Stefan Collini: What next for the BBC?

VOLUME 44 NUMBER 8 21 ApRiL 2022 £5.45 US $7.99 CANADA $8.49

Andrew O’Hagan:
My Kingdom for
a Mint Cracknel

Colin Burrow:
Pope’s Luck

Emily Witt:
Sheila Heti’s
New Cosmology

Tom Crewe:
Totally Tourgenueff

Arianne Shahvisi:
What It Costs to Live
 In the latest issue
war for ukraine

‘The dichotomy between two explan­

atory schemas—one emphasizing
nato expansion, the other the long­
hidden force of Russian nationalism;
one supposedly exculpating Russia,
the other muting the role of nato—is
false. The emergence of an assertive
and militarized Russian nationalism
is inextricable from the process of
nato expansion, because it was in
large part propelled and reinforced by
it. Russian nationalist fantasies have
been enmeshed with geo­strategic
calculations, the advancement of
oligarchic interests with the self­
preservation of the “imitation
democratic” system. What weight we
assign to these factors can be debated;
but that they simultaneously exist
should not.’
—Tony Wood

Also in nlr 133/4: politics in Ukraine

and Russia; digital feudalism; us &
uk lefts; theorizing ‘race’; radical
criticism; black cinema. Plus book
reviews: Hito Steyerl on Stallabrass,
Killing for Show; William Harris on
Issa Shivji’s critical life of Nyerere; Joy
Neumeyer on Frye’s Putin.

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2 london Review of booKs 21 April 2022

 London Review of Books
vo l UM e 4 4 n U M b e R 8 21 ApRil 2022 £ 5 . 4 5 U s $ 7 . 9 9 C A nA dA $ 8 . 4 9

4 Letters Felix Cowan, Craig McFarlane, Thomas Grant, Roger Booker, Gerry Harrison, editoRs: Jean McNicol, Alice Spawls
senioR editoRs: Paul Laity,
John Hendry, Conrad Natzio, Albion Urdank, Holly Trusted, Joe Waters
Paul Myerscough, Daniel Soar
AssoCiAte editoRs: Tom Crewe, Joanne O’Leary
5 Stefan Collini The BBC: A People’s History by David Hendy
AssistAnt editoR: Daniel Cohen
This Is the BBC: Entertaining the Nation, Speaking for Britain? 1922-2022 editoRiAl AssistAnt: Ben Walker
by Simon J. Potter editoRiAl inteRns: Malin Hay, Gazelle Mba
ContRibUting editoRs:
8 Andrew O’Hagan Extinct: A Compendium of Obsolete Objects edited by Barbara Penner, James Butler, Deborah Friedell, Jeremy Harding,
Rosemary Hill, John Lanchester, Patricia Lockwood,
Adrian Forty, Olivia Horsfall Turner and Miranda Critchley Hilary Mantel, James Meek, David Runciman,
Steven Shapin, Amia Srinivasan, Colm Tóibín,
9 Erin Maglaque Love: A History in Five Fantasies by Barbara Rosenwein Jenny Turner, Marina Warner, Michael Wood
editoR-At-lARge: Andrew O’Hagan
11 Tom Crewe A Nest of Gentlefolk and Other Stories Us editoR: Adam Shatz
by Ivan Turgenev, translated by Jessie Coulson online editoR: Thomas Jones
speCiAl pRojeCts: Sam Kinchin-Smith
Love and Youth: Essential Stories
by Ivan Turgenev, translated by Nicolas Pasternak Slater and Maya Slater ConsUlting editoR: Mary-Kay Wilmers
ConsUlting pUblisheR: Nicholas Spice
12 Arianne Shahvisi Short Cuts
CReAtive diReCtoR: Christopher Thompson
16 Emily LaBarge At the Hayward typesetting: Sue Barrett, Anna Swan
pAste-Up: Bryony Dalefield
17 Jonathan Parry Entente Imperial: British and French Power in the Age of Empire by Edward J. Gillin designeR: Lola Bunting
pRodUCtion: Ben Campbell
20 Jen Stout In Tulcea CoveR: Anne Rothenstein

21 John Foot Holy War: The Untold Story of Catholic Italy’s Crusade against the Egyptian Orthodox Church pUblisheR: Reneé Doegar
finAnCe diReCtoR: Taj Singh
by Ian Campbell finAnCe: Manjinder Chana,
Antoinette Gicheva, Marija Radonjić
22 Anne Carson On Snow AdveRtising diReCtoR: Kate Parkinson
heAd of sAles: Natasha Chahal
23 Emily Witt Pure Colour by Sheila Heti sAles AssistAnt: Ellie Redfern
CiRCUlAtion MAnAgeR: Chris Larkin
24 Mary Wellesley In Hereford CUstoMeR seRviCe eXeCUtive: Tim Hayward
pRodUCt MAnAgeR: Francesca Garbarini
25 Lucie Elven The Fool and Other Moral Tales by Anne Serre, translated by Mark Hutchinson
heAd of sUbsCRiptions: Laura Reeves
The Beginners by Anne Serre, translated by Mark Hutchinson MARKeting MAnAgeR: Rachna Sheth
Retention MAnAgeR: Flavia Collins
28 Michael Wood At the Movies senioR MARKeting eXeCUtive: Cassie Gibson
pRodUCt developMent: Jill Tytherleigh
29 Owen Bennett-Jones Stonehouse: Cabinet Minister, Fraudster, Spy by Julian Hayes heAd of fACilities: Radka Webb
John Stonehouse, My Father: The True Story of the Runaway MP by Julia Stonehouse fACilities Co-oRdinAtoRs:
Kwadwo Acheampong, Corinne Delaney
31 Colin Burrow Alexander Pope in the Making by Joseph Hone heAd of pRodUCtion: Rachael Beale
digitAl pRodUCeR: Anthony Wilks
The Poet and the Publisher by Pat Rogers web: Jeremy Harris, Georgios Tsiagkalakis
teChniCAl diReCtoR: Tom Gosling
32 Jorie Graham Poem: ‘Time Frame’ it MAnAgeR: Danial Price
website editoR: Alexandra Tzirkoti
35 Liam Shaw Slime: A Natural History by Susanne Wedlich, translated by Ayça Türkoğlu
37 Christopher English Pastoral: An Inheritance by James Rebanks In the next issue, which will be dated 12
de Bellaigue Field Work: What Land Does to People and What People Do to Land by Bella Bathurst May: Donald MacKenzie on online advertis-
ing; Keith Thomas on witch trials; Azadeh
40 Richard Sanger Diary Moaveni reports from the Polish border.

Christopher de Bellaigue is writing a series Tom Crewe’s first novel, The New Life, is due Erin Maglaque is a historian at Sheffield. Liam Shaw is a postdoctoral fellow at the
of books about Suleyman the Magnificent. in January. MacLean Lab in Oxford, researching bacter-
Andrew O’Hagan,the LRB’s editor at large, ial genetics.
Owen Bennett-Jones interviews authors for Lucie Elven’s novel The Weak Spot is out now. teaches at HM Prison Kilmarnock.
a weekly show on the New Books Network. Jen Stout is still in Romania.
John Foot’s history of Italian fascism, Blood Jonathan Parry’s Promised Lands: The British
Colin Burrow’s most recent book is Imitat- and Power, will be published in June. and the Ottoman Middle East has just been pub- Mary Wellesley’s Hidden Hands came out
ing Authors: Plato to Futurity. lished. He teaches history at Cambridge. last year. Encounters with Medieval Women, co-
Jorie Graham teaches at Harvard. Her next presented with Irina Dumitrescu, can be
Anne Carson’s H of H Playbook is a translat- book, [To] The Last [Be] Human, is out in Richard Sanger’s most recent collection of found via LRB podcast.
ion of Euripides’ Herakles. September. poems is Dark Woods.
Emily Witt is the author of Future Sex.
Stefan Collini’s edition of George Orwell’s Emily LaBarge is writing a book about Arianne Shahvisi is writing a book about
Selected Essays was published last year. trauma and narrative. the philosophy of social justice. Michael Wood is always working.

London Review of Books, 28 Little Russell Street, London wC1A 2hn. editoRiAl tel: 020 7209 1101; fax: 020 7209 1102; email: edit@lrb.co.uk; www.lrb.co.uk
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3 london Review of booKs 21 April 2022

Letters
son, was alive to the difficulties the pas­ centre of Belfast while trying to make a he remained unmolested. Lee lost Arling­
sage posed for the defence. When he rais­ film (LRB, 10 March). I had rented an of­ ton, but what about the other Custis prop­
ed his concerns with Penguin’s main wit­ fice near the Lisburn Road and commuted erties he had inherited through marriage?
Paper Cuts nesses, the academics Graham Hough and from my digs on a borrowed bike. It was He was stripped of his US citizenship, but
Malin Hay writes about the ‘longest strike Helen Gardner, they dismissed his inter­ the marching season and the Drumcree left to live out his last years comfortably
in the history of the Finnish paper indu­ pretation. But another potential witness, stand­off was imminent. The bike didn’t as president of Washington College (later
stry’ (LRB, 24 March). This is a long hist­ Harold Nicolson, wrote in a letter to Hutch­ have lights. It was midsummer, but start­ Washington and Lee University). Convict­
ory. In the early 20th century, Finland inson before the trial: ing to get dark, so I decided to pack up and ion for high treason was normally follow­
was the chief paper supplier for periodicals cycle home. I could hear the flutes and ed by hanging and the confiscation of
I thought at one time that I might be pre­
across the Russian empire. Leading news­ drums of an Orange march nearby. When estates; radical Republicans pressed for
pared to say that I was certain that Lawrence
papers as far away as Odessa relied on did not intend the book to be pornographic,
I turned onto the Lisburn Road the par­ harsher punishment, but were defeated
shipments of high­quality Finnish paper but wished to write a lyrical essay on normal ade, about eighty strong, stretched out in by Lincoln’s stricture, happily followed by
for their daily printing. Having looked sex relationships. On reading it again, how­ front of me. Mindful that I had no lights his Southern successor, Andrew Johnson,
at thousands of these newspapers, I can ever, I realise that Lady Chatterley’s relations and that the RUC were strung along the to display ‘malice toward none and char­
attest to the enduring quality of Finnish with the gamekeeper were not any more road, I swung out and cycled past the ity for all’. This grave error allowed the
paper, even for newsprint intended to be normal than those which he had impos­ parade. I came up to the Lambeg drums at South to remain unreconciled to defeat,
ed upon his unfortunate wife. Rubinstein
ephemeral. A hundred years later it is the front. Beside them was ‘security’: two paving the way for the emergence of Jim
[Penguin’s solicitor] failed to notice this
often dirty and brittle, but still intact and point and was rather shocked when I ment­
or three men with tattoos, rings, leather Crow. The naming of ships and forts after
legible. ioned it. But I imagine that those whom the and muscle. The next thing I knew I was Confederate generals in the 20th cent­
After the outbreak of the First World attorney general has chosen to brief him will thrown off the bike and given a good kick­ ury marked an effort to mobilise South­
War, inflation and strain on the Russian have caught on to the point, and that in cross­ ing. All the while the parade marched past. ern feeling for the old cause in the serv­
transportation network meant interrupt­ examination I should have to admit that the Lying on the roadside, I uncurled myself ice of the Union, amounting to a form of
ions to the paper supply from Finland. sexual relations between the hero and hero­ and opened my eyes. A policeman was pandering.
ine were not in the least normal, and to that
Distant newspapers resorted to buying looking down at me. ‘Never overtake the Lee’s attitude towards slavery, as Karp
extent the book was ‘liable to corrupt’ within
locally produced but lower quality paper, the meaning of the [Obscene Publications
Orange Order,’ he said and strode away suggests, remained recalcitrant, but was
and it shows: higher daily prices, decay­ Act 1959]. after the parade. probably worse than he, and Guelzo’s book,
ing newsprint, and fewer or smaller pages Gerry Harrison let on. Had Lee not sued in court to re­
per issue. Editors at the time reported Penguin called 35 ‘expert’ witnesses to Lewes, East Sussex verse the manumission of slaves granted
drops in circulation, despite the immense speak to the literary merit and moral signi­ by Mary Custis’s father, on coming into
demand for war news, because of the ir­ ficance of Lawrence’s novel, though Nicol­ I Shall, You Will possession of the estate? And his willing­
regular supply of paper. son was not one of them. Hutchinson re­ My wife says she learned the rule about ness to sacrifice the lives of his troops in
Felix Cowan called his anxiety that Griffith­Jones would ‘shall’ and ‘will’ from Kennedy’s Latin battle, almost gratuitously, shocked even
Champaign, Illinois cross­examine on the difficult passage and Primer, first published in1875, and I think some of his own generals. The demolit­
was astonished that in the event it was never I must have too (Letters, 10 March and ion of the cult of Robert E. Lee is long
Two Cultures raised with any of the defence witnesses. 7 April). The older editions read ‘I shall, overdue.
Adam Mars­Jones refers to ‘Newton’s sec­ By the time Griffith­Jones made the veil­ thou wilt, he will [it was written for boys], Albion Urdank
ond law of thermodynamics’ (LRB, 7 April). ed reference in his speech to the jury it we shall, ye will, they will.’ By our time Los Angeles
The second law of thermodynamics is un­ was too late. But at the beginning of the this had been modernised somewhat, but
usual among scientific laws in that it can’t trial Hutchinson thought an acquittal was the ‘shall’ and ‘will’ (and the masculine) Bronze and Soap
be attributed to a single person, but we by no means guaranteed. He believed that remained. It isn’t clear where Kennedy I enjoyed Linda Gregerson’s poem ‘Melt­
can be confident that Isaac Newton didn’t Griffith­Jones’s reticence may well have had got this from. The standard usage in his ing Equestrian (Cavendish Square)’, about
have a hand in it, if only because he died a profound impact on the history of censor­ time was to distinguish between ‘will’ and the two statues of the Duke of Cumberland
about a hundred years before it was form­ ship in this country. ‘would’, for simple indicative and subjunct­ (‘Butcher Cumberland’) that have stood in
ulated. Credit has to go to the tragically Thomas Grant ive moods, and ‘shall’ and ‘should’ as carry­ the square (LRB, 24 March). Perhaps I could
short­lived French scientist Nicolas Sadi Maitland Chambers, London WC2 ing some element of ‘ought’, irrespective take the opportunity to note the names of
Carnot (1796­1832), but the second law in of person. While this was – and still is – the sculptors: John Cheere (1709­87), who
its modern form is usually attributed to the Humble Skill quite clear in the case of ‘should’, it was executed the first gilt bronze monument,
German physicist Rudolf Clausius (1822­ Jo­Ann Wallace’s piece on typing, in part­ always much less so for ‘shall’. As Dr John­ and the contemporary Korean sculptor
88), who in the process introduced the icular her emphasis on the importance of son observed, ‘the explanation of shall, Meekyoung Shin, who created the soap
slippery concept of entropy. Other names anticipation, put me in mind of the work which foreigners and provincials confound version.
(Kelvin, Carathéodory) are part of the com­ psychologists and physiologists were do­ with will, is not easy.’ And without a clear Holly Trusted
plicated story. It may be true, as Mars­ ing in the 1950s to develop a theory that distinction, Kennedy’s usage does make a Public Statues and Sculpture Association
Jones claims, that ‘general readers are no behaviour is sequentially organised (LRB, kind of sense. To say ‘You shall’ would be Duns Tew, Oxfordshire
more likely to be able to describe [the sec­ 24 February). Karl Lashley, having observ­ to suggest a command. To say ‘I will’ would
ond law] than they were in 1959, when ed that many typing errors, particularly at be to suggest a lack of commitment or Not All Roses
C.P. Snow lamented the gap between the the end of words, were essentially anticip­ self­control. I was surprised to read Florence Sutcliffe­
“two cultures”,’ but a useful (if facetious) atory of the next word, argued that the John Hendry Braithwaite’s cheery account of Welsh de­
guide to all three laws of thermodynamics sequencing of behaviour was organised Girton College, Cambridge volution, in particular her suggestion that
was offered in the American Scientist in March through cognitive plans, not (as the then a ‘radical’ economic approach has been
1964: dominant behaviourist theories propos­ For first­person use at any rate, ‘shall’ and undertaken by Welsh Labour (LRB, 7 April).
First law: You can’t win, you can only break
ed) as a chain of letter by letter stimulus­ ‘will’ have surely become interchangeable This seems at odds with reality. Child pov­
even. response mechanisms. This is nicely illus­ north of the Border (and indeed in Ire­ erty has worsened in recent years, so that
Second law: You can only break even at ab­ trated by Wallace’s sense that even as she land). ‘Will I come in?’ a hesitant young one in three Welsh children now live in
solute zero. is typing the word ‘anticipation’, she is al­ Scottish reporter asks in David Bone’s Land­ poverty, the highest rate in the UK. Educ­
Third law: You can’t reach absolute zero. ready prepared for ‘the falling into place of fall at Sunset (1955), teetering at the door of ational attainment remains very low, with
that concluding “tion” which . . . falls trip­ his busy London editor. ‘God knows!’ is less than a third of pupils eligible for free
Craig McFarlane pingly from the fingers’. Lashley’s theory the impatient reply. school meals achieving five or more A*­C
Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire was one of the first nails in the coffin of Conrad Natzio grades at GCSE. In the year to March 2020,
behaviourism and presaged the ‘cognitive Woodbridge, Suffolk homelessness in Wales was at its highest
The Little Red Schoolbook revolution’ in psychology. level since records began, with more than
Stephen Sedley refers to the closing speech Roger Booker Demolition Overdue thirty thousand households applying for
of Mervyn Griffith­Jones, acting as pro­ London SW4 In his review of Allen Guelzo’s biography homelessness assistance. It is strange to
secutor in the Lady Chatterley’s Lover trial, in of Robert E. Lee, Matthew Karp doesn’t see a country undergoing such a sustained
which he alluded to a passage in the novel On the Lisburn Road mention the relative leniency with which period of economic decline celebrated as a
that clearly described an act of anal inter­ Susan McKay’s Diary about the political Lee and other Confederate leaders were beacon of radicalism.
course (LRB, 10 March). The junior coun­ situation in Northern Ireland took me back treated in defeat (LRB, 7 April). Jefferson Joe Waters
sel for Penguin Books, Jeremy Hutchin­ to the mid­1980s, when I was living in the Davis was allowed to return home, where Newport

4 london Review of booKs 21 apRil 2022

A Beebology
ttitudes to the BBC are, for the rest of the country were very much of the
most part, spirit-sappingly predict- same type. Shared backgrounds and cult-
able. Politicians of all parties believe ural attitudes smoothed the way, and the
it is biased against them. One powerful
lobby claims it is a hotbed of radicals bent Stefan Collini ‘just a quiet word in your ear’ approach was
relied on to sort out differences before they
on undermining national identity, another became too pronounced. Potter notes the
that it is the mouthpiece of the establish- The BBC: A People’s History recommendation of the parliamentary com-
ment. Some critics denounce the licence by David Hendy. mittee overseeing the charter review in 1936
fee as insulating the BBC against the brac- Profile, 638 pp., £25, January, 978 1 78125 525 4 that ‘BBC officers should consult civil serv-
ing winds of competition, while others ants, informally, whenever “the interests of
complain that the corporation has already This Is the BBC: the state appear to be at all closely involv-
abandoned its public service remit in the Entertaining the Nation, Speaking for Britain? 1922-2022 ed.”’ Only ‘informally’, of course: nothing
search for profit. One chorus takes up the by Simon J. Potter. more than a chap having a word with an-
theme that programming remains ‘elitist’ Oxford, 288 pp., £20, April, 978 0 19 289852 4 other chap. The extent to which this could
and ‘middle class’, another that it has be- compromise the BBC’s independence be-
come demotic and debased. Many people experience of the living room and integrate the whole story in a single volume, if not came apparent in the late 1930s when the
seem to feel that so long as The Archers and it into institutional accounts? exactly from the cradle to the grave (though Foreign Office agitated for foreign-language
the shipping forecast are left untouched, For historians the BBC represents both a undertakers hover in their closing pages), broadcasts to counter the propaganda of the
then all is right with the world; others seem fantasy object and a Borgesian nightmare. then at least from the crystal set to iPlayer. Axis powers. John Reith, the director gen-
to think that the problem is precisely that As an organisation, it has been one of the David Hendy’s book has the strengths of eral, felt obliged to accept an arrangement
The Archers and the shipping forecast have great record-keeping bureaucracies in hist- an insider’s account, packed with detail that, as Potter puts it, ‘included agreeing
been left untouched for too long. It’s not ory. The BBC’s Written Archives Centre at and anecdotes, shrewd in its assessment that news editors would accept specific
easy to come up with any really new com- Caversham is a treasure trove, but it’s also a of personalities, light on socioeconomic guidance from civil servants as to which
plaints about the BBC. labyrinth in which one expects to find white- change. Simon Potter’s is more academic items needed to be included in, or omitted
Faced with this repetitive litany of charge haired historians still groping myopically and astringent. Potter tends to be critical from, different foreign-language services.
and countercharge, what contribution can along the endless shelves of files, doom- where Hendy is indulgent, but Hendy’s vol- All this was subsequently enshrined in a
historians make? An internal memo in ed to uncover material so fascinating that ume is more fun, while Potter’s occasion- secret “gentleman’s agreement” between
1952 affirmed that ‘the exact nature of the all likelihood of ever finishing any work of ally dips into right-minded solemnity. They the BBC and the government, unwritten and
past of the BBC is important in any discus- scholarship has long since passed. both more than earn their place on the ever thus eminently deniable by both parties.’
sion of its future’ and that ‘any question- If ever there was a historian to whom the lengthening shelf of Beebology. Those convinced that the BBC will always
ing’ of the BBC’s role ought to be informed phrase ‘daunting task’ acted like a starting Neither book can avoid the vexed quest- end up bowing to the government of the
by ‘the consideration of the service which pistol it was Asa Briggs, who was commis- ion of the BBC’s independence. The corp- day tend to adduce its conduct during the
this unique institution has so far rendered, sioned to write an official history of the oration is not, in any simple sense, a state general strike of 1926. The official case
and ought to be based not on faulty recol- BBC. The first volume, The Birth of Broadcast­ broadcaster, but nor is it a free-standing against the strike was given ample airtime;
lection or hearsay but accurate informat- ing, appeared in 1961; the fifth volume, Com­ commercial enterprise, raising its own cap- the strikers’ position was not. When Reith
ion’. That’s easily said: too easily perhaps, petition, taking the story up to 1974, came ital and generating its own income, though checked with Downing Street to see if the
since the pin-striped positivism of such out in 1995. The full series amounts to some it is increasingly being driven in that direct- BBC could broadcast a plea by the archbishop
phrases as ‘exact nature’ and ‘accurate in- four thousand densely researched pages. It ion. It is, as we are repeatedly reminded, a of Canterbury for both sides to suspend
formation’ is not likely to go down well in was a remarkable achievement, especially corporation licensed by royal charter, over- hostilities in ‘a spirit of fellowship’ (contra-
our more relativistic age, where questions since it was started at a time when few other seen by a board of governors (subsequently dicting the government’s hard line that there
of epistemology are so often treated as de- historians seemed interested in what radio trustees, and then from 2017 members of could be no negotiation until the strike was
pendent on questions of sociology. In any and television meant for British life in the a new board), and largely funded by the lic- called off ), he was told, in a mild but sinister
case, what does ‘the past of the BBC’ con- 20th century. Briggs’s history is a monu- ence fee. Successive governments of both phrase, ‘the prime minister would rather
sist of ? There are institutional continuities, ment, but like most monuments it repays parties have tried to exercise control by you didn’t.’ And so, of course, he didn’t.
of course, but millions of radio and tele- repeated visits rather than long residence. haggling over the terms of charter renewal, Winston Churchill, the leading anti-union
vision broadcasts have evaporated into the In his stately volumes controllers talk to con- favouring compliant governors, and setting hawk at the time of the strike, pursued an
ether. A history that confined itself to mat- trollers and committees to committees, in the level of the licence fee, yet at the same almost lifelong vendetta against the BBC.
ters of governance and finance would be unending games of office chess. Others time every government has complained that He was outraged that the corporation could
like a history of football that concentrates have followed where Briggs led, notably Jean the BBC has constantly undermined their not simply be commandeered to put out
on decisions in club boardrooms without Seaton, who continued the story in livelier efforts to govern the country. the government’s line, and in later decades
ever mentioning what happened on the pitch, vein in ‘Pinkoes and Traitors’: The BBC and the During the 20th century, many British was still insisting that it was an enemy
let alone what the matches meant to mil- Nation, 1974­87, published in 2015, and there institutions – national museums and gal- within the gates ‘run by reds’. As this may
lions of ardent fans. Listeners and viewers have been any number of more specialised leries, the University Grants Committee, the suggest, his interventions were not always
have been no less ardent about some of studies on such topics as the BBC and pop- Arts Council – enjoyed a not wholly dis- well grounded. During the war, he person-
the BBC’s programmes, as a ceaseless cor- ular music, or the BBC during the Second similar hybrid status. These ‘arm’s length’ ally rang the duty controller at Broadcast-
respondence of complaint and enthusiasm World War. arrangements tended to work fairly well ing House to complain about an item he
has made clear over the decades, but how The corporation’s centenary sees the pub- when the men who ran them (they were said he had just heard on the nine o’clock
far can historians capture the subjective lication of two histories that aspire to tell nearly all men) and the men who ran the news. The controller was able to point out,

The Pivotal Generation: Why Twelve Theses on Attention

We Have a Moral Responsibility to The Friends of Attention
Slow Climate Change Right Now Edited by D. Graham Burnett Stevie Knauss

Henry Shue A meditation on the ethics

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An eminent philosopher explains why we owe it
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“At a time when our freedoms are under various
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“Henry Shue’s reflection on climate change . . . presence of others.”
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—Stefanie Hessler, Director of the Kunsthall
hopeless vision for how we should approach
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this unique challenge.”
Biennale Sensing Nature
—Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland

5 london Review of booKs 21 apRil 2022

politely but firmly, that this seemed unlike­ ‘equating it with the medieval Catholic At the outset, the BBC’s fragile auto­ The Second World War is often regard­
ly given that it was still only 8.50 p.m. Church, controlling thought from a middle­ nomy owed as much to commercial calcul­ ed as the BBC’s finest hour. It certainly
Another illustration of the BBC’s complic­ class, establishment position’. Harold Wil­ ation as to high­minded planning. By 1922 a strengthened the position of ‘the wireless’
ated relationship with power is the role of son, naturally given to suspicion, thought number of companies were becoming aware in national life. In no other major war can
external broadcasting after 1945: was this the BBC was somehow conspiring against of the potential of new transmitters to send people’s experience have been so pervas­
an impartial news service or an arm of Brit­ him, and in the mid­1970s suggested abol­ signals not to a specific end point, as with ively mediated, and at the same time made
ain’s soft diplomacy? During the Cold War, ishing the licence fee in order to bring the the telegraph, but to anyone within range bearable, by listening to the radio, while the
the Foreign Office funded and set the guide­ corporation more directly under govern­ who had a ‘receiver’. Partly to avoid wave­ BBC’s international wartime role enorm­
lines for the European Service’s broadcast­ ment control, a frequent reflex of disgruntl­ length mayhem, the GPO negotiated with ously enhanced its reputation around the
ing, while the BBC was supposed to have ed politicians. the six main companies who sold receivers world. Potter is sceptical about the extent to
editorial control over content – an arrange­ Predictably, Margaret Thatcher hated the to set up an entity to be called the British which the corporation managed to defend
ment almost designed to cause friction. As ‘British Bastard Corporation’, as her hus­ Broadcasting Company. The manufacturers its independence against government pres­
Hendy observes, however, ‘potential rows band liked to call it. Coverage of the Falk­ were to be, in effect, the shareholders, but sure in these years, arguing that it adopted
were often defused through personal relat­ lands War was an inevitable flashpoint, with the new organisation was to have consider­ an ‘essentially co­operative, and sometimes
ionships.’ This was the great advantage of Thatcher raging against reporters’ references able freedom of action, not least because submissive, approach’. Hendy devotes more
being run by chaps who knew other chaps. to ‘British’ forces rather than ‘our’ troops. much of its funding was to come from a than a hundred pages to the period, three
But it didn’t always work like that. One The tabloid press sensed an opportunity to share of the revenue from the licence which chapters that are among the best things
of Anthony Eden’s several miscalculations put the boot in, with the Sun wheeling out the GPO obliged every owner of a receiver in either book. He brings out the way the
over Suez was his assumption that he could the tiredest of tropes by damning the BBC’s to buy. The company had a de facto mono­ BBC’s subsequent reputation as an impart­
bully the BBC – which he described in a mo­ coverage as the work of ‘traitors in our midst’. poly, a situation which brought certain con­ ial news broadcaster went back to the delic­
ment of particular exasperation as ‘a nest of Norman Tebbit’s much quoted tirade against straints (there was to be no on­air advertis­ ate line it had to tread between supporting
communists’ – into supporting the invas­ the corporation – the ‘insufferable, smug, ing, for example). the war effort and refusing to put out ob­
ion by threatening to cut or curtail its Ex­ sanctimonious, naive, guilt­ridden, wet, pink It soon became evident that radio was out­ vious falsehoods for propaganda purposes.
ternal Services broadcasting. The director orthodoxy of that sunset home of third­rate growing the awkward arrangement in which And he does justice to, among other things,
general, Ian Jacob, rightly sensing that the minds of that third­rate decade, the Sixties’ a consortium of wireless manufacturers own­ the romance of sending coded messages to
country was divided on the issue, stood – betrayed a shaky grasp of cultural history. ed what was already coming to function as resistance groups in occupied Europe, not
by the corporation’s commitment to even­ (Michael Foot’s description of Tebbit as ‘a a ‘public service’. So in 1927, following the least with the following astonishing stat­
handed reporting. Once American pressure semi­house­trained polecat’ may have reveal­ recommendation of a committee of inquiry, istic: the evening before D­Day, ‘the BBC
had forced Eden into a humiliating with­ ed an equally shaky grasp of natural history, the company was turned into a public cor­ started transmitting an unusually long list
drawal from the Canal Zone, the threat yet still seemed nearer the mark.) There poration, based on a royal charter, over­ of messages across the English Channel.
evaporated, but the episode did nothing to was no pleasing either side in that divided seen by a board of governors and funded by Within 24 hours, 1050 acts of railway sabot­
lessen some politicians’ suspicions about decade: Arthur Scargill was as hostile to the a share of the income from the licence fee. age had been initiated via the BBC, 950 of
the subversive character of the nation’s prin­ BBC as Thatcher, denouncing the TV news It was fortunate that the great press barons, which were successful.’
cipal broadcaster. The Labour governments as ‘pure unadulterated bias’. And so it goes such as Harmsworth and Beaverbrook, Hendy also gives a vivid picture of daily
of the 1960s and 1970s were almost equal­ on, with complaints and threats stacking weren’t interested in broadcasting: had they life at the BBC under wartime conditions.
ly antagonistic to the BBC, with Tony Benn up like Brexit­blocked containers. been, they might have contested the BBC’s Many of its activities were moved out of
monopoly position more vigorously. In the London in 1939, the bulk of them to Wood
event, the new arrangement was in place Norton Hall near Evesham. Soon, around a
before the immense potential of radio was thousand items a week were being produc­
widely appreciated. In the early years, relat­ ed from the depths of rural Worcestershire,
PETER RODULFO ively few households had a licence for a re­
ceiver and transmitter coverage was patchy.
though announcers continued to say ‘This
is London calling’ (clearly, ‘This is Wood
HERE COMES THE SUN Paintings But by 1936 the BBC could reach 98 per Norton calling’ just wouldn’t cut it). Even
cent of the population. in this sylvan retreat, safety procedures had
to be followed in the event of an air raid.

F
OPENING SATURDAY 23 APRIL - NOON TO 5PM
CONTINUING TO 22ND MAY 2022. oR the most paRt, early broadcast­ ‘The warning signal that went off at Wood
Open Wednesday to Sunday 10am to 5pm or by appointment ing was parasitic on existing genres: Norton consisted of “The Teddy Bears’ Pic­
Booklet available on request – free including postage there were transmissions of concerts, nic” blasted through loudspeakers. As soon
CHAPPEL GALLERIES, Colchester Road, Chappel, Essex CO6 2DE. Tel: 01206 240326
plays, lectures, variety shows, church serv­ as it was heard, all the producers, actors,
email: info@chappelgalleries.co.uk www.chappelgalleries.co.uk – see full exhibition ices and so on. Perhaps only the ‘feature’ administrators, secretaries and engineers
was truly native to radio, a genre that came promptly did as they were told and ran into
into being in the interwar years and flour­ the nearby woods to lie down in pairs.’ I
Here Comes the Sun. Acrylic on canvas, 2020, 56x66cm ished in the decade after 1945. But in time suppose it’s what you’d most want to do if
the BBC became a great patron of new writ­ you thought you were about to die.
ing as well as of new music. Dylan Thomas’s After the war, the two domestic stations
Under Milk Wood, broadcast in January 1954, that had broadcast throughout, the ‘Home’
may be the most celebrated piece of liter­ and the ‘Forces’, were replaced by what was
ature it’s hard to imagine coming into exist­ termed ‘the pyramid’: the Light Programme
ence without radio; more generally, plays for popular listening, ascending to the Home
written for radio have adapted or reinvent­ Service for the middle range of BBC offer­
ed an established form. But the great filler ings, and culminating in the intellectually
was music, especially varieties of ‘light and aesthetically more ambitious Third Pro­
music’. By the end of the 1930s, as Hendy gramme. Both the conception, and the pro­
reports, ‘musical comedy, operetta, ballads, portions of the listening public that each
film scores, organ recitals, solos, palm­court station attracted, reflected the class struct­
trios, “seaside” music, military bands, brass ure of the day. It’s difficult now to recapture
bands and small orchestras playing class­ the centrality of radio to national life in the
ical highlights had all been homogenised late 1940s and early 1950s. The war had
into a capacious category of “light” music made news bulletins required listening, a
that became the centre of gravity in the response replicated at moments of nation­
BBC’s output.’ For all the recurrent fuss over al and international crisis ever since. Other
the broadcaster’s political bias, and for all kinds of programme became fixed points
the sneers about the unrealistically high­ in many people’s days. Launched in 1948,
brow character of some programmes, in Mrs Dale’s Diary attracted ‘more than half of
the 1930s and 1940s the greater part of air­ the available working­class radio audience’.
time was given over to easy listening as re­ The Archers, first broadcast in 1951, soon
presented by programmes such as Music had an audience of almost ten million; it
While You Work. has been calculated that a quarter of the

6 london Review of booKs 21 apRil 2022

adult population were listening when Grace I didn’t think it odd that the panellists on behemoth the corporation has become. ‘By ‘venture capital for creative production’, as
Archer was killed off in 1955. (Some listen- What’s My Line? wore evening dress, nor did 2021 the BBC was running ten domestic a 2005 report called it. Its appropriateness
ers could take things rather literally: the it occur to me to be offended by The Black and television channels, 56 radio stations, a sub- as a way of funding a multimedia empire is
actor who played Phil Archer reported that, White Minstrel Show, just as I laughed at the stantial online presence, and an internat- obviously open to question, even among
after a scene of snogging in the back of a byplay between ‘Sandy and my fwiend Julian’ ional news service broadcast in English and those who support the idea of public serv-
car, he was sent contraceptives through the in Round the Horne without understanding more than forty foreign languages.’ This ice broadcasting, though it is difficult to see
post.) And radio had its peculiar reverse the innuendo. growth has involved fundamental changes an alternative funding model that would
impact on print: the Radio Times, ‘the Brad- My epiphany occurred late on a Saturday to the BBC’s nature: sustain the distinctive character of the BBC.
shaw of broadcasting’, became the biggest evening in November 1962. I was a spotty But of course there are many who have no
The public corporation has, over the last thirty
selling weekly in Britain, while the Listener, 15-year-old with an unsteady grasp of the desire to see that character sustained, and
years, essentially become a commissioning
‘the Hansard of broadcasting’, had a circul- difference between girls and Martians, and body. It runs radio and television networks once again the undertakers are polishing
ation of more than 50,000, larger at the a literary urge whose expression in my home- and digital services, but no longer makes many the brass on their coffins. Nadine Dorries’s
time than all serious periodicals except the work wasn’t appreciated by my teachers. of the programmes that they deliver to aud- recent proposal for the privatisation of
New Statesman. But by the time I went to bed that evening I iences. Instead, today it fills broadcast sched- Channel 4 is an ominous sign of the way the
Television had made a faltering start in had been given a glimpse of the kind of per- ules and slots on iPlayer by buying content political wind is blowing.
the 1930s, with its signal only available to son I thought I wanted to become. That Was from over 350 different independent product- Potter ends his study by declaring, not
ion companies and from its own commercial
those in the Greater London area and very the Week That Was entranced me. It was clever, wrongly but a little earnestly: ‘Anyone who
operation, BBC Studios, which also makes
few people owning or renting sets. The irreverent, funny, and at the time there content for other providers. cares about what we read, watch, and listen
fledgling service was closed down for the were to my mind no higher values (it was all to, on television, radio, or online, should
duration of the war, but when it restarted it helped by my having an instant crush on The BBC is a hybrid in a world of hybrids. think about what life would be like without
was still thought a minor affair, obviously Millicent Martin). I’m now more aware of It retains some ‘public service’ obligations, the BBC, and about how the corporation
secondary to radio. In 1952, the year before the programme’s limitations: driven by over- and for many listeners and viewers is still might, in the future, find new and better
the coronation, there were eight times as confident young men such as David Frost the ‘national broadcaster’, but it’s not ob- ways to serve all our needs.’ Hendy ends his,
many radio-only licences as TV licences, but and Bernard Levin, much of its content vious that it will be able to sustain this role. fetchingly if a little sentimentally, with the
things rapidly changed. By 1958 ‘the num- might generously be called ‘undergraduate An Ofcom survey in 2018 showed that 16 to diary entry of a retired nurse in the Second
ber of households with television sets ex- humour’. Though politically impudent, it 34-year-olds were ‘consuming’ less than half World War who had turned off her radio in
ceeded, for the first time, those with sound- was of its time and place in its unspoken as much BBC ‘output’ as the national aver- protest against its unappealing programmes,
only licences. That year BBC expenditure assumptions about such matters as gender age and in 2019 the number of people in but who then, when her set was broken for
on television also exceeded its budget for and race. (Tynan called such satire ‘anti- the UK watching Netflix overtook those on three weeks, declared herself ‘lost . . . as
radio for the first time.’ reactionary without being progressive’.) But iPlayer. The majority of people under thirty though a friend has gone from the house’.
The coronation, described by one insid- it hit its moment perfectly. It’s so often in- are more likely to watch programmes on Hendy presents this snippet as ‘a simple
er as ‘the outside broadcast of all outside voked in retrospects of the 1960s that it’s phones or laptops and never listen to BBC reminder that we sometimes never know
broadcasts’, played a part in promoting tele- sobering to be reminded that it only ran for radio at all. On the other hand, in 2020 91 just how much we need or want something
vision, though its impact on TV ownership thirteen months. However popular it may per cent of UK households accessed some until it is gone.’ Whether or not we think the
has sometimes been exaggerated. Techno- have been with suburban, black-polo-neck- BBC services every week, as viewing num- BBC is now ‘crouching below/Extinction’s
logical advances (better transmitters) and wearing enragés like my younger self, That bers surged during lockdown. alp’, to adapt a phrase from Larkin’s ‘The
the availability from 1955 of a second chan- Was the Week That Was soon became too much Perhaps the licence fee, a regressive flat Old Fools’, the poem’s bleak concluding
nel (ITV), played a larger part, while in- even for the liberal director general, Hugh tax tied to an outdated model of a house- line may be all the comfort we can give our-
creasing affluence and the accompanying Carleton Greene; tired of fielding endless hold, should now be regarded simply as selves: ‘Well,/We shall find out.’ 

