The Times Literary Supplement Feb 19, 2010 No 5577

A. N. Wilson Tolstoy's Sonata in Beverly Hills John Stokes Is the theatrical scandal dead? Carolyne Larrington Love magic in Old French Alex Clark Mavis Gallant's Burgundy weekend FEBRUARY 19 2010 No 5577

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THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

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ILS

BIOGRAPHY

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Elaine Showalter

Stephen Henighan

Times House, 1 Pennington Street, London E98 IBS Telephone: 020 7782 5000 Fax: 020 7782 4966 [email protected]

" Is genuine theatre scandal still possible?'" asks our critic, John Stokes, reviewing Theodore Ziolkowski' s book Scandal on Stage. In many recent examples of plays that have created a fuss, the cause has been more social than theatrical. Dodgy expenses, office affairs and celebrity nudity are what pass now for a shocking night out in Britain. Meanwhile, however, there is a demanding job for a Norwegian who must tour the world looking for Ibsen productions that are worth bringing back to the playwright's homeland, an Iranian imam in Ghosts, perhaps, or a Peer Gynt from the Dundee Rep. Ziolkowski ' s

POEMS

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10 LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

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HISTORY

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LITERARY CRTICISM

RELIGION

J. Brookes Paul Henry

Richard J. Aldrich

Adam I. P. Smith Heather O'Donoghue

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Carolyne Larrington

Laine E. Doggett Love Cures - Healing and love magic in Old French romance. Raluca L. Radulescu and Cory James Rushton, editors A Companion to Medieval Popular Romance. Stephen Knight Merlin Knowledge and power through the ages. Elizabeth Archibald and Ad Putter, editors The Cambridge Companion to Arthurian Legend

Anthony Kenny

David Bentley Hart Atheist Delusions - The Christian revolution and its fashionable enemies Jonathan Benthall Returning to Religion - Why a secular age is haunted by faith

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14 Howard Thomas et al

rial imposition as it is a history of theatrical outrage"; so the author is advised by Stokes not to try the Norwegian Hedda Gabler now playing successfully in London.

James Doelman Hugo Williams Then and Now

A tragedy of idle weeds - Why Grigori Kozintsev's Lear is more faithful to Shakespeare's 'arable play' than most modern stagings Herbert' s couplet? Freelance TLS January 27 , 1995 - Mavis Gallant on Saint-Exupery

A. N. Wilson

The Kreutzer Sonata. The Last Station (Various cinemas)

ARTS

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FICTION

19 Alex Clark Akin Ajayi Navtej Sarna Carol Birch Nicholas Clee Olivia Laing

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John Stokes Samantha Ellis

Tolstoy ' s The Kreutzer Sonata produced explosive ructions in Moscow from the moment it first appeared in underground lithographed copies. Its discussion of sex is "electrifying even today", says A. N. Wilson, reviewing a new American film version whose "clever script uses many of Tolstoy's most striking lines, while transferring the scenes of seduction, secrecy and maddened murder to Beverly Hills" . He considers too The Last Station, the film of Tolstoy' s death, which, while sentimental and genial to a fault, has the immense virtue of never losing sight of Tolstoy's greatness both as novelist and as "conscience of the Western world" . The photographer Dorothea Lange became a conscience for the United States during the Depression, a creator of iconic images of poverty and a woman whose work, argues Elaine Showalter, still fails to get the critical appreciation it deserves. A book by Anne Whiston Spirn declares Lange to be one of the most important American artists of the twentieth century, but she has remained "sterotyped and marginalized". Fiona Stafford describes the earlier hardship trail of a bigamist mother from Durham who reaches Dodge City in the 1880s before tiring of the New World and going home.

PS

Zoe Anderson Michael Caines IN BRIEF

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POLITICS

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Kenneth Minogue

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Fiona Stafford

MEMOIRS

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Mavis Gallant The Cost of Living: Early and uncollected stories Alon Hilu The House of Rajani - Translated by Evan Fallenberg Laila Lalami Secret Son Susan Irvine Corpus Margaret Forster Isa and May Sarah Rayner One Moment, One morning Henrik Ibsen Hedda Gabler (Riverside Studios). Theodore Ziolkowski Scandal on Stage - European theater as moral trial Noel Witts Tadeusz Kantor. Michal Kobialka Further On, Nothing Tadeusz Kantor's theatre Jann Parry Different Drummer - The Life of Kenneth MacMillan Aiofe Monks The Actor in Costume Peter Washington, editor Russian Poets Michael Greenberg Beg, Borrow, Steal - A writer's life Fiona MacCarthy The Simple Life - C. R. Ashbee in the Cotswolds Trevor Williams The Ultimacy of Jesus - The language and logic of Christian commitment JiII Matus Shock, Memory and the Unconscious in Victorian fiction Eric Langley Narcissism and Suicide in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries Thomas E. Crocker Braddock's March - How the man sent to seize a continent changed American history Russ Willey Brewer's Dictionary of London Phrase and Fable

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Christopher Andrew The Defence of the Realm - The authorised history of MI5. Matthew M. Aid The Secret Sentry - The untold history of the National Security Agency John Keegan The American Civil War - A military history Robert Ferguson The Hammer and the Cross - A new history of the Vikings

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book is " as much a polemic against directo-

THEATRE STUDIES

Apprehension Catrin Sands Universities and the pursuit of truth, Deir Yassin, Celine, etc

John Habgood

COMMENTARY

Linda Gordon Dorothea Lange - A life beyond limits. Anne Whiston Spirn Daring To Look - Dorothea Lange's photographs and reports from the field Benjamin Moser Why This World - A biography of Clarice Lispector Clarice Lispector The Apple in the Dark - Translated by Gregory Rabassa with an introduction by Benjamin Moser

John Armstrong In Search of Civilization - Remaking a tarnished idea Roger Hutchinson Walking to America - A boyhood dream This week's contributors, Crossword

J. C.

The Catcher in the Rye, Sports studies, The TLS Reviewer's Handbook

Cover picture: Oklahoma City. February 1936: a photograph by Dorothea Lange for the Farm Security Administration © Granger Collection, NYCrropFoto; p2 © Associated Press ; p3 © David Cheskin/ PA; p4 © An sel Adams Publishing Rights Tru st/Corbi s; pS Courtesy of Paula Gurgel Valente; p7 © Anthony Upton; p8 © Bettmann/Corbis; p9 © Bridgeman Art Library; pl4 © Ronald Grant Archi ve; piS © Bridgeman Art Library; p17 © EPA/Stephen Rabold; pl9 © Cartier-Bresson/Magnum photos; p22 © Tina Engstrom; p24 © Chris Davies/Alamy The Times Literary Supplement (ISSN 0307661 , USPS 021-626) is published weekly by The Times Literary Supplement Limited, London UK, and di stributed in the USA by OCS America Inc, 49- 27 31st Street, Long Island City, NYIIIOI - 3113. Periodical postage paid at Long Island City NY and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: please send address corrections to TLS, PO Box 3000, Denville, NJ 07834, USA

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BIOGRAPHY

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Bound feet The art of Dorothea Lange escapes at last from the stereotypes and margins of her time n a 1974 essay on Mary Wollstonecraft, E. P. Thompson wrote a memorable credo for biographers of great women: "Wollstonecraft was reminded by every fact of nature and society that she was a woman. She was not a mind which has no sex, but a human being exceptionally exposed within a feminine predicament". Although Thompson did not define the feminine predicament, he implicitly challenged future writers to do so, and since the 1970s, feminist biographical theory has responded. As Carolyn Heilbrun, Linda Wagner-Martin and others have seen it, the central issues of contemporary female biography are first, explaining how a woman, especially an artist, fulfils her ambitions without sacrificing her personal needs or destroying her public image; and second, how women get recognition or rejection for their roles as historical actors. The life of the American photographer Dorothea Lange, best known for her iconic and beautiful photograph "Migrant Mother", powerfully raises these questions. As Linda Gordon declares in her moving biography, Lange, like Wollstonecraft, led "the life of a woman embedded in the historical events of her time" . Committed to democracy, antiracism and social justice, she did her finest work during the Depression, when she documented the experience of migrant workers in California; the poor of many races in the Dust Bowl and the Mississippi Delta; the homeless of the cities, and the changing landscapes of the United States. During the war, she photographed the conditions of Japanese American internment camps. Her two marriages, to a fellow artist, Maynard Dixon, and an economist, Paul Schuster Taylor, were passionate and egalitarian, but she nonetheless bore the sole responsibility for parenting, and made decisions about childcare dismaying to readers today. Gordon concedes that although "her children bore some of the costs of her prodigious photographic contribution", Lange was "exceptional" in her "talent and her willingness to reach beyond limits", America's "preeminent photographer of democracy". Yet both Gordon and the photographer and historian of landscape architecture Anne Whiston Spirn, whose book about Lange's photographs during 1939 complements and enriches the biography, demonstrate the ways that Lange, whom Spirn calls "one of the most important American artists of the twentieth century", was stereotyped and marginalized as an emotional woman artist. Her strong, unflinching photographs were dismissed as domestic and sentimental, although very few are actually about mothers and children. She was overshadowed by her male contemporaries, such as Walker Evans, or even left out of art and cultural histories. The captions to her portraits - scraps of conversation and dialogue she turned into free verse - have

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ELAINE SHOW ALTER Linda Gordon DOROTHEA LANGE A life beyond limits 536pp. Norton. $35. 9780393 05730 0 Anne Whiston Spirn DARING TO LOOK Dorothea Lange's photographs and reports

from the field 376pp. University of Chicago Press. Paperback, $30; distributed in the UK by Wiley. £20.50. 9780226 76985 I been ignored, along with her extensive landscape photography. Her lengthy field reports, which she intended to accompany her photographs, have gone unpublished. Critics and historians have attributed even her most famous pictures to chance or luck rather than artistic vision. Spirn speculates that Lange has been underestimated because the full

body of her work has been hidden, but this is of course a circular argument; Lange's work has been hidden because no one has troubled to find it. Gordon believes that Lange's reputation has been improving since her death, but also that the economic conditions of today make her images more relevant and important than ever before, and that we are now placed to understand that they were not produced by a "faultless genius who could remain above the wounds, failings, and sins that afflict the rest of us" . In contrast, both Gordon and Spirn were inspired and transformed in their own professional roles as they studied Lange's career. Gordon notes that "I began to feel an affinity with her work through the concept 'documentary ' , which applies to historical scholarship as well as photography". Once she discovered Lange, Gordon writes, "I could not let her go. Lange's life trajectory, though nothing like mine, sounded and resounded themes that resonated with my concerns, forming an obligato underlining significant episodes and problems in U.S. history". Spirn

14.02.2010 Edinburgh The last line of Douglas Dunn's "Disenchantments" was chosen for a Valentine's Day projection on to Edinburgh's Castle Rock as part of a campaign to encourage Scots to "Carry a Poem" with them as they go about their daily business, "Look to the living, love them, and hold on" closes a work which was billed in 1993 as "a meditation on the afterlife" although, as our late poetry editor, Mick Imlah,

pointed out, it is "more fun than that", To read the whole poem would certainly illuminate any commuter trip or time queuing for the bank, The book in which it appears is called Dante's Drum-kit, one of Dunn's several phrases for terza rima, the verse form of Dante's Divine Comedy, and ever since, in Imlah's words, "the measure in which we can expect the dead to speak",

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found that reading interviews and listening to tape recordings with Lange discussing her belief in complex connections between art and justice inspired her "to integrate my passions rather than to elect one and exclude others" . Dorothea Lange did not provide a theoretical defence of her work, yet many aphorisms in her interviews suggest how fully she understood photography as an act of respectful observation rather than invasive, penetrating or exposing. "A portrait is a lesson on how one human being should approach another", she said in 1965. At the same time, she believed in photography which had a point of view, which was neither merely pictorial nor pretended to cold objectivity but focused on significant details that both illuminated a social situation and revealed the individuality of the photographer. She was never tempted by the avant-garde, Surrealism, or sensational photojournalism. Her "consistent aim", according to Gordon , "was communication". Implicitly following Lange's example, Gordon makes her biography a lesson on how one human being should approach another, mixing a sensitive selection of details from Lange's life with a rich historical account of the time she lived in. For example, Lange never did a self-portrait. But in 1959, in an assignment to students to photograph the "place where they lived", she submitted a picture of her own right foot, crippled and twisted by childhood polio. "I think it [polio1 was the most important thing that happened to me", she wrote, "and formed me, guided me, instructed me, helped me, and humiliated me". Although by determination and will she had mainly overcome this disability in her demanding work, it remained a physical symbol of her confinement and femaleness, like the bound feet of Chinese women which Pearl Buck was writing about in the 1930s. Gordon also finds a poignant correlative of Lange's identity in a "heavy wide-ribbed Navajo silver cuff bracelet", which she bought in Arizona in 1922 and wore every day of her life. By the time she died of oesophagal cancer in 1965, Gordon notes, the bracelet had worn away. Growing up in New York, Lange formed the desire to hecome a photographer in her teens. She set out to travel around the world with a friend , and got as far as San Francisco where their money was stolen, and she found a job in a photography shop. Beautiful, gifted, and hard-working, she was photographed in 1920 by the great San Francisco society photographer Edward Weston , and with his support established her own successful portrait studio. In 1920, Lange also married the handsome "cowboy artist" and bohemian Maynard Dixon. He was the veteran of many affairs, including a passionate fling with the married feminist playwright

BIOGRAPHY

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Dorothea Lange, 1965, Berkeley, California Sophie Treadwell, which ended in 1917; and he had a daughter, Consie, who would have a stormy relationship with Lange, The couple had two sons together, and began a practice which she would continue for many years, of "placing out" , or boarding, the children with foster families for long periods when she had to work and travel. Gordon works hard to explain, if not justify, this aspect of Lange's parenting, one that her children never forgave, Lt was one aspect of the feminine predicament, an "indication of Lange's ambition, .. an unacceptable, hidden drive among women". She was both freeing herself of childcare and compensating for Dixon' s absences and infidelities. She was the responsible parent; he was as "a delightful visitor who arrived bearing gifts". Gordon argues that in 1935, when Lange divorced Dixon and married Taylor, she was "able to become an artist" because she had "a husband who could support her" . Indeed, Lange and Taylor, the leading American expert on Western labour and the migrant workforce, shared dedication to a cause and a personal passion that kept them together for thirty years. He was much more engaged in their blended family - he took custody of his three children - than Dixon, who never paid a nickel of child support. But Taylor, too, stayed out of decision-making about the children's daily lives, and was a detached father "not focused on his children's well-being". The other side of Lange' s predicament was her reluctance to call herself an artist rather than an artisan; to name herself and her work; to establish the kinds of professional schools and associations that help to make a reputation. These were behavioural patterns she shared with many other creative women, from poets to Pop artists. While their male contemporaries were forming groups, naming them, writing manifestos, starting magazines and opening galleries, women artists were just doing their work, allowing others to

name them, and too busy to join groups or go to meetings. In the 1960s, Lange reflected on her own career, but did not see a connection between her professional marginalization and her lack of interest in self-promotion and branding: "Most young photographers want too quickly to make a name for themselves .... But the way it happened with me, I was compelled to photograph as a direct response to what was around me" . Meanwhile, the celebrated male photographers of her time, including Alfred Stieglitz, Arnold Genthe, Walker Evans and Ansel Adams, organized themselves into aesthetic schools, like Stieglitz's "Photo-Secession" or Ansel Adams's f/64. Only a few women artists were invited to join the groups, and Lange was not among them. She was one of only four women involved alongside Evans, Ben

Shahn and Jack Delano in the influential photography wing of the Farm Security Administration which documented migrant workers from 1935 to 1939, but she was fired from the project by its director Roy Strycker, who suspected her of insubordination. On the positive side, Lange was also an ideological independent. She never joined the Communist Party or got swept up in the political factionalism and pressure of the 1930s. Perhaps her resistance to party lines and her commitment to seeing and looking freed her too from the cynicism of the 1950s, when, Gordon notes, many male American artists " leaned into ironic and alienated identities - Beat writers, Abstract Expressionist painters, cool jazz musicians, noir filmmakers". Lange retained her energy and sense of joy, although she was struggling with serious

Apprehension The apprehension in the shoulders of the man ahead and how he beat the keys, then sprang away even as the cashpoint gargled, snapped, and sighed what looked like forty quid into the light of day seemed the upshot to his villainies. I looked his way, and judging by the hopeless looking crew pulling out in something knocked off earlier that day, I knew the forty quid or so (too much the answer to a bill to be ungratefully turned down) was mine, and walked away. I wondered if the cans and smack would fuddle them enough, or if they ' d turn and draw alongside me with a That 's the little prick. and leave me for dead, but no car doors swung open, no fists were formed , no heavy words were said, indeed, nothing at all took place, except all afternoon I walked round with the shoulders of the man ahead.

J. BROOKES

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health problems. She worked for Life magazine, contributed to the exhibition of the "The Family of Man", and attempted in her role as grandmother to repair the flaws and failures of her mothering. But her contemporaries did not see these traits as strengths; Evans used the phrase "photographing babies" as a synonym for selling out artistic integrity. A few months after her death in 1966, Lange's first one-woman show opened at MoMA, her "belated invitation into the exclusive club of photographers recognized by the art establishment as an artist". But even in this retrospecti ve, Lange was treated as an anomaly; Spirn points out that the catalogue connected her neither to twentieth-century art in general nor to documentary photography in particular. The reviews were a mixture of "tepid praise or curious criticism". In contrast, Evans became ever more sanctified, held up by the influential art critic Hilton Kramer as the man who singlehandedly had determined "what the United States looked like and felt like in the nineteen-thirties". Dorothea Lange's role in creating the visual imagery of Depression America has been increasingly valued since the 1960s, in both popular culture and the art market; in 2005, one of her most famous pictures sold at auction for $822,400. Her combination of image and text, and the "ethnographer' s eye" she brought to her documentation of working people in the 1930s, chime with contemporary interests in multiculturalism and social history. Our exposure to the lives of other women artists and writers in the contexts of feminist biography can make us more sympathetic to her difficult personal choices. Finally, the woman photographer as witness and as artist, "exceptionally exposed", as Thompson said, "within a feminine predicament", has become an exemplary figure of our own time. Dorothea Lange may not have succeeded in living a life beyond limits, but Linda Gordon's magisterial biography succeeds in imagining what such a life could be.

BIOGRAPHY larice Lispector, the most important Brazilian woman writer of the twentieth century, was born in a hamlet in south-western Ukraine close to the border with present-day Moldova. This improbable origin, which appears as a footnote in much writing on her work, is the core of Benjamin Moser's impassioned biography. Lispector, a tall, striking woman with a throaty voice who wrote mysterious allegorical novels, had a gift for inspiring devotion. Her English translator Gregory Rabassa was "flabbergasted to meet that rare person who looked like Marlene Dietrich and wrote like Virginia Woolf'. Moser's unabashed delight in his subject, and his liberal use of superlatives, confirm that Lispector, who died in 1977, when her biographer was a year old, continues to exert a strong appeal. The pivotal contribution of Moser' s biography is to illuminate Lispector's roots in Eastern European Jewish culture. Previous biographies, such as Teresa Cristina Montero Ferreira ' s Eu sou uma pergunta (1999; I Am a Question), have paid less attention to Lispector's Jewishness. By establishing this background in persuasive detail, Moser is able to decipher Lispector's more impenetrable fictions as Jewish allegories. The first application of the term "magic realism" to Latin American fiction may have appeared in a review of Lispector's first novel , Near to the Wild Heart (1943) , yet Moser argues that her works are best understood by evoking the tradition of Franz Kafka rather than that of Gabriel Garcfa Marquez. The most revealing parts of Why This World are the first five chapters, in which Moser describes in detail the world into which Lispector was born. Western Ukraine in 1920 was crisscrossed by marauding armies whose only shared ideological ground was violent anti-Semitism. Lispector's mother, who was raped by Russian soldiers in a pogrom, contracted syphilis a few months before conceiving the youngest of her three daughters. Born into the Ukrainian winter to a seriously ill mother and a family that had lost its home and possessions, the infant Chaya Pinkhasovna Lispector was fortunate to survive the refugees' gruelling journey to Bucharest. Here her mother, suffering from paralysis, was hospitalized, and her father obtained a passport for travel to Brazil, where some of the family's relatives had emigrated ten years earlier. The mysticism that nourished Lispector's creativity grew out of the overlapping inheritance of two vast rural areas renowned for rich folklore and religious fervour: Ukraine and north-eastern Brazil. The Lispectors' decision to emigrate to Brazil's long-settled, impoverished north-east, source of the most traditional features of the national culture, rather than to the cosmopolitan cities of the south, ensured that their youngest daughter, who remembered nothing of Ukraine, would grow up intensely Brazilian. The paradox of a northeasterner who seemed foreign contributed to Lispector's mystique. Moser concentrates on the small Jewish neighbourhood in Recife, where Lispector grew up; but, as some of her short stories illustrate, the surrounding culture also made a strong impact on her. She lost her parents early - her mother died when she was ten, her father when she was twenty - hastening her absorption into Brazilian life. Shortly before his

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Two worlds STEPHEN HENIGHAN Benjamin Moser WHY THIS WORLD A biography of Cia rice Lispector 479pp. HallS. £20. 978 1 906598426

Clarice Lispector THE APPLE IN THE DARK Translated by Gregory Rabassa with

an introduction by Benjamin Maser 445pp. HallS. £12.99. 978 1 90659845 7

death, her father had moved the family to Rio de Janeiro, with its larger Jewish community, to assist his daughters in their search for husbands. Clarice, who studied law and worked as a journalist while publishing her first short stories, made the decision - unheard of at the time - to marry a gentile. Near to the Wild Heart was subjective and stylistically adventurous, defying the social realism that dominated Brazilian fiction. It won a prize for best novel of the year. In it the tension between the two female protagonists, the wild, instinctive Joana and the maternal Lidia, seemed to express Lispector's conflicted feelings about her marriage to the diplomat Maury Gurgel Valente. She wanted both bohemian independence, such as that enjoyed by her friend the gay novelist Lucio Cardoso, and a family. In spite of its tedious formalities , diplomatic life provided Lispector with the freedom and financial security to write and bring up her two

young sons. She accompanied Valente to postings in Naples, Berne and Washington, DC. Her second and third novels, however, received less attention than her first. She lived away from Brazil between the ages of twenty-four and thirty-eight, and her literary reputation faded. As her chronic insomnia worsened, she ran through a succession of psychoanalysts (they kept falling in love with her), and became addicted to cigarettes and sleeping pills. Her oldest son turned out to be schizophrenic, and, as long as she remained abroad, not even the assistance of devoted literary friends at home could secure publication of her major novel, The Apple in the Dark. In 1959, Lispector made the dramatic decision to leave her husband and return to Brazil to pursue her literary career. For a short time she tried leading an artistic life in Rio, then she turned up in Warsaw, where Valente was now ambassador, with her children. On the advice of friends , she finally let the marriage go and immersed herself in the exuberant Brazil of the early 1960s: the era of bossa nova, cinema novo, and the futuristic new capital of Brasilia. Her timing was perfect. The two books she published on her return, the short story collection Family Ties (1960), and The Apple in the Dark (1961), made her part of the prevailing ebullience. She was idolized by young icons of Brazilian culture, such as the singer Caetano Veloso. The bloom did not last; by the late 1960s a military coup led to a brutal dictatorship that sent prominent cultural figures into exile. Lispector's health collapsed in 1966 when she suffered serious burns over much of her body

CIarice Li8pector at home in the 19708

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5 after falling asleep with a lighted cigarette in her hand. These injuries did not prevent her from producing much of her best work, including the Beckett-like interior monologue The Passion According to G. H. (1964), which Moser ranks as being "among the century' s greatest novels", the brilliantly abstract Agua Viva (1973), and The Hour of the Star (1977), whose portrait of a Rio market combines Jewish and north-eastern Brazilian themes, and which is her most widely read novel in Brazil today. Lispector's neighbour in Rio, the poet Elizabeth Bishop, thought her friend's short stories, some of which she translated into English, "Chekhovian", but did not enjoy her novels. The American publisher Alfred A. Knopf was pleased to bring out The Apple in the Dark, though he said he had no idea what it was about. A tropical counterpart to The Castle , the novel shares Kafka's predilection for naturalistic description of a world that feels emblematic. Its reputation for difficulty is perhaps exaggerated, but while the prose's incessantly self-questioning introspection makes individual passages engrossing, the story can be difficult to absorb on a first reading. The protagonist, Martin, jumps off the balcony of a rural hotel where he is spending the night when he becomes convinced that the hotel's German owner is about to denounce him for an unnamed crime. He flees into the countryside and leads an almost feral existence as a manual labourer on a farm run by the repressed Vit6ria and the nervous, mentally unstable Ermelinda, a parodic reprise of domestic Lidia and artistic Joana. Over time, Martin integrates into the community, learns to work, reconnects with humanity through his affair with a mulatto woman, and discovers God. His relationship with deity having awakened his guilt, Martin confesses that he has murdered his wife. It later emerges that the wife has survived, but, after a dialogue with his deceased father, Martin insists on being taken to prison. Moser, both in his biography and in his introduction to the new English edition, interprets The Apple in the Dark as "a Jewish creation story" in which a sinning man creates God, and through this creation, finds redemption. His reading of this and other works by Lispector in a Jewish context is highly illuminating, although it needn ' t rule out other interpretations. One might also read The Apple in the Dark as a Brazilian creation story. In contrast to Kafka's imaginary worlds, Lispector's description of Martin's flight emphasizes that "The man was in the heart of Brazil" . The abundant natural world, where "plants grew without sense", challenges his conception of order. Stripped of his past, like generations of Europeans arriving in the Americas, Martin is attracted to his »Iulaua lover because she offers him a link to local history, recapitulating the miscegenation that created modern Brazilian society. His guilt is Jewish, but it is also the guilt of the white settler in the Americas, both outcast and colonizer, who must develop a hybrid identity and acknowledge the sins inherent in his privileged position. The richness of The Apple in the Dark defies the explanatory power of any single interpretation. Clarice Lispector's greatness as a writer originated in her Jewish culture, but it flourished amid Brazilian diversity.

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Deir Yassin Sir, - Your issue of January 22 carries a review by Francis Robinson of Eugene Rogan's The Arabs: A history which contains two errors of historical fact relating to Israel that require correction. l. Regarding Dayr Yasin (Deir Yassin), Robinson refers to "the unp rovoked attack" . The fact is that Deir Yassin was a militarized village and the base for irregular Muslim forces that were firing on Jewish West Jerusalem and were also about to mortar the Jewish supply line in the Battle of Jerusalem. 2. Robinson baldly states that the attack on Deir Yassin " left 250 villagers dead" . This is simply not true. Research by Arab Palestinian scholars published in 1987 gives a list of 107 villagers killed and twelve wounded, commenting that they were "absolutely convinced that the number of those killed does not exceed 120 .. Our list was compiled on the basis of the testimony of Deir Yassin natives. We have devoted great effort to checking it and making certain every name is accurate" (Sharif Kanaana and Nihad Zaytawi, Deir Yassin, Monograph 4: Destroyed Palestinian Villages Documentation Project Bir Zeit University, 1987). One survivor who had himself fought against the Jews at Deir Yassin counted ninety-three villagers killed, while another leader related that on the following day the leaders of the clans met in Jerusalem and counted 116 names of those who had not yet been found alive. These data come from Palestinian, not Israeli sources, and are readily available on the internet and elsewhere. PAU L LAWRENCE ROS E Cen ter for Research on A nti se miti srn ,

Penn sy lva ni a S tate U ni vers ity, Uni ve rsity Park , Pennsylvania 16802.

