ILS

Times House, 1 Pennington

ART HISTORY

BIOGRAPHY
3

5
Rachel Polonsky

Peter Maber

Patrick O'Connor
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

Andrew McConnell Scott The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi -

Laughter, madness and the story of Britain 's greatest comedian
Street, London E98 lBS
Telephone: 020 7782 5000 LETTERS TO THE EDITOR 6 'The Brothers Karamazov' , Herbert's couplet, Wotcher, etc
Fax: 020 7782 4966
JEWISH STUDIES 7 Martin Goodman Shlomo Sand The Invention of the Jewish People
letters@the-tls.co.uk Mitchell Cohen Alexander Yakobson and Amnon Rubinstein Israel and the Family
of Nations - The Jewish nation-state and human rights
Jordan Finkin Max Weinreich History of the Yiddish Language - Two volumes

POLITICS & HISTORY 10 Timothy Snyder Tomasz Kamusella The Politics of Language and Nationalism in
Modern Central Europe
B etween "the benign plague of naive real-
ism" , as Osip Mandelstam called it,
and Socialist Realism, which was anything
POEMS 10 Andrew McNeillie The Journey
13 Gottfried Benn Bauxite
but benign, young Russian artists and critics 24 Carol Ann Duffy A Rare Bee
experienced "one of the most thrilling epi-
sodes ... in the history of art" as for the first HISTORY 11 Sophie Quinn-Judge Bend Greiner War Without Fronts. Mark Philip Bradley
time they saw the works of Monet, Cezanne, Vietnam at War
Picasso and Matisse. The Museum of Adam Roberts Mark Mazower No Enchanted Palace - The end of empire and the
Modern Western Art in Moscow was liqui- ideological origins of the United Nations
dated by order of Stalin in 1948, but its hold- Jeffrey Collins Jonathan Israel A Revolution of the Mind - Radical Enlightenment
ings miraculously survived, and hang in that and the intellectual origins of modern democracy
city still. The remarkable story is told in a
new book reviewed by Rachel Polonsky. ECONOMICS 13 Tyler Cowen John Lanchester Whoops! - Why everyone owes everyone and no
"Whatever was wrong with the Stalinist one can pay
state", writes Gregory Freidin, reviewing
"last year's most talked about work of fiction COMMENTARY 14 Lesley Chamberlain Back to origins - Heidegger through post-Darwinian eyes
in Russia", Kammenyi most by Alexander Zinovy Zinik Freelance
Terekhov (below), " it was saturated with a Then and Now TLS February 3, 1978 - Jan Morris on Gandhi
sense of mission .... This is what both the
ARTS 17 Keith Miller Van Doesburg and the International Avant-Garde (Tate Modern).
novel's protagonist and its author, drowning
in anomie, find lacking in post-Communist Gladys Fabre and Doris Wintgens Hotte, editors Van Doesburg and
Russia" . the International Avant-Garde
Guy Dammann Sergei Prokofiev The Gambler (Royal Opera House)
Con or Farrington Ralph P. Locke Musical Exoticism - Images and reflections

FICTION 19 Gregory Freidin Alexander Terekhov Kamennyi Most - Roman

Marci Shore Ferenc Barnas The Ninth; Translated by Paul Olchvary
Oliver Ready Roman Senchin Minus ; Translated by Arch Tait
Andrew van der Vlies Mark Behr Kings of the Water
Anjali Joseph Andrea Levy The Long Song
Jess Chandler Louise Welsh Naming the Bones

FICTION IN BRIEF 22 Judith Flanders Ann Cleeves Blue Lightning

Janet Aspey Jo Nesbj) The Snowman; Translated by Don Bartlett
Heather O'Donoghue Qiu Xiaolong The Mao Case
A. P. D. Lawrie Frank Tallis Deadly Communion
Justin Warshaw Nigel Farndale The Blasphemer
Modern artists' abandonment of time-
honoured modes and subjects had a counter- LITERAR Y CRITICISM 23 Caroline Miller Zadie Smith Changing My Mind - Occasional essays
part in Martin Heidegger's attempt to undo
the whole course of Western philosophy. POETRY 24 Henry Shukman W. D. Snodgrass Not For Specialists - New and selected poems
Behind these upheavals, Lesley Chamberlain Tim Dooley E. A. Markham Looking Out, Looking In - New and selected poems
argues in Commentary, lay the work of
Charles Darwin. In his search for the origins IN BRIEF 26 Dwayne Raymond Mornings With Mailer. Oliver Postgate Seeing
of Being, Heidegger read "a story parallel to Things. Peter Parshall, editor The Woodcut in Fifteenth-Century
the history of evolutionary biology into the Europe. Saleem H. Ali Islam and Education. Robert Chandler
history of the German language". Two Alexander Pushkin. Felix Guattari Les Annees d'hiver 1980- 1985.
remarkable language-histories are welcomed James C. Scott The Art of Not Being Governed. George L. Hersey
this week, which sees Jewish Book Week get Falling in Love With Statues
under way in London: a two-volume edition
TRAVEL 28 Jon Garvie Jan Morris Contact!
of Max Weinreich's History of the Yiddish
Language, and an "encyclopedic" history of SOCIAL STUDIES 30 Claudia Pugh-Thomas Jim Krane Dubai - The story of the world's fastest city
the language-politics of Central Europe, "the
earnestness of [which] undertaking cannot 31 This week's contributors, Crossword
quite conceal an underlying romance ... with
language as such". A romance with language NB 32 J. C. How to write, Lewd limericks, Lawyer verse
as such is what we expect to find in poetry,
and what Alice Quinn, in New York, and Cover picture: "Torso (Prototype Of A New Image)" by Kazimir Severinovich Malevich; Courtesy State Ru ssian Museum , St Petersburg © Culture-images/
I will be looking for among the entries to 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
this year' s TLS Poetry Competition (details
Alamy; p20 © Lenke Szilagyi ; p25 © Kathy deWitt/Alamy
on p25). We wish all poets joy of their The Times Literary Supplement (ISSN 0307661 , USPS 021-626) is published weekly by The Times Literary Supplement Limited, London UK, and distributed in
Muse. 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
AJ offices. POSTMASTER: please send address corrections to TLS, PO Box 3000, Denville, NJ 07834, USA

TLS FEBRUARY 26 2010


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
W the least cultured of Stalin's
men) laughed at the Matisse
paintings in
whole entourage echoed him: "Heh, heh,
Moscow ' s
Museum of Modern Western Art in 1948, his
heh" . "Many years have passed, but this cho-
rus of chuckles still rings in my ears", Nina
Iavorskaia, deputy director of the museum,
recorded forty years later. Hours before Voro-
shilov ' s visit, on official instructions, nerv-
ous 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 "cosmopoli-
tanism", he is unlikely to have taken a risk
for Matisse.) The eighty-six-year-old Iavor-
skaia's still-tremulous published reminis-
cences of the dispersal of the great collection
(a bitter and dramatic finale to the 130 pieces
of art criticism in this illuminating antho-
logy) mark the crumbling of what the art
historian Ilia Dorontchenkov calls "that invis-
ible 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 Mos-
cow 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 ' post-
Cezanne 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
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
ART HISTORY
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-speak-
ing 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-
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 visi-
tors to "join a march through time
following Britain's struggle for demo-
cracy over two centuries". A collection
of posters, banners, political cartoons
and significant objects, ranging from
Thomas Paine's death mask to Keir
TLS FEBRUARY 26 2010
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 sophisti-
cated 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. Dorontch-
enkov' s anthology also multiplies our perspec-
tives 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".
Hardie's pit-lamp, tells the story from
the Peterloo Massacre (1819) to the
present day, Naturally, the narrative
presented is stirring rather than even-
handed. The workers shown on this
poster, issued by the Labour Party in
support of Lloyd George's "People's
Budget" in 1909, were being encour-
aged to support a Liberal policy rather
than a Labour one, www,phm.org,uk
3
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 paint-
ings: "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 exter-
nal 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 Suprema-
tist 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 crea-
tion".
The creative path of Malevich (and his
contemporaries Mikhail Larionov, Natalia
Goncharova and David Burliuk, among
others) cannot be understood without refer-
ence to the tastes of the rich men who made a
home for contemporary French painting in
Moscow in the 1900s. In 1903, the textile mil-
lionaire Sergei Ivanovich Shchukin bought
his first Cezanne from the Parisian art dealer
Paul Durand-Ruel. He visited Matisse's stu-
dio and, after deliberation , purchased a still
life, "Crockery on a Table". In 1909, he com-
missioned "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, Gau-
guin, 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 twen-
tieth 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, para-
doxically, point a new direction for Russia' s
artistic youth who "already have" that "crude-
ness and simplicity that Matisse wants to
acquire by force". Benois conjectured that
the path Shchukin was following in his acqui-
sitions 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
4 ART HISTORY

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 Mos-
cow 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 ques-
tioning its own ultimate meaning". The real-
ist 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 con-
cept 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 " integration" with the outside world and
of the evil spirit", in which there was fit "autarchy", an oscillation which continues to
" material for the agonizing religious labor the present day, when "anti-Western senti-
that sanctifies the Russian soul". Andrey ment has returned to Russian cultural life" . In
Bely, in a rare example of anti-Semitism in his acknowledgements, he notes the menac-
Russian art-critical discourse, warned darkly ing hostility to his own research on
that international Jewry was using " modern Russian-Western cultural dialogue of
art" to "separate the flesh of the nation from Vladimir Kemenov, the chairman of the
its spirit". Lenin, meanwhile, told the Ger- examiners of his MA dissertation in 1983,
man Communist Clara Zetkin that he did not and the vice-president of the Soviet Academy
understand "the works of Expressionism, of Fine Arts, who began his own career in the
Futurism, Cubisms and other isms" , and that early 1930s as one of Stalin ' s "red guards" .
they gave him "no pleasure". Mandelstam called " naive realism" a
Dorontchenkov's book is laced with a parti- "benign plague". The turn to Socialist Real-
cular pathos. He describes in his preface ism (a style which, as Dorontchenkov notes,
Russia's long-standing oscillation between 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 preach-
ing?" the secret police asked Malevich dur-
ing 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 Voro-
shilov): "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 back-
ground of culture, whose names are hardly
remembered: the curators, librarians and
scholars who made sure that precious arte-
facts 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 Tern-
ovets, who first set eyes on Matisse' s "Music
and Dance" in Shchukin's home in 1911 ,
whispered with her colleagues, made tele-
phone 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.

----------------------------------------------------~----------------------------------------------------
more than the sum of its parts. Where it
might have made a real contribution, in study-

Words of lesjeunes ing mutual and divergent influence and devel-

opment, we instead find a piecemeal
approach in which potentially interesting
topics such as inter-class relations, anti-
he Slade School of Art, founded nature, and Dora Carrington's involvement Semitism, and Bloomsbury's bisexuality,

T
in 1871, was by 1910 a curious mix-
ture 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 stu-
dents 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 Draw-
ing, a practising surgeon before he became
an artist; a teacher whose knowledge of anat-
omy, as well as his own technical insecuri-
ties, 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 draughts-
man" , and would later say that he learnt more
about structure, form , and colour from play-
ing 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-Impres-
sionists, 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 ser-
vice 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 fre-
quently overlapping and mutually inspira-
tional 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 techno-
logy, Paul Nash's mystical understanding of
with design projects. Though little of this is
groundbreaking in the context of the many
existing individual biographies and mono-
graphs, 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 genera-
tion: it is the story of how les jeunes (as Fry
christened them) came of age in the most
changeable of periods; though all five sur-
vived 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 him-
self together with the mistress he couldn't
live with or without - the melodramatic ver-
sion of Gertler's relationship with Car-
rington. The most touching, and illuminating,
moments, however, come not from grand
overviews, but in miniature: Spencer describ-
ing the agonizing way success can be trans-
formed 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
make fleeting appearances, never to be devel-
oped. 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 contin-
gency: Nash, bringing his experience of
poetry to his metamorphic visions of land-
scape; 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 fin-
ished", "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, throw-
ing 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.

