William Shakespeare:TheComplete Works

Second Edition
EDITED BY JOH N JO W ETT, WILLIAM MO NTGO MERY,
GARY TAYLOR AND STA NLEY WELLS
'The most interesting edition of Shakespeare
since the First Folio : John Carey, Sunday Times
ILS
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An unusual and witty bo ok sho wing how and
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SHAKE S P EARE M aren M einhardt

Redm ond O'Hanl on
R ob ert P utts
FROM OXFORD John Ryle.
Rupert Sho rtt
M artin Smith
FORTHCOMING Pete r Sto tha r d
Shakespeare in Parts Ga len Strawson
SIMO N PALFR EY AN D TIFFANY STERN Ad rian Ta ho ur d in
The first book to full y explore the original form in An na Va ux. Biograph y, Social Stud ies, Learned Journ als, Travel (anna.vaux@the-tls.co.uk)
wh ich Sha kespeare's drama circulated - the actor's Elizabeth Wi nter
part, consisting of bare cues and speeches.
September 2007, 550 pages, Hardback M an a gin g Di r ect or
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Offers clear but ambitious readings of the late Back issu es 020 77400217 tls@ocsmedia.net
pla ys, considering Shakespeare's achievement
alongside and in int eraction with that of his
Bate, one of the ed itors of
contemporaries.
The RSC Shakespeare,
February 2007, 184 pages, Hardback and Paperback
exp lained to TLS read er s
978-0-19-926595-4, £12.99 / $19.95
978-0-19-926594-7, £25.00 / $49.95
"In an important sense
Shakespeare d id not live
why he had based this new
edit ion on the Firsl Fo lio of
1623. T here have been many
in his life, if by life we mean edi tion s of per for mance lex ts
circumstantia l e xiste nce. " before this, as Peter Holl and,
Early Modern Catholicism Barbara Ev erett, in the latest w ho now reviews Ba te' s,
An Anthology of Primary Sources of a di stinguished series of reminds us; The RSC Shake-
EDITED BY ROBERT S. MIOLA essays on Sh akespeare in thi s speare , whi le it makes so me
Through an exploration of Catholic contributions to paper, shows wh y biography, rad ical an d orig inal cho ices,
the early modem period, the culture of attac hed of necessity 10 the presentin g a Shakespeare
Early Modem England - including su ch social, the superficial, can F rancois-J ose ph Talma who is, prec ise ly, sexy and
figures as Shakespeare, Donne, Spenser , tell us so little abo ut the "pro - a n d Mile Duchenois in a n eve n " raunchy" , do es not
Milt on, and jonson - is redefined. vincial nobody" who was eig htee nt h -ce nt ury Hamlet engage d irec tly with " the
June 2007, 536 page s, Hardback and Paperback also on e of the gre atest of mu ltip le disco verie s tha t the
978-0-19-925986-1, £25.00 / $45.00 "those whose work is not we ll be the story of his direc tor s, ac tors and design -
978-0-19-925985-4, £70.00 / $150.00 superficial"; and why, even mind, bUI the life he did ers" of the " mag nificent"
in the age of television and live wa s that of a hig hly Ro ya l Sh ake speare Company
ce lebr ity, we should be con- success ful playwright and have ma de abo ut the plays
tent 10 look for Shake- aclor-manager; his grea t since its inception. T he TLS

OXFORD speare ' s face in the Droe-

shout engraving and the Stral-
poe try wa s wri tten for the
stage - eve n if not in the Strat-
this week will spe ak 10
anyone who care s about
UNIVERSITY PRESS ford bust (an d even more in ford of his upbr ing ing , the Shak espe are, abou t poetry,
the poem s and play s) ra ther place to which he ev entually drama, and human creativity,
P UBLISH ER & DI STRIBUTOR OF THE YEAR 2 0 05,2 0 06, and 2007 than searching for a more ret urned an d which is now whether they are in Stra tford
Awar ded by the Academic, Specialist, and Professional Group of the UK Book sellers Associatio n g lamorous or sexy image. the hom e of Shakespeare or far beyond - if not
The tru e biography of study and performance. " beyo nd beyond" .
Tel: 01536741727 I Email: bookorders.uk@oup.com "gentle Shake speare" migh t Ea rlier this year Jonathan A.J.
~ Available from allgood bookshops, or from OUP direct
www www.oup.com/ukJtlsforspec.al offers. sample chapters, and news
T LS A UG UST 17 200 7

Give'tme again
The 'raunchy ' RSC Shakespeare finds fresh ways of presenting the plays, and makes
some radical decisions - but owes little to the RSC' s own productions
n 1887, Henry Irving began colla bora t-
I ing with his friend Fran k Marshall on an
edition of Shakes pea re. The aim was to
bring the plays to the genera l reader ,
then still a creatur e in no immedi ate danger
of extinction, in a way that combined the lat-
es t scho larship of F. J. Furniva ll in England
and H. H. Furness in Am erica with some
sense of the plays in perform ance. Published
in eight volumes over the next three years ,
The Henry Irving Shakespeare includ ed illu s-
trations by Gordon Bro wne which, while not
represe nting perfor mance directl y, sugges ted
curren t sty les of stage cos tume, and notes by
Irving on cuts in the text , both those used by
professional com mercia l companies like his
ow n and those that would mak e public read-
ings or amateur produ ctions practicabl e. Th e
fin al volume to appear cont ained a genera l
introdu ction and a biograph y of Shakes pe are
written by Edwa rd Dowden , the forem ost
critic of the age .
There had been many editions of perform-
ance texts befor e this, including John Philip
Kernbl e' s acting editions and tho se by
Charles Kean who proudl y recorded the his-
torical authenticity and antiquarian sources
of his produ ctions and ensured that his name
on the title page was follo wed by his FSA, as
a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries.
Earlier, there were the editions publi shed by
John Bell, starting in 1773, of the plays "as
they are now performed at the Theatres
Royal in Lond on" , based on the prompt-
books for the plays in the repertory and with
sugges tions by Fra ncis Ge ntleman for the
right way to adapt the plays not curr entl y
bein g perform ed. Though Kernbl es and
Keans nam es were very visible in their texts
and thou gh Bell' s text emphasized its con nec-
tion with the Lond on stages , none was quit e
so emphatic in their linkin g of actor and
author as The Henry Irving Shakespeare,
and , as far as I kno w, there was no success or
in quit e that style. There is no Oli vier
Shakespeare or Gielgud Shakespeare, nor did
Lilian Baylis edit an Old Vie Shakes pea re.
Now there is a Comp lete Works edited by
Jon ath an Bate and Eric Rasmu ssen, alrea dy
wide ly known as The RSC Shakespeare, a
hand some piece of book-making, for all that
the cover design sugges ts the futur e market-
ing of matchin g curtains. The publicity for
the volume has trump eted the fact that, for
the first time ever, it is the First Fo lio (F I as
scholars call it) of 1623 that provides the
basis for the text. Thi s is, in effec t, an edition
of F I, a mod erniz ed , corrected and annotated
version of that text, with Bate in ove rall
charge, Rasmu ssen tightl y controlling the
textu al matters, and Helors e Senech al super-
vising the co mmentary.
But in what way is it The RSC Shake -
speare? Nes tling on page 64, after Bate' s typi-
call y invigoratin g General Introduction , after
the es pecially necessary User's Guide and a
modernized version of the prelim s to F I
LITERATURE & DRAMA
P ET ER HOLLA ND
J on ath an Bat e and
E r i c R a smus s en , e di tors
WILLI AM S H AKESPEA RE : THE
C OMP L ET E W O R KS
2,486pp. Macmillan/RSC. £30.
9780230 003507
(co mme ndatory poem s and all), com es a one-
page for eword by Mich ael Boyd, the Royal
Shak espeare Co mpany's Arti stic Direct or : a
rath er bland set of recommendations to read-
ers to rememb er that they are "reading
scripts" , not to be "put off by any sense that
his work might be difficult to appreciate", to
"trust the author" and to "be inspir ed" . A few
pages of phot ograph s of RSC productions
(and one visiting production) have good cap-
8.8.07: London
Joshua Reynolds's portrait of Samuel
Johnson (1756-7) in the National
Portrait Gallery was attacked last week
by a man wielding a hammer. The
attacker was unable or unwilling to
offer any motive fo r his action - which
cannot therefore properly b e d escribed
as iconoclasm. Over th e years, art van-
dals have invoked all kinds of rationale
for taking knives, chisels, paint-sprays
and even pistols to famous works, from
personal distaste to critical statement
to postmodernist "intervention". In
1914, Mary Robinson, a militant
Suffragette, went for Velazquez's
"Rokeby Venus" in th e National
Gallery with a meat cleaver, as a
protest ag ainst th e arrest of Emmeline
Pankhurst; more recently Vin cent
Bethell r emoved th e woman 's dress
TL S AUGUST 17 200 7
tions but are often disapp ointingly predicta-
ble choices: a head- shot of Paul Scofield as
Lear does nothin g to show how Peter
Brook ' s production "portrayed a dark and
primiti ve world" in the clear way a still from
the performance' s opening scene would have
don e; an image of lan McK ellen and Judi
Dench as the Macbeth s does not hint at "the
intensity of an intim ate Macb eth in the tiny
' black box' of The Oth er Place" , as a shot of
the circle of light within which they worked
and aro und which the res t of the cas t and the
audi ence sat would have do ne.
Therea fter, for the rem aining all-but 2,500
pages of plays and poem s, the RSC-n ess of
The RSC Shakespeare is an invisibl e eleme nt,
apart from some pass ing produ ction details in
Bate' s sharp introductions to the indi vidual
plays. The RSC Shakes peare is an exa mple of
corporate brandin g, of comm ercial exploita-
he had b een wearing before painting
a large yellow doll ar sign over
Rembrandt's "Self-Portrait at th e Age
of Sixty-Three" (also in th e National
Gallery, which seems to have suffered
unfairly from this kind of thing), in
order to "highlight th e injustice of
cr im ina lizing puhlic nakedness". More
original, som e might think, was th e
approach of Jubal Brown, who as an
art student in th e 1990s ingested highly
coloured foods before vomiting over
"lifeless, boring" paintings by Piet
Mondrian and Raoul Dufy. Th e gr eat
Or Johnson would almost certainly
have taken this latest incident in his
stride. "I would rather", he told
Bosw ell, when he was exp ecting to be
criticized for his Lives of the Poets, "be
attacked th an unnoticed."
3
tion of a marketable logo, of product recogni-
tion offering a guarantee of qualit y and desira-
bilit y. What it is not is an edition that directl y
engages with the histor y and practice of the
Royal Shakespeare Co mpa ny, with the multi-
ple discoveries that the dire ctor s, actors and
designers of the comp any have mad e about
the pla ys, line by line and sce ne by scene,
eve r since Peter Hall created the brand name.
Henry Irving was an active coll abor ator
throughout the edition that bears his name,
but The RSC Shakespea re is more the product
of the comp any' s Marketin g Department than
the rehearsal roo m and production record .
On e of the virtues of the appro ach Bate and
Rasmu ssen have taken is to offer fresh ways
of prese nting the plays. Som e at lea st of these
are reflections of performance texts. So the
" Key Facts" box for each pla y (so helpful
when revising for exa ms) gives a list of major
roles in descendin g order accordin g to the per-
cent age of lines, recording for each the
numb er of spee ches and sce nes . The lists
reveal much about, say, the domin anc e of
Haml et (37 per cent of the lines) or Richard
III (32 per cent ) or Pro spero (30 per cent ),
and the intriguin g fact that Theseu s, onstage
for onl y three sce nes of A Midsummer
Night's Dream, is very nearl y as substa ntial a
role as Bottom or Helena in the ense mble of
the play. Helpful for tri via question s it may
be (I would not have guesse d that Troilu s is a
lon ger ro le than Ulysses in Troilus and
Cress idai, but the inform ation serves a much
more serious criti cal functi on than that ,
throwin g into relief the comp arative silence
of Gertrude, onstage for ten scenes but with
no more lines than Ophelia , or the way a
sma ll role like Prince ss Katherin e in Henry V,
with 2 per ce nt of the lines and onl y two
sce nes, can have a theatric al impa ct out of
proportion to the role' s size, or the shrinking
presenc e of Princ e Henr y bet ween the two
part s of Henry IV ( 18 per cent of the lines in
Part On e but only 9 per cent in Part Tw o,
while Falstaff scores 20 per cent in each part).
Unlike the quartos, F I makes at least an
attempt at dividin g the plays into acts and
scenes. F I 's occasionally half-h earted repre-
sentation in five acts even of plays originally
given continuou s perform ance at the Globe, in
part a reflection of theatrical practice by the
1620 s, with act-divisions a standard feature of
indoor perform ance at the Rlackfri ars Theatre
(amon g other reason s, they ena bled the
candles to be trimm ed or replaced), and in part
a reflection of the classical dignity that Ben
Jonson had given his plays in his collec ted
edition of 1616, is rightly followed and com-
pleted here, so that Hamlet has more than the
first three scenes of Act One and the start of
Act Two marked. A quarto-b ased edition
might have opted simply for continuous num-
bering of scenes, but Bate and Rasmu ssen
reflect the theatrical experience of continuous
perform ance by balancing the act and scene
Continued on page 4
4

Continued fro m page 3

LITERATURE & DRAMA 3 Pe ter H oll and J on a th an Ba te a n d Eric Rasm usse n, ed itors William Shak espeare: division s with a useful inno vation : a "running
Th e Complete Work s (The RSC Shakespe are) scene" cou nt that enables the read er to be
aware that, say, A Midsummer Night 's Dream
LETTERS 6 Boswell vs . Hum e, ' Night Watch ', 8 Roya l Co llege Street, etc has only seven sce nes in all, as, for instance,
"running scene 4" includes both Act Two
BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIRS 7 Neil Powell Pe ter Sta nford C. Da y-Lew is - A Life Scene Two and Act Thre e Scen e One, with
H owa rd T emperl ey William Ha gu e Will iam Wi lberforce - The life of the great Titan ia asleep onstage acro ss the act-br eak .
anti-sl ave trade campaigner Occa sionall y argu able, as the editors well
Ste phe n To m k ins Will iam Wi lberforce - A biography know , the running scene numb ering reminds
Ch r isto phe r L eslie Br own Mora l Ca pital - Found ation s of us that, in the cour se of any performance with-
Briti sh abo litioni sm out act-breaks, no member of the audience
A ndrew va n d er Vlies Wole Soy inka You Mu st Set Forth at Dawn - A memo ir other than a Shakespeare scholar has the slight-
Alfre d Ri eb er Simon Sebag Mo nte fiore Young Stal in est idea whether he or she is watching Act
Thre e or Four - and couldn't care less either.
DIARIES 11 Michael W h ite Alas tair Campbell The Blair Year s
All of this is well and good, and effective ly
COMMENTARY 12 Ba rbara Everett Reade him , ther efore - Wh y biography can never con sciou s of performance . Prob lem s arise, as
tell us as much about Shake spe are as the plays and poem s can so often in Shak espe are edit ions, wit h stage
Hu go W illia ms Freelanc e directions. Editions are made up of thou sand s
Th en a nd Now TLS August 16 1957 - The Am erican Way of small choic es, but the detail matters
grea tly to our und er stand ing of what might
ARTS 17 Pe ter P a rker India & Pak istan 07 (BB C2 and BBC4) happ en and what the stage -eve nt might mean .
Paul Binding Victoria Ben edi ct sson The Enchantme nt (Cottesloe Theatr e) Pickin g on an exa mple or three may indeed
J udith Fl ander s Patsy Sto ne man Jane Eyre on Stage, 1848- 1898 sound pick y, but they will have to stand for
the problematic significance a direction has
FICTION 19 Sa meer Rahim Mahmo ud Dowlat ab adi Missing Soluch
for the pot ential of performanc e, future or
Henri As tier J ean- Paul Du b ois A French Life
imaginary, and as a record of performances
Lu cy Da llas Pierre Pej u Clara 's T ale
pa st. Theatrical meaning is generat ed
Heather T ho m pson J oyce Carol Oates Th e Grav ed igger' s Daughter
moment by mom ent - not onl y by some over-
Pau lOwen Dav id F lusfeder The Pagan House
all directorial conc ept - and the opening up
Mark Kamine Woody Alie n Mere An arch y
or clo sing do wn of possibility is cruci al to a
ESSAYS 22 Cl ive G r iffi n Mario Vargas LIosa Touchstone s - Ess ays on literature, art and read er ' s und erstanding of the plays' wa ys of
politic s mak ing meanin g. As rad ical and origina l here
as elsewh ere , the ed itor s have separated
BIOGRAPHY & FILM 23 Sarah Churchwe ll Michael Ba rrier The Animated Man - A Life of WaIt Disney F I-style direc tion s (mo stly entrances and
Nea l Gabler Wait Disne y - The biography exits) from what they dub "directorial inter-
vent ions" , the form er in the run of the text ,
the latter in the margin in a different type-
CULT URAL ST UDI ES 24 P . D. Sm ith E h r ha r d Bah r Weim ar on the Pacific - German exile cultur e in face. The y also include "permissive stage
Lo s Ang eles and the cri sis of modernism directions" such as "Aside?" or "may exit" ,
leaving reader and production to dec ide
PSY CHOLOGY 25 Br enda Maddox J an in e Bu rke The God s of Freud whether this is a good idea. At time s this
& MEDI CINE W . F . Bynum Noga A r ik ha Passions and Temp ers - A histor y of the humours permi ssiveness is oddl y questionin g of
what seems unque stionable. In Troil us and
RELIGIO N 27 A ntho ny Ke n ny Alister McGrath with J oanna Co IIicutt McGrath The Dawkins
Cress ida , Troi lus' sleeve, his parting gift to
Delu sion ? - Athei st Fund amentalism and the den ial of the divine
Cress ida, moves to and fro betw een Cressida
Ph ili p Hoare William La mo nt Last Witne sses - Th e Muggl eton ian history,
and Diom ede in the scene that Troilus
1652- 1979
watch es. Clea rly Cress ida has the slee ve
when she enters, Diomede has it when
IN BRIEF 28 Suk hdev Sa n dh u Night Haunts - A journey through the London
Cress ida says "Give' t me aga in", and
night
J on athon Taylor Tak e Me Hom e - Parkin son ' s, my fath er , myself Cress ida has it when she says " I hav e't
J am es Auste n-Leigh Fugitive Pieces - Trifl es Light as Air: The poem s aga in". Directions saying "She may give him
of Jame s Edwa rd Au sten-Leigh, neph ew and biog rapher of Jane Au sten the sleeve" or "She may take back the sleeve"
are unh elpfully permi ssive, unle ss the open
Julia P r est Theatre Under Loui s XIV - Cross -cas ting and the
performance of gend er in drama, ballet and opera qualit y of the latter direction is an indic ation
that, instead of taking it back , she may be
Pe ter J on es Ove Arup - Masterb uild er of the twentieth cent ury
J on a than Clements Wu - The Chinese Empress who schemed, given it by Diom ede. Nor doe s it help to add
"She may attempt to take back the slee ve"
seduced and murd ered her way to becom ing a living god
when Diomede says, "Nay, do not snatch it
K atha ri ne A. Craik Readin g Sen sation s in Early Mod ern England
Nige l Ham ilto n Biography - A brief hi stor y fro m me" . Such stage direct ion s add little and
seem merely to state the obviou s.
31 Thi s wee k's contributors, Cross word But what happ ens on stage in The Tam ing
of the Shrew when Petruc cio says of Kather-
NB 32 r.c, Th ank s for your support, Bird belief s, RIP Edward Lowbu ry, ine, "Why does the world report that Kate
Metaficti on III doth limp?" ? (It is, incidentally, disappoint-
ing to see the ed itor s accept for spee ch-
prefi xes Petruccio ' s diminutive form of
Kath erine' s nam e as "Kate" when she is so
clear about its proper form , "They call me
Kath erin e that do talk of me" : the same trick
of power-based nicknaming that Henry V
will use with his Kath er ine . Such cho ices are
not trivial in the way they accept one charac-
ter' s view of ano ther , here an act of con trol.
Calling her " Kate" eve ry time she speaks
Co ver picture: Willi am Shakespeare by Philip Sutton © Bridgem an Art Libr ary; p2 © Bridgeman Art Librar y; p3 © National Po rtrait Ga llery; pS © Donald
clouds the reader' s perc ept ion and is also in
Cooper/Photostage; p7 © Fellk s Topolski/Hult on Archives/Ge tty Images; p9 © Key ston e/G ett y Images; plO © TopFoto ; p l 2 © National Portr ait Ga lle ry/A FPI
Getty Images: p 17 © BBC/Deep Seg hal: p 18 © Nobby Clark: p 19 ©Jean Gaumy/Mag num: p22 © Juli o Mun oz/epa/Corbi s: p23 © Bettm ann/Corbi s: p24 © Hul- conflict with the edition's and F I ' s stage
ton-Deutsch Collec tion/Ca rbis; p25 © Peter Aprahamian/Corbis; p26 © Mehau Kulyk/Science Photo Libr ary; p27 © Bridgeman Art Libr ary directions for "Kather ina" .) According to

TLS A UG US T 17200 7

The RSC Shakespea re, "Kate" might be limp-
ing because Petruccio "kicks her". I am sure
there mu st have been Petruc cios who have
kicked their Katherin es at this point, though I
cannot remember any, but , because the co m-
mentary is sile nt, the question mark after the
marginal direction has to do a grea t deal of
wor k to invite the reader to consider other
poss ible even ts: perhaps she does not limp at
all (few Katherines do), perh aps she has
tripped, perhaps she has turn ed her
ankle. But neith er a Kath erine who is sile nt
when kicked, nor a Petru ccio confide nt
enough and brut al enough to kick her at th is
stage of their relationship, see ms so likely
that the stage direction is wa rranted.
At the play ' s end, after Katherine ' s long
speec h, by far her longest in the whole
play - for she is a strikingly quiet shrew -
Petr uccios "Come on , and kiss me, Kate"
attrac ts the direction " They kiss", without so
much as a question mark to throw doubt on
the action. But how do we know they kiss?
M any RSC prod uctions have show n a Kather-
ine co mpletely unabl e to kiss the man who
has wage red on her obedience; others have
shown a wo man delighted to kiss the ma n she
loves. A perfor mance-aware edition, es pe-
cially an edit ion aware of the RSC's ow n his-
tory, could have opened readers' minds to the
co nflicting, mutually exclusive possibilities
at this point.
Someti mes it is the co mme ntary that
has strange effec ts on the mea ning of stage
directions. When King Lea r first en ters , the
1608 quarto has him preceded by "one bear-
ing a coronet" and, thou gh F I does not
includ e this "one", the editors break their
own rules and for some reas on import Q I' s
anonymous serva nt. Shakespeare is precise
abo ut coro nets, with Case a fir st naming the
objec t offered to Juliu s Caesar "a crow n" and
then redefinin g it: "yet ' twas not a crow n
neith er , ' twas one of these coronets" . Since
Lear will, after di sinheriting Cor del ia, later
instruc t Cornwall and Albany, "This
coronet part between you", it seems quite
likely (though not definit e) that the coronet is
Cor de lia's. It doesn't of course have to have
been brou ght in sepa rately; Lea r could, for
instance, snatch it off Cordelia's head at this
point. The com mentary glosses "bearing a cor-
one t" both as "carrying a sma ll crow n" and
"wearing a wrea th or garla nd about the head" .
The latter explanation makes no sense to me
whatsoever . Of co urse "bearing" can mean
"wearing" , but exa mples of the word "coro-
net" meaning in that period a "garland" are
vulnerable and, though the OED quotes A
Midsummer Night 's Dream as the first exam -
ple for this sense, the line "With coro net of
fresh and fragrant flowers" need not precisely
mea n that a coro net is a garland but rather
that the wor d is being used as a kind of meta-
ph or : T ita nia has crowne d Rottom (or " coro-
neted" him). And why on eart h wo uld some -
one wearing a garland precede the King of
Britain ? And what would an early modern
audience - or any other audience, for that mat-
ter - und erstand such an odd ceremo nial entry
to mean? That such an entry might be neatly
prolepti c of Cordelia's descrip tion of the mad
Lear, "Crowned with rank fumit er and furrow
weeds" (which he mayor may not be wea ring
when he enters a few scenes later, but wh ich
the edi tors are confident he does still have
on), is not in itself ju stific ation for such a
bizarrely dressed leader of the procession.
LITERATURE & DRAMA 5
be there. It is good to be made aware of a
Shakes peare as raunchy as this, so much enjoy -
ing the ways in which English can make hun-
dreds of words have double mea nings, but the
potency of language may be in the eye of the
beholder and not in the control of the spea ker:
when William Page in his Latin lesson in The
Merry Wives of Windsor says "0 , voca tive 0",
he may - or, more likely, may not - know that
"0 " is "suggestive of the vagina" .
The fir st edition of Romeo and Juliet I rea d
in school had cut some of the rudest lines,
though the preface 's identifi cation of which
lines had been cut sent us all rushing off to a
Co mplete Works to find out what was bein g
kept from us; we could ma ke little sense of
Mercuti o on the medlar tree, eve n with the
help of a dictionary. As teacher s desper ately
searc h for ways to prove Shakespeare's relev-
ance to teenagers of the iGeneration who
have no interest in anything not about them-
selves, The RSC Shakespeare may perform
a useful public serv ice, even if it may also
provoke protests from Americ an parent s, so
overanxious and overprotective abo ut sex .
If this sexy Shakespeare broadens our sense
Amanda Harris a s Titania and Ch r istoph er Benjamin a s Bottom in the Royal Sh ak e- of the author, Bate and Rasm ussen have had to
sp eare Com pa ny production orA Midsummer Night 's Dream, Barbican , London, 1996 do some nifty footwork around the texts
which are not in F I in ways that narrow our
I don't want to be breakin g a butt erfly but mind - rightly when it goes to town on Mercu- vision of Shakespeare's range. Since The RSC
the probl em s with this single commentary tin ' s language (though is "0" in "0 Romeo, Shakespeare could hardly do without Pericles
note don't end there. The coronet, the co m- that she were, 0, that she were / An open arse" and The Two Noble Kinsmen, two plays not in
me ntary assures us, " must be of material that really yet "another vaginal pun"?), but a little F I , they are tacked on at the end in doubl e-
ca n be broken in half', but this is to read crass ly when it states unequi vocally the pres- column s, as are the long poems and the
Lear's instruction to "part" it too literally, to ence of a sexual mea ning that may or may not Contin ued on page 7
ass ume that the spee ch and a stage -eve nt are
aligned. The exhilara ting theatri cal point
may be prec isely that the coronet ca nnot be
divided , that, try as they might , neith er Lear
nor his sons -in-law can split the metal ring,
that the circle, such a potent sign of who le-
ness, will not brea k - espec ially in a play fas-
cinated by the way 'T he whee l is come full
circle", as the dying Edmund puts it. A trick
coro net is not necessaril y requ ired; an
equally potent theatr ical possibility is eas ily
ava ilable without resorting to spec ial effec ts.
Seiz ing on th is example may be unfair
when so much of the com mentary is newly
conce ived, alive to the possibilities of early
modern English and of Sha kespeare 's trans-
for mations of it. Thi s is the first full- scale
co mme ntary to be able to use the riches of
electronic databases such as the Lexicon of
Early Modern English and it has taken full
adva ntage of them. It is also strikingly awa re
of Shakespeare' s sexual language, trusting
the super b scholarly research of Gordon Wi l-
liams. There is no room here for the vag ue-
ness of a commentary note poin ting to an
unexplained sexua l meanin g. Here, eve ry
spa de is call ed a pen is. And here too Bate and
Se necha l go so much furt her than prev ious
editors that some times eve n my pleas ure in
bawdin ess ca nnot keep up with them .
Willia ms accep ts, though the OED does not,
that the wor d "come" could mean "orgasm"
at that period , but it does not foll ow that it
does so quit e as frequently as here. Full of
sex ua l meanin gs though Cleopatra 's idiolec t
may be, I am not rea lly sure that " Husband, I
co me" has "connotations of orgasm" or that
her see ing An tony "rouse hi mself ' has "con-
notations of penil e erect ion" . And Orsinos
description of the music' s "dying fall" has
suc h a faint ec ho of "the sense of orgasm and
detu mescence" as to be completely inaudible
to me. Some times this commentary has a dirty
TL S AUGUST 17 2 0 0 7
6
'Night Watch'
Sir, - Erik Spaa ns (Le tters, Jul y 27)
belittled Ro bert Irwin' s sugges tion
(in a review of several books on
photography, Jul y 13) that there
are some links between the comm on
icono graph y of seven tee nth-ce ntury
Dutch painting and that of the
nineteenth- century Orient alist paint-
ers. And he mentions me in passing
as someo ne who has worked on the
topic: he is referrin g to an old article
of min e, "Gerome ' s Ori ental paint-
ings and the Western ge nre tradi-
tion" , in Art s Magazine, Febru ary,
Mar ch 1986.
The article was based on the idea
that the iconographic al traditi on is
so embedded in most painters '
minds that they tend to see the
world in term s of long-set "picture
materi al" , subje cts that they are
already famili ar with, and they
seldo m invent new themes. This
theory was sugges ted years ago
by Jan Bialostosc ki in the essay
"lkonographische forschun g zu
Rembrandt s Werk", in his boo k Stil
und lkonographie ( 965 ). Bialosto-
scki foun d only two subjec ts in
Rembrandt ' s wor k that he might
have invent ed (perhaps precedent s
have been found for the two since
then). I arg ued that Western paint-
ers in the Islami c land s also saw
traditi onal "picture materi al" , and
many of these traditional them es
ca me from seve ntee nth-ce ntury
Dutch painting: market sce nes,
quiet cafes (not rowdy bars),
zo nked smokers, prostitution,
soldiers' activities , farmers at work ,
worship, chu rch interiors, pri soners,
the Powe r of Music (that is, listen-
ers entra nced as a musici an plays
or sings) , and recreation al games
such as cards and checkers. So
Spaans, in his list of Dutch genres
that do not to him see m "fit for a
comp arison with Oriental imagery" ,
in fact hits on many of the very
topics that we re tra nsposed from
Dutch to Orient al sce nes in the
nineteenth century.
Bec ause of the prot ected privacy
of hom es, most nineteenth- century
Orientalist paint ing is of publi c life:
streets, mosq ues, caravans. But
even the Am eri can Ori ent alist
Freder ick Brid gman , who managed
to pay his way into the hou se of a
widow with a sma ll child and a
se rvant, de pict ed their ac tiv ities as
if he we re in an Am erican home:
cleanin g house, naps, was hing the
baby, the First Steps, etc. And eve n
the infam ous (but actually rather
rare) depicti ons of crue lty or torture
in Ori ent alist paintin g have an
eve n older Western iconographical
traditi on: that of the depi ction of
Chr istian martyrdom.
GE RA LD M. ACKE RMAN
333 N. Co llege Way , Claremo nt.
CA 9 1711.
Boswell VS. Hume
Sir , - Barton Swaim begin s his
review of The Enlightenment and
the Book by Rich ard B. Sher (July
20) by describing an ep isode wh ich,
he says , lies at the heart of this "new
and definit ive histor y of books and
booksellin g du ring the Scottish
Enlightenment" . Accordin g to
Swaim (and presumably also Sher ),
"in March 1776 James Boswell
visited Willi am Ad am s at Pem-
bro ke College, Cam bridge", and
noticed with disappro val a "hand-
somely bound " quarto ed ition of
David Hume' s Essays and Treatises
on Severa l Subjec ts in Ad arns' s
library. " Boswell understood wha t
book histor ians spend their careers
trying to prove to their colleagues in
literatur e and histor y dep artm ent s:
that the for m in which a wor k of
phil osoph y, fiction or history first
appeared affect ed its recepti on . .. ."
Thi s inference is not ju stified by
the j ourn al entry to which Swaim
refers. Boswell does not com ment
on the bindin g of the volume,
beyond say ing that it is "bound in
morocc o" . The presence of a copy
of Hum e ' s wor k in Ad am s' s library
was not the subs tance of Boswell ' s
disappro val. Ad am s had met Hum e
at London at dinner, shaken hand s
with him, and the two had engage d
----------~,----------
Ayn Rand
Sir, - Mark Crees, in a rev iew of
Ayn Rand ' s two most famous nov-
els, The Fountain head and Atlas
Shrugged (July 27), refers to
Objecti vism as an "intellectual
cult" . Thi s does not give full credit
to Rand ' s phil osophi cal movement.
After the publi cation of Atlas
Shrugge d, Nathaniel Branden, who
was Rand ' s lover , organi zed the
Nathaniel Branden Institut e, later
known as NBI, in response to the
grow ing dem and fro m Rand ' s
reader s to learn more about her
ideas. Figures such as Alan Gree n-
span, Leonard Peik off and Mary
Ann Ruk avina were the lectu rers at
the Institut e.
With the grow ing influ enc e of
her phil osoph y, Rand was invited to
give lectures at Prin ceton , Co lum-
bia, John s Hopkins and Massachu-
setts Institut e of Technology. In
1963, she recei ved an hon orary
degree, Doctor of Hum ane Letters,
from Lewis and Clark Co llege in
Portl and, Oregon . She was also
invited to place her manuscript s in
the Library of Congress. Magazines
such as The Objectiv ist News letter
and The Object ivist we re estab-
lished to pro mote theoretical
aspe cts of Obj ecti vism . Objec tiv-
ism has been recogniz ed as a phil o-
sophica l movement by distin-
letters @th e-tls.co.uk
in what sounds like agreea ble
banter ; Ad ams had later ca lled on
Hum e and Hum e had called on him.
"Of all this I disapp roved" , writes
Boswell.
To und er stand Boswell ' s dis-
approval one should rememb er that
Hume was a notorious "infidel",
that Ad ams was in holy ord ers, and
that in 1752 Adam s had written an
essay which the DNB would
describe as "the first answe r to
Hum e" . As Boswell subsequently
mak es clear , it is Ad am s' s easy
famili arity with his antago nist of
which he di sappro ves.
It is also worth pointin g out that
Boswell' s re lations with Hum e
were co mplica ted, not least because
Boswell and his famil y had been
guished phil osoph ers and scho lars
of the aca demic world, discussion
groups have been form ed all around
the wo rld, and private schools have
been set up to impl ement Rand' s
concept of reason and individu al-
ism. To refer to this as a cult is
simply wro ng.
AS IA ZGA DZA J
145 Springbank Road, Hither Gree n,
London , SEI3.
----~,----
Reagan revisited
Sir, - Among the catalog ue of
crimes Sylva n Go llin ascrib es to
President Reagan is the fact that "he
did nothin g to avenge the massacre
of 241 Marines in Lebanon that
occurred on his wa tch" (Letters,
Jul y 27).
Some o f us would reg ard thi s as
one of his virtues. How was he sup-
posed to identify and puni sh those
respon sibl e? Toda y we witness
daily the effects of "avenging" a
crime by killing and maimin g hun-
dred s of thousand s of people who
manifestly bore no conn ection with
the eve nt. It is scarce ly an edifying
pro spect.
NIKO LA I TOLSTOY
Co urt Close , So uthmoor ,
nr Abingdo n, Oxon .
TL S AUGUST 17 2 00 7
renting Hurnes hou se in Edin-
bur gh. Boswell was troubl ed by
Hum es atheism; later in 1776 he
would ca ll on the dying philo soph er
and passionately urge hi m to repent.
Boswell was visiting Dr Adams as
the companion of Dr John son , who
himse lf disapp roved stro ngly of
Hum e, and in Boswell ' s descripti on
of the con versation with Ada ms it is
obvious that he is pontificatin g in
an attempt to impr ess his mentor, as
he ofte n did , almos t always un-
success fully.
Boswe ll was collec ting material
for the Life of John son, and see ms
to have been di sappoint ed that
Ad ams had not prov ided more. Joh n-
son had known their host since his
undergraduate days more than forty
years earlier, when Adam s had been
a college tutor. He was now Master
of Pembroke. This brings me back
to the first sentence of Barton
Swaim ' s review, in which there is a
howler , perh aps his fault , perh aps
Shers or an editor 's . John son was
of course an Oxford ma n. Ad am s
was Ma ster of Pemb roke Co llege,
Oxford - not Cam bridge .
ADAM SISMAN
clo HarperColl ins, 77-85 Fulham
Palace Road, Lond o n W 6.
Sir , - 1 would like to congratul ate
the TLS for soundly beatin g the
New York Review of Books. The
latter managed to publi sh a long
rev iew article on Ronald Reagan ' s
deed s and achieve ments which did
not menti on at all the dirt y wa rs in
Ce ntra l Amer ica. The form er has
ju st published two articles in one
issue and still manage d to avoid tell-
ing such an improper story. Perhap s
the 30,000 people killed in Nica ra-
gua alone were not important
enough.
AN TONIO CAZO RLA-SA NCHEZ
Cham plain Co llege , CS, Trent
Univer sity, Peterborou gh , Ontario.
----~.---
8 Royal
College Street
Sir, - Readers of the TLS may
remem ber that, two years ago , a
gro up of eminent figur es from
literatu re, the arts and aca demia,
with their own French connect ions,
came togeth er with me to voice
our conc ern about the dilapid ation
of the house at 8 Royal Co llege
Street, where Rimb aud and Ver-
lai ne lived and wor ked, and to see
how we could secure the literary her-
itage of this 1828 listed building
(N B, Janu ary 6, 2006 ). We were
luck y: we disco vered that the
hou se and the two on either side
could be up for sale.
We met the own ers, the neigh-
bourin g Royal Veterinary Co llege,
and it was agreed that for one
yea r we could attempt to sell the
build ings at the "valuation" - not
the "market" - price. We then
interviewed potenti al purc hase rs,
individu als and institutions , who
we re sympathetic to our aims,
namely to erect a Blue Plaque and
try to ensure an appro priate use for
No 8. Camden Co uncil finally
agreed to consider a change of use
from residential. We found a
purch aser, but delays not of ou r
making meant that the Co llege
could not wait, and so put the
build ings up for auction. They
reached a very high "market"
price, with which our preferred
buyer could not compete.
The ne w ow ner is aware of our
concerns and ambiti ons. But how-
eve r sympathetic he ma y be, he is
a developer. We are now trying to
ass ist the original intended pur-
chase r to buy No 8 from him .
Again there have been delays, and
the new owner has started refur-
bishm ent. Thi s wor k has alarmed
certa in poets, who have been
organ izing "guerrilla barbecu es"
outside the premi ses. The devel-
oper, however, has done nothi ng
illegal.
Camde n Co uncil, which had
the Gra de 2 buildings spotlisted
in 1993, ha s accept ed the installa-
tion of the Blue Plaqu e, which
was hotl y deb ated on the English
Herit age Com mittee in 2003, but
finally con ded after interventions
from Stephen Fry and David
Starkey . We are now hopin g
that with the agreement of the final
purchaser and with the help of
a charity, " Poet in the City", we
may be able to brin g readin gs
and perform ance into 8 Royal
Co llege Stree t, where, in 1873,
Rimbaud worked on some of his
greatest poem s. If we can achieve
this and the Blue Plaqu e outside,
perhaps eve n our detractor s will
applaud.
GE RRY HARRI SON
3 Inke rman Road, London NW5 .
----~,---
Hamlet
Sir, - Pace David Martin (August
10), Haml et' s phrase "this quint es-
sence of dust" occu rs in dialogue
with Rosencrantz and Guilden-
stern, not in what he wrong ly calls
"soliloquy" : soliloquy is not one
charac ter spea king alone on stage,
it is literall y talkin g to oneself.
TH OMAS TALL ON
35 Birchingto n Clo se , Bexle yheath,
K ent.