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Alfred Sir, - Leofranc Holford-Strevens interestingly identified one of the mid-twentieth century ' s Alfredian novels in hi s letter (January 8) regarding Bernard Cornwell's The Burning Land. Alfred Duggan's The King of Athelney was just one of several novels to be published in the decades after Chesterton' s Ballad of the White Horse - among others were works by Samuel Walkley, Jeffery Farnol and Geoffrey Trease. However, the point made in my review was that none of these texts significantly recast the formulae seen in the many Alfredian works of the nineteenth century. Duggan's "hi story through Alfred's eyes" is very much a revisiting, for instance, of the hi storical dramas in which Alfred appeared during the Victorian period. Moreover, the

Universities and the pursuit of truth Sir, - Gabriel Josipovici hopes that "the Sussex example might allow us to have a national debate" on whether "we are going to allow market forces to determine the nature of British universities in the twenty-first century?". Should universities, he asked, "be treated strictly as businesses ... in the same way as Tesco or Marks and Spencer?" (Letters, February 12). The "we" he has in mind are political parties and vicechancellors, though he might also include the courts. Indeed, anyone concerned about the impact of economic forces on the character and values of British universities, and the complicity of some university administrations in the erosion of (institutional and individual) academic freedoms, might be interested in a 2009 decision of the Australian Federal Court. The decision - University of Western Australia [UW A] vs Gray involved a claim by UW A to ownership of certain inventions made by its former Professor of Surgery, and of associated patent rights. The original bases for its claim included uni versity regulations asserting ownership of academics' intellectual property, and common law principles supporting employers' ownership of employee inventions. The Court rejected both bases. To the extent that the UW A regulations purported to appropriate academics' intellectual property, they were invalid. Further, common law principles governing employee inventions were not applicable in the context of UW A, due to the distinctiveness of universities and academic employment. On the nature of uni versities, the Court said: UW A has not been immune from the forces, financial and otherwise, that

A further distinctive feature of many . . . uni versities . . . is that ... academic staff are part of the membership that consti tutes the corporation

. . .. To define the relationship of an academic staff member w ith a univers ity simpl y in terms of a contract of em ployment is to ignore a distinctive dim ension of th at relationship

[t probably is the case

letters @the-tls.co.uk are forcing changes in the character of the uni versity sector in . . .. UW A has engaged in cial activities, as have done not al1, uni versities". The put on

A ustralia commer"most, if evidence

by UW A as to the range, char-

acter and sig nificance of such activi-

ties of UW A was slight, though it hoped .. . that we wo uld take judicial notice of these matters ... . What is notable .. . is that there is nothing. to suggest that those commercial activ-

ities have displaced, either totally or if in part to what ex tent, UW A's traditional public function as an institution of higher education in favour of the pursuit of commercial purposes (if it

lawfully could do so under its Act). Its function, in other words, was not limited to that of engaging academic staff for its own commercial purposes. Accordingly, we agree .. . that o n the evidence Dr Gray was not required to advance a commercial

purpose of UW A when selecting the research he would undertake.

Thus, while universities increasingly operate in the market, they are not of the market, being rather of the purposes contained in their charter or Act. Central to the purposes of many universities is the ideal of the unfettered pursuit of truth, an ideal at the heart of the UW A case:

that some of the practices revealed ... in thi s matter . .. and the underl yin g va lu es w hich seem to inform the m, are more like ly to be referable to understandings that have been tradition ally associated w ith membership. The seem ing freedo m to choose the subjec t or line of research and the mann er of it s pursuit and the freedom to decide w he n and how to publish the products of one's research to the extent that these subsist, sit un eas il y w ith emp loyme nt not io ns such as the

implied duty of an employee to obey all law ful and reasonable in struct-

ions of the employer within the scope of the employee's employment, o r to maintain the secrecy of confidential inform at ion generated in the co urse of e mployment. Yet they are apparent mani festat ions of the contested va lue of "academic freedom".

UK courts have also supported academic freedom when considering inte llectual property rights. That they will do so in the future also seems likely, particularly given the Human Rights Act 1998 and increasing influence of European norms. Thus, in the national debate over the values and character of Briti sh uni versities, the courts may have a contribution to make. JUSTINE PILA S t Catherin e 's College, Oxford.

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twentieth-century novels of Duggan and others had nothing like the impact or readership of Chesterton 's work, which was quoted on the front page of The Times on the day that Crete fe ll to German forces during the Second World War. Holford-Strevens's observation that Cornwell's narrator is historically inaccurate in his claim that Alfred usurped the throne is one instance of how Corn well himself fail s to move on from Victorian commonplaces. This charge against the king seems to have first been made in the eighteenth century by historians such as Paul Rapin, and was incorporated into the work of several nineteenth-century novelists. JOANNE PARKER Department of English, University of Exeter, Exeter.

Oz Sir, - Among the dreamers inspired by California's "bountiful resources and pioneering traditions" (Michael Saler, January 29) was L. Frank Baum, the creator of Oz. Baum was enchanted by his fi rst view of Southern California in 1904 and described Coronado, a suburb of San Diego, as a paradise. In 1910 the Baums settled in Hollywood, then a quiet suburb with orange trees on the main street. Oz as conceived in The Wizard of OZ (1900) is a magical but not utopian country that physically resembles rural upstate New York, where Baum grew up. However, Oz developed into an ideal ized California. In The Emerald City of OZ (1910), its weather is "always beautiful" and it has a rich variety of flowers and

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fruits flourishing all year round. It has also become a socialist utopia where all work part-time, produce "for the good of the community" and freely give to their neighbours what they require. Baum's idyllic physical surroundings helped to inspire his vision of a utopian society. KATHARINE M. ROGERS 6202 Perth shire Co urt , Bethesda,

Maryland 20817. -------~,-----­

Hamsun too Sir, - George Steiner is wrong to say that the case of Celine is "a singularity" (February 12) on the grounds that it involves a writer of "decisive stature" who has been pivotal in the development of the modern novel, and yet whose instincts were so

completely at odds with those of a liberal humanist elite. It may seem a peculiar precedence to be claiming, but the Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun (1859-1952) was a novelist of arguably greater stature who sided unequivocally with the forces of the far Right in the 1930s and during the war. Twenty-five years ago, I documented Hamsun' s support for Hitler, Mussolini and Quisling in my biography Enigma: The Life of Knut Hamsun, suggesting that it might be explained - but not excused - by an enthusiasm for the Pangermanism that was excited by the rise of the Prussian state in the 1870s; focu sed by the Germans' early acceptance of him (by the mid-1890s) as a major writer; and made a matter of public knowledge by Hamsun ' S trenchant support for the German cause in the First World War, reinforced throughout by a profound di slike of the English and the arrogant manifestations of the British Empire as seen from within the borders of a small country like Norway. With novels like Hunger (1890) and Mysteries (1892), Hamsun' s role in the creation of the modern novel has probably been greater than Celine's, and with a siredom that includes Musil, Kafka, Gorky, Thomas Mann, Hemingway, Henry Miller and Updike it is certainly more varied. The reason for the lack of recognition of Hamsun' s contribution to modern literature - in spite of the aberrations of his final years - is a familiar one: few people take the trouble to learn to read the language he wrote in. ROBERT FERGUSON Trudvangveien 25, 0363 Oslo. -------~------

Cool Sir, - Donald Clarke is right (Letters, January 29) to point to British colloquial use of "cool" by Wilkie Collins in the 1860s. In the United States, Lincoln used it in his Cooper Union Address in New York in 1860 - "the speech that made him President" . He said: "B ut you will not abide the e lection of a Republican president ! In that supposed event, you say, you will destroy the Union ; and then, you say, the great crime of having destro yed it will be upon us! That is cool. A highwayman holds a pi stol to my ear, and mutters through his teeth, 'Stand and deli ver, or I shall kill you, and then yo u will be a murderer!"'. Both in Coli ins and here, the word seems to imply a blithe outward demeanour to cover morally di stasteful behaviour. E. D. HIRSCH, JR 2006 Pine Top Road, C harlottesvill e , V irg inia 22903.

HISTORY

7

An extra copy for Mr Philby What historians are allowed to tell us about British and American security services hristoPher Andrew's latest work - a vast black funereal tome on MI5 announces itself as the "authorized history" of MI5 rather than the official history. The distinction is significant. Professor Andrew has been free to enunciate his own opinions and the volume does not reflect M15 's institutional view of its own past. This was a commendable decision by the authorities. Andrew does not hesitate to criticize the service where he feels this is warranted and, for example, identifies its slowness to pick up on the growing threat from al-Qaeda in the 1990s. Other secret services around the world have been deeply impressed by the project. Only the Swiss have attempted anything like it, and the decision to take the MI5 history up to the present day is unprecedented. Nevertheless, the book has been censored, or "redacted", for security reasons. Behind the scenes, there has clearly been something of a battle as M15's management and the Cabinet Office, supported by auxiliary units of MI5 lawyers, have snipped away at Andrew's text, removing things thought potentially actionable or otherwise anxiety-inducing. Andrew notes that he has contested this process with " vigour". Overall , the result represents a spectacular achievement. The Defence of the Realm contains not only new insights into the history of British counter-espionage and security, but also many important connections to the history of modern British politics and society. There is new material on significant moments in British public life, including the Profumo affair, the disappearance of John Stonehouse, and the Miners' Strike, during which Moscow provided money to the strikers against the advice of its own intelligence service, the KGB. Some of the most enjoyable passages of The Defence of the Realm describe the interface between MI5 and Downing Street. Harold Macmillan 's horror of any public discussion of secret matters reveals his Edwardian roots. Harold Wilson 's tendency to be simultaneously fascinated and terrified by the secret service is manifested in his habit of conducting important conversations with his private secretary in the lavatory of Number 10 with the taps turned on full in the hope of defeating imagined bugging devices. Then there is the security operation launched by James Callaghan against MI5 in 1978 to prevent the service from discovering that its

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RICHARD J. ALDRICH Christopher Andrew THE DEFENCE OF THE REALM The authorised history of MI5 I ,032pp. Allen Lane. £30. 9780713998856

Matthew M. Aid THE SECRET SENTRY The untold history of the National Security Agency 432pp. New York: Bloomsbury Press. $18. 9781596915152

Andrew's most important observations about MI5 as an organization is that it has never been a mere domestic security service. Close connections with the British Empire in its early years allow MI5 to make a plausible claim to be one of the first secret services with a global reach. The confluence of the Cold War and the end of Empire re-affirmed this substantial overseas role. The "New Terrorism" has served only to expand the international world of domestic security and now, in Britain's overseas intelligence stations, it is

more frightening to the spooks than any plot that Osama bin Laden might dream up. What, after "redaction" , has ended up on Andrew's cutting room floor? The missing dimensions of MI5 history are all areas of excruciating secrecy. Relations with allied services was one super-sensitive subject, Northern Ireland was another. Codebreaking or "signals intelligence" was the most touchy subject and has been largely sanitized. The very mention of the word "intercepts" is likely to cause a neuralgic twinge on the face of any denizen of Whitehall. This is somewhat ironic, since Andrew has been prescient in pointing out that our limited current information about signals intelligence remains the single most problematic aspect of Cold War history. During the last half-century, codebreaking has absorbed more staff and more money than MI5 and the Secret Intelligence Service put together. In Andrew's book, signals intelligence manifests itself in a most enjoyable chapter on Venona, the successful effort to decrypt KGB cables, which led to the uncovering of figures such as Donald Maclean and Klaus Fuchs. Andrew reveals fabulous new material here - including Kim

MI5 files opened soon after their release in 1997

new Director General was to he an external

candidate and not drawn from within its own ranks. The appointment came upon the retiring incumbent, Michael Hanley, as a "thunderstroke" . Overcome with anger, he burst unannounced into the office of the Home Secretary, Merl yn Rees, shouting that the decision was a "fucking disgrace". These wider landscapes are nicely juxtaposed with a detailed review of the organization of MI5. Each major section of the book opens with a substantial chapter looking at issues such as bureaucratic change, money, budgets, technology and buildings. One of

not unusual for the chief to be a Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) officer and the deputy to be drawn from MI5. When MI5 moved into its current headquarters at Thames House, some suggested that the Secret Intelligence Service might also be accommodated there. It seems that the secret services themselves resisted this idea strenuously because lurking underneath was the ghastly possibility of merger. Indeed, the concept of a single UK and Intelligence and Security Agency - an idea touted in Whitehall as early as 1925 - has resurfaced regularly. Unsurprisingly, this scheme was far

Philby 's successful request in July 1950, sent to the Head of the Secret Intelligence Service, to be given his own additional copies of these sensitive decrypts. Alas, thereafter, the subject of signals intelligence more or less submerges - yet we know it was there. One of the more authentic revelations in Peter Wright' s sensational memoir (Spycatcher, 1987) was the important interaction between MI5 and Britain's codebreakers at GCHQ. What if, to choose a hypothetical example, the British had been successfully reading some of the communications of the HV A, the

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East German foreign intelligence service in the 1980s? What difference would this have made to the intricate game of counterintelligence in the last decade of the Cold War? Since the end of the Cold War, one of the more controversial issues - witnessed in the Omagh bombing - has been the challenge of responding to tactical signals intelligence on terrorism in real time. These are the kind of secrets that are likely to remain locked away for decades to come.

A

t a mere 400 pages, The Secret Sentry, Matthew M. Aid's new history of

the US National Security Agency, cannot compete with the corporeal bulk of the MI5 history. Nonetheless, it reflects a research task that has been no less arduous. The National Security Agency - America' s equivalent to Britain's codebreaking agency GCHQ - is obsessively secret, and within Washington's Beltway its initials NSA are reputed to stand for "Never Say Anything". Although this is Aid' s first book, he is already famous in the United States. A few years ago he uncovered the Bush administration's secret reclassification programme. For years, teams of "weeders" had been quietly operating at the US National Archives, closing down thousands of pages of historical documents that had been open to scholars for years. Files from the 1950s on the Korean War already cited by scholars were disappearing from public view on the grounds that this sort of material might be useful to al-Qaeda. The officials doing this work were retirees working on a generous daily consultancy rate. Unsurprisingly, day after day, they kept finding more "sensitive material" that needed shutting down. The Secret Sentry contains some remarkable revelations. On April 11 , 1951, President Harry S. Truman stripped General Douglas MacArthur of his role as American Commander-in-Chief in the Far East. In his place, General Matthew Ridgeway was ordered to take control of the war in Korea. MacArthur returned home and remained a vociferous critic of the American government throughout the Korean conflict. The precise circumstances of MacArthur's removal have always been a mystery. Aid shows that during his period of command, MacArthur had in fact been explaining his current strategic thinking to the diplomats of friendly powers based in Tokyo, including the ambassadors of Spain, Portugal and Brazil. His plan was to try to widen the conflict in the hope of generating an all-out war with both Communist China and the Soviet Union. There was clearly an underlying desire to justify the use of atomic weapons and to engage in a preventative war that would deal abruptly with the Communist menace. Suitably alarmed, the various ambassadors cabled their home governments, reporting these conversations, and their messages were then intercepted and decyphered by NSA. Before long their accounts of MacArthur's bellicose ruminations were piling up on Truman' s desk. Surprisingly, a full third of Secret Sentry

HISTORY

8 concerns the period after 1989, including the recent wars in the former Yugoslavia, Iraq and Afghanistan. Aid's ability to integrate the work of the CIA and other agencies into his story means that this must be considered the most authoritative study of US intelligence during recent times - and it is highly critical. With regard to the events of September 11 , 2001, Aid shows that by midday, NSA had secured intercepts that strongly pointed to al-Qaeda' s culpability for the attacks on the Twin Towers. However, Donaid Rumsfeld dismissed these reports, and by mid-afternoon he had ordered the Pentagon to begin attack planning against Iraq. Despite the fact that Iraq had been a high-priority target for more than ten years, NSA' s intelligence coverage of Saddam ' s regime was poor. It was the Americans themselves who had encouraged the Iraqis to move their military communications to secure underground fibre optic networks, making their messages much harder to intercept. NSA mostly collected voice traffic from low-level troop formations that told them little. Nevertheless, in 2002, N SA 's chief, General Michael V. Hayden, concurred with the infamous National Intelligence Estimate insisting that Iraq 's WMDs posed a grave danger. These are the two most important intelligence histories to appear during the past decade. They are successful because they are not mere spy-yarns and demonstrate instead the way in which intelligence connects with wider issues. Andrew's MI5 history moves elegantly across a range of fascinating political and social themes in British life, such as the changing attitudes to women in the workplace and the treatment of homosexuality within the Civil Service. The most impressive aspect of Aid 's account of NSA is the way in which it connects the secret business of signals intelligence with the broader narrative of US foreign policy and the American presidency. Both books hint at a yet more mysterious story - the relationship between secret services and the historians who write about them. When Aid began his investigations in the early 1980s, he was reviled by NSA. By the 1990s, the American code breakers had learnt to tolerate him. Over the past few years, NSA has actively assisted his research, although Secret Sentry remains an unofficial study. Christopher Andrew's own journey, over some three decades, has also followed a winding path from outsider to trusted historical auditor. This gradual transformation suggests that some secret agencies at least have begun to recognize a fundamental historiographical truth. Not so long ago, these organizations were trying to deny their own existence, believing that this would prevent their history from ever being written. All they did was ensure that it was written hy others , some of whom were genuine historians , but many of whom were fantasists or people with an axe to grind. Another result was that the personnel within the secret agencies themselves were often remarkably ignorant of their past. Some of the mistakes of the last decade could have been avoided had the agencies enjoyed a greater understanding of what their predecessors had done. Both these books suggest that the more imaginative secret services have stopped treating history as an outright enemy - and have seen its potential as an ally.

Brutalized uring the American Civil War, the eminent anti-slavery Senator Charles Sumner was accused of being so consumed by the issue of emancipation that he regarded the war itself as an "unfortunate and most annoying, though trifling, disturbance, as if a fire-engine had passed by" . The same might be said in reverse of the eminent military historian John Keegan's latest book: while he knows that he can ' t ignore them altogether, the great issues of slavery and emancipation, and, more generally, the larger political context in which the war happened, are perceived only dimly and in the distance. The result is a battle-filled, strategy-andtactics-fuelled narrative which will satisfy some but frustrate others. Keegan' s admirers will relish both his bufferishness - "Civil War armies were the worst tailored of any great conflict", he laments - and also his keen eye for the day-to-day reality of a soldier's life. The human cost of the conflict is always close to the surface and the book' s most graceful and effective moments come when Keegan quotes Wait Whitman - which he does at length - or the first-hand testimony of soldiers. The bulk of the book consists of a welltold story of engagement after engagement, which conveys very effectively the growing ability of the North to bring its superior industrial and manpower resources to bear against a wily and resilient but ultimately weaker opponent. The big question , however, as Keegan himself puts it, is "how to make sense of the war" . Keegan 's way of making sense is to explain how the various military engagements related to one another, why fighting occurred when and where it did, and how the geography of the battlefields influenced the outcome. There is no doubting the author's topographical mastery of the American landscape or his command of the hour-by-hour narrative of each important battle. There are passages in this book describing the fundamental importance of geography to the war's course and outcome that are as lucid as any that have been written before. But there is, of course, a different way of approaching Keegan's question about how to make sense of this terrible, costly conflict, and that is to explore why it happened and what its effects were. Here the reader is given little help. Part of the problem is that as soon as it strays from the battlefield, the book is strewn with small inaccuracies. Some are relatively trivial matters, such as mistaking the year Abraham Lincoln became a Republican or claiming that Philadelphia was the largest city in the Union in 1861 , when in fact it was New York. Other errors are more surprising: it was Palmerston who was the British Prime Minister in those years, not Disraeli; and presidential elections took place on a single day, not, as Keegan claims, over a period of months. There are some serious mistaken identities: Henry Clay was emphatically not, as Keegan bizarrely describes him, an " ideologue of southern nationalism" but almost the opposite: a fervent Unionist who spent his long political career battling against those who wanted to divide the United States on sectionallines. Later, in possibly the most confus-

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ADAM I. P. SMITH John Keegan THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR A military history

394pp. Hutchinson. £25. 978009 1794835

ing paragraph in the book, Keegan summarizes Lincoln's plan for post-war Reconstruction as "virtually a recognition of southern sovereignty", which it most certainly was not. Keegan ' s observation that "the causes of the war are now its least remembered ingredients" may be accurate, but, if so, this book does little to jog the memory. It is to be expected that in a book subtitled "A military history", the causes of the war might be dealt with briskly, but Keegan's efforts at broadbrush concision are often at the expense of accuracy. Most importantly, he elides the critical political distinction between states and

A Union Infantry corporal, c1861-5 territories. Federalism meant that neither Congress nor the President had the power to regulate or abolish slavery in states, but they did have that power with regard to territories, land held in trust by the federal government prior to being admitted to statehood. New Mexico and Utah, wrested from Mexico after the US invasion of that country in the 1840s, were never admitted as states during these years, as Keegan claims, still less as slave states. The explosion of the slavery issue into American politics in the 1850s was a direct result of the fact that, for the first time for several decades, a vast swathe of land in which the status of slavery had not yet been decided was under the direct control of Congress. The result of the conflict between those who wanted to see the spread of slavery into the South-west and those who wanted to reserve this new land exclusively for free white settlers was a compromise, brokered in part by a dying Henry Clay, in which Congress tossed the hot potato to the local level by authorizing the territorial legislatures to decide on the issue. This approach temporarily quieted the controversy, but it was reignited with a fury when a Democratic Senator from Illinois, Stephen A. Douglas, used the same formula of local delegation (or "popular sovereignty", as he called it) to determine the fate of human bondage in two

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territories in the middle of the continent, Kansas and Nebraska. This was not new land seized from another republic but previously "unorganised" Indian land, long in the possession of the United States although largely unsettled by whites, from which, according to an earlier congressional settlement, slavery had supposedly been excluded forever. The fear of many Northerners that the Kansas-Nebraska Act represented a takeover bid for the nation by a conspiracy of southern slaveholders stoked the rise of the exclusively Northern "free soil" Republican Party which was committed, above all, to halting the expansion of slavery. Like Lincoln, Keegan concedes that slavery was "somehow" the cause of the war, but because he muddles some of the crucial details of this story he is never very clear how and why that was so. Underlying Keegan' s vagueness about why the war happened is a rather romanticized view of the pre-war nation. It is " mysterious", he muses in the introduction, that civil war should have broken out in a country "which from its earliest times had devoted itself to peace between men" . Yet his claims that "the Christian character of nineteenthcentury American society forbade atrocity" and that "antebellum America had been a gentle society" would come as a surprise to Indians, Mexicans, and, of course, to slaves. In truth, pre-Civil War America was in many ways a brutal and brutalized society in which war and violence, or the threat of both, were formative influences. These things matter because, masterful as Keegan 's grasp of the military narrative is, his lack of attention to politics and, above all, to the role of slavery ultimately compromises his ability to explain not just why the war happened but also his core concerns: how it was fought and how it ended. In a brief chapter summarizing the reasons for Confederate defeat, Keegan mentions slavery only in an aside about Gone with the Wind. While he insists that the Confederates would have been wiser to have adopted a strategy of tactical retreat, what he does not convey is that the fundamental reason why that was not possible was that the Confederate leadership's primary concern was always to preserve slavery, which meant, in essence, keeping their slaves as far from the Union advance as possible. There are a few paragraphs on the Union's recruitment of black soldiers, but little sense of the ways in which slaves were themselves actors in the great drama happening around them. Taken on its own terms, this book has both wit and charm ; the panache with which the battles are narrated and the sensitivity to the experience of the ordinary soldier can be compelling; and as a primer for those who, like Keegan, want to make the battlefields of this great conflict " a living reality", it is as good

as anything else in print. All along, moreover, there are odd glimpses of another, broader, more interesting approach. Keegan concludes with the startling assertion that "American socialism was stillborn on the fields of Shiloh and Gettysburg". The democratic settlement conferred by Union victory and encapsulated in Lincoln ' s Gettysburg Address , he suggests, forever undermined the appeal of socialism to a working class who felt themselves empowered already. This is a plausible, if highly debatable, claim. But it requires a different kind of book to sustain it.

LITERARY CRITICISM

9

A detail from "The Temptation of Sir Percival", 1894, by Arthur Hacker edieval romance created and authorized the making offictions in Western literature. Its preoccupations the failure of idealism in social institutions, the self-realization of the individual, the tensions and anxieties within the family, the agency of women, and the pressures of masculinity - reappear throughout the centuries, in the successor to romance, the novel, as well as in a multitude of other media from primetime television to opera. Romance's varied contexts, its long history and its development into new forms in the twenty-first century, whether drawing on the national myth of Arthur or on the popular plots of romances such as " Sir Gowther", in which a devil sires a baby on a desperate mother, all provide, as these four books show, fertile ground for thinking about our past, our present and our future. One might be forgiven for thinking that Chaucer was not fond of romance. His devastating parody of the popular metrical romance "The Tale of Sir Thopas" , which is his character's contribution to The Canterbury Tales, may have done more than adverse modern critical judgements to suggest the low status of the tail-rhyme subgenre. Yet Chaucer's parody is affectionate: he compares his hero to a string of other English romance heroes: "Men speken of romances of prys / Of Horn Child. . / Of Beves and Sir Gy, / Of Sir Lybeux and Pleyndamour / But Sir Thopas, he bereth the flour / Of roial chivalry". Chaucer explores the literary possibilities of the genre elsewhere in The Canterbury Tales, adding at least four other examples to his curtail ed experiment in tail-rhyme romance. Among the secu lar genres in medieval literary culture, romance was by far the most popular and the most influential. Over a period of some 400 years, collections of romance catered for the tastes of both the nobility and those who aspired to noble status. From its earliest appearance in medieval literature a broadly defined category - its name derived from the simple fact of its being composed in a vernacular language rather than Latin romance told tales of the adventures of noble men and women. Although it often claimed

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Cupid's wounds CAROLYNE LARRINGTON Laine E. Doggett

Stephen Knight

LOVE CURES Healing and love magic in Old French romance 256pp. Pennsylvania State Un iversity Press. $75; distributed in the UK by Marston Books. £6 1.95. 9780271035314

MERLIN Knowledge and power through the ages 288pp. Cornell University Press. $27.95; distributed in the UK by NBN. £18.95. 9780801443657

Raluca L. Radulescu and Cory James Rushton, editors

Elizabeth Archibald and Ad Putter, editors

A COMPANION TO MEDIEVAL POPULAR ROMANCE 209pp. Brewer. £50. 978 I 84384 192 0

THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO ARTHURIAN LEGEND 261 pp. Cambridge Un iversity Press. £50 (US $90). 9780 521 67788 2

to take its impetus from history, many romances were highly fictionalized, allowing free play to the authors' imaginations. Romance had no necessary connection to "romance" in the modern Mills and Boon sense; though romances might often end with a wedding, they need not be about love per se. Romance developed first in French as a mirror in which a European warrior-caste saw itself reflected as a courtly and chivalric aristocracy whose pursuit of honour was tempered by attentiveness to women, ritualized fighting with members of the same class, and a determination to face every danger. Romance, whether Arthurian or popular (the

sage and the king, as "speaking truth to power". Raluca L. Radulescu and Cory lames Rushton's collection of essays, A Companion to Medieval Popular Romance, aims to provide new reading contexts for the popular romances of medieval England. The Cambridge Companion to Arthurian Legend has as ambitious a scope as Knight' s Merlin, reaching back to the period after the retreat of the Romans from the British Isles, when the historical Arthur would have li ved had he lived at all, to Spamalot in 2005. Doggett's book makes large claims for a hitherto unregarded connection between romance and contemporary society. Looking closely at twelfth-century romances, and, by way of comparison, the thirteenth-century "Roman du Silence", Doggett argues that the depiction of various noblewomen, notably Iseult and her mother from the Tristan legend, as possessing healing skills draws on historical practice: the tradition of unofficial healers, whom she calls "empirics" , whose knowledge of herbs and salves was passed down through the generations. The role of the romance heroine in healing the knight's injuries overlaps with her granting him her love, so that at first healing and loving go hand in hand. Only later, as medical know-

two are not mutually exclusive), may operate

chiefly in the realm of fiction, but contemporary social concerns often manifest themselves in the episodes of knightly derring-do. The four recent books reviewed here take different approaches to medieval romance and its reception. In Love Cures: Healing and love magic in Old French romance, Laine Doggett restricts her discussion to a group of important twelfth-century French romances. Stephen Knight offers a history of Merlin, from his earliest appearances in Welsh poetry to the recent BBC television series, and concentrates on the relationship between the

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ledge becomes the preserve of universityeducated men and female empirics are excluded from practice through professional regulation, does the idea that women literally cure their lovers dissolve into a metaphorical understanding of the beloved as healing the wounds made by Cupid. Nor, Doggett stresses, shou ld we assume that magic is at work in the healing process; the distinction between magical remedies - or the love potion of Tristan and Iseult - and effective drugs would almost certainly be differently understood by the medieval audience. Doggett's book has some repetitive passages; the arguments for the existence of female empirics is reiterated in different chapters, and there are some very lengthy quotations. However, the stud y carefully makes the argument that, along with elements which we might now consider fantastical, romance deploys concepts from contemporary medieval cultures. Thus individual romances can contribute evidence to the history of medicine, and indeed the histories of magic and of love, if attentively read. The Companion to Medieval Popular Romance deals mostly with romance in English, with some examples from AngloNorman, the dialect of French understood in England after the Norman Conquest. Radulescu and Rushton, like many of their contributors, take their cue from Nicola McDonald's rallying cry in her introduction to Pulp Fictions of Medieval England (2004) , to reconsider the popular romances as exemplifying "that which is essential to all provocative literature, the interrogation of the norms that order and regulate our li ves". McDonald is interested in the academy's discomfort with the unsettling and shocking in the popular romance. She adduces the gripping narrative of "S ir Gowther", mentioned above, in which the devil's offspring, a delinquent child, gnaws off his mother's nipple when she breastfeeds him, kills several of his wet-nurses and in adolescence rapes convents full of nuns and forces friars to jump off cliffs, yet achieves absolution for his sins and wins a princess. Other tales deal with the extraordinary luck of being chosen for love and unimaginable riches by a beautiful fairy

10 mistress, or explore the tensions between a knight's love for his best friend and his bond with his children, when the friend ' s leprosy can only be cured by the children's blood. The Companion is, however, not concerned with rehabilitating the individual romances, a task already taken on in several recent essay collections; it prefers to explore more general questions about the romances' medieval contexts, and to examine their later reception. Outstanding essays here are Phillipa Hardman's argument that the youthful protagonists in many English romances, including (as Helen Cooper has noted), a good number of feisty heroines, offer imaginative role models for young readers and Karl Reichl's re-examination of the discussion of what kinds of oral contexts can safely be posited for texts which have been preserved for us only in written form. Maldwyn Mills and Gillian Rogers look at manuscript collections of popular romances, noting how tales, which were composed in the twelfth century for courtly Anglo-Norman audiences, are rendered into English and collected in fifteenthcentury household miscellanies such as the Thornton manuscript. This manuscript (now MS Lincoln Cathedral 91) gives a snapshot of the kinds of reading matter, both religious and secular, that the Thornton household found entertaining. In another essay, Ad Putter succeeds in making metre and rhythm compelling, showing how some metrical forms, like the one parodied by Chaucer in "The Tale of Sir Thopas", can produce striking poetic effects when listened to with a sympathetic ear.

