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------------------------------------------J------------------- TL S N O V E M B E R 23 2 0 07

Pursued by bears
Ted Hughes left a paper trail for posterity in his letters - but also traces of the man who
remained 'untamed, undomesticated, unruly and animal'
n 19 11, Ego n Schiele paint ed a self-
I po rtrai t of himself as Eros - in his left
han d a terrific, sa lmon-pink erec tio n,
somewhat (I imagine) larger than life.
Height 56 cm, width 32cm, the go uac he used
to belong to Victor Lownes, the ers twhile
Editor of Mayfair. I don 't think Schiele is
paintin g what Ted Hughes, in a lett er to his
painter bro ther Gerald, disparaging ly ca lls
"transfers" : " any fool ca n beco me a mirror if
he pract ise hard". Schie le ' s gouache is not
mimes is. It is fra nk subjectivity. That is how
erec tions fee l - larger than life. That is why
men like them . Th ey en large us.
Let me begin with Ted Hughes' s erec tions
- with a co mme nda bly indi screet mo ment in
thi s co mmenda bly discreet selec tion of his
letter s, tactfull y ch osen and scrupulously,
unostentatiou sly annotated by Christopher
Reid, form erl y Hughes' s editor at Faber &
Faber , as I had been before him . (I
have on ly two imp ro vement s to offer for the
paperb ack: on p153, Hughes writes, "Sy lvia
detests Lyde": he must mean Joe Lyde whose
jazz is played in "S t Botolph' s" from Birth-
day Letters ( 1998) . On p658, Hu ghes is spec -
ulating about the euphor ia felt by the sur-
prised prey of wild anima ls: maybe a cross
reference to "Tro phies", also in Birthday
Letters, would be in order ?) On Oct ober 23,
195 6, Hughes was in Yor kshire at his
parent s' hou se. Sy lvia Plath, his new wife ,
was in Cam bridge . Their marr iage was a
secret because the co upl e feared (nee dlessly ,
as it prove d) that Plath ' s Fulbright Scho lar-
ship wo uld be withdraw n. Th ey met at the
wee kend s.
Above all, save every whisper until Satur day,
save every little bit of you. I can hardly reme m-
ber you without feeling sick and getting aching
erect ions. I shall pour all this into you on Satur-
day and fill you and fill myself with you and
kill myself on you.
Let ' s be clear about what Hugh es is saying.
He is tell ing her not to masturbate, to restrai n
herself as he is evidently res tra ining himself.
Ther e may also be a suggestion that their
pill ow talk should be save d till Saturday an d
not com mitt ed to the page . No t that mu ch is
co mmitted to the page. Compared to, say,
James Joyces ero tic letters to his wife, Nora,
thi s seq uence of intim ate letters is strangely
co ntinent, strange ly literar y. (Pe rha ps
strangely only to non-wr iters. There is an
apocr yph al story told abo ut Bri an Friel that
illu strates the cent ral , defi nin g importance of
writing to wr iters. Friel is said to have as ked
his wife of man y years whether she wo uld
have loved him had he not been a writer at
all. Of course, she reass uring ly repl ied. It is
misc hievous ly said that the dramatist wa s so
offended he didn 't spea k to her for a month. )
But then Plath was a writer too, as Nora wa s
not. Th is sequence is full of schemes, poe tic
reg ime ns, technical tips, pinpoint parti cul ar
criticisms of poetic wea knes ses, and a stock-
LETTERS
C RA I G R AI NE
C h ris to phe r R e id , e d i tor
LETT ERS OF TED H UGHES
756pp. Faber. £30.
978057 122 1387
pile of "saleable", somewhat tediou s plots -
with only odd mom ents of passion . " I shall
kiss you into blisters." "I co uld crush you into
my por es." "That night was nothing but get-
ting to know how smooth your bod y is. The
memory of it goes throu gh me like brandy."
We read wr iters' lett ers for two reas ons -
high-mindedl y, for the light they shed on the
fini shed writing and, less laud abl y perh aps,
but undeni abl y, for what Hugh es, in a lett er
to his moth er-in-law Aureli a Plath , acc u-
rate ly ca lls "the inside-d op e" . Christopher
Reid, co nstrained by con side rations of len gth
- these 700-odd pages repr esent the tini est
sliver of Hugh ess total correspo nde nce - has
12.11.07 St Pancras International
When St Pancras Station was newly
built (1865- 77), George Gilbert Scott's
Gothic hotel facade, and the single-span
train shed behind it, engineered in iron
and glass by WilIiam Henry Barlow,
were greeted as contrasting but
com plem enta ry wonders. Both elements
were threatened with demolition in th e
mid -1960s, but were saved by a
ca m paign led by Nikolaus Pev sner and
TLS NO VE M BE R 2 3 2007
prop erl y opted for a narr ati ve of his writing :
"the stor y is above all that of Hugh es the
writer" . He speci fica lly tell s us that thi s is not
"a biograph y in disgui se" . He tell s us that he
has not been co nstrained by conditions of pro-
priety . I beli eve him when he says he has had
"unimpaired editorial freedom " . But how-
ever correct his preference for art over gos -
sip, the effect overall is slightly deaden ing,
even a bit dull . Of cour se we are grateful for
indi spensable glosses and authorial co mmen-
tary on the work. Yet the effec t is to turn
Hugh es into a slight mon om ani ac - ban gin g
on , ju stifying, ex plaining, bent on leavin g a
paper trail for posterit y. Here there are sev -
era l pages of com mentary, for instance, on
The House of Ari es, a play produ ced by the
BBC. They end, "So much for the Hou se of
Aries. I'm afra id I' ve been very ob scur e. And
tedious" . To o true. Wh at Hughes says to
Aur eli a Plath about her selection of Sylvia ' s
lett ers appl ies equally here: "all these lett ers
ex ist within a single relati on ship, and thi s
John Betjeman. With th e restoration of
St Paneras as th e terminus for th e new
high-speed link to Europe now
complet e, a statue of Betjeman, cast in
bronze by th e sculptor Martin Jennings,
has b een unveiled in th e station con -
course by the poet's d aughter, Candida
Lycett Green. A verse on the plinth
reads : "Here where the cliffs a lon e pre-
vail I I stand exultant, neutral, free .• ." .
3
entai ls, eve ntua lly, beyond a certa in criti cal
mass of text, a feelin g of monoton y and
narro wness". In that case , the clau strophobi a
of Sy lvia talkin g and talkin g to her moth er.
Here, Te d Hugh es filibu sters on the subjec t
of poetr y.
Neve rtheless, inevitably, the suicides of Syl-
via Plath and Ass ia Wevill are touched on,
often mov ingly, but with this proviso,
shrewdly formul ated by Reid: these terribl e
episodes , he says, are "retailed as fully as the
partial - in a doubl e sense - nature of the tell-
ing will allow". Hughes fou nd these events
comp letely intractable: as who wo uldn' t. It is
one thin g to accept blanket blame, as he does,
unflin chingly, in a letter to Aurelia Plath - " I
don 't want ever to be forgiven . I don 't mean
that I shall become a publi c shrine of mourn-
ing and remor se, I wo uld sooner become the
opposite. But if there is an eterni ty, I am
dam ned in it" . It is another to co nfront the
less cosm ic, actual circum stances, the whys
and the hows, and the how exac tlys. In his
play Old Times, Harold Pinter (w hose The
Caretaker Hughes disliked, mys terio usly, as a
trite outin g for Jun g' s egolid polar ity) ends
with a trio of characters unable to reco nstruct
more than the charred remnants of their actual,
shared , damaged sex ual expe rience. Mu ch the
same thin g happens with Ted Hughes.
When Sylvia Plath kill s herself, Hughes' s
adultery is ass igne d a min or role in his lett er
to Aur eli a Plath (Ma y 13, 196 3): " my love
for her simply und erwent tempo rary impri son-
ment by some thing which ca n only be
de scribe d as mad nes s, as muc h an attempt to
free myse lf from the stra ngling qu alit y of our
closeness as by any oute r cause" (my italics).
Ass ia Wevill ge ts the same shor t shrift in
Birthday Letters, where she is "Slightly filth y
wi th ero tic mystery", but abso lved of blame ,
as eve ryo ne is absolved of blame in Birthday
Letters, because she is the age nt of Fate -
Fate that she, Te d and Sylvia are , dreamers
all, sleepwalking towards. It is hard not to
be imp atient with the facile bro ad bru sh
of Birthday Letters, hard not to invoke
Edmund in King Lear, Act One, Sce ne Two :
This is the excellent foppery of the world, that,
when we are sick in fortune, - ofte n the surfeit
of our own behaviour, - we make guilty of our
disasters the sun, the moo n, and the stars; as if
we were villains by necessity, fools by
heavenl y co mpulsion , . .. drunkards, liars, and
adultere rs by an enforce d obedience of
planetary influence . . .
There is a bio gr aph y in embry o in thi s
vo lume - or trace eleme nts of one , which
are easy to miss. Writing to Terry Giffor d on
Januar y 16, 1994 , Hugh es writes about
putting "the hum an bein g back in cont act
wi th the hum an animal" and ad umbra tes the
possible situations that help thi s proced ure .
They include havin g a child (rea son ably
eno ugh, to any one who has see n a child bein g
Continued on page 4
4
CONTENTS
Continued from page 3
LETT ERS 3 Craig Raine Christopher R eid , edito r Letters of Ted Hughes born ) and the "hectic bout of adultery". On
p296, a footnote tells us that a letter to
LET T ERS TO TH E EDITOR 6 The London Library, War memori als, O verlook ed? , etc Richard Murph y, dated October 10, 1969,
was written "from Lumb Bank [a rem ote
PO EMS 8 Cia ra n Cars on T wo poem s hou se Hughes had bought in York shir e]
9 Ala n Brownjohn Ludbrooke : His Eaves dropping where T H had moved with his children , and
12 Der ek W al cott Fo ur po em s with Brenda Hedd en, with whom he had been
conducting an affair, and her children" . Assia
BIOGRAPHY 9 Stefan Co Ilini A. Da vid Moody Ezra Pound: Poet, Vo lume One
WeviIl killed herself on March 25, 1969. In a
PO ETRY Il G abriel Josip ovici Pet er Cole, editor and translat or The Dre am of the Poem - letter to her sister, Ce lia Chakin, dated Apr il
Hebrew poetr y from Mu slim and Christian Spain 950- 1492 14, 1969, Hughes writes: "Assia was my true
wife and the best friend 1 ever had" - j ust as
HISTO RY I3 Sud hir Hazar eesin gh Da vid A. Bell The First Total War - Napoleon' s Europe he had written to Aur elia Plath, on May 13,
and the birth of modern wa rfare 1963, "My love for her [Sylvia] simply
continues , I look on her as my wife and the
COMMEN TARY 14 Ritchi e Robertson Turf wa rs: The fate of books and book ow ners in Vienna only one 1 shall ever marry . .." .
duri ng " a barbarism of meticu lous order" 1 do n't mean to be censorio us or morali z-
T. J . Reed Risen from the ashes - The Ann a Am alia Library ing. It is easy to find contradiction s and
Zinovy Zinik Free lance complications in a lifetime' s corres pondence.
Th en a nd No w TLS Octob er 18 1957; Febru ary 6 1998 - Ted Hughes (For exa mple, in Autumn 1986, to An ne
Stevenson, Sy lvia's bio grapher-in-waiting,
ARTS 17 Car olyne L arrington Beowu lf (Var ious cinem as) Hughe s denies eve r having been bothered by
Dick Ringler , translator Beo wu lf - A new translation for fame at the begi nning of his marriage. On the
oral delivery contrary : "I would have liked a bit of fam e in
And r ew Porter Elizab eth Maconc hy The Sofa. The Departure those days, but it see med far off'. We can
(Lilia n Baylis Theatre ) check . In early Dec ember 1960 , Hughes is
complaining to his in-laws A urelia and
FICTION 19 Ste phen AbeIl Zadie Sm ith, ed itor The Book of Ot her People War ren Plath that his induction into London
Lidija H aa s Mc Sweeney' s, Issue 24
literary life, "becoming something of a public
J ennifer W aIla ce Su Tong Binu and the Grea t Wall figur e" , has left him drained of ene rgy.
David Cuwa r d Frederic Rapha el Fame and Fort une Again, on Apr il 22, 1961 , he notes ruef ully:
Danny L eigh G lenn P atter son The Third Party " I' ve been in the news a bit too much lately,
Anthony C um m ins Benj amin Bla ck The Sil ver Swan I' m beginning to feel news-burned". QED .
The fact of his sex uality - that erec tion again
LITERATURE 22 H enry Power Cla r e Brant a nd Sus a n E. Whyman, ed itors Walkin g the Streets of
- is so mething neither he nor the major ity of
Eightee nth-Ce ntury London - Joh n Gay's Trivia (17 16)
his readers eve r quite face. He uses his
SO CIAL ST UDI ES 22 G illia n DarI ey Tim Ri ch a rdson The Arc adi an Friends - Inventing the lifelong belief in astro logy as an alibi: to his
English landscape sister Olwyn in the late summer of 1962, he
J en nifer Potter AIIyson Hayw ard Norah Lind say - The life and art of a garden makes plan s for a private bank account, an
designer ex it strategy , his marriage to Plath being over
for practica l purpo ses: "I' m aghast when I
HISTO RY OF SCI EN CE 24 Daniel Garbe r Ste phen G a u k ro ger Th e Emerge nce of a Scient ific Culture see how incredi bly I' ve con fined & stunted
my existe nce . . . . However, by progression I
ARCH ITECT URE 25 Lu cy Beck ett K eith M iller St Peter ' s now have Leo in the Ascendant instead of
Ca ncer, which j ust about expresses the
IN BRIEF 26 Arthur Co na n Do yle Ro und the Red Lamp change I feel". He glances at it now and aga in
Anne F adiman At Larg e and At Sm all in th is c orres po nde nce. To hi s son N ic holas
G ra ha m McCan n Fawlty Towe rs (who has j ust ende d a re lationship) he hints at
Sa ra Beam Laughing Matters the unreaso nable restrictions Sylvia imposed
Simo n C r itc h ley Infinitely Dem and ing (undated 1986):
Hu gh Crow The Memoirs of Ca ptain Hugh Crow It meant , Nicholas, that meeting any fema le
Mar ia Messina Beh ind Close d Door s between 17 and 39 was out. Your mother
M ichael Ea ude Catalonia - A cultur al histor y banished all her old friends, girl friends, in case
one of them set eye s on me - presum ab ly. And
T RA VE L & 28 Da vid GaIlagher Robert Carver Paradise with Serpent s
if she saw me ta lking wi th a girl student, I was
ANTHROPOLOGY Fernando Ce r va n tes Frank G r a zia n o Cultures of Devotion
in court. Foo lish of her, and foolish of me to
enco urage her to think her laws were reason-
NAT URAL HISTORY 29 Jonathan SiIver town Da vid BeerIing The Emera ld Planet
able . . one person ca nnot live wi thin
31 This wee k's co ntributors, Crossw ord ano ther' s magic circle , as an enchanted
prisoner.
NB 32 J . C. Graves 's fou l language, The neutral pronou n, Churchill's wit, The poet as Proust's Albert ine, La Prison-
RIP Vernon Scanne ll niere. On the one hand, Sylvia is unreason-
ably jealou s - and, therefore, we assume, has
nothing to fear. On the other hand , imp lici tly,
a man needs more than one sex ual partner.
Isn ' t there a co vert appea l to male ca mara de-
rie here ? No thing is qu ite spe lled out.
In Birthday Letters, "Fidelity" touches,
rather bafflingly, even cra ssly, on this subjec t.
The poem is constructed around a chivalric
ideal in which Hughes, the knight, und ergoes
a kind of test - sleeping with two naked
women every night without making love
with either - because he is so "focused", so
Co ver picture : Ted Hughes, 1971 © Henri Car tier- Bre sson/Mag num Photo s; p2 © E. O. Hoppe/Corbis: p3 © M ichael Wafter/Troi ka: pS © Estate of Leon ard
"locked onto" Sylvia. The two naked women
Baski n. Co urtesy Galer ie St Etienne, New Yor k; p lO © Percy Wyndham Lewis/Bridgeman Art Libr ary; p I 3 © Bridgem an Art Libr ary; p 14 © Oster reic hische exist invisibly in a blind spot created by
Natio nalbibliothek; p i ? © 2007 Warner Bra s; p IS © Robbie Jack; p24 © Glasgow Univer sity Libr ary/Bridgeman Ar t Lib rary; p25 © Kevin l ordan/Corbi s Sylvia' s brilliance. One woman respects his

TL S N O VE M BER 23 2 0 07

"Black and Red Raptor" (1990) by Leonard Baskin, who oft en collaborated with Ted Hughes; included in Proofs and Processes, an
exhibition of Baskin 's work at Ga lerie St Etienne, New York, until January 5, 2008
continence. Th e other "Did all she could to get
me inside her" . The sex ual stupidity here is
striking. Were you wishing to dem on strate
fidelity, you co uldn' t choo se a more unpro mis-
ing, unreassurin g scenario than sharing your
bed with two other naked women.
Th e fox-cub poem "Epiphany" in Birthday
Letters is an allegor y of wildness, which is
also about H ugh ess unt am ed sex ua lity.
Hughes meets a man with a fox cub inside his
jacket. The pric e is £ 1. He decides aga inst buy-
ing the cub - we ighing the cramp ed dom estic
conditions, a new bab y, aga inst the potenti al
"mannerless energy" of "an unpr edictable f
Powerfu l bounding fox". By refu sing the cub ,
Hughes "walked on f As if out of my own
life" . And he concludes, enigmatically, "our
ma rriage had failed". Enigmatica lly, that is, if
it is on ly a fox cub. If it symbolizes some thing
untam ed , undomestic ated , unrul y and animal
- something that a good marri age could
accommodate - it becomes relatively straight-
forward . But the young Hughes is cen sorin g
his own beha viour - and therefore den ying, as
he sees it, his true inner self.
According to Elaine Fe instei n' s bio graphy,
in "real life" Hughe s was mor e candid about
his requirement s - and her conclusion s are
based on inter views with Brenda Hedd en and
on correspondenc e in the Hugh es archi ve at
Emory Unive rs ity in Atlanta. He was frank
about his need for more than one sex ual part-
ner : Brend a Hedd en told Elaine Fein stein
that "T ed was a man who needed seve ral
wo men ... . oth er men do , don 't they? He
isn't un ique" . Carol Orchard marri ed him in
Augu st 1970 and therefore overl app ed with
Brenda Hedd en, whose invol vement began in
196 8 and see ms to have petered out in
LETTERS
Sept emb er 1970 , ending finall y in 1971.
Ca rol accompanied Te d on literary trip s to
Israel and Persia . Ju st as well . In Au stral ia, at
the Adelaide Literary Festi val, in 1976 ,
Hugh es began an affa ir with Jill Barber, the
press co-ordinator, who actually lived in
London . At the same time, Hughe s was having
an affair with the novelist Emma Te nnant. Jill
Barb er kn ew abo ut th is and w as unworried by
it. Emma Tennant disco vered the rival relation-
ship by seeing the obviou sly intim ate pair at a
part y. Meanwhile Carol Hugh es was at Court
Green, their hou se in Devon (where Ted had
also lived with Sylvia), mourning her father,
Jack Orch ard , who died in February 1976.
Hugh es visited at the wee kends. The affair
with Jill Barb er continued until she went to
live in New York in 1980.
It is too easy to be cen sor iou s. We simply
don't know enou gh. The affair with Jill
Barb er probably began as a counter weight to
the hatr ed ex presse d by militant fem inists
who hounded Hughes at Adelaid e, accusing
him of having murdered Plath. Public vilifica-
tion is hard to bear on your own. Th ereafter
there was loyalt y, gratitude , sex ua l attra ction ,
sex ua l imprinting, fear of fatal con sequence s
sho uld he attempt to leave . Phil and erer , a
word sometimes applied to Hugh es, eve n by
friends, see ms inad equ ate . His lett ers to
Assia Wev ill, for exa mple, are tender and lov-
ing in the face of her sometimes exas perating
beha viour. We forgi ve serial marr iages, one
love rep lacin g another. But wh y is this more
comm end able than continuing to lov e one
per son while also loving another? It is more
normal, of course, but is it more commenda-
ble? Serial adultery we und erstand , are
familiar with . Multiple adultery seems
TLS NO VE MBE R 23 2007
beyond our comprehension for no good rea-
son. Kindness and habit mu st play their part -
doubling in ways that are not unthinkable.
Habit, for instance, will hold you and slacken
the hold on you.
Nev ertheless , it is impossible to write
sheer, pur e, impure sex ual energy out of the
picture . In Passion Play (19 81), one of the
grea t plays of the last ce ntury , Peter Nichol s
has the courage to voice the ma le sex ual
imp erati ve . l ames, a picture restor er , is
addressing a painting of Christ:
I' m an unemotion al man who ' s inspir ed a pas-
sion in my partn er. And I needn 't tell you what
passion mean s. Sufferin g, self-inflicted torture,
masochism, all that' s holy. Like that exquisite
depiction of a bleedin g corpse that ' s waiting
for me in Zurich. By day I'll patch it up, repair
the blood and wounds where they' ve been
knocked aro und ove r the yea rs, but eve ry night
I' ll fuck as though life depended on it. Which
o f co urse it do es.
He doesn 't ju st mean reproduction . He means
being alive , fee ling alive . As for the analo gy
with Christ's Passion - hi s wife, Eleanor,
sings in Bach' s St Matth ew Pa ssion - we can
compare Kip ling' s "the jo y of an old wound
waking" (in "The O ldest Son g") . Or Tom
Stopp ard ' s The Invention of Love, where the
midd le-aged Hou sman, smitte n still byMo ses
Jackson, parses the middl e-a ged Hor ace
fac ed with Venu s wa ging war. It is no acc i-
dent that we fa vour the word " smitten" to
descr ibe sex ua l passion.
Of course, we would like not to succumb.
We would like to beha ve imp eccabl y.
Nineteenth-century literature is found ed on
the confl ict between passion and duty , from
Jane Eyre to The Mill on the Floss. Sense and
5
susceptibility . In all of us, there is a real strug-
gle between the Purit an and the Hedoni st.
Hugh es' s ow n natur e, and his attractive ness to
wom en, ensured that this struggle was more
rea l for him than for mo st, so much so that it
inform s his readin g of Shak espear e in Shake-
speare and the Goddess of Complete Being -
where he is on the side of comp leteness, of
licenc e, of pagan candour , a Nietz schean
immoralist. As he is in Gaudete, where, muta-
tis mutandis, the Rev Lumb gets to go with
nearl y every fema le in sight. Rejoice .
In a letter to Daniel Weissbort (undated ,
1976) , Hugh es writes: "the rea l subject of
poetry might be what we reall y feel about
wh at reall y happ ens to us, and the real lan -
gu age might be a very plain & direct busi-
ness" . To Ann e Sexton (Au gu st 9, 1967) he
writ es: "Anyway, you'v e no need to worry.
Wh en you ' ve got it you've got it - you don 't
ha ve to both er about poetry , yo u ju st have to
be truthful (which is where the brain and all
its hideou s lies leap in, I know) ". It seems so
simple: tell it ho w it is. As an imperative, it is
simple. But what reall y happens to us isn't.
We tell the story of our sel ves to our own
ad vanta ge, from our own confusion. In
Hughess ca se, his openn ess was as illusory
as our own.
His essay "Superstitions" (in Winter
Pollen, 1994) mounts a conc essive defence
of as trolog y: "To an out sider, astrology is a
procession of pueril e absurdities. A Babe l of
gibberish". It has no way of shedding its
mistake s as science do es. Yet , reviewin g
Loui s MacNeic e ' s Astrology , Hugh es offers
up Eva nge line Adam s as testabl e data, show-
ing that astrology work s, whether as magic
or as a science . In thi s volume of letters,
astrology is a persistent point de repere , a
significa nt exa mple of what Bridget Jon es
call s " mentionitis" , Page 14, "astrological
map s" ; pag e 19, "I' ve worked it out by paren -
tal temp eraments, zod iacal, and such"; page
22, "my host - a mon strou sly built Gemini" ;
pag e 30, Sylvia is " Scorpio Oct 27th , moon
in Libra , last de grees of Arie s rising and has
her Mars smack on my sun" ; page 47 (of his
brother Gerald 's children), "with two Lea s
you will hav e to look out " ; page 49, " I had to
stay at Leed s for an hour, so 1 bought a glass
of milk and a HOROSCOPE and read our
different fortune s for the month - all very
non-committal & uncon vinc ing as usual " ;
pag e 62 , " I can put it do wn to the conjunction
of the moon and saturn"; page 78 shows us
Sylvi a' s astrological chart; on page 94
Hughe s is trying, unsucc essfu lly, to place a
new spap er ad verti sem ent as a professional
astrologer. I could go on . But there is a comic
thread throu gh these lett ers that con veniently
epitomizes Hughess astrological ob se ssion
and the ration al world' s refu sal to accede to
his beli ef. The ration al world in th is case is
Faher and Fab er . Wh en Wodwo is accept ed ,
Hughes asks his editor , Charles Monteith, if
the book can be published on Ma y 9, "the
da y of day s", as he kno ws from "thousa nds
of hour s studying Astrology ". Chr istoph er
Reid notes dryl y that " Wodwo was in fact
publi shed on 18 Ma y 1967" . Frank Pike at
Faber wa s asked if Crow could be pub lished
on October I, because "Newton and Kepl er
are in agreem ent , that is a great day in
heaven" . Reid notes: " Crow' s eve ntual
publ ication dat e was 12 October" . It wasn't
until the publication of Season Songs on
Continued on page 8
6
Sir, - On behalf of the Tru stees of
the London Lib rary, I wish to
respond to the letters from memb ers
who are co nce rned about the
increase in the subscription fees (Let-
ters, Nove mber 9 and 16). We sym -
path ize with their feelin gs, and of
cour se wo uld prefer not to have to
make these increases. But as the
Library' s governing body, we are
charged with respons ibility for ens ur-
ing that it surv ives and flouri shes.
For many years, the subscription
has increased on average only every
three years , and by small degrees.
Th is was naturally attrac tive to mem-
bers but it has resulted in subscrip-
tions fallin g out of line with the real
costs of runnin g the Lib rary. Mem -
bers' subscriptions are currently heav-
ily subsidized from the Library's cap-
ital endow ment. This position cannot
continu e. It has become increasingly
clear that the only realistic way of
maintainin g the Library' s stability
and securing its futur e is to increase
the annual subscription by what we
realize is a substantial prop ortion ,
and to do so without delay.
Our Charter requires us to main-
tain a library for the adva nce ment of
education, learning and knowled ge
for all who sho uld wish to make use
of it, subje ct to paym ent of "such
sums by way of fees and other
charges as are necessary to defr ay
the expe nses of the pro vision and
maintenanc e thereof'. No rea son-
able memb er in possession of the
facts could ex pect the Libr ary to
continu e to subsidize the annu al
subsc ription by depletin g its capital
to an extent that would soon threaten
the surv ival of the institution.
Few members can have been
unaware of the ge neral positi on,
since in eac h of the past thr ee years
the Treasurer has spo ken plainl y of
the need, also outlined at successive
AG Ms and rec orded in annual
reports, to address the ong oing
deficit. We built on thi s by sending
all memb ers a spec ial note about
o ur prop osal before thi s year's
AGM on Nove mber I.
--------------------------~--------------------------
War memorials
Sir, - Mark Whittow 's statement,
"Ge rma ny (and Austria) is very well
stocked with mem ori als to both
world wars and the wars of unifi ca-
tion too" (Nove mber 9), needs some
rectifi cation . It is true only in part ,
the exce ption bein g the Second
World War. Alth ough the losses
were higher, there are hardly any
monuments in Germany comme mo -
ratin g the Ge rma ns who died, whe-
ther on the battlefield or as civilians.
Why? Because after 1945, re-educa-
tion wor ked all too we ll, resulting in
a cult of self-accusation and guilt
acco mpanied by a thorou ghl y nega -
tive self-image . Th e climate of polit-
ical correctn ess that still prevails
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
The LondonLibrary
At the meetin g, which was exce p-
tion ally we ll atte nded, there was a
len gth y debat e on the issue, con-
du cted in full accor da nce with the
Lib rary ' s co nstitution and rules.
Ample opportunity was give n to
members to put their views o n
both sides of the matte r. Ou r pro -
posal was approved by a subs tantial
majority of those present.
We are, of co urse, conc erned
about the impact of this large
increase. Th e spec ial note sent to
memb ers with the annual report
includ ed details of a new scheme
allowing all members to spread the
cost of their subscriptions through-
out the yea r. It also reminded mem-
bers of the existing scheme opera ted
by the Londo n Libra ry Trust to pro-
vide co ncess ionary rates to those for
who m the real-c ost level wo uld be a
barrier to maintaining memb ership.
Th e London Libr ary is not in a
crisis and it will survive and prosper.
But it must pay its way. With its day-
to-d ay running cos ts on a firm foot-
ing, the Libr ary will be better placed
to carry on pro vidin g an unparal-
leled, milli on-stron g open-access
book co llection and unri valled levels
of pers onal service for ge nera tions of
readers and writers to come.
THOMAS LEGG
London Library, 14 St l ames' s
Square , London SW I.
Sir, - A rev iew of the Lond on
Lib rary ' s acco unts does not show
an instituti on in crisis and certa inly
does not ju stify either the 80 per
ce nt fee in crease or the " h igh -toned
mora l indi gn ation " show n by
Richard Davenport-Hines (Le tters,
November 16) in respon se to a mil d
qu esti onin g of thi s increase. The
Libr ary spends £3 milli on p.a. and
receives from memb er s, regul ar
don ation s and investm ent s, £2.3
milli on. However , thi s ex pe nditure
in Germany today precludes any
attempt to cast a cold eye on the past.
FRIEDRICH RAPP
Institut fur Philosop hie, Univers itar
Dort mund, Dortmund.
----'~,---
Overlooked?
Sir, - I was surprised that J. C. (NB ,
Novemb er 9) co nsidered Catherine
Ca rswe ll's The Savage Pilgrimage,
on D. H. Lawrenc e, an "overlooked"
book. Th e 1932 edition was reissued
by Ca mbridge University Press in
1981, with a mem oir of the author by
John Carswe ll, in hardb ack and
pape rback. (I bought the paperb ack ,
for £3, in 2000.) Last yea r, in your
Ietters @the-tIs,co .uk
includes (i) fund-raisin g cos ts of
£3 09, 000 (ju stifi abl y inc reased to
raise the fin ance for the new build-
ing), (ii) book purchasing of
£239,000 (surely thi s co uld be
fund ed by an Annu al Fund from
don or s?) and (iii) £4 15,000 for
ca talog uing (this mu st be largely in
connection to the retro specti ve
conve rsion of the old ca talog ues -
as the Library only bou ght 8,000
boo ks last yea r - which it see ms
legitim ate to fu nd from reser ves, as
thi s is a long-t erm , one-off invest-
ment ). Deduct these item s and the
Lib rary makes a surp lus on its
regul ar incom e of £2 52,000.
The real probl em for the Lib rary
is to grow its members hip base. The
Annu al Report shows a net increase
of 122 memb ers (to 8,025) in the
yea r 2006-07; 105 of these are half-
price memb ership s sold to under- 25s
- in itself a very go od idea - but hid-
ing the lack of real grow th in mem-
bership. (It would be interesting to
know why the grow th is so wea k -
but very little attention is paid to this
issu e in e ithe r the An nual Report or
the Chairma n's letter.) Paul Barker ' s
co ncern that the dram atic increase in
fees wo uld lead to a reduction in
memb ership is therefore a legitim ate
worry. A grow ing memb ership is
good for the incom e but it is also a
vote of confide nce in the Library,
and undoubt edl y makes the jo b
ow n column s, Michael Lister called
the book "lastingly important".
A. D.ROBERTS
8b Lancaster Drive, London NW3.
----~,----
Japanese allies
Sir, - A long-held aversion to coloni-
alism - which didn't prevent the
United States from practi sin g its
ow n version of it - is not the same
thin g as the "destruction of the Brit-
ish Imperiu m" ; the loaded phr ase,
"realized wa r aims", gives John
A. Davis' s ga me away (Letters,
Nove mber 2). Th e US had no inten-
tion of either saving or destro ying
the Briti sh Em pire when Pearl
TLS NOVE MBER 23 2 007
of the Lib rary' s fund-raising team
eas ier. Did the Tru stees research the
likely imp act of the SO per cent fee
increase? The Lib rary find s it very
hard to rec ruit new members - it
may find it eas ier to lose them.
MAR K STOREY
lOE Eaton Square, Lond on SW I.
Sir, - Richard Davenport-Hin es
describes opposition to the Lond on
Library ' s prop osed subscription level
as the "unpleasant sound of the Eng-
lish middl e classes defendi ng their
own selfish interests" with demand s
that "the Library Tru stees should
give a dole, year by yea r, prom iscu-
ously, to eac h and every one of the
Library' s 6,000 ordin ary memb ers".
I write as one of these scro unge rs,
with a distinctly unsucc essful track
record . I have not needed the
Libr ary in recent tim es, and in the
last five yea rs I think I have bor-
rowe d onl y one book. But I have
renewed my subsc ription in support
of the institution.
Mr Davenp ort-Hines has made me
do the calculation for the first time,
and I find that this one loa n seems
to have cost me about £800 . Am I
alone, or eve n rare, amo ng members
in having taken this attitude but in
decidin g now that I won' t go on if
the Trustees push throu gh their plan?
I hope for the Lib rary' s sake that I
am a rare exception, and that this
has been established beyond reason-
able doubt from the computer
record s. But I very much doubt it.
And with the Libra ry issuin g only
80,000 loans in the past year, an aver-
age of ten vo lumes per member, I
have a hunch the Trustees may be
seriously wro ng about likely levels
of renewal. If so, they are in troubl e.
BAM BER GASCOIGNE
1 Sr Helena Terrace, Rich mond,
Surrey.
Harb or for ced her into the Second
Wor ld War ; vengeance came fir st,
ove r and above the ex presse d des ire
to "cleanse the wor ld of ancien t
ev ils" (Roosevelt's words) . The
Empire was never go ing to surv ive a
sec ond c atas trophe on the sca le of
another world war, never mind impe-
rial ove r-stretch and the rising cla-
mour for independ enc e among her
man y subje cts. Perh aps Davis bu ys
into the bli mpi sh fantasies dreamt
up by the Alan Clark/Jo hn C harm-
ley Schoo l of histor ical rev isionism;
if he do es, he' s fooling him self.
Hitl er loathed Brit ain and her liber-
ties with a passion ; without Am er-
ican money and Ru ssian blood , thi s
sce ptred isle wo uld have wound up
an offshore Finland at best.
Sir, - As a memb er of both the
Lond on Lib rary and Newcastle's
Literar y and Phil osophical Soc iety
Library , popul arl y known as the
Lit & Phil , I am astonished by the
divergent ways in which both insti-
tuti on s handl ed a raise in subscrip-
tion . The qu estionn aire sent round
beforeh and by the Lit & Phil, in
keeping wi th goo d practi ce, not
only consulted the me mbersh ip
but also increased the Library 's
knowl ed ge of the memb ership and
the use that was made of its collec -
tion . No thing of thi s kind preceded
the Lond on Libr ary ' s annou nce-
ment of an 80 per cent increase in
its annual subscription, bringin g
the fee to £37 5. The sudde nness
of thi s hike, an d the abse nce of
co nsultation, make for worry ing
co ncerns in rel ation to futu re do na-
tion s and legacies from me mbers.
FRANCES SPALDING
Th e Flat, 70 Glouces ter Crescen t,
Lond on NW !.
Sir, - Richard Davenport-Hines
attacks memb ers of the Lond on
Library who protest at a near-
doublin g of the fees, and who query
the way the governing Tru stees
have shunted fund s to cover ex orbi-
tant buildin g plans. If Paul Barker
repeatedly "bobbed up" at the
AGM to make the case for the
memb ership , we should be grateful
to him . The new fees are simply
beyond the means of many regular
users of this great working library.
Wh en Davenp ort-Hines mock s
tho se who question the way the
Library is bein g run , he reveals a
sad an d worrying gulf between
its reader s and tho se entrus ted
w ith its managem ent. R ead er s
who know the Libr ar y' s frien dli-
ness and co urtesy - and its profes-
sional efficiency - will be aston-
ished by thi s lapse into invecti ve .
A. L. REES
22 Me lling Street, Plumstead,
Lond on SE 18.
Finally, when I read a sentence
like "My broth er, who spent the
war fightin g the Japanese in
Burma, once said that he much pre-
ferred them as men to his Chinese
and American allies", I wonder
w hethe r my uncl e' s sacrifice at the
Battle of the Bulge was in vain.
This smac ks more of snobbery than
chivalry; Daviss broth er might
have taken a more j aundic ed view
of his adve rsaries if he had fallen
into their hands. As if it were only
abo ut "oil supplies"! Just ask the
Chinese and the Koreans how they
benefited from the "Greater East
Asia Co-Pros perity Sphere" .
GEO RGE RAFAEL
109 Mil son Road, Lond on W 14.
Selected Poems The Collected Poems
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FEDERICO GARcIA LORCA C. P. CAVAFY
Translated by MARTIN SORRELL with an Translated by EVANGELOS SACHPEROGLOU;
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8 LETTERS