‘privatisation of experience’ were even more complaints, he concluded that it was, after
significant. It’s still remarkable that more all, possible to be a bit too iconoclastic and
than half the adult population of the coun- he cancelled it after two series. It may be
try (20.4 million people) are supposed to that, as with some poets, an early death
have watched the coronation on TV, if not contributed to an enduringly glamorous
always in their own homes. Contrast this reputation.
with what has been logged as ‘the most com- If it’s hard to get away from nostalgia
plained about event in the history of the when discussing broadcasting, good hist-

MUSICAL
BBC’: not Kenneth Tynan saying ‘fuck’ on ory can at least show that the apparent con-
air, or a programme giving equal time to stancy of the BBC’s character is an illusion,
an alleged IRA commander and a loyalist hiding radical discontinuities and self-

STORYBOOKS
hardliner, or even the proposal to alter the reinventions. It can also remind us that much
timing of the shipping forecast, but the of the output has always been forgettable,
blanket coverage given to the death of Prince run-of-the-mill stuff. Yet at the same time
Philip in 2021. the effect of studying the history can be to
increase rather than diminish one’s gratit-

E
Fantasy worlds, 21st-century testimonies and a satirical
veryone who has grown up in the ude for the existence of the BBC. Under-
money vs morals tale, all told through unforgettable melodies.
broadcasting age has a relationship standably, neither of these books has much
with particular programmes and per- to say about broadcasting in other countries,
sonalities. Even more than is the case with but more comparative studies would bring STRAVINSKY’S THE FIREBIRD
reading, whose form is less tied to a partic- out just how exceptional the BBC has been. plus Ravel’s Mother Goose suite
ular moment in time, memories of and at- There can be disagreements about why this & Qigang Chen’s L’Éloignement
with Xian Zhang & Peter Moore
titudes to broadcast media are significant- is: some credit the licence fee, some point Sunday 24 April
ly determined by one’s generation. I was a to the sustained dominance of British pub-
young child in the 1950s and then that re- lic life by certain cultivated elites, some cite HALF SIX FIX: SEVEN DEADLY SINS
latively new phenomenon, a teenager, in the a long-entrenched hostility to ‘free enter- introduced by Sir Simon Rattle
1960s, so my radio and TV memories were prise’. Whatever the explanation, it’s hard with Magdalena Kožená as Anna
Wednesday 27 April
shaped accordingly. I was a bit young fully not to be grateful for what happenstance
to appreciate the zany genius of The Goon has delivered over the past century, a senti- SEVEN DEADLY SINS & KURT WEILL SONGS
Show (though I can still sing ‘The Ying Tong ment intensified by the briefest exposure with Sir Simon Rattle & Magdalena Kožená
Song’), but I was more than happy to let to certain ‘news’ broadcasting in the US or Thursday 28 April
Grandstand structure my Saturday afternoons, much of the ‘entertainment’ that domin-
with all matches beginning at the divinely ates TV in some other European countries. lso.co.uk
appointed time of 3 p.m. The drama of the That’s without raising the contrast with
results coming in by ticker tape had the im- countries where the state broadcaster pumps
mediacy of a war room. I was no budding out the government’s propaganda in brazen
cultural critic: what I heard and watched all and uninhibited ways.
seemed as much part of ‘reality’ as the bus Can it continue? Both these books, Potter’s
to school or roast potatoes at Sunday lunch. especially, show what a semi-commercial
LRB_LSO-April_121x161.indd 1 01/04/2022 16:24:55
7 london review of books 21 april 2022
W A Cosmos Indoors
hat I most wanted was a Soda­ haviour as well as interior spaces was sub­
Stream. A person with a Soda­ stantial . . . In the Flashcube’s dazzling
Stream was in charge of his light, families staged domestic tableaux in
destiny to a pretty awesome degree. Same
with the Breville sandwich toaster. Instead Andrew O’Hagan an effort to display their nuclear family
credentials.’
of a slice of Scottish Pride smeared in beef Nuclear is right: the bulbs could cause
paste, you could go your own way, killing it Extinct: A Compendium of Obsolete Objects first degree burns. And the light couldn’t be
softly, taking over the kitchen and inciner­ edited by Barbara Penner, Adrian Forty, Olivia Horsfall Turner and Miranda Critchley. controlled, not quite, so a radiation red
ating a few squares of plastic cheese and Reaktion, 390 pp., £23.99, October 2021, 978 1 78914 452 9 would often fill startled eyes in the snaps.
a bit of ham in a sarcophagus before hit­ ‘If they ever looked at the used Flashcube
ting the street like the god of modernity. TV, mum,’ my brother said. ‘We could get were unavailable, and sane­making to know before discarding it,’ Harriss writes, ‘sub­
Guys like that had lava lamps. They had you one and you’d have all the channels you that the journey towards what you fancied jects would have noticed the scorch marks
a Casio calculator with trig functions in want.’ The following week it was all set might be quite long, and you might meet inside, resembling the remnants of a chip­
their schoolbag. These items remain, but up and Gerry was showing her how to use people along the way, and you might never pan fire in a doll’s house.’ Which brings us to
with other things, the sense of lost desire the remote control. He told her that she even get there. I love the internet, perhaps Ibsen, the poet laureate of the never­quite­
can be strong. The future is always be­ could pause the TV while watching Coron­ more than anyone, but my innocence died extinct. Everyone knows that feeling at
hind us, or at least it seemed that way in ation Street to go and make a cup of tea. ‘Oh, with its success. four o’clock in the morning when you’re
the days of the space shuttle and the BBC I wouldn’t do that,’ she said. For Lydia Kallipoliti, self­mirroring suddenly unsure what any of the family’s
Micro: they could memorably explode or ‘Why not?’ was there all along in the new things we belongings have to do with you. It can add
freeze in the middle of the day, reminding ‘Because what about all the other chose to invest in and build. ‘Rather than to the grief. ‘It’s not only what we have in­
us of the relation between obsolescence people?’ operating autonomously’, she writes in Ex­ herited from our father and mother that
and novelty. She thought she would be pausing tinct, Cybernetic Anthropomorphic Mach­ walks in us,’ Ibsen wrote. ‘It’s all sorts of
Growing up, I worried I didn’t have the Coronation Street for the whole nation. And ines were ‘mechanical replicas of the dead ideas, and lifeless old beliefs, and so
requisite gear with which to launch myself the funny thing was that none of it was “master” human operator, echoing their forth. They have no vitality, but they cling
as a leader of tomorrow’s people. I set affectation; she genuinely felt the 21st cent­ movements in an act of orchestrated pup­ to us all the same, and we can’t get rid of
great store by the small things I did have – ury was a leisurely joke at her expense. She peteering’. History is littered with defunct them.’
a tape recorder, a digital watch – though I accepted that items existed – hair tongs, for machines that were meant to better us, in Consider the snail. ‘Snails are on the
worried that Kafka probably didn’t have a example, or kettles that turned themselves more senses than one. The American engin­ front line of extinction these days,’ Richard
gonk pencil­topper with crazy hands jiggl­ off – which made life a bit better than it eer Ralph Mosher, we learn, ‘introduced Taws writes, and it’s not just their stuff or
ing under his chin when he was writing The used to be, but these things were unusual. additional features to make [robots] more their parents, but their existence as a species.
Castle. Then, about 1980, things took a Most things were expensive and drove you lifelike and to give them a capacity for Achatinella apexfulva, the Hawaiian tree snail,
definite turn towards the sun, and some mad. Existence, for our mum, wasn’t about error, typical of human actions’. To this gave up the ghost on 1 January 2019. Maybe
saviour presented me with both a Sony change, it was about everything staying the end, he worked on machines that were the loss of a few Fisher Price toys from the
Walkman and an Atari home video unit, same, and people too. She loved paying for tied to the human nervous system, to re­ marketplace isn’t so bad. But humans can
made for people who were winning so big things with cash, and, when she got a bank plicate the logic of hesitation. Mosher en­ long for things they never wanted very bad­
that the rest of the world would surely card, insisted on keeping it in the purse visioned the human­machine union – our ly in the first place. I yearn every other day
spend eternity catching up. with her pin number. neurons ‘translating desire into kinesis’. for Mint Cracknel, a chocolate bar from the
My mum died recently, and I realised, in She believed, with justification, that This reminded me of my one­time friends 1970s that was criminally discontinued. I
the middle of it all, that a special world young people use material things to fool in WikiLeaks, lashed all night to their lap­ miss Player’s Number 6. I mourn flappy air­
of technophobia had gone with her. She themselves into thinking they’re living tops, their nervous systems wired into these line tickets with your name printed in pur­
didn’t know what the internet was. She had their best life. (‘You can’t take it with you!’ machines that they believed contained their ple ink. On busy, productive days, I can still
never sent or received an email. Her phone, was one of her favourite phrases.) If you’re conscience. hear the compressed suck and thunk of the
devious and self­involved, was an instru­ eighteen now, obsolescence just tells you The future wants to look like a Stanley pneumatic postal system that sent mail
ment of torture to her: making promises it how much you’ve grown. Nobody with an Kubrick set, but ends up happening next from floor to floor in the office job I had
couldn’t keep; showing caring messages iPhone13 secretly craves an iPhone6, not to an Aga. The ambience of futurity never when I was sixteen. I miss memos. I crave
covered in love hearts that instantly dis­ even for reasons of nostalgia or pervers­ becomes extinct, though, even when its the Polaroid SX­70 – ‘seeing the image take
appeared, never to be found again; light­ ity. Consumers can enjoy things looking talismanic objects disappear. As Guang Yu shape produced an overwhelming urge to
ing up, at all times of day and night, with old – take the Roberts radio craze – as Ren and Edward Denison put it, ‘there are see and hear the magic repeated,’ Deyan
graphics and noises only her grandchildren long as the item has digital capability. But some things for which extinction is a mere Sudjic writes – and I wish I had a serving
could decipher. Every day was a digital Gol­ there is a limbo zone of deleted desires, blip in a broader existential experience that hatch in my sitting room because then I’d
gotha. She felt scourged by technological of superseded dreams, that operates a bit long outlives the subject’s original funct­ feel properly middle class. Only yesterday, I
advances and nostalgic for simple things like Proust’s writing on our sentimental ion.’ I can still recall the strange, shift­ debated with myself whether to buy a tele­
that didn’t work. The big cupboard in her credulity. ing sound of the fax machine in the old phone table and set it up in the hall with a
hall was like outer space, a cosmos indoors, Extinct takes the long and often absurdist LRB office, the way it would suddenly begin red telephone, like the one we had in 1977,
full of junk and old gadgetry floating view. There are mad things we don’t miss scrolling out possible futures. ‘Yes, why the one that never rang until one day it did.
through time, dead appliances that still – arsenic wallpaper (vivid but deadly) – not?’ from Susan Sontag. A blast of rage My mother had got it connected while we
hinted at their powers of improvement. I and things we miss every twenty minutes: from Harold Pinter. A request from Hitch­ were all at school, and I can hear it ringing
felt she was keeping them for a happier ashtrays (deadly but vivid). ‘In extinction,’ ens and a poem by Heaney. They’ve now still.
domestic life in the next world, or for the Thomas McQuillan writes about Concorde, got Seamus’s fax machine behind glass in So many of the deleted objects were to
past to return in this one, shaking us out of ‘it’s not the objects that fail. It’s the world his hometown museum in Bellaghy, and, do with voice. You spoke into them, or they
our need for better radios. that supported them that has gone.’ That is when I saw it the other day, I recalled the spoke back, or you rolled paper into them
She called one day to ask me to stop certainly true about supersonic flight. I squeal and purr it would cause in Tavistock and clacked, finding something to say. A
sending nice pictures of my holidays to her suppose some people in the UK would still Square, setting off our grey machine linked suitcase was found at my mother’s house.
friend Mary who lived up the road. like to get to New York in three hours, but to the stars. It was full of my college essays, and, sand­
‘Eh? But I didn’t.’ when the means of fulfilling that desire As a boy photographer, I had a special wiched between the folders, home cassettes
‘Yes, you did. Mary knows all about your becomes defunct, where are you stranded? love affair with the Kodak Flashcube. I still of my favourite albums. I had pressed stop,
time in Mexico –’ Concorde was a gas­guzzler, and too ex­ see it in dreams, the button on the camera some time in 1990, on each of those tapes,
‘New Mexico.’ pensive. Most of the people who used it are depressed by a sticky finger on Christmas and here they were, frozen mid­song, 32
‘Wherever. She has photos of you all in a flying around the world on private jets. But, morning and ‘pop!’ – instant history de­ years after I’d gone, and the bands had
hotel. Or in a pool. How do you think that even as an ordinary punter, you can regret livered in a tiny miasma of burning plastic gone, and the machines that played the
makes me feel, that you send her pictures Concorde’s failure: it was so beautiful, and and knackered filament, a shock but an up­ tapes had gone too. Yet nothing seemed
and not me?’ its forced ending (after a crash) made it the grade on available light. ‘Its fragility dis­ more alive to me that week than the con­
‘It’s called Instagram, mum.’ Hindenburg of my generation. To judge from guised its ferocity,’ Harriet Harriss writes tents of the cupboard where the suitcase
‘I don’t know what it is, but they should a rash of recent novels, young people be­ in one of the best essays here. ‘Partnered had been found. I hoped that maybe there
ban it.’ lieve that, in the past, we were all just wait­ with Kodak’s Instamatic camera, the Flash­ would be an old ITT cassette­player at the
Another time, she complained that the ing for the internet: we weren’t, and life cube’s adaptability, portability and ease of back, dusty and perfect. If you pressed the
woman next door had more TV channels was quite nice without it, partly because use made interior photography possible for green button it would light up with the
than her. ‘That’s because she’s got a Smart it was calming to know certain things the masses . . . The impact on interior be­ words ‘Batt OK’. c

8 london Review of booKs 21 apRil 2022

P Promises, Promises
ooR Emma BovaRy, nourished on So we learn that Plato says humans
stories of ‘love affairs, lovers, mis­ were once shaped like a perfect sphere,
tresses, persecuted ladies fainting in each with two faces, two genitals, four legs,
lonely country houses . . . dark forests, palp­
itating hearts, vows, sobs, tears and kisses Erin Maglaque four arms, until Zeus cut them in two and
doomed them to spend their days seeking
. . . gentlemen brave as lions, gentle as out their lost half: a foundation myth of the
lambs’, fancied her husband­to­be a ‘white­ Love: A History in Five Fantasies soulmate. This ideal of like­minded love
plumed rider on a black horse’. He turned by Barbara Rosenwein. was applied to friendship centuries later in
out to be dull as dishwater. Emma’s imagin­ Polity, 220 pp., £20, October 2021, 978 1 5095 3183 7 Montaigne’s writing about his best friend,
ation was held hostage by the 19th­century Étienne de la Boétie: ‘It is no special reason,
bourgeois ideal of revelatory, eternal love the textual. Monique Scheer and others have is not captured by cultural construction, nor two, three, four, nor a thousand; it is
within marriage. She was enmeshed in a argued that emotions are felt and expressed everything that eludes the conscious ex­ I know not what quintessence of the entire
particular set of historical circumstances – in movement, gesture, in voluntary and in­ pression of ideas in language. By describ­ mixture that, having captured my entire
a flourishing letter­writing culture, burgeon­ voluntary actions like blushing or crying or ing historical scripts about love as ‘fant­ will, brought it to plunge and lose itself in
ing female literacy, an emerging awareness fainting. Rosenwein has been sceptical of asies’ Rosenwein seems to promise ambi­ his; and that, once it captured all his will,
of urban bourgeois fashion among the pro­ this, arguing that embodied emotion can’t guity, ambivalence and messiness. But for brought it to plunge and be lost in mine
fessional classes – which created an espec­ be studied if there is no writing to repre­ her, a fantasy is a way of naming familiar with a like hunger, a like convergence.’ In
ially wide gulf between women’s expect­ sent it. Historians have read up on neuro­ stories about love that have held particular the early 19th­century United States, intim­
ations of love and its realities. ‘To be in fant­ scientific studies of emotion too: Rosenwein power over our imaginations. She admits ate male friendship was a source of passion
asy is to live “as if ”,’ according to Denise can’t resist discussing the mirror neurons an allergy to the latent. and pleasure before marriage. Daniel Web­
Riley, but life may become intolerable when of monkeys in an otherwise textual history This means that her love fantasies follow ster wished he could return to the days of
a metaphor collides with the facts. of the idea of the soulmate. a predictable pattern. Each chapter begins his youthful friendship with James Hervey
So love has a history. Does knowing that What part of emotion is biological, and with some combination of Homer, Plato, Bingham, imagining that they would ‘yoke
make it survivable? ‘In my view,’ Barbara what cultural? To what extent are emotions Aristotle, Cicero or Augustine. As we might together again; your little bed is just wide
Rosenwein writes, ‘knowing love’s history subject to historical change? Can historians expect from a medieval historian, she then enough, we will practise at the same bar
may also be – is – a kind of therapy, helping adjudicate this boundary between biology looks at texts from early Christian martyrs, and be as friendly a pair of single fellows as
free us from stories that appear to be fixed and history without training in the neuro­ monks, Abelard and Héloïse, the trouba­ ever cracked a nut.’
and true for all time.’ Such stories are the sciences? How are they to understand ephem­ dours, Dante. Next she moves on to David One fantasy about love is that it allows us
terrain of the history of emotions, which eral and material expressions of emotion if Hume, Goethe, Byron, Casanova, before to transcend whatever it is that keeps us
is concerned with people’s emotional lives; they were left unrecorded? The history of concluding with a smattering of Netflix shackled to the mundane. This idea was
with the changing historical expression and emotions has provided an occasion for hist­ scripts and YouTube comments. Is this a especially powerful for medieval religious
understanding of emotions; and with the orians to debate some thorny problems, to history of love? Or a history of certain women. Perpetua was imprisoned for her
ways in which emotions have shaped hist­ examine our desire to attain proximity to ideas about love? As the historian of China conversion to Christianity in third­century
orical change. Rosenwein, a medievalist, is our subjects, and prod at the impossibility Eugenia Lean has argued, the ‘single emot­ Carthage. Her father begged her to recant,
one of the pioneers of this approach. She of ever doing so. ion’ approach risks landing us with an intel­ reminding her of her infant son, who would
edited one of the earliest volumes to trace There is something touching about a lectual history of Christian, white, Europ­ die without her. But then Christ appeared
the history of an individual emotion, Anger’s bunch of nerdy historians inventing a whole ean, mostly male, mostly straight authors. before her milking a sheep, and offered her
Past (1998), and in Emotional Communities in methodology to justify their desire to see
the Early Middle Ages (2006) examined the people in the past as people. Historians are
emergence of groups – readers of Gregory people too. It’s as well to keep that in mind
the Great, or the elites at Merovingian courts when reading studies of the history of emot­
– who shared a particular view of the emot­ ions, because – tangled in knots over these
ions, focusing on the language they used to methodological questions – its practition­
express their emotional expectations and ers can sound like robots. One recent text­
values. book, The History of Emotions, begins: ‘Emot­
Rosenwein was reacting against the dom­ ions are at the centre of the history of the R.L. BARTH
inant paradigm for understanding emotion human being, considered as a biocultural
in the premodern past: Norbert Elias’s The entity that is characterised as a worlded body, Learning War
Civilising Process. For Elias, the Middle Ages in the worlds of other worlded bodies.’ One Selected Vietnam War Poems
were a time of uninhibited feeling, before person’s biocultural entity is another per­
regulation and refinement were introduced son’s person. Methodology is necessary, of 978-1-910996-56-0 (pbk) 78pp £11.99
at the courts and dinner tables of early mod­ course, but as the cultural theorist Lauren The Vietnam War happened a long time ago in a
ern Europe. Rosenwein challenged the idea Berlant writes, ‘there is nothing more alien­
place far away. For an entire generation, it was
that emotion is an inalienable psychic drive ating than having one’s pleasures disputed
one of the most defining events of the age,
(though one that could be tamed), arguing by someone with a theory.’
instead that it is always culturally construct­ Rosenwein has identified five central certainly for all those who fought in it, but also
ed. This insight – that emotion is itself an ‘fantasies’ of love that have had particular for those who protested against it, and for those
artefact of history, subject to change – has staying power, even as their meanings have who watched it nightly on their TV screens, with
been critical for the field. changed. These fantasies are not feelings body counts served alongside the evening meal.
Rosenwein’s scholarship affirms the pos­ but ‘narratives that organise, justify and It has been the subject of countless books,
sibilities and the limits of language as make sense of experiences, desires and feel­ movies, and documentaries. Why, then, should
the medium of historical practice. She has ings that are otherwise incoherent and we read about it now? The poet R.L. Barth, who
meticulously pieced together the webs of bewildering’. These are the stories people
as a young Marine experienced the war first-hand, responds, ‘Because it’s truth.
meanings of emotional vocabulary – of tell themselves and others about love: about
like­minded friendship, the transcendent
Because it’s history.’
anger, grief, love – and the ways those mean­
ings were negotiated over the centuries. She love of God, love as obligation in marriage, In Barth’s poems, victims are given voice. Those who fought, those who died,
insists that we can’t discover what people’s obsessive unrequited love, and the insatiable those who returned wounded and shattered in body and mind:
feelings were, only the way those feelings love of eros. Rosenwein argues that we need
were expressed in historical texts – mediat­ these cultural scripts – about the need for ‘A huge shell thundered; he was vaporised
ed, compromised, qualified. ‘We cannot total authenticity in marriage, say, or the And, close friends breathing near, internalised.’
know how all people felt, but we can begin consequences of unrestrained lust – to help – ‘One Way to Carry the Dead’
to know how some members of certain us make sense of emotions that are by their
ascendant elites thought they and others nature inchoate and confusing. To view/order other titles on our list visit www.greenex.co.uk
felt or, at least, thought they ought to feel,’ ‘Fantasy’ carries with it a suggestion Biography ♦ Literary Criticism ♦ Fiction ♦ Poetry ♦ Philosophy ♦ Theatre Studies ♦ Student Guides ♦ Focus On Series
she’s written, conscientiously. of the irrational, of something before and Greenwich Exchange Publishing, 2 Heathway, London SE3 7AN
More recently, historians of emotion beyond language. This is the concept of Distribution: Central Books, 50 Freshwater Road, Chadwell Heath, London RM8 1RX
have been reluctant to remain so circum­ fantasy that allows Joan Scott in The Fantasy
scribed by a poststructuralist emphasis on of Feminist History (2011) to investigate what

9 london Review of booKs 21 apRil 2022

Barth Ad V1.pmd 1 05/04/2022, 14:37
a gift of cheese – at which point her baby the earthly bonds of motherhood, or self- Young Werther was a cultural phenomenon, begin medicine, martyrdom, murder and
was spontaneously weaned, allowing her to hood, or secular beauty. with Werther’s obsessive love for Lotte be- matrimony.’
die free of earthly obligation. The 14th- Obsessive love, too, has its own genea- coming a model for desiring and being ‘Always, the examples are all wrong, which
century French mystic and poet Marguerite logy. The ancients despised the powerless- desired. When Werther first meets Lotte he is why love theory tends to be so conserv-
Porete devised a visionary ladder of medit- ness that came with desire, and prescribed is wearing knee breeches, a yellow waist- ative – ProustProustProustBovaryBovary-
ation and self-mortification that allow- baths and sleeping around and general de- coat and blue overcoat, and after they be- BovaryAbelardEloiseCourtly,’ Berlant argu-
ed her to obliterate her selfhood in loving bauchery to counter the vulnerability of ob- come threadbare he buys another outfit just ed in a 2012 lecture. It’s true that the exam-
union with God. The idea of the transcend- session. For the troubadours intense desire like it. Goethe’s male readers dressed in ples given are less interesting than the fact
ent power of love was perfected by Dante: was an organising philosophy: their poetry replicas of Werther’s outfit, and women that they can be strung together so seam-
Beatrice was both a real person and a mir- elevated love to the highest of virtues, to daubed themselves with Eau de Werther. lessly, less interesting than the fact that there
acle, the promise of salvation in the form of be tamed with elaborate rituals and court- After Lotte marries another, Werther shoots is so much that is mutually intelligible be-
a beautiful woman. For medieval writers, liness. Obsession was given a new form in himself with her husband’s pistol; a rash of tween a 12th-century troubadour’s songs

8 chapbooks.
the love of Christ offered a way to escape the Romantic novel. Goethe’s The Sorrows of copycat suicides followed the book’s pub-
lication. Rosenwein is pretty cool-headed
and Taylor Swift’s. It’s not that the scripts
and their meanings don’t change: of course

8
8
8 chapbooks.
chapbooks.
dutch writers.
about all this, comparing such obsession to
contemporary talk about love addiction. The
they do. Rosenwein’s chapter on marriage,
in particular, shows the ebb and flow be-

8 chapbooks.
8 dutch writers.
cure? Get a hobby.
For the writers in Rosenwein’s chapter
tween obligation and freely given love across
centuries of writing about marriage. But

dutch writers.
8 translations.
dutch writers.
8 translations.
on insatiable love, sex was the hobby. Pietro
Aretino, the Renaissance poet and porn-
ographer, wrote that the penis should be
these narratives remain troublingly sticky
variations on a theme. We are constantly
reminded just how conservative the exam-

8
8 translations.
translations.
celebrated, ‘worn around the neck as a pend-
ant, or pinned onto the cap like a brooch’.
His emblem was a satyr’s head composed
ples are, how repetitive, how unlikely it is
that we will be surprised by any of them.

F
entirely of phalluses. The Enlightenment ive fantasies are not very many,
licensed a new libertinism, especially for really, when we’re talking about ways
the aristocracy. Giacomo Casanova slept to organise the imagination. The avail-
VERZET is a collection of beautifully designed with a whole family of sisters, and opened able plots weren’t enough for Eliza Moode,
VERZET is ashowcasing
chapbooks, collection ofeight
beautifully
excitingdesigned
young his autobiography: ‘In this year 1797, at the an 18th-century Philadelphian who wrote
chapbooks,
Dutch writers, superbly rendered into young
showcasing eight exciting English age of 72 . . . I have delighted in going astray to a female friend about a man they knew:
and I have lived constantly in error.’ Rosen- ‘Does he think that all the business of our
Dutch
by a new generation of translators. English
writers, superbly rendered into
wein argues that the fun came to an end lives is only to learn how to make a sausage
by a new generation of translators. with the domestication of love into marriage or roast a joint of meat and take care of a

8
8 chapbooks.
chapbooks.
in the 19th century. But there were refuse-
niks like Flaubert: ‘I want to cover you with
love when I next see you, with caresses,
house and practise in short good economy?
All that is necessary, I avow it. But can’t we
be that and take charge of our spirits at the

8
8 dutch
dutch writers.
writers.
with ecstasy,’ he wrote to Louise Colet. ‘I
want to gorge you with all the joys of the
flesh, until you faint and die.’ Promises,
same time; must we neglect the most valu-
able part for fear of offending our masters?’
Rosenwein argues that there is a radical
8
8 translations.
translations. promises. He only saw Louise a handful of
times, and admitted: ‘I enjoy debauchery
power in writing the history of love, and
that it might help us escape such constraints
and I live like a monk.’ on our emotional imaginations. She urges

8 CHAPBOOKS Rosenwein’s discussion of marital love

centres on the shifting patterns of oblig-
ation. In the Middle Ages, she argues, mar-
us to ‘strive to change the narrative we cling
to as individuals’, arguing that history’s
great power is its ability to show that what

8 STORIES riage became the only relationship in which

earthly love was permitted by the Church.
we consider natural, inevitable, the only
way of telling stories about ourselves, is

8 TRANSLATIONS
Popular religious dramas taught their aud- historically contingent. If those old stories
iences to find happiness in domestic oblig- don’t work for us, ‘we may find – or create
ations, as in a German version of the nativ- – new ones.’ The book begins under the
ity play: sacred sign of Joan Didion’s most famous
sentence, understood as an aphorism about
Joseph (carrying the cradle): Mary, I have the therapeutic value of writing: ‘We tell
considered it well and brought you a cradle in ourselves stories in order to live.’
which we can lay the little child.
But history isn’t therapy. A different crit-
Mary (sings): Joseph, dear husband mine,
help me rock the little one. ical history of love might account not only
Joseph: Happily, my dear wife. for the stories and the fantasies, but for
their failures, and for the costs of those fail-
During the Enlightenment, obligation was ures, for all the ways of loving that can’t
no longer thought of as sufficient to secure be reconciled to a handful of narratives. It
a marriage: love became necessary too. But might explain how the love plot has dimin-
that didn’t mean it came naturally. Men ished what is universal and collective to the
1 Reconstruction by Karin Amatmoekrim, transl. by Sarah Timmer-Harvey and women bought copybooks filled with scale of an individual drama, rather than
1 Reconstruction by Karin Amatmoekrim, transl. by Sarah Timmer-Harvey
2 Shelter by Sanneke van Hassel, transl. by Danny Guinan models for declarations of love to help them reaffirm that it is up to the individual to
2 Shelter by Sanneke van Hassel, transl. by Danny Guinan compose their letters. The exemplary vied change the story. And anyway, Didion’s sent-
3 Bergje by Bregje Hofstede, transl. by Alice Tetley-Paul
3 Bergje by Bregje Hofstede, transl. by Alice Tetley-Paul with a new need for authenticity in emot- ence begins an essay that excoriates the
4 The Tourist Butcher by Jamal Ouariachi, transl. by Scott Emblen-Jarrett
4 The Tourist Butcher by Jamal Ouariachi, transl. by Scott Emblen-Jarrett ional expression. Courting Sophia Peabody sentimentality of our narrative impulses:
5 The Dandy by Nina Polak, transl. by Emma Rault
5 The Dandy by Nina Polak, transl. by Emma Rault in the 1830s, Nathaniel Hawthorne told she thought it more honest to look coldly
6 Resist! In Defence of Communism by Gustaaf Peek, transl. by Brendan Monaghan
her that her letters ‘introduce me deeper
6 Resist! In Defence of Communism by Gustaaf Peek, transl. by Brendan Monaghan on the irreconcilable and reject the urge
7 Thank You For Being With Us by Thomas Heerma van Voss, transl. by Moshe Gilula
and deeper into your being, yet there is to tidy it up into a plot. After a banal
7 Thank You For Being With Us by Thomas Heerma van Voss, transl. by Moshe Gilula
8 Something Has To Happen by Maartje Wortel, transl. by Jozef van der Voort no sense of surprise at what I see, and feel, rendezvous with her lover, Emma Bovary
8 Something Has To Happen by Maartje Wortel, transl. by Jozef van der Voort
and know, therein. I am familiar with thinks: ‘It didn’t matter. She was not happy
your inner heart, as with my home.’ The and had never been.’ She wonders: ‘Why
PUBLISHED BY STRANGERS PRESS
P UBLISH/ERESISTANCE
VERZET D BY STRAN// GE£35
RS PFOR
RESASFULL SET expectation of total obligation and total was life so inadequate, why did the things
VERZET / RESISTANCE // £35 FOR A FULL SET transparency made marriage a hard sell she depended on turn immediately to dust?’
www.strangers.press/verzet to some young women. ‘What an unlucky A history of love can suggest some answers
www.strangers.press/verzet letter “M” is,’ Violet Blair complained to to her question. But history can’t stop our
22nd September 2020
22nd September 2020 a friend in Gilded Age Washington, ‘to attachments turning to dust. 

10 london review of books 21 april 2022

For more information go to
For more information go to
www.strangers.press/verzet
www.strangers.press/verzet
Available from good bookshops &
A A Soft Pear
Round six in the moRning on after all.’ Maupassant said he was ‘simple,
19 January 1870, at the Roquette good, and straight almost to a fault, ready
Prison in the eleventh arrondisse- to do a favour as none before him’. Flaubert
ment, Ivan Turgenev watched as a man was
prepared for the guillotine. Four months Tom Crewe called him a ‘soft pear’, denoting, in James’s
paraphrase, ‘a certain expansive softness’,
earlier, Jean-Baptiste Troppmann had murd- as well as a ‘comprehensive indecision’.
ered, for money, the entire Kinck family – A Nest of Gentlefolk and Other Stories Turgenev was harder on himself. He ‘in-
the owner of an engineering works, his by Ivan Turgenev, translated by Jessie Coulson. sisted that he was a coward’, a friend re-
heavily pregnant wife and their six child- Riverrun, 568 pp., £9.99, April 2020, 978 1 5294 0405 0 ported in 1881, ‘and that he had not got a
ren – and buried them in a shallow grave at pennyworth of will’.
Pantin on the edge of Paris, before being Love and Youth: Essential Stories A liberal and convinced ‘Westerner’, for
arrested at Le Havre while trying to leave by Ivan Turgenev, translated by Nicolas Pasternak Slater and Maya Slater. most of his adult life Turgenev visited Rus-
the country. Now, Troppmann was hobbled Pushkin, 222 pp., £12, October 2020, 978 1 78227 601 2 sia only at intervals. Explaining his decision
with leather straps and his hands were to go to university in Berlin in 1838, he
tied behind his back. A priest was ‘softly dwell on his own weakness: the cold sweat erable unhappiness, he lived in a mostly later explained, with his usual self-censure,
reading prayers’. The executioner’s elderly and wobbly legs, his inability to watch comfortable ménage with her and her hus- that
assistant went to secure the prisoner with the execution, and his near swoon when band, Louis, and their children (his daugh-
I could not breathe the same air as those who
extra straps (he was only 22, and thin), but the blade thudded against the block. He ter, whom he named Paulinette, was also
stood for the things I hated so much; I could
they didn’t have enough holes, so he set knew he had indulged a grisly curiosity by enrolled in the family). He followed them not remain at their side. I expect I had not the
about boring new ones: accepting the invitation: his descriptions doggishly around Europe; in one house, necessary stamina, the necessary strength of
of the foolishness of the other guests – run- visitors were surprised to find him lodged character, for that. I had to put a certain dist-
His unskilful fingers, swollen with gout, ning ahead of Troppmann in a corridor to in the attic. Unlike his mother, Turgenev ance between myself and my enemy so as to
obeyed him badly, and, besides, the hide was get a better look at him – and the bloodlust did not make a fetish of personal dignity. be able to attack him more effectively from
new and thick. He would make a hole, try it the distance that separated us. In my eyes
of the drink-blotted Parisian crowd serve In 1882, he visited the Tolstoys and, at
out – the tongue would not go through: he this enemy had a clearly defined form and
had to bore a little more. The priest evidently only to heighten his disgust with himself. 63, performed the can-can for the child-
bore a well-known name: this enemy was –
realised that things were not as they should He sees the pointless inhumanity of Tropp- ren. ‘Turgenev – the can-can. Sad,’ Tolstoy serfdom.
be, and glancing stealthily once or twice over mann’s treatment – ‘the hideousness of all wrote in his diary. Most of his European
his shoulder, began to draw out the words of those undressings, dressings, hair-cutting, friends, by contrast, delighted in his lack of His attack on serfdom, when it came, was
the prayers, so as to give the old man time to those journeys along corridors and up and grandeur. ‘Adorable’ was Henry James’s characteristically indirect: a series of short
get things right. At last the operation during down staircases’ – and the savageness of a word for him; he was ‘the most approach- stories set in the Russian countryside, writ-
which, I frankly confess, I was covered with a
public death, as well as his own complic- able, the most practicable, the least un- ten from the perspective of a huntsman.
cold sweat, was finished and all the tongues
went in where required. ity. The willed blindness of the educated safe man of genius it has been my fortune The lives of the serfs he encounters are pre-
classes, from whose sight executions had to meet. He was so simple, so natural, so dictable and burdensome, and yet except-
Next, Troppmann was seated on a stool. been removed, was perfectly symbolised, modest, so destitute of personal pretens- ional (because, as Turgenev understood, all
The shirt he had just put on was cut away he knew, by his decision to turn his back ion . . . that one almost doubted at mo- lives are exceptional, in some moments).
to his shoulders (he ‘twitched them slight- on the spectacle. It is the severity of Tur- ments whether he were a man of genius ‘Never, surely,’ James remarked, ‘was a work
ly: it was cold in the room’) and his hair genev’s self-judgment, and the sincerity of
was trimmed. Turgenev, who was one of his self-exposure, that allows him to per-
several guests of the prison governor, ‘could sonify and at the same time to assert
not take my eyes off those hands, once societal guilt.
stained with innocent blood, but now lying Turgenev was then 51. He was the son
so helplessly one on top of the other – of a tyrant. His mother, Varvara Petrovna SPRING 2022
and particularly that slender, youthful neck’. Lutovinova, was the owner and ruler of SPRING 2022
Some of Troppmann’s hair drifted across some five thousand serfs, whom she made
the floor and settled by Turgenev’s boot. the punchbags for a lifetime of disappoint-
At last they went out the prison gates, ment (she had been abused by her step-
meeting ‘the great roar of the overjoyed father; Turgenev’s father had married her
crowd’ (around 25,000 people were already for her money and then neglected her
on the spot at 3 a.m.), and Turgenev – his before his premature death). She ordered
legs weakening beneath him – watched floggings, denied or demanded marriages,
Troppmann climb the steps to the guil- separated families, provoked women to in-
lotine, ‘two men pouncing on him from fanticide and sent people to Siberia. Tur-
the right and left, like spiders on a fly; I genev spent his childhood in terror of her, DISTRIBUTED BY
DISTRIBUTED BY
saw him falling forward suddenly and his and of her power over his life and the lives PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
heels kicking . . . But here I turned away and of others. He was aware of the irony in the ONLINE AT ZONEBOOKS.ORG
ONLINE AT ZONEBOOKS.ORG
began to wait.’ There was a long pause be- fact that he was first seduced by a family
fore ‘something suddenly descended with serf (the mother of his only child, a daugh-
a hollow growl and stopped with an abrupt ter, was another woman owned by his
thud . . . Just as though a huge animal had mother):
retched . . . I felt dizzy. Everything swam
before my eyes.’ Afterwards, Turgenev was I was very young. I was a virgin and with the
desires one has at the age of fifteen . . . It was
told that Troppmann had struggled brief-
rather a damp day, not a rainy day: one of
ly, throwing his head sideways so that it those erotic days that [Alphonse] Daudet
wouldn’t fit under the blade, and biting likes to describe. It began to drizzle. She took
the finger of one of the executioners as he – mind you, I was her master and she was my
was dragged by his hair into the correct pos- slave – she took hold of me by the hair at the
ition. He was also told that spectators had back of my head and said to me ‘Come.’ What
crawled under the guillotine and soaked followed was the sensations we have all ex-
perienced. But the sweet clasp of my hair
their handkerchiefs in Troppmann’s blood.
accompanied by that single word – that still
His fellow guests ‘obviously felt relieved . . . gives me a sensation of happiness every time
But not one of us, absolutely no one, looked I think of it.
like a man who realised that he had been
present at the performance of an act of In his adult life, this inverted power
social justice: everyone tried to turn away dynamic repeated itself. Turgenev was pas-
in spirit and, as it were, shake off the re- sionate – some thought insane – in his sub-
sponsibility for this murder.’ jection to the great opera singer Pauline
It was typical of Turgenev, writing up Viardot, to whom he was attached for forty
the experience for a Russian magazine, to years. Eventually, after periods of consid-

