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"shunned all physical relation-
ships", writes D. J. Taylor.
But he wrot e memorable
letters, skilfully used by his
.. S exual dimorphism" is biographer, includi ng a fine
the bio log ist' s nam e for descrip tion of Sir Frederick
what the rest of us recognise Ashton tripping oUI of a giant
as differences between the champagne glass onto a din-
fem ale of the species and the ing room table dressed only in
mal e. Th e female may be a black sequin widow ' s veil,
often smaller, sometimes gloves and shoes .
do wdier or dead lier , occ asion - J ohn Co wpe r P ow ys, c1 914 Mozart w as a n even more
ally bigger and , in the case of accomplished letter-wr iter, a
the Cra b Sp ider , it see ms, up complex, and unusual fami ly skill learnt from his father
to one hundred times bigger , dyn am ics at the roya l court and used for eleganl abu se,
"one of the larg est" d imor- of Korea in the eighteenth musica l go ssip and famou s
phism s in the entire anima l century . Th is wee k she takes scata log ical fu n. Tbe con duc-
kingdom . A thirty-year study on the hard ly less complex tor , biographer and cri lie
of these squat, sideways- per sonal life of the va st Cow- Jane Glover pra ises a new
scuttling, claw- wa ving and per Po wys clan, con sid erin g edition, while taking issue on
uncomfortably matched litt le a ne w and " m aj o r work" on the proper tran slation of
creatures is revi ew ed by John Cowper Po wys, sado- vibralo.
Matthe w Co bb - alon g with a masoch ist, fanlasist and A . N. Wi lson enters the
book on the Harvestmen, author of We ymouth Sand s, lists for the best ch ildren' s
anoth er sex ually anoma lous alongside a restor ed ed ition book of the Second World
trib e of arachnids . of Pori us, the late nov el he War. W as it a Bigg les or a
Marg aret Drabb les last con sidered his masterp iec e. Blyton, "T he Cha let School
2005 rai sed issues of evo lu-
tionary bio log y, the Oed ipu s
The painter , set-designer
and observer of the Bright
Youn g Peopl e, Edward Burra
in Ex ile" or "T he Little Gre y
Men " ?
P S
TL S N O VE M B E R 16 200 7

Ichthyosaurus ego
John Cowper Powys, patron saint of desperate introverts and creator of mythic
masterpieces, receives the biography that the psychodrama of his life deserves
ohn Cow per Powys is a bio grapher' s
J nightmare. He was immen sely produ c-
tive, he continued to publish until he
was in his late eighties, he kept a diar y,
he wro te thou sands of letter s, and his hand-
writing was illegibl e. His immediate fam ily
was vas t (he was the oldes t of eleve n child-
ren), all his siblings were important to him,
and some to literary history. Hoards of his
papers surv ived, so me by chance in pro ver-
bial attics, and his last large novel, Porius,
was never publi shed in full in his lifetim e,
although the original manu script s and type-
scripts also survived in sca ttere d location s in
different countri es. How to make a coherent
narrati ve out of this embarrass me nt of
riches? It needed courage to take up the
challenge, and Morin e Krissd6ttir has risen to
it with outstanding success. Descents of
Memory is a rem arkabl e book .
Nearl y all of Po wys' s writing is openly
autobiog raphica l, root ed in his childhood, in
his own troubl ed psyche , in the land scapes of
Wales and the West Co untry and in the
biz arre Powys famil y rom anc e. This gives a
biograph y an added interest and ju stific ation .
Although he publi shed , in 1934, one of the
most astonishingly frank autobiographies
since that of Rousseau , whom he made his
model, this raised as many questions as it
answe red. Some of it seeme d wildly implau si-
ble, the work of a voye uristic, sado masochis-
tic and pornography-addicted fant asist, yet it
is so brilli antl y written and so packed with
circum stantial det ail that it comp els respect ,
and most of it rings oddly true. Disent anglin g
fact from fiction ca nnot have been easy, and
it mu st have been temptin g at times to aba n-
don close investigation, but Krissd6ttir has
pur sued her subje ct rigorou sly. She enters
into his sec ret world of dark inten sity, yet
mana ges not to have been dri ven mad . She
confesses, in her introduction , that his works
"both attract ed and repul sed" her , yet she
becam e enthralled by them and by him . She
is too discreet to intrud e herself as narr ator
into the story , excep t at one or two well-
timed and poi gnant (not to say heartbr eakin g)
moment s, but her volume ca n onl y have been
the result of a long apprentices hip, a long
friend ship , a long quest. Powys and the part-
ner of hi s later yea rs, Phyllis Playter , emerge
from th is chroni cle as two powerful , fragi le,
bra ve and ecc entric figur es, charact er s from a
myth they wove for them sel ves.
The importance of Powys' s oeuvre is
widely accepted and as widely ignored . Thi s
was partly his own fault. As his biographer
reveals, he was, time and again, his own
worst enemy, a man who had no sense of self-
preservation, although he mysteriously lived
to be ninety-two, in poor health and on a
diet of stale bread and tea. His first forty
years showed little promi se of the great novels
to come, for after an unhapp y boyhood at
Sherborn e Scho ol (we learn in Descents of
BIOGRAPHY
MARGAR ET DRABBL E
M orin e Kris sd 6ttir
DE S C E N T S OF M EMO R Y
The life of John Cow per Powys
480pp. Duckworth/O verlook Press. £25 (US $40).
978 158 5679 17 I
John C o wp er Po w y s
POR IU S
A novel
Edited by Murine Krissd6ttir and Judith Bond
624pp. Duckworth/O verlook Press.
£25 (US $37.95).
978 1 585673667
Memory that he did not tell the whole truth
about his schooldays) and an undistinguished
university career, he embarked on a pointless
and unfortunate marriage, from which he
escaped as an itinerant lecturer on literature in
7.11.07 Madrid
"Sakeuntala" , the scu lpture a lso
known as "L'Abandon", by Camille
Claudel (1864 -1943) goes on display at
the Fundacion Mapfre, reviving argu-
ments about th e artist's reputation.
Will sh e a lways be known as Rodin's
abused muse and lover - or was sh e a
genius in her own right? In 1998 our
critic Fiona MacCarthy named Claud el
as an example of how feminist guilt has
led to the over-estimation of certain
TLS N O V E M B E R 16 200 7
Britain, and then in the United States, where
he stayed for decades. He was a hypnotic
speaker, and could draw crowds of thousand s
as he lectured on Homer, Whitm an, Nietzsche,
Rabelais and other favourit es: in those years
he earned good money, much of which he sent
home to support his wife and the child he
hardly ever saw. But the good times did not
last. He had his own high standards of
integrity but no financi al sense, and his follies
on this front are carefully docum ented by
Krissd6ttir with a kind of impatient admira-
tion . With the appearance in 1929 of his fourth
published novel, Wolf Solent, when he was
nearing sixty, it looked as thou gh he was about
to becom e a success in spite of him self, as the
book sold surprisingly well, but he managed to
avoid this fate by a series of ludicrou sly mis-
handled contracts, throu gh carelessly incur-
ring expensive libel action s, and by misunder-
standing his English wife's astute and self-
interested reading of the financia l imp lications
women as artists. Dora Carrington was
a beneficiary of the same trend, she
said. A TL S review of a novel about
ClaudeI's life in 2004 d escribed "a
mistreated and exceptionally gift ed
woman". In th e same year another
r eview concentrated a lso on an
acbievement, though not one like ly to
appeal to feminist supporters: how her
suffering inspired the poet Paul
Claudel, her brother.
3
of his relation ship with his Americ an mistress.
It is a cautionary tale from which he emerges
as a tragicomic clown , a role which many of
his fictional characters assume.
The story of the disastrou s libel probl em s,
real and potenti al, arising from two of his
major novels, A Glastonb ury Romance
(1932) and Weymouth Sands (1934), is told
in full for the first time by Krissdottir, and if
the det ail ove rwhe lms a casual read er
(though casual readers do not much favour
Powys), it will grip his fell ow authors.
Publi shers, age nts and insur ance companies
are the villains of the piece, not the litigant.
Powys see ms to have been incapable of read-
ing a contract, and this wea kness was
exploited eve n by tho se who ought to have
prot ected him . Krissd6ttir gives the cont ext ,
reminding us that this period was notorious
for libe l and obscenity actions again st writers
(she cites D. H. Lawrenc e, l ames Hanl ey,
Havelock Ellis, Co mpton Mack enzi e and
Llewelyn Powys' s lover Game l Wool sey),
but she conc edes that Powy s was singularly
reckl ess and unfortunate - part ly, as he
claim ed , becau se he was psychic , and
guesse d the truth even when he could not
have kno wn it, a dan ger peculiar to novelists.
In the first of these cases, the ow ner of
Wookey Hole, then and now a famou s touri st
attraction in So merse t, claim ed that Powys' s
portrait of the entrepre neur Philip Crow , the
fictitiou s owner of this cave, libelled him,
and there we re indeed coinc ident al similari-
ties which might well have made him take
offe nce. C apta in Hodgkinson ' s action was
not edifying, but it was more ju stifiabl e than
the ways in wh ich Powys' s Am eric an and
Engli sh publishers and their insurers tried to
shift the blame and make Po wys pay. Simon
and Schu ster , Bodley Head and the agent
Laur ence Pollin ger we re all so mew hat shab-
bi ly involved in this battle, which, despite an
appea l to the Society of Authors, pro ved di s-
astrous. It would be unwise to attempt a
preci s of this account for fear of arousing
furth er libel actions, but the outc ome was
clear: Powys was pu shed to the brink of ruin ,
where he hun g peri lously for the rest of his
life, refusing seve ral offers of help . His pub-
lishers, fearing a second and similar onslaught
on Weymouth Sands (1934) , set very recogniz-
ahly in the town of the title, forced him to cut
and rewrite and rename his characters, and the
book was born mutil ated but, like its breech-
born author , indestructible.
If es tablishing the fact s of these and
many other confusing sequences were all that
Krissd6ttir had achieve d, we would still owe
her a grea t debt. But she gives us much , much
more. Her readin g of Powy s' s states of
mind (his " life illusion ") and techniques for
surviva l is unfailin gly sensitive , and her use
of the fiction , letter s and diari es as illustra-
tion shows us why we need to pay attention
Continued on page 4
4

Continued f rom page 3

BIOGRAPHY 3 Margaret Drabble Morine Krfssdottir Descent s of Mem ory - The life of John Cowper Powys to thi s man. She catch es the colours of his
John Cowper Powys Porius - A novel land scapes and the very mo vem ent of his
D. J . Taylor Jane Stevenson Edwa rd Burr a spirit. She sa lvages fine mom ent s from
unpubli shed holo gr aph s: here is Pow ys after
LETT ERS TO TH E ED ITOR 6 The London Library, ' War and Peace' , The Assumption, etc the libel disaster , presentin g him self as no-
nam e Dud in an early draft of Maiden Castle,
M USI C 9 Jane Glover Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart A Life in Lett ers; edited by Cliff Eise n "a man " , she writes , "in inten se shock, for
Franz Xaver Niemetschek Mo zart - The first biography whom eve n natur e cannot give solace" :
POE MS 10 John Mole Cluedo Keeping his eyes carefully on the rut before
18 Claire Crowther Room Unde r the Stair s him , his mind visualized rather than articul ated
the syllables "Fever-Few" and, immediately
HIS TORY 12 Adam Tooze Norman Davies Euro pe at War 1939-1 945 - No simple victory afterwards, the syllables "Camomile" .
Here, in the margin between co nscio usness and
SCI EN C E 13 Thomas Dixon Peter J . Bowler Monkey Tri als and Gor illa Serm on s - Evolution and uncon sciou sness, the two wo rds, or rath er the
Christianity from Dar win to Intelli gent Design faint simulacra of the two wo rds, hung sus-
Sahotra Sarkar Doubting Dar win ? - Creationist design s on evolution pended, like diml y-seen vesse ls in a reg ion
where sea and sky were indi stin gui shable.
COMMENTAR Y 14 John E. Joseph He was an Englishman - Ferdinand de Saussures ances try Thi s is Powys, the patron saint of all desper-
Hugo WiIliams Freela nce ate introvert s who hop e to be save d, as his
Then and Now TLS Ma y 20, 1949 - Nor ma n Mailer admirer J. B. Priestley put it, "by long soli-
tar y wa lks" . She quotes at more len gth so me
ARTS 17 Keith Miller Wat er (Ly ric Th eatre, Hammersmith)
of his better-known passages, such as the
The World as a Stage (Tate Mod ern)
ex traordinary description of the floodin g of
Muriel Zagha Eas tern Promises (Various cin em as)
the Somerset Level s:
FICTION 19 Mick Imlah Posy Simmonds Ta mara Drewe Up the sands and shoals and mudflats, up the
Beth Lynch Carol Birch Sc apeg allows inlet s and estuaries and back waters of that
Anthony Cummins Clare Wigfall The Loud est Sound and Nothing channel-shore raced steadily, higher and higher
Sarah Curtis Salley Vickers Wh ere Thr ee Road s Meet as day followed day, these irresistible hosts of
Jonathan Beckman Antal Szerb 0 liver VII ; tran slated by Len Rix invadin g waters . . . . There was a strange co l-
Matthew Tree Quim Monzo Th e Enormity of the Tr aged y; translated hy Peter Rush our upon them , too, these far-trave lled deep-
Chitralekha Basu Elif Shafak Th e Bastard of Istanbul sea waves , and a strange sme ll rose up from
them, a smell that came from the far off mid-
NATU RAL SCIENCE 22 Matthew Cobb Machado Pinto-da-Rocha et ai, editors Har vestm en - Th e biolog y of Atlantic for many days. They were like the
Opiliones death mounds of some huge wasteful battle-
Douglass H. Morse Predator upon a Flo wer - Life history and fitn ess in a field carried along by an earthquake and tossed
crab spide r up into milli ons of hill summits.
And on the pro se surg es, for four pages, for ,
MEDIA ST UDIES 23 J ames Fergusson Bridget Fowler The Obituary as Collective M emory as she dril y note s, "Powys never freed waters
Nigel Starck Life After Death - The art of the obituary by half'.
Mo st of the col ourful character s in the
CLAS SIC S 24 Andrew Feldherr Catharine Edwards Death in Anci ent Rom e psych odrama of his life are member s of the
Powys clan. They include his writer-brothers,
ART HISTORY 25 Angus Trumble Martin Kemp The Human Anim al in Western Art and Sci enc e
the dark, depr essed , oddl y larg e-he aded
Th eodore, who se so n was torn to piece s by
LIT ERARY CRIT ICISM 26 Celine Surprenant Anthony R . Pugh Th e Gro wth of 'A la Recherche du temp s perdu ' -
"disaffected nati ves" while visiting one of hi s
Volume One: 1909-1911
Nathalie Mauriac Dyer Prou st inache ve - Le do ssier ' Alb ertin e less ecce ntric uncl es in Afric a, and con sump-
disparue ' tive curl y-haired Llew elyn, known as Lulu ,
Sophie Duval L'lronie prou stienn e - La vision stereos copique who wa s not as ange lic as he look ed. Mak ing
lov e "it la Lulu " wa s John' s cod e for penetra-
Stephane Chaudier Prou st et le langage reli gieu x
tive sex, a method he did not favour but
A. N. Wilson Owen Dudley Edwards British Children's Fiction in the Second World War
32 Andrew Hadfield Beatrice Groves Tex ts and Tradition s - Religion in Shakespeare 1592-1604 occasionally pra cti sed, whereas Lulu
practi sed it randomly and frequ entl y. Then
IN BRIEF 30 Ronan McDonald Th e Ca mbridge Introduction to Samuel Beck ett there were the sisters, sad Katie , independent
Judith Bishop Eve nt lace-m akin g Mari an , practical bee-k eeping
Kenneth Baker George III - A life in caric atur e Gertrude, and little Luc y, who lived on until
David Renton, David Seddon and Leo Zeilig Th e Congo - Plunder and 1986, and was buried with no flow ers on her
resistanc e bier, but a tin y doll - a black coated clergy-
Rosemary Goring, editor Scotland: Th e Autobiography - 2,000 yea rs of man. (Their father had been a clergym an , and
Scottish histor y by tho se who saw it happ en so wa s John ' s ill-fated son.) Th e feelin gs
Sebastian Horsley Dandy in the Und erworld between seve ra l famil y memb er s verged on
Celia Lyttelton The Scent Trail - A journey of the senses the ince stuou s, andMarion' s son, Peter,
Mark Urban Fusiliers - Eight years with the Redcoats in Am eric a app ears to have beli eved for mo st of his life
Laura Leedy Gansler The Mysterious Pri vate Thompson - The double that he was the son of his uncl e John ; a beli ef
life of Sarah Emma Edmo nds , Civil War soldier that Marion and John see m not wholly to
have di scouraged, but which was almost cer-
35 This week 's contributors, Crossword tainl y not true . (Peter committed suicide in
1992, ha ving sent his journals to Krissd6ttir.)
NB 36 r.c, Donl eavy in Pari s, Patriotic verse, ' We avoid ' , RIP Nor man M ailer The siblings offer neuroses too exa ggerated
to be described as textb ook Freudi an ca se
histori es, but Krissd6ttir confronts all thi s
melodramatic and at tim es ludicrous confu-
sion with profession al ex pertise, sympathetic
distanc e and a much-needed wit. Th e
Powyses found them selves funn y at tim es,
Cove r picture: Sunset ove r the Dee Estuary © Colin McPherson/Corbis; p2 © from Descents of Memory by Morin e Krissdottir , reviewed on p3; p3 © Philippe and luckil y so does she . It was a period
Desm azes/AFP/Getty Images; pl 6 © Hulton Archive/Ge tty Images; p17 © Catherine Sulliva n, co urtesy Ga lerie Ca rher ine Bastide, Bru ssels and Metro Pictur es, distingui shed by proliferating psychoanalytic
New York ; p22 © M. F. Merl et/Science Photo Library; p29 © Dean & So n Ltd/Roger Harris theori es and outpourings of psych osexu al

TLS N O VE M BE R 16 200 7
 BIOGRAPHY 5

"Inside/Outside" (2002) from I Love Pictures! by Tim Walker (160pp. Hanover: Kestnergesellschaft. €35. 978 3 775 7 2111 0)

confession , but the Powy s rom anc e takes doing his "yoga" . At on e point she bec ame so Pow ys robed as a magician. Earlier in 1939, ov erwhelming evocation of the primal land-
us beyond Freud and Jung and Hav elock enra ged by the holes in the carp et , and white they had seen Stra vin sky' s ballet Petrushka scapes of Wales, peopled by some eve ryda y
Ellis, and into the wilde r realm s of tantric pile s of cigar ette ash, that she se ized his ha ir in Lond on , which bec ame another of their Welsh village characters from the twentieth
yoga, gland chemi stry and alchemy, where and pulled off his spectacles in " insane fur y" , alternative life myth s: thereafter he fre- century. She tell s us that while he was writ-
Krissd6ttir proves an ex pert guide . but "his prid e and dignity did not see m to be qu entl y describ ed him self as the sad clo wn ing it, Pow ys used to encourage his imagina-
Th e heroine of thi s saga was not born , and even so much as cro ssed by the shadow of a Petru shk a and Phylli s as "the Danc er" . (Kriss- tion by a ritu al of holdin g his head und er
never legall y bec ame, a Po wys. Phylli s dra gonfly . ... I deser ve to be a bent sha rp d6ttir is al so editor of Petrushka and the water in a basin to "think of the she lls and
Pla yter , kno wn to John as the "T T .", or the stick stuck forever in a muddy and uncomfort- Dancer: The diary of John Cowper Powys, sea -a nemones and sea -wee d and pebbles . . . .
"Tiny Thin" or the "Tylwyth Teg", was his able crevice in Leth e forever". Tho se fam iliar June 1934-July 1935 , 1995 .) Thus I dail y go back to the Edge of the Sea
slende r fair y sylph, his "elemental" , who ful- with the Powys style will reco gniz e from So po werful are these ima gin ar y world s out of which all life orig inally sprang" . What
filled his need for embodied disembodiment. such passages the natur e of their bond. that it is slightly shoc king to learn of some of he called his "ichthyosaurus ego " was still
She was a youn g Am erican wo man whom he One would expect, in the twent y-fir st the more ordinary of their dai ly activities - searching for its prehi storic ori gin s, and for
had met in 1921 , when at the age of twent y- century, to react with indi gnation aga inst Phylliss much -needed restorative lunch es in its reunion with the natural wo rld.
six she attended on e of his lectures in Jopl in, such arch etypa l exploitation, but their mutu al the We ssex Hotel during their Dorchester Th e original text of Porius was heavily cut
Mi ssouri. She was twent y-t wo yea rs yo unge r fanta sy and mutual dep end enc e remo ves years, her shopping trips, John ' s joining of at the requ est of his publisher s, whose init ial
than him . The y imm edi atel y embarked o n a them to a mythic land where normal judge- the London Library, their evenings read ing reaction had been that it wa s indecipherable,
corr espondence which evo lved into a lifelong ment s do not see m to appl y. Here is Pow ys, C. P. Snow and A lan Sillitoe in their last and overwritten , and long-winded : they may also ,
union . Playter had a frail body and a sensi- on Pla yter ' s de sire to have a real child to mo st impractical of home s at Blaenau Ffestin- mor e pro saically, hav e plead ed the post-war
tive, depr essive and occ asion ally hysterical repl ace the " stone child " she had "adopted" iog . But the y never dw indl ed into norm ality paper shortage . He set about " scraping" his
temp erament , but in Pow ys she had met , in and nam ed Perdita. (Th ey also had a toy doll or banality. Pow ys ' s last work s, such as The "great buggerl y book" with reluctant vigour,
every sense, her match. called Ol wen and an ima gin ary chi ld ca lled Bra zen Head and At lantis, bring to mind boa sting he wa s "a ma ster-cutter" , and fear -
Th ey both lived at a pitch of great emo- Glauk .) He wrot e " I wi ll not ever con sider - some of Dori s Lessing' s work s of inn er- ing that his publishers wanted to delay it
tional intensity, and recorded their stor ms in in this po int [my] deepest Selfi shn ess or Ego- space fiction : these bold mind s trav el into the becau se when "this old sod dies .. . his pric e
letters and diaries, some of which have only ism is Ad amantine - eve n so much as a unknown where few dare or wish to follow. will go up". (The y would have had to wa it a
recently com e to light. She wrot e with a quiv- thou ght of a litt le Perdita! My on ly dau ghter Krissd6ttir is cr itical of some of his mor e long time, for he did not die unt il 1963, and
ering and defenc eless hon esty of her rages, is a Stone - the daughter of a stone - & my incoherent later efforts, but she reserve s her Playter lived unti l 1982 .) It has now been pub-
and she had much to rage ahout. Wh en they onl y little girl is the TT."'. Such a highest praise for Porius, a g igantic nov el lished in a new editio n edited hy Kr ixsdottir
were living, in the 1930 s, at their remote f olie-a-deu x goe s beyond abu se and imba l- (which includes giants in its cast) set in and Jud ith Bond, rea ssembled from man y var-
country hom e, Phudd Bottom, in upstat e ance. Playter was an eq ual partner in and a Wal es in 499 AD , written when he was in his iant versions. Who le sce nes have been
New York , without electricity , heating, or eo-creator of this myth , not a help less victim seventies, and first publ ished in a heav ily restor ed , including a significant sectio n about
indoor plumbing, she not onl y had to cope of it. They were both role players, rescuin g edited version in 1951. a magical child which Krissd6ttir arg ues was
with scrubbing linoleum , lightin g fires, fill - them sel ves from psychic tor ment and met a- Powys believed it to be his ma sterpi ece, an essential part of the original alchemical
ing oil stoves and carrying ashes and grocer- ph ysical despair by endless ly renewed inven - and so doe s Kri ssd6ttir. As she says, "it is plot. One can only hop e that this mythic
ies, but also had to type manu script s and tion. Photographs of Playter show her more impossibl e to summarize this hug e ' Dark masterp iece will now find the reader s that it
admini ster enemas to her bo wel -ob sessed frequ entl y in fanc y dress than in her ord inar y Ages' novel of nine hundred typ eset pages deserv es, for it is, as critics hav e argu ed , fit to
partn er , and sympathize with him when hi s cloth es: we see her as a girl of fourt een in with its fort y-nin e characters and ch aotic be compared both for ambition and achi eve-
ulcer spat " with a froth of fury like a sea Breton costum e, aged thirt y-four in an events" . Poriu s is, on one level, a hi stor ical ment with Ulysses, while the bio graphy,
anemone" . He, mean wh ile, never learned antiq ue Ru ssian lace headdress lent to her by novel which deal s with the decl ine of Rom an Descents of Memory, de serv es to stand with
how to open a window or pull up a blind, and John ' s sister Marian, and in 1939 as a danc er rule in Br itain and Jessie L. We ston' s inter- Richard Ellma nn's James Joyce as a major
describ ed lying on a sofa reading a book as in Halloween costume, acco mpa nied by pret ation of the G rail legend, but it is also an work about a major arti st.