Continued from page 5
Sonnet s. But yet again , as in so many other
editions, Shake speare ' s sections of Sir
Thomas More, the "Hand D" scenes, are
printed in not-so-splendid isolation from the
rest of the play, so that, unlike the experience
of reading the whole play in the second edition
of the Oxford Complete Works, the reader
here cannot tell at all what the play into which
these addition s were inserted was like. Bate
and Rasmu ssen distrust the argument that
Shakespeare wrote scenes in Ed ward III or, as
MacDon ald P. Jackson has been strongly argu-
ing, a scene in Arden of Faversham , and both
are excluded (that both are availabl e on the
edition's website www .rscshake speare .co.uk
is not really a compensation) . While collabora-
tive plays like Henry VI, Part I or Henry VIII
are in the volume compl ete, these other possi-
ble collaborations are dropp ed, reducing our
sense of Shakespeare ' s invol vement in the
work of others, his conn ection to the multi-
author ship practice s of much early modem
drama. Gone , too, is the poem "A Lover ' s
Compl aint" , in the light of Brian Vickers' s
convincing arguments again st attributing it to
Shakespeare.
To continue the "who' s in, who ' s out" list:
the epilogue to the Queen for Shro vetide
1599, first printed in the Riverside edition and
which Juliet Dusinb erre has linked to As You
Like It, is in, with Bate oversteppin g the mark
in describing the attribution as "absolutely
secure". There is no external evidence at all
for the attribution, and the parallel of a form of
genitive with an occurrence in Anton y and
Cleopatra is a weak basis for the case since, as
Jonathan Hope has recently demon strated, this
form was common ; especially when "circu-
lar" , one of the few uncommon word s in the
poem , is not used by Shakesp eare elsewh ere
but is used by a number of other dramati sts
and poets. If Shake speare did write an epi-
logue for Court performance, this chang es our
perception of his involvement in the world of
the Court. James Shapiro, one of the poem' s
advocates, emphas ized this in his Shakespeare
microbio graph y, 1599, but I wish I were confi-
dent enough of my ear to say, with Shapiro,
that the epilogue 's style and diction are
"unmistakably Shakespeare an". There are
stronger rea sons to includ e a numb er of short
epigrams exclud ed by Bate and Rasmu ssen:
the serious epitaph on Elias Jame s, the two
comic ones on John Combe, and the lines
inscribed on Shakespeare' s own grave, all of
which are firmly ascribed to Shake speare in
seventeenth-century manuscript s. Tho se
ascripti ons do not prov e the poem s are by
Shakespeare, but the evidence is stronger than
it is for the Shro vetide epilogu e, however
much one likes its delicat e style.
In the end, it is not these marginal cases that
will matter in decidin g how good, how impor-
tant, or how useful The RSC Shakespeare will
prove to be. I look forw ard to using it at my
desk and perhap s in my classroom over many
years, enjo ying Jonathan Bate' s perceptive
comments, trusting Eric Rasmu ssen' s textual
scholarship - and always questioning what
the edition and the texts them selve s can tell us
about how performance generates meanings,
not some idealized single way of playing, but
the kind s of unending, astute, exhilarating,
demanding, creati ve, rigorou s, exhausting
investigation s of potenti alit y that have always
been the hallm ark of the Royal Shakespeare
Company itself at its magnific ent best.
LITERATURE & BIOGRAPHY
Po and others
"M Y dispo sition has alwa ys been to
conform" , wrote C. Day-Lewis in
his autobio graph y, The Buried
Day (1960) . It ' s an odd dispo sition for a
writer who in his earl y life had so much to
rebel again st: a repressive, possessive Anglo-
Irish clergym an for a father ; an energetically
dim, pri ssy stepmother (he called her the
"step-dragon"); a dull hom e uprooted from
London to rural Nottingha mshire at the very
mom ent whe n he could have done with the
capit al' s stimulus. At Sherborne Scho ol, he
won the English Verse Award, but was other-
wise unrem arkabl e, not quit e making the
First XV or XI, and failing to form tho se sub-
versive ly intellectual friend ship s which tradi-
tionally help aspirin g poets to survive their
schooldays. The se had to wait until Oxford
where , reading Classics at Wadham , he mad e
up a hou se- sharin g trinit y with Charles
Fenby and Rex Warn er ; he vowed to do
badly , and left with a Third. Me anwhile, he
remained loyal to his first love, Mary King ,
daughter of hi s Sherborne hou sema ster: they
were married in 1928. He also met W. H.
Auden.
For seve ral years, starting with their joint
editorship of Oxford Poetry, 1927, Da y-
Lewi s and Auden regarded each other as com-
petitiv e equal s. In an uncollected verse letter
of 1929, Auden generou sly declared that "we
are one / In choice of calling and ambition" ,
before going on to wond er "if there 's room
for you and me" among the "tons of new
pro se and poetry" appea ring dail y. He could
afford to be generous, for his was imm easura-
bly the greater talent ; on the other hand , his
friend was three yea rs and two slim pub-
lished collections ahead of him, which
seemed to bring them into plau sibl e parit y.
Bewitch ed as he was by "the tow-haired
poet" whom he weirdly addr essed in The
Magnetic Mountain - " Look west, Wy stan ,
lone flyer, birdm an , my bull y boy!" - Day-
Lewis wasn 't Aud en ' s poodl e. Had he
attend ed more carefull y to his brilli ant friend,
his own early poem s might have shed some
blo wsy rhetoric and clunking archa isms :
their voice is an odd , often flat-footed
amalgam of Hopkins, Georgianism and the
emerging Thirti es style.
When he arriv ed to teach at Cheltenham
Co llege in 1930, he found that his reputation
had preceded him . His immediate superior
was alarmed by the sexual frankn ess of Transi-
tional Poem ("They' re love poem s addresse d
to my wife", Day-Lewis had to explain),
while another colleague, Fra nk Hallid ay, later
describ ed him as "a young marri ed man who
... was said to write poetr y"; Peter Stanford,
author of C. Day-Lewis: A Life, hear s "doubt"
in that remark, rather than its intended wry-
ness. Nor did left-wing politic s go down well
in Cheltenham: after he'd addressed a Friend s
of the Soviet Union meetin g, the chai rman of
the school governor s asked him if he knew
"what would have happened to you if you 'd
don e that sort of thing in the Regim ent". Yet
in other respects he looked like a conformist:
he bought a prett y cotta ge within cycling dis-
tance of the school; he had a loyal wife and,
from 1930, a son - whose name, in an Irish
moment of defi ance, he 'd altered from John
TLS A UG US T 17 2007
NEIL POW ELL
Pet er Stanford
C. D A Y- LE W IS
A Life
384pp. Continuum. £25.
978 08264 8603 5
to Sean somew here between home and regis-
try office. In fact , the marriage was alread y
rockier than it seemed: he and Mar y had sepa-
rate room s (his single bed and desk "felt like a
reminder of his boarding school"), and he was
looking elsewhere for sexual and intellectu al
stimulus.
C. Day-Lewis (1962) by FeIiks Toploski
Th e faultline of the conformi st rebel run s
through every aspect of Day-Lewis' s life and
work. When he left teaching to becom e a
full-time writer in 1935, he realiz ed that his
sustaining income would come from detec-
tive novel s by "Nicholas Blake" : the first (of
twent y) had ju st appeared , and the pseudo-
nym signa ls his intention that "Day-Lewis"
should be percei ved as a poet rather than an
all-round writer such as Hardy , whom he
admired . Stanford barely glanc es at the detec-
tive fiction, which he calls "an escape" ,
although the chronological pro ximit y of the
disastrou s verse dram a Noah and the Waters
to the hug el y success ful Blake novel The
Beast Must Die sugge sts that for a while Day-
Lewi s' s alter ego had an artistic as well as a
financial advant age over him; later came the
incid ental pleasure of bumping off fictional
ve rsio ns of real-life form er lo vers. Th e di vi-
sion wa s there in his politic al life, too , as he
admitted to him self while addr essing a left-
wing meetin g at the Queen' s Hall in 1938: he
suddenly "seemed to detach myself from the
man who was eloqu entl y holding forth " , and
when he sat down he knew " It won 't do . It
ju st won 't do". Soon afterwards, the Day-
Lewi ses moved to a most unrevolutionary
thatch ed cott age at Mu sbur y, deep in Hard y
country on the Devon-Dorset bord er.
It was there, somew hat improbably,
that the conflict betwe en decent husband
and serial adulterer began in earnes t: Billie
7
Currall was a local farmer ' s wife, who call ed
him "P o" (for " Poet" ) and bore him two sons.
In Da y-Lewi s' s other affairs - for instance,
those with Rosamond Lehmann and Eliza-
beth Jane Howard - ther e was usuall y an ele-
ment of literary solace ; Mar y, as her quot ed
letter s show, was devoted but nai ve, ill at
ease with the Lond on cultural world in which
her husband increa singly moved. Nat asha
Spend er shrewdly noted that Day-L ew is and
Lehmann "could give the impr ession that
they were playing out some inten se litera ry
drama": that level of their emotional rhetoric
eventu ally prov ed unsustainable. In the end,
the affair which ended his first marri age
and led to his second was with the actre ss Jill
Balcon , who was literat e and intelli gent but
mostly kept her drama for the stage .
In retro spect , Day-Lewis' s poeti c high
point is the dec ade or so of intim ate , depoliti-
ciz ed work which lead s up to his Collected
Poems of 1954. In 1951, he becam e onl y the
second living writer, after Eliot, to be
includ ed in Th e Penguin Poets - a con spicu-
ous honour, even if right s availability played
its part - and to that volume he contributed a
dril y self-ass ess ing preface: he was struck
both by his own "lack of developm ent" and
by the way in which he remained "still much
open to the influ enc e of other poet s" . He
make s a virtue of conformity, rath er than orig-
inalit y. If John Ma sefield , who became seri-
ously ill in 1949, had died then , Day-Lewi s
would have been an excellent choice for Poet
Laureat e; but when he did actually succee d
Ma sefi eld , in 1967, he had little time left.
Ne vertheless , it' s for his ge ntle later lyric s -
"Walking Awa y" or "O n Not Sayin g Every-
thing" - that he will be rem emb ered and
anthologized, rather than for the hulking nar-
rati ve of 'T he Nabara" , which once seemed
his likeliest monument.
Peter Stanford' s useful book assembl es a
vast amount of background det ail , but is in
other respect s calamitous. Although he
quot es copiously from the poem s, uncomfort-
ably set in italics, he seldo m mak es critical or
analytic al use of them; his discu ssion s of liter-
ary histor y - Georgianism and Mod erni sm ,
for instance - are rudimentary. There are no
page referenc es for any quotation s nor publi-
cation details for books in the bibli ography;
footn otes attached to other authors' name s
supply only their dates; letter s are quot ed
without authenticating details (was "the
younger poet Anth on y Thw aite" reall y onl y
sixtee n when Day-L ewi s wrot e to him ?); the
index is haphazard and repetit iou s. The
author' s pro se need s a buck etful of comm as
poured ove r it, as we ll as editorial attention to
such matt ers as agreem ent (" neither .. . or" ,
"the couple was . . . perfect hosts"); superflu-
ous or rever sed apostrophes; absence or pre s-
ence of hyphen s; and full stops after initial s
("W . H. Auden" has, hut "r Day-Lewis"
hasn't). There are some phra ses which would
make a nineteenth-centu ry solicitor blu sh -
"they need onl y to look by dint of contrast at
... " , "came in useful in regard of ..." - and
other s where an ob viou sly wrong word has
survived editor and proofreader : "Larchfield
School [Acad em y]" , "writing alternative
[altern ate] paragraph s", "Wor kers' Educa-
tion Authority [Association]"; even Che lten-
ham College becom es "Cheltenham School "
in the index. The author 's shortcomings are
an occa sion for sorrow , the publi sher ' s for
anger.
8 BIOGRAPHY
illiam Hague' s account of Willi am
W Wilberforc e ' s life open s with a
description of eve nts in and
aro und Westmin ster on February 23, 1807.
The day began much like any oth er, with
M Ps comi ng and going. King Ge orge III and
his Mini ster s we re deadlock ed ; the wa r with
Fra nce seemed destin ed to dra g on for eve r;
the nation al debt was spira lling out of con-
trol. In nearby Newg ate Prison, a public hang-
ing attracted such a thron g that thirt y died in
the crus h. This, however, is simply Hague ' s
way of setting the scene for the drama that
reach ed its clim ax in the early hour s of the
followin g mornin g, when MP s agreed, by a
vote of 283 to 16, to end Briti sh parti cip ation
in the slave trad e. Almo st lost to sight in
the crow d, as they leaped to their feet in
jubilation, was the man largely respon sible: "a
slight and hunch ed figure among a sea of trib-
utes", tears strea ming down his face, barely
able to co ntrol his emotions on findin g that
after twenty years of labour, he had finally
triumphed. It was a remarkable achievement.
Of course, the victory was not his alone:
others, as Hague makes clear, had labour ed as
long, or longer. Public pressure, too, had
played a part. But the task of presentin g the
case to Parliament had fallen to Wilb erforce,
and he had carried it off triumphantl y.
March of the saints
HOWARD T EMP ERLEY
Willi am H a gu e
W I L LIA M WIL B ER FOR CE
The life of the great anti-s lave trade ca mpaigner
582pp. HarperColIins. £25.
978 000 722885 0
Steph en T omkin s
W I L LIA M WIL B ER FOR CE
A biography
224 pp. Oxford: Lion Hudson. Paperback, £8.99.
978 074595232 I
US: Wm. B. Erdmans. $ I8.9780802825933
C hr is t o p he r L e sli e B r o wn
MOR AL CA P ITA L
Foundations of British abo litionism
49 6pp. U nivers ity of North Carolina Press.
Paperback, $22.50; distributed in the UK by
Eurospan. £ 14.50.
978 0807856987
Wilb erfor ce was a great orator in an age
when parli ament ary ora tory count ed for far
more than it does today. This had enabled
him , without holdin g gove rnment office or
belonging to a politi cal party, to sway opinion
and shape eve nts in ways no longer ava ilable
to a modern backb ench er. His considera ble
TL S A U G U S T 17 200 7
personal wealth and friend ship with William
Pitt the Youn ger were also a help. Neve rthe-
less, it had been diffi cult. Hague com pares
the anti-slave ry campaign to takin g on the
modern arms and tobacco indu stries. Indeed,
mos t of the arg ume nts with which Wilb er-
force had had to contend are as familiar today
as they were then. To compete in a global mar-
ket, it was said, Britain had to put moral con-
siderations aside. Its withdrawa l from the
slave trade would merely open the way for
others. Job s would be lost. The nation ' s secu-
rit y would be jeopardi zed . Deprived of fresh
supplies of labour , Britain ' s colonial produ c-
ers would be disadvantaged . Africa would not
benefit , and in the end the cos t of it all would
have to be born e by British consum ers.
Ho w much validity there was in these
claim s Hague does not tell us. Wh at he does
say is that there was little in Wilb erforce' s
ea rly life to sugges t that he would find him-
self in the position of having to take on such
po werful interests. Diminutive in stature and
frequ entl y ailing, it was surprising that he sur-
vived at all. Having lost his father at the age
of nine, he had been brou ght up largely by
relati ves. Ne ither at the various schoo ls he
attend ed nor later at Ca mbridge did he show
much inclin ation to study. Possessed of a
large income and no need to work, he might
have become a was trel. Fo r a time he did mix
in the rather raffish society that frequent ed
the Lond on club s and coffee houses of the
I780s. His deci sion to go into politics, by
Hague' s acco unt, was more forthe fun of the
thin g than out of any desire for office, or
becau se he felt he had any particul ar mission
to acc omplish.
Tw o eve nts changed this agree able if
slightly aimless existence . One was hi s
beco min g an Eva ngel ica l con vert, an exper i-
ence he likened to recovering "the use of my
reas on after a deliriu m". The seco nd was hi s
resol ve to put his newly awa kened Christian
conscie nce to good use by taking up a variety
of moral causes. Whether Wilb erforce ' s
form er life had been as sinful as he now
believed may be doubt ed. Neve rtheless ,
having decided to reform his own beha viour
he was determined that others should reform
their s too. Ge orge III was accordingly pre-
vailed on to issue a Procl amati on callin g for
the suppress ion of drunkenn ess, prostituti on,
gaming, blasph emy and eve rything else of
which those of a Purit an dispo sition might
di sappro ve. Thi s bein g Boswell' s Lond on,
Wilb erforce' s newborn resol ve to put eve ry-
one on the road to salvation did not make him
popular. One contemporary describ ed the
ai m of the Kin g ' s Procl am ati on as hein g to
suppress "the vices of persons whose income
does not exceed £500 per annum" .
Wilb erforc e' s denunci ation of the slave
trad e was better rece ived, partly because con-
demning the behaviour of others is eas ier
than reforming one ' s ow n, partl y becau se the
gro und had already been well prepared. Eve n
before his conversion, Wilb erforce had har-
bour ed doubt s as to the trade' s moralit y.
Th ese were strengthened by John New ton,
Rector of St Mary Woolnoth in the City, to
whom he turn ed for spiritual guidance .
Besides having und ergon e an Eva ngelica l
con ver sion much like Wilb erforc e' s, New ton
had captained a slave ship and so had per-
sonal experience of the way the trade was con-
ducted. The age nt principally res ponsi ble for
persuadin g Wilb erforce to take up the cause ,
however , was Thomas Clarkso n, lately do wn
from Cambridge and already engage d in
organizin g abolitionist efforts aro und the
country.
As this is a biograph y of Wilb erfor ce and
not a history of the anti-slavery movem ent ,
Hague very properly concentrates on the strug-
gles within Parliament. All the same, some
acknow ledge ment of the broader issues
involved would have been welcome. How
import ant were the slave trade and slavery?
Were they simply regrettable practices, like
the excess ive use of the death penalty - which
Wilberforce also camp aigned aga inst - or pil-
lars of the nation' s eco nomy? Hague is
shrew d enough not to be taken in by Eric Wil-
liamss claim that abolition was economica lly
moti vated . Otherwi se, however, he has little
to say regarding economica l matters. This is a
pity, for aboliti on was as much an eco nomic
as a social experiment. Had Hague referred to
Seymour Drescher ' s Econocide: British slav-
ery in the era of abolition (1977) he would
have found much that would have usefull y fle-
shed out his account, for without the trade
figures it is hard to assess the sca le of what the
abolitionists were attempting or, for that mat-
ter, what it was that they actually achieved.
In term s of Isaiah Berlin' s famou s distinc-
tion between the hedgeho g and the fo x,
one seeing a single big thin g, the other many
different thin gs, Hague is plainl y a fox.
The same goes for Steph en Tomkins, whose
William Wilbeiforce co vers much the sa me
ground but in a sprightlier mann er and with
rather more diversion s. Hague, as might be
expected from a for mer leader of the Co nserv-
ative Part y, is very goo d at explaining the
intri cacies of parli amentary politic s, but turn s
out to be no less knowledgeable on a host
of other topic s, among them the origins
of Lond on club s and the character of
eighteenth-century religiou s conversion.
Tomkin s, slim though his volume is, ranges
even more widely, hoppin g from topic to topic
so rapidly that his might alm ost be called the
grass hopper approach.
Christopher Leslie Bro wn, by way of con-
trast, is very much a hedgehog. The fact that
the footnotes of Moral Capital: Foundations
of British abolitionism take up more space
than the ma in text indicates that it is a book
intend ed for scholars rather than the genera l
publi c. Furthermore it offers an acco unt of
the rise o f abo litio nis m that e nds more or le ss
at the point Wilb erforce enters the scene. Yet,
different though it is in term s of style and
approach from both Hague ' s and Steph en
Tomkins' s books, they all share one thin g in
common, namely a concern with the imp act
of Eva ngelica l thou ght on Briti sh politi cs.
Hague lea ves us in no doubt as to its
impa ct on Wilberforce, in that it was what led
him to ca mpaign not only aga inst the slave
trade but aga inst all the other sins of the age .
The Wilb erforce he describes was no wishy-
washy liberal but a hardlin e Christian fund a-
ment alist whose cond emn ation of the slave

trade was all of a piece with his fulmin ations
over adultery, fornic ation , drunkenn ess and
all the other practic es he saw as eating aw ay
at the moral fibre of the nation. By extension,
the sa me is show n as applying to the other
Eva nge licals. At one point Hague refer s to
them as bein g the "Fathers of the Victorians".
Yet whe n he comes to weighing up the fac-
tors that gave rise to the abo litionism of the
l78 0s he is cauti ous, presumably bec ause he
does not wa nt to give the impression that he
is makin g greater claim s than are warra nted
by the evide nce. It was , he tells us, "a fortu-
nate chance" that Wilb erforc e' s con version
occurr ed "at the very mom ent when the battle
over the ex istence of the slave trade was
read y to be fought". According to Brown ' s
acco unt it was not "a fortun ate chance" at all.
On the contrary : but for the religious conver-
sion of Wilb erforce and his assoc iates there
would have been no battle. Disappro ving of
the slave trad e was one thin g; active ly ca m-
paignin g for its abo lition was so mething dif-
ferent, while the passin g and implementin g
of laws providi ng for its termin ation we re
something else aga in. People could have
go ne on disappro vin g of the slave trade for
eve r. What changed the situation was the
aw akening of the Eva nge lica l conscience .
Not for Brown, therefore, vague stateme nts
about "the opportunities of indi vidual s to
change hi story" bein g " shaped by the great
social and intellectual forces of their times".
By hi s acco unt, it was the Eva nge lica ls who
shaped histor y, not "forces" . The battle ove r
the slave trade was fou ght bec ause "the
Saints" we nt marchin g in.
Where Bro wn gets into troubl e is in defin-
ing the nature and practi cal uses of moral capi-
tal. Would its acc umulation make soldiers
more loyal , indu ce armies to fight better?
Would it rend er other countries more tract-
able? Or was it simply something that could
be drawn on when the need arose, as Britain
did when it used abolitionism as an exc use for
occu pying parts of Africa? Brown does not
tell us. Hague, on the other hand, is very good
at show ing us Wilberforce 's views on the mat-
ter , which could not have been more simple
and straightforw ard. Co untries that sinned
would be punished, as was eviden t in Brit-
ain's loss of its Ameri can colonies, the storms
that had lately wasted its fleets, the diseases
currently decim atin g its armies, the manifest
incomp etenc e of its generals and all the other
misfortun es that had lately befallen it. The
purp ose of moral refor mation was to lighten
Britain of its "load of guilt and infamy" .
M any polit ician s write books, but few pro-
duce significa nt wor ks of scholars hip. Like
Win ston Churchill and Roy Jenkin s before
him, Willi am Hague has a gift for writing
histor y of a kind that is both well researched
and appea ling to the general reader. When his
WilIinm Pitt the Younger was chose n Histor y
Book of the Yea r in 2004, many marvelled
that anyo ne so active ly involved in politi cs
could summo n up the time and energy to pur-
sue what amounted to a seco nd career. Th at
he has managed to complete his William
Wilherf orce two ye ars after becoming
shadow Fore ign Secr etar y is an eve n grea ter
wonder. Christopher Brown ' s Moral Capital
is rem arkabl e in another way , namely in man-
aging to say so mething genuinely new about
a subjec t that has been di scu ssed and written
about for two centuri es; and that , too, is no
small achieve me nt.
MEMOIRS 9
Gowon ' s regim e was only one of seve ral
The stressful bane milit ary dict ator ship s in relation to which
Soy inka had to negoti ate a prin cipl ed
position. There was Mohammadu Buh ari
(1983- 85), depict ed as almost equally vio-
n his return to Nige ria in late 1959, A NDR EW VA N D ER VLl ES lent and corrupt, the co mpromised and dupli c-
O after five years in England, and with
money from the Rockefe ller Founda-
tion, Wole Soyinka journeyed extensive ly
Wal e Sa yinka
itous Ibrahim Babangid a (1985- 93), with
who m Soy inka had several enco unters, and
the crimin al psychopath Sani Ab ach a, whose
throu gh Wes t Afri ca, study ing form s of myth Y OU M U S T SET F ORTH A T D AW N years in power (late 1993 to mid-1 998)
and ritual, their plac e in dail y life, and their A memoir Soyink a describ es with eviscerating cl arity of
creati ve potential for repr esentin g the 528pp. Methuen . Paperback, £ 19.99. purpo se. He admits that the demands of "a
region' s cultural identities in a time of polit- 978 04 13 77628 0 publi c cause" often impose decision s "that
US: Random House. $ 16.95. 978 0 375 755 14 9
ical change. His travels allowe d him , in his appea r, on the surface, to contradi ct one' s
ow n words, to follow Og un (or Ugun), his democratic convictions and indeed , lifelong
"demiurge of wa r and creati vity" , a deit y ature. Thi s new mem oir adds to his autobio- pursuit" ; pragmati sm occas ionally won out
whose many faces includ e that of god of gra phica l sequence Ake (childhood), lsara aga inst his virulent opp osition to milit ary
the road - a place of death , but also of com- (the life of his father), and lb adan (his own rule, and he found him self able to work with
muni on , adve nture and po ssib ility. Soyink a early manh ood, to 1965), an account of the one milit ary regim e (Murtala Muh amm eds,
reflects on this time in his new me moir, You playwright-p oet less as crea tive artist than as 1975 to early 1976), while not bein g able
Must Set Forth At Dawn (the title taken from public intellectu al, relu ctant politician and to bring him self to deal with the "fascistic
a poem written about these expeditions): "Per- popul ist agitator. and was trel 'democracy' of Alh aji Shehu
haps 1 ass ume d the fun ction of the wa nderer Soyinka's descripti ons of his involvement Shagari's National Party of Nige ria"
whose occupation was to bear witness to the in the life of his nati on over the past half (1979- 83). Always, inevitably, he writes, he
road' s many phases that mirrored not merely cen tury sugges t a thrilling ride along an has had to co ntend with "the Nigerian
human fate but, more directl y and effec- uncommonly rock y road . Nigeria, uneasy killer factor" , nam ely "the stress ful bane of
tively, an imm edi ate entity in form ation" . with itself from the start, has lurched from the mere act of critica l thought within a
The entity was, of course, Nige ria, which crisis to cri sis, throu gh ci vil wa r, corruption soc iety where power and cont rol rema in the
ga ined its independ enc e within a ye ar of and no fewer than nine milit ary coups d 'etat, playthin gs of imbeciles, psychop ath s and
predator s" .
General Olu segun Oba sanjos role as a
strongman of Niger ian politi cs receives
insightful analysis. It was to Ob asanjo, the
offic er co mma nding federal forc es in the
country ' s Western Region at the time of the
Biafran secess ion, that Soyinka was com-
missioned to deli ver a message which
co mpromised his patri otism in the eyes of the
milit ary state. The Gene ral painted him self
the "conqueror of Biafra" after the victory of
the federal forces in 1970, but Soy inka dis-
misses Obasanjos war memoirs as a tissue of
fabri cation s, sugges ting he is "most pron e ...
to the extreme latitud es of crea tive licence" ,
to rewr iting histor y to suit him self , and to
eleva ting his ow n role in it. The men share a
hometo wn , Abeokut a, and Soyink a has had
frequent occas io n to observe this "man of
fluctuati ng destini es" , someo ne he cas ts as
a mock-h ero, all too frequentl y the benefici-
ary of fate. Sec ond-in-comm and to Murt ala
Muh amm ed , Ob asanjo becam e head of state
"by default " when Muh amm ed was assass i-
nated , and later ove rsaw the transition to
Shagari' s disastrou s civ ilian rule. Imp risoned
und er Ab ach a, Ob asanj o emerged from
prison in 1998 - "now an accredited civilian"
- and swe pt to power in heavily criti cized
Wol e Soyinka, Ibadan, Nigeria, 1969 elections in 1999, and again, "under eve n
more discredit ed circumstances " , in 200 3.
Soy inka 's retu rn, and which he wo uld watch We glimpse Soyink a' s early sense of polit- Several month s ago , Oba sanjo saw power
"turn both carrion and scave nger as it killed ica l com mitm ent as a student in Leed s and descend to his hand-picked successor, Uma ru
and consume d its kind" , ove r the next fort y London in the late 1950 s, enduring petty Yar' Adu a, in an equa lly contentious poll -
yea rs. In the decay of his country' s road s, he racism, but ag itated, too, by the outra ge of which Soy inka him self argued should be sus-
reads the State ' s retr eat fr om humani sm , a apartheid in South Africa, and by politi cal pend ed . The long enta ngleme nt has clearly
"fall from grace" littered with acci dent vic- sca nda ls and corruption at home, as Britain continued beyond the pages of the memoi r.
tim s and other roadkill. Th roughout this time, prepared to grant Nigeria its independ ence in Soyink a owes no allegiances, and so
Soyinka has been among his country's pre- 1960. He describ es the "firestorm" in West- spea ks truth to power , show ing none of the
eminent intellectu als and most challenging ern Nigeria followin g the elections of 1965, reticence about criticizing Afric an leader s
polemi cists. The contours of hi s prodi gious his involvement in a radio broadcast farce, which mars the crede ntials of some intellectu-
car eer are well kno wn , and includ e powerful , variously interpr eted as a prank or an als (he refers, for exa mple, to the "stale
evocative, densely textured plays (including attempted coup (fo llowe d by his trial and tobacco as h-end of the Hitlerit e Rob ert
The Lion and the Jewel, Kongi's Harvest, acquitta l), and the chaos and destructi on Mugabe" ), The account of his oppos ition to
Death and the King's Horseman), two novels attenda nt on the Biafran secession - in which Abacha, from exile in the United States and
(The Interpreters, Season ofAnomy), antho lo- he tried to medi ate, and for which Ge nera l throu gh frequ ent lobb ying meetin gs and
gies of poetry, and collec tions of essays and Yakubu Gowon ' s regime impri soned him for publi c addresses across the globe, attests
lectur es. In 1986 he becam e the fir st Africa n two yea rs and four months, much of wh ich particul arly strongly to Soy inka 's commit-
writer to be awa rded the Nobe l Prize for Liter- Soy inka spent in solitary confin ement. ment to rem ainin g independ ent , in no one' s
TL S AUGUST 17 200 7
10
pay, de termined, shrill, the fly in the oint-
ment of so many gove rnments - in Africa and
elsew here - which erre d, tragicall y, by refu s-
ing to sideline the regime or condemn it forc e-
fully enoug h (fasc inating appendices repro-
duce letters pert ainin g to this period in parti-
cular, including corres pondence bet ween
Abacha and M andela).
Soyinka gives a gripping acco unt of his
dangerou s re-entry into Nigeria, from Beni n,
after a trip to Europe, durin g the chaos follow-
ing the annulme nt of the M ay 1993 elections
- a peri od wh ich left the President- Elect ,
Abi ola, incarcerated , presaged the end of
Babangid a' s rule, and sparked the rise of
Abach a. Initi ally, no taxi dri ver will take
Soyink a to Lagos, although all those asse m-
bled at the bord er recogni ze him instantl y
and regard him as a leader in the pro-
dem ocracy movement. Even tually one agrees
and, despit e concern s that some drug-cra zed
vigilante manning a barri cade will not recog-
nize "Prof" befor e shooting him, they com-
plete the j ourn ey, Soyink a' s driver becomin g
ever bolder at each road block as his passen-
ger's stature sec ures safe passage: " He took
--------------------------~.--------------------------
ew "great men" of history have taken
P such pains as Stalin to conc eal, distort
or destroy evidence of their ear ly life.
Stalin was a tall teller of tales about himself ,
engag ing throu ghout his life in a process of
self-invention. Memoirs of contemporaries,
many written long after the events, are also
unreliable and self-serving. Simon Sebag Mon-
tefior e acknowledges the pitfalls of working
with these sources . But in his racy biograph y,
Young Stalin, he cannot resist a goo d story.
The result is a readable but highl y colour ed
portrait of Stalin from his birth to the October
Revo lution which largely disregards the
author's ow n warning signs. Sebag
Montefior e has gone to great pain s to find new
sources, particularly in Georg ia, where he
worked in archives and interviewed survivors
of Stalin's early years and famil y members.
What they contribute mainly , however, is
another layer of stories to the Stalinist myth.
The author's main aim is to show Stalin as a
more active and influenti al figure in the Bol-
shevik movement in the Caucas us than the
older and by now discredited account s of Trot-
sky and the Menshevik Nikolai Sukhanov
would have had us believe. Biographi es by
Robert Tucker and, especially, Robert Service
have already revised that perception. To go
beyond them requir es Sebag Montefiore to
exaggerate Stalin ' s politic al awakening and
his direct participation in and leadership of
strikes and bank robberies that provided fund s
for the Bolshevik Party.
Sebag Montefiore spee ds up Stalin' s
comin g to Mar xism , in which he actua lly
lagged behind many of his conte mporaries .
Although Stalin was a di sobedi ent student in
the Tiflis Seminary, he did not openly cha l-
lenge authority like his comrades, and was
expelled only bec ause he did not show up for
his exa ms . Oth ers we re made of sterner stuff.
A few months later, fort y-odd students boldl y
resigned in a collecti ve protest. Sebag Mont e-
fiore has Stalin j oinin g the Russian Social
Dem ocrati c Labou r Party at its incepti on in
1898; but the Tiflis committee was only
form ed in 1899, and Stalin was eo- opted in
190 1. Soon after, he left und er a cloud for
Batumi , the oil port on the Black Sea . There,
BIOGRAPHY
offence at having to slow down at all - Whas
the matter with you? You no get eyes? You no
see who I dey ca rry for inside ca r?" . Eve ntu-
ally, inside Lagos, they encounter pandem o-
nium , and Soyink a reflec ts on the natur e of
mobili zed ma sses:
A teem ing crow d of humanit y is an awe-
insp iring phenom enon . As an objec tive spec ta-
cle, that is all it is, a spec tacle, but when you
are within it, when you are one of the bits and
pieces that make up the tumult, you become
one with it, you share in the force that it repre-
sents and you endure a loss of identity, exce pt
as a compressed lump within the crowd. I con-
fess that I have never expe rienced being fully
melted into the pack, so I can only approxi-
mate. When I am caught in one, I can not wait
to find a way out of the swar ming pro miscuity.
The safest crow ds are those that are made up of
a majority of individuals who know why they
have coa lesced into one, why they have chosen
to j ettison their individual identities to form a
new substantive , a mass. One can talk to such
a crow d. One can reason with it; one can even
modify its purpose and direction. Above all,
however, one can re-create such a crow d, trans-
Fun with my buddy
AL FR ED RIEB ER
Simon S eb a g M ont efio r e
YOUNG STA LIN
496pp.Weidenfeld and Nicolson. £25.
9780 29785068 7
US: McArthur. $34.95.
978 I 55278646 8
Seb ag Montefiore has him turnin g the cit y
"upside down". The evide nce here is highl y
circumstantial, and the picture of Stalin
sprea ding "blood and fire" ignores the fact
that the workers had something to do with
the strike movement.
As for Stalin the bank robb er, it has long
been kno wn that he was involved in planning
and perhaps guiding seve ra l "heists", as the
author likes to call them . But that is not
enough for Sebag Montefiore. He relies
heavily for colour, dial ogue and fact on the
mem oir s of Josef Davrichewy, publi shed
posthumously in Fran ce in 1979 und er the
sugges tive title, "Ah Wh at Fun We Had
with M y Buddy Stalin" . A n adve nturer,
Davrichewy claim ed, among other thin gs, to
be Stalin ' s half-brother. Se bag Mo ntefiore
acknow ledges that Stalin subsequently led a
" shadowy" caree r in Baku , but in a short
chapter called , typicall y, " Boss of the Black
City" he portr ays Stalin as runnin g prot ection
rackets and kidn appin gs. The prohlem with
eva luating the ev idence is that the author
offers three footnotes; the seco nd lists thirt y-
one different sources, some arc hival, some
seco ndary. Th ere are many smoking guns in
this account; the question is who is holdin g
them . There is no question that Sebag Mont e-
fiore has control over his sources; the details
give an overwhelming impr ession of veri-
similitude . But all too often the dubi ou s
becomes possibl e, the possibl e prob able and
the prob able cert ain within the space of a
single episode . In discu ssing Stalin' s role in
1917, Sebag Montefiore adm its, "Stalin flour-
TLS AUGUST 17 200 7
form the solidified mass of humanit y, and turn
it, at its most violent, towards paci fism or,
from its most pacific conditio n, make it heave,
a mountai n in conv ulsion.
Self-dramati zing, eve n perhap s a little self-
agg randizing, there is here, nonetheless, writ-
ing of the highest calibr e: where Soyinka the
dram atist reflect s on the power of words to
move, and moves his reader s with an acco unt
of a death-d efying journey.
There are also, however, passages which
an unch arit able read er might consider inade-
quately self-consc ious ove rwr iting - as in
this recoll ection of his response to bein g
invited to dine with Nelso n Mandela, at a
dinn er hosted by Danielle Mitt errand in
Paris, in 1990:
Pity that individual - never mind Bertold
Brecht ! - who has no one to call a hero. There
was no way that I co uld miss an intimate
dinn er with Nelson Mandela, a first direct
enco unter since he was released from priso n!
Have passpo rt, will trave l. Visa was waiting.
Off I flew two nights later, with nothing
beyond the proverbial toothbrush.
But we forgive Soyink a such lapses, and
Joseph Stalin, 1902
ished in the sha dows ", yet in his descripti ons
of Stalin in Batumi and Baku he has him oper-
ating in the full light of day. In a curious way,
Sebag Mont efiore' s picture is a mirror image
of the official Stalini st myth , minu s some of
the less savo ury aspects: Stalin as the preco -
cious Marxist, the youthful leader of strikes
and revolutionary activity, the " Lenin of the
Caucas us". When all the flamb oyant mem-
oirs and offic ial Stalinist hype are set aside,
what rem ain s is a deviou s, manipul ati ve,
deceitful figur e, brut al and coa rse to be sure ,
but posing as a man of action who was most
effective operating out of the limelight.
Sebag Montefiore is not much interested
in Stalin's politi cs or his ideas. He relegates
a discussion of Stalin' s most famou s theor eti-
cal wor k, on the nationaliti es question , to a
enjoy his exciteme nt. There are lighth earted
moment s, too, as when Soyinka narr ates his
invol vement in high- spirit ed - and highl y
serious - esca pades, like stealing what he
takes to be a cas t of the famou s bron ze head
of Ife, a long-lost, looted cultu ral treasure,
from the hom e of a Braz ilia n architect in
Bahia, only to discover its altoge ther less
lofty pro venance: it was a cas t purchased
from a British Mu seum gift shop .
Readers eage r for reflec tion by Soyinka on
the author's private or crea tive life will be dis-
appointed. He mak es brief mention of so me
famil y memb ers, and pro vides anecdo tes
about a few produ ctions of his plays. Thi s is
not that kind of memoir , however. It is,
rather, a testimony to Soyink a ' s long involve-
ment at the centre of Niger ian public life, an
answe r to his critics (among them tho se
younger, Marxist writers and intellectu als
who attac ked his art as insuffic ientl y engaged
throu ghout the 1970s), and a stateme nt of
affiliation and com mitment. " I am back" , he
co ncludes at the end of the narrati ve, remem -
berin g his return fro m exile in 1998, " where 1
should never have left" .
footn ote in the text. As a result he misses
the main reaso n for Lenin ' s interest in Stalin .
Terrori sts and bank robb ers were a kop ek a
doze n in the wild South Caucas us (and the
Arm eni an Dashn akt sutiun Part y, bar ely men-
tioned by Sebag Montefiore, carri ed out far
more assass inatio ns than the Bolsheviks, let
alone "Stalin' s ga ngs" ). By contrast, there
we re very few memb ers of the Bol shevik
faction who recognized the import ance of
winning support from the non-Ru ssian nation-
alities without granting them full autonomy
within the movement. Stalin was one of
these. His real contribution to the revolution-
ary cause in Baku was to cultivate the
Mu slim radica ls organized into Himm at
(Sebag Mont efiore errs in stating that Stalin
was one of the found ers of the Party), which
later in 1919 merged with the Aze rba izhan
Co mmunist Party.
Instead Sebag Montefiore is more inter-
ested in the salac ious detail s of Stalin' s sex
life. But this leads him into his most egre-
gious mishandlin g of sources. He reproduces
a docum ent from the Party archives in Mos-
cow purporting to pro ve that while in Siberia
Stalin seduced and impr egnated a thirt een-
year -old girl, an act "so outrageo us as to be
legend ary" . But the photocop y proves noth-
ing of the sort. It is a report of the KGB
to the sec retariat of the Central Co mm ittee
expos ing as a forgery a docum ent publi shed
in Life magazin e ident ifying Stalin as an
agen t of the tsarist sec ret poli ce. A corr ect
description of the docum ent appea rs else-
where in the text, but the misreadin g cann ot
help hut raise doubt s in the mind of the
rea der about other possibl e misattributions.
Mor e rea ssurin g is Sebag Montefiore ' s dis-
missal of the old rumour s of Stalin as a police
age nt, although he keep s referrin g to them
as if he is reluct ant to let the issue die.
Dealin g with Stalin in 1917, Simon Sebag
Mont efi ore adheres clo sely to the sta ndard
interpretati ons and provides no surprises . For
the reader who enjoys a highl y spiced
biograph y with an emphas is on Stalin as
ga ngster and lecher, this is the book. Readers
see king more serious fare will need to look
elsewhere.

