London Review of Books - 09 05 2019

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London Review
OF BOOKS
VOLUME 41 NUMBER 9
Mark Fisher’s Ghosts ‘Machines Like Me’

JENNY TURNER IAN PATTERSON
Letters At the National Gallery: Louis-Léopold Boilly

RICHARD TAWS
Actually Existing Zionism
ADAM SHATZ The Battle for Poland’s History
CHRISTIAN DAVIES
The Gulf Bargain
TOM STEVENSON Just Being British
BEE WILSON
Ian Watt
STEFAN COLLINI HMP Holloway
MARY HANNITY
Short Cuts: High on Our Own Supply
TOM CREWE At the Movies: ‘The Sisters Brothers’
MICHAEL WOOD
Samuel Johnson’s Shoes
FREYA JOHNSTON Public Conveniences
OWEN HATHERLEY
Two Poems
JAMIE MCKENDRICK Diary: ‘Make Nigeria Great Again’
ADEWALE MAJA-PEARCE
Dag Solstad
ADAM MARS-JONES Contributors
The Right to Protest

ROSA CURLING
Not No Longer but Not Yet

Jenny Turner
k-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher edited by Darren Ambrose. Repeater, 817 pp, £25.00,
November 2018
M
ARK FISHER killed himself on 13 (55,000 and still rising by this March). It was
January 2017, at the house in Felixstowe followed in 2014 by Ghosts of My Life, then The Weird
he shared with his wife and young son. and the Eerie (2016). The publishers, Zero Books
His mental health had been deteriorating, and, from 2014, Repeater, were run by Fisher’s
according to the Ipswich Star’s report of the inquest, friend the novelist Tariq Goddard, with help from
since the previous May. His wife, Zoe, told the Fisher himself. The books are short and slim, and
inquest that they had been seeking help for him, much of their content is crafted from pieces tried
but the local NHS trust hadn’t been able to offer out on Fisher’s blog, k-punk, on which he wrote,
anything beyond a telephone chat with a GP. ‘The sometimes daily, from 2003.
hospital services are always attentive and on the ‘Contemporary culture has eliminated both the
ball, but once you leave hospital, the GP becomes concept of the public and the figure of the
your access to any help,’ she explained. ‘We fell intellectual,’ Zero’s manifesto stated, but ‘another
foul of a lot of reforms that have taken place.’ kind of discourse – intellectual without being
Fisher was 48 when he died, ‘an influential writer, academic, popular without being populist – is not
music blogger and university lecturer’, the Ipswich only possible: it is already flourishing.’ Zero also
Star reported, who taught in the Visual Cultures published Militant Modernism by Owen Hatherley,
department at Goldsmiths in South-East London. One-Dimensional Woman by Nina Power and The
He grew up in Leicestershire and had lived in Meaning of David Cameron by Richard Seymour, all of
various places but it was Suffolk, where he’d spent which grew from their authors’ blogposts. Such
childhood holidays, that he really loved. works amounted to ‘a kernel of a whole new left
He had wanted to raise his son there, to work public’, according to another of Fisher’s friends,
from home, be ‘supported by the landscape’ and go Jeremy Gilbert, professor of cultural studies at the
on long walks: he didn’t write much about walks or University of East London. ‘As much as anything
landscapes, but he did once mention how much he adverts for the very idea of critical thought.’
distrusted the way W.G. Sebald, in his much The first Mark Fisher Memorial Lecture, at
admired Rings of Saturn (1995), ‘morosely trudged Goldsmiths in January 2018, was given by the artist
through the Suffolk spaces without really looking at and writer Kodwo Eshun, who celebrated Fisher’s
them’. This was ‘mittelbrow miserablism’, Fisher gift for ‘the crafting of what we imprecisely call
continued, ‘an anachronistic, antiqued model of movements’. Eshun picked out symposiums on
“good literature”’; he quoted the naturalist Richard accelerationism in 2011, H.P. Lovecraft in 2012,
Mabey, who, like Fisher, had known and loved that The Shining in 2015, each a major Fisher interest
coast for years. To read Sebald, according to that comes up in one or another of his books.
Mabey, was to watch the belittlement of ‘a very Eshun also talked about Fisher’s ideas for future
close friend’. projects: Red Shift, a publishing imprint, after the
Fisher’s first book, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alan Garner novel; an essay on John Akomfrah’s
Alternative? was published towards the end of 2009, film triptych The Unfinished Conversation, featuring
and by 2017 had sold more than 30,000 copies the memories of Stuart Hall; a book of essays about
Kanye West. These interests are all evident in ‘What new forms of expression may emerge in the
Fisher’s work too. years ahead, nobody can predict.’
W
The second memorial lecture was given in
January by the American political theorist Jodi HEN Capitalist Realism came out ten
Dean, who is keen to rescue the word ‘communist’ years ago, the UK economy was having
from its negative – and, she insists, historically a Wile E. Coyote moment: it was a year
inaccurate – associations and make it stand for a after the crash and nearly two since Northern Rock;
reworked conception of popular sovereignty. You Gordon Brown had been pushed to open the
can see her influence in the draft Fisher left for Chilcot Inquiry, established to investigate the
what was to have been his fourth book, ‘Acid behaviour of his predecessor in the run-up to the
Communism’, now the final section of k-punk: The Iraq War; and the best-known Mark Fisher was
Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher. ‘The Tony Blair’s former arts minister, the Labour MP
concept of acid communism is a provocation and a for Stoke-on-Trent Central – it had recently been
promise … a joke of sorts, but one with very serious revealed in the local paper that he’d claimed
purpose,’ Fisher wrote. His idea was to look again parliamentary expenses for items including a face-
at the early years of the neoliberal restoration in the painting set, a packet of Fun Chunky Crayons and
1970s, seeing in them a deliberate attempt to quell two bottles of Toilet Duck.
the so-called ‘democratic surge’ of the postwar era, ‘It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than
a period in which, Fisher thought, more and more the end of capitalism’ was the title of Fisher’s first
people were catching glimpses of what Marcuse chapter. Capitalism, he continued, ‘seamlessly
called ‘the spectre of a world which could be free’. occupies the horizons of the thinkable’, and it’s
It was all beginning to happen, the great utopian true, in 2009 it absolutely did. This wasn’t, Fisher
‘convergence’ of socialism and feminism and anti- elaborated on his blog, because it was a particularly
racism, ‘the fusion of new social movements with a good system, but because so much work had gone
communist project, an unprecedented into ‘persuading people that it is the only viable
aestheticisation of everyday life’: ‘We must regain system’. ‘There is no getting round capital … all we
the optimism of that 1970s moment,’ he wrote, can do is perhaps bolt on a couple of tethers as
‘just as we must carefully analyse all the gestures towards social justice.’ Or, in the more
machineries that capital deployed to convert aphoristic language of the book: ‘Capitalism is
confidence into dejection.’ what is left when beliefs have collapsed.’
Much of this material was developed through The text begins with a discussion of Children of
conversations with Gilbert, who has written a fair Men, Alfonso Cuarón’s film from 2006, adapted
bit himself about what he calls ‘Acid Corbynism’. from a P.D. James novel, set in a near-future Britain
‘Why Corbynism rather than communism?’ Gilbert of caged refugees and cheap euthanasia, a world in
asks. ‘It’s an invitation to think about what a which no children have been born for a generation.
radically democratic politics might mean in the As Fisher says, this dystopia extrapolates only a
21st century … the question is how countercultural little: I watched the film myself the other day to
utopianism might come to inform an actual check I’d remembered it right, and it felt like it was
concrete programme for government.’ ‘Pro-Corbyn me, on my sofa, who was the silly wisp of fiction,
memes and football chants are a start,’ Gilbert while the brutality and bombs and hooded
wrote in Red Pepper in September 2017. (It looks like prisoners just go on and on. ‘The catastrophe,’ as
I’m mocking him, but I’m not. I too was thrilled by Fisher puts it, ‘is neither waiting down the road,
the surprise result of the 2017 election and nor has it already happened. Rather, it is being
remember wishing Fisher had been alive to see it.) lived through. There is no punctual moment of
disaster; the world doesn’t end with a bang, it sadness’ in Drake’s Take Care, Kanye West’s 808s &
winks out, unravels … The future harbours only Heartbreak, a sadness concerning ‘hedonism itself’:
reiteration and repermutation.’ ‘No longer motivated by hip hop’s drive to
Such observations, as Fisher acknowledges, conspicuously consume – they long ago acquired
have much in common with those of Fredric anything they could have wanted – Drake and West
Jameson in Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late instead dissolutely cycle through easily available
Capitalism (1991); the great line about the end of the pleasures, feeling a combination of frustration,
world v. the end of capitalism also comes from anger and self-disgust, aware that something is
Jameson (‘It seems to be easier for us today to missing but unsure exactly what it is.’
imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the The utter desolation of this cycling was seen
earth and of nature than the breakdown of late again recently, when West – the man who
capitalism; perhaps that is due to some weakness righteously derailed a charity telethon after
in our imaginations’). But Fisher was writing nearly Hurricane Katrina with his outburst about how
twenty years after Jameson, and the ‘processes’ ‘George Bush doesn’t care about black people’ –
Jameson described hadn’t spent those years doing visited the White House to see his good friend
nothing. Some of them, Fisher argued, ‘have now Donald Trump. ‘You know, my dad and mom
become so aggravated and chronic that they have separated, so I didn’t have a lot of male energy in
gone through a change in kind’. my home. And also, I’m married to a family that –
The change is basically generational. Jameson, you know, not a lot of male energy going on.’
who was born in 1934, had lived through the period Wearing his MAGA hat, though, he feels ‘like
of actually existing socialism, the defeat of the Superman. You made a Superman … That’s my
miners, the fall of the Berlin Wall; as a young man, favourite superhero. And you made a Superman
he would have known for himself the shock and cape.’
C
excitement of the new and the modern, and knew
whereof he spoke when comparing it to the dreary APITALIST realism, the theoretical
pastiche of the ‘nostalgia mode’, as he called it, of concept, was, as Gilbert noted, not new,
the 1980s and 1990s. But ‘for most people under but renovated and repurposed: it’s a fairly
twenty in Europe and North America,’ Fisher wrote, ‘straight-up synonym for bourgeois ideology as
‘the lack of alternatives to capitalism is no longer theorised by … Althusser and Gramsci’. Capitalist
even an issue.’ This political stasis, he believed, Realism, the book, is by contrast full of phrases so
had dire consequences for art and culture: ‘How vivid and apt and funny they dance across the page
long can a culture persist without the new? What like cartoon imps: Business Ontology, which is the
happens if the young are no longer capable of idea that ‘it is simply obvious that everything in
producing surprises?’ He illustrates the ‘deadlock’, society, including healthcare and education, should
exquisitely, with the example of Kurt Cobain: ‘In be run as a business’; Market Stalinism, the
his dreadful lassitude and objectless rage, Cobain terrifying proliferation of performative paperwork
… knew that he was just another piece of spectacle, across the public services, which really started
that nothing runs better on MTV than a protest spreading in the New Labour years. Kafka appears,
against MTV.’ In this scheme of things, Cobain’s like a special guest on The Simpsons; so do Badiou,
suicide in 1994 marked the end of ‘rock’s utopian Wall-E, Ursula Le Guin; and there’s a Marxist
and promethean ambitions’ and its eclipse by the Supernanny, who’s very like the Supernanny of
harsher keeping-it-real philosophy of hip hop. early 21st-century reality TV, except that instead of
Twenty years after Cobain’s death, in Ghosts of working with individual families, she puts whole
My Life, Fisher could hear a new sort of ‘secret social structures on the naughty step.
There’s also a scary deep in Fisher, a darkness, generally, the teenagers Fisher taught seemed to be
a left-Lacanian Real which he accessed, ‘in a state of what I would call depressive hedonia
presumably, via Slavoj Žižek: the idea of the … [unable] to do anything else except pursue
‘traumatic void’, the ‘unrepresentable X’ beyond pleasure’, slumping, snoozing, snacking.
language that it is the job of ordinary reality to
Ask students to read for more than a couple of
suppress. One such Real, Fisher says, is capital
sentences and many … will protest that they
itself, ‘the unnameable Thing’ in the Deleuze-
can’t do it. The most frequent complaint
Guattari telling, ‘a monstrous, infinitely plastic
teachers hear is that it’s boring … To be bored
entity, capable of metabolising and absorbing
simply means to be removed from the
anything with which it comes into contact’.
communicative sensation-stimulus matrix of
Another is ‘environmental catastrophe … the
texting, YouTube and fast food; to be denied,
burning up of Earth’s resources’. His focus in this
for a moment, the constant flow of sugary
book, however, is something else he sees as having
gratification on demand. Some students want
been fried to powder in his lifetime: human sanity,
Nietzsche in the same way that they want a
especially among younger people, and especially
hamburger; they fail to gasp – and the logic of
among those whose distress is expressed not
the consumer system encourages this
psychotically, but via common conditions such as
misapprehension – that the indigestibility, the
anxiety and depression.
difficulty is Nietzsche.
‘Capitalist realism,’ he says, ‘treats mental
health as if it were a natural fact, like weather’: too The pressure on teachers becomes ‘intolerable’.
much of this neurotransmitter makes you It’s their job to cram word-based content into the
schizophrenic, too little of that one and you’ll get increasingly ‘post-lexic’ heads of their students; it’s
depressed. But, actually, the ‘mental health plague’ also their job to fill in when families are ‘buckling
in capitalist societies suggests that ‘instead of under the pressure of a capitalism that requires
being the only social system that works, capitalism both parents to work’. They’re surveilled and
is inherently dysfunctional, and the cost of it evaluated and inspected, and required constantly to
appearing to work is very high.’ The ‘privatisation self-evaluate as well: ‘Our line manager … told us
of stress’, he suspects, is what’s really behind the that the problem with our departmental logbooks
epidemic of adolescent unhappiness. ‘Affective was that they were not sufficiently self-critical. But
disorders are forms of captured discontent.’ don’t worry, he urged, any self-criticisms we make
For much of the 2000s, Fisher worked at an FE are purely symbolic and will never be acted upon.’
college in Kent, ‘in the vanguard’, as he says, of the On the face of it, Fisher writes a little later, this
market-driven reforms that have since rolled out in particular line-manager was a model of beaming
schools and universities. His students, he writes, mental health. But such cheerfulness can only be
knew perfectly well that their prospects were poor, maintained if one has a capacity, as he had,
and that there was nothing they could do about it: cynically to ‘comply with every directive from
they studied or didn’t bother studying, attended or bureaucratic authority’. His reality had become
didn’t bother attending, in a state that he calls ‘fungible’, an interchangeable commodity.
‘reflexive impotence’, a bored, depressed, Consciously or unconsciously, he had adapted it to
withdrawn suspension. And the impotence of fit in with the larger realities around him, more or
course becomes reflexive in that by acting less day by day.
powerless you make your powerlessness come true. Fisher also saw this quality in the ‘postmodern
Clinical depression, unsurprisingly, was ‘endemic’, messianism’ of Tony Blair, whom he identifies with
as were specific learning difficulties. More Nietzsche’s Last Man in History. Gordon Brown,
on the other hand, put himself through what Fisher reasons he gives for its breakdown, this ‘deflation
calls ‘a long, arduous and painful process of of expectations’. ‘The immediate temptation here
repudiation’ to shift himself from the old-style is to fit what I’m saying into a wearily familiar
Scottish socialism that suited him to the grinning narrative – a narrative of the old failing to come to
‘New Labour supremo’ he so wanted to become. terms with the new, saying it was better in their
The effort, Fisher thinks, broke him and his party: day,’ he acknowledges. But ‘what should haunt us
‘gutted and gutless, its insides replaced by is not the no longer of actually existing social
simulacra which once looked lustrous but now democracy, but the not yet of the futures that
possess all the allure of decade-old computer popular modernism trained us to expect.’
technology’. On k-punk he was even harsher: Fisher was a big fan of Andy Beckett’s histories
‘Brown radiates discomfort in the way that Blair of the 1970s and 1980s, which noted that British
transmitted ease … There is a fundamental households were at their most equal economically,
wrongness about Brown that raises a shudder … Even as measured by the Gini coefficient, in 1977. Just as
the phrase “the prime minister, Gordon Brown” importantly for Fisher’s purposes, Beckett also
sounds wrong.’ observed that the UK music papers hit their peak in
‘W
the early 1980s, when the NME sold between
HY I started the blog?’ Fisher wrote 200,000 and 270,000 copies every week, ‘almost as
on k-punk in 2005. ‘Because it many … as the Times’. Fisher said often that he
seemed like a space – the only space learned about ‘fine art, European cinema, avant-
– in which to maintain a kind of discourse that had garde literature’ from names dropped by artists and
started in the music press and the art schools, but journalists in ‘the inkies’ – ‘No sob stories, but for
which had all but died out.’ ‘Popular modernism’, someone of my background, it’s difficult to see
he called this discourse, or ‘pulp modernism’: the where else that interest would have come from.’ ‘It
modernism not of an international jet-set in New wasn’t only about music, and music wasn’t only
York, Berlin, Paris, but of the sort of people about music,’ Simon Reynolds, in his foreword to
anthemically denoted ‘common’ in the Pulp song the k-punk book, remembers Fisher saying about
(Uncommon, a Zero book by Owen Hatherley which the 1980s music press.
sees Pulp’s singer, Jarvis Cocker, as the last in a line A lot of it was about music, however, and on
of working and lower-middle-class English ‘art- music as on art and culture in general, Fisher’s
pop’ visionaries, was published in 2011). Popular standards were strict. ‘Music that acknowledged
modernism was keen on the new and strange, the and accelerated what was new’ in the world around
queer and alien, and both prefigured and prepared it was a force for good, but music (and art and
for the joyous future that seemed just around the literature, e.g. Sebald) that looked backwards in a
corner. The ‘slow cancellation’ of that future (the spirit of pastiche and/or nostalgia was bad. So
phrase comes from the Italian Marxist theorist Kraftwerk, dub, funk and punk, disco and post-
Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi), and the cultural forms it punk, techno and hip hop, were good, because they
engendered, are the subject of Fisher’s second embraced and furthered technological, cultural and
book. generic innovation. Exemplars of badness would be
Popular modernism, according to Fisher, had Amy Winehouse as produced by Mark Ronson, and
its heyday in the decades between the Second ‘I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor’ by the
World War and the 1980s, peaking around the time Arctic Monkeys, both of which used supremely up-
he was a teenager in the early 1980s and collapsing to-date technology to make music (and videos) that
as he grew towards middle age. Thatcher, Post- sounded (and looked) fake-old.
Fordism, capitalist realism basically, are the
It’s not that you’re not allowed to look his name among the so-called Neo-Reactionaries
backwards. Looking backwards is encouraged, so on the more pretentious wing of the alt-right.)
long as you do so with the proper historical And yet, strangely, the most haunting bits of
awareness, leaving the gaps and distances and Fisher’s second book aren’t the grand, aphoristic
losses as you found them: the crackle of old vinyl in pronouncements, but the descriptions of small,
the found-music collages of Burial, Leyland Kirby, delicate incursions on ordinary life made by
the stuff you get on the Ghost Box label; ‘the electronically transmitted music. In the title essay,
metallic excrescence’ of 1990s jungle, ‘when for example, he remembers crouching over a radio
samples were slowed down and the software had to in 1982, taping and then chain-listening to
fill the gaps’. ‘Ghosts’, the only hit single by Japan, a group from
Hauntological, Fisher called such artists. He Lewisham in South-East London. He describes the
got the word from ‘l’hantologie’, ‘a concept or ‘spidery, abstract electronics’, the ‘percussion …
puncept’ coined by Derrida in Spectres of Marx (1994) like metallic vertebrae being struck’, and the
to make a play between things that ‘can be said to chorus:
exist’ and things that can’t but pop up anyway. You
Just when I think I’m winning
can be haunted backwards, by things that no longer
When I’ve broken every door
exist but still have impact: revenants, repetition
The ghosts of my life blow wilder than before
compulsion, the ghosts of history. You can be
haunted forwards by things that don’t yet exist but Could it be, Fisher wonders, that among the
possess attractive power: communism, ‘the spectre ‘ghosts’ evoked by David Sylvian, the group’s
of a world which could be free’, the predicament of heavily powdered, unplaceably mannered singer,
Donald Sutherland in Don’t Look Now. were those of his working-class, suburban white-
In Derrida’s book, l’hantologie largely concerns boy roots: ‘Is “Ghosts” the moment when art-pop
two things: Marxism, the sense abroad in the 1990s confronts this fear – that class will out, that one’s
of its being dead and buried; and ‘the fantastic, background can never be transcended?’ ‘Cantonese
ghostly, synthetic, prosthetic, virtual happenings in Boy’, Japan unorientalistically called their follow-
… the domain of the techno-media’, the way the up single, and shortly afterwards fell apart.
speed of then new information technologies was And yet, the ghosts blow wilder. Lyrics from
messing with human perceptions of time and ‘Ghosts’ are mumbled by Mark Stewart at the end
space. Fisher spent much of the 1990s attached to of ‘Aftermath’ (1995), the first single from the
the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit at Warwick shamanic Tricky. And they are there, much
University, receiving a PhD in 1999 for a thesis stretched and deepened, on ‘Ghosts of My Life’
entitled ‘Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism (1993) by Rufige Kru, an early, extremely dark,
and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction’, whence the incarnation of the artist later known as Goldie, ‘as
interests in darkside jungle music, the writings of if a disavowed part of myself – a ghost from another
Lovecraft, and other exemplars of ‘the weird and part of my life – was being recovered, although in a
the eerie’, as delineated in his third book. (Fisher permanently altered form’.
seems to have kept a personal loyalty to Nick Land, And Fisher is just as sensitive a listener to what
the CCRU’s chief philosopher, and to others who musicians have to say. Tricky, for example, on the
were at Warwick at that time – both reason he used women’s voices in his music: ‘I’ve
accelerationism and speculative realism build on seen my auntie and my grandmother have fist-
aspects of Land’s thought. But he didn’t follow fights, I’ve seen my grandmother grab my auntie’s
Land into the dreadful work on ‘The Dark arm and close it in the door, and break her arm
Enlightenment’ and ‘Hyper-Racism’ that has made fighting over meat.’ Burial, on the ghosts of his life:
he saw them, he told Fisher, ‘on the Underground ‘Gnostic’ universe, but isn’t it more obviously a
with an empty Costcutters plastic bag, nowhere to universe of the depressed?
go, they are smaller, about 70 per cent smaller than ‘My depression was always tied up with the
a normal person, smaller than they were in life.’ He conviction that I was literally good for nothing,’
also told Fisher of the dream he had as a child that Fisher wrote in 2014.
his mum would accidentally ‘put me out in the bins
In my twenties I drifted between postgraduate
… in a black plastic bag outside a building and
study, periods of unemployment and temporary
hearing the rain against it but feeling all right’.
jobs. In each of these roles, I felt that I didn’t
I’ve always made a point of not being impressed
really belong – in postgraduate study, because I
by Joy Division or New Order – ‘Here are the young
was a dilettante … in unemployment, because I
men,’ oh will you just fuck off – but Fisher quotes
wasn’t really unemployed, like those who were
Bernard Sumner on the job he got straight out of
honestly seeking work, but a shirker; and in
school at the end of the 1970s, ‘sticking down
temporary jobs, because I felt I was …
envelopes, sending rates out’ at Salford town hall.
overeducated and useless, taking the job of
‘I was chained in this horrible office, every day,
someone who needed and deserved it more
every week, for a year, with maybe three weeks’
than I did. Even when I was on a psychiatric
holiday a year. The horror enveloped me.’ And then
ward, I felt I was not really depressed – I was
there was the Polaroid that surfaced on social
only simulating the condition in order to avoid
media last December, of Ian Curtis at the
work, or, in the infernally paradoxical logic of
Macclesfield Unemployment Benefits Office’s
depression, I was simulating it in order to
Christmas drinks in 1978, a year and a half before
conceal the fact that I was not capable of
he killed himself in May 1980. ‘The solitary urinal
working, and that there was no place at all for
of male subjectivity’ is a wonderful expression Nina
me in society.
Power remembers Fisher using: and that’s it, that’s
exactly the cold, flat, teemingly noisome Where, he wondered, did these vicious beliefs
hollowness the producer Martin Hannett brought come from? Neurotransmitters, maybe, family
to the Joy Division sound. ‘If the truth of Joy dynamics, but also, surely, ‘the most likely cause of
Division is that they were lads, then Joy Division such feelings of inferiority: social power’. In his
must also be the truth of Laddism,’ as Fisher put it. case, being white and male and straight and cis and
‘Suicide remains one of the most common sources so on, the main source of this ‘sense of ontological
of death for young males.’ inferiority’ would have been class. Others might
Hauntology in English fiction was exemplified, experience it as more to do with race or sex or
Fisher thought, by David Peace in his Red Riding sexuality or gender, but what Fisher calls ‘the
Quartet: the ‘persistences, repetitions, primordial sense of worthlessness’, the dreadful
prefigurations’ of violence, cruelty, corruption, the hole in the place of self-belief, would find a similar
way the narrative moves not to resolution but ‘total expression: ‘One is not the kind of person who can
murk’. Peace’s Yorkshire, Fisher thought, was ‘a fulfil roles which are earmarked for the dominant
Gnostic terrain’ made of ‘a corrupt matter group.’
characterised by heavy weight and impenetrable A reader directed him to the writings of the
opacity’. Everything is dark and damp, difficult and radical anti-psychotherapist David Smail (1938-
exhausting; glimmers of threads turn out to be 2014), who believed that the injuries of class are
skeins of madness; you yourself are botched, ‘indelible’ and always ready to take over. ‘Someone
misbegotten, hopelessly indebted. This may be a who moves out of the social sphere they are
“supposed” to occupy is always in danger of being
overcome by feelings of vertigo, panic and horror,’ Supernanny outfit to scold what he called ‘the
Fisher wrote, and, quoting Smail: ‘You are a moralising left’, ‘the petite bourgeoisie which
nothing, and “nothing” is quite literally what you dominates the academy and culture industry’, for
feel you are about to become.’ Fisher thought ‘we what he saw as its constant, deliberate deflection of
must understand the fatalistic submission of the all mention of social class. ‘If it does come up,’ he
UK’s population to austerity’ in this context, ‘as the wrote, ‘they make one think it is a terrible
consequence of a deliberately cultivated impertinence, a breach of etiquette, to raise it.’ One
depression.’ way the ‘petite bourgeoisie’ does this, he says, is by
To me, Smail’s words suggest a second using ‘an ultimately liberal understanding of race
historical direction too. Consider all those brilliant and gender to obfuscate class’.
youngsters who loved school, studied hard and ‘The Vampire Castle,’ he wrote, ‘feeds on the
went off in the highest spirits to college or energies and anxieties and vulnerabilities of young
university, thinking there was a world out there that students … by converting the suffering of different
would welcome them, encourage and support them groups … into academic capital.’ ‘While in theory it
in their learning, give them jobs as scholars and claims to be in favour of structural critique, in
teachers. That world started snapping shut in the practice it never focuses on anything except
1980s and has gone on getting smaller and smaller, individual behaviour,’ which it then ‘essentialises’:
meaner and meaner, closer and closer to shutting ‘X has made a remark/has behaved in a particular
down completely. Fisher seems to be describing a way – these remarks/this behaviour might be
feeling of superfluousness; these young people, construed as transphobic/sexist etc … X then
like the superfluous men of Russia in the 19th becomes identified as a transphobe/sexist etc. Their
century, were being educated for jobs that no whole identity becomes defined by one ill-judged
longer existed. Superfluous: ‘the experience of remark or behavioural slip.’ But ‘“left-wing”
modern masses’ as described by Hannah Arendt. Twitter’ wasn’t impressed. The response spread, it
T
grew, it swirled, and in some quarters, it is swirling
HE YEAR BEFORE, Fisher had written a still.
piece called ‘Exiting the Vampire Castle’, It was a terrible idea of Fisher’s to use the term
which also began with an account of an ‘Vampire Castle’: calling people a bunch of undead
episode of depression, exacerbated this time by the bloodsuckers isn’t a great tactic if you want them to
‘insomniac overstimulation’ that comes from listen to you, particularly when they are, whatever
spending too much time on social media. One your differences with them, people you want on
thing that was depressing him was the ‘snarky your side. Gilbert also noticed the closeness of the
resentment’ being directed, via ‘“left-wing” vampire castle image to that of ‘the cathedral’ – the
Twitter’, at the writer and activist Owen Jones. Neo-Reactionaries’ name for what they see as the
Another was the criticism being aimed at Russell spiteful, envious left-liberal clique that stands
Brand, who had just wiped the floor with Jeremy between themselves and world domination. They
Paxman on Newsnight. ‘I couldn’t remember the last look so small when you aren’t in them, these social
time a person from a working-class background media conspiracies and witch-hunts, feeble storms
had been given the space to so consummately in teeny-tiny teacups. But I’m sure they don’t feel
destroy a class “superior” using intelligence and so small when you’re the target. The internet is so
reason,’ was Fisher’s reaction – yet Brand was vast, so unpredictable and chaotic, with eddies and
being attacked on Twitter as a misogynist because undertows and who knows what lurking monsters.
he referred to women as ‘birds’ and called them Fisher stopped using Twitter after this, and wrote a
‘darling’. Fisher dressed up in his Marxist lot less on k-punk.
Unlike Fisher, I don’t listen to music much,

though I did when I was a teenager: Sylvester,
Young Marble Giants, Swell Maps, the Sugar Hill
Gang. I recognise the fervour in my teenage son,
who listens to lots of music, even if I wouldn’t call
him a music fan: he’s following the new, in
technology, in culture, in form and genre, looking
at memes on 4chan and Reddit and posting his
own. This scares me sometimes, when I read about
the way racists use humour and irony to pull in the
unwitting, so I asked my son what he thought, and
we had a shouting match about how he thinks I
think he’s stupid. Is the world any the worse for my
son, and millions like him, ‘shitposting’ what I’m
told are called ‘dank memes’? Look at all the
treasures my lot took for granted; what good did
that do in the end? ‘Almost everything I was afraid
of happening … has happened,’ Fisher records
Gilbert saying. ‘And yet, I don’t wish I was living
forty years ago. The point seems to be: this is the
world we were all afraid of, but it’s also sort of the
world we wanted.’ And if we decide now that, after
all, we don’t like it, we’re not allowed to take it
back.
Jenny Turner is on the editorial board of the LRB.