TLS NO VE MBE R 16 200 7

6
German war
memorials
Sir , - Mar k Whittow (Letters,
Nove mber 9) com ments that mem o-
rials have always struck him as a
"rich pot ential source for insights
into the Ge rma n twenti eth ce ntury"
and hop es that "someone will be
inspired to use them as a basis for a
book" . There is a book which
provi des such insight s, thou gh co n-
cerne d not wi th memori als to the
two Wor ld Wars but to another
neglect ed area of study , Germa n
co lonial history. In his book
Kolonialdenk miiler und Gesc hich ts-
bewusstsein, Joachi m Ze ller begin s
with an ex ten ded discussion on his-
tori cal consciou sness, the symbo lic
role of mem or ial s and the ways in
which they may be interpreted.
EDWA RD NEATHER
Long Summers, Woo dbur y, Devon .
Sir, - There are many interestin g
wa r mem ori al s in Ger ma ny, but
so me do not comm em orate Ge r-
man s.
I recentl y visi ted the prett y town
of Tor gau, near Leip zig, lookin g for
the ven ue of the fir st German-
language opera (Dafne, by Heinri ch
Sc hiitz, 1627). Torgau also hap-
pened to be where the US and Rus-
sian armies met across the Elbe in
1945 . On the riverb ank , there is a
towerin g monum ent, "To the Red
Ar my and their heroic allies in their
triumph ove r fascist Ger ma ny" .
Fac ing it across the road is a large
bas-relief tableau (in rather cru mbly
concrete) depictin g Red Army
heroes, some wo unded, gree ted in
front of the town by grateful Ger man
citizens: " Ruhrn dem Sov ietvo lk -
danke fur seine Befreiu ngstat". I
wo ndered who actually put that up.
In the town museum a few hund red
yards away , a flight of steps leads
down into a cellar. A plaque tells us
that "in these cellars, on May 18,
1945, ten days befor e the end of
the war, Torga u citizens Herm an n
Schneider and Em il Stoll were mur-
dered by plund erin g Sov iet soldiers".
Elsew here in town there is a ceme -
tery with the graves of a hund red or
more Russ ian soldiers. The cemetery
is neatly kept, but firml y locked.
JO NATH AN FA I.I .A
We st Co ttage , Glend uckie , Cupar .
Fife.
----~,----
'War and Peace'
Sir, - It is best not to respond to bad
reviews, but when negati ve criticism
is gleefully repeated the time has
co me to fight back. (See "Tomrny in
Mosc ow", NB, Nove mber 9, and
NB, Augu st 12, 2005) . I wish to cor-
rect seve ral mistakes by J. C. in his
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
The London Library Jews demandin g the right to emi-
grate, defend ers of their nation ' s
language and culture (Crimea n
Tatars trying to return to their home-
Sir, - Paul Barker and his co- of the Lib rar y' s 6,000 ordinar y land , or Cheche ns, Baits, Ukra ini-
signator ies (Le tters, November 9) memb ers deser ve alms to the ans and others who hoped to see an
have give n a tend ent iou s account of value of £ 165 a yea r eac h from the end to Moscow' s misrule of their
the back ground to the increase of Tru stees. native land), private marketeers
subsc riptions for ordin ary memb ers Paul Bark er complains that he who risked the death pen alty
of the Lond on Library from £2 10 was prevented fro m summing up for "speculation", env ironme ntalist
to £37 5 and of the meeti ng which on behalf of those who oppose d wor kers ass ociating in illegal inde-
agreed to thi s recomm endati on. It the inc rease. Th e fact is that he was pendent trades unions and dem on-
is not the case that there was " no o ut of orde r, and that the feelin g of strating aga inst shortages and poor
prior con sultation " or that the pro- the meetin g was aga inst hearin g yet living co nditions - or mothers
posal was "rushed throu gh " . On the another repetiti on of his views . I demandin g that their sons be
contrary, successive reports fro m had the misfortune to be sitting brought hom e from Afghanistan. A
the Treasurer have warne d for yea rs Ietters @the-tls.co .uk near Mr Barker during the meeti ng, "within-system reform er" such as
that it costs far mo re to run the and lost co unt of the tim es that he And rei Sakharov was sufficiently
Lib rary than its 6,000 ordin ary There we re dignified speec hes bobb ed up on his feet or made inter- influenc ed by these circles to move
members have been pay ing in fees. opposing the increase, but overall I jections while others we re spea k- into overt dissidenc e. Western radio
Memb ers were asked last yea r to ag reed with someo ne who atte nded ing. Mos t of us already knew by stations broadcast dissident views
pay the prop er cost of member ship the mee ting with an ope n mind and heart his tedi ou s rigm arole of still more widely. Archie Brow n's
vo luntarily, and some of us imme- ex cla ime d to me afterw ards, "what lam ents. claim that repression had reduc ed
diatel y did so. an unpl easant sou nd is made by the "the never-large dissident mo ve-
Th e Barker letter shirks any ex pla- Eng lish middl e cl asses defending RICH ARD DAVENPO RT- HINES ment to groups that were both
nation of the fee increase, which is their ow n sel fis h interests und er the 5 I E1sha m Road , London W 14. minu scule and marginalized" is
necessitated by the Trus tees' deci- guise of high-toned mo ral indi gn a- therefore open to debate.
sion to stop spe nding the capit al of tion " . Th e Lond on Libr ary is a char- Sir, - We write to suppo rt the need
the reserves (built up over fort y ity that ex ists to amass and preser ve for tim e to recon sider at the Lon don lAIN ELLIO T
yea rs) to subsidize in a very sho rt- the raw materi als for learning rather Lib rary, as prop osed in a letter last 42 Pre ston Park Avenue, Brighton .
term, arbitrary way the member shi p than to pro vid e pecun iary benefit s wee k. We feel there is a serious
----~----
fees of people who happen to be cur- for its memb ers. Tho se who sup- danger that the large increase in the
rent me mbers, altho ugh all income
fro m the Lib rary' s reser ved invest-
port ed the Trus tees' recomm end-
ation rej ect ed - perhaps like me
annua l fees may dr ive away so
man y memb ers that the Library
The Union
men ts will continue to be allotted to they we re repell ed by - the special Sir, - Davie Lain g (Letters, Nov -
ceases to be viable. It is sure ly not
the runnin g costs. The amount taken pleading that, ju st bec ause nice necessary to argue in the TLS that
ember 9) sugges ts that "a robu st
out of reserves this yea r to cover run- boo ks are involved , the Libr ary politi cal culture" in Sco tland "left
thi s wo uld be a disas tro us outco me.
ning costs is £800,000; the amo unt Tru stees sho uld give a dol e, yea r by its mark on the fin al term s" of the
taken out of rese rves to cover run- yea r, promi scuou sly, to each and ANTONY BEEVOR, ALAN Treaty of Union of 1707. It is cer-
nin g costs since 1999 is abo ut £5 eve ry one of the Lib rary ' s 6,000 BE NNETT, MA RGA RET tainl y true that pop ular feelin g
million. At current rates there will ordinary memb er s - rich , poor and DR ABBL E, M IC HAE L FRA YN, aga inst the Union was dem on-
be no rese rves left within a decade. those sca ttered in between. Nothing JOHN .IULIUS NO RW ICH strated by prot ests in the stree ts and
No rese rves ; no Libr ary. will con vince me that the maj or ity 85 SI Mar k ' s Road , London W IO. a flood of addresses to the Parlia-
ment aga inst the Union and not one
---------------~ ,----------------in favour ; but there is not the slight-
comm ent s on my 2005 tran slation of of refineme nt. His excla mation to Williams wo uld like to give serious est ev ide nce that thi s had any
War and Peace, which has repla ced the troop s de rives from the ph rase, co ns ide ra tio n to the op inion of my effec t. The Sco ttish Cha nce llor,
Rosem ary Edmo nds 's version with " I have been fucki ng your moth er gra ndmother that the music of J. S. Sea field, sa id the addresses were
Pen guin Books - thou gh thi s has into her coffin". Th at is too crude for Bach sounds like a sew ing machin e? only fit to make kites.
escaped J. c. 's attention. English ears, even today. Yet it is It is clear fro m the ev ide nce
First, it is no crime to dispen se standar d slang in Ru ssia; hence in ROBI N FU LTON that the term s of the Treat y were
with the French . There was a lot of the theatre of war a reference to the Mj ugha ug terrasse 8, dict ated by an Eng lish elite and
thi s in the ea rly editions of the French as "the fuckin g bastard s" N 4048 Hafrsfjord, Norwa y. accepted by a parli ament ary major-
novel , but in 1873 Tolstoy tran s- seems norm al and appro priate. Now ity of the Scotti sh elite as a conse -
----~---
lated it all into Ru ssian. I was that the wor ds "fuck" and "ye bat" quence of brib es and the threat of
rece ntly congratulated at Yasnaya appear in dictionar ies, there is no
Polyana by Tol stoy' s grea t-great- need to be coy and use initial s. By
Perestroika invasion .
grands on and other spec ialists o n the way, when Pevear and Volokh on- Sir, - In my review of Seven Years PAUL HEND ERSO N SCO TT
using the 1873 edi tio n, which can sky say, "f ... th .. . in the f .. ." , That Changed the World (Nove mber 33 Drum sheugh Garden s,
be rega rded as canon ical. The what does thi s actua lly mea n? 2), I did not intend to correct Archie Edinburg h.
Maudes' vers ion (approve d by To l- Brow n, but rather to put forward an
----~--­
stoy him self) has almos t no Frenc h TO NY BRIGGS alternative view. In my caree r as a
in it; Edmonds uses very littl e.
Th e rend ering of Deni sov' s
Custard Mea d, Sto pper s Hill,
Bri nkworth , Wi ltshire .
Russia watcher, I have had the privi-
lege of meetin g several outstanding
The Assumption
spee ch impedim ent by using a " w" indi viduals know n as dissident s. In Sir, - In his lett er (Novem ber 9)
----~,---
for an "r" is sta nda rd practice , used the yea rs imm ediately before Ge orge Steven Swan qu eries "the
by the Maud es, and also Ed mo nds,
who writes, "What a cwazy bweed
Bach and Brahms Gorbachev took charge we had infor- bibli cal acco unt of the Ass ump -
mation on some 10,000 who had tion " . 1 am remind ed that in 1950 ,
yo u Wostovs are!". Thi s seems Sir, - Peter William s is rightly oppose d abuses of power by the when thi s dogma was first promul-
better than leavin g it out (like Con- rega rded as one of our leading Bach Co mmunist reg ime, but were far gated, my friend the late Ma urice
stance Garn ett ) or resortin g to scho lars, but he seems to be pretty from formin g a spec ific mo vement. Charlton used to spea k of it as
unread able grow ling guttura ls like deaf to the music of Brahm s if he Dissident s brave enough to stand "the grea tes t ass umption in hum an
those of Pevear and Volokho nsky , wants us to give serious co nsidera- up and be co unted were but a small histor y".
("fghro m tomo ghrrow"). tion to G. B. Shaw 's preposterous fraction of those who shared their
Th en the swea ring. Kutuzov is and (I would have thought ) by now views and were on occasion prepared DENYS POTTS
anythi ng but a "refined General" ; quite discredited co mme nts on that to act on them - whether as hum an 12a Bushcombe C lose ,
Tolstoy loved him for his total lack composer (Nove mber 9) . I wonder if rights activists, religiou s believers, Woo dmancote, Chelte nham.
TLS N O VE M B E R 16 20 0 7
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8 BIOGRAPHY
or relieving lowness of spirits there is
F nothin g to touch one of Edwa rd
Burr a ' s letters. Here is a note written in
1926 to Billy Chappell about their mutual
friend Irene Hodgkin s' s brief career as a
choru s girl:
What is this you say about Hodgekins going
into the Hotel Metropole caberet whe n I read
your letter dear you co uld have knocked me
down with a feather as they say what does she
do if you please step dancing clog or double
shuflle tango paso doble or simple ballroom?
does she sing or does she simply appear as
Nadia Hodgekins the uncro wned empress of
Eastbourne in dimond so up plates and tinted
ostrich feather more news I beg dear .
Several point s might be made about the
fragm ent s of Burr a corr espond enc e liberally
strew n throu gh Jane Steven son' s superlative
new biograph y. The fir st is that, with their
blend of Firba nkia n fant asy, shaky syntax ,
heroic misspe llings and co mplete abse nce of
punctuation, they are more or less sui
gene ris. The second is how compa rati vely
little of him self there is in them : eve rything is
always at a distanc e. The third, conn ected to
the second, is a sense of self-prese rvation con-
veye d almos t by default. A. C. Benson once
rem arked of M. R. James that it was as if his
mind ex isted behin d a pri vet hed ge that grew
higher and less penetr able eve ry yea r. The
sa me, allow ing for certain sharply expresse d
personal loyalti es and incidental mom ent s of
half-revel ation, is true of Burr a.
Not man y mod ern Briti sh artists have had
to wor k harder at the task of self-prese rva -
tion. He was born in 1905, into a pro sperou s
famil y with its headqu arters in a large house
outside what Burra ca lled the "tinkerbell
towne" of Rye and a grandpare ntal base in
South Kensin gton , but his infancy and much
of his adult life were ove rs hadowe d by
chronic ill health . To arthritis could be added
a (possibly hereditary) blood conditi on called
spherocy tos is, which made him dangerou sly
anaemic and peri odic all y di stend ed his
splee n. The public-scho ol education the
se nio r Burras had pl ann ed for him was aba n-
doned. Instead , two month s short of his six-
teenth birthday, he enro lled as an unu sually
young student at the Che lsea College of Art .
Steven son assum es, not unreasonabl y, that
Burra' s slantwise view of the world, his love
of popul ar culture, his inten sely reali zed
imaginati ve life, was a question of upbrin g-
ing. Had he gone to Eton, she insists, he
would have und ergon e a "brutal trainin g in
conformit y" and been enco uraged "to look
back with humo rous cond escen sion at the
thin gs that fascin ated his infant self, before
he had learned pro per di scrimin ation" . In
fact , the Eton class of 1919 , in which Burr a
might pro specti vely have figur ed , was a hot-
bed of avant-garde aes thetics, numb ered
• FOUR COURTS PRESS
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Explores some of th e ways tha t w rit ers hav e eng age d with
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ISBN 978-1 -84682 -°71 -7 272PP ills. £50
Published: 16 November
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Twentieth-century eye
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9780224078757
Brian Howard , A nthony Powell and Robert
Byron in its rank s, and gave birth to both the
Eton Soci ety of the Arts and its house
journal, the Eton Cand le. There was a kindly
drawin g master , Sidn ey Eva ns, and eve n
Ge orge Orwell, two yea rs Burr a' s senior,
rem emb ered a relati vely liberal atmosphere
that allowe d eac h boy "a fair chance of devel-
oping his own ability". At the same time, the
self-sufficiency of Burr a' s ment al life is one
of his most attracti ve qualities. Stevenson
quot es a wa rtime letter exulting in his discov-
ery of the minor Eliza bethans: " I payd a
profitable visit to Mason s Norm an Rd & go t
a treat by Professor Saint sbur y Eliza betha n
literatur e - the Prof put s all poets in
their prop er plac es cas tigating 'excesses'
Cy ril Tourne ur & Cras haw Cras h is rather
excess ive & ' hysteric ' at times nobodys
ever excess ive enough for me or sufficie ntly
hysterical . ..".
Friend ship , though, was another matter.
The grea t adva ntage of the Che lsea College
of Art , and of the Royal College of Art,
to which Bur ra proceeded in 1923, was
that they furni shed hi m with a ready-made
gang of like-minded convives - Chappell,
Hod gkin s, Barb ara Ker-S eymer, Clove r
Pritchard - who reco gnized his talent, sympa-
thized with his frailti es and were prepared to
exe rt them selves on his behalf. Friendship
with Bur ra, as Steve nso n shows, impo sed
substa ntial obli gati ons on the friend , who
was expected to provide su ppo rt , accom-
mod ation, transport and comp any with
maxim al unobtrusiveness. Burra appr eciated
the bargain s he go t, and the late-period
references to "Nurse Chappell" are a mark
both of Chappe ll's relish of his role as
superior fact otum and of Burr a ' s ackn owl-
edge me nt that the kind of life he want ed to
lead could onl y be led in the cont ext of this
high- grad e support service.
The circl es in which Burr a mo ved at the
end of the 1920 s, whe n his work had already
begun to attract attention - there was a debut
exhibition at the Le icester Galleries in 1928 -
we re thorou ghl y boh emian . Chappe ll
switched from art schoo l to a career as a
dancer. The lesbian Ker- Seymer was an
ava nt-ga rde photographer. In their co mpa ny,
Burr a becam e a minor attenda nt on the smart,
partygoing " Younger Set" written up in
Evelyn Wau gh ' s Vile Bodies (19 30). Whil e
lackin g the stamina for any sustained involve-
ment with the Bright Young People, Burr a
was a fascin ated obse rver of the scene. A
letter to Ker-Seymer from 1929 adve rtises a
party thro wn by the homosexual Chappe ll's
" new piece", John "The Wid ow" Lloyd (the
nickname cam e from a shav ing preparation
ca lled "The Wid ow Lloyd ' s Euxes is") :
• Are you going to be the only gentleman at
the widow Lloyds party which our old tart
TLS NOVEMBER 16 200 7
of a Chappell is going to? I am longing to
hear about it lve no doub t we shall in the
News of the World the police having raided
it j ust as our Freddie trips out of a gia nt
champagne glass (dressed only in a black
sequin widows veil gloves & shoes) on the
din ing room table.
"Our Freddie" is Frederick Ashton. However
constrained by health and temp erament ,
Burr a' s cultural affiliations were wide-
ranging . He continued to keep a foot in the
ballet camp , as it we re, but there were art-
world conn ect ion s with Paul Nas h and the
Vorticist paint er Edwar d Wad sworth, and
a friend ship with his Rye neighb our the
Americ an writer Conrad Aik en. There was
also, in that inter war Elysium of favou rable
exc hange rates and cheap tran sport , a fair
amount of foreign travel: to standard Bright
Youn g destin ation s such as Pari s and
Harl em, but also to more exo tic loc ales. A
revelator y trip to Spain (" I don 't want to
lea ve Spain not till I mu st" runs the sign-off
to one letter hom e) was follo wed by a chaoti c
Mexic an jaunt with Aik en and the alcoholic
Malcolm Lowr y that ended in an attack of
dysent ery. Burr a return ed to Rye so anae mic
that he needed iron injecti ons and massage:
HI take 15 iron s pill s a day", he report ed , "and
not a square inch sous le bas fond where there
isnt the mark of a needl e" .
Both Spain and Mexic o, in their separate
ways, had a decisive influ enc e on Burr a' s art.
His early pa intings, full of roc oco embe llish-
ment , in which outlandish figur es parade
across dense, other-wo rldly land scap es, the
genera l effec t con sistentl y und ercut by
stea lthy intim ations of unease, are closely
connected to the smart met ropolitan wor ld
of his leisure hour s. "Girl in a Wind y Land-
sca pe", for example, from his Royal Co llege
of Art days, look s uncannil y like a Vogue
cove r. A sketch from 1930 of two grotesque
figur es perfor ming the Charleston has a
sinuousness and a conce ntration perfectl y in
keepin g with the world of "stunt" parti es and
Florence Mill ' s " Blackbirds" dance troup e.
Th e suppresse d violence, death and religious
imag ery of the Spanish and Mexic an pictures
took him into new territory. All this is ballast
to Stevens on's chi ef argument about Burr a' s
w or k, w hic h con cerns its re si st ance to, or
outri ght separa tion from, prevailin g trend s.
In the 1930s, as she point s out, in an
environmen t do minat ed by abstraction and
land scape, he was paintin g highl y sty lized
peopl e in urban settings. Thirty yea rs
later , when the human figur e was back in
fashion, he we nt back , or rather for ward , to
land scape.
Th e continu al need to rein vent him self
appli ed as much to bread-and-butter j obs as
to more form al work di splayed in his regul ar
po st-war shows at the Lefevre Gall ery. His
1950 s commi ssions includ ed set-des ign for
client s as cultu rall y detach ed from each other
as Ashton and J. Arthur Rank. The painting,
mean wh ile, had moved on aga in into an
extraordinary series of bibli cal pictures, influ-
enced by Caravaggio and El Greco , whose
unveilin g, according to Steven son, marked
the point at which "his life reall y began to
straighten out" . But what ex actly did that life
consist of? Frugal, reclu sive - he lived with
his parent s until their death s, finally comin g
to rest in a cotta ge near the famil y home in
Playden , Su ssex - ac idulous if rou sed , he
shunned all physical rel ationship s. Steve nso n
offers fascinating glim pses of the flakes of
high emotion that occa sion ally chipp ed off
the stee p wall of his reserve. A letter to Ch ap-
pell announcing the death of his twelve-year-
old sister, Betsy, from menin giti s, which
starts with the matter-of-fact "now shes
croked" has the words HI feel/h er death/very
much" pencill ed in the margin .
As for feelin gs beyond the famil y hearth , a
diary note from 1929, about having his for-
tune told , mentions a mysteriou s third part y
who may "try to estrange me from someone
who likes me very much". The semi-famous
late 1920s interro gation by Hermi one Badd e-
ley (" Have you eve r loved a man ?" "No."
" Ha ve yo u ever lo ved a wo ma n?" " N o ." " N ot
eve n your moth er ?" "No ." ), record ed by
Anthony Powell, Steven son di scount s on the
grounds that Burr a was merely affronted by
the intru sion. Come the 1950 s, he cert ainl y
enjoyed the comp any of the dancer-turned-
TV -produ cer David Paltenghi - in a photo-
graph of the two of them taken at the Man-
drake Club Burra looks positi vely animated-
but the most enduring of hi s friend ship s
see ms to have been with Chappell, who left
touchin g accounts of Burr a' s last yea rs.
Waitin g to meet him at Waterlo o Station ,
Chappell wo uld see his friend
moving (as slowly and deliberately as a snail)
among the trailing figures of the last pas-
sengers to alight; a duffle bag hung over his
shoulder. I felt a surge of affection as [
watched him approach so slowly and painfully,
and we em braced when he passed the barrier
(who are those two dotty old men kissing each
other? They must be foreigners.)
Burra died in 1976, guarding hi s pri vacy
from the blandi shm ent s of the modern medi a
almo st to the end : Steve nso n has a droll
account of the filmi ng of an Arts Co uncil-
sponsored interview in 1972 (" I thought it
would be ju st the paintin gs & perh aps a photo
or two of me, little did I know it was to be a
quaynte person alit y sketch" the subjec t
lament ed). Thirty yea rs ea rlier, Raymond
Mortimer left an exhibition at the Redfern of
Burr a ' s South Am eric an paintings, com plain-
ing, "T hey' re so loud" . Burra ' s life, on the
other hand , is a series of half-tones, diminu en-
dos, noises off, fascinating both in what
it conc eals and what is intermittentl y laid
out to view . Impressively researched and
unerrin gly well-informed about the social
land scapes in which Burr a operated, Edward
Bur ra: Twentieth-century eye has only
three minor defect s. The first is its con stant
belittl ement of Anth on y Powell: to take only
one slight, his 1934 spoof "Caledonia" , to
w h ic h Rurra co ntrih uted a fr onti spi ece , ma y
very well be a piece of "s ub-Pope invect ive"
but it also turn s up in the Oxf ord Book of
Light Verse. Th e second is the abse nce of
any reproduction s of Burra ' s paintings, no
doubt on ec onomic grounds . The third is the
pric e.
Thi s is Jane Steve nso n's first bio graph y,
but one can think of half a dozen other
Briti sh artists whose mili eux are in
some sense approx imate to Edwa rd Burr a ' s
and who would benefit from her engrosse d
and intensely sy mpathe tic treatm ent: Keith
Vaughan, for exa mple, or Luci an Fre ud.

Genius in circulation
ozart learned much of his letter-
M writing technique fro m his fath er.
Thro ugho ut his childhoo d, on
various length y travels across Europe , he
obse rve d Leopo ld writing acco unts of their
activities and se nding them back to Salzburg,
fir st to his friend and landl ord Lorenz
Hagenauer, and later to his wife Maria Anna,
when she and their daughter Na nnerl were
left at home; to ma ny letters, the grow ing boy
wo uld add pos tscri pts . Leopold wrote these
chronicles , in part , for the publicit y; he knew
they would be circulated in Salzburg, and
he often edited his reports accordingly (" I am
say ing nothin g here about most of our jour-
ney", he wro te from Muni ch on Nove mber
10, 1766. " I know how differe ntly people
judge th ings, dependin g on the differenc es of
their own feeble und erstanding" ). But in gen -
era l his epistolary technique was entirely
stream -of-co nsc iousness (" Do n' t be sur-
prised if I write thin gs down in no particular
order, but in cases like these yo u have to
write dow n your ideas while they strike you,
otherw ise you forget them"), and frequ entl y
hi s letters we re seve ral thousand words long.
If Leopold had paper , he filled it; and if he
ran out of space , he co ntinued up the margins
and onto the enve lopes . Oft en his letters took
days to compose , and then of course days to
arrive . But they were worth the wait; the
ear ly letters, in particular, includ e wonderful
descripti ons of the places visited by the
family (he is illumi natin g on the subjec t
of mid-eighteent h-century London, for
instance, with its high cost of living, its meat
and beer, the pleasure gardens of Vauxhall
and Ranelagh, and its many eccen trici ties,
among which Leop old numb ered pip e-
smoking wo men), and lively insight s into
cont emporary manners as well as music.
When , at the age of twenty-one, Mozart
himse lf at last becam e independent of his
father' s dai ly company , he too slid into
the habit of length y letter-writin g. His style
is immedi ate, conversational and engagi ng,
and there are clear para llels with his mu sical
writing . He seems to have been as fluent and
inventi ve with words as he was with mu sic,
for his letter s have pace, narrative, dram atic
contras t and terrific passion. He could
develop any subje ct with the greatest imagina-
tion, as he did when impro visin g at the
key boa rd; and his phenomenal memor y,
famou sly show n musicall y when he wro te
down Allegri' s Miserere having heard it ju st
once in Rome, enabled him to rec all lengthy
con versations verbatim. But there was also
some thing therapeuti c for him about the
writing a nd recei vin g of lett er s. " Occasio n-
ally I am ove rco me by bout s of melanchol y" ,
he wro te on Jul y 3 1, 177 8, fou r wee ks after
the death of his moth er, "but I ca n most
easi ly avo id them by writing or rece iving
letters; this imm ediately chee rs me up aga in."
For such a gregario us soul, this private
form of social intercour se was peculi arly
imp ortant.
The relationsh ip bet ween Mozart and
hi s fath er, including its gradual disintegra-
tion, domi nates A Life in Letters. Both
person alities emerge with some times painful
clarity. Mozart himself was of the liveliest
MUSIC
JA N E G L OVE R
W olf g an g Am ad eu s M o z art
A LI F E I N L E T T E R S
Edited by Cl iff Eiscn and translated by
Stewa rt Spencer
644 pp. Peng uin. Paperback, £ 14 .99 (US $ 17).
978 0 14 144 1467
F ra nz Xa v er N ie me tsc he k
MOZART
The first biography
Tra nslated by Helen Mautner
96pp. Berg hahn. £ 17.50 (US $ 15).
978 1 84545 23 1 5
goo d hum our , show n in extre mis in his nine
ce lebrated ly sca to logica l letters (of which
only one is includ ed here) to his naughty
cousin, Maria Anna Thekl a. Like all private
codes of communication (incl uding the Mit-
fords' Boudledidge, perhaps), these letters
we re no doubt more fun for tho se who trul y
share d the jo ke than for those afterwa rds who
try to make sense of it all. But though they
are childish and surprising, they are esse n-
tially innoc ent , and an inten sification of the
genera l teasin g style that Mozart ado pted
with his sister Nannerl, befo re that passionate
relati onship eva pora ted utterly after the dea th
of their father in 1787. Thro ughout A Life in
Letters there are brilli ant snapshots of
Mozart' s acquaintance ("S he has sugar and
honey on her lips but pepper in her heart" , he
wrote of the Co untess Walli s, of who m he
was deeply suspicious, in Jul y 1778), and no
doubt accurate assess ments, both favou rable
and highl y unfavour able, of music ians who m
he obse rved or with whom he wor ked.
The ill-disciplin ed musician s of Salzburg
(Leo polds colleag ues) incited his fiercest
rage (" rich in a ll th at is usele ss and unneces-
sary but very poor when it comes to what's
necessary and entirely lackin g in what's mos t
indi spen sable of all", August 7, 1778).
Mozart clearly had an explos ive temp er , as
he reported so grap hica lly when describing
his dismi ssal from the service of Salzburg's
Archbishop. (And it was his recognition of
this which surely ena bled him to depi ct rage
so effective ly in the mu sic of, for instance,
Osmin , or the Quee n of the Night.)
But Moza rt's natur e was also profou ndly
vulnera ble. Eve n when desperatel y at odds
with his father, he required Leopolds
approval and suppo rt, and his frequent cries
from the heart ("I n Sa lzburg I don't know
who I am ", Oc tober 15, 1778) are devastat-
ing . Afte r hi s marri age to Co nsta nze W eb er ,
he was more settled and con fiden t; but any
abse nce from her made him restless and
agi tated, and within hour s he was already
writing her the most touchin g letters (" I feel
it' s yea rs since I saw you .. .. I' ve grow n far
too accusto med to you - I love you too much
to be able to be separated from you for long",
Octob er 1790 ). The marri age, like any other,
had its ups and dow ns, but is revealed in
these letters as being, for the mos t part,
passionate and secure . Co nstanze was for
Mozart an anchor in a sea of violently fluctu-
ating fortu ne. Family life was impor ta nt to
TLS NOVEMBER 162 0 07
9
were tossed aside), the wor ld became weary
of prodigious talent and Leopold ' s passion
oss ified into obsess ion. His bigoted views
inten sified : he was anti-Ita lian, then anti-
French. His oldes t friend s became less useful
him, and there is no greater or more touchin g to him, so he aba ndoned them. When
proof of this than his last letter to his wife,
wr itten (October 14, 1791 ) j ust one month
before his final illn ess began to take hold. He
Hagenauer ' s dau ghter Martha died, to the
grea t distress of Wolfgang and Na nnerl,
Leopold could not be bothered to write a let-
wro te happily of having taken their seve n- ter of condolence, but dismi ssed the matter
yea r-old son Carl , with Co nstanzes moth er, airil y: "What ca n' t be changed must be left to
to a perform ance of Die Zau berflote , and of Go d's discretion" (October 20, 1770 ). In his
having supper afterwa rds with Co nstanzes desperate (and fruitl ess) quest for a job for
sister Josefa (who had ju st sung the Queen of his son, he began effec tive ly to stalk potenti al
the Night) and her husband: " It was no sm all patro ns, such as his ow n for mer employe r the
treat for Carl to be taken to the opera. - He ' s Prin ce of Tax is, who refu sed to see him after
lookin g splendid". In letters such as this, and Leopold follo wed him hom e from church
(Janu ary 26, 1770 ). And , most serious of all,
in ma ny others to Cons ta nze , Na nnerl, or to
cl ose friends, we peep behind the curtain of he antago nized the ruling Hab sbur g famil y,
genius to disco ver an intri guin gly normal, even tually pro vokin g the Empress Ma ria Te r-
albe it livel y, do mesticity. esa into a blisterin g di smissal of the whole
Leopold eme rges from his letters with a Mozart famil y as "useless peopl e" .
de pth similar to that of his so n. At first he is In two particular periods of crisis,
see n as the proud, resour ceful , imagin ati ve Leopold' s letters becam e longe r and more
young fath er determined to do the best for hysterical. The first was the di sastrou s job-
his remark able children, a good friend and see king tour of 1777- 8, which culminated in
neighbour, with a delightful sense of hum our. the tragic death of Mozart ' s moth er in Pari s.
But his joy in his childre n's talent s The seco nd was the prol onged episode in
soo n became blink ered , and he instigated an Vienna, in the spring of 178 2, in which
unfor giving regim e of co nstant performance: Wolfgang got him self dismissed from archi-
"my children are used to wor k: if they we re episco pa l service . As Leopold react ed from
to get used to hour s of idleness, my entire afar to these unfoldi ng dramas, he resorted to
edifice wo uld collapse; custom is an iron bull yin g and emotional blackm ail in his let-
shirt" (Nove mber 10, 1766 ). The n, as the ters. Father and son became utterly opposed
children grew up (and the talent s of Na nnerl to one another. Leopold took the view that
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10 MUSIC

eve ry thing sho uld be plann ed - by him - to
the sma lles t det ail ("even thou gh I am some
distanc e away, I can still see mor e and judge
thin gs better than yo u", Febru ary 23, 1778),
whereas Wolfgang maint ained that unpr edic t-
able circumstanc es might change anything.
In between these two cri ses, harmony was to
an ex tent restored , and the lett ers exc hange d
bet ween them durin g Mozart's compositi on
of ldomeneo in Muni ch in 1781, in which
they invigor atin gly share d mu sic al and thea-
trical insights, are among the best in the col-
lecti on.
Aft er the seco nd cri sis, Leopold relu c-
tantl y acce pted the fact that Wolfgan g was
now marri ed to Co nstanze , and eve ntually
visited the co uple in Vienn a in 1785. This
visit, rich in mu sic al activity and public
acclaim, was all report ed in exc ited lett ers to
Na nnerl. But wheneve r Leopold was apart
from Wolfgan g, he lost faith in his son and in
Mozarts ability to succeed on his ow n. He
eve n see med to lose his artistic judgement ,
too. He pou red sco rn on Wolfgang' s sympho -
nies ("work s that do yo u no credit" , Septem -
ber 24, 177 8), and depr ecated Mo zarts col-
labor ation with Lor en zo da Pont e on Le
nozze di Figaro ("a most wea riso me piece" ,
March 23, 1786). Wh en Leop old died in
1787, Mozart was devastated. In spite of
eve rything his father had been the rock in his
found ation , and after its remo val man y oth er
eleme nts in his life began to cru mble . Soon
afterwards, he was co mpe lled to beg for
mon ey in a humiliatin g series of lett ers to a
NEW FROM
ALDINETRANSACTION
fellow Freem ason , Michael Puchb erg. Onl y
three of them are inclu ded in thi s collecti on ,
but they are distressin g to rea d. And alth ough
Mozart ' s fortunes took a turn for the bett er
in 1791 , the acc ount of his fin al illn ess, as
reca lled more than thirt y yea rs later by
Co nsta nze 's yo unge r sister Sophi e, is as
harrowin g in thi s translation as it is in
any other : "The last thin g he did was to try
and mouth the soun d of the timp ani in
his Requiem ; I can still hear it now " (A pril 7,
1825).
ozart' s corr espond enc e is we ll
M known , not merely in the four
vo lumes of original Ge rma n,
but also in Eng lish, mos t espe -
cially Emily A nde rson' s gro und-brea king
three volumes , ori ginally publi shed in 1938.
Among many more recent selec tions in
different tran slation s, Rober t Spae thling's
Mozart 's Letters, Mozart 's Life (2000) is par-
ticularly vibran t. And A Life in Letters, edited
by Cliff Eisen and tran slated by Stewart Spen -
cer, is a rich addition to the libr ary. Eisen has
selected 184 letter s, ninety-nine by Mozart
him self, and the maj orit y of the rest by
Leop old. Th e result is superbly prepared ,
exce llently introduc ed and footnoted , and
translated with a real feelin g for co lloq uia l-
ism. I wo uld take issue with ju st one passage
of translation, and only do so because it is
exce ptionally imp ort ant. On Jun e 12, 1778 ,
Mozart wrote with some passion on the sub-
ject of singe rs ' vibra to - as thorn y a topi c in
his age as it is toda y. He made the basic point
that the hum an voice vibra tes natur all y,
and as such is very beautiful ("Die
Menschstimme zittert schon selbst - aber so
- in einem solchen Grade , daB es schon ist -
das ist die Na tur der Stimme") , but when
vibrato is ove rused it becom es ugly and dis-
tortin g. Stewart Spenc er tran slates thi s as
"the hum an voice is natu rall y tremul ou s" ,
which is not what Moz art is say ing at all,
dilut es the imp act of his stateme nt - and
indeed ch anges its mea ning . Elsewhere,
there are some minor inconsistencies in the
footnot es. All titles of the dramati c wor ks,
for instance, have been helpfully tran slated,
with the excep tion of Il sogno di Scipione.
And in the last yea r of his life Mo zart twic e
quot ed from Die Zauberflo te while he was in
the thro es of comp osing or performi ng it. (It
was very rare for him to do this in his letters,
so these two qu otation s are all the more pre-
cious.) One of the quotation s ("lebt wohl, auf
Wiedersehn !" ) has been helpfully identifi ed,
but the other ("Dea th and despair we re his
reward! " ) has not. These are minor flaws in
an otherw ise very fin e publ ication.
Professor Eise n has also been involved
in anoth er we lco me addition to the Mozart
library, a translation (by Helen Mautn er) of
the fir st bio gr aph y of the co mpose r, by
Franz Xave r Nieme tsc hek. Thi s brief work
appea red in 1798, ju st seve n years after
Mozart's dea th, and was authorized by
Co nstanze , the ed uca tion of whose childre n
Nieme tsc hek was now supervising in Pragu e.
It therefore bears the seductive stam p of
authentici ty, for it is clear that Co nstanze
was clo sely interr ogated by the autho r. "This
story com es fro m a reliable source", claims
Niemetsc hek, near the beginnin g. Perh aps
because of Consta nze's proximity to the
project , it rather gushes with superlatives ,
and lack s a balanced view of the subjec t; the
narrati ve is also slan ted in fa vour of Pra gue
and its unreser ved enthusias m for the co m-
po ser. Prag ue, of cour se, had reason to be
proud , for it had been respon sibl e for Don
Giova nni, La Clemenra di Tito and the
Prag ue Sy mp ho ny; but Nieme tsc hek's book ,
which also includes a list of co ntem porary
Boh emi an com poser s, is a littl e lopsided as a
result. Struc tura lly, he devotes mor e than half
his book to Mozart' s life, and then comm ent s
on it; and a small postscript, "S ome Notes
abo ut his Work s", throws interestin g light on
the chaos of their pub licati on before Co n-
stanze made her deals with Breitfkopf and
Hart el at the turn of the century. Although by
no means who lly acc ura te, thi s book includes
mu ch cont emp or ary deb ate (on whether
music is a victim of fashion , for instance, or
on the paucit y of goo d mu sical ed uca tion),
and is absorbing to read.
One fin al thou ght. Mu ch later , after
Constanze had marri ed a Dani sh di plom at,
Geor g Nisse n, she mo ved to Salzburg where
Nisse n prep ared another "official" biograph y
of Mozart. He died before fini shing it, so
what was even tually publi shed in 1828 was
inevit abl y a mish-mas h of fascinatin g but
inchoate materi al. Perhaps Cliffor d Eise n, in
coll aboration wi th one of hi s red oubtable
translator s, might turn his con sid erable
editor ial skills to this.

Cluedo

He pro mised her everyth ing

sa id the lead pipin g.

His hypocrisy got on my wick

COUNTER-
REVOLUTION
How Revolutions Die
James H . M eisel
In this fascinating volume,
the author illuminates the
revolutionary process as it has
de veloped from antiquity to
the present day. Meisel's wo rk
is presented in the fonn of
12 absorbing episodes in
the hist o ry of West em
civilizati on . As it is the nature
of revolutions to fall short of
their objectives and to enjoy
only a brief heyday that
becomes the stereotype
accepted by posterity, the
author emphasizes their
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Edited by Sol Tax with a
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LEARNING sa id the ca ndlestic k.
MECHANISMS
IN SMOKING Likewise his super ior manner
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He forgo t to seal the enve lope
ye t until recently the y have sa id the rop e.
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She stood and watched him stagger
stud ying learning in man .
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If all six admiit it?
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12
orman Dav ies is a historian who
N courts controversy, and Europe at
War appears to set out with ser ious
revisionist intent. Professor Dav ies is at war
with some thing he ca lls the "Allied scheme
of histor y" , which he beli eves has domi nated
the his toriography since the Second Wor ld
War. Th is has led "western historians " to
play dow n the role of the Eas tern Fro nt,
while at the same time ado pting a naive
war time ind ulge nce towards the cr iminality
of Sta lin's regim e. On this above all else,
Dav ies wan ts to put us straigh t. First of all,
the Sov iet Union was not identi cal to Russ ia.
The Sov iet Union was the resu lt of Russo -
Bo lshev ik agg ression, dating back at least to
19 19-20. Seco nd, Sta lin was a brut al dic ta-
tor. Th ird, he was complicit with Hitl er in
starting the war and exploited it thro ugh out
fo r the pur pose of territorial agg randizeme nt.
The war, therefor e, was not a con flic t
between goo d and ev il: "The wa r in Europe
was domi nated by two ev il mo nsters, not by
o ne. Each of the monsters co nsumed the best
people in its terri tory before embarking on a
fight to the death for supremacy".
This is ju st the mos t imp ortant of the
ma ny misco ncep tions that Dav ies sets out to
correc t: What were the biggest battl es of the
war? Davies is far from clear himself, but
they were ce rta inly all in the Eas t. The largest
conce ntration ca mp? Not Ausc hw itz, but the
Vor kutlag in Siberia. The nationalit y that
suffe red the grea tes t proportional losses? The
Bye lorussians. The grea tes t maritime disaster
of the war? The Soviet torp edoing of the
Wilhelm Gust/off in 1945 . The tone of
combat ive revisionism is unrelen tin g. At one
po int it see ms that Dav ies eve n wa nts to start
a figh t abo ut the datin g of the war itse lf. "The
Seco nd Wo rld Wa r did not [italics are
Davies ' s] start in 194 1, in 1940, or eve n on 3
Sept emb er 1939. It began at 4.4 5 am o n I
September 1939." Trivialities aside, Dav ies 's
initi al challe nges need to be follo wed up
with a disciplin ed presentation of reasoning
and ev ide nce . Are they?
If we take D aviess treat me nt of the a ir
war, the answe r is " no" . G ive n hi s anno unced
intent to focus on the Eas tern Fro nt, Davies
might claim that the air war was incident al.
But , in relat ion to his argu men t about mora l
eq uiva lence , it is clearly import ant. Davies is
intent on shaking readers in Britain and Ame r-
ica out of their mor al co mplacency, and a
favourite mea ns of doi ng so is, of co urse, the
area bombin g ca mpaign. As Davies puts it,
" In mora lity [sic], two wro ngs do not ma ke a
right, and pleas of ju stifi ed respon se do not
was h" . In his initi al thematic treatm ent of
the war , Dav ies prov ides the briefest of narra-
ti ves of the bomb ing campaign, stre tching
fro m the horro rs of Jul y 194 3 in Hamb urg,
where the RAF kill ed 40 ,000 peopl e, to Dres-
den in Fehrua ry 194 5, for which Davies gives
a figure of 60 ,000 dead . In between, perhaps
to balance out the blame, he positi ons a raid
by the USAAF on Berl in on February 3,
194 5, which he claim s killed 25, 000 peop le.
If th is we re so, it wo uld indeed be wor thy of
note. But, as eve n Jorg Friedrich has been
qui ck to point out, the February raid on Ber-
lin is a ca nard . There is a zero too ma ny in
Davies ' s number, as there often was in cas u-
alty co un ts issued by Naz i author ities. The
wors t sing le ra id on Berli n cl aimed 2,893
lives. A slip of thi s kind is exc usa ble of
course. But Davies' s treatment of the we ll-
HISTORY
Look East
A DA M T O OZE
N orm a n D a v i e s
EU R OPE AT W AR 19 3 9 -1 9 4 5
No simple victory
456pp . Macm illan. £25 (Paperback, £9.99).
978033369285 1
researched Dresden case is more unsettling.
The range acce pted by most reput able histori-
ans for Dresden is not the 60 ,00 0 cited by
Davies, but bet ween 25,000 and 40 ,000.
Indeed , the city of Dresden, in an effor t to
ref ute the casual use of exaggerated figur es,
paid for a research co mm ission that es tab-
lished an upp er boun d of 35 ,000. Later in
the text, Davies gives a range for Dresden
of between 30,000 and 120,000 (sic). The
higher of these nu mbers is tod ay preferred
only by propagandists of the ex treme Right.
Davi ess use of the pictor ial ev ide nce is
even more tend ent ious. In the seco nd of three
pic ture sec tio ns, he present s a series of
ima ges under shared titles. O n one page he
ju xtap oses two horrifi c images of mou nds
of man gled bodi es with the co mme ntary:
"Corpses of innoc ent Europea ns killed by
delib erate intent became a common sight.
Above : Dresden , Feb ruary 194 5 - Be low :
KL-Be rge n-Belse n, May 1945" . Aft er such
gratuitous and insub stant ial pro vocation , it is
hard to take serious ly Daviess mo re signifi-
ca nt cla ims . But let us give him the benefit of
the doubt. W hat of his argu ment with the
"A llied schoo l of histor y" ? Here, too, Davies
is tilt ing at windm ills . No one in the last ge n-
era tion has eve r ser iously doubted Daviess
mo st imp ort ant con tentions. Stalin's Sov iet
Union was an oppressive reg ime of ex treme
brut ality. And it was Sta lin's forces that
playe d the ma in part in the battl efield defeat
of Hitl er' s We hrmac ht. Indeed, Al an Clark
said as much in 1965. But whi le there will
be no general di ssent from Daviess views on
thi s score, a serious an alysis of the Second
Worl d War sugges ts that the po int is not quit e
as simp le as Davies puts it.
To bol ster his case Davies ca lculates a
statistic, whic h summarizes in man- months
the qu antit y of gro und forces depl oyed on
eac h front. This purp ort s to show that almos t
90 per cent of the war effo rt was ex pended on
the Eas tern Fro nt. G iven Daviess imp reci-
sion abo ut sources and me tho ds , it is imposs -
ible to replicat e this res ult. But the probl em is
immediately obv ious. No t only does Davies
fail to even includ e the manpower deplo yed
in the Battle of the Atlantic or the air wa r in
his calculations. More imp ort antl y, hy focus-
ing only on manpower, Dav ies 's index is
ove rw helm ing ly biased in favou r of his hypo-
thesis, the Eas tern Fro nt being by far the
mo st lab our-intensive theatre of the wa r. If
instead, we use a mor e bro ad-b ased indi cator
of the wa r effort, such as total arma men ts
pro duction, the pictur e look s substantially dif-
ferent. Ge rma ny co uld never afford to co nce n-
trate even as much as 60 per cen t of its arma-
ment s effo rt on the Eas tern Fron t. Eve n in
1941 , it was setting as ide close to half its
resour ces for the war at sea and the future air
wa r aga inst Brit ain and A merica.
TLS NOVEMBER 162 007
A Sovi et T -34 tank; from
The Daily Telegraph Illustrated History of
th e Second World War by John Ray
(Weid enfeld and NicoIson. 978 0 297 84663 5)
Indeed, here too Davies fail s to make goo d
on his polemi cal intent. Of the fift y-fi ve
pages that he devotes to the narrative of the
actual fighting bet ween 4.4 5 am on Sep tem -
ber I, 1939 and 11.0 I pm on M ay 8, 194 5,
fewer than half are given ove r to the Eas tern
Fro nt. If there is a phase of the wa r in the
Eas t that does demand more atte ntion it is the
fin al Soviet drive to the Poli sh bord er, which
began with Ope ration Bagration , laun ched
on Jun e 22 , 1944 , the third anniversary of
the Ge rma n invasion . This assa ult, which
result ed in the destru ction of an en tire Ge r-
man army gro up in a matter of wee ks, is
wide ly regarded as the single mo st dram atic
operation conducted by any Allied ar my in
the entire war. And unlik e Stalingrad or
Kursk, Bag ration does co ntinue to be over-
shadowe d by D-Day. Dav ies clearly ap preci -
ates Bagration's sign ifica nce . It is amo ng
the list of trick qu estion s wi th which he likes
to wrong -fo ot his seminar audiences. But
a section of two- and- a-h alf pages apparently
devoted to the camp aign boil s dow n on
cl ose r inspec tion to three flaccid paragr aph s
which attribute the success of thi s epic Sov iet
ass ault largely to over whel min g num erical
superior ity, owed in large part to Lend-
Lease, the fam iliar exc use of the Wehrmacht.
The problem is that Dav ies is in two
mind s. He wa nts to prior itize the Eas tern
Fro nt and yet at the sa me tim e he wishes
to avoid makin g hero es of the Red Arm y,
which he strugg les to see as anything more
than an instrument of Sta linist dictato rshi p.
This co nflict colours his entire acco unt of the
Soviet wa r effor t. In deali ng wi th the damage
done by the Seco nd Worl d War, it is obv i-
ously im port ant to be very precise abo ut who
did what to who m. And Davies is abs olutely
right to say that no more than 10 per ce nt of
the Soviet Unio n was eve r occu pied by the
Germa ns and that of thi s territo ry the maj or-
ity was made up of the Balti c States, the
Ukrai ne and Bye loruss ia.
But whi le makin g these valid po ints, Davies
neglects to remin d his readers that most of the
vast expanse of Sovie t territ ory that rem ained
unoccupi ed by the Wehrmacht was in fact
uninh abitable Siberian steppe, and, furth er-
more , that the fightin g on indisputably Rus-
sian soil was among the most destructive in
the entire war. What, for instance, are we to
make of a list of the "main Europea n war
zo nes of 1939-1 945" that along with Poland,
the Baltic States, Byeloru ssia and the Ukra ine,
inclu des Albani a, Norway, Denm ark, Bene lux
and north ern Fran ce, but does not includ e Rus-
sia, Davies having ass igned Lenin grad , wes t-
ern and southern Russia not to the "main war
zo nes" but to a subsidiary list of territ ories that
"were visited by the more seve re aspec ts of
warfa re for only relatively short periods"? To
rea lize the perversity of this distinction, one
need only co nsider the state in 1945 of a Rus-
sian city such as Smo lensk as com pared to the
capit al of a " main Europea n war zone" such as
Brusse ls.
Perhaps this is mere slopp iness . But, agai n,
one is left wonder ing whether there is not
some deeper resentment, in this case of an
anti-Ru ssian variety, lurkin g behind the analyt-
ical flaws. And this brings us finally to the
absolut ely centr al argume nt of the book , the
claim of moral equiva lence between the
Soviet and Naz i regimes, a claim, which like
so many others is sugges ted rath er than full y
argued throu gh. Hitler and Stalin were both
ev il mon sters - about this at least Davies is
clear. They were both respon sible for the
deaths of million s of people. Aga in one co uld
argue about the figures, and particularly his
reliance on Robert Conquest's discredited
numb ers for the fam ine of the 1930s, but num-
bers are not Dav iess strong suit. However, the
category of ev il is so central to his book that
we mu st insist on some clarific ation. And
quit e casually, on page 175, Davies does pro -
vide us with a defi nition of this troubl esom e
but indi spensable category of moral philoso-
phy. The So viet Union, he argues, belon gs in
the "same league of infamy as the practices of
the Third Reich" because it killed "more
huma n bein gs; and in the destru ctive irration al-
ity which we call Ev il it plumbed the depths".
But if this "destructive irrati onality" is to be
our definit ion of ev il, is this really an adequate
characterization of Stalinism? That in fact has
always been the central probl em that has ago -
nized all serious students of the Sov iet reg ime.
And it is nowhere more press ing than in rela-
tion to the war. And this is Davies' s mo st
basic failur e. If the Eastern Fro nt is to be given
the central importance that he de mands, then
our first task mu st be to exp lain the rema rk-
able powers of resistance of the Sovie t reg ime.
And we simply cannot do this if we adopt
Davies' s mora listic lens.
To put it bluntl y, we have no hope of under-
standing the centr al facts of the Seco nd World
War if we spe nd more tim e lam entin g the per-
fidy of the Katyn forest than we do analysing
the ex traor dinary performanc e of the Sov iet
home front. Davies might wish, of course , to
wave this question aside by reference to the
incenti ve provide d by the Gulag, but eve n he
must admit that the produ ction of T-34s had
something to do with the co nstruc tive aspec ts
of Stalini sm . As he puts it in a casual aside,
"The five -yea r plans had serve d their pur-
pose". But if he will admit so muc h, then how
can he be satisfie d with a chara cterization of
the Sov iet regim e that reduces it to nothing
more than "destructive irrationality" ?
 SCIENCE 13

n a televised deb ate among those hoping how are they doin g so far? He ack now ledges