Other chapters in the collection cast new light on familiar topics, such as gender or the popular topic of nationalism in what was already a multicultural island. What is most innovative about this Companion is not so much the revelation that popular romance can be fun, or that it shares tropes with Star Wars, but its discussion of material objects: it examines actual manuscripts and their contents, and the recurrent lists of popular romance heroes found in various medieval texts, even, as noted above, in "Sir Thopas", showing that these low-status, but well-loved, stories left their mark on high literary culture. The welcome new addition to the authoritative Cambridge Companion series traces Arthurian narrative from history through pseudo-history to romance, and on into the post-medieval centuries. The first half of the book traces the development of the legend in English and French tradition, by century from the twelfth century onwards. This works well for the first four chronological chapters; the limited number of significant texts or text collections in each period allows space for eminent scholars such as John Burrow to write at some length on "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" and the other Gawain romances, and for Barry Windeatt to give a detailed commentary on Malory's Morte Darthur. Ad Putter' s chapter on the twelfth century is a masterpiece of compression, covering Geoffrey of Monmouth, the French and English translations of his work, and the romances of Chretien de Troyes, while Jane Taylor gives a lively and informative account of the French Vulgate and Post-Vulgate cycles in the thirteenth-century chapter. Once the milestone of Malory is passed, however, the two chapters on the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, and the

LITERARY CRITICISM twentieth and twenty-first centuries are taken at a gallop. Norris Lacy notes that the great bibliography of Arthurian writing, the Arthurian Annals indicates that 80 per cent of everything written on Arthur has been produced since 1900; an attempt to give a representative overview of the poems, novels, plays, films, musicals and ephemera produced in recent years leaves space only for a one-line critical verdict. Lacy detects a growing tendency towards humour, debunking and disillusionment, though, as he sensibly notes, the inherent flaws in the Camelot project were perceived from the earliest days of the Round Table. Many readers will share Lacy's judgement that Monty Python and the Holy Grail is the most successful Arthurian film yet made; he notes that the film "creates humour in the name of, but not necessarily at the expense of, the story of Arthur and the Grail Quest". The twenty-first century seems to have heralded a revival of interest in the Grail ; Umberto Eco, is, as ever, ahead of the trend with his marvellous novel Baudolino (2002), his return to the fully imagined medieval world of The Name of the Rose (1983). The second half of the Companion traces several different themes from the Arthurian corpus. Elizabeth Archibald shows that medieval romance had already begun to question chivalric ideology; a critical appraisal of the system is not purely the province of the heirs of Don Quixote. Making his first appearance in the French Prose Tristan, the disaffected knight Sir Dinadan is prone to asking his fellow knights why they choose to fight against unfavourable odds, and why they are so obsessed with serving their ladies. A comic high point in Malory comes when Dinadan is made to dress in women's clothing, a spectacle which amuses Queen Guenevere so much that she falls on the floor

laughing, "and so dede all that there was". Archibald points out that Dinadan's view of chivalry, despite being both the butt and the source of comedy, is "honest but not destructive" . Jane Gilbert draws parallels between the world created in what she calls "Arthurian discourse" and online virtual worlds such as "Second Life" . "Arthur World" always exists in a past which cannot be recovered by readers or writers. Nor can its residents ever capture the originary perfect moment, the "brief shining spot" of "Camelot the musical" , when the Round Table was complete, before its destruction was ineluctably written by the choices made by its constituents: particularly in the disastrous conception of Mordred. Gilbert also discusses how the "good" can be as difficult to identify in early romance, as it is in the modern computer game; gamers encountering a new creature know "we can hit it, kiss it or ask it a question" , so the adventuring knight is always facing new challenges, failing (or partially succeeding), but always - at least until the final catastrophe - living to fight another day. Peggy McCracken takes up the unusual theme of the adulterous French version of Arthur, who is always being taken in by pretty women with designs on his person or kingdom; the English Arthur is very much less susceptible. Chapters on imperial politics, religion and magic and on Arthurian geography complete this readable and thoughtfully assembled collection. Merlin of course appears frequently in the Cambridge Companion, but he has a history of his own. Stephen Knight begins by outlining the combination of ancient Northern and Welsh traditions giving rise to the hybrid figure of Merlin the madman of the woods, and Merlin the prophet, an embodiment of pure wisdom. Knight gives full weight to

Catrin Sands Catrin Sands, are you still there? I dreamt about you last night. You think it' s all Brown Helen but it's you who were pale and thin last night. And your eyes were brown instead of blue Catrin Sands, if you ' re still there. The sea was a long way below the wooden room I found you inside, pale and thin, in a white blouse. You looked at me with your new eyes like you never did as a child. The sea was a long way below. There was something you needed to say, my ear to your lips as you tried but the sea, forty years below, drowned all I wanted to know. So I held you close, in case we had died with something you needed to say. Catrin Sands, are you still there? I dreamt about you last night. You think it's all Brown Helen but it's you who were pale and thin last night. And your eyes were brown instead of blue Catrin Sands, if you ' re still there.

PAUL HENRY

TLS FEBRUARY 192010

Merlin as the traumatized survivor of the battle of Arfderydd, in which Merlin's lord, and his sister' s son are killed; Merlin retreats - as he frequently does through his long history from public life into a forest isolation which tips him over the edge of sanity, his only confidant an apple tree, or in another early Welsh poem, a little pig. Knight frames Merlin's career in terms of the different functions he performs in successive periods. The medieval Merlin is predominantly an advice-giver, bringing prophetic knowledge of what is to come and adding a modicum of political sense to his dealings with Arthur and his royal predecessors. As in the Cambridge Companion, the fewer texts which survive from the earlier periods allow more expansive and always acute analysis; Knight demonstrates that the role of "grand vizier", the king's closest counsellor, whose supernaturally attained wisdom is inevitably respected, becomes scaled down by the fifteenth century, reflecting the changing structures of power; the king's decision-making is no longer determined by personal links to his advisers. The realization by Elizabethan historians that neither Arthur nor Merlin had a historical existence reconfigures the early modern Merlin as political prophet and proto-technologist. Considered under the rubric of Cleverness, this Merlin guarantees the imperial destiny of Britain in The Faerie Queene, but he also works with devils and creates quasi-magical devices: a diamond shield and a brazen wall surrounding Carmarthen. In the following centuries, this humanist scientist finds himself in some odd company, descending into low culture to fraternize with pantomime figures like Tom Thumb, or, more grandly, presiding over a "Hermitage" or cottage of learning, built in 1735 for George II's queen , Caroline. Here he features as the central figure among six other life-size wax images, mostly representing historical and imaginary learned women. The Romantics rediscover the Celtic Merlin ; Knight offers a close reading of Tennyson ' s Merlin, before embarking on his final section: "International Merlin", in which Merlin embodies Education. Here T. H. White's tutor-wizard is a key figure , but, perhaps inevitably, the scope of this section, covering Merlin's appearances in French and German as well as anglophone culture leaves the reader breathless as oneline summaries come on apace. So Nicol Williamson plays Merlin in John Boorman ' s film Excalibur as "an eccentric bully"; the Merlin figure in Robertson Davies's The Lyre of Orpheus (1998) who narrates this subtle and inventive novel is "a sadly reduced, selfknowing form of modern Merlin" , the lessons mediated by the website for the BBC Merlin series are mere "electronic substitutes for knowledge". Knight ends his history with a hrief hut heartfelt warning that the dialectical relationship between knowledge and truth and the public institutions of power remains crucial to both the academy and to the health of the body politic. The last Merlin-figure invoked is the weapons inspector, Or David Kelly. Once again an indirect victim of war trauma, Kelly's lonely apparent suicide in woods near Oxford removed for ever the chance of hearing what truths he might have had to say to the Blair government bent on the invasion of Iraq. Speaking truth to power remains a dangerous, yet absolutely vital, role in both old and emerging democracies.

RELIGION

11

But Julian was good n the ongoing suit of Secularism vs God, David Bentley Hart is the most able counsel for the defence in recent years. Though confident in the strength of his case, he does not hesitate to abuse the plaintiff's attorneys, and he does so in grand style. Richard Dawkins is guilty of "rhetorical recklessness". Christopher Hitchens's text "careens drunkenly across the pages" of a book "that raises the wild non sequitur almost to the level of a dialectical method". Daniel Dennett's theses are " sustained by classifications that are entirely arbitrary and fortified by arguments that any attentive reader should notice are wholly circular". Hart has the gifts of a good advocate. He writes with clarity and force, and he drives his points home again and again. He exposes his opponents' errors of fact or logic with ruthless precision. He is generous in making concessions on his own side, provided they leave intact his overarching claims. Above all, he has ensured that his brief is modest and manageable. Thus, no attempt is made to plead in defence of religion as such. "Religion in the abstract", Hart says, "does not actually exist, and almost no one (apart from politicians) would profess any allegiance to it". This is a sound and fundamental point. The creeds of the major religions are mutually contradictory, so that the one thing we know for certain about religion is that if any religion is true then most religions are false. Hart's client is not religion in general - it is traditional Christianity. It is this, he claims, that has been misunderstood and slandered by its cultured despisers. Again, Hart concentrates on issues of history rather than philosophy. True, he claims that Dawkins's philosophical arguments are ones that "a college freshman midway through his first logic course could dismantle in a trice". However, the claim that Dawkins is philosophically illiterate is based on an ontology that would be rejected by many a seasoned professor of philosophy. Hart's own strengths lie elsewhere, so he is wise to

I

concentrate on narrative and invective.

The aim of the first half of the book is to demolish "the mythology of a secularist age". Secularists invite us to believe the following story. In the medieval ages of faith, culture stagnated, science languished, wars of religion were routinely waged, witches were burned by inquisitors, and Western humanity was enslaved to superstition. The literary remains of antiquity had been consigned to the flames, and the achievements of Greek science lay forgotten until Islam restored them to the West. The age of faith was succeeded by an age of reason and enlightenment, which gave us the riches of scientific achievement and political liberty, and a new and revolutionary sense of human dignity. The modern separation of Church and State has put an end to the blood-steeped intolerance of religion. Western humanity has at last left its nonage and attained to its majority in science, politics and ethics. "This is", Hart says, "a simple and enchanting tale ... its sole defect is that it happens to be false in every identifiable detail." Six chapters demolish detailed elements of

ANTHONY KENNY David Bentley Hart ATHEIST DELUSIONS The Christian revolution and its fashionable enemies

272pp. Yale University Press. £22.50 (US $28). 9780300111903

this secularist myth. Chapter Four refutes the allegations that the ancient library of Alexandria was destroyed by Christians and that the pagan philosopher Hypatia was murdered out of hatred for women and learning. Chapter Five shows that far from burning Classical texts, Christian monastic librarians preserved them from decay. Chapter Six argues that Greek science had become sterile long before the Christianization of the Roman Empire. The only innovative physicist of late antiquity, we are told, was the Christian John Philoponus. During the four and a half centuries of its scientific pre-eminence, Islam made "no more progress than a moderately clever undergraduate today could assimilate in less than a single academic year". Paying tribute to the Oxford calculators of the fourteenth century, Hart illustrates the continuity between medieval and Renaissance science. Pope Urban VIII' s condemnation of Galileo, he claims, was not an index of inherent ecclesiastical hostility to science, but a clash of arrogant personalities. The seventh and eighth chapters defend Christianity from the charges of intolerance and cruelty. The persecution of witches, Hart points out, was an early modern rather than a medieval phenomenon, and the inquisitors of the time did their best to suppress witchhunts. The rise of modern science and the obsession with sorcery "were two closely allied manifestations of the development of a new post-Christian sense of human mastery over the world". In exculpation of the use of torture and the burning of heretics, it can be said that the Church was merely following a fashion which was originated by the State. During the so-called Dark Ages, the only penalty for misbelief was excommunication, whereas in the heyday of the Holy Roman Empire heresy became a capital crime. "Violence", Hart says, " increased in proportion to the degree of sovereignty claimed by the state, and whenever the medieval church surrendered moral authority to secular power, injustice and cruelty flourished." Addressing the responsibility of the Church for warfare, Hart briskly gets the Crusades out of the way. Admitting that they were "holy wars" - the only ones in Christian history, he maintains - he dismisses them as "the last gaudy flourish of Western barbarian culture, embellished by the winsome ceremonies of chivalry". The European wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are treated at greater length. Here, we learn, "no prince of the time waged war against another simply on account of his faith". In its bloodiest days the Thirty Years War was not a war of religion, but a struggle between two Catholic houses, the Bourbons and the Habsburgs. Hart is at his most convincing when he argues that for the sheer scale of its violence,

the modern period trumps any of the ages of Christian faith. "The Thirty Years War, with its appalling toll of civilian casualties, was a scandal to the consciences of the nations of Europe; but midway through the twentieth century ... even liberal democracies did not scruple to bomb open cities from the air, or to use incendiary or nuclear devices to incinerate tens of thousands of civilians." In the second part of the book, Hart seeks to replace the secularist myth with a positive account of what he calls "the Christian revolution" - "perhaps the only true revolution in the history of the West" . Many of the values prized by modern secularists are inheritances from the early days of Christianity. Pre-Christian cults involved human sacrifice, self-castration and self-mutilation. PreChristian society despised the poor and weak and tolerated infanticide; it enjoyed gladiatorial combat, and it was built on slavery. Only Christianity fostered the concept of a dignity intrinsic to every human soul. Only the Church built hospitals and almshouses, and taught that charity was the highest virtue. Well aware that the Christianization of the Roman Empire did not wipe out the evils of pagan society, Hart is generous in concessions to the opposition. He has no illusions about the great Christian emperors. Constantine was "a

TLS FEBRUARY 192010

violent, puritanical, ponderous, late Roman brute" . Theodosius was a harsh persecutor of pagans and heretics. Justinian was one "whom nobody very much liked or likes". Surprisingly, the one emperor who gets a kind word is Constantine's apostate nephew Julian, who tried to reintroduce paganism. "Of all the emperors in the Constantinian line Julian alone stands free of any suspicion of bad faith. He was also without question the most estimable and attractive of the lot." It is wrong, Hart argues, to see Christianity as invading a joyful pagan milieu of vitality and mirth, and turning the world grey with its breath. Late antiquity was an era of fear and melancholy, and contempt for the body was a leitmotif of many of its thinkers. Christianity provided a liberating message, in which the resurrection of Jesus offered hope of the transfiguration of the flesh and the glorification of all creation. Christianity slowly gave greater freedom to the oppressed of the present world. The legislation of Constantine and Theodosius II improved the status of women , whether virgins, wives or widows. Christian husbands, unlike pagan ones, could not force their wives to submit to abortion or to expose their infants. In the course of Christian history, the foundation of hospitals, leper asylums, almshouses and hostels palliated the lot of the most downtrodden members of society. Hart cannot deny that the institution of slavery long outlasted Western Europe's conversion to Christianity. With a shrug, he observes that it is no more surprising that

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RELIGION

12 some pagan moral values survived in a Christian culture than that some Christian moral values survive in our secular culture today. He can point to imperial edicts ameliorating the lot of slaves, and he can quote a sermon of St Gregory of Nyssa as early as 379 that attacked slavery as an institution, denouncing as blasphemous the claim of any human being to own another human being. In his final plea for the defence, Hart puts to the jury the question " When Christianity departs , what is left behind?". The highest ideals of the secular project, he proclaims, are borrowed ideals, and Nietzsche was right that any effort to cast off the Christian faith while retaining the best elements of Christian morality is doomed to defeat. In an ultimate flourish he dons the robes of opposing counsel. "To use Richard Dawkins's justly famous metaphor (which unfortunately he does not quite grasp is a metaphor), memes like "human rights" and "human dignity" may not indefinitely continue to replicate themselves once the Christian ' infinite value of every life' me me has died out." Let us now abandon the forensic context, and ask how accurate is Hart' s historical narrative. The set-piece treatments of the iconic

events of secularist propaganda - the burning of the Alexandria library, the Spanish Inquisition, the trial of Galileo and so on - are detailed and often convincing. But the book is full of generalizations that spur the reader to look for - and often to find - counter-examples. For instance, in expounding the significance of the gospel story of the denial and repentance of Peter, Hart claims that in a pagan world "Peter, as a rustic could not possibly have been a worthy object of a well-bred man's sympathy". To say this is to ignore the existence of a whole genre of classical poetry devoted to the joys and sorrows of rustics, namely pastoral elegy. Frequently, in order to emphasize the originality of Christianity, Hart devalues the achievements of Classical antiquity. Science as we understand it, he claims, depends on Christian underpinning. But if science is the collaborative pursuit of truth about the world by empirical inquiries whose results are structured into a theoretical discipline, then the West' s first centre of scientific research was Aristotle' s Lyceum. Hart is not at his best when discussing Aristotle. He cannot have read The History of Animals when he calls Albert the Great "the

father of biological field research". In physics he believes that Aristotle's prime mover was an outermost crystalline sphere, when in fact it was an incorporeal divinity outside the universe. (How Hart would have crowed if he had come across such a howler in Hitchens!) Hart is right that the discoveries of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and Newton were not so much a liberation from religious authority as from latter-day Aristotelianism. But the persistence of Aristotle' s cosmology for many centuries after its sell-by date was partly due to the religious cultures in which it survived. His works became the possession of "peoples of the book" - Muslims, Jews and Christians, and accordingly they were treated in the way that sacred texts are treated. That is why many of the greatest minds of the Middle Ages, instead of following Aristotle's example of original investigation, wrote commentaries on his scientific works. Hart' s comparisons between Classical and Christian eras are all too often partisan. In order to portray Christianity as more cheerful than paganism, he has to downplay the patristic teaching that everlasting torment awaited the majority of mankind. To claim that the ultimate equality of all humans is an exclu-

sively Christian doctrine he has to ignore the teaching of Stoics such as the slave Epictetus and the Emperor Marcus Aurelius. To explain his admiration for Julian the Apostate, he has to claim that of all the emperors between Constantine and Theodosius he was the most "genuinely Christian in sensibility". The truth is surely that the institutions and values we cherish, like the works of art and architecture that we prize, are not the exclusive property of anyone stage in our long history. Some institutions, like democracy, were invented in the ancient world, and others, like universities, date from the Middle Ages. Some values, such as philanthropy, are part of our Judaeo-Christian inheritance: others, such as freedom of speech, we owe to the Enlightenment. Some values and institutions can be credited to more recent times, such as the abolition of slavery and the empowerment of women. Surely, we should be grateful to our ancestors, near and distant, for the good things they handed on to us, and we should do our best to eradicate the evils we have inherited from them. But we can also agree with Hart that to regard our own age as blest beyond all others with an overplus of good versus evil is the height of folly.

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ifty years ago, BBC television celebrated the hundredth anniverary of the publication of The Origin of Species with a series of programmes, the last of which featured a small discussion group with the task of exploring Darwinism's wider social and religious implications. One of its members, Sir Julian Huxley, dominated the discussion with his enthusiasm for the now largely forgotten works of Teilhard de Chardin, a Roman Catholic priest, palaeontologist, and author of an ambitious synthesis of evolutionary theory and theology. His voluminous writings on the subject for a time enjoyed huge popularity. Huxley had been sufficiently inspired by them to write a fulsome introduction to Teilhard's best-known book, The Phenomenon of Man, despite the contempt in which it was held at the time by many of his scientific colleagues, who interpreted it as undermining the basic principles of natural selection. Our conversation in the BBC group was enlivened by Huxley's amazingly un-Darwinian pronouncements, and it must have been confusing, to say the least, for the audience to encounter such an unexpected amalgam of religion and science in what was intended to be a Darwinian celebration. My memories of the occasion were brought vividly to mind by a refrain which runs through Jonathan Benthall ' s erudite and thought-provoking book: "Throw religion out of the door; it flies back by the window".

Not all responses to these human needs express themselves in conventional religious forms. There are what Benthall calls "parareligions" and "religioid movements", which share some traditional religious characteristics without themselves claiming to be reli-

" Religion", he writes, " is a human univer-

gions. Rnvironmentalism and animal rights

amhivalent and selective where animals are

sal, and those who think they can eliminate it by scientific argument or ridicule are no more likely to succeed than those who would eliminate sexuality or playfulness or violence." These are the conclusions of an anthropologist whose academic discipline has convinced him that "a religious inclination is essential for the functioning of any society". Religious undercurrents and residues in supposedly secular organizations may take various forms , he claims, all of which bear a family resemblance, and which display many different degrees of religiosity.

movements tend to fall into one or the other of these categories. The fact that they draw on basic human emotions, often with strong religious overtones, despite the relative lack of explicit concern about such matters in most traditional religions, gives such movements a momentum they would not possess, had their members not sensed that spiritual as well as material values were at stake. To illustrate the point Benthall provides a detailed analysis of the charity Medecins sans Frontieres, and sets out his reasons for classifying it as a parareligious movement.

concerned. Despite, or perhaps because of, this apparent lack of religious interest, the animal rights movement itself is beginning to bear some of the hallmarks of a parareligion, such as the martyrology, and the demonizing of offenders. Benthall suggests that for most of us, animal welfare belongs more to the field of aesthetics than to ethics. We oppose visible cruelty, but prefer not to see what consequences our way of life, and our assumptions about the status of animals, may have for living creatures other than ourselves. Among those who are emotionally and mor-

F

A part of us JOHN HABGOOD Jonathan Benthall RETURNING TO RELIGION Why a secular age is haunted by faith 229pp. Taurus. £52.50 (US $89). 978 1 8451 1 7184

Rotary, for instance, with its motto "Service above Self', its ubiquitous logo, and its role in creating community, has the characteristics of a weak form of religion. At the opposite extreme, Chairman Mao' s notorious Little Red Book, on the face of it an unlikely candidate for religious status, was for a time the basis of a full-blown quasi-religious cult. We humans, Benthall concludes, are driven by a fundamental need for religion to help us cope with the ambiguities and threats inherent in our human existence. Hence its constant reappearance, even in highly unpropitious circumstances.

It is not a label which those involved in it would be comfortable about using of themselves, given that they belong to an organization which for good practical reasons is deliberately non-religious, and which sees no problem in recruiting atheists and agnostics, as well as those not specially concerned about the "spiritual". What is essential to it, however, is the strong commitment of its members to a number of non-negotiable principles, which have been developed and safeguarded by an inner core of loyalists whose values and disciplines have been built up over many decades. It has also developed a style of its own by what Benthall calls "skilful use of the technology of enchantment". Over many decades these forces have shaped it into a body with all the appearances of being practical and down-to-earth but which, he claims, is dependent nevertheless on a quasireligious aspect, never openly named as such. Similar accounts could be given of other movements and organizations. The religious momentum of animal rights campaigners, for instance, does not depend on any explicit mandate from Christianity, which on the whole has not been particularly sympathetic in its treatment of animals. The same is true of many other religions, which are at best

TLS FEBRUARY 192010

ally committed, however, even the most zealous campaigners are unlikely to take respect for living things as far as the Thai monks who have devised a way of protecting trees by symbolically "ordaining" them as monks. A chapter on "Some humane disciplines as religioid movements" throws a valuable light on the relationship between scientism and fundamentalism. In recent years, both have contributed unhelpfully "to the inflexible and dogmatic application of supposedly scientific method to issues where a more nuanced approach is appropriate" . With such dogmatisms set aside, he argues, it is possible to see numerous circumstances in which disciplines, from psychoanalysis to anthropology, overlap with the religious sphere. In short, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that religion is a human universal. Hence the foolishness of imagining that it is simply going to disappear, and that the world would be a better place if it did. It is important, however, to distinguish between good and bad religion, not least in terms of their relation to science. Moreover, because circumstances make a difference, it should not be surprising to find Benthall even having a good word to say about the mystical scientism of Teilhard de Chardin. Recent high-profile disputes about atheism have done little to illuminate what is actually at stake. Nor have the most vociferous advocates of atheism reckoned sufficiently with the extent to which, as Benthall puts it, their liheral humanist morality, inherited from the European Enlightenment, is indebted to implicit Judaeo-Christian values. On the other hand, to assert that religion is basic to human culture is not to claim that all forms of it are good or desirable. The wide-ranging scope of this important and illuminating book can assist identifying the distinctions which really matter. The essential point is that no serious discussion of the role of religion in contemporary society can afford to ignore the author's main conclusion - that religion is part of our human make-up, whether we like it or not.