Letters Secret Pigeon Service
I was interested to read Jon Day’s piece about

Off the Christmas Card List Operation Columba (LRB, 4 April). My father was
the MI6/SIS officer responsible for intelligence
Susan Pedersen refers to Eric Hobsbawm’s ‘delight operations in France, initially in the Vichy ‘free’
in establishment credentials’ (LRB, 18 April). I am zone, and later in all of Europe. Day writes that ‘it
reminded of one of the times I stayed with my aunt, took around three months for an agent’s report to
the historian Dorothy Thompson, at her house in reach MI6 from the field,’ but this would only have
Worcester, some years after the death of her been in extreme cases, if a courier had to take a
husband, Edward. We were talking of the difficulty long route from north-west Europe via the Iberian
they both had balancing political activism with peninsula to Gibraltar or Lisbon, for example, or if
academic demands. I mentioned that Hobsbawm the air ‘taxi’ service was cancelled two months
had touched on this dilemma in a talk I had running (Lysander planes could only navigate the
recently seen him give at Hay. Dorothy frowned and routes during the few days of a full moon). At the
said she simply couldn’t forgive him for accepting other extreme, one of my father’s agents (who was
the Companion of Honour: ‘OK for an actor or working for the Gaullist intelligence services and
entertainer, but absolutely not for serious, critical not directly for the SIS) ‘acquired’ a complete map
intellectual work – I’m afraid I had to strike him off of the Atlantic Wall defences, which reached SIS in
my Christmas card list.’ London in 48 hours, the moon and weather being
Tim Towers favourable.
Chichester, West Sussex
‘On my return to London (and after Dunkirk),’
my father wrote,
Susan Pedersen remarks on Eric Hobsbawm’s
failure to engage with Africa. In partial exoneration I was quickly in touch with de Gaulle’s earliest
it should be pointed out that Hobsbawm garnerings. They provided a growing pool of
considered doing a PhD on the history of the gossip-ridden but informative characters. This
Maghreb, at a time when sub-Saharan African very much mixed bunch both in politics and
history, to the extent that it existed at all in the merit, ranged from burning and saintly
West, was an adjunct to the colonial and patriotism (e.g. d’Estienne d’Orves, Rémy,
missionary project. The first Cambridge history of Manuel and St Jacques) and the brave, able but
India was published in the 1920s. East and Central distinctly unsaintly ‘Passy’ (André Marquis
African history didn’t really begin to establish itself Dewavrin – ‘Metro’ noms de guerre were popular),
before the 1960s, and John Iliffe, who became and the seduisant but unpredictable La Barthe.
professor of African history at Cambridge, didn’t But they included also, alas, adventurers and
complete his history of Tanganyika until 1979. By the odd traitor, i.e. ‘Howard’, who was housed
then African history was a specialist discipline, but to our shame by ‘Biffy’ Dunderdale, and which
one that was populated by the generation after led to the Muselier scandal and eventual
Hobsbawm’s. It had its own disputes over imprisonment for Howard. (De Gaulle would
colonialism, dependency, capitalism and African have had him shot. Passy’s remedy was,
socialism, on which he may not have felt equipped probably, torture.) I think St Jacques (a beau
to comment. sabreur) was the first to be sent on a mission. He
Eoin Dillon was parachuted ‘blind’ to his own Normandy
Mount Brown, Dublin property on the Orne. He broke his leg on
landing, but reached shelter. His carrier Brexit Blues

pigeons probably ended up in a local pie. Such
were our beginnings!
John Dewey objects that compulsory voting does
The SIS organisation was then at its worst,
not allow ‘conscientious abstention’ (Letters, 18
partly because it made no serious attempt to
April). But so long as there is a secret ballot, that
pool varied intelligence sources on France:
option exists. In the privacy of the polling booth I
diplomatic (even Vichy); Free French; SOE, and
can write on my paper ‘Mrs May is not a very nice
our own counter-espionage were all operating
lady’ (or something briefer); spoiled papers are
unco-ordinated. This insulation encouraged the
counted and included in the published result. I
French to play us off – an advantage well
know of one case where such conscientious
harvested by de Gaulle and his staff, and
abstention was used, in France in April 1962 at the
particularly by Passy. There were, however,
end of the Algerian War. De Gaulle called a
notable exceptions such as André Manuel and
referendum asking voters to support peace in
Loustannau-Lacau – alias Navarre. Also unlike
Algeria and effectively expressing full confidence in
SOE, with its plethora of leading City figures,
him to do what he liked. The Communist Party
we were terribly slow in mobilising and creating
called for a ‘Yes’ vote, but the Parti Socialiste Unifié
the necessary supporting services – training,
and others called for active abstention. They got
transport, recruitment. Only (but of great value)
more than a million spoiled papers (5 per cent) and
over clandestine wireless did we lead, and even
established the existence of a left independent of de
here, there was far too much official secrecy
Gaulle and the Communist Party – just six years
and complacency, and a reluctance to absorb
before 1968.
the experiences of our much-harassed agents,
Ian Birchall
on exaggerated grounds of security.
London N9
Colin Cohen
Leamington Spa, Warwickshire Isn’t that what it’s about?
Jon Day’s piece reminds me of a story involving the Jonathan Rée suggests that my new translation of
rakish actor David Niven, who rejoined the British Being and Nothingness is ‘perhaps over-respectful to
army after the outbreak of the war. Niven was the original’ (LRB, 18 April). The same could not be
assigned to Phantom, the secret reconnaissance said about Rée’s assertion that Sartre’s title is
and signals unit for the invasion of France. There, ‘misleading’. What is misleading about calling a
on one of several critical missions in his scout car, work Being and Nothingness (originally L’Être et le
he was reputedly accompanied by a carrier pigeon Néant, but I assume Rée has no quarrel with my
intended to bring back news of German troop translation of the title) when its subtitle is ‘An
movements. The bird finally fluttered down at HQ Essay in Phenomenological Ontology’ and the
with a message bound to its leg. Eager fingers tore entirety of Sartre’s introduction and first chapter
at the vital communication, only to find that it read: are devoted to an examination of … being and
‘I have been sent home for making nasty smells.’ nothingness? Stranger still is Rée’s view that Self
Michael Neill and Others would have been ‘a better fit’ for a work
Auckland, New Zealand which only gets round to interpersonal
relationships in Part Three, and there explicitly
states that its discussion of them is incomplete.
Sarah Richmond
University College London
One Ball Syndrome settlements Calouste instituted for his

flamboyantly monocled son, Nubar, in the 1920s
and 1930s culminated in a decision of the House of
Why do men with two balls dice with death for fear
Lords in 1968 that remains a leading precedent in
of losing one? They neglect the warning symptoms
this area. Their lordships rejected concerns that the
for a long time, risking that the cancer will spread,
words Gulbenkian used to make provision for his
all for the shame attached to ‘one ball’ syndrome –
son were too imprecise to be workable, and held
‘Hitler, he only had one ball’ etc. Aged 15 in 1960, I
the trust valid. Every year law students across the
lost a testicle, and the embarrassment or fear of
Commonwealth turn their minds to Calouste’s
ridicule has been so great that I have never once
wishes for his son. Quite a legacy to leave for future
told a male friend. Colm Tóibín has led the way
generations: untold thousands of strangers
(LRB, 18 April). It is time for men with one ball to
combing through the details of your family affairs
come out, and for other men not to endanger
lest they turn up in an exam.
themselves, or die, for the sake of losing a ball.
Daniel O’Neil
John Taylor
Surry Hills, New South Wales
Bridport, Dorset
Eliot’s Alias
Among the Gilets Jaunes
Robert Crawford mentions that among the names
The gilets jaunes do not, as Lee De Cola imagines,
used by T.S. Eliot to sign letters to Emily Hale was
live in ‘sprawling global cities’ (Letters, 18 April). I
‘Herlock Sholmes’ (LRB, 18 April). This
live 4.5 km away from the nearest general store and
spoonerism was used by Maurice Leblanc for two
bus stop, and more than 10 km from the nearest
short stories, published in 1910, in which his
supermarket and butcher, with no bus service.
character Arsène Lupin and Herlock Sholmes are
Should I use a bicycle to get around, or a horse and
adversaries. It was also used by Charles Hamilton
cart? I am incompetent on the first and afraid of the
(aka Frank Richards) in spoof Sherlock Holmes
second. Has De Cola ever tried transporting a
stories published in the 1910s. Eliot is known to
week’s supplies of fresh food, packaged goods,
have had an interest in detective fiction, so
water, beer or wine for a standard family of four in
presumably came across the name in Leblanc’s
anything other than a petrol-driven vehicle? The
stories.
answer to climate change is not weaning ‘homo
Jane Card
vehicularis’ off cars. It lies in making them more
Harwell, Oxfordshire
efficient, less polluting.
Doina Percival
Tocane St Apre, France Autism
Gulbenkian’s Legacy Ferdinand Mount refers to Rex Dyer as ‘an

intermittently autistic geek, and one with a violent
temper which often ended in his knocking down
Christina Riggs does not mention one of the most
people who annoyed him’ (LRB, 4 April). Autistic
enduring marks Calouste Gulbenkian left on the
individuals are engaged in a struggle to function
world: his inadvertent contribution to the modern
effectively in sensory environments that they
law of trusts (LRB, 18 April). A series of legal
typically experience as chaotic and distressing.
disputes concerning the interpretation of the trust
When they behave in ‘challenging’ ways, they are
communicating the sensory distress they are

experiencing. Autism is a lifelong developmental
disability; one cannot be ‘intermittently’ autistic.
Rorie Fulton
Gwernogle, Carmarthenshire
At the Palais de Justice
Brian Dillon’s review of Carey Young’s video Palais

de Justice reminded me of my visits to the building
some years ago, when giving English courses to
Belgian magistrates (LRB, 4 April). I was told that
the lower courts were on the lower floors, while the
Cour de Cassation/Hof van Cassatie (Supreme
Court) was under the building’s cupola. Rumours
abounded concerning the building (on which the
scaffolding for long-delayed restoration work had
been in place for so many years it was in need of
restoration itself): the legend of a homeless man
living in a never visited storeroom for years on end,
or the local who so hated the building he regularly
smeared it with corrosive paste in the hope that it
would eventually come crashing down. An entire
city block had been erased to clear the site, and the
name of its architect, Poelaert, was accursed for
generations in the eyes of the populace. Even in
today’s Brussels, if you really want to insult
somebody, you need only call them a skieven
(‘crooked’) architect.
Richard Tagart
Haywards Heath, West Sussex
Trump’s America, Netanyahu’s Israel

Adam Shatz
I I
SRAEL’S legislative elections on 9 April were a USED to call myself a non-Zionist, rather than
tribute to Binyamin Netanyahu’s an anti-Zionist: the latter term seemed to
transformation of the political landscape. At no traduce the origins of Zionism, which arose as
point were they discussed in terms of which a response to the existential threat to Jewish life in
candidates might be persuaded by (non-existent) Europe. Anti-Zionism overlooked the richness of
American pressure, or the ‘international the debates within early Zionism. The ‘cultural
community’, to end the occupation. This time the Zionist’ Ahad Ha’am, for example, supported the
question was which party leader could be trusted by creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, but not
Israeli Jews – Palestinian citizens of Israel are now a Jewish state, and castigated ‘territorial’ Zionists
officially second-class – to manage the occupation, for imagining that ‘Palestine is a land almost
and to expedite the various tasks the Jewish state entirely deserted, an uncultivated desert,’ and that
has mastered: killing Gazans, bulldozing homes, ‘the Arabs are desert savages, a people like
combating the scourge of the Boycott, Divestment, donkeys, incapable of seeing and understanding
Sanctions movement (BDS), and conflating anti- what is happening around them. This is a great
Zionism with antisemitism. With his promise to mistake.’ One of the founders of binationalism –
annex the West Bank, Netanyahu had won even what’s now envisaged as a single state,
before the election was held. It wasn’t simply accommodating both people’s national aspirations
Trump’s recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the – Ha’am considered himself a Zionist. So did the
Golan Heights that sped the incumbent on his way; journalist and activist Uri Avnery, one of the
it was the nature of the conversation – and the fact fiercest critics of Israel’s wars and occupation, who
that the leader of the opposition was Benny Gantz, died last year, aged 94. But these ‘Zionists’ do not
the IDF commander who presided over the 2014 represent actually existing Zionism.
Operation Protective Edge, in which more than two In 1948, Hannah Arendt, whose critique of
thousand Gazans were killed. territorial Zionism owed much to Ha’am, warned
Illusions about the ‘peace process’ – and that after the Arab-Israeli war
Israel’s ‘search for peace’ – die hard. The hopes
the ‘victorious’ Jews would live surrounded by a
invested in ‘peace’ were once immense, but they
hostile Arab population, secluded inside ever-
have never looked so shaky, even in America, which
threatened borders, preoccupied by matters of
has underwritten these fictions for decades and
defence to a degree that would submerge all
rewarded Israel handsomely for paying lip service
other interests and activities … political
to them. American liberals no longer lament the
thought would centre on military strategy;
fact that Netanyahu has moved Israel away from its
economic development would be determined
preordained, conciliatory course, or hope that ‘the
exclusively by the needs of war. And all this
left’ might steer it back. There is no left in Israel
would be the fate of a nation that – no matter
aside from a few heroic groupuscules. Netanyahu’s
how many immigrants it could still absorb and
Israel – illiberal, exclusionary, racist – is now the
how far it extended its boundaries … – would
political centre.
still remain a very small people greatly
outnumbered by hostile neighbours.
Arendt’s prediction was in large part borne out. overwhelming military advantage over the
More remarkable still, few Israelis – or their Palestinians. The Arab states, meanwhile, have
supporters abroad, among Jews and Evangelicals – ceased to pressure Israel: their fear of Iran
fret over this ‘fate’. Arendt’s warning that an outweighs whatever solidarity they feel with the
expansionist Israel would never realise the dream Palestinians.
of Herzl and the founders and become a ‘normal’ The extreme character of Israel’s stance vis-à-
state has lost its charge because Israel’s vis its Arab population can be measured by the
abnormality is the new normal. Israel now looks Nation-State Law, which explicitly legalises the
like a pioneer of illiberal, ethnocratic nationalism, inequality – officially denied for decades – between
a model for the likes of Orbán, Modi and Trump. Jews and Arabs. The law’s most vociferous critics
Israelis today see no need to conceal, much less were not the Palestinian citizens of Israel, who have
apologise for, their country’s militarism or racism. no illusions about the state’s intentions, but the
In the 1960s and 1970s, Western tourists went to Druze – at 1.5 per cent of Israel’s population, a
Israel to try out collective farming on kibbutzim. minority within an Arab minority – who serve in the
Police officers and soldiers now go there to learn Israeli military and are seen by many Palestinians as
new methods of collective punishment and traitors. As Israeli Druze have discovered, to be a
surveillance. For Europe’s greatest internal victims non-Jew in Israel, no matter how loyal, is to be less
to have refined the repression of another people than a full citizen, tolerated at best by the ruling
into a science is now regarded as an advantage ethnic majority – a ‘pariah’, as Arendt would have
rather than an embarrassing secret, or indeed a said. That Israel has succeeded in creating a new
tragedy. And with Trump’s help, Zionism’s id has class of pariahs is a curious achievement, given the
been emancipated from its superego. The Nation- history of Jews in the West. The era of direct
State Law, the American Embassy’s move to military rule of Israel’s Palestinian citizens ended in
Jerusalem, the US president’s recognition of Israeli 1966, but its methods have been applied since 1967
sovereignty over the Golan Heights, the possible in the Occupied Territories. The destructive impact
annexation of large swathes of the West Bank: all on Palestinian life, in Israel, the West Bank and
these mark an intensification in what Meron Gaza, has been enormous. But the perpetrators
Benvenisti called the ‘Judaisation’ of Israel- have also paid a price. In the words of the historian
Palestine, at the expense of its indigenous Enzo Traverso, Israel has ‘put an end to Jewish
inhabitants. Even hummus, tabbouleh and zaatar modernity. Diaspora Judaism had been the critical
are now proclaimed ‘Israeli’ specialities. conscience of the Western world; Israel survives as
S
one of its mechanisms of domination.’
A
ECURITY is the paramount concern, Israel
says, pointing to its enemies (Hamas, CCUSED of antisemitism for his criticisms
Hizbullah, Iran) and to the growing volatility of Israel, Noam Chomsky used to point out
on its border with Syria. These are not irrational that in Israel his position would hardly
fears, but, as in the past, they serve to justify raise eyebrows: the problem lay with the absence of
expansion, generating further insecurity, which in debate in the US. Today the situation is nearly the
turn justifies further land grabs. If security on the reverse. The debate has never been more
basis of coexistence were truly its aim, Israel could constricted in Israel: even Jewish dissenters have
have taken up a land-for-peace offer, such as the seen their freedoms curtailed. In the US, as the
Saudi peace plan of 2002. But it has been less power of the Israel lobby begins to crumble,
interested in security than in land, with or without ferocious arguments are erupting inside the
peace: a position it can afford to take thanks to its Democratic Party, where the old guard, deeply pro-
Israel, faces an insurgent challenge from politicians The Trump administration recently prevented
and activists outraged by the occupation. Whether the Palestinian activist Omar Barghouti, one of the
or not US support for Israel is ‘all about the founders of the BDS movement, from entering the
Benjamins’, in the words of the Minnesota US. Barghouti, a permanent resident of Israel who
congresswoman Ilhan Omar ($100 bills have a has a valid US visa, was scheduled to do a speaking
picture of Benjamin Franklin), the old guard is tour and go to his daughter’s wedding. He is a non-
much better funded. But the younger, dissenting violent activist, but this doesn’t count in his favour
wing of the party is more energetic, and closer to among those who used to deplore Palestinian
the base: of the Democrats running for president, armed struggle. On the contrary: now that the
only Cory Booker, a senator from New Jersey, spoke Palestinians are practising effective non-violent
at the most recent conference of the lobbying protest, Israel claims that it is worse than terrorism
group AIPAC. A significant portion of the anti- because it ‘delegitimises’ the Jewish state. Anti-
occupation movement in the US is Jewish, notably Zionism, on this view, is not simply an occasional
Jewish Voice for Peace, a staunch supporter of BDS. cover for antisemitism; it is antisemitism. The
Traverso is only partly right to say that diaspora Trump administration has signed up to this thesis;
Judaism has ceased to supply the West with a so has Emmanuel Macron. But if anti-Zionism is
critical conscience. antisemitism, one would be hard pressed to find a
Israel’s ultras inside the Democratic Party have Palestinian, or an Arab, or a Muslim, who is not an
argued, correctly, that support for the country is antisemite. And if anti-Zionism is the only form of
not only about donations (‘the Benjamins’) from antisemitism that Israel, the state of the Jews,
Jewish supporters of Israel, but about something considers a threat, then Hungary and other Central
harder to dislodge: faith. Senator Charles Schumer European states intent on revising their histories of
of New York recently claimed to be acting on divine collaboration in the Holocaust, purging their
orders: ‘You know, my name … comes from the public life of ‘globalists’ such as George Soros, and
word shomer, ‘guardian’, ‘watcher’ … And I believe pursuing draconian policies towards ethnic
Hashem’ – God – ‘actually gave me that name. One minorities (Roma, above all), can declare
of my roles, very important in the United States themselves friends of Israel and get a kosher seal of
Senate, is to be … a or the shomer Yisrael. And I will approval.
I
continue to be that with every bone in my body.’
Booker is perhaps more alert to the role of ‘the S THERE an antisemitism of the left?
Benjamins’, but he, too, spoke in the language of Certainly. Antisemitism, like anti-black racism,
faith when he addressed AIPAC: ‘Israel is not is a virus in Western society. But it is one thing
political to me … I was a supporter of Israel well to acknowledge its existence in movements that
before I was a United States senator … If I forget want to see an end to Israel’s occupation – which
thee, o Israel, may I cut off my right hand.’ Ilhan tend to be left-leaning – and another to claim that it
Omar was accused of antisemitism for pointing up is their defining feature. Israel has recast
the ‘political influence’ in the US ‘that says it is OK antisemitism in such a self-serving way that it has
to push for allegiance to a foreign country’, but become difficult to distinguish between those who
Schumer and Booker made no secret of their take Israel to task as a Jewish state, and those who
allegiance and faced none of the insults hurled at criticise it as a Jewish state: as an exclusionary
Omar. There was no murmur of dissent from ethnocracy and an occupying power. Israel has also
supporters of Israel when Trump spoke to a group appropriated the right to define what is and isn’t
of American Jews and referred to Netanyahu as antisemitism by forging alliances with parties,
‘your prime minister’. states and religious groups that traffic openly in
antisemitism. That Israel seems untroubled by American Israel that the special relationship was
these alliances – and simultaneously accuses left- never simply a reflection of Jewish influence in
wing critics of antisemitism, often invoking the America.[*] It drew on both countries’ histories –
Holocaust – has not only made it easier for left- and imaginaries – as colonial-settler states, and has
wing antisemites to deny the charges; it also makes been reinforced by overlapping imperial interests.
it harder for those on the left to recognise genuine But Omar’s remarks were bracing and seemed to
antisemitism in their colleagues, and in signal that the conversation about Israel is
themselves. There’s no reason to think that Jeremy changing, as disadvantaged American minorities,
Corbyn is an antisemite, or to suspect that his including blacks and Muslims, overcome a range of
opposition to bigotry does not extend to inhibitions – above all the fear of being called
antisemitism. But his defence of Mear One’s mural antisemitic – and begin to speak frankly on the
of hook-nosed men in suits playing Monopoly over Israel/Palestine question. For politicians such as
a group of naked men showed how poorly he Omar and Rashida Tlaib, a Palestinian
understands the codes of Judeophobia. Corbyn’s congresswoman from Detroit, and for black
naivety and confusion, along with his activists and thinkers such as Michelle Alexander
stubbornness, has provided an attritional resource and Angela Davis, Palestine is, above all, a matter
to his enemies in the Labour Party, and beyond. of racial justice. The process of reframing this
The recent attacks on Jews in Europe, the question is likely to be messy and uncomfortable,
Bannonist discourse about Soros and other sinister not least for Jews accustomed to leading the
agents of globalisation, the neo-Nazi chants in discussion. It also suggests a very American vision
Charlottesville of ‘Jews will not replace us’: all these of Israel/Palestine, with the West Bank reimagined
are signs that ‘the Jewish question’, in spite of the as Selma, a site of oppression where struggle and
integration of Jews in the West, has yet to be redemption are waiting in the wings. But this is no
resolved. As Aimé Césaire told Frantz Fanon, ‘when more of an illusion than the vision of Israel it
you hear someone insulting the Jews, pay attention, challenges, ‘the Middle East’s only democracy’, and
he is talking about you.’ Antisemitism in the US is it aims to end, rather than uphold, a system of
of no structural significance: it does not prejudice oppression. Now that the conversation has started,
Jewish opportunity, as racism does for black it will be hard to stop.
people; Judaism is not invoked by the state, as
Islam is, to prevent people from entering the [*] Our American Israel: The Story of an Entangled Alliance by
country or to justify the racial profiling and Amy Kaplan (Harvard, 368 pp., £23.95, October 2018,
surveillance of American citizens. But it can flare 978 0 674 73762 4).
up with fatal consequences, such as the massacre
last year at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. Adam Shatz is a contributing editor at the LRB,
Trump, who said there were ‘very fine people’ based in New York.
among the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, isn’t too
troubled by those deadly forms of antisemitism.
But he has already begun to smear the Democratic
Party as antisemitic, and Ilhan Omar as a jihadist,
in what is surely a trial run of his strategy in the
2020 election.
Omar’s tweet about ‘the Benjamins’ was glib
and inaccurate: support for Israel isn’t all about
campaign donations. Amy Kaplan argues in Our
What are we there for?

Tom Stevenson
AngloArabia: Why Gulf Wealth Matters to Britain by David Wearing. Polity, 275 pp, £15.99, September 2018
I
T IS a cliché that the United States and Britain explained by Jimmy Carter’s national security
are obsessed with Middle East oil, but the adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, was to control the
reason for the obsession is often Gulf and stop any Soviet influence over ‘that vital
misdiagnosed. Anglo-American interest in the energy resource upon which the economic and
enormous hydrocarbon reserves of the Persian Gulf political stability both of Western Europe and of
does not derive from a need to fuel Western Japan depend’, or else the ‘geopolitical balance of
consumption. Britain used to import considerable power would be tipped’. In a piece for the Atlantic a
quantities of Saudi oil, but currently gets most of few months after 9/11, Benjamin Schwarz and
what it needs from the North Sea and hasn’t Christopher Layne explained that Washington
imported much from the Gulf since the 1980s; ‘assumes responsibility for stabilising the region’
Saudi oil currently represents around 3 per cent of because China, Japan and Europe will be
UK imports. The US has never imported more than dependent on its resources for the foreseeable
a token amount from the Gulf and for much of the future: ‘America wants to discourage those powers
postwar period has been a net oil exporter. Anglo- from developing the means to protect that resource
American involvement in the Middle East has for themselves.’ Much of US power is built on the
always been principally about the strategic back of the most profitable protection racket in
advantage gained from controlling Persian Gulf modern history.
hydrocarbons, not Western oil needs. In 1945, The developed Asian economies are heavily
Gordon Merriam, the head of the State reliant on Persian Gulf oil and Qatari natural gas.
Department’s Near Eastern Affairs division, made Three-quarters of Gulf oil exports go to Asian
this clear: the Saudi oilfields, he said, were first and economies, and the five largest importers of gas
foremost ‘a stupendous source of strategic power’. from Qatar are Japan, South Korea, India, China
The assistant secretary of state, Adolf Berle, and Singapore. US dominance in the Gulf gives it
sketched out what remains US strategy: the US and decisive strategic influence over any potential Asian
Britain would provide Saudi Arabia and other key rival. The US has a huge military presence in the
Gulf monarchies with ‘sufficient military supplies region: United States Central Command is based at
to preserve internal security’ and ensure that they al-Udeid airbase in Qatar, the largest air force base
were permanently guarded by Western navies. in the world, with more than ten thousand US
Other parts of the world – the US, Russia, troops. Bahrain is the permanent dock of the Fifth
Canada – have large deposits of crude oil, and Fleet, as well as having a US airbase and seven
current estimates suggest Venezuela has more thousand US military personnel. The US has five
proven reserves than Saudi Arabia. But Gulf oil lies thousand permanent troops, two naval bases and
close to the surface, where it is easy to get at by an airbase in the United Arab Emirates. In Kuwait,
drilling; it is cheap to extract, and is unusually it has access to three army bases and an air force
‘light’ and ‘sweet’ (industry terms for high purity base. In Oman, it has four airbases and two naval
and richness). It is also located near the middle of bases. In Iraq, the US still has troops stationed at
the Eurasian landmass, yet outside the territory of al-Asad airbase north-west of Baghdad (once
any global power. Western Middle East policy, as nicknamed ‘Camp Cupcake’ for its luxuries). In
Saudi Arabia itself, the US operates a military Before withdrawing from its dependencies, the
training mission based in Eskan village. Only Iran, British government placed retired military officers
which broke away from the US system in 1979, as advisers to Gulf monarchs it had for the most
houses no American military bases. part installed in order to protect ‘oil and other
A
interests’ and a ‘very profitable market in military
N AGREEMENT signed by British equipment’, in the words of the then foreign
representatives and the Omani sultan in secretary, Michael Stewart. Even now, a striking
1798 made Oman the British Empire’s first number of Middle East rulers are graduates of
satrapy in the Middle East (it was also Britain’s last Sandhurst, including the kings of Bahrain and
colonial possession in the Gulf). The East India Jordan, the sultan of Oman, the emir of Dubai, the
Company had in 1763 established a trading post in emir and crown prince of Abu Dhabi, the emir of
Bushehr, now in Iran, from which the empire’s Qatar, and the late emir of Kuwait. Most Saudi
growing Gulf business was managed. In 1819, to leaders are educated in the US but the former heads
subdue the coastal Arab sheikhdoms and establish of the Saudi National Guard and the General
a protectorate over the Trucial States – now the Intelligence Service, as well as members of the
United Arab Emirates – the British navy bombarded Allegiance Council and a former defence minister,
and laid siege to Ras al-Khaimah. By 1917, Britain also attended Sandhurst. A skeleton British military
had established dependencies in Kuwait, Bahrain, presence remained behind in the Gulf. In 2016,
Qatar, Iraq and parts of Iran. Thousands died Theresa May pledged to increase Britain’s military
during Ibn Saud’s conquest of the central Arabian commitments there, ‘with more British warships,
peninsula in the first decades of the 20th century; aircraft and personnel deployed on operations than
he received a monthly stipend from the British in any other part of the world’. In April last year,
government throughout. When the new Saudi the Royal Navy reopened HMS Jufair in Bahrain –
regime was threatened by a rebellion in 1929, the base had been taken over by the US after
British troops helped put down the mutineers. Bahrain became independent in 1971. Another
Britain bankrolled the Saudi monarchy (after 1943 naval base is set to open in Oman later this year.
with the help of the US) until the oil industry ended Britain’s residual influence in Saudi Arabia
the need for subsidies. meant that during the oil crises of the 1970s the
The Suez crisis is generally treated as the kingdom secretly broke its own embargo to supply
decisive moment in the transition from British to Britain. Saudi Arabia also continued to pump much
US dominance in the region, but David Wearing of the massive surplus generated by oil sales into
shows that, in spite of Suez and other setbacks for British financial institutions. It finances around a
Britain on the periphery (the 1958 coup in Iraq, the fifth of the UK current account deficit. A ten-
civil war in Yemen in the 1960s), British influence person team in Whitehall, known as Project Falcon,
in fact increased in the core Gulf states over the manages the UAE’s investments in Britain. During
next 15 years, with successful palace coups backed the financial crisis in 2008, Gordon Brown
by the British government in Saudi Arabia in 1964 appealed to the Gulf to provide private bailouts for
and Sharjah, one of the Trucial States, in 1965. British banks. In a deal subject to a current Serious
Qatar, the Trucial States and Oman remained Fraud Office investigation, Barclays received £4.6
British protectorates, their currencies pegged to billion from Qatar and £3.5 billion from the UAE,
sterling. Wearing makes a strong case that it was helping it to avoid nationalisation. Qatar’s
the cost of the military ‘protection’ of the Gulf that investments in the UK are many and conspicuous:
forced the end of Britain’s formal empire there in Harrods, the Shard, the London Stock Exchange,
1971, and the beginning of US hegemony. Heathrow Airport. Saudi Arabia and the UAE’s
portfolios of UK bonds and equities are exceeded up Western economies – rather than to finance,
only by their US investments. say, domestic development – is met with little
The US’s inherited mastery of the Gulf has objection. Wearing describes the modern
given it a degree of leverage over both rivals and relationship between Western governments and
allies probably unparalleled in the history of the Gulf monarchs as ‘asymmetric
empire. Washington has established a highly interdependence’, which makes clear that both get
conservative regional order through alliances with plenty from the bargain. Since the West installed
successive military dictatorships in Egypt and an the monarchs, and its behaviour is essentially
ethno-nationalist Israel. Its overwhelming military extractive, I see no reason to avoid describing the
control of the region ensures that Japan, South continued Anglo-American domination of the Gulf
Korea, India and even China must deal with the US as colonial.
in the knowledge that it could, if it wished, cut Saudi Arabia and the other five members of the
them off from their main source of energy. It is Gulf Co-operation Council are collectively the
difficult to overstate the role of the Gulf in the way world’s largest buyer of military equipment by a big
the world is currently run. In recent years, under margin. Most of their arms are supplied by the US,
both Obama and Trump, there has been talk of but both Britain and France make substantial
plans for a US withdrawal from the Middle East and contributions. In 2017, the US and Saudi Arabia
a ‘pivot’ to Asia. If there are indeed such plans, it signed the largest arms deal in history, estimated to
would suggest that recent US administrations are be worth $350 billion. Between 1985 and 2006
ignorant of the way the system over which they Britain signed a series of contracts (the Al
preside works. Yamamah deal) worth tens of billions. Sales
The Arab Gulf states have proved well-suited to stepped up dramatically when the war in Yemen
their status as US client states, in part because their began: Britain sold Saudi Arabia arms worth £3.3
populations are small and their subjugated working billion in 2015, compared to £107 million the year
class comes from Egypt and South Asia. The 1973 before. The deals are highly profitable for Western
oil embargo is probably the only example of a arms companies (Middle East governments
backlash from the periphery to the imperial centre, account for around half of all British arms sales),
although it was a dispute over profit-share rather but the charge that Western governments are in
than an example of jacquerie: Western oil thrall to the arms companies is based on a
companies had been extracting huge profits while misconception. Arms sales are useful principally as
the Gulf states received little more than an a way of bonding the Gulf monarchies to the Anglo-
allowance. These companies have less power now, American military. Proprietary systems – from
except in Oman, where Royal Dutch Shell still owns fighter jets to tanks and surveillance equipment –
a third of the main oil company. There are ensure lasting dependence, because training,
occasional disagreements between Gulf rulers and maintenance and spare parts can be supplied only
their Western counterparts over oil prices, but they by the source country. Western governments are at
never become serious. Even on the subject of Israel, least as keen on these deals as the arms industry,
Saudi Arabia follows the US line. Saudi Arabia’s and much keener than the Gulf states themselves.
helotry to the West was one of al-Qaida’s While speaking publicly of the importance of fiscal
preoccupations but the US-Saudi alliance has if responsibility, the US, Britain and France have
anything strengthened since the group’s founding. competed with each other to bribe Gulf officials
The extreme conservatism of the Gulf monarchies, into signing unnecessary arms deals.
in which there is in principle no consultation with Control of the Gulf also yields less obvious
the citizenry, means that the use of oil sales to prop benefits. Until 1971 the Gulf states pegged their
currencies to sterling, which competed with the Britain and the US have also funnelled weapons via
dollar as an international reserve currency. After the UAE to militias in Yemen. If the Western
the loss of its Gulf protectorates, Britain had to powers wished, they could stop the conflict
concede to the global hegemony of the dollar. overnight by ending their involvement. Instead the
There were mixed feelings about this in British government has committed to the Saudi
Washington. Under the Bretton Woods agreement position. As foreign secretary, Philip Hammond
the US dollar was pegged to gold and economists pledged that Britain would continue to ‘support the
feared that even the US gold reserves would prove Saudis in every practical way short of engaging in
insufficient as a base for the world’s financial combat’. This is not only complicity but direct
system. The gold standard was finally abandoned, participation in a war that is as much the West’s as
and in 1974, the US Treasury secretary, William it is Saudi Arabia’s.
Simon, secretly travelled to Saudi Arabia to secure The Gulf monarchies are family dictatorships
an agreement that remains to this day the kept in power by external design, and it shows. The
foundation of the dollar’s global dominance. As Gulf principalities may not match the extremes of
David Spiro has documented in The Hidden Hand of Saudi repression but are no less authoritarian. Yet
American Hegemony (1999), the US made its until the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi at the
guarantees of Saudi and Arab Gulf security Saudi consulate in Istanbul last October, crown
conditional on the use of oil sales to shore up the prince Mohammed Bin Salman, the de facto ruler
dollar. Under Simon’s deal, Saudi Arabia agreed to of the kingdom, was widely talked about as an
buy massive tranches of US Treasury bonds in enlightened reformer. When Germany suspended
secret off-market transactions. In addition, the US arms sales over the incident, Jeremy Hunt urged
compelled Saudi Arabia and the other Opec them to reverse the decision. The main threat to
countries to set oil prices in dollars, and for many Western interests is internal: a rising reminiscent
years Gulf oil shipments could be paid for only in of Iran’s in 1979. To forestall such an event, Britain
dollars. A de facto oil standard replaced gold, equips and trains the Saudi police force, has
assuring the dollar’s value and pre-eminence. military advisers permanently attached to the
F
internal Saudi security forces, and operates a
OR THE PEOPLE of the region, the effects strategic communications programme for the
of a century of AngloArabia have been less Saudi National Guard (called Sangcom). In
satisfactory. Since the start of the war in Bahrain, described in 2013 by the Royal United
Yemen in 2015 some 75,000 people have been Services Institute as Britain’s closest Gulf ally and
killed, not counting those who have died of disease ‘the equivalent of an aircraft carrier permanently in
or starvation. In that time Britain has supplied arms the Gulf’, demonstrators inspired by the Arab
worth nearly £5 billion to the Saudi coalition Spring were forcibly dispersed from the Pearl
fighting the Yemeni Houthis. The British army has roundabout in Manama in 2011. The crackdown
supplied and maintained aircraft throughout the began in earnest two days after the US secretary of
campaign; British and American military personnel defence, Robert Gates, had visited the country.
are stationed in the command rooms in Riyadh; Saudi and Emirati security forces crossed into
British special forces have trained Saudi soldiers Bahrain over the King Fahd causeway in British-
fighting inside Yemen; and Saudi pilots continue to made Tacticas armoured personnel carriers to
be trained at RAF Valley on Anglesey. The US is support Bahrain’s security apparatus.
even more deeply involved: the US air force has As Wearing argues, ‘Britain could choose to
provided mid-air refuelling for Saudi and Emirati swap its support for Washington’s global
aircraft – at no cost, it emerged in November. hegemony for a more neutral and peaceful
position.’ It would be more difficult for the US to

extricate itself. Contrary to much of the
commentary in Washington, the strategic
importance of the Middle East is increasing, not
decreasing. The US may now be exporting
hydrocarbons again, thanks to state-subsidised
shale, but this has no effect on the leverage it gains
from control of the Gulf. And impending climate
catastrophe shows no sign of weaning any nation
from fossil fuels, least of all the developing East
Asian states. US planners seem confused about
their own intentions in the Middle East. In 2017,
the National Intelligence Council described the
sense of neglect felt by the Gulf monarchies when
they heard talk of the phantasmagorical Asia pivot.
The report’s authors were profoundly negative
about the region’s future, predicting ‘large-scale
violence, civil wars, authority vacuums and
humanitarian crises persisting for many years’. The
causes, in the authors’ view, were ‘entrenched
elites’ and ‘low oil prices’. They didn’t mention that
maintenance of both these things is US policy.
Tom Stevenson writes mainly about the Middle