magine, if you ca n bear it, Berti e Wooster
I with drive and ambition, Jeeves with atti-
tude, as if the pair of them had spen t some
time in Austra lia. In this ega litar ian mutation ,
master and man are both prone to a narrow
but rigoro us deployme nt of Anglo-Saxo n
exp letives ("fuck , fuck , fuck" , says Bertie
during one crisis) wh ich he lps sustain thei r
righteo us dismay at the bung ling wor ld they
see k to rescue. Stee l yourse lf fo r a laddish
doll op of GQ magaz ine ("Have you see n that
Fre nch woma n reporte r in the front row?") .
Hug yourse lf and stir the concoction with a
cup of tears from the New Man novels of
Nick Hornb y. Be sure to use a long spoo n.
All done? Then you are starting to get the
flavour of this grimly gripping account of life
at the top under To ny Blair , hand-writt en at
the end of eac h exhausting day by the mos t
significa nt eyew itness yet to eme rge : the man
who was nomi nally press secretary , but in
fact far more, to the Labour leader and Prime
Mi nister from 1994 to 2003 . Sober through-
out, if not alway s entire ly sane , Alastair
Camp be ll felt confiden t enough to propose
cour ses of action directly to Bill Clinton, to
the surprise of deferenti al Whit e House staff-
ers. With George W. Bush he discussed Go d
(" You still do n' t believe?" "No, I don 't ") and
their shared experience s as joggers and ex-
dru nks (Dubya's consumption , it turns out,
was negligible in compar ison to Campbe ll's) .
Our diari st seems to have dispen sed his
chutzpah freely, to statesme n, ad mira ls and
gene rals, though he never loses a sense of
awe about being at the centre of even ts. Part
of the price he paid for this was hav ing rou -
tinely to witness Blair in varying states of
undress, in the bath , on the loo, maki ng lunch
for the kid s and weari ng a very silly pair of
slippe rs. Neve r mind. Things rarely got so
bad between Blair and his Chancellor and suc-
cessor, Gor don Bro wn, or with Peter Mandel-
son, Blai r's patron and protege , or with the
hated BBC, that To ny and AIi co uldn' t "have
a laugh" about it; and when they did, Ca mp-
bell - never Blair - had to go off and have a
qui et weep . On mos t such occasions, a gener-
ous rea der will th ink better of this ang ry and
vulnera ble man for doing so.
Much has been made of Campbell's anger,
its wellsprings clearly deep. On a plane with
Blair in their early days, he refer s to an irrit at-
ing fellow passenger enlisted as their "ma nda-
tor y hate figu re". In print , Cam pbell can
often sound as chippy as John Prescott, albeit
with less ju stification : few Cambridge und er-
grad uates reg ularly head-butt cigare tte
machin es, as the diarist admits that he did.
Yet there is much more here than his loathin g
of his for mer trade (the BBC' s John Hum-
phr ys is "up himself', the pundit Si mon
Jenkin s a "total wa nker"), or his despair at
feebler mini ster s like Frank Field and Harriet
H arrn an , w hose me s se s the overb urde ne d,
sometimes self-pitying factotum has to clean
up.
Camp be ll rec ords many kindn esses and
eve n comm its so me himself. What the diaries
also confirm is a whole network of vexed rela-
tionship s involving Brow n, Mandelson and
Ca mpbell, Blair' s three "genuises". Bro wn
stands aloof. The others jos tle for Ton y ' s ear
and approva l with the likes of Jonath an Pow-
ell, Richard Wil son and A nj i Hunt er (all staff
at No 10) and Joh n Presco tt. Campbell makes
plain that he admires Prescott , Blair' s touchy
but loyal deput y; he respects calm Margaret
DIARIES
Spun out
MI CHA EL WHIT E
Al a st air Ca m p be l l
THE B LA IR YEARS
Extracts from the AlastairCampbcll diaries
794 pp. Hutchinson. £25.
978009 179629 7
US: Knopf. $35. 978 0 307 2683 10
Beckett, her pens tied neatl y in a rubber band.
He ca n' t help likin g Robin Coo k ("for all his
diddling and pomp osity" ) or - strange ly for a
trib alist - the Tory MP (and fellow-d iarist)
Alan Cla rk. Eve n Prin ce Charles is "basically
a decent bloke": as Ca mpbe ll sees him , sad
and unfulfilled .
The riva lries and manoe uvre s of these pro-
vide much for the outsider to laugh about.
Until her death in the Par is car cra sh, Blair
and Campbell behave like a coupl e of schoo l-
boy rivals ove r Princess Diana, with whom
they have a clandestin e dinner in Hackn ey
under the disappro ving glares of their part-
ners. Throughout the volume , Cherie Blair
and Ca mpbell's partn er Fiona Millar do dut y
as Bertie Wo oster ' s fearsom e aunts, co n-
stan tly on hand to disrupt the pair ' s plans.
What doe s Di wa nt?, Cam pbell muses;
" You", replies Fiona . When Ca mpbell tells
Blair that he can ' t wea r a "hippy" over coa t
for a press conference with Vladimir Puti n,
Cher ie (never Camp bell's biggest fan) hisse s,
" You are a total fascist" .
Here, as so often, Campbell-Jeeves is
right: Berti e-Bl air borrows a pro tec tion
office r's coa t. Yet it is Blai rs self-belief,
ove rco ming his ow n doubt s and others ',
whic h keep s New Labou r' s boat afloa t. " You
love me rea lly" , Blair teases a repro achful
Ca mpbell - who ulti mately knows his place.
He loves to reco rd the plentiful comp liment s
he receives (handso me, clever, indispensa-
ble, tall ), but resists sugges tions that he
should becom e an elec ted MP or mini ster. In
an otherwise equal relationship , which mark s
it out fro m other leader/spokesman teams,
Blair retains the upp er hand.
Most gove rnments attract a moth-li ke ca st
of grotesques, courtiers and hangers-on
whom eve n Wodehou se might have hesitated
to invent: Cheries "style guru" , Carole
Ca plin, who m our diarist marked dow n ear ly
as Tro uble, long before her co nman boy-
friend, Peter Foster, tried to "help" the Blair s
buy flats and plun ged them into a medi a
stor m; Clare Short, the Cabinet's impossibl y
self-indulgen t "bag lady" ; Jacques Chirac,
the stereo typ ica l French charmer with the
wa lk-o n part, w ho se sc he m ing vanity make s
Coo k look like a team player; Gor don
Bro wn ' s knu ckle-d ragging spin doct or, Char-
lie Whel an, a sledge ham mer to M andelson ' s
Faberge egg . Ca mpbe ll portrays these, often
affectionately, as believabl e monsters.
Yet ma ny reader s will di slike both the tone
and the co ntent of The Blair Years . If we
grant that his famil y life claim s all Ca mp-
bell ' s spare time, the book still seems relent-
lessly phil istine (footba ll and pop stars , no
pro per book s or theatre), and it is at times
both coarse and manipul ati ve, as the pro tago-
nists strugg le to keep tomorr ow' s ma lign
TL S AUGUST 17 2 0 0 7
headli nes from ove rwhelmi ng them . Oth ers
may look more kindl y on Ca mpbell's harrow-
ing descripti ons of the relentl ess pressure of
mode rn gove rn ment. It is a wor ld whe re a
pr ime minister ' s day can take his attention
fro m Belfast to Bos nia or Baghd ad and back
again via bog-stand ard comprehensives ,
Mandelson' s mortgage probl ems or
Humphrey the Downin g Street mog. (When
Cherie Blair, allergic to ca ts, is rum our ed
to have had him murd ered, Humphrey must
be traced: to hi s reti rem ent in Purl ey.)
AIastair Campbell, 2007
Such a roller-coaster life is obviously exhil-
arating : it is also a torment from which
instant , ubiquito us communications provi de
virtually no esca pe. Blair has to deal with a
Mo Mow lam pro blem (there are many) down
a phone line from a To kyo res tauran t. The
Omag h bombi ngs in August 1998 bring him
home on the first day of his holidays. When
Clinton falters durin g the Mon ica Lewinsky
affair , Blair takes on the role of leader of the
West, drumming up suppor t over Kosovo.
Elsew here, Ca mpbell wa tches Blair and the
Irish Tao iseac h, Berti e Ahern, the
latter straig ht from his mother's fun eral ,
engage d in so ul-rotting micro -neg otiatio ns
that eve ntually produ ce Northern Ireland' s
Good Friday Ag reeme nt, perhap s Blair' s
finest hour.
What was Blairite Labour trying to
achieve? Campbell is no philoso pher: a practi-
cal man, he prefers pollsters. Yet, despite
charges by the Left of betrayal and of a
poodle-like attitude to Amer ica which haunt
them from the start, and de spite Rlair's instinc-
tive lurch to the Right whenever Rupert
Murdo ch is nearby (Ca mpbe ll's heart is
Kinnockite Labour , his head Blairite), they are
activists who believe - as Lord Salisbury, for
instance, did not - that gove rnments can make
Britain and the world much better places. That
surely makes them socia lists of a sort.
At this distanc e, the results look distinctly
mixed. Ca mpbell famo usly did not do policy
(or Go d), and the boo k' s index does not list a
sing le entry under "environment" - a signi fi-
can t ove rsight that could torpedo New
Labour's legacy. It is still more surpr ising -
11
dodgy, eve n - that "Iraq" warra nts no
indexed listing, though it hangs over the back
half of the book. Blair' s ea rly experience of
ineffectu al EU and UN negotiations, of
Sadd am Hussein ' s devious de laying tact ics,
and the necessity to deplo y Am erican power
- hard and soft - to end the killing in the
former Yugoslav ia, all point him towards the
fateful decision to suppor t the 200 3 invasion ,
with or without UN support. As ea rly as
1998, Blair had told the Cabinet that it was
"not an op tion to do nothi ng".
The crucial word in Campbell's subtitle,
however, is "extracts" . Campbell has sought,
honourably by his ow n lights, to publish an
interesting account of his nine years at Blair' s
side when it still has high market value; simul-
taneously, he has tried to mini mize damage to
his beloved Labour tribe by excising many rev-
elations that would undermi ne Gordo n
Brow n' s capac ity to keep the party in power.
From this, Brow n benefits most, the reader
least. The outcome is inevitably frustrating:
Hamlet without Fortinbras. It is safe to write -
at length - about the Princess of Wales,
because she is dead. But how much does the
diarist know about those Blair-Brown battles
ove r policy and prim acy that he isn't tellin g
us? Obviously a lot. What is he holdin g back
about that Bush-Blair meeting at the Presi-
dent' s ranch in Craw ford , Texas, in the run-up
to war? What precisely was Campbell's ow n
role in the naming of Dr David Kelly, the
weapons scientist whose death led ultimately
to Campbell's ow n departure from No 10- by
now too much part of the story to be offurther
use as Blair's media fixer?
To these and other controve rsies of the
period we get "not much of an answe r". What
Campbell pro vides, rather, is an acco unt of
what he felt at the time. Moreo ver, the pub-
lished narrati ve provides no clu es as to where ,
how and why it has been edited. This wea k-
ness is com pound ed by the decision not to
contextuali ze the more bewildering diary
entries : we want italici zed summaries to
exp lain why the Prime Mini ster is gra ppling
with heal thcare reform today when we left
him somew here else yes terday. There is too
much "he said" and " I said" . At the risk of pro-
voking fresh bile about media self-absorption,
Campbell is also surprisingly coy about his
ow n tradecraft , the stor ies spun, suppressed
or handed out as favour s or to dish a rival.
The Sun's Trevor Kavanagh has one less
index entry than I do, which is misleading.
But if voters will find no startling revela-
tions on these pages , and jou rnalism studen ts
will learn no tric ks from them, both gro ups
will be able to see how speed, clarity of
response and (sometimes) openn ess fre-
quently serve d Campbell well in ha ndling the
demand s of the round -the-cloc k media -
though his ju dgem ent eve ntua lly betrayed
him o ver the Iraq do ssiers. If his diaries also
fail sufficiently to question his ow n means to
ends, that too reflec ts his ow n journ alistic
background : compare, for instance, the
medi a' s recent failur e to exa mine their ow n
hyped misreport ing of the abortive poli ce
inqu iry into Blai rs "loans for honour s".
Ala stair Ca mpbell has a good eyew itness 's
story to tell here. He tells half of it in terms at
least as honest as those deployed by his detrac -
tors. But his doctor was wrong to tell the spin
doctor that his probl em was getting "all of the
shit and none of the glory". He got more than
his share of the glory - and dinner with Di.
12
Reade him, therefore
Why biography, however rewarding, can never tell us as much about Shakespeare
as the plays and poems - and even the Droeshout engraving - can
cademic Eng lis h began as a liter-
A ary and lin gui stic study. Over the
past half- century it has change d
its natur e. On the one hand it
has becom e a kind of theor etical, politic al
sociology of the medi a; on the other, it
prac tises and stud ies biograph y. Biograph y
itself has taken new form s, often hopefull y
aspiring towards the work of art: great len gth ,
essayistic inter venti on s, and perspecti ves that
include the biograph er ' s biograph y. The
wo rd "biography" itself has moved far from
meanin g the chronicle of a life. A recent
book about Lond on by Peter Ackroy d
carries the subtitle The Biography. A new
series of short book s-ab out-books handling
texts like Candide, The Origin of Spec ies
and Das Kapital, describ es each o n its
du stj ack et as a "biography" of the classic in
qu esti on. And of cour se the word biography
is neat er th an " literary-cr itica l, hi stori cal ,
sociolog ica l, phil osophi cal and theor eti cal
analysis" .
Th e probl em is that biograph y loses
mor e of its charac ter the mor e fashi onabl e
it becom es. Th ere have been prot ests at
thi s infl ation , arg uing (for instance) that
while eve ryone rea ds Steph en Gree nblau 's
Life of Sh akespeare, no on e is readin g
Sh akespeare. But it is hard to see what
such prot ests achi eve. The literary culture
in Brit ain gives signs of havin g change d
beyond the poi nt of reca ll. We are n' t at
the moment creatin g much of value in the
literary arts (unl ess film and pop mu sic are
two of them): the bookm ark et is fill ed
with high- sellin g wor ks of social utilit y,
pro vidin g information , or by their oppos ites ,
giant narr ati ves of fant asy and romance -
and biogr aph y could now be said to borro w
some thing from both .
Th e current situation invites us to co nsider
the limit s of eve n the best bio gr aphi cal
writing - because the ge nre itself ha s offered
for many yea rs very rea l and enj oya ble
readin g. Of Shakespeari an biograph y in
particular there has been a flo od ove r the
last few decades, goo d, bad and indifferent.
I don 't by any mean s intend a survey of
Lives of Shakespe are, let alone some kind
of review of them ; onl y, in the presence
of this decomp osition of biograph y, to
con sid er how hard it is to presum e to know
what the life of a man like Shakespear e
actu all y is.
It is often conc eded that Shakespeare ' s
great distanc e from us in time makes for
diffi culty. There are abysses in our
under standing of sixtee nth-cen tury culture
that histori ans can' t eas ily cro ss. Even mor e
than thi s is the fact that, give n the lack of
interest among Elizabethans in the lives of all
but a few person s, well-bo rn or important
politi call y, we kno w ex traordinarily littl e
about the real life of Shakespeare . Gi ven thi s
ignoranc e, most biography either bri ngs into
play data which it is tend entious to suppose
releva nt to him at all , or makes mor e and
BARBARA E VE RE T T
mor e rem ark abl e use of ficti on (a nd thi s is
true eve n of scholarly-see ming, qu asi-factu al
acco unts).
But there is an issue eve n beyond thi s of
hon est dearth of informati on . The biograph er
ca n be led by sho rtco mings in his or her
materi als to pass ove r, or simply fail to asse nt
to, a mu ch deeper probl em . Th e life of an
imaginative ge nius is strictly spea king a bio-
graphy of the mind , and as such it is largely
hidd en from us, except through the work pro-
duced . The Life of a writer is therefore cen-
trall y criti cal, allow ing what has been writte n
to guide and control what is as ked. Oth er
kind s of inform ation may be both absor bing
and valuable, perh aps necessary : but they
demand to be call ed something like ex terna l,
or even superficial. Becau se thi s is an arg u-
ment not ce rtain to ea rn ag ree me nt fr om
every reade r or writer of bio graph y, 1 wan t
briefl y to thro w light on the Shakespearian
probl em by referenc e to two good mod ern
Six paintings from th e sixteenth and seventeenth centuries purporting to represent
WilIiam Shakespeare. C lockwise from the top : The Chandos Portrait (1600-10) ; th e
Soest Portrait (cl667); the Sanders Portrait (1603) ; the Janssen Portrait (cl610) ; th e
Flower Portrait (1620-40) ; and the Grafton Portrait.
bio gr aphi es of recent writers, nearer to us in
time and easier of app roa ch .
A few months ago , an enthusiastic review
in the TLS, by Timothy Mo wl, of A. N.
Wil son ' s Life of John Betj em an saw the
chief virtue of the bo ok as a con son anc e
between the subje ct of the Life and the biogra-
pher him se lf. Betjern an ' s essenti al gift (so
Mowl argued) was "his own superficiality" ,
and Wil son' s characteristic style of cool
and clever detachm ent made him "the ideal
TLS A U G US T 17 2007
biographer of such a man" . Thi s ma yor may
not be true - and Wilson's Life of Betj em an
is in man y ways an affectionate book. But
there is a ge neral prin cipl e here of some
interest, on e not far from Pop e' s insistenc e
that we must read a text "in the same spirit as
its auth or writ". Mowl come s clo se to suggest-
ing that the best subje cts for literar y bio-
graphy are "superficial" writers, and the best
writers of them superficial too . Ce rta inly,
Betj em an ' s verse might have sold altoge ther
few er copi es if it had been deeper, and might
eve n have been less goo d in its own way. But
the notion of the superficial impli es a mor al
bias perhaps intru sive, and might be bett er
rep laced by so mething at o nce larger and less
incriminatory: "social", for instanc e. It is the
socia l side of a writer's ex istence that mak es
him or her a go od subjec t for biography; and
in the view of man y biograph ers it may co nsti-
tute the life itself. And these presupposition s
have good sense on the ir side. Studies in the
souls of poet s and novelists are not entirely
desirabl e, and may eve n be offen sive.
But even the mo st lucid writers can raise a
sense of the limit s of the social. I wan t to
illustrate this from another biograph y of a
writer clo se to us in time, Zac hary Lead er' s
admirable Life of Kingsley Ami s: 900 pages
of documentary spoils, a triumph of the com-
puter' s po wer to retrieve and amass - letters,
journals, reviews, inter view s, anecdotes. At
once heavyweight and entertaining, tolerant
and shrewd in its intelligence, this is a bio-
graphy un likely to be superseded soon, if at
all. And yet some eve n of its warmest review-
ers - and the book was hugely success ful -
had one reservation : that Leader ' s book never
explains the story it tells. A highl y attrac tive
man as Ami s was, both intellectu al and gifted,
born the only child of indul gent parents,
grow ing up in petit bour geois comfort and
educated for a professional life rewarded
with success, money and honours: how
should such a man become (in their view ) a
mon ster, wo unding and out raging tho se
around him, regul arly alienating his lovers
and friend s?
A Life that tried serious ly to answe r such
question s would risk bein g oversystem atic .
But if Amis did have his rea son s, they were
prob abl y other than merely social. A mod ern
bio gr aph y tend s to ju stif y its sca le by assert-
ing the greatness of its subjec t. Ami s was a
brilli ant and enj oy able writer, but perha ps
not a grea t on e. An inci sive critic him self, he
may never have found in his own wor k the
standing that thi s biograph y gives him .
Wh en he con sidered the talents of his
friend Philip Larkin, he saw a degree of
conc entration and achieve me nt beyond his
own . Di sapp ointment with him self and his
fate could have produced the promi scuiti es
and rages of a man in man y ways kind and
judicious.
Though Leader was him self apparently a
friend of Amiss, his bio graph y neith er aims
at nor enco mpasses intimacy. Its first sen-
tenc e introduces its subjec t as "not only the
fin est Brit ish comic noveli st of the seco nd
half of the twenti eth century but a domin ant
force in the writing of the age" . Words like
"comic" , "dominant" and "force" do littl e but
defin e Ami s as a social presen ce and writer,
as of course he was (it is instru cti ve that the
poem s were never much mor e than compet-
ent, while all the imaginati on is in the nov-
els) . But in fact thi s is a Life not much at ease
with the writing, beyond its imputed relation-
sh ip with the soc ial life lived .
Leader actua lly mak es the occa sion al mis-
take when di scu ssin g the novel s. This is not
rare in biographi es - there are alw ays Lives
of Shakespeare which ge t the plots wro ng.
But one slip in Lead er ' s Am is we might
pau se over , because it compactl y defines the
probl em s of a stress simply soc ial. It relat es
to one of the noveli st' s more ima gin ati ve nov-
els. Som e of the writer's mo st rea listic fic tion
(a nd the prizewinning The Old Devils is a
case in point) may be said to have faded
so mew hat, but the genr e fiction s if anythin g
incr ease in vividness with tim e, perh aps
becau se their fant astic conve ntions allowe d a
freer reign to what was inventi ve, perh aps wil-
ful , in the noveli st ' s gift. Th e almos t cartoon-
ish disciplines of rom anc e in bo ok s such as
The Green Man, The Riverside Villas Murd er
and The Alt eration made for the writer a lan-
guage of metaphor without the pret en sion s of
symbolism; and the result ca n be luminou sly
absorbing.
"The Gree n Man" is the nam e of a coach-
 COMMENTA RY 13

ing inn ju st out side London run by Maurice
Allingham , a man hard not to like (the narra-
tive is first-p erson) but with self-indulgences ,
drink and sex especially, that make life a mis-
ery for his wife, mistress, daughter , father
and friend s. His vices are treat ed humorously
but not quite lightl y. They are refl ect ed, as
in a distorting mirror, in two unsoci ab le
presenc es who play a large part in the story :
out side the inn , a violently destruc tive
emanation from Nature, the Gree n Man
himself , and inside it, the sinister gho st of a
late- seventeenth-century cleric , Or Thomas
Underhill, a rapi st of young girls and a
ma ster of disturb ing shadow plays. Alling-
ham com es to term s with his own natur e, and
exorc izes the gho st, this last with the unwill -
ing help of the unbeli eving local rector, a
trend y, snobbish and gay young man . The
spirit of Underhill struggles aga inst
exorcism, the climax of his attempted bribe s
of Allingham being, 'T 11 teach you peace of
mind". Startlingly, but und oubt ed ly, Leader
ascribes these word s not to Underhill but to
the scornful young prie st.
A mistake invol ving six word s hard ly
counts against the plea sures of 900 page s.
But the slip is interesting. Genre fiction may,
as [ have sugges ted, ha ve attracted Ami s
bec ause his mind was not merel y social. He
elsewhere described Allingham as being
more like him self than mo st of his charact er s.
[fthis is so, the amiable and even redoubtab le
innk eeper is the Ami sian social self, a norma-
tive presenc e. He lack s the darkn ess in which
Underhill has his being ; and yet the ghost
also throw s back in a sinister form the power
of intellect and even the necromancy that
might be attributed to an imaginati ve writer.
As Ami s proj ects Allingham , and Allin gham
confronts Underhill, there is the sense of a
fine descending spiral from the bright surface
of genr e fiction do wnward s and inward s
tow ard s moral cu lpabil ity. The who le real
act ion of the book directl y con tradict s that
"peace of mind " offered by the bad gho st to
Allin gham , who refu ses it.
How ever trivial, a misreading of this
kind can sugges t a failure with the noveli st' s
seriousness of purpose, a miscalcul ation
conc ernin g what the writer and his text are
actu ally doing here. Ami ss ghosts do what
we in fact rely on work s of art to do , in a
beleaguered period: the y open up the lim its
of the social.
Mod ern biogr aphy has reached a point of
spontaneo us combustion . It is rich er than
ever befor e in its cho sen resourc es, and yet
sometimes unab le to tell us the simple thing s
we need to know about writers: unab le, one
might say , to confront the ghosts in a culture.
The staple of biography is still the social and
hi storical cont ext it gives the work. Certainly
it is still valuable and necessary to kno w
about Shakespeare' s hierarch ical world ,
about the small pro vinci al town he grew up
in, about the theatres that fostered his profes-
sion and the royal Co urts he served. But
Shakespe are was onl y himself (and not some
oth er Elizabethan) in the work that he did.
The centr e of the poet ' s life was the life of hi s
mind .
Stud y of the socia l and externa l alone
won 't tell us anything worth kno win g about
that creati ve mind : inde ed , it may mislead us
dangero usly. [ wa nt to illu strate this by
another divergenc e, turning not to Shak e-
spea rian biograph y nor to the plays and
poem s them selves, but to the images of the
poet which are the most vivid way ofperceiv-
ing him ex ternally. Conso nantly with the cu lt
of biogr aph y, there is now a strong interest
in the appe aranc e of the poet, one given
evidence in the recent National Portrait
Ga llery exhibition, In Search ofShakespeare.
Thi s was followed by lively debat es in this
paper and elsew here, all involving authentic-
ity. None paused to bring to daylight the
underl ying princ iples involv ed in the search.
o turn back for a mom ent to bio -
T graphy : a cultur e gets the kind of
Lives it wa nts and need s. The first
and still greatest of literary Lives in
English, Bo swell' s Life of John son, is
much more and other than its histor ical
docum ent ation. It is Boswell' s Life , begun in
its writer' s perc eption that the mom ent was
one at which the life of a grea t man was
called for ; and carried out in the light of the
judgment that Samu el John son, a clo se
friend , loved and studied, if only very par-
tially kno wn , was the subje ct called for.
Boswell ' s achi evem ent was a complex of dif-
ferent principles, all acting togeth er. Our
motiv es now are less promising : the hun ger
for document ation , for histor ical validity,
get s knott ed with needs more uncon sciou sly
subje ctive. Our s is an age of tele vision and of
celebrity, and it requires Shak espear e ' s face.
Onl y two authenticated images of the poet
have survived. One is the engraving by
Martin Droeshout which preface s the
First Folio. The other is the bust by Gerard
John son in Shakespeare' s pari sh church at
Stratford-upon -Avon . An ex traordinarily
large numb er of viewe rs, at different period s,
have cond emn ed both engraving and bust as
horrib ly disappointing ; the onl y exception
to them is the histor ian A. L. Ro wse, who
lauds the engraving in the highe st term s as a
nobl e portrait of geniu s. John Do ver Wil son
saw in the bust the pictur e of a local
pork-butcher. Anthony Burgess said of the
engrav ing,
The face is the face of a commercial traveller
grow ing bald in the service of an ungrateful
firm. If it ever appeared, the back-hair suitably
crop ped, with a decent sub-fuse suit below it,
in the saloon bar of a Stratford pub, it would
hardly be noticed.
Th is last seems to me a bri lliant observation,
and [ shall return to it.
Book s and exhibitions like the interestin g
In Search of Shakespeare are searching
bec ause they think we haven 't found him .
Over the centuries of disillusion , in di sgu st
at both the engraving and the bust , some
half-doz en candid ates for glor y have been
put for ward, led by the "C handos " and the

Shakespeare Macbeth: New Critical Essays

Nick Moschovakis
Journal of the British
April 2008: 234x156: 304pp Hb: 978-0-415-97404-2: £55.00
Shakespeare Association
This collection of new essays will expand th e critical context in
1 combined print volume w it h w hich Macbeth can be enjoyed as both literat ure and th eatre and
3 online issues per year covers a wide spectrum of topics and theories including text ual
Editors: Deborah Cartrnell, and performanc e-oriented approaches, intertext ual stud ies,
De Mo ntfort University, UK feminist, psychoan alytical, Marxist and postco lonial enqu iries.

•
Gabriel Egan.
Alternative Shakespeares 3
Lough borough University, UK
Usa Hopkins, Edited by Diana E. Henderson
Sheffield Hallam University, UK September 2007: 198x129: 328pp
John Joughin. University of Hb: 978-0-415-42332-8: £65.00
Pb: 978-0-415-42333-5: £18.99
Cent ral Lancashire, UK
introducing th e most innovative of th e
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scholarship, th is volume identifies and
Shakespeare is a major peer-reviewed journal, pub lishing articles draw n
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Shakespeare stu dies at this time.
th e gap between the disciplines of Sha kespeare in Performa nce Studies
and Shakespeare in English Literature and Language. The journ al builds
on t he existing a im of th e British Shakespeare Association, to exploit th e
Presentist Shakespeares
synergies betwee n academ ics and performers of Shakespeare. Hugh Grady and Terence Hawkes
November 2006: 216x138: 208pp
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Featuring an outstand ing list of
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adopts a new approach to Shakespeare by
focusing on the principles of ' presentism'
- a critical movement that takes accoun t
of th e continua l dialogue betw een past
and present.

