The Times Literary Supplement January 08, 2010 No 5571

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

" If you think that anyone is mad to believe in anything at all, the people in this book are among the maddest": Wendy Doniger welcomes a new book by William Dalrymple (below), the author of "extraordinary travel books" about India, who this time has written a "glorious mixture of journalism, anthropology, history and history of religions". It shows us, through its stories of the suffering and sacrifice that are still the daily reality of many on the subcontinent, "religion responding to human life at its most extreme, and ugliest". There are those, perhaps especially in England, who are more exercised by the suffering of animals than that of their fellow humans. Andrew Linzey goes a bit further than some in his belief that "animals are protected by principles which have an absolute force" - but does not convince Roger Scruton, who lives on a farm and rides to hounds, and concludes that it is not just "the mouse in my kitchen and the rat in the barn" that need protecting from people, but people themselves: "not least from the prigs and puritans who dislike their way of life".

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LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

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PHILOSOPHY

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Roger Scruton Jennie Erin Smith Barry Dainton

Andrew Linzey Why Animal Suffering Matters Paola Cavalieri The Death of the Animal - A dialogue Robin Le Poidevin The Images of Time - An essay on temporal representation

SCIENCE

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Richard A. Fortey

Andrew Parker The Genesis Enigma - Why the Bible is scientifically accurate

LITERATURE

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Jonathan Keates

Jose Maria E"a de Queiroz The Tragedy of the Street of Flowers. The Mandarin and Other Stories. The City and the Mountains ; Translated by Margaret Jull Costa

HISTORY

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Gabriel Paquette

A. R. Disney A History of Portugal and the Portuguese Empire

BIOGRAPHY

13 Mark Bostridge

Alison Weir The Lady in the Tower - The fall of Anne Boleyn Tracy Borman Elizabeth ' s Women - The hidden story of the Virgin Queen

COMMENTARY

14 David Womersley

Souvenirs of mortal pain - Jonathan Swift and the abbe Guiscard's assassination attempt on Lord Treasurer Harley Freelance TLS March 4, 1988 - To the Caribbean

Wendy Doniger

What are universities for?, Flaubert's Candide, Unfriend, etc

Hugo Williams Then and Now ARTS

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FICTION

19 Ronan McDonald

Adam Mars-Jones Juliet Fleming

Edmund Gordon Chris Moss Jonathan Bate Madeline Clements TRANSLATION & LITERATURE

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Adrian Tahourdin Doireann Lalor Ruth Morse John Taylor

LlTERAR Y CRITICISM & BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Anthony Bale Robert E. Lerner

This month sees the award of seven prizes for literary translation, the art or craft of which "is in good shape", according to our own Adrian Tahourdin: "if as a nation of readers we in Britain remain insular or parochial, there is less excuse for that than ever". In a year dominated by prose and particularly by fiction, one of the prizes goes to Margaret Jull Costa, for her version , made from the Spanish translation, of a novel originally written in Basque. Jonathan Keates also salutes this "inexhaustibly versatile" translator's work - this time, for her versions of novels by the great Portuguese writer Jose Maria E9a de Queiroz. Orhan Pamuk, the Nobel prizewinner and sometime contributor to the TLS, in his new novel (translated by Maureen Freely), reveals the "gilded life of Turkey's Westernized elite" and its segregation from "the impoverished and destitute majority" - whom, presumably, religion waits to embrace.

AJ

William Dalrymple Nine Lives - In search of the sacred in modern India

Patrick Hamilton Rope (Almeida Theatre) A Woman's Wit - Jane Austen's life and legacy (Morgan Library and Museum, New York) Orhan Pamuk The Museum of Innocence; Translated by Maureen Freely Panos Karnezis The Convent Tonino Benacquista Badfellas; Translated by Emily Read Richard Powers Generosity Petra Hulova All This Belongs To Me; Translated by Alex Zucker A turn to prose - Translation Prizes 2009 Ludovico Ariosto Orlando Furioso - A new verse translation ; Translated by David R. Slavitt Charles Perrault The Complete Fairy Tales; Translated by Christopher Betts Jose-Flore Tappy, editor Jaccottet Traducteur D'Ungaretti Correspondance 1946-1970 Philippe Jaccottet A vec Andre Dh6tel. Ce Peu de bruits Alastair Minnis Translations of Authority in Medieval English Literature - Valuing the vernacular Daniel Hobbins Authorship and Publicity Before Print - Jean Gerson and the transformation of late medieval learning

IN BRIEF

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RELIGION

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Bernice Martin

David Hempton Evangelical Disenchantment - Nine portraits of faith and doubt

MEMOIRS

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Peter Parker

Nicholas Haslam Redeeming Features - A memoir

Peter May The Rebel Tours - Cricket's crisis of conscience Sam Willis The Fighting Temeraire Alistair Cooke Alistair Cooke at the Movies Scott C. Lucas "A Mirror for Magistrates" and the Politics of the English Reformation Ernest B. Gilman Plague Writing in Early Modern England Ken Worpole Modern Hospice Design - The architecture of palliative care Jean-Paul Sartre The Last Chance - Roads of Freedom IV ; Translated by Craig Vasey Serge Soupel et ai, editors Adventure - An eighteenth-century idiom: Essays on the daring and the bold as a pre-modern medium

31 NB

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This week's contributors, Crossword

J. C.

Laforgue in London, Robust cliches, Mick Imlah

Cover picture: An Indian folk dancer from Kerala performs the Theyyarn dance © B Mathur/Reuters/Corbis; p2 © Geraint Lewi s/Rex Features; p3 © Kim Kyung-Hoon/Reuters; pS © Steve McCurry/Magnum Photos; pS © Apex News & Pictures; p9 © Marco Secchi/Xianpix; plO © James L. Amo s/Corbi s; pll © Ran Chapple StocklAlamy; pl4 © Mary Evans Picture Library; pl7 © Donald Cooper/Photostage; pl9 © Vlf Andersen/GarnmafCamera Press; p23 © The Bridgeman Art Library; p30 © Richard Young/Rex Features The Times Literary Supplement (ISSN 0307661 , USPS 021-626) is published weekly by The Times Literary Supplement Limited, London UK, and distributed in the USA by OCS America Inc, 49- 27 31st Street, Long Island City, NYIIIOI - 3113. Periodical postage paid at Long Island City NY and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: please send address corrections to TLS, PO Box 3000, Denville, NJ 07834, USA

TLS JANUARY 8 2010

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Balm for the wounds How the poor and the pious of modern India find salvation in 'a great open air lunatic asylum for the divinely mad' anisha Ma Bhairava worships the Goddess and engages in Tantric ceremonies in the cremation grounds at Tarapith, in Bengal. Lal Peri is a devotee of the Sufi saint Lal Shahbaz Qalander. Tashi Passang lives as a Tibetan monk in Dharamsala, in India. Hari Das is possessed nightly by a god during a cycle of theyyam ritual performances every December to February in Kerala. Rani Bai is a sacred prostitute (a devadasi) in a town in northern Karnataka. Kanai is a blind minstrel who sings with the Bauls ("crazies"), an antinomian sect, at Kenduli, in West Bengal. Mataji wanders as a member of a sect of Digambara ("sky-clad", that is, naked) lains at Sravanabelgola. Mohan was a low-caste singer of the epics of the cavalier hero and deity Pabuji in Rajasthan. Srikanda Stpathy is a Brahmin idol-maker in the temple town of Swamimalai in South India. What do these nine people, the subjects of William Dalrymple's Nine Lives, have in common? All are in some ways purveyors of the sacred, but beyond that the patterns blur. They are Hindu, lain, Buddhist, Muslim. Four women, five men. Only one (the idolmaker Srikanda, who serves as a kind of baseline point of contrast for all the others) is a Brahmin. Six of them inherited their jobs, while three of the four women, and one man, chose to renounce conventional life for various extreme forms of religion. What binds them together is the unusual suffering that they have undergone - all but Srikanda, whose chief sorrow is that his son wants to become a computer engineer instead of carrying on the family tradition. (" I do feel there is something special in the blood", he says: "At some level this is not a skill which can be taught.") Dalrymple notes that many of his subjects had been brutally affected "by invasions, by massacres, and by the rise of often violent, political fundamentalist movements: a great many of the lives of the searchers and renouncers I talked to were marked by suffering, exile and frequently , great pain: a large number turned out to be escaping personal, familial or political tragedies" . As one of the devadasis remarked, "If I were to sit under a tree and tell you the sadness we have to suffer, the leaves of that tree would fall like

M

WENDY DONIGER William Dalrymple NINE LIVES In search of th e sacred in modern India 288pp. Bloomsbury. £20. 978 I 4088 0061 4

Finally, "I determined that I would try to eat a Chinese meal in a Chinese restaurant to try to cure myself of this rage". Eventually he found a restaurant run by a Chinese woman whose mother, like his own, had been tortured to death by Mao's soldiers. " After that we both burst into tears and hugged each other. Since then I have been free from my hatred of all things and people Chinese." When he was six months old, Kanai caught smallpox and went blind ; when he was ten his brother was killed in an accident, and when he was eleven, his father died. With such bad

luck in the family , no one wanted to marry Kanai's sister, who hanged herself because, as Kanai recalled, "she must have thought she was too much of a burden on me, and that we could not afford the wedding" (a scene eerily reminiscent of Jude the Obscure, and the hungry children who hang themselves because "we are too menny"). Kanai left the village then and joined the Bauls. Mohan died of advanced leukaemia in Rajasthan, when, because of his poverty, no hospital would treat him or even give him a painkiller. Rani Bai , the devadasi, services eight or ten customers a day. Her parents sold her when she was six; she was deflowered (by the highest bidder) right after her first period; her aunt said, " You should not cry. This is your dharma, your duty, your work. It is inauspicious to cry" . Her daughter died of AIDS, and she herself is now HIV -positive. Her fatherless son accused her: "He said I should not have brought him into the world like this" .

tears" .

Dalrymple reveals these tragedies to us, leaf by leaf: Hari Das, a Dalit (or Untouchable), works as a well-digger (filthy, dangerous, physically gruelling work) and as a prison warder (where the inmates brutalize and occasionally kill the warders); he also suffers , like most Dalits, daily indignities, such as not being allowed to drink water from the wells he digs for other people. Tashi Passang, who fought against the Chinese after they invaded Tibet and killed his mother, hated the invaders so much that for years he couldn ' t bear to eat in Chinese restaurants.

Tokyo 05.01.10 These young Japanese are displaying their writings at the annual new year calligraphy contest in Tokyo. Kakizome (literally, "first writing") is the term for the calligraphy written traditionally on January 2, using ink rubbed with the first water drawn from the well on

New Year's Day. Nowadays children are assigned kakizome as homework for the winter holidays, and more than 3,000 calligraphers, having qualified in country-wide competitions, gather to show their work at the Nippon Budokan on January 5.

TLS JANUARY 8 2010

Lal Peri was driven first out of India into East Pakistan after Hindu-Muslim riots in the late 1960s and then, when Hindu-Muslim tensions and Bihari- Bengali tensions increased there at the creation of Bangladesh in 1971, out of East Pakistan into Sindh. When her father died, her uncle grabbed the land, and her family was penniless. Her best friend , a Hindu, took poison and killed herself because her family would not let her marry the Muslim boy she loved. There were devastating floods. "Things were so bad that we stopped eating fish from the river because there were so many bodies rotting in the water." Her traumatic life left her emotionally raw. She finally took refuge in the shrines of Sindh and struggled to live the life of a Sufi woman in the male-dominated and increasingly Talibanized society of Pakistan. Manisha Ma Bhairavi, dirt poor (her father drank away their money), was beaten by her husband, rejected by her mother-in-law, and lost her home and her three daughters. She left her husband and children to join the Tantrics at Tarapith. Dalrymple vividly evokes the lives of these men and women, with the sharp eye and good writing that we have come to expect of his extraordinary travel books about India, such as City of Djinns and The Age of Kali, and his histories (White Mughals, The Last Mughal). But Nine Lives is different from his other works; it is not so much about places as about the religious lives of people who live in those places, and is a glorious mixture of journalism, anthropology, history, and history of religions, written in prose worthy of a good novel. Each chapter places the biographies in the context of the religious activities and history of the place. For Rani Bai ' s role of temple prostitute, for instance, Dalrymple explains that British reformers in the nineteenth century, and the Hindu reformers who aped them, "have not succeeded in ending the institution, only demeaning and criminalizing it" . Signs are posted: "Dedicating your daughter is uncivilized behaviour" . In the descriptive passages, the book is rather old-fashioned, driven by a taste for the exotic and the picturesque, somewhat reminiscent of the memoirs of Raj adventurers such as William Crooke or Sir Richard Carnac Temple; not since Kipling has anyone evoked village India so movingly. Dalrymple can conjure up a lush or parched landscape with a single sentence: "Kingfishers watch silently from the telegraph wires". "Flotillas of ducks quack and stretch their wings." "Goats picked wearily through dusty stubble." He also has a gift for evoking India through comparison with England: "At times the road seemed to pass through a long dark wooden tunnel , with the roots rising above and to either side of the road, like flying buttresses flanking the long nave of a gothic

TRAVEL & ANTHROPOLOGY

4 cathedral" . "Round his waist was a wide grass busk, as if an Elizabethan couturier had somehow been marooned on some forgotten jungle island and been forced to reproduce the fashions of the Virgin Queen's court from local materials." And he has an ear for vivid phrases from the people he interviews: "At least my mind no longer goes off like a yak that has escaped its herder" . Dalrymple delights in the oft-satirized flowery metaphors that Tantrics use, such as "the full moon at the new moon" (sex with menstruating women), "drinking nectar from the moon" (ingesting a drink compounded of semen, blood and bodily fluids), "close the mouth of the snake and boil the milk of bliss" (make love without ejaculating), and "make the frog dance before the serpent" (I'll leave you to figure that one out for yourselves); they speak of using Tantric sex as a "booster rocket" to drive the mind out of the gravitational pull of everyday life. The contrast between the colourful religious festivals and rituals and the bitterness of individual lives is stark indeed. Has religion been a balm to their wounds, or is it one of the wounds? This is not a question that Dalrymple cares to ask. He is determined to "keep the narrator firmly in the shadows, so bringing the lives of the people I have met to the fore". Very occasionally, he lets us catch a glimpse of him, as when Rani Bai remarks of a client, "He was very hefty, very fat. Much fatter even than you". I wish that the author had stepped out of the shadows a bit

an evening with . ..

ASBYATT Acclaim ed ,U11hor o r The Childre/l 's Book, Possessio/l alld A1Jgels iwd I1Jsects Thursday

14TH JANUARY 2010 6:BO PM Headillg;s Ii'om her book

ANGEL AND JNSECI~" f()llowed by a discussioll. THE SWEDENBOHG SOCIETY 20 BLOOMSBU HY WAY LON DON WCIA 2TH

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more. It is in any case disingenuous of him to think of himself as invisible, as no anthropologist since Malinowski would be so naive as to do; though he never explicitly editorializes, his biases are evident not only in the stories that he chooses to tell, but in the quotations that he chooses to include. If the book leaves the reader with an overwhelming sense of sadness, it is because Dalrymple chose to tell sad stories. As he himself admits in the introduction, he made the decision to root many of the stories "in the darker and less romantic sides of modern Indian life". To some extent, his selections reify the old Orientalist cliche of South Asian renunciation as pessimism, as a flight from life only because the particular life in question is unliveable, rather than because (as the renunciatory religions themselves argue) life itself is inherently tragic. But the people in this book often depict religion as balm rather than wound. The women who left their families and found love and community in these bands of religious ecstatics tell why they renounced their homes. Mataji, who came from a well-to-do and loving Jain family, just happened to meet a holy man one day: "I was very impressed and started thinking. It didn't take long before I decided I wanted to be like him .... I was only sad that I had already wasted so much of my life". Lal Peri "was an illiterate, simple and trusting woman, who saw the divine and miraculous everywhere" ; after her years of oppression and flight, she started to associate with wandering Sufis and began to think that she might become one herself. As for Kanai , the death of his father, brother and sister drove him "mad with grief'. Unable to remain in the village, he remembered a Baul guru whom he had met. There was, moreover, another consideration: "I was always very religious, but it wasn ' t just that: it seemed a practical decision too. A blind man cannot be a farmer, but he can be a singer". Manisha did not want to sleep with her husband; her mother-in-law disliked her and kept saying: "What are you crying for?". When she was forced to move into her husband's bedroom, she was possessed by the Goddess, and had a fit for the first time. For years she kept going into trances; her husband beat her; " It seemed that the more angry and violent my husband became, the more often I went into a state oftrance". She ran away from him and slept in the temple, and from that day, her trances became less frequent. It doesn't take a psychoanalyst to connect the dots here. The positive effects of certain religious traditions are also in evidence. Very poor, and very pious, women see the devadasi system as "providing a way out of poverty while gaining access to the blessings of the gods, the two things that the poor most desperately crave" . Unlike other women , a devadasi can

inherit her father's property. Tashi remarked: "In the monastery I was happier than I had ever been. In my life as a herdsman, I had to worry about the wolves, and my yaks, and to look after my grandparents - life was full of anxieties. But as a monk you only have to practise your prayers and meditation, and to hope and work for Enlightenment". It was in the monastery, too, that Tashi learnt to read the Tibetan alphabet. As for caste, Hari Das claimed that, during the season when the god possessed him in nightly performances, "Though we are all Dalits even the most

bigoted and casteist Namboodiri Brahmins worship us, and queue up to touch our feet". The stories enacted in the theyyam , too, often tell of a member of the lower castes who "transgresses accepted caste restrictions and is unjustly punished with rape (in the case of women) or death (in the case of men, and sometimes women too), and then is deified by the gods aghast at the injustices perpetrated by the Brahmins and other ruling castes". The Brahmins attending the performance are said to be discomforted " and seek to reform their behaviour" . Hari Das admits that after the performance season, for the rest of the year, "no one here would even greet me or invite me to share a cup of tea with them .... They may pay respect to a theyyam artist like me during the theyyam itself, but outside it they are still as casteist as ever". Yet he sees the theyyam as a weapon of resistance against an unjust social system, instilling self-confidence in the younger generation of Dalits and inspiring them to seek an education. One of the unexpected benefits of Tantric religion is its comfortable domesticity. As Dalrymple remarks, "For all the talk of what might elsewhere be considered black magic, in the daylight at least, the cremation ground that surrounded Ma's little hut made an oddly domestic scene an oddly villagey and almost cosy feel". The Goddess receives, in addition to the more usual offerings of coconuts, white silk Benares saris, incense sticks, bananas and bottles of whisky. Sitting around the fire as the corpses burn, people sip tea, play cards and listen to cricket matches on the radio, "as casual, eager, relaxed and at ease as their British equivalents would be on Guy Fawkes night" . Some of them work at oiling the skulls that they use in their rituals and painting them red, to keep them from going mouldy in the monsoon. A Bollywood director, who is the local Bihar Communist MP, comes here with a sacrificial goat when he wants to find out what the election results will be. By the end of the chapter, the reader begins to feel that there is nothing weird at all about drinking warm blood or decorating your home with skulls. Manisha Ma's children became quite used to her trances; "they thought all mothers were like this" . Even after she abandoned them ("I missed my children, of course - the youngest was only four, and none of them were old enough to understand. Often I would weep"), her devotees filled the place in her heart that her children had occupied. Other Tantrics have other problems with their children; one of them refused to cooperate with Dalrymple because his two sons were now opthalmologists in New Jersey. "They had firmly forbidden him from giving any more interviews about what he did in case rumours of the family dahhling in Rlack Magic damaged their profitable East Coast practice." The embourgeoisement of some Tantric orders was in part a survival response to two challenges to Tantra which arose in the nineteenth century: Hindu reformers, many of whom began to appear in Bengal in reaction to British missionaries, attacked not only the devadasis, but also the Tantrics. At the same time, the rise of devotional (bhakti) sects worshipping Krishna and Rama threatened to eclipse Goddess cults and blood sacrifices. The solution, simple but brilliant, was to incorporate bhakti into Tantra. As Manisha

TLS JANUARY 8 2010

Ma put it, "I am beginning to think that Tantra only really works properly when it is coupled with intense devotion, with bhakti . What you need is to find a balance between bhakti and tantra. With the two of them together, with both love and sacrifice, I believe you are on the right path". Dalrymple steps out of the shadows to praise this world. He speaks of " living in a mystical anarchy in a great open air lunatic asylum for the divinely mad" and describes the asylum: There is a palpable sense of community among the vulnerable outcasts, lunatics and misfits who have come to live there, and those who

might be locked up, chained, sedated, hidden, mocked or shunned elsewhere are here vener-

ated and respected as enlightened lunatics full of crazy wisdom. In return they look after one another and appear to tolerate one another' s eccentricities. It is a place where even the most damaged and marginal can find intimacy and community.

And he ends the book with an upbeat passage which could have come straight out of A. A. Milne: "' We have a song about this. You would like to hear it?' 'Very much,' I said". After they have finished their song, Kanai says, " It makes us so happy that we don't remember what sadness is". This is religion with a happy face. But the uglier face of religion, religion as wound rather than balm, is visible too. Other Hindus persecute both the Tantrics and "poor, widowed, and socially marginalized women, who are accused of practicing witchcraft and 'eating the livers ' of villagers, particularly when some calamity befalls a community; indeed they are still occasionally put to death, like the witches of Reformation Europe and North America". Mataji underwent two ceremonies in which the hairs on her head were pulled out one by one, a process that she chose instead of having her head shaved. "The whole ritual took nearly four hours, and was very painful. I tried not to, but I couldn't help crying." Her only friend died of TB and malaria, in great pain. Though the sect are not allowed to use Western medicine, they finally took her to a hospital for an MRI scan, but "One doctor said that if we had come earlier they could have helped, but we had left it much too late" . Lal Peri eventually ran into the Wahhabis, Muslim reformists who opposed the Sufi movement; they blew up the shrines, silenced the music, and persecuted the women , blaming Sufi liberalism on friendly contact with Hindus, which they viewed as pollution. This last factor is the source of the greatest suffering caused by religion: inter-religious hatred. Dalrymple raises, but does not answer, a very good question: "Why does one individual embrace armed resistance as a sacred calling, while another devoutly practices ahimsa, or non-violence?". Tashi is the only one of the Dalrymple Nine who engaged in armed resistance himself, when he fought in the Indian army against the Chinese. He tries hard, but in vain, to justify his actions: "They would make us drink rum and whisky so that we would do these things without hesitation and not worry about the moral consequences of our actions. Every day I saw corpses .... War is far worse than you ever imagine it to be. It is the last thing a Buddhist should be involved in". Communist and Buddhist ideas about Iiber-

TRAVEL & REFERENCE BOOKS ation are rather different; when the Red Colonel told the Tibetans that he had come to liberate them, "the abbot replied that he could not liberate us, as the Lord Buddha had showed us that it was up to each man to liberate himself'. Yet Tashi bends over backwards to justify his violence in religious terms. He notes a number of precedents, great figures, both divine and human, in the Tibetan tradition, who performed "acts of great violence in order to protect Buddhism and defeat its enemies, both human and demonic". A more interesting argument is Tashi's evocation of Buddhist scriptures which say "that in certain circumstances it can be right to kill a person, if your intention is to stop that person from committing a serious sin. You can choose to take upon yourself the bad karma of a violent act in order to save that person from a much worse sin" . Buddhists believe that one person can gi ve another his good karma (or his accumulated merit) or take another's bad karma upon himself. (Some Hindu ascetics in the medieval period worked the system selfishly, in reverse: they went so far as to trick people into treating them unfairly, in order to steal their good karma.) Therefore, by killing people before they can kill you, you are actually doing them a favour: you get the bad marks that will give you a bad rebirth and they go to a better rebirth than they would have had if you had let them kill you. In addition, Tashi says, "I have prayed for the souls of the men I have killed, and asked that they have good rebirth. But still I worry". And with good reason. "If anything I prayed more in the army than I did as a monk", he insists. "But within my heart, I knew I was going against ahimsa." For Tashi, at least, religion was not the

Villagers participating in the Holi Festival, Rajasthan, India, 1996 solution to the problem of violence. But for many of the others, it was. The relationship between Hinduism and Islam in India has long ricocheted between love and extraordinary syncretism on the one hand, and hatred

and terrible violence on the other. Lal Peri , who later suffered from the violence, grew up in a time of peace, when " it seemed as if the Hindus and Muslims were like brothers and sisters. . There was a mosque and a

5 temple not far from each other, and if people wanted something, they would usually go to both". This situation still obtains in parts of India today, despite widespread communal tensions and frequent outbursts of hostility. In particular, peace is preserved in many fringe religious groups, including the Tantric gatherings and Lal Peri's shrine, "where for once you saw religion acting to bring people together, not to divide them ... a balm on South Asia's festering religious wounds. The shrine provided its often damaged and vulnerable devotees shelter and a refuge from the divisions and horrors of the world outside". This aspect of the book gives an answer to Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and those who would condemn all religions for the sake of the fanatical fringe, who assume that anyone who believes in anything theologically heavier than Santa Claus is ajihadist. If you believe that anyone is mad to believe in anything at all, the people in this book are surely among the maddest. But they have found a world of peace and love to live in, and they don't kill anyone. Some are full of joy, though many of them also mention, in passing, their enduring unhappiness, and end up saying, well , life is like that; there is always sadness. Why did these people choose peaceful, if often painful and/or anti-social , ways of life instead of striking back at the society that made them miserable? The writer in the shadows does not ask, but he skilfully points us where he wants us to go. Here is religion at its most extreme, and often ugliest, but also religion responding to human life at its most extreme, and ugliest, and responding in a way that the walking wounded of the material world find healing.

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ose Luis Borges once distinguished between two kinds of anthologies - the encyclopedic and the idiosyncratic. The first kind seeks to represent all varieties of authors, genres and themes; the second to showcase the editor's own prejudices and fancies. Dictionaries are different from anthologies, however; they cannot so obviously display the compiler's interests and predilections. There are thus only two kinds of dictionary - those that are more, and those that are less, comprehensi ve. The new Oxford Dictionary of Hinduism valiantly seeks to do justice to an ancient and complex religious tradition. For the most part, it succeeds very well. With close to a billion adherents, Hinduism is the third most popular religion in the world. Unlike Islam and Christianity, however, it is identified very closely with a particular land mass: the Indian subcontinent. Older than either of the two monotheistic faiths , it also has a far greater diversity of deities , texts, myths and legends. W. J. Johnson displays the cardinal virtues of the dictionary-compiler: clarity and brevity. The entries are crisp and precise; simple without being simplistic, accessible without being condescending. A particular strength of the book is its discussion of philosophical schools (mimamsa , nyaya, etc) and concepts such as dharma and moksha. Much attention is paid to the two great epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. Their narrative structure is elegantly laid out, and the individual entries on the major characters are most helpful. The comparisons to other traditions are

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Older-time religion RAMACHANDRA GUHA W. J. 10hnson A DICTIONARY OF HINDUISM 384pp. Oxford University Press. £30 (US $45). 9780198610250

well judged. Thus Karna, the estranged brother of the Panda vas in the Mahabharata, is indeed "perhaps the character most obviously resembling a Western ' tragic hero"'. (A personal complaint: among the characters in the Ramayana who do not merit an entry is my namesake, the hunter-king Guha.) The dictionary has a whiff of the archaic and the Orientalist in the best (namely preRdward Said) sense. Consider the attention it pays to forms of ritual and worship (including sacrifice): the instruments, symbols and materials used in various prayers and ceremonies are meticulously described. (The entries devoted to agni, fire, and its derivatives are exemplary in this regard.) The book is very good on medieval saints and sects (including Ramanandis and Kabirpanthis), and good also on nineteenth-century reform movements like the Brahmo Samaj and the Arya Samaj. There is some attention to sculpture, but virtually none is paid to music, the best of which, in India as in Europe, has been inspired by religion.

For all its depth and antiquity, the practice and orientation of Hinduism has seen major shifts in our own time. It is here that the Dictionary appears to be on weaker ground. If Hinduism in practice is defined above all by the caste system and its operations, then there is a close link between Hinduism and Indian democracy. It is surprising that the book does not have entries on affirmative action or on caste in elections, or that the entry on Jawaharlal Nehru omits to mention that he oversaw the radical reform of personal laws, so that, for the first time, Hindu women could choose their marriage partners, file for divorce, and inherit a fair share of their father's property. The editor's lack of interest in modern times is also illustrated by the claim that the

more visible when it comes to the twentieth century. How else to explain the omission of C. Rajagopalachari, whose modern renditions of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata have influenced generations of middle-class Hindus; or of M. S. Subbulakshmi, the great classical singer whose renditions of bhajans (devotional songs) made her a household name well beyond her native Tamil Nadu? Another bias, albeit not acknowledged, is in favour of Western scholars and traditions of scholarship. There are far too many entries on nineteenth-century European academics almost anyone who ever held a chair of Sanskrit in a university in Britain or elsewhere in Europe seems to have been a candidate for inclusion. At the same time, among those missing here are Indians who contributed enormously to the modern scholarship on Hinduism, such as the classicists R. Shama Sastry and V. Raghavan, and the anthropologists G. S. Ghurye and N. K. Bose. Also sur-

main challenge to hrahmin supremacy comes

prising is the ahsence of an entry on the Gita

from ksatriya (kings) and warriors. While this may have been true in the past, for some decades now the strongest challenge to priestly hegemony has come from castes ranked very low in the ritual hierarchy. On this theme, while there is an entry on the scholar-lawyer B. R. Ambedkar, who played a major role in drafting the Indian Constitution, other influential critics of the caste system, such as Jotiba Phule, Iyothee Thass and E. V. Ramaswami, go unmentioned. Johnson admits to a possible bias in favour of north India over south India. This, too, is

Press, Gorakhpur, whose editions of Hindu epics and texts are available on railway platforms all over India. In his preface, Johnson takes out an early insurance policy against the carping critic. "Much has been knowingly omitted", he says. Withal, these omissions do diminish the value of what is otherwise an admirable attempt to capture the depth and diversity of Hindu traditions. Since the book is destined to be reprinted at regular intervals, one hopes that the second edition will include relevant new material.