TLS FEBRUARY 26 2010

 BIOGRAPHY 5

hat did Lord Byron see in Joseph lesser talents such as the appalling-sounding

W Grimaldi? The friendship between

poet and clown is just one unlikely
aspect of the performer' s life, which is still
In knots "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
celebrated each year with a memorial service texts of some of the pantomime sketches,
conducted by the Clowns' Chaplain at Holy PATRICK O ' CONNOR Scott describes the gradual evolution of the
Trinity in Dalston. "Grimaldi was panto- stage persona the clown created, his make-up
mime" , writes Andrew McConnell Scott in Andrew McConnell Scott and patchwork costumes, the dances and
his biography. The star comic turn at Covent acrobatic stunts. One of Grimaldi's greatest
Garden, Drury Lane and Sadler' s Wells in THE PANTOMIME LIFE triumphs was in Mother Goose at Co vent
the early decades of the nineteenth century, OF JOSEPH GRIMALDI Garden in the winter of 1806. In the play,
Grimaldi, like many comedians, traded in Laughter, madness and the story of Britain's Grimaldi was Squire Bugle, the villainous
greatest comedian
humour that was laced with violence and landlord, out to wed the virtuous heroine,
433pp. Canongate. £20.
cruelty. To invite laughter and mockery is Colinette. In the Harlequinade that followed,
978 I 847672957
often the refuge of wounded and uncertain he was Clown. Thomas Hood described his
souls, and this was surely what drew Byron antics with the Pantaloon of Joe Bologna:
(ten years younger) to the clown. They would father had witnessed the Gordon Riots, but Jo "Flung and floundered, and flounced and
sometimes spend the afternoon together, and experienced something, although on a bounced, and shuffled and scuffled, and
then Byron would stand in the wings of the smaller scale, which was almost as violent - draggled and wiggle-waggled, shambled, gam-
theatre awaiting the conclusion of the per- the "Old Price" war at Covent Garden. The bolled, scrambled and skimble-skambled".
formance , so that they might continue their rebuilt theatre, under the management of Scott suggests that there was always an ele-
conversation. Thomas Harris and Charles Kemble, opened ment of "off-beam sexuality" in Grimaldi's
The Grimaldi story is that of five genera- in September 1809. In order to raise funds to playing, and the rigorous physicality of his
tions, beginning with Joseph's great-grand- payoff the builders, prices were raised across Joseph Grimaldi in Mother Goose, by turns took its toll. There is a pathetic descrip-
father, John Baptist, a dancer, comedian and the board. The regular audience turned up Samuel De Wilde, 1807 tion of his state as he came off stage, years
dentist - "pursuits that were far from incom- night after night and stopped the perform- later in a piece called The Orphan of Peru.
patible": Scott cites a Parisian tooth-puller ances, chanting "OP" and staging fights and danger and discomfort, the gymnastics and Between scenes he collapsed into the arms of
on the Pont-Neuf who entertained the "performing a tribal dance". This nightly stunts necessary to entertain audiences result "men positioned in the wings where they laid
crowd with jokes and a pet monkey while he scrimmage lasted an incredible sixty-seven in injuries and disfigurement. Mrs Siddons, him on a table and vigorously rubbed the mus-
performed the operations. John Baptist days. There are stories of angry stage carpen- Sheridan, Dora Jordan and other great figures cles that had 'gathered up into huge knots"'.
Grimaldi's son, the fairground acrobat who ters deliberately leaving trapdoors open, so make appearances in the tale. All the while, Scott' s biography is rich in detail. He suc-
became famous in Paris in the 1740s as that the star would fall through and be Grimaldi's celebrity grew. ceeds in evoking the London theatrical world
"Jambe de fer" ("Iron Leg"), made the transi- injured. Fires break out, managements go But what were his appearances like, that of the time in all its riotous energy, but the
tion from street performer to stage, even bust, ri val clowns steal each other' s jokes, gained him such renown and allowed to story is not a happy one. The clown's final
appearing at the Opera-Comique (then in journeys by stagecoach are fraught with him to outlast the short-lived enthusiasm for tragedy was to see his own son, who had
Saint-Germain). It was his son , Giuseppe, risen up to become an admired performer, die
who settled in London around 1758, and was as the result of a life of dissipation. Arriving
engaged by Garrick to be maitre de ballet one evening at his parents ' house in Isling-
at Drury Lane. Giuseppe, known as "the ton, he was "pale with disease and squalid
Signor" was something of a reprobate, with 'He is a writer of originality with dirt and want. steeped in degrada-
children by several partners, one of whom and grace and his novel is a delight' tion". Not long before, Grimaldi had himself
(Rebecca Brooker) was the mother of Joseph. bid farewell to the stage in a performance at
Terry Coleman , Guardian (1966)
By the time of his birth in 1778, things were Drury Lane. Of all the descriptions in the
looking up for his father, who eventually set book, the account of this evening gives one
up house with Rebecca, two more children, of the clearest ideas of what he was like.
four maids and an African footman named Barely able to stand, he chose a favourite old
Sam, in Little Russell Street. routine which "called for Clown to be seated
The Signor, although a talented dancer and while a barber worked busily around his
man of the theatre, was a ferocious teacher chops". Grimaldi held the basin of soapy
and father, who drilled the children merci- water between his knees and sang one of his
lessly. His younger son, John , at his father's most famous songs, "Hot Codlins", about an
death in 1788, immediately signed on to join apple-seller who gets drunk on gin. Each
a ship's crew. So eager was he to get away verse would end with a double entendre, but
from London, the theatre, and every memory Grimaldi would not utter the word; instead
of his father, that when he learnt that the ship the audience shouted it out, at which he
was not to depart for another ten days, he would turn to them, and cry in mock outrage,
abandoned his possessions and swam to a "For shame". And there it is, that London
neighbouring vessel, due to sail the next day. humour that found its way down to the likes
He signed on as cabin boy - he was eight of George Robey, Nellie Wall ace and Max
years old. Miller. Robey - "The Prime Minister of
Later in his life, when he wrote some mem- Mirth" - once he had his audience roaring
oirs - edited after his death by Charles Dick- with laughter, would turn to them with the
ens - Joseph Grimaldi romanticized his admonishment, "Please, remember where
father's career and attributes. He had been on ' Elegantly erotic, with masses of that indefinable you are - kindly temper your hilarity with a
the stage himself since the age of two, and in quality, style ... this has the real stuff of immortality' modicum of reserve", while Wallace (always
the months following his father' s death, he billed as "The essence of eccentricity")
found himself acting in crowd scenes at B.A. Young, Punch (1966) would wag her finger, and say, "Ah, I don't
Sadler's Wells, and later in the evening in the mean what you mean". One of Grimaldi's
afterpiece at Drury Lane; he frequently had 'The novel has a dynamism defined by one of its own phrases. harsher obituarists wrote, " We don't know
to run - across the fields then - through Clerk- Ha ven't you heard of £instein's Law? Pleasure turns into energy' why so much fuss has been made about the
enwell, "scattering the sheep at Gray' s Inn Clara Janes, £1 Pais (Madrid, 1988) death of this certainly very clever mounte-
and Lincoln's Inn", in eight minutes. bank". The crowds who choked the brow of
Although there were initial setbacks, by 1789 Out of print in the UK for 20 years - over 5 million copies sold worldwide Pentonville hill to watch his funeral cortege
a Times critic had singled him out: "the tricks might have answered, as Scott concludes,
... were admirably played off by that little because he was "someone who operated
~ M ODER N CL A SS I CS
Marmozet Grimaldi" . \3JI www.penguinclassics.com always in the present tense, whose very pur-
Grimaldi's story is that of the London pose was to catch his audience by surprise
theatre during some of its stormiest days. His with a visceral alteration of the now".

TLS FEBRUARY 26 2010

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 Her-
bert. 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 bet-
ter 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 sen-
sibly 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 com-
memorate 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.
--------~-------
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 "reason-
ably fair". To this more disinter-
ested 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 clan-
destine revolutionary" . Contrary to
Rice, in Dostoevsky' s letter to Pobe-
donostsev, 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 Alyo-
sha is not "lusting after" Grushenka
when he visits her. His mother's hys-
teria is caused by Fyodor Karama-
zov'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
-------------------------------~.-------------------------------
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.
-------~------
The Khanates
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). How-
ever, the War Office was concerned
enough to acquire every new pub-
lication 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
letters@the-tls.co.uk
identification with her suffering and
his distress over his father's threat-
ened 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 asso-
ciated to "Aleksei Man of God", a
popular Orthodox saint. It is sympto-
matic of Rice' s "clinical" approach
that he labels Alyosha's sublime,
epiphanous dream vision a "halluci-
nation" and "hysterical seizure",
analogous to epilepsy. Dostoevsky,
though, tentatively applies the diag-
nostic 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
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 adminis-
tration of Muslim Central Asia was
in some respects less oppressive than
Britain's in India.
PHILlP LONGWORTH
5 Parkgate Mews, London N6.
-------~,-----­
Wotcher
Sir, - The greeting "What cheer"
(see Michael Charles's letter, Janu-
ary 15) was in use among the
English of Connecticut and Massa-
chusetts at least as early as the
1630s. And not only by the colo-
nists. In his Newes From America,
published in London in 1638, Cap-
tain John Underhill recalled the
following exchange on the eve of
the 1636 Pequot war: "The Indians
spying of us came running in multi-
tudes 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
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 liter-
ary 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 formu-
las" 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 com-
mented on by reference to J. M.
Coetzee's novel about Dostoevsky,
The Master of Petersburg. Dosto-
evsky 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 obses-
sional illness as is Professor Rice.
DA VID CROSSEN
I Lexington A venue,
New York 10010.
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'
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
him", was "being selfless, or merely
self-assured". The answer is nei-
ther; Hacker was simply saying
what he believed to be true. I had
nothing to do with the commission-
ing of the review of my own book,
and knew nothing about it until
after it had been received.
GALEN STRA WSON
Department of Linguistics and
Philosophy, Massachusetts Institute
of Technology, Cambridge,
Massachusetts 02139.
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 dif-
fers from your reviewer's conclu-
sions. 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 bleed-
ing 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 Surgeon-
Commander 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.
-------~-----­
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.
--------~-------
Cool
Sir, - I too thought of Lincoln's
nineteenth-century use of " cool",
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 heart-
less: what my (post-war American)
generation would call "cold".
ANDRE MAYER
79 Pemberton Street, Cambridge,
Massachusetts 02140.

n AD 67, a year after the Jews of Jeru-
I salem 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 fel-
low 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 thor-
oughly 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 read-
ers, 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 out-
side 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 Jeru-
salem 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 writ-
ings 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 Pal-
estine and was a sophisticated author in the
Greek rhetorical tradition, would lay his argu-
ment 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,
JEWISH STUDIES
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 antiq-
uity was composed in Galilee, including the
Mishnah. It is hard to imagine that this infor-
mation can come as a surprise to Israelis of
any background in the light of the consider-
able 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 coast-
lands 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 discus-
sion 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 conver-
sion, 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 con-
verted in this period, not least for intermar-
riage, is not in doubt, and the evidence
adduced hy Sand (as for many of his alle-
gedly 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 popu-
lations to Christianity within the Christian
Roman state from the fourth century, without
evoking considerably greater hostile evi-
dence 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
TLS FEBRUARY 26 2010
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 con-
siderable extent by religious identity, referred
to the Jews also primarily in religious terms
- as a "secta", "superstitio" , or (on rare occa-
sions, 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 unambig-
uous, and the same terminology can be found
in a law, preserved in the fifth-century Theod-
osian code, of the Christian Emperor Cons tan-
FIavius Josephus surrendering to Titus, 66
AD;from a fifteenth-century manuscript of
Josephus'sJewish War (detail)
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 his-
tory, to write about a subject of which he pat-
ently knows so little? The answer is refresh-
ingly simple. His aim, which he does not try
to disguise, is to undermine the claim of
Israeli Jews who come from diaspora commu-
nities 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
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 justi-
fied , 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 ludi-
crous. 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 know-
ledge 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 atten-
tion 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 enthu-
siasts 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.
8 JEWISH STUDIES
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 mat-
tered 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 con-
sciousness - notably Hebrew and Palestine.
The latter, then broken into three Ottoman dis-
tricts, was for them the Land of Israel.
And so another problem emerged force-
fully after the First World War: Arab opposi-
tion. 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 Edu-
cation, are surely right to say in their impor-
tant 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 Rubin-
stein 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 intel-
lectuals. How many successful, democratic
bi-national states have there been? How
many brought peace between long-warring
nations? Would bi-nationalism bring a solu-
tion, 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 trou-
bled 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 fore-
close 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 pur-
suit, 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 disagree-
ment.
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. Con-
sider 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 Rubin-
stein. 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 Pales-
tine. 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 self-
determination 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 reli-
gion 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 anti-
Zionists champion Palestinian nationalism,
but refuse Jews self-definition. Moreover,
they point out that democracy doesn ' t make a
TLS FEBRUARY 26 2010
state culturally "neutral". Israel can be a Jew-
ish state and a state of all its citizens, because
the legal-civic meaning of democracy is dis-
tinct 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 lan-
guages 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 minor-
ities? 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 pro-
pose, 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, Aus-
tralia, 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 Gover-
nor 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 Catholi-
cism "the Religion of the State", while prom-
ising 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
years after the Holocaust, gives Jews citizen-
ship 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 Euro-
pean norm" for nation-states with diasporas
to maintain special bonds, one legitimate
expression of these manifests itself in prefer-
ential 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, com-
prise the sole refugee population of the imme-
diate post-Second World War era that have
not been resettled. They wonder why crusad-
ers 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 any-
one 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 transforma-
tions in Israel's political culture since the
1970s, when its nationalist Right defeated the
social democratic Left that had long domi-
nated the Jewish state. Yakobson and Rubin-
stein don't address the corrosive impact on
internal democracy of the military occupa-
tion 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.

