Amia Srinivasan: Pets with Benefits

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 London Review of Books
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4 Letters William Beaver, Joseph Saxby, Ian Beckwith, Dominic Carroll, John Foot, editoRs: Jean McNicol, Alice Spawls
senioR editoRs: Paul Laity,
Timon Screech, Richard Fotheringham, Bill Williams, Joel McIlven, Paul Myerscough, Daniel Soar
Simon Matthews AssociAte editoRs: Tom Crewe, Joanne O’Leary
AssistAnt editoR: Daniel Cohen
editoRiAl AssistAnt: Ben Walker
5 Amia Srinivasan Loving Animals: On Bestiality, Zoophilia and Post-Human Love by Joanna Bourke contRibUting editoRs:
James Butler, Deborah Friedell, Jeremy Harding,
Rosemary Hill, John Lanchester, Patricia Lockwood,
9 Colin Burrow Along Heroic Lines by Christopher Ricks James Meek, David Runciman, Amia Srinivasan,
Christopher Tayler, Colm Tóibín, Jenny Turner,
Marina Warner
12 Francis FitzGibbon Short Cuts editoR-At-lARge: Andrew O’Hagan
Us editoR: Adam Shatz
online editoR: Thomas Jones
13 Thomas Jones Hearing Homer’s Song: The Brief Life and Big Idea of Milman Parry by Robert Kanigel speciAl pRojects: Sam Kinchin-Smith
editoRiAl boARd: Linda Colley, Hilary Mantel,
Steven Shapin, Inigo Thomas, James Wood,
17 Miriam Dobson In Memory of Memory by Maria Stepanova, translated by Sasha Dugdale Michael Wood
consUlting editoR: Mary-Kay Wilmers
20 Gaby Wood At Tate Britain cReAtive diRectoR: Christopher Thompson
typesetting: Sue Barrett, Anna Swan
pAste-Up: Bryony Dalefield
23 Paul Mendez Xstabeth by David Keenan designeR: Lola Bunting
pRodUction: Ben Campbell
Monument Maker by David Keenan
coveR: Alexander Gorlizki

25 Adam Shatz The Man Who Lived Underground by Richard Wright pUblisheR: Nicholas Spice
coMMeRciAl diRectoR: Reneé Doegar
finAnce diRectoR: Taj Singh
26 James Meek On the Energy Crisis finAnce: Manjinder Chana, Antoinette Gicheva,
Jayshree Mistry, Marija Radonjić
AdveRtising diRectoR: Kate Parkinson
31 Michael Wood Les Soixante-Quinze Feuillets: Et autres manuscrits inédits heAd of sAles: Natasha Chahal
sAles AssistAnt: Ellie Redfern
by Marcel Proust, edited by Nathalie Mauriac Dyer ciRcUlAtion MAnAgeR: Chris Larkin
cUstoMeR seRvice eXecUtive: Tim Hayward
pRodUct MAnAgeR: Francesca Garbarini
33 David A. Bell Capitalism and the Emergence of Civic Equality in 18th-Century France heAd of sUbscRiptions: Laura Reeves
by William H. Sewell Jr MARKeting MAnAgeR: Rachna Sheth
Retention MAnAgeR: Flavia Collins
senioR MARKeting eXecUtive: Cassie Gibson
34 A.E. Stallings Poem: ‘Peacocks’ heAd of fAcilities: Radka Webb
fAcilities co-oRdinAtoRs:
Kwadwo Acheampong, Corinne Delaney
37 Christopher Tayler Not a Novel: Collected Writings and Reflections heAd of pRodUction: Rachael Beale
digitAl pRodUceR: Anthony Wilks
by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated by Kurt Beals web: Jeremy Harris, Georgios Tsiagkalakis
softwARe developMent diRectoR:
Tom Gosling
39 John Whitfield Science Fictions: Exposing Fraud, Bias, Negligence and Hype in Science by Stuart Ritchie website editoR: Alexandra Tzirkoti

41 Caroline Campbell Antonello da Messina edited by Caterina Cardona and Giovanni Carlo Federico Villa
In the next issue: Jenny Turner on Hannah
44 Rosa Lyster Diary Arendt.

David A. Bell, who teaches history at Prince-
ton, is the author, most recently, of Men on
Horseback: The Power of Charisma in the Age of
Revolution.
Colin Burrow is a fellow of All Souls.
His book include Imitating Authors: Plato to
Futurity.
Caroline Campbell is director of collect-
ions and research at the National Gallery.
Miriam Dobson is a lecturer in history at
Sheffield.
Francis FitzGibbon is a QC.
Thomas Jones edits the LRB blog, and pre-
sents the LRB podcast, from Orvieto.
Rosa Lyster is researching a book about the
global water crisis with the support of the
Pulitzer Centre on Crisis Reporting.
James Meek’s most recent novel is To Calais,
in Ordinary Time. Private Island: Why Britain
Now Belongs to Someone Else, which consists
of essays first published in the LRB, won the
Orwell Prize in 2015.
Paul Mendez’s first novel, Rainbow Milk, is
out in paperback.
Adam Shatz is the LRB’s US editor, based in
New York. He is working on a book about
Frantz Fanon.
Amia Srinivasan is the Chichele Professor
of Social and Political Theory at Oxford.The
Right to Sex is published by Bloomsbury.
A.E. Stallings’s most recent collection, Like,
was a finalist for the Pulitzer prize. She lives
in Greece.
Christopher Tayler is a contributing editor
at the LRB.
John Whitfield is comment editor at Research
Professional News.
Gaby Wood is the director of the Booker
Prize Foundation. She has an etching in the
Royal Academy Summer Exhibition.
Michael Wood is an emeritus professor at
Princeton. He has written books on Yeats,
Nabokov, Stendhal, Hitchcock and Empson,
among other things.

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3 london Review of booKs 7 october 2021

Letters
In Praise of Indexes
Indexes are trouble, Anthony Grafton writes
(LRB, 23 September). He also makes clear
how valuable they can be. Within a year of
the invention of the Dewey Decimal Sys­
tem in 1877, W.H. Smith, then financial
secretary to the Treasury, ‘was astounded’
to find several top graduates of the Staff
College (usually sappers or gunners, temp­
orarily in the fledgling Intelligence Divis­
ion) combing obscure sources and sub­
jects germane to their assigned part of the
world and indexing it all into a 537­page
quarto catalogue of seven columns with
numerous cross entries to between five
and nine divisions. This was a state of the
art database capturing information ready
to be turned into real­time intelligence for
the Foreign Office (the War Office declin­
ed to involve itself with anything so tawdry
as ‘intelligence’). Smith now understood
why Lord Salisbury called the Intelligence
Division ‘a most valuable department of
state’ and offered to increase their grant
whenever they asked. In the 1890s, when
Edward Maunde Thompson, principal lib­
rarian and secretary to the British Mus­
eum, disdained to co­operate with the lib­
rarian of this unknown department, he re­
ceived a gentle admonition from the Treas­
ury; it was, he was told, ‘believed to be the
best military library in the world’. Soon
he, too, became a close, if confidential, ad­
vocate of the strange goings­on at 16­18
Queen Anne’s Gate.
William Beaver
Oxford
Philby did it
Charles Glass puts the failure of the Brit­
ish and American attempt to overthrow
the Albanian regime in the late 1940s
down to the fact that ‘the Hoxha regime
had long since penetrated the exile move­
ments’ (LRB, 12 August). In fact, the fail­
ure was down to a key participant on the
British side: Kim Philby, who was already
a key asset for Moscow. Between 1949 and
1951, while he was based in Washington
liaising between the SIS and the OPC/CIA,
every single one of the agents who enter­
ed Albania was rounded up and killed by
Hoxha’s security forces.
Joseph Saxby
London W9
Anglo-Catholic Radicals
Paul Flewers, making the case for a radical
political tradition in Anglo­Catholicism,
gives the example of Conrad Noel, the ‘Red
Vicar of Thaxted’ (Letters, 9 September).
Noel was appointed to Thaxted in 1910 by
the patron of the benefice, Daisy, Count­
ess of Warwick, a socialite turned social­
ist. Two years earlier, she had appointed
Edward Maxted to nearby Tilty, another
living in her gift. The son of a tinsmith,
Maxted had himself been apprenticed to
the trade. He then left for Canada, where
he earned enough money to put himself
through a theology course at King’s Col­
lege, London. He was ordained and served
his first curacies in working­class parishes
in London, notably St Anne’s, South Lam­
beth, where the vicar, Father Morris, put
socialist principles into practice and preach­
ed an embryonic liberation theology. On
his days off Maxted worked for the Social
Democratic Federation, touring London
with the Clarion van.
A burly former boilermaker, Maxted
could not have made a greater contrast
with the patrician Conrad Noel, with his
aristocratic connections and matinée idol
looks. Noel tends to get all the attention,
as though he was the only priest preach­
ing socialism. Maxted might have lacked
Noel’s gift for theatre, but when it came
to preaching socialism he was in a class of
his own. During his time at Tilty, he held
a public meeting every Saturday evening
either in the nearby, intransigently Tory
market town of Great Dunmow or on the
green on the outskirts of his own parish.
Standing on a box, without any amplific­
ation, he addressed the large crowd that
invariably assembled, mainly in order to
barrack him. He also sometimes invited
speakers from the Independent Labour
Party to these meetings.
Such were the feelings aroused by the
‘socialist vicar’, verbal abuse sometimes
turned into physical assault. On 5 Nov­
ember 1909, Maxted was burned in effigy
at Great Dunmow’s Guy Fawkes Night.
Where Noel concentrated on recreating an
imagined medieval community at Thaxted,
Maxted campaigned for council­funded
housing for farm workers to replace the
leaking hovels in which many of them
lived, even on the estates of his patron.
He stood as a candidate for Essex County
Council, coming second to his Tory op­
ponent, and when, at harvest time in 1914,
the local farm workers went on strike for
better pay and the right to join a union,
he went round the villages encouraging
them. (As far as I know there is no evid­
ence that Noel appeared in support of the
agricultural labourers.) The outbreak of
the First World War brought the strike to a
halt.
During the war, Maxted fell silent, pro­
testing only against the use of schoolboys
to replace the farm workers who had left
to join the fighting. In 1918 he swapped
parishes with a vicar from Bristol, and in
1922, after a brief and stormy ministry in
New Zealand, he and his family migrated
to the US, where they became American
citizens. As a republican who had chafed
at serving under the king as supreme gov­
ernor of the Church of England, perhaps
in his role as a minister of the Episcopal
Church he relished praying instead for the
president of the republic. He died in Hous­
ton in 1966, aged 92.
Ian Beckwith
Church Stretton, Shropshire
Call it what it is
Thomas Meaney chose his words carefully
when describing the US ‘departure’ or ‘with­
drawal’ from Afghanistan (LRB, 9 Septem­
ber). No mention of ‘retreat’, which is usual­
ly understood to mean a tactical disengage­
ment following a setback. In 1991, this
semantic distinction cost many Iraqi sold­
iers their lives on the infamous ‘Highway
of Death’ – the road from Kuwait City to
the border with Iraq at Safwan, and then
on to Basra. The Iraqis, having commun­
icated their intention to withdraw from
4 london Review of booKs 7 octobeR 2021
Kuwait in compliance with UN Security
Council Resolution 660, had been assur­
ed  they would be unmolested along the
way. When Iraq complained of US interfer­
ence in its troops’ withdrawal, George H.W.
Bush angrily denounced Saddam Hussein,
declaring: ‘He is not withdrawing. His de­
feated troops are retreating. He is trying
to claim victory in the midst of a rout.’
There followed the infamous ‘turkey shoot’,
while the white flags of surrender flown
by desperate Iraqi soldiers were ignored.
With regard to Afghanistan, and to para­
phrase Bush, the US did not withdraw;
its defeated troops retreated. Significant­
ly, Biden has warned that the US has un­
finished business in Afghanistan, declar­
ing: ‘We just don’t need to fight a ground
war to do it.’
Dominic Carroll
Ardfield, County Cork
Mrs Gilroy
Marina Warner writes about Beryl Gilroy’s
reissued memoir, Black Teacher (LRB, 9 Sept­
ember). In the 1970s I was a pupil at Beck­
ford Primary School in North London when
Mrs Gilroy, as we called her, was the head­
teacher. I remember sometimes pretend­
ing to be ill so I could be taken to her of­
fice, which was always open and welcom­
ing. In her book she refers to me as ‘our
knowledgeable grandson of a lord’ (I must
have been annoying) and reports:
Some of the children offered to sing their
national anthems but, oddly enough, there
were no offers from the English. They only
seemed to recognise ‘God Save the Queen’
after considerable prompting. The most mil­
itant among them protested!
‘We don’t sing that,’ said Jenny, the little
daughter of middle­class intellectuals. ‘We
hate the queen.’
‘Yes we do,’ John chipped in. ‘She has
too many houses. She should give them to
Shelter.’
John Foot
Bristol
The Sixth Taste
Daniel Soar writes that, at the end of
the 19th century, ‘for 1200 years meat
had been banned in Japan’ (LRB, 9 Sep­
tember). That would take us back to 700,
but no law banning meat was issued then,
or at any time. It is true that eating ‘use­
ful animals’ (oxen and horses) was taboo,
but this was because forested mountains
covered most of the country and there was
scant agricultural space: land had to be
given over to rice production, and couldn’t
be lost to animal feed. People took to
rivers and seas for protein for practical
reasons. The idea that they avoided meat
through Buddhist belief is also a canard.
Wild animals requiring no set­aside for
feed (deer, boar, hares) were copiously
eaten, as were birds.
Timon Screech
Kyoto
Many years ago, my wife and I gorged on
a delicious wheel of blue cheese left over
from a party. I got her to the emergency
room just before the swelling completely
occluded her airway. Allergy testing turn­
ed up only one sensitivity – to monosodium
glutamate. We carry an adrenaline epipen
in case it happens again. We check the
fine print on the backs of bottles, jars
and packets, and on menus in restaur­
ants. Sometimes we forget and geographic
tongue is the first warning that something
contains MSG; it always does: there have
been no false positives. Some natural foods
– tomatoes and mushrooms in particular –
also cause a reaction, though it’s less ex­
treme. It’s concentrated MSG powder add­
ed to food that causes serious swelling and
urticaria. For some of us, it’s no laughing
matter.
Richard Fotheringham
Brisbane, Australia
Alone of Its Kind
Barbara Taylor quotes Patricia Lockwood’s
remark that Marian Engels’s Bear is ‘alone
of its kind’ (Letters, 9 September). But, as
Taylor asks, ‘What is its kind?’ If we are
talking about novels with a bear as prot­
agonist that include woman­bear romantic
involvement, then we can include The Bear
Comes Home by Rafi Zabor, which won the
Pen­Faulkner Prize in 1998. Narrated from
an ostensibly ursine perspective, it relates
the existential and romantic challenges
faced by a hip alto­sax­playing talking bear
as he attempts to break into the US jazz
scene.
Bill Williams
University of Lisbon
Getting Away with It
John Lanchester explores the attitudes in
different sporting cultures towards oper­
ating outside the rules. Cheating holds an
exalted place in Nascar (LRB, 29 July). The
sport emerged from the practices of moon­
shine runners in the American South dur­
ing Prohibition, who modified their cars
to gain an advantage over law enforcement
agents. Nascar drivers and teams have con­
tinued the noble tradition of trying any­
thing to stay ahead of the law. Since Glenn
Dunaway’s winning car failed inspection
after the very first Strictly Stock Series race
in 1949, illegal alterations to car engines,
bodies, tyres, type of fuel used, not to
mention dodgy in­race manoeuvres, have
displayed an imagination which is perhaps
surprising in a sport which at first glance
involves nothing other than left turns for
hours on end. Involvement in cheating
‘scandals’ seems only to enhance the re­
putation of the sport’s greats, such as Jeff
Gordon, Jimmie Johnson and Dale Earn­
hardt. As the legendary driver Richard
Petty is said to have remarked: ‘If you ain’t
cheating, you ain’t trying.’
Joel McIlven
Totnes, Devon
Where does the bus stop?
Let’s settle this (Letters, 9 and 23 Sept­
ember). The 1966 London Transport Bus
Route Map shows the 88 running from
Acton via Shepherds Bush, Marble Arch,
Oxford Circus, Piccadilly Circus, Trafalgar
Square, Westminster, Tate Gallery, Vaux­
hall, Stockwell, Clapham Common and
Tooting to Mitcham, extended to St Helier
Estate (in rush hours) and further still
(on Sundays) to Belmont and Banstead
Hospital.
Simon Matthews
Sheerness on Sea, Kent
H What does Fluffy think?
ave you ever experienced the love
of an animal? Jack, my family’s
golden retriever, put on an admir-
able show of adoring all of us, but we knew
his deepest attachment was to my mother,
on whose lap he liked to lie, having his
silky ears stroked as he slept. Jasper, the
ill-advised beagle that followed, loved no
one but himself. The heart of my hamster,
Kramer, was an enigma. When one morn-
ing I found his cold, motionless body next
to the wheel in which he had whirred away
the days, a small furry Sisyphus, I cried for
a creature I had never really known. But the
arrival last summer of Goose, a black Lab-
rador, means that I too now know what it
is to be the object of an animal’s love, and
to love her in turn, as I tell her several times
a day. She lies next to me as I write, her
paws tucked neatly under her otter-smooth
head, her body pressed against my side.
Later we will take each other for a walk
in the meadow and delight in each other’s
delight: at rabbits forever out of reach, at
the clean line she cuts through water, at the
shivering trees. What could be better than
this?
For some people there is an answer, and
it is sex with animals. It isn’t something
openly talked about, apart from – like so
many other things we repress elsewhere –
in art, folklore and myth, where sex with
animals has always featured in a big way.
The oldest surviving evidence of bestiality
comes from a Palaeolithic cave painting in
Italy, which shows a man penetrating an
animal; similar images are common in the
art of the Iron and Bronze Ages. Indigenous
peoples in South-East Asia, Australasia and
North America have traced their origins
to sex between women and dogs. Ancient
myths are full of human-animal hybrids:
satyrs, centaurs, minotaurs, mermaids;
swan-Zeus, jackal-headed Anubis, shape-
shifting fox-women.
Closer to the present, in Woody Allen’s
Everything You Always Wanted to Know about
Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask), an Armenian
shepherd confesses to being in love with
his sheep, Daisy: ‘It was the greatest lay I
ever had!’ In Edward Albee’s The Goat, or
Who Is Sylvia? (2000), the same premise
plays out as family tragedy. The disclosure
of the father’s goat-love – ‘a love of an . . .
(dogmatic) un-i-mag-in-able kind’ – prompts
both marital crisis and a frantic burst of
incestuous lust on the son’s part. We can
only imagine how Sylvia, whose murdered
Amia Srinivasan
Loving Animals: On Bestiality, Zoophilia and Post-Human Love
by Joanna Bourke.
Reaktion, 184 pp., £18, October 2020, 978 1 78914 310 2
body is dragged onstage in the play’s final
scene, felt about this.
Animal-human transgression is the fant-
astical norm in the dreamworld of myth,
and operates still as a powerful symbol of
the desire to reach beyond the confines of
the possible or the acceptable. And yet, it’s
one thing to read about animal-human sex
in Yeats – ‘How can those terrified vague
fingers push/The feathered glory from her
loosening thighs?’ – and another to think
about, say, your neighbour getting down
with Fluffy. Could he be? So what if he
is? And what does Fluffy make of it? (As
Wendy Doniger wrote in the LRB in 1994,
‘What does the animal think about it?’ is
‘the most interesting question in the area
of bestiality’.)
Joanna Bourke’s Loving Animals is an
exploration of the ethical possibilities and
often grim reality of modern bestiality.
Bourke focuses on the US and the UK
(where 67 per cent and 51 per cent of
people, respectively, have pets), and on the
overwhelmingly favoured animal object of
human sexual activity: dogs. (Apparently,
male dogs are sexually more popular than
female dogs, and both are followed in the
rankings by male horses. The fourth most
sexually favoured animal among men is
female horses; for women it is male cats.)
Her thesis is that while sexual interaction
between human and non-human animals
is very often abusive, it needn’t be. Drawing
on feminist and queer theory, she makes
the case for a form of human-animal love
that isn’t merely free from harm, but is
governed by reciprocity, respect and care.
Taking this seriously can, Bourke thinks,
help us understand what we owe our fellow
non-human animals, and the sex humans
have with each other.
First things first: is your neighbour get-
ting down with Fluffy? It’s hard to know
how many people out there are having
sex with animals, although it’s surely a lot
more than chaste animal lovers might like
to think. (The stigma attached to bestiality
is so strong that even its practitioners
internalise it; more than 40 per cent of
people who enjoy sex with animals are re-
luctant to meet others like them, on the
grounds that they are ‘weird’.) Nearly all
studies of bestiality focus on people in
psychiatric hospitals or prisons, where the
rates of bestiality appear to be considerably
higher than they are among the general
population, or the members of online com-
munities dedicated to the destigmatisation
of bestiality.
There are some exceptions. In his study of
American men’s sexual practices in 1948,
Alfred Kinsey found that 8 per cent of men
claimed to have had a sexual encounter with
an animal, and 17 per cent of those who
lived in farming communities reported ex-
periencing orgasm as a result of animal con-
tact, a number that rose to 65 per cent in
some rural settings. In his study of Amer-
ican women in 1953, Kinsey found that just
under 4 per cent had engaged in sexual
activity with an animal since adolescence;
almost all these cases involved dogs or cats.
In 1974, the sexologist Marilyn Story con-
ducted a survey of students at the Univers-
ity of Northern Iowa, in which one in ten
said they had had sexual contact with an
animal; when she repeated the study in
1980, the number had dropped to just 3 per
cent, presumably because Reagan wouldn’t
have approved. Some contemporary sex
therapists claim that their urban patients
are increasingly turning to their pets for
sexual gratification, unable or unwilling to
find it with humans.
‘Bestiality’ covers a wide range of acts,
objects, fetishes, desires and motivations.
While sex with ‘companion animals’ – dogs
(canophilia), cats (aleurophilia) and horses
(equinophilia) – is the most prevalent form
of human-animal sex, humans are also
known to engage sexually with donkeys,
goats, pigs, sheep, cows, chickens, turkeys,
hamsters, dolphins, eels, octopuses and
(less commonly) camels, deer, llamas, bulls,
boars and gorillas. Sexual attraction to cert-
ain creatures is common enough to have
a scientific name: mice (musophilia), birds
(ornithophilia), spiders (arachnephilia), bees
(melissophilia) and snakes (ophidiophilia).
Bestiality very often involves genital stim-
ulation – penile penetration, masturbation,
cunnilingus or fellatio performed on or by
the non-human animal –  but it need not.
‘Formicophilia’ is the condition of being
sexually aroused by having small insects
crawl on one’s body, ‘anolingis’ by licking
lizards. Zoophilic voyeurs are aroused by
watching animals, as in the case of one
‘Mr Z’ Bourke refers to, who had a habit
of masturbating in front of large dogs and
peeping on them in neighbours’ homes.
(Asked how he imagined the dogs felt about
this, Mr Z said they ‘probably enjoyed it’.)
‘Necrozoophilia’ is the sexual attraction to
dead animals. ‘Avisodomists’ penetrate the
cloacas of birds, breaking their necks right
before ejaculation.
As the last example suggests, bestiality
is very often sadistic. Animal rape is com-
mon in the meatpacking industry; Bourke
quotes a worker who explains that sheep
are easiest, since ‘you can pick them up by
putting your hand up their ribcage, or up
their arse.’ A veterinary survey of nearly
five hundred ‘battered pets’ found evidence
of sexual assault in 6 per cent of cases.
So-called ‘crush’ films feature women in
stilettos stomping live animals to death –
usually rabbits, puppies or kittens. Often
the women verbally humiliate the animals
as well.
But sexual interaction between humans
and animals can, at least on the face of it, be
non-violent. In the 1960s Margaret Lovatt
lived for six months with a young male
dolphin called Peter as part of a Nasa pro-
ject to teach dolphins to speak. The pair
grew extremely close. Peter would often get
sexually aroused and rub himself against
Lovatt, disrupting their language lessons.
Eventually Lovatt started to masturbate
Peter: ‘It would just become part of what
was going on, like an itch – just get rid
of it, scratch it and move on’ (a sentiment
not confined to women who have sex with
dolphins). After six months, the project was
decommissioned and Peter was sent to a lab
in Miami where he committed suicide by
closing his blowhole. In Wet Goddess (2010),
the journalist Malcolm Brenner gives a
semi-fictionalised account of his love af-
fair, as a college sophomore in the 1970s,
with Dolly, a bottle-nosed dolphin (Brenner

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published part of Wet Goddess in Penthouse at
the time). Brenner says that Dolly courted
him for months – leaving her enclosure by
squeezing through a gap in the boards to
get closer to him, rubbing herself against
him, getting angry when he resisted – until
one day he gave in to desire in the open
water. (Since you were wondering, Dolly
was horizontal, Brenner was vertical.) Bren­
ner recalls the feeling of ‘merging with her’,
becoming ‘one creature that was making
love with himself ’.
Richard von Krafft­Ebing’s Psychopathia
Sexualis (1886) introduced the distinction
between ‘bestiality’ – the practice of having
sex with animals – and ‘zoophilia’ or ‘zoo­
reastie’: the pathological love of, or sexual
desire for, animals. This allows us to draw a
distinction, however blurry, between those
people who have sex with animals out of
convenience or opportunism (‘bestialists’),
and those for whom animals are a strong
or primary sexual preference (‘zoophiles’).
Zoophiles, Krafft­Ebing said, were evolut­
ionary throwbacks, and typically the child­
ren of unwed mothers. Gaston Dubois­
Desaulle’s Bestiality: A Historical, Medical, Legal
and Literary Study (1905) concurred that
zoophilia was a sign of serious mental dis­
order, but observed that men who had sex
with male animals were much sicker than
those who did it with females; in the
latter case there was ‘no inversion but only
anomaly in the choice of consort’. (In other
words, better to be a ‘straight’ zoophile
than a gay man.) In 1980, zoophilia got
its own entry in the American Psychiatric
Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Man­
ual of Mental Disorders under ‘Paraphilias’:
‘The act or fantasy of engaging in sexual
activity with animals is a repeatedly pre­
ferred or exclusive method of achieving sex­
ual excitement.’
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Today, many zoophiles embrace the
label, but insist that it describes a sexual
orientation, like homosexuality or bisexual­
ity, rather than a psychosexual pathology.
Sometimes, zoophiles compare themselves
to trans people, as in the case of one ‘zoo’
who describes himself as ‘a Rottweiler, but
I have the body of a human’. Zoos do not
embrace the comparison with paedophiles,
another group whose members like to fash­
ion themselves as a persecuted sexual min­
ority. (However, the North American Man/
Boy Love Association, a notorious paedo­
philia advocacy group, has proclaimed its
solidarity with zoophiles.) Zoos generally
claim to love and care for the animals they
have sex with, and that they are loved, cared
for and desired in turn. (Again, many paedo­
philes make the same claim about child­
ren.) Mark Matthews is one of the leaders
of the zoo movement. In 1994 he published
The Horseman: Obsessions of a Zoophile, a mem­
oir about his romantic and sexual encount­
ers with horses. Bourke quotes Matthews’s
description of his first sexual encounter with
his pony, Cherry:
They made slow love, using their whole
bodies in foreplay, rubbing against each
other, caressing with hands, lips, noses, teeth,
using all that each had to use; then, when
his testicles and penis ached with arousal,
he entered her and they rocked on their feet
in blissful harmony . . . ‘I love you, little girl.
I’m in love with you. You’re so sweet, so funny,
so – oh, Cherry, my darling!’ He hugged her
neck, hung her head over his shoulder, rub­
bing his cheek against her sleek coat.
Bourke charitably observes that ‘despite
the lack of literary flair’ and the ‘soft porn
mannerism’, the ‘emotions Matthews was
struggling to convey were real enough’. When
Cherry died Matthews was grief­stricken.
Eventually, he fell in love with another mare:
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6 london Review of booKs 7 octobeR 2021
‘I feel a warmth and companionship that I
can trust. No games, no power plays, just
honest affection.’
B
ouRKe begins by discussing the
case of a man in Washington State
who died after being penetrated by a
stallion – the case that made me (and per­
haps a whole generation of sickos) interest­
ed in zoophilia. In the early hours of 2 July
2005, a 45­year­old Boeing engineer and
divorcé named Kenneth Pinyan was drop­
ped off at a hospital near Enumclaw, Wash­
ington. Medical staff wheeled him in only
to find that he was already dead. The night
before, he had joined a group of men who
regularly met up to get drunk and have sex
with a horse owned by James Michael Tait,
a truck driver. Tait’s horse was apparently
not in the mood, so the men wandered
naked onto a neighbouring farm, where
they were anally penetrated, each in turn,
by a stallion they had nicknamed Big Dick,
actual name Strut. The stallion mounted
and penetrated Pinyan, perforating his sig­
moid colon; doctors later ruled the cause
of death as acute peritonitis. (The erect
penis of a stallion is on average between
two and two and a half feet long.) A thirty­
second video of the fatal act – the men had
shot hundreds of hours of footage, event­
ually seized by the police – quickly spread
through the seedier byways of the internet.
Zoo (2007), a documentary shown at Cannes
and Sundance, alluded to the film but de­
clined to show it. (I’ve watched it; I would
strongly suggest you don’t, unless you’re
thinking about having sex with a stallion.)
Pinyan’s death outraged the locals in
Enumclaw, a small, horse­loving city in the
middle of farm country; the men who
went there to be serviced by the stallions
were generally, like Pinyan, outsiders who
met on zoophile internet forums. The
men’s activities ‘brought a bad light to the
close relationship many [Enumclaw resid­
ents] had with their animals’. What was
worse, the men couldn’t be prosecuted for
anything more serious than trespassing,
since bestiality hadn’t been illegal in Wash­
ington since 1976, when it was inadvert­
ently decriminalised along with ‘consensual
sodomy’. In this, Washington was moving
in step with the gradual reduction of the
severity of legal punishment for bestiality
across the US and Britain since 1945. That
trend has since been reversed, in large part
because of what happened in Enumclaw.
In 1990, a handful of US states classed
bestiality as a felony; by 2017, the number
was 42. After Pinyan’s death, Senate Bill
6417, which made bestiality a Class C fel­
ony, was quickly passed in the Washington
State Senate, though some senators refus­
ed to sign it on the grounds that bestiality
was too ‘repugnant’ even to think about.
‘If a man lie with a beast, he shall surely
be put to death,’ Leviticus 20:15 com­
mands, ‘and ye shall slay the beast.’ Today,
few if any legal jurisdictions take that sec­
ond clause seriously. This wasn’t always so.
In early modern Britain, animals were tried
along with humans for bestiality. In 1677,
Mary Hicks, a married working­class wom­
an, was brought before London’s Central
Criminal Court on the charge of having sex
with her dog. The dog was brought into
court and ‘set on the Bar before the prison­
er’. He immediately started ‘wagging his
tail, and making motions as it were to kiss
her’, which was taken as dispositive evid­
ence that the charges were true. Both Mary
and her dog were found guilty; she was
made to watch the dog be hanged before
being executed herself. In 1758 a Royal
Marine was initially convicted of ‘buggery
upon the body of a she­goat’ but later
pardoned because he was judged to be
‘next to an idiot’. The she­goat was execut­
ed, though, on the grounds that she had led
him on. In another trial, involving a man
and his donkey, neighbours swore to the
donkey’s ‘virtuous’ character, insisting that
she had ‘never given occasion for scandal’.
The man was convicted, the donkey set
free.
As these cases show, the reason bestial­
ity was considered bad wasn’t that it violat­
ed animal innocence. Animals could be as
guilty, or more guilty, than their human
counterparts of crossing the supposedly
inviolable boundary between human and
other species. Bestiality was seen as a crime
of miscegenation, not as a crime of abuse.
As Bourke notes, the authors of Washing­
ton’s new anti­bestiality law had to be
careful to distinguish the abuse they want­
ed to criminalise from the routine practice
of animal husbandry, which involves the
sexual arousal and genital manipulation of
animals. In 2015, Farmers Weekly carried an
‘Eight­Step Guide to Artificially Inseminat­
ing a Dairy Cow’, which instructed readers
to make sure the cow is ‘appropriately re­
strained’ (using what the industry calls a
‘rape rack’) before loading an ‘AI gun’ with
semen. The guide continues:
Prepare the cow’s vulva with a paper towel
and put on a full­arm glove and lubricant . . .
Insert your arm into the cow . . . After locat­
ing the cervix, use the elbow to exert down­
ward pressure on the vagina. This will part
the lips of the vulva for the AI gun . . . The
semen should be deposited into the short
chamber of the uterine horns . . . Deposit the
semen slowly, by counting five, four, three,
two, one.
Karen Davis, the president of United
Poultry Concerns, calls husbandry ‘sexual­
ly abusive in essence’. To avoid accidentally
criminalising it, anti­bestiality laws target
human intent rather than action. In Wash­
ington, sexual interaction between humans
and animals is now prohibited when it is
‘for the purpose of sexual gratification or
arousal of the person’, but not otherwise.
In other words, it’s fine to violate an animal
in order to produce milk or meat, but it’s
not OK if it turns you on. Animal liberat­
ionists demand an end to all sexual viol­
ation of animals, whether for economic or
other ends. But the overlap between bestial­
ity and husbandry, and our uneven re­
sponse to these practices, suggest a partic­
ular squeamishness about the use of anim­
als to satisfy human sexual desire. Perhaps
our fundamental problem with bestiality
isn’t what it does to animals but what it
does to us: that bestiality, as Kant said, de­
grades the human animal.
Peter Singer, the philosophical lodestar
of the animal liberation movement, came
out for bestiality in 2001, in a review of
Midas Dekkers’s Dearest Pet:
The taboo on sex with animals may have
originated as part of a broader rejection of
 non-reproductive sex. But the vehemence with
which this prohibition continues to be held,
its persistence while other non-reproductive
sexual acts have become acceptable, suggests
that there is another powerful force at work:
our desire to differentiate ourselves, erotically
and in every other way, from animals.
For Singer, the taboo against having sex
with animals, like the practice of killing and
eating them, is a sign of human ‘species-
ism’: our tendency to think of animals as
our inferiors, less deserving of moral con-
sideration. While some acts of bestiality
‘are clearly wrong, and should remain crimes’
– Singer gives avisodomy as an example –
‘sex with animals does not have to be
cruel.’ Who, he asks,
has not been at a party disrupted by the
household dog gripping the legs of a visitor
and vigorously rubbing its penis against them?
The host usually discourages such activities,
but in private not everyone objects to being
used by her or his dog in this way, and oc-
casionally mutually satisfying activities may
develop. 
Here, as elsewhere in his moral philo-
sophy, Singer identifies pleasure with well-
being: the dog enjoys having his penis rub-
bed by the human, and perhaps the human
enjoys it too – in which case they are both
better off for it. The word ‘consent’ doesn’t
appear in the review, perhaps because Singer
tacitly identifies it with physical pleasure: if
an animal enjoys sex, it must have chosen
to do it. The right-wing shock jock Rush
Limbaugh reasoned similarly when he in-
sisted that Strut, the horse in the Enum-
claw case, had consented, since he had an
erection and mounted the men. ‘If the
horse didn’t consent,’ he said, ‘then none
of this would have happened.’
The conflation of pleasure and consent
is commonplace in rape apologism. It’s at
work whenever an orgasm or an erection is
taken as proof that someone consented,
even when they insist that they didn’t –
or, as with young children, when they are
incapable of meaningful consent. In a New
York Times op-ed, Singer and Jeff McMahan
defended Anna Stubblefield, a former Rut-
gers philosophy professor who had been
convicted on two counts of aggravated sex-
ual assault against a 29-year-old man with
severe cerebral palsy under her care. They
argued that either the man (known to the
court as ‘D.J.’) had the cognitive capacity
to consent, in which case it was ‘difficult
to believe that he was forced to have sex
against his will’, since he’d had an erect-
ion and didn’t struggle; or he did not have
the capacity to give or withhold consent,
in which case it was ‘less clear what the
nature of the wrong might be’, as ‘it
seems reasonable to assume that the ex-
perience was pleasurable to him.’ Either
way, D.J.’s erection exonerated Stubblefield,
or at least mitigated the wrongness of her
actions. She was not ‘a sexual predator but
. . . an honest and honourable woman in
love’.
Bourke is not unsympathetic to Singer’s
claim that the taboo against bestiality ex-
presses a commitment to human except-
ionalism. She quotes Derrida’s line that men
‘have given themselves the word [‘animal’]
in order to control a large number of living
beings within a single concept’. But she
is rightly sceptical of Singer’s equation of human. Thus the ‘violation of an animal’s
pleasure, consent and well-being. She dis- sexual integrity . . . does not depend upon
cusses the work of Gieri Bolliger and Ant- the question of what an animal feels during
oine Goetschel, who point out – in a paper a zoophilic act.’ Reading this, I thought of
of 2005 titled ‘Sexual Relations with Anim- the account of father-daughter rape in the
als (Zoophilia): An Unrecognised Problem anonymously written Incest Diary (2017), in
in Animal Welfare Legislation’ – that while which the author confesses to having desir-
‘zoophilic relationships can be mutual,’ in ed, and desiring still, sex with her sadistic
general animals have to be trained into hav- father, who began raping her when she was
ing sex with humans. Even self-identified a young child. The issue isn’t that the
zoophiles often ‘groom’ animals: bribing author didn’t want it, or that she didn’t de-
them with food, constructing specialised rive pleasure from it, but that her father
barns, halter breaking, acclimatising them made her into a creature who wanted it,
to human penetration with dildos, inject- and now, as an adult, can’t stop wanting
ing them with hormones. Such condition- it – can’t, that is, be free of him.
ing, Bolliger and Goetschel write, not only For Singer, sexual desire is a sign of
infringes ‘the free sexual development of equality; the taboo against having sex with
an animal’, but runs the risk of creating a non-human animals shows that we think
‘strong dependency’ of the animal on the they are beneath us. That he can think this
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reveals his ignorance of even the most rud-
imentary feminist insight. Sex can be as
much about degrading and dominating as
elevating the other. This is indeed why so
much bestiality is, to use Singer’s word,
‘cruel’, and why so many feminists have
made a connection between the abuse of
animals and the sexual subordination of
women. In the same year that she acted,
against her will, in the cult pornographic
film Deep Throat (1972), Linda Boreman was
forced to perform in a silent 8 mm stag
film variously released as Dog 1, Dog Fucker,
Dog-a-Rama and Dogorama, in which she has
sex with a dog. In her memoir Ordeal (1980),
in which she describes the physical and
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almost everything that has happened to me
in my life . . . But I’m still not able to handle
that day. A dog. An animal. I’ve been raped
by men who were no better than animals,
but this was an actual animal and that
represented a huge dividing line.’ Nearly
all bestiality porn features animals and
women, very often black women, in humil­
iating positions. Bourke observes that anim­
als, like women, are ‘particularly vulnerable
to abuse within the privacy of their own
homes’. Domesticated animals and women
alike struggle to seize control over their
solace in unconditional love’ from animals.
The impulse to portray animals as simple
sources of unconditional love is ‘abusive’
and based on ‘lies’.) Mark Matthews, who
described having sex with his ‘little girl’
Cherry in The Horseman, writes about women
in the same book in ways that are so ‘of­
fensive’ that Bourke refuses to quote from
these passages. ‘It is important to remem­
ber,’ Bourke writes, that ‘many zoophiles
treat their sexual partners as of no intrinsic
value or worth.’
communication we barely understand . . .
We make each other up, in the flesh.’ The
human­companion animal relationship,
properly understood, Haraway says, is ‘not
about unconditional love, but about seek­
ing to inhabit an inter­subjective world that
is about meeting the other in all the fleshly
detail of a mortal relationship’.
It is true that humans can know a lot
about their dogs, and dogs about their
humans, and that some of us make each
other up – and the same presumably goes
for other animals with whom humans live
lizards or bats, feel about the burning of
their forests, the melting of their ice floes,
the contamination of their water? Or is it
that we do know, and simply fear what
acknowledging it would mean?
In sex of all things, where humans
so often misconstrue what other humans
want, where the temptation to project our
fantasies and images onto the other is al­
ways pressing, where coercion and control
figure all too easily – can we ever trust our­
selves to know, really know, what an anim­
al wants? Perhaps one day there will be