I to succeed George Bush as the Republi-

ca n Par ty 's President ial ca ndida te, sev -
era l expressed their disbeli ef in evo lution and
their support for the theory of Intelli gen t
Design (ID) . Prop onent s of thi s theory, the
mos t we ll-known bein g the biochemi st
Mi ch ael Behe an d the phil osoph er and ma the-
ma tic ian W illiam De mbsk i, arg ue that ther e
are some part s of anima l and plant biolo gy
which displ ay suc h a degree of " irreducible
com plexit y" that they cannot have been pro-
d uced by a proc ess of ge netic mut ation and
natu ral se lec tion, and mu st instead be the
work of an int elli gent designer (w ho is never
nam ed, but who is wi de ly supposed to be
Go d) . The ir most fam ou s example is the
ba cter ial f1agellum, which is indeed a marvel
of bioch emi cal eng inee ring .
Mo st peopl e, ho wever , suspe ct that for all
its scie ntific aspira tions , the ID movem ent is
rea lly ju st the latest incarn ation of relig ious ly
mo tiva ted opp osi tion to evo lution. T ha t was
cert ainl y the view taken by Jud ge John E .
Jones in a Federal co urt case in Penn syl vania
in 2005, whe n he rul ed that the Dover Sch ool
Bo ard , in plac ing a stateme nt abo ut ID o n the
scie nce sy llabus, had ac ted in breach of the
First Amendment prohibition on state spo n-
sors hip of reli gion . For the mo me nt, it see ms
ce rtain that the A me rica n co urts will co n-
tinu e to keep ID off the sc ience sy lla bus.
Th er e rem ain s, however, a need for a
hi storicall y and ph ilosophicall y infor med
public di scu ssio n, which is where these
Top labels
T H O MAS DI XO N
P e t e r J. B o wl e r
M ON KEY TR IALS AND GO R I L LA
SE R M ONS
Evo lution and Christianity fro m Darwin to
Intelli gent Design
250pp. Harvard Univers ity Press . £ 16.95
(US $24.95).
978 0674026 155
S a ho tra S a rk ar
DOUB TING D A R WI N ?
Crea tionist des igns on evo lution
2 14pp. Black well. £40 (paperbac k, £ 12.99).
US $49 .95 ; $ 19.95.
978 I 4051 5490 I
two book s ha ve vita l contributions to make .
In his fascin atin g, thorough and author ita-
tive book Monkey Trials and Gori lla
Sermons: Evolution and Christianity from
Darwin to Intelligent Design, Peter J. Bowler
pays parti cul ar atten tion to theolo gi an s and
scien tis ts who have found a degree of har-
mon y bet ween evo lutio n and C hristianity .
Popular under standi ngs of the history of
science and reli gion are do min ated by epi-
sodes of conflict suc h as the " monkey trial "
of Bow ler's title - the prosecution of the
scho olteac he r John Sco pes for breaching
Ten nessee' s anti-evolutio n statute in 1925.
Bo wler argues that, in see king histori cal prec-
ede nts for more co nc iliatory positi on s, we
sho uld look to the lib eral tradition re pre-
sen ted by the "gorilla sermo ns" of the An gl i-
ca n clergym an Ernes t William Barn es. Deli v-
ered in Westminster Abb ey in the ea rly
I920s, Barn es' s addresses taught that Go d
had created livin g thin gs according to the
laws of na ture, and that sin was a ves tige of
hum an ity ' s ape ances try ra ther than a product
of the Fa ll. As Darwin hi mself had put the
same idea in one of his not ebooks almos t a
cen tury earl ier, "O ur descent, then , is the
ori gin of our evi l pass io ns! ! T he Devil und er
form of Baboo n is our grandfather!" .
In Doubting Darwin ?: Creationist designs
on evo lution, Sahotra Sarka r also mak es use
of the history of scie nce, alo ng with some
quite det ailed phil osophi cal and scie ntific
argume nts, in a conc ise and elegant d is-
mantling of ID. Instead of tryin g to demar-
ca te " science" from "pseudosc ience " in the
mann er of phil osoph er s of scie nce of previ-
ou s ge nera tio ns, he takes the claim s of the
proponent s of ID at face value . If they
reall y are trying to institute so me thing like
a Kuhnian scien tific revo lution, Sarka r asks ,
that they ca n tak e so me comfor t from the
history of sc ience. Th er e ce rtainly have been
dr amatic and unexp ected cha nges of theoreti-
cal fr amework in the past. No t only that ,
but these have also brou ght with them
fund amental changes in metaph ysics compa-
rab le with the ID movemen t' s hoped-for
rei ntro ductio n of supe rn atural entities
such as intelli gent design er s int o the
theoretical appara tus of the natural scie nces.
For instan ce, the predict ive triumphs of
Newto n's law of grav ity eve ntua lly per-
suade d defender s of the mech ani cal philos -
ophy that ac tio n at a di stan ce, which seemed
to them an occ ult prop ert y, could ind eed
be a feature of nature . Sim ilarly , the empiri-
ca l success of qu antum mech anics forced
ph ysicists to g ive up determinism. Th e case
that Sa rka r builds is not that ID is not
sc ien ce , but , eve n if co ns ide red as sc ience,
it wo uld be a hopelessly poor science, which
has pro duce d not hing to compare wi th the
triumph s of those ear lier theo ries. ID ha s
identifi ed no new phen omena, made no new
pre d ictio ns, ge ne rated no new ex perime nta l
res ults. Mich ael Behe has d rawn atte ntion to
bioch emi cal mech ani sms which pose diffi-
cult pu zzles for evo lutiona ry scien tists to
wor k on, but his in vocation of an unelabo-
ra ted co nce pt of "design" in these cases,
while ge nera lly , unl ike more traditional
crea tionists, acce pting an evo lutio nary
history for life, tak es us no furth er for ward
scien tifica lly .

Two Lives Gertrude and A lice What Is Sport? Fallen Angels

Janet Malcolm
"A book by Ianet Makolm is always an
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"Ma1colm's research into those murky
war-time and post-war events reads like
a great detective story.. .cogently argued, . .------.-~
wholly original. v.will irrevocably alter
history's view of Stein and Toklas"-
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240pp. 12 b/w illus. £16.99
The Art of William Steig
Claudia J. Nahson
With contributions by Robert Cotting ham,
Edward Sorel, Jea nne Steig and Maggie Steig
Preface by Ma urice Sendak
Known for his brilliant cartoons and
award- winning children's books, William
Steig leaves a legacy that spans much of
the twen tieth century. This definitive
book feature s over 250 of his drawings ,
many of them previously unpublished.
208pp. 153 b/w + 128 colour iIIu•. £29.95
When Asia Was the World
Stewart Gordon
This fascinating view of Asia during th e early
medieval period explores how its great
civilisatiouflourished and spread through its
travelling merchants, scholars and holy meu.
"A timely book. v.This is lively, engaging
and very welt-crafted history,"-
Daud AIi, School of Oriental & African
Studies , London
232pp. 16 b/w illu•. £ 16.00
Roland Barthes
"]'\\"O LI"ES Translated by Richard Howard
A poetic meditation on professional
sport by one of the major figures of
twentieth-century French literature.
Published here in an elegant
paperbac k gift edition, Roland
Barthes's inspired What Is Sport? ponders
bull fighting , car racing , the Tour de France ,
hockey and football.
96pp. 15 b/w iIIus, Paper, £8 .99
Bears A Brief Histo ry
Bernd Brunner
Translated by lori Lantz
This engaging book examines the shared
history of people and bears around the world .
Hopscotching through history, literature and
science, Bernd Brunner presents a rich
compendium of the interactions between the
two species and explores ho w bears have
become central figures in our inventory of
myths and dreams.
272pp. 105 b/w iIIus, £16.99
The First Day of the Blitz
September 7, 1940
Peter Stansky
This compelling book recreates the first day of
the London Blitz in all its horror, using rich
archival sources and first-hand accounts , many
previously unpublished. Stanskyexamines what
this crucial day meant to the nation and
contends that the first twelve hours of bombing
determined much of the future of Britain.
"There is no shortage of books about the
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224pp. 16 b/w iIIus, £16.99
Harold Bloom
Illuminations by Mark Podwal
In this lovely illustrated gift book , literary
critic Harold Bloom considers the
meaning of angels, and particularly fallen
angels . Exploring represent ations of angel s
iu world literature from the Bible to
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Angels in America, Bloom offers a wise
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80pp.4 b/w + 9 colour iIIus. £9 .99
Treasure-House
of the Language
Tbe Living OED
Charlotte Brewer
This histor y of the celebrated Oxf ord
English Di ctionary and its makers examines
how and why the dictionary developed from
1928 to the present. The book explores the
methods, biases, tradeoffs and int entions of
OED editors and others who battled to
keep pace with the explos ion in vocabulary,
changing cultural attitudes and technological
advan ces.
336pp. 16 b/w iIIus, £25.00
Rudyard Kipling
The Books I Leave Behind
David Alan Richards
This book celebrates the multi-faceted
achievements of Rudyard Kipling. With 80
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of Kipling's works and displays the variety
and breadth of his printed productiou, both
during his lire and in the years sincehis death.
148pp. 80 colour iIIus. £16.99

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TLS NOVEMBER 162 007

14
He was an Englishman
Ferdinand de Saussure, the father of structuralism, owed much to Hobbes
and Mill, and numbered Henry VII among his ancestors
s he lay dying, in 1913, ofa rterio-
A sclerosis and influenza , still a
leth al co mbination today, Ferd i-
nand de Saussure must have been
sure that, come the yea r 2007, no one would
mark the centenary of his first course on gen-
era l linguistics at the Univers ity of Ge neva or
the sesquice nte nary of his birth , on Nove m-
ber 26 . His name, never wide ly known , was
for gotten except among the few scho lars
who recalled his impr essive M aster' s thesis
of thirty-fou r yea rs earlier.
All this depressed him . A mod est, eve n-
temp ered man, at the age of fifty-fi ve he
harbou red no deep bitterness, yet the one
thi ng that consistently upset him was being
denied his due. On a visit, in 1911 , to his sister
Alb ertin e, at Mettingham Castle in Suffolk ,
her husband , Major Hastings Ross-John son,
raised a sceptical eyebrow at Ferdin and' s
claim to descent from English nobi lity. In
good aristocratic form , Sau ssure disguised his
dismay, but as soon as he return ed to Geneva
he started writing to cousins for informati on
that wo uld confirm the lineage.
With the help of Bu rke 's Peerage, he
traced his direct line of descent from King
Henr y VII , via Prin cess M ary, the sister and
co-h eir of Henr y VIII, to the Ege rton family ,
Earls of Brid gewater. Sau ssures materna l
grandfather, Charles-William Saladin de
Cra ns, was the son of Elizabeth Egerton, and
Burk e 's Peerage confirmed Saladin ' s right to
quarter the royal cres t in his coat of arms. As
Ross-Johnson sca nned the famil y tree which
his broth er-in-l aw drew up and sent to him ,
his eye brow descended again. Your wife and
I, it infor med him , are pedigreed descend ant s
of Willi am the Co nquero r, whereas you,
Major, bear the name of one of his battle-
field s. Game, set and match.
When a letter from Albertine mention ed
that she was plannin g to send her son to a
public school, Saussure urged her to reco n-
sider. As a boy of ten, he had him self gone to a
Swiss boardin g school run on the British
model, and had terribl e memori es of what the
older boys had put him throu gh . He was pulled
out in the middle of a term on account of what
his father , not usually a reticent man, referred
to in his diary only as "deplorable things" .
Years later, Saussure claimed a spec ial insight
into the English mentalit y, which, predict ably
in the circum stances, did not always manifest
itself as sympathy. His private writings show
him to have been deeply upset at British
policies in South Africa in the run-up to the
Boer War, though this did not stop him from
investing money in British comp anies there.
No ne of this inform ation has been pub-
lished before. It has com e to light in pap ers
discovered in 1996, onl y a very few of which
have mad e their way into print. The Writings
in Genera l Lin guistics, fir st publi shed by
Gallim ard in 2002 (Engli sh translation from
Oxford University Press, 2006 ), con sists
mainl y of texts already publi shed in 1974 or
earlier. The new material in Writings, includ-
JOH N E . JO S EPH
ing the brief fragment s found in twelve
enve lopes marked "On the doubl e esse nce"
or "O n the esse nce" , does not differ on any
essenti al point fro m the previously kno wn
manu script s. Saussure was con sistent in his
concep tion of language throu ghout his life.
Ferdinand de Saussure, painted by his
brother Horace (late nineteenth century)
More revealing is the personal inform ation
in the papers. His claim s to Englishness are
surprising because he seems so archetypically
Continental, standing as he does at the head of
all th e struc turalis m and po ststructuralism th at
followed in his wake. Yet Geneva , the city of
Calvin and Frankenstein (for whom Ferdi-
nand' s great-grandfather Horace-Benedict de
Saussure may have been a model), was
described in 1814 by the historian and polit-
ical economist J. C. Simonde de Sismondi as
"a sort of British city on the continent . .. a
city where peopl e think and feel in English,
thou gh they spea k and write in French " .
Saussure' s most chara cteristic ideas have
British or American sources, includin g the
most distincti vely Saussurean idea of all:
In a language there are only differences with-
out pos itive terms. Whether we take the signi-
fied or the signifier, the language contains
neither ideas nor sounds that pre-exist the
lin gui stic system, but only co nceptua l d iffer-
ences and phonic differences issuin g from this
syste m.
(From the po sthumous Cou rse in Genera l
Lingui stics, 1916.)
The term s "s ignifier" and "signified" were
not introduced until one of his last general
linguistic s lectures in 1911. But the idea of a
psychological sound pattern correspondin g to
a spoken word, functioning purely throu gh its
difference from every other such signifier, is
found in his notes as far back as 188 1, when
he was in Paris working towards a French doc-
torat e that he never comp leted . "Language" ,
TLS N OVE M BER 16 200 7
he wrote at that time, in a manuscript now in
Harvard' s Houghton Library and publi shed in
1995, "is comp osed of a system of acoustic
oppo sition s." Acou stic onl y: no indication as
yet that the conceptu al side , the signified, is
similarly oppo sitional in its nature - that it too
has no positive content , ju st a value generated
by its difference from other signifieds, as
claim ed in the quot e from the Course.
This rem ain s vividly controve rsia l, as I
was reminded so me month s back when 1 was
dra wn into an e-conversa tion with a philo-
sopher of language who is convinced that the
meanin gs of words must have so me primor-
dial realit y that is not simply differential , and
bla mes Saussure for introducing a fund amen-
tal error. Yet, in phil osoph y itself, and in sci-
ences other than lingui stic s (because lingui sts
ju st did not think about such thin gs), it was a
com monpl ace view in the second half of the
nineteenth ce ntury that all thought and all
consciou sness was purely differenti al and
negative in nature. It was a defining feature
of British psychol ogy, as oppose d to Conti-
nental (particularly Ge rman) psycholo gy,
which, befor e the Briti sh approach made
inro ads into it, took thought to be made up
of ideas, maybe innate, maybe acquired, but
with real, substa ntive cont ent.
For the late nineteenth century the locus
classicus of differentiality was John Stu art
Mill' s Examin at ion of Sir William Hamil-
ton's Philosoph y (1865 ), a scathing attack
that brou ght far more attention to Hamilton ' s
writings than their auth or had man aged dur-
ing his lifetim e. Hamilton ' s "relativity of
hum an knowledge" was one of the few thin gs
Mill agreed with , sum marizing it as follo ws:
We only know anything by knowing it as distin-
guished from something else; all co nscio us-
ness is of difference; two objects are the small-
est numb er required to const itute conscious-
ness; a thing is only seen to be what it is by
contrast with what it is not.
"With this doctrin e" , wrote Mill , " I hav e
no quarrel." Since Hamilton nowher e sta tes
it so succinctly or clear ly, one can hardl y
begrudge Mill his eo-o wnership of it.
Saussure had come into contact with the
English and Scotti sh philo sophical tradition s
in his teens, reading Pictet' s survey of them in
his book on aesthetic s, Du Beau . That back-
ground left him recepti ve to the Hamilton-
Mill doct rine when he was introduc ed to it, at
the start of the I890s, via his younger broth er.
After compl eting a degree at the Ecole Poly-
techniqu e in Paris, Rene de Saussure had gone
to the United States hopin g to start an aca-
demic career. Not findin g him self in dem and,
he worked as an architect and wrote papers on
bidim ensional geo metry, a field straddling the
border of geo metry and physics. He would
send these papers to Ferdinand, who critiqued
them (sometim es to his broth er' s irritati on)
and arranged for their public ation in Geneva n
scientific journals. (The most import ant
of Rene' s manu script s, together with his
letters to his broth er, are amon g the Saussure
paper s to have come to light in recent years.)
The main source of Renes inspiration -
indeed the sole source cited in one of his
papers - was The Concep ts and Theori es of
Modem Physics (1882) by John Bernh ard
Stallo, German-born but from the age of six-
teen a resident of Cincinnati, Ohio. Rene' s
papers includ e very full resumes of Stallo and
length y citation s, ensuring that Ferdinand
knew its content s, whether or not he read the
book or its French translation. Among the
many passages of interest to him is this one:
Thought, in its most compre hensive sense, is
the esta blishment or recognition of relations
between phenom ena. Foremost among these
relations - the found ation, in fact, of all others,
such as those of exclusion and inclu sion, co-
ex istence and sequence, cause and effec t,
mean s and end - are the relations of identit y
and difference. The difference between pheno-
mena is a primary datum of sensation. The
very act of sensation is based upon it. It is one
of the many acute observa tions of Hobb es that
"it is all one to be always sensible of the same
thing and not to be sensible of anything.
Stallo next quot es the se ntence from Mill
cited abov e, not menti onin g that Mill is
summarizing Hamilt on. But the invocation of
Hobb es anchors the doct rine still more firm ly
in the tradition of Briti sh thou ght.
Wh at is orig inal to Saussure , then, do es no t
includ e the view that linguistic meanin g or
any other form of conc eptu al kno wled ge is
generated purely by the difference of one ele-
ment from another within a system of values.
Nor, of cour se, does it include the idea that the
link between a lingui stic meaning and the
sounds which signify it is arbitra ry - that is an
ancient herita ge. His novel contribution was to
imagine the sound side of language on the one
hand , and the conceptual side on the other, as
perfectly alike in their nature and menta l opera-
tion . Thi s is the "double esse nce": two orders
of difference, held together by a force that is
essentiall y social, which he called the immut a-
bility of lingui stic signs. It makes it impossib le
for an individual to introdu ce a chang e into the
sig n sys te m, and it mean s th at an y communa l
change creates a wholly new system of values,
which is to say a new langu age.
For if all consciousness is of differenc e,
we can only speak of "a language" where all
differenc es have been con venti onalized, and
are shared. Saussure repeatedl y testifie s that
on this point he was influenced by the work
of the Am er ican lingui st Willi am Dwight
Whi tne y, with whom he had a chanc e meet -
ing while study ing in Germ any in 1879 .
Whi le he did not full y accept Whitney' s char-
acte riza tion of a lan guage as an " institution" ,
it set him on the track toward his own modi-
fied view of its ess entially social nature.
How the psycholo gical link is made
between the two orders of difference is not
addresse d by Saussure , But he becam e cen-
trally involved when the question was taken
up in 1892 by his psycholo gist colleague Theo-
dore Flournoy, the most regular European
correspond ent, confidant and intellectu al soul-
mate of William James. In his review of
Flournoy 's book on "coloured hearing" (also
called synopsia or photism or, more generally,
synaesthesia), James underscores the vast
range of individual pecu liarities discovered in
the re search. " Sometime s" , l am es not e s, " it
makes a differenc e how one imagines the
sound to be written. The photism, e.g., of
French ou may differ from the same individ-

ual' s photism of German u, thou gh the sounds
are the same." The indi vidual Jam es was
writing about - referred to by Flournoy as "the
eminent lingui st Mr X" - was Saussure.
Photism, a word James himself was the
first to use in Eng lish, had been a popul ar
subje ct in German and French psychological
research since the start of the I ~ ~ Us . None of
the studies menti on s the poem "Voyelles",
written in 1871- 2 by the yo ung Rimb aud,
eve n thou gh these psycholo gists were scholar-
scientists who kept up with literatur e. Of
Flournoy 's 700 anonym ou s subje cts, Saussure
was the onl y one to report that it made a differ-
ence to him how a sound was written:
In French we write the same vowe l fo ur di ffer-
ent ways in terrain, plein , matin, chien. Now
when this vowel is written ain, 1 see it in pale
yellow like an incompletely baked brick; when
it is written ein, it strikes me as a netwo rk o f
purplish ve ins; when it is written in, I no lon ger
kno w at all what co lour se nsa tio n it ev okes in
my mind , and am inclin ed to beli eve that it
evo kes none.
Wh en Sauss ure ass oc iates ain with an
incompletely bak ed brick, it is hard not to
think of the prototypic al baked good, and one
of the two most common French words to
co ntain ain. Although pa in (bread) is not men-
tion ed, it too is a pale yellow when incom-
pletely baked . Wh en ein strikes him as a net-
work of veins, thi s time the word used to
ide ntify the visual ass ociation is present -
veines - thou gh whil e the lett ers ein are there,
in thi s wor d they are not pron ounc ed with the
vowe l he is di scu ssing. If in ev okes nothing,
could that have to do with in- bein g a nega-
tive prefi x? Or with in bein g the stresse d
vowe l of his give n nam e, Mongin, which he
never used ? He continued :
So it does not seem to be the vowe l as such - as
it ex is ts for the ear, that is - that ca lls forth a
certa in corres ponding vis ual se nsatio n. On the
o ther hand , neither is it see ing a certai n letter
or gro up of letters that ca lls forth this se nsa-
tio n. Rather it is the vowe l as it is co ntained in
this written ex press ion, it is the imagin ary
being formed by this first association o f ideas
which, through another associatio n, appears to
me as endowed wi th a certain cons iste ncy and
a ce rtain co lo ur, sometimes also a ce rtain
shape and a certa in sme ll.
Terms such as associatio n and sensation
which Saussure uses here figur e prominentl y
in the "assoc iationism" es tablished by Mill ' s
Scottish ally Alexander Bain . In the second
half of the nin eteenth century it came to
defin e "modern" psychol ogy in Brit ain , then
in Am erica and Co ntinental Euro pe, where
opp osin g traditions were more firml y root ed.
Saussur e depl oys an asso ciationist vocabu-
lary in a casual and comfort able way that sug-
ges ts no deep study of the subjec t, but rather
a familiarity acquired from articl es addresse d
to the ge neral puhlic and discussion s in the
salon. These are the likely sources of the
ec hoes of Hippolyte Taine, a popularizer of
associationi sm in France , that Han s Aarsleff
was the fir st to spot in Sauss ure.
Sau ssur e makes no pretenc e of analysing
his own reactions psychologicall y. He ju st
records them , in ex q uisite detail. Th e French
lett er- sound a he experiences as
off-w hite, approac hing ye llow; in its co nsist-
ency, it is so me thing so lid, but thin , that crac ks
eas ily if struck, for exa mple a shee t of paper
(yellowed with age) drawn tight in a frame, a
flimsy door (in unvarnished wood left white)
COMMENTARY 15
that you feel would shatter at the slightest immortal of the Acadernie Franca ise, After doctrin e that one mu st express idea s clearly
blow, an already broken eggshell that you can that, Saussure never wrote another line of and directly. Any revellin g in the beauty of lan-
keep cracking by pressing o n it wi th yo ur verse , apart from amusing part y pieces, guage would be doubl y frowned upon , both
fingers. Better still: the shell of a raw egg is a though he never lost his poet' s instincts for because it was pleasurable and because it mu st
(w hether in co lour or in the co nsis tency o f the language. stand in the way of clear express ion. Sau s-
object), but the shell of a hard-boiled egg is not The best of his poems is "Le Feu sous la cen- sure's poetic nature pro vides an insight into
a, because of the feeling you have that the dre'' (The fire beneath the ashes), the portrait his synaes thes ia, his fascination with ana-
o bjec t is co mpact and resista nt. A ye llowed of a Huguenot famil y of the sixteenth century: gra ms and his belief in a structure lurkin g
pane of g lass is a ; a pane of ordinary co lour, "Se uls on voit ec laires d'un e rouge lueur I Le within the chaos. His Ca lvinism help s us to
offering bluei sh refl ection s, is the very o ppo- pere et ses deu x fils devant la chernin ee" understand the lucidit y of his lectures,
s ite of a, because of its co lour, and de spite its (Alone are seen, illumined by a red glow I Th e achieve d with enormo us personal effort, but
cons iste ncy bein g ju st rig ht. father and his two sons before the fire). Som e- also his inabilit y to commit his conc eptions of
Flournoy ' s analytica l comm ent ary states thin g, we are not told what, is troublin g the old language to paper in a form that met the super-
the principle of the arbitrariness of the man. As he and his sons look into the fire they hum an demand s he impo sed on him self.
lingui stic sign that will ge nerally be credited have frightful prem onitions, and hear For someo ne who believed that opposition
to Saussures later lectures, though aga in its anguished sighs remini scent of Dante ' s Hell: and differenc e were fund amental to language,
antiquity is we ll known : Et les vo ila tou s trois , reve urs et ser ieux he was entirely blase about the contradictions
The wo rd is arbitrary, co nvent io nal, and ge ts Cherc hant dans ce chaos un se ns rnysterieu x in his ow n life. A Ge neva n throu gh and
attached to the idea only through the direct but Et si le d estin so mbre auss i leur fait attendre throu gh , a sergea nt in the Swiss militia , his
purely superficial and (if I may use the term) Quelq ue vague malheur qui co uve sous la earliest years were spent grow ing up on a
cortica l link that repetiti on ends up creat ing ce ndre. farm, not in Switz erland, but in France. He
between the corresponding cen tres or plex uses; (And there are the three of them, rapt in had Pruss ian citi zenship , becau se his mother ' s
the connec tio n of the sig n and the thing sig ni- sombre thought, I Searching the chaos for a famil y were from Ne uchatel, which belonged
fied is artific ial and results from habitual my steriou s meanin g / A nd whe ther dark des- to Prussia until 1857, the year of his birth .
ass ocia tio n. On the o ther hand the relatio nship tiny also has in store for the m / So me vag ue But Frenc h was the Saussures ' language, and
of photi sm to the auditory pheno menon is mi sfo rtune smouldering beneath the ashes.) Ferdinand never felt at hom e speaking the
natural, being esse ntially found ed o n . . . the It is the one poem in which Sau ssur e hold s German he learned at the boardin g school
identical psychological effects that they have something back - a mysterio us meanin g that where all those deplorable thin gs occurred.
in the depths of the organism. smo ulde rs beneath the text. His oth er verses And let us not forget, for he him self has said it,
Flournoy's detailed terminology of co rtica l start from a transparent image, or event, or and it is greatly to his credit, that he was an
link s and plexu ses will never be taken up by sentiment, and strive for literary effect on the Eng lishman. Burke 's Peerage shows that
Saussure, nor will the noti on of repetition or surface , in rh ythm, rh ym e and the occ asion al Ferdinand de Saussure, the poet who could
habit creatin g link s. He was scrupulo us about syntac tic affe ctation. smell vowe ls, was a tenth cou sin (tw ice
sticking to purely lingui stic matters, his ex per- The famil y portr ayed is undoubtedl y Saus- rem oved ) of Princess Diana. In some parallel
tise bein g phil ological rather than psycholo gi- sure's ow n. In his veins ran the Ca lvinist uni verse, that sure ly signifies something.
cal. Still, the ove rlap with the Jamesian
Flournoy is unmi stakable. Th e two me n
remained clo se, Flournoy turning to Sau ssur e
to analyse the "S anskritoid" utterances of the
medium Helene Smith, mad e world-famo us
in Flournoy ' s From India to the Planet Mars
(1900 ). Saussur e ' s son Raymond studied
under Flournoy and marri ed his dau ght er,
Ari ane, before go ing on to becom e a di scipl e
of Freud.
Wh at see ms most disharmoniou s with
Saussures later views is the status he acc ords
here to the writte n sign. No hint of the
"tyranny of the lett er" , of the visual image of
a so und leading to "vicious pronunciati ons"
that are "patholog ical" - all those over-
state ments so brilli antl y decon stru cted by
Derrida, but actu all y all from the pen, not
of Saussur e, but of Ball y and Sechehaye,
editors of the Course in Genera l Linguistics.
Saussure did make rem ark s, in his third
cour se, abo ut spelling pronunciati on s bein g
teratologiques, "anomalous", eve n "mon-
stro us", suggesting that it is unn atur al for the
visua l image of a sound to affec t the spoke n
ima ge, which it is its functi on to repr esent
passively. In his synaes thes ia, the two ima ges
see m much more eq ual, neith er out weighin g
the oth er in its contribution to the imagin ary
bein g that evok es synaes thetic sens ations.
No one becomes as famou s as Saussure did
without both admirers and detractors reducin g
them to a paragraph ' s worth of ideas that can
be readil y quoted, debated, memorized and
exa mined. Those ideas then becom e "Saus-
sure" , while the hum an bein g, in all his com-
plexity, disappears. But Saussure was a man
who lived a life of contradictions, as we all do ,
he perh aps more than most. At seven teen, he
had heard his neocl assical poetry publicl y
procl aimed by his teach er John Braill ard ,
norm ally a brutal critic, to be superior to that
of Jacques Delill e, "the French Virgil" , an
TLS NOVE M BER 16 200 7
16
lhel Merman sing ing "There ' s no bus i-
E ness like show business" goes into
deli berate dig ita l m-m-m -me ltdown as
loud curses are heard and the cast comes on of
Curtain Up, Lights Up, Cock Up, a "celebra-
tion of all that is lousy about show business",
"maliciously compiled" by my broth er Simo n
for the Jermyn Street Th eatre. Sitting alone at
the back for the final run-through , I rea lize that
I have sole responsibility for laughter. Unfortu-
nately I have a cough and am obliged to invent
a kind of brayin g noise. My guffaw at the
chestnut abou t the actor in the lion suit at the
zoo telli ng the actor in the gor illa outfit "Shut
up, or we' ll both be out of work" takes all
three performers by surpr ise.
"Welcome to the Heather McCart ney Mill s
Benefit Night" , says my brother, openi ng the
show. He starts with some defi nition s, of
which David Hare' s strikes a person al note:
"Ragged and gap -toothed as it is, the theatre
still has a healthi er po tentia l than so me poor
abandoned arts" . To uche . "Walter Pli nge" is
the actor 's name hab ituall y used for thea-
trical anecdotes, but Simo n decides that "Jer-
emy Iron s" (a fri en d) wo uld be funni er, as in
"Je rerny Iro ns playe d Hamlet. Hamlet lost" .
As usual, he find s a way of including me :
" It took a while for my broth er and me to
fig ure out what our father did. He was at home
all day and only went out to work aro und bath-
time. At breakfast he'd say thin gs like ' Good
hou se last night ... full to the rafters' , so that
we reckoned he mu st be a burglar" .
Seco nd-ge neration actors may be mo re
theatri cal than first. My broth er is the perfec t
player, relishing eve ry aspect of theatre life,
and I too harbour a kind of nos ta lgia for my
lost career on the stage . "Well, son, wha t are
yo u go ing to do with yo ur life?" goes the
story . "Oh Dadd y, I wa nt to be an actor when
I grow up." "Sorry, son. I' m afraid it's
IN NEXT WEEK 'S
IS
Craig Raine
The animal in
Ted Hughes
Stefan Collini
Youn g Ezra
Stephen Abell
Zadie Smith' s
other people
Poems by
Ciaran Carson and
Derek Walcott
COMMENTARY
FREELANCE
H UGO WILLl AMS
either -or. Yo u can ' t do both ." My ow n
version of the story is not so amusing . "The
honeymoon ' s over", my father told me, aged
seve ntee n. "W hat are you going to do?" After
a pa use for thou ght I answe red, " I wa nt to be
an actor " . "Over my dead body" sums up his
repl y. Our ho me life was not especially
preo ccu pied with theatri cal matter s, although
I do rem emb er my father imit at ing John
Gielgud 's wa lk and my mo ther biting her
ar m as Tallul ah Bankh ead .
One of the few stories I rem emb er fro m
tho se days was abo ut Mrs Patrick Campbe ll.
One night it was hot on stage, so the grea t
lady told my father to fetch her fan . "Where
is it?" he as ked. "In my dressing room of
co urse. " The j uve nile was oblige d to run
downs tairs, leaving her alone on stage for sev -
era l minutes, which wa s the object of the exer -
cise. The one star we did hear a lot abo ut was
Ce lia John son, of who m Noe l Coward said,
"T he only thing that prevents her from becom-
ing the grea tes t actress of her time is her
monotonou s habit of havin g bab ies". Simo n
and I used to hear abo ut her dau ght ers, Kate
and Lucy, whose characters see med to mirror
our ow n, Kates literary (she later wor ked
with me on the London Magazine ), Lu cy' s
theatrical (Simon later marr ied her and they
have often appeared in plays together). I
rem emb er our father tellin g us abou t an un-
intended spo onerism uttered by his beloved
Ce lia . The line he had writte n for her in his
play The Grass is Greener we nt "Who do you
thin k yo u are, the Co unt of Mont e Cristo?"
One night , Ce lia began, "Who do think yo u
TLS M ay 20 1949
Norman Mailer
Follow ing the death last week of Norman
Mailer, we look hack to the review of
The Naked and the Dead from the TLS of
May 20, 1949. It was reviewed hy Al an Ross
with two other firs t nove ls - Sam ara hy
Norma n Lewis and Aft er My Own Fas hion
hy Raiheart Elder. To read the article in fu ll,
go to www.the- tls.co.uk
ar, eve n at its most inten se, leaves
W plenty of gaps in action, gaps in
whic h the imagin ation atte mp ts to
co mpe nsate for tho se thin gs of which the
indi vidual is being partic ularly depri ved. In
time emo tional separation, rom anti c love,
profess iona l interes t in a civilian jo b
ex ha ust them sel ves by their remoteness as
touch ston es of rea l life . Sex ua l gratific ation,
on the other hand, grows more ob sessive as
a repeated ment al act in pro portion to its
pract ica l absence. M r. Ma iler 's The Naked
and the Dead, which deals with an assa ult
and shor t ca mpa ign on an isolated Pacifi c
island , attem pts to give the who le trut h, as
nine or ten men see it, of that parti cular
expe rience . Thu s we are give n descri ptions
TLS NO V EM BE R 162 007
are, the Mount of .. .". stopp ing herself j ust in
time. I thou ght thi s was terribl y saucy.
It amazes me some times how littl e I know
abou t the theatre, co nsider ing it was my
cradle, for instance that "being off ' means
fail ing to come on. It is as if I have been off
myself all my life, loiteri ng vag uely in the
wings. I liked the story of Desm ond Barrit ,
play ing a de tec tive in a murd er mys tery, who
respond ed to one no- show by wa nde ring
round the stage picking thin gs up and examin-
ing them . Eve ntually, he turn ed to the aud i-
ence and sa id, " I feel so happ y I think I'll
sing a song". At the Min ack open -air theatre,
set into a cliff in Co rnwa ll, one actor failed to
make his en tra nce because he had lost his
way on the cliff path an d could be heard in
the distance, ye lling for help . When I heard
the intro , "Two old actors were wa lking
down the stree t after a lon g and liquid lunch
. .." , I was sure they were go ing to go past a
fishmon ger ' s slab and sudde nly reme mber
the matin ee, the usual conclusion . But
Simon's vers ion takes the story a step furth er.
They enter the theatre and ge t ticket s. A shor t
while later , one whispers to the other, "This
is a good bit , this is where I come on".
The one-line rs are lobb ed back and forth:
"He' s complete ly unspoil ed by failur e" (Cow -
ard) . "Having no talent is no lon ger eno ugh"
(Go re Vidal). "Who do I have to screw to ge t
out of thi s show?" "The same person you
screwe d to get into it, darling" (unattri buted) .
It was rec alled how Barbara Leslie, appea r-
ing as the Ghos t of Christmas Past, nea rly
had a fit when Scrooges nightc ap, operated
on a thread by a mischievou s AS M, see med to
rise qui verin g from his head. But imagine the
Norman Mailer, c 1954
of the landin g, of the settling in, of local
patrol s and of the atte mpt at cl im bing the
mou ntain that domin ates the islan d. At the
sa me time there are interspersed , like one -
act plays, acco unts in dialo gu e for m of the
men ' s relations with one another and with
their office rs . These in turn are sepa rated by
flash-b ack s abo ut each of the story 's chi ef
charac ters as he becom es the ce ntral point
of the narrati ve . The final res ult co mbines
horror of actor Richard Digby Day, play ing
Hamlet, who fou nd at the end of a scene with
Gertrude that he'd forgotten to kill Polonius.
On the subject of critics, my broth er does
not spa re himse lf. Known for a piercing tun e-
lessness as a chil d, he has nevertheless und er-
taken the lead in several mu sic als, one of
whic h was gree ted with " Someone sho uld
tell Sim on Will iam s that pitch is not some -
thin g yo u put on broken roa ds". The best line
of the eve ning co nce rns Robert Mit chum :
"He does n' t so mu ch act as point his suit at
peo ple" . A few unattrib utedj okes I take to be
my brother ' s own witticisms findin g safe
haven at last: "One old actor cl aim ed to be
such a lou sy lay that he go t booed by a pee p-
ing tom " .
At the opening night , I watch in awe my
brother ' s gift for aud ience mana gem ent. If
some thing goes wro ng, he simp ly says,
"Take two" an d everyone is happy. "Anyo ne
fancy doin g a Wood y All en?" he' ll ask his
coll abo rator s, giving them dispara gin g marks
for their efforts, or oste ntatious ly takin g out
his pen to scratch dud j okes from the script if
they bomb. No t for the first tim e in my life I
wonder why it is that I' m not more like that
myse lf. I think of those yo uthful broth ers sit-
ting on either side of our fath er at the table
I no w sit at for my mea ls, my broth er bein g
lightl y witty , me dripping tears of fru str ation
into my food. Once, on holid ay in Spain,
aged about ten , he tapped his nose and sa id
"Nose bien", How I env ied him . I dri ed my
tears, but our characters are still sun an d
shade , mo uth turn ed up versus mo uth turn ed
down , as in those twin theatre masks behind
him as he talk s, o ne with a banana skin hang-
ing out of its eye . So it feels only right that I
should be sitting here in the dark of the
Jer myn Street Th eatre, takin g notes, while
my broth er stands in the light makin g jo kes.
an objec tive acc ou nt of a few weeks ' fight-
ing with the various subjec tive views that
go to substantiate it.
The virtue and limit ation of Mr. M ail ers
approac h are that he leaves noth ing out.
Fro m the beginning of the campaign to its
en d there is no selection of material, no
whittling away of detail to keep the narr a-
tive moving, to give sha pe to experience
that is esse ntially forml ess. Th e result is
that, in spite of the feelin g of co nv ictio n
Mr. Ma iler's wri ting ge nera tes, the book
grows increas ing ly unreadable. There are
go od episodes embedded in the grea t am or-
phous mass of descripti on , shrew d ana lyses
of charac ter, so me subtle revelations of men
und er fire. But it beco mes too mu ch ; Mr.
Mailer keep s no thing in reser ve, no bait to
lure the reade r on to any kind of discover y.
The camp aign will, and does, simply end.
In comparison with Mr. Mail er' s full-
bloode d A mer ican vitality, both Mr.
Nor man Lewis ' s and Mr. Ra ibea rt Elde r's
characters see m shadowy and insub stanti al.
In Samara Mr. Lewis had the materi al for
an exce llent no vel , but a poo r sense of tim-
ing, a discur sive we akness in dialo gu e, frit-
tered its chances away .. .. Af ter My Own
Fashion is the story of a deep friend ship
between two Sikhs whic h is brok en up by
their co nflicting loyalti es . .. . but an unc er-
tain lushn ess in the more descripti ve pas -
sages and the characterization ma ke thi s
only an aver age novel.
 17