Pregnant with meanings
ewish Eastern Europe in the first decades
J of the twentieth century was a charged bat-
tleground of ideologies and cultural affini-
ties. 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 clus-
ter of beliefs known as "Hebraism" .In 1925, a
plan was conceived by a group of intellectu-
als, 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 head-
quarters were transferred to New York, where
the institute has remained ever since.
Modern Yiddish Studies has seen the publi-
cation of many great books: for example,
Ayzik Zaretski's Yiddish grammar (Prak-
tishe yidishe gramatik) , the first , and lament-
ably only, instalment in the Great Dictionary
of the Yiddish Language, and Max Wein-
reich ' s History of the Yiddish f.anguage
(Geshikhte fun der yidisher shprakh). Com-
pleted 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 Yid-
dish, this work attempts to provide a system-
atic way of understanding not only the
language and how it works, its distinctive fea-
tures 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 lan-
guage" , that is, a system which is quite liberal
in regulating the influx of material from other
languages. In locating and dating these influ-
ences, Weinreich provides a great deal of use-
ful 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 regulat-
ing 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, Ger-
man, Polish, Ukrainian, English, to name a
few , are all such "stock languages". Only por-
tions 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
JEWISH STUDIES
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 com-
bined, 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 contri-
butions 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 per-
ceived role as the social, cultural , religious
and, indeed, linguistic organizer of lewish
Eastern European life. That Yiddish assimi-
lated 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 mimid-
bor 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 "lift-
ing 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
TLS FEBRUARY 26 2010
9
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 for-
mal 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 rel-
ished 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 lan-
guage. For a people confronted with numer-
ous 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 cata-
strophe of the Shoah only boosted the desire
to strengthen the bulwark. Weinreich ' s dedica-
tion to the project of YIYO did involve setting
a normative framework which could moder-
ate (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 contem-
porary 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 commentar-
ies) were translated into English by Shlomo
Noble. The text, without the notes, appeared
in 1980. And while the text itself is of histori-
cal 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 land-
mark 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 pre-
cincts. 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 sim-
ply 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 His-
tory itself - will require the energy and endur-
ance that marked the generation of YIYO ' s
foundation. In his poem "Learning in a Dead
Language" M. S. Merwin descants on the pas-
sions to be revealed by such an exploration:
" What you come to remember becomes your-
self." No language loved is ever lost or dead.
Harel
A pioneering study of Syria's key Jewish
communities, bringing to light an enormous
amount of material and providing a broad ,
multifaceted perspective on Jewish life in Syria.
320pag ••
978-1-90411~2 £35.00/$59.50
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 ••
978-1-87477oH15-3 £39.50/$64.50
INSIDERS AND OUTSIDERS
Dilemmas ofEast European Jewry
Edited by Richard I. Cohen,
Jonathan FrankeI, and Stefani Hoffman
A perceptive examination of how Jews redefined
their identity cultural, social, and political in the
context of the nation·states of eastern Europe.
262 pages, 13 colour illustrations, paperback
978-1-906764-00-5 £19.95/$29.95
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
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how it was destroyed, and how it is being
memorialized.
192 pages, 74 colour photographs, map, paperback
978-1-9067~H £15.95/$27.95
Published in North America by Indiana University Press
PSBN 978-0-253-22185-8)
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EWISH MYSTICISM
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The LiUman Library of Jewish Civilization
www.littman.co.uk
10
European romance
Does language, 'solidarity through the written word', inspire nationalism?
o read Tomasz Kamusella's magnifi-
T
cent history of language politics is to
be reminded of Jan Potocki' s Manll-
scrit 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 transi-
tion " 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 cir-
cle. 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 Ara-
maic, 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 substan-
tial issue of historical background with the
same thoroughness that he applies to the lin-
guistic context. Everything begins from first
principles, sometimes more than once. The
history of Latin and German and their compe-
tition 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 his-
tories of Old Church Slavonic and Ottoman
Turkish , languages less supported in the cru-
cial 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 chan-
cery Ruthenian, the East Slavic court lan-
guage 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
POLITICS & HISTORY
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 lexi-
cons, 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 Polish-
Lithuanian state, and Taras Shevchenko gave
modern Ukrainian its grammar. As for Alex-
ander 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 schol-
ars transliterated Czech words into the
Hebrew script. Muslim Tatars had higher lit-
eracy 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:
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
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 multi-
fariousness of history. In Nations and Nation-
alism (1983), Gellner memorably argues that
national activists seek the isomorphism of lan-
guage, national feeling and state boundaries.
Nationalism, as the aspiration to such iso-
morphism (says Kamusella after Gellner),
became the only way to legitimate statehood
in the twentieth century. In the Gellnerian
account, national activism arises as an unin-
tended side effect of the modernization poli-
cies of multinational states. As they school
their populations and expand, empires unwit-
tingly create linguistic groups suffering from
urban anomie, but newly capable of solidar-
ity 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 polit-
ical decisions, while contingent, cannot be
seen as entirely arbitrary. What seems "arbi-
trary" from a linguistic perspective may have
an intelligible political motivation.
Even in the age of empire, states were func-
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 para-
digm 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 Ger-
man better than they knew Polish. In addition,
religion influences national movements, often
at great distance. Jesuits create the educa-
tional infrastructure that Habsburg emperors
or Polish kings then appropriate. Protestant
missionaries appear again and again, here pub-
lishing 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 demon-
strates, 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 ques-
tions. The state that disrupts the Gellnerian
paradigm more than any other is Nazi Ger-
many. 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 inauspi-
cious 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 homo-
geneity. 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 set-
ting, 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 influ-
ence of the Greek diaspora throughout the
Ottoman Empire. Once a people is seen as a

nation, in the modern political sense of want-
ing 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
----------------------------------------------------~----------------------------------------------------
wo new books on the Vietnam war pro-
T vide a chance to refresh our memories
of a conflict that figures so prominently
in current thinking about the war in Afghan-
istan. 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 experi-
ence. Bernd Greiner's War Without Fronts ,
a thick volume including more than a hundred
pages of notes, focuses on war crimes, treat-
ment 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 lead-
ership 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 schol-
arly study of the topic to make use primarily
of US archival evidence. It takes imagination
to think back to the 1960s, when the percep-
tion 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 supe-
riors of the abuses being committed. (Sea-
soned 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 vio-
lence 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 popu-
lated 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 interpreta-
tion 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. Peas-
ants who chose not to be herded into refugee
camps and to stay on their land found them-
POLITICS & HISTORY
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 mem-
bership 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
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 cam-
paign 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 reac-
tion 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 investiga-
tor, "Sir, we have permission to kill anyone in
this area if we want to". In all of South Viet-
nam, 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 measure-
ment 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
TLS FEBRUARY 26 2010
ambition for total history that recalls the nine-
teenth, 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 earnest-
ness of the undertaking cannot quite conceal
an underlying romance: not with anyone
nation, or with one language, but with lan-
guage 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-
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 geo-
graphy of the Communist movement is less
firm than his mastery of the military docu-
mentation of investigations. He seems to con-
fuse 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 pro-
vincial 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 south-
central 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 Commu-
nists forced many cadres to flee to the moun-
tains 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 read-
ing Mark Bradley's Vietnam at War, which
focuses on the Vietnamese experience of the
conflict. Bradley's book takes on the chal-
lenge 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
11
ened by learning, but generous and fair. He
makes neutrality seem like a powerfully ani-
mating 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 national-
ism in this region should begin with it. It
provides countless sound judgements, and
dispenses with a tremendous amount of
nonsense.
the memory of the war". But he draws a pic-
ture 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 Bud-
dhist 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 will-
ingly under dire conditions to provide medi-
cal 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 theo-
retical 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 unbi-
ased, broad-based study of Communist atti-
tudes 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 Viet-
cong resistance in the 1960s and the Afghan
insurgency today. Although President Barack
Ohama recently called the Vietnamese resist-
ance a broad-based, popular movement,
Greiner takes care to steer clear of such an
assessment. He emphasizes instead the appal-
ling 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".
12
he trouble with internationalism, in its
T 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, lib-
eral imperialists, Leninists, Trotskyites, Iran-
ian 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 inter-
national 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 par-
amount 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 demoli-
tion. However, Professor Mazower is disarm-
ingly modest in his claims for the book,
which is " nothing more than the sketch of an
-----------------------------------------------------~-----------------------------------------------------
o borrow one of Isaiah Berlin 's
T 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 Enlighten-
ment In Radical Enlightenment (2001) and
Enlightenment Contested (2007), Israel pro-
duced 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 dysto-
pia of madhouses and prisons. He is an
unapologetic historian of ideas, and his impa-
tience with postmodern fads is refreshing.
Israel's mission is to redeem the Enlighten-
HISTORY
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 think-
ing 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 con-
struction of apartheid in South Africa. This
may seem to us today to be wildly inconsist-
ent, 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-
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 "moder-
ate" 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 moder-
ates for their caution, and presents them
as docile abettors of the counter-Enlighten-
ment He unabashedly lionizes the radicals.
They alone, supposedly, defended human
equality, democracy and liberty with suffi-
cient vigour.
Israel's thesis has been criticized for its
reductiveness, but the sheer learning of his
TLS FEBRUARY 26 2010
wealth was " not an English, nor an Anglo-
Saxon 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 ori-
gins 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 law-
bound 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 anti-
colonial 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
big books tends to deflect the charge. Indeed,
it is hard to imagine what they could have
been reduced from. Quite different is A Revo-
lution of the Mind, which is manifesto-like in
both length and tone. The book credits "radi-
cal Enlightenment" with all the political
achievements of the "age of revolution" -
equality, rights, democracy, toleration, pacifi-
cism, 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 liberty-
loving credentials of his radicals by tenden-
tiously 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 evan-
gelical Christians whom they despised. He
excoriates Voltaire's sycophancy to "enlight-
ened despots", but excuses Diderot's unedify-
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 pre-
sented 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 con-
tributions 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 interpreta-
tions. The UN is depicted as having aban-
doned the League's commitment, however
faltering, to the protection of national minor-
ities 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 ori-
gins, but it is far from being the final word.
ing career at the court of Catherine the Great
He scorns George Washington's slave hold-
ing, but overlooks Jefferson 's . Adam Smith
is distorted into a defender of "rank and aris-
tocracy", and Locke into an apologist for
empire and a scourge of homosexuals.
But when it comes to his radical "free-
thinkers 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 vin-
dicate 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 biology-
addled 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 pre-
eminent historians has done exactly this.

••• and why no one is to blame
ost books on the financial crisis
M 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 bro-
kers 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 pen-
sion 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 indi-
vidual 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 extra-
ordinarily clear popular treatment of deriva-
tives. 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 equiv-
alent 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 deriva-
tives 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
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 parti-
cular 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 Treas-
ury Secretary Timothy Geithner has been
advocating. And he's not willing to put the
whole event down to an extreme bout of bad
ECONOMICS 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
TYLER COWEN United States fights against much-needed fis-
John Lanchester
WHOOPS!
cal 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 cap-
tain probably will go down with the plane;
Why everyone owes everyone and no one can pay induced caution is not the same as virtue.
223pp. Alien Lane. £20. The more we experience the after-effects of
978 I 846 14285 7 the crisis, the harder it is to escape the conclu-
sion that millions of people were complicit,
luck, namely that so many unfavourable mech- whether intentionally or not. Let' s say you
anisms were operating together at the same directed a museum and four years ago you
time. started the construction of a new wing, made
Lanchester is more on target when he asks bids to assemble new collections, and hired
that banks be limited to serving society rather new staff, perhaps because you thought the pre-
than preying on it, but that's not so far from vious state of affairs wasn't "enough", to use
the attitude that led to the crash. It was a com- Lanchester's loaded word. No one expected
mon view, in many countries and political you to forecast financial crises, but still you,
parties, that banks were here to help us own Richard Fuld, chairman and chief and many many other people like you, could
homes and also to buy more goodies. For all executive officer of Lehman Brothers have acted with more general caution than you
the common talk of deregulation run amok, Holdings, testifies before the Committee did. After all , things do sometimes turn out
banking is one of the more heavily regulated on Oversight and Government Reform, bad. For the most part we, as a society, simply
sectors in most Western economies. In the Washington DC, October 2008 let this possibility slip. You, as a museum
US , for instance, banks have numerous regu- director, may feel less guilty than you think
lators, ranging from the Federal Reserve ing on the regulators to fix the markets but the banker ought to, but your actions are not as
System to the Federal Deposit Insurance there is very little talk about how to fix the far removed from the banker's as you might
Fund to a variety of minor offices and state regulators. like to think. You both had ambition. You
regulators, all acting in concert. Not only Lanchester wishes that bankers had the both pushed for what turned out to be an over-
did these regulators fail but they egged on ethics and the moderation of doctors or expansion. You were both hubristic. And you
the excesses which later exploded. The more airline pilots. Yet in commercial settings both, either directly or indirectly, ended up
consolidated regulatory approach of the UK doctors are notorious for overprescribing med- having to take jobs away from people.
didn't seem to fare much better. We' re count- icine and overselling treatments, not necessar- 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
Bauxite cognitive biases which they captured in the
laboratory are small compared to the mix of
I spent a lot of money this week, complacency and herd behaviour which
almost four hundred marks, brought on the financial crisis. Lanchester is
but it did make possible some magical moments, focusing on the provable hypothesis but play-
sublime, interior, silksoft, ing down the bigger story of how much a col-
with flows of intoxicating transcendence. lective delusion can hold a society in its grip.
There is a tension, however. Insofar as the
I often look with interest author plays up major, widespread cognitive
at the right hand of the Lord: delusions, the particular explanations of the
it' s the hand that opens, crisis seem less important by comparison, a
usually it's not worth the candle, kind of sideshow, relevant to the details of the
but the times that you remember narrative but not really explaining what went
are the blisses of the deeply breathing on. That drains away the moral flavour of the
soft white chestnut flowers story and more importantly it makes it hard to
that are a blessing in May. explain how we will avoid another crisis - of
a different flavour of course - the next time
From other tables one hears: "We're backing singers", around. No one is suggesting that we can over-
or "Mr Kraft, what good are customers turn the follies of human nature, including its
who don ' t pay their promissory notes", conform ism and its excess enthusiasms. Out-
or "The monthly instalments are thirteen-fifty": lawing the particular causes of this crisis, this
the world is full of such sayings. time around, is scant consolation because we
And confronting them the encashments of heaven, aren ' t going to get an exact repeat in any case.
ruinous perhaps, in a certain sense criminal , The financial crisis, in its varying forms , is
but you were lying around shop-soiled, grubby, sale item, plaguing many societies: not only the irrespon-
and now for four hundred marks sihly deregulated hanking system of Iceland
cracks in the rocks but also the economies of Greece, Spain, Hun-
detonations gary, Ukraine, Dubai, and other locales to var-
ying degrees. (Nor should we think that all of
the veins shimmer the proverbial shoes have dropped.) The varia-
with pure gold tions of policy and circumstance across these
bauxite - different locales suggest that a very general
global intoxication was largely responsible for
an entire week for heaven ' s "backing singers". what happened. The crisis does not resist
explanation in its particulars and in that regard
John Lanchester succeeds with flair and in a
GO TT FRIED BENN remarkably short space. Yet we are still left
Translated by Michael Hofmann with a major world-historical event which
resists easy moral or conceptual digestion.
TLS FEBRUARY 26 2010
14