reproductive systems from men – to have
or not have children on their terms – and
perform large amounts of uncompensated
labour under male control. As Carol Adams
wrote in her feminist classic The Sexual Pol­
itics of Meat (1990): ‘Meat­eating is the re­
inscription of male power at every meal.’
Zoophiles’ insistence that they are a per­
secuted sexual minority hardly makes them
immune from these dynamics – particul­
arly the men. The men who gathered in
Enumclaw were ‘voracious meat­eaters’ who
gave the horses they supposedly loved de­
rogatory nicknames. One study found that
women zoos cited ‘emotional involvement’
as their primary reason for having sex with
animals, while male zoos ranked it last –
their top priority was ‘sexual expressive­
ness’. Many zoos say they prefer having sex
with animals because they are easier and
more ‘co­operative’ than humans. (In The
Companion Species Manifesto, Donna Haraway
rebukes those humans who indulge the
fantasy that ‘people, burdened with mis­
recognition, contradiction and complexity
in their relations with other humans, find
C
ould it ever be possible for a human
to have ethical sex with a non­
human animal? Bourke thinks it will
‘require a different conception of sexuality
– specifically one that is neither phallogo­
centric or anthropocentric’. She looks to
adult­infant communication as a model for
the way humans can, if they exercise suffic­
ient care and attention – perhaps of the sort
that Iris Murdoch described as ‘a just and
loving gaze directed on an individual real­
ity’ – come to understand the needs, wants
and preferences of a creature that does not
share our language. It may be true, Bourke
concedes, that we don’t know what certain
animals are thinking (do lizards like being
licked by humans?) but usually when it
comes to zoophilia, we are talking about
‘sociability with species such as Canis famil­
iaris, with whom we have closely co­evolved
since between 9000 and 30,000 years bce’.
In the suggestion that companion species
bear a special epistemic relation to humans,
Bourke echoes Haraway, who wrote of her
Australian shepherd, Ms Cayenne Pepper:
‘We are training each other in acts of
in close community. Goose tells me when
she’s hungry or wants to go for a walk,
when she is happy, bored or worried, when
her ball has rolled under the sofa, when
she is wary of another dog, when she is
convinced that the vacuum cleaner is trying
to kill me, when she wants to turn around
and go home, when she wants to be swept
up and held and have her ears kissed. I read
without effort the difference between her
whimpers of pain and whimpers of petul­
ant complaint. She knows when I want to
play and (though she doesn’t always care)
when I need to work, when I’m angry, when
I’m sick, when I’m sad. If I accidentally
step on her paw or her tail she is upset for a
flash until I apologise, at which point we
hug, my nose is licked, and all is forgiven.
There are many humans I find more
opaque than this. What’s more, the idea
that it is impossible to know what non­
human animals are feeling or thinking
can serve as cover for their exploitation,
domination and extermination. Do we really
know nothing of how animals, even anim­
als as physiologically different from us as
members of the animal species Homo sap­
iens who are able to have sex with other
animal species in a way that has nothing
to do with the will to dominate, fetishise or
transgress. If so, I think, those people would
be of our species, but not of our kind.
One thing I am undecided about is
whether it was right to get Goose spayed. I
have little doubt that, like most creatures,
she has within her the instinct for repro­
duction. But I also know that Goose, like
any human, is more than a bundle of in­
stincts, that she has a sense of the good life
that extends beyond the mere satisfaction
of urges. When she is finally let out after a
spell of confinement – for example, after
finishing her first season, when she had to
be kept on the lead in case any ‘entire’ male
dog ‘got to’ her – she doesn’t simply romp
or run: she dances. What Goose loves most
of all, I sense, is the feeling of freedom.
Spaying her means, I hope, that her body
will remain hers, that she will not have to
repurpose it, weigh it down, for anyone
else. After all, Goose is no more a creature
of nature than I am. c