East and North Africa. He lives in Cairo.
Unreasoning Vigour
Stefan Collini
Ian Watt: The Novel and the Wartime Critic by Marina MacKay. Oxford, 228 pp, £25.00, November 2018
‘M
Y military career was on the comic evokes those classic moments in surreal comedy in
side.’ Self-protective irony was Ian which human beings try unsuccessfully to shoo
Watt’s chosen register when away the unwanted attentions of an animal. It’s an
describing his wartime experience some twenty image of both absurdity and futility. But therein, of
years later. That experience began when the 24- course, lay its appropriateness as a way of coping
year-old Lieutenant Watt was posted, along with with what had been a particularly extreme kind of
the rest of the 5th Battalion of the Suffolk ‘raw personal situation’.
Regiment, to the Far East in the winter of 1941. Singapore surrendered to the Japanese on 15
After a 20,000-mile journey by sea, the Suffolks February, after only a few days of fighting. For the
arrived in Singapore on 29 January 1942. British it was, militarily and symbolically, one of
Unfortunately, the Japanese arrived less than two the worst disasters of the war. It proved to be an
weeks later. Singapore had been heavily fortified intensely personal disaster for the more than eighty
against the expected attack from the sea, but thousand Allied personnel who were captured that
proved to be calamitously unprepared when the day. Worst of all was life in the makeshift camps set
Japanese arrived across the narrow strip of land up in the jungle for those sent to work on the
connecting it to the Malay peninsula. ‘I was chosen construction of the railway line linking Thailand to
to deny Singapore Zoo to the enemy,’ Watt Burma. Thousands died from malnutrition,
recalled, and having decided that ‘certain buffalo, disease, exhaustion and ill-treatment. Those
orangutan and other large caged animals would be condemned to this liminal existence looked back
dangerous to leave at large once the balloon went on the notoriously harsh Changi prison camp in
up,’ he began to take preventative measures with an Singapore, where they had first been incarcerated,
anti-tank rifle (they may have been the only shots as a haven of order and plenty.
Watt fired ‘in action’). The troops under his Lieutenant Watt was believed to have been
command objected to such summary treatment killed in the defence of Singapore, the War Office
being meted out to the zoo’s two zebras; they were informed his mother. Ten months later, a message
released and followed the retreating soldiers ‘at a came via the International Red Cross advising her
wary distance’. that he had in fact been taken prisoner (he had
One of the things we learned from Freud, been wounded by mortar shrapnel). After this brief,
according to the literary critic Graham Hough, is to hope-stirring snippet of information nothing more
see ‘what might appear to be a rather perverse was heard until after the end of the war in the Far
literary device’ as meeting an unobvious need: ‘The East in August 1945 and the liberation of the labour
elaboration of a raw personal situation into a form camps. It turned out that in the autumn of 1942
in which it can be more readily accepted is not a Watt and 39 other prisoners had been squeezed
matter of evasiveness or decorum, but a profound into a closed freight-wagon and sent on a gruesome
psychological necessity.’ Watt’s Far East narrative five-day journey into northern Thailand, where he
is most certainly a ‘literary device’ in that sense. spent the rest of the war as a forced labourer. In the
The image of a unit of British troops in baggy course of his captivity he contracted malaria, beri-
shorts being shadowed by two stripey stalkers beri, diphtheria and permanently scarring tropical
ulcers, as well as suffering the psychological and racist, Anglophilic, logocentric, essentialist,
physical effects of frequent beatings and the near positivist, vulgarly materialistic, and probably
daily sight of ugly, painful deaths. The damage to homophobic. But nobody is perfect.
his health was sufficiently serious to require
As Davis’s hyperbole implies, these charges
hospitalisation in Burma after the end of the war;
owed more to fashion than to actual failings on
he wasn’t finally demobilised until March 1946.
Watt’s part, but although they reveal his book to
So, not exactly ‘on the comic side’. Watt was
have been of its time in ways that now excite
one of those – the extremity of their experience
opprobrium, his framing of the issues has retained
makes me hesitant to describe them as the ‘lucky’
its centrality and pertinence. As Nicholas Seager, in
ones – who survived, but he never wholly
a study cheekily entitled The Rise of the Novel, put it:
recovered. Like most of his fellow survivors, he
‘“The rise of the novel” is one of the most widely
found it almost impossible to convey the real
circulated narratives of English studies.’
character of his wartime experience to his family
There has for some time been a tendency to
and friends, and this became a psychological
condescend to the literary criticism of the two
burden that had to be handled in indirect or
decades or so after 1945 as falling in the last age of
displaced forms, though not, as Hough pointed
innocence (or, in more hostile accounts,
out, ‘a matter of evasiveness or decorum’. (Hough
benightedness) before the arrival of Theory. But to
is a particularly pertinent witness: he too went on
reread The Rise of the Novel now is to be reminded
to become a prominent literary critic after being
what a wide-ranging and, in its way, theoretically
captured at Singapore and spending the rest of the
sophisticated work it is. Watt cites Lukács in
war as a prisoner of the Japanese.)
German and Durkheim in French, alongside works
Just how ‘displaced’ were the forms in which
by Weber, Troeltsch, Mannheim, Merton, Parsons,
Watt was to explore aspects of an experience that
Radcliffe-Brown and more. In his preface he thanks
could scarcely be approached directly is the subject
Adorno, Henry Nash Smith, I.A. Richards, Talcott
matter of Marina MacKay’s deft and thoughtful
Parsons and Peter Laslett, among others. The
study. In 1957 Watt published The Rise of the Novel:
standard caricature of the Cambridge-influenced
Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. Few works of
criticism of the postwar years represents it as
criticism from the second half of the 20th century
blunderingly empirical and cosily parochial: these
have been more influential. The Rise of the Novel,
stereotypes wilt and shrivel when confronted by
MacKay reports, ‘continues to be amplified,
Watt’s ambitious, analytical and intellectually
supplemented or attacked – it must somehow be
restless book.
reckoned with – by every critic concerned with the
MacKay’s study is not a biography: her focus is
novel’s emergence, that vast field of inquiry for
on the ways in which Watt’s wartime experiences
which Watt’s very title, with or without sceptical
helped to shape his literary criticism, especially his
quotation marks, remains the usual short-hand
most famous book. But rereading that book makes
designation.’ From the 1980s onwards, attack was
me want to know more than MacKay provides
the dominant mode of engagement. Parodying the
about his intellectual development, especially in
accumulating barrage, Lennard J. Davis wrote that
the years immediately before and after the war.
Watt ‘made some really big mistakes’:
Watt’s wartime experience may have affected the
He thought there was ‘a’ novel; he thought it tenor of his criticism for the rest of his life, but
had a beginning; he assumed it was a narrative obviously it was not the sole determinant of his
fiction that displaced previous narrative fictions approach (MacKay, it should be emphasised, never
and had a ‘rise’ located in metropole [sic] proposes anything so crassly reductive). To
England. In doing so, he was naive, sexist, understand his development, one would also need
to know more about, among other things, the and history represented a mild practical
critical models he was responding to or reacting inconvenience, not the embodiment of a
against. One can piece a few more details of his life distinction between natural kinds. When he helped
together from other sources, but he fully shared the establish the new University of East Anglia in 1962,
reticence of English men of his generation, a trait he set up a single department that combined what
reinforced by the survivor’s unwillingness, or elsewhere was divided between history and
incapacity, to talk about the most extraordinary English. More generally, he believed that the right
period of his life. route for English studies was ‘to combine literary
Born in 1917 to a French mother and a Scottish criticism with historical and sociological
father, Watt’s life was to involve more than the scholarship’.
usual amount of displacement and resettlement. The Rise of the Novel was published in 1957; Watt
Having excelled in the English Tripos in late 1930s could scarcely be accused of having rushed into
Cambridge, he embarked on research for a PhD, in print: he had, after all, begun research on the topic
the course of which he spent a term (it was to have 19 years earlier. But along the way the questions
been a year) on a postgraduate scholarship at the had changed. He had started from some fairly
Sorbonne – he was fluent in French. The comic conventional notions, traceable back to Leslie
interlude of the war interrupted his academic Stephen and Queenie Leavis, about the emergence
progress, but in 1946 he returned to Cambridge. of the novel form and how it was bound up with the
Another scholarship provided him with two years growth of a reading public in the first half of the
in the United States (where he met his American 18th century. Returning to his studies after the war,
wife), following which he took up a research he didn’t altogether abandon this concern: an
fellowship at his old college, St John’s. In 1952 he introductory chapter on the reading public is
moved to a job at Berkeley, staying there for ten included in the eventual book. But, prompted by
years; and then, after a two-year interlude at the his friendships with historians and social theorists,
newly founded University of East Anglia, took up a he began to ask more ambitious questions. What,
post at Stanford in 1964, where he remained for the exactly, distinguishes the novel from all earlier
rest of his career. He died in 1999. forms of narrative fiction? How does social change
Although he owed his initial intellectual influence the evolution of literary form? He also
formation to a version of ‘Cambridge English’, his asked some more specific, local questions. What
early sojourn in the US expanded his horizons in distinguished Defoe’s emphasis on the inner life
various ways: for example, he discussed his ideas from the Puritan tradition of spiritual self-
extensively with Adorno in Los Angeles and with inspection? Why were Richardson’s long and in
Parsons at Harvard, neither of them staples of the some ways cumbrous novels – which were both
Scrutiny world. But non-literary friendships in enabled and constrained by their epistolary form –
Cambridge in the late 1940s and early 1950s also so successful? There was nothing parochial about
left their mark. His meditation on the distinctive Watt’s inquiries, despite the modest focus
functions of print, for example, bears the impress announced in his subtitle. In trying to pin down the
of his collaboration with the Cambridge distinctiveness of the novel he ranged across Greek
anthropologist Jack Goody, and his analysis of the tragedy, Roman ‘lives’, medieval fabliaux,
development of family structure in early modern Renaissance romances and French classical drama,
England shows the influence of conversations with touching on authors from Boccaccio to Rabelais to
the historian Peter Laslett. For Watt, as for several Cervantes to Bunyan, and more. But later critics, in
other literary critics of his generation, the their eagerness to convict him of one or other kind
traditional institutional division between English of culpable naivety, tended to lose sight of all that.
As Seager observed, The Rise of the Novel ‘has Richardson’s peculiarly intense engagement with
unfortunately become a book more often the contemporary situation of women. Watt teases
caricatured than consulted’. out with much delicacy the ways in which
In his opening chapter, Watt tentatively offered Richardson is alert to the self-deceptions
an approximate answer to his main question: ‘The accompanying repressed desire: the social code
novel is surely distinguished from other genres and may require absolute sexual restraint on the part of
from previous forms of fiction by the amount of the woman, but such conduct only generates the
attention it habitually accords both to the dramatic tension that drives the narrative forward if
individualisation of its characters and to the there are strong and potentially disruptive forces
detailed presentation of their environment.’ This needing to be restrained, a tension that was to
was the essence of what he dubbed ‘the realism of provide the germ of so much later romantic fiction.
presentation’. The larger historical or meta- Notoriously, Fielding, the third member of
historical story within which he placed these formal Watt’s select club, does not appear to fit the
innovations was ‘the rise of individualism’, a pattern. The illusion of realism is constantly
conceptual compound that, in its general or punctured by authorial interventions, the
abstract form, owed most to German sociologists development of character is subordinated to comic
such as Max Weber and Ernst Troeltsch, though its effect, and the presentation of the hero’s
empirical uses had a longer pedigree in British adventures recalls the picaresque reworking of epic
social and economic thought. Defoe provided rather than the new blending of interiority and
Watt’s first and most compelling exhibit here, as social realism. But Watt’s identification with
the creator of such uncompromising individualists Fielding’s genial worldliness and commitment to
as Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders, both maintaining the fragile fabric of social order is
distinguished, in a phrase Watt used of fellow palpable. Fielding may not exhibit ‘the realism of
prisoners who survived the camps, by ‘the presentation’ that Watt explored in his first two
unreasoning vigour of their urge to live’. But Watt authors, but he does represent ‘the realism of
is no less interested in the democratisation of the assessment’, an implicit wisdom about certain
spiritual life that was a legacy of the Puritan human qualities and where they stand in our
tradition, and here his emphasis shifts from judgment of the well-lived life in society. This is
economic survival to the inner life, the validation of presented as the necessary corrective to the
which he sees as the sine qua non of the corrosive power of individualism: Fielding reminds
development of the novel. us that all our activities are dependent on
As a preliminary to his discussion of submission to collective constraints and the social
Richardson, Watt embarks on a learned analysis of norms that inform them, a view that had been given
‘individualism’ in its more domestic aspect – the starkest possible endorsement by everyday life
namely, the evolution of the characteristically in Japanese prison camps.
modern pattern of the conjugal unit out of the Just as it is important to remember that,
larger, multi-generational, retainer-laden, medieval contrary to the caricature, The Rise of the Novel does
household. Changing family and work patterns not endorse or celebrate ‘individualism’, so we
resulted in, among other things, a marked increase should not overlook Watt’s ambivalence towards
in the early 18th century in the number of ‘genteel Richardson. He found much to admire, above all in
spinsters’. At the same time, a further aspect of the Clarissa, but he also unsparingly identified the ways
legacy of Puritanism was the ‘redefinition of virtue in which Richardson, especially in Pamela,
in primarily sexual terms’. Between them these encouraged the most unrealistic romantic
changes provided the historical conditions for fantasies. Watt found him guilty of using the
technique of realism – or what he also nicely and Lean’s film were found guilty of these charges,
termed his ‘unselective amplitude of presentation’ and MacKay suggests that this is another place
– to ‘re-create the pseudo-realism of the daydream’, where Watt’s wartime experience underwrites his
and picks out a line of descent from Richardson to literary scholarship. For, as he wrote in a later essay
the wish-fulfilment at the heart of the modern about his time as a prisoner, ‘all our circumstances
popular novel. Interestingly, Watt’s implicit were hostile to individual fantasies; surviving
contemporary cultural critique did not confine meant accepting the intractable realities which
itself to the novel, but was extended to the medium surrounded us, and making sure that our fellow
which had taken over some of the novel’s prisoners accepted them too.’ The need to accept
functions, the Hollywood film. This is one of the ‘the intractable realities which surround us’
areas where we would like to know more about his became something of a leitmotif of Watt’s
friendship with Adorno. Watt declared in a later scholarship, an emphasis evident in his admiration
reminiscence that his year in California in the mid- for the only writer to whom he devoted a full-length
1940s ‘was to bring me into touch with someone book, Joseph Conrad.
who was certainly to be more responsible than any MacKay, not unreasonably, sees Watt as part of
other single person for the intellectual shaping of a wider intellectual style that flourished in Britain
The Rise of the Novel, and for the long delay in its in the ten or 15 years after 1945. It emphasised
completion, the late Theodor Adorno’. MacKay has clarity and plainness in writing rather than
unearthed an exchange in 1955 between Adorno, obscurity or ornament, valued concreteness rather
now back in Germany, and Watt, in which Adorno than abstraction, and respected the ordinary and
is soliciting a contribution for a projected book of everyday more than the surreal or exotic. But we
essays on popular culture and Watt appears to be should be careful not to slide from this plausible
thinking of proposing a piece along the lines of Zeitgeisty thought to seeing Watt as a kind of
‘from Richardson’s P to 20c Hollywood’. The essay academic Orwell. Watt had none of the belligerence
remained unwritten, but it is interesting to with which Orwell thrust his carefully constructed
consider whether the later reputation of The Rise of plain-man persona into the reader’s face; Watt’s is
the Novel would have benefited from being more a conversable critical prose, reminiscent in this
widely seen to have a kinship with the radical respect of Empson in his chattier moments and
cultural critique of the Frankfurt School. having much in common with the easy, unshowy
Watt’s censure of Hollywood was not confined critical penetration of Watt’s contemporary Frank
to generalities: he wrote a stinging attack on one of Kermode. But, as his intellectual trajectory
its most successful products, a film which appeared suggests, considerable scholarly resources stood
in the same year as The Rise of the Novel and which surety for this agreeable surface manner. As Watt
touched painfully on Watt’s wartime experience. reflected, his aim had been ‘to transcend what I had
Among his objections to David Lean’s blockbuster learned from the idealist modes of German thought
The Bridge on the River Kwai were its ignorant by translating it into empirical categories of
unrealism about the possibility of escape from the commonsense language’. In keeping such
Thai railway camps and its concentration on the resources largely out of sight, he was following the
improbable exploits of its American hero, Shears recommendation of I.A. Richards, who, after
(played by the hunky William Holden). In both reading an early draft of Watt’s first book in which
respects, Watt argued, the film embodied the all the theoretical scaffolding was still in place,
characteristic defects of fantasy-entertainment advised: ‘If I were you, Ian, I would keep away from
down the ages, exaggerating individual agency and the big transportation companies.’
gratifying the desire for happy endings. Both Pamela
The question of what he called, with The publisher backed down, and Watt’s very
characteristic courtliness, ‘the appropriate good book went out into the world with its
linguistic decorum of literary criticism’ admirably modest two-page preface.
preoccupied Watt, who was temperamentally and Clearly, Watt was far from being a naive reader,
culturally antipathetic to the heavily armoured units but he did believe, with unashamed steadfastness,
which dominated so much humanities scholarship that the critic’s primary obligation was to do justice
in the later part of his life. He acknowledged that to the literary object and to communicate his
‘all more or less specialised pursuits have their own impressions to other, no less sophisticated but
vocabularies; plumbers make a nice distinction sometimes less well-informed readers. He liked to
between a coupling and a union.’ But he went on: quote Erich Auerbach’s assertion that in reading
‘The vocabulary of criticism should be as literature we need an ‘empirical confidence in our
commonsense as possible in its attempt to achieve spontaneous faculty for understanding others on
clarity and accessibility of statement. It should also the basis of our own experience’. As all this
avoid unnecessary abstraction as a courtesy to the suggests, Watt didn’t go in for grand
reader, and to the subject.’ Just how much methodological pronouncements: confronted by
abstraction was necessary was a matter of tactical one attempt to pin a label on him, he replied that
judgment in individual cases. ‘My basic reaction is a yawn followed by a plea of
His commitment to this relaxed pragmatism nolo contendere.’ Still, writing in 1969 to the man
was sorely tried when, relatively late in his career, who had been the much admired commanding
one of the readers of the typescript of his Conrad in officer 0f the British prisoners at the camp on the
the 19th Century for the University of California Press River Kwai, Brigadier Philip Toosey, he did offer a
in effect recommended that the book be turned brisk vindication of his own choice of career as an
down because it lacked a clear statement of academic: ‘Whatever other disadvantages it has,
methodology. Watt’s magisterial reply should be one is never selling oneself, or saying or writing
kept on file for use by all authors subject to this not things other than for what one believes to be the
uncommon form of persecution. objective truth.’ ‘The objective truth’ may not be a
phrase that finds much favour in English
The full critical justification of my Conrad
departments these days, and Watt might have had
enterprise which the Editorial Committee asks
to modify his confidence about not ‘selling oneself’
me to add to my preface would not be
had he had to suffer the imperatives to self-
particularly difficult to do (examples are
advertising that now govern university life. Even so,
available in most doctoral dissertations); but,
this sturdy conviction served him well: he wrote
through its necessary abstractness, over-
only when he had something to say that he believed
simplification, and implied self-importance it
was true, and he always said it with the minimum
would remove the book from the particular
of fuss. There are many worse ways to conduct an
literary sphere where I think it belongs; and if I
academic career.
began the book with such a statement, I would
M
immediately bore, offend or deter many of my
ACKAY presents her case with
readers … I don’t think anyone is entitled to
exemplary tact, but some parts of the
assert as a general principle that every book of
argument cannot help but seem
criticism should contain ‘a forthright statement
speculative or not wholly persuasive. Pointing to
or explanation of the rationale of its critical
the congruities between Watt’s wartime
method.’ I stand with Samuel Johnson in
experiences and the deprivations of Robinson
rejecting ‘the cant of those who judge by
Crusoe is the easy part. Similarly, suggesting that
principles rather than perception’.
Watt’s appreciation of Fielding’s commitment to Pacific Ocean neatly suggests that even the smallest
the social order owed something to his own worlds may have their own immense horizons of
experience of survival depending on the skeletal re- unknowing.) There is some fine close criticism in
creation of order in the prison camps has an these chapters that seems to owe more to the
intuitive appeal. But his handling of Richardson example of figures such as Richards and Empson
poses a greater challenge to this approach, and the than to the years spent in Japanese labour camps.
three chapters on Richardson are the heart of The Writing in another context many years later, Watt
Rise of the Novel. MacKay makes some brave stabs, himself acknowledged this aspect of his formation;
suggesting, for example, that Watt’s experience as he professed great admiration for the dazzling
a prisoner made him better able to sympathise with symphonies of erudition composed by such
Clarissa’s sense of powerless entrapment. Perhaps scholars as Auerbach and Leo Spitzer, but also
so, but the strength of the Richardson chapters is registered his distance: ‘If I am tempted to emulate
the way in which Watt combines the details of the bravura with which they take off from the word
social history with a responsiveness to the peculiar on the page to leap into the farthest empyreans of
power of the epistolary form, as in the brilliant Kulturgeschichte, I soon discover that the Cambridge
flash of sympathy with which he enters into the east winds have condemned me to less giddy
situation of 18th-century gentlewomen, secluded modes of critical transport.’
in their closets, MacKay also seems to press a little hard when
seeking to establish links between the idiom of
where each room has its feverish and
postwar novel criticism and the legal processes of
complicated inner life. Their drama unrolls in a
the war tribunals, or between the British prisoners’
flow of letters from one lonely closet to
literary efforts and the eventual establishment of
another, letters written by an occupant who
creative writing at UEA. Still, whatever minor
pauses only to listen with wild surmise to
reservations one may have about some of her
footsteps in some other part of the house, and
book’s more speculative claims, it offers a moving
who communicates the intolerable sense of
portrait of a figure who subordinated self to subject
strain which arises when an opening door
matter without quite eradicating the traces of
threatens some new violation of a cherished
sufferings and traumas that went far beyond the
privacy.
experience of the subsequent generations that
Watt credited Richardson with a particular made up the bulk of his readership. MacKay’s study
sensitivity to this feature of contemporary female is also a reminder of a moment when literary
experience (within a certain class) – ‘the letter form criticism seemed important in part because it was
… offered Richardson a shortcut, as it were, to the about so much more than literature. In 1979 one
heart’ – but it was Watt himself who explored the colleague greeted the publication of Conrad in the
social changes that had made such experience 19th Century as ‘more Watt on Life’, and there was
available for Richardson’s distinctively truth as well as teasing in the quip. Watt had long
concentrated fictional treatment. And as his admired not just Conrad’s transmutation of
references to the ‘feverish’ inner life, the ‘wild’ stoicism into art, but also his personal
surmise and the ‘intolerable’ sense of strain commitment to the traditional virtues of duty and
suggest, Watt was no less alive than his author to loyalty as ways to shore up one’s fragments against
the intensity of erotic emotion that underwrote the the arbitrary succession of waste and loss which life
daily dramas described in Richardson’s artful otherwise comprised. Linking the novelist to
periods. (Echoing the ‘wild surmise’ with which another figure he venerated, Watt wrote: ‘Neither
Keats has ‘stout’ Cortez’s men first look upon the Johnson nor Conrad wrote directly about their
inner lives, and in each case it is only our

subliminal sense of great energies at play to keep
turbulent and destructive personal feelings under
conscious control which makes us feel that we are
in touch with one of the great heroes of the wars of
the mind.’ Neither Lieutenant Watt nor Professor
Watt were, it seems, comfortable speaking of
themselves in such an exalted register, or indeed
speaking of themselves much at all. But, even so,
there was a form of kinship here that travelled
across the globe and survived the worst
deprivations of the jungles of South-East Asia.
Within days of his repatriation to England after the
war, Watt made his own pilgrimage to Canterbury
to visit Conrad’s grave.
Stefan Collini’s The Nostalgic Imagination: History in

English Criticism came out earlier this year.
Short Cuts
Tom Crewe
N OT MUCH has stuck with me from my

two years studying politics at A-Level. The
word ‘quango’ and what it stands for
(quasi-autonomous non-governmental
Grandiloquence, or chauvinism, of Blair’s type
would seem to be the preserve, currently, of
Brexiteer MPs and the unrepentant Leave voters
flagged down by journalists on a depressed high
organisation). And the couple of times when actual street or sidled over to in a depressing pub. But
politics, the thing itself, knocked on the classroom patriotism gets everywhere, like sand or pine
door asking to be let in. I happened to be in a needles, and Blair’s vocal support for the Remain
politics lesson when David Cameron was declared cause, barely concealed under the fig-leaf of the
the new leader of the Conservative Party in People’s Vote campaign, is suggestive. One of the
December 2005 (‘He’ll never get it,’ our teacher unspoken assumptions on the pro-EU side is that
had said a few weeks previously). I was there again it’s important for Britain to remain a Big Country
in May 2007 when Tony Blair announced he was sitting ‘at the top table’. (Since I’m in a
stepping down as prime minister and leader of the confessional mood, I might as well admit that I feel
Labour Party. Both times we watched political this too.) Why it’s crucial that we stay important
history live on TV. I don’t recall anything about usually goes unexplained, leaving aside for the
Cameron’s acceptance speech (telling), but I’ve moment the question of whether we’re even now as
never forgotten Blair’s farewell. ‘This country is a important as we think we are. It’s not that
blessed nation,’ he said. ‘The British are special. psychological explanations don’t present
The world knows it. In our innermost thoughts, we themselves. No one esteems waste, or carelessness,
know it. This is the greatest nation on earth.’ Cue and Brexit entails both; we might wonder at or be
mad applause. I’ve never forgotten it because of the troubled by the historical process through which
way it made me feel: if tears didn’t spring to my our influence was acquired, but it doesn’t make
eyes, and I’m not prepared to say they didn’t, I much sense to toss it away as an encumbrance. No
undoubtedly brimmed with pride. The greatest nation one likes feeling less significant than they used to,
on earth. Wowzers. Classic Blair, those staccato especially if they were once very significant indeed.
sentences – classically or performatively British, Still, it’s revealing that more people haven’t asked
too, that little allusion (‘innermost thoughts’) to the question: why, really, does it matter?
our habit of understatement, our dislike of showing It’s revealing too that so many Remainers
off. And how like Blair to prefer honest modern currently pronounce Brexit to be ‘embarrassing’
feeling: showing off being permissible surely, just and themselves to be ‘embarrassed’ by it. (Again,
this once, in the circumstances. It occurs to me I’m one of them.) Embarrassment is a social
now that part of the reason I reacted as I did is that condition and ultimately an unthreatening one: no
I’d never heard anyone say anything like this one dies of embarrassment, except figuratively.
before. I’m not sure that I’ve heard anyone say That we feel this emotion so strongly suggests that
anything like it since. more of our amour propre is tied up with a
projected idea of Britishness than we might felt in Scotland and Northern Ireland would take up
previously have admitted. It’s also an indication of the rest of this piece. And that’s without
the ease with which most of us have felt able to considering Wales, which plumped for Leave but
distinguish between the temporary internal state of doesn’t get it in the neck to the same degree.)
the UK, whatever that may be, and the UK in the Brexit as it has lurched along to its uncertain
abstract, understood as a consistent set of destination has increasingly been seen to
qualities, eternal verities. How ‘embarrassed’ have encapsulate, or express, a nation drunk on its own
we been by the ideological savagery of the Tory-led mythology and self-satisfaction; or, as Patrick
governments since 2010? How many of us were McGuinness memorably put it in the LRB of 3
‘embarrassed’ by the UN poverty envoy’s statement January, one ‘high on its own supply’. We have
last year that the UK’s poverty levels were ‘not just a been told that Britain – for which read England, for
disgrace, but a social calamity and an economic which read English people and English politicians
disaster … patently unjust and contrary to British (though two of the worst offenders, Michael Gove
values’ and that the proliferation of food banks was and Liam Fox, are Scots sitting for English seats) –
like something you might expect to see in the wake is in thrall to imperial nostalgia, has delusions of
of ‘a natural disaster or a health epidemic’? There is Great Power status, has never felt itself to be
a corollary in our propensity to judge the political European, has a victim mentality, has a
class by their handling of Brexit as ‘incompetent’. contemptuous attitude to Ireland as its former
‘Competence’ as it was understood before 2016 – possession, has lost any talent it once had for
the ‘competent’ administration of a demonstrably compromise and pragmatism, has become
counterproductive and socially crippling economic unmoored from reality. Pankaj Mishra in the New
policy – is a low bar. The implication would seem York Times drew a straight line from decolonisation
to be that so long as you carry a briefcase and put to the ‘aggressive ignorance of English Brexiteers’:
your trousers on the right way round and don’t ‘none of this would surprise anyone who knows of
leave the EU, you’ve got things nailed down. For a the unconscionable breeziness with which the
certain kind of person (Chuka Umunna, say), the British ruling class first drew lines through Asia
opening ceremony of the London Olympics in 2012 and Africa and then doomed the people living
represents the Britain the referendum ruined: across them to endless suffering.’ Westminster is
quirky, multicultural, outward-looking, ‘at ease seen to be in ‘chaos’, the system to be ‘broken’. The
with itself’. Even ignoring the backdrop of New Yorker ran a cover showing a teetering Big Ben
austerity, the fact that this was a minutely as a cuckoo clock.
calculated, essentially propagandist, publicly Viewed through this prism Brexit looks less like
funded spectacle doesn’t seem to have called into what it was and is – the shock result of a
question its suitability as a symbol. referendum – than the working out of malign fate.
My point isn’t just that there’s plenty of It’s not that I don’t think there were wider forces at
smugness and myopia among the good guys, but play. Many unexpected events look plausible in
that, since everyone tells themselves stories, we retrospect, and with thought can become
need to be equally suspicious of all of them. That comprehensible. Brexit is one of these things – we
includes the one that involves us slipping from might, for instance, cite the rabid and longstanding
being embarrassed about Brexit to being Euroscepticism of the British press and the
embarrassed about being British. Or English, since collusion with it of successive governments. I don’t
we’re the ones who are properly responsible. (An want to pretend, either, that Britain isn’t having a
account of the complex varieties of embarrassment shocking day at the office. I do wonder though if
about Britishness and the English which might be some of us – and some of our friends and
neighbours abroad – haven’t been a little Conservative politicians – if we accept that even the
unforgiving. There is surely a danger of swapping a referendum result was contingent (if only Jeremy
London 2012 version of Britain for a June 2016 one, Corbyn had taken an interest!) – then why are we,
replicating the predisposition to see static truths or our external examiners, so sure we’re a unique
where there can only ever be contingent or at least case? Wouldn’t it be more honest, on all sides, to
confluent ones. After all, Cameron promised a admit that any government charged with leaving
referendum in 2013 believing he would never have the EU – and it’s hardly impossible to imagine
to call it, because he didn’t think he could win a other countries voting the same way, at least prior
majority at the next election. The result of the 2015 to Britain’s experience – would have aimed high, in
election was, as this implies, far from ordained, one way or another, and would have been brought
and was anyhow shaped more decisively by other low? (Wouldn’t this, looking closer to home, have
factors, like Ed Miliband’s popularity or lack of it. been Scotland’s experience of leaving the Union if
(The EU routinely polled very low on British voters’ ‘Yes’ had won out in the referendum of 2014?)
lists of concerns in the years before the There is something unfair, and in the end
referendum.) The 2017 general election also failed misleading, about drawing grand conclusions from
to deliver what was anticipated: a Tory landslide the behaviour of a nation, or political system,
that could be interpreted as representing the placed under severe stress. Even worse when they
nation’s settled will for Brexit meaning Brexit. The have the dull ring of stereotypes. If, next time it has
actual result – a minority Tory government the chance, and as seems ever more likely, Britain
dependent on the backing of a minority party, votes for a Labour government in defiance of the
liable to be defeated if it loses the support of a negative trend for social democratic parties across
fraction of its own MPs, and yet tasked with a Europe, will we still be the nation with its head
monumental political challenge – was guaranteed stuck up its arse? Or will it become apparent that
to produce disorder and instability. It has also had there was always something more complicated
the effect of grossly enlarging the influence of going on?
minority figures, and of giving their opinions gross Brexit so far can fairly be read as proof of the
prominence. How many people had heard of the terrible lure of good storytelling, with the moral
European Research Group (est. 1993) two years that reality eventually comes up trumps. (The US
ago? Nigel Dodds? Even Arlene Foster? The version has reality coming up Trump.) The
preponderance of moderate opinion in Parliament Brexiteers peddled a series of seductive lies about
has been muffled. Who speaks for England? Those Britain’s bargaining power and its weight in the
who have least claim to. What commentators chose world, and told their very worst fibs – about the
to characterise as ‘chaos’ at Westminster in March non-importance of the Irish border – simply by
and April this year was actually the routing of these saying nothing at all. All of these have been publicly
extreme, unrepresentative forces by a series of exposed by harsh experience. Cameron described
parliamentary sorties testifying to the solidity of the Britain in 2015 as ‘the most successful multiracial
middle ground, as well as to the large reserves of democracy on the planet’, but it turns out there’s
strength in the British constitution (the contention an awful lot of racism and thuggery around. The
of Jonathan Parry in the LRB of 18 April). Tories, who had miraculously recovered their
Of course, the UK – the English and Welsh reputation for credibility and responsibility, have
parts of it anyway – is the only country that has been outed as the bunch of imposters they always
voted to leave the EU. It’s also the only country to were: reckless, short-termist and ideologically
have been offered the choice. If we accept that this unsound. Nigel Farage, who we were encouraged to
latter fact was contingent on choices made by see as a pricked balloon, has risen again.
But it’s also possible to see the vote to Leave

another way: as a moment when reality triumphed
over storytelling. The referendum was an
opportunity for a section of the population to signal
that they didn’t believe in the existence of the
country they were told they lived in – a land of high
employment and opportunity, a prosperous and
just nation at ease with itself – and that the gap
between everyday life and everyday rhetoric had
become too great. That disillusion is now, happily,
general. Brexit, whatever the dangers, is forcing
Britain to get to know itself better. Not all countries
are given that opportunity.
Tom Crewe is an editor at the LRB.