Theatre and its ramshackle forms

Striking disclosures
K EITH MILL ER probably means radic al theatre - the goa l of
emp owerin g an audience by making it
WATE R question its role, or asse rt its status , within
Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith thi s or that space , proc ess or cont ext. One
piece, "Seance de Shado w 11", by Dominique
THE WOR LD AS A STAG E Gonza lez-Foe rster, does so straightfor -
TateModern
wa rdly, by turning the ga lleryg oe r into a per-
form er. A row of motion-acti vated light s
he Lyric Thea tre in Hamm ersmith run s along on e side of a dark ened corridor at

T is a bosom y, roc oco pleasur e pal-

ace , stas hed imp rob abl y inside a
1960 s block like a buri ed childhood
memory. It is a goo d plac e to think abo ut the
natur e, rules and boun daries of the theatrical
ex perience , whatever may be on the bill
there. Curre ntly, that is Water, a devised
piece put on by a co mpany called, appropri-
ately eno ugh, Filter (comi ng soon: Coffee),
but dir ected by the Lyric' s David Farr.
Th e comp an y have de velope d a sort of
Godardian reali sm w he re hy th e nuts a nd
bolt s of a show - the sound and lightin g
design ers, stage ma nage rs and so on - are
made visible to the audience . This plays o n
o ne level like a straightforward Brechtian
alien ation technique; but it also marri es up
with the co mpa ny 's oth er big idea, which is
to use, and likewise show, plent y of techno-
logic al hard war e - video scree ns, webcams,
laptops. Wh at one sees is less like a con ven-
tional theatri cal perform anc e than a stra nge
hybrid: part co rpor ate presentation , part rock
conc ert. It all feel s prett y ze itge isty. It also
serves straightforw ard narr ati ve and dr amatic
needs well eno ugh, as when two charact ers
Sk ype eac h oth er, or when an actor has to
sw itch quickly between two chara cters, and
the chan ge is flagged up by what look s more
like a sce ne change in a mo vie than anything
yo u wo uld ex pect to see in a theatre.
At the heart of all this wiza rdry is a pair
of slightly banal stories, both based loosely
around the eminently fashionabl e theme of
eco log ica l angs t. Co lin, an unh app y ma n in
early middl e age, is summo ned to Van co uve r
by his half-b roth er , a tackil y ex ubera nt DJ , to
help with the sca ttering of their father ' s
ashes. Awk ward fact s emerge about the
father ' s deserti on of hi s fir st famil y, the pro-
fessor ship he took in Canada twent y yea rs
ago, his seco nd marri age, and legaci es both
fiscal and scho larly. In the next hot el room to
Colin is Claudi a, a hard-n osed , emo tionally
crippled env iro nmental lobb yist, who is in
town to conduct so me tou gh pr e- su mmit
negoti ation s about carbon emission redu ction
- and to squeeze in a pregn anc y test betw een
mee tings . Mean whil e, her es trange d lover is
about to test his manhoo d by embarking on a
perilous ly deep cave di ve in Mexico .
For a devised piece, it all ha ngs togeth er
tightl y enough, thou gh it could probabl y do
with a bit mor e devising (or, dare one say ,
writing ). As thin gs stand, the two main char-
acters have nothing to do with one another
beyond sharing a hotel lift (thou gh it' s an
undeniable feat of dramatur gy to make us
aware that they are in a lift in the fir st place).
Carolyn e Shoemaker in Catherine SuIlivan's "The Chittendens" (2005)
At any rate , my half-time hopes that they
might sa il off into the Pacifi c sunset togeth er
came to nothin g. What is suppose d to unit e
them , and to ju stif y the pla y' s freewheelin g
structure and loose edges, is the metaph or s
ge nerated by water. The trouble is that these
are so wide-rang ing as to be, if not quit e
meaningless, then certainly more or less use-
less as an organizing principle . We are told
that our bodi es are 70 per cent water (thou gh
in some of our emissions and secretions - our
tears, our seminal and amniotic fluid s, to take
three sa lient ex amples - the figur e is rather
high er). We are told, ju st in case we didn 't
know , that the seas are ri sing. Indeed , Colin's
fath er is nam ed as on e of the first prophets of
clim ate cha nge , thou gh we find out that his
bosses and their sponso rs later induc ed him
to - sha ll we say - wa te r down hi s me ssage a
littl e. Co lin ge ts to redeem some of his
fath er ' s comp romi ses when his inherit anc e
com es through . But Claudia, compelled by
her cynic al colleagu es and the infl exibility of
her own nature to make so me compromi ses
of her own , look s set for a bleaker future .
A rou gh and read y style (or one carefull y
crafted to leave that impression , which is
what Filter have devised ) is con venti onall y
see n as one of the hallm ark s of radica l
theatre . But eco logical aw areness doesn't
qui te go with ag itpro p. Socialist the atre was
all about the po ssibility of willing the wor ld
to be a simpler and thu s a better plac e, and
tran sforming that will int o actio n out sid e the
theatre . But the task of undoing environmen-
tal harm is as compl ex as it is daunting. It is
difficult to imagin e a sing le wor k of art which
would rou se both a Chinese entreprene ur and
a Jerem y Clarkso n out of their complacenc y,
as Brecht and others hoped to do with the
workers of all land s a few decades ago; while
the metropolit an bour geoi sie pack ed into the
Lyric see m already committed to reducing
their carbon footprint, for all the good that
may do us. Water is anyway mor e about com-
promi se than commitment , thou gh it offers a
helpful reminder that doin g the easy thin g
often mak es life hard er later on .
A different perspecti ve on what theatre is,
and is for , can be see n at Tate Mod ern , where
The Wor ld as a Sta ge , a gro up show, gath ers
up works by mo stly young ish arti sts from
around the wor ld. Th e ex hibition's theatric al
theme is best und erstood fairl y loo sel y,
thou gh it does include video footage of per-
form anc e pieces, and sev eral live eve nts are
slated to run over the next few wee ks . As you
go in, the tick et-t aker recit es a tabloid head-
line to you; thi s, I guess, tell s us that eve nts in
the world are medi ated by the form and set-
ting in whi ch they're repr esent ed - thou gh
it' s not cle ar whose art work the reci tation is.
Onc e inside, what man y of the artists see k to
do is borrow from theatre - again , here one
floor - that is, footli ght - level. Your
pro gress throu gh the space is turned into a
Gothic shadow play, with sudde n appea r-
ances and disapp earanc es, and fresh charac-
ter s appearing unexpect ed ly at yo ur heel s.
Another, "Arena" by Rita McBride, is a mon-
um ent to the act of being a spec tator, a simple
tiered cur ve of sea ting from which the toin gs
and froin gs of staff and visitors aro und the
ex hibition space , and the oth er art wor ks
with in sight, take on a subtly altered, if not
qu ite " spectacular" qu al ity . On e of th e ja zzi-
est pieces, "Rotating Labyrinth" by Jepp e
Ste in, makes yo u both performer and specta-
tor. It con sists of two counter-rotating circles
of mirrored rect angul ar slabs, a sort of disco
Ston ehen ge. Stepping on to the platform you
see yo urse lf spliced, in varying configura-
tion s, into others. It is both exhil aratin g and
disorientatin g: a seas ide hall of mirrors and
the bleak final e of a paranoid 1970 s thrill er.
Wh at is generally missing, or onl y sketchily
addresse d, is the po litical as opposed to the
philo sophic al or sensual implic ations of the
them e: the wider respon sibiliti es of a given art
form , and especially, in this contex t, the way
in which the coa lescing of a certain numb er of
indi vidu als into a cast or an audience carries
political implicati on s. T he ex ce ption is
Jerem y Deller' s "Battle of Orgrea ve Archi ve
(An Injur y to One is an Injur y to All )", a
remarkabl e piece of work which neverth eless
see ms at first sight to be unlik e anything you' d
expect from the realm s of either art or theatr e.
At the Tate it is repr esented, or mayb e "com-
mem orated" is a better word, by an hour-lon g
film and a small, ramshackl e museum of the
sort that local history societies and herita ge
centr es often put togeth er.
In 2004 , Dell er was commission ed by the
public art trust Art ang el to stage a large-scale
re-enactm ent of the 1984 clash bet ween strik-
ing min ers and police at the Orgr eave coking
plant outside Sheffi eld . Regular battl e re-
enacters from groups such as the Seal ed Knot
we re joined by me n who had been pr e sent, on
one side or the oth er , at the eve nt itself (sev -
eral ex-miners - to man y of whom the past
twenty yea rs have clearl y not been kind -
were "cast" as polic em en , there bein g a short-
age of volunteer s for that role. Sta yin g in
charact er pro ved difficult for these perform-
ers, as well, for rel ated rea son s, as some
oth ers) . The event was supervised by
Ho ward Giles, who then worked for English
Heritage, and filmed by the occa sion al Holl y-
wood hand Mik e Figg is, with inter view and
archive foot age spliced in.
Deller' s project contained many eleme nts:

TLS N OVE M BER 16 20 0 7

18 ARTS

a critique of our politically quietist heritage
industry, a desire to take art beyond elite
precincts and exp lore fresh forms of creative
co llaboration, an examination of what "real-
ism" means in our time. Witnesses to the
even t itself report it as fairly unsatisfying - a
windblown day out for the cultural elite,
sparse ly attende d by current or former
membe rs of the working class. But the film
which survives it shows that its true sig-
nificance was probably rese rved for the
participants rather than the audience. The film
has an epic quality - some scenes look like
a particularly sanguinary Greek temple frieze
- but it is also a serviceable documentary
about the last mass industrial dispute we're
likely to see in this country for a long time.
The projec t as recorded seems socially
important, thought-p rovoking and emotionally
engag ing in a way that very few works of art
or theatre manage. Watching it in the little
cinema set up at the Tate, one became part
of a different sort of audience , absorbed and
curious, commi tted, even, with little of the
drifting in and out which usually characterizes
video art installations. The fact that our
political culture has changed since the strike -
was to some extent changed by the strike - and
has changed even since the re-enactm ent,
was occasio nally eviden t, too. I kept thinking
that maybe today' s environmentalist is
yesterday 's socialist, and wondering what
the pit closures mean in the context of that
particular realignment.
Ogres in wonderland
inutes into David Cro nenberg's
M new film, a man has his throat
brutally cut in a barber' s shop and a
bewildered pregnant girl haem orrhages to
death on the floor of a chem ist's. Both these
scenes , especially the latter, in which the bare-
foot, traum atized wo man has managed to
stagger away from some unspeakable horror
- a figur e familiar from such di verse exa m-
ples of the genre as the opening sequences of
Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly (19 55) and
Jea n-Jacq ues Bein eix' s Diva ( 198 1) - clearly
signa l sadistic ga ngland, film- noir territ ory.
Thi s isn 't quit e Cro nenberg 's fir st foray
into the cr imina l underworld: Eastern Pro-
mises follows A History of Violence (about a
sma ll-tow n Am eric an cafe ow ner with a
secret past as a mob hitman) . However, in
the pas t, the Cana dia n director ' s visceral
visua l conceits have tended to belong to the
"body horror" ge nre : after early ep idem ic
thrill ers The Parasite Murders (1974 ) and
Rabid (1976) ca me such wor ks as Video-
drome ( 1982), in which James Woods devel-
oped a pul satin g videotape-shape d slot in his
stomac h, and Dead Ringers ( 1988), where a
deranged obstetrician played by Jeremy Irons
crafted terrifying instru ments des tined for
gy naecologica l use on wome n he believed to
be mutating. Eastern Promises, set in the con -
M URI EL ZA G HA
EASTERN P R O MI S E S
Various cinemas
text of the Eas tern European sex trade in Lon-
don and written by Steve Knight, the auth or
of Stephen Frea rs's Dirty Pretty Things, a
film about asy lum see kers forced to engage
in the traffi c of hum an org ans, appears to
mark a definiti ve move from fant asy to social
realism.
The innoce nt interl oper who stumbles into
the affairs of the Vory V. Za kone ("Thieves
in law") criminal broth erhood is an Eng lish
midwife, Ann a (Naomi Watts), keen to find
the relati ves of a baby whose fourt een- year-
old Russ ian mot her, the fugiti ve of the open-
ing sequence , died on her ward . At the luxuri-
ous Trans-Siber ian res taurant where the girl
appa rently used to work , Anna mee ts ga ng
boss Semyo n (a profoun dly sinister , softly
spo ken Armin Mu eller- Stahl ), his enforcer
so n the psychotic Kirill (Vincen t Casse l)
and the "family' s" driver, Nikolai (V iggo
Mo rtense n).
Knight ' s story of und erworld violence is
based on well-doc ume nted realit y: the Vory
V. Zakone is a real criminal org anization and
Se rnyon's character was closely mode lled
on the head of a New York-base d Russian
"family" . But the script's translation into
Cronen berg 's universe has tilted it cha rac ter-
istically towards the fant astic, eve n though,
like A History of Violence, Eastern Promises
esc hews superna tural elemen ts and hallu cin a-
tion s, whether bro ught about by games -
play ing in virtua l realit y (as in eXistenZ ,
1999), sch izophrenic paranoia (as in Spider ,
200 2) or dru gs (Cronenberg ada pted William
Burr ough s' s Naked Lunch in 199 1).
Eastern Promises is per mea ted with a
hypn otic air of unrealit y. Filme d in was hed-
out greys and bro wn s, Lond on looks like an
alternative (and subtly Eas tern Europea n) ver-
sion of itself. The charac ters ' behaviour is
also, at times, rather surprising: wo uld sensi-
ble A nna reall y be so naive as to be taken in
by Serny on's avuncular manner ? Perh aps
not , but Eastern Promises is both an expose
of the sex trade and a night mari sh fairytale in
which Semyo n is an og re in disguise and
Ann a (who also brings to the film the
memor y of Watts' s perform ance in David
Lynch' s dreamlik e Mul holland Drive), the
wide-eye d heroin e sta nding on the threshol d
of a terrifying wo nderla nd.
The film revolves around the dark figur e
of Niko lai, driver and "undertake r" to the
mob - whose gris ly duti es includ e the dis-
po sal of dead bodi es. Whil e gradually illum i-
natin g what happened to the dead girl and
tracing her baby' s parentage, Eastern
Promises attempts to peel away the layers of
Nikolai's charac ter. Where the protagoni st of
A History of Violence (also played by Viggo
Mortensen) had repressed his co nnec tions
with the mob and hidden behind a new ident-
ity, Niko lai's criminal history is written all
over his bod y. First see n encase d in black
clothin g and wearing dark glasses, he later
reveals the many sy mbo lic tattoos acquired
in Russian prisons which make up his "pass-
port" in the und erworld. They also lead to
his having to fight for his life naked - in an
astonishing sequence worthy of und erground
filmm aker Kenn eth Anger ' s most delir ious
homoerotic fantasies - when he is attacked in
a public bath s by knife-wield ing leather-cl ad
Chec hen killers.
Cro nen berg has decl ared in interview that
he didn' t wan t to make "a Bourne -type film
[alludi ng to the Bo urne trilogy starr ing Matt
Dam on] .. . where you don 't have to pay a
penalty for that violence as an audience" .
There is indeed so mething implacable and
sobering about Eastern Promises's di splays
of unacceptable, inhuman beh aviour: blood
is not there for show but - throu gh DNA test-
ing - is ultimately a "poetic" (in Nikolai's
words) age nt of j ustice.

Room Under the Stairs

Crus hed against stair rises , no
pushin g the hard ma rgins apart
but I tried to lunge, one foot
buried in a flank of brushed cotton ,

a lost bale. O utside, on the stairs,

my mother ' s feet, stubby substitutes
for words. M y gra ndmother's steps
breathed in-out-in to the top.

Dark books hunc hed like handl es

of cases in the nearly midnight
in there. Every fold ed muscle
ached. Upside bones we re craze d

with needles. Air, packed with sca les

from unfini shed wall, strugg led into my lungs.
I was fill ing two tins and closin g
smiling dog lids and wen t shopping

when my mother slid across red tiles

into the light rule aro und the door. Who's to say
why I had to collapse my imagination?

C LA I RE C R OWT HE R

TL S NOVE MBER 16 2 0 0 7

M ICK I ML AH
P o s y Sim mon ds
TAMARA DREWE
I 12pp. Cape. £ 16.99.
9780224078 160
here is a revea ling if not quit e
T roma ntic story about the illu stration
of Tho mas Hard y ' s Far from the
Madding Crowd - his tale of contending suits
and the wro ng marriage. The nove l fir st
appeared as a serial in the Cornhill magaz ine,
runnin g in twelve monthly instalm ents from
January 1874 . The magazine ' s edi tor, Les lie
Stephen, ado rned the text with a series of
woodc uts he had commissio ned from Helen
Paterson, a highl y regarded form er pupil of
Frederic Le ighton's . When nove list and illu s-
tr ator met in per son for th e fir st and (as far
as we know) only time, at the Pall Mall Ca fe
in May 1874, she was twenty-six, and he
thi rty-four ; eac h was engaged to be married
that August, Helen to the Irish poet Willi am
Allingha m, a man of fifty, Hardy to his long-
term fiancee Emma Gifford. Whatever was
said at the dinner , she subsequently declin ed
his invitation to furth er wor k - on The
Laodicean - claimin g she had given up book
illustration for goo d.
As late as 1906 , however, whe n the widow
Helen Pater son Allingham was a well-known
watercolourist, Hardy describ ed her ruefull y
in a letter to Edmund Gosse as "the best
illustrator I eve r had" ; the letter goes on to
surmise, with a huff of profanity, that "these
two sim ulta neous we dd ings wo uld h ave
been one but for a stupid blund er of God
Almighty" . And it is to Mr s Allingha m - or
"H.P.", as she is designat ed there - that
Hardy dedicates a poem of 1914, ca lled "The
Opportunity", where she is cas t as one of
those missed chances on which he liked to
dwell. The third stanza run s,
Had we but mused a little space
At that critical date in the Maytime,
One life had bee n ours , one space ,
Perhaps, till our long cold d aytime.
Tamara Drove is the seco nd of Posy
Simrn ond s' s graphic novels, after Gemma
Bovery (1999), to base itself on a classic
wor k of fiction ; and it is tempti ng to prop ose
it as the perfect ma tch between text and
picture. S irnmo nds first ca me to fame as a
cartooni st for the Guard ian, where Tamara
appeared last year as a wee kly feature; and
her visual inventi on, enha nced here by a
step from monochrome into colour, may still
take the lead: her shrew des t charac terization
is done in clothes. But the book will take
as long to "read" as many an ordinary
novel, and its single most impressive
attribute is the brilli ant managem ent of what
wo uld be ter med , in a purely literary contex t,
the plot.
The first page of artwork present s an
adve rtisemen t, torn from the classified
Posy Simmonds's modem Hardyesque
Away from it All
Tamara Dr ewe on her mobil e to the outsid e world: from the book r eviewed here
section of a literary journal, which at once
point s to the source : "Far from the Madding
Crow d. Working retr eat for wr iters. Easy
access M96". (Rea ders ca n adj ust to the
sharpness of the detailin g ahead by discover-
ing that the "M96" is a cras h-test site in the
Co tswo lds .) The village is Ewed ow n, the
postal district (as glimpsed on a letterhead )
is Bourn emouth : we might ca ll the setting
Wessex .
The retreat is run by Beth Hardi man (there
is plenty of gen tle wor dp lay), a good, busy,
unglamorous wo man of fifty, who is also
required to manage the life of her husband
Nic holas, crea tor of the lucrati ve series of
" Doctor Inchcombe" detecti ve novels.
(Nicho las "likes to show off to women", and
as the book opens he is guiding his wife
throu gh the ruins of his latest affair in publi sh-
ing, with Nadia fro m foreign rights - " I
wo n' t lie. She was important to me". )
In this nest of authors, Beth is one of four
characters whose inform al diaries and scra p-
book reco llections are the means throu gh
which the story eme rges. The others are
Glen Larson , an Ame rican aca demic in
sem i-perma nent residence, an inert , spongey
presence and mild opportunist; Casey, a
teenage girl from the council houses with no
expec tations, who reports the incursions into
the plot of her more adve nturo us friend ,
Jod y; and Tamara Drewe herself - the
counterpa rt of Hard y ' s Bath sheb a Everdene
- who has retu rned to the village on the death
of her mother to take ove r the farmhouse they
bought there, and to write an und em andin g
co lumn about it for the Monitor. (He r own
urban "improvemen t" , in Hardy' s term , is
symbolized by the surgeo n's reduction of her
rustic "hooter" to a neat little modern nose.)
Like Bath sheb a, Tam ara has her affections
pull ed three ways . The flashy, irrespo nsibl e
Sergea nt Troy is refigured as Ben, the form er
dru mmer of the band Sw ipe , the connec tion
TLS NOVEMBER 16 200 7
I cl id n' c want tn is to happen . . . .
pick ed out in a scar let jacket worn on the
band ' s pro motional photos. Ben is an
unsha ven layabout with a rank philoso phy
(" Life's a shit sandw ich sometimes") and a
yellow Por sche; like Troy, he beco mes
involved with the heroin e while sulkily fixed
on an old flame. Alone of the charac ters here,
he is shown to mak e nothin g: not literatur e of
any kind ; not Beth ' s cakes and dinn er s; not
Jod y' s fantasies of love beyond her station;
not eve n the songs he once wro te for his
band ; onl y money. Yet Ben is no Victor ian
villain either, for he deals clum sily but
decentl y with the ove rflow of Jod ys infatu a-
tion . And as he withdraws from Ta mara's
bed, Nicho las Hardiman moves in, with
squirea rchical certa inty. Waitin g by various
gates and cabbage patches, meanw hile, is
the upro oted Ga briel Oa k figur e of And y
Co bb, with his bouqu et of "earth, dog,
tobacco, engine oil", garde ner to the inco m-
ers and conscience of the village, ready to
ra ke up the pieces .
But to app roac h this book through refer-
ence to Hard y' s novel risks neg lecting its
richness, its originality, its very part icul ar
imaginative coherence . For one thing, the
plot is propelled by modern gadge try .
Liaiso ns are "papped" on "rn obies". Youn g
Jod y sets the whole thin g rac ing by breakin g
into Tamaras hou se a nd compute r to se nd
her potent versio n of Bath sheb a' s va lentine :
an ema il to Ben, subje ct "Love",cc' d to
Nicho las and And y, reprodu ced here in Arial
10pt, rea ding " I wa nt to give you the biggest
shagg ing of your life" . And a co nsumer
pro duct new to the market proves a fatal
instru ment.
If there was a time when what Posy
Simmo nds see med to offer was an "entertain-
ing satire on the middl e classes" , that limita-
tion no longer applies . There is nothi ng in
Hard y, you might say, which more grimly
conveys the paralysis of lesser rura l life than
19
her pictures of Casey and Jod y at the old bus
shelter. And y Cobb lament s that Ewe dow n
now has " no shop, no bus, no po st office",
but it is the teenage popul ation who have to
act out the consequ ences: "We were goi ng to
get a lift into Haddit on with Jod y ' s mum, but
decide not to - we' re sk int, it' s freezin g,
and getting back mean s stay ing there
blood y hour s till her mum fini shes her shift
at Tesco" , On the verba l side, Posy
Simm ond s has the knack of rend erin g
particul ar idioms, such as the vinega ry
flavour of the kid s' "sex" talk , without ove r-
doing it : "Fur thest she's ev er go ne was w ith
Sam. Clothes on, zip stuff. Patted the dog
throu gh the letterbox"; "Ryan's been sta nd-
ing there porkin g out on Quave rs". There is
real punch, too, in Jod y' s burst of anger at
Nicholas because "he' s a chea ter, like my
dad" . Then, ju st as Casey has amaze d her self
by stumbling on a modest romance of her
own - "When Ryan thro ws his ci ggie down
I throw mine down too" - their fir st kiss is
illu minated by the arrival of an ambul ance in
Aspe n Close .
When, on stage at the Monk sted Literary
Festiva l, rattled by the presence in the
audience of both wife and girlfriend,
Nicholas announces the dea th of his detecti ve
Inchco mbe, "a gust of dism ay" blows
throu gh the gathering, "as though a real
death ' s been anno unced". Readers may feel
a similar jolt as this book reaches its
doubl e clim ax. But it is now part of Posy
Simmonds 's repertoire as a story teller to
shock and disturb . That said, one of the
book ' s fatalities is treated , rather charmin gly,
in the spirit of its victim, as a murd er
mystery. The autopsy reveals death by
"multiple inju ries infli cted by the co ws" - a
spooked herd of Belted Gall oways - "and
a collision with the wa ter trough" . But the
qu iet A merican cake -ea ting, feet-up
Glen - has secre ts of his ow n.
20 FICTION

ominously and to the point , with the six-yea r-

Awaiting the drop
ver the past two decades, Carol
O Birch ' s ficti on has become asso c-
iated with so me recurring them es:
working-class lives; femal e surv ivors;
old Mar garet witness ing a public hangin g,
and it develop s a them e symbolized by, but
ex tending far beyond , the " scapegallows" ,
He,
B ETH LY NCH
As Birch unhu rriedl y imagines the course of
Margarets life in Suffo lk, fro m birth to Tiresias
Car o l Birch
transportation , she resists any sense of moral
or, indeed , narrati ve destin y impli ed by that
trajectory . Scapegallows probes how peopl e
SARAH C URTIS