11 london Review of booKs 21 apRil 2022

with a polemic bearing more consistently the serfs in 1861 (Alexander II is said to génieff, Turgeniev, Turgenef, Turgeneff, for Turgenev . . . a source of authority.’ As
low in tone, as painters say . . . No single have claimed it as an influence on his de­ Toogueneff (this last when he was visiting Orlando Figes shows in The Europeans: Three
episode pleads conclusively against the cision). For the rest of his life, Turgenev Scotland). Lives and the Making of a Cosmopolitan Culture,
“peculiar institution” of Russia; the lesson was the most famous Russian in Europe. T.S. Eliot wrote in the Egoist that Tur­ Turgenev used this authority – and his
is in the cumulative testimony of a multi­ His celebrity, but also the novelty of his genev ‘was a perfect example of the bene­ command of French, German and English,
tude of fine touches.’ A Sportsman’s Sketches, presence, is reflected in the baffling variety fits of transplantation . . . A position which as well as some Italian and Spanish – to
published in 1852, became a sensation and in contemporary spellings of his name: for a smaller man may be merely a com­ establish himself as the consummate cult­
may have contributed to the liberation of Tourgéneff, Tourguéneff, Tourgenueff, Tur­ promise, or a means of disappearance, was ural middleman, a human conveyor belt

Short Cuts
are. Homeostasis is sometimes used as profit over the last five years. With the new in Ukraine – as though that justifies his
a way of defining life itself: living beings cap in place, household fuel bills will rise decision to make the poorest pay most.
can maintain steady internal states de­ by £700 over the course of the year, but it He stumbled when a BBC presenter asked

E
Rwin SchRödingeR is best known spite changeable external conditions. One won’t stop there. Another increase has him what he spends on a loaf of bread:
for his cat, suspended in a state of of the earliest formulations was physio­ already been announced for six months’ ‘We all have different breads in my house,’
being both dead and alive. Less well logist Claude Bernard’s description, in time. he said. So far, so Marie Antoinette. It’s
known is ‘Schrödinger’s paradox’, which the 1850s, of a ‘milieu intérieur’: ‘All of Fuel prices have pushed inflation to a easy, and may not be wrong, to assume
describes the apparent contradiction be­ the vital mechanisms, however varied they thirty­year high, driving up the cost of a that Sunak is punishing those who have
tween life and the second law of thermo­ may be, have always one goal, to maintain calorie of food. This is the second energy fewest options. But I also wonder whether
dynamics. The second law rules that the the uniformity of the conditions of life in crisis. Apples are up by 25 per cent, marg­ he understands what money means for
entropy – usually glossed as the measure the internal environment . . . The stability arine by 31 per cent, milk by 7 per cent. most people. In a recent publicity stunt, he
of disorder – of an isolated system must of the internal environment is the con­ Food is more expensive and people have posed with a supermarket employee’s car
always increase with time. Whatever we do, dition for the free and independent life.’ less to spend. Food bank users are turning in an attempt to look normal, then tried to
entropy goes up (as Allen Ginsberg reput­ Our bodies can only maintain homeo­ down rice and pasta because of the cost of pay for a can of Coke by waving his credit
edly said, ‘You can’t break even’). This stasis within reasonable bounds, however. boiling a pan of water. Worse is to come. card in front of a barcode scanner.
suggests a compelling hypothesis for the Acute challenges lead to disease and Ammonium nitrate fertiliser has risen There is a precedent for the government
end of the world: the universe will reach death; chronic pressures wear us down. from £280 to £1000 a tonne in the last shafting working­class people after a pan­
maximum entropy and thereafter be a dark There is a Silicon Valley trend for toying year, reflecting the increased cost of the demic. After the Black Death nearly halved
place of spent heat where nothing hap­ with those limits. Intermittent fasting and energy required to produce it. Crop yields the population of England, the demand
pens. Yet life seems to defy physics. Our icy showers are supposed to induce ‘pos­ will suffer, and food prices will continue for labour grew so great that it threatened
bodies produce and maintain an internal itive stress’, allowing tech bros to spend to rise. to give the peasants meaningful bargain­
order. Ageing cells are succeeded by per­ more hours processing code. For everyone This is the forecast: disposable incomes ing power. In response, Edward III set a
fect copies, wounds heal, muscles build else, there’s just old­fashioned negative are set to fall by 2.2 per cent, the steepest cap on earnings to protect the nobility. His
with use, synapses form and strengthen as stress, both psychological and biological. decline since records began in 1956. Uni­ successor, the 14­year­old Richard II, or
we learn and remember. For eighty years Poverty is a major cause. Persistent food versal credit, cut by £20 a week in October, whoever was really in charge, went further,
or so, a body is a haven from the thermo­ insecurity in children leads to a sustained will rise by just 3.1 per cent, while inflat­ introducing a poll tax to pay for the on­
dynamic void. stress response that pushes the body to ion could soon exceed 8 per cent. House­ going skirmishes with France. In 1381, a
In What Is Life?, based on a series of extreme homeostatic responses, includ­ holds will be around £1100 worse off over tax collector went to Fobbing in Essex to
public lectures given at Trinity College, ing prolonged and abnormally high levels the coming year. (The average annual spend demand a silver groat from each inhabitant,
Dublin in 1943, Schrödinger accounted of cortisol and continuous inflammation. on groceries is more than £1300 per per­ and was chased away by an angry crowd.
for the paradox. The increase of entropy, The result is more frequent and prolonged son, so those living on the poverty line Their resistance provoked the broader re­
he said, is a demand made of isolated sys­ childhood illness. That’s in addition to will effectively have their food budget volt against serfdom.
tems, and living beings are not isolated. the direct effects of hunger and under­ wiped out.) An additional 1.3 million peo­ Speaking to Sky News, and trying as
For one thing, we eat; we ingest and sub­ nutrition: stunting, fatigue, poor working ple, including half a million children, will usual to show us that he isn’t Jeremy Cor­
sume chunks of our environment. A non­ memory. These effects continue into adol­ be tipped into absolute poverty as their byn, Keir Starmer said: ‘People don’t want
isolated system is permitted to decrease escence, and are associated with a higher household incomes sink below 60 per cent a revolution. They do want to know “How
its local entropy as long as there are larger risk of depression and suicidal thoughts. of the median. Like every other we’re­all­ am I going to pay my energy bill?”’ He
offsets elsewhere. The balance sheet comes Food insecurity in adults increases the in­this­together scenario, the reality is proposed a one­off tax on the profits of
out right in the end because of the ex­ risk of hypertension, diabetes and cardio­ nothing of the sort. A poorer person must gas and oil companies, as Macron is doing
cretion of higher­entropy waste products vascular disease. Long­term exposure to spend a greater share of their income on in France. That would be a start, but given
– warm shit, steaming piss, moist breath – low temperatures strains the body’s equi­ basic necessities such as food and fuel: the scale of the crisis, why isn’t he talk­
and our eventual putrefaction. librium. More people die in the winter that’s what it means to be poor. One can ing about renationalisation? Revolution­
Food can fuel bodily order because it is months because of respiratory virus epi­ scrimp here and there, but the energy ary measures are what we need. Food and
a low­entropy source of energy, meaning it demics, increased air pollution and cold needs of the body set a hard lower limit. fuel shortages aren’t a blip; ‘external fac­
provides a budget – both energetic and en­ weather, but studies correcting for these These grim predictions arrive in the tors’ are here to stay. We need to end our
tropic – for bodily processes. It owes this factors show that one in five excess winter midst of existing deprivation. A report by reliance on fossil fuels, ensure our homes
property to nuclear fusion reactions in deaths in the UK is attributable to low the Food Foundation in 2017 found that, are properly insulated and fix the broken
the core of the sun, which maintains a temperatures at home. compared to the rest of the EU, the UK had link between work and pay. Does it need
temperature imbalance with respect to the While the energy required to keep a the highest proportion of children living stating that people shouldn’t be asked to
earth that allows it to supply the planet body running remains unchanged, the in a ‘severely food insecure household’. work for wages that leave them hungry
with a stream of high­energy, low­entropy price of doing so is higher than ever. Even One in six parents surveyed by the Social and cold?
photons. These photons are incident on before the instability caused by Putin’s Mobility Foundation said that their child Fobbing is ten miles from my home­
plants, algae and cyanobacteria, whose war, gas markets were failing to meet or children had to eat less than they would town of Southend­on­Sea, the UK’s new­
cells synthesise the basic units of organic post­lockdown energy demands. Reserves like, skip meals or sometimes go a whole est city, where a third of children live in
matter on which the rest of the food depleted during the cold winter of 2020­ day without eating. Between January and poverty, excess winter deaths are double
chain depends. We are all solar­powered 21 haven’t been replaced. The UK only im­ July 2020, nearly 2500 children were ad­ the national average and half of all re­
(or nuclear­powered, if you prefer), and, ports a fraction of its gas from Russia (5 mitted to hospital with malnutrition, twice sidents struggle to buy food, clothes and
crucially, stars persist long enough to pro­ per cent, compared with 41 per cent for as many as the year before. School meals other necessities. It is one of many places
vide not only the entropy gradients need­ the rest of Europe), but that makes little need to make up for this deficit. where people watch the news with the
ed for life, but the timescales required for difference when prices hike on the global ‘What do the majority of educated peo­ knowledge that the cost of living is be­
the evolution of interesting versions of it. market. Natural gas now costs twenty times ple know about poverty?’ Orwell asks in coming untenable. Suicide rates are on
Life is energetically expensive. Even if what it did at the lowest point of the pan­ Down and Out in Paris and London. He com­ the rise across Essex. A footbridge over a
you lie completely still, the cost of living demic, and a third more than it did in Jan­ plains that the editor of François Villon’s dual carriageway in Southend has become
is around 1500 kilocalories per day – the uary. The UK government has responded Le Testament felt it necessary to add a foot­ a hotspot in recent years. Fuel prices rose
amount of energy it would take to heat by lifting the energy price cap by 54 per note explaining the line ‘Et pain ne voyent on April Fool’s Day. The day before, the
eighty litres of water from tap temperature cent, protecting companies from taking qu’aux fenestres.’ Responding to critic­ bridge was closed for good.
to that of a scalding bath. Most is spent on the hit despite the fact that the Big Six – ism of his Spring Statement, Rishi Sunak
homeostasis, the processes by which our British Gas, EDF, E.ON, npower, Scottish pointed to ‘external factors outside the
bodies stay more or less exactly as they Power and SSE – have made £7 billion in country’ – dwindling gas reserves, the war Arianne Shahvisi
12 london Review of booKs 21 apRil 2022
transporting in one direction (in his own sympathy or antipathy for his own child. The genev, the notorious Westerner, who is now much time spent outside, first as a child
translations or on his recommendation) reader feels like getting angry: he is asked not seen as a Russian antique, while Tolstoy, frightened of his mother and then as a de-
Flaubert, Zola, Maupassant, Daudet, the to follow a well-beaten path, but to tread his Dostoevsky and Chekhov have passed into voted huntsman). Here are a few:
own path.
Goncourts, Heine and Whitman, and, in the the realm of the universal.
He’d get hold of one of his ideas with great
other, Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Gon-

T
effort, like a ladybird climbing on to a blade
charov, Saltykov-Shchedrin, Mussorgsky For Europeans and Americans, excluded he Republication of A Nest of of grass, and he’d sit on it and sit on it, all the
and Tchaikovsky.1 His piece about Tropp- from these controversies if not entirely ig- Gentlefolk, with ‘First Love’ and two time spreading his wings and making ready
mann, describing a French execution for a norant of them, Turgenev was for decades other superb long stories, in Jessie to fly – and then he’d suddenly fall off and
Russian audience, but criticising the death a crucial source of information on life in Coulson’s neglected translations of 1959, have to start climbing up again.
penalty as it operated in both countries, is Russia (‘What a very Tourguéneffish effect in addition to new versions of ‘First Love’ Rudin
an example of this transnational advocacy. the samovar gives!’ Theodore Colville ex- and five stories from A Sportsman’s Sketches by So a quiet and gentle creature, torn, God
‘You know a lot about life, my dear claims in William Dean Howells’s Indian Nicolas Pasternak Slater and Maya Slater, knows why, from her native soil and immed-
friend,’ Flaubert told him in 1873, ‘and you Summer, set in Florence). But he was most prompts us to ask again: ‘What is Tourguén- iately abandoned, like a sapling dragged out
know how to express what you know, which admired for the poignancy of his work. effish?’ Edmund Wilson, John Bayley and of the ground and left lying with its roots in
the sun, ended her earthly course.
is rarer.’ Turgenev’s work deals with inde- ‘Read Lisa [A Nest of Gentlefolk] if you want others have made the point that Turgenev
cision, incapacity and inconsequence; with your heart really broken,’ Colville tells the in the original is more ‘textured’, modulat- A Nest of Gentlefolk
distraction, disappointment and disillusion. young woman who asks: ‘What is Tourguén- ed and idiomatic (‘He is interested in words,’
He observed contentment from a distance, effish?’ And it’s true that Turgenev’s side- Wilson wrote, ‘in a way that the other great The same life flowed silently, like water
among marsh grasses.
apprehending the negative emotional space line in politics was just that. Even when, in 19th-century Russian novelists – with the
inhabited by those failing to arrive at it. In Fathers and Sons, he does manage to incorp- exception of Gogol – are not’) than he tends A Nest of Gentlefolk
his work – seven novels, many novellas and orate political discussion effectively into to seem in translation.2 Turgenev reads My fancies played and darted, always round
short stories as well as poems and plays the drama, these are the book’s least en- very similarly – that is to say, cleanly – in all the same images, like martins at daybreak
(A Month in the Country is still regularly gaging sections. The political elements in the available English translations, which round a bell tower.
performed) – men dream, propagandise, Smoke are a distraction from his analysis of suggests that the problem of conveying this ‘First Love’
pledge themselves, hesitate, backtrack and adultery. Virgin Soil is about the appeal of texture is insuperable. Richard Freeborn’s
fail, often disappointing or betraying the idealism to damaged or deprived individ- decision in his translation of Fathers and Sons Indistinct streaks of lightning flickered inces-
women who love them. uals, and only vaguely and tangentially to have Bazarov speak a slangy American santly in the sky; they did not so much flash
as flutter and twitch like the wing of a dying
Sometimes, sexual passion cuts across about the ideals themselves. The frailty of does not convince otherwise.
bird.
a life, as it cut across Turgenev’s. In Smoke the human personality was his real subject. In reading Turgenev in English we are
‘First Love’
and Spring Torrents, Litvinov and Sanin de- At the time of his death in 1883, Turgenev’s not departing from historical precedent.
stroy all their plans for the future when they reputation – an elite, European reputation The vast majority of his 19th-century read- Dunyasha would gladly giggle at him and
are taken over by desire (when Sanin falls to – as one of the century’s greatest writers ers, in company with his most distinguish- give him sidelong significant looks as she
his knees before his ‘sovereign mistress’, seemed secure. ‘We know of several excel- ed European and American admirers (James, ran past him all aflutter like a little quail.
she seizes ‘his hair with all ten fingers’ – lent critics who to the question, Who is the Flaubert, Zola, George Eliot, Howells, the Fathers and Sons
an echo of Turgenev’s own experience). In first novelist of the day? would reply, with- authorities in Oxford who gave him an hon-
Fathers and Sons, the bullish young nihilist out hesitation, Ivan Turgénieff,’ James wrote orary doctorate in 1879), read him largely He’ll come down on you like snow off a roof.
Bazarov is thrown off course when he falls in 1873. A little over twenty years later, he in French or English. His importance for ‘Biryuk’
in love with Anna Sergeevna Odintsova, who observed (note the change of spelling) that Western literature is unavoidably a mediat-
Nejdanov had no need of lengthy replies; he
is unable to fully respond. Abandoning ‘Turgenev is in a peculiar degree what I ed one, and it is through translation that knew quite well that his friend swallowed
himself to his medical studies, he attends may call the novelists’ novelist, – an artistic we see what made those readers praise him every word of his, as the dust in the road
an autopsy and accidentally, perhaps care- influence extraordinarily valuable and in- so highly. swallows each drop of rain.
lessly, infects himself with typhus. Anna, eradicably established.’ So: Turgenev’s greatest strength as a Virgin Soil
visiting him on his deathbed, cannot offer Ineradicably? Turgenev’s reputation has writer was his talent for detail, which had
solace (instead, she gives an involuntary been on the slide since the 1880s, when the several different applications. One of his When Turgenev was dying of misdiagnos-
shudder when he tells her she is beautiful). signing of the first internal copyright con- most distinctive habits is his use of similes ed spinal cancer, he underwent several
Turgenev’s willingness to stage political vention at Berne in 1886 led to a boom in drawn from the natural world (the result of futile operations, during one of which, he
debates in his fiction, combined with a re- Russian translations (unlike Britain, France
fusal to come down decisively on one side, and Germany, Russia stayed out of the con-
made him a controversial figure in Russia. vention, so no rights had to be bought, and
The character of Bazarov was attacked from translations were cheap). As Figes writes,
the right as an endorsement of anti-tsarist ‘the discovery of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy –
thought (it was Turgenev who popularised seemingly more Russian than the Europ-
the term ‘nihilist’ by using it in the novel), eanised Turgenev – altered Western expect-
and from the left as a malicious parody. ations of Russian literature. Now . . . read-
Turgenev’s depiction of Russians abroad ers in the West wanted Russian writers to
in Smoke and the travails of would-be revol- be roughly primitive and spiritual, motivat-
utionaries in Virgin Soil also drew criticism. ed by the big ideas about human existence,
It was useless for him to point out that exotically original, to write at greater length
– in sum, unlike anything in the rest of Eur-
the reader always feels ill at ease . . . is easily
opean literature.’ As early as 1917, Joseph
bewildered and even aggrieved if an author
treats his imaginary character like a living
Conrad was complaining of ‘public indif-
person, that is to say, if he sees and displays ference’ to Turgenev’s works. Eliot, writing
his good as well as his bad sides, and, above in the same year, mourned that Turgenev
all, if he does not show unmistakable signs of was the ‘least exploited of Russian novel-
ists’. He hasn’t lacked champions, start-
1 Penguin, 576 pp., £12.99, April 2020, 978 0 ing with Conrad and Eliot, and including
14 197943 4. Woolf, Edmund Wilson (‘No fiction writer
2 I have used the following translations: Richard can be read through with a steadier ad-
Freeborn’s Rudin and Sketches from a Hunter’s Album; miration’), Hemingway (‘Turgenev to me
Gilbert Gardiner’s On the Eve; both the revised is the greatest writer there ever was’) and
Constance Garnett and the Freeborn translation
of Fathers and Sons; Coulson’s A Nest of Gentlefolk, V.S. Pritchett. But the patchiness with which
‘In A Quiet Backwater’ and ‘First Love’; Michael he is now published and read, and the mis-
Pursglove’s Smoke; Leonard Schapiro’s Spring conceptions this has generated – that he is
Torrents; and Rochelle Townsend’s Virgin Soil. predominantly a portraitist of the Russian
Also David Magarshack’s edition of Turgenev’s landscape and the lives of the serfs (as in
Literary Reminiscences and Autobiographical Fragments
from 1958. Where I make a point of a particular A Sportsman’s Sketches) or a commentator on
passage or phrase, I have consulted more than the problem of Russian progress (as in
one translation. Fathers and Sons) – has meant that it is Tur-

13 london Review of booKs 21 apRil 2022

later told Daudet, ‘I searched for the words on mere serfs, which made such an im­ of hoofs along the village street . . . The wind uncertainty around Arkady – his pride and
with which I could give you an exact im­ pression). In ‘First Love’, in the Riverrun shrieked past, as though straining to blow enjoyment in him, his earnest desire to
pression of the steel cutting through my edition, the narrator visits the family newly out the lanterns, and the pond, black and understand his friendship with Bazarov,
threatening, splashed noisily . . . The coach­
skin and entering my flesh . . . something moved in next door and is met by a servant coupled with his own incomprehension.
man seized one boat­hook, the bailiff anoth­
like a knife cutting a banana.’ Hearing ‘carrying a plate containing the backbone er, and both jumped into the boat, pushed off Later, we are given a brief insight into the
of this, Edmond de Goncourt marvelled: of a herring. Closing with his foot the door and began dragging the water with their period preceding the action of the novel.
‘Our old friend Turgenev is a real man of leading to the next room, he said abruptly: hooks; others lighted them from the bank. It It is never referred to again, but it is all
letters.’ “Yes?”’ It is the herringbone and the serv­ was strange and terrible to see their move­ we need:
Another manifestation of Turgenev’s tal­ ant’s hasty, undignified shutting of the ments and their shadowy figures in the haze
above the disturbed waters of the pond, by For the first time, he clearly perceived the gulf
ent for detail was his proclivity for giving door with his foot that capture the grimy between himself and his son; he foresaw that
the dim and uncertain light of the lanterns . . .
miniature portraits of even the most in­ disorder of this household, presided over it would grow wider and wider with every
Something white showed near the boat.
significant figures in his books. We learn of by a princess down on her luck, who is passing day. In vain, then, had he spent
a language and music teacher ‘who spoke later seen scratching ‘her head under her Turgenev’s use of visual detail, his power whole days reading the latest books during
3 the winters in Petersburg; in vain had he
indifferent French and German and played cap with the point of a knitting needle’. to make us see, is almost casual. He leaves
listened to the conversations of young peo­
the piano after a fashion, but who made ex­ us to notice, or not, the way the two little

I
ple; in vain had he rejoiced when he’d man­
cellent pickled cucumbers’; of one charac­ n ‘A Quiet Backwater’, again translated girls and their raindrops prefigure Masha’s aged to interject his own ideas into their heat­
ter’s mother whose ‘left eye was inclined by Coulson, Vladimir Sergeich Astakhov death, or the way the group’s earlier rush­ ed discussions.
to water, and on the strength of this [she] is invited by Mikhail Nikolaich Ipatov ing in from the rain is inverted by their
considered herself a woman of refined sens­ to stay at his house in the country, where panicked rushing out to the pond. His de­ About halfway through the novel, the
ibility’; of a priest with ‘only one not ent­ he lives with his young daughters and his scription of the scene by the water also two young men swap hosting duties and
irely pleasant habit, which was that from sister­in­law, Masha. One evening when relies for its effect on details simply stated, Bazarov arrives at his family home with
time to time he would slowly and carefully they are on the terrace, there is a rainstorm steadily added one to the other without Arkady in tow. Bazarov’s parents haven’t
raise his hand to swat flies on his face and the group run laughing into the draw­ emotional brocading. seen him for three years. (They are a few
and sometimes managed to squash them.’ ing room; Turgenev has us notice that But Turgenev is also a master of the de­ rungs down the social ladder: his father,
James cited another example: ‘Ipatov’s little daughters laughed loudest of tail that gives access not just to a general a retired army doctor, served in Arkady’s
a gentleman who makes a momentary ap­
all as they shook the raindrops from their impression – of disarray in a princess’s grandfather’s brigade.) At dinner, Bazarov’s
pearance as host at a dinner party, and . . . has dresses.’ Later, Vladimir Sergeich is woken household – but to individual character and mother pays no attention to their guest:
our impression of his personality completed in the night with the news that Masha, circumstance. It says everything about the ‘She leaned her round face . . . on her closed
by the statement that the soup at his table was disappointed in love, has thrown herself contradiction gripping the 16­year­old nar­ little fist and didn’t take her eyes off her
filled with little paste figures, representing into the pond. He runs downstairs to find rator of ‘First Love’, lurking in the garden son. She sighed repeatedly . . . dying to
hearts, triangles and trumpets. In the auth­ the house empty, but before he goes out­ at night in the hope of spying the object know how long he intended to stay but . . .
or’s conception, there is a secret affinity be­
side (through the doors opening from the of his devotion with her rumoured lover, afraid to ask him.’ When, after only three
tween the character of this worthy man and
the contortions of his vermicelli.
drawing room) he spots the two girls: that when he hears a noise, he murmurs days, Bazarov signals to his father that he
‘Half­dead with fright, they stood in their ‘“Who is there?” . . . almost inaudibly’, and is leaving in the morning, by asking off­
James’s charge – Turgenev ‘strikes us as lov­ little white petticoats, their hands clasped when he hears laughter and ‘rustling among handedly for horses to be sent for, Tur­
ing details for their own sake, as a biblio­ and their little feet bare, by a night­light the leaves’, repeats the interrogative ‘more genev handles the scene with agonising
maniac loves the books he never reads’ – placed on the floor.’ The scene that follows softly still’. He doesn’t actually want to delicacy. ‘I have to go and stay with [Arkady]
has some justice, especially when it comes makes obvious what Hemingway took from make the discovery, which he has already for a little while. I’ll come back here again
to the detours Turgenev likes to take. These Turgenev: half made, that this lover not only exists, later,’ Bazarov says.
can be tiresome, but they can’t be separat­ He found Ipatov at the edge of the pond; a but is his own father.
ed from his broader impulse to particular­ Much of the emotional power of Fathers ‘Ah! For a little while . . . All right.’ Vasily Ivan­
lantern hung on a branch lit the old man’s
ise. It is his restless desire to make the read­ and Sons comes from the small touches that ovich drew out his handkerchief, and, blowing
grey head clearly. He was wringing his hands
his nose, bent over nearly to the ground. ‘Oh
er see the distinctive way somebody does and staggering like a drunken man; near him demonstrate the attitude of the elder fig­
well, everything will be arranged. I thought
something, or to convey a small but telling a woman lay on the grass writhing and sob­ ures – Arkady’s widowed father, Nikolai you were going to be with us . . . a little long­
feature of a scene, that gives his prose its bing; there was a bustle of people all round Petrovich Kirsanov, and Bazarov’s parents – er. Three days . . . after three years, it’s not
them. Ivan Ilyich was in the water up to his
aliveness, its capacity to surprise. to their children. Constance Garnett called very much – it’s not very much, Evgeny!’
knees, groping along the bottom with a pole;
Take the undemonstrative driver in the the coachman was undressing, his whole her translation Fathers and Children, and
story ‘Kasyan from the Beautiful Lands’, body shivering; two men were dragging a though this wording has been supplanted He can’t resist telling Bazarov that his
from A Sportsman’s Sketches, who, having boat along the bank; there was a sharp clatter in all modern editions, it captures some­ mother had only just asked for fresh
decided to continue a journey although his thing significant: your child always re­ flowers for his room:
cart has a broken axle, ‘carefully replaced 3 In the translation of ‘First Love’ by the Slaters, mains your child. The relationship includes (Vasily Ivanovich didn’t mention the fact that
the snuff­box in his pocket, brought his hat the herringbone is ‘gnawed clean’, following the possibility that, through an excess of every morning, just after dawn, he conferred
down over his brows without touching it, Constance Garnett’s version of 1897. This sug­ tenderness, it is the yearning parent who with Timofeich [the servant], standing with
simply by a movement of his head, and gests that the princess has been eating with becomes childish. his bare feet in slippers, pulling out one dog­
her hands (for that matter, can one gnaw a We are aware of Nikolai Petrovich’s vuln­ eared ruble note after another with trembling
climbed thoughtfully up on to the seat’. It’s
herring?). It’s curious, too, that they have the fingers and ordering him to make various
the bit about the hat, by any measure un­ servant keeping the door ‘open’ with his foot, erability from the beginning, as he waits
purchases, with special emphasis on good
necessary, that makes the driver real (in­ when all the other translations I’ve read have impatiently for his son to arrive from St
things to eat and red wine, which, as far as he
deed, it was details such as these, lavished the door being pushed shut. Petersburg (Arkady has just graduated). could tell, the young men liked very much.)
Nikolai Petrovich asks his coachman twice ‘Freedom – that’s the main thing. That’s
if there is any sign of the carriage before sit­ my rule . . . I don’t want to constrain you . . .
ting down with a sigh, thinking about his not . . .’
dead wife, who did not live to see her son He suddenly stopped talking and made for
a graduate. When Arkady finally appears, the door.
‘We’ll see each other soon, Father, honestly.’
they embrace, and Nikolai Petrovich is so
But Vasily Ivanovich merely waved his
flustered that ‘it was as if he were a little hand without turning around, and went out.
lost, and a little shy.’ It is only now that
Arkady reveals that he has brought a friend, This is what makes the moment later
Bazarov – a cleverness on Turgenev’s part, on when Bazarov tells his father that he
because we feel his father’s surprise, and has almost certainly infected himself with
then his sadness that the intimacy of the re­ typhus so terrible. The wait to see if the
union has been lost. The new atmosphere, illness will manifest is even worse.
and Nikolai Petrovich’s determination to
show he doesn’t feel it, is conveyed to us [Vasily Ivanovich] restrained himself for two
whole days, although he didn’t like the way
by the way he ‘promptly’ turns and shakes
his son looked at all; he kept watching him
Bazarov’s hand (which hasn’t been extend­ stealthily . . . but by the third day, at dinner,
ed), formally asking his first name and he couldn’t bear it any longer. Bazarov was
patronymic. From here on, we become sitting with his eyes downcast, without touch­
familiar with Nikolai Petrovich’s smiling ing his food.

14 london Review of booKs 21 apRil 2022

 ‘Why aren’t you eating, Evgeny?’ he in­ Nejdanov’s inability to accept Maria’s offer Such happy endings are rare, but that time pass as swiftly as in Russia,’ Turgenev
quired, donning a thoroughly nonchalant ex­ is gradually revealed as unwillingness, an­ shouldn’t obscure the fact that Turgenev’s writes, ‘though they say that in prison it
pression. ‘The food has been prepared quite other aspect of his mortifying failure fully novels, like Austen’s, usually depict an passes even more quickly.’
nicely, I think.’
to realise a revolutionary consciousness. intense, pressured moment of youthful, Turgenev believed that all human effort
‘I don’t want anything, so I’m not eating.’
‘Don’t you have an appetite? How’s your His collapse is described sidelong: it is as never to be repeated romantic opportunity. and desire – satisfied or unsatisfied – is
head?’ Vasily Ivanovich added timidly. ‘Does though he is being slowly suffocated by ‘First love is exactly like a revolution,’ he rendered irrelevant by the passage of time.
it ache?’ those strange, oppressive, nameless emot­ writes in Spring Torrents. ‘The regular and This pessimistic view allowed him to re­
‘Yes, it does. Why shouldn’t it ache?’ ions that Turgenev’s other characters event­ established order of life is in an instant solve his complex feelings about personal
Arina Vlasevna sat up and became alert. ually express through action. At last, Nej­ smashed to fragments; youth stands at the agency: from the point of view of the uni­
‘Please don’t be angry, Evgeny,’ Vasily danov expresses them too – by suicide. barricade, its bright banner raised high in verse, nobody has very much for very long.
Ivanovich continued, ‘but won’t you let me
‘They are so short and yet they hold so the air, and sends its ecstatic greetings ‘Men’s dreams never come true, and their
feel your pulse?’
Bazarov stood up. ‘I can tell you without much,’ Virginia Woolf wrote of Turgenev’s to the future, whatever it may hold – death regrets are futile. He who has not drawn a
feeling my pulse that I have a fever.’ novels. ‘The emotion is so intense and yet or a new life, no matter.’ What gives his winning number may as well be satisfied
so calm. The form is in one sense so per­ stories their plangency, the emotional com­ with a losing one and not breathe a word
All is darkness after that, and we are left fect, in another so broken.’ The brokenness pression and strange calm that Woolf about it to anyone.’ His stories are often
with the image – again drawn from nature is easy to identify: Turgenev’s propensity to noted, isn’t just that they usually end in told in recollection by aged narrators, or
– of Bazarov’s parents at the moment of brake and reverse a considerable distance failure or defeat or sacrifice. It’s what hap­ end by jumping decades into the future:
his death: ‘Side by side . . . they bowed into the past in order to describe how a pens next: these flurried lives settle into in the present there is no great happiness,
their poor heads like lambs in the noonday character came to their present position a stillness from which, we are given to or melodramatic anguish; it is merely the
heat.’ repeatedly stalls narrative momentum and understand, they will never be disturbed. case that time has passed and is continuing
introduces a note of artificiality (‘We must As Pritchett wrote, Turgenev ‘is moved to pass. It is no more possible to remedy

I
t is in Turgenev’s use of speaking de­ now say a few words about Markelov . . .’). by the rise and fall of love and not by long ago mistakes than to choose a better
tails – we might call it ‘showing not tell­ This master of showing could not resist a the fullness of love realised. Hail and fare­ moment to be born.
ing’ – that his influence on the develop­ great deal of unnecessary telling. His school­ well. Spring and autumn. No high summer Turgenev’s dwelling on nature, on the
ment of the novel can be detected, perhaps ing in the theatre (he wrote eight plays be­ of fulfilment. Therefore no tragedy, only turning of the days and the seasons, is his
especially as it was transmitted through fore his first novel) explains his focus on sadness.’ way of instructing us in our insignificance,
James, as well as Maupassant, Chekhov and dialogue and the exterior signs of interior Turgenev had a curious relationship to at the same time as he holds a magnifying
Conrad. He relies on dialogue, his plots states, the limited casts and settings (very time. At the age of 36 he was wistful about glass to our small and squirming human
consist of deepening relationships among often a house in the country), the swift and his ‘old age’, and, perhaps encouraged by connections. Woolf put it best: ‘As we not­
a limited cast, usually over a short period decisive scenes – but also the formal weak­ his prematurely white hair, early adopted ice, without seeming to notice, life going
of time. He rarely describes his charact­ nesses, most obviously this failure to in­ a languishing pose. He had trouble keep­ on, we feel more intensely for the men and
ers’ motivations, entering their heads only corporate back stories. It also accounts for ing appointments: ‘It was impossible to women themselves because they are not
to emphasise their internal inarticulacy: some of his creakier stratagems: in his see much of him,’ James recalled, ‘without the whole of life, but only part of the whole.’
they are frequently unable to define their otherwise desultory lecture on Fathers and discovering that he was a man of delays.’ ‘I am not afraid of looking at the future,’
‘nameless’ emotions, feeling confused, or Sons, Nabokov was scornful of the appear­ His characters, too, miss their moment, Turgenev wrote on his 42nd birthday.
unsure, surprising themselves by their act­ ance late in the novel of the ‘overheard in or prove superfluous to it (‘Hamlet of the Only I am conscious of the fact that I am
ions, sometimes realising their inevitabil­ the arbour’ trope (‘We have sunk to the Shchigrovsky District’ and ‘The Diary of a subject to certain eternal and unalterable, but
ity only after the fact. ‘The drama is quite un­ level of a comedy of manners’). ‘His literary Superfluous Man’ are two of his stories). In deaf and dumb laws . . . and the small squeak
commented,’ James wrote. Turgenev ‘never genius,’ Nabokov said, ‘falls short on the this way, Turgenev’s work is a kind of com­ of my consciousness means as little in this
plays chorus; situations speak for them­ score of literary imagination, that is, of nat­ mentary, both covert and overt, on Russia, life as if I were to babble ‘I, I, I’ on the shore
selves.’ In A Nest of Gentlefolk, the reader is urally discovering ways of telling the story a star with which his characters’ fortunes of the ocean that flows without return. The fly
still buzzes, but in another instant – and
the first to see that the long disillusioned which would equal the originality of his de­ consistently fail to align. Even Bazarov,
Lavretsky is falling in love with Liza: ‘As she scriptive art.’
Gravity for Beginners
Gravity for Beginners
the progressive, tells Arkady at the end of
thirty, forty years is also an instant – it will
Kevin Crossley-Holland
Kevin Crossley-Holland buzz no more.
went, Liza had hung her hat on a branch; It’s a little more complicated to explain Fathers and Sons: ‘Get married as soon as you
Lavretsky gazed at that hat, with its long, what is perfect in Turgenev’s work. But, for can, and build your nest, and have as many In all his work, Turgenev seems to be out
slightly rumpled ribbons, with strange, one thing, he can rival Austen for a rom­ children as possible. They’llKevin be smartCrossley-Holland
ones, ahead of us. ‘As a punishment of myself
Kevin Crossley-Holland
almost tender emotion.’ In Fathers and Sons, antic finale. This is Lezhnev speaking in because they’ll have been born at the right and as a lesson to others,’ he wrote after
we understand Arkady’s confused feelings Rudin: Gravity forGravity
Beginners
for Beginners
time, not like you and me.’ Russia is slow to witnessing that execution in Paris, ‘I should
on leaving the home of Anna Sergeevna ‘You talk like that, Alexandra Pavlovna, be­ change, and life is short. ‘Nowhere does now like to tell everything I saw.’ c

much better than he does – he has con­ cause you don’t know me. You think I’m a Kevin Crossley-Holland’s first
Kevin Crossley-Holland’s first
vinced himself he is in love with her, de­ blockhead, a complete blockhead, just wood new collection of poems for
new collection ofsix years
poems for six years
spite knowing that she is attracted to Bazar­ from the neck up. But don’t you know that I’m – “poetry [which] is accessible
– “poetry [which]yet is accessible yet
ov, and despite actually being in love with capable of melting like sugar and spending uncompromisingly contemporary.”
uncompromisingly contemporary.”
her sister Katya. ‘Arkady was the first to go
whole days on my knees?’ John Greening,John Country Life Country Life
Greening,
down the front steps; he climbed into Sit­
‘That I confess I’d like to see!’ Gravity for Beginners
Lezhnev suddenly stood up. Kevin Crossley-Holland
978-1910345-39-9 pbk £10.99 pbk £10.99
nikov’s carriage. A butler respectfully help­ ‘Then marry me, Alexandra Pavlovna, and
978-1910345-39-9
ed him into his seat, but he would gladly you will see it.’ 
Alexandra Pavlovna reddened right up to

have hit him or burst into tears.’ Kevin Crossley-Holland
Brian Johnstone
her ears.
The Marks on the Brian Johnstone
The technique is best exemplified in TheMap
Marks on the Map Gravity foron
Beginners
Virgin Soil, Turgenev’s last, longest and un­ ‘What was that you said, Mikhaylo Mikh­
aylych?’ she murmured in confusion. BRIAN JOHNSTONE
The MarksThe
BRIAN JOHNSTONE
the Map
on Marks the Map
fairly disregarded novel, in the relationship
between the two young unmarried revol­
‘I said something,’ answered Lezhnev, “Brian Johnstone takesCrossley-Holland’s
Kevin
“Brian us on a takes us on
Johnstone firsta
‘that has been a long, long while and a thous­
utionaries, Mariana and Nejdanov. Mar­ remarkable journey,
new not justjourney,
collection
remarkable topoemsnot
of for six
just years
to
and times on the tip of my tongue. I’ve finally
iana has told Nejdanov that they can sleep said it, and you may do now as you know best.
discover what is there,
discover but also
what iswhat
there, but also
– “poetry [which] is accessible yet what
together, as proof of her commitment to But so as not to embarrass you I’ll now leave. was there, mapping time as
was there, well as contemporary.”
mapping
uncompromisingly time as well as
him. They have eloped and are staying in If you want to be my wife . . . I’ll be out in the space. This is one map
space. I would
This is one
John Greening, Country map I would
Life
rooms on opposite sides of a hallway. garden. If you have no objection, just ask for urge readers to follow…”
urge readers to follow…”
me to be called: I’ll understand . . .’ John Glenday John Glenday
978-1910345-39-9 pbk £10.99
Alexandra Pavlovna wanted to detain Lezh­
She went out, but in a minute or two her door nev, but he swiftly went out into the garden 978-1910345-35-1 pbk £10.99 pbk £10.99
978-1910345-35-1
opened slightly and he heard her say, ‘Good without putting on his hat, leaned on a gate,

night!’ then more softly another ‘Good night!’ and began gazing into the distance. From bookshops Brian Johnstone
or bookshops
The Marks on the Map From or
The Marks on the Map
and the key turned in the lock. ‘Mikhaylo Mikhaylych!’ resounded the direct from Arcdirect(10% discount,
from Arc (10% discount,
Nejdanov sank onto the sofa and covered voice of a maid behind him. ‘Please come to POST FREE in UK)
BRIAN JOHNSTONE POST FREE in UK)
his face with his hands. Then he got up quick­ the mistress. She’s asking for you.’
ly, went to her door and knocked. Mikhaylo Mikhaylych turned round, seiz­
“Brian Johnstone takes us on a
‘What is it?’ was heard from within.
‘Not till tomorrow, Mariana . . . not till
w w w. a rw
ed the maid by her head with both hands, to
her great astonishment, kissed her on the
c publ
w w. aicr catpubl
ion sic
.co.u k s .co.u k
at ion remarkable journey, not just to
discover what is there, but also what
tomorrow!’ forehead, and strode off in the direction of was there, mapping time as well as
‘Till tomorrow,’ she replied softly. Alexandra Pavlovna. space. This is one map I would
urge readers to follow…”
15 london Review of booKs 21 apRil 2022 John Glenday
978-1910345-35-1 pbk £10.99

