past (operates backwards) (9) 17 Pamphlet reportedly followed (5) 18 Curtains raised by him in 1961 (5) 19 Smile Lear contrived in French port (9) 20 Introduction in favour of educational toy followed by fellows accepting negative (12) 24 Seen as pre-Murdoch in the world of communications (4) 25 "Blissful language" is coming back with diagram in remuneration (10) 26 So, big writer seen with new dean (4) 27 A tender Sprite, pace Words worth (10)

818

DOWN 1 Job at Bukowski's office (4) 2 Dwarf the last name of French composer brothers (4) 3 Would Powell's characters ever wear morning or evening dress? (9 , 3) 4 Pal Joey (5) 5 Ellis was one, Felix Krull another (9) 7 Fast be able, perhaps, to produce a tale by La Fontaine (5 , 5) 8 Kind dog for compositor (10) 11 Tip never refused by her (6, 6) 13 Christopher Robin , possibly, or Sebastian Flyte (10) 14 Like the Herald in wartime (10) 16 "The whole baronelage, peerage, - of England" (Thackeray, Vanity Fair) (9) 21 Rousseau on education? or Zola? (5) 22 A boat for Crane, several for Noyes (4) 23 Governess to inspect around river (4)

TLS JANUARY 29 2010

Michael Saler is Professor at the University of California, Davis, where he teaches intellectual history. He is the author of The Avant-Garde in Interwar England, 1999, and co-editor of The Re-Enchantment of the World: Secular magic in a rational age, published last year. Tom Shippey's most recent book is his collection of papers on Tolkien, Roots and Branches, 2007. He is the editor of The Shadow-walkers: Jacob Grimm 's mythology of the monstrous, which won the Mythopoeic Society's award for scholarship in 2008. Nicholas Shrimpton teaches English at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. He published The Whole Music of Passion: New essays on Swinburne in 1993, and is editing the poems of Matthew Arnold. Jeremi Suri is the E. Gordon Fox Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin. His most recent book is Henry Kissinger and the American Century, 2007. He is writing a history of nation-building since the nineteenth century. Kate Webb is a freelance writer living in London. She is writing a book on the impact of film on the literary imagination. Nicholas White is Chairman of the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages in the University of Cambridge. As well as editing After Intimacy: The culture of divorce in the West since 1789, 2007 , he continues to edit Dix-Neuf, the online journal of the Society of Dix-Neuviemistes. Max Winter's book of poems, The Pictures , was published in 2007. Correction: The image by Gerhard Richter accompanying Will Self's Commentary article "The good German" (January 22, piS), is of Onkel Rudi, as referred to in the final paragraph of Selfs piece.

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n a review of two books by William Styron earlier this month (TLS, January 15), it was noted in passing that Styron's second novel, Set This House on Fire, published in the US in 1960, had been censored before release in Britain the following year. This ought to come as no surprise: books such as Tropic of Cancer and Naked Lunch were unpublishable in Britain and the US at the time; but, as the review noted, "the altered text" of Styron's second novel was still the version sold in British bookshops when most forms of censorship had been swept away. The first UK publisher of Set This House on Fire was Hamish Hamilton. When rights in Styron ' s work were sold on, for paperback reissue, the new publisher simply offset the pages from an existing HH copy. The process was repeated over the decades, thus establishing the expurgated Set This House on Fire as the standard English edition. The most recent issue dates from 200 I , part of a uniform paperback set of Styron's work from Vintage, a division of Random House. A curious twist emerged when it was noticed that the Vintage edition evidently has been reset. B ut when we asked Random House publisher Dan Franklin about it, he made the sensible observation: "Reset from what? Possibly from the corrupt Hamish Hamilton text". Without rigorous scrutiny of the Hamilton, Vintage and Knopf editions, side by side, the case would be hard to solve. However, Styron ' s biographer and bibliographer James L. W. West has sent us a list of

Y Oll dirty dog the alterations - there are about twenty - thus enabling us to ascertain that the 200 I Vintage edition of Set This House on Fire does indeed replicate the expurgated text. To a modern reader, the interventions seem quaint. Styron purposely cast some foul-mouthed characters, and the foulness is intentionally baroque. "The filthy dog!", Cass Kingsolving says. "Mother-defiling jackal!" He then says (in the US edition), " Vigliacco! Masturbator of small children! Putrescent shark!". This was too much for Hamish Hamilton, which shrank the outburst to " Vigliacco! Putrescent shark!". A few pages later, Cass says, "Triple bleeding God! Did you ever drink grain alcohol?". The bleeding God was unprintable, as were "Bleeding Saviour" and "Thrice-punctured Christ". Jamie Hamilton explained to Styron that the problem was obscenity "complicated by a soup~on of blasphemy". According to Mr West, "Hamilton was in a tight spot; this was not long after the Lady

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Ruga Williarns

From regular TLS contributor Hugo Williarns, comes his latest edition of poetry. Summoning the poet's past selves in order of appearance, as in an autobiography, we can admire once more the droll fearlessness and art of candour as practised by Hugo Williarns in this, his tenth collection of poems.