TLS A UG US T 17 200 7
14
"Grafton'' portrait s. With out atte mpting art-
historic al scholarship, one simple thin g ca n
be said about all these contenders that mark s
them out as inauth enti c. Diff erent as they are,
they are all - in their way s - too glamorous,
too attra cti ve, too sexy and too discernibl y
upp er-cl ass. Just as we are creatin g a field of
massive biographies about Important Peopl e,
ce lebrities , "dominant forces", so we are
sear ching fo r a face that is right for a Shake-
speare in Love, an image that reflects what a
viewe r wa nts it to be. I would not myself
wa nt to echo Ro wse ' s ardour for the Dro e-
shout engrav ing, but it strikes me (on
grounds qu ite different from his) as an
entirely trustwor thy picture of the poet, how-
ever badly exec uted. It is the image of a
writer, not of a television star: the high , tired
forehead , the bagged short-sighted eyes, the
expression watchfully tol erant and melan -
chol y, withdraw n.
The lack of quality in both the images of
the engrav ing and the bust may well derive
partl y from the suggestion of class stereo-
type s. As Burge ss' s descr iption in part icular
shows, they locat e Shake speare - perhap s
accid entally but with a forc e of revelation -
in a specific social world: that milieu which
in fact has produced man y of our greatest
artists. It extends from what we should now
call white-collar working people to the
shabby impoverished gentr y. Soci al analys is
of the period was and is unsoph istic ated , but
in Elizabetha n term s the poet was a yeoma n's
son. This suggests little now. It is better to be
COMMENTARY
anachronistic and thin k in term s, as an
amused Bur gess doe s, of a type only
slow ly recognized as emerging throu gh the
nineteenth century: an often educa ted and
sensitive lower-middle class of clerk s and
shopmen , loaded with a great sense both of
aspiration and failure, and brin gin g extrao rdi-
nary new possibi lities into the literary arts.
This is not to say that Shakespeare was
"like" Keats or Lamb (though both were
among the best writ ers and crit ics of their
time) - onl y that the Eliza bethan poet had
inborn in him so me of the cultural burd en s
that forc ed Rom antic writers for ward. He
carried through the first half of his life a
father, John Shakespeare, who ascended into
wea lth and local sta nding, then seemingly
fai led at the point of success . Eve n if both
fath er and son were capable busin essmen , the
poet star ted life as son and heir to a pro vin-
cial failed shopkeeper. Shakespeare had not
eve n attended the University, and had there-
fore, until he achi eved arms , no claim to be
called a gentlema n. He won what position he
had through his poem s, and his money
throu gh work for the theatr e, an institution
that was certa inly on the way up, but from a
position clo se to vaga bond status.
All this is, of cour se, well known . Yet it
see ms rarely concluded that the man of
who m this is true was in so me real sense a
nob od y, and looked and acted like one -
indeed that the one public eve nt of his early
professional life, the attack by Gree ne, was
induc ed by his appearance of vulnera bility.
TLS A UG US T 17 200 7
Most hum an bein gs are form ed by what has
happened to them befor e their twent y-fifth
birthd ay (in Shak espeare ' s ca se, 1589); later
success make s a difference onl y to the very
superficial. For both social and per sonal
rea sons, the engrav ing and the bust are
authentic in their very medi ocrity. They are
portraits of a nobody, a condition both
accepted by Shakespea re, as an unavoidabl e
deri vation of his birth, and also assumed by
him as a disgui se, a mask , a vantag e-po int of
humiliation.
This impression is cert ain ly hypothet ical.
But it is supported by the onl y leading social
fact about the writer that has come down to
us. The almost Hom ericall y or stereotypi-
cally recurrent detail we know of him - it is
used , for instanc e, under the Droeshout
engraving - is the word "gentle" . Its mean -
ing s were prob ably various, and at least dual.
There is in the repetition a hint of the social
gestur e, an approbation not untouched by
irony. Shak espeare startled those around him
all his life by giving signs of what the age
would have called "better" birth. Educated by
nati ve intelli gence , with mann ers derived
from instinct and ob servation, and a per sonal
calm owed to ince ssant ach ievement, Shak e-
spea re embodied a kind of polit e and conserv-
ative socia l anarchy by bein g a gent leman ,
"gentle" Shak espeare. That anti-Stratfordia ns
have eve r since insisted that a low-born man
cou ld not have written the work is no sur-
pri se: they merely inherit Elizab ethan snob-
beries and stupidities, and are unabl e to grow
beyond them .
Even as used by tho se many who plain ly
liked and admired him , ther e is latent in the
term of rank - "gentle", or of the gentry - a
placin g by birth : by birth Shak espeare was
and rem ained wh at is still occ asionall y and
obno xiou sly called "a little man" . But this
social conditioning had its more personal or
inward acco mpa nime nts . Interestin gly, both
engraving and bust communicate - as the
new por traits do not - an impression of bon y
slightness (the engrav ing) or of crouched
shortness (the pudgi er bu st). The assurance,
even the sex iness of power are totall y lack-
ing: and yet both images have a kind of quiet ,
a concentration that is form idab le as well as
greatl y agreeable. Soci al defic ience s of birth
and possib ly eve n of bearin g, an unglamor-
ous face, an unimportant bod y, wo uld have
made him welc ome the di sgu ised life of an
actor, as well as the vital express ion given to
his work by the theatre . But success in the
theatre, huge by mid-c areer , would not have
ex cise d a more personal "gentleness", a
respon sive reticence of bearin g that always
feels for the defeat ed , and that takes up a
place on the edge of groups and crowds.
Again , among the very few perh aps apocry-
phal stories of Shakespeare in public that
have c ome do wn to us, the po et is fi gured in
his wit-battles with Ben Jon son as the sma ll
English ship, with the other as the great
Spani sh galleon ; or aga in, it is said that when
invited to part ies, Shakespe are wou ld write
that he had a head ache.
With affection and perh aps irony Shak e-
spe are's cont emporaries called him "gentle" .
They we re always astonished how civilized
the man was, consider ing he was a nobody;
and how little ove rbea ring, considering hi s
success. The author of what may be the
soundes t recent biograph y of Shakes peare,
Park Honan, there uses of the wr iter the word
"diffident" , which catch es some of this; when
he mo ves on to a life of Marlowe , something
goes odd ly wrong with the ima ge of Shake-
spea re, who is there seen as sly and slippery
by comp ari son . The hint of iron y in the
cont emporary "gentle" has turned viciou s
in defenc e of the lesser, if superb, poet
Marlo we. But the failur e of sympathy here on
the part of Hon an reflects the realit y of the
prob lem . Shakespeare is the despair of biogra -
pher s, as well as their resourc e. We don 't
merely happ en not to kno w any important
fact s about the dram atist: we fai l to know
them necessari ly. The life of the creati ve
Shak espeare is the life of an unkno wn man , a
writer not secretive but able to transform an
uncho sen pub lic silence into a creati vity.
e want a por tra it of Shake-
W spea re, whether paint ed or
written, because he is in man y
ways our great est writer. His
very ret icence the more excites interest. And
undoubtedly few biographies fail to find
something docum entary that throw s light.
Probabl y the most delightfu l and rew ardin g
of recent biograph ical wor ks, Jam es
Shapiros focu s on one year in the dramatist' s
life, 1599 , illuminates what the move into the
Globe may have brought Shakespeare in
terms of increased confid ence and security.
Even Shapiro may slightly overestimate his
subje ct's externality, his sheer intere st in his
world : "he understood his age perfectl y . . .
eve n as he kept a lock on what he revealed
about him self'. This emphasis on the willed,
the self-interested and self-controlled and
self-concea ling, is a law of recent biographi-
ca l endeavour : Shak espeare' s life becomes
Shakespeare ' s purp ose, his "ambition" . The
biographer sets in the bright foreground what
he happen s to have found out. Both Stephen
Greenblatt and Micha el Wood give an entranc-
ing picture oflate-sixteenth-century London -
theirs is a "Shakespeare of London", an
infinitely more kno wledgeable and upda ted
version of the sixty-year-old biograph y by
Marchette Chu te.
Much of the new scholarship in Sh ake-
spea re biograph y is fictio n, and "Shake-
spea re 's Lond on" is a case in poi nt. The
poet' s work give s no sense that his mind
inhabited London, as does the writin g of John
Donn e, Samu el Johnson and Charles Lamb;
Ben Jon son and T. S. El iot are urban poets as
Shak espeare never was . Of cour se he uses
local detail s of his world as and when they
come to hand; and he needed the capit al,
already becoming a grea t cit y, for its Court
and patron s and theatres, for its news, infor-
mation , human type s, goss ip, colle ague s and
confr eres - in short, for the kind of social or
superficial experience which a small pro vin -
cia l town could not offer. But it was the small
tow n that he ret urn ed to. Hi s m ind and h i s
root ed loyalties were nouri shed in an ear th of
the rural past and future , not by an immedi-
acy of London stree ts.
In an important sense Shakespeare did not
live in his life, if by life we mean circumstan-
tial exi stenc e. Neither a dream y aes thete nor
a dithering incompetent, the poet - a business-
man' s even shrew der son - looked after his
ow n (and his own were his plays and poem s
as well as his fami ly): he save d and invested
well and wisely, and fought back when his
future in his profession was threat ened . But a
man can devote his se nsible energies to

matter s beyond sense . Thi s poi se gove rns the
whole of his caree r, at once supremely rom an-
tic and thoroughl y gro und-base d ("My mis-
tre ss, when she wa lks, tread s on the
gro und" ). Thi s is a balance that seems to
move into pro min enc e at that late mom ent
whe n, with great achieve ment behind him,
the poet allows him self an amu sed and obje c-
tive self-co nsc iousness, self-articulation.
Coriolanus' tra gic hop e of "a world else -
where" discover s how to become lm ogen' s
more hopefull y comi c thou ght of what is
"beyond beyond " .
Thi s is not an equilibrium easy for bio-
graphy to ex po und . All kind s of historian
may be baulk ed by Shakespeare' s ve rse . One
of his two or three best Son nests, 107 (" Not
mine own fears ...") is regularly glossed by
scholars who beli eve it mu st be possibl e to
locate unch an geabl y in tim e such lines as
"The mortal moon hath her eclipse endur'd";
but they fail to perc eive that the poem is
about tran sform ation s of and in tim e, und er
the po wer of love . Passing mom ent s and
eve nts here become met aph or : " I' ll live in
thi s poor rhym e". The same is true of the
strug gle to forc e into a writ er ' s life the issues
which most bio graph er s now see as domin ant
in his age, par ticul arl y the politi cs of the
church and of gen der. Was Shakes peare Ca th-
oli c? Was he a misogyni st? A whole life is
defin ed in ter ms of opinion and of will. But
Shakespeare' s ex traordinary ori gin alit y was
to be a nobody who saw "beyond beyond " :
who sides tepped such lab yrinths in pur suit of
his ow n life . Th e plays and poem s at need
play fast and loo se with polemi c and dogma,
introducing herb ali st priests and roya l rule-
breakin g monk s and thro win g no vices ' ro bes
over nubil e stro ng-minded wom en: redu cin g
the whole Reformation to the laws of the pri-
vate conscience , which demanded a whole
new rhetoric more than political affirmation.
Th e Wom an Question (as Vict ori ans called
it) he resolv ed by inventin g some of the most
intelli gent and autono mo us wo me n in litera-
ture . Sh akespeare clearl y needed desperately
to wor k in thi s way . A nd yet, that it was a
position that still aroused anx iety, may be
g uesse d . It is the ambiguous and in some
sense criminal Fa lstaff, magnifi cent as he is,
who quotes Scripture to the effec t that " It is
no sin for a man to labour in his vocation" .
And the super lative late Sonnets 124 and 125
deb ate with great depth the who le politi cs of
state (power) and love and art, only ambi gu-
o usly and punningly ju stif yin g the mind that
"all alon e stands hu gely politi c" .
It is these very dubi eties that make the poet
so diffi cult for the clariti es of bio graph y. If,
in Sha piros ph rase, Shakespe are really did
"understand his age perf ectly " , then he under-
stood how much could be ignored or for got-
ten, and ho w dangerou sly. One exa mple of
thi s: it is sometimes suppose d that Shake-
spea re's lack of care to do as Jon son did, in
coll ectin g together hi s plays for publi cation,
reveals his esse ntial cynici sm as one who
wro te for money and witho ut estee m for his
art. But the oppos ite may be truer. Sonn ets
110, 112 and 121 defin e situations in which
bein g " vile estee med", bein g impotentl y sub-
ject ed to hostil e mocker y by the un-under-
standing - as in the ea rly attack by Gree ne -
could pro ve paral ysin g. Th e writer was per-
haps unwilling to pause and publi sh because
of an ex treme nervous need to go on invent-
ing, to ge t it dow n on paper. Wh at applies
COMMENTARY
to the plays will also suppo rt a sense that
Sh akespeare never brou ght him self to
publi sh his ow n Sonnets, a prob ability the
stro nge r give n that - as Em rys Jones has
suggested pri vately to me - the odd title
Shakespea re 's Sonnets cann ot have
emanated dir ectl y from the poet him self.
Ce rtainly Sh akespeare mu st have had
man y instin cts that mad e him Eliz abeth an, an
apprec iation of wea lth and sta nding bein g
among them. But such moti vation s could be
subor dinated to larger ends , to ideas and
ideal s "beyond beyond ". If thi s is true, then
the poet was - by some ironic law of life -
provid en t. He is unlik ely not to have wished
to found a line - to be a So me body . But
except throu gh his sister, the large famil y did
not survive; his broth ers died before him with-
out surv iving pro gen y; his ow n son died
ear ly, in the mid-15 90 s, and his dau ght ers
bred no children as his descend ant s. His ow n
great Str atford hou se was finall y ruin ou s.
Deep in the Sonnets is a knowled ge so certain
of "Devo uring Time" as to see m at moments
alm ost proph etic. However hard Shakespeare
worked, he could not change the fate of tho se
aro und him who bec ame (in Sonn et 125) "Pit-
iful thri vers, in their gaz ing spent" . The first
seve ntee n Sonnets had used the device, or
met aph or, of persuasion to marr y and breed
dir ected at a young aristocrat , hut the eight-
eenth is wiser in abruptly offerin g a love
poem instead : "So lon g lives this .. .". The
switch here in conc eptual bases of arg ument
is striking ; the poem s are learning newer and
truer metaphors. That in some literal sense
the writer, a pro vin cial nob od y, actually had
a love affair, or eve n a close friend ship with
an earl, it is sure ly foll y to imagin e: though it
is still a belief gra tefully avowed by some edi-
tor s and bio graph ers, glad to have the mean s
of annotation and life story. Ce rtainly, Shake-
spea re needed all the ranks and ritu als of his
tim e - if for nothing else than to mak e meta-
phors from. It is hard not to wo nder what
Southampton or Herb ert wo uld have made of
their fate 400 yea rs later , "lords and ow ners
of their faces" becom e footn otes to the work
of a gentle nobod y.
f we foll ow tho se footnotes back to their
I so urce in a soc ial cont ext, and set
Shakespea re within it, it is hard not to
find him - as he is still some times found
- uniqu el y sec ret ive, possessive, locki ng
him self aw ay from his grea t publi c. But
thi s is neith er a desirabl e nor a necessary
conclusion . For all his intelli gence, Shake-
spea re was capable of bein g mor e interested
in some thin gs than in oth ers, and the some
thin gs were often in his head, waiting for
daylight (Dr yden ' s superb image of the poet
was of one " moving the sleeping im ages of
thin gs toward s the light ": thi s may be reti-
ce nce, but it is not secrecy). S hakes pea re is
one ofthe grea tes t of those whose wor k is not
" superficial"; he fills his wor ld, like eve n the
lucid and soc ia l Amis, with ghos ts, spirits,
strange and unsoci al bein gs whose locati on is
in a "wor ld elsew here" . A man to who m the
word "escapist" wo uld have been lun atic if
applied, he lived between drear y Stratford
and crue l Lond on , working to base that
"wor ld elsew here" on the bo ards of his
theatre and the pages of his poem s.
It is an interestin g fact that Pro spero , who
was of cour se not born a nobod y, but merely
became one, fin ally names his visions "base-
TLS A U G U S T 17 200 7
less" and his own co ndition near "despair".
The Tempest is set deep in the same difficul-
ties as eve ry thing the poet wrote, and most of
what he lived , considered biographi call y.
Th ere is a grea t truth in the play, but it would
be a serious mistake to read it literally:
which is sure ly why Shakespear e here and
throu ghout his work so disposes tim es and
places as to make imp ossibilities for the
literali st. Pro speros island , for instanc e, is
neither Old World nor New World. This
self-limiting establishment of the "ro mantic"
is only one aspec t of the writer's uniqu e
credibility. It could be said that Shakespea re
is our grea test wr iter simply becau se of
this intensely person al poise between wor lds,
at onc e rock -so lid and "thin air", "a pageant" ,
a "dream" . As with other great art ists, his
sense of the actual and of the imagined
interfused , interbr ed and created. As a
dim en sion of thi s, we ca n perha ps say that if
his biograph y is to be found it has to be here,
in the plays and poem s, but never literally and
never provably.
Rather than leave thi s ge neral obse rva tion
vague and em pty as it stands , I will try to give
two brief exa mples. An yone who has kno wn
the work lon g and with appreci ation may
ex perience a curi ou s effect, as of some thing
hardl y defin able see n out of the corn er of the
eye. It could he ca lled the dim en sion of hio-
graphy, of ex perience that has lost its ego ism .
Wh at is still prob abl y Shakes peare 's most
fam ou s play is a case in point. Th ere is
always something odd in the fact that one of
the gru bbier Elizabethan dr am atic sys tems,
the reven ge-stor y and reven ge-pl ay, sho uld
produce so grea t a wor k as Hamlet. The sub-
ject could fabricate the rem arkable, as it does
in Kyd ' s Spanish Tragedy, witho ut promis-
ing what Hamlet has: a vision, for all its
courtly pow er and brilli ance, into ordinary
hu man life. There may be a clue in the fact
that Prin ce Haml et is a nob od y too, whose
cl aim s to inherit and succee d Shakespeare
carefully ob scur es; he is a poet , a dram ati st
and dir ector, a word-sp inner, a man who has
troubl e with famil y, mi stress and friend s. Th e
writer has infu sed an ex traordinary man with
an ordin ary fate: the fate of bein g thrown into
a "time . .. out of joint", and "born to set it
right" . Hamlet is a traged y of fathers and sons
- to which Gertrude and aphelia add that of
mothers and dau ght ers; somewhere inside its
rigiditi es is the always und erstood pain of its
writer's ruin ed fath er and his dead son.
Th e plays can offer glimpses eve n less
critica lly ex plicable than this, imp ossibl e to
ju stify yet nouri shin g what a give n reader or
memb er of an audience may take from the
work. King Lear is a fiercely untheatrical
masterpi ece, set in a barb arou s early Brit ain .
Its mo st wo nder ful effects are those brilli an-
cies and compl exities of madn ess that make
up the sto rm sce ne s and the scenes on Do ver
cliff; and in them , the excluded and dri ven old
kin g begin s to kno w wh at it is to be a nobo dy.
Without any grain of self-co nsciousness in
the text, the many madn esses sudde nly come
to includ e what Hen ry Jam ess dyin g writer,
Dencomb e, calls sadly "the madn ess of art".
Th ese ruin ed courti ers, so me of whom have
without doubt in their time "played the King",
are also actor s rehearsing a play, held
togeth er in a part-loyal, part-d esperate rela-
tion ship and kno wing ju st how far they are
from real sec urity . Th e miser y, the games, the
songs , the outc ries, the ad-libbing, the
15
ex treme ex pertise : the stor m and the cliff are
what they are and also a startling sudde n
glance into Shak espeare' s theatre as it was , in
rehearsal and performance, a lifeti me' s
achieve men t, loved and hated .
Drama is the mo st objective of all literar y
arts, bein g embodied, requiring actors for its
full est express ion. It is a mark of Shake-
spea re's gifts that he produced superla tively
imp er son al dram a that ca n still offer up a
sudde n sense that we are see ing Sh akespeare .
Biogr aphi es are enj oy able, inform ati ve and
eve n perh aps necessary, but none gives quit e
thi s perc epti on of a mind, lon g ago and still
living. In the same way, the two authentic por-
trait s in all their medi ocrit y tell us per haps all
there is to know about Sha kespeare's life.
Th e di stingui shed art critic John Richardson
once reviewed a popul ar film about Picasso
that he thou ght very bad, and ended:
Film s abo ut great artists are a beni ghted ge nre
in that they usuall y sacrifice art to La-Boherne-
ish sentimentality or a soa p-o pera story line.
The trouble is that the work ings o f the creative
process are too slow , too private and too pains-
taking to be entertai ning , let alone ci nema tic.
Th e best biographi es of Shakespeare do
their best to free themselves of sentime ntal-
ity, soa p opera and ea rls. But they don 't
really tell us much beyond what is there in
th e tw o portrait s, and mu ch m ore so in
the pla ys and poem s themselves. As the
dead poet' s friend s and editors, John
Hemin ge and Henr y Co nde ll, sa id in the
Folio , "R eade him , therefore".
SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS
With a new commentary
by David West
SII ,\K ESl'rA~E ' S
S ON N E T S
UA'" 11l W I· ' I
'In discussing each of Shakespeare's
Sonnets with great clarity, range,
depth and freshness, David West's
book is itself a modern classic.
This is one of our few indispensable
works on Shakespeare and in itself
an unfailing delight and tonic for
the mind' Park Honan, author of
Shakespeare: A Life
£25 hb ISBN: 978-07156-3661-9
&
DUCKWORTH
Tel. 0207 490 7300
~ www.ducknet.co.uk
16 COMMENTARY

n less than a lifetim e, sun tanning, like thi s surreal piec e of window-dress ing wa s

I smo king, has go ne from bein g go od for

yo u to bein g pot entially fatal. Ima ges of
deep-tanned cow boys smo king Marlb oro s
now look like health warnings with ske letons
on hor seb ack . They hamm ered smo king a lit-
tle and lun g canc er ca me down . Malignant
melano ma, onc e accounting fo r onl y 3 per
cent of canc er s, is no w the mo st common
for m of the disease, igniting headlin es such
as a recent one in The Tim es: "Deadly canc er
o n rise as Brit on s ignore lifestyle warnings" .
In previous centuries, a tann ed skin was
associated with manual labour and was there-
for e und esirabl e to the gentry. "Thus goes
eve ryone to the world but 1, and I am sun-
burnt; I may sit in a corn er and cr y heigh ho
for a hu sband " (Bea trice , in Mu ch Ad o Ab out
No thing) . Queen Eliza beth may have died of
poisonin g from whit e lead make-up. By the
mid-I920s, it was workers in off ices who had
white skin and so a suntan became a sign of
the lei sur ed life . Th e look became fashion-
able in 1926 when Coco Chanel accidentally
acq uired a tan on board the Duk e of West-
minster' s yacht. Th e follo win g yea r, as Th e
Surreali st Ga llery was openin g in Pari s, cou-
turi er Jean Patou launched "le sportswear"
from a boutique on the beach at Deau vill e,
dr essing tenni s star Su zanne Len glen amon g
others and introducing a sunta n oil call ed
"Chaldee" . Th e Pari s cra ze for Jo sephine
Bak er might have had something to do with
the vog ue for dark skin. Lik e man y new fash-
ion s, from tailco ats to blue jeans, the outd oor
look had com e indoors. It mo ved to Holl y-
wood and from there, via Western s and epics,
to the rest of the wor ld. I got my fir st pair of
jeans from Am er ica in 1947, the yea r of
Ann ie Get Your Gun (''I'm an Indi an too").
By the time I saw Shane in 1954 , I knew you
had to be tann ed in ord er to handl e a six-gun
H UGO WILLIAMS
corre ctly. Jeffr ey Hunt er mod ell ed the new
skin-tone as half-br eed Martin Paw ley in The
Sea rche rs ( 1956). A lain Delon perfected the
look in Plein Soleil (1960), and no one ha s
ever surpasse d his immaculate bron reage.
Hunt er' s impressive dismount-at-a- gallop in
The Searc hers, don e witho ut a doub le,
tog eth er with end less Ro y Roger s comics,
con vinc ed me that I need ed a Gold en
Palomino to complete the fant asy . Stewart
Granger ' s Bovril-hued appea rance in The
Prison er of Zenda was another influ ence . His
swas hbuckling Rudolf Rassend yl was my
role mod el when 1stabbed my self in the thigh
with a silver meat skewer whil e repellin g
boarders from my bedroom in the nude .
A fe w years later, I was taken to Pinewood
to watch Ca ry G rant and Robert Mitchum
sho oting the film of a play by my par ent s,
The Grass is Greener. Gr ant was playin g
Lord Rhyall , the part my father had taken o n
the stage. He kept cur sing the complicated
lines my fath er had writt en for him self and
Mitchum, sitting with my moth er , gallantly
took bets on how man y takes he would need
before he got it right. Grant had decid ed to
play Lord Rhyall with his usual deep tan and
would sit angrily in a little courtyard between
takes with a reflecti ve metal co llar ro und his
neck to catch the meagre English sunshine.
This was the status qu o in 195 6, the yea r of
rock and roll , when the sme ll of Ambre
Solaire fir st held out its prom ise of transfor-
mation to me , aged fourt een . I lay for hour s
on end in feebl e sunshine, turn ing myself
occ asionall y, in the hope of gro win g up and
devoid of participant s, the image of a
bronzed nude sliding up and down the pole
cou ld be imagined in the subdued lighting . I
becoming Am erican. I thou ght the mu scles note that impressario -poet Felix Dermis
on my arm showed up mor e when the y we re cho se for his luxur y item on Desert Island
bro wn . I rememb er the disappointment of our Discs recent ly, "a stainless stee l bar ". When
first ho liday abroad when we only we nt as far pressed, he said it wa s to attr act any pol e-
as Belgium and it rained all the tim e . dancing merm aid who happ ened to be pass-
It was now that I got hold of some perman- ing . Nobody kno ws a trend better than
ganat e of pot ash, not a drug, but purp le Denni s. He prob ably own s both businesse s.
crystals which you threw in the bath . 1 had We are all celebrities now and we try to get
seen my father standing knee-de ep in the others to realize thi s by mak ing our selves
browni sh flu id to dye his shins brown for a look as thou gh we have been skiing or on
dressing -go wn scene in one of his plays. location in Hawaii . I used to hav e my hair cut
Friends of the period remember my streaky yel- by an exceptionally good-look ing young man
low appea rance, which didn 't show up in the who talked about his looks on an objective
bathroom mirror. Th ey thought it wa s some- basis, as a kind of per sonal currenc y to be
thing to do with my theatrica l background and maximized at eve ry opportunity. He thought
left it at that. It was true that the cheap dye did of his fac e as a blank canva s, open to se lf-
reproduce the look of stage make-up , which 1 ex press ion. He took frequent tanning trip s
associated with success in love. abroad with top -up s at the local tann ery. At
It seems that tann ing, like slimming and thi s stage, it was still possible to compliment
body-bu ilding , is hab it-forming - the soft him on his peculi ar winter burni sh. But it
dru g of the self-improv ement indu stry . We didn 't stop there. With the ble ssing of the
have tanah olic s suffering from tanorexia. National Hea lth, he mad e the tran sition to the
Tanning shops used to be places where knife . After nose and cheekbone enhance-
peop le lay in their und er wear, clamped in a ment , he we nt in for some bargain-basem ent
giant waffle-iro n. " Health spas", such as the work on his eyelid s, to give him a more wide-
Electric Beach, aren 't like that. You go naked eye d look. Thi s had to be corrected and so it
into upright bronzing sta lls where high -up went on, alwa ys with an optimistic air, as if
pol e-dancing handl es allow you to gy rate to he welcomed a little pain to achi eve some -
mu sic of yo ur choic e, your arms above your thing wor thwhile . He see med to be attempt-
head for an overa ll fini sh, even if mo st of the ing a kind of per sona l ev olution of the
peop le there are deepl y tann ed already. species, but without the help of the centuri es.
1passed a shop selling po le-d ancin g eq uip- I recently had a possibly canc erou s mo le
ment the other day , in the window of which removed from my shoulde r. A s the surg eo n
was a little stage with a silve r pole set in the threw it in the bin, 1 tho ught how man y
middl e and dark red curtains. In the back- patient , deluded hours were packed into that
ground wa s a four-poster bed, suggesting a littl e black bun of warring mo lecul es, precipi-
pr ivate performance go ing on with a loved tate of a narci ssi stic youth. Ambre Sola ire
one lying back to enj oy the show . Although doe sn't smell quite the same an y more .

IN NEXT WEEK'S
TLS August 16 1957
The Ame r ican Way
The TLS of August 16, 1957, carried a forty-
fou r page symposium on "committed litera-
Summer doub le issue tur e " aro und the world. Below we print
extrac ts f rom an article by the lat e Harold
Elizabeth Lowry Beaver on writers in the United States. For
the f ull version go to www.the-tls.co uk
Coetzee's alter ego
f we look for commitment in the French
documented Salem witch trial, he was able
pa ssionat ely to defend the right s of an indi-
vid ual's con scienc e again st the ons laughts
of mass-n euro sis in a community. Though
the scene was laid in sev entee nth-century
M assachusett s, the parallel s bet ween the
Puritan inqui sition and its mod ern counter-
part wer e not far to seek. Th ere it all was -
the autocratic pow er of the court, the arro -
gance of the examination, the vacill atin g
witness es, the spread of guilt by ass o-
ciation , and fin all y that same top syturvy-
such, it wa s a rare event on Broadway . ...
But by far the largest group of wr iters
now wr iting in Am erica, as in England, are
committed to noth ing ex cept their own per-
sonal experience . Thi s ex perience ma y be
adolescent or neurotic - Truman Capote,
Gore Vidal , Paul Bowles, Tennessee Wil-
liam s, even Carson Mc Cull er s come to
mind - but we have no doubt that , at what-
eve r remo ve , it is their own . As Tennessee
Williams writ es in the preface to Cat on a
Hot Tin Roof: "As a charact er in a play
once said, ' we' re all of us sentenced to soli-
tar y confinement inside our ow n skins.' Per-
sonal lyrici sm is the outc ry of pri son er to
prison er from the cell in solitary wher e each

Dinah Birch I and origin al sense, if we look for novel s

like Andre Malraux' s La Condition
Humain e, which represent s as we ll as any la
Desolate du Maurier; litt erature eng agee of the French 1930s , we
shall search almost in vain .... Yet one po l-
Daphne du Ma urie r itical issue has roused intense parti san contro-
versy in recent year s. McC arth yism has
An unpublished preface since simmered down and the recent
Supreme Court deci sion seems finall y to
Ferdina nd Mount hav e laid that senator 's gho st. One play-
wright, how ever, is still arraigned for con-
The modern Peel tempt before a senatorial committee, and still
refu ses to reveal the nam es of Communists
he once knew or frequ ented many yea rs ago .
David Arnold It is a situation Arthur M iller him se lf
employed in The Crucibl e. In that play, by
Democratic India takin g as his theme a we ll-know n and we ll-
do m of Anglo-Saxon ju stice whereby a man
is gu ilty until he proves himself innoc ent or
sav es him self by turning informer.
For Jud ge or Deputy -Go vernor it see me d
we mu st read Mc Carthy, for the dec ent Sab-
bath-keepin g folk of Sal em the democracy-
loving citizen s of Am eric a, for tho se accu sed
of witchcraft and con sorting with Satan , Com-
muni sts, fello w-tra veller s, reader s of the
Daily Work er . Yet the play was far more than
an elaborate politi cal alle gor y ... . His wa s
an attempt at trag ed y, even thou gh there wa s
too much of me lod rama in the hero ' s bid for
mart yrdom and his fin al exit to the gallows .
But it began as a comment, and an "engaged"
comment, on the Am erican political sce ne of
1953 when the play wa s first performed . A s
is confined for the dur ation of his life." Th e
outcry can become a Howl , as in a slim vo l-
ume of poetr y issued last year from San
Francisco hy Allen G insher g . Th e verse
may not be great, but it is auth entic, as
Am eric an as the supermark et or the super-
high way. Mr. G insber g is committed to
nothing except his own ex perience , body ,
fru stration , sensuality . He is maladjusted,
socially and sex ually, to the Am erican com-
munity and puzz les out in rhetorical Whit -
man esqu e line s his Am erican identity :
Am erica, I' ve given you all and now I'm
nothing.
Am eric a, two dollars and twent y-seven
cents, January 17, 1956.
I can 't stand on my own mind . .

TLS A U G UST 17 200 7

 17

TV at the junction ofImperial history and modern life

A subcontinentaljourney
P ET ER P ARK ER the people of Pakista n" , she decl ared as she
peeled off her fa lse eye lashes), but her very
I N DI A & PAK ISTAN 07 existence seeme d a cause for the optim ism
BBC2 and B BC4 the former cricke ter felt abo ut his country.
Sa ira Khan' s insistence that bec ause of
Islam' s respect for privacy, Pakis tan is "can
lmost every book about India begins live however they choose as long as they

A with an admission that it is impossi-

ble adeq uately to character ize th is
do n' t make a noise about it" didn't altoge ther
convince, but she spoke to a wide range of

I MIGRATIO
huge country . Tryi ng to do so on television people - from the hijras of Karachi and the
may see m an equally forlorn enterpr ise, but occ upa nts of a wo man's refuge to the Presi-
the BBC has taken the oppor tunity affor ded dent him self - and it was hard to disagree
by the sixtieth ann iversa ry of Indian Inde- with her co nclusion: "There isn 't rea lly one

CHECKPOS
pe ndence and the crea tion of Paki stan , which Paki stan , but ma ny Paki stans. And I haven 't
fa lls this wee k, to have a go . The " India & once in six wee ks enco untered the one we get
Pakis tan 07" seas on on BBC2 has been sup- to hear about on the news in Britain".
plemen ted by a numb er of exce llent docu men- Perhaps the most co mpre hensive ser ies of

taries on BBC4, while an instru cti ve selec-
tion of older items show ing how the subco nti-
nent and its people have been viewe d and
reported - often emharrass ingly - ca n he
found online in the BBC Archive Tria l
(www .bbc.co .uklarchi ve/trialfopen/home) .
The histor y of India remains inextricably
bou nd up with that of Britain , and this uneasy
re lationship was brou ght viv idly back to life
in The Lost World of the Raj by the skilful
use of stuttering home movies and the faintly
astonished but often mov ing rem inisce nces
of former me mbers of the Indi an Civ il Ser -
vice. We learned how juni or civil serva nts
administered "huge areas the size of Sco tland
and Wa les", but also how they rel axed in
Mu ssorie, "the most deca dent hill station of
them all" . In one of the hotels there a ha lf-
bli nd wa iter was employe d to parade the cor-
ridors ringing a wa rning bell so that the rul-
ing cas te could scuttle back to their ow n
roo ms before the servants brought them morn-
ing tea. Perh aps the most unusual footage
was that recentl y discovered by the he irs of
the lecherou s Ma harajah of Raj pipla, who
see med to spe nd most of his time filmi ng
cavorti ng British ladies, none of whom
looked cut out to be traditi onal memsahib s,
though one in fact ended up as Maharan i.
One of the lastin g legacies of the Brit ish in
India is the railway sys tem, which by happy
coincidence was inaugur ated in Bomb ay on
A ugust 15, 1854 , so that Independence Day
has additional significa nce for the country 's
ra ilway workers whose lives were foll owed
in Monsoon Railway . The first train should
have stea med out of the Imperial capital,
Ca lcutta, but the ship carry ing it from Eng -
land so mehow missed India altoget her and
sailed on to Au stralia, while its carr iages
were lost when another ship sa nk in the Bay
of Bengal. After this inauspicious sta rt, the
ra ilways went on to become a vital part of
Indian life. There are some 7,000 stations,
including Kharagpur Jun ction in Wes t Ben-
ga l, which has the longest rail way platfo rm in
the world, stretching more than a kilo metre.
Indian Railways are the biggest civil employ-
ers in the wor ld, providin g housi ng, health-
ca re and other benefit s for their wor kers,
while keepin g II million passenger s on the
OUTGOING
Sanjeev Bhaskar at the Wagah Border between India and Pakistan
move eve ry day. Indeed , for all its ram-
shack le qualities, the state-ow ned sys tem is
remarkably efficient, puttin g our own priva-
tized networ k to shame . Durin g the monsoon
seas on the trac k is inspected twent y-fou r
hour s a day , and a brid ge was hed away by the
rain is rep aired (by hand) within four days;
freight profits are used to subsidize ticket
prices for the poor; and the Minister of Rail-
ways has banned plastic beakers and rei ntro-
duce d equally disposa ble but biod egrad able
clay cups, which are not only much nicer to
drink cha i fro m but pro vide jo bs for 100,000
potters. Bea utifully filmed and edited , Mon-
soon Rail way was a model of its kind .
The most absor bing of a series showcasing
six Masterpieces of the East exa mined the
various meanings ascr ibed to Tip oos Tiger,
the famous musical instru ment in the form of
a tiger devourin g a Europe an, mad e in the
1790s for the amu sement of a Muslim ruler
of Mysore . The tiger rema ins a potent sym bol
in Ind ia, and Office Tigers was a di spiriting
but often fun ny fly-on-th e-wall docum entary
series foll owin g the fortun es of an Amer ica n-
ow ned co mpa ny that provi des wor ldw ide
" professiona l suppo rt se rv ices" round the
clock from Chennai. The rap id rise of
modern Indi a was also explored in India with
Sanjeev Bhaskar. Starti ng his j ourn ey round
the country in Mumbai, the gen ial actor and
comedian took par t in a soap opera watched
by some 200 million viewe rs, swa nned
around on the private yac ht of the milli onaire
who ow ns the Raym ond clothin g compa ny,
and help ed ju dge a beauty competition. To be
fair, Bhaskar did also investigate recy cl ing
initiati ves re minisce nt of Our Mutual Friend
and showe d - very briefl y - for cibl e slum
clearance, but his firs t prog ramme seeme d
both directi onless and superfic ial. Things
improved grea tly as the series wo re on, with
Bhas kar finding the plac e in Delhi to which
his own famil y fled after Partiti on, then cross -
ing into Pakistan where coc kaded bord er
guards strutted like exo tic jun gle fowl in the
matin g season, while porters in red , gree n or
blue tabards ca rried goo ds to and fro.
Bhaskar' s tour of Ko lkata may have been
brief, but it was a goo d deal better than Cal-
cutta Uncovered, in which an exc itable A nita
Rani confesse d that although she had
"always been fascinated by Calcutta and Ben-
ga li culture" , she had never before both ered
to visit the place on her many trips to India. It
showe d, not least when she referred to the
Maidan as "Maidan Park". Her aim was "to
get to the heart of a city that symbolizes
many thin gs: coloni alism, Communism, crea -
tivity" , but history and politic s passed her by.
In searc h of the "sp iritua lity" she thou ght
ce ntral to Kol kata, Ran i did not visit
Kalighat, Belur Math or Dakshin eshwar, but
an astro loge r who used a laptop . One gave
her cre dit for not once mentionin g Mo ther
Teresa, but the film "uncovered" very little
and wo uld hardly have passed muster as a
report for Blue Peter.
Saira Khan 's Pakistani Adventure was alto-
gether superior. Know n hith ert o as an abra-
sive contestant on the entre preneurial realit y
TV show The Apprentice, Khan proved a sen-
sible, sensitive and genuinely adven turo us
guide to a country that has been demonized
since the star t of the "war on terro r". She
began in Karac hi, where a drag queen ca lled
Beg um Nawaz ish Ali hosts a highl y success -
ful chat show . It was uncl ear whether Ali
really intended to follow Imran Khan into
politics ("O nly I have the power to liberate
the seaso n was Indian School, for which a
film crew spe nt a yea r chart ing the prog ress
of Ind ia' s rising generation in two schools in
Pune. The Kalmad i Shamrao High Scho ol is
a traditional and highl y disci plined es tablish-
ment , whe reas the Rewachand Bhojwani
Academ y is run along less orthodox lines,
recallin g A. S. Neill's Sum merhill. Wh at
they have in commo n is two char ismatic
wome n head teacher s who care abo ut educa -
tion and society. Indian School was touchi ng
and funn y, but it also tackl ed bro ader issues.
In ten half-h our episodes it ma naged to
enco mpass sex, famil y life and the position
of wo me n; the importance of both new tech-
nology and traditi onal culture; the complica -
tion s of religion , cas te and class; and eve n
rural life. One wo uld hardl y know from most
of the other progra mmes that although cities
may be booming in India so me 72 per cen t of
the popul ation still lives in villages.
It is perhaps inevitabl e that the anni ver sary
should be marked by a docum entary entitled
Partition: The day India burned. Rem arkable
co lour film of the period was blend ed almost
seamless ly with dram atic recons truct ions of
riotin g and refugees, whi le a wide range of
witnesses, from Mountbatten' s daughter to
an ancient Mu slim wres tler from Lahore, sup-
plied moving recollecti ons. The most horrify-
ing testimon y was that provided by an elderly
Sikh who recalled with undiminished relish
how he had cut dow n Mu slims with his
swor d. Whether in the subcontinent or the
Balk ans or in Rwanda, interneci ne vio lence,
in which neighb our turns aga inst neighb our ,
is often hard to exp lain, but this sombre
prog ramme did its best. The commentary
was occasionally portent ous - "As a British
barri ster draws a line on a map , a once pea ce -
ful land impl odes" - but the narra tive was
clear and eve n-handed. Partiti on was of
course the tragic price pa id for freedom, but
The Lost World of the Raj includ ed an inter-
view with two wome n who as twel ve-year-
olds had been imprisoned for taking part in
the 1942 Quit Indi a ca mpaign. Goo d as Parti-
tion was, it made one regret that no one had
thou ght to ce lebrate Independence by making
a rather more positive docum entary about
tho se who fought and cam pa igned for it.

