The Times Literary Supplement

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ART HISTORY

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Rachel Polonsky Peter Maber

BIOGRAPHY

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LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

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JEWISH STUDIES

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Patrick O'Connor

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Andrew McConnell Scott The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi Laughter, madness and the story of Britain 's greatest comedian 'The Brothers Karamazov' , Herbert's couplet, Wotcher, etc

Martin Goodman Mitchell Cohen Jordan Finkin

etween "the benign plague of naive realism" , as Osip Mandelstam called it, and Socialist Realism, which was anything but benign, young Russian artists and critics experienced "one of the most thrilling episodes ... in the history of art" as for the first time they saw the works of Monet, Cezanne, Picasso and Matisse. The Museum of Modern Western Art in Moscow was liquidated by order of Stalin in 1948, but its holdings miraculously survived, and hang in that city still. The remarkable story is told in a new book reviewed by Rachel Polonsky. "Whatever was wrong with the Stalinist

Ilia Dorontchenkov, editor Russian and Soviet Views of Modern Western Art - 1890s to mid-1930s David Boyd Haycock A Crisis of Brilliance - Five young British artists and the Great War

Shlomo Sand The Invention of the Jewish People Alexander Yakobson and Amnon Rubinstein Israel and the Family of Nations - The Jewish nation-state and human rights Max Weinreich History of the Yiddish Language - Two volumes

POLITICS & HISTORY

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Timothy Snyder

Tomasz Kamusella The Politics of Language and Nationalism in Modern Central Europe

POEMS

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Andrew McNeillie Gottfried Benn Carol Ann Duffy

The Journey Bauxite A Rare Bee

HISTORY

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Sophie Quinn-Judge

Bend Greiner War Without Fronts. Mark Philip Bradley Vietnam at War Mark Mazower No Enchanted Palace - The end of empire and the ideological origins of the United Nations Jonathan Israel A Revolution of the Mind - Radical Enlightenment and the intellectual origins of modern democracy

Adam Roberts Jeffrey Collins

ECONOMICS

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Tyler Cowen

John Lanchester Whoops! - Why everyone owes everyone and no one can pay

COMMENTARY

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Lesley Chamberlain Zinovy Zinik Then and Now

Back to origins - Heidegger through post-Darwinian eyes Freelance TLS February 3, 1978 - Jan Morris on Gandhi

ARTS

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Keith Miller

Guy Dammann Con or Farrington

Van Doesburg and the International Avant-Garde (Tate Modern). Gladys Fabre and Doris Wintgens Hotte, editors Van Doesburg and the International Avant-Garde Sergei Prokofiev The Gambler (Royal Opera House) Ralph P. Locke Musical Exoticism - Images and reflections

state", writes Gregory Freidin, reviewing

"last year's most talked about work of fiction in Russia", Kammenyi most by Alexander Terekhov (below), " it was saturated with a sense of mission .... This is what both the novel's protagonist and its author, drowning in anomie, find lacking in post-Communist Russia" .

Modern artists' abandonment of timehonoured modes and subjects had a counterpart in Martin Heidegger's attempt to undo the whole course of Western philosophy. Behind these upheavals, Lesley Chamberlain argues in Commentary, lay the work of Charles Darwin. In his search for the origins of Being, Heidegger read "a story parallel to the history of evolutionary biology into the history of the German language". Two remarkable language-histories are welcomed this week, which sees Jewish Book Week get under way in London: a two-volume edition of Max Weinreich's History of the Yiddish Language, and an "encyclopedic" history of the language-politics of Central Europe, "the earnestness of [which] undertaking cannot quite conceal an underlying romance ... with language as such". A romance with language as such is what we expect to find in poetry, and what Alice Quinn, in New York, and I will be looking for among the entries to this year' s TLS Poetry Competition (details on p25). We wish all poets joy of their Muse. AJ

FICTION

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Gregory Freidin Marci Shore Oliver Ready Andrew van der Vlies Anjali Joseph Jess Chandler

Alexander Terekhov Kamennyi Most - Roman Ferenc Barnas The Ninth; Translated by Paul Olchvary Roman Senchin Minus ; Translated by Arch Tait Mark Behr Kings of the Water Andrea Levy The Long Song Louise Welsh Naming the Bones

FICTION IN BRIEF

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Judith Flanders Janet Aspey Heather O'Donoghue A. P. D. Lawrie Justin Warshaw

Ann Cleeves Blue Lightning Jo Nesbj) The Snowman; Translated by Don Bartlett Qiu Xiaolong The Mao Case Frank Tallis Deadly Communion Nigel Farndale The Blasphemer

LITERAR Y CRITICISM

23

Caroline Miller

Zadie Smith Changing My Mind - Occasional essays

POETRY

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Henry Shukman Tim Dooley

W. D. Snodgrass Not For Specialists - New and selected poems E. A. Markham Looking Out, Looking In - New and selected poems

IN BRIEF

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TRAVEL

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Jon Garvie

Jan Morris Contact!

SOCIAL STUDIES

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Claudia Pugh-Thomas

Jim Krane Dubai - The story of the world's fastest city

Dwayne Raymond Mornings With Mailer. Oliver Postgate Seeing Things. Peter Parshall, editor The Woodcut in Fifteenth-Century Europe. Saleem H. Ali Islam and Education. Robert Chandler Alexander Pushkin. Felix Guattari Les Annees d'hiver 1980- 1985. James C. Scott The Art of Not Being Governed. George L. Hersey Falling in Love With Statues

31 NB

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This week's contributors, Crossword

J. C.

How to write, Lewd limericks, Lawyer verse

Cover picture: "Torso (Prototype Of A New Image)" by Kazimir Severinovich Malevich; Courtesy State Ru ssian Museum , St Petersburg © Culture-images/ Lebrecht; p4 © State Hermitage Museum; pS © Mary Evans Picture Library; p7 © The Art Archive/Musee Con de Chantilly/Dagli Orti ; p8 © Getty Images; p9 © AKG-images; pl3 © Rex Features; pl4 © The Bridgeman Art Library; pl7 © The Muse um of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence; pl9 © Vladphotosl Alamy; p20 © Lenke Szilagyi ; p25 © Kathy deWitt/Alamy The Times Literary Supplement (ISSN 0307661 , USPS 021-626) is published weekly by The Times Literary Supplement Limited, London UK, and distributed in the USA by OCS America Inc, 49- 27 31st Street, Long Island City, NYIII01 - 3113. Periodical postage paid at Long Island City NY and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: please send address corrections to TLS, PO Box 3000, Denville, NJ 07834, USA

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ART HISTORY

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The Devil at work From a dialogue of equals to an inferno of daubers: how changing reactions to art revealed the invisible wall between Soviet and Western cultures hen Kliment Voroshilov (not the least cultured of Stalin's men) laughed at the Matisse paintings in Moscow ' s Museum of Modern Western Art in 1948, his whole entourage echoed him: "Heh, heh, heh" . "Many years have passed, but this chorus of chuckles still rings in my ears", Nina Iavorskaia, deputy director of the museum, recorded forty years later. Hours before Voroshilov ' s visit, on official instructions, nervous curators had laid out Matisse's "Music and Dance" on the floor for him to view; the large panels had been in storage since the war. An order duly came, signed by Stalin, to liquidate the museum. (It was rumoured that Molotov refused to sign it, but as he could not protest against the arrest of his own wife during Stalin's campaign against "cosmopolitanism", he is unlikely to have taken a risk for Matisse.) The eighty-six-year-old Iavorskaia's still-tremulous published reminiscences of the dispersal of the great collection (a bitter and dramatic finale to the 130 pieces of art criticism in this illuminating anthology) mark the crumbling of what the art historian Ilia Dorontchenkov calls "that invisible wall between Soviet and Western cultures that was in a sense higher than the Berlin Wall". The Museum of Modern Western Art had been founded by the People's Commissariat of Enlightenment in the early 1920s to house the expropriated art collections of the Moscow merchants Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morowv. The art critic Pave I Muratov, who may have had a hand in the 1918 Decree on the nationalization of Shchukin's collection (anthologized here) , hoped that the museum would "directly and creatively influence all active manifestations of contemporary artistic culture", and present "the ' postCezanne period' in painting as it ... has not yet been shown anywhere" . Osip Mandelstam still sensed something new and challenging about the museum when he visited it in the early 1930s, calling it "the embassy of painting". Invoking diplomacy, he was not talking so much about relations between the Soviet Union and the West as about visual perception itself, about the "cold treaty" between an observer and a work of

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art. " Under no circumstances go in as if you

were entering a chapel", he instructed in a quirky prose fragment of 1933, "The French", which became part of his Journey to Armenia. Mandelstam noticed how visitors shuffled through the museum "as though in church", magnetized by a woman lecturing them on the pictures. Instead, Mandelstam said, the visitor, who might be "recuperating from the benign plague of naive realism" , should stroll, cutting "through the heat waves of the space of oil painting", accustoming the eye to the " new material ambience". Mandelstam hailed Cezanne, "Good old

RACHEL POLONSKY Ilia Dorontchenkov, editor RUSSIAN AND SOVIET VIEWS OF MODERN WESTERN ART 18905 to mid-1930s Translated by Charles Rougle 368pp. University of California Press. $65; paperback, $32.95 ; distributed in the UK by Wiley. £44.95 ; £20.95. 9780520221031

grandfather! ", but took a dislike to Matisse, "a rich man's artist" : "Enough already of this carpet chess and odalisques!". Dorontchenkov presents the English-speaking reader with a great throng of opinionated Russian museum visitors as they react to Western painting, opening with the laments of the sculptor Mark Antokolsky about the artistic poverty of Russia as he looks at the work of Manet and Puvis de Chavannes in Paris in 1897, and ending with Voroshilov ' s opaque laughter fifty years later. Thought-

fully arranged and annotated, this collection of reviews, polemics and excerpts from private letters reconstructs this history in all its creative turbulence and contradictoriness. In the course of it, we become familiar with certain voices, such as those of the sophisticated and influential critics Pave I Muratov, Igor Grabar, Alexander Benois and Nikolai Punin , tracing their varying responses and cultural initiatives from the late 1890s, when Western paintings were first exhibited in Russia, into the Revolutionary period, when these men briefly had a role in building the cultural institutions of the new state. Dorontchenkov' s anthology also multiplies our perspectives on one of the most thrilling episodes of creative seeing in the history of art, when, at the beginning of the twentieth century, young Russian artists first entered the " new material ambience" of French painting. For Vasily Kandinsky, seeing Claude Monet' s "The Haystack" at an exhibition of French Impressionists in Moscow in 1896 was an event that " stamped my whole life and shook me to the depth of my being".

LABOUR CLEAR THE WAY

23.02.10 Manchester After a rebuilding project which has cost £12,5 million and taken three years, the People's History Museum has reopened. The Museum invites visitors to "join a march through time following Britain's struggle for democracy over two centuries". A collection of posters, banners, political cartoons and significant objects, ranging from Thomas Paine's death mask to Keir

Hardie's pit-lamp, tells the story from the Peterloo Massacre (1819) to the present day, Naturally, the narrative presented is stirring rather than evenhanded. The workers shown on this poster, issued by the Labour Party in support of Lloyd George's "People's Budget" in 1909, were being encouraged to support a Liberal policy rather than a Labour one, www,phm.org,uk

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What captivated Kandinsky was Monet's "discrediting" of the object "as an essential element within the picture". Andrei Bely remembers the indignation (which, as a child, he could not share) with which the Moscow professors ' wives looked at the same paintings: "Have you seen them? ... Such brazen mockery! " . The powerful art critic Vladimir Stasov was appalled by the "discrediting" of the object that so excited Kandinsky: "Impressionism concerned itself with external forms" , he complained, "and never with the content of art" . Less than two decades later, Kazimir Malevich , who, like many of his contemporaries, went through an early "Impressionist" phase, mounted his Suprematist 0- 10 exhibition in Petrograd, with "Black Square" hanging, icon-style, at a 45 degree angle from the wall, in the top corner of the room. He had transfigured himself into the "zero of forms", he declared; his "new painterly realism" was "non-figurative creation". The creative path of Malevich (and his contemporaries Mikhail Larionov, Natalia Goncharova and David Burliuk, among others) cannot be understood without reference to the tastes of the rich men who made a home for contemporary French painting in Moscow in the 1900s. In 1903, the textile millionaire Sergei Ivanovich Shchukin bought his first Cezanne from the Parisian art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel. He visited Matisse's studio and, after deliberation , purchased a still life, "Crockery on a Table". In 1909, he commissioned "Music and Dance" . Matisse came to Moscow to supervise the hanging of the fiercely coloured decorative panels on Shchukin's staircase. The stuccoed rooms of his mansion were by that time crowded with brilliantly chosen works by Monet, Van Gogh, Picasso and Shchukin ' s hero, Gauguin, whose Tahitian scenes were arranged on the walls like icons on an iconostasis. Shchukin's home, which he opened to artists, was in every sense a "hothouse". The young art critic Boris Ternovets (the future director of the Museum of Modern Western Art) was "literally intoxicated" by the "wild, irrepressible outburst" of "Dance", which he considered "perhaps the best that the twentieth century has to offer so far". Benois, an art historian , critic and stage designer for

Sergei Diaghilev' s Ballets Russes, regarded the panels as "two truly awful failures", admired only by snobs, tragically strained attempts at "childlikeness" that might, paradoxically, point a new direction for Russia' s artistic youth who "already have" that "crudeness and simplicity that Matisse wants to acquire by force". Benois conjectured that the path Shchukin was following in his acquisitions was "the path of perhaps our entire culture". The very presence in the city of Shchukin's collection "prevented Moscow artists from seeing and painting as they

ART HISTORY

4 had before" , Dorontchenkov writes. While Shchukin and the younger and more conservative collector Morozov were building their museums, another entrepreneur, Nikolai Riabushinsky, financed Golden Fleece, a Moscow journal published in French and Russian which ran from 1906 to 1909, and promoted Gauguin, Matisse and Van Gogh, as well as traditional Russian folk art, icons, and the work of Goncharova and her husband Larionov, who co-edited its arts section. Golden Fleece organized exhibitions in which the works ofthese young Moscow primitivists hung alongside Picasso, Degas and Cezanne. By 1910, as Dorontchenkov emphasizes, Russian artists were engaged in a dialogue of equals with the French painters. Russia had become an artistic centre in its own right. Benois registered what some observers found "frightening in the new art" from abroad that was rapidly reshaping Russian creativity and public taste: it seemed to be "penetrating secret and very dangerous places without knowing why or even questioning its own ultimate meaning". The realist painter lIya Repin saw "the Devil" at work, greeting an exhibition of French art in St Petersburg in 1910 as "a whole inferno of cynical Western daubers". The Marxist Georgy Plekhanov noted the animating role in Cubism of the ideologically suspect "new physics", which had broken down the concept of objective reality. (Malevich took the implications of relativity theory much further than Picasso in his painting and his writings on art.) The Orthodox philosopher Sergei Bulgakov (a former Marxist) was "gripped by a mystical unease bordering on horror" when he entered Shchukin ' s Picasso room, seeing "the fruit of demonic possession". For

Bulgakov, Picasso expressed "the worldview of the evil spirit", in which there was fit " material for the agonizing religious labor that sanctifies the Russian soul". Andrey Bely, in a rare example of anti-Semitism in Russian art-critical discourse, warned darkly that international Jewry was using " modern art" to "separate the flesh of the nation from its spirit". Lenin, meanwhile, told the German Communist Clara Zetkin that he did not understand "the works of Expressionism, Futurism, Cubisms and other isms" , and that they gave him "no pleasure". Dorontchenkov's book is laced with a particular pathos. He describes in his preface Russia's long-standing oscillation between

" integration" with the outside world and "autarchy", an oscillation which continues to the present day, when "anti-Western sentiment has returned to Russian cultural life" . In his acknowledgements, he notes the menacing hostility to his own research on Russian-Western cultural dialogue of Vladimir Kemenov, the chairman of the examiners of his MA dissertation in 1983, and the vice-president of the Soviet Academy of Fine Arts, who began his own career in the early 1930s as one of Stalin ' s "red guards" . Mandelstam called " naive realism" a "benign plague". The turn to Socialist Realism (a style which, as Dorontchenkov notes, owed much to French Impressionism) was

Sergei I vanovich Shchukin by Xan Krohn, 1915

anything but benign. "What Cezannism are you discussing? What Cubism are you preaching?" the secret police asked Malevich during his three-month imprisonment in 1930. Dorontchenkov gives the last word in his book to Alexander Gerasimov, first president of the Soviet Academy of Arts (who pushed lavorskaia aside when she approached Voroshilov): "If anyone dares to exhibit Picasso, I'll have him hanged". Like many stories of how cosmopolitan aspects of Russian culture survived the Soviet period , the story of Western art in Russia becomes a story of the quiet heroism of the less colourful players in the background of culture, whose names are hardly remembered: the curators, librarians and scholars who made sure that precious artefacts and historical records were preserved when the door on the West was closed, and that no one was hanged for hanging Picasso. Ilia Dorontchenkov is one of their number, and his anthology is part of this work. Gerasimov did not have the last word. Nina Iavorskaia, the widow of Boris Ternovets, who first set eyes on Matisse' s "Music and Dance" in Shchukin's home in 1911 , whispered with her colleagues, made telephone calls, and "almost literally prayed to God". The French masterpieces from the liquidated Museum of Modern Western Art were not destroyed or scattered to museums in far-flung provinces of the USSR, as the curators had feared they would be, but hang still in the Hermitage and the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow. Though no longer in the setting that Pavel Muratov proposed for them in 1920, Russia's public collections of "modern Western art" still rank among the best of their kind, anywhere.

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Words of lesjeunes he Slade School of Art, founded in 1871, was by 1910 a curious mixture of the conservative and the bohemian: with its insistence on drawing from life and from Classical sculpture it offered the pre-eminent training for fine draughtsmanship; yet its prominent alumni Augustus John and Wyndham Lewis were scandalizing London with both their art and their behaviour, while its young female students courted opprobrium, being among the first to cut their hair short, and campaign for suffrage. Instruction was largely provided by the legendary Henry Tonks, Professor of Drawing, a practising surgeon before he became

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an artist; a teacher whose knowledge of anat-

omy, as well as his own technical insecurities, came together in an uncompromising eye and savage tongue that would leave many doubting their artistic futures. Such one-sidedness was clearly not for everyone, nor was it always a reliable indicator of future success: Ben Nicholson, who attended briefly, was dismissed as a "poor draughtsman" , and would later say that he learnt more about structure, form , and colour from playing billiards in the pub round the corner. Moreover, this was a period when the Slade was losing its stronghold on the promotion of

PETER MABER David Boyd Haycock A CRISIS OF BRILLIANCE Five young British arti sts and the Great War 386pp. Old Street Publishing. £20. 978 I 905847846

the Old Masters, under threat first from Roger Fry's championing of the Post-Impressionists, then from the various modernisms, both imported and native to the city. But the greatest disruption of all, of course, came with the First World War; even Tonks was said to have returned from his hospital service a little more sympathetic to struggling students. David Boyd Haycock's study focuses on five of modern British art's most significant Slade graduates, charting their studies, early careers, and involvement with the war, between 1910 and 1919. Despite their frequently overlapping and mutually inspirational lives, the artists are distinctly drawn, delineated by their abiding interests: Stanley Spencer's personal interpretations of Christianity , Mark Gertler's expressionism, C. R. W. Nevinson's obsession with technology, Paul Nash's mystical understanding of

nature, and Dora Carrington's involvement with design projects. Though little of this is groundbreaking in the context of the many existing individual biographies and monographs, the book gains a freshness in its use of manuscript letters and diaries. The contention is that these were artistic lives irrevocably disturbed by the pressures of art and war, amounting to a tragic generation: it is the story of how les jeunes (as Fry christened them) came of age in the most changeable of periods; though all five survived the war itself, many of their peers died in the trenches. A drama that epitomizes the rife personal tensions is that of the promising artist John Currie, who eventually killed himself together with the mistress he couldn't live with or without - the melodramatic version of Gertler's relationship with Carrington. The most touching, and illuminating, moments, however, come not from grand overviews, but in miniature: Spencer describing the agonizing way success can be transformed into failure in a few brushstrokes; Nevinson on his motorbike, driving under the influence of Marinetti and the Futurists, to the astonishment of the New English Art Club; Gertler being advised by a bemused patron to see an oculist. ButA Crisis of Brilliance fails to add up to

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more than the sum of its parts. Where it might have made a real contribution, in studying mutual and divergent influence and development, we instead find a piecemeal approach in which potentially interesting topics such as inter-class relations, antiSemitism, and Bloomsbury's bisexuality, make fleeting appearances, never to be developed. Only in the last few chapters, dealing with Nevinson ' s and Nash's roles as Official War Artists, does the material begin to be synthesized. Quotation is this study ' s heart, mind and soul; it defers to others' words. The artists are always taken at theirs; yet artists' words are often many-hued, coloured with contingency: Nash, bringing his experience of poetry to his metamorphic visions of landscape; Nevinson, with a bravado that can segue sometimes into new ways of seeing, sometimes into paranoia. More perplexingly, the author refuses to look at works directly. .lust when a canvas appears to he hrought into focus , it is blurred by a careless coating of adjectives: paintings are "beautifully finished", "subtle" , " mysterious", "strikingly modern", even "rather abstract". David Boyd Haycock's subjects deserve closer scrutiny, and a good place to start might have been to parse Tonks's ambiguous phrase which lends the book its title, throwing into sharper focus the various crises at stake here (of new movements, the war, of making ends meet, of individuality). It is, after all, precisely the nature of these artists' brilliance that demands serious analysis.

BIOGRAPHY hat did Lord Byron see in Joseph Grimaldi? The friendship between poet and clown is just one unlikely aspect of the performer' s life, which is still celebrated each year with a memorial service conducted by the Clowns' Chaplain at Holy PATRICK O ' CONNOR Trinity in Dalston. "Grimaldi was pantomime" , writes Andrew McConnell Scott in Andrew McConnell Scott his biography. The star comic turn at Covent THE PANTOMIME LIFE Garden, Drury Lane and Sadler' s Wells in OF JOSEPH GRIMALDI the early decades of the nineteenth century, Laughter, madness and the story of Britain's Grimaldi, like many comedians, traded in greatest comedian humour that was laced with violence and 433pp. Canongate. £20. cruelty. To invite laughter and mockery is 978 I 847672957 often the refuge of wounded and uncertain souls, and this was surely what drew Byron (ten years younger) to the clown. They would father had witnessed the Gordon Riots, but Jo sometimes spend the afternoon together, and experienced something, although on a then Byron would stand in the wings of the smaller scale, which was almost as violent theatre awaiting the conclusion of the per- the "Old Price" war at Covent Garden. The formance , so that they might continue their rebuilt theatre, under the management of conversation. Thomas Harris and Charles Kemble, opened The Grimaldi story is that of five genera- in September 1809. In order to raise funds to Joseph Grimaldi in Mother Goose, by tions, beginning with Joseph's great-grand- payoff the builders, prices were raised across father, John Baptist, a dancer, comedian and the board. The regular audience turned up Samuel De Wilde, 1807 dentist - "pursuits that were far from incom- night after night and stopped the performpatible": Scott cites a Parisian tooth-puller ances, chanting "OP" and staging fights and danger and discomfort, the gymnastics and on the Pont-Neuf who entertained the "performing a tribal dance". This nightly stunts necessary to entertain audiences result crowd with jokes and a pet monkey while he scrimmage lasted an incredible sixty-seven in injuries and disfigurement. Mrs Siddons, performed the operations. John Baptist days. There are stories of angry stage carpen- Sheridan, Dora Jordan and other great figures Grimaldi's son, the fairground acrobat who ters deliberately leaving trapdoors open, so make appearances in the tale. All the while, became famous in Paris in the 1740s as that the star would fall through and be Grimaldi's celebrity grew. But what were his appearances like, that "Jambe de fer" ("Iron Leg"), made the transi- injured. Fires break out, managements go tion from street performer to stage, even bust, ri val clowns steal each other' s jokes, gained him such renown and allowed to appearing at the Opera-Comique (then in journeys by stagecoach are fraught with him to outlast the short-lived enthusiasm for Saint-Germain). It was his son , Giuseppe, who settled in London around 1758, and was engaged by Garrick to be maitre de ballet at Drury Lane. Giuseppe, known as "the 'He is a writer of originality Signor" was something of a reprobate, with children by several partners, one of whom and grace and his novel is a delight' (Rebecca Brooker) was the mother of Joseph. Terry Coleman , Guardian (1966) By the time of his birth in 1778, things were looking up for his father, who eventually set up house with Rebecca, two more children, four maids and an African footman named Sam, in Little Russell Street. The Signor, although a talented dancer and man of the theatre, was a ferocious teacher and father, who drilled the children mercilessly. His younger son, John , at his father's death in 1788, immediately signed on to join a ship's crew. So eager was he to get away from London, the theatre, and every memory of his father, that when he learnt that the ship was not to depart for another ten days, he abandoned his possessions and swam to a neighbouring vessel, due to sail the next day. He signed on as cabin boy - he was eight years old. Later in his life, when he wrote some memoirs - edited after his death by Charles Dickens - Joseph Grimaldi romanticized his father's career and attributes. He had been on ' Elegantly erotic, with masses of that indefinable the stage himself since the age of two, and in quality, style ... this has the real stuff of immortality' the months following his father' s death, he B.A. Young, Punch (1966) found himself acting in crowd scenes at Sadler's Wells, and later in the evening in the 'The novel has a dynamism defined by one of its own phrases. afterpiece at Drury Lane; he frequently had Ha ven't you heard of £instein's Law? Pleasure turns into energy' to run - across the fields then - through Clerkenwell, "scattering the sheep at Gray' s Inn Clara Janes, £1 Pais (Madrid, 1988) and Lincoln's Inn", in eight minutes. Although there were initial setbacks, by 1789 Out of print in the UK for 20 years - over 5 million copies sold worldwide a Times critic had singled him out: "the tricks ... were admirably played off by that little ~ M ODER N CL A SS I CS Marmozet Grimaldi" . www.penguinclassics.com Grimaldi's story is that of the London theatre during some of its stormiest days. His

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In knots

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5 lesser talents such as the appalling-sounding "Master Betty", a child star who attracted the town throughout the 1804-05 season? As well as quoting a few of Grimaldi ' s songs, and the texts of some of the pantomime sketches, Scott describes the gradual evolution of the stage persona the clown created, his make-up and patchwork costumes, the dances and acrobatic stunts. One of Grimaldi's greatest triumphs was in Mother Goose at Co vent Garden in the winter of 1806. In the play, Grimaldi was Squire Bugle, the villainous landlord, out to wed the virtuous heroine, Colinette. In the Harlequinade that followed, he was Clown. Thomas Hood described his antics with the Pantaloon of Joe Bologna: "Flung and floundered, and flounced and bounced, and shuffled and scuffled, and draggled and wiggle-waggled, shambled, gambolled, scrambled and skimble-skambled". Scott suggests that there was always an element of "off-beam sexuality" in Grimaldi's playing, and the rigorous physicality of his turns took its toll. There is a pathetic description of his state as he came off stage, years later in a piece called The Orphan of Peru. Between scenes he collapsed into the arms of "men positioned in the wings where they laid him on a table and vigorously rubbed the muscles that had 'gathered up into huge knots"'. Scott' s biography is rich in detail. He succeeds in evoking the London theatrical world of the time in all its riotous energy, but the story is not a happy one. The clown's final tragedy was to see his own son, who had risen up to become an admired performer, die as the result of a life of dissipation. Arriving one evening at his parents ' house in Islington, he was "pale with disease and squalid with dirt and want. steeped in degradation". Not long before, Grimaldi had himself bid farewell to the stage in a performance at Drury Lane. Of all the descriptions in the book, the account of this evening gives one of the clearest ideas of what he was like. Barely able to stand, he chose a favourite old routine which "called for Clown to be seated while a barber worked busily around his chops". Grimaldi held the basin of soapy water between his knees and sang one of his most famous songs, "Hot Codlins", about an apple-seller who gets drunk on gin. Each verse would end with a double entendre, but Grimaldi would not utter the word; instead the audience shouted it out, at which he would turn to them, and cry in mock outrage, "For shame". And there it is, that London humour that found its way down to the likes of George Robey, Nellie Wall ace and Max Miller. Robey - "The Prime Minister of Mirth" - once he had his audience roaring with laughter, would turn to them with the admonishment, "Please, remember where you are - kindly temper your hilarity with a modicum of reserve", while Wallace (always billed as "The essence of eccentricity") would wag her finger, and say, "Ah, I don't mean what you mean". One of Grimaldi's harsher obituarists wrote, " We don't know why so much fuss has been made about the death of this certainly very clever mountebank". The crowds who choked the brow of Pentonville hill to watch his funeral cortege might have answered, as Scott concludes, because he was "someone who operated always in the present tense, whose very purpose was to catch his audience by surprise with a visceral alteration of the now".

6

Herbert's couplet Sir, - In the form in which it is cited by James Doelman (Commentary, February 19), the famous couplet on the husband who deliberately died shortly after his wife cries out for emendation, despite that cardinal rule of textual criticism, difficilior lectio potior. Doelman's version is part of a poem he attributes to George Herbert. It runs (I modernize): "The first deceased, he for a little tried / To live without her, liked it not, and died" . "The first" would make better sense if the two had already been referred to in the poem separately, she first. But this isn't so, and we don't know which of them is meant until "he" obliquely tells us. "She first" is more informative, more sensibly makes "first" an adverb rather than an adjective, and gives us the natural pairing "She ... he". Might "The", then, be a scribal error for "She"? Or might Doelman have misread the initial letter? I must declare an interest. Soon after his (second) wife's death, my father asked that a plaque bearing the couplet should be posthumously affixed to a gate in his memory, and he wrote it out for the purpose, beginning "She" . True to the text, and no doubt intentionally, he died within three months of her. HENRY HARDY Wolfson College, Oxford.