Continued from page 5
M ay 13, 1976 , that Faber obli ged Hughes.
Th ere is a revealin g sentence o n pi 04 :
"There is no ex planation for it, thou gh astro-
logy, of course, ex plains it all" . Hugh es
beli eved that ration alit y was limitin g. It is
obv ious from these lett ers that astrology, in
fact , shut do wn far too much. In a key letter
to Luc as M yers (June 19, 1959) Hughes
adva nces the theory that " most po etr y,
parti cul arl y mod ern poetr y, is quit e witho ut
thi s who leness - me n mak e their who le style
out of one filament of the thick rop e of
hum an natur e". This is one with the title of
Shakespeare and the Goddess of Comp lete
Being. Joyce leaves behind him a rec ord of
his complete bein g in his wor k. Hughes' s
record is shor t-circuited by astrology - by the
autoco mplete of astrolo gy as the ex planation
for everything .
Which is why, despite Hughes' s moving
last letters about the fin al, painful disclosure
of the Sy lvia Plath saga - complete disclosure
that he hoped wo uld cure his cancer - Birth-
day Letters are a failur e as a full reco rd and
therefore as poetry . Virtu ally every poem is a
memo ry arran ged to reflect a tragic telos. It
makes for falsity and formal monotony. Fixed
stars gove rn a life - as Plath wrote in her poem
"Words" . Th e danger for Hughes is that they
are fixed like the World ' s Series is fixed by
Meye r Wolfsheim in The Great Gatsby.
Of co urse , there are grea t thin gs in these let-
ters - a mar vellou s acco unt of recei vin g the
Queen' s Go ld Me da l for Poetry, writte n for
Hu ghess da ughter Frieda, and compl etely
different from the acco unt he gave me. He is
gen uinely mod est abo ut his work: "the
poe ms in my book [The Hawk in the Rain]
seem crud e in pitch for the most part" ; of his
nex t book , Lupercal, "much better than my
earlier ones , but gravely crippled by the
aw ful emo tional dryn ess I' ve felt ove r here
[the USA]". Regul arl y, if not as frequ entl y as
you might ex pec t, you enco unter deli ghtful
touch es: on Fortnum and Mas on's, "deep car-
pets, sturge on's ton gues, bowin g uniform ed
atte nda nts, cassowary brain s in me lon
syru p". Thi s is Frieda learnin g to speak : "issu-
ing a strea m of Japanese, with the beginnings
of tran slation - app-uh, for apple, ooo -e n, for
ope n . . ." . Th e fam ou s are brou ght before us:
" Neruda - he read torrenti all y for abo ut 25
minutes off a piece of paper about 3" by 4".
Then he turn ed it ove r, & read on" .
T . S. Eliot: " His smile is like that of a person
recovering from some serious operation ....
Eliot isn 't at all un guarded in his remark s. He
has hu ge thick hand s - unexp ected". You
might think lett ers we re Hughes' s fort e, his
natur al mode, since the Shakes peare book
emerged from lett ers writte n to the Swedi sh
director Donya Fe uer, and given the episto-
lary templ ate of Birthday Letters. However,
lett ers are only lett ers finally.
However man y mir acul ou s tou ches letter s
cont ain, fini shed wr iting is better for seco nd
thou ght s, and we sho uld curb our ex pec ta-
tions. So metime in the summer of 1959,
Hugh es wro te to his parent s an acco unt of
the bears in Yello wston e Na tional Park ,
Wyoming. "Tuesday we we nt ro und the park
loo king at the geysers, whole valleys full of
these thin gs - most are ju st holes in the cake d
white gro und - stea ming, & bubbling wa ter,
a reall y helli sh landscape, sulphur sme lls" .
Com pare Kipling in Japan in From Sea to
Sea : " In the end we fou nd an imp overished
and sec ond-hand Hell . ... Water, in which
bad eggs had been boiled, stood in blister-
lip ped poo ls . . .". Of course, Kiplin g' s
Letters of Travel were compose d for publi ca-
tion . In thi s case, it is possibl e to compare
Hughess roug hed-out or iginal lett er with the
fini shed vers ion, "T he 59th Be ar", publi shed
thirt y-odd yea rs later in Birthday Letters. The
writing is bett er but the inci dent is worked up
- the bear alleg or ized to sta nd in for the dea th
pur suing Plath . In the lett er, Ted and Sy lvia
co unt sixty-seven bear s. In the poem, the
leth al bear that sudden ly di splaces the
am iable bears fed by the tour ists is the fift y-
ninth . The or iginal has de tails "missing"
from the fin al poetic narr ative: "we heard it
sucking our oranges"; a car co mes and "the
bear ran to hid e behind our tent - hittin g a
guy ro pe & shaking the whole place". On the
other hand , ge nerally the detail is impro ved:
" He' d left matted hairs. I glued them in my
Shakes pea re"; the hidin g bear' s "breathing /
Heavy after the night ' s gourma ndizing, /
Rasped clo se to the ca nvas - onl y inches /
From yo ur face that, big-eyed, stare d at me /
Staring at yo u" . Thi s is a reprise of the clo se
of "Full Mo on and Little Frieda" - "The
moon has stepped back like an artist gazing
amazed at a wor k / That po ints at him
amazed" - yet it is trem end ou s, all the same.
Tre mendo us, but abou t to be pressed into a
thesis. Ju st a littl e reminisce nt of a politi cian,
gifted with or atory, but bu rdened with a
part y agend a.

Two Poems by Ciaran Carson

le Reviens L' Air du Temps
Nice perfume, I said. Yes, yo u said, the last tim e I saw yo u. Th at whiff of L' Air du Te mps I go t back then in the war dro be -
What is it abo ut it? I said. The Hou se of Worth , yo u said, I rem emb er when I first registered that prim al sce nt,

1932. M y moth er wo uld have been seve ntee n. whence the sym bolis m of the pa ir of intert winin g doves,
It' s the sce nt G Is in Pari s wo uld bu y for their girl-friends and the fro sted glass bottl e that made yo u think of Paris

as a promi se that they wo uld return when dem obilized . under a cloudl ess winter sky, as I did of yo ur blou se
That some did not goes without say ing. I come agai n, of pale pastel blu e , so crisp and clean and near tran sparen t.

l e reviens . The overall effec t is difficult Th en it began to develop waves, and I was standing
to describ e, since it seems to deve lop sep arate ly with you on a beach as we noted how the laps of foam

but sim ultaneously on two distinct level s, wave lengt hs mouthed upon one ano the r, how the cres t of the barrel
of sugges tion and risk as we ll as definite stateme nt. doubl ed and brok e into a shru bbery of ju mpin g sprays.

One factor is mysteriou s and wo ody, with piqu ant We go t soa ked with spindrift and spray , our cheek s frosted with brin e,
flashes of herbs, the other a head y rush of flower s. but we saw the waves we ll. In the sunlight they were gree n-b lue,

It is based on narcissus poetic us, a nati ve flint y sharp, and ruck ed in stra ight lines by the wind, bottl e-green
of the und er world attra ctive to ghostly reflecti on s. under their for elo ck s, or the turn ed- over plait of the crest.

Iris root is an esse ntia l ingred ient , Iris Th e laps of running co mb buffeting the sea wa ll doubl ed
a sister of the Harpi es, and messen ger of the go ds, o n them selves, plied and purl ed in their fold ed cras h and back- swa sh,

who ferri es the so uls of dead wo men to the und erworld , clockin g the stones under water agai nst one another.
who per sonifi es the rainbow , the iris of the eye . We leaned unsteadil y into the wind all the way back

How we go t from the sce nt to the Af gh an rug I don 't know, to the hotel. We stoo d and look ed at the waves for a while
but as we spraw led carelessly on its groun d of red madder fro m the bay wind ow. We sw itched off the light s to wa tch T V.

we began to en ter its ara bes ques of indi go Th ey were show ing the latest news fro m my nati ve cit y.
and purpurin flecked with yellow lark spur of the desert . It look ed like a Sixties newsreel where it always drizzled,

At first the pattern see med to be a Tree of Life, but then the police wea ring glis tening black ulsters and gun-ho lsters.
the warp and we ft began to shift and shimmer und er us, Wh en it ca me to the bit with the talkin g heads we sw itched off.

becomin g now a dragon and phoeni x in comb at, now We must have drift ed off to the far-off sound of the waves,
a snarl of vines or snakes . Ens narled and think ing to escape, both of us thinking of ho w when takin g off your jer sey

we plun ged down through the ages till we land ed on a field of rib-knitted wool in the dar k, with an accide ntal
of Afgh an war rug bright with helicopt ers, guns and tanks. stro ke of your fin ger you drew a flash of electric light.

TLS NOVEMBER 23 2007

 BIOGRAPHY 9

n the summer of 1908, a twenty-three- The present vo lume is, wi tho ut question , a

I year-old American , who had recently

been dismissed for "immor ality" ha lf-
way throu gh his first year of teaching at
a sma ll co llege in the M idwest, found him -
self, like ma ny other cul ture d or indigent
Ame rica ns before and since, in Venice . He
had brou ght with him littl e money, a soa ring
litera ry ambition, and the manusc ript of a
co llec tion of his poems. He arra nged for an
Italian printer to ru n off 150 copies of thi s lit-
tle vo lume, entitled A Lume Spento ("With
Ta pers Qu enched" ), and drew up a list of
peopl e to whom cop ies we re to be sen t. The
first fo ur names on the list were Hilda
Doolittl e, A. C. Sw inburne , Willi am Car los
Williams and W. B. Yeats, Such co nfidence,
or presum pti on, was already charac teris tic;
and the fo ur names neatly represe nted the
main aspects of the ident ity thi s singular
yo ung man had chose n for himse lf.
Fired up with fantasies of becoming a latter-
day Dante, Ezra Pound thou ght he had fo und
his Beatri ce in Mi ss Doolittl e, and the co uple
had becom e engaged three years earlier,
when she was nineteen. The engagement was
soo n brok en off (she ch afed at having the
script of her life wri tte n for her, and anyway
her we ll-co nnected fam ily disapproved ), but
a poeti c as mu ch as an emo tional bond
endured, and, as "H.D." , Hild a was to be at
the heart of Poun d ' s later (a nd also shor t-
lived ) attem pt to make Imagisme the fashion-
able poeti c of the day in London. On e of the
poets the young couple rea d together with
rap turous intensity was Swin burne, the late-
Victorian whose lush , hon eyed verses min-
Wild man
S T E F AN C OL LIN I
A . D a vid M o od y
EZRA P O U ND : PO ET
A portrait of the man and his work
Volume One: The Young Genius 1885-1 920
507p p. Oxford Univers ity Press. £25 (US $47.95) .
9780 1992 15577
Club, and shameless ly buttonholed writers at
eve ry opportun ity. By Jun e 1909, he had
ma de eno ugh of a splas h by his writing and
his soc ial activities to be granted the acco lade
of a lamp oon in Punch. And two mo nths
earl ier, Pound had achieve d the goa l that
ma ttered to him above all others : he had met
Yea ts. The olde r poe t was we lcoming , and
the rel ation ship bet ween the two men devel-
ope d to the po int where, fro m 1913 onwards,
they spent part of three winters closeted
togeth er in a cott age in Sussex, with Pou nd
noti on ally fulfilling so me secretarial duti es,
but where the real bu siness was writing and
discussi ng poetry.
The mann er of the arriva l in Eng land in
Augu st 1914 of another Ame rican gra duate
stude nt with poetic aspirations might have
seemed, at first sight, to augur less we ll for
literary success than Pound 's co nfide nt
assa ult. T. S . Eliot was ju st completing the
writing of his Harvard PhD disser tation on
reversed . Eliot was by then highl y estee med
as both poet an d critic, espec ially by the
serious yo ung, and was we ll on his way
towards the almos t papa l author ity he was to
exe rcise over Eng lish literary life in the mid-
dle decades of the cen tury. Pound's career , by
contrast, seemed to have run agro und on the
reefs of his own imp atient literar y ex perime n-
tat ion and tactl ess self-adve rtisement. Th e
rejecti on was mutual: Eng land, he declared
mor e than once, now ex hibited nothing but a
"dead mentalit y" , and he decided to give up
on the project of civiliz ing it, leaving for Paris
in December 1920. He moved to Italy in
1924, never to live in England aga in.
M any of the thin gs that Pound did and said
and wro te in the rem ainin g five dec ades of
his life (he died in 1972 ) so dam aged his
reput ati on that even now he ca n be dismissed
in so me qu arters as - the emphases vary - a
Fas cist, a traitor, an anti-Se mite, or a lun atic
(he spent twelve yea rs in an Americ an mili-
tar y ment al hospit al after the Seco nd World
War, having initi all y been tried for trea son
for havin g mad e pro- Fascist broadca sts fro m
Mu ssolini ' s Italy). In oth er qu arters, the
huge, spraw ling collecti on of the Cantos,
whose co mpos itio n was spread across these
later decades, is regard ed as one of the major
literary achievements of the twentieth cen-
tur y. These co ntras ting assessmen ts have in
co mm on a tendency to sca nt Pound's early
full y researched bio gr aph y, but it retains
eno ugh of the literary-criti cal emphas is of the
earlier work to set it somew hat apart from the
domin ant genre of co ntem porary literary
biograph y. In the cour se of the narrative ,
Mood y allows him self len gth y interludes of
critica l ana lys is of Pound ' s poetry, analyses
which cer tainly do not shirk that poetry' s allu-
siveness and rhythmica l co mpl exity. Scho l-
ars may welco me these learn ed exegeses,
though it has to be said that they make the
readin g hard going in places.
On e of the ex traor dinary thin gs about the
first thirt y-fi ve yea rs of Pound ' s life is his
utterl y single-minded and aut onom ou s se lf-
crea tio n as a poet, and a po et of a self-
co nsc ious ly revolut ionary kind. He did not
co me from a parti cul arl y literary back-
gro und. Hi s father had a ro utine job in the
Phil adelphi a mint, and Poun d wen t to a local
schoo l which ca tered for boys of his cl ass.
But by the time he entered the Univers ity of
Pennsylvania at the age of sixtee n, he had
ceased to have much truck with the co nve n-
tion al requirem ents of ed uca tio n. Wh at he
wa nted to learn was ho w the great poet s of
ear lier centuries, es pec ially the medi eval and
Renaissanc e ce nturies, had achieved their
strange and beautiful effec ts, and how he
co uld depl oy such kn owledge to crea te a new
poetic which wo uld swee p away what he
alrea dy saw as the acc umulated sen timen tali-
ties of the interve ning ce nturies . The inten-
sity, exclusive ness and unshakeable se lf-

gled aes theticism and atheism in a way that
made him seem thrillingly mo dern to some
Edw ardia n readers. Pound 's ow n ea rly poeti c
sensibility was largely form ed in the after-
glow of 1890 s decadence; Ernes t Do wson ,
for instance, co mma nded more res pec t than
the would-be po etic revolut ion ary showe d to
,
the philo soph y of F. H. Bradl ey, but , althoug h life and work, merely mining them for antici- SHEARSMAN BOOKS
he had co me to Eng land ostensibly to pur sue pation s of whateve r is see n as his defi nin g
- NEW TITLES-
his phil osophi cal studies , and altho ugh he later identity. One of the merits of Moody' s
"",., , ,,,~,. , ,,, ,,,,;:4j
~:-\""''''.
spent much of 1914 -1 5 in Oxford, where Bra-
dley was a res ide nt Fe llow of Merton Co l-
detail ed narr ati ve in Ezra Pound: Poet is that
it esc hews hind sight as far as possibl e an d
.,.. "
lege, the soc ially unconfid ent Eliot neve r
atte mpted to invade the pri vacy of the notori-
tries to rec apture the exci tingness and literar y
brilli ance of the col ourful yo ung troub adour
' '. ......... --. ..

mos t of those he chose to regard as releva nt
predecessor s, and Sw inburne was the still-
livin g represe ntative of this inh eritance (he
was to die the foll owin g yea r). Willia m Ca r-
los Willi am s had been a fell ow stude nt at the
Unive rsity of Penn sylvani a, where Poun d,
reactin g violently agai nst the aridity of the
Ge rma nic phil ology that dominated the study
of literatu re, had pursued an idiosyn cratic
ro ute throu gh Latin and ear ly Rom anc e-l an-
ously reclu sive phil osopher. Indeed, it is not
clear how we ll Eliot would have made his
way in the Lond on literar y wo rld (h is real
ambition , eve n if one not yet full y disclo sed
to his parents) had he not been taken up by
Pound, only three yea rs his senior but seem -
ingly a decade ahea d of him in ter ms of publi-
cation and social ex per ience . A nd yet, by
1920 , the end of the period covered in the first
volume of A. David Mo ody's new bio gr aph y
~
in a flop py tie who made such an imp act on
Lo ndo n literary society in the yea rs imm e-
' "
diately before and after 1914 .
The ma in title of Mo ody' s book may at ...," --' ~ .,-4,;M---:...
first sugges t that he is tryin g to repeat the
success of his highl y regarded Thomas
..
~ _ ,.,.... .
Steams Eliot: Poet, first published in 1979
Hanne Bramness
(rev ised, 1994 ). But that book was explicitly Salt on the eye- Selected Poems
not a biograph y: tho ugh arran ged chro nologi - (Translated by HanneBramneJS erFrances Presley)
ca lly, it co nsis ted of close critical com me n- (128pp, paperbac k, £9.95 /S17 / isbn 978190570041 7)

guage poe try , before aban doning a project ed
docto ral dissert ation. Williams had been one
of the few who go t to know the eccentric
Pound and took him ser iously as a poet - a
rival poe t, it soo n turn ed out, as Willi ams,
less precocious an d flamboyant than his
yo unger friend , doggedl y cultiva ted his own
distincti ve com bination of the ex perimenta l
and the eve ryday. But in some ways the rec ip-
ient of the littl e co llection of poe ms who mat-
tered most to Pound was Yea ts. Wh en, at the
end of that 190 8 summer, Pound moved to
Lond on , one of his chief ambitions was to
meet and learn from the man he describ ed,
with charac teristic hyperb ole, as "the only
poet worthy of serio us study" .
His larger amb ition was to co nquer literar y
London , a task he set abo ut wi th typi cal
energy and lack of soc ial inhibition. He
imm edi atel y placed poems in the Even ing
Standard and the St l ames 's Gazette ; he
began negoti ations for the printing of a
seco nd collec tion, A Quinzaine for this Yule;
he got him self invited to dinner at the Poe ts '
of Poun d, their roles were comp rehensive ly tary on the major ph ases of Eliot's po etr y. Pura Lopez-Colorne - Aurora
(Tra",lated by]a.son Stump!)
(132pp, pap erb ack, £9.95 /S 17 / isbn 978 1905700387)
Toby Olson - Darklight
(124pp, pap erb ack, £8.95 / S15 / isbn 978 1905700233)
Ludbrooke: His Eavesdropping Peter Hughes - Nistanimera
(80pp, paperback, £8.95 / S15 / isbn 9781 905700288)
Robert Herrick - Selected Poems
Through the office par tition he hears someo ne say ing (Shearsman Classics 2; edited by TonyFrazer)
"Ludbrooke ? - a mon ster!" But of all the big, simp le (1l 6pp. paperb ack, £8.95 /S15 / isbn 978 1905700493)
And final term s of judgement on anyon e, Poetsof Devon &- Cornwall
It' s abo ut the least offen sive. It wo uld give Ryd iard -from Barclayto Coleridge-
(Shearsman Classics 1; edited by TonyFrazer)
More dignit y than he dese rve d to be calle d "a mon ster". (136pp. pap erback, £9.95 / S 17 / isbn 978 1905700448)
In every legend a mon ster has been more splendid
Tha n any hum an crea ture dismi ssable David Kennedy (ed.) - Necessary Steps
(196pp, paperback, £12.95 / S23 / isbn 9781905700639)
With one put-dow n syllable: a mo nster
Will always breathe more fire than "prat" , for exa mple , Tony Lopez & Anthony CaJeshu (eds.) -
Poetryand PublicLanguage
And cl atter mor e sca les than a "ponce" . In hi s mirro r, (296pp, pape rback., £15.95 /$27 / isbn 97819 05700646)
Lu db rooke can easi ly discern he is not a mon ster,
All titles now available.
He is not di sfigured , or fri ght ening, or huge.
SHEARSMAI'iJBOOKS
- Vet he likes to feel he has the power of a mons ter. 58 Velwell Road
Exeter EX4 4LD
AL A N BROW NJOHN W'W"'-shearsman.com

TL S NOVE MBER 23 2007

10
beli ef wi th which he pur sued his chose n
co urse did not en dea r him to mos t of his
teachers or conte mpora ries, but Pound was ,
ea rly and late, largely indifferent to oth ers'
jud gemen ts, whe ther of himself or anything
else. When, in Februa ry 1908, he was dis-
mi ssed - or willingly res igne d - from
Wabash Co llege, Crawfordsv ille, Indi ana,
leavin g him free to set out for Europe (subsi-
di zed by a sma ll allowance from his father),
it was a release for both parties. Ne ither duti-
ful acade mia nor sma ll-tow n A merica knew
how to cop e with someo ne so un abashedl y
set upon becomin g the new Dante.
Po und 's Lond on yea rs were full of incid-
ent and achi evement. He married Doroth y
Shakespear, the daught er of one of Yeats' s
form er lover s (Yea ts later ma rried one of
Do roth y ' s fr iend s, with Pound as best man);
he stage -ma nage d, or was at the heart of ,
seve ral shor t-lived but imp ort ant literary
movemen ts, mos t notabl y Imagisme and
Vorticism; he played a crucial role in furt her-
ing the careers of Eliot, James Jo yce and
W yndh am Lew is; an d, more ge nerally, he
made him self an uni gno rable presence on the
Lond on literary sce ne . His decl ared ideal in
the years leadin g up to the First World War
was a poetr y that was "austere, dir ect , free
from emo tio nal slither", as " much like gra n-
ite as it can be" (an indication of how far
he had already moved fro m the Swinburno-
Do wsoni sm of a few yea rs ear lier) . In his
desire to es tablish a "purer" poetr y, he was
con stantl y tilt ing at windmills . One of the
most celeb rated exa mples of his mann er of
proc eedin g with his crusa de was his letter
to the Ge org ian poet Lascell es Abercro mbi e
whe n the latt er had called for a return to
Wor dsworthian simplic ity : "Stupidity carried
beyond a certain po int becomes a public men-
ace . I hereb y challe nge you to a du el .. . my
seco nds will wa it upon yo u in du e cou rse" .
As Moody tell s the story : "the challenge d
poet, havin g the cho ice of wea po n, prop osed
that they pelt eac h other with unsold copies
of their book s. Pound enjoyed the co mic
riposte and the affair en ded in lau ght er. All
the same , he reall y did mea n to give no
q uarter to public stupidity".
Onl y a selec t gro up of writers were he ld
by Pound to be free from the ge nera l stupid-
ity - Eliot, Joyce and Wyn dham Lewis we re
the trio in whom he had abiding faith - and
he tend ed to be dismi ssive of, or inattenti ve
to, almos t everyone else . Thi s puri sm is ev i-
dent in his des pa iring reflecti on in 1920 on
the state of writing in Brit ain and Am erica.
Co mmen ting on ho w some of H. D.' s recent
poem s had a "touch of the real thin g, in
spo ts" , he concluded: "Suppose we ought to
be thankful for what there is. A tou ch in her,
in Williams - a touch of some thing very dif-
ferent in T. S. E., & elsew here desolation " .
The relationship , and contras t, with Eliot
has been very full y ex plore d over the years,
and Moody does not try to rev ise the estab-
lished account, thou gh the relati on ship
retain s its fascin ati on . Pound publi shed or
help ed to ge t publi shed Eliot's ear ly poem s,
taki ng pains to ge t an uncut version of "The
Love Son g of J. Alfr ed Prufrock" into print
since he thou ght it "the best poem I have yet
had or see n from an American". His deci sive
editing of the draft of The Waste Land a few
yea rs later was the mo st str iking dem on str a-
tion of his critica l talent s, as we ll as an indica-
tion of a mutu al respect an d affection
BIOGRAPHY
Ezra Pound (1939) by P ercy Wyndbam L ewis
between the two men that was often to be put gangrene" and his havin g assa iled "the state
to the test. But there was no disgui sing their of mind which The Times represe nts" as "a
differenc es in social sty le and literary loath som e state of mind , a ma lebo lge of
mann er. Pound co uld tease "the Reverend obtuse ness".
Eliot" and regret that so me of his compa- A large part of the surface narrati ve of
triot ' s judiciou s critica l ess ays sounded like Pound' s life during these ye ars ca n be told
coded appli cation s for memb ership of the Ath- in term s of his atte mpts to get co ntro l of
enae um Cl ub. Pou nd abho rred respectability, a j ourn al in orde r to prom ote the kind of
but he knew how dee p the crav ing for it we nt new writing of which he approve d. He succes -
in Eliot an d he was am used at the latter ' s self- sive ly played a prominent , or eve n in one
effacing, self-promo ting conform ism. In turn , or two ca ses a directin g, part in the English
Eliot was to stay loyal, after his fashion , to Review, the New Freewoman, the Egoist, the
his old friend throu gh thin and thinn er, New Age, Poetry , the Little Review and the
though often depl ori ng his excesses. His Dial (all the while inveighin g aga inst "the
much later characterization of Pound' s polem- villa iny of co ntr ibutors to the front page of
ical mann er strove to be sym pathet ic: "Every The Times Literary Suppleme nt") . He had
change he has adv ocated has alwa ys struc k so me notabl e successes, sec uring the publica-
him as bein g of instant urgenc y" , and for thi s tion of seve ral early Eliot poem s in Poetry
reason "he often present s the appearance of a and the fir st publi cati on of instalm ent s of
man tryin g to co nvey to a very deaf person Joyces Ulysses in the Littl e Review, but in
the fac t that the hou se is on fire" . But "a le the end there we re always failin gs short and
Ez" could never have adopted the tactics of faili ngs out. For example, he tried to exe rcise
"O ld Possum". Pou nd didn' t do lyin g low. a dictatori ally se lective policy over subm is-
Pound' s tirad es again st the parochi ali sm sions to Harri et Mo nroes Chicago-based
and phil istini sm of Englis h culture were Poetry ; after she had successfully insisted on
often self-defeatingly exaggerated and intem- a more inclu sive line he, alw ays the purist,
perate, but there are detail s in Ezra Pound: would refer disparagin gly to "H arr iets Home
Poet whic h eve ry so often remind us of what Gazette" . He aliena ted seve ral oth er erst-
he was up aga inst. There was , to begin with, while allies in the same way. " He was not
the con stant prud er y and the assoc iated fear, made for compromise or coop erati on" ,
o n the part of publisher s and book seller s, of obse rved Herb ert Read ; others wou ld have
pro secuti on. In 19 16, a publi sher was jibbing put it less understandi ngly.
at some of the (fa r from indecent ) poem s And yet one kind of cooperation at which
Pound wished to include in his new collec- Pound exce lled was that of providin g a fellow
tion on the gro unds that "not only men co me writer w ith detailed recon stru cti ve sugges -
into this shop, but ladies". Conven tio nal pre- tion s for the impro vem ent of a partic ular
j udices of other kin ds also impinged on him . piece of work. Moody em phas izes the dis-
In 1914, he published a long and well-infornaed interestedness of Pound' s devotion to furth er-
articl e on Noh theatre in the conser vative ing the cau se of go od poetr y, not ju st of
though still prestigiou s Quarterly Review, his own poetry: for a few yea rs in the early
but after his appe ara nce a year later in the twenti eth century , Po und was the man yo u
fir st numher of RI.AST, Wyndh am I.ewis ' s ca lled in whe n yo u we re havin g trouhl e with
Vorticist as sault on received opinion, the your lines. To have perfo rmed thi s service so
self-consciously respectable, not to say stuffy , success fully for poets of the calibre of Yeats
Editor of the Quarterly, G Proth ero , wro te and Eliot is already an unu sual claim to fam e.
to Pound to say that henceforth its pages Helping, mor e than once, to raise fund s for
wo uld be closed to him since to be "asso- a habitu al spo nge r such as Joyce was less dis-
ciated publicly with such a publication as tincti ve, but it is still imp ressive to see Pound
BLA ST . . . sta mps a man too disadvant a- eng ag ing in such cheer ful benevolenc e when
geo us ly" . All very pompous and unwar- he was him self in pre tty dir e fin ancial stra its.
ranted, no doubt, thou gh o ne has to im agin e "One of the kindes t men that ever lived" was
the imp act on a man of Proth ero ' s pin- strip ed the co nsidere d j udge ment of one minor writer
con venti onalit y of Pound' s havin g apos tro- whom Pound help ed. Overall , Mood y largely
phize d The Times as " You slut-bellied succeeds in convey ing the attrac tive sides of
obstruct ionist, you fun gu s, yo u continuou s Pound' s person ality, above all hi s ex uber-
TLS NO VE M BE R 23 2007
ance , ge nerosity and eye -po king irreverenc e.
But there is another, mor e subterranea n,
and ultim ately much mor e important , story
to be told , which ca n onl y be follo wed in the
slim vo lumes and fu giti ve pieces of verse
Pound publi shed bet ween 190 8 and 1920.
Moody' s critica l excurs uses go so me way
toward s chro nicl ing the rich an d strange
histor y of Poun d's dealin g with the music of
wor ds, but eve n these co mpresse d co mmen -
taries are in some ways too doggedly exegeti-
ca l and literar y-hi storic al quit e to co nve y the
distinctiveness, and the fertil ity, of Pound' s
cra ftsmanship through the yea rs that run
from ea rly vo lumes such as Persona e and
Canzoni to the later Homage to Sext us
Propertius and Hugh Selwyn Mauberley.
Quotation help s, but the biogr aphi cal propri e-
ties have to be obse rved, and those propri e-
ties leave us little the wiser abo ut the astonish-
ing dram a of Pound ' s poetic developm ent in
these yea rs, as he moves from "The Tree" of
c l 906 -
Naetheless I have been a tree amid the woo d
And many ne w things understood
That were rank folly to my head before
to the celeb rated "In a Station of the Metro "
of 191 3 -
The apparition of these faces in the crowd :
Petals on a wet, black bough
- to the opening of Th e Fo urth Canto in
191 9:
Palace in smoky light,
Tray but a heap of smouldering boundary
stones,
ANAXIFORMINGES! Aurunculeia!
Hear me. Cadmus of Golden Prows!
It is hard to know ho w to talk abo ut all
this within a conventional biographical fram e-
wor k, so we fall back on summary judge-
ment s, such as Eliot's , in his best chairma n-
of-th e-m eetin g ma nner, that "Mr Pound is
mor e respon sible for the XXth-centur y rev -
oluti on in poetr y than is any other indi vid-
ual", or Williams 's more downright opinion
that Pound had "the best dam ned ear ever
born to listen to thi s langua ge" .
For Pound, poetry was everything , and
before qu otin g any of his all-too -q uotable
prose pro nounc ement s agai nst him (whi ch is
mostl y the use they see m to have lent them-
selves to), one sho uld recall hi s decla rati on to
his moth er in 190 9: " I sho uld never think of
prose as anythin g but a stop-ga p, a mean s of
procuring food . Ex actly on the sa me plan e
with mark et-gardenin g. If a thin g is not suffi-
ciently interesting to be put into poetr y, & suf-
ficiently important to make the po etic form
worth while, it is hardl y wor th say ing any -
thin g at all". A few months later he followed
this up with a no less revealing piece of self-
charac terization: "My mind, such as I have,
wor ks by a sor t of fu sion , and sudde n crys ta l-
lisation , and the effort to tie that kind of
acti on to the dray wo rk o f pro se is ve ry
ex ha usting . One should have a vege table sort
of mind for prose". Blessed , or curse d, with
the opp osit e of a " vegetable sort of mind",
Pound wrote a wea rying qu antity of prose
during his Lond on yea rs. In 1917, he sighed
that he had been "turning out an article a day
for weeks" : "My present ex iste nce is that of
a highl y mechaniz ed typin g vo lcano" . It was
not j ust that he never had any kind of salary
to re ly on, as Eliot did during his years work-
ing in a bank , but , more importantl y, Pound
lack ed Eliot' s stra teg ic calculation abo ut
onl y writing pieces that wo uld en hance his