TL S AUGUST 172 007

18
If you hate, will you survive?
he "morality debate" that swept Scandi-
T navia in the mid-1 880 s claimed Vict o-
ria Benedictsson (1850 -8 8) as both
brilli ant participant and tragic victim. It
reviewed the desideratum of free love
where the sexes at last knew eq uality - in the
cont ext of publi c respon sib ilit y and of the
dan gers (and appeal) of unfett ered se lf-
re lease , inspiring Benedictsson to write her
cla ssic novel , Money (1885 ). Thi s master-
piece of intelli gence and arti stry, both a
follo w-up to Henrik Ibsen ' s A Doll 's House
(1 879) and a present ation of her ow n pro-
vincial marri age, earne d the Swe dish writer
a place at the centre of Nordic intellectu al
acti vity, in the Co penhage n circl e of Geor g
Brand es (1842-1 92 7), the Niet zschean apo lo-
gist and literary critic.
Brand es and Benedi ct sson began an affa ir,
con summated only after angui shed resistance
on her part, and unequ al in the commitment
of its partner s. It is difficult to acq uit
Brand es, then movin g toward s "aristocratic
radicalism " (his own later term ), of self-
protectin g ca llousness throu ghout, and his
per sonal reputati on ne ver recover ed . Refu s-
ing to ch ampi on Benedi ctsson' s sec ond
novel, so important to her, and wave ring in
hi s ow n emotions, he und ermined her fragile
self-confide nce so gre atly that she took her
ow n life in a peculiarly horrible fashi on. But
shortly befor e doin g so, she wrote a play obv i-
ou sly based on their re lationship, explor ing
its mor al and soci al implication s. This was
di scovered only after her dea th; the Na tional
--------------------------~--------------------------
ictorian stage melodrama has been an
V overlo ok ed area of scho larly research
for most of the past centur y, both
becau se of doubts abo ut the qu alit y of the
wor ks as literatu re or theatre (for the most
part, very rea sonabl e doubts) and becau se it
was see n as neith er "literature" nor "history" .
It is onl y relati vely recentl y that thi s "art of
the peopl e" has begun to ge t the recognition
it deser ves.
A few scho lars have produced exc iting
studies - Jacky Bratt on , Mich ael Booth and
Jane Mood y, in parti cul ar , have don e much
to map out an itinerar y for futur e scholars to
follo w. Now Patsy Stonem an has produced a
useful and illu minati ng study of eight ada pta-
tion s of l ane Eyre stage d within the first fifty
years of the novel' s publi cati on . If for no
oth er rea son , thi s bo ok wo uld be we lco me
simply as an access ible ve rsion of plays that
ex ist onl y in manuscript in the Briti sh
Libr ary (w hich hold s the Lord Cha mberlain's
collection of plays for licensin g), or in fairl y
rare actin g editions. But Ston eman has don e
mor e . By setting the plays side by side,
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ARTS
PA UL BI NDI N G
Vi ct or i a B en edi ct s s on
THE ENC HANTM ENT
Translated by Clare Bayley
Cottesloe Theatre
Thea tre 's produ cti on of Clare Bayley' s sens i-
tive Eng lish vers ion is its British premiere.
Three of the pla y' s four acts are set in an
atelier in Pari s, mag net of so many Sca nd ina-
vian artists, and the mili eu eulog ized by the
paint er Osvald Al vin g in Ibsen ' s Ghos ts
(1881 ). Ac t Thr ee alone takes us to the south-
ern Swe de n (Skane) that Money had rend ered
so vividly. A nd it has to be ack now ledg ed
from the o utse t that Benedictsson was less
acco mplished as a dram ati st than as a novel-
ist. The Enchantment has aw kward, ove r-
apparent joins, and makes use of devi ces
from the French we ll-made play which Ibsen
and Bjernson had already tran scended : coinci-
de nces and their opp ortu ne revelation , lett ers
cont ainin g information bett er spoken, charac-
ters who are fire lles, lackin g autonomy. Rut
with a cour age matchi ng Benedi ctsson' s
ow n, Paul Miller' s dir ection avo ids the tem p-
tation to smo oth ove r authorial clum siness,
presentin g the wor k for what it is: an elo-
quent arg ument made flesh, and a dem on stra-
tion of a predic ament of such ago nizing
importance to the ce ntral character, Loui se
Stra ndberg (the mo vin gly ge ntle Na ncy Ca r-
roll ) that death , rather than death-in-life, will
High old
times at
Lowood
JUDlTH FLAND ERS
Pa t s y St on em an
J A N E E Y RE O N STAGE , 184 8 -1 8 9 8
452pp. Ashgate. £55.
97875460348 I
she has ena bled us to make reason able
ass umptions abo ut the audi enc es for these
melodramas, and by ex tension, for do mestic
melodrama more ge nera lly .
Man y of these ve rsio ns of Jane Eyre we re
aimed dir ectl y at audiences who probably
knew , if not the novel , then at least the plot in
ge neral outline. (This is made clear by dia-
logue that wo uld be incomprehen sib le to any -
one witho ut prev ious kno wled ge: "your
father was related to my moth er. Your uncl e
also . .. who, disinh eritin g myself and sister,
leaves his fortun e to his orphan niec e" .) The
authors we re thereb y freed to focu s o n ele-
ment s that wo uld appea l most to those payin g
admission. The 1848 ve rsion, l ane Eyre. or,
The Secrets of Thornfi eld Manor, was by
John Courtney , hou se author for the Surrey
TLS A U G US T 17 20 0 7
Nan cy Carroll as Louise
be her preferr ed solution.
Th e design er Simon Daw has his set domi-
nated by a huge blown-up reproduction of
Rodin ' s "D anaid" , Thi s is wonde rfully effec -
tive. Th e play' s Brand es figur e, Gustave
All and , is a sculptor, and an apt parallel to his
relation ship with Loui se can be found in that
Thea tre, and stage d only three months after
the publication of Bront e ' s no vel. The Surrey
dr ew a ge nerally wor king- and lower-middle-
cla ss audience , and it spe cialize d in " servant"
plays tSusan Hopley, or, The Vicissitudes of
a Serva nt Girl ran and ran) , and thi s l ane
Eyre did not disapp oint. Th e play opens with
Betty Bun ce bemo anin g her lot as "se rva nt of
all work to a charity schoo l", and pit yin g the
girls who "are se nt out of the way by father s
and moth er s that can 't very we ll account for
their bein g in the way" . Wh en Brocklehurst
bulli es Jane Eyre, Joe Joker , another serva nt,
is sacked for sy mpathizing with her. As
Stonem an notes, his departure from Lo wood
with Bett y makes Janes departure "less the
so litary flight of a Romantic indi vidu ali st
than part of a conc ert ed rebellion of class
victims".
Thi s l ane Eyre was stage d in 1848 , the
year that saw pub lication of The Communist
Manifesto, the fin al Chartist petiti on, and sev -
era l Euro pe an revoluti on s. Yet the serv ants,
see mingly so ind epend ent in Act On e, by the
last act are happil y employe d by Roch ester :
Act One, it turn s out, is a prot est again st bad
masters, not the con cept of masters and serv-
ants. Wh en Joe Jok er sees Roch ester about to
be engulfed in flam es, he rushes for ward to
rescu e him : " He is o ur master and mu st not
peri sh thu s!" . By 1870 , three years after John
Stu art Mill' s suffra ge amendment was
rejected, on the gro unds that all decent
women had a man to prot ect them , Charlotte
Birch-Pfeiffer ' s adaptation had con centrated
its interest in men ' s protection of wom en,
of Rodin ' s with Ca mille Claud el, the mod el
for Danaid , who beautifully, erotica lly,
reac hes out for revivif yin g water. (The sculp-
ture wo uld later inform perh aps the grea tes t
of all Sca ndinav ian plays about arti sts,
Ibsens When We Dead A waken. ) Al so, by
ove rarching the actors with Rodin' s artefact ,
Daw mak es us appreci ate that the " mora lity
debate" of the 1880 s, requiring as it did hon-
es ty and the cour age to confront basic hum an
desires, is germa ne to our ow n tim es, not
least for the way in which it brou ght about art
of the first ord er. These Sca ndinav ians in
Pari s we re trailblazers.
Zubin Varla as the sculptor All and look s
remar ka bly like Brand es, comporting himse lf
on ly too con vincingly as a man familiar with
fame, a believer in the suprem acy of the indi-
vidual inclin ati on who has no room for
infrin gem ent of it by anoth er person , ho w-
eve r admi rabl e or passion ate. For an earlier
lover, Loui se' s friend , the paint er Erna
Walld en (superbly played by Niamh
C usac k), Alland ' s self-se rving attitude to
wo men has no part in the new cultu re which
she wa nts to help sha pe. He should be
reje cted; Loui se mu st mo ve away fro m him .
She cannot, however. Wh y not ? Is it simply
that, unlik e her creator, she lack s gifts and
ambiti on s? " If you hate, yo u will surv ive ",
we hear. Rut l .ou ise and Ren edi ct sson do no t
wish to hate those who deli vered them from
the con venti onalism depi cted in the Swe dish
interlude . Rath er than do so they prefer to
die, suicide bein g the only ex press ion of
hatred po ssibl e for them . Thi s ma y point to a
deep wea kness in both person alit y and We/t-
anschauung; yet ho w ca n one not respect the
art born of it, as so thoughtfull y and reso-
nantl y recreated at the Co ttes loe?
and Roch ester is "father to the neighbour-
hood " . By 1879, talk of the Marri ed
Wom en' s Prop ert y Bill was wides pread, and
that year's l ane Eyre inherit s from her uncl e
ear ly in the pla y : no lon ger eco nomically
vulnerable, she mak es dispo sitions for her
own and oth er s' lives.
A lon gside these indi vidu al insight s, Ston e-
man exa mines the similarities and chan ges
acro ss fift y yea rs : some vers ions stress the
predatory nature of Roch ester, and the fate of
a wo man who succumbs to a fal se marri age;
oth er s are more interested in class mocker y
of the lower ord er s. Roch ester ' s mora l wor th
fluctu ates - in the 1848 version, the mad-
woman is hi s wife ; in seve ral ot hers, she is
his evil broth er' s immoral widow, mo ther to
Ad ele; in 1879, Adele is his illegitimate
ch ild, and not only is the mad wom an his
wife, but there is a parall el story of John
Reed' s sed uction and ab andonment of
Blanch e Ingram that emphas izes what hap-
pen s when " the ch oicest je wel of a wo ma n's
life" is taken aw ay from her.
Th ese richl y rewarding texts have been
edited we ll by Ston em an, with some thou ght-
ful not es on Victorian me lodrama in ge nera l
and specific theatres in particular. One
wishes that her publi sher had employe d a
proofreader - the text is littered with errors -
but melodrama-lo vers eve ryw her e mu st be
grateful to have access to a version of l ane
Eyre that includes renditions of a song ca lled
"I' ll Wear the Trouser s, Oh " , and another
that includes the line " Hark! Sir Rowland
him self - I kno w hi s proud step" .
 19

A novel of Iranian village life

Caged and uncaged

SAM E ER RAH1M becom es a cam el shepherd. Whi le reflecting
that in his life there is "no time for senti-
M ahmoud Do wl atab adi ment s", he sees a dark camel attackin g a mare;
the fem ale cries, "as if she were cryin g an old
MI SSI NG SO LUC H woman's lamentation s" (animal suffering
Tra nslated by Kamran Rastegar here is alway s on a human scale). Abb as takes
507pp. Hoboken, NJ: Melville House Publishing. up his stick and beats the dark camel, "blow
Paperback, $16.95. after blow upon his face and temp le". He is
978 I 933633 II 4
relentless. The narrator comm ent s that "even
with the most cold-hearted of people, when
ahmoud Dowlatabadi is named they are drawn to hit a beast in a moment of

M after the village in north- east Iran

where he was born in 1940 . His
famil y was poor thou gh literate. Whil e
grow ing up he worke d as a labourer and a
shepherd. In order to distr act him self from
ten sions at hom e (he clashed with his father ' s
seco nd wife and her children) he imm ersed
him self in both classic and popul ar Per sian
literature: Ferdowsi' s Book of Kings and the
Shi a passion pla ys stage d eve ry Ashura. His
father was both a superstitious and a cultured
ma n: when his shee p fell ill he would beg
wandering dervishes for blessed water to heal
them ; yet he knew hundreds of poem s by
heart. Dowlat abadi left his village in his early
teen s and wa ndered the countryside; later , he
arrived in Tehran , where he wor ked as a
hairdresser , a slaughterer in an abattoir , an
actor and eve ntually a journalist.
Whil e in Teh ran, Dowlatabadi began to
think about the soc iety in which he had
grow n up. He read Che khov 's short stories
and the wor k of the Iranian author Sadegh
Hedayatn , who wrote on Kafka and had com-
mitted suicide in 1951. (Last year Hedayatn ' s
books we re banned in Iran .)
Influenced by progressive social ideas
conc ernin g the role of wo me n and land di stri-
bution, Dowlatabadi believed that "there are
writers in the world who ha ve recounted and
continue to recount realit y and truth " . He
publi shed his first short story in 1962 and
continued to write and perform in plays and
film s. He concluded that:
unl ess yo u have spe nt a night out on the pave-
men t you have no idea of how bli nd the syste m
is towards its own childre n; unl ess yo u were
forced to sleep on a sheepfold roof for lack of a
hou se, yo u wo uldn' t know the imp or tance of
security for you yourself, let alone for society
at large; unless you have lived in a shack of 30
square met res full of peopl e and so mu ch stink
that slee p will not come to you, you wo n' t
und erstand th at a hum an be ing first need s
mi nimum means of subsistence and digni ty
be fore he ca n rise against hi s hein ou s
exploiters - the paras ites, id lers and others
who constitute the bulk of the dark social
forces.
The Shah impri soned him for such com ment s
in 1975 and he was not released for two
yea rs. On the eve of the Revoluti on in 1979,
he publi shed a novel, Missing Soluch, which
ha s only ju st been translated into English by
Kamran Rastegar.
The novel is set in a poor Irani an village
called Za minej. There is little to enterta in the
Th e villag e of Masu ieh in th e Ta lesh mounta ins of Northern Tran, p hotographed in 19116
children in this remote land scape. One way
they fill the time is by torturing animals. A
group will ca pture a live lizard , squeeze its
head until its mouth is forc ed open and plac e
a pinch of snuff on its tongue; the lizard is
allowe d to run round in distress unt il it dies,
then its swo llen bell y is beat en with a sharp
stone until its insides are expose d. Som e
children leave; others hang round spitting
near the corp se. In Za minej, cru elty to
both anima ls and huma ns is not a source of
pleasure (almos t nothing plea sant happen s in
this book ); in this world, cruelty is the only
forc e strong enough to energize its peopl e.
Sur viving becom es eve n more difficult if
the social sys tem is disturb ed . When Soluch
- the husband of Mer gan and father of three
children, who at different times is a "clay
ove n maker . .. a pit digger . .. a dredger . .. a
reap er . . . a room plasterer" - disappears
from his house one night with no explana-
tion , his famil y loses their onl y protect ion
from gree dy landowners and rapaciou s
elders . Mergan is angry and confused . A long
time ago the attraction between husband and
wife faded to habit ; shortly before Soluch' s
disappea ranc e it had grow n eve n weaker:
"They shared neith er their work nor their inti-
mate lives". Soluch had grown listless. He
once took great pride in the oven s he fash-
ioned - he would knead the cla y like a skilled
baker with his dou gh - yet he left
without fini shin g the granary he was build-
ing . Mergan is unsure how to defin e her loss:
" She sensed she had suddenly lost some-
thin g, and she didn 't know what it was . She
knew its name, which was Soluch, but she
didn't know its essenc e . . .. It felt like
something else" . Their fifteen-year-old son
Abba s takes the opportunity to rebel. He
forc es Mergan to let him grow a thick tuft
of hair (his fath er insisted that he have it
clo se cropped); he eats the bread meant for
his younger broth er and sister, and then
shouts at his mother for pro viding on ly
enough "to feed a baby goat". He bulli es his
more sensitive broth er Abr au . When Mergan
sends them to pull up root s from a nearb y
fro zen field, the y are told to keep a look- out
for the man who ow ns the land, but instead
Abb as mock s his broth er and pu shes him
aro und. When the lando wn er arrives he run s
away , leaving Abrau to take a beatin g that
leaves him sobbing "like a calf' s braying".
The famil y does have a field it has been cul-
tivatin g for yea rs - a sma ll piece of un-
enclose d space called God' s Land - but it is
not registered in the ir nam e. Soon after
So luch' s di sappearance the village elders try
to claim it. Abba s and Abr au sell their shares
for mea gre compensation , but Mergan and
her twel ve-year-old daughter Hajer refu se to
sell their s. However, without an adult man to
defend her right s Mergan panic s. She marri es
Hajer to Ali Gena v, a man who suffers mis-
fortun e ea rlie r in the novel and is now relent-
less in inflictin g it on others. (Durin g a
snows torm his moth er ' s roof fell in and
killed her ; grief-stricken, he blam ed his wife
who didn 't wa nt her to live with them; he
gra bbed a shove l and brok e her legs, perm a-
nentl y laming her.) One of the few tend er
moments in the book com es on Hajer' s
wedding night. Mergan thread s her
daughter ' s bod y hair and slaps her to brin g "a
bit of life and colour" to her face ; she softens,
thou gh, when applying the rouge and face
pow er, "as if she ' d ju st reme mbered not to
snap at her daughter" on her wedding night .
Mergan admits that her chi ldren are the
vict ims of her troubl es: she compares herself
to a wild animal, caged in the out side world
but set loose in her home .
In Zam inej, hum an behaviour is often see n
as anima l-like: Ab rau savours his bread like
a "hedgehog that has grabbed onto the tail of
a snake, slow ly, slowly swallow ing more of
it" ; Abb as and Abr au fight "like a mon goose
and a snake" . The mo st powerful sce ne in
Missing Soluch is no different from the rest
in term s of tone or theme : it merely exceeds
the others in its vivid brutalit y. Abb as
rage, there is still a sensation of pity that
twinges in their heart". Here there is not.
The camel - as imperviou s as "black rock "
- turn s on Abb as, cha sing him so closely that
his neck is flecked with spit. Abba s almost
escapes but then his shoulder is bitten and the
hoo ves are on him ; he mana ges to grab his
knife and stab the came l in its "face, eyes ,
neck , chest" , but this only enrages the anim al
more. Ahha s' s only refuge is a dry well do wn
which he thro ws him self. Barely con sciou s,
he find s the soft sa nd of the walls impossible
to grip ; the fur ious camel is still waiting for
him at the top - and it can surv ive longer than
he can without water. In an almo st fatall y
humorous touch, the well turn s out to be
the home of some poi sonou s snakes . Abb as is
rescu ed but is ment all y scarred and rarely
spea ks; it is as if he has been drained of
the violence that once sustained him. This
twent y-page sequence is an exhilarating
summation of the novel' s fairly simple out-
look : that cruelty begets cruelt y; that the piti-
less will be puni shed for what they have
done and then more so, until the read er ends
up sympathizing with a character describ ed
earlie r as someone who "would eve n bite off
his moth er ' s nippl e to get a bit more milk ".
Later , when Mergan as ks for compen sation
from the cam el-owner, he rapes her.
The author's writing about life in
his home village of Dowl atabad has an ele-
ment of nostalgi a which is missing here. In
Zaminej , an elder does read aloud from the
Book of Kings (which has its own share of
bloody battles as well as exquisite poetr y),
but he stops because he is goin g blind. There
are some brilliantly tou gh piece s of writing -
it is apparent ly the first novel written in the
everyday languag e of the Iranian peop le and
its vigour com es through in translation.
Although Mergan is not yet fort y, her face
rese mbles the land scape in which she works :
"T aut skin, dr awn over ro ug h, per si stent
bones, with visibl e inclin es and peaks".
Hajers face is like a pool of water : " Some-
times it sparkled, as if the sun were shining
on it. Oth er times it was dark , as if a
sands torm we re brewing. Sometim es it
was froz en over , as if winter had set in.
Som et imes it was grey, as if clouds we re
accumulating" .
Thi s passage comes from early in the
nove l, when ther e is still hop e that Soluch
will return . From then on , Mahmoud
Dowlatab adi does not allo w one ray of sun-
shine to fall on Zamin ej .

TLS A UG US T 17 200 7
20
Soixante-huitard
tendh al likened politic s in a work of
S fiction to a "pistol bein g fired in the
middl e of a concert " - a noise that is
both disrupti ve and without forc e. "Such
politi cs", he noted, "will mort ally offend half
your readers, and bore the others who found
it ex presse d in a much more specific and
forceful way in the mornin g newspap er." The
warning has been ignor ed by French writers
eve r since .
Jean-P aul Dub ois ' s new novel, A French
Life, which as Vie Francaise won the Pri x
Fe rnina in 2004 , is one of the most direct
challenges to Stendha l's precept mount ed
in recent yea rs. It tells the life story of a man
born in 1950 , with the main eve nts of the past
fift y yea rs interwo ven into his first-p erson
narrativ e. The chapter titles are the nam es of
the French pres idents from Charles de Ga ulle
to Jacqu es Chirac. The perso nal and the
politic al are meant to inform and enrich each
oth er in a two-way metaphor.
The life of the narrator , Paul Blick , is un-
rem arkable, reflectin g what Duboi s evidently
regards as a rotten time. The book opens with
the death of his elder broth er in 1958 , ju st as
French voters approve the constitution of the
Fifth Republic . The rest of his childhood is
spent in joyless comfort, overshadowed by a
reactionary old grandmother who is meant to
embody the strictures of Gaullist France.
The gra ndmother does not survive the
swinging I960s, which happil y coincide with
Paul' s sex ual aw akening. Then , in his home
town of To ulouse, he revels in the spirit of
1968. "What was at stake that May" , he
writes, "was nothin g more or less than the
simultaneo us departure of milli ons of men
and wo men towards a new planet, another
world, where art, education, sex, music, and
polit ics would be free of the narrow-minded
norm s and codes forged in the rigors of the
post-war period " . The j ourn ey is short-lived:
within the next few yea rs, President Georges
Pompid ou "returned the country to the fold
and its citizenry to work" . Paul takes a job in
a secondary school, a "little labor camp " ,
Have you
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FICTION
H E NRI ASTl ER
J e an-P aul Dub oi s
A F RENC H LI F E
Translated by Linda Covcrdale
276pp. Hamish Hamilton. £14.99.
9780 241 14339 1
ruled by a disciplinarian headma ster, where
he is scornful of his fello w teach ers who have
reduced the spirit of 1968 to an adulterous
frenzy: "They tried to con vince them selves
that lying to their mates . . . fondlin g each
other between classes and fuckin g eve ry other
Wednesday were so many acts of politi cal
emancipation and liberation".
He falls in love with the daughter of a
businessm an - despit e her bour geois back-
ground - and marries her when she fall s
pregnant. His fath er-in-l aw find s him a job as
a j ourn alist on the sports magazine he ow ns,
while hi s wife, a produ ct of the pro-bu siness
Gisca rd d' Estaing era, succee ds her father at
the head of the famil y firm . Pa ul becom es a
house-hu sband , lookin g after their two child-
ren. In the 1980 s, his famil y life deteriora tes .
He sees less and less of hi s workaho lic wife
and school-age children. He takes up photo-
graphy and has an affair with a neighb our.
But the spirit of those individualistic times
catches up with Paul. "During the eighties,
you had to be dead not to have ambiti on.
Money had the aggress ive, truly noxious
smell of toilet deodorant." He stumbles into
success with two book s of glossy photo-
graphs, makes piles of money and hates him-
self for it: " I had und ergon e all the phases of
indoctrination into middl e-class citizenship."
He makes a private politic al gesture by turn-
ing do wn the offer by President Mitt errand to
make him his official photographer.
The 1990s see Paul sink deeper into cyni-
cism. He is disgusted by the sca ndals of the
late Mitt err and years - the graft, the HIV-
contaminated blood supplies, the phon e taps,
the sec ret famil y. The "monarchica l Republic
TL S A UG UST 17 200 7
. . . had left state ethics and the public welfare
in a prehi stori c conditi on", he writes. The
Chirac presidenc y, from 1995, di sgusts him
eve n mor e. "With eve ry day ca me a deli very
of fresh manur e: corruption, breach of tru st,
misuse of public fund s, embezz leme nt . ..
racism, povert y, unempl oyment. " As public
mores unravel, so does Paul' s pri vate life.
His wife takes a mafia lawyer as a lover and
loot s the famil y business; they die in a plane
crash. Paul is ruined in the collap se of
the famil y firm and find s work as a
gardener. His daughter goes mad and is
lock ed up. Th e book ends with Paul , now
in his mid-fifties, takin g her up to a mount ain-
top, and reflectin g on the absurdity of
life, which "I knew was nothin g more than
-----------~,-----------
In a deep dark wood
LU CY DALL AS
Pi e r r e P e j u
C LARA 'S TA L E
Translated by Euan Cameron
314pp. Harvill Seeker.£12.99.
978 184655007 2
he origin al title of Pierre Peju' s nove l,
T Le Rire de l 'ogre, suits this broodin g
medit ation on evil, memory and
surviva l much better than Clam's Tale.
It opens with a dark littl e fable about war,
children and an ogre, which ends with Death
and the Devil makin g an appearance. After
this prologue, the novel prop er begins as Paul
travels to the Ty rol in 1963 to stay with his
penfriend. Paul is a mood y young ma n,
con stantl y makin g dar k, violent sketches
rather than mi xing with the hearty, happ y
young people of the village of Kehl stein. On
a trip to a nearb y lake, he wan ders into a dark
for est and discovers a huge vase of red roses
attach ed to a tree, a sight which fills him with
a sense of evil and for ebodin g. Ove r the
next few chapt ers, Paul recount s hi s time
in Kehl stein , where he meets the enigmatic
Clara, who comes and goes as she pleases,
takes phot ograph s of eve rything and di splays
a relaxed intim acy at once exc iting and
alarmin g. Interspersed with Paul' s adolesce nt
adventures are wa r stories from twenty
years befo re, involv ing two natives of
Kehlstein: Lafontaine, the town doct or, who
turn s out to be Clara 's fath er, and Moritz, the
so n of the sawm ill o wn er. These men have to
com e to term s with the hor ror of the wa r as
they exper ienced it, in particul ar with one
episode involving the murder of a group of
Jewish children. Morit z leads a boy and a
girl to their death , much as the og re in the
prol ogue does; his breakdo wn many years
later echoes the sa me episode and explains
the roses in the forest.
These war chapters are told in flat third-
person narration which brings the despa ir of
Lafont aine and Moritz vividly to life; we
wonder how they can live with the taint and
knowledge of such evil. Paul' s aw akening,
an illusory strand connectin g us to others".
A French Life was success ful in Franc e
becau se it was ju st that: it held a mirr or up to
a nation. Paul's running commentaries on
curr ent eve nts may sound like the rant s of a
barfl y, but they are believable. His hard-l eft
politi cs, his who le outlo ok on life - a
combination of private libertari ani sm and
strident pronouncement s on publi c matt ers -
are typical of his age . His wor ld-wea ry, eve ry-
one-is-stupid-exce pt-me tone is also very
French. The question is, ca n the nove l have
univer sal appeal? Despite an elega nt tran s-
lation into (A merica n) English, this is
dubio us. The characters, with the possibl e
exception of the narrator , are mere shadows.
To tho se unf amiliar with the lives of
French babyboomers, the book may read like
the rumin ation s of a self-absorbed cy nic.
And the politi cs may not resonate like the
background music of a genera tion, but like a
Stendh alian concert-spoiling shot.
related in the feveri sh, pomp ous tones of
adolesce nce, is also streaked throu gh with
guilt and bad memories; his father, a Resist-
ance fighter, was murdered when he was
twelve, and the mystery has never been
solved. He leaves Kehl stein with a set of
symbols that will haunt him throu ghout his
life: "a forest path runnin g through spruce and
fir trees that leads to a vast clearing flooded
with light , and a small lake on which the fleet-
ing reflection of cloud s shimmers". Paul goes
back to Pari s to be an art student, tears up the
pavin g stones in 196 8 for something to do,
and eve ntually sets out to be a sculptor, work-
ing in stone and steel, creatin g images of
sadness , pain , crue lty , or solitude . Clara
crosses his path from time to time, brin ging
with her an eleme nt of anxious surprise ; she
becomes a war photographer , taking pictur es
of combatants and tryin g to reac h the skull
beneath the skin. Th rou gh Clara, Paul meets
Jeanne, a nurse, and, somew hat improbably,
they end up married with two children in the
French countrysid e. He strugg les to accept
the happin ess within his grasp and, in the
final chapter, when he is a very old man , he
acknow ledges that his inabilit y to do so has
blighted his life.
Peju refers to fairy tales and fables throu gh-
out Clam's Tale, and the story is weighed
down by characters who do not progress
beyond their sym bolic meaning. The imagery
itself is simp le - the lake at Kehl stein is called
the Black Lake, Clara is pale with black hair
and wea rs only black , whereas Jeanne is rosy
and blond e. There tends to be a stor m, or
at least rain, w hen any thing mom entou s is
happening. It is difficult to balance a convin-
cing narrati ve with this sort of pictu re-book
metaphor, and in the end the novel collapses
under the stra in. Mich el Tourni er' s Le Roi des
aulnes perform s the same trick magnific entl y,
and would see m to be a strong influence, but
Tourni er can journ ey much furth er into the
realm of fable without eve r losin g his grip
on the story at hand. The account of Paul' s
later life does not match up to the power
and intensity conj ured up in the beginnin g of
Clara 's Tale; the ogres of history are far more
terrifying than those in fables.