TLS JANUARY 8 2010

6

Marfas's mentor Sir, - Reviewing Your Face Tomorro w 3 by Javier Marfas, Margaret Drabble wonders (November 13) what Sir Peter Russell (191 3-2006), the Oxford scholar whom she call s Marfas's mentor, made of the "fictionalization of his distingui shed career" . I can tell her: he was mildl y amused and, his vanity tickled, did not obj ect. He was far from full y enthusiastic, however, and would have agreed with Drabble that the nove l owed as much if not more to James Bond than to Marcel Prou st. Wheeler, incidentally, the name he is given in the novels, was Sir Peter' s original surname, which he changed to Russell by deed poll , at an early age, so as to qualify for an inheritance from a relative on his mother' s side. Drabble also comments on how unconvincing is the final explanation for Wheeler' s (or Russell ' s) wife' s death. The wife was only Wheeler' s. Russell , who was homosexual , never married. DAN IEL W A ISS BEIN Sara vi 275 I , La Lonj a, Pilar, Buenos Aires.

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Alfred Sir, - Reviewing Bernard Cornwell' s The Burning Land, Joanne Parker writes (J anuary I): "After the publication of G. K. Chesterton 's Ballad of the White Horse (1911), Alfred waited for almost a century for an author to remodel him for modern tastes" . I don't claim to know which modern tastes she has in mind, but fifty years after Chesterton, Alfred Duggan wrote The King of Athelney, history seen through Alfred 's eyes, though written in the third person. The burnt cakes of course are there, though the old woman lets fl y in English prose rather than, as in the original legend, a Latin hexameter. As to Alfred' s "usurpation of the throne", it would appear that Cornwell 's Uhtred is a refu gee from some time much later in the Middle Ages, when a kingdom was expected to descend like a fee, even when the late king's son was a child. That was not the AngloSaxon rule; it was for the witan to choose a successor. Naturall y, a nd rightly, they chose Alfred.

What are universities for? Sir, - A document has come into my possess ion which might be of interest to your readers - an email , in fact, which the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Sussex, Michael Farthing, has sent to all undergraduates, explaining to them his plans for "the development of the University" . These plans consist of the sacking of over 100 staff and the closing down or reduction of a number of "areas" , so that the word "development" is somewhat ironic, but in keeping with the tone of the document, which is couched throughout in the worst bureaucratese. Thus: "OUf aim is to continue to invest in successful areas in the University and grow our income where possible" . As one might imagine, this is not good news fo r those di sciplines which have always been seen as at the heart of the Humanities side of English universities . "In some areas", the VC says , "there are no opportunities for sustainable growth and we need to make targeted reductions in those areas while continuing to develop our Uni versity as a broad and balanced research-intensive institution across the arts and social sciences." It is difficult to see how this last aspiration is to be met when it is followed by this: "In a number of schools we are now seeking financial savings, including Engineering and des ign; English; History, Art Hi story and

translated it into Engli sh, the better to savour its artful beauties" . The only evidence which I have been able to find for this is a letter written by Flaubert to Loui s de Cormenin of June 7, 1844: "I have read Candide twenty times over, I've translated it into Engli sh ... " . This one sentence has been rehearsed, augmented and elaborated by various critics and biographers, but has anyone found the manuscript? I'm intrigued, and I'd like to read it. C HA RL ES LO C K

Flaubert's Candide Sir, - David Coward' s celebratory essay on Candide (October 23) includes thi s sentence: "Flaubert read [Candide] a hundred times and

postmodernism and heritage culture, and I tried to call a halt. Modernism, to which I still subscribed, was, I felt, interested in the present and the future, not in the feti shization of the past. M y historian friend the late Raphael Samuel upbraided me, pointing out that to get history into the pages of the paper was worthwhile, whatever the excuse.

GA BRIEL JOSIPOVICI 60 Prince Edward ' s Road, Lewes.

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

Vita Sackville-West

of Copenhagen, Denmark.

Sir, - May I pull a weed from Robert lrwin ' s otherwise excellent short review of Vita Sackville-West's Twelve Days in Persia (January I)? It wasn' t Vita, but her husband Harold Nicolson who was "the designer of the gardens at Sissinghurst" (see Jane Brown' s Sissinghurst: Portrait of a garden, 1990). Brown also reminds us that Albert Powys (a lesser-known Powys brother, then Secretary to the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings) also had a hand in the creation of the garden. In today ' s

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Sir, - It is suggested (NB, January I) that newspapers like to encourage writers to take note of anniversaries when considering possible articles, yet this was not always so. When I was features editor of the Guardian in the 1980s, I found that this hitherto unfamiliar and unsavoury practice was creeping in. I perceived it to be a symptom of

parlance, Vita was a "plantswoman" - albeit one of outstanding gifts. lrwin is therefore spot-on when he says "it is not surprising that there is a great deal about flowers and plant-collecting in her [Persian] narrative" . DA VID WHEEL ER Hortus, Brya n' s Ground, Presteigne, Powys.

RIC HA RD GOTT 88 Ledbury Road, London W I I .

De partme nt of En gli sh, Ge rma ni c and Romance Studies, Uni versity

Anniversaries --------~-------

Philosophy; Informatics; and Life Sciences". By contrast, predictably: "In academic school s with recent growth and good prospects for the future, we are pressing ahead with our growth and development plans, including the school s of Business, Management and Economics; Global Studies; and Media, Film and Music". Though he insists that "staff affected by the changes will receive our support and help", none of the people so affected that I have talked to has received any such thing, and, indeed, it is difficult to see what form such support and help might take. The VC also insists, in his execrable Engli sh, that he is committed to "maintaining excellence in the student experience", promising that "we will support your teaching, and we are not proposing to reduce contact hours" - presumably he will achieve this by working the remain-

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

LEO FRANC HOL FORDSTREV ENS 67 St Bernard 's Road , Oxford .

letters @the-t1s.co.uk

ing faculty even harder. " We will continue to invest in improving the student experience at Su ssex", he concludes. "One of our absolute priorities through this difficult process is our commitment to students and to the quality of the education and student experience we provide." Clearly, this uni versity at any rate is being treated strictly as a bu siness, with the least profitable branches closed and the most profitable ones developed. No doubt, in the light of the proposed changes to research funding criteria (see Stefan Collini , "Impact on humanities" , November 13, 2009) and the cuts recentl y announced by Lord Mandelson, vice-chancellors around the country are doing exactly what Farthing is doing. The question thi s raises is: Are uni versities really businesses? And if not, what are they? Are they to become forcing houses for the immediate economic development of the country and nothing else (ie, are Business and Media studies to replace Engineering, Engli sh, History and Philosophy)? If that is what the country wants, so be it. But we should be clear that it means the end of universities as they have been known in the West since the Middle Ages .

TLS J A NUA R Y 8 2010

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Old Mrs Lazibones Sir, - Gerda Mayer wants to know how she can reclaim her poem, "Old Mrs Lazibones", from anonymous publicatio n on the interne t (Letters, December 4). I'm no expert in these matters, but I think that, at least in connection with US internet sites, she should investigate the use of takedown notices under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Perhaps the Society of Authors or some such body would help her in that investigation.

Hawkins Sir, - In his review of 0 M Brack' s "well-annotated" edition of John Hawkins' s The Life of Samuel l ohnson LLD, Henry Power writes that Hawkins' s Life "is now available for the first time since 1787" (December 18 & 25). But Macmillan republished Hawkins' s Life in 1961 , edited by Bertram H. Davi s. Only if Power intended to qualify his statement by alluding to an unabridged edition (the 1961 edition is abridged to 277 pages) and a well-annotated edition (the 1961 edition has only a twenty-one-page introduction and sixty-three pages of notes and index) is hi s comment accurate. GORDO N HAG EN 13002B Mink Fa rm Road , Thurm ont, Maryland 2 I 788. ------~,---

Regimes Sir, - Though Oliver Dennis may draw the inference if he likes (in hi s review of The Revolt of the Pendulum: Essays 2005- 2008, December 18 & 25), the attentive reader will not find, anywhere in my work, the least implication that the democratic regimes do not occasionally, or even frequently, lie, cheat, steal and inflict suffering. But my point, often made, is that undemocratic regimes do those things all the time. C LIV E JA M ES

13 Park Parade, Cambridge. ------~,--­

Unfriend Sir, - We read with great interest J. c. 's report on the Oxford Word of the Year, "unfriend" (NB , January I). We were intrigued at his example of a modern use of the word "monster" as a verb. We quote: "X' s blog was monstered by Y" . J. C. admits the use is not in Chambers, but claims it " is current among the Facebook generation" . Urban Dictionary (in our experience the preferred reference of the Facebook generation) gi ves three meanings to the verb "to monster" . The first two refer to heavy consumption of alcohol and/or drugs. The third refers to winning a game by a wide margin. Using the search term "monstered" in Google gave a number of results to support these definitions. We could not find any reference that fitted the example J. C. provided. Is this a case of the NB being monstered?

LES LI E KATZ

A DAM SC HULZ LEO SC HULZ

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PHILOSOPHY

7

A friend to animals but no friend to men ndrew Linzey is a theologian and an Anglican priest, who campaigns widely for laws which will, in his view, offer increased protection to both wild and domesticated animals. He directs a "Centre for Animal Ethics" which he has established in Oxford, and has been a staunch opponent of fur-farming , seal-hunting and hunting with hounds - all three of which activities are considered at length in this book, in which he argues for moral and legal reforms that will answer to long-neglected human duties. Linzey does not really tell us why animal suffering matters; nor does he need to - it matters because it is suffering. Linzey's argument is really directed to the question how animal suffering matters to us, and how a concern for animal suffering should be built into the moral fabric of human society. He argues persuasively that animals should not be treated as mere instruments for our purposes, and that it is not permissible to impose heavy burdens on animals for some small human gain. He repeatedly emphasizes that the defenceless position of animals in the face of human power and ingenuity is a reason for offering them moral and legal protection, just as we do to children. And the fact that animals are non-rational, without moral feelings or the capacity for self-conscious reflection, is no reason for excluding them from our moral concern but, on the contrary, a reason for including them, since we alone are able to provide for their welfare in an increasingly hostile world. All that is both humane and reasonable, and few people today would disagree with it. Linzey is able to summon theological and scriptural resources - including a hadith of Muhammad, no more obviously bogus than the rest of them - in order to reinforce his view that God has placed animals under our care and protection, and commands us to include them within the life of respect and compassion that it is our duty to establish. But he intends his argument to carry weight for atheists and agnostics as well as for believers, and this is where a little philosophy is needed, if he is to convince those not already persuaded, or those (a minority, perhaps, but not necessarily an unthinking minority) who consider the fashionable emphasis on the sufferings of animals as an elaborate moral evasion. The problem is that Linzey offers us only a little philosophy, and certainly not enough to justify the far-reaching condemnations which emerge as the goal of his argu-

A

ment.

Unlike Peter Singer, whose Anima l Liheration (I975) initiated the "animalist" agenda, Linzey is not a utilitarian. He does not think that moral questions can be settled by costbenefit calculation. Nor does he think that it is open to us to engage in those thought experiments for which Singer is notorious and which have been held to justify murder in all its more well-meaning and public-spirited forms, such as abortion , euthanasia, infanticide, eugenic cleansing, and the liquidation of inconvenient minorities. For Linzey there are moral absolutes which cannot be qualified by calculation, and it is not only humans

ROGER SCRUTON Andrew Linzey WHY ANIMAL SUFFERING MATTERS 416pp. Oxford University Press. £16.99 (US $29.95). 9780 19537977 8

that are the beneficiaries: animals, too, are protected by principles which have an absolute force, and which cannot be set aside by the benefits of flouting them. But whence comes this absolute force? Linzey does not tell us. Like Singer, he has no clear metaphysical position concerning the nature of human beings and the distinction between moral agents and others. For Aristotle, Aquinas, Kant and the other great philosophers of ethics, this distinction is not only absolute but foundational to our understanding of the moral life. If you say nothing about it, and give no indication what it means to us humans, that we alone in the world are beset by moral burdens, that we alone are free, responsible and accountable, that we alone are sovereign over our lives and bound by obligations, then you are not likely to say anything plausible about the grounds of moral judgement, or about the absolute principles that govern us. Still less are you likely to cast any light on our relation to the animals, who cannot reciprocate our moral concern, who have no conception of the injustice of their sufferings and who make no claims of their own. Many, if not all, of the absolutes that order the moral life of ordinary people stem from their recognition that human beings are special. There are things you cannot do to people without committing a crime that must be atoned for. You cannot punish someone for an act that he did not commit, whatever beneficial effects might result from doing so. You cannot steal, rape, or murder; you cannot trap someone into fulfilling your designs or fraudulently use him to your own advantage. You cannot keep someone captive, train him by stick and carrot to do your will, or put him out of his misery when his sufferings have become a problem. There is, around each person, a wall that cannot be transgressed, and the foundation of that wall is the real topic of moral philosophy. Is there such a wall around each individual animal , including the mouse in my kitchen and the rat in the barn? Linzey assumes as much; but he gives no argument to prove it, since he ignores most if not all that philosophers have said concerning the concept of the person. Nevertheless, Linzey is prepared to enunciate two absolute principles which should govern our dealings with animals. The first is that it is wrong to inflict suffering on an animal unless for its own good. Linzey is clear that such a principle involves extending to animals the respect for the individual that we owe to our fellow humans. Hence he is dismissive of those conservationists who believe that it is right to kill individual animals for the sake of the habitat that is needed by the species, or to control one species (the grey squirrel, for instance) for the

sake of another (the red squirrel). The principle has other and yet more challenging consequences. Killing animals for food is ruled out, unless the killing can be effected entirely without pain, fear and distress. For Linzey it is not just halal butchery that is forbidden , but butchery of just about every kind. It becomes obligatory to be a vegetarian. At a certain point Linzey seems to accept this conclusion; but he is careful not to announce it when putting his principle forward. Equally counter-intuitive, it seems to me, is the consequence that it is morally wrong to control pests if our doing so causes them to suffer. I live on a farm which is plagued by rats, mice and feral cats. But I am obliged, according to Linzey's principle, to adopt an attitude of laissez-faire, since there is no way of killing any of these creatures that will guarantee a painless death. Exactly how I am to respect our rats as individuals is another question. I value their presence in the fields , since they provide food for other and more beautiful species - foxes , badgers, buzzards and hawks. But their presence in our out-buildings means stolen eggs, polluted horse feed , and a general risk of disease which I am surely under an obligation to eliminate. More plausible is Linzey's second principle, which holds that " it is intrinsically wrong

to cause suffering for the purposes of amusement, recreation or in the name of sport", a principle which, he believes, is the real ground for condemning hunting. This principle is more plausible precisely because it does not focus on the animal, and what supposedly cannot be done to it, but on the human being, and the state of mind from which he acts. In other words, it does not involve extending to animals the privileges and protections that are the gift of moral agency. The principle is rooted in a conception of human vice - the vice of enjoying suffering for its own sake. But the phrase "for the purposes of' is not clearly defined. We all of us make a distinction between an activity that someone enjoys (horse racing, for example) which has animal suffering as an unwanted side effect, and an activity in which it is precisely the suffering or the spectacle of suffering - that is enjoyed. Linzey ' s language elides these two things, and so gives him an easy route to accusation. Anglers enjoy catching fish; but they don't enjoy the suffering that they cause, and a good fisherman strives to minimize that suffering and to extract the hook kindly when the fish is landed. Surely there is all the difference in the world between such a fisherman and the hooligan who takes fish from the

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8 water in order to pierce them with barbs and to shriek with delight at their misery. The first is enjoying the sport, the second is enjoying the pain. There are other relevant distinctions too. You may be engaged in an activity that directly causes suffering to an animal - as when you beat a recalcitrant horse or shoot a dangerous bear. Or you may be engaged in an activity that does not directly cause suffering, but which nevertheless has suffering as a foreseeable by-product - as when you keep a domestic cat, which is very likely to kill mice and birds in the lingering way that cats on the whole prefer. You might say that, in both cases, a human is responsible for animal suffering. But it is another question whether this responsibility imputes any measure of moral guilt. Whether fox-hunters are to be condemned for sins that cat-keepers somehow avoid is a matter that is in no way settled by Linzey ' s arguments, which remain at such a shallow level that one can only bridle at the self-righteous judgements he heaps on those, like myself, whose way of life he abhors. For Linzey, followers of foxhounds are "animal abusers", comparable to those who torture cats and dogs for their amusement and who according to research that he cites without question - are predisposed to become violent criminals when they turn their attention to their fellow humans. I conclude from this that Linzey may be a humane observer of animals, but he is no charitable observer of people. Maybe he cannot bring himself to attend a meet of foxhounds; but he could at

PHILOSOPHY

The Silverton hunt, Devonshire, 2000 least have consulted the literature, from Plato and Xenophon to Turgenev, Sassoon, Masefield and Ortega y Gasset, devoted to the place of hunting in a virtuous life. Perhaps the most disturbing feature of Linzey's position is his endorsement of the

British government' s argument for the ban on fur-farming. This ban was justified on the grounds that the rearing of captive animals for a " luxury" product is an offence against "public morality". It is true that the law must, at some level, respond to genuine moral con-

cerns, and cannot be simply out of line with the ordinary conscience. But what exactly is public morality, and who is to define it? What happened to Mill's famous argument in On Liberty that the coercion of the criminal law can be justified only in order to prevent us from harming others, and never in order to force our compliance to a moral code? What happened to the Wolfenden Report, disapproving the judgment, in DPP v. Shaw, which held that it is a crime to offend "public morals"? What happened to the argument for the decriminalization of homosexuality, despite widespread moral disapproval? What happened to the sovereignty of the individual, which British law has, over the centuries, striven to define and protect, and which Linzey is covertly relying on in urging us to treat animals as individuals, entitled to a life and and fulfilment of their own? And why is it so sinful to breed animals for their outer layers, and not for the stuff inside? The MP who introduced the Bill to ban fur-farming often wears woollen cardigans and leather shoes. But this, it seems, is an offence only against the private morality of those who stick to animal-friendly but environmentally destructive materials such as nylon and plastic. The sad thing is that Linzey either doesn ' t see, or doesn ' t care, where the use of this kind of argument is leading. He is right to want to protect animals from people. But people also need to be protected from people, not least from the prigs and puritans who dislike their way of life. The liberal thinking that was until recently enshrined in our law was the most successful means ever devised to achieve this.

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few years ago, the Australian philosopher Peter Singer, reflecting on the thirtieth anniversary of the animal rights movement, lamented that while many of the movement' s practical and legal goals had been achieved, at least in industrialized countries, the public was "still very far from adopting the basic idea that the interests of all beings should be given equal consideration irrespective of their species". The practical gains really have been significant. An American football player, Michael Vick, recently served eighteen months in prison for his involvement in dogfighting, a sport that was still legal in some American states until the mid-1970s. Every hen in the European Union will lay her eggs in more spacious and comfortable confines by 2012 , under penalty of law. More stringent rules govern the use of animals in medical research than thirty years ago, and fur will never be quite fashionable again. Yet while the terms "ageism" and "sexism" are in common use today, their philosophical underpinnings understood and

A

accepted, " speciesism" , a term of the same

vintage, remains more likely to be used mockingly on right-wing radio than seriously in public discourse. Many people are glad to extend de facto rights protection to animals ; few can coherently argue why animals should have a claim to it. Whose fault is this? One might look to the movement' s philosophers, who, in turning the Victorian concept of "animal welfare" into today's "animal rights", placed a heavy intellectual yoke on the public. And lately they have pressed their case in a bizarre, insular manner that seems unlikely to gain them more converts.

A heavy yoke JENNIE ERIN SMITH

Paola Cavalieri THE DEATH OF THE ANIMAL

A dialogue 168pp. Columbia University Press. $19.95; distributed in the UK by Wiley. £13.95. 9780231 145527 The oddity that is Paola Cavalieri ' s The Death of the Animal - a hypothetical dialogue followed by retorts and commentary from other authors - seems to be the continuation of a trend dating back to 1997, when the novelist J. M. Coetzee was invited to lecture on human values at Princeton University. Instead of doing that, Coetzee read from a new work of fiction in which his protagonist, an ageing, highly decorated novelist named Elizabeth Costello, gets invited to speak on human values at the prestigious " Appleton University" , where she surprises and offends by delivering a long lecture on animal rights. Two years later, the text of Coetzee's lectures, or Costello's, emerged as Coetzee's The Lives of Animals, with five more authors contributing material. One of them was Peter Singer, who responded to Coetzee's fiction with his own made-up dialogue about a dog. ''It' s hard to tell whose tongue is in whose cheek", complained a reviewer for Natural History magazine. In The Death of the Animal, the in-joke picks up again. Cavalieri, an Italian philoso-

pher whose standard position demands that the rights we now call "human" be extended to animals , writes the anchor chapter in the form of a terrifically stilted fictional dialogue between Alexandra, an "analytic" philosopher who is presumably a stand-in for herself, and Theo, a "Continental" philosopher, on a Greek beach. Five more animal-rights authors, including Singer and Coetzee, contribute commentary. Coetzee begins his, refreshingly, by ridiculing Cavalieri ' s beach scene with a dialogue of his own: Question: To whom is the lifestyle, and perhaps even the life, of A and T available? Is it available to a horse? Answer: No, not as far as we know. Question: Is it available to human beings to

whom grants to travel to philosophy conferences in the Mediterranean are not an option? Answer: In theory yes but in practice no - it is confined to the upper intelligentsia.

Coet7.ee, here and later in the hook , putS into sharp focus its only interesting question - how, if at all, is this sort of philosophy serving animals? Coetzee argues that philosophy is used to back up the emotions and epiphanies - "ethical impulses", he calls them - that originally lead people to animal rights; it does not generate them. (Better to make the case through Nobel Prize-winning fiction , Coetzee seems to be taunting the less gifted writers in this line-up.) Other contributors claim that they came to their positions strictly through argument, just as many of England's abolitionists came to

TLS JANUARY 8 2010

theirs without first-hand exposure to slaves. Cavalieri says she doesn't have time for epiphanies and thinks reason is enough: her fictional Theo is persuaded by Alexandra that no animal should ever be legally confined or killed, and he goes for a dip in the sea. "The animal question" having been answered to everyone's satisfaction, it is assumed that some transformative magic must occur next. Not all of the book's contributors share this confidence. Peter Singer, who has never shirked the practical work of improving the lives of animals , credits Cavalieri with " a distinct and very lively debate about the nature of philosophy and the role that reason can play in ethics", but not anything that could produce a tangible advance. Another contributor, Cary Wolfe, sees in Cavalieri's approach shades of J acques Derrida, who despised violence towards animals and even the word "animal" , yet nonetheless rejected introducing animal rights protection " into the existing juridical framework" . Derrida, according to Wolfe' s reading, felt that proper contemplation of the "animal question" should itself " impel a radical and fundamental questioning of the existing juridico-political framework" that should not be foreclosed by, say , offering actual protection to actual animals. Too late. The real gains for animals continue, thanks less to overconfident philosophers lazing on beaches than scientific findings that attest constantly to the depth of the animal experience, triggering and validating human emotions or even epiphanies, and in turn changing laws and attitudes. " Speciesism", meanwhile, gets rejected by the spellchecker.

PHILOSOPHY t is arguable that there have been three Copernican revolution s in Western thought - so far. The first needs no introduction: the di scovery that our sun is just an ordinary star, located nowhere very special in a uni verse that is awesomely (frighteningly) vast. The second came with the uncovering and acceptance of "deep time" in the first decades of the nineteenth century, when the geological writings of James Hutton and Charles Lyell undermined the biblicall y inspired chronologies of Archbishop Ussher and others. Rather than be ing just a few millennia old, the Earth, it turns out, has a hi story that stretches back many million s of years (about 4.5 to 5 billion, according to current thinking). The third major decentring came with the Darwinian revolution: the human race, it turns out, is nothing very special at all. While the second revolution might conceivably have occurred without the first, the third almost certainl y required the second: evolution takes time (a lot of it) , and it is not a coincidence that the first volume of Lyell 's Principles was among the books Darwin had with him on the Beagle. As for why the true extent of the past took quite so long to discover, the full story is no doubt a complex one. But it is also true that whereas it is easy to be astoni shed, on looking at an ordinary hunk of rock, to learn that it is millions or billions of years old, no one who has gazed up at a clear night sky will be remotely astoni shed to hear that space is vast. On the cosmic (though not human) scale, size is visible in a way that age is not. While refl ecting on the vastness of deep time is no doubt salutary, there are important - even monumental - questions about the past which neither geology nor history can hope to answer. Establi shing what happened in the past is one thing, but what is the nature of past happenings? Are the inhabitants of the past just as real as anything that exists in the present? This may seem implau sible : it' s not easy to believe the dinosaurs inhabiting the Jurassic are as real as present-day cats and dogs . So should we hold that past things exi st, but in a different way from presently exi sting things? This may sound a good deal better, but it rai ses more questions than it answers. How does the shadowy, intermediate mode of existence enjoyed by the denizens of the past differ from the full-blown sort we enjoy? Are we to suppose past people to be colourless or weightless? Thi s won't do: a colourless glass vase is just as real as a coloured one; mass less particles posited by contemporary physics are not regarded as anything less than fully real. So perhaps we should conclude that past things have no ex istence whatsoever. This may sound a good deal better: it allows for thin gs that are dead and gon e to he rea ll y gone. But this view too gives rise to problems. If the past is wholly unreal , how can there be genuine facts about what it contains? If the past is entire ly lacking in any fo rm of exi stence, it is hard to see how hi sto ry can differ from mere fantasy. While there are those who remain sceptical of deep time - the so-called Young Earth creationists spring to mind - their views are not taken seriou sly by the mainstream scientific community. There is no such consensus about the nature of the past. Establi shing how (or whether) the past differs from the present

I

9

Past, what past? BARR Y DAINTON Robin L e Poidevin THE IMAGES OF TIME An essay on temporal represe ntati on

I92pp. Oxford University Press. £37 (US $65). 978 0 19 9265893 and future is the main task in the metaphysics of time, and there are leading contemporary metaphysicians who have defended each of the conceptions of the past just outlined. For the proponents of the so-called B-theory, there is no ontological difference between what is past, present or future: all events are equall y real, wherever and whenever they occur. For the proponents of Presenti sm much in vogue - reality is confined to the here and now: both past and future are equall y (and complete ly) unreal. Between these extremes are the "Growing Block" theo-

not with temporal metaph ysics, but with what might seem a rather more trivial matter: how time is represented. Several chapters are devoted to some of the ways in which temporality registers in our consciousness - in our memories, in our perceptual experiences of change and duration. More unusually, equal space is devoted to considering how time is represented in fiction and the visual arts. So far as the latter is concerned, hi s starting point is G. E. Lessing ' s di stinction between "arts of time" and "arts of space" . Lessing took painting to be an art of space, and so incapable of directly representing change. This probably wouldn ' t sound plausible to the cartooni st skilled in drawing images of cats chasing mice, and (super)men fl ying through the air. Le Poidevin agrees: drawing on work by contemporary aestheticians, he argues that there is indeed a legitimate sense in which motion and change can be depicted in static images, even though these images do

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The installation "Tide" by Darren Almond, consisting of 567 digital wall clocks; Royal Academy of Arts, London, December 2009 rists, who deny reality to the future but regard the past as real and growing thanks to the continual creation of new presents. There is also th e " Moving Spotli ght" vie w, w hich grants some degree of reality to both the past and the future, but holds that only those events that fall under the steadily advancing beam of the present are full y real. Determining where the truth lies between these competing views is obviously an important task, so it is not surprising to find that most philosophers interested in time devote most of their activities to this central metaphysical issue. Robin Le Poidevin is a well-known temporal metaphysician who, in previous writings, has defended the B-theory. But in The Images of Time, his primary concern is

not suppl y us with sensory impressions of motion. Taken as a whole, Le Poidevin ' s book is an unusual and refreshing addition to the literature. He is to be applauded for demonstrating that the issues temporal metaph ysicians engage with have relevance beyond the confines of temporal metaphysics itself. I found some parts of his discussion more persuasive than others - his case against the specious present struck me as less than conclusive but I want to focu s here on a more central aspect of the book, in which metaphysical questions, although not centre stage, are by no means ignored: Le Poidevin te ll s us that one of hi s main aims is to demonstrate that we can learn something about time

TLS JA NU ARY 8 2010

itself by studying how time is represented. This may seem rather improbable, but there are cases in which , given a particular representation , if we know the mechanism that produced the representation , then we can conclude something about the nature of what is being represented. If I see a car explode on a television screen, and I also know that the television is connected to a live feed from a video camera, I will be justified in concluding that a car has just exploded. Le Poidevin contends that analogous reasoning can be employed to shed light on the nature of time. To illustrate thi s thesis he focu ses on socalled epi sodic memories, and argues that if such memories do what they seem to do provide us with knowledge of our own past experiences, and hence the past itself - then, given some plausible assumptions about how memory works, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the B-theory (all events are equally real, past, present and future) is true. The details of hi s argument are intricate, but the driving idea is straightforward. We all know (roughly) how a digital camera works: light from the chosen scene fall s on a sensor, the resulting information is processed and stored ; later on, the stored data can be used to generate an image which accuratel y depicts the original scene. The often attested fact that cameras don ' t lie rests on the ass umption that past happenings possess an easily overlooked feature: we can call it stability. Just supposebizarre though it might seem - that objects change their colours as they slip into the past, with blue things rapidly turning red, and vice versa. On May I, at noon , you take a photograph of your new blue car. The next day you make a print of thi s photograph, and the latter successfull y captures the distincti ve blue of your new vehicle, or so you think. But is this print reall y an accurate representation of your car as it was on May I ? In one respect, yes, for it shows the colour you saw yesterday (blue). In another respect, definite ly not: for as of the present time, your car on May 1 is no longer blue, but red. The instability of the past means your camera can' t but lie. If we ass ume that cameras don ' t lie in this fashion, we can conclude that the past doesn' t change in thi s sort of way. Given the obvious similarities between our visual memories and cameras - in both cases an initial image is stored for later recall - if the past were unstable, our memories would mislead us as to its character. The colour-change example is an artificial one, but there are accounts of time that entail an analogous instability. Proponents of the Moving Spotlight conception of time hold that obj ects are only fully real when present, and that they cease to be full y real as they sink into the past. When you saw your car on May I it was both present and full y real, and this is how you now re memhe r it; hut since your car on May I has slipped into the shadowy realm of the less than full y real, your memory is misleading you as to what the past is (now) like. If we believe that our memories do not mislead in this sort of way, we should reject this conception of time. What should we make of this? For Le Poidevin the moral is clear: only the B-theory, he says, "can satisfactorily account for the epi stemology of episodic memory" . But this is too strong. The most hi s argument shows is that conceptions of time that posit a variable past cannot accommodate some

SCIENCE

10 plausible assumptions about memory. The B-theory does posit a fixed , unchanging past, but it is not the only conception of time to do so: the Growing Block model also posits an unchanging past - a past which is intrinsically indistinguishable from that posited by B-theorists. So even if Le Poidevin' s argument is effective against some of the alternatives to the B-theory, it is not effective against all. How does it fare against Presentism? For Presentists, it's not just presence that past events lack, it's existence, in any shape or form. Le Poidevin believes that his argument is effective against Presentists, and this may seem plausible: if the past is unreal , there' s nothing for memories to be memories of. Doesn't the existence of memories require the existence of the past? I suspect, however, that most Presentists won ' t be greatly troubled by these considerations. Presentists are well aware that their view of time sits uneasily with some of our ordinary ways of thinking. The wholesale elimination of the past makes for some very general problems, perhaps the most serious of which is how there can be truths about the past in the absence of the past. A common Presentist move is to construe the past as made up of abstract (and hence timeless and immaterial) entities such as ensembles of propositions, and hold that claims about the past are answerable to these. The removal of the past from the spatiotemporal domain is a radical move in itself, to say the least. Having willingly embraced this amount of conceptual upheaval, Presentists are unlikely to be very worried when told that their approach does not sit easily with some natural assumptions about the workings of memory. There is a further lesson here. Le Poidevin ' s project of learning something about the nature of time by examining the mechanisms responsible for temporal representations is complicated by the diversity of metaphysical conceptions of time on offer. It will be complicated still further if it turns out that these conceptions can have implications for the nature of the relevant representational mechanisms, and there is reason to think this will sometimes be the case. Digital cameras and other information storage-andretrieval devices (such as human memory) rely on causal processes which span time. For B-theorists, such processes invariably connect fully real objects, even when these processes lie in the past; for Presentists, such processes relate objects that are entirely lacking in concrete reality. What could be more different? This may not make it impossible to learn anything about time from the generative mechanisms of temporal representations, but it does muddy the waters a good deal. To return to Copernican revolutions, there may he two more on the cards. If the case for the quantum mechanical multi verse continues to gain in strength, we may soon have to accept that our whole universe is just one among a vast multitude of others. And then there is "dark matter" . If the case for this gains in strength, we may have to accept that the vast bulk of the universe - perhaps 90 per cent of its total mass - is made up of stuff that is quite unlike matter as we know it. Given the continuing controversy over the nature of time, it is perhaps as well that neither of these revolutions has any obvious implications for the nature of the past.

"Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night, and let them be for signs and for seasons, and for days and years" (Genesis I: 14) is the passage in question. I am astonished to learn from he reader will search in vain for a Parker that this verse refers to the appearance RICHARD A. FORTEY of sight in fossil animals. Especially since reference to Jean-Andre de Luc "God made two great lights: the greatest to (1727-1817) in this eccentric book by Andrew Parker rule the day and the lesser light to rule the Andrew Parker. Martin Rudwick described in THE GENESIS ENIGMA Bursting the Limits of Time (2005) how de night", to most readers of common sense Why the Bible is scientifically accurate Luc treated the Bible as a historical resource might rather suggest the Sun and the Moon. 320pp. DoubIeday. £20. that might be taken into account alongside the But no, says Parker, we have already made the 97803856 15204 evidence of fieldwork to discern the history Sun in verse 3, so it cannot be that. I am of the earth; the Good Book provided a narraunsure whether he is using Genesis to support tive to be taken seriously and often literally. his Cambrian sight hypothesis, or is attempting to use the latter to vindicate Moses. In De Luc ' s was a perfectly respectable intelleceither case, this has little to do with science as tual position for his time (he also coined the word "geology"), but it comes as something "the disinterested pursuit of truth" . It is hard to of a shock to find Andrew Parker making believe that Parker is serious when he goes on comparable claims nearly a quarter of a milto equate the subsequent proliferation of life lennium after de Luc. I suspect he has never with Genesis I :20: "Let the waters bring forth heard of his intellectual forebear; certainly, abundantly the moving creatures that hath his grasp of the history of geology is sketchy. life" . But he is evidently serious when he says: I should perhaps explain the programme of "the creation sequence as described in Genesis was precisely correct - that vast numbers of The Genesis Enigma, so that the basis of the marine creatures appeared .... Extraordinarargument can be examined properly. After a ily, the Genesis creation story implies a diverrevelatory moment in the Sistine Chapel, Parker realized that the sequence of "events" sity [his italics] of sea creatures. There is no described verse by verse in Genesis corre- A Cambrian trilobite fossil excavated from way such diversity could have been underthe Marjum Formation of Utah, USA sponded to real events in the history of the stood at the time". Since when has abundance solar system and of life on earth. Such was been the same as diversity? the one-to-one correspondence between the for getting it more or less right ("Erasmus Parker also makes periodic references to " latest" scientific discoveries and the Author- Darwin's failings over evolutionary theory", the archaeology of the Middle East, and to ized Version of the Bible - the relevant etc). But it is hardly possible to take seriously the work of T. E. Lawrence and Leonard page of which provides the only illustration his contention that this biblical description Woolley in establishing the identity of people in the book - that the likelihood of the implies an awareness of the importance of and places referred to in the Old Testament. ancient sources arriving at the right sequence photosynthesis, and the transforming effect Yes, this collection of books is, in part, a hisof events by chance alone was very small this process, as performed by marine cyano- torical account - does anyone doubt it? But indeed, or so he claims. Therefore, the bacteria, had on the primitive atmosphere. "It just because Babylon can be identified on the account in Genesis is, to use the subtitle of accords particularly well with the science" ground implies nothing for the scientific truth the book, "scientifically accurate" . Of hardly describes the similarity between bacte- of Genesis - just as the actual existence of a course, some allowance must be made for the rial mats and greensward dotted with fruit monarch called Nebuchadnezzar has no bearing on the veracity (or not) of Methuselah ' s limitations of understanding that pertained in trees. And it gets worse. biblical times. Parker' s theory also allows for I have to digress at this point to explain putative 969-year lifespan. Parker implies a brief, not to say broad-brush, account of that Parker has an earlier book to his credit, that if one bit of the Old Testament is correct the history of cosmological and evolutionary In the Blink of an Eye , which is an attempt to - well, why not the other? The best that can be said of The Genesis thought to be interwoven with the biblical link one of the great thresholds in evolution sequence. A chapter near the beginning is to the appearance of sight just before the base Enigma is that it has its heart in the right entitled "Truth", and one at the end "God", so of the Cambrian period, rather more than place, seeking out some middle ground the reader is clearly going to encounter 500 million years ago. This was indubitably a between science and religion. It will not Momentous Thoughts. The crux of the argu- time of unprecedented evolutionary activity, please creationists, because it insists on the ment appears in italics at the end of this alto- when the major animal groups still with us geological timescale and recognizes the progether bumpy ride: " The opening page of appeared in the sea in short order. Sharp cesses of evolution. It will amuse the " ultraGenesis is scientifically accurate but was sight, it was argued, stimulated both prey Darwinists" because of its lack of rigour. written long before the science was known. and predators into an evolutionary arms race, And it will irritate historians because of its How did the writer of this page come to write and provided the motor for rapid innovation. casual scholarship and Whiggish hindsight. this creation account?". How indeed? The reviewer has a difficult choice when I declare an interest here, because Parker The narrati ve chapters of the book are each names the first visually acute organism as faced with a book like The Genesis Enigma. preceded by a quote from Genesis I, so that the trilobite, and I studied trilobites for more Should it be given the oxygen of publicity? Or the appropriate match with scientific discov- than three decades at the Natural History should it be ignored? To treat such a book at ery can then be discussed. It all starts reasona- Museum in London. Parker's notion was a length in the TLS is to award it a seriousness bly enough, one could possibly say, with " let useful addition to a long list of possibilities it does not really deserve, but what has prothere be light, and there was light" (I :3), put forward to explain the Cambrian evolu- pelled me to do so is the invocation of science which equates with the formation of the solar tionary "explosion" , but it was scarcely the and scientists in support of Parker' s dodgy system , and our planet at just the right dis- hreakthrough he claims. For example, there thesis. It is important that scientific evidence tance from the Sun. Let' s stretch a point and was no "proto-trilobite" with partially devel- be honestly treated. There is an alarming allow, next, "let the waters under the heaven oped eyes. Moreover, most of the early Cam- tendency today to regard science as "just an be gathered together unto one place, and let brian organisms that "exploded" lacked eyes. opinion". I do think it possible that some antithe dry land appear" (I :9). After all, there is A long list of other explanations is ignored, rationalists might welcome Parker's book to evidence of the early formation of seas after including one that attributes the "explosion" show how much a matter of opinion science the hot and sterile first phase of the planet. to the activities of worms in sediment, which can be. It is not, of course; it stands or falls The trouble really begins with the origin of Martin Brasier presented in his book on evidence. Moreover, the endpapers of The life: " let the earth bring forth grass, the herb Darwin's Lost World (reviewed in the TLS Genesis Enigma emphasize Parker's apparyielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit of June 12, 2009). Parker gives the false ently respectable positions in the scientific after his kind" (I: 11). This provides Parker impression that his hypothesis has been establishment, as an Honorary Research Felwith an excuse to give a cartoon account of accepted by the scientific community as a low of Green Templeton College at Oxford. the origin of evolutionary ideas, awarding fact, and then goes on to match the "fact" to He does, in one sense, speak for science, and marks to one or another of the key figures the Bible. he has done science no favours.

Lights out

T

TLS JANUARY 8 2010

LITERATURE

11

Iced oranges in ether L

ike an iceberg, the bulk of whose frozen mass is concealed by the sea in which it floats, much of Jose Maria E9a de Queiroz' s oeuvre remained unpublished during his lifetime. The novel A Capital (To the Capital), for example, begun in 1877 as a satire on Lisbon ' s republican intelligentsia and carried on for four years until the author decided the project was too dangerous, appeared posthumously in 1925. Its text has recently been reassembled from newly available manuscripts. 0 Conde de Abranhos (The Count of Abranhos), the piquant pseudo-biography of an asininely pompous monarchist politician by his Pooterish secretary, was for similar reasons set aside by its creator, while a full version of that fascinating nonesuch A correspondencia de Fradique Mendes (The Correspondence of Fradique Mendes), a kind of autobiography mediated through an authorial alter ego, in the form of a memoir and a bundle of letters, only emerged after E9a'S death in 1900. "My poor Jose, he never thought his work was perfect enough", his widow Emilia Resende confided to her husband's lifelong friend and collaborator, Jose Duarte Ramalho Ortigao. Ramalho undertook to examine the considerable corpus of manuscripts she entrusted to him, but he went further and overhauled or completed one or two of them, including A cidade e as serras (The City and the Mountains) and A ilustre casa de Ramires (The Illustrious House of Ramires), while ignoring most of the rest. In the complex history of E9a'S modern reputation, inflected as it was by Portuguese politics, Emilia's religious scruples and the fluctuations of literary taste both within and beyond Portugal, Ramalho's role as an early keeper of the flame was a dubious one, to say the least. It was E9a' S family who successfully blocked publication of A tragedia da Rua das FLores (The Tragedy of the Street of Flowers was reissued last year) until the expiry of the author's copyright in 1980. Begun in 1877, while E9a was Portuguese consul in Newcastle upon Tyne, the work was originally intended as part of "Scenes from Real Life", a projected series of novellas anatomizing contemporary mores among the different social echelons of Lisbon, Oporto and the provinces. The spirit of his two early masterpieces, 0 crime do Padre Amaro (The Sin of Father Amaro) and 0 primo Bas£lio (Cousin Basilio), each a full-length novel, was to be distilled in the shorter form while retaining that note of scornful indignation typical of the French naturalist writers E9a continued to imitate and admire.

Not altogether surprisingly, despite E9a' s declared penchant for the novella, A tragedia swiftly achieved the length of its predecessors. The principal theme, later so embarrassing to Emilia and her children, was incest, the topic that later provided Os Maias (The Maias, 1888), his most ambitious novel, with its sensational clou. The earlier work opens in a Lisbon theatre at a performance of Offenbach's Barbe-Bleue. Dreamy, impressionable young Vitor da Silva catches sight of a handsomely dressed woman seated in a box, her blonde beauty - blondes always have a special charm

JONATHAN KEATES Jose Maria

E~a

de Queiroz

THE TRAGEDY OF THE STREET OF FLOWERS Translated by Margaret lull Costa 346pp. Paperback, £9.99. 978 I 873982 64 8 THE MANDARIN AND OTHER STORIES Translated by Margaret lull Costa 176pp. Paperback, £7.99. 9781903517802 THE CITY AND THE MOUNTAINS Translated by Margaret lull Costa 288pp. Paperback, £9.99. 978 I 90351771 0

Dedalus. for the writer - more effulgent for the presence at her side of a scrawny, red-nosed English companion. Women in E9a are generally cast as either whores or aunties. Much as he admired the work of George Eliot, his imagination never allows an intelligent woman to penetrate that homosocial male nexus which forms the core of his novels. When women do appear, they have a certain air of predatory loucheness as the price they pay for being rational and articulate. Genoveva de Molineux - the poule de Luxe name is a gi veaway - begins as she means to go on, by kicking a child who has dared to get in her way, an act of petulant cruelty

struck boy's long-lost mother. "It's not immoral or indecent, it's cruel", E9a told the publisher Ernesto Chardron , and so indeed A tragedia da Rua das Flores appears. As in 0 crime do Padre Amaro, a careful technique of alienation is at work, keeping almost every character save Uncle Timoteo firmly at arm's length. Why, if he enjoyed writing it so much , did E9a suppress the book? His decision, as Margaret Jull Costa plausibly suggests in her introduction to her English version, probably owed less to its potentially outrageous subject matter than to his increasingly uncomfortable sense of its closeness to his own experience as a bastard child denied his mother's love. In comparison with Amaro and Bas£lio, A tragedia is distinctly uneven in structure and tonal control. While we admire the insatiable appetite for detail which enables the writer to place his protagonists so convincingly, and the unflagging sense of physicality with which social contexts are rendered memorable, his indulgence in each occasionally overburdens the narrative. E9a' S obsessive habit of revising, had the novel reached publication, would surely have purged this acrid chronique scandaleuse of the garrulity and diffuseness which muffle much of its impact. As an attempt to distance himself from the orthodoxies of Gallic realism, E9a used a French holiday in the summer of 1880 to write 0 mandarim (The Mandarin). This novella, incorporating elements of fairy tale in the story of a lowly Lisbon clerk to whom

A statue orE~a de Queiroz and muse, Lisbon witnessed hy Vitor's kindly uncle Timoteo. While engaged in seducing the young man's friend Diimaso, who has more money than sense, she falls heavily for Vitor' s odd amalgam of naive sincerity and seeming indifference. Timoteo, having vainly tried to discourage his nephew from marrying her, tries, like the hero's father in La Dame aux camelias, to urge the impropriety of the union on the courtesan herself. Only after her chance reference to growing up in the northern town of Guarda does Timoteo realize where he has seen her before. The temptress is none other than Joaquina da Ega, the love-

a chance encounter hrings unconscionahle

wealth, is a brilliantly mischievous essay in fantasy chinoiserie, irreverently subverting the trope, created half a century earlier by Balzac in La Peau de chagrin, of the Oriental curse masquerading as a blessing. In the same Dedalus collection of E9a' S short fiction lies a late gem, "Jose Matfas", a love story told at a funeral by a Hegelian philosopher, in which the issue of the narrator's own relationship with reality adds a comically ambiguous layer to the tale. The textual authenticity of A cidade e as serras, which appeared in print in 1900, a

TLS JANUARY 8 2010

year after the author's death, was questioned in the briskly paced yet admirably thorough biographical study of E9a by Maria Filomena Monica, which was published in 2001 and issued four years later in Alison Aiken' s English translation. On this novel, Ramalho Ortigao's intervention seems to have been more drastic than is often acknow ledged. The entire final section, according to Monica, was rewritten by Ramalho in a fashion "far exceeding the bounds demanded by literary respect". Originally deriving from E9a'S short story "Civiliza9ao" (1892), the novel reads inevitably as a critical farewell to the nineteenth century, with which he had been so passionately engaged throughout his creative life. It is also, in a sense, an epitaph for that realist tradition of Guy de Maupassant and Alphonse Daudet which the Portuguese writer, more humane in his outlook than either of them and not indissolubly wedded to French ideas of literature as an affair of rules and systems, had refined for his own artistic purposes. The essential fable here is one of redemption. Jacinto, the novel's central character, is a " vile body" for the experiment carried out on him by the agency of fate, circumstance and his own caprice. An expatriate Portuguese, the spoilt child of fortune, he lives, coddled by apparently limitless affluence, in a Parisian palace on the Champs-Elysees, with a library of 30,000 volumes and a battery of technological gadgets necessary to the metropolitan sophisticate. His friend Ze Fernandes, the book' s narrator, marvels at " soft, fat cables snaking over the carpet, scurrying into the shadows like startled cobras", which lead to the Writing Machine, the Adding Machine, the Conferencephone and the Theatrephone. At dinner the menu, written in red ink on slivers of ivory, includes iced oranges in ether and a choice of mineral waters that embraces oxygenated, carbonated, phosphated and sterilized. "The ether brings out the soul of the fruit", declares Jacinto. Ze Fernandes, recalling his aunt' s country estate in Portugal, where "the souls of oranges had remained undiscovered inside their succulent segments", rapidly assumes the role of sceptic and iconoclast in this ultimate sanctum of urban living. Watching the Sacre Coeur as it is built, he has an apocalyptic vision of the city below as merely a layer of rubble and tiles, dissolved into "a brown stain sullying the Earth". The illusory promises it offers Jacinto, "my Prince" as Ze Fernandes calls him, have already been symbolized by a catastrophic failure of the electric system at No 202, Champs-Ely sees. They hecome the stuff of magnificent farce when a Grand Duke comes to dinner. He has presented Jacinto with some rare and delicious fish from Dalmatia, designed to provide the banquet's gastronomic climax. The electric dumb-waiter, however, stalls on its ascent from the kitchen. As the guests peer down the shaft at the steaming platter, the infuriated Duke, improvising a rod from a walking stick, some string and a hairpin, attempts unsuccessfully to hook up the fish. Soon after this episode, Jacinto, on a whim, decides to return to the Portugal he has never properly known, to the fertile wooded

12 northern valleys where E~a himself grew up. At this point the writer, who knew his WaIter Scatt, comically inverts the melancholy fin-de-race atmosphere surrounding Edgar Ravenswood at Wolf's Crag in The Bride of Lammermoor. Returning to Tormes, the ramshackle mansion of his ancestors, Jacinto loses all the elaborately packed luggage (including divans, pier glasses, jars of truffles and a lightning conductor) accompanying him from Paris, and is reduced to a ludicrous figure in clogs and a nightdress borrowed from the caretaker's wife, preparing to bed

LITERATURE & HISTORY down on a straw mattress. The redemptive process starts here. "My Prince", encouraged by the wise and affectionate Ze Fernandes, and under the influence of landscape and peasantry, becomes a model landlord, replacing sterile acquisitiveness with practical benevolence and sloughing off the febrile self-absorption of his Parisian avatar. The pastoral trope is underlined by the narrator's allusions to Virgil and Horace, but E~a's effervescent humour and lack of sentimentality prevent any outbreak of Tolstoyan rusticity. Even more than his French literary

models, he is preoccupied with descriptive detail, its use refined by a charm of manner those writers, whether through snobbery or obtuseness, so notably avoid. Here as in the other works reviewed, Margaret Jull Costa is an inexhaustibly versatile translator. An earlier English version of The City and the Mountains made in 1955 by Roy Campbell reads well enough but lacks precision: in a description of Ze Fernandes's pretty cousin Joaninha, for example, E~a's original "esplendor rubicundo" becomes "rustic beauty" - not quite the same thing. In this

latest rendering, however, was it the translator or her editor who decided to omit a reference to Jacinto's Negro valet Cricket as "0 digno preto", "the worthy black"? Costa clearly savours as much as we do the book's final ironic vision of a village station master fossicking lickerishly through the Parisian pornography Ze Fernandes has just thrown onto the rubbish heap. Whether this idea originated with Ramalho or with E~a himself, it is hard not to read it as a symbol of those influences the writer had transcended and left behind.

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

he physical remnants of Portugal's empire are scattered across the globe, from the forsaken fortresses that dot Morocco's coastline to the whitewashed churches that punctuate the sky lines of Goa and Salvador da Bahia. Other traces of Portugal's imperial past linger as well: Portuguese is the world's sixth-most commonly spoken language, with over 220 million native speakers, while the syncretic music emanating from the Lusophone world, blending rhythms from Iberia and Africa, has a global audience. Tragedies of staggering magnitude are also part of Portugal's imperial legacy. Protracted wars of decolonization served as a prelude to even longer, more devastating civil wars in Angola and Mozambique, conflicts which smouldered through the 1990s. In Brazil, chattel slavery persisted until 1888, more than fifty years longer than in the British Empire. The inequalities it incubated helped to spawn the endemic violence and social stratification that continue to plague Brazil today. Portugal's imperial history has tended to be ignored in the anglophone world. Portuguese historians have published many fine books, including several multi-volume studies of the subject, but only fragments of these have been translated. There are several excellent studies in English - by Charles Boxer, Kenneth Maxwell, A. J. R. Russell-Wood, Malyn Newitt and Francisco Bethencourt but none of these offers a panorama of Portuguese overseas expansion from its inaugural stirrings in the fourteenth century until the disaggregation of much of the empire in the early nineteenth. A. R. Disney's two-volume synthesis accomplishes this feat. A History of Portugal and the Portuguese Empire is a remarkable achievement, combining rigour with lucidity and offering expert guidance across a complex and varied historical terrain. He allots as much coverage to Portuguese expansion in South Asia and southern Africa as he does to Brazil, and the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries receive equal attention. He directs the reader's attention to longstanding academic controversies without focusing on them unduly. This is sophisticated narrative history at its finest. The dispersed, decentralized character of the Portuguese Empire makes Disney's synthesis particularly impressive. From a small, struggling frontier kingdom on the periphery of Europe, Portugal metamorphosed into a vast maritime empire with multiple far-flung nodes - forts , port cities, strategically situated islands - of both formally administered and quasi-independent communities. It stretched, at its apogee, from Nagasaki to Colombo, and from Luanda to Recife. Often sitting on the peripheries of vast, land-based

T

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empires, Portugal's overseas colonies benefited from fluid, flexible structures of governance which could be reconfigured to meet evolving demands in the absence of swift communication with Lisbon. The empire was not the product of a grand design. It developed in piecemeal fashion, through a spasmodic flurry of acquisitions followed by periods of stagnation and even contraction. In the fifteenth century, a bevy of trading fortresses, or feitorias, were constructed within a few decades in North Africa, only for the lion's share of them to be abandoned. In the sixteenth century, the Estado da India, based at Goa, was established quickly, its tentacles stretching across the ocean from Timor to Mozambique, with important hubs at Melaka, Cochin, Diu and Hormuz. Owing to the absence of troops and treasure, territorial empire was unimaginable. The Portuguese thus made a virtue out of necessity, contenting themselves with controlling sea lanes through strategic fortification and naval superiority. In the Indian Ocean, they set up a remarkably effective and durable system for collecting revenue. They required all ships to pay a fee for safe conduct and also controlled customs. Brazil, discovered in 1500, languished until setbacks in Asia, at the hands of Dutch and English challengers, made its settlement more attractive and its continued neglect less tenahle.

The motives behind expansion were never purely mercantile, though the lure of plunder figured largely in drumming up interest in it. Disney points out that the conquest of Ceuta in 1415 was conceived as part of the reconquest of Iberia from the Muslim powers. Already in the fourteenth century, Portuguese kings had secured papal bulls authorizing crusades in Granada and North Africa. Divorced from purely economic considerations, the cost of such adventurism in the service of faith was high. More than 200 ships and 20,000 men took part in the conquest of

Ceuta, and the debts incurred to finance the expedition were still being repaid in the 1440s. King Sebastian's disastrous defeat at Al-Ksar Al-Kabir in 1578 resulted not only in the death of 15,000 of his troops, but also set in motion a chain of events that saw Portugal absorbed for sixty years into Habsburg Spain. To readers familiar with the European empires of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Disney's depiction of Portugal's early modern expansion may seem surprising because of the Crown's unmistakably secondary role. Much of the impetus behind Portuguese expansion came from non-state actors. Missionaries, mercenaries, private merchants

and exiled convicts played leading parts, often without government supervision. Disney estimates that 90 per cent of the merchandise shipped between Asia and Portugal in the first half of the seventeenth century passed through private hands. The unwieldy nature of the empire resulted from interactions at a turbulent and ever-fluctuating frontier, the consequence of encounters between largely independently operating Portuguese and non-European peoples. The result, particularly in southern Africa and South Asia, were hybrid communities of go-betweens, people who inhabited two cultural worlds and made the intercourse, commercial, spiritual and otherwise, between Portugal and nonEuropean societies possible. Disney's book highlights the interconnected nature of the Portuguese Empire. Undoubtedly, there was a centrifugal quality to its overseas expansion, as many Portuguese who ventured abroad maintained tenuous links with Portugal, if they remained connected at all. Yet it is the creation of robust relations between heterogeneous, distant territories that stands out as a central theme of Disney's account. Slavery was the institution that did the most to bring the continents together and to make their economies interdependent. In the seventeenth century, 10,000 slaves were brought from Angola to the New World per year, a figure that jumped to 20,000 in the eighteenth century. About 50 per cent of the African slaves brought to Brazil were purchased with Brazilian products, with cacha,a (sugar cane brandy) accounting for half ofthat figure. It was Portuguese imperial activity that set this macabre supply chain in motion. One of the admirable qualities of Disney's book is his eschewal offacile nationalist historiography in favour of locating Portuguese history in a broader international context. The role of foreigners is emphasized: during

TLS JANUARY 8 2010

Afonso Henriques's legendary siege of Lisbon in 1147, German and English fighters , en route to the Second Crusade, paused long enough to help carry the day for the Christian army. An English priest, Gilbert of Hastings, was named Bishop of reoccupied Lisbon. Much of the Christian reconquest of Muslim Portugal - Gharb al-Andalus - was conducted by international military orders, the Hospitallers and the Templars, the latter of whom endowed Portugal with one of its architectural treasures, the Convento de Cristo in Tomar. The fragility of Portugal's status as an independent kingdom is another recurring theme in Disney's narrative. Had the Battle of Aljubarrota in 1385 gone the other way, Portugal would probably have been subsumed into Castile. The navigational feats of Dias, da Gama and Cabral, whose voyages were undertaken in the service of the Portuguese Crown, may never have been attempted. A few weaknesses in A History of Portugal and the Portuguese Empire should be mentioned. First, this is primarily a work of political and economic history. Those interested in the history of the arts, religion and political ideas are advised to look elsewhere, perhaps to A. J. R. Russell-Wood's A World on the Move (1992) or Portuguese Oceanic Expansion 1400- 1800 (2007), edited by Francisco Bethencourt and Diogo Curto. Second, while Disney has written two very valuable books, his decision to keep separate the histories of Portugal and its empire is questionable. Particularly after 1500, it is hard to disentangle the histories of metropolitan Portugal and its overseas possessions. By 1519, as Disney himself points out, 68 per cent of the Crown's total receipts came from overseas trade, while the return on Asian pepper and spices alone exceeded all internal Portuguese revenues. What Disney's volumes reveal is the need to commingle the histories of empire and nation more thoroughly. Third, Disney ends his story rather abruptly in 1807, the year that Napoleon ' s invasion of Portugal necessitated the transfer of the seat of the monarchy from Lisbon to Rio de Janeiro. This was no doubt a pivotal event, which culminated in Brazil's independence from

Portugal. Yet Disney's account fails to probe the underlying causes of this momentous dismemberment of empire, leaving the reader with the discomfiting sense that a final , explanatory chapter was mistakenly excised from the book. This is nevertheless an important study, the result of a heroic scholarly undertaking. Disney ' s volumes deserve a place on the shelves of anyone who has ever wondered why and how such a small country could have had such a decisive impact on world history.