Sir, - The image of George Herbert that accompanied James Doelman' s article was not from "a seventeenth-century stained-glass window" , but rather a detail of the memorial glass (which aJso depicts Herbert' s friend Nicholas Ferrar) inserted into the west window of St Andrew's, Bemerton, to commemorate the 300th anniversary (in 1933) of Herbert's death. The stained glass was the work of Caroline Townshend (1878-1944) and Joan Howson (1885-1964). JOHN w. BRIGGS 38 Crofton Close, Purbrook, Waterlooville, Hampshire.

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Fair reviews Sir, - En route to slapping Bharat Tandon's wrist for the crime of too easily slapping his own thigh (Letters, February 12), Martin Amis concedes that Tandon's review of The Pregnant Widow was "reasonably fair". To this more disinterested reader, Tandon ' s review seemed sensitive and penetrating and all too fair. But since the review was only reasonably favourable, it is tempting to conclude that for Amis fairness in this context bears a straightforward relationship to

'The Brothers Karamazov' Sir, - James L. Rice's essay on Dostoevsky (January I) and his letter (February 12) contain serious errors and misreadings which call for further comment. Dostoevsky had four children, not three, as Rice states. On his deathbed he had read to him Matthew 3: 14-15 on the baptism of Jesus, not, as Rice has it, "the Parable of the Prodigal Son". Alyosha Karamazov only exists as a fictional character in The Brothers Karamazov. As for its unrealized sequel, all we have is Zosima's prophecy to Alyosha that he will finally return to the monastery, thereby hinting at an ultimately redemptive outcome, and certainly not at the fantasy which Rice finds "plausible", that Alyosha would return to the monastery Has a clandestine revolutionary" . Contrary to Rice, in Dostoevsky' s letter to Pobedonostsev, zhizn does mean "life" in general. Dostoevsky never would have used zhizn for a vita, but always zhit 'e or zhizneopisanie, which are respectively applied to Zosima and Alyosha. An attentive reading of Book 7, Ill, makes it clear that Alyosha is not "lusting after" Grushenka when he visits her. His mother's hysteria is caused by Fyodor Karamazov's appalling abuse and her fear for her child Alyosha's future, and is not a disease "inherited" by her or her son. Alyosha's spontaneous imitation of her gestures signals his

[email protected] identification with her suffering and his distress over his father's threatened desecration of her venerated icon. Traits that are ""puzzling" to Rice are comprehensible in light of the hagiographic topoi on which Dostoevsky anchored Alyosha' s image. Alyosha is repeatedly called "angel" and several times is associated to "Aleksei Man of God", a popular Orthodox saint. It is symptomatic of Rice' s "clinical" approach that he labels Alyosha's sublime, epiphanous dream vision a "hallucination" and "hysterical seizure", analogous to epilepsy. Dostoevsky, though, tentatively applies the diagnostic term "hallucinations" only to Ivan's dialogues with the devil. It is not only the aesthetic and Christian aspects of Dostoevsky's novel that are ignored or dismissed, but also its central ideological themes. In Dostoevsky, evil ideas

lead to criminal acts and psychic disorders. Dostoevsky' s loyalty to Christ in the face of struggles with doubt is an ancient topos of spiritual narratives, and hardly evidence of his "pure sophistry" and "pointless bravado" . But whatever may have been a problem for Dostoevsky in his life, he transformed it into a literary art of universal significance. In his determination to turn Dostoevsky and his fictional characters into examples of psychiatric categories and medical textbook histories, it is Rice who reduces to "simple formulas" an immensely rich, generically diverse and subtle work of poetic art. DlANE OENNING THOMPSON Department of Slavonic Studies University of Cambridge, Sidgwick A venue, Cambridge.

Sir, - James L. Rice' s response to Joseph Frank can obliquely be commented on by reference to J. M. Coetzee's novel about Dostoevsky, The Master of Petersburg. Dostoevsky is portrayed as contradictory, obsessional, sexually drawn to young girls. In short, Coetzee was as much drawn to the Russian author' s coded preoccupation with obsessional illness as is Professor Rice. DA VID CROSSEN I Lexington A venue, New York 10010.

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favourability; I suspect he found Peter Kemp' s review - "the prose strains for loftiness ... the book is ramshackle" - monstrously unfair, and Philip Hensher's review - "I love this novel The Man Booker Prize would be no more than its due" - very fair indeed. LEO ROBSON 6 Wrentham Avenue , London NWIO.

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acted only after they had become a source of instability on its frontier. Finally, as A. S. Morrison has shown in his recent study, Russian Rule in Samarkand, Russian administration of Muslim Central Asia was in some respects less oppressive than Britain's in India. PHILlP LONGWORTH 5 Parkgate Mews, London N6. -------~,-----­

The Khanates

Wotcher

Sir, - Robert Carver may be right to suggest that the Great Game lacked "any basis in serious geopolitical reality" (in his review of John Ure's Shooting Leave, February 12). However, the War Office was concerned enough to acquire every new publication about Russia's exploration of Central Asia as soon as it appeared, whether Semenov on the "Celestial Mountains" of Tian Shan or Kuropatkin' s account of the conquest of the Khanate of Kokand. Nor does his conclusion that imperial Russia was "bent on absorbing" the independent khanates of Central Asia into the Empire quite square with the fact that it

Sir, - The greeting "What cheer" (see Michael Charles's letter, January 15) was in use among the English of Connecticut and Massachusetts at least as early as the 1630s. And not only by the colonists. In his Newes From America, published in London in 1638, Captain John Underhill recalled the following exchange on the eve of the 1636 Pequot war: "The Indians spying of us came running in multitudes along the water side, crying, ' What cheer, Englishmen, what cheer, what do you come for?'''. Unhappily for them the English had come for their land, and the Pequots would soon become, as

TLS FEBRUARY 26 2010

Herman Melville put it, "extinct as the ancient Medes". The story can also be found in Francis Jennings's The Invasion of America (1975). RONALD WRIGHT PO Box 413, Salt Spring Island, British Columbia. ------~,------

'Selves'

Falklands medics Sir, - Druin Burch alleges (in his review of Medic by John Nichol and Tony Rennell , February 5) that medical care in the Falklands was "shockingly basic" . Yes, all battlefield response to casualties is basic. Yet the overarching truth differs from your reviewer's conclusions. On the voyage south to the Falklands even first-time soldiers were brought to an extremely high level of care for the injured. They practised on a human model which they themselves had bought. Ordinary soldiers could and did insert drips and stop bleeding under fire. Medics were even better trained, crawled out to retrieve the wounded under rounds from all too dense machine-gun fire, treated the lads on the spot and saved lives. If a casualty made it back via helicopter to SurgeonCommander Rick Jolly's space (and most did), where that unusual man operated with an unexploded bomb in his roof, he had a 99 per cent chance of surviving. Jolly's skill, compassion and innovative care of his charges still resonate among the veterans of that sad affair. DA VID KENNEY PO Box 191, Upperville, Virginia 20185.

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Misprison Sir, - Tom Shippey's review of Peter Carey's Parrot and Olivier in America (January 29) refers to "the Pennsylvania Quakers' Easter Penitentiary", conjuring up the interesting notion of a prison devoted to the resurrection of those confined within. Alas, the building is the Eastern State Penitentiary, now closed but well worth visiting, on Fairmount Avenue in Philadelphia. PETER MEREDITH 112 Hilltop Drive, Severna Park, Maryland 21146.

Sir, - In his comment on Peter Hacker's critical review of my book Selves (January 22), Guy Dammann notes that I'm the Philosophy editor of the TLS (Letters, February 5), and asks whether Hacker, "in his readiness to bite the hand that feeds

Sir, - I too thought of Lincoln's

him", was "being selfless, or merely

nineteenth-century use of " cool",

self-assured". The answer is neither; Hacker was simply saying what he believed to be true. I had nothing to do with the commissioning of the review of my own book, and knew nothing about it until after it had been received.

but I don't believe E. D. Hirsch, Jr (Letters, February 19) is quite right to say the word seems to imply a blithe outward demeanour to cover morally distasteful behaviour. There is no cover about it; Lincoln meant amoral or blatantly heartless: what my (post-war American) generation would call "cold".

GALEN STRA WSON Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139.

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Cool

ANDRE MAYER 79 Pemberton Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02140.

JEWISH STUDIES n AD 67, a year after the Jews of Jerusalem had begun their war against Rome, a certain Antiochus, the son of the leader of the local Jewish community in the great city of Antioch in Syria, brought about a massacre of some in this community by alleging that his fellow Jews were plotting to bum the city to the ground. Those who survived were compelled, at Antiochus's instigation, to sacrifice in the pagan manner: Antiochus wanted to prove his change of allegiance, and he knew the most effective way to attack his fellow Jews. Soon afterwards the remaining Jews were accused of responsibility for a fire which did in fact burn down the market square and surrounding buildings. The Roman authorities only with great difficulty restrained the local mob from killing the rest of the Jews in the city, even though it turned out on investigation that the incendiaries had been not Jews, but debtors who had hoped to free themselves from their burdens by destroying the public archives. What was to happen to these diaspora Jews when , some three years later, the city of Antioch was visited by Titus, conqueror of Judaea, who had destroyed Jerusalem so thoroughly as to " leave future visitors to the spot no ground for believing it had ever been inhabited"? The people of Antioch greeted Titus with acclamations and a petition to expel the Jews from their city, to which Titus responded that this was not possible: "their own fatherland , to which, being Jews, they ought to be banished, has been destroyed, and no place would now receive them" . These stories and quotations come from the last book of Josephus's account of the Jewish War, which was composed soon after the events as a work of history for Roman readers, including Titus himself. If what Josephus wrote was true, what is one to make of the claim in Shlomo Sand' s The Invention of the Jewish People, that there was no exile of the Jews in AD 70, that the notion of such an exile was the product of Christian theology later adopted by the rabbis, that modern Jews are all the descendants of gentiles from outside Judaea who converted to Judaism as a religion , and that the Jews were not, and should not now, be considered as a people until the Jewish people were "invented" in the nineteenth century? Is there anything at all to be said for Sand 's much-hyped hypotheses? Certainly it is true, and has always been well recognized, that the dejudaization of Jerusalem was not instantaneous in AD 70. A Roman legion was quartered there, but the early rabbinic sources (almost totally ignored by Sand) refer to Jews among the ruins, and it was not until the failure in AD 135 of another uprising, the Bar Kokhba war, that Jews were forbidden to enter into the territory of the city. The explicit testimony to this ban in the writings of Justin Martyr in around the l40s AD is incomprehensihly dismissed hy Sand as the product of Christian theological bias, but it is hard to know why Justin, who came from Palestine and was a sophisticated author in the Greek rhetorical tradition, would lay his argument open to easy refutation on the grounds that his assertion about the exclusion of the Jews from their home city was simply not true. It is also a well-known fact that exile for these Jews was only from Jerusalem and its environs, not from all the areas that had at times been part of the Roman province of Judaea in the first century AD or constituted "the land of Israel" for the rabbis - indeed,

I

Secta and natio MARTIN GOODMAN Shlomo Sand THE INVENTION OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE Translated by Yael Lotan 332pp. Verso. £1 8.99. 978 I 844674220

much of the rabbinic literature of late antiquity was composed in Galilee, including the Mishnah. It is hard to imagine that this information can come as a surprise to Israelis of any background in the light of the considerable efforts made in recent years to build up tourism to sites of Jewish settlement in late Roman Palestine, such as Sepphoris. But (as everyone also knows) many Jews in late antiquity were to be found scattered around the wider Roman world, not just in the diaspora in the eastern Mediterranean coastlands where Jews had been established long before AD 70, but also in parts of the western Mediterranean and in northern Europe where they are attested only after Jerusalem had been destroyed. Where did these Jews come from? Sand claims that not just some, but the great majority, of these diaspora Jews were descended not from inhabitants of Judaea, but from converts, and this is where his discussion substitutes belligerence for argument. Sand 's analysis starts from the assumption that the total population of Jews in the Roman Empire was so huge that it can only have come about through widespread conversion, but this assumption itself is faulty. He confidently cites the figure of a total of 4 million Jews in the Roman Empire in the first century AD , a number derived, via a series of wholly random guesses, from a figure which was itself long ago shown to be an error which crept into scholarly literature in the nineteenth century on the basis of a confused reference by the thirteenth-century Syriac author Bar Hebraeus to the total number of Roman citizens in the time of Claudius. And if the Jewish population did indeed grow disproportionately to the non-Jewish population in the early centuries AD, the impact of Jewish opposition to abortion and infanticide deserves to be taken a great deal more seriously as an explanation than it is by Sand, who seems to be totally ignorant of the standard methods of population control , including child exposure, in the pagan Roman Empire. That some non-Jews converted in this period, not least for intermarriage, is not in doubt, and the evidence adduced hy Sand (as for many of his allegedly radical assertions) is all standard. But to imagine that mass conversion to Judaism could have taken place in this period on the same lines as the conversions of whole populations to Christianity within the Christian Roman state from the fourth century, without evoking considerably greater hostile evidence from the Roman state in either its pagan or its Christian guise, is desperately implausible, given the illegality of male conversion to Judaism in the Roman world from the mid-second century. No less implausible is Sand' s claim that the

Jews were regarded only as a religious group after AD 70, and not as a people. It is of course true that the complex identity of Jews as both a religion and a nation is a stock topic of undergraduate essays in the (perfectly respectable) academic field of Jewish History so despised by Sand, and the same topic has recently absorbed the energies of the Supreme Court in London. And the Christian Roman state, which from the late fourth century categorized all its inhabitants to a considerable extent by religious identity, referred to the Jews also primarily in religious terms - as a "secta", "superstitio" , or (on rare occasions, more politely) as a "religio" . But there is also no doubt that both pagan and Christian Romans sometimes thought of the Jews as a people (and in this respect the terminology used about Jews is very different from that used about Christians, about whom Sand has remarkably little to say). Near the end of the third century, 200 years after the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple but still under a pagan Roman emperor, the author of a legal tome called the Sententiae referred to these "iudaei" as a "natio", which is unambiguous, and the same terminology can be found in a law, preserved in the fifth-century Theodosian code, of the Christian Emperor Cons tan-

FIavius Josephus surrendering to Titus, 66 from a fifteenth-century manuscript of Josephus'sJewish War (detail)

AD;

tine II: on August 13,339, he gave judgement on the punishment to be inflicted on Jews who bought a slave "of another secta or natio". The same term " natio" was employed about the Jews by the aristocratic pagan poet Rutilius Namatianus when he vented his rage in verse against a Jew whose bad temper ruined a visit he made, at some time hetween 415 and 417 , to some particularly pleasant fish-ponds near Faleria, which he encountered on the way from Rome to his property in his native Gaul. What has possessed Shlomo Sand, a Tel Aviv historian of contemporary European history, to write about a subject of which he patently knows so little? The answer is refreshingly simple. His aim, which he does not try to disguise, is to undermine the claim of Israeli Jews who come from diaspora communities to have returned to the land from which their people originated. He hopes thereby to help to turn the state of Israel into a more

TLS FEBRUARY 26 2010

7 equal democratic society in which the origins of its Jewish and Arab inhabitants are ignored. Now, Sand's political concerns for the present and the future may indeed be justified , since there is no doubt that keeping the state of Israel both Jewish and democratic is proving by no means easy - not at all a new insight, as the many studies cited by Sand himself in his final chapter go to show. But this political stance cannot be justified by an appeal to invented history. It is not just Sand's ancient history that is faulty. His account of the historiography of the Jews over the past two centuries, with his constant polemic against Zionist historians, is ludicrous. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Jewish intellectuals referred to the notion of race no more than others in Europe at the time, and such language fell out of use among Jewish historians long ago. A concern with the racial genetics of contemporary Jews is Sand ' s, not theirs: anyone walking down the street in Tel Aviv can see the genetic diversity of modern Israeli Jews. It is extraordinary to claim, as Sand does, that Jewish historians have suppressed knowledge of the remarkable conversion of the Khazars to Judaism in or around the ninth century ; on the contrary, they have frequently revelled in it. Sand' s whole discussion of this topic is, as the historian Israel Bartal put it in a devastating review published in the French journal Cites, "l'invention d' une invention". One can only speculate about the reasons for Sand's so frequent misrepresentation of the books he quarries, but the result is farcical. Why bother at all to review such a book? So far as I know, no scholar who works on Jewish history in the Roman period has deigned to pay it any attention. But such lordly disdain is dangerous. The cover of Sand's book proclaims it an international bestseller, and it has been widely discussed by journalists and on television and radio both in Israel and France, and now in Britain. For the general public, what catches the attention are the headlines, not the arguments or the evidence, and it is revealing that there is evidently an appetite for such claims among secular Israeli Jews. But, more worryingly, the book has also received praise from historians and others who ought to have known better. These enthusiasts do not presumably know the material about which Sand writes, but they like his conclusions, and they have presumably been taken in by the impression that his book is scholarly history - an impression created by large numbers of footnotes referring to a wide array of scholarship (much of it only in fact half-digested) and an opening chapter which gallops competently enough through standard discussions about the construction of national identities and the notion of ethnicity hefore the author turns to his highly dubious claims about the Jews. In a self-glorifying preface to this book, Sand describes his role as that of a revealer of inconvenient facts suppressed by a malicious political and academic establishment. Some of those who have expressed approval of his book may believe that, like the Israeli New Historians whose discovery of genuinely new data on the events of 1948 has indeed caused much discomfort to that establishment, Shlomo Sand, too, has faced opposition because he has unearthed something new. Nothing could be further from the truth.

JEWISH STUDIES

8

A nation not quite like all others Z

ionism emerged after the Russian pogroms of 1881. Adherents of the movement spoke of Jews becoming a "nation like all others" with their own state. Zionist aspirations developed to some degree in Western and Central Europe, but political frameworks differed. The Dreyfus case mattered because its setting was not a backward autocracy but a liberal republic, as one observer, Theodor Herzl , noted at the time. He became Zionism's leader before long, and, while he was prepared to consider a Jewish homeland anywhere around the globe, most members of his movement were not. They believed a threatened people could not be brought together by the abandoning of central motifs in its cultural and historical consciousness - notably Hebrew and Palestine. The latter, then broken into three Ottoman districts, was for them the Land of Israel. And so another problem emerged forcefully after the First World War: Arab opposition. Nevertheless, if we bracket any political imperatives unleashed by the Holocaust (large brackets indeed), and concentrate on Zionists and Arabs, it is not evident that the bloodshed and population movements that accompanied Israel's birth differed radically from the upheavals suffered by many other states. Alexander Yakobson, a professor of Roman history at the Hebrew University, and Amnon Rubinstein, a former Minister of Education, are surely right to say in their important book Israel and the Family of Nations that "If there is anything that the Jews and Arabs have always agreed upon ... It IS . that they do not belong to the same people". That is why the authors advocate "two states for two peoples" - Jewish and Palestinian states based on the pre-1967 borders. This idea isn't new. The force of this study derives from its criticisms of contemporary anti-Zionism. While Yakobson and Rubinstein contest many of their country's policies, they also eviscerate calls to replace Israel by a bi-national state as wrong in principle, and a consequence of a utopian sense of political reality, especially among some Western intellectuals. How many successful, democratic bi-national states have there been? How many brought peace between long-warring nations? Would bi-nationalism bring a solution, or translate all the violence into civil war? If Yakobson and Rubinstein's two-state solution will irritate right-wing Zionists, who confuse Israeli security with "eternal rights" to land, anti-Zionists ought to be more troubled than they are with the idea, popular of late, that a " democratic Jewish state" is some-

how a contradiction in terms. The authors make a layered argument against purism in politics, all the while situating Israel within norms practised today by Western liberal democracies. Purism, they think, blurs into assertions of absolute rights, and these foreclose compromises needed to surmount actual strife and suffering. Better to accept, as a broader principle of politics, that there are always tensions between "legitimate values" . Better to grapple with them than to pretend that discord can never arise in the pursuit, say, both of political liberty and of social

MITCHELL COHEN Alexander Yakobson and Amnon Rubinstein ISRAEL AND THE FAMILY OF NATIONS The Jewish nation-state and human rights 246pp. Routledge. £70 (US $140). 9780415464413

equality, or of civil liberties and public safety (especially during a war), or of multicultural tolerance and gender equality. Democracy doesn't finalize societies. It assumes disagreement.

It would be best, then, to recognize that nation-states, however democratic, must cope inexorably with strains between, say, majority rights and those of minorities. Consider the plight of Arab citizens of Israel. They comprise 19 per cent of the population, and have voting and language rights, yet suffer discrimination. Doesn't it follow that a Jewish state must be undemocratic? Yakobson and Rubinstein rebut this notion in frequently exasperated tones. Twisted, decontextualized standards, they suggest, are applied to Israel by many critics, among them "New Historians" who have sought in recent decades to rewrite Zionism's record. Many readers will be struck if they compare current reproofs of "Zionist imperialism" and the denial of Palestinian identity with statements from 1948 cited by Yakobson and Rubinstein. Egypt's then Prime Minister, Nokrashy Pasha, demanded war against Israel because it was a beachhead for "communist atheism" . Syria' s delegate told the UN that "there is no distinction whatever between the Palestinians and the Syrians". Jamal el-Husseini of the Arab Higher Committee for Palestine vowed at the UN in 1947 that human rights would be secure in a unitary, democratic Arab Palestine. Yakobson and Rubinstein point out that this Committee's head, Amin el-Husseini , Jerusalem's Mufti, had just spent the Second World War in Berlin supporting the Third Reich. But Yakobson and Rubinstein's case is not primarily historical , even though they believe Israel's creation was a legitimate act of selfdetermination and self-defence by the Jewish people. They want to show that, rhetoric aside, Israel functions internally by norms that are pretty much those of today's liberal democracies. They dispute claims to the contrary made by bi-nationalists like Azmi Bishara, an Israeli Arab who served in the Knesset hefore fleeing ahroad when accused of abetting Hizbollah during the Lebanon war of 2006. B ishara has declared that "I do not recognize the existence of one Jewish people around the world .... Judaism is a religion and not a nationality". He grants that Zionism created a "Jewish-Israeli people" , but contends that Israel cannot be linked to Jews around the world and also be a "state of all its citizens". Yakobson and Rubinstein think something is not quite right when antiZionists champion Palestinian nationalism, but refuse Jews self-definition. Moreover, they point out that democracy doesn ' t make a

state culturally "neutral". Israel can be a Jewish state and a state of all its citizens, because the legal-civic meaning of democracy is distinct from its national-cultural sense. Israel is neither the sole democracy with a significant minority of citizens who do not identify with the majority, nor the only state with links to diasporas. But Diaspora Jews don ' t have voting rights in Israel, while Israeli Arabs do. Hebrew and Arabic are both official languages in the Jewish state, and Arabs have the right to education in Arabic. (France, by contrast, agreed to Europe's Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, but its Constitutional Council ruled that the country could have only one official tongue.) What of national symbols - which are often religious too? Must they alienate minorities? That depends on how a minority is treated. Yakobson and Rubinstein write that the condition of Israeli Arabs "falls short" of liberal democratic standards (which, they note, are peacetime standards). They propose, as a measure towards improvement, that Israel's Arab citizenry be considered a national minority with collective cultural rights along with the political rights they share with other Israelis. But they also note that the Star of David on Israel's flag doesn ' t

Israeli Air Force cadets before being sworn in for duty at a Western Wall ceremony on September 23, 2003, in the Old City of Jerusalem frustrate its Druze citizens or stop them from serving in the armed forces. Britain, Australia, Greece, Hungary and Scandinavian countries have crosses on their flags without

provoking agitation among non-Christians (who, clearly, don't find this a pressing matter). Britain's monarch is Supreme Governor of the Church of England, but Yakobson and Rubinstein point out that the country' s Catholic minority is not (today) upset about this. Costa Rica's constitution makes Catholicism "the Religion of the State", while promising freedom of religion. Similar clauses are in the Greek, Irish, Hungarian and Danish constitutions. And what, then, of Israel's Diaspora ties and "Law of Return" ? The latter, passed five

TLS FEBRUARY 26 2010

years after the Holocaust, gives Jews citizenship for the asking. Is it "racist"? Yakobson and Rubinstein point to the statement in 2001 by the Venice International Commission, a legal advisory body to the Council of Europe, that international law has long considered it normal for "home-states" to have concerns, chiefly cultural , for "kin-minorities" abroad. Bonn and Copenhagen signed accords in 1955 covering "kin-minorities" in their respective countries, as did Rome and Vienna in 1969. It is not only a "recognized European norm" for nation-states with diasporas to maintain special bonds, one legitimate expression of these manifests itself in preferential immigration policies. Irish law allows Dublin to exempt an applicant from some regular citizenship procedures if he or she is of Irish extraction. Greek law stipulates that anyone "not of Greek extraction" must reside in the country eight years before asking for citizenship. Germany has had provisions for displaced ethnic Germans, and comparable privileging is found in Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic. Are all these countries not " states of all their citizens" ? Or is democracy a little more complex? Yakobson and Rubinstein ask whether provisions like these aren't best understood as practical consequences of a good deal of history, border-changing and migrations. In comparative light, then, Israel's Law of Return is hardly anomalous. It is as legitimate for a democratic Jewish state to have special ties to Jews abroad as, say, a democratic Arab Palestine in the West Bank and Gaza would have with the Arab world and "kin" in Israel. These "kin" would have voting rights in Israel where they have citizenship. Yakobson and Rubinstein accept a Palestinian "right of return" to a Palestinian state, not to pre-1967 Israel , where its implementation would, finally, not mean bi-nationalism, but undoing Jewish statehood. Palestinians, they observe, comprise the sole refugee population of the immediate post-Second World War era that have not been resettled. They wonder why crusaders for their "right of return" to Israel don't demand the same for, say, Indians and Pakistanis who lost homes in 1947. (India' s constitution excludes from citizenship anyone who migrated to Pakistan.) Israel and the Family of Nations offers trenchant challenges to one-dimensional thinking. However, its focus on legal norms sidesteps some key matters, like transformations in Israel's political culture since the 1970s, when its nationalist Right defeated the social democratic Left that had long dominated the Jewish state. Yakobson and Rubinstein don't address the corrosive impact on internal democracy of the military occupation of a neighbouring population, or help us to understand how (after their book was written, to be fair) Benjamin Netanyahu is again Prime Minister. His earlier, hawkish period in office during the late 1990s was an overwhelming failure. His Foreign Minister, A vigdor Lieberman , wants public loyalty oaths to the state to be taken by Arab citizens - a sign of a feeble grasp of what it means to be loyal to liberal democratic values.

JEWISH STUDIES

9

Pregnant with meanings ewish Eastern Europe in the first decades of the twentieth century was a charged battleground of ideologies and cultural affinities. Debate centred on competing claims about the complexion of lewish nationhood. " Yiddishism", the idea that Yiddish formed the glue of lewish life, was arrayed against the forces of Zionism, who championed the cluster of beliefs known as "Hebraism" .In 1925, a plan was conceived by a group of intellectuals, including the linguist Max Weinreich, to provide Yiddish with a scholarly edifice and modern scientific apparatus. The result YIVO (Yiddish Scientific Institute) - opened that year in Yilnius, with branches around the world, to promote these goals. In the aftermath of the Second World War its headquarters were transferred to New York, where the institute has remained ever since. Modern Yiddish Studies has seen the publication of many great books: for example, Ayzik Zaretski's Yiddish grammar (Praktishe yidishe gramatik) , the first , and lamentably only, instalment in the Great Dictionary of the Yiddish Language, and Max Weinreich ' s History of the Yiddish f.anguage (Geshikhte fun der yidisher shprakh). Completed shortly before the author's death in 1969, and first published by YIYO in four volumes in 1973, it was the product of nearly half a century of work. Representing a complete history of Yiddish, this work attempts to provide a systematic way of understanding not only the language and how it works, its distinctive features and characteristics, but why it functions as the perceived core of Ashkenazi lewish identity, the embodiment of a way of life. That all languages are shaped by contact with other languages (the processes of which are investigated in Max Weinreich ' s son Uriel's seminal work on the subject, Languages in Contact) is the thread binding the History of the Yiddish Language together. And that thread is wound tightest around two notions. The first is that Yiddish is an "open language" , that is, a system which is quite liberal in regulating the influx of material from other languages. In locating and dating these influences, Weinreich provides a great deal of useful information on periodizing Yiddish and analysing the rich diversity of its dialects. Of course, no linguistic system can be wholly open, or it would cease to function. To account for the processes involved in regulating these influxes, Weinreich formulated the second notion, namely that Yiddish is a "fusion language". The various languages with which Yiddish was in some significant contact he calls stock languages. Hebrew, German, Polish, Ukrainian, English, to name a few , are all such "stock languages". Only portions of these stock languages are available to flow into Yiddish , and then only certain parts of them actually do so. There is a great descriptive flexibility in this approach, which Weinreich applies not just to vocabulary, but also to morphology, syntactic features and, in the longest technical portion of the book, the Yiddish vowel system. What makes Yiddish such a fascinating case to study is that there is not only a constant flow of information over time but also a dynamic interaction between

J

JORDAN FIN KIN Max Weinreich HISTORY OF THE YIDDISH LANGUAGE Two volum es

2,42Spp. Yale University Press. £150 (US $300). 9780300 10887 3

these features themselves. In Weinreich's words, "The elements are frequently the same; what makes a culture specific is the manner in which the elements have combined, developed, and affected one another and finally formed a system" . The process has been developing for a thousand years. One of Weinreich's most important contributions was to take the regulating structures of contact viewed from without and apply them to a cultural system understood from within. To do this he revived an old concept of the "Way of Shas" (derekh ha-shas, or "the way of the Talmud") and used it as a shorthand to understand the Talmud' s perceived role as the social, cultural , religious

and, indeed, linguistic organizer of lewish Eastern European life. That Yiddish assimilated at various times several words for floor (podloge , podleke, dil, brik), for example, is unremarkable. This is how languages work. That they cohabit in Yiddish is a natural function of its openness. The simultaneous

"Der U nterricht" (1930) by Franz Xaver Wolf dissemination of a saying such as "loy mimidbor horim, fun zogn vert men nit trogn" assumes quite a different set of structures. The first phrase is plucked from Psalm 75:7, and means something like "nor to lift up from the wilderness" (though out of context, it can plausibly mean " nor mountains from the wilderness"). The Yiddish "translation" - a practice modelled on the traditional method of Bible pedagogy involving phrase-by-phrase translation from Hebrew into Yiddish - is anything but literal: "you don't get pregnant from talking" . The punning is learned, where homophonous roots for "wilderness" and "lifting up" can also have to do with speech and pregnancy. The intellectual somersault from the sacred text to a seemingly unrelated and pedestrian moral precept on the one hand

plays on the kind of mental dexterity so prized by the Way of Shas - but it also deflates exactly that activity by a satirical humour equally prized by that same system. Though the large run of Yiddish-speaking Jews who lived in the world of this phrase knew little formal Hebrew, their religious life would have exposed them to enough to recognize such a common word as "mountain". The creative humour of their imagination would have relished the lofty biblical mountain lining up with the pregnant belly of one who did not heed this bit of simple Yiddish wisdom. One of the tasks that YIYO set for itself was a standardization of the Yiddish language. For a people confronted with numerous pressures, such as acculturation and assimilation, standardization was seen as a way of bolstering the position of Yiddish as both inherently valuable on its own, and as the ligament of secular lewish identity. The catastrophe of the Shoah only boosted the desire to strengthen the bulwark. Weinreich ' s dedication to the project of YIYO did involve setting a normative framework which could moderate (hut not necessarily control) the contours of the language. Uriel Weinreich's Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry, for instance, as well as the foundational texts of modern Yiddish literature, enshrine a host of forms and features well beyond the pale of standard YIYO-sanctioned Yiddish. These tensions still figure prominently in contemporary debates about the language. What is beyond doubt is the singular achievement of a lifetime's work. The four original volumes (two of text and two of extended and extensive notes and commentaries) were translated into English by Shlomo Noble. The text, without the notes, appeared in 1980. And while the text itself is of historical significance to the field - in fact essential for a cultural history of the idea of Yiddish and of Yiddishism - it is and must be open to critical re-evaluation. The beating heart of the project is the mass of invaluable detail found in the notes. At last, not only the full text but all of the apparatus have now appeared in two volumes in English. This transforms a landmark of the field into an enduring monument. Yiddish still occupies contested space today, whether the sole preserve of academic study, the playground of post-vernacular enthusiasts, or hedged within Hasidic precincts. Those sincere attempts to maintain its living reality need to come to terms with the loss of the Way of Shas as its creative ethos not only in a traditional sense, but as the driving force behind a bewilderingly vibrant, productive and sophisticated secular reality as well ; there are impossibly complicated sequences of the linguistic code which simply no longer have the Enigma of that culture to make them comprehensible. For Yiddish Studies to live - the commitment to which supplied the driving force ofWeinreich ' s History itself - will require the energy and endurance that marked the generation of YIYO ' s foundation. In his poem "Learning in a Dead Language" M. S. Merwin descants on the passions to be revealed by such an exploration: " What you come to remember becomes yourself." No language loved is ever lost or dead.