Keeping-going
acob Sch wart , a math s teacher and
J print er in the Old World , a cem etery
caretaker in the New one, makes two
extravagant purchases in the final dec ade of
his life. On the first of these, a second-hand
radio, he listen s to the defeat of his enemies
the Nazis. When it seems the fight aga inst
Am erican xeno phobes and anti-Semites
cann ot be won, he uses the second extrav a-
gance, a Remin gton doubl e-barrelled
shotgun, to kill a visitor to the cem etery,
then his ow n wife, and finall y him self.
"Hide your wea kness, Rebecca" , he told his
daughter , and for the res t of her life she
adheres to his advice: neith er of her two
husband s find s out that she is Jewish. In her
mind they are always referred to by their
last nam es, "T ignor" and "Gallagher", as if
a recit ation of those imp ersonal , acceptably
Ge ntile words - her nam e now - soo thes her.
Joyce Carol Oates, that prolifi c, intense
ob server of Am eric an life, di scovered the
truth about her ow n ances tors in middl e age,
after her grandmother's death in 1987: they
were Germ an Jews who emigrated to Am er-
ica to esca pe per secution . The Gravedigger's
Daughter is not Oatess first exploration of
Jewishness - which she not ably broached in
the novel The Tattooed Girl - but it is clearl y
intended to be a heartfelt hom age to the
strugg les of her grandmother and tho se who
came befor e. It tell s a story of shifting identi-
ties, of a wo man who buries herself in order
to survive. Rebecca Schwart is the scruffy,
abused child of rev iled small-tow n outc asts.
Rebecc a Tignor, the subdued wife of an itiner-
ant bu sinessman , toil s in a factor y to save a
few doll ars for the futur e. As Hazel Jones
--------------------~,--------------------
Good for a laugh
othing of Wood y Alien's very public
N
private strugg les surfaces in Mere
Anarchy , a light, thin collection of
stories, some of which were first publi shed in
the New Yorker. Instead, Alien sticks to the
tried and often trite formul as of the standard
Am erican humour piece, includin g funny
names (Dr Diverticulin sky, April Fleshpot)
and wife jok es ("Her husband died recently,
a massive heart attack, but I wa rned him -
don 't look directl y at her when she steps out
of the shower"). Runyonesque dialogue (" I
guess I shouldn' t have opened my big yap")
and lots of showbiz settings keep the read er
from anything approaching the personal.
The piece s riff on current events, oft en on
stories from the New York Times. A news
item about a two-pound truffl e so ld at a
Lond on auction for $ 110,000 prefaces a
detecti ve tale in the style of The Maltese
Falcon , complete with a Sidney Greenstreet
character and an ending that quot es Casa-
blanca. In "Tandoori Ransom", the tale of
the failed kidn appin g of an actor 's stand-in,
the j umping-off point is a Times exce rpt
about the "legendary outl aw Vee rappa n" ,
but the j okes are tasteless rather than funn y.
Alien ' s signature addition to the comic set
piece is the injection of an intellectu al or
FICTION
H EATH ER THOMP SO N
Jo yc e Ca r o l O at e s
T HE G RA VED IGGE R 'S D A U GHT ER
582pp. Fourth Estate. £ 18.99.
978 000725845 1
(later Ga llagher), she becom es a perk y inno-
cent , a young lady "of the utm ost propri ety in
her dress as in her mann er". Men - and
wome n - ador e her. The luxuriou s life she
attains allows her son to pur sue a career as a
piani st, fulfilling a musical talent inherit ed
from the Ge rma n gra ndmother he will never
kno w.
And so the grea t meltin g pot prevails. To
be a true Am eri can, Oat es impli es, is to be an
actor. She specializes in equivoca l moralit y:
her vict ims are rarely innoc ent , and her
descriptions of eve n the vilest villains pro-
voke empathy. In the recent novella Rape:
A love story , a righteou s polic em an
murder s the perp etrator s of a ga ng rape. You
Must Remember This details a passion ate
love affair between a teen age girl and her
uncl e. A seve rely battered child turn s on her
younger sister in The Rise of Life on Earth.
"Tragedy", Oates wrot e in Conversa tions
(2006 ), "always uph old s the human spirit
because it is an exploration of hum an natur e
in term s of its streng ths. One simply cannot
kno w strengths unless suffering, misfortun e,
and violence are exp lored quit e frankl y by
the writer." Rebecc a, the newly orp haned
gravedigger's daught er, fall s in love with her
first hu sband when he beat s up an unwant ed
suitor of hers. In Tignor she sees a strong
MARK KAMIN E
W o od y Ali en
M E RE ANA RC HY
160 pp. Ebury Press. £ 12.99.
978 0 09 192 02 1 0
high- art cont ent into a slapstick wor ld. "Thus
Ate Za rathustra" featur es selections from
the newly discovered Friedrich Nietzsche's
Diet Book. "Sing, You Sach er Tort es" relays
a Bro adway produc er' s pitch to an investor
for a musical set in Vienn a whose opening
numb er "is Waiter Gropius, Mies van der
Rohe, and AdolfI.oos singing ' Form Follows
Func tion"'. The ju xtaposition of weighty
names and silly situations is good for a laugh:
in the invocati on of famous writers at the
opening of the dusty Hollywood sell-out
story "This Nib For Hire" , "Flanders
Mealworm " sounds funni er follo win g hard
on Dostoevsky, Fa ulkner and Fitzgerald.
The funni est piece in Mere An archy relies
on some awareness of the eve nts surrounding
the hirin g and firin g of Michael Ovitz by the
Wa It Disney Co mpany. "Surprise Rock s
Disney Tri al" is a short play in which a
Disney atto rney questions "an unexpect ed
TL S A U G U S T 17 200 7
man, who has no need to hide his weaknesses
- but Tignor beat s Rebecca as well. She
leaves him when he attac ks their three-year-
old son. Before findin g Ga llagher and a
measure of security, mother and chi ld travel
fearfully for month s, "keeping-going"
throu gh the communities that dot the road s
and high ways of the Am eri can North- East.
Oates imagines a disturbingly famili ar
emotional land scape amid the factory town s
and small cities, the wa terfa lls, glittering
lakes and wild deciduous for ests. More than
any them e, it is this dark setting that marks
her abund ant output, makin g a continu ous
narr ati ve of the dozen s of novels, novellas
and short stories . She grew up, at the tail end
of the Depr ession , on a sma ll farm in Lock-
port , NY. Despit e quickl y, conclusively
launching herself into the rarefied world of
aca dem ia, she has never strayed far from
the Great Lakes: when she and her husband ,
Raymond Smith, the Editor of the Ontario
Review, move d to Ca nada durin g the
Vietnam wa r, they lived in Wind sor, ju st a
few minut es across the bord er fro m Detroit.
Th e strong winds off these lakes remind
the grave digge r's daughter of what she
would like to for get: "There we re these
wayward breezes, some times .. .. Whipping
wind of the kind she' d grow n up with, rush-
ing at the old stone cott age from the vas tness
of Lake Ont ario. A crue l suffocating wind".
Th e charac ters buffeted by it appea r equally
auth enti c, brou ght to life in tight , seamless
prose - Oates only falters slig htly with the
Dick ensian excess of Rebecca' s squalid,
graveyard-bound childhood . She certainly
succee ds in evo king the peril ous compl exity
of complete cultural integration , the fault y
found ation of American life. As Hazel Jon es
would have it, "Nowhere is where we are
from , mister. But somew here is where we
are going".
witness": "Will the witness please state his
name". "Mickey Mou se." " Please tell the
court your occupation." "Animated rodent."
The piece tracks in deadpan court-transcript
style the exchanges between animated rodent
and high-po wered attorney . Simply namin g
those prese nt at a party "at the home of
Jeffrey Katzenberg" has a gleeful absurdity.
Counse l: " You were present ?". Witn ess:
" Yes. Myself, To m Cruise, To m Hanks, Jack
Nicholso n. I believe Sea n Penn, Wile E.
Coyote, the Road Runn er" . In seve n pages,
Mick ey' s testimony touch es on greed, sex ,
ambition and substance -abuse. You cou ldn 't
ask for a better gloss on life in Hollywood .
Other success ful pieces includ e one on
home renovation in Manhatt an that gets into
gear when its narrator notic es that Dante
"had left out any spec ial menti on of cont rac-
tors" in his vision of hell. Delay and di saster s
follo w, driving the homeo wners to insanit y
and insolvency before thin gs return neatly to
Dante' s Inf erno. All the stories employ a
winkingly eleva ted dict ion - the contrac tor is
see n "wolfing back his matutin al porti on of
sturgeo n" - and shopwo rn slang, good for
a smile here and there and for a breezy,
famili ar-seeming read, as Ali en tackl es New
Age gurus, pri vate-school snobbery, and
tell- all memoirs. Everything see ms grist to
Wood y Allen' s comic mill - high art, phil oso-
phy, eve n string theor y in the aptly titled
"Strung O ut". Onl y Alien himself is abse nt.
21
Inventing
Eddie
PA UL OW E N
D a vid Flu sf ed er
T HE P A G A N H OU SE
4 10pp. Fourth Estate. £ 14.99.
978 0 00 724962 6
he Pagan House tells two stor ies : one
T that of Edgar Pagan, a twel ve-year-old
Briti sh boy visiting his estranged
father in upstate New York ; and the other of a
nineteenth-century religiou s cult with which
George Pagan, one of Edgar's ances tors, was
invol ved . In the present day, Edgar, who
find s himse lf in the middl e of a famil y squab-
ble ove r his grandmother's hou se, attem pts to
get to know his shiftless father and strugg les
with his sex dri ve. In the past, 150 yea rs
earlier, George Pagan falls under the spell of
a messianic Christian leader who preach es a
doctrin e of " Biblical Co mmunism" and insti-
tutes free love, poly gamy and publi c nudit y.
The twent y-fir st-centu ry sce nes are full of
unexpect ed twists: a detour into the world of
sadomaso chistic spanking; Edga r's reappear-
ance as a much-pi erced dropout kno wn as
"Mental Eddie" ; and the uncon vincing fram-
ing device revealed on almos t the last page.
The tone and overall shape of the novel do
not easily withsta nd these diversion s, which
sit uncomfort ably with the unshowy histori-
cal back story , though when David Flusfeder
does brin g the two eras togeth er, it is with a
pleasin g neatn ess. Narrative voice is also
probl emati c. The novel is in the third per son ,
thou gh from Edga r's point of view, yet the
author makes no effo rt to adapt the voice to
Edgar's age : the twelve-year-old spec ulates
that his moth er is ruin g her "failures as a
wo man and a wife" , and makes an unlik ely
reference to "the wailing madwom an beatin g
on the locked attic door". In other ways ,
Flusfeder keenl y recreates the mind of a teen-
age boy in sce nes of ma sturb ation , including
one which takes plac e on an aircraft plummet-
ing toward s the sea.
The loving rel ationship between Edg ar and
his mother is we ll drawn , as is the less loving
one between Edgar's yo unge r broth er and his
father. And Flu sfeder, an American based in
Britain, is goo d on the small differenc es
between the two countries : a recurring joke
has his Am erican socce r coach taking it for
granted that the untalent ed Edga r is a " British
virtuoso of the sport" .
Flusfeder says The Pagan House is about
"the pro ce ss of hecom ing" , and make s mu ch
of the fact that his pro tago nist - whose nam e
is in fact Edwa rd - has rechristened him self.
Ele cta, the girl he ha s a cru sh on, and her
Native Am eric an famil y, have rein vent ed
them sel ves as Italians and opened a pi zza
bu siness, while Geor ge Pagan and his wife
tran sform their lives to foll ow the teachings
of their pastor. But non e of thi s is explore d,
and it is only when Edga r return s, ten yea rs
later , in his "Mental Eddie" guise, that
David Flusfeder addresses the ways in which
some one's ch aracter can both cha nge and
stay the same over the course of a life.
22
Read for freedom
Prolific noveli st, playwri ght , critic
A and journalist, Mario Vargas Llo sa is
also a fine essay ist. A key figur e in
the " Boom" which in the 1960 s brou ght
Latin Am erican ficti on to an internati onal
readership , he has always been eager to share
his thou ght s about his ow n ficti on , about the
fun ction of literatur e, and his admiration for
the authors - particularly novelists - he reads
so acut ely. In additi on , he is a cultural com-
ment ator of stature. A n inveterate tra veller ,
he wr ites in an essay on Andre M alraux that
"his was the life that I would have liked to
have led ... present, often in a starring ro le,
at the great eve nts of his century" . Vargas
Llo sa may not share the Frenchman's knack
of always having been where the action was ,
but he has the curio sity, range, social commit-
ment and shee r energy of another Frenc h
writer he greatly admi res: Victor Hugo. Sev-
enty last year, he shows no sign of flagging.
Fleetingly a Co mmunist, and once a promi-
nent supporter of the Cuban Revoluti on , Var-
gas Llo sa ran for the Presidenc y of his nati ve
Peru on a liberal ticket, and onl y narro wly
failed to be elected, in 1990. Toda y he is a
fierce criti c of Fide l Castro, nationalism, dic-
tatorship and dem agoguery of both Right and
Left - a neo-liberal citizen of the world who
maint ain s that globalization has the potenti al
to relieve poverty , promote dem ocracy, pro-
tect the rights of the indi vidual , and democr a-
tize culture. A n admirer of Isaiah Berlin , Karl
Popper and Jean- Francoi s Revel, he attacks
those who have an unshakeable faith in the
rightn ess of their views (hence hi s terro r of
fanatici sm), advo cating instead a readin ess
con stantl y to question our most cherished
beli efs. Touchstones: Essays on literature,
art and politics illu strates how much his
literary and art criticism falls into line
with hi s politic al co nvictions, and revea ls
how constant the latter have in fact rem ained
over the past twent y yea rs. He is refresh ingly
forthright : impatient with rec eived opinion
and politi cal correc tness, always careful to
maint ain what he refer s to here as his " moral
independ enc e".
Touchstones reproduces in English
thirt y-seven of his essays, articles and book
reviews written since 1987 and in the main
fir st publi shed either in his column "Piedra
de Toque" (hence the title of this book) for
the Spanish daily El Pai s or in his coll ection
of literar y criticism, La verdad de las men ti-
ras (The Truth of Lies). The most substa ntial
sec tion of the book is devoted to literary criti-
cism, with essays on Breton , Cam us, Ce rvan-
tes, Conrad, Isak Dinesen , Giinter Grass,
Dr Sarah Bastow
or
(Unive rsity Hudders field )
The e alholic Gemryof'Yorkshirc, 1536- 1642:
Resistance and A ccom mod ation
288pp £69.95 Hardcover
978·0·7734·5325·8 Puh. July 2007
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gentry families in their local coatcxt..... Professor Ctalre
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ESSAYS
C Li VE GRI F FI N
M aria V ar ga s Ll o s a
TO U CH S TO N E S
Essays on literatu re, art and polit ics
Se lected, tran slated and edited by John King
386p p. Faber. £25 .
978 057 12 14990
Hemin gway, Malraux, Mann, Henr y Mill er ,
Nabokov, Woolf and ju st two fellow Lati n
Americans: his comp atriot Jose M arfa Argue-
das; and Pabl o Neruda , a poet whose left-
wing politi cs have not always been to his
taste. But the whole volume is imbu ed with
literatur e, and es pecia lly marked by the influ-
ence of Borges .
Vargas Llosa has the gift of instantl y draw-
Mario Vargas LIosa , Seville, March 24, 2000
ing his rea der in, and many of the essays in
Touchstones are beautifully crafted. Th ey
ca n start with an anecdo te or simple account
of a life or a book, but deftly shift gear to
offer insight s into an author's method s and
idea s, or to draw general observation s about
fiction fro m the analysis of particular texts.
One of the many virtues Vargas Llosa
admires in Isaiah Berlin' s writings is their
re adability a nd w ha t he ca lls th eir " nove listic
qualit y" ; he shares that virtue and is at his
most engaging whe n tellin g a story. His
enthusiasm for the eclec tic mix of works he
writes about is infectious: like other goo d
critics, he stimulates us to read authors we
have missed , or to reread with fresh eyes ones
we thought we already knew. The essays are
always intelligent and uncon venti onal; they
are also invari ably amusing (a hero of the
young Vargas Llosa was Richm al Cromp-
ton' s Willi am ). He is at his best when, rather
than address ing speculative question s such as
what may moti vate writers to write, the crafts-
TL S A U G U S T 17 200 7
man lays bare the trick s of his trade. He is par-
ticularl y adept at teasing out the subtle effects
novelists can achieve throu gh narrative voice :
his essays on Hemin gway ' s The Old Man and
the Sea, which is reproduced here, and on the
Cuba n Alejo Carpentier 's The Kingdom of
this World , which is not, are minor master-
pieces of acute observation.
A collection like Touchstones, which
brin gs togeth er pieces not intended for con-
sec utive readin g, inevitabl y cont ain s repeti-
tion , makin g it a book to dip into . Several fre-
quentl y reiterated idea s, long famili ar to Var -
gas Llosa' s rea ders, form the armature for hi s
essays on literatur e and art. As an avowed
re alist in his ow n work, he assert s that,
although grea t ficti on may be based on his-
tory, the observation of realit y or perso nal
ex per ience , it does not reproduce them.
Rather , what he calls the author' s "added ele-
ment " transform s them into the autonomous
re ality of the novel. Nove lists, like artists, are
"deicides" who repl ace God's creati on with
their ow n; success ful fiction or great paint-
ings by Vel azqu ez or the modern Co lom bian
Ferna ndo Botero are, as he put s it, marr yin g
his belief in indi vidu al freedo m with his
aesthetic credo, "sovereign" or independ ent.
l-it er ature pro vid es so lace, a n escape from
mediocre realit y or eve n - in Vargas Llo sa' s
case - fro m a terror of air tra vel, while he
writes in an essay about the paintin gs in the
Prado that it is "the tragic fate of men and
women to have been give n . .. the ability to
fant asise and to desire a rich er and more
di verse life, and the limit ations of having ju st
one destin y, which falls well short of our
dream s" . It is their dissatisfaction with the
mediocrity of their ex istence that leads wr it-
ers and arti sts to creat e an alternative realit y.
Th at alterna tive realit y may be the "lies"
spun by fiction or art, but tho se "lies" tell
truth s - so me of them uncomfortable - about
hum an bein gs, expos ing the irrationalit y and
ev il which, Vargas Llosa believes, lurk in all
of us.
The fullest literary essay in this volume ,
"Literature and Life" , is an impassion ed plea
for the import ance of fiction and poetr y.
Vargas Llosa has abando ned his early convic-
tion that noveli sts can impro ve an imp erfect
world ; indeed , he now considers the pur suit
of socia l utopi as to be misguid ed and danger-
ous. But he still maintain s that "there is no
better defenc e aga inst the stupidity of
prejudi ce, racism, xeno phobia, religious or
politi cal sec tarianism or autarki c nati onali sm
than this invariable truth that appears in all
grea t literatur e: that men and wome n from
across the world are equal, and that it is
unju st that they are subjec t to discrimination ,
repression and exploitation". (We might
rememb er Pol Pot ' s reput ed love of Ver-
laines poetr y in the cont ext of this opti mistic
asse rtion.) Import ant works of ficti on are said
to make us better people, enriching our lan-
guage, our thin king and eve n, apparently, our
sex lives. They are seditious, fosterin g
critical intelligence and thu s constructing a
bul wark again st those who wo uld control
language, thou ght and us. Great liter ature, in
Vargas Llosa' s eyes, defend s freedom.
Freedo m and dem ocr acy are leitm otif s run-
ning throu gh his politi cal essays, the fullest
of which chronicle a brief trip he made to
Iraq in the summer of2003. The articles writ-
ten for El Pai s trace the softening of his origi-
nal oppos ition to the A mer ica n and British
invasion, and his cauti ous ju stification of the
ove rthrow of Sadda m Hussein , stories of
whose reign of terror remind him of the
blood y dict ator ship of Truj illo in the Do mini-
can Republi c (which he had researched for
his bestsellin g novel, publi shed in 2000 , La
fiesta del Chivo) . To day, with the very con-
siderable benefit of hind sight , his account of
post-in vasion Iraq see ms ove r-optimistic.
Thi s is not the case, however, with his
immedi ate reac tion to 911 1, when he pre-
dicted that the attacks would res ult in the cur-
tailin g of per sonal freedom s in dem ocratic
cou ntri es. He is sure -footed when writing
about Latin Am erica, es pec ially in his robust
defence of Pinocher' s arrest in Britain , and
his celebration of the 2006 elec tion in Chile,
which result ed in the coming to powe r of
Michelle Bachelet. He considers that elec tion
borin g in the very best sense : democratic , con-
sensual and devoid of the violence and
excess which foreigners find so exo tic about
Latin Am erica. Onl y in his essays about the
recent rule of Alberto Fujimori, who beat him
to the Pres idency of Peru and then und er-
mined that country 's fragile dem ocrac y, does
his passion risk tippin g ove r into invecti ve.
John King selec ted and translated a first
English coll ection of Vargas LIm a ' s essays,
Making Waves, in 1996. Thi s seco nd volume,
with its balance of thoughtful , hard-hitting
and lighter pieces, is a welco me sequel. It has
the bonu s of Professor King ' s inform ati ve
and judicious introductory essay, which is an
excelle nt plac e for English spe akers to start
or continue their engage ment with a major
writer. An index, and illustration s of the less
famili ar wor ks of art discussed , would have
been helpful to readers, while Faber could
have served author and translator better by
more careful atten tion to detail. But this is a
fascin atin g book.

An accidental genius
he animator 's task is not unlike the
T biographer ' s. Animated films trick the
brain with a visua l illusion, a kind of
extended trompe l' oeil. At its best, biography
is another anima ted art: both require pa ins-
taking attention to detail, and the magic of
makin g accumulation sugges t life. Very few
biographi es can manage the illu sion on their
own ; it gene ra lly requi res seve ra l to conjure
anything lifelik e. Alth ough few readers have
sufficie nt patience, or devotion, to tolerate
multipl e biographies of the same figur e, it can
be the best way to produ ce eve n the glimme r
of a person. But two biographi es may be mos t
distortin g of all, creating a para llactic view.
The pun ning title of one of two new bio-
gra phies of Wa It Disney, The Animated Man
by M ichae l Barrier , implies that Disney,
whose name was synonymous with anima -
tion for much of the twenti eth cen tury, will
prove a livel y biographical com panion. Bar-
rier quotes a 1934 profil e of the young up-
and-com ing filmm aker , describing Disney' s
passion for his wo rk: " When he talks of a pic-
ture or a plot, he becom es an imated , inten se;
his mimicry leaps out" . The diffi cult y is what
to do with the times when Disney was n' t talk-
ing of a pictur e or a plot ; these two books
impl y that he cease d to exist. Admittedly, Dis-
ney see ms to have done little else but wor k.
He was faithful to his wife, who called her-
self a " mouse widow " and was n' t always pre-
cisely supportive (when he was labourin g
over Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs she
decl ared: " I predict nobody'll eve r pay a
dim e to see a dwarf picture"). He was
devoted to hi s two da ughters, socialized lit-
tle, chain-smoked, and drank to extreme mod-
era tio n. He played golf, and polo, unt il inju-
ries stopped him. Then he gave up the pre-
tence of other interests and spent the rest of
his life maki ng thin gs.
Barrier ' s biograph y has emerged flanked
by Nea l Ga bler's author ized Wait Disney:
The biograp hy (the A merican edition has the
jingoi stic and inaccurate subtitle The triumph
of the American imagination) . Gabler is the
fir st biographer to have had complete access
to the jealou sly guarded Disney archives ,
although there are at least a dozen unauthor-
ized acco unts of his life. Togeth er Ga bler and
Barrier sugges t a dull , co ld contro l freak ,
dri ven by capricious enthusiasms , a wor ka-
holic techn ophil e of little vivac ity and no
humou r. A nimation of the human, as
opposed to cinematic, variety is in such short
supply that a read er who first encountered
Disney throu gh these biograph ies could be
forgiven for wo ndering why anyone ever
liked his film s.
Of course, it is impossibl e to conceive of a
reader fir st enco untering WaIt Disney
throu gh these biographies. Love him or hate
him, Disney is pro bably the mos t influ enti al
figur e in the hi story of Ame rican popul ar cul-
ture. People debate both his abilities (was he
simply "a genius at using other people' s
gen ius" , as some have claim ed ?) and the
merit of his achieve men ts (we re his fil ms and
theme park s uplifting fant asy, or toxic fak-
ery?) , but few would di sput e his cultural pre-
dominance, and it is impossibl e to deny his
popul arit y. The net effect of these biogra-
BIOGRAPHY & F I L M
SA R A H C HU RC H WE L L
M i ch a el B ar ri er
THE AN [ M A TED MAN
A Life of WaIt Disney
4 [ [pp. University ofCal ifornia Press. $29.95;
distribnted in the UK by Wilcy. £ [8.95.
978 052024 1[76
Nea l Ga b ler
WA LT D ISNEY
The biography
700pp. Aurum Press. £25.
978 [ 84513 277 4
phies - Barrier' s in particul ar, which has pho-
tographs of people but none of the famou s
images: the consequence, one presum es, of
having failed to recei ve the Disney imprim a-
tur - is a D VD mark eter' s dream : they create
an urgent desire to see for onese lf the film s in
which Disney, throu gh a Nie tzsc hea n will to
art, transform ed a mediocre gimm ick into an
aes thetic form.
Wait Disney, Philadelphia, 1939
Disney did not invent anima tion, but he
was the first to rea lize its potential. Certa inly,
the superb exe cution was left to others - and
happil y hoth hio graphies give these hrilli ant
craftsme n their due - but the inventi veness,
and the com mitm ent to exce llence , we re his
ow n. He mad e the first cartoo n with sync hro-
nized sound (Steamboat Willie) in 1928, fol-
lowed in 1932 by the first full-c olour ca rtoo n
featur e (Flowers and Trees) and a yea r later
by The Three Littl e Pigs, which proved so
popul ar that the eight-minute short was mar-
keted like a featur e, while its theme song,
"Who' s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?",
became a Depression- era anthem. In 1937,
Disney released Snow White and the Seven
Dwarf ' , the first feature-l ength cartoon,
TL S AUGUST 17 2 0 0 7
which he had full y env isioned and ove rsee n,
frame by meticulou s frame. Somehow fusin g
1930s Am erican populi sm with 1830s Ger-
ma n Roma nticism , Snow White and the
Seven Dwarf' could have been gro tesque, but
it is exq uisite. The distinguished fil m critic
Oti s Ferguson placed it "among the gen uine
arti stic ach ieve me nts" of Am erica, while Se r-
gei Eisenstein pron ounc ed it "the grea test
film eve r made". At the film ' s premiere, John
Barrymore report edly bounc ed up and down
in his sea t with excite ment, while Clark
Gable and Carole Lombard were spotted cry-
ing at the end .
Snow White and the Seve n Dwarf ' was
follo wed, less triu mph antl y, by Pinocchio,
Bambi, and the wonderfully berserk
Fantasia, all of which cost more to make
than they ea rned back in initial release. Mean-
while, Mickey Mouse was an intern ational
phenomenon : his shorts played befo re nearly
500 milli on paid adm issions in 1935 alone,
while as early as 1934 Disney reportedl y
ea rned more from ancillary right s than from
the cartoo ns. (This was one of Disney ' s most
far-reac hing insight s: he esse ntially invented
marketing synergy.) The histori an Warren
Susman commented that if po litica l hist-
orians would one day ca ll 1930s America the
age of Fran klin Roosevelt , cultural histori ans
would ca ll it the age of Mick ey Mou se.
Disney' s golden decade of film making
ended with the Second World War, as the
studio was hit by the esca lating cos ts of
Disney ' s perfectioni sm, the closing of
markets in Europe , and a vitriolic strike at the
studio, which had expan ded too rap idly for
Wait' s patern alism to keep his worke rs con-
tent edl y singing " Heigh-Ho" while diggin g
in his mines. He kept the studio afloat by mak-
ing films for the War Dep artment (and shorts
like the hit Der Fuh rer 's Face , in which Don-
23
aId Duck drea ms he ' s a Naz i) and kept him-
self happ y by playin g with model trains.
Eve ntua lly his ambitions for a life-size model
train park expa nded into what would becom e
Disneyland , and his seco nd act as the inven-
tor of theme parks was und erway. Many, of
cour se, saw the park as an Iearian foll y, but
Disney proved himself an A merican Dae da -
Ius once aga in.
O ver time, Disney became increa singly dif-
ficult , and increasin gly reactionary, blamin g
Co mm unis t agi tators for the strike (wh ich he
prim arily caused throu gh bad managem ent ),
and turnin g friendl y witness for HUAC (the
House Un-America n Acti vities Co mmittee) ,
while instituting a blackl ist at the studio. His
Song of the Sou th was too racist for Am erica
in 1946 , which is say ing so mething, while
acc usa tions of anti-Se mitism persist. He
grew steadily more ruthl ess: eve n as he devel-
oped his cosy fireside perso na on television
as Uncle Wa It in the 1950s, he was cavalierly
firin g the men who earlier had designed , writ-
ten , and hand-mad e Snow White and the
Seven Dwarf ' , Pinocchio and Fanta sia for
him. He died of lung cance r in 1966, before
he could realize the final dream, EPCOT
(Expe rimental Prototype Co mmunity of
Tom orr ow); give n that it was a fant asy of
social control , this is almos t certainly a goo d
thin g.
All biograph y is constrained by a version
of the anthro pic principl e: selection bias
greatly determin es the comp osition of the bio-
graphical portr ait. According to Ga bler's
index, Disney's "sense of hum or" and "story-
tellin g skills" togeth er are granted eleve n
pages of the book ' s 633 . They are ove r-
whelmed by the precedin g list of salient ch a-
racteristics : "loneliness, me lancholia, moodi-
ness, obses siveness , optimi sm, overexten-
sion", and so on. "Creativity", for instance,
isn 't inclu ded . But the animators who worke d
for him testifi ed to Disney' s brilli ance. Milt
Kahl , who des igned Pinocchio, later said :
"He was just a tremendously creative man
and he'd start cooking .. .. He wo uld com e
up with a grea t many ideas because he was
cooking all the time; his brain was go ing all
the time. He was like a fount ain". An othe r
rememb ered that "Walt would take stories
and act them out at a meetin g, and kill you
laughin g, they we re so fun ny . . . We often
wonde red if WaIt could have been a grea t
actor or a comedian. The acting in them was
what made hi s pictures so grea t". Signifi-
cantl y, neith er Barri er nor Ga bler offers
either of these quotation s, wh ich co me from
Steven Wa tts 's exce llent 1997 volume The
Magic Kingdom: Wait Disney and the Amer-
ican way of life. Both Ga bler and Bar rier tell
stor ies about Disney acting out his tales, but
neith er sugges ts a ma n who could kill his
em ployees laughin g; they on ly sugges t a man
who co uld kill his employees : Barrier ' s open-
ing words are "Wait Disney was angry . Very
angry" . (Gabler starts with Disney dead , and
not - contrary to persistent urban myth - cryo-
gen ica lly preserved.) A worse problem than
selection bias, which is inevitable, is experi-
mental bias, which is not. Mo st conte mpo-
rary biograph y relies on a thesis to let it find
what it was lookin g for , and save it from
thin king. The biographi cal thesis shrinks
people do wn to a bundl e of mechani stically
repeated beha viou rs, turnin g complexi ty into
compul sion .
The pro blem of consciou sness, as Henry
24
James knew, is the probl em of the novel ; it is a
bigger probl em for mod ern bio graph y, but it is
not solved by flat claim s of biographic al deter-
mini sm . Barrier and Gabler eac h offers his
own key to all Disney mythol ogies; predicta-
bly, both are vag uely Oedip al. For Gabler ,
Disney' s qu asi-Dic kensian childhood, with a
violent-tempered fath er who put his children
to work, turned him into an adult who craved
toys, utopia and, above all, control. Thi s reduc-
tive idea, tirelessly repeated, ex plains every -
thin g from Snow White and the Seven Dwarf ' ,
which, we are infor med , mirror ed Disney' s
psych o-developmental needs (fantasies of
findin g a surrogate famil y), to Disneyland ,
which Gabler incongruou sly likens to the
"C ity on a Hill of Purit an dreams". Barri er' s
invariable sol ution is that Disney was his
father ' s son: "Disney had clearly inherited
--------------------------~.--------------------------
n 1966 , Ehrhard Bahr stopped his VW
I Beetle at a pet rol station in Westwood , a
suburb of Los Ange les . He was en ro ute
to take up his fir st lectureship at the Univer-
sity of Ca lifornia, Los Angeles, and the car' s
back sea t was piled high with his books. On
top was a collecti on of Th om as Manu ' s short
stories. This ca ught the eye of the pump
attendant, who then engaged Bahr in a
len gth y discussion of The Magic Mountain.
" I took it as a good ome n", says Bahr in the
prefac e to Weimar on the Pacific, the fruit of
thirty yea rs ' research into the West Co ast's
ex ile culture. Later, he found out that, until
1952, Mann used to have his hair cut in West-
woo d. " Nach Westwood zum Haarschn ei-
den" (to Westwood for a hair cut ) is appar -
ently a regular refrain in his diaries.
Edward Said argued that the twentieth cen-
tur y was "the age of the refu gee, the displaced
person , mass immigration" . Hitl er' s rise to
power in 1933 pro voked a haem orrh age of
talent from Ge rman-speaking Europe . As
fasci sm spread in the 1930s and 40 s, as man y
as 15,000 refu gees found a haven from perse-
cuti on in southern Ca lifornia. Many headed
for Los A ngeles, a city that has traditionally
occupied a space somew here between an
acquired Arcadi a and a man-made utopi a in
the Americ an imagin ation . Am on g them
were Arn old Scho enb erg, Fritz Lan g and Ma x
Reinh ardt fro m Vienn a, Franz Werfel from
Prague, Bill y Wild er from Poland, the actor
Peter Lorre and the film dir ector Micha el
C urtiz fro m Hun gary, Heinrich and Th om as
M ann from Germany itself. It was , says Bahr ,
"one of the largest emigrations of writers and
artists record ed in histor y" .
Th e ex iles were the cream of Europe 's intel-
ligent sia, ma ny of them "hard-boiled intell ec-
tuals" like Bertolt Brecht and Alfr ed Doblin
(author of the moderni st classic Berlin Alexan-
derplatz; 1929), who had felt "at hom e in the
• FOUR COURTS PRESS
Dante and the Church:
Literary and Historical Essays
P. AC QUAVIVA & J. PETRIE EDITO R S
Examin es how aspects of D ante's wor k relate to specific
churchmen, religious mov ements and the historical
institution of the church.
ISH="" 978 -1 -84682-0 26 -7 2.56 pages £50
Published: 17 August
7 M alpas Street, D ublin 8, Ireland
Tel. (Dublin ) 453 4668 www.fourcourtspress.ie
BIOGRAPHY & CULTURAL STUDIES
his father' s entreprene urial temp eram ent" ;
"Disney was becomin g a filmm aker and entre-
preneur on the Elias Disney model" , and so
on. Give n that Elias Disney worked at menial
labour for mo st of his life and see ms to have
been something of a serial failur e, it is hard to
see thi s as particularly persuasive.
Mor eover, Di sney was an entreprene ur by
default ; he created businesses so he could
indul ge hi s perfecti oni sm w ithout constra int.
An animation ex pert, Barrier isn 't really inter-
ested in entrep rene ursh ip; the wor d see ms to
substitute for psy cho log ica l insight. It is
Gabler who is actua lly fascinated by the stu-
dio' s commer cial transacti on s - alth ough Dis-
ney him self found them a distracting irrit ant ,
breezil y delegatin g them to his brother Roy
as cons igliere. Lik e so man y author ized biog-
raph ers, Gabler see ms unable to exclude any
Culture clash
P . D. SMITH
E hr h ar d Bahr
W E I MA R O N THE P A C IFI C
Ger man exi le culture in Los Angeles and the crisis
of moderni sm
378p p. University of Ca lifornia Press. $39.95:
distributed in the UK by Wiley. £23.95.
978 0 520 25 128 1
sin city of Berli n of the I 920 s" . In Los An ge-
les, Doblin compl ained abo ut having to spend
so much time "in the gree nness "; I'm not a
cow, he kvetched . Brecht , who arr ived in Los
Angeles from Vladi vostok in 1941 , was sca th-
ing about the cit y in his poetr y, comparing it
to hell. It was a city full of "luxuriant ga rde ns
I With flowers as big as trees" and "houses,
built for happ y peopl e, therefore standing
empty I Eve n when lived in" . But according
to Bahr, the cont rast between the old and the
new world created a uniqu e ar tistic pot ential :
"perhaps it was this startling co ntrast between
the city's paradi siacal setting and the aware-
ness that the most brut al warfare ever had
been unlea shed that made Los Angeles the
most appro priate locale for art that dealt with
both the realit y of fasci sm and World War 11
and the hop e for a better futur e" . Out of thi s
cla sh of cultures, says Bahr, grew a uniqu ely
dialectical mode of thinking that led to a
renewal of mod erni sm and a " second flouri sh-
ing of Weim ar culture" .
Theo do r Adorno once said that "for a man
who no longer has a hom eland , writing
becomes a place to live" . He and Max
Horkh eim er both reloc ated from New York
to Los Angeles in 1941. The ir classic study
Dialectic of Enlightenment (194 7) pro vid es
Bahr with both a herm eneuti c tool and a para-
digm for the dial ectical approac h of "exile
mod erni sm". Horkheim er and Adorn os co n-
clu sion that the enlightenmen t proj ect co n-
tained within it the seeds of the "new kin d of
barb arism " that had gripped Europe was one
that the ex iled moderni sts of Los Angeles
were reachin g ind epend entl y in their ow n
field s as they tried to resolve the cri sis of
moderni sm provoked by the rise of fascism .
•
Brecht ' s play Galileo, origin ally written in
1938, then tran slated and adapted in Los Ange-
TL S A U G U S T 17 200 7
of his research, and so spends much tim e pre-
senting the wo nde rful world of acco unting.
O ne suspects that his book will appea l
imm en sely to tho se who read biographi es of
self-made milli onaires for business tip s: bio-
graphy as se lf-help. Gabler also has odd
lap ses: it is surp rising to read that Igor
Stravin sky dislik ed Disney' s use of The Rit e
of Spring in Fantasia because he had com-
posed it as "a celebra tion of A merican Indian
rituals" : Str avin sky' s subtitle is " Pictures
fro m Pagan Ru ssia" .
Simil arl y, in discu ssin g the probl em s
ca used by the depiction s of Africa n Ameri-
ca ns in Song of the Sou th, Ga bler writes that
Disney learn ed a lesson from the 1946 film
Stormy Weath er, which, he asse rts, "had to
be mad e in such a way that sce nes featuring
blacks co uld be cut or southern ex hibitors
Charles Laughton (Galileo) and Reisse
Merin in Bertolt Brecht's Galil eo , Beverly
Hills, Los Ang eles, 1947
les with the Briti sh actor Charles Laught on , is
(Bahr argues) "an ex tension of the discussion
of modern science in Dialectic of Enlighten-
ment". He is right , however, to qu alif y thi s by
addin g that the play, which was performed at
the Coronet Th eatre in Beverl y Hill s in 1947,
"takes the debate to a new level" by askin g the
audi enc e to make a decision about the role of
science in the atom ic age.
Despit e the fact that Brecht once referr ed
to Horkh eim er as a clown , Galileo (and epic
theatre ge nerally) clearl y lend s itself we ll to
Bah rs argu ment. For lapsed mod ernists such
as Dobl in and Werfel , however, Bahrs thesis
that there is common dial ectical grou nd
het w een th e ex iles is le ss c onv inc ing. He sees
the religiou s turn in both writers ' wor ks as
ev ide nce of what Horkheim er and Adorno
describ e as a "regress to mythol ogy" . Never-
theless, Bah rs percepti ve and not unsympa-
theti c analys is of their late wor ks co ntributes
grea tly to what is an imm en sely impress ive
survey of ex ile mod erni sm , on e that ex tends
beyond literatur e to include phil osoph y, film
and arc hitecture .
Th e architec ts Richard Ne utra and
Rud olph Schindler, who arrive d in the 1920 s
and who founded the "California Modern "
style, exe mplify a mod erni sm unt roubl ed by
wo uldn' t show them " . As Stormy Weather
was one of the few film s classical Holl ywood
made with an all-bl ack cast, it' s diffi cult to
ima gin e what thi s way might have been.
Barri er and Ga bler have don e their
research ; Barri er illuminates anim ation;
while Gabler clarifi es studio histor y. Both
have help ed wide n the cultura l port rait of the
man who m the histori an T. Jack son Lear s
accura te ly summed up as the "central figur e
in the corp orat e reclamation of the nation al
myth olo gy, the redefinition of the Am erican
Way of Life from a vag ue populism to an
equally murk y noti on of free enterprise", but
neith er has quit e don e ju stic e to thi s compli-
cated man nor to his Go rdian legac y. It may
we ll take a bio graph er who can match Di s-
ney' s own inventi veness and scope to offer a
definitive port rait of thi s acc ide nta l ge nius.
the crisis that torm ent ed the later emigres .
Tho mas Mann found Ne utra 's moderni sm
too ava nt-ga rde for his co nse rva tive taste. He
hated what he calle d that "cubist glass -box
sty le" and igno red Ne utra 's persistent ove r-
tures while lookin g for an archit ect to design
his Los Angeles hom e in 1941. Th e resultin g
building at 1550 San Rem o Drive, Pacifi c
Pali sades, was, sa id the architec t J. R. David-
son (a nother Berlin immi grant), " nostalgic
Ge rman" in inspi ration . Photo gr aph s of the
ex iles ' hom es as they are tod ay add a fascinat-
ing ex tra dim ension to Weimar on the Paci-
fic , pro vidin g a geographical locu s to comple-
ment the intellectu al histor y. Mann ' s hom e is
a sprawling and rather showy mansion; by
co ntras t, Brechr ' s (at 1063 Twenty-sixth
Stree t, Santa Mo nica) is a simple wea ther-
board ed hou se ; hard-up Doblin, who fail ed to
find a publi sher in the United States willing
to print any of his book s in ex ile, had to mak e
do with a rather plain cottage, now dwarfed
by the exo tic palm s in the front garde n.
With typi cal mod esty, Mann described Dr
Faustus (19 47 ) as "a novel to end all novel s".
Bahr's chapter on thi s is quit e superb, and it
is here, as we ll as in the follo win g discu ssion
of Schoe nberg - the model for Leverkiihn
and, as M ann said, the "true mod erni st" -
that the them es of Weimar on the Pacific fuse
mo st success fully. In the nove l, Leve rkiihn
(M an ns last grea t artist figur e) becom es "a
repr esent ati ve not onl y of the Germa n
soul and its mu sicalit y ... but also of the
histori cal pro gress of Europe an art durin g
the twenti eth century". Bahr ex plores the
parallels between Ad orn os notion of art 's
articulation of the "me mory of acc umulated
suffering" and the centr alit y of suffe ring to
Leverkiihn ' s new aes thet ics.
Although Leverkiihn ' s com pos itions (mo d-
elled on Sc hoe nberg's twelve-t one sys tem)
may be inspired by Nietzsc he 's aesthetics,
" in the ir ultimat e c ris is and defeat they are
marked by Adorno ' s co ncept of art" .
Eq ually, it is Adorn os dialectical concept of
the "I den titat des Nichtide ntische n" (ide ntity
of the non-identi cal) that lies behind
Ze itblom's referenc e to the "hope beyond
hop elessness" evo ked by the fin al reson ant
ton e of Leverkiihn ' s last compos ition,
"The Lam entation of Doctor Faustus". Thi s
cantata, writes Bahr , is "a work of ago ny that
does not den y the suffer ing of its century" . By
offer ing what M ann calls a "miracle that goes
beyond faith", Leverkiihn ' s mu sic tran scend s
mod erni sm and heralds a new age of art.