BIOGRAPHY

The ashes and the phoenix ust over a century separates the two major scholarly biographies of Anne Boleyn, by Paul Friedmann in 1884, and Eric Ives in 1986. In the years in between, the place of Henry VIII's second Queen in what Alison Weir calls our national folklore was kept alive by Anne's portrayal on stage, screen and television, and, more especially, by her appearance as a staple character in popular fiction set at the Tudor court. One of the latest, and certainly the most commercially successful, of Anne's fictional incarnations is as the ruthless younger sister in Philippa Gregory's The Other Boleyn Girl. Gregory's novel centres on Mary Boleyn, Anne's elder sister and briefly one of her predecessors as Henry VIII's mistress, who died in obscurity after incurring Henry and Anne's wrath by secretly marrying Sir William Stafford in 1534. The lack of documentation for key aspects of Anne Boleyn' s life - partly a result of Henry VIII' s dri ve to excise her memory from the history of his reign, but also of Elizabeth I's understandable reluctance to mount a full-scale rehabilitation of her mother - has ensured that where the woman "that did set our country in a roar", as Thomas Wyatt described Anne, is concerned, fact and fiction have always fed off each other. Gregory's plot owed a significant debt to the now discredited theories of the American historian Retha Warnicke. Warnicke argued that Anne' s sudden fall and execution stemmed from her miscarriage, in January 1536, of a deformed foetus, which associated Anne with witchcraft and convinced Henry of God' s displeasure at his second marriage. (There is no contemporary reference to this deformed foetus , only the assertion of the Jesuit Nicholas Sander, in his De Origine ac Progressu Schismatis Anglicani, a treatise published in 1585 reflecting the savage Catholic view of "the English Jezebel", that Anne had given birth to "a shapeless mass of flesh " .) What is impressive about Alison Weir's study is the author's refusal to be waylaid by unsubstantiated rumour or tradition, or anything approaching imaginative guesswork which makes her refusal to provide full references to her sources all the more frustrating. True, she devotes an appendix to various sightings of Anne's headless ghost, and elsewhere demonstrates an unhealthy preoccupation with the immediate effects of decapitation (Anne is likely to have suffered at least two or three seconds of intense pain). But generally Weir shows admirable forensic skills, not least when it comes to the ambassadorial reports of Eustache Chapuys to the Emperor Charles V, at once the most valuable source for Anne's reign and the most notoriously difficult to analyse effectively. Her interpretation is broadly derived from Ives (though from the 1986 edition of his work, not the 2004 recension) and, like Ives, Weir believes that Anne was probably innocent of the charges - of adultery, incest and seeking the King's death - that were made against her. She occasionally devotes too much attention to spurious material, like the Cottonian manuscript of a letter said to have been written by Anne to Henry from the Tower, which is

J

decades. Grand scenarios have been constructed: that Anne stood in the way of a new imperial alliance; that Anne's desire to Alison Weir redirect the assets of the monasteries in order THE LADY IN THE TOWER to convert them for educational purposes The fall of Anne Boleyn made her an obstacle to Cram well ' s plan to 416pp. 978 0 224 06319 7 fill the King' s coffers with proceeds from the Dissolution; or simply that Henry had tired of Traey Borman her and was bent on marrying Jane Seymour. ELIZABETH'S WOMEN But the serious flaws underlying each of The hidden story of the Virgin Queen these arguments have been exposed, and ulti4S0pp. 978 0 224 08226 6 mately none of the scenarios has commanded Cape. £20 each. general assent. Weir has overlooked Walker's more recent, compelling account of transparently a forgery probably concocted Anne's fall (in the English Historical Review for Thomas Cromwell, though to what end is for 2002), which rejects "grand and emotive no longer clear. She is also misleading about themes" in favour of a "briefer and more pyrothe legal process that brought Anne down - technic" sequence of events. According to and consequently about the chronology of Walker's version, Anne fell not because of Anne' s fall- when she states that the commis- what she did, but as a result of what she said. sions of oyer and terminer appointed on April Her flirtatiousness , incautious remarks, and derogatory gossip about the King's lack of virility played into the hands of her enemies. Furthermore, in the frenzied atmosphere of those May days, as the arrests of the men accused with the Queen mounted, Henry VIII's own role in the investigation of his wife, so long a disputed feature of the historiography, became central. Henry's suspicions, as Walker says, were fuelled by his paranoia and by what appeared to be a conspiracy of silence among the accused. "He took charge of the questioning himself, and with a characteristically demonic zeal, only handing over to others once he was convinced of the Queen's guilt." As for the charges of adultery and incest against Anne, the balance of probability still finds in favour of her innocence. The absence of evidence and of witnesses for the prosecution, the failure to arrest any of the female members of Anne's household who would unavoidably have colluded in the Queen's alleged crimes, the desperate attempts to spy on Anne in the Tower to gain evidence to buttress a weak case, and, most of all , the specific charges of adultery against Anne and the five men, which can easily be A locket ring owned by Elizabeth I (c1575), demonstrated to be false, all point to one thing: a prefabricated case heard before showing portraits of herself and Anne hand-picked juries which rubber-stamped the Boleyn; from Elizabeth's Women judgments as a foregone conclusion. It will 24, 1536 were specifically intended to investi- be interesting to see ifG. W. Bernard's forthgate Anne' s alleged crimes. In fact, as Greg coming book on Anne's fall, provocatively Walker has pointed out, these commissions titled Fatal Attractions, manages to overturn may have been established for quite other pur- the arguments for Anne's innocence. Hithposes, and became "the best judicial instru- erto, Professor Bernard has been a lone voice ment to hand" when the scandal surrounding urging Anne's guilt, though his case against Anne broke. However, for the most part, her has, to date, appeared eccentric. Weir sifts the fragmentary evidence relentAnne Boleyn , naturally enough, is lessly, even to the detriment of the pace of included in the roll call of women in Tracy her narrati ye. Barman ' s book, who are said to hold the key Anne' s imprisonment, trial and execution, to "the hidden story" of Elizabeth I. Baraccomplished in the space of little more than man's main argument is that historians have three weeks, represent, as Weir reminds us, tended to ignore the importance of women in one of the most astonishing and brutal coups Elizabeth's life, preferring to concentrate on in English history. Yet our understanding of the carefully controlled public image of the the motives that lay behind this swift disposal Queen as a " man's woman". In place of this, of a regnant queen (for Anne was crowned in Barman offers a view of Elizabeth's private her own right in May, 1533) remains, tantaliz- world , the inner sanctum of her court, ingly, as ill-defined as ever, despite the way governed by devoted servants like Blanche in which the subject has become a battle- Parry, who gave her mistress thirty years of ground for some historians over the past two faithful service, and was valued in turn for MARK BOSTRIDGE

TLS JANUARY 8 2010

13 her honesty and discretion. Elizabeth 's Women promises a fascinating study of the small group of female attendants who had unrivalled access to Elizabeth and to her most private feelings, but disappointingly fails to provide this, retreating instead to the much more familiar territory of Elizabeth I's relationships with her sister Mary I, her cousin Mary, Queen of Scots, and to "flouting wenches" like Lettice Knollys, who stole Robert Dudley, Elizabeth's closest male favourite, from the Queen. Weir and Barman agree that, while Elizabeth as Queen adopted an attitude of public reticence towards her mother's memory, she undoubtedly believed that Anne had been wrongly convicted. One of the clues to Elizabeth's true feelings about her mother, mentioned by both writers, is the ring, now belonging to the Chequers Trust, which Elizabeth I wore in the latter part of her life, and which was only removed from her finger at her death to be given to James VI of Scotland as proof of the Queen ' s demise. Presented to Elizabeth in about 1575, probably by Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford (ironically, Jane Seymour' s nephew), the ring opens to reveal miniature enamelled reliefs of Elizabeth and Anne Boleyn. What Weir and Barman omit to mention is that enamelled on the back of the oval bezel is the figure of a phoenix, Elizabeth's device as well as Edward Seymour's. Should we regard this as a symbol of the daughter rising from the ashes of the mother's disgrace?

MUSIC THE ORIGINAL SOUNDS OF BACH'S ORGAN WORKS Elaine S. Dykstra

SPRECHSTIMME IN ARNOLD SCHOENBERG'S PIERROT LUNAlRE: Aidan Soder

MUSICAL EQUAL TEMPERAMENT IN CHINA AND EUROPE IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY Gene Jinsiong Cho

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39.95 UK (44) 01570-423-356 USA (1) 716-754-2788

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14

Souvenirs of mortal pain Jonathan Swift and the abbe Guiscard' s assassination attempt on Lord Treasurer Harley mong the Forster manuscripts in the National Art Library in the Victoria & Albert Museum is a letter dated March 8, 1783 from John Lyon to Deane Swift (MS Forster 570), in which Lyon discusses matters relating to his "ever to be honoured & admired Friend & Patron", Jonathan Swift. Swift scholars seem to have overlooked this document. Yet it sheds a bright light on Swift's response to the most dramatic episode of his life, and by reflection, on an overlooked detail of Gulliver's Travels. The text of the letter is as follows: Peter Street March 8'": 1783

A

DAVID WOMERSLEY the Publick Grammar School, and of Florence his Wife. It mentions his being very eminent in his Profession and verso and that he dyed 31 ": of May 1622 aged 52 - I

took this Abstract of the Inscription in the Chapel As to sermons, or any other writings of the Dean, 1 have not any thing to be called so. Many things did fa1l in my way as Executor of M" Dingley, besides what I had saved from y' hands of the Auctioneer, when he was put in possession of the Dean's Library, for the

Dear Sir

purpose of making a Catalogue - But Fau lkner

I have been honoured with the Rect of Y": dated 30'" : Jan': by the hands of my much esteemed Friend & Neighbour M" Swanton;

very early got every thing that he thought fit to take, without fee or reward - The inc10sed Letter & Papers seem to be genuine - 1 am Dear Sir with very much respect your very humble

together with your animadversions on Dr Delany ' s erroneous Ace' on that vile Assassin Guiscard's Penknife, with which he attempted

to take away the Life of Lord Treasurer Harley. After the death of my ever to be honoured & admired Friend & Patron D' Swift, I took care of that Knife & also of the first Plaster, that was taken of the wound, both which the good Dean had preserved, & did afterwards wrap them together in a Paper, with a short Ace' of y' Villain ' s attempt. In 1760 when my private Affairs occasioned my Journey to

London, I took this Relick with me, in order to put it into the hands of Lord Oxford, or some Branch of that noble Fami ly to be delivered to him. And being one day invited by Aid: Harley when Lord Mayor, to dine at the Mayoralty House, I gave him the said Knife &c to be given to the said Earl of Oxford, which Knife

Servant John Lyon (Reproduced with the kind permission of the Trustees of the Victoria & Albert Museum .) Although there is much in this letter which merits discussion - for instance, the "true Busto of D' Swift" which Lyon presented to Shelburne, and the pillaging of Swift's manuscripts after his death - it is on what Lyon reveals about Swift's reaction to Guiscard ' s attempt to kill Lord Treasurer

Harley that I wish to concentrate here. Antoine de Guiscard, abbe de la Bourlie (1658-1711), was a renegade from his nati ve country, who had gone on to serve as an officer of the Grand Alliance charged with fomenting popular unrest in the Cevennes . Failure led to the withdrawal of his commission. In order to make up for the loss of income, Guiscard, now resident in England, had begun to spy for the French . On Tuesday March 6, 1711 , Guiscard's treasonable correspondence with France was intercepted. Two days later, Harley obtained a warrant for Guiscard's arrest, and convened an emergency meeting of the Cabinet in the Cockpit for the purpose of exam ining him. Although Guiscard tried to brazen it out, the evidence against him was overwhelming. But as Guiscard was being taken away to Newgate, he contrived to stab Harley with a penknife he had concealed while waiting to be interviewed. The hlow was muffled hy the layers of clothing Harley was wearing on account of a sore throat, and the blade broke against his breastbone. Swift described the ensuing uproar in his report of the incident to Archbishop King in Dublin, written later that same day: Immediately Mr. St. John rose, drew his Sword, and ran it into Guiscard ' s Breast. Five or six more of the Council drew and stabbed Guiscard in several Places: But, the Earl

Powlett called out for God 's Sake, to spare

he was much pleased to see, & did promise to

put into his Lordship's hand very shortly, as he expected to see him soon - I left London quickly after, & heard no more since. At ye same time I carried to London a true Busto of

D' Swift taken from Nature, which I made a present of to Lord Shelburn; as his Relation here told me, there was nothing he long ' d for so much as some true Representation of the Dean, in ayl colours, Plaster or Wax - After ye Paris Plaster had continued one Night on his Countenance, it was taken off by ye

Artist & left to dry in the Study; from which ye eminentMr Cuningham formed ye mold most truly, but was aided in ye true form of Features as li vely express'd inMt Bindon's Picture of the great Original - I deposited y' Maid in our

College Library. 1 am not a little concerned, at not being earlier acquainted with your Intention of a new Publication of that excellent Man' s Remains. Because such Papers as were in my Power, were obtained about a Year ago by a Friend of Mt Sheridan; so that in truth nothing remains

in my Power. The inc10sed Letter & Papers do not appear in ye Dean ' s Works, that 1 Cd: find At Bristoll saw a small monum' agt ye Wall in

y' Mayor's Chapel of one of your Ancestors - I mention ye contents of it, as perhaps it has

escaped you. To the Memory of Woo Swift M. A. Master of

Jonathan Swift (1718) by Charles Jervas

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Guiscard's Life, that he might be made an Example; and Mr. St. John's Sword was taken from him, and broke, and the Footmen without ran in, and bound Guiscard, who begged he

might be killed immediately; and, they say, called out three or four Times, my Lord Ormond, my Lord Ormond. Guiscard died a few days later of his wou nds. Harley, however, who had throughout shown great composure, eventually made a full recovery; although not before he had suffered a worrying bout of fever. Swift had heard about the attempted assassination on the evening it happened while he was playing cards at the house of Lady Morice. After making enqu iries of the Lord Treasurer's son, Edward Harley, Swift went back to his lodgings and wrote a report of the day's dramatic events for Archbishop King. He begins by explaining that he writes "under the greatest Disturbance of Mind for the Public and Myself', and relates what he had heard from young Harley. He concludes by deploring the timing of the accident, for "Nothing could happen so unluckily to England at this Juncture", and touches again on his own " violent Pain of Mind ... greater than ever I felt in my Life". He struck the same chord of patriotic anxiety and personal grief later that evening in the letter he wrote to Esther Johnson, where he begins without preamble by announcing "my heart is almost broken", before going on to admit that he was " in mortal pain" for the Lord Treasurer. Lyon's letter to Swift corroborates this evidence, and it enriches our understanding of the sign ificance of this event for Swift, indicating that Guiscard's attempt on the life of Harley had an enduring importance for him. Lyon's revelation that Swift had kept the penknife used in the assault (a fact mentioned by Deane Swift in his Essay on the Life and Character of Dr. Swift of 1755, but denied by Patrick Delany in A Letter to Dean Swift, Esq. published the same year), as well as - rather ghouli shly - the "first Plaster, that was taken of the wound", and his implication that they possessed for him the status of relics, suggests a depth of enduring emotional and imaginative engagement on Swift's part which is compatible with the anxiety expressed in his reports of these events written at the time. Lyon also mentions "a short Ace' of y' Villain's attempt" in syntax which is ambiguous, but which probably refers to an account composed by Swift rather than by Lyon himself (who was only nine years old in 1711). Four accounts of Guiscard's desperate violence composed by Swift have come down to us: the letter to Archbishop King; the version he wrote for Esther Johnson the same evening; Examiner 32, published a week later on March 15, 1711; and finally the slightly compressed account in Memoirs Relating to that Change Which Happened in the Queen's Ministry. To these should be added the glancing references to the episode contained

COMMENTARY in The History of the Four Last Years of the Queen. The account referred to by Lyon does not seem to correspond to any of these, since it appears to be a private memorandum of the event, enveloping both literally and metaphorically its two concrete vestiges, namely Guiscard's knife and the bloodied impression of the wound it had made, preserved in the first plaster. (In Swift' s day a plaster was not, as now, a dressing applied over the surface of a wound, but a paste of supposedly healing gums and unguents pressed over and into a wound.) To know that Swift composed yet another account of Guiscard ' s attempt, however, further underlines the obsessive way his thoughts returned repeatedly to the troubling events of March 1711. Rather like Clarendon's History of the Rebellion (which Swift said he read four times), Guiscard's attempt to kill Harley became part of the furniture of Swift's imagination. The testimony of Lyon's letter also serves to strengthen an interpretation of a detail of Gulliver's Travels which might otherwise seem fanciful. In Part n, Gulliver suffers a series of humiliating accidents: Once a Kite hovering over the Garden, made a

Stoop at me, and if I had not resolutely drawn my Hanger, and run under a thick Espalier, he would have certainly carried me away in his

Talons. Another time, walking to the Top of a fresh Mole-hill, I fell to my Neck in the Hole through which that Animal had cast up the Earth; and coined some Lye not worth rernembring, to excuse my self for spoiling my

Cloaths. I likewise broke my right Shin against the Shell of a Snail, which I happened to stumble over, as I was walking alone, and thinking on poor England.

At first glance, each of these mishaps seems to be an instance of the innocent fantasy with which Swift interleaves his satire in Gulliver's Travels. However, if we begin with the third mishap - Gulliver breaking his shin on the shell of a Brobdingnagian snail we will see that it has another meaning. Throughout his life, Swift had problems with his shins. He included "broken Shins" (meaning bruising or grazing of the skin, rather than a fracture of the bone) among the miseries of his schooldays, and his correspondence throughout his life records a series of such mishaps. However, the fact that Gulliver breaks his shin while "thinking on poor England" directs us to a particular accident. On March 13, 1711 , five days after Guiscard's attack on Harley, Swift, still distracted with grief and anxiety and - as we have seen - gloomy about the implications for England in Harley's feverish disorder, told Esther Johnson that he had broken his right shin " in the Strand over a tub of sand left just in the way". Is it plausible to see Gulliver' s injury as an echo of the accident which had befallen Swift fifteen years beforehand? Our willingness to do so is increased when we notice that both Gulliver's hair's-breadth escape from the kite and his fall into the molehill resonate with political reference. In a famous letter

of November 26, 1725 to Alexander Pope, written just as the final touches were being applied to the MS of Gulliver's Travels, Swift explained the particular character of his "Disaffection to the World" : I tell you after all that I do not hate Mankind, it is vous autres who hate them because you would have them reasonable Animals, and are

Angry for being disappointed. I have always rejected that Definition and made another of my own. 1 am no more angry with WaJpole

than I was with the Kite that last week flew away with one of my Chickins and yet I was pJeas'd when one of my Servants shot him two

days after. Swift saw Walpole as the architect of Ireland's current misfortunes, for it was Walpole who had foisted Wood's halfpence on the kingdom, against which Swift had been writing since February 1724 in the character of "M. B. Drapier". Gulliver' s escape from the Brobdingnagian kite, thanks to both his brave swordsmanship and the cover of "a thick Espalier", can be read as a transposed version of Swift's seeing off of the English kite Walpole, thanks to both the resolute aggression of The Drapier's Letters and the protection afforded by pseudonymous publication. Moreover, Gulliver's tumble into the molehill also possesses a latent political charge. William III had died on March 8, 1702, in fact of a pulmonary fever, but in the popular imagination as a consequence of a fall when his horse had tripped over a molehill on February 21, 1702 (hence

15 the Jacobite toast to the "little gentleman in velvet breeches"). Swift's attitude towards William III was ambivalent. His ostensible panegyric, the "Ode to the King", is sown with discordant satiric implications; and Swift remained troubled by the events of 1688, which in his eyes had been a desperate remedy required for the defence of the Church of England, but which had also inflicted lasting damage on England' s constitution. So when Gulliver "fell to my Neck in the Hole through which that Animal had cast up the Earth; and coined some Lye not worth remembring, to excuse my self for spoiling my Cloaths" , the prelude to the death of William III is recast in a ludicrous form, while the soiling of Gulliver's clothes recalls the Jacobite calumny, that William had befouled himself at his coronation - a tradition to which Swift had also referred in another poem of the 1690s, "The Problem": "We read of Kings, who in a Fright, / Tho' on a Throne, would fall to sh-". As Lyon's letter suggests, Swift was reluctant to let go of the dismay he felt during those black days in March 1711 , cherishing the knife and the plaster he salvaged from the event almost as fetishes (Deane Swift remembered being shown the penknife "several times"). In the obsessive energies of Swift' s mind, the memory of past sufferings and the consciousness of present injustices jostled one another; and Gulliver's Travels was wonderfully invigorated by the resulting turbulence.

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TLS JANUARY 8 2010

TLS

fOR LOYERS OF LITERARY CULllltt

COMMENTARY

16 he Francis Xavier School in South London has started a campaign called "Mind Your Slanguage" which seeks to ban words and phrases like "innit" , "I was like ... " , "Trust me, bruv" and "Do you know what I'm saying" in the classroom. Demerits are given for using text-speak in written examinations. The school wants to encourage "appropriacy", a word which goes toe-to-toe with the language of "tomoz" (tomorrow). As in the banlieue of Paris, a sub-language is taking shape which generates its own slang specifically to exclude people and things like "appropriacy". The roots of what is called "Jafaican" (because it is spoken with a fake Jamaican accent) go back to Somalia, Nigeria and Kuwait as well as the Caribbean. In multicultural London, the word "like" is no longer pronounced " loik", but " lahk" , the word "face" no longer "fice" but "feece". "That standard Queen's English ting is a ting of the past", said a pupil from Francis Xavier interviewed on BBC radio. "Most people know how to switch codes", a girl said. "For instance, for ajob interview, you ' re suddenly ' highly motivated', like a white girl." A young white rapper I met at a Christmas party taught me some of the words frowned on by Francis Xavier: " Wha's poppin ', bruv?", "Wha's gwaan?", "Chillax , blood", "Go hard or go home" . In this world, shoes are "kicks" or "skids", a t-shirt is a "T" , a knife is a "shank", a gun is a "strap", a night is a " sleep" , a slut is an "apple" or a " slusher" and a chat-up is a "churp", as in "This badman churps me chick on de road". You might say, "We met this random guy. I felt like a total disconnect". "I'm a-ghost" means "I'm

meanings. Merchant banks only became a danger to civilization when they re-named themselves " investment banks". (You might as well call a casino a building society.) You don't tell an artist you like his pictures any more, you say "I love your practice" , because process is all. People who were once "disempowered" are now "disenfranchised". Difficulties have become "projects". Faced with one of life' s turnarounds, one says "I have projects". We are no longer crippled, handicapped, or suffering from a "learning difficulty", we are merely "differently abled". In this way, the blind, deaf and dumb are protected from their afflictions by painful mis-usages. One wonders why they don ' t just call everyone normal and be done with it, or "regular" rather, if we're being American, although that won ' t do because that' s their word for small: we had better just call everyone "big". But first we need to "study the statistics such ideas are normed on". Elsewhere, it seems the useful "actress" has gone to join "poetess" and "sculptress" on the naughty step. In order to avoid using "he" as a pronoun of common gender, some writers, including academics, have gone over to using " she", a more obtrusive, less attractive word. (Who's she? The cat's mother?) A sentence in the most recent issue of Poetry Review, ending "which ought to put the reader on her guard", made me think I'd missed a reference to a particular person. New locutions, nice and nasty, overflow

from the American melting pot, keeping the language lively, but it was depressing to hear on Radio Four that our new poet laureate was "stepping up to the plate". Expressions like "I'll have him call you" and "Do I get to go out with her" are well established, but "fit" as the past tense of the verb strikes me as unnecessary, likewise the misleading "sick to my stomach" , the American phrase for feeling sick, which has been resisted over here until now. I heard it used as a kind of heightener when someone on television said China's execution of a drug dealer made him feel "sick to his stomach" , as if his feeling merely sick was not enough. Meanwhile, the adjective-to-noun conversion continues: "I don ' t do nice", Selima Hastings said on Bookclub of her biography of Somerset Maugham. "I'm quite good at solitary", David Tennant said unconvincingly on Desert Island Discs. Likewise the noun-to-adjective, "very niche" , "all your gifting needs" ; the verb-to-noun: ''It's a long commute"; and the noun-to-verb: "They ' re moneytizing our eyeballs". The expression "What do you reckon to ... " (some singer, for example) struck me as strange until I realized that the "to" was its effort to put out transitive shoots. The "That bed's not going to make itself' formula and "Did you see what I did there?", which comes after a bad joke, are unexceptionable modern tics, but I can't stand the contemporary girly habit of hand-over-mouth in mirthless joy or surprise when attention falls on them - two hands if they win something. We've just heard that body-scanners are to be rolled out across the country. Are they on little wheels?

important encounters. Miss Eugenia Charles, the Prime Minister of Dominica, painted a disturbing picture. "In every island", she said, "there are little nests of well-trained people, coached not in Cuba but in Russia, who are there to destabilise society. I have seen directives saying they must have one man in every ministry. That' s why I move people round every few months, so they won't have time to disrupt the work ... ". The Rastafarians - wildeyed, tousled, dizzy with the wisdom-weed and dreaming of a return to Ethiopia - have spread far beyond the shanties of the Kingston "dunghill" in Jamaica, and the sale of hashish has hoisted them to burgher prosperity. (Crewe is very good on peculiar groups, of which there are many.) The extraordinary collection of races in Trinidad - Negro, British, French, Sephardic Jewish, Corsican, Muslim , Hindu , Bangladeshi , Syrian, Chinese and Amerindian - made a colourful start to Crewe's journey, though it was largely neutralized by the depressing buildings of Port of Spain. Things looked up in Tobago, and the beauty of the coast and the hinterland in Grenada, the pre-Revolutionary French and English architecture, the excitement of learning about the Bishop regime and the coup, changed the psychological tempo. The actual pace of the journey was suitably unhurried. Disregarding a notice, near the twin jungly pinnacles of St Lucia, saying "Trespassers will be Vio-

lated", the author gets everywhere. Very occasionally something unsurmountable reminds us that Crewe is in a wheelchair, but such is the charm of Hamish, the tireless friend who propels him, that all barriers dissolve. They attend a delirious wedding as guests of Colin Tennant, whose elephant probably the only one in the hemisphere outside a zoo - is the cynosure of the Lesser Antilles. It is hard to say which I enjoyed most, revisiting old staging-points or reading of ones I had missed and have rued ever since. St Vincent - full of rewards here - was nothing, then, but a cloud tea-cosy underneath our plane. I recognized at once the feelings that Barbados prompts: wonder at the rustic classicism of the plantation-houses, dissent from the transplanted parochial atmosphere and irked fidgeting under the strait -jacket of race divisions. The author recoiled from the islanders of Guadeloupe for exactly the opposite reason, and, after the umpteenth unprovoked jangle in record time, did an exasperated hunk. In Martinique he was captivated hy songs in the Incroyable patois accent, the beauty of girls of all shades, the Proustiansounding names of the squirearchy, its sophistication and political argument, the delicious rum-punches and the hospitable inhabitants. Further on loomed the dread crater of the Mont Pele, the volcano which in 1902 destroyed all the inhabitants of St Pierre (the old capital) except one. The author brooded among the overgrown wreckage, in spite of the warning notice which, Aldous Huxley says, is implicitly posted up among ruins by the Time-Spirit - "No musing, by order".

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HUGO WILLIAMS out of here" , while "Low it" (rhymes with now) means "Don't do it" (or allow it). As always, only the usage of the word defines its meaning. My favourite was "spitting" which means "rapping" on account of the flecks of saliva that fly out of your mouth when you're saying all those long words. The boy did one for me - an impressive stream of abstractions and rhyme-words with an out-of-control feel to it. What's odd about rap is that it leans towards the Latinate (and hence philosophical) side of the language rather than the Anglo-Saxon, where poetry more naturally resides. The circumlocutions and repetitions summon up the tortuous constructions of Victorian letters rather than today's street-life; only the hurry is modern. The Latin wing of the language seems to be making a comeback in the grown-up world too, with a plague of prefixes and other extensions struggling to make themselves unclear: "reprioritization", "undecommissioned" , "deeffectuate" , "non-experiential", "reparented", "undisadvantaged". I read somewhere that a certain novel was " less over-determined" than the author's previous work and thought this might be a good thing if "over-determined" meant there were too many reasons for things happening, which often seems to be the problem in fiction. It is probably part of the great euphemism pile-up in which words wriggle like snakes to slough off guilty

IN NEXT WEEK'S

ILS James Campbell William Styron's great themes John Gross Fear and longing in the Depression Jonathan Clark Modernists' 1688 Amanda Vickery Mariage a la mode Cairns Craig Herbert Grierson

TLS March 4, 1988

To the Caribbean We look back to Patrick Leigh Fermor's review of Quentin Crewe's book Touch the Happy Isles. To see the review in full, go to www.the-tls.co.uk "Just you watch this lucky feller go / Out to some distant archipelago ... ": this snatch of an ancient musical comedy which forty years ago pounded in my memory non-stop all the way to the Caribbean and back, recently struck up again to haunt another journey, a vicarious one this time, with Quentin Crewe as the lucky traveller embarked on a very similar quest of instruction and pleasure. The changes which have taken place in the Caribbean during the interim have made Touch the Happy Isles long overdue. Martinique and Guadeloupe remain integral Departments of metropolitan France, but with a few exceptions, of which Puerto Rico is the most important, the former colonies have become independent. Their divergent idiosyncrasies, however, make the idea of a Caribbean Federation hard to imagine. The biggest change of all, not of status but of polity , is in Cuba: and more recently there has been the United States intervention in Grenada. In one of Crewe's many

TLS JANUARY 8 2010

17

The bare facts about Patrick Hamilton's play in the worst possible taste

Cards on the table ADAM MARS-JONES

in mind you're in Mayfair and not the Alhambra! " . So it seems fair to say that the race card and the sexual-irregularity card are dealt but not played. The one minority that is over-represented on stage is the posh-patrician, though of course this was the rule in the classic West End play. The firelight in those opening minutes would have been reflected back from lustrous shirt-fronts, lapels and patent-leather shoes, and the frantic business of searching through all eleven pockets of one's threepiece suit for a scrap of paper would have seemed less exotic a pantomime. The two murderers, their handsome but empty-headed supper guest Kenneth Raglan and the older poet Rupert Cadell, particularly invited because he might in theory appreciate the aesthetic mastery of the crime, while shrinking from the reality of it, all went to the

Patrick Hamilton ROPE Almeida Theatre

atrick Hamilton's play Rope (1929) , long a warhorse of amateur drama, is put through its paces by professionals in the Almeida's scrupulous new production, directed by Roger Michell, and shown to be, if not quite a thoroughbred, then certainly a fascinating piebald cross, The play borrows from the real-life crime of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, who committed a murder in supposed accordance with the teachings of Nietzsche. It adds a Grand Guignol twist: the killers hold a supper party where food and drink are served on the chest containing the hody, that of an ordinary wholesome young man in their social circle, with their victim ' s father as one of the guests. It' s like a Jazz Age version of the cannibal pie served up in Titus Androniclls. The Aristotelian unities of drama are strictly observed: a single drawing room setting, and action which unfolds in real time, from the moment after the murder to its discovery, with the fall and rise of the curtain (omitted here) marking the division into acts without interrupting events. Yet the whole construction is in the worst possible taste. So Rope is both a supremely, even caricaturally well-made play, and an affront to those who value such things. It is an exercise in the suspense of no suspense, since the audience knows whodunit from the outset, and a psychological study which disowns depth. It is also a collision of genres - light comedy as experienced by most of the characters, something very different for the two plotters and the one who finds them out. The Almeida has been reconfigured in the round for the occasion, and Hamilton 's elaborately described set reduced to bare essentials. No radio, no baby grand piano, no grandfather clock and no windows, but half a dozen chairs, a convincing coal fire with a mirror over the mantelpiece, a table lamp, a drinks trolley and a telephone. And of course the chest, here imagined as octagonal. The first scene is done entirely by firelight, and it is hard to imagine that the effect was managed anywhere near as well at the Ambassadors Theatre in 1929. The characters bathed in its glow are Wyndham Brandon (Blake Ritson) and Charles Granillo (Alex Waldmann). The obvious way to remake the play for a modern audience would be to build this up as a gay relationship, following Tom Kalin in his film Swoon (1992), based on the same crime; to say in effect, "yes we're monsters, but you wouldn't let us be anything else, and we've come to enjoy it". Michell's production resists this approach. The subtext remains subtext, though there is one moment later in the play when the guilty

P

same school.