artin Heidegger himself rarely the naturalist and evolutionary biology's lead-

M spoke of Darwin, but he did

recall that, while still at school ,
he relished the challenge evolu-
tion presented to Christian belief: religion
"prompted me to read widely on the biologi-
cal theory of evolution", he wrote. (His uni-
versity 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 recog-
nized 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-Darwin-
ian, 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-
gence" . At once succinct and mysterious , this
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 alter-
native 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 some-
thing 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 sub-
title 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 Robin-
son's admirable translation of Being and
Time, Ursprung is " source", and "primor-
dial" 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
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 illumi-
nate his relationship to Darwin.
When evolutionary theory rethought both
natural and cultural being, it had a lasting
effect on, among other things, the understand-
ing of language. Heidegger had two strong
pre-war ideas of how language would serve
his project. One was that only a fresh lan-
guage of springing and leaping and "noth-
ing" would allow him to describe the emer-
gence 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
"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 repeat-
edly on beginnings and on "the beginliness of
the beginning" . Scrutinizing the German lan-
guage for fossilized clues to non-surviving
meanings that would shed light on emer-
gence, he suggested that we are "thrown"
into the world, an idea found in the word
"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 Ur-
sprung indeed was the hallmark of evolution-
ary thought in German discourse and some
considered it an error on the part of Darwin's
first German translator, Bronn, when he ren-
dered On the Origin of Species as Ober die
Entstehung der Arten. The second , better-
qualified German translator of Darwin, Julius
Victor Carus, wrote to Darwin on June 3,
1869, suggesting they would do well to substi-
tute 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 Men-
schen). Ursprung featured in many popular
titles in the age fascinated by evolution, when
Heidegger was a schoolboy. Ernst Haeckel ,
ing figure in Germany, published as a most
prominent example, Ober unsere gegenwiir-
tige 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 Uni-
verse) sold more than 400,000 copies. As for
the substance of Haeckel' s version of Darwin,
that book announced that the theory of evolu-
tion 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 distin-
guished between what philosophy should
seek in Being and what " the positive sci-
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 sci-
ences ... " . Ontics was concerned with enti-
ties and facts about them, whereas ontology
requires that we first come to an understand-
ing of "what we really mean by this expres-
sion ' Being"'. More than twenty years after
Being and Time , and despite a neat formula-
tion 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 philo-
sophy is like a tree: the roots are metaphys-
ics, the trunk is physics and the branches.
are all the other sciences." But then
Heidegger extended the tree with a new ques-
tion 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 empha-
ses). 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 sur-
face. 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 -

TLS FEBRUARY 26 2010


that in his view no philosopher could justify
those roots. No classical Western philoso-
pher could say what metaphysics itself was
standing on or rooted in. Hence his own
search for "the concealed element that sup-
ports 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 emer-
gence of beings.
The Darwinian element in pre-war
Heidegger can be seen most clearly in The
Origin of the Work of Art in repeated men-
tions of the irrelevance of the old belief in a
Creator, and can be witnessed most intrigu-
ingly 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 annivers-
ary of The Origin of Species, in for example
the exhibition Endless Forms: Charles Dar-
win, 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 Impres-
sionists, and on the late nineteenth-century
German painters Max Klinger and Arnold
Bocklin, evidently went deeper. (Another
show last year, this time in Frankfurt, Dar-
win, Art and the Search for Origins, made
pioneering connections between Darwin and
Max Ernst, progenitor of Dada and Surreal-
ism, and Darwin and the Austrians Gustav
Klimt and Alfred Kubin - much of the influ-
ence 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 "deconstruc-
tion" 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
COMMENTARY
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 his-
tory 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-the-
work, cast a special light on Being. It fol-
lowed 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 cata-
logue 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 demo-
cratic and particuliarizing and localizing, and
he was rightly accused of undoing high cul-
ture; 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
TLS FEBRUARY 26 2010
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 trans-
lator John Durand put it in 1867, "If Darwin
was the Newton of his days ... Taine hoped
to be the Newton of culture". In a much-
quoted 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 produc-
tions 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
Y which drove the Romantic in
Heidegger back to the metaphys-
ics 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 exist-
ence. That this was not the Darwinian strug-
gle was clear from Heidegger's choice of
words. This was not a "Kampf' but an onto-
logical 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 consist-
ently 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
15
places which Darwin came across on the
Beagle voyage and described as "wild", "sav-
age", "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 agita-
tion, and the abnormally heightened vision
which produced Van Gogh's late work and
through Van Gogh inspired the fierce colora-
tion 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 primi-
tivism, 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 "back-
ward" 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 con-
stantly re-engaged (bestritten) in language,
the brunt of the task fell on the native lan-
guage 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 "origi-
nary" saying a people, ein Volk, comes into
its historical own. But the word Volk here
should not be read as automatically politi-
cally incriminating, even if written in 1936,
even if written by Heidegger.
In the sometimes awkward standard trans-
lation of The Origin of the Work of Art by
Albert Hofstadter, crucial poetic moments
are sacrificed to the need to provide transpar-
ent terms, so no wonder the Darwinian
echoes have not been heard. Perhaps it is
time to start rereading Heidegger through
expressly post-Darwinian eyes.
16
ob the electrician was standing at the
B entrance to my local , smoking out-
side. The pub is located on the beach
road and Bob was staring intensely in the
direction of the pier. "Bloody EDF", he mum-
bled, 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. Visi-
bility was poor because of the clouds of snow-
flakes , dancing madly in the dusk. It is usu-
ally 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 rig-
marole 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 spon-
sored by Vauxhall Motors - adding an addi-
tional ironical twist to the project in this win-
ter of disconnectedness, of impassable motor-
ways, 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
IN NEXT WEEK'S
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Colonus
Robert Orledge
Debussy's Melisandes
Ritchie Robertson
Driven mad by
Bernhard
COMMENTARY
ZINOVY ZINIK
said) that would receive electrical signals
from the lightning strikes and electromag-
netic storms everywhere from the North Pole
to North Africa. It demonstrates that every-
thing 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 snow-
storms for the whole week. So I talked to her
by calling her mobile phone which was prob-
ably operated by the same satellite that was
sending signals to the twenty electric bulbs
on the pier. Katie said that the mobile's crack-
ling line resembled the sound of another
mobile phone she's using. That one is con-
nected 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
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
M really began only when I
discovered that we shared a birth-
day. 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 eva-
sions, and slightly surprised King George V
by arriving at Buckingham Palace wearing
only a loin-cloth and sandals (it hardly mat-
tered, 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-
TLS FEBRUARY 26 2010
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 epilep-
tic fit and lead to severe bodily harm.
None of us could comprehend, though,
how these worldwide electromagnetic distur-
bances could be detected by a little antenna in
Deal, or how the signals are directed by satel-
lite 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 choco-
late bar or tobacco wrapping) and put it into a
bowl of water: after a few moments of vacilla-
tion, the foil will always position itself indi-
cating 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.
ers, but yet in some kind, I could not help
thinking, a charlatan. Most gurus, of course,
have this effect upon Westerners of a cer-
tain 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 Brit-
ons who, in the course of their imperial
duties, had found themselves ensnarled in
Gandhi's tortuous pretensions. The be-
wildered 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 discov-
ered 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,
The pier is the most desirable place for fish-
ing and the local anglers say that the flicker-
ing 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 pre-
vious projects, such as her experiment with
Beethoven's "Moonlight" Sonata. She trans-
posed 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 connec-
tion, 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.
had seemed absurd to the British imperial-
ists of the 1930s, and appeared hardly less
ridiculous to the indigenous rulers of India
thirty years later. Steel mills, power sta-
tions, 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 policy-
makers. The Gandhian ethos seemed to
have retreated into the crankiness from
which, at least in British eyes, it had origi-
nally 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 amor-
phous 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 ex-
hibition cases, or minutely examining distri-
bution diagrams in zoos.

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
W argumentative tribe of avant-
gardists who called them se Ives, or
who have been called by others, "Constructiv-
ists" - 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 country-
man ' 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 remark-
able 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 editor-
ship 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,
17
Modernist disagreements about the purposes of art
teepee for a while in the 1920s.
There are also several designs for build-
ings 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 canon-
ized 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 some-
times 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
"Counter-Construction, Axonometric, Private House" (1923) by Theo van Doesburg differences. There might have been a bit
more Russian work on display, and certainly
among other things ; Mondrian was banished where the bulk of the animal's torso might the influence of Kandinsky on several of
from the pages of De Stijl in 1924), his work be. The process implies that abstraction is a these artists is too palpable not to have been
is nonetheless broadly simi lar to the older journey away, or a removal of inessential acknowledged a bit more emphatically. The
man 's . Grids are infilled with flat rectangles material , from some sort of visual transaction broader question of political affiliation is,
of colour, elegantly but asymmetrically with a definite subject. Yet elsewhere van perhaps, soft-pedalled a little, in the good
arranged across the picture surface or cafe Doesburg uses arithmetical series, or patterns postmodern style, which is what we nowa-
wall in question. It is all very resolved, very inferred from pieces of music (like many of days often mean by art for art's sake. At any
clearly conceived and fully realized (though his associates he was very keen on Bach, and rate, van Doesburg, while certainly leftish (in
on an architectural scale it must all have been we've noted Mondrian 's love of jazz above) a Fourierist or even Bloomsburyish way) was
a bit strident). to generate pictures. In his writings, and in no hurry to mount the barricades. Many of
The term Mondrian devised for this sort of notably in Klassiek - Barock - Modern the proclamations to which he put one or
work, "Nieuwe Beelding", cognate with if (1918), he speaks of a harmony between the other of his names shows a weari ness or a
not quite the same as "New beholding", universal and the particular, between essence cynicism about politics, a wariness arising
implies a looking at the world, a sense of and phenomenon. In his last years he pre- from the Soviets ' abandonment of avant-
some kind of reference to nature in art, ferred the term "concrete" to " abstract", and garde principles - and, as a corollary, a sense
whereas its common English translation, his ultimate attempt to found an artistic group- of disappointment in the reluctance of the
"Neoplasticism" , stresses the autonomous ing went under the name "abstraction-crea- working classes to be transformed by his, and
being of the work of art, its independence tion", which suggests two different paths con- his friends' , new beholding.
of any suhject, its disavowal of any docu- verging on the same destination.
mentary or allegorical role. Van Doesburg, Around Mondrian and van Doesburg's
ever the diplomat, hedges his bets somewhat paintings, and other pieces of "fine" art by THE EDWIN MELLE~ PRESS
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 Ecclesiastical Patronage in England
tion, arising from van Doesburg's contempla- assembled a broad church, or a busy and Four Political Families, 1770-1801
tion of a cow (a potent emblem of national rowdy square-dance, of European art, design by Reider Payne
identity in the Netherlands, let's not forget, and typography from between the world 39.95 from publisher only
and an important motif in Dutch art) . The wars : De Stijl's camp followers in Germany
UK 01570 423356 / US 716-754-2788
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 inquis- I want to publish your scholarly book.
ing, are both cow-like to some degree. The itive work of Moholy-Nagy and other artists peer reviewed / no subsidies
third is a matrix of squares and rectangles on affiliated with the Bauhaus, outside the editor@mellenpress.com
a white ground, with a single larger square gates of which van Doesburg pitched his
TLS FEBRUARY 26 2010
18
he stages of opera houses are no
T 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 self-
consciously 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
----------------------------------------------~----------------------------------------------
ranz Liszt was an ardent admirer of
P Franz Schubert, but he was sharply
critical of the latter's Divertissement a
l'hongroise, the most substantial composi-
tion 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 recogniz-
able 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 Car-
men, 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
ARTS
The interwar period sets are equally
Simply insane virtuosic . Nicky Gillibrand ' s costumes are
fashioned in extraordinary detail, combining
sophisticated shades of Erte with contempo-
rary grotesques. The result is a riot of sense
GUY DAMMANN makes the music difficult to interpret, the and reference for the eye quite equal to
quicksilver pacing and two-dimensional Prokofiev' s music. Antony McDonald's art-
characterizations make it very difficult to deco interiors have foreshortened interiors
Sergie Prokofiev
stage. Yet the Royal Opera' s new staging is so that the monumental aspects of the hotel ,
THE GAMBLER one of several successful recent British botanic garden and gaming rooms are offset
Royal Opera House productions of The Gambler, although the by deceitful distortions of perspective.
work has not been heard in London since Jones's direction, too, acutely emphasizes
and emotional equilibrium is the brief David Pountney's staging for English the skin-deep psychology of Prokofiev's
moment when events are put completely National Opera in 1983. (The Royal Opera characters, carried through with some finely
beyond his control. This is the gambling have also used Pountney ' s translation.) judged acting from Susan Bickley as
addict's pathological focus - something that One reason for this recent surge of interest Babulenka and John Tomlinson as the Gen-
renders the rest of the world colourless, is obvious: the society pilloried so merci- eral. (Tomlinson was also Christian Badea
devoid of sympathy - as art. lessly by Prokofiev is, in many respects, and Pountney's General.) As for the singing:
Prokofiev had completed no fewer than no worse than our own. The madness according to Prokofiev, you shouldn't really
six operas before 1915, when his proposal for endemic in Dostoevsky's Roulettenberg notice it. But the Italian tenor Roberto Sacca
The Gambler was finally accepted by Albert (based on Wiesbaden in Germany) is and German soprano Angela Denoke (who is
Coates as part of his effort to rejuvenate the institutionalized, just as individuals today are scheduled to appear as Salome later this
Maryinsky Theatre. Although the Revolution consumed by an economic environment in season) both make the best of the lyrical
prevented the production from going ahead which the relation between value, worth and scraps left for them by the composer.
(the premiere was in Brussels in 1929), the work has been stretched beyond breaking One touch that deserves mention is Jones's
score was ready in 1917 after an intense point. If such a factor were enough to addition of an unscripted (silent) acting role
period of work during which the composer' s recommend the project to Antonio Pappano for a sunken-eyed caretaker. Attention rests
mother, hearing the brutal and frenzied and his director, Richard Jones, it cannot by on him for one passing moment, as Alexey
sounds emerging from behind her son's itself guarantee the work' s dramatic success. mocks the Germans (yes, he goose-steps) for
closed door, began to worry seriously about But Pappano's investment in the score is their absurd notion that modest wealth and
his mental and musical health. But Prokofiev total - excitingly immediate and yet suffi- comfort should be earned by hard work. The
knew exactly what he was doing. "I have ciently clear-sighted to maximize each of caretaker haunts the stage almost for the
done everything possible", he explained at Prokofiev's minute orchestral effects. And entire duration of the opera, working when he
the time, " not to burden the singers with just because it is a difficult score to listen to can , watching when he can ' t. Only once does
unnecessary conventions, in order to afford attentively (Prokofiev's early conception of he come into contact with the other world,
them freedom in the dramatic realization of opera was that the music should be transpar- when the General flings him against a wall as
their parts. 1 am aiming only for simplicity." ent in respect of the action and " not stand out he marches back to the casino; the caretaker
As promised, the score comes unhampered as an independent element"), it doesn't mean crumples to the floor before returning to his
by arias and set pieces, presenting over two that The Gambler shouldn't be great fun to sweeping. The actor who plays him is,
hours of unadulterated recitative. If this play - which it clearly was. appropriately, uncredited.
Olivier Messiaen to Kevin Volans have writ-
Noble savage notes ten works that can be interpreted as examples
of submerged exoticism, or, to use a more
neutral term from Locke' s inventive lexicon,
CON OR FARRINGTON sions of works such as Schubert's song "Du "transcultural composing". As Volans
liebst mich nicht" demonstrate that the ability says of his Hunting: Gathering (I987),
Ralph P. Locke of (wholly or partially) non-exotic music to "Although the title and a lot of the music
conjure up images of distant places and ethnic quoted in the piece are modelled on African
MUSICAL EXOTICISM groups is by no means limited to dramatic gen- music, it's not an African piece at all". Yet if
Images and reflections res. For Locke, audiences typically respond to exoticism is context-dependent, then surely
440pp. Cambridge University Press. £55. more than compositional style alone, welding the composer can never fully control the
9780521 877930
frequently non-exotic aural material with a "exotical quotient" in any specific perform-
range of exotic suggestions, hints and implica- ance? A piece such as Hunting: Gathering,
repeated rhythmic patterns are insightful and tions to create a context-dependent version of with a "primitivist" title and material derived
original, but his monograph is more than a aesthetic truth. As Locke succinctly remarks, from African music, can hardly avoid generat-
piece of formal analysis. He also introduces "Notes don't exhaust the matter". ing some kind of exotic aura. From this
and develops a relational approach to under- The author gives most of this subtle and point of view, Locke can be understood as
standing musical exoticism , which he calls powerful account of musical understanding emphasizing the contextual nature of artistic
"All the Music in Full Context" . The phrase with reference to works from the Classical truth while gently pricking the bubbles of
refers to the ability of musical works to evoke and (late) Romantic periods, but matters composers unwarrantedly assured of their
exotic lands without necessarily employing grow more complicated when he turns his artistic omnipotence.
exotic compositional techniques. attention to more recent composers. This is Musical Exoticism is not just a fine
This possibility emerges most obviously in due in part to the widespread rejection by instance of contemporary musicology but
operas, where plot, dialogue and stage sets fin-de-siecLe composers of what Locke calls also a timely intervention in debates about
combine to suggest distance and difference in "overt exoticism" - the deliberate portrayal the ethical and didactic role of the arts in
spite of frequently non-exotic music. So, of remote cultures - in favour of " submerged society. If1 have a criticism, it is that Locke's
stylistically "Western" works, such as exoticism", or the musical incorporation of definition of exoticism is given in purely
Rameau ' s Les Indes galantes and Hande!'s elements of exotic style or musical philos- geographical terms. An analysis of musical
Belshazzar, may still be read as exotic (and ophy in apparently non-exotic works. depictions of fantastic or spiritual realms
exoticizing) on the grounds of their plot Composers such as Debussy and Ravel could be just as rewarding, musicologically,
structures, which feature stereotypes of noble frequently drew on "exotic" musical charac- as discussions of Madama Butterfly or
savages and Oriental despotism. Locke demon- teristics such as arabesque-like melodic Scheherazade. (Programmatic works such as
strates, for instance, how Handel successfully figures and octatonic scales to enrich non- Liszt's Apres une Lecture de Dante: Fanta-
portrays Belshazzar as a sottish despot using exotic musical works (Prelude al'apres-midi sia quasi Sonata come to mind.) And what
musical means indistinguishable from those d'unfaune, for instance) rather than to evoke could be more exotic, from a linguistic point
employed in his non-exotic works. And discus- distant lands. More recently, composers from of view, than the language of music itself?
TLS FEBRUARY 26 2010