stand ing as a se rious c ritic . To Pound, liter ary
journali sm was not merely seco nda ry : it was ,
as a med ium , of no account compared to th e
real bu siness of writing goo d poet ry. But
others took it more ser ious ly, and ma rked
Pound down as a wild man , altoge ther too
free with his (fas t-c ha ng ing) opinions and
sweeping d ismi ssals of other writers . Eve n A .
R . Orage, the sympathe tic Edito r of the New
Age, concl ude d sa dly th at " he has made more
ene mies th an friends" . "See w hat he has
becom e" , w rote Vi vienn e Eliot in 191 9: " a
lau ghin g stoc k." T hro ughout Pound' s career,
he seems to have failed to anticipate the harm
that he mi ght do to h im self by hi s cas ua l and
not always we ll-j udge d prose ex c ursi ons .
In the dec ades afte r 192 0 he was , of
co urse, to go on to make enemies on an alto-
ge the r different sca le; he nce some of the
co ntinuing d ifficulties in doin g ju stice to
him . But even tak ing h is early decades on
their ow n terms, it is hard to kn ow qu ite how
to draw up a balanc e sheet: for all th e int erest
of hi s ow n poetic ex pe rimen ts and desp ite hi s
success in prom otin g the wor k ofthe few wr it-
ers he beli e ved in , there was also some thing
se lf-de fea ting about hi s crus ad ing zea l, some -
thin g abo ut the m an and h is ma nn er that
pro vok ed resistance a nd disd ain ra the r th an
issuing in th at ope ning of mind s wh ich he
claim ed as his goa l. G ra ppling with thi s prob-
lem , Moody at one point obse rves that Po und
believed he had bee n " the so le e ntre pre neur
of int ellectu al ren e wal in E ng land - an out-
rageous delu sio n, one might thi nk, unti l one
thi nk s of hi s part in wha t has e ndure d from
these yea rs". Thi s is ge nerous, w hich is
becoming in a biogr aph er , but sure ly too
indulgent. T he exaggeration of "sole" wrecks
the cl aim - was no pa rt played by Ford
Mad ox Ford, by T. E. Hul me, or by Wynd-
ham Le wi s, not to ment ion by pat ro ns such as
Harr iet Weaver or John Quinn? - and any -
way " intellectual renewal" is too tendenti ou s
to be allowed to pass unch all enged .
Th e bett er gro und is no t th e ac tua l effec t
of Pound ' s various cultural ca mp aig ns -
most of wh ich, for all the ir occasio na l spec -
tacul ar success, ended in rej ect ion and ru in -
but his und evi at ing abs or ption in the craft
of poetry. A nd for doing ju stice to thi s a bi o-
grap hy is, if not exactly irrele va nt, at least
malada pted, eve n a biogr aph y th at tries to
att end to th e poetr y as muc h as M ood y' s
does. Even tho se w ho remain baffl ed by, or
sce p tica l of, th e achi evem en t of the Cantos
wo uld have to co ncede th at Po und stre tc hed
poet ry in E ng lis h in a way fe w have done . He
heard th e so unds a nd rhyth m s of words and
lines so vivid ly , having cultiva ted hi s ea r by
his single-mind ed study of the poe try of other
traditi on s and oth er langu ages (and ulti-
ma tely - with Ch inese - of other ca llig ra -
phi es, too ). And he d id not , at lea st during th e
period covered in thi s v o lu me , g ive a d amn
about any th ing else - that was all so m uch
mark et- gard ening. Thi s mean s th at it is not
easy to be Po und 's bio grapher, or even to be
a rea de r of Pound ' s biograph y, for wha t j us ti-
fies so m uch atten tio n to all his blu ster and
wro ng -hea dedness is rea lly going on else -
whe re, all but inaud ibly to many of us. Po und
wo uldn' t have give n a d amn about that
eithe r. Perhaps he mi ght have ex te nded the
se ntime nt he, still o nly twent y-three, ch eer-
full y ex pressed to h is long-suffering fath er :
" Be ing fa mily to a wi ld poet ain' t no bed of
roses but yo u sta nd the stra in ju st fin e" .
P O E TRY
Found in Spain
W
e seem to live, intellec tua lly
and e mo tiona lly , in sea led -off
un iverses. Pe te r D ronk e, po lym ath
and medi evali st, began hi s wo nde rful little
bo ok The Medieval Lyric (1968): "T his book
is intended as an int rodu ction to med ie val
lyric, sec ular and sac red, in both the
Romance and the Ge rma nic lan gu ages" . T he
reader could be forg iven for im aginin g (as I
did ) that w ha t foll owed was an introduct ion
to the e ntirety of Western European poetr y
of th at per iod. Ye t though on rer eading I find
th at Dronke was clearly not unaware of the
rich tri lingu al c ulture of the Iberia of the tim e,
hi s book passes over in silence a vas t bod y of
magnificent wor k in Arabic and Heb rew, wr it-
ten fir st in Spa in an d Por tu gal, an d th en
(w hen tho se co untries grew increasingl y
an tago nistic to the Ar ab s a nd Jews in their
midst) in Prove nce and Gas cony. M ean wh ile,
reader s of Heb re w poetr y w ho prob abl y have
ne ver heard of A rna ut Dani el , or W alth er vo n
der Vogelwe ide, know th e wor k of Shmuel
Han agid , Shel om o Ibn Gab iro l, Mo she Ibn
Ez ra a nd Yehuda Halevi as we ll as reader s
of English kn ow Milton or Keats, a nd even
tho se w ho do not read poetr y are familiar
wi th ma ny of their works, which figur e promi-
nently in the liturgies of Jud aism.
Tho ug h th ere have been seve ra l tran sla-
tion s of the work of these poets (w ho lived
an d worked between the e nd of the te nth
an d the middle of th e twelfth cen turies) into
E ng lish, notably Ga brie l Levin's beautifu l
se lec tion of Yehu da Halevi, Poems from the
Diwan, Pe te r Co le has in the past decad e
been es ta blis hing h imself as the leading
E ng lish-lang uage tra nslator of thi s grea t
bod y of work, with a se lect ion of the poems
of Shm ue l Han agid appearing in 1996 a nd
one of the poe ms of Ibn Ga biro l (de d ica ted to
Ga briel Levin) in 200 1. The Dream of the
Poem crowns his effo rts . No t on ly does he
give us sa mples fro m the wor k of fifty -four
poet s, but he e mbeds these in a den se thi ck et
of comme ntary : a general introduction of
twenty pages (w ith twenty-t wo pages of
notes); introduct ion s to eac h of the poets;
notes to the poe ms, incl udi ng the under-
grow th of bib lical refer en ces, an d co m me nts
on wo rd -play impo ssibl e to reproduce in Eng -
lish, di scu ssion of the form and pro sody, a nd
scholarly informati on on pro venan ce, attri bu-
tion and so o n (ma ny of these poe ms we re
fou nd by acci de nt in th e twenti eth ce ntury,
an d some are still turning up ); an d, to co n-
clu de, a fasci na ting g lossary of term s (for
exa mple, "adab : A central term in classica l
A rab ic - and, by ex te nsio n, Hebr e w - lite ra-
rur e , adah co nno tes h oth learni ng in its fu ll -
ness as a way of life and the sig nature sty le of
the culture d per son. It refers at once to di sci-
plines of the m ind and soul, good breeding ,
refi ne ment , culture, and belles lettres. Sim i-
lar to th e G reek notion of paid eia" . " Yidu' i:
A sec tion of the liturgy rec ited o n fast days
an d d ays of peniten ce, es pe cially bet ween the
New Year an d the Day of At on e men t. Some-
times incor porat ed int o larger piyyu tim.
See, for example, Ibn Ga biro l's Kingdom 's
Crown and Avner's ' T he Last Words of M y
Desir e " ' ). As all th is suggests , the book is a
trea sur e tro ve, a lab our of lo ve a nd excep-
T LS NOVEMBER 23 2007
11
Chaucer and Gower, or of circles of friend s
like those aro und G uido Cavalca nti or John
Donn e. And the range is asto nishing . T here
are sty lized love poe ms close to the Ara bic,
such as the mid-tenth -centu ry "A Faw n
GA B R IEL JO S IPO VI CI So ug ht in Spain " by Yitzhak Ibn M ar Sha ul:
A fawn sought in Spain
works wo nders with desire,
P et er Co le , e di to r a n d and through it he controls
t r a n sl at or all male and fema le creat ures .
T HE D REAM OF THE PO E M For med like the moo n -
Hebrew poe try fro m M us lim and his height adds to his splendor;
Christian Spain 950- 1492 his curly hair is crimson
548pp. Princeton Universi ty Press. Pape rback, agai nst his cheeks of pear l . .
£ 11.95 (US $ 19.95). T here are powerful poems lam entin g the
978 069 1 121956 loss of so ns or brother s or patro ns ; re lig io us
poem s w hic h, perhaps un surpri sin gly,
tion al erud ition, wh ich will ope n up to the re mind on e more of the Psalm s than of other
reader a world of poetry and culture as rich as European reli giou s lyrics of th e period ; ther e
any thing in hum an ci vili zati on . a re ex traord ina ry Kabb alistic poem s that
Of cour se, no matter how goo d the transla- rem ind on e of Blake ' s Prophecies ("The
tion and how fu ll the notes, there is no subs ti- na me of the fir st wa rr ior-king is Q adar i' el, /
tute for the original. Ho we ver, since readers of a nd the name of the second is Mag d i'el; and
Hebrew are few and far bet ween , and a the nam e of th e third / is A lfi'e l: and the
dual-lang uage ed ition wo uld have made a na me of the wa rri or-king yo u saw / at the
bulk y vo lume impossibly large, and wo uld beginning of th at visio n is T ur i'el .. ." ).
have massively increased its price, Princ eton M an y are acrostic poe ms, an d a number work
Univers ity Press have sens ibly so lved the prob- with co ns tra ints th at wo uld have de lighted
lem by pro viding the Hebrew originals online. Raymond Q ue nea u a nd Jacqu es Roub aud
M any of the poem s Dronk e dealt with are (himse lf the ed itor of a wo nder ful a nthology
anonymous; the poem s in The Dream of the of Pro ven cal poem s). Some form part of
Poem, on the other hand , were writte n by poets th ose poet ic slanging m atch es that ea rlier cul-
who we re known and respected . T he out lines tur es we re so fond of, like the tensos of the
of their biographi es, in most cases, are we ll tro ub ad ou rs and the fl ytin gs of W illiam Dun-
known . We have to th ink of Co urt poets like bar. A large nu mb er are sligh t and wi tty , suc h
NATIONAL HUMANITIES CENTER
Summer Institutes
in Literary Studies
Chaucer: Past, Forms of Life in
Present, and Future Emily Dickinson's Poetry
SETH LERER SHARON CAMERON
Avalon Foundation Professor William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of
in Humanities and Professor of English, The johns Hopkins Un iversity
English and Comparative Literature,
Professor Cameron will guid e a close reading
Stanford University
of Dickrnsons poetry exploring formal,
Professor Lere r will lead an exploration of
conceptual , and philosophical innovations .
Chaucer works exam ining them from aesthe tic
She will examine the problem of naming
and political perspectives. He will probe the
relationships among formalism and historicism, in Dickin sons po etry ; the violen ce manifested
aesthetic judgment and po litical response , in in the disruptions in prosody and syntax; and
the study of earlyEnglish literature. Lerer will the temporality of Dickinsons works. Cam eron
also consider how we should read and teach will also explore the significance of the way
Chaucer today Who is the Chaucer for the in which Dickinson ordered her poems.
early twent y-first centu ry?
July 6-11, 2008
National Humanities Center, Research Triangle Park, NC
The National Humanities Center's Summer Institutes in LiteraryStudies give scholars the
opportunity to engage a small number of literarytexts deeply through close reading under
the direction of leading critics.
The institutes are open to scholars who have received a Ph.D.within the last ten years
and who teach in departments of literature or other relevant disciplines at colleges or
universities in the United States. Each institute will accommodate fourteen. Participants
will receive a stipend of $1,500. The National Humanities Center will cover the cost of
travel, lodging, meals, and texts.
For complete details and an application, visit
http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/siliterarystudies/.
Application deadline: postmarked by March 7, 2008.
This programis madepossible by a grant from TheAndrew W Mellon Fcundetion.
12 PO ETRY
."Sy nagog ue" (t h e sy m bolic figure of the Old Testa me n t in E u r o pea n art), b y Felipc
Vigarny or Die go d e S Hoe, p art of the hi gh a ltar p iec e in th e C o ns ta ble' s Chapel, Burgos
C a tbe d ral; from Th e Arts ofSpain : Ib eria and Latin A merica 1450-1 700 b y M arjorie
Trust ed (224 p p . V & A Publications. £40. 9781851775231)
as the many Ilea an d Ily poems, or Hale vi ' s
" Whe n a Lone Si lver Hai r" :
When a lone silver hair appeared on my head
1 plucked it oot with my hand. and it said:
" You 'v e beaten me one on one - but what will
you do with the army to co me?" .
Col e is rightl y proud o f his inclusion of a
recentl y di scov er ed poem by a woma n, the
wife of the first poet in the a ntho logy, Dun ash
Ben Labrat, w ho is cr edit ed with havin g first
co mbined the He bre w langu age and A rab
poeti c fo rms ; but equa lly surpris ing is a poem
th at wittily /li es in the face o f the dail y prayer
th at has always been a probl em to liberal
Jew s, where the supplica nt e nds by than kin g
G od for not having made him a wo man. Here
the autho r, Q alon ym os Ben Q alon ym o s, w ho
was re now ned as a tran slat or from both Ar a-
bic a nd Latin , e nds his prayer by beg g ing
God : " If o nly yo u wou ld make me a fem ale" .
Am azin gly, there are eve n poem s abo ut
wri ter ' s bloc k, suc h as th is o ne from the late
thirt eenth ce ntury by Sh em To v Ardutiel
(w ho also wrot e epigra ms in Spani sh and wa s
much ad m ired by Ant onio Mac hado), in w hat
sounds like a rem arkable work, ca lled The
Battles of the Pen and the Scisso rs:
At night he says: "Tomorrow I' ll write,"
but there' s nothing at all to back up his words;
the heaven ' s frost lau ghs in his face ,
and the cack ling of mocking ice is heard.
Wh at a modern reader might find mo st
surprising is the sex ual explicitness of quite a
few of the poems. Sometime in the ea rly
twelfth ce ntury, Yosef Ibn T zadd iq, a dayyan,
or religiou s judge, as we ll as a poet, se nt a
poem of co nso lation to his friend A vra ha m
Ibn Ezr a, who, as Co le says, " found himself in
a most uncom fort abl e situation when his
brid e' s mens trua l peri od began ju st after the
weddi ng ce remo ny but before the marri age
co uld be co nsu mma ted" . Pla yin g with a
number of bibli cal moti fs, Ibn Tz addiq wri tes:
Take up this poem and let it console you,
bridegroom of blood who resembles a ram
perched on a cliff above a stream,
where its thirst can' t be quenched.
Delight in the doe of your desire.
So beautifully formed and fine to behold:
look as you will. but do not touch her.
Ibn Ezra replies in the same He brew metr e
and with the same Hebrew rhyme:
The rivers of Eden flow along
gently before me, and I am thirsty,
and like a man looking up at the sky,
all I have is wha t I can sec.
But a poem has co me to offer me comfort -
its words woven like the finest embroidery -
and the signs it ment ion s are alread y here
and this is wha t they mean for me:
hugging and kissing. thigh over thigh.
an arm across shoulder and nape - though now
from that place where the milk runs full I turn
as the Na zirite turn s from the gra pe.
Som etim es the poet is utterl y dir ect, like the
ea rly-fo urtee nth-ce ntury Todros Abul afia :
The day you left was bitter and dark,
you finest thing, you - and when I think of it,
it feels like there' s nothing left of my skin.
Your feet, by far. were more beautiful,
the day they mounted
an d wrapped my neck in a ring .
My feelin g is that Cole is bette r at these
occasio nal poems than at the gre at reli g iou s
poem s for w hic h the major poet s o f the
peri od are best known. It ma y be th at the
Hebrew of suc h poems is simp ly too alie n
to com e across ad equately in cont emp orary
Engli sh, or that his Pou ndian orientation
make s him respond more easi ly to the infor-
ma l than to the grand and the hieratic. Or it
may j ust be that I myself need more time to
enter into the m. Howe ver, by surro unding
them with thi s sea of fascinating, more occ a-
sional verse and by setting them in the rich con-
text of his schol ars hip, he has performed an
enormou s se rvice and produced a book which
is by turn s mo ving, charm ing and funny . No
o ne after this will be able to write a book on
medieval poet ry without tak ing the Hebre w
a nd A rabi c poet s o f Spain into accoun t.
Pet er Co le and Gabriel Le vin both live in
Jeru salem a nd are j oint editors of the Ilourish-
ing little pre ss call ed Ibi s Editions, which has
as its aim to brin g to the En gli sh-speakin g
rea de r the best literary wor k coming out of the
M iddl e Eas t, be it in Hebre w, Ar abi c, Turk-
ish, French , or Eng lish. Th e title o f Cole' s
antho logy is tak en from a remark by the lead-
ing Pale stin ian poe t M ahmoud Darwi sh :
"Andalus . . . might be here or the re, or any -
wher e .. . A meeting place of strange rs in the
project of bu ildin g human culture . . . . It is not
o nly that ther e was a Jewi sh-Muslim co- e xist-
enc e, but that the fates of the two people were
similar ... . A I-A nda lus for me is the reali za-
tion of the dre am o f the poem". One need not
be a starry-ey ed ide alist to say, Hear, hear !
TL S N O VE M BE R 23 2007
Four poems by Derek Walcott
I hadn 't see n them for half o f the Christma s week,
the egrets, and no one told me w hy they had gon e,
but the y are back with th e ra in now, o ra nge beak,
pink sha nks and sta bbing head , back o n the lawn
w here the y used to be in the clear, limitl ess rain
o f the Sant a Cruz va lley, wh ich, w he n it rain s, fall s
stea d ily aga ins t th e ce da rs till it mi sts th e pla in.
The eg rets are the co lour o f waterfalls,
a nd of clouds . So me friends, the few I have left ,
are dying, but the egrets stalk throu gh th e rain
as if nothing mort al ca n affec t them , or the y lift
like abrupt ang els, sa il, th en se tt le again .
Sometimes the hill s them se lves di sappear
like friends, slowly, but I a m happier
tha t they ha ve come back , like memory, like pra yer.
for August Wilson
A ug us t, the qu arter- moon han gs like a bu gle
over the old brick cantonments o f the Morne
who se barrack ap artments have the se rial glow
of pos tage stamps; the clouds' le tters are torn,
a nd your swee t instrument is put aw ay as
yo ur silver corne t lies in its velvet case
with all those riffs a nd arias whose characters argue
the way that wind ela tes the ac aci as,
unti l the y wr estl e with the roar of torrents,
black, j agg ed silh ou ett es read y to do battl e
with enormous hand s and ey es with the coming da y
in the brick thi ck ets of Pitt sb urgh a nd Seattle,
in pla ys th at a re thei r ow n battl e cry an d a nthe m .
I unhook the qu art e r-m oon to blow your prai se,
and Hor ace Pippin, Rom are, Jo seph La wrence,
I saw the mo o n han ging there a nd tho ug ht of them .
Thi s wa s my ea rly wa r, the bell owin g qu arre ls,
at the pitch of noon, of men mo vin g cargoes
w hile gu lls screech ed their mo not onous vo wels
in complex curses without co m ing to blow s;
muscular me n sw irling cod fis h barrels
and heaving rice bags, who had stunted nic kn a mes,
w ho co uld, one-handed, ho ist phenomenal ro lls
of wire , hoi st flappin g galvan ise with both arms
to pitch it int o the ho ld w hil e hoo ks and winc hes
sw ung nearb y. A t lunc h they a te in the shade
of mo un ta ino us frei ght bo und wit h knots and ci nc hes,
ign or ing the gu lls wi th thei r bou lders of brea d.
T he n one wo uld be terribly injured, o ne lose a leg
to rum and diabetes . You wou ld watch him shrink
into hi s nicknam e, not too proud to beg,
who wou ld roar lik e a lorry revvi ng in the pr ime of hi s drink.
I wa tch the hu ge trees to ssin g at th e ed ge of the law n
lik e a heavi ng sea with out c res ts , the bamboo s plun ge
their necks like ro ped hor ses as ye llow lea ves, torn
from th e wh ipping branche s, turn in an avalanche;
all thi s before the rain sca rily pours from the burst,
sodden can vas of the sky like a hop el ess sa il,
gus ting in shee ts and hazin g th e hill s completel y
as if the w ho le va lley were a hull o utrid ing the ga le
and the woods we re not tre es but waves of a running sea .
Wh en light cr ack s a nd thunder groa ns as if cursed
and you are sa fe in a dark hou se deep in Santa
Cruz, wit h th e ligh ts out, the c urre nt suddenly gon e,
yo u thin k: Who 'll house the shivering ha wk, and the
impeccable eg re t and the cl oud-coloured heron,
and the parrots who panic in alarm at the fire of dawn ?

ocieties implacably mob ilized against
S each other , in con flicts end ing only
in unconditional surrender; large- scale
conscript arm ies, whose titanic clas hes pro-
voke mass slaugh ter; the enemy utterly de-
humanized, with exec utions of priso ners and
unspeakable atroc ities aga inst civ ilia ns; terri-
tories precar ious ly con tro lled by occu pying
armies , whose powe r and authori ty are sys-
tematically eroded by guerr illa gro ups; and
war and military martyrdom represent ed as
the highest of huma n endeavours .
Co ntrary to conve ntio nal wisdom, David
A . Bell sugges ts in The First Total War, these
featur es of modern war were not born in the
Worl d Wars of the twentieth ce ntury . Rather,
their orig in lies in the Revoluti onary and
Napo leonic co nflicts of 1792-1 815, which
gave birth to what Carl Schmitt later
describ ed as the norm of "absolute en mity".
Bell cl aims that it was this mo ment - wh ich
co nsecrated Europe's largest empire since
the Middl e Ages, and its grea test conqueror
since Char lemag ne - that shaped the modern
understanding and practice of "total" war -
fare, car rying it across the murderous
battl efi elds of the twenti eth century.
This arg ument about the foun dational
nature of the Na po leonic Wars has been
made before, notably in Jean-Yves Gui-
orna r's L 'Invention de la guerre totale
(200 4) . But Bell ' s rend erin g is much more
rad ical. First, his argume nt rests on a bold
vision of the transfor mation of the modern
culture of wa r in eig htee nth-ce ntury Europe .
He co ntras ts the seda te, aristoc ratic concep-
tion of limit ed war fare, wo nderfully symbol-
ized by the 145 tons of baggage which accom-
panied the Duke of Cum berland into battle,
with the frenzied , messianic and apoca lyptic
qualities of the French Revoluti onary wars.
In order to make his case, Bell also integrat es
approac hes to the history of wa r which are
ge nera lly kept separa te: its intellectu al hist-
ory , its polit ical and strateg ic di mension s, its
soc ial and cultura l underpinnings , without
forgettin g the expe riences of ord inary com-
batan ts. Fina lly, and in a stark challe nge to
ou r common sensi bilities, Bell argues that
total war sprang not out of the French Revolu-
tion ' s Republica n ideology or its national-
ism, but its irenic yearni ng for abso lute
peace: the ear ly 1790s saw France decl are
war on monarc hica l despoti sm in the very
name of the ideals of peace and liberty - the
precur sor of the First World War ' s aspiration
"to end all wars ". This ex ter minatio nist logic,
Bell cla ims , pushed the Revoluti on into an
increasin gly belli gerent posture abroa d. It
also provoked a savage internal conflic t at
home aga inst all manifes tations of "counter-
Revoluti on" , which culm inated in the killing
field s of the Vendee , where at least 250,000
men, wo men and children died in 1793-4.
(O ne of the perpetr ators of this hutchery,
Ge neral Turrea u, is still honour ed on the
Arc de Triomphe.)
Napo leon Bonaparte represent ed the apo-
gee of this new warri or cu lture. Bell draws
an arres ting pictur e of the rise to power of
this charismatic Revoluti onary genera l, and
shows how his seizure of power in 1799 repre-
sen ted the logic al culmination of the militari-
za tion of the Revoluti on . Bonapar te's regime
institut ed an unprecedent ed cult of the mili-
tary: 97 per ce nt of all those decorated with
the Legion d'Honn eur we re from the arme d
forces. Indeed the Gra nde Armee was held
HI S T ORY
Apocalypse then
S UDHIR H A Z AR E E SI NGH as its ce ntral features, Bell not only offers a
challengi ng acco unt of the French Rev olu-
D a v id A. Be l l tion , but also a com pe lling alterna tive to the
standard explanations of the demi se of Repub-
T HE F I RST T OTA L WAR licanism. Napo leo n emerges neithe r as the
Napoleo n's Europe and the birth of modern warfare nem esis of the Revo lution, as long claimed
420pp. Bloomsbury . £20. by his oppo nents, nor as the sav iour and codi-
9780747577 195 fier of the "tradition of 1789" , as ce lebrated
US: Houghton Miffl in. $27. 978 0 6 18349654
in his own propagand a. Instead, he appears as
the supreme em bodiment of a new war rior
up as the em bodime nt of civic virtue, and its culture which was found ed by the Revo lu-
leader' s power rested on an original cult, tion , and taken to its ze nith by the First
which all at once celebrated hi s "popular" Empire. Yet the exp lana tory weig ht Bell
origins and legit imacy, but also hi s martial see ks to assig n to this new milit ari stic culture
prowess and his quasi-di vine status; the eve r- is probl em atic. The pre-R evoluti onary cul-
oblig ing Vatic an even cano nized a saint in ture of " limited" war, which drew on the
his hon our. wr itings of Gro tius and Vattel, was hardly a
In his analys is of Na poleo n's early military model of restraint: as Karm a Na bulsi's Tradi-
triumphs at Ulm, Aus terlitz and Jena, as well tions of War (1999) remin ds us, Gus tav us
as in his later setbacks in Spain and Russia, Adolphu s carri ed a copy of Gro tiuss De Jure
Bell emphas izes the grow ing pervasiveness Belli ac Pacis (On the Laws of War and
of the culture of total wa r: the expo nen tial Peace) in his saddlebag as he laid was te the
grow th of com batant forces (while 60 ,000 territ ories he conquered. And , for all its attrac-
men had fought at Ma reng o, 500,000 com bat- tively paradoxical quality, the argument
ants took part in the Battle of Leipzig); the which traces the intellectu al origins of total
demonization not only of enemy forces but wa r to Euro pean pacif ism and rep ublican
" T h e Battle of Aboukir" (1806) by Baron Antoine J ean Gros
also of entire peop les; and the extreme hostility to monarchi cal despoti sm is uncon-
excesses of parti san wa r in Italy and Spa in, vincing . Bell him self shows that ma ny of the
which seve rely crippled French for ces and key parti cipant s in the debates of the ear ly
provo ked savage reprisals aga inst civ ilians, I790s we re arguing tacticall y rath er than out
chi llingly anticipating the bestialit y of Nazi of gen uine ideo logical convict ion: Mirabeau,
beha viou r in parts of Occupi ed Europe . Bell for exa mp le, proposed to codify the ren uncia-
insists on the abso lute prim acy of this new tion of expans ionary wa r, eve n though he did
wa r cultu re: Napoleon appea rs not onl y as its not beli e ve it ; w hile Rohes pierre was at this
proge nitor but also as its instrum ent, and later time an ardent opponent of wa r and politica l
as its victim. Tr apped by the inexorable logic violence (as we know , he moved on qui ckly
of total wa r, the Frenc h Empero r lurched into to better thin gs).
ever more desperate milit ary and politi cal The First Total War also und erplays all
ga mbles, until the final debacl e at Waterl oo the body of evide nce which might cha llenge
in 1815 . its ce ntral thesis. The representation of
Thi s is a pro vocati ve and disturb ing book, Napo leon as a relentl ess advocate of mass
which forces us to thi nk afres h about such ex term ination, indifferent to the fate of his
fund ament al issues as the nature of the civie own soldiers and oblivious to the customs of
order crea ted by the Frenc h Rev olution ; wa r requiring hum ane treatment of prisoners
Napoleo n's role and legacy; and the tran sfor- and civilians, is exaggerated : if he was so
mation of mode rn wa r in the democra tic age . ghastly to his Army , why did his so ldiers
By res toring milit ary and politica l violence endure such sufferings across his campaigns,
TLS NOVEMBER 23 2 007
13
take such insane risks in battle, and wors hip
his memory with such fervour after 1815 ?
There is little ev idence , fu rtherm ore, that the
rhetor ic of abso lute enmity was actually inter-
nalized by the European populations of the
time; and there are clear indi cations to the
co ntrary - not least the fact that many Frenc h
soldiers staye d on and made their homes in
Russia after Nap oleo n's retreat in 1812
(imag ine office rs from the Waffen SS trying
to settle in the Dordogne in 1945). The
Gr ande Arrnee was see n by many as a liberat-
ing force in the countries it penetr ated, and
Bell omits to ment ion that in Poland the
French forces (led by the flambo yant Mur at)
were gree ted with extra ord inary popul ar fer-
vour, and that to this day Na poleo n is
invoked in Poland ' s national anthem . It is per-
haps in this respect that Bell' s " militarist"
rea ding of the po litical culture of the
1789-1 815 period is the most questionable.
There is no ex planatio n for the gap between
the end of the "first" total war in 1815 and its
res ump tion in 1914. If this culture of "total
war" had been as powerful as the book sug-
ges ts, eve n breakin g the resolve of a man as
obsessive, single-minded and ruthl ess as
Napo leon, it strains belief that it wo uld have
been smothered ove r the next hund red years
by the wea k and ineffectual mona rchies which
dominated the nineteenth- century Co nce rt of
Euro pe. And if the Ven dee was the "matrix
of French experience", as Bell somew hat
imprud entl y claim s, why did subsequent gen-
erations of French Republicans not torch the
countryside as soo n as they (re) captured
power at various point s duri ng the nineteenth
century? An exclusively milit arist readin g of
Na po leon's legacy also cannot ex plain his
pos thumo us triumph in the Euro pea n co llec-
tive imagination. Contrary to Bell ' s asse r-
tion, the Emperor's legend was not pri maril y
a celebration of his military prowess: in fact,
he was reinvented as a constitutio nal liberal,
the progenit or of Rep ublicanism , the symbol
of meritocracy and individu alism , and the
father of European unity - and it is this
rosy , c omforting my th w hic h successive
generations have celebr ated up to this day.
The overa rching norm ative thesis of The
First Total War, warning against the dangers
of messianic "wars of liberation", resonates
very powerfully in American public discourse
at the moment. David Bell draws many
compelling analogies between the failures of
the French military occupations in the early
nineteenth century and the curren t American
predicament in Iraq; and we only have to
observe the daily humiliations visited upon
Palestinian popul ations by their Israeli occ upi-
ers to agree wholeheartedly with the author's
conclu sion that military occupation is pro-
foundl y corrupting. But although we can
appreciate the opposition of American liberals
to Pre sident Ge orge W. Rush 's dem ocratic
mess ianism, we should be careful about fol-
lowing them down the Grotian path of a whole-
sale rejec tion of ju st-war doctrin e - espec ially
in light of the proposition (which Bell accepts)
that war is an inescapable feature of our polit-
ical landscape. For to rejec t j ust war under
such circums tances is implicitl y to sanction a
world where the resort to force forever
rema ins the prese rve of the strong. Jean-
Jacques Roussea u's response to Grotius is still
worth quoting: "one can live peace fully
enough in a dun geon, but such peace will
hardly, of itself , ensure one 's happiness" .
14
ne might imagine that in troubled
O
times, the most harmless and
peaceful occ upat ion wo uld be
run ning a library. Yo u keep yo ur
head down , ca talog ue book s as they come in,
make them ava ilable to reade rs, an d know
that whatever co nflic ts may be rag ing in the
world outside, yo u, at least, are qu ietl y
serving the life of the mind .
Such , however, is unlik ely to be you r lot
if yo ur library is in Euro pe, has the wor d
"National" in its name and is goi ng thro ugh
tim es as troubled as 1938-45. This is the
period that Mu rray G . Hall and Christina
Kosrner, followin g on from the ex hibition of
"Plundered Boo ks" that Hall and his
co lleag ues organized in the Austrian
Na tional Lib rary in 2004-05 (desc ribed in
the TLS, March 11, 2005), cover in their
mass ive histor y of the Lib rary, ". .. All erlei
fur Die Nationa lbibliothek zu ergattern .. . ":
Eine iisterreichisc he Institution in der NS-
Ze it (Vie nna: Bohl au ), In M arch 1938, the
co nservative , author itarian , but anti-Fascist
Co rporate State, set up after the vio lent
suppression of Soc ial Democracy in 1934,
succumbed to its ove rbearing northern neigh-
bour and becam e the "Os tmar k", a pro vince
within the Third Reich . Th e Director of the
I.ibrar y , Io sef Rick , was tak en to a co ncentra -
tion cam p, and an en thus iastic Austria n
Na zi, Paul Heigl, who had sat o ut the yea rs
of the Corpora te State in Berli n, was sw iftly
imported to replace him. Seven years later , as
Ru ssian troop s encircle d Vien na , Heigl and
his wife co mmitted suicide .
For the lower rank s of the library staff,
reg ime cha nge was less ca taclysmic, though
some long-servin g librarians who had reser va-
tion s abo ut Naz ism had to accept demotion
and see ideo log ically sound colleag ues
drafted in from Berlin . Each change, how-
eve r, was acc ompa nied by a different loyalty
oa th. Th e Co rporate State required emp loy -
ees to pledge to A lmighty Go d that they
wo uld not join any foreign politi cal bod y (ie,
the Naz is); in 1938, they swo re obedience to
Ado lf Hitl er ; and after the defeat of the Third
Reich , they vowe d loyalt y to the co nstitution
and laws of the Seco nd Republic.
Still, once these form alities were out of
the way, the librarians co uld ge t on w ith cata-
loguin g the new acq uisitions. But ho w had
the book s been acq uired? This qu estion is at
the heart of the Hall-Kostner volu me, for the
Ges tapo pro mp tly closed down Jewish-
ow ned bookshop s and publi sh ing hou ses and
confi scated their stoc ks , which were co l-
lected in the "Book Eva luation Point" in
the Doro thee rgasse in the centre of Vien na .
Wh en they had been sorted - a proc ess for
whic h space and staff we re absurdly insuffi-
cien t - their destinati on de pended on the turf
wars fou ght bet w een lib rari an s in Be rl in a nd
Pau l Heigl, who wan ted to kee p eve ry thing
of any value in Vien na.
Fro m the biographi cal ske tch of him give n
here, it is clear that Heigl was a cultiva ted
ma n and a highl y qu alified libr arian, devoted
to what he affec tionately ca lled his " N abi".
Wh en in 194 3 a bomb destro yed o ne-fifth of
the hol din gs of the Bavarian State Lib rar y in
Mu nich, Heigl was not displeased to find that
his own library was now the seco nd biggest
in the Re ich. But his offic ial corr espond ence,
deftl y summarized and qu oted by Hall and
Kosrner, gives one a sense - famil iar to histo-
Turf wars
The fate of books - and book owners - in Vienna
during 'a barbarism of meticulous order'
RIT CHI E ROB ER T SO N
rian s of Naz ism - of inh abit ing two incom-
men sur able worlds . As bomb s fall , refu gees
flee, and whole popul ation s are ens lave d,
bur eaucrati c euphem isms roll off the type-
writers. A s German troop s enter Be lgrade,
Heigl is form ally appo inted Co mm issar for
Sc ho larly Libraries in Occu pied Yugos lavia.
The publi sher Go ttfr ied Ber ma nn Fisc her, on
havin g some of his books restored after the
wa r, noticed how, thou gh stamped with swas -
tika s, they had been carefully preserved; he
kept them as meme ntos of "a barb ari sm of
meti culous order".
Heigl had to contend not only with Berlin
but with the claims of the "F uhrerbibliothek"
which Hitler wa nted to erect alo ngside his
massive art museum in Lin z, the city whose
cultura l pres tige was to rend er Par is insignifi-
cant. Officially, Heigl was enthusias tic about
this project, but rivalry arose over the priceless
collection of books and drawi ngs belongin g
to the stage designer Edwa rd Gordon Craig,
whom Hitler cons ide red to be among the great-
est living artists. Having been taken fro m
German-occupied Paris to an internm ent
camp, Craig was released but induc ed to sell
his co llection (one can eas ily imagine the
press ure he and his family were under).
Heigl' s hopes of adding it to Vienna's impor-
tant theatrical library were soo n dashed : this
prize was destined for Linz, whe re it was
meant to illustrate an "Aryan Eng land",
though it spen t the later years of the war stored
for safety in an Upper Austrian salt min e. The
National Library did , however, acquire some
Cra ig dra win gs UIl ex tended luan as a spe cia l
present from Hitler, and Hall and Kostner
expose the deviou s pretexts by which the
Lib rary doggedl y held on to them after 1945 .
The bulk of their study recounts in minute
and repell ent de tai l ho w various departm ents
of the Na tional Lib rary secured the private
co llections of peopl e who emigra ted or we re
deported. The total cann ot be exac tly qu anti-
fied , but the record s permit the conclus ion
that the Libra ry acquired by dub ious means
" 180,000 plundered books , plus 233 crates of
books, seve ntee n basketful s of book s, a car-
load of book s, and several thou sand book s
belon ging to the Roth schild famil y alone" . It
also scooped up innumerabl e manu scripts,
musical sco res, maps and pictur es. Man y indi-
vid ua l cases m ak e di smal and d istasteful read-
ing. Fritz Brukn er, o ne of the leadin g ex perts
on Viennese theatre, had a preciou s col-
lection of manu scripts which the Na tional
Librar y wa nted, thou gh Bru kner had already
given an opt ion on the coll ection to a profes-
sor of theatre studies in Co log ne . In such situ-
ations, the Ges tapo could be useful. Heigl
se nt a co lleag ue, accom panied by a Ges tapo
office r, to pac k up Brukner' s collecti on and
mo ve it to the Lib rar y; and when the profes-
sor in Cologne pro tes ted, Heigl go t the
Ges tapo to harass him. Brukner was eve ntu-
ally pressured into se lling the collec tion to
TLS NOVE MBER 23 2007
the Lib rary for a tiny fracti on of its rea l
val ue . " If yo u do not sign" , Heigl warne d
him, " I ca nnot guaran tee yo ur perso nal
safe ty" : the Gestapo as ultima ratio.
Hall and Kostner ' s book is a trul y out-
standing piece of scholarly detective work,
minut ely docum ented and lucidly prese nted.
As their narrative proceeds, one has the
imp ression of a fren zied hunt for Jewish-
ow ned book s, espec ially in the account of
Heigl' s wartime visits to the Tr ieste area .
Bein g considered an expert on Freemaso nry,
and believing that most Freemas ons were
Paul H eigl
Jews, he was co mmiss ioned to set up an
institut e for the study of Free masonry and the
"Jewish Question" in Trieste. Though no such
institut e eve r opened, Heigl spent some time
in the Tr ieste synagog ue, lookin g through the
books of deport ed Jews that had been assem -
bled there. So me sad photograp hs show the
interior of the synagog ue in 1945 , with books
scattered carelessly ove r the floor. Heigl also
soug ht famil y albums co ntaining photo graphs
which wo uld illustrate Jewish physical charac-
teristics and thu s prov ide his institute with
material for racial studies. One is struc k by the
cas ual heartl essness with which Heigl refers
to "Jude nphotos" of "J ude nfa milien" : the
degradin g effec t of such comp ound noun s
might be conveye d by such English expres-
sions as "Jew photos" of "Jew famili es".
After 1945 , with Bick reinstated as Direc-
tor , the Libr ary did restore many plu ndered
items to their ow ners, but, as docum ented
here, the process was often slow and hesitant,
and und ert aken only in respon se to req ues ts.
A law passed in 1998 required libraries and
mu seu ms to take the initiative in tracing the
provenanc e of their holdin gs and returning
items that had been acq uired illegall y.
Several thou sand plundere d book s with iden-
tifi able owners were found in the Lib rar y' s
stacks, and the process of restitution began
mor e vigoro usly .
To record this history is all the more impor-
tant since libraries, espec ially nation al and
civic libraries, are crucia l storehouses of cu l-
tural memo ry. That idea is centra l to a volume
edited by Juli a Dani elczyk, Sy lvia Mattl-
Wur m and Christian Mertens, Das Gediic htnis
der Stadt: 150 Jahre Wienbibliothek im
Rath aus (Vien na: Oldenb our g), co mme mora t-
ing 150 yea rs of the library found ed in 1856 as
the Vienn a City Libr ary. This instituti on has
been throu gh seve ral cha nges both of name
and of purpo se. Its habitu es who knew it for
many yea rs as the "W iene r Stadt- und Landes-
bibli othek" have not yet got used to calling it
the "Wienbibliothek im Rath aus". This
rebr andin g was apparently undertaken to pre-
vent the public from confusing it with the
mai n lendin g library. For its function is very
different. Origin ally it was intended as a mod-
est collecti on of legal and historical texts
abo ut Vienn a, a reso urce only for the city's
administrators. In the late nineteenth century,
however, underthe directo rship of the great lit-
erary scho lar Carl Glossy, it acq uired the
books and papers of Austria' s classic dram a-
tist Franz Gr illparzer, round which a huge co l-
lectio n of literary and theatrical material s
grew up.
The City Lib rary was as shaken by the
disasters of the mid-twe ntieth century as its
Na tional co unterpart. In 1938, all its employ -
ees had to discl ose their racial backgrou nd s
and their politi cal affilia tions . Two proudl y
revealed that they we re memb ers of the
Na tional Soc ialist Party (ba nned in Au stria
und er the Corporate State). It is sad to learn
that one of these crypto-Naz is was G ustav
Gug itz, the literary and cultural histori an ,
who pro duced so many invalu able editions
of Viennese literatur e. During the war, the
Library suffe red not only bomb damage but ,
in 194 5, an invasion of Russ ian so ldiers, who
entered the readin g room wavi ng burning
torches and we re indu ced to leave by a
Ru ssian-speaki ng librarian who rema ined
behind when all oth ers had fled. This makes a
goo d story, but it may be part of the mythol-
ogy which ora l traditi on has woven aro und
the Ru ssian occupation of Vienna an d Lo wer
Au stria.
Se nsitize d by Mu rray Hall' s wor k, the
histor y deals also with plu ndered book s,
whether they were seized from the libraries
of ban ned organizations or fro m Jewi sh emi-
gres who had to leave their prop ert y behind.
Fortu nately, we hear nothi ng of sys tematic
book-hunts like those und ertaken by Pa ul
Heigl. lllegal acq uisitions must have been
doubl y welco me, since und er the Third Re ich
the Library was obli ged to spe nd mu ch of its
bud get on book s published in Ger many about
the principl es of Na tional Sociali sm. The pro-
cess of retu rnin g such acq uisitions to their
rightful ow ners (w he n these surv ived) was
init iated in 1946 , and is still unde r way.
Del ays are attributed part ly to a lack of staff
ava ilable for the purpose, partl y - and thi s is
a very frank admission - to a feeling that
since the Librar y had af ter all paid money for
books ex pro priated from Jewish emigres, no
wro ngdo ing had occurred .
Nowadays, the Wienbiblioth ek im Rath aus
is an exceptionally user-friendl y lib rar y and a
pleas ure to wor k in. Wh en in Vien na, I divid e
my working tim e bet ween it and the rare
books room (the Au gu stiner-L esesaal) of the
Na tional Libr ary, and the differenc es are pal-
pable. The wa lls of the Augu stiner-L esesaal
are lined with reference book s which readers