Blake Ritson as Wyndham Brandon and Henry Lloyd-Hughes as Kenneth Raglan pair, on their own in the room, register a frisson of intimacy in passing. No one in the play, including the ultra-respectable Sir Johnstone Kentley and his dowdy widowed sister, expresses surprise that two undergraduates should be sharing a house in Mayfair. The adjective "queer" pops up in the dialogue, but not as a code word (unless having guests over at nine in the evening, so described, betrays sexual unorthodoxy); it is hardly more used than "eerie" or "macabre" and certainly crops up less often than "weird". The closest Brandon comes to a pet name for Granillo is "Gran no", which sounds less like an endearment than the full form, a reverse diminutive. The only possible bit of byplay involves that missing piano. Before the guests arrive, Granillo is supposed to sit down and play "Dance Little Lady" with a "rather unpleasant" brilliance, looking "significantly" at Brandon while he does so. This might be a hint about role, though Granillo is the less dominant partner, or it might simply mean, " isn't this the stupid tune you like so much?". Otherwise it is actually the absence of innuendo which is striking. The same goes for the racial element. Granillo is Spanish, and specified in the stage

directions as dark (something ignored in the casting of the pinkish Waldmann). There's some stereotyping in the stage directions: "He speaks English perfectly. To those who know him fairly well, and are not subject to Anglo-Saxon prejudices, he seems a thoroughly good sort". Later on, Granillo gives a shrug of the shoulders which is "characteristic of his race". But there is nothing of this in the dialogue. No audience could plausibly track that shrug to its homeland, any more than it could deduce, not just from Philip Arditti's performance but from any interpretation whatever, however racked with nuance, that Sabot the French servant is "married,

quietly ambitious, industrious, and will have a restaurant of his own one of these days". When Granillo becomes hysterical, as he does now and then, you'd expect a hint that he was thereby revealing his inner pansy or dago - in fact Brandon might save the situation, in terms of normalizing these emotional outbursts, by referring to Southern blood. Of course, at the time of Rope's first production, the Lord Chamberlain was hovering oppressively over the texts of plays, but he would hardly have objected to the odd manly bark of "Be a man , for Heaven's sake!" or "Bear

TLS JANUARY 8 2010

As Hamilton's fiction shows - and The Midnight Bell is contemporary with Rope he hardly shied away from low life. Perhaps it amused him to posit here a world of toffs either fatuously innocent (ingenu and ingenue bellowing happily at each other) or homicidally perverse, and to have it taken seriously. The Noel Coward aspect of the play works very well in this production, with Emma Dewhurst's awkward, tongue-tied widow providing an odd pre-echo of Mike Leigh's agonized inadequates. The underlying cause for undergraduates to be living in a Mayfair house (and employing a servant) would most likely be the same underlying cause invoked at the time for the formation of a male couple - something to do with parents. But in the little world of Rope no parents are mentioned for the lovers , if we are to call them that, nor is any reference made to orphaning. So class analysis and Freudian theory join the list of things that are both part of the play and formally removed from it. In fact, the only person in the play who has parents is the one who has nothing and no one, the boy in the trunk. There is some tender business in this production when Sir Johnstone, played by Michael Elwyn, is called to the phone. He's like an octogenarian of today confronting a computer. Michell has understood that a man of, say, sixty in 1929 would not have grown up with the telephone, certainly not to the point of taking it for granted as an amenity. Coming in from the other room (offstage), he has to look around to locate the instrument, then picks it up rather tentatively and crouches over it to talk. At the end of the call he lays it down gingerly, as if it might shatter. Possibly this is a little too tender in building up the part. You could make a case for Patrick Hamilton's including Sir Johnstone on exactly the same sadistic basis as the killers have for inviting him to their Black Mass of cocktails and sandwiches - to turn the knife. He' s a prop at blood heat, in spats. Families in the play are made up of the

18 occasional uncle, like the one who left Brandon his library, and the odd aunt, like the one of Cadell's who lives in Bayswater - but is presumably not the source of his West End residence, which is big and well staffed enough for him to invite friends home on impulse. A poet's income would hardly run to that in 1929 or any other year. Bertie Carvel, who plays Rupert Cadell, has been styled to resemble Ezra Pound in his Vorticist prime, his hair a cresting wave. When he sits in a cloud of tobacco smoke, dreamy but unblinking, he might almost be waiting for Wyndham Lewis to paint his portrait. This role is the one which seems most obviously to incarnate decadence. "He is enormously affected in speech and carriage", say the stage directions. He brings his words out as if he is " infinitely weary of all things". "His affectation almost verges on effeminacy." These instructions are not ignored. Rupert is the character who aspires least to wholesomeness. Murderous Brandon has his sententious side, admiring Matthew Arnold and Carlyle, but Rupert rejects CarIyle out of hand, giving Arnold only a partial reprieve. The great bulk of his admiration he reserves for himself. He defends murder, since it is hypocritical to condemn it if you accept the far worse cruelty of war. Leila the ingenue suggests that he must have some moral standards. "Must IT' he replies. "I don't recall any." Told by her that in practice he wouldn't hurt a fly , he says that he has hurt thousands. Matter-of-fact dismissals of the Decalogue were not routine on the West End stage in the 1920s. Asked " what's wrong with the Ten Commandments?", Rupert replies, "Nothing whatever. Indeed, I have no doubt they were of the profoundest significance to the nomadic needs of the

ARTS tribe to whom they were delivered" . Rupert' s speeches become longer as the play proceeds, until they are often monologues, which (combined with the deliberateness of his delivery) tends to exonerate him from charges of glibness and talking for effect. Quizzed specifically about the seventh commandment, he claims to have offended against it "since infancy". This is a shrewd tease on the playwright's part. Even in the 1920s, West End playgoers would not necessarily feel sure of the commandment being referred to (which tends to prove the point). Embarrassing to call out " Shame!" from the stalls and then find it isn't adultery after all. In a classic detective story, the full cast must be gathered together for the denouement. Here, the unravelling is of a different order, and requires privacy. A game of cat and mouse is not best played before an audience of rabbits. The guests disperse, but Rupert returns like some dandified Columbo to ask one more question, and then a few more. He has shown that he belongs as much to the underworld of the play as to its pretended normal surface, and his character increasingly becomes the subject of the drama. He mentions as one of his poetic projects a poem concentrating on 10.35pm, "a horrible hour - a macabre hour, for it is not only the hour of pleasure ended, it is the hour when pleasure itself has been found wanting" . It makes sense that Rope was written to be played at 8.30. Then, with the customary West End slow start (ten more minutes before the curtain goes up), the clock on stage would synchronize with the watches in the audience. After the two intervals omitted in this production, the time, as Rupert speaks , would indeed be 10.35, "the hour when jaded London theatre audiences are settling down

in the darkness to the last acts of plays, of which they know the denouement only too well ... " . This is formalism biting the hand that bought the ticket. In Alfred Hitchcock's film (1948) of the play , that perverse reworking of stagecraft into self-absorbed cinematic virtuosity, the Rupert character (played by James Stewart) is a professor, whose ideas the murderers imagine they are putting into practice. An element of recantation is involved, when Rupert realizes the dangerous implications of his teachings. He steps back from the edge. Nothing like this exists in the play, and the relationship of Rupert to the killers isn't fatherly , but much more ambiguous. Before Rupert arrives, Brandon asks Raglan (who was his fag) if he ever met him. When Raglan says no, Brandon agrees, saying, "he was before your time, wasn't heT'. So apparently Rupert and Brandon overlapped at school. This doesn't add up, though Hamilton slyly slips the information in at a distracting moment in the play, after the doorbell has rung and before the visitor (who turns out not to be Rupert) is admitted. The dates can't be made to mesh. Rupert is identified as being twenty-nine in the stage directions, while Brandon and Granillo are undergraduates and what school has an age spread of eight or nine years? If one did, it would hardly countenance intimacies across that gap. The scenario referred to at one point, with Brandon as " an infant" or " morbid child" telling Rupert " stories round the fire" , goes against the grain of what is possible. The facts of a play, though, are what you can get audiences to accept. Patrick Hamilton wants to establish both a link and a crucial difference between the killers and the immoralizing poet. The difference is the war, in which Rupert has served, has killed and has

lost a leg (he gets about with the help of a stick). This must be the barest, most minimal account of a veteran in literature. Not a place name, not a regiment, not an anecdote. It would have been so easy to humanize the character at this point, if that had been what the playwright wanted, to have him talk about the friend he saw die or the girl who rejected him as damaged (particularly as his sexuality seems so questionable). What Hamilton wants is the bare fact of war and the implacable light it casts on everything else. Sometimes audiences "know" the denouements of plays so well that they don't notice when they ' ve been cheated. The ending of Rope is hardly even a technical triumph for morality. Rupert sits in judgement on the killers, but he is no spokesman for humane values. " You have said that I hold life cheap. You're right. I do. Your own included." He unmasks their shallow nihilism , but only in the name of his own, deeper one. Saying that Rope incorporates and holds in place some very sharp contradictions makes it sound like a great work of art, which I don't believe anyone has ever thought. But it is a remarkable piece of theatrical machinery, showing no trace of rust or dust, and a tour de force which insists on its own hollowness. Its combination of rigour and shamelessness, sophistication and crudity, puts the playwright into the category of his villains, if only on formal grounds. Staging the play in the round subtracts the windows required by the final stage direction, so this production goes for broke with a single visual flourish, a sort of jack-in-the-box nemesis effect. Perhaps this is a way of making it clear that, though everyone involved has concentrated on letting this iron maiden of the stage work as it was designed to, it wasn ' t through any lack of invention, nerve or flair.

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he only attested lock of Jane Austen ' s hair was sold at Sotheby's in 1948. Attendees at the next Annual Meeting of the newly formed Jane Austen Society were lamenting the loss of this relic to an American when Alberta H. Burke rose to her feet. "I am the American who bought Jane's hair, and if the Society would like to have it, I shall be glad to make a contribution of it." The Society did not demur, and the hair is now in the Jane Austen House at Chawton. But Mrs Burke's collection of Austen ' s letters and manuscripts (including a memorandum of her accounts, and a letter to a niece in which every word is written backwards) was bequeathed to the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, where, combined with other letters purchased for the library, they now comprise the largest archive of Austen's correspondence - more than one third of the 160

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letters that are known to survive.

Having kept the hair and lost the handwriting, English Janeites may cast envious glances towards New York, where an exhibition of letters and manuscripts, together with first and early illustrated editions of Austen's novels and other related material, currently occupies part of the Morgan. A good modern edition of Austen' s letters was published by R. W. Chapman in 1932 and updated in 1952; in 1995, Deirdre Le Faye re-edited the collection for Oxford University Press. It represents a fraction of Austen' s output, estimated to have been around 3,000 letters, mostly

Hair and heroines JULIET FLEMING A WOMAN'S WIT lane Austen's life and legacy Morgan Library and Mu seum, New York

written to her sister Cassandra. As Virginia Woolf imagines their loss, "when Miss Cassandra Austen grew old, and the growth of her sister's fame made her suspect that a time might come when strangers would pry and scholars speculate, she burnt, at great cost to herself, every letter that could gratify their curiosity, and spared only what she judged to be too trivial to be of interest". Even those that escaped have had lines removed by cutting or scoring. Nevertheless, much of interest remains. Visitors may not read all seventeen letters on display: written in Austen's clear hand, they are densely packed and sometimes cross-written, while transcriptions are not supplied. But those with the eyes to focus will be able to find evidence of Austen's acid tongue, as when a neighbour's wife is discovered to be "everything that the Neighbourhood could wish her, silly and cross as well as extravagant". We can see her sense of the ridiculous ("Mrs Bertie lives in

the Polygon, & was out when we returned her visit - which are her two virtues"), her talent for deft characterization and the writerly high spirits that rarely desert her for long. Austen's family relations are also legible: her confidence in and admiration for her brother Henry, her impatience with her hypochondriacal mother, her dislike of all but the best behaved children, and her passionate trust in the understanding of Cassandra. Indeed, what is perhaps most interesting about these letters is that they suggest that as a writer Austen was not alone: family members were quicker to recognize her talent than some of her other contemporaries and read, admired and discussed the novels as they were written. The family favourite remained the earliest-written of Austen's published novels, Pride and Prejudice. In 1813, four years before her death, Austen wrote to Cassandra that she had just seen a portrait of Mrs Bingley (the former Jane Bennett), in a painting by William Blake of Mrs Harriet Quentin: "There never was a greater likeness. She is dressed in a white gown, with green ornaments, which convinces me of what I had always supposed, that green was a favourite colour with her. I dare say Mrs D. will be in yellow" . Pursuing the joke, Austen looked

TLS JANUARY 8 2010

for a portrait of Elizabeth Bennett in two further exhibitions, but was disappointed: "I can only imagine that Mr D. prizes any Picture of her too much to like it should be exposed to the public eye. -I can imagine he would have that sort of feeling - that mixture of Love, Pride and Delicacy". Austen, and those closest to her, were already becoming Janeites. The exhibition at the Morgan features a short film, in which an oddly chosen group of intellectual celebrities, including Colm T6ibin, Cornel West and Siri Hustvedt, talk with a striking lack of thought or consequence about Austen's "influence". It is also accompanied by a series of "Public Programs" which suggest more knowledge of that influence than is dreamed of by most of us: an evening "Dancing with Darcy", a reading group "on three of Austen's most beloved novels" led by Patrice Hannon, author of Dear lane Austen: A heroine 's guide to life and love (written for the modern woman in the voice of "the famed Regency novelist"); and a presentation by their authors of some recent adaptations and continuations of Austen's work, including Sense and Sensibility and Sea-Monsters, Pride and Prejudice (graphic novel), and Lady Vernon and her Daughter. Lest we believe such extravagances are peculiar to the Americans, we might remember that in 1972 the lock of Austen's hair was deemed by its English curators to have become faded , and was, after careful chemical analysis, re-dyed to restore its original glossy brown.

19

Orhan Pamuk' s taxonomy of erotomania in Turkish high society

Beloved object RONAN MCDONALD Orhan Pamuk THE MUSEUM OF INNOCE NC E Translated by Maureen Free ly 532pp. Faber. £ 18.99.

9780571 237005 "E

very passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector' s passion borders on the chaos of memories." So wrote WaIter Benjamin. For Benjamin, collecting saves unique items from absorption in general patterns: the objects in a collection resist classification as types, preserving their individuality, their "thing"-ness. The cliche warns us about not seeing the wood for the trees, but Kemal Basmac, the narrator and protagonist of Orhan Pamuk' s new novel is, like Renjamin , alert to the opposite danger: the loss of the sensuous and the immediate object through abstract thought or the distortions of passing time. For Kemal, the urge to collect is a way of capturing lost time, of redeeming grief. The Museum of Innocence is a story of erotic obsession and lost love which takes place in Istanbul during the 1970s and 80s. Lost love is hardly an original theme, but Pamuk crafts it into a delicate treatment of guilt and innocence, tradition and modernity, sacrifice and humiliation, memory, time and happiness. In 1975, Kemal, a son of a wealthy Istanbul family, is thirty years old and engaged to Sibel , who all agree is his ideal match. One day, seeking to treat his fiancee to a designer handbag, he wanders into a fashionable boutique where he encounters the beautiful , eighteen-year-old Fiisun Keskin, a distant cousin from a more down-at-heel family. Kemal begins a secret affair with Fiisun, meeting her in the afternoons in one of his family' s empty apartments. During one bout of vigorous sex , he has what he will later realize is the "happiest moment of his life". One of Fiisun' s earrings falls on to the bed sheet and gets lost. It later becomes an item in his "museum of innocence", a collection that grows from the odd objects connected with his beloved that he gathers over the years . Hi s double life culminates in his engagement party (depicted here as a brilliant satire on Turkish high society), where the guests include Turkey ' s first Miss Europe, a former foreign minister and an invidious gossip columnist. Such is Kemal's obsession that he wangles an invitation for Fiisun, and concentrates on her every movement throughout the evening. However, the party marks the end of their affair and the beginning of his extended anguish . He imagines he sees Fiisun drifting around the streets, and returns again and again to the apartment where they enjoyed their trysts. Eventually, when his turmoil leads him to confess his heartache to his fiancee, their engagement peters out. Nothing can comfort him for the loss of

Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul Fiisun save the momentary relief afforded by touching and holding objects associated with her, rubbing a cigarette end she left in an ashtray "against my cheeks , my forehead , my neck and the recess under my eyes, as gently and kindly as a nurse salving a wound" . It is not unusual in this situation for someone to be drawn to objects that carry traces of a shared life with a lost love. Many of us can look back to youthful traumas when we have fingered a lock of hair or wept into a favoured t-shirt. But Kemal' s fetish takes a peculiarly intense form. A constant visitor to the modest home where Fiisun lives with her "fatso" husband and her parents, he compulsively filches objects. Over the eight years that he visits the Keskin home, he manages to take 4,213 cigarette ends, 237 hair barrettes, 419 national lottery tickets, one saltshaker, and one quince grinder. Like Proust' s madeleine, these items afford Kemal encounters outside time and without the accretions and distortions of retrospect. Collecting here is not about elegy but about anticipation. "Real museums", he observes. "are places where Time is transformed into Space" , and he hopes that visitors to his museum will " lose all sense of Time" . This escape from history afforded by the object is one of the meanings of "Innocence" in the title. Innocence is regained by having access to the sensuous particularity of things and moments. The secret of happiness, Kemal suggests, is dismembering the seeming coherence of a narrative whole, the idea of time as a continuum, into its discrete isolated moments: For me, happiness is in reliving those unforgettable moments. If we can learn to stop thinking of our li ves as a line corresponding to Aristotle' s Time, treasuring our time instead for it s deepest moments, each in turn , then waiting

eight years at your beloved 's dinner table no longer seems such a strange and lau ghable obsess ion but rather (as 1 wou ld disco ver much

later) assumes the reality of 1,593 happy nights at Fiisun's dinner table . Today 1 remember each and every evening 1 went to supper in C::ukucuma - even the most difficult, more hopeless, most humiliating evenings - as

happiness. This happiness, for all the themes of hurt and pain, is the affirmative note on which the novel ends. One of the many oppositions or paradoxes in The Museum of Innocence is between the chaos of the collection and the regimented, systematic mind of the collector. Notwithstanding the intensity of the feelings depicted, the tone here is cool and direct, even scientific. Eighty-one short chapters, together with a map at the beginning and an index of character names at the end, indicate that the novel , however intimate the subject, is itemized and ordered. Kemal has a liking for lists and numbers. This calm taxonomy counterpoints, or perhaps compensates for, the intensity and abandon of the emotional register, mixing the absurd and poignant. It is an attractive voice, and surely to the credit of Maureen Freely' s translation, that subtle, nuanced social moments and psychological states are caught and rendered without fuss or affect. The logical manner in which Kemal narrates his obsession, and plots to acquire his objets d'amour, puts the borders of plausibility under pressure, adding an anti-realist note. There is much blurring of the real and the fictive here, a remnant of Pamuk' s earlier penchant for experimental fiction. Near the end of the novel , Orhan Pamuk, the novelist, reveals that he has been ventriloquizing Kemal , at the latter's request; Kemal wanted

TLS JANUARY 8 2010

a first-person chronicle to explain the items in his museum to visitors and has commissioned Pamuk for the task. But the blurring is not confined between the covers of this book: Pamuk, it transpires, has bought a building in Istanbul to house an actual "Museum oflnnocence", which is due to open in late 2010. Despite the broadening of the narrative voice, and the public implications of a " museum", readers might assume that the theme of erotic obsession in The Museum of Innocence is less historically or politically focused than in the two novels for which Pamuk is best known, My Name is Red (2001) and Snow (2004). This wou ld be misleading. When Kemal is trying to persuade "Orhan Pamuk" to tell his story, he confesses that he struggled with Snow because he does not " like" politics. Yet, it is through these narrative occlusions, and through the refusal of characters like Kernal to look at historical realities, that the political sensibility in thi s novel finds an insistent utterance. The gi lded life of Turkey's Westernized elite, with its imported booze, designer labels and malicious gossip, is based on its segregation from the impoverished and destitute majority. Military coups and leftist or ultranationalist militants merely irritate Kemal and his privileged set, as if the politics of the nation have little to do with them. But their bland materialistic lives give the impression of riven , corrupt and suffocating class divisions. Kemal, of course, is so absorbed in his erotomania that he loses interest in his old friends and the family business, let alone in a wider political reality. Yet the political turmoil of the times is the percussive background to the novel's private action. A political critique is insinuated through seemingly casual asides. The morality of the novel, in the venerable tradition of Swiftian satire, is communicated through the obtuseness of the narrator. The depiction of the unlovely social swirl of Istanbul needs no authorial annotation. The wider context for this society is Turkey's relationship to global power and prestige and the forced de-Islamization on which Atatiirk founded modern Turkey. Like Pamuk' s memoir Istanbul: Memories and the city (2005), the novel contains transporting evocations of Istanbul , the "bridge" between East and West. Yet the reader who wants to position Istanbul as a harbour city of intercultural trade and traffic, and thereby a location that promises the integration of Europe and Asia, will be disappointed. There is a significant scene in the novel when Kemal and Fiisun go for a swim in the Bosphorus and, for a precarious moment, find themselves as far from Asia as from Europe. It creates fear, not reconciliation. Those Istanbul residents who teeter between the two cultures are not waving but drowning. This is largely because of inequalities in power and prestige. For the wealthy denizens of Istanbul, the West sign ifies the modern

20

FICTION

and the desirable. Clothes and entertainment come from Paris, London , New York and Hollywood. At one point, a character is derided for going "a la Turca", taking an interest in Turkish music and fasting at Ramadan. For all their prosperity and privilege, these nouveaux riches suffer from cultural deprivation and dislocation. This is not a healthy hybridity but rather the use of an imported culture to buttress internal class division. The version of Western culture they adopt demands the denial of native values. In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 2006, Pamuk spoke about the feelings of cultural inferiority and marginality that he experienced growing up in Istanbul: "In the centre of the world, there was a life richer and more exciting than our own, and with all of Istanbul, all of Turkey, I was outside it". His new novel pivots on this sense of disinheritance, depicting the pressures of social expectation in a country mesmerized by the fashions and styles of a Europe that responds with indifference or caricature. When Kema!'s best friend, Zaim, seeks to introduce something local - the first Turkishmade soft drink - he has to promote it with advertisements featuring a blonde German model. Other Turks wear "East-West" watches, with Arabic numerals on one face and Roman on another. This is a culture with a fragile and imitative sense of modernity, forced astride two incompatible value systems. Women are expected to be sexually " liberated" like Westerners, but also to preserve their virginity. It is tempting to see Kema!' s seduction of Ftisun, while engaged to the wealthy Paris-educated Sibel , as an allegory for this split sense of belonging. If the obsession with foreign fashion symbolizes the shallowness of the Turkish bourgeoisie, it is nonetheless through going abroad that Kemal learns to recognize the cultural enervation of home. In his mission to build his museum, he travels to 5,723 museums around the world, often visiting small out-of-the-way collections. His travels prompt a growing awareness of his own place in the world. "One evening while drinking alone in the bar of the Hotel du Nord, gazing at the strangers around me, I caught myself asking the questions that occur to every Turk who goes abroad (if he has some education and a bit of money): What did these Europeans think about me? What did they think about us all?" If Kemal once felt comfortable with the banal Eurocentrism of his circle in Istanbul , he now sees the tension in claiming an allegiance to a world that does not see you as its own. It is to raise the selfregard of non-Western nations that he wishes to build his museum. " While the West takes pride in itself, most of the rest of the world lives in shame. But if the objects that bring us shame are displayed in a museum, they are immediately transformed into possessions in which to take pride." If museums define ideas of culture and civilization by exhibiting totemized artefacts, then the sort of small-scale, quasi-illicit museum proposed by Kemal , will give access to a different sort of collective memory. It turns the glimpsed object, the throwaway remark, the disregarded life into the sacred residue of personal experience, exhibiting a life unravelled into a series of free moments.

Fatal foundling " H e wrongly believed that" ; "It would have eased her pain a little to learn that"; "He did not have the slightest suspicion that" : Panos Karnezis deploys a narrator of scrupulous omniscience, eloquent on his characters' blind spots and misapprehensions, but there is not a murmur of postmodern self-consciousness to his voice: his approach feels almost pre-modern, and has been characterized by several reviewers as "mythic". Karnezis's first two novels, The Maze (2004) and The Birthday Party (2007), dealt directly with the popular mythology of Greece's recent past: the War in Asia Minor and the life of Aristotle Onassis respectively. The Convent, his first novel not to be based in historical events, is also constructed with the simplicity of line and grandeur of incident characteristic of myth. From its Olympian first sentence ("Those whom God wishes to destroy he first makes mad"), the novel is at once archaic in its form and timeless in its sensibility. The story itself has a kind of nursery quality, a vivid earnestness, even though it has been written for adults. It begins when a newborn boy is found abandoned in a suitcase near the entrance to a secluded Spanish convent. The Mother Superior, Sister Maria Ines, who had a secret abortion before taking her vows, becomes convinced that a miracle has occurred - that God is demonstrating his forgiveness by giving her a second chance at motherhood - and resolves to keep the child and bring him up within the convent. But Sister Ana, an ambitious, embittered nun who resents the Mother Superior's leadership, believes that the baby 's appearance is the Devi!, s handiwork. The conflict between these two women is the driving force of the narrative; the great scope of their delusions creates much of its energy. There is little attempt

hat is the one occupation you should not pursue when you are an ex-Mafia boss living in hiding under the FBI's Witness Protection Program? Autobiographer, perhaps? That is just what Fred Blake (real name Giovanni Manzoni) decides to become when he and his family are relocated to the small town of Cholong-sur-Avre in Normandy. Having spent decades frightening , torturing and killing people, and managing his dedicated team of henchmen, Fred decides it is time to tell the truth about his career as a mob leader in the "wise-guy paradise" of New Jersey, his former home and dominion. Opening with this somewhat improbable undertaking by the family capo, Tonino Benacquista's novel, Badfel/as, sets off along several far-fetched plot lines. Blake's son Warren runs scams at his school like a young Corleone; his sister Belle, who is described throughout in strangely reverent but slightly pornographic terms, dominates her peer group through sheer beauty and charisma; not to be overshadowed, their mother, Blake's wife Maggie, burns down

W

EDMUND GORDON

had had no courage to tell her. They stood aside and let her pass without a word, and

Panos Karnezis

she, still unaware of the tragedy, thanked them for their good manners, lifted her habit

THE CONVENT 214pp. Cape. £12.99. 9780 224 07934 I

a little, so as not to trip, and climbed down the steps to the courtyard.

to endow either of them with a complex inner life, but so organically do their personalities seem connected to the narrative in which they feature, they come to assume archetypal proportions. Sister Maria Ines is "a desperate childless woman", while Sister Ana is "a lost soul". These formulations are so definitive, one feels, they might as well be capitalized. As the story gathers pace, both women start allowing their manias free rein. Sister Maria Ines poisons the stray dogs kept by the elderly Sister Carlota for fear they will harm the baby; Sister Ana gathers what she believes to be evidence of Satanic rituals for the presiding Bishop, with whom she imagines herself to have a special relationship. Although an authorial presence is perceptible throughout the narrative as a ministering consciousness, Karnezis is almost invisible stylistically. His prose is for the most part restrained and impassive, eschewing poetic effects. Declarative sentence follows declarative sentence, without significant modulation of tone, and the cumulative result is a chill lucidity: When the nuns had walked out of the chapel they had seen the dogs lying in the courtyard and had realised to their horror that they were

dying and there was nothing they could do. They had simply stood there, horrified, listening to the dogs yowling until Sister Carlota. always the last out of the door because of her

old age, had come up behind them. Then the other women had come out of their trance but

Tonino Benacquista BADFELLAS Translated by Emily Read

256pp. Bitter Lemon. Paperback, £8. 99. 978 I 904738435 the local store when its manager casts aspersions on her American nationality. The middle of the book focuses on the increasing tension between Fred - who is, after all, responsible for the Blakes' outcast status - and the rest of the family. They don't take his new vocation as an author seriollsly, and are growing increasingly frustrated at having to live anonymously. Two FBI agents are posted in the house opposite, watching their every move, ostensibly to protect them. In spite of this expert surveillance, Fred manages to escape one night to a local film club in order to give a talk on the Mafia (another rather daft plot twist) and, later on in the novel, he sets out under cover of darkness to dynamite a local factory responsible for polluting the town's waterworks, in an attempt to represent the will of the people.