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A Ti tum ti tum ti tum
lectuRe by the critic Christopher
Ricks, now in his late eighties, is a
properly theatrical affair. There is
much leaning forward on the lectern, legs
often crossed; hand frequently raised with
intensity to brow (often furrowed, espec­
ially when quoting statements of folly);
sheets of paper flipped away as though un­
necessary to the performance (if you catch
a glimpse of them they seem to contain
little more than a word or a quotation),
such paper flurries occurring particularly at
times when in the sober medium of prose
one might notice a hiccup or a rough con­
junction in argument; meanwhile a build­
ing sweat, spreading from the armpits but
also on the ample brow, conveys that this is
stuff that gets the pulse racing. The words
flow. Apt phrases from T.S. Eliot; some Bob
Dylan; Samuel Johnson; much dazzle and
many jokes; Keats­Byron­Tennyson­Dryden­
Shakespeare­Beckett­Hill running giddily
into each other; but each writer and observ­
ation given its space to illuminate and be il­
luminated into a radiant energy, which con­
veys, above all, that literature matters and
that it also matters to get everything as
right as one humanly can, and that prob­
ably if you really tried you could also feel
these words in your body as intensely as the
lecturer visibly does.
As a lecturee he’s almost as animated. I
once sat behind Ricks while Geoffrey Hart­
man delivered a lecture which sliced all
the fun and feline energy from Christopher
Smart’s cat Jeoffry, and left the fur and
paws of the poor creature clinically decon­
structed on the lecture room floor. Ricks’s
scalp, exposed in noble baldness from be­
hind, was contorted in pain and contest­
ation. Indeed, one might say, his body
fought. I really felt for the cat, caught be­
tween two such minds.
Ricks’s early books – Milton’s Grand Style
(1963), Keats and Embarrassment (1974), T.S.
Eliot and Prejudice (1988) – each make a big
claim and prove it by examples: Milton’s
style is good; eliciting embarrassment is
a vital part of Keats’s appeal; Eliot could
make poetic use of prejudice by provok­
ing the feeling in his readers. Ricks’s later
works tend to be wider and more miscellan­
eous. They also make big claims (principles
matter more than theory in criticism; poets
can configure themselves as heirs to earlier
writers in ways that are generous rather
than aggressive; factual accuracy matters,
even in fiction) but their reflexive prose
style isn’t always kind on readers who can’t
imagine the physical presence of Ricks giv­
ing force to the words. A single sentence
from his most recent collection of essays,
Along Heroic Lines, offers an example: we’re
confronted not only with the phrase ‘the
prodigious prodigality of it all’ but also ‘just­
ification by works in which we can justifi­
ably have faith’.
But if you keep your faith that the pro­
digious prodigality of verbal energy on dis­
play is worth it, then it is. Ricks states that
‘criticism is the art of noticing things that
the rest of us may well not have noticed for
ourselves and might never have noticed. It
asks tact, of itself and of its readers, for it
must neither state nor neglect the obvious.’
The things that Ricks notices are often verbal
felicities, which for him are not simply
sources of pleasure or mere accidents, but
Colin Burrow
Along Heroic Lines
by Christopher Ricks.
Oxford, 330 pp., £20, April, 978 0 19 289465 6
also a kind of emotional education which
can capture and explain what is being felt,
or expand the possibilities of feeling, ‘fel­
icities being exactly such effects as hap­
pily  befall by benign casualty’. So when
Byron writes that he was glad to leave Cam­
bridge because it made him ‘lemancholy’,
this felicity captures the peculiar melan­
choly that arises from a lover (leman), and
so is a verbal accident which encapsulates a
passion.
Ricks regards literature as achieving in
extended form a similar effect as a local
felicity: it can speak thoughts and shape
emotions we didn’t know we had. For him,
as for his chief master William Empson,
imaginative writing is a way of thinking and
feeling to which you can and should react
as to a person, with all the emotions and
confusions and desires that being a per­
son encompasses. As Ricks puts it in Keats
and Embarrassment, ‘can we praise and value
works of imagination as we should praise
and value behaviour? I think that we can,
should and do.’ Readers and writers are
people, and judging, liking, relishing and
occasionally resisting what one reads is as
much a part of reading as judging, liking,
relishing and resisting people is of living.
The unifying theme of Along Heroic Lines
is heroism and its relation to the ‘heroic
line’, which is Ricks’s preferred term for the
iambic pentameter, since it implies ‘flex­
ibility, elusiveness and variety, as against
the schematic quasi­precision (and the class­
room air) of “iambic pentameter”’. The col­
lection includes pieces written for the most
part over the past two decades on topics
such as Dryden’s triplets, Shakespeare and
anagrams, T.S. Eliot, Henry James, Byron,
Norman Mailer, Ion Bugan, Samuel Beckett,
Geoffrey Hill, and what Ricks argues is the
non­distinction between poetry and prose.
‘Any claim to coherence has to be a mild
one,’ Ricks says of the volume, since the
two subjects, heroism and the heroic line,
are not self­evidently one. Making them
converge requires the critic to find heroic
lines embedded within prose works (he
finds a lot of them, some less heroic than
others) and even to make sonnets from
heroic lines embedded in the novels of
Mailer. Heroic conduct treads a line be­
tween grandiosity and pusillanimity and
has to stay this side of self­glorification,
while heroic metrical lines require con­
trasts of stress and variation of a pattern,
and run the risk – which is also potentially
a benefit – of dissolving into prose:
As always, with any idea or ideal, the strict
sense (with its danger of becoming narrow)
must be held in tension with the wide sense
(with its danger of becoming slack). The faith
in heroism must resist both the hardening
which would speak as if heroism can take one
form and one form only, and the relaxing
which would speak as if greatness, or even
any abstention from pusillanimity, constitut­
ed heroism.
9 london Review of booKs 7 octobeR 2021
The heroic line of verse is not simply
ti tum ti tum ti tum ti tum ti tum; the heroic line
of conduct is not a path pursued by a jug­
gernaut, or even necessarily the right path
to follow, but a faint and dangerous trail
which opens out in glimpses, with its moral
divagations, its ups and its downs, and its
traps at its ending. The title of the collect­
ion derives from The Portrait of a Lady – the
moment when Isabel Archer, determined
to marry the wrong person, ‘went on, hav­
ing caught a glimpse, as she thought, of the
heroic line and desiring to advance in that
direction’ – and Ricks enlists ‘desiring  to
advance in that direction’ as itself a heroic
line in the metrical sense.
There is throughout a notable sympathy
for moments of high passion, and for the
way heroes in extremis have to tread a
delicate line between self­dramatisation and
self­destruction. ‘T.S. Eliot and “Wrong’d
Othello”’ defends Eliot’s notorious claim
that Othello is ‘cheering himself up’ in his
final speech. It does so partly by attacking
those who have quoted Eliot’s phrase out
of its setting, where it forms part of a
much wider meditation on the ways in which
people run the daily risk of self­heroisation.
As Eliot puts it, ‘humility is the most dif­
ficult of virtues to achieve; nothing dies
harder than the desire to think well of one­
self.’ Ricks shows that Shakespeare uses
the words ‘cheer up’ at moments ‘when the
pressure of death is not only immanent
(universal, human and more than human)
but imminent’. He then follows the phrase’s
migration into Eliot’s Fragment of an Agon
(written the same year as the Othello essay),
in which Sweeney ‘knew a man once did a
girl in’, who is and is not Othello, and
would ‘give him a drink and cheer him up’.
The much quoted ‘cheering himself up’,
when seen as part of the Eliot lexicon, and
as itself a Shakespearean echo, has a lethal
edge which is blunted by those who quote
it out of context. The depth and delicacy of
Ricks’s critical tracery – he both traces al­
lusions and weaves them together – are
A memoir in
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enough to make one feel stupid for not hav­
ing seen it all before.
Other less well­known figures of heroic
passion are given their moment in the lime­
light. These include John Jay Chapman
(1862­1933), who in 1887 beat a rival with
a stick, then in repentance burned off his
own hand. In Chapman’s heroically dispas­
sionate words, he ‘plunged the left hand
deep in the blaze and held it down with my
right hand for some minutes’, after which
he applied his coat as a tourniquet. A quart­
er of a century later Chapman wrote with
passion about the burning alive of Zachar­
iah Walker, an African American, in Coates­
ville, Pennsylvania, ‘chained to an iron bed­
stead, burning alive’. He said: ‘I knew that
this great wickedness that happened in
Coatesville is not the wickedness of Coates­
ville and of today. It is the wickedness of all
America and of three hundred years – the
wickedness of the slave trade.’ Ricks, in
that baroque late manner of his, notes that
John Jay Chapman is ‘no longer a name to
conjure with, to adjure with, or to injure
with’, but argues that the fact Chapman
took off his coat and waistcoat when he
burned his own hand in 1887 played some
part in his heroic sympathy for a man tied
down and burned in a place called Coates­
ville in 1911. Heroically speaking out against
an injustice can have the trace of egoism
that sympathy often, and perhaps neces­
sarily, includes within itself.
So Along Heroic Lines is a great bag of
Ricksian riches. But it also displays the
main hazards of the Ricks style of critic­
ism. The first of these could be crudely de­
scribed as a woods and trees problem. His
concentration on verbal felicities might
imply that literary criticism is more akin to
a nosegay of noticings (hearing the word
‘coat’ in Coatesville) than an attempt to
convey a way of understanding or respond­
ing to an entire text, or period, or genre.
And that brings with it a related and great­
er hazard. Is his criticism in danger of be­
ing as much about the critic’s brilliance in
noticing as it is about literature?
The woods and trees problem is relative­
ly easy to hack down. An unstated premise
of Ricks’s method is that a well­chosen
local observation about a text can lead to a
broader understanding of it or its author’s
nature. His essay on ‘Geoffrey Hill’s Griev­
ous Heroes’ is a case in point. It picks out a
tiny detail – Hill’s penchant for the suffix
-ible/-able – of which there are many instances
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(art ‘reconciles the irreconcilable’, ‘Each
distant sphere of harmony forever/Poised,
unanswerable’). Noticing this ‘indispens­
able suffix’ leads Ricks to the heart of Hill,
who so often presented himself as resisting
the ‘accessible’, deploring the deplorable,
or excoriating the unconscionable, and in
so doing tended to present himself as a
heroic opponent of insupportable inanity.
Or as Ricks puts it:
The hero may be thought of as someone who
acknowledges, and who lives by, contrarieties
that are both underfoot and aloft. To one
side, a greater­than­usual refusal to grant the
world’s insistence that such­and­such is im­
possible (or indisputable or inescapable or
inevitable . . . ). To the other, a greater­than­
usual refusal to be broken – or broken in – by
the insistence of things, the fact that such­
and­such is, yes, impossible (or indisputable
. . . ). Heroism may be characterised by an ex­
ceptionally imaginative courage in the face of
these pincer jaws. The unremarkable suffix
-ble, is the outward and visible sign of an in­
ward and spiritual grind.
The essay praises Hill for putting himself
through that grind, but goes on to criticise
him for overusing the overusable -ble con­
structions: ‘A poet’s liberties are his or hers
to take, but a critic has other responsibil­
ities, for instance to differentiate the real
thing from what (from overuse) sometimes
became no more – or no other – than a
habit, a recourse, a tick, a tic, or even a
pathology, addiction to a diction.’
When Ricks makes that criticism of Hill
it’s hard not to notice a dusting of soot on
the pot that criticises the kettle. The phrase
‘addiction to a diction’ (can’t you hear the
audience chuckle?) is the kind of punning
recoil on his own words to which Ricks –
who often brings out the ‘tic’ in critic – is a
little too much himself addicted. And that
takes us to the problem of the relationship
between the critic’s brilliance and that of
the text. Does a critic who is as skilled at
making literature interesting as Ricks risk
becoming the hero of his own story?
This problem is thornier than the woods
and trees. The line between seeing things
(in the sense of observing things which are
there) and seeing things (in the sense of
imagining things which are not there) is a
finer one in literary criticism than it is in
life in general. But the boundary between
the two matters in several ways. Only a
really good critic can take you up to that
boundary and make you wonder which side
you’re on. Bad critics tell you what you al­
ready knew, or else stride obliviously over
the boundary between the noticed and the
imaginary into their own fantasy realms of
implausible readings. Good critics make
you see things. They do it by redescribing
texts, or paintings, or music, or posters, or
advertisements, or cultures, so that some­
thing which was not fully visible before be­
comes legible. That act of making visible
could be a matter of saying ‘look how the
brushwork here creates a glowing shadow,’
or even ‘look at this correlation between
poverty and the spread of disease,’ or it
could be ‘look at all those -ibles and think
about what they tell us.’ Criticism is an
especially contentious discipline because
the criteria for distinguishing the seen from
the invented are themselves contentious.
The plausibility of a particular piece of
criticism depends in part on the persuas­
iveness of the critic and the willingness of
an audience to see things a particular way,
with facts and data also playing their part,
but not a much more determining part than
the judgment of the audience. That means
an ultra­plausible critic like Ricks can create
a kind of supernova of brightness which
eclipses the texts he’s analysing and makes
it hard to see the boundary between what is
him and what is them.
This might seem an unfair thing to say,
since one of the many things that makes
Ricks so wonderful to hear and to read is
his overt warmth towards the writers he
reads: he is grateful to them for having giv­
en the gift of thought­filled words, apprec­
iative of their beauty and delighted with an
almost childlike intensity by their felicities.
He thinks literature thinks and feels things
for us. But in his earlier collection Essays in
Appreciation (the title of which is not just
retro­chic but a genuine expression of grat­
itude to writers for having written) he ex­
pressed this opinion in a strange but reveal­
ing way: ‘Very often my beliefs have been
best expressed by others; this is for me
not an admission but an acknowledgment,
since it makes thought about literature con­
tinuous with literature, where too I re­
peatedly find my beliefs best expressed by
others.’ There is gratitude and modesty in
that acknowledgment, but the repetition of
‘my beliefs’ might suggest that literature is
a source of external validation for attitudes
that Ricks already has, rather than a place
for discovering things he would not have
otherwise thought, or for experiencing what
he could not otherwise have conceived – as
10 london Review of booKs 7 octobeR 2021
though literature is not the best that has
been thought and said, but the best possible
expression of his own pre­existing opinions.
Along Heroic Lines sidles around this prob­
lem. It is preoccupied with people who risk
putting themselves forward too much –
the   self­dramatising Othello, or the even
more self­dramatising Byron, or the over­
reachingly ambitious Shaftesbury in Dryden,
whose fiery soul is so full of energy that
it ‘o’erinformed the tenement of clay’ and
spills beyond the heroic couplet into a
heroic triplet – and with heroes who are
heroic because they are also critics. The
narrator in Henry James’s ‘The Next Time’
is treated as a critical self­representation of
James the author, over­squeamishly sens­
itive and ‘wincing at words, and mincing
them . . . everything about the narrator that
is both becoming and unbecoming is an act
of judgment, sometimes self­criticism, by
the author.’ In another essay, ‘The Novelist
as Critic’, Ricks explores how novels can be
acts of criticism of earlier novels, and sug­
gests that ‘creation is itself the highest, wid­
est and deepest form of criticism.’ That’s
another formulation of which the overt
humility (criticism is by contrast not the
highest, widest or deepest thing) masks a
nearly equal and opposite potential for ag­
grandisement: creation is – no more than?
– criticism widened and deepened. Entire­
ly uncritical readers might indeed tend not
to be very good writers, though not all good
writers need to be critics as good as T.S.
Eliot or Henry James; but critics do need to
remember, I think, that creation requires
something other than and beyond crit­
icism. In saying this, I believe I have God
on my side, since ‘Let there be light’ is not
a critical statement. The implied prior act of
criticism (‘I’m getting a bit sick of all this
darkness’) requires the additional power of
creation in order to make something new.
Once that power has done its stuff God
becomes a critic again, and sees that it is
good. But it’s the bit in between – the mak­
ing – that matters most, even though it
might pain a critic to confess it.
C
Ritics see things but do not make
things. That doesn’t make them use­
less sops or fantasists, because it’s
sometimes the case that what only one per­
son can see at a particular moment turns
out to be what everyone comes to see as
self­evident a little later: John Jay Chap­
man, with his acute sensitivity to the burn­
ing pain of racially motivated violence,
fuelled by the earlier incineration of his
own hand, is a heroic case in point. So see­
ing things that other people don’t or can’t
or won’t is not just a symptom of error, but
can be a sign of far­sightedness.
But there are times when one might reas­
onably say to even a brilliant critic: ‘I just
don’t see it that way.’ An instance. I dis­
agree with what Ricks says in Along Heroic
Lines about anagrams in Shakespeare’s son­
nets. Ricks confesses that this essay, which
was originally a British Academy Shake­
speare lecture, doesn’t quite fit into the col­
lection’s general concern with ‘some vers­
ions of the heroic’, though he does note
that anagrams can reveal the villain within
a hero by turning, for instance, Tony Blair
MP into ‘I’m Tory Plan B’ or Harold Wilson
into ‘Lord Loinwash’. He gives my edition
of the Sonnets some genial stick for emphas­
ising their oral and performative aspects (I
was just trying to get people to read them),
rather than dwelling on how their letters
dance into different visible forms in ana­
grammatical abundance on the page. The
essay is wonderfully alive to the role of the
eye in reading, where the presence of a
word within a crowd or the anagrammat­
ical affinity between a silent person and
one who listens may make the eye pause
and the mind hear hidden resemblances.
With his infinite energy Ricks takes us
through so many instances of anagrams in
Byron and Housman and Lucretius and
elsewhere that even reading the essay you
can more or less hear the sheets of paper
being cast vigorously aside by the lecturer
as he charges through the canon, creating
by the impetus of his charge the strength of
his case. His main claim for regarding ana­
grams as a significant poetic effect is that
‘an anagram is no more and no less arbit­
rary than a rhyme,’ and ‘an anagram is a co­
incidence, true – but you should hear the
voice of the bard, and take what you have
gathered from coincidence.’
Coincidentally, when I first heard Bob
Dylan sing ‘take what you have gathered
from coincidence’ I heard it as ‘take what
you have gathered from cold winds that
dance.’ The mishearing makes a bit more
sense if you listen to the record rather than
read the words – Dylan gives ‘coincidence’
a real twang – but it’s clearly wrong. Co­
incidences can be illuminating but they can
also be things heard or seen which are not
there, or in which the ear or eye of the ob­
server unduly diverges from the object of
observation. Sometimes these divergences
can be more illuminating and delightful
because they are accidents. A schoolfriend
of mine when reading aloud the line ‘Bare
rn’wd quiers, where late the sweet birds
sang’ from an unmodernised text of Son­
net 73 accidentally pronounced it as ‘Bare
ruined queers’, whereupon our wonderful
gay English teacher applauded the misread­
ing because, he said, ‘bare ruined queers’
more or less summed up the whole sequence.
The fact that the letters of the word ‘critic’
are all present and in the correct order
within ‘Christopher Ricks’, for instance, is
a wonderful coincidence that might make
you think that he was born, or at least bap­
tised, to do what he does so well. However
it is an arbitrary and probably uninteresting
coincidence that a full anagram of ‘Chris­
topher Ricks’ is ‘chic sport shirker’, since
Ricks isn’t so far as I know famous for skiv­
ing games while sporting a Versace track­
suit. Distinguishing a coincidence from the
cold winds that dance is not an easy matter,
and if you’re drawn towards felicities it is
even more of a challenge since a coincid­
ence can be felicitous and illuminating at
the same time as being an illusion.
Yes, it is a coincidence that ‘love’ and
‘glove’ rhyme, and it is also a coincidence
that ‘love’ lurks within ‘vole’. It’s a more
usable coincidence that love also figures (in­
verted) within malevolence, and that male
violence is only an egotistical ‘I’ away from
the same word. But the difference between
an anagram and a rhyme is that in a rhym­
ing poem the rhymes are visibly marked
as mattering by their position (usually) at
the ends of lines, and that fact about the
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conventional shaping of poems licenses the
ear to give them weight elsewhere, and to give
weight also to all the other phonic games to
which poems sensitise their readers’ ears
and eyes. The dance of a letter through a
line can be part of the cohesion of a poem,
of what simultaneously holds it together
and pulls it apart, but unless some formal
property of the poem or cue within it says
to a reader ‘look out for letters that dance
around here’ they probably warrant less at­
tention than other kinds of lexical accident.
Historical knowledge can act as a prin­
ciple of thrift in the proliferation of mean­
ing, and, being a principle of thrift, it can
also be a bit mean. But the early mod­
ern  poetic instances of overtly anagram­
matical poems which Ricks cites tend to
be anagrams of names, and almost all
occur in encomiastic contexts: Ben Jonson
anagrammatically praised Charles James
Stuart (James VI and I) as one who ‘claimes
Arthur’s seat’, the letters I and J being inter­
changeable then. Encomiastic and onom­
astic anagrams often involve a bit of cheat­
ing, which helps to create the impression
that poets are bending over backwards
to please their princes. George Chapman
dedicating his Homer to ‘Henry Prince of
Wales’ anagrammatised his patron’s name
into ‘OVR SVNN, HEYR, PEACE, LIFE’ by
splitting the W of Wales into two constit­
utive Vs and then deeming them able to
Short Cuts
D
ominic Raab is the eighth lord
chancellor and secretary of state
for justice since the Conservative
Party entered government in 2010. The
average tenure has been nineteen months,
with a corresponding churn of junior min­
isters and special advisers. Kenneth Clarke,
the first in the post, lasted 28 months, just
pipped by Chris Grayling, whose disastrous
term was the longest at 32 months. Clarke,
inexplicably the favourite Tory of non­Tories,
volunteered to cut his department’s budget
by 20 per cent in the first wave of austerity in
2010. By 2017 it was down 40 per cent
from its 2011 level, and was still about 25
per cent lower in 2019­20. Clarke was also
responsible for the Legal Aid, Sentencing
and Punishment of Offenders Act, which
drastically reduced access to justice for
those who can’t afford representation. The
Ministry of Justice and the services it runs
(courts, legal aid, prisons and probation)
have never recovered. Grayling honed his
talent for spoiling everything he touched,
the privatisation of the probation service
being his worst policy. His successor, Mich­
ael Gove, at least recognised the depth of
the problems he inherited. In 2015 he said
that British justice was the gold standard
for those who could pay, but everyone else
‘has to put up with a creaking, outdated
system’. He gave emphatic support to pro­
posals by an independent commission for
improving the quality of publicly funded
advocacy, but Theresa May sacked him be­
fore he could put them into practice. Liz
Truss showed barely any interest in the
job. David Lidington came and went with­
out a trace in just seven months. David
Gauke, a relative fixture with a term of
eighteen months, had to renationalise the
serve as Us, which again was doable then.
This is done Very Visibly in the original
printed text in order to show the reader
something odd is going on, though Ricks,
when he quotes it, makes it look even more
like a cheat by replacing the original’s ‘V V
ALES’ with a simple ‘Wales’. Call me an
old grumpus if you like, but I don’t think
this encomiastic use of nameagrams in the
17th century is a reason to elevate potential
anagrams in all words from the period, no
matter what class or condition they might
be, to an analogous function or status as
rhyme. It might indeed suggest that the
anagram was a very particular type of poetic
performance, and its methods were sealed
(though not with absolute impermeability,
since different components of a culture don’t
have valves which cut one part off from an­
other) within specific social conventions.
The things Ricks notices going on with
reassembled letters in Shakespeare’s Son­
nets should probably be called intergrams
(words hiding inside other words) or para­
grams (which the OED defines as ‘a play on
words in which a letter or group of letters in
a word is altered so as to produce or suggest
another word’) rather than anagrams. But
even if he were to retreat from the word
anagram I would still think that many of his
instances of para or intergrams would de­
pend, paradoxically for such intrinsically
inaudible textual phenomena, on the vigor­
probation service, at a cost of about half a
billion pounds.
Raab’s immediate predecessor, Robert
Buckland, sacked in the reshuffle of 15
September, was one of the last cabinet min­
isters who voted Remain in the EU refer­
endum, so did well to survive as long as he
did. He was a proper criminal barrister,
practising for almost twenty years before
becoming an MP in 2010. He was aware
that austerity had left criminal justice in a
deplorable condition, and the pandemic
enabled him to screw more money out of
the Treasury to keep the courts going and
make good some of the damage. He also
quietly ditched Tory ambitions to reduce
the courts’ powers to carry out judicial re­
view of government decisions. The 2021
Judicial Review and Courts Bill does not
alter the fundamentals, though it makes
two significant changes. Judges will be able
to suspend orders that strike down admin­
istrative actions and decisions: at present
these orders are always retrospective, mean­
ing the decision is deemed never to have
had any effect. And decisions by tribunals
will not normally be judicially reviewable:
this is tacitly aimed at attempts to over­
turn asylum appeal decisions. The bill does
not exact revenge on the Supreme Court
for stopping Boris Johnson withdrawing
from the EU without consulting Parlia­
ment and then calling his decision to pro­
rogue it unlawful. Buckland is a Conservat­
ive who wants to conserve rather than a
zealot demanding rapid radical change.
The same cannot be said of Dominic Raab.
After the fall of Kabul Johnson expressed
his full confidence in Raab as foreign sec­
retary, but replaced him less than a month
later. If he failed at the Foreign Office, why
give him another cabinet position? And
what had Buckland done wrong to get the
sack, with no compensatory job? The ans­
12 london Review of booKs 7 octobeR 2021
ous animation of his delivery as a lecturer
to make one see them as being really there.
There can be a joy to these noticings. When
Ricks quotes the description of the poet’s
eye in Sonnet 114 ‘Creating euery bad a
perfect best/As fast as obiects to his beames
assemble’ and says of it ‘How conclusively
assemble assembles those beames,’ I’m will­
ing to see what he sees, partly because the
poem is describing how the eye sees what it
wants to see, and how it can make things
better by doing so, and there seems a kind
of justice in making the poem better by
doing to the poem what it says the eye does
anyway. But with Sonnet 55 I come over all
thrifty and pedantic:
When wastefull warre shall Statues ouer­turne,
And broiles roote out the worke of masonry,
Nor Mars his sword, nor warres quick fire
shall burne:
The liuing record of your memory.
‘Am I imagining things,’ Ricks asks, ‘or
was – more valuably – Shakespeare doing
so, with a turne upon “ouer­turne”, when
he had “the worke of masonry” (there in
the Conclusion of the line) succeeded at
once by two words that are the rubble of
masonry: “Nor Mars”?’ My churlish answer
to the first of these rhetorical questions
would be ‘yes’ and to the second ‘no’, largely
because I want to ask why (oh y) should the
Y in masonry not form part of its rubble,
and conversely why should the letter R fig­
wers may lie in the strident nationalism
and populist­ideological bent of the John­
son government and of Raab himself. In
2009, while working as chief of staff for
the then shadow justice secretary, Dom­
inic Grieve, Raab published a book called
The Assault on Liberty: What Went Wrong with
Rights. It contains reasonable criticisms of
New Labour’s policies on crime and ter­
rorism, which are seen as serious infringe­
ments of fundamental freedoms, but most
of the book is an attack on the European
Court of Human Rights and the Human
Rights Act. Raab makes some superficially
subtle points, about the inconsistency and
lack of legal certainty in the Strasbourg case
law, for example, but the polemic drowns
them out. He claims the European Convent­
ion on Human Rights was based on Eur­
opean (boo) socialist (boo) principles. In
fact, one of the convention’s lead authors
in 1949, David Maxwell Fyfe, who had been
a prosecutor at Nuremberg, became Con­
servative home secretary in 1951. That well­
known socialist body, the Catholic Church,
was represented on the drafting commit­
tee, together with a range of political and
civil society groups. The significance at­
tached to family life in Article 8 reflects
the Church’s contribution.
Raab believes the Strasbourg and UK
courts have stretched the remit of the con­
vention to give people legal rights to things
that should properly be policy decisions
made by elected governments, such as the
requirement for the police to warn people
if there is a credible threat to their lives. He
says this unfairly diverts police resources
because it protects gangsters from the con­
sequences of their own actions. He hasn’t
thought this complaint through: without
the warning and the protection, gangsters
would kill one another more often, a bad
thing and wasteful of still more resources.
ure twice among the ruins but only once in
the masonry? Is not the point more that
Mars, sword, wars are taking the phonic
energy of the line and screaming out that
they all belong together, and that the rhyme
on ‘masonry’ and ‘memory’ retrospective­
ly rebuilds the overturned masonry into a
living memory of the young man, all of
which energetically going on means that
readers and maybe even an author as re­
markable as Shakespeare don’t have much
circuitry or processing power left to watch
letters assembling and disassembling from
and into heaps? But Ricks’s circuitry, let
alone Shakespeare’s, is superior to my tangl­
ed threads of neurons; so if he sees things
we might want to try to see them too. If one
suspects, at times, that one’s eye is being
led on a dance, it is at least always a merry
one, and he is a fine enough critic to worry
(‘am I imagining things?’) whether he might
have crossed the invisible line between
noticing things that are there and seeing
things that aren’t just at the moment when,
to my eye, he has done so. The wider point
of the essay, that ‘the Sonnets depend upon
ceaseless realisations of the way in which
the eye’s reading is other than oral recept­
ion,’ is substantial and well made, and, like
everything Ricks says, should provoke ser­
ious thought – even if the eye, as Shake­
speare well knew, can sometimes have a
whale of a time with a cloud. c
Raab sees New Labour’s policies on crime
and the Human Rights Act, passed by Lab­
our in 1998, as inimical to his idea of liberal
democracy, which involves minimal inter­
ference by the state in citizens’ lives. When
involvement is inevitable, it should come
through democratic rather than judicial
processes. But the principles of human
rights provide for a balance to be struck
between the actions of the state and the
rights and freedoms of individuals. Who
better to adjudicate than impartial judges?
With a populist’s instinct for hyperbole,
Raab insists there has been a ‘contagion’ of
claims in the UK under the Human Rights
Act. In 2009, he did not contemplate with­
drawal from the European convention, al­
though he argued that British courts should
not consider Strasbourg’s decisions as bind­
ing (they do not) and called for a retreat to
what he regards as core human rights, such
as not to be killed, tortured or locked up
without due process. He objects to the Stras­
bourg court’s use of the convention as a
‘living instrument’, which adapts the 1950
text to the needs of the present. A bright
spot is his firm belief in the right to trial by
jury. He proposed a bill entrenching these
limited rights – ‘British rights’ – that Parl­
iament would not be able to amend with­
out a super­majority.
Nothing Raab has said since 2009 sug­
gests he has changed his mind. Peter Gross,
a former Court of Appeal judge, is due to
deliver a report on reforming the act later
this year. It may give Raab the ammunition
he needs. If the government wants to be
seen to be ‘taking control of our laws’ by
weakening, even severing, links with the
European convention and its court, Raab
is the man for the job.
Francis FitzGibbon
K Left with a Can Opener
ing alexandeR of Yugoslavia was
assassinated in Marseille on 9 Oct­
ober 1934, alongside Louis Barthou,
the French foreign minister. When the news
reached Dubrovnik, the bells rang ‘all morn­
ing long’ according to a ten­year­old Amer­
ican girl staying in the city. ‘Everybody
spoke in an undertone except the roosters
and my brother.’ The children’s mother hung
an academic gown in the window as a
makeshift flag of mourning. Their father,
Milman Parry, a young classicist at Har­
vard, was in Goražde, 120 miles from Dub­
rovnik. He had come to Yugoslavia to re­
cord local folk singers as evidence to sup­
port his theory that ‘the Iliad and the Odys-
sey are composed in a traditional style, and
are composed orally.’ There were rumours
that the king’s assassin was Italian, and
Parry’s car had Italian plates. He and his
assistants – Albert Lord, who had recently
graduated from Harvard, and Nikola Vujn­
ović, a young Bosnian stonemason and
singer – set off for Dubrovnik as fast as
they could. Police officers escorted them
through Sarajevo. They kept their heads
down for a few weeks, but resumed work in
November, even though singing was ban­
ned during the mourning period for the
king. By the time Parry sailed for the US
the following autumn, he had hundreds of
hours of recordings on more than 3500
aluminium discs, as well as eight hundred
notebooks of transcribed songs – raw mat­
erials for a lifetime of research. But three
months after returning to America he was
dead from a gunshot wound in a Los Angeles
hotel room.
Milman Parry was born in Oakland, Cal­
ifornia, on 23 June 1902. His father was
variously a prosthetics fitter, a nurse and a
pharmacist who devised his own hair tonic
and dandruff remedy. When a masked gun­
man tried to hold up the drugstore where
he worked he threw the cash register at
the robber, chased him into the street and
had him arrested. Milman’s mother died
of stomach cancer in 1918, the year before
he enrolled at the University of California,
Berkeley, four miles away from the Parrys’
house.
He began taking Ancient Greek classes
in his first year – an hour a day, every day –
and soon switched his major from pre­law
to Greek. In 1922 he met Marian Than­
houser in the classics library. She was three
years older than him but had started at
Berkeley late because of illness. She grew
up in Milwaukee, where her maternal grand­
father owned a department store (Robert
Kanigel describes him as ‘a force in the
local Jewish community and a major phil­
anthropist’). Her mother thought the Cali­
fornian climate would help Marian recover
from Spanish flu – and also wanted to enrol
at the university herself. Marian’s mother
got her degree; Marian did not. A year after
meeting Parry, she was pregnant. They
got married in San Francisco on 11 May
1923 and hitchhiked to Carmel for their
honeymoon.
Back at Berkeley in the autumn, Parry
began his MA thesis on the Iliad and the
Odyssey. ‘A Comparative Study of Diction
as One of the Elements of Style in Early
Greek Epic Poetry’ was submitted in Dec­
ember but not published until 1971, when
Parry’s son, Adam, brought out his collect­
Thomas Jones
Hearing Homer’s Song: The Brief Life and Big Idea of Milman Parry
by Robert Kanigel.
Knopf, 320 pp., £28.95, April, 978 0 525 52094 8
ed papers as The Making of Homeric Verse.
Sterling Dow – the Harvard classicist who
among other things deduced that Linear B
was an early form of Greek, and whose
notebooks are an important source for
Kanigel’s new biography of Parry – read the
thesis in the library at Berkeley in 1964. He
was amazed to find that ‘the great discov­
ery is there – firm, detailed, bold.’
Throughout the long 19th century (the
origins of the argument go back much
further) the so­called Homeric Question –
who wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey, and
when – was fought over by two competing
schools of thought, analysts and unitarians.
According to the analysts, the Homeric
poems were patchworks of disparate scraps
of verse composed by diverse poets over
several centuries and compiled by later
editors; the unitarians clung to the notion
that (as the joke goes) even if Homer didn’t
compose the Iliad and the Odyssey, another
poet of the same name did. The analysts
outnumbered the unitarians, though that
may have been in part because the analyt­
ical view provided more fertile ground for
study.
Parry didn’t answer the Homeric Quest­
ion so much as dispense with it:
Just as the story of the Fall of Troy . . . and the
other Greek epic legends were not themselves
the original fictions of certain authors, but
creations of a whole people passed through
one generation to another and gladly given
to anyone who wished to tell them, so the
style in which they were to be told was not a
matter of individual creation, but a popular
tradition, evolved by centuries of poets and
audiences.
The evidence he adduced was entirely in­
ternal, drawn not from archaeology, hist­
ory or papyrology, but from the words and
the verse form of the poems themselves:
There is no other poetry in the world as
smooth and rapid as this epic poetry, in
which the ideas of the particular passage
seem fitted so perfectly, and yet so compact­
ly, to the hexameter framework. And this
smoothness is due, of course, to the use of a
traditional diction which for centuries had
experimented for words and phrases which
would most perfectly fit the framework of
the verse, and it is especially due to the use
of ornamental words which eliminated even
more completely any discrepancies in the
pattern.
The illiterate performers who recited or
sang epic poems in Ancient Greece did not
learn them by rote. (Boris Johnson’s botch­
ed renditions of the Iliad are a double fail­
ure: failing to learn it by rote and trying to
learn it in the first place.) Rather, a poet
would improvise his song using formulaic
words and phrases. Every performance was
in some sense a new composition, but also
a seamless continuation of the tradition.
Parry focused, by way of example, on
the ‘ornamental adjectives’ or epithets used
13 london Review of booKs 7 octobeR 2021
to describe Athena. She is variously ‘Pallas
Athena’, ‘grey­eyed Athena’, ‘the goddess
grey­eyed Athena’ and so on according
to the demands of grammar and metre:
as Parry points out, ‘Homer had to hand
a particular word for each of ten metrical
exigencies that might arise.’ These didn’t
always conform to logic. Ships are describ­
ed as ‘hollow’, ‘swift’, ‘black’, ‘well­decked’,
‘seafaring’, ‘trim’, ‘many­tholed’, ‘curved’,
‘huge’, ‘famed’, ‘well­built’, ‘many­benched’,
‘vermilion­cheeked’, ‘prowed’ or ‘straight­
horned’, according to where they appear
in the line of verse rather than where, or
if, they appear on the ‘wine dark’, ‘grey’
or ‘loud­roaring’ sea: the Greeks’ ‘swift’ and
‘seafaring’ ships are beached throughout
the Iliad. ‘Early rose­fingered dawn’ is ment­
ioned so often in Homer for much the
same reason a blues singer might tell you
he ‘woke up this morning’: in part to buy
time while composing the next line. (As
it happens, Parry corresponded with John
and Alan Lomax, who travelled around the
American South recording folk musicians.)
‘The singer of tales,’ Parry later wrote, ‘has
no pen and ink to let him slowly work out a
novel way of recounting novel actions, but
must make up his tale without pausing, in
the speed of his singing.’ Formulae made
this possible. This fundamental aspect of
Homer’s verse, Parry insisted, doesn’t dim­
inish the poetry. Far from it: ‘The first
impression which this use of ornamental
words makes on the reader is one of utter
loveliness.’
In the introduction to his father’s col­
lected papers, Adam Parry acknowledges
that ‘each of the specific tenets that make
up Parry’s view of Homer had been held
by some former scholar . . . Parry’s ach­
ievement was to see the connection be­
tween these disparate contentions and ob­
servations.’ In 1962 Walter Ong argued that
‘Parry’s special type of interest in Homer
was made possible by the fact that he lived
when the typographical era was breaking
up.’ Adam Parry was unconvinced by this,
but the arrival of ‘an age of secondary oral­
ity’, as Ong put it, ‘the orality of telephones,
radio and television, which depends on
writing and print for its existence’, must
have made it easier to imagine, however
imperfectly, the ‘primary oral cultures’ that
existed (and in places still exist) before the
invention of writing. The newsreels that re­
ported the assassination of King Alexander
are worlds away from the Iliad and the Odys-
sey, and would have been scripted, but they
still used formulaic phrases – ‘a hail of
lead’, ‘this foul deed’ – to tell, out loud, dif­
ferent versions of the same story, of a voy­
age across the Mediterranean and the viol­
ent death of a king.
It probably isn’t a coincidence, either,
that Parry’s insight came the year after The
Waste Land, Jacob’s Room and Ulysses were
published. ‘Epic poetry differs diametric­
ally from modern poetry,’ he argued in his
MA thesis, ‘which lays so great a value on
individuality and uniqueness of style.’ But
poets we now describe as not ‘modern’ but
‘modernist’ were at the same time reacting
against Romantic notions of ‘individual­
ity’. ‘The poet must develop or procure the
consciousness of the past,’ T.S. Eliot wrote
in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, pub­
lished in the Egoist in 1919. ‘The progress of
an artist is a continual self­sacrifice, a con­
tinual extinction of personality.’ There’s no
direct evidence that Parry read the essay –
even if he was later said by one of his stud­
ents to have relished Eliot’s poetry – but
four years later he was arguing that formul­
aic diction ‘has been to a great extent the
means of submerging the poet’s conscious­
ness in that of his race’.
His use of the term ‘race’ is striking –
and discomfiting – but Parry seems to have
been largely oblivious to the nationalist cur­
rents of the 1930s, or the ways in which
the idea of a poetic tradition could be pol­
itically exploited. In Ismail Kadare’s novel
The File on H, loosely based on Parry and
Lord’s adventures in Yugoslavia and pub­
lished in Albanian in 1981, the two foreign­
ers are mistaken for spies, and a Serbian
monk worries what their researches might
mean for the future status of Kosovo. The
Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić, while
on the run from the International Criminal
Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, is said
to have frequented a nationalist bar in Bel-
grade where he told the epic singers they
were ‘the greatest treasure of the Serbian
people’ and even performed once himself.
But that isn’t the kind of ‘submerging’
Parry had in mind.
In January 1924, a month after he sub-
mitted his MA thesis, the Parrys’ first child
was born. She was named Marian, after her
mother, but known as ‘Wux’. Milman had
a badly paid teaching job at Berkeley but
couldn’t get funding for a PhD; Marian sus-
pected it was because high-ups in the clas-
sics department disapproved of their hav-
ing lived together before they were mar-
ried. She had inherited some money when
her father died, which wasn’t enough to
cover the costs of studying in the US, but
might be sufficient if they went to Europe.
Once Milman had his doctorate from a
European university and a teaching post
somewhere back home, Marian would be
able to complete her BA. At least, that was
the plan.
They arrived in Paris in the autumn of
1924, after spending the summer – and too
much of Marian’s money – in Dieppe. For
most of the next few years Marian was stuck
at home with the children (Adam, christ-
ened Milman, was born in February 1928)
while Milman was in the Fifth Arrondisse-
ment doing his research, or learning French,
or enjoying everything else that Paris in
the 1920s had to offer. In the summer of
1925 he went to Greece by himself; Marian’s
mother and grandmother were visiting, and
they took her and the baby to Switzer-
land. He wrote to his father that he’d visit-
ed Athens, ‘thence by bicycle to Megara’,
Corinth, Mycenae, Argos, ‘a bunch of other
little places in between whose names are
found in Homer’, as well as Sparta (‘where
the bed was full of lice which drove me to
sleeping on the walls of the ruins of Mistra’),
Lefkas and Ithaca. Returning to Paris in
the autumn, he enrolled at the Sorbonne
in November 1925 and completed his PhD
thesis (in French) three years later.
‘L’Épithète traditionelle dans Homère’
was an elaboration and consolidation of his
MA thesis, underpinning the ‘bold’ idea with
19th-century German scholarship and ex-
haustive analysis, complete with extensive
tables, of the ornamental epithets in the Iliad
and the Odyssey. Parry may have taken the
argument too far: as Bernard Knox put it in
1990, ‘it is the fate of most new and valu-
able insights to be enthusiastically develop-
ed beyond the limits of certainty, or even
of probability,’ and ‘extravagant claims for
the predominance of formula in Homeric
poetry have now been generally discounted
. . . there is nevertheless general agreement
that Parry was right in one thing: Homer’s
unique style does show clearly that he was
heir to a long tradition of oral poetry.’
In September 1928 Parry took up a
teaching job in Des Moines, Iowa. Marian
was quite happy to be back in the Midwest,
though not so happy when Milman went
to New York over Christmas to give a paper
to the American Philological Association.
‘I was left then in the snow and ice with a
can opener,’ she later remembered, ‘so I
14 london review of books 7 october 2021
wouldn’t starve. You know, if I couldn’t get
out.’ Milman sent her a telegram from New
York to say he’d accepted a job offer from
Harvard. The months in Iowa were ‘about
the low point of our marriage’ but things
didn’t improve much once they got to Cam-
bridge. The pervasive snobbery and anti-
semitism made Harvard life unpleasant for
Marian, and Milman was no help. He threw
himself into his work.
W
here his research in Paris had
focused on the traditional nature
of Homeric verse, at Harvard
Parry turned his attention to its oral char-
acter. But he found himself, as he later put
it, ‘in the position of speaking about the
nature of oral style almost purely on the
basis of a logical reasoning from the char-
acteristics of Homeric style’. To make it
more than a circular argument, he needed
to study a living oral tradition. At the Sor-
bonne he had encountered Matija Murko of
Prague University, who was in Paris to de-
liver the lectures that would later be collect-
ed as La Poésie populaire épique en Yougoslavie
au début du vingtième siècle. It was through
Murko’s writings that Parry came to settle
on ‘the heroic poems of the South Slavs’ as
a subject. ‘I am just now studying Serbian,’
he wrote to his sister in April 1931, ‘so that
I can read Serbian epic poetry: then in two
years or so I shall apply for a Guggenheim
fellowship and spend a year in Jugoslavia
to find the explanation of the Iliad and
the Odyssey.’ In March 1933 he directed the
Harvard Classical Club’s production of Soph-
ocles’ Philoctetes. Elliott Carter wrote the
incidental music. The title role was taken
by Robert Fitzgerald, who would go on to
translate both Homer and Sophocles into
English. (He remembered Parry sitting at
the back of the hall, ‘laughing at the
abominable acting’.) Three months later,
the Parrys sailed for Yugoslavia, arriving in
early July.
Dubrovnik was a ‘lovely vacation place
when not too hot’, Marian wrote in a letter
home. Milman had language lessons every
morning. His teacher was Ilija Kutuzov, a
Russian émigré who, like Parry, had a PhD
from the Sorbonne. Presumably they com-
municated largely in French: Parry’s grasp
of Serbo-Croat was by all accounts fairly
shaky. One evening Kutuzov took Parry to a
kafana, or bar, to listen to a guslar perform.
The gusle, like the Albanian lahuta, is a
single-stringed instrument held between
the knees and played with a bow. The body
is made of wood with a skin membrane
(like a drum), and the string from sixty en-
twined horsehairs. The neck often finishes
in a scroll carved in the form of a horse’s
head. The bow is horsehair too. The instru-
ment has a narrow range, tuned to the same
pitch as the guslar’s voice.
The performer Parry heard that night
was the stonemason Nikola Vujnović. Re-
turning to the bar, Parry got to know Vujn-
ović, buying him drinks, asking who had
taught him (his uncle Vlaho, who lived next
door and used to sing while making his
shoes). On one especially rowdy Saturday,
Vujnović gave up part way through the tale
of Prince Marko’s bloody triumph over the
bandit Musa, and Parry asked him to write
the rest of it down. The next time Vujnović
sang ‘Marko and Musa’, Parry asked Kutuz-
ov to make a note of any variations from the
typed-up earlier version. But there were so
many ‘he could scribble only a small part of
them,’ according to Parry, and soon gave
up. Even Vujnović was surprised at how
different the two renditions were. But for
Parry it was the first piece of living con-
firmation that he was right about the way
the Homeric epics had been composed.
In early August, halfway through his
trip, Parry went to Belgrade to buy sound-
recording equipment and returned with a
wax-cylinder Parlograph dictating mach-
ine. When he played the cylinders back,
however, he found that the singers’ voices
couldn’t be distinguished over the sound of
their instruments. Instead, as Parry and his
assistants travelled around the villages of
Bosnia and Herzegovina, the work of re-
cording the songs fell to Kutuzov, who took
dictation from the guslari with pencil and
paper. (At times Parry bears a more than
passing resemblance to Michael Redgrave’s
character at the beginning of The Lady
Vanishes, ‘putting on record for the benefit
of mankind one of the last folk dances of
Central Europe’.) Parry returned to Harvard
in September with less material than he
would have liked, but a better sense of what
he would need on a second expedition: more
time, more equipment, more people and
more money.
The money came from the American
Council of Learned Societies: $11,000 (the
equivalent of $200,000 today, Kanigel reck-
ons) to pay for a fifteen-month expedition.
The people included Vujnović, Lord and
some local typists whose names are not re-
corded. The equipment to be shipped from
the US included Parry’s car, a Cyrillic type-
writer and a bespoke recording apparatus
manufactured by Sound Specialties Inc of
Waterbury, Connecticut. It had two turn-
tables and a toggle for switching instant-
aneously between them. Even though each
78 rpm aluminium disc would last only a
few minutes, the twin decks meant that
Parry and his team could record continu-
ously without losing any lines or having to
ask the guslar to stop while they changed
discs.
This would seem to confirm Ong’s view
that Parry had his insight in part because he
was living through a period of technolog-
ical transition. The rise of sound recording
in the early 20th century is analogous to
the shift from orality to literacy around the
time that the Iliad and the Odyssey were first
written down (the development of the print-
ing press in 15th-century Europe is another
such moment). But it also points to a short-
coming in the Parry-Lord hypothesis. As
Emily Wilson put it in 2018, ‘there is still a
very wide range of opinion about how, ex-
actly, the words of many generations of il-
literate and semi-literate bards turned into
the written texts of Homer that we have.’
Kutuzov didn’t accompany Parry on his
second tour of Yugoslavia, but with the
help of Lord and Vujnović, his 1932 Ford
and his Sound Specialties recording equip-
ment, he was able to gather the huge quant-
ity of material now in the Milman Parry
Collection of Oral Literature at Harvard.
There were occasional setbacks – the death
of King Alexander, heavy snows in Jan-
uary 1935 – that left him kicking his heels
in Dubrovnik, making up stories for his
children in which Mickey Mouse thwarted
Winnie the Pooh’s plans for world domin-
ation (he got that one wrong). But for the
rest of the time, Parry, Lord and Vujnović
toured the villages of Bosnia and Herzegov-
ina, interviewing and recording the guslari
they met there. Some sang tales from Serb-
ian legend; others told of the assassination
of Franz Ferdinand. Without Vujnović it
would have been impossible: ‘While Parry
may be the boss,’ Slavica Ranković wrote in
2012, ‘it is Nikola who holds the authority
and the singer’s confidence.’
In June 1935 they met Avdo Međedović,
‘our Yugoslav Homer’, a farmer in his sixties
living near Bijelo Polje, a town in north-
eastern Montenegro. He told Vujnović his
life story – his nine years in the army
brought to an end by a bullet to his left arm;
his marriage at the age of 29 to a woman
he’d never met; his career as a butcher
ruined by his son’s gambling debts; his son
disappearing to join the army – and he play-
ed the gusle and sang nine songs over the
course of six weeks. ‘He sat cross-legged on
the bench,’ Lord wrote a few years later,
‘sawing the gusle, swaying in rhythm with
the music. He sang very fast, sometimes
deserting the melody, and while the bow
went lightly back and forth over the string,
he recited the verses at top speed. A crowd
gathered.’ One of Međedović’s epics was as
long as the Odyssey. Another was his vers-
ion of a song he’d heard only once, per-
formed by a guslar called Mumin Vlahovl-
jak, while Parry’s team was recording it in
Bijelo Polje. Lord again:
Avdo was asked his opinion of it and whether
he could now sing it himself. He replied that
it was a good song and that Mumin had sung
it well, but that he thought that he might sing
it better. The song was a long one of several
thousand lines. Avdo began and as he sang,
the song lengthened, the ornamentation and
richness accumulated, and the human touches
of character, touches that distinguished Avdo
from other singers, imparted a depth of feel-
ing that had been missing in Mumin’s version.
But Međedović’s genius shouldn’t be mis-
taken as evidence to support the unitarian
view of Homer. ‘Avdo had other models
in addition to Mumin’s song,’ Lord wrote.
‘He was not re-creating out of whole cloth.
His many years of experience in building
themes, a technique inherited from the gen-
eration of singers before him, made pos-
sible what seemed on the surface to be an
incredible feat.’ In other words, Avdo, like
Homer, ‘was the tradition’.
W
hile the Parrys were in Yugo-
slavia, Marian’s mother moved
to Los Angeles, where she began
living far beyond her means, possibly at the
mercy of an unscrupulous fortune-hunter.
Marian went out to California in Novem-
ber 1935, and Milman followed a few days
later. (His precise movements in these final
weeks are unclear.) They went from LA to
San Francisco at the end of the month, then
flew back to LA on their way to San Diego
to visit Milman’s sister. At 2.30 p.m. on 3
December 1935, the LAPD were called to
the Palms Hotel on South Alvarado Street.
Milman was dead in his room with a bullet
in his heart. The police interviewed Marian
and decided it was an accident: there had
been a loaded gun in Milman’s suitcase
which went off by mistake as he was look-
ing for a clean shirt. He was cremated with-
out an autopsy on 5 December. Different
theories have been propounded about the
death. Kanigel thinks it (slightly) more likely “Provocative and engaging.”
that Marian killed him than that Milman
took his own life, but sees the official ver- —New Republic
dict of accidental death as most probable.
ACME Newspictures called it a ‘tragic ex-
ample of professorial absentmindedness’.
A memorial service was held at Harvard “In this final book, [Rorty’s] unique
on 19 December. Marian left Cambridge
soon afterwards and went back to Berkeley. literary style, singular intellectual zest,
She and the children lived within walking
distance of the university campus and in and demythologizing defiance of official
May 1936 she at last completed her BA. philosophy are on full display.”
She went on to work as a French teacher.
In 1981 she gave an interview over three
days to Pamela Newhouse, a graduate stud- —Cornel West
ent at Cornell who was thinking of writ-
ing  a biography of Parry. She never did –
instead, as Pamela Mensch, she has trans-
lated Herodotus, Plutarch and others –
but the interview proved ‘invaluable’ to
Kanigel.
Parry’s work was continued by Lord,
who returned to Yugoslavia after the Sec-
ond World War, managing to track down
Avdo Međedović and record him again. In
1960, he published The Singer of Tales, which
brought Parry’s ideas to a wider audience.
Its title was taken from a book Parry had
just begun when he died. Two years later, in
the prologue to The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Mak-
ing of Typographic Man, Marshall McLuhan
described his book as ‘complementary’ to
Lord’s. The second edition of The Singer of
Tales, published in 2000, came with a CD-
Rom of some of the original audio record-
ings and photographs; the third edition, in
2018, dispensed with the obsolete CD but
provided a (now broken) URL for the on-
line Milton Parry Collection, where all the
materials have been digitised and are freely
available (at a different but easy to find web
address) to anyone who’s interested.
At the same time that Lord was working
on The Singer of Tales, Adam Parry was put-
ting together his edition of his father’s col-
lected papers. The two men fell out in the
late 1960s, in an unnecessary but perhaps
inevitable manifestation of a form of sib-
ling rivalry. In an article entitled ‘Homer
as Oral Poet’, published in Harvard Studies
in Classical Philology in 1967, Lord attacked
No book offers a more accessible
at length ‘a return to the subjective inter-
pretation and appreciation of the Homeric
account of Rorty’s utopia of
poems’. He singled out an article on one
of Penelope’s dreams in the Odyssey that
pragmatism, just as no philosopher
had appeared in Yale Classical Studies the pre-
has more eloquently challenged the
vious year, written by Anne Amory, Adam
Parry’s wife. Amory responded in the Clas-
sical Quarterly in May 1971 with her essay
hidebound traditions arrayed against
‘Homer as Artist’: ‘If all interpretation is to the goals of social justice.
be damned as “subjective” in Lord’s pejor-
ative sense, then we might as well admit
that the meaning and poetry of the Homeric
epics are unimportant and agree that what
really matters is the counting of formulas.’
The Making of Homeric Verse appeared around
the same time. In the introduction, Adam
Parry wrote that his father ‘sought and at-
tained, in his own life, something of the
connection between art and living which
made heroic song itself so valuable to Belknap Press | hup.harvard.edu
him’. On 4 June 1971 Adam Parry and Anne
Amory were killed in a motorcycle accident
in France. 
15 london review of books 7 october 2021
 


 
 



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3414 smaller cover.indd 3 01/07/2021 10:29