are forbidden to cons ult; one occas iona lly
fee ls tra nsported back to the days when librar-
ies were thought to ex ist for the sake of librar-
ians. For the Wienb ibliothek im Rathaus,
such days are long pas t. Among the attrac tive
features of the commemora tive volume are
essays by its long-term users about particular
holdings that they have exp lored. To single
out two exam ples : Ernst Wa nger ma nn, the
distin gui shed historian of eightee nth-ce ntury
-----------------------~,-----------------------
Risen from the ashes
irst time rou nd, the books esca ped : the
F
Duchess had moved them out to her
new library in the Green Palace eight
years before the great fire of 1774. The ruin
of the Old Residence was one of the first
things Goethe saw when he arrived in Weimar
in the follow ing year. Later, for thirty-five
years from 1797, he ran Anna Am alia' s
library, as he ran much else in the duchy. With
its buildin g adapted and extended by himself
and the local architect Clemens Wences laus
Coudray , and its collections enlarged, the
library became an intellectual arsenal (it
had most recentl y been a literal one) for the
crea tors of a modern German literary culture
who were gathered in that small town. When
Schiller spends nine hour s a day reading up
the sources for his historical narratives, or
when Herder says he has read every thing on a
subjec t, we know where the books came from.
(Goe the had to remind Herder, to his annoy-
ance, of the 500 volumes he had kept out for
up to ten years. Goethe borrowed 2,000 , but
return ed them more pro mptly.) On September
2, 2004, fire at last caught up with the books
and manuscripts. A few more weeks and they
would have been transferred to a magnificent
new exte nsion, indeed more of an independent
library, in the massive Cube elegantly slotted
into the courtyard of another historic buildin g
across the way. The electrical fault resp onsible
was part of an overall decrepitude long since
reported and publicized ("The cradle of
German culture will become the grave of a
million books if you don't help").
But with much of the material about to
move, renovation see med to the authorities
less than urgent. Now over 100,000 largel y
historic volumes, thirt y-seven paint ings and
almos t the whole co llection of musica l manu-
scripts we re lost or seve rely damaged. The
buil ding itself see med irretri evably ruined.
The top storey was burn ed out, the exquisite
rococo chamber fill ed with rub bish from
above. Water and chem ica l foam had seepe d
eve ryw here into the struct ure, both woo d-
work and sto ne. Phot ograph s convey the
hop el essne ss of the mornin g after.
Yet fro m that first day there was a resolve
to rebuild and restore, an extension of the
spirit which had brou ght so many people out
in the night to rescue books at risk to life. The
sa me spirit became a local and then a nati onal
impu lse that brou ght in fund s for restoration ,
some 20,000 contributions, from a large
gran t by the Vodafo ne Foundation and a
surprise co ntribution from a di stant brewery,
down to the yea r's overtim e payments of the
dustmen and bus drivers of So ndershause n.
On October 24, barely three years after the
disaster and on the 200th anniversary of
COMM ENTARY
Aus tria, writes about the Library ' s prodi-
gious collec tion of pamphl ets fro m the
1780s, the pamphl et being the princip al
medium in which the Au strian Enlighten-
men t fou nd express ion ; and Edward Timms,
tracing his ow n use of the Libr ary back to
his fir st arrival as a gra duate student in 196 1,
gives us glimpses into the archiva l researches
that even tually und erpinn ed his massive two-
volume study of Karl Krau s.
An na Ama lia's death , the library was
reopened by the Fede ral President.
Perh aps there was magic in a wo ma n's
name. Instituti onal titles the library once had,
or ones prop osed after reu nific ation ("Centra l
Library of Ger man Class icism", "Weirnar
Research Library ") would sure ly have had
less effec t. The slog an " Help for Anna Ama-
lia" invited a perso nal identifi cation. One's
apprec iation of this spontaneous response
should not be mistaken for sentime ntality.
Perh aps there was an element of conscience
in the €4 million of Federal fundin g that
instantly cam e in. The library had been too
long neglected, though renovation was sched-
The Anna Amalia Library
uled and an architect appointed. Conscie nce
has certa inly caught up now. The Foundation
that runs Weimar's libraries and historic build-
ings has a 20 per cent bud get increa se. The
Goe the-Schiller Archi ve has a grant of
€220,OOO to prese rve the manuscript s of the
two poets' cor respo ndence, threatened by the
acid ink - not the highest of scholarly priori-
ties, but an apt symbolic ges ture.
All this only touch es the eleva ted va lues
Weim ar itself sym bolizes . The Presiden t's
address drove home the ultim ate point.
Restoring one historic library left the nation' s
public and school libraries thinl y sca ttered
and und er-r esour ced , its university libr aries
patheticall y short of "coverage" . Yet libraries
were sym bols of the word-depe ndence of
an advan ced soc iety, of the need to read and
interpret the wor ld, not ju st for an "informa-
tion eco nomy" but for a culture. A soc iety's
TL S NOVE MBER 23 2007
The TLS reviewer of Hall ' s earlier work ,
whic h showe d how some Au strian publi shers
yielded to Naz i influ ence even before Aus-
tria' s annexa tion (Osterreich ische Verlags -
geschichte 1918- 1938 , reviewed October 3,
1986), cornmended him for breaking "the
consensus in Austria that it is better to for-
give and forget the even ts of 1938--45".
Mu ch has cha nged since then. The " Plun-
dered Boo ks" ex hibition was mou nted by the
va lues are easily invoked, less rea dily paid
for. For a mom ent on a co ld Wednesday in
Wei mar, librari es were pushed up high on the
political agen da . Whether the impetu s will
outlive the celebr ations rema ins to be see n.
Mea nwhile there is lasting and absorbing
docum entation in three vo lumes published
this yea r. In Die Biblioth ek brennt: Ein
Bericht aus Weimar (Gottinge n: Wallstei n)
the librarian, Michael Knoche, narrates
eve nts down to the ope ning of the library and
study centre in the Cube in Febru ary 2005 ; in
"Es nimmt der Augenbli ck, was Jahre
geben ": Vom w iederaufbau der Biicher-
sam mlung der Herzogin An na Amalia Bibli-
othek, edited by Claudia Kleinbub, Katja
Lorenz and Johannes Mangei (Gtittinge n:
Vandenh oeck & Ruprecht), specialists dis-
cuss the natur e and extent of the losses, the
techni calities of book res tora tion and the
reacquisition of early editions (it's amaz ing
what has alrea dy turned up); and in the
cen tra l piece of Die Herzogin Anna Amalia
Bibliothek: Nac h dem Brand in neuem
Glanz, edited by Walther Grunwa ld, Michael
Knoch e and Hellmut Seem ann (Berlin: Otto
Me issners), the beautifully illustr ated volume
that marks the reopening, the architec t det ails
the techn ical debates and so lutions that
bro ught Ann a Ama lia back to life.
Even in the light of that achieve me nt, the
disaster rem ain s a harro win g story : from the
first message, "The library' s on fire" , wh ich
provi des the librarian' s title, via the dram atic
mo ment when the flam es break through the
roof, but the rescue opera tions are luckil y
made possible by the strong design of the
roofb eams. Over all this a ma ssive bust of
Goe the, too heavy to be shifted without
mec hanical help , continues to preside as he
presided ove r the library in life. Then the sad
after math: sorting through the rubbi sh for
any thing that looked like a book and sending
off forty tons of materi al to restorers in Leip-
zig , whose skills were honed by the Dresden
floods of 2002. Then come end less press con -
ferences and television interviews, of varying
sensitiv ity and usefulne ss. A lso all so rts of
decision s. How to phrase an appea l for a
cultural ca use at the same time as the Asian
tsunami . Whether to sell off unrestorable
fragment s to help raise money. Wisely they
didn 't : in Germany burned books are a
subjec t needin g tact.
Things weren ' t all swee tness and light. A
present descendant of Ann a Amal ia tried to
pull rank in a post-feud al age , dem andin g the
resignation of whoeve r plac ed those valuable
things up there under the roof (answe r: it
was his ances tor's librarian 240 years ago);
a multin ation al com pany required the librar-
15
National Lib rary itself , and the book acco m-
panyin g the exhibition was subtitled "The
Austrian Nationa l Library confronts its
National Socialist past" . The Lib rary' s
present Direct or, Or Johann a Rach inger, not
only enco uraged Hall and his ass ociates to
mount the exhibition but active ly help ed the
produ ction of this latest, monumen tal book.
There has been progress, and Murray Hall
deserves much of the credit.
ian ' s presence at an inflated PR occasion so
as to be see n handin g over a rather modest
cheque; a sugges tion that memb ers of the
nation ' s literary acade my might consider
donating a copy of their book s to the library
got mini mal response. But the overall sense
is of an engage d and acti ve community. "So
much destroyed, but also such unbelievable
energies released", in Michae l Knoche' s
summing-up.
Among the half-charred single pages
found blowin g about the stree ts was a repro -
duction of Bl akes Go d in the act of crea tion,
bending do wn from a gap in the cloud s
very like the open ing atop the rococo room
itself , his hair stream ing in the winds of
space, in his hand s the co mpasses of precise
construc tion. Altogether a nice em blem for
the architec tura l recon structi on and its result.
The beauty of shape and surface in the
restored roc oco roo m is und erpi nned by the
most up-t o-d ate technnology. There is now
something like eight times as much floor
space as before holdin g the machin ery that
guara ntees the library' s clim atic con ditions
and sec urity.
So the volume 's ce lebratory subtitle, "after
the fire in new splendo ur", is not quite acc u-
rate. Rather it is the old splendour with a new
invisibl e support system. Ge tting there was
co mplex, and it is a wo nder it has all been
done so fast. There were fierce debates
between the architect and the historical preser-
vation authorities over what was desirable and
what was permi ssible. Sometimes they were
resol ved by disco veries as more and more o f
the buildin g' s archae ology was laid bare - the
work whose first cause was a fire in the roof
finally we nt down to found ation level. Deci-
sions on the externa l and internal colour
sche mes were not arbitrarily aesthetic: " You
have to understand a build ing' s history before
you can restore it" , notes the architec t. His
acco unt taxes the reader ' s vocabulary and
spatial imagination, but ends as a co mpelling
co mprehensive picture. Photograph s show
every phase and aspect of the restora tion.
Ann a Am alia is once more, for 200 visitors
a day, a sight for sore eyes: a delicate
chamber piece compare d with the symphonic
gra ndeur of Panizzi's British Mu seu m Rea d-
ing Room, Tri nity College Dublin , or Tri nity
College, Cam bridge . It is also once more a
wor king library, a centre for the study of the
book and a centre to the libraries of Weimar,
which them sel ves stand at the crossroads
between the Baro que remit of the Duk e
August library at Wolfenbiitt el (in Ann a Ama-
lia ' s childhood home duchy) and the modern
rem it of the Literatur e Archive in Schiller's
Marbach . Weimar is not ju st a mu seum and a
curiosi ty for touri sts. With its new and its
restored old library it reassumes its place as
one of the great homes of literatur e and liter-
ary scho larship.
T . 1. R E ED
16
orders are becoming blurred - at least
B when it comes to class dist inct ions ,
virtual rea lit ies, pub lic spaces or
matters of life and dea th. This leads to pec u-
liar cases of mistaken identity, of people as
we ll as places . I am not a grea t en thusias t for
the ga theri ngs of write rs that proliferate these
days . It is generally ass umed tha t writing is a
lo nely occ upa tio n and novelists need com -
pa ny, but wri ters are not necessarily good
talkers, and, if they are, they tend to keep
their mo uths shut in public, for fea r that
their brilli ant stor ies wi ll be stolen by their
co mra des -in-ink. Conversa tion is usually lim-
ited to an inf or mati ve chat abo ut the wea ther
and mor tgages. I have always held the view
that it is much easier an d more rewarding for
the wr iter to com mun icate with a publisher or
agen t, or j ust an ordina ry talkative drunk in
the local, than with a fellow author. How-
ever, a wee k or two ago I was on my way to
the Co lony Ro om in Soho when I passed the
Blue Posts pub in Fitzrov ia and realized that
it was the first Tuesday of the month. On that
day, a friendl y gro up of writers, nickn amed
by its habitu es The Silent Three (De borah
Moggach and Robert Irwin are amo ng them ,
but I haven't yet found out who is the mysteri-
o us third ), meet in the Blue Pos ts . I decided
to check it out.
On entering the spacious, oa k-pane lled
roo m upstair s, I ex pec ted to see a few
familiar faces engaged in a hushed exc hange
of mod erate opi nion s, punctuated by the
clink of wine glasses . To my sur prise, I foun d
a boisterou s crow d, sprea d out to all co rners
of the room. As I was bu ying myself a drink
at the bar, a yo ung man introduc ed himself.
"Are yo u po lyamoro us?", he as ked without
any prelimin aries. I co nfessed I did n't kn ow
what the word meant. He exp lained that it
IN NEXT WEEK 'S
Books of the Year
Julian Barnes Margaret
Drabble William Boyd
Frederic Raphael Linda
Colley Ferdinand Mount
George Steiner Marjorie
Perloff Alberto Manguel
Elaine Showalter John
Bayley James Davidson
Clive James Joyce Carol
Oates Gabriel Josipovici
Rowan Williams Peter
Green Nadine Gordimer
COMMENTARY
FREELANCE
Z IN O VY Z IN I K sce nes from classical ballet we re perf or med,
follo wed by a lavish recepti on.
impli ed loyal amorous involvement with The atm osphere was supposed to be remi-
several people at the same tim e. I considered niscen t of that of a stuffy Wh ite Russian ball
the question for a few seco nds , then told him in the Ca fe Royal in Rege nt Street. And yet
that yes , I care abou t all the charac ters in my the Ru ssian ga thering I happ ened to atten d, in
novels with the sa me passion, regardless of the Thistle Hotel in Victor ia, bore a str iking
their ge nder, age or pro fess ion. The plur alit y similarity to any other big receptio n in Lon-
of the wr iter's loyalty to his chara cte rs is don, with an air of ne utra lity and friendli ness,
notoriou s. To lstoy was as much in love the gues ts not show ing off their wea lth in the
with Anna Karenin a ' s hu sband as with his way the New Ru ssians so metimes do.
heroi ne. And we all rememb er Flaubert's I was standing with my dri nk, observing
"Madame Bovary, c'est moi i", the changes, when I was accosted by a
"Are yo u a writer?" he asked . friendl y man who asked whether I still think
"Aren' t yo u?" I enq uired in return . " No !" of myse lf as a pot enti al victim of a near-fatal
he said. " I came here for a mee ting of the acci de nt and what had bee n my chances of
Polya mory Society." It turned out that the surv ival? The qu esti on was asked in Englis h
differe nt sides of the pub were occ upied by - per haps my interlocut or was an Eng lish-
separate ga ther ings , which were gra dually man married to a Russian? No one had both-
mixing with one another. I sugges ted that the ered to int roduce the gues ts to eac h other, ju st
two gro ups ultimately sho uld merge. as in the goo d old days when it was safer to
At unf amil ar ga therings these days, I tend preserve anonym ity in the comp any of pot en-
not to disclose my Russ ian or igin, for fear of tial doubl e agen ts.
bein g mi staken for an unemplo yed oligarc h. I ponde red the qu estion . Wh en I em igrated
A decade ago, yo u co uld have recogni zed a from Russia to the West thirty years ago, I
Russian at a glance, eve n witho ut hearing did so vo luntarily, without rega rding my
a word spo ken. This is no lon ger true. Wh en I dep artu re as a catas trophe, or myself as a
atte nded a one-day co nference of " Russian- victim of it. And yet, the idiosy ncratic sugges -
spea king Co mm unities in Europe" a co uple tion of the decision to em igra te as being a
of yea rs ago, I expected to see the old-sty le roa d acc iden t pro voked my me mory to make
crow d of a few hundred ex patriates, the men a sentime ntal survey of fatal co llisions in the
predo minantly dressed in silky black suits, lives of my fellow travell ers in ex ile. I left
but shod in chea p shoes , next to wo men in my question er and we nt for another glass of
the dye d skins of dead ani mals, overloaded whis ky. The bar was outside the co nfe rence
with swa thes of jewell ery. To such ga ther- roo m, and it was only then that I noticed the
ings, some gues ts used to brin g their children poster with the name of the ga thering which
for a co nce rt where Russia n folk songs and I was atte nding: "T he Meetin g of Pot enti al
fact th at mo st of h is poems have real root s.
TLS October 18 1957;
He is a co untry man sens itive and acc urate
Febru ary 6 1998
in his obse rva tion of the wor ld; his imagin a-
tion has been subm itted to a natural disci-
Ted Hughes pline. Were one to say that he had benefit ed
Follow ing Oil from our lead review of the from read ing Tho mas the astuter reader
letters ofTed Hughes, we give below extrac ts would not automatica lly ass ume " Dylan" -
from reviews of the first and last volumes of thou gh , astonishingly enough, that seems
his poe try: Patric Dickinson Oil The Hawk in also to be the case.
the Rai n (1957) and Ka rt Miller Oil Birthday Mr. Hughes' s idiom , however, is not star-
Lett ers (1998). These call be read ill fu ll at tlingly origina l. No idiom is import ant in
www.t he -tls.co.uk itself: what matters is what is sai d in it. Mr.
Hugh es has a great deal to say . "October
fter yea rs of rev iew ing poe try Da wn" , "Wind" , or the 'T wo Wi se Ge ner-
A Edward Thomas was able to wr ite:
Nothing is to be compared with see-
ing the stars . . . in the east when most eye s
als" are goo d eno ugh, partic ularly in a first
book, to exc ite one 's en thusiasm , but to
come upon such a poem as "S ix Yo ung
are wa tc hi ng the west, except per haps to rea d Men" is thrillin g and deli ghtin g, and there
a fresh modern poet stra ight from the press, are oth er poem s almos t as grea tly charged
before anyone has praised it, and know that it with hum anit y and comp assion , and with a
is good. tend ern ess which never for an instant turns
Mr. Hughes is goo d. It is natural that a into sentime ntality . There is a crisp and
yo ung man ' s ex perience should be subjec- unc omp romi sing intell ectu al con tent in the
tive: but few yo ung poet s make mor e than best of these poem s .. .. Wh at is lacking in
private or obsc ure poem s out of such his wo rk as yet is any stro ng ly indi vidu al
material. Mr. Hugh es in such poems as rhyth m, an d thi s must be acco unted a
"Meeting" or "A Mod est Proposal" crea tes ser ious defect .. .. It is the content of his
images which have more than a pri vate work which is memorable, and as he devel-
value . ops his art we sho uld have much to look
The ability to create such images is his for ward to.
stro nges t suit. But enc ourag ing too is the
*
TLS NOVEMBER 23 2007
Victims of Nea r-Fa tal Accident s".
It turned out that in this huge hotel different
co nventions were takin g place in neighbour-
ing co nference rooms . Thro ugh another door I
co uld see an almos t identical crowd. But one
figure there, dressed all in black, co uld not
have been co nfused with anyo ne else: it was
Bori s Berezovsky. This time I knew I was in
the right place. For some, the mere presen ce
of Mr Berezovsky blurred the distinction
between the Co nference of Russian-spea king
Com munities in Europe and that of potential
victims of near-fatal accidents.
My Moscow friends tell me that durin g the
yea rs follo wing perestroika, when the curre nt
po litical restrict ion s were not yet in place ,
many American, British and Europea n reli-
gio us societies, hum an right s groups and other
charities opened branches in the large cities of
Russia. Both the Samaritans and the eutha na-
sia organi zatio n Exit, in their Russia n varie-
ties, came to town . These outfits are famou s
for their rigorou s chec king of the intenti on s of
those whom they' re trying to help. Using a
spec ial interrogatio n technique, the Samar i-
tans analyse your state of depression and
probe the sincerity of yo ur attempt to stay
alive - with the same intensity, and using the
same meth od s as those used by Exit whe n they
chec k out your desire to co mm it suicide.
It wo uld have been very hard , I imagine,
for an ordinary dep ressed Ru ssian to
distin gui sh bet ween the two proc edures. The
tro ubl e was that , because of the ge nera l indif-
ference of the Russian adm inistration to
matters of life and death , and the near-f atal
accid entality of life in Moscow, the Samari-
tans and Ex it had been put up next door to
eac h other in the same building. If yo u co n-
fu sed the entrance, you might have passed
into the other world.
he poe ts of the mod ern wor ld have
T said that poetr y makes nothi ng hap-
pen, and is no plac e for the poet' s
person al life, and that what the reade r
should care abo ut is not "the th ing sa id" but
the way of say ing it. This is a job descri p-
tion which might ap pear to ha ve go ne
unhee ded by the author of the prese nt book.
Th e thing said in this instanc e cons ists of
a vers ion of Ted Hughes' s seven -yea r mar-
riage to Sy lvia Plath, which ended with their
separation and, in 1963, with Plath's suicide .
It seems we ll within the bounds of possibil-
ity that this thin g, and this way of say ing it,
will make a difference to the way peopl e feel
about poetry, and about marr iage , however
unlikely it may be that the book will appease
the blamers and defacers who have contrib-
uted to the cause celebre of this particular
marriage by demo nizing Hughes. We have
already heard that Sy lvia Plath can ' t answe r
hack in relati on to the se lf-j ustifica tions pre-
sumed to be impli cit in Birthday Letters.
Th e book is fill ed with the past and
present feelin gs of its autho r; we ca n be
sure that he isn 't professing or pretendin g to
have them, for art ' s sake . Birthday Letters
is, non e the less, a work of art, an d none
the less so for being at least as personal an d
histori cal as it co uld be thou ght mystical or
transcendent. Th e two poets can see m larger
than life, their destin y written in the stars.
Du ring the seve n yea rs of their uni o n, how -
eve r, thei r star-crossed feet were often on
the gro und, as these poe ms attes t . ...
 17

An Anglo-Saxon at the cinema and in translation

Digital monstrosity
C A R O L Y N E L ARRI NGTO N troll ed performanc e as the rept ilian Unferth,
choo sing his insult s to Beowulf with the
BE O W UL F over-precision of the habitual drunk. Robin
Various cinemas Penn Wright makes a winsome youn g
Wealth eow, Hroth gar ' s queen who is
Di ck Rin gl e r , t r an sl at or repelled by her husband ' s fle shlin ess, and
BEOWUL F she brin gs an icy dignit y to the later sce nes .
A new tran slation for ora l delivery And Ang elin a Joli es Grendel's Mother is all
304pp. Indianap olis: Hackett. $27.50 too tempting; her inner hag onl y appears
(paperback, $9.95). when she invades Beowulf' s dream s as she
978 0872208940 exact s her revenge on his warriors.
Zemecki s' s Beowulf is in touch with criti-
he Anglo-S axon epic poem Beowulf cal debate about the poem . The clash

T has been film ed more often and

more variously than the ordin ary
cinema-goer might think. A fellow-
rev iewe r tipp ed me off to the Au stralian
Grende l, Grendel, Grendelo f 1981, an anima-
bet ween pagani sm and Christianity is there :
Hroth gar ' s land is teeterin g on the edge of
conv ersion to Christianity , a creed attr acti ve
to Unferth, who see ms by the end to have
beco me a priest. Wealtheow , too, is working
tion fil m narr ated by the mon ster Grend el on a half-finished tapestry show ing an Odini c
him self , voiced by Peter Ustinov . Yuri Kula- figur e surro unded by ange ls, thou gh the other
ko v direct ed an animat ed short for tele vi sion unregen er ares, Dan e s and G ears al ik e , keep
in 1998 with an impr essive range of Briti sh right on swearing by Odin. Gre nde l has lan-
acting talent doing the voices . Aimed at child- guage, speaking a kind of pidgin O ld Engli sh
ren, this version told the story straightfor- and the ascription of hum an and mon strou s
wardly, from the arri val of the hero Beowulf characteri stic s to both prot agoni sts inflect s
to help King Hroth gar of Denm ark deal with their charact eriz ation in interestin g ways.
the dem onic monster who attacks his hall and Mod ern preoccupation s: a Freudian anxiety
the gns, through the climactic fight of hero about father s and sons, and conc ern s about
and mon ster in the hall Heorot; the surprise inherit ance and power-broking shape the
emerge nce of Grend el' s mother as ave nger Ray Winstone in Beowulf dynamic s of plot. Kingship is particul arly at
for her son; Beowulf' s later rise to the thron e issue; Hroth gar ' s sty le of leadership is that of
of Geatland and his death in battle again st a being bulk y, ugly and Icel andic- speakin g. fication . Ray Win stone (Beowulf) loses the old rugb y capt ain presidin g ove r one last
dra gon . It did not conc ern itself with contem- Hroth gar is highl y evas ive about Grende l's twent y-fi ve years in the fir st half of the film , Saturday night ; Beo wulf, as in the poem ,
porary relevanc e, psychological moti vation , moti vations, and Beowulf begin s to develop and gains a superbly sculpted bod y. Sir fall s to self-scrutiny when the dragon com es,
sex uality, paternit y, embodiedness or any of so me sympathy with the unlo ved troll . Even- Anth on y Hopkin s as Hroth gar becomes a thou gh, since he has made a Fa ustian pact for
the other issues which later live-action ver- tually , however , he fini shes him off and then paunchy, debauched Wel sh sot, and Angelina pow er and has come to resemb le Hrothgar,
sions have uncovered in the basic three- quickl y dispo ses of the mother. Jolie, a surprise castin g for Grendel' s he ha s much more to work on than his blame-
monster-fight structure. Roger Avary, the eo- Before he leaves " Dane land" • a my st eriou s M oth er , is a sli nky se duc tress w hose oth er- less predece ssor, that "god cynin g". The
writer with Neil Ga iman of the new BeowulJ, witch-figure, largely respon sibl e for expos i- worldly cur ves exploit the lust for sex and homo soci al bond s of the comitatus rem ain
claim s to have " solved" the probl em of Gren- tion in the film, intim ates that she is pregnant pow er in ge nerations of local kings. The writ- pow erfu l, but the erotic cann ot be cont ained .
del' s mysteriou s paternity by foistin g him on with the next generation of Gre nde lkin: the ers have taken con siderable liberti es with Wealth eow and Grende l's Moth er function
king Hrothgar , but this was the plot twist of feud is set to continue. Neither of these films both plot and characteri zation : Hroth gar pre- in part as doubl es of one anoth er; Ge rma nic
the perh aps und errated Beowulf of 1999, dealt with Beowulf' s rise to kingship and the sides over a Heo rot reminiscent of a rugb y lust for treasure fuses with the lust for the
direct ed by Gr aham Baker, starring a dead- coming of the dragon which the old warr ior club in the heart of the Valleys (it takes about gold en- skinned femal e mon ster and her pro-
eye d Christopher Lamb ert as the eponymous dies fightin g. J. R. R. Tolkiens hugel y influ- a minute and a half for the first ripe belch of mise of power. Fame - having a tale which
hero and with a post-apocalypti c setting. enti al article "B eowulf, the Mon sters and the the film to be heard); Wiglaf is Beowulf' s will be retold when all men living are dust, as
Unlike Hroth gar , Lamb ert' s Beowulf has the Critics", pub lished in 1936, persuad ed man y faithfu l right-hand man throu ghout , rather one character put s it - is not the prim ary
good sense not to be taken in by the foxy read ers that the poem has a dual struc ture, than his youthful companion in the final bat-
blond e stalking Hroth gar ' s hall ; corn ered in contrastin g movem ent s of risin g and fallin g, tle, and is con sequ entl y rather grizz led when
the building' s flood ed cellar, she reveals her- youth and age , but film-makers have been his turn for kin gship com es. Nevertheless, HI got hold of Henry Mo ore's
self as a mon strou s spider and is dealt with in reluct ant to skip ahead fifty yea rs for the last there is much to enjo y in the noisy, action- shelter pi ctures and weighed
summary fashion . The menace of Grende l's third of the film - and, of course, dragon s are packed spec tacular effects of the fight s. Gren-
mother is eliminated once and for all. Follow - expe nsive to depict. Avary and Ga iman, how- del in particul ar, half-fo etu s, half-corpse with them against these stories, and
ing so me recent critica l paradi gm s, Lam- eve r, link the three mon sters togeth er throu gh the fla yed skin of a Gunther von Hagen the stories weighed heavier!"
bert' s Beowulf explains that he, too , is mon- a ch ain of fath er s a nd sons , a nd thu s solve figure, is both grotesquely terrifying and pitia-
strous, fathered by an unkn own supernatural so me longstandin g probl em s of unit y, though ble; the fear evok ed in the poem when the Mrs Valley'S War
figur e; this affinity with the Oth er gives their inventi ons are bound to outrage some of mon ster realizes that he has met his match ,
him the power to vanquish Grendel and his their audienc e. and his miserable death in the mere are bril-
- the Shelter Stories of
mother. Robert Zemecki s uses performance cap- liantly reali zed . The dragon , too , has a splen- Feyyaz Kayacan Fergar
The Icelandic- Canadian eo-production ture - where movement s in three dim en sion s did golden hid e, as if cru sted with lumps of
Beowulf and Grendel, from 2005 , dir ected by are captured throu gh digital sensors on a ore, while the Scandin avian skaldic term for translated from Turk ish by
Sturl a Gunnarss on and starring Gerard But- bod y-suit worn by the actor and rework ed on gold as "fire in the water" underli es the aes- Ruth Ch ristie & Selyuk Berilgen
ler, had only one UK show ing to my kno w- computer ; a techni que familiar from Gollum thetic of the haunt ed mere wher e Grendel and ISBN 978-1-904851- 13-4 Pbk £7.99
ledge, and no US cinema release at all. In in Peter Jack son' s Lord of the Rings trilogy. his mother live.
available from
this, Grendel's enmity against Hroth gar is The effect is more natur al than CG I - thou gh Beowulf him self retain s the South London www.rockinghampress.com
dri ven by feud - the fund amental imp etu s in the charact ers' eyes rem ain rath er glassy - hard-man per sona of Win ston e, whose reco g- www.inpressbooks.co.uk
Icel andi c saga narrati ve - for Hroth gar has and it retain s the likeness of the actor, while nizabl e gro wl issues from the new hairl ess, www.centraibooks.com
killed Grendel's troll-father, apparently for permittin g considerab le enh anc ement or ugli- muscul ar tor so. John Malk ovich gives a con-