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FAMILIES, RABBIS, AND EDUCATION Traditiona/jewish Society in Nineteenth·Century Eastern Europe Shaul Stampfer

Viewing the Jewish history of eastern Europe through the prism of the lives of ordinary people produces findings that are sometimes surprising but always stimulating. 428pag ••

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INSIDERS AND OUTSIDERS Dilemmas ofEast European Jewry Edited by Richard I. Cohen, Jonathan FrankeI, and Stefani Hoffman

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THEJEWS IN POLANDAND RUSSIA Volume 1: 1350-1881 Antony Polonsky

A comprehensive survey-socio·political, economic, and religious-of Jewish life in Poland and Russia. Wherever possible, contemporary Jewish writings are used to illustrate how Jews felt and reacted to new situations and ideas. 568 pages, maps, tables 978-1-874774-84-8 £39.50/$59.50

REDISCOVERI NG TRACES OF MEMORY The Jewish Heritage ofPolish Galicia Jonathan Webber photographs by Chrls Schwarz

Contemporary colour photographs are sensitively and perceptively contextualized to show Galicia's centuries·old Jewish heritage, how it was destroyed, and how it is being memorialized. 192 pages, 74 colour photographs, map, paperback £15.95/$27.95 Published in North America by Indiana University Press

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EWISH MYSTICISM The Infinite Expression of Freedom Rachel Elior

A masterly investigation of the Jewish mystical phenomenon, from antiquity to the twentieth century, contextualized in the spiritual and historical circumstances in which it evolved. 220 pages, paperback 978-1-9067_3 £14.95/$22.95

The LiUman Library of Jewish Civilization www.littman.co.uk TLS FEBRUARY 26 2010

POLITICS & HISTORY

10

European romance Does language, 'solidarity through the written word', inspire nationalism? o read Tomasz Kamusella's magnificent history of language politics is to be reminded of Jan Potocki' s Manllscrit trollve a Saragosse. Potocki's novel proceeds not forward in time, but in vertical levels of plot. A narrator tells his tale, only to encounter another narrator, who begins her own. At each such juncture the reader may be discomfited by a sudden bump, but is soon absorbed in the picaresque and the beautiful. Where Potocki might write, "and here the chief of the Bohemians began his story", Kamusella gives us the equally jarring transition " subject x wouldn't be complete without subject y". But then, in the history as in the fable, the reader is astonished as what seems to be a tangent inscribes its own perfect circle. Thus, discussion of the origins of Polish, Czech, Slovak and Hungarian requires a full description of the Balkan languages, which would not be complete without Greek, which would be senseless without Turkish, which in turn suggests Tatar - and Tatar brings us back to Polish, since some of the Tatars wrote prayerbooks in Arabic script in a Slavic language much like Polish. Similarly, an account of these East Central European languages demands a review of the origins of modern Hebrew: but the history of Hebrew is only intelligible in tandem with that of Aramaic, and of course Yiddish, which suggests the sephardic vernacular Ladino; and these diaspora languages require comparison with others, such as Armenian, Romani and finally Esperanto - which returns us to modern Hebrew, since the two languages were invented by men of similar background and similar hopes. The book has no subtitle, nor does it need one: this really is a history of the language politics of East Central Europe, and of much else besides. Kamusella treats every substantial issue of historical background with the same thoroughness that he applies to the linguistic context. Everything begins from first principles, sometimes more than once. The history of Latin and German and their competition is presented, concisely and well, from several perspectives. The importance of French as the chosen language of elite groups is not neglected. Kamusella attends to the histories of Old Church Slavonic and Ottoman Turkish , languages less supported in the crucial early modern period by the printing press and the state. His account of the rise and fall of Czech and Polish as chancery languages is authoritative. The treatments of Hungarian and Slovak seem equally good. At the same time, he charts carefully the history of chancery Ruthenian, the East Slavic court language of Kievan Rus and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which though now forgotten was used for half a millennium in major European realms. The great drama in the background is the astonishing rise of the modern Russian language. When the Russian Empire absorbed the Baltic lands and then much of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, it became a country with many people who were literate, but not in Russian. More

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TIMOTHY SNYDER Tomasz Kamusella THE POLITICS OF LANGUAGE AND NATIONALISM IN MODERN CENTRAL EUROPE 1,140pp. Palgrave Macmillan. £125 (US $225). 9780230 550704

Russian subjects read German and Polish than Russian. Russian appears on the scene very late, to become the paradigm case of a language that rises and falls with the tide of empire. Kamusella, whose method draws him chiefly to dictionaries and other lexicons, might have paid more attention to the poets who in effect conspired with or against empires. Adam Mickiewicz established an unforgettable longing for the lost PolishLithuanian state, and Taras Shevchenko gave modern Ukrainian its grammar. As for Alexander Pushkin, his Russian was like the trails left by a sleigh: clean and enduring, dark lines won from white chaos by immense but invisible effort. Kamusella rewards the patient reader with bright detail, shards of painted pottery in well-tilled fields. Martin Luther, we are reminded, inspired a Latin translation of the Qur'an. The earlier church reformer, Jan Hus, invented the diacritical marks used in modern Czech after seeing how Jewish scholars transliterated Czech words into the Hebrew script. Muslim Tatars had higher literacy rates than Russians when the Russian Empire took its first census in 1897. When the historian Peter Sugar did his research in communist Yugoslavia during the Cold War, he confounded the police by taking his notes in Hungarian in Arabic script. Hungarians longed for common ancestry with the Turks:

so much so that when linguists established the link with Finnic peoples, Hungarians rejected a " kinship smelling of fish oil". Parents near the city we now call Bratislava used to exchange their children , so that young people would have native knowledge of Hungarian, German, Slovak and Croatian. Slovaks and Ruthenians both claim Andy Warhol as their own. A student of the late Ernest Gellner, Kamusella tries gamely to apply Gellner's model of nationalism to the awesome multifariousness of history. In Nations and Nationalism (1983), Gellner memorably argues that national activists seek the isomorphism of language, national feeling and state boundaries. Nationalism, as the aspiration to such isomorphism (says Kamusella after Gellner), became the only way to legitimate statehood in the twentieth century. In the Gellnerian account, national activism arises as an unintended side effect of the modernization policies of multinational states. As they school their populations and expand, empires unwittingly create linguistic groups suffering from urban anomie, but newly capable of solidarity through the written word. One problem with this account is that it makes the state omnipotent (although not omniscient). It is a blind Leviathan disgorging half-formed nations. A linguist, Kamusella wishes to show that the state has similar powers with language. He asserts that linguistic factors in history are essentially "arbitrary" since they are subject to the "decisions" of those in power. But politics, no less than language, cannot be separated from history, and political decisions, while contingent, cannot be seen as entirely arbitrary. What seems "arbitrary" from a linguistic perspective may have an intelligible political motivation. Even in the age of empire, states were func-

The Journey I came back and stayed on my head turned by a girl and what I didn ' t know about the place I was in. Under the same streeling light habitual to my mind, between sea and mountain, I taught myself another lesson. How the familiar opens out. How all horizons meet under you, invisibly, if you pause to think. As prompted this morning waiting at the quay for the visitors, their cameras already busy as they come ashore.

ANDREW McNEILLIE

TLS FEBRUARY 26 2010

tioning in an international environment in which nationalism was as much a nuisance from next door as the bastard son of domestic politics. A major theme of Kamusella's work is the mimetic character of nationalism: Poles, Czechs, Hungarians and Slovaks all knew German, and all copied what Kamusella calls " the modernization paradigm of the German language". He presses this point further than Slavic scholars have generally been wont to do (with exceptions such as Vladimir Macura). One can read a lot of Polish history without learning that the compilers of standard dictionaries knew German better than they knew Polish. In addition, religion influences national movements, often at great distance. Jesuits create the educational infrastructure that Habsburg emperors or Polish kings then appropriate. Protestant missionaries appear again and again, here publishing the first Bulgarian periodical, there translating the New Testament from ancient Greek to modern Greek - for Greeks. In the end, language itself does exert a certain force. It matters, as Kamusella beautifully demonstrates, that some rulers confront populations who speak mutually intelligible languages from similar language groups, while others must deal with groups who do not understand each other. If for no other reason than this, a centralized Germany or France was going to be easier to achieve than a centralized Habsburg monarchy or Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Such barriers, which might seem arbitrary in political terms, have a properly linguistic explanation. In a book that treats the entire modern period to the present, the absence of a chapter on the Second World War raises some questions. The state that disrupts the Gellnerian paradigm more than any other is Nazi Germany. As Kamusella recalls, the linguist Max Weinreich said that a language was a dialect with an army and a navy - so far, so good for Gellner. But he said so in Yiddish, in 1945, and published his article in a journal which had recently moved, in very inauspicious circumstances, from Vilnius to New York. Germans had just destroyed Yiddish as a major language not by the conventional instruments of state power, but by bullets and gas. Mass murder, so consequential for the shape of nations, cannot be seen as the actions of an empire of the Gellnerian type. Nazi Germany was not only, as Kamusella wishes to maintain, an extreme example of a national state working towards ethnic homogeneity. If that were so, Hitler might have stopped in 1938, or at the latest in 1939, after all German lands had been won. Instead, Hitler embarked on a war whose aims were the elimination of Jews and the deportation or destruction of tens of millions of Slavs. The violence of the 1940s, far more than any prior or suhsequent event, transformed Rast Central Europe into a series of homogeneous regions: without Jews, but also without Germans, and other minorities subject to post-war cleansings. As Kamusella points out in a different setting, national sovereignty can come at the price of lost national influence. Writing of the Greeks, Kamusella describes what he calls "shrinkage": the price of having a small independent state on the Aegean Sea is the reduction of the religious and financial influence of the Greek diaspora throughout the Ottoman Empire. Once a people is seen as a

POLITICS & HISTORY nation, in the modern political sense of wanting or having a state, its representatives are treated accordingly, rather than simply as bishops or bankers. This holds true regardless of their own preferences, and so in some sense they are less rather than more free. Here Kamusella has noticed a much more general tragedy of nation-building. Some national movements begin from a group that enjoys international prestige or power. National activism involves forcing literacy in their language downwards, into the working

and peasant classes, leading to the creation of a homogeneous state. But by the time this is achieved, the group has lost its original appeal. Something of the sort happened to the Poles, and may be happening now to the Russians. In our own times, East Central European states that regain sovereignty strive for membership in the European Union. This, rather than ethnic homogeneity, is the mark of success. Despite an encyclopedism that smacks of the eighteenth century, and an

ambition for total history that recalls the nineteenth, Kamusella is clearly writing for the present moment. His book is an illustration of its own core argument: scholarship on language serves social purposes. The earnestness of the undertaking cannot quite conceal an underlying romance: not with anyone nation, or with one language, but with language as such. Kamusella is suspicious of the state and lauds peoples who have escaped its thrall, to the point of praising primitivism. His is an unusual sensibility, not only broad-

11 ened by learning, but generous and fair. He makes neutrality seem like a powerfully animating commitment, and his discussions of hundreds of controversial issues are each laudable for their clarity and justice. Every EU official and NGO activist who deals with East Central Europe should have this book to hand, and every graduate seminar on nationalism in this region should begin with it. It provides countless sound judgements, and dispenses with a tremendous amount of nonsense.

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wo new books on the Vietnam war provide a chance to refresh our memories of a conflict that figures so prominently in current thinking about the war in Afghanistan. Mark Phi lip Bradley's Vietnam at War is a concise survey, incorporating the latest scholarship, covering the period from the French-Indochina war to the final collapse of South Vietnam in 1975, with a coda on more recent Vietnamese views of the war experience. Bernd Greiner's War Without Fronts , a thick volume including more than a hundred pages of notes, focuses on war crimes, treatment of civilians and the difficulty the US military has had in coming to terms with their record on these issues. How ironic that it has taken a German historian finally to pull together these facts, mainly from US military archives. The message of Greiner's book is fairly brutal: he contends that the US military leadership condoned and covered up behaviour in Vietnam which led to men being hanged in Japan and Germany. Greiner is not the first to suggest that by the standards of Nuremberg, US military leaders could be convicted of war crimes against civilians for their conduct of the Vietnam war, but his is the first scholarly study of the topic to make use primarily of US archival evidence. It takes imagination to think back to the 1960s, when the perception of Asian peasants was so clouded by racism, the experiences of war in Korea, and by pure Cold War panic that these actions could have been deemed acceptable. A few of the enlisted men, as Greiner shows, knew that they were not and tried to warn their superiors of the abuses being committed. (Seasoned observers such as Bernard Fall warned from the outset that the technological onslaught on the Vietnamese peasants was counter-productive, if not illegal.) One of the pretexts for indiscriminate violence against civilians was the creation of "Free Fire Zones", in areas considered to be Vietcong strongholds. These "specified strike zones" were to be configured to exclude populated areas except those in "accepted Viet Cong bases". Within these areas, the "Rules of Engagement could he interpreted hy local commanders as a license for unrestricted action". According to the Army's interpretation of the laws of war for South East Asia, violation of international law would only occur if "a policy of deliberate mass murder is being pursued and therefore the intention of committing genocide can be proved". The logic of this policy required that in provinces with a strongly pro-Communist population , such as those in south-central Vietnam, the countryside be cleared of its inhabitants. Peasants who chose not to be herded into refugee camps and to stay on their land found them-

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Lawless zones SOPHIE QUINN-JUDGE Bernd Greiner WAR WITHOUT FRONTS The USA in Vietnam Translated from German by Anne Wyburd with Victoria Fern

520pp. Bodley Head. £20. 978 I 84792 079 9 US: Yale University Press. $35. 978030015451 I

Mark Philip Bradley VIETNAM AT WAR 240pp. Oxford University Press. £14.99 (US $29.95). 9780 192803498

selves in Free Fire Zones, classified as "pink" or unfriendly. The province of Quang Ngai, one of the most solidly Communist areas in South Vietnam, with the highest percentage of men who regrouped to the North in 1954, became the target of a mass resettlement campaign in the spring of 1967, when a mixed Army and Marine task force moved 40 per cent of the entire rural population, around 300,000 people, and destroyed their villages. Not surprisingly, the locals did not get any friendlier, and the My Lai massacre, which took place not far from the provincial town in March 1968, is often viewed as the GI' s reaction to peasant hostility. Yet as Greiner shows, My Lai can be seen as a consequence of a long-term US policy of total war in the countryside - "in practice", he notes, "the entire province of Quang Ngai was declared a Free Fire Zone". One Marine accused of murdering a woman in My Lai in the spring of 1970 told a military investigator, "Sir, we have permission to kill anyone in this area if we want to". In all of South Vietnam, between 1964 and 1969, 3.5 million people were forced into resettlement centres

and towns. The US military interpreted the high numbers of refugees as a positive sign as a weakening of the Vietcong. The most important measure of victory, however, was the enemy body count. This was the measurement of an officer' s success, when a six- to twelve-month tour of duty in Vietnam was his chance of a lifetime to win promotion. Greiner quotes the view of an anonymous sergeant who wrote several times to his superiors about the carnage in the Mekong Delta during "Operation Speedy Express", an effort in 1969 to clear out the Communists in

the Delta before the US troop withdrawal. This soldier wrote that, in view of the need to accumulate high body counts, "the pressure to kill indiscriminately, or at least to report every Vietnamese casualty as an enemy casualty, would seem to be practically irresistible". Greiner' s grasp of the history and geography of the Communist movement is less firm than his mastery of the military documentation of investigations. He seems to confuse Quang Ngai province with the whole of French colonial Annam, now usually referred to as Central Vietnam or Trung Bo. Ho Chi Minh was not a native of Quang Ngai , nor were the French absent during the Second World War, as he alleges, except for the final five months. The first leaders of the anti-colonial movement there, such as Pham Van Dong, were from the families of scholars, men who had seen their authority usurped by the French. The key fact that Greiner fails to explain is that Quang Ngai, a rural province with a small, impoverished provincial town, remained a "'safe zone" for the Communists during the French-Indochina war, and they expected to keep it in their zone of control after the Geneva Conference. When the statesmen negotiating the peace moved the demarcation line north from the 13th to the 17th parallel, the Viet Minh had to move their armed forces out of the southcentral provinces, where they had controlled most of the countryside. They left behind political cadres and families who suffered far more than "exploitation and lack of respect" at the hands of Ngo Dinh Diem's government. Local Communist leaders, including women, were arrested and "disappeared" in a variety of ways. When the 1956 nationwide election called for in the Geneva Agreements did not take place, the campaign to denounce Communists forced many cadres to flee to the mountains or to take refuge in Buddhist monasteries. The ease with which they regained control of the countryside once they returned to guerrilla war in the early 1960s is really no mystery. Greiner would have benefited from reading Mark Bradley's Vietnam at War, which focuses on the Vietnamese experience of the conflict. Bradley's book takes on the challenge of synthesizing recent scholarship and a variety of perspecti ves for the general reader. This approach may not satisfy readers looking for the final word on the Vietnam wars. Bradley points out that Vietnamese memories and representations have grown more diverse over the years, and that the state has " increasingly lost the ability to control

TLS FEBRUARY 26 2010

the memory of the war". But he draws a picture of the progression from the French war to the start of the American involvement, which makes it clear that in both urban and rural South Vietnam, the Americans were not necessarily viewed as benefactors. The urban anti-war demonstrations of 1966 in the cities of Hue, Danang and Saigon had strong Buddhist support and came close to a full mutiny in the centre of the country. Bradley also includes excerpts from the recently released wartime diary of a young North Vietnamese doctor stationed in Quang Ngai province, to give readers a feeling for the fabric of life in a guerrilla zone. There were ordinary peasants there, working willingly under dire conditions to provide medical care to wounded soldiers from the North, as well as to their local guerrilla fighters. This war was not won by soldiers terrorized into fighting, even though the passion of the rank and file may have waned during the toughest years of combat. Although it is now fashionable to contest what Bradley calls "the nationalist scaffolding of Vietnamese history", the war cannot be explained without accepting at some level the population ' s commitment to national self-determination. To place current views in perspective, it would have been useful for Bradley to add an introduction to the historiography of the wars, including the complications presented by changing political tides in Vietnam and theoretical fashions in Western history. The book would have been improved, too, by better proofreading of the Vietnamese terms used in the text. The complex mixture of motivations that kept the Vietnamese Communists fighting until 1975 is one of the puzzles that neither of these books can answer satisfactorily. There is not yet and perhaps never will be an unbiased, broad-based study of Communist attitudes to the war, one that does not rely on defector interviews or on the propaganda of either side. A question in 2010 is how close a parallel one can draw between Vietcong resistance in the 1960s and the Afghan insurgency today. Although President Barack Ohama recently called the Vietnamese resistance a broad-based, popular movement, Greiner takes care to steer clear of such an assessment. He emphasizes instead the appalling way in which the US waged war. It was partly in reaction to this conduct that in the 1960s, as both Greiner and Bradley point out, what had started as an anti-colonial social revolution became an anti-American war. Greiner reminds us, too, of the danger to the US military itself which the Vietnam war posed, when half-hearted reactions to crimes against civilians caused the "erosion of the culture of military law by legal process".

HISTORY

12 he trouble with internationalism, in its many guises, is that it is almost always based on a touching but impractical belief that the rest of the world should be more like one's own society, and should share the same aspirations, Bonapartists, liberal imperialists, Leninists, Trotskyites, Iranian mullahs and American neoconservatives are among the many who have sought to reshape the world in accordance with their values, with varying degrees of success and (mostly) failure, This tendency was embedded in international organizations right from the start In London in September 1864, Karl Marx founded the first International Working Men' s Association, He reflected the Victorian optimism of his time, suggesting that its purpose was "to vindicate the simple laws of morals and justice, which ought to govern the relations of private individuals, as the rules paramount of the intercourse of nations". If only! As with the First International, so with the League of Nations and its successor the United Nations. When the League was established in 1920, the British and French in particular saw it as a means to extend their great power status - especially through the device of the League's mandates system; and it was these two colonial powers that played a dominant role in the League's short and ineffective life. Mark Mazower sets out to challenge two notions: first, that the UN's creation in 1945 was uncontaminated by association with the League; and second, that it was above all an American affair. I am not sure how widely held these notions are, or whether they merit being particular targets of historical demolition. However, Professor Mazower is disarmingly modest in his claims for the book, which is " nothing more than the sketch of an

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Prime movers AD AM ROBERTS Mark Mazower NO ENCHANTED PALACE The end of empire and the ideological origin s of the United Nations 236pp. Princeton University Pres s.

£ 16.99 (US $24.95). 9780691135212

argument". It offers "a series of probes into the ideological prehistory of the United Nations and the post-war world order". So the reader can ' t expect a systematic history of the creation of the UN , or even of the thinking behind it What the book does offer is some illuminating vignettes. The first figure depicted in the book is Jan Smuts, Prime Minister of South Africa (1919-24). Smuts managed to combine high internationalist rhetoric - he helped to draw up both the League Covenant in 1920 and the UN Charter in 1945 - with a key role in the construction of apartheid in South Africa. This may seem to us today to be wildly inconsistent, but it made sense if the League, and the UN, were seen as benevolent instruments for continuing white guidance for backward races. The second vignette in the book is of Alfred Zimmern , who like Smuts had a part in drawing up both Covenant and Charter. He was the first holder of the Montague Burton Professorship of International Relations at Oxford (1930-44), and his most basic and enduring view was that the British Common-

wealth was " not an English, nor an AngloSaxon but a world experiment". With the formation of the UN in 1945, he saw the baton as having been passed from Britain to the United States, to which he moved after his retirement from Oxford. His last major book, The American Road to World Peace (1953), saw the US as enthroning law and liberty across the globe: British imperial thinking seamlessly transported across an ocean and into the Cold War. Mazower introduces other figures whose lives illustrate the complex intellectual origins of the UN and its early history. Raphael Lemkin, a Polish emigre lawyer in the US and the prime mover of the 1948 Genocide Convention, is depicted as failing to grasp that international law had lost its strength, and that the world of the UN was less lawbound than that of the League. These were the architects whose dreams for the UN had largely failed to materialize. But Mazower also considers figures who succeeded in turning the UN into something very different from the latter-day British Commonwealth that Smuts and Zimmern had envisaged. Jawaharlal Nehru, Prime Minister of India (1947-64), brilliantly exploited the high rhetoric of the UN Charter to steer the entire world enterprise in a decisively anticolonial direction. And, to the chagrin of Smuts, he did so by winning crucial votes in the General Assembly on the rights of the Indian population of South Africa. This act wrecked the cosy plans of the UN 's colonial architects, but saved the organization, giving

it a global appeal that the League of Nations had never had. Yet Nehru's Asianism, too, was based on a belief that the whole world could be more like India, and when Asia itself remained obstinately divided, his vision "turned out to be a dead end". While Mazower's basic argument is presented with verve, it has weak points. Even on his central theme of the Commonwealth idea in the UN, there are omissions. Mazower says little about the significant contributions of two Commonwealth countries, Australia and Canada, to the process leading to the UN Charter; and he skips over Winston Churchill's helter-skelter succession of ideas on how the UN might work alongside the British Empire and indeed various regional bodies. France doesn ' t get a look-in. Apart from a few minor errors (the name of the historian Llewellyn Woodward is given wrongly), there are some debatable interpretations. The UN is depicted as having abandoned the League's commitment, however faltering, to the protection of national minorities within sovereign states, when maybe the UN 's general emphasis on human rights was a subtler and better way of addressing the same problem. Most oddly, this book muddies the waters on some of the key similarities and differences between the League and the UN. For example, it repeatedly refers to the veto power of the Permanent Five members of the Security Council as something new, and as the major point of differentiation from the League. It wasn't The League Covenant had endowed all the members of the League (both Council and Assembly) with the veto: the UN Charter represented a drastic and necessary reduction of an already existing veto power. This book offers interesting glimpses of the UN ' s origins, but it is far from being the final word.

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o borrow one of Isaiah Berlin 's aper~us , if Jonathan Israel had read half the books in his bibliographies, he would be a remarkable man. And Jonathan Israel is a remarkable man. His erudition is epic in scale. And as he reads, he writes. Together, his dozen books run to 6,600 pages. For the past decade, he has laboured on a multi-volume history of the Enlightenment In Radical Enlightenment (2001) and Enlightenment Contested (2007), Israel produced a grand synthesis of the Enlightenment in the manner of Ernst Cassirer in the 1930s and Peter Gay in the 1960s. His third and final volume will follow the fortunes of Enlightenment through the age of democratic revolution and on into the fruited fields of modernity. While we wait, Israel has given us a preview - an uncharacteristicall y slender volume entitled A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the intellectual origins of modern democracy. The caprices of scholarly publishing favour short books, and so for thousands of students and general readers, A Revolution of the Mind is likely to be their sole exposure to Israel's thesis. Unfortunately, brevity is not always the soul of wit Israel's work is controversial. He has little time for either Habermas's Enlightenment of bourgeois coffee houses or Foucault's dystopia of madhouses and prisons. He is an unapologetic historian of ideas, and his impatience with postmodern fads is refreshing. Israel's mission is to redeem the Enlighten-

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Spinoza's machines JEFFREY COLLINS Jonathan Israel A REVOLUTION OF THE MIND Radical Enlightenment and the intellectual origins of modern democracy 296pp. Princeton University Press.

£ 18.95 (US $26.95). 9780691 142005

ment as a liberating philosophical revolution. To achieve this, he divides it between a heroic "radical" faction and a feeble "moderate" one. The radicals - Bayle, Diderot, d'Holbach and others - were devoted to Renedict Spino7.a. They were materialists,

determinists and atheists. The moderates - Locke, Voltaire, Kant attempted to reconcile reason and faith , and clung to outmoded notions such as the soul and free will. Israel flays the moderates for their caution, and presents them as docile abettors of the counter-Enlightenment He unabashedly lionizes the radicals. They alone, supposedly, defended human equality, democracy and liberty with sufficient vigour. Israel's thesis has been criticized for its reductiveness, but the sheer learning of his

big books tends to deflect the charge. Indeed, it is hard to imagine what they could have been reduced from. Quite different is A Revolution of the Mind, which is manifesto-like in both length and tone. The book credits "radical Enlightenment" with all the political achievements of the "age of revolution" equality, rights, democracy, toleration, pacificism, even sexual liberation. We owe these things, it turns out, to Spinoza's materialist and atheistic apostles. Historically, much of this is implausible. To present Spinozism as the "chief factor" propelling the American Revolution defies fifty years of scholarship, and borders on the absurd. Writing Locke out of the American Revolution is like writing Marx out of the Russian. Israel is on safer ground in attributing the French Revolution to radical Enlightenment But here he can only salvage the libertyloving credentials of his radicals by tendentiously blaming the Terror on Rousseau, who is consequently (and dubiously) presented as something other than a radical. The book is full of such special pleading. Israel credits the radicals for abolitionism, even though abolition was chiefly advanced by the evangelical Christians whom they despised. He excoriates Voltaire's sycophancy to "enlightened despots", but excuses Diderot's unedify-

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ing career at the court of Catherine the Great He scorns George Washington's slave holding, but overlooks Jefferson 's . Adam Smith is distorted into a defender of "rank and aristocracy", and Locke into an apologist for empire and a scourge of homosexuals. But when it comes to his radical "freethinkers and creative minds", Israel ceases such fault-finding. They insist upon their ardour for equality and democracy , and Israel obligingly reports their "noble and beautiful thoughts". He writes less as their historian, and more as their devotee. Israel's histories often veer towards philosophical advocacy. In this, his most dogmatic book, he deploys the history of human freedom in order to vindicate the proposition that man is an organic machine, and to further "embed" this as an "officially endorsed principle" . Whatever one thinks of such a project, it is not a historical one. Nor is Israel positioned to

defend

"one-substance

materialism"

philosophically, or to explain why it would inevitably produce altruism, pacifism and egalitarianism. (One is reminded of Vladimir Solovyov' s satiric quip, "Man is descended from a monkey, therefore let us love one another".) To be sure, Jonathan Israel's views capture the mood of our present biologyaddled zeitgeist, but voguishness is not often a scholarly virtue. Nor does good intellectual history treat a particular dogma such as Spinozism as a master key. Regrettably, in A Revolution of the Mind, one of our preeminent historians has done exactly this.