TLS JANUARY 8 2010

The danger of writing in this mode is that, since it relies so heavily on creating the right atmosphere, a few punctures to its surface mystique can do disproportionate structural damage. Karnezis is a Greek writing in English, and perhaps a few semantic blunders in his work are inevitable (for example, "cash" is not usually what people bequeath in their wills, nor is it common to describe a newborn human as "it"). But his editor, presumably anglophone, might have been expected to notice them. More distressing are those points at which the prose takes on a storybook jauntiness, as in one paragraph that ends: "Sister Ana had finally solved the mystery of the baby in the suitcase". Karnezis comes close, in such sentences, to revealing his narrator as a false God. What ultimately rescues the novel from bathos is the tightness of its construction. Karnezis is a natural short story writer - as was demonstrated by his brilliantly strange and echoing debut collection, Little Infamies (2002) - and The Convent, much more than either of his previous novels, is written with the same disciplined swoop, the same clear trajectory from first word to last, as are the best of his tales. Lean and compulsive, it is a work shorn of all superfluous elements. Like the myths it so often resembles, it should be easy to dismiss as naive, but proves unexpectedly haunting, its details catching like splinters in that part of the imagination that responds to pure storytelling.

We can give Benacquista some credit for seeking to make a hero out of a mafioso rat, even though he is taking his cue from the Martin Scorsese film, Goodfel/as (1990), in which the mobster Henry Hill describes his epic journey from joining the gang to becoming a snitch, which was in turn based on Nicholas Pileggi 's book Wiseguy (1986). But Benacquista's novel is self-consciously an entertainment, and the interesting material he is working with - the true confessions of a (largely unrepentant) gangster, the life of a family who can never come clean, big city American folk adapting to small-town life in France - is at times undermined by a desperate need to make the reader laugh. Explosions going off in Cholong and a denouement in which an army of assassins descend on the local fete might possibly be funny in a film comedy. Benacquista is a good storyteller, with a gift for character and setting, but here he gets caught up in the many twists of his madcap plot and is ultimately unable to write himself out of it.

CHRIS MOSS

FICTION ll novels are thought experiments, few more self-consciously so than those of Richard Powers. Prisoner 's Dilemma (1988) is named after a famous thought experiment in game theory, while his most accomplished novel, Plowing the JONATHAN BATE Dark (2000), turns on a metaphor for the white page or screen onto which the novelist Richard Powers imprints a virtual reality: imagine yourself GENEROSITY in an empty white cube, then make it into a 296pp. Atlantic Books. £ 16.99. world. In one of that novel's threads, a group 978 I 84887 125 0 of scientists turn their white room into "the Cavern", an advanced virtual reality machine that can realize any world you want. In the won him a position as a visiting humanist in other thread, a teacher is held hostage in an the science faculty in his old university in empty white cell in Beirut. His only means of Urbana, Illinois. (Many of his novels are mental survival is to turn it into the worlds he located in the flat Midwestern landscape.) has known and loved in his experience and By good fortune, he found himself in the in his reading; he does so through the art of university 's National Center for Superanother advanced virtual reality machine, computing Applications when they develthe human imagination. oped the Mosaic browser in 1993, a key Powers began his university career with moment in the early history of the web. So it the intention of becoming a physicist, but is that in Gala tea 2.2 - a charming revision ended up majoring in literature. There are of the Pygmalion myth in which a superfew novelists as deeply invested in the rivalry computer is set the task of becoming a better - or the complementarity - of scientific and literary critic than a clever PhD student in the literary ways of understanding the world. He English department - we find Powers writing has the knack of asking the right question at of "the web: yet another total disorientation the right time. His breakthrough novel , The that became status quo without anyone Gold Bug Variations (1991), grew from realizing it" . In 1995, when this was pubtwin realizations. The scientist in him lished, most of us hadn ' t even heard of the perceived that the most important work of web. This is the kind of thing that has given the fin de siixle was being done in the life Powers his reputation for being ahead of sciences, not in what he later called his the technological curve. "beloved physics". The artist perceived that Throughout the past decade a stream of the organization of information is the key to stories about the gene for this and the knowledge. Creative artist and life scientist gene for that have made their way from are alike in depending on the writing of code. the scientific to the popular press. On The novel's title yokes an Edgar Allan Poe December 31,2002, the New York Times ran story about cryptography yielding up a a feature called "Born to be Happy, through a hidden treasure ("The Gold-Bug") to Bach's Twist of Human Hard Wire". It described Goldberg Variations; its narrative holds a woman who had every reason to be sad together the search for the secret code of job lost, husband dead of cancer, son DNA and an analysis of musical structure. depressed - yet who could not stop herself Powers's facility in incorporating compli- being happy, extroverted and good company. cated science within the form of the novel Another woman was quoted as saying "It's

Happily hard-wired

A

actually kind of embarrassing to be so cheerful and happy all the time. When I was in high school I read the Robert Browning poem ' My Last Duchess.' In it, the narrator said he killed his wife, the duchess, because, 'she had a heart - how shall I say, too soon made glad?' And I thought, uh-oh, that' s me". The condition is known as hyperthymia. Not the intermittent hypomania of classic bipolar behaviour, but a perpetual state of happiness. In the terms of Hippocrates and Galen, this is due to an excess of the sanguine humour. In those of modern neuroscience, it is the result of an abundance of serotonin and dopamine. The following year, an article was published in Science under the title "Influence of Life Stress on Depression: Moderation by a Polymorphism in the 5-HTT Gene". It argued from a longitudinal study that children with two copies of the long allele of the serotonin transporter gene on Chromosome 17 had an unusually low susceptibility to depression. The findings were tentative and have not been corroborated by subsequent studies, but it is easy to see how this hypothesis could be vulgarized into newspaper headlines screaming that the secret to human happiness has been found. And from there, to imagine an entrepreneurial genomic engineer synthesizing the favourable genetic code and selling you an IVF package complete with guarantee of a happy child. How much would you pay for that? This is the territory of Powers's new novel, Generosity (gene-rosity), for which he prepared by becoming one of the first dozen people in history to have his entire genome sequenced. He described this process in an article in GQ magazine in 2008, basking with pleasure when the genomicists at

21 Knome Inc. (motto "know thyself') told him that he has "the ' novelty-seeking' allele". He is unquestionably a novelist seeking novelty. In Generosity, a failed writer teaches a creative writing class. Among the usual complement of dysfunctionals is a young Algerian woman called Thassa who proves to have hyperthymia. Civil war, ethnic cleansing, loss of family, attempted rape: none of them can dent her happiness. Thomas Kurton, meanwhile, is the entrepreneurial geneticist, whose Truecyte Corporation is about to publish its claim that they have discovered the hard wiring for happiness. When Kurton gets to hear about Thassa via the blogosphere, he sees that she can become the poster girl for his discovery and persuades her to let him read her DNA. As a result, she becomes a celebrity - the happy Arab chick - who is wheeled before Oprah (reconfigured as Oona, the richest and most famous Irish-American woman in the world). The twist is not exactly a surprise: celebrity is the one thing that makes her miserable, thus showing that we are more than the sum of our genes. The conceit is elegant. The standard critique of genetic determinism is to emphasize environmental influences on behaviour. Powers imagines a character who is immune to environmental influence until she enters the virtual environment, the bubble of celebrity, at which point the genetic determinism collapses. The conjunction is summed up in the characteristic Powers sentence: "Reality has become programming's wholly owned subsidiary". Generosity gets off to a slow start, goes on a little too long and suffers from the Powers vice of schematism (shambling writer versus slick scientist). There is also an unnecessary postmodern layer in which it is a book about its own writing. But even a second-rank Richard Powers novel such as this is unerring in its anatomy of our scientized lives.

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

What belongs etra Hulova's first novel, which tells the imaginary life stories of three generations of twentieth-century Mongolian women, caused a sensation when it was first published in the Czech Republic in 2002. The author, then a twenty-threeyear-old student of Mongolian Studies, attributed the book's popularity partly to her youth and good looks, but also, more interestingly, to its unusual setting within a Euro-Asian culture, poised between Russia and the East. The novel's appeal does not lie in Hulova's provision of colourful snapshots of a remote foreign landscape. Her bleak depictions of life spent on Mongolia's rural steppe and in the longed-for capital, Ulan Bator, are far from picturesque. Even the moments when the book briefly lightens are grounded in a gritty realism: the yielding of a love-starved kitchen girl in a cheap city guanz to the touch of a greasy maternal hand in her hair; an ostracized old lady's proud self-enthroning " like a khan princess" outside her yurt, where she may finally find rest. These five bitter narratives of female abuse, exploitation and loss - often enacted

P

MADELINE eLEMENTS Petra Hlilova ALL THIS BELONGS TO ME Translated by Alex Zucker 195pp. Northwestern University Press.

Paperback, $17.95. 978081012443 I

by women on women - are, like the lives of the novel's protagonists , monotonous, and

and are rejected as erliz or half-breeds by their clan. Sent to the city by their mother, the two girls are recruited as prostitutes in their aunt's brothel , thus losing ownership of their bodies. Both bear illegitimate children. Zaya keeps her baby and becomes a single mother; Nara gives hers up, and remains childless. As a result they are further isolated from their pure-blooded Mongol sister and excluded by their xenophobic tribe. The poetic passages which frame the novel's start and close, lyrically translated by Zucker, offer a poignant illustration of Zaya's status as "other" in her society. We are aware of this throughout the narrative, but she and her sister barely acknowledge

at times hard to endure.

it, either to themselves or to one another. We

Alex Zucker's English title draws attention to the Mongolian characters' need to belong to - and be able to claim ownership of - a home place, powerfully symbolized here by the family yurt or ger. It also highlights one of the novel's central ironies: that while the story may take the reader into the heart of the traditional Mongolian home, the tale that is told is one of estrangement from that sheltering centre. Hulova's main narrator, Zaya, and her younger sister, Nara, are the illegitimate products of their mother's sexual encounters with Chinese and Russian men,

first meet Zaya as a stolid little girl, seated "at home" in front of her parents' ger in a dust storm, childishly confident in spite of growing doubts about her Khalkha purity. At the end of the novel , having returned to her home town of Bashkgan somon, she takes up her stance as an old woman before the dilapidated ger she has on temporary loan from her sister. When her fantasies of ownership and citizenship are stripped away, what "belongs" to Zaya is immaterial: her knowledge of the harsh landscape she surveys, and the colour and scent of old memories.

TLS JANUARY 8 2010

The novel may leave the reader with a feeling of emptiness, but ALL This Belongs to Me is an acutely observed account - compelling despite its grimness - of the lives of its semi-nomadic subjects. Yet, while this European author's novel may seem to reinforce Western assumptions about the oppressed lives of women in developing countries, the representations here are not straightforward. Hulova has said that her characters and the realities they face were modelled on Czech subjects, transported in fiction to a distant setting, where their emotions and relationships might be pursued in a purer form uncluttered by European ephemera. The seemingly authentic Mongolian characters, European projections onto an Asian landscape, are in fact ambiguous cultural hybrids. Their experiences of racism and sexism reflect not only on the Mongolian society Hulova appears to scrutinize, but also on the Czech one that informs her subject matter. While the original Czech title, PamiH moji babicce or "Memory for My Grandmother" , hints at an intimate relationship between the author and the women of the novel, the connection is severed in the English version. One hopes that the complex dual perspectives such contemporary "writings from an unbound Europe" can offer are not overlooked as a result.

22

TRANSLATION PRIZES

A turn to prose he art - or craft - of translation is in good shape. New versions of the classics pour off the presses, and several smaller publishers - Hesperus, Dalkey Archive, Pushkin, Gallic and Quercus and Dedalus prominent among them are busy commissioning translations of both new works and old. Translators tend to lament the fact that their work is either underappreciated or only drawn attention to in order to be criticized. They have a point: the quality of their work appears to be high at the moment and, if as a nation of readers we in Britain remain insular or parochial, then there is less excuse for that than ever. The surprise in the awarding of translation prizes this year is the absence of poetry from the list - given the quality of the work being done in that field - in contrast to last year when five of the seven prizewinning translations were of books by poets (even the runners-up this year feature no poetry). Instead, the year has been dominated by fiction. Pushkin Press have done Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) proud over the past few years and indeed have just released two new translations of titles by him, The World o/Yesterday and a compendious volume of Selected Stories, both translated by the industrious Anthea Bell. This year' s Schlegel-Tieck

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ADRIAN TAHOURDIN Prize for translation from the German goes to Bell for her earlier version of Burning Secret (l17pp. Pushkin Press. Paperback, £LO. 978 I 901285 85 7). The novella appears in a nice compact edition but, as is always the case with Pushkin titles, there is a frustrating absence of critical apparatus - no introduction or preface; on the dust jacket we are told that the story is set in the I 920s, but a glance at the copyright page will reveal that the novella was first published in 1913, as Brennendes Geheimnis. The book is the savage account of a mother's mistreatment of her twelve-year-old son, Edgar. The pair have come to an Austrian spa town, where they meet a charming young man who is referred to throughout as "the Baron" - "a baron from a not particularly illustrious noble family in the Austrian civil service". When the Baron befriends Edgar it soon becomes apparent that this is in order to win favour with the boy's mother (who is separated from her husband). Edgar' s presence becomes a hindrance to the amorous couple - the mother tells him at one point "I am not going to plague myself with you any more". Edgar' s jealousy and incomprehension are beautifully conveyed, as is his realization ofthe couple's betrayal of

him. This is a small masterpiece, beautifully rendered in Anthea Bell's translation. In any other year, the runner-up Michael Hofmann's fine version of Fred Wander's powerful novel The Seventh Well would surely have won the German prize - and deserves an honourable mention. This is the first translation of a book that was first published in East Berlin in 1971 (as Der siebente Brunnen) at the prompting of several of Wander's friends , including Christa Wolf. Wander, who had been born in 1916 into a family of poor Jewish immigrants to Vienna, never saw his mother and sister again after 1938 and was deported to Auschwitz from Drancy in 1942. Hofmann's excellent translation conveys a powerfully understated style: of a young couple Wander writes, "They lay in a silent intimate embrace, respected by all. The honeymoon voyage was to Drancy, and then on to Auschwitz. There they were parted, and it was over". Tove Jansson will be known in this country for the charming novella The Summer Book. Fair Play, another short book, was published in 1989, which accounts for the disorientating references in it to cassette recorders. Jansson was Finnish, but grew up speaking Swedish. This edition (l27pp. Sort of Books. Paperback, £6.99. 978 0 85489 953 0), trans-

lated by Thomas Teal, reads very well. Teal wins the Bernard Shaw Prize for translation from the Swedish. The novella is made up of a succession of vignettes, episodes in the lives of lonna, an artist, and Mari, a writer, which seem inconsequential but which cumulatively create an intimate portrait of the two women. In her warm introduction, Ali Smith reveals that lansson (who died in 2001 , aged eighty-six) "lived both on her island and in Helsinki, alongside her lifelong partner and travelling companion, the graphic artist, Tuulikki Pietila" (there are sepia photographs of the two on the inside of the dust jacket). Smith also describes Teal as a " luminous translator of Jansson's twin talent for surface and depth, simplicity and reverberation in language. .". Those qualities can be seen in particular in her depictions of weather patterns: "The sky moved toward them in a finely drawn curtain of local thunder showers, each with its own delicate drapery. The light turned subterranean and yellow, the shallows had gone Bengali green. Very soon, it would all be nothing but grey rain" . Elsewhere, "The room had four windows because the sea was equally beautiful in all directions. Now, as autumn approached, the island was visited by exotic birds on their way south, and it sometimes happened that they tried to fly right through the windows toward the daylight on the other side, the way they might fly between trees" . In stark contrast to Jansson ' s Nordic lyricism, this year's Scott Moncrieff Prize goes to

Translation Prizes 2009 The Times Literary Supplement, together with the Translators Association of the Society of Authors, is pleased to announce the winners of this year's Translation Prizes.

The CalousteGulbenkian Foundation

for translation from

The Premio Valle Inclan

Prize for translation

The Vondel Prize for

The Schlegel-Tieck

The Scot! Moncrieff

The Bernard Shaw Prize

Prize for translation from German.

Prize for translation from French.

for translation from

translation from Dutch

Spanish.

The Saif GhohashBanipal Prize for translation from Arabic.

Swedish:

or Flemish.

from the Portuguese.

Prize: £2,000

Prize: £2,000

Prize: £2,000

Prize: £2,000

Prize: £1,000

Prize: £2,000

Prize: £1,000

Winner: Margaret

Winner: Samah Selim

Winner: Polly McLean

Winner: Thomas Teal

Winner: Sam Garrett

Winner: Peter Bush

J ull Costa for The

for Gross Margin by

for Fair Play by Tove

for Ararat by Frank

for Equator by Miguel

Accordionist' s Son by Bernardo Atxaga

Stefan Zweig

Laurent Quintreau

Jansson

Westerman

Sousa Tavares

for The Collar and the Bracelet by Yahya Taher Abdullah

Winner: Anthea Bell for Burning Secret by

Runner-up:

Runner-up: Tina

Runner-up: Francis lanes

Runner-up:

Runner-up:

Runners-up:

Runner-up: Barbara Melior for Resistance:

for What It Is: Selected

Margaret Jull Costa for The City and the Mountains by E,a de

Edith Grossman for Happy Families by

France by Agnes

Carlos Fuenles

Judges: Andrew Brown

Judges: John King,

Judges: Winifred Davies, Patricia Duncker and

Humbert

Queiroz

Elliott Colla for Gold Dust by Ibrahim al-Koni and Michelle Hartman for Wild Mulberries by

Nunnally for The Story of Blanche and Marie by Per Olov Enquist

Judges: Martin Sorrell,

and Kjell Espmark

Judges: Patricia Odber

Jeremy Munday and

Iman Humaydan Younes

Christine Lo

de Baubeta and Fay Weldon

Jason Wilson

Judges: Roger Alien

Michael Hofmann for The Seventh Well by Fred Wander

Memoirs of Occupied

poems of Esther lansma

Judges: Paul Binding,

Susan Massotty and Ina Rilke

Jacob Ross and D. J. Taylor

(chair), Marilyn Booth, Aamer Hussein, Francine Slack

The leading paper ill the worldfor literary culture

TLS JANUARY 8 2010

TRANSLATION Polly McLean for her unflinching and fluent translation of Laurent Quintreau's Gross Margin (117pp. Harvill Secker. £12.99.978 I 846 55121 5). Quintreau is a performance artist; he is also a trade unionist and works for an (unnamed) corporation. His book was originally published in France in 2006 as Marge brute and takes the form of a board meeting: eleven executives are gathered around the table at II am and the reader "hears" the interior monologue of each in turn, with nine of them each allocated a circle of Hell and the two directors Purgatory and Paradise (the epigraph to the book is from Dante's Divine Comedy). The meeting concludes at I pm, two hours being roughly the time it takes to read this torrent of invective, world-weariness and sexual fantasy. It is a long way from being "appallingly funny" , as the reviewer from Le Monde seems to have found it, but it does convey a bracing sense that much of office life is time wasted; "the ethnomethodology of the office" is, alas, unelaborated but there is plenty of talk of "pathetic losers" and "subshitheads" as well as "politically correct community fuckwits". This is a world of highly educated executives who know their Proudhon and Marx, but who "no longer read, don ' t have the time, what was the last one, oh yes,

The Da Vinci Code, almost a year ago. This year's SaifGhobash-Banipal Prize for translation from the Arabic has gone to Samah Selim for his versions of Yahya Taher Abdullah ' s stories collected in The Collar and the Bracelet (146pp. American University in Cairo Press; distributed in the UK by Arabia Books. £16.95. 978 977 416 145 2). Abdullah (1938- 81) was known for his " virtuoso oral performances" in Cairo, which may help to explain why his tales, some of which are little over a page long, occasionally read like parables: "One day, a man cut off a viper's tail with an iron bar, so the viper fled his house and took refuge in the house of an old widow". The long title story, a tragic family saga, is set in the ancient Upper Egyptian village of Karnak (near Luxor). In an afterword, Selim talks of Abdullah's use of "the ritualized, communal language of the public poet and storyteller ... the language of the great epic cycles of rural Egypt ... " . As a consequence, he has chosen to "translate literally ... the many proverbs and folk aphorisms that Abdullah weaves into his writing". Bernardo Atxaga writes in Basque and Spanish. The Accordionist 's Son (389pp. Harvill Secker. £18.99. 978 I 843432807) was published in Basque in 2003 as Soinujo-

learen Semea and then translated into Spanish as El hijo del acordeonista by Asun Garikano and the author. This is the version that Margaret Jull Costa, the winner of the Premio Valle Inclan , has rendered into fluent colloquial English. Reviewing the Basque edition (TLS, August 13,2004), Amaia Gabantxo described it as a "self-referential , multilayered work" that "offers a lyrical yet harsh view of what happened in the Basque country after the Spanish Civil War", when the men of the new generation were driven into the arms of ETA. The book is, in Gabantxo's estimation, "the first great Basque novel" . Earlier Peninsular history is the theme of Miguel Sousa Tavares's novel, Equator (374pp. Bloomsbury. £16.99. 978 0 7475 8174 I). The book is partly set on the Portuguese island colony of Sao Tome, to which the hero has been sent, in 1905, by King Dom Carlos as its new governor. Tavares concocts a brew of sex and colonial and slave history, in which Portugal's "oldest ally" vies for the spoils. Reviewing the book, Toby Lichtig (TLS, November 21 , 2008) described the sex in the book as "copious and mawkish" , while noting that Peter Bush ' s "occasionally clotted translation" rose to the "challenge with gusto". Bush, who until now has translated

23 Spanish fiction , wins the biennial CalousteGulbenkian Foundation Prize for translation from the Portuguese. The only work of non-fiction among this year' s winners, Frank Westerman ' s Ararat (23Ipp. Harvill Secker. £16.99. 978 I 846 55089 8), defies categorization: an engaging and extremely interesting personal-quest narrative and travelogue, the book is also a well-researched "history" of Mount Ararat. Westerman, who has consulted scientific journals and cites an alarming-sounding article on " Volcanic hazards in the region of the Armenian Nuclear Power Plant", describes himself as occupying "the shadowy area between believing and knowing"; he became obsessed with the mountain when he was working as a foreign correspondent in nearby Yerevan. As Tayt Harlin, in reviewing the book, wrote (In Brief, July 17, 2009), Westerman ' s "account of [his] trek up Ararat with a motley crew of Czechs is gripping". Sam Garrett's fine translation from the Dutch wins the biennial Vondel Prize. The seven prizes will be presented by the Editor of the TLS, Sir Peter Stothard, at a ceremony at King ' s Place in London on January 11. This will be followed by the 2010 Sebald lecture, to be given by Will Self.

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rlando jurioso is regarded as the literary masterpiece of the Italian Renaissance. In it we learn of the exploits of Charlemagne' s knights as they fight off the invading Saracen armies, and, more significantly, as they attempt to appropriate one another's lovers. Ludovico Ariosto was a contemporary of Machiavelli, Michelangelo, Raphael, Leonardo and Titian, as well as of Martin Luther, Henry VIII and Christopher Columbus. This epic poem has inspired numerous artists (Ingres, Redon, Dore), composers (Handel, Vivaldi, Haydn), and writers as diverse as Cervantes, Proust and Calvino. So why do we not flock to it as we do to the pages of The Prince or to the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel? It has not always been so. During the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods Ariosto permeated the literary scene. Wyatt, Surrey, and Lodge drew on the Furioso, as did Spenser, who derived from it much material for his Faerie Queene, famously allegorizing and moralizing it in his effort to "overgo" the Italian poet. Shakespeare, too, plundered his works for plots and characters as well as for an Ariostan "flavour" . The Romantic period saw renewed fervour for Ariosto, who influenced Wordsworth, Waiter Scott, Southey, Keats, Byron and Mary Shelley. Yet after such an illustrious beginning, this complex intertextual dialogue virtually stopped there. We simply do not have twentieth-century transformations of Ariosto in English; there are no analogues to the myriads of Dante-inspired works. He has generated no Waste Land, no Station Island, no Omeros. So why did the English-speaking world give up on this poem? Its main themes are sex and war - usually a winning formula. Could previous translations be partly to blame? It seems so. The older ones were either bland and lifeless - indeed one was accused of transmuting Ariosto's "gold" into " lead" - or else they drastically censored the racy episodes. Barbara Reynolds's 1975 version was the first complete, uncensored

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The earthly sublime DOIREANN LALOR Ludovico Ariosto ORLANDO FURIOSO A new verse tran slation Translated by David R. Slavitt 672pp. Harvard University Press/Belknap. £29.95 (US $39.95). 9780674035355

text in octaves. But her tone is just a little too strait-laced, and she does not capture the range of styles so crucial to the Furioso. David R. Slavitt's major achievement is his re-creation of Ariosto's stylistic range. Barbara Reynolds deemed it necessary to maintain a "'certain dignity" or Ha minimum dispensable tone of epic". But Slavitt disagrees. Ariosto' s text ranges across the entire linguistic spectrum, from the everyday to the sublime, and so too does Slavitt's. Here, for example, we see a stylistic progression, from a relatively elevated style to a more idiomatic one within a single octave: But Ruggiero, impervious to their wiles, declines their invitation, for the bold knight is aware that only a few miles behind him is Alcina, rushing pell mell in pursuit of him, like the proverbial bat out

of hell. The text is veritably saturated with idioms, which are manipulated to comic effect: "For the moment, we'll leave them there, but, as I say, / we' ll return. I have other fish to saute". At times the style is grotesque and vulgar. Orlando, on a particularly brutal killing spree, is compared to a boy who found a nest of vipers sunning themselves and he

picked up a good sized rock with which to pound them all into a disgu sting

pate.

You see

"Angelica Carving Medoro's Name into a Tree", 1757; a fresco by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, Villa Valmarana ai Nani, Vicenza one wriggle off in a hurry across the ground but missing its tail. Another, in agony, cannot move but writhes in its coil and twitches.

So Orlando dealt with these sons of bitches. Yet we also have the occasional interjection of French ("Sacre bleu !") or Italian ("prestissimo") to remind us of the poem's setting and original language. Also, usually for comic effect, we find sporadic insertions of highly Latinate words ("exsanguinating", "horripilating") or old-fashioned words or phrases that are redolent of the epic mode ("forsooth! " or

TLS JANUARY 8 2010

"this martyrdom of innocent maidens that makes the world wax wroth"). Slavitt's octaves are skilfully constructed, each one with its own self-contained mood and pace, and ending on a rhyming couplet that often takes the form of a pithy concluding comment: "Bogio of Vergale he skewered too. / (He' d promised his wife he'd return , but what can you do?)". His rhymes are at times simple and understated ("back" / "hack" / "thwack") or more imaginative (" inasmuchas" / "in her clutches"), or utterly tongue in cheek ("wonderful job" / "shish kebab" / "poor yob"). In order to hold the narrative strands and digressions together, Ariosto styled himself a self-conscious narrator. Slavitt heightens this device, by playing metafictional games. He addresses the reader with utterances such as "Ah, you see / it all connects!" or "as you might have guessed, with all those pages you ' ve got in your right hand". His similes are concrete and evocative, following the precise contours of Ariosto's images when he deems this appropriate, and inserting contemporary allusions to Freud, Genetic Selection, Reception Theory, and even to recycling. Slavitt also brings Ariosto's denunciation of warfare up to date. The Italian poet condemns the development of cannons and guns, which rang the death-knell of the chivalric ideal of mano-a-mano conflicts, replacing them with wide-scale slaughter. Slavitt brings us into the nuclear age, in which the scale of war that Ariosto despised has increased exponentially: "that machine of fire, iron, and sound, / a weapon of mass destruction, that terrible gun". Perhaps a purist would object to the slang and contemporary allusions in this new translation, but they are in keeping with the spirit of the poem. Slavitt injects Ariostan irreverence back into the Furioso and opens it up to a wider anglophone readership. His translation is witty, energetic, playful, outrageous, yet serious and sombre too. Crucially, it is effortlessly readable.