TLS N OVE M BER 23 2 0 07

18
mo tiva tion for the hero that it was in Beo wulf
and Grendel, or as fre que ntly invok ed as it
was by Mr Jolie (Brad Pitt ) as Ach illes in the
highly sel f-conscious epic Troy . Altho ug h
Beowulf shows mercy to a defea ted Frisian
in order to feature in the tale he will tell back
at hom e, the hero ' s fun eral takes place on a
fiery ship; there ' s no memori ali zing grave -
mo und in the landscape to remind futur e ge n-
era tions of his story, and Wiglaf's elegy for
the fa llen kin g dwell s only on his friend ' s
strength and co urage.
Beo wulf tell s us quit e a lot abo ut twenty-
first-centu ry anx ieties abou t masculinity and
power, and abo ut the ways in which we
refr ame stor ies fro m our national pas t, but it
is also rip-roarin g fun. Puri sts, however,
might prefe r to stay at ho me with Dick Ring-
ler ' s new tran slati on of Beo wulf; intend ed for
oral de live ry, and perform the story for them-
se lves . Ring ler has produ ced a really good
tran slati on of the poem , free of Seamus
Heaney' s quir ks and Irishi sm s, kee ping the
rh ythm and allitera tion, and retainin g a
simplicity which dem on strates how otiose
film effec ts are when the poe m is both po wer-
ful and mov ing. The translati on is acco mpa -
nied by a ma rve llo us I y straig htforward
introduction, esc hew ing all mo dis h modern
critic ism and thu s a useful correc tive for
those stude nt-readers co nfused by the liber-
ties taken by Beo wulf and its writers. To lkien
would have been pleased by Ring ler's
versio n. I am not so sure that he wo uld have
enjoyed the film .
ARTS
Are you sitting comfortably?
he repert ory of one-act operas wor th
T doing is hu ge, but they ca n be diffi cult
pieces to fit into toda y' s bills. Forces
vary from Bizet ' s early, piano-acc ompanied
salon piece La M aison du docteur (awaiting a
Briti sh prem iere?) to Ric hard Strau sss hu ge-
orc hes tra Sa lome . The Met prem iere of
Sa lome, in 190 7, was am plified by an all-star
preliminary co nce rt with co ntributions fro m
Farrar, Se mbrich, Bon inseg na and Ca ruso.
Cavalleria rusticana was give n its Met
premi ere as an afterpiece to G luck's Orfeo , in
1891 ; and so, in 1893, was Pag liacci. Once
j oin ed, Cav 'n ' Pag becam e the one-ac t operas
in reg ular repertory. Schoe nbergs Envar-
tung , Bartok ' s Bluebeard 's Castle, and
Strav inskys Oedipus Rex are one -ac t opera s,
variously paired , playe d from tim e to tim e
by the big co mpan ies .
Sma ll ad ventu rou s comp anies have we l-
co med the sma ller, less cos tly products of the
ge nre . John Blow' s Venus and A donis or
Purc ell ' s D ido and A eneas ca n be bill ed
beside new com missions. Th e Eng lish O pera
Gro up created , among much else, Walton ' s
Th e Bear , Lenn ox Berkeley 's A Dinner
Engagement and his masterl y, beautiful Cast-
away. For the Music Thea tre Ensem ble, Alex -
ande r Goe hr co mposed his remark able sma ll-
ense mble triptych Naboths Vineyard, Shad-
owplay and So nata about Jeru sal em. Am on g
TLS N OVE M BE R 23 2007
AN D RE W PORT ER
E l iz a be t h M a c o n ch y
THE SOFA
THE D E P AR T UR E
Lilian Baylis Theatre
the New Opera Co mp any creations at
Sadler's Well s we re Elisa beth Lut yenss
Infi delio and Tim e Off? Not a Ghost of a
Chance! and Eliza beth M aconch y' s fir st
opera, The Sofa, and her later The Depa rtu re.
The Sofa , which lasts abo ut forty minut es,
has a " saucy" libr etto by Ursula Va ugha n
Willi am s, based on an idea fro m Crebillon's
1742 conte moral. Th e o riental tale is moved
to nin eteenth- centur y Pari s and simplified .
The hero , tran sform ed before our eyes into a
sofa, ca n res ume hu man for m onl y when two
people con summate their love upon him. In
the opera, he does not have lon g to wa it.
The mu sic is tun eful , elegan t, compose d
with resour ce and disti nction . Eigh t yea rs
after the pre miere - at Sadler's We lls in
1959, in a doubl e bill with John Joub erts In
the D rought - M aconch y rescored the piece
for cha mber ensem ble , and we heard it at the
Ca mde n Fes tiva l, in a bill with Hind emith' s
Hin und zuriick and Hol st ' s The Wa ndering
Sc ho la r. In 1960 The Th ree Strangers, to her
own libr ett o after Hardy, and in 1962 The
Departure, with a libr ett o by A nne Ridler,
co mpleted a tril ogy of one -ac t cham ber
opera s. York Unive rs ity played it last year,
dir ected by M aconchy ' s daughter, the com-
pose r Nico la LeFanu. Earlier thi s month, in
the Lili an Baylis Th eatre, the sma ll hou se
tuck ed into the rebuilt Sadler' s Well s, a pro m-
ising new co mpa ny, Independ ent Opera,
revived Th e Sofa and The Departure in
M acon ch ys cen tenary year.
Dame Elizabeth Maconch y (w ho died in
1994 ) "loosened up" in her later wor ks, let go
with lyricism while not relinquishin g the
intell igence, craftsma nship, inventi veness
and "s hee r mu sicalit y" that mark all her com-
positions. There are th irteen rem ark able
string q uarte ts - an achieve me nt unparalleled
before Peter M axwell Davies completed his
"Chandos" sequence . Sh e ca me to prom i-
nence back in 1930, when Henry Wood
co nducted her orches tra l suite The La nd,
after Vita Sackville-West, at the Prom s. Her
works figur ed in several lSC M festi val s. But
Fra nk Ho wes, lumping her together in his
The Eng lis h Mu sical Renai ssance with
Lutyen s and Phylli s Tate , sugges ted that she
was insufficientl y "feminine" . In my early
d ays as a crit ic, Maconchy was not pr om i-
nent. Her contributions to the 1951 Fes tiva l
of Brit ain, the Sixth Strin g Qu artet and the
Th eme and Variati on s for Strin g Orchestra,
are but pass ing refere nces in the Times vo l-
um e of reviews recordin g the eve nts of that
yea r of Brit ish mus ica l achieve men t. But
I like to think that I heard and hail ed
Macon ch y' s merit s when I rev iewed her
operas a half- century ago. The Independ ent
Opera revivals pro vid ed confirm ation . I
won' t put her beside Bart ok - not yet, no t till
I' ve heard more of her mu sic. But mayb e
that' s where she sho uld be ranked.
Nicholas Sharratt as Prince Dominic
in Th e Sofa
Th e yo ung perfo rmer s at Sad ler 's Well s
gave a spirited but unsubtl e acco unt of Th e
Sofa . The action was shifted for ward to the
present day, where " Dorninic is havin g a wi ld
part y". Back in 1959, the Observer critic
call ed The Sofa "unique in that it includes the
only atte mpt I have eve r see n to present the
act of copulation on the publi c stage" . Toda y,
it has become rare to see an opera wi tho ut
o ne; and Alessandro Talevi, the dir ector ,
ev ide ntly thou ght he sho uld outd o the coa rse
cli ches of our co ntempo rary Figaro and R ing
producti on s. More grievo usly, the talent ed
yo ung singers, instead of bein g urged to sing
an operett a lightl y, fluentl y, elega ntly, with
clear words, were per mitted to bawl as if in
the Vero na Arena rather than an inti mate
theatre. Dominic Whee ler, con ducting,
allowe d his ensem ble to accom pany them
with heavy, full-blood ed , not thin , tran spar-
ent ton e. The singe rs' pronunciation of sung
Eng lish was unmu sical. Final - n and - m and
the g of the -ing wor ds were not a hum but a
vo iced ex plosion; the -d of and was banged
out as if rock on' ro ll had never com e their
way. But they all had go od vo ices. Even
whi le sing ing far too loudl y they made goo d
sound, and gave pleas ure. Nicho las Sharra tt
was a bri ght- eyed hero.
Th e Depa rtu re is a two- singer piece. Julia
fr om a w indow w atc hes a fun er al , not kn ow-
ing that it is her ow n. Her widowed hu sband
enters the room , becom es awa re of her still
lingeri ng presence, sings with her. "To pro-
vide a synops is wo uld dilute the wor k's
dram atic suspe nse" , said the prog ramme.
Loui se Pool e, in a role radiantly created in
1962 by Ca ther ine Wil son , sang with beauti-
fu l so und car ried throu gh Maconchy 's
wide-ra ng ing lines, but her wor ds we re
poorl y pro no unced, sac rifice d to ton e. Hakon
Vra msmo 's words we re we ll pron oun ced,
his ph rases we ll-sha ped. Thi s yo ung Swe dish
barit on e is someone to watch for.

This thing that I am
ST EPH E N A BE L L
Za d ie Smith , e d i t or
T HE B O O K O F O T H ER P EOPL E
168pp. Hamish Hamilton. £16.99.
978 0 24 1 14363 6
he Book of Other People, acc ording to
T Zadie Smith's introduction , is "about
ch aracter". Thi s is nearl y correc t: it
is no mor e than the title sugges ts, a book of
character s. As Smith her self notes, a few
sentences later , "the book has no particular
thesis or arg ument to con vey abo ut fiction al
character" ; it merely co nstitutes the attem pts
of twent y-three recogni zed writers to pro-
duc e a short story focu sin g on a different
indi vidu al, which has been stre tched to
include an anima l, a pre-evolved man and a
giant made of rock . Happil y, the heneficiary
is a charity, en co urag ing literacy, called 826
New York. Of cour se, eve n if Zadie Smith
has not the tim e, unpaid, to discern any
pattern in the resultant co llection (a nd her
editing ro le is ge nera lly rather restricted: a
three-p age introduction, a fifth of which is
about font s; the arra nge me nt of the stories in
alpha betical ord er ; the conc ern to "retain the
indi vidu alit y of eac h piece by leavin g them,
by and large, littl e chan ged" ), patt ern s do
eme rge noneth eless. And there are some
we ll-turne d tales to enj oy as we ll.
An initi al worka ble definition of "char-
acter" , relevant to the mod ern short story ,
com es from the OED: "a person regard ed in
the abstract as the possessor of specified
qu alitie s" . This is sugges tive of the ficti on al
idea that a per son can be brok en down into
con stitu ent part s: pro se as a pri sm, in which a
spectru m of characteri stics is revealed . The
Book of Other People cont ain s man y
mom ent s of such separa tion. This is from
"Gideon" by ZZ Packer :
I saw him thinking about his parents - Sy and
Rita - grow ing worried in their condo ' s sunny
Sarasota kitchen; I saw him never finishing
his thesis and goi ng to work for some grubby
non -profit where eve ryo ne ate temp eh and
couldn' t wear leather and almost had a Ph.D.:
I saw him hauling the kid around to parks,
saying it was the best thin g he'd eve r don e.
Character can thu s be cata log ued, divid ed
into a series of di stinct featur es that form the
who le. A ce ntral thesis of thi s co llec tion of
short stor ies is that this proc ess is most oft en
achieve d by the act of recollection . The
majority of them con vey information abo ut a
person by recounting what each remembers.
For ex ample, Adam Thirlw ell 's Nigora can
make "lists of her life" by recallin g key
aspec ts of it: "she rememb ered the sledge on
nail s above the front door; the do vecot e of
slippers beside it. She rememb ered doin g
pian o practic e on a Saturday morning, a
metron om e becoming hysteric al beside her" .
Thi s is memory as meton ym y: the part s of
peopl e ' s pa st that act as repr esent ation s of
Zadie Smith collects some characters
what they have becom e in the present. A
ficti onal portrait can eas ily be, as Heidi
Jul avits put s it in thi s book, " an anecdote
inside a reminiscen ce inside a reminiscenc e
inside a remini scence".
The reminiscenc es are primaril y visual,
another key unifyin g factor in The Book of
Other People. The prevailin g imagin ati ve
resourc e for the modern short-story writ er is
not literatur e, but film : A. L. Kenn ed y' s
superb "Frank" is set in a cinema; Dani el
Clowess tiresom e "J ustin M . Damiano" , a
graphic story (what he has called elsewhere a
" narratoglyphic picto- assemblage" ), is about
a film critic ; Thirlwe ll 's Nigora can also
list her life in term s of "all the films which
she had see n with her fath er" ; and so o n.
Mom ent s in characters' lives are, therefore ,
describ ed as if they were framed seg ments
from a mo vie: "chemical flare-ups in the
hr a in ch emi str y , arr estin g mo vin g im ages
(hi s analogy ca me from photographic film)" ,
as Za die Smith puts it in her own story. Th e
book can be see n as a sort of literary
YouTube, a series of short, reveal ing clip s of
its character s.
It cert ainl y seeks to emphasize - in typic al
post mod ern fashion - the imp act of images
on ind ividu als. When Tenn yson talk ed about
the proc ess of matur ation , he referr ed to the
ex perience of learnin g: "I am not what I see
and oth er than the thin gs I touch" . Yet we are
told here that what we see also reflect s who
we are : Nigo ra, chara cteri zed by her films; Chris Ware's graphic biography "J or dan
Zadie Smith' s Han well , who wants his
env iro nme nt to "become not ju st the thin g follows its subject from conception to first
I see but the thin g I am" , is echoed by
hi s fath er, "for who m th e worl d was, and
could con sist onl y of, tho se peopl e he saw or
spoke to eve ry day". "Character" , according
to the OED, is also "a form al testimony" :
what ch aract ers see , and how they react ,
form s a tell ing testim on y of who they are.
This proce ss of perception bec oming
self-char acterization is neatl y set out by
A. L. Kenn ed y, who describ es the reaction of
grieving rel ati ves in the foll owin g way: "they
rage for their lovers, their loves, for their
dead love, their dead selves " . The focu s
mov es from the per son loved, to the act of
love, to the self doin g the loving. The out-
wa rd vision becomes, then , a gra phic illu stra-
tion of the inward person . The proc ess is also
an illu strati on of F. Scott Fitzgerald's maxim
- in hi s not e s for Th e Last Tycoon , hi s no vel
about mo viemaking - that "action is charac-
ter" . Thirlwell says something similar wh en
Nigora notes that "events are a sure guide to
chara cter . .. our characters - she would ha ve
arg ued, sadly - are nothing but eve nts" .
"Nigora" is actually an ex tract from a
novel , a form that has room to have more
thin gs happ en in it. Michael Cha bon ha s
describ ed the American short story as "plot-
less, sparkling with epiphanic dew" , and
there is a diffi culty that short work s (as is true
for the more footling efforts here) can be
reduced to merely impressioni stic accounts
TLS N O VE M BER 23 200 7
"April 12th , 1966"; a panel from
Welling ton Lint to the Age 13" , which
love. From the book rev iewed here.
without the narrative to reinforce them.
Th e point is highli ght ed in the two mo st
fant astical stories in the coll ection : Tob y
Litt' s "Monster", and "Theo" by Dave
Eggers . Litt' s contribution is a description of
a memb er of an unn amed species, presum-
abl y earl y man , who have onl y "few words
and concepts available to them: mon ster,
creat ion, sun, tree, fruit, merd , good , bad , up
and do wn". Egge rs tell s the story of three
mountainous lump s in the scenery who
awaken as giant s, one of whom is femal e
(complete with "35-foot brea sts, ten-foot-t all
lip s, legs eighty feet high " ) and is lusted
after by the oth er two . Litt offe rs his epi-
phanic testim on y to the life of his mon ster,
but no mor e, concluding : "the mon ster had
no story , unl ess bein g a mon ster is story
enough" . Merely bein g a mon ster, bein g
an y character, is not story enoug h; the read er
recoil s from the arrog ance of a conceit
that does not both er to be mor e than a conc eit.
Eggerss giants (Soren , Magdel ena and
The o) form an intri guin g love trian gle,
brok en when the fir st two get togeth er,
leavin g Th eo ber eft , sitting " silently near the
chalky cliffs of To to-Mootn, eating bears,
lost in thought". Yet anoth er definition of
"character" is "essential peculiarity" : both
the stor ies are peculi ar, but the peculi arit y is
19
on ly esse ntial when it is used to tell a story .
Narr ati ve in short stories , of course, is
physic ally restricted by space, and thi s has
an imp act on ho w much can be revealed . The
Book of Other People is nece ssaril y a
coll ection - giants not with standing - of
sma ll-scale character ization : the narrat or of
"G ideo n" has "a litt le life" ; Han well Senior
"existed in a small way " ; Nigor a "was a
minor character". Th e best short stories use
thi s small scale as a tight focu s, which ho w-
eve r rem ain s sugges tive of the wider world
out side the narr ati ve . A short tale, in Henr y
James' s view, should come from the chann el -
ling of the "space-hunger" of its charact ers: it
sho uld at onc e dem and more words , and be
energized by their restriction .
The best exa mple of thi s is A. L.
Kennedy' s " Frank" . It turn s on an un-
descr ibed traged y, "which had been an
acc id ent, an over si ght, a ca re less ness th at
lasted the space of a breath " , which beauti -
fully informs Frank's actions throu ghout. We
crave furth er information , but are deni ed it;
the unstated part is able , as Hemingway
put it, to "strengthen the story and make
peop le feel something more than the y
under stand ". In the lesser offerin gs her e, we
also notice that overstatem ent can occ asion-
ally be the product of the shor tness of short
stor ies . "Character" can yet aga in be defin ed
as "a distinctive mark ; a brand, stamp" ; and
probl em s occur when a writer seeks to brand
someo ne too distinctivel y in too sma ll a
space . One resu lt of thi s is cl iched dialo gue :
indi viduals spee ch-ma rked by their creator s,
given words that are sta mped excess ive ly
with their cha ract er. So, Da vid Mitchell ' s
middl e-ag ed par venu , Judith Castle, says
thin gs like: "he couldn 't hid e how utterl y
enchante he was with littl e old moi on a
carn al level". Or there is Jon athan Safran
Foer's stereotypica l Jewi sh grandma, who
parr ots: "Have a cookie. It' s good for yo u.
You kno w what your prob lem is?".
There is also the apparent pressur e on
writers to stamp their own "style of
writing peculiar to any indi vidu al" (OED
again, "character" ), which can lead to a
different type of writ erly over statem ent: the
inappropriate poetic ism . Ex amples include
the un wieldy coll ecti ve noun: Mitchell
descr ibes ant s " like a spilt cani ster of
commas" ; A leksand er Hemon sees "a flock
of blood drop s" . Or the descripti on over-
furni shed with met aphor: "the uph olstery
warted with burn mark s" (Jul avit s); or "the
armchair, with its pornogr aphic rent s and
tears" (Thirlwell).
In the end, The Book of Other People still
manag es to offer a ge nera lly enco uraging
report on the current state of short-story
writing. It shows us that the best accounts of
indi viduals are visual and filmic , ba sed on
memory and action, space -hungry but calmly
under stat ed , and tell a story . So perh aps
Zadie Smith was correct , and thi s book is
indeed "about character" after all .
20
Lost boys
asculinity is in troubl e, if not
M in the wor ld at large, then cer tainly
in the doubl e-sided Issue 24 of
McSweeney 's. The narr ator of Jon athan
Am es ' s story, "Bored to Dea th" , a writer
and "periodic alcoho lic", is dryin g out
again, pla yin g hour s of intern et backgammon
and "going throu gh the third Raym ond
C ha ndler phase of my adulthoo d" . He has
some charac ter istics of a latter-day Philip
Marl owe - " my drinking probl em and my
fin anc es and my dead love life" - but he is
essentially soft-boi led. Knowin g that "it' s
path etic", he nevertheless adve rtises on
Cra igs list as a pri vate investigator, and is
soon seeki ng Lisa, a missing person with
"high chee kbo nes, a sens ua l mo uth" and a
shady olde r boyfri end. Sta king out an un-
savoury hot el , "eyeballing" its deni zens with
feigned wea riness, the wo uld-be shamus is
interrupted by a telephone call from his
parents in Flor ida : "My moth er had taken a
t' ai chi class for seniors at the Y and my
father ' s ring fin ger had bent in and he
couldn 't stra ighten it out".
Am es reve ls in the silliness of his ga me :
sure ly noth ing exci ting could happ en to a guy
like his narr ator ? Wh en thin gs do start to
darken, the reader is unprepared . Th e para-
ph ernalia of the ge nre - pri vate dick s, shad-
The Perfect Christmas Present
The Public Catalogue Foundation
FICTION
LIDIJA HA AS
MCS W EENEY 'S , I S S U E 24
207pp. Hamish Hamilton. £ 18.99.
978 0 24 1 14392 6
owy tou gh s - enge nder a sense of unrealit y,
height ened by the protago nist's inadequ a-
cies. Yet if we doubt that a lazy fort y-
something writer wo uld chase an adolescent
part y girl throu gh Manhatt an' s see dy night-
spo ts, we need onl y remind ourse lves that
his alterna tive was intern et back gamm on .
Most of the stor ies here featur e men who
wo uld like to be tou gh , impress wo men and
have ad ventu res, but who ju st aren' t up to
it. There is an unnerving innocenc e in their
conception of violence. Peter , in "Look at
Me" by Aaron Gwy n, di scu sses gu ns online
with other losers, wears und er wear bou ght
by his grandmother , slee ps with the light on,
and cl aims he was once in the Special Forc es,
when in fact he has never left the state. Over-
grow n boys go lookin g for dan ger, ex pec ting
to find a simulacru m of it. Our amuse men t
gives way to anx iety, for it is the men
them sel ves who are wishful, self-crea ted
ficti on s; the trouble they are in rema ins
blo od y, and all too real.
Thi s is still mor e affec ting where story
TLS N O V E M B E R 23 2 0 07
encounters historic al fact , as in Joe M enos
"Stockholm, 197 3" , a ficti onali zed acco unt
of the eve nts that led to the defin ing of
the term " Stockholm syndro me" . Di sturb ed
Jan Ol sson bot ches a bank hold-up, shoots
a cop and takes four peopl e hostage (for
M enos purposes, all four are attrac tive
girls) . Di stressed and unsure of himself,
Ol sson insists, as his first demand, on seei ng
his friend Clar k: "He is my best friend . He
will kn ow what to do". When Clark arrives ,
they hold the girls in the vault and try
plainti vely to arrange an escape. The girls,
who are far more afra id of the polic e, wa nt
to leave with their captors - hence the
"syndro me" . Throug hout McSweeney 's,
Issue 24, girls do what littl e is ex pec ted of
them perfectl y - gorge ous and helpl ess,
they fit the ge nre, while the men fail to live
up to it.
Dave Egge rs and the edi tors of this
coll ection light-h eartedl y berate them sel ves
for the issue ' s mac hismo - an all-ma le
line-up of authors on one side, a tribute to
"another dead whi te man" on the other. Th e
poigna nt stories of lost boys find ec hoes in
-------------~,-------------
A soup of tears
J E N NI F ER W A L L ACE
Su T o ng
BI N U AN D T HE GREA T WA L L
Translated by Howard Goldblatt
29 1pp. Canongate. £ 12.99.
978 184 195904 7
ro m the tim e when China's first
P
em peror Q in Shi orde red the bu ildin g
of a barricade some 3,000 miles lon g
on the bord er of his new ly unifi ed kingdo m,
his subjec ts assoc iated the "long wa ll" wi th
des potic power. Partl y pragmatic defenc e
and partl y bold statement, the wa ll was
a pro duct of Qin Shi' s self-aggrandizing
paranoia , as crazy and excessive as his tomb
with its vast terr acott a army. Many walls
and mill enni a later , at the beginning of the
twenti eth centu ry, the "Great Wall" became
a sym bol of Chinese nation al identity.
Cur io us ly, on e myth of the wa ll, which
has been passed dow n the centuries and
which Su To ng has chosen to retell in Binu
and the Grea t Wall, cha lle nges its mass
proj ect. Me ng Jian gnu , the wife of o ne of
the peasant s press-gan ged into se rvice
construc ting the wa ll for the emperor,
travel s a hu ge dist ance to bring w inte r
cl oth e s to he r hu sband. Wh en she reaches
the wa ll, she di scover s th at he has died and
that hi s hod y is huri ed und er the wa ll (in
so me versio ns, the con structi on wo rkers
we re kill ed and buri ed ). Men g' s tears ca use
the wa ll to co lla pse , revealing her husb and ' s
skeleton. The story is a reminder of the
hum an cos t of an inhuman proj ect. It is
abo ut individ ua l love and sacri fice whic h
co unters the gra nd sca le of Qin ' s vision.
Unlike some authors in the Ca nonga te
M yth s ser ies, Su Ton g does not updat e the
myth or give it a con tem porary contex t, other
than to renam e the heroine Binu . Th e land-
sca pe is feudal, with fortified palaces and
peasant hovels, and the traditi on al be liefs in
the sad, swee t rerrum scenc es ga thered
under the headi ng "Come Back , Don ald
Barth elm e" . Thoug h there is mu ch frothing
ove r his sentences, there is also a yea rning
for Barthelme the man . He is what we wan t
our writers to be: dead, of co urse, but also
hard-drinking, chain- smokin g, pron e to
"attentive bossiness" with wo me n, kind but
exac ting, New York sharp an d Texan tou gh .
Barthelme is praised for never playin g "a
ga me of literary personalities" , but
McSweeney 's plays exac tly that ga me : this
feti shizing is a kind of ento mbmen t. False
notes are sounded: some aco lytes impl y the
saddes t aspec t of Barthelrnes early death
was that he never go t to read their own
brilli ant manu scripts. Robert Coover's one-
line offer ing - "Donald was laconi c" - put s
theirs to sha me . Two previou sly uncollect ed
Barthelme stories close the issue: "The Bed" ,
a bracing ma rital post-m ort em , an d the
playfull y Beck etti an "Pages from the Annual
Report". It is a reli ef to leave the fawnin g
behind and pay a proper tribute to Don ald
Barth el me; he should not be idoli zed, but
read.
reincarnatio n, ghos ts and sorce rers are
unshaken. Binu ' s 300-mile j ourn ey to the
wall form s the major part of the novel, a
picaresqu e of unr elentin g crue lty and hard-
ship, where her only comp ani on is a magical
fro g, who m she believes is a rein carn ated
mo ther sea rching for her son.
But the novel implicitly as ks the topical
qu esti on : wha t is the value of ind ividu al
gr ief or di ssent in China? Binu co mes from
a village where cr yin g is forbidden and
the women learn to shed tears from their
ea rs, fingertip s, hair and brea sts. And at
the wa ll itself, cr yin g is bann ed bec au se it
"disturbs the wor kers and del ays the wo rk".
In any case, tears are surplus to require -
me nts. " Rain moi sten s the land. The ri ver
provides for peopl e . ... Onl y huma n tears
are useless; they are the mo st worthless
thin gs in the world" , Binu is told. In a strik-
ing episo de, she is dragged into a tear-brew
fact or y because her tear s have a spec ia l
flavour and the local leader is parti al to
medi cin al tear soup. Her grief has commer-
cia l va lue as she is instru cted to thi nk of
"something sad" and wee p int o a vat.
Binu , however, eva des all these atte mpts at
ex ploitation and censors hip, and, driven by
her unqu estionin g love for her husband ,
reaches the wa ll where she lets rip with
apocalypti c ho wling. Su Tong co mme nts in
the novel' s preface that myth s offe r a wor ld
of "w arm co ntours". In myth , "life and de ath
are given natur al, if emblema tic, reasonin gs" ,
he ob ser ves, and conside rs M eng Jian gnu ' s
tale "optimistic" rather than sorrow fu l. So the
novel ends melod ram atic all y and abru ptly,
with the wa ll crum bling and the wor k
stopped. Victory for Binu and arg uably for
all indi vidu al wee pe rs.
Th e Chinese imaginati on dem an ds such an
upbeat coll ecti ve resoluti on to indi vidu al
tragic ex per ience; Wes tern rea ders might
prefer a co nclus ion of less "warm co ntours",
more cynic al and bitt er, perha ps, mor e ironi c
and disturbing.