ECONOMICS

•••

and why no one is to blame

ost books on the financial crisis postulate either too few causes ("The Fed") or too many causes ; a colleague of mine listed seventeen distinct causes of the crisis without breaking much of a sweat, ranging from the Basle capital requirements to the compensation schemes for bank traders to unregulated mortgage brokers and many more. Very smart economists have cited "too much securitization" and '''lOO little securitization" as causes and without thinking that the holders of the opposite view are in ignorance of the facts. (Should banks have securitized at all? Shouldn't they have securitized everything and put it with the pension funds?) As the crisis recedes in time the tale may become messier rather than cleaner. John Lanchester's Whoops! Why everyone owes everyone and no one can pay lists multiple causes, explains them with literary panache, does not track the narratives of individual participants, and covers both the United States and the United Kingdom; it does not demonize, but rather hints at an underlying moral dimension to the entire affair. Most of all, the book stands out for explaining arcane financial instruments with the skills of a fine novelist. Lanchester uses memorable images to express complex points: "The whole idea that a banker looks a borrower in the eye and takes a view on whether he can trust him came to seem laughably nineteenth-century". Chapter Two, "Rocket Science", is an extraordinarily clear popular treatment of derivatives. The opening sentence shows how the exposition mixes economics with analogies from the humanities: "Finance, like other forms of human behaviour, underwent a change in the twentieth century, a shift equivalent to the emergence of modernism in the arts - a break with common sense, a turn towards self-referentiality and abstraction and notions that couldn't be explained in workaday English". The derivatives chapter nonetheless could have used more analytic differentiation. Apart from credit default swaps, which brought down AIG and set off the danger of a chain reaction, most derivatives worked well before, during, and after the crisis. That's trillions of dollars of markets that performed as advertised. In many disasters, it's almost too easy to explain what went wrong; the point is to have a theory that also explains what, often at the very same time, worked just fine. If there's a fundamental problem with this book, it comes with the denouement. The last sentence of the book is indicative: "In a world

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running out of resources, the most important

ethical and political and ecological idea can be summed up in one simple word: 'enough"'. But is an attitude of "enough" really the solution? It's an arbitrary "enough" that Lanchester is invoking. He' s not willing to end liberal democratic capitalism, nor should he be. He doesn't have a single overriding particular cause of the crisis to rail against and fight against. He' s not willing to fight for policy nerds and a more able technocracy, as Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has been advocating. And he's not willing to put the whole event down to an extreme bout of bad

TYLER COWEN John Lanchester WHOOPS! Why everyone owes everyone and no one can pay

223pp. Alien Lane. £20. 978 I 846 14285 7

luck, namely that so many unfavourable mechanisms were operating together at the same time. Lanchester is more on target when he asks that banks be limited to serving society rather than preying on it, but that's not so far from the attitude that led to the crash. It was a common view, in many countries and political parties, that banks were here to help us own homes and also to buy more goodies. For all the common talk of deregulation run amok, banking is one of the more heavily regulated sectors in most Western economies. In the US , for instance, banks have numerous regulators, ranging from the Federal Reserve System to the Federal Deposit Insurance Fund to a variety of minor offices and state regulators, all acting in concert. Not only did these regulators fail but they egged on the excesses which later exploded. The more consolidated regulatory approach of the UK didn't seem to fare much better. We' re count-

Richard Fuld, chairman and chief executive officer of Lehman Brothers Holdings, testifies before the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Washington DC, October 2008 ing on the regulators to fix the markets but there is very little talk about how to fix the regulators. Lanchester wishes that bankers had the ethics and the moderation of doctors or airline pilots. Yet in commercial settings doctors are notorious for overprescribing medicine and overselling treatments, not necessar-

Bauxite I spent a lot of money this week, almost four hundred marks, but it did make possible some magical moments, sublime, interior, silksoft, with flows of intoxicating transcendence. I often look with interest at the right hand of the Lord: it' s the hand that opens, usually it's not worth the candle, but the times that you remember are the blisses of the deeply breathing soft white chestnut flowers that are a blessing in May. From other tables one hears: "We're backing singers", or "Mr Kraft, what good are customers who don ' t pay their promissory notes", or "The monthly instalments are thirteen-fifty": the world is full of such sayings. And confronting them the encashments of heaven, ruinous perhaps, in a certain sense criminal , but you were lying around shop-soiled, grubby, sale item, and now for four hundred marks cracks in the rocks detonations the veins shimmer with pure gold bauxite an entire week for heaven ' s "backing singers".

GO TT FRIED BENN Translated by Michael Hofmann

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13 ily cynically but in a manner that is consistent with their own profit. Lots of doctors don ' t perform the simple task of washing their hands when that would prevent illness and save lives. Most of the medical sector in the United States fights against much-needed fiscal reforms and cuts in reimbursement rates. When it comes to the pilots it's harder to say, but at the very least everyone knows the captain probably will go down with the plane; induced caution is not the same as virtue. The more we experience the after-effects of the crisis, the harder it is to escape the conclusion that millions of people were complicit, whether intentionally or not. Let' s say you directed a museum and four years ago you started the construction of a new wing, made bids to assemble new collections, and hired new staff, perhaps because you thought the previous state of affairs wasn't "enough", to use Lanchester's loaded word. No one expected you to forecast financial crises, but still you, and many many other people like you, could have acted with more general caution than you did. After all , things do sometimes turn out bad. For the most part we, as a society, simply let this possibility slip. You, as a museum director, may feel less guilty than you think the banker ought to, but your actions are not as far removed from the banker's as you might like to think. You both had ambition. You both pushed for what turned out to be an overexpansion. You were both hubristic. And you both, either directly or indirectly, ended up having to take jobs away from people. I worry about Lanchester's fifth chapter, where he argues that Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky proved the irrationality of human behaviour. He's not wrong, but the cognitive biases which they captured in the laboratory are small compared to the mix of complacency and herd behaviour which brought on the financial crisis. Lanchester is focusing on the provable hypothesis but playing down the bigger story of how much a collective delusion can hold a society in its grip. There is a tension, however. Insofar as the author plays up major, widespread cognitive delusions, the particular explanations of the crisis seem less important by comparison, a kind of sideshow, relevant to the details of the narrative but not really explaining what went on. That drains away the moral flavour of the story and more importantly it makes it hard to explain how we will avoid another crisis - of a different flavour of course - the next time around. No one is suggesting that we can overturn the follies of human nature, including its conform ism and its excess enthusiasms. Outlawing the particular causes of this crisis, this time around, is scant consolation because we aren ' t going to get an exact repeat in any case. The financial crisis, in its varying forms , is plaguing many societies: not only the irresponsihly deregulated hanking system of Iceland but also the economies of Greece, Spain, Hungary, Ukraine, Dubai, and other locales to varying degrees. (Nor should we think that all of the proverbial shoes have dropped.) The variations of policy and circumstance across these different locales suggest that a very general global intoxication was largely responsible for what happened. The crisis does not resist explanation in its particulars and in that regard John Lanchester succeeds with flair and in a remarkably short space. Yet we are still left with a major world-historical event which resists easy moral or conceptual digestion.

14 artin Heidegger himself rarely spoke of Darwin, but he did recall that, while still at school , he relished the challenge evolution presented to Christian belief: religion "prompted me to read widely on the biological theory of evolution", he wrote. (His university education from 1909 was intended as clerical training, but he quickly abandoned that course of study for philosophy and the natural sciences.) Heidegger was never a Darwinian, but his concern with materiality and time belonged to a world which recognized but was also troubled by the scientific truth of evolution. It was because what had once been God ' s creation now lacked a prime mover and an ultimate meaning that in 1927 Being and Time ventured a new, post-Darwinian, account of human being. Heidegger asked about the beginnings of our world, something Darwin had explained to his own satisfaction without regard to metaphysics. Heidegger persisted, What is Being and how is human being-here, Dasein, part of being as a whole, das Seiende im Ganzen? And what he found was that the answer lay with "the nothing" . According to the lecture "What is Metaphysics?" (1929), "The nothing is not just the opposite of beings; it is essential to their very emer-

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Back to origins Heidegger through post-Darwinian eyes LESLEY CHAMBERLAIN Origin of the Work of Art (1935-6) , a short, pivotal work which alongside Being and Time seems the best starting point to illuminate his relationship to Darwin. When evolutionary theory rethought both natural and cultural being, it had a lasting effect on, among other things, the understanding of language. Heidegger had two strong pre-war ideas of how language would serve his project. One was that only a fresh language of springing and leaping and "nothing" would allow him to describe the emergence of Being out of Nothing. The second was to work back through the meanings to find a point when a certain significance was fresh. Reading a story parallel to the history of evolutionary biology into the history of the

"design" (EntwurfJ stripped back to its old sense of "projection". Beings are no longer thrown into the mortal fray by God' s project, but by a force inherent in Being itself. Only one actual mention of Darwin himself in Heidegger's work stands out. In The Basic Concepts of Metaphysics (lectures given in 1929-30), he quoted the English naturalist as asking why moths fly towards a candle and not towards the moon. But the biological revolution dictated his repeated emphasis on the emergence or origin of things, just as it shaped the popular scientific culture in which he grew up. The term Ursprung indeed was the hallmark of evolutionary thought in German discourse and some considered it an error on the part of Darwin's first German translator, Bronn, when he rendered On the Origin of Species as Ober die

the naturalist and evolutionary biology's leading figure in Germany, published as a most prominent example, Ober unsere gegenwiirtige Kenntnis vom Ursprung des Menschen (1898), that is, Our Present Knowledge of the Origin of Man. When Heidegger titled his lecture The Origin of the Work of Art, he must have known the term bore the freight of more than half a century of special meaning. Did Haeckel, who more than anyone popularized Darwin in Germany, influence Heidegger directly? Heidegger did not supply names to accompany the account of his reading in his last years at school, but these were the days in which, up to 1914, Haeckel's Die Weltriithsel (1899, The Riddle of the Universe) sold more than 400,000 copies. As for the substance of Haeckel' s version of Darwin, that book announced that the theory of evolution was compatible with a monistic account of the meaning of life. God might not be in his creative heaven any more, eternity and essence were fictions , but human existence in mind and body remained intelligible in one continuous and emotionally satisfying way. Being and Time shadowed that mixture of loss and satisfaction and looked for what Dasein and all beings had in common. Heidegger's definitive work of 1927 distinguished between what philosophy should

gence" . At once succinct and mysterious , this

seek in Being and what " the positive sci-

was Heidegger's metaphysical supplement to Darwin. The Nothing has been ridiculed by Heidegger's Anglo-Saxon critics ever since. But through translation the nothing can look more obscure than it is. This crucial, clear sentence comes from Thomas Sheehan's alternative English translation of the 1929 text and seems to set Heidegger reading on a new path. "Das Wesen des Seins" is not "the Being of beings" but "the emergence of being" . Wesen, like the past participle gewesen, "been", captures the evanescent form of things, says Parvis Emad, translator into English of other Heidegger texts, and of Heinrich Wiegand Petzet's memoirs of Heidegger. Emad remarks that Wesen "indicates a special way (which varies from case to case) for something to be - 'to be' understood in the sense of enduring, whiling, abiding, issuing forth , and emerging". Wesen is also the standard German translation of "any being" in On the Origin of Species. Wesen is what a being is insofar as it is subject to what Darwin called "the complex and varying conditions of life", including emerging and dying. Note too that Heidegger's word for specific human being, Dasein, seems to come straight from the subtitle of the German translation of On the Origin of Species, "der Kampf ums Dasein" rendering "the struggle for life". Asking how is it that beings emerge from , or are somehow assisted by, the Nothing, and equipped with his notions of Wesen and Dasein, Heidegger goes beyond evolutionary explanation to ask about how things came to be. In John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson's admirable translation of Being and Time, Ursprung is " source", and "primordial" used for the adjective urspriinglich. Ursprung, with " leap" at its heart, could also be rendered "origin". Heidegger sometimes also speaks of Herkunft for where things come from. But what consistently interests him is self-generating movement within, "Being which rises up and grows out of itself, the Physis". This last phrase is from his The

ences" had already achieved. This, he said, was the difference between ontology, his approach, and ontics. "Ontological inquiry . .. is more primordial [urspriinglichJ as over against the ontical inquiry of the positive sciences ... " . Ontics was concerned with entities and facts about them, whereas ontology requires that we first come to an understanding of "what we really mean by this expression ' Being"'. More than twenty years after Being and Time , and despite a neat formulation of the ontic/ontological distinction in the 1929 lecture "What is Metaphysics?", Heidegger retained the feeling that it had been poorly understood. How else could he explain it, now, to a growing international and non-academic audience? One possibility was to imagine a genealogical tree, as Descartes had once done for philosophy and Darwin had roughed out to picture his new biology. Heidegger's "Existence and Being" in 1949 accordingly opened with a quote from Descartes. "Thus the whole of philosophy is like a tree: the roots are metaphysics, the trunk is physics and the branches. are all the other sciences." But then Heidegger extended the tree with a new question of his own, namely: "In what soil do the roots of the tree of philosophy have their hold? What element, concealed in the ground, enters and lives in the roots ... what is metaphysics ... at bottom?" (my emphases). The genealogical tree served Descartes, it served Darwin, as most recently it had served Haeckel, whose Tree of Man (1874) was famous. Now the evolutionary tree as a picture of philosophy, including his own new level of it, also served Heidegger. Haeckel's tree of life had no roots. Even the lowest form of existence was on the surface. Haeckel' s, like Darwin's, was an ontic tree, naming observed entities and giving their relations, from the simplest to the most evolved. Descartes ' s tree of knowledge by contrast had roots. It showed all the sciences as rooted in metaphysics. Yet that was Heidegger's problem, three centuries on -

"Tiger" by Franz Marc (1880-1916) German language, Heidegger was persuaded to look for moments of "originary saying" which set truth in motion. Sprung from the meaning of the ordinary verb "to say", sagen, the noun Sage moved towards truth handed down as a saga, the wisdom of a tribe or people conscious of its roots. Before and during the war, Heidegger focused repeatedly on beginnings and on "the beginliness of the beginning" . Scrutinizing the German language for fossilized clues to non-surviving meanings that would shed light on emergence, he suggested that we are "thrown" into the world, an idea found in the word

Entstehung der Arten. The second , betterqualified German translator of Darwin, Julius Victor Carus, wrote to Darwin on June 3, 1869, suggesting they would do well to substitute Ursprung for Bronn's Entstehung. Both finally rejected a change because it would lead readers to expect a new book (Ursprung was subsequently used by a different hand to translate The Descent of Man in 1874, though there it was less accurate and this book was later renamed Die Abstammung des Menschen). Ursprung featured in many popular titles in the age fascinated by evolution, when Heidegger was a schoolboy. Ernst Haeckel ,

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COMMENTARY that in his view no philosopher could justify those roots. No classical Western philosopher could say what metaphysics itself was standing on or rooted in. Hence his own search for "the concealed element that supports and nourishes the tree". Heidegger wanted ontology to be philosophy's unique modern moment, in which it acknowledged the theory of evolution but worked with the Nothing, and with the embedded power of the German language, to explain the emergence of beings. The Darwinian element in pre-war Heidegger can be seen most clearly in The Origin of the Work of Art in repeated mentions of the irrelevance of the old belief in a Creator, and can be witnessed most intriguingly as applied to a fresh understanding of art. If evolution changes our view of how the world was made, so, Heidegger suggests, it should change our view of how the work of art originates. The work is not, primarily, an object made by the artist, but something that comes into being because art is; because, as it were, Art "arts" as Being is and the Nothing " noths". Art is a primal force which, just like the Nothing, does not materially exist, but acts to make Being, in this case the being of the work of art, possible. The link between Darwin and art was freshly explored last year, the I 50th anniversary of The Origin of Species, in for example the exhibition Endless Forms: Charles Darwin, Natural Science and the visual arts at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge (reviewed in the TLS, July 17, 2009). Much of Darwin's influence on Victorian painting was literal, generating themes like the great age of the earth, the struggle for existence, and the evolution of man from an apelike ancestor. But his impact on the French Impressionists, and on the late nineteenth-century German painters Max Klinger and Arnold Bocklin, evidently went deeper. (Another show last year, this time in Frankfurt, Darwin, Art and the Search for Origins, made pioneering connections between Darwin and Max Ernst, progenitor of Dada and Surrealism, and Darwin and the Austrians Gustav Klimt and Alfred Kubin - much of the influence mediated through Haeckel.) Perhaps the deepest, certainly longest-running Darwinian infl uence on French and German art, in the main, was Primitivism. As Robert Goldwater made clear in Primitivism in Modern Art (1986), evolutionary theory generated both the subject matter of painting to come - from rocks in Monet and Cezanne to Gauguin's "Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?" - and fired the courage of painters to abandon classical procedures. Richard Kendall, writing on Impressionism in the catalogue to Endless Forms, noted that "the abandonment of time-honoured modes of painting and revered suhject matter seemed to go hand in hand with the challenge to the structure of knowledge itself'. If, in painting, "The whole achievement of classical and Renaissance Art was called into question" by, for example, Gauguin's stylized "Green Christ" (as Ernst Gombrich put it in The Preference for the Primitive, 2002) pari passu that was true of Heidegger in the sphere of knowledge. His "deconstruction" of metaphysics attempted to undo the whole course of Western philosophy since the Greeks, as he reopened basic questions using roughshod revivals of earlier terms and

created an account of Being which seemed as primitive and unintelligible and fascinating as that Being itself. With his thrownness and being-here he called the whole humanist history of man into question. But, lonely as he was in philosophy, we can see now that he was remarkably part of what was happening in the European art world, as it broke with the traditions of classical representation in the first decades of the twentieth century. What was happening to the place of "art" and "mankind" in Western culture Heidegger himself addressed in The Origin of the Work of Art, and there were two driving ideas behind that lecture. One suggested that works of art, defined as the truth-at-work-in-thework, cast a special light on Being. It followed from this that art, and beauty, and the truth of the work, should be considered in a sphere other than traditional aesthetics. After Darwin, who showed that the mind and the moral sense had also evolved and did not come divinely equipped with a sense of beauty, truth and goodness, both the moral worth of high art and the category of beauty were radically disrupted. Darwin showed that "every form and colour that man chose to find beautiful, from the spirals of a shell to the blooms of an insect-pollinated flower, were the effects of 'secondary laws' ... related to the dire struggle for existence" (from the catalogue to Endless Forms). And so Heidegger could say aesthetics was another set of beliefs left with no ground to stand on. Beauty did not relate to an impulse of delight the Creator wished to share with mankind. Nor did it have, for Darwin at least, a "higher" meaning. Heidegger gave art a meaning, to allow a glimpse of Being, but he showed a wilful lack of interest in art' s human creators. Look again at what Darwin was accused of from the side of the humanities: we can see how closely it matches the negative view of Heidegger that prevailed in many circles to the end of the twentieth century. "The subversive tendency ... challenged the whole basis of traditional thinking about the beauty of the creation" (also from the catalogue to Endless Forms). Evolutionary theory, which gave beauty a subordinate use in the struggle to sustain emergence, removed the moral privilege of the work of art, and the moral and social status of those who claimed it as the vehicle for universal truths. The impact of Darwin's undoing of classical aesthetics was democratic and particuliarizing and localizing, and he was rightly accused of undoing high culture; as Heidegger seems to do. For above all the approach to the work of art in Heidegger's Origin is from the bottom up. What is the difference between a sack of potatoes and an old painting stored in a basement, and between a painting and a hat or a shotgun hanging on the wall?, he asks. Around the "'Werk" component of the " Kunst-

werk", Heidegger paid tribute to an order of activity many more people could approach with first-hand knowledge than could approach high art, namely, craft. The 1935-6 lecture embedded art in a world of busy making at every level; a world of hammers striking and stones grinding and the feet of men and women and horses ploughing the furrow. It used the breakdown of classical aesthetics to express a preference for the metier of Heidegger's father, a master cooper, and the peasant world to which the erudite son always wanted to return, with

his insistence on being surrounded by a "workshop" and not a library. One of the books at Heidegger's elbow when he was working on the final version of The Origin of the Work of Art was Hippolyte Taine' s Philosophie de l 'art (1865). Heidegger asked his wife to send up the Taine volume from his library in Freiburg in August 1936. The choice of text was apropos, for, as Taine's American translator John Durand put it in 1867, "If Darwin was the Newton of his days ... Taine hoped to be the Newton of culture". In a muchquoted passage, Taine (who featured strongly in the Frankfurt exhibition) proposed treating art like botany: The modern method which 1 strive to pursue

and which is beginning to be introduced in all the moral sciences, consists in considering human productions, and works of art, as facts and productions of which it is essential to mark the characteristics and seek the causes; and

nothing beyond this .... As for the aesthetic science ... [she] is like botany, in which the laurel, the pine, and the birch, are of equal interest; it is a kind of botanical method,

applied not to plants, but to the works of man. Taine led attention away from the individual artist towards impersonal forces, believing that shifting historical , geographical and cultural conditions caused certain productions of the human mind, "like those of animated nature", to emerge, while others were concealed. So one imagines Taine's evolutionary aesthetics crystallized in Heidegger's mind. Together with Heidegger's own social preoccupations, they presented the opportunity of embedding the humanities in a socially much broader, and more material, world than hitherto, and strongly helped to determine the character of Western art for a century to come. et Darwin and Taine left a deficit which drove the Romantic in Heidegger back to the metaphysics of German nature philosophy, with its roots in Goethe and Spinoza. Hence his theory, in The Origin, that the work of art was distinct from other made objects because it could give a glimpse of Being, normally concealed. Heidegger rejected the Darwinian naturalistic view of humanity. Almost as if it were a painting, The Origin unveiled a new mythological picture of a constant, normally concealed, struggle for life. Earth, conceived of as a powerful reclaimer of all the forms of life that emerged from its fold, was pitched against World, or the forms of temporal existence. That this was not the Darwinian struggle was clear from Heidegger's choice of words. This was not a "Kampf' but an ontological quarrel, ein Streit, which meant that it could be redeemed in language. Several extraordinary passages in The Origin thus show Heidegger in competition with Darwin, delivering his own account of nature and its constant variations. The quarrel at the heart of things is neither a struggle for survival, pace Darwin, nor a dialectical stage in the history of progress, pace Hegel. It is about the opening up and shutting down of consistently renewed life, in all its plethora of forms, on the planet; about constant death and re-emergence. The quarrel between Earth and World is Heidegger's picture of "the jungle". It is the equivalent of those remote, luxuriant, exotic

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15 places which Darwin came across on the Beagle voyage and described as "wild", "savage", "peculiar" and "magnificent". It stands comparison with the jungles painted by Douanier Rousseau and, still more aptly , by the early German Expressionist Franz Marc. Yet Heidegger's place of emergence cannot be travelled to on a ship. To get there we need to be afflicted by certain moods such as boredom and angst. How Heidegger developed a philosophical interest in moods is curious. While reviewing a book by Karl Jaspers, The Psychology of Worldviews (1919), and on receiving from Jaspers a supplementary small volume on the depressive origins of the creativity of Strindberg and Van Gogh , Heidegger leapt from his desk to caution against treating extreme moods as exceptional. Never think in terms of the normal, he insisted, for there was only Being, to which all kinds of beings (including moods and works of art) belonged. And so one sees also the parallel between Part I, Chapter V, of Being and Time, on moods, and the dreams, the agitation, and the abnormally heightened vision which produced Van Gogh's late work and through Van Gogh inspired the fierce coloration of German Expressionism, work that was being produced in Germany and Austria as the young Heidegger was laying down his plans for a career. This too was the new primitivism, scraping away at the rock face of the human psyche: Darwin, Freud, Heidegger and twentieth-century painting, especially German painting, expressed it. Darwin's impact on the early twentieth century made itself felt also in the matter of race. To some ears , his theory seemed to suggest that some races were more "backward" than others; and it helped those who were dismayed by the anarchic power of his other findings to cling to the superiority of the civilized West. Against this background it is worth looking at what Heidegger said about Germany and its people. Since he defined the ontological quarrel, which could be exemplified in the fitness to endure of a particular culture, as something to be constantly re-engaged (bestritten) in language, the brunt of the task fell on the native language and its writers and speakers to keep the culture alive. "To speak out with the design of a world in mind is instantly to gainsay the undifferentiated randomness into which being withdraws and dissolves" , Heidegger told listeners in Freiburg and Frankfurt and Zurich. This "speaking out with the design of a world in mind" is the role of all artistic saying and it takes us back to the Origin' s closing meditation on Sage and sagen, where speaking becomes elided with saying, and saying with those national sagas which, in occupying the same ground as art, tell of the life of peoples and their gods. Tn such "originary" saying a people, ein Volk, comes into its historical own. But the word Volk here should not be read as automatically politically incriminating, even if written in 1936, even if written by Heidegger. In the sometimes awkward standard translation of The Origin of the Work of Art by Albert Hofstadter, crucial poetic moments are sacrificed to the need to provide transparent terms, so no wonder the Darwinian echoes have not been heard. Perhaps it is time to start rereading Heidegger through expressly post-Darwinian eyes.

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ob the electrician was standing at the entrance to my local , smoking outside. The pub is located on the beach road and Bob was staring intensely in the direction of the pier. "Bloody EDF", he mumbled, implying, no doubt, the French origin of this corporation which supplies electricity to the residents of Deal in Kent. I followed his stare and saw how at a distance, across the grey immensity of the roaring winter sea, the lights on the pier flickered chaotically. Visibility was poor because of the clouds of snowflakes , dancing madly in the dusk. It is usually five minutes' walk from the pier to my house; but in these weather conditions it looked as if the lights were on the other side of the Channel. Inside the pub, news of the faulty lights was received with resignation - as part of the worldwide weather conspiracy to cut Deal off from the rest of the universe. A trip to Deal from London during the recent harsh weather involved changing trains a few times, standing on frozen platforms with no waiting room open, and coping with the rigmarole of finding out whether you are in the right part ofthe train. They divide at Ashford, and if you are not in the four front carriages you might end up in Broadstairs, looking at Dickens's Bleak House, instead of in Deal. On the wall at the entrance to the pier, I found an advertisement which informed me that the flickering-lights phenomenon was the responsibility of Katie Paterson, a conceptual artist who conspired, seemingly in cahoots with that electricity company and the weather conditions, to create this effect. It was sponsored by Vauxhall Motors - adding an additional ironical twist to the project in this winter of disconnectedness, of impassable motorways, rail-service delays and power outages. Katie had installed on the pier a little satellite dish ("just like a big bit of chicken wire", she

should close down the installation , regardless of where the signals are coming from. It is a well-known fact, she said, that flashing lights can affect certain people badly, especially in a state of inebriation, even trigger an epileptic fit and lead to severe bodily harm. None of us could comprehend, though, how these worldwide electromagnetic disturbances could be detected by a little antenna in Deal, or how the signals are directed by satellite to find their way across the skies to our pier. It was as mysterious as the question of how David manages to get home each night, walking, drunk as he usually is, on his crutch (because of the injured knee). David was very proud of his crutch, which was given to him gratis in the local hospital: it looked like a professional accessory to his disability and acted as a certificate which allowed him to sit in the pub as long as he liked. But David said that he can always find his way home, regardless of the state of his leg or of his inebriation, as a sailor can always find his way in the sea guided by the stars. David knows what he's talking about, because he spent ten years in the merchant navy before becoming a builder. When I confessed that I would never be able to navigate a ship by the stars, he reassured me that nothing is simpler and when push comes to shove one doesn't need the stars or even a compass for that matter. Take a strip offoil (say, from a chocolate bar or tobacco wrapping) and put it into a bowl of water: after a few moments of vacillation, the foil will always position itself indicating north. If, that is, your vision is not impaired by flickering lights. David and the nurse were not alone in their objections to Katie Paterson 's installation.