16 london Review of booKs 7 octobeR 2021
M Kid Gloves
aRia stepanova’s story begins
with the death of her aunt. To­
wards the end of her life, Galya
retreated from the world, unplugging her
phone and devoting her time to classify­
ing, sorting and sometimes discarding the
possessions that crowded the ‘cave of her
tiny apartment’. Shortly after her death,
Stepanova sits among her aunt’s piled­up
photographs and postcards, thermal vests
and leggings, books and newspapers, ivory
brooches and embroidered shirts, consider­
ing this odd accumulation of objects which
only really had meaning ‘within the frame
of a continuing life’.
In a wooden box, she finds a stash of
Galya’s diaries and notebooks. Stepanova
hadn’t been close to her aunt – her parents
‘had what you might call troubled deal­
ings’  with Galya – and she begins to read
‘in search of stories, explanations’. But the
diaries offer no personal insights. Instead
Stepanova finds a chronicle of the domest­
ic routines of an old woman in early 21st­
century Moscow. ‘It’s 1.45 p.m. Just put the
towels, nightgown etc except dark colours
in to soak. Will do the bedlinen later’; ‘Left
after nine, took my time to get ready. Bus
no. 3 didn’t come till 9.45. We waited an
age. Should have taken the 171’; ‘Took my
hypertension pills last night just after 1.45
after measuring B.P.’ A single entry, from
the summer of 2005, offers a rare moment
of reflection:
Sima rang this morning. I got down the photo
album afterwards. Shook all the photos out
and spent a long while looking at them. I
didn’t want to eat, and looking at the photos
gave me such a feeling of melancholy, tears,
real sadness for the times passed, and for
those who aren’t with us anymore. This point­
less life of mine, a life lived for nothing, the
emptiness in my soul . . . I wanted to lose
myself, forget it all.
Stepanova always knew she would write
a book about her family: ‘As if my life’s work
was to catalogue them all. As if that is what
I grew up to do.’ She made her first attempt
in a school exercise book at the age of ten;
her second six years later, on scraps of
paper which she squirrelled away in desk
drawers and later lost. Much has been writ­
ten about the rise of post­Soviet nostalgia
after the dislocations of the 1990s, but
Stepanova’s childhood in the 1970s and
1980s was also steeped in the past. It was a
special treat to spend an evening with her
mother looking though their ‘domestic arch­
ive’: photographs and postcards, pebbles,
a rattle, drawing instruments. Their apart­
ment and dacha were crowded with pos­
sessions handed down through the gener­
ations – pieces of material, kid gloves, tea­
cups, a mahjong set, ink stands, ancient
nightshirts, an old leather wallet contain­
ing the photograph of a naked woman – all
preserved, regardless of whether they still
served any practical function.
These small acts of preservation seem to
run counter to the main current of Soviet
culture, with its scorn for bourgeois mat­
erialism and its relentless drive towards the
future. Stepanova describes the Moscow
rubbish tips of the 1960s and 1970s over­
flowing with discarded antique furniture:
‘Young people were voluntarily casting out
the old world with its carved legs and reli­
able oaken gravitas.’ Despite her family’s
Miriam Dobson
In Memory of Memory
by Maria Stepanova, translated by Sasha Dugdale.
Fitzcarraldo, 500 pp., £14.99, February, 978 1 913097 53 0
fetishism of letters, photographs and mag­
azine clippings, they had no qualms about
leaving behind a bulky four metre­high
sideboard with coloured glass when they
left their communal apartment and moved
to a new flat with low ceilings. Stepanova
tries to explain this inconsistency or double­
mindedness, the ‘longing for a disappeared
world’ and the contradictory desire to show
belief in a ‘new existence’:
In Russia, where violence circulated cease­
lessly, society passing from one space of trag­
edy to the next as if it were a suite of rooms, a
suite of traumas, from war to revolution, to
famine and mass persecution, and on to new
wars, new persecutions – the territory for this
hybrid memory formed earlier than in other
countries: spiralling, multiplying versions of
what has happened to us over the last hund­
red years, dimpled with inconsistencies, like
a sheet of opaque paper blocking out the light
of the present.
At times, the historian in me wants to
tie this all down. When did this territory
form in Russia – and elsewhere? In the
Soviet Union, how widespread were the
approaches to memory Stepanova records?
Even as they navigated the many ruptures
and dangers of Soviet life, crafting polit­
ically safe versions of their family history
– a merchant becomes a tradesperson,
a solicitor a clerk – Stepanova’s relatives
worked hard to preserve texts, objects and
stories and pass them on to future gen­
erations. They disrupt the cliché that in
dangerous times the past is best forgotten.
Stepanova’s family history is a dazzling
reflection on forms of remembering. In
the Russian original, the book is subtitled
‘a novel’, but In Memory of Memory doesn’t
conform to any established genre. Photo­
graphs from family albums are described,
but not reproduced, inviting the reader to
imagine how the characters might have
posed in front of the camera. Stepanova’s
first­person narrative is interrupted by
transcripts of surviving letters presented in
a series of interludes, each of which is head­
ed ‘Not­a­Chapter’. Alongside the stories
of her relatives, past and present, she con­
siders those writers, artists and thinkers
who have been preoccupied with the pract­
ice of memory – many of them Russian or
Jewish, or both.
One of them is Osip Mandelstam, who
began his career longing to shed the ‘exotic­
ness’ ascribed to his Jewishness and be­
come part of ‘world culture’. By the 1920s,
though, he was writing his ‘strange mem­
oirs’, part of a wave of retrospection that
took hold in parts of early 20th­century
Europe even as a new civilisation was being
constructed. Stepanova also considers the
narrator of W.G. Sebald’s documentary fict­
ion – who, after the catastrophe of the
Holocaust, inventories objects, people and
places as if to save them from inevitable
annihilation. There’s also a compelling com­
17 london Review of booKs 7 octobeR 2021
mentary on Charlotte Salomon’s Life? Or
Theatre?, a series of 769 paintings which
‘work like the film of a family’s history, run
from beginning to end as if everyone was
dead and gone, including her’.
In contrast to these public lives, Stepan­
ova’s family – though they fascinated her as
a child – seem disappointingly ordinary: ‘I
felt bound to notice that my ancestors had
made hardly any attempt to make our fam­
ily history interesting.’ She experienced a
kind of shame on 9 May each year when
other grandparents came into her school
with their war medals and bouquets of
flowers. Almost no one in Stepanova’s fam­
ily was a Communist Party member, but
there were also no outspoken dissidents.
Instead of great artists or writers, her relat­
ives were doctors, engineers, accountants,
librarians and architects. To Stepanova, this
invisibility, the hiddenness of her ancest­
ors’ lives, seems unjust. She sees herself
‘peering out from intimate family convers­
ations as if from under a fur cap, and ad­
dressing the railway station concourse of
collective experience’.
If the book has a heroine, it is Stepan­
ova’s great­grandmother. Sarra Ginzburg
was born in 1885 in Pochinky, a small pro­
vincial town south of Nizhny Novgorod,
one of fourteen (or maybe sixteen) child­
ren. Sarra’s father, Abram Ginzburg, was
a wealthy merchant, though by the time
Sarra had finished her education there was
little money left. She studied first in a gym­
nasium in Nizhny Novgorod, where she
joined a community of young revolution­
aries. One of them was another Sarra, the
sister of the future Bolshevik leader Yakov
Sverdlov. Stepanova describes a photograph
from 1905:
Great­grandmother Sarra, first on the left,
looks older than her seventeen years. Her hat,
the sort that’s fastened with pins, has slipped
to the back of her head, a strand of hair has
escaped and her round­cheeked face is red
raw, you can see how cold she is. One of her
hands is tucked into her coat’s cuffs, another
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is balled into a fist. Her right eye, injured on
the barricades, is covered with a black band­
age, like a pirate’s patch.
In 1907, Sarra spent time in prison in St
Petersburg, after which she seems to have
lost her zeal for revolution. A later photo­
graph shows her in an anatomy class, one
of six young women gathered around a
corpse. Having abandoned radical polit­
ics,  she found a different route out of
Pochinky and ‘the musky, fur­clad world
of Judaism’: the path of secular education.
Fragments of correspondence survive from
the six years she spent studying medicine
in France, including postcards exchanged
with her future husband, Mikhail Fridman.
Their letters contain almost no Yiddish, no
reference to Jewish tradition or rituals: like
Mandelstam, they determinedly cast off the
world of their parents.
Sarra returned to Russia in 1914, qual­
ified as a doctor, married Mikhail (in 1915
or 1916), opened her own medical practice
in Saratov – Mikhail’s home town – and had
a daughter, Lyolya. Despite her early ad­
ventures in revolutionary politics, Sarra led
what Stepanova saw as an ‘ordinary’ Soviet
life: she worked as a doctor in Moscow,
raised her daughter after Mikhail’s death
and instilled in her the importance of educ­
ation, a career and a sense of purpose. She
avoided the fate of many of her earlier com­
rades on the barricades, arrested in 1937.
She also escaped the anti­cosmopolitan
campaigns of the Stalinist era: as a Jew
educated overseas she was potentially vuln­
erable, but a stroke and the ‘senility’ that
followed put her out of harm’s way.
Now she could ‘sort through her photo­
graphs, make little notes on them, and
put her hand out and touch any beckon­
ing memory’. One picture from the 1960s,
Stepanova writes, shows her with her old
revolutionary friend Sarra Sverdlova, ‘sit­
ting on the bench outside the Home for
Old Bolsheviks, two grey­haired old ladies
in thick coats, warming themselves in the
winter sun, pressing old­fashioned muffs
to their stomachs’. In a curious twist, the
visit of a Frenchman around the same time
– his identity now long forgotten – trigger­
ed something in Sarra’s impaired cortex,
and for the remaining years of her life she
spoke only in French.
Sarra’s story is told in bursts throughout
the text, reconstructed from the photo­
graphs and postcards that she – like Aunt
18 london Review of booKs 7 octobeR 2021
Galya – curated in old age, and from
experiences gathered during Stepanova’s
travels: to Sarra’s birthplace in forsaken
Pochinky, to the attic rooms of a Paris hotel
in the quartier where her great-grandmother
took digs.
Her other great-grandparents leave few-
er traces. Except on her paternal grand-
father’s side, they were all Jewish. Zalman
and Sofya Akselrod, the most religious,
lived in a shtetl in north-west Russia, Zal-
man selling soap and ice cream. Vladimir
Gurevich came from Kherson, on the Black
Sea coast, where his father owned a factory
producing agricultural machinery before
he was possibly killed in pogroms after
the revolution. Vladimir died in 1920 from
brain inflammation. His widow, Betya, mov-
ed to Moscow in 1922 with few possessions
apart from a handful of photographs and a
postcard. Now a single mother, she put her
dreams of becoming a doctor to one side
and worked as an accountant in various
state institutions. Stepanova visited their
home towns, not in pursuit of information
– beyond the domestic archive, most of
what she gleans comes from the internet –
but in search of an emotional connection
with the place.
She tells the story of her trip to Saratov,
where Mikhail Fridman was born. Using an
address directory from 1908, downloaded
from the internet, she identifies her great-
grandfather’s house on Moskvaya Ulitsa,
and spends time in the yard outside, trying
to commit it all to memory:
I spent a good while in the yard just running
my hands over the rough Saratov brickwork.
Everything was as I’d hoped, perhaps even
more so than I’d hoped. I recognised my great-
grandfather’s yard unhesitatingly. There was
no doubt in my mind, even though I’d never
seen it or had it described to me . . . The yard
put its arms around me in an embrace – that’s
what it was.
It later turns out there has been a mix-up:
Mikhail did live on Moskvaya Ulitsa, but at
a different number.
This anecdote sums up Stepanova’s
approach to memory: she is in its thrall,
but admits the absurdity of her infatuation.
She interrogates her compulsive desire for
a personal connection with the past –
something that reflects what she calls our
‘dull fear of the unknown’. People seek out
objects, images, texts and sensations which
they will reframe and recontextualise: hist-
ory is ‘raw material, destined for editing’.
Sarra’s postcards and Mikhail’s brickwork
seem to promise a tangible connection to
a disappeared world. As Stepanova says,
this quest to recuperate the past may be a
response to trauma. Here, she draws on
Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory,
which deals primarily with the trauma of the
Shoah and its transmission to future gen-
erations. Stepanova, though, sees a more
universal legacy of 20th-century violence:
‘Most people alive can consider themselves
survivors to some extent, the result of a
traumatic shift, its victims and the bearers
of its legacy.’
Stepanova and her acquaintances often
seem more memory-obsessed than most:
‘When I meet someone new I hardly notice
the moment when we begin talking about
our grandparents and ancestors, compar-
ing names and dates as happily as animals
who have finally reached their watering
spot and drink, shuddering with the delic-
ious cold of the water. It usually happens
about half an hour into the conversation.’
But many readers will recognise themselves
in her wry send-up of our contemporary
habit of capturing and conserving every
passing experience. She is brilliant on the
excesses of digital photography: ‘I imagine
the piles of images. Huge diggers shovel
at them, scooping all the waste into their
buckets: the underexposed pictures, the
duplicates and triplicates, the tail of an out-
of-frame dog, a picture of a café ceiling
taken by mistake.’ But her book also shows
that the compulsive wish to remember and
be remembered is in no way peculiar to the
digital age. Stepanova sees our obsession
with genealogy websites, with social media
and selfies, as a continuation of her ancest-
ors’ hoarding of insignificant objects, of
their need to pass them on – to a loved one,
to a future self, to an unknown posterity.
I
n old age, her grandfather Nikolai
became increasingly fixated on his own
memories, time and again recounting
to his daughter-in-law the same painful
stories of his poverty-stricken childhood.
Unlike Stepanova’s other grandparents,
Nikolai was one of Russia’s destitute set to
benefit from the revolution: a cattle-herd
turned worker, later a Red Army officer and
then a worker at a car factory. One day in
the mid 1970s he set off on his own mem-
ory tour. He rode two hundred miles on the
pillion of a motorbike to his home town
of Bezhetsk, and spent a few moments in
the house his family had owned before his
father’s death. During the Great Terror,
Nikolai, like many Red Army officers, was
suspected of being a foreign spy. At a party
meeting he was openly branded ‘an enemy
of the people’ and his weapons were con-
fiscated. In the small garrison town where
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19 london Review of booKs 7 octobeR 2021
he was living his neighbours kept their
distance. Although he was never arrested,
suspicion hung over Nikolai for the rest of
his life. He spent the whole of the Second
World War in the Urals, serving ‘right at the
back of the rearguard’ since ‘the front line
was barred to him’. ‘He must have felt in-
jured by the rejection,’ Stepanova writes,
‘this man who had prepared all his life for
sacrifice.’ He was demobbed in 1944 and
‘hardly even protested when the door was
slammed in his face’.
Stepanova’s other grandfather, Lyonya,
was an engineer in the rearguard. One of
the letters he wrote to his wife while re-
cuperating from an emergency operation
in 1942 or 1943 forms part of the family
archive passed down to Stepanova. Lying in
hospital, with his family evacuated to west-
ern Siberia, Lyonya experienced a kind of
epiphany. He asserts a very Soviet com-
mitment to being happy: ‘These last few
weeks, I’ve felt quite different, I’ve felt sure
that I have the strength to claim my proper
place in life, to fight for it, to live and to be
happy!’ He also reaffirms his love for his
wife, couched in a rhetoric of self-criticism
and self-improvement that is also very Sov-
iet: ‘I love you now just as I loved you before,
with a strong devotion. But considering the
flaws in your character, your tricky person-
ality, I want to try to understand you in all
your actions, and to yield to you.’
There is no record of his wife’s reaction
to this rather ambivalent declaration of
love, though she kept the letter, bringing
it back with her to Moscow after the war.
But the most treasured correspondence in
the family archive are the letters of Leonid
Gimmelfarb, a cousin of Stepanova’s grand-
father who died in the Second World War.
From the marshes of the Leningrad hinter-
land where he was serving, Lyodik, as he
was known, wrote to his mother, Vera, who
had been evacuated to Yalutorovsk, along
with Sarra and her daughter, Lyolya, now
pregnant. Lyodik’s letters are heartbreak-
ing in their reticence: in place of news
about himself, there are endless quest-
ions  about his mother’s health and the
unborn baby. When Vera died, she pass-
ed  on the small bundle of letters, photo-
graphs and death notifications to Stepan-
ova’s mother,  Natasha Gurevich, the baby
born in evacuation shortly before Lyodik’s
death. Stepanova is also a poet, and in
‘Spolia’ writes:
22-year-old lyodik killed in action
his father, a volunteer, bombed troop train
his mother who lived right up until death
a little girl who will remember all this
Lyodik became Natasha’s childhood hero,
and it is her handwriting on the envelope
the correspondence is kept in, adding a
third name to the memory chain: Lyodik-
Vera-Natasha. She passed on the bundle to
Stepanova, another ‘little girl who will re-
member all this’.
If Stepanova’s family are as ordinary as
she fears, their obsession with the past
must make them representative. In Memory
of Memory suggests that people are always,
unwittingly or not, engaged ‘in the product-
ion of perfect casts and taxidermy’. Of all
Stepanova’s stories and images – marvel-
lously rendered in this English translation
by Sasha Dugdale – the most striking is a
description of sekretiki, a game played by
Moscow schoolchildren in the 1970s. They
would drop to the ground and bury a little
collection of cherished things – feathers,
beads, the photograph of a celebrity cut
from a newspaper – then cover them with a
piece of glass and hide them with soil. In
classic Soviet posters, young pioneers gaze
out of the frame towards the shining fut-
ure. Here the children are face down in the
earth, to preserve a familiar object and turn
it into something that will last. c
At Tate
Britain
J
ane eyRe, a series of large-scale litho-
graphs made by Paula Rego in 2001,
begins with two images based on the
novel’s first scene. Girl Reading at Window is
a more or less direct illustration of events,
sequential moments laid out on a single
page like a storyboard or graphic novel.
Loving Bewick, the second image, is differ-
ent. Its subject is what happens at that
point in Jane’s mind, and what was hap-
pening in Rego’s mind. In the novel, Jane
retreats behind a curtain to read Bewick’s
History of British Birds. Her imagination, we
understand, has grown to equal the brut-
ality of her everyday life. As she reads of
‘bleak shores’ and ‘death-white realms’,
the illustrated birds take flight. She forms
of these places ‘an idea of my own: shadowy,
like all the half-comprehended notions that
float dim through children’s brains, but
strangely impressive’.
In Rego’s hands this communion with
Bewick becomes a Leda story: a pelican
comes to life in Jane’s lap, its enormous
beak hovering at the edge of her open
mouth. She is older than the Jane of the
novel, and the bird is gigantic. Her knees,
covered by a dress of criss-crossed taffeta,
are shaped like the ‘solitary rocks’ that
Bewick says are ‘the haunts of sea-fowl’.
The symbolism is of sacrifice or nurture –
the pelican (not the first in Rego’s work)
pierces its breast to feed its young – but
the dynamic is sexual. The girl and bird are
posed at an angle. Jane’s eyes are closed
and her mouth stretched wide; she is
needy, greedy, pained or ecstatic, the em-
brace a nightmare of assault or a dream of
sustenance, perhaps salvation. Jane is fed
by a fiction and so, in turn, is Rego.
By the time Rego came to make this
lithograph, the ideas informing it had
already found precedents in her work. In
1996 she experimented with a girl swallow-
ing a stork, a print too spiky and direct to
be suggestive. The etching Baa, Baa, Black
Sheep from 1989 was an early flirtation
with a feral lover, and in 1990 she depict-
ed Andromeda dismissing a tiny Perseus
and reaching up to caress the sea monster
instead; in both of these images the
woman’s face is hidden. Loving Bewick is in
some sense the resolution of these earlier
encounters between woman and creature:
a more delicate balance, a more erotic
proximity, a more drastic confidence. The
lineaments, and the presence of monstrous
fowl, recall an etching by Goya in the
Caprichos, Is There No One to Untie Us?, which
shows a human couple bound together
with rope, the woman struggling as she
is attacked by an owl her own size. Rego
saw the sex in this and transferred it to the
raptor. (Unlike the other images, Loving
Bewick was made on a piece of transfer
paper that her collaborator, the printmaker
Stanley Jones, had kept in a drawer for
three decades. ‘We haven’t had such a good
transfer in years,’ he said later.)
The current retrospective at Tate Britain
(until 24 October) shows – in its scale, its
curatorial arc and its popularity – what
should never have been in doubt: Rego’s
unending ideas, her technical gifts, the
fierceness of her intentions, her signific-
ance as an artist. She has often said she is
not a ‘proper artist’ because proper artists
paint in oils. Having grown up in Portugal,
the daughter of liberal anglophiles living
under Salazar, she was sent to finishing
school in the UK and then to the Slade,
where she met a number of ‘proper artists’
– one of whom, Victor Willing, she later
married. The director of the Slade was
William Coldstream, whose work was as-
sociated with the anaemic realism of the
Euston Road School, and Willing’s paint-
ings – which included wan female nudes
in oils – weren’t out of place. Willing
would become the star, and the critical
voice, of their generation. Rego sat at the
20 london Review of booKs 7 octobeR 2021
back of the class and painted from her
imagination. ‘Of course one becomes
very self-conscious at art school,’ she told
her son hesitantly during an interview
in 2016, ‘being a day-girl, not being an
intellectual, the restricted way of teaching
in those days – the Euston Road method,
which I could not do. You lose your – it’s
not so much your confidence you lose,
you lose your – you hide more.’
The first two rooms at Tate show a
painter with lots to say who is suspicious
of the available means to say them. The
opening work, Interrogation, was painted in
Portugal when Rego was fifteen. A woman
is flanked by two men in white, her head
in her hand and her legs twisting around
each other as she sits and submits. From
this early figuration Rego drifted into
abstracts and antic collages, her political
rage apparently undimmed, her vehem-
ence exerted with colour and scissors, but
none of that work formulated a full re-
sponse to the work of her heroes – Picasso,
Dubuffet, Max Ernst, Arthur Rackham,
Gustave Doré. The work most indicative of
things to come is a painting for which she
received a prize at the Slade, Under Milk
Wood (1954), which transposes to a Portu-
guese kitchen Dylan Thomas’s (then new)
radio play. Creatures dead and alive; ex-
pressive female figures; the heft of muscle
and flesh; the invitation to interpret the
scene as a psychosocial drama; homecom-
ing as a crucible for storytelling: Rego
would develop these and allied elements,
but not for many years.
Rego and Willing met at a house party,
sometime around the coronation of Eliza-
beth II. He was behind her on the stairs,
and guided her into a bedroom. ‘Take down
your knickers,’ he said. It didn’t occur to
Rego to refuse. ‘I was a virgin, so you can
imagine the mess,’ she told their son. ‘He
could at least have hailed me a taxi.’ After
a number of backstreet abortions, she de-
cided to keep her next baby, then kept
two more. She moved back to Portugal.
Willing eventually left his wife and joined
her.
Rego found motherhood false. ‘It was
brush or baby,’ she explained. ‘When you
From left to right: ‘Snare’ (1987); ‘Loving Bewick’
(2001); ‘Procession to the Sea’ (1996).
were doing a picture you were much more
yourself.’ Willing, meanwhile, became the
arbiter of these pictures. He guided her
and wrote about her, at times positioning
himself as an art-critical bystander to her
life. ‘It happened that when the picture
had reached an impasse, the security of
the family was threatened by a girl,’ he
wrote in an essay about Rego’s work in
1971. ‘The artist introduced this girl in
the dark, heavy, reclining form pressing
into the top of the picture. An angry hour’s
work . . . forced the picture to a con-
clusion.’ The act he describes is his own
infidelity.
Willing was diagnosed with multiple
sclerosis in 1966. For the rest of that
decade and all of the next, Rego felt she
was ‘treading water’. In the early 1980s she
experimented with large, unbridled paint-
ings of almost comic-book violence, feat-
uring a recurring character, Red Monkey.
A few years later, after she’d seen the work
of the so-called outsider artist Henry
Darger, she riffed on his schoolgirl char-
acters, the ‘Vivian girls’, in frantically pop-
ulated acrylics. As Willing’s health deter-
iorated, she acquired focus: the cartoon
figures crystallised into a series of paint-
ings of an oversized young girl looking
after a large dog. The girl is caring, taunt-
ing, playful and dangerous by turns, the
balance of power firmly in her favour. She
feeds the dog, lifts her skirt for him, ad-
justs his collar, shaves him with a lethal-
looking razorblade. This girl and her
doubles would recur in works to come.
The dog, Rego never hesitated to say, was
Willing.
The girl and dog paintings were exhib-
ited at the Edward Totah Gallery in Lon-
don, and met with critical success. Willing
wrote the catalogue essay. In the eighteen
months that followed, Rego worked on a
sequence of large acrylics that became the
culmination of a solo show at the Serpent-
ine Gallery and which changed her career.
Willing was bedbound. In Secrets and
Stories, the documentary about Rego made
by their son, Nick Willing, she describes
bringing each painting-in-progress to the
room where Willing lay, and asking him
what she should do with it. His edicts
were, in her account, unwavering. ‘Paint it
all out,’ he’d say of something she’d just
painted in. ‘You’ve got some beautifully
painted figures there, and you’ve got rub-
bish furniture behind – it’s killing the
picture.’ ‘He could see and I couldn’t,’ she
said later.
Many of these pictures, first shown in
October 1988, are brought together at the
Tate in a single room, the largest by far in
the exhibition, reflecting their impact at
the time. Everything before seems to lead
up to this moment. The Policeman’s Daughter,
Snare, The Little Murderess, The Cadet and His
Sister and The Family all owe a debt to Max
Ernst’s The Virgin Spanking the Christ Child
(1926). Rego later told Fiona Bradley, the
author of an excellent monograph on her,
that Ernst’s painting was her favourite art-
work. If you conceive of art history as a
series of archetypes rather than preced-
ents, Rego had begun to find a way to ex-
ploit them for her own purposes, just as
the oral tradition of fairy tales invites
retellings. The rounded faces of Picasso
circa 1906, the spooky architecture of a de
Chirico set, digressions on Las Meninas:
Rego took all of this and turned it into a
story about (in Willing’s words) ‘rebellion
and domination; or freedom and repres­
sion; suffocation and escape’. The paint­
ings are flat and spare: missives from a
child’s world, perhaps, and all the more
perverse for importing these games into
the world of adults. There were ominous
girls: wrestling with a dog, polishing a man’s
boot, plucking a dead goose, approaching
someone offstage with a ribbon, ready to
strangle. And there were girls in groups –
undressing a father, combing an older
woman’s hair, tying a brother’s shoelace –
the agency always theirs, each scene arrang­
ed theatrically for manipulation or harm.
By the time the show opened, Rego was 53
and Willing had been dead five months.
On the morning of his death, their three
grown­up children, asleep on the floor in
other rooms of the flat, were woken by a
howl of fury from their mother. ‘Who is
going to help me with my work now?’
I
n 1799, Goya published an announce­
ment in a Madrid newspaper about the
Caprichos, his first major series of etch­
ings. He was 53. The eighty prints were
works of the imagination, he wrote, and as
such deserved more esteem than images
drawn from nature, since the artist ‘has to
put before the eyes of the public forms and
poses which have existed previously in the
darkness and confusion of an irrational
mind, or one which is beset by uncontrol­
led passion’. Goya had survived an illness
that had nearly killed him and had left him
deaf. The etchings he made in the years
after his recovery were as far as darkness
could take him from his work as paint­
er  to  the Spanish court. In the process,
he transformed the medium of etching
itself.
An etching is made by drawing on a
coated metal plate using a needle. When
exposed to acid, these uncoated lines are
‘bitten’ away, leaving grooves which hold
the ink. The subsequent process of shad­
ing the drawing is called aquatint. The
artist works from the most pale tones to
the most dark in a series of layers, each of
which is fixed with resin dust. In Goya’s
time aquatint had been used in England
and France, but solely for the purposes
of reproduction: it was a way to make
prints look like watercolours, preparing
the drawing for hand­tinting. Goya saw
the potential for aquatint to be an end
in itself, a means of making nightmares:
witches sitting in the penumbra; monsters
erupting from the night; the Inquisition
gathered under an intractable veil of
grey.
Rego had worked with the printmaker
Paul Coldwell in 1987 but it was not until
two years later, after Willing’s death, that
they began a major collaboration lasting
for many years. (Her other significant col­
laboration, with her model, Lila Nunes,
also began around the time of Willing’s
death: Nunes was his nurse.) The first full
series Rego made in Coldwell’s studio,
Nursery Rhymes, was a direct descendant
of Goya’s Caprichos, and established her
graphic capabilities. Like Goya, she relied
on her imagination, informed by years of
drawing the human figure. Giant dolls
dance with soldiers in Polly, Put the Kettle
On. Faint courtiers emerge from mist in
Sing a Song of Sixpence, as blackbirds gather
at the king’s feet, ready to swarm. A giant
humanoid spider holds Little Miss Muffet
in a many­legged embrace. Here, the sly
humour already evident in Rego’s work
found expression in technical wit: the line
drawings loose and free­associative, the
aquatint masterfully calculated. The Nurs-
ery Rhymes are smart in the way a chess
move might be, or a football trick, and just
as stylish.
Coldwell had set up a press in a small
room next to his kitchen in Hackney so
that he and his wife, Charlotte Hodes (a
former student of Rego), could make their
own prints. He didn’t have all the right
equipment to begin with but this suited
Rego just fine: it became, in Coldwell’s
words, an informal, secret location where
she could experiment without interrupt­
ion. She would arrive in the morning with
croissants and the copper plates she had
drawn on in the night, and they would
begin. Over a period of four or five months,
Rego worked feverishly, juggling several
etching plates at a time, each at a different
stage of development. ‘Everything that
had been squashed in . . . came pouring
out,’ she said. Coldwell had to keep track
of timings and acid strength and where
Rego was up to in her tonal gradation. He
likened the print room to a pizza parlour
and later wrote that this outpouring ‘was
at times almost terrifying’.
While some artists make prints as com­
mercial vehicles for their primary work,
Rego has always treated the medium as
the work’s full expression. Excepting her
abortion series, where she made smaller
prints of the large pastel drawings in order
to disseminate them more widely (in the
hope of encouraging Portuguese voters to
turn up to a second referendum on the
legalisation of abortion), Rego has never
made prints as versions of or sketches to­
wards something else. They are independ­
ent works. This doesn’t mean they are
necessarily predetermined: their purpose
has often been to set her free. ‘Whenever I
got stuck or didn’t know what to do, I
would make a print,’ she told the curator
Sophie Lindo. ‘The process would free up
my mind and let me just work without
21 london Review of booKs 7 octobeR 2021
making art. Often that’s when you do your
best things.’ The prints are not only a
major component of her output as a whole
– T.G. Rosenthal’s catalogue raisonné of
her Complete Graphic Work contains almost
three hundred – but sidelong views onto
her habits of thought. They whisper some­
thing to the viewer; something like, as
Marina Warner has put it, ‘This is what I
know; this is what you – we – choose not
to see.’
This summer a small exhibition of
Rego’s prints was held at the Cristea
Roberts gallery to coincide with the Tate
show. It contained a few prints that were
proofed by Rego and Coldwell years ago
but never editioned. The commercial drive
to treat them as finished works is obvious,
but some are interesting precisely because
they are unfinished – the first or last etch­
ings of different sequences, either warm­
ing up or figuring out how to end. Proces-
sion to the Sea was made in 1996, after the
last of Rego’s work on The Children’s Crusade,
a series of etchings hand­coloured by
Hodes. Procession is un­coloured and clear­
ly unresolved. Unlike the other prints in
the series, it has a wide landscape format,
leaving space for several mini­scenes. A Joan
of Arc­like girl makes an exit, gripping her
horse with the balls of her feet; behind her
a witchy monarch is carried on a litter by a
group of gnarled children; there are twin
blind women at the rear, dancers on the
sidelines and, in the distance, a pair of
angels at sea, negotiating half­drawn waves.
There is more blank space here than Rego
would usually allow. The plate is patchy
and scratched in places, and the shadows
are unnaturalistic, falling differently on
different groups of people, as if she were
trying out types of shade rather than
capturing the fall of light. Yet – or perhaps
because of this – it is full of strength and
mystery, a portrait of Rego’s by now elab­
orately agile mind.
After 1989, when prints became a sig­
nificant form for her, Rego seems to have
made her peace with drawing as a final
gesture. Very much a proper or, rather, im­
proper artist, she largely abandoned paint
in favour of graphic media. In 1994 she
took up pastels and wielded them like
knives. She spoke of ‘punishment’ and ‘re­
venge’. From a distance in the gallery,
these majestic works – Dog Woman, Angel,
After Hogarth – look like oil paintings and
hark back to Velázquez or Murillo: smudg­
ed darkened backgrounds, a murkier and
more mature overall palette than that of
the playful acrylics. Many of them are
paper mounted on canvas. It’s only up
close that you notice the lines: the stabs
and scratches of an instrument used with
force. ‘I’m not mad about the lyrical qual­
ity of the brush,’ she said in 2009. ‘I much
prefer the hardness of the stick. The stick
is fiercer, much much more aggressive.’
The Tate exhibition, curated by Elena
Crippa, is framed in political terms. Rego
is often described as depicting women’s
lives (‘the best painter of women’s exper­
iences alive today’, as Robert Hughes once
called her) and just as often as ‘auto­
biographical’. To some extent the work
invites this interpretation. She has de­
scribed Nunes, the model for many of the
later works, as her ‘stand­in’. The images
of women crouching, contorted, lustful,
angry, constrained by clothes, howling
like wolves, caught up in strange or ambi­
guous games, deliberately confound our
gaze. It’s not surprising that one response
to these complex works is to treat them as
part of a feminist project. An ardent para­
graph of wall text at the Tate signs off by
saying that ‘Rego is an artist who has con­
sistently made work that responds to and
fights injustice . . . Rego’s and our wish is
that there might be an Escape, and more
justice for all women.’
Perhaps this is not the moment to
ask whether that interpretation limits her.
The figures may be mostly female but the
forces they channel are supernatural or
unconscious, and their human forms are
often cross­dressed. Rego’s best works
look at politics askance – at power and
repression, at the darkness between and
within individuals. Growing up under a
dictatorship, in a country whose oral trad­
ition of song and stories was exuberantly
sinister, gave her all the atmospheric pol­
itics she needed in order to conjure work
that is unafraid to give a face to cruelty. If
she is remembered for her fictions over
her manifestos that will be no less import­
ant, and no less political, than the other
way around.
Gaby Wood
 Twinkle, twinkle little star
farther off than Zanzibar;
blazing away your effulgent existence
at 2.64 parsecs distance
How I wonder what you are,
incandescently bizarre;
invoking cosmic mystery:
did He who made the moon make thee?
Up above the world so high,
beneath Orion’s heedless eye;
olfactory member, Canis Major
(Zodiacal nomenclature)
Like a diamond in the sky,
hard to human hue and cry;
observing hotly human passion
in a cool and distant fashion
Quo Vadimus?
Reneau H. Reneau
Alone in the eventide, while I loll
on the veranda and swizzle Long
Island Tea, in vain do I try to
pierce the grim blanket choking
our planet. Only when space
shuttling on a tour of duty do I
see above an unbounded ocean of
sparkling points of light! To no
avail we have invested our blood,
our brains, and our sacred bucks
in an effort to find acceptable
havens beyond our solar prison.
So, on we strut, trusting that
our holy homosapiens traditions
(Siriusly)
will survive, if indeed any
homosap is around to carry
the torch. Our footprint on the
trail is eroded; the trail itself
disappears; yet we are full of
piss and vinegar. We sprint
forward, vanishing into the
brume, evolving and mutating
into something utterly unlike the
ourselves of now. No matter. Our
charge is simply to nurture the
flame of awareness. Is our own
continuous memory and physical
form of any consequence?
What do we recall of our time
in the womb, anyway? And as
we mature, childhood notions
are smothered by reality.
Are we marching forward to
neoconsciousness or backward
to paleoconsciousness? Could
it be that they are one and
the same? Quo vadimus! Do
oodles and oodles and oodles
of slivers of awareness rejoin or
reconfigure an Eternal Gestalt?
We won’t know until we get
there. Of course by then “we”
won’t be we, and “until we get
there” is meaningless. But back
in the meantime, as we penetrate
the haze and regard those dots of
light, they wink, and we wonder.