Small but perfectly formed
S
paring with insight s into hi s own
psyche , Sigmund Freud offered no
explanation for his compul sive coll ect-
ing of sma ll antiquities other than to describ e
him self as an archaeologist of the mind . He
described his j ob as unco vering what had
been long buried. The photo graph of him
at his desk crowd ed with sma ll statuary, jars
and carvings is almost as well kno wn as that
of his iconic couch.
Janin e Burke, an Au strali an writ er and spe-
ci alist in art histor y, has written a book that
needed to be written. She det ails the histo ry
and significa nce of the 2,000 piece s Freud
assembl ed durin g dec ades of coll ectin g.
Man y of them are on view today at the Fre ud
Mu seum at 20 Maresfield Garden s in Hamp-
stead, where hi s Vienn ese consultin g room
and study have been reassembl ed almost as
they were when Freud fled Vienna in Jun e
1938. According to Burke, the co verin g of
the famou s couch is an Irani an Qashqai rug,
wove n in warm tones of madd er red and
ochre into an intric ate geometric design
depicting a garden in paradi se. Freud bought
it in 1891 at an exhibition at the imp erial
Au strian Trad e Mu seum.
In his Vienn ese con sultin g room at Berg-
gasse 19, sea ted behind his patients, listening
to their free associati ons, his eyes were free
to wander. " I must alwa ys have an object to
love" , he told Jung befo re their break in
1912 . Mo st of the object s Freud coll ect ed
are not of grea t value in them sel ves except
to histori ans of cla ssical art. What Burke
reveals is Freud 's absolut e compulsion to
acquire ancient Greek , Rom an and Egy ptian
bits and pie ces; he particul arly trea sured rep-
resent ation s of the Sphin x. He had no use for
modern art, or even the Impr essioni sts.
His therapy was sho pping for his trea sures.
No trip - es pecially to his belo ved Rome -
was complete without the purchase of a small
anci ent troph y. In New York in 1909, while
making his onl y Am erican journey, he not
onl y visited the Metropolitan Mu seum' s col-
lection of Greci an vases but we nt shopping
at Tiffany' s and bought a j ade bowl and a
bronz e bust of Buddha. As the years we nt by,
he could hardl y rise from his desk for the
pre ss of objects and he rearrang ed them end-
lessly. Eve n whe n he left Vienn a for his
summer homes, he would take the bulk of his
coll ection with him.
But what effect did the vas t assembl y of
tin y excav ated object s have on patient s as
they were led pa st, Freud explaining one or
two on the way to the couch ? One explana-
tion came from the writer and poet Hild a
Doolirrle, " H.O.", who was anal ysed hy
Freud in Vienn a in 1933. "I had not expected
to find a museum , a templ e" , she wrote later ,
sugges ting that Freud showe d the coll ection
as a way of inducing his patient s to rela x. On
her first visit, she look ed so intently he gave
an instant interpretati on - that she preferred
"the dead shreds of antiquity to hi s livin g
presenc e" . When Freud was about to leave
Vienna in 1938, a friend and coll eague
enli sted Edmund Enge lman, a phot ograph er,
to go to Bergga sse 19 and phot ograph the
collection along with the con sultin g room
and Freud sea ted at his desk. The proj ect was
PSYCHOLOGY & MEDICINE
BRENDA MADDOX
J anin e Burk e
T HE G O D S OF FRE UD
Sigmund Freud's art co llec tion
455pp . Knopf Australia. Aus$49.95.
978 17 405 1375 3
executed at so me danger to Engleman, him-
self a Jew, but these photo graph s survive to
give later generations an idea of what Freud ' s
con sultin g room was like.
Burke' s important book could have done
with less biogr aphic al stuffing. Freud ' s child-
hood in Mora via, the famil y' s move to imp e-
rial Vienna (a city he alwa ys claim ed to
hate), his court ship of Martha Berna ys, have
all been recorded in the man y fine bio gra-
phies of Freud. Mo st inter esting are the
detail s of the coll ection . Freud began coll ect-
ing at the same time that he was writing
The Interpretation of Dreams, in the period
follo wing his father ' s death in 1896, an event
that left him feelin g uprooted. As a child he
had been an arde nt hero- wor shipp er of
figur es ranging from Alexand er the Great to
Sigmund Freud's desk, in the Freud Museum, London
Napoleon. As an adult , as Burk e sees it, he
need ed to surround him self with images of
masculin e greatness to inspire and encourage
him. Overall, Burk e says, the collection
appea rs to embody the theori es he was devel-
oping : an investig ation and celebration of the
past, a mem ento of real and imagined jour-
neys, and a catalogue of desires.
Freud ' s choic e of statues and carvin gs also
e xpresses hi s ambi val ence to wards w ome n:
goddesses to be wors hipped but kept passive;
in sum, his attitud e toward s his adored
moth er Amalia and his wife Martha. In The
Interpr etation of Dreams he describ es one of
his own dream s at the age of seven or eight in
which his sleeping mother was carri ed into a
room and laid on a bed by peopl e with bird
beaks. He awok e in tears and screa ming,
reco gnizing the beaked figur es as gods with
falcon s' head s that he had see n on an anci ent
Egy ptian funer ary relief illu strated in the
famil y Bible. Later , a small Egyptian bronz e,
"Is is Suckling the Infant Horu s" (Horu s the
TLS A U G US T 17 200 7
falcon-headed son of Isis and Osiri s), was
one of his favourite pieces.
His favourite above all in the coll ection
was a small bronz e statue of Ath ena , a
Rom an cop y of a Greek bronz e from the
fifth century. "She is perfect" , he told H. D.,
"only she has lost her spear." The Athena
now occupies the centr al plac e on the desk in
his museum .
Burke tell s well the fascin atin g stor y of
Freud's flight from Vienna in 1938, with
many of his famil y, plu s his doctor and his
doct or' s famil y, organized by Dr Ernes t
Jones in London and Prince ss Marie Bona-
part e in Pari s. She describ es in great detail
the excruciating negoti ation s with the Nazis,
who dem anded an assess me nt of taxable
assets before anyone could leave . Luckil y
for Freud , the man ass igned to evaluate his
coll ection for a declaration of "no impedi-
ment " was Han s von Demel, curator of the
Kunsthistori sch es Mu seum and a personal
friend. Demel gro ssly under valued the
coll ection at 500 Reich smark s, far below the
tax limit for refug ees, thu s enabling Freud to
take it to London with him .
Further to cu shion the blow of forc ed exile,
Freud's Vienn ese curator, Paul a Fischl, who
had memorized the ord er of the main works
on Freud 's desk in Vienn a, arranged them
ju st as they had been - a welcome sight to
greet the ailing Freud when he walked into
his Mare sfield Garden s home from their first
temporary home on Elsworth y Road. (There
Freud had given very short shrift to Salvador
Dalf, who visited him , con siderin g him a
fath er figur e. Freud coldl y told him that
Surre alist paintin g showed only the con-
scious, while in the classical art he loved, he
could find the subconscious. Dalf took
Freud's words - perhap s corr ectl y - as the
death-knell for Surr eali sm .) The house at
Maresfield Garden s was , Freud felt , the
nice st he had ever had , and his last month s
were spent on a swing loung e in the garde n,
where he could see his belo ved possession s.
When he died , in September 1939, his ashes
were placed in a red-fi gur ed Greek urn , from
around the fourth century BC, given to him
by Princ ess Marie Bon aparte.
25
Every
man in his
humour
W. F . BYNUM
No ga Arikha
PA SSIO N S A ND T E M P E R S
A history of the humours
400p p. HarperCollin s. US $27.95.
9780 06 073 1168
he sages have long told us that we
T got philo soph y, logic , science, dram a,
epic poetry and the ideal of beauty
from the Greek s. When democracy became a
positi ve word, they added that to the list.
They often for get the humours, but few
ancient Gree k concepts have had such
pervasive staying pow er in Western thought.
Noga Arikha clearly agrees, and has written
a virtua l histor y of medicine via the humours
and their ramification s. Man y of the big
names, from Hippocrates through Vesaliu s
and Harvey to Pasteur and beyond, are
represent ed in Passions and Temp ers without
Arikh a stray ing too far from her brief.
The hum our s them selves are famili ar even
toda y: blood, yellow bile , black bile and
phlegm . They make their appeara nce in some
of the Hippocratic writings, a coll ection elab-
orat ed by various hand s over a coupl e of
centuri es from the late fifth century BC.
They entered main stream Western thought
via Galen (l 29- c2 10), who saw him self as
completing and ex tending Hippocratic medi-
cin e. The hum our s were the central consti-
tuent s of a pow erful explanatory sys tem of
health , disease and much else besides. They
were easily related to the intimate bodil y
change s in acute di sease, wherein pati ent s
sweat, vomit, turn yellow, get flushed or
pal e, and cou gh up blood or phlegm. These
humours see med much more compl ex than
the bodil y fluid s that could be observed at the
bedsid e. They wer e theoretic al entities,
exactl y analogous to the four elem ent s of
Greek natural philo soph y (air , earth , fire and
water) to which they possessed symmetry.
For instanc e, blood, like air, was hot and
moi st; phlegm, like water, was cold and
moist. The actual blood shed in bloodl ettin g
or after a wound was not the pure humour;
rather, bodie s we re mixture s, as were all the
materi al thing s that surround us. We live in a
messy world.
These theor etic al con sideration s, espe-
ciall y as appli ed to medicine, were frequently
lost on later doctors, who identified the
bedside humours as the rarefied substances
of Hippocratic and Galenic writings. The
humours were also con stituti ve of the two
concepts of Arikh a' s main title: pa ssion s
and temp erament s. On e of the powerful
stre ngths of Gr eek humoralism was its inte-
grated vision of bodil y funct ion s, ment al
as well as physical , states of health as well
as tho se of disease. Historic al reading s of
the relation ship between bod y and mind
26
occ upy a central theme in Arikha 's book .
The third, problematica l, hum ou r, black
bile, was also known as melanc holy. Its pres-
ence was elusive in the original Hippocratic
formul ation of the hum our s, and it was added
later - partl y, one suspects, to compl ete the
symmetry of four : four humours, four ele-
me nts, four seaso ns, four ages of man. Its
presenc e in the scheme crys tallized the
unit y of hum oral mind-bod y re lations. It was
discu ssed in various Greek versions of
Hipp ocratic humo ralism , but its heyday was
the Renaissa nce, when doct ors, phil osoph er s
and artists elabora ted several versions of the
sa me conce it: the me lanc holy gen ius. Ar ikha
unp ack s the mu sings of Marsilio Ficin o, con-
siders the enigmatic engraving of Alb recht
Dur er, "Melancholia I" , and offers a se nsitive
readin g of Robert Burt on ' s Ana tomy of
Melancholy (162 1). She also has cogen t
things to say about other rel ated Ren aissance
preoccup ations: love sic kness, musica l ther-
apy, and acc idie, the disease of sloth. She is
sensitive to the gender dim en sions of hum or-
alism , recog nizing that the humour s were
not neutral, universal ca tegor ies, but related
intim ately to cultural issues of patri archy and
disord ers of the "weaker vesse l".
The hum our s pro vided a fram ework for
explaining health and disease, but they also
offered an explanation of per sonality type.
The indi vidu al humoral balance varie d
acc ording to life-cycle, sex , diet, occ upation.
In addition, eac h person had a tendenc y to
possess a single domin ant humour. Henc e,
there were also four temperament s: sangu ine,
choleric, mel anch olic and phlegmatic.
Within Hip pocratic medicine, the tempera-
ment s we re part of the individuation of
disease that ch aracteriz ed diagnosis and
treatm ent. Hippocr atic doct ors tended to treat
young fem ales differentl y from old males,
eve n if both were suffering fro m an acute
fever.
The temperament s had to be grafted onto
the other variables of humoralism, but these
chara cteristics of personality traits have had
great historical resonance, feedin g into the
sys te matic medieva l marrying of the
hum our s with astrology . In a debase d form ,
temp erament s live on in modern astrology ,
but in the ea rly modern peri od, astrology had
cultural credibility and, for doctor s, vital diag-
nostic and progno stic importance. One of the
mos t complete set of early modern case
record s, tho se of a Buckin gham physician
and clergym an, Richard Na pier (15 59-1 634 ),
are rema rkable not simply for the varie d
complaints that Na pier 's patients brought to
him, but for the fact that he routi nel y began
a con sultati on with a horo scope. The Eliza -
beth an physici an and sexo log ist Simon For -
man also used astro logy in his medi cal prac-
tice. Astrology and its acc om panying atten-
tion to the astral interaction s of hirth
and temp eram ent were centra l to their
medical practi ces. Yet their range of diag-
noses and treatm ents we re pre tty standard
for the time.
One of the tropes of Arikh a' s mon ograph
is the co ntras t between the elasticity of
medica l theor y and the constancy of medical
practice. Time and aga in she point s out
that doct ors who substituted mec hanistic or
chemical theories for explaining the causes
of disease relied on the basic therapeuti c
modalities sanctified by humoral ism: blood-
letting, cathartics, emetics and the other
MEDICINE & RELIGION
"Cabalistic Adarn", an illu stration from
Collectio Operum by th e sixteenth-century
mystic Robert Fludd, linking the humours
with th e elem ents
manipulation s of bodil y fluid s. They were
hall owed by long employ men t, and their
efficacy could be explained from a variety
of theoretical perspecti ves. Many of the
doctor s who acce pted the basic tenets of
Hippocrat ic therapy for got another ce ntral
Hippocrat ic doctrine: the healin g power of
nature (vix medicatrix naturae). Medi cal
practitioner s have always been prey to the
philo sophi cal fallacy of post hoc, ergo prop-
ter hoc and taken cre dit for what in the nine-
teenth century was expresse d as the idea of
the self-limi ted disease.
Eve n bloodlettin g eve ntually faded as a
main stay of the medic al armame ntarium ,
and the humour s lost their purch ase within
orthodox medi cal theor y. The temp erament s
enjoye d an afterlife in the safe harbour of
physiognom y, credible dur ing the Rom anti c
period , and transmut ed into psycho logy by
Ca rl Ju ng' s noti ons of introvert s and extra-
verts, and Hans Eyse nck's theory of perso nal-
ity types. Their innateness has mean t that
the temperam ent s have appea led to eugeni-
cists, and been wedded to conservative philos-
ophies.
A rikha deals with these issues briefly, but
she sees the endpo int of her story in another
legacy of Hippocr atic humoralism: its mind-
bod y holi sm. Crudely speaking, the rupture
occ urred with Rene Descartes and his strict
dualism . Arikh a devotes the last chapters
of her book to reflecti ng on post-Cartesian
attempts to put the mind and the bod y
together aga in, beginnin g with Thom as
Willi s (162 1- 1675), and ending with contem-
porar y brain research. Her readin g of the
modern period is intri guin g, though very
selec tive. She bypasses the impl icit holi sm
of evolutionary hiology, includin g Charles
Darwin' s work on the emo tions and passions,
con centr ating instead on the neuro humoral-
ism of contem porary neuroscience, sugges t-
ing repea tedly that much scientific com ment
on the mind-bod y issue could, muta tis
mutandis, be expressed in Hipp ocratic terms.
It is a fair point , but the mutat is mutandis is
what actually matters. Whether we like it or
not , we live in a post-Cartesian world, and
longing for the comfortabl e certa inties of
humoralism doesn't get us much closer to
answering that old question: where exa ctly,
in our bodies, are we locat ed?
TL S AUGUST 17 2 0 0 7
Reason to believe?
lister McGrath and Richar d Dawkin s
A both hold doctorates in the life sci-
ences and both are professors at
Oxford. In 2004 , McGrath, an athe ist turn ed
Christian, wrote a study of the work of
Dawkin s, a Christia n turned atheist. Entitled
Dawkins ' God: Genes, memes and the mea n-
ing of life, it co mbined a respectful acco unt
of Dawki ns' s scientific work with a critiqu e
of the atheism which has been the back-
gro und of his writing eve r since The Selfish
Gene ( 1976) .
Recently, Dawkins published The God Delu-
sion (reviewed in the TLS, January 19). As
McGrath says, this book marks a significant
departure . Dawkin s is no longer an atheist
whose main aim is to make evo lutionary
biology accessible to the genera l public: he is
now a preacher whose mission is to co nvert
religious readers to atheism. The book has a
strident and agg ressive tone, and a cava lier
attitude to evidence that tells against its thesis
that religion is the root of all evil. Thi s has
pro voked McGrath to write a short volume
exposing its flaws. The Dawkins Delusion ? is
credited to both Alister McGrath and his wife
Joanna Co llicutt Mc Grath, who is a lecturer in
psychology of religion at Heythrop Co llege,
London. But the extent of her contribution is
not made clear, and the book is written in the
first person singular "for historical and stylis-
tic reasons". This makes it difficult to interpret
the autobiogra phical statements. In this review
I shall follow the authors' convention and
refer to "McGrath" in the masculin e singular.
McGrath says that he is co mpletely baffled
by the hostility that Dawkin s now displays to
religion. But surely two recent phenomena
explain the heightened shrillness of Daw kins's
atheism . The first is the rise of Christian funda-
mentalism in the United States, which endan-
gers the teachin g of evo lutionary science in
schools. The second is the rise of Islamic fun-
damentalism which has spaw ned extremist
gro ups of people willing to murder thousands
of innocent people even at the cost of their
own lives. Of course McGrath is no less horri-
fied than Dawkin s by these two developm ents.
But he regards them as largely irrelevant to the
evaluation of religion. There can be atheist fun-
damentalists as well as religious ones, and
Dawkin s, he claims, shows every sign of
being one. Moreover, atheism as well as reli-
gio n has given rise to massacres, and true reli-
gio n, as exemp lified by Jesus of Nazare th, is
hostile to violence.
These points are fairl y taken , but I do not
think McGrath does ju stice to the way in
which religio n, if it does not originate evil,
gives it greater power. Those w ho heli e ve
that they have a direct revel ation from Go d
reg ard their sac red texts as trumping what-
eve r science may discover. Those who
believe that they are acting out Go d's will are
not going to be deterred by any sec ular moral-
izing about j ust and unju st wars. But of
cour se McGrath is right that religion "tran-
sce ndentalises" goo d as we ll as evil. He adds
that much of Daw kins's book is a confu sed
and misleading acco unt of other people ' s
areas of spec ialization. He has in mind par-
ticuarl y Da wkin s' s ventures into histori cal
theol ogy, which is McGrath' s ow n field.
AN T H ON Y K E N NY
A l is ter M cGr ath wi th
J o ann a Co llic ut t McG r ath
THE D A WKI N S D EL U SI O N ?
Athei st fundamentalism and the deni al of the divi ne
96pp. SPCK. £7.99 .
978 0 28 1 05927 0
US : [VP Books. $ [6. 9780 8308 34464.
Oddl y eno ugh, it was precisely in this area
that it see med to me that Dawkin s was often
the more acc urate of the two debater s. Let me
give you a few instances.
McGrath criticizes Dawki nss treatment of
St Thomas Aquinas 's Five Ways. Dawkin s
deni es that these con stitut e sound proofs for
the existence of God. Mc Grath agrees that
they do not, but maintains that they were
never meant to do so. They presupp ose faith ,
he claim s, and simply exhibit its coherenc e
with our exper ience of the world. He is surely
in error here. In the Summa Theologiae Aqui-
nas states flatly that Go d's existence "can be
proved in five ways ", and in the Summa con-
tra Gentiles he says that proofs of this kind
ca n convince infidels.
"Contrary to what Dawkin s ass umes" ,
McGrath tells us, "orthodox Christianity
und erstands Jesus to have been full y hum an
and not om niscient." No doubt some present
day Christians in goo d sta nding deny that
Jesus was omni scient, but throu ghout most
Christian centuri es it has been taught that
Jesus was not only full y hum an but also full y
divine, with all the attributes of divinit y.
Here it is Dawkin s, not Mc Gr ath , who is the
clo ser to ortho dox Christianity.
Th ese are minor point s, though they illu s-
trat e that McG rath can be as unfair to
Dawkin s as Dawkin s can be to Christians. A
much more ser ious issue in the debate
bet ween the two writers is the natur e of faith .
McGrath complains that Dawkin s makes no
distinct ion between religion and belief in
God , see ing the two of them as two sides of
the sa me coin. In fact , McGra th says, there is
a critica l distin ction between the two. There
ca n be religion without belief in Go d and
there ca n be belief in Go d without religious
beh aviour. Buddhists are cited to illustr ate
the first case and, less plausibly, Eva nge lica ls
are held to illu strate the second. Dawkinss
failur e to make the distinc tion, we are told ,
leads him to ignore important relig ious phe-
nom ena such as the emo tions McGr ath ca lls
"hot cog nitions" - to which Dawkin s wo uld
no doubt repl y that feeli ngs are no reliable
guide to truth .
But if Dawkin s fails to make a di stin ction
bet ween religion and belief in God, both
McGrath and Dawkin s fail to distin gui sh
bet ween belief in God and faith . Faith is
some thing more than the mere belief that
there is a Go d: it is an assen t to a purported
revelation of Go d, communicated throu gh a
sacre d text or a religions comm unity. It is
faith in a creed, not mere belief in Go d,
that is Daw kins's real target in The God
Delusion. It is the revelations that differe nt
religion s claim to be communi cati ons from
God that give rise to the disput es between
 R ELI G I O N 27

them and the evi ls that Dawkin s deno unces.
" What is reall y perni ciou s" , Dawkin s says,
" is the practi ce of teachin g children that faith
itself is a virtue . Fa ith is an ev il preci sely
because it req uires no ju stific ation and
broo ks no argume nt ... . Su icid e bo mber s do
what they do bec ause they really beli eve
what they were taught in their reli giou s
schools: that duty to God exceeds all other pri-
or ities, and that ma rty rdom in his service will
be reward ed in the gar de ns of Paradi se."
Mc Grath obj ects to Dawki ns' s acco unt of
faith . " It is not a Christian defini tion of faith ,
but one that Da wkin s has invent ed to suit his
ow n purposes." It is, ind eed , too much to say
that faith requir es no ju stifi cati on : many reli -
gious peop le offer arg uments not ju st for
belief in God but for their partiuclar creed . It
is also excessive to say that faith bro ok s no
arg ument, if that mean s that the faithfu l are
unwillin g to offer respon ses to crit ici sm.
Noneth eless, I think that Dawk ins is co rrec t
to den y that faith is a virtue, for the follo win g
reason .
Th e com mon chara cter istic of faith in
almost all reli giou s tradit ion s is its irrevoca-
bility. A faith that is held tentative ly is no
true faith . It mu st be held with the same
degree of certa inty as kno wled ge. In some tra-
ditions the irrevoc ability offaith is reinforced
by the impo siti on of the death penalt y for
apos tasy, which is the abandonment of faith.
Now the kind s of arg uments that be lievers
offer in support of their reli gion cannot be
claimed to have anyth ing like the degree of
"The Creation of th e Anima ls" (c 1550) by Ti ntoretto
cogenc y that would rationally ju stify the
irrevoc able comm itment of faith . Again, no
argument will make a true believer give up
his faith , and thi s is some thing that he or she
mu st be resol ved on in ad vanc e of hearin g
any argume nt.
Mc Grath will no doubt di sown such a
view of faith. But onc e aga in, Dawkin s' s
account is clo ser to traditi on al Christianity
than McGrath' s. Th e idea that faith is an irrev-
ocable commitment, which goes far beyond
any ev ide nce that cou ld be offered in its sup-
port , is ex plicitly stated by Christian th inkers
as different from each oth er as Aquinas,
Kierk egaard and New ma n. It is the degree of
But our ow n ex istence, Mc Grath retorts,
shows that so mething very improbable can
happ en. Th e issue is not whether God is prob -
able, but whether he is actual.
Thi s, in my own view , is a question to
which no one has give n a con vincing answe r,
and the appropri ate reaction is one of ag nosti-
cis m. But I do not ag ree with Dawkin s that
all tho se who beli eve in God are unreason-
able in so do ing. Tho se who claim to know
that there is a Go d are mak ing a claim that is
not ju stifed ; but so too are those who claim to
know there is no God. But a beli ef in God ,
fallin g short of certainty, is not open to the
same obj ection . A beli ef may be reason able,
thou gh fal se, if held with the appropriate
degr ee of caution. As Stephen Jay Gou ld
po inted out, if Dar wini sm is incompatib le
with religiou s belief, then half the world's sci-
entists are stupid.
commitment invol ved in faith, rather than its The Dawkins Delusion r, sadly, shares
religi ous obje ct, that is rea lly obj ection able. some of the vices of The God Delusion, and
Not all fanat ici sm is reli giou s fanatic ism , as is not free fro m over-h asty argument and
the histor y of Naz ism and Stalinism makes rhetorical padding. But it is hard to di ssent
abundantly clear. from Ali ster McGrath ' s conclusion that
McGrath is at his mo st con vincin g when Rich ard Dawkins has no mand ate to spea k
he is on Da wk ins' s hom e patch . He deals for the scientific community, and that his
bri skly and effec tive ly with the principal recent cru sade has don e more harm to
argum ent offere d in The God Delusion science than it has to reli gion . Mo st peop le
again st the ex istence of God. Dawkins points have a grea ter intell ectual and emotional
out the antecede nt impro bability of the exi st- investment in religi on than in science , and if
ence of beings as comp lex as hum an s. Belief they are once con vinc ed that they have to
in God , he then argues, repre sent s beli ef in a choo se bet ween religion and science and
bein g whose ex istence mu st be eve n mor e cannot have both, it will be science that they
complex, and therefore mor e imp rob able. will renounce.

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TLS A U G US T 17 200 7
28
London
Sukhdev Sandhu
N IG HT HA UNTS
A journey through the London night
144pp. Verso. £10.99 .
978 I 84467 1625
I n Twice Roun d the Clock, his 1859 account
of the days and night s of London, G. A.
Sala describ ed the city as "s o full of these
foot step memories, so haunted by imp alpable
ghos ts of the trac es of famous deed s". Sukh-
dev Sandhu ' s ext raordinary echo-so unding
of the cont emporary London night - lyric al,
hallu cinatory and harrowin g by turn s - not
o nly reveals the persistenc e of various form s
of urban night-time in the face of the official
image of a light-pollut ed, twenty-four-hour
tim e-zon e of hand y con sum ption, but makes
an honourable addition to the literature
of London as a place layered and haunted
with the ghosts and trac es of its histor y
(images of strata and palimpsests occur
repeatedl y).
Sandhu' s first book , Lond on Ca lling
(2003) , showe d him to be adept at tracin g the
unoffi ci al Londons ex perienced by black and
A sian immi grants; and while the "invisible"
workforce also featur es here, his ex cursions
also take in such diverse nocturnal figures as
aerial surve illa nce polic e, ex orcists and the
Sam arit ans. Indeed, it is in the Sa marita ns
chapter that we enco unter a phrase that sums
up the spirit of the wo rk: "these cartographi es
bleed biographi es".
Though the journeys are Sandhu's own ,
the eye definitely takes prec edenc e over the
"1" here ; rather than providin g what he pun-
ge ntly describ es as "the se lf-obsessed maun-
derin gs of psycho geogr aphi c writing", he
pitch es his eyes and ears to the anx ieties
and idiosyn cra sies of hi s subjects. In the
process, he travel s literally and metapho ri-
cally beneath the fac ade of the post-1 997
"Cool Britannia" capital , to unc over some of
the un ackn owled ged drud ger y that susta ins
the city 's " slicked-up for m of com modit y
urb ani sm" .
Ori gin ally conce ived as part of a coll abora-
tive onlin e art proj ect, Sandhu's pro se loses
nothing for being stripped of its ori gin al
accompanim ent s; ind eed , so me of his most
ev ocative glimpses stand out afres h on the
print ed page, such as the sight of the lit cit y
from the air ("J ewell ed neckl aces winking at
us . ... Thi s is the panoptic sublime"). A pan-
or ama of the alienated, the ex ploited, the
accreted ph ysic al detritu s of con sum eri sm,
yet o ne also studded with irreduc ible gra ces :
it is thi s that ranks N ight Haunts among the
essential guides to that parad ox of Londo n -
its ability simultaneously to possess and dis-
possess its citizens.
BHAR AT TAN D ON
IN BRIEF
"Hawaiian Music Girls" ; from Exotic Postcards: The lure ofdistant lands
by Alan Beukers (208pp. Thames and Hudson. £24.95. 978 0 500 543368)
Memoirs
Jonathon Taylor
TA KE M E HOME
Parkinson' s, my father, myself
274pp . Granta. £ 12.99.
978 I 86207 955 7
J onathon Tay lor's relati on ship with his
father was uneasy , to say the least. The
usual conflicts of teena ger and parent we re
exa cerbated by the fact that his father , in a
chronic delu sional state accompa nying Par-
kin son' s disease, passed from the famili ar
criticism s of his son's long hair and lifestyle
to proj ectin g on to him all things bad . As the
disease progressed, so did the paranoia and
terr or. Taylor paint s a picture of a man dro wn-
ing in hi s ow n fr agmentin g mind while losing
cont rol of his bod y. He is totally hon est abo ut
the trials of the relation ship bet ween ca rer
and cared for, the sma ll crue lties, the mind-
ga mes , the resentm ent , boredom and ange r.
Tay lor's brave chronicle of his father ' s ill-
ness and dem entia is as much a sea rch for
truth as it is an account of the tri als of carin g
for someone with an incurable degenerati ve
disease. "Because of what happened to my
father as a child, this is all we ca n do: adopt
an incompl ete famil y histor y" , he concludes,
after atte mpts at researching his heritage pro-
duce mainl y obfusc ation.
The section of the book which finall y
reveal s the full story of his father' s ea rly
childhood is preceded by a wond erful qu ote
from De Quincey : "the deep , deep tragedi es
of inf ancy, as when the child' s hands we re
unlinked for ever fr om hi s mother ' s neck , or
his lips for ever from his sister's kisses, these
rem ain lurkin g below all , and these lurk to
the last" . It is accompa nied by a faded photo-
graph of a chubby-faced boy of about six,
with a sweet, unc ert ain half- smil e. Co ming
as it does after a detailed account of the men-
tal and ph ysical degenerati on of thi s same
child as a gru mpy old man, and ju st before
the painful revelation of how he was given
away at the age of three by his famil y, it is
deepl y affec ting.
This first cruc ial shattering of security is
see n mirr ored ag ain and again thro ughout a
TLS A UG UST 17 200 7
life, until the ultimate fragm ent ation of an
entire person alit y. In tryin g to mak e sense
of it all, Jon athon T ay lor achieves a heartfelt
yet unsentiment al memoir that is also a
reconcili ation .
CA ROL BIRC H
Poetry
James Austen-Leigh
FUGITI VE PI EC ES
Trifles Light as Air : The poems of James
Edward Austen-Leigh, nephew and biographer
of Jane Austen
Edited by David Selwyn
138pp. Jane Austen Socie ty, clo 22 Hyde
Street, Winchester S023 7DR. £7.50.
978 09538 17467
T he Au stens we re versifie rs throu gh sev-
eral ge nerations. It was their tireless
deli ght in wordplay, charades, riddl es and
bouts-rimes that impressed visitors to
describ e them as a gifted famil y. Jane
Au sten' s moth er, Cassandr a, brou ght with her
a talent for epigram and witty verse epistles
and fables, nurtured in her famil y, the Leigh s.
In his youth, Janes eldes t broth er James
wrote prol ogues and epilogues for their holi-
da y amateur theatricals and he continued to
pe n verses throu ghout his life. Jane Au sten,
too, wrote occ asion al poetry in this semi-pub-
lic style, to am use famil y and friend s and to
mark the little and large eve nts of daily life:
lines to acc ompany a bag for thread and nee-
dles; lines to her broth er Fra nk on the birth of
his son; and the comi c verses on St Swithun
compose d onl y da ys hefore she died .
Da vid Selwyn, who has edited most of the
verse of the earlier ge neration of Au stens,
no w mak es ava ilable a coll ection of Jam es
Edwa rd Au sten-Leigh ' s poem s. Thi s is a vo l-
um e for the dedic ated Janeit e rather than the
po etr y lover. Au sten-Leigh' s real claim to
our atte ntion is as his aunt' s first biograph er :
his Memoir of Jane Austen was published
when he was an old man in 1870, ove r fift y
yea rs after her death ; but his po em s, with few
exceptions writte n before he was twent y-
five, date from her lifetim e or soo n after.
Th ey conn ect to peopl e and places she knew;
some wo uld have been shared with her , and
wo uld have taken sha pe in the confide ntial
story telling hint erland that she ex plore d with
her neph ews and nieces as they grew up. Two
teenage pieces we re directl y inspir ed by her:
the comi c lines "To Mi ss Au sten" from 1813,
on disco verin g she is the author of Sense and
Sensibility and Pride and Prej udice; and the
bathetic doggerel "To the Memory of Mi ss
Jane Au sten" , from September 1817.
Lik e his father James, Au sten-Leigh
sounds trite or po ndero us whe n he tries for
seriousness . His humorou s ve rses are mo re
success ful than his se ntime nta l, in no small
part because they set up fewer ten sion s with
his seve rely limit ed technique ; headl ong octo-
syllabic couplet s and the stock ballad stanza
are hi s preferenc e. By cont rast, the wome n in
the famil y see m to have had a sav ing sense
that their verse had no more than comic poten-
tial. We wo uld not rem emb er Jane Au sten for
her poetr y. In her case, so mething rem ark-
able and unexpected burn ed alongside their
slighter sparks of talent.
KA THRYN S UT H E RLA ND
Theatre
Julia Prest
T HEATRE UN DER LOUIS X IV
Cross-casti ng and the performance of gender
in drama, ballet and opera
208pp. Palgrave Macmillan . £65.
978 I 4039751 8 8
A ny book on seve ntee nth-ce ntury French
theatre that open s wi th a discu ssion of
the stoni ng sce ne in Monty Pyth on ' s Life oj
Brian mu st be worth readin g. The link?
Cross-cas ting, that is, whe n an actor plays a
character of the oppos ite sex. Juli a Prest' s
subje ct might , however , appear to be a slight
on e. The rise of the actress on the early
mod ern French stage, beginning in the
sec ond half of the sixtee nth century, means
that cro ss-c ast roles are very rare . For
instanc e, of all the co medies produced in the
seve ntee nth century , Prest identifi es cross-
cast roles in onl y seve n of them, and four of
these are by Moliere, But that is in itself tell-
ing, Prest argues, for Moliere' s trick is to pre-
serve a see ming ly outmoded con vention and
use it as a device to enrich the co mic textur e
of his plays. Prest' s analyses of these plays,
in her first cha pter, are lucid and mercifully
free of the kind of obfuscatory j argon to
which thi s subje ct could lend itself. She use-
fully points out, for ex ample, that any inter-
pretati on of Les Femmes savantes that
inclin es to see Phil aminte as a laud able
prot o- femini st ign ores the significa nce of
her role havin g been premi ered by a man :
the character is clo ser to a mode rn-day
pantomime dame than a Germaine Greer in
seventee nth-ce ntury ga rh.
Elsew here, Prest shifts her atte ntio n from
texts to cont exts: her chapt er on school
dr ama, for instanc e, focu ses more on where
and how plays we re performed than on the
plays them sel ves. In fact , in thi s chapter and
the subse quent chapters on court ballet , the
focu s moves incr easin gly from cro ss-casting
to perfor manc es of femininity not by cross-
dressing men, but by wo men. And what eme r-
ges particularly clearl y here, and from the
later discussion of men' s cross-cast roles
in opera, is the normati vity that charact eriz es
the seve ntee nth-ce ntury French stage : hom o-