The pier is the most desirable place for fishing and the local anglers say that the flickering lights reflected in the water disturb not only the fishermen but the fish, too. They would have become even more paranoid, I presume, if they had known about Katie's previous projects, such as her experiment with Beethoven's "Moonlight" Sonata. She transposed it into Morse code and sent the signals to the moon. Bounced off the moon 's surface, the signals were reflected back to Earth and played as notes on a digital piano. I wondered how the fish would have reacted to the tune and what Lenin would have said listening to this version of Beethoven. Lenin is known to have said that when you're listening to the "Moonlight" Sonata, you become full of desire to embrace and caress human beings, when in fact what people need in the first place is a good hiding, in order to force them into taking part in the revolution. Hearing my reference to Lenin and noting my foreign accent, David asked whether I was Russian. Because he was Russian too, he said, on his mother' s side. His father was an English sailor on the fleet that had provided allied help and delivered war supplies to the Soviet Union via the port of Murmansk. There, David's father met his Russian lover, who died giving birth to David. The fact that David and I turned out to be compatriots was a revelation to everyone in the pub. Excited by the unexpected connection, David stood up to shake my hand and accidentally stepped on his crutch lying on the floor. It cracked under the weight of his body: David is not a butterfly. Now he couldn' t walk home on his feet. He sat back into his chair. He had time for another drink before the taxi arrived. In the silence we heard snowflakes falling like frozen butterflies outside, and the lights flickering on the pier.

ers, but yet in some kind, I could not help thinking, a charlatan. Most gurus, of course, have this effect upon Westerners of a certain age, and what little I knew of Gandhi's philosophical techniques I did not much admire. Those fasts to the death that never killed him! Those embarrassing displays of sanctimony ("I cannot free myself from that subtlest of temptations, the desire to serve")! Bred as I was to admiration of the soldierly virtues, I sympathized instinctively with all the supposedly straightforward Britons who, in the course of their imperial duties, had found themselves ensnarled in Gandhi's tortuous pretensions. The bewildered generals and puzzled magistrates were Us, I used to think. Mahatma Gandhi was most distinctly Them. Until one day, wandering in India in the early stages of research for a trilogy I was writing about the British Empire, I discovered quite by chance that Gandhi was born, like me, on October 2. He was a Libran too, his element Air, his Ruler Venus, his lucky number 6, his sign the Heavenly Balance. In the India of the 1960s, mind you, Gandhi was not difficult to ignore. His notions of political and social simplicity, home-spun cloth and cottage industries,

had seemed absurd to the British imperialists of the 1930s, and appeared hardly less ridiculous to the indigenous rulers of India thirty years later. Steel mills, power stations, industrial exhibitions, tanks-these were the chosen images of Indian progress now, and disciples of the Mahatma were hard to find among the New Delhi policymakers. The Gandhian ethos seemed to have retreated into the crankiness from which, at least in British eyes, it had originally emerged. I discovered my affinity with Gandhi in a rather fusty setting. There is in Delhi , not far from the Ghat where Gandhi's ashes lie, a small museum and library dedicated to his memory. It is rather awkward to get to, as I remember it, being somewhere in that amorphous strip of No Man's Land which still to this day separates, if only figuratively, the New Delhi of the British imperialists from the Old Delhi of the Moghuls. I had walked there from my hotel and arrived a little jaded to find the place almost deserted. There were no tourists, no lines of awe-struck school-children, only a few of those slightly moustachio'd Indian youths, generally in couples, who are to be found inspecting with an anxious intensity any institution of the republic, whatever its nature, slowly mouthing the captions of exhibition cases, or minutely examining distribution diagrams in zoos.

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ZINOVY ZINIK said) that would receive electrical signals from the lightning strikes and electromagnetic storms everywhere from the North Pole to North Africa. It demonstrates that everything in the world is connected, illustrating again the proverbial butterfly effect - i.e., that a butterfly flapping its wings in Washington, DC, can result in an earthquake in Tehran. Or flickering lights in Deal. I tried to meet up with Katie, but she was commuting between her native Glasgow, her residence in Berlin and her studio in London, while I was stuck in Deal under the snowstorms for the whole week. So I talked to her by calling her mobile phone which was probably operated by the same satellite that was sending signals to the twenty electric bulbs on the pier. Katie said that the mobile's crackling line resembled the sound of another mobile phone she's using. That one is connected to a microphone installed on a glacier near Iceland. You dial the number and hear the sound of iceberg melting - reminding us of the melting budget of Iceland, bankrupted in the age of global warming. We wished the snow in Deal would melt as speedily. By the time I revealed the real cause of the trouble with the lights on the pier to those inside the pub, the first victims of the project had been identified. David the builder said he had been out of work for days now, having injured his knee when he stumbled on an icy ladder. The accident happened not because he was drunk, but because he was hypnotized by the flickering lights. That was confirmed by a nurse who happened to be sitting next to David at the bar. In her opinion, the council

IN NEXT WEEK'S

TLS Timothy Williamson Reasons for red Michael Silk W. B. Yeats at Colonus Robert Orledge Debussy's Melisandes Ritchie Robertson Driven mad by Bernhard

TLS February 3, 1978

Jan Morris on Gandhi We look back to an article by fan Morris entitled "In the steps of the Mahatma". To see it in full, go to www.the-tls.co.uk y pursuit of Mahatma Gandhi really began only when I discovered that we shared a birthday. He was, after all , born fifty-seven years before me and I can only dimly remember, as I remember the Abdication and the hurning of the Crystal Palace, the commotion caused by his visit to Britain in 1931 , when he delighted ordinary people with his puckish informality, dismayed a tea-party of Oxford dons by his gadfly evasions, and slightly surprised King George V by arriving at Buckingham Palace wearing only a loin-cloth and sandals (it hardly mattered, the Mahatma said, the King had enough on for both of them). Like many Britons, too, I had found him in my not very well-informed fancy more irritating than inspiring. A saint of course, a great patriot, one of the world's prime mov-

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17

Modernist disagreements about the purposes of art

Useful or beautiful? KEITH MILLER VAN DOESBURG AND THE INTERNATIONAL AVANT-GARDE Constructing a new world

Tate Modern

Gladys Fabre and Doris Wintgens Hotte, editors VAN DOESBURG AND THE INTERNATIONAL AVANT-GARDE Constructing a new world

264pp. Tate Publishing. Paperback, £24.99. 978 I 85437872 9

ithin the loose and sometimes argumentative tribe of avantgardists who called them se Ives, or who have been called by others, "Constructivists" - that is, artists whose work was more or less abstract in content, restricted in means and jagged or geometrical in effect - are several wide splays of opinion. Chiefly at issue was a question which had exercised the philosophical flank of the artistic community through much of the nineteenth century: should art be useful or beautiful? Or rather, could it be both? The artist, designer and critic Theo van Doesburg believed it could. A decade younger than the better-known Piet Mondrian, he championed his countryman ' s painting and publicized his ideas through a Stakhanovite lecturing schedule and an influential journal, De Stijl, as well as strongly echoing it in his own art. Van Doesburg steered a judicious middle way between the manically engage approach of artists such as Tatlin and Moholy-Nagy and the art-for-art's-sake stance assumed by Mondrian and other artists in De Stijl's orbit. It is the doggedness and suppleness with which he maintained this course, as much as the estimable quality and remarkable diversity of van Doesburg' s output, which makes him a wise choice of flagship for what is effectively a group show at Tate Modern. Van Doesburg and the International A vant-Carde is both a beautiful and a useful exhibition, though maybe only rarely both at once. Van Doesburg's first artistic creation was himself. Having survived the First World War, he proclaimed himself reborn, and discarded his given name, Christian Emi l Marie Ktipper, in favour of his stepfather's rather more patrician one. During his editorship of De Stijl (which lasted a decade or so from 1917), he also wrote under the names Aldo Camini and IK Bonset, to conceal his authorship of writings with, respectively, a futurist and a dadaist bent. But as an artist, typographer and what we might today call an interior designer, he was pretty consistent: once he found his path he stuck to it. Less exclusive than Mondrian in his palette and formal language (the duo disagreed strongly about the permissibility of the diagonal,

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"Counter-Construction, Axonometric, Private House" (1923) by Theo van Doesburg among other things ; Mondrian was banished where the bulk of the animal's torso might from the pages of De Stijl in 1924), his work be. The process implies that abstraction is a is nonetheless broadly simi lar to the older journey away, or a removal of inessential man 's . Grids are infilled with flat rectangles material , from some sort of visual transaction of colour, elegantly but asymmetrically with a definite subject. Yet elsewhere van arranged across the picture surface or cafe Doesburg uses arithmetical series, or patterns wall in question. It is all very resolved, very inferred from pieces of music (like many of clearly conceived and fully realized (though his associates he was very keen on Bach, and on an architectural scale it must all have been we've noted Mondrian 's love of jazz above) to generate pictures. In his writings, and a bit strident). The term Mondrian devised for this sort of notably in Klassiek - Barock - Modern work, "Nieuwe Beelding", cognate with if (1918), he speaks of a harmony between the not quite the same as "New beholding", universal and the particular, between essence implies a looking at the world, a sense of and phenomenon. In his last years he presome kind of reference to nature in art, ferred the term "concrete" to " abstract", and whereas its common English translation, his ultimate attempt to found an artistic group"Neoplasticism" , stresses the autonomous ing went under the name "abstraction-creabeing of the work of art, its independence tion", which suggests two different paths conof any suhject, its disavowal of any docu- verging on the same destination. Around Mondrian and van Doesburg's mentary or allegorical role. Van Doesburg, ever the diplomat, hedges his bets somewhat paintings, and other pieces of "fine" art by on this question. Bart van der Leck, Georges Vantongerloo There is a nice trio of pictures in the exhibi- and other De Stijl regulars, the curators have tion, arising from van Doesburg's contempla- assembled a broad church, or a busy and tion of a cow (a potent emblem of national rowdy square-dance, of European art, design identity in the Netherlands, let's not forget, and typography from between the world and an important motif in Dutch art) . The wars : De Stijl's camp followers in Germany first two, a stylized but recognizably "hand- and Eastern Europe, a dash of dada, the made" pencil drawing and a more rigid paint- more cool-headed and technologically inquising, are both cow-like to some degree. The itive work of Moholy-Nagy and other artists third is a matrix of squares and rectangles on affiliated with the Bauhaus, outside the a white ground, with a single larger square gates of which van Doesburg pitched his

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teepee for a while in the 1920s. There are also several designs for buildings and interiors, and some furniture by Gerrit Rietveld, Marcel Breuer and Ei leen Gray . It is this which may be the most widely recognizable fruit of the De Stijl philosophy. Rietveld 's "Red-Blue" chair, which he devised before coming into contact with the De Stijl circle, but which he simplified and painted in Mondrian' s triad of red, blue and yellow under its influence, has been canonized as a design classic. It exemplifies the utilitarian as well as the utopian aspirations of high modernism (it was an early example of flat-pack furniture). Yet it isn't what you'd call a model offunctionality, and never will be until the day that humanity finally evolves a right-angled backside. A table designed under the same rules is wobbly and weak - and Gerrit Rietveld's sideboard of 1919, as well as being more or less the most hideous thing you will ever see, must have been responsible for many concussed and black-eyed children, and a good few kneecapped adults, in the progressive dining spaces of Europe between the wars. Never entirely useful, and only sometimes beautiful , in other words. In general, though, the exhibition does its best to improve and delight. Putting fragile works on paper next to paintings and sculptures demands lowish light levels, so the colours in some of the pieces don't quite sing out as they shou ld, but it does stress broad continuities as it exposes small differences. There might have been a bit more Russian work on display, and certainly the influence of Kandinsky on several of these artists is too palpable not to have been acknowledged a bit more emphatically. The broader question of political affiliation is, perhaps, soft-pedalled a little, in the good postmodern style, which is what we nowadays often mean by art for art's sake. At any rate, van Doesburg, while certainly leftish (in a Fourierist or even Bloomsburyish way) was in no hurry to mount the barricades. Many of the proclamations to which he put one or other of his names shows a weari ness or a cynicism about politics, a wariness arising from the Soviets ' abandonment of avantgarde principles - and, as a corollary, a sense of disappointment in the reluctance of the working classes to be transformed by his, and his friends' , new beholding.

THE EDWIN MELLE~ PRESS Ecclesiastical Patronage in England Four Political Families, 1770-1801

by Reider Payne 39.95 from publisher only UK 01570 423356 / US 716-754-2788

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18 he stages of opera houses are no strangers to madness. Indeed, from Orlando to Wozzeck and Lucia to Tom Rakewell , delusion and insanity of one kind or another have come to be staples of operatic psychology. Few works, though, can claim to be as thoroughly estranged from reason as Prokofiev's early adaptation of The Gambler, a novella by Dostoevsky about the capricious charms of the roulette table and the hollowed-out society that gathers around it. This is not simply a question of individual characters going mad - although that does happen - but of the world in which they operate being depicted as, in itself, radically unhinged. More importantly, the main device in this representation - beyond an adaptation of the story from which Prokofiev has stripped away all humanizing features - is musical. Employing selfconsciously astringent expressionist idioms, Prokofiev's score is structured as a series of violent headlong descents into the dramatic present which leave the listener gasping for breath, groping for some minimal vantage point to use as a neutral position for reference. Only one is offered, coming in the final act. It depicts with shrill woodwind and piano, quite brilliantly, the metallic rattle and skip of the ball on the slowing wheel, and then the tortuous silence that divides the moment it settles from the number being called. That the single moment of musical rest offered by Prokofiev is also the opera's dramatic climax is the stroke of genius that holds the work together. The audience's world becomes complicit in the madness on stage, the audience hankering after peace with an immodest urgency, like a gambling addict whose sole access to clarity of vision

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Simply insane GUY DAMMANN Sergie Prokofiev THE GAMBLER Royal Opera House

makes the music difficult to interpret, the quicksilver pacing and two-dimensional characterizations make it very difficult to stage. Yet the Royal Opera' s new staging is one of several successful recent British productions of The Gambler, although the work has not been heard in London since David Pountney's staging for English National Opera in 1983. (The Royal Opera have also used Pountney ' s translation.) One reason for this recent surge of interest is obvious: the society pilloried so mercilessly by Prokofiev is, in many respects, no worse than our own. The madness endemic in Dostoevsky's Roulettenberg (based on Wiesbaden in Germany) is institutionalized, just as individuals today are

and emotional equilibrium is the brief moment when events are put completely beyond his control. This is the gambling addict's pathological focus - something that renders the rest of the world colourless, devoid of sympathy - as art. Prokofiev had completed no fewer than six operas before 1915, when his proposal for The Gambler was finally accepted by Albert Coates as part of his effort to rejuvenate the Maryinsky Theatre. Although the Revolution consumed by an economic environment in prevented the production from going ahead which the relation between value, worth and (the premiere was in Brussels in 1929), the work has been stretched beyond breaking score was ready in 1917 after an intense point. If such a factor were enough to period of work during which the composer' s recommend the project to Antonio Pappano mother, hearing the brutal and frenzied and his director, Richard Jones, it cannot by sounds emerging from behind her son's itself guarantee the work' s dramatic success. closed door, began to worry seriously about But Pappano's investment in the score is his mental and musical health. But Prokofiev total - excitingly immediate and yet suffiknew exactly what he was doing. "I have ciently clear-sighted to maximize each of done everything possible", he explained at Prokofiev's minute orchestral effects. And the time, " not to burden the singers with just because it is a difficult score to listen to unnecessary conventions, in order to afford attentively (Prokofiev's early conception of them freedom in the dramatic realization of opera was that the music should be transpartheir parts. 1 am aiming only for simplicity." ent in respect of the action and " not stand out As promised, the score comes unhampered as an independent element"), it doesn't mean by arias and set pieces, presenting over two that The Gambler shouldn't be great fun to hours of unadulterated recitative. If this play - which it clearly was.

The interwar period sets are equally virtuosic . Nicky Gillibrand ' s costumes are fashioned in extraordinary detail, combining sophisticated shades of Erte with contemporary grotesques. The result is a riot of sense and reference for the eye quite equal to Prokofiev' s music. Antony McDonald's artdeco interiors have foreshortened interiors so that the monumental aspects of the hotel , botanic garden and gaming rooms are offset by deceitful distortions of perspective. Jones's direction, too, acutely emphasizes the skin-deep psychology of Prokofiev's characters, carried through with some finely judged acting from Susan Bickley as Babulenka and John Tomlinson as the General. (Tomlinson was also Christian Badea and Pountney's General.) As for the singing: according to Prokofiev, you shouldn't really notice it. But the Italian tenor Roberto Sacca and German soprano Angela Denoke (who is scheduled to appear as Salome later this season) both make the best of the lyrical scraps left for them by the composer. One touch that deserves mention is Jones's addition of an unscripted (silent) acting role for a sunken-eyed caretaker. Attention rests on him for one passing moment, as Alexey mocks the Germans (yes, he goose-steps) for their absurd notion that modest wealth and comfort should be earned by hard work. The caretaker haunts the stage almost for the entire duration of the opera, working when he can , watching when he can ' t. Only once does he come into contact with the other world, when the General flings him against a wall as he marches back to the casino; the caretaker crumples to the floor before returning to his sweeping. The actor who plays him is, appropriately, uncredited.

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

ranz Liszt was an ardent admirer of Franz Schubert, but he was sharply critical of the latter's Divertissement a l'hongroise, the most substantial composition to appear in the "Hungarian style" before Liszt's Magyar dallok and Magyar rapsz6di6k. According to Liszt, Schubert had betrayed the Hungarian (in fact Roma) Gypsies by "trimming up" their music "according to our rules and methods", eschewing discord, modulatory freedom and episodic structures in favour of musical convention. Liszt' s Hungarian Rhapsodies, by contrast, embodied his identification with the charismatic yet marginalized Roma by embracing their distinctive sound world. By writing virtuoso piano pieces that emulated sounds such as the cimbalom in dances like the lassan and friska , Liszt created a body of music instantly recognizable as "Hungarian" . For Ralph P. Locke, these Hungarian Rhapsodies are prominent examples of "musical exoticism", or the portrayal of distant peoples and places in Western art music. Other familiar exotic works include Mozart' s Rondo alla Turca, Puccini's Madama Butteifly, and Bizet's Carmen, each of which employs specific musical means to conjure up images of Turkey, Japan and Spain, respectively. Locke' s book is a comprehensive classification of the various melodic, harmonic, rhythmic and structural techniques employed by Western composers to depict particular peoples and regions. Locke's explorations of the "exoticizing" power of melismas, static harmonies and

P

Noble savage notes sions of works such as Schubert's song "Du liebst mich nicht" demonstrate that the ability of (wholly or partially) non-exotic music to Ralph P. Locke conjure up images of distant places and ethnic MUSICAL EXOTICISM groups is by no means limited to dramatic genImages and reflections res. For Locke, audiences typically respond to 440pp. Cambridge University Press. £55. more than compositional style alone, welding 9780521 877930 frequently non-exotic aural material with a range of exotic suggestions, hints and implicarepeated rhythmic patterns are insightful and tions to create a context-dependent version of original, but his monograph is more than a aesthetic truth. As Locke succinctly remarks, piece of formal analysis. He also introduces "Notes don't exhaust the matter". and develops a relational approach to underThe author gives most of this subtle and standing musical exoticism , which he calls powerful account of musical understanding "All the Music in Full Context" . The phrase with reference to works from the Classical refers to the ability of musical works to evoke and (late) Romantic periods, but matters exotic lands without necessarily employing grow more complicated when he turns his attention to more recent composers. This is exotic compositional techniques. This possibility emerges most obviously in due in part to the widespread rejection by operas, where plot, dialogue and stage sets fin-de-siecLe composers of what Locke calls combine to suggest distance and difference in "overt exoticism" - the deliberate portrayal spite of frequently non-exotic music. So, of remote cultures - in favour of " submerged stylistically "Western" works, such as exoticism", or the musical incorporation of Rameau ' s Les Indes galantes and Hande!'s elements of exotic style or musical philosBelshazzar, may still be read as exotic (and ophy in apparently non-exotic works. exoticizing) on the grounds of their plot Composers such as Debussy and Ravel structures, which feature stereotypes of noble frequently drew on "exotic" musical characsavages and Oriental despotism. Locke demon- teristics such as arabesque-like melodic strates, for instance, how Handel successfully figures and octatonic scales to enrich nonportrays Belshazzar as a sottish despot using exotic musical works (Prelude al'apres-midi musical means indistinguishable from those d'unfaune, for instance) rather than to evoke employed in his non-exotic works. And discus- distant lands. More recently, composers from

CON OR FARRINGTON

TLS FEBRUARY 26 2010

Olivier Messiaen to Kevin Volans have written works that can be interpreted as examples of submerged exoticism, or, to use a more neutral term from Locke' s inventive lexicon, "transcultural composing". As Volans says of his Hunting: Gathering (I987), "Although the title and a lot of the music quoted in the piece are modelled on African music, it's not an African piece at all". Yet if exoticism is context-dependent, then surely the composer can never fully control the "exotical quotient" in any specific performance? A piece such as Hunting: Gathering, with a "primitivist" title and material derived from African music, can hardly avoid generating some kind of exotic aura. From this point of view, Locke can be understood as emphasizing the contextual nature of artistic truth while gently pricking the bubbles of composers unwarrantedly assured of their artistic omnipotence. Musical Exoticism is not just a fine instance of contemporary musicology but also a timely intervention in debates about the ethical and didactic role of the arts in society. If1 have a criticism, it is that Locke's definition of exoticism is given in purely geographical terms. An analysis of musical depictions of fantastic or spiritual realms could be just as rewarding, musicologically, as discussions of Madama Butterfly or Scheherazade. (Programmatic works such as Liszt's Apres une Lecture de Dante: Fantasia quasi Sonata come to mind.) And what could be more exotic, from a linguistic point of view, than the language of music itself?

19

Mysteries at the heart of Stalin's empire

A bridge to the past GREGOR Y FREIDIN Alexander Terekhov KAMENNYI MOST Roman

832pp. Moscow: Ast/Astrel. 9785 17058261 7 "Never in my life have I taken first place", muses the narrator of Kamennyi most (The Stone Bridge), as he lines up his toy soldiers on a flea market stall in Moscow on a quiet autumn Sunday in 1998. Such is the opening of Alexander Terekhov's 832-page novel, last year's most talked-about work of fiction in Russia which took second prize in the Big Book awards. A graduate of the Journalism Faculty of the Moscow University (like many of the leading literary figures of his generation), Terekhov, who was born in 1966, began his career as an essayist and journalist. He published his first novel, Krysoboi, in 1995 (it came out in English as The Rat Killer in 2008). Kamennyi most is his second, and so far it exists only in Russian. Greeted with mixed and sometimes muddIed reviews but always acknowledged as compelling, Kamennyi most takes its title from Moscow ' s Bolshoy Kamennyi most, or Great Stone Bridge, the site of the murder mystery at the centre of the novel. The bridge's single span connects the two banks of the Moscow River in the heart of the capital. On one bank stands the residential apartment complex for high Soviet officials a brooding Constructivist giant of the 1930s, echoing the Lenin Mausoleum which was the setting for Yuri Trifonov's novel The House on the Embankment (1976). The other bank is dominated by the Kremlin, a medieval fortress in Gothic style, the seat of the "Emperor" , as Terekhov 's narrator calls Joseph Stalin. Sometime in the 1990s, while working as a reporter on Russia's investigative tabloid Sovershenno sekretno (Top Secret), Terekhov came across the "Case of the Wolf Cubs", as the murder-suicide of two teenagers on the Great Stone Bridge on June 3, 1943, came to be known. At the centre of the case was the fifteen-year-old only son of Stalin's Minister of Aviation , Yolodya Shakhurin, who shot and killed Nina Umansky, the fifteen-year-old only daughter of a Soviet diplomat who had just been appointed ambassador to Mexico. Nina had been due to accompany her father to his new post the following day. Yolodya, who was in love with her, asked her to stay. When she refused, he shot her and then turned the gun on himself. The weapon belonged to a friend who was with them on the bridge Yano Mikoyan, the son of Anastas Mikoyan, one of Stalin's closest comrades-in-arms and a member of the wartime Supreme Military Council.

A view of the Kremlin with the Bolshoy Kamennyi bridge The investigation quickly took another turn on the discovery of Yolodya's diary, which contained details of a Nazi-inspired secret society at the elite school the three teenagers attended. "The Fourth Empire", named by analogy with the Third Reich and the ancient Muscovite political doctrine of Moscow as the Third Rome, had a membership of half-a-dozen boys in their early teens. All , including two of Mikoyan's sons, were from prominent families; they gave themselves Nazi titles and fantasized about seizing power from their fathers once the war came to an end. "Wolf cubs", Stalin is said to have remarked on hearing the report, "they must be punished." They were: after six months of interrogation in the Lubyanka Prison and a signed confession, all were sentenced to a year in exile. Their parents, however, remained untouched by the scandal. Griefstricken, Konstantin U mansky left with his distraught wife the day after their daughter's death to take up his new post in Mexico, where he was killed in a plane crash in 1945.

the one who pulled the trigger and killed both Yolodya and Nina? Was Umansky's plane crash an accident? Or was it, rather, a carefully planned assassination carried out by the Americans who suspected him of being a conduit for a network of Soviet nuclear spies? Or was it perhaps a "special operation" carried out by the agents of the Emperor as a prelude to the post-war purge of prominent Soviet Jews? These are some of the questions that propel the narrative of Kamennyi most, where they are underpinned by the texts of official documents and a parade of historical figures , mostly dead but some still alive, strutting about under their real names. And yet, the novel itself is decidedly about something else. Instead of the standard Russian problems, What is to be done? Who is to blame?, Terekhov's novel raises postmodern (or post-Soviet) questions: Who am I? What is history? A mixture of cold-case detective novel, fictionalized documentary and historical investigation without footnotes, Kamennyi most consists largely of a first-person mono-

Mikoyan continued as a leading government

logue, a stream of consciousness inside the

figure until 1965. Alexander Shakhurin remained in his post for the rest of the war, but was arrested in 1946 and convicted on an unrelated charge - ruining the Soviet aviation industry. Beria released him soon after Stalin's death, and he resumed government service until his retirement in 1959. Both Umansky and Shakhurin died childless. Such are the essentials of the story, based on the recollections of contemporaries and participants and on the case dossier of the NKYD. But was this really what happened? What if Yano Mikoyan was a "third man" -

head of a hard-boiled sleuth, a man of an age with Terekhov, who is bent on pinning down his historical actors, with regular breaks for cold brutal sex with a succession of women. Although there are transcripts of interviews with elderly witnesses and historical documents cited in part or in full, the real world of the novel unfolds inside the narrator's head. He is a trained historian, once spotted at the Higher School of the KGB , a deprogrammer of victims of religious sects, capable of restoring their obliterated memories, a secret consultant to the Moscow

TLS FEBRUARY 26 2010

Patriarchy, and, as the novel opens, an obsessive collector and seller of Soviet toy soldiers. He is so mesmerized by the past that it takes just a conversation and a couple of old photographs to set him off on a seven-yearlong investigation to find out what really happened on the Great Stone Bridge that afternoon in June 1943. His quest introduces the reader to some colourful survivors and ghosts of the past: wives, lovers, major and minor Stalin officials. Among them are the Litvinovs Stalin 's diplomat-in-chief Maxim Litvinov, his English wife Ivy, and their children, especially Tatyana Litvinov, who followed her mother back to England in 1976 and who now lives in Brighton. They reappear throughout the novel and are portrayed with uncharacteristic warmth and delicacy. Konstantin Umansky, the murdered girl's father , was a protege of Maxim Litvinov, who was Soviet ambassador to the US from 1941 to 1943. Known for his pro-Western leanings, Litvinov was perhaps the only old Bolshevik of his stature to have survived the purges. He was also, we find out, the lover of Umansky's old flame, Anastasia Petrova, who accompanied Litvinov to the US as the ambassador's secretary. In John Carswell's biography of Ivy (The Exile: A Life of Ivy Litvinov), Petrova is mentioned only as "P", but thanks to Terekhov's investigations we now know a good deal about her, her provincial origins, her lovers, children and her deep cover as an informer for the NKYD. Litvinov clearly appeals to Terekhov because of his patriotism and his integrity, and the author is also fascinated by the family which, unlike the other families of high Soviet officials examined here, kept clear of the corruption and rot. He cites Tatyana Litvinov ' s letter to Stalin of 1951 in which she pleads with "Iosif Yissarionovich" to disregard her father's modest deathbed request to leave the Moscow apartment to his surviving family. Terekhov 's transcripts of interviews with her - obtained by a fictional agent that the novel's narrator sends to Brighton form some of the sturdiest threads woven into the fabric of the novel. Whatever the provenance of these transcripts, they sound authentic and the stories they contain, known hitherto only within a small circle, ring true. Tatyana Litvinov's openness, her erudition

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20

FICTION

and her feel for the times account for much of the freshness and humanity of Terekhov ' s historical reconstruction. The informants furnish the novel with a human bridge to the past, but it is the Great Stone Bridge itself which emerges as the master allegory. A material correlative of a mental construct, it connects post-Communist Russia and its citizens, both uncertain of their identity, with the Soviet Empire at the height of its glory, "after the Battle of Stalingrad and before the Battle of Kursk", as we are reminded early on. Terekhov sees the bridge as a hyphen linking power to meaning, a visual guide for Stalin's strong men in the House of the Embankment, to train their moral line of sight on the Emperor in his fortress across the river. Whatever was wrong with the Stalinist state - and Terekhov does not pine for the good old days - it was saturated with a sense of mission, especially during the Second World War when Soviet society was filled with what Emile Durkheim called effervescence and Max Weber theorized as charisma. This is what both the novel 's protagonist and its author, drowning in anomie, find lacking in post-Communist Russia. Terekhov's narrator seeks the secret of this effervescence in the fantastic confessions of the former revolutionaries at the show trials of the 1930s. Aware of Nikolai Bukharin's letters written to Stalin from jail, he imagines these "men of iron" awaiting the warden's steps in order to obey

whatever is asked of them so that they could preserve their connection to the Absolute Power, which gave them the sense of ... what?

[think - immortality. Only a misunderstanding would make one say that they had lived as captive slaves. They lived a life of meaning -

the meaning defined by him [the Emperor]. To abandon this meaning was worse than dying it was to become cosmic dust, an Absolute Non-Being, and the empire had given them a

clear understanding of what the Absolute means.

Some might view Kamennyi most as a piece of Stalinist deja vu by an author who in the 1990s wrote an essay "Stalin: In Memoriam". This is not the case. The narrator' s musings read like a retelling of Nietzsche's "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense" , as he discovers for himself that "the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die" . The investigation, a seven-year-long orgy of nostalgia for the empire, ends with all the leads, even the supernatural ones, revealed as either false or a dead end. But the narrator himself has been enriched and transformed by his quest, realizing its essential solipsism. In a homage to Trifonov's novel, The House on the Embankment, which closes with the scene of the old man visiting the grave of his only daughter, Terekhov' s narrator finds himself in a cemetery, near the wall which holds the ashes of the Umansky family , who left no issue. But the novel itself ends not at a cemetery, nor on the bridge in the heart of Moscow, but with an open vista of the Moscow River on the periphery of the city, where a white boat glides past on the water before mooring at a peer. A conventional allegory - life floating on the river of time - has replaced the stone bridge, a rigid metaphor for constructing identities and meaning. Welcome to postimperial Russia in the post-nostalgia age.