24 nce upon a time there were no fairy tales. Yet, when all of Europe was covered with great forests and winter nights were long and dark, many stories were told. There were tales of magic ; romances of valiant wanderers and steadfast maidens ; stories of wishes that came true; of courage and of cunning. Children met animals who spoke to them; when among their own, the animals spoke to each other; and sometimes almost-humans intervened in mortal affairs. However, there were no fairy tales, because they had not yet been classed as a genre. Indeed, genres had not yet assumed the force of recognition that came with the hindsight of collectors such as Andrew Lang, whose "Comparative Method" never interfered with his sensitive storytelling. Nonetheless, some decisions about similarity and relationship seem to have been taken when various supposed oral tales, from Aesop's Fables to coarse French fabliaux , to anecdote and adventures with wild creatures (many originally written and literary), enjoyed sudden social mobility in Paris at the end of the seventeenth century. In the broad sense "contes", "fairy tales", were an idea whose time had come. Charles Perrault (1628-1703), an obscure but talented civil servant, rose under Colbert to become supervisor of public buildings and then general administrator and apologist for Louis XIV, including promoting the new Academie Fran~aise. His coterie of enemies included Boileau, defender of the faithful-toAntiquity. Only in his mid-fifties did Perrault turn from royal panegyric, voluminous defence of contemporary artistic achievement, and occasional verse. He is most famous where, perhaps, he is least recognized as innovative, in his cultivation of what he addressed to the king's niece as

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FRENCH LITERATURE

No fear of fun RUTH MORSE Charles Perrault THE COMPLETE FAIRY TALES Translated by Christopher Betts 204pp. Oxford University Press. £14.99 (US $29.95). 9780 19 923683 I "Contes de ma mere J'oie", what we now

know as Mother Goose Tales. Like his female counterparts, he presented as "old" tales which may have been all his own invention. It was Mme d' Aulnoy who first called them fairy tales (contes de /ties). Looking back, this apparently sudden flowering in the 1690s is neither surprising nor in need of much explanation. Supernatural and non-human meddlers have been part of our imaginative lives as long as fables have. At the time, however, the concatenation of circumstances that earned these low-style, oral tales their lettres de noblesse looked more than unlikely. Three apparently unrelated things contributed to the catalyst. First, a revival of the quarrel between the Ancients and Modems, with its retrospect on the imitation of Aesopic fables as an early step in the acquisition of reading; second, the availability of the Christian justification (eloquently explored by Erich Auerbach) of sermo humilis, which originally dignified the low literary style of the Gospels; third, the late-seventeenth-century literary fashions dividing polite society. Since La Fontaine had

already bagged "fables", the accommodating category "contes" was happily Perrault' s for the taking. His ten elegant narratives included Sleeping Beauty, Puss in Boots, Bluebeard, Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, and Donkey Skin, as well as the more hortative stories of the stupidly wasted wishes and the rewards and punishments for politeness to strangers. He also rewrote Boccaccio's tale of Patient Griselda, which Petrarch had deigned to immortalize in Latin. Both those learned fourteenth-century authors built into their tales some criticism of the husband' s extraordinary ill-treatment of his wife. But with the disappearance of their words, Griselda, like many medieval romances, degenerated - in this case into preposterous misogyny. Fairy tales, although much anatomized, are not usually subject either to historical contextualization or to close scrutiny of their verbal expression. They tend to be treated as largely timeless material to which tellers turn when the invisible wand of Id or Zeitgeist inspires symbolic or allegorical expression for suppressed hopes and fears. In recent years we have had Bruno Bettelheim's now notoriously authoritarian psychoanalytic analysis and Jack Zipes's " social-ideological" interpretations. Such readings depend in no small measure on treating the individual retelling as transparent, or at least translucent, and of no distinct intellectual interest. That is, it is safe to ignore the words in which they are composed, however distinguished. In the seventeenth century, according to the usual history, authors such as La Fontaine and Charles

Perrault attempted to sanitize traditional material by attaching apparently authorial morals at the end. Ifreaders for so long asked what "they" mean and what "use" they were, the problem was greater than category confusion, greater than a fear of fun for the young. But close attention to what authors wrote reveals wide and witty spaces full of irony, of double address to younger and older readers, of what amounts to sending up the hallowed insistence that stories have simple moral ends, that books for children are childish or that simple folk are anything of the kind. Young children, as this tale will show, And mainly pretty girls with charm, Do wrong and often come to harm In letting those they do not know

Stay talking with them when they meet. And if they don't do as they ought, It's no surprise that some are caught By wolves who take them off to eat.

The paratext of this handsome book tacitly tells its own tale. The red ribbon placemarker, the Dore frontispiece of Grandmother reading to her daughters and their children, and the further selection of beautifully reproduced Dore illustrations, present a complete Perrault as a treasured gift for children. A complete duallanguage edition with prose translations by Stanley Appelbaum was published in 2003, but this is the first time the three verse tales have been translated into verse. It is worth recalling that it was translating - really paraphrasing - Perrault that horrified Angela Carter into replying with feminist tales of her own. Christopher Betts is a gifted translator and conveys much of Perrault's wit and irony. His introduction, though, is dense and hard to follow , and the scholarly apparatus is likely to be of interest only to the aged persons who buy the stories for the ever avid young.

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ranslators ask questions, and are grateful for answers and encouragement, when they correspond with the poet or writer on whose words they are labouring. Yet published records of such relationships are rare. This is why Jaccottet traducteur d'Ungaretti is so absorbing. Collecting the letters that the young Swiss poet (b 1925) and the elderly Italian (1888-1970) exchanged between 1946 and 1970, this volume, which is enhanced by Jose-Flore Tappy's biographical annotations, offers insights into Giuseppe Ungaretti ' s verse, chronicles Philippe Jaccottet's literary coming of age and reveals the linguistic, personal and practical intricacies of a joint effort to render Ungaretti's terse, compassionate and philosophically resonant Italian poems into French. Although the letters mostly restrict themselves to the finer points of translation or to topics such as proof-reading, review copies, copyright, editors and publishers, a literary friendship shines through these pages. Ungaretti was fluent in French. The two men corresponded in that language, beginning with Jaccottet' s first letter, which warmly thanks the Italian for his hospitality during an initial meeting, in Rome, that had been arranged by a Swiss artist-friend. Jaccottet knew no Italian, but the consequences of this brief encounter were lasting. He not only learnt the language but also started reviewing Ungaretti's books when they appeared in Italian or in French translations by other hands. His first review dates to 1948, and this piece, along with two other

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Dhotel and other maftres JOHN TAYLOR Jose-Flore Tappy , editor JACCOTTET TRADUCTEUR D'UNGARETTI Correspondance 1946- 1970 249pp. Gallimard. €20. 978 2 07 0120949

Philippe Jaccottet A VEC ANDRE: DHOTEL II Ipp. Fata Morgana. € 16. 978 2 85194 724 6 CE PEU DE BRUITS 128pp. Gallimard. € 12. 978 2 07 0120345 little-known articles, is reprinted here, thus complementing three other articles about Ungaretti that are included in Jaccottet's collection Une Transaction secrete (1987). Jaccotlet and Ungaretti not only exchanged letters and manuscripts, especially when a translation project was underway, but they also met from time to time, sometimes thanks to the generosity of the older poet. Although he was not a rich man , Ungaretti occasionally paid for the impecunious Jaccottet's trips to Rome so that they could work together. Jaccotlet' s engagement with Ungaretti's

poetry and "poetic prose" (the translator' s first efforts were devoted to the narratives of IL deserto e dopo, 1961) arguably influenced his own evolution. Deeply attached to the metaphysical questioning of Germanlanguage poets, and in particular to Holderlin and Rilke, Jaccotlet discovered travel writing through Ungaretti , and Mediterranean sensuality through both him and other Italians such as Eugenio Montale, Attilio Bertolucci, Mario Luzi, Piero Bigongiari, and Luciano Erba. The poetics of these and other contemporaries helped Jaccottet to ponder how a search for truth might run up against the temptations of lyricism. Jaccottet's increasing dubiousness about aesthetic smoothness and his aspiration to an uncompromising authenticity may partly stem from his reflections on Ungaretti's style, not to mention his wordby-word tussles with it as a translator. Yet the youthful Jaccottet struggled with these same questions by studying the work of other elders as well. One of these was Andre Dh6tel (1900-91), a charming French novelist who evokes moments of grace, and toys with peering beyond or through the real world. Often misunderstood by reviewers , who were blind to his metaphysical seriousness, Dh6tel found a probing critic in Jaccottet. No fewer than nine articles - and this is a selection - by Jaccottet about

TLS JANUARY 8 2010

the novelist are gathered in A vec Andre DhOtel, followed by their correspondence. As with Ungaretti, the differences between the two writers are instructive. " Without being able to partake of (Dh6te!'s) serenity" , notes Jaccottet "I admire it .... A grace is at work here that fascinates me, all the more so in that I have always been deprived of it." Jaccottet's resolve to reject any illusory "grace" yet to keep his senses fully open to the possibility of experiencing it has never been taken to such lengths as in Ce Peu de bruits, which brings together poems, diarylike notes and tributes to deceased friends. Jaccottet describes a physical and perhaps also a metaphysical fleetingness that he associates especially with light, but also with flowers , burning leaves, birds alighting on melting snow, or a night sky glimpsed through branches. If such perceptions open mysterious doors (a characteristic metaphor) , the poet ventures no further; he distrusts words as soon as he utters them ; and he scrutinizes his own intimations of transcendent realms so sharply that they quickly fade - only to reappear in an unending cycle of wonder and scepticism. Looking back, Jaccottet senses that he has made "no progress, not the slightest step forward, some setbacks instead, and nothing but needless repetitions". Ce Peu de bruits is a modest, even self-disparaging book, and it teaches an ominous lesson: what the poet defines as failure can be generalized into an essential trait of any life.

25

LITERARY CRITICISM & BIBLIOGRAPHY "vernaCUlar" is a native or indigenous language, from the Latin vema, meaning a native or slave who was born in his master's household; vernacularity carries within it prejudices and hierarchies. A vernacular might be seen as unofficial, informal, colloquial , socially levelling, subservient. As Alastair Minnis's engaging collection of essays shows, the issue of vernacularity was both complicated and of great consequence, for medieval England was a polyglot place where most people knew more than one language. In practice, for laypeople, this might simply have meant spoken English was used in general, with Latin reserved for Church, prayer and official or administrative affairs. However, to use a language was entirely different from translating something from one language to another; translation, suggestive of the removal of something from one condition to another, was always hierarchical and political. To change something into another language was to produce a different version, with changed resonance and audience and an utterly different kind of authority. The "Lollard" followers of John Wycliffe brought this question to the fore in fifteenth-century England, not only by translating Scripture from Latin into English, but also by allowing laypeople and women to preach, and by raising the issue of translation as a scholarly undertaking in the universities. In Translations of Authority in Medieval English Literature, Minnis addresses two related questions: first, how did English writ-

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Vulgar tongues ANTHONY BALE Alastair Minnis TRANSLATIONS OF AUTHORITY IN MEDIEVAL ENGLISH LITERATURE Valuing the vernacular

272pp. Cambridge University Press. £50 (US $90). 9780521515948 ing reflect and remake Latin texts and clerical ideas? And, second, what is " popular", or vernacular, about medieval popular religion and its texts? In the vivid religious lives of late medieval people - preserved in the monuments of Gothic architecture, in the mystery plays, in illustrated manuscripts - are encoded sophisticated debates about who has the right to preach, translate and administer God's Word. As Minnis shows, these debates force us, as they forced medieval people such as Waiter Brut (a Welshman tried for heresy), Geoffrey Chaucer and Margery Kempe, to reassess the very basis of cultural authority. To comment in the vernacular on Latin texts was potentially disruptive, as it was nonclerical in its concerns as well as its language. Minnis describes how, in the charged atmosphere following Archbishop Arundel's early-fifteenth-century suppression of vernacular preaching, "all English

writings, no matter how much or how little theology they contained, no matter how defensible their orthodoxy may have been, could ... fall under suspicion" . This leads Minnis to consider some intriguing problems. Is all religious writing in Latin different in its concerns from "vernacular theology" ? Why does English writing fail to engage with the debates about Nominalism which animated Latin texts? Was "Lollardy" , that loose affiliation of commentators, translators and preachers, a specifically Englishlanguage phenomenon, or might heresy be articulated in Latin too? If women can preach in English, can they "confect" the Eucharist, " making" the body of Christ? If there is a distinctively "vernacular" religion, was there something especially appealing to the vulgus about devotional objects like Christ' s foreskin , "the greatest genital relic of them all" , the sweat-stained facecloth of Thomas it Becket (the kissing of which "could be a stomach-turning experience"), or scrapings of cement from the tomb of St William, the boy-martyr of Norwich? Minnis' s essays suggest that questions such as these take us to the very core of what could be at stake (literally, given the occasional burning of heretics in fifteenth-century England) in writing in English. Moreover, Minnis usefully connects debates on language

translation with controversies over "the substitution of a relyk of debatable power for the real thing". Minnis crucially shows how Lollardy - sometimes presented as if it was ubiquitous and coherent - must be seen against larger concerns about "the vernacular" and "vulgarity" which were the ground of late-fourteenth- and fifteenth-century English culture. The vernacular could both substantiate and oppose orthodox authority. The final chapter of the book is an enjoyable reading of the conflict between Harry Bailly and the Pardoner in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales; "serious and silly" sources are considered, reading Bailly' s abusive reference to the Pardoner's "soiled pants" - his feculent breeches - as a vernacular discourse about holy relics. Having investigated how English puns, jokes and mistranslations reflect and illuminate Latin debates, Minnis ' s closing asseveration seems misplaced: Top-down research, based on high-culture texts, will not get us very far into the breach. Rather we need to work from the bottom up reading between the lines of the elite documents, becoming familiar with the research.

of social anthropologists and folklorists. By such means, we may attempt to access the rich mother lodes of vernacular religion, and allow them their true value.

Anthropologists' flattening rationality and folklorists' rejection of historical specificity are very much at odds with Alastair Minnis's fascinating and lively essays, which so fully interrogate the idea of the "true value" of the vernacular.

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story goes that a customer in a large bookshop in Paris asked a clerk whether he could recommend a good book about Jean Gerson and was startled to find the clerk returning with a book about Gershom Scholem. Perhaps this is apocryphal. Yet a better attested story is one about the American in a Parisian bookshop who requested a book about Gerson and found the clerk coming back with a book on George Sand. Doubtless few, even in France, have heard of this late-medieval French Chancellor of the University of Paris and man of letters, but if any work will advance Gerson's reputation it is Authorship and Publicity before Print. Daniel Hobbins has not written a biography and feels no calling to turn Gerson into a great thinker. B ut he has demonstrated that his author (who lived from 1363 to 1429) was a pivotal intellectual personality and a rough equivalent of Erasmus or Voltaire as the unrivalled prince of the thought-world of his day. Central to Hobbins ' s brief for Gerson are the ways in which he succeeded in taking learning beyond the university to a wider literate public by means of his literary style, his choice of subject matter and his publishing strategies. Earlier, Thomas Aquinas, the most prominent theologian of the later thirteenth century, had addressed practical moral questions in his Summa; yet, even so, he had almost no appeal for non-theologians. In contrast, Gerson was a best-selling author. How did he manage it? For one, he put aside impersonal rationalistic discourse, accompanied by relentless articulations, divisions and subdivisions, for a greater use of rhetorical adjuration and affectivity. Attacking contemporary theologians who relied heavily on abstruse logic as pedantic

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Early bestseller ROBERT E. LERNER Daniel Hobbins AUTHORSHIP AND PUBLICITY BEFORE PRINT Jean Gerson and the transformation of late medieval learning 335pp. University of Pennsylvania Press.

$49.95; distributed in UK by Plymbridge. £32.50. 9780812241556 fools or "windbags" , he opted for vigorous prose meant to sway the passions. Never assuming a captive audience, he might engage his readers' interest by taking on different personae, narrative devices and dialogues. He also preferred to write on topics of immediate relevance, approaching the manner of a "public intellectual": the Great Schism; the errors of Jan Hus; tyrannicide; whether the Romance of the Rose was too smutty; the conduct of Joan of Arc. Trust Gerson to address the issue of whether a priest ought to communicate the Eucharist the morning after a nocturnal emission. (Answer: yes, he could, provided he had not gone to bed with evil thoughts.) Sometimes he might engage in furious controversy, as in his campaign in favour of the Immaculate Conception (against Dominican opposition); often he might urge against overzealous religious scrupulosity, quoting Proverbs to say that "he that violently bloweth his nose bringeth out blood" ; sometimes he might advance a pet cause, as in his propaganda for the sainthood of Mary ' s husband, Joseph, earlier deemed a

harmless cuckold. (Those who have never heard of Gerson are necessarily unaware that he had an enduring influence in the last regard: hardly any children were named Joseph before Gerson's advocacy, and the devotional image of the Holy Family only gained its modern currency because of him.) Specialists have been aware of some of these facts before Hobbins, but not as a package. What Hobbins is the first to see is that Gerson was an innovative "publisher" . The term is not anachronistic. There definitely was "publishing before print", given the standard procedure of late-medieval authors of presenting a work at a specific moment to a scribe for the purpose of dissemination by further copying. Gerson was innovative within these terms by engaging the Carthusian Order as a copying and recopying network (houses of the Order also served as lending libraries), and by encouraging the copying of groups of his works in single codices - "Gerson anthologies" . The most original insight in this book is that he spearheaded the creation of a new literary genre: the tract. Whereas earlier scholastic authors wrote technical "disputed questions" , commentaries, or systematic treatises explaining step by step all that it was necessary to know about a given subject, Gerson was among the earliest to write non-pedagogical "rapid response" pieces, resembling the later pamphlet. Such tracts were comparatively cheap to produce because they were written on paper rather than parchment, and their style and subject matter allowed them to

TLS JANUARY 8 2010

reach a comparatively large audience, itself created by sociological trends. As Hobbins puts it, Gerson gained "fantastic success, measured by manuscripts, in reaching a wide and varied international readership". This success makes it credible to maintain that the fifteenth century was "the century of Gerson" . Authorship and Publicity before Print is tightly argued, and based on prodigious research, elegantly and unobtrusively presented. The blurb is not guilty of puffery when it calls the work "one of the most important contributions to late-medieval thought and culture that has been written in decades". My only reservation is that Daniel Hobbins has allowed himself to be too easily intimidated by the current mode for railing at "master narrative". No one doubts that history does not move in straight lines, but history is also not an unaccountable mass of shades and shadows. If a historian has succeeded in showing how and why Jean Gerson ' s grasp of authorship and publicity comes so much closer to ours than his predecessors' , he should not hesitate to say so.

B FOUR COURTS

PRESS

Dublin in the Medieval World Studies in honour of Howard B. Clarke ). BRADLEY /

A. FLETCHER/ A. SIMMS, EDITORS

'The essays range dizzily over time and topic. an exciting brand-tub into which to dip ... For lovers of Dublin, the contributions tell much that is new about the capital.' Toby Barnard, Irish Times. ISBN 978-1-84682-154-7. hbk. ills. 604pp. £45.00

+353 1 453 4668 • www.fourcourtspress.ie 0 Order onlme and receive a 10% discount

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IN BRIEF

Sport Peter May THE REBEL TOURS Cricket's crisis of conscience 344pp. SportsBooks. £17.99. 978 I 899807 80 2

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he Rebel Tours is a history and analysis of the seven cricket teams that toured South Africa between 1982 and 1990 in defiance of the international sporting boycott. These unofficial national teams played socalled Tests and One Day Internationals against "official" Springbok XIs. In its dealings with apartheid, cricket was always more contentious than other sports. The presence of the Indian, Pakistani, Sri Lankan and West Indian international teams An aigrette or breast ornament from around 1720, with enamelled flowers, diamond water drops, an insect and a parrot; from Brilliant Effects: A cultural history ofgem stones and caused what Peter May calls the "crisis of conscience". The English cricket authorities jewellery by Marcia Pointon (426pp. Yale University Press. £45; US $85. 978 0 300 14278 5) feared that a Kerry Packer-style team of leading white players would go to South Africa as captain of what turned out to be the last rectly, so the ship was known as "Timmera". and leave second-string teams to play formal unsanctioned tour, when Nelson Mandela' s Her complete refit allows Willis to compare release was imminent. Pictured on the book's French and British shipbuilding techniques Tests against the non-white nations. As May's chronological account makes cover, Gatting, John Emburey and David and to offer lesser-known details such as the clear, there were always double standards Graveney of that 1990 team all later assumed superiority of British pumps and blocks. In and Pharisaisms. There were lesser race important coaching or administrative roles in 1798, the name "Temeraire" passed to a concerns in rugby - Maoris in the New Zea- English cricket. Nobody emerges with credit 98-gun ship launched to fight Napoleon. Willand team were made "honorary whites" dur- from Peter May's meticulous and detailed lis follows this ship' s naval career from glory days at the Battle of Trafalgar, when its crew ing tours. Golfers and tennis players - white account of the rebel tours. STUART GEORGE saved Nelson's flagship at great cost by ones, anyway - could visit South Africa withengaging the Spanish Santisima Trinidad, the out punishment. In the 1970s, touring cricket largest ship in the world, through its long sides could field multiracial teams but decline as prison hulk and supplies depot in Springbok XIs were either black or white. the 1820s and 30s. Sam Willis Cricketers considered as rebels and traitors Willis's book is infused with his experiTHE FIGHTING TEMERAIRE by some were seen as pioneers and crusaders ence and knowledge of seafaring. For exam323pp. Quercus. £25. by others. ple, he notes the usual slow build-up to any 978 I 84724 998 2 May describes how many of the players naval battle, inevitable when the enemy involved " ignored or declined my enquiries; n August 2005, BBC Radio 4 ran a poll to might be spotted fifteen miles away and waronly one offered the unimprovable, irony-free find the nation's favourite painting. The ships sailing at 2-3 knots took hours to close response, ' What's in it for me?"'. For most cricketers, the sums offered for playing in winner was Turner' s "The Fighting Temer- the distance, and a test of nerve for crews. South Africa were impossible to turn down, aire, Tugged to Her Last Berth to Be Broken Beautifully illustrated with maps and colour even when it was revealed in 1986 that the Up, 1838", which received more than a quar- plates , the book also has useful appendices tours were funded by the South African ter of all votes. Sam Willis tells the story of featuring ship plans, and poems and songs Cricket Union and its sponsors via 90 per cent this famous warship in the first volume of his about the Temeraire. Willis offers narrative tax rebates from the ruling National Party. Hearts of Oak trilogy, which will focus on rather than analysis and adds little to our appreciation of Turner, but his book will Despite the hype, rebel teams were typically iconic stories from the Age of Sail. Willis offers an engaging biography of the please maritime enthusiasts. half-first XI/half-second XI in representation MARGARETTE LINCOLN and playing strength. Players such as Peter Temeraire and gives a detailed picture of life Willey - an effective England all-rounder but in the sailing navy. He binds these two subno Botham - were discussed in awed tones by jects together in clear, accessihle prose so South African newspapers. The West Indies that each informs and enriches the other. Alistair Cooke of that decade, however, had virtually a spare Details from the lives of key contemporary ALISTAIR COOKE AT THE MOVIES team of outstanding (and impecunious) figures, including Admiral Boscawen and Edited by Geoff Brown players that could not force their way into the Olaudah Equiano, add interest. His arrange366pp. Penguin. £20. first-choice Test squad. The rebel West Indi- ment of themes is governed by a loose 978 I 84614 III 9 ans represented what May calls "the greatest chronology focusing on important battles, coup and the deepest affront" . The 1983-4 which he describes with gusto. Early chapters deal with the French warpanning seventy-five years, from Camteam captained by Lawrence Rowe was the bridge juvenilia to obituaries of old only rebel side to win a "Test" series in South ship, Temeraire, captured during the Seven Africa, but many of those players faced pro- Years War and taken into the British fleet friends, Alistair Cooke at the Movies, a collecfessional and personal rejection when they where it saw distinguished service. Sailors tion of that celebrated broadcaster's reports on thought it unlucky to change a ship' s name film , opens windows into the history of a returned to the Caribbean. Mike Gatting went to South Africa in 1990 but could or would not pronounce it cor- medium. Here are to be found evocations of

Hollywood in the 1950s ("the city is thick with ne'er-do-wells of every description ex-waitresses who will never get near a studio; fifth-rate playboys who skipped their home towns; desiccated old couples from the Midwest come to live out a hollow old age in the monotonous sunshine broken-down crooners, showgirls, unsuccessful models, burlesque dancers, movie-struck high school girls sitting up on drugstore stools ... "), eyewitness accounts of the industry's panic over the threat of television in 1958 ("to hear that the movies are in radical trouble and could pass away is a shock and a shame") and, twenty years later, almost identically, over video (Cooke frets that "the home-recorded programme" could become "as popular and inexpensive as a long-playing phonograph record"), as well as more sombre illustrations of cinema's power. After watching a newsreel in 1938, Cooke describes an unforgettable tracking shot as the Japanese delegate quits the Assembly of the League of Nations: "there is no speech and hardly any sound, just the camera weaving and darting a yard away, step by step with this silent and frightening little man" . The highlights of this thorough volume are Cooke's reminiscences of his meetings with the stars wherein his intimate style is most abundantly apparent, whether visiting a washed-up Groucho Marx on the set of a television abridgement of The Mikado in 1960 ("Groucho is crowding seventy, but his energy belies and makes more touching the extreme frailty of his body"), witnessing Humphrey Bogart's appearance in court in 1949 and noting in the melee which results outside that "somebody stepped on an old lady's terrier and there was the unmistakeable crunch of bones" or, best of all, sitting beside Greta Garbo ("every man's harmless fantasy mistress") at a screening, after which, in his "small, pathetic attempt at conversation", she turns out to have "only one thing on her mind: the awful price of vegetables".

History

JONATHAN BARNES

Literary Criticism Scott C. Lucas "A MIRROR FOR MAGISTRATES " AND THE POLITICS OF THE ENGLISH REFORMATION 275pp. University of Massachusetts Press. $39.95; distributed in the UK by Eurospan. £34.50. 978 I 55849 706 I

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TLS JANUARY 8 2010

t is good to have a book about A Mirror for Magistrates, still one of the most scandalously neglected works of English literature. A Mirror was probably the most popular secular book in print in the second half of the sixteenth century. It started life as the brainchild of William Raldwin , the driving force hehind a collection of verse lives of English rulers, A Memorial of Such Princes, as since the time of king Richard the seconde, have been unfortunate in the Realme of England, which was stopped by Mary's regime as too confrontational. It eventually emerged as A Mirror in 1558. The collection subsequently went through a bewildering number of editions and transformations during Elizabeth ' s reign, as new parts were added and old ones rediscovered. Nevertheless, the basic formula of the work survived: a series of stories of the high and mighty who came to bad ends,

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IN BRIEF either through their own abuse of power, or through a series of unfortunate circumstances. Accordingly, later governors could learn from their posthumous tales of woe and try to avoid the mistakes of the past. As Scott C. Lucas shows in this meticulously researched work of historical scholarship, A Mirror was relentlessly topical, as befitted a work that sought to adapt the familiar genre of "mirror for princes" literature to a wider audience and to make it more obviously relevant to anyone who had to govern (a "magistrate"). He demonstrates how the tale of the downfall of Edward Seymour, the "good duke" of Somerset and the first Lord Protector of the young Edward VI, was used to show that the real villains of the piece were those who destroyed him, leaving the monarch and Somerset relatively free from blame. Somerset' s tale, contrary to the popular conception of A Mirror, insistently attacks mystifying metaphysics, showing that the "good Duke" was not punished by divine intervention, but "the lamentable effects of bad luck and the ' noughty time'" in which he lived. More impressive still is Lucas's reading of the fate of the poet William Collingbourne, executed for his political rhyme against Richard Ill: "the Catte, the Ratte, and Lovell our dogge, / Ruleth all Englande under a hogge". According to Professor Lucas, the tale is a plea for freedom of speech, for poets to speak their minds, especially in the time of tyrants, a message that haunted literature during the reigns of the Tudors and Stuarts.

narratives of science's triumph - are now under acute pressure. Any "dominant triumphalist paradigm" has been shaken to the point of exhaustion by AIDS and super viruses. Plague Writing is thus written without the condescension of history, and remains alert to the degree to which language, metaphor and genre not only shaped early modern constructions of plague, but also (as Susan Son tag argued) continue to shape notions of disease today. Gilman reads with tremendous precision, finding nuance everywhere. Not all his contentions convince: the idea of an "uncanny liaison" between moments of plague and Pepys's delight in his rising wealth - a form of compensation, Gilman suggests, amid disease - weakens when one realizes that Pepys's diary is at all times concerned with financial accounting, and indeed seems to have started as a series of financial notes, later revised into narrative. Gilman ' s decision to concentrate on familiar (what he calls "exemplary") printed texts is defensible given his interest in formative constructions, but this canonical corpus (there is nothing in manuscript) is a missed opportunity, particularly since critical work on plague writing in the past decade - by Margaret Healy and Jonathan Gil Harris, among others has opened up the field. Nonetheless, Gilman's book is a remarkably careful, selfreflective analysis, and a valuable addition to the subject. ADAM SMYTH

ANDREW HADFIELD

Architecture Ernest B. Gilman PLAGUE WRITING IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND 312pp. University of Chicago Press. $35; distributed in the UK by Wiley. £24. 978 0 226 29409 9

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rnest B. Gilman's rich, absorbing book examines literary engagements with plague, focusing on the London ravages of 1603, 1625 and 1665. While responses in Catholic Europe made use of an iconography of suffering saints (Saint Sebastian, Saint Roche), Protestant England stripped away such mediation and so faced "a kind of representational darkness". Plague in England was thus understood through language: as something to be written about, but also itself as a form of writing, its victims inscribed with "God's Tokens", marking sin. While Gilman discusses pamphlets and mortality bills, his focus rests on four well-known attempts to "write out" plague: Ben Jonson ' s epigram on the death of his seven-year-old son ("his best piece ofpoetrie"); Donne' s Devotions, "Anniversaries" and plague sermon of 1626; Pepys's Diary; and Defoe' s genre-bending A Journal of the Plague Year, purportedly "Written by a Citizen who continued all the while in London", but published in 1722, fifty-seven years after London's affliction, while plague ravaged Marseilles. Gilman describes how attempts to reconcile plague with theodicy gave way to an increasingly secular engagement with disease, as the physician gradually (but never wholly) replaced the divine. But this is not a story of secular progress: Gilman argues that the stories the modern West tells itself about medicine - those heroic twentieth-century

Ken WorpoIe MODERN HOSPICE DESIGN The architecture of palliative care 122pp. Routledge. Paperback, £24.99. 9780415451802

odern Hospice Design is more of a report than a book, really, but it is thought-provoking none the less. Ken Worpole traces a path out of the darkness and into the light: from the Victorian asylum or sanatorium, devised to punish the sick, to the hospice movement and its assertion that even those who can't be made well by clinical medicine are entitled to be treated by the medical profession with not just dignity but something like love. Architecture has a role to play in this: the very sick must have peace, privacy, nice colours, access to nature's beauty outside, no more medical hardware lying around than is necessary. Inevitably, close attention is paid to events in Scandinavia; Alvar Aalto is quoted in his belief that architects must build "for man at his weakest". Humane alternatives to the dark-satanic-mill tradition are cited, and mined for potential lessons: the almshouse, the Begijnhof. The growing legacy of Maggie Keswick Jencks, in whose name a series of drop-in centres for cancer sufferers has begun to be built to designs by famous architects, is discussed - and a certain broadmindedness is evident from the author's suggestion that hospitals and hospices could learn something from the hotel trade. Of course, no architect will be able to obscure the fatal function of the hospice altogether - and no patient, or client, of such a place would be taken in by a facetious attempt to do so. They are about making the