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Chauerley trial, and publishers were still not sure how the courts would interpret things" . Dan Franklin says that, were they to reprint the book now, "we would definitely reset it, if it made commercial sense" .

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rich Segal, who has died aged seventytwo, lived a double literary life. The two personae were introduced to readers of the TLS in consecutive years. In 1969, the paper reviewed Segal's first book, Roman Laughter, a study of the comedies of Plautus. Our critic welcomed the "unscholarly freshness" of its approach, giving as an example the author's claim that the recent film A Funny Thing Happened on the Way 10 the Forum "fuses three Plautus plays into one" ; it was also mentioned that Segal, then teaching Classics at Yale, had a screenwriter' s credit on the Beatles' film Yellow Submarine. A funny thing happened to Erich Segal on his way up the academic ladder. The following year, the TLS reviewed Love Story, Segal's novelization of his own screenplay . Notable for lines such as "Love means never having to say you ' re sorry", it came as a surprise to those expecting a follow-up to his study of Plautus. "We are told [it] has been at the top of the American best-seller list for months", wrote our admirably detached reviewer; "bought, no doubt, by those who enjoy having their heartstrings plucked." British readers were not yet familiar with the "preppie" and the "All-Ivy jock" . It's fair to say that Segal, and the film which featured Ali McGraw and Ryan O' Neal, helped acclimatize them. Segal went on to write several other novels, but at the TLS was known mainly in his academic guise. During the 1980s and 90s he was a regular contributor to our Classics pages. In the issue of April 19, 2002, the paper reviewed his last book, The Death of Comedy, a sequel to the Plautus. It was "thrillingly ambitious", and based on "deep foundations of learning" .

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ird poetry is divided into two kinds. There is the Wordsworthian " 0 blithe new-corner! I have heard, / I hear thee and rejoice" sort. Then there is the Ted Hughes kind, from Crow: Who is stronger than hope? Death. Who is stronger than the will? Death. Stronger than love? Death. Stronger than life? Death.

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Both kinds are represented in The Poetry of Birds, edited by Simon Armitage and Tim Dee. The nature of birds is frequently in the eye of the beholder. Shakespeare referred to the Red Kite, a scavenger, as "detested kite!", but the Welsh poet Gwyneth Lewis loves her local kites and distributes leftovers, as much to console herself as to feed them: "Talon and claw / are tender to me, the craw / much kinder than men" . If true, this may be because Ms Lewis is not a newly hatched chick or a baby rabbit, to which the kite' s talon and claw are equally attracted. In its way, however, Ms Lewis's romanticization is not too far from Shelley ' s address to the Skylark: "Teach me half the gladness / That thy brain must know" ; or Wordsworth ' s to the Cuckoo, "babbling ... Of sunshine and of flowers". The Poetry of Birds contains some lovely poems, including one by Anne Stevenson, which catches the twin pleasures of spotting an unexpected visitor, then consulting the bird manual: "Small bird with green plumage, / yellow 10 green 10 white / on the underparts, yes, a siskin / alive on my own cedar". We also liked the determinedly unanthropomorphic Raymond Carver, inspired by a crow outside his window: . .. not Ted Hughes's crow, or Galway' s crow. Or Frost' s, Pasternak's. or Lorca' s crow. Or one of Homer's crows, stuffed with gore, after the battle. This was just a crow.

The Poetry of Birds is published by Penguin at £25 .

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ast week we reported on the disagreement between Kingsley Amis and the Times journalist Valerie Grove over the use of "curmudgeon". Amis complained that the picture of him in interviews was shaped to fit "all the curmudgeon stuff'. Ms Grove pointed out that "'curmudgeon" meant "skinflint". Amis replied: "I've never heard that". Ms Grove went home and consulted the dictionary: "Curmudgeon: an avaricious churlish fellow; a miser; a niggard ... ". She phoned the obstinate Amis. "I know you ' re wrong", he said. Correspondence on the subject sides with Amis. Robert Fraser of the Open University wonders which dictionary Grove consulted. In her article she says it was the Shorter Oxford, which follows the OED, which in turn follows Dr Johnson, in giving the "avaricious ... miser ... niggard" sense. "Had she dipped into the commonly used New Oxford Dictionary of English (1998)" , says Mr Fraser, " she would have had to cede the palm to Amis, a straightforwardly ' bad-tempered or surly person ' ." David Hawkins of New York tells us that "the fourth edition of Webster's New World College Dictionary gives only one definition, 'a surly, ill-mannered, bad-tempered person'''. Usage is apt to change the meaning of words. It seems this is one. The Valerie Grove/OED meaning now needs the gloss "archaic".

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TLS JANUARY 29 2010

J.C.

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