Going on elsewhere he year 1968 was a caesura in twentieth-century European history in both East and West. There were widespread demonstrations against censorship, militarism, imperialism and the war in Vietnam, and in favour of Maoism, a softer Marxism , free speech and free love. A younger generation demanded an accounting with the past. In Hungary, nothing happened. The country had been broken a dozen years earlier, when a precocious attempt to practise democratic socialism was put down by Soviet tanks. After the bloodshed, the new Soviet-approved government knew that it was unwanted. And so compromises were made: the Party would retain its monopoly on power, but terror would relent. The people would not interfere with the state, which in return would grant them some privacy. Prudent economic reform would raise standards of living. This was goulash Communism, and Hungary became known as "the most cheerful barrack in the Soviet camp". This is the backdrop to Ferenc Barmls's The Ninth , originally published in Hungarian in 2006, and the first of Barnas's novels to appear in English. The narrator is a nineyear-old boy, the ninth of eleven children, one of whom has died, the oldest of whom is married. While his older siblings are at work, the narrator, as one of the "Little Ones", spends his days at the village school, listening to his teacher, Miss Vera, whose beautiful voice has a "strange quiver". In Hungary in 1968, life was elsewhere, and the drama in the novel is largely psychological. Afflicted by a speech impediment, the young narrator is also afflicted by a heightened sensory awareness: of his siblings' whimpering, his older brother's tight belly, his mother's pallor. He is especially responsive to the smell of food, and the aromas of sausage and sweets join more tangible signs of poverty, such as the absence of smoke

T

MARCI SHORE Ferenc Barnas THE NINTH

Translated by Paul Olchvary 159pp. Evanston: Northwestern University Press .

Paperback, $16.95. 9780810126022

in the chimney and the toe rags stuffed into shoes. The child 's sensitivity and his innocence illuminate darker circumstances. His father, a former army officer, has been stripped of his status and career by the Communist regime; his mother has sacrificed a career as a pianist for long hours in a ballpoint pen factory. She pawns her engagement ring, and goes hungry in order to feed her children. Her Catholic faith provides her with a higher

meaning for her suffering and her husband with an institutional framework for his anti-Communism and small-scale capitalism. Every month, he claims the family 's state food subsidy and uses it to fund his entrepreneurial projects: the making and selling of rosaries, crucifixes and devotional pictures. On the train he tells his fellow passengers that in this filthy Communist country of ours he not only raises his ten children and sees to

it that they get a proper education, but he also sends all of them to church, and then, he gripes, certain people give him funny looks all the same. The narrator is "subjectively" generous in his judgements, but (to use an infamous Communist distinction) "objectively" violence and resentment define his surroundings: the father compensates for his emasculation under "the Reds" by tyrannizing his wife and children. Tension builds. One source of anticipation is the construction of the Big House, which will have a bathroom and individual beds. The other is the black handbag Miss Vera leaves unguarded on her desk when she steps out of the classroom. As in Communist Hungary so in the narrator's family , everyone becomes accustomed to domination. Here it is the handbag that serves the narrative function of Chekhov's gun - and which is bound to rupture an oppressive stasis. The Ninth is a well-chosen addition to Northwestern University Press 's excellent series, Writings from an Unbound Europe. While the significance of certain references the mother' s Transylvanian origins in particular - may remain obscure to many readers, Paul Olchvary 's translation is effective and the novel reads smoothly. Like Bruno Schulz's The Cinnamon Shops, it belongs to a distinctly East European modernist tradition, one that reveals the jolting proximity of the beautiful and the grotesque.

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Life and pseudo-life oman Senchin grew up in Tuva, a republic in southern Siberia known for its shamans and throat singers, and, more recently, for the nationalist tensions that drove many Russians away in the early 1990s, Senchin's family among them. In his autobiographical novel, Minus (first published in Russian in 2001), dislocation and ennui are a way of life.

R The

narrator's

once-respected

OLIVER READY Roman Senchin MINUS Translated by Arch Tait 240pp. Glas. Paperback, £8.99. 9785 7172 0083 7

market where a third of the town's population now tries to make a living. The narrator observes yesterday's "muggers, factory workers, teachers, housewives, or pensioners" selling bananas, smoked fish and toilet paper, and professes to enjoy the spectacle - until he spots his parents among the traders. His is an ambiguous presence: a passive audience for the laments of others, he also has a share in the anarchic fantasies common to many of his acquaintances, one of whom is obsessed with the IRA. Arch Tait's rendering of Senchin's deliber-

parents

in milk. When one man tries to dry out, his

ately unliterary prose is certainly distinctive.

have exchanged a comfortable existence in Tuva's capital for a "half-ruined cabin" in the Russian countryside, making occasional forays to sell vegetables in the small town of Minusinsk. Their son works in the town as a stagehand, sharing a room in a hostel with a surly colleague. The theatre is entering its I 16th season, having once played host to tsarist exiles. Its employees are paid in food coupons and spend their leisure time stupefying themselves with Gipsy Girl, the cheap local spirit, and "ditchweed" which they collect outside the hostel and steam

colleague observes that this is all very well, but "what is he giving it up for?".

There is much shifting of stiffs, putting in of oars, and chasing of skirt and crumpet. This creaking idiom is employed consistently, however, and a sense of thorough disenchantment is effectively communicated. Chekhov 's realism was tempered by fleeting epiphanies and the tentative hope that life might improve if people worked hard enough. Writing a century later, Roman Senchin describes ageless souls who are no longer interested in Chekhov or Bunin, who work only to stave off hunger and sobriety, and who are "tired, probably terminally" .

Senchin is a convincing exponent of "new

realism", a relatively recent tendency in Russian writing (with parallels in drama and film) that has sought to confront post-Soviet reality in the raw. The chief artistic merit of his documentary approach is to allow life's metaphors to speak for themselves. The daily routine of the indestructible theatre, as seen by a stagehand, supplies an apt analogy for the other theatres of "pseudo-life" in Minusinsk, such as the hostel or the local

TLS FEBRUARY 26 2010

FICTION offered by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, much of the country ' s recent fiction has mined this rich inevitability. Behr's self-conscious allusiveness goes further back in time: there are references to Sol Plaatje' s Native Life in South Africa ANDREW VAN DER VLIES (1916), a seminal expose of the stripping of land rights from black South Africans, to Mark Behr Nadine Gordimer's The Conservationist KINGS OF THE WATER (1974) and to J. M. Coetzee' s Disgrace 236pp. Abacus. Paperback, £ 12.99. (1999), both powerful interrogations of 9780349113708 complicity and the "price one has to pay for staying on" (the phrase is highlighted in - is well placed to investigate, continuing Michiel's late mother' s copy of Disgrace) . what he began so strikingly in The Smell of But Kings of the Water is not simply Apples (1995). Michiel has returned to the another exploration of white guilt, the land country he left seventeen years earlier, in issue, or the brutalizing of apartheid's queer subjects. There is little catharsis, only proviorder to bury his mother on the family farm. Unfolding in the present over the course sional reconciliation and an awareness of of two days in 2001, the narrative, focalized the size of the challenges remaining (receivthrough Michiel , also revisits some traumatic ing a black petrol attendant's deference, episodes in his past. These include the death Michiel muses "Christ ... how do we undo of his adored older brother; a brief relation- this?"). A description of water torture in ship with a childhood friend , Karien, and her the Angolan war suggests links with other, resulting pregnancy; and Michiel's military contemporary horrors, and Michiel' s brother service and later desertion from the navy, Benjamin, irritated at what he interprets after he is disciplined for having sex with a as Michiel's preaching about black farmfellow officer, a man who, in a further out- workers' conditions, bristles: "Go and take a rage to apartheid decency, happened to be of look at the land around Salinas and tell me Indian descent. We learn, too, of Michiel's what distance between so-called fucking years of wandering, from London to the abstraction and sweat makes your life in South Pacific, and of his relationship with America possible". Kamil , a Berkeley academic, with whom he In the final pages, as Michiel lives in relative stability in San Francisco's travels to Johannesburg for his return flight Castro District. (Kamil's HIV status and to California, he hears - while standing " in AIDS-related suffering is treated matter-of- the shade" of two "concrete grain silos" - of factly , never mawkishly.) But a reckoning events unfolding at the site of the Twin with the implications of the di stant past Towers on the other side of the globe. In must be made - particularly with Michiel's the hands of some authors, this coincidence flight from Karien, who undergoes a botched might have seemed contrived or clumsy. abortion. Here it serves both to comment on the conKarien, who is one of the mothers at the nectedness of life in the new global village, dam, says of the new South Africa: "Here and as a marker of an understanding of how there' s this obsession with remembering". In epochs are defined, marked by coming after the wake of apartheid' s demise and, more an event or spectacle, while the coming after specifically, after the narrative recuperation never truly lets go of the going before.

Flight from Karien hree boys, splashing about in a farm dam in South Africa's Free State province, commandeer an inflated T inner tube and, fending off a group of girls, taunt them with an impromptu rhyme: "We're the kings of the water, and you're the henchman' s daughter". Their mothers, taking this as a provocation which "no daughter of Africa" can ignore, throw modesty to the wind, strip to their underwear, and plunge into the icy water (it is September, early spring in the Southern hemisphere ; the farm has suffered a hailstorm) to assist their daughters. Watching from the safety of the dam wall, Michiel Steyn, a visiting expatriate, is taunted in turn by his nephew, one of the boys limping to safety to nurse their outraged pride: "What about you? You could have helped us, you ... " , he exclaims, leaving unspoken an insulting epithet from a store of names he might have used for his queer uncle. Although apparently tangential to the main events of this, Mark Behr's third novel , the episode is symbolically at its centre. It speaks of the marginalization of the one who has left: "returned, Michiel thinks, as little more than a voyeur". It invokes expectations of gendered solidarity and the performance of a male - and incipiently patriarchal assumption of authority, and it shows the challenge posed by the recently empowered; one of the mothers is black, suggesting that race and gender are both at issue. The boys' rhyme and the nephew ' s taunt raise the spectre of complicity: whose henchman , whose failure to act, or decision to act differently? Deftly and movingly, Kings of the Water explores complicity in all its guises. This is a topic that Behr - who, in 1996, revealed his own double-agent activities during the 1980s

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Master, mistress, slave " T h e negroes were running down the lanes now, July knew it. For in her mind 's eye she was once more among them." This is the dramatic climax of Andrea Levy' s new novel The Long Song. July, the protagonist, is also the novel' s narrator, though she tells her story in the third person. At this point she is a slave in the plantation house where she has lived as a lady ' s maid since being taken from her mother in early childhood; she is standing in the drawing room watching the uproar in the negro village. For once, she is discernihly torn between her present life - as a servant, but also the lover of her mistress's white husband, and the mother to his child - and the world she has left behind. It is in such instants of fracture from the self that the decision to separate the narrator from her past self works best. It is not always clear, otherwise, why the story could not have been told either in the first person or in the third person without the convention of a framing device: here, it is that the elderly July' s educated son is a printer who gets her to write her story. He explains to the

ANJALI JOSEPH Andrea Levy THE LONG SONG 320pp. Headline Review. £18.99. 9780755359400

reader that he has edited his mother's language - a caveat that is supposed to smooth over the fluctuations in the narrative voice, which flits , sometimes uneasily, between literary, worked language, and a more colloquial nineteenth-century Jamaican English. Levy is a deft, accomplished writer: this book is filled with memorable characters, rich in research and punctuated by quieter moments of glancing beauty: the sixteenyear-old July, alone in the big house, examining her reflection in the back of a spoon, while outside a rebellion is taking place; or the unexpected comedy of a master-servant scene between her and Nimrod, the groom , which leads them into bed. Less interesting, although ingenious, are knowing devices such as the painting of a group portrait of

July, her master (who is also her lover) and her mistress; or the comparison of July' s narrative with contemporary journals of European women travellers to the West Indies. The volume of what has obviously been diligent historical research sometimes forces compression of the story; certain sections, like a banquet scene at the plantation house, or the list of atrocities committed on rebel slaves, read like hurried enumerations. The Long Song contains some beguiling characters. The quadroon social climber Miss Clara, a fair-skinn ed hut partblack woman who begins as a lady 's maid and then organizes dances for white men and mixed-race women, could have been a minor character in V. S. Naipaul' s Miguel Street. But where Naipaul's characters begin in a Dickensian way - their quirks established and repeatedly displayed - they also have room to grow and alter, to stop iterating their comic utterances ; to behave, in fact, like real people. Levy doesn' t allow her characters thi s space; perhaps she doesn' t have time, for the story, with its twists and loops, must go on.

TLS FEBRUARY 26 2010

21

Beyond the grave JESS CHANDLER Louise Wel s h NAM I NG THE BONES 389pp. Canongate. Paperback, £ 12.99. 978 1 84767255 1

r Murray Watson, a professor of English literature, is obsessed with Archie Lunan, a poet whose earl y death consigned him to obscurity. Determined to "unravel the tangled knot of Archie's life", Watson soon becomes entangled in an increasingly hazardous process of research. Moving between the academic worlds of Glasgow and Edinburgh, and the isolated island of Lismore, his investigations expose a history of deviancy and betrayal , amid "a muddled world of drugs and spells" and the tainted idealism of the 1970s. Naming the Bones, Louise Welsh's fourth novel, is a literary crime thriller that relies on the use of predictable tropes. It is saturated with dark imagery, which colours even the most ordinary of settings and its melodramatic finale culminates in an exhumation, the final decoding of the mystery that has gradually been exposed. There is an exaggerated Gothic sensibility in the conjuring of mood: Watson sits up "like Dracula risen from the dead", the ketchup on his chips reminds him of blood, and his thoughts are of Hamlet's father's ghost and Macbeth's porter. Suicide, death, eroticism and the supernatural are accompanied by their atmospheric counterparts: stormy weather, hallucinogenic drugs, a desolate island, a grave, and a burning house. Mixing together genre fiction and literary fiction , Welsh draws on the Dickensian device of associating the role of detective with that of author and critic: Or Watson is the aptly named literary detective, the victim is a gifted young poet, and evidence comes in the form of poetry and fiction. Despite its almost humorous reliance on genre tropes, Naming the Bones is ambitious in its consideration of the process of writing. Welsh is interested in the destructive processes of creativity, and in the critic ' s task of "revealing scandals from beyond the grave". The dead poet Lunan , who was interested in "the beyond" and in life after death, has achieved the immortality of literary fame. Enjoyable and exciting, Naming the Bones finally lacks the originality required to move beyond the restrictions of its form. The char-

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acters are stereotypes , and therefore unahle to

surprise and the story of a lonely academic, whose investigation into the life of another turns out to be a journey of self-discovery, adheres closely to the fictional formula. There is, however, an ironic playfulness to Welsh's prose that represents the ease with which established conventions can be used as tools to create a desired effect. As Watson searches for the material for his book, Welsh accumulates a collection of literary ingredients, as though the real investigation is that of the novelist compiling the pieces that compose a work of fiction.

22

FICTION IN BRIEF Ann Cleeves BLUE LIGHTNING 357pp. Macmillan, £16.99. 9780230014473

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nn Cleeves ' s Shetland Quartet has already won an admiring circle of readers, and she received the Gold Dagger award for the first book in the series, Raven Black (2006). Blue Lightning, the final instalment, lives up to expectation. Detective Jimmy Perez returns to his parents ' home on Fair Isle, to introduce them to his fiancee. A brief visit was planned, but the island is cut off from the mainland by a violent autumn storm. Then the warden of the local bird observatory is found dead, murdered, her body decorated with feathers , in what looks like a ritualistic manner. Perez is forced to operate in isolation, for he is different from both the tight-knit community members he grew up with and the outsiders who visit and work in the observatory. Cleeves has found a way of transforming the closed-circle elements that made Golden Age detective fiction so satisfying; she makes use of a realistic modern context, with the isolated Shetlands in place of the country house or village. The problems of these communities trying to survive in the modern world are woven into the plot, not as embellishment, but as part of the texture of life. Cleeves herself worked at a bird observatory, and her depiction of the daily routine and the difficult and emotionally handicapped people who are drawn to the isolation of such places is sharp, as is her view of their interaction with the locals, who are uncomprehending yet entirely unfazed by the incomers. It is the crime element that takes a back seat here - the lives of the community, and of the birders, are far more engaging. Perhaps the somewhat elegiac nature of the closing volume in the Quartet has led to this more leisurely pace. Blue Lightning should not be thought less of for that. It delivers the unexpected: a fully satisfying novel, rather than a genre formula. JUDlTH FLANDERS

Jo Nesbll THE SNOWMAN Translated by Don Bartlett 454pp. Harvill Secker. £ 18.99 (paperback, £12.99). 978 I 84655 348 6

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he first snow of the winter falls, and a young boy wakes up in the middle of the night to find his mother gone. Frightened, Jonas tiptoes through the silent house, follows the single trail of wet footprints down the stairs and through the open door. There in the garden, bathed in cold moonlight, stands a sinister snowman , its black pebble eyes seemingly staring up at the house. And around its neck, his mother's treasured pink scarf. Something about the woman ' s disappearance doesn ' t sit well with Inspector Harry Hole. As well as the lack of any evidence to suggest a planned disappearance, something about the snowman in the garden unsettles him. He suspects it is connected to a menacing letter he received months before, recording the appearance of the snowman

during the first snow, and of the disappearance that would follow as it melts. When more snow falls and a second woman disappears from a remote farm on the outskirts of Oslo, Harry is convinced that the two are linked. Leaving his team to gather evidence, he follows the double set of footprints into the woods close by, and discovers a gruesome snowman under the canopy of snow-laden branches. The hunt for a serial killer has begun; a serial killer who appears to have selected the famous Inspector Harry Hole to catch him. Hole is all a fictional detective should be: a hard-working alcoholic, who is driven by the chase, even when it costs him everything. Fortunately Jo Nesb"s' s characterization is warmer than that clicM suggests. There is a well-tuned balance in The Snowman between the scenes involving Hole as the bullish detective, and those depicting a man listening to music in his lonely flat, pining for the woman he has lost. Nesb"s's plotting is one of the best things in the novel as a whole. Each scene is succinct, dovetails with another, shifts the reader' s perspective, and keeps the pace fast and interesting. Although the identity of the killer can be guessed quite early on, there are enough surprises and plot twists to ensure the narrative remains compelling. The novel's success lies in Nesb"s's eye for the macabre. Like any good horror writer, he twists an innocent image of childhood and uses it to prey on our buried fears. In doing so he ensures his readers keep turning the pages to read more. JANET ASPEY

Qiu Xiaolong THE MAO CASE 304pp. Sceptre. Paperback, £7.99. 978 0 340 97859 7

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he Mao Case is the sixth in Qiu Xiaolong's acclaimed Inspector Chen series of crime novels set in contemporary Shanghai. The series shares many features familiar from British and American crime fiction: Chen Cao is a decent, and indeed cultivated policeman (a poet and literary critic, in fact) , with a troubled private life. In this novel, his beloved Ling, the daughter of a top-ranking Communist Party cadre, has tired of Chen' s devotion to police work and has married another upwardly mobile HCC high cadre' s child - who is a successful businessman and a Party official. Chen also has the usual hassle from his superiors, the chillingly ubiquitous security forces and the even more chilling Party machine. The case Chen is presented with here is the investigation into the granddaughter of one of Chairman Mao's mistresses, who is mysteriously funding a lavish lifestyle of 1930s style parties in a mansion which has somehow survived the massive rebuilding project that is modern Shanghai. The double premiss of The Mao Case is that any material object associated with Mao is now extremely valuable in China, and that the Party will do anything to prevent scandal about him becoming common knowledge. But even in such a promising setting, with strong political and geographical interest, The Mao Case is slower-going than Qiu's previous novels. Shanghai is depicted with the edgy authenticity and fiercely critical eye

of the exile, and the detail of the Chinese food eaten is gruesome. Although there is nothing here that is quite so disgusting as the drunken shrimps cooked alive which featured in the previous Inspector Chen novel, readers may find the carp' s eye episode hard to swallow. Much of the dialogue consists of the exchange of opaque Chinese aphorisms with a highly allegorical relation to whatever matter is in hand. There are copious quotations from Chinese poetry - both classical verse and Inspector Chen' s own work - and it must be said that this loses something in the translation. More problematically, the plot is a damp squib: the Mao memorabilia which the characters are all either hiding or seeking fails to deliver its punch, and we are left with a fascinating but unfocused novel about a poetic policeman and a new China obsessed with its recent past. HEATHER O'DONOGHUE

Frank Tallis DEADL Y COMMUNION 346pp. Century. Paperback, £12.99. 978 I 846 05359 7

F

rank Tallis ' s impressive new novel, the most recent instalment in his Liebermann Papers series, is set in turn-ofthe-century Vienna; Freud himself makes some memorable appearances, suggesting the growing influence of psychoanalytic theory at the time. The story opens with the psychoanalyst Or Max Liebermann in session with a neurotic patient, who claims to have seen his doppelganger and is therefore certain that his own death must be imminent. A conversation with Freud suggests to Liebermann that this hallucination may have a more sinister cause: "material offensive to the ego - unacceptable fantasies , all the strivings of the ego which adverse external circumstances have crushed ... are projected outwards to something foreign " . This baleful opening is a foretaste of the grisly events to come, as 01 Rheinhardt and his assistant Haussmann are called to investigate the horrifying death of a young woman, who has been found without her underwear, stabbed with an unusual weapon. Rheinhardt has to work at speed before the killer turns the Viennese streets into a place of terror; unimpressed with his progress, and concerned about the reputation of his department, Commissioner Briigel increases the pressure by demanding conclusive results. Rheinhardt makes use of the psychological expertise of his friend Liebermann to find the unlikely motive behind these crimes. Conversations between the two men - conducted over sweet pastries in Vienna's cafes - are the most rewarding aspect of Deadly Communion , as their mutual respect allows them to find common ground between psychoanalysis and "the terra firma of conventional detection" . The shadowy Viennese back streets are skilfully evoked; lending the novel's portrait of the city a degree of inscrutability that is matched by a cast of odd characters, such as the pathologist Professor Mathias, who performs autopsies while reciting lines of eighteenth-century poetry. "Mathias stroked her forehead and said softly: 'To the quiet land. Who will guide us there? Who will guide us there with gentle

TLS FEBRUARY 26 2010

hand: ah, across to the quiet land?'''. The artist Ludo Rainmayr is an abhorrent creation , who panders to the perverse whims of his clients , specializing in nude paintings of young girls, in a world where morality and human decency are rare. The novel can be confusing when it darts quickly from one plot-line to the next, and its references to art and architecture seem showy at times, but it is a welcome addition to Tallis's series, and his recurring protagonists continue to fascinate. A. P. D. LAWRIE

Nigel Farndale THE BLASPHEMER 432pp. Doubleday. £12.99. 978 0 38561 779 6

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aniel is the first Kennedy in four generations not to bear arms for his country. To his highly decorated father, Philip, his son 's choice of an academic career is a disappointment, perhaps even more so than his atheism, left-wing sympathies and failure to marry Nancy, his long-term girlfriend and the mother of his daughter. Andrew, the first Kennedy to bear arms, went missing in action at Passchendaele in 1917. The story of what really happened to him is unfolded in parallel to the present-day story about Daniel , who has grown up in the shadow of his father, grandfather and greatgrandfather. William , the grandfather, was killed in action in Normandy and awarded the VC posthumously. Daniel only knows him through the memoirs of a fellow officer, in which " Silky" Kennedy is brought to life; a brave warrior, camping it up in the mess, pretending to be more interested in clothes than battle and able with his dying breath to joke about the sniper's marksmanship. Philip, Daniel's father, was wounded and decorated in the first Gulf War. Daniel's failure to follow in their footsteps leads him to question his manliness; would he be brave or cowardly? On a trip to the Galapagos, this is put to the test when the small plane, flying him and Nancy from the capital to the Darwin Station, crashes into the ocean. His first reaction is to save himself, but he returns and saves her and other passengers. He is greeted as a hero. Only he and Nancy know the truth about his first reaction. This incident leads to the virtual breakdown of their relationship. In parallel, Andrew, survi ves the horror of trench warfare and has a relationship with a French nurse, who takes him in and hides him for over a year. Nigel Farndale brings these different relationships vividly to life, without any misplaced sentimentality; his portrayal of Daniel's descent into a type of madness, questioning his strongly held atheism and seeing visions of angels, is plausibly drawn. It is contrasted with Andrew's easy reaction to the apparition which he believes saved him in battle and to his arrest and court martial. The novel's theme of cowardice is eventually resolved as Daniel and his father come to terms with the truth about Andrew, and then with their own relationship on a road trip to the battlefields of France. As well as strong central characters, Farndale' s first novel has interesting subplots and wellsketched minor characters. JUSTIN WARSHAW

23

LITERARY CRITICISM ne of the most moving pieces in Changing My Mind, a collection of Zadie Smith's essays, lectures and journalism, is her funny and frank testament to her father, a Fawlty Towers fan who died, like Tommy Cooper, halfway through a joke, CAROLINE MILLER Smith borrows an old comic formula to tell the story of class sclerosis that held her father Zadie Smith back from grammar school because ("wait, it CHANG I NG MY MIND gets better") his parents couldn't afford the Occasional essays uniform, Growing up in the multi-ethnic pool 308pp. Hamish Hamilton. £20. of Willesden, educated at Cambridge and 9780241 142950 then graduating to become a big fish in the literary world ("a puddle", she confides in one of her many engaging, autobiographical and, like Forster, she pitches to the "middle asides), it is small wonder that Smith's own ground" . However, Smith's middle ground is relish for "Hancock, Fawlty, Partridge, Brent more nuanced and complex than Forster's, , , , all clinging to the middle rungs of Eng- navigating racial as well as academic and land' s class ladders" comes with an acute class-based politics. When her bestselling perception of the status anxiety that drives first novel White Teeth was published in British comedy, This is also a major fault line 2000, some critics heralded it as a poster for a in Britsh cultural life, Small wonder, too, that post-racial society. In her lecture on Obama's "fluency" and "fluidity" are the most highly ability to speak in tongues, she adjudicates praised literary qualities in this collection between the appeal and the limits of this ideal in which there are perceptive articles on a and its opposite, the authenticity politics of a pantheon of cultural idols, from Katharine black consciousness that demands you "keep Hepburn and Barack Obama to Bernard Shaw, it real", and is hostile to Eliza Doolittles who David Foster Wallace, Vladimir Nabokov, alter their vocabulary and their vowel sounds. Changing My Mind does not offer the satisGeorge Eliot and William Shakespeare. Collections of multi-purpose, previously fyingly sustained argument of a manifesto published prose are often bitty and unsatisfy- (" ideological inconsistency is, for me, an artiing. So it is apt that a Barthesian omnivorous- cle of faith", the introduction acknowledges) . ness (Smith is equally passionate about However, the intellectual and emotional genbad movies and good writers) reflects her erosity which stems from open-mindedness book' s dominant intellectual instinct: tolerant especially Smith's technically astute and open-mindedness. In Changing My Mind, the sympathetic posthumous appraisal of David polyvocal ability which makes Shaw, Shake- Foster Wallace, "Brief Interviews With speare et al definitively great, is also the Hideous Men" - is inspiring and refreshing. sound of the middle ground . Like Obama Changing My Mind, whose title is itself a (whose politician's version of negative capa- pre-emptive disclaimer, is a far cry from bility is admired in "Speaking In Tongues", the rebarbative polemics of an older generfirst delivered in 2008 at the New York ation of essayists, such as Martin Amis and Public Library), these writers possess a "cer- Christopher Hitchens. Connoisseurs of litertain kind of genius" which can "jive talk like ary bile may even be disappointed by the fact a street hustler and orate like a senator". that Smith so rarely resorts to the slam-dunk Smith admires the common touch in Eliot's of the insult. She nevertheless takes reading compassion for all sorts of people, writing and writing personally and describes herself a spirited defence of her pioneering willing- "inhaling" books; hurling frustrating ones ness to give as much literary time to dull across the room; saying of Zora Neale Fred Vincy as glamorous Dorothea Brooke Hurston (at the end of a comic account of her ("Middlemarch and Everybody" ). She rejects dogmatic teenage reluctance to admit to subE. M. Forster's literary editors' embarrass- jective feelings about books) " She is my sisment about "the middlebrow elephant in the ter and I love her" . Her intimacy with books room", praising him for cajoling a mass audi- and their authors is infectious. Her approach ence into reading good books in his BBC wire- to literature, despite the big systematic less broadcasts ("E. M. Forster, Middle Man- guns in the footnotes (Derrida, Foucault and ager"). And, like many before her, she finds Barthes are all cited) is direct, accessible and the most persuasive reflection of her idea in largely pragmatic. As literary criticism, it borShakespeare, who "always sees both sides of ders pleasantly on fiction as much as theory. a thing" and is "black and white, male and Smith ' s friendly , first-name appraisals revive female ... everyman". Ventriloquism is the the once-dead figure of the author by regenius of this "certain kind of voice" and com- inventing him (or her) as a character in the passion, tolerance and outreach are its virtues. mind of the reader. The question of whether Judged on her own criteria, Smith ' s voice "Will" (Shakespeare), as Smith asserts, truly is impressively limher. A stand-up comedy refused to take sides in his era's war of ideas fan who teaches at NYU and Columbia, she because of the "dreams of his father", an speaks Ivy League and street. "Curtis '50 equivocator in matters of religion, is beside Cent' Jackson. My brain is giving you one the point. Smith's novelist's instinct for perstar but my heart is giving you five", she ceiving - and inventing - personalities makes enthuses, in one of several vivid film reviews her essays on Kafka, Forster, and "Marian" commissioned by the Sunday Telegraph (Evans - George Eliot) as enjoyable as a and filed again here in the anthology's "See- party at which the reader is the guest of honing" section ("Being" includes a somewhat our and George Clooney and Heidegger less flexible account of an Oxfam-funded trip can be glimpsed digging in to the canapes. to Liberia; "Feeling" is devoted to Smith's This cross-cultural party of influences is father; "Reading" includes substantial essays not bland, despite its friendly accessibility. in literary criticism). Her novel On Beauty Smith provides drama by finding probable (2005) is a structural tribute to Howards End antagonists on either side of theoretical

O

Worshipful debates and staging fights between them: in one essay, she has fun playing the boldest of readers, Barthes, off against that most fastidious and demanding writer, Nabokov (''It's a brave critic who dares tell Vladimir Vladimirovich that he is 'diminishing like a figurine at the far end of the literary stage"'). Similarly, a piece entitled "Two Directions for the Novel" sets Joseph O' Neill's lyrical realist novel Netherland up for a fall, against "necronaut" Tom McCarthy's avant-garde Remainder: Smith's own work (broadly on the lyrical realist highway) and her own writerly position on the debate remain politely invisible. Characterization does have its analytic limits. It can be problematic to revive theoretical debates as a "question of character" or preference - as Smith does when discussing Barthes, noting that half of her students display a pre-theoretical inclination to break and enter canonical texts while the remainder wish to enter on their knees. She defines character as the signature of a writer - a writer' s way of "being in the world", discernible in the aesthetic and moral cruxes of the works they leave behind them. It is a restorative - albeit vague - statement of faith in readers and the old-fashioned faith of readers in writers (" You get to decide who to worship", is one of this volume's epigraphs, from David Foster Wallace). It does

not follow that the existence of the writer's character makes the reader capable of accurately discerning it. But Smith's readings, which are sensual as well as intellectually wide-ranging, read like communions with the departed authors - especially those Christ-like radical empathists, Eliot and Wallace. Value judgement and tolerance can be awkward fellow pilgrims: Smith often praises writing she believes to be "right" or knows to be "beautiful". As a corrective to academic dryness this is refreshing. But, as a wider credo, it has little except its superior eloquence to recommend it - and no principle from which to recommend superior eloquence. If we each decide whom to worship, then there can be no arbiter on beauty and truth other than the mass market. If the dreams of our fathers - Forster's "dream of mass connection", or Obama's or Shakespeare's - are to be realized in literature, then we need a critical vision to make the case for its value. Does it matter if Changing My Mind's tolerant defence of individual preference and its inspiring and well-informed enaction of reading as a private pleasure reflect the broad pop cultural norms that are marginalizing the "literary" novel? It certainly doesn't diminish the pleasure and erudition on offer here. Yet, in an era of choose-your-own worship, ghostwritten celebrity autobiographies are at the top the books charts and liberal arts lovers struggle to defend the "truth" and "beauty" that these essays so perceptively reveal.