The success hounds
he Glittering Prizes (1976), Frederic
T Raphael' s inventive ch ronicl e of the
lives, loves and ambitions of a gro up
of Ca mbridge und ergradu ates, foll owed
Ada m, two Barb aras, M ike, Alan, Denis,
Joy ce, Dan, Gav in, Bill and An na fro m 1952
to the mid- 1970s . They reappeared mem-
orably in a television series and in a fou r-part
radio serial. Now here comes Fame and
Fortune, launch ed in conjunction with a
reissue of the fir st book, and given a six-part
Radio 4 dramatiza tion (which ends on
Decemb er 1); it track s the gang throu gh the
Th atcher yea rs, "a low mean deca de in which
money is the onl y thin g that talks" .
Raphae l resum es where he left off and
keep s up the form. Fully inhabitin g the
character s he knows so well, he root s their
actions and reactions in their seve ral brand s
of ego tism. Plotlines multi ply, twist and turn ,
and the dial ogue is sharp and studded with
one-liners and lapid ary provocations: "God is
better at iron y than he is at ju stice" , "sex and
sex -talk now furni sh the opiate that religion
once suppose dly did" . If the ideas spill over
into areas of wider politi cal and cultura l
sig nifica nce, the focu s rem ain s firml y fixed
on the rarefied literary-cum-showbi z world
in which the character s make themselves so
miserable. Raphael allows little light from
outside to percolate into their gilded but
suffocating cage. The Min ers' Strike , the
Falklands war, the poll tax and AIDS are not
-----------------~,-----------------
Miso for breakfast
he narrator is unnamed, his nemesis
T goes by a pseud on ym . As these are the
cen tral figur es in The Third Party ,
G len n P att er so ns mesmer ic account o f a
Belfast businessm an' s sales trip to Japan , the
anony mity is fitti ng, for the nove l is infu sed
with the hidd en and decepti ve. The setting is
modern Hiroshim a: at once j ust another half-
exo tic world cit y, and anythin g but. In town
to establish a commerc ial foothold for the
"U vbag" (a food wrap designed to render
clin g film redundant ), the narrator find s that
the final mornin g of his stay is inform ed
both by the surrea l - an eag le swoop ing
throu gh the empty streets at dawn - and the
see mingly munda ne: a hotel breakfast,
muesli , cro issa nts and blear y glances
exc hanged among the guests . Sea ted ove r
stea med fish and miso, he spots the cele-
brated Northern Irish novelist, Ike - his
nickname , an ahhrev iatio n o f Icon , sardo n-
icall y awa rded to him by the narrator. lke is
in Hiroshim a to read at a conference devoted
to the literatu re of confli ct. Indeed, the two
men ,appare ntly united only by the airport
tags on their luggage, have already experi-
enced a degree of friction ; their sparring
sma ll talk has an und ercu rrent of malice, a
tension developed between the pair durin g a
brief earlier acquaintance . Irretrievably so ur,
Ike is the kind of writer who point edl y fails to
rememb er the name of the bright-eyed
acolyte who acts as his chauffeur du ring his
stay in Hiro shima; and yet both the narrator
FICTION
D A VID C O WA R D
F re der ic R aph a el
F A M E AND F O RTUN E
295pp. JR Books, The Old Brewery , 6 Blundell
Street, London N7 9BH. £ 16.99.
978 I 9062 1734 I
allowe d 10 displac e the perm anent question
of who is doin g what to whom and for how
much. For Adam, Mik e, Joyce and Co, the
real challenge of the decad e is getting and
stay ing ahea d of the competition. They tell
them sel ves and eac h other that they wa nt
love and tendern ess, but few are capable of
either. They equate fulfilm ent with success,
for they are addic ted to deals, rave rev iews ,
status and money . Chas ing the bubble reput a-
tion takes its toll. Some burn out, so me dis-
appea r down the neck s of bottl es, others
see their dream s come true then turn to dust,
leaving them with nowhere to go . Raph ael
passes a bleak jud gement on the brightest
stars of the post- war generation.
He is more interested in so me of his
characters than in others. Mik e - now Sir
Mik e - Clode turn s into the full-b lown
caricature he threatened to becom e, and Alan
Parks, the burly Australian television person-
ality, becomes an even crasser talkin g-
machin e than he was. Gav in, once a scourge
of es tablishment values, lurches Right wards,
D A N NY L EIGH
Gl enn P att er s o n
T HE T H IR D PARTY
l68pp. Belfast: Blackstaff. Paperback, £7.99.
978 0856408090
and The Third Party are repeatedl y drawn
back to his comp any. Togeth er, the two men
share a mornin g ' s sightsee ing at Mo unt
Ogon- Zan ; views are appra ised , snaps hots
comp osed . Later, his U-bag business done,
the narr ator ventures forth alone, determin ed
to ma ke the most of hi s fin al hou rs in his host
city; having already visited the A-B omb
Mu seum three times, he opts instead for the
lure of the departm ent stores. Onl y at the last
momen t does he deci de to attend Ike' s read-
ing at the city university - and even then the
eve nt is dela yed by a homh sca re, the venue
dotted with obliquely sinis ter graffiti.
So efficient is the novel' s use of the cas ual
and episodic that it would be easy to miss the
gathering mom entu m. And yet for all the
drea mlike tangent s, ten sion always tick s
away at the back of this deftl y written and
haunti ng novel, steadily acce lerating amid
the swirling notes of deadpan and menace.
Striking ju xtaposition s abound : a harrowin g
black- and- whit e television docu mentary
about an elderly Japanese cou ple ' s last years
togeth er ; the narrator' s wilful strides towards
an affa ir; the ca talog ued horr ors of the
TLS N OVEMBER 23 2 007
enters the Lords and settles happil y in Thatch-
erdo m. Even Dan Bradley, the most disint er-
es ted of them all, reaches an acco mmodation
with the heady but brittl e life of an actor. But
for one of the gro up, whose life and career
traj ector y offer certa in parallels with his
creator 's, Raphae l has much more time.
Adam Morris, novelist and scree nwriter,
holds the centre of Fame and Fortune, a title
which captur es his ambitions as well as those
of his friends. He is as vulnerable to the miser-
ies and anxieties of the ove rach ieve r as any
of them : a writer 's life, he obse rves wryly, "is
an endless series of ex ams" . But he stays
intact by keepin g one cha mber of his cas tle
lock ed and safe from publ ic view . He is sa ne
enough to acce pt (though throu gh gritted
teeth ) that writers, unli ke the performer or the
impr esario, are doom ed to win only bron ze
medals and get the sma llest chequ es. But he
does well enough. He is a decent famil y man
and a non-practising Jew who feels compul-
sive ly guilty for bein g alive when so many of
his generation died in the Holocaust. He
thu s has a conscience and takes (his broth er
chides) a moral view of a world which does
not wor k that way . And so he endures, soft
and abrasive, wisec racking but also wise
after his fashion, "a happ y man, almost" .
Ca mus said as much of Sisyphus whose lot
was, however, less comfort able than Adam ' s.
Raphael, going for ju gul ar and jocul ar with
equal reli sh, tells the story with zest, swa tting
the idol s, and their wors hippers, of a genera -
tion which failed to live up to its promi se.
Sequ els ofte n do likewise, but not clever,
seductive Fame and Fortune which keeps the
standard flyin g high.
A- Bomb Mu seum ; the inanit y of a male
voice choir appea ring at Ikes "Writing Out
of Co nflict" conference to sing " If I Had a
Hammer". Given Patterson ' s talent for comi c
det ail, The Third Party co uld (w ith, perhap s,
a reloca tion to Toky o or Osaka ) have evo lved
into a travelo gue of Western baffl ement.
With its textu al ec hoes and counterpoints, it
is considera bly more than that. And central
to its success is the odd coupling of Ike and
the narrator, busy with their displ ays of
mutual incomprehen sion . Much of the detail
surro unding lke' s ca reer is simply very droll
- notin g that a graffito at the conference
promi ses You Will Be Sorry For Wh at You
Wrote, he remark s that, at a gathering of
writers, the threat is pretty much a given. But
Patterson find s a dark resonance between
the pair. Routin ely trekkin g to conferences,
readin g the same single passage from the
sa me yea rs-old novel before, more often than
not, the same people, Ike is creative ly spen t.
Despit e the fracti ous snap of their exc hanges ,
he and the narrator are more co lleag ues than
fo rei gn ers to o ne ano the r; both are sa les me n;
and if not quit e con-artists, then not always
so far from that. Yet The Third Party is its
narrator ' s story, and so eve n Ike must exi t,
bested by the finit e nature of the short-stay
business tri p. Although the narrator is prep ar-
ing to pack his bags, the book sugges ts that
arriva ls and departures are seldo m clearly
defin ed, and that our personal histori es can
lay propri etori al hands on us in the mo st
unlik ely places. The novel' s ending is all the
more powerful for having been kept tucked
out of sight; only afterwa rds does it seem
inevitable, as the past often ca n.
21
The sights
of
Dublin
A N T H ON Y CU M M IN S
Be n j a m i n Bl a ck
T HE S I LV ER SW AN
345pp. Picador. £ 16.99.
978033045403 2
his is the seco nd novel that John
T Banville has published under his
crime-wr iting pen name, Benj ami n
Black. As in his fir st outing in Christine
Falls (2006), Black' s hard- drinki ng patho-
logist Qu irke find s him self invo lved in a
murder investigation. He is six month s sober
when a forgotten acquainta nce from medi cal
schoo l turn s up with a stra nge request. The
bod y of Deirdr e Hunt , the ow ner of the
Sil ver Sw an beauty parlou r in Dublin, has
been brou ght ashore after an apparent
suicide , and Billy Hunt wa nts Quirkes assur-
ance that his wife won' t be "sliced up ... like
some sort of carcass". As a widowe r
him self , Quirke sympa thizes. But his deci-
sion not to ch allenge the verdict of acc idental
dro wnin g has little to do with fellow feeling,
more with the pathol ogist' s sense that this
is a case ripe for his personal unoffici al
investigation. Deirdre ' s left arm bear s a
needl e mark: either Bill y is hidin g some -
thin g, or he doesn't kno w the full story .
Q uirkes search for the truth about the
wo man's death drags him into an agreea bly
sordid neth erworld, inhabited by three main
suspec ts: Deirdres schem ing business
partn er, Les lie White, a ladies' man with
a mor phin e habit; White ' s sultry wife, Kate,
who knew that D eirdre ' s rel ation s w ith her
husband we re more than profess ional; and
Dr Kreut z, an enigmatic spiritual healer with
a shady sideline in amateur photograph y. The
resoluti on involves Q uirkes daughter, a fall
from a fo urth-fl oor window , and a spiked
railin g. Long before that grisly point is
reached , one succ umbs to the seedy allure of
a post- war Dubli n cloud ed in ciga rette smoke
and reekin g of stout. The rhythm s and idiom s
of Black' s pro se do as much as his vivid
descripti on of sights and sme lls to evo ke a
strong sense of place.
See king to satisfy his profession al "itch to
cut into the quick of thin gs, to delve into the
dark of what was hidd en - to know", Qui rke
fingers the wro ng party. No doubt the
arm chair sle uth w ho pr esum es to kno w hetter
will noti ce the teasingly incr imin atin g det ail,
repeat ed one too many times not to aro use
suspicion; but you need a passing famili arit y
with Gae lic ga mes - some thing that Black
refu ses a princip al English charac ter - in
order to interpret the clu es when you spot
them. Alongs ide the detecti ve business, the
pathol ogist' s tortuous per sonal life continues
to unfold compellin gly, with past threads
taken up and nicely left loose for another day.
By the end of The Silver Swan, Qui rke is
back on the booze and we are lookin g ahea d
to the next round.
22
Street-talk
J
ohn Gay moved from Devon to London
as a young man, and spent the rest of his
life in the cap ita l. At first, he was poor
enoug h to have travelled the city by foot. He
wor ked as a dra per's apprentice, spen t a brief
period in dom estic service as stewa rd and
sec retary to the Duc hess of Monm outh, and
strugg led to make ends meet as a writer. It
was the success of Trivia, or the A rt of Walk-
ing the Streets of London ( 17 16) which lifted
him o ut of penury for the fir st tim e (tho ugh
he was to find him self pennil ess aga in seve n
ye ars later, havin g invested his earnings in
the South Sea Co mpany). John Arbuthnot
wro te to Al exand er Pope that Gay had "got
so much mon ey by his art of wa lking the
stree ts, that he is ready to set up his equi-
page" ; Gay enj oyed repeatin g the j oke to
friend s, thou gh thi s may have been an
atte mp t to co ncea l his embarrass me nt ove r
the grubby bu siness of writing for mon ey.
Trivia apparently synthes izes so me of
Gay's early Lond on ex per iences . It is a did ac-
tic poem in three books, offe ring adv ice
o n ho w to negoti ate the increasingly crow ded
stree ts of the city . Gay tell s his reader s what
shoes, capes and hats to wea r, and how to pro-
tect them sel ves against the eleme nts. He also
warns of the threat s po sed by pickp ockets,
pro stitutes and wet paint. Th e poem is
addresse d to the go ddess Tri via, a cult for m
of the Rom an Dian a, who m Gay fancifully
makes the patro ness of pedestri ans.
The work is punctu ated with anecdotes
and cautionary tales of Lond on life, including
the sorry tale of a naive yo ung Devoni an
seduced, robb ed and inf ected by a pro stitute.
Thi s can hardl y be an acc ura te se lf-portrait,
but it co rresponds to the po pular image of
Gay as a guileless , affable co untry ma n, ill at
ease in the corrupting metropoli s. Pop e enthu-
sias tica lly pushed thi s ve rsion after his
fri end' s dea th in 1732 , opening his epitaph,
in Poet's Co rne r, "Of mann er s ge ntle, of
affections mild ; / In wit, a man ; simp lic ity a
chil d .. .". Gay' s sel f-penned epitaph reads
simply, " Life is a jes t and all thin gs show it / I
thou ght so once, and now I kno w it".
As David No kes makes clear in his exce l-
lent 1994 biogr aph y, Pop e ' s view of Gay was
far from accur ate. Despit e Pope's insistenc e
o n referring to him as "yo ung Gay ", Gay was
the elder of the two poet s by three years .
Th e view of Gay as a ch ildlike figur e was
reinforced by his tend ency to stick to pas tora l
form s of verse . The re is, however, plen ty
of violence lurkin g in the wor ld of The
Shep herd 's Calendar (171 3) or Rural Sports
(1714 ). Wh at Gay ' s se lf-prese ntation as a
pastor al po et more accur atel y refl ect s , as
does his epitap h, is a relu ctan ce to have his
wor k taken seriously. Pastoral, after all, occu-
pied the bottom rung on the ge neric ladd er,
and was rega rded by the Augu stans as a kind
of literar y sa ndpit where budding bards
prep ared for grea ter thin gs. "The Worl d, I
beli eve" , says Gay on the title page of Trivia,
"will take so littl e Notice of me, that I need
not take much of it."
Trivia is ge nerica lly indetermin ate, like
most of Gay' s work (a yea r earlier he had
written a one-act play entitled The What D 'Ye
Call It). As Susann a Morton Braund point s
LITERATURE & SOCIAL STUDIES
H E NRY POW ER
C lare B ra n t a n d
Su s an E . Wh y ma n, e d i t ors
WA LK ING THE ST REETS O F
EIGHTEENTH-CENTU RY LO NDO N
John Gay's Trivia ( 1716)
256pp. Oxford University Press. £50 (US $100).
978 0 19 9280490
out in an essay on its cla ssical sources , the
poem aligns itself simultaneo usly with satiric,
pastoral and epic poetry. Its maj or model ,
though , is Virgil's did actic poem on agr icul-
ture, the Georg ics. Gay seems to have com-
posed with Dryden' s 1697 translation in front
of him ; there are countl ess localized verbal
echoes, as we ll as adap tations of we ll-know n
Virgilian set-pieces . Most memora bly, the
story of Orph eus' beheadin g at the hand s of
the Th racian women is tran sferred to an apple-
seller named Doll , who meets her end wande r-
ing among the temporary stalls erected on the
frozen surface of the Thames :
Ah Doll! all Mortals must resign their Breath,
And Industry it self submit to Death!
The cracking Crystal yields, she sinks, she
dyes,
Her Head, chopt off, from her lost Shoulders
flies:
Pippins she cry'd, but Death her Voice
confounds,
And Pip-Pip-Pip along the Ice resounds.
The natu re of thi s source is wor th conside r-
ing. In Se neca 's fam ou s phr ase, the Georg ics
we re written "not to teach farmers, but to
deli ght rea de rs"; and Trivia too is empha ti-
cally a work of imagin ati ve literatur e. Gay
stresses the po int by appending a spectacu-
larl y useless mock-index, with en tries such as
"Saturday , by what Ob ser vation s to know it" ;
"Street, ho w to cross it"; and "Cheese not
lov'd by the Author".
By distancin g his book fro m the var ious
ge nuine vade mecums floodi ng the ma rket
(1716 also saw the publi cati on of practi cal
guides to the Art s of Paintin g, Gardenin g,
Survey ing, Mid wif ery and Fire-lighting,
amongs t oth er topi cs), Gay point s to the pre-
dom inantly literary textur e of his ow n work.
Thi s should make us cautious about relyin g
on the inform ati on give n in Trivia.
Gay's earnes t style has enco urage d some
readers to treat the poem as a piece of report-
age. Clare Brant and Susa n E. Whyrnan ' s
Walking the Streets of Eighteenth-Century
London consists of nine short essays on Trivia,
along with an annotated text of the poem.
Though all the cootrihutors pay lip service to
the fact that the poem' s adv ice may not be
straightforwardly practical, mos t of them end
up treatin g it as a historical docum ent. The
title of the book is tellin g. This is not, for
the most part , a book abo ut John Gay's Trivia.
It is a book about wa lking the streets of
eighteenth-century London which takes
Trivia, for all its elusive ness, as its centr al text.
Most of these essays are pieces of cultura l
history, with Ga y's text ransack ed hap-
haza rdly for co rro borating detail. Ail een
Rib eiros piece on cos tume is typi cal in thi s
res pec t. She tell s us, for example, that "shoes
TLS NOVEMBER 23 2007
were usually black, and Trivia notes the
importance of shoe -cleaning to preser ve this
colour" . But the poem also tell s us that the
first boot-bl ack was the illegitim ate son of
the sewer-go ddess Cloacina : sounder sources
are ava ilable for scholars whose prim ary
interest is in the shoe -clea ning indu stry.
Mor e troublingly (because it invo lves a wil-
ful misreadin g of the text in hand ), Ribe iro
sugges ts that Gay "happily admitted to a
deli ght in" the cl othes desc ribed in the
prolo gu e to The Shep herd 's Week:
I sold my sheep and lambkins too,
For silve r loops and garme nts blue.
There is nothing "ha ppy" about these
lines, which must refer (if we need to rel ate
them to their auth or ' s ex perience) to the
humili ation Gay suffere d when required to
we ar the liver y of the Duchess of Monm outh .
The impul se to dismemb er poem s for histori-
ca lor biographical det ail is a dan gerou s one,
and can leave a crit ic with a weaker sense
both of the poe m and of the wor ld that pro-
duc ed it.
There is much to enj oy in thi s volume .
Tim Hit chcock treats Trivia as a histori cal
document of another kind , examining the
way in which imagin ati ve wor ks of thi s sort
distort ed publi c perc epti on s of povert y, and
were ultim ately respon sibl e for erro rs in the
es tablis hment of instituti on s for the poor.
Literar y beggars were predomin antl y male,
and wor kho uses we re built acco rding ly.
Most real beggars, however, we re femal e.
Clare Brant' s own essay touch es tantaliz-
ingly on the poem' s relation ship to wor ks of
literar y criticism. The text of the poem itself
is a sound one, foll owin g almost identic al
ed itorial principl es to those of Beck with and
Dearing. The co mmentary , far full er than
anything currently ava ilable, will be useful.
For the most part, thou gh , Gay is treat ed
like the minor poet he always has been . It is
hard to imagine a book dedi cated to a wor k
by Swift or Pop e in which so little atte ntion
was paid to the qu alit y of the verse. The onl y
poi nt at which Gay is eleva ted to the level
of his fellow Scribl erians is whe n M argaret
Hunt co nv icts him of " misogyny of Sw iftian
propo rtion s". There is some truth in thi s, in
that Sw ift's work is not straigh tforwardly
mi sogyni stic, and nor is Gay' s. Hunt point s
to the emp has is on pro stituti on in Trivia as
ev ide nce of Gay 's revul sion from wo men.
The poem is ce rta inly co ncerne d with pro sti-
tuti on, but Gay him self is thorou ghl y impli-
ca ted . He is, after all, schoo ling his readers in
the "Art of Walkin g the Streets".
Th ere is littl e talk of Gay' s prac tice as a
poet. M ark Jenn er notes his skill in makin g
"fine Pictur es" (the ph rase is Parne ll's) from
the ch aos of the city, but we hear nothing of
ho w he wor ks thi s alchemy. In particular, it is
a sure sign that poeti c form is bein g neglected
w he n the ve rses o f a po em are fl atten ed out
and set as prose ; and in mo st of these ess ays,
Gay' s ve rse is present ed no differentl y from
the various lett ers and diaries quoted to illu-
min ate his text. This is a pity, as there are few
bett er ex po nents of the heroi c couplet than
Gay (in his lifetim e his wor k was oft en attrib-
uted to Pope). He wou ld no doubt be
deli ght ed that scho lars are co ntinuing hi s
joke by rea ding the poem for inform ation
rather than pleasur e. No nethe less , if we don 't
read Trivia as (above all) a poem , then we are
den yin g ourse lves one of the great treat s of
eightee nth-ce ntury literatur e.
Pretty,
political
Landskips
GILLI A N DARL EY
Tim Ri ch ard s on
THE A RCA D IAN F R IENDS
Inventing the Englis h landscape
359pp. Bantam Press. £25.
9780593 05273 0
o one is a sure r guide to the ea rly
N eightee nth-ce ntury land scape gar de n,
its sources , deli ght s and absurdities,
than A lexander Pope . Th e poet-gardener -
and the central figur e in Tim Rich ard son ' s
The A rcad ian Friends - spent hi s teen s in a
village in Berk shire, Binfi eld , a land scape
of ge ntle inci dent etched into the clearin gs in
Windsor deer par k: "our Fores t" , he called it.
His Pastora l.', writte n then , we re inspir ed
by Virgil' s seasonal po em s but drew on his
ow n obse rva tions of the local sce nery. To be
utterl y satisfying, each part sho uld "contain
some part icul ar beaut y in itself, and . . . be
differen t" .
Th at hun ger for var iety was the grea t leap
forward in the Englis h land scape garden,
whic h became, in the ear ly 1700 s, a rich stew
of allusion, embracing phil osoph y, poetr y,
aestheti cs and politi cs, lookin g back to
classical antiquity and for ward to conte m-
porary aspirations. Thi s was the art which,
in the words of a mid-ce ntury critic, was "the
o nly taste we can ca ll our ow n, the only pro of
of orig inal taste in matters of pleasur e". It
guided and dictated the cho ice and dispo si-
tion o f every e lement in the w ho le de sign,
from woo dland, grass and water to built
featur es.
Th e journey away from the form al par-
terr e, the stage d effects of Baroqu e statuary
and wa ter features as perfected in France and
Italy, had begun in the seve ntee nth centu ry.
In north York shire, the third Earl of Ca rlisle
ove rruled his gar de ner at Cas tle Howard
to produce a successio n of surprises and
featur es in Wray Wo od , a "wildernesse"
where Stephen Swit zer was please d to find
"all the Varietys that Na ture and Art can
furni sh" . It was an engross ing project for a
"natural Gard ener" who had j ust fallen from
office. Pope himself wo uld later try his han d
at similar complexity, o n a necessaril y
reduced sca le, in his riverside ga rden at
Twickenham.
Th e other literary godfa ther of the new
land scape, Joseph Addi son , found inspir ation
at Fo ntaineblea u where he comm end ed the
French King' s restraint , faced by an ex uber-
ant sce ne of rocks, rough chas ms and dee p
for est. With so mu ch splendour to hand, art
should be brou ght in only "to Help and regu-
late Na ture witho ut reform ing her too much"
he wro te to Congreve in 1699, pred atin g the
Picturesqu e by severa l decades. Later , Add i-
son commented that "a Man might make a
prett y Land skip of his ow n Possession s" ,

turni ng his es tate to both the profit and the
pleasure of the ow ner. That attitude was noth-
ing new - the standing timber see n from the
windows of the seven tee nth-ce ntury man sion
was , after all, both its orname nt and its finan-
cial sec urity - but it help s support Richard-
son's cont ention that the transfor mation of
the land scape garde n to a polit ical agen da
was becomin g "a Whi g habit of mind" .
Richardso n retells the histor y of ea rly
eightee nth-ce ntury landscape gardening
through the prism of po litics, setting himself
the diffic ult, if rhetoric al, ques tion "how can
a garden be po litical?". He traces a network
of Whi gs, both ascendant and descendant,
their ga rdens reflectin g now their assuranc e,
now their insecurity. Land scap e architec ts
hover in the shadows, awa iting instru ctions;
the patron s determin ed the tenor and theme
of their landscapes. Stowe is, of course , the
best exa mple of all. The first Viscount Co b-
ha m - uncl e fox to a pack of nephews (and
friends), Grenvilles, Tem ples, Lytteltons and
Pitt s, known as "Cobham 's Cubs" - became
a furio us oppo nent of Rob ert Walpole' s
Whi g administration after 1733, when he
was cas t out of gove rnme nt. The heavily
sym bo lic land scape and archit ectu re that
Lord Co bham and Willi am Kent planned is
all too clearl y critical, if not satirica l, and has
little conn ect ion with the patron' s earl ier
scheme at Stowe laid out in sunnier times.
--------------------------~,--------------------------
Smelling of roses
n this large-format, sumptuously illu s-
I
trated biograph y, Allyson Hayward pro-
mises new insight s into the life and career
of the soc ialite gar dener, Norah Li ndsay,
who flitted between the gardens of her
wea lthy, aristocra tic friend s in Britain and
Con tinental Europe between the wars, design-
ing their herb aceou s bord ers and enjoy ing
their hospit alit y after her own financial and
marital sec urity had coll apsed. The tone is set
fro m the opening pages, in which we learn
that Lind say (nee Bour ke) was "the charmin g
and beautiful daughter of an upper-class
famil y who lived her entire life among Eng-
land ' s country-house elite. She lunched with
Win ston Churchill, garde ned for the Prin ce
of Wales, holid ayed with Edith Wharton , and
hobnobbed with Hollywood' s Merle Ob eron ,
David Niven , and Vivien Lei gh" . The ques-
tion is: does Hayward succee d in her aim of
rescuing Nora h Lind say fro m her reput ation
as a soc ial gadfly and of turnin g her into a
garden designer of real merit?
Born in India in 1873, the young Norah
Bourk e grew up in London amon g the aristo-
crats and royals cultivated hy her socially
ambiti ous mother. At the age of twent y-two,
Nora h married Harry Lind say, younger
brother to the beautiful and talented Violet,
Marchi oness of Gra nby. Amon g their
wed ding gifts was the Thames-side manor of
Sutt on Courtenay , where Norah Lind say
developed her garden ing skills, held "unfor-
gettable parties" and brou ght up two children
who appear only intermitt ently in the narra-
tive, as perhaps they did in their mother ' s life.
The marriage found ered after ten yea rs;
although the couple lived apart, they never
actuall y divorced. Still nomin ally the
SOCIAL STUDIES
The enraged, demot ed Co bha m mad e sure
that the upp er area of his Elys ian Fields was
cut by the Styx (no more than a strea m, in
realit y), its vicinity planted darkly so that visi-
tors might , all the more surprised, suddenly
arrive at the sunlit lowlands laid out below.
There, in Richard son ' s happ y phrase, they
found them sel ves in "a port ion of infinity".
The fou r incumb ent s of the Tem ple of
Anci ent Virtu e, still sta nding, are parago ns
of civic probity, all brou ght low by a corrupt
state, but the Templ e of Modern Virtue has
long go ne. It was a ruin with a statue of a
headl ess man in modern dress (whose Garter
sugges ts it was his sworn enemy, Walp ole).
Acro ss the water stands the Templ e of Briti sh
Wo rthi es, hardly any of who m were living -
exce pt, of cour se, Alexa nder Pope himself.
Pope was born in 1688, the year of the
so-called Glorious Revolution, and so, for
Rich ardson' s purposes, neatly ope ns the
period under discu ssion. Richardson spent his
own youth in the next-door village to Binfield
and his mem ories of the Berkshire landscape
are immediat e and tellin g. His streng ths are a
poet' s eye and splendid acuity, on occas ion
undermin ed by awk ward colloquialism and
factual care less ness . To give life to the early
eightee nth-century landscape garden he walks
us from Castle Howard (gustily, in wind, rain
and rainbo ws) via Rousham , Stourh ead and
more (both extant and lost) to the almos t
J EN NI F ER PO T T ER
All y s on H ay w ard
NO RA H LI NDS A Y
The life and art of a ga rden designer
288pp. Frances Lincoln. £35.
978 07 11225244
chatelaine of Sutton Co urtenay (it was
frequentl y let out to pay the bills), Nora h Lind-
say made her social life pay for itself by under-
taking her first gardening commi ssion in
1924, for Sir John and Lady Hom er at Mells
Manor House near Frome. Her client list went
on to includ e assor ted Euro pean princ es and
princ esses, a Vanderbilt , Nancy Astor (who
kept a sharp eye on Lind say' s somew hat lax
accounting), the Trees at Ditchl ey Park, and
the Prince of Wales at Fort Belvedere in Wind-
sor Great Park, where Edw ard VlII signed
his abdica tion papers. Two special friends
were Lawrence "Johnny" John ston of Hidcote
Ma nor and Serre de la Madone, and her one-
time client Sir Phili p Sasso on of Trent Park
and Port I.ympn e. Norah worked hard hut ate
well at her friends' tables, grumbling about
her health and the privation s of war, but still
lunchin g on pate de foie gras in aspic, until
her adva ncing age and frailty required more
genero us whip-rounds among family and
friend s. " It is impossible to think Norah ca n
use buses, and her love of beauty must be satis-
fied, etc." wrote her sorely tried younger sis-
ter to a friend as they wondered what to do
with her. Nora h Lind say died of ca ncer of the
kidney in 1948, leaving an estate of £2,442 to
be divided equally between her two childre n.
Hayward clearly has a good story to tell of
TLS NO VEM BE R 23 2007
vanished ferme ornee, the Leasowes, with
which he closes. Yet, having drawn up his
lines of landscap e engage ment between the
Whigs and the Tor ies, the affected and dis-
affected, those of Court and Co untry ten-
dency, Rich ardson is often left arguing with
him self - the hapless reader caught between
the two of him - or he takes his conclusions
well beyond the reasonable: Studley Royal
and Wres t "a rebuke to Walpole"?
After all, as Richardson tells it, these
mes merizing, self-consc ious landscapes with
their baggage of classical and literary refer-
ence, driven by aesthetic and political impera-
tives, were esse ntially (and enterta iningly)
contradi ctory. Jonathan Tye rs was an entrepre-
neur who transform ed Vauxhall Gar dens
after 1728, turning them into a scintillating car-
nival of delight that offered London ers pleas-
ures rang ing from the cultural to the carnal,
seductive ly twinklin g across the river. But
when Tyers put his mind, and not inconsidera-
ble fortun e, to planning a landscape garden for
his estate, Denbies, on the top of the North
Downs near Dorkin g, he chose themes relat-
ing to piety and mortality. He built a hermit-
age and called it the Temp le of Death , made a
gateway from coffin s, on end, ornamented
with skulls, and com memora ted his admira-
tion for the verse of John Milton by namin g
his eight-acre wood " 11 Penseroso" . Wh y
Tyers, the arch-purveyor of popul ar entertain-
Norah Lindsay ; from the book under
review
a char med life that lost its sparkle and the
ultim ate triumph of the spirit ove r adve rsity.
What she gives us is an intim ate por tra it of
upp er-cl ass life in the first half of the twenti-
eth century, told almos t excl usive ly from the
letters, archives and con versation s of Lind-
say and her circle, and illustrated with a fine
coll ection of then-and-now photograph s (a
23
ment , should have chosen this gloomy,
intro verted topic to thread throu gh his land-
scaped estate - as a memento mori for his
close friend and fellow gardener Lord Petre?
Or as an ironic exercise in the Gothick?
- remains an unanswered question . After
Tyerss death, all the lugubriou s furni shings
disappeared fro m Denbies.
After the antiquarian and druid- enthu siast
Willia m Stuke ley had left London to live in
Gra ntha m, where he could finall y culti vate a
garden of his ow n, he was soo n reportin g to
a friend that he had swea ted out "all the
London fog" and had roses in his chee ks
from digging, plantin g and building. " It
wo uld ravish you to think with what pleasure
I take a book in my hand & wa lk about my
garden, my ow n territor ys, mea regna, as
Virgil ca lls it, surrounded with the whole
co mplication of nature ' s char ms ." Stukeley
was a most contented horticulturalist but
more often, as Richardson revea ls, the grea t
land scap e garde ns cam e into bein g as an out-
pourin g of grief, the palli ative to suffering,
disappointme nt or bereavement where calm
and a measure of happin ess could be regained.
It is, perhap s, particularl y telling that during
Cobham's first phase of works at Stowe,
carried out by Bridge man and Vanbru gh when
their patron ' s star was still high in the polit ical
firmament , he had no truck with emblems of
either vice or virtue in his landscape.
few snapped by Lady Ottolin e Morrell ) that
ju stify the large form at, eve n if they make
this a diffi cult book to rea d.
But there are dangers in adopting such a
narrow focus. Hayward never prob es awkward
questions, such as the identit y of Lindsay's
various "amours" (Hilaire Belloc was a strong
contender), or her troubl ed relations with her
daughter; nor does she offer an antidote to the
gushing opinions and unpleasant snobberies of
Nora h Lindsay' s set. The few contrary views
bring welcome relief: Lindsay' s elder sister
Anne criticizing Nora h's own garden as "thin
and wee dy" and her hou se as " pretty. too , but
untidy and rather dirty" ; and goss ipy James
Lees-Miln e describin g Nora h Lindsay at a
luncheon party as "kittenish, stupid-clever,
and an amusing talker". Lees-Milne also
details Lindsay' s outfit, which includ ed "a flat,
black hat like a pancake on the side of her
head, pulled down over one eye": Hayward
has an excellent eye for fashion.
But in the end, Norah Lind say' s talent s
as a garde n designer rem ain elusive. Did
Country Life give Lind say the unu sual
honour of writing abo ut her ow n gardens as a
tribut e to her ski lls or becau se of her soc ial
sta nding? Was her " style" anything more
than Jekyllesque with added topi ary? How
did Lind say achieve her stated ambition
of lettin g trees and plant s look as if they had
chose n their ow n positions? Despite
Lindsay' s famously vivid letter s, her garde n
writing lack s the verve of Ge rtrude Jekyll or
Russell Page. On the evidence asse mbled
here, the Duk e of Wind sor' s verdict seems
corr ect when he describ ed "Mrs. Nora h
Lindsey" (sic) as
a charming English lady who used to help me
in my first gardening efforts at The Fort. She
specia lized in herbaceou s plantin gs, and if yo u
had money she was the one to spend it. I think
now that her use of rose s alone was wor th the
tuition fee.
24 HI S T O R Y OF SC IENCE

thou ght. But despit e its virtues, thi s histor y

All in doubt of science is rather old-fashioned. The basic

story Ga ukroge r tell s is that of an Ari stote-
lian natural philo soph y that was losin g steam
by the ear ly seve ntee nth centu ry, running
our hundred years ago, mo st peopl e DA NI EL GARB E R into trouble with Christian theol ogy and with

P wo uld have found it hard to gras p that

anyo ne could ser ious ly be an athe ist;
tod ay we find it almos t as incompr ehen sibl e
St ep h en G auk ro g er
the rise of Copernicanism, which in turn
dem and ed a new ph ysics. A s Ga ukroger
sees it, the main alterna tive to thi s degenerat e
that anyone co uld seriously reject science . TH E E ME RG ENCE O F A Ari stot eli ani sm century was the recogni zable
In The Emergence of a Scientific Cl/Ill/re, SC I EN TI F IC CU LTURE anc estor of the mod ern ph ysical sc iences, an
the first of a project ed five- volume ser ies, Science and the shaping of modernity, 1210-1685 amalgam of the new mechanical and cor pus-
Steph en Ga ukroger begin s the lon g journey 5npp. Oxford University Press. £35 (US $65) . cular physics as exe mplified by Beeck man ,
978 0 19 929644 6
toward s an ex planation of ho w we go t to thi s Descart es and Gassendi, the ex perime ntalism
point. His goa l is "a conc eptual and cultural of Bacon and his followers, and the mathe-
hi story of the emerge nce of a scientific cul- kno wled ge abo ut the natural wo rld eve ntu- matical approa ches of Galil eo, Hu ygen s, and ,
ture in the West from the early-mo dern era to ally ca me to pro vid e co gniti ve norm s in a later, New ton. Though he reject s the Enlight-
the present " . At the centre of his conception wide variety of oth er dom ain s. Gaukro ger enment Interpretati on , his narr ati ve is co n-
of this scientific culture is a cert ain set of reject s one dominant approach to acco unting struc ted aro und the Enlightenme nt panth eon
cogniti ve norms, intellectu al values charact er- fo r these pheno mena - what he call s the of the Great Men of Science .
istic of a dom ain of inquiry which can in Enlightenment Interp ret ation. On that view , Th e scien tific world of the late sixteenth
principle be ex tended to other domains. For the success of the scie ntific revoluti on in the and early seventeenth centuries was much
a dom ain to be scientific, be it politic s, West is to be ex plained by the fac t that "its more compl ex than that. Whil e the recog niz-
mora lity, or anything el se, it need s to exe m- practitioners hit upon the only rea lly success- ably modern mecha nical, expe rime ntal and
plify those cog nitive norms. ful way of pur suing science " . Ga ukroge r mathematical approaches to natu re were cer-
Gaukroger accepts that there have been sugges ts, instead, that the ex pla nation tainl y imp ort ant , they were by no means the
other sc ientific cultures in other plac es and com es from "a variety of contingent rea- only approa ches to natur e in the period .
at other times, in China, medieval Islam , medi- sons" . We are dealin g with a cultura l set A lmos t co mpletely missing from Ga ukroge r's
eva l Paris and Oxford. But these, he obse rves, of circumsta nces, largely played out along story are the lively alchemical and medic al
"each exhibit a pattern of slow, irregular, inter- nation al lines. Wh at happ ened was some- worlds of the sixteenth and seve ntee nth ce ntu-
mittent grow th, alternating with substantial thin g that was drive n in large part by cultur- ries, not to mention figures such as Kenelm
period s of stag nation" in which attention turn s ally spec ific con cern s about the standing of From "Anatomical Tables" (c 1580) by Digby and Th om as White, Robert Fludd and
to oth er matters. In these cases, "science is revel ation, and the out com e was a fu sion of John Banister, a manuscript held at Athanasius Kircher, important in their day
ju st one of a number of activities in the cul- revel ation and natural phil osoph y, transform- Glasgow University Library thou gh now largely for gotten . Recent studies
ture, and attenti on devoted to it cha nges in ing the latter into part of a di stincti ve kind of have also emphasized the vigour of the late
the sa me way atte ntion devoted to the other legitim ator y enterprise. logy popping up in the yea rs follo win g, scho lastic traditio n, which interacted with the
featur es may ch ange" . But , he claim s, with Ga ukroge r's atte mpt to acco unt for the throu gh the Renaissanc e and into the six- new phil osophi es in interesting ways . Thi s is
the scie ntific revolution that started in the origin and uniqu eness of current Western teenth century. Furthermore, he argues , at true particul arl y amon g the Jesuit s. Ga lileo 's
sixtee nth century, the West "breaks with the culture is a project of breatht akin g ambition. about that time, the rising popularity of the early wor k was known and apprec iated in the
boom/bu st pattern of all other scientific cul- Tho ug h the enterpr ise ge ts a gra nd send-off Co pernican sys te m also serve d to moti vate Jesuit Co lleg io Roma no; Father Noe l, a
tures, and what emerges is the unint errupted in the openin g pages, the big qu estion s are new, anti-Aristotelia n natural phil osophies; teacher at the Jesuit co llege of La Fleche,
and cumulative grow th that constitutes the hardl y in ev ide nce in the res t of thi s fat tom e. the movin g earth and the stationary sun com- respond ed to Pascal' s vac uum ex per ime nts
ge neral rule for scientific developm ent". Th e bulk co nsis ts of a ge neral acco unt of pletely upend ed the Ari stoteli an distinction and the Jesuit Franci scus Linu s is one of the
Wh at needs to be ex plained, then, is not why the history of sc ience and sc ientific thinking bet ween the heavens and the earth and the important res ponde nts to Boyle' s air-pump
thi s didn' t happ en elsew here, but why it did from the thirt eenth century up unt il the end of Aristoteli an con cept ion of prop er plac es for ex periments; Copernican and Ca rtesia n
happen in the West. Wh y was the scientific the seve ntee nth, a sor t of one- volume histor y the elements, which, in turn , undermined cosmology was discussed (tho ugh not sympa-
revoluti on co nso lida ted in a way in which of medi eval and early modern scie ntific and accepted accounts of the charac teristic thetically) in man y scho lastic cla ssroo ms and
o the r sc ie ntific advances we re not? Wh y di d relat ed philosophi cal thou ght. Ga ukrogers motion s of both the planets and terrestrial bod- some sc ho las tic textbook s.
science com e to be a hegem oni c intell ectual story see ms to go some thing like thi s. With ies. If Co pernican ism was to be accepted, a Ga ukroge r's story is largely limited to the
prac tice in the West? the introdu cti on of Ar istot eli anism into the new science was needed . For Gaukroge r, the purely intell ectu al histor y of the period . He is
The sc ien tific revoluti on in early modern Latin West in the thirt eenth centu ry, particu- ce ntra l tenet s of thi s new science included almo st co mpletely silent abo ut the crucial
Europe created a rem ark able bod y of know- larl y with Th oma s Aquinas, natur al phil oso- mech ani cal phil osoph y and the closely chan ges in the instituti on s of science. The sev-
led ge and a rich research pro gr amm e for ph y became cent ral to the intell ectu al enter- related corpuscular phil osoph y, ex perimental entee nth century saw the rise of the sc ientific
findin g mor e ; thi s pro gramme did not die pri se, the entry point into philo soph y and phil osoph y, the application of mathematics academ y - the Royal Soc iety of Lond on and
o ut, but, in a way , continues to thi s day; and theol ogy. But Gaukro ger sees tension s to natur e, and the continuing development of the Acaderni e ro yal des Scien ces in Paris,
these interconn ected pro grammes for findin g between Aristot eli ani sm and Christian theo- natur al histor y, which became incr easingly amon g man y sma ller local gro ups - as we ll
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _~ link ed to natur al theolo gy. as the establishment of scientific j ourn als.
It is o nly in his fin al chapter that Ga uk- Ga ukroge r also ignores con nected issues,
NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY: JOSEPH CONRAD STUDY DAY
roge r returns to his larger themes. He tries to such as the relation s between science and gov -
Thursday 6 December 2007
show ho w three strea ms discussed earlier in ernme nt, and science and the Churc h. Whil e
'CONRAD, LONDON AND CONTEMPORARY FICTION' the book - the kind of found ation al natur al he gives a co nsidera ble amount of attenti on
phil osoph y found in Ari stoteli ani sm and to the thirt eenth-century oppos ition to Aristo-
AFTERNOON SESSION: 2.00-5.00 (£15) later in Descartes, the expe rime nta l traditi on telianism in Pari s, there are on ly three brief
and the mor e math ematical strand that is menti on s of Galil eo' s cond emn ati on . Nor is
Col m Toibin , Salley Vickers , Keith Carabine, Anthony Fothergill ex pressed in, s ay, mechani cs - c o me to geth er th er e di scu ssion of th e livel y deb at es o ver
to form a unit y. Quite ho w they do so, Ca rtes ianism in the Neth erl ands and in
Tickets bookable online www.np g. o rg .uk/ eve n ts ho wever, rem ain s uncl ear. France . Al so missing are the di scu ssion s of
or from 020 7306 0055 or in person from the Gallery. In man y ways, thi s is an impressive per- science among the Jesuit s. Ga ukroge r dis-
form anc e. Gaukroge r cover s a lot of gro und . cu sses the person a of the natur al phil osoph er,
EVENING SESSION: 7.00-8.00 (£5) Though a number of the cha pters see m to where he talk s, amon g other thin gs, about the
depen d heavily on seco nda ry sources , he impo rtanc e of patronage in the case of Ga li-
Giles Foden, lain Sinclair, Robert Hampson shows a broad knowl ed ge of the literatur e, leo; but we need to know much mor e about
both prim ar y and seconda ry, and synthes izes the variety of roles that peopl e we might wa nt
Tickets a vailable b y phoning 020 7306 0055 or in person from the Gallery. a lot of difficult material into a coh erent to ca ll scie ntists occupied in early mod ern
bod y. There are also so me original touch es. society. Thi s is ju st the first part of a much
The National Gallery in association with the Joseph Conrad Society (UK) For example, Ga ukroge r is very keen to larger project ; and Step he n Ga ukroge r is to
and the English Department. Royal Holloway, University of London. emp has ize the imp ort ance of hydro stati cs in be con gratul ated on his ambition. But we
the development of Ga lileo 's and Descartes' s aren 't there yet - at lea st not in thi s vo lume.