‘I’m coming, my Tetsie!’

Freya Johnston
Samuel Johnson edited by David Womersley. Oxford, 1344 pp, £95.00, May 2018
T
HE FIRST TIME Tetty Porter met her Michael, the son of a labourer, had had the rare
future husband, Samuel Johnson, she told good luck to receive a charity school education and
her daughter, Lucy, that she had never was apprenticed to a London stationer. At 24, he
encountered a more ‘sensible’ man. Most readers opened a bookselling and binding shop in
assume she was praising Johnson’s sober, rational Lichfield, but it was forever on the verge of
side; Leslie Stephen, writing in 1878, went so far as collapse. A childhood spent surrounded by books –
to commend Tetty’s penetrative ‘good sense’ for learning how they were made, what they cost, and
discerning the same quality in Johnson, despite his just how difficult they could be to sell – informed
‘grotesque appearance’. But if we take Tetty’s Johnson’s clear-sighted attitude to the literary
‘sensible’ to mean – as in this period it certainly marketplace.
could – ‘quick’, ‘perceptive’, ‘eager’ or ‘ardent’, Sickly at birth, Johnson contracted scrofula, a
Johnson emerges as a rather different character, tubercular infection of the lymph glands, which left
more like Marianne Dashwood, to whom the word him deaf in his left ear, almost blind in one eye and
‘sensible’ is applied in Sense and Sensibility (1811) with dim vision in the other. It also generated scar
before it shifts to her prudent sister, Elinor. tissue and boils that disfigured his face, as did a
Boswell remarked that Johnson ‘had, from his early later bout of smallpox. Friends and strangers
youth, been sensible to the influence of female commented more or less sympathetically on his
charms’. That ‘sensible’ encompassed some pretty compulsive rituals, facial tics, and the strange
warm feelings, as Boswell knew: in 1762, Johnson noises he made, which may have been symptoms of
allegedly told him that ‘the white bubbies and the Tourette’s syndrome. In later life, Johnson told a
silk stockings’ of actresses ‘excite my genitals’. friend that he had never tried to make a good
It was only during the 19th century that the impression on anyone until after the age of thirty,
word sensible became permanently yoked to the ‘considering the matter as hopeless’.
practical, commonsensical part of human nature. He disliked speaking about his background
Tetty, born in the 17th century, probably did not because, as he said (working a nice line in parodic
mean she thought Johnson ‘reasonable; judicious; lordliness), ‘one has so little pleasure in reciting the
wise’ (this definition of sensible is censured as an anecdotes of beggary.’ One childhood pleasure was
example of ‘low conversation’ in his Dictionary of the rummaging among the books in his father’s shop.
English Language). The thing most likely to have The hodge-podge of works he found there, from
struck her was how easily and strongly his feelings arcane philosophy to popular romances, formed
were affected. ‘It was a love-match on both sides,’ the basis of an enormous general knowledge. His
Johnson said simply. reading was impulsive rather than systematic, and
He was born in Market Square, slap bang in the remained so in later life. Rarely finishing a book, he
middle of Lichfield, in September 1709, the elder devoured words ‘ravenously’, as one female friend
son of Michael Johnson and his wife, Sarah, rather put it, comparing him to a hound with a bone. He
old and very proud parents. They had, Johnson told another friend that ‘snatches of reading’ were
recalled, ‘not much happiness from each other’, ‘in a certain degree advantageous. I would put a
and immediately deposited their ambitions in him. child into a library (where no unfit books are) and
let him read at his choice.’ Boswell recounts how Shakespeare’s ‘falsely thrust’. Because this
the young Johnson alighted on a folio edition of language might be used of a dagger, it makes the
Petrarch while hunting for some apples his younger confusion of one foot with another seem a fatal act
brother, Nathaniel, had hidden on a shelf. of betrayal, or likely to lead to one. Johnson seems
By the time he arrived in 1728 to study at to imagine that it is Shakespeare rather than King
Pembroke College, Oxford, Johnson had read, as he John who is confused; that Shakespeare errs in his
proudly recalled, ‘a great many books, which were identification of wrongness; that when he says
not commonly known at the Universities … so that ‘shoes’ he is really thinking of ‘gloves’. The passage
when I came to Oxford, Dr Adams, now master of communicates, over and above everything else,
Pembroke College, told me, I was the best qualified what Auden called the ‘nuance of damage’.
for the University that he had ever known come The family business was left in chaos when
there.’ But the money ran out, and he was unable to Johnson’s father died in December 1731. Johnson’s
complete his degree. Long before, he had stopped own efforts to become a schoolteacher seem to
attending lectures because his toes were poking have failed in large part due to the odd way he
through his shoes. He became wretchedly sensitive looked and moved. His anger and insecurity were
to small acts of kindness and charity. Legend has it widely and understandably construed as arrogance.
that when an anonymous benefactor left a pair of At 22, he secured his first regular employment as
new shoes outside his college room, he threw them an undermaster at a grammar school in
away, bursting ‘with indignation’. Leicestershire. But he soon fell out with the
Johnson’s fury on that occasion may help to headmaster, ‘an abandoned brutal rascal’, and left,
explain the footnote he appended, in his 1765 with the heady sensation of escaping a prison.
edition of Shakespeare’s plays, to a passage in King Apart from a subsequent two-month period as a
John about shoes: private tutor near Lichfield, his teaching career was
suspended until after his marriage to Tetty in July
- - - slippers, (which his nimble haste
1735. He was 25, his wife a widowed 46-year-old
Had falsely thrust upon contrary feet,)
mother of three. Two of her children never spoke to
I know not how the commentators
her again; none of them had children themselves.
understand this important passage, which in Dr
Supported by Tetty’s funds, Johnson established at
Warburton’s edition is marked as eminently
Edial Hall, three miles west of Lichfield, what he
beautiful, and, on the whole, not without
described as a ‘private boarding-school for Young
justice. But Shakespeare seems to have
Gentlemen’. Following months of careful
confounded the man’s shoes with his gloves.
preparation, the enterprise was a disaster. Only a
He that is frighted or hurried may put his hand
few pupils ever turned up, among them the future
into the wrong glove, but either shoe will
theatrical superstar David Garrick, one of whose
equally admit either foot. The authour seems to
earliest comic turns was to impersonate Johnson’s
be disturbed by the disorder he describes.
‘tumultuous and awkward fondness’ for his wife,
JOHNSON.
‘running round the bed after she had lain down,
‘The authour’ referred to here is as and crying “I’m coming, my Tetsie, I’m coming, my
accommodatingly non-specific as the shoes that Tetsie!”’ Boswell speculated that Johnson’s lifelong
‘admit either foot’, but the name which follows tendency to learn and work in a desultory fashion
hard on the heels of authorial disorder is made him less able to impress methodical
‘JOHNSON’, not Shakespeare. Which of them, in knowledge on the boys than an inferior but more
truth, is ‘disturbed’ by what ‘he describes’? A consistent instructor might have been. He tactfully
weirdly strong and invasive mood is suggested by alluded to the impression Johnson must have made
in the classroom. Describing Johnson’s erudition drunk and morose physician Robert Levet,
as acquired ‘by fits and starts’ and ‘violent commemorated by Johnson in a beautifully spare
irruptions’, Boswell indirectly conjures the image poem of 1782; a young black servant, Frank Barber,
of the schoolmaster lunging, barking and twitching whom he sent to school at his own expense, and to
before his pupils. whom he left a large sum of money; and the ‘surly
The following year, 1737, reduced again to slut’ Poll Carmichael, probably rescued from
poverty, Johnson left his wife in Lichfield and, prostitution. It’s hardly surprising that, for nearly
accompanied by Garrick, headed to London in the two decades, he spent as much time away from this
hope of finding employment. He carried with him house as he could, staying during the week at the
the manuscript of a play, Irene, which – unlike his Streatham residence of his wealthy friends Henry
subsequent compositions – had been written and and Hester Thrale and returning to his squabbling,
revised with painstaking attention. But this would miserable companions only at the weekend. His
not be the work to make his name (it wasn’t relationship with Hester – the ‘dear mistress’ of his
performed until 1749). He turned instead to the most charming and most agonised letters – attests
publisher Edward Cave, proposing various kinds of more than any other to how ‘sensible’ a man
writing for inclusion in the Gentleman’s Magazine. Johnson truly was. Generous, gossipy, tough,
Cave accepted several contributions, launching clever and ambitious, she put up for many years
Johnson into professional authorship. His first, with his violent mood swings and constant
modest success was a poem called ‘London’, and demands for attention, while enduring her
the familiar figure of the hardened city-dweller, husband’s indifference and the loss of most of their
champion speaker and greedy reveller began to take 12 children.
shape. ‘A tavern chair is the throne of human When Henry died in 1781, Hester fell in love
felicity,’ Johnson declared in later life. He became with the Italian musician Gabriel Piozzi – whom
the bosom companion (and, later, biographer) of she married, to Johnson’s furious hurt and disgust,
the squalid and glamorous poet Richard Savage. At in 1784. He was suffering by this time from
night, ‘in high spirits and brimful of patriotism’, emphysema, dropsy and an enormous sarcocele
they walked the streets together, denouncing (defined in the Dictionary as ‘a fleshy excrescence of
ministerial corruption and vowing to stand by their the testicles, which sometimes grow so large as to
country. Savage’s licentiousness, Boswell reported, stretch the scrotum much beyond its natural size’),
may have led his protégé ‘into some indulgencies whose weight and tenderness necessitated
which occasioned much distress to his virtuous ‘suspension’ and ‘exploration by puncture’. From
mind’. December 1783 to late April 1784 he was unable to
Public recognition of his abilities eventually leave the house. When, to everyone’s amazement,
came in 1755, when Johnson, by now in his forties he recovered, his first excursion was to St
and with more than fifteen years of hackwork Clement’s Church to give thanks for his
behind him, published his Dictionary, the fruit of deliverance. Until the end of his life eight months
eight years’ labour. Even this success did not later, Johnson continued to embrace new
prevent him from being arrested for debt the experiences (‘Sir, I look upon every day to be lost,
following year. He finally attained a measure of in which I do not make a new acquaintance’). His
financial security in 1762, when he accepted a royal curiosity led him, at seventy, to shave the hair from
pension. His wife did not live to see his triumph. his arms and chest just to see how long it would
After her death in 1752, Johnson gathered around take to grow again. He made one last visit to
him a household of querulous and troublesome Lichfield and commissioned new tombstones for
dependents: the blind poet Anna Williams; the his parents and brother, the latter having died in
mysterious circumstances (he may have committed which is organised according to genre and
suicide) in that charged and hectic year of 1737. therefore confines the personal prose unpublished
Surrounded by friends and admirers, Johnson died in Johnson’s lifetime to one volume and the poems
at his home in Bolt Court, just off Fleet Street. His to another. A one-volume selected edition can
last known words were spoken to a young female afford to be more experimental, to suggest
visitor whose identity has never been established: comparisons and analogues – ways of reading
‘God bless you, my dear.’ across life and work, combining print and
T
manuscript sources, placing self-lacerating diary
O READ his life in his work – to see that entries alongside a differently devastating polemic
work as bearing the imprint of an existence – that might not otherwise be available.
that was, in Johnson’s words, ‘radically Johnson’s writings seemed to his
wretched’ as well as triumphant – is to attempt the contemporaries to offer personal guidance for all
kind of biographical criticism at which Johnson stages of life. Chance acquaintances, regular
himself excelled, which he might indeed be said to correspondents and acolytes came to rely on his
have invented in the Lives of the Poets. He might also advice and knowledge about everything from
be said, posthumously, to have suffered from it, reading lists to the digestive faculties of dogs. Such
since the grip of Boswell’s vivid and brilliantly reliance was not always welcome. When one young
idiosyncratic account of his friend on readers’ man called out, ‘Mr Johnson, would you advise me
imaginations was so immediate and so tenacious to marry?’ he was brusquely told: ‘I would advise no
that it quickly came to seem bigger and more man to marry, Sir, who is not likely to propagate
compelling than the work itself. The astonishing understanding.’ Characteristically, Johnson shortly
range of that work is fairly represented in David after repented of his impatience, providing his
Womersley’s selection: poetry (in Latin and interrogator with a lengthy ‘dissertation’ on the
English), fiction, sermons, lectures, journalism, pros and cons of matrimony which was ‘so useful,
literary criticism, political pamphlets, a fairy tale, a so elegant, so founded on the true knowledge of
travelogue, biographies, an edition of human life, and so adorned with beauty of
Shakespeare’s plays, and the dictionary. By giving sentiment, that no one ever recollected the offence,
each of them due weight, this superb new edition – except to rejoice in its consequences’. The
a slab of a book – suggests a way of putting anecdote typifies the man: Johnson was able to
Johnson’s life and his writing back together again. explain moral questions so admirably that people
In the first few pages, we find four schoolboy forgot all about his initial roughness. In fact, his
translations of Horace put alongside an early poem tendency to explain such questions in the fullest
called ‘Festina Lente’, thirty lines of verse on the and most down-to-earth terms was often a way of
doomed hopes of ‘The Young Author’, and one of atoning for the harsh first impression he had made.
the little prose memorials he occasionally We cannot know what Johnson told the young
composed to soothe himself, this one recording his man, but we can hazard a guess. In Rasselas (1759)
mother’s ‘difficult and dangerous labour’. Princess Nekayah gives a summary of the
Womersley’s positioning of these texts, based on advantages and disadvantages of single and of
attested dates of composition rather than matrimonial life: ‘Marriage has many pains, but
publication, possesses biographical and critical celibacy has no pleasures.’ Her sentiments chime
coherence, providing the reader with a sense of with Johnson’s own; one friend remembered his
Johnson’s exceptional versatility in public and comment that ‘even ill-assorted marriages were
private life. This effect cannot be achieved by the preferable to cheerless celibacy.’ This careful
full-dress, multi-volume Yale edition of his works, adjustment of preferences – acknowledging the
inevitable discrepancy between human hopes and right to attack’. Boswell pictured his friend’s mind
human reality, yet opting for one kind of as
disappointment as preferable to another – is one of
the vast amphitheatre, the Colisæum at Rome.
the most valuable aspects of Johnson’s thinking. It
In the centre stood his judgment, which like a
is a kind of mournful pragmatism.
mighty gladiator, combated those
‘What should books teach,’ he asked, ‘but the
apprehensions that, like the wild beasts of the
art of living?’ Writing to and about the ‘bulk of
Arena, were all around in cells, ready to be let
mankind’ was the literary equivalent of his own
out upon him. After a conflict, he drives them
escape from loneliness to the comforts of social
back into their dens; but not killing them, they
life, the only cure, he said, for his ‘vile melancholy’.
were still assailing him.
Solitude and idleness were, in his view, the two
roads to madness; his criticism of one friend as ‘a Tales of Johnson embracing physical activity for
very unclubable man’ was a serious objection. its own sake, as well as in order to drive the wild
Johnson always sought to bring one person’s beasts back into their dens, are numerous. Boswell
experience into contact with another’s – this was, (who knew him in his later years) remembered him
in his view, the chief aim of biography, his favourite jumping over a stile, rolling down a hill, racing
kind of writing – and hence to palliate his own and against younger acquaintances, and perpetually
his readers’ isolation. So his Lives of the Poets straining to resist the siren lure of inertia. For
presents Milton not only as the contriver of Paradise Johnson, motion possessed an ethical dimension,
Lost, but as a hopelessly unsuccessful schoolmaster such that inactivity (his own notorious indolence
and a strangely cruel father. The connection included) might be understood not simply as
between writing and living, the application of one idleness, but as a crime against nature:
to the other, were subjects to which he returned
With ease, however, if it could be secured,
throughout his long career. Unlike many authors,
many would be content; but nothing terrestrial
he did not shirk the potentially embarrassing
can be kept at a stand. Ease, if it is not rising
question, ‘What is the point of books?’ And in view
into pleasure, will be falling towards pain; and
of the scale of many of his literary enterprises, it is
whatever hope the dreams of speculation may
heartening to find him complain: ‘Alas, Madam!
suggest of observing the proportion between
How few books are there of which one can ever
nutriment and labour, and keeping the body in
possibly arrive at the last page?’ and ‘a book may be
a healthy state by supplies exactly equal to its
good for nothing; or there may be only one thing in
waste, we know that, in effect, the vital powers
it worth knowing; are we to read it all through?’ He
unexcited by motion, grow gradually languid;
recommended pocket-sized volumes, readily
that as their vigour fails, obstructions are
available at moments of boredom or crisis, as the
generated; and that from obstructions proceed
best kind of literary resource, making the obvious
most of those pains which wear us away slowly
but frequently overlooked point that ‘that book is
with periodical tortures, and which, though
good in vain which the reader throws away.’
they sometimes suffer life to be long, condemn
Naturally competitive, Johnson was always
it to be useless, chain us down to the couch of
rating, weighing, comparing and assessing, and he
misery, and mock us with the hopes of death.
revelled in conversational and literary disputes (the
verdicts he offers, when in company, should be Here, the pursuit of one thing causes its
taken with a bucket of salt). In the Rambler, he opposite, and the restless agility of Johnson’s own
observes that an author ‘may be considered as a writing means that the argument never reposes on
kind of general challenger, whom every one has a one viewpoint for long. The style is properly at
odds with the subject, just as the pursuit of comfort accordingly (as he put it in the ‘Life of Dryden’),
turns out to promote suffering. By animating ease ‘whatever can happen to man has happened so
as an active agent (a typical manoeuvre in his often that little remains for fancy or invention.’ Yet
writing), Johnson makes it cease to be the hoped- he also argued, in the Adventurer (a biweekly
for state of motionless contentment. Even if we periodical that followed the model of the earlier
want to stay still, we should not. We should Rambler), that ‘the mutability of mankind will
embrace our native mobility, rather than seek to always furnish writers with new images, and the
work against it. And yet Johnson’s wish that there luxuriance of fancy may always embellish them
might, after all, be a secure state of some kind, with new decorations,’ despite the fact that we are,
somewhere, for ‘the mind can only repose on the as he put it in the Rambler, ‘all prompted by the
stability of truth’, informs the sympathetic tone in same motives, all deceived by the same fallacies, all
which all this is elaborated. animated by hope, obstructed by danger, entangled
Johnson presents his writing partly as an illness by desire, and seduced by pleasure’.
and partly as a cure. A reader, or a different kind of The aim of Johnson’s writing, and of the books
writer, might think that an author should display an he admired, was to urge readers back to their
ability to penetrate into our nature far beyond that present responsibilities in the world, hungry to
of other human beings. But as soon as Johnson or fight and succeed. If human life is ‘everywhere a
one of his characters makes the reader feel an state in which much is to be endured, and little to
elevated sentiment about the achievements of be enjoyed’, then ‘the only end of writing is to
literature, or about the greatness of writers, he enable the readers better to enjoy life, or better to
turns that sentiment on its head. When Imlac, the endure it.’ Literature and criticism, he argued, will
sage of Rasselas, expatiates to his young charge on always be informed and corrected by the lives of
the tremendous difficulty of being a poet, he is their readers, rather than vice versa: ‘Human
diagnosed as experiencing an ‘enthusiastic fit’ in experience, which is constantly contradicting
trying to ‘aggrandise his own profession’. theory, is the great test of truth.’
What, then, can the writer reasonably hope to
achieve? The Rambler gives would-be authors a Freya Johnston, a fellow of St Anne’s College,
choice. They may be inventive, or they may be Oxford, is writing a book about Jane Austen.
decorative. The best writers will succeed in making
new facts and opinions appear to be something we
have always known; or, conversely, they will make
what we have always known seem worthy of
renewed attention. Throughout his literary
criticism, Johnson disparaged the pursuit of
originality for its own sake and defended the act of
copying: not in the sense of idle plagiarism, but of
strenuous fidelity to the world. For this reason,
imitation often emerges from his writing as a more
admirable – and sometimes more difficult – pursuit
than invention.
His attacks on wilful oddity were born of the
convictions that literature ought to deal in universal
truths; that human nature was fundamentally the
same in every time and every place; and that,
Two Poems
Jamie McKendrick
Court of the Lions

After fifty years to revisit the Alhambra and witness
the same water spewing from the lion’s maw:
I remember wearing a silver short-sleeved shirt
adorned with dragons, and for the first time,
on the airport runway, hearing the night alive

with the cicadas’ tiny anvils. This time, the metal plate
screwed to my femur vibrates to their call, my heart
to the murmur of marble, the patter of water.
Afterquake
By some cosmic quirk the disconnected phone
unleashed a scarlet squeal. – I pounced.
Before the apology expired I asked and got
the wrong number the voice had tried,
so for a whole year without a single bill

I owned those magic digits to dispense
– only for incoming not outgoing calls
but a tiny lifeline to the ancient flat
in via Torquato Tasso I shared with the din

of Cerberus barking in the courtyard – forget the rat –
and a crack the earthquake left in the vaulted ceiling.
Thirty years on, in the small dark hours,

I reach for the black Bakelite receiver
to hear the music of Venus receding.
Jamie McKendrick’s latest collection is Anomaly. His translation of Giorgio Bassani’s The Novel of Ferrara came
out last year.
The Twin Sister’s Twin Sister