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POETRY

24 " y o u r name's absurd", W. D. Snodgrass wrote of himself in "These Trees Stand" , the first poem in Not For Specialists: New and selected poems. A few lines later he rescued his name with the memorable pentameter: " Snodgrass is walking through the universe" . Today, Snodgrass is no longer walking through the universe. He died in January 2009 at the age of eighty-three, so that this volume - his first British publication in over thirty years - is both accidentally posthumous, and timely. Acutely self-aware, often painfully frank about his personal life, Snodgrass was a poet who came of age not long after Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop. He was among the first prominent American poets to be reared not just within academe, but as a "creative writer" within academe (he attended a poetry workshop at the State University of Iowa). In those days university poets were known for their accessibility and restraint, at a time when other schools of American poetrywere producing works of lofty, sometimes incoherent ambition, marrying Poundian Modernism with a Beat freedom from traditional prosodic concerns. Fifty years on, by contrast, American academic poetry tends towards the even more difficult and sometimes impenetrable. From the vantage of today, the early MFA programmes seem to have been the refuge of a quiet, intelligible lyricism - a middle-of-theroad poetry for a putati ve common reader. The title of this collection, indeed, lifted from an early poem, is a declaration of intent: this is poetry for the general reader, not for the specialist. At least, that was the hope. If the history of poetry is viewed as an uneasy game of cat and mouse between poetry and criticism, then the confessional poetry of the 1950s and 60s was a fresh dash by the mouse, to escape the claws of New Criticism. In fact, confessional poetry is often no more "confessional" than the more overtly autobiographical poems of Hardy or Wordsworth, say, and the term makes best sense when understood in the context of the orthodoxies of the day. Taking a stand against the ideal of impersonality enshrined by T. S. Eliot, flouting New Criticism ' s strictures about objectivity, it represented a movement away from both Modernism and the Beats, involving the reinstatement, in varying degrees, of poetic discipline (much of what Snodgrass wrote was in rhyme and metre), and the resurrection of the personal life as the main source of subject matter. Where it differed from the - in some ways analogousMovement in England was in its emotional frankness , and sometimes rawness. Depression, affairs, trauma, divorce were all admitted, in both senses. Snodgrass himself disliked the term "confessional" because of its religious overtones, hut it would he fair to say that his early work epitomizes it. The poem that launched his career was "Heart's Needle", which became the title poem of his first collection. When Robert Lowell saw an early draft, he reportedly declared: " You've got a brain; you can't write this kind of tear-jerking stuff'. A year later, however, he was applauding the revised poem. In 1960, as Lowell won the National Book Award for Life Studies, his former student Snodgrass was collecting the Pulitzer Prize with Heart's Needle. The poem remains one of Snodgrass's best-known works - a lengthy sequence about the loss of

Tender tracks HENR Y SHUKMAN W. D. Snodgrass NOT FOR SPECIALISTS New and selected poems

280pp. Waywiser. Paperback, £ 10.99. 9781904130352

custody of his three-year-old through a bitter divorce.

daughter

Winter again and it is snowing;

Although you are still three, You are already growing Strange to me.

In rhyming stanzas addressed to the daughter, the poem's tone is loving but rueful, and often anguished. While some critics at the time deplored Snodgrass's plundering of his own life - James Dickey called the work "snivelling, self-serving" - most were kinder. M. L. Rosenthal said: "Snodgrass has built a moving poem out of something we treat far too casually: early divorce, in which it is the love between children and their parents that receives the deepest wounds". Poetry that depends on intense emotional experience of the autobiographical sort is somewhat at the mercy of the life. Not for Specialists, in over 250 pages of poetry, offers an invaluable overview of Snodgrass ' s career, and the reader can trace how he rose to

the particular challenges that face a personal, lyric poet. After the divorce and separation from his child that informed that first collection, his second book, After Experience, generally more stoical and philosophical, has as a running, intermittent theme an affair, beautifully rendered in poems such as "Leaving the Motel" and "A Friend": "We've nowhere we could keep a keepsake - / Ashtrays, combs, things /I That sooner or later others / Would accidentally find. / Check: take nothing of one another's", he writes in the first. And in the second, on the pain of a double life: "I stand, Prince of Lies, / Who' s seen bliss". But what happens if the poet' s life settles down? Overall , in spite of the frank tenderness of much of the work, Snodgrass gives an impression here and there of a rather dark philosophy, one that at times could make even stoicism seem cosy. In "The Mouse", a poem about a friend dying young, from his third collection, Remains, life is an unremittingly cruel cat playing with the poor human mouse, "That pats at you, wants to see you crawl/Some, then picks you back alive; / That needs you just a little hurt. / The mind goes blank, then the eyes. Weak with dread, / In shock, the breath comes short; / We go about our lives" . Yet the bleakness is redeemed by the valiant intent of that last line. Through much of the first half of this book there's an unsettling mixture of mourning

A Rare Bee I heard tell of a tale of a rare bee, kept in a hive in the soul of a wood by a hermit - hairshirt, heart long hurt and that this bee made honey so pure, when pressed to the pout of a poet it made her profound ; or if smeared on the smile of a singer it sweetened his sound; or when eased on the eyes of an artist, Pablo Picasso lived and breathed; so I saddled my steed. No birds sang in the branches over my head, though I saw the wreaths of empty nests on the ground as I rode - girl, poet, knight darker into the trees, where the white hart was less than a ghost or a thought, was as light as the written word; legend. But what wasn't going, gone, I mused, from the land , or the sky, or the sea? I dismounted my bony horse to walk; out of the silence, I fancied I heard the bronze buzz of a bee. So I came to kneel at the hermit's hive a little church, a tiny mosque - in a mute glade where the loner muttered and prayed, blind as the sun, and saw with my own eyes one bee dance alone on the air. I uttered my prayer: Give me your honey, bless my tongue with rhyme, poetry, song. It flew at my mouth and stung. Then the terrible tune of the hermit' s grief. Then a gesturing, dying bee on the bier of a leaf. CAROL ANN DUFFY

and something like viciousness. Even behind the self-recriminations of "Heart's Needle" is a just-discernible undercurrent of blame directed at the ex-wife who played her part in all the grief. There's plenty of emotion recollected, but perhaps too seldom in tranquillity. The title poem of After Experience interleaves the outlines of an existential inquiry, lifted directly from Spinoza, with instructions on how, literally, to rip off a person's face with your bare hands. We are implicitly encouraged to link this violent rage with the existential challenge presented in the other lines; yet it seems in excess of the evidence, curiously unaccounted for. Halfway through the book comes perhaps the least characteristic episode in Snodgrass's output: a long sequence of poems spoken by the leading Nazis holed up in Hitler's bunker during the last days of the Second World War. "The Fuehrer Bunker" includes typographic novelties - German Gothic script, bold type, and poems printed as telegrams on graph paper. It's a curious thing, a kind of masque, with Albert Speer, Goebbels, Goering, Himmler, Eva Braun and Hitler himself all speaking from the page. At times there's a Cabaret-like exuberance, for example where Eva Braun' s ruminations are interrupted by the words of a popular American song ("Tea for Two"). Some of the lines were actually spoken by Hitler, others lifted from his diary. Altogether, this was the least well-received of Snodgrass's books, and the overall effect is still curiously uncertain, the poem insufficient to its subject matter. The volume concludes with a section of new poems, one of them written "'on rumors

that Richard Wilbur has had a hip replacement so he could go on playing tennis" . This poem too could stand as a kind of late manifesto for Snodgrass' s own poetic practice: "Wilbur's ball and ceramic socket / Propel him like a racing sprocket / To where his artful serve and volley / Dole out love games and melancholy. / Tremble, opponents: learn by this / What power's secured through artifice". Throughout his career, one senses that what kept him going was the versifying itself. Apart from the odd deviation, he rarely turned from the "artifice" of formal verse. Whatever tragedies or trifles show up in the lines, the lines themselves remain steadily iambic, inventively rhyming: sets of well-wrought rails that know their business.It's as if the poet keeps on riding through all vicissitudes on his steam engine. Although this volume's inclusiveness as a Selected can't be faulted, it could do with a few more notes. There's a short paragraph of biography, and a quarter-page afterword from Snodgrass explaining that some of the cycles are incomplete. But a word or two of bibliographical explanation would not go amiss: why, for example, are the poems from the collection Remains dated both 1970 and 1985? Since this is a Selected, why are there selections from another Selected (Selected Poems 1957- 87)? And why do the titles of the poems ride as high on the page as the headers, leaving a huge gap between title and first line? Somehow, this fails to indi viduate the poems as they deserve. Why does the font size change? But these quibbles pale beside everything the volume provides: a ready and welcome gathering of Snodgrass's best work for the British reader. Poetry' s first duty must be to help us want to live. If Snodgrass goes on being read, it will be because of what he has in plenty: uncommon tenderness.

TLS FEBRUARY 26 2010

POETRY

.

A. ("Archie") Markham' s volume of new and selected poems, Looking Out, Looking In , was in preparation before hi s untimely death in Paris in 2008 , its editing completed by hi s publi sher Peter Jay and hi s form er partner, the poet Mimi Khalvati. As well as including fifty pages of new work, Looking Out, Looking In selects roughl y a third of the poems from the seven mature collections that thi s prolific , engaging poet publi shed between 1986 and 2003. Lt provides a welcome introduction to the poetry Markham publi shed under hi s own name. A selection of hi s heteronymou s poems, LambchofJs with Sally Goodman, was published in 2004. Markham, who came to Britain from Montserrat as a teenager in the 1950s, first thought of himself as a playwright, undertaking research in seventeenth-century drama and directing the Caribbean Theatre Workshop before making hi s name as a poet in the crowded world of British small press publication in the 1970s. A continuity in all hi s work was sensitivity to suffering. "A History Without Suffering" tries to imagine a life without pain:

E

. . . after a gap, comes Nellie. She

is in a drought-fi sted field with a hoe. This is her twelfth year on the land, and today her back doesn' t hurt. Catechisms of self- pity and of murder have declared a day' s tru ce

in the Civil War within her. So today,

25

The search is on TIM DOOL E Y E . A. Markham LOOKING O U T , LOOKI N G I N New and selected poe ms

252pp. Anvil. Paperback, £14.95. 978 0 85646 41 4 0 we can bring Nellie, content with herself, with the wo rld , into our Hi story.

For a day ... Markham 's sense of the temporary nature of human happiness fuelled, and was fuelled by, relentless travel. Periods of living in the South of France, Sweden, Enver Hoxha's Albania, Papua New Guinea and Northern ireland, as well as returns to the Caribbean and visits to Africa, provided a wealth of detail for his mordant observations. In "Hinterland", written in Portrush when he was a writer-inresidence at the University of Ulster, he talks of having "Explored the world, tasted its strangenesses" and "failed to colonize it / With family tongue or name", and this sense of being at home anywhere, and yet nowhere, running "errands for a house not li ved in / these forty years", is a thread woven through the collection.

other people ' s problem rather than his own, a poem like "It Gets Worse, M y Friend" links the discomfort of being targeted by an academic colleague "for disqui sitions on cricket" to the fate of a "wrong- / looking man shot from a car" . Several of the new poems and the long poem "John Lewis & Co" address Markham' s decision to leave "the confusions / of England" in what turned out to be hi s final decade. "Back Stories" gives one reason for not returning to the Caribbean ("to come and build / mausoleum for yourself, is a thing / that don ' t make any sense to me, at all"). Instead Markham immersed himself in the life of a major European city and his own densely peopled imagination: As always The frame of this picture is adjustable. For look at those two nun s in

the park, a joke rippling their habits, Sharing the ca nva s with brow ning bodies on

E,A,Markham,2003 Many of the poems address absent figures : a lost grandmother, a mother later to be lost, former lovers, schoolfriends, mentors. Typically they hold their interlocutors with verbally dextrou s, digression-filled narrations that start in medias res, resist closure and defy summary. Their apparent anxiety about incompleteness or uncertainty of context is much more than a postrnodern posture. Though identity, in a cultural or racial sense, seems to have been something Markham considered

the Cote d' Azur and pallid ones in Urology in a Sheffield wa iting room -

All this - and maybe more - to be restored to you .. . . CA Story for Today") Markham was someone for whom the work of writing would always seem necessarily, even joyously, incomplete; as in the conclusion of "The Last Letter to a Grandmother", "the search is on (0, endless, endless game) for something lost" . Looking Out, Looking In provides a welcome opportunity fo r new readers to join him in that energetic search.

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I. Poems must be the original unpublished wo", of the entrant. in English. Entrant;; are adv ised to keep copie;;. as poems will not be returned and there will be 1\0 acknowledgement of receipt. 2. Each entry must be printed clearly on one sheet of A4 paper. Enlr.mt"s name must not appear anywhere on the poem. Name. address and titlc(s) of the poems submitted should be printed clearly on the entry fOIlll. 3. Entries must be received by April 9. 2010.4. Competitors may enter a ma."imum offive poems. Entry fee for the tirst poem is £5: for each additional poem £3. Cheq ues/postal orders (sterling only) to be made payable to: The Times Li terary Supplement Ltd. and must be enclosed with an entry form or photocopy of the entry fOITIl OR credit card details filled in on the entry fOlTIl. S. 1be judging of the competi tion is by Alan lenkins and Alice Quinn: the judges' decision is final. The title;; of the six prizewinning poems and the names of their authors will be published on May 14th. 2010. Prize-winners will be advised before that date. Enlr.mts and others wishing to be informed of the resu lt~ should enclose a stamped addressed envelope marked W INNERS. 01" visit the·lls.co.uk. where winners' names will be displayed from May 14th. 6. Copyright remains with the author. but entrant, are deemed to have assigned first publication rights to the TLS for the durJ.tioo of the competition. 7. Nocorrespondence will beentered into regarding the outcome of any stage of the judging process. S.1be submission of any entry will be deemed to assume the unqualified acccptallCe of the conditions of entry by the competitor. t By supplying youremail address you are happy to receive offers via email from or in association with The Times Liter.uy Supplement (fLS). The TLS is passionate about securing great promotions and offers for you. The TLS directly (or via its agents) may mail or phone you about new promotions. products and services. Tick if you do not want to receive these from us [ I OI"carefully selected companies [ I (Held underUK law. Sec our privacy policy at www.nidp.com.)

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26

IN BRIEF

creations. Rather, we gain insight into the man behind them: a gentle philosopher who dislikes unbridled materialism ("like spending one's life decorating one's tomb") and speaks out against the political infighting that marred the early 1970s; nuclear weapons; and energy waste. Well before the perils of climate change became apparent, he designed a simple fan-assisted greenhouse to harvest solar energy; the water companies apparently rejected it due to its lack of built-in obsolescence. Seeing Things is charmingly written. If, like Bagpuss, it is a little " loose at the seams", it remains as endearing as any of Postgate's characters. TOBY LICHTIG

experiments in colour and texture, woodcuts both had a market and existence in themselves, and also contributed to other environments. Most obviously, they were also used to illustrate manuscripts , providing pictures to accompany text and other decoration. In this, they are reminders of some of the difficulties in speaking too glibly of a printing revolution: innumerable books sat, as it were, half-way, part print and part manuscript. Block-books, with text and image both carved in wood, were not so much primitive precursors of printed books as we know them, as an economical means of manufacturing some kinds of books in some kinds of circumstances - not just the Apocalypse or the Biblia pauperum, but also schoolbooks. The central essays are concerned with woodcuts in use, but the most generally valuable contribution, setting them in the context of early printed books, is a detailed analysis by Paul Needham of prints in early printing houses. The ambiguity of such terminology has often caused confusion, particularly when modern writers thoughtlessly refer to print shops when they mean printing houses. (A print shop is where you buy prints.) Needham shows how various crafts intersected in making fifteenth-century books, and offers a classification scheme to help us understand these artefacts better. Subsequent contributors explore these phenomena within their various interests. At the other end of the volume is a series of contributions concerning colour, its analysis, the limitations and possibilities of studying it as a means of localization, and the costs and skills involved. This is a subject as yet in its infancy. The volume closes with a reminder of how wood blocks could be exploited beyond their most obvious and elementary uses, and could be employed to create cheap versions of expensive-looking cloth, or used experimentally in paste prints. DA VID McKITTERICK

Bibliography

Religion

Peter Parshall, editor THE WOODCUT IN FIFTEENTHCENTURY EUROPE 352pp. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art; distributed by Yale University Press. £55 (US $79). 9780300121636

Saleem H. Ali ISLAM AND EDUCA nON Conflict and conformity in Pakistan ' s madrassahs 214pp. Oxford University Press. £4.99 (US $39.95). 978 0 19 574672 9

Memoirs Dwayne Raymond MORNINGS WITH MAILER A recollection of friendship 342pp. HarperPerennial. £9.99 (US $13.99. 978 0 06 173359 8

I

n 2003 , Dwayne Raymond began work as personal assistant to Norman Mailer, having served him in a restaurant where fellow waiters had branded the ageing author "difficult" . Mailer was by then living full time in Provincetown, at the tip of Cape Cod, aged eighty, physically frail but sufficiently wilful to climb into a car against all good advice and take off for a pleasant afternoon of solitary eating and drinking fifteen miles along the coast. The car refused to start for the journey back, Mailer got tipsy, and ended up sharing a taxi home with a transvestite. "He's a nice guy", the Cher-Iookalike told Raymond a few days after the incident. "I invited him to drag bingo next week? You think he' ll come?" Raymond assumed that his duties at the Mailer house would cover mostly literary affairs - Mailer was working on his novel about Hitler, The Castle in the Forest, when their arrangement began - but he ended up driving, organizing the extended Mailer family (nine grown-up children, most of whom seem to like each other), cooking, and listening to Mailer's advice on how to cook. The affection appears to have been mutual , and while the table-waiting verdict on the master's difficulty was not disproved, the servant soon learnt the essential skill of standing authority on its head. Ultimately, Raymond writes, "I would develop what can only be described as paternal affection for the man". Mailer hated plastic, hated technology his bewilderment at email grew the more Raymond explained it - and, most of all, hated television, as a destroyer of "the maturity of concentration". He welcomed readers with genuine courtesy, however, once reprimanding Raymond for attempting to rescue him from a fan in a car park, and was regarded as a friendly presence in the town. At that first encounter in the restaurant, Raymond, with

almost textbook naivety, confessed that he wanted to write. Meeting Mailer, helping him put on his Ugg boots, organizing his chaotic desk and listening to a thousand theories, was a greater gift than he could have hoped for. The book skilfully weaves in a number of sub-plots, including Mailer's wife's illness and Raymond's gay partner's "transition" to a new identity. There will be other memoirs of the writer, who died in 2007 , but few will offer such a close-up view as this one. JAMES CAMPBELL

"Rayograph", 1926; taken from A lias Man Ray: The artofreinvention, by Mason Klein (240pp. The Jewish MuseumIY ale University Press. $50. 978 0 300146837), published in conjunction with an exhibition at the Jewish Museum, New York, until March 14 Oliver Postgate SEEING THINGS A memoir 425pp. Canongate. £16.99. 978 I 84767 840 9

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he late Oliver Postgate was the doyen of twentieth-century British children's television. His creations, in collaboration with Peter Firmin, included Alexander the Mouse, Ivor the Engine, Noggin the Nog, the Pingwings, the Pogles, the Clangers and, most famously , Bagpuss - voted in a BBC poll in 1999 the best children's programme ever. As Postgate's memoir, Seeing Things , reveals, he was also a quiet social revolutionary, eccentric inventor and all-round good egg. Born to genteel socialist parents in Golders Green, North London, a grandson of the Labour leader George Lansbury, Postgate grew up in a world of liberal intellectualism, surrounded by erudite adults. Only later did he realize his good fortune: the "short wide frenzied man with a squeaky voice, who bullied people to play games and hated losing" turned out to be H. G Wells; "the elderly man with a thin ratty voice" was Bertrand Russell. Sent to the "progressive" Dartington Hall, he was encouraged to be "absolutely free" , and promptly panicked. He spent the war trying to get arrested as a conscientious objector and went to Germany with Save the Children in 1946. He combined stints at acting, writing and industrial button-plating with work as the designer of animated displays for exhibitions. Postgate was good with his hands: he devised a washing machine for his fibrositic mother (" it had a tendency, while working, to walk"), a corkscrew post-hole digger for farmers and a toy forklift truck, which he attempted to market. An early animated pig left the BBC executives "hysterical" (they "begged me to stop"), and it was with Alexander the Mouse that he and Firmin achieved their initial breakthrough. But the system of magnets that moved the mice proved cumbersome, and they gradually refined their technique, learning as they went along. Film-making, it seems, was simple "common sense". Postgate does not linger on his delightful

I

n 2005-6, first in Washington and then in Nuremberg, an inspired exhibition on the fifteenth-century woodcut acknowledged a revolution. The subject had moved out of connoisseurship not just into social history, but into a world where several disciplines need to learn together. Peter Parshall suggests a combination of historians of religion, monastic culture and folklore, bibliographers , manuscript specialists and historians of printed media; and the list could be easily extendedas indeed it is just on the evidence of these pages. The exhibition, hugely enjoyable in itself, is likely to be remembered as one of the most influential ever mounted concerning the fifteenth century. This volume, The Woodcut in Fi[teenthCentury Europe , records the conference that accompanied it. In part, the papers lean on themes apparent in the exhibition, but they develop matters further. From the cheapest devotional images to be pasted to walls or furniture, or tucked into books, to ambitious

TLS FEBRUARY 26 2010

O

ver the past thousand years, madrasas have been the institutions where young Muslims have come to learn the Qur'an, the traditions relating to the Prophet Muhammad, and the skills (Arabic grammar, jurisprudence, logic) to make that knowledge socially useful. With the dominance of the West in the Muslim world over the past 200 years, madrasas have come to perform an additional role, of hulwarks against ideas and behaviour which might undermine Islamic societies from without. Since independence, the number of madrasas in South Asia has grown vastly - in Pakistan, for instance, from 245 in 1947 to 13,500 in 2006. Afterthe 9/11 Commission described them as " incubators of extremism", madras as became a major matter of policy concern. This, of course, meant research money: academics have flocked to study them. Saleem H. Ali was one such academic, impelled in part by the lazy connections being made in the policy establishment between

IN BRIEF madras as and extremism. He set out to establish hard facts about Pakistan's madrasas: their growth, funding , curriculum, relationship to government, relationship to foreign powers, and the measures which might be taken to bring them into the modern world. His qualifications for the task are not obvious. True, he had some training in madrasa scholarship from the ulama of Pakistan ' s Jamia Ashrafia Madrasa, but he is by profession a professor of environmental planning; his previous book was Mining, the Environment and Indigenous Development Conflicts (2004). The outcome is a curate's egg of a book. There is a helpful introduction on the growth of madrasas in colonial South Asia, the different sects into which they fall, and their history in the context of Pakistan. Two excellent local studies examine the reasons for their growth in a rural subdivision of the Punjab and the capital, Islamabad; in the former because of poverty and lack of resources, and in the latter the migration of students from the northern districts of the North-West Frontier Province. On madrasas and violent extremism Ali makes clear the complexity of the issue, but importantly suggests that the direction of action is more internal than external , and in the case of sectarian violence in rural Pakistan may have as much to do with a class struggle between landed elites and peasants as with anything else. Less focused chapters address the policy issues: "The Role of Government and other Stakeholders in Conflict Prevention" , i.e. primarily what Pakistan needs to do to reform its madrasas; "Education, Development and Conflict Prevention: The role of foreign powers", i.e. primarily what the USA might do to improve its public diplomacy. Saleem Ali has brought together a great deal of useful information - though I am sure that he would be the first to say that there is more work to be done. FRANCIS ROBINS ON

Biography Robert Chandler ALEXANDER PUSHKIN 152pp. Hesperus. Paperback, £8 .99. 978 I 84391 9124

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lexander Pushkin's biography is a source of spirited discussion by all those with a serious interest in Russian literature because so much starts here. The idea of a poet's destiny as something that can be consciously shaped; the relationship between poet and tsar; words as deeds; exile as the road down as well as the road up - the list goes on and on. As Russian poets and intellectuals have been saying now for two centuries, Pushkin lived his life in such a way that it appeared to leave hehind no residue: every-

thing he came in contact with was either poeticized by this remarkable hybrid sensibility (verbal energy fuelled seamlessly by " life") or it disappeared from view, apparently incapable of producing meaning. The greatest mystery of Pushkin's life, one still not satisfactorily solved after generations of study, is that this person, so erratic in his dealings with others, possessed something like perfect pitch when it came to choosing, at life's most difficult moments, the moral high road. It was as if his formal restraint as a poet, an aesthetic category, protected him from making a

false move in the moral world as well. Given our sound-bite culture, Robert Chandler's new mini-biography of Pushkin is a welcome addition. In just 150 pocketbooksize pages and a short chapter format Chandler manages to describe, sometimes in surprising detail, all the main periods of the poet's life. He also provides synoptic analyses of Pushkin's major works, a separate chronology of his life and times, minimal explanatory notes and a short bibliography. Primary sources for information about Pushkin's life are the poet's letters, V. V. Veresaev's standard compendium Pushkin in Life, and T. J. Binyon's celebrated recent biography, although other well-known biographers, including D. S. Mirsky and Yury Lotman, appear in the chorus of narrative voices from time to time. A pitfall in writing such a biography is that the information we have about the poet has been distorted over the decades by a patina of legend, and that distortion can intrude on the simplest of conclusions. Was Pushkin ' s black great-grandfather Abram Gannibal "befriended" by Diderot and Voltaire? Was the historian Nikolai Karamzin "the embodiment of political orthodoxy"? Wasn't Pushkin quite distraught, that is, not at all optimistic that he was being "allowed to hope", when his future mother-in-law initially rejected him, hence his headlong departure for Transcaucasia? In the fatal duel were Pushkin and d' Anthes "to start off 40 yards apart"? And is The Captain's Daughter really "the most subtle and poetic of all nineteenth-century novels"? Still , these are quibbles and do not seriously detract from this engaging and enjoyable "brief life" of Russia' s greatest, most quintessential poet. DAVID BETHEA

French Theory Felix Guattari LES ANNEES O'HIVER 1980-1985 298pp. Les Prairies Ordinaires. € 17. 978 2 35096 003 6

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his welcome new edition of the French theorist Felix Guattari's writings from the 1980s is dominated by one year alone: 1968. "A la veille de 68, j'avais le sentiment d'etre sur une vague porteuse, de faire du surf, en articulant toutes sortes de vecteurs d' intelligence collective", he declares in an interview in 1985. Elsewhere, Guattari doesn ' t want to come across as a "soixante-huitard attard€", but the fact remains that "Je suis de ceux qui vecurent les annees soixante comme un printemps qui promettait d'etre interminable; aussi ai-je quelque peine a m'accoutumer a ce long hiver des annees quatre-vingt". Les Annees d'hiver has three main parts. "Politique" deals with issues directly relevant to France and Europe. Convinced "qu ' on jugera ces dernieres annees comme ayant ete les plus stupides et les plus barbares depuis bien longtemps", Guattari reserves much of his contempt for politicians, such as the leader of the French Communist Party, and President Reagan ("un cretin"). The subversive power of comedy is also attested to in Guattari's support for the comedian Coluche' s campaign in the 1981 French presidential election (Coluche was leant on not to stand and some regard his death in 1986 as suspicious). However, Guattari warns his fel-