TLS N OVEMBER 23 2 0 07

The rock and the Baroque
t Peter ' s is a building, a church, an
S expe rience like no other. The secon d
se ntence of Keith Mill er ' s ambiti ous
book says of the papal basilica at the material
ce ntre of Catholicism, "It is very old, very
opulent and very very large". Wh at is discon-
certing to so meone brou ght up on the ca the-
drals of Engla nd and Fra nce is that the St
Peter ' s that is very opulent and very , very
large doesn't see m old at all, while all that is
left of the St Peter' s that is very old is sma ll,
far unde rgro und, recentl y discovered and not
in the least opul ent. To give an acco unt of
this building that connects the hole in the
wa ll of a buried pagan and Christian cem e-
tery, where the bones of St Peter almos t cer-
tainl y res t, with the huge masterpi ece of high
Baroqu e asser tive ness heavy above it is a
cha llenge indeed, particularly as there is
alm ost nothing left to see of the church that
bridged the gap, the basilica built by Cons tan-
tine when the prestige of the Bishop of
Rome was onl y a little grea ter than that of the
many bishops strugg ling towards order and
ortho doxy in the conten tious days of early
Christianity.
Kei th M iller takes up the cha llenge boldl y,
awa re that an und erstandin g of St Peter' s is
impossibl e without some gras p of the histor y
of the instituti on whic h has always based its
authority on Christ's commiss ion to Peter ,
and so me sense of the Rom an circumstances
of the sixteen th and seve nteen th cen turies
whic h deli vered the new St Peter's from the
old. It has to be said that he is much better at
convey ing the seco nd than the first.
It is se nsible to take the dramatic arc hitec-
tural embrace of Bernini ' s piazza, and then
the rota, the ancient porph yry di sc inside the
doors of the basilica, as visua l cues for a
rapid narrati ve of papal histor y. But Mill er ' s
acco unt, focused becau se of the rota on
Charlemagne's co ro natio n in 80 0, leaves o ut
altoge ther the fou r precedin g ce nturies when,
after the collapse of the Western Empire, the
power vac uum in a beleaguered , often fam-
ished and refugee-cro wded Rome was fill ed
by popes alone able to sustain so me kind of
order in the city and its hint erland. Leo I
(referred to once, as Leo IV), Ge lasius I,
Gregory I (who is at last mentioned late in the
book ) and Sergius I are more centr al to the
story of the papac y, the cit y and the Church
as a whole, as are such unmenti oned later
popes as Gregor y VIl and Innocent lll, than
is the crue l, self-see king figure of Leo III
who crow ned Charlemag ne. It is not the case
that after 800 "the Popes wo uld enj oy a cas t-
ing vote in the affairs of Europe for centu-
ries" : the Holy Roman Empire, not so ca lled
until 450 yea rs after Charle mag ne, was run
(up to a point) by em perors , not by popes.
The papal es tates in Centra l Italy had been
asse mbled gradually ove r the centuri es since
Co nstantine, so Cha rlemag ne 's father did
not give the popes "something they had never
had befor e: a domin ion of their ow n", and the
cont ra st between popes of the Carolingian
period and "the piety, simp licity and unworld-
liness of their forefather s" is misleadin g to
say the least. Popes, like other figur es of
authority, have been variously good, bad
and indifferent in eve ry peri od.
ARCHITECTURE
L UCY BEC KETT
K eith Mill e r
S T PETER ' S
224pp. Profile. £15.99.
978 I 861979545
US: Harvard University Press. $19.95.
978 0674 026896
The Dom e ofSt Pet er 's Basili ca
Mistakes are one thin g: St Pa ul was never
a so ldier; Istanbul is not the capit al of
Turkey ; cuius regio eius religio is a principle
that predated the Trea ty of Westph alia by a
hun dred years; anyone who held wha t Mill er
ca lls "the longstandi ng noti on that St Peter's
was the A ugustinian City of God" had totall y
failed to understand Au gustin e. A default
tone of mockery is so mething else . In the
"b ricolage", one of his favourite words, of
his narrative, almos t noth ing esca pes a
snee r: the pap acy itself , "this chain of divine
author ity, a metempsyc hotic or eve n sha-
ma nic transference", Michelangelo , Raphael
Luth er ' s youthful piety. Oddl y enough, the
trul y corrupt Renaissance popes, whose self-
aggrandiz em ent began the process of rebuil d-
ing the crumbling basilica, get off lightl y: the
bitterly rese nted sale of indul gences to
finance the project, launched by Juliu s Il and
pushed hard by Leo X, so provoking Luther
to the start of the Refo rmati on, is scarce ly
me ntioned. Instead we are told that from the
Catholic empires "s laves, sp ices, tobacco,
mahoga ny, blue brazilian marble and tons of
gold we nt a good way toward s eas ing Rom an
pain at the loss of a few drizzly tracts of
Northern Europe to the Prot estant heresy" ,
and that the Co uncil of Trent was responsible
for "the stomac h-turning martyrdom s, trem-
blin g ecs tas ies and Imm acul ate Conceptions"
of the Baroque. That the extravag ances of
Baroque religiou s art are some kind of
counter-state ment direct ed aga inst Protestant
TLS NOVE MBER 23 2 007
25
The Edwin Mellen Press
Publisher ofScholarly Books
The Early Education ofthe Blind in
Britain c. 1790 - 1900
John Oliphant
iconocla sm is und eni able. But the di stanc e
between the toilin g bishops at Trent and the
showy luxur y of St Peter's is as great as the
distance between St Te resa's down-to-earth
Waseda University
978-0- 7734-5247-3
practicalit y and Bernin i' s embarrassing
portr ayal of her. L 'Antigone de Jean Cocteau
When Mill er reac hes the story of the
compli cated archit ectural histor y of the new Jocelyne Francoise Le ber
Royal Military College of Canada
St Peter ' s, for decades when buildi ng stopped
"an honorary rui n" , and Michelangelo ' s and 978-0-7734-5424-8
Berni ni's work on St Peter' s, his pro se calms
down and the reader is given a good, clear
acco unt of what is now to be seen. He does
A Comparative Study ofthe Political
his best with Bernini ' s vast bal dacchin o and
the florescent sculpture beyond it which Communication Styles ofBill Clinton
hold s aloft the Petrine chair. This, as he says, and Tony Blair
echoes the mon strance in effec t, but the mon-
strance (an obje ct not, by the way, used dur- Chris Olugbenga A yeni
ing the Mass) predates the Reform ation by Eastern Conneclicut State University
decades, as do the "glory" rays of Bern ini' s 978-0- 7734-5976-2
fram e, better done by Veit Stoss for his
grea t Crac ow altarpiece in the 1480s: there
is a lurking ass umption in this book that
"Ca tho licism" was inve nted by the Counter-
La Historia Silenciada
Reform ation . Sylvain B Poosson
There are so me vivid and po werful pas- Montgomery College
sages in Miller' s book : an exce llent descrip- 978-0-7734-5633-4
tion of Bem ini' s lavish marbling of the inte-
rior of the chur ch and of the ancient asso -
ciation of marble with imperial ostentation
Death and Violence in Old and
and exo tic pro venance; a lucid guide to the
Middle English Literature
excavations below the basilica which have
led to the almost certain identific ation of St John William Sutton
Peter' s tomb (though Miller' s surprise that the
978-0-7734-5469-9
Vatican should have supported the work is mis-
placed : "proof denies faith , after all" does not
apply to the burial of apostles); and a dizzying
account of the climb to the roof and then to Bibliography of Twentieth- and
the top of the dom e and of what can be seen Twenty-first Century Works for Voice,
at each increasingly vertiginous point. He is Horn and Piano
appropriately coo l about the tomb s in the Marissa L Ulmer
chur ch, and the replacement of paintings with West Virginia University
mo saic co pies which "reinforce the general
978-0- 7734-5501-6
sense of unrelieved perfectio n" ; he quotes gen-
ero usly fro m distinguished visitors who have
foun d a goo d deal in St Peter ' s to compl ain
about; and he describes well the visual effect Modern American Indian Leaders
of the basilica within the city and its influence (book one and book two)
on later architects elsewhere. Dean Cha vers
An alert editor would have saved Miller Stanford University
from some pretentious moments. Miller is in
978-0-7734-5408-8
deeper water than he realizes when he says,
and of Bernini : " We have see n .. . how cer-
tain degrees of religious belief might inflect
on the concept of allegor y or even the very How War Makes Politics Impossible
con vention of artistic representation : that faith Heimo Hofmeister Translated and
might make a wor k of art really become that introduced by David B Greene
which it symbolised, j ust as the Host really North Carolina State Unversity
becomes the body of Christ" . The re are too
many other ho w lers: "visitors ... soon begi n 978-0-7734-53 78-4
to segrega te" (separa te); "anointment" of a
successor; "heterodoxical" ; Bernini' s "sweet-
ness of effect ... was too much for the ascet ic We invite proposals for books that
palettes [palates?] of the nineteenth centur y" will make a contribution to
where the reference is to Stendhal, exact scholarship.
contemp orary of Delacroix and Gericault ; We reply promptly to all enquiries .
reason as "the very antipathy of religious
belief' ; "the death-th rows of Cleop atra".
The Edwin Mellen Pre ss
But this is a lively, spirited shot at an
16 College Street
almost impossible task and, despit e its fault s,
Lampeter SA48 7DY
leaves the reader with a strong and detailed
Wales UK
impr ession of one of the most rem ark able
Tel: ++44 (0) 1570423 356
buildin gs in the world .
Fax : ++44 (0) 1570423 775
emp@mellen.demon.co.uk
www.mellenpress.co.uk
26 IN BRIEF

Literature
Arthur Conan Doyle
RO UND T HE RED LAMP
And other med ical writings
Edited by Robert Darby
348pp. Kansas City: Valancourt Books.
Paperback, $ 16.95.
978 0 9792332 7 5

A rthur Co nan Doyles 1894 collec tion of

medic al tales pro ved a bitt er pill to
man y Sherlock Holm es enthusias ts, who
found it too grimly reali stic , eve n horrific.
Do yle retorted that "one cann ot write of the
medi cal life and be merr y ove r it" . Ironic ally ,
the least frightening stor ies are the few dedi-
cated to the supernatural or Grand Guigno l.
Doyl e didn 't take these very serious ly, find-
ing black hum our in the incredibl e misfor-
tun es of oth ers. In "Lot No . 24 9" , a medic al
stude nt bravely chall en ges a fell ow scho lar
who has revived a mum my to ca rry out his
homicidal plan s: "you' ll find that yo ur filth y "Viscount Lepic and His Daughters: Place de la Concorde", c 1875, by Edgar Degas ; taken from Degas: A dialogue ofdifference,
Egy ptian trick s wo n' t answer in Eng land" . by Werner Hofm ann, translated by David H. Wilson (319pp. Thames and Hudson . £45. 978 0 500 093412)
Not all Eng lish doctors are as altru istic . In
"The Case of Lad y Sannox ", a surgeo n tasteful but heartfelt paean to the Am erican brand bein g allowe d to give up so eas ily.
embarks on an affair, and is tricked by the
Essays flag (ign oring, however , its conn ection with Rarely averse to a labour ed jo ke, Gr aham
cuckold ed husband into mutil atin g the deceiv- Anne Fadiman the stars and stripes on George Washin gton ' s Mc Cann find s Fawlty Towers "well worth a
ing wife . "The Retirement of Signor Lam- AT LA RG E AN D AT SMA LL anc estral coat of arm s). return visit and a relati vely leisur ely stay".
bert" is a similar con te cruel. This tim e, the Confessions of a literary hedonist Th e most absorbing essay in thi s coll ect ion His histor y of the sitco m, despit e the pun s,
cheat ed husband , an ind ustrialist, engages in 220pp. Penguin. £12.99. is "The Arcti c Hedoni st", an ambiguous repetitions and cli ches, will be enjoyable for
a cras h cour se on voca l cord anatomy and sur- 978 I 846 14043 3 hom age to Vilhj almur Stefansson , the Icelan- all devotees of " Britain' s favourite sitcom ".
ge ry, dark knowled ge to be used aga inst his dic-Ca nadian ex plorer. Notor ious for his Mc Cann pro vid es potted bio gr aphi es of its
relu ctanc e to was h and for desert ing his ship- crea tors , actors and charac ters, and spares a
op era singe r nem esis.
T he more ter rifyin g stories arc the o nes in H
ow sincerely do we regret the death of
the essay, the sort with which E. V.
which ordinary peopl e are faced wi th ill ness, Lucas, Robert Ly nd and "Alpha of the
m ate s in A las ka, he ne verth el e ss emerges
from Fadiman's acco unt as a fascinatingly
few pages fo r the irascibl e hoteli er on whom
the show was based: Don ald William Sin-
pain and loss. "The Curse of Eve " is a harro w- Plough" entertained our Edw ardian great- fla wed hero of Pola r discovery. Like its prede- clair, a "thrice-torpedoed" for mer naval Com -
ing tale of childbirth; "A Medi cal Document " gra ndparents and whose esse nce was painfull y cess or Ex Lihris, thi s book is obliqu ely autobi- mander turn ed manager of Hotel Gleneagles
present s three physicians discu ssing their distilled by a genera tion of Briti sh schoolchil- ographic al , a series of windows on the author in Torquay, where the Mont y Python crew
pati ent s' terminal illnesses and ph ysic al mal- dren in their preci s exe rcises? Acro ss the her self as scho lar, editor, enthusiast and staye d in 1970. Unlike Cleeses Basil, Sin-
form ation s. Do yle describes these in unspar- Atlantic, the endu rance of a literary magazine woman of lett ers, its mann er selfco nsciously clair was shor t and Sco ttish ; much like Basil,
ing clinical det ail , lavishin g atte ntion on a culture ensures the survival of the genre, with old-fashioned and none the wo rse for that. he was hara ssed and ve ry rud e. "Right, that ' s
"murderous tum our " and a "rodent ulcer". In Anne Fadiman as one of its most distingui shed J ONATH AN KEATE S it - out!" , he was heard to sho ut, whe n a
hi s inform ative introduction , Robert Darb y practiti oners. Th e title of her latest collecti on, gues t enquired abo ut some sandw iches. He
argues that these texts are valuable as social At Large and At Small, has been designed to Television accu sed Eric Idle of possessing a bomb ,
hi story, capturing the practic es of physicians cont rast her "presbyopic" interests with a berated Te rry G illiam for his table mann ers
at the cusp of mod ern medicine. "myopic" focus upon them. Her cho ice of Gr aham McCann and rebuked Mich ael Palin for req ues ting a
To this end he co ntributes ann otation s, these two adjec tives reflect s Hazlitt' s co mpar i- FAWLTY TOW ERS wake-up ca ll. The crew sw iftly left for a
gathers medi cal stories by Do yle not found in son of "the organs of the mind" with the con- The story of Britain' s favourite sitcom more amicable establishme nt, exce pt Cleese,
earlier editions and includes Doyles non- traction or dilati on of a pupil within an eye . 336pp. Hodder and Stoughton. £18.99. who stayed on, en thra lled.
fiction medical writings. Round the Red Hazlitt' s cont emp orar y Charles Lamb is 978 0340898 11 6 Mc Cann con sid ers the show 's co medic
Lamp sho uld appea l to others besides histori- th e o bject of Fadimans re ver en ce as a found- mech ani sm s, its mi xed ea rly reception , th e
ans and hypo chondriac s, however. Some ing father of the kind of lei sur ely, di scur sive
tal es are ephe mera l Victoriana, but others ess ay she fa vour s, unfettered by con sid era-
deal with issues that don 't date: life, death , tion s of printing costs or column inch es. She
D espite enthusiastic reviews, devoted
fan s and audiences of ove r 10 million,
Fawlty Towers only ra n to twel ve episodes,
evo lution of its charac ters , and gives enter-
tainin g close readings of indi vidu al episodes .
In "The Psy chiatrist", "even [Ba sil' s] cloth es
and the rand om work ings of fate . As both acknow ledges "a monument al crus h" on six fir st scree ned in 1976 and a furth er six in see m painfully repr essed" , his braces tuggin g
ph ysici an and writer, Doyle bor e witness to ge ntle-hearted Charles, detecting layer s of 1979. This was partl y an indic ation of the his wa istband aw ay "fro m the dan gerou s area
inexplic able suffering. He has one of his nar- sombre we irdness unch arted by readers for perfecti oni sm of its writers, John Cleese and of his ge nita lia" ; whe n Basil find s him self
rators reflect that "there are times when on e whom "A Dissert ation Upo n Ro ast Pig" is Connie Booth , who, between series, suffe red trapp ed in a cupboard, havin g tried to apolo-
feels that some thing is wro ng in the scheme quit e enoug h to be go ing on with. Thi s sense a marit al breakdown. It is also a sign of a gize for an act of accide ntal grop ing, it is a
of thin gs". Thi s may be why Do yle aban- of the essay medium as ex plora tory or revela- very different television clim ate. Brit ain had "penile-like" littl e fin ger that pokes out. The
don ed ration ali st materi ali sm in fav our of tory, rather than as merely a chanc e to pontifi- aired long-running sitco ms before, but in the pleasure to be had in McCann' s len gth y epi-
spiritualis m: not eve n Sherlock Hol mes cate or show off, fuel s Fadiman's disqui siti on era of Friends (236 ep isodes), when eve n the sode sum maries is testament to the sitco m's
could solve the Case of Job . on coffee (Goe the, it see ms , was respon sibl e cultish Peep Show has already sho t its fifth enduring brill ianc e. Mc Cann also pro vid es
MI CH AEL SALER for the chemical isolation of ca ffe ine) and a series, it wo uld be hard to imagin e the Faw lty some go od Fawl ty Towers arca na : Ball ard

TLS NO V EM BE R 23 2007

Berk eley (M aj or Gowen) onc e roomed with
Cary Grant; Andrew Sach s (Manuel ) reall y
did get burned durin g the shooting of "The
Germ ans". The £700 he received in dama ges
far excee ded his fee of £ 140 for the series .
TOBY Li CHTI G
Theatre
Sara Beam
LA UGHING M ATTERS
Farce and the making of absolutism in France
288pp. Come ll University Press. £29.50
(US $55).
9780 801445606
U nabashedly vulgar and boldl y satirica l
in cont ent, French farc e und erwent a
tran sformation durin g the years prior to the
War s of Religi on. Outlawed in the 1560s, the
genre reappeared in the early seventee nth
century in a more anody ne form that posed lit-
tle threat to an increa singl y centralized state.
Le Doeteur amou reux, famou sly performed
by Moli ere and his troup e befor e the young
Loui s XIV in 1658, thu s bear s onl y a slight
resembl anc e to the type of theatre that had
entertained his kingl y forebears in the previ-
ous century.
Sara Beam rightl y claim s that the story of
farce is a useful ga uge of the evo lving cli-
mat e of early modern Fra nce. She is at her
best when dealin g with preci se exa mples,
such as that of a sixtee nth-ce ntury sermon
that includ ed the story of a man beaten in his
slee p by Saint Nicetas of Lyon as a puni sh-
ment for his lack of generos ity. Whil e the
comi c cont ext may be lacking in church, the
figur e of the devi ant charact er bein g given a
good beatin g is a defining characteri stic of
farc e. Give n the genre 's irreverence and its
prop ensity to includ e comm ent on contempo-
rary eve nts, it is not difficult to und erstand
why it should have been silence d durin g a
period of such grea t ten sion and blood shed.
What is perhap s less ob viou s is the role
played by the urban , pro vincial elite, in col-
laboration with a Paris-based governme nt, in
ensuri ng that it was never to flou rish in the
sa me way again. Most fascin atin g of all is
Beam ' s account of how, in the ea rly seve n-
teenth century, satire of a type that had
decades ea rlier been found in the theatre
mad e its way into print ed pamphl ets, pub-
lished - intri guin gly - in the name of noted
performer s of farce , such as Ta barin or Bru s-
cambill e. The name of an actor associ ated on
stage with a gentle form of satire might
thereby be associated on the page with an alto-
gether more vitupera tive variety. Beam ' s
study would have benefited from a closer
investigation of what satire is and exa ctly
how it wor ks, but her insistenc e on examin-
ing a theatric al genre as an integral part of
its soc ial, politi cal and reli gious c ontex t
undoubtedl y bears good fruit.
J ULIA PR EST
Philosophy
Simon CritchIey
INFI NI TEL Y DEM ANDI NG
Ethics of commitment, politics of resistance
178pp. Verso. £17.99 .
978 I 84467 121 2
M odem philosophy begin s not in won-
der, as it did for the ancients, but in
IN BRIEF
disappointment. There is religious disappoint-
ment that the world has no meanin g in the
abse nce of a transcend ent deity. Thi s pro-
vokes nihili sm, expressed in fund amentali st
violence and non-th eistic, pa ssive spiritua l-
ity. Then there is politic al disappointm ent
inasmuch as j ustice has becom e meanin gless.
Thi s is a cri sis of ethics, in parti cular due to
the lack of an ethical experience. That experi-
ence wo uld be the feelin g of a moral cl aim
that was interna lly comp ellin g, not merely
externally com pul sory.
Thi s is the current impasse identifi ed by
Simon Critchley . Inf initely Demand ing is a
little book with a big idea ; through high
theor y and wry obser vation s, Critchley see ks
to describ e a way forw ard. In short, this is to
find an ethics of commitment based on a
dem and that is felt to be infinite. Critchley
uses Alain Badiou ' s idea offide lity and Levi-
nas' s of the other, inter alia . But in ord er to
ensure that the indi vidu al is not cru shed by
the impo ssibility of such responsibiliti es - a
failur e that would result in another kind of
nihili sm - his ethical subje ctivity turn s on
itself and find s humour at its own tragic inau-
thenticity. As Wood y Alien put it, "co medy
is tragedy plu s time". Co nsc ience, then, is
"dividuated" subje ctivity.
Politic s becom es grass -roots interventions
by tho se who are against the consensus sanc-
tioned by the state, an activism that also
serves as a definition of dem ocr acy. It culti-
vates a kind of self-asse rtion dri ven by anger.
But what about the probl em of violence?
Humour is an inadequ ate safeg uard : after all,
soldiers j oke in the face of atroc ity as a way
of copin g becau se it ca n keep the ethica l at
bay. But there is another ethica l attitude that
Critchley never quit e addresses, namely that
of comp assion . Thi s is an identifi cation with
anoth er (related to but different from respect
for the other), which is an ekstas is, a stepping
out of yourse lf. It is also the beginnings of a
meanin gful transcendenc e not guaranteed by
God but born of a sense of infinite mystery,
and wo nder.
M ARK VERNON
History
Hugh Crow
T HE M EMOIRS OF CAP T AI N
HUG H CROW
The life and times of a slave trade captain
264pp. Bodleian Library. £15.99.
978 I 85 124321 I
H istory is usually written by the winners.
In a posthum ous elegy for the glory
days of Briti sh slaving, Hugh Crow defend ed
the business and the way it was conducted
without a hint of apology, or an adm ission of
wro ng. He saw nothin g to be asha med of, and
was onl y anx i o us to remind hi s fellow l-i ver-
pudli ans of their herit age.
Crow we nt to sea in sea rch of his fortun e,
and having ove rco me his reservati ons, he
found it in the last yea rs of the Afri can Slave
Trad e. He emerges from the fronti spi ece por-
trait and the text of his Memoirs as a straight-
for ward, square-built fellow, sword in hand
and ready for action. Despit e frequent bout s
of tropic al disease and battles with French pri-
vatee rs and Briti sh cruisers, the central
themes are his success in deli verin g the
"cargo" to market, how often it reach ed the
slave auction in "prime condition", and the
TLS NOVEMBER 23 2007
relati onship s he developed with the Afric an
vendors. Rather than addr ess the evils of his
trad e, he lamb asts Wilberforc e and Tho mas
Clarkson for their hypo cri sy in ignoring the
plight of indentured labour ers, sailors and
other underprivileged white men.
For Crow, compassion began at hom e.
After commanding the last legal slaving voy -
age from a British port, he retired fro m the
sea a rich man, but life did him few favour s.
His only son died young and he ended his
days lamenti ng the passing of an older world.
The final three chapters, com piled by Crow's
exec utors from his notes and other Afric an lit-
erature , reflect acute embarrass ment. In retail-
ing his eightee nth-century idea s they adopt a
mealy-mouthed and unin spirin g tone. Onl y
anecdo tes of the Afric an slave port s retain a
hint of Crow's lively character. This fine edi-
tion of a rare text allows the losers of histor y
to have their say, and reminds us why they
lost. Three yea rs after the boo k first appea red
in 1830, slavery was abolished throughout
the Briti sh Empire, consignin g Crow and his
belief s to the dustbin of history .
AN D REW LAMB ERT
Italian Literature
Maria Messina
BEHI ND CLOSE D DOORS
Her father's house and other stories of Sicily
Translated from the Italian by Elise Magistro
198pp. Feminist Press at the City University
of New York. £17.50
(US $ 19.95).
978 I 5586 1553 3
T here was a time, according to Christ
Stopped at Eholi, Carlo Levi' s classic
account of his forced residence in the South
of Italy und er Fascism, when eac h home had
two portrait s, one of the Madonna and one of
President Roosevelt ; but Am erica was differ-
ent fro m La Merica , the hated, di stant land
which appea rs in the short stories of the Sic il-
ian writer, Maria Messina (1887-1 944 ), who
fo cu se s o n the po verty w hich forced men to
leave their own island and even more on the
misery and depri vation, sex ual as well as
financial, of the women left behind .
Catena buck s the trend of Messina ' s char-
acters by insistin g on acco mpa nying her hu s-
band , but is turn ed back at the port on
account of her ill health , while Grandmother
Lidda makes sacrifices to brin g up her son's
child as her own , onl y for the son to send per-
emptory, pitiless instructions that the boy be
dispatch ed to Am eri ca in spite of Lidd a' s
prot estation s that she now regard s him as her
ow n.
The plight of the wome n is Messina ' s ma in
concern, but the men sca rce ly fare better.
Petru comes back from Am erica a brok en
man , and face s the humili ation in Si cil y of
discoveri ng that his wife is more able than he
is to run the littl e shop he sets up with his
meagre earnings, while the cobbler Va nni in
" Dainty Shoes" return s to find that his fian-
cee had been too imp atient to wait. His
resourc eful mother persuades him that the
shoes he made for their wedding could be
rec ycled for so me alterna tive bride.
No t all the tales in this selection deal with
emigra tion, but most of Messina ' s wor ks
portray the grim life of Sicilian women, sub-
jected to conv enti ons that forbid them to
move freely in village society, and deni ed the
27
chance to show initiati ve or asse rt their indi-
vidua lity. Marri age is a necessity for status,
but marriages must be sanctioned by male
figur es of authority, and inside marri age, or
eve n inside illicit rel ationship s, beatin gs are a
regular occurrence.
It would be a mistake to read these poign-
ant stories as sociologica l document s.
Maria Messina was a proponent of late nin-
etee nth-ce ntury verismo, and a follower of
Giovanni Verga , who held her in high
es tee m. She could craft a fine tale, cunningly
display sympathy in spite of the authorial neu-
tralit y required by realist precept s, and unfail-
ingly gave passionate life to charact ers who
lived in silence. She has been periodi call y
"rediscovered" and then forgott en, but hers is
a voice that deserves to be heard.
JOS EPH FARRELL
Cultural History
MichaeI Eaude
CATA LON IA
A cultural history
280pp. Signal Books. £12.
978 I 904955 32 0
n her recent boo k El preu de ser cata lans
I (The Price of Bein g Catalan), the Argentin-
ian journalist Patrfci a Gabancho claim s una-
bashedl y that "Catalonia has the most impor-
tant stateless culture in the worl d, in term s of
content , qualit y and the scope of its produ c-
tio n" . Mich ael Eaude 's Catalonia is the best
attempt so far to give the English-reading
publ ic an accurate idea of what this "stateless
culture" consists of.
This he does in two succ inct moves. First,
he reco unts how Catalonia, once the hub of a
flouri shin g Medit erranean empire, was whit-
tled down into the Spani sh region it is held to
be today: a histori cal fall from grace without
which Catalan culture is all but imp ossibl e to
und erstand. Eaude lines up the key dates with
precision: 1518 brou ght the ban on Catalan
trad e with the A meri cas; 1652, a loss of both
autono my and te rritory, after a decade-l on g
upri sing aga inst Cas tile; 1714 , the loss of all
politic al right s follo win g military defeat by
the Bour bon dy nas ty; 1939, a thirt y-seven
year attempt, on the part of the Franc o
regim e, to eradicate the Catalan language,
root and branch .
Thi s sprint throu gh the pa st is follo wed by
what will be a revelation for many: that the
grea t modern Catalan household names -
Dali , Mir6, Gaudi and Tapies, among others
- form part of a hetero geneous yet clearly dis-
tinct Catalan cultural tradition that began
with a Romantic renaissance in the late nine-
teenth century and continu es to this day.
Eaude traces multipl e link s: from the mystic
poet Jacint Verda guer to the spiritualism of
Antoni Ga udf; fr om the icon ocla stic Sit ge s
painter s and writers (Santi ago Rusiiiol,
Ramon Casas, Isidr e Nonell) to their teena ge
friend Pablo Picasso; from the stubborn surre-
alism of Joan Mir 6 to the passionate protest
songs of Raimon , and so on. Eaude omits to
menti on a coupl e of major figur es, such as the
philo soph er Francesc Pujol s - Dalf' s mentor
- or the poet J. V. Fo ix - an important influ-
ence on Mir 6 and Ta pies - but this is a minor
critici sm of a boo k which cas ts a welcome
ray of light on a cultu ral universe still largely
in shadow , courtesy of a di sastrou s past.
M ATTH EW T REE
28
araguay is not a country one ge ts to
P hear abo ut very ofte n. It is landlocked
in the middl e of the continent , but stra-
tegicall y pl aced between Brazil , Argentin a
and Boli via, and its prin cip al economic activ-
ity has tradition ally been contraband. This
could ex plain the low intern ation al profi le
Paraguayan gove rn men ts seem to adop t. Para-
guay is also a violent co untry . The innat e law-
lessness of contraband is one reason for that ;
but oth er factor s include long, bloody wa rs of
attriti on with its neig hbo urs , which have led
Paraguayan adults to bear ar ms , as a matter
of course, over more than a century, and its
auth orit arian politi ci ans, who have du ring
most of its histor y taken power , and gov -
erne d, by forc e . Nee dless to say , Paragu ay is
not a co mmo n destination for touri sts.
Robert Carver, autho r of The Acc ursed
Mountains: Journeys in Albania, was dr awn
to Paraguay bec ause of his interest in "the
half- made, half- abandoned places in the
wor ld". Parag uay seemed to him to be a "sort
of So uth American A lbania - lawless, pirati-
ca l, bandit-ridden and co rrupt" . He was also
drawn to it becau se an ances tor , Charlie
Ca rve r, disap peared there toward s the end of
the nin eteenth centu ry. He had been lookin g
for a lost city wi th hidd en Inca go ld. A
smas hed go ld-plated pock et watch with his
nam e inscrib ed on it was ominous ly hand ed
ove r to a Ca tho lic mission by a gro up of
semi-C hristianized Indians. Hi s bod y was
never found .
Ca rve r is goo d on the effec t the discovery
of A merica had on Europeans, and how it led
to various ofte n contradi ctory reac tions:
In a strange sense the bifurcation of the human
mind was reflected in the Europea ns' Man -
ichean obsession with America - a place fro m
which to loot and steal gold and silver, to
-----------------------~,-----------------------
ince Chris tianity was impo sed by force
S on the indi genou s peopl es of Latin
A merica , many peopl e ass ume that the
continent is replete wi th autochthonous ele-
ments co nsta ntly tryin g to escape the stifling
cont rol of the Church. Recent histori ograph y,
however , has brou ght to light the esse ntially
rec iproca l natur e of the interacti on between
Euro pea ns and indi gen ou s peopl es throu gh-
o ut the colonial period. Research has
revealed that the offi cial con demn ation s of
indigenou s rites are in fact the result of
attempts to prese nt the proc ess of Christiani-
za tion in triumphant term s, so that what hap-
pened in practi ce ca n onl y be adeq uately
gauge d by go ing beyond official sources to
the more spa rse ly documented cont act s of
Europeans and Africa ns of widely different
bac kgrounds with indi genou s peopl es.
It is now wide ly accepted that the ave rage
immi gr ant arriving in Latin A merica wo uld
(;lFOUR COURTS PRESS
Fear: essays on the meaning and
experience of fear
KA T E HEBBLETH WAITE &
ELIZABETH MC CA R T HY EDI T O R S
Examines the effect of fear on the human experience and
how it has shaped the creative and social imagination.
ISBN 978 -1 - 84682 -070-0 240PP ills. £50
Published: :J3 November
7 M alpas Street, D ublin 8, Ireland
Tel. (Dublin ) 453 4668 www.fourcourtspress.ie RI
TRAVEL & ANTHROPOLOGY
Paranoia para mi
D A VID G ALLAGH ER
Ro b e r t Ca rve r
PARA D ISE W ITH SE RPENTS
Travels in the lost world of Paragu ay
376pp. Harper Perennial. Paperback, £8.99.
978 000 257096 I
pillage, rape and plunder, and a place to found
ideal communities which would redeem man-
kind, straig hten the crooked timber of human-
ity, and build the Perfect City.
Paraguay itself rece ived countl ess fortun e-
hunt ers and it had mor e than its fair share
of Utopianists. The Jesuit s, until they were
rudely ex pelled by a jealous Spanis h Crow n
in 1768, established powerful missions there,
in which the Indians lived in theocratic, and
eco no mica lly very produ cti ve, harmony. The
Spa nish ex pe lled the Jesuit s because their
Platoni c communities were in effec t a state
within a state, behold en only to the multi-
nation al Jesuit order. Subseq uently, areas of
Paraguay were colonized by Menn onit es,
Australian Co mmunists and anti-Se mitic Te u-
toni c nation alists led by Eliza beth Nietzsc he
- she was not able to con vince her broth er
Friedrich to joi n her Paraguayan qu est for the
"purification and rebi rth of the human race" .
Of these settlers dr iven by ideas, only the
Mennonit es surv ive . Carve r makes vivid, nos-
talgic visits to the sites where the Jesuit mis-
sions and New Australia flouri shed . New Au s-
tralia fell , like Or well' s Animal Farm, und er
the yoke of a zea lous dict ator. His name was
Recycled rituals
FE RN A NDO CE R V ANTE S
F ra n k Gr a zian o
CU LTURES OF DE VO TI ON
Folk saints of Spa nish A merica
352pp. Oxford University Press. £19.99.
978 0 195 17 1303
have had no particul ar qu alm s abo ut defer-
ring to the superior kno wled ge of nati ve re li-
gious leaders, not onl y about the phys ical
env iro nme nt but also abo ut the local spiritual
forces. Co nve rse ly, indi gen ou s healing prac -
tices soon ca me to be accompa nied by Christ-
ian prayers and invocati on s - eve n hallu cino-
ge ns are know n to have been assoc iated with
Chri stian sa ints and ange ls. Wh at might he
more surprising is that these processes were
often mo st effec tive ly accompli shed throu gh
the mini strati on s of mendic ant friars and itin-
erant preach ers, whose fun ction s we re per-
fectly comp arable to those of indigenou s heal-
ers. It was preci sely in thi s middl e ground
of ritu al - of the cult of saints and their relics
and miracles - that the transfu sion of Christ-
ianity with local indi genou s re ligions was
mo st successfully achieved. Mu ch mor e than
the di stant bishop s and priests, popular itiner-
an t preacher s fun ction ed as facil itator s of
new alleg iances and pattern s of obse rvance .
TLS NO V EM BE R 23 2007
Willi am Lane. Curiously, his self-righteous
leveller zeal did not ex tend to natives: the
most hein ou s offence in New Australia, apart
from drin kin g, was to have sex across the col-
our bar. Lane ende d up working as a j ourn al-
ist in New Zealand, hav ing co nve rted back
into a "deeply con ser vati ve Empire Loyalist" .
Carve r is good at show ing up how peopl e ca n
be zea lous and self-righteous in defence of
the stranges t of values, eve n to the po int of
giving up their lives for them .
For tunately, tho ugh , he does not see too
mu ch heroi c ideali sm in the ga ngs of Naz is,
including Dr Men gele, who took refu ge in
Parag uay after the wa r and who supported
General Stroess ner as dictator there between
1954 and 1988. He vis its a Germ an co untry
club nea r the capit al, Asunci 6n , and feels
"physically sick" at what he takes to be a
"Iair of Nazis" in which he sees "overweight
blond beasts attackin g ste ins of lager and out-
size d Wiener Schnitzels".
Carver shows us that nothin g is surprising
in Paraguay. Anything can happen even in
Asunci6n , despite its ge nteel, though decay-
ing, belle epoque buildings. But as you sail
upri ver, the residu es of civilization gradually
fade. Ca rver's river expeditions self-
co nsciously echo Conrad's Heart ofDarkness.
In this kind of setting Ca rver is able to present
him self as bein g always in danger, and he
is therefor e able to cre ate a lot of suspense ,
eve n if in the end the best he can do to ju stify
the exc itement provoked by his con stant
state of paranoi a is a mugging at the hand s
of two kid s, right at the end of his stay.
In a co mpara tive ly mund ane way they
embrace d and grad ually reduced to order a
large number of co nflicting sys tems of ex pla-
nation, thu s instillin g on the indi gen ou s peo-
ples an image of C hristianity as a new power
that see med stro nge r than the natur e spirits of
the local reli giou s sys tems, but not for that
reason dram aticall y differe nt fro m their
wor ld-view or reli giou s faith .
In Cultures of Devotion: Folk saints of
Spanish America, Frank Graz iano pro vides a
fascin ating insight into six current devotion s
to folk saints from Argentin a, Mexico and
Peru that are clearly gro unded in this traditio n.
It is unfortunate that Graz iano seems unaware
of recent research and fail s to see the co ntinui-
ties, preferring to place his evidence in the co n-
te xt of a reaction to ce nturies of an imposed
religion and of a "profound disillu sion with
religiou s and secular institutions" .
Hi s analys is is noneth eless marked by a
deep sympathy, and he makes the important
ob ser vation that , " no matter how . . . critica l
devotees may be of the Churc h, their devo-
tion s are entirely dependent on Ca tholicis m,
from its co nce ption of the superna tura l to the
po wers exe rcise d by the very priests who are
devalued, despi sed or displ aced" . The "essen-
tial paradox" that Graz iano sees at the heart
of thi s "ambiguity" is mo re appare nt than
real. In fact, the resili ence of the reli giou s
Th ey make off with a camera and wallet.
Carver admits that it co uld have happ ened
in London. But he then decides to flee Asun-
ci6n. He makes the plane he takes to Sao
Pau lo feel like the last helicopter out of Sa i-
go n. Gettin g an air ticket is made to sound
like a miracl e. So is the fact that he ge ts a seat
o n the plane afte r runnin g across the tarm ac.
Paradoxically, there was a point mid-j ourn ey
in which Ca rve r had been quit e taken with
Paragu ay; a liberta rian, he com es to value
what he takes to be the individu al freedom
fro m the state which people have in
Paragu ay, contrastin g it with Brit ain, which
he rem emb er s as a "prison" , confined by
laws wo rthy of " Kafka and Orwell".
Ca rve r no doubt exaggerates a grea t deal in
his book but the exaggerations are amusing.
Th ere are, however, co untless sloppy mis-
takes. He should have give n the man uscript to
a Spani sh-speaker , to correc t his inveterately
Italianate Span ish. His geography is we ird.
He talk s of the "deserts of southern Chile" . In
Sao Paulo airport on his way to Asunci6n, he
is exc ited by the "destinations from a poet' s
lexicon" an nounced on the loud speaker,
amon g them " Valparafso and Tegu cigalp a" .
A las there are no flight s from Sao Paul o to
Va lparaiso because Valp araiso has no inter-
nation al airport.
Para gu ay is an exciting enoug h country
and thi s book enjoyable enough for it not to
be necessary for Carver to up the ante by mak-
ing Paragu ay a stand-in for all of So uth Amer-
ica. He impli es that there is nothing he says
about Paraguay that co uld not be sa id about
any other country in the region , and he
impli es that neighbouring Arge ntina is in an
even mor e parlou s state. That is like cl aimin g
that the rest of Euro pe is like A lban ia and
France eve n worse.
culture that emerged in co lonia l Latin
A merica is inseparable from the imp ort anc e
it gave to the Ca tho lic litur gy. The mendi cant
friars and their successors in the seve ntee nth
and eightee nth centurie s we re above all goo d
litur gists, form ed by their daily readin g, sing-
ing and meditation on Scripture . And it was
in thi s litur gical culture that they could claim
to be in co mmunion wi th the supernatural
world.
Thi s was no mere collec tion of for mul aic
rites and rituals: it was a ritu al cycle that was
full y integrated with the agricultural yea r,
and thu s readil y supp lanted the old ritu al
cycle of sacrifice aro und which the life of the
community had revol ved. The liturgy also
pro vid ed a clear principl e of un ity and a
mea ns by which the indi gen ou s peopl es
could becom e attune d to a new view of life
and a new co nce pt of histor y, where the
commemorati on of the feasts of the sa ints
prov ide d an e lement of co rporate id entit y and
social co ntinuity by whic h eve ry co mm unity
found its litur gical repr esent ati ve and patron.
It is natural that there have been
strong reaction s whe neve r this tradit ional
liturgical culture has faced threats, whether
from sixtee nth-ce ntury Co unter-Re for mation
bishop s, or seve ntee nth-ce ntury ex tirpa tors
of idolatr y, or eightee nth-ce ntury Bourbon
reformers, or nineteenth-c entu ry liberal s, or
twent ieth-c entu ry educa tors, or twenty-fir st-
centu ry liberation theolo gians. The devotions
that Gra ziano so vividly analyses have deeper
roots than he suspec ts.
 NATURAL HISTORY 29