From bookshops or
At the wears a luxurious fur coat and holds her
sculpture Fillette: a giant latex phallus she
series of eleven heads made between 1998
and 2009 demonstrates her virtuosity and
tapestries are fixed to the exterior and in­
terior walls of the cage, and draped over

Hayward
referred to as her ‘doll’. It wasn’t until her attention to the particular qualities an upholstered chair at its centre. Little
she was in her eighties, however, that she of fabric. The materials include wool, felt, Louise, now grown up, has not repaired
began to think of clothes as sculptural muslin, tapestry, cotton, terrycloth; the the missing pieces of the tapestries, how­

I
n antony, the southern suburb of elements – intimate, indexical, mnemonic. heads appear to grimace, open their mouths ever, and it appears some images have been
Paris where Louise Bourgeois spent her ‘You can retell your life and remember your in anguish, stare or implore. Some have no deliberately excised: the face of a king, the
childhood, the river water had special life by the shape, the weight, the colour, face, while others have three. Two heads, crotch of a naked child. Bourgeois’s work
properties. The Bièvre, which ran past the the smell of the clothes in your closet,’ covered in raised seams that look like asks what we do with the past – particular­
Bourgeois home, was thick with tannin, she said. ‘Fashion is like the weather, the scars, face each other and touch the tips of ly when it remains painful or in pieces,
an important ingredient for the family’s ocean – it changes all the time.’ their extended pink tongues. This is the moth­eaten.
tapestry restoration business: wool wash­ Bourgeois had all the clothes, fabrics heroic classical bust made soft and slyly Three of her special edition fabric books
ed in this water is more receptive to dyeing and textiles from her closets brought down weird. – The Woven Child (2003), Ode à l’oubli (2004)
agents – colours set fast and don’t fade. to the basement studio and hung over the In other works, bodies are enclosed in and Ode à la Bièvre (2007) – are displayed
Her father’s first job was as a landscape pipes according to colour. Those that evok­ structures (Bourgeois called them ‘cells’) page by page alongside a series of works
architect and he would bring back decor­ ed particular places, people or memories made of glass, wood, steel mesh, repurpos­ from the mid­2000s that continue her
ative garden sculptures from his travels remained whole, while others were cut up ed windows and doors; or arranged in spiral and web motifs. In these pieces, all
across Europe. They always needed to be and repurposed, stitched together, often dioramas. Visitors may already be familiar untitled, swathes of coloured and striped
repaired and straightened up. ‘It is partly crudely, to form heads and other corporeal with some of these – small, pink, seam­ cloth have been cut into triangles and
why I became a sculptor,’ Bourgeois said. elements. In Untitled (1996), eight pieces of covered bodies, often female and in various tightly stitched together to form circles and
‘I was so familiar with them.’ After the war, clothing are suspended at different heights hybrid states – a selection of which were patterns, which radiate outwards from fix­
he began to collect tapestry fragments, from a central steel pole; they radiate round recently displayed at Tate Modern in a room ed points. Some have small fabric flowers
drawing on his wife’s knowledge to restore it like ghostly, drifting bodies. Two silk devoted to Bourgeois. I was most surpris­ at their central nodes. Others have been
and reshape them (she had worked in her slips, one carefully edged in lace; four ed by Couple III and Couple IV (both 1997), turned over, revealing the network of in­
family’s tapestry atelier in Aubusson, where delicate chemise­like vests, some frilled large vitrines, each containing two head­ tricate seams on the reverse and draw­
the river Creuse, like the Bièvre, coursed ing attention to her labour. ‘Where do you
with tannin). place yourself, at the periphery or at the
Little Louise, sometimes known as vortex?’ Bourgeois asked, with reference
Louison, was brought into the family busi­ to these works:
ness aged eight as dessinateur, at that time
Beginning at the outside is the fear of losing
an exclusively male role. On Thursdays
control; the winding in is a tightening, a re­
and Sundays, when she wasn’t at school, treating, a compacting to the point of dis­
her job was to draw in the missing sect­ appearance. Beginning at the centre is af­
ions – often bodies or parts of them. She firmation, the move outwards is a represent­
started with the feet. At fifteen, Bourg­ ation of giving, and giving up control; of
eois left school altogether to work in the trust, positive energy, or life itself.
weaving and restoring ateliers full time,
while preparing for the École des Beaux­ In two late works from 2009, Eternity
Arts. The house was filled with stacks of and Eugénie Grandet, the spiral becomes a
tapestries and as a child she would fold clock face. Next to each number in Eternity
herself inside them to keep warm or to is a pair of torsos, male and female, paint­
hide – they were ‘a form of textile sculpture ed by Bourgeois on a square of fabric and
to be entered’, she said, a rich, immersive then sewn onto the main piece, a vast
material. white sheet. In blues, pinks, reds and inky
The Woven Child at the Hayward (until blacks, the two bodies face each other –
15 May) is the first large­scale retrospect­ or with a necktie, others fastened at the ‘Together’ (2005) penis erect, stomach swollen – in eternal
ive of Bourgeois’s textile works, made from side with silk­covered buttons; a pale pink tumescence. Eugénie Grandet is quite dif­
the mid­1990s until her death in 2010. Her pussy bow shirt; and a shimmering, bead­ less black fabric figures lying on top of one ferent: a small sixteen­piece needlepoint
work with cloth is varied, prolific and in­ ed black cocktail dress hang on cow bones another, like giant poupées abandoned in ode to Balzac’s lonely heroine. Each white
novative; many pieces offer new iterations whose rounded joints extend through the an inert romance. (If only they could love rectangle of fabric – muslin, linen, cotton,
of familiar Bourgeois themes – memory, arms of the garments. The pink shirt and each other, I thought, quickly ashamed at striped, checked – is embellished or em­
sexuality, identity, the body, pain, love and black dress are gently padded, to remind the idea of their animation.) In Couple III, broidered with small objects: tiny jewels,
most of all, perhaps, the compulsion to us that these garments once held bodies. one figure wears an elaborate pink arm flowers, clasps, buttons, needles. There
make. Created late in her life, they are The words ‘SEAMSTRESS’, ‘MISTRESS’, brace; in Couple IV, one has a wooden leg are three clocks, each showing a different
themselves retrospective, made from the ‘DISTRESS’, ‘STRESS’ are welded to the laced up its thigh in leather. For Bour­ time, and another with no hands at all,
stuff of her life – personal garments, dom­ base – evidence of her childhood and of its geois, the body imagined through fabric only a tight bouquet of purple flowers.
estic linens, needlepoint, embroidered vexing memories (her father was a serial was a visible – and haptic – site of pain and This is Bourgeois at her most convent­
handkerchiefs, scraps of tapestries brought philanderer who carried on a long affair loss. ‘The subject of pain is the business ionally unconventional, feminine, careful
to New York after her father’s death. ‘Hav­ with her young governess, among other I am in,’ she said. ‘To give meaning and and neat, reminding us that such delicate
ing held onto these objects of clothing for tyrannies). shape to frustration and suffering. What work is associated with childhood and old
a lifetime,’ her assistant, Jerry Gorovoy, The body is spectral and absent in this happens to my body has to be given a formal age, that it can be an act of devotion. Sew­
wrote shortly before her death, ‘by incorp­ work, but in others it is all too present abstract shape. So you might say, pain is ing, Bourgeois wrote, ‘is a plea in favour of
orating them into her art she alleviates her – large, stuffed, heavy, sagging. Single I the ransom of formalism.’ a/second chance, it is a plea in favour of/X
fear of separation. This processing is con­ (1996), a body without hands, feet or a Bourgeois described her ‘cells’ as re­ and against Y.’ If severing and cutting were
nected to the fear of dying. The need to head, is made from a number of grey­ presentations of different types of pain, connected with the father, sewing was
mark time, which is what these clothes re­ toned fabrics and hangs upside down in but they are also highly controlled display associated with the mother. ‘My mother
present, is connected to her awareness of the Hayward’s brutalist stairwell, arms ex­ mechanisms that marshal how and what would sit out in the sun and repair a tap­
her own fragility.’ tended like Saint Peter, tiny round breasts we are allowed to see. As in much of estry or a petit point,’ she recalled. ‘This
As a child, Bourgeois’s parents com­ protruding. High up, over a doorway, Legs her work, the status of the materials is sense of reparation is very deep within
peted with each other to dress her in the (2001) is a cluster of three enormous red ambiguous: what contains or constricts me.’ Bourgeois liked to invoke the spider
latest fashions: ‘Chanel, Poiret, lingerie patchwork limbs suspended from metal also shelters and protects. Are we voyeurs, and the caterpillar – creatures that draw
Suisse, furs, foxes, boas’. This elegant and wires; in the centre of another room hangs observing moments of private suffering, transformative materials from within – as
sometimes idiosyncratic style remained Spiral Woman (2003), faded black fabrics or has our attention been drawn to some­ emblematic of artists. The woven child,
with her throughout her life: who could stuffed and sewn in a spiral that gives way thing special, arranged with love and care? Louise, Louison, is both maker and made,
forget the image of her outside her Man­ to a pair of slender, dangling limbs. ‘The In Spider (1997), a large, circular steel cage weaver and woven.
hattan townhouse in a brown latex cost­ spiral is somebody who doesn’t have a is enclosed by the angular legs of one
ume of coarse, bulbous forms; or the 1982 frame of reference,’ Bourgeois wrote. ‘The of Bourgeois’s spiders, its body nestled in
Mapplethorpe photograph in which she only thing is this hanging, this fragility.’ A the top of the structure. Fragments of Emily LaBarge
16 london Review of booKs 21 apRil 2022
E Grumpy in October
arly in July 1853, eighty thousand the same name appeared, exploiting wide-
Russian troops crossed the River Pruth spread anger at the incompetence of the
and invaded the Ottoman Empire. By war effort. It is still complaining to this
15 July they had occupied Bucharest, the
capital of Ottoman Wallachia, as well as its Jonathan Parry day.
The war established a precedent for at-
other major towns. It was an unprovoked tempts to impose Western power on re-
attack, justified on spurious grounds: Tsar Entente Imperial: British and French Power in the Age of Empire calcitrant forces elsewhere in the world.
Nicholas I claimed that more than ten mil- by Edward J. Gillin. (It was a fitting irony that Napoleon III’s
lion Orthodox Christians were imperilled Amberley, 288 pp., £20, February, 978 1 3981 0289 7 son, the prince imperial, was killed serving
by the indifference and barbarism of their with the British army during the Anglo-
Ottoman overlords. Russia asserted a hist- Prince and Princess of Wales visited in 1869 Georgia, but was frustrated because France Zulu War of 1879.) The most infamous of
oric right and duty to protect these people, but found the battlegrounds strewn with supported Russian claims. these forays was the joint British and French
though the vast majority had expressed no ruins, slowly reverting to agriculture. Most So the Anglo-French alliance of the attack on China in 1859-60, after the Chin-
interest in such protection. It refused to of the 139 burial sites had been neglected; 1850s did not seek to bring liberalism and ese emperor resisted a trade treaty insist-
leave, despite intense international diplo- it was another fifteen years before they nationalism to Russia’s borderlands. Did it ed on by the two powers, who had just
macy. The motivation for this expansionist were consolidated into one memorial on have any wider meaning? Was it an aber- bombarded Canton. More than 200 ships
gamble was Russia’s anxiety about the bal- Cathcart’s Hill. This was itself never ade- ration? On 17 April 1855, Queen Victoria arrived with 23,000 men and modern artil-
ance of power across Central and Eastern quately safeguarded: it was ravaged during held a ball at Windsor Castle to celebrate lery, attacked the forts on the river Pei-ho,
Europe. The Revolutions of 1848 had de- the Second World War and later by Khrushch- the state visit of Napoleon III. Its location and opened a path to Peking. After the
monstrated that Western liberals could stim- ev’s bulldozers. The military campaign it- was the magnificent Waterloo Chamber, Chinese captured and tortured a Times cor-
ulate uprisings against the status quo in self was remembered mainly for a single a symbol of Britain’s global ascendancy. respondent, the allied forces razed the flee-
Italian, Hungarian, Polish and Balkan lands; piece of ghastly incompetence – the charge If Napoleon III, nephew of the original, ing emperor’s Summer Palace to the ground
now the Ottoman Empire, which Russia was of the light brigade during the Battle of minded dancing with George III’s grand- (the British couldn’t resist blaming the
used to bullying, was being bullied more ef- Balaklava. Even before Tennyson’s poem daughter in this setting, he was careful not French for the worst of the looting). Much
fectively by Britain and France. In response appeared in December 1854, its painful les- to say so. The visit suggested that after priceless art was destroyed, though some
to the invasion, Sultan Abdulmejid I declar- sons were well established. The Times noted many centuries Anglo-French hostility was magnificent pieces were shipped back to
ed war on Russia, and Britain and France that the British soldier would always ‘do finally at an end – but not that war would royal residences in Britain and France, to-
sent ships to the Bosphorus to protect him his duty’, even when sentenced to probable automatically give way to peace, since the gether with five Pekinese dogs – the one
against attack. On 30 November 1853, Rus- death by ‘some hideous blunder’. During Crimean conflict killed half a million peo- given to Queen Victoria was christened
sian missiles destroyed the Ottoman navy their lifetimes, the surviving chargers were ple. The alliance wasn’t without tensions. Looty. Such vandalism was not the exped-
in the Black Sea. The British and French still seen as heroes – in October 1875, they In 1853 there had been a media scare that ition’s intention, but it left a permanent and
press lamented their countries’ humiliat- were reunited at Alexandra Palace for an af- Napoleon III might be planning to invade painful legacy.
ion. In March 1854, both of them joined ternoon of celebrations featuring another Britain across the Channel. Britain’s decis- The greatest monument to Anglo-French
the Ottoman side. war veteran, an Arab horse, together with ion to work with him was shaped by a con- technological co-operation in these years
Though the conflict that followed is trapeze artists and a banquet topped off cern that, unrestrained by British counsel, was the Suez Canal, planned during the
almost always known as the Crimean War, with Balaklava pudding – but this was be- France would compromise with Russia in Crimean War, funded by a French company
it was not a war for the liberation of the cause the experience of most other Crim- order to divide up the East between them. established in 1858, and opened in 1869.
Crimean peninsula, which Russia had annex- ean soldiers was tediously inglorious: the On the other hand, if Britain and France The canal is too often (but not here) seen
ed in 1783. Britain and France aimed simply long, cold, muddy siege of a faraway naval united, they might reshape the world them- as a French attempt to challenge British
to prevent a maritime attack on the Otto- base. Tony Richardson’s cinematic treat- selves, representing the forces of modern- commercial and political predominance in
man capital, Constantinople, by neutral- ment in 1968 was the sharpest of several ity. One useful way of analysing the scope Egypt – hardly a realistic aim by this point.
ising the Russian naval base on the pen- 20th-century attempts to reinterpret the of Anglo-French global ambitions in the Though the British government was initial-
insula – a task which turned out to be not charge as a symbol of officer-class arrog- 19th century is to focus on the role of tech- ly hostile and investors were sceptical about
at all simple. It took eleven months. Brit- ance and privilege. The light brigade’s fail- nology. This is the approach taken by Ed- its viability, the appeal of a seaway connect-
ain and France agreed on the political need ure is still a touchstone: in February, the ward Gillin, a historian of science, in his ing the Mediterranean with India was over-
to secure Constantinople, but some British defence secretary, Ben Wallace, made re- entertaining overview. The Crimean crisis whelming for the world’s greatest economic
naval strategists would instinctively have ference to the Crimean War while puffing can itself be seen as an attempt by these power, once it became clear that it could
preferred a naval blockade and the bombard- the Ukraine conflict as a glorious stand two technologically superior countries to indeed be completed. The publicity for the
ment of Russia’s Baltic ports, and it was against Russian expansionism; the Daily Mail intimidate the Ottomans into accepting their canal also gave an enormous fillip to the
the eventual decision to focus on the Baltic retorted by using the charge to illustrate political guidance in return for military pro- ambitions of finance capitalists in London
theatre that forced Russia to make peace in the foolishness of intervention in remote tection. Technology also allowed unpreced- and Paris, who now looked to fund infra-
1856. British public opinion saw Russian quarrels. ented media coverage of the war, much of structure projects anywhere in the world
ambitions and values as a threat to Eur- Russia’s late 18th-century expansion into it illustrated: Queen Victoria was given a where steam power offered plausible pro-
ope as a whole, and particularly to the lib- the Crimea and most of present-day Ukraine documentary photograph album. In April spects of returns. Napoleon III had already
eral and national cause in Hungary, Poland had been paralleled, further north, by the 1855 a daily telegraph link from the battle- allowed investment banks to tap French pub-
and Italy. The press presented the war as partition of Poland after a series of agree- field to Constantinople was established. lic savings for domestic railway construct-
a defence of ‘English’ ideals – liberalism, ments between Russia, Austria and Prussia. Two months later a British newspaper of ion and war loans. After the Crimean War,
constitutionalism and international law – These agreements were possible, in large
against the Russian bear. part, because of the disruption of European § Detailed critical assessments by professional editors for
There wasn’t much British postwar iden- diplomacy caused by bitter Anglo-French writing at all stages of development, in all genres
tification with the Crimea either. It never discord. During the Crimean War, there § Links with publishers and agents, and advice on
caught the imagination as a ‘lieu de mém- was pressure on Britain and France to make self-publishing
oire’. In her excellent new book on the amends for Poland’s disappearance from § Submission Package Reports, Online Writing Surgeries
afterlife of the conflict, Lara Kriegel shows the map. Domestic radicals and influential and Copy-editing/Proofreading
that memorial tourism was only sporadic.* Polish expatriate networks wanted its in-
§ Six one-to-one sessions with a professional editor, online or
The peninsula was not on major British dependence restored, but nothing happen-
in person
trade routes, had no magnificent classical ed. Nor did the allies instigate any national
§ Includes separate manuscript assessment and industry day
or Renaissance attractions, and, most prob- uprisings against the Russians around the
with publishers and agents
lematic, remained Russian territory. The Black Sea coast – two decades earlier, the
ambitious young British diplomat David § Masterclasses and skills workshops via Being a Writer
Urquhart had been sacked for making such community platform
* The Crimean War and Its Afterlife: Making Modern
Britain by Lara Kriegel (Cambridge, 347 pp., £90, an attempt in Circassia, just east of the § Literary Adventure writing retreat
February, 978 1 108 84222 8). The book is made Crimea, which Russia was then trying to
up of six case studies showing how the war’s T 0203 751 0757 ext.800 (Mon-Thurs)
subjugate. British and French caution re- E info@literaryconsultancy.co.uk
icons have been reinterpreted over the years. As
flected an anxiety that a Balkan war of W www.literaryconsultancy.co.uk
well as the charge of the light brigade and Crim-
ean tourism and burial sites, it covers the Vic- nationalities would destroy Ottoman rule.
toria Cross and the reputations of Florence At the 1856 peace talks, Palmerston tried to
Nightingale and Mary Seacole. keep Russia out of Circassia and if possible

17 london review of books 21 april 2022

these banks set their sights further afield, suit London appetites, drastically reducing pleted his great new harbour at Cherbourg as the foundation stone of Atlanticism.
and in 1863 the first investment banking the sugar content and adding more fizz. To and floated the first ironclad warship, La This was a distinctive Anglo-French project
consortia were established in Britain. Back discerning Frenchmen, such adjustments Gloire. Britain’s sail ships now seemed ir- that the US eventually joined once it expand-
in 1851, an early beneficiary of the new tele- were painful: ‘Le champagne, on ne le pré- relevant. Palmerston had to rally public opin- ed its horizons. It was based on common
graph cable across the Channel had been pare pas comme une omelette,’ one manu- ion with a spending spree on ironclads and strategic interests and on the Enlightenment
Paul Julius Reuter, who saw that profits could facturer commented ruefully. In London, fortifications including four sea forts in values of which Britain and France were the
be made from the swift communication the 1890s were a boom-time for French- the Solent, which have still not found their leading exponents: free institutions, inter-
of information – particularly stock market style hotels and restaurants: César Ritz and raison d’être, even as luxury hotels. national law and socio-economic evolution
prices – between the two capitals. Georges Escoffier revived the Savoy and powered by commercial and intellectual ex-

T
In both countries, scientists and com- established its culinary reputation, before here is, however, another way of change. It assumed that Russia, Austria and
mercial men urged the benefits of stand- going on to found the Carlton and the Ritz. conceiving of the Anglo-French inter- Prussia could not seriously obstruct the ad-
ardising other sorts of data, arguing that Six decades earlier, the French émigré Alexis national political project after 1815, vance of these principles and would event-
global trade and communication would be Soyer had become the first celebrity chef, one focused on geography and geopolitics. ually have to bow to them. Disraeli said
enhanced by greater uniformity in meas- employed initially by Whig aristocrats and Both countries wanted peace: France was Anglo-French co-operation was ‘the key and
urement. In 1884, an international confer- then at their new party headquarters, the saddled with war reparation payments, while cornerstone of modern civilisation’.
ence agreed to organise global time around Reform Club. Many British noble families Britain’s industrial and commercial growth This informal Anglo-French understand-
the Greenwich Meridian. Many Frenchmen had cultivated French habits and culture made it the greatest beneficiary of the new ing is rarely given proper attention because
wanted the world to accept the metric meas- since before the revolution, as a signifier global status quo. Over the next two dec- politicians and newspaper editors in both
urements of weights and distance that France of cosmopolitanism and taste. As the 19th ades, British and French politicians agreed countries did their best – as they often
had adopted in a bout of rationalising revol- century went on, and Continental travel be- to share responsibility for the Atlantic coast- still do – to pretend it wasn’t happening.
utionary fervour. Metres, litres and grams came easier for the middle classes, France line, particularly Iberia and the Low Coun- The same thing occurred when the US join-
were all defined by reference to the Earth’s was naturally the most popular destination. tries, the main Anglo-French battlegrounds ed the party. Memories of past conflicts
dimensions. When Britain obstructed these Of course, national rivalry, articulated during the recent wars. They created Belg- were so visceral – and so easy to exploit in
strange notions, Richard Cobden lament- through long-standing stereotypes, often ium as a model liberal constitutional mon- speeches and headlines – that they contin-
ed his countrymen’s ‘Chinese conservat- imperilled collaboration. This was certain- archy following a southern rebellion against ued to dominate the discourse. There were
ism’. On the whole, however, co-operation ly the case in the Crimea; each side accus- the king of the Netherlands, and settled a many legitimate reasons for each country
outweighed controversy. The French dom- ed the other of misjudgments at the Battle Spanish civil war in favour of the constit- to be suspicious of the territorial and eco-
inated the natural sciences and mathemat- of the Alma. No British officer at that time utionalists, all while minimising the local nomic ambitions of the other two. Brit-
ics, but admired the British steam engine had fought a war that wasn’t against the influence of Russia, Austria and Prussia. Brit- ain and France were both perplexed by US
and its manifold applications. At the Great French, and Captain Kingscote ridiculed the ish recognition of France’s interests along expansion across the continent, especially
Exhibition in 1851, many Britons agreed appearance of the French officers, ‘like the European coast also helped persuade the acquisition of Texas in 1845, though
that French luxury goods were superior monkeys, girthed up as tight as they can be it not to seek revenge for Waterloo by in- neither could prevent it since the Texans
to homegrown mass-produced articles. For and sticking out above and below like bal- triguing with Russia. International histor- were in favour. In addition, though the
two French economists, Joseph Garnier and loons’. The 1860 treaty, a political gesture ians of the 19th century place great em- creation of a liberal North Atlantic world
Hippolyte Dussard, the exhibition’s lesson symbolic of its moment, fell foul of ideo- phasis on a ‘Concert of Europe’ – repre- was an Enlightenment project, each of the
was that ‘the United States can feed the logues on both sides and was replaced in sented in action at the Congress of Vienna three states felt that it had made the pre-
world, England can clothe it, and France 1882 by less ambitious arrangements, as – but its main concern was to stabilise eminent contribution to liberal thought
can beautify it.’ Gillin traces the ramific- France turned back to protectionism. Central and Eastern Europe. Britain and through its own political revolution – Brit-
ations of these lines of thought to the 1860 The rapidity of technological progress France quickly worked out how to check the ain in 1688, America in 1776, France in
Anglo-French Commercial Treaty, which also occasionally undermined British self- interference of the eastern powers further 1789 – and that this was manifestly super-
weakened traditional tariff barriers to trade, confidence about its invulnerability to French west. ior to the other two.
but also to Ruskin’s worship of the med- military power. The Crimean War made it Dealing with the affairs of Spain and Ever since, so many politicians and jour-
ieval cathedrals of northern France, which clear that, despite the Waterloo myth, Brit- Portugal also required the two countries to nalists in the three countries have gleefully
he saw as antidotes to the modern mater- ain wasn’t very good at fighting. By January agree on a new liberal settlement for the ridiculed their rivals’ behaviour that it’s
ialist spirit. 1855, France had four times as many sold- Americas. In the 18th century, the Atlantic easy to forget that for nearly two hundred
The 1860 treaty opened Britain to many iers in the field. They were also better organ- powers had greedily competed to dominate years it has been almost inconceivable that
beautiful things, not least to French wine, ised. One day the French provided 35,000 and exploit the New World’s trade and re- they could ever go to war with one another.
which by 1898 was producing 35 per cent loaves for hungry British troops. In the sources, but after 1815 Britain and France Initially, the logic of co-operation rested on
of the total consumed in England, against winter of 1854-55, British fatality rates in belatedly accepted that this competition two planks. The first was British naval power.
5 per cent in sherry-and-port-sodden 1843. the Crimea were double those of the French. had badly damaged them (as well as almost From its bases in Halifax and Bermuda,
Champagne became so popular that by 1890 Britain fell back on reassuring tropes of everything they touched). It had lost them and later at Esquimalt on the western Can-
the major vineyards had altered its taste to naval superiority, until Napoleon III com- the most important parts of their North adian coast, Britain could – if the US ever
American empires: Britain had ousted France chose to invade Canada – blockade and
from Canada, and France had assisted with bombard Boston, New York, Washington
Britain’s ousting from what was now the and San Francisco into severe deprivation
I

United States. Post-Napoleon, France tried or worse. Britain was also usually confident
briefly to use its power in Spain to maintain that its ships could keep the French fleet
some influence in Spanish South America, confined to harbour in any war (though it
now the site of multiple rebellions against was not quite so confident that it could
European rule. By the 1820s, it accepted manage both these tasks at the same time).
that the rebels, helped by British naval and It was unnecessary and counterproductive

Writing Courses commercial power, had won their independ-

ence. The Atlantic trade boomed, and Brit-
to draw attention to such possibilities, how-
ever, because each country derived obvious

and ish cotton products flooded into the new

South American states. In the 1830s, Brit-
worldwide trading benefits from the ab-
sence of conflict between them. In the 19th

Editorial Services ain abolished slavery in the West Indies and

stepped up its naval and diplomatic assault
century, some wars were acceptable to the
British and French publics, but only if they

Online on the Atlantic slave trade. In support of

this, Britain and France signed agreements
could be justified by liberal rhetoric, took
place far away, and did not cost much –
in 1831 and 1833 permitting mutual rights something that technological superiority
Details & online entry:
of search and arrest on their countries’ trad- over non-Western peoples helped to ensure.
www.fishpublishing.com ing vessels in the Atlantic. Britain reconstit-
uted an enlarged Canada as a liberal and in-
Second, co-operation was promoted by
representative politics itself. Nineteenth-
creasingly self-governing colony after the century politicians constantly had to interact
Fish Publishing, Durrus, Bantry, Co. Cork, Ireland. French minority rebelled in 1837, in co- with legislative assemblies. Taxpayers want-
operation with France. ed to prioritise peace, commerce, low taxes
We should see this emerging collabor- and the preservation of capital and prop-
ation in Western Europe and the Americas erty. Political language often incorporated

18 london review of books 21 april 2022

appeals to prestige and honour, but hardly ion of most of the Conservative Party’s
ever to the glory of combat. The language foreign policy experts: Ken Clarke, David
of patriotism helped bolster state legit- Gauke, Oliver Letwin, David Lidington and
imacy, while also allowing shrewd pract- Rory Stewart. With them went the liberal
itioners to prevent hotheads from taking Tory realist tradition of foreign policy which
control of the narrative. Such language had been a constant of British statecraft

Institute for
could be used to establish a national con- since it became a world power. Instead we
sensus, which was often a valuable diplo- are in the hands of Jacob Rees-Mogg, the
matic weapon. Alternatively, it could reveal minister for Brexit opportunities, who told
that no consensus existed, which encourag-
ed compromise. Palmerston is often thought
of as a populist, but he lost office twice in
us last autumn that ‘the French are always
grumpy in October, the anniversaries of
Trafalgar and Agincourt.’
Ideas & Imagination
the 1850s because he supported a French The reality, however, is that two coun-
entente. Far from imperilling Western col-
laboration, the rituals of the liberal parlia-
tries which share a long frontier and com-
mon pursuits have many reasons to co-
is proud to announce its 2022–23 Fellows:
mentary order have provided its bedrock. operate day to day. Border communities
There is another reason for thinking of the have done so for centuries, despite the irrit-
Anglo-French project as an Atlanticist one. ations and difficulties caused by distant of- Yevgenia Belorusets Sabelo Mlangeni
Though it’s common to see the relation- ficials. The long-running dispute about the Writer/Visual Artist Abigail R. Cohen Fellow
ship between the two countries as wax- right of French fishermen to fish in Jersey Ukraine Photographer
ing and waning over the decades (as Gillin waters after Brexit may yet be settled by a South Africa
does), its strengths and strains are better modest increase in the number of licences Barry Bergdoll
understood if we think less about time and awarded to French boats; in November 2021, Abigail R. Cohen Fellow John Duong Phan
more about place. There has been a sus- the president of the Ille-et-Vilaine Fisheries Architectural History Vietnamese Studies
tained understanding on Western Europe Committee said that his members would Columbia University Columbia University
and the Americas, but the Mediterranean prefer to negotiate directly with Jersey than
has proved infinitely more troublesome for rely on EU mechanisms. In 1991, in pre- Alessandra Ciucci Katharina Pistor
both states. France had dominated it in the paration for the opening of the Channel Ethnomusicology Comparative Law
18th century; in 1798, Napoleon occupied Tunnel, Britain and France reached an agree- Columbia University Columbia University
Egypt in order to challenge Britain’s new ment on border policing which, supplement-
Indian empire. Nelson retaliated by destroy- ed in 2000 and 2003, still generally funct- William Dougherty Hannah Reyes Morales
ing the French fleet; Britain soon took Malta ions well (in spite of a dysfunctional British Composer Photographer
and Corfu and became a Mediterranean Home Office). The number of registered Columbia University Philippines
naval power in order to protect the route French residents in the UK in 2021, though
to India. Thereafter, neither country quite lower than before Brexit, is roughly the Isabella Hammad Pauchi Sasaki
trusted the other’s activities in Greece, which same as in 2011 – the British census in Writer Composer
the European powers permitted to leave the that year revealed that there were more United Kingdom Peru
Ottoman Empire, or in Lebanon, which than two and a half times as many French-
they did not. For more than seventy years, born residents as there had been in 1991. Yala Kisukidi Yasmine Seale
both accepted the status quo that Egypt Sporting contacts remain highly develop- Philosopher Translator
should be a buffer state under nominal ed, unsurprisingly given that France im- France United Kingdom
Ottoman sovereignty: British domination ported rugby and cycling from Britain. As
of commerce and the Red Sea thoroughfare for the nationalist posturers and their re- Brian Larkin Ersi Sotiropoulos
was disguised by a varnish of French cult- ferences to ingrained Anglo-French hostil- Anthropology Writer
ure. But the inrush of Anglo-French finance ity, it’s likely that Brexit will eventually re- Columbia University Greece
capital in search of unrealistically high duce the purchase of such language. Most
interest rates after the Crimean War led to voters will be unimpressed if a government Melina León Eliza Zingesser
Egyptian bankruptcy and political disorder. that boasts of its success in reclaiming Abigail R. Cohen Fellow Medieval French and Occitan
The subsequent British occupation in 1882 sovereignty simultaneously blames the EU Filmmaker Columbia University
poisoned relations with France for more for every domestic setback. The Ukraine Peru
than twenty years. Finally, an entente was crisis has in any case changed the mood by
engineered in 1904, presided over by Ed- making the need for Western co-operation
ward VII, Britain’s most famous devotee of abundantly clear.
French champagne and Parisian boudoirs. Since the 1960s, Britain and France have Located at Reid Hall, home to Columbia Global Centers | Paris,
It resolved the Mediterranean tensions, but shared two fundamental Atlanticist aims: the Institute hosts a residential community of scholars, writers,
at the cost of Britain ceding naval superior- to keep the US committed to European de- and artists.
ity there so that it could protect both coun- fence, and to check any German impulses
tries against the German threat along the to accommodate Russia, whether through Please visit our website at ideasimagination.columbia.edu for
Atlantic coast. When the Ottoman Empire Ostpolitik in the 1970s or energy depend- further details about our Fellows and their work, the Institute
collapsed, Britain had no way of rejecting ency under Merkel. During the Cold War, and its mission, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Public
French claims to Syria and Lebanon as a the guarantee of US protection occasion- Humanities Initiative, and our emergency program of assistance
counterweight to British Egypt and Iraq. ally disguised this common aim, allow- for Ukrainian writers, journalists, and artists.
During the two world wars, agents of both ing British and French politicians the lux-
powers engaged in very damaging conspir- ury of spats which gave their domestic aud-
acies and plots against each other in Syria iences the comforting impression that their The Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination is made possible by the generous
and Palestine, even while their alliance con- countries were still independent global support of the Areté Foundation, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, the Andrew
tinued elsewhere. powers. The prevailing uncertainty since W. Mellon Foundation, and Daniel Cohen, and with additional gifts from Judith
the 1990s has required more direct Anglo- Ginsberg and Paul LeClerc, Olga and George Votis, the EHA Foundation, and Mel

I
f we see Anglo-French relations funct- French collaboration, including a Joint and Lois Tukman.
ioning in different ways in different geo- Nuclear Weapons Commission establish-
political contexts – Atlantic, Mediter- ed in 1993 and the 2010 Lancaster House
ranean and domestic – this may provide treaties on security and defence integrat-
some comfort as we confront the post- ion. Work on cyber security is ongoing. Al-
Brexit situation. The Brexiters’ shrill reject- though the EU amplifies French power to
ion of Theresa May’s deal with the Eur- a degree, French politicians also need to
opean Union, which aimed at preventing maintain a distinct identity from it, given
costly trade friction and at preserving the the amount of domestic Euroscepticism.
integrity of the UK, led to the defenestrat- The Ukraine tragedy seems to have secured

19 london review of books 21 april 2022

the two great Anglo-French objectives, tying Bolshevik, imperialist, kleptocratic, barb- papers showed when discussing Italy in the representative politics? It seems likely that
the US to Europe more completely than it aric. Some new form of security arrange- late 19th century. Having boasted of Brit- Russian nationalism, insecurity, opacity and
probably wishes, and forcing Germany to ment against it is clearly necessary, but ain’s role in establishing a liberal constit- unpredictability will be a force in inter-
confront the reality of Russian imperial- ‘Western’ may not be the right word for it. utional monarchy there, they tended to suc- national politics for years to come, and that
ism. It has also soothed French anger at The current coalition against Russia relies cumb to racial and religious stereotyping enormous care will be needed in dealing
Britain’s recent agreement with the US and on a degree of co-operation with Poland when articulating their disappointment at with it. This is partly a matter of the natural
Australia on military security in the Indo- and Turkey which recalls France’s 18th- its failure to develop appropriately. For most and nuclear resources at its disposal, but
Pacific. century barrière de l’est, forged with the Otto- Britons, the West hardly extended beyond also of its complex relationship with the
Evangelists for Atlanticism have always mans, the Poles and the Swedes against the Rhine, leaving aside a few historic Baltic greater power of China. Growing Chinese
assumed that their gospel – the free exchange Russia, but also against the Austrian Habs- ports, German university towns and Italian influence outside Europe was not some-
of goods, labour and ideas – will win con- burgs. Absorbing all of Eastern Europe into city-states. thing anyone needed to worry about in the
verts further and further east. Ukraine’s re- the EU as properly valued member states Presently, we share many of our talk- 1850s. Those who boast about the spread
fusal to accept Russian dictation appears to must eventually create something unthink- ing points with the 1850s. Faced with un- of Western power over the last two cent-
provide fresh evidence for the dynamism of able in 1957, when the EEC set its borders predictable Eastern autocrats, is the West uries might reflect on the astonishment
the West as a concept. Plainly it has unify- at the familiar gateways of Passau and too pusillanimous or too insensitively ambit- of the philistine soldiers at the Summer
ing power in contrast to Russian oppres- Trieste. For this to happen, European pol- ious? Are Russia’s desires for a ‘sphere of Palace, or Cobden’s free market liberals,
sion. The image of the Russian ‘other’ is all iticians would need to cultivate more sens- influence’ acceptable? Should we fear its if they were to be confronted with the
the more potent for having been presented itivity in dealing with varying cultures and military machine or deride its underlying world of 2022 and the survival of ‘Chinese
in so many forms over the years: tsarist, economic circumstances than British news- feebleness, stemming from its rejection of conservatism’. c