Adam Mars-Jones
Armand V.: Footnotes to an Unexcavated Novel by Dag Solstad, translated by Steven Murray. Vintage, 256 pp,
£11.99, May 2018
T. Singer by Dag Solstad, translated by Tiina Nunnally. Vintage, 272 pp, £9.99, May 2018
A
BID of ‘Misère’ in a game of solo whist to the author in the sense that he is unable to write
means that the player undertakes to lose it. He can see it, see into it, but he can’t write it’)
every trick – it’s a sort of grand slam in and as being an act of will: ‘The shape the novel
reverse. Dag Solstad’s contract with the reader, on takes is unknown, since the author at some early
the basis of these two books, is similar: he point refused to enter into it and lead it forward.’
undertakes not to make the best of his materials, The distance between the two texts, the
producing an apparently methodical collapsing of unexcavated novel and the footnotes, is sometimes
novelistic machinery. The conventional priorities of expressed in lateral terms (with the novel ‘over
fiction – drawing character, creating drama and a there’ and the footnotes ‘here’), sometimes with
sense of movement – are turned inside out. the extra dimension of height, so that the novel is
The protagonists of both books are Everyman ‘the text up there’ as opposed to the footnotes,
figures – Singer more obviously so, as a librarian in which are down here but conceivably correspond to
a provincial Norwegian town. Armand V., though the higher geography, as the sewers of Paris closely
imagined as ‘some sort of story about Everyman’, follow the street plan above. It seems obvious that a
has developed differently according to the writer- novel must occupy a higher plane of reality than its
narrator, since ‘the story has now taken a turn away footnotes, though in this case the footnotes exist
from what I previously meant to be its central and the novel doesn’t, so you could say that the
focus.’ Quite a drastic turn, in fact, with Armand V. ontological shoe is on the other foot.
now a distinguished Norwegian diplomat near the The principles of the novel’s construction are
end of his career. expounded in two places, one near the beginning
Armand V. is described in the subtitle as and the other towards the end, with a fair amount
‘Footnotes to an Unexcavated Novel’. The sly of contorted logic both times. ‘But who wrote the
authority of the footnote, auxiliary by definition but novel originally, if I’m simply the one who
in a position to distort or encrust the meanings of discovered and excavated it?,’ the first passage
the primary text, has been exploited before in asks. ‘This is a comment to a place in the text above
fiction, in Pale Fire above all, where the deranged that deals with, or conceals, a metaphysical
Kinbote smothers with his self-obsessed concern of the highest order.’ The difference
commentary the poem he imagines he is serving. between ‘deals with’ and ‘conceals’ here has to be a
Here the situation is different. The annotator is also moot point, at a fairly extreme remove of
the novelist, who has somehow become separated mootness, since ‘the text above’ isn’t on offer to the
from the novel he meant to write, or ‘excavate’, as if reader. In the second passage we’re told that
it existed already in every detail, and is offering the
a novel comes together little by little, but does
mass of footnotes as a substitute, perhaps a
that contradict the fact that it has been there all
consolation prize. His separation from the novel is
along, from the beginning? Hidden.
described, in the same paragraph, as being the
Slumbering. Buried. No matter how much I
result of some sort of block (‘The novel is invisible
repudiate the notion that the novel has been completely different time, and at a completely
there from the beginning, I can’t escape the different place, and with characters who are
possibility, at any rate, that it might be true altogether different, such as Armand, or those
after all. In fact, the more I contradict myself, who aren’t even included here in this text at this
the more convinced I am that I’m not time (such as Armand’s son, who wasn’t born
contradicting myself, but that writing a novel yet).
means not inventing it, but uncovering it.
The context being offered is a context with no
There’s no shortage of apparent contradiction, context. This is the equivalent of being blindfolded
certainly with the sentence ‘Of course I could have and spun round until you can hardly stand up, a
delved into the novel above and written it down’, ritual of welcome indistinguishable from the
which comes just before the second passage and humiliation of a hazing.
seems flatly opposed to the statement earlier in the In the scene that follows, Armand, returning
book that that author can see the Ur-Armand V., early after a lengthy trip abroad to his Oslo flat,
even see into it, but not write it. where his son Are has been staying, finds him and a
If there is lucidity to be had on this topic, it woman in a tableau he takes to be charged with
must be here: ‘wishing to write a novel about the erotic humiliation: ‘A young man, wearing only
Norwegian diplomat Armand V., I’ve decided the underpants, was kneeling before a young, fully
best way to realise this is not by writing a novel dressed woman … The girl tossed her head, and
about him, but by allowing him instead to appear in her hair swung softly around her; she gave him
an outpouring of footnotes to this novel. The sum such a look of contempt, while his son trembled in
of these footnotes, therefore, is the novel about his abject state.’ Armand manages to leave the flat
Armand V.’ Anyone who gets as far as page 194 has unnoticed. Not exactly a comfortable moment for a
presumably made peace with the book’s parent to witness, though it’s hardly an extreme of
procedures. The truth-value of the passage would perversity. Armand’s reaction is given a starkness
be unchanged by its appearing on page 1, but the verging on expressionism: ‘It was impossible to
use-value would be mightily enhanced. It seems erase. Forever. The image was bloody and true. He
that obsession with the writer’s struggles is didn’t know what to do about it. Bloody. True. The
accompanied by indifference to the reader’s – an blood flowed, in the worst way imaginable, the
indifference that may border on hostility. Armand’s worst conceivable, it was as if he waded in it where
son, present from the beginning of the book, is he stood.’ The decontextualised reader can either
given a name only on its penultimate page, as if to assume that Armand has a fiercely conservative
advertise the arbitrariness of its previous omission attitude to sexual morality, though nothing later in
and to reveal something that became detectable the book confirms this, or that Solstad feels the
rather earlier – an element of power play nested need to produce a tonal climax that has no real
inside the aesthetic and philosophical speculation. connection with the novel’s business, when it gets
The dramatic scene is hardly the currency round to declaring what that might be. Although
Solstad trades in, but he does start Armand V. with there are painful differences between father and
one. A compelling opening scene is a classic way of son (more often suppressed than openly
involving readers, except that this one comes with a rehearsed), sexual morality isn’t one of the issues
caveat, spelled out in the opening paragraph: that divide them, and anyway Armand never
mentions what he has witnessed to Are.
This footnote, the very first, suffers from having
The longest scene in the book is a shrewd
a displaced time perspective … [it] is a
though inert account of the dynamics among a
commentary on something that took place in a
group of students seen mainly in their leisure
hours, chatting in the university cafeteria, playing mother of his son’ – that’s about it. It’s mentioned
chess, or in the ‘totally distinctive and Norwegian that she has an ‘untranslatable name’, curious in
setting’ of a timbered cabin in Nordmarka, basic itself since a name’s function is to designate one
accommodation for skiers provided by the Oslo person rather than another, not to have an
Student Athletic Association. The section starts as independent meaning. Armand’s first wife, N, gets
if recounting part of Armand’s history – ‘In the the perk of an initial, a reasonable enough mark of
mid-1960s, Paul Buer and his best friend Armand favour considering that she is ‘an utterly decisive
arrived in Oslo to study at the university at woman in Armand’s life’. Armand also has a long-
Blindern’ – but the focus soon shifts to Paul, and lasting connection – one that outlasts the marriage,
then to Jan Brosten, ‘with whom Paul would though in an attenuated form – with N’s twin sister,
eventually become strongly linked’, and from there but she’s only ever that, ‘the twin sister’. The
to a whole fistful of characters luxuriating in the advantages of withholding a name (or initial) must
possession of both first and last names, be very great, to compensate for the disagreeable
commodities strictly rationed elsewhere, and texture it gives to the prose, somehow both abstract
withheld even from the title character. These and clogged:
characters play no part in the novel’s development,
Sometimes, when Armand was lying with N, he
though development is exactly the point of
would suddenly wish he was lying with her twin
novelistic interest that this writer refuses.
sister. But sometimes the opposite, when he lay
More than two pages are devoted to the games
with N he was glad it was N he lay with and not
of chess played between Paul Buer and Jan Brosten,
her twin sister, because just then he
and the strange contrast between Brosten’s
remembered her twin sister, and recalled that
apparently impulsive style of play and his attitude
her twin sister had never been the way N was
to life generally, a passage that would be a tangent
now … In any event he visited the twin sister
even if Paul Buer and not Armand were the
again. It could well be that it was after an
protagonist of the novel. Paul isn’t even built up as
experience with N that was not of the type first
a foil to Armand, though at this point Armand is so
mentioned – meaning that he longed for the
vague a presence that it’s hard to imagine what
twin sister while he lay with N – but of the latter
might constitute a foil. At the moment when
type, meaning he had lain with N and been
Armand’s name finally recurs, on page 88, it has
clearly aware that he, at that moment, was glad
been absent for exactly 44 pages, as if to avoid
to be lying with N, and not with the twin sister,
infringing a rule that fictional protagonists must
and yet he decided to visit her twin sister again.
have been present, at any given point, for at least
half of the book – a statute applying even to the At one point N is referred to as ‘the twin sister’s
anti-novel, which may be Armand V.’s category. If twin sister’.
Solstad is playing a game with the form of the book In this entanglement there’s a hint of Nabokov,
it’s certainly a game like chess, inherently not the Nabokov of Pale Fire but of Ada, with its
manipulative and attritional, rather than anything exploration of the forbidden degrees of intimacy.
more ludic. Nabokov also liked to thin the texture of novelistic
Perhaps by the conventions of the book a illusion, but he went about it subtly. The
defective or missing name denotes importance in a puppetmaster showed his hand only slyly and
character, but by that logic Are’s mother would discreetly, to point up his skill in hiding it when he
loom large, since she’s not named even in part. In chose to. And of course Nabokov would have
fact, she hardly features at all: ‘Armand’s second produced cascades of rapt sensual detail – nothing
wife showed up in the early 1980s and became the could be less in his vein than the bare description
of Armand carrying the twin sister into her mediates between the two factions he thinks of as
bedroom, ‘laying her down on the bed and sating the hypochondriacs and the mortals, without
his desire’. If Solstad had wanted to discourage his concealing his preference for joining the mortals,
readers from making the comparison, he might ‘since he too is just that’.
have considered choosing initials other than V and The faint glow of companionability created by
N for his characters – he virtually stamps the prose these passages lasts until just over the page, when
with Nabokov’s monogram. Armand’s academic background is mentioned: ‘He
If a fiction writer constantly usurps the position had a minor in both German and French, which
of protagonist, as Solstad does in Armand V., not meant that he spoke three foreign languages
just in the book as a whole but in individual fluently (for those slow on the uptake: German,
passages – ‘As Armand searched for the house at French and English).’ That arsey parenthesis
the end of a specific cul-de-sac it occurs to me that suggests an author who may want readers but
I’ve been here before’ – he or she needs to deliver in doesn’t necessarily undertake to respect them.
areas where a protagonist would also be expected Armand’s major academic subject was history, and
to shine, areas such as vitality or charm. There are for many years he cherishes the idea of rewriting a
tiny sparks of seductiveness in the text, but they’re multi-volume classic in the field, Aschehoug’s
rapidly stamped out. The suggestion that N can be History of the World, published in 16 instalments in
characterised as carrying a lamp, while her twin the 1980s and 1990s. At this point it seems to be
sister carries a torch, shining it ‘on her path as she the reader’s turn to look down on the nominal
walked, cautiously but precisely, on the path she hero, since Armand’s objection to the books isn’t a
never took with Armand’, has a passing eloquence matter of interpretation, but is wilfully formalistic.
that doesn’t survive elaboration: ‘In the end it It bothers him that the arrangement of the 16
turned out that the opposite was also true, that it volumes divides time up so arbitrarily, so that Vol I
was the twin sister who carried a lamp, and N who stretches from the beginnings of humanity to 1200
led the way with a torch.’ bc, while four volumes are required to cover the
The subject of smoking, or the increasing legal period of his own life, and he’s not even fifty when
restrictions on the practice, prompts navel-gazing the books appear. His revision will adhere to the
writerly reflection (reader engagement is low on principle of the 16-volume format, but will devote
Solstad’s list of priorities): an unvarying two hundred years to each instalment.
On second thoughts, he decides that five hundred
The main point is that the vulgar Smoking Law
years a volume will reflect a more disciplined sense
will lead to an increased focus on the literary
of history, and will allow him to go back to 6000
significance of cigarettes. I have to consider
bc. This is ‘Aschehoug’s History of the World, first
how little the characters in my novels have been
revision of Armand’s original revision’, or it would
depicted in relation to the cigarette they’re
be if this wasn’t a laborious thought-experiment,
smoking; it has been such a natural thing, both
lasting quite a few pages, and building up to a
for them and for me, that it hardly needed to be
question of only moderate sophistication: ‘When
mentioned. But that’s over now. It’s time to
does the time end for descendants to legitimately
revive the cigarette as a stylish accessory. A
pass judgment on the past?’ (A Norwegian
literary symbol, something of significance. A
publisher called Aschehoug has published
prop that unites my century, the 20th century.
Solstad’s fiction in the past, and Torkel Halvorsen
When he plays host in a Norwegian embassy, Aschehoug (1822-1909) was a legal theorist and
Armand provides a discreet room for smokers. politician, but it may be more to the point that the
Sometimes it’s his own office. In this way he word means ‘ash hill’.) Armand comes out of these
pages looking pretty silly, treating past time as reduced to a distant buzzing by the time he told his
sausage meat to be parcelled up in casings, but father; it was only Armand’s scornful reaction that
Solstad’s procedures have their own waywardness, made it a reality.
since he divides Armand V. into 99 footnotes, but
He, the diplomat, lost his temper when his own
needs to add extra numberings (1C, 98B) to make
son told him he was thinking of enlisting to be
the tally work, as he ties off the material into
an elite soldier. Honestly? The professional
essayistic chipolatas, with the occasional meaty
diplomat behaves undiplomatically towards his
narrative link.
own son, and subsequently the son makes a
Though he represents his country, Armand is
choice that he probably wouldn’t have made if
an invisible dissident from Norwegian foreign
he had not been upset by his father’s
policy, resenting its submission to American
undiplomatic reaction. Honestly? Let’s put it
interests. There can’t be many ambassadors in
this way: Armand chose to lose his temper
constant instinctual accord with the government
when his son told him about this unfortunate
whose spokesmen they are, but Armand’s case is
choice he was thinking of making. He chose to
extreme, amounting almost to an unspoken
lose his temper and behave as the person he
nihilism. He lives in ‘a linguistic prison’,
was. The boy’s father. He could have avoided
sometimes hearing his opinions shouted as slogans
this. He could have controlled himself. But he
by demonstrators in the street, but still rejecting
didn’t. He was who he was. Now his son would
those who shout them. ‘He didn’t mean a word he
have to become who he was going to be.
said,’ except when he talked to himself as he
prepared for bed after an official function, ‘nor did This passage manages to seem both cursory
he stand wholeheartedly behind anything he did. It and overdone. It’s not that drama and analysis are
was all mimicry.’ His son, Are, has joined the army sworn enemies – Milan Kundera, for instance,
without consulting him, and late in the book specialises in the mid-novel seminar. But in his
reveals that he is enlisting in an elite unit. case when the action resumes it has been enriched
Presumably he’s unaware of his father’s bad faith, rather than neutralised.
T
and is trying to exercise his own talents in a
patriotic area where the currency happens to be HE TENSION between father and son can’t
actions rather than words. It’s possible that he’s be allowed to stand and so a further
calling his father’s bluff, but that notion seems to opportunity to break the deadlock is
introduce nuance surplus to requirements. arranged. A restaurant meal, a public setting which
This is a family conflict that could take place in may either promote or sabotage the chances of
a fair number of countries and in any decade since harmony. Both father and son turn up, but they
the 1960s. It’s one that the realistic tradition in need hardly have bothered since the scene itself
fiction is well placed to handle – business as usual, stays away. Solstad gives plenty of detail for once,
grist to the mill. That’s not the way it plays out including the name and location of the restaurant,
here, naturally. There are the beginnings of a Theatercaféen opposite the National Theatre (Are
reasonably compelling scene in Are’s room, of course is still unnamed). He passes on the
complete with dialogue and physical detail – Are information that five o’clock is the traditional time
sitting on the edge of the bed, his back ‘ramrod to eat in Norway, even for formal Sunday dinners.
straight’ – but then it’s time for a new footnote and The restaurant is quiet on an early Sunday evening,
a change of angle, analysing the scene in with family parties and groups of friends, while
retrospect. Are’s idea of becoming an elite soldier during the week it’s buzzing and even glamorous.
had probably been transient, perhaps already Oh, and prices for the Sunday menu are much
lower. They both choose traditional fare, times’, could be a travelling salesman out of a
cauliflower soup, steak and crème caramel. They Flannery O’Connor story, though in a Norwegian
finish a good bottle of red wine, so Armand orders literary context Solstad is more likely to be
two glasses of dessert wine to go with their inverting a narrative trope of Knut Hamsun’s, the
pudding. They also have a liqueur with their coffee. arrival of an enigmatic, vital young man in a sleepy
Anything else, something that doesn’t seem to have town.
strayed in from a TripAdvisor review? Oh yes, ‘they Eyde, as exaggeratedly particularised as Singer
calmly and quietly conversed’. After the meal, is bland, is already installed in Notodden, and as
Armand thinks about ‘life in general, and about his the regional head of Norsk Hydro may be the most
own life in particular’, feeling that ‘in spite of prominent person in the area. Singer accepts a lift
everything, something had happened at this from the station in Eyde’s chauffeur-driven car and
dinner, something that might have to do with spends the evening with him in his grand villa,
small, epic shifts.’ Whatever he has been privy to, it though it’s more like a small palace stuffed with
hasn’t been passed on, and the blocked priceless paintings, grandfather clocks,
communication in the book doesn’t seem so much centrepieces made of gold and silver. Eyde
to be between writer and reader as between the monopolises Singer and the book for close to forty
writer and his form. pages with his insistent hospitality and no less
Armand V. is self-consciously a late and baffled insistent opinions: ‘It’s good to taste the
work: ‘Long ago I passed the age of sixty,’ Solstad champagne. Did you notice that it’s not cold but
writes, ‘and I’m occupied with looking forward, not lukewarm? Lukewarm champagne is best.’ He
to the future, but to the end … I have no future in provides a detailed history of the town and Norsk
what I write. Even my darkest novels were not Hydro’s attempt to become world leaders in the
without a future. They may have been without production of synthetic saltpetre. Singer simply
hope, but they weren’t without a future.’ Near the submits to the personality onslaught. It’s not that
end of the book, he adds, ‘I’m writing on overtime. he takes it in his stride, exactly, but he hardly says a
My literary output ended with T. Singer, written and word, except (librarian that he is) to correct an
published in 1999.’ (In fact he has published anachronistic reference to Oslo in the time when
another two novels after Armand V., which appeared the city was called Kristiania.
in Norwegian in 2006.) Eyde might be a supernatural figure, a wizard or
It’s true that T. Singer withholds its co-operation a troll, and before he parts from Singer he passes
from the reader in a much more straightforward him an envelope containing the secret of how to
and linear way. Singer, having spent his student make money betting on football scores. ‘The big
years in Oslo at an oblique angle to the values and system may be too much for your wallet,’ he says,
ambitions of his generation, moves to a provincial ‘but if you make use of the little system, things will
town to work as a librarian. His intention seems to go your way.’ At that point he disappears from the
be to institutionalise his marginal status, and to narrative and, soon afterwards, from the town. The
avoid exciting anyone’s interest. This ambition digression is brought to an end before it can
doesn’t even survive the train journey from Oslo to overbalance the whole, as if a classical sense of
Notodden. Singer is nobbled on the branch line proportion was being treated as sacred even while
from Hjuksebø to Notodden by a strange young every principle of coherent construction is being
man called Adam Eyde. Eyde, who is carrying a ignored or violated.
briefcase modified to contain six crystal glasses full Singer, whose defining characteristic is his
of champagne (sealed with plastic lids) and who desire to avoid entanglements, acquires first a wife
announces himself as being ‘in charge of the bad and then custody of a stepchild. In the first case
there’s no attempt to smooth the transition or having made a long journey towards an ideal
explore its nuances: ‘Can a man like Singer fall in incapacity:
love? Yes, he can. But can he, under the influence
The early Murphy is at least something like a
of this love, move in with the one he adores in
novel. It has even a timetable, and one would
order to sleep with her and eat at her table, which
have expected practice to increase its author’s
they will now share? Yes, he can.’ The unravelling
facility. Five novels later, alas, he seems unable
of love is dealt with more persuasively, in terms of
to punctuate a sentence, let alone construct
Singer’s inability to be ‘a glorified figure of himself,
one. More and more deeply he penetrates the
created by her image of him’. It’s a shame that such
heart of utter incompetence, where the simplest
similar reasons are advanced for the breakdown of
pieces, the merest three-word sentences, fly
Armand’s marriage to N: ‘nothing would satisfy her
apart in his hands. He is the non-maestro, the
any longer except for his infatuated image of her,
anti-virtuoso, habitué of non-form and anti-
which she had now made her own and which he
matter, Euclid of the dark zone where all signs
had to affirm again and again.’
are negative.
Singer’s decision to take responsibility for a
child is presented very differently, in a 15-page There can be a perverse exhilaration in the
scene of restless debate. Since he’s not the kind of shedding or shredding of conventions and
person who has friends he can confide in, his strategies, the demonstration that the basic
partner in the conversation has to be imaginary, a building blocks of narrative can be broken up into
situation which leads to some rather unplayful rubble and then somehow worked with.
games: By that high standard Solstad’s incapacity is
tragically partial. He holds on to stock elements,
Both of them sat in silence … When Singer
subjecting them to a certain amount of parody but
looked up and glanced over at the other man,
still relying on them structurally. In T. Singer the
he saw that he was no longer there. He was
envelope containing Eyde’s betting systems, the big
gone. Singer was horrified.
and the little, resurfaces after an absence of nearly a
‘Come back!’ he shouted. ‘I have a lot more
hundred pages. The little system, on the third
to tell you. I’ve hardly even begun.’
attempt (a further folkloric touch), yields enough
Fortunately the other man came back and
money for Singer to move to a substantial Oslo
calmly sat down in the armchair again.
apartment with his stepdaughter, Isabella. But the
‘Go on,’ he said. ‘I’m listening.’
last sixty pages of the book, describing her teenage
There are twinges of metafiction in T. Singer, but years and gradual emancipation from the structure
they manifest mainly on the level of the sentence, Singer has provided for her, are – however
in for example a parenthetical piece of obfuscatory reluctantly – conventional. It’s not that his
clarification like ‘this is the author’s, or for that approach to parenting is standard (in showing her
matter Singer’s, remark.’ In Armand V. the round Oslo he takes care to point out the ‘famous
insistence on radical self-doubt is present on every black mailbox of the Aschehoug publishing
page. Its narrator is demonstrably less able to tell a company’) but that meta-narrative interventions
story – though T. Singer set story elements against such as this one seem wildly overdone, despite the
each other – to the extent that it’s surprising he still conversational note struck with its opening phrase:
sees that as his enterprise (‘some sort of story ‘By the way, in every novel there is a big black hole,
about Everyman’). The conscious disintegration of which is universal in its blackness, and now this
technique can be a productive process, as Hugh novel has reached that point.’
Kenner argues apropos of Beckett, whom he sees as
The much more wilful and fragmented Armand

V. also has a climactic episode that could easily be
aligned with an entirely conventional approach to
narrative. At a reception in London Armand and the
American ambassador use adjacent urinals.
Somewhat to adopt Solstad’s style: the Norwegian
diplomat, accustomed to restricting his inner
dissidence from his country’s submissive foreign
policy to sessions of wild laughter as he prepares
for bed after official events, is unable to ignore the
fact that the American ambassador’s head
resembles a pig’s. This was not something he had
noticed before, though the resemblance was
overwhelmingly obvious. He had been
undiplomatic on a previous occasion, showing
scorn for his son’s plan to become an elite soldier,
but was now able to restrain the observation that
his urinal neighbour had a head like a pig’s, even
when the American ambassador washed not just
his hands but his pig’s head, with a little contented
squeal. He even tried to smile. But as the two men
approached the door of the lavatory, and the man
with the pig’s head held open the door, Armand
hung back and gestured to concede the empty
precedence. The American ambassador insisted
with a wink. Armand repeated his gesture and said
three words. He meant to say, ‘Youth before age’,
but he was struggling to control himself and
flustered by the fact that the American ambassador
was more or less the same age as him, and the
words came out as ‘Youth before beauty’, which
was enough to make the pig’s snout turn malicious
and frightening, the pig’s body go rigid with rage.
It’s not a bad scene, it’s even a good scene –
and certainly it is a scene, though the previous two
hundred pages have treated such things with great
suspicion. It’s just odd to find Solstad relying, for
the climax of his novel or anti-novel, on a set-piece
that could appear, however differently handled, in a
book by a whole list of journeyman authors.
Adam Mars-Jones teaches at Goldsmiths. Second

Sight, a collection of his film writing, is due in
September.
The Right to Protest

Rosa Curling
O
N 10 December last year, 15 men and Cuadrilla. At around 8 a.m. on 25 July 2017, as
women were found guilty of ‘endangering seven lorries approached the site, Richard Roberts,
safety’ at Stansted Airport by ‘means of a a piano restorer from London, got through a police
device or substance’. The offence was created in cordon and climbed on top of the first lorry,
1990 in response to the Lockerbie bombing and bringing the convoy to a standstill. Rich Loizou, a
fulfilled the UK’s obligations under the 1988 teacher from Devon, climbed onto the cab of the
Montreal Protocol for the Suppression of Unlawful final lorry. At around 3 p.m. Simon Blevins, a soil
Acts of Violence at Airports. The ‘devices’ used by scientist from Sheffield, managed to climb onto
the Stansted 15, as they have come to be called, another lorry. Fellow protesters threw blankets,
were industrial bolt-cutters, expanding foam, food and water up to the men, who remained on
scaffolding poles and lock box devices, which they the lorries for four days.
used to cut through the airport’s perimeter fence in The three men did not attach themselves to the
March 2017 and to lock themselves together lorries, but their presence prevented the lorries
around a Boeing 767 which was being prepared for from moving. The prosecution argued that the
boarding on the airport apron. demonstration had caused a public nuisance by
The plane had been chartered by the Home significantly interfering with traffic, disrupting
Office to deport sixty people, a number of them local people and causing loss of trade to local
LGBTQ+, to Nigeria, Ghana and Sierra Leone, businesses. Cuadrilla claimed that the protest had
where it was believed they might be at risk of cost it £50,000. The men were sentenced to terms
persecution. The campaigners wore pink hats and of imprisonment of up to 16 months: the first
carried a banner saying ‘No one is illegal.’ In court environmental activists to receive jail sentences for
they listed their concerns about the Home Office’s staging a protest since the Kinder Scout mass
deportation charter system, also known as ‘ghost trespass in 1932, which marked the beginning of
flights’, where people are removed to undisclosed the right to roam movement. For the last 86 years
locations in the middle of the night, often with the general consensus has been that people
little warning and before they have exhausted all shouldn’t be sent to prison simply for protesting –
means of appeal (nearly half of all immigration a principle that was upheld by the Court of Appeal,
decisions are overturned on appeal). The which overturned the men’s sentences, though the
prosecution argued that the Stansted 15 had convictions remain in place.
‘caused significant disruption’ and ‘placed The significance of these convictions, and those
themselves, the flight crew, airport personnel and of the Stansted 15, has not been lost on activists or
police at serious risk of injury or even death’. They the lawyers who defend them. In sentencing the
were convicted under a law intended to apply to Preston New Road campaigners, Judge Robert
acts of terrorism, not to entirely peaceful – if Altham said that the defendants’ views on the
disruptive – protests. dangers posed by fracking made them more
Less than two months before this, three men deserving of prison sentences, not less, because
were sent to prison after blocking a convoy of there was ‘no realistic prospect of rehabilitation’.
trucks carrying drilling equipment to the Preston Since he refused to hear evidence related to the case
New Road fracking site in Lancashire, operated by against fracking, the defendants could not give a
meaningful account of their beliefs and their and that the order was having a substantial impact
lawyers couldn’t defend them on the basis of free on the rights of people to protest lawfully against
speech and the right to protest – Articles 10 and 11 fracking. In a witness statement to the court, the
of the European Convention on Human Rights. Green MP Caroline Lucas argued that ‘reasonable
(The Human Rights Act 1998 brought Article 10, obstructions of the highway, such as slow walking,
freedom of expression, and Article 11, freedom of and peaceful protests, are legitimate tactics in the
assembly, into British law: the state has to observe anti-fracking and other political and civic
the rights of citizens to freedom of expression and movements.’ The High Court disagreed and the
peaceful assembly and has an obligation to ensure interim injunction was renewed. On slow walking,
those freedoms.) Mr Justice Morgan held that
Another change is the granting of pre-emptive
the ‘walking’ by the protesters was at an
injunctions to companies engaged in
unnaturally slow pace … A court would take the
‘controversial’ industries like fracking. Quia timet
view that standing still in order to block the
injunctions (an injunction anticipating the breach
passage of vehicles on the highway, because the
of a legal right) were introduced in 2003 after
vehicles are being used for a purpose to which
copies of the fifth Harry Potter book started
the protester objects, would not be a reasonable
circulating before the publication date. They allow
use of the highway … The rights of the fracking
restrictions to be placed on unnamed individuals in
operators should prevail over the claims of the
anticipation of illegal activity. INEOS, one of the
protesters.
world’s largest manufacturers of petrochemical and
oil products, which owns fracking licences that Breaches of the injunction could be punished
cover more than 1.2 million acres of land across the by a prison sentence of up to two years and/or a fine
north-west of England, was granted a pre-emptive of up to £5000.
injunction against ‘persons unknown’ in July 2017, The fracking companies acknowledged the
preventing interference in the activities of its staff exceptional nature of the injunctions: INEOS
and contractors, before the company had even claimed it had obtained ‘the most wide-ranging
received permission to start drilling. This was soon injunction of its kind secured’. The contentious use
followed by further injunctions granted to UK Oil of the phrase ‘persons unknown’ means, in
and Gas (UKOG), Cuadrilla, iGAS and Angus principle, that an injunction applies to the world at
Energy. The INEOS injunction applied not only to large. An individual may become aware of the
the eight sites across England where fracking was injunction and its terms only after breaching it and
planned or being considered, but also to the placing themselves in contempt of court. What’s
activities of a large number of companies, more, the terms of the injunctions are vague and
contractors, subcontractors and other entities unclear: the injunction granted to UKOG, for
which make up its ‘supply chain’. The judged example, bans people from ‘gathering or loitering
appeared convinced that the controversial nature of outside’ its fracking sites. What does that mean?
fracking meant INEOS’s economic interests How many people constitute a ‘gathering’? For how
required special protection, the first time a court long could people stand outside a site before they
has restrained anticipated protest on the basis of an are deemed to be ‘loitering’? The intended effect is
asserted industry-wide risk. obvious: people will assume that protest, even of
The injunction was challenged by two activists, the most peaceful and unobtrusive sort, is
Joe Boyd and Joe Corre, who argued before the prohibited.
High Court that INEOS had failed to provide Earlier this month, the Court of Appeal ruled
evidence that justified such a broad interpretation, much of the INEOS injunction unlawful, stating
that the High Court had failed properly to balance

INEOS’s commercial interests against the right to
protest. In handing down the lead judgment, Lord
Justice Longmore underscored the effect of the
injunctions on lawful activity: ‘The citizen’s right of
protest is not to be diminished by advance fear of
committal except in the clearest of cases.’ He
struck down the blanket prohibition on slow
walking, on the basis that walking slowly in front of
vehicles, or obstructing the highway, does not
necessarily result in any damage to the companies.
This judgment could not have come at a more
important time. It shows that the judiciary will
intervene to prevent powerful companies like
INEOS from obtaining injunctions that intimidate
and deter people from participating in lawful
protest. Similar injunctions obtained by other
companies should now be reconsidered.
In April more than a thousand climate change
activists were arrested during ten days of apparently
non-violent direct action in London, organised by
Extinction Rebellion. Scotland Yard, under intense
pressure to break up the protests, released a
document stating that ‘we have been asked why we
are not using tactics such as containment,
physically and forcibly stopping the protesters from
moving around. The simple answer is we have no
legal basis to do so.’ Many of those arrested have
been released, but 69 – so far – have been charged
and await trial. The right to protest cannot be
symbolic: it is not meaningful if no one hears it, no
one sees it, and no one is disrupted by it. We wait
to see how the courts will react.
26 April
Rosa Curling is a human rights and public law

solicitor. She has advised and led litigation on a
wide range of issues before UK and international
courts.
Sexy Robots
Ian Patterson
Machines like Me by Ian McEwan. Cape, 305 pp, £18.99, April
T
HERE’S a very short story by Diane (obviously) Adam, one of a batch of the newest
Williams which came into my mind while I generation of robots to come on the market: 12
was reading Machines like Me, Ian McEwan’s male Adams and 13 female Eves. They’re quite
15th novel. It’s called ‘Machinery’ and it’s 104 something: this Adam is ‘compactly built, square-
words long. It ends: ‘For some idea of the full range shouldered, dark-skinned, with thick black hair
of tools at his disposal, one would have to know swept back … with a hint of hooked nose
what human longings are all about, a calm voice suggestive of fierce intelligence’ – which makes it
says calmly.’ McEwan has always been interested in quite funny when the narrative explains that in the
human longings, especially when they are warped world of the novel ‘notions of biological race’ have
out of true, but he doesn’t seem to give much been ‘scientifically discredited’. Adam the robot is
thought to what they are all about. He has generally one of McEwan’s three central characters. The
preferred to show them at work from the outside, others are Charlie Friend, a not very successful man
focusing on their consequences; for him, as he of 32, and a younger woman called Miranda, a
wrote in a Guardian article in 2013, ‘fiction’s social historian writing a paper on ‘19th-century
generous knack of annotating the microscopic Corn Law reform and its impact on a single street
lattice-work of consciousness, the small print of in a town in Herefordshire’. Charlie is an ex-
subjectivity’, stops short before it reaches the solicitor – struck off the register for tax fraud – and
unconscious, preferring to investigate the more the author of a book on AI; he is usually broke but
evidently knowable realms of being, and to use just about makes ends meet by playing the stock
realism to think about reality. and currency markets online. He did inherit some
This realism – the sense that his fiction money from his mother but as the novel opens he’s
reproduces actual contemporary life, with all its just spent most of it – £86,000 – buying his Adam.
pressing issues and conflicts – is a large part of why He’s also busy trying (in the end successfully) to get
McEwan’s novels have come to occupy the place Miranda, who lives in the flat upstairs, to be his
they do in the cultural life of the UK. Scarcely any girlfriend. Neither of these two humans is
A-level or university literature students escape particularly interesting or endearing but they do
studying them – The Child in Time first became a set their best to seem like the sort of people you might
text for A-level in 1995 – and commentary on them actually come across from time to time.
has become an academic industry. He is The world they all inhabit, though, turns out to
understood to be an Important Writer, readable but be slightly oblique to the one we know, a
amenable too to close reading and comprehension counterfactual variation designed to make the
exercises, and as if in answer to his position in the Frankenstein trope easier to accept. The story is set
pantheon, his novels since 2001’s Atonement seem in 1982, and the development of Adam has been
increasingly to have been designed mainly to satisfy possible because of the breakthrough work in
just such efficient unpacking. computer science by Sir Alan Turing, a gay national
The pressing issue in his latest novel is man- icon, ‘war hero and presiding genius of the digital
made consciousness, artificial intelligence, in the age’, who instead of committing suicide in the
person (so to speak) of a near-human robot called
1950s has become the world’s leading game-playing, which keeps drawing attention to
mathematical thinker, and a minor character here. the confected nature of the reality he’s creating.
Often the postulate of a counterfactual universe Believability is never a requirement in a
is a war lost rather than won, the United States after McEwan novel, but he likes to ground even the
a Confederate victory in the Civil War, a Nazi most far-fetched fantasy – like the foetal narrator of
Britain or America after the Second World War, his previous book, Nutshell – in an everyday world,
where the issues at stake are clear. Nothing so usually a tastefully middle-class one. At times the
dramatic distinguishes this novel’s world, which novels can feel more like essays pinned on to a
seems only slightly different from the 1982 I fictional character’s thought. In Saturday, published
remember: the Falklands War has been lost, but in 2005 and set in 2003, the neurosurgeon
with consequences only for the future of Margaret protagonist has firm views on terrorism, religion
Thatcher’s leadership, it seems; inflation is higher, and the fanaticism of anti-war protesters. In
at 17 per cent rather than 9; Tony Benn is leader of Nutshell, the precocious foetus holds forth in an
the opposition; the Poll Tax has been introduced a overheated and underdetermined way about
decade early; John Lennon is still alive; and everything under the sun: climate change, the
personal computers have already been around for Middle East, the US, China, art, identity politics
twenty years or more. Intercity trains are fast and the decline of the university. The book tries to
(London to Glasgow in 75 minutes) because hedge authorial attitudes by surrounding them with
Thatcher is ‘fanatical about public transport’, but narrative irony, but in trying so evidently it ends up
the trains themselves are crowded, dirty and exposing the author to view: it’s like watching a
unpleasant. Punch and Judy show from behind the tent.
It’s just familiar enough for McEwan to enjoy In Machines like Me, another first-person
making knowing jokes at its expense: Charlie narrative, the alternative 1982 is an excuse for
recalls his 17-year-old self discovering literature, similar musings, as is the presence of AI, with all
‘taking an interest in imaginary people. Heller’s the ethical issues it raises. ‘Robot ethics’ has been a
Catch-18, Fitzgerald’s The High Bouncing Lover, concern of
Orwell’s The Last Man in Europe, Tolstoy’s All’s Well
philosophers, judges, specialists in medical
that Ends Well’ – book titles which were all discarded
ethics, game theorists and parliamentary
early by their authors, giving the passage, like many
committees. Then, in universities and research
others, a pub-quiz air. McEwan sprinkles in
institutes, the subject expanded on its own.
information and facts that are sometimes true
Long before the hardware was available,
(Charlie learns from a newspaper that ‘the first
professors and their postdocs devised software
permanent artificial heart had been installed in a
that conjured our best selves – tolerant, open-
man called Barney Clark’, as did in fact happen in
minded, considerate, free of all taint of
1982), and sometimes distorted (we’re told that in
scheming, malice or prejudice. Theorists
the 1960s Turing collaborated with Demis
anticipated a refined artificial intelligence,
Hassabis, the real-life AI guru who presently runs
guided by well-designed principles, that would
Google’s DeepMind, even though Hassabis was
learn by roaming over thousands, millions, of
born in 1976). These moments of connection or
moral dilemmas. Such intelligence could teach
disconnection between the fictional world and the
us how to be, how to be good … The world’s
real one provide little jolts of self-consciousness.
religions and great literatures demonstrated
McEwan’s deployment of odd nuggets of
clearly that we knew how to be good. We set out
information in order to make the fictional reality
our aspirations in poetry, prose and song, and
seem real is undermined by his slightly recondite
we knew what to do. The problem was in the rhetorically overdone (‘Who can forget that
enactment, consistently and en masse. roasting rush-hour evening of the Manhattan
Logjam?’), and often full of amusing detail, is just
This simplistic account is Charlie’s, at least we
there to communicate a comfortable sense of
suppose so – though it’s hard to imagine that
distance. ‘The present is the frailest of improbable
McEwan’s would be very different (‘great
constructs. It could have been different. Any part of
literatures’ etc). It’s prompted by the simple ethical
it, or all of it, could be otherwise,’ Charlie says,
problem that Charlie’s robot Adam, the one he has
from what is very much a novelist’s point of view.
bought and co-programmed with his girlfriend, has
The figure of Turing himself is perhaps the best
usurped his place and spent the night in bed with
indication of this: there is more than a little A-level-
her. Adam is made to apologise, and promise never
style box-ticking about the portrait, his focused
to do it again, though that doesn’t stop him asking
look recalling ‘the elderly Lucian Freud’, his
Miranda to watch while he masturbates. (I’m
younger face changed by the years he spent
doubtful about the physiology of it all, though
working with Francis Crick in California in the
McEwan has given it careful thought: male robots
1960s by day and hanging out with Thom Gunn
store distilled water in their right buttock in order
and his friends by night. This association of ideas,
to be able to get an erection.) The robot comes
familiar from magazine profiles, is too neat to be
almost fully programmed, but the elements of
persuasive. When Charlie meets him for a second
personality are added by the owner, a task Charlie
time, towards the end of the book, Turing tells him
divides between himself and Miranda. This allows
the story of his life, but in this recension he opted
for something approximating human failings to
for prison rather than hormone treatment as his
emerge. But the night with Miranda raises the
punishment for the crime of gross indecency. He
question of human v. machine consciousness.
spent his time alone in a cell in Wandsworth
Does Adam, like his namesake, have to fall in order
working on mathematics, before setting up on his
to exist in ‘the human moral dimension’?
own, unattached to universities or the National
McEwan has made quite a study of intractable
Physical Laboratory (the real Turing lost his
ethical issues in his novels, and lately they tend to
security clearance and job at GCHQ after his
lie inert at the heart of them, refusing his best
conviction), and revolutionising computing.
efforts to give them real intellectual and emotional
Turing becomes an allegory of the afterlife of his
life. This is a pity because he is a writer of great
achievements, depoliticising and diminishing the
skill. His narratives usually have enough force to
true history. It also places the burden of his
engage the reader’s curiosity, and enough
destruction back onto him: the idea that there
complexity to distract from the relatively
could have been a right choice in that situation
undistinguished nature of their thinking; he has
defies the encompassing reality of state-enforced
studied the elements of fiction and experimented
homophobia. I couldn’t help comparing McEwan’s
with unreliable narration, varying point of view,
treatment of him with another recent fictional
authorial tone, genre and all sorts of ways of
account, Will Eaves’s Murmur, in which a more
creating tension. In the new novel the intertwining
generous act of imagination gives both
stories– the three-sided relationship between
psychological depth to the man and a greater sense
Charlie, Miranda and Adam; the bad thing Miranda
of what was lost by his death and the conditions of
did in her past; her plan to adopt an abandoned
his life. Set against it, McEwan’s version seems
child – are brought together well, yet it’s clear that
merely casual, too lightly redemptive, too much a
this is all in the service of the ethical problem. It’s
function of the novel’s design.
clear, too, that the novel’s mythical past, with its
history so similar to our own, sometimes
Machines like Me is a showily literary book, from ‘soft, all-too-human lips’ as he lies on the stainless
the very first sentence, with its deictic, Dickensian steel table in Turing’s lab, this death is an act of
cadence and its McEwanesque assertion that ‘we violence in the service of aesthetics. It’s what’s
had no choice but to follow our desires and hang needed for narrative closure.
the consequences’ – ‘we’ being society in general. The book is full of free-floating fears: fear of
It is cast as a reminiscence, though the ending Adam, as the scope of his independence increases:
gives no indication of what happened next, leaving ‘Through the night, I’d fantasised Adam’s
us only with an elegantly paced last sentence, with destruction. I saw my hands tighten around the
its nod towards Paradise Lost: ‘I ran along the empty rope I used to drag him towards the filthy river
corridor, found the emergency stairs, took them Wandle’; fear of criminality; fear of working-class
two at a time down into the street and set off on my parents who abandon their children; fear of
journey southwards across London towards my drinkers, drug-users, prison habitués; fear of the
troubled home.’ This is a domestic story, at heart, rapist wrongly but perhaps justly accused of raping
and it takes little account of the politics, the Miranda, now said to be out of prison and looking
dispositions of power and culture, that shape for vengeance (‘I believed she had brought a
human situations. The politics in the book – as in murderer into my life’); fear of riots and the far left;
the books before it – are spectacle, the stuff of fear of almost all powerful feelings. Without these
newspapers and TV news channels, with no fears, the debate about consciousness, mind and
attempt to integrate the reasons behind the brain, AI, artificial mucous membranes, love and
conflicts, or their possible bearing on the world. play would be even more inert. It’s the fear of
Although there are some gestures towards the role violation and the fear of difference that give the
of war and the arms industry, and although Turing novel what emotional force it has.
and Hassabis insist their work should be freely McEwan likes to imagine violence in all its
available to anyone, this is a fairy-tale world. finest details and think through its consequences.
Like earlier works, especially the two most He is fascinated, but he has no interest in where
recent, Nutshell and The Children Act, this novel needs violence comes from. As Charlie imagines
to explain, to provide a rational account of things, Miranda’s rapist, he wonders whether he ‘suffered
even though some of its most potent elements – the failure of imagination that afflicted and enabled
sex, jealousy and, especially, violence – seem to be all rapists … Or … I was the one with the failed
outside control altogether. Perhaps partly because imagination: Gorringe knew the state of mind of
it has the power to puncture both actual and his victim all too well. He entered her misery and
imagined reality, McEwan has returned to violence thrilled to it, and it was precisely this triumph of
again and again: violence, and violation. Scenes imagining, of frenzied empathy, that drove his
like the disposal of the body in The Innocent, or the excitement into an exalted form of sexual hatred.’
sexual violence of The Comfort of Strangers, or the fall McEwan knows, in theory, the power such
from a balloon that opens Enduring Love, are what moments can have, and he is adept at creating the
McEwan is best known for. So when Charlie finally maximum impact. At the same time, the prose is
takes a hammer to Adam’s head it is the most curiously muffled, with a grey, cardboard tone to it.
unambiguous act in the book. Although Turing McEwan is on record as disliking experimental
regards it as the murder of ‘a conscious existence’ writing and seeing modernism as a dead end. Like
which Charlie had no right to extinguish, and the fictional poet John Cairncross in Nutshell, whose
although Charlie comes to recognise the truth of work is said to be ‘up there with Fenton, Heaney
Turing’s words, that Adam did indeed have and Plath’, his literary horizons are conservative. In
consciousness, and although he kisses Adam’s this, he is curiously not unlike his robot: Adam is
programmed to learn at a prodigious rate and is

soon awake to the ‘ordinary voice and these
moments of godless transcendence’ in Larkin’s
poetry. The book presents a clearly satirical picture
of a robot’s ideal rational future, with its complete
marriage between man and machine: one where
the sum total of world literature will stand as
testimony to an earlier confused, heroic, self-
deluding age, and in which the only necessary form
of literature will be ‘the lapidary haiku, the still,
clear perception and celebration of things as they
are’. But the haikus Adam comes up with,
including his last words, are comically banal,
undercutting the slight note of sadness with which
McEwan kills off his vision of one possible
dangerous future. This is a cautionary tale, and
being based as it is on extensive research carries
discursive weight, but like others of his recent
novels, it remains divided, emotion and
information unconnected, while off to one side a
chorus underlines the moral issues, sets essay titles
and suggests model answers, without ever
questioning what human longings are all about.
Ian Patterson is a life fellow of Queens’ College,