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Flints in Henry Moore’s hands, 1978. Photo: © Gemma Levine

Final weeks: closing 31 October 2021

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Edmund de Waal presents

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22 london Review of booKs 7 octobeR 2021

D Screwdriver in the Eye
avid Keenan’s first novel, This Is
Memorial Device: An Hallucinated Oral
History of the Post-Punk Scene in Airdrie,
Coatbridge and Environs 1978-86 (2017), docu­
ments the rise and fall of a fictitious (though
awesomely real) band called Memorial De­
vice. Its members are from Keenan’s home
town of Airdrie – about thirteen miles east
of Glasgow – and the book takes the form
of 26 testimonies from band members,
friends, jilted lovers, relatives, hangers­on
and rival acts. It has been left to two dedic­
ated gig­goers, Ross Raymond and Johnny
McLaughlin, to document for posterity the
scene surrounding a band that ‘sounded
like Airdrie . . . sounded like a black fucking
hole’, since most of their peers ‘went off
and became social workers and did courses
on how to teach English as a foreign lang­
uage or got a job in Greggs’ or ‘died or dis­
appeared or went into seclusion, more like’.
Airdrieonians grow up and stay put: they
learn to make their own fun. (If they do leave,
their insular earnestness makes them vuln­
erable.) The book has the dirty glamour of
an after­party: pale blue light presses at
closed curtains, there’s an overflowing ash­
tray and crushed beer cans; the narrative
tension comes from the interplay between
notions of belonging, freedom and being
fatally penned in. Keenan is attuned to each
distinct voice, even if most of them are writ­
ten in standard English. Only one – an im­
potent bystander to a doomed love affair –
speaks straight from Scotland’s Central Belt.
The chapter titles are reminiscent of song
names. You can imagine a Hatful of Hollow­
ish compilation featuring ‘Rimbaud Was
Desperate or Iggy Lived It’ or ‘My Dream
Bride Which Is Of Course My Mother but
Not with a Vagina Please’, though the Smiths,
like Joy Division, are never mentioned di­
rectly (Joy Division appear briefly in the ap­
pendix). This might be because they are too
obvious, too famous, too thinly spread for
an encyclopedic mind like Keenan’s to re­
ference (he is well known as a rock critic).
Ian Curtis seems to have been the model for
the band’s lead singer, Lucas Black, whose
brain condition results in short­term mem­
ory loss, hence his copious written notes.
The people around Black are either hope­
lessly attracted to his ‘endearing combin­
ation of, like, startling intellect and this
weird childlike quality’ or freaked out by his
in­the­moment oddness. Curtis also has an
echo in Richard Curtis, the Memorial De­
vice drummer, who leaves his wife (and the
band) for a twenty­year­old Palestinian girl
after she takes down her knickers to reveal
a ‘bald fact’. He vows to follow her to ‘the
end of the world’.
Keenan’s male characters aren’t interest­
ed in streaming services or mass­produced,
discount­stickered CDs from the charity
shop. They own two copies (‘Mint or Ex+’)
of every sub­underground masterpiece (on
vinyl, obviously): one for their council flat
in Airdrie, the other for the bunker where
they’re going to sit out the imminent apo­
calypse and where the biker Teddy Ohm says,
‘I’m gonna impregnate me some women.’
It’s about dropping acid just before the
Clash gig in Belfast in 1977 and not ment­
ioning that Stiff Little Fingers – post­punk
chroniclers of the Troubles – were there.
It’s about sitting in a quiet pub thirty years
later, at three o’clock on a weekday after­
Paul Mendez
Xstabeth
by David Keenan.
White Rabbit, 168 pp., £14.99, November 2020, 978 1 4746 1705 5
Monument maker
by David Keenan.
White Rabbit, 808 pp., £25, August, 978 1 4746 1709 3
noon, talking with a barfly about that time
in ’83, ’84 or ’85 when you were there to see a
band that only really exists in the minds of
those who witnessed the pre­internet, pre­
phone­camera world:
It reminded me of standing on a hill, in the
dark, with a big industrial plant in the dis­
tance and just feeling this roar: this massive
earthly vibration, like the silence had been
taken over by something that was even deep­
er than silence itself, something that silence
implied, in a way, like silence was a sound and
here was its underpinning, this terrific grid­
locked noise that sounded like a complete
standstill even as it never stopped moving.
Keenan specialises in the rare, the ex­
clusive, the inner circle, in being one of ‘the
Boys’, in getting ‘in’. There are passages to­
wards the end of his second novel, For the
Good Times (2019), set against the backdrop
of the Troubles, that if extracted would
sound like gobbledygook. You’ve got to hang
around these people for a while if you want
to roll with them, be part of their club, be
trusted with their secrets. Keenan’s nar­
ratives often suggest that if you didn’t wit­
ness it – the music, the scene – first­hand,
then it’s too late. Copies of his book Eng-
land’s Hidden Reverse: A Secret History of the
Esoteric Underground (2003) go for hundreds
of pounds online, approaching four­figure
territory for first­edition hardbacks. A line
of T­shirts, the sort you might get at a gig,
was produced to coincide with the public­
ation of This Is Memorial Device. A novel, The
Towers the Fields the Transmitters, was available
as a limited online download for those who
pre­ordered Xstabeth, which came out last
year.
Monument Maker, Keenan’s fifth novel, is
his most insidery yet. More than a decade
in the making, it consists of four novellas
huddled together like strangers in a broken
lift. The first is a sort of sex­drenched road
trip through France some time in the
1980s. We then shift to Khartoum in 1884
(just before the Berlin Conference and the
division of Africa) and a novella in diary
entries about the last days of General Gor­
don. We remain in Africa for the third sect­
ion, with a man called Maximilian Reh­
berg, who ends up shooting himself (three
times!) in the head. The longest section,
at more than two hundred pages, belongs
to ‘The Gospel According to Frater Jim’, a
British soldier who sustains catastrophic
facial disfigurement and is thrown off a
cliff by a group of Nazis. He survives and,
Candide­like, makes his way around Europe,
receiving a face transplant before landing
back in the arms of his wife, who marries
him, not realising that this new man is
actually her first husband. It’s difficult to
grasp exactly what all this means or what
23 london Review of booKs 7 octobeR 2021
it’s for. The novel’s 808 pages make a mock­
ery of straitened attention spans, and the
book is provocatively underedited. Keenan
wants all your time, space and energy.
Monument Maker is the literary equivalent of
manspreading.
Keenan’s novels aren’t intended as part
of a series, but they are connected. Names
carry over from book to book, attached to
different characters (there is also, some­
what inevitably, a David W. Keenan). And
there are repeated tropes: coded brother­
hoods and homoerotic friendships, tend­
ing towards hero­worship and sometimes
homophobia; parenthood and parentless­
ness. The parent theme is especially pro­
minent. The mother and father of a char­
acter in This Is Memorial Device are said to
have ‘died, one after the other, just like that
. . . it was like they floated away or drowned
on thin air.’ Another’s ‘couldn’t give a toss
whether she lived or died’. But more often
parents are separated, and their grown­up
children’s traumas are examined in the
light of the parent­child relationship. After
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his suicide, Lucas Black’s mother changes
her identity and goes unnamed when inter­
viewed. Dead mothers are everywhere. Sam­
uel McMahon, the narrator of For the Good
Times, carries a Semtex ‘abortion’ into Bel­
fast’s Europa hotel, only for a huge blast to
go off there anyway (he claims responsibil­
ity for it and is hailed a hero). He takes his
unexploded suitcase home to his mother’s
house, slides it under his bed and forgets
about it. When mice chew through the wires
and the bomb blows up the house with his
mother inside, he shows no remorse or
sadness.
Fathers are depicted as pathetic and clue­
less, or untrustworthy and despairing, or
self­mutilating and emasculated. Remy, the
keyboardist in Memorial Device, is said
to have come ‘from a long line of homos’;
his ‘father had become a eunuch in a back­
street operation . . . after hooking up with a
bunch of subterranean gays who practised
cock and ball torture’. In For the Good Times,
Samuel and his brother, Peter, were just
‘four or five’ when they discovered that their
father carried a weapon wherever he went,
even on holiday: he used a hammer on a man
trying to do an old lady out of her pennies
in an arcade. They weren’t much older when
they were shown, by their grinning father,
their paternal grandfather’s dead body in
its open casket. And they were still young –
‘all scared like little white rabbits’ – when
they picked tightly wrapped barbed wire
out of their father’s penis after he returned,
faint and bloody, from a spell of ritual self­
mortification that he warned them they too
would one day have to practise. In Monu-
ment Maker, ‘Holy’ Maximilian Rehberg fails
“What better escape from the woes
of our present day than rolling
around in the intrigues of the
Roman Empire? Naughty Caesars!
Pictures too! Avidly I plunge in!”
—Margaret Atwood
“Mary Beard provides a masterclass
for art historians and classicists.”
—Simon J Malloch, Literary Review
“[Beard’s book] will have that
distinctive focus of hers: not just who
the emperors were and what they did,
but how we think about them.”
—Josh Spero, Financial Times
to euthanise his hopelessly ill father before
shooting himself. Incapable of ‘a true and
supreme compassion’, he philosophises on
love while his father convulses in terminal
agony.
The Electra complexes and daddy issues
are most overt in Xstabeth. The action opens
in St Petersburg. The narrator, Aneliya, is
the daughter of a failed musician still cling-
ing to the hope he might achieve greatness.
Aneliya’s mother is dead. It isn’t until she
becomes pregnant that her father explains
how her mother died, by singing it on his
guitar, but he doesn’t go into detail. When
Aneliya is asked about her mother, she lies:
‘She got murdered on her honeymoon. I
said. I was twisting facts for no reason. Her
partner put his foot on her head.’
We assume that at some point, at least,
Aneliya has been to bed with her father;
perhaps it is a perennial arrangement. ‘I
wrapped my legs around him,’ she says,
congratulating him after he is booked for
the gig whose secret recording comes to be
known as ‘Xstabeth’. She knows that she
won’t be able to attend, since she has an
illicit date planned with her father’s best
friend, a ‘famouser’ musician nicknamed
Jaco: ‘I imagined him passing me over to
the famouser musician in exactly the same
position.’ After her father judges the gig to
have been a failure, he breaks down in tears,
his head in her lap. She feels she is being
‘batted about . . . between these two men
like a little tennis ball’. She spends a sum-
mer holiday with her father in St Andrews,
to coincide with a golf tournament. At the
beach, she watches him ‘standing in the
water with the soft waves lapping. Lapping
around his legs and with his dark trunks
on. His dark trunks with the white pull-
string.’ She meets a famous golfer, who in-
itiates their affair by telling her: ‘I want to
do you up the shitter,’ urging her to call him
‘daddy’ and pimping her out, pressing her
– pregnant, by this point – to sleep with
everyone she sees. ‘But not in the arse,’ he
tells her. ‘That’s the rule. I get the arse after-
wards.’ ‘I wasn’t sure if I really did want it,’
she reflects. ‘But I was responding to the
situation’. On the same holiday, her father
meets a new woman called Sheila. ‘You’re
good in bed,’ she tells him. ‘But I knew that
already,’ Aneliya says.
with my patience. The final part of the book
is incomprehensible.
It’s clear that, for great stretches of Monu-
ment Maker, Keenan is choosing to mutilate
his prose, because at other points he proves
himself capable of writing brilliantly on art,
architecture, music, literature, religion, the
occult. What is far less clear, across all his
work, is why he takes such pleasure in the
expression of ugly social attitudes. His fe-
male characters are childlike, intellectually
subordinate, easily manipulated and frict-
ionlessly fucked, helpless against and sub-
servient to the abusive patriarchal instinct
– or else they’re tight-mouthed ‘lesbians’
who won’t give head. A third, and more elus-
ive, type is unattainable or dead (or both).
We become better acquainted with certain
(blonde) female characters’ vaginas than
with their faces (‘The lips of her labia are
felt-grey, mouse-eared. When she opens,
she opens like a butterfly’; ‘After wards, she
sat on a footstool and displayed her newly
shaved pussy to me’). Few of them articul-
ate more than a moan.
We should be careful not to conflate an
author’s views with what is depicted in
their work, but if there is any irony here I
have failed to spot it. Keenan won’t mind
that. ‘Shut your mouth about the gendered
gaze for a minute, with all that claptrap,’ he

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T
he best of Keenan’s novels so far,
For the Good Times, is also his most
formally conventional; it builds a
ferociously readable narrative from illiteracy,
mental illness, sexual entitlement, classic
menswear, torch songs and sectarian viol-
ence. He doesn’t have to go to any effort to
reconstruct the atmosphere of the Troubles:
we know it was hell, so we accept the screw-
driver-in-the-eye moments of extreme viol-
ence as we do those in Marlon James’s A
Brief History of Seven Killings:
All my cousins moved away, eventually. Look-
ing for work and a place to settle down that
wasn’t a fucking war zone. They went to Glas-
gow and Birmingham and Liverpool and Lon-
don and the Isle of Man. We were just the
dirty Irish, filthy Tims, ignorant Micks, fuck-
ing daft Paddies, lower down the pecking
order than blacks or dogs. And it kept happen-
ing, all over again. People were getting burn-
ed out their houses every day of the week.
People were getting shot down in the street.
People were getting dragged by the hair along
the pavement, bloodied and screaming into
army vehicles, I saw it myself, locked up for
defending your own neighbourhood. I looked
at the Union Jack and forgive me, son, but all
I saw was a swastika. I looked at the red hand
of Ulster and to me it was nothing but a
blood-soaked Sieg Heil.
Not coincidentally, the most successful
section of Monument Maker – the one con-
cerning General Gordon – is also pegged
to real events. A historical backdrop gives
Keenan’s work the base notes lacking else-
where. Unfortunately, he is most interest-
ed  here in disorienting his readers. Long
passages begin with interesting statements
that fritter to nothing. Multiple pages are
given over to single sentences into which are
crushed all dialogue and incidentals. These
sentences are punctuated only by commas
– three or four words then a comma, a mad-
deningly repetitive phrase then a comma,
until the reader is begging for a full stop.
Eventually, I was seeing only the commas,
all other meaning having departed, along
tells the reader part way through Monument
Maker. Is there anything interesting beyond
the I-don’t-give-a-fuck, open-shirted, one-
of-those-beards male posturing?
If anything, people of colour get it worse
than women in these books, dashed (and
bumped) off as stereotypes and easy prey.
The unnamed Chinese man in This Is Mem-
orial Device who is immediately bludgeoned
to death, apparently for japes, by a flying
lump of concrete supposedly too heavy to
lift, owns – surprise! – a restaurant. Assif ’s
father owns – surprise! – a corner shop
(which is broken into: the Boys know he
won’t do anything silly like pressing charges,
so they sit in the broken glass and drink,
smoke and microwave burgers until they’re
found the next morning asleep in their own
sick). Fists and jaws clench at the merest
whisper of a person of colour in the neigh-
bourhood, even if Tommy, the narrator’s
hero and friend in For the Good Times, ‘looks
like a fucking negro. The only negro in Bel-
fast.’ Apart from a few faceless figures in a
paragraph describing a trip to Nigeria in
This Is Memorial Device, there isn’t a single
Black person to be found in Keenan’s first
three novels, though this absence is a pre-
sence of sorts, and Keenan uses his fict-
ion for mischief: he deliberately misnames
Donna Summer, calls Stevie Wonder ‘the
most depressing music ever’, confuses Bob
Marley with Bob Dylan – both names used
interchangeably to pin down a dreadlocked
‘dark-skinned’ DJ – and dismisses a shared
milestone in African American/Jewish Amer-
ican history as ‘that song, the one about
strange fruit’. In Monument Maker there is a
lament for the Black GIs who fought in the
Second World War, but it is inconsequent-
ial, apropos of nothing, hypocritical and
insulting, especially in light of Keenan’s
refusal to name any of the Black walk-on
characters in the novel. Only John Coltrane
– whose work is likened to Russian literat-
ure in translation – passes the ‘cool’ test in
the world where David Keenan is God. 