In Tulcea
mosque. The Independence Monument, there are eight a day – the foot passengers three Ukrainians, said: ‘We might be next.’
commemorating Romanian independence get off first, followed by buses and cars In Tulcea, a friend showed me what he
in 1877, stands on the site of the ancient with ‘Children!’ signs in Russian taped to calls his ‘bunker’. It’s just the cellar of his

A
s Refugees began to flee Ukraine city of Aegyssus. the windows. A retired sailor from Odessa house, where he stores pickled vegetables
on 24 February, reporters headed Dobrogea has a complicated history, told me that although his generation has and homemade tomato sauce, but he was
for the major crossings into Poland and remains home to disparate groups: some deep roots in Russia, and broadly support- only half-joking. His business, like many
and Hungary – Záhony, Barabás, Medyka – Ukrainians have been surprised to find ed the Donbas separatists, his children look here, relies on tourism. Who will be taking
and for Siret in northern Romania. I had themselves billeted in Russian-speaking to the West. The war has destroyed what their holiday in the delta this year? People
been on a fellowship programme in Mos- households in the villages along the delta. remained of his former affiliation, what living near the border keep a bag packed,
cow, which advised us to leave the country, Around twenty thousand Lipovans still he described as ‘the life that is past’. No ready for a quick getaway. Some were try-
so I headed for Isaccea, a small Romanian live here, descendants of the Old Believ- Ukrainian person I have spoken to during ing to stock up on iodine tablets. Romania
town on the Danube, close to the Black Sea. ers who fled Catherine the Great. Ukrain- five weeks at the border has expressed any- has been a member of Nato for eighteen
Few other journalists were going this way. ians have also settled in Dobrogea over the thing other than hatred for Russia. years and an attack here would start a
Isaccea is a ramshackle port town, dwarf- years. These communities have kept to Romanian-Ukrainian ties, however, grow spiralling, catastrophic war. But such logic
ed by huge electricity pylons. The river is themselves for the most part, fiercely pre- stronger every day. Many refugees weren’t is not as reassuring as it once was. In the
half a mile wide here, and if you arrive serving their distinct identity. When Rom- sure what to expect and seem overwhelm- days before the invasion, even as the US
from Ukraine by ferry – the Danube marks ania’s unofficial princess, Margareta, visit- ed by the welcome. Orlivka, on the Ukrain- issued dire warnings, the general feeling –
the border between the two countries – as ed the border post recently in her position ian bank of the Danube, where they caught from Moscow to Kyiv, Tallinn to Bucharest
around a thousand people a day did at the as head of the Romanian Red Cross, she the ferry, was once Romanian, as was much – was that an all-out attack on major
start of the invasion, it’s the substation was greeted in Tulcea by ethnic Ukrainians of that part of Bessarabia. Snake Island, in Ukrainian cities was impossible. On the
you see first. From the shore, you can see in full regalia: vinok flower headdresses, the Black Sea, was the subject of a forty- morning of 24 February, we all woke up
the new arrivals, all in puffer jackets and embroidered tunics, Cossack sheepskin year border dispute – resolved but not feeling stupid.
blankets, crowding to the front of the hats. They carried a huge platter of bread forgotten. And the treatment of the Mol- Towards the end of March, I sat watch-
ferry. and salt, a traditional Slavic welcome, and dovan and Romanian minorities in Uk- ing TV with a group of locals in Tulcea.
When they get off, they’re offered sand- spoke of the plight of their ‘brothers and raine is a recurrent theme in the Kremlin- Jens Stoltenberg, the secretary general of
wiches, hot dogs, hygiene products, coffee, sisters’. controlled media. There are exceptions to Nato, was making a speech. ‘We cannot
tea and sim cards. After this some head I spoke to a group of refugees unpack- this outpouring of goodwill – stories (as take peace for granted,’ he said, announc-
inland. The landscape is mostly farmland ing their things in the Ukrainian Union yet unverified) of Roma refugees facing ing the deployment of four new battle-
and forest, and vineyards rising up under house on Tulcea’s long Strada Corneliu hostility from volunteers at Isaccea, for groups in Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary and
the Măcin mountains. The whitewashed Gavrilov. They told me they had come instance – but it is hard not to be im- Slovakia. It was, he added, a ‘fundament-
Orthodox monasteries stand out against from Mykolaiv, Odessa and Izmail. There pressed by the scale and enthusiasm of the ally changed security environment’. The
the faded brown of late winter. They are was a stark difference between those from response. Romanians in the room listened warily.
the destination for some refugees: anyone Izmail – a city on another branch of the In Orlivka, locals have been working Many of these troops have now been de-
with room to spare is encouraged to offer Danube that once belonged to Romania – with Romanian volunteers to get supplies ployed to the Mihail Kogălniceanu air
it up. The government sends people on to and those from Mykolaiv, a port city fur- to towns and hospitals deeper in Ukraine. base in Constanta, seventy miles south of
Bucharest, for instance, if they want to ther into Ukraine that has been besieged When I visited, an old green canvas tent, Tulcea: hundreds of Belgian and French
continue their journey. But otherwise it’s and bombarded since the start of the invas- painted with a white cross and flying the soldiers, plus equipment and vehicles. (The
the luck of the draw: you might end up in ion. I found that those who had suffered Ukrainian flag, was pitched at the side of base is also home to two thousand Amer-
a repurposed classroom or a private home. most wanted to talk most. Some of the the road to provide assistance to those ican troops.) Three days after Stoltenberg’s
Some are taken to the nearby city of women from Mykolaiv had spent days or waiting to cross the border. It was a poor speech, four British Typhoon jets arrived
Tulcea. Here, the Danube begins to divide. weeks in basements before making their sight compared to the brand new tents for an ‘air policing mission on the Roman-
Tulcea, which has seventy thousand in- escape. When I interviewed them, they were around Isaccea, with pub-garden space ian Black Sea coast’. The Wall Street Journal
habitants, sits on a bend of the Sfântu overwhelmed with rage. They repeatedly heaters running all hours. In Orlivka, described this as ‘a new front line for Nato
Gheorghe (Saint George). Approaching referred to Russian propaganda: ‘Who are people gathered round a wood-burning in Romania’.
from the west, you see the cooling towers we being saved from? Ourselves? Who are stove to warm their hands. The tempera- The number of people crossing at
of the alumina refinery close to the main all these fascists? Isn’t it they who are ture at night was below zero. A young sol- Isaccea each day has dwindled to a few
road. A small lake is encircled with ware- fascist, these Russians?’ The idea that dier, sitting on a sagging camp bed, an- hundred; some are even making the return
houses and cranes, but downtown the Ukrainians were being ‘protected’ by Putin nounced that his wife had just had a baby journey, convinced it’s safe to go back. The
waterfront has a shabby, relaxed Black Sea was particularly enraging. ‘I am Russian- girl and held up his phone. Cheers went volunteer operation continues, but there
feel. Tourist boats bob by the quayside, speaking, from Russian-speaking Odessa,’ up. Everyone spoke Romanian, though you is a sense of things winding down. No one
waiting for the season to start. The delta a young woman told me, ‘but my state is could get by with Russian and Ukrainian. is hopeful though. Odessa is a big prize
is a site of great ecological importance Ukrainian. Is this so hard to understand?’ One volunteer told me he wasn’t wor- for the Russians and the forces retreating
and Tulcea is the jumping-off point for I didn’t say it, but this wasn’t a reality ried about being bombed because a major from Kyiv are redoubling their efforts near
most visitors. It’s the sort of place you shared by most of the people I had met in Gazprom pipeline runs just a few kilo- the Black Sea.
pass through. But it has its attractions: Moscow, who seemed wildly deluded about metres away. ‘Putin wouldn’t bomb his 8 April
winding, cobbled streets; red-tiled rooftops Ukraine’s political identity. own pipeline.’
and the golden domes of churches; the I have been spending most days at The volunteers I met were energetic but
pale minaret of the late Ottoman Azizyie the Isaccea port. When the ferry arrives – anxious. One woman, who had taken in Jen Stout
20 london Review of booKs 21 apRil 2022
I Where are those crowns?
n may 1937, troops under Italian com- Ethiopian Church, housed a number of
mand moved into the remote area treasures. But it is another photograph that
around the monastery of Debre Libanos really raises questions. This one depicts
in Ethiopia. They had been sent there by
Rodolfo Graziani, one of the commanders John Foot two famous Italian partisans next to what
appear to be the same crowns, still with
of the Italian invasion of the country in their museum labels attached.
October 1935 and now the viceroy of Itali- Holy War: The Untold Story of Catholic Italy’s Crusade against As Mussolini and Graziani fled north in
an East Africa. In February 1937 he had the Egyptian Orthodox Church the wake of the liberation of Italy in 1945,
survived an assassination attempt in Addis by Ian Campbell. they took as much money and as many
Ababa. In retaliation, the Italians had killed Hurst, 449 pp., £30, November 2021, 978 1 78738 477 4 treasures with them as they could carry.
at least 19,000 people over the next three When Mussolini was captured by Italian
days (a fifth of the city’s population), a but there are closer comparisons. The Church and the the Italian state – is some- partisans disguised as German soldiers
massacre that became known by the date burnings, the pleasure in violence, the ex- times seen as amounting to complete back- in April 1945, near a place called Dongo on
on which it began, Yekatit 12. People were tremity of the destruction are reminiscent ing for Italy’s actions in Ethiopia. Certainly, Lake Como, he had money and other pos-
burned alive in their homes or beaten to of the methods used by the squads who some Catholics and clergy were in favour of sessions with him, which became known
death in the streets. Others were placed in brought fascism to power in Italy itself in the slaughter as part of a so-called ‘civilis- as the Gold of Dongo. Mussolini was shot
detention camps, where conditions were 1921-22. In Ethiopia, these squads were ing mission’. But this wasn’t true of the the next day, probably by the communist
appalling, and tortured or executed. But given free rein against an ‘uncivilised’ and whole Church; the pope, Pius XI, seems to partisan Walter Audisio, who is one of the
this wasn’t enough for Graziani. He claimed ‘heretical’ external enemy, and they went have been reluctant to lend his support. men standing in front of the crowns. But
that his attempted assassination had been about their task with gusto and frightening Graziani still has a reputation in Italy, what happened to the Gold of Dongo? No-
planned by the Ethiopian Church and, as efficiency. The violence and destruction and even abroad, as a heroic soldier, seen body knows. Where are those crowns now?
he recovered in hospital, began to plan the seems to have brought pleasure to some separately from the regime he served so In defeat Graziani was much smarter
destruction of its most important centre, of the perpetrators – many of them took faithfully. He is not often remembered as a than Mussolini. He made sure he sur-
the monastery at Debre Libanos, founded in photographs showing their victims with war criminal. There is even a mausoleum rendered to the Allies, rather than being
the 13th century. The pretext for the attack severed heads or limbs. and memorial park in his native village of captured by the partisans. This meant he
was that the two men who had tried to kill Despite this savage repression, resist- Affile, south of Rome, opened only ten years survived, and despite being sentenced to
Graziani in Addis had supposedly passed ance to the Italians continued. In fact, the ago and built with the help of public funds. nineteen years for collaborating with the
through the lands surrounding the monast- strategy of massacres backfired, pushing Somehow, the idea of Italy as a nation of Nazis he only served a few months in
ery as they made their escape (Debre Lib- the Church in Ethiopia (what remained of Captain Corellis, mandolin-carrying, reluct- prison (there was no equivalent of the
anos is sixty miles or so north of the city). it) into a much more active role against the ant invaders, still survives. Nuremberg trials for Italian fascists). After
The plan – which survives in the archives of Italian occupiers. This, in turn, led to a One of the most fascinating episodes his release he became an active member of
the Italian administration – was to kill the policy reversal by the Italians, who tried to in the book concerns the looting of arte- the neo-fascist Movimento Sociale Italiano,
entire religious community there. Graziani’s incorporate the Ethiopian clergy into the facts and relics from Ethiopia (the Italians and wrote a bestselling memoir in which he
subordinate General Maletti was chosen to occupying regime. But the damage had been also purloined cash for their own bank ac- claimed he had merely been ‘defending the
carry out the massacre, commanding a done. ‘Catholicism, now clearly identified counts). When Graziani returned to Italy in fatherland’. For many, he remained a war
Muslim battalion made up of Eritreans, with the enemy, had become as unpopular 1938 he took 79 crates of stolen material hero, his image encapsulated in the much
Libyans and Somalis. It is an uncomfort- there as it had been after the religious wars with him. Campbell describes some photo- reproduced photo of him in uniform, hair
able truth for those on the far right who of the early 17th century,’ Campbell writes. graphs of an exhibition at the Museo Colon- swept back, jaw jutting, sleeves rolled up.
look up to Mussolini, while also promot- ‘For the Roman Church, the great crusade iale in Rome in 1939 in which a number At his funeral in 1955 there was an open
ing Islamophobia, that the Italian army en- had been a disaster.’ of what look like Ethiopian crowns can show of fascism on the streets of Rome for
abled a form of jihad against the Ethiopian In 1941, the Italians were kicked out of be seen in a glass case. They were almost the first time in years, with mourners rais-
Orthodox Church. Ethiopia after a humiliating military defeat. certainly
More pinched
than justfrom
a trueDebre Libanos, ing their arms in the fascist salute. Nobody
Pilgrims gathered at the monastery every Haile Selassie, who had lived in exile in which,
crime story, Fred holiest places in the
as one of the mentioned Debre Libanos. 

year to celebrate the feast day of its founder, Bath since leaving the country in 1936, re- Vermorel’s account
St Tekle Haymanot, on 20 May. Maletti turned and in his first speeches remember- More than designer
of fashion just a true
began to round up people as they arrived at ed the ‘young men, the women, the priests crime story,
MoreTownsend’s
Jean Freda true
than just
the site. On 19 May, Graziani ordered the and monks whom the Italians pitilessly Vermorel’s
crime becomes account
story, Fred
death a wild
summary execution of ‘all monks without massacred’. Ethiopia tried several times in of fashion designer
Vermorel’s
card methodologyaccount
distinction’. ‘Please assure me this has been the 1940s to have named Italians charged Jean Townsend’s
of fashion
for
death probing
becomes
designer
1950s
a wild
done,’ he went on, ‘informing me of the through the UN War Crimes Commission,
Jean
card Townsend’s
Britain: a cesspit of
methodology
number of them.’ Orders were also given to not just for these massacres but for the use
death
vice
for andbecomes
probing violence,
1950s a wild
burn the buildings and bodies. The mas- of poison gas and the bombing of hospitals
card methodology
from
Britain:coprophiles
a cesspit of to
sacre is described by Ian Campbell in Holy during the initial invasion, as well as the
War, in horrific detail. In order to hide the ‘total destruction of Abyssinian chiefs and
for probing
vice and violence,
bombsite gangs1950s
and
extent of the killing, most of the victims notables’, as Graziani put it in a telegram to Britain:
from
flick knivesa cesspit
coprophiles of
to
in cinemas.
bombsite gangs and
vice and illustrated
Densely violence,
were taken from the monastery in trucks. another army officer. But their efforts were
flick
fromknives in cinemas.
coprophiles to
They were shot, mainly with machine guns, thwarted by geopolitical considerations. with archival material,
Densely
bombsite illustrated
gangs and
and buried where they fell in mass graves. Britain played a leading role in this: Ethiopia this deeply-researched,
with archival material,
Those who refused to get into the trucks wanted Pietro Badoglio, Graziani’s pre- flick knives in cinemas.
darkly-curious exposé
this deeply-researched,
were shot on the spot. Many of the victims decessor as viceroy of East Africa and the Densely
of 1950s illustrated
society
darkly-curious exposé
were elderly, some were children and all prime minister of Italy between 1943 and with
touches
of archival
1950s on material,
celebrity,
society
were unarmed. Campbell estimates that be- 1944, to be tried, but after the war Britain this deeply-researched,
royalty,
touches the post-war
on celebrity,
tween 1200 and 1600 ‘pilgrims and clergy’ considered him a valuable counterweight darkly-curious
establishment
royalty, exposé
and,
the post-war
were killed that day. He shows that what to Italian communism. of 1950s
establishment society
ultimately, tragedy.and,
happened at Debre Libanos was part of a Campbell’s account of the massacre of ultimately,
touches ontragedy.
celebrity,
series of massacres aimed at destroying the Debre Libanos is the centrepiece of more royalty, the post-war
Ethiopian Church as an institution. Villages than twenty years of work. He has travelled A masterpiece.
A masterpiece.
establishment and,
and homes in other parts of the country to many of the massacre and burial sites Jon Savage
Savage
ultimately,
Jon tragedy.
were attacked; churches were burned down over a period of decades, talked to the last
and sacked. Graziani reported back to Rome surviving witnesses and examined the Itali- A genuinely
A genuinely original
original work
work which
which both
both Available now
now from
from
A masterpiece. Available
in bureaucratic language, repeatedly using an archives. He argues that the systematic reinvents and
and revitalises
revitalises true-crime
true-crime writing.
writing.
reinvents Strange Attractor
Strange Attractor Press
Press
the phrase ‘all prisoners have been shot.’ destruction of the Ethiopian Church was
InJon
In Savage
aa word,
word, brilliant. David
brilliant. David Peace
Peace
Italy’s ‘total war’ in Ethiopia prefigured the part of a holy war launched by the Catholic
way the Nazi army would act; far from Church in alliance with the fascists. At AAAgenuinely
great
great read,
read, aa great investigation
greatwork
original investigation and
which bothand Available now from
being a meek follower of Hitler, Mussolini times, this interpretation is pushed too far. a fascinati ng
a fascinating
reinvents recreation of the period.
recreationtrue-crime
and revitalises of the period.
writing. Strange Attractor Press
was ahead of him. The Church’s support of fascism – especially Stephen Dorril
InStephen Dorril David Peace
a word, brilliant. Distributed by The MIT Press
Campbell underlines the parallels be- after the Lateran Pacts of 1929, which end- Distributed by The MIT Press
Available from Strange Attractor Press
tween historic crusades and the massacres, ed the historic split between the Catholic
A great read, a great investigation and
a fascinating recreation of the period.
21 london review of books
Stephen21 Dorril
april 2022
Distributed by The MIT Press
O On Snow
ne cold daRK night there was ‘And his garment shone white as snow,’
a story about a knocking at the continues Matthew’s Gospel, reminding me
outer gate. Despite cries of Yes! to go to the door and see who was knocking
Yes! Coming! someone still knocked and
the snow that had piled on the gate was Anne Carson – has it stopped? – but there is a sense of
suspension in the night air, as of a person
blown halfway up the door itself, with no not quite turning away to go back on their
meaning as to the blind knocking or the My soul fainteth for thy salvation: but I young and closeness to death made him own footprints through the deepening snow.
thick snow or why it did not stop. I knew I hope in thy word. queasy. Do I blame him? I admit I was not a Snow can deepen fast on nights like this.
should be writing a straightforward story, Mine eyes fail for thy word saying, When very erotic person at the time. And well, my The reason I went to visit my mother, the
wilt thou comfort me?
or even a poem, but I didn’t. I should get quotient of astoundedness was full. He drove week before her death, was a dream I had.
For I am become like a bottle in the smoke;
back to words, I thought, plain words. yet do I not forget thy statutes.
me to the funeral and more or less kept A young man in red epaulets was minister-
I had been looking at the New Testament going. I more or less waved goodbye. ing to a room of restless guests who lay
in an 1801 edition of Johannes Leusden’s And all at once I recognised it as a passage There was no question I had to get out of fully clothed in bathtubs. Waking sudden-
side-by-side (Greek and Latin) version, which I had worked on before, at a time when giving that lecture. ly (3 a.m.) I knew the young man in red
I’d found on my bookshelf in a fragile state snow was not my concern – I’d been invited The odd thing is, I can’t remember if I epaulets as the night clerk in the hotel where
that did not allow the pages to be turned to give a lecture on (as I recall) ‘the idea of did or did not (get out of the lecture). The I stayed when I visited her. Strange choice
quickly. Little flecks broke off. I opened it the university’, a topic about which I knew chronology is a blur. I do remember sitting for a psychopomp, I thought, as hours later
at random to 1 Corinthians 10, a letter of little, and so began to compose a lecture in an armchair, at the very brink of an arm- the train glided west in a weak tarnish of
Paul’s about idolatry. The letter spoke of more concerned with the word ‘idea’ than chair, hands fisted in my lap, facing the dawn. There was ground fog everywhere,
people who wandered in the wilderness eat- the concept of the ‘university’. I’m not clear professor of religious studies who had com- then afternoon sunlight (the bus) so deep
ing ‘pneumatic’ bread and drinking from a on whether I ever delivered this lecture: I missioned the lecture. I was pleading for you could enter it as a lake. Finally a taxi
‘pneumatic’ rock – or so I was translating it can’t find it among my papers. Three days a cancellation or deferral. He sat tightly gliding past people in their kitchens.
in my head, the word for ‘spiritual’ being before the lecture date my mother died. I contained on the far side of his big desk. The weekend was spent watching her
pneumatikos in Greek, from pneuma, ‘breath’. fell to my knees in the kitchen. Astounded- He was pale. Alarmed. He may have been a sleep, oxygen shunting on and off. When
Can either bread or rock be made of breath? ness was like a silvery-white fog that seep- priest. Tears poured down my face. I told awake she glared wildly, or ate small dabs
Anyway who can drink from a rock? A sort ed up and over all those days. I had visited him of my mother’s outlandish little red of ice cream or, once, spent a few minutes
of dreariness, like a heavy smell of coats, her only a week before, the long train, then car coat. He was not a chaotic person. studying a photograph I’d brought her (of
comes down on the word ‘spiritual’ and bus, then taxi trip. She seemed OK. Forbid- A large feeling of cul-de-sac filled the myself at a posh artist’s retreat on Lake
makes religion impossible for me. The page den by her doctor from her nightly glass of room. Beyond that I can recover only a few Como) then said, ‘Why did you wear your
is turned. Flecks fall. Armagnac she’d taken to dabbing it behind mental screenshots of me speaking about glasses?’ I was not with her when she died.
Before turning the page though, I notic- her ears. The word ‘idea’ comes from ancient bottles and smoke to a dusty lecture hall of I assume the young man in red epaulets
ed that Paul’s text, in the verse following Greek ‘to see’. Was there a way to get out of people with crossed legs, but these may be showed up and that he let her wear her car
the pneumatic rock, was at pains to ident- giving that lecture, I wondered. shards of some anxiety dream, not a cred- coat. She loved that red car coat.
ify the rock with Christ (that is, God) and to Psalm 119:83 is an outcry: ‘For I am ible memory. Last thing: one Sunday evening about a
explain that the rock was ‘following’ these become like a bottle in the smoke; yet do I Historically the first instance of the year before all this we were on the telephone,
people through the desert so they could drink not forget thy statutes’ in the King James noun ‘idea’ in ancient Greek is in an epinic- my mother and I; it was just after we sold
from it. How very awkward, I thought. I version. In more modern versions, ‘I am ian ode of Pindar (Olympian 10:103) prais- the house and she’d moved to the facility,
wondered why God couldn’t come up with like a wineskin shrivelled by smoke’; or ing an Olympic victor ‘beautiful with re- where she was allowed a small sensible room
a better water arrangement for these people ‘Though I am shrivelled like a leather flask spect to his idea’, that is, in his appearance. and a few possessions. As we talked I was
and why Paul couldn’t find a more graceful in the smoke’; or ‘I am useless as a discard- Plato’s use of the word to designate things watching snow drift down the dusk outside,
image of God’s care. Presumably Paul wants ed wineskin.’ The notion seems to be that like ‘the form of the good’ is familiar. Slight- counting it, one hundred and five, one hund-
people to seek and cherish God’s care? But without God the psalmist or his life be- ly stranger perhaps, Demokritos’ choice of red and six, one hundred and seven, when
to visualise the longed-for Other bumping comes dry, sooty, wrinkled and worn, dark atomoi ideai (literally ‘uncut shapes’) to mean out of a pause she said: ‘It’s funny to have
along behind your desert caravan in the and dismal, parched, disfigured, miserable, the indivisible elements of his atomic theory. no home’ – funny being a funny word for
form of a rock might just make you morose bereft of spiritual moisture. There is a strand Best of all is Matthew’s phrasing in the final what she meant. I say this now to remind
or confused. of tradition that reads ‘hoar frost’ in place chapter of his Gospel (28:3) to describe the myself how words can squirt sideways, mute
Confused and morose myself, not least of ‘smoke’ but no one knows what to do with look of the angel who came down from and mad; you think they are tools, or toys,
of all because of that continued knocking that. The same week my mother died my heaven, rolled back the door of Christ’s tomb or tame, and all at once they burn all your
at the gate, and in need of a fresh idea, I boyfriend left. (Beware the conversation that and sat on it: clothes off and you’re standing there singed
opened the New Testament again and found begins: ‘Do you think people should be com- and ridiculous in the glare of the lightning.
Psalm 119:81-3. This seemed to be another pletely honest with one another?’) We’d ἦν δὲ ἡ ἰδέα αὐτοῦ ὡς ἀστραπή I hung up the phone. I stared at the snow
text about people in the wilderness: been together a number of years but he was (The idea of him was like lightning.) for some time. I expect she did too. c

new work by

RUTH
KING
28 April – 21 May 2022

G A L L E RY & S H O P

Opposite the British Museum and just around

the corner from the London Review Bookshop.
63 Great Russell Street, London WC1B 3BF.
See website for gallery opening times
and online ordering.

contemporaryceramics.uk Party Piece. Salt-glazed stoneware, 2022.

22 london Review of booKs 21 apRil 2022

S Critics in the Sky
heila heti writes novels about the be,’ Heti writes, ‘here in the first draft of
burden of freedom. Her characters existence.’ The sun still rises, but very little
navigate their lives as if the world were else can be counted on.
new and traditions obsolete; they can’t
trust history, but they don’t trust intuition Emily Witt In Motherhood, Heti wrote of the sense of
abandonment her narrator felt when her
either. In How Should a Person Be? (2010), friends had children. The desertion of their
the main character, also called Sheila, tries Pure Colour shared social project leaves her surprised.
to answer the question posed by the title by Sheila Heti. Books, on the other hand, never let some-
through minute observation of her closest Harvill Secker, 216 pp., £16.99, February, 978 1 78730 280 8 one down. ‘The lonely fill up their lives with
friends. In The Chairs Are Where the People books. I don’t live in nature. I don’t live in
Go (2011), a nonfiction book co-written melting. The species were dying. The last of a concept than a person, but the blank culture. I don’t live in my relationships. I
with Misha Glouberman, Heti documents of the fossil fuels were being burned up. quality of Heti’s prose is compelling in the live in books.’ In Pure Colour, which quest-
Glouberman’s beliefs and aphorisms as a A person collapsing in the street might same way that a prairie or a snowbank is ions the idea of the ‘chosen family’ as an ad-
series of life lessons. ‘I thought the world be collapsing from any one of a hundred compelling. Its lack of sharp edges comes equate replacement for the biological one,
should have a book about everything he things. New things to die of were being with a sense of reassurance, that a child the disillusionment with friendship seems
knows,’ she writes in her foreword. (Chap- added each day.’ would be safe here, and that she is never even more pronounced. As Mira gets older,
ter headings include ‘People’s Protective As God prepares to edit the first draft of going to say anything that will hurt you. the group of friends who ate peanut stew
Bubbles Are Okay’ and ‘Don’t Pretend There existence, he splits himself into an alternat- Having been raised with the suffocating together grows apart, and she questions the
Is No Leader’.) In her novel Motherhood ive holy trinity of ‘three critics in the sky: a love of her bear dad, Mira is drawn to the worth of what they shared. ‘All that time, all
(2018), the narrator weighs up the pros and large bird who critiques from above, a large outward-facing energy of Annie, a fish (I that stupid time, I should have been with
cons of having children with recourse to fish who critiques from the middle, and can’t say whether Heti’s use of categories my father.’
the I Ching and interviews with friends who a large bear who critiques while cradling that have their own associations on Grindr She thinks this after her father has died.
are mothers. creation in his arms’. Each human, in turn, and RuPaul’s Drag Race is intentional or not, He is as abstract an entity as Annie. Like a
The ceaseless metaphysical self-inquiry tends towards one of these archetypes. A but the gay-slang connotations of ‘bear’ Disney heroine, Mira doesn’t seem to have
of Heti’s books is a maddening, but accurate, fish concerns herself with the condition of and the out-of-style ‘fishy’ don’t seem to a mother or siblings. She was everything to
depiction of a world in which one cannot the many instead of the condition of the in- apply here). her father, ‘her lonely father, who had no
boil an egg or clean a toilet or get married dividual. A bear ‘is like a child holding on Mira falls in love with Annie, a love out woman besides Mira’. In life, Mira tried
without wondering whether there might be to their very best doll’ – they keep a few of proportion. ‘With a few people in one’s to put distance between them. After his
a more optimal way of doing it explain- people close. A bird considers the world life, too much happens emotionally – more death, she allows herself the depth of in-
ed in a video on the internet. Heti writes an abstraction and is ‘interested in beauty, than even makes sense to happen, given how timacy she couldn’t handle when he was
for a generation that seeks guidance from order, harmony and meaning’. It’s the kind little has actually occurred.’ Their relation- alive, including sexual ideation. In order to
fortune-tellers, self-help books, behaviour- of taxonomy one might find in an internet ship doesn’t progress. Mira is starting to converse with her father directly, Heti tells
al science, evolutionary biology, make-up dating profile alongside attachment styles, realise that the world is going to disappoint us, Mira uploads herself to a leaf on a tree
tutorials and lists of the food famous peo- love languages, Enneagram numbers and her: the love, work and money she had and enters the cosmic plane of the afterlife.
ple consume in a given day. Despite their astrological signs. Mira is a bird, ‘torn be- expected will not arrive. She suffers from I don’t think we need to understand exact-
freedom, her characters bear little resem- tween her love for the mysterious Annie, what Lauren Berlant called ‘cruel optimism’ ly what this means, except that while she
blance to the 20th-century existentialists who seems to Mira a distant fish, and her – a condition where ‘something you desire remains in the leaf Mira is liberated from
who seem to be their intellectual predeces- love for her father, who appears as a warm is actually an obstacle to your own flourish- ordinary constraints of space and time, and
sors. They are not the daughters of Simone bear’. ing.’ ‘Nothing would be as we hoped it would can speak to her father directly. (Perhaps
de Beauvoir, shaping their lives through de- A couple of pages later we are back in the
termined acts of will. Instead, they grapple familiar setting of a Heti novel: a Toronto-
with an unstable sense of self, their certainty like city where young people hang out with
easily swayed by whoever is nearby. They their friends and balance their artistic am-
want to escape the dysfunction and hier- bitions with ordinary jobs. Mira has moved
archy of the patriarchal family but fear that out of her childhood home and works at a
rejecting inherited norms will leave them shop that sells Tiffany lamps. She begins a
with no family at all. They wonder if art can course of study at an international satellite
give purpose to solitude, if it’s more de- of the elite ‘American Academy of American
pendable than fickle human ties. Critics’ (I laughed). ‘In the large room,
Pure Colour is unusual among Heti’s students stood on desks, declaiming,’ Heti
books in taking on two life experiences in writes. ‘They knew they had to develop a
which agency is useless: unrequited love style of writing and thinking that could
and the death of a parent. The challenge for survive down the ages, and at the same
the main character, Mira, is not deciding time penetrate their own generation so in-
what to do but accepting that nothing can cisively.’ The joke’s on them – smartphones
be done. Pure Colour, like Motherhood before are about to arrive, and with them a new
“We love love love our Vitsœ system. Photo by
it, is also a book about getting older. What medium through which ‘people who had Melvin T
had seemed a lark, a great project of hang- far more charisma than they did would The build quality and easiness of
ing out with friends and trying new things, let flow an endless stream of images and assembly is amazing, but it was your
loses its significance in time. Mira is com- words’. Another side effect of ageing is service that made the whole process
ing to terms with how small life ends up nostalgia. Heti is looking back on Mira’s
such a joy.”
being. young adulthood, when social circles were
The novel begins with the outline of a smaller and ‘it was enough to know just
‘Love’ is a word we hear a lot at Whether in-person, or on the other side
cosmology, its own Book of Genesis. God four or five people and to have slept with
Vitsœ. Other verbs just don’t seem to of the globe, our planners hold your
has created the heavens and the Earth, and two or three of them,’ when she didn’t cut it. Like in this heartfelt message hand throughout the whole process.
then stepped back to contemplate his creat- have hundreds of online ‘friends’ further from Melvin in Sydney, Australia to
ion. ‘This is the moment we are living in – muddling the question of how a person his personal Vitsœ planner Sophie in Time and again we prove that long-
the moment of God standing back,’ Heti should be. London, England. distance relationships really do work.
Be it planning your first system, moving
writes. She calls this ‘the first draft of exist- It is in this small world of students gath-
As with any customer, Sophie ensured it to a new home or adding an extra
ence’ and suspects it might be nearing its ering to eat vegan peanut stew that Mira that every detail was considered so shelf, every single interaction is handled
end. A looming apocalypse, then, which meets Annie. Of Annie, we learn only that that Melvin’s shelving was perfect for with love, from Vitsœ…
situates us in the present, the era in which she grew up in an orphanage in a faraway his needs.
‘the world was failing at its one task – of re- American city (the pleasure of Heti’s jokes
Like everybody at Vitsœ, she’s Design Dieter Rams
maining a world.’ The seasons had become is that they are scattered at random) and
passionate about good service, and Made in England
‘postmodern’, she writes in a passage on that she seems to be an older writer grant- communicates with all her customers Delivered worldwide
climate change – something that has be- ed microcelebrity status by the students of directly, wherever they are in the world. vitsoe.com
come an almost perfunctory gesture in the the American Academy of American Critics.
contemporary novel: ‘The ice cubes were The lack of human detail makes Annie more

23 london Review of booKs 21 apRil 2022

it is worth noting that ‘leaf ’ rhymes with who didn’t get what she wanted, while this ones who sort of have to, that love given It didn’t have to be as close as possible for
‘grief ’.) woman would.’ freely is often unreliable – and fear about it to be something good.’ But when Mira
In the leaf, Mira and her dead father dis- As the novel progressed, I began to what happens to a childless person when opens her heart to Annie, going so far as
cuss God and consciousness. Their theo- wonder whether the pandemic has made us their parents die. Mira thinks about the en- to show up at her house dressed in a be-
logical arguments about faith versus reason revanchist. ‘What you want are fixers, but tities that will witness the second draft of draggled leaf costume as proof of her love,
are not given a particular religious context, what is needed is to follow the traditions creation. ‘How strange and sad our world Annie has nothing much to give her in re-
and their ahistoricism has a naive quality, with faith,’ Mira’s father tells her, as they will seem to them then – if they even find turn, just the usual coldness. Now she’s
like the revelations of a person on acid. converse in the leaf. ‘Part of human life is out about it – that we once had to create older, Mira doesn’t take it so personally.
Mira and her father contemplate the second following the traditions of family. That’s people with our own bodies, in order for There is comfort, it turns out, in resignat-
draft of the world, when it will be given over part of the real plot of it. If you follow the there to be, among the billions of people ion, in not trying to make a second draft of
to plants, or birds, or whatever replaces traditions, you don’t need fixers, who will already living, someone who could love us, one’s life, of believing in a god who has
humans. ‘We are the tragic ones who think kill you eventually.’ Fixers aren’t quite de- and someone we could love in turn.’ This a plan instead of prevaricating over every
it’s a tragedy that the human animal will fined – they are ‘coming from the world of isn’t a repudiation of anything in Motherhood, choice. Life didn’t turn out quite the way
be gone,’ Mira says, echoing Dr Malcolm in psychology, from those who know nothing which concludes with the narrator accept- Mira wanted, but she resigns herself to the
Jurassic Park. ‘But that doesn’t mean it’s a about the traditions and don’t care, and ing that she won’t have children, or even a fact that just as the world doesn’t progress
tragedy on a worldwide scale.’ The second would smash them if they could, and would compelling argument for having children. to something better, life doesn’t necessarily
draft of creation will not be mired in our institute a whole series of reforms’. Heti It’s just an expression of disappointment. either. It is just itself:
petty concerns: ‘You are sad because art, doesn’t mention Covid-19 explicitly, but the But then Mira remembers that Annie is It was a delusion to think she had created the
which is love, will be gone, but you only pandemic had a way of throwing us back an orphan, and that being an orphan has world and everything in it; that she had made
need art because you are stuck in the first into dependence on our nearest relations. freed her to believe in the possibility of up its rules and was always to blame. Where
draft,’ Mira’s father tells her. ‘You are sad Whatever passed for social life in 2019 communal life that Mira has lost faith in. It had that idea come from? Or did everyone
because your father had to die, but in the turned out to be a mirage, just a lot of noise, is Annie who helps Mira find her way out of feel that way, a little bit, for it was actually
next draft you won’t be sad, because there and its sudden disappearance left me with the leaf in a jewel of a scene where the two God who was feeling it – the God who had in
fact created the world, while we picked up on
won’t be fathers.’ Sometimes Annie comes the same feeling that Mira seems to be de- meet to drink tea and eat chocolate. ‘Even
his shame for having made it, in some ways,
to sit under the tree with her new girlfriend. scribing in Pure Colour: a sense of disappoint- if they weren’t as close as two people pos- poorly, and mistook his feeling of respons-
Mira watches from the leaf, heartbroken ment in the primacy of biological ties – that sibly could be, still they were sitting at the ibility for our own.
and envious: ‘Mira was going to be the one the people who love you the most are the very same table, and that was pretty good. c

In Hereford Not far from Gansmir, in the region

roughly approximate to western Russia,
we can see a large bear; it has an almost
man, with a short beard, wearing a crown.
The fabled sets of teeth aren’t visible. In
the upper reaches you can find the bonna-
the world, events both within and outside
time occur: the Last Judgment at the top
and, in the right-hand corner, a huntsman