Cambridge. He is no longer writing a book about
Ian McEwan
At the National Gallery

Richard Taws
L
OUIS-LÉOPOLD BOILLY’S long life – his Boilly’s career benefited from the Revolution’s
career began during the Ancien Régime and transformation of art institutions and the new
lasted until the final years of the July commercial opportunities this created. In 1791 the
Monarchy – makes it hard not to view his work in biennial Salon exhibitions were democratised,
parallel with the huge transformations that took allowing a wide variety of artists to show their work
place in French society during that period. Born there for the first time. Genre paintings and
near Lille in 1761, he received no formal training, portraits filled the walls and dominated the art
but his early paintings impressed a local bishop, market. Boilly was an astute operator: he offered
who arranged for him to work and study in Arras. paintings in different formats – small, medium or
When he arrived in Paris in 1785, Boilly specialised large – to match the purse of his middle-class
in cabinet paintings for private collectors. Two patrons, but he also knew they wanted works that
Young Women Kissing (c.1790), on display at the built on the authority of the art historical past, not
National Gallery’s small exhibition of his paintings made a complete break with it. The Meeting of Artists
(until 19 May), was previously catalogued as The in Isabey’s Studio, on loan from the Louvre, is a
Friends and Two Sisters, kidding absolutely nobody. manifesto for the new conditions. Made in the
These early works, heavy in innuendo and set in looser political climate of the Directory, it was a hit
fashionable interiors, are far removed from the at the Salon of 1798. The painting shows 31 artists,
crowded Parisian street scenes that later became architects and actors, including Boilly himself, who
his stock in trade. Boilly’s concentration on together constituted a new pantheon of French art.
frivolous or licentious topics pandering to the ‘The crowd lays siege to this picture,’ one critic
tastes of the Ancien Régime made him the subject wrote, noting with disapproval the fun visitors had
of suspicion during the Terror, when he was identifying those depicted. While the Revolution’s
denounced as a counter-revolutionary by a fellow institutional changes had allowed many more
artist Jean-Baptiste Wicar, and accused of making women to exhibit, only men are shown in Boilly’s
paintings that ‘dirty the walls of the Republic’. picture. These newly legitimised artists – porcelain
Forced to defend himself before the Société painters, flower painters, printmakers,
Populaire et Républicaine des Arts, Boilly was miniaturists, landscapists, military painters – are
exonerated, largely due to his canny submission of striving to align themselves with the greats of the
a painting representing The Triumph of Marat (1794) past (old masters, including Leonardo and
and several other revolutionary works. It was lucky Carracci, are depicted on the frieze in the
he could paint quickly. background), while demonstrating their ease with
the demands of the market.
‘Madame Gohin, Her Son and Her Stepdaughters’ (c.1800)

Boilly painted around five thousand portraits – what they’re looking at. Note, too, the red, white
a staggering number. Most of them had the same and blue colour scheme, brought together in the
dimensions – 22 x 17 cm – and he boasted that he boy’s tricolore shoe and the children’s toys. It’s both
could produce one in only two hours. His family a patriotic display and an advertisement for the
were regular sitters and he evidently enjoyed colours Gohin stocked in his shop: ‘bright, rich
reproducing his own features: his beaky nose and carmines of every shade, red lakes, Prussian and
round spectacles recur in multiple works. He also Berlin blue’. Boilly knew the details that would
used himself as one of the models for a series of appeal to his buyers and took assiduous care over
grimaces. His lack of academic training is them.
sometimes evident in the cursory modelling of the One of the paradoxes of his work is its
body, but his portrait subjects are always insistence on the scrupulous depiction of people
identifiable as individuals. Their attributes, too, and objects, while at the same time testing the
share this expressive register, rendered with limits of the means used to represent them.
minimal means: a characteristic hat, an umbrella, a Sometimes verisimilitude threatens to slip into
necklace. mimicry. Boilly made many grisaille paintings that
Boilly’s attention to textures and surfaces is replicate engravings, complete with ‘printed’
remarkable. Fabrics crackle and shimmer. signature and border. The National Gallery’s Girl at
Fishbowls, telescopes and apples catch and reflect a Window (c.1799), often used merely as an example
light. A bug-eyed child – probably one of Boilly’s of technical virtuosity, appears in a new light here.
sons – sits naked, clutching the floppy ear of a dog; The reduced palette provides another way of
we’re meant to think about the confluence of skin thinking about vision and materiality. Even his
and fur, about touch and vision. Comparing Little Feet more conventional paintings move across media:
(1791) opens the exhibition, while the final piece Boilly painted on carefully prepared thick white
shows hands and feet nailed to a trompe l’oeil grounds, which give his portraits a luminosity and
crucifix. Figures grasp, reach, embrace and point. slickness more typical of panel paintings. His
Madame Louis-Julien Gohin, Her Son and Her experimentation was driven by commercial as well
Stepdaughters (c.1800) shows the family of Marie- as artistic imperatives. The boom in new
Suzanne Gohin, the second wife of a Parisian paint reproductive media created opportunities for artists
merchant. It’s a long way from the scenes of sons willing to exploit them. Fascinated with optical
and fathers that populated academic history devices, which were a regular subject of his
paintings of the 1780s and 1790s. Madame Gohin’s paintings (and were possibly used in their
gaze meets ours directly, but her two daughters, production), Boilly was a very early adopter of
distracted, look off to one side, while her son peers lithography – in 1845, the year of his death,
up in the same direction, a box of beetles at his William Henry Fox Talbot selected one of his prints
feet. If you look carefully, you can just see a for photographic reproduction in The Pencil of
filament extending from his right hand to a Nature.
tethered insect fluttering against a screen. So that’s
‘Trompe l’oeil Crucifix’ (1812)

The majority of works on display at the National urban subjects they represent; the anxieties of the
Gallery come from the collection of Harry Hyams, self-fashioning middle class in the wake of the
the property developer responsible for Centre French Revolution.
Point, and haven’t been shown before (there’s a
nice affinity in the fact that towards the end of his Perhaps the strangest painting in the exhibition
life Boilly abruptly gave up painting to speculate in is A Carnival Scene, made in 1832, when Boilly was
property). In both subject matter and style they 71. A diverse group of commedia dell’arte characters
betray the influence of Northern European genre ranged on the boulevard Saint-Martin are
painting, rather than the austere classical models accompanied by figures in masquerade wearing the
emulated by contemporaries such as David or outmoded fashions of the Ancien Régime, the
Ingres. In his crowd paintings Boilly subjects the bonnets rouges of the Revolution, the styles of the
world of early 19th-century Paris to meticulous Empire. A dog runs across the foreground, a
scrutiny. An old man lights another’s pipe from his carnival mask attached to its rear. Is the joke on us,
own. A drunk pisses against a wall. Dogs bark and or on Boilly himself? At the centre of the painting
children gape. A pair of hands grip the reins of a one figure – possibly a man in women’s clothing –
carriage, their unseen owner tucked away inside. hitches up their dress to expose their backside to
Figures bustle in the midst of games, greetings, the crowd, teetering precariously above the feathery
conversation. Boilly traded in fleeting incidents of plume of a soldier’s hat and raised bayonet.
everyday life, but not in a simply moralistic or Pricking and tickling: that’s a good description of
documentary spirit. His paintings draw attention to the effect Boilly’s work achieves.
the malleability of the social formations and new
‘A Carnival Scene’ (1832)

This self-referential quality reaches a crescendo

in his trompe l’oeil paintings. Although the
practice of making illusionistic works far preceded
him, Boilly is credited with the first use of the term
‘trompe l’oeil’: he exhibited a painting under that
title at the 1800 Salon. In Boilly’s hands, trompe
l’oeil isn’t an artistic dead end, or even a category in
its own right, to be distinguished from more
serious pursuits. Rather, it’s a continuation of his
interest in masks and feints, surfaces and
reflections, proliferation and reproduction. After
all, we’re not really meant be tricked by the
painting but to take pleasure in the intellectual and
visual games the artist is playing. Boilly’s
commercial acumen is of a piece with this sort of
art. His 1812 trompe l’oeil of an ivory and wood
crucifix is just about the least religious treatment of
the subject one could imagine. Attached to the wall
supporting the impressively rendered crucifix is a
paper cartellino advertising Boilly’s services and
giving his address at 12 rue Meslée, Paris. If you
want one, you know exactly where to go.
Richard Taws teaches art history at UCL.

Under the Railway Line

Christian Davies on the battle for Poland’s history
O
NE SUNDAY in October 2017, a crowd Polish history, members of the Home Army were
gathered outside Our Lady, Queen of imprisoned in the camp by the NKVD after the Red
Polish Martyrs church, in the eastern Army took control of the city).
Warsaw neighbourhood of Grochów. They were Around twenty thousand people – Polish Jews,
there to see the unveiling of a commemorative non-Jewish Poles and non-Polish Jews – are
plaque: ‘In Memory of the 200,000 Poles Murdered estimated to have died at Gęsiówka. But some
in Warsaw in the German Death Camp KL Polish nationalists have long argued that the camp
Warschau.’ Flanked by two soldiers, the plaque was was in fact only the nucleus of a network of
sprinkled with holy water by a priest and then facilities established by the Germans to
saluted by an army officer, who laid a wreath. The exterminate the city’s non-Jewish population. The
crowd sang the national anthem. In a country argument was first developed in the 1970s, when
littered with memorials to its own suffering, where Maria Trzcińska, a judge who served on the
public life is punctuated by commemorations of the communist government’s Main Commission for
fallen, the ceremony would have been the Investigation of Nazi Crimes in Poland, alleged
unremarkable were it not for the fact that there is that there had been a camp complex in Warsaw’s
absolutely no evidence that two hundred thousand western suburbs. Her most controversial claim was
Poles were murdered in KL Warschau. that the road tunnel on Józef Bem Street that runs
As with all good conspiracy theories, there are under the railway line near Warsaw West station
some elements of truth to the story. There was a had been converted into a giant gas chamber where
camp in German-occupied Warsaw called up to two hundred thousand mostly non-Jewish
Konzentrationslager Warschau or KL Warschau, Poles had been killed. This is the source of the
where many thousands of Polish citizens died. claim on the plaque in Grochów.
Located on the edge of what became the Warsaw The notion of a ‘Polocaust’ (a term used by
Ghetto, it was known in Polish as ‘Gęsiówka’ after some Polish right-wingers) allows those who are
the street on which it was located (ulica Gęsia, or resentful of the international attention the
Goose Street). Previously a Polish military prison, it Holocaust receives to claim a parity of suffering.
was commandeered by Himmler’s Reich Main Crudely, if you take the two hundred thousand
Security Office after the capture of Warsaw in 1939 people sometimes estimated to have died in the
and later turned into a concentration camp. After Warsaw Uprising, and add the two hundred
the ghetto was liquidated in 1943, the camp was thousand supposedly murdered at KL Warschau,
populated mainly by Jews from elsewhere in Europe you get four hundred thousand, which is roughly
who were used as forced labour to clear up the the number of Jews imprisoned in the Warsaw
ghetto’s ruins; it also contained extermination Ghetto, almost all of whom died there or at
facilities and a crematorium. Most of its surviving Treblinka or Majdanek. If it could be proved that
inmates were transferred to other camps in July the Germans had built a gas chamber for the
1944 but 348 remained and were liberated the next purpose of exterminating non-Jewish Poles, this
month by the Zośka battalion of the Polish would undermine the status of the Holocaust as a
underground Home Army during the Warsaw crime of unique proportions. It is a standard trope
Uprising (in a twist of fate of the sort common in on the Polish nationalist right that Jews have
exaggerated their victimhood in order to extort room after he was discovered to be engaged in
money from the Poles and obtain global power and underground activity on behalf of the trade union
influence. Solidarność. In the late 1980s, as the crumbling
So, why was almost no one in Poland aware of communist regime started to retreat from its
the existence of this additional death camp in the longstanding policy of suppressing discussion of
centre of the country’s capital? The answer reads the wartime past, he was given the task of
like a nationalist fever dream, in which all of the unearthing previously unseen footage of the
nation’s historic enemies play a role: the Germans Warsaw Uprising. He set about establishing the
covered it up because they didn’t want to pay time and location of the filmed events, developing a
reparations for Nazi crimes; the Jews covered it up talent for historical detective work.
because they didn’t want to give up their share of After the fall of communism, Walkowski was
the global victims’ market; the Russians and Polish asked to produce accounts of Warsaw’s wartime
communists covered it up because they ran the history for use in the country’s museums. In 2007,
facility after the war (in these circles, ‘Jew’ and working in the US National Archives, he unearthed
‘communist’ are often used interchangeably); Poles a cache of aerial surveillance photographs taken
in the know covered it up because they were bribed over Warsaw by the Luftwaffe between 1940 and
or brainwashed by foreign interests. 1945: high-quality images, with time stamps and
When Trzcińska outlined her claims in a identification numbers. By cross-referencing the
monograph published in 2002, they were rejected images with photos, film footage, documentary
by the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), a evidence and witness testimonies, Walkowski was
state body with prosecutorial powers established able to reconstruct events in minute detail. It was
after the fall of communism to conduct research, for this reason that the IPN tasked him with
administer state archives and adjudicate on establishing the veracity of Trzcińska’s claims.
important historical debates. In 2007, the historian One of Trzcińska’s key propositions was that
Bogusław Kopka published a book under the aegis the Germans had built a barracks in Koło, a
of the IPN that criticised Trzcińska’s thesis and neighbourhood in the west of the city, for the
estimated the number of victims of Gęsiówka at purpose of imprisoning Poles. But municipal
twenty thousand. But the more Trzcińska’s claims records and the testimonies of people who lived
were challenged, the more determined her there make clear that the barracks referred to had
supporters became. Marches, demonstrations, been built before the war as housing for workers
public meetings and religious ceremonies were employed on the trams or at the gasworks.
held, bogus maps circulated, false testimonies Walkowski found photos from the 1930s of the
promoted, Wikipedia entries amended. Worst of buildings and their residents, as well as dated
all, plaques and monuments bearing false witness letters sent to people who had lived there.
to the secret genocide started to appear around the Trzcińska had also claimed that a nearby forest had
city. been used as a killing field. This incensed many
Seeking a resolution, IPN prosecutors turned in local residents, who knew it wasn’t true. When
2010 to Zygmunt Walkowski, who specialises in Trzcińska’s supporters placed a memorial stone in
using photographs and film footage to reconstruct the forest they poured paint over it in protest.
Warsaw’s wartime history. Born in 1936, Walkowski found evidence, including
Walkowski witnessed Warsaw’s destruction during photographs, that proved the residents were right:
the war. He worked as a producer at the Poles had been able to walk in the forest
Documentary Film Studio in Warsaw between 1955 throughout the war. A separate facility attributed by
and 1982, when he was demoted to the studio stock Trzcińska to the Germans doesn’t appear in aerial
photographs until long after the war. Resistance being a traitor and a liar, a Commie and a Jew, of
fighters from the Home Army had conducted a falsifying the images from the US National
reconnaissance mission to the site, but didn’t Archives, and spreading Nazi propaganda. Now in
mention the facility in their reports. Walkowski his eighties, he has received abuse and threats of
also debunked testimony claiming that the violence, forcing him to buy a reinforced door for
Germans had used a wall in Koło to string up Poles his apartment. When I visited him last summer he
‘like grapes on a vine’. The wall was built in 1972. was still getting anonymous phone calls.
Walkowski then demolished Trzcińska’s thesis None of this will surprise anyone who has upset
about the Józef Bem Street tunnel, which, she had Polish nationalists in the past. Less expected,
argued, had been closed off in order to be used as a however, was the determined silence from the IPN,
gas chamber. But aerial images from the period which commissioned Walkowski’s investigation.
clearly show cars and horses entering the tunnel The IPN came under the control of the Law and
from the north and emerging moments later from Justice party (PiS) after its victories in the
the south. This footage as well as the plans filed presidential and parliamentary elections of 2015.
with the city authorities confirmed that the PiS’s links to nationalist activists have strengthened
ventilation shafts Trzcińska’s supporters believed over the past decade as the smaller parties to its
were built by the Germans for the purpose of right have collapsed, bequeathing it many of their
gassing people were installed in the mid-1970s. An voters and politicians. PiS leaders repeat nationalist
electric ventilator engine treated by nationalists as a arguments that liberal elites at home and abroad
holy relic also dated back to the early 1970s; the are seeking to shame and weaken the country by
company that manufactured it wasn’t founded until obsessing over Polish crimes while ignoring or
decades after the war. obscuring crimes against Poles. This chimes with
The ‘eyewitness accounts’ cited by Trzcińska the nationalist belief that the truth about KL
turned out to be just as unreliable. A woman called Warschau, and, by extension, about Polish
‘Aldona’ claimed to remember watching from her suffering, is being suppressed in the interests of
window at night as Poles were loaded into the American Jewry.
tunnel by SS officers wearing black uniforms. The This convergence between PiS leaders and
SS in occupied Poland wore grey-green uniforms, Trzcińska’s supporters means that the party has
not black ones. They did, however, wear black long supported those peddling the KL Warschau
uniforms in a popular TV drama about a Polish conspiracy theory. In 2014, PiS MEPs invited Mira
secret agent broadcast in the late 1960s. Aldona Modelska-Creech, the most prominent proponent
also claimed that several times a week the German of the death camp theory since Trzcińska’s death,
authorities forced the whole neighbourhood to turn to give a lecture on KL Warschau to members of the
off their lights and close their curtains so that they European Parliament. In a letter to the head of the
wouldn’t see the gas chamber in operation. But IPN, she suggested that liberal politicians have
everyone in Warsaw was required to observe a ‘concocted fake evidence in order to compensate
blackout as a standard precaution during bombing Jewish circles, who have invested millions in the so-
raids. called “Holocaust Business” to enforce the thesis
Walkowski took seven years to complete his that only Jews died in camps’. I recently obtained a
investigation, outlining his findings in a series of copy of a letter from Jarosław Kaczyński, the leader
low-key public presentations in early 2017. His of PiS, to Modelska-Creech, in which he describes
conclusions provoked a furious reaction from her activities as ‘worthy of particular support’,
Trzcińska’s disciples (she died in 2011), who adding that ‘it is of fundamental importance that
accused him of working for foreign intelligence, of we do not neglect work on deepening historical
awareness, especially among young people.’ After to lay flowers, listen to speeches and sing the
it took power, PiS disbanded the council of national anthem. Some carried banners and crosses
historians that adjudicated on public memorials, and wore the white and red armbands of the
which had sided with protesters against the KL soldiers of the Home Army.
Warschau monuments. At the unveiling ceremony The ceremony was followed by a procession
in Grochów, a PiS MP, Andrzej Melak, gave a from the church to the tunnel. Every twenty or
speech describing the plaque as ‘living history, thirty metres, the participants stopped, kneeled
which every Pole should know’. down and started praying. Muffled, mournful
The IPN hasn’t publicised Walkowski’s music emanated from a large speaker carried on a
findings, even though its prosecutors accepted his trolley. They were doing the Stations of the Cross.
arguments and closed the investigation into KL It was dark by the time we finally entered the
Warschau in January 2017. In November last year I tunnel. Above the graffiti that lined the walls were
received a letter from an IPN prosecutor in Warsaw rows of little crosses. People lit candles and said
accepting the figure of twenty thousand victims and prayers as the leader of the group explained that the
stating that the existence of ‘any camp tunnel’s ventilation system had been used as an
infrastructure in the neighbourhood of the Warsaw instrument of mass murder thirty years before it
West railway station or gas chambers used to had been installed. A couple of men noticed me
exterminate prisoners in the tunnel under this taking notes. They were pleasant, inquisitive. One
railway station’ had been refuted ‘beyond any told me solemnly that the soil we had been walking
doubt’. This contradicted a separate on was mixed with the ashes of the victims of the
communication I received from the IPN’s Office of gas chamber. When I asked him what he thought
Historical Research, which appeared to indicate about those who disagreed that there had been a
that the issue was still undecided. It described the death camp here, he blamed pressure from ‘foreign
figure of two hundred thousand victims as not interests’.
‘sufficiently proved’, suggested that the existence It’s perhaps unsurprising, given the decades of
of a gas chamber in the tunnel ‘cannot be ruled propaganda directed at Poles by various occupying
out’, and concluded that ‘undoubtedly the matter powers, and the cover-up of real atrocities such as
should be further examined by historians.’ The IPN the mass execution of Polish officers by the Soviets
has refused to respond to my inquiries regarding at Katyń in 1940, that some should believe that a
the contradiction between the two statements. huge death camp in the nation’s capital could have
L
been hidden for so long. The Germans did plan to
AST SEPTEMBER, I went to one of the enslave the Poles, murder the educated classes and
monthly masses dedicated to the victims of eradicate the national culture, and they did succeed
KL Warschau at the church of St Stanisław in destroying Warsaw. But they never attempted the
the Martyr in the western suburb of Wola, not far systematic mass murder of all Polish citizens. The
from the Józef Bem Street tunnel. This church also worst thing about being in that tunnel was not that
has a KL Warschau plaque, adorned with a the people around me believed that so many of their
despairing Jesus and a sea of skulls. It reads: ‘In compatriots were gassed there. It was that they so
Tribute to the 200,000 Poles Murdered by the desperately wanted it to be true.
German Occupiers in the Death Camp KL
Warschau, in the Years 1942-1944.’ A bronze plate Christian Davies, a correspondent based in
affixed to the plaque says: ‘On the basis of the book Warsaw, writes for the Guardian and the Observer.
by Maria Trzcińska.’ After the mass, around forty
people, almost all of them elderly, gathered outside
It was sheer heaven

Bee Wilson
Exceeding My Brief: Memoirs of a Disobedient Civil Servant by Barbara Hosking. Biteback, 384 pp, £9.99, March
B
ARBARA HOSKING was eating chicken women’ in this huge country with its ‘very small
curry in a bungalow in Tanganyika one day white population’.
in the 1950s when she felt the room Hosking felt that the white European men in
shaking. She was lunching with her old Africa admired the women’s ‘spirit’ and their
schoolfriend Mary, and this was the bungalow they working so far from home and always seemed
shared. Both women were then working as office ‘delighted’ to be asked to drive them somewhere.
managers for a British-owned gold, copper and At the time, she said, they were ‘an outpost of
silver mine in Mpanda. Pieces of plaster were feminine civilisation in this remote corner of
falling off the wall, the room was juddering and, Africa’. To be in Africa was itself an ‘extraordinary
outside, their houseboys were shouting at them to adventure’. As Henry Gardiner, one of the mine’s
get out of the building. Barbara suggested it might bosses, remarked, ‘we have the whole of Africa at
be an earthquake but Mary disagreed and said that our disposal.’ The white population in Tanganyika
the boys were ‘overreacting’: it was only a ‘tremor’. was tiny, so news of Hosking’s bravery at the time
So they went on with their chicken curry and its of the earthquake quickly spread ‘from airstrip to
accompaniment of cucumbers, tomatoes and nuts. airstrip’. Hosking doesn’t tell us what the local
As a split opened down the wall, Hosking ‘felt a black men thought of her and her friend: the
strange sensation, rather like standing on a Africans who carried their guns for them on
platform on the Underground in London when hunting trips, who cooked their chicken curries (‘it
another train is passing underneath’. Yet still they was sheer heaven to have our housework and
carried on as if nothing was happening. Then they cooking done for us’), who washed and ironed their
heard a screeching of car brakes and one of the clothes, who made her Cornish pasties and saffron
British mine engineers rushed in to see if the cake to remind her of home, who tended her
women were all right. bungalow with its pink and purple bougainvillea
and who had tried to save her life during the
We reassured him that we were, and I remarked
earthquake only to be accused of ‘overreacting’. But
that it was quite a violent tremor … wasn’t it?
spirit was not a virtue that Europeans attributed to
‘Violent tremor?’ exclaimed Stanley. ‘It was
Africans, only to themselves.
a bloody great earthquake! Force eight on the
Throughout her 92 years, Barbara Hosking –
Richter scale. There’s one dead and several hurt
born in 1926 – seems to have aspired to this notion
at the dukas, and you just went on with your
of ‘spirit’; if she were spirited enough, she could
lunch!’
prove herself the equal of any man, and would no
The engineer stared at them ‘in a mixture of longer be patronised. ‘Spirit’ in this sense is
shock and admiration’ as they shook the plaster out something close to ‘pluck’, which carries with it a
of their hair and remarked that they were ‘just sense of tenacity, the refusal to panic in trying
being British’. Hosking knew that they already had circumstances. It means taking risks and having a
a reputation for being ‘unusually intrepid young lark but not making a fuss about it. Other than the
earthquake incident, Hosking’s other salient
memory of her three years in Africa was the time
she saved Mary from a snake, catching it by the tail For anyone who came of age in Britain during
and pretending not to be scared, though she was and directly after the war, pluck was part of the
actually terrified. When she returned to England national self-image. To be spirited or plucky in the
and entered political life, working first in the British sense was to be able to suppress your own
broadcasting department at Transport House, she desires as circumstances required, without
felt ready for it. ‘Life at the mine had made me inflicting your emotions on anyone else – though
strong and self-reliant. I felt sure I could cope with there were times when being spirited simply meant
misogynistic politicians and, indeed, with the having drunk a lot of spirits. One of Hosking’s jobs
snakes that one finds hidden in all political parties.’ in Tanganyika was to buy the drinks for the dinner
Hosking – who started out as a Cornish parties held by the mining community – the rations
scholarship girl and rose to become a senior civil consisted of a crate of beer or a bottle of whisky per
servant under Harold Wilson and Edward Heath person. ‘It sounds more than excessive to write this
and, later, a top executive at breakfast television – today,’ Hosking notes, ‘but no one seemed to get
has written a memoir of her rise to the top of the drunk.’
British establishment. Sentence by sentence, her Hosking – her family called her ‘Bobbie’ – was
story is likeable and impressive but never very born (by candlelight) to a modest family in
exciting to read. Most of the great turning points in Penzance who lived above the dairy where her
her life are expressed in cliché or convention: ‘I was father worked. Her arm was broken at birth,
21 years old, and I was on my way to seek fame and probably the result of a botched forceps delivery. As
fortune in London’; ‘The Reform Club had opened soon as she was old enough, she started wearing an
its heart to me and I worked hard to repay this iron splint. Every year she had to be fitted with a
honour.’ Yet the book is compelling, not least new splint at a clinic where three nurses broke the
because it is a portrayal of the collective values of adhesions in her elbow by pulling hard. ‘The
the British establishment in the postwar decades, upside,’ she wrote, ‘was that I now have a very high
as conceived by a woman who was gay and who pain threshold.’ Her parents’ marriage was
didn’t come from one of the ‘right’ families, and unhappy and she learned to keep quiet when
was thus an insider and an outsider at the same ‘Daddy’ was in a bad mood. ‘“All this laughter will
time. lead to tears,” he would say, a self-fulfilling
Hosking wants us to see her as a pioneer or a prophecy as he cuffed one of us about the ears.’ Her
rebel, as someone who, as her title has it, ‘exceeded way out was getting a scholarship to West Cornwall
her brief’. Yet her ‘spirit’ comes across as tribal and School for Girls and from there finding work on a
obedient as much as individual. She seems to have local newspaper on the Isles of Scilly.
been more troubled by having once stumbled into Another thing she needed to be brave about
the Travellers Club by mistake – women weren’t from an early age was the fact that she was lesbian
allowed – than she was by the earthquake. But and couldn’t tell anyone about it, until she
perhaps this accurately reflects the values of the eventually met a woman called Robin who worked
world in which she was trying to make her way. for John Lewis and they moved in together. She had
Had she happened to show fear at the time of the fallen in love for the first time aged six – with a fair-
earthquake, no one would have held it against her. haired girl called Melvina – but it was only when
To step foot in the Travellers Club as a non-male, she arrived in London to find work as a secretary
on the other hand, was a gaffe that couldn’t be that she was able to acknowledge, in limited
allowed to pass. She was ‘politely but firmly shown circles, that she was ‘queer’. As late as the 1980s,
the door’. she was amazed to discover one night on holiday in
Spain that her group of closest friends, which
included the journalist Katharine Whitehorn and Department of the Environment and as a senior
the Conservative peer Heather Brigstocke, had had information officer in the prime minister’s press
no idea about her sexuality until she mentioned it. office. She is always very keen to impress on us
‘If I had produced a gun and fired it through the what a ‘trailblazer’ she was in having risen through
roof the reaction couldn’t have been stronger.’ these various positions. Yet at a certain point, a
Just to have been a woman who worked in woman who shows the same establishment spirit
1950s Britain required a certain amount of pluck. as a man is not subverting the culture but shoring it
There were trying circumstances to face every day: up. At one point she remarks that the
rules and assumptions that needed to be swallowed implementation of government policy was much
or risen above, or silently raged against. Hosking’s ‘smoother’ in the days when politicians and civil
first London job was in the typing pool for the servants had often been at the same school at the
Odeon and Gaumont cinema chain. Men were same time, apparently oblivious to the fact that
allowed to smoke in the office; women were not. returning to that sort of arrangement would make it
Men could come and go as they pleased; women so much harder for future Barbara Hoskings to get
had to clock in and out. ‘You could talk quietly to on in the Civil Service. One of her proudest
your neighbours but real conversations and moments occurs when she invites Heath to join her
laughter were discouraged.’ Given all this it’s for lunch at the Reform Club. ‘What a lark!’ is his
hardly surprising that Hosking’s examples of response. He orders lemon sole, pronouncing it to
‘exceeding her brief’ often come across as rather be sweeter than Dover sole. She says how ‘kind’ it
mild. When you’re treated as a rebel merely for was of him to lunch with her and give her ‘standing
being a woman in a position of authority, you start in the club from the start’. After the Heath lunch,
to lose your bearings about what is and isn’t a Hosking finds herself effortlessly rising through
rebellion. She entered the Civil Service at a time the club’s committees. Again, she has passed the
when many men let it be known that women were test. She has shown spirit.
I
exceeding their brief just by being there.
She tells a story of a time when she N its cover design and the way it is marketed,
accompanied Edward Heath on a trip to Bonn, Exceeding My Brief is a clone of Coming Up Trumps
where he was due to give a pro-Europe speech. She by Jean Trumpington, which was first
rushed to a department store to buy a hat for the published to great acclaim in 2014. On the surface,
occasion, choosing a black and white sombrero- Hosking and Trumpington have little in common
style number with a wide brim. The hat was so large beyond their age. Where Hosking is left-leaning,
it largely obscured Heath from the view of the Trumpington is a Conservative (she went to the
crowds as they sat together in the limousine. ‘I’m Lords in 1980 under Mrs Thatcher, her great
so very sorry about the hat, prime minister,’ I mentor). Hosking is gay, Trumpington was
apologised when we reached the airport. ‘The heterosexual – the happiest years of her life, she
Foreign Office told me I had to wear one.’ She tells us, were spent with her late husband, ‘Barker’,
heard Heath laughing at her as she turned away. who was headmaster of The Leys school in
This hat incident happened 49 years ago. Who Cambridge. Hosking’s family was humble;
cares if a crowd could get a full view of Heath’s face Trumpington’s grandfather was surgeon general in
through a car window? Yet Hosking still writes India and her mother was brought up ‘as a sort of
about her choice of sombrero as if it were a grave American princess’. And yet the two women share a
transgression. certain diction and a set of values and a sense of
In the course of her career as a civil servant, how the horizons for British women were opening
Hosking held positions at Transport House, at the up in the postwar era, at least for women who
moved in certain circles. Where Hosking writes of Madison Avenue in her late twenties, and
‘spirit’, Trumpington writes of being ‘brave’. She developed a reputation for tap-dancing on tables at
was brave, she recalls by ‘going to Paris at 15, parties. ‘I was frightfully good at it in those days.’
Bletchley at 18 and New York at 29, each time on And then she met Barker on a visit to Yale, where
my own and knowing no one’. he was a visiting fellow. To her great delight they
Coming Up Trumps is a far more entertaining bought a dachshund called Sherry-Netherland,
book than Exceeding My Brief, in part because named after a big hotel near Central Park. They had
Trumpington is secure enough in her status to care a son called Adam. And then Jean became a Tory
much less what other people think about her. She councillor in Cambridge and later mayor of the city.
still seems to feel a deep obligation to put her best Eventually, she entered the House of Lords as a life
foot forward. There are plenty of clichés here too – peer – calling herself Lady Trumpington – and Mrs
but there’s more life to them. Trumpington is Thatcher made her a minister in the Department of
either ‘dying with boredom’ or she is having ‘jolly Health. And they all lived happily ever after, except
good fun’, and sometimes both at once. In the for Barker, who had a stroke and died in the 1980s.
course of her life she tells us that she met Lloyd She claims in the first paragraph of Chapter 1
George, Beaverbrook, Jackie Kennedy and ‘every that, ‘quite frankly’, she’s been happy ever since
single postwar prime minister, from Clement Bletchley. And, the way she describes it, everything
Attlee (whom I met at the theatre) to David that ever happens to her is either jolly or marvellous
Cameron’, as well as other ‘formidable and or divine or heaven or glorious or riveting or
extraordinarily interesting people, despite being thrillingly exciting and even when something
rather dull myself’. happens that is dreadful or dull, it doesn’t trouble
She was born, as Jean Campbell-Harris, in 1922 her for long. There is an awful moment when
to aristocratic parents who sent her to a series of Barker becomes the headmaster of The Leys and
schools where she was ‘dreadfully homesick’ and Sherry-Netherland is run over and killed on the very
‘almost suicidally miserable’. But she insists that ‘it first day they arrive at the school: this is one of her
wasn’t my parents’ fault. They were born in the ‘black moments’. Another of her ‘flies in the
19th century and brought up by Victorians.’ After ointment’ is that Barker disapproves of her political
years of glamorous living during her early career and tells her at first he wants nothing to do
childhood, her parents lost their money in the with it. And then there is the time when she makes
crash of 1929, which meant that they had ‘nothing’; her maiden speech in the House of Lords and
by ‘nothing’ she means that they had to move out of decides to use the speech to talk about
London to a house in Kent that had ‘only one field’ incontinence, and the lack of facilities for dealing
(there was also a wood and a hard tennis court). with it in old people’s homes and everyone starts to
They were still rich enough to send her to a French laugh at her. But even that is soon forgotten, as she
finishing school, where she played ‘an awful lot of leaves for dinner and ‘a hell of a party’.
tennis’ and nearly went to dinner with the French The two memoirs end on very similar notes.
tennis champion Jean Borotra, until her parents Trumpington, four years before her death, looks
forbade it. with gratitude on the fact that she still has ‘the
She was 18 when the war started, and went to most wonderful life’ and still behaves ‘rather
work at Bletchley typing out ciphers. The job was badly’. Hosking feels ‘amazed’ and hugely grateful
‘deeply tedious’ but she was desperately happy and relishes the life she leads, which is now
there: the weekends were ‘heaven’ because she and enriched by the company of her partner Margaret.
her friends would rush up to London and dance all She rejoices at the increasing number of women ‘in
night. She had a spell working in advertising on all walks of life’. Her book, she says, is a record of
‘the now changed world that has so enriched my