Boiler House 3419.indd 1

24 london review of books 7 october 2021
24/09/2021 14:44
W Outcasts and Desperados
hen Richard Wright sailed to
France in 1946, he was 38 years
old and already a legend. He was
America’s most famous black writer, the
author of two books hailed as classics the
moment they were published: the 1940 novel
Native Son and the 1945 memoir Black Boy.
By ‘choosing exile’, as he put it, he hoped
both to free himself from American racism
and to put an ocean between himself and
the Communist Party of the United States,
in which he’d first come to prominence
as a writer of proletarian fiction only to
find himself accused of subversive, Trotsky­
ist tendencies. In Paris he was a celebrity.
French writers and American expatriates
flocked to the Café Monaco, where he held
court a short walk from his Left Bank flat.
‘Dick greeted everyone with boisterous con­
descension,’ Chester Himes remembered.
‘It was obvious he was the king thereabouts.’
His place on the throne was shakier than
he imagined. The novels he wrote in Paris,
where he would spend the rest of his life,
failed to deliver on the promise of Native
Son, the incendiary tale of a poor black
chauffeur in Chicago, Bigger Thomas, who
achieves a grisly sense of selfhood after kill­
ing two women: his black girlfriend and
the daughter of his wealthy white employer.
But even that novel’s reputation declined,
thanks in large part to another black Amer­
ican in Paris. In 1949 James Baldwin de­
scribed Native Son as a modern­day Uncle
Tom’s Cabin, ‘a continuation, a complement
of that monstrous legend it was written to
destroy’, arguing that Bigger Thomas ‘ad­
mits the possibility of his being subhuman’
and that Wright was no less guilty than
Harriet Beecher Stowe of insisting that a
person’s ‘categorisation . . . cannot be tran­
scended.’ Baldwin, whose success Wright
had done much to promote, wasn’t the only
protégé to turn against him. In 1963 Ralph
Ellison wrote that, in Bigger Thomas, Wright
had created not a black character other black
people would recognise, but ‘a near sub­
human indictment of white oppression’
crudely ‘designed to shock whites out of
their apathy’. Ellison’s hyper­cerebral prot­
agonist in Invisible Man, who is able to see
far beyond his own condition, was a point­
ed rejoinder to Bigger’s inarticulate and ex­
plosive rage.
That rage had once been important
to Ellison too. During their days in the
CPUSA, he had sent a letter to Wright com­
mending Bigger’s ‘revolutionary signific­
ance’. Readers horrified by Bigger’s viol­
ence, Ellison insisted, ‘fail to see that what’s
bad in Bigger from the point of view of
bourgeois society is good from our point of
view . . . Would that all Negroes were as
psychologically free as Bigger and as cap­
able of positive action!’ This argument was
echoed in 1966 by the Black Panther lead­
er Eldridge Cleaver, who called Bigger ‘the
black rebel of the ghetto’, with ‘no trace
. . . of the Martin Luther King­type self­
effacing love for his oppressors’. For Cleav­
er, who wrote in his memoir that he had
practised raping black women before grad­
uating to white women, Bigger embodied
an authentic, revolutionary black mascul­
inity that Baldwin, a gay man, naturally
despised.
The Black Power movement’s patriarch­
al and homophobic embrace of Wright did
Adam Shatz
The Man Who Lived Underground
by Richard Wright.
Library of America, 250 pp., £19.99, April, 978 1 59853 676 8
little to salvage his reputation, especially
after the rise of black feminism in the 1970s.
In Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman
(1978), Michele Wallace traced the move­
ment’s ‘love affair with Black Macho’ back
to Native Son. Black women writers never
forgave Wright for having once accused Zora
Neale Hurston of writing ‘in the safe and
narrow orbit in which America likes to
see the Negro live’. It didn’t matter that
he had denounced the absence of female
speakers  at the 1956 Conference of Black
Writers and Artists in Paris, insisting that
black men could only be free if black women
were too. Or that in a 1957 book of report­
age he had catalogued the forms of oppres­
sion suffered by women in contemporary
Spain, comparing the Catholic cult of ‘fe­
male purity’ to the Ku Klux Klan’s defence
of white womanhood. Thanks to Native Son,
he continued to be associated with the idea
that, in Darryl Pinckney’s words, ‘the black
man can only come to life as the white man’s
nightmare, the defiler of white women.’
Black feminists weren’t the only ones
to take offence. In 1986 the novelist David
Bradley confessed that the first time he read
Native Son,
I shed no tears for Bigger. I wanted him dead;
by legal means if possible, by lynching if
necessary . . . I did not see Bigger Thomas as
a symbol of any kind of black man. To me he
was a sociopath, pure and simple . . . If the
price of becoming a black writer was follow­
ing the model of Native Son, I would just have
to write like a honky.
Novelists never completely shake off an
association with the murderers they invent:
Dostoevsky is still remembered for Raskol­
nikov, Camus for Meursault. The difference
in Wright’s case is that Bigger Thomas is
practically all he is remembered for. Wright
is not just blamed for Bigger  but almost
mistaken for him.
On the surface, Wright’s life bore little
resemblance to Bigger’s: he was a child of
the rural South not the northern ghetto, a
self­made intellectual and writer. But as a
young man in Chicago he had had a series
of menial jobs in hospitals and the postal
service and could identify all too easily with
Bigger’s anger at the white world. He had
known Bigger’s fear of white people’s arbit­
rary power – in his view, this was the ‘fund­
amental emotion guiding black personality
and behaviour’, even if it sometimes ap­
peared in the ‘disguise that is called Negro
laughter’. It wasn’t only whites he wanted
to provoke with Native Son, but members
of the decorous black middle class, who
felt that a figure like Bigger Thomas was
a threat to their precarious status on the
margins of white America.
Native Son was a work of shocking in­
transigence in its portrayal of black rage,
in its treatment of liberal whites and, above
all, in its violence. After suffocating his
25 london Review of booKs 7 octobeR
210922_ceu_lrb_add.indd 1 2021
to the tension’, to a ‘feeling of not existing’
in white­dominated society. ‘The black man
is a toy in the hands of the white man. So
in order to break the vicious circle, he ex­
plodes.’ For Bigger, murder provides an ir­
resistible glimpse of freedom. It is ‘dis­
intoxicating’, as Fanon would write of anti­
colonial violence in The Wretched of the Earth.
‘I didn’t want to kill,’ Bigger tells his lawyer,
‘but what I killed for, I am.’
employer’s daughter, Mary Dalton, with a It was hardly surprising that middle­class
pillow – he’s terrified that she might alert black readers had little desire to be assoc­
her blind mother to his presence in her iated with Bigger. But for Wright, Bigger
bedroom, and that he might be accused of Thomas was not – or not merely – a sym­
rape – Bigger slices up her corpse and burns bol  of persecuted black masculinity. He
it in a furnace. His violence is recounted was a symbol of the psychic injuries of
as if it were the concentrated payback for oppression, rootlessness and dispossession
hundreds of years of anti­black violence and under capitalism. Wright said that he had
humiliation, and described with graphic met defiant men like Bigger while grow­
relish. When he murders his girlfriend, Bess, ing up in segregated Mississippi, men who
to prevent her from revealing his crime, he rebelled ‘at least for a sweet brief spell’
feels a rush of exhilaration: at last he has before they were ‘shot, hanged, maimed,
accomplished ‘something that was all his lynched’. But in Chicago and New York he
own’, an act no one would have imagin­ had ‘made the discovery that Bigger Thomas
ed him daring enough to execute. ‘Elation was not black all the time . . . and there were
filled him.’ No longer emasculated by fear, literally millions of him, everywhere. The
no longer ‘a black timid Negro boy’ in a extension of my sense of the personality of
white man’s world, he has ‘a sense of whole­ Bigger was the pivot of my life; it altered the
ness’, of power over his oppressors. He is complexion of my existence.’ As he became
a man who has ‘evened the score’. aware of ‘a vast, muddied pool of human
Frantz Fanon drew on Native Son to exam­ life in America’, he began to see that segreg­
ine the violent impulses that racism creates ation was ‘an appendage of a far vaster and
in its victims. ‘Bigger Thomas . . . is afraid, in many respects more ruthless and im­
terribly afraid. But afraid of what?’ Fanon personal commodity­profit machine’.
wrote in Black Skin, White Masks in 1952. ‘Of Wright presented Bigger Thomas as the
himself. We don’t yet know who he is, but humiliated, alienated and dangerous ‘pro­
he knows that fear will haunt the world once duct of a dislocated society’, seething with
the world finds out.’ For Fanon, Wright had fear and envy, susceptible to fantasies of
shown that violence is a way to ‘put an end power, domination and revenge. ‘He liked
THE PASSPORT AS HOME
COMFORT IN ROOTLESSNESS
Andrei S. Markovits
Foreword by Michael Ignatieff
Challenging an entire tradition, Markovits explores
through his life story the ups and downs of post-
1945 Europe and America offering a panoramic view
of key currents that shaped him.
COMMUNIST GOURMET
THE CURIOUS STORY OF FOOD IN THE
PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF BULGARIA
Albena Shkodrova
A highly illustrated, lively, and detailed
account of how the regime in Bulgaria
determined people’s everyday
food experience during communism.
A SPECTRUM OF UNFREEDOM
CAPTIVES AND SLAVES IN THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE
Leslie Peirce
First overview of captivity in the middle centuries
of the empire. With Anatolia as the geographic
focus, Leslie Peirce searches for the voices of the
unfree, drawing on archives, histories written at
the time, and legal texts.
PRESS www.ceupress.com
2021. 09. 23. 18:13
to hear of how Japan was conquering China;
of how Hitler was running the Jews to the
ground; of how Mussolini was invading
Spain.’ Wright obliquely alluded to Marcus
Garvey’s Back to Africa movement, with its
fusion of black nationalism and militarist
discipline. ‘Someday,’ Bigger muses, ‘there
would be a black man who would whip the
black people into a tight band and together
they would act and end fear and shame.’
In linking social atomisation and fear, rac­
ism and authoritarianism, Native Son ant­
icipated Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Total­
On the Boil
I
t wasn’t much of an investigation,
and it wasn’t much of an experiment.
It was like the kind of measuring you
do in primary school and call an exper­
iment: I came back from the deli and put
the kettle on. From the jump on the smart
meter (already installed when we moved
in a couple of years ago) I worked out the
kettle was sucking in about three kilowatts
of power. It took a minute to boil. The
firm that sells us our electricity, Octopus,
changes its tariffs every half­hour accord­
ing to the price set at the auctions where it
and other buyers bid for electricity from
the companies that generate it. It was just
before 11 o’clock, and the price was 35
pence for a kilowatt hour. I think I got this
right: a small tea­water boiling set me back
a penny and three­quarters.
Next to nothing. Teas all round! But it
adds up. A router here, a fridge there, al­
ways on. Put a wash through, set the dish­
washer going, switch on the lights, charge
the phones and the laptops, set the micro­
wave to gyre, bake a pie, and before you
know it the monthly bill is in the high
double figures. Or more. Normally, on a
weekday morning in late September, out­
side the peak demand of early evening, elec­
tricity’s way cheaper than this. At the same
time last year, boiling a pint of water would
have cost halfpence. The pandemic was
full on then, you might think; demand was
down. But the year before that, pre­Covid,
it was even cheaper – a quarter of a penny.
Thirty­five pence per kwh on a bright,
sunny, early autumn morning is an emerg­
ency price, a sign of extreme stress on the
system. It’s the most the UK government
allows electricity firms to charge house­
holds. They would charge more, but be­
cause they’re not allowed to, the smaller
ones can’t cover their costs, and they’re
going bust, nine so far this year. Farewell,
People’s Energy, Utility Point, PfP Energy,
MoneyPlus Energy, Hub Energy, Green
Net work Energy, Simplicity Energy, Avro
Energy and Green Supplier. We hardly
knew you. A million and a half customers
will be shunted onto bigger suppliers that
have survived so far because they built
clever financial defences against the pred­
ations of the market they live by. But there
isn’t space inside the fortress for a sudden
inrush of new households. Having  bene­
fited from electricity privatisation, the big
firms are calling for state help. None is
talking about giving its old dividends
back.
Why have prices risen so high? How
much time have you got? As I write, the
itarianism, and Wright suggested that Big­
ger ‘carried within himself the potential­
ities of either communism or fascism’.
Baldwin criticised Wright for overlook­
ing the traditions, rituals and family relat­
ionships that protect and fortify black com­
munities in even the most appalling con­
ditions. But Wright wasn’t interested in the
structures of support or mutual aid that en­
abled black people to survive as a collective.
He was drawn to outcasts and desperados
who had fallen through the cracks to find
themselves adrift, naked, in mass society.
sun’s shining, and that gives a handy few
gigawatts of solar power, but much of Brit­
ain’s electricity is generated by wind, and
the country lies becalmed, breezeless. It’s
blowing a gale off the north­west coast,
but the waters there are too deep for wind
farms. There are practical ways of storing
wind energy, but none has been built on a
big enough scale. Most of the country’s
coal­fired power stations have been shut
down. Both reactors at Hartlepool nuclear
power station have broken down, as have
two reactors elsewhere; the new nuclear
station at Hinkley C is at least five years
away from making electricity. As the trans­
ition to renewable energy proceeds, Brit­
ain relies more and more on being plugged
into the biggest possible trans­European
grid, so windless or dark days in one reg­
ion are balanced out by sunny or blustery
weather in another. But a fire knocked out
much of the capacity on the main electric­
ity cable linking Britain to France, and a
new cable connecting Britain to Norway
has only just begun operation. In all this
Brexit is not quite the blame­sponge that
hardcore Remainers might like it to be,
but decoupling from Europe’s automatic
electricity balancing system, and replac­
ing it with two uncoordinated, daily Brit­
ish auctions for European electricity, didn’t
help.
All these problems, even combined,
wouldn’t be causing the trouble they are if
it weren’t for another issue that outweighs
them all. If coal, nuclear, wind, solar and
electricity imported from Europe aren’t
generating enough of Britain’s electricity,
what stops the lights going out is gas.
It would be different on a windy day,
but on the morning I’m writing, gas­fired
power stations in the UK are making half
the country’s electricity, compared to 15
per cent for nuclear and 8 per cent for
wind. For better or worse, for the time
being, fossil gas is Britain’s energy back­
stop. And it’s everybody else’s backstop,
too. It’s become expensive very quickly.
Over the past five years the price of gas
traded in Europe has never risen above
€29 per megawatt hour. This week it was
up to €75.
The days are long gone when Britain
could count on a supply of gas from the
North Sea to cover its needs; one of the
reasons it burned through its North Sea
fossil fuel reserves so quickly was that the
market encouraged the construction of gas­
fired power stations. Now the country is
dependent on supplies piped from Nor­
way and consignments of liquefied natural
gas shipped to Milford Haven and the Isle
of Grain. The LNG carriers with their dis­
tinctive raised tanks load up in produc­
26 london Review of booKs 7 octobeR 2021
He himself was a loner, never at ease in
his own family, and hostile to the Church
thanks to a grandmother who frowned on
reading anything other than the Bible. His
fiercest quarrels inside the Communist Party
were with black militants who shared his
working­class roots but didn’t trust him as
one of them: he was too intellectual, too
independent. He was unmoved by the pro­
mise of ‘another country’ where black Amer­
icans would at last be free. Unlike the young
Baldwin, Wright doubted that such a coun­
try would ever exist in his homeland.
er  countries and set sail for the highest
bidder. Any shortfall in the market for
gas, anywhere in the world, redirects the
tankers, and raises the price for everyone.
The richest countries are forced to pay
more; the poorest countries may have to
go without.
Some of the hike in the price of gas
is the result of industrial economies ramp­
ing up production as the world part over­
comes, part assimilates the pandemic.
Some of it is a consequence of catch­
ups on coronavirus­delayed maintenance.
But these aren’t the only explanations. In­
creased demand for gas is also tied to
countries reining in their coal­fired power
stations without the renewables to replace
them, and to Japan and Germany’s turn­
ing against nuclear power after the Fuku­
shima Daiichi disaster of 2011. Japan is
very gingerly reopening its reactors; Ger­
many is moving as fast as it can to shut
them all down.
The present crisis began to show in
Asia towards the end of last year. John
Kemp, a Reuters energy analyst, describes
the emergency there as a shock similar to
Britain’s terrible winter of 1947 or the oil
crisis of 1973: a sudden event that expos­
ed deeper structural problems. Pakistan
warned of a major gas shortfall last Oct­
ober and abandoned a planned series of
LNG imports because they were too ex­
pensive. By this summer industries were
shutting down and power cuts rampant.
India and Bangladesh, too, couldn’t meet
the price in a seller’s market, and people
who were used to regular gas and electric­
ity had to go without. Some residents of
Dhaka had to sit up until the small hours
of the morning to wait for gas to cook
with. China ran into gas shortages and
high prices, in part because it had shifted
so many district heating systems from coal
to gas. A ferociously cold winter in South
Korea and Japan, where at one point black­
outs seemed likely, put more pressure on
the LNG market and the ageing fleet of
coal­fired power stations Japan uses to fill
in for its missing nuclear. In Europe, the
dominant gas supplier, Gazprom, has stop­
ped filling its storage facilities, putting
extra pressure on prices: sceptics accuse
the company, which is controlled by the
Russian state, of deliberately heightening
gas anxiety as leverage in its efforts to get
approval for a new pipeline to Germany
that bypasses Ukraine.
As winter approaches, then, an electric­
ity crisis is accompanied by a gas crisis
that is its major cause. For cash­strapped
countries in Asia, it’s a crisis of supply –
intermittent gas and blackouts. For Japan
and Europe, it’s more likely to be a crisis
Why did Baldwin and others mistake
Wright for a crude proletarian realist? His
engagement with the Communist Party –
he had been a leader of the Chicago John
Reed Club, the CPUSA writers’ group, and
published journalism in The New Masses –
contributed, but Wright’s relationship with
the party had always been stormy, particul­
arly when it came to aesthetics. His 1937
manifesto, ‘Blueprint for Negro Writing’,
laid out the case for a radical, politically
engaged modernism, and he had no time
for sentimental depictions of the lives of
of money, threatening poverty, layoffs and
cold homes for people who can’t afford to
heat them. In Italy, the government step­
ped in earlier this year with a €1.2 billion
subsidy to protect households after energy
bills jumped. A new spike of 40 per cent
on electricity bills is now threatened and
Italy is proposing a further €3 billion in
subsidies. Spain and France have also pro­
mised to help bill­payers. But Britain is in
a particularly dire place, afflicted by four
decades of free market fanaticism that left
it up to commercial companies to pay for
the storage of natural gas reserves against
a supply crunch or a price explosion. Re­
sult: there isn’t any storage. In a cold
winter, Britain warms itself from tanker to
tanker.
It’s still an open question whether the
UK will see a crisis of energy supply as well
as a crisis of energy price. According to
Mike Bradshaw of the UK Energy Research
Centre, LNG imports account for a fifth
of Britain’s gas use, and few UK­bound
consignments are on long­term contracts.
The ships will turn round and head for
Japan instead of Britain if Japan bids more.
‘The UK is not considered an attractive
market for LNG traders and is often seen
as a market of last resort,’ he writes. Graeme
Wildgoose, an LNG analyst at Poten and
Partners, told me that ‘the logic has always
been that the market will find a solution,
and the price will rise to a point at which
the necessary supply will come in. How­
ever what we’re seeing at the moment sug­
gests this is not quite as robust an argu­
ment as was thought.’
It still seems more likely that Japan
and Britain will secure enough gas, in the
same way they secured enough corona­
virus vaccines, by the expedient of poorer
countries not getting enough. But for Brit­
ain the price crisis will be harsh. Free
market fanaticism combines with the brutal
practice of making the poorest citizens
pay a disproportionate share of the cost
of funding the transition to zero­carbon
energy. What are essentially taxes to subsid­
ise offshore wind and new nuclear power
stations are collected via the electricity
bill, without much concern for people’s
ability to pay. Inflation is on the up, low­
income workers will be hit by the nation­
al  insurance rise more than high earn­
ers, and a cut to universal credit is loom­
ing. The increase in energy bills causes the
same size wound in the finances of com­
fortable households and precarious ones,
but it barely marks the flesh of the well­off,
and cuts the poorer to the bone.
James Meek
the poor and oppressed. The direct, some­
times coarse prose of Native Son represent­
ed a deliberate rupture with comforting
modes of realism.
The demands of the publishing industry
helped conceal Wright’s modernist leanings.
His 1938 novel about a day in the life of
a black postal worker, Lawd Today!, writ­
ten under the influence of Joyce, was never
published in his lifetime. But the market
also had a hand in the works that did appear,
ironing out complexity and rejecting any­
thing that might be too unsettling for white
readers. Under pressure from the Book of
the Month club, Wright’s editors at Harper
& Brothers suppressed passages in Native
Son describing Bigger Thomas and Mary
Dalton in bed. ‘The sharp bones of her hips
move in a hard and veritable grind. Her
mouth was open and her breath came slow
and deep.’ This is not rape: it is the sort
of encounter between a black man and a
white woman that the myth of the black
rapist was intended to conceal. By expurgat­
ing such passages, Wright’s publishers not
only restored the image of the pure, virgin­
al white woman, but deprived Bigger of a
comprehensible motive for his panic. They
magnified the brutality of his crime and
turned him into a monster. The original
version of the novel wasn’t published until
1992, when the Library of America brought
out a restored edition of five of Wright’s
books. When Baldwin and Ellison took aim
at Native Son, it was the Book of the Month
version of Bigger they were writing about.
Wright’s memoir also raised objections
from the Book of the Month club. One mem­
ber of the selection committee, Dorothy Can­
field Fisher, was offended by the way Black
Boy overlooked those white Americans who
‘have done what they could to lighten the
dark stain of racial discrimination in our
nation’. The second half of the book, about
Wright’s often harrowing experiences in
Chicago and New York and his struggles in­
side the CPUSA, was cut entirely, so that
the memoir could be read as a hopeful tale
of exodus from Southern terror rather than
a caustic commentary on the pervasiveness
of racism on both sides of the Mason­
Dixon line.
M
oRe was suppressed too. Wright’s
publishers rejected the novel he
at the time considered his most
important, written between Native Son and
Black Boy. An abridged version of The Man
Who Lived Underground appeared in the post­
humous collection Eight Men (1961) and at­
tracted some influential admirers, includ­
ing Irving Howe, who declared its ‘sense
of narrative rhythm’ to be ‘superior to any­
thing in his full­length novels’. Despite this,
the complete novel hasn’t appeared in print
until now. It’s a short, riveting, exploratory
work, begun in June 1941, after the Nazi in­
vasion of the Soviet Union. Two weeks be­
fore the invasion, at the opening session of
the fourth American Writers’ Congress, he
had given a passionate speech against the
war. To his fury, the CPUSA had suspend­
ed its campaign against racism in the war
industries, and with the American military
still segregated, he refused to support a
white man’s army. (He was later drafted but
declared psychologically unfit, apparently
because of his views about racism.) Al­
though he wasn’t yet ready to leave the
party, he withdrew from its activities and
poured all his energy into The Man Who
Lived Underground.
The novel was inspired by a story Wright First and only
read in a detective magazine about a white light to make a
man in California who lived for several
months in a hideout. Wright’s protagon­
real difference.
ist, Fred Daniels, is black, but unlike Bigger Mr White | Warwickshire
Thomas he is also innocent. The novel
begins on a Saturday evening when Daniels,
a working­class, churchgoing man with a
pregnant wife, is stopped by the police and
accused of killing a white man in order to D MADE
WAV E L E N G
AN I
rape his wife. They beat him with a black­
N
H
jack, and promise he can go home if he
H T TH
signs a confession. Although he’s innocent,
I G T RE I
N
G
he feels ‘condemned, inescapably guilty of AT B R I TA
EC
YL
some nameless deed’, and agrees to con­
DA
fess, if only to end the agony and see his
HN
wife. When the police take him to his apart­
No Ordinary Light
O LO
ment she goes into labour. They rush her to
hospital, where he manages to escape. He
opens a sewer and climbs inside, sensing in
‘the whispering rush of the water’ the ‘illus­
G Y (TM)
If only you could still see detail and
ion of another world with other values and
other laws’. As many critics have said, The
colours without the frustration of
Man Who Lived Underground seems startling­ straining to do so. This was precisely
ly contemporary in its treatment of police why our Founder first built a better
violence against an innocent black man. light for his mum who suffered with
The story of the interrogation has partic­
macular degeneration.
ular resonances with the 1989 Central Park
Five case, in which a group of black and See the world with a fresh pair
Latino teenagers were manipulated into of eyes
confessing to the rape of a white female
jogger. Not surprisingly, The Man Who Lived Our eyes are most comfortable and
Underground has been held up as a prescient work best under natural light. This is
indictment of the racist carceral state – a why Serious Daylight Wavelength
parable for the era of Black Lives Matter. Technology™ uses special-purpose
But this is another misrepresentation.
36v purple LEDs, patented phosphors
In fact, the book is much less of a pro­
test  novel than Native Son, and takes even and proprietary electronics to project a
greater liberties with naturalism. Its setting powerful light beam that will transform
and atmosphere – chases through sewers, your visual experience. You’ll enjoy
frenzied manhunts – recall noirish films crystal clear clarity when reading and
like Fritz Lang’s M and Carol Reed’s The
see the vibrant colours that make
Third Man. The writing combines the blunt
rhythms of hard­boiled detective fiction with craftwork such a pleasure.
kinetic, almost phantasmagorical strokes, Every Serious Light is hand-built by
intensities of emotion and colour. As Howe skilled British technicians from over 100
observed of Native Son, ‘naturalism pushed
to an extreme turns here into something
bespoke components. Your eyes are
other than itself, a kind of expressionist unique, so the adjustable beam-width,
outburst, no longer a replica of the famil­ full dimming capability, and fully flexible
iar social world but a self­contained realm arm mean you can tailor your light to
of grotesque emblems.’ However much the suit you and what you are doing.
novel may reveal about police brutality and
racism, Wright thought of it as a novel of
Enjoy clear detail again
ideas rather than a book about racial in­
justice: as he told his agent, it was ‘the first 30 day in-home trial
time I’ve really tried to step beyond the
straight black­white stuff ’. Recommended by over
Daniels is a victim of police violence,
but Wright’s narrative doesn’t hinge on his 500 Opticians
victimisation so much as on the mutations
of his consciousness as he builds a new For Advice. For a Brochure. To Order:
home for himself underground, illuminat­
ed by a single lightbulb. (Ellison, who knew FREE +44 (0)1296 390387
all about Wright’s novella, equipped his own seriousreaders.com/3927
underground man with 1369 lightbulbs.)
He steals money from a real­estate and in­ Compact Light
surance company that has ‘collected hund­ WORTH £150
reds of thousands of dollars in rent from
poor coloured folks’ – ‘not to spend, but with any Serious
just to keep around and look at’. He ‘rubbed Light order when
the money with his fingers, as though ex­ you use code 3927,
pecting it suddenly to reveal secret qual­ while stocks last
ities’: this is money as Marx describes it
27 london Review of booKs 7 octobeR 2021
in his essay on ‘the mysterious character of
the commodity form’. As Daniels observes
‘with a musing smile’, it is ‘just like any
other kind of paper’, and he uses it to wall-
paper his underground home, a ‘mocking
symbol’ of his exile from the world that re-
jected him. When another man is accused
of the theft he has committed he can only
conclude that ‘everybody’s guilty.’ The con-
tingency and artifice of the world outside,
the ‘dead world of sunshine and rain he had
left’, leads him to the realisation that some-
how ‘he was all people. In some utterable
fashion he was all people and they were he.’
Rather than hardening his sense of individ-
ual identity, racist persecution leads him to
an almost cosmic awareness of what he
shares with others.
One of the novel’s first readers was the
German-Jewish psychiatrist Fredric Werth-
am, who sent a poem in response:
The Freudians talk about the id
And bury it below.
But Richard Wright took off the lid
And let us see the woe.
Wertham, a professor at Johns Hopkins who
moved in left-wing circles, shared Wright’s
conviction that there was ‘no other act . . .
that so gathers together the threads of
personal, social, political life of the nation
as crime’. Wright had written to Wertham
after reading his book Dark Legend: A Study
in Murder, about a young Italian immigrant
who killed his sexually adventurous mother
to defend the honour of his dead father.
Wertham, in turn, published a remarkable
essay on Native Son, linking the bedroom
scene to a repressed episode from Wright’s
childhood. They later joined forces to set
up the Lafargue Clinic, which provided cheap
psychiatric counselling for people in Har-
lem. Wright’s friendship with Wertham re-
flected his desire to fuse the insights of
Marx and Freud – he said they were two of
his favourite ‘poets’ – and apply them to the
lives of oppressed people, especially vic-
tims of racism. ‘I’m convinced that the next
great arena of discovery in the Negro will
be the dark landscape of his own mind, what
living in America has done to him,’ he wrote
in his diary.
Wright explored his own mental land-
scape in ‘Memories of My Grandmother’, a
previously unpublished essay that appears
as an appendix to The Man Who Lived Under-
ground and describes the experiences that
lay behind the novel. The first – an en-
counter with the ‘strangely familiar’ – took
place in Chicago, shortly before his grand-
mother’s death in 1934. Wright thought
he had ‘swept my life clean . . . of the
religious  influences of my grandmother’,
until he read a book that ‘miraculously link-
ed my grandmother’s life to my own in a
most startling manner’: Gertrude Stein’s
Three Lives. Reading ‘Melanctha’, Stein’s story
in black vernacular speech, at his grand-
mother’s flat, ‘I suddenly began to hear the
English language for the first time in my life!
. . . But more than that; suddenly I began
to hear my grandmother speak for the first
time.’ Later, he read the story aloud in a
basement on the South Side to a ‘group
of illiterate, class-conscious Negro workers
. . . and there were such wild howls of de-
light, such expressions of recognition, that
I could barely finish.’
Somehow Wright connects this moment
to a form of music his grandmother had
reviled: the blues, with their manner of
‘freely juxtaposing totally unrelated images
and symbols and then tying them into some
overall concept, mood, feeling’. By impos-
ing a strange order on the fragments of a
chaotic, intolerable reality, the blues mark
‘the advent of surrealism on the American
scene’. Wright was familiar with surrealism
from his experience of psychoanalysis, but
the blues represented a surrealism born of
necessity rather than theory – not unlike
the surrealism of the Martinican poet Aimé
Césaire, whose epic Notebook of a Return
to the Native Land was discovered by André
Breton in a haberdashery shop in Fort-
de-France. Suddenly, Wright could see par-
allels with his grandmother’s ‘ardent and
volatile religious disposition’, which he had
previously found ‘illogical if not degrad-
ing’. After reading about the white man
who had lived underground, he immediate-
ly thought about his grandmother, who, in
her religious life, had retreated from the
world. The ‘guilt theme’ provided him with
a ‘steady beat upon which I proceeded to
improvise’, as in jazz, with its ‘improvis-
ed, tone-coloured melodies’. (Almost as an
afterthought, he adds that this was linked,
‘in a rather muted way’, to ‘the problem of
mother, who looked so white she could have
been a ‘pretty Victorian woman’. It took him
a while to learn to ‘sense white people
as “white” people’, because ‘many of my
relatives were “white”-looking people.’ He
didn’t have to go to school to realise that
race was a construct – not that any school
in America would have taught him that.
To be a black male in the South was to
be at constant risk of catching ‘the white
death’ – especially after the First World War
ended, and black soldiers returned home
to face a new wave of violence. Wright’s
uncle was murdered by white men envious
of his success in business; a classmate’s
brother was lynched and castrated for sleep-
ing with a white prostitute. Baldwin lam-
ented the fact that in Wright’s fiction ‘there
is a great space where sex ought to be; and
what usually fills this space is violence.’ But
anti-black violence, from property destruct-
ion to lynching, was the overwhelming real-
ity of Wright’s childhood, and it was often
ignited by rumours of sex between black
men and white women. By the time he turn-
ed twelve,
I had a conception of life that no experience
would ever erase, a predilection for what was
real that no argument could ever gainsay, a
sense of the world that was mine and mine
alone, a notion as to what life meant that no
education could ever alter, a conviction that
the meaning of living came only when one
was struggling to wring a meaning out of
meaningless suffering.
All this, he found, gave him ‘insight into
the suffering of others’, drawing him to
what he called the ‘drama of human feel-
ing which is hidden by the external drama
of life’. But it also intensified his sense of
separation from people who didn’t see what
he did.
Black Boy was denounced by Southern
segregationists like the Mississippi senator
Theodore Bilbo, who called it ‘the dirtiest,
filthiest, lousiest, most obscene piece of
writing that I have ever seen in print’, de-
signed to ‘plant the seeds of hate in every
Negro in America . . . against the white race

WORLD
WORLD LITERATURE
LITERATURE
the Negro’, since ‘if you accuse a man of
something that he did not do . . . it has the
power of upsetting his entire way of life.’)
anywhere’. Even in New York, Wright and
his wife, Ellen, had to set up a fake corpor-
ation to buy a house, since no bank would

DECENTER
DECENTERED
ED
Wright was always a deeply self-reflective
writer. But ‘Memories of My Grandmother’
is especially revealing about the way he want-
give a black man a mortgage, especially a
black man married to a white woman. They
didn’t dare walk arm in arm on the street.
BEYOND
BEYOND THE
THE "WEST"
"WEST" THROUGH
THROUGH TURKEY,
TURKEY, MEXICO
MEXICO
ed to write: a homegrown modernism in-
spired by tabloids and pulp cinema, the
His white leftist friends couldn’t provide
much comfort: they couldn’t understand
AND BENGAL
AND BENGAL blues and black working-class life, and a why Harlem exploded in riots in 1943 after
robust sense of the absurd. a black soldier was killed by a white police-
The same memories, the same ‘strange- man. Wright’s confrontations with Amer-
ly familiar’ juxtapositions of the ‘unrelated’ ica left him exhausted – and desperate to
Ian
Ian Almond
Almond that Wright believed defined black exper- flee. Although he’d quit the Communist
ience in America, went into the writing of Party, he remained under FBI surveillance,
Black Boy. That Wright lived to tell the tale because J. Edgar Hoover saw him as even
was itself a near miracle: his early life was more subversive than his former allies.
""......aavital,
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Literature'." as his fiction. The rural Mississippi he grew n 1946, Wright accepted a formal invit-
Sharae up in was the epicentre of American apart- ation from Claude Lévi-Strauss to visit
SharaeDeckard,
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in
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WorldLiterature,
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orthe
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culture white people ‘too much to talk of them’. close to being resolved in America. ‘There
inthe
in theEnglish
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FrenchLanguages."
Languages."
When Wright was three, his family moved is not a black problem in the United States,
IgnacioM.
Ignacio M.Sanchez
SanchezPrado,
Prado, Professor
Professorof
of to Memphis, Tennessee, where his father but a white problem,’ Wright replied. The
Spanishand
Spanish andLatin
LatinAmerican
AmericanStudies
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at
WashingtonUniversity
Washington Universityin
inSaint
SaintLouis,
Louis,USA
USA abandoned them. His mother worked as a existentialists embraced him, and he said
cook for a white family but soon became he had more freedom on a single block in
an invalid, and he was largely raised by Paris than in all of the United States. Camus
his austere, Seventh Day Adventist grand- arranged for Black Boy to be published by

28 london Review of booKs 7 octobeR 2021

Gallimard, and Sartre and Beauvoir champ- sidered himself a novelist, not a ‘Negro In Paris there were new connections to graphs of Palestinian refugees expelled from
ioned him as an exemplary engagé writer, an novelist’, but the fiction he published in be made among men and women who were their villages. ‘I peered up into the face of
outsider who wrote about ‘the struggle of a France tended to vindicate those who be- forging a collective future for themselves in the journalist; his eyes were unblinking,
man against the resistance of the world’ (in lieved that exile had cut him off from the anti-colonial struggles. Wright c0-founded hot, fanatic. This man was religious . . .
Beauvoir’s words), and a victim of racism world his work depended on. The Outsider Présence Africaine with Aimé Césaire, Leo- And the Jews had been spurred by religious
who exposed the lie of the American dream. (1953), his most ambitious attempt at an pold Senghor and Alioune Diop, and help- dreams to build a state in Palestine . . . Ir-
Though Sartre and Beauvoir were fellow- existentialist fiction, was a long, unwieldy ed organise its Conference of Black Writ- rationalism meeting irrationalism.’ West-
travellers, they were willing to overlook his novel of ideas, by turns pulpy and ponder- ers and Artists at the Sorbonne. Like most ern imperialism’s great legacy among its
hatred of Soviet communism. ous, with a plot so improbable – a black black writers in Paris, including Baldwin, former subjects, Wright argued, was an in-
As if determined to play the role in which nihilist postal worker in Chicago, gruesome he shied away from declaring support for tense racial consciousness, which – with
his French admirers had cast him, Wright murders and a manhunt – that it would the Algerian national liberation struggle, dangerous ease – could be fused with relig-
sometimes spoke as though he’d made a have caused a B-movie director to blush. but he also refused to sign a statement de- ious feeling to mobilise the masses. But he
sudden metamorphosis from black man to But it was also a brave attempt to explore nouncing the Soviet invasion of Hungary was also moved by the display of Afro-Asian
existential man: ‘I have no race except that the dark landscape of Cold War paranoia unless it condemned the war in Suez too. unity at Bandung, ‘a decisive moment in the
which is forced upon me. I have no country and fear. As a black writer who had sever- His first travel book, Black Power, came out consciousness of 65 per cent of the human
except that to which I’m obliged to belong. ed his connections to everything that had of a trip to the Gold Coast in 1953, taken at race’ that seemed to promise a ‘de-Occid-
I have no traditions. I’m free. I have only anchored him – family, country and com- the urging of the pan-African intellectual entalisation of mankind’ and therefore a
the future.’ He hadn’t come all the way rades – Wright was now experiencing a new George Padmore. Kwame Nkrumah invited time when ‘there will be no East or West.’
to France to write sequels to Native Son and form of isolation and claustrophobia. His him to give a speech but otherwise ignor- White Man, Listen!, published in 1957, was
Black Boy; he wanted to expand his reach black nihilist postal worker, Damon Cross, ed  him, arousing Wright’s suspicion that Wright’s most confessional account of the
both imaginatively and geographically. His who moves to Harlem under a false ident- Nkrumah saw him as an anti-communist inner drama of decolonisation. He dedicat-
fiction became more explicitly philosoph- ity after killing an acquaintance, has also spy. ‘My blackness did not help me,’ he ed it to Eric Williams, the prime minister 
ical, featuring long – sometimes tortured – severed all connections. He too is both isol- noted, among Africans who didn’t see him of Trinidad and author of Capitalism and
disquisitions on guilt, freedom and re- ated and confined, embroiled in the faction- as a brother. In his diary from the Gold Slavery, and to the ‘Westernised and tragic
sponsibility. He also began to travel, writ- al struggles of the Communist Party while Coast he described himself as ‘enervated, elite of Africa, Asia and the West Indians,
ing essayistic, introspective works of report- failing to find common ground with a group listless . . . I find myself longing to take a the lonely outsiders who exist precarious-
age that – as Hazel Rowley pointed out in of black men cracking jokes about whites – ship and go home.’ ly  on the cliff-like margins of many cult-
her 2001 Life of Wright – prefigured the he can’t find ‘in this world rebels with Yet his commitment to independence in ures’. The ‘“whiteness” of the white world’,
New Journalism. whom he could feel at home’. ‘All writing Africa and beyond was unwavering. In 1955 the spread of white supremacy in countries
Wright’s American friends looked ask- is a secret form of autobiography,’ Wright he went to cover the Bandung Conference dominated by imperialism, had left native
ance at his romance with the Parisian exist- said, and so it is with The Outsider. It was, of non-aligned countries, where he found elites orphaned: they could never be fully
entialists. ‘You see I kept saying his books after all, Wright’s sense of himself as an himself confronting a new, insurgent polit- Western but neither could they find a haven
were not Negro,’ Gertrude Stein confided outsider – an intellectual, as well as a black ics inspired by the two mystical illusions in their own traditions. Wright saw aspects
in Carl Van Vechten. ‘That is what I liked pariah – that had led him into the Com- with which he’d wrestled back home: race of himself in the colonised elites of Africa
in them so much, but now when he isn’t, munist Party and out of it again. The Cold and faith. The book he wrote about the trip, and Asia, especially in their tendency to
do I like it so much?’ Wright resented the War exacerbated his feeling of homeless- The Colour Curtain, begins on the flight to ‘hide their deepest reactions from those
notion that he was obliged to represent what ness, of being caught between Stalinism Indonesia, where an Arab journalist, also they fear would penalise them if they sus-
Stein called the ‘spirit of his race’. He con- and the American empire. on his way to Bandung, shows him photo- pected what they really felt’. Like Wright,

SARA AHMED Complaint!

Stuart Hall

Cultural StudieS media StudieS televiSion StudieS

Cover art: Stuart Hall on bbC televiSion in 2000, from The STuarT hall ProjecT (JoHn akomfraH, 2013), CourteSy of JoHn akomfraH and Smoking dogS filmS. © Smoking dogS filmS.

New Books from DUKE UNIVERSIT Y PRESS

Writings on Media gathers more than twenty of Stuart Hall’s media analyses, from scholarly
essays such as “Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse” (1973) to other writings

SARA AHMED
addressed to wider publics. Hall explores the practices of news photography, the development
of media and cultural studies, the changing role of television, and how the nation imagines
itself through popular media. He attends to Britain’s imperial history and the politics of
race and cultural identity as well as the media’s relationship to the political project of the
state. Testifying to the range and agility of Hall’s critical and pedagogic engagement with
contemporary media culture—and also to his collaborative mode of working—this volume
WRITINGS ON MEDIA

reaffirms his stature as an innovative media theorist while demonstrating the continuing

Writings on Media
relevance of his methods of analysis.

“How refreshing and urgent to revisit Stuart Hall’s formative ideas about racism, identity,
ideology, and media at the very moment that media has become such a contested site and
source of ideological work. Hall’s searing and critical insights about what media does, how

History of the Present

it works, and why it matters have never been as pressing as they are today. In our global and
national media ecologies where disputes over facts, epistemological turmoil, fake news, and
ideological rigidities are routine, Charlotte Brunsdon’s curated collection of Hall’s essays on

STUART HALL
hy
the media is a remarkable and indispensable gift.”—Herman Gray , Emeritus Professor
of Sociology, University of California, Santa Cruz

p
“Stuart Hall revolutionized the critical study of media, positioning them—newspapers,

CHARLOTTE BRUNSDON, editor

photographs, television—as key sites of struggle over cultural meaning and power, and

so the
thus as central to the project of cultural studies. Above all, however, Hall did not just write
about media but used them prolifically as outlets for critical intervention in the world. This

o
superb set of essays testifies to the uniquely powerful voice of one of the most important

l
public intellectuals in postimperial Britain.”—Ien anG , Distinguished Professor of Cultural
Stuart Hall: Selected Writings
i n
Studies, Western Sydney University

phers oy of r
Stuart Hall (1932–2014) was one of the most prominent and influential scholars and public
intellectuals of his generation. Hall taught at the University of Birmingham and the Open
University, was the founding editor of New Left Review, and was the author of Cultural
Studies 1983: A Theoretical History, Familiar Stranger: A Life between Two Islands, and other

Philosophy for Spiders

id heor ackeie
books also published by Duke University Press.

WRITINGS ON MEDIA History of

p
CHarlotte BrunSdon is Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of
the Present

s w t hy enz k
Warwick. Her most recent book is Television Cities: Paris, London, Baltimore, also published

COMPLAINT ! On the Low Theory of Kathy Acker

by Duke University Press.