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 genera-
tion), 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 mud-
dIed 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 teen-
agers 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.
Mysteries at the heart of Stalin's empire
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 member-
ship 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. Grief-
stricken, 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.
Mikoyan continued as a leading government
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" -
TLS FEBRUARY 26 2010
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 opera-
tion" 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-
logue, a stream of consciousness inside the
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 histori-
cal documents cited in part or in full, the real
world of the novel unfolds inside the narra-
tor'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 memo-
ries, a secret consultant to the Moscow
19
Patriarchy, and, as the novel opens, an obses-
sive collector and seller of Soviet toy sol-
diers. 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-year-
long 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 offi-
cials. 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 through-
out the novel and are portrayed with unchar-
acteristic 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-West-
ern 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 investi-
gations 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 dis-
regard her father's modest deathbed request
to leave the Moscow apartment to his surviv-
ing family. Terekhov 's transcripts of inter-
views 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
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-Commu-
nist 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 misunderstand-
ing 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 narra-
tor' s musings read like a retelling of
Nietzsche's "On Truth and Lies in a Non-
moral 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, realiz-
ing its essential solipsism. In a homage to
Trifonov's novel, The House on the Embank-
ment, which closes with the scene of the old
man visiting the grave of his only daughter,
Terekhov' s narrator finds himself in a ceme-
tery, 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 post-
imperial Russia in the post-nostalgia age.
FICTION
Going on elsewhere
he year 1968 was a caesura in
T
twentieth-century European history
in both East and West. There were
widespread demonstrations against censor-
ship, 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 stand-
ards of living. This was goulash Commu-
nism, 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 nine-
year-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 psychologi-
cal. Afflicted by a speech impediment, the
young narrator is also afflicted by a height-
ened sensory awareness: of his siblings'
whimpering, his older brother's tight belly,
his mother's pallor. He is especially respon-
sive to the smell of food, and the aromas of
sausage and sweets join more tangible signs
of poverty, such as the absence of smoke
----------------------------------~----------------------------------
Life and pseudo-life
oman Senchin grew up in Tuva, a
R
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.
The narrator's once-respected parents
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
TLS FEBRUARY 26 2010
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
OLIVER READY
Roman Senchin
MINUS
Translated by Arch Tait
240pp. Glas. Paperback, £8.99.
9785 7172 0083 7
in milk. When one man tries to dry out, his
colleague observes that this is all very well,
but "what is he giving it up for?".
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
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 entrepre-
neurial 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" vio-
lence and resentment define his surround-
ings: the father compensates for his emascula-
tion 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 bath-
room 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 effec-
tive and the novel reads smoothly. Like
Bruno Schulz's The Cinnamon Shops, it
belongs to a distinctly East European modern-
ist tradition, one that reveals the jolting
proximity of the beautiful and the grotesque.
market where a third of the town's popula-
tion now tries to make a living.
The narrator observes yesterday's "mug-
gers, 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-
ately unliterary prose is certainly distinctive.
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 disenchant-
ment is effectively communicated. Chek-
hov '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" .

Flight from Karien
hree boys, splashing about in a farm
dam in South Africa's Free State
T province, commandeer an inflated
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 Septem-
ber, 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 spec-
tre 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
----------------------------------~----------------------------------
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
FICTION 21
offered by the Truth and Reconciliation
Commission, much of the country ' s recent
fiction has mined this rich inevitability.
Beyond
ANDREW VAN DER VLIES
Behr's self-conscious allusiveness goes
further back in time: there are references to
Sol Plaatje' s Native Life in South Africa
the grave
(1916), a seminal expose of the stripping of
Mark Behr land rights from black South Africans, to JESS CHANDLER
Nadine Gordimer's The Conservationist
KINGS OF THE WATER (1974) and to J. M. Coetzee' s Disgrace Louise Wel s h
236pp. Abacus. Paperback, £ 12.99. (1999), both powerful interrogations of
9780349113708 complicity and the "price one has to pay for NAM I NG THE BONES
staying on" (the phrase is highlighted in 389pp. Canongate. Paperback, £ 12.99.
- is well placed to investigate, continuing Michiel's late mother' s copy of Disgrace) . 978 1 84767255 1
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 r Murray Watson, a professor of
country he left seventeen years earlier, in issue, or the brutalizing of apartheid's queer
order to bury his mother on the family farm. subjects. There is little catharsis, only provi-
Unfolding in the present over the course sional reconciliation and an awareness of
D English literature, is obsessed with
Archie Lunan, a poet whose earl y
death consigned him to obscurity. Deter-
of two days in 2001, the narrative, focalized the size of the challenges remaining (receiv- mined to "unravel the tangled knot of
through Michiel , also revisits some traumatic ing a black petrol attendant's deference, Archie's life", Watson soon becomes en-
episodes in his past. These include the death Michiel muses "Christ ... how do we undo tangled in an increasingly hazardous process
of his adored older brother; a brief relation- this?"). A description of water torture in of research. Moving between the academic
ship with a childhood friend , Karien, and her the Angolan war suggests links with other, worlds of Glasgow and Edinburgh, and the
resulting pregnancy; and Michiel's military contemporary horrors, and Michiel' s brother isolated island of Lismore, his investigations
service and later desertion from the navy, Benjamin, irritated at what he interprets expose a history of deviancy and betrayal ,
after he is disciplined for having sex with a as Michiel's preaching about black farm- amid "a muddled world of drugs and spells"
fellow officer, a man who, in a further out- workers' conditions, bristles: "Go and take a and the tainted idealism of the 1970s.
rage to apartheid decency, happened to be of look at the land around Salinas and tell me Naming the Bones, Louise Welsh's fourth
Indian descent. We learn, too, of Michiel's what distance between so-called fucking novel, is a literary crime thriller that relies on
years of wandering, from London to the abstraction and sweat makes your life in the use of predictable tropes. It is saturated
South Pacific, and of his relationship with America possible". with dark imagery, which colours even the
Kamil , a Berkeley academic, with whom he In the final pages, as Michiel most ordinary of settings and its melodra-
lives in relative stability in San Francisco's travels to Johannesburg for his return flight matic finale culminates in an exhumation, the
Castro District. (Kamil's HIV status and to California, he hears - while standing " in final decoding of the mystery that has gradu-
AIDS-related suffering is treated matter-of- the shade" of two "concrete grain silos" - of ally been exposed. There is an exaggerated
factly , never mawkishly.) But a reckoning events unfolding at the site of the Twin Gothic sensibility in the conjuring of mood:
with the implications of the di stant past Towers on the other side of the globe. In Watson sits up "like Dracula risen from the
must be made - particularly with Michiel's the hands of some authors, this coincidence dead", the ketchup on his chips reminds him
flight from Karien, who undergoes a botched might have seemed contrived or clumsy. of blood, and his thoughts are of Hamlet's
abortion. Here it serves both to comment on the con- father's ghost and Macbeth's porter. Suicide,
Karien, who is one of the mothers at the nectedness of life in the new global village, death, eroticism and the supernatural are
dam, says of the new South Africa: "Here and as a marker of an understanding of how accompanied by their atmospheric counter-
there' s this obsession with remembering". In epochs are defined, marked by coming after parts: stormy weather, hallucinogenic drugs,
the wake of apartheid' s demise and, more an event or spectacle, while the coming after a desolate island, a grave, and a burning
specifically, after the narrative recuperation never truly lets go of the going before. house. Mixing together genre fiction and liter-
ary 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.
ANJALI JOSEPH July, her master (who is also her lover) and Despite its almost humorous reliance on
her mistress; or the comparison of July' s genre tropes, Naming the Bones is ambitious
Andrea Levy narrative with contemporary journals of in its consideration of the process of writing.
European women travellers to the West Welsh is interested in the destructive pro-
THE LONG SONG Indies. The volume of what has obviously cesses of creativity, and in the critic ' s task of
320pp. Headline Review. £18.99. been diligent historical research sometimes "revealing scandals from beyond the grave".
9780755359400 forces compression of the story; certain sec- The dead poet Lunan , who was interested in
tions, like a banquet scene at the plantation "the beyond" and in life after death, has
reader that he has edited his mother's lan- house, or the list of atrocities committed on achieved the immortality of literary fame.
guage - a caveat that is supposed to smooth rebel slaves, read like hurried enumerations. Enjoyable and exciting, Naming the Bones
over the fluctuations in the narrative voice, The Long Song contains some beguiling finally lacks the originality required to move
which flits , sometimes uneasily, between lit- characters. The quadroon social climber beyond the restrictions of its form. The char-
erary, worked language, and a more collo- Miss Clara, a fair-skinn ed hut part- acters are stereotypes , and therefore unahle to
quial nineteenth-century Jamaican English. black woman who begins as a lady 's maid surprise and the story of a lonely academic,
Levy is a deft, accomplished writer: this and then organizes dances for white men and whose investigation into the life of another
book is filled with memorable characters, mixed-race women, could have been a minor turns out to be a journey of self-discovery,
rich in research and punctuated by quieter character in V. S. Naipaul' s Miguel Street. adheres closely to the fictional formula.
moments of glancing beauty: the sixteen- But where Naipaul's characters begin in a There is, however, an ironic playfulness to
year-old July, alone in the big house, examin- Dickensian way - their quirks established Welsh's prose that represents the ease with
ing her reflection in the back of a spoon, and repeatedly displayed - they also have which established conventions can be used as
while outside a rebellion is taking place; or room to grow and alter, to stop iterating tools to create a desired effect. As Watson
the unexpected comedy of a master-servant their comic utterances ; to behave, in fact, searches for the material for his book, Welsh
scene between her and Nimrod, the groom , like real people. Levy doesn' t allow her accumulates a collection of literary ingredi-
which leads them into bed. Less interesting, characters thi s space; perhaps she doesn' t ents, as though the real investigation is that
although ingenious, are knowing devices have time, for the story, with its twists and of the novelist compiling the pieces that
such as the painting of a group portrait of loops, must go on. compose a work of fiction.
TLS FEBRUARY 26 2010
22
Ann Cleeves
BLUE LIGHTNING
357pp. Macmillan, £16.99.
9780230014473
A 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 depic-
tion 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 unex-
pected: 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
T 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 moon-
light, 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 disappear-
ance 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
FICTION IN BRIEF
during the first snow, and of the disappear-
ance 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 narra-
tive 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
T 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 busi-
nessman 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
TLS FEBRUARY 26 2010
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 quota-
tions 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-of-
the-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 sug-
gests 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 depart-
ment, 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 - con-
ducted 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 psy-
choanalysis and "the terra firma of conven-
tional 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
hand: ah, across to the quiet land?'''. The
artist Ludo Rainmayr is an abhorrent crea-
tion , 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 protago-
nists continue to fascinate.
A. P. D. LAWRIE
Nigel Farndale
THE BLASPHEMER
432pp. Doubleday. £12.99.
978 0 38561 779 6
D aniel is the first Kennedy in four genera-
tions not to bear arms for his country.
To his highly decorated father, Philip, his
son 's choice of an academic career is a dis-
appointment, 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 great-
grandfather. 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 passen-
gers. 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 well-
sketched minor characters.
JUSTIN WARSHAW
 LITERARY CRITICISM 23