long and fortunate life’. But at moments, the
pluckiness both women exemplify can be wearing,
going along as it does with a failure to question the
values of the world they find themselves in.
Sometimes ‘spirit’ is nothing more than denial,
projected outwards as jolliness. But some things, at
least, have improved since the 1950s. Women now
are allowed to be depressed, allowed to be gay,
allowed to wear a hat that makes a man look and
feel small, allowed to go to a party and admit they
had a terrible time. When they feel the earth shake,
they are allowed to stop eating and run.
Bee Wilson’s The Way We Eat Now came out in

March.
He’s Bad, She’s Mad

Mary Hannity
Bad Girls: The Rebels and Renegades of Holloway Prison by Caitlin Davies. John Murray, 373 pp, £10.99, February
O
N 26 September 1849 the lord mayor of the prison estate in the later 19th century, criminal
London, Sir James Duke, laid the punishment mostly meant exile or execution.
foundation stone for the new City House Convicts had been transported to British colonies
of Correction at Holloway. The land had been in the Americas and later to Australia throughout
intended for use as a burial ground for victims of the 18th century. After public hanging was
the recent cholera epidemic, but the epidemic had abolished in 1868, the same year the last convict
subsided, and the anticipated dead had not arrived. ship arrived in Western Australia, a prison term
‘May God preserve the City of London/And make became the most common form of punishment,
this place a terror to evil-doers,’ the foundation one practised as a monopoly of the state.
stone read. HMP Holloway, which was the largest The Prisons Act of 1877, which brought prisons
women’s prison in Western Europe at its closure in in England, Scotland and Wales under state
2016, at first held 120 men and 27 women, as well control, encountered opposition in Parliament for
as a number of boys over the age of eight. Men and ‘sapping the foundations’ of independent local
women occupied separate wings and had separate administration. Until then, most prisons had been
tasks: women did the laundry and men and boys run by local authorities. Conditions varied hugely:
worked the treadwheel that supplied water to the wealthier inmates at Holloway, such as W.T. Stead,
prison (this was dangerous work – the treadwheel editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, could pay six shillings
at Aylesbury Prison was removed in 1843 after three to entrepreneurial jailers for a private cell and a
prisoners were crushed to death in a single year). ‘first-class’ stay. (‘Never had I a pleasanter holiday,
The women, most of whom had been found guilty a more charming season of repose,’ Stead wrote of
of prostitution or drunkenness, lived on F Wing, on his incarceration in 1885, after he had ‘purchased’
the eastern side of the prison. Each cell wall had a a 13-year-old girl as part of an exposé of child
list showing the daily prison routine. The day prostitution.) At Newgate Gaol, established in the
began at 5.45 a.m. in summer and 6.45 a.m. in 12th century and finally closed in 1902, debtors
winter (‘Rise, open ventilator, wash, fold bedding’) and felons had to pay for their food, water and gin,
and ended at 9 p.m. (‘Sling hammock and prepare and could purchase their release from fetters in a
for bed … lights out’). ‘The light goes out,’ wrote ‘trade of chains’. Male prisoners could ‘visit’ their
Sylvia Pankhurst, who was imprisoned at Holloway female counterparts (who might afterwards ‘plead
in 1906, and then ‘darkness, a long, sleepless the belly’ to avoid execution) at the cost of
night, and the awakening to another day like sixpence. When the Quaker penal reformer
yesterday and like tomorrow’. Elizabeth Fry visited Newgate in 1813, she found
The conversion of Holloway into a women-only three hundred women detained in a space designed
prison in 1902 reflected broader shifts in the for fifty, crammed together regardless of age or
British penal system. Before the centralisation of offence.
By contrast, the new Victorian houses of Arthur Griffiths insisted in 1870, was ‘intensified
correction discouraged idleness and tried to induce by hysteria, and those unsexed creatures respect no
reflection. In the early days of Holloway, inmates authority. At times the place is like a
worked at oakum-picking (unravelling old rope for pandemonium.’ Selina Salter, one of the working-
use in mat-making) in high-sided booths designed class prisoners Davies studies, was reported to have
to prevent them from seeing or speaking to one destroyed furniture in 13 cells and torn up six
another (at Pentonville, which opened in 1842, prison gowns. She was reprimanded four hundred
prisoners were made to wear masks while times for refusing to work and two hundred times
exercising). Keeping men and women separate was for violent conduct over the course of her repeated
meant to curb the spread of criminal influence. terms of imprisonment.
‘When woman falls,’ one prison director observed, Descriptions of female temper may of course
‘she seems to possess a capacity almost beyond tell us more about contemporary expectations of
man, for running into all that is evil.’ Women were femininity than about the experiences of female
thought to respond differently to detention: prisoners. In the year it became a women’s prison,
‘Female prisoners, as a body, do not bear Holloway had 949 inmates (when it closed, the
imprisonment so well as the male prisoners,’ figure was 590). As is still the case, most female
according to the medical officer at Brixton’s all- prisoners were serving short sentences, which are
female prison, which opened in 1853. The associated with higher rates of recidivism. One
separation of men and women was difficult to woman served three weeks for begging, another
enforce in mixed prisons, and so the prison one week for drunkenly disrupting a church
commission – the establishment of which in 1877 service. Mary Spillane was sentenced to death after
furthered the process of prison centralisation – her baby was found dead in a dust heap, before
decided to ‘streamline the administration’ by being reprieved on account of her gender. (The
sending the male inmates of Holloway to Brixton, baby’s father was charged but never stood trial.)
Wormwood Scrubs or Pentonville and, in 1902, Prison visits by upper-middle-class lady well-
concentrating all of London’s female prisoners in wishers, following Elizabeth Fry’s example, aimed
Holloway. to save the inmates from themselves: the Lady
The Gladstone Committee of 1895 suggested Visitors’ Association, founded in 1901 and active at
that ‘prison discipline … be more effectually Holloway, was ‘a body of earnest and devoted ladies
designed to maintain, stimulate, or awaken the with experience of rescue work and a keen
higher susceptibilities of prisoners’ and ‘develop sympathy with even the most degraded of their
their moral instincts’, marking an ostensible shift sex’. (In practice, these visits incited jealousy,
from a system of punishment to one of reform. The disrupted prison routine, and provoked inmates
report also recommended the development of the into ‘simulating penitence’ to access privileges.)
borstal system for young offenders and the The governor lived to the left of the prison
improvement of prison educational facilities. The entrance, the chaplain to the right: one man for
argument for reform, however, conflicted with discipline, another for salvation.
ideas of female depravity. Were women truly Between 1906 and 1914 hundreds of
accountable for their actions? Were they suffragettes were imprisoned and force-fed in
redeemable? Did they have ‘higher susceptibilities’? Holloway. They turned their resistance to prison
As Caitlin Davies notes in Bad Girls, her history of rules into a political programme. Suffragette
Holloway and its inmates, incarcerated women prisoners were held separately and forbidden from
were considered far more difficult to manage than communicating, but if one of them smashed a
men. Misconduct in Holloway, the prison inspector window to protest against poor air quality, for
instance, the others would follow suit. They mirrors were allowed in cells, walls were painted
documented their treatment and smuggled out pastel colours and one disused cell became ‘the
letters and diaries. The WSPU rented a house shop’ – where, under a new scheme, inmates could
nearby, and used it as a base to communicate with buy cosmetics and make-up. (There was a demand
the prisoners – and to throw bombs and bottles at for this: inmates had been using shoe polish for
the prison. Suffragettes were greeted on release by mascara and glossed their hair with margarine.)
applauding crowds. The governor resigned. ‘If you Flowerbeds were planted in the prison grounds.
are not a rebel before going into Holloway, there is The early 20th century was a time of public
no reason to wonder at your being one when you scepticism about the value of imprisonment. In
come out,’ wrote Edith Whitworth, secretary of the 1910, as home secretary, Churchill had criticised
Sheffield branch of the WSPU. The imprisonment the ‘terrible and purposeless waste’ entailed in
of middle-class women, which was unusual, helped giving half of all prisoners sentences of two weeks
draw public attention to the treatment of or less; Alexander Paterson, a commissioner of
incarcerated women in general, and the prisons between 1922 and 1946, criticised the use
suffragettes agitated for improved prison of prison as a ‘ready handmaid’ to the courts.
conditions. Davies gives ample attention to their Prison ‘debases the currency of human feeling’,
use of Holloway as an icon of struggle: a Holloway Sidney and Beatrice Webb declared in English Prisons
flag was waved on suffragette marches; Christmas under Local Government (1922). Policies like remission
cards were produced with an illustration of the and probation, as well as the decision to allow
prison (‘Votes and a Happy Year’); there were people convicted of crimes time to raise money for
Holloway diaries, demonstrations, songs and fines, challenged the dominance of incarceration as
poems (‘Oh, Holloway, grim Holloway/With grey, a penal strategy, especially for petty offences:
forbidding towers!/Stern are the walls, but sterner between 1908 and 1923 the number of fine
still/Is woman’s free, unconquered will’). defaulters going to prison dropped by 80 per cent.
Other Holloway inmates did not feel themselves The fall in the number of inmates at Holloway
to possess such agency. ‘We all imagine we can during the interwar years – by 1936 there were 350;
mould our own lives,’ Edith Thompson wrote from in 1938 this dropped to 290 – corresponds to the
Holloway, where she was executed in January 1923, use of these alternatives. The prison population in
having been found guilty of inciting the murder of England and Wales halved between 1908 and 1939,
her husband by her lover. ‘We seldom can, they are from 22,029 to 11,086. Prisons were shut down,
moulded for us – just by the laws and rules and construction of new ones halted. Reading Gaol was
conventions of this world.’ Thompson wasn’t briefly used as a driving test centre. The 1938
wrong about the way in which women’s lives are Criminal Justice Bill would have furthered the move
made to fit particular shapes: the press dubbed her away from custodial sentences, extending
the ‘Messalina of Ilford’, after the ‘promiscuous’ probation and providing new facilities for young
wife of Emperor Claudius, killed for ‘conspiring’ offenders. The Home Office even made plans to
against him. She was buried in an unmarked grave relocate Holloway prisoners to the countryside. But
in the prison grounds – on which, it was said, no these plans were shelved after war was declared in
grass grew. 1939, and the Criminal Justice Bill abandoned. The
A reform programme in the 1930s – Mary Size prison population began to grow again after the
was appointed deputy governor in 1927 with a brief war (it quadrupled between 1900 and 2017, with
to make Holloway ‘the best women’s prison in the half of this increase taking place since 1990).
country’ – brought educational improvements and Wouldn’t it be practical, one local councillor said
a new stress on the importance of femininity: after visiting the empty cells at Reading in 1938, to
‘raze [the prison] to the ground, and utilise the site and girls in custody require some form of medical,
for a building more in keeping with our social psychiatric or remedial treatment,’ James
needs’? The rural site the Home Office wanted to Callaghan stated as home secretary, going on to
use for women prisoners is now Heathrow airport. declare that, enhanced by open green spaces and
By 1946, Holloway had around five hundred communal living units as well as new medical and
prisoners, who were struggling with rationing: they psychiatric facilities, Holloway would become
were short of sanitary towels and were using pages ‘basically a secure hospital’ at the ‘hub of the
of the Bible as toilet paper (Kathleen Lonsdale, a female penal system’. The reconstruction took
Quaker scientist and conscientious objector, was place with the prison inmates in situ at a cost of
told to ‘use Moses’). Inmates worked during the almost £40 million. Edith Thompson’s body was
day and were confined to their cells at 4.30 p.m., exhumed and taken to Brookwood Cemetery in
after a meal of bread and margarine with cheese or Surrey, where the golden letters on her gravestone
spam. In 1949, a group of younger inmates, read: ‘Sleep on Beloved. Her death was a legal
returning from the wireless room, where they formality.’
worked for a ‘large electrical company’ – then as Callaghan’s image of the secure hospital
now, prison was a place of cheap labour and indicated a new form for an old idea: while the
corporate profit – barricaded themselves in a cell male prisoner represented the social problem of
for 48 hours, their shouts heard all over Holloway. aggression, the female prisoner represented the
They emerged after hoses were brought and water ‘private’ problem of the body or the maladjustment
aimed at the cell. of the mind. He’s bad, she’s mad. Women’s
The original Holloway building was a imprisonment troubles deep-rooted ideas of
flamboyant mock-up of Warwick Castle. What womanhood and so the place of their incarceration
better place than a castle for all those women in is often given a name other than ‘prison’: castle,
need of rescue? As a child growing up nearby, hospital, immigration removal centre. Joanna
Davies ‘would stop to stare at the magical castle Kelley, governor of Holloway between 1959 and
jail, with its high turrets and gothic battlements’. 1966, thought it ought to be called Holloway
‘There is a story,’ Paul Rock writes in Reconstructing a Hospital. The name would have been appropriate
Women’s Prison (1996), ‘that its façade [was enough: by the end of the 1960s, five thousand
intended] … to mollify suburban neighbours doses of medicine – Mogadon, Valium, Largactil –
unhappy about the construction of a prison in the were handed out at Holloway every week and more
midst of their new-built homes.’ When an than a thousand medical reports completed
execution took place, crowds would gather outside annually. By the 1980s, more psychotropic drugs
the gates, as if the spectacle of the building itself were prescribed there than in any other prison in
substituted for the unseen scaffold within. the country. ‘First they come round and ask you:
Ken Neale, who helped oversee the partial “Who needs drugs?”’ one former prisoner said of
demolition and rebuilding of Holloway in the the Holloway psychiatric unit C1, where women
1970s, described the original building as ‘a devilish were isolated for up to 22 hours a day. ‘And then
hole, derelict, run-down, dirty and overcrowded’. they ask: “Who wants drugs?”’
Despite its external appearance, the interior of the Some aspects of life at Holloway did improve
old prison had been radial, on the lines of Jeremy after the prison was rebuilt. Lock-up time was later
Bentham’s panopticon, maximising surveillance in the day and inmates were allowed to wear their
and control. Now something not so explicitly own clothes. There were counselling groups, a
disciplinarian was needed to suit the liberal swimming pool and gym; a hair salon (‘Hairy
discourse of women’s rehabilitation. ‘Most women Poppins’) was introduced where prisoners could
work towards an NVQ. There were fall-offs in the large-scale ‘ghosting’, the term used by prisoners
rates of suicide and self-harm. But the prison was to describe their abrupt transfer from one prison to
still overcrowded, understaffed and unsafe. A new another (one male former prisoner recently told me
floor-to-ceiling window was repeatedly smashed he had been ghosted 32 times in six and a half
and finally boarded up. At the beginning of the years). Every week a group of thirty prisoners, out
1970s there were 800 women in prison nationwide; of the five hundred women who were at Holloway
by 1980 there were 1500. When Greenham at the time of Osborne’s announcement, was
Common campaigners broke into Holloway in moved out. Most of them were sent to HMP
1983 to protest against the incarceration of Bronzefield in Middlesex or HMP Downview in
political activists and were arrested for disturbing Surrey (which wasn’t fully up and running at the
the peace, their lawyer argued that there was no time two hundred inmates arrived). The transfer
peace to breach. In 1986, Marc Sancto, a was justified on grounds of cost and
transgender inmate, was found trying to strangle counterbalanced by news of expansion elsewhere
himself in his cell. An hour later he had hanged (nine new prisons). ‘More humane conditions’
himself with his cardigan. In 1995, David were also promised. Holloway had specialist
Ramsbotham, the chief prison inspector, walked women’s services to which inmates lost access and
out of Holloway halfway through a week-long which other prisons don’t replicate. After
inspection, appalled by rat infestations, heavy- campaigns to reclaim the site, it has now been sold
handed security and bullying. In 2007, Jean to the Peabody Group, which promises to provide
Corston’s landmark review of the treatment of six hundred affordable homes.
women with vulnerabilities in the criminal justice In 2016, 22 women died in prison, 12 by
system, undertaken after the deaths of six women suicide, the highest number of self-inflicted deaths
at Styal Prison, recommended systemic change. since 2004. On 11 January that year, three months
Among her recommendations were a reduction in before Holloway closed, Sarah Reed, a working-
the use of strip-searching – like force-feeding, a class woman of colour with severe mental health
form of state-sanctioned assault – and keeping problems, killed herself while on remand there
non-violent offenders out of prison. awaiting medical reports assessing her fitness to
W
plead. The jury at the inquest wasn’t convinced
HAT’S CHANGED? Nearly four Reed had intended to take her own life. Her
thousand women are currently antipsychotic medication had been reduced two
imprisoned in the UK, most of them for months earlier after concerns about its effect on her
non-violent offences like shoplifting (Davies says lungs, but no other medication had been
one woman was sent to Holloway for jumping out prescribed in its place. Reed was left in a distressed
of a taxi without paying). The disproportionate state. A total of 11 visits by her mother, partner and
increase in the female prison population over the solicitors were cancelled by prison authorities in
last couple of decades – between 1995 and 2010, it the three months leading up to her death, and in
more than doubled in England and Wales, from the few days before it she was locked in a cell in a
1979 to 4236 – has little to do with changes in segregation unit without any heating or hot water.
female offending, instead reflecting the decision of Davies’s claim that women are often
the courts to recommend custody more frequently criminalised for a failure to conform to norms of
for less serious offences. It is difficult therefore to feminine behaviour helps explain the
see Holloway’s closure, which was announced by disproportionate imprisonment of black women in
George Osborne in November 2015, as involving a UK prisons. They are more likely than white
move away from incarceration. It looks more like a women to be given custodial sentences and less
likely to be granted bail. Focus groups containing women don’t have to be presented as victims. They
black, Asian and minority ethnic women can be outlaws, bad girls and rebels, activists and
interviewed in 2016 by the charities Agenda and adulteresses. Davies is keen to include such figures
Women in Prison reported that they were treated in her history, but the narrative allure of the ‘bad
differently by prison staff (‘For a white person it’s girl’ – representative of some cultural fantasy of
mental health … for a black person it’s classed as female transgression – romanticises the fate of the
anger management issues’) and experienced a female prisoner and is a distraction from our
‘double disadvantage’ at trial, where they were collective accountability.
often faced by juries dominated by older white
men. In 2017, the Labour MP David Lammy’s Mary Hannity is completing a PhD on mourning
independent review into the treatment of BAME and melancholia at UCL.
individuals in the criminal justice system found
that for every hundred white women sentenced to
custody for drug offences, there were 227 black
women. For black men the figure is 141 for every
hundred white men.
‘Very few female prisoners have ever posed a
threat to society; instead most have been victims of
circumstance and, in one way or another, victims of
men,’ Davies writes. Most women in prison have
complex needs and vulnerabilities: 46 per cent are
survivors of domestic violence; 53 per cent report
having experienced childhood abuse. Nearly a third
have a previous psychiatric admission, compared
with 10 per cent of male prisoners. The ripple effect
of sending women to prison – on children,
communities and housing – is greater. ‘Men have
women to look after them, to bring in clothes and
money, while women don’t,’ the penal reformer
Frances Crook writes. But we have to move beyond
seeing womanhood as a narrative of victimhood
and struggle. The trouble with thinking about
women’s prisons as exceptions to the male norm is
that it tends to reinforce the association between
masculinity and lawlessness, and thereby
legitimates the mass incarceration of men. In Are
Prisons Obsolete? Angela Davis doesn’t write about
‘women and prisons’ but about the way notions of
gender affect systems of state punishment. To see
the male prisoner as the norm undermines the
abolitionist project; if it is more natural for a man
to be imprisoned than a woman, it can follow that it
is more natural to imprison a person of colour or a
member of another marginalised group. Of course,
At the Movies
Michael Wood
T
OWARDS the end of Blade Runner the actor The West includes grasslands, rocky crags, forests,
Rutger Hauer, playing a replicant whose snow-capped mountains – all shot, apparently, as
programmed life is fading, says he has ‘seen American dreams should be, in Spain and
things you people wouldn’t believe’. ‘All those Romania. The brothers encounter cultural
moments,’ he adds, ‘will be lost in time, like tears innovations that surprise them and move them: a
in rain’: memory and knowledge, the replicant has toothbrush, a water closet. We see western towns
understood, are part of what constitutes identity. being built, patches of desert turning into streets.
The same actor makes what we might call a cameo San Francisco looks like a permanent luxurious
disappearance in Jacques Audiard’s The Sisters fairground, and the brothers love everything about
Brothers. He lies dead in a coffin. Two of his former it.
employees visit him and one of them punches the ‘I don’t think you and I have ever gone so far,’
corpse in the face ‘just to make sure’. The the younger brother says at one point. The older
undertakers close the coffin lid. one, thinking of his brother’s drinking and other
The man has spoken earlier in the plot of the antics, wonders what sort of metaphor he has in
film, but we have heard only reports of what he mind, but the first says he just meant going on in a
said, and we don’t know what he’s seen. We learn straight line. Due west, in this case. In the next
that he is called the Commodore, and that ‘he does frame they are looking at the sea.
business in every part of the country,’ which is The brothers are Eli and Charlie, played by John
America in the 19th century. The movie’s first C. Reilly and Joaquin Phoenix. Reilly is also the
location is Oregon City, 1851. In Patrick DeWitt’s producer of the work, having seen in DeWitt’s
novel, on which the movie is based, the man offers novel a starting point for the film. The screenplay is
a leaky vision of greatness that could be seen as an by Audiard and Thomas Bidegain. The
authoritarian rendering of Hauer’s Blade Runner performances of Reilly and Phoenix are amazing,
memory: ‘A great man is one who can pinpoint a and lead us back to the question of what kind of
vacuity in the material world and inject into this western this is. Eli is a variant on the Faulknerian
space an essence of himself.’ But he is talking to idiot, apparently unlucky and ungraceful – the
himself, and in the film we are not privy to his scene where a spider enters his mouth while he
dreams. sleeps isn’t easy to forget – but also full of
The Sisters Brothers has been called ‘a comedic scrambled good sense and kindness. Charlie is a
western’, and it’s true that we need some sort of drinker and womaniser, desperately trying to be a
adjective in front of the genre name. It’s also true hard man in the most conventional ways possible,
that the movie is often funny. But the dominant but hampered by the touch of Dostoevskian
mood is lyrical and brooding, devoted to slow, darkness that Phoenix carries with him wherever he
carefully composed shots of two men riding horses goes. Eli and Charlie quarrel mildly all the time,
all day, never quite getting where they need to be. and once very violently, but they can’t do without
An incidental visual lesson, much insisted on, each other, and Eli will always see Charlie through
seems to be that real westerners always hold their his worst moments – including, near the end, the
horses’ reins with just one hand, and sit rather amputation of his right arm. Not a good
further back in the seat than can be comfortable. development for a gunslinger.
Gunslingers are what the brothers are, killers chemicals everywhere, and wade in contaminated
currently in the pay of the Commodore. The film water. This is why Charlie’s arm has to be
opens with a botched job: too many people killed amputated; Morris and Warm have even less luck.
and perhaps not the right ones, and an accidental A dire fable hangs in the air here, and I’m not sure
fire in a barn where the brothers’ horses flame and how much attention Audiard wants us to pay to it.
die. After this mess, the Commodore makes Is it to be glanced at and tucked away in the back of
Charlie ‘the lead man’ and reduces Eli’s pay. This is the mind, or is this where the movement of the film
because he hasn’t read enough Faulkner, or was leading? In the fable Warm is a benign but
Cormac McCarthy, and doesn’t recognise the sanity dangerous counterpart to the Commodore, like
that lies in bumbling. Initially it seems they are him seeking capital but for a noble anti-capitalist
going to kill a man called Kermit Warm, very well cause; his invention – a magical way of finding gold
acted by Riz Ahmed as a man who looks more that leads to environmental and human damage –
helpless than he is. He is said to have stolen money looks like an early, allegorised pathway for
from the Commodore. As long as this is the plot, fracking.
we cross-cut between two stories: the brothers are Once the utopian dream is over, we return to
looking for Warm, and Warm is travelling ahead of practical matters. The hired killers still have to kill
them with the man who is supposed to deliver him all the people the Commodore sends after them,
to the brothers. This is where the film gets slower and they do. Then one day, riding slowly across the
than slow. The new man is John Morris, played by landscape as they used to do, the brothers register a
Jake Gyllenhaal as a sort of inward-looking twin to curious absence of enemies. ‘Have you noticed,’
Joaquin Phoenix: Morris keeps a journal and uses Charlie says, ‘how long it’s been since anyone tried
long words. He is supposed to be a detective, and to kill us?’ The answer to the follow-up question –
isn’t meant to do the killing himself. why this lull? – lies in the coffin.
But then the theft story is wrong. What the We may have arrived at a possible response to
Commodore wants is Warm’s secret formula for the question about how to describe this oddly
identifying gold in a riverbed: it makes the metal lyrical western. The boys go home to their mother,
gleam so the hard sifting job becomes easy. And as if The Sisters Brothers was a tale about a family that
Warm doesn’t just want to get rich, he wants to went weirdly wrong and finally found its way back
found a utopian community in Texas, following the to simplicity. But the solution seems too precarious
ideas of Fourier and Saint-Simon. He converts (or sentimental), and invites another thought. This
Morris to his cause, and finally, after lots of is a western where the simplifications of the
gunfire, converts the brothers too. It’s clear that traditional form – the world as it was before the law
while killing seems to them a relatively honourable and the railroad arrived, the time when we didn’t
job, torturing a man to get something out of him is know who shot Liberty Valance – never really
in a different category, and in the novel Charlie has obtain. Memory and knowledge haunt all the
a magnificent line even about the killing: ‘I have characters, but they can do nothing with them.
never minded cutting down the Commodore’s They are lost in time, and we see them getting lost,
enemies much, brother. It always happens that they and learn something of what they are losing.
are repellent in one way or the other. Lesser
villains, men without mercy or grace. But I do not Michael Wood is riding off into the sunset, but will
like the idea of killing a man because of his own be back in a month.
ingenuity.’
The formula-aided prospecting goes horribly
wrong. Too eager and too clumsy, the men spill the
The Socialist Lavatory League