S
even centuRies ago, an artist embarrassed expression. A little further on, con – a benign beast with the paws of a on horseback, departing the scene. He is
made a perforation with a compass east of Hungary, we find an improbable leopard and the body of a bull, its horns followed by a forester and a dog. The for-
on a large piece of parchment. The ostrich. The inscription reads: ‘Ostrich: curving inwards. The bonnacon is shown ester addresses him, ‘passe avant’ (‘con-
pinprick formed the centre of his universe. head of a goose, body of a crane, feet of expelling faeces, a feat which, the inscript- tinue on’), but the huntsman looks back
Around it he drew the circular shape of a a calf; eats iron.’ Pliny the Elder said the ion notes, it commonly performs in self- wistfully at the universe above him. Some
city, with crenellated towers – Jerusalem. bird ‘has a remarkable ability to digest defence. scholars think this scene refers to a spec-
Radiating outwards from this point, the anything it swallows’. This Europe is not The map’s humanoid creatures are some ific historical incident involving Bishop
artist and perhaps six others portrayed one we would recognise. It is principally of its most compelling. There are dog- Thomas of Cantilupe, who was a keen
the world as they knew it. It was a circular defined by its water systems; our modern headed men (seemingly engaged in con- huntsman, but I prefer to see the rider as
world, hemmed by a great ocean. They drew borders are nowhere to be seen. A mer- versation) as well as a ‘monocule’ or Scia- allegorical, a figure who searches for salv-
distant and fabulous places – Troy, the Red maid swims in the Mediterranean. pod: a man with only one foot, extended ation in the heavenly realm and is exhort-
Sea, the Cretan Labyrinth – as well as some ed to leave the sinful world behind.
less fabulous ones, such as ‘Carlua’ (Car- The passage of the centuries has etched
lisle) and ‘H’ford’ (Hereford). The parch- new biases and alliances on the parch-
ment is now known as the Mappa Mundi ment. The town of ‘H’ford’ is nearly rub-
and it can still be seen in ‘H’ford’, where bed away, presumably by generations of
it was probably made around 1300. It is visitors who jabbed at the map to mark
worth the visit just to see the tiny pinprick their place in the world (a familiar im-
at the map’s centre, an in principio moment pulse). The area of Paris and France, mean-
visible centuries later. while, has been scored by a knife. Nine-
‘Mappa Mundi’ can be translated as teenth-century scholars, among them the
‘map (or cloth) of the world’. Cloth might authors of Medieval Geography (1873), be-
be more appropriate because the Mappa lieved this ‘might have been perpetrated
isn’t a ‘map’ in the way we would now by some over-patriotic Briton at a time
understand it. It wasn’t made to show you when feeling ran high against France’. This
the way to anywhere, except perhaps to impulse might be familiar to some, too,
heaven. It describes both space and time, but the diagnosis of ‘feeling . . . against
biblical history, classical mythology, spir- France’ reflected their own mentality. The
itual truth. Maps often tell us more about last time I visited the map at Hereford
their makers than they do about the world. Cathedral, I passed a sign outside a pub
Modern European maps, for example, put that read: ‘Brexit Beer Deal: Tell the Bar
Europe at the top and centre. Medieval Staff What You Want and Get Something
European maps put our north to the left, Some of the creatures have recognis- A detail of the Mappa Mundi Completely Different.’ Hereford voted over-
east to the top and south to the right, with able names, but would be hard to identify whelmingly for Leave.
Jerusalem at the centre. In the bottom left- in a line-up. The crocodile looks more like into the air. He cuts a lonely figure, as Maps and their ghosts remind us that
hand corner of the Mappa Mundi, at the a cow wearing a lizard mask. It is being does the Blemmye, a creature with no our sense of the world, and our place with-
world’s edge, there are some blob-like ridden by a man wielding an axe. Hugh of head but a ‘face’ in the middle of its body. in it, are contingent. The Mappa Mundi
islands – Anglia, Scotia, Hibernia – but not St Victor claimed that the inhabitants of In a region between Armenia and China is the largest surviving medieval map. An
much is happening there. A little further ‘Meroe’ in the Nile domesticated ‘coco- (near neighbours in this rendering) we can even greater mappa mundi, the Ebstorf
away, however, towards modern-day Nor- drillios’ and rode them across the river. see a stork person, with a human body, Map, was destroyed in the Allied bomb-
way, we see a figure, labelled ‘Gansmir’, in Other creatures are entirely unmoored from stork’s feet and a beak on its human ing of Hanover on the night of 9 October
a pointed hat wearing a pair of skis. An in- reality, like the manticore, which sup- face. 1943. It survives only in black and white
scription reads ‘super egea currit’ (‘he runs posedly has a ‘triple set of teeth, the face As well as places and creatures, the map photographs and some disappointing col-
along egeas’), which shows an unfamiliarity of a human, yellow eyes . . . a lion’s body, a also shows events: the expulsion from the our facsimiles.
with skis or Latin or both. It’s possible that scorpion’s tail, a hissing voice’, but is de- Garden of Eden; the quest for the Golden
it is meant to read ‘super aquas current’ picted on the map with a sleek, leonine Fleece; Noah’s Ark filled with humans and
(‘they will run upon the waters’). body and the face of a surprised-looking beasts. And beyond the circular edge of Mary Wellesley
24 london Review of booKs 21 apRil 2022
A The Dining-Room Table
nne SeRRe was ten when her and ‘mon ami Mark’, who shares the name
mother died in 1971. She claims to of her friend and translator Mark Hutch-
have no memory of the preceding inson, sometimes makes an appearance.
years. ‘My father sank into a depression,’
she told the White Review in 2020, ‘and my Lucie Elven Islands recur, so does fate, suicide, se-
quences of women, hot air balloons, knives
sisters and I . . . tried with all our might – with ivory handles, absent interlocutors,
like all children in this type of situation, I The Fool and OtheR MoRal Tales driving alone and the comparison of char-
think – to protect him, resuscitate him.’ He by Anne Serre, translated by Mark Hutchinson. acters with literary and artistic figures:
took a job as the deputy headmaster of a Les Fugitives, 228 pp., £10.99, June 2021, 978 1 83801 415 5 Carson McCullers, Elizabeth Taylor, Romy
secondary school in Orléans, and the fam- Schneider, Maigret.
ily moved into a staff apartment. When she The BeginneRs Le Cheval blanc d’Uffington deals with an
had nothing to do at the weekends, Serre by Anne Serre, translated by Mark Hutchinson. author who has secluded herself on an
roamed the empty school and wrote a book New Directions, 128 pp., $14.95, July 2021, 978 0 8112 3031 5 island to avoid strong sensation, choos-
– in part, she says, to seduce her philosophy ing to write about the world instead of ex-
teacher. all smiles.’ This zigzag pattern of events, about a word choice. Characters are refer- periencing it. ‘For a year, I had incessantly
Her first book, The Governesses, published which Italo Calvino identified as a feat- red to by their initials and sometimes dis- questioned myself as to how to preserve my
in France in 1992, began as a short story.* ure of folktales, creates ‘incessant motion’ appear without explanation. As in fables, own joy without it hurting me and it was ex-
Even now it comes to little more than a within a restricted space. Play is more real emotional states are revealed through be- tremely difficult.’ While music ‘sucks her
hundred pages. Three governesses, ‘mis- here than reality: three pages are dedicated haviour: ‘I whistled as I left my mother. My into a well’, writing allows Anne not to
tresses of games and pleasures’, are em- to the governesses’ game of pretending to step was light, I leapt into the mountains.’ forget her old life completely. When she
ployed to entertain the four young sons of leave ‘just to stir up the household’, while Describing the long journey taken by three visits the mainland in an attempt to rejoin
the Austeur family. Although they have in- ‘relationships that endure’ are said to have sisters to their father’s funeral, the narrator the world, she realises the risk she had in-
dividual names (Eléonore, Laura and Inès), ‘a beginning, a climax and the inevitable remarks that ‘there is the possibility of a curred by ‘turning streets on which she’s
the governesses work as one. When they downfall’. Everything is in a state of term- picnic all the same because, ultimately, one walked into written streets’, remembering
are at a loose end they like to ‘stroll through inal undoing. can be going to a funeral and feel peckish. that even at the time it had seemed like ‘a
the garden together’ discussing their fav- So it is with the governesses. At the Dignified, they take out a ham, spread a miracle to find herself intact and in good
ourite t0pic of conversation (men). They book’s midpoint, after an evening of ex- checked tablecloth . . . and, still dignified – health the morning after’. Guided by in-
talk to outsiders (men) at the gate ‘in turn, hibitionism directed at the voyeur with the is one allowed to sing before a funeral? stinct, she sets off on a tour of churches. At
though it’s practically the same voice’ and telescope, in which ‘they part their buttocks No – they wipe their knives melancholic- one, she meets her dead mother, at the
hope that one will venture into ‘the trap for the figure observing them’, Laura dreams ally on their skirts.’ Landscapes are half- next, her friend John. Her observations are
of their vast, lunar privacy’. If he does, of opening a ‘large, royal blue door . . . onto metaphorical. childlike and, soon enough, she develops
they ‘devour’ him sexually and leave him an unfamiliar stretch of countryside’. Nine But, even in these early stories, there is an affinity for a little girl. ‘I was so scared
for dead. They are unwittingly destructive: months after this fertile dream, she gives more going on than the word ‘fable’ would that she would take me over to the side of
‘They’d love to find him again, restore him birth, and the ‘centre of the house’ shifts. suggest. One story begins with an end- childhood,’ Anne says, ‘that I became more
to his former state, dip back into him and ‘Perhaps that was why she’d had this child: ing (‘On the last day of their love, Clara brusque. I spoke to her as though to a man;
draw out that sense of bliss without which in order to change the roles in the house- and Pierre Glendinning went for a walk she spoke to me as though to a man; we
they feel bereft.’ The governesses keep ‘vow- hold?’ Then, ‘there came a day when, much in the countryside’) and one ends with a were two men. I was amazed at her under-
ing’ to redress their unbalanced natures, to everyone’s surprise, the elderly gentle- beginning (‘I think I will be born anew in standing of my desires.’ This is not enough
‘to learn Latin or Hebrew’ for instance, or man withdrew, for he was tired of watch- my mother’s house’). Another is composed to make Anne want to become a mother,
to be more like Madame Austeur, who always ing the governesses.’ He directs his tele- entirely of questions, arranged in stanzas however, or to make the girl the subject of
dresses in grey. scope instead at a fern leaf and a hare. and apparently directed at someone who has her story. Instead, the plot centres on a
But the governesses’ pursuit of excite- Without his spectatorship, the governesses gone away leaving few instructions: ‘Does missing man, someone she used to know.
ment is what animates the household. Their languish (‘We’re fading,’ they announce, in the name Patricia Nothingdale mean any- But perhaps she is just looking for a form:
‘gargantuan appetite’ brings passion to a a rare piece of direct speech). ‘The gardens thing to you?/Do you know that this person ‘When I tell a story and there I am carried
family where the parents ‘prefer to live apart, shrank, the little boys toppled over, the presented herself to me as having rights off as if on a speeding sailboat, a runaway
so long as they are together’. In return, Mon- house lost its walls, Monsieur Austeur his over you?/Which rights?’ In other books – horse charging, I keep in mind that I have
sieur Austeur ‘reins them in so that every- cigar, Madame Austeur her grey dress, the Eva Lone (1993), La Petite Épée du coeur (1995), the unfortunate habit of saying rosebud in-
thing is once more orderly, composed’. All maids the platters they had been carrying.’ Film, Au secours (both 1998) and Le Cheval stead of table.’ Itself composed of five or
the characters play their part in the fam- There is no moral in the ending – Serre has blanc d’Uffington (2002) – Serre can be ana- six lines (spine, flank, three legs, a square,
ily romance and each depends on the jettisoned that element from the folktale lytical, metatextual, abstract. Au secours is beaky face) cleaved in chalk, the white
others: when the governesses first arrive genre. Like Leonora Carrington, she does contrived as an offer of rescue to the painter horse makes an appearance when, having
and find themselves lost in the grounds, all not mimic life, but has an interest in stories Paula Rego. ‘How could I be your friend lost the group on a walk in the Auvergne,
they need to do is ‘climb a tree and look for as machines with their own life on the page. if I didn’t miss you?’ When she discovers Anne finds it spread out in front of her and
the smoke from Monsieur Austeur’s cigar’. But stories like Carrington’s ‘The Debut- a hole in the bottom of her boat, the nar- is reminded of a ‘love story that had not
Together, they achieve an unconventional ante’ fantasise about freedom (the freedom rator’s offer becomes a plea to be rescued happened’:
harmony – Monsieur and Madame Aust- of a hyena to give a ball, of a girl to read by Rego – as well as a meditation on a life At almost every turn, I stumbled against him
eur, the little boys and the little maids, her book in peace) while Serre’s govern- dedicated to invention. A number of Serre’s so often on my path that, meeting him inces-
the governesses – and the elderly gentle- esses are fated to play out their role. ‘Who protagonists are called ‘Anne’ or ‘Anna’, santly and incessantly avoiding him, I ended
man who watches them across the garden can be said to have free will?’ she writes
through his telescope and records his elsewhere.
observations.
Château Austeur is the book’s entire
The Governesses was called ‘promising’ by
Le Monde but Serre’s subsequent work re-
Free book plus
world, as well as the stage for the govern-
esses’ exploits, and regularly changes its
ceived a hushed reception in France. Though
she has said they were only ever intend-
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aspect, one minute sensible, the next out of
all proportion; straightforward then cartoon-
ed as exercises, or musical scales, her early
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* It was translated into English by Mark Hutch- comment on the narration: ‘Let’s not de- www.leftbookclub.com
inson in 2018. bate this forever,’ one teases, after quibbling

25 london Review of booKs 21 apRil 2022

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26 london Review of booKs 21 apRil 2022

 up drawing a kind of hollow shape. And the (Les Débutants, 2011) opens like a news re- while they sat watching television together This second phase of her life is char-
body of my love was so gigantic that it made port: ‘In August 2002, Anna Lore, age 43, on the sofa. Whereupon Papa would brutally acterised by the repeated words ‘never’,
me laugh. It was like Gulliver’s body, around fell madly in love with Thomas, age 56.’ squeeze one of her breasts, or, without glanc- ‘anything’, ‘never’, ‘nobody’. People are
which a whole little armed, frightened and ing around, tug violently at the curls of her
Their past lives seem to fall away, including interchangeable – ‘red-headed men, dark-
fascinated people is deployed, or like the Uff- bush.
Anna’s marriage to Guillaume (‘she had a haired men with singsong accents, strange
ington White Horse, drawn by the Celts into
the mountain itself, that covers such a dis- childlike trust in him, he looked on her as a men, men in fast cars’ – and so are places:
tance that you can’t see it from the earth, only marvel’). The ‘space around Anna’ changes Dr Mars, ‘one of our allies’, pops by be- ‘One man took me to Nevers, another to
from the sky. To go from one church to the after Thomas texts her: ‘This went on for tween house calls to ‘follow Maman into Nîmes, to another I said: “I’ll go wher-
next . . . was to go from the angle of his two hours, at the end of which she sent a the dining room, shove her down against ever you’re going,” then left him along the
shoulder to his elbow, then from his elbow to cautious, “I’d rather we let a little time pass the table and thrust himself violently inside way.’ The tone here is different from that
his hand, and so on, so that in a certain way first.” Feeling relieved, she was making her her’. In response, the narrator explains that of the matter-of-fact first part of the story.
the body of my love covered the earth.
way back up the rue de Seine when he re- her mother ‘had an unhappy childhood; It’s as though the narrator is employing a
Serre is posing a question about what is plied: “Another ten years?” Six days later, she needed a bit of madness.’ If the reader lyrical language, rather than a rational one,
essential to a story and to a life, and what she phoned him.’ is shocked, the narrator is not, nor, Serre because her life is now a series of con-
remains if one element (geography, for Anna becomes useless with love, like a has said, is she trying to produce that im- tingencies. ‘It’s a gift I’ve always had, at
example) is subtracted, then another. The romantic heroine: ‘Could anyone imagine pression. Living without an external pattern fifteen, at twenty, at twenty-five: finding
‘hollow shape’ that is carved out is un- Phèdre with a job?’ But the similarities stop to follow, she experiences everything as a decent hotel with nothing to go on but
fulfilled desire. there. After much dithering as to whether new. To recall her childhood a ‘fecklessness my own intuition, something inexpensive,
In 2003, Serre wrote a defence of smok- she should leave Guillaume, he leaves her, – a certain forgetfulness even –’ is neces- a godsend, always a godsend.’
ing in Libération, in which she described the his voice becoming ‘that of a manager, a sary. She even worries that in documenting But she doesn’t regret her childhood:
way cigarettes give shape to life in mental boss, a high court judge’. Worst of all, ‘for ‘the broad strokes of our family life’ she is ‘It’s not out of loyalty to my parents that I
institutions and prisons, offering the pos- the first time, he thought like an ordinary ‘circumscribing’ her mother’s ‘form’. insist on the beauty of that period in my
sibility of small humanising gestures. (When man and ascribed ordinary behaviour to As in The Beginners, there is a rupture in life. Our union was so intense and so com-
asked about this later, Serre said that she her.’ The separation is inconceivable to the middle of the story – in this case, a pact, our sexual complicity so steadfast,
didn’t know what had come over her, dabbl- Anna, but as she considers the relationship physical separation. The narrator decides like a firm handshake, that I’ve been lean-
ing in reality in that way.) In the two short (Serre uses repetition to show her stitch- to leave home at the age of fifteen, giving ing on it for support ever since, on the dark
pieces she wrote soon afterwards, Le Nar- ing and unstitching the past), she begins to only the slightest explanation: ‘If I left my lake of our dining-room table.’ The past,
rateur (2004) and Le Mat (2005), English see that it was only ever two monologues. family early it was because I was ready to steadier than the present, is what the nar-
translations of which are included in The And yet, she insists, ‘in twenty years they’d lead my own life.’ The second part of the rator chooses to record; she finds that writ-
Fool and Other Moral Tales, she goes back to never had a single misunderstanding.’ story considers what ‘living’ might mean ing is a ‘gleaming banister’ she can cling to.
thinking about fiction. Both of them deal after such a childhood. ‘My life ran along ‘Why is it that so many people in my life

P
with stock characters. The figure of the utting down one of Serre’s books songlines like the ones in dreams’, she have wound up insane? . . . Wasn’t it ob-
fool, like his Tarot counterpart, represents is like coming up for air. The theor- tells us. ‘I lied because I’d always lied.’ vious to them, as it was to me, that this dark
a kind of chaos. Serre relates, in the first ist André Belleau argues that, unlike Updates from her siblings punctuate her lake and its black waters would save us, so
person, his appearances in her life, and novels, short stories collapse time in the days: ‘Mother frail. Permanently bedridden.’ long as we kept peering down into it?’ She
claims that ‘the childlike ruses I adopt- service of a singular event; Serre’s stories of ‘Mother delirious.’ ‘Mother dead.’ She de- enacts the metaphor when she visits Lake
ed’ to escape his clutches constituted a all lengths do this. (She’s noted that her scribes this news as ‘alarming’, but reports Maggiore, ‘going from one island or one
practice that, over time, meant ‘I became a longer books are always roughly the same that ‘for many years I had no real feelings.’ side of the lake to another, as if trying to
writer.’ Once you have evaded the fool, ‘you 120 pages.) Her first sentences are ‘packed
can move freely on the mountain plateau tight, like an egg in its shell’, middles are
of independent-mindedness, without being significant (when Guillaume leaves Anna,
afraid you will meet some terrifying ghost she remarks that ‘for this to have happened
from the past.’ at the middle of the book, it could only have
In Le Narrateur, the narrator is treated occurred at the very centre of her being’),
as just another stock character. He avoids and endings mean breakdowns.
the judgment of others by watching from One of Serre’s most tightly packed lines
a distance rather than participating (‘he opens ‘The Wishing Table’: ‘I was seven the
has never voted’). Serre visits on him the first time I saw my father dressed as a girl.’
indignity of becoming a character among The story begins as an account of a house-
many: ‘He tries to walk at the same pace, hold where incest is central to family life:
laugh at the same things, take an interest if the orgiastic frenzy is paused, when the
in the same discoveries,’ but ‘he can sense three daughters go on holiday with their
their mistrust.’ The others are troubled by grandparents, for example, ‘we would be-
his ‘enigmatic presence’ and speculate about come fretful.’ The architecture of the house
his true nature: ‘A shady character? A gang- becomes warped by it: ‘Our little house
ster? An ex-con?’ When the narrator does on the rue Alban-Berg, with its polished
take part, for example, in an orgy, he tells furniture and the dining-room table where
his lovers whom they remind him of, as Maman would recline, Papa’s study, which
though his role is to make the connections we never tired of entering, and the hall-
between one episode and the next. Thrown way with the huge mirror in which Maman
among other people, he is revealed to be would examine her naked reflection – how
a self-satisfied fraudster, ‘a perfect little we longed to be back there!’ The abuse car-
saint, insufferable, always merry, always ried out by both parents is documented
‘A big-hearted, intricate and
friendly, always polite’, much like ‘those with enthusiasm. As in The Governesses, there
compelling novel’
serial killers who . . . to everyone’s sur- is a certain order to proceedings, the sit-
Jenn Ashworth
prise, turn out to be good husbands, good uation ‘was obviously dysfunctional and yet
fathers, good friends – it was a question of functioned so well’. The narrative glides
protecting behind indestructible walls the from room to room – no door is kept locked. ‘A poignant, multi-layered exploration
rites being acted out in his secret room.’ The desires of the neglected mother and of family relationships’
(Hutchinson’s translations retain as far as the power trips of the father drive the fam- Ruth Hogan
possible the rhythms of Serre’s prose, but I ily dynamic. She is an exhibitionist who
wonder if we will soon see a novella called stays indoors (or perhaps she is an exhib-
fiction
The Translator. She likes an intermediary.) itionist because she always stays indoors),
After her next book, Un chapeau léopard who ‘seemed very much in love with Papa,
(2008), Serre began to receive more ac- but he was hard on her’:
claim in France, though the only change, as
far as I can see, is that she began to talk The moment he was home, she would plead
more openly about her work. The Beginners with him, ‘Touch me! Touch me, my love!’

27 london review of books 21 april 2022

encompass and contain, to examine from and that we write without having full aware­ body.’ The narrator can create art as long as ern word, ‘telephone’ or ‘petrol’, say, they
every conceivable point of view, this enorm­ ness of our subject matter. she accepts that she is condemned to look would use a classical metaphor. Like non­
ous table that was much too big for my life’. The image of a castle recurs. The nar­ into her past. It might seem that she is pay­ sense verse, Grande Tiqueté takes more pleas­
Like Anne contemplating the chalk horse, rator first sees it during a sexual encounter ing ‘attention’ to the wrong thing – the bird ure in sonic randomness and confluence
the narrator’s account of her attempt to with the family optician, then, when her and the towers – but writing allows connect­ than in meaning. The actual story, as far as
fathom the unfathomable has something father dies, she has ‘a feeling of something ion and disconnection, and the metaphor I can tell, is about three companions who
to do with the fiction writer’s attempt to being born, a surge, a castle springing up of the castle encapsulates that split. set out on an adventure and meet a virgin, a
superimpose a complex imaginary life over inside me, with its towers, its crenellated After such steep and circling work, Serre sailor, a mother and a hanged man called
familiar territory. walls, and its drawbridge raised’. It returns returned in Dialogue d’été (2014) and Voyage Alistair – according to Serre the book is
Rather than following on from the first at the end, after she visits her sister: avec Vila-Matas (2017) to unpacking the act both ‘a conjuring’ (etymologically, a band­
part, the second section of the story over­ of writing. The Governesses, her first book ing together) and ‘an exorcism’ (a driving
She nattered on about my new haircut, about
lays it, leading to strange refractions. In to be translated into English, came out in away).
her son, her pregnancy, the labour and the
Rome, delivery, the work her husband did in the gar­
2018, leading some American reviewers to That same year, her collection Au coeur
den then again about her son, again about the argue that her work hadn’t been translated d’un été tout en or won the Prix Goncourt de
everything I saw filled me with an intense and labour and the delivery, her husband and the until then because of the squeamishness of la Nouvelle. Each of its stories, which are at
piercing pleasure, everywhere I went I found garden, without once leaving a gap in which the Anglophone mainstream. France isn’t most a few pages long, takes its first line
meaningful phenomena on the march: a tree our eyes might meet and address the quest­ straightforwardly less squeamish, and in from another writer (Arthur Conan Doyle,
in bloom and birds screeching outside the ion that was written there, a question so ser­
window of my boardinghouse on the Avent­ fact the change of language seems to make Marie NDiaye, Robert Walser). In the course
ious and profound that it would have been
ino in May; in another part of Rome, a board­ Serre’s work more palatable, even as it of this repurposing, Serre seems to shed
terrifying to have to confront it: ‘How are
inghouse with a dark, frozen corridor like the you?’
makes it more enigmatic. Grande Tiqueté her fabulist narratorial armour. Good things
hallway in my childhood home. (2020) might prove to be untranslatable. It happen: a mother becomes unrecognis­
On her way home, she sees the spires of is written in an invented language inspired able – more affectionate and practical and
Seeing her lover from a certain angle sud­ a cathedral and remembers the optician, by the archaic dialect Serre’s father spoke chicken­roasting – overnight; a therapist
denly takes her back, only now with the ‘busying himself on top of me, inside me, as he was dying. She believes she could turns out to be a forgotten cousin; a girl
thought that the dining­room table, ‘instead beneath me, while I observed a bird on the understand it because it was addressed to decides to leave a boyfriend who is a little
of being a thing of frenzied, passionate other side of the car door’. Dissociation has her. She writes in the foreword that her deranged. The girl thinks about why she
delight, had been a sacrificial altar, as if become the basis for fiction and so, the father taught French, Latin and Greek. chose to be with someone who perplexed
I’d been amputated there, tortured and dis­ narrator notes, ‘everything was right with ‘One day he picked up a hitchhiker, a Ger­ her friends and caused her to forget she had
membered, but back then had somehow the world . . . you only had to pay – as I had man, and it turned out this man was also a grandparents and a family. ‘Did occasion­
dreamed my way through it all.’ Serre seems always known and believed – close attent­ Latin teacher. They spoke that language for ally adopting a different face to my own
to be saying that we turn trauma into art ion for a terrible joy to be born in your life, the whole car journey, from Bordeaux to give me strength when I found my own,
without always knowing it to be trauma, for a work of art to be forged from your Orléans.’ When they needed to use a mod­ when it was my own that I displayed?’ c

At the a psychologist, and then a psychologist

who decides to become a photographer:
Nothing moves. Except Eivind. She finds
him in the café where he works and the
world of the film. The effect is the re­
verse of literary. The movie is pretending

Movies
each change is signalled by a new boy­ two of them walk through the city, spend­ to be a novel, but entirely (and no doubt
friend. Then she meets Aksel – played by ing a long time together in a park. Then deliberately) without success. It feels in­
Anders Danielsen Lie, the actor who sug­ Julie goes home and we realise that this creasingly like a movie, and if the char­

J
oachim TRieR’s Oslo films – Reprise gested the idea of the trilogy to Trier – and has all happened in less than a minute, acters don’t understand themselves then
(2006), Oslo August 31st (2011) and The the story begins. Aksel is the creator of the time it took for Aksel to look away and the narrator paraphrasing their speech can’t
Worst Person in the World (2021) – didn’t an ‘underground’ comic­book hero called turn back. Time itself was frozen, a version understand them either. Everyone is lost,
start out as a trilogy, but when one of Bobcat, and later complains bitterly about of the set­up for Ambrose Bierce’s story but they have lots of things to say about
his actors suggested that they formed one, the ‘sanitised and safe’ screen adaptation. ‘An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge’ and it.
Trier liked the idea. It’s not so obvious ‘In underground comics you shit,’ he ex­ Borges’s ‘The Secret Miracle’. We could All of this makes the epilogue effective
what links them, except for being set in plains, and the film studio was having none imagine that Julie took the trip only in her in a way that the rather too talkative chap­
Oslo and adding up to three, but the idea of that. The relationship lasts for a while, mind, but it’s not easy to reconcile this ter about Aksel’s sickness is not. Julie has
grows on you. Trier said he was thinking happy as long as Aksel doesn’t talk about with what we’ve seen and probably not left Eivind and is now working as a photo­
of Scenes from a Marriage when he made the having children, and his male friends aren’t worth trying. Major decisions take you out grapher – after all, it turns out she is a bit
new film, and together they do feel rather too unthinking about their privilege. ‘If of the world, or put the world on hold. more professional and consistent than she
like Bergman for another time. A shallower, men had periods, that’s all we’d hear about,’ Sometimes your life is a movie while the and the film have let on. ‘I feel like I never
more shifting time, dominated by privileg­ Julie says. She writes an article about oral lives of others are just pictures. see anything through,’ she says to Aksel.
ed bafflement rather than existential angst. sex that Aksel admiringly calls ‘intellect­ Julie and Eivind set up house together, We might ask why it’s useful to see things
I don’t mean the films are shallow or shift­ ual Viagra’. and they too live pretty cheerily for a while. through if there isn’t anything you care
ing – as Walter Benjamin said, a depict­ But then this agreeable relationship is There are a few pointless episodes before about, but the film invites another ques­
ion of confusion is not the same as a con­ not dangerous enough for Julie. She wants the film heads into the darker territory it tion. Julie is working as the still photo­
fused depiction – but the characters are adventure, and at this moment the film seems to have been longing for even in its grapher on a film set. Her job is to photo­
constantly surprised by the ordinary, and gets really silly. Unlike Julie, Trier knows lightest moments. This is what Trier calls graph the lead actress when she isn’t act­
the concept of depth seems new on them. exactly what he wants but it is a distinct the ‘story worth telling’, as if the rest of the ing, or at least not acting for the camera.
Trier has spoken about presenting a world risk to make his characters look so thin. film had not been quite that. Aksel is dying When she snaps the actress leaving the
of ‘failed ambition’ and ‘a sense of expect­ Julie meets a barista called Eivind (Herbert of pancreatic cancer; while Julie does not studio, Julie is surprised to see that the
ation’, but the new film goes further than Nordrum), and they scare and delight each go back to him, they do have long regret­ man waiting for her is Eivind, with a baby
that. If there’s one thing its heroine knows other with the thought of an affair. Just ful conversations, regretful more generally and pram, completing a picture of the
for sure it’s that she doesn’t know what she toying with the idea makes Eivind feel like about the fact that time passes and people normal, fertile family.
wants. ‘the world’s worst person’ of the film’s die. ‘I’d given up long before I got sick,’ We don’t know how Julie feels about
Julie is played by Renate Reinsve with an title, and without having sex the pair do Aksel says. All he has now, he says, is this, and the film isn’t going to tell us. She
amiable calm that fails to conceal worry – really transgressive things like smelling ‘knowledge and memories of stupid, futile goes home and brings up a photograph of
she conveys the failure so well that in 2021 each other’s sweat and watching each other things’. Julie for her part is scared because the actress on her computer screen. We
she was named Best Actress at Cannes. It pee. she’s pregnant and doesn’t know how she can’t see Julie’s face; we view her from the
keeps looking as if the calm will conquer For Julie and Eivind this is a real rom­ feels about it. side, look at her looking. No drama. No
the worry, and in one memorable sequence ance. They can’t stop thinking about each The film has a rather arch, literary feel talk. This is where Julie’s (and Reinsve’s)
Julie is walking along a street – she walks other, even if they don’t connect again right because it’s divided into twelve sections calm is at its most impressive, deferring
along a lot of streets – with a face that away. Then Julie decides to leave Aksel called chapters, with a prologue and an all recourse to meaning. We might risk a
seems entirely impassive. Then, as we look and we arrive at the film’s much discuss­ epilogue. Trier says he likes the idea of a minor prophecy, though. Julie will be back
more closely, we see that she is crying. She ed high point, a long sequence during ‘faux­novelistic framework’, and a more at work tomorrow, living her unsettled,
turns thirty early in the film, which depicts which Julie is the only person who moves, interesting instance of this is his insertion, incomplete life. And the day after.
four years of her life. What came before is while everyone else is frozen in a still. She at certain intervals, of a woman’s voice re­
summarised in an elegant montage. She is passes a woman on a staircase, people on porting in the third person what we’re
a medical student who decides to become the street, cars in the middle of the road. hearing the characters say in the projected Michael Wood
28 london Review of booKs 21 apRil 2022
I The Thief and the Trousers
n 1970 the Labour MP for Morpeth, house to grant him citizenship. But the bank
Will Owen, was charged with being an was problematic. There were regulatory
agent of the StB, Czechoslovakia’s secret obstacles, and a shortage of cash deposits
service. The man who had named him was
Josef Frolik, a Czechoslovak defector, who Owen Bennett-Jones from British Bengalis. The police started
investigating possible fraud, and the pres-
said Owen was on a £500 monthly retainer sure on Stonehouse built up. Even though
organised by Robert Husak, another intel- Stonehouse: Cabinet Minister, Fraudster, Spy he wasn’t charged, the fraud inquiry made
ligence officer at the Czechoslovak embassy by Julian Hayes. it even harder to raise funds, so Stonehouse
in London. Owen, Frolik said, had been pass- Robinson, 384 pp., £25, July 2021, 978 1 4721 4654 0 started putting in his own money. It was
ing secrets to the Czechoslovaks since 1954. partly to save face: he couldn’t face the em-
During his trial at the Old Bailey, Owen ac- John Stonehouse, My Father: The True Story of the Runaway MP barrassment of the bank collapsing. By 1974,
knowledged receiving money but denied that by Julia Stonehouse. Julia Stonehouse writes, her father was in
he had given away any classified inform- Icon, 384 pp., £10.99, May, 978 1 78578 819 2 a ‘dire financial predicament’. There was
ation. He was acquitted. Frolik also named another source of pressure too: Frolik was
a Labour minister, the postmaster general, that the second defecting StB agent was ually wore him down, forcing his resignat- about to publish a memoir and Stonehouse
John Stonehouse – who, he said, had been Karel Pravec, who took over from Husak as ion. After a spell in the RAF during the war, must have wondered if he would be named
recruited in the late 1950s after being com- Stonehouse’s handler in 1968 but found it he went to the LSE before spending a couple in it.
promised by a homosexual honeytrap on a increasingly difficult to secure meetings with of years as an anti-colonial activist in Africa. Stonehouse tried to disappear. His met-
trip to Prague. him. By the late 1960s Stonehouse seemed He was elected to Parliament in 1957 at iculous preparations were modelled in part
Instead of having Stonehouse prosecut- to think that his seniority in government the age of 32, becoming Britain’s youngest on Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal
ed, Harold Wilson asked him to the Num- was making his contact with the Czecho- MP. He steadily climbed the political ladder (1971): he obtained the birth certificates of
ber Ten sitting room for a chat. The prime slovaks risky. He had never been an ideo- and was an increasingly prominent soft-left two dead constituents and applied for pass-
minister wasn’t inclined to believe the ac- logically motivated communist, and the member of Wilson’s governments. ports and bank accounts in their names,
cusations. It turned out that Frolik had never files suggest that the StB felt he was trying As he makes clear in Death of an Idealist, forging reference letters in the name of
actually met Stonehouse, and there was no to obtain as much money as he could while being dropped from the shadow cabinet hit a terminally ill MP. He even managed to
evidence that Stonehouse was homosexual. supplying as little information as possible. Stonehouse hard. But he didn’t take the secure the right for one of his fake ident-
In his memoir, Death of an Idealist (1975), ‘We paid him a lot of money and didn’t get reversal lying down. He turned his focus to ities to emigrate to Australia. Taking large
Stonehouse said he had been shocked when anything from him,’ Pravec wrote in one making money, first through a business amounts of money out of his businesses,
Wilson confronted him. He admitted hav- report. offering consultancy services for export pro- he transferred the funds into 27 different
ing had a number of meetings with Czecho- But for some, the StB records don’t settle motion and then, more controversially, by accounts. In disguise – new clothes, thick
slovak officials, including Husak, who on the matter. Stonehouse’s daughter Julia has establishing the British Bangladesh Trust spectacles – he flew to Florida, booked into
one occasion appeared uninvited in Stone- seen the same files as Hayes and Andrew Limited, which he hoped to turn into a a hotel and walked into the sea. It later
house’s room in a Czechoslovak hotel. But, and concludes that her father was wrong- bank. The idea began after he helped estab- emerged that after swimming parallel to
he maintained, there was nothing untoward ly accused. Indeed, she thinks the papers lish a charity that raised hundreds of thous- the shoreline he had emerged a little way
in these encounters – and if the Czechoslov- show that Stonehouse wasn’t a spy. Even ands of pounds from British Bengalis to help down the beach before rearranging his hair
aks had been trying to recruit him, they fail- going by her own account of their contents, the Bangladeshi independence struggle. with a centre parting and heading for the
ed. Wilson later told the House of Commons however, the most she can legitimately Bangladesh’s government, which took office airport, eventually reaching Sydney. As in-
that an inquiry had found no evidence against claim is that although there are repeat- in 1972, was sufficiently grateful to Stone- tended, most people, including his wife,
him. Even so, after Wilson lost the 1970 elect- ed references to his spying, the references
ion, Stonehouse was quietly dropped from might be wrong. Czechoslovak intelligence
the shadow cabinet. officers must have made things up about
Ten years later, with Thatcher in power, her father in order to impress their super-
a second Czechoslovak defector said that iors and steal money they pretended was
Stonehouse had been a paid agent from 1962 for him. She points out that Stonehouse’s
onwards, and that as parliamentary secret- file contains a misspelled street name and
ary at the Ministry of Aviation between 1964 the wrong house number – how then could
and 1967 he had supplied information on messages have been delivered? Hayes ans-
aircraft as well as general government plans wers this by pointing out that the Czecho-
and policies. Thatcher was told that Stone- slovaks were often frustrated that they STRATEGIES AND SELF-HELP
house had apparently been paid a total of couldn’t get hold of Stonehouse and the FROM COUNSELLING AND
PSYCHOTHERAPY
£5000 – close to £100,000 in today’s money. mistake might help explain why. Despite
BY MADALINA DAY
Her attorney general was sure that Stone- Julia Stonehouse’s book being heavily foot-
noted and Hayes’s having no references at Audiobook narrated by
house had been a spy but he lacked evidence
Dustin E. Walden.
admissible in court. Perhaps swayed by the all, a neutral reading of the two accounts
highly embarrassing exposure of Anthony leaves Hayes’s version seeming rather more There is a French edition,
Blunt the year before, Thatcher agreed that likely. STRATÉGIES EN
PSYCHOTHÉRAPIE,
Stonehouse shouldn’t be confronted with Stonehouse’s father was an active trade
TRANSLATED BY ANAIS
the new information or prosecuted. unionist and his mother was the Labour SCHILENGER
When the StB files were finally opened mayor of Southampton. They enrolled John Paperback available at
up in 2008, there were hundreds of pages in the Woodcraft Folk, the ideologically Waterstones, Amazon worldwide
and audiobook available on
on Stonehouse, including a five-page re- correct version of the Boy Scouts in which
Audible, iTunes, Amazon and
port in Stonehouse’s handwriting provid- children sat around a bonfire singing the various other audiobook outlets
ing detailed information on members of Internationale and the Red Flag. To start worldwide.
the African National Congress, an organ- with, John followed in his parents’ foot-
isation he knew well. There were also typed steps, joining the Labour Party at the age of
letters, reports and the minutes of a Labour sixteen and the Co-operative Movement,
shadow cabinet meeting on nuclear disarm- where he soon became the youngest mem-
Published in English and in French, this book is about a dialogue/dyadic created
ament in 1963. The Czechoslovak files sug- ber of the Board of Management. It was here
between a private sector and public delivery of health or National Health System
gest that Stonehouse was an agent lured by that he fought his first political battles. In-
money. In his authorised history of MI5, furiated by an entrenched Communist Party (known in the UK as the NHS). Manuscript’s structure flows around its narrative
published in 2009, Christopher Andrew con- majority, Stonehouse believed that the Co- technique and reflective practice episodes. The writing is presenting several case
cluded that Stonehouse had indeed spied op was losing out to emerging supermarkets studies as life stories and self-help strategies; all chapters are, in fact, evidence-
for the Czechoslovaks, becoming ‘the only such as Tesco. His attempts to drag the Co- based research within the public services and private sector psychotherapeutic
British politician (so far as is known) to op into competitiveness were repeatedly practice. The text was praised by several editors, as topical, potential intriguing
have acted as a foreign agent while holding blocked by, in his words, ‘evil’ communist and thought-provoking. It was asserted that strategies offered may be absorbed by
ministerial office’. opponents. He was elected to the presid- the reader and in earnest stay with the reader long past the turn of the final page.
Julian Hayes, Stonehouse’s great nephew, ency of the London Co-operative Society
has also consulted the StB files. He explains but the Communist Party elements event-