ne of the most moving pieces in not follow that the existence of the writer's

O 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,
Worshipful character makes the reader capable of accu-
rately discerning it. But Smith's readings,
which are sensual as well as intellectually
wide-ranging, read like communions with the
like Tommy Cooper, halfway through a joke, CAROLINE MILLER debates and staging fights between them: in departed authors - especially those Christ-like
Smith borrows an old comic formula to tell one essay, she has fun playing the boldest of radical empathists, Eliot and Wallace.
the story of class sclerosis that held her father Zadie Smith readers, Barthes, off against that most fastidi- Value judgement and tolerance can be
back from grammar school because ("wait, it ous and demanding writer, Nabokov (''It's a awkward fellow pilgrims: Smith often praises
gets better") his parents couldn't afford the CHANG I NG MY MIND brave critic who dares tell Vladimir Vladimi- writing she believes to be "right" or knows
uniform, Growing up in the multi-ethnic pool Occasional essays rovich that he is 'diminishing like a figurine at to be "beautiful". As a corrective to academic
of Willesden, educated at Cambridge and 308pp. Hamish Hamilton. £20. the far end of the literary stage"'). Similarly, a dryness this is refreshing. But, as a wider
9780241 142950
then graduating to become a big fish in the lit- piece entitled "Two Directions for the Novel" credo, it has little except its superior elo-
erary world ("a puddle", she confides in one sets Joseph O' Neill's lyrical realist novel Neth- quence to recommend it - and no principle
of her many engaging, autobiographical and, like Forster, she pitches to the "middle erland up for a fall, against "necronaut" Tom from which to recommend superior elo-
asides), it is small wonder that Smith's own ground" . However, Smith's middle ground is McCarthy's avant-garde Remainder: Smith's quence. If we each decide whom to worship,
relish for "Hancock, Fawlty, Partridge, Brent more nuanced and complex than Forster's, own work (broadly on the lyrical realist high- then there can be no arbiter on beauty and
, , , all clinging to the middle rungs of Eng- navigating racial as well as academic and way) and her own writerly position on the truth other than the mass market. If the
land' s class ladders" comes with an acute class-based politics. When her bestselling debate remain politely invisible. Characteriza- dreams of our fathers - Forster's "dream of
perception of the status anxiety that drives first novel White Teeth was published in tion does have its analytic limits. It can be mass connection", or Obama's or Shake-
British comedy, This is also a major fault line 2000, some critics heralded it as a poster for a problematic to revive theoretical debates as a speare's - are to be realized in literature, then
in Britsh cultural life, Small wonder, too, that post-racial society. In her lecture on Obama's "question of character" or preference - as we need a critical vision to make the case for
"fluency" and "fluidity" are the most highly ability to speak in tongues, she adjudicates Smith does when discussing Barthes, noting its value. Does it matter if Changing My
praised literary qualities in this collection between the appeal and the limits of this ideal that half of her students display a pre-theoreti- Mind's tolerant defence of individual prefer-
in which there are perceptive articles on a and its opposite, the authenticity politics of a cal inclination to break and enter canonical ence and its inspiring and well-informed enac-
pantheon of cultural idols, from Katharine black consciousness that demands you "keep texts while the remainder wish to enter on tion of reading as a private pleasure reflect the
Hepburn and Barack Obama to Bernard Shaw, it real", and is hostile to Eliza Doolittles who their knees. She defines character as the signa- broad pop cultural norms that are marginaliz-
David Foster Wallace, Vladimir Nabokov, alter their vocabulary and their vowel sounds. ture of a writer - a writer' s way of "being in ing the "literary" novel? It certainly doesn't
George Eliot and William Shakespeare. Changing My Mind does not offer the satis- the world", discernible in the aesthetic and diminish the pleasure and erudition on offer
Collections of multi-purpose, previously fyingly sustained argument of a manifesto moral cruxes of the works they leave behind here. Yet, in an era of choose-your-own wor-
published prose are often bitty and unsatisfy- (" ideological inconsistency is, for me, an arti- them. It is a restorative - albeit vague - state- ship, ghostwritten celebrity autobiographies
ing. So it is apt that a Barthesian omnivorous- cle of faith", the introduction acknowledges) . ment of faith in readers and the old-fashioned are at the top the books charts and liberal arts
ness (Smith is equally passionate about However, the intellectual and emotional gen- faith of readers in writers (" You get to decide lovers struggle to defend the "truth" and
bad movies and good writers) reflects her erosity which stems from open-mindedness - who to worship", is one of this volume's epi- "beauty" that these essays so perceptively
book' s dominant intellectual instinct: tolerant especially Smith's technically astute and graphs, from David Foster Wallace). It does reveal.
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. ALBAN BOOKS
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 THE SACRED BODY SCIENCE AND THE QUEST FOR
bility is admired in "Speaking In Tongues", the rebarbative polemics of an older gener- Asceticism in Religion, Literature, MEANING
OAVIO IASIER
first delivered in 2008 at the New York ation of essayists, such as Martin Amis and Art, and Culture ALFRED I TAUBER
DAVID JASPER Eloquently traces the history
Public Library), these writers possess a "cer- Christopher Hitchens. Connoisseurs of liter- of the philosophy of science,
An autobiographical journey
tain kind of genius" which can "jive talk like ary bile may even be disappointed by the fact through disparate written texts seeking in the end to place
a street hustler and orate like a senator". that Smith so rarely resorts to the slam-dunk in literature, philosophy, sc ience within the humanistic
th eo logy, religion, art and context from which it
Smith admires the common touch in Eliot's of the insult. She nevertheless takes reading cinema. Exam ines the body of originated. Tauber offers a way ~:!!~~~.t!l
compassion for all sorts of people, writing and writing personally and describes herself the Christian tradition of "the of understanding science as
Word made flesh" - a body an evolving relationship
a spirited defence of her pioneering willing- "inhaling" books; hurling frustrating ones torn and crucified, resurrected and divin ized. between facts and the values that govern their
ness to give as much literary time to dull across the room; saying of Zora Neale Bay/or UP . 978 1 60258141 8. 266pp • HB • discovery and applications.
Fred Vincy as glamorous Dorothea Brooke Hurston (at the end of a comic account of her £26.99 Bay/or UP' 978 1 60258210 1 • 256pp • HB •
£19.99
("Middlemarch and Everybody" ). She rejects dogmatic teenage reluctance to admit to sub- ECCENTRIC EXISTENCE TWO
E. M. Forster's literary editors' embarrass- jective feelings about books) " She is my sis- VOLUME SET KNOWING DARKNESS
ment about "the middlebrow elephant in the ter and I love her" . Her intimacy with books ATheological Anthropology ECCENTRIC Reflections on Skepticism,
DAVID H KELSEY Melancholy, Friendship, and God
room", praising him for cajoling a mass audi- and their authors is infectious. Her approach A theologically-grounded EXISTENCE ADDISON HDDGES HART
ence into reading good books in his BBC wire- to literature, despite the big systematic treatment of the question, A provocative apologet ic for
less broadcasts ("E. M. Forster, Middle Man- guns in the footnotes (Derrida, Foucault and "What does it mean to be th e benefits of both
human?" Representing the scept icism and melancholy for
ager"). And, like many before her, she finds Barthes are all cited) is direct, accessible and cu lmination of decades of Christian faith. Draws on the
the most persuasive reflection of her idea in largely pragmatic. As literary criticism, it bor- theolog ical thought, this book exper iences of figures in
explores God's relat ion to all Scr ipture such as Job and
Shakespeare, who "always sees both sides of ders pleasantly on fiction as much as theory. things, as the creator of all things. Qoheleth of Ecclesiastes, and
a thing" and is "black and white, male and Smith ' s friendly , first-name appraisals revive WJK ' 978 0 664 22052 5' 1496pp • H8' from the well -known life of Mother Teresa .
£53.99 Eerdmans • 978 0 8028 63447· 160pp • PB •
female ... everyman". Ventriloquism is the the once-dead figure of the author by re-
£8.99
genius of this "certain kind of voice" and com- inventing him (or her) as a character in the THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS ON
passion, tolerance and outreach are its virtues. mind of the reader. The question of whether SEXUALITY REDEEMING THE
Attitudes Towards Sexuality in ENLIGHTENMENT
Judged on her own criteria, Smith ' s voice "Will" (Shakespeare), as Smith asserts, truly Christianity and the Liberal Values
Sectarian and Related Literature
is impressively limher. A stand-up comedy refused to take sides in his era's war of ideas at Qumran BRUCE K WARD
fan who teaches at NYU and Columbia, she because of the "dreams of his father", an WILLlAM LOADER Sets up a three-sided dialogue
I nvestigates the Dead Sea between primary thinkers and
speaks Ivy League and street. "Curtis '50 equivocator in matters of religion, is beside Scrolls, mining every critics of modernity including
Cent' Jackson. My brain is giving you one the point. Smith's novelist's instinct for per- document of potential Rousseau, Nietzsche and
star but my heart is giving you five", she ceiving - and inventing - personalities makes relevance for understanding Dostoevsky. Ward offers
ancient attitudes towards in novative redemption of the
enthuses, in one of several vivid film reviews her essays on Kafka, Forster, and "Marian" sexuality. Covers a wide range Enlightenment values of
commissioned by the Sunday Telegraph (Evans - George Eliot) as enjoyable as a of issues from ritual and cultic concerns to eq uality, authenticity, tolerance and compassion
visions of human commun ity and family. and argues that th ey are, in fact, based on
and filed again here in the anthology's "See- party at which the reader is the guest of hon- Eerdmans • 978 0 8028 6391 1 • 448pp • PB • Christian moral ideals.
ing" section ("Being" includes a somewhat our and George Clooney and Heidegger £29.99 Eerdmans • 978 0 8028 0761 8 • 264pp • PB •
less flexible account of an Oxfam-funded trip can be glimpsed digging in to the canapes. £17.99
to Liberia; "Feeling" is devoted to Smith's This cross-cultural party of influences is Available from your local bookshop or in case of difficulty from:
father; "Reading" includes substantial essays not bland, despite its friendly accessibility. Alban Books Ltd, 14 Belford Road, Edinburgh EH4 3BL, UK Web: www.albanbooks.com
in literary criticism). Her novel On Beauty Smith provides drama by finding probable A L BAN
BOOKS TBI: +44(0)1312262217 Fax: +44(0)1312255999 Email: saIBs@albanbooks.com
(2005) is a structural tribute to Howards End antagonists on either side of theoretical