otanists ca rry a c hip on th ei r sho ul- ca pture d from the atmosphe re. In swamps ,

B de rs . T he ir re lati onsh ip w ith a zoo-

ce ntric wo rld is lik e th at of perplexed
pa ren ts wi th a su lle n teen ager w ho refu se s to
acknowl edge that hi s very existe nce depends
upon th e m. Da vi d Beerling beli e ve s that to o
ma ny peopl e share th e att itude of Tom
W ell er in Science Made Stupid (l n 5) th at
" the evolution of pl ant s is an im port ant
ch apt er in the hi stor y of life . Ho we ver , it' s a
pretty d ull chapter , so we ' ll skip it" . Beerl in g
c ompla ins th at R ichard Dawkins all but
ignor ed pl ants in hi s evolutio na ry sur vey of
life , The Ancestor 's Tale (2 004). Beerling 's
rese ntment is pa lpa b le .
The Emera ld Planet is a se rio us talking-to
abo ut why pl ants m us t not be ig nored. T he
c ur re nt ge ological era has been dubbed th e
A nthro pocene in recogn iti on of th e fact th at ,
si nce the Industrial R evolution abo ut 20 0
ye ars ago, human influen ce on th e enviro n-
me nt ha s becom e p lanetary in sca le . Now 40
pe r ce nt of pl ant growth eac h ye ar is approp ri-
ated fo r human use. Everyo ne sho uld ap pr eci-
ate thi s impact and a lso kn ow , Beerl in g
ar gu e s, how pl ants fit int o th e glo ba l picture .
In J a mes Lovel ock ' s Ga ia theory, th e Earth
is a se lf-regula tory sys tem th at functi on s in a
man ne r th at preserves life , th ou gh , as Love-
lock consta ntly wa rns, not necessaril y hu m an
life. Beerl in g addresses the sa me ki nds of
pl an et ary- sc ale issu es as Lovel ock , but from a
very different per sp ect ive . Yes , Beerli ng and
Lo vel oc k agree , the co m pos itio n of Ea rth 's
atmosph ere is a co nse q uence of the pre sence
Green poles
JO N A TH AN SIL V ER TOW N
D a vid B e erl in g
THE EMERA L D PL A N ET
How plants changed Eart h' s history
304pp. Oxford University Press. £ 14.99
(US $29.95).
978 0 19 280602 4
of life (es pec ially plants) on o ur p lane t, but
Lovel ock was wro ng to cl aim th at the pr esent
20 per cen t co nce ntra tio n of ox ygen in the air
is nea r th e m aximum po ssibl e an d th at a
mu ch hi gh er perc entage wo uld ca use forest s
to co m bus t spo ntaneous ly , th er eb y c ons u m-
ing oxygen and returning Ea rth 's atmosphe re
to a low er balanc e . A t th e end of the Carbon if-
ero us A ge , 30 0 m illo n years ago , the atmos-
phere co ntai ned 35 per ce nt ox ygen. T his
supply was rich e no ug h to support the respi ra-
tion of dr agonflie s w ith 63cm w ings pa ns, and
othe r giant in vert eb rate s w hose size today is
limit ed by th e m uch low er av ailab ility of oxy-
ge n . Eve n some ve rte brates reach ed gian t
pro port io ns . Ancestors of modern ne wt s we re
several met re s in len gth. Beerli ng beli e ve s
th at Gaia, wi th its view th at everything is
nicel y regul ated , is a theory " suspe nded
unc omfortabl y bet ween taint ed met aphor ,
fac t and fal se sc ience ". In its pl ace are Ea rth
sys tem models that sc ientists use to build a
pi ctu re of how the di ffe re nt bit s of th e livin g
and non-livin g worlds int era ct w ith eac h
oth er at a g loba l sca le . Earth history shows
the planet to be a m uc h mor e chan geabl e
pl ace th an Ga ia wo uld pe rm it.
P lants play a du al rol e in Beerl ing ' s ac co unt
of th e Ea rth sys te m . The fir st is as actor s
in the ca rbo n cy cle, influen cin g the fates of
carbo n and oxygen ato ms and the composi-
tion of Ea rth's atmosphe re . P lants' sec on d
ro le is as w itnesses that bear test am ent to pr e-
va iling e nv iro nme nta l conditio ns, leavin g
fossil clu e s to past atmosphe res and climates.
T he past sce na rios of climate cha nge that
e me rge from the pala eontolog ic al record are
va lua ble indi c ator s of how the plan et' s mecha-
nism s work. T he fossil rec or d tell s us th at the
fir st land plant s we re small and leafl ess, w ith
littl e ab ility to influen ce the Ea rth sys te m . But
as lan d p lants sp read they began to influ enc e
the glo ba l ca rbo n cy cle in two major ways .
O ne rel ati vel y recently di scovered , is by
m ean s of pl ant ro ot s which in cr ease the ra te at
whic h buri ed roc ks are weathe re d . T his
c he m ica l pro ce ss co nsumes ca rbo n d ioxid e.
T he othe r way is via plant growth .
C ompetitio n among ea rly land plants for
light and nutri ent s favou red the evolutio n of
bigger a nd bigger for m s, cul min atin g in trees
w ith gian t woody ste ms built from ca rbon
where decay is inhibited, dead tree s acc um u-
lated and in cr easin g amo unts of ca rbo n we re
lock ed into sed ime nts, so me ultim ately for m-
ing coal. Th is pro cess deplet ed the concentra -
tio n of carb on d ioxid e in the atmosphere,
weake ning the greenho use effe ct and cooling
th e clima te as a resu lt. Lar ge le aves eas ily
overhea t, but , as the cli m ate cooled, larger
leaves bec am e via ble, and their appeara nce in
the fo ssil record is w itness to the cha nge in
climate. It is d iffi cult to imagin e , but in the
Cretaceous period befor e the coo ling too k
p lace , Ea rth 's climate was warm e no ug h for
fo re sts to grow in the pol ar regi on s.
Th e id ea that tree s ca n be used tod ay to
ca pture carbo n from the atmos phe re to offse t
e m iss io ns from air travel, and othe r ac tiv ities
that consume fossil fu els, ap peals to gree n co n-
su me rs, and there are several co mpa nies that
use thi s as a bu sin e ss model. Unfort una te ly, it
tak es a hundred yea rs for a tree to ca pture the
ca rbon em issio ns of only a few ho urs ' fl yin g ,
an d the offset companies do not promise to
lock its re sid ues awa y for eve r by bur yin g
yo ur tree in a swa mp . The fore st ecolog ist
O live r Rackham has de scribed carbo n offse t-
tin g wi th trees as like tryin g to pr event sea -
level rise by encourag ing peopl e to drink mor e
wa ter. G lo ba lly , we con sume a m illio n ye ars '
accumulati on of fossil fu els eac h year. Only a
drastic redu ction in fossil fu el con sump tio n
ca n sign ifica ntly limit carbo n d ioxid e emis -
sio ns . W e mu st not only spa re livi ng tree s the
ch ain saw , but fo ssil tree s the furnac e .

GRANTS

CA L L F O R PA PE RS

THE SWORD OF JUDITH

Multidisciplinary Conference in the Humanities at the New York Public Library
W E I NV IT E I' A P E RS that exam ine
any aspect of the theme of'j udith for a
mu ltidi sciplin ary conference in the
hum anities to be held at The New Yor k
Public Libra ry April 17-18, 2008. We
welcom e .11 schola rly app roaches and
new contribu tions to discussio n of the
cano nicity, authorship and historica l
background o f the Boo k of j ud ith and
to any aspect of the textural and visual
traditions of j udith in later pe riods.
Possible to pics include the the relationsh ip of th e Boo k o f
j udith to the Jew ish and Christian canons; th e Mary lJudith
typology; the inter pre tation ofJud ith in jewish, Chris tian. or
secular literature , man uscript illumina tions , and works of art;
Ju dith as a subject in music an d dan ce : and th e resur gent int er-
est in jud ith in the 19th and 20th centuries. Papers that
address the Ju dit h nar rati ve in its larger contexts arc particu-
larly welcome . To enhance mu ltidi sciplinar y co llab u rat io n
and com mu nity, a co mb ination o f private Web site and w iki
te ch nolog y will enable scholars to circulate their work-in-
progress before and afte r the conference. Research gra nts are
availa ble and co nferenc e tr avel expenses will be paid for
selected part icip an ts,
Th e conference is part of TIle) ,,,lil!. Projecl: &pall/liltg Ihc
Bou,,,laries of Disciplillarity through Collaborati<'C Scholarly Prac·
ticc. Organized around the biblical (or apo crypha l) text and fig·
ure of Judith , the Jud ith Proj ect will olTer schola rs the op po r-
runny to pursue their own research age nda s on j udi th, as part
of a year-long techn ology-enabled , m ultidisdplinary collabo-
ra tive effort : It will also leave, as an onli ne legacy. a searcha ble
corpu s of digi tal im ages (via the non -pro fit ARTstor libra ry)
and bibliog raph ic references, a glob al inventory of art and Iit-
erature related to the Book of judith and its ico nography
acro ss th e ages. The outpu t of th e judith Project will be gea red
to the interests of scholarly and gener-al audie nces alike.
T he j ud it h Project learn is moti vated by the idea that
lib raries-e-physical and digital re 'Tu,; . 1 inst itu tional sites for
the o rganizatio n and prod uction of knowledge. The j udith Pro-
ject's goal is to embrace tech nological innovation and provide
scholars with the hest poss ible tools for mu ltidisciplinary <"OlIaOO-
ration. Thc)u,lith Projel1: Expmrdillg the Bo"",larie. of Disdplillarity
through Co!l<ll",rative Scllolarly Practice is sponsored by the Brine
Family Charitable Trust .
Up to th ir ry u niversity- or ope rating foundatio n -adrnin is-
tcre d gr ants are available from 56,000 to S J J ,000 for research
on th e Judith them e. Sub missio ns sho uld include the scho lar's
CV and. proposal hrnited to 1.500 word s. Grant requ est sub-
missions mu st include the adm inistering institu tion's name.
address , fed eral tax ident ification number, non pro fit design a-
tio n. the name of the depa rtme nt / prog ra m chair o r director.
a detailed pro form . budget request , and th e c-rnail address of
t he institut ion's admi nist rative contact. C ran t req ues ts require
th e signature of the dep artment ch air /progra m director. Th e
bu dge t can include up to 20 perce nt depar tmen t allocation.
Direct all submissions to J udith2008@ rarewild llower.o rg.
SUBMIS SION AN D PUBLI CATION TIME Ll N E
Novemb er 30, 2007 Proposal submission deadline.
Dece mbe r 31, 2007 Papers selected (Distinguished Academic
Panel in formation). Applicants nonfied b)' e-mail,
Dece mbe r 31, 2007 Rollout of "The Sword of Judith " Web site
and PBwiki. "Th e Sword of j ud uh" conference will use techn olc -
gy to enable muhidlsc ipllnary collaboration and community with
the philosophy that creative schol arship is: a social pro (ess. With a
com bina tion o f a private \Vcb site and wik i technology. scholars
will be able to circulate their wor k in prog ress and ut llize an elec-
trcnic forum ( 0 converse before anti after the conference.
Ja nu a ry ' 5, 2 008 G ra nts remitled for u uiversuy - and fou ndation-
ad min istere d grants.
Ma rch 21 , 2008 Completed papers rnus t be ready to be posted
on the conference website
April ' 7-18, 2008 "T he Sword of judi th " conference fo r invited
participan ts at 111e New York Pu blic Libra ry; All travel e xpe n~es
and accom modations will be paid for parti cipants,
August 31, 2008 All lInal entries submitted by e-rnail for publica-
tion. On receipt of the publishable final paper, the remaining 30
percent of the research /produc tion stipend reru itted . Work sub-
mill ed after August 3 1 will not be eligible for the final pJ ymel1l or
publication.
Fall2008fWinte r 2009 Publication of 'T he Sword of j udith" by
Jason McCoy Inc.IC u yatid LLC Publications.
the Swonl of judith " lOO K Confer ence and Publication
Th e Brine F;lmil}' Cha ritable Tru st
1)I\Oto: Hr tc K a m~) / l nJ.cx Stuck 11l1i1);c ry /Jupitc rirnagc s
Ii-ma il Judil h20 oN;@ran: wiIJ I], Mrcr.org

TLS N O V E M B E R 23 2 007
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Ste phe n Abe ll is a freelance writer living in (2006), bot h short- listed for the James Tait and M idd le Eng lish Literature at St John's Thomas Mann, 2001. He is a Fellow of St
London. Blac k Memorial Prize . A revi sed ed ition of Co llege , Oxford . Her mos t recent book is John' s Co llege, Ox ford .
her Villages of Vision was pub lished last King Arthur 's Enchantresses : Mor gan and
Lucy Beckett' s mos t recen t book, In the mon th. her sisters in Arthurian tradition , pub lished M ichael Sa ler teaches Intellectual History
Light of Chris t: Writings in the Western tradi- last year. at the Univer sity of California, Davis . He is
tion, was published last year. She is the J oseph Farr ell is Pro fessor of Italian at the author of The Avant-Garde in Interwa r
author of Richard Wagner: Parsifal and York Stra thclyde University. He is the author of a Danny Leigh is the author of two nove ls, England, 1999.
Minster, both published in 198 1. study of Leonardo Sciasc ia, 1995, and Dario The Grea test Gift, 2004, and The Monsters of
Fo and Franca Rame: Har lequins of the Gram ercy Park, 2005 . J on athan Silver town is Professor of Eco l-
Alan Brownjohn ' s twelfth volume of verse, Revolution, 2001. ogy at the Open Un iversity . His most recent
The Men Around Her Bed , was publishe d in Tnby Li chtig is an Assis tan t Editor at the book is Demons in Eden : The paradox of
2004 . His Collected Poems was pub lished David Galla gher is the author of Mod ern TLS . plant diver sity , 2005 .
last year. Latin American Literature, 1973, Improvisa-
ciones, 1991, and Otras Imp rovisaciones, An d rew P orter is ch ief mus ic crit ic of the Matt he w Tree, who has lived in Barcelona
Ciara n Cars on is the author of nine books of 2005 . TLS . for the pa st twenty-one years, is the author of
poe try and four prose work s, and the winner two nove ls, a volume of short stor ies and five
of several awards incl uding the Irish Times Daniel Gar be r is Professor of Philosophy at J ennifer Potter is the author of Secret Gar- non -fict ion books, all wri tten in Catalan,
Iris h Litera ture Prize, the T . S. Eliot Prize Pr ince ton Univer sity . His books include Des- dens , 1998, Lost Gardens, 2000, and , mos t including La vida despres de Deu, published
and the Forward Pr ize for Bes t Co llec tion for cartes Embodied, 200 I, and, as co-editor, the recently, Stran ge Blooms: The curious lives earl ier this year.
Breaking News in 2003. Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century and adventures of the John Tradescants,
Philo sophy , 1998. pub lished last year. Mark Vernon' s recent book s include After
Fe r na ndo Cervantes is Sen ior Lecturer in Atheism , 2000 , Science, Reli gion and the
History at the University of Bris tol. His Lidij a Haa s works at the London Review of Henry Power is a lecturer in Engli sh at the Meanin g of Life, pub lished last year , and
book s inclu de The Devil in the New World: Books. University of Exeter. He is wr iting a book What Not To Say, which is pub lished this
The impact of diabolism in New Spain , 1994, abo ut Henry Field ing and the Scriblerians. month .
and The Hispanic World in the Historical Sud hir Haz areesin gh is a Fellow of Ballio l
Imagination, pub lished last year. Co llege, Oxford. A French tran slation of his Julia P resr ' s cr itica l edit ion of La Deviner- Der ek W ulcott' s Selected Poems was pub-
study of Napo leon ic civ ic fes tivities, Saint- esse by Thomas Corneille and Jean Donneau lished ea rlier this year. His book -lengt h
Stefa n Co llin i' s most recent book is Absent Napoleon, was published in Paris ear lier this de Vise was published earlier this mont h. poem , The Prodi gal, appeared in 2005 .
Minds : Intellectuals in Britain , pub lished last yea r. She is As sistant Profe ssor of Frenc h at Yale
year. His other books incl ude English Pasts : Universi ty. J ennifer W all a ce is the author of Digging
Essays in history and culture , 1999, and Gab r iel Josipovici' s most recent books the Dirt: The archaeologica l imagination,
Public Moralists: Politic al thou ght and intel- include The Singer on the Shor e: Essays : C raig R aine is Editor of A rete. His study of 2004 , and The Cambridge Introduction to
lectua l life in Britain 1850- 1930, 1991. He 1991-2004 and a nove l, Nur ein Schertz, T. S. Eliot appeared ear lier this year , and a Tragedy, pub lished earlier this year. She is a
teaches at the University of Cambridge . both published last yea r. co llec tion of essays, In Def ence ofT. S. Eliot , Fellow and lecturer in Eng lish at Peterhouse,
appeared in 2000. Cambridge .
Da vid Co wa r d is Emeritus Pro fes sor of J onathan K eat ess mos t recent book is The
Frenc h at the Univers ity of Leeds . His transla- Siege of Venice, pub lished last year. His mos t T . J . Reed has recently ret ired as Professor Zinovy Zinik' s co llection of comic stor ies
tion of Pau l Morand's Hecate et ses chiens is recent novel is Smile Please, 2000 . of German at Oxford. He is one of the and ske tche s on life outs ide Russia, At Home
due to appear next year , and his History of Gen era l Ed itors of the new Frankfurt edit ion Abroad, is soon to be pub lished in Mo scow .
French Literature appeared in 2002. A nd re w Lambert is Professor of Naval His- of the complete works of Thomas Mann . His His most recent collection of short stori es is
tory in the Department of War Stud ies at ed ition of the early short fiction, Erziihlungen One-Way Ticket , 2005 .
An th ony C um m ins is writing a doctoral King's College London . His books include 1893-1 912, has recently appeared.
thes is at the Univers ity of Oxford on Emile Nava l His tory 1850- p resent, published Correction: It was stated in the rev iew of
Zola in late nineteenth -cen tury England. earl ier th is year, and Ne lson : Britannia's God Ritchi e Rob ertson ' s book s include Kafka : The World as a Stage wh ich appeared in last
of War , 2004 . A very short introduction, 2004 , Kafka : week 's paper that Jeremy Del ler' s re-enact-
G illia n Darley is the author of biographies Judaism , politics, and literature, 1985, and, ment of the Battle of Orgreave was commis-
of John Soane (1999) and John Eve lyn Ca ro lyne L a r ringt on is Tutor in O ld as ed itor, The Cambridge Companion to sioned in 2004 ; it was commissioned in 200 I.

TLS C ROSSWORD 719 K I M B A L L 0 H A R A .

ACROSS DO WN
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I Site of truly mag num opus of Chaf es 2 Scene of abduction plotted by Bretzner
T H E F A L L E N T I T L E
(6) (5)
E 0 K 0 I T A
5 Such women on the beach portra yed by 3 Sheridan' s find (9) R H Y M E N A I H A N A E L
Post-Impressioni st (8) 4 Betting system ceremony for water C I E B
9 Dull speaker has bad pain identifying creature (6) A N T I S P A S T S U L L A
godd ess ( 10) 5 New Earth unsuitably describes R 0 0 R C 0 T
to Remark overheard defined this trium - Auden's wurk (4, 5 , 6) R 0 Y A L E T A L A S T 0 R
I N D H G N T 0
pha nt memo rial (4) 6 His heart was hot within him (like a
E B B T I 0 E R 0 D G E R S
11 Endurin g acade mician like Mar guerit e living coa l it was) (8)
E E M A A R S
Yourcenar , for example? (8) 7 Helpful blow from 13 (5) E 0 R G E S M I L E
• G y ••
12 Nove l heroin e from the Midd le East, 8 Hawthorn e' s name for Ma lmaison (9)
inte r alia (6) 14 Bridies dissector (9) SOLUTION TO CROSSW O RD 715
13 First kno wn agreement for nove list (4) 16 Shades uf Or/ando (9) The winne r of Cross wo rd 7/ 5 is
15 Prophet thwart s he-man (ie with capital 17 Shaw' s savv y socialist (8) B rian Martin , Dublin .
H) (8) 20 First king, for instance, to live right (6)
20 Susan Coolidge explained what she did 22 Johnson' s work was less industrious (5)
(4, 4 ) 24 Lady Snow 's was in judgm ent (5)
2 1 Deli vered , say, from Exmoor by Black- T he se nde r of the first correct
more (4) solution opened on December 14
23 Poetical mo vement (6) will recei ve a ca sh priz e of £40 .
25 He scratches a living as an artist (8) Entrie s should be addressed to
27 Eliot ' s was at Dorlc ote (4) TLS Crossw ord 7 19,
28 He laid his heart bare in autobio graph y Times Ho use , 1 Pennington Stre et ,
(10) London E98 1BS.
29 No satyrs harm ed in Russian crown
domain (8)
30 The alternative to unknown hypothe sis
(6 )

T LS NOVEMBER 2 3 2007
32
P erambulatory Christm as Book s, Part IX.
Hard by Marylebone Station , at 83 Bell
Street, is half an acre of perambulatory
hea ven - the Archi ve Bookstor e , a ram-
shac kle, tumbl edo wn , Old Curios ity Shop of
a book shop. Odd volumes totter in tower s;
mu sic al scores slither from drawer s; bo xe s
hea ve with antiq ue number s of the Listener.
Th e shopkee per, dre ssed in flann el apron ,
dir ected us to the poetr y shelves , where we
light ed on W. W. Gibso n's Solway Ford, a
Selected Poem s publi shed by Faber in 1940.
Min or tears in du st jacket; oth er wise good;
three quid.
That could sca rce ly count as a Perambula-
tor y ch oic e, of cour se. We see k a neglect ed
wor k by a not able writer, purchased at o ne of
Lond on' s bounteou s second-ha nd book shop s
for £5 or less. We pick ed up Lars Porsena:
or The Future ofSwearing by Rob ert Graves ,
publi shed in 1927 by Kegan Paul. Gr av ess
op ening gambit is that "Of recent years there
has been a notic eable declin e of swearing and
foul langu age" - which prompts the thou ght ,
"No blood y lon ger". But the charm of his
essay is in judging cur ses by their inventi ve-
ness. "Of swea ring-duels little is now heard.
Th ey used to be frequ ent in the days when
public-hou ses kept open all night and beer
was mor e stro ng ly brewed." Lars Porsena is
unu sual in hein g a hook ahout a suhject w hic h
the author is prohibited by law from discu ss-
ing. In 1927, Graves was forc ed to fall back
on the usefulness of "blast" , "By Ge orge"
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -----, of the feminine was "mannered" , when "his
I ·~
..
Supported by British Library Pat rons
EVENTS
Monday 3 December
18 .30 - 20.00
WHAT HAPPENED TO
THE AVANT GARDE?
By the late 19 30 '5 war, political upheaval
and Depression had caused the Avant Garde
to disperse, retreat or turn to reaction.
Was this inevitable? Panel debate.
In association with The Times
Literary Supplement
Unspeakability
and " By Jove", and eve n "Oddsboddikins" ,
In his day, "one of the unfo rgivabl e wor ds of
abuse " was "bastard" , which is no longer so.
It remain s true, however, that "the word
' whore' is among the angriest prop ertie s of
swearing in any class". Th e thin gs yo u dar e
not spea k about nowada ys concern race and
reli gion , as M artin Ami s has recentl y found .
A point we ll mad e by Graves form s the
main obj ecti on to the pueril e habit of swear-
ing for effect tod ay: "The chi ef strength of
the oa th everyw here is that it is forbidden by
author ity". Once preci ou s, it is now worth-
less. Lars Porsena pro ved popular: our cop y
is the 1929 fifth impression ; it co st £4.50.
T he TLS Reviewer 's Handbook , an update
(see N B, last wee k, etc). Whil e our team
of lexico graph ers toil s in the underground
We asked the editor charge d with shepherd-
lab yrinth, inching toward s rulin gs on matt ers
ing the review to the page . He could see no
of sty le - "rock and roll, not rock 'ri 'r oll "; The
rea son to stand in the way of "the reviewer' s
preferenc e". Anoth er editor felt that the use
Wednesday 5 December
18 .30 - 20. 00
ABSURD
LUDMILLA PETRUSHEVSKAYA
A special program me of absurd film, poetry
and song conceived by one of Russia's truly
great writers. A total experience where black
humo ur and eccentricity are made beautif ul.
Part of Russian ACT
Price £6 (concessions £4)
Book Online http:/ /boxoffice.bl.uk
TLS N OVE M BER 23 2007
ugly. But in the morn ing 1 shall be sober" .
Wh at is the source of these Churchillisms?
In The Quote Verifier, Ralph Keyes tell s us
that the first rem ark about Attl ee is allegedly
dr awn from a con ver sation with Harr y S.
Truman, but "archivists at the Tru ma n
Libr ary ca n find no ev ide nce that such an
excha nge took place". Th e auth enti cit y of the
second is doubted by Richard Lan gworth ,
"editor of the Churchill Ce ntre". As for the
drun k / sober ge m, " members of Churchill's
famil y qu estion it. He held his liqu or we ll
and was galla nt to wo me n" .
Times, but the Guardian - we we lco me the Never mind . There 's always Oscar Wil de.
views of the per son in the street. One writes "One must ha ve a heart of stone to read the
to ask what our style is on the neutr al pro- death of Littl e Nell without lau ghin g." Thi s,
noun . You kno w the kind of thin g: "W hen "like man y of Wild e' s me mora ble q uips,
the reader encounters a poem by X, he knows appears nowhere in his publi shed writing" (a
he is in the hands of a master . . .". Som e folk friend recorded it). Another grea t wit, M ark
objec t to the use of "he" in thi s cont ext, think- Twain , said : "Wag ner's mu sic is better than
ing it discriminator y. Co mmon se nse says it it sounds" - except (as you've guesse d) he
is prud ent to use "he or she", but the struc ture didn 't. Th e source is the humori st Bill Nye.
of a parti cular sentence might mak e that Sever al Twain witt ici sm s have been reattrib-
usage cumberso me . "What is your sty le?" uted to H. L. Mencken , such as, "The only
as ks our reason able reader. He points to a way for a newspaperm an to look at a politi-
review by lan Pindar on p5 of the TLS of cian is down". Mencken reattribut ed it to
Novemb er 9 . It included the foll owin g: Frank Simo nds . Oth er Twaini sms that could
"W hen it com es to ficti on ... the reader pro- not have been made by anyo ne el se (tho ugh
duces the space of the novel as much as the they were) include "Golf is a goo d wa lk
writer, drawin g on her ow n memory, ex peri-
e nce a nd under standin g" . Wh y " he r" ?
spo iled" ; "W henever I feel an urge to exer-
ci se Ili e do wn until it goes away" ; HIt' s easy
to give up smo king . I' ve done it hundred s of
tim es" . However , he did say : "Few thin gs are
harder to put up with than the annoyance of a
go od exa mple". Hil ariou s.
or her / he or she" would have don e. Som e
might see the forc e of that arg umen t when, as
in thi s case , both the reviewer and the author
T he first contribution to the TLS by Vern on
Scann ell, who has died age d eighty-five,
was a poem , " Romantic Suicide" , publi shed
und er review are male. Fiftee n writers and half a century ago. Over the decades he was a
ficti on al ch aract ers are cited in the piece, of regul ar presenc e in these pages, as poet and
whom fourteen are male. Wh y is the put ative criti c, and as the autho r of man y bo ok s und er
read er a "she" ? review. In addition to his volumes of poetr y,
We asked Mr Pind ar, who repli ed: " I the last of which appea red ea rlier this year,
would not use ' she ' as a matter of course, as Scann ell wro te novel s and memoirs. In The
some femini sts do. It is a qu estion of person al Tiger and the Rose, he describ ed how he
choice . If some male reader s are mom ent aril y desert ed from the Arm y after takin g part in
alienated by it, they are merel y bein g asked the Normandy Landings, and fell back on his
to perform the sort of ment al gy mnastics that skill as a boxer. You don't read this sort of
wo me n read ers are ex pected to perform thin g in the autobiographies of many poets:
almos t all of the time" . However, he gamely 1 started fast and landed a couple of good jabs
brou ght to our notic e the guida nce of Judith but he got underneath the third and, once agai n,
Butcher, author of Copy-Editing: " Inclusive grabbed me in a clinch. He trapped my right
lan guage which dr aws atte ntion to itself as glove firmly under his left arm and, before I
such will distra ct the reader ; the aim sho uld could free myself and push him away, he man-
be unobtru siv eness". Expec t to find that
quoted in the final revision of the Handbook.
aged to get his own right gloveto my face, palm-
ing upwards with the inside and the lace. I wres-
tled free, eve n more determined to finish him
H alf of Britain reveres Win ston Churchill
for inspiring the nation to victory in the
Sec ond World War with bro om stick s and tin
off after this blatant infringement of the rules.
Lik ewise, there are few amo ng our pool of
reviewers who ca n be called o n to review
hats; the oth er half values him as a wit. Of competentl y books abo ut Benn y Lynch,
Cleme nt Attl ee , his success or as Prim e An gelo Dund ee and Rock y Marc iano. About
Mini ster, Churchill sa id, "Attlee is a very the last, Sc ann ell wrote in 1977 that he was
mode st man . . . who ha s m uch to be m od est "the m os t ex trao rd ina ry hea vywei ght ever to
abo ut" . Attl ee was also "a shee p in win the wor ld title and one who, despit e the
shee p's clothing" . To the woma n who formid able claim s of Muh amm ad A li, must
accuse d him of being drunk at a dinn er part y, sure ly be rank ed the grea tes t".
Churc hill respond ed: "And you, madam , are J .C .
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