29 london review of books 21 april 2022

 thought he had committed suicide, and a and business life of Britain that had caused
ceremonial service was held in the House his breakdown.
of Commons. Stonehouse was charged with 21 counts
But despite his best efforts there was a of fraud, deception and theft. He decided he
flaw in the plan. Lord Lucan had vanished didn’t need Robertson and would be better
The quality of
just two weeks before Stonehouse and peo- off representing himself. It was a bad de-
light from my ple were on the lookout. So when a bank cision. His absurd six-day monologue in his
Alex Light is employee on his lunch break noticed a tall, own defence irritated the judge and, Robert-
self-assured Englishman going in and out son believes, contributed to his seven-year
breathtaking. of a number of different banks in central sentence. Locked up in Wormwood Scrubs,
Mr Hutchinson | Devon Melbourne, he called the police. They were Stonehouse reluctantly resigned as a mem-
told by the British authorities that two pro- ber of the Privy Council and – rather belat-
minent Englishmen had gone missing and edly – gave up his seat in Parliament.
D MADE

WAV E L E N G T
AN I that there was a way of telling them apart: After his conviction, Stonehouse tried

N
H
one had a scar on his leg. Stonehouse was to make a living through writing. He had
H T H detained and the police told him to take brought out his first book before his min-
I G T RE I down his trousers. They found no scar. Sat- isterial career took off: Prohibited Immigrant

N
G
AT B R I TA
isfied that they had not apprehended Lord (1960) recounted his anti-colonial camp-
EC
YL

Lucan, the authorities set about establish- aigning in Africa. Now behind bars, he start-
DA

HN
ing Stonehouse’s identity. In the interview, ed writing about himself again. Both Death
Read in comfort for longer he resorted to bluster, telling anyone who of an Idealist and the excruciatingly boring
O LO
would listen that he was a member of Her My Trial were self-pitying attempts to clear
Majesty’s Privy Council who deserved re- his name. ‘I was innocent,’ he wrote in
spect. After unsuccessful bids for asylum memoir number two. ‘But in my heart, I felt
Since making a reading light for his mum in Sweden and Mauritius he was extradited that if the people of England really needed
G Y (TM)

who suffered from macular degeneration back to the UK, where he recruited a bar- to express their orchestrated venom on me
more than 35 years ago, it has been our rister to represent him, the young Geoffrey then perhaps I could still perform some
founder Alex’s sole aim to combat dark Robertson. Robertson later recalled that service in accepting the role of sacrificial
nights by bringing simulated daylight Stonehouse had by this point ‘lost faith in lamb.’ Next came four spy thrillers. Accord-
indoors and into your eyes. socialism, he’d lost faith in himself, he’d ing to one of his publishers, John Calder,
lost faith in the political process . . . and Stonehouse was convinced they would be
Although the days are getting longer, there was suddenly a loss of belief in all the bestsellers. They weren’t – probably be-
the classically gloomy and unpredictable portentous things he’d done in life.’ cause they were written in the style of the
British weather can still be a challenge He had also grossly mistreated his wife. boys’ own adventures he had read as a
for your eyes, and can have a detrimental Julia Stonehouse explains that, after he’d child. ‘As the gypsy dancing girls regrouped
impact on your ability to discern detail been rumbled in Sydney, he called her for another seemingly spontaneous demon-
and colour. mother to say that he was alive after all and stration of native energy,’ Stonehouse wrote
Better light can really help. The Alex that she should join him. Also, could she in Oil on the Rift (1987), ‘he mused on the
bring his mistress with her? In Australia, vagaries of fate.’ In The Ultimate (1976), writ-
Light uses our Daylight Wavelength
when his wife complained about the mistr- ten under the pen name James Lund, Stone-
Technology™ to shed an unsurpassed
ess, Stonehouse knocked her to the ground, house described an IRA mortar attack on a
light beam that mirrors the daylight
grabbed her by the hair and repeatedly cabinet meeting at Number Ten. The sim-
spectrum, so you can concentrate in banged her head against the floor. She tried ilarities between his story and what actual-
comfort for hours on end. to call for help, so he ripped the phone off ly happened in February 1991 when John
the wall and hit her with it. Julia Stone- Major’s cabinet was nearly blown up by a
Energy-efficient LED
house argues that her father’s behaviour can mortar fired from a vehicle in Whitehall are
technology be explained by the stress of being in love so uncanny that one can’t help wondering
with two women at the same time, as well if someone in the IRA had read The Ultimate
Robust flexible arm as his addiction to tranquillisers. and taken the idea from there. Two other
thrillers, Ralph (1982) and The Baring Fault

W
Fully dimmable
hy did he run away? Unsym- (1986), published under his own name, dealt
pathetic critics may find it easy with a tricky topic for Stonehouse: both are
Alex Table Alex Floor to explain. Proud and egotistic- stories about British politicians spying for
Light Light al, Stonehouse simply wanted to flee from the Soviet bloc, one of them initially com-
failure and start a new life. He said as much promised by a honeytrap.
Height 28” (71cm) Height 60” (152cm) to the Australian police: ‘In order to escape After his early release from prison in 1979,
Weight 10lbs (4.5kg) Weight 13lbs (6kg) from exceptional political and business Stonehouse remained in the public eye, ap-
pressures which I suffered in England, I pearing on radio and TV to talk about his
£249.99 £299.99 wished to establish a new identity and live story. He tried to stay politically relevant,
and work in a more congenial country.’ In joining the newly created SDP, but was never
an interview with the BBC, he gave a more taken seriously again. His political career,
Available with lightweight and florid account: ‘Lots of MPs go on fact- books and businesses hadn’t amounted to
heavyweight bases, and four finding tours overseas. I have been on a much. Even if he was a spy, he wasn’t a
stunning finishes. fact-finding tour about myself.’ Later, in significant one. As for his political legacy,
a statement to the House of Commons, his obituarists had nothing weightier to
For Advice. For a Brochure. To Order: Stonehouse explained that he’d ‘assumed work with than his introduction, as post-

FREE +44 (0)1296 390387 a new, parallel personality that took over
from me, which was foreign to me, and
master general, of the second-class stamp.
Until the end, he was still sending House of
seriousreaders.com/7301 which despised the humbug and shame of Commons Christmas cards to friends, as if
the past years of my public life’. But as be- hankering after past glories. On 25 March
Compact Light came clear during his trial, which opened 1988 Stonehouse collapsed in Birmingham
WORTH £150 on 27 April 1976, when it came to planning before he was due to appear on a TV show
his disappearance he had acted rationally about missing people. He died three weeks
with any Serious and effectively. As Robertson put it, ‘if it later. For both Julian Hayes and Julia Stone-
Light order when were madness, there was too much method house, his story is a matter of intense inter-
you use code 7301, in it to ever convince a jury.’ In Death of an est. For the rest of us he is little more than
while stocks last Idealist Stonehouse simply blamed others: it a trivia question: ‘Which British MP faked
was, he said, the hypocrisy of the political his own death on a Florida beach?’ c

30 london Review of booKs 21 apRil 2022

‘P Puppeteer Poet
ope has had bad luck,’ F.R. Leavis ligence than any other English poet, except
once declared. It’s true that his possibly Chaucer. He wrote in an age of
reputation suffered a big dip in the Party – in the political rather than Downing
19th century, but otherwise he did pretty
well for himself, all things considered. He Colin Burrow Street sense – and his kind of intelligence
was exactly attuned to an environment in
was only four foot six and suffered from which different groups of people knew dif­
curvature of the spine in an age when phys­ Alexander Pope in the Making ferent things and supported distinct pol­
ical disabilities were often taken to imply by Joseph Hone. itical causes. He knew precisely the over­

Jonathan Parry: The Conservative Nation

moral deformity. He was a Catholic during Oxford, 240 pp., £60, January 2021, ‎978 0 19 884231 6 tones and undertones his target readers
years in which Catholics could not attend would hear in any given line, and that en­
university, or live within ten miles of Lon­ The Poet and the Publisher: The Case of Alexander Pope, Esq., abled him to suggest innumerable things
don, or (in one of the most bizarre legis­ of Twickenham v. Edmund Curll, Bookseller in Grub Street without actually saying them. This was a
lative expressions of Protestant paranoia) by Pat Rogers. great skill, although it can turn modern
own a horse worth more than £5. Reaktion, 470 pp., £25, May 2021, 978 1 78914 416 1 readers off. He often alludes to people
Pope was born in 1688, the year of the and events which he knew his audience
Glorious Revolution, which for Catholics He achieved this status through roughly Pope understood that to be included in knew but which not many readers now
was rather less glorious than it was to their equal measures of will, luck and brilliance. the English canon which publishers of the know (Charles Gildon, anyone?). So Pope
Protestant countrymen. Despite his size, He absorbed and imitated Jonson, Milton, age were establishing you shouldn’t overtly needs notes, and, as Samuel Johnson com­
his religion, and the sinister nominative Spenser, Waller, Cowley, and above all Dry­ claim to be a child of Dryden or part of plained, notes refrigerate the mind by
determinism of his name, he managed den (who converted to Catholicism late in a literary genealogy of greatness. Doing interruption, even if (as in Pope’s Dunc­
while still in his twenties to publish his life), and by doing so he associated him­ that in an explicit way would just invite iad Variorum) the notes are hilarious spoof
Pastorals (1709), An Essay on Criticism (1711) self with the English poets who were being your enemies to mock you. The strategy scholarly annotations written by imagin­
and the mock­heroic Rape of the Lock (1712­ marketed and sold as classics by high­ he adopted was to allude to and echo his ary pedants about people one hasn’t heard
14). These created all kinds of sensation in status printers such as Jacob Tonson. He illustrious predecessors (as he does here of.
a London hungry for literary sensations. modernised works by Chaucer and Donne, with ‘reason . . . rage . . . bosom’), while But, setting aside the problem of not
Pope belonged to the first generation ofVOLUME tapping their 43canonical
NUMBER 7 1mak­
kudos while apRiL 2021 that£4.75
suggesting USa civilising
he exerted & CaNaDa $6.95 who Pope’s enemies were, the
influ­ knowing
poets to benefit from the 1710 copyright ing them speak Popish English. He trans­ ence on them. His readers could congrat­ sense that Pope often gives of anticipating
act, which, though intended principally to lated Homer as Dryden had translated ulate themselves on recognising his allus­ exactly how his readers are going to react to
protect the interests of stationers, enabled Virgil, and made him speak Popish too. ions, acknowledge his excellence and re­ his words can be slightly creepy, as though
authors to sell the copyright of their writ­ After Agamemnon has said that he will joice in the higher civility of their own age he’s a puppeteer deliberately tweaking your
ings to publishers, who might hope to seize Briseis, Pope’s Achilles is tossed on all at once. lips into a smile or a grimace of assent. The

Arianne Shahvisi: Life in a Tinderbox

benefit from the right to print them for the horns of antithesis in a way that is not
an extended period. In 1714 he negotiated quite Homer but very like Pope:
a contract with Bernard Lintot (who was
Pope stole another trick from Dryden. great set­piece description of the heroine
He constructed a rival line of contemporary Belinda’s dressing table in The Rape of the
dunce­poets, who were explicitly present­ Lock is the best instance of his controlling
hoping to buy himself a poet who could Achilles heard, with grief and rage opprest, ed as a genealogy. This lineage of poets brilliance, the only fault in which is its
His heart swell’d high, and labour’d in his

Clair Wills on Molly Keane’s bad behaviour

rival John Dryden in merit and popularity) (who not coincidentally are now hardly ever complete faultlessness:
breast.
for a translation of Homer. This was prob­ read) – Flecknoe, Mac Flecknoe aka Thomas
Distracting thoughts by turns his bosom
ably the best deal ever struck by an English Shadwell, Colley Cibber, piddling Theo­ This Casket India’s glowing Gems unlocks,
ruled,
poet. The fee for the copyright combined bald, Richard Blackmore – teems through And all Arabia breathes from yonder Box.
Now fired by wrath, and now by reason
The Tortoise here and Elephant unite,
with income from the sale of subscription cool’d. the Grub Street grunge of Pope’s greatest

Thomas Meaney:
Transform’d to Combs, the speckled and the
copies of the Iliad made Pope around £5000. poem, the mock­heroic satire on books and white.
That was an eye­watering sum. The con­ This reads like a rational cooling of Dry­ fools and publishing called The Dunciad. The Here Files of Pins extend their shining Rows,
tract for Milton’s Paradise Lost in 1667 paid den’s ebullient translation of the same dynasty of dunces established the notion Puffs, Powders, Patches, Bibles, Billet­doux.
him two instalments of £5 and may have passage:
got his widow a further £8. The average an­
nual income for an agricultural labourer in
The Singapore Formula
At this th’ Impatient Hero sowrly smil’d:
that literary traditions and bloodlines do
exist, since other people belonged to the This is a masterly satire on the bathos
genealogy of folly. It also implicitly sug­ of global consumerism: objects from all
His Heart, impetuous in his Bosom boil’d,
1710 was a little over £17, and a solicitor at And justled by two Tides of equal sway,
gested that Pope belonged to the rival tribe around the world are yoked together by a

Clair Wills on Molly Keane

that time might earn around £113 a year. Stood, for a while, suspended in his way of greatness. violence which is deliberately suppressed
Pope published his Works in 1717, some­ Betwixt his Reason, and his Rage untam’d; So Pope made his own luck. But he was by the descriptive language: ‘The tortoise
thing which no English poet under thirty One whisper’d soft, and one aloud reclaim’d. also brilliant. He had a sharper social intel­ here and elephant unite’ as though they
had ever done before, and by 1719 had
earned enough to move to a riverside villa
in Twickenham. Here he got himself a
beautiful Great Dane called Bounce, one
of whose offspring was given to Frederick,
Prince of Wales, along with a collar in­
scribed: ‘I am his highness’s dog at Kew;/
Pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you?’ Who
could have been luckier?
Pope loved Bounce and I’m sure Bounce
loved Pope. But not everyone has done so.
Lytton Strachey said his satires ‘resembled Get more
from your
nothing so much as spoonfuls of boiling
oil, ladled out by a fiendish monkey at an
upstairs window upon such of the passers­
by whom the wretch had a grudge against’,
and the jeers about A. P­­E being an ape­
subscription
like imitator of the ancients or having the
body and manners of a lower primate echo­
Register online now
ed around him throughout his life. But
despite all that, Pope still looks like the
to read everything
most self­consciously canonical of 18th­
century English poets, even though the
ever published
canon has been exploded outwards, and in the LRB
lrb.co.uk/activate
even though the number of people who
really love reading him is now, I would
guess, less than a thousandth of what it
was in 1720.

31 london Review of booKs 21 apRil 2022

want to, rather than having their tusks and How new-born Nonsense first is taught to high levels of social intelligence he knew the memoirs of John Ker, which were sup-
shells cut off and shipped to England. And cry, exactly how to make one person feel rotten posed to contain secrets of state. ‘Golden
they all go to make . . . the paraphernalia Maggots half-form’d, in rhyme exactly meet, while making everyone else laugh; but (like showers’ are a perfectly pitched Popean
And learn to crawl upon poetic feet.
on a girl’s dressing table. ‘Bibles’ (plural: my grandmother, who was the mistress of pitcher of piss (or rotten eggs, or other
Here one poor Word a hundred clenches
how many doesn’t matter) dissolve into makes,
the conversational dum-dum bullet – an fragrant matter) showered on the head of
‘billet-doux’, texts so much more sacred to And ductile dullness new meanders takes. apparently innocent remark that silently his enemy. The fact that they’re presented
a young woman in the age of Queen Anne enters the flesh and then explodes inside, like a complimentary golden bouquet just
than all those dreary epistles from the This is meant to be recognised as a re- with infinite psychological destruction), he makes the insult worse: Jove’s descent to
apostles – and the word ‘Bibles’ virtually write of the realm of Chaos in Paradise Lost, didn’t always realise how much a perfect- Danaë in a shower of gold is transformed
has a tag hovering above it which says but the rewrite takes over so much of the ly targeted cruel remark could make his by the curious alchemy of Pope’s imagin-
‘Smile at the incongruity here.’ You do as partially uncontrolled creative force of that victims hate him. His cruelty was always ation into a shower of filth. Presenting the
you’re told of course, and smile. But a laugh wild, whirling space in Milton’s universe knowing, and it always rested on knowing insult with mock seriousness as an elevat-
that’s not entirely choreographed by an that Pope himself seems overrun by its exactly what his audience knew about its ing compliment exponentially increases
author is more fun than a laugh that comes energy. The writing loses itself in the realm target. This knowingness augments the the hurt, since it implicitly says to the un-
from something that flags itself as perfect- of its duncistical enemies: the ‘clenches’ or savagery because it displays very clearly fortunate Curll: ‘The fact that you were put
ly mirth-provoking. puns on ‘maggots’ (both ‘grub’ and ‘per- that your enemy is not just your enemy, in the stocks and showered with heaven
What saves Pope from the charge of verse fancies’ in the language of the period) but your friends’ enemy too, and that your knows what is the talk of the town, and no
being too darn conscious of everything he’s are teeming with life, tottering on their friends know the dark secrets to which you matter how obliquely or gildedly I allude
doing is the surreal excess of his savag- poetic (metrical and physical) feet, as Pope are cryptically alluding. So at the start of to it all my knowing readers will instantly
ery. Sometimes the puppeteer loosens the superanimates the creative processes of his Book 2 of The Dunciad Pope’s hero sits on understand just what I mean.’
strings and the show turns into a tableau enemies in order to turn their energy to a throne which directly recalls Satan’s bad As Joseph Hone shows in Alexander Pope in
of uncontrollably animated monsters of the chaos. These moments when the division eminence in Paradise Lost: the Making, Pope began his writing life as a
mind – as when he describes the Goddess between satirist and target melts down into predominantly manuscript poet writing for
Dullness, who presides over The Dunciad a shared fearsome creative spawn of the High on a gorgeous seat, that far out-shone ‘tight-knit recusant networks’ in the Thames
Henley’s gilt tub, or Flecknoe’s Irish throne,
Variorum and imagination are the points at which even Valley. Hone argues that for the early
Or that where on her Curlls the public pours,
those who don’t want to like Pope more or All-bounteous, fragrant grains and golden part of his career Pope not only wrote for
beholds the Chaos dark and deep,
Where nameless somethings in their causes
less have to like Pope. showers . . . but shared the political attitudes of these
sleep [. . .] The other thing that saves Pope from Catholic and often outright Jacobite patrons
How Hints, like spawn, scarce quick in being a cardboard cut-out Augustan ration- The publisher Edmund Curll was put in and friends. After the failed Jacobite rising
embryo lie, alist is his cruelty. Like many people with the pillory in February 1728 for publishing of 1715, Hone argues, Pope ‘countered the

Time Frame distance where her gaze rested. Are those

drums? Are we in the distant past or the distant
Jorie Graham future I ask. The witches float in the air
above us. There are three. Of
course there are three. They have returned. No,
your ability to see them
The American experiment will end in 2030 she said has returned. Your
looking into the cards, willingness. She asked for
the charts, the stars, the mathematics of it, looking cold wine and a railway schedule. It was time
into our palms, into all of our she said, to move on, her gaze
palms, into the leaves at the looking out at the avenues and smaller streets,
bottom of at the silk dresses on the mannequins in
the empty cup – searching its emptiness, its piles of dead storefronts, all of them, across the
bodies or is it grass at the edge planet, the verandas poking out under the
of the field where the abandoned radio is crackling hemlocks, violin strings crossing from
at the winter-stilled waters, the winter-killed one century to another, although now I could hear they were
will of God – in the new world now the old world – sirens all along,
staring quietly without emotion into the rotten meat invisible and desperate the warnings
in the abandoned shops, moving aside with one easy gesture in their rise & fall –
the broken furniture, the fourth wall are you not listening
smashed are you not listening –
& all yes those are sirens in the streets but here,
the private lives of the highrise apartments up close, in the recording of the
exposed to the city then orchestra, the violin solo
wind. Ash everywhere. The sounds of has begun, it is screaming from one
crying. Loud then ruined soul to another to beware, to pull the
soft. It will not seem like it’s bloody bodies from the invisible
dying where we are putting them daily –
right away, she said. What is the ‘it’ you refer to I no, every minute, no,
ask. Is it a place. Is it faster – we are o-
an idea. A place is bliterating the one chance we had to be
an idea, an idea is for a while a place. Look good. There it is. The word. It brings us up
she says, there are short. I notice she is gone. The
two fates. One is the idea one is the place. American project she had said, putting the words
And everywhere I see water. out into the kitchen air with some measure of
As in blessing? As in baptism? kindness. It was not the only one, she sd, but it was
As in renewal? No, the last one.
as in the meadows disappear under the sea. After it, time ran out. We both looked out the window
Then I heard a sound in the far still shocked by the beauty of the moonlight

32 london Review of booKs 21 apRil 2022

changing political circumstances of Han­ though of course the absence of a smok­ social intelligence: his ability to make his Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall;
overian Britain by rebranding his topical ing gun can sometimes just mean that the friends hear what he wanted them to hear And Universal Darkness buries All.
works as timeless literary classics’. In 1715 perpetrator has thrown it into the Thames. in his words was matched by an ability to
he published a spoof key to The Rape of the There is a wider point about self­censorship imagine what his enemies might hear there After the accession of George I in 1714,
Lock which with solemn absurdity interpret­ here, however. Self­censorship isn’t always too. This is not to deny that his early Cath­ to say in public that you thought the House
ed the poem as a Jacobite allegory. That simply a matter of cutting lines that reveal olic and Jacobite readership mattered. As of Stuart should be on the throne rather
was a way of getting his retaliation in first hidden or forbidden beliefs. It can be a Hone suggests, that readership was a cruc­ than a load of dim and philistine Protestant
against anyone else who tried to read sedit­ matter of imagining what your words might ial component in Pope’s art, however he Germans was to give yourself a first­class
ion into his writing. In the Works of 1717 he be taken to mean by a group of hostile read­ tried to hide it. His early experience writing ticket to the pillory or worse; but to attack
revised earlier manuscript poems ‘to lessen ers, and revising them to avoid that potent­ for a group of recusants enabled him to de­ a false lineage of dunce­poets who had
their topical resonance’. He entirely sup­ ial interpretation. Publication in print en­ velop his later style of nudges, winks and usurped the throne of wit and brought
pressed his early epic Alcander, Prince of Rhodes, courages a poet to hear his own words with insinuations to those in the know. That lambent Dullness into the realm, and who
and did so at the suggestion of the notable others’ ears, and a changing climate of mode is well­suited to poems written for seemed coincidentally to be mostly Whig
Jacobite Francis Atterbury. Hone argues that opinion can make more or less innocent re­ small groups of like­minded readers who supporters of Hanoverian rule, well, that
this poem was suppressed ‘out of fear, not marks originally directed to a small group have something to hide. was just fine and dandy, and in these high
aesthetic embarrassment’, and was at least sound subversive to a wider body of read­ This might also suggest that Pope, later matters honi soit qui mal y pense. Anyone who
implicitly Jacobite – though in the absence ers. By 1715 Pope knew that his hostile in his career, did not seek simply to be a said this was treasonous Jacobitism could
of the work itself it’s hard to be sure. readers – whose ranks were growing almost ‘timeless classic’, but retained a kind of be told that it was really all about poetic
Even Pope’s ‘classic’ phase as a translator as rapidly as those of his admirers – would literary Jacobitism (akin to that which runs lineages and the purely literary­critical di­
of Homer may have had a swirling tide of seek to pin a Jacobite label on anything through the works Dryden wrote after his stinction between the dull and the great.
Jacobite conspiracy beneath it: Hone sug­ he wrote that seemed even faintly Tory or conversion to Catholicism) which is more a To make himself a ‘classic’ author Pope
gests that the process of drumming up sub­ Catholic. They even referred to his ‘Popish style of insinuation than a matter of overt had to tack and weave through the shoals of
scribers for Pope’s Homer from 1714 on­ translation of Homer’. It’s not surprising political action or beliefs. That form of styl­ politics and religion. He also had to work
wards may have been used to raise funds for that he carefully reconsidered his earlier istic, doctrinally deniable, quasi­Jacobitism the market for printed books. He did this
the Jacobite cause. works in the changed political environment can be heard rumbling right through his with more success than any other writer of
How much of a Jacobite was Pope? Per­ which followed the death of Queen Anne career until the apocalyptic ending of the his age, but that didn’t mean it was ever
haps both more and less than Hone sug­ in 1714. To think of Pope as revising not revised Dunciad of 1742: easy. When he represented the Grub Street
gests. There’s no smoking gun which shows to suppress his heterodox political beliefs printing presses in The Dunciad as a heav­
definitively that Pope actively supported but to close off opportunities for malicious Lo! Thy dread Empire, CHAOS! is restor’d; ing mass of grubby plagiarists and pirates
the return of the Stuart line to the throne, readers would make a lot of sense, given his Light dies before thy uncreating word: ready to bury the classic author in filth he

in this Spring. Are we running out still wild. My bones hurt sometimes
of Springs I had wanted to causing pain. It is not terror.
ask. Is the oxygen. Will there be no more open I feel for the cash in my pocket.
channels. Can one not live I do not have time to prepare.
beneath. A little life in the I am comfortable.
morning. Crazed police cars in the distance Time passes and I am still here. I am
but here this sunflower getting by. I replace one
which seeded itself, calendar with another. I put seed out
seeded its mathematics & religion in our tiny for birds and sometimes one
backyard, comes. Once I saw two.
will do. The creaking The spider is still here. I remember how geese
doorhandle we love, used to fly over. It meant something.
the spider we help come back after each wind I remember when there were planes
by letting the hanging vine & I could see them catch the light up there. What a
which needs to be trimmed paradise. Some people had
just stay – just stay I whisper to myself – enough. They were not happy but they were
stay under, don’t startle able to come and go
time, the century at will.
will go by – you can mind They could leave
your own business. You can finger the rolled up their houses. At any time. Anytime. And go
leaf, feel its veins, you can watch the engines go by where they wished. Sometimes
over all the bridges we shared ideas. It
above you. filled the time. We agreed or we did not.
You can remain unassimilated. The They were not afraid. I was not
American project she said, will end afraid. Summer would come soon.
in 2030. Said find land away from here. Find It would get warmer. It might rain too hard.
trustworthy water. When it flooded we worked to fix it.
Have it in place We did as we saw fit.
by then. I paid her. Hi neighbour we would say across the fence
I saw the bills go into the pocket to the one tending their portion of the
in her purse. Her shoes were so worn. disaster.
Her terror was nowhere. I looked at my garden. It will be ok again soon,
It was dry here and there. one of us would say. We were allowed to
The shoots were starting up. Like a speak then. It was permitted.
dream they were poking through the rusty One of us might dream. One of us might
fence. despair. But we cleaned up the
I am spending my life, I thought. I am un­ debris together & the next day sun came
prepared. It is running thru & we were able to sit in it
my fingers. The wind is as long as our hearts desired.

33 london Review of booKs 21 apRil 2022

wasn’t entirely making it up. He struggled shanked Edmund Curll, muck­raking pub­ by lacing Curll’s glass of sack with an pseudonym ‘P.T.’ and wrote offering the
throughout his life to prevent or suppress lisher’, along with his own favoured pub­ emetic, which the miraculously meticulous publisher a cache of letters by Alexander
pirated versions and parodies of his works, lisher, Lintot, at a tavern. Curll had just Pat Rogers, for whom no detail in the long Pope. He then hired someone, possibly the
which could simultaneously lose him money published a set of three Court Poems which series of bouts of Curll v. Pope is too small, out­of­work actor and artist James Wors­
and damage his reputation. He was prob­ he ascribed to Pope (‘the laudable trans­ thinks was probably antimony potassium dale, to dress up as a clergyman and de­
ably not alone among 18th­century auth­ lator of Homer’), although only one was tartrate. So now you know. Pope then went liver to Curll by night some printed copies
ors in wanting to poison the publishers in fact by Pope. Pope had warned Curll off off and wrote a gleeful pamphlet, compos­ of Pope’s letters as well as some manu­
who threatened him in this way, but he the unauthorised publication, but he went ed exactly in the manner of publications scripts. Curll duly advertised these and
was probably the only poet to have actually ahead regardless, for regardlessness came favoured by Curll, describing the publish­ sold them under the title Mr Pope’s Literary
done so. In March 1716 he met ‘spindle­ naturally to him. Pope took his revenge er’s deathbed farewells to those he held Correspondence.
dear, and his highly pathetical speeches As Claudio says in Measure for Measure,
of remorse. These all reached a mighty ‘Our natures do pursue,/Like rats that ravin
climax: ‘The poor Man continued for some down their proper bane,/A thirsty evil;
Hours with all his disconsolate Family and when we drink we die,’ and Curll, by
about him in Tears, expecting his final Dis­ gobbling up Pope’s letters, seemed to have
solution; when of a sudden he was surpris­ ingested another dose of poison. Since it
ingly relieved by a plentiful foetid Stool, appeared that some of the letters in the
which obliged them all to retire out of the collection of epistles to and from Pope were
Spring events Room.’ by members of the nobility, Curll was ac­
cused of breach of privilege and summoned

at the Bookshop
T
he feud between Pope and Curll before the House of Lords. How Pope must
lasted for decades. Rogers sets out have chuckled. But he didn’t get the last
the detail, blow by blow, courtroom laugh. Curll triumphantly vindicated him­
style, with such even­handedness that one self, and the Lords found no breach of
ends up feeling a bit sorry for Curll, who was privilege in the published letters. P.T. (alias
not only poisoned by Pope in 1716, but was Pope, no doubt biting his lip) then wrote to
blanket­tossed by the pupils of Westminster congratulate Curll on his ‘victory over the
School for having tried to print without Lords, the Pope and the Devil’. Curll exult­
permission a funeral oration by their head antly went on to publish a series of volumes
boy. So who cares if he pirated texts by Swift, of Pope’s letters in 1735­36, while Pope re­
or repeatedly issued pornographic works peatedly complained in public about ‘the
under titles like Eunuchism and Onanism Dis­ Follies and Impertinence of Edmund Curll’s
play’d, or The Nun in Her Smock, or invent­ Edition’. He published a narrative account
ed keys to The Dunciad and Gulliver’s Travels, of the affair which set out in the hoitiest
or published a scurrilous Popiad, as well as of toity manners his horror at the piratical
14 April the almost unimaginably ingrown Curliad: a proceedings of that filthy Grub Street pub­
Julian Barnes discusses his new novel, Elizabeth Finch, Hypercritic upon the Dunciad Variorum? Rogers lisher Edmund Curll, who had (though Pope
shows how the fiercely personal quarrel did not confess this) been provoked in his
with Chris Power
intersected with politics and religion. Curll, malfeasance in publishing Pope’s letters by
though an opportunist, was no friend of one Alexander Pope.
20 April
Tories and hit Pope hard with accusations Curll’s great strength was that he never
Emily Berry and Denise Riley read from and discuss of Jacobitism in 1716 when anti­Catholic gave up. It was also his weakness. He event­
their new collections paranoia was at its most intense. Rogers ually overreached by republishing a col­
also asks the vital question about pots and lection of letters between Pope and Swift
21 April kettles: was Pope – who sought and won a which had been illicitly printed in Dublin.
Fernanda Melchor and Nicole Flattery discuss reputation as a ‘classic’ poet – as much a Pope scented blood, and in the summer of
Melchor’s new novel, Paradais manipulator of markets and of publishing 1741 initiated a humdinger of a court case
fashions as his Grub Street enemy Curll? in Chancery, in which he claimed that he
By the 1730s the publisher and the poet owned the copyright of his letters. He en­
Check the website for in-person and online ticket were locked together in such a vicious dog­ listed as his barrister the future Lord Mans­
availability: fight that it’s hard to tell whose teeth were field, who later in life made one of the key
sunk into whose hide or which was the decisions in the evolution of English copy­
londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/events
lower sort of cur. The key episode was the right law. The decision in Pope v. Curll was
publication of Pope’s letters. Pope wanted also a crucial one. It established what is
to publish a carefully curated collection of still, more or less, the position under Eng­
London Review Bookshop his letters to people of note. These would lish law with respect to the copyright of
14 Bury Place, London, WC1A 2JL display his critical sagacity and his social letters. The recipient owns the physical ob­
Monday to Saturday 10 a.m. – 6:30 p.m. connections. But he didn’t want to look ject, having received as it were a gift of
Sunday 12 p.m. – 6 p.m. too much like a papistical peacock blowing paper and ink from the correspondent, but
his own trumpet, so held off from print­ what came to be called the intellectual
+44 (0)20 7269 9030
ing an authorised edition himself. He was property (the words and the right to bene­
www.lrbshop.co.uk · @LRBbookshop also worried that some of his letters, if fit from publication of them) remains the
published in unedited form, could be used property of the author. Hence Curll could
against him. In 1726 Curll had got hold of not legitimately publish Pope’s letters even
a clutch of Pope’s letters, which he gladly if he had purchased the autograph copies
printed, since Pope’s name made money, of them from a third party. Only Pope
and the opportunity to make money while could publish Pope’s letters. The decision
pissing off Pope was for Curll simply ir­ enabled Pope to become a ‘classic’ author,
resistible. Then, in 1733, he advertised whose Works and whose Letters – published,
his intention of publishing a Life of Pope, of course, purely to correct the appalling
for which ‘nothing shall be wanting but distortions of the monster Curll – could
his (universally desired) Death,’ and asked sit together on the shelves of the great and
people to supply him with ‘Memoirs &c’ to the good. The cost of this skulduggery to
fuel it. Pope’s reputation was immense: it was a
Pope, knowing that a Life by Curll would major reason for the collapse of his critical
not be a garland of compliments, struck standing in the 19th century. But perhaps
back in the most bizarre manner. He re­ it is from such acts of skulduggery that
sponded to Curll’s advertisement under the classic authors are made. c

34 london Review of booKs 21 apRil 2022

A Life Soup
few houRs after Jean-Paul Sartre ation. Lucretius wrote of the way moist soil
was injected with mescaline by his could have given rise to humans without the
friend Daniel Lagache, a psychiatrist need for divine intervention. In contrast,
at the Sainte-Anne Hospital in Paris, Simone
de Beauvoir phoned to check in on the first- Liam Shaw dust is inert, needing an injection of moist
vitality to come alive. As Daryn Lehoux argu-
time tripper. Her call came as a reprieve. ed in Creatures Born of Mud and Slime (2017),
As Sartre told her in a scrambled voice, she Slime: A Natural History spontaneous generation was ‘the last stand’
had interrupted a losing battle against a by Susanne Wedlich, translated by Ayça Türkoğlu. of the ancient scientific worldview. Wedlich
mass of octopuses. He had been promised Granta, 326 pp., £20, November 2021, 978 1 78378 670 1 is careful to distinguish the slime that ‘just
a safe experience. An intern who had also happens’ when mud and water mix from
taken mescaline found himself gambolling she goes the other way, including things That ‘slime’ is an easily translatable con- ‘true’ biological slimes. But without know-
through fields of flowers, so Sartre’s night- that may not be slimy per se so long as they cept helps Wedlich’s case. She links it to ing the origin of the substance in front of
marish visions could hardly be the drug’s catch her attention ‘in a slime-like way’. the risk of contamination: our bodies use you, inorganic slime can often seem part of
fault. But he had never liked slimy sea creat- The original German title (‘The Book of mucus as a barrier to soak up pathogens what William Ian Miller, in The Anatomy of
ures. As a child he had almost fainted after Slime’) describes it better. Wedlich appeals which are themselves slimy. Her translator, Disgust (1997), called ‘the organic world of
seeing an engraving of a moonlit quay with to slime’s own lack of ‘hard borders or dis- Ayça Türkoğlu, deploys an impressive and generative rot . . . life soup, fecundity it-
a shadowy sea monster emerging to drag a tinct divisions’ to explain the book’s organ- viscous vocabulary. Both German and Eng- self ’. For most of history, as Lehoux points
hapless drunk to his death. isation into loose chapters that can be read lish have slimy words for slimy things. The out, spontaneous generation was a fact, not
The blurriness of Sartre’s poor vision ‘in sequence or independently’. The excuse smack and suck of saliva make for squelch- a theory. The distinction between muddy
was fertile ground for his hallucinations. is unnecessary: the book isn’t marred by its ing prose. Frogspawn looks like ‘slimy star slime and living slime makes sense in a
Indistinct shapes could morph into scuttl- formlessness. snot’. Differences in translation do exist, modern biological framework. It didn’t
ing cephalopods and crustaceans. After his Although Slime focuses on biology, Wed- however. German-speaking friends tell me always.
mescaline experience, he claimed to have lich first deals with her readers’ presumed that schleim is more neutral than in English; Lorenz Oken, a German natural philo-
continued to hallucinate three or four crabs revulsion. As Sartre noted, ‘sliminess’ for you can tuck into a warm bowl of Hafer­ sopher born in 1779, thought that life had
who followed him around for a year. Each most of us denotes a host of human and schleim, for example (‘oat slime’, or oatmeal). not only begun as a primordial slime but
morning, he later told John Gerassi, he would moral characteristics: a handshake, a smile And even in English, slime has ebbed and that this slime could still be found form-
greet them: ‘My little ones, how did you or a thought can all be ‘slimy’. It is a type of flowed. Wycliffe’s 14th-century translation ing today. He argued that this slime ‘has its
sleep?’ He got used to the crabs, but other contaminated morality. (During the Sec- of the Bible has God creating Adam ‘of the origins in, and is in its essence of, the sea,
sea creatures – molluscs in particular – re- ond World War, Wittgenstein remarked dis- sliym of erthe’. In most later versions, the not mixed with it through the dissolution
mained objects of horror. Sliminess had concertingly to a friend: ‘Things will be ter- first man emerges from ‘dust’. The imagery of rotting substances’. For Oken, the ‘whole
something to do with it. Being and Nothing­ rible when the war is over, whoever wins. has stuck in modern Christianity. ‘Ashes to ocean’ was alive. In England he was accus-
ness (1943) concludes with the idea of the Of course, very terrible if the Nazis won, ashes, dust to dust’ is an oddly desiccated ed of heresy for suggesting that ‘globules
visqueux. Sliminess is horrible to Sartre be- but terribly slimy if the Allies win.’) Accord- summary of life’s viscous circle: a euphem- of slime’ were the basis of life. Coleridge
cause it has neither the reassuring inertia ing to Sartre, we might assume that we ism posing as a proverb. avidly read (and annotated) Oken’s works,
of a solid nor the yielding shapelessness of have, on the one hand, the physical exper- It’s unclear why ‘sliym’ slipped out of the judging him ‘a man of genial Talents’.
a liquid, but a clinging contamination that ience of sliminess, and, on the other, slimy English Eden. Perhaps it made the account But in one marginal note he asks: ‘Was
envelops and consumes the investigator. behaviours and attitudes. By projecting our in Genesis too close to spontaneous gener- Oken drunk when he wrote this?’ Coleridge
The visqueux, for Sartre, is the ultimate ‘re- knowledge of the human world onto slimi-
venge’ of unconscious matter (‘being-in- ness we imbue slime with a moral charact-
itself ’) against conscious matter (‘being- er. But this begs the question. In order to
for-itself ’). make the connection between the physical
There are mucilaginous monsters in and the moral, Sartre argues that we have
Susanne Wedlich’s Slime that Sartre might to be able to perceive a certain moral base-
have found even more horrendous than oct- ness in both. He draws two conclusions:
opuses. The hagfish transforms seawater that moral qualities are always charged with
into a suffocating slime ‘that will even gag physical sensation, and that the physical
a shark’. Anomalocaris was a metre-long sensation of sliminess has an innate moral
armoured shrimp-like creature – mercifully quality. If he’s right, I think it’s unlikely to
extinct – that once roamed the Cambrian be separable from the way our bodies are
seas ‘like a wolf ’, embracing its prey to made: slimy on the inside, with a non-slimy
feed them into its razor-studded mouth. outside. If we were conscious slugs that wore
The cellular slime-mould Dictyostelium discoid­ our sliminess externally, we might have an
eum, formed when hundreds of thousands equal but opposite revulsion: for the dry,
of amoebae coalesce into a ‘faceless, see- the hard, the parched.
through slug’, is an existentialist nightmare A huge variety of slimy things could trig-
straight out of a B-movie shocker: Revenge ger our revulsion, but only some do. Sartre
of the Being-in-Itself. claimed in Being and Nothingness that ‘observ-
Early in her book, Wedlich admits that ation’ of young children proved they were
she can’t give an easy definition of slime. A instinctively repulsed by all that is slimy. It
purely physical one doesn’t work. We don’t seems more likely he was universalising his
learn much by defining slime as ‘an extreme- own particular phobias. As Wedlich points
ly aqueous and viscously fluid hydrogel’. out, young children will quite happily eat
Slime is also phenomenological, ‘a thing worms; only if they grow up in a culture in
in between a feeling and a description’. We which worms are taboo will they learn to
may agree that mucus and mayonnaise stop. ‘We are born to be disgusted’ by slime,
have the same viscosity, but disagree as to but must be taught which slime ought to
whether this makes my sandwich disgust- disgust us. Human bodies are never slimier
ing. Cultural differences show up clearly in than during sex, but most of us don’t ex-
food, but they hide in other areas too. Slimy perience this as a difficulty. To describe
things are everywhere, but there is no uni- humanity as slimy is true (if misanthropic);
versal concept of sliminess. to single out certain practices or bodies
Since cells are jellied bags of proteins, as ‘slimy’ is to reveal one’s prejudices. The
there’s no such thing as a slime-free creat- misogyny of Sartre’s warning against the
ure. A ‘natural history’ of slime, as Wedl- ‘sweet and feminine’ visqueux is one of the
ich’s English subtitle promises, fast over- slimiest moments in his writing.
flows its boundaries and threatens to be- There does seem to be something uni-
come a history of all life on earth. Rather versal about the feeling of disgust that
than agonise over how to narrow the lens, slime provokes, even if its valences differ.