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Stuart Hall: Selected Writings

A series edited“Complaint!
www.dukeupress.edu

is precisely
by Catherine Hall the text we need at this moment”—Angela
and Bill Schwarz Y. Davis
DUKE
Edited by Charlotte Brunsdon Stuart Hall
or
f lo kat mckwar MCKENZIE WARK

Couplets
A Brian Massumi Travels in Speculative Pragmatism
BRIAN MASSUMI
Thought in the Act

F ICT IONAL “Beyond Nahum

Dimitri A Fictional Commons
This Chandler Natsume Soseki and the Properties
Narrow
Now“ of Modern Literature
COM MONS Or, MICHAEL K. BOURDAGHS
Delimitations,
of
W.E.B.DuBois
Natsume Sōseki
“Beyond This Narrow Now”
C uplets
and the Properties of Modern Literature

Or, Delimitations, of W. E. B. Du Bois

Michael K. Bourdaghs Travels in Speculative Pragmatism NAHUM DIMITRI CHANDLER

In the U.K. and Europe, contact COMBINED ACADEMIC PUBLISHERS.

combinedacademic.co.uk dukeupress.edu

29 london review of books 7 october 2021

 many had been attracted to the non-racial,
secular politics of the Communist Party,
ALIEN LISTENING:
which had enabled the racially oppressed
VOYAGER’S GOLDEN RECORD
to ‘meet revolutionary fragments of the
AND MUSIC FROM EARTH
hostile race on a plane of equality’. But with
by Daniel K. L. Chua
the rise of independence struggles, and the
and Alexander Rehding
birth of the non-aligned movement, Afric-
“This book is a unique hybrid of music ans and Asians could now collectively ex-
theory and bioastronomy, an engaging press their ‘racial feelings . . . in all their
how-to manual especially for composers turgid passion’.
fluent in both Kierkegaard and Klingon.” ‘My position is a split one,’ Wright said.
— J O N L O M BERG ‘I’m black. I’m a man of the West . . . I see
and understand the West . . . but I also see
FLASHBACK, ECLIPSE: and understand the non or anti-Western
THE POLITICAL IMAGINARY point of view. How is this possible? The
OF ITALIAN ART IN THE 1960S double vision of mine stems from my being
by Romy Golan a product of Western civilisation and from
my racial identity.’ Wright didn’t consider
“Not only challenges prewar and postwar
his ‘double vision’ to be a source of tor-
periodizations in Italian art, but also
ment, as W.E.B. Du Bois had described
reevaluates the performance of anachrony
‘double consciousness’ in The Souls of Black
in the writing of art history.”
Folk. It was, rather, an intellectual asset,
— S P Y RO S PA PA PE T RO S
allowing him to ‘see both worlds from an-
other and third point of view’, and to see
NEAR FUTURES SERIES
the colonised as both ‘victims of their own
MARKETS IN THE MAKING: religious projections and victims of West-
RETHINKING COMPETITION, ern imperialism’. An anonymous reviewer
GOODS, AND INNOVATION in El Moudjahid, the French-language news-
by Michel Callon
paper of the Algerian National Liberation
“Upends not only the model of the market Front, took strong exception to this claim.
offered by economists but most of The author was almost certainly Fanon,
F A L L 2 0 21
the alternative ways of thinking about who six years earlier had sent a fan letter to
market processes…a profound and Wright. But by the time White Man, Listen!
important work.” — TIM O T H Y MIT C HEL L appeared, Fanon had joined the Algerian
revolution, and lost interest in, and patience
DISTRIBUTED BY PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
with, the private sorrows of colonised elites.
ONLINE AT ZONEBOOKS.ORG ‘It is true,’ he wrote in his review, ‘that the
drama of consciousness of a Westernised
black, torn between his white culture and
his negritude, can be very painful; but this
drama, which, after all, kills no one, is too
particular to be representative: the misfort-
A new collection from une of the colonised African masses, ex-
master of the short story ploited, subjugated, is first of all of a vital,
material order.’ The psychic agonies of mem-
DIANE WILLIAMS bers of the elite were, he wrote, ‘a luxury
that they are unable to afford’.
W
Right would have accepted the
difference between material nec-
essity and the ‘luxury’ of merely
“Williams can do more with
being lost between one identity and an-
two sentences than most
other. But he understood – in part thanks
writers can do with two
to his own struggles as a black Southern
hundred pages.” refugee who had made his way north – that
—The New York Review of Books the obstacles on the road to freedom were
as much psychological as economic. The
violence and exploitation of imperialism,
“The godmother of along with Western education and the sec-
flash fiction.” ular styles of thought and ideology it ex-
—The Paris Review ported to the colonies, had created forms
of dislocation – patterns  of dependence,
hierarchy, cultural schizophrenia – that
“Diane Williams seeks political independence couldn’t overcome
to stun, in something overnight. Unsparing in its indictment of
the West, but alert to the destructive allure
near the literal sense
of nativism and other sectarian passions,
of the word.”
Wright’s appraisal of the post-colonial con-
—The New Republic dition was full of suggestive ambiguities.
As Doris Lessing recognised, this ambival-
ence was an expression of lucidity – and
courage. Wright’s trilogy of books about
decolonisation was the great achievement
of his last decade, but to his contempor-
On sale October 12, 2021 aries, especially his black contemporaries,
his candour came across as scepticism, even
disdain, towards the African motherland at
the dawn of its emancipation. He seemed
30 london Review of booKs 7 octobeR 2021
to have little to offer the colonised other
than patronising ‘tough love’. 
As a novelist, meanwhile, Wright look-
ed  more and more like a literary Sonny
Liston, knocked out by not one but two
Muhammad Alis: Ellison, whose rhetorical
pyrotechnics threw the leaden philosophis-
ing of The Outsider into embarrassing relief;
and Baldwin, whose winding, hypnotic sent-
ences evoked the cadences of the Church
from which Wright had escaped. His per-
sonal life, too, was in crisis. His marriage
had fallen apart, and the novelist William
Gardner Smith ran away with his mistress.
He became convinced – with good reason –
that the black expatriate journalist Richard
Gibson was spying on him for the CIA. In
his last year Wright slept with a revolver be-
side his bed. When friends made light of
his paranoia, he said that ‘any black man
who is not paranoid is in serious shape.’ He
rang up friends in the middle of the night –
Sartre, the black expatriate cartoonist Ollie
Harrington, the anarchist Daniel Guérin –
to vent his frustrations. He found solace at
his country home, where he spent his time
gardening and writing haikus about the sun
and rain in the fields of Mississippi, child-
ren in the alleys of Chicago tenements, his
dead mother’s melancholy expression. His
late fiction, especially his short stories, ex-
pressed a longing for the speech, the hum-
our and the blues sensibility of the working-
class black Americans he seemed to have
left behind when he crossed the Atlantic.
When Baldwin read the posthumous stories
in Eight Men, he could ‘not avoid feeling that
Wright, as he died, was acquiring a new
tone, and a less uncertain aesthetic dist-
ance, and a new depth’.
For all his proud solitude, Wright never
imagined that he was fighting merely for
himself. In his last public speech, ‘The Sit-
uation of the Negro Artist and Intellectual
in American Society’, delivered at the Amer-
ican Church on the Quai d’Orsay on 8 Nov-
ember 1960, Wright described the world
of black writers as a ‘nightmarish jungle’
controlled by a white publishing industry
that was only too happy to see them tear
one another apart in furies of Darwinian
competition. He thundered against black
churches and concert halls for shutting
their doors to Paul Robeson, who had been
blacklisted and stripped of his passport.
As much as he despised Robeson’s com-
munism, he hated Robeson’s racist enemies
more. He was done with the protest novel
but not with protesting, and he was em-
boldened by the knowledge that his aud-
ience included American government agents.
It might have been a scene in his last novel,
‘The Island of Hallucination’, a darkly satir-
ical portrait of black writers in Cold War
Paris that has still never been published.
Shortly after his address, Wright fell ill
with an infection; less than three weeks
later, he was dead. (His daughter, Julia, still
believes he was poisoned by the CIA; others
blame the KGB.) Thomas Diop, an editor
at Présence Africaine, gave the eulogy at a priv-
ate ceremony at Père Lachaise on 3 Dec-
ember 1960. ‘Dick’s body was cremated,’
Chester Himes wrote, ‘the coffin consum-
ed by flames as Dick’s enemies showered
praise on his body.’ ‘Listen to Dick,’ Ollie
Harrington whispered to him. ‘He hears
what they’re saying about him.’ c
‘P
roust’s unpublished work does
not exist,’ Bernard de Fallois wrote
in 1954. Provocative words, since
he was introducing a whole volume of such
material, and two years earlier had brought
out Jean Santeuil, an unfinished novel Proust
worked on between 1895 and 1899. De Fal-
lois was trying to suggest, with a little too
much bravado, that all Proust’s writing,
early and late, published and unpublished,
should be considered part of his great novel,
À la recherche du temps perdu. ‘The thousands
of pages he dedicated to preparing for it,’ he
argued, were sketches for the same grand
project. Another rather more dubious mean-
ing is that we won’t find a new Proust by
looking at his manuscripts, only meet again
the author we already know. Still, there is
something to be said for de Fallois’s notion
that a writer’s workshop is a fictional space:
‘The history of a novel is a novel.’ And pretty
soon he relaxes and is happy to contradict
himself. ‘Proust’s unpublished materials . . .
do not aspire to an independent existence,
distinct from his work, but they are defin-
itely something other than drafts.’
De Fallois had been studying the profus-
ion of Proust papers still at that point held
by the family, and later given to the Biblio-
thèque nationale. His argument about the
unpublished materials was made in his intro-
duction to Contre Sainte-Beuve, which gath-
ers together essays on literature and critic-
ism along with garrulous pieces of social
and personal gossip. There are thoughts on
sleep, on rooms, on days, and on what it’s
like to see something you’ve written appear
in Le Figaro. There are discussions of Sainte-
Beuve’s critical method, of Nerval, Baude-
laire and Balzac. And there is a brief elab-
oration of the memory theory that will re-
solve the supposed riddle of À la recherche:
where are writers to turn when they have
lost all faith in their talent and all interest
in reality?
A more austere, more scholarly version
of some of these writings was edited by
Pierre Clarac and published under the same
title in 1971, and there are English trans-
lations of both works: of the first by Sylvia
Townsend Warner in 1958, of the second
by John Sturrock in 1988. The English titles
rather elegantly contradict one another.
Sturrock’s is literal and exact: Against Sainte-
Beuve. Townsend Warner’s is more allusive
and less quarrelsome: By Way of Sainte-
Beuve. Sturrock calls her title ‘emollient’,
but it has its element of mischief, since it
could be translated back into French as Du
côté de chez Sainte-Beuve. All kinds of things
can happen down someone’s way, and Proust
himself thought his writing was more ‘à
propos de Sainte-Beuve’ than ‘sur Sainte-
Beuve’, more in connection with him than
about him. The difference seems slight, but
it may matter.
Throughout his introduction, a wonder-
ful piece of critical writing in itself, de Fal-
lois keeps looking for the right phrase to
describe the material he has assembled.
‘This is not an essay or a novel,’ he says. ‘It
is a work.’ He also calls it ‘the dream of
a book, a bookish dream’. He means it’s
Proust’s dream, of course, but since it’s his
own assembly it’s his dream too. The lit-
erary adventure, however, is Proust’s. He
makes a start on a novel, abandons it, turns
to criticism and theory, finds that those
Proust and the Pet Goat
Michael Wood
Les Soixante-Quinze Feuillets: Et autres manuscrits inédits
by Marcel Proust, edited by Nathalie Mauriac Dyer.
Gallimard, 384 pp., €21, April, 978 2 07 293171 0
modes begin to look more like a novel than
his novel did, and sets out in earnest on the
project that will occupy him till dies.
Among the papers de Fallois consulted
were ‘75 large-format pages’ dating from
1908, which constituted ‘the earliest stage
of À la recherche’ after Jean Santeuil. And here a
curious story begins. Until 2018, no one had
seen any of these 75 pages since de Fallois
reproduced fragments of them. What had
happened? In the second volume of his bio-
graphy of Proust, published in 1965, George
Painter referred to ‘fragments of a lost novel’.
In his 1996 biography Jean-Yves Tadié spoke
of ‘75 pages currently missing’. The manu-
scripts were not in the collection of papers
that went to the Bibliothèque nationale in
1962, or indeed anywhere else that schol-
ars could think of. For Nathalie Mauriac
Dyer, the skilful editor of the now publish-
ed documents, ‘their disappearance, the
vain inquiries conducted by several gener-
ations of scholars since the beginning of the
1960s, all that imprinted on the “75 pages”
a special mystery and aura.’
Then in January 2018 de Fallois died, and
his papers too went to the Bibliothèque nat-
ionale. They contained, among many other
things, some stories Proust had chosen not
to print – these were edited by Luc Fraisse
and published in 2019 as Le Mystérieux Cor-
respondant et autres nouvelles inédites – and the
75 pages. Had de Fallois forgotten he had
them? Did they get lost among his own
papers? Either way, he had kept them. Both
Fraisse and Mauriac Dyer turn to an inter-
esting old French phrase in this context:
‘par-devers lui’. It means ‘to himself ’, but is
a little more formal than that. Fraisse uses it
of Proust’s treatment of the pieces he didn’t
want to publish: ‘Proust preserved them
pars-devers lui in his archives.’ Mauriac Dyer
uses it of de Fallois: ‘A Proustian with taste,
Bernard de Fallois . . . had not kept par-
devers lui the least remarkable of the manu-
scripts of the author of Swann.’
I like the archaic flavour of the phrase,
and when I first read Mauriac Dyer’s sent-
ence I thought it was a polite way of saying
almost nothing. Then the implications of
‘with taste’ and the double negative (‘not
kept . . . the least remarkable’) dawned on
me, and the irony seemed hard to ignore.
Delicate, but distinctly present. On this read-
ing, the (unstated, entirely deniable) sug-
gestion would be that, having published
some of the 75 pages, de Fallois didn’t want
to do any more damage to Proust’s reputat-
ion, even if scholars were publicly grieving
for the lost treasure, for what Gallimard, on
the publication of Les Soixante-Quinze Feuil-
lets, called the Proustian grail.
There are apparently 76 pages with writ-
ing on them, but Mauriac Dyer and Gal-
limard have kept the magical number 75 for
their title. Mauriac Dyer has divided them
into six sections or episodes, with the titles
‘An Evening in the Country’, ‘The Villebon
31 london review of books 7 october 2021
Way and the Meséglise Way’, ‘A Stay at the
Seaside’, ‘Young Girls’, ‘Noble Names’ and
‘Venice’. She lists those elements that will
reappear in some form in À la recherche:
The grandmother in the garden, the good-
night kiss, the drama of going to bed, the
walks towards Meséglise and Guermantes, the
farewell to the hawthorns, the lessons taught
by the two ‘ways’, the portrait of Swann, the
room in Balbec, the guests at the Grand
Hotel, the three trees of Hudimesnil, the little
‘band’ of girls, the poetry of names, the death
of the grandmother, posthumous dreams,
Venice.
Some of the names won’t stay the same,
and some angles of vision, but this is al-
ready a lot of thematic material. What’s not
there yet seems by contrast quite modest:
‘Charlus and Albertine, Sodom and Gom-
orrah, though Sodom’s way is not absent,
hidden in allusions’. Still, her helpful chart
of concordances shows us the connections
are mainly to the first volumes, Du côté de
chez Swann and À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs.
And we can wonder what these elements be-
ing present means in a long work of fiction.
It’s worth remembering, however dizzying
the thought, that Proust knew from the
start that his narrator was going to be dis-
composed by learning that the two ways –
the two childhood walks he later allegor-
ised into two walks of life, separate zones
of personal feeling and social performance
– were not opposed, that one could easily
cross from one to the other. He knew this,
but readers couldn’t register it as a narrat-
ive event until the early pages of Le Temps re-
trouvé, the last volume of À la recherche, pub-
lished five years after his death.
The pieces de Fallois had already pub-
lished come from the first and fifth sect-
ions of Les Soixante-Quinze Feuillets. The latter
is an excursus on the allure of aristocratic
titles and properties, remarkable mainly for
the invocation of a ‘psychological altern-
ative realism’ by means of which we can get
over our disappointments in ‘the countries
we have visited . . . as soon as they have
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once again become names to us’, as Towns-
end Warner translates it. The earlier epi-
sode concerns a curious scene in which the
narrator’s younger brother – he has no
brother in À la recherche – has a huge tantrum
because he can’t take his pet goat with him
when he leaves his uncle’s country house
for Paris. At least this is the ostensible reas-
on for the drama. There is a strong current
of displaced anger in the scene, and it in-
volves both brothers. Even the older boy
speaks of ‘an irresistible fury’ against his
mother and father and the ‘plot they had
hatched to sever us’ – that is, the older boy
from his mother. He calms down a little, and
remains ‘smiling and broken, frozen with
sadness’. The narrator’s younger brother
has already stolen the scene with the mast-
erly stroke of a sit-down strike on a railway
track, leaving his mother ‘pale with terror’.
His father drags him away and hits him a
couple of times.
‘An Evening in the Country’, where this
scene occurs, is the longest entry in Les
Soixante-Quinze Feuillets (24 pages in the print
edition). It begins with a comic family rout-
ine where the grandmother and the uncle
are at odds about gardening and many other
matters, then moves to a version of the
goodnight kiss (already rehearsed in Jean
Santeuil) that will be a crucial element in the
plot and argument of À la recherche. The
problem for the narrator is ‘the awful mom-
ent when I would have to say goodnight to
Maman, feel life abandoning me at the
moment when I left her to go upstairs to my
room, and then face a suffering one will
never know’. As soon as lamps are lit in the
garden, he ‘can’t think of anything else’,
speaks of his ‘awful anguish’ to come,
thinks of ‘having no more happiness’ be-
fore him. He mentions ‘anguish’ again, add-
ing the ideas of ‘torture’, ‘prison’ and being
‘sentenced to death’. He stands at the foot
of the stairs to his bedroom and thinks that
‘each step would have been more cruel for me
to climb only if it had led to the guillotine.’
Fortunately, the family farce is continu-
ing in the garden, and the narrator’s ‘delight’
in it stems his anguish for a bit. The topic
is the supposed distinction of the uncle’s
chief dinner guest, Monsieur de Bretteville.
A nice enough fellow, the grandmother
says, but ‘not distinguished’. How could
he not be distinguished, the uncle yells,
since he owns everything in the neighbour-
hood of his château: ‘two villages, a lake, a
church, a barracks’. The place itself is called
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after him, Bretteville-l’Orgueilleuse. We may
feel the barracks and pompous name put
an effective end to all idea of distinction, and
the grandmother supports us. Her valet,
she says to the uncle’s outrage, ‘is a hund-
red times more distinguished’.
The story of the goodnight kiss returns
and takes on the clear contours of its earlier
and later versions. The scene ends upstairs
with the boy realising that his ‘first victory’
– gained by sobbing loudly enough to per-
suade his mother to stay with him – is also
her ‘first defeat’, and the narrator hints at
the mythology that will be so important to
the development of À la recherche. ‘For the
first time in my life in my mother’s eyes to
weep was not “to misbehave, to be naughty,
to deserve to be punished”, it was to be sad,
and even more, to have an affliction for
which one was not responsible.’ The boy
feels that he has ‘managed to pervert her
will and her reason’. His own will and his
reason too, since he is old enough to know
about these things. ‘My tears redoubled
without her understanding why.’ This is
when she starts to mock him ‘with a tender
gentleness’, and soon after this we get the
scene of the brother and the goat. Proust is
repetitive here, prone to over-emphasis, a
trope quite different from his later, fully
mastered habit of hyperbole. He hasn’t
found a voice: he is a person writing out
family legends and self-analysis rather than
a novelist. Still, we do have the beginning
of an answer to the astute question Jean-
Yves Tadié asks in his preface to the newly
published manuscripts: ‘What was there in
these 75 pages that was so good that he
would write them, so bad that he would
stop working on them?’
There are pages that, as de Fallois sug-
gests, do not read like early work. One of
them involves the death of a mother (in
À la recherche the narrator’s mother doesn’t
die). Even here there are things an editor
might want to change, but repetitions aren’t
the worst of faults. The mother is dead
when the narrator organises his sentences,
as Jeanne Proust was in 1908, and the time-
frames (then, now and in between) are
expertly managed. The narrator mentions
‘the day that broke her life, prepared her
death in a matter of months’. Before this,
he has described her as she was when as
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a child he waited for her ‘in the shadow
like a thief ’, hoping to steal his goodnight
kiss:
She was wearing a white cloth dressing gown,
her admirable loosened black hair, contain-
ing all the gentleness and all the power of her
nature, and which survived for so long like
an unconscious vegetable growth of ruins
that she protected tenderly at the cost of her
happiness and beauty, framed a face of ador-
able purity, gleaming with an intelligence,
with a playful tenderness that sorrow could
never extinguish, looking towards life with
a hope, an innocent gaiety that disappeared
very quickly and that I saw again only on
her deathbed when all the sorrows that life
had brought her were effaced by the finger
of the angel of death, when her face, for the
first time in so many years no longer express-
ing sorrow and anxiety, returned to its orig-
inal form like a portrait overloaded with
impastos that the painter wipes out with a
finger.
He tells us that this is not the final vision he
retains of his mother, and that ‘on the dark-
ened roads of sleep and dream’ he sees her
looking tired, walking fast, a little over-
weight, an irritation on her face that he
feels is ‘in part directed towards me’, sug-
gesting that ‘she accused me a little’. We
don’t have to attribute all her ‘sorrow and
anxiety’ to her concern for her son, but
there are no other named candidates, and
as Mauriac Dyer suggests, we aren’t far here
from Proust’s 1907 essay in Le Figaro on
matricide, where ‘he had pictured himself,
and had pictured all sons, as assassins of
their mothers.’
O
ther good pages in the Feuillets are
lighter. The narrator catches sight
of some girls at the seaside, and we
see straight away what attracts the narrator
to them: they don’t pay any attention to
him. They are creatures ‘for whom the rest
of the universe seemed not to exist’. ‘They
all had a grace, an elegance, an agility, a
disdainful pride . . . which made of them a
race completely different from that of the
little girls of my world.’ The narrator would
like to get to know these creatures, but real-
ises that’s impossible, and he shifts quick-
ly into a full-blown comic register that is
quite rare in the Feuillets. ‘I would passion-
ately have liked – not to know them, but
I
32 london review of books 7 october 2021
that they should have the highest possible
opinion of me.’ It would help if they knew,
for instance, that his uncle was the best
friend of a duke, ‘Son Altesse le duc de Cler-
mont’. Actually, it wouldn’t help at all be-
cause the girls would have seen the duke as
‘an old, very badly dressed bourgeois’, and
taken his very politeness as ‘a proof of com-
mon birth’. Then the narrator sees a family
friend, Monsieur T., talking to some people
who turn out to be the parents of some of
the girls, and makes a plan.
He combs his hair, borrows a pink tie from
his brother, puts a little powder on a spot he
has on his nose, and grabs his mother’s
parasol, because it has a jade handle that
makes it look like ‘a sign of wealth’. All he
has to do now is to take a walk with Mon-
sieur T. and run into the girls by accident.
This isn’t as easy as it sounds, and almost
doesn’t happen. But finally the two of them
are in the right place, and Monsieur T.
greets the grown-up who is standing with
the girls. The man politely lifts his hat, but
the girls stare rudely at Monsieur T. and the
narrator and move on.
The narrator’s delusions are very well
tracked. ‘I have to say the parasol didn’t
seem to produce exactly the effect that I
had wished.’ Monsieur T. is shocked at the
girls’ rudeness, though his reasons aren’t
entirely admirable: ‘They don’t know that
without me their father would neither have
his château nor even have married the per-
son he did.’ The narrator pretends not to
be unhappy with the encounter: ‘I couldn’t
complain. If it had no effect, that was some-
thing else. They knew what they needed to
know and that seemed to me a sort of just-
ice. They knew the advantages I possessed.
It was justice . . . So I had nothing to regret.’
A little later he says again that he couldn’t
complain, but he can’t control the slippage
of his adjectives: ‘I returned disappointed
and yet happy.’ At the end of the section
he almost meets one of the girls, and she
smiles at him ‘as if we were two old friends’.
But he can’t experience the pleasure, be-
cause he ‘had not had the time to imagine
it’.
The group of girls who appear at the
seaside in À la recherche (Albertine is one
of them) have similar qualities – grace and
elegance and a complete scorn for other
people – and they are a ‘bande à part’, as
both Proust and Jean-Luc Godard call such
a gang. But the girls’ role in the novel is not
now to trigger a scene in which the narrator
plays a socialite clown. They are instead
a sort of magical species whose very exist-
ence fascinates him, so that, however much
time he spends with Albertine, he can never
fully separate her aura from that of her
friends and their ‘fluid, collective and mobile
beauty’.
The strangest passage in the Feuillets de-
picts a different trial for the imagination.
At first it seems as if the moment – it occurs
in the section on the two ways – settles a
question that remains unanswered both in
other early drafts and in its final form in À
l’ombre des jeunes filles. The narrator, faced
with a group of trees that seem to be saying
something to him – something he can’t
understand – wonders where he has seen
the trees before, what memory they repre-
sent and wish to recall. In the later versions
he keeps wondering, but here in the Feuil-
lets, as Mauriac Dyer says, ‘Proust lets us
have in advance the key to the memory of
the three trees of Hudimesnil.’ Well, a key
anyway:
Since then, seeing similar trees in Normandy,
in Burgundy, I would often feel that a sort
of gentleness was invading me, that my cur-
rent state of mind was slipping gently away in
order to make room for a very old one. ‘I have
seen these trees before, where.’ It was so
vague that I thought it was only in a dream.
And then I remembered, it was the avenue
that we took on leaving town to walk on the
road to Villebon.
Villebon is the name of the way that will
in the finished novel be associated with
Guermantes. But then the mystery opens
up again, as if the real message of the trees
was the unavailability of their meaning,
as if continuing to look for a message was
a mistake, or a disability. Mauriac Dyer
writes of ‘an anti-intellectualist credo’. The
narrator knows where he first saw the trees,
but that is all he knows. The magical exper-
ience loses all contact with the past and be-
comes another instance of reality’s failure
to live up to an attractive dream: ‘the way
we imagine each place that we do not yet
know, and that we never find when we go
there . . . That obsessive desire to exhaust
the particularity of a region, and to find
words for it has ended up as a sort of intel-
lectual discomfort that returned to me
in dreams, like physical discomforts.’ Re-
writing these thoughts a page or so later,
Proust says: ‘Even today when all the places
in the world have one after the other re-
fused access to the mysterious essence I
dreamed of for each of them . . . it seems to
me that this avenue must really contain
something analogous to what I have so
often dreamed.’ And then he settles for a
hypothetical ban as a form of consolation.
‘For there truly are things that must not
be shown to us. And when I see that I have
spent my whole life trying to see these
things, I think that is perhaps the hidden
secret of Life.’
‘Each place’, ‘never’, ‘must not’, ‘hidden
secret’. Proust’s later work rarely grants
such perfection to hopelessness. Indeed
much of it is dedicated to the fairy tale of
the magical moment, the terrible proxim-
ity to defeat that finally allows for victory.
But there is something else he learned in
1908. Learned as a writer, we might say,
rather than a thinker. We don’t see it in the
Feuillets, but it is amply there in Contre Sainte-
Beuve. It is the long music of goodbye, of
giving up the game. And starting a journey
at the same time. We can’t be sure of suc-
cess, but we can’t be entirely sure of failure
either. This is John Sturrock’s translation
from Against Sainte-Beuve:
The beautiful things we shall write if we have
talent are inside us, indistinct, like the mem-
ory of a melody which delights us though we
are unable to recapture its outline, or to hum
it . . . Talent is like a sort of memory . . . There
comes a time in life when talent, like the mem-
ory, flags, when the mental muscle which
brings both internal and external memories
closer no longer has any strength left. In some
this age lasts all through life, from lack of
exercise or a too quick self-satisfaction. And
no one will ever know, not even oneself, the
melody that had been pursuing you with its
elusive and delectable rhythm.

‘O
ne Red sea of Fire, wild-billow-
ing, enwraps the World; with
its fire-tongue licks at the very
Stars.’ When Thomas Carlyle wrote these
words in the 1830s, few people in the West
doubted that the event he was describing,
the French Revolution, counted as among
the most important in human history. Some
saw it as a deliverance, others as a cata-
strophe, but they agreed that it had changed
everything. For the next 150 years, this ver-
dict stood more or less unchallenged.
No longer. The collapse of Communist
states and parties at the end of the 20th
century thinned the ranks of those who saw
1789 as the first successful social revolut-
ion, the great precursor to 1917. Postmod-
ern critics deconstructed the grand histor-
ical ‘metanarratives’ in which the French
Revolution could have a central place. More
recently, the dispiriting outcomes of the
Arab Spring and the ‘colour revolutions’
have cast doubt on the ability of revolutions
really to change things. And the rise of a
global sensibility has called into question
the French Revolution’s seemingly most
significant achievements. Yes, the French
solemnly proclaimed the ‘rights of man
and citizen’, but they did so while keeping
hundreds of thousands of men, women
and children enslaved in their overseas col-
onies. Today, if any revolution of the period
excites my undergraduate students, it is not
the French, but the Haitian, in which en-
slaved people not only freed themselves but
forced France to abolish slavery everywhere
in its empire (until Napoleon brutally re-
imposed it in 1802).
As the French Revolution’s lustre has
faded, the task of explaining why it occur-
red has come to seem less urgent. A few
decades ago, fierce battles raged between
historians who adhered to the marxisant
‘social explanation’ and the so-called ‘re-
visionists’. The first camp proposed that a
rising capitalist bourgeoisie had found its
progress blocked by the desperate resistance
of a reactionary feudal aristocracy, trigger-
ing violent conflict. The second pointed
out that the lines between the classes were
hopelessly blurred, and that in any case
titled nobles had played a far more import-
ant role in the early part of the revolution
than bourgeois capitalists. By the time of
the bicentennial in 1989, the revisionists
had the upper hand, but they failed to agree
on an alternative overarching explanation,
and the energy behind their arguments
leached away before a consensus could
emerge.
Historical debates have a way of coming
back full circle, however. The French Revol-
ution may no longer look like the hinge of
world history, but many historians would
put the rise of capitalism in that position.
Indeed, the ‘history of capitalism’ has be-
come a popular subfield, with its own con-
ferences, journals and faculty positions.
The ferociously disruptive power of capital-
ism in our own day makes inquiries into its
origins appear all the more necessary. For a
historian of capitalism, whose work will
inevitably consider 18th-century Western
Europe, one key question is how capitalism
has shaped political life. Is there a connect-
ion with the French Revolution?
In responding to this question, William
Sewell is attempting something quite differ-
Added Fashion Value
David A. Bell
Capitalism and the Emergence of Civic Equality
in 18th-Century France
by William H. Sewell Jr.
Chicago, 412 pp., £28, April, 978 0 226 77046 8
ent from a replay of past disputes. Although
old enough to have participated in those
disputes, he largely sidestepped them at
the time. He made his reputation in 1980
with a brilliantly inventive book called Work
and Revolution in France, which used insights
from cultural anthropology to understand
the politics of labour between the last days
of the Ancien Régime and the Revolution of
1848. Its central claim, that a cultural idiom
forged in guild brotherhoods did more to
shape working men’s politics than brute
economic relations, placed him on the side
of the revisionists. At the same time, how-
ever, he expressed his debt to ‘certain new
strains of Marxism’. Since then, he has en-
gaged with the Marxist tradition in a series
of influential theoretical reflections on
history and social science – the most im-
portant of which are collected in Logics of
History (2005) – and sought to demonstrate
that social experience shapes culture and
politics even if it does not rigidly determine
them.
Sewell’s first plunge into French Revolut-
ionary history was a short study provocat-
ively titled A Rhetoric of Bourgeois Revolution
(1994). In it, he argued that the greatest
piece of French Revolutionary writing –
Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès’s incendiary What
Is the Third Estate? (1789) – reflected broad
changes in 18th-century French society,
which increasingly used the tools of polit-
ical economy to understand itself and had
begun to link political rights to economic
productivity. Sieyès denounced unearned
aristocratic privilege and argued that the
‘Third Estate’ (i.e. the 98 per cent of the
French population that belonged neither to
the clergy nor the nobility) deserved rights
commensurate with its preponderant eco-
nomic role. At the same time, Sewell ob-
served, Sieyès combined these assertions
with a defence of specifically bourgeois
privileges, such as property qualifications
for voting. This made his work theoretic-
ally incoherent, yet ideally crafted to ap-
peal to the wealthy non-nobles who would
eventually emerge as leaders of the revol-
utionary movement.
Capitalism and the Emergence of Civic Equality
is a more ambitious work. The result of
years of reflection (although relatively little
original research), it presents a compelling
vision of the way a specifically French
variety of capitalism developed in the 18th
century, and how resulting forms of social
experience in turn laid the groundwork
for a new, revolutionary politics. The book
doesn’t offer a comprehensive explanation
for the French Revolution. Sewell, still very
much a cultural anthropologist, ultimately
cares more about the ways in which people
thought than about why they acted as they
did. His principal conclusion, that by 1789
capitalism had led the French to see civic
equality as a natural and desirable state
33 london Review of booKs 7 octobeR 2021
of affairs, does not by itself explain why
violent revolution took place that year,
still less what followed: radical attempts
to reshape social relations; war; terror;
charismatic dictatorship. But he does pro-
vide a crucial piece of the puzzle. And in
the process, Sewell offers a surprisingly
sympathetic portrait of what he calls, with-
out irony, ‘capitalism’s rosy dawn’, a mo-
ment when its ferocities seemed minor
compared with those of expiring feudal-
ism  and its liberatory potential was still
undimmed.
Sewell’s argument starts from the simple
fact that in the 18th century, thanks to im-
proved agricultural productivity, burgeon-
ing international trade and relative political
stability, the French economy was expand-
ing at an unprecedented rate. An average
increase of 0.6 per cent in real physical
product may seem small by modern stand-
ards but it amounted to a boom by those of
early modern Europe, where agricultural
productivity in some regions had barely
improved since the Romans. By 1789 it
took only 40 per cent of the adult male
population to feed France, freeing the re-
mainder for other work. An industrial re-
volution and proletarianised workforce were
still in France’s future. But rapid commerc-
ial change was already taking place, gener-
ating investment capital and spurring the
sort of increases in productivity that Marx
would later judge necessary for sustained
growth.
Sewell pays particular attention to the
most dynamic sector of the domestic French
economy: luxury textiles. As increasing
numbers of people acquired disposable in-
come, they purchased more clothing and
paid more attention to fashion. Canny silk
producers drove this development by means
of advertising and what amounted to mar-
ket research: monitoring consumer taste
and putting out brightly coloured new pat-
terns each year. Demand drove up prices –
and profits – allowing producers to take
even more risks. Sewell, in Marxian lang-
uage, terms this process the securing of
‘added fashion value . . . silk producers
gained enhanced profits by what can proper-
ly be termed the subsumption of consumer
desire under capital.’ A genuine capitalist
dynamic had developed.
This turn of events was all the more re-
markable for taking place in a country where
markets remained constrained by punish-
ing internal tolls, heavy-handed price con-
trols, stifling guild regulations and poor-
ly  developed credit mechanisms. Sewell,
synthesising a mass of research by eco-
nomic historians, notes that capitalist
practices were pushing through France’s
archaic economic structures like flood-
water through a leaky dyke. Everywhere,
merchants and tradesmen eager for profit
were moving their business to areas ex-
empt from guild rules, turning notaries’
offices into primitive banks and setting
up grey markets with the tacit approval
of royal officials. And, as Michael Kwass
showed in his brilliant Contraband (which I
discussed in the LRB of 8 January 2015),
where legal workarounds failed, criminal
gangs stepped in with huge smuggling
operations.
Fashionable clothing was just one of the
products flooding into urban settings and
fundamentally altering them. Consumers
were also spending money on the products
of colonialism, including coffee, tea, sugar,
chocolate, tobacco, cotton and textile dyes.
They were buying books and periodicals
in unprecedented quantities. The world of
entertainment was expanding beyond the
theatre, encompassing concerts, art exhib-
itions, fairs and scientific demonstrations.
In a classic example of how to evade guild
rules and create a new economic sector,
chefs challenged the monopoly on selling
cooked food held by royally chartered cater-
ers, setting up establishments offering ‘re-
storative’ meat broths and a few side dishes
as medicinal products (Sewell draws here
on an important study by Rebecca Spang).
The French word for ‘restorative’ is, of
course, ‘restaurant’. Cafés proliferated, with
thousands operating in Paris by 1789, pro-
viding drinks as well as the chance to per-
use newspapers and magazines.
In all these venues, men and women
of different classes rubbed shoulders, the
countess next to the lawyer next to the
master bricklayer’s wife. They received the
same services in exchange for the same
fee. Increasingly, they all dressed in the
same rapidly changing fashions. Sewell
quotes a satirist mocking a brief fad for
parading through town in dressing gowns:
‘[It] has masked all conditions; it is no
longer possible to recognise anyone. The
highest personage of the state travels the
streets dressed like the lowest of citizens.
One imagines oneself dealing with an
attorney’s clerk and it’s a prince of the
empire.’ Sewell adds that this anonymity
not only flattered men and women of low
standing but could also provide relief to
aristocrats, who spent their time at court in
a constant, stressful competition for status.
legal privilege as unjustifiable. They also
sought to escape from the fiscal double
bind through reforms that would generate
reliable, taxable economic growth.
At this final stage of his argument,
Sewell manages to conduct an unlikely but
convincing marriage between Marx and
Alexis de Tocqueville. He takes seriously
Tocqueville’s contention that the French
monarchy, through its relentless drive for
centralisation, effectively promoted civic
equality – in this case by putting all French
subjects in the same relation to an all­
powerful state. Unlike Tocqueville, he does
not attribute this drive to an age­old thirst
for power on the part of French kings. As he
points out, if older generations of historians
imagined a tyrannical Louis XIV humbling
proud nobles and locking them up in the
‘gilded cage’ of Versailles, modern scholar­
ship has emphasised that before the 18th
century, French kings more often collabor­
ated with the nobility in the pastime of
squeezing every last sou out of a prostrate
and resentful peasantry. The new generat­
ion of ministers pursued increasingly am­
bitious reform proposals, not only to garner
a greater share of the country’s existing
wealth, but to grow the economy itself.
Turgot, in a brief and disastrous stint as
finance minister, attempted to abolish much
of the guild system, as well as price controls
on staple products, in the hope of promot­
ing free trade, while creating a system of
representative assemblies mostly intended
to funnel information to central govern­
ment. One of his successors tried to replace
France’s baroque system of direct taxes
with a single tax on all landed property –