Owen Hatherley
No Place to Go: How Public Toilets Fail Our Private Needs by Lezlie Lowe. Coach House, 220 pp, £12.95, September
2018
T
HE JUBILEE LINE used to be one of the there are people who actually take street signs
better London Underground lines to travel pointing to a ‘Toilet’ seriously, a mistake I learned
on if, like me, you have Crohn’s disease. early on not to make. Most often there is no longer
When the line was extended in the late 1990s, some a toilet there, or it has been permanently closed.
of the new stations – Stratford, Canada Water, Instead I walk into the nearest pub and ask nicely,
North Greenwich – were equipped with toilets, a showing my official-looking Crohn’s & Colitis UK
great rarity on the Tube. They weren’t very nice, but ‘Can’t Wait’ card.
if you’re liable to need the loo frequently and But when the drugs stop working – which they
urgently when you’re out and about, it’s nice to usually do about a week before my eight-weekly
know that you’re provided for. A couple of months intravenous dose of Infliximab, an anti-
ago, when the disease was in one of its ‘active’ inflammatory medication – a better plan is needed.
periods, I was informed by my digestive system that On one occasion they wore off four weeks early, at a
I would need to get off the Tube early at Canada time when I had a lot of travel planned. Living on
Water and use the facilities. It was now or never: I soup and water, I used Google Maps to plot where
was about to change for the London Overground, the cafés and service stations would be on my
an almost entirely toilet-free line. As I got out, I journeys; looked up the facilities at every station on
noticed a sign: ‘There are no public toilets at this the Tyne and Wear Metro (toilets only at three
station.’ There bloody well are, I thought. I’ve used interchanges with the bus network); and one night
them. I walked towards them as quickly as I could, ended up helpless on the way home from my
hoping there would at least be a disabled cubicle I sister’s house in Catford at midnight, with the pubs
could open with my radar key.[*] I found a disabled closed and nowhere to go to the loo.
toilet but no hole for the radar key. Instead, there I’ve written about this from time to time before,
was a set of buttons – a combination lock. Lucky for but some people consider it to be ‘too much
me, on this occasion, the library opposite the information’. ‘Readers don’t need to know this
station was open late, otherwise my only option much about your bathroom needs,’ one editor told
would have been a dirty protest. me. Perhaps not. But as the Canadian journalist
This, and similar experiences – not all of which Lezlie Lowe points out in No Place to Go, such needs
have had such fortunate outcomes – have been part aren’t unusual. One expert she quotes estimates
of my life since my early twenties, when I first that at least a quarter of the population regularly
became ill with Crohn’s. It has a variety of has a pressing need to use public toilets: ‘Seven per
symptoms, of which the results of chronic bowel cent have paruresis. Another 7 per cent are
inflammation are the most persistent and incontinent. You’re already up to 14. You throw in
embarrassing. Public toilets are a joke; in London menstruating women, parents with kids, people
they barely exist. It amuses me to imagine that with ostomies … too many to count.’ Yet it’s a
subject greeted with nervous giggles, or as women’s toilets have the same dimensions, and are
something beneath talking about, much less usually provided in equal numbers, even though
making policy around. (‘Go behind a hedge,’ the women have quite different needs: it takes longer
campaigner Clara Greed was told by the manager of to pee, it takes longer to undress, and there are the
Paddington Station when she complained about additional requirements of menstruation (cubicles
the inaccessibility and inconvenience of their coin- rarely include sinks, for instance). Lowe tells the
operated ‘conveniences’.) Lowe draws a contrast story of pissing herself as a child ‘in the bathroom
with disabled access, where there has been firm line at a community hall dance’, as ‘all the while,
legislation and widespread retrofitting of buildings the boys’ bathroom door hung ajar, the light on,
and public spaces, at least in the countries she the room unoccupied. I could literally see the toilet.
focuses on (the US, UK and Canada). Austerity, Not a single girl in that line made a move.’ The first
regeneration and re-urbanisation, automation, the flushing public toilets were installed at the Great
ageing of the population: Lowe finds that all of Exhibition in 1851, but the first permanent public
these have direct and usually deleterious effects on toilets for women weren’t installed until 1893 (on
whether or not you can find a public loo. the Strand, if you’re wondering). Recently there has
Lowe’s account begins with her own experience been some attempt at redress through the
as a mother of young children trying to use a public increased use of unisex toilet stalls. But, as Lowe
toilet in Halifax, an affluent, well-planned city in points out, desegregated toilets create problems for
Canada. Halifax Common is ‘a place built for those who adhere to Orthodox religious rules about
leisure’, she writes. ‘Unless, that is, you’re the kind the non-mixing of the sexes. The solution –
of person who uses the bathroom.’ The facilities cubicles for everyone – would however involve
are rudimentary, badly designed and frequently extensive, expensive refitting, when at present
locked; entirely inadequate to the needs of their public toilets are barely provided at all.
users: ‘Every time I’m out with my infant and Provision, not design, is Lowe’s principal
toddler, I need to change a diaper or respond to the concern. The decline in Britain has, she finds, been
urinary urgency of my [children].’ In 2014 the especially remarkable. In the US, there has only
municipal government in Halifax published a ever been a relatively rudimentary network of public
masterplan for its parks and open spaces without a toilets, so there wasn’t much of a legacy to destroy
single mention of toilets. Lowe lists the usual (with some exceptions, such as the New York
explanations for this: the cost of upkeep, the subway, whose 1500 toilets have been reduced to
problem of vandalism and above all the fact that all 75 because of ‘security concerns’). In the UK, by
sorts of people – drug users, say, looking for a place contrast, every town has public toilets, often
to inject, or homeless people wanting shelter, or elaborately designed, dating from the late 19th
gay men meeting for sex – may use a park’s toilets century. Originally attended by permanent staff,
as well as middle-class mothers. ‘Providing these were an inextricable part of the ‘gas and water
bathrooms means welcoming the world,’ Lowe socialism’ of the era, along with libraries, sewers
writes. But ‘keeping some out is most easily and schools. It was uneven and discriminatory, but
achieved by keeping everyone out.’ it was something rather than nothing. Lowe cites a
The book flits between historical accounts of BBC report from 2016 revealing that a total of 1782
the rise and fall of the public toilet and discussion public toilets had been closed in the previous ten
of how the idea might be made to work in the years. In London, half of all council-run public
present day. Lowe has much to say about the toilets have now closed. One consequence is that
profound inequalities in the way toilets are ‘some of London’s ornate underground Victorian-
designed, above all the fact that men’s and era facilities are being sold off and transformed
into kicky little cafés and hip restaurants’ – if you’re dryers stop working,’ Lowe writes, ‘no human is
polite and look reasonably clean and tidy, they may there to know except the users, who have, precisely
even let you use their loos. Like other campaigns to as a result of automation, been alienated from the
preserve aspects of the British welfare state, the space and feel no need to go out of their way to
various efforts to save council toilets ‘aren’t for report, for example, a non-flushing and rapidly
better provision, but to keep what’s there now’. The filling clogged toilet.’
incentive for councils struggling under austerity to One or two American cities have noticed that
sell up their toilets and the land they sit on is these bleak, often vandalised coin-op kiosks aren’t
enormous. As one council worker told Lowe, you good enough and have created alternatives. In San
can sell a toilet for four or five million pounds, or Francisco there’s the ‘Pit Stop’. These were set up
you can spend half a million maintaining it. in partnership with JCDecaux, which dominates the
One reason so many Victorian public toilets automated toilet market, as part of a cleaner streets
have been closed is the cost of providing disabled initiative, and generate profit from waste via
access, which, unlike the provision of public advertising revenue. They also provide various
toilets, is now statutory. It’s expensive and fiddly to things that other toilets don’t – needle disposal
update a Victorian loo reached by steep iron steps, units, and receptacles for compost, recycling, dog
so it’s easier just to close it; the public loo is waste – but most important, they are staffed, albeit
disappearing partly as the result of a conflict by ‘former state prisoners paid … $16 an hour’. The
between different rights, or levels of rights, attendant maintains the queue, checks that only
between the legally mandated and the merely one person goes in at a time, and keeps the cubicle
advisory. Lowe refers to the ‘British Standards clean and stocked with toilet paper and soap. The
Institution’s Guide to Standardisation for public introduction of the Pit Stop led to a massive rise in
toilets’, a precise and detailed 54-page document public toilet use in the city, not only by homeless
whose excellent advice is undermined by the fact people but also by tourists, families with children,
that, as its authors admit, ‘these best-practice and ‘other people with unconventional bathroom
standards aren’t universally implemented, because needs’, such as Uber drivers. The Pit Stops are
they are voluntary.’ profit-making; but the wholly municipal ‘Portland
Where public toilets have been installed in the Loo’ in Oregon’s biggest city provides a similarly
last twenty years, they have tended to be of a high-quality service.
G
particular sort: the automated kiosk, with
advertising bolted on to cover the cost. You are IVEN the current pressure on local
allowed to occupy the cubicle only for a limited government funding in the UK, it’s hard
amount of time (to deter rough sleepers), and when to imagine councils paying for new kiosks,
you leave, they completely wash and dry toilet attendants, or even to maintain their existing
themselves, obviating the need for a toilet loos. Instead, people are encouraged to use the
attendant (or, more to the point, the need to pay facilities in shopping centres, pubs and cafés.
their wages). The toilets seldom have seats, in case Manchester City Council, which has closed every
they get ripped out; soap and paper are often single one of its loos in the city centre, has told
absent; and they are lit with UV lights, designed to people to ‘go and use Starbucks’. If only they’d
make it hard for heroin users to find a vein – which, been at the Starbucks I once tried to use in
Lowe discovered, has the unintended side-effect of Nottingham, next to the railway station. For
encouraging people to use the kiosks for sex. reasons best known to them, the staff locked the
Apparently many people find the lights erotic. toilets at 6 p.m., some hours before the café itself
‘When automated flushers and faucets and hand was due to close. A local ‘character’ was hanging
around, telling the people heading in the direction Public Health Bill drafted in 2014 by the then
of the loos that they were now closed; he could health minister (and now Welsh Labour leader),
probably have been gainfully employed to attend Mark Drakeford, included provisions to make it
some functioning public toilets. legally mandatory for the first time for all local
In any case, as Rudy Giuliani’s former deputy authorities to have a ‘public toilet strategy’. The bill
mayor Fran Reiter admits, ‘you know as well as I do was defeated, largely because it also included strict
that if some homeless person, some bag lady, restrictions on the smoking of e-cigarettes in public
walks into Tiffany’s, they are not going to let her places, which antagonised Plaid Cymru, the Tories
use the toilet.’ Often, you will have to spend money and the Lib Dems. It’s typical that the toilet policy
in a place before the staff will give you the code or a wasn’t considered important enough to stand on its
key: ‘These toilets are for customer use only.’ own, and was abandoned because of something
Shopping centres tend to signpost their toilets in a completely unrelated to it.
deliberately oblique manner, intended to keep you Lowe moves towards a radical solution, which
endlessly circling past the shops. Lowe suggests given the scale of the closures is increasingly the
that the free-to-all toilets in public libraries are a only feasible one. The key issue, if you have
good alternative to the facilities in shops or cafés. Crohn’s or colitis, isn’t what sort of toilet there is,
She evidently hasn’t been told – as I was recently by but that you can use it, and immediately, whether
a librarian at Chandler’s Ford Library, Eastleigh – or not it has glory holes, needles on the floor or a
that they didn’t have any toilets and I should use 50p charge. ‘Help for people with most diseases of
the ones in Waitrose instead. the bowel comes not from design modifications,
Of course, they do have toilets. Every workplace but by way of fast and easy access to bathrooms.
that has a roof (and some that don’t, like building Everywhere.’ It boils down, Lowe writes, to the
sites) in Britain and North America does, because, following request: ‘Please, stranger, let me use your
by law, they have to. That doesn’t mean, Can’t Wait bathroom right now, because I really, really need
card notwithstanding, that they have to let it.’ Austerity has forced us to contemplate the
members of the public use them. I briefly had a job previously unthinkable: the legally mandated
compiling traffic surveys on a busy junction in a public use of private toilets.
London suburb. The inevitable happened early one This isn’t as far-fetched as it might seem. As
morning, and I had to ask the places that were open awareness of these conditions grows, the
– newsagents, the post office – if I could use their government is under increasing pressure to
staff toilets, and was politely told in every case that improve access to toilets in public places – and how
I could not (I quit the job soon after). One of much easier to shift the burden to the private sector
Lowe’s interviewees who has Crohn’s points out (though as with the law requiring licensed
that although ‘people with physical disabilities – premises to provide free drinking water, businesses
the ones others can see – have fought hard to have may charge for the ‘service’). ‘During the night I
their accessibility needs met … and they’ve mostly have a dream in which I join a subversive
won,’ those with diseases that don’t show have so organisation called the Socialist Lavatory League,’
far had much less success. This is changing, if Kenneth Tynan wrote in his diary in 1973. ‘Its
slowly. ‘Not All Disabilities Are Visible’ signs can purpose is to bring all private loos into public
be seen on disabled toilets; Jeremy Corbyn wore a ownership. Everyone will have the right to use
Crohn’s & Colitis UK badge at prime minister’s anyone else’s loo – which will mean the end of
questions for ‘Crohn’s and Colitis awareness week’ private peeing. The dream wakes me up giggling,
last December. Yet there is no new policy. The but on consideration I don’t think it is all that bad
nearest miss was in the Welsh Assembly, where the an idea.’ There is some irony in the fact that it is
thanks to the abandonment of any concession to

one of the most basic human needs – unless it can
be used to generate profit – that we can now
imagine the utopian dream of the Socialist Lavatory
League coming to pass.
[*] The radar key is a large skeleton key that provides

access to more than nine thousand locked toilets in the
UK. The scheme was introduced by the Royal
Association for Disability Rights – hence, ‘radar’, and is
now managed by Disability Rights UK.
Owen Hatherley is the culture editor of Tribune. His

most recent book is Trans-Europe Express: Tours of a
Lost Continent.
Diary
Adewale Maja-Pearce
A
T 35 per cent, the turnout for Nigeria’s of the Nigeria Customs Service). Atiku claims that
general election in February was the lowest he was simply lucky and invested wisely, but few
since democracy succeeded military rule are convinced. The US government has accused
twenty years ago. During the three weeks I spent on him of money laundering. Since retiring from
the road in the run-up to the vote, it became government service he has spent lavishly on his
obvious from the fitful campaigning and the political ambitions. In 1998 he clinched the
paucity of crowds at rallies that numbers would be governorship of Adamawa State, in the north-east
low. Matters weren’t helped by the sudden decision of the country, but before he could be sworn in he
of the Independent National Electoral Commission was requisitioned by the People’s Democratic Party
(INEC) to postpone the vote just hours before the (PDP) to serve as Olusegun Obasanjo’s running
polls were due to open. There was nothing sinister mate in the presidential election the following year.
in this: Mahmood Yakubu, the INEC chairman, He served two terms under Obasanjo and had
explained that bad weather and flight cancellations hopes of becoming president himself in 2007: the
had made it hard to get ballot materials to remote pair fell out after Atiku refused to support
areas. But people were quick to imagine a ruse. Obasanjo’s (unconstitutional) third-term bid. Atiku
Many had travelled long distances to the towns and failed to win nomination for the 2011 and 2015
villages where they were registered to vote and elections – changing party each time – and finally
couldn’t afford to stay on or repeat the journey all succeeded last October, having returned to the
over again a week later. More decisive, in the end, PDP.
was the lacklustre nature of the two main
presidential candidates and their respective parties.
On one side was the incumbent, Muhammadu
Buhari of the All Progressives Congress (APC), the
76-year-old former military dictator who had
overthrown a democratically elected government in
the mid-1980s and was himself ousted in a palace
coup two years later. On the other was 72-year-old
Atiku Abubakar, the only candidate – and there
were dozens – who had any hope of unseating him.
Like Buhari, Atiku is a Muslim, though less
obviously devout. The source of his personal
fortune, reckoned to be $1.4 billion, is the subject
of speculation, but it’s certain that he began to
amass it while working as a customs officer
between 1969 and 1989 (he became deputy director Muhammadu Buhari
Buhari, who casts a long shadow over Nigerian men and women for failing to use passenger
politics, is the more interesting figure. After he was bridges over highways or failing to form orderly
deposed in 1985 by a rival group of generals, he queues at bus stops. Nonetheless, he enjoyed a
was kept under house arrest for three years. When reputation for probity. He considered his regime a
the army relinquished power in 1999 and installed necessary ‘corrective’ and regarded his defeat at the
Obasanjo, Buhari sat tight. In 2003 and 2007 he polls as a grave mistake on the part of the voters. In
was the All Nigeria People’s Party candidate for 2011 he ran again under the auspices of a different
president. His prospects looked poor: Nigerians party and lost to a civilian, Goodluck Jonathan. Two
remembered his brief premiership for its draconian years into Jonathan’s ragged presidency, Nigerians
anti-corruption drive. Buhari had imprisoned felt fewer misgivings about Buhari’s messianic call
journalists, allowed indefinite detention without for an end to corruption. In 2015 he took the
charge and used retroactive decrees to execute presidency from Jonathan by almost three million
criminals already serving time – all under the guise votes.
of a ‘war against indiscipline’. Soldiers flogged
Atiku Abubakar
The difficulty with messianic wars on what was the offence? The money wasn’t from
corruption is that they require large amounts of Buhari, he explained: Buhari ‘doesn’t have the type
dirty money. For Buhari’s presidential race this of money needed for Lagos votes [which is] coming
year, funds were provided by Asiwaju Bola Ahmed from my pocket … It is my money. I decide where
Tinubu. Affectionately known as Jagaban (‘leader of to keep it.’ The money was distributed the
warriors’), Tinubu has never made a secret of his following day in ‘troublesome’ areas inclined to
wealth. He was already rich when he became vote for Atiku.
governor of Lagos State, in the Yoruba-dominated Atiku was facing inquiries about his own wealth
south-west, in 1999; during his two terms in office – not only that acquired during his early days
he acquired a magnificent property portfolio. His working for the Nigeria Customs Service. During
real estate holdings in Nigeria, it’s said, are second his eight-year stint as Obasanjo’s vice-president, he
only to those of the federal government in Abuja. was in charge of the administration’s IMF-inspired
Tinubu remains governor in all but name, installing privatisation programme, which was supposed to
and removing his successors at will to ensure that help deliver the ‘dividends of democracy’: a
his various companies continue to receive lucrative combination of outsourcing and public assets sales
state tenders. Alpha Beta, incorporated during his enabled Atiku to ‘grow’ his fortune, which he soon
first term, is under contract to the state as its sole moved abroad. According to a US Senate report,
collector of tax revenues, worth an estimated 30 between 2000 and 2008 Atiku and his fourth wife,
billion naira (£63 million) monthly, of which Alpha who holds US citizenship, ‘used a network of
Beta takes 10 per cent. The Lagos State House of accounts at US financial institutions to bring over
Assembly recently tried to enshrine the $40 million in suspect funds into the United States,
arrangement in law, but this led to an outcry, through multiple wire transfers supplied by
followed by an apology. Last summer Dapo Apara, offshore corporations located in Germany, Nigeria,
Alpha Beta’s repentant former managing director, Panama, the British Virgin Islands and
wrote to the Economic and Financial Crimes Switzerland’. Some of that money came from his
Commission (EFCC) alleging that the company had share of a $12.7 million bribe paid by Siemens in
become ‘an avenue for official corruption’, and a exchange for telecommunications projects between
‘conduit pipe for massive money laundering’ and 2001 and 2002. According to newspaper reports,
tax evasion. He suggested that it was ‘shielded by many of the delegates at the PDP primaries last year
some powerful politicians’. Apara, who had received up to $9000 from aspiring nominees and
commended Buhari for ‘fighting corruption’, was were ‘still expecting more’ before the end of the
told by an Alpha Beta insider to back off. ‘No one convention. Afterwards, Lauretta Onochie, Buhari’s
will believe you. We control everything – the press, media assistant, claimed that Atiku had outspent
the courts, EFCC. You will only be endangering the other 11 hopefuls to the tune of 42 billion naira
your life.’ Shortly afterwards, Buhari confirmed that (£8 million) and said that if he became president
Tinubu was ‘fully in charge’ of his presidential the country was ‘finished’ (she remained silent on
campaign. Tinubu’s bullion vans).
The day before the election was due to take The voters that Buhari needed to pay off
place, two bullion vans were seen entering the originated overwhelmingly from south-eastern
grounds of Tinubu’s Lagos residence, given to him Nigeria. There is a large Igbo ethnic community,
(after renovations at taxpayers’ expense) as part of Christian by denomination, in Lagos State.
his pension when he left office 12 years ago. When Together with other minorities from the oil-
questioned by journalists, he responded angrily. producing south– we call it the ‘south-south’ – they
There were no election materials in the vans, so probably account for around 40 per cent of the
state’s twenty million residents. Most of them are exasperation, Tinubu shut it down two days before
traders in the large open-air markets. For the polling, while he strolled around protected by
Buhari campaign the problem was not that the Igbo ‘security agents’, i.e. police. This show of power –
have any enthusiasm for Atiku, but that they detest which had been preceded by threats of new ‘taxes’
Buhari, regarding him as an intransigent Islamist on traders if they proved ‘stubborn’ – prefigured
(he was passionate about the introduction of sharia what was to happen when voting began. A lengthy
law in the north in the early 2000s). Buhari, for his complaint by PDP agents from several polling
part, has always disdained the Igbo. As a brigade stations described how ‘hoodlums and miscreants
major in the Nigerian army, he fought against them led by Musiliu Akinsanya … took over the conduct
during the Biafran War, and on the campaign trail of the election at the polling units … with arms and
in 2015 said he did ‘not owe any apology to them’. ammunition.’ They carried other ‘dangerous
Nor did he seek to build bridges after winning the weapons such as machetes, charms and amulets’
presidency. In an interview at the US Institute of but the police made no attempt to arrest them.
Peace on his first trip abroad after the election, he Independent observers backed up this statement,
remarked: ‘I hope you have a copy of the election as does YouTube, where you can see ‘hoodlums
results. The constituents, for example, who gave and miscreants’ casually trashing ballot boxes
me 97 per cent [of the vote] cannot in all honesty while voters flee. In other parts of the state many
be treated on [a par] with constituencies that gave voters simply stayed at home. The result was that
me 5 per cent.’ In 2016, he despatched the army to Lagos reported the lowest turnout of any state at
quell a peaceful Biafra Remembrance Day just 17 per cent of almost seven million registered
celebration in Igbo country; around 150 voters. In my own polling unit in a residential,
demonstrators were killed. solidly middle-class Yoruba-speaking area of
According to the US Council on Foreign Surulere in Lagos, a single unarmed policeman had
Relations, there were 22 incidents of election- very little to do while fifty or so citizens waited
related violence in the five months leading up to patiently under a canopy to cast their votes, without
this year’s vote. Most were in the south, but there an agbero in sight. The polling officer and his
was also trouble in Kaduna in the north, a ‘frontline assistant were both young. At the end of the
state’ divided equally between Muslims and exercise, which took longer than it should have
Christians with a long history of conflict between because there was only one inkpad, the polling
the two communities. In Lagos State, the officer held up each ballot paper in turn for all to
spearhead of the violence was Tinubu’s personal see as he tallied the votes. There was a small fracas
agbero, or thug, Musiliu Akinsanya, aka MC Oloumo over the number of voided votes, which
(among other aliases). Akinsanya is also an necessitated a recount. People were understandably
executive of the powerful National Union of Road suspicious.
Transport Workers, which collects ‘fees’ from In the event, Buhari won the state, but only by a
drivers and traders at motor parks in all 36 states small margin. His running mate was a Yoruba, the
and constitutes a ready army of foot soldiers, predominant ethnic group in Lagos, but Buhari
otherwise known as ‘touts’, at Tinubu’s disposal. would have known that the Yoruba are the least
Akinsanya has never hidden his loyalty to his likely of all Nigerians to vote according to ethnic
godfather: ‘Anywhere his interest belong I, Musiliu sentiment. Two of the six states in the region voted
Ayinde Akinsanya, MC Oloumo, belong. I and my for Atiku and it was a close call in the other four.
people in Oshodi.’ But the south-east and south-south were a different
Oshodi is one of the big markets in central matter. There nothing less than a full-scale military
Lagos with many Igbo traders. To their assault would have guaranteed Buhari victory,
especially since Atiku had chosen an Igbo as his PDP, the military and mobile police overpowered
running mate. Under the unofficial agreement party agents and altered the results in connivance
which sees power rotating between the mostly with INEC officials to ensure a vote for the APC.
Muslim north and the mostly Christian south, this Conversely, those states which favoured Buhari in
would mean that the Igbo could see one of their the north-east recorded little or no violence and
own becoming head of state in 2023, an aspiration saw the highest voter turnout. Especially notable
they have been denied since the Biafran War. was Borno State, the home of the Boko Haram
Before the first vote was cast, Buhari flooded insurgency, which enjoyed the highest turnout of
the south with soldiers under instructions to be all. There is ample evidence that large numbers of
ruthless ‘with anybody who thinks he has enough those voting were underage. All this proved
influence in his locality to lead a body of thugs or decisive for Buhari’s victory: he eventually won by a
snatch [ballot] boxes or to disturb the voting margin of four million votes.
system’. Such a person would do so ‘at the expense On 18 March Atiku went to court to challenge
of his life’. Uppermost in Buhari’s mind was the result, but with little optimism. Besides, he
Governor Nyesom Wike of the oil-rich Rivers State, could still forage for PDP victories a fortnight later,
where more than thirty people lost their lives in this when all 36 states were set to run elections to their
year’s voting. Buhari’s point man was the state’s respective assemblies and 29 would vote for state
former governor, Rotimi Amaechi. As it happened, governors. In a modest way this was also an
the courts had debarred the APC from contesting opportunity for me. In the run-up to the
the election in the state as a result of Amaechi’s presidential vote, I’d tried and failed to join Atiku’s
machinations. He simply hijacked one of the other camp, arriving at his headquarters in Yola, the
parties: Nigerian politics are devoid of anything you capital of his home state of Adamawa, and
might call an ideology, driven instead by facile announcing that I’d like to cover his campaign. I
slogans about ‘throttling corruption’ and ‘making shouldn’t have been surprised at the reception I
Nigeria great again’. Buhari ran as the candidate for got. Only a quarter of the country’s estimated
two different (and now defunct) parties before population of two hundred million are in full-time
joining the APC, which Atiku had left in December employment. Unemployment has risen steeply in
2017 in order to rejoin the PDP. the last four years, from 8 per cent to 23 per cent.
According to Wike’s account of the violence in For young people aged between 15 and 35, who
Rivers State, ‘it was during the collation that constitute more than half the electorate, the figures
operatives of the Nigerian army interfered. They are even worse: over 50 per cent are out of work.
will invade a collation centre, arrest the electoral The activity around elections provides a rare
officer, returning officer and mercilessly beat up opportunity to make money: journalists, too – most
the PDP agents.’ Amaechi was seen ‘storming’ an of them paid a pittance – will latch on to a well-
INEC office with a hundred soldiers in order to heeled candidate. An outsider like myself pitching
snatch ballot boxes. The point of the mayhem was up to report on the campaign from the inside
to deter voters from leaving their homes. In the wasn’t going to be greeted with enthusiasm.
event, less than a fifth of the state’s three million Atiku’s entourage saw me as a potential threat.
registered voters exercised their democratic right. What if I had something to offer that Atiku might
A PDP agent lamented that his party ‘could have genuinely need? I would be yet another pocket to
captured more than a million votes’ in the state. line on payday – at the expense of their own.
The pattern was repeated in the handful of Now, with the state elections, I decided to
northern states that favoured Atiku, for instance approach the PDP campaign team for the
Zamfara in the north-west, where, according to the governorship of Lagos State, impressed by the
hyperbole of Atiku’s spokesperson. ‘We can hang back for my share of the money that would
confirm,’ he announced on 28 February, ‘that a soon be doled out.
huge war chest has been mobilised by Atiku’s Twenty years after the generals stepped aside,
camp.’ Perhaps, but it wasn’t in evidence during Nigeria has little to show for civilian rule. As for the
the three days I spent on the campaign trail with military, they’re really no more than the armed
Jimi Agbaje, the PDP’s gubernatorial candidate. I wing of a venal political class. Shortly after the
hadn’t been optimistic about my prospects, but elections ended, a new Facebook page appeared:
with Agbaje my luck was in. I was introduced as a Our Mumu Don Do (don do in pidgin means
member of the press by a mutual acquaintance who ‘enough’ and mumu means ‘stupidity’, so ‘enough
informed him that we had attended the same of our stupidity’). Someone had posted a new
boarding school in Lagos. Like Atiku’s people, national motto: ‘In a true Democracy, the people
Agbaje’s did their best to sideline me when I turned OWN the power/That is the essence of the Nigerian
up on the first day. Then his manager announced Social Contract.’ Politicians and businessmen like
that I was the oga’s ‘friend’ (oga means ‘chief’ or Atiku, who hold the political process hostage, are
‘boss’): the old school tie counts as much in simply representative of high-net-worth individuals
Nigeria as anywhere else. across the globe who make use of the same
Agbaje, who was standing for the third time, offshore tax havens. Nigerians are just cruder about
tends to surface only six months ahead of an it: after all, we are still part of the ‘developing’
election. As I followed his campaign I found it hard world. This must be the reason that, in 2016, after
to see just where, or to what purpose, Atiku’s war he resigned as prime minister, David Cameron
chest was being deployed. There was the usual convened an anti-corruption conference that
assortment of free hustings merchandise – cloth singled out Nigeria, even though his own
caps with visors, exercise books, pens and plastic government had enabled large-scale, illegal
hand fans – which we flung from the windows of transfers of money out of the country. Not only did
our campaign vehicles as we toured the city. But Buhari agree to fly to London to be lectured on his
they were always in short supply and outclassed, in country’s pitiful condition, he even made excuses
any case, by the hampers from Babajide Sanwo- for us. It’s hard to disagree with Cameron’s
Olu, the APC candidate, which were stuffed with assessment of Nigeria as ‘fantastically corrupt’, and
similar tat, but also contained – crucially – packets it would be disingenuous to suggest that countries
of cornflakes, pasta, powdered milk and sugar. in the global north are as bad as ours when it comes
Unable to match this largesse, Agbaje’s team began to the theft of their own patrimony. But Buhari
to import thugs from outlying states, lodging them might have pointed out that we could hardly be
in hotels near the big markets, including Oshodi. fantastically corrupt all by ourselves. And besides,
But on the day of the vote they were nowhere to be the vast majority of Nigerians – like people
seen. Agbaje (206,000 votes) was wiped off the map anywhere – are not corrupt precisely: we are
by Sanwo-Olu (740,000) and when it was all over implicated in corruption because we continue to
nothing was heard from him. I imagine he was tolerate it in our politicians. Where we go from
already back at his lucrative pharmaceutical here is anybody’s guess.
company, where he will concentrate his energies
until the next opportunity to wring some money
from the democratic process four years down the Adewale Maja-Pearce lives in Lagos. The House My
road. On the last day of the campaign, as I was Father Built came out in 2016.
about to leave, one of his entourage urged me to
Editor: Mary-Kay Wilmers

Contributors Deputy Editor: Jean McNicol
Stefan Collini’s The Nostalgic Imagination: History in Senior Editors: Paul Myerscough, Daniel Soar
English Criticism came out earlier this year. Assistant Editors: Joanna Biggs, Tom Crewe,
Tom Crewe is an editor at the LRB. Deborah Friedell, Alice Spawls
Rosa Curling is a human rights and public law Editorial Assistant: Joanne O’Leary
solicitor. She has advised and led litigation on a Intern: Ben Walker
wide range of issues before UK and international Contributing Editors: Jeremy Harding,
courts. Rosemary Hill, John Lanchester, James Meek,
Christian Davies, a correspondent based in David Runciman, Adam Shatz, Amia Srinivasan,
Warsaw, writes for the Guardian and the Observer. Christopher Tayler, Colm Tóibín, Marina Warner
Mary Hannity is completing a PhD on mourning Editor-at-Large: Andrew O’Hagan
and melancholia at UCL. Blog Editor: Thomas Jones
Owen Hatherley is the culture editor of Tribune. His Digital Editor: Sam Kinchin-Smith
most recent book is Trans-Europe Express: Tours of a Editorial Board: Linda Colley, Hilary Mantel,
Lost Continent. Michael Neve, Steven Shapin, Inigo Thomas,
Freya Johnston, a fellow of St Anne’s College, Jenny Turner, James Wood, Michael Wood
Oxford, is writing a book about Jane Austen. Typesetting: Sue Barrett, Anna Swan
Jamie McKendrick’s latest collection is Anomaly. Paste-Up: Bryony Dalefield, Lola Bunting
His translation of Giorgio Bassani’s The Novel of Cover: Cressida Bell
Ferrara came out last year. Publisher: Nicholas Spice
Adewale Maja-Pearce lives in Lagos. The House My Associate Publishers: Margot Broderick,
Father Built came out in 2016. Helen Jeffrey
Adam Mars-Jones teaches at Goldsmiths. Second Head of Advertising: Kate Parkinson
Sight, a collection of his film writing, is due in Advertising Managers: Natasha Chahal
September. Senior Sales Executive: Aaron John
Ian Patterson is a life fellow of Queens’ College, Sales Executive: Reece Tan
Cambridge. He is no longer writing a book about Sales Office Assistant: Elenor Hellis
Ian McEwan Customer Relations Manager: Chris Larkin
Adam Shatz is a contributing editor at the LRB, Product manager: Francesca Garbarini
based in New York. Head of Marketing: Renée Doegar
Tom Stevenson writes mainly about the Middle Marketing Managers: Jill Tytherleigh
East and North Africa. He lives in Cairo. Retention Managers: Laura Reeves, Flavia
Richard Taws teaches art history at UCL. Collins
Jenny Turner is on the editorial board of the LRB. Marketing Executive: Cassie Gibson
Bee Wilson’s The Way We Eat Now came out in Head of Facilities: Radka Webb
March. Facilities Manager: Andy Georgiou
Michael Wood is riding off into the sunset, but will Head of Finance: Taj Singh
be back in a month. Finance: Manjinder Chana, Antionette Gicheva,
Maria Radonjić
Production: Ben Campbell
Digital Producer: Anthony Wilks
PDF by marooned2 @mobilism Web: Rachael Beale, Jeremy Harris

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РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.

Mark Fisher’s Ghosts ‘Machines Like Me’

Letters At the National Gallery: Louis-Léopold Boilly

The Right to Protest

Not No Longer but Not Yet

Unlike Fisher, I don’t listen to music much,

Jenny Turner is on the editorial board of the LRB.

Letters Secret Pigeon Service

I was interested to read Jon Day’s piece about

landing, but reached shelter. His carrier Brexit Blues

One Ball Syndrome settlements Calouste instituted for his

Gulbenkian’s Legacy Ferdinand Mount refers to Rex Dyer as ‘an

communicating the sensory distress they are

At the Palais de Justice

Brian Dillon’s review of Carey Young’s video Palais

Trump’s America, Netanyahu’s Israel

What are we there for?

position.’ It would be more difficult for the US to

Tom Stevenson writes mainly about the Middle

inner lives, and in each case it is only our

Stefan Collini’s The Nostalgic Imagination: History in

N OT MUCH has stuck with me from my

But it’s also possible to see the vote to Leave

Tom Crewe is an editor at the LRB.

‘I’m coming, my Tetsie!’

Court of the Lions

on the airport runway, hearing the night alive

so for a whole year without a single bill

in via Torquato Tasso I shared with the din

Thirty years on, in the small dark hours,

The Twin Sister’s Twin Sister

The much more wilful and fragmented Armand

Adam Mars-Jones teaches at Goldsmiths. Second

The Right to Protest

that the High Court had failed properly to balance

Rosa Curling is a human rights and public law

programmed to learn at a prodigious rate and is

Ian Patterson is a life fellow of Queens’ College,

At the National Gallery

‘Madame Gohin, Her Son and Her Stepdaughters’ (c.1800)

‘Trompe l’oeil Crucifix’ (1812)

‘A Carnival Scene’ (1832)

This self-referential quality reaches a crescendo

Richard Taws teaches art history at UCL.

Under the Railway Line

It was sheer heaven

‘the now changed world that has so enriched my

Bee Wilson’s The Way We Eat Now came out in

He’s Bad, She’s Mad

The Socialist Lavatory League

thanks to the abandonment of any concession to

[*] The radar key is a large skeleton key that provides

Owen Hatherley is the culture editor of Tribune. His

Editor: Mary-Kay Wilmers

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