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A tragedy of idle weeds Why Grigori Kozintsev' s Lear is more faithful to Shakespeare's' arable play' than most modern stagings hree years before he died in 1971 , the dissident Soviet film-maker Grigori Kozintsev released Korol Lir, his final work, a Russianlanguage version of Shakespeare's King Lear. Boris Pasternak provided the translation and Dmitri Shostakovich the score. Widely celebrated, though now rarely shown, Kozintsev ' s production was in part a response to, and a reaction against, Peter Brook's seminal 1962 staging of the play, filmed in 1970, at the centre of which is the barely contained rage of Paul Scofield's Lear. Brook's stark sets place events against the ground-zero backdrop of a bare, apocalyptic winter landscape. This nihilistic topography was inflected by an influential reading of Shakespeare's tragedy by the Polish critic Jan Kott in his Shakespeare Our Contemporary (1961). For Kott, King Lear was an absurdist drama, a Shakespearean Endgame - and registered the paranoid climate and denuded mental landscapes of the Cold War. The absence of the living land from this production also marks a post-Second World War shift towards desiccated, psychologized dramatizations of King Lear. For Brook and others, stage directions in post-1681 editions of the play - which misleadingly suggest that much of its central action takes place on a "heath" - authorize a blasted vision of the earth. Brook' s - and through Brook, Bertolt Brecht's and Samuel Beckett's - influence continues to be felt. His is largely the image of the world of King Lear inherited by modern audiences. More recent productions, including Adrian Noble's 1982 and 1993 RSC productions, and Trevor Nunn ' s 2007 version, which starred Ian McKellen as a ludic Lear, and which took its ground-zero references from Brook, also largely ignore the land, bringing to the fore more cosmically scaled battles. Today's audiences could be forgiven , then , for thinking that in King Lear, Shakespeare was wholly uninterested in the worked land as a living actor in the drama. Kozintsev, although a personal friend of Brook and an admirer of his work, lamented the HBrechtian aesthetics" and " mannerisms" of this staging. Kozintsev spurned what he called Brook's "desolate nature", and his own staging was informed by an interest in returning to Shakespeare's original focus on the land - a focus lost to most modern audiences. The spaces in his film as in Shakespeare's play - are not "empty" ; rather, they are populated by the common people, who make this into a lived and living, and hence also diseased and dying, land. This refusal to red act the land on the stage is shared by Natal'ia Vorozhbit' s The Grain Store (reviewed in the TLS, October 9,2009), which toured the United Kingdom recently. In his press release, the director, Michael Boyd, compared this RSC commission to King Lear. Yet Korol Lir actually offers the more fruitful pairing, since, like

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Gerarde's Herbal! (1597), points out - in August. The play's climax, then, takes place during early harvest time - and not, as stage orthodoxy has it, in winter or spring. When The Grain Store, its cultural and political Crownd with rank femiter, and furrow darnel infiltrates the food chain, most often frame of reference is also the 1930s Ukrainweedes, ian famine, known as the Holodomor. With hor-docks, hemlocke, nettles, in the form of bread or beer, the results are symptoms resembling madness: blurred cookow flowers So what nature of land is revealed by Kozvision, hallucinations, incoherence, and disDarnell and all the idle weedes that grow, intsev's wide angles? In what approximates In our sustayning, come; a centurie is sent orientation. In the central image in Natal'ia to Act IV Scene vi of Shakespeare's play, Vorozhbit's play - a church converted into a Korol Lir crawls on his elbows through a forth, wheat field, gathering furrow weeds (and a Search euery acre in the hye grow ne field, grain hoard - the undistributed contents "beet-top" - beetroots tellingly provide a And bring him to our eye. become mouldy, psychotoxic and corrupt. recurring motif in The Grain Store). The Despite the fact that this report clearly, and in Vorozhbit's grain store, then, harbours prehungry King even grazes, like a ruminant. a very particular manner, describes a crown cisely these symptoms of derangement, and This is emphatically not a "heath"; it is tilled, of arable weeds, we have been encouraged to in one of the play's most trenchant scenes, cultivated land. Kozintsev's presentation of think of Lear as being adorned with a crown the hapless Gavrilo, in a "drunken stupor", is Act IV Scene vi is faithful to Shakespeare's of wild flowers - decidedly not the same shut inside and goes mad as a result. Gerarde's taxonomy, or genealogy, of play-text and to what we know of early thing. And what about Shakespeare's "hye modern agriculture and its lived - and living growne field"? We are familiar with the sight arable species and subspecies distinguishes - landscape. The idea of the mad and dispos- of modern fields of wheat or barley in three kinds of relationships between field sessed Lear on a "blasted heath" - a phrase which mature plants stand less than a metre plants: "fools", "kin" and "bastardes". The terminology is particularly suggestive in the context of King Lear. We have proper wheat, and we have fool's wheat: darnel. We have an Edgar, and we have a fool's Edgar: Edmund - who is, of course, referred to as "Bastard" from the opening stage direction of the 1608 quarto. And so in this brief description of Lear's crown of " idle weeds", and in the King's choice of "darnel" in place of "wheat", Shakespeare alludes to the personal and political issues at the heart of his tragedy: a father's privileging a subversive, "bastard" child, Edmund, over a legitimate and loyal son, Edgar; the potential for subversion to arise from within; and the devastating effects on the living landscape and its people when a King abdicates his responsibilities in the autumn of his life. Lear was begun in 1604, the year of King James 's coronation and the beginning of negotiations that would result in the Union of the Crowns. In this same year, Shakespeare was forty, and like Lear requesting "rayment, bed and food" from his daughters - he seems to have started making provision for his eventual retirement. But what should have promised peace and prosperity delivered a period of sustained civil and social unrest particularly in Shakespeare's homeland, the Midlands - fuelled by a series of bad Juri Jarvet as King Lear in Grigori Kozintsev's film, 1971 harvests, deaths from starvation and malfrom Macbeth , not Lear - which seems to tall. Such so-called dwarf cereals are, in fact, nutrition, and land enclosures. These factors have influenced Brook and his followers is in a product of twentieth-century plant breeding prompted civil disobedience, withdrawal of fact an editorial invention. The term "Heath" and biotechnology. In Shakespeare's time, labour, and the illegal "hoarding" of grain. Shakespeare himself was guilty of the was introduced in Nahum Tate's text of 1681 you could get lost in a wheat field , among and picked up by Nicholas Rowe for his edi- crop plants (and their weeds) up to two latter activity. Although living in London, he tion of the play (1709). Further damage was metres and more tall. Cordelia's scout heard retained substantial properties in and around done in early nineteenthcentury stage direc- Lear singing, but could he have seen him? Stratford, where he stockpiled grain for sale tions, in which a childlike and Christ-like Only his crown, if at all. Lear crawls through at inflated prices to the local brewing trade, Lear enters "fantastically dressed with wild wheat fields in Kozintsev' s film - that was and in July 1605 paid a large sum, £440, for the only way, given the prevalence of modern a half interest in a lease of "tithes of corn, flowers" . By returning to Shakespeare's 1608 quarto, dwarf varieties of wheat, for Kozintsev to grain, blade, and hay" . Anticipating his retirewe can restore the play to its original agricul- remain faithful to the lines spoken in Act IV. ment, Shakespeare found that his personal One of the "idle weedes" that tells us "harvest time" was neither peaceful nor pastotural and political context, and ask why it is that for Shakespeare, as for Kozintsev, King much about the world, the environment, that ral. Instead, when he sat down to devise King Lear is an arable play. Here is Cordelia's Shakespeare has in mind in King Lear, is the Lear, Shakespeare contemplated a turbulent description of her father in Act IV: poisonous wheat-mimicker darnel, which Britain, in which food was scarce, harvests ... why he was met euen now. ripens - as one of Shakespeare' s sources, uncertain, and its subjects divided.

RICHARD MARGGRAF TURLEY, HOWARD THOMAS AND JA YNE ELISABETH ARCHER

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COMMENTARY There are parallels between Shakespeare' s Britain and Kozintsev's Soviet Union that suggest reasons why the director was able to pick up these themes. In King Lear: The space of tragedy, Kozintsev ' s filming diary, he reflects on his wish to portray Lear's world as one in which the state descends from plenty and abundance into famine, where crops have been destroyed as a consequence of political decisions and "wholesale burning". Situating some of the film in a plain by the Caspian Sea - one of the ancient trading routes and sources of grain - he brings to the play his own childhood memories of disease and famine under Stalin. "This" , he writes of the scenes in Acts IV and V, " is my idea of the black death. I saw more than enough of this sort of darkness or black death in my early childhood." Kozintsev would have been very aware of

the politicization of agriculture and what can happen when the state mishandles food and grain supply. Korol Lir is traumatized by memories of Stalinist agrobiology. In addition to the 1932-3 Holodomor, the Soviet Union suffered two other devastating famines: 1921-2 and 1946-7. The author of Stalinist agronomy was Trofim Lysenko, whose political rise between 1928 and 1940 was built on an ideological rejection of the discipline of genetics as established by the work of Gregor Mendel, Thomas Hunt Morgan and others; Stalinist collectivism, as depicted in The Grain Store, provided the opportunity for an Edmund-like upstart such as Lysenko. In Lysenko's own words: "It is clear to us that the foundation principles of MendelismMorganism are false. They do not reflect the actuality of living nature and are an example of metaphysics and idealism".

Instead, on the flimsiest of evidence, Lysenko, with the imprimatur of Stalin , introduced quack remedies to the already ailing agricultural economy of the Soviet Union. The year 1946 was one of severe drought, especially in the Ukraine, Moldavia and parts of the central black-earth and lower Volga regions. The grain harvest was only about 40 per cent of that in 1940, and had declined by almost 20 per cent compared with production in 1945, the last year of the Great Patriotic War. It was not until 1964 that Lysenko's doctrines were finally discredited: Nikita Khrushchev eventually conceded that under Lysenko, "Soviet agricultural research spent over thirty years in darkness" . Kozintsev's vision of King Lear took shape as these historic events unfolded. The Grain Store , which focuses explicitly on events from 1929-33 and their continuing impact on

15 Ukrainian identity, registers a similar renewed anxiety about crises of sustenance, man-made and natural. Dramatic orthodoxy follows the groundzero conceptualizations of Lear so starkly exemplified by Brook, Nunn and Noble. However, it is in fact Kozintsev's Korol Lir that is closest, not just to the radical energies of Shakespeare' s play, which interrogates the political uses of land, but also to our own twenty-first-century fears and preoccupations about what we do to the land - and what it does to us. The thought of an empty stomach, as Vorozhbit's The Grain Store illustrates, is every bit as creatively energizing as post-nuclear Angst. Shakespeare's Lear, like Kozintsev's Lir, is the Autumn King, the King of Wheat, and this arable play Shakespeare's unrecognized Georgic.

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he canon of George Herbert's poetry has been relatively limited and stable. The bulk of his English poetry appeared in The Temple, published in 1633 , the year of his death: to this have been added a few devotional lyric poems found in the Williams manuscript, and a small body of Latin poems. A few occasional English poems were included as "Doubtful" by F. E. Hutchinson in his standard edition of Herbert's poetry (1941), some of which have been more certainly identified as Herbert' s by subsequent scholars. To this limited canon, a hitherto unrecognized poem may now be added. This twelve-line epitaph survives in a number of manuscripts, but only through combining the evidence of two of them does its authorship become clear. It appears in BL Harley MS 6038 as follows: Here lye two Bodyes happy in their kinds the rich Apparel of two noble minds All blessings they familiarly did know

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Herbert's couplet? JAMES DOELMAN

credible. (The poem also appears, with neither title nor ascription, in BL Harl. 1221.) John and Margaret Barker were buried in St Andrew's, Wroxeter, in Shropshire, with a surviving monument that also records the circumstances of their death: "the said John Barker being in good perfect health at the decease of the said Margaret, fell ill the day following and deceased, leaving no issue behind". Herbert presumably wrote the epitaph shortly after the couple's death, sometime in 1618, a time when he was serving as sub lector and then (as of June, 1618) praelector at Cambridge. Little is known of the provenance of BL Harley 6038. In many ways it is a typical Wch either earth or Heaven could bestowe. miscellany of the early Stuart period, includThe first deceased, He for a little try'd ing many short poems found in many other to live wthout her, likt it not & dy'de. manuscripts: "The Parliament Fart", poems They had noe children, whence we truly say by John Hoskins and Richard Corbett, the good of all their offspringe in them laye. and well-known anonymous libels on the ffor they ingross'd thir Heyres right, & did Carr-Howard scandal and Francis Bacon. prove However, also appearing, especially in the their owne Inheritors in Grace, in love. first twenty leaves, are many much rarer Neither to others nor themselves a trouble Whose soules are one, & yet reward is double. poems (most of which are also found in BL Harl. 1221). A high number of these G. H. The faint initials "G. H." in the same hand are signed with the signature initials, either appear as the ascription to one of Herbert' s "R. F." or "R. J.", and as this signature is known Latin poems, which appears four consistent, even while the hand of the poems leaves further on in the same manuscript. themselves varies, it seems plausible that This anti-papal anagrammatic poem, "Roma. he/she was the owner, who used a number of Anagr.", forms part of the loose collection of scribes to compile both his own and others' Latin epigrams by Herbert gathered together poems. Also noteworthy is that in the leaves as "Lucus" in the Williams manuscript. This between the two Herbert poems a number of initialled ascription would not be in itself others appear which are clearly connected enough to confirm Herbert as the author. with the circle of the Newport family of However, another (unascribed) copy of the Shropshire. For example, there are two epipoem, in Folger MS V.a.345, provides a title taphs on Elizabeth Leveson, daughter of Sir that makes certain a Herbert connection: "On John Leveson and Christian Mildmay (born the death of Mr Barker of Hammon, and his in Hailing, Kent, in 1588). Her sister, Rachel , was married to Richard Newport, nephew of wife who dyed both together". The reference is to John and Margaret Magdalen Herbert. One epitaph refers to Barker of Haughmond Abbey, Shropshire, Elizabeth as " my sister"; presumably then the who died within two weeks of each other poem is by one of Elizabeth's brothers, or her in March 1618. Margaret, nee Newport, brother-in-law, Newport. Rachel had actually was the younger sister of Herbert's mother, been born in Wroxeter, and she and Richard Magdalen. There is thus a family connection made their home there from at least 1616 that, along with the initials in the Harley until 1627. (The second is ascribed to an manuscript, renders an ascription to Herbert unidentified "Jo: Fitzwilliams".) The other

George Herbert depicted in a seventeenth-century stained-glass window, Bemerton Church, Wiltshire side of this leaf begins with "My Lady Corbets Epitaph". While there are a number of potential "Lady Corbetts" in the period, the most likely, given the dates and geographical basis of the surrounding poems, is Lady Frances Corbett (1615 or 1616), the wife of Sir Vincent Corbett, of Moreton Corbet, Shropshire, some seven miles north of Wroxeter. Vincent's sister Margaret was married to Sir Waiter Leveson , of another branch of that family, and a number of more distant family connections can be made to the Newports. It therefore seems likely that the poems in this part of the manuscript emerged from the gentry circles of central Shropshire, which included the Newports, Levesons and Corbetts, and that this is the context of Herbert's epitaph on the Barkers. In contrast to that of his contemporaries, Herbert' s poetry circulated little in manuscript during his lifetime. However, lines 5-6 of this poem ("The first deceased, He for a little try'd / to live wthout her, likt it not & dy'de") appear very frequently on their own in surviving manuscripts from the 1620s, but have hitherto been ascribed to Henry Wotton, or, more lately, John Hoskins. In many of the manuscript copies of this couplet, the word-

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ing has been changed, and most significantly the gender of the two individuals switched, so that it is the man who died first. In this form , the lines became attached to Sir Albertus and Elizabeth Morton, who died within a few months of each other in 1625. Such reworking and reapplication of epigrams and epitaphs was common in the early seventeenth century. This version was quoted in a letter by Wotton, and subsequently came to be credited to him by most later scholars. Under his name, it has appeared in books of quotations and anthologies (including the Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse), and even been descri bed as "perhaps the most perfect epitaph in English". In 1981 , Baird W. Whitlock recognized the longer epitaph in Harley 6038 as the source of the couplet, but misread the initials as "J. H." , and on that basis reattributed the poem to John Hoskins (who was renowned in the period for his witty epitaphs). Whitlock subsequently included the poem in his John Hoskins: Serjeant-at-Law (1982). Ironically, then, the lines of Herbert most quoted during his lifetime have not hitherto been recognized as his. The abrupt, almost flippant air of the couplet seemingly rendered it quotable and attractive, and is consistent with Herbert's sometimes playful approach to serious matters. Indeed, the couplet is similar to the startling conclusion to his sonnet "Redemption", where an account of the speaker's appeal to Christ is concluded, "there I him espied, / Who straight, Your suit is granted, said, & died". The larger epitaph also includes elements akin to Herbert's devotional poetry, particularly in the playful application of the legal language of inheritance in the latter part of the poem. The attribution of this poem also raises the possibility that other Herbert poems might lurk unidentified in manuscripts. That the Latin poem "Roma" is also from 1618 and circulated more widely than Herbert's other poetry suggests that, at that stage in his career, Herbert was more inclined to allow manuscript circulation of his verses. Identification of Herbert as the author of this poem perhaps makes more likely that two epitaphs, on Sir John Danvers and Henry Danvers, Earl of Danby, included by Hutchinson as "Doubtful" (but omitted in Helen Wilcox's recent edition) were indeed by Herbert, as it shows a willingness to compose (and circulate) such memorial verses for extended family members.

COMMENTARY

16 new film by Julien Temple seeks to rewrite the story of rock music in this country. Oil City Confidential is a cine-noir portrait of Or Feelgood, an early 1970s band from Canvey Island in the Thames estuary, which flowered briefly in the "pub rock" period just before punk captured the headlines. Or Feelgood were protopunk - short hair, short jackets, short, fast bursts of black-influenced rhythm and blues. As the words and actions of their big live number "Riot on Cellblock Number Nine" suggested - "Scarface Jones said it's too late to quit. Pass the dynamite, , cos the fuse is lit" - the group put a bomb under "glam rock" and "prog rock", the prevalent sty les of the time. For those, like me, who happened upon one of their precision operations at the Lord Nelson in the Holloway Road in 1972, music, not to mention clothes, hair and life, were never quite the same. Having expressed an interest in writing something about the band for the New Review, where I was currently "working", I found myself, late one night, talking to guitarist Wilko Johnson in the band' s Ford Transit. Not only was he a poet, but we had a friend in common, Tony Harrison , with whom he had lived as a student in Newcastle. "Tony ' s the only person I've ever met who's more intelligent than I am", he said winningly. I was soon visiting Canvey Island, a strange, below sea-level place, reclaimed by Dutch workers in the seventeenth century and defined by the sea wall which forms its oppressive horizon. It was an overspill area after the war and the cockney accent is old school, such as you don ' t hear in London today. Full of boatyards and bungalows and little tacky clubs, it is vaguely reminiscent of something in the Mississippi Delta, or so the blues-fan teenage Feelgoods imagined. I went on tour with the band, and the Ford Transit broke down in classic fashion.

No sign of Temple, but I located his assistant and together we awaited his arrival. Gradually I realized that he had arrived at the foot of the hill, and was preoccupied with camera angles. After a long wait, I was summoned and placed in position with the hill rising behind me. It seemed Temple wanted to cast me in the image of Francis Bacon as he appears in the famous photograph by Bill Brandt. It remained only for a certain street lamp to come on, echoing the one in the photo, and we' d be away, though what Bacon had to do with Or Feelgood was a mystery. After a quick run-through of my memories - discovery, friendship , touring - Temple got round to what he was really interested in, the band's premature dissolution. What had triggered the break-up? The truth, according to hindsight, is that Wilko, the creative, songwriting band member and a born mono loguist, found it hard, not sharing the others' taste in stimulants, to hang out with them in endless Essex pubs. He drifted to London, where, like Ian Curtis of Joy Division, he discovered the muse of adultery. But I couldn't very well say that, and anyway there was something artistically right about their fracture: they had achieved their heights, if not their fortunes. Temple became increasingly impatient with my efforts and eventually turned away. It seemed I was dismissed. I put my woolly hat back on and made my way down the hill to Chalk Farm tube, muttering "Quoth the Raven" to myself. I can only say that he was right: the film ' s hectic, knockabout style would have been ruined by my middle-class equivocations, which duly hit the cuttingroom floor. He must have understood that the break-up, a phenomenon endemic to rock and

a mystery to outsiders, had to be the central drama of any film about Or Feelgood, the useful equivalent of a death in fiction, which the film takes pains to imitate. The premiere was a novel affair with a democratic feel. Hosted by Temple himself, with actor Keith Alien as compere and followed by a concert from Wilko' s present band, the evening was beamed live, via satellite, from a venue in Camden Town, to cinemas across the UK. My daughter watched in Plymouth, I watched in Islington. "Don't bother switching off your mobiles", Temple told the audience, "because it'll be too loud to hear." The first surprise was that the film turned out to be a comedy, an uproarious montage of live footage, period newsreel and humorous clips from old black-and-white B-movies, inserted as satirical comment on the action, as if This Is Spinal Tap were using actual band members, not actors, to send themselves up. We see Wilko today, poking his head through a trapdoor leading to his rooftop "observatory" , immediately followed by someone like Harold Lloyd doing the same thing in an old silent film. Now here's Wilko out on the sea wall, looking out across the Thames estuary and recalling standing there as a child and thinking, "Kent! Kent! The Promised Land!". He quotes Milton, something about "Serves only to deliver signs of woe" - a typical Wilko reflection. I spoke to him later and it seems the second coming of Or Feelgood may be at hand, with interviews and tours flowing in the wake of Oil City Confidential. I wonder will the longgone band achieve immortality this time around? I think of a similar case, that of Philippe Petit, the tightrope walker of the Twin Towers, who became famous recently following the release of the film Man on Wire. But then Or Feelgood didn ' t have the levelling of the scene of their greatest triumph to raise them to glory.

the Little Prince. As with Andre Malraux, the legend about the life has superseded the fiction. At the same time, they are likely to own the Pleiade edition of the collected work. Every year, usually around Christmas time, some 300,000 of these loyal nonreaders acquire a copy of The Little Prince, a morbid and narcissistic fable considered suitable for children, either because of the charm of the illustrations or because the hero is a child from a distant planet, disappointed in ours - like Saint-Exupery himself - or because it contains talking animals and a chatty rose. What it is about, exactly, has heen thrashed over for fifty years. Critics have seen it as an exercise in nostalgia, the longing of an unwilling grown-up for the comfort of the nursery; as a homosexual fantasy , barely disguised. Whether The Little Prince conveys all or some or none of this, it is a book embedded in French custom and culture .... So a child in France learns to deal tidily with a large artichoke, while still small enough to have to sit on a cushion in order to reach the table; so he opens his mouth, trustingly, to receive his first oyster. What the child receives, in this case, is the assurance that Earth is no

place for the innocent. The only way to escape the world and the prospect of adult life, with its dilemmas of nostalgia and frustration, contradiction and disappointment, is to go back to the starting-point. For the Little Prince, the very beginning is a small planet, uninhabited except for some sheep. In order to make the trip, he has to die. He induces a venomous snake to bite him on the ankle, in what can only be called assisted suicide. The narrator, a pilot downed in the Sahara, as Saint-Exupery had been just a few years before, is left holding the child's lifeless body. However, not to mourn: somewhere in the Milky Way a perpetual child lives for ever. Peter Pan syndrome? Pretty-pretty version of Christian belief? Mortal guilt and atonement? At any rate, a long way from The House at Pnnh Corner. Saint-Exupery frequently needed to be reassured. He could also be reassuring. It is the word that an old friend uses when she recalls him: "His very presence was rassurant. Just to see him walk into a room made one feel well. Children adored him." What about the broken appointments, the selfcentred monologues, the habit of calling friends in the middle of the night to read to them or to sing? Did she not mind? Apparently, no one did. For one thing, his friends loved him dearly. For another, she says , sadly, "People sang more then."

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HUGO WILLIAMS Another was hired, but they didn't have a towing rope. Wilko set off into some woods and came back with a rope he'd found hanging in a tree. "What did you do with the body, Wilko?", someone said. "It's foolish really, don ' t you think", said singer Lee Brilleaux as we proceeded north, "to go up the M 1 with only a teaspoon and an aerosol shaving can?" "I don ' t know," said Wilko, "it's better than a stupid toolbox." The cockney chaff summoned a whole new England for me. One night I took Thorn Gunn to see them play at the Hope and Anchor in Islington and dragged him into the dressing room afterwards. "Hello, Thorn", Lee said. "We used to do your poems at schooL" He recited a few lines of "El vis Presley". When I asked Thorn for a quote for my New Review article he suggested: "The Reverend Gunn showed his appreciation of the group by referring to them as shameless". So it was that a year ago I got a call from Julien Temple's assistant, requesting an interview for the film. I agreed, providing they came to my house, where, as I explained, many exultant post-gig coffees had been drunk. Well , Temple was never going to come to my house. Eventually, I agreed to go to Parliament Hill , where the Feelgoods once came to our daughter' s birthday picnic. On another occasion, they sent a group photo with a bubble saying they couldn't come to the picnic because they were going to be in Wandsworth Prison on that day. (The photo appears in the film.) The day before the interview, I learnt that the venue was to be Primrose, not Parliament, Hill , a very unFeelgood spot and bitingly cold in the depths of winter.

IN NEXT WEEK'S

TLS January 27, 1995

No place for innocence

Rachel Polonsky Modern art comes to Moscow Martin Goodman What possessed Shlomo Sand? Caroline McGinn Zadie Smith's mind Lesley Chamberlain Heidegger's Darwin

We look back to a review by Mavis Gallant of the complete works of Antoine de SaintExupery, and two biographies of him. To see the review in full, go to www.the-tls.co.uk

o French readers, Antoine de SaintExupery is part of early childhood (Le Petit Prince) and late adolescence (Vol de nuit, Cnurrier Sud). He helongs to memories of perfect summers, of having once wanted to do something unspecified but reckless and grand and worth describing. Later they remember him but not his work, except for the one book written for children. They know when he disappeared - July 31, 1944 - and that it was during a reconnaissance flight, somewhere between Grenoble and his air base in Corsica, and they can put a name to an untitled photograph all the more accurately since a fifty-franc note was issued, two years ago, bearing his portrait and the even better-known likeness of his creation,

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17

Two cinematic versions oflate, great Tolstoy

Despite his faults A. N. WILSON

Moreover, Pozdnyshev's arguments in the story are advanced with the same blunderbuss lack of subtlety as Tolstoy at his most infuriating. Both Pozdnyshev and his creator feel untroubled by inconsistency. They argue that abortion and birth control are profoundly sinful. But their grounds for doing so seem less than sound when set beside their belief that one good consequence of total abstinence would be the eventual elimination of the human race itself. "According to all the teaching of the Church the end of the world will come, and according to all the teaching of science the same result is inevitable." And yet it was that generous-minded, subtle doctor, Anton Chekhov, who could write of The Kreutzer Sonata ,

THE KREUTZER SONATA THE LAST STATION Various cinemas

hen Leo Tolstoy was aged sixty, in 1888, he heard a performance of Beethoven ' s Opus 47 Sonata for Violin and Piano at his house in Moscow. Also present were the distinguished painter llya Repin, whose portraits of Tolstoy recall the Old Testament Prophets, and the actor Vasily Andreyev-Burlak. The music so impressed Tolstoy that he proposed that the three artists should create works inspired by the music to be presented together. Only Tolstoy completed his part of the bargain. The story he wrote, The Kreutzer Sonata, represented, in the words of his biographer Aylmer Maude, the fact that "he had returned to art". After years in which he had written and published nothing but pacifist or vegetarian tracts, "his train has at last come out of its tunnel". It was an age since the man who wrote War and Peace had given up art in favour of preaching. In that time, Tolstoy had slowly turned himself and his family into characters not from his own fiction but from Dostoevsky, eaten up with irrational passions and hatreds and religious obsessions. The Kreutzer Sonata, being the frenzied account of a wife-murderer muttered aloud during an overnight train journey, is the most Dostoevskian of Tolstoy's writings, though naturally the way it was written, and the gospel it preached, were flavoured with his own unmistakable pungency. The publication caused a tremendous scandal. It is unimaginable that such a book would have found a publisher in England in 1890. Although admittedly the monologue of a homicidal maniac, the story's frank discussion of sex is electrifying even today. In Russia, publication was forbidden , and the story circulated in lithographed copies. Tolstoy's readers were by now used to him taking up extreme positions. He had renounced the eating of meat. He fulminated against the use of alcohol and tobacco. He was openly anarchist in his political views, and in a country where the Orthodox Church was allowed to censor all publications, he openly denounced Church Christianity, mocked the idea of salvation through Christ's blood and defended his own highly edited version of Christian ethics against the teachings of the ecclesiastics. Yet, when The Kreutzer Sonata appeared, with all its misogyny, its claim that married women are really whores, its candid reflections on abortion and birth control, its nihilistic claim that all married love is a confidence trick, that no married people really love one another, his long-suffering wife Sofya Andreyevna petitioned the

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Christopher Plum mer as Tolstoy in The Last Station Emperor to lift the ban. "Tell me, Countess", said Tsar Alexander 1Il, "why you make such persistent efforts to obtain permission to publish The Kreutzer Sonata? It seems to me that this work, directed against marriage and family should be quite alien to you. To you as Lev Nikolaevich's wife it should be unpleasant." (The Emperor might have added, if he had read the book, that he took personal exception to the claim that the morals of his own court were indistinguishable from those of the lowest Moscow brothels.) "Your Majesty" , replied the Countess, "I ask your permission to print The Kreutzer Sonata, not as Lev Nikolaevich's wife, but as the publisher of his works." At the end of his life, Tolstoy rejected her in both roles, making a will which placed the publication of his works in the hands of his fanatical follower Vladimir Grigoryevich Chertkov, and running away from Sofya to die in a remote railway station in southern Russia - Astapovo. Two new films revisit the old Tolstoyan themes. One is a remaking of The Kreutzer Sonata in a modern American idiom and the other a much more stately, old-fashioned drama - called The Last Station - about Tolstoy's flight from wife and home. The former (released on March 12) is a bold reconstruction by the English director, Bernard Rose. On reading that it concerns Edgar Hudson (Danny Huston) from Beverly Hills, who seduces a pianist (Elisabeth Roehm) away from her boyfriend, and gets her pregnant, you might wonder how seriously the screenplay has been, as it claims, "based on the novel" by Tolstoy. But the clever script (written by Rose and Lisa Enos) in fact uses many of Tolstoy's more striking lines and presents the essence of the story in modern clothing. By the end we feel it has stomach-churningly explored many of the same uncomfortable themes. Yes, there

are scenes here of copulation, masturbation and hotel-television pornography. Yes, these characters travel by plane not train, car not troika, and they plunder one another's secrets by email and cell phone. But in a modern setting it is more disconcerting than ever to discover that Tolstoy ' s lines have such a powerful dramatic effect. "We've been told a lie", says Bernard Rose's maniac. "We've been told sex is so wonderful ... look into my soul. See the devils who love tearing it apart and tell me it's all so fucking wonderful." Give or take the odd expletive, this is Tolstoy's line, and as delivered by the smug, middle-aged , plain, rich man of Beverly Hills, who has developed the morbid conviction that his pianist wife is conducting a sexual liaison with the violinist (Matthew Yang King) who accompanies her in Op 47 , it is devastating. "Evidently the sound of the piano is purposel y made to drown the sound of their voices, their kisses." That is a direct quotation from the story. So, too, is the narrator's appalling description of his wife as "a fresh, well-fed horse, whose bridle has been removed". When the murder takes place, there is a great spurt of blood from Aby - it comes up like a fountain. Turn back to the book and you find "the blood rushed from under her corset" .