27

low citizens not to dismiss Jean-Marie Le Pen as a joke. Le Pen, he insists, is a contemporary phenomenon, "une passion collective", and Guattari's concerns about a rising tide of racism in France come to the fore in a manifesto included in the appendix: " 1981: Non a la France de l'apartheid". The pieces in the second section, "Moleculaire", are extensions of Guattari's work with Gilles Deleuze, including an essay on "drogues machiniques" and another on the "microrevolution" of adolescence. The third section, "Art Processuel", features an essay on Franz Kafka for the catalogue of an exhibition at the Pompidou Centre. In this troubled collection Guattari reluctantly concludes that capitalism is " irreversible", but he refuses to subscribe to a cynical postmodernism ("Je ne suis pas un postmoderne"). Confronted by an infantilizing mass media, increasing racism and a "remontee massive et ecoeurante de religiosite", it is too easy to succumb to disenchantment, says Guattari , so with characteristic perversity he remains "a la fois hyperpessimiste et hyperoptimiste".

expects such sniping from specialists. For him the peoples of Zomia are repositories of egalitarian values opposed to the imposed hierarchies of states. Scott is indeed bold to be so romantic in our cynical age. However, as he acknowledges, highland and lowland societies are entwined in a single system, and he could have theorized this more clearly. The book's repetitiveness might have been traded for a chapter on the modern state and minorities, something only alluded to in asides. But one doesn't have to see like a Zomian nor pretend to be an anarchist to appreciate the many insights in James Scott' s book. GRANT EVANS

Cultural Studies George L. Hersey FALLING IN LOVE WITH STATUES Artificial humans from Pygmalion to the present 188pp. University of Chicago Press. $40; distributed in the UK by Wiley. £27.50. 978 0 226 32779 2

lAN PINDAR

I

History J ames C. Scott THE ART OF NOT BEING GOVERNED An anarchist history of upland Southeast Asia 442pp. Yale University Press. £20 (US $35). 978 0 300 15228 9

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he land of Zomia traverses the highlands of northern South-east Asia, India and China, contains some one hundred million minority peoples of "bewildering variety", and "represents a novel object of study", says James C. Scott, the author of the acclaimed Seeing Like a State (1998). Zomia, Scott argues in his new book, is where people have fled to for centuries from oppressive lowland paddy-states in South-east Asia and China, and he offers us a reverse view of these states from the stateless mountain-tops. His overall argument is that the colourful patchwork of cultures found in the mountains is not some survival from times past but is in fact the product of lowland refugees who have fashioned their societies and cultures, and even ecology, as ways of escape from the clutches of the state. The lowland paddy-state creates ecological, social and religious uniformity, while upland societies revel in diversity. Even so, Scott contends, this diversity is a "state effect". These claims are not new, having been made by many individual researchers, and often he repetitively pushes at open doors. What is new is his bringing together research from Malaysia, Thailand, Burma, Vietnam and China to make a forceful general case for the politically constructed

nature

of

upland

societies

in

response to the pressures of lowland states. Scott's panoramic view will no doubt enthral many readers, but one also has to beware of his swift prose as it races through time and space. He writes, for example, that Miao intermarriage with other groups is

"extremely common",

to advance an

argument for ethnic blurring, but his references do not concur. And Lao readers will be surprised to hear that the revolt of their hero King Aonuvong against the Siamese in 1827 is an example of an upland prophetic uprising. Scott, however,

TLS FEBRUARY 26 2010

n his new book, George L. Hersey offers a quirky and fascinating guide to our capacity to fall in love with statues, dolls and automata. He begins in ancient Cyprus with Pygmalion, king, sculptor and priest of Aphrodite. Seeing the Propoetides prostituting themselves with no shame, he gave up on girls and, in an early instance of sublimation, sculpted a statue he fell in love with and which Aphrodite eventually brought to life. It was Ovid who introduced what Hersey calls "tactility". You could now do more than look; Ovid' s statue could be touched and touch back. One thing leads to another: Ovid's Pygmalion and the statue marry and have a son, Paphos, "a lovely boy" . Monotheism didn't change much, Hersey argues. The Bible threatened those who worshipped graven images with eternal damnation, and the early Christian Arnobius pointed out that anyone who had a chisel could dismantle a statue and discover that these majestic gods are " made out of fused plates and wickerwork, the parts joined every which way as in a piece of wreckage" . Still , as Hersey makes clear, you can't keep a strong urge down, whatever the "truth" is. Goethe revealed that when he contemplated an image of Christ (which he never identified) he had an erection. Hersey suggests this must have been a Crucifixion or Deposition " in the sensuous supple early Rococo figure style". One artist, Asam, specialized in "nude stucco Christs that were both pious and sexy" . Unlike Goethe, Freud didn't feel em barrassed by the statue he loved. He identified with Moses and spent hours in front of Michelangelo's immense statue of the prophet. Hersey ' s hook would have been even better if he had discussed Pygmalion's narcissism. He brings the story up to the present by tackling the question of automata. Robots have replaced statues, but as love objects they have more practical parts. Hersey fears that in the future many people will find it easier to have relationships with dolls than with other humans. He seems to half-welcome this on the grounds that human beings haven ' t done all that well with the planet, or with one another. DAVID COHEN

TRAVEL

28

Between Here and There an Morris's catalogue of work attests to a remarkable lifetime of peregrinations, but, as she confesses in the introduction to Contact!, she has spent surprisingly little time describing people. This collection of epigrammatic reminiscences, most less than half a page in length , attempts to correct a lifetime' s worth of omissions. In fact, she argues, "people ... have been sparks of my work". The exclamation mark of the title proclaims their catalytic force. The introduction claims that the several hundred encounters contained within were "scattered across half a century and forty-odd books, that I have here gratefully plucked out of their literary obscurity". It is unclear whether this means that these characters have featured - perhaps in other forms - in Morris's previous work, or not. It is impossible to check this suspicion as the majority of encounters are undated, or, as the introduction suggests, "simply occurred between Here and There, to Him or Her, after Then and before Now" . There are no adequate themes to bind together Tenzing Norgay descending from Everest, the trial of Adolf Eichmann, Winston Churchill's deathbed and the less lofty circumstances of the peasants, farmers and slum-dwellers that populate this collection.

J

JON GARVIE Jan Morris CONTACT! 202pp. Faber. £14.99. 9780571 250684 The one continuous thread is Morris herself; no encounter is without an intrusive authorial voice, remarking on the historical, ethical or cultural significance of those who cross her path. Morris often disallows the subject's right to speak, preferring to describe the thoughts and emotions triggered from her own bank of memories. Many of the assembled cast impress by the simplicity of their lives; a simplicity which derives unerringly from poverty. An aged woman selling oranges on a Portuguese roadside insists that free apricots must accompany the narrator's purchase of oranges; then, "bustling around looking for other kindnesses to perform" , hands over a "sprig of rosemary". A Nepali Sherpa silently offers up a brown nut. Such people are seldom characterized as individuals, but are, rather, crudely drawn vehicles for larger themes. The uninhibited voodoo dance of a girl in Martinique reveals the quintessential noble

savage. The "hard hewn, bashed about, gaunt faces" of the Swiss peasantry insinuate memories of witch-burning and ancient disease. Stereotypes and anachronisms abound. At an opera house in Odes sa, Morris espies "three ill-shaven Levantines ... [who 1seem to be in throes of opium dreams, squirming and sighing in their seats". Aside from the poor, Morris treasures her encounters with the rich and famous , particularly if they are in some way symbolic of an ancien regime. She revels in the feudal Frenchness of Yves Saint Laurent, whose entourage of "cutters, shoemakers, milliners and tailors, seemed to me a true ornament of French civilisation and a vindication of French pride". She regrets that King Sobhuza of Swaziland wears European clothes, rather than his "tribal costume" , because of the "terrific effect ... the stunning assembly of feathers, bright textiles and talismanic brooches" would exert. The impurities of modernity have no place within Morris's Romantic imagination. Her vision of Oxford Street in the 1980s (an unusual dating) would not be out of place in a eugenics textbook. The thronging crowds cause her to exclaim: Who were these fearful people, of no particular race , of no particular kind , so crude and el vish

of face , so shambling of gait, so shabby of

clothes, so degraded and demeaning of bearing? Where were they shoving and sidling their

way to? What culture did they represent, what traditions inspired them, what loyalty did they cherish, what God did they worship? These ugly pleadings encapsulate the book' s one, unintended truth: travel is often disappointing, and for the very humdrum reason that reality undermines expectation. For a traveller carrying as much baggage as Morris, disappointment becomes increasingly uniform. The darkly poetic aspect of a Persian student is ruined when he begs the narrator for help with his English grammar. A Dutchman disgraces himself when he wishes to talk about unemployment and football, rather than tulips, dykes and Rembrandt. The narrator frequently yearns for the preindustrial, agrarian societies that travel has always destroyed. In describing an Ethiopian market, Morris almost expresses that paradox directly. She suggests that "there was nothing ugly to be seen there, nothing sham, nothing pretentious. It was like watching an assembly of beautiful lithe-limbed animals I thought how fortunate were those creatures of nature, those children of the thatched hut and the empty places, those sisters of specious innocence. But alas, even there the dream would soon be over". The innocence is, of course, specious because the writer' s presence means that it is already vanishing. However, a less self-involved traveller might have bothered to ask those "creatures of nature" for their own views.

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great humour from writers including I.B. Singer, Y.L. Peretz, Bruno Shultz, Ida Fink. and lanusz Korczak, all the way through to second-generation writers from the Jewish Polish diaspora conjuring up the strongly felt presence and sense of loss. Tickets £8

Thursday 4 March, 3.00pm

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Sunday 7 March, 3.30pm

MEMORY AND REVIVAL lonathan Webber (Unesco Professor of Interfaith Studies, Brirmingham University), Janusz Makuch (Jewish Culture Festival, Krakow) and Kate Craddy (Galicia Jewish Museum, Krakow) discuss Jewish culture in today's Poland and ask whether we witness a genuine Jewish revival or the creation of a virtual world. Tickets £8 Sunday 7 March, 5.00 pm

TIMETRAVELLlNG IN POLISH LITERATURE From the urban decadence of Yiddish theatre to the timeless world of the shtetl, Henry Goodman, Beverley Klein and Lemez Lovaz give voice to the prose, poetry and drama of a century of Jewish Poland. They take us into an irrecoverable world, invoking deep pathos and

Sunday 7 March, 6.30pm

MEET THE CULT AUTHOR Pawel Huelle has a cult following both in Poland and internationally. A novelist, playwright and newspaper columnist, he worked for Solidarity, was a university lecturer in philosophy and head of Gdansk's local television channel. He talks to Maureen Freely and Antonia Lloyd-Iones about his life and work, includ ing the novel that launched his career, Who Was David Weiser?, the story of an enigmatic Jewish boy set in Huelle's native city of Gdansk. Tickets £8

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On the publication of the English translation of her book Dark Matter by Harvill Seeker Juli Zeh in conversation with Peter Guttridge Thursday 11 March, 7pm Juli Zeh initially studied international law then changed to creative writing. She has won a literary prize nearly every year since 1999 and her work has been translated into thirty languages. Peter Guttridge is not only the Observer's crime fiction critic but also a writer of crime fiction himself.

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Christina von Hodenberg (London): Alf Garnett Goes to Germany: Television Comedy and the Cultural Revolution, 1965-1979

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30

ILS

SOCIAL STUDIES

Mall-Arabia

Telephone: 020 7782 5000 Fax: 020 7782 4966 [email protected] s newspaper columns are filled with CLAUDIA PUGH-THOMAS speculation over the rapid rise and precipitate fall of the most audacious Jim Krane and widely recognized of the seven United DUB AI Arab Emirates, here is a thorough, fast-paced The story of the world ' s fastest city and at times affectionate study that attempts 358pp. Atlantic Books. £ I8.99. to address the elusive nature of Dubai, past, 978 I 84887 007 9 present and future. If the book reads as though it was written in a hurry, Jim Krane's breathless style complements his subject matter: tage. The huge dry docks, designed to accomDubai is a city that has arisen impetuously and modate enormous vessels, were completed incoherently, its shape shifting as incessantly just as the Iran-Iraq war broke out. "For as the desert sands on which it is built. Dubai", Krane writes, "the war was an ecoAlready, some of the details here are out of nomic lemon. So Sheikh Rashid made lemonade." date. Krane is an ambivalent spectator, inclined Decades later, Sheikh Mohammed consolineither towards sycophancy nor stern judge- dated Dubai ' s position as the link between ment. He has lived in the city, observed it, East and West when he launched his national accumulated a wealth of anecdote, the reminis- airline, Emirates, and brought in the European cences of locals and expatriates, solid facts tourist. It was for the tourist that many aspects and enlivening details; and Dubai is variously of the city were conceived. Bereft of an allurcompared to Venice, "an island of enlighten- ing geography, lacking in cultural stimuli, ment in a sea of religious fundamentalism", to Dubai offered instead unapologetic luxury, sixteenth-century Cordoba, and to Shenzhen, and endless opportunities to shop. The hotel China. It is a place that is "Arab enough, and became the destination. The distinctive Burj it's Western enough". Tt is, if its current ruler al-Arah, huilt on its own island, and ahsurdly Sheikh Mohammed is to be believed, "the ostentatious, exemplified the essence of engine that will drag the Arab world into the Dubai ' s new marketing exercise. It also represents the haphazard nature of the city; one architect designed the building's clean, white exterior, another was responsible for how it looks within. There are acres of gold leaf. But then, Dubai is, as Krane remarks,

A

a city of incongruities. The roads are modern but the network is incoherent. The cars are advanced but driving is anarchic. Malls are rife but there is no art museum. The airport is world class, but education is substandard. An optimist would say that ' s the essence of an emerging market, the reason Dubai crackles with opportunity. A realist would point to a government that preferred impulsive decisions

renaissance". It is a country where mosques and churches co-exist, and where Western expatriates can move freely in a sanitized and "Disneyfied" version of the Arab world. It is also a place of exponential growth. Those who are not engaged on projects in China are stationed in Dubai. The demographic explosion - due to the ever-increasing number of expatriates who arrive to keep the cogs of the city moving - has taken the small settlement of around 1,000 indigenous people in 1822, to around 276,000 in 1980. This year, the population is expected to reach 1.6 million. What set Dubai on the path along which it now teeters was oil. Before oil, it was pearlfishing - until the Depression and the arrival of the Japanese cultured pearl killed the market in the 1920s. Yet, from an early stage, Dubai has proved itself to be remarkably adaptable. Long a trading hub, with the dredging of the Creek in the 1950s and the mercantile skills ofthe Persians who were among the first expatriates to settle there, the visionary Sheikh Rashid realized the strategic importance of his city and managed to capitalize on the habitual disquiet in the region, turning it to his advan-

to level-headed planning. Krane quotes Sheikh Mohammed from his book, My Vision: "If anyone asks me how Dubai achieved so much at such a record speed, I'll simply say, that's because we never drowned ourselves in detail. The key to a true and effective development process is a vision that doesn't allow small details to cloud its basic goals". Yet, the fact is that the details do matter, as the "fastest city" in the world has been slow to learn. Here is a multicultural population where many of the Emiratis, overwhelmingly in the minority, feel besieged by the foreign workers who make the city their home but on whose imported labour they have become wholly dependent; where rates of diabetes and obesity are exceptionally high; where health and safety procedures count for little, and traffic-related accidents are the number two killer after heart disease; where the very concept, let alone the practice, of environmental sustainability is barely acknowledged; and where the Islamic identity of the emirate is challenged by the relaxed mores of an ever-expanding expatriate presence. Here, beneath the glittering fa9ade and the brash opportunism, in the mundane but essential details of social infrastructure, would seem to be where the devil is most likely to be found. "How far will Dubai go?" wonders Krane. "It'll be fun to watch."

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TLS FEBRUARY 26 2010

31 Janet Aspey has an MA in Creative Writing from Manchester Metropolitan University and was reviews editor at Incwriters (the International Network and Community of Writers Society) for two years. David Bethea is Vilas Professor in Slavic at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Professor of Russian Studies at the University of Oxford. His most recent book is The Superstitious Muse: Thinking Russian literature mythopoeticaliy, 2009. James Campbell is the author of a biography of James Baldwin, Talking at the Gates, 1991. A collection of essays, Syncopations, was published in 2008. Lesley Chamberlain is the author of Motherland: A Philosophical History of Russia, 2004, and The Philosophy Steamer: Lenin and the exile of the intelligentsia, 2006. Jess Chandler studied English Literature at University College London, and is now working as a freelance writer. David Cohen is the author of Soviet Psychiatry: Politics and mental health in the USSR today, 1989. Mitchell Cohen is Professor of Political Science at Bernard Baruch College and the Graduate School of the City University of New York. He is co-editor of Dissent magazine. Jeffrey Collins is an Associate Professor of History at Queen 's University, Ontario. He is the author of The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes,2005. Tyler Cowen is the author of Create Your Own Economy: The path to prosperity in a disordered world, 2009. He is Professor of Economics at George Mason University. Guy Dammann teaches at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.

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Carol Ann Duffy became Poet Laureate in 2009. Grant Evans taught Anthropology for many years at the University of Hong Kong and has written widely on South East Asia. He is an adviser at the Academy of Social Sciences, Vientiane, Laos. Conor Farrington is a research associate at the Business School, Cambridge. Jordan Finkin is Cowley Lecturer in PostBiblical Hebrew and Fellow of St Cross College at the University of Oxford. Judith Flanders's most recent book, Consuming Passions: Leisure and pleasure in Victorian Britain, was published in 2006. Gregory Freidin is Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Stanford University. He is the author of a biography of Osip Mandelstam, A Coat of Many Colors, 1987, and the editor of The Enigma of Isaac Babel, 2009, and the Norton Critical Edition of Isaac Babet's Selected Writings, 2009. Jon Garvie is a freelance writer living in London. Martin Goodman is Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Wolfson College. His recent publications include Judaism in the Roman World: Collected essays, 2007, and Jews and Christians in the First Centuries, 2008. Michael Hofmann's translation of Alone in Berlin by Hans Fallada was published last year. Anjali Joseph's first novel , Saraswati Park, is to be published in July.

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Tim Dooley is reviews editor for Poetry London. His latest collection, Keeping Time, 2008, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

PAS1GRA

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SOLUTION TO CROSSWORD 818 '/J1e winner afCrossword 818 is

Paul Collet, London.

The sender of the first correct solution opened on March 19 will receive a cash prize of £40. Entri es should be addressed to TLS Crossword 822, Times Hou se, 1 Pennington Street, London E98 I SS.

CROSSWORD

ACROSS 1 Playwright suits hit mu sical to a "t" (5) 4 He wrote before dawn , and later before sunset, we're told (9) 9 Middleton 's good Cheapside girl (5,4) 10 SOil of trap for Pamela's dece ived husband (5) 11 A gate opened by Katie Hickman, revealing first letter arriving by railway (6) 12 Pipe (English? American?) for a loyal giant (8) 14 Lawrence work, ending in one by Stephens' (3.7) 16 Bird-lover in fabl ed account (4) 19 "The dread - - that is, death - will reign until the human race has begun a new cycle" (Yidal, Kalki) (4) 20 Greek poet makes Cretan seem mi staken (10) 22 Genre leads to higher rankings in light literature easily read (8) 23 Julia Frankau's was in jeopardy (6) 26 Jerome journal not so bu sy (5) 27 His 1981 play was a great hit (9) 28 Tchaikovsky's tragic noblewoman from Adriatic resort? (9) 29 Avuncular narrator (5)

A. P. D. Lawrie is studying for a PhD at the Univerity of Edinburgh on novel criticism and the rise of English studies in thefin de siixle. Toby Lichtig is a freelance writer and editor living in London.

Claudia Pugh-Thomas is a writer living in London. Sophie Quinn-Judge is the author of Ho Chi Minh: The missing years, 2003.

Peter Maber teaches English at the University of Cambridge, and writes on modern art.

Oliver Ready is a Junior Research Fellow in Russian Literature at Wolfson College, Oxford, and the Russia and East-Central Europe editor of the TLS.

David McKitterick is Librarian of Trinity College, Cambridge. His books include A History of Cambridge University Press in two volumes; Printing and the Book Trade in Cambridge, 1534- 1698, 1992, and Scholarship and Commerce, 1698- 1872, 1998.

Adam Roberts is President of the British Academy. He co-edited The United Nations Security Council and War: The Evolution of thought and practice since 1945, 2008.

Andrew McNeillie's memoir Once was published last year and a new collection of poems, In Mortal Memory, is due to appear this month. He is Professor of English at the University of Exeter. Caroline Miller is a freelance writer living in London.

Francis Robinson is Professor of the History of South Asia at Royal Holloway, University of London, and Sultan of Oman Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. Marci Shore is Assistant Professor of History at Yale University. She is the author of Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw generation's life and death in Marxism, 1918- 1968, which appeared in paperback in 2009.

Keith Miller is a freelance writer living in London. His book about St Peter's Basilica was published in 2007.

Henry Shukman's first collection of poems, In Doctor No's Garden, appeared in 2002.

Patrick O'Connor, who died suddenly last week, was the author of Toulouse-Lautrec: The nightlife of Paris, and The Amazing Blonde Woman: Dietrich's own style, both 1991. He was Consulting Editor to The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, 1998.

Timothy Snyder is Professor of History at Yale University. His most recent book is The Red Prince: The fall of a dynasty and the rise of modern Europe , 2008. His book Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin will be published later this year.

Heather O'Donoghue is a Reader in Old Norse at the University of Oxford. She is the author of From Asgard to Valhalla: The remarkable history of the Norse myths, 2008.

Andrew van der Vlies teaches Contemporary and Postcolonial Literatures and Literary Theory at the University of Sheffield. His book on J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace is forthcoming.

lan Pindar's debut collection of poems, Emporium , will be published in 20 11, and his second collection, Constellations, in 2012. Rachel Polonsky's new book, Molotov 's Magic Lantern, will be published next month.

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1 Hi s drama first seen in 1940, hi s theatre didn't appear until 1952 (9) 2 Last resort for Mailer, perhaps, viewed in the face of convention (5) 3 Modify ritual to produce intensive instruction (8) 4 Reid's horseman lacked it (4) 5 Secretive voices recorded by Buchanan? (ID) 6 Apocryphal protagonist associated with 14 Smollett (6) 7 That of Dundas revealed by Linton (9) 8 Poet suggests conflicting answers (5) 13 Where Hardy was in the dark, Brecht shed li ght (2,8) 15 Gillette's most confused damsel e'er staged (9) 17 Marathon participant won at least thirteen literary prizes (9) 18 She wanted us to look at her before her hi ghly prized lake hotel (8) 21 The Vicar of Wakefield, for example, in vehicle richly turned out (6) 22 Hornung's nocturnal robber reinforced by Koestler (5) 24 Encampment featured in Exodus may be taken from Ma cbeth (amply described) (5) 25 Hi s haiku not everyone 's cup of tea?

TLS FEBRUARY 26 2010

J ustin Wars haw is a barrister. Zinovy Zinik's new collection of stories and sketches in Russian, Pisma s Tretyego Berega (The Letters from the Third Shore) was published in 2008.

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sked in 1958 to give advice to the "would-be writer", Ernest Hemingway replied: "Let' s say that he should go out and hang himself because he finds that writing well is impossibly difficult. Then he should be cut down without mercy .... At least he will have the story of the hanging to commence with". The Guardian Review asked twenty-nine authors to list their "personal dos and don'ts" in the service of good writing. While several made it sound "impossibly difficult", few recommended the pursuit of unusual experience. "Work hard" seemed to be the answer to finding distinctive material. "Don ' t give up." Neil Gaiman's first tip is "Write" . His second is "Put one word after another". By the time you ' ve reached No 3 - "Finish what you ' re writing" - the book is done. Few suggested waiting for a good idea. "Don ' t just plan to write", said P. D. James. "Write." Ian Rankin advised the same, only more: "Write lots". Recognizing that the closest most contemporaries come to a life of action is jetting about the world, Margaret Atwood got down to specifics: I. Take a pencil to write with on aeroplanes.

Pens leak .... Take two pencils. 2. If both pencils break, yo u can do a rough job of sharpening with a nail file.

.Jack Llndsay

FANFROLICO AND AFTER

How it's done Ford' s "Don ' t have children". If that doesn't appeal, follow Helen Dunmore' s advice instead: " If you fear that taking care of your children will damage your writing, think of J. G. Ballard" (who raised three). Franzen forbids the use of "then" as a conjunction. Esther Freud forbids metaphors and similes. Elmore Leonard forbids adverbs - "a mortal sin". Mr Leonard forbid s quite a lot: weather at the opening, prologues, verbs "other than 'said ' to carry dialogue", exclamation marks, "suddenly", regional dialect, detailed descriptions of characters and things. We waited for him to say, break any or all of these rules if you know what you're doing, but in vain. Many of the writers gave the wisest advice of all: "Read". No special talent required.

3. Take something to write on. Paper is good.

Richard Ford got metaphysical: "Marry someone you love", as did Jonathan Franzen: " You have to love before you can be relentless". Among the prominent "don ' ts" was

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reviewer in a long-ago issue of the TLS described the limerick as "corresponding to the underlying ritual of Greek tragedy, with the parados of the first line, the

peripeteia of the second, the stichomythia of the two short lines, and the epiphaneia in the last". The definition is quoted by the distinguished Sovietologist and Movement poet Robert Conquest in his introduction to A Garden of Erses, a collection of limericks by "Jeff Chaucer". Several of Jeff's erses refer to fe llow writers. We would say that they are smutty, thought by some to be an essential part of limericism, but that would be a lie. They are filthy. They are tragically filthy. Leigh Hunt once, when talking to Landor, Remarked with considerable candor,

"Though my rhyme has pleased many The fact is with Jenny I can't get a stand, and can't stand her."

A Garden of Erses will reintroduce you to Oliver Twist ("Tried to fuck every woman he kissed / And was crossed off George Eliot's list"), Nicholas Nickleby ("Asks ' How would a nice slap-and-tickle be?'''), Jane Austen ("one's interest does quicken. / To know when and if / Captain Wentworth will get his great prick in") and a "famous old writer called Spender", about whom we will say only that his name - when pronounced in the accent of an elderly Movement poet rhymes with "pudenda" . Conquest -Chaucer is of the view that Edward Lear, perhaps the best-known writer of limericks, "had not truly grasped the form". He himself is sparing with the traditional starting point, "There was a young lady from ... ", preferring to focu s on unexpected rhymes (Georgia / ordure / bored ya) and enjambment ("In palazzos along the old Appi- / an Way I make Contessas happy"). To enjoy the parados, the peripeteia and the rest in full tragic glory, you may order A Garden of Erses from Orchises Press, P 0 Box 320533, Alexandria, Virginia for $12.95. It is dedicated to Martin Amis, but then so are most things these days.

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he London pub depicted on the dust jacket of Jack Lindsay' s memoir Fanfrolico and After (1962) is unidentified, but an educated guess says it is The Champion in Wells Street, Fitzrovia. The picture is taken from a history of the press by John Arnold, detailing its origins in Australia in the 1920s, before the di ssolution in London in 1930. Lindsay was the proprietor of Fanfrolico, as well as its most prolific author. The memoir, one of three, deals with Lindsay' s relationships with two women, who may be waiting

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for him here, together with the barman. The Fanfrolico Press: Satyrs, fauns and fine books is published by the Private Libraries Association of Pinner, Middlesex.

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avid Kader and Michael Stanton have edited Poetry of the Law, a homage to their own profession. Kader is a professor of law at Arizona State University, and Stanton a practising attorney. "Poems about lawyers tend to divide into Good Lawyer and Bad Lawyer", they say, but there is no mistaking where the emphasis lies. Jonathan Swift wrote: The lawyer is a common drudge, To fight our cause before the judge: And, what is yet a greater curse, Condemned to bear hi s client's purse.

It is a view that hasn' t altered much since. With some surprise, after laying down Poetry of the Law, we found ourselves pitying the poor things. It offers a choice between Pope's lawyer, who devours the worth of the thing the claimants fight over, and Anthony Hecht' s judge, who " in his chambers sits ... / And grimaces and spits". Asked to side with D. H. Lawrence, whose paintings were "arrested" in 1928, or the " magistrate, and six fat smaller bobbies" who did the deed, which would you favour? Is there anyone alive who thinks the law did well by Oscar Wilde? Even poets who practised law have it in for lawmakers. Roy Fuller, a solicitor for the Woolwich Building Society, depicts a judge "summoned from his crossword puzzle" to hand down a death sentence. It is left to Yvor Winters to speak up, in a poem dedicated to Edwin V. McKenzie, a Californian lawyer who fought against the conviction for murder of a Stanford University employee in 1933: You fought your battle, inch by inch of ground. When Justice had become an angry so und , When Judgment dwindled to an angry man, You named the limits of the civil span.

Poetry of the Law is published by University of Iowa Press at $22.

The Times Literary Supplement Limited. 2010. Published and lieenscd for distribution in electronic and all other derivative forms by The Times Literary Supplement Limited. Times House. I Pennington Street. London E98 lBS. England. Telephone: 020-7782 5000 Fax: 020-7782 4966 E-mail: letters @the-tls.eo.uk without whose express permission no part may be reproduced. Primed by Ne,,·sJlfinters (Koowsley) Limited. Kitling Road. PrescOl. Merseyside. L34 9HN. England EUROPEAN PRICES: Belgium €3.50. France €3.50. Germany €4.20_ Greeee€4.20.ltaly €4.00_ Netherlands €4.20. Portugal €3.50. Spain €3.50. CANADIAN PRICES: Toronto $5.50_ Outside S5.75. ROW: Denmark DKR30. leeland lKR625. India lNR400. Israel NlS34. Kuw ait KWS I.25. Malta MTL2.1O. New Zealand NZS7. Norway NKR32. Singapore SGS6_ UAE AE$ 15. T LS suhscription rat es ( 12 months/52 issues): UK £115. Europe £140. USA $1 69. Canada (Air freight) $225_ Rest of World (Airmail) £165. Please send cheque or credit card details to: TLS Subscriptions_Tower Housc. Sovereign Park. Market Harborough. LE87 4JJ_ UK. Telephone 01858 438781. For US and Canada please send to: TLS Subscriptions_ P.O. Box 3000 Dcnville Nl 07834_ USA. Telephone 1-800 370 9040 (new subscriptions only) and 1-800 783 4903 (general enquiries).

TLS FEBRUARY 26 2010

J .C . 08