35 london Review of booKs 21 apRil 2022

rejected Oken’s idea of monadic slime- in gastric juices. The sliminess of ectoplasm present and lactose is then make lactase biofilms date back at least 3.5 billion years.
globules as an explanation for the stuff of came not only from a ferment of philosoph- to digest it. It was as if, once you drained Stromatolites are built by successive layers
life. Next to a passage about ‘Life-Atoms’, ical and scientific ideas, but from the pract- away the slime, bacteria were revealed as of bacteria in shallow water. As grains of
Coleridge writes that ‘Atheism has driven ical constraints of what mediums could ac- tiny circuit boards, digital computers whir- sand and dirt accumulate in each layer, the
Oken mad: unless Oken was mad. And complish with nothing up their sleeves. ring away beneath the stickiness. bacterial sediments build upwards. The re-
Atheism found him.’ Yet the image of a The age of molecular biology was less kind This logic extended beyond bacteria. The sult resembles ‘a stony pile of pancakes’ more
slime-filled sea was widespread at the time. to slime. One of the most important tools conceptual division of the eukaryotic cell than anything we’d recognise as living. Mod-
Even before reading Oken, Coleridge had of the field in its formative years was X-ray into the ‘brain’ of the DNA in the nucleus ern stromatolites can still be seen in a few
written in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner crystallography, which allowed researchers and the ‘body’ of the cytoplasm enforced a places, such as Shark Bay in Western Aus-
that ‘slimy things did crawl with legs/Upon to work out the structure of proteins. It powerful dualism. Since nuclear DNA was tralia. They grow so slowly that when Wed-
the slimy sea.’ This slime is notably non- works best on small, well-ordered, soluble what mattered, the rest of the cell was mere- lich visits she can easily make out the tracks
Okenian, arising because the sea is rotting, molecules. Slime proteins are not only large ly a slimy vehicle, devoid of information. In of camel-drawn wagons that passed over the
rather than being the stuff of life. Later and messy, but have evolved to bind water. the 1960s, when Lynn Margulis wanted to stromatolites a century ago. Like the scient-
in the poem, his shipmates all dead, the It has taken recent improvements in other study heredity in mitochondria, there was ists in Stanisław Lem’s Solaris, she says, we
Mariner is not entirely alone: ‘a thousand methods to allow glimpses of the tangles disagreement as to whether they even had may fail to recognise life that doesn’t give
thousand slimy things/Lived on; and so did that they form inside us. Despite being up DNA. Suspecting that mitochondria had us the biological clues we expect.
I.’ (In the Lyrical Ballads version there are a to 99 per cent water by mass, slimes are far once been free-living organisms, Margulis Wedlich excels at drawing such analogies,
‘million million’ of them.) from structureless. They are made of mol- suggested that the eukaryotic cell had arisen giving Slime an eclectic and rich biblio-
Every era finds a different way to enlist ecules that expand thousands of times when from a symbiosis, with the capture and col- graphy. One of the pleasures of a book like
slime into its prevailing theories. Slime can wet, holding water in a loose interlocking laboration of the mitochondrial ancestor in this should be following up the references,
soak up any number of metaphysical pre- network – or, as Wedlich puts it, ‘water in the Precambrian era, more than a billion but because there are no footnotes it’s im-
conceptions and hold them in sticky sus- chains’. years ago. She wasn’t the first to suggest possible to know where in the bibliography
pension. In the early 20th century, the spirit- The discovery of the structure of DNA this unorthodox idea, but she was the first the curious or the sceptical should go for
ualist movement picked up on ideas about in 1953 was a particularly bad moment for to live to see herself vindicated. In 1979 it more. (At one point we’re told that the
‘cellular slime’ to ground its metaphysical slime. To the early molecular biologists, was found that the mitochondrial genome womb may not be sterile, ‘according to a
claims. The ‘milky-white emissions’ of ecto- the double helix was proof that, despite a – a tiny smidgen compared to the huge disputed publication’ that we get no further
plasm that showed up beautifully in photo- superficial sliminess, at the fundamental nuclear genome – uses a slightly different details about.) It’s a shame, because Wed-
graphs convinced figures like Arthur Conan level life was about information. As Matthew genetic code. Slime can be full of surprises. lich clearly put effort into choosing these
Doyle that the spirit world could tangibly Cobb has written, a generation which had The theory of symbiogenesis is a reminder studies: in her acknowledgments she re-
intersect with our own. Wedlich mentions spent the Second World War cracking codes of the value of studying the soft edges of grets not having space to include a discus-
props such as ‘fluttering gauze’, but doesn’t and programming computers was primed biological knowledge. sion of spiggin, the unique slime secret-
explain that the production of ectoplasm to use these new metaphors for biology. Margulis also did research into commun- ed by the kidneys of male sticklebacks and
was often intensely visceral. The medium’s The later elucidation of gene regulation in ities of bacteria living together in ‘biofilms’. used to build their nests. As she notes,
medium was cheesecloth, sometimes fist- E. coli by François Jacob and Jacques Monod Most bacteria don’t live free, floating adrift there is no evolutionary problem that doesn’t
ed into a tight ball and swallowed, to be re- showed the way cells could convert sugary as single cells, but combine and stick to- seem to have been solved somewhere with
gurgitated in a clotted white string steeped ooze into discrete logic: if glucose is not gether on surfaces. The earliest fossils of slime. c

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36 london Review of booKs 21 apRil 2022

F Country Life
aRmeR’s GloRy, the classic agrar­ sumed in Britain should be produced here,
ian memoir by A.G. Street, was pub­ but the recent trade deal with Australia,
lished in 1932. The traditional mixed which will remove tariffs on Australian
farm where Arthur Street spent his boy­
hood in the first decade of the 20th century Christopher de Bellaigue sugar, beef and lamb over fifteen years,
points the other way. Rebanks’s area of the
was the centre of a self­sufficient commun­ northern Lake District is already being de­
ity, stout in defence of the four­course rot­ English Pastoral: An Inheritance populated of the old farming families, with
ation and despising anything shop­bought. by James Rebanks. tenancies given up, barns being converted
There was a ‘spaciousness and an aura of Penguin, 304 pp., £9.99, September 2021, 978 0 14 198257 1 to holiday lets and the number of sheep on
solid wellbeing’ in this intermission be­ pastures like the Lowther Valley falling to
tween agricultural slumps. The primary con­ Field Work: What Land Does to People and What People Do to Land the lowest level in living memory.
cern of a large tenant farmer like Street’s by Bella Bathurst. In her new book, Bella Bathurst is de­
father wasn’t the bottom line: ‘One didn’t Profile, 236 pp., £9.99, April, 978 1 78816 214 2 termined to concentrate on farmers, not
farm for cash profits, but did one’s duty by farming policy, but even she finds it im­
the land.’ the farms with thousands of animals had ment’s Environmental Land Management possible to divorce the motivations of the
In 1911 the Streets had a row. It’s a com­ more muck than their land could possibly ac­ Schemes – and these will involve spend­ first from the insanity of the second. A
mon pattern in the agricultural world: the commodate, while the crop farms now had ing so much time filling out forms and let­ senior civil servant at the Department for
no animals, and thus no muck to fertilise the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
cocky son offends his father by trying to ting in inspectors that many small farmers
plants, so were entirely reliant on [artificial]
teach him how to farm. Arthur decamped won’t consider them worthwhile. Farms will tells her there is ‘no one single coherent
fertilisers. Livestock in the new systems were
to the Canadian Prairies. Cleared of its Indi­ now creating muck so acidic that the soil it get fewer and bigger. Andersons, a farm­ vision or mission’. ‘Whatever farmers think
genous inhabitants (not that Street knew was spread on began to compact and die. ing consultancy, predicts that the number of government,’ Bathurst writes, ‘the real­
much about them), Manitoba had been di­ Crop­growing farms were top­dressing with of full­time farm businesses in the UK ity is worse, that no one at Defra has ever
vided into one­mile squares between bluffs ammonium nitrate and killing their soil. will fall by 20 per cent in the next decade, actually been to the country, and that attit­
of poplar and willow scrub. Day after day from 54,000 in 2020 to 42,300 by 2030. udes to it are split along party lines: Tories
Street steered his plough through virgin An East Anglian farmer told me a couple of It is likely that the most productive parts want to shoot the wildlife while Labour
soil, and as ‘the strip of black on the east years ago that ‘we farmers are increasing­ of the country, such as the Fens, will be would rather shoot the inhabitants.’
side of that piece of prairie grew slowly wider ly seen as people who take public money farmed ever more intensively, while un­ Farmers can try environmental methods
and wider until it neared the west bound­ while raping the land.’ economical hill and dairy farms close or and/or branch out (Glastonbury is the most
ary,’ Street fancied he had written ‘a signat­ Street enlivened Farmer’s Glory with Wilt­ amalgamate. famous example of diversification). They
ure of which I shall never be ashamed . . . shire dialect and rural personalities; Re­ The government and the National Farm­ can double down on intensive production.
each furrow is such a definite little stride in banks turns workaday activities – sharpen­ ers Union are in public agreement that not Or they can sell up. James Dyson might come
the world’s history.’ ing a scythe on a whetstone – into exotic less than 60 per cent of the food that is con­ knocking: his farming, renewable energy
In time the Streets were reconciled and set pieces. There’s a trailerful of irony in
on his father’s death Arthur took over the his title: as he points out, one definition of
farm in Wiltshire. But the days of plenitude pastoral is ‘a work of art portraying or evok­
were over and in 1928 he abandoned crop ing country life, typically in a romanticised
rotation, became a dairy farmer and em­ or idealised form for an urban audience’. In
braced mechanisation. His milking mach­ 1994, aged twenty, Rebanks too had a tiff
ine had suckers that drew the milk from the with his father – a Cumbrian hill farmer –
udders through a nickel pipe to the churn, and went off to Australia. The farm where
six cows at a time. It was a ‘beastly business he spent nights making hay under tractor
saying goodbye to many old and trusted light confused him with its vastness. ‘Tens
employees’, but Street didn’t regret it: he of thousands of sheep ranched in fields big­
could now beat his competitors on price. ger than our entire farm. Herds of six or
As for doing one’s duty by the land, the seven hundred cows.’ An Australian boast­
farm now ‘presented a dull, green same­ ed: ‘We can outcompete everyone else in
ness throughout the year. The glorious the world.’ Rebanks came home full of con­
patchwork of different kinds of grain crops, tempt for traditional methods and con­
alternating with green fields or roots, and vinced that the death of small farms was a
here and there a brown fallow, was now an necessary accompaniment to Schumpeter’s
expanse of prairie.’ Street started contrib­ ‘gale of creative destruction’. He describes
uting to the local papers and went on to his change of heart after inheriting his fath­
write dozens of books, with a column in er’s farm, his disenchantment with special­
Farmers Weekly and an appearance on Desert isation, industrial methods and the un­
Island Discs. Only three minutes of the pro­ relenting pressure to produce more food as
gramme survive, which may be just as well. cheaply as possible.
‘The most important thing in my life,’ he Rebanks rejects the two extremes that
told Roy Plomley, ‘has always been sport, have dominated public debate for the past
you see: hunting, shooting and fishing. decade or so, modern commercial methods
When that permits, we do a little farming. and rewilding. (There is, he writes, ‘a very
And when that permits, we do a little writ­ thin line between idealism and bullshit’.)
ing or broadcasting.’ He practises something in between, which
It’s hard to imagine anyone nowadays could be called regenerative farming: shun­
writing a book called Farmer’s Glory. What ning fertiliser, reducing field sizes and fenc­
did for the public reputation of farmers was ing off river banks. But the price his stock
the national ambition of self­sufficiency, fetches doesn’t make up for the hit he takes
directed by bureaucrats and financed by by farming less intensively than his neigh­
subsidies. It was justifiable in wartime; in bours. The book’s repeated allusions to
the peace that followed, even some farmers money worries suggest that, were it not for
opposed it. Ripping up hedgerows and his success as a writer, Rebanks would find
dousing fields in chemicals brought a divid­ it a lot harder to farm as he does.
end in the form of high yields and cheap The reforms the government has em­
food, but it was only achieved by running barked on after leaving the EU and the
down the starting capital – the land itself. Common Agricultural Policy will shift the
The problem with replacing mixed farming target of subsidies from farming to car­
with intensive monocultures is that it relies ing for the environment. But subsidies as
on artificial means. James Rebanks writes a whole will drop, perhaps by as much as
in English Pastoral: half, even for farmers who join the govern­

37 london Review of booKs 21 apRil 2022

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38 london Review of booKs 21 apRil 2022
and estate company already owns 35,000 clear assessing squint: good or bad, friend
English acres. The effect of all this on the or foe’. The collies by his side were called SAME SAME BUT DIFFERENT
ordinary farmer is what interests Bathurst. Bryn and Come Here You Useless Bugger.
‘The best short story collection to come out of lockdown’
She tends to write about people on the Howells’s £4000 deficit after subsidies (this
– The Bookseller
periphery: lighthouse builders, wreckers, was 2013) was just about offset by the rent
herself when creeping deafness estranged from the cottage and selling hay. But for A playful, sensuous, unpredictable anthology by prizewinning
her from society. On the face of it, Field Work Bert, the fourth Howells to farm here, Rise authors including A. L. Kennedy, Amanda Craig, Alison Moore
is a string of reporting trips – she follows Farm meant something else: and Stephen Thompson, celebrating love, loss and solitude
a knackerman, watches an apple farmer with a fine touch of darkness and a ghost or two...
prune his trees, hangs out with some agri- He knew the burr in the ash by the hedge that
the tups liked to scratch and the hidden HB £16.99
culture students – that might seem a little
places without reeds where the water still
dull. But she is skilled at reading the ordin-
sprang. He knew where the earth was at its
ary, and these excursions give her an ob- best and the patch where only docks would
lique and original view. While helping a grow. He knew which week the blackthorn THE TINY GESTURES OF SMALL FLOWERS
vet called Dan test cows for TB, she learns whitened at the base of the hill and the
that the trend for double-muscling – breed- knuckle of concrete where the trailer always An accomplished, powerful, mesmerising coming of age story
ing cattle to have twice the natural amount tripped. He knew the high-tide mark for the that explores a seventeen-year-old’s embroilment in an abusive
of lean muscle – means the calves of certain brook in flood and the years when it had over- relationship with an older man.
topped it. He knew the middens, tips and
breeds can only be born by C-section. This Praise for Critchley’s debut Notes on my Family:
dumps where the old shed asbestos was bur-
makes Dan’s life more dangerous – he was ied and exactly what happened to the missing ‘Compelling, sharply observed ... narrative voice reminiscent of
recently double-barrelled (both hooves) and batch of Cymag and dynamite . . . he thought Mark Haddon or Harper Lee’ – Sunday Times
sent flying across a shed, narrowly escap- nothing of his knowledge.
HB £16.99
ing a broken neck. From Bathurst’s day
at the Hereford Livestock Market we dis- Howells got into the habit of visiting
cover that British Muslims are propping up Bathurst every week or so. He told her CIRCLES A CLOVER
sheep farming, now that much of the rest about his father, Gerwyn, who, no matter
of the country prefers cotton-wool chicken how hard the young Bert worked, always Kyle Halfpenny lives in a village in Cheshire. Her father is
manipulated into nuggets. She describes worked him harder. About his son, David: making preparations for the end of the world. To escape, they
farmers’ continual struggle against disease. ‘No idea about farming (“heart’s not in it”), travel to the mysterious island of Selny. Playful, lyrical and
‘For Britain’s urban population, Covid came no idea about land (“stupid notions”), no sensuous—a rich blend of reality and fantasy.
out of the sky, a once in a century event, idea about looking after animals (“up too ‘Haunting, intricate ... there’s a dark magic to the world Egan explores’
random as a meteorite,’ but for those in late”)’. ‘Bert knew his own father had been – Jenn Ashworth
the countryside, inured to successive waves a bastard to him,’ Bathurst writes with an
of TB, BSE and foot-and-mouth, it was a openness and perplexity that are the more HB £14.99
‘thing to add to the land’s long list of adapt- powerful for their rarity in this softly spok-
ations’. And, Bathurst might have added, en book, ‘but he seemed unable to stop
a further contribution to the gulf in com- himself from hurting both himself and his EverythingWithWords.com
prehension between city-dwellers and the son in his turn.’
minuscule number who continue to live on Bathurst stayed at Rise Farm long enough
the land. to see Bryn retire, Come Here abscond and
replacements arrive. ‘The new dogs were

Y
ou might assume the decision young and slippery, tucking themselves
over what to do with a farm when the like hares into the long grass or rising from
farmer dies is straightforward, but pools of shadow to ambush the running Two
as Bathurst explains, ‘farmers as a rule do
not talk.’ ‘If you know that any mention of
ewes. They were collies (one Welsh, one un-
decided) and still at an early stage in their
literary
the words “inheritance” or “future” is fol- professional development, keen to make a classics
lowed by an explosion, then why would you good impression.’ When the price of lamb
talk? The stakes are far too high. In the past fell, David suggested planting apple trees from the
decade borrowing has doubled, but fewer
than half of farmers are making a living.’
on the south-facing hill at the back of the
house. ‘I never heard anything so stupid,’
Baltic
At a meeting organised by the NFU to said Bert, a mess of shingles, diabetes and
promote discussion of the undiscussable, bitterness. After he died the photos display-
Bathurst realises that for many people in ed for the mourners showed him on the
the room the farm is land he loved and fought against. Not that White Shroud Vargamäe
his house had windows onto the view. Not
a character in its own right, a personality The original Lithuanian edition of Vol. I of A.H. Tammsaare’s monumental
larger and more dominant than any single in- that he ever took a walk for pleasure in his
Antanas Škėma’s White Shroud was first pentalogy is a Tolstoyan epic of Estonia’s
dividual . . . and there’s something mon- life. A competent poultry and sheep farmer
strous in the way they describe the place: the who reserved his best stockmanship for published in London in 1958, because peasantry in the late nineteenth century,
autocracy of its demands, the spite of the pigs. A dab hand at bottle-feeding grand- it couldn’t get through the censors in and introduces us to Estonia’s journey
bad weather or broken machinery, the energy children (all those lambs). the USSR and the US, and its English through revolutions to independence and
they give it and the debts they owe, the hole translation was published in Glasgow beyond (the other four weighty volumes
Agricultural land is exempt from inherit-
in the money getting bigger and bigger until
the fear of money’s absence is all they can see.
ance tax. By the book’s end, David and his in 2018. Considered the most important will be published by Vagabond Voices
mother are making a go of Rise Farm. The Lithuanian modernist novel, it draws on by 2025). The country’s greatest literary
As for leaving the farm to a girl, that’s go- workshop is occupied by a company mak- the author’s own refugee and immigrant figure who has been translated into
ing slowly: ‘There is probably no other sect- ing film props. The barns have been empt- experience. The narration shifts between many European languages starts in this
or in Britain, from the oil rigs of the North ied of rusting machinery and are let as
memories of a homeland and the volume with his own roots and describes
Sea to the codebreakers of GCHQ, which garages for motorhomes and caravans. The
remains as bullishly patriarchal.’ That said, Howells have applied for permission to turn alienating life in the US, the one country with wit and supreme narrative skills the
of the 2500 full-time students studying farm buildings into accommodation. The willing to offer him asylum. harsh conditions of newly freed peasants
agriculture at Harper Adams University in last of the old flock were taken to market Translated by Karla Gruodis working on marshy land.
Shropshire, two-thirds are female, and the when Bert fell ill. But now David has bought Translated by Inna Feldbach and
number of women farmers is growing. a few lambs and five Hereford beef cows, £10.95 PB ISBN: 9781908251848
While researching her book Bathurst easy calvers who need little help. He is Alan Peter Trei
rented a cottage on a 180-acre Welsh hill thinking about getting a bull. ‘Tentative- £14.95 PB ISBN: 9781908251909
farm. Bert Howells, a round-shouldered man ly at first, he was beginning to digress from
in wellingtons and an old Barbour, looked Bert’s purist views on what a farm should www.vagabondvoices.co.uk
up as her car passed for the first time, ‘a be.’ 

39 london review of books 21 april 2022

Diary campments and staging posts. The organ-
isers had said they wouldn’t budge until all
vaccine mandates had been repealed, and
between the provincial police (in charge of
highways) and the federal Mounties (in
charge of monitoring extremists), as well

‘W
hat do you thinK about it looked like they meant it. As the num- as the fact that former Mounties and army
Ottawa now that the convoy’s bers grew, the declarations became more officers were advising the organisers and
gone? Back to dead?’ I was grandiose: they were going to bring the eliciting sympathy from their sometime
watching a YouTube video by Zot, one of city to its knees, get rid of the government colleagues. But the main problem was a
the livestreamers who built up a following and – so the signs said – FUCK TRUDEAU! lack of resources and a lack of foresight.
during the protests against Covid vaccine In response, the city laid on rows of porta- Peak crowd estimates range from eight
mandates that took over the city for three potties. No one knew how it would end. thousand to fifteen thousand. How could
weeks in February, with the help of a large Whoever was running the show was Ottawa’s 1200 officers control all those
convoy of trucks. Two middle-aged guys good at logistics, if not logic. Most of the people? It wasn’t reassuring to hear that
– ‘Fun Travel 69’ and ‘Live from the Shed’ vaccine mandates were imposed by the police officers were advising residents who
– called in to the show to exchange dark provinces, which have responsibility for were being harassed for wearing masks to
inferences about the mainstream media healthcare, not the federal government. take them off. Locals began to take things
(MSM). Someone asked Zot what made him The only federal mandate concerned cross- into their own hands: a 21-year-old civil
join the protests. ‘I’m from Ottawa,’ he re- border truckers and mirrored require- servant, Zexi Li, obtained a court injunct-
plied. ‘Nothing ever happens in Ottawa.’ ments imposed by the US: even if Canada ion to stop the trucks from blasting their
Like Zot, I grew up in Ottawa (some call were to remove it, the American equival- horns, and in Ottawa South residents
it ‘Ottograd’) and know what it is to long ent would still be in place. Worse was the stood in front of a platoon of supply trucks,
for disruption, upheaval, anything to shake protesters’ delusional ‘memorandum of demanding they remove their Canadian
up the town. The closest thing we had was understanding’, which envisaged Canada’s flags.
the invocation of the War Measures Act by unelected governor-general dissolving Parl- But people kept pouring into Ottawa,
Pierre Trudeau in October 1970, after a iament and negotiating directly with the especially on the weekends. Copycat pro-
series of kidnappings by Quebec separat- convoy’s organisers. Meanwhile the fun be- tests sprang up in other cities. There were
ists. Soldiers with machine guns were post- came more family-friendly: bouncy castles, blockades on the bridge into Detroit and
ed across the city. Now, more than fifty hockey games, horse rides, hot tubs, saunas, at the Alberta-Montana border. On Wel-
years after his father called in the army, hog roasts, a performer on stilts . . . The lington Street, the mood was peace and
hundreds of enormous rigs were rolling word went out: bring the kids. It was good love and Canadian unity, and in a strange
into town and Justin Trudeau was trying for optics, and the organisers knew it way, the extreme weather helped. On the
not to repeat his dad’s heavy-handedness. would make things harder for the police: first two weekends of the occupation,
All three levels of government – federal, no chance of tear gas. Tamara Lich, the the temperature dropped below -20° C. I
provincial and municipal – studiously key fundraiser and spokesperson for the thought of Victor Hugo on Napoleon’s re-
avoided confrontation (except with one truckers, is active in far-right politics and treat from Moscow: ‘Deux ennemis: le
another). You could see why. Close up, the sings in a band in Medicine Hat, Alberta; Czar et le Nord. Le Nord est pire.’ The pro-
trucks were massive: two storeys high with during the protests, she was like a waitress testers were winning one battle just by
five, six ladder rungs to reach the cab. counting her tips – except that she had coming out in the cold: for this demo-
The brainchild of Western Canadian millions in her hands (she also accepted graphic, being able to deal with the weather
right-wingers who had staged a similar pro- crypto). A tree-planting comrade of my is a badge of citizenship. But they also
test two years earlier – the pro-pipeline, niece’s DJ-ed on the Wellington Street stage, seemed to feel that they were witnessing
anti-environmentalist United We Roll con- as did the former head nurse at Wakefield history. I have never seen so many red maple
voy – the Freedom Convoy’s message re- Hospital, who is also a bar singer and anti- leaves flying – and the crowds included
sonated. Following the first critical mass vaxxer. It was Carnival come early – to plenty of flag-averse francophone Quebec-
of truckers, blocking off downtown streets, Ottawa, of all places. ois. A few flew it upside down, presumably
the people the occupation brought out were How did they get away with it for so long? in protest. When an Aussie on the main
an extraordinary mix, though overwhelm- For the first two weeks, the city police pur- stage said that the Canadian flag could
ingly white: born-again Prairie Christians, sued a policy of rigorous de-escalation. now be seen at protests in the US and Aus-
anti-communist Eastern European im- This meant ceding ground and avoiding tralia, a huge roar went up.
migrants, New Age anti-vaxxers (‘my body, conflict at all costs. It was curious, some Patriotism doesn’t come naturally to
my choice’), loudmouth hockey mums, people felt, that this approach was being most Canadians. Twice in my lifetime,
free-thinking Mohawks, dreadlocked weed- adopted now: the Black Lives Matter and Quebec referendums have brought the
smokers, curious small-towners and their Indigenous land rights protests of recent country to the verge of breaking up, and
snow-suited kids, all brandishing the red years had been broken up with traditional English-speaking Canadians accept that
maple leaf and other flags. The more fun it aggressive policing. TikTok clips emerged a loose, unassertive confederation is the
looked, the more people came out. Walk- of unmasked officers expressing ‘100 per best way of keeping the country together.
ing down Wellington Street a week into cent’ support for the protesters and even Last summer, the discovery of human re-
the occupation you could feel the giddi- hugging them. Only a small number of the mains – the bodies of children who died
ness, the elation. A mass of people who occupiers – a couple of hundred – were act- after being removed from their parents –
had never set eyes on one another, unless ually professional truckers, though many on the grounds of an Indigenous resident-
perhaps briefly online, were meeting in owned vans and trailers. Nor did I see many ial school in Kamloops made it much
the flesh after all the lockdowns. No won- people of South Asian origin, though Sikh more difficult to feel any sort of national
der they were hugging and dancing. or Pakistani truckers make up twenty per pride. The flag on Parliament Hill flew at
The giddiness only increased when the cent of the industry in Canada. Omer Aziz, half-mast for months afterwards. Yet now
protesters saw what they could get away a writer from a family of truckers, argued it was being brandished everywhere you
with. Not just stopping all traffic, blar- in the Globe and Mail that the impunity with turned – often at the end of a hockey stick
ing horns day and night and belching which the protesters marauded through – and the protesters were singing ‘Oh
diesel fumes, but swarming unmasked into central neighbourhoods was ‘the clearest Canada’ every chance they got.
stores, harassing locals, and generally definition of white privilege’. And where Didn’t they read the news? Apparently
behaving like drunken frat boys. As the frat boys and hockey mums congregate, not. Many just wanted positive vibes, find-
days passed, the party atmosphere gave homophobia is never far behind. ‘If Turd- ing the MSM a real downer. ‘How can they
way to greater organisation and less piss- eau wants a man-date, he should go on prove all those people died of Covid? I
ing in the streets. Volunteers built a stage Grindr.’ ‘Don’t be afraid of the police,’ a don’t know a single person who’s died.’
across from Parliament Hill, a soup kitchen megaphone roared. ‘They won’t come after Others had curated their internet feeds to
in Confederation Square and a fuel depot you. No red-blooded Canadian’s gonna show them only what they wanted to be-
for distributing jerry cans of diesel to keep take orders from Justin Trudeau.’ lieve. Sensing I was missing out, I started
the trucks running in the freezing weather. In fact, the police response was com- following the Twitter accounts and live-
A couple of parking lots on the outskirts of plicated by several factors: jurisdiction- streams of journalist-entrepreneurs like
town were commandeered for use as en- al disagreements and misunderstandings Zot. But I was going down a thousand

40 london Review of booKs 21 apRil 2022

rabbit holes. There was no one set of facts, I was in Ottawa because my father had
just competing versions. Everyone was died a week before the protests, and my
compulsively documenting events, docu­ brothers and I were clearing out his room.
menting themselves documenting events, On the face of it, no one could have been
even precipitating events in order to docu­ more MSM than my dad: he worked for
ment them and monetise them. Pat King, decades as Canada correspondent for the
the most outspoken of the organisers, Guardian and the Economist; he was also a
livestreamed his own arrest. James Bauder, frequent contributor (and loyal subscrib­
the Prairie born­again Christian who start­ er) to the Globe and Mail. But like many
ed the convoy, believes God told him to of the protesters I met, he preferred good
do it in a prayer. Confronted by a jour­ news to bad (particularly when it came
nalist about the claim that Covid is a to Africa, his other field of expertise) and
‘plandemic’ – GlaxoSmithKline owns the loved Ottawa. So, the good news: no other
Wuhan lab, Soros and Bill Gates are in on weapons were found. On 14 February,
the action etc – Bauder unwittingly called Trudeau invoked the Federal Emergencies
everything into question: ‘Just because Act, which allowed the police to freeze all
it’s a post does that make it a fact? There financial transactions related to the con­
are things called postings to see what voy and to compel reluctant towing com­
other people are saying . . . I’m actually panies to remove trucks. The police, be­
looking for validation.’ having in exemplary fashion, cordoned
There were some very dark aspects to off the downtown core, set up checkpoints
the occupation and many of them involv­ and gave ultimatums in both official lang­
ed money. It’s what kept the whole thing uages telling everyone to leave.
going: diesel is expensive and if the truck­ Then, just as they assembled to clear the
ers couldn’t run their big engines, they area, a massive storm hit Ottawa, dump­
were going to get cold quickly and give up. ing 30 cm of snow on the city. Officers ad­
The financial effort began with a crowd­ vanced slowly up Wellington Street in riot
funding campaign through various Christ­ gear, one or two steps at a time. The crowd
ian and right­wing channels. Then came resisted but was forced to retreat. Those
the big endorsements – Canadian con­ who pushed back were carried off. The
servatives, Ted Cruz, Elon Musk, Donald snow kept coming. ‘Il neigeait, il neigeait
Trump – and money poured in. It turns toujours . . . on ne connaissait plus les
out that Canadians, as well as Americans, chefs ni le drapeau./Hier la grande armée
tune into Fox News. On GoFundMe ten et maintenant troupeau.’ (I kept hearing
million dollars were raised in a matter Hugo.) Now and then, Mounties on horse­
of days. When GoFundMe froze the ac­ back broke through the line of protest­
count, the organisers switched to the ers and the police were able to advance
Christian platform GiveSendGo, which further. The hardcore protesters became
bypasses Canadian banks, and raised an­ hopelessly emotional, yelling insults and
other $8.2 million. Hackers investigat­ sometimes attacking. ‘Hold the line, hold
ed and revealed that 55 per cent of the the line!’ The final diehard truckers, holed
donations came from the US. Americans up in their cabs, discovered that the police
were directly funding a movement whose were quite willing to smash their windows
stated goal was to overthrow the demo­ in and drag them away. There were fines,
cratically elected government of a neigh­ arrests. Soon there was the roar of rev­
bouring country. I doubt most of them ving engines, high­pitched beeps as trucks
could find Ottawa on a map. Mark Carney, went into reverse, then the growl of gears
the former governor of the Bank of Eng­ engaging as they gunned it out of town.
land, called it sedition. But the journalist The fun was over.
Justin Ling, himself proprietor of a few Or was it? Commentators seemed to
choice internet rabbit holes, warned against agree that Trumpism had arrived in Can­
the assumption that the arguments were ada. In the New York Times, Ross Douthat
imported along with the cash. ‘This ex­ saw the convoy protest as another battle
tremist movement was born in Canada, in the new class war: educated elites, or
raised in Canada and has proliferated in Virtuals, against those who work with their
Canada.’ hands, the gilets jaunes or Practicals. This
Homegrown extremists were certain­ might seem plausible – except these part­
ly in attendance. Pat King spoke about icular Practicals were entirely reliant on
the ‘Anglo­Saxon race’ and talked freely digital communication not only for organ­
of ‘bullets flying’. A swastika was spotted ising and fundraising but also for spread­
early on at Parliament Hill, alongside the ing and reinforcing their views. And the
usual regalia of the American far right: the great majority of real Practicals, depend­
Confederate flag, the Stars and Stripes, ent on vehicles for their work, were strong­
the ‘Don’t Tread on Me’ rattlesnake of the ly opposed to the blockades and the dis­
Gadsden flag, which became the symbol ruption, to say nothing of the anti­vaxxers’
for the storming of the US Capitol. These demands. It seems unlikely that any single
protesters may be Canadian but the world political party will be able to harness the
they inhabit has a lot of American furn­ energy of the heterogenous crowd I saw.
iture – one person detained by the police In the early days a parade of Conservat­
thought the First Amendment would pro­ ive politicians snapped selfies with these
tect him. More worrying was the discov­ ‘ordinary folk’, but on 2 February the Tory Peter Campbell was the resident designer at the
ery of a stash of weapons – long guns, party ditched its leader, Erin O’Toole, and London Review of Books from its founding in 1979.
handguns, body armour, ammunition – has since shown itself to be deeply fissur­ He continued to write, draw and design for the paper until his death in
near the blockade in Alberta and the ed. The people I met wanted a party, but 2011.A selection of his paintings can now be seen on a website. Some
subsequent arrest of four people, two of not that kind.
were used as covers for the LRB, many have not been seen before.
them with links to a white supremacist
militia, on charges of conspiracy to mur­
Richard Sanger petercampbell.org.uk
der Mounties.

41 london Review of booKs 214408apRil

Peter Campbell 2 col.indd 2022
1 08/04/2022 10:12
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 ■ BOOK BUYERS ■ FOR SALE ■ HOLIDAYS (continued) ■ WRITING AND ARTS RETREATS (cont.)

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