Tolstoy's narrator-murderer, Pozdnyshev, is a more disconcerting figure than Rose's Edgar, however. The film resolves itself ultimately into a horror story, seen through the eyes of a man who is clearl y deranged. And while it would be simple-minded to think of Pozdnyshev as a self-portrait (Tolstoy did not, after all, murder his wife), many of the views expressed by the maniac are reinforced by Tolstoy himself in his afterword - "The Christian ideal is that of love of God and one's fellow man whereas sexual love, marriage, is a service of self'.

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When reading it one can hardly refrain from exclaiming, "True, it has very annoying defects - namely the audacity with which [Tolstoy] treats matters he has no knowledge of, and from stubbornness does not wish to understand. For instance, his remarks about syphilis, Foundling Hospitals, women's aversion to contraception, &c. are not merely open to dispute, but frankly reveal an ignorant man who during his long life has not taken the trouble to read a couple of books by specialists. But for all that the defects are blown away like feathers before the wind. The quality of the story obliterates them.

Irritation with Tolstoy's slapdash - one is almost tempted to write slapstick - methods of argument rises to the surface every few pages when one reads a new Penguin - Last Steps: The late writings of Leo Tolstoy. (It is put together by the American Jay Parini, whose fictional account of Tolstoy's final year forms the loose basis of Michael Hoffman's film of The Last Station.) An English reader might well like to begin with Tolstoy's notorious essay "Shakespeare and the Drama" (1906). Tolstoy blames Shakespeare's high reputation on Goethe. Because Goethe was "the dictator of philosophic thought", his enthusiasm for the great Shakespeare was taken up by "the great European public" . It is not enough for Tolstoy to try to persuade us that Shakespeare had a grossly inflated reputation as a dramatist. Tolstoy' s supposedly dispassionate account of King Lear, for example, tells us that Lear talks in an "inflated characterless style, like all Shakespeare's kings". (Characterless? "Rumble thy bellyful, spit fire, spout rain ... " ?) No, Tolstoy has to assert that as well as being a bad writer, Shakespeare was also a bad man. The reader - who, very characteristically, Tolstoy imagines to be "a young man" - "having assimilated the immoral view of life which permeates all Shakespeare's works", will lose "the capacity to distinguish between good and evil". It is hardly surprising that a critic who can be so cavalier with the truth, and whose reading of Shakespeare could be so grotesquely wrong should have an equally skewed picture of other texts and histories. If Shakespeare stood in Tolstoy's way as a serious rival for

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18 title of Greatest Writer in the World, then the Orthodox Church was another rival which needed to be kicked into touch, once he had decided that he was the only authentic interpreter of the words of Jesus. Since his spiritual awakening in late middle age, Tolstoy had come to the conclusion that his own reading of the Gospels was irrefutable. In An Appeal to the Clergy (I902), he used the same rhetorical tricks as he used against Shakespeare. Rather than the crude (and only semi-accurate) summary of the plot of King Lear we have a crude and semi-accurate account of Christian doctrines. It is then followed by the completely false historical statement - "How have you preached this truth? From the time a society calling itself the Church was formed, your predecessors taught this truth chiefly by violence" . It would spoil Tolstoy' s vision of himself as the sole interpreter of the Gospel if he were to admit that for the first few hundred years ofthe Church's history, it too had insisted upon pacifism, as he did, and for most of its history (with painful aberrations, naturally) it had distrusted the concept of personal property - witness the Apostles holding all things in common, the rise of monasticism, and later the Franciscan movement. It would do Tolstoy no good at all to admit these things because by now he had turned into the leader of a cult. Why, then, do we bother to read late Tolstoy? Some of the answer is provided in the film The Last Station, sentimentalized as it sometimes is. For it reminds us of Tolstoy's importance historically to the people of Russia in those last days. It does not ultimately matter (or not as much as his disciples supposed) whether we accept his views on vegetarianism, or on sex. He had become the focus of protest, dissidence, hope in the oppressive latter days of the Tsars. If some of his arguments are reductive, and indeed ludicrous, they had potency in their time. What was the alternative to Tolstoyanism in Russia? History answers Leninism. What was the alternative to his universal gospel of pacifist-anarchism? The First World War. Given these stark choices, his gigantic stature remains, in spite of (perhaps partly because of) his capacity to make us shout with annoyance. He could not have been so effective a dissident if he had been wholly reasonable: this was a lesson which Solzhenitsyn surely took to heart. Everyone who has ever meditated on Tolstoy's death at a remote railway station in 1910 has been conscious of it as a novelistic flourish. Having spent the first part of his creative life fashioning experience into story, he spent the second half making his own life into a sort of grotesque parable. At the end of The Last Station, the crowds gather on the platform in a village whose name each memher of the cast persistently mispronounces. (It should be "AsTAHpuvver", not "Aster-po-vo".) The world' s press are anxious to hear of his every last gasp. John Sessions, playing the doctor, comes out with news bulletins of the kind which today would be delivered outside a hospital where lay a dying monarch or president. It was the first event in world history captured by M Path" on his famous movie newsreel - a fact which for some reason Hoffman omits. Instead, he makes an almost static tableau of mourners as the coffin is borne from the stationmaster's house, followed (can this be right

for the excommunicate Tolstoy?) by a priest, and his rejected widow. The camera draws back and we look at the crowd assembled on the platform rather as we should see the chorus of an opera on stage. They are all standing still and looking towards the lens. It is a bold way to end the film , but not entirely successful. For one thing, anyone who has read about the real funeral of the novelist, would want a much bigger crowd. Hundreds and hundreds of people followed that coffin - not because they had read Tolstoy's novels but because they saw in him a figure of titanic moral authority who could stand out against the insane militarism which was about to engulf the world in destruction and against the horrible inequalities which allowed a few to wallow in luxury while the poor remained so poor. The faces of the crowd in Hoffman ' s film were recognizably the pudding visages of East Prussian or Silesian extras, for the film was made in Germany. The crowds who followed Tolstoy's coffin in real life were, of course, Russians. I wanted more Slavic chaos in those last frames of The Last Station, and something a bit more like the opening scene of David Lean's Doctor Zhivago , which evokes that haunting opening sentence by Pasternak - "And on they went, singing eternal memory". (They really did sing that hymn following Tolstoy to the last resting place.) And it would have been good if, in addition to its departure from the railway station, we had seen the coffin coming home to his estate at Yasnaya Polyana where, at his request, it was buried, not in consecrated ground (that would not have been allowed in any event by the church) but in the wooded glade where, during Tolstoy' s childhood, his brother had buried that Green Stick which, as he supposed, contained the secret of how all men may cease to be angry with one another, and how they may live together in brotherhood.

back at Yasnaya Polyana. (The house they have chosen, by the way, is too stately: what a pity it was not filmed at Yasnaya Polyana itself, with its fretwork verandas and feeling of folksy intimacy). No one looks for consistency in Tolstoy's behaviour, and it was an oft-repeated jibe in his lifetime that he had preached the virtues of sexual abstinence while fathering his last few children. Tolstoy was candid, even boastful, about his lapses in old age from his own high calling to abstinence. When he was nearly seventy, he told Aylmer Maude, "I was a husband last night, but that is no reason for abandoning the struggle" . But this film is meant to be happening in 1910, when, as Tolstoy told Maude, for the first time in his life he was no longer troubled by desire. The absence of sex gave both Tolstoys time to concentrate with an insane venom on their final great quarrel- concerning the ownership of his copyright. By now, poor Sofya Andreyevna had to all intents and purposes gone mad, and the flavour of his attitude towards her is well conveyed by a letter penned on May 13, 1909, which he left for her to open when he was dead - "I write to you from beyond the grave in order to tell you what I wanted to tell you many times and for so many years and for your own good, but was unable to tell you while I was alive. I know that if I had been better and kinder I would have been able to tell you during my lifetime in such a way that you would have listened to me, but I was unable to". The letter appears to be generous enough to concede that "I have nothing to forgive you for; you were what your mother made you ; a kind and faithful wife and a good mother", but the sting is in the tail: Just because you were what your mother made

you and stayed like that and didn' t want to change, didn ' t want to work on yourself, to progress towards goodness and truth, but on the contrary clung with such obstinacy to all

that was most evil and the opposite of all that he grave, a little green mound in the middle of the birch wood, is a place of pilgrimage to this day - and always was , even in the worst days of Soviet repression. You cannot stand beside it without being reminded of Tolstoy's indomitabilityand of human indomitability. One is reminded of the opening paragraphs of Resurrection, in which the power of Nature is stronger than the industrialized grime of paving stones and politics. It is surely right to see in the best of Tolstoy's Peace Essays, such as "The Kingdom of God Is Within You" , just such a recipe for sanity and peace as was carved on the Green Stick. Last Steps contains the long letter he wrote to Gandhi , and the life of Gandhi is perhaps one of Tolstoy's greatest legacies. One of the slightly surreal things about the film is that all the chief protagonists (except perhaps the unfortunate Chertkov, Tolstoy's self-appointed Vicar on Earth) are sexually active. Valentin Bulgakov, the intelligence through which the narrative is seen, is having a delightful romance with the beautiful and largely invented figure of Masha (played by Kerry Condon) who says that the reason she left Moscow to join the Tolstoyan commune of Telyatenki was in order to practise free love. This is more or less plausible but much less so is the continued gerontic lovemaking of Lev Nikolayevich and Sofya themselves

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was dear to me, you did a lot of evil to other

people and sank lower and lower yourself and reached the pathetic condition you are now in.

This terrible letter conveys the atmosphere in which they were both living in the last year of Tolstoy's life. She was indeed in a pathetic condition. Was he also mad, or simply a monster? He had now reached the point of believing that, because Sofya did not want to hand over the copyright of his works to Chertkov and the Tolstoyan movement, and because she still went to church , she was "evil". The letter is a good example of how the Tolstoys by now conducted many of their deadliest assaults on one another in writing. They did not want their disagreements to be things of the moment, or their marital rows to evaporate in the air. On the contrary, every slight and expression of hatred was on the record. And one of the comically deft things about the Hoffman film is that in most scenes someone or another is keeping notes, or writing the conversations down. At several points Sofya bursts out in protest or tries to snatch the notebook from the copy taker' s hand. This film, in common with most sensible people, glows with sympathy for poor Countess Tolstoy ' s position. Helen Mirren plays her, most of the time, as little more than mildly exasperated. Perhaps Mirren has still not entirely shaken off the frozen habits of

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good behaviour of Queen Elizabeth n, her last triumphantly successful film role; perhaps she is simply too reasonable a person. But she hardly ever suggests the real streak of mania in the old Sofya. This really matters in terms of the plot, because the film does not create enough of a sense that Tolstoy ' s life had become intolerable in his own home. Even the scene in which she fires a gun at a photograph of the hated Chertkov has a sort of calm about it - more the shooting party at Sandringham than an insane outburst. Tolstoy, played by Christopher Plummer, is likewise far too genial. (And far too handsome - could not the make-up people have shoved a blob of putty on to Plummer's fine nose?) As the letter just quoted shows, Tolstoy had, in relation to Sofya, a real malignancy. " You poison the very air we breathe!" he once exclaimed to her, before turning back to dictate some tract on the necessity of universal love. Aylmer Maude, guided by Tolstoy' s son llya, saw that the crucial factor in Tolstoy's decision to leave home was his having decided, in a moment of supreme folly, to change his will, cutting out his wife of fortyeight years and giving the control of his estate to Chertkov. By abandoning any claim on his copyrights, as Maude sharply points out, Tolstoy merely allowed a lot of unscrupulous people to profit from his works, and to rush out bad translations in all languages without having to pay for them. He knew that he had made a mistake as soon as he had signed the will, according to Maude and llya. "To tell his wife" - this is his son llya speaking - "was out of the question ; it would grievously have offended his 'friends'. To have destroyed the will would have been worse still, for his 'friends' had suffered for his principles and had been exiled from Russia, and he felt bound to them. And on top of all this were his fainting fits , his increasing loss of memory, the clear consciousness of the approach of death, and the continuing growing nervousness of his wife, who felt in her heart of hearts the unnatural estrangement of her husband and could not understand it." This is the fairest possible summary of the situation, and it is one to which the film is very largely faithful. I do not want to end on a cavil about the film. It is beautifully shot; the music by Sergey Yevtushenko is perfect, in its subtle allusions to nineteenth-century composers and its evocative modernity; and the low-lying (in fact Prussian) fields on to which a computer has cleverly superimposed the distant view of an onion-domed church, makes the heart race faster - it looks so authentically like the scenes evoked by Tolstoy himself in his greatest fiction - for example, the mowing scene in Anna Karenina. Moreover, and this is why I salute the film , it never loses sight of Tolstoy' s greatness. If he were merely an opinionated old beardy who did not like Shakespeare or women, we should have no interest in him. But he carried off the twin trick of being one of the greatest novelists ever, and the conscience of the Western world. For all the inconsistencies of his arguments, he remains both things to this day. Whenever we hear politicians presenting spurious arguments for their acts of war, we who have learnt from Tolstoy go back in our minds to the bright glade where he, and the Green Stick, are so peacefully, yet so provocatively, buried.

19

Mavis Gallant's dreams of escape

In transit ALEX CLARK Mavis Gallant THE COST OF LIVING Early and uncollected stories 340pp. Bloomsbury. £20. 978 I 408806104

avis Gallant's short stories are peopled so frequently by the dispossessed - those in want of a natural home-place, a family , a partner, money, and sometimes all of these - that it can come to seem like the defining feature that overwhelms all else. We take for granted the solitary individual, someone who is alone even and perhaps especially when in company, conscious of a past that has either fallen to bits or been conjured into a sort of founding myth , and we come to know the constraints that beset them and their daily struggles. It is tempting to see their dislocation as necessary - both to their character and to Gallant's fictional project - and to regard it as the subject to which she feels irresistibly drawn above any other. It is not quite the whole truth, although it is supported by biography; by Gallant's own removal, in 1950, from Canada to first New York, where she formed the bond that led to many of the stories in this collection appearing in the New Yorker, and then Europe, where she finally established herself in Paris; and by the fractures of her upbringing, and by the rackety places she witnessed on her travels. She would not, we surmise, have written the same stories had the circumstances of her life been different. But we might also conclude that had she stayed put she would still have become a writer and alighted on the same essential subject: that of the self's attempts to locate itself and to isolate a sustaining source of stability and

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nurture.

In the title story of this gathering of Gallant's early and uncollected pieces, one of the few in which she opts for a first-person narration, two sisters - Louise and Priscilla, or Lulu and Puss - have travelled separately to Paris from Melbourne, and find themselves living in a down-at-heel hotel. Louise, the sister who stayed behind to nurse their mother until her death, is the less worldly, but also the one capable of turning her hotel room into a combination of "a travel bureau and a suburban kitchen", and of nursing her sister through the flu ; in possession of a legacy but naturally cautious, she keeps her accounts in ledgers transported from Melbourne, in columns marked "Necessary" and " Unnecessary". It is Puss who tells the story of Louise's enchantment with a young actor and with Sophie Laval, a grubby girl who lives in a linen cupboard, scavenging for essentials while claiming to be a writer or a photographer. Extravagant gifts for Sophie begin to appear in the "Necessary" column,

Henri Matisse with model, Vence, 1944; detail from a photograph by Henri Cartier-Bresson although Louise cannot bring herself to record their true price, instead inflating the cost of everyday items until the books finally balance; only Puss, going through the ledgers after Louise has gone back to Australia, can see what the true cost of living has been. Of her own life, spent teaching music and working in an art gallery, she says merely: "I came home tired every night, disinclined to talk. I saw that everyone in this hotel was as dingy, as stationary, as I was myself, and I knew we were tainted with the same incompetence". A kind of incompetence, sometimes figured as an immense psychological or material difficulty, stalks many of Gallant's characters; at times wilful, occasionally treasured and often ignored altogether. In "Going Ashore", a story from 1954, twelveyear-old Emma Ellenger accompanies her mother, a fading beauty in a furious flight from the latest of Emma's "uncles" , on a cruise; their suitcases packed with brand-new summer clothes, they alight in a chilly Tangier with little notion of how to entertain

themselves. The story is full of sharply observed details: Mrs Ellenger struggling to fix a camellia to her hair; a passenger dispatching vivid accounts to his analyst "in revenge" for the analyst's having suggested the journey; a second, more competent mother-and-daughter pair planning days in advance how they will spend time on their next trip to shore. The ship itself functions most obviously as a carrier of those adrift, thrown together but ill-assorted; as it ploughs purposefully through the seas, Mrs Ellenger makes for herself a circuit of cabin, bar and

beauty salon, an accommodation that becomes horribly strained when she is forced into a new territory. The imagery of the story is not very sophisticated, but it is in the careful manipulation of our sympathy that it succeeds; in the fact that despite the painful neglect and carelessness that Mrs Ellenger visits on her stoical daughter, we retain a spark of feeling for her hatred of the ship's claustrophobic hallways and for its failure to deliver a dream of escape. Few of Gallant's characters are without dreams of escape, whether or not they are put into practice; those who find themselves in transit are, she hints, simply elaborating what everyone feels. In fact, the more apparently stable the situation she depicts, the more frequently a secret desperation lies beneath. The well-to-do Connecticut hostess of the collection's earliest story, "Madeline's Birthday" (1951), claims never to have known an unhappy moment in her nicely appointed summertime house; instead, she imports unease in the form of a series of charity cases. As her largely absent husband reflects on his list of "impossible summers" , which include Polish war orphans, Bundles for Britain and an unmarried mother, he takes comfort in the relati ve peace afforded by this year's intake of troubled adolescents. " Unlike the unmarried mother", he notes, "they did not leave suicide notes in the car." Mrs Tracy, meanwhile, thinks nothing of chiding the diffident Paul, a German boy whose father was killed during the war, for keeping his bedroom shutters closed against the purifying American light. "Who on earth are you hiding from?" she asks, her lack of

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tact mitigated, in her mind, by her disappointment in Paul's un-Germanness. Cultural collision is a favourite subject, and often deployed to humorous effect, as in "The Picnic", in which American forces stationed in a provincial French town are prevailed on to organize an outing to demonstrate the army ' s good relations with their host community, all for the benefit of an American magazine. A long-suffering army wife hard-boils eggs in the kitchen belonging to a French grande dame, while the magazine's photographer, never seen, sends notes from his hotel commanding the Major to orchestrate a display of folk dancing. "Baseball", retorts the Major grimly , "is as far as I'll go." In another story, "A Day Like Any Other", two sheltered American children imagine that their German governess must have been related to Hitler, so hard does she seem to have taken his fall. A suite of stories from the early 1960s show Gallant's focus shifting from the immediate aftermath of the Second World War to matters that more closely concern her adopted country. " Sunday Afternoon" presents us with a young girl, trapped in a Paris apartment by the indifference of her lover, Jim, and his friend, Ahmed, for whom she exists, like other women, "to come occasionally with fresh coffee, to say pretty, harmless things". Jim, who refuses to take her for dinner in any restaurant which is out of the reach of the working classes, is concerned with the political landscape, and with impressing on Ahmed his delicate understanding of the situation in Algeria. But Veronica cannot "keep off her private grievances", most specifically her desire to marry Jim, and her character offers us a telling insight into Gallant's sharp-eyed appraisal of the impossible dynamics of personal relationships. Apart from this, "Sunday Afternoon" is not a strong story; it has a tendency towards over-explication and is schematic. Similarly, in a story entitled "Bernadette", in which a liberal Canadian couple attempt to forge a bond with their maid, it is the servant's observation that "their mental leaps and guesses were as mysterious to her as those of saints, or of ghosts" that stays in the mind, rather than their efforts to school her in world literature.

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20 It is in the skilful depiction of mystery that Gallant excels. One of the finest and most disturbing stories here, "Travelers Must Be Content", begins with the wonderful sentence: "Dreams of chaos were Wishart' s meat", and proceeds to introduce us to a social climber who, although a schoolteacher at home, spends glorious summers in Europe sponging off rich women and moving " in a gassy atmosphere of good will and feigned successes" . At the story's opening, we hear of Wishart's latest dream, dreamt when he was en route to Cannes, in which he has foreseen the catastrophe of a sinking ferry but has failed to give a warning; even while asleep, he exculpates himself with the conceit that he never interferes. On waking, his thought is of self-congratulation: "No one was gifted with a subconscious quite like his, tirelessly creative, producing without effort any number of small visual poems in excellent taste". Yet Wishart's subconscious terrorizes him, subjecting him periodically to terrible "frights"; it is these frights, we assume, that keep him on the move, yearning for the Riviera in London and plotting his future decampment to Venice. His immediate concerns appear to be superficial - the continuing exercise of that excellent taste - but Gallant reveals them to be far more elusive, her initial social stereotype disappearing under closer inspection, and Wishart' s apparent devotion to high society mutating into something far less readily comprehensible. Here and elsewhere, Gallant's talent for analysing snobbery can be seen to encompass a commitment to understanding fundamental truths about need and its fulfilment. Her fullest exploration of that theme here comes in the long story "The Burgundy Weekend" , which closes the collection. It is a piece punctuated by silence - most overtly the silences of the central character Jerome, a mentally unstable man of indeterminate occupation protected from the world by his wife, Lucie, a nurse. There is also chatter, in the shape of Lucie's boastful cousin Gilles, who decides, in an act of selfconscious largesse, to give the couple a lift to Burgundy. Once there, they will be the guests of Madame Arrieu, a Socialist activist with whom Jerome once stayed in his impressionable youth. The weekend hovers painfully between disaster and resolution, between glimpses into Jerome' s fractured mind and nimble sketches of class tension, leaving us to wonder whether, in the end, each character is in some way fulfilling his or her own needs. Much is made of the opacity of Jerome's condition , as Lucie is left to conclude that "Only God could have known what he was thinking, but if you live with Jerome you live without God, and so nohody knows anything". And yet the story concludes with Lucie's defiant declaration of Jerome's well-being, and her rider that " nobody knows that I know" . What we know about ourselves, and about one another, is the greatest mystery of all, and for the characters in these stories it is not at all clear that finding out is the answer. Gallant's achievement, as she charts their progress across continents and through hopeless situations, is to demonstrate the creative opportunities of that ambiguity and to make the transient and rootless appear to know as much as the rest of us.

FICTION

In a fertile land he year is 1895. Victor Haim Margaliot Kalvarisky, an agronomist, sails from Europe to the port of Jaffa, in Palestine, to settle in the Promised Land with his new bride, Esther. They are part of the first wave of aliyah, mass Jewish immigration to Palestine, and they are fortified against the challenges of the new land by the pioneering zeal of the Zionist enterprise. Palestine does not yield the rich rewards it had seemed to promise from afar. The arable land is mainly in the hands of the Arab population, and many of the new immigrants have to eke out a marginal existence with the support of wealthy sponsors of the Zionist cause. When Kalvarisky's wife - her Ladyship as he calls her - refuses to consummate their marriage, the exotic otherness of Arab Jaffa starts to appear seductive. On the other side of the social di vide, twelve-year-old Saleh Rajani lives in a dilapidated mansion, the House of Rajani. The only child of a wealthy, absent merchant, he suffers from visions predicting a terrible fate for his people from "worms of fire" and "iron birds". Fearful for her child, his mother Afifa decides to seek professional counsel. This prompts the fateful encounter between the pioneering Jew and the native Arab. The boy likes the look of the fair-haired foreigner, "sporting gossamer wings on his back and beautiful golden curls". Kalvarisky notices the boy, but is drawn to the mother. "Her eyes were mischievous, summoning a man to

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AKIN AJA YI Alon Hilu THE HOUSE OF RAJANI Translated by Evan Fallenberg 284pp. Harvill Seeker. Paperback, £ 12.99. 978 I 84655299 I

Iightheadedness and debauchery." His next thought is more revealing: "Perhaps she was a harlot, seeking to earn her wage for her unfortunate son". Afifa hopes that the charismatic foreigner might somehow bring her son out of his shell , and she invites Kalvarisky to visit them. He is astonished to discover that the House of Rajani lies amid lush fertile land, such as he has searched for without success since his arrival in Palestine. Afifa's sultry charms, when set against the frigidity of her Ladyship, engage him further; he covets both the woman and the land, and sets to work to secure them both. Kalvarisky's account of his engagement with the Rajani family is the dominant voice here; the story is partly told through his diary, written with a baroque lucidity that matches the romanticism of his Zionist adventure. Amid the literary flourishes, however, Kalvarisky lets slip the occasional remark that reveals his nature. "The ways of women are furtive and filled with ruses", he tells himself. "He who wishes to beat a path to their door must also behave furtively and proceed

with caution." Between the lines, a darker side emerges. Kalvarisky is not the only diarist, nor indeed the only romanticist. Salem pens elaborate melodramas, featuring a sensitive young hero ready to sacrifice himself for the honour of his people. But, as Kalvarisky gradually insinuates himself into his family life, Salem's narratives take on a different hue: the sensitive hero must now protect his family - to the death if necessary. Alon Hilu was awarded Israel's Sapir Prize in 2009 (though he and his fellow winners had to return the prize, which was withdrawn after allegations of a conflict of interest), and his novel should be judged as a work of literature. Its ornate prose - subtly translated by Evan Fallenberg - evokes an almost innocent era of mutual tolerance, and it would do a disservice to Hilu's bold storytelling to consider The House of Rajani solely as metaphor. But, as the principals hurtle towards a tragic denouement, one cannot ignore the book's bitter political meaning. Neither Kalvarisky nor Saleh can engage with each other in any but the most inflexible terms; from their competing narratives there emerges a tragic story of mutual incomprehension. The analogies between their story and the history still being made of the birth of Israel, are impossible to ignore. "The Jews will raze the estate. . and will build three towers on its land" , Saleh tells Kalvarisky. "The Jews' children will be fair and golden haired, the mothers will promenade nonchalantly between the towers. They will crush beneath their feet the dry Biara, the uprooted orchards and the ruined groves without knowing a thing of Saleh or Afifa."