sexual subtexts are invariably denied and
women ' s role as the object s of the desirin g
mal e gaze reaffirmed. But Prest is not merely
retelling the con ventional tale of so-ca lled
"classical" drama. Rath er, she conci sely and
con vincin gly demon strat es the inherent inter-
es t of a largely neglect ed feature of sev -
entee nth-century French theatre that is signifi-
cant precisely because it is scarce.
RUSS ELL GO ULBOURNE
Architecture
Peter Jones
OVE AR UP
Masterbuilder of the twentieth century
364pp. Yale University Press. £25.
978 0300 11 296 2
P eter Jon es seems to want to remind us of
Halvard Solness, the doomed, megaloma-
niac protagoni st of lb sen' s 1892 play. Yet sev-
eral things distinguish the brilliant engineer
Ove Arup fro m his literar y counterpart. For
one thing, he was onl y half Norwegian (born
on Ty neside to a Danish father and a Norwe -
gian mother). For another, it appears that, iras-
cible , impatient and eve n snobbish thou gh he
could be, he was in most respects a good
friend and a good boss. His practice was, or
strove to be, "a collection of odditi es", an envi-
ronm ent in which individual talents could
flouri sh and idiosyncratic voices be heard.
Trained as a philosoph er before he turned to
engineering, he tended to reject dogma in
favour of a pragmatic, eve n plurali st,
approach. He was bridesmaid to some of the
most extraordinary architecture of the last cen-
tury, but never quite culti vated a "style" of his
own (though the elegant parabol as of concr ete
which span Britain' s moto rways might count ).
Joness book hinge s around two set pieces,
the later rather more famili ar. This tells the
troubl ed tale of the Sydn ey Opera Hou se,
designed in 1956 , see mingly on the back of
an envelope , by the Dan e Jorn Utzo n. Arups
were brou ght in to try and wor k out how
Utzons paper dream s could be made to sta nd
up, which they duly did. But Utzo n - whom
these pages do not exa ctly cover in glory -
became more and more di sench ant ed with
both engineers and client. In 1966 he offered
his resignation , prob ably as an act of brink-
manship ; the state of New South Wales
accepted it with alacrity and relief (four
decades later he would be rehir ed to advise
on refu rbishment , or, as some said, "comple-
tion " of the building). The episode was
clearly a painful one for Ove, dealin g a blow
to his hopes of a new di spensation bet ween
enginee rs and architects, necessitating reams
of harsh, careful corr espo ndence, costin g hi s
firm a fortune. The story is offered up as a
kind of parabl e of how not to do top-fli ght
publi c architec ture - thou gh those who think
a building that look s good on the outsid e is
more wo rthw hile than one which vag uely
works on the inside may lend a deaf ear to it.
Mor e unfamiliar, and in many ways more
interestin g, is Joness treatm ent of Oves
wa r. Arup lobbi ed and campai gned for a
sma ller numb er of bigger, sturdier bomb shel-
ter s to be built , rather than the domestic
And erson-t ype shelters and reinfo rced din-
ing-tabl es which the Gove rn ment in fact
depl oyed . Eve n if one might suspect that a
civil engineer would tend to lobby for a stra t-
egy that demanded plent y of civil engineer-
IN BRIEF
ing in preference to one that didn 't , the boo k
makes it seem very much as thou gh Ove won
the argum ent. But it was a fascinating argu-
ment , dra wing on logistics, ethic s (the cash
value of a hum an life), prob abilit y (how
many bomb s would be dropped , from what
height, how inaccurately and so on) , as well
as, impli citl y, questionin g the moderni st engi -
neer-architect ' s desire to take respon sibility
for broad areas of hum an experience and wel-
fare. Most Londoners in the end opted for
Tub e stations, of cour se.
K EITH MILLER
Chinese History
Jonathan Clements
WU
The Chinese Empress who schemed,
seduced and murdered her way to
becoming a living god
239pp. Stroud: Sutton. £20.
978 0 750 93961 4
T he subtitle says most of it. Jonathan Cle-
rnent ss last book , The First Emperor of
China, offered a "terrifying glimpse into a
land und er absolut e rule" , and this new vol-
ume is similar. There is, however, some ju sti-
fication for Clements's work, since in both
book s he sets out the current popul ar view of
these historic al figur es, and the shock-horror
aspect of Chinese popul ar histor y is part of
the Chinese historic al tradition. Wh ile the
gentle jokes of 1066 and All That may be our
bottom line, in China, histor y is no jok e; it is
about abso lutes .
Thi s is also true of Chinese historio graph y
which, since its beginnin gs, has sought to
praise or cond emn . Confucian historians
look ed back to sage rulers of the misty past
whose goodness and greatness was the more
apparent when set against the utter villainy of
bad rulers, and all of this was to serve as a
warning for curr ent rulers. Thi s mor al line
was reinforced by the 2,000- year-old practic e
of historic al wr iting by which the curr ent
dyna sty wro te up the histor y of the dynasty
which it had ju st overthro wn and whose
downfall could be see n as a moral puni sh-
ment. Empress Wu (625-705) is one of the
great hate figures of popul ar Chinese histor y
and , as a wo man, was compared with
other bad women such as the late
nineteenth-centu ry Dowager Empress Cixi,
and Mad ame Mao. She naturall y com es out
badl y in the offici al histori es compiled after
her death , which Clem ent s uses, but the folk-
lore that has grown up around her includ es
much of what is covered in Cleme nts 's sub-
title. If folklore is to be believed, her lover s
includ ed the Taizon g Emperor and his son
the Ga ozong Emperor, a Buddhist monk with
an unusual taste for blood and a pair of effem-
in ate brother s, w hi le tho se she murder ed
includ ed her two half-b rother s, an uncl e, a
niece and her own baby dau ghter , whose kill-
ing she tried to pin on a rival.
Clements aim s to make a legendary Chinese
Empress better known in the West, and we
should all know more about Chinese history,
but his re-tellin g is frequentl y unsubstantiat ed
or based on the many fictional work s based on
her life. Footnotes are frequently abse nt or
somewhat difficult to align with the text.
Erotic folklore can furni sh unnecessary anach-
ronism s; I longed to know the source of the
claim that the Empress used "large mirror s"
TLS AUGUST 17 200 7
when "ca noodling" with the Emperor on a
couch , since all the Tan g mirror s that survive
are made of polished metal, no bigger than sau-
cers, and you' d have to peer very clo sely to
see anythin g, let alone find inspiration.
With the aim of makin g Chinese histor y
mor e palatabl e to Western audiences, Clem-
ents might also con sider the question of
names. Hund red s of officials, generals, sib-
lings and relati ves appear befo re us here in a
dizzying and forgettable mass. Professor Tim-
oth y Barratt has written a forthcoming
account of one of Empress Wu' s more posi-
tive contributions, her prob abl e promotion of
woodblock printing, thu s taking this signifi-
cant invention furth er back in Tan g histor y,
and he has done so by hardly mentioning a
Chinese name, instead using epith ets, which
are much eas ier to retain.
FRANCE S WOOD
Literary Criticism
Katharine A. Craik
RE ADI NG SENSAn ONS IN EARLY
MOD ER N ENG LAND
200pp. Palgrave Macmillan. £45.
978 I 4039 21925
T he incr easin g ava ilability of print ed
materi al in England in the late sixtee nth
and early seve ntee nth centuri es provoked anx-
iet y about literature ' s place in society. The
detractors and apologists analyse d in
Katharine Craik's exce lle nt study are forced
into the consideration of funda ment al ques-
tion s. Wh y do we read ? How can writing
interact with our bodies in such variously
arousing ways, and what dan gers does this
present ? Can sec ular literature ever be more
than fri volou s? Can it possibl y be manl y?
Craik is explicitly conc erned with the last of
these question s: the overlap of theori es of
readin g with those of gentlemanly conduct.
No figur e epitomizes the ambiva lence of
poetr y' s plac e in masculin e endeavour more
than Sir Phi lip Sidney . In the first of two
chapters devot ed to the soldier-poet, he is
see n to strive, with his cont emporary George
Puttenham, to associate the pleasurably sensu-
ous effects of language with the virtues of
sy mpathy and decorum. In the second chap-
ter, Sidney 's alternative line of argum ent -
that the right kind of poetry can " ignite fer-
vour in men ' s mind s and bodies" - is plac ed
in the context of Ari stotle ' s On Rhetoric, as
we ll as, usefull y, an exa mination of the more
con ventional advice book s directed at young
soldiers. These concern s find an intri guin g
parall el in an analys is of Donn e ' s Anniversa-
ries, where decorous mourning is threat ened
by poetry' s innate lack and luxuri anc e. If,
later in his car eer , the book ca n be redeemed
as a spiritual metaphor, Cra ik shows that
Dnnn e first has to confront the inad equ acy of
writing, and mortal wr iters, to fulfil the ro le
of con solation.
The last in a series of rew ardin g ju xtaposi-
tion s sees A Nursery for Gentry ( 1638), Rich-
ard Braithwait' s censorious acco unt of "wan-
ton workes" corrupting "young Englishmen" ,
read alongs ide Thomas Cranley's Amanda:
Or the refo rmed whore (16 35), an erotic tale
of one wo man's rescue from sin. Here litera-
ture' s virtuous facad e is more tran sparentl y
the alibi for illicit pleasure. The subtle coher-
ence of previou s chapters ens ures that Cra ik' s
thesis now appears self-evident: "Porno-
29
graphy is not accurately describ ed as a sca n-
dalou s new categor y of literature ... . Rather
it is best understood as a passionat e tran s-
action between book s, writers and readers
made possibl e by earlier discu ssions of the
stimulating effects of literatur e on the bod y".
GUVER H ARRIS
Biography
Nigel Hamilton
BIOGRAPHY
A brief history
345pp. Harvard University Press. £ 14.95.
978 0 67402 466 3
N igel Hamilton begin s his histor y of bio-
graphy by askin g why no such guide
already exists . He also notes that des pite bio-
graphy 's "extraordinary renaissance in rec ent
years" , there is only one university depart-
ment in the wor ld devoted to it. Hamilton' s
book is an atte mpt to encourage and facilitate
more widesp read study of this neglect ed field
by introduc ing readers to the rich histor y of
biograph y in the Western world.
Given this ambitious aim, Biography is a
surprisingly slim and invitin g book. In
uncomplicated language, Hamilton uses
well-chose n exa mples to whisk the reader
through biographi cal express ion in the
ancient world, medi eval hagiograph y and
the developm ent of life-writing from the
subve rsive texts of the Renai ssance to
the whitewas hed "pseudobiographies" of
the nineteenth century. He then dissects
twenti eth-c entury biograph y in greater detail,
revealin g how the form was liberated by mod-
ern ism and cin ema , how the "people ' s war"
crea ted greater interest in the indi vidu al and
post-structuralism threatened biograph y' s cul-
tural profil e. Finally he reflects on the form' s
recent popularity, its survival of crippling
intellectu al prop erty laws, and reflects intri gu-
ingly on the possibl e plac e of genetic
research in biograph y ' s futur e.
Inevit ably, given that this is a shor t, single-
volume work, any reader expecting in-d epth
readin gs and detailed contex tual analysis will
be disapp oint ed . Instead Hamilton punctu-
ates his discu ssion with illu str ations and
short ex tracts from the relevant period. Th ese
extracts also pro vide proof of the historic al
and stylistic range encompasse d by biographi-
cal texts, from Xenophon' s description of
Socrates' death , written in 380 BC, throu gh
WaIter Ralegh ' s medit ation s on his ex pected
exe cution in 1603, to Edmund Morri s' s
widely cond emned 1990s experiment in
novel- style biograph y, Dut ch: A memoir of
Ronald Reagan .
Hamilton also see ks to demon strate the
elastic nature of his subjec t by using a prov oc-
ative variety of sources including Shake-
spea re's plays, Mont y Python ' s li fe ofR rian ,
the autobiographic al poem s co ntained in Ted
Hughess Birthday Letters and the current
trend for blo ggin g. His deplo yment of some
of these exa mp les jars confu singly aga inst an
emphasis elsew here on the print biographi es
of literary figur es (espec ially in rel ation to
the "death of the author" propo sed by Rol and
Barthes). But this engag ing book indi sput a-
bly demonstrat es the intricate histor y of his
field , and will prompt its reader s to read
"life-writing" both with more und er standin g
and with grea ter pleas ure .
Lu cv CARLYLE
30 RELIGION

on the night in Au gust 1651 when "the Win-

Apple-box revelations dows of Heaven we re opened" to M uggleton
- to the witness of Philip Noa kes, who died
in 1979, Lam ont present s a pictu re of the
n 1929, John Betjem an wrote a whimsi- PHILIP HOAR E they did divide spiritual time into three faithful through their letter s. Mu ggleton him-

I cal, gothic short story for the London

Mercu ry entitled "Lord Mount Pro spect" .
It was a loose skit on Willia m Mount-
Templ e, illegitim ate son of Lord Palm erston ,
pol itician, spiritua list and conve nor of the
Broadl and s Conferences , a kind of Victori an
Glastonbury festival of religiou s sects . In his
ge ntle satire, Betjem an laid the inspiration
for this ecce ntric aristocrat's belief s at the
feet of the Ember Day Bryanit es: "a n obscure
sec t found ed by William Bryan, a tailor of
Patern oster Ro w, Lond on" , who believed "in
a bodil y resurr ection and . . . that the sun is
four miles from the earth" . No t only that, but
as the narrator disco vers, memb ers of this
sec t we re still alive and worshipping in a
Lond on suburb.
Betjeman ' s story does not featur e in Wil-
liam Lam ent ' s histor y of the Mu ggletoni ans,
Last Witnesses , but it clearly point s out the
kind of probl em s the sect faced. Not lea st of
these was the odd-so unding nam e of its
Willi am L amont
L A S T W ITNESS ES
The Mugg letonian history, 1652-1 979
360pp . Ashga te. £55 (US $99).
978 0754655329
founder, an aspec t which Lodo wick Mu ggle-
ton ( 1609-98) him self addresse d towards the
end of his life: " I was known by person to
thou sand s and by nam e to hundr ed s and to
many that never saw me, so that you need not
so much wo nder at the stra ngeness of my
nam e".
There is more to won der at, perh aps, in
Mu ggletoni an beliefs: that the soul is mort al
and dies with the bod y after death , but will be
resurr ected with it at the Las tJ udge ment; that
God has a bodil y form; and that Heaven is
ju st a few miles up in the sky . Although the
Mu ggletonian s were not a millenni al sec t,
ph ases - "three grea t armies" : the first led by
Moses in the Old Testament, the seco nd by
the Apo stles in the New Tes tame nt, and the
third by the Two Witn esses of the Book of
Revel ation: Mugg leton him self, and John
Reeve, a Lond on tailo r.
Lament' s narrati ve of these belief s -
roo ted in the religiou s and politi cal uph eavals
of England in the mid- seventeenth century -
relies on E. P. Thompson ' s remarkable dis-
covery of the Muggletoni an archive at a Kent-
ish farm in 1974. These papers, including
Mu ggleton' s per sonal and extensive corre-
sponde nce, had been rescued from the sec t's
Bishop sgate readin g room durin g the Lond on
Blitz, and stowe d away in appl e boxes by the
son-in-law of one of the last Mugg letonians.
Now catalog ued and prese rved in the Briti sh
Lib rary, they have given Lamont his uniqu e
insight into the surprisingly long histor y of
the sec t.
Trac ing their story from its beginnin gs -
self emerges as a sto ic charac ter, refu sin g to
travel by or across water, or anywhere much
but by foot , yet dispensin g blessin gs and
cur ses by letter to the faithful and the faith-
less. Parti cul ar ene mies includ e the Quakers,
whose ea rly fit s and hypn oti c states Mu ggle-
ton com pared to witchcra ft. Lam ont is es pe-
cially fascinati ng on the parallel existences of
the Mu ggletoni an s and Qu akers durin g the
English Civ il War and the ye ars imm edi ately
afterward s.
Soon before he died, Mu ggleton told one of
his many correspondents that he did not want
his writings pored over by "the great men of
the world and learned men" . Rather, the docu-
ments should be "kept in ch ains of darkness
until the jud gem ent of the great day" . Willi am
Larnonts impeccably researched and lively
account may well have flouted his subjec t's
wishes, but the result has extended the
memory of the extraordinarily tenacious
spiritual hold of Lodowick Mu ggleton .

.Submissions Sought Cuckoo's Nest Press is

the United Kingdom's latest publishing
The Bibliographical Society endeavour, the result of an irrepressible desire
to bring emergent. unpublished t alent to the
fore . Wcseck longer wor ks of an y genre, science
f'lction , and fantasy excepted. Two chapters and
Katharine F. Pantzer Jr Research Fellowship a synopsis should be emailed 10
cuckoosnestpress ts'gman .com ma rked for the
in the History of the Printed Book editor.

The Bibliographical Society has received a generous bequest from the estate of the
distinguished bibliographer Katharine F. Pantzer Jr and has established awards in her
memory . Applications are now invited for the Pantzer Fellowship. which is to be awarded
for the first time in 2008.
Appli cants' research must be within t he field of the bibliographic al or book-h istoric al
study of the printed book in the hand-press period , that is, up to (.1830. Applicants
Coming up in
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researchers. There are no restrictions as to age or nationality of applicants.
The Fellowship. worth up to £4,000. is intended to assist with both immediate research
the TLS ...
needs, such as microfilms or travelling expenses, and longer-term support, for example 24th & 31st August-
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money to pay for teaching cover.
Fiction/Autumn Export
Applications must be received by 1 December 2007. Please note that the Society will 7th September -
advertise its normal Major Grants scheme later in the year.
Cultural Studies/
Further details and an application form may be found on the Society's website -
www.bibsoc.org.uk • or from: Psychology
Or John Hinks
Secretary : Fellowships & Bursaries Subcommittee
14th September -
The Bibliographical Society Reference Books
Centre for Urban History
University of Leicester
Leicester LE1 7RH
Email: jh241 @le.ac.uk

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TL S AUGUST 17 2 00 7
 31

Henri Astier is a BBC journalist.
Paul Binding' s With Vine-leaves in His
Hair: Ibsen and the art ist was publi shed last
ye ar. He is the co-author of The Bahel Guide
to Scan dinav ian and Balt ic Fiction , 1999 .
Carol Birch ' s mo st rec ent novel is The
Namin g of Eliza Quinn , 2005 . Her other
book s include Turn Again Hom e, 200 3, and
Life in the Pala ce, 2000 .
W , F . Bynum is Emeritus Profe ssor of the
Histor y of Medicine at the Wellc ome Trus t
Ce ntre for the Histor y of Medicine at
University College London. His book s
includ e Sc ience and the Practice of Med icin e
in the Nine teenth Century, 1994, and , as co-
editor, M edicin e and the Five Senses, 1993,
and The Oxford Dictionary of Sc ientific Quo-
tation s, 2005 .
L ucy Carlyle is a writer and a post graduate
stude nt at the University of Oxford, writin g a
doctoral thesis on the writin gs of Elizabeth
Bow en and Rosamond Lehmann .
Sarah Church well is Senior Lecturer in
Am erican Literature at the University of Eas t
An glia and the author of The Many Li ves of
Marilyn Monroe, 2004.
L ucy Dallas is the editor of the TLS web site
and In Brief pages.
Barbara Everett , form erl y Professor of
Engli sh at Som erville College, Oxford , is the
author of Young Haml et: Essays on Shake -
spear e 's tragedi es, 1989, and Poets in Their
Tim e: Essays on Engli sh poetry from Donn e
to Lark in, 1986 .
Judit h Flanders ' s most recent book , Con-
suming Passions: Leisure and pl easur e in
Victoria n Brit ain , was pub lished last ye ar.
She is the author of A Circle of Sisters, 2001,
and The Victorian Hou se: Do mesti c life from
childhirth to deathh ed , 2003.
Russell Go ulbourne is Profe ssor of Early
Mod ern French Literature at the University
of Leed s. He is the author of Voltaire Comic
Drama tist, publi shed last year, and has edited
various works in Les (Eu vres completes de
Voltair e. His tran slati on of The N un by
Diderot was publi shed as an Oxford World' s
Cla ssic in 2004 .
Cl ive Griffin is a Fellow and T utor in
Spani sh at Trinity College , Oxford . He is the
author of The Crombe rge rs of Sev ille: A
history of a p rinting and merchant dyna sty,
1988, and Journ eymen-Printers, Heresy and
the Inquisition in Six tee nth-Century Spa in,
2005 .
Oliver Harris is studying the Shak espeare in
History MA at University College London .
Philip Hoare' s England 's Lost Eden :
Adventures in a Victorian utopia appeared in
2005 . His other book s incl ude Se rious Pleas-
ures: The life of Stephen Tennant, 1990, Noel
Cowar d: A bio graph y, 1995, and Spik e
Island: The memo ry of a military hospital ,
2001.
Peter Ho lland is curr ent ly Presid ent of
the Shak espeare Associat ion of Am erica and
Editor of Shakespear e Survey . He wrot e the
entr y on Wi lliam Shak espe are for the Oxford
Dictionary of Nati onal Biograph y and
recently co -edit ed Shakespea re, M emory and
Performance, publ ished last year.
Mark Kamine is Assistan t Production
Mana ger on The Sopranos. He line-produced
Interview, a mo vie starring Steve Buscemi
and Sienn a Miller.
Anthony Kenny has been Ma ster of Balliol ,
President of the British Academy and
Chairman of the Board of the Briti sh Libr ary.
He is the author of a four- volum e histor y of
philo soph y from Thales to Derrida. Among
his recent book s are The Unknow n God,
2004, and What I Believe, publi shed last yea r.
Brenda Maddox ' s biography of Nora Joyce
appeared in 1988. Her other book s include
Freud 's Wizard: The enigma of Ern est Jon es,
publi shed last year, Rosalind Franklin: The
Dark Lad y of DNA , 2002 , and Ma ggie: The
First Lad y , 200 3.
Kei th Miller' s book about St Peter' s Basil-
ica was pub lished earlier this year.
P aul Owen is Guardian Unlimited's po litics
sub-editor.
P et er Parker was an ass ociate editor of the
Oxfo rd Diction ary of Nationa l Biograph y ,
2004 , and has writt en Lives of J. R. Ackerl ey,
1989 , and Chri stopher Isherwood, 2004 .
Neil Powell' s book s include Geor ge Crahhe:
An English life, 1754 -1 832 and A Halfw ay
House, both 2004 , and Roy Fuller: Writ er
and society , 1995. He edited the Sele cted
Po ems of Fu lke Gre ville, 1990 .
Sameer Rahim work s at the Dail y Tele-
graph.
Alfre d Rieber is Emer itus Professor of
Histor y at the University of Penn sylvania and
at the Central Europe an Univer sity in
Budapest. His book s include The Politics of
Autocra cy, 1966, and Mer chant s and Entr e-
pren eur s in Imperial Russia , 1982 .
P. D. Sm ith' s stud y of science and German
literature, Metaphor and Mat erialit y , was
publi shed in 2000 , and his biography of Ein-
stein appeared in 2003 . His most recent book
is a cu ltural histor y of science and superweap-
on s, Doom sday M en, publi shed ea rlier this
year. His web site is www .peterd sm ith.c om .
Ka thryn Su therland is Professor of Textual
Cr itici sm at the University of Oxford and
a Fellow of St Annes Coll ege. Her edit ion
of Jame s Edward Au sten -Leigh ' s Mem oir of
Jane Austen and Oth er Family Recoll ections
was publi shed in 2002 . Her most recent
book, Jane Austen 's Textual Li ves: From
Aesch ylus to Bollyw ood , will be publi shed in
paperb ack later this year.
Bharat Tando n teach es at St Ann e' s
College, Oxford . His book Jan e Austen and
the Mo rality of Conversation was publ ished
in 2003.
Howard Tem perley is Emeritu s Professor of
Am eric an Histor y at the University of East
Angl ia. His books include Whit e Dreams,
Black Africa : The antisla very expedition to
the Niger , 199 1, After Slavery: Eman cipati on
and its discontents , 2000 , and Britain and
Am erica since Independence, 2002.
Heather T ho mpson lives in Berlin . She is
working on a nov el.
Andrew van der Vlies lectur es in Post-
coloni al Literatures and Theor y in the Univer-
sity of Sheffi eld' s School of Engli sh. His
South African Textu al Cultures: White,
black, read all over, will be publi shed later
this year.
M ichael W h ite is an assistant editor
(po litic s) of the Guardian, who se political
editor he was from 1990 to 2006.
H ugo W illiams' s mo st recent co llection of
poem s is Dear Room , pub lished last year. His
Collec ted Poems appeared in 2002.
Frances Wood is the author of The Silk
Roa d , 200 3, Did Marco Polo Go to China? ,
1995, and Hand Grenade Practice in Pekin g,
2000 . She is curator of the Chinese co llec-
tion s at the British Library.
Correctio n : The illustration accompanying
Jan e Jakeman 's rev iew of the exhibition
Spirit and Life at the Ismaili Centre (Augu st
3) was taken from the Akh laq-i Nas iri of
Tu si (Lahore, cl595) , depicting the kitab-
khana not the Qanun fi 'l-tibb of lbn Sina of
!O52.

TLS C ROSSWORD 708 T H

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ACROSS DOWN R 0 S A L Y N 0 E L 0 o G E

1 Operatic chivalry (10 ) 2 Unhappy land of Huxley (6) N I L N R E E L

O M E G A E T C H R H y S
9 Smooth change at loge (6) 3 First male Jarro w scholar was a car -
F R R U V 0 H
10 Dorothead efied his will (8) penter (4, 4)
T U E S 0 A Y S E A G U L L
11 End of bird at poet' s party (8) 4 Some convoluted ways of Borges ( 10) H P I N S A
12 Household word for one seen as rogue 5 Greek archons offe r cattle farms (7) E X P 0 S E 0 C I S T E R N
(4) 6 Smart type dispatched by 24 (4) S I M A 0 I 0
13 Destro ying the image of Byzantium 7 A degree in Aryan version of Sanskrit C L E A I V A N T R U S S

poem (8) R C 0 I Q T S C
(10)
E V A D E N A U M A C H I A
15 Frenc h rib allowed inside to meet 8 High flyer with ligh tweight surname
W S L C E R E P
writer (7) (3, 7) 0 L 0 I E S T H R E E
•• s R
17 Unyie lding French sculptor with 12 He wrote the kind of poetry he wanted
wor ker (7) ( 10) SOL UTION TO CROSSWORD 704
20 " Why do ye strive to bar wished death 14 Possibl y rid Antonio of admission to
from his so ju st - " (Phineas Fletcher, the mini stry ( 10) The winner of Crossword 704 is
Etisa) (10) 16 'T he so-called system of - which was Ceridwen Jones, Cambr idge.
21 Obscure time for Koestler (4) employed by Russell and Whiteh ead"
23 Poet in teni ble riot about 24 being sent (A. J. Aye r) (8)
back (8) 18 A lot of bull in one of 4 (8)
19 Out standin g art form (7) Th e se nder of the first corr ect
25 Insured a different name once given to
the Po? (8) solution ope ne d on Se pte mbe r 14
22 Those of the midden will madden said
26 Manners of speaking from identit y of Auden (6) will recei ve a cash prize of £40.
24 She was also ca lled Clare (4) E ntries sho uld be addressed to
mythical prin cess on manuscript (6)
27 Dean' s remark initially modified (10 ) TLS Cross wor d 708 ,
Time s House, I Pennin gton Street,
London E98 1BS .

TLS A UG UST 17 2007

32
T he author who has no one to thank after
completing a great work is a sad author.
Th e mor e peopl e to who m you give a
special menti on for "insightful sugg estions" ,
for "company and con versation" , for "sanctu-
ary" , the more interesting a guy yo u see m to
be. Th e ackno wled gem ents in Ed ward Doc x' s
Book er Priz e-Ion glisted novel Self Help, from
which the abo ve are taken, fairl y bubbl e with
gratitude: "to Lena , for teaching me ' I love
yo u' ", to "L uca Antilli for ten thou sand great
days and night s in and out of the sack", and
"last and mo st importantl y to Emma ; you are
the beaut y and the light and the better part
of what 1 am" . Could it be that Mr Docxs
ackn owledgement s are rea lly to Mr Doc x?
In the 1950s, such gushings were unkn own.
In the first edition of On the Road, publi shed
fift y years ago, Jack Kerouac didn't thank any-
one, despite having relied on the loyalty of
many peopl e durin g the yea rs leading to publi-
cation of his book. No w, the ori gin al " scroll"
draft of the novel is bein g publi shed to mark
the anni versary. On the Road: The original
scroll (Penguin , £25) comes with comm en-
tary by Howard Cunnell, Ge orge Mouratidis,
Penn y Vlago poulos and Joshu a Kup etz, who
tell us nothin g about them selves, but much
abo ut their feelings of gratitude.
Fa mily are a high priority for the post- On
the Road ge neration. Mr C unnell thank s his
dau ght er s for " inspiration" , his broth er ("still
o n the roa d"), his " mum" and his wife - "this
is for her". A dozen more are sq ueezed in.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - ----, myths and legend s attaching to man y bird s, Shak espear e was pri vately circu lated by
viewed
All booKS re
LS and over
\n t\'1e 1 t''tles in pr\n t,
.'
a mIllion
ot\'1er I
are av
a\lable from
kshOP
600
,.\.5
t\'1e d prices wit\'1
at d\SCounte 'n t\'1e UK.
fREE delivery I
. booK
nd advIce, .
Assistance a ""endatlOns
recom, I I
catalogues, gestions from
and sUg d \'1elpful
d eabl e an
Knowle 9 bOOKsellers.
Arthur Country in Co rnwa ll, where he hop ed
to catch the ancient breath of "Merlin, Iseult,
Guineve re". This was 1960 :
What ghosts can hold their own against this
traffic -
The cafes , cameras , moto rcycles, ices;
Aerials on all the roofs, inside the wireless
Tinging the air with j azz and fat stock prices?
Thanks a lot
The introduction is fift y pages long, giving twel ve-pa ge article . He compensates with a
Mr Cunnell an acknow ledgements ave rage of fin al flouri sh in the dir ection of his wife, with-
rou ghl y one person per three pages of work. out wh om "I wo uld never have known ho w
Geo rge Mour atidi s beats that hand s down , to fini sh thi s project, in particul ar, or where
with twelve effusions: to his par ent s, his to begin , in ge neral". Wh at will he say if he
broth er, a pair of friend s for "illumination and ever ge ts round to writing a book ?
encourage ment" , another for "s upport and
und erstanding" , and to his three colleagues
for " support, ass istance and inspiration " . Mr B
irds featur e in pro verb s and superstitions
across the globe . For exa mple, it is
Mour atidi s' s essay is thirt een pages long: a
thou ght to be luck y to be the target of a bird
good ave rage of almos t one person per page.
dropping ; the cr y of a curl ew at night is sa id
Penn y Vlagop oul os is similarly mindful of
to herald a death (thr ee sw ans flyin g togeth er
intim ates the same); peacock feath ers mu st
kin: " I wo uld like to ex press my gratitude to
not be brou ght ind oor s; wre n feathers, on the
my parents, Marika and Tr ipho n, and my
brother Pete for their endless support". Te n
other hand , brin g goo d luck. Writ ers fro m
acknow ledgeme nts for a fift een- page essay
Aristotle to Shakespeare ha ve indul ged the
mak es a respect able average of o ne per one-
folk belief that a swa n sings sw eetly before
and-a-half pages. Joshu a Kup etz thank s his
its own death (E milia, stahbed hy Oth ello: "1
will play the swa n, I And die in mu sic" ).
moth er and sister "for their unending faith " ,
but only five others for ge neral enco urage-
Th e ornitholo gi st Peter Tat e has brou ght
out Flights of Fancy, which deals in these
ment , leavin g him with a poor ave rage for a
topi cs (Ra ndom Hou se, £ 10). He o utlines
he above drawin g of the Victori an man of
lett ers Frank Harri s bein g sized up by
T
and also pays atte ntion to the part pla yed by M ax Bee rbohm in 1896. It was inspir ed by
bird s in literatur e. Th e mo st apos trophized Harri ss comment on the downfall of Oscar
bird s, goin g by thi s g uide, are not the eag le or Wild e, that great men such as Wi lde had a
the dove, but the robin , which brin gs ge ner- kind of droit de seigneur. As Harris put it,
ally goo d tidin gs; the magpi e, ge nerally bad ; "Had Shakespe are asked me, 1 wo uld have
and the rave n, which can be good or bad. Co n- had to submit" . It app ears in Facing the Late
trast Christopher Marlowes "sad presaging Victorians: Portraits of writers and artists,
raven , that toll s I The sick man' s passport in by Margaret D. Stez, a collecti on of some
her hollo w beak" with the beli ef that if fift y drawin gs, caricatur es and photographs,
raven s sho uld for sake the To wer of London, published by Unive rsity of Delaware Press.
Brit ain ' s do wnfall mu st foll ow.
Th e we ll-know n say ing, A bird in the hand
is worth two in the bush , occurs in similar
etafiction Ill: Of all the M etafictions -
I, 1I and III - the third stage has pro ved
form in man y different lan gu ages, including the mo st popul ar, contrary to initi al ex pecta-
M
Italian - E meglio oggi l 'uovo, che doman i la tion. Th e unsurp assed Master is Theo dore
gallina (yo u ca n wor k it out) - and Russian: Ziolkows ki of Princ eton Unive rsity. He tell s
Ne suli zhuravlya v nebe, a dai sinitsu v ruki ; us that Richard son' s Pamela shows up in
Don't promi se the crane in the sky but give Fielding 's Joseph Andrews; that Balzac' s Mel-
the tomtit in yo ur hand. moth reconcilie appropriates the title-fi gur e
of Charles M aturi n' s Melmoth the Wanderer ;
T
he poet Ed ward Lowb ury has died, age d that E. T . A. Hoffmann appea rs in Herm ann
nin ety-three. In addition to bein g the Hesse' s Journey to the East, along with
author of man y book s of verse, he had a dis- figur es from his tale "The Go lde n Pot" . And
tingui shed career in microbiology, with a in Waiter de la Mare ' s novel Henry Brocke n,
special interest in antibiotic resistanc e and its the hero encounters Jane Ey re as well as
prevention. Hi s parent s prescientl y gave him many other figur es from English literature .
the middl e nam es "Joseph Lister". He also gives us the only known instan ce
In a TLS review of 197 8, Peter Scupham of a metafict ion al dog. "E. T. A. Hoffmann
described Lo wbury as a " m ost dis turbing and use s the canine her o of Ce rv antes 's ' C o llo-
versa tile poet , mo vin g fro m aphor istic enter- qu y of a Dog' in his ' Account of the Most
tainm ent s to poem s of old age" . His occ a- Recent Fortunes of the Dog Bergan za' ."
sional app ear ances here included a fift y-lin e You win, Professor Zi olkows ki.
poem, "Tintagel" , about a visit to Kin g J .C .
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