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best of a bad lot. You might not mind being in a grim Victorian hospital if you knew or believed you'd be leaving it under your own steam in the near future. We owe those whom we can't prevent from dying a congenial environment to die in - that much seems obvious (though not entirely apolitical: some would presumably say that the very idea of a hospice represents an intrusion of secular publicsector values into the proper domain of the family or the church). Rogers Stirk Harbour's Maggie's Centre in west London has landed the practice with the Stirling Prize last year, and it is indeed a remarkable piece of work (all the more so when one considers the hygienic austerity of Rogers's previous designs). But the day may also come when the dying want something other than peace and stillness, an unthreatening water feature , or non-denominational " meditation space". KEITH MILLER

Fiction Jean-Paul Sartre THE LAST CHANCE Roads of Freedom IV Translated by Craig Vasey 223pp. Continuum. Paperback, £14.99. 978 I 84706 551 3

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his book presents for the first time in one easily accessible volume the texts which were to form a continuation of Sartre's Les Chemins de la liberte, published as a trilogy in 1945 (CAge de raison and Le Sursis) and 1949 (La Mort dans l'ame). It also constitutes a stimulating reflection on the challenges and opportunities presented by the task of translating Sartre. The texts that Craig Vasey has translated under the title The Last Chance include "Strange Friendship", published as "Drale d'amitie' in Sartre's journal Les Temps modernes in 1949, and the more fragmentary "The Last Chance" , included as an appendix in the 1981 Pleiade edition of Sartre's Oeuvres romanesques as "La Derniere chance". These stories, which derive from Sartre's own experiences as a prisoner of war in 1940, illustrate his post-war attempts to contest Stalinism before his communist "conversion" in 1952. The "strange friendship" in question is a fictionalized account of Sartre's dealings with Paul Nizan, the latter branded as a traitor by the Party after he resigned in 1939 in the wake of the Nazi-Soviet pact. "The Last Chance" reunites Mathieu and Brunet, the trilogy ' s protagonists, in a satisfying though rather staged debate between the philosophy teacher and the militant on morality and politics. But this volume is much more than a literary-philosophical curiosity. Many admirable passages of typically Sartrean narration, such as Mathieu's dream at the start of the second section of "The Last Chance" or Moulu's off-set murder in the concluding section, make these stories worth reading. The translator' s voice is audible in this raw, American-English translation. Vasey does not shy away from rendering the crude language of the original, which could have sounded coy in British English. The translated text and the accompanying discussion together offer an interesting commentary on Sartre's original , from the justification of the use of the preposition "of' in the title (as against previous renderings in English as

TLS JANUARY 8 2010

"The Roads to Freedom") to a perceptive analysis of the relationship between tense usage, existentialist philosophy and Sartre's fictional technique. This book will make readers want to go back to the first three volumes and that is a testimony both to Sartre and to his translator. ANGELA KERSHAW

Essays Serge Soupel, Kevin L. Cope and Alexander Peltit, editors ADVENTURE An eighteenth-century idiom: Essays on the daring and the bold as a pre-modern medium 343pp. AMS Press. $145. 978 0 404 64858 9

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few months before his death in 1754, Henry Fielding endured an adventure. It began with the sclerotic author, whose arms, legs and stomach had been swollen grotesquely by dropsy, being hoisted on to the ship that would take him, for his health, to Portugal. Of those watching from land, he observed, "few ... failed of paying their compliments to me, by all manner of jests and insults". Fielding continued to record his impressions as he headed for the Continent, the result being a poignant, defiantly witty and posthumously published book: The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon. If this was one type of adventure, the Journal itself suffered another - a textual one. There are several types of adventure examined in the course of Adventure: An eighteenth-century idiom. Daniel Defoe and James Boswell go to Scotland (separately, that is); there is the cross-dressing Hannah Snell, and that spiritual adventurer John Bunyan. In Fielding's case, his Lisbon Journal was altered before first publication to make it "bland", Andrew Varney writes, "where Fielding was decidedly acerbic" . Something like the author' s original only entered the public domain, providentially, because of the Lisbon earthquake of November 1755; the publishers had a "pertinent" title on their hands, and duly cashed in. Kevin L. Cope and Alexander Pettit describe adventure as "a central but frequently elusive topic" in eighteenth-century life and literature - central because, for a start, this was a time when "adventuring had become an art form, a means of exciting aesthetical states of mind, stirring sensibilities, and eliciting the newly popular sense of sublimity". This collection of essays makes those connections freshly visible, and has some satisfying artistic moments of its own. In his account of Lord Orford's Fenland cruise of 1774, for example, H. J. K. Jenkins manages to hring in Captain Cook, the Hellfire Club, Lewis Carroll, the American War of Independence, and all the pleasures and perils of navigating the waterways between Lakenheath Lode and Peterborough. Reflections of the worsening American crisis appear in Orford's dealings with the locals, while reports of cannibalism in New Zealand inspire a joke about one passenger's failure to report back to the Fenland "Fleet" before nightfall. But the name of the ship that brought back those reports? Adventure. Perhaps the topic was not so elusive after all. MICHAEL CAINES

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RELIGION

vangelicali sm is an intriguing phenomenon. In Britain and America since at least the early nineteenth century it has been the most successful Protestant movement, and currently enjoys a massive worldwide expansion. Yet it repels as much as it attracts. What is more, it so often holds on to its scientists and technologists while losing artists and social reformers. This is odd since the popular thesis, endlessly repeated in this Darwin anniversary year, remains that the cause of secularization springs from the clash between science and biblical literalism. In his new book charting the li ves of nine creative artists and social reformers between the l830s and 1960s, David Hempton explores just why and how the attraction of Evangelicalism swiftly gave way to disillusionment in each case. Evangelical Disenchantment: Nine portraits of faith and doubt is the mirror image of Timothy Larsen's Crisis of Doubt, which made a stir in American Evangelical circles in 2006. Hempton' s project has been on his mind for thirty years, ever since he read George Eliot's anonymous article castigating Evangelicali sm, published in the Westminster Review in 1855. Hempton ' s study does not directly respond to Larsen, even though there are intriguing parallels between the two books. Larsen charted the lives of seven working-class, nineteenth-century exponents of secularism who eventually returned to some variety of Christian faith. Hempton reverts to a secu lari zation story, but a nuanced one in which straightforward intellectual doubt is seldom the primary mover. He works through mini-biographies of men and women who abandoned the Evangelicali sm in which they were brought up, or, more often, to which they became passionate converts as you ng adu lts. In doing so, he has lighted on a crucial issue for Evangel icalism. I am not sure, however, why he selected these lives rather than many others - Jeanette Winterson might have made a modern

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Where is love? BERNICE MARTIN David Hempton EVANGELICAL DISENCHANTMENT Nine portraits offaith and doubt

233pp. Yale Uni versity Press. £20 ($30). 9780300 14067 5

partner for Edmund Gosse, for example. Nor is the reason for Hempton's choice of time span entirely clear. After all , the fulcrum of Evangelicalism shifted between the l830s and I960s so that James Baldwin 's story is part of the mutually hostile entrenchment of Evangelicals and liberals on opposite sides of America's distinctive culture wars after the 1960s. Hempton 's rationale is hinted at in chapter subtitles pointing up distinctive challenges to Evangelicalism in each biography, although the lives are not as tidy as this implies. The chapter on George Eliot is about the challenge of morality to evangelicalism. This came out in her blistering critique of the narrow dogmatism, the failure of love and charity, the hypocrisy and thirst for power shown by some prominent evangelicals. The Calvinist preacher Dr John Cumming took the full blast of her scorn in the Westminster Review article. Eliot condemned Evangelicali sm out of its own mouth and threw back in its face the self-righteousness that often accompan ies its belief in universal sinfulness. She also personalized her moral challenge through her scandalous liaison with a married man and then, in middle age, her marriage to a very much younger man. Yet in Adam Bede, Eliot provided one of the most sympathetic literary portraits of an Evangelical in the figure of the gentle and saintly

Methodist preacher Dinah Morris, who freely chooses celibacy. Hempton 's chapter on George Eliot introduces two of the recurring themes of these portraits: Evangelicali sm's failure to live by what it proclaimed as its central value the belief that God is love (the hook that initially caught young idealists such as Mary Ann Evans and Vincent Van Gogh); and its hypocrisy about sex and power, which was what alienated James Baldwin. George Eliot also illustrates the intellectual confrontation between biblical literalism and German-inspired Higher Criticism of the Bible and the trends of modern thought in philosophy, science and social science. Yet Hempton is surely right to see Eliot' s moral revulsion as lying at the core of her disillusion. It was the internal moral contradictions in the Evangelical tradition that spelt its doom not just for the best-read woman in England but for most of the other subjects in this book. Hempton identifies other sources of disillusion besides. For Francis Newman, brother of the more famous John Henry, it was the failure of his Darbyite mission to convert the Muslims of Baghdad before the End Times caught them, and the appall ing human costs of the expedition. He concluded that the encounter of different religious systems only creates conflict, and spent the rest of his life working out a "natural" theology purified of divisive dogma. As Hempton points out, it looks remarkably like today's commondenominator "new spirituality". For the American abolitionist Theodore Weld, the problem was the urgency of reform here and now. Once he realized that even the mass saving of individual sou ls by that virtuoso revivalist Charles Grandison Finney was not bringing an end to slavery, the emancipation campaign took priority. For his sister-in-law

Sarah Grimke, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the temperance campaigner Frances Willard, the cause was gender equality, in society as well as theology. Like Weld's, their disillusion was hastened by the discovery that Evangelicals were among the most inflexible opponents of reform. Hempton 's final review of the themes gives due weight to the idiosyncratic elements in each individual life, not least family dynamics. Though he recognizes the problem of defining "Evangelicalism" , which stretches in his examples from Darbyite premillennialism to the softer end of Methodism , he does not directly confront the tension between the extremes, particularly between Calvinist and Lutheran tendencies, so sign ificant an undercurrent in these case studies. Quite often, eventual disenchantment follows from the emphasis on grace freely available to all, which trumps biblical literalism, restrictive dogmas about who can be saved, and eagerness for the eschatological violence of the End Times. Active love of neighbour in this world becomes more important than selfi shly securing your own passage to a possible afterlife. This secularizing trajectory more readily empties liberal Evangelical churches than doctrinally conservative ones. Yet it also leaves the secular world sign ificantly shaped by Evangel ical idealism constructed around the person of Jesus as exemplar of love, forgiveness and selfsacrifice. Where secularized Calvinism characteristically mutates into a high, dry rationalism (when it does not inspire the wild satire of a James Hogg), secularized Lutheranism elevates the spirit over the letter and leaves behind an emotional cult of authenticity and sincerity. It is not surprising that creative artists and social reformers are so often found in the second camp. And it is fitting that a distinguished historian of Methodism should remind us that secularization has been as much the working out of the interior contradictions of Evangelicali sm as the consequence of rampant secularism as such.

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30

ILS

MEMOIRS

Marvellous parties

Telephone: 020 7782 5000 Fax: 020 7782 4966 [email protected] ickY Haslam (as everyone calls him) may be one of Britain's leading interior designers, but he is as well known for his party-going as he is for his pelmets. Hannah Rothschild's affectionate but somewhat dispiriting recent television documentary, Hi Society: The wonderful world of Nicky Haslam, presented us with a man who has genuine taste as a designer but absolutely no discrimination when it comes to people. Janet de Botton or Paris Hilton: it's all the same to Nicky. As he air-kissed his way through all those Vile Bodies, one sympathized with the most recent of the four great loves of his life, Paolo Moschino, who said he ended the relationship because he couldn't face another party. The realm of money and celebrity is, of course, where grand interior designers find their clients. Haslam had already discovered at Eton that painting portraits of his schoolfellows "proved a ready way to acceptance and popularity", and his chosen career performs a similar function. Friends become clients, clients become friends. From school he launched himself more or less directly into the world of fashion , starting out as a graphic designer on Vogue in New York. Very soon he had, it seems, met everyone - which is to say the extremely varied and loosely grouped set of socialites, aristocrats, photographers, artists, designers, actors and pop stars who more or less created the Sixties. As this book's populous index makes clear, Haslam's circle of acquaintance has continued to grow, but Redeeming Features is thankfully a world away from the usual celebrity autobiography. Haslam writes evocatively and touchingly about his background and upbringing, for instance. He was born in 1939, at Great Hundridge Manor, a substantial and fully-staffed Queen Anne house in the Chilterns. His father's family had made a fortune in cotton spinning; his mother's parents were less well-off but better connected, securing Queen Victoria as a godmother to their daughter. Early childhood was happy and secure until , at the age of seven, Haslam contracted polio and was obliged to spend almost three years immobilized in bed. This may be where his eye for interior design was born: confined to the Blue Room at Hundridge, he came "to know every twist and turn of the painted marble cornice, each flower gathered in the bouquets of the black-background earlyVictorian needlework carpet", and it might be said that he has studied surfaces ever since. His illness also made him even more acutely aware of a romantic Gypsy encampment on a nearby heath, where "brownlimbed, long-haired children raced whooping through the labyrinth of dark tunnels they'd formed beneath the high bracken". He had once joined in their games, experiencing "a kind of thrilling sensuality" in their company: afterwards, on his way back across the fields to Hundridge, he felt caught between the contrasting pulls of the wild freedom represented by the Gypsies and the comfortable solidity of his own home. "I felt for the first time that I was in some way two people in one, that there was a second being within me

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PETER PARKER Nicholas Haslam REDEEMING FEATURES

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Amemoir

35 Ipp. Cape. £25. 978022408971 5

Nicky Haslam and Paris Hilton, May 2009 who would always look longingly at beauty, at an attractive figure, at a different life." Looking longingly at beauty resulted in his being picked up by a drama student while on holiday in New York with his mother, and being whisked off by this new friend to spend the weekend with Tallulah Bankhead. He was only fifteen, but clearly starting out as he meant to go on. The following year, during the school holidays in London, he was picked up in Duncannon Street (" named after my mother' s family" ) by a man called Simon Fleet who was "steeped in the world of theatre, dance, and art" and lived in a "romantically dotty little folly" in Chelsea called the Gothic Box. It was here that Haslam learnt all about antiques and interior design and was introduced to Cecil Beaton, Diana Cooper, Terence Rattigan, Bunny Roger, Frederick Ashton, Noel Coward, Anthony ArmstrongJones and many others for whom the 1950s were anything but drab. The early parts of this memoir are undoubtedly the liveliest and the most rewardingly detailed. Later on the chronology is often either vague or awry, so that one is never entirely clear how much time is passing, and we find Haslam writing a column for David Bailey's RilZ several pages before the magazine is described coming into existence. One of Haslam's redeeming features is that he really can write, although this book would have benefited from a more attentive editor, who might have curbed such ill-advised flourishes as "the buttock-cheek-by-lifted-jowl plethora of parasols and restaurants of today" (Saint-Tropez) or "that particular can of worms had somewhat lost its shelf-life" (the Abdication); might have ensured that names were not misspelled while being dropped ("Wilfred" Blunt, Robert "McBride"); and might have prevented the confusing of Mary Tudor and Mary Queen of Scots or the muddling of Lord Berners with (one assumes from the hybrid surname the composer is given) Teddy Millington-Drake.

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31

Anthony Bale is Senior Lecturer in Medieval Studies at Birkbeck, University of London. He is the author of The Jew in the Medieval Book: English antisemitisms 1350- 1500, 2006, and is writing a book about the aesthetics of persecution in medieval culture. Jonathan Barnes's first novel The Somnambulist was published in 2007. The Domino Men appeared in paperback last year. Jonathan Bate is Professor of Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature at the University of Warwick and the author, most recently, of Soul of the Age: The life, mind and world of William Shakespeare, 2008. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Literature. Mark Bostridge is the author of Vera Brittain: A Life, 2008. He is the editor of Lives for Sale: Biographers ' tales, 2004, and Because You Died: Poetry and prose of the First World War and after, by Vera Brittain, 2008. His most recent book, Florence Nightingale: The woman and her legend, appeared in paperback last year. Michael Caines is an editor at the TLS. Madeline Clements is writing a PhD in International and Postcolonial Literature, focusing on South Asian Muslim writers.

Sanskrit of books 15- 18 of the Mahabharata is forthcoming.

Engagements: Women, literature and the Left in 1930s France, 2007.

Juliet Fleming is Associate Professor of English at New York University. She is the author of Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England, 2001 , and Taxidermies: The work of Peter Briggs, 2007.

Robert E. Lerner teaches History at Northwestern University, Evanston. A collection of his essays in Italian translation appeared in 2008 as Scrutare il Futuro.

Richard A. Fortey is Research Associate at the Natural History Museum in London. His most recent book is Dry Store Room No.1: The secret life of the Natural History Museum, 2008. Stuart George is a freelance writer living in London. Edmund Gordon is a freelance writer and reviewer. Ramachandra Guha is the author, most recently, of India after Gandhi: The history of the world's largest democracy, published in 2007. He is working on an anthology of modern Indian political thought. He lives in Bangalore. Andrew Hadfield is Professor of English at the University of Sussex. His books include Shakespeare and Renaissance Political Culture, 2003 , and Shakespeare and Republicanism, 2005. He is the co-editor of The Oxford History of the Irish Book, Volume Three: The Irish Book in English, 1550- 1800, 2006.

Barry Dainton is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Liverpool. His books include Time and Space, 2001, Stream of Jonathan Keates's most recent book is The Consciousness, the second edition of which Siege of Venice, 2005. His most recent novel appeared in 2006, and The Phenomenal Self, is Smile Please, 2000, and he is the author of 2008. Handel: The man and his music, which was reissued last year. Wendy Doniger is Professor in the School of Divinity, and the Department of South Asian Angela Kershaw is Senior Lecturer in Languages and Civilizations at the Uni- French Studies at the University of Birmingversity of Chicago. Her most recent book, ham. She is the co-editor of Women in The Hindus: An alternative history, was Europe between the Wars: Politics, culture, published last year. Her translation from the society, 2006, and the author of Forgotten

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SOLUTION TO CROSSWORD 811 Fhe willner of Crossword 811 is

J. T. Came rOil, Edinburgh.

The sender of the first correct solution opened on January 29 will receive a cash prize of £40. Entries should be addressed to TLS Crossword 815 , Times Hou se, I Pennington Street, London E98 I BS.

TLS

CROSSWORD

ACROSS 1 Student heavily influenced by Arnold (3, 5) 5 Victorien dramatist (6) 9 Motion advanced at Oxford (8) 10 Greek sp irits, frequently drunk (6) 12 Denys, perhaps, whose rule may have been, obey my collaborator (5) 13 All - Earwicker, for example (9) 14 Shan't airline somehow represent Shakespearian curate? (3,9) 18 Is the Russian novel taking a turn to the left? (4, 8) 21 Poetical subject of Modigliani (9) 23 Student in the way of American poet (5) 24 A worthy Hector, with 14's Alexander (6) 25 "Wo man , do what thou canst to save our honours" (-) (Henry VI, Part I) (8) 26 Thackeray 's Amelia, her sharp friend 's antithesis (6) 27 Holy man - a stylite - in Greek ode (8)

Margarette Lincoln is the Deputy Director of the National Maritime Museum, London. She is the author of Maritime Empires: British Imperial maritime trade in the nineteenth century, 2004. Adam Mars-Jones's books include Venus Envy: On masculinity and its discontents, 1990, The Waters of Thirst, 1993, and Blind Bitter Happiness, 1997. His most recent novel , Pilcrow, was published in 2008.

Empire, 1759- 1808, published in 2008. Peter Parker's most recent book, The Last Veteran: Harry Patch and the legacy of war, was published last year. Roger Scruton 's most recent books include a third edition of A Dictionary of Political Thought, 2007. I Drink Therefore I Am: A philosopher's guide to wine and Beauty both appeared last year. He is Research Professor at the Institute for the Psychological Sciences, where he teaches philosophy at their graduate school in both Washington and Oxford. Jennie Erin Smith is a freelance science reporter. Her book about reptile smuggling will be published in 2010.

Bernice Martin is Emeritus Reader in Sociology at the University of London. She is completing a book on Pentecostalism with David Martin.

Adam Smyth teaches Renaissance Literature at Birkbeck, University of London. His new book, Autobiography in Early Modern England, will be published later this year.

R6nan McDonald is Director of the Beckett International Foundation and Senior Lecturer at the University of Reading. His most recent book is The Death of the Critic, 2007.

Adrian Tahourdin is an editor at the TLS.

Keith Miller is a freelance writer living in London. His book about St Peter's Basilica was published in 2007. Ruth Morse is Professor of English at the University of Paris-Diderot. She has recently completed Imagined Histories: Fictions of the past from "Beowulf" to Shakespeare. She is ajudge for the Crime Writers' Association International Dagger. Chris Moss's book Patagonia: A cultural history was published last year. Gabriel Paquette is a Junior Research Fellow in History at Trinity College, Cambridge. He is the author of Enlightenment, Governance, and Reform in Spain and Its

815

DOWN 1 'Nam put in the ascendant by Samuel's club associate (6) 2 The greater part, that is, of hi storical noveli st (6) 3 Ruler's kin will accrue to author (9) 4 Communications from Zane Grey (7,5) 6 Where Jaws are set (in fri endship) (5) 7 Strange comedian, like a good genius (8) 8 "There's no tradition of bears on -s here" (John lrving, The World According to Carp) (8) 11 Old books in changed will? (3,9) 15 Eminence inspiring Milton's attack on censorship? (9) 16 He made a wild conquest in 1951 (8) 17 Leave a sort of blank here (8) 19 Philosophical system hardly Maoist (6) 20 He took toll of Greeks who were late (6) 22 This Breton was a Norman. How surreal (5)

TLS JANUARY 8 2010

John Taylor's books include The Apocalypse Tapestries, 2004, and a twovolume collection of essays. Paths to Contemporary French Literature, second edition, 2007. Hugo Williams's most recent collection of poems, West End Final, and a new edition of his selection of John Betjeman's poems were both published last year. David Womersley is Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of St Catherine' s College. His books include The Transformation of "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire", 2008. He is the General Editor of the Cambridge Complete Writings of Jonathan Swift, for which he is editing "Gulliver's Travels". His new book, Divinity and State, is due to be published later this year.

32 iterary anniversaries, part n. We pledged to offer some bait to the aspiring scribe hoping to hook the interest of editors at the better newspapers and magazines (see our item on the centenary of To Is toy ' s death, NB , January I). The year 2010 marks the sesquicentenary of Jules Laforgue, a name linked in English-speaking lands to that of T. S. Eliot. It would take an ambitious aspirant to explain why this is so, but many readers would be interested to learn about it. You might introduce them gently to the intricate analyses to follow, by drawing attention to the remarkable coincidence of the two poets having been married in the same London church , seventy-one years apart. On December 30, 1886, Laforgue walked down the aisle of St Barnabas, near Olympia, arm in arm with Leah Lee, a "very thin, very English" woman from Devon, with "chestnut hair ... and those eyes - oh wait till you see them!" (the words are those of the enraptured groom). The Laforgues were ill-starred: he died in Paris a few months later, and poor Leah followed in 1888. In a perhaps unwitting tribute, his future disciple wedded Valerie Fletcher in St Barnabas in 1957. It happens that Stephane Mallarme also married in London, in the Brompton Oratory (1863), though in his case the bride was German. At the beginning of the new century, Guillaume Apollinaire crossed the Channel in pursuit of Annie Playden , a Sunday School teacher from Clapham. He didn't get the girl , but the pursuit inspired several poems, includ-

L

Poets in love ing "Annie" and the longer "L'Emigrant de Landor Road". Everybody knows about the London-focused romantic adventures of Verlaine and Rimbaud, though it wasn ' t English lasses they were after. If you can make something out of these contiguous fancy facts , using Laforgue' s 150th birthday as a starting point, you might be in business.

W

ere you reassured when the prime minister described the attempt by an Islamist fanatic to blow up a plane at Christmas as "a wake-up call"? When some voluble Conservative responded by accusing Mr Brown of "playing politics", did you thump the desk and say, "By Jove! Spot on"? Of course you didn't. If you responded at all , it was to deplore the use of trite phrases on both sides. It would be nice if politicians would acknowledge the cliche as the elephant in the room. How about some thinking

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Everyone is looking for love - some in impossible places. Some mourn the love they have lost. Some long for love they are refused. In lIIyria love aches and madness rules. Following its run in Stratfordupon-Avon, Shakespeare's darkly comic Twelfth Night transfers to London' s West End for a limited lO-week season with Richard Wilson making his RSC debut as Malvolio. For your chance to win one of five pairs of top-price tickets, visit the-tls.co.uk

outside the box, guys? It' s a big ask, but fresh language is key to original thought. At the end of the day, an innovati ve word or phrase will grow your vocabulary more robustly than a hackneyed one. It's not rocket science. Think Orwell, think plain English, think the TLS Reviewer's Handbook. Okay, we' ll stop now. Lessons have been learned (it's hard, once you ' ve started). All of the above are far too elementary to require regulation in the Reviewer's Handbook, a revised edition of which is currently in preparation. Our team of researchers has, however, asked us to be on the qui vive for certain word-couplings that occur often in print but dant wit ... "; "taut, elegant prose ... ". If you

didn't mean to suggest that to win the Nobel Prize is shameful, that highbrow is the new lowbrow, that to be over forty-eight is to dwell spiritually in the Stone Age, that English critics have a greater predisposition to vacuity than Mexican or Namibian ones. But

haven't yet made a New Year's resolution,

not everyone is as understanding as we are.

seldom in speech: Ha wry smile ... " ; " mor-

you know what to do. Step up to the plate. Better: chuck it out.

T

he Guardian ran an interesting, if melancholy, feature at New Year, looking back at the writers who have died between 2000 and 2009. We counted seventy-eight names of those who have deserted us, including many we had come to think of as immortal Norman Mailer, Susan Son tag, Thorn Gunn not only in the sense of writing great work, but just of always having been there, like Mum and Dad. There were some oddities. It was touching to have lan Rankin, in his piece on Muriel Spark, relay one great Scottish writer's tribute to another ("I approached her [with] my first edition of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. She inscribed it 'with admiration ' ... "). More puzzling was the following sentence in James Meek's otherwise levelheaded estimation of Saul Bellow: "To some it may seem unlikely that a Nobel prizewinner so beloved of highbrow middle-aged white English writers and critics can really be so great; yet Bellow is" . We have struggled to unpack this in the days since. Is Mr Meek being ironic? We don 't think so; the joke would be out of keeping with the remainder of the piece. Is middle age something that anyone, even Mr Meek (forty-eight this year), can avoid? Do scientific studies prove that Englishness and so-called whiteness leave those thus afflicted prone to genetic inferiority? Perhaps that's true. But wouldn ' t it then be kinder, and less discriminatory, not to mention the harsh fact? Please explain, Mr Meek. We know you

I

t is one year since our colleague Mick Imlah died , aged fifty-two, and we miss him all the more. Consolation arrives in the form of a special issue of Oxford Poetry, dedicated to his work and memory, with contributions in prose by Alan Hollinghurst, John Fuller and Mick's old schoolmaster at Dulwich College, Jan Piggott; and in poetry by Alan Jenkins, Glyn Maxwell , Carol Rumens and others. Fuller, who contributes a fond memoir of Mick' s days at Oxford, also offers a poem, "Two Words" Need we protest our story' s never

To be endured or be enjoyed? Two words prove to be destroyed, Two sweet words, now gone for ever.

the words being the subject' s first and second names. Fuller weaves his doleful song through ten stanzas without employing any of the letters from "Mick" or "Imlah". When it came to office deadlines, Mick, seen above in 1985, was answerable "to a set oflaws that were, and remain, evasive of scrutiny" , as one contributor puts it. Hollinghurst draws an accurate outline of his character: He seemed to move at two different speeds simultaneously. He was entrancingly quickwined, funny, several moves ahead in exact and ironic understanding of any matter being

talked about; but he was equally and happily prone to a dawdling, quizzical slowness.

We can picture him now, dawdling out of the office at six o ' clock, with his customary

"Tomorrow if we' re spared". Oxford Poetry, priced £6, is available from Magdalen College, Oxford OXI 4AU.

J . C.

e

Terms and conditions 1. One entry per person. 2. Competition open to UK residents a<}ed 18 and over, except employN's of the TL5, their families, agents or dny other person connedi'd with

the competition. 3. Competition doses at midnight on .l
The Times Literary Supplement Limited. 2010. Published and lice nsed for distribution in electronic and all other derivative forms by T he T imes Literary Supple ment Limited. Times House. I Pennington Street. Lo ndon E98 ms. England. Telephone: 020·7782 5000 Fax: 020·7782 4966 E· nmil: letters @the·tls.eo.uk without whose express permission no part may be reproduced. Primed by Ne"'sJlfinters (Koowsley) Limited. Kit ling Road. Prescot. Merseyside. L34 9HN. England EUROPEAN PRICES: Belgium €3.50. France €3.50. Germany €4.20. Greeee€4.20. ltaly €4.oo. Netherlands €4.20. Portu· gal €3.50. Spain €3.50. CANADIAN PRICES: Toronto $5.50. Outside S5.75. ROW: Denmark DKR30. Iccland IKR625. India INR4oo. Israel N IS34. Kuwait KW$ 1.25. Ma lt a MTL2.1O. New Zealand NZS7. Norway NKR 32. Singapore SGS6. UAE AE$15. Subscription mtes including postage are: UK £1 15. Europe £140. USA $169. Canada $225. ROW £165. TLS suhscription rates (12 months/52 issues): UK £115. Europe £140. USA $169. Canada (Air freight) $225. Rest of World (Airmail) £ 165. Please send cheque or credit card details to: TLS Subscri pt ions. Tower House. Sovereign Park. Market Harborough . LE87 4JJ. UK. Telephone 01858 43878 1. For US and Canada please send to: TLS Subscriptions. P.O Box 3000 Denville NJ 07834. USA. Telephone 1-800 370 9040 (new subscriptions only) and 1-800 783 4903 (general enquiries).

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