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The other father ain falls suddenly in the crowded, garbage-strewn, stinking Casablanca slum, "a melting pot of misery and poverty" , and eighteen-year-old Youssef and his widowed mother move hurriedly out of the yard into their windowless, rust-bitten house with its corrugated tin roof. His mother's thought is for the soup that is on the fire; Youssef worries about saving the photograph of his dead father from the rain. As Youssef soon finds out, his father is not dead, nor was he the man in the photograph. The boy's search for truth and identity takes us through a landscape riven by corruption , politics, class and religion: present-day Morocco ambitiously portrayed by Laila Lalami. Youssef discovers that he is not after all the son of a respected schoolteacher but of a rich businessman. Leaving behind his life in the slum - a life of smoking at street corners, climbing into the screen at the local cinema, and leering at girls - he enters the world of prosperity and privilege which exists just across the city. At first he finds acceptance, even affection from his father. But things soon become complicated: at the same time that he is gaining a son, the father is in danger of losing his daughter to a lover in America. After a series of unconvincing plot twists, Youssef's fairy-tale journey grinds to a sudden halt. He discovers that the rich really are different from the poor and that his father is capable only of the weakness

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NAVTEJSARNA

Laila Lalami SECRET SON 291 pp. Viking. Paperback, £12.99. 9780670918294

and selfishness which he had once displayed towards Youssef's mother. Lalami portrays Youssef's anger, as he finds himself back in the slum, with a rare flash of metaphor in her otherwise spare prose: His anger look many shapes: sometimes it was soft and familiar, like a round stone that he had caressed for so long that it was perfectly smooth and polished; sometimes it was thin

and sharp, like a blade that could slice through anything; sometimes it had the form of a star, radiating his hatred in all directions, leaving him numb and empty inside.

Rejected, and unsuccessful in his attempts to somehow gain a foothold in a corrupt system, Youssef falls prey to the voracious activists of the fringe Islamic party that is slowly filling the vacuum left by a callous, ineffective government. In telling this age-old story of the illegitimate son, Lalami takes on many weighty issues - poverty and privilege, politics and religion, fractured identities, traditional and liberal values, class conflict - and handles

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them with varying degrees of success. Perhaps the most empathetic treatment is reserved for the struggle for identity. Youssef yearns to find his real self: is it the one that he has lived with, or is it the one that he should have received from his father? Only when he knows the full truth of his mother's origins is the thorn finally pulled out of the flesh: "He was half-Berber and half-Arab; he was a man of the mountains and a man of the city; a man of the people and an aristocrat; a full-blooded Moroccan, with the culture and the history of a thousand years". But identities can be layered; he is also "a slumdweller, the son of a hospital clerk, a man with no illusions about his place in society". His half-sister is persuaded to leave her life in the United States and come back to her family, her culture, her country, but she cannot settle in her former home and culture, because she feels she can only be complete when she is with the man she loves. Even their morally vacuous father is finally forced to examine the emptiness of his compromises and to take a stand. Other predicaments are insufficiently explored. Would a father who accepts his illegitimate son so enthusiastically also give him up so easily? Would a mother try to wean her son away from his father, when she clearly has no better future to offer? Does a person like Youssef with no strong fundamentalist religious conviction so quickly accept an assignment to kill? It is for such questions that one puts down this promising first novel with a sense of incomplete satisfaction.

FICTION

Morethan motherly

May, whose late husband was a plumber and who spent a good part of her life as a cleaner, is affectionate and sentimental. Both women are cautious. But while Isa is wary of emotional openness and of engagement with the past, May, who loves to reminisce, is more territorial. She insists on managing the world on her own terms. Her often wilfully obtuse conversation, and her refuge in remonstrations such as "Don't get smart with me, miss", are entirely believable. Somewhat less believable is Isamay's relationship with Ian, her boyfriend. lan is steady, sensitive and affectionate; but he refuses to tell Isamay anything about his past, and avoids her family as much as possible. Would someone such as Isamay, absorbed in the past and demandingly inquisitive, put up with this behaviour? It seems unlikely. When Ian, learning that Isamay is pregnant, tries to persuade her to have an abortion, and says that if she has the baby he will continue the relationship but move out of their flat, he is likely to lose the reader's sympathy for good - and this may not be what Forster intends. His thematic function , as someone who wants to erase the past, is at odds with his role in the heroine's life. It comes as no surprise to learn that Isa and Ian have secrets that they cannot suppress. Some Canadian cousins arrive with a family tree showing Isa's brother, whom she has never mentioned previously; her protest, "I had no brother .... This is all nonsense", is futile. Ismay opens her door to an implacable woman who claims to be lan's mother, a schematic arrival counterbalanced by the particularity of Forster's characterization. Isamay 's discussions of her thesis, in passages that read as if brought in from another project, tend to hold up the narrative. But Forster' s precise observation of human behaviour, and her understanding of how it can be affected by history and by familial influences, make {sa and May a rewarding and readable novel.

21

On the catwalk

piece of art for the Turner Prize. In "Novel", a writer explains his idea for a novel telling the story of Abelard and Heloise from the Susan Irvine point of view of their bodily functions. CORPUS "Joyce already did the shit of everything 295pp. Quercus. Paperback, £ 12.99. going through the mind" , he tells Jim, a NICHOLAS CLEE 978 1 847249555 "really good craftsman", the person who will actually do the writing . " Your Soup-Can Margaret Forster usan Irvine's first novel Muse (2008), Changed This Country" reveals that Andy ISA AND MAY a dark tragicomedy set in the world Warhol used to hide himself away in a Long 320pp. Chatto and Windus. £17.99. of high fashion , marked her out as a Island retreat and paint beautiful figurative 97807011 84667 talented, if sometimes prolix, new writer. paintings full of poignancy and sensitivity, Corpus, her new collection of short stories, "built up from layers of translucent glazes in argaret Forster' s new novel, {sa perhaps follow s too soon. Of the fifteen the old style". and May, is her twenty-fourth and pieces here, about half succeed . The others, There are several of these ideas-based her bibliography also includes nine though dotted with sharp observation and stories. At their least successful they are works of non-fiction. A prolific writer' s nuggets of impressive prose, do not quite clever but uninvolving. "Corpus", the craft may never desert her, but her ear and work as stories. surreal title story, a satire on academic jargon As in the earlier book, she continues to and over-analysis is pushed too far and sense of pace might: judgement of contemporary tone, and of what to put in and what to mine the peculiarities of the fashion indus- simply becomes irritating. At their best, they leave out, is hard to maintain. So it is bold of ttry, a world of fatuous gloss and pointless sparkle with observation, as in "Late", in Forster to give the narration of {sa and May luxury parading in poverty 's shadow, which a woman desperately tries to find to a protagonist in her late twenties, and to shallow yet brimming with tragedy. She also the time to write. Although it is yet another one who is at work on an academic thesis. turns an eye on art, celebrity culture and the story about writing, everyone will be able to The narrative has a relaxed, colloquial craft of writing . It is time an intelligent writer connect with its sense of overload - " leaking style reminiscent of that of a very different tackled all this without resorting to stereo- pipes, red bills, budgie dead, milk off. writer, Nick Hornby; and, like Hornby, type, and for this she deserves credit, but she everyone you know with all their endless Forster manages this apparently straightis let down here by self-indulgence. "I am a fucking problems dragging you down". forward but tricky technique with great writer because I say so and because I turn up Subjected by a friend to an hour of "bilgeassurance. at the page", says one of her frantic protago- like stream-of-consciousness", the unnamed {sa and May continues Forster's exploranists in "Chaplet of the Infernal Gods". In protagonist f1ees into a world of dreamlike "Love After Death", another imagines her- madness in which she closes her eyes and tion of families and memory. Her narrator, self a ghost floating about watching people ears and heart to the starving and needy in Isamay, is an MA student researching the influence of grandmothers, having been living out their stories. It is as if Irvine order to get a bit of time to herself. prompted by her closeness - her name the writer, though clearly a good one, cannot Death hovers over gaudiness in the best reflects it - to her own grandmothers, Isa and step back. She wants to share with us her stories, and Irvine has a Hogarthian eye May. "I am more like May than my mother flailing progress towards articulation. She for detail and the grotesque. She delights is", she writes. "I am more like Isa than my succeeds in this, but it is not enough to in words, and her Joycean impressionism has father is. Sometimes I wonder if anything sustain a story. improved since she over-indulged it to about me is my own or whether I am made Better are the sharp little satires that convey the wildness of a drug- and drinkup entirely of my grandmothers." Isa is a skewer pretension. In "Concept 1", an artist addled mind in Muse. The most successful comfortably settled widow, formal and cool; enters her child, "a work in progress", as a stories are those which appear towards the end of the collection. In "Fashion", a ----------------------------------~,---------------------------------- journalist fields phone calls and sends saucy ling handbook. Nor, despite this privileged emails while writing up the catwalk shows. access to other people's troubles, has she The look of the models is " Yemeni Bag developed any special insight. "It is tragic Ladies meets Edwardian Doll" ; the audience that Simon died leaving behind so many is full of "fabulous couture creatures with rom Brief Encounter to Murder on the OLIVIA LAING people to mourn him" , she muses, "but bubble lips and beagle's ears of diamonds" . Orient Express, the chance meeting of It is a mad world. "Brain" shows two perhaps it is even more tragic to leave this strangers on a train has generally world with no one special to miss you." stylists selecting a real human brain for a Sarah Rayner augured a love affair or a violent crime. The tendency to reframe emotions into cutting-edge fashion shoot. "Hmm" , says ONE MOMENT , ONE MORNING Although Sarah Rayner' s third novel, One comforting truisms is not confined to Lou. one, " it's a little veiny. Do you have anything 408pp. Picador, £12.99. Moment, One Morning , opens with a death All three women are addicted to self-scrutiny without the purple?" Best of all is "Summer 9780330508834 aboard the commuter service, the conseand when they draw breath the narrator Trees", a simple story about an old person quences are quieter here, with friendship picks up the tune. " What Karen wants in a care home whose wheelchair is one day yielded rather than passion. On the 7.44 of these three problems have been tidily to do - needs to do - is cry" ; "Bottling all placed under the trees instead of by the wall from Brighton to London , Lou is idly resolved. this stuff up isn't good"; "Her father must as it usually is. Understated, affecting and There is a glibness about One Moment, have stifled his emotions in order to remain beautifully written, it shows that Susan Irvine watching a couple opposite her when the man vomits coffee down his shirt before One Morning , which self-consciously deals married." It is a relief when Karen 's children is a writer to be taken seriously. collapsing dead in his seat. In the chaos that w ith large themes , whi le remaining uncom- are introduced, since they at least can express follows she finds herself sharing a taxi with fortable with stasis or entropy . Rayner's their grief directly. FOUR COURTS PRESS Anna, another commuter who turns out two previous novels were gaudily romantic Despite this mistrust of the reader's to have known the man intimately; she is the concoctions. By killing off the male lead capacity to draw conclusions, Rayner is a 2010 CATALOGUE Now AVAILABLE best friend of Karen, the newly bereaved within the first few pages, she has here swift, efficient plotter, nudging her wife. liberated herself from the demands of the characters towards the light of congruence Contact us at the address below In the wake of this coincidence the three chicklit genre, turning her gaze instead to and self-reliance. Her Brighton is carefully to obtain your free copy. women become close. While Karen struggles the steadier relationships that abide between and affectionately mapped, and her account to come to terms with widow hood, Anna women. This might be likeable, even of the gruelling rituals a death involves Become a Friend of Four COUrts Press on is in an uneasy relationship with a sporadi- rousing, were it not for Rayner's reliance on viewing the body, preparing the funeral lunch Facebook to get weekly updates on new cally violent alcoholic boyfriend, and Lou is the cliches of popular psychology. - is deftly done. These objective scenes tend publications, launches, lectures, and more. a lesbian who has not yet come out to her Lou is a youth worker, which seems to to be the most affecting, suggesting that the +353 1 453 4668 • www.fourcourtspress.ie 0 mother. Such is the power of female friend- license her to analyse everyone she comes heavy-handed announcements of emotional Order onhne and receive a 10% discount ship that, within a matter of months, two across in language borrowed from a counsel- weather are overdone in every sense.

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CAROL BIRCH

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A good cry

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THEATRE STUDIES

There's no stove! t a symposium entitled "Ibsen from Page to Stage", held at the Riverside Studios on Saturday February 6, a small number of theatre scholars, the English director Stephen Unwin, and a representative of the National Theatre in Oslo debated the place of the Norwegian playwright in the international theatre of today. The issues focused as, perhaps surprisingly, they still tend to, even now, on the right of directors to reshape texts according to their own interpretative inclinations and to the surrounding circumstances. This is a battle that seems to have to be continually refought and the usual asides were directed at the "text-based" conventionalities of English directors. The most illuminating contribution came from the Norwegian Ba Clemetsen, whose job it is to circle the globe searching for Ibsen productions worth inviting back home. Clemetsen is always on the look-out for intrinsically local enterprises that might be of interest by virtue of their extreme otherness, and she is clearly finding them. Any early impulse to shrug off her predictable loyalty to postmodern principles, her denial of any kind of textual "original" or any idea of ultimate "authority", was soon dispelled by the extraordinary range of examples she presented: from Ramallah, where an audience of Muslim women exposed to A Doll 's House showed no patience with Nora' s bid for selfrealization , from Cuba, where the costumes chosen for An Enemy of the People reflected the uniform of local political groups, and from both Galway and China, where productions of the same play evoked imminent environmental threats. Inevitably, provocation leads to repression: Ghosts was banned in Iran when Pastor Manders was represented as an imam. All around the world Ibsen can be seen to have attracted not just members of the internationally celebrated avant-garde such as Robert Wilson, Susan Sontag and Thomas Ostermeier, but lesser-known, equally questioning talents. Witness an allfemale Hedda in China and, not necessarily the same thing, a lesbian version in Denmark. Meanwhile, back in Bergen, a production of A Wild Duck had to be called to a halt after twelve hours of continuous performance with the end of the play still not in sight. Ibsen himself was a director, said Clemetsen, so he of all people would have understood the need for experiment. His texts actually "allow" interpretation, and the evidence for that lies in physical movement as much as in speech, in what is not said along with what is. Since theatre can only be a temporal event,

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JOHN STOKES Henrik Ibsen HEDDA GABLER Riverside Studios

Theodore Ziolkowski SCANDAL ON STAGE European theater as moral trial 190pp. Cambridge University Press. £50 (US $85). 9780521112604

a current production, also at the Riverside, of Hedda Gabler- though it isn't entirely vindicated either. Directed, translated and adapted by a Norwegian, Terje Tveit, this is staged by the London-based Ibsen Stage Company with some capable young British actors. Undeniably creepy and atmospheric though it is, Tveit' s Hedda Gabler nevertheless demonstrates how postmodern possibilities can obscure as well as enlighten. The acting area is a large circular island space surrounded by a sea of torn white paper and a few wooden chairs. Outside - and sometimes inside - the circle, the lighting is extremely dim, though spots will pick out faces. There is a single major prop: a thronelike chair, covered with a white sheet that is usually in the centre of the circle. Sometimes it is facing us; sometimes all we see is its back. Hedda will spend a good deal of time in that chair which is alternately her place of refuge (the equivalent of the inner room in more

realistic productions), a power base for controlling others, and a screen for eavesdropping on what is being said at the back of the stage. At extended moments, Sarah Head, a fiery and noticeably youthful heroine, looks straight ahead at us while her flashing eyes register what she is hearing behind her with all the regularity of a digital display. An ambient soundtrack of synthesized noise, sonic booms, nervy strings, icy chords, and what may well be robotic seagulls acts as accompaniment. There's a brief new prologue describing Hedda' s arrival back home which is distributed, sentence by sentence, among the actors. It will be repeated at the end. Entrances and exits involve pacing around the perimeter before stepping into the central circle. This process gives a distinctive clip-clopping sound and, when several characters are lined up, the impression is of circus ponies, although, because many lines are delivered out into the void rather than to another character, the dominant suggestion is obviously supposed to be of a domestic prison or cage. As if we needed help. All through, much that is implied in Ibsen ' s text is made visible, which is not to say that it is made more apparent. Indeed, a reverse process may be taking place since some innovations are newly puzzling. Lovborg's manuscript is a long medieval-style paper scroll described as a "poem" rather than as a speculative and prophetic book. It is destroyed not by Hedda alone -there's no stove - but collectively by the whole cast in a series of tearing movements. Protracted physical

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nothing more hut nothing less, directorial

freedom is the inescapable privilege of the moment.

While members of the panel as a whole had praise for the Dundee Rep production of Peer Gynt, which came to the Barbican last year, they - tactfully no doubt - made no mention of another recent show, a modernized and anglicized Little Eyoif at the National Theatre which, though dull in execution, was ambitious in its own parochial way. The British have not always been supine in the face of foreign greatness, and the right to interpretative freedom is certainly claimed by

gestures frequently outlast their significance. Tveit' s heavily choreographed Hedda is the kind of production that might confirm Theodore Ziolkowski' s worst fears, since Scandal on Stage is as much a polemic against directorial imposition as it is a history of theatrical outrage, the link between the two being Ziolkowski ' s belief that when directors stamp their own personal vision on a work in order deliberately to cause a sensation they are effectively pre-empting, or even counteracting, its innate provocations, denying rather than amplifying the writer' s wishes. He begins in the early nineteenth century with the weakening of aristocratic and clerical patronage, and the ensuing dependence of artists on the rise of a paying public. The emergent quandary is that the artist must sometimes attract and serve that public by challenging or insulting its avowed standards. This can be done either by uncompromising engagement with unrepresented political issues (at one extreme agitprop) or, conversely, by refusing any social involvement whatsoever and serving "Art" alone. The "freedom" of the artist becomes a shibboleth that is produced precisely out of his initial situation. The public must continue to pay - and in more senses than one. The historical starting point of Ziolkowski ' s argument, like many of his examples both old and new, is German: Schiller's famous essay on the theatre "as a moral institution", which the poet defines as an activity above law and religion, and yet necessary to both. Theatre, according to Schiller, takes us into human realms that conventionalized ethical systems may ignore or suppress, and in so doing it reveals more complex truths. It is for this reason that society cannot survive without the ancient art form , and that it should be institutionalized, a step taken in many European nation-states with national, regional or civic initiatives. Ziolkowski, respecting Schiller, argues that a genuine scandal occurs when the sacred responsibilities of theatre are believed, at least by some, to have been abused and corrective action or protest is thought to be necessary. This may take many forms according to context. Ziolkowski's well-documented but selective survey takes in responses to Schiller' s Die Riiuber, Hugo's Hernani, Hauptmann's Vor Sonnenaufgang , Jarry' s Vbu Roi, Wilde's (and Strauss's) Salome, Stravinsky's Le Sacre du printemps, Schnitzler's Reigen, Brecht's Mahagonny, Rolf Hochhuth's Der Stellverteter and Hans Werner Henze's Das Floss der Medusa. Ibsen, one might note, isn't included - though he obviously could have been, given the scandalized reactions to A Doll's House, Ghosts and, indeed, to Hedda Gabler.

Sarah Head as Hedda Gabler

TLS FEBRUARY 192010

most cases, responses, all the way from

legal reprimand to street-based riot, involved some external or peripheral cause, whether partisanship on aesthetic grounds as with the first night (or nights) of Vbu Roi (occasions recently rehearsed in the correspondence columns of the TLS), or some more directly political commitment, as was the case with Synge's The Playboy of the Western World in 1907 or Genet's The Screens in 1966. Neither Synge nor Genet is discussed by Ziolkowski, nor does he mention the two great English examples of theatrical scandal in modern times: Edward Bond' s Saved and Sarah

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THEATRE STUDIES Kane' s Blasted, both serious plays about violence and poverty where the scandal should be seen as social in the first instance and theatrical only in the second. At least, that seems to have been their authors ' intention.In the event, the scandals lay in the treatment given them by journalists. Similarly, purity campaigns have been periodically mounted by people who would never normally go near a theatre, while, as Ziolkowski makes pointedly clear, some twentieth-century interventions cannot be separated from outright anti-Semitism. When we speak of a scandal as "created", this is often what we mean: something exceptional that takes place outside the text as such and is to do with aspersion or tainting, orchestrated and maintained by specific vested interests that only profess to be concerned with the general good. And it's this feeling of manipulation that encourages Ziolkowski to go on to argue that today the directors are increasingly part of the process, sometimes with the excuse that they are keeping texts alive, but in actuality always submitting them to some external imperative. His leading example is Hans Neuenfels' s direction of Mozart's Idomeneo, which caused a considerable fuss in Berlin in 2006 because of an imported scene considered, and probably designed, to offend organized religion. It is true that in Britain "scandal" has become a small word, restricted for the most part to the sexual and the financial. Dodgy expenses and office affairs are scandals; invading a foreign country may be a crime or a courageous moral decision, either way it' s something to which gossip may contribute but which ultimately lies beyond its delighted buzzing. Scandals go with gossip, the unverified, which is why the tabloids love to create them. When Schnitzler's Reigen was first published in 1903, long before its first authorized performance in 1920, it suffered ugly attacks from both Left and Right and was seen as a slur on the German people. Years later, in 1998, when the play was revived in London in a new translation by David Hare as The Blue Room and the director opted for brief full-scale nudity, the scandal, such as it was, seemed trivial , no more exploitative than the average popular newspaper and mostly generated by the fame of its moviestar lead. Is a genuine theatre scandal still possible? At our own national institution on the South Bank, Alan Bennett's The Habit of Art currently features sexual behaviour (with language to match) that was illegal within the lifetime of many of its appreciative onlookers, while David Hare's The Power of Yes addresses the economic crisis in a manner that is baffled but oddly unshockable. Representations of financial irregularity and explicit sex

Ghetto geometry n 1942, Tadeusz Kantor was twentyseven and living in Cracow in a building that had once been part of the Jewish ghetto, but was now on the edge of it because, by then, so many Jews had been deported that the ghetto had shrunk. Kantor had just found out that his father, who had gone to fight in the First World War and never returned (starting another family in Silesia), had been arrested by the Germans for distributing an underground newspaper, and murdered at Auschwitz. He was living, as he later wrote, "at the very centre of the harshest terror, cut off from the rest of the world", and yet "in the face of all logic" he "turned to the international avant-garde" and formed a clandestine theatre company - at considerable risk, as the Nazis had banned theatre - and began staging plays in a ruined synagogue. In his invaluable new introduction to the maverick director, Noel Witts describes Kantor' s first production, an abstract take on Juliusz Slowacki's Balladyna:

I

he used geometrical forms , circles, arcs, right angles. and materials such as tin sheet, black tar paper and fabrics to create a sculptural structure. One of the characters, Goplana, was fitted with a golden string which vibrated and ga ve off a moaning sound. Inside the structure sat an actor who had to speak into a washbasin in order to achieve a metallic tone of voice, and so on. While the performances of Balladyna were laking place the Nazis were rounding people up .

It is impossible to understand Kantor's work without knowing about his life. He returned again and again in his work to Wielopole, the Galician shtetl he grew up in, a place so scarred by history that it was no longer the place he knew. He couldn't go back, could never really re-create it, yet he could not forget it, and he kept on producing plays such as The Dead Class (1975), in which he attempted, as Witts writes, to "excavate" the schoolroom of his childhood, his actors playing old people weighed down by mannequins of their younger selves, Kantor himself appearing as their teacher, silently directing the action, hunched in his trademark black suit, black scarf and white shirt. He described it as less a play than a "seance" . Five years later, he made Wielopole, Wielopole , which began with him re-creating a family photograph on stage while the actors questioned the validity of his memories, re-arranging themselves, displacing things, dressing and undressing. In 1975, Kantor wrote his well-known manifesto The Theatre of Death, in which he argued that mimesis was impossible, that, as Witts puts it, "all representation on stage is of

no longer in themselves make for scandal in

something that is no more and has heen resur-

the theatre - as they did in Ibsen' s time - and that is no bad thing if we are seeking the deeper origins of human behaviour. According to Judge Brack, contemplating Hedda Gabler's suicide, "people don' t do such things", a famous irony that is played down in the current Riverside production, perhaps as too obvious, too well known, no longer startling. But what people do and what they don't do, and where and how they do it, must always be the primary concern of any worthwhile theatrical practice requiring intellectual purpose as well as interpretative vision.

rected from memory", or as Kantor himself said, "it is possible to express life in art only through the absence of life, through an appeal to DEATH, through APPEARANCES, through EMPTINESS and the lack of a MESSAGE". Kantor's excitement is palpable as he moves entirely into capital letters to express his new concept of theatre: "IT IS NECESSARY TO RECOVER THE PRIMEVAL FORCE OF THE SHOCK TAKING PLACE AT THE MOMENT WHEN OPPOSITE A MAN (THE VIEWER) THERE STOOD FOR THE FIRST TIME A MAN (THE ACTOR)

SAMANTHA ELLIS Noel Witts TADEUSZ KANTOR 122pp. Routledge. Paperback, £ 16.99. 9780415434874

Michal Kobialka FURTHER ON, NOTHING Tadeusz Kantor's theatre 552pp. University of Minnesota Press. Paperback, $35; distributed in the UK by NBN. £20. 9780816654819

DECEPTIVELY SIMILAR TO US , YET AT THE SAME TIME INFINITELY FOREIGN, BEYOND AN IMPASSABLE BARRIER" . Hence his efforts to make theatre strange again - the white make-up he gave to his actors so that they seemed like corpses or ghosts, the extra limbs he sewed into their costumes, the mannequins he strapped to their backs, the reveals of stage machinery, the constant questioning of what he was doing as he was doing it. So many of these ideas have been appropriated by other theatremakers that it can be difficult to see how strange they would have been when Kantor first staged his plays. There are a lot of plays now featuring broken umbrellas and death-white mannequins, a lot of plays in which Death wears a bowler hat. And this does make one worry about Witts' s suggestions, in the chapter on practical exercises, for how to "create work with any kind of Kantor flavour" . Where this admirably clear book shines is in showing how personal and particular Kantor' s work was. He was such a presence in his own work that it can seem impossibly distant now that he is not here to anchor it - so much so that when his last, unfinished work, Today Is My Birthday, premiered in 1991, an empty chair was incorporated into the play to commemorate him. For him, the umbrellas, the mannequins, the bowler hats, were not empty tropes but deeply felt, arising directly out of his own experience. For Michal Kobialka - who describes his interest in Kantor as "obsessive" and who has been writing about him and translating him for twenty years - Kantor is "in an uncanny way and ... in an idiosyncratic manner" as political a theatre-maker as Bertolt Brecht or Augusto Boal. In his study, Further On, Nothing, Kobialka intersperses examples of Kantor's writings with his own argument that Kantor did not just change the way we represent reality on stage, but perturbed reality itself, ruptured it even. Kohialka shows how , from his very first productions, Kantor insisted on the reality of the spaces he was performing in. The room in wartime Cracow in which he staged The Return of Odysseus in 1944 was, wrote Kantor, "a real site, / which was as real as the events surrounding the audience. The ROOM was thus an integral part of a work of art: a production. The audience was inside the / The naked and poor work of art. / WALLS , marked by gun shells, were a substitute for a Greek horizon and its blue and sunny skies" . He had no desire to create an escapist illusion for his audiences; he wanted

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his theatre to engage with, even to quarrel with, reality. He was living in inexplicable and shocking times. In making theatre at all (let alone in taking the risks he did to make it secretly), he was anticipating Theodor Adorno' s question about whether it is right or possible to make art in the shadow of Auschwitz, and his response was the theatre he made, theatre that he wanted to be " like a catastrophe happening unexpectedly ... like the emergence of another world" . Occasionally, Kobialka becomes opaque. "How", he asks, in his discussion of Kantor's images of the Holocaust, "can one endure the memory of these events, the bloody memory of humans unhoused in being, fallen into the nonplace, the missing articulation, since because there are no speakable words for what is ontologically undesired?" He argues that Kantor's subject was not so much his own story, or history, but his "treatment of the relationship between immaterial memories and the processes of representing them" . This may be true, but Kantor seemed to be struggling not just with these postmodern concerns but with the hope and pain of trying to resurrect the past. His rehearsal notes for Wielopole, Wielopole can at times be heartbreaking: "Here, this is a room of my childhood / with all its inhabitants. / This is the room which I keep reconstructing over and over again / and which is destroyed over and over again" . Kobialka is more convincing in his argument that Kantor created "a radical theatre practice that interrogates the ontology of theatre that takes exception to the normati ve order of things in order to think 'otherwise' ''. Kantor' s own take on this was that art should always involve "PROTEST, / MUTINY, / BLASPHEMY AND SACRILEGE OF SANCTIONED SHRINES" . It is Kantor's own writings, part manifesto, part poetry, often bombastic, sometimes messianic, filled with startling images, raw emotion and outbreaks of capital letters, that form the spine of Kobialka's book. In translating them, he has given non-Polish speakers the enormous gift of being able to get close to Kantor. "Further on , nothing" was a refrain, a credo, almost a rallying cry, for Kantor, describing his desire to leap into the void, to take risks, to avoid cliches and accepted forms of art. "FURTHER ON, NOTHING!", he wrote. "I left all the road signs / behind me. / I felt anger against / history, / trends, / stages, / theories." He was going on a journey into the dark. Towards the end of his life, he evaluated that journey, writing that he had reached "the ultimate moment", that he had embarked on "a self-examination. / How was it really / with that reality? / Have I really done for it all that I could?".