TLS FEBRUARY 26 2010

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 work-
shop 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 produc-
ing works of lofty, sometimes incoherent
ambition, marrying Poundian Modernism
with a Beat freedom from traditional prosodic
concerns. Fifty years on, by contrast, Amer-
ican academic poetry tends towards the even
more difficult and sometimes impenetrable.
From the vantage of today, the early MFA pro-
grammes seem to have been the refuge of a
quiet, intelligible lyricism - a middle-of-the-
road 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 stric-
tures about objectivity, it represented a move-
ment 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 analogous-
Movement in England was in its emotional
frankness , and sometimes rawness. Depres-
sion, affairs, trauma, divorce were all admit-
ted, in both senses.
Snodgrass himself disliked the term "con-
fessional" 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 report-
edly 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
POETRY
and something like viciousness. Even behind
Tender tracks 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 recol-
HENR Y SHUKMAN the particular challenges that face a personal, lected, but perhaps too seldom in tranquillity.
lyric poet. After the divorce and separation The title poem of After Experience interleaves
W. D. Snodgrass from his child that informed that first collec- the outlines of an existential inquiry, lifted
tion, his second book, After Experience, gen- directly from Spinoza, with instructions on
NOT FOR SPECIALISTS erally more stoical and philosophical, has as a how, literally, to rip off a person's face with
New and selected poems running, intermittent theme an affair, beauti- your bare hands. We are implicitly encour-
280pp. Waywiser. Paperback, £ 10.99. fully rendered in poems such as "Leaving the aged to link this violent rage with the existen-
9781904130352 Motel" and "A Friend": "We've nowhere we tial challenge presented in the other lines; yet
could keep a keepsake - / Ashtrays, combs, it seems in excess of the evidence, curiously
custody of his three-year-old daughter things /I That sooner or later others / Would unaccounted for. Halfway through the book
through a bitter divorce. accidentally find. / Check: take nothing of comes perhaps the least characteristic episode
Winter again and it is snowing; one another's", he writes in the first. And in in Snodgrass's output: a long sequence of
Although you are still three, the second, on the pain of a double life: "I poems spoken by the leading Nazis holed up
You are already growing stand, Prince of Lies, / Who' s seen bliss". But in Hitler's bunker during the last days of the
Strange to me. what happens if the poet' s life settles down? Second World War. "The Fuehrer Bunker"
In rhyming stanzas addressed to the daughter, Overall , in spite of the frank tenderness of includes typographic novelties - German
the poem's tone is loving but rueful, and much of the work, Snodgrass gives an Gothic script, bold type, and poems printed
often anguished. While some critics at the impression here and there of a rather dark as telegrams on graph paper. It's a curious
time deplored Snodgrass's plundering of his philosophy, one that at times could make even thing, a kind of masque, with Albert Speer,
own life - James Dickey called the work stoicism seem cosy. In "The Mouse", a poem Goebbels, Goering, Himmler, Eva Braun and
"snivelling, self-serving" - most were kinder. about a friend dying young, from his third col- Hitler himself all speaking from the page. At
M. L. Rosenthal said: "Snodgrass has built a lection, Remains, life is an unremittingly cruel times there's a Cabaret-like exuberance, for
moving poem out of something we treat far cat playing with the poor human mouse, "That example where Eva Braun' s ruminations are
too casually: early divorce, in which it is the pats at you, wants to see you crawl/Some, interrupted by the words of a popular Amer-
love between children and their parents that then picks you back alive; / That needs you ican song ("Tea for Two"). Some of the lines
receives the deepest wounds". just a little hurt. / The mind goes blank, then were actually spoken by Hitler, others lifted
Poetry that depends on intense emotional the eyes. Weak with dread, / In shock, the from his diary. Altogether, this was the least
experience of the autobiographical sort is breath comes short; / We go about our lives" . well-received of Snodgrass's books, and the
somewhat at the mercy of the life. Not for Yet the bleakness is redeemed by the valiant overall effect is still curiously uncertain, the
Specialists, in over 250 pages of poetry, intent of that last line. poem insufficient to its subject matter.
offers an invaluable overview of Snodgrass ' s Through much of the first half of this book The volume concludes with a section of
career, and the reader can trace how he rose to there's an unsettling mixture of mourning 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
A Rare Bee 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 rac-
I heard tell of a tale of a rare bee, ing sprocket / To where his artful serve and
kept in a hive in the soul of a wood volley / Dole out love games and melancholy.
by a hermit - hairshirt, heart long hurt - / Tremble, opponents: learn by this / What
and that this bee made honey so pure, power's secured through artifice". Throughout
when pressed to the pout of a poet his career, one senses that what kept him
it made her profound ; or if smeared going was the versifying itself. Apart from the
on the smile of a singer it sweetened his sound; odd deviation, he rarely turned from the "arti-
or when eased on the eyes of an artist, fice" of formal verse. Whatever tragedies or tri-
Pablo Picasso lived and breathed; fles show up in the lines, the lines themselves
so I saddled my steed. remain steadily iambic, inventively rhyming:
sets of well-wrought rails that know their busi-
No birds sang in the branches over my head, ness.It's as if the poet keeps on riding through
though I saw the wreaths of empty nests all vicissitudes on his steam engine.
on the ground as I rode - girl, poet, knight - Although this volume's inclusiveness as a
darker into the trees, where the white hart Selected can't be faulted, it could do with a
was less than a ghost or a thought, was as light few more notes. There's a short paragraph of
as the written word; legend. But what wasn't going, gone, biography, and a quarter-page afterword from
I mused, from the land , or the sky, or the sea? Snodgrass explaining that some of the cycles
I dismounted my bony horse to walk; are incomplete. But a word or two of biblio-
out of the silence, graphical explanation would not go amiss:
I fancied I heard the bronze buzz of a bee. why, for example, are the poems from the col-
lection Remains dated both 1970 and 1985?
So I came to kneel at the hermit's hive - Since this is a Selected, why are there selec-
a little church, a tiny mosque - in a mute glade tions from another Selected (Selected Poems
where the loner muttered and prayed, blind 1957- 87)? And why do the titles of the poems
as the sun, and saw with my own eyes ride as high on the page as the headers, leaving
one bee dance alone on the air. a huge gap between title and first line? Some-
I uttered my prayer: Give me your honey, how, this fails to indi viduate the poems as they
bless my tongue with rhyme, poetry, song. deserve. Why does the font size change? But
It flew at my mouth and stung. these quibbles pale beside everything the vol-
Then the terrible tune of the hermit' s grief. ume provides: a ready and welcome gathering
Then a gesturing, dying bee of Snodgrass's best work for the British
on the bier of a leaf. reader. Poetry' s first duty must be to help us
want to live. If Snodgrass goes on being read,
CAROL ANN DUFFY it will be because of what he has in plenty:
uncommon tenderness.
TLS FEBRUARY 26 2010
 POETRY 25

. A. ("Archie") Markham' s volume of other people ' s problem rather than his own, a

E new and selected poems, Looking Out,

Looking In , was in preparation before
hi s untimely death in Paris in 2008 , its edit-
ing 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 col-
lections that thi s prolific , engaging poet pub-
li 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, undertak-
ing research in seventeenth-century drama
and directing the Caribbean Theatre Work-
shop before making hi s name as a poet in the
crowded world of British small press publica-
tion in the 1970s. A continuity in all hi s work
was sensitivity to suffering. "A History With-
out Suffering" tries to imagine a life without
pain:
. . . 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,
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 ire-
land, 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-in-
residence 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.
poem like "It Gets Worse, M y Friend" links
the discomfort of being targeted by an aca-
demic 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 Eng-
land" 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 the Cote d' Azur and
pallid ones in Urology in a Sheffield
Many of the poems address absent figures : a wa iting room -
lost grandmother, a mother later to be lost, All this - and maybe more - to be restored to
former lovers, schoolfriends, mentors. Typi- you .. . . CA Story for Today")
cally they hold their interlocutors with ver- Markham was someone for whom the work
bally dextrou s, digression-filled narrations of writing would always seem necessarily,
that start in medias res, resist closure and defy even joyously, incomplete; as in the conclu-
summary. Their apparent anxiety about incom- sion of "The Last Letter to a Grandmother",
pleteness or uncertainty of context is much "the search is on (0, endless, endless game)
more than a postrnodern posture. Though for something lost" . Looking Out, Looking In
identity, in a cultural or racial sense, seems to provides a welcome opportunity fo r new read-
have been something Markham considered ers to join him in that energetic search.

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26
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 Ray-
mond explained it - and, most of all, hated
television, as a destroyer of "the maturity of
concentration". He welcomed readers with
genuine courtesy, however, once reprimand-
ing 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
IN BRIEF
"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
T he late Oliver Postgate was the doyen of
twentieth-century British children's tele-
vision. His creations, in collaboration with
Peter Firmin, included Alexander the Mouse,
Ivor the Engine, Noggin the Nog, the Ping-
wings, 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 bul-
lied 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 exhibi-
tions. 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 Alexan-
der the Mouse that he and Firmin achieved
their initial breakthrough. But the system of
magnets that moved the mice proved cumber-
some, and they gradually refined their tech-
nique, learning as they went along. Film-mak-
ing, it seems, was simple "common sense".
Postgate does not linger on his delightful
TLS FEBRUARY 26 2010
creations. Rather, we gain insight into the
man behind them: a gentle philosopher who
dislikes unbridled materialism ("like spend-
ing 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 lit-
tle " loose at the seams", it remains as endear-
ing as any of Postgate's characters.
TOBY LICHTIG
Bibliography
Peter Parshall, editor
THE WOODCUT IN FIFTEENTH-
CENTURY EUROPE
352pp. Washington, DC: National Gallery of
Art; distributed by Yale University Press.
£55 (US $79).
9780300121636
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 con-
noisseurship not just into social history, but
into a world where several disciplines need to
learn together. Peter Parshall suggests a com-
bination of historians of religion, monastic
culture and folklore, bibliographers , manu-
script specialists and historians of printed
media; and the list could be easily extended-
as 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[teenth-
Century 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 fur-
niture, or tucked into books, to ambitious
experiments in colour and texture, woodcuts
both had a market and existence in them-
selves, and also contributed to other environ-
ments. 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 diffi-
culties 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 manufactur-
ing some kinds of books in some kinds of cir-
cumstances - not just the Apocalypse or the
Biblia pauperum, but also schoolbooks.
The central essays are concerned with
woodcuts in use, but the most generally valu-
able 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.) Need-
ham shows how various crafts intersected in
making fifteenth-century books, and offers a
classification scheme to help us understand
these artefacts better. Subsequent contribu-
tors explore these phenomena within their var-
ious 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 ele-
mentary uses, and could be employed to
create cheap versions of expensive-looking
cloth, or used experimentally in paste prints.
DA VID McKITTERICK
Religion
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
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 Muham-
mad, and the skills (Arabic grammar, jurispru-
dence, 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

madras as and extremism. He set out to estab-
lish hard facts about Pakistan's madrasas:
their growth, funding , curriculum, relation-
ship 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 scholar-
ship from the ulama of Pakistan ' s Jamia
Ashrafia Madrasa, but he is by profession a
professor of environmental planning; his pre-
vious 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 differ-
ent sects into which they fall, and their his-
tory 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 Fron-
tier 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 exter-
nal , 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. pri-
marily what Pakistan needs to do to reform
its madrasas; "Education, Development and
Conflict Prevention: The role of foreign pow-
ers", i.e. primarily what the USA might do to
improve its public diplomacy. Saleem Ali has
brought together a great deal of useful infor-
mation - 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
A 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 con-
sciously 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 intellec-
tuals 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 poeti-
cized by this remarkable hybrid sensibility
(verbal energy fuelled seamlessly by " life")
or it disappeared from view, apparently inca-
pable of producing meaning. The greatest
mystery of Pushkin's life, one still not satis-
factorily 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 aes-
thetic category, protected him from making a
IN BRIEF
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 pocketbook-
size pages and a short chapter format Chan-
dler manages to describe, sometimes in sur-
prising detail, all the main periods of the
poet's life. He also provides synoptic analy-
ses of Pushkin's major works, a separate chro-
nology of his life and times, minimal explana-
tory 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 bio-
graphy, although other well-known biogra-
phers, including D. S. Mirsky and Yury Lot-
man, 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 embodi-
ment of political orthodoxy"? Wasn't Push-
kin quite distraught, that is, not at all optimis-
tic 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
T 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' intelli-
gence 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 subver-
sive power of comedy is also attested to in
Guattari's support for the comedian
Coluche' s campaign in the 1981 French presi-
dential election (Coluche was leant on not to
stand and some regard his death in 1986 as
suspicious). However, Guattari warns his fel-
TLS FEBRUARY 26 2010
low citizens not to dismiss Jean-Marie Le
Pen as a joke. Le Pen, he insists, is a contem-
porary phenomenon, "une passion collec-
tive", 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, "Molecu-
laire", 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 exhibi-
tion 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 char-
acteristic perversity he remains "a la fois
hyperpessimiste et hyperoptimiste".
lAN PINDAR
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
T 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 uni-
formity, while upland societies revel in diver-
sity. 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 force-
ful general case for the politically con-
structed 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,
27
expects such sniping from specialists.
For him the peoples of Zomia are repositor-
ies of egalitarian values opposed to the
imposed hierarchies of states. Scott is indeed
bold to be so romantic in our cynical age. How-
ever, as he acknowledges, highland and low-
land 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 appre-
ciate 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
I n his new book, George L. Hersey offers a
quirky and fascinating guide to our capa-
city to fall in love with statues, dolls and
automata. He begins in ancient Cyprus with
Pygmalion, king, sculptor and priest of Aph-
rodite. 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 wor-
shipped graven images with eternal damna-
tion, 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 contem-
plated an image of Christ (which he never
identified) he had an erection. Hersey sug-
gests this must have been a Crucifixion or
Deposition " in the sensuous supple early
Rococo figure style". One artist, Asam, spe-
cialized 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
28
Between Here and There
an Morris's catalogue of work attests to
J 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 epi-
grammatic reminiscences, most less than half
a page in length , attempts to correct a life-
time' s worth of omissions. In fact, she
argues, "people ... have been sparks of my
work". The exclamation mark of the title pro-
claims 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 whe-
ther this means that these characters have fea-
tured - 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 introduc-
tion 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, Win-
ston Churchill's deathbed and the less lofty
circumstances of the peasants, farmers and
slum-dwellers that populate this collection.
SAVE 3 4 % N A
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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 road-
side insists that free apricots must accom-
pany the narrator's purchase of oranges; then,
"bustling around looking for other kind-
nesses 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
TLS FEBRUARY 26 2010
savage. The "hard hewn, bashed about, gaunt
faces" of the Swiss peasantry insinuate mem-
ories 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 sigh-
ing in their seats".
Aside from the poor, Morris treasures her
encounters with the rich and famous , particu-
larly 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 "ter-
rific effect ... the stunning assembly of feath-
ers, 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 bear-
ing? 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 disap-
pointing, and for the very humdrum reason
that reality undermines expectation.
For a traveller carrying as much baggage
as Morris, disappointment becomes increas-
ingly 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 foot-
ball, rather than tulips, dykes and Rembrandt.
The narrator frequently yearns for the pre-
industrial, 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 spe-
cious 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.
TLS
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 ILS
30 SOCIAL STUDIES