Manchester and the No rth. Most recentl y, her
explorations of identit y and famil y fortun es
throu gh multiple gene rations, in the novels
Turn Again Home (2003 ) and The Naming
of Eliza Quin n (2005), have entered into
compl ex engage me nts with historical
perspe cti ve.
Scapegallows. Birch' s accomplished ninth
novel, draws on the sort of biographic al fact
that is the stuff of rom antic fiction : an ordi-
nary girl fall s in love with a smugg ler and
is twice sentenced to, and reprieved from ,
the gallows , befor e being tran sported to
Au stralia. It is based on the life of Margaret
Catchpole (1762-1 819), the daughter of a
Suffolk plou ghman , who fell in love with a
shipwright-turned-smugg ler, Will Laud. In
fiction , as in Catchpole's life, Margaret (who
narrat es the novel) spends her early adulthoo d
in service, first to a wealthy farmer, then to a
phil anthropic brewin g famil y, the Co bbolds
(one of Birch' s sources is an account of
Catchpole's life by a Co bbold son). She is an
independent spirit with a predilection for bare-
back riding and drinkin g with the sailors who
haunt the Suffolk estuaries. Her associ ation
with the smugg lers leads to the loss of both
her jobs, to her parent s' ruin , and, indirectl y, and helpless. I realised it was so even there,
to her mother ' s death . She steals a horse to
pay for Will' s release from priso n, and is sen -
tenced to death for the crime.
Thanks to the intercession of the
Cobbo lds, and other benefactor s, her sen-
tenc e is commuted to impri sonm ent in New -
gate. Escaping from prison , she is recaptured
-------------------~,--------------------
Sinister sensations
n the evidence of this enjoyable debut
S C APE G ALLOWS
435pp. Virago.£14.99.
978 I 84408 390 9
and sente nced aga in to death ; her advocates
secure a seco nd reprieve, and she is trans-
port ed to A ustralia, whence, in life , she
maint ained a lifelong correspond ence with
her erstwhile employer, Elizabeth Cobbo ld .
Catchpole's story might lend itself to an
all-for-love histori cal rom ance centring on
her criminal adve ntures . In Scapegallows,
these episodes acc umulate only in the final
third of the book: Birch' s confid ently under-
stated approach to her mat eri al creates a very
different kind of suspe nse, one which resists
its own melodramatic potential. The novel
opens with a fast-p aced episode, set in
Australia sixtee n yea rs after her transport a-
tion, in which Mar garet - who has become a
shopkee per and mid wife - deli vers a bab y
and saves seve ral peopl e from a flash flood
by helpin g them climb throu gh a barn roof
and into a tree. This prelud e frames the main
plot, for a "s capegallows" is someone who
has diced with death:
it's not just this co untry where I am small
in England, where the ground never heaved .
It's dreadfully easy to go wrong in the world,
and death comes dreadfully sneaky. I was all
ready for the morning drop. Twice.
Gripping in its ow n right , there is neverth e-
less something superfluous about this action-
pack ed episode. The narr ati ve prop er opens,
AN THO NY C U M M I N S
"go wrong in the world", but encourages no S all e y V ic ke rs
concl usions. Moti ves are hinted at but elude
definiti on, and the peren nial them es of class WHE RE TH REE RO ADS MEET
and love becom e slippery remind ers of how 197pp. Canongate.£12.99.
easy it is to "go wrong" . Mar garet is sac ked 978 I 84195986 3
for her involvem ent with the smugg lers,
yet non e of her employe rs see ms entirely alley Vickers was a natural choice as a
inno cent of conn ecti ons with the "free trad-
ers" - a sma ll hint that implicitly and pow er-
full y complicates the moti vati on behind the
Scontributor to this Canongate series in
which writers are invited to retell a myth
"in a contemporary and memorable way". Since
interventi on of the Cobbo lds at Margarets her debut as a novelist, in 2000, with Miss
trials. Class boundaries become probl em atic Garnet 's Angel, she has introduced into the
when they are not observed: Mr s Co bbold's everyday lives of her characters ghostly or
intimacy with Margaret might reflec t phil an-sacred figures, from the Archangel Raphael to
thro py, genuine affec tion, or a frustrated God Himself. Nor is it surprising that as a
bohemian bent; Mar garet is unc omfortable former psychoanalyst Vickers should select
with her employe r's friend ship , yet prot ests
the Oedipu s myth and deconstruct it with the
throu ghout the novel that all hum ans are help of a near-mythic indi vidu al, Sigmund
equal in her eyes. Margaret and Will are Freud. Her last book , The Other Side of You
separated by necessity, yet they also see m (2006), was about a psychi atri st who used his
independent of each other. listenin g skills to good effect.
Meanwhile, the smugg ling action is largely In her new book , Where Three Roads
played out offstage, though signalled by the Meet, the short narrati ve is prefaced by an
elusive, self-agg randizing sailor-smugg lers extract from The Interp retation ofDreams, in
who go between Margaret and the wider which Freud sets out the story as told by
wor ld. The novel has moment s of awkwa rd- Soph ocl es, co mme nting that the plot consis ts
ness: Margaret ' s spirited voice occasi onally
of "gradually inten sifying and elaborately
slips into a cliched bolshiness, and her refer-
delayed expos ure (not unlik e the task of
ence to a horse' s fetlock as its "forelock" psyc hoa nalys is)". Vickers next gives a
stands out aga inst Birch ' s otherwise meticu-
detailed account of Freud' s life, after the
lous research. The doubl y ep isodic structurediscovery in 1923 of the malignant grow th in
deftl y tells a story spanning seve ral decad es,
his mouth . Her own tale then opens as a
with an intensity that is often lyric al, and dialo gue between Or Freud, reco verin g in
Birch subtly evo kes the period without com- Vienn a after his first ope ration, and a strange
visitor who turn s out to be T iresias, the blind
promi sin g her compl ex diachronic conc ern s.
seer of the Oe dipus story . Their con ver sation
continu es over the yea rs until the sick man
rounding the turn a few metres behind . On takes morphine to spee d his death in 1939.
the ground between the two lay a dark mass. At first it seems as if the priest of ancient
It could have been a little horse, or a bod y. times has come to consult the di stingui shed
Undernea th . . . was written, They fo und modern analyst about the meani ng of his
a return ticket to Epsom in Davison 's hand- life from hi s boyhood as a templ e nov ice at

O collec tion of stories - which features

two dug-up corp ses, four murders
and over four score stolen babies - Clare
Cl a r e Wi gf all
bag ." The man does not recogni ze the Delphi. He retells the Oedipu s story from
fam ous image - of the suffrage tte Emily the angle of his ow n involvem ent , departin g
Da vison' s fatal Derby Day protest in 1913 - sometimes from the famili ar texts, giving
Wigfall does not like giving the ga me away. T HE LO UD EST S OUND AN D and Wigfall lets it hang qui etl y as an ironic Joc asta more und erstandin g of the situation,
Her half-lit story telling prefers whispering NOTH ING backgro und to his furti ve relief. and him self a bigger part as a witness of
hint s to our imagination. In "Night after 230pp. Faber. Paperback, £12.99. So me stories are hea vier-h anded . A dismal eve nts. Because of his illn ess, Freud is the
Night", Joycie is peelin g potatoes when the 9780 571 19630 2
toil et-cubicle coupling result s in a teena ge one lyin g on the couch, from where he inter-
polic e com e to arres t her husband ("What pregnanc y; and the heart sinks when a tale of jec ts sceptica l co mment s, but gradually it is
about yer tea?"); once she discovers "what foll owed the cur ve of her hip as it smoothed remote Highland life terminates in incest and clear that the twenti eth-c entury interpr eter of
Stan don e. All them . . . horribl e thin gs", we into the length of her bare thigh"). Arou sed , infanti cid e. But the abiding impr ession is of human actions, who relies on reason, is learn-
wan t to fill the ellips is, but understand noth- he consider s "how easy it would be .. . to do Wigfall' s versatility. Set in different times ing from hi s visitor 's experience of the
ing. At the end of the story, having binn ed exac tly what he wanted . ... This girl on and plac es, these seve ntee n stories are "immortal forces" of Ap ollo and Dion ysos.
Stan ' s tea and "cleaned every thing there was the bed , she didn 't eve n know his name". The deli vered in an acc om plished range of Told like this, the tale cert ainl y reso nates
to clean", Io ycie sits alone in her flat. She murkin e ss of pre vious sto ries make s us voices : the tale narrated by Cly de Borrow - - hut it always does. Vickers shows how
hears the "birds singing. And kiddi es playing, nervous, thou gh the precise nature of the as in "Bonnie Palmer and" - stands out as a Oe dipus obstinately pursues the truth , and
down in the courtyard" . With nothin g else to man ' s opportunism is not easy to guess . rem arkabl e exhibition of ventriloquy . she is interestin g, if not original , about the
go on, the omin ously emphatic clo sing line " Watching the girl" , he visits the bathroom : A story about a woma n undergoing psycho- ambi guiti es inherent in choice (between the
dares us to make a queasy inferenc e. Thi s is "Through the open doorway, he could see her analysis after the death of her brother in the three roads in Phoki s), in role (Apollo is both
how The Loudest Sound and Nothing works. white legs stretched out upon the bed shee ts". First World War pro vides the collection's killer and healer) and in language (the Greek
Usually the stories are subtle, rather than There the story ends, but its distincti on rather kno wing finale. "I' ve been tellin g word for "swollen" , describi ng Oedipu s' feet
merely oblique. In the Pari s of the 1960s, in does not lie solely in this restrained sugges - stories since I could spea k", the patient in his name, is similar to oida, the Gree k
"A Return T icket to Epso m" , two young tion of sto len sexual thrill s. The relevance of confesses : " I' ve honed my articulacy to a word for " I know"). The dial ogue, however ,
Am eric ans pick each other up in a bar. They the title emerges when the protagoni st pro wls horr id art ... . I'm a fine performer, but that' s never rings true. Freud's comm ents are too
kiss drun kenl y at the woma n's flat, but there around the bedroom, noticing on the not it .. . I wa nt you to believe". Finely per- obvious, the referenc es to others, such as his
is only sleep and no sex. Wakin g ear ly, the wo ma n's desk a phot ograph of a racecour se: form ed, em inently believable, and at times daughter Anna, are banal, and the exhaustive
ma n watches hi s still sleeping com panion "One horse was about to gallop from the horrid, The Loudest Sound and Noth ing recountin g in eac h episode, by Freud , of the
("he could hardl y see her face . .. but his eye bottom-ri ght corner of the frame, another announc es a promi sing talent. sym ptoms of his long illness is labour ed .

TLS NOVEMBER 162 007

o:
FICTION 21

VII was publi shed in Bud apest
in 194 2, supposedly the wor k of
an Eng lishman ca lled A. H. Redcliff.
Th e nove l bears a disconc ertin g relation to its
histori cal circums tances. While Europe was
tearing itself apart and Ant al Szerb , the
Ca tholic child of two Jews, was person ally in
dan ger, he wrote this wry and froth y tale, a
stylish, carefree fantasy, with charac ters for
who m freedom from care is either the pin-
nacle of their desires or a luck y dispo sition.
Yet , if wa r does not impinge directly o n
Oli ver VII, it mottl es its surface with recog-
nizabl e signs. The story ope ns , in the fic-
tion al Ce ntral Europe an country of Altu ria ,
with an age ing politician ' s luck y escape
fro m a coffee hou se. A ltho ugh he is only
eva ding the right eou s ange r of his wro nge d
wife, who m he is deceiving with a danc er, it
is not hard to discern the silho uette of a sec ret
policem an behi nd hi s spo use's sex ual
suspicions. Like Hun gary, Alturia is poised
to become a depend enc y ; the bankrupt
govern ment prop oses to turn the country into
a co mm ercial subs idiary of the business
empire of Co ltor , a tycoon fro m neighb our-
ing Norlandia. Th e Alturians, a natur all y
con spir atori al peopl e, resent thi s insult to
their nati onal pride, and a co nvo cation of
eminent citizens plots revoluti on against the
Dance of the doubles
JO NATHA N B E CKMA N
A n ta l S z erb
OLI V ER V II
Translated by Len Rix
176pp. Pushkin Press. Paperback, £7.99.
978 I 90 128590 I
kin g and his ministers, swearing alleg iance
to the Na meless Ca ptain, a qu asi-m ythi cal
figur e believed to appea r at the mom ent of
A lturia 's greates t need . Szerb tant alizes the
reader with the incomplete outlines of a polit-
ical allegory, while co mica lly smo thering
any such ex pec tations. The plotters are
describ ed as "oddly dressed , wi th the sort of
inten se faces you see only in tim es of histori c
uphea val" . The sartor ial ridi culou sness is
appare ntly as significa nt as the visible
impress of histor y.
Th e coup is a triu mph ant success, aided by
the fact that the Na meless Cap ta in turn s out
to be non e other than the king him self, Oli ver
VII. Oli ver , who had found the duti es of
offi ce too con stricting, takes adva ntage of his
people ' s dissati sfacti on to overthrow him self
and live a less bur densom e life in the water-
ing holes of Euro pe. He closely resembl es
Mih aly, the protagoni st of Szerb's master-
piece Journey by Moonlight (1937), who ,
when separa ted from his wife on their ho ney -
moon in Italy, makes no effor t to try and find
her; both flee from their respon sibilities,
believin g that outside the restricti on s of their
social roles there ex ists a richer, more invigor-
ating life. Here, Oli ver tell s his loyal retainer
that "I have always believed that the real test
of life was uncertainty" . The frisson of contin-
ge ncy was abse nt from his life in the palace.
The new A lturian rulers, eage r to trac k
do wn their form er ruler, sen d Sa ndov al, a
painter who has played a minor role in the
revolution, to Venice, where he discovers
that the kin g, livin g incognito , has fallen in
with a ga ng of conmen and is infatu ated with
a flight y yo ung Pari sienn e . After man y
machin ation s, Oli ver is per suaded to play
him self in an attempt to dup e Co ltor , who
is desperate to revive his plan to purchase
A lturia. Szerb handl es the danc e of the
doubl es and their play-acting with a light
touch. All the chara cters spea k as if slightly
detached from their words, as thou gh aw are
they are in a work of fiction. Thi s lend s the
novel a patin a of iron y, and allows for fre-
qu ent mom ent s of co medy , es pec ially rega rd-
ing social positi on: "M arcelle exp lained that
she too was a paint er, thou gh not one who
needed to wor k" . Co unt St Ge rmain, the
maes tro of the deceiver s, is drawn with grea t
vividness. Hi s blend of natur al author ity and
charm brin gs to mind Prou st ' s Charlus.
Th e persistent iron y, indeed glibness, risks
bein g unsati sfyin g, and Oliver VII do es not
have the emo tional ran ge of Journey by
Moonlight. Nonetheless , thi s is a rem ark able
novel : an es capist fanta sy which teach es that
there ca n be no escape . Len Ri x' s tran slation
is preci se, idiomatic and espec ially effective
in di stin gui shin g mult iple identiti es. Antal
Szerb died in a for ced-l ab our camp in Balf in
194 5. He never for got his respo nsibilities. In
his fin al months he refu sed to take a numb er
of opportunities to emigrate, because he
wo uld not aband on his famil y, his friend s and
his beloved Hun garian langu age. It is a mark
of his hum anit y that he indul ges so wa rm ly,
in his character s, the abse nce of the qu aliti es
that he him self em bo die d with such integr ity.

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

E l i f S ha f ak the addition of ju st one more eleme nt.

A drink too far THE BASTA RD OF I S T A N B UL

M A T TH EW TR E E
Q ui m M on z 6
T HE EN O RM ITY OF TH E TRAGEDY
Translated by Peter Bush
222pp. Peter Owen. Paperback, £9.95.
97807206 1299 8
ome ten yea rs ago, on Catalan publi c
definitive narr ati ve twist, giving Ra mo n-
Maria an erec tion that simply will not go
away. Nex t, we mee t the nove l's other main
character, Ann a-Francesca, Ram on-Maria' s
stepda ughter, a fifteen- year- old girl suffe ring
from self-obsessed puppy love . A sec ond
plot twist (w hich shou ld not be revealed)
pushes Ram on-M aria into despair and fill s
the girl with murd erou s spite. Th e out com e is
a traged y as crue l as it is revealing of the
360pp. Viking. £ 16.99.
For all its quirkiness and hum our ,
The Bastard of Istanbul is a meas ure d
and unu sually cou rageou s co mme ntary
97806709 17204
o n the T urkish- Ar me nian co nflic t. Shafak
f one must find a flaw in Elif Shafa k's believes the present Turk ish Govern me nt's
I new nove l, it is this: The Bastard of insecu riti es abo ut free ex pression are left
Istanbul is too well ro unded, its plot too ove r from the old Ott oman Em pire, which
se amless and its tellin g so smoo th that sys tematica lly slaug htered its "intellect-
the story it tell s glides eas ily along without uals". The persecuti on of Arm eni an s in
fri ction, despit e a grand scheme spa nning 191 5 - in which hund reds were eliminated
seve ral ge nera tions an d cross ing co nti- or drive n out of the co untry - is an invisibl e
nent s, and its aim to depict the histori cal link bet ween the characters in this no vel ,
differenc es between the Arm enians an d a code that need s to be deciphered to

S television' s most popular chat show ,

the host asked the auth or Qui m Mon zo
how he thou ght a stable coupl e might be
affected if one of its memb er s had an affair.
Ignoring the qu estion , Mo nzo snapped back :
"There are no stable co uples" . Although the
repl y clearl y took the presenter aback , it
wo uld not have surprised Mon zos read ers,
long used to his ficti onal presentati on of life
as a qui rky video game in which anythin g
ca n happ en and eve rything is provision al.
In the open ing cha pters of The Enorm ity
of the Tragedy , Monzo toys with thi s condi-
tion al view of thin gs to goo d com ic effect.
O ne evening a failed publi sher turned
trumpet player, Ramon-Maria, an d the
wo ma n he is tryin g to sed uce, go fro m a
restaur ant where he has drunk too much
cham pagne to a har w here, con cern ed abo ut
hi s ability to perfor m sex ually , he or ders a
sobering coffee. She has a brand y to keep
him co mpa ny, but he fini shes his coffee too
qui ckl y and, since she is only halfway
thro ugh her brandy, orde rs a rum-cola to
kee p her company; the rum-cola is del ayed,
so, whe n it arrives, she has fini shed her
brand y but she ord ers another to keep
hi m company. And so it goes on, until
Ram on-M aria fin ds him self neg otiating
the steps to her flat , "completely plastered".
It is a wo nde rfully timed, irresistibl y
lud icrou s sequence . Monzo then risks a
title' s darker implication s.
From tim e to tim e, M on z6 exchanges hi s
ow n distin ctive sty le for brief pasti ches
of Sha kes pea rea n rhetoric, CIA murd er
manuals, and teen magazine stories; he eve n
imit ates cert ain we ll-know n Barcelon a
noveli sts who write effusive ly about the city .
These imit ati on s have led to his Europe-w ide
rep utation as a mas ter of "postmodern
literar y parod y". Happil y, he is a grea t deal
mor e than that. To rea d thi s novel is to enter
a ficti on al uni verse crea ted by an author
trapp ed bet ween ave rs ion to and astonish-
ment at the wor ld in which he has found
him self. His almos t mani c hum our is
underpinned by a fri ght enin gly bleak vision
of da ily life. A ll thi s is conveyed in Monzos
lapid ary Ca talan, which is fin ely rend ered
hy Peter Rush .
The Enor mity of the Tragedy shows its
debt to writers such as Robert Coover, John
Cheever, the surrea list/sa tirica l Ca ta lan
writer of the 1930 s, Fra ncesc Traba l, and
the Mexico-exiled Ca tala n master of magical
reali sm , Pere Ca lde rs, among oth ers. Never-
theless it is a thorou ghl y ori gin al piece of
writing which, since its publi cation in 1989,
has bec ome a modern classic in its ow n co un-
try. Let us hope that Mon zos mo st rece nt
book , MU Cretins ("A Tho usan d Cretins"),
published in Oct ober 200 6, will not have to
wa it so long for an Eng lis h tra nslation .
T urks ove r the past hundred years. Th e lend grea ter clarit y to their lives. Elif
no vel is written w ith a sty lishness that is Shafa k, like Orh an Pamuk, was tried by the
slightly inti mid atin g. Turk ish Go vernme nt for " insulting Turkish-
Food is both them e and metaphor , ness". Her crime was to write about
substa nce and ga rnish in the novel. It is the issue of the ge noc ide of Arme nian
ce lebrated as both da zzlin g and soothing, deportees.
tantalizin g and nouri shin g, an ex perience Th e question is eve nly we ighed here.
that brin gs peopl e together and also pushes Th e laid-back Turkish intellectu als who
them away. When the voluble and some- meet in the Ca fe Kund era, and the
what simple-minded Rose is separ ated from Arme nian cyb er com mu nity who chat in
her Armenian hu sband , she chucks the the Ca fe Constantinopo lis, are both give n
patlijans and sarmas out of her life, vow ing a cha nce to defend their own people and
to live on hamburgers thereafter. But when blame the other. Th e elusive and cyni cal
her daught er , Arman ou sh, a modern young Baro n Baghd assarian, Arm anou sh ' s cy ber
woman raised in America among her friend , point s out that , while the Turks
Armenian aunts, who were suspicious of never acknow ledge the ge nocide, the
her pass ion for Bor ges and Kund era, visits diaspora Arme nians them selves don' t wan t
the Kazanci famil y in Istanbul , she is them to apo log ize, not wishing to give up
deli ght ed 10 find the sa me bab a g hnnousb the comforts o f vic tirnhood .
and pilaf that ad orne d her Arm eni an grand- Mor e damagin g is the sugges tion that
moth er ' s table in Sa n Francisco . the Tur kish nation is willing to cut off its
Food can be an index of charac ter too. antecedent s and live in isolation , un willin g
The Kazanci sisters have their ow n way of to admit realit y. Like the bastard child,
preparin g dolma (stuffed vine lea ves): Asya, who grows up to be an arroga nt and
Banu ' s are stuffe d with nuts, Ferides bur st cerebr al Istanbulite, who swears by
with rice, spices and herb s, Cev riyes are A ntonio Gram sci and Johnny Cash in the
oversweet. A recipe can be deadl y. As hure , same breath , such peopl e ju st ex ist: se n-
the Turk ish dessert that com es with pom e- sual, emp athetic, idiosyncr atic and, always,
gra nate seeds glittering like rubi es in their living for the mom ent.
soft bed , whose man y ingredients prov ide
Safa k's chapter titles, beco mes lethal , with C H I T R A LE K HA BAS U

TLS NO V EM BE R 162 007

22
piders genera lly get a bad press.
S Peopl e are scared of them and their
long-legged otherness, which, together
with their predatory habit s, tend s to rank
them high in lists of least favourite anim als.
Thi s is unfortunate, as they are some of the
mos t interestin g organi sm s on the plan et, as
show n by these two exce llent, if very differ-
ent book s. Predato r upon a Flower is the
result of half a lifetim e ' s devotion to the
behaviour of crab spiders - vicious pred ator s
that lurk on flo wers and jump out at their
prey . Harvestmen , on the other hand , deals
with a huge group of arachnid species that
ha ve been studied far more inten sively by a
subs tantia l number of peopl e.
In their typic al form , harvestm en have
blob-like bodies suspended from eight incred-
ibly thin legs, a bit like the M arti an tripods in
The War of the Worlds. In many species, the
second pair of legs are primarily used as sen-
sors , which are waved about in front of the
anim al as it walks. This has given rise to their
Japanese name - Zato mus hi , or "blind bug" .
It also means that many harvestm en effec -
tively walk like an insect , on six legs, with
three legs touching the gro und. Not all har-
ves tmen look like this, however - some are
short and squat, and others have pow erful
forelegs for seizing prey. Although they are
part of the class A rachnida (together with
spiders, mites and tick s), harvestm en are not
spiders - they have fewer eyes (ge nerally
only two), none of them produces silk, and
the two main bod y region s genera lly appea r
to be fused into a single structure, lacking the
"waists" of spiders. Sin ce the nineteenth cen-
tury they have been classified in the order
Opili ones, after the Latin opilio ("s hep-
herd" ). The editors of Harvestmen sugges t
that this deri ved from a comp arison bet ween
the long, slender legs ofthe most ob vious spe-
cies of harvestm an and the impl ausibl e (but
rea l) tend ency fo r nineteenth- century Euro-
pean shepherds to walk on stilts. However,
older names such as the seven tee nth-ce ntury
English "shepherd spider" sugges t there was
a link with ovines and their keepers long
befor e the recorded use of stilts. In the United
States, harvestmen are often ca lled "daddy-
long-legs" , which British people once used
solely for the long-legged crane fly. Man y
modern common nam es, however , sugges t
something to do with harvestin g - Kosec
("reaper") in Slovakian, Hooi wagen ("hay -
wago n") in Dut ch, or Pedro in Spanish,
allegedl y after St Peter' s Day, which falls dur-
ing harvest. The Finn s avo id all speculation
and have adopted a name - Lukki - which
apparentl y has no other meanin g.
Harvestm en, like spiders and scorpions,
are members of the sub-phylum Che licerata-
a gro up that includ es horses hoe crabs, sea
spiders and the thankfull y extinct giant water
sc o rpio ns, which co uld g row up to three
metres long. Thi s watery ances try sugges ts
that something quite closely related to modern
harvestmen craw led out of the sea at the begin-
ning of the Silurian period. Thi s scenario is
indic ated by the fact that the earliest kno wn
harvestm en have been foun d in the Rhynie
chert, near Aberdeen, and date from around
400 million years ago, shortly after terrestrial
life began . A spectac ular photo of one of these
fossils shows sections of male and fem ale
harvestm en, compl ete with genitalia. Scot-
land has also pro vided a remarkably modern-
lookin g harvestman , in a 340-million-year-
NATURAL SCIENCE
Her ovipositor
MATTH EW COBB
Ma chad o Pi nt o-da-R o cha ,
Gl au co M ach ad o a n d
G o nza l o G ir i be t, e d i t ors
H A R VES T MEN
The biology of Opi lioncs
608pp. Harvard University Press. £80.95 (US $ 125).
978 0674 023437
Dou gla s s H . Mo r s e
PR ED A TOR U P ON A F L O WE R
Life history and fitness in a crab spider
392pp. Harvard University Press . £32.95
(US $49.95).
978 0674 024809
old rock from East Kirkt on , near Edinburg h.
Part of the mystery of harvestm en is that
many of them appear to have traver sed so me
of the most stormy period s of the planet's
histor y - ramp aging dino saurs, osc illating
sea levels, plummetin g asteroid s - with
barely any changes to their externa l morph-
ology. The vital changes that enabled this
asto nishing surviva l may of cour se have been
intern al, or simply not have left a trace in the
sparse fossil record .
Harvestmen have penetrative sex (unlike
spiders), and, in a stroke of evolutionary eco-
nomy, the male and female sexual orga ns are
basically identical - the eversible structure that
the male uses as a penis, the female employs as
an ovipositor. Around 6,000 species of harvest-
man are currently known , and they are found
on every contin ent with the exce ption of
Antarctica. However, although they can sur-
vive in high latitudes and at high altitude (up to
4,000 m), virtually nothin g is known about
African, tropic al Asian or Amazonian species.
The editors sugges t that the final numb er of
extant spec ies may be around 10,000, but the
scale of our ignorance indicates this is
prob ably a very rough estimate.
Unlik e spiders, which are all carni vorou s,
harvestm en appea r to ea t a wide range of
food (fungi, lich en s and hickor y nut s),
tho ugh most species clearly prefer meat
(snails, beetles, spiders, etc). If you wa nt to
keep them , a final chapt er on practic al
aspec ts describ es how to build a suitable
cage, and states that they will consum e
chop ped-up worms, banana or eve n cappu c-
cino mousse. Am azingly, harvestm en masti-
cate their food rather than sucking it up, like
spiders or flies.
Harvestmen cover s virtually eve ry aspec t
of har vestman biology - from pala eontology
to cyto genetics (they generally have XY sex
determination, like hum ans), and from social
beha viou r (so me spec ies are highl y grega ri-
ous, but sadly lack a collecti ve noun ) to
defenc e mech ani sm s (as we ll as deterrent
spines, some species produ ce a strong sme ll).
Inevitably, the longest chapter is on taxon-
omy, dealin g with the distin gui shin g features
of the famili es and subfamilies in the four
major Opiliones suborders. Thi s is the first
major revision of the order in ove r fift y yea rs,
and it is a tour de forc e. However, though
there is an overall key, it is not for the faint-
hearted - my attempt to identify a harvest-
TLS N OVEMBER 16 200 7
A crab spider (Misumena vatia )
man to one of the subfa milies failed on the
first criteri on, for which the figur e referenc e
appears to be mistaken. The chapter con-
clud es with a mixture of a sigh and a call to
arms, in term s that are depressingly famili ar
to anyone who has strugg led with arthropod
taxonom y: "Meanwhile, hundred s of obscure
species with tiny, compl ex, and hard-t o-
interpr et male ge nitalia are waiting for
study". Unusually for a coll ecti ve work, the
ch apters are remarkabl y well written and of
similar weight and approa ch. Th e illustr a-
tions are superb. This is a book that will be
prized by man y natur alists, both am ateur and
professional. For anyone with eve n a passing
intere st in har ve strn en , it w ill be required
reading for decades to com e.
Despit e the remarkable range of inform a-
tion present ed, there are inev itable omis -
sions. It is disapp ointin g that the editors
could not find space for Robert Hooke ' s
stunning drawin gs from his 1665 masterpi ece
M icrograph ia, which depi ct the bod y of a
"Shepherd spider" in exquisite detail. Mor e
intri guin gly , the book reveals that there is a
huge gap in the substa ntial literatur e on Opil-
iones . In a grea t man y other arthro pod s,
hydrocarbons - waxes - on the cuticl e are
used for protection from desiccation, and
abo ve all for inter- and intra-specifi c chemi-
ca l communication, containing information
about spec ies, sex and reproductive status. It
w o uld he asto nis hing if thi s we re not the case
for Opilio nes, but no one yet see ms to have
tried droppin g a harvestm an, spindly legs
and all, into some so lvent, and then injectin g
so me of the result ant mixtur e into a gas
chromatog raph. Major new insights into the
beh aviour , eco logy and taxonomy of harvest-
men could probably be pro vided by this
relati vely simple technique.
Chemical communication is also largel y
abse nt fro m Predator upo n a Flower, Dou g-
lass H. Morse' s summary of nearly thirt y
yea rs' work on the beha viour of the crab spi-
der , Mis umena vatia . Morses wor k sugges ts
that volatile pherom ones are not involved in
crab spider mating, but as with har vestm en ,
the role of cuticular hydrocarbons ought to
be investigated . A more surprising abse nce is
any study of the role of sce nt in flower choice
by these pred ator s - which Mor se shows to
be a vital point in the spider 's life histor y. As
their nam e sugges ts, crab spiders have a
squat appea rance and tend to scuttle side -
ways when alarm ed . They have two large
limb s at the front end, with which they catch
their prey and, unlik e harvestm en, have a
mass ive sexual dim orphi sm - one of the
largest in the animal kingdom , with fem ales
weighing up to 100 times more than males.
Morse is interested in how the environ-
ment shapes an anima l's behaviour, in parti-
cul ar how it for ages for food (in this case,
throu gh predation ). His primary focu s is on
crab spider life history, often see n through
"fitness payoffs", whereby the consequences of
a given behavioural, ecological or life-hi story
"choice" are meas ured in terms of the produ c-
tion and surv ival of offspring - the ulti mate
meas ure of fitn ess. Twel ve summers ' worth
of obse rvations by Mor se and his students are
summarized in a striking diagram show ing
how the moth er ' s choice of predation patch
has a major effect on the size of her egg mass
and thence on the numb er of spiderlings . The
size of the egg mass also affects the prob abil-
ity that the mother will guard her offspring
again st predation, befor e and after hatchin g,
which in turn has an evide nt consequence for
offspring survival.
But as is generally the case in science,
answering one question merely raises another.
If the imp act of pred ation patch is so impor-
tant , why do fem ales not always choose the
flo wers that will be most often visited by
potenti al prey? There does not see m to be
any limit to the numb er of these high-quality
sites , relati ve to the frequ enc y of the spiders,
yet both adults and spiderlings see m not to
make optimum choices. Intriguin gly, the two
stages in the an ima l's life cycle use different
stimuli in makin g this choice: spiderlings
res po nd to fl o wer c ues , w hile adult fem ale s -
which are much more flexibl e in their
choices - respond directl y to cues from prey.
The lack of optima lity in the choic e of flower
may be due to the spider's bein g more likely
to be a victim of predation as it searches for a
new patch and is no longer ca mouflaged. In
this case, the spider's genes may tell it to stay
put as long as it can. Mor se has also focu sed
his attention on the tiny male crab spiders.
Extreme sexual dimorphi sm means that each
sex adopts different foraging and predator-
avoidance strategies, though, like females,
males understandably prefer flowers that attract
large numbers of potential prey - and potential
mates. The way that life-history choices made
by males affect their offspring remains an
intriguin g suhjec t for future re search.
Although Predator upon a Flower lack s
the rich illustr ation and hum our of Harvest-
men, it will also become a classic of its kind ,
summarizing a distincti ve approac h to the
biolo gy of an intri guin g organi sm. But
despit e the sexy title and the superb cover pic-
ture (M isume na vatia eating a bee fly), this
is above all a book for serious stude nts of
behavioural eco logy . In a way , that is sad, as
spiders need all the good coverage they can
get; this would have been an exce llent opp or-
tunity to brin g both arac hnid biol ogy and
behavioural eco logy to a broader publi c.