Iv studies international in spirit" and interdiscipIina in scope. I Derotm

Essay submissions are invited from scholars in all areas of drama. Contact and subscription information at http://www.wmich.edulcompdr/

24 enneth MacMillan is one of the major figures in twentieth-century ballet. With their passionate duets, his Romeo and luliet and Manon are in the repertory of ballet companies around the world. Seventeen years after his death , his ballets are one of the main reasons why dancers want to join the Royal Ballet, the company with which he was most closely associated. He died in 1992, backstage at the Royal Opera House, on the first night of a revival of his Mayerling. Many of his ballets push into unusually dark territory. The Invitation , created in 1960, included a graphic on stage rape. Mayerling tells the story of Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria - with its hero' s morbid obsessions, his drug addiction and a suicide pact with his teen aged mistress - in tangled, erotic pas de deux and sharply observed mime. When he fell short of the psychological insight of Mayerling , his focus on sex and violence could be repetitive; for most of his career, he was a controversial choreographer. Jann Parry's superb biography reveals MacMillan 's drive to create, despite fierce criticism and his own frequent unhappiness. Uncovering MacMillan' s past, Parry has found plenty of grim material. He was born in Scotland in 1929, but his family later moved to Great Yarmouth in a " moonlight flit" , leaving debts behind; in Yarmouth, he lived through bombing raids. For a man who would insistently create ballets about lonely, rejected "outsider" figures , MacMillan had plenty of school friends , along with a gift for performance and comedy. But he also clung to his mother, only to be overcome with shame when she developed epilepsy. She died when he was twelve. "' I used to wish she'd die,' he told his wife many years later, 'and then she did. '" At the age of fifteen , MacMillan faked a letter from his father to apply to the Sadler's Wells ballet school (company and school were

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THEATRE STUDIES

Outsider talents ZOE ANDERSON Jann Parry DIFFERENT DRUMMER The life of Kenneth MacMillan 758pp. Faber. £30. 9780 571 243020

Kenneth MacMillan, 1990 later renamed the Royal Ballet). A fine dancer, he soon developed crushing stage fright, which helped to redirect him into choreography. Throughout his life, he was insecure and nervous, later becoming dependent on first alcohol and then prescription drugs. His sexuality was troubled, but at forty-two he met Deborah Williams, an intelligent, forthright Australian who provided him with the emotional stability he needed, particularly with the

birth of their daughter Charlotte. The sweetest moment in Parry 's book is MacMillan' s response to his knighthood. "Bemused at thought of being a 'Sir"', he wrote in his diary. "How will it affect Charlotte? If Deborah is a Lady, hope Charlotte won't feel left out." Parry reveals extraordinary new information, which she recounts without sensationalism. Ambiguous relationships are outlined in as much detail as she can find; she doesn't jump to conclusions. She also looks at how MacMilla's life fed into his work, noting how epileptic fits recur as an image of illness in his ballets, and drawing parallels between his childhood and My Brother, My Sisters with its family of grim children playing dangerous games. She is very good on MacMillan 's complex relationships with his dancers. He often formed tight groups with his collaborators, relying on them personally as well as professionally. In the studio, he drew out their personalities in dramatic works, challenging and often surprising them with the demands of his roles. "MacMillan's casting games could be cruel , if the artist concerned realised what he was up to", Parry points out; when L ynn Seymour was out of shape, he cast her as an over-the-hill burlesque performer. Yet he repeatedly discovered talent, from Seymour to the young Darcey Bussell. Parry takes a fresh look at the many controversies in MacMillan's career. Romeo and luliet was created for Lynn Seymour and Christopher Gable. They were his muses, shaping a bold view of the story, which was driven by Seymour's rebellious, sensuous Juliet. Yet the production's first night, at the insistence of the Royal Ballet's management, was danced by the older, starrier Margot

Fonteyn, with Rudolf Nureyev. That cast change, and the fury it caused, is well known - but Parry gives it new context. She unpicks the management negotiations, from box office demands to company politics, but also points out MacMillan' s surprising passivity: he was hugely ambitious - and for the time being, he could blind himself to the compromises he was making by blaming forces beyond his control. He had championed Lynn [Seymour] over the television casting of The Invitation, and lost the chance to have that ballet reach a wider audience. He was not going to imperil Ronteo and iulief by fighting for her again when even higher stakes were involved.

The toughest controversy of MacMillan 's career came with his directorship of the Royal Ballet in the 1970s. He replaced the company's other defining choreographer, Frederick Ashton - who had groaned about the demands of administration, but was outraged when the company's Board of Directors took him at his word. The handover was desperately botched, muddled by secrecy and confusion. It left Ashton' s supporters angry and ready to blame MacMillan, helping to create a bitter divide within the company, among critics and sections of the audience. (The division of British ballet into pro- and anti-MacMillan camps is only just fading.) The mistakes and confusions coloured MacMillan ' s years as director. Parry draws on interviews, memoirs and the minutes of meetings at the Royal Opera House to give a crisp and detailed account of these events. The research for Different Drummer has taken more than a decade. Parry has spoken to friends , relations and colleagues, while consulting MacMillan' s own papers and diaries. She looks at the ballets as well as their creator, taking time to examine neglected as well as successful works. Sympathetic but never sycophantic, Different Drummer is a thorough, sensitive account of an artist and his life.

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ow do you dress a ghost? The question arises towards the end of The Actor in Costume , when Aoife Monks quotes John Gielgud on the problem of bringing on stage Hamlet's father, a supposedly immaterial entity straining not to clank: " it seems to be an impossibility to design silent armour for the Ghost", says Gielgud, "and consequently he is always dressed extremely vaguely and underlighted almost out of recognition". At such times, as Monks observes, "the costume shouldn't seem to have a body in it". There are plenty of variations on this theme - bodies that shouldn't appear to have a costume on them, costumes and bodies that merge, costumes haunted by the bodies that

clothes he had thought fine from a distance; there are curtain calls, when the actor, still dressed in character, takes an out-of-character bow. ("Actors bowing in leftover costumes stand as ghostly reminders of the theatrical

were once in them - and these are the subject

hodies that once seemed so convincing.")

of Monks's engaging (if not always convincing) study. She is interested in the various uses and abuses of dressing up, and in supplying a suggestive account of this variety rather than a comprehensive history or a practical guide. Ghosts pose a problem for the theatrical wardrobe department because they are likely to be comical when they should be uncanny. But a different kind of ghostliness she finds to be endemic in the theatre. There is the "third space" of the dressing room, between the stage and the outside world, where Pepys sorrowed over the state of

And The Actor in Costume repeatedly returns to the subject of the metaphorical costume that is called celebrity, by which Daniel Radcliffe stripping off in Equus gave fans an opportunity to see "Harry Potter" naked, and Fiona Shaw displaying signs of intelligence in interview dictated what reviewers had to say about her body. Prejudices, associations, memories: perhaps these are the plates in an actor's "silent armour". Monks illustrates theatregoers' inability to cope with the oddity of seeing film stars in the flesh with a striking example.

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All dressed up MICHAEL CAINES Aiofe Monks THE ACTOR IN COSTUME 158pp. Palgrave Macmillan. £ 16.99. 9780 230 21700 3

During a performance of This Is Our Youth by Kenneth Lonergan, at the Garrick Theatre in 2002, then starring Matt Damon and Casey Affleck, a member of the audience answered her mobile phone. "They're right in front of me", she said. "I could reach out and touch them." For this woman, Monks argues, the moment had a "cinematic coating". Despite what she said about the immediate, physical presence of the men from Hollywood, she seems to have forgotten that if she could reach out and touch them, then they could likewise reach out, touch and even hear her. Not that they wanted to - Damon told her to call hack. With such stories in mind, it is odd to return to the introduction to this book and find costume defined there as "a body that can be taken off', "that which is perceptually indistinct from the actor's body, and yet something that can be removed": what seems to interest Monks here, more often than not, are the layers that cannot be removed. The performance artist Franko B, naked and bleeding for real, is gruesomely strung upside down from a meat hook for The South Bank Show, yet is still wearing white make-up and "performing" honesty; the bodies of actors of

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the pre-industrial age are fashionably attired in the cast-offs of their aristocratic patrons, yet they remain a working class beneath the finery, their labour kitted out as leisure. This may be to grasp Monks's argument inadequately, since her rhetoric has a generalizing, pat tendency, but one implication of The Actor in Costume seems to be that actors are all too readily, even permanently, trapped by their trappings. Is it the real Michael Gambon portrayed by the artist Stuart Pearson Wright, sitting in his dressing room at the National Theatre, "as" Sir John Falstaff in 2005? Or does the combination of actor and role - who share striped socks and a halfunbuttoned shirt - suggest a third possibility, appropriate only to this "third space" between the stage and the world outside? The Actor in Costume achieves its aim in posing such questions and offering fresh ways to think about theatre through the fundamental process of costuming. Its version of theatre history is at its vaguest and most unhelpful in a vaulting account of costume from the medieval to the Victorian stage, but this at least indicates how Aoife Monks 's work might be further developed ; her opening and closing references to The Bacchae, "a play about the dangers of dressing up", gives an assurance that anxieties about people in costume have ancient roots.

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HISTORY here are many books about the Vikings, and their titles are a surprisingly accurate guide to the differences between them. There are Viking books with pictures (such as Peter Sawyer' s Oxford Illustrated History of the Vikings) ; or with exclamations (such as Magnus Magnusson's Vikings!). There are scholarly books which present the Vikings in a positive light (for instance Peter Foote and David M. Wilson's The Viking Achievement) and jokey ones which don't (Terry Deary ' s The Vicious Vikings). The title of Robert Ferguson's book The Hammer and the Cross indicates the clash between Heathendom (accorded a capital letter throughout the book) and Christianity, and the transition from one to the other or assimiliation of the two, as the book's organizing principle, but its subtitle, A new history of the Vikings, is more problematic, unless we simply understand new as latest. In fact, The Hammer and the Cross offers a picture of the old Vikings we used to know, before scholars like Peter Sawyer smartened up their reputations. Ferguson stresses their violence (accusing them of the genocide ofthe Picts) and their cruelty, citing Jomsv{kinga saga for an instance of child sacrifice, though this thirteenth-century work with its fictionalized heroes is already itself part of the Viking myth. Ferguson assumes too often that "literature was. . reflecting a familiar aspect of Viking Age life". His tone is sometimes lurid: a "psychopathic rage" is "unleashed" with "infantile orgies of transgressive behaviour".

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Dirty streams HEATHER O'DONOGHUE Robert Ferguson THE HAMMER AND THE CROSS A new history of the Vikings 451 pp. Penguin. £30. 9780713997880

An entry in a ninth-century Irish annal noting that a lot of porpoises were killed is offered as evidence of Viking bloodlust. Ferguson's apparently straightfaced claim that "coal biters" in Icelandic family sagas spent their time "irritably gnawing at lumps of coal, annoying themselves and annoying those around them" is a wildly over-literal reading of a metaphor for stay-at-home young men, though it would make a good gag in Terry Deary' s book. The book's many references to websites, and newspaper articles, is markedly contemporary, but there is always a problem with the reliability of such sources. This text is full of minor inaccuracies. Icelandic names are wrongly spelt or strangely anglicized (Odd Monk sounds as if he too has strayed in from The Vicious Vikings) and the careless transliteration of Icelandic script leads to absurdities such as "Pingnes" for I>ingnes. The celebrated inscription on the so-called Alfred jewel -

iElfred heht mec gewyrcan ("Alfred ordered me to be made") is wrongly transcribed. Information is often slightly garbled. Ferguson briskly describes Orkney as a pre-Scandinavi an name which means seal island (not quite: it is a Scandinavian name which means seal island, but is derived from an earlier name which didn't). Alcuin's famous question "What has Ingeld to do with Christ?" does not prove that Beowulf was popular in monasteries. Some things are simply wrong: the skaldic stanza on the back cover of the book is not a "shield poem" (or even from a shield poem). Details are inconsistent, such as the age of the supposedly sacrificed child which varies from seven to nine. Referencing is patchy, and the sources are dated. Tacitus, uncritically credited with the startling claim that "Germanic males were naturally attracted to violence and loved fighting" , is resurrected as a valid source for information about the Vikings, and it is a long time since anyone referred to the Inuit in Greenland as Eskimos. Ferguson is based in Norway, and many of his secondary sources are in Norwegian, which makes a welcome change from the usual anglophone frame of reference. His most usual resource is a scholarly Norwegian encyclopedia of medieval Scandinavia published thirty years ago. But as a result, many of the

names of characters in, or authors of, Old Icelandic texts appear in modern Norwegian forms, which is confusing when reference is being made to a work in English translation with its own familiar anglicized names. Olaf, for instance, is very variously spelt (sometimes two or three different ways on the same page), though it at least will be recognizable to everybody in all its forms. Much of the text is very traditional. There are great stretches of military campaigns, negotiations, royal power struggles. Even the faded black-and-white photographs of Viking sites have the look of old postcards. But true to its title, The Hammer and the Cross is organized not on strict chronological principles, but thematically, with opening chapters on longships and heathen beliefs, and later ones on the conversion of Iceland and the Viking saint. Widely separated chapters make a useful distinction between the Viking "devastation of all the islands of Britain", and the Scandinavian settlement of the Danelaw which followed it. Ferguson's image of the demise of Charlemagne's empire, " lashing and plunging like some great leviathan as it sank beneath the waves" is memorable, and neatly references the mythic Old Norse World Serpent. Of the Irish king Cinaed' s ignominious execution in "a dirty stream" Ferguson notes tartl y that "the quality of the water can scarcely have mattered to him". In the end, however, The Hammer and the Cross is not lively enough to make for popular history, and not reliable enough to be a work of reference.

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fOR LOVERS OF LITERARY cULlntt

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IN BRIEF

Poetry Peter Washington, editor RUSSIAN POETS 252pp. Everyman / Knopf. £9.99. 978 I 841597805

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pocket full of Russian poets is worth many a thick novel. Imaginatively organized according to rubrics like "The Muse", "Native Land" and "Love", this anthology of lyric poems extends almost exactly a century from the Golden Age of the 1820s (Pushkin, Vyazemsky) to the Silver Age of the 1920s (Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Pasternak) with a few forays beyond to Brodsky in the 1970s. All of the poets are canonical in their native tongue, though many are little known in English. This volume provides perhaps a unique service in collecting a mass of translations that have appeared separately over many years. By and large, Peter Washington ' s selection shows excellent taste. Poets who are distinctive in Russian continue to sound individual in English, a sure mark of success. Alan Myers is unsurpassed in his mastery of iambic measures, and applies great syntactic skill and verbal economy to rendering in unfussy English the intonations and voices of nineteenth-century poets. Maurice Bowra's versions of Gumilyov, Akhmatova's first husband and something of a Russian Kipling, still have just the right swagger, Robert Tracy's settings of the young Mandelstam capture his hauntingly evocative early style, and David McDuff ably conveys Tsvetaeva' s lacerating rhetoric without imitating her radical, untranslatable metrical innovations. The republication of fluent translations of Lermontov - now more appreciated in English as a novelist than first-class lyricist - by Myers, Vivian de Sola Pinto and Anatoly Liberman is welcome. Some practitioners consciously pursue imitation rather than literal transposition: the versions of Blok by Peter France and Jon Stallworthy capture a poet poised between Symbolist and Modernist tropes and have a vivid angularity, while Charles Tomlinson ' s re-invention of the metaphysical Fyodor Tyutchev is pared down and striking. Robert Lowell earns his creative licence in sympathetic adaptations far better than the wayward D. M. Thomas, who strains after the originals. Inevitably in an anthology of this type there is some unevenness. Too many renderings date from the Edwardian period and deserve to be relegated: versifiers such as J. S. Phillimore and Oliver Elton make the populist master Nekrasov sound like Browning, the exquisite Fet, a great nature poet, comes across here as closer to W. S. Gilbert, and a couple of otherwise accomplished translators come to grief "thee-ing" and "thou-ing" through Pushkin. Even so, the many excellent versions open up the art of Russian lyric

A selection of African trade beads collected by Velma Davis Dozier; taken from The Arts ofAfrica: At the Dallas Museum ofArt by Roslyn Adele Walker (319pp. Yale University Press. £55. 978 0 300 13895 5) with skill and musicality and deserve a new readership in English. ANDREW KAHN

Essays Michael Greenberg BEG , BORROW, STEAL A writer' s life 216pp. Bloomsbury. £16.99. 978 I 4088 0580 0

Singer. One can hear echoes of them all thrumming through Greenberg's prose, which manages, miraculously, to be at once Technicolor and sepia. Not since Orwell wrote about the parlous, humiliating drudgery of the hack reviewer have I read a book that makes writing appear at once such an appealing and repellent career option. It is recommended without reservation to potential students of creative and non-creative writing courses: if this doesn't put them off, nothing will. ALAN TAYLOR

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he New York which Michael Greenberg inhabits, and about which he writes affectionately and unsentimentally in Beg, Borrow, Steal, is that of a writer with the old-fashioned notion of making ends meet by writing whatever is desired or required of him. Not, it seems, for him the gravy train of academe. The book' s forty-four columns first appeared in the TLS between June 2003 and April 2009, when Greenberg's byline was last seen fluttering under the "Freelance" flag. Each column, Greenberg notes, was to be pitched between I,LOO and 1,200 words, which, as he rightly says, is "just long enough to tell a complete story". While the stories stand on their own, they are no less effective or evocative when collected. They reveal a canny observer of the peculiarity of life in New York and, in particular, its feisty denizens and their dreams and delusions. The book begins and ends with snapshots of Greenberg's family, who also feature in his recent memoir Hurry Down Sunshine , a raw account of his daughter Sally's "crack up". "MyoId man", Greenberg begins, with a sentence that would have cheered Salinger, "was like Zeus's father Cronos: he couldn ' t bear the idea that any of his children might surpass him." Six years later, he devoted his valedictory column to the remembrance of his mother's father who made a fortune by investing his earnings as a doctor in a cousin ' s mayonnaise factory. The fortune was lost to the family, however, who were cheated out of it by their cousin. This is terrain customarily tilled by the likes of Bellow and Roth, Malamud and

Biography Fiona MacCarthy THE SIMPLE LIFE C. R. Ashbee in the Cotswolds 204pp. Faber Finds. Paperback, £18. 978 0 571 25580 I

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s Janet Ashbee, the true heroine of Fiona MacCarthy's book, noted more than once, the simple life, so seductive in theory, was in practice very complex. The charismatic C. R. Ashbee was a leader of men, and his belief in "simple useful things produced by honest toil" turned out to entail a good deal of practical endeavour. Having established the Guild and School of Handicraft in Whitechapel in 1888, he moved his hand picked force of mainly cockney silversmiths, enamellers, woodworkers, bookbinders and embroiderers to the Cotswold village of Chipping Campden, buying or leasing huildings to provide accommodation and setting up workshops. As well as the organization of a workforce and the promotion of a handcrafted luxury product to wealthy patrons, the enterprise involved lectures, a cricket team, swimming parties, "'beanfeasts", productions of Congreve and Shakespeare, sing-songs and ballad-collecting. The Simple Life, which was first published in 1981 and is now reissued as a Faber Find, provides a clear-sighted, sometimes wry account of the Gloucestershire Guild and its brief flourishing - it was disbanded for financial reasons after five years in 1907. Mac-

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Carthy provides thoughtful portraits of Ashbee and his wife, and of the skilled craftsmen, as well as lively sketches of peripheral figures: Lady Elcho and Mrs Pat Campbell, curious visitors to Chipping Campden in their flounces and trains; the dying Whistler, a tenant in Ashbee's Chelsea house, lying on an Empire bed in a silk nightshirt with a little knitted shawl over his shoulders; the young John Masefield, writing couplets in praise of Campden Wold. MacCarthy sets Ashbee in a context of late nineteenth-century rural idealism, with links to William Morris and Edward Carpenter. She details the finances of the Guild and its dependence on a wider economy. She also sympathetically records the sometimes conflicting desires of the participants, their fellow villagers and the local gentry. Above all , she has a sharp eye for decor and dress - the use of lusterware and pewter, the popularity of the sandal - and for the domestic burdens imposed by a high-minded way of life. A concentrated episode in the story of English socialism, A Simple Life, with its photographs of the Guild' s artefacts, the buildings and the cloth-capped workers, still suggests a tantalizing idyll. LINDSAY DUGUID

Religion Trevor Williams THE ULTIMACY OF JESUS The language and logic of Christian commitment

184pp. Aureus Publishing. Paperback, £15. 978 I 89975042 9

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or Christians, the person of Jesus is definitive and ultimate. But this immediately raises a problem: the scandal of particularity. How can the life and death of one individual , in one time and place, have unequalled and authoritative significance for all times and places? With clarity and honesty, Trevor Williams outlines an answer in this short work of apologetics. Christian readers will be able to reflect on their commitment; non-Christians,

IN BRIEF on what is at stake in Christianity. Williams's case is built upon an analysis of person hood, borrowed from an existentialist philosophy that sees the goal of human life as that of becoming a person. This project must be conducted in relationship with other persons, most obviously in the case of the child in relation to its parents, whom Williams calls "person-makers" - though it follows that relationships can be "person-breakers" too, such is human nature. The difference that Jesus makes, for Christians, is that his appearance in history manifests a case of completely realized human personhood. Moreover, that person hood reveals the ultimate person hood of God, who is the supreme "person-maker". Hence, Jesus' s ultimacy - though this, of course, raises a host of allied questions. For Christians, these will include how such a Christology relates to elements including sacrifice, atonement, resurrection and lordship. Williams explores them, with reference to theologians informed by existentialism. For example, he appeals to Paul Tillich's suggestion that while the crucifixion was an event that became a symbol , the resurrection was a symbol that became an event, which is to say that whatever else it was, the experience of Good Friday and Easter Sunday was one of a complete shattering and then transformation of the disciples' humanity. For non-Christians, though, the scandal of particularity remains. They may agree that person hood is a category of fundamental importance, though still feel it is unclear how the remote life of Jesus can be more than a resonant placeholder for it. Or, they may wonder why God would restrict the complete actualization of personhood to him alone. The ultimacy of Jesus may be rationally defensible, but in the end, as Williams acknowledges, its affirmation is a question of faith. MARK VERNON

Literary Criticism JilI Matus SHOCK,MEMORYANDTHE UNCONSCIOUS IN VICTORIAN FICTION 247pp. Cambridge University Press. £55 (US $90). 978 0 521 76024 9

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n June 9, 1865, Charles Dickens was returning from France on the tidal express when his train left the rails at Staplehurst. All but one of the first-class carriagesthe one occupied by Dickens, Ellen Ternan and her mother - tumbled into a muddy ravine. Dickens clambered down, and did what he could to help the dead and dying, administering brandy and water to a man who was crushed beneath a carriage for half an hour until he died. It was only when he returned to London that he began to develop symptoms of some sort of psychic injury loss of voice, fearfulness , repeated attacks of what he called "the shake". A year later he still suffered from sudden, unaccountable paroxysms of terror, and he was often gripped, during train travel, by a fear that made him tremble and a delusion that his carriage was tilting dangerously. The delayed onset of these psychical injuries would today be recognized as typical of trauma; our understanding of trauma's workings, however, is intricately linked to Freud's

27

conception of the unconscious mind. As Jill Adonis, Romeo and Juliet and Othello, and to begin learning the arts of war that were later Matus shows in this fascinating book, Victo- make them fresh for the reader, exploring the turned against the British by, among others, rian theories of shock and trauma necessarily involuted rhetoric of the narcissist/suicide, one of Braddock's military family , a young relied on a rather different understanding of and its compulsively repetitive structures officer named George Washington. the architecture of the mind, and often empha- ("Narcissus so himself himself forsook"; NATHAN M. GREENFIELD sized the role of extreme emotion rather than "Myself thy friend will kill myself thy foe") , that of the repressive memory. This emo- with a clear sense of its ironies. Similarly, tional intensity had an understandable appeal although he draws on a huge range of priRuss WilIey to Victorian writers, and Matus provides mary material, he avoids the traps of what astute readings of novels by Dickens, might be called the "EEBO study" - in which BREWER ' S DICTIONARY OF LONDON PHRASE AND FABLE Gaskell, Eliot and Stevenson. She stresses online databases such as Early English Books 576pp. Brewer's. £25. the various ways in which Victorian fiction Online are used to string together swathes of not only pilfered these pretraumatic theories relatively undigested sources - through metic978 05 50 10445 8 for its plots, but also played an active role ulous attention to their intellectual and aesondon, its history, music, art and literature in imagining, observing and conceptualizing thetic concerns. Lucy MUNRO - and yes, its "psychogeography" - may the possible effects of shock on the psyche. In tracing these Victorian theories of shock have been the subject of countless voguish and the unconscious, Matus argues that books in the past few years, but that is because the city provides an almost inexhaustible suptrauma theory has much deeper cultural Thomas E, Crocker ply of material. In some respects the dictionroots, and a more contingent and complex ary is the ideal form for capturing the diverse, history, than many critics who apply trauma BRADDOCK ' S MARCH fragmentary yet often interconnected narratheory to Victorian texts seem prepared to How the man sent to seize a continent changed American history tives of the modern metropolis. And Russ acknowledge in their work. It is a salutary reminder, and Matus ' s book will take its Willey's book, which incorporates London 384pp. Westholme Publishing. place alongside others in the past decade that entries from the original Brewers Dictionary £25.95 (US $28). of Phrase and Fable alongside many new 978 I 594160967 have deepened our understanding of the links between psychological and novelistic innovaones, has much to commend it. At its best, uebec, Saratoga, Yorktown, Gettysburg, reading it is like dipping into WaIter Bentions in the Victorian age. DAVID MCALLISTER Sherman 's March to the Sea: reverse the jamin's Arcades Project. Willey, too, is an outcome of any of these battles and the map insatiable collector of prize facts. If anything, of North America would likely look very there is less editorializing here, though it Eric LangJey different. Thomas E. Crocker makes a good should be remembered that Benjamin was NARCISSISM AND SUICIDE case for the Battle of Monongahela, fought a often happy simply to present and juxtapose IN SHAKESPEARE AND HIS few miles from present-day Pittsburgh in interesting nuggets of information about CONTEMPORARIES 1755, belonging on this list. Had General Second Empire Paris. This is key to the charm 312pp. Oxford University Press. Edward Braddock defeated the French at Fort of both books. £50 (US $95). Entries in Brewer's London range from the Duquesne, the French and Indian War, as the 9780199541232 Seven Years War is known in North Amer- expected synoptic histories of particular ica, might have been over in a trice and, even areas, streets and buildings to more esoteric Self am not my Self, another same; more importantly, Britain would not have headwords. I doubt whether anyone will ever / Unlike my Self, and like my Self I imposed the taxes that were meant to pay for reach for this dictionary wondering what am: / Self-fond, Self-furious." George Good- the war, but which sparked the Revolution. "Greaze" is (a pancake-throwing game win's extraordinary poem, "Auto-Machia", (Crocker might also have noted, incidentally, played every Shrove Tuesday at Westminster encapsulates the concerns of Eric Langley 's that without la guerre de sept ans, France School), or how to cook an "alderman in deft and multifaceted study: the relationship might not have been bankrupt and Louis XVI chains" (defunct slang for a roast turkey garbetween narcissism and suicide, and its effect would not have had to call1es Etats Generaux nished with sausages). But the good thing on our understanding of early modern concep- and, perhaps, no revolutionfran,aise either.) about a dictionary like this is the opportunity tions of the self. Although seemingly diametThe strength of this book is not, however, it affords you to stumble on surprising inforrically opposed, the self-lover and the self- the "what ifs" nor even the account of mation - simply because it happens to be destroyer turn out to have much in common; Braddock's blunders; rather, it lies in alphabetically adjacent to the entry on your in some traditions, after all, Narcissus was Crocker's presentation of the battle and the local pub or favourite novelist. both. "My subject", Langley writes, " is the complicated logistics involved. The timeWilley's introduction sees this haphazard subject whose subject is himself', and he serving officer displayed all the predictable browsing as being central to "the Brewer's explores the ways in which the suist and the arrogance of his class. He rubbed the coloni- tradition" . In this spirit, he points readers to suicide "stand as negati ve exemplars of exces- als up the wrong way, refused to take military one of his own favourite entries, " little apples sive self-subjection and self-involvement, as advice from men who knew the terrain, lis- grow quickly please" , a mnemonic used by advocates of gratuitously isolationist self- tened to favourites and failed to arrange for taxi drivers (students of The Knowledge) to sufficiency ... cautionary figures of immod- timely intelligence, though, it must be remember the order of the theatres on Shafteserate individualism". stressed, in battle he turned out to be fearless. bury Avenue: Lyric, Apollo, Gielgud, Drawing extensively on Classical poets A strict disciplinarian, Braddock routinely Queen 's and Palace. There is a real pleasure and philosophers and their later translators reduced the number of lashes court martials in uncovering the layers of meaning that and redactors, on early modern theology and meted out. attach to different locations, and observing polemic, and on the work of Shakespeare and Despite the odds - numerous uncharted the ways in which they are constantly re-interhis fellow poets and playwrights, Narcissism mountain ranges, rivers and forbidding rock preted. The Brewer' s tradition is worth and Suicide explores an early modern dis- formations - he managed to move an army of upholding, in the digital age when a keyword course of selfhood which - although at times almost 2,000 men and twelve cannon, some search can take us directly to our destination it seems to have much in common with later borrowed from Royal Navy ships, from Vir- without the pleasant diversions sometimes Freudian and Lacanian models - also ginia's tidewaters hundreds of miles inland. forced on us by a paper dictionary. Willey's demands to be read on its own terms. For Politically tone-deaf, he nevertheless called decision to exclude references follows the Langley, "part of the aim of this study is the first "congress" of colonial governors and original Brewer's in providing a clean text, to identify an earlier grammar of self- managed to get three to agree to garrison Fort uncluttered by obtrusive bibliographical appareflection"; the book "seeks to understand Duquesne once it was in British hands, thus ratus. Yet some of the entries, terse as they Narcissus before Narcissism , reflexive self- setting the template for the Continental Con- are, are just too tantalizing, and leave the formation before the stade du miroir". gresses to come. Braddock's defeat and the reader wanting a reference to follow up. This One of the many strengths of this wholly thousands of colonists killed and taken pris- may seem a pedantic point - "more footabsorbing book is the quality of Langley's oner when the Indians allied with France set notes, please" - but dictionaries should satclose analysis. He has a rare ability to take the frontier aflame, undermined the coloni- isfy pedants, their most dedicated audience. much-discussed works such as Venus and als ' faith in British arms and forced them to MATTHEW TAUNTON