Mall-Arabia
Telephone: 020 7782 5000 Fax: 020 7782 4966 letters@the-tls.co.uk
s newspaper columns are filled with CLAUDIA PUGH-THOMAS

A speculation over the rapid rise and

precipitate fall of the most audacious
and widely recognized of the seven United
Jim Krane
Editor........................... .
Assistant to the Editor
Deputy Editor .........
........................... Peter Stothard (editor@the-tls.co.uk)
... Maureen Allen (editor@the-tls.co.uk) 020 7782 4962
.................................. Alan Jenkins (deputy@the-tls.co.uk)
Arab Emirates, here is a thorough, fast-paced DUB AI
and at times affectionate study that attempts The story of the world ' s fastest city
to address the elusive nature of Dubai, past, 358pp. Atlantic Books. £ I8.99.
present and future. If the book reads as though 978 I 84887 007 9 Mary Beard ... ............................. Classics, Ancient History (mbI27@hermes.cam.ac.uk)
it was written in a hurry, Jim Krane's breath- Michael Caines ....... Website, Bibliography, Reference, Theatre (theatre@the-tls.co.uk)
less style complements his subject matter: tage. The huge dry docks, designed to accom- James Camp bell ......................... American Literature, Scotland (scotus@the-tls.co.uk)
Dubai is a city that has arisen impetuously and modate enormous vessels, were completed Lucy Dallas. .. ................................... Website, In Brief (TLS_Internet_Editor@newsint.co.uk)
incoherently, its shape shifting as incessantly just as the Iran-Iraq war broke out. "For Roz Dineen ..... Editorial Assistant, Syndication (roz.dineen@the-tls.co.uk)
as the desert sands on which it is built. Dubai", Krane writes, "the war was an eco- Lindsay Duguid. .................................. Fiction, English Literature (fiction@the-tls.co.uk)
Already, some of the details here are out of nomic lemon. So Sheikh Rashid made lemon- .... Music, Theatre, Architecture, Art History (arts@the-tls.co.uk)
Will Eaves ........
date. ade."
Norman Hammond .. ........................... Archaeology (ndch I @cam.ac.uk)
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neither towards sycophancy nor stern judge- dated Dubai ' s position as the link between David Horspool ....... History, Asia, Sport (history@the-tls.co.uk)
ment. He has lived in the city, observed it, East and West when he launched his national Robert Irwin ..... ...... Middle East, Islam (alhambra2@gmail.com)
accumulated a wealth of anecdote, the reminis- airline, Emirates, and brought in the European Alan Jenkins .. ............. Commentary, Poetry, English Literature (deputy@the-tls.co.uk)
cences of locals and expatriates, solid facts tourist. It was for the tourist that many aspects David McKitterick ... Bibliography (dmckitterick@gmail.com)
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compared to Venice, "an island of enlighten- ing geography, lacking in cultural stimuli, Catharine Morris .................................. Deputy Production Editor (catharine.morris@the-tls.co.uk)
ment in a sea of religious fundamentalism", to Dubai offered instead unapologetic luxury, Redmond O'Hanlon ........................................................... Natural History (science@the-tls.co.uk)
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China. It is a place that is "Arab enough, and became the destination. The distinctive Burj Oliver Ready................ .. .... Russia, Central and Eastern Europe (oIiver.ready@the-tls.co.uk)
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but the network is incoherent. The cars are
advanced but driving is anarchic. Malls are rife Managing Director ...... James MacManus (caroline.johnston@newsint.co.uk)
but there is no art museum. The airport is
Commercial Director ....... Jo Cogan Uo.cogan@the-tls.co.uk)
world class, but education is substandard. An
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emerging market, the reason Dubai crackles
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speed, I'll simply say, that's because we never
renaissance". It is a country where mosques drowned ourselves in detail. The key to a true
and churches co-exist, and where Western and effective development process is a vision
expatriates can move freely in a sanitized and that doesn't allow small details to cloud its
"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 demo-
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, over-
Have you
graphic 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
whelmingly 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
missed an issue?
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now teeters was oil. Before oil, it was pearl- number two killer after heart disease; where Please state the date of each issue required.
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of the Japanese cultured pearl killed the ronmental sustainability is barely acknowl-
market in the 1920s. Yet, from an early stage, edged; and where the Islamic identity of the
Dubai has proved itself to be remarkably adapt- emirate is challenged by the relaxed mores of
able. Long a trading hub, with the dredging of an ever-expanding expatriate presence. Here,
the Creek in the 1950s and the mercantile beneath the glittering fa9ade and the brash
skills ofthe Persians who were among the first opportunism, in the mundane but essential
expatriates to settle there, the visionary Sheikh details of social infrastructure, would seem to
Rashid realized the strategic importance of his be where the devil is most likely to be found.
city and managed to capitalize on the habitual "How far will Dubai go?" wonders Krane.
disquiet in the region, turning it to his advan- "It'll be fun to watch."

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 Mother-
land: 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 work-
ing as a freelance writer.
David Cohen is the author of Soviet Psychia-
try: 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 maga-
zine.
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.
Tim Dooley is reviews editor for Poetry
London. His latest collection, Keeping Time,
2008, was a Poetry Book Society Recom-
mendation.
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 Post-
Biblical 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 pub-
lications 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.
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.
Peter Maber teaches English at the Univers-
ity of Cambridge, and writes on modern art.
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 Scholar-
ship and Commerce, 1698- 1872, 1998.
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.
Keith Miller is a freelance writer living in
London. His book about St Peter's Basilica
was published in 2007.
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.
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.
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.
Claudia Pugh-Thomas is a writer living in
London.
Sophie Quinn-Judge is the author of Ho Chi
Minh: The missing years, 2003.
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.
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.
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.
Henry Shukman's first collection of poems,
In Doctor No's Garden, appeared in 2002.
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 Blood-
lands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin will
be published later this year.
Andrew van der Vlies teaches Contempo-
rary and Postcolonial Literatures and Literary
Theory at the University of Sheffield. His
book on J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace is forth-
coming.
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.

PENTATEUCH
o
OB TLS CROSSWORD 822
S A I SAENS GARP ACROSS DOWN
1 Playwright suits hit mu sical to a "t" (5) 1 Hi s drama first seen in 1940, hi s
TR1SMEGlSTUS 4 He wrote before dawn , and later before theatre didn't appear until 1952 (9)
sunset, we're told (9) 2 Last resort for Mailer, perhaps, viewed
ETROACTS T R ACT
9 Middleton 's good Cheapside girl (5,4) in the face of convention (5)
o 0
10 SOil of trap for Pamela's dece ived 3 Modify ritual to produce intensive
S El L L E
o T D husband (5) instruction (8)
PROLEGOMENON 11 A gate opened by Katie Hickman, 4 Reid's horseman lacked it (4)
o revealing first letter arriving by 5 Secretive voices recorded by
I R I S PAS1GRA railway (6) Buchanan? (ID)
12 Pipe (English? American?) for a loyal 6 Apocryphal protagonist associated with 14
E D N PENTANCE
giant (8) Smollett (6)
14 Lawrence work, ending in one by 7 That of Dundas revealed by Linton (9)
SOLUTION TO CROSSWORD 818
Stephens' (3.7) 8 Poet suggests conflicting answers (5)
'/J1e winner afCrossword 818 is
16 Bird-lover in fabl ed account (4) 13 Where Hardy was in the dark, Brecht
Paul Collet, London.
19 "The dread - - that is, death - will shed li ght (2,8)
reign until the human race has begun a 15 Gillette's most confused damsel e'er
new cycle" (Yidal, Kalki) (4) staged (9)
The sender of the first correct 20 Greek poet makes Cretan seem 17 Marathon participant won at least
solution opened on March 19 mi staken (10) thirteen literary prizes (9)
will receive a cash prize of £40. 22 Genre leads to higher rankings in light 18 She wanted us to look at her before her
Entri es should be addressed to literature easily read (8) hi ghly prized lake hotel (8)
TLS Crossword 822, 23 Julia Frankau's was in jeopardy (6) 21 The Vicar of Wakefield, for example, in
Times Hou se, 1 Pennington Street, 26 Jerome journal not so bu sy (5) vehicle richly turned out (6)
London E98 I SS. 27 His 1981 play was a great hit (9) 22 Hornung's nocturnal robber reinforced
28 Tchaikovsky's tragic noblewoman by Koestler (5)
from Adriatic resort? (9) 24 Encampment featured in Exodus may be
29 Avuncular narrator (5) taken from Ma cbeth (amply described) (5)
25 Hi s haiku not everyone 's cup of tea?

TLS FEBRUARY 26 2010

32
A 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 com-
mence 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 rec-
ommended the pursuit of unusual experience.
"Work hard" seemed to be the answer to find-
ing 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.
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 relent-
less". Among the prominent "don ' ts" was
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 descrip-
tions 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.
A reviewer in a long-ago issue of the TLS
described the limerick as "correspond-
ing to the underlying ritual of Greek tragedy,
with the parados of the first line, the
TLS FEBRUARY 26 2010
.Jack Llndsay
FANFROLICO
AND AFTER
peripeteia of the second, the stichomythia of
the two short lines, and the epiphaneia in the
last". The definition is quoted by the distin-
guished 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. for him here, together with the barman. The
Leigh Hunt once, when talking to Landor, Fanfrolico Press: Satyrs, fauns and fine
Remarked with considerable candor, books is published by the Private Libraries
"Though my rhyme has pleased many Association of Pinner, Middlesex.
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
D avid Kader and Michael Stanton have
edited Poetry of the Law, a homage to
their own profession. Kader is a professor of
kissed / And was crossed off George
Eliot's list"), Nicholas Nickleby ("Asks
' How would a nice slap-and-tickle be?'''),
law at Arizona State University, and Stanton a
practising attorney. "Poems about lawyers
tend to divide into Good Lawyer and Bad Law-
Jane Austen ("one's interest does quicken. yer", they say, but there is no mistaking where
/ To know when and if / Captain Wentworth the emphasis lies. Jonathan Swift wrote:
will get his great prick in") and a "famous old The lawyer is a common drudge,
writer called Spender", about whom we will To fight our cause before the judge:
say only that his name - when pronounced in And, what is yet a greater curse,
the accent of an elderly Movement poet - Condemned to bear hi s client's purse.
rhymes with "pudenda" . It is a view that hasn' t altered much since.
Conquest -Chaucer is of the view that With some surprise, after laying down Poetry
Edward Lear, perhaps the best-known writer of the Law, we found ourselves pitying the
of limericks, "had not truly grasped the poor things. It offers a choice between Pope's
form". He himself is sparing with the tradi- lawyer, who devours the worth of the thing
tional starting point, "There was a young lady the claimants fight over, and Anthony
from ... ", preferring to focu s on unexpected Hecht' s judge, who " in his chambers sits ... /
rhymes (Georgia / ordure / bored ya) and And grimaces and spits". Asked to side with
enjambment ("In palazzos along the old D. H. Lawrence, whose paintings were
Appi- / an Way I make Contessas happy"). "arrested" in 1928, or the " magistrate, and six
To enjoy the parados, the peripeteia and fat smaller bobbies" who did the deed, which
the rest in full tragic glory, you may order would you favour? Is there anyone alive who
A Garden of Erses from Orchises Press, thinks the law did well by Oscar Wilde? Even
P 0 Box 320533, Alexandria, Virginia for poets who practised law have it in for law-
$12.95. It is dedicated to Martin Amis, but makers. Roy Fuller, a solicitor for the Wool-
then so are most things these days. wich Building Society, depicts a judge "sum-
moned from his crossword puzzle" to hand
T he London pub depicted on the dust
jacket of Jack Lindsay' s memoir Fanfrol-
ico and After (1962) is unidentified, but an
down a death sentence. It is left to Yvor
Winters to speak up, in a poem dedicated to
Edwin V. McKenzie, a Californian lawyer
educated guess says it is The Champion in who fought against the conviction for murder
Wells Street, Fitzrovia. The picture is taken of a Stanford University employee in 1933:
from a history of the press by John Arnold, You fought your battle, inch by inch of ground.
detailing its origins in Australia in the 1920s, When Justice had become an angry so und ,
before the di ssolution in London in 1930. When Judgment dwindled to an angry man,
Lindsay was the proprietor of Fanfrolico, as You named the limits of the civil span.
well as its most prolific author. The memoir, Poetry of the Law is published by University
one of three, deals with Lindsay' s relation- of Iowa Press at $22.
ships with two women, who may be waiting J .C .
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