Will they say anything about
me when I'm dead?
ho gets an obituary in a national
W
newspaper? It has never bee n an
easy question for the obituaries
edi tor to answe r: in Britain, much of the job
seems obvious (the death s of Prime Mi nis-
ters, No bel Prizewinners, Ca ptains of Eng-
land all make the main news) , but much of it
is instin ctive. Different newspapers have dif-
ferent tastes, and the expec tations of the read-
ership vary acc ordi ngly . On e paper may
favou r war hero es and gentry, another artists
and acade mics, another schoo lteac hers and
old Communists, another still practiti oners of
eve ry co lour of jazz. Wh at is und eni able is
the extraordinary burgeoning of the obitu ary
art in the late twenti eth cen tury - and the cor-
respo nding increase in the numb er and sort of
subjec ts covered.
Bridge t Fow ler begs to differ. Her co nten-
tion , repeatedl y stated in The Obituary as
Collective Memory, is that whatever obitu ar-
ies editors (the gatekeepers of collec tive
memory) say about the "revolution" that has
occ urred, very little has altered since The
Times published j udicious accounts of Zulu
war vetera ns in 1900 . More obituaries may
be publi shed , but selection is hardl y more
"democratic" than it was then : obituaries still
ce lebrate an entrenc hed elite and there are
far too few wo me n on the page.
Fow ler writes as a soc iologist and sets out
to analyse the natu re of the "publicl y griev-
able life". What is "grievability"? What
office is it that obituarists, on behalf of their
public, perfor m? She applies herself to both
"qualitative" and "quantitative " assessments,
investigatin g in detail a batch of obituaries
from a variety of papers, and drawing provoc -
ative co ncl us ion s from specifi c studies o f
obituaries of politicians, writers , artists,
sports peopl e and trades unionists. Mu ch of
what she writes is illumin ating. She has con-
ducted the first close exa mination of obitu ary
co ntent, at the same time as intervie win g
obituar ies editors (myse lf among them) about
meth od and practice. But Fow ler is a so lem n
reporter. As an academic she is torn between
accepting, grudgingly, a slow but histori c
alteration bet ween the news agend as of 1900
and 2000 (she allows, for exa mple, that there
has been so me positive move ment in the
areas of jazz and the blu es, football and box-
ing), and stubbornly asser ting her thesis.
From her quant itative sa mple she concludes
that a sta rtling 72 per ce nt of British subje cts
in 2000-01 were educated privately and 35
per ce nt of them at Oxbrid ge; and the pro por-
tion of wome n featured across the board
is only 19 per cent (falling to 14 per ce nt in
the New York Times). The implication , in
ordinary language, is that most subjec ts are
spo ilt, or at least privileged, and that there
is unfairn ess in the process of selection by the
(predomin antl y ma le) obituaries editors, who
are themsel ves represent ati ve of an elite
"dominant" class which shapes and skews
their idea of "achievement" .
Fow ler's ow n language, it must be said,
is more opaque than this, drawin g on the
MEDIA STUDIES 23
The Edwin Mellen Press
Publisher ofScholarly Books
Ownership in China's Transitional
Economy
YangChen
University of Northampton
978-0-7734-5265-7
the subjec ts she hold s dear. What she harks
J A MES FE RGUS S ON The Autobiographical Narrative
back to, did she but know it, is the local news- in Modern Japan
Br id g et F o wl er papers of a century ago (and indeed she
shows a marked sympathy for the two prin ci- Masako Nakagawa Graham
T HE OB IT UAR Y AS C OL LEC TIVE pal papers in Scotl and, where she lives) who Villanova University
ME MORY were keen to honour their local heroes, whe-
295pp. Routledge.£65 (US$120). 978-0-7734-55396-8
ther the butcher, the schoolmistress or the
978 0 415 364935 local squire. The Gentleman's Magazine' s
monthl y cale ndars of the dead in the eight- Self-leadership and Goal Stri ving
N ige l St a r ck
ee nth and nineteenth ce nturies were the last Across Cultures
LIF E AFT ER DEAT H nation al mediu m where such "democracy"
The artof the obituary of publi c death was obse rved. Nigel Starck Sibylle Georgianna
256pp. Melbourne University Press. AUS$32.95; Irvine Valley College
dip s with zest into that splendid periodical' s
distributed in the UK by Eurospan.£16.50. 978-0- 7734-5397-5
archives , as, in a more se lective manner, he
978 0 522 85256 1
samples the newspapers of No rth Am erica
and his nati ve Au stralia. If he has a wea kness
vocabulary of her mentor in soci ology , Pierre for anecdo te, that is possibl y appropriate
Bo urdieu: "habitus", "hexis" , "doxa" and to his subje ct.
Insider Stories ofthe Comstock Lode
and Nevada's Mining Frontier,
" illusio"; indi vidual adva ntage is defined in Fow ler's ambiva lence about her subjec t -
1859-1909
term s of cultural, soc ial and eco nomic "capi- does she hate or secretly app rove of obitu-
tal" ; obituar ies them selves are the final "syrn- arists? - is at the heart of her book. An d so me Edited and compiled
holi c baubl es" . ac ts o f sec ular "co nsecra- of her findin gs are perpl exing. How did she by Lawrence Berkove
tion" . The elite maint ain s its do minance by arrive at her samples for 2000-0l ? For that University of Michigan
"symbolic violence ", in which, ev ide ntly, period she chooses "a minimum of one hun-
978-0-7734-54 11-8
obitu aries play their brut al part. dred obituaries" from her selec ted news-
The "revolution" to which Fow ler tenta- papers, yet each of them in those two yea rs
tively refers began in Britain in 1986 when the will have publi shed at least 1,800 (not all, of
newly found ed Independent abando ned the cour se, on different subjec ts). She specifi- The Anglo-American Biomedical
convention of anonymity for its obitu aries and cally cla ims that there is "almost no trace" of Antecedents ofNazi Crimes
encouraged creative illustratio n in place of the such occ upations as teacher s and nurses,
Jeremy Hugh Baron
pass port shot, and the Daily Telegraph intro- when the Independent, for exa mple, offers Mount Sinai School of Medicine
duced a subvers ive, sometimes hilariou s, take five nurses in 2000- 0 I as well as a number
on the old po-faced school-magaz ine valete. of teachers. Despite her enthusiasm for the 978-0- 7734-5502-3
Much of this gro und is covered in Nige l genre she can, too, be a care less reader.
Starc k's diverting account of the obituary Alden Whitman, "M r Bad News " of the New
"art" , Life after Death, which began as a York Times, was not interviewing obitu ary Yugoslav Worker Emigration,
doct oral thesis and has materiali zed as a subjec ts in the 1980 s, as he retired in 1976 ; 1963-1973
matey vade mecum , giving a hi story of the Jonath an Will iam s, author of a fond piece on
form fro m ea rliest times (16 22, according to an outsider artist, IIo ward Fin ster, is a poet David E Goodlett
Fort Ha ys State University
Starc k), a guide to its practice, and an antho- not a Pri mitive Bapti st mini ster ; the critic
logy of miscellaneous ex amples. Elizabeth Young's obitu ary was not written 978-0-7734-5398-2
While both the Independent and the by "Wilf" Se lf; Aub eron Wa ugh was never
Telegraph had leeway on qui et news days in Editor of Private Eye ; Unity M itford was not
the late 1980s to follow their own editorial shot at a Naz i rally; and none of the poets
John Bunyan's Master Story
whim, they were, and still are, blown by the Aude n, Spen der, MacNeic e, Empso n or Day
preva iling wind of the jo urnalistic agenda. Lewis eve r we nt to Eton. Daniel Virgil Runyon
Bridget Fow ler on the one hand knows this I wonder how useful it is to cl aim "demo-
978-0-7734-5384-5
(obituaries editors being a subordinate class cracy" for obituaries at all, but one of the
in term s of the newspaper hierarchy), on the delib erat e intentions of the Independent from
other ignores it. She advocates wider crit eria the beginnin g was to increa se plur alit y of
for recog nition, taking in more "private", voice by outsourcing obitu aries to non- The Court Poetry of Chaucer
eve n more feminine , subjec ts, openin g up jo urna lists, to writers who knew what they
to nurses, maybe, or manu al wor kers , but at were talking about rather than simp ly how to Compiled and translated
the same time conc edes that the obituaries write an obituary. Th is both enhanced the by James Dempsey
page primarily ex ists for a publi c purpo se: authority of indi vidu al pieces and enriched Worcester Polytechnic Instutute
to give biographies of househo ld nam es, or the mix for the future, as writers came back
978-0-7734-5434-7
tho se "in the new s" or at so me time "in the and prop osed new subje cts .
news" who have died. The job is to a large Brid get Fow ler herself , after all, who con-
ex tent descripti ve, not presc riptive; reactive tribut ed a lucid and cogent obituary of Pierre
not proac tive . On e must not fall into the error Bourdieu to the Independent in 200 2, and in We invite proposals for books that
of the incoming chief exe cutive who asked the same yea r and in the same place (an obitu- will make a contribution to
me in 1993, " Do you thin k you could get ary she neglects to mention) the story of Stu- scholarship.
more young people on the page?". art Shorter, one of the "chaotic hom eless" , We reply promptly to all enquiries.
The Briti sh paper s are unu sual in the ambi- was first told by Alexa nder Master s. Masters
tion of their coverage, both nati onally and extended that poignant biograph y into the The Edwin Mellen Press
intern ationally. This is perh aps thei r do wn- 2005 bestseller Stuart: A life backwards. 16 College Street
fall, so far as Fow ler is concerned . Their inter- Stuart Shorter was a "miraculo us survivor", Lampeter SA48 7DY
Wales UK
nationalit y only tends to display their rac ial in Bou rdieu ' s ringing phrase, if eve r there
Tel: ++44 (0) 1570423356
prej udice, their national conce rns to edge out was one . Fax: ++44 (0) 1570423 775
emp@mellen.demon.co.uk
www.mellenpress.eo.uk
TLS NOVE MBER 16 20 0 7
24 CLAS S rcs

How you go is what counts

ld Cow boys may ju st fade away , but A NDR EW FE L D H E R R

O Romans have to die. "I am a Roman

.. . 1 have as much courage for dying
as for killin g", shouts one exe mplary young
citizen, Q. Mucius, at a decisive moment in his
nation ' s history. Mucius was lucky; display-
ing civic identity only cost him an arm. But
the principle that you can tell a Roman by how
he dies - as well as by how he kills - predict s
the distincti ve role of mortality in definin g
what it meant to be Roman both for the
ancients and for us. When we think about the
Rom ans, we think about dying. And not ju st
individual deaths on the battlefield, on the
sands of the arena, or via the self-inflicted
wounds of noble Stoics like Cato and Seneca.
The Rom ans as a people "decline and fall",
and their collective role as the West' s
memento mori continu es in the strea m of
recent books that imply the collapse of Amer-
ican society merely by comparing it to Rom e.
Despit e the many cult s promi sin g some
sort of life after death , the ave rage mort al
Rom an faced his end without the expectation
that his consc iousness would survive . The
poetic underworld s of literatur e we re more
like illustrated lesson s in histor y or phil oso-
phy than glimpses of what readers wo uld
hope to exper ience them selves. When the Epi-
cur ean poet Lucr etiu s has Nature hold up a
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In a manner quite different from
the usual tale of internment by
Japan, Gudao, Lone Islet chronicles
events in Treaty Port Shanghai
just before and during the Japanese
occupation of 1941 - 1945, with an
Epilogue reaching to the present.
Margaret Blair tells this
multifaceted story in a memoir
described by Modris Eksteins as
' bittersweet and beautifully crafted'.
www.trafford .com/06-2901
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Ca t h ar i ne E dwa r ds
DE ATH I N ANC IENT ROM E
304pp. Yale University Press. £25 (US $35).
978 0 300 11208 5
mirror of the time after our death , it is as
empty as our perc eptions of what happ ened
befor e we we re born. Yet this insistence on
the nothin gness of death - preci sely what
may terrify us - aim s not to express a
Roman' s fear of dying but to ass uage it. We
may reasonably aspire to die without facin g
death , passing uncon sciously from bein g to
nothin gness, and perh aps this gives our fears
their existentialist direction , but it is the physi-
ca l enco unter with death , " its appea rance and
its co ming", in the words of Seneca, that ani-
mates Roman dying.
Senec a's present ation of death as an op-
ponent point s to the und erlying thesis of
Catharine Edwar ds's book Death in Ancient
Rome. For the elite Rom an, death was a con-
test to win. By construin g dea th as a victory,
the Roman ended his life with a triumphant
demon strati on of his virtue, a word that never
lost its power to evo ke the manly cour age of
the battlefield. Henc e the specially Rom an
value of death as a definit ion of indi vidu al
worth, but also a numb er of parad oxes that
make their represent ation of death, and
Edwa rdss treatm ent of it, so varied and
intellectually challenging. If the dyin g man
is the winner, who ex actly is he beatin g?
An emperor whose exe cution ord er he
forestalls by suicide? His ow n fears and
impul ses? Or mort alit y itself? And if dea th is
a victory, then why does it look so much like
losing?
The pro blem of turnin g the ultim ate sign of
failu re into success tak e s different forms over
the cour se of Roman histor y. Edwa rds shows
that the Roman s never shared the Greek fixa-
tion with the beautiful corpse as a starting
point for the immortal glory for which the
hero bart ers his life. Rom ans liked to win,
and cared relati vely little about the bodies
eve n of their own war dead . Under the Repub-
lic the onl y hero ' s death ava ilable to a Rom an
leader was throu gh an act of self-sa crifice
to ensure the defeat of the enemy. Dyin g here
becomes literall y a route to winning, and
the ritu al invol ved stresses the age ncy and
conscious choice that puts the " self ' in self-
sacrifice.
The civ il wa rs of the late Republ ic brin g a
different kind of challenge. Mu ciu s' claim
that sac rificing your hod y for the state was a
mark of Rom anness becomes harder to main-
tain when the defeated "others" are Rom ans
too. The identit y of winner and loser that
result s from claimin g death as a contest
becom es a perfect figur e for the parad ox that
it takes a Roman to beat a Rom an. And it is in
this context that suicide , the most imm edi-
ately active form of death, becom es a particu-
larly Roman art, epitomizing, but also displac-
ing, the eve nts of the battlefi eld. An episode
of Lucan' s poetic treatment of the ci vii wars
highli ght s the fate of a group of Caesar's
soldiers caught while tryin g to flee their
"The Death of Cato of Utiea" (1797) by Baron Pierre-Narcisse Guerin ; from th e book
under review
Po mpeian opponents by raft. Their leader
Vulteius urges his troops to kill them sel ves,
ringing all the rhetorical changes on the prop-
osition that death is victory . He goes so far as
to wish that some possibility of esca pe were
open to him so that his death might be eve n
more transparentl y self-w illed . In what fol-
lows, Lucan uses the con venti on s of epic
to glorify not a battl e but an act of collec tive
suicide. And as a wa rrior's victory should
in spire em ulation, so Lu c an int end s thi s as
an exa mple, yet one that shows the power
of civ il wa r to invert Roman values . Unlike
these Roman self-murde rers, "coward races
will not learn that it need s no arduous virtue
to escape slave ry by one 's ow n hand " . But
Lucans comment reveals the darker conse-
quenc es of Vulteiu s' cour age: had his Caesar
not wo n the civil war ther e wo uld be no slav-
ery to esca pe.
That last twist would not have been lost on
Lucan ' s contempora ries under the reign of
Caesar's descendant Nero. The co ming of
emp ire adds a spec ial politi cal acce nt to the
dialectic of death as the ultim ate express ion
of lib ertas, a word that mean s both acti ve
freedom and rejection of the status of a slave .
Ta king one 's life hecom e s an ac t of re si st-
ance, and the suic ides come so thick and fast
in the historian Ta citus' account of the ear ly
empire that they threat en to ove rshadow mili-
tary victory and electoral success as the only
memorabl e deeds possibl e for a Rom an
und er a tyrant. Yet, for such death s to mak e
their point , the roles of killer and victim
required careful balancin g. Blame mu st fall
on the tyrant , but for the suicide to appear too
passive negated its value as a demon stration
of freedom . Eve ry Tacitea n death reveal s
subtle stage managing on both sides to con-
trol its meanin g. When the order comes for
the philosopher Seneca to kill him self , it
offers him a golden opportunity to live up to
his writings by em ulating the suicide of
his Republi can hero Cato. For Edw ards,
Senec a' s death succee ds in validating his life.
Yet, despit e all his courage, Seneca , unlik e
Cato, was also followin g orders.
Edw ards ends her story with the
Christians, arguing that their depi ction s of
martyrdo m drew as much on the Roman
ca lcu lus of de ath as victo ry , as on th eir ow n
religious doctrin es. But the Christian perspec-
tive also changes every thing by offering an
esc ape from death ' s finalit y. A martyr's suf-
ferin g bears witness not only to his or her
ow n fortitude but to a creed that deni es the
realit y of death itself. The more horribl e the
death , the more powerful the testimony, a
logic that - as Edw ards acutely sugges ts -
opens the way for an enjoy me nt of violence
that was potenti ally as dehum anizin g to the
victim as any Rom an spectacle .
Mu cius' boast about the Rom anness of his
appro ach to dyi ng makes clear that any book
about Ro man death must inevitably treat more
than a slice of intellectu al history. Beyo nd its
chron ological scope, Catharine Edw ards's
work offer s a prov ocative w indow onto
Roman culture as a whole, its texts, beliefs
and practic es, from the arena to the dinin g
room . Eve n when she touch es on well-know n
scholarly models and familiar anecdot es, she
makes them seem new. She also writes beauti-
fully, combining richl y detailed descripti on
with comp ellin g argum ent s to mak e the co m-
plexity of her interp retations access ible eve n
to a non- speci alist reader. The eloquent final
pages of Death in Ancient Rome make clear
that she has a personal as well as an academic
stake in demonstrating the surprisingly life-af-
firmin g potential of Roman death.

TLS N OVEMBER 162 0 07


artin Kernps new book, which
M began its life as a ser ies of lectures
at the Univers ity of Chicago,
ex plores the relatively sim ple idea that all of
us "have a pro pensity to reac t to me mbers of
the anima l kin gdo m as if they have personali-
ties that we ca n read fro m their appea rance"
and that we "also ten d to see ind ividu al
peo ple as bearing some kind of resembl ance
to one of our fellow vertebra tes, or even inver-
tebr ates" .
The Human Anima l in Western A rt and
Science co mmences with Hipp ocrates,
Ga len , the four hu mour s of anc ient medi cine,
and the Ar istotelia n Physiogn omi es, which
Kemp sees as pro vidin g long-standi ng, holi s-
tic mo dels for "the setting of the hum an con-
stitution within the grea t who le of the created
wo rld". These models, it is argued , informe d
the wor ld-view of Renaissanc e artists as
diverse as Leonardo , Dur er and Cra nac h, and
the wor k of later, sixteen th-ce ntury theori sts
such as the Nea politan Giam battista de lla
Port a with his leonine men , and "timid,
panther-like" wo men , to say nothi ng of the
anon ym ou s compiler of an apparen tly uni qu e
set of probably Dutch seventeenth-century
zodi acal paper-fl ap " season cu m medi cal"
engrav ings no w at Du ke Unive rsity in
Durh am , No rth Carolina. Th is, in turn , leads
us to the physiognom ic traditi on comme nc-
ing in the seve nteen th cen tury with Char les
Le Bru n and his beak-like noses, " stubborn
and suspicious" ca ts' heads, and onwards to
Lavater , C uvie r and others.
The nce , Kemp proc eed s to the whole
ex pressive range of facial gy mnas tics, which
he distin gui shes from more properly "fixed"
ch aracteri stics, looki ng closely at the patho-
gno mic imp lications of ex treme faci al exp res-
sions carved by Bern ini or etched and paint ed
by Re mbra ndt. Fro m there he j umps forward
to Hogarth ' s respon se to a compa rable range
of ph enom ena in "The Ana lys is of Beaut y"
(1753) an d other wor ks ; Goya 's Los Capri-
chos , and the bizarr e series of head s in
Vienna by Franz Xav ier Messer schmidt ,
whose " Inte ntional G rimace in the Fo rm of a
Mani c Grin" ( 1775) has always see med to
me more sugges tive of constip ation than
ma nia . That may be the point, of course : gen -
era l agreement about the meanin g of facial
tic kin g changes over tim e, as for exa mple in
the case of what is tod ay ass umed to consti-
tut e a "genuine" smile , ear-to-ea r, tooth-bar-
ing, open-mouthed . Before the adve nt of ph o-
togr aph y and the acce lera tion of shutter
speeds , which transfo rmed notions of deco -
rum and spo ntaneity in facial exp ress ion, the
broad grin was thou ght at best im prop er, but
more usuall y offe ns ive or eve n obscene, as in
seve ntee nth-ce ntury Dutch ge nre paintin g
where it is co nve ntion ally paired with dru nk-
enness and lecher y.
Gallopin g onward s into the realm of Daurn-
ier and the electric ex per iments of Duchen ne,
Kem p track s the study of physiognom y and
emotion-express ion pa st Charles Bell down to
Charles Darwin , whose Expression of the
Emotions in Man and Anima ls (187 2) he sees
as "the last great act in the traditi onal succes -
sion instigated by the Renaissance artists".
Finally - bearing in mind that we are still only
in Chapter Tw o - the author car ries us for-
ward to curren t work in neu rology and behav-
ioural science, from which he co ncludes that
our tendency to elide human and anima l
physiognomies is a by-product of the complex
ART HISTORY
Like a fox
AN GUS T RU MB LE
Ma r t in K emp
THE H UM A N A N [MA L [ N W ESTE RN
ART AN D SC I ENCE
320pp. University of ChicagoPress. $40. £22.50.
9780226430332
mecha nisms that we acq uire (from nature and
nurture) to perform vital functio ns in the differ -
entiatio n of faces and types in the human and
anima l worlds. As such, it is not par ticularly
useful, but neither is it a disadvantage in evolu-
tionary term s. It ju st happen s.
Such strangely neutral conclusions are a
recurring featur e, an d give the impression
that the author is prepared neith er to arg ue
that in these respects we are forthri ghtl y
anima l, nor to insist on our uniqu e capacity
as humans. We are both , he see ms to say, and
there it is. This may be true, but the shee r vo l-
ume of arti stic, sc ientific, technical and phil o-
"Hyena Attacked by Two Dogs" (1739) by J ean-Baptiste Oudry; from Oudry 's Painted
Menagerie , edited by Mary Morton (152pp. Getty Publications. $60. 978 0 89236 879 2)
sophical achi evement to which he points in
the course of building his arg ument sugges ts
otherw ise. Such eve n-handedness is also phil-
osophica lly misleadin g. It is, or should be,
ax iomatic that non e of us is in a position to
know what non-human anima ls perceive or
expe rience .
In Cha pter Thr ee, the em phas is shifts to
the conflict between materi ali st attitudes to
the bod y and soul vers us the intuiti ve and reli-
g io us co nv ic tio n that bodi es are mo re th an
mere organi sm s or automata. Com me ncing
with the pers istence of ideas about the roy -
alty of lion s, for exa mple, or less attrac tive
characteristics thou ght to be innat e in various
beasts - the deviou sness of the serpe nt, and
so o n - Kernps treatm ent of thi s subjec t
also embraces the fascin atin g world of imagi-
nary composites: ange ls, sera phim, sirens ,
sphinxes , harpies, merma ids, ce ntaurs,
satyrs, werewolves , and St Eustaces visio n
of the crucifix planted squarely between the
an tlers of a stag. Th is is amo ng the stro nges t
sections of the book , bec ause it is into these
TLS NO V EM BE R [62 007
sem i-huma noid beasts of the imagin ation that
artists, poe ts and think ers have at var ious
tim es decanted ideas abo ut what in hum an
charac ter co nstitutes the most bestial , or the
most sac red.
After a series of Car tesian challenges to the
ancient Christian belief in the uniqu eness of
the "moral hu man" , we pro ceed via the
Fables of La Fontaine, and other anthro po-
morphi c literar y and artistic form s, to the
world of anim als with feelin gs, the rage of a
tiger as port rayed by Jean-B apti ste Oud ry, for
exa mple, the nobil ity of Landseer' s "Mon-
arch of the G len" , or the blind indu striou sness
and streng th in numbers of the beaver as com-
pared to bees by the Com te de Buffon . There
follow the ge ntle Houyhnhnms of Swift;
clever pigs, and the flamboyant port rait of
"Marengo, Na po leo n's Charge r at Waterloo"
by James War d amo ng other Rom antic
"show-beasts" whose arrival coincides with
the inventi on of "wildlife", and the concur-
rent, chilling tend ency to co nde mn as sem i-
hum an "primitive" peopl es and races on the
basis of a tho rou gh going bestial mo rpho logy .
The long and complica ted devel opment
of huma n attitudes abo ut apes - with its
fami liar Dar wini an clim ax - is exa mined in
a separate cha pter, where the ye llow -cloa ked
Ju das of the " Betrayal" in Giottos Scrovegni
Chape l is apparently "endowed with a di s-
tinctl y 'Neande rthal' profil e" , whi le a selec-
tion of Fre nch soft-porn cave ma n art by
Fa iv re and Fr erni et is offe red in su ppo rt of
the idea that the anx ious nin eteenth-century
mind was soo thed by see ing primitive
peo ples "languishing self-co nscio usly in
their base co ndition, wa iting for the lon g
yea rs to pass before their heir s co uld lay
cl aim to the title of civilized humans".
In co nclus ion, Kemp turn s to the question
as to what, along thi s lon g path of literar y, sci-
entific, and artistic development, constituted
at any one time a rap idly evo lving conce ptio n
of science, and how thi s might infl ect fore-
going attitudes abo ut the anim al and the
hum an. Craniosco py, "or ganology" , phren ol-
25
ogy , euge nics, and the quest by Ca mper ,
C uvier, Ta ine, Lomb roso and others for
know ledge about degenerat e or regressive
charac teristics in hum ans are adde d to the
tour d 'horiron, along wi th poor Saatje Baart-
man 's bottom . We retu rn to the present by
way of a cin em atic postlud e featuri ng WaIt
Disney' s dilut ion of Rud yard Kiplin g; Count
Dracul a; Raqu el We lch in Do n Chaffey's
One Mill ion Years BC; Dr Jek yll and Mr
Hyde ; "Me Tarzan , You Ja ne", and a heated,
Ror schach readin g of Asger Jorn' s " In the
Beginning Was the Ima ge" , 1965, in which it
is cl aim ed "we ca n j ust di scern masklik e
faces, night mari sh in their primiti ve feroc-
ity". A note on the nature of co nsci ousness ,
accompanied by an MRI of the author 's ow n
brain , leads to the con cluding rem ark :
Yes, we are an ima ls. But the conj unction of
mental and bodily powers we have developed
has crucia lly gra nted us a capacity to thin k
and act differently in kind from anima ls. His-
tory tells us that we can use these powe rs for
goo d or ill. This is not to say that there are
things separa ble in practice as "human pow-
ers" from "a nimal insti ncts"; we are wha les in
which ever y facet of our natures is ever -present
and potentially acts integrally with every other
in every circ umsta nce. It may seem that we can
at moments beco me truly "human" or truly
"bestial", but in effect we are both all the time
since there is no nonporous boundary.
A nim als do not give lectur es, do not write
book s, do not create wor ks of art, do not set
out their thou ght s and beliefs with the sub-
tlety and co mplexity that charac terize the
achi evement s of hu man civ iliza tion. Nor do
they employ more than basic signa ls for lan-
guage . In his introdu cti on , the author tell s us
that he has no ticed peo ple in a Brentwood
cafe who have aq uiline no ses, foxy faces, or
eat like a bird , or might possibl y be tigers in
bed . He tell s us that people we ca ll pigs are
not likely to be at all pleasant. No doubt, and
in sayi ng so Kemp reminds us that we are at
tim es pron e to think in banal , ofte n danger-
ous stereo types .
Fo r all its pr ovocative ness a nd vas t learn-
ing, and its pur suit of a big and boisterou s
argu ment , The Human A nimal in Western Art
and Science is fund ament ally wea kene d by
the single-minded determin ation with which
so many and such var ied gro ups of utterl y
different works of art (fro m unequ alled
masterpi eces to Holl ywood ad verti sing) are
co nfla ted into bro ad catego ries of anthropo-
morphism, spec ies of animaliz ing tend enc y,
or scientific data. To o mu ch has been
attempt ed and, notwith standin g the impres-
sive size of the overlapping animal polit ies
and hum an besti aries o n offer, it is neverth e-
less surprisingly diffi cu lt to di scover in
Kernp' s book a comfortable spo t for crea -
tures such as Edw ard Lear' s Jumblies or the
Don g w ith a lumino us no se - heautiful poeti c
crea tions of the min d that are neith er plausi-
bly animal nor quit e recogni zabl y hum an.
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26 LITERARY CRITICISM
n 1972, the French narratol ogist Gerard
I Ge nette suggested that A la Recherche
du temps perdu could be con sider ed as
an amplifica tion of the utter anc e "Marcel
Idols and ironies
becom es a writer" . If such an e mphas is on the
pl ot is mi sleadin g, ho wever , it is not becau se CE LlNE S URPR E NA NT
it wo uld entail an ex tra ordinary reduction of
th e no vel to a tenu ou s narr ati ve lin e. Anth o n y R. Pu gh
Ra the r, in taking "M arcel becom es a
THE G R OWTH OF "A LA
wr iter" to be th e narr ati ve core w hich th e
R E C HE R CH E D U T E MPS PE R DU "
no vel exp ande d, one ri sked taking the novel
Volume One: 1909-1 911
to be telling the story of how "M arcel fin all y
376pp. University Press of Toronto. $ 150;
bec om es a w rite r", that is, the story of th e distributed in the UK by NBN. £96.
so lving of a difficulty (how does o ne w rite a 978 08 02088 185
novel ?). Yet , problem s surro und ing the clo-
sure of th e no vel were rarel y, for Pro us tia n
sc ho lars hip, a matt er of the plot or of the com- N a t ha lie M au ri a c D y e r
pl ex tempor al struc ture alone . Fro m aro und PR O U ST I N A CH E VE
1909, w he n he began tran sforming a criti cal Le do ssier " Albertine dispa rue "
essay int o a novel , until hi s death in Novem- 405pp. Honore Champion. €70.
ber 1922, Prou st was bu sy writing a " rigor- 97827453 1131 3
o us ly composed" nove l of recollect ion. In
doin g so, he produced a collec tion of ava nt- ha d in fact "j ust begun " . No t only was th e
tex tes (m anus cripts , correct ed typescripts and novel co mposed over a lon g peri od of time
proofs) from w hic h it is possible to rec on sti- (between 1909 and 1922), but its publication ,
tut e the hi stor y of co mpos ition of the no vel , begun in 1913, ex te nde d be yond Prou st ' s
as the late Anthon y R . Pugh does in The death in 1922 until 1927 (fro m 1922, it was
Growth of "A la Recherche du temps perdu", supe rv ise d by th e writer's brother Rob ert ,
In view of th at broade r hi stor y, it wo uld be a nd th e publisher ). A t least since the publica-
eve n hard er to describ e the no vel as the ampli- tion of the Pleiade ed itio n of the no vel
fi cati on of the ph ra se " M arcel bec om es a ( 1987-9), w hic h includes a se lec tio n of
writ er " . Fo r the ex pa ns ion would have to be Prou st ' s ske tc hes , reader s may engage with
so powerful as to ex pla in the complex pro- the story of tran sformati on s from whi ch it
cess of po sthumous compositi on and publica- results. Yet th at story ca lls into qu estion the
tion , which, ac cord ing to Ge nette in 1987, very limits of the novel.
~.
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TLS N OVEMBER 16 200 7
S ophi e Du v al
L 'IRO NI E PRO U S TI E N N E
La vis ion srereoscopique
5 16pp. Honore Champion. €80.
97827453 0963 I
S t e p h a n e C ha u d ie r
PRO U ST ET L E L A N G A G E
R ELI GI E U X
La ca the drale profane
549pp. Honore Champion. €80.
9782745307682
Unlike the Plei ad e edition, which pre-
se nted only a se lec tion of Prou st ' s sketc hes
in App endices, Pu gh ' s book, th e fir st of a
planned two- volu me study , atte mpts a c hro n-
ological reco ns titution of th e "gestatio n" of
the novel from 1909 until the int errupti on of
its publicati on brou ght about by the First
Wo rld War. Dr awin g o n thirty years or so of
wo rk o n Proust ' s avant-textes and on hi s own
meti culous study of them, Pu gh tell s, in
seve ntee n c hapte rs , th e intricate story of the
" writing unit s" , w hic h are sca tte re d on vari-
ou s writing suppo rts, from the tran sformation
of a critica l essay on Sa inte-Be uve into a co n-
vers ation bet ween a narr ator and hi s m othe r
on aes the tics, to the " rom an de 19 11". Pu gh
es tab lis hes a vas t rep ert oir e of "composi-
tio nal ac ts" - a mplify ing, backt racki ng, strik-
ing o ut, taking up aga in, recop yin g , tacking
on , ch angin g nam es, etc - a nd situa tes the
e pisodes , them es and c harac te rs within the
bro ader co ntex t of the novel, on th e basis of
int ern al an d ex terna l ev ide nce (the logic of
an episode or re fere nces to conte mporary
events) . Th e book , in whic h Pu gh' s voi ce
int erestin gl y m ingles with th at of Prou st in
hi s notes de regie, with th eir descripti ve and
prescr ipti ve mi ssion , will be an in valu abl e
tool for Prou stian scho lars . It offers the oppor -
tunity to ex pe rie nce both the chao tic as pec ts
of the process of compo sition and the logical
pro gression th at animates it.
Na tha lie M auri ac D yer ' s Proust inacheve:
Le doss ier "Albertine disparue " deals with
the history and problems posed by the di scov-
ery , in 1986, of a "second" typ escript of A lber -
tine disparu e. Ju st before his dea th in 1922,
Pro ust had not abl y " cut ou t" 250 pages from
the typescript, which had , up until 1986,
se rved as th e bas is for the publica tion of th at
se ction of the no vel. One sig nifica nt ch ange
pertain ed to the plac e whe re Alb ertin e died
(the fact th at she dies in the correc ted ve rsio n
" near the Vivo nne" rend ers ob solet e the narr a-
tor ' s foll owin g investigati on int o her sex ua l
life. Alb ertine ' s return to Montjouvain con-
firms her lesbi ani sm ). Proust did not live to
carry out the rev isio ns in the last part s of the
novel, whic h th e " cutting out " of large
c hunks of the typ escript wo uld have oblige d
hi m to do. Proust inac heve provides a
detail ed hi story of how the found typ escript
di slocates the can oni cal versio n of the novel
es tablis hed through arbit rar y decision s a nd
co mp romises. It reveals the ex ten t to whic h
that ver sion is in fact marked by an acc ide ntal
incomplet eness: as Pugh shows, Prou st
wor ked by rewr itin g a nd rearr angin g frag-
ment s; neverthel ess, as Ma uriac Dyer sug -
ges ts, he had an " ending" in vie w from the
outse t. M au riac D yer published the shorte ned
version of Al bertine disparue twent y yea rs
ago, and provoked a co ntroversy amo ng
Prou stia n sc ho lars as to the signi fica nce of
Prou st ' s last correcti on s, an d thei r di sturbing
imp act on the struc ture of the novel. Neverthe -
less, the incomplet e story of di scover y of the
"se co nd" typ escript is still wo rth telling. In
the fir st ch apt er , we learn about the de velop-
ment of the sketc hes of Sodome et Gomorrhe
in the cont ext of the ea rly de velopment of th e
novel : th at section (w hic h was to de vel op into
11, Ill , IV and beyond) was to con stitute th e
seco nd part of th e novel , a nd not simply th e
sing le vo lume we know. T he seco nd cha pte r
deals with the tran sform ati on of th at sec tion
of the no vel in 1922, whe n Prou st planned to
ex te nd it co ns iderably . T he ex te ns ion wo uld
have reinforced , accord ing to M auri ac D yer ,
the bin ar y struc ture of the no vel. In the third
and fourth cha pte rs of the book , she exa mines
the literary as pec ts of the found typ escript in
response to Prou sti an scho lars' negat ive eva l-
uati on of it. Th e sus picio n that Prou st ' s final
corr ecti on s aro use d shows thei r un willing-
ness to include del eti on , alo ngs ide amplifica -
tion , in the repertoire of the writer's tech-
niqu es of compos itio n. M auri ac Dyer' s reco n-
stitution supports on e of the ce ntra l con cern s
of her boo k: " how, henceforth, should on e
publish Albertine disparue'l", in view of the
"posthumous uses" to w hich the novel has
been put?
Th e incomplet eness of the novel may we ll
be acciden tal; the 1922 correcti on s harbour
author ia l intentions which one mu st try and
dra w out. M auri ac Dyer put s forth hypoth eses
about how the nove l could have devel op ed ,
had Pro ust lived to carr y out the plann ed sec -
tion s of Sodo me et Gomorrhe . She suggests
th at the ch anges th at Prou st left pending high-
light both the op enn ess a nd the rigour of the
bin ary struc ture of the novel, whic h organiz es
ele me nts according to a " large compass", wid-
ened by tem por al del ay. Th e Prou stian poeti cs
of incompleti on , which e me rges from Proust
inacheve, effect ive ly di sturbs our co ncep tion
of Prou st ' s novel as a cl osed liter ary work
(eve n if a po sthumou s one). It pro vid es far-
reaching theoreti cal re flections and a compel-
ling prospecti ve story - on e late episo de in the
broader story of Prou st' s w ritings - which ca n
be included und er the headin g of A la Recher-
che du temps perdu .
Sophi e Du val' s SOO-page book , the su m-
mary of a lon ger do ct or al thesis, propo ses an
essentia lly dyn a mic definition of iron y. Even
th ou gh Du val draws, in her int rodu cti on , on
lin gui stics, pragmatics, narr at olo gy and
aesth eti c stud ies of iron y a nd the co m ic, she
is mo st c onv inci ng on the va lue of iron y as a
key to reading A la Recherche whe n she
describes the fun cti onin g of iron y in the very
terms of th e novel. T ha t is, w he n iron y is
con cei ved as a spa tia l, " geological" multi-
laye red m ode l, and simulta neo us ly as th e
"optical instrument " , wh ich ca n thro w the
stereoscopic dim en sion s of a n utt erance int o
reli ef, and ca n show the int ern al movem ent s
whic h animate the text. For A la Recherche is
built aro und a dyn am ic prin ci ple, w here by
th e belated discovery of truths is "prepared"
by th ei r ea rlier co ncealmen t. T he alternation
bet ween kn owl ed ge and ign oran ce in th e
 LITERARY CRITICISM 27

hero, the narr ator and the read er is brou ght
back to the redoubling structure of iron y,
which forbid s imm ediat e knowled ge.
Th e oppos ition between story and narr a-
tion in the novel can thu s be describ ed in
term s of ironic duplicit y, which operates at
four level s. Aft er a presentation of the charac-
ters' ex plicit, sceptical and dec adent iron y, in
Part On e of the book , Du val analyse s how
the narr ator devalues that first level throu gh
satirica l iro ny, which pro vid es techniques
of deform ati on , on which Par t Two impr es-
sive ly expounds . Given that , acc ording to
Du val , Prou st ' s parado xical novel "depends
on what it negates" , the conde mnation of
satirica l iron y in turn leads to the engaged
form of iron y, the "ironie rom anesqu e". That
level of iron y, discussed in Part Thr ee, has an
aes thetic, redemptive functio n in so far as it
is the one that presides ove r the creation of
the novel (it produc es the com ic aspec t of the
novel ). On the fourth level , deve loped in Part
Four, it is the iron y of the author, as the demi-
urge, whic h has the funct ion of making the
novel appea r as the noveli st' s fabric ation.
Iron y is a "tool of self-reflexivity", as
Du val' s discu ssion of repetiti on exp la ins,
which impli es that the who le of the no vel be
rep eat ed.
L 'l ronie prous tienne ex tends the mod el of
the ironic sign to the binary structure of the
novel. However, it is in Du val' s attention
to the local effec ts of iron y that the study
is most striking . Sh e pro vides illuminatin g
analyses of the ex plicit, affecti ve and wor ldly
iron y of charac ters . Parti cul arl y fruitful is the
suggestio n that character s them sel ves, espe -
cially the artists in the novel , are elabora ted
on the mod el of the rhetori cal figur e of iron y:
Elstir, who is a ma ster of metaph or and
optic al illu sion s, is the transform ed Biche.
The superimposition of Elstir-Biche, among
oth ers in the novel , corresponds to the co nsti-
tuti on of the self, whereby the self is born e
out of "perpetual dup lication" , throu gh a
"proces s of com plication" .
In Du val' s analyses, reli giou s metaph or s
participate in the iro nica l set-up of A la
Recherche, but they do not pla y a special role
amon g other elements of the no vel. One has
to turn to Step ha ne C ha udier 's Pro ust et le
langage religieux: La cathedra le profane to
ex plore their effects in the co mica l eco no my
of the no vel. Drawin g on the novel as we ll as
Prou st' s critical writings , correspondence,
lett ers, co nver sations, co mm issioned article s,
the annotated tran slation s of Ru skin and on
Jean Santeui l, Cha udier ex plores how Prou st
appli es reli giou s langua ge and bibli cal
them es to secular topi cs such as society, love,
jealou sy, sex ual inversion and literary crea-
tion . Ce ntral to the analysis is the idea of
detournement of the blasph emou s di version
of reli giou s term s, which con stitutes a co m-
mon literar y device, at least since Moli ere' s
Tartuffe. Not only is there no Prou sti an
theor y of reli gion , but Prou st' s apparent
incroyance is also the co ndition for "an
acti ve and fruitful , alway s poeti cal and criti-
cal relation , to the religiou s tradition". Thus
Prou st ' s appropriation of reli giou s di scourse
ca n be treated as a stylistic issue rather than a
theological one. In di vertin g reli giou s ter ms
away from their ordinary use, Prou st trans-
gresses the social and lingui stic norm s. He
does so, for exa mple, throu gh burl esqu e,
whereby the writer allies aes thet ic reflec tions
to the most tri vial rea lities.
Reli giou s langu age is instrument al in
depi ctin g the falseness and violence of
wo rldly society. Throug h the idea of reli-
gious faith , Pro ust describes the ficti ve
natur e on which the worldly "sign" is based.
For faith ensures the cohesion of social group-
ings. O ne is not faced, ho wever, with a con-
demnation of falseness. Th e no vel' s respon se
to the artifice of wor ldly society connects to
the bin ary structure of the no vel (that is, to
the dyn ami c prin cipl e of truth and erro r,
which Du val saw in term s of the ironi cal
sign, and which Mauri ac Dyer' s hypot heses
reinforce). The ambiva lence is for egrounded,
for exa mp le, aro und the theme of idolatry.
The idolat er is env isage d, critica lly, from the
point of view of the decepti on that presides
ove r the institution of his or her idol. How-
eve r, the text present s the delight which the
idolat er takes in the idol as poetic materi al.
The novel thu s shows simultaneo usly the dis-
dain which the writer entertains for the idola-
ter ' s enthusias m, and the idolater ' s deli ght.
No t only is idolatr y clo sely related to poetic
crea tion (bo th involve ignorance, decepti on ,
"c roya nce" and a belatedl y acq uired know -
led ge); Cha udier even sugge sts that the
imp ossibility of giving up idols is a main
them e of the wor k.
Focusing on the relati on bet ween re ligious
langu age, the body and sex uality allow s
Cha udier to explore "the prof anati on of the
moth er" as one of the mo st obscure of
Prou st ' s fantasies involvin g transcend enc e.
Cha udier establis hes a link bet ween the dese-
cration of the mo the r, Prou st ' s ambiva lent
attitude toward s Ju daism , and the literary
voc ation as it appea rs in the novel and in
Jean San teuil. Cha udier fin ally conside rs the
met aphors of the divine and the ca thedral,
throu gh which the creator and his wor k are
present ed in the fin al aestheti c reflection s of
the novel. It is throu gh the figur e of the cathe-
dral that Prou st pro vides the model of literary
reor gani zation from which the novel pro-
cee ds: what is ex perie nced throu gh the bod y,
in sensation, is organized throu gh writing.
A ll the wor ks reviewed here conclude with
the topi c of literar y creation, an d indeed , in
Du val and Cha udier, with the figur e of the
creator. It is as thou gh Prou st' s novel force-
full y imp oses that topic. Wh at seems uncl ear
from reading these repr esent ati ve works of
recent Prou stian scholarship is the location
of that pro blem. Is it intern al to the wor k?
Does Prou st ' s novel pro vid e its own aesthetic
theory? Or is literary creation not also the
very em pirica l, material probl em , which occu-
pies ge netic criticism ? In which case, the
aesthetic theor y that it pro vid es might in fact
be indi stin gui shabl e from the actua l story of
its co mpos ition.