Reference

L

History

Q

"MY

TLS FEBRUARY 192010

28 here are two ways of dealing with the dangerous idea of civilization. One is historical , the other moral. The first is dangerous because it violates multicultural pieties by excluding tribal and indigenous peoples from honorific status, while the second is elitist and can hardly beat the charge of Eurocentrism. John Armstrong's search for the meaning of civilization is impatient about historical considerations, and defiantly, we might say - embraces the second option. In telling us what it is to be civilized he is also telling us how to be. He describes his book as a philosophical inquiry, but much of its charm results from its personal character. This is philosophy mitigated by autobiography. The very idea of civilization, Professor Armstrong argues, has been "tarnished" by its association with imperialism , and he invokes Matthew Arnold against the imperialist sentiments that may be found in Elgar and Kipling. Armstrong himself was depressed by a conference in London in 1989, when three speakers all agreed in denigrating "civilization". He is certainly right in thinking that the current academic fashion in Western universities is to parade our collective humility. Europeans have a culture no better than that of anyone else. Yet being Uriah Heepish about our technological inventiveness and sporadic passion to disseminate the benefits of human rights can hardly conceal the fact that European mores are unavoidably the basis of modern life. Most people, rightly conscious of the many problems that accompany an inventive technological culture, don ' t affect a sense of superiority. The fact remains that millions from other cultures are currently desperate to cross our borders in order to get out of their societies and into ours. The collective humility often expressed on our behalf by academic critics recalls that of academic Marxists in the last century affirming the moral superiority of a system of government from which its own subjects were desperate to escape. It is never wise to dismiss patterns of migration as clues to social reality. Armstrong wants to affirm civilization as a universal value incorporating such practices as sensitivity to artistic experience and a broad tolerance about the disagreements of civil life. This is a worthwhile project, and he executes it with considerable philosophical verve. It is, however, virtually impossible to detach the idea of civilization from its cultural roots. Armstrong does recognize that "the very things that bind an individual to a civilization also form a horizon of understanding" but he also (and justifiably) adumbrates as emerging from civilized conduct a "community of civilized people" who have "left behind the official loyalties of [their] society". Armstrong has no prohlem detaching himself from the imperialist attitudes of some of our forefathers, or from Christian dogma, but these are moves easily made in the context of available Western universalism. They are easily made because Western conceits of superiority are far more lightly lodged in our culture than those of even a highly sophisticated Muslim sage or Hindu mystic. In our Western parts, ideal characteristics such as rationality, openness to competing opinions, artistic sensitivity and so on will pass without challenge. Such responses need not, even at the ideal level, correspond

T

POLITICS

Us and them KENNETH MINOGUE John Armstrong IN SEARCH OF CIVILIZATION Remaking a tarnished idea 208pp. Allen Lane. Paperback, £ 14.99. 978 1 84604003 7

to the admirations of other cultures. Indeed, the fact is that on such central matters as the position of women, or the importance of tolerating other opinions, they virtually never do. It is striking, for example, that most civilizations except our own used to be deeply uninterested in the rest of the world. Muslim contempt for the dhimmi, or the Chinese belief that only barbarians are to be found beyond the Great Wall were certainly "horizons of understanding". One might even say that it has historically been a defining characteristic of civilizations that, believing they have discovered the truths necessary for the harmony of their own world, they necessarily construe outsiders as obviously in need of enlightenment. European societies are certainly subject to this temptation, but a continuous strand of sympathetic interest in how other societies live has never been absent. The disdain for other ways of life so widely found in other cultures has, of course, been transformed recently because of the need to come to terms with the West's overwhelming

power. Europeans have meanwhile been generating whole academic disciplines, such as anthropology and archaeology, which recognized the autonomy and value of other cultures. In contemporary fashion , Armstrong wants to detach the pure idea of civilization from the religious beliefs inseparable from civilizations in the past. Western civilization is, however, inexplicable except in terms of the intellectual history of Christian doctrine. The politics of a public world, the notion of experimental science, the individualism of a moral life detached from supernatural beliefs all emerge from Christian theology, which in turn resulted from the necessity of creating an orthodoxy on which a Church might be founded. Such an orthodoxy was argued out in terms of the Greek philosophical heritage as it had been passed on to the late Romans and their empire. One important problem of a free-floating philosophy of civilization may be illustrated by Armstrong' s remarkable sentence, "The West, as a whole, encountered industrialization and its problems earlier than any other part of the world". It certainly did, for the simple reason that Europeans alone among the cultures of the world had developed the intellectual and social conditions that made it possible for them to generate the prosperous world of today. That "encountered" is a masterpiece of (presumably unintended) mu 1-

ticultural humility. Modern industry emerged out of Western technological preoccupations, out of its concern for rationality, its commercial interests and other specific cultural features, along, no doubt, with the good fortune of having people with these ideas sitting on top of abundant raw materials. It was a unique experience. and not at all one that must necessarily have been replicated in an inevitable progress of mankind. Western creation of the industrial shape of modernity is clearly not a matter of superior intelligence or any other supposed superiority but of the fact that others lacked the social and intellectual superstructure that could generate so remarkable a creation. Multiculturalism rejects any claim of cultural superiority, and no doubt it is seldom plausible to judge one culture superior to another, across the board as it were, but logically speaking, every culture has a great variety of aspects, and these can indeed be validly compared with each other. We in the West, for example, are keen to codify our ethical opinions as a set of rights which we advance as suitable criteria for improving the conduct of all other peoples. In doing so, however, we may be exhibiting a certain distance from reality, and again, Armstrong may illustrate the point. His book usefully rubs the personal against the philosophical. At one point he talks of the problem of marshalling his children for the school run. His own father had experienced no such trouble, for "I was frightened of disobeying him. I do not think my children are afraid of disobeying me. I am glad they are not Armstrong' s account of civilization is thus, to cite Matthew Arnold, whom he so greatly admires, all "sweetness and light". Most civilizations, however, have not been based on sweetness and light, but often on slavery and oppression, and even in our own, there are charmless realities that we prefer not to make too prominent. Bismarck, never a man to shy away from brutalities, thought it better to avert one's eyes from the ways laws and sausages are made. Hobbes thought that in constructing a civil order "the passion to be reckoned on is fear". It is no doubt going too far, as de Maistre did, to base human societies on the executioner, but the nastier preconditions of civilization are things which our particular epoch finds unpalatable. We have become remarkably fastidious even about such elementary things as discipline in schools. The great virtue of Armstrong' s notion of civilization is that it captures the many important things we mean when we commend people as being "civilized". Being civilized is perhaps the most important of the discriminatory virtues, but in packing all good discriminations into the one concept, Armstrong threatens to leave us in a hi nary

A detail from a costume design by Inigo Jones for The Lords' Masque by Thomas Campion, performed at Whitehall on February 14, 1613; from Seven Ages ofBritain: The story of our nation revealed by its treasures by David Dimbleby et al (256pp. Hodder and Stoughton. £25. 978 0 340 99408 5)

TLS FEBRUARY 192010

world containing only civilized people on the one hand, and vulgar barbarians on the other. Discrimination must include other attitudes, such as a sense of absurdity and an acceptance of realism, if we are not to end up merely deploring the thoughtlessness of popular opinion or the folly of consumerism. Questions of merit cannot be settled , as he remarks, by money or majorities. On the other hand, too much civilisation can border on decadence. I am happy to salute his "community of civilized people" but I'm not sure I want to be a paid-up member of it.

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Wayfarers of Fate

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A Novel of the Spanish Civil War

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ILS

MEMOIRS

Wild Blevins

Telephone: 020 7782 5000 Fax: 020 7782 4966 [email protected] n Dece mber 1884, Rosina and Miles FIONA STAFFORD Hutchin son set off on foot from County Durham, carrying the ir toddler, William, Rog e r Hutchinson and accompanied by Miles's younger WALKING T O AMERI C A brother, Chri stopher. As they crossed the A boyhood dream Pennines, they gazed at the Iri sh Sea for 200pp. BirIinn. £9.99. the first time, before arri ving in the biggest 978 I 84 I58783 7 city they had ever encountered: Liverpool. Such sights were as nothing , however, to what they would experience once aboard begin s to acquire epic stature in the ir heroic ship, on a voyage that was extraordinary journey in search of a better life. and yet shared by thou sands. In the second The fascinating insights into America in half of the nineteenth ce ntury, the deci sion the making are nevertheless secondary to the to leave "the dirty, troubled old world central narrative which, by its very nature, behind and walk to America" was taken pieced together from parish records, Victorian by 6 million people from England, Ireland, travels, newspapers and family memories, Scotland and Wales - a fifth of the remains tantalizingly incomplete. Hutchinson population. Although Roger Hutchinson' s has painstakingly assembled the retrievable account of his great-grandparents' journey facts about hi s great-grandparents, but is intensely personal , it is also representa- without diaries or letters to fill in the gaps, his ti ve of a large, if little-known, area of Victo- readers are left to share his speculations about rian social hi story, and maintains a sense of the feelings and moti ves of these accidental the wider significance throughout. The lead- pioneers. ing players in hi s narrative may have found The revelation that Rosina was a bigane ither lasting fame nor fortun e, but the ir mi st, having married Miles Hutchinson

I

stori es are as compe lling as an y li ves of

without securin g a divorce from th e fath e r

the period , and are show n cross ing and fu sing with the great currents of American hi story. In the decade before the Hutchin son s headed westwards, for example, the Scotti sh immigrant Andrew Carnegi e had returned to the old country, visited Henry Bessemer's state-of-the-art steelworks in Sheffi e ld, and brought the new manufacturing methods back to Pittsburgh. The famil y from Durham , with their ex perience of mining bituminou s coal , accordingly made their way to Pittsburgh in search of work. Subseque nt events sent them on to Virginia and Loui siana, w here the aftermath of the Ci vil War still registered in the racial attitudes and cultural complex ion of local society. As they moved furth er west, they stopped in Dodge City ("the Wickedest town in the West") before settling at last in Holbrook, Arizona , during a bri ef period of re lative calm between the violent conflict wi th the Apaches and the arri val of the Hash-knife cowboys . Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday and Geronimo all make brief appearances in the Hutchinson s' story, though the ir high profiles are often less me morable than the passing anecdotes of famili es such as the Blevin s, gunned dow n by the new Sheriff of Holbrook after a saloon di spute. The vast hi story of a vast nation extends far beyond the expansion of the European s

of her first child, makes her journey to America as much a flight as a quest, even though she was apparently following her sisters across the Atlantic. These sisters continued to prompt her travels: Kate's blindness meant that the whole famil y moved whenever news arri ved of a self-made optician or faith hea ler who promi sed a new treatment for restoring sight. Rachel' s mysterious di sappearance took them as far south as New Orleans, where their brother-in-law seemed to have gone to ground in the large and lawless Irish community. Failure to recover either Kate's eyesight or the lost Rache l was eventua ll y compounded by the death of Miles and Rosina 's two baby daughters in Holbrook: the exhumation of the ir newly buried remains by hungry jackal s marked the nadir. Far from turning out to be a land of milk and honey, America had proved no better than the dirty, troubled old world they had left behind , and so, like millions of other European e migrants, they eventually went home. How such experiences affected the Hutchinson s is a matter for each reader' s imagination , but the care with which their desce ndant has assembled the fragments provides a powerful e motional charge . Their ti reless pursuit of remedies fo r life 's various blows is interspersed with glimpses of the author' s quest for meaning among the puzzlin g hints visible in his grandfather' s bungalow. The journey deeper and deeper into America is thu s historical as well as geographical, offerin g readers the crossing coordinates of different generations. The emigrants' return to Tyneside is matched by Roger Hutchin son ' s recognition that the Buffalo nicke l inherited from hi s grandfather could not, after all , have been picked up in the Wild West, since it was minted many years after hi s departu re . If neither journey's e nd offered quite the sati sfaction anticipated by the travellers, however, the book that has e merged from them is an unexpected treasure.

in the nine teenth ce ntury, and so Hutchin-

son' s account pau ses to sweep back million s of years to the Late Triassic period , when Arizona was a tropical forest fill ed with ferns, ri vers and dinosaurs. As volcanic ash soaked into the fall en conifers, the fertile jungle graduall y became a petrified forest, fill ed with preciou s stones and meta ls and later chri stened " the Painted Desert" . Such awe-inspiring back-stories enabl e the author to infu se his ancestors' me moir with colours so rich that they seem magnified rather than dwarfed by America' s immensity. The unassumin g family from T yne and Wear

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Richard J, Aldrich is Professor of International Security at the University of Warwick where he directs the Arts and Humanities Research Council's "Landscapes of Secrecy" project. Akin Ajayi writes for the Jerusalem Post and This Day, the Nigerian national newspaper. Zoe Anderson is the author of The Royal Ballet: Seventy-five years, which was published in 2006. She is the dance critic for the Independent. Jayne Elisabeth Archer is co-editor (with Elizabeth Clarke, and Elizabeth Goldring) of the five volumes of John Nichols's The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth I, 2009. Carol Birch' s books include Turn Again Home, 2004, and The Naming of Eliza Quinn , 2006. Her most recent novel , Scapegallows, appeared in paperback in 2008. J, Brookes is the editor of the poetry magazine, The Yellow Crane. His collection of poems The Dresden Cantata was published in 2008. Michael Caines edited a volume on David Garrick in the Lives of the Shakespearian Actors series, 2008, and has contributed to The Oxford Companion to the Book, published this year. He is writing a doctoral thesis on the plays of Nicholas Rowe. AIex CIark is a freelance writer. Nicholas Clee' s most recent book Eclipse, about the eighteenth-century racehorse, appears in paperback this month. He is the joint editor of Book Brunch, a book industry newsletter. James Doelman is an Associate Professor of English at Brescia University College,

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Lindsay Duguid is the Fiction editor of the TLS. Samantha Ellis' s play Cling To Me Like Ivy opened at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre on February 15.

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SOLUTION TO CROSSWORD 817 '/J1e winner of Crossword 81 7 is

Tom Hughes, Capetowfl.

London E98 I SS.

Carolyne Larrington is Tutor in Old and Middle English Literature at St John's College, Oxford. Her book King Arthur's Enchantresses: Morgan and her sisters in Arthurian tradition was published in 2006, and her translation of The Poetic Edda in 2008.

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ACROSS 1 Unfini shed shroud from 28 (9,3) 9 "Thi s time he wo uld not bid me enterl The exhausted air-bell of - - " (B row ning. Christmas-Eve) (3,6) 10 Boy proceeding by degrees with a shrub (5) 11 Hi s w ife refu sed to turn over a page (6) 12 Playwright made the arrows, perhaps, but no t the slings (8)

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13 Muir's landed property of verse (6) 15 Burden shouldered by Aeneas (8) 18 Hi s legs dramatically revealed in 1736 (8)

6 One happeni ng to be associated with

19 Proprietors of Churchill play (6)

21 It was o n the cards for Dennis (8) 23 Moore heroine associated with Bath The sender of the first correct solution opened on March 12 will receive a cash pri ze of £40. Entries should be addressed to TLS C rossword 82 1, Tim es Hou se, I Pennington Street,

in Sussex. She is writing a book about the River Ouse and Virginia Woolf.

David McAllister teaches English Literature Nathan Greenfield' s book Baptism of at the University of York. He is writing a Fire: The Second Battle of Ypres and the forg- book on grief in Victorian literature. ing of Canada, April 1915, was published in 2007. Kenneth Minogue is Emeritus Professor of Political Science at the London School of John Habgood was formerly Archbishop of Economics. His books include A Very Short York. His books include Church and Nation Introduction to Politics, 2000, and Alien in a Secular Age, 1983, Being a Person: Powers: The pure theory of ideology, 2001. Where faith and science meet, 1998, and The Lucy Munro is a lecturer at Keele UniversConcept of Nature, 2002. ity. She was editor of the Globe Quarto's Stephen Henighan' s books include a novel, edition of Edward Sharpham' s Th e Fleer last The Streets of Winter, 2004, a collection of year and her book, Children of the Queen 's short stories, A Grave in the Air, and a collec- Revels: A Jacobean theatre repertory, was tion of essays, A Report on the Afterlife of published in 2005. Culture, both 2008. He teaches Spanish American Literature at the University of Heather O'Donoghue is a Reader in Old Norse at the University of Oxford. She is the Guelph, Ontario. author of From Asgard to Valhalla: The Paul Henry 's The Brittle Sea: New and remarkable history of the Norse myths, 2008. selected poems will be publi shed in the autumn. Navtej Sarna is India' s Ambassador to Israel. His most recent novel , The Exile, was Andrew Kahn is the editor of published last year by Penguin India. Montesquieu's The Persian Letters (translated by Margaret Mauldon), 2008 , and EIaine Showalter is Professor Emerita of the author of Pushkin 's Lyric Intelligence, English at Princeton University, and a 2008. He is Tutor in Modern Languages at Research Fellow at the Huntington Library in California. Her most recent book is A Jury of St Edmund Hall , Oxford. Her Peers: American women writers from Anthony Kenny, a former Master of Balliol Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx, 2009. College, is the author of the four volumes of Oxford University Press's New History of Adam I, P, Smith is Senior Lecturer in Western Philosophy, which appeared in American History at University College paperback last year. London. He is the author of No Party Now: Politics in the Civil Wa r North, 2006, and Olivia Laing is a freelance journalist living The American Civil War, 2007.

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University of Western Ontario. He is the author of King Jam es I and the Religious Culture of England, 2000.

hea ler (6)

26 Leve l bet on directions taken by First Lady (5) 27 Rare poet identifi ed w ith every man (9) 28 Uni versity Wit who spared a groat's worth (6, 6)

1 How to soothe a dog sent to Coventry? (7)

2 Betsy Trotwood would have preferred David to be a great one (5) 3 "-", said Pnin , lifting two fingers , "has ex pressed everything about mermaids in only two poems" (Vladimir Nabokov) (9) 4 Herbert found it in sufficient (4) 5 Infantile poet with cava li er attitude? (8) wisdoms by Donald Davie (5)

7 " In her the - of all heavenl y grace / In chiefe degree are heaped up on hye" (Spenser, The Faerie Queene) (8) 8 Island fo lklorist (6)

14 Some persistent urge, ne ver quite followed, to be a noveli st (8) 16 Architect sell s heath ? (9) 17 Apt to be sighted, say, like a loud dust jacket? (8)

18 American writer posted publicity (6) 20 Odd as Garfield's affair of Adelaide 8 (7) 22 Poet given to concea ling love (5) 24 Some unu sual cl othes seen on German poet (5)

25 One of R. D. Laing' s sandpipers? (4)

TLS FEBRUAR Y 192010

Fiona Stafford's books include Starting Lines in Scottish, Irish, and English Poetry: From Burns to Heaney, 2000, and, most recently, Jane Austen, part of the Brief Lives series , 2008. John Stokes is the author of The French Actress and Her English Audience, 2005 , and co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to the Actress, 2007. Matthew Taunton is a writer and academic. His books include Fictions of the City: Class, culture and mass housing in London and Paris, 2009. Alan Taylor is co-editor (with Irene Taylor) of The Assassin 's Cloak: An anthology of the world 's greatest diarists, 2001. Howard Thomas is Emeritus Professor of Biological, Environmental and Rural Sciences at the University of Aberystwyth Richard Marggraf Turley is Director of Postgraduate Studies and a Reader in English at the University of Aberystwyth where he is also the co-founder and co-director of the Centre for Romantic Studies. He is the author of Bright Stars: John Keats, Barry Cornwall and Romantic Literary Culture, 2009. Mark Vernon is the author of Plato's Podcasts: The Ancients' guide to modern living, which appeared in paperback last year, and editor of the Chambers Dictionary of Beliefs and Religions, also 2009. Hugo WilIiams's most recent collection of poems, West End Final, and a new edition of his selection of John Betjeman 's poems, were both published last year. A, N, Wilson 's most recent non-fiction books include Betjeman: A Life, 2006, and Our Times: The age of Elizabeth 11, which appeared in paperback last year. His most recent novel is Winnie and Wolf, 2007.

32

J.

D. Salinger and the "heavily edited" British edition of The Catcher in the Rye, contd. Following Salinger's death on January 27 , a friend who worked in publishing for many years told us about a rumour concerning "huge" differences between the British and American editions of The Catcher in the Rye. The changes, so the story went, "were down to an over-enthusiastic copy editor". We duly raised the question in NB on February 5, and again on February 12. Our necessarily hasty comparison of the US and UK settings (using the original Penguin of 1958) revealed no discrepancies, except the excision of six occurrences of the word "fuck" in the novel's penultimate chapter. Holden Caulfield is disgusted when he spies "Fuck you" written on a wall in his sister Phoebe ' s school. A British publisher could not risk this, and the expression was reduced to "- you", fooling no one while shielding sensitive readers. Meanwhile, the Guardian carried a letter from Tim Bates, the Penguin editor who oversaw the British reissue of The Catcher in the Rye in 1994. Mr Bates told readers of the newspaper that "the existing text had been heavily edited by Hamish Hamilton in the 1950s: profanities had been censored". He offered no examples, however, which left us feeling sceptical. We appealed to learned readers for help. And thus help has arrived. Richard Davenport-Hines writes to suggest that "the question whether the UK edition of The Catcher

Just one word in the Rye was censored by Hamish Hamilton" might be settled by a letter from the publisher to Bernard Berenson , dated February 6, 1952. It resides in what Mr Davenport-Hines calls "the gloriously rich Berenson archives at I Tatti". Jamie Hamilton wrote: When I read the novel , I was taken aback by the monotony of the schoolboy repetitions, by the blasphemy, by the dirtiness, and I realized that it was bound to fail here, whatever might happen in America. Yet the book seemed to me to have the saving graces of humour and veri similitude and a certain pathos, and I felt , and feel, confidence in Salinger' s future. In addition to this, the author, in spite of an obstinate streak which made him refu se to allow us to alter a word in our edition, is one of the most likeabl e and intelligent people I've e ver met.

Hamilton did alter one word, as noted above. Unless others come to light, the myth of a "heavily edited" UK edition of The Catcher in the Rye will have to be buried.

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he Oxford Dictionary of Sports Studies "brand new" - is full of wonders. Here's

one:

Crip theory: A strand of critical cultural analysis that, alongside "queer perspectives and practices", has "been deployed to re sist the contemporary spectacle of able-bodied heteronormativity" .

You probably don't need us or crip theory's inventor Robert McCruer to point out that crip derives from "the derogatory word ' cripple"', and that hooking it up to "theory" is an act of reclamation. Other entries include Match analysis, defined as "The analysis of patterns of play ... in matches"; "Emotion: A psychological state arousing feelings such as happiness ... ", and "Fitness tests: Tests of physical performance used to measure . fitness". We hadn't thought of Josephine Baker as a sportswoman until we read that her dance in the banana skirt "extended the boundaries of physical performance at a time when the sporting body was still very much clothed" . It would be wrong to say that the only thing missing from the Oxford Dictionary of Sports Studies , compiled by Alan Tomlinson (OUP, £12.99), is sport. Still, you might be surprised at what you come across in the list of recognized sports federations. There is the Federation of International Bandy and the Biathlon Union. There are societies for Floorball, Korfball and Wushu, and presumably match analysis, emotion and fitness testing relating to all. "Life Saving" is a recognized sport, as is "Dancesport". We looked under D for "drugs", to see what the Dictionary had to say about the most problematical issue in modern sport, but found nothing. We did read about "Drum dance" - "A body cultural event of the Inuit" - and "Duncan, Isadora", who "broadened the boundaries of acceptability of performative bodily cultures". Now we know about Ulmaliztil, a ball game popular among the Aztecs, and Ca1cio, a form of football played in Renaissance Florence. We also learnt that Chess and Bridge are officially recognized sports.

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he above picture of a semicolon being intimidated by parentheses is taken from a peculiar book called In the Land of Punctuation , an illustrated version of a poem by the German writer Christian Morgenstern (1871 - 1914). It describes how "the peaceful land of Punctuation" is disturbed by semi-

e

colons. Commas assemble to see them off: Within the hour they form their troops, an anti-semicolon group.

No sooner have the semicolons been despatched than dashes arrive and "cut across the commas' necks". The action concludes with a speech by an exclamation mark. In the Land of Punctuation (Tara Books of India, distributed in the UK by Frances Lincoln; £9.99) is translated by Sirish Rao and illustrated by Rathna Ramanathan.

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reader writes to our Marketing Department from the Bronx, NY: "I should very much like to purchase a copy of The TLS Reviewer's Handbook, available I believe by calling the New Jersey office". Now that is news, and slightly worrisome news at that. We understood that we were in charge of the long-awaited revised edition, which - or so we thought - is still in preparation. When the first copy becomes available, we will present it, avec I'expression de nos sentiments distingues, to Charles Portier of Paris. Standards are declining everywhere, M Portier writes to tell us (on a lovely manual typewriter). "No better example than your own writing." While he is kind enough to credit us with a "personal style" , it is "deplorable". It is "deformed" . M Portier offers an example from NB, January 15, in which we stated that Albert Camus "was killed on his way to Paris in a Facel Vega" . Enter M Portier: "No, J. c., Camus was not ' killed ' . To kill implies a weapon. Camus died, or perished". We forwarded this distinction to the team of lexicologists toiling on the Revised Edition. In spite of the difficult conditions in which they labour, the reply came shooting back: "To kill means destroy, to deprive of life; 'Camus was killed' : okay". M Portier complained about many other things in the TLS of January 15. It is wrong to use "'wade" unless referring to "'waist high water" . If our reader in the Bronx tracks down a copy of the Handbook in New Jersey, perhaps he could get us one, too.

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