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TLS N O VE M BE R 16 20 0 7
28 LI TERARY CRITICI SM
Forgiving Adolph
n his encyclo pedic British Children 's Fic- A . N . W ILSO N
I tion in the Second World War, Owen Dud-
ley Edwa rds argues that The Chalet
School in Exile is "one of the best books for
O w e n Dudl e y E dwar ds
children - in all senses" to appear durin g the BR I TI S H CH I L D REN ' S F IC TI ON I N
war. To my sha me, I have not rea d El inor M. T H E SECON D W O R L D WAR
Brent-Dyer' s Cha let Sc hool series, and my 744pp. Edinburgh University Press. £150.
ow n prize for best children' s book pub lished 97807486 16510
dur ing the war would be B. B.' s The Little
Grey Men, published in 1942; but it is argua - girl of the school, Joey Bettany, who had
bly not a wa r book, and what distingu ishes appeare d in prev ious novels in the series, is
The Chalet School in Exile, ev idently, is its now marr ied and called Joey Maynard . She is
realism, its depiction of Au strian lynch mobs ove rhea rd having this con versation with her
attackin g Jews, its inclusion of the thought husband. "The laughter died out of Jos face.
processes of a trou bled, guilt-ridden Nazi ' I wish you hadn' t to go . I do feel lonely
pupil at the schoo l, and its analysis of why when you' re away. And the girls will grow
this particular war is necessary. Memb ers up, and you will miss all the j olly part of their
of the Cha let Schoo l Peace League, which first teeth, and seeing and hearing them begin
stands out in opposition to the Naz is, are com- to walk and talk . How I loathe this horrible
pe lled to acknow ledge this necess ity. An old wa r!' ' But it is necessary, Joey? If it' s
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A messag e th at bu siness m ay find t hey ar e
surpr ised to ag ree with - Financ ial Times
• ISBN: 978 1 84407 193 I
• Price: £16.99
• Address: 8-12 Camden High St,
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to dri ve something utterly evil fro m the
world? " '. Dudley Edwar ds persuades me that
this book really is "a novel of ideas".
The length of British Children 's Fiction in
the Second World War is of a kind which
some reviewers would call inordinate, which
is precisely what it isn't. No one in the wor ld
can have read as many children's stories from
this period as Dudley Edwa rds; and even if
you have read as many of the Biggles stories,
or Richmal Crornpton's William stories, you
are likely to have forgotten them . The exten-
sive quo tation which illustrates all the allu-
sions to the stories does not merely add to the
richness of the book; it was, in the circum-
stances, esse ntial. By the end, the reader has
read not only a fascinat ing analysis of the sub-
ject, but also an invaluable anthology. It is a
boo k which likes what it finds, wallows in for-
gotten Worrals adventures , as well as comics -
The famous book o f parod ies o f
Fre nch d ecade nt poet ry f rom 1885,
pr e c ed e d b y a "Llte of th e Po et".
Im mac ula te ver se translation s
p re se nted In fuchsia wr a p p er s a nd
lila c slipcase. Exquisite .
• ISBN: 978 1 90056539 4
• Price: £ 16.00
• Address: 27 Old Gloucester St.,
London WC1 3XX
• Trade Order.: order.@turnaround .co .uk
• Email: atlaspres.@compu.erve.com
• Webslte: www.atlas.co.uk
01 Curiosity An Essay on Intellectual Appet~e
Paul J. Grilliths
G rlff lths d e fines pos itive Intell ectu al c uriosity,
o r stu d iousness, a nd urg es vig ilan c e about
th e a mbig uo us d e lights of m e re c uriosity .
The d lsto rt1ons of c uriosity can le a d a way
fro m a se nse th at knowled g e Is a g ift fro m
God. This ha s im portant im pli c ati o ns for tn e
work o f th e conte m p ora ry un iver sity,
esp ec ia lly th e Chr istian un iversity.
• ISBN:0 920718 77 9
• Price: $16.95 Canadian
• Address: Canadian Mennonlte University,
500Shahesbury Blvd, Winnipeg MB,R3P 2N2
• Fax Number: 204 487 3858
• Emall: OrderstocmUbookstore@cmu .ca
• Webslte: www.cmu.ca/publlcatlons
AGENDA A GAME OF WAR by Guy Debord with Allce Becke r-Ho
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0 1'
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keep at th e cuffi ng edge of poe try th at
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matt e rs
Poem s, essays, rev iew s from new,
esta b lished and youn g w riters (15+).
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TLS N O V E M B E R 16 200 7
for as long as they survived before paper-short-
ages abolished them for the duration . The
most notable feature of the book, perhap s, and
the one which will surprise some readers, is
theh generos ity which it extends to the unfash-
ionable figure of Enid Blyton . " If any of
Blyton's critics had perform ed a tithe of her
services to children of Britain in their time of
greatest need , they would have deserved med-
als." By way of exa mple, Dudley Edwa rds
quotes The Adventurous Four - which, he tells
us, has themes not only of defiance of the
Germans but also of Scottish nationalism. Of
one scene, in which wee Andy shakes his fist
at a departing German ship, Dudley Edwa rds
comm ents, "B lyton did not aspire to classic sta-
tus, more especially once she went into high
producti on and her style glutinised: but she
had learned her business from the classics and
their votaries, and this has the breath of the
spirit of the captive Jim Hawkins' s defiance of
the pirates in Treasure Island" . He also gives
Blyton the credit for resisting national stereo-
typing. At a time when there was violent anti-
Irish feelin g, following the IRA bicycle bomb
A Tale 01 Th,ee Cities
D.G. Holllday
Stonemason Jim Willis, ap prenticeship near done,
finds himseH' drawn into the factory of William
Foster & Co alongside elder brother George
Foster'sare building the flrsttanks,answer perhaps
- and perhaps not - to the horrors of trench
warfare. Inexorably the brothers move south to
Suffolkfor training and on to Plcordv.Dlschorqed
wounded and back in Lincoln, Jim mustchoose:
stone or metal,mason or mechanic?
• ISBN978 0955706400
• Price: £11.95 Hardback
• Address: Bentham House, Oldtield
Road, Maidenhead, Berks SL6 lTH
• Tel: 01628 632379 Fax: 01628 776631
• Emall: Into@ly ndonpubllshers.co.uk
SOMEWHERE MORE SIMPLE by Marlon Molteno
An absorb ing n ew no ve l from a p rize-
w inn in g a ut ho r. Set on th e Isle s o f Sc illy,
wher e th re e strang er s ar rive, c ut o ff
from th e ir past by th irty m iles o f sea ...
A n e lo q ue nt ta le o f d esire , lo ss a nd
fo rg iv e n ess - Flnanc fal Tfmes
V ivid ly e vo king th e atmo spher e o f t h at
remot e, bea ut ifu l p lace , M o lteno
sw itc h es between past a nd p rese nt in
lyric al p rose, illu mi na tin g th e inn e r live s
o f he r c haracters - Lond on Revie w of
Boo ks
G uy Debord , In stig ator a n d th e or ist o f
th e Sltuatlon lst Inte rn ati o n aL a n d
. .........._ - a utho r of The Society ot the Spect acl e.
d ev ise d th e ga me d e scri b e d in t h is
book after b ecom ing int e re ste d in
c la ssic a l w ar th eory (C lausewitz). The
fi rst Ew ng llsh ve rsion In cl u d e s, In a
slip c a se, a ga me-board and counte rs
so th at It may act ua lly be p la yed .
• ISBN: 978 1 90056538 7
• Price : £20,00
• Address: 27 Old Gloucester St.,
London WC1 3XX
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• Website : www.atlal.co.uk

in Coventry in 1939, Blyton defiantly gave
the heroin es of the St Clare's school stories
an Irish name . The only one of her 600 or so
titles to bear the surname of a child is The
O'Sullivan Twins (1942 ); and in one of the
Sunny Stories ('The Boy Who Changed His
Name" ), she enters sympathetically into the
agon y of a boy called Adolph who is tortur ed
by the other children , and subsequently shows
"British" virtues of forgi vene ss and heroi sm.
"To be British means to forgi ve your
enemies." It was in its humble way what Tolk-
ien in those days was bringin g into being as
the turning point of The Lord of the Rings.
In the opening chapter , the author takes
George Orwell to task for his dismissal of
the Billy Bunt er stories. Frank Richards, "like
so many colleagu es, had fought long and well
again st tyrann y in a most insidiou s and widely
accepted form ; in the proc ess, he had trained
his readers in com edy, courage, and comrade-
ship, all of which they would need". There are The illustration hy LesIie Stea d for th e cover of Biggles of266hy Captain W. E. J oh ns
post-war fict ions, such as Nina Bawd en ' s
classic Carrie 's War, which analyse the effect which I am aw are does the work of Dudle y
of the war on child ren, but no critical work of Edwards, which is to analyse on a wide sca le
INDEPENDENT PUBLISHERS
Pop Art Portraits Paul Moorhou.e and Domlnlc Sandbrook
Pop Art Portraitsexp lores th e role o f
portraiture with in Pop Art b ringi ng together
key works by artists working on both sides of
the Atlan tic In th e 1950s and 19605 a nd
examin ing th e ir shared engageme nt wHh
depicti ng t he fa mous . Featur ing im a g e s
taken from adve rtising, pop m usic. ci nema
a nd th e p ress.
Accompanies a National Portrait Ga llery
exh ib itio n unti l 20 Ja nu a ry 2008 .
• ISBN:9781855143784
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• Add re..: St Martin'. Place London WC2H OHE
What Did We Do to Deserve This?
Pales tinian Life Under Occupation in the West Ban k
Throug h p hotographs a nd Interview s, th is book
exp oses the re altt1es of dall y life und er Isra eli
occupation for Pclesf mlons In the West Bank.
"Ha rd -hitting, gr itty, re a listic, ye t a lso
c o m p a ssio nat e and h um cnlsftc", Pafestlne
Chro nic le
"A rare opportun ity t o he a r th e vo ic e s of
Pa le stln la ns Pafestlne News
H
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No Fear: GrOWing up in a risk averse society
By TimGiII
No Fear Joins th e vig orou s debate about th e
ro le and natur e of ch ildhood, It argues th at
c hildhoo d Is be ing undermined by the
sp rea d of risk avers ion Into many a reas of
c hildren's live s, and ca lls for th e adoption of a
p hilosop hy of re silien c e and for th e pro mo tion
of more c hild-friend ly co mm unities
• ISBN: 9781 903080085
• Price: £8 .50
• Order trom: Central Books, 99 Wa lll s
Road, Lo n d o n E9 5LN
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• E-mail: mo@cenfralbooks.com
• We b : www.c e nf ra lb o o ks. co.u k
LITERARY CRITICISM
the literature which helped see a generation
through the traum as of bombardment, becom -
Why Not Catch 21?
The Stor ies Behind the Tit les by Gary Dexter
Why Not Catch 217 Or. Indeed. why A
Clockwork Ora nge a nd not A Robottc
Banana ? Ga ry Dexter presents fifty
b ite-sized pieces of lite ra ry h istory, wlth
t I U . , l u . " . ll.t H l o,;. .
m any fascinati ng deta ils o f each
Htl1 I TU~. w ork' s genesis a nd composition . The
e mphasis Is o n ttNe s th at are lite rall y
Ine xpl ic a b le witho ut t h is backgrou nd
kno w ledge.
• ISBN: 9780711 22 7965
• Available trom all g ood
bookshops or direct trom
www.tra nc e slln c o ln .c o m .
Hello At Last
Embracing the Koan 01Friendship and Med nation By Sara Jenkins
'Deep en your relati onship s,' my Zen teacher
sold yet our practice takes p lace larg ely In
silenc e. - Sara Jenklns
Suc h was her 'insolub le rid dle'; follow a
c ontemplative inner life b ut turn outwards.
interact and engage with other peop le,Join
Sora as she beg ins her inspiring spiritual journey.
• ISBN Numbe r: 978 1 899579792
• Price : £9.99
• Orders 10 : Book sou rce, 50 Cambuslang
Rd , Gla sgo w G3 28NB UK
• Tel e p hone Order number: +44 141 643
3961or 08453700063
• Fax Number: 08453700064
• Emoll: order s@booksource.net
• www.wind horsep ub lic a tio ns.c o m
A Treatise on White Magic Fllteen rule. 01 Magic
by Alice. A . Bailey
The purpose of W hil e Ma g ic Is to Invo ke
h ig he r va lues and th e energy of th e sou l
a nd to use th e se as g uid ing pri nc ip les In
life . Allc e Ba iley 'Stre at1se g ives t he ke y to
u nfo ld ing sou l power and to demonstrate
the m a g ic a l w o rk o f th e sou l as a tru e
server of humanity.
• ISBN: 978 0 85330 1233
• Price: £15
• Lucis Press, Suite 54, 3 Wh ite ha ll Court,
London SW1A 2EF
• Em a ll: lu cl sp ress @lucl strust .org
• Webslle: www.luc lstrust .o rg/p ub llc a l lons
• rei : 020 78394512
• Direct Line 0870 7701653
TLS N O VE M BE R 16200 7
29
ing evacuees, rationing, fear of invasion and
bereavement. The chapters are ordered themat-
ically, dealing with issues such as cla ss, race
and gender ; the arrang ement leads to surpris-
ing and illuminating ju xtapo sition s - Orwell ' s
Animal Farm discu ssed in the same breath as
some little-known Anthony Buck eridg e
school story, for example. And there are
inci sive and always sympathetic analyses of
how the war changed the lives of many of
the established author s. Captain W . E. Johns
was compe lled to becom e a femini st, and
creat e a WAAF heroine , for example; Enid
Blytons marr iage brok e up.
Is Owen Dud ley Edw ard' s heroic analysis
of so much Blyton and Biggles worth the
effort? Is it worth the stagge ring sum of
£150 , which is the book' s pric e? Th e answ er
to both tho se question s is a loud " Yes" . Brit-
ish Child ren 's Fiction in the Second World
War is one of tho se admirable exercises in
one small area of know ledge which thro ws
light on something much bigg er, nam ely the
effect of the Second World War on the Hom e
Front, an effect which is still bein g felt.
Once Upon a Country A Pa lestinian Llle
Sari Nu..elbeh with Anthony Davld
The story o f Nusselbeh's fam ily Is th e story o f
t he Pa lestinia n people. Born Into a
prominen t fam ily with d eep roo ts in
Je rusa le m, Nussei b eh re luctant ly became
inv olv e d in po litics, a lways a ware t hat co-
ex istence with Isra el w a s poss ible. Hat e d
by a ll e xtre m ists, he has a lways he ld fast to
t he p rinc ip les o f fre e d om and equality.
• ISBN: 978 190555905S
• Price: £20.00
• Address: 22 Golden Square, London W1F9JW
• TelOrdor No: L,B.S 01903828 800
• Fax Number: 01903 828 802
• Ema ll: books@holbonpubllshers.com
• We bslte: www.ha lb a np u b llshers.c om
Daily Encounters: Photographs from Fleet street
Roger Hargreaves with an essay by Bill Deedes
Da lly Encounters celebrates British
press p hotography during t he spa n
of lis decisive Flee t Street ye a rs and
reca lls some o f the mos t memorable
events o f th e Twent ieth Ce ntury .
• ISBN: 978185514377 7
• Price: £17.99 hardback
• Address: St Ma rt in 's Place
London WC2H OHE
• rei Order No.: 0207 321 6624
• Fax number: 0207 321 6657
• Email: tste wart@npg.org.uk
• Web. lte: www.npg.org.uk/ . hop
Enifharmon Press
POETRY OUT OF MY HEAD AND HEART
by tseee Rosenberg
A co llect ion of 34 lette rs a nd 18 d raft poems
b y th e First World War poet Isa a c Rosenbe rg
was re c ently d iscove red at th e BrH1sh Lib rary .
Pub lished he re for th e first time, it inc ludes
c orre spond e nc e with fellow poets laurence
Binyon a nd Gordon Bottom ley, tog eth er with
materia l about Rosen berg from fa mily a nd
friend s,
• ISBN: 978 1 90463 438 6
• Price: £15 .00 hb
• Address: Central Books, 99 Wallls
Road, London E9 5LN
• rei: 0845 458 9911
• Emall: orders@centralbooks.com
• www.e n it ha rm o n.co. u k
30
Literary Criticism
Ronan McDonald
T HE CAM BRIDG E
INTROD UCTION
TO SAM UEL BECKETT
140pp. Cambrid ge University Press.
£35 (paperback, £10.99);
US $65 (paperback, $ 19.99).
978 0 521 83856 6
omi n McDonald defin es the term "Beck-
R ettian " as "a pitil ess urge to strip away,
to expose , to deal in pith s and essenc es". His
short introduction to "one of the giants of
twenti eth-c entury literatur e and dram a"
whose "generally bleak and bleakl y general
images have see ped into popular culture" is
agreeabl y pith y, too.
The Cambridge Introductions aim to pro-
vide students and others with access ible and
lively approa ches to major authors and gen-
res. McDonald ' s book focu ses on the plays
by Samu el Beckett that are stage d most fre-
quentl y and the pro se works that are most
often studied by und ergraduate stude nts.
" Unfortunately" , McDonald says, "this has
necessitat ed omitting extended con sideration
of the minimalist skullsca pes of Beckett' s
later period" , and it was with regret, too , that
he had to leave out critical con siderat ion of
the poetr y, "a lament ably neglected part of
the oeuvr e". Neve rtheless in a little over a
hundred pages McD onald man ages to cover
Beckett' s life, the plays from Waiting for
Godot to Happy Days, the fiction from More
Pricks Than Kicks to How It Is, and to con-
clud e with a brief but inci sive survey of Beck-
ett criticism. He is particul arly good on Beck-
ett's Irishn ess, quoting appro vingly Decl an
Kiberd' s estimation of him as "the first trul y
Irish pla ywri ght , becau se the first utterl y free
of factitious eleme nts of Irishness". Pointing
out that "we should be careful about unif ying
the identit y of Irish Prot estant s into an undi s-
tin gui shed morass" , he shows how much
Beck etr' s middle-class suburba n back ground
differed from that of the land- ownin g Ascend-
ancy "to which Lady Gregor y belon ged and
to which Yeats aspir ed".
McDon ald is percepti ve about Beckett' s
relation ship with his adored father and the
diffi culti es he had coping with his moth er ' s
"savage loving" , and with her "domineering
and stern" attitud e that pro voked in him
"intense feelin gs of anxiety and guilt" . Those
feelin gs we re later enca psulated in Krapp 's
Last Tape. Waitin g for his mother to die, long-
ing for it to be "all over and don e with, at
last" , young Krapp played with a rubb er ball.
His older self is still haunt ed by the me mory :
" I shall feel it, in my hand , to my dying day".
McDon ald explains how, throu gh apparently
simple pro se like this, Beck ett became a grea t
dramati st.
JOH N FLETC HE R
IN BRIEF
An illustration from "Sing A Song for Sixpence"; from Randolph Caldecott's Picture Books,
by RandoIph Caldecott (236pp. Huntington Library Press. £15.95 . 978 0 87328 223 9)
Poetry
Judith Bishop
EV ENT
68pp. Cambridge: Salt. Paperback, £9.99.
978 I 8447 1 2830
Udith Bishop is an Au stralian , but , if her
J poetr y is anythin g to go by, she might have
been born anywhere. Her first coll ection,
Event , well ove r ten yea rs in the makin g, is
rem arkabl e, chiefl y, for its knowing preoccu-
pation with the ungroundedn ess of thin gs - or
what Bishop her self refers to as " incidents of
wind" . Here is an unu suall y perceptiv e poet
for whom the local is useful onl y in so far as
it can pro vide the means of conn ectin g her to
its unseen, esse ntia l natur e. To this extent her
wo rk seem s to have m or e in com mon w ith
the feminine mystical traditi on in poetr y, as
practi sed by the likes of Emily Dickinson ,
than with our current general preferenc e for
surface descripti on for its ow n sake.
Since to classify Bishop in such a way is,
nowadays, to risk den ying her the audience
she deserves, it is worth notin g that her parti-
cular brand of mys ticism isn 't too obtrusive;
in fact her poetry' s quiet humility count s as
one of its for emo st attractions. An authe ntic
and unsentiment al belief in the capacit y for
tendern ess bet ween creatures lies at the heart
of Bishop' s writing . She appears to view the
whole of life - everything that has eve r lived
- as parti cipants in the largest of conversa-
tion s across time, the shared "event" of being
alive: " Hail, red-eyed pigeon ; prancing spar-
row , hail. / Toni ght we file together , at some
distance, to the show " . These two lines,
alone, give a se nse of Bishop ' s refin em ent ,
allusive ness and control , but con sider , as
well, the foll owin g, from a poem ("Late in
the Day") about the death of a hawk:
In late-shadowed pines,
her yo ung incline toward the sun.
A screen of white down
lies aggrieved by wind at dawn.
Other notable poems, in a book whose over-
all effec t is grea ter than that of its indi vidu al
part s, are "After the Elem ent s" , "Desert
TLS NOVEMBER 16 200 7
skills in their neth er regions; Fox and No rth
excrete togeth er ove r a royal commode while
the devil hold s his nose, or are joined by
Burk e, the Princ e of Wal es and Maria Fitzher-
bert in shitting and fartin g ove r the nation ;
Britain, Holl and , Spa in, France and Am eric a
piss together into the Peace of Versailles ,
while John Bull is show n moonin g and fart-
ing quit e cont entedl y at the ima ge of his
mournful monarch .
The book contains 200 illustrations, the
majority in colour, varying from the very
well known to the reall y obscure, mainl y
taken from Baker ' s ow n collection, with his
own choice comm ent ary which, thou gh
highl y informative, never reall y taxes the
brain . The style reminds one of writing tele-
grams and countin g every word. "George was
a control freak." " Bute ' s influ ence wa ned."
After a while it can get quit e catching .
D AVID N OKES
History
David Renton, David Seddon
and Leo Zeilig
TH E CO NGO
Plunder and resistance
245pp. Zed Books. Paperback, £16.99.
Wind " , "The Indifferent" , "Rabbit", "Still 978 I 84277485 4
Life with Co ckles and She lls", " Issuance"
and "The Chords of Sno w Meltin g".
If there is weakn ess, it stems from
Bishop' s historical interests (se e the poem s
T his book pro vides a summary of the
unh app y history of the Congo and its
incessant plund er by out siders. It would have
about Dofia Marin a, mistress to Cortes) , benefit ed from an editor to correct the many
which necessaril y place a con str aint on her spe lling, typo graphical and other errors. The
inborn ability to make words resonat e; admit- same two sentences are repeated twice on a
tedl y, given her fondness for viewi ng the
per sonal with in a public setting, this obje c-
single page, and the portrayal of Uganda 's
relationship with the Mou vem ent pour la
tive tend ency could well be part of a larger Liberation du Co ngo (ML C) is wrong in
project, a foil to help seed lyric poem s with a detail: Uganda was not an important backer
flavour unlik e any other in poetry today. of the Rassembl em ent Congolais pour la
QUVER D EN NIS Democratic (ReO), but helped to splinter it
into at least three other faction s. It did not
"promote" ML C' s lead er Jean-Pi erre Bemb a
Art to that position in 200 I - he was very much
Kenneth Baker there alread y - although it was his principal
GE O RGE III back er. Eve n m ino r in accuraci es re duce one 's
A life in caricature confid enc e that the guide knows the way.
224pp. Thames and Hudson. £24.99. The period before the arrival of Stanley
978 050025 1409 and Livingstone is covered in the first sixtee n
pages, and the book fini shes in Decemb er
K enneth Baker was always a rath er super-
ior vege table in Mr s Th atcher ' s Spitting
Image Ca binet - so mething bet ween a glazed
200 5, with the ado ption of a new con stitution.
It does not cover the elec tions held in 2006 ,
which return ed to power the young Joseph
artichoke and highl y butt ered asparagus - Kabil a, son of Laurent , who overthrew the
and he has, appropriately, present ed a reall y malignant President Mobutu with outside
scrumptious tit-bit to fit into those bulgin g help in 1997. The Congo is a story of gree d,
Christmas stockings . George Ill: A Life in violence and misrule, told within a loosely
caricature is a highl y colourful trot throu gh Mar xist framework. Its them e - broadly - is
the many escapades of that splendid era that Western capit al is behind most of the
when, though Am erica was lost and republ i- turbul enc e the countr y has known; its vas t
ca ns, not all of whom we re mad , made bold resou rces and we ak state structures have
assault s on roya l personages, France was allo wed pilla ge on a scale that not onl y
so und ly heat en and Fa rme r George , worry ing shames the W e st hut als o more recentl y Z im-
over the health of his pigs, became the model babwe, Rwanda and Uga nda, who sent to the
for generations of Lord Emsw orths fussing DRC forces that equalled those of King
over their Empresses of Blandin gs. Leop old in rapacity and destruction.
It was the time of Hogarth Gust), James In the aftermath of the Co nference Nation-
Gillra y and Thom as Rowland son, and the car- ale Souveraine in the early I990s, opposition
icatures reproduced in the book are salacious, leaders shrank from seizing the power the y
graphic and highl y amusing. The bare royal might have had. Now , two wa rs later, the
po steriors are show n shitting in the regal country has an elected President , who is try-
pri vy on receiving the news that Gustav us 1II ing to cont ain another Tutsi insurgent,
of Sweden has been shot, manurin g his ver- Laurent Nkunda, as the probl em s of Rwa nda
dant plain at Wind sor or lying on the royal and Burundi extend once more into the
counterpane to be kissed by aspirants to pre- ungo verned spaces of the eastern Co ngo.
ferm ent. His opp onent s dem onstrate equal The leader of the oppos ition - the same

Jean-Pierre Bemba - has tak en refuge in Por-
tugal. There is no Congolese Mandela in
sight and the horror is not yet ended.
PHILIP WI NTER
Rosemary Goring, editor
SCOTLAND : THE A UTOBIOGRAPHY
2,000 years of Scotti sh history by those
who saw it happen
483pp. Viking. £25.
9780670916573
n a letter of 1770 the Edinburgh philo-
I soph er David Hume wrote of Scotland:
" I belie ve this is the historical Ag e and this
the historical Nation" . It would be difficult to
nam e a time when Scotl and and the Scotti sh
peoples have not felt this to be so. From Bar-
bour ' s fourte enth-century poem The Bruce to
the novel s of Scott and Steven son in the nine-
teenth century, on to Kevin Mac Neil' s drink-
sodden, herita ge-oppressed The Stornoway
Way, a twenty-fir st-century tale of Hebridean
life , the Scotti sh literary imagination has
tuned itself to history .
Thi s is as true of Scotl and 's popular and
political imagin ation. An entry in Scotland:
The Autobiography, recording the death of
Don ald Dewar on October 11, 2000 , quote s
his rem ark on what con stitutes "the beaut y or
the terror of Scotti sh history " : the fact that
"We are all affected by it and its influences
are never far awa y".
Rosemary Goring has assembled an enter-
taining anthol og y that catches the mixed and
complex blessing s of this national legac y.
Loude st are the usuall y silenced voices of
tho se whose lives profession al history rarel y
records. Extracted from newspapers, journals
and letters, as well as court records and state
papers, and told by croft ers, criminals, com e-
dian s, prisoners, children and sport smen,
the se eye witness accounts may be vivid , but
like official history , as Goring shrewdly
point s out, they are no more certain to be true
or unpr ejudiced.
Much is history in its raw est form ; but
though evidence is thicker for more recent
time s, there is a disappointing reliance on
print sources . Nor is Scotl and ' s ethnic diver-
sity repre sented: no mention of Gla sgo w' s
Italian community, for exa mple. Hum es writ-
ings contributed to Scotland' s recognition as
a modern, prog ressive European nation. Yet
so many of the institutions defining Scot-
land ' s essence in the out side world toda y con-
tinue to draw on ass ociations with a primitive
Highland society of Celtic mists and myth s.
Thi s contradiction is one rea son why it is so
difficult to define what is typic all y Scotti sh.
A short appendix print s original text s in the
Scot s langu age, but not a single passage in
Gaelic. On the other hand , Bill y Connolly is
favour ed with two entri es.
KATHRY N SUTH ERLAND
Autobiography
Sebastian Horsley
DA NDY IN THE UN DE RWO RLD
328pp. Sceptre. £16.99.
978 0 340 93407 4
" I keep trying to be miserabl e but a kind of
cheerfulness keep s spoiling it" , Seba stian
Hor sley recentl y said, althou gh his life
has been far from textbook cheerful. A free-
IN BRIEF
foraging childhood was shadowed by a string
of chaotic , self-destructive adult s who
"didn' t even bother to ignore us". "Gin and
cat atonic " was the order of eve ry day. His
moth er was fuelled by Mandrax, " like a tor-
toise on a leop ard hunt ". His self-obsesse d
fath er moved his mistr ess in, then abandoned
the famil y to find him self. Seba stian failed at
a rash of schools, left art coll ege to live with
"the most violent man in Scotland", then fled
to London where he sealed his flat again st
daylight and did nothing but take drug s. He
saw no one except his dealer and occa sion al
pro stitutes. When this mea gre human contact
oppr essed him he bought an inflat able doll to
have sex with and got his dru gs by post. Thi s
is potentially the stuff of a miserabl e mernoir ,
but Horsley never solicits pity. He want s to
entertain, and he does.
Dandy in the Underworld is playful,
funny, intense and somehow affectionate.
The pro se give s the impression of carel ess-
ness, but is in fact controlled, lean and plea s-
ing . His aphorisms are unstoppable, some-
time s very Wood y Allen , sometimes rather
Oscar Wilde. Sle ep is "like death , without the
long-term commitment". "The intelli gent are
to the intelligentsia what a gentlema n is to the
gents". There are many one-liner s: " It was so
cold I was thinking of getting married". (He
does so, then realiz es " I' d rather have lived
with a gas leak" .) There are straight-faced
build-ups to tragi-comic absurditi es, as when
he remember s his coming of age, and the
desire to mark it: he took a long train journey,
through dismal trees, blank field s and silence
- "I had decid ed to spend my twent y-first
birthday alone in a gas chamber at
Au schwitz", What follow s is oddly moving,
as are other mom ent s of pain , confusion and
passion. " I alway s fell in love with whatev er
see med weak , ruin ed , sadde ned, orphaned,
disint egrated." The book ends with an invita-
tion to the reader to "adore" Sebastian him-
self. Clos ing it is a little like saying goodbye
to a per son you 've met in a pub and sworn to
call , very soo n. But as time passes and the
insi stent vo ice fade s, you realize you won't
stay in touch. Hor sley is not mad nor very
bad , but he might be dang erou s to know.
SH EENA JO UGHIN
Travel
Celia Lyttelton
TH E SCENT TRAIL
A journ ey of the senses
320pp. Bantam Press. £15.
9780593051146
C elia Lyttelton fulfill ed a long-held ambi-
tion when she had a bespok e sce nt
created. To come up with a scent that
reflected her own char acter and histor y, she
was subje cted to clo se analy sis hy a perfurnier
and a colour expert. Eventually, out of some
3,000 " single note scents" her own three-
tiered bespoke sce nt emerged, con sisting of
top , middl e and base note s, as they are called ,
made up of eleve n differ ent scents in total.
She was so fascinated by the stori es behind
the se ingredient s that she decided to go in
search of them her self. This led to two year s
of tra velling from places as close to home as
Gr asse (famous for its scent-making since the
Middle Ages), where mimo sa is gro wn, to
Moro cco for neroli and pettigrain, Turkey for
dama sk rose, Italy for iris, Sri Lank a for nut-
TLS NO VE M BER 16200 7
meg , India for zambac ja smine and veti vert ,
Yem en and the extraordinary island of
Socotra off the coa st of Somalia for frankin-
cen se, myrrh and ambergris.
This book , which Lytt elton calls an "olfac-
tory ody ssey" , is her account of her adven-
tures and encounters during this journ ey,
so metimes acco mpanied by her husband and
young son, sometimes alone. She track s
do wn the grow ers, describ es the harvest and
the factori es, some very primiti ve, and
explains the complex proce sses involved in
extracting scent from flowers (or trees, or, in
the case of ambergri s, the vomit of the sperm
whale, a highl y priz ed and very rare ingr edi-
ent who se aroma can, apparently, linger for
300 yea rs).
The Scent Trail is dense with fascinating
fact s, stories, literary references and histor y.
We learn that it takes ten yea rs to train as a
junior "nose" (ma ster perfurni er) , that Alex-
ander the Great was particularly fond of per-
fume s, that frankincen se has multifarious
medic al uses, and that Plin y wrot e exte n-
sively on the topic , as did Theophrastu s.
Celia Lytt elton deal s with the technicalities
of this highl y complex subje ct, which is
both art and science, with enough detail to sat-
isfy the read er ' s curiosity, but not so much
that it becomes burdensome . Her book could,
though, well be used as a reference work by
the enthusiast, as it cont ain s a useful glo s-
sary, bibliograph y and index.
MARY FuRNE SS
Military History
Mark Urban
FUSILI ERS
Eight years with the Redcoats in America
384pp. Faber. £20.
978 0 571 22486 9
n Fusiliers, Mark Urban has sought to re-
I create the success of his earlier book,
Rifl es (200 3), by following a single regiment
through a war. The 23rd Ro yal Welch Fusi-
lier s fou ght throu ghout the Am eri can War of
Independ enc e, from Bunk er Hill to York-
town , and can therefore act as illu strati ve of
the war as a whol e.
Unlike the 95th Rifles of Urban's previous
study, the 23rd were a " line" regim ent, with
none of the glam our of "special" troop s. And
given the very fluid organization of the Brit-
ish Army , it is difficult to sustain a singl e-
regim ent narrati ve thread, as his Ro yal
Welch witnesses com e and go. Urban tries to
use eyewitness es wherever he can, but not all
are eyewitnesses to the actual events he is dis-
cussing .
Urban's lack of milit ary background and
wider under standin g is sometimes apparent.
The essential need to train the Arm y on a com-
mon doctrine w as not pos sibl e until the Duke
of York became Commander-in-Chief, with
the full weight of Royal authority behind him .
If the correct solution was a fusion of the "Ge r-
man " and "American" military schools, that
was never possible, given the stresses of ser-
vice, until General Sir Ralph Abercromby got
nearl y two month s to train his army prop erly
in 1800-0 I, befor e the campai gn against
Napoleonic forc es in Egypt. Abercromby was
the first Briti sh commander to have that oppor-
tunity after the reserve of train ed troop s was
dissipat ed in the West Indies from 1793-5 .
Neverthe less , Urban ha s written a very
31
engaging book about the Briti sh Arm y in the
Revolutionary War, when there are not many
other s (Chri stopher Hibb ert and Pier s Mack-
esy aside) to choo se from . He has don e much
to dissipate the many myths belov ed of
Am erican authors , particularly conc erning
the colonists' tactical effectiv eness. This is
the book ' s greatest strength; a unit-l evel
account of a forgotten period in the Briti sh
Arm y' s histor y, when they we re fighting a
bad war in a bad plac e at a bad time, tryin g to
carry on as profession all y as possible .
JON LATIM ER
Laura Leedy Gansler
TH E MYSTERIO US PRIV ATE
THOMPSON
The double life of Sarah Emma Edmonds,
Civil War soldier
260pp. University of Nebraska Press.
Paperback , $19.95.
978 0 80325988 I
T he story at the heart of Laura Leedy Gan-
sler' s workmanlike biography of Sarah
Emma Edmo nds - a New Brun swick-born
woman who , having masquerad ed as "Frank
Thompson" for four years, joined the Union
Arm y in the Am eric an Civil War, and then
served as a spy before deserting and return-
ing to her real ident ity - has becom e almo st a
clich e of ninet eenth-century women ' s his-
tory. Born in 1841 , unappreciated by a father
who desperately want ed a strong boy , the
tombo yish Sarah was a crack shot. Her deci-
sion to flee her famil y and then to become
"Frank Thompson" , a very success ful door-
to-door salesma n, demon strat es that wom en
had exactl y those skills ideologues said they
didn 't. Edmonds' s deci sion to enli st in Lin-
coln ' s army was only anoth er extension of
her role-playing. Even her first success , as a
"male" battl efield nurse, would have under-
mined the traditional view of women, who , it
was argu ed, were too frail in both mind and
bod y to stand the rigour s of military nursing .
Later , she became a spy and then a po st rider;
during one mission as the former, cloaked as
an Iri sh woman, she took shelter in a hou se in
which she succoured a wounded Confederate
soldier and fulfilled his dying wish - bring-
ing his watch to his commander. Though
Gan sler notes that ther e is controversy about
some of Edrnonds ' s claims, there is more
than enough evidence that befor e "Thornp-
son" desert ed (probably becau se a dose of
malaria would have led to a medical examina-
tion and expo sure ), hers was an extra ordin ary
military career.
Equally inter estin g are the men around
her. None of the men who knew "Frank is a
femal e" expo sed her. In the 1880s, when
Edmonds sought to clear Thornpsons nam e
and collect "his" pen sion , every one of her
old comrades supported her, many goin g so
far as to swea r oath s in petitions to Congress
and the President. Her regimental comrades
and commander sponsored her applic ation to
the Grand Arm y of the Republic, which in
1898 buri ed her with full military honours.
Just as Edrnondss life shows the foll y of
accepting the prevailing prejudices of her
day, so her comrades' acceptance of her
shows that ther e were man y men at the time
whose mind s were much more open than we
might have thought.
NAT HAN M . G REENFIE LD
32 LITERARY CRITICISM

uch has been written about the atre does not mean that religion explains

M Shak espeare' s religion in recent

years, not all of it quite
objective. Texts and Traditi ons: Religion in
Shakespeare 1592-1604 is a sensible attempt
to get awa y from speculative and often
parti san explorati ons of Shak espeare ' s life
and wor ks that try to align him with a
particular church. Beatric e Grov es is far
more intere sted , as she says , in exploring
the way Shakespeare' s "verbally sophisti-
cated , embodied drama" engaged with "the
relig ious culture in which both he and his
work s were embedded".
To this end the book succeeds extremely
well. A learn ed and judicious first chapter
examin es how Shak espear e read the Bible,
pointing out that he undoubtedly knew the
Bishop s' Bib le (1568) from its use in church,
and that he probably read the Geneva Bible
(1560) , the version that was most widely
avail able in print. King Lear owes much to
the Book of Job , for example, and Macb eth to
the story of Elisha and Haza el in 2 Kings; and
when Mowb ray is sent into exile in Richard
II his impassioned speech echo es Psalm 137.
The second chapter argues that Shake spear e
Not in church
ANDR EW HADFIELD
Beatrie e Grov es
TE XTS A ND TRADITIO NS
Religi on in Sh akespear e 1592-1604
231 pp. Oxford Univers ity Press. £50 (US $95).
978 0 19 920898 2
would have been famili ar with the Mystery
plays, and , like much of his audience, would
have retained an affe ction for the old
ways and ritu als. Indeed , it might be argued
that much commerci al Elizabetha n dram a
sought to provide a replac em ent for the
public express ion of belief that such literar y
work s pro vided, something that Gro ves
labels an "incarnational aes thetic" . Indeed ,
Shakespeare 's plays do contain echo es of the
My stery pla ys. In Richard ll, for example,
the king comp lain s that the people no long er
greet him with "All hail", the words that
Jud as used to addre ss Christ: the "all" comes
from one of the old plays - perhap s the York
Agony and Betrayal - rather than the Bible ,
which ha s ju st "hail" .
Such parallels are sugges tive of a relation-
ship, and Grov es ha s don e a good service in
gath erin g together a tradition of scholars hip.
It is at this point , however, that the book
starts to unra vel. Man y of the argum ent s
see m as opportunistic as tho se of the more
parti san scholars working in the area. It is
claim ed that the interweaving of plot and sub-
plot in Elizabethan dram a "may have evolved
from the iconographic and dramatic cycles of
medie val culture", as such linkag es we re not
apparent in classical literature. Other explana-
tion s ba sed on theatr e histor y are far more
plau sibl e, but once such conn ections have
been "discovered" it is very hard to stop them
appearin g everywhere . Argum ent s based on
relatin g a text to its sources , as if a vital key
will unlock eve rything, are often reductive.
The fact that anti-theatrical writers such as
Stephen Go sson target ed ido latry in the
everything , es pecially when, as in Shak e-
speare's works, the conn ections are not obvi-
ous and no real pattern emerges . The fact that
Juli ets death contain s a hope of her revi ving
does not make Romeo and Juli et a pasch al
play of resurrection ba sed on the life of Jesus.
That the murd ered Arthur in King John is
associated with religiou s imagery does not
make the play a weird defenc e of the divine
right of kings (sho wing that the incumbent
monarch is failing but the principles some -
how remain intact ). Mor e per sua sive is the
chapter on Henry V, but it argue s that Hal' s
use of religious imagery exposes his lack of
Christian spirit: evidenc e aga inst the book ' s
the sis rather than for it.
Texts and Traditi ons does contain some
useful materi al - even if much of it is esse n-
tially an overview of secondary sources . But
it really adds little to debat es on Shakespeare
and religion. Everyone accepts that Shake-
speare lived in a religi ous age, and that
his works mak e use of Christian images and
reference s. To use such evidenc e to sugges t
that Shak espeare wa nted his plays to be read
as religiou s alle gori es is distorting.

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International books
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The Society is pleased to announce that the 2006 Criticos Prize was awarded to Averil
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The 2007 Criticos Prize will be awarded to a writer, artist or researcher for an original backgro und . professional experience and publications. Bibliography
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Submissions for the 2007 prize should be made no later than January 31st, 2008 to: 0207782 4974
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TLS N O VE M BER 16200 7

 APPOINTMENTS MISCELLANEOUS PUBLISHING &
RIGHTS
G. HEYWOOD HILL LTD Old & N ew Books The LIVING LITERATURE Club .SARAH GRAND I FRANCES MCFALL !fyou
Managing Director Bringing literature to life have information about copyright holders for the
work of Sarah GrandlFrances McFall of The
Heywood Hill is one of London's few bespoke ind ep endent bookshops. In the former homes of the literary greats Heavenly Twins, The Beth Book, and ldeala pleas e
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We are looking for a talented bookseller to continue the development of this Univ., Dept. of English, 1 LMU Drive, Los Angeles
unique enterprise. The successful applicant will be responsible for every
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Opening Gala Evening CA 90045 -2659, myoungkirsdmu .edu

Attracting new business whilst sustaining the shop's special character and
existing customer relationships will be essential.
Bruce Purchase as Samuel Johnson
Resourceful and well organised you will have good business skills, perhaps
Dr. Johnson's formerhomein London's Gough Sq HOLIDAYS
with management experience , and a deep understanding of books in terms Drinks reception. Buffet supper with wine
of reading and collecting. Highly motivated, you will have a good memory, Saturday 15thDecember from 6pm • Rome - historical centre - one bedroo m apart-
an intuitiv e sympathy for and interest in people, a measured approach and ment available for short term rental. Images on
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I The TLS regrets that it printed an old advertisement in issues 24th August and 28th September I

Princeton University

Shelby Cullorrl Davis Center for Historical Studies

http://dav.princeton.edul

Cultures and Institutions in Motion

During the academic years 2008109 and 2009/10 the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies will
focus on the problem of cultures and institutions in motion . How have ideas , institutions, structures, and artifacts
moved across social and geographical space? How have they intersected with their new environments? How have
they been adapted, resituated, hybridized, and transformed in processes of motion? The field ofinquiry includes
transnational history but is not limited to it. Problems could include the diffusion of religious and cultural
practices, the migration of technologies and objects, the circulation of ideas , traditions, and aesthetic forms, the
transfer of policies and legal practices, the dynamics of traveling social movements, histories of reception,
appropriation, and encounter, and the creation oftranslocal networks and intermediaries. As in the past, we hope
to address this problem from a wide variety of periods and places, from prehistory to the present and from all
parts of the world. Scholars from all disciplines with an interest in the topic as an historical phenomenon are
invited to apply.

The Centerwill offer a limited number ofresearch fellowships for one ortwo semesters, running from September
to January and from February to June, designed both for senior scholars and for highly recommended y o u n g e r
scholars w h o have finished their dissertations by the application deadlines . Fellows are expected to live in
Princeton in order to take an active part in the intellectual interchange with other members ofthe Seminar. Funds
are limited, and candidates are, therefore, strongly urged to apply to other grant-giving institutions as w e ll as the
Center, if they w ish to come for a full year.

Written inquiries should be addressed to the Manager, Shelby Cullom D a vis Center for Historical Studies,
Department of History, 136 Dickinson Hall, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544-1017, U.S.A. The
deadline for applications and letters of recommendation for fellowships for 2008/2009 is December 1, 2007.
Scholars who would like to offer a paper to one of the w e e k l y Seminars are asked to send a brief description of
their proposal and current curriculum vitae to the Director.

Applications can be made online athttp://dav.princeton.edulprograIIIleI4/fellowship_inforrnati.htInl.Princeton

University is an equal opportunity employer and complies with applicable EEO and affirmative action
regulations . For general information about applying to Princeton and how to self-identify, see
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Daniel T. Rodgers
Director 2008-12
 CLASSIFIED
GRANTS COURSES New Publications in English
Philip IlENEDICT, Gr. pilir fliJ,"']:
771t Wars, Massacres and Troubles .f
MASTER OF STUDIES IN ENGLISH AT OXFORD 7ortof,.Jmill J~tTh;jJl. 2007, 432 p.
94 m, 8 in colours s:43 fold-outs
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GRANTS

CA L L F OR P AP ER S

THE SWORD OF JUDITH

Multidisciplinary Conference in the Humanities at the New York Public Library
W E IN V IT E PAP E RS that ex' m ine
. ny aspect of th e them e of Ju dith fo r a
mu lt idiscip lin a ry confere nce in th e
h um anities to he held at Th e New Yo rk
Public Library April 17-18. 2008. We
welcom e all schola rly approache s and
new con trib utions to discu ssion of th e
canonicity, au tho rship and histori cal
backg round o f the Boo k of judith an d
10 any aspect of th e tex tu ral and visual
tr aditio ns of Jud ith in later period s.
Possible to pics include the the relations hip of th e Book of
j udith to the Jewish and Christian can o ns; the Mar y /j udith
typology; the int erpre tation o f j udith in Je wish . Chris tian. o r
secular lite rat u re, m an uscrip t illum inatio ns. • nd wo rks of art ;
Ju dith as a subje ct in music a nd d ance : a nd th e re su rg e n t int er-
est in Jud ith in the 19th and zo rh cen turi es. Papers th at
address the j udith narra tive in its larger con texts arc par ticu-
larly we lco me . To enh ance muhidi sciplin ary co llabo ratio n
and co m m uni.}'. a co m bin alion o f private \ Veb site and wi ki
le chno log y will ena ble scho lars to circul. te their wo rk-in-
prog ress before .nd ali er the co nfere nee. Researeh gr. nts are
available and confe renee travel expe nses will be paid fo r
se lect ed partid p. nt s.
Th e ro nfere nce is p. r t of TIleJu .lith Projw: Expall,ling r!le
BO'H..lanrs of DiscipJillanty tl" cug!' Collaborolt;''C Scholarly Prol C-
lice. Org .nized around the biblic. 1(o r . poc ryph. l) lexl and fig-
ure of Judith. lhe Jud ith Proj ect will o lTer scholars the oppor -
tu nity to pursue their own research agcnda s on j udith. as part
of a year -long technolog y-en abled , m uhidisciplinary co llabo -
rative effo rt. It will ;1150 leave , as an onli ne legacy, a sea rch able
co rpus of d igital im ages (via the no n-profit ARTsto r lib rary)
and bihlio g raph ic references, a glob al invento ry of ar t and lit-
eratur e related to th e Book of Jud ith and its ieo nog raphy
across the ages. T he output of th e j udit h Project will be gea red
to the int erests of scholarly and general audie nces alike.
T he Ju dith Proj ect team is m o tivated by the idea tha t
librari es- physieal and digital- are crucia l institu tional sites for
the o rganizatio n and prod uction of kno wledge. The j udith Pro-
ject 's goal is to embrace techn o log ical innovation and provi de
scho lars with the hest po ssible tools for mulridisciplinary collabo -
ratio n. The]",lit" I'rojn:l: Expanding the BCIIII.lanes of Visoplillanty
tI,rcIlgl1 Cclltdroratil'CSdlOlarly Praerice is spo nsored by the fl rine
Family Cha ritable Tru st.
Up t o thir ty u nive rsity- o r o pe ra ting fou nd ation -adrnini s-
tcred g rants are available from $6,000 to $ J 1.000 for research
o n the judit h Ihe m e. Sub m issions sho uld include lhe scho lar's
CV and a proposal lim ited to 15 00 wo rds. Grant requ csl sub -
mission s mu st include th e adm inistcring instituti on's nilmc.
address. federal ta x ident ifieati on nu mber, no npro fit designa-
tion , the nam e of the depart ment / prog ram chair o r d irector,
a detailed pro for m a bud get requ est . and the e-mail address of
th e instilut ion's adm inistr at ive co nta ct. Gra nt requ ests re quire
the sign atu re of thc dep 'rlmcn t chair/program director. The
bu dge t can include up to 20 percent deparl ment alloca tion.
Direct all su bm issions 10 J udith2oo8@ rarewildtlower.o rg
S U BM ISSI ON AN D P UB LICAT ION TIMELlNE
Novem ber 30, 2007 Proposal submission dead line.
Dece mber 3' , 2007 Papers selected (Distingu ished Academic
Panel in format io n). Applicants no tifie d b)' e-mail,
Dece mbe r 31, 2007 Ro llour of "T he Swonl of j udith" Web site
an d Pbwiki. "The Sword of j ud uh" conference will use techno lo -
g)' to ena ble muhi disd plmary co llaboration and co tu munit y with
th e philosophy th at creat ive scholarsh ip is a social p rocess. With a
co mbina tion of a private \Veb site and wiki tech nolog y scho lars
will be able to circulate th eir wor k in prog ress and utilize an elec-
tronic forum (0 co nverse before and after th e confe rence,
January ' 5, 2003 Grants remitted for university- and foundation -
ad ministered g ri.lllts.
March ZI , zoo3 Co mp leted papers must be ready to be posted
on the co nference website
April 17- 18 , z008 "T he Sword of j udhh" conference fo r invited
part icipants at Th e New York Public Library. All tra v'cl expenses
an d acco m mo dat ions will be paid fo r participant s.
Augu st 3' , z008 All fin,,1ent ries submin ed by e·m.i1 for publim ·
lion , O n rerei p l of Ihe publ j~ha. b l e final pa pel'". rhe remaining 30
pereent of Ihe I'e se. r..-h {production stipend remill ed. Work sub-
mi ll ed aft er AUguSl 31 w ill no r be eligible for lhe filM} pJyme nl or
pub licat io n.
Fall zoo3fWinter zOO9 Publicalion of "The Sword of Jud ith" by
Jaw n McCoy Inc.l Carp tid LLC Publications.
- n u; Swn ni of JuJ ith" 2.001iCon fcn:m'c J.rn.I i)uhlicatio n
'I' -.ne Brine F,m ily Ch,rirable Trust
Phnt o : c ric Kam p / lnJt!x Sto ck lrnilgc ry /J up itc rim agcs
I!-mail J u\li (h2. n o ~ @ra n:wilJ il nwc r. (] rg

Chitralekha Basu edits the j ourn al Take
One, publi shed by the Satyaj it Ray Film and
Television Institut e in Kolk ata.
Jonathan Beckman is a freelance literary
journalist.
Matthew Cobb is Senior Lectur er in Ani mal
Beh aviou r at the Univers ity of Ma nches ter.
His book The Egg and Sperm Race: The
seventeenth-century scientists who unrav-
elled the secrets of sex, life and gro wth was
published in paperback earlier this yea r. His
translation of The M isun derstood Gene by
Michel Morange appea red in 2001.
Cla ir e C r owt her's first co llec tion of poem s,
Stretch of Closures, was publi shed this yea r
and has been shortlisted for the Jerwood /
Ald ebur gh First Co llec tion prize.
Anthony C um m ins is writing a doct oral
thesis at the University of Oxford on Emile
Zo la in late nineteenth- century England.
Sarah Curtis is the author of Children Who
Break the Law, 1999, and the editor of
the three volumes of Woodrow Wya tt' s
Journals , 1998- 2000 .
Oliver Dennis is a violinist and violin
teach er living in Melb ourn e.
Thomas Dixon is a lectu rer in Histor y at
Queen Mar y, University of Lond on . His
Science and Religion: A very short introduc-
tion will be publi shed next year, and his
From Passions to Emotions: The creation of
a secular psycho logica l categor y appea red in
2003.
Margaret Drabble' s rece nt novels includ e
The Peppered Moth, 2001, The Red Quee n,
2004, and The Sea Lady, publi shed last yea r.
She has edited several editions of the Oxfo rd
Compa nion to English Literature.
Andrew Feldherr is Associate Professor of
35
Classic s at Princ eton University and the Underwa ter , was publi shed in 2005 , and her D. J . Taylor' s recent books includ e On the
author of Spe ctacl e and Soc iety in Livy 's first, Things To Do Indoors, appeared in Corinth ian Spiri t: The decli ne of ama teurism
" History " , 1998. He is writing a book about 2003. in sport and Kept: A Victorian mystery , both
Ov id' s Metamorphoses. published last year , and a Life of George
Jon Latimer is the author of Burma: The Orwell, 2003. His new book , Bright You ng
James F ergusson was foundin g obituaries forgo tten war , 2004, Alam ein, 2002, and Peop le: The rise and fa ll of a generation,
editor of the Independ ent , 1986-2007. Deception in War, 200 1. He is wor king on an l Yl li-llJ40 , was publi shed last month.
acco unt of the war of 1812. He lectures on
John Fletchers translation of Les wa r and society at the Swa nsea University. Adam Tooze ' s boo ks include Statistics and
Georgiq ues by Claude Simon, The Geor gics, the Germa n State, 1900-1 945: The maki ng oj
appeared in 1989, and his Ab out Beckett: The Beth Lynch lectures in English at New nham modem eco nomic know led ge, 200 1, and The
play wr ight and the work appeared in 2003. Co llege, Ca mbridge . She is researchin g a Wages ofDestruction: The making and break-
He is Honorary Senior Research Fellow at book on John Bunyan and material culture ing of the Na zi economy, the winner of
the University of Kent. since 1800 , and is the author of John Bunyan the Wolfson Prize 2006, publi shed last yea r.
and the Language of Conv iction , 2004. He is University Senior Lectur er in Modern
Mary Furness is a form er teacher of Philo so- Euro pean Economic Histor y at the Univer-
phy and currently a full-time art student. Keith Mill er is a freelan ce writer livin g in sity of Ca mbridge .
London. His book about St Peter ' s Basilic a
Jane Glover is a condu ctor, and the author of was published ea rlier this year. Matthew Tree, who has lived in Barcelona
Morart 's Women : His fam ily. his friends, his for the past twent y-one yea rs, is the author of
music, 2005. She has been Mu sic Director of John Mole' s new co llection of poems, The two novels, a volume of short stor ies and five
G lyndebourne Touring Opera and Artistic Other Day , was published last month . His non-fiction book s, all written in Catalan,
Direct or of the Lond on Mo zart Player s. Counting the Chimes: New and selected including La pu ta [eina , published last year ,
poems, 1975- 2003 appea red in 2004. He is and La vida despres de Deu , publi shed this
Nathan M . Greenfield ' s new book, Baptism clarin etti st with the jazz quartet Blue year.
of Fire: The Second Battl e of Yp res and the Coc katoo.
forgin g of Canada , Ap ril 1915, has ju st been Angus Trumble is curator of paintin gs and
publi shed . He is the author of The Battl e of David Nokes is Professor of English at sculpture at the Yale Ce nter for Briti sh Art in
the St Lawrence: The Seco nd World War in King ' s College London. His first novel, The New Haven, Co nnectic ut. He is the author of
Canada , 2004. Nightinga le Papers, appeared in 2005, and A Brief History of the Sm ile, 2004 .
his Life of Jane Au sten in 1997. He is work -
Andrew Hadfield is Professor of Eng lish at ing on a biograph y of Samuel John son . Hugo Williams ' s latest co llec tion of poem s,
the University of Sussex . His books include Dear Room , was publi shed last year. His
Shake speare and Renaissance Poli tical Celine Surprenant is Senior Lecturer in Co llected Poems appeared in 2002.
Culture, 2003, and, as co-editor, The Oxf ord Fre nch at the University of Sussex . She is the
History of the Irish Book, Volum e Three: The author of Freud's Mass Psychology: Ques - A. N. Wil son ' s recent books includ e a nove l,
Irish Book in English, 1550-1 800, publi shed tions of scale, 2003, and has translated The My Nam e Is Legion, and London: A short his-
last year. Specu lative Remark by Jean-Luc Nancy , tory, both publi shed in 2004. His most recent
2001. novel, Winni and Woolf, was shortlisted for
Mick Imlah is Poetry editor of the TLS. the Man Book er Prize this year.
Kathryn Sutherland is Professor of Textual
John E. Jos eph is Professor of Appli ed Criticism at the University of Oxford and a Philip Winter ha s wor ked in Africa for
Linguistics in the University of Edinburg h. Fellow of St Ann es Co llege . Her edition of more than twent y years, in aid, business and
His recent books includ e Language and Ident- Jam es Edwa rd Austen-Leig h ' s M emoir of famin e relief. He is a Fellow of the Rift
ity: Nation al, ethnic, religious, 2004, and Jun e A usten and Other Family Recoll ections Valley Institute.
Language and Politics , publi shed last year. was publi shed in 2002 , and her Jun e Au sten 's
Textual Lives: From A eschyl us to Bollywood Muriel Zagha is writing a book about the cul-
Sheena Joughin' s second novel, Swim ming was publi shed in paperback earlier this yea r. tural origin s of the "Eternal Frenchwoman" .
TLS CROSSW ORD 718 F I
K
E L
A
D I
D
N G
I
T
H
A L B
R
0 T
H
ACROSS 28 French stone extreme right-winger 0 E L U G E 0 V E R T U R E
1 Tolerance a fan contrives for 28' s crea- sooner than Thiba ult' s work (6, 7) B R A V G T C
P A L E S T R A L 0 L I T A
tor (7, 6)
N A E N 0 S S
9 Like Shelley' s deaf and vipero us char- DOWN D A N T E E N T R E C H A T
acter , capable of administeri ng a draught 1 "Hardship' s Ale" or mixed Ludlow E E A I Y 0 L
s.
of woe (9 ) beer for him? (1,10, 3) Q u A S I M 0 o 0 s u p P E
10 Support for fine art (5 ) 2 Dream production prepared to defend U D P I B R R.
11 Hardy status of Gittings (5) itself (5) I S A I A H P L A T T N E R
N M 0 A R S
12 Ange r, say, of Ame rican novelist (4) 3 Read ing inspired him to write a ballad
c 0 N C E R T 0 T A H I T I
13 Assoc iated with averages, perhaps, in (5, 5)
E A A L 0 I E.
Hu xley'x enquiry (4) 4 The Terminator by Joseph KeIl (7) Y A N E K L E
K E .O A A P P
15 "What the devil does the plot - , ex- 5 Tusitala perhaps makes tale err (7)
cept to bring in fine things?" (Buckingham, 6 Festival doctor in The Suicide Club (4 ) SOL UTIO~ TO CROSS WO RD 714
The Rehea rsal) (7 ) 7 Indispensable - like Wilson' s Shake- The winner of Cro sswo rd 7/1 is
17 Carpentier ' s was mag ic (7) speare? (9) John Trehe wey, A beryst wyth.
18 How stood the hills of Watts? (2, 5) 8 Brittle creatures of Wi lliams (5, 9)
20 Pet Mr Ben nett ex presse d in Romance 14 So und con tribution by Goo ssens to
language (7) Maugham piece (4, 2, 4) T he se nder of the first correc t
21 The Hon . Emily 's house was semi- 16 Poets' ego mod ified in militaristic so lutio n opened o n Decem ber 7
detached - her garden original (4) progress (5, 4) w ill recei ve a cas h prize of £ 40 .
22 W ith arms akimbo - partl y concealing 19 Scale by which one gets a degree in En trie s sho uld be ad dress ed to
M unro (4 ) French? (7) TLS Cro ssword 7 18,
23 Lo ud and extended, its use result s in a 20 Wa llace' s circle (7) T ime s Hou se , I Pe nn ing to n Stree t,
stereotype (5) 24 Ecce ntric part of Rex Stout reprint (5) Lon don E9 8 IBS .
26 Disposition Haml et thought meet to put 25 Verdant area describ ed by J. I. M.
on (5) Stewa rt (4)
27 " If I wiste what she we re I For whom
that thee al this - ayle th" (Chaucer ,
Troilus and Criseyde ) (9 )
TLS NOV EMB ER 16 200 7
36

P erambulatory Christmas Book s, Part

V Ill. Our perambulation s return us to
C haring Cross Road , to Henr y Pordes Book s,
which ca lls itself "an old-fashioned shop
with old-fas hioned serv ice " . We have found
no reason to disagree. Wh en yo u descend to
the basement to rum mage amo ng the paper-
back s at Pord es, yo u are not oblige d to snea k
past a sign sayi ng, "No bags allowed".
For this series, we see k ove rloo ked wor ks
by notable writers, pur chased for £5 or under.
This wee k's treasur e inv olves a slight devia-
Paris edition
tion. Some yea rs ago , Pordes had a range of
Olymp ia Press titles for sa le, including wor ks was surpr ised one day not long ag o to be might strugg le towards the next line. The
by Jean Genet, Hen ry Mill er and the Ma rq uis show n our co py of the 1958 edition. He hea rt sinks because of sentences like this:
de Sade (translated by Austry n Wa inho use) . ex plained that the who le lot had been England is enchanted - its landscape, history
The odd ity among them was an Olympi a imp ound ed by Custo ms and had never and traditions, and especia lly its people: their
edition of J. P. Donl eavy' s novel The Ginger reac hed British book shops. This one presuma - ga llantry , genero sity, modesty and eccentricity
Man - not the rare 1955 first but a 1958 print- bly ca me from a box that had surface d in - an encha ntmen t given unique expression
ing, issued (unusually) in hardback in Paris, Giro dias 's old Paris store roo m. The few
through our poetry.
specifica lly for the Brit ish market. Th at is the ope ning to the intro duction to Eng-
po unds we paid Por des seemed we ll worth-
The history of Donl eavy' s novel is fiend- while, an d Mr Donl eavy' s kind inscri ption in
land 's Best Lo ved Poems by George Co ur-
ishly co mplica ted, so we will say on ly that a tau Id, "pro ud patri ot and bestselli ng autho r"
red ink has en hanced its sen timenta l value.
ce nsore d Lond on editio n had appeared in (Ebury, £ 10). If we describ e it as tosh, we ' ll
hy does the heart sink whe n the eyes be acc used of ca lling "patriot" a dirty wor d.
1957 , aga inst the wishes of Olymp ia's propri-
etor, M auri ce Girodias . As author and pub- W
fall on the title England 's Best Loved So let' s say it is true, but no truer than thi s:
Poems? It ca nnot be because the English don't " England is cor ru pted - its land scape, history
lisher prepared for legal co mbat, G irodias
Cam bridge in the 1950 s. (Don ' t yo u wa nt to
kill them alrea dy? Me too.) Ac tually, though,
Fame and Fortune came off . ..." . That is
tried to take adva ntage by issuin g the "Paris"
have best-lo ved poems - or at least best-loved and tradit ion s, and espec ia lly its peo ple: the ir dr awn from last wee k's Observe r, a veritable
lines. "My head is bloody, but unbowed", " Ts susp icion of stra nge rs, stinginess, yobbish-
text at the same time as the abridge d one. nest of jokey parenth eses. If yo u see one,
This was the mint- condition, dust-jac keted
there anybody there?' said the Traveller", ness - a corruption given uniqu e exp ressio n stam p it: "We avo id". Sta mp "veritable"
" Season of mi sts a nd mell ow fruitfuln ess" , throu gh ce lehrity-worship and realit y TV".
hardb ack that we carried away from Por des . w h ile yo u ' re at it.
Do nleavy is known to dis like the co nnec-
and of co urse "If yo u can keep yo ur hea d Mr Co urta uld is particul arly fon d of verses
when all abou t you / Are losing theirs", are that affi rm his feeling that "we are a land of
tion of his book w ith the Ol ympia Press of
decla imed frequ entl y, even if the decl aimer hope and glory", and that the ships of " Britan-
which, stra nge ly, he is no w the ow ner. So he
nia triu mph ant" bore the "watchword - ' be
T his pa inting of a Yell ow- Breasted Chat
by the eig htee nth-ce ntury Eng lis h artist
Mark Ca tesby is taken from The Bedside Book
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -----, free "'. More than one poem is introduc ed of Birds, by Graeme G ibso n (B loo msbury ,
with the informa tion, "much admired by Win- £ 12.99) , a lavishl y illu strated "avian misce l-
ston Churc hill" . Our charac ter istic ga llantry lany" , of pictures, poe ms and com me ntary .
imp ell ed us to read on , encountering more of The Ye llow -Breas ted Chat is see n mainl y in
Eng land's best-l oved lines as we wen t, Nor th America, where Ca tes by spe nt ma ny
inclu ding " Do not go gen tle into that goo d yea rs. Mr G ibson attac hes a poem by the Por-
nigh t" (Tho mas) , " I wa lked , w ith other souls tuguese wr iter A lberto Cae iro (a ka Pessoa):
in pa in" (Wilde) , and the mi sprint ed " Here is Reme mbering betray s Nature,
the sailor hom e from sea" (RLS) . Wel sh, Becau se yesterday ' s Nature is not Nature.
Irish and Scots patriots will be kissi ng their Fly, bird, flyaway ; teach me to disappear.
St George's flags.

O ur tea m of le xi col ogi st s continues its

rev ision of the TLS Reviewer 's Hand-
O nly last week we we re say ing that the
M ail er Review was among th e few j ou r-
nals devoted to a living writer. Wh en issue
book . Reco mmendations for avo ida nce are No 2 appea rs nex t year, it will no longer fit
The Printed Face of the European relayed by appre ntices from the underground the ca tegory . Mail er was perhaps the first

I ·~
lab yri nth, to be duly stam ped . In recent ce lebri ty author , rising to promi nen ce at the
Avant Garde 1900 -1937 wee ks, we have dealt with "reference to sex same time as the expansion of mass media, of
beginnin g in 1963, in conjun cti on with which he was a clever mani pul ator. So me
9 November 2007 - 30 March 2008 Larkin , Phil ip" - en dorsed with a heavy peop le admired Ma iler ' s work while loathin g
.. FREE EXHIBITION
The British Library, 96 Euston Road, London NW
1 2DB imp ress of "We avoid". The sa me fate has
met "iconic" (tho ugh a q ualifica tion states :
the public person a; others disliked both ; few
wou ld dispute that he commands a prominent
e. Kin g's Cro ss St Paneras and Eusto n " perm itted in co nnec tio n w ith icons" ), " ironi- place in mo de rn literature.
www.bl .uk/breakingtherules ca lly" ("except in reference to meta ls"), One regre t was the failur e of the No bel
"carbon footp rint", "time poor" and anything committee to award him a prize. In The Pris-
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involvin g "interrogate" (exce pt of criminal oner of Sex (1971) , Ma iler se lf-mock ing ly
suspec ts), "foregro und" (exce pt in connec- told ho w, on the day the anno uncement from
tion with art). "Community" - black / Mu slim Stockho lm was due, his secretary was aware
/ literary - is pro hibited, tout court (as are of his eve ry move. It see med like another bit
EVENTS mos t foreign phrases). of clowning on the part of the fictional inven-
An other habit increasing in the era of per- tion "Mailer", but the Nobe l Ac adem icia n
sona l journali sm is the parenthetica l add ress Knut Ahn lund sa id some yea rs ago : " I arg ued
Monday3 December Tuesday 4 December 2007
1B.30- 20.00 18 .15 - 20.00 to the reade r: "Fame and Fortune picks so ma ny times for him". No t enoug h.
WHAT HAPPENED TO THE HARLEQUIN YEARS up the story of seve ral friends who met at J .C .
THE AVANT GARDE? Roger Nichols discusses the struggle between
By the late 1930's war, political upheaval trad it ional French virtues and Avant Garde
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