T
hese changes were revolutionary.
Before the 18th century, legal status
and profession had to a large extent
determined the way people led their lives:
where they lived, how they dressed, what
they consumed. The new capitalist eco­
nomy, by contrast, produced a form of
Peacocks
civic equality. In ever more areas of daily
life, men and women operated under the
A.E. Stallings
same formal abstract rules – the rules of
the consumer marketplace – and did so
as equivalent entities, distinguished by the I speak to the unbeautiful of this bird.
size of their purses rather than by their James Merrill
birth or occupation. Again, in Sewell’s
Marxian idiom: ‘The generalisation of the
commodity form . . . gives rise to a unique­
ly abstract form of social relations, govern­
ed by a logic of exchange of equivalents in The peacock thinks he can’t be seen: When I go shoo him off again.
markets.’ Stealthily towards the cat­food bowl (Some mornings I have heard a rattle
The French themselves were by no He stalks, while I’m behind the screen Like a shock of summer rain,
means unaware of these changes. Writers Coffee in hand: peacock patrol. When one, fanned out, vibrates for battle
could hardly fail to notice them, since the More blue than the Saronic, green With a false twin in the window pane.)
vertiginous expansion of the book market
meant that, for the first time, they could As bristles on Aleppo pines, When he absconds, he leaves behind
hope to make a living and maybe even get Perhaps he thinks he only . . . blends? A duller shade, a haunt of blue,
rich from the sale of their writings, rather And often, as the day declines, A dazzled blindspot in the mind.
than relying on wealthy patrons (Sewell A raucous mob of fowl ascends I’ve read that science says the hue
illustrates the point with engaging, if over­ To virid roosts, while dusk defines Is something that you will not find
ly long, biographical sketches of several
prominent philosophes). Not surprisingly, The drooped flabella of their tails Peering through microscopes: there’s no
many turned to the study of political eco­ And flails of needles just the same. True blue to dye his plumes; despite
nomy and found eager audiences. As Sewell (The perfect camouflage for males The after­burn of indigo,
notes, in the four decades before 1789 It turns out.) Neither wild nor tame, It’s all a trick of light, a sleight
French publishers produced more books The feral population hails Of keratin arranged just so –
on political economy than novels (although
the novels had better sales). From elsewhere – someone brought them here, Armoured in light, in light arrayed,
The French state was also reacting to But no one keeps them, and they breed. A cloak of visibility!
these changes. Throughout the 18th cent­ Each spring, new chicks – chick peas? – appear. They say the colour will not fade,
ury, the spiralling costs of international They’ll gobble anything. They’ll feed Because it is not there to see,
military competition – especially with Great On cat food, tulip bulbs; they smear The brilliance new, because new­made
Britain – put France’s antiquated, hugely
inefficient and amazingly corrupt fiscal Flagstones with shit. On lizard feet, By shedding light, by flash and flaunt.
structures under intolerable strain. The Jurassic more than Pleistocene, Sly peacock! Back again for scraps!
royal government desperately needed to in­ He creeps back, and I let him eat Dismissive gestures seem to daunt:
crease revenues. Traditionally, it had done To watch the iridescent sheen He bustles off, with little flaps,
this in two ways: raising tax rates or selling A hundred irises repeat, Like taffeta and debutante.
government offices that conferred various
forms of privilege, including, most import­ But also note the lapis crown,
antly, membership of the nobility. These Egyptian­kohl­mascara­ed eyes,
strategies worked at cross purposes since His zebra wings, the russet brown
legal privilege generally included exempt­ Beneath. He rustles with surprise,
ion from many taxes; but since the system Train trailing like an evening gown
of ‘venal offices’ may have generated as
much as 40 per cent of state revenue, the
crown could not eliminate it, and so found
itself in a double bind. Over the course of
the century, however, more and more royal
officials became avid readers of political
economy, and some of them, notably the
reforming minister Anne­Robert­Jacques
Turgot, also made important contributions
to it. They increasingly came to see formal

34 london Review of booKs 7 octobeR 2021

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35 london Review of booKs 7 octobeR 2021

including property belonging to the fiscal­
ly exempt.
These reforms all foundered on encount­
ering resistance from the privileged orders,
but nonetheless had an effect. As Sewell
concludes, ‘in adopting the viewpoint of
political economy, the administrators . . .
were adopting a method of valuation of
persons and activities that fundamentally
contradicted the traditional foundation of
the state.’ People were to be judged not by
their status, but by their ‘ability or willing­
ness to produce useful goods or services, to
consume and to invest’. The public contro­
versies advanced by the reform efforts
ative body, the Estates General, that had
last met in 1615. The debates that accom­
panied elections to the Estates borrowed
heavily from the new language of political
economy, with the principle of civic equality
taken as gospel, notably by Sieyès in What
is the Third Estate? When reform­minded
deputies overcame royal resistance with the
help of popular violence in the summer and
autumn of 1789, gaining the right to design
a new constitution, the wild divergence be­
tween their principles and the structures of
French government and society more or less
guaranteed radical conflict.
ly and left them to starve whenever the
harvest failed or the economy faltered. Only
later, with the maturation of industrial
capitalism, would proletarianisation and
the factory system introduce new forms
of oppression comparable with those de­
stroyed by the French Revolution. In this
rosy dawn, the benefits of civic equality
arguably outweighed the ills of economic
inequality.
This is true of France itself, perhaps, al­
though Sewell skips too quickly over the
horrors of the Lyon silk district, where
young women from the countryside worked
their fingers to the bone and gave up their
value’ involved consumers’ mouths as much
as their wardrobes (not coincidentally, as
Colin Jones has observed, the encounter be­
tween colonial sugar and European teeth
also helped spur a revolution in European
dentistry).
When the Declaration of the Rights of Man
and Citizen arrived in the Caribbean col­
onies, some white plantation owners greet­
ed it with enthusiasm – but not for the
statement that ‘men are born and remain
free and equal in rights.’ It was Article 17,
which called property a ‘sacred and inviol­
able right’, that appealed to them, and
which they glossed to include their own

spilled into the new periodicals and were
debated in cafés, salons and other public
venues, where this viewpoint was almost
ubiquitous. In short, the state’s actions
both reflected and powerfully reinforced
the social changes driven by the emergence
of capitalism. By 1789, for the vast majority
of literate and politically aware French peo­
ple, civic equality had come to seem both a
natural and desirable state of affairs, and
they would judge political ideas and pro­
posed political changes according to this
criterion.
None of this made the French Revol­
ution inevitable. Political systems whose
governing principles contradict the beliefs
and desires of their subject populations
have survived very well throughout history.
But in the years 1787­89 the last, desperate
royal reform proposals failed, France teeter­
ed on the edge of bankruptcy, and Louis
XVI finally convened a national represent­
I
t is, all in all, an elegant and import­
ant argument. It would have benefited
from more rigorous editorial pruning,
as some long sections summarise informat­
ion that specialists already know, and that
non­specialists do not need. Sewell might
also have done more to provide a comparat­
ive perspective – does his argument about
textiles, for instance, apply to other, less
fashion­dependent European economies?
Most important, he might have tempered
his conclusions about ‘capitalism’s rosy
dawn’. Sewell is right that the notions of
civic equality generated by emergent French
capitalism could appear enormously ap­
pealing in comparison with the oppres­
sions of the ‘feudal’ Ancien Régime. Before
1789, French elites often treated the lower
orders as little more than speaking animals.
They imposed restrictions on their free­
dom (some French peasants still lived in
virtual serfdom), exploited them financial­
children to likely death at the hands of over­
burdened wet nurses. But in addition, as
Sewell himself notes, France owed much of
its economic growth not to these silk works
but to the colonies of the Caribbean, where
enslaved Africans lived an average of just
five to ten years after arrival.
The sugar plantations were one of the
most striking – and most terrible – examples
of early industrial capitalism. They requir­
ed heavy capital investment in equipment,
as well as a large, brutally disciplined lab­
our force. And just as in the case of colour­
ful silk clothing, the expansion of markets
for sugar in Europe depended on the man­
ipulation of consumer desire. The taste for
sugar might seem natural, but its growth
necessitated the sale of a host of other
products and services – chocolate, coffee,
equipment for brewing coffee, shops sell­
ing pastries and cakes, cafés, and so forth.
The generation of capitalist ‘relative surplus
property in human beings. In the largest of
these colonies, Saint­Domingue, the en­
slaved humans would violently free them­
selves and establish the independent state
of Haiti. Elsewhere in the Americas, as
Sven Beckert demonstrated in Empire of
Cotton (2014), the plantation system would
not only survive, but go on to supply the
19th century’s single most dynamic engine
of capitalism, the British textile industry.
In illustrating with remarkable clarity a key
path of capitalist development in France,
Sewell has produced a work of scholarship
that might even help restore the French
Revolution to something like the place it
once occupied in accounts of world history.
But we now know that the ways in which the
revolution ‘enwrapped the world’ were more
complex, and perhaps also more sinister,
than they first appeared to historians whose
gaze stopped at the eastern shores of the
Atlantic. c

A Section of Now: What will you do if you live to 100? How many
parents do you have? We ask these and other

Social Norms and Rituals as Sites

questions in our upcoming book, published
as part of our one-year investigation Catching
Up with Life. Co-published by the CCA and
for Architectural Intervention Spector Books, available in October 2021.

cca.qc.ca/catchingupwithlife

36 london Review of booKs 7 octobeR 2021

‘I
didn’t write the book because I
wanted to become a writer,’ Jenny
Erpenbeck says of her first novel – a
novella really – in one of the pieces collect-
ed in Not a Novel. She was 27, had studied
opera directing and was working in a bakery
in her native Berlin when she started writ-
ing what would become The Old Child
(1999). The germ was a news story she re-
membered from adolescence, a case of
an adult impersonating a schoolchild, and
her account of her motivation is matter of
fact. She wrote because she had always
liked to write, because a new laptop made
it easier and because ‘I wasn’t used to having
nothing to do with my brain.’ With grown-
up discipline she wrote a story ‘about a
woman who doesn’t want to grow up’. Then
she landed a job at the opera house in Graz.
She had no sense of being in a race for lit-
erary fame. The book sat in a drawer for
three years and ‘it was only belatedly, and
via various detours, that my manuscript
made its way to the Eichborn publishing
house, and suddenly they decided that it
was already finished as it was, that is, they
accepted it and printed it.’
In time, writing took over from opera
directing. Visitation (2008) and The End of
Days (2012) did well outside Germany, and
the acceptance speeches for literary prizes
reproduced in Not a Novel – there are many
more in the German version – testify to her
unlooked for stardom. In 2015 her novel Go
Went Gone, which deals with the refugee
crisis, was published at the height of the
debate in Germany about asylum seekers
arriving from Syria. Die Welt’s review ap-
peared on 31 August, the day Angela Mer-
kel – who, like Erpenbeck, grew up in the
German Democratic Republic – upended
national policy with the words ‘Wir schaffen
das’: ‘We can do this.’ The border opened
four days later.
Not a Novel is a selection of Erpenbeck’s
occasional writings from 1999 to 2018. The
English edition, translated by Kurt Beals, is
less than half the length of the original. It
contains memoir, pieces on writers Anglo-
phone editors might have heard of (Hans
Fallada, Thomas Mann, Walter Kempowski,
Ovid) and two forays into social criticism.
It’s a useful introduction to a body of work
in which what isn’t being said, or isn’t
being said in the expected way, can be as
significant as what is. ‘Open Bookkeeping’,
a piece about her mother’s death in 2008,
rehearses the technique in miniature, item-
ising the tasks the death imposed on her –
paying a bill for €1.42; disposing of house-
hold goods; ordering and putting up a
gravestone; working out what to do with
her mother’s flat – before ending, after the
flat has been rented out a year later: ‘Now
I’d like to call my mother.’
In Erpenbeck’s fiction, great swathes of
detail serve a similar function. Visitation,
which looks at Germany through the 20th
century via the history of a lakeside house
near Berlin, and The End of Days, which does
the same by means of five different versions
of one woman’s life, both arrive at some of
their most piercing moments by tracking
particular objects. In The End of Days a Jew-
ish family’s looted heirlooms turn up in a
Viennese antique shop, where a tourist in-
spects, but doesn’t buy, the multi-volume
edition of Goethe that his great-grand-
Dead Ends
ing clarity: as an infant, the narrator was
taken from her birth parents, who were
‘disappeared’ in a dirty war closely model-
Christopher Tayler led on Argentina’s, and brought up to call
their torturer and murderer ‘father’. For
good measure, it’s strongly implied that
Not a Novel: Collected Writings and Reflections her adoptive grandparents are exiled Nazis.
by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated by Kurt Beals. The unsettling atmosphere of The Old Child
Granta, 208 pp., £14.99, November 2020, 978 1 7837 8609 1 – which seems at first to be playing rather
bookishly with motifs from Robert Walser
mother lugged from place to place until she authorities put her in a children’s home, and Thomas Mann – is also explained,
was put on a transport in 1941. In Visitation where she happily assumes a lowly place in though even after she has been unmasked
the uprooting of an ailing fir tree reveals a the adolescent social hierarchy, a place de- as an adult, the central character doesn’t
case full of porcelain buried by an architect termined by her slowness and silence and disclose her motives.
before he fled to West Berlin. Years later, the oddly lumpen physical presence. Erpen- As Erpenbeck tells us, these false child-
architect’s work for Albert Speer is merely a beck’s second book, another novella, The hoods can be interpreted in various ways.
point of interest in an estate agent’s sales Book of Words (2007), is the monologue of The old child might be playing a game, or
pitch. a disturbed young woman who jumps protesting against the vacuity of adult life,
Both novels are also concerned with between childhood memories and adult or staging a breakdown (she writes herself
rituals and the way of life of particular retrospection. Her account of a bourgeois notes saying things like ‘as far as i’m
groups. The End of Days, in which the anon- upbringing in an unnamed hot country, concerned, you are dead. best
ymous central character dies over and over where her blue-eyed parents teach her trad- wishes – your mama’), or acting out a
again, has a particular interest in rituals of itional German songs, is interrupted by historical allegory. ‘We can see the Nation-
mourning. After the woman’s first death, as grotesque, apparently hallucinated images: al Socialists’ ambitions for total dominat-
an infant in a small Galician town, her a child’s severed hands, nuns falling from ion reflected in the girl’s self-abasement,’
mother covers the mirrors, ‘so the child’s the sky. Even in translation, both books are Erpenbeck suggests, ‘and we can see the
soul wouldn’t turn back’, and empties out filled with striking phrases which suggest destruction of Dresden, which is mention-
all the water in the house: ‘They say the that the poetic concentration of the writing ed at one point, as a sign of the failure of
Angel of Death would wash his sword in is more than half the point. Attentive pupils those ambitions, the nearing end.’ The most
it.’ As an eminent East German writer, she’s expend great effort ‘to drive their minds obvious interpretation, however, is that
given a funeral with music by Haydn, a along in front of them’. Unspoken words Erpenbeck was beginning to feel her way
wreath from the Central Committee and accumulate ‘like a heap of scrap metal . . . through the great historical crisis of her
a military procession. Her son wonders and sometimes she even looks down to see early adult life: the abrupt collapse of the
whether the soldiers are there ‘to ensure whether one of these sentences isn’t pok- GDR when she was a student in East Berlin.
that the officially prescribed levels of grief ing out of her side.’ ‘There was suddenly a lot of talk of freedom,’
are maintained’. After her final death, in They’re also less self-enclosed than they she recalls in a piece called ‘Homesick for
a reunified Germany, there’s only private appear. The surreal images in The Book Sadness’,
weeping. Visitation is bookended by two of Words, and the monologue’s disjointed which floated freely in all sorts of sentences.
bravura passages: a description of a wed- structure, eventually resolve with disturb- Freedom to travel? (But will we be able to afford
ding in the village where the house will
one day be built – in the form of a list of
the rules that must be followed to avert New Books from
bad luck – and a description of the house’s
demolition many years down the line, pre- TEMPLE UNIVERSITY PRESS
sented as a guide to the relevant environ-
mental regulations: ‘In order to calculate
the number of truckloads that will be re-
quired to remove the debris, one must also
take into account the fact that the material
is not densely packed, which involves mult-
iplying by a factor of 1.3.’
As with the bill for €1.42, the obsessive
attention to detail draws attention to the
feelings that aren’t being dramatised (the
wedding never happens because the bride
goes mad; a woman is moved by the
demolition of the site of her childhood
idyll). A synthetic omniscience turns data
into poetry. The effect is similar to the de-
scription in Ulysses of the way water reaches
Bloom’s kitchen tap: details so hyper-
realistic that they bounce the reader out of
the ordinary mode of the realist novel. The
End of Days gives map co-ordinates for every
spot where a character meets a violent
death, and Visitation begins outside human
history, ‘approximately 24,000 years ago’,
with the glaciers that formed the lakes in
the Brandenburg hills. At the same time, it
doesn’t take too much work to piece to-
gether a more conventional set of stories,
or even a family saga, from the novels’ dis-
continuous episodes.
On the face of it, Erpenbeck’s first two
books are quite different. In The Old Child, a Wherever books tupress.temple.edu
mysterious girl, who gives her age as four- & ebooks are sold
teen but offers no other information about
herself, turns up in the street one day. The
37 london review of books 7 october 2021
 it?) Or freedom of opinion? (What if no one
cares about my opinion?) Freedom to shop?
(But what happens when we’re finished shop-
ping?) Freedom wasn’t given freely, it came at a
price, and the price was my entire life up to
that point . . . Our everyday lives weren’t every-
day lives any more, they were an adventure
that we had survived, our customs were sud-
denly an attraction. In the course of just a few
weeks, what had been self-evident ceased to
be self-evident. A door that opens only once
a century had opened, but now the century
was also gone forever. From that moment on,
my childhood belonged in a museum.
Erpenbeck treads a delicate line in writ-
ing about her childhood. She makes it clear
that she isn’t given to ‘Ostalgie’. Still, she
sometimes hints that the triumph of cap-
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italism might not be to everyone’s satisfact-
ion and that growing up in a less consum-
erist society, with a utopian – if endlessly
deferred – vision of the future, wasn’t all
bad. She has to tread extra carefully here
because of her family’s place in the GDR’s
intellectual aristocracy. The protagonist in
The End of Days and the character of a grand
old writer in Visitation are both versions of
her paternal grandmother, Hedda Zinner,
a much decorated writer and broadcaster
whose husband, Fritz Erpenbeck, a writ-
er  and dramaturge, was a senior cultural
functionary in the 1950s and 1960s. Erpen-
beck’s mother was Naguib Mahfouz’s Ger-
man translator; her father is a physicist and
writer, and there can’t have been many child-
£4.75 US & CANADA $6.95
38 london review of books 7 october 2021
ren in East Germany who were allowed to
spend a year in Rome, as she was, in 1974.
This wasn’t everyone’s GDR.
Her focus in these recollections isn’t so
much politics, however, as the process of
change: disorienting, but just as inexorable
– and in some ways as morally neutral – as
the glaciers that rolled over the landscape
24,000 years ago. ‘It has nothing to do with
the question of whether the past that is
now being replaced was pleasant or un-
pleasant, good or evil, honest or dishonest,’
she writes after exploring the ruins of her
secondary school. What she’s looking for
there is ‘simply time, time that really did
pass in this way that I knew, and that was
preserved in those rooms.’ The archaeo-
logical quality of her imagination allows
her to come at East Germany from un-
expected angles. She writes of learning to
roller-skate on a street that was free from
traffic because it terminated at the Wall, of
money that was ‘light like play money’, of
counting off the minutes of the school day
on a huge capitalist clockface she could see
in West Berlin. The only mystery solved
when she looks at her Stasi file is the identity
of a boy who once sent her anonymous love
letters. It was ‘a pale, skinny boy who had
fallen in love with me when I played a mer-
maid in a pageant at summer camp’.
Other kinds of change gradually became
legible too. As a child, Erpenbeck
didn’t differentiate between the ruins that
the Second World War had left behind and
the empty lots and city-planning absurdities
that resulted from the construction of the
Wall . . . Buildings still painted with the words
‘Dairy’ or ‘Coal Merchant’ in the gothic script
of the Nazi era, even though no dairy or coal
shop had been there for years, were an every-
day sight.
East German schoolchildren were taught
that the Federal Republic was entirely re-
sponsible for the war, and ‘it was only much
later, when I was already grown, that I
learned that the magnificent red marble in
the Mohren Strasse subway station, which
was called Otto-Grotewohl-Strasse in East
German days, came from the ruins of the
Reich Chancellery.’ Schiller’s furniture, she
reports, was once ‘stored in the Buchen-
wald concentration camp’. The indignation
in the novels, the careful tracing of proven-
ance and the feeling of a world in constant
flux are ancillary benefits, these recollect-
ions seem to imply, of her childhood in East
Berlin.
E
rpenbeck writes that she slept
through the night the Wall fell. Her
tone is self-deprecating rather than
curmudgeonly, but it gets sharper when
she contemplates the transformation East
Germany underwent. In December 1989,
she saw a man from the West handing out
Christmas wrapping paper without leaving
his truck, ‘so that we, the needy people who
didn’t have such lovely, shiny wrapping
paper, could have a chance to enjoy some-
thing pretty for a change. I’m sure that he
meant well . . . [But] it was a gesture of
objective arrogance, so to speak.’ She felt
more comfortable travelling to Austria and
Italy than to Frankfurt or Cologne. The firm
that published her grandmother’s books
went bankrupt. ‘Whatever was broken, what-
ever was flawed, was left in the blind spots,
in the shadows,’ she writes. ‘The grey
façades, the gaps left by the bombs, the
dead ends along the dividing line gradually
disappeared, and I could hardly find my
way around my own city.’ There are dis-
approving references to ‘desirable locat-
ions’ and designer shoes. There’s also the
feeling of a writer finding her subject. Her
first non-fiction book, a volume of essays
that hasn’t been translated into English,
was called Dinge, die verschwinden: ‘Things
that disappear’.
Go Went Gone – the title is a verb con-
jugation: ‘Gehen, ging, gegangen’ – circles
around a set of questions that she asks
more polemically in a later lecture:
Why do we still see pictures on TV every year
on the anniversary of the fall of the Wall,
showing happy East Germans jubilantly sit-
ting astride the wall – whereas pictures of
people scaling the twenty-foot barbed-wire
fence that separates the Spanish enclave of
Melilla from Morocco only inspire tougher
security measures from the European Union?
Why do we still hear laments for the Ger-
mans who died attempting to flee over the
Wall but almost none for the countless refugees
who have drowned in the Mediterranean in
recent years, turning the sea into a giant grave?
Why is it that the opening of the border in
1989 was something wonderful, but today
voices cry out for new and stronger borders?
What is the difference between these two
groups of people who aspire to a new life, to
this thing we call ‘freedom’?
The novel is based on the experiences of
asylum seekers who lived in a protest camp
in Oranienplatz in Kreuzberg between
2012 and 2014. The main character, how-
ever, is a retired classics professor called
Richard, a widower from the former East
Berlin whose wife drank herself to death for
reasons he doesn’t like to think about.
Among other things, Richard is a lightning
conductor for the worries a white European
novelist might have in trying to dramatise
the lives of African refugees. Clueless about
geography, and given to consulting Herod-
otus, he draws up an almost childlike list
of questions and decides to interview the
Oranienplatz protesters out of a need to do
something with his brain as well as a more
obscure feeling of moral unease.
Richard’s daily life is portrayed with eerily
undifferentiated Erpenbeckian detail. We
read about his open sandwiches, that he
treats himself to a boiled egg on Sundays,
of his trips to the garden centre to have
his lawnmower blades sharpened, of his
memories of his wife and his lover, and his
musings on the fate of his possessions after
his death. His tentative steps into activism
constitute the plot of the novel, but its sub-
stance is the semi-reported testimony he
elicits from Rashid, Karon, Awad and others.
(Not a Novel includes Erpenbeck’s obituary
for Bashir Zakaryau, the model for Rashid.)
Richard, whose self-examination only ex-
tends to admitting he wasn’t very nice to
his wife, isn’t offered as an especially ad-
mirable figure. With his elegantly essayistic
inner voice, the unusual perspective afford-
ed by his historical experience, and his
quizzical attitude towards the global order,
he could almost be a J.M. Coetzee char-
acter. In a novel by Coetzee, however, there
would be an impassable line of otherness
and guilt to be negotiated. Richard just
wanders over the line and gets on with it. 
I Replication Crisis
n November 2017 the China Daily ran a
story about a Beijing barbecue restaur­
ant called Liuyedao (‘The Lancet’), which
was offering a discount to any customer
who could show they had recently publish­
ed a paper in a scientific journal. The re­
staurant took the journal’s ‘impact factor’ –
a statistic based on the average number of
citations received by papers carried in the
journal in the two years after publication –
and converted it into a cash equivalent, to
be deducted from the bill.
The impact factor was invented in the
1960s as a way of helping academic librar­
ians decide which journals to hold in their
collections. It is a reasonable measure of
the strength of a journal. But the distrib­
ution of citations is skewed: a small fraction
of papers account for most of them, while
most papers get few if any. So the impact
factor isn’t much use as a guide to the qual­
ity of an individual paper: no one should
judge a scientific article by the journal in
which it appears. Most people working in
research know this. Yet because scientific
papers are difficult for non­specialists to
understand, and because it is so hard to keep
on top of the literature, the temptation to
assess scientific work by means of a single,
simple measurement, even a bogus one, is
hard to resist. As a result, the impact factor
has become a marker of prestige. Even be­
fore anyone has read it, a paper published
in the Lancet, which currently has an impact
factor of 60, is worth far more than a paper
in a specialist outlet such as Clinical Genetics,
with its impact factor of 4.4. Unsurprising­
ly, this has an influence on where research­
ers submit their work.
Whether and where a researcher gets
hired depends to a large extent on their
publication record: how many papers they
put their name to, which journals they are
published in, how many times their papers
are cited in other papers. This has created
a system that favours speed of publication,
volume of output and – because journals
prefer new, eye­catching findings over neg­
ative results or replications of previous work
– sensationalism. There can be financial
incentives too. At the time the barbecue­
discount story appeared, many Chinese uni­
versities were giving cash bonuses for pub­
lications, with higher­impact journals se­
curing bigger rewards for researchers. In a
survey of Chinese university policy in 2016,
the average bonus for the lead author of a
paper in Nature or Science was calculated at
$44,000, five times the average professorial
salary.
The chief form of pre­publication quality
control in science is peer review. Journal
editors send submissions to experts, usually
two of them. Their job is to judge whether
a study’s methods, data and analyses are
sound, and whether the evidence backs up
the authors’ claims. Their (most often an­
onymous) reports assess the work’s validity
and importance, suggest how it might be
improved, and recommend rejection or ac­
ceptance, usually with required revisions.
Reviewers are increasingly difficult to find,
since they are generally not paid or other­
wise credited, and must fit the work around
their own teaching, research and admin­
istrative responsibilities. It is next to im­
possible, even in the several hours it takes
to put together a typical review, to check all
John Whitfield
Science Fictions: Exposing Fraud, Bias, Negligence and Hype in Science
by Stuart Ritchie.
Bodley Head, 368 pp., £18.99, July 2020, 978 1 84792 565 7
of a paper’s methods and analyses. The
same goes for detecting simple errors, such
as a wrong number typed into a spread­
sheet or a mix­up in cell cultures, let alone
fabricated, fraudulent data. As a result, re­
viewers and journals end up taking a lot on
trust. Even diligent reviewing is inconsist­
ent, since reviewers may disagree about a
paper’s merits, and will have their own intel­
lectual and social biases.
In Science Fictions, Stuart Ritchie explores
the problems with this system. The book
is a useful account of ten years or more of
debate, mostly in specialist circles, about
reproducibility: the principle that one pur­
pose of a scientific paper is to make it
possible for others to carry out the same
work, and that one test of its reliability is
whether they get the same result. In recent
decades there have been large­scale efforts
at replication in several fields, but if an ex­
periment can’t be repeated, it doesn’t neces­
sarily mean the original work was incompet­
ent. Work at the frontier of a discipline is
difficult, and skilled hands are an under­
acknowledged factor in scientific success.
Some observations are noteworthy precise­
ly because they are unusual, or depend on
their context. Sometimes doing the same
experiment and getting a different result
reveals something useful. Even so, the find­
ings of these large­scale replication studies
have helped to fuel a widespread sense
that science is failing on its own terms: in
cancer biology, one effort managed to re­
plicate just six out of 53 studies; in psych­
ology about 50 per cent of studies cannot
be replicated; in economics, about 40 per
cent. In 2016 Nature surveyed researchers
across the natural sciences and found that
more than half the respondents had been
unable to repeat their own work, though
less than a third regarded the failure as a
sure sign that a study was wrong.
At one end of the replication crisis, as it
has become known, there are spectacular
frauds. In the early 2000s the South Korean
biologist Hwang Woo­suk became a nation­
al hero for cloning human stem cells; just
a few years earlier, the materials scientist
Jan Hendrik Schön was being tipped for a
Nobel Prize for papers describing molecular­
scale electronic components. Both had made
up their results. In surveys, about 2 per cent
of researchers admit to fabricating data,
though many more suspect their colleagues
of doing so. But deliberate malpractice
probably accounts for only a small portion
of unreliable science. The greater concern
is that the rush to publish and the pres­
sure  to make a splash pushes researchers
to take short cuts and dodges: low­level
fiddles that stop short of fraud but under­
mine reliability.
As Ritchie shows, every section of a stand­
ard scientific paper is a potential source of
problems. Many researchers describe their
methods so sketchily that it’s impossible
39 london Review of booKs 7 octobeR 2021
for others to repeat them. The language
in discussions and abstracts has become
increasingly hyperbolic: between 1974 and
2014, the proportion of papers describ­
ing  their findings as innovative, robust,
unprecedented, groundbreaking and so on
rose more than eightfold. But the crux of
the replication crisis is in the way results
are presented and analysed. There may be
legitimate reasons for excluding a partic­
ular measurement or tidying up an image,
but it’s also true that you’re unlikely to be
caught if, consciously or otherwise, you do
something like this in order to steer your
results towards the conclusion you’d like.
Some problems are specific to particular
disciplines. In cancer biology, countless
papers are based on studies using contam­
inated or misidentified cell cultures. The ad­
vent of Photoshop has made it difficult to
tell when images of cell processes and gen­
etic molecules have been enhanced, duplic­
ated, spliced or otherwise manipulated.
Other problems are shared by many fields.
The use of statistics is a general concern.
Statistical methods are used to analyse the
patterns in data, with a view to disting­
uishing random variation from underlying
causes. When an experimental result is
described as statistically significant, that
usually means a statistical test has shown
there is a less than 5 per cent chance that
the difference between that result and, for
example, the corresponding result in a con­
trol experiment is attribut able to random
variation.
There are lots of different statistical tests,
each suited to asking a particular question
about a particular type of data. Computer
software makes it possible to perform such
tests without difficulty and without any
knowledge of their mathematical found­
ation. That makes it easy to drift away from
testing a hypothesis towards searching for
unlikely patterns in data. The more tests
you do, the more likely you are to find a
result that makes it under the 5 per cent
threshold. You can then write up the study
Use code LRBTOTE21
www.leftbookclub.com
as if that was what you were looking for
all along. This is known as P­hacking or
HARKing: hypothesising after the results
are known.
Other varieties of P­hacking include
continuing to collect data until you find
something statistically significant, and ex­
cluding outliers or other measurements be­
cause they mess up your stats. Between
a third and a half of scientists own up to
having done something along these lines.
Other widespread practices include split­
ting studies to yield as many publications
as possible, and recycling chunks of old
work in new papers. Funding also creates a
bias towards positive results: experiments
and trials paid for by the pharmaceutical
industry, for example, tend to show more
positive results than equivalent studies fund­
ed by governments and charities. The bias
towards positive results has become self­
perpetuating: when three­quarters or more
of the papers published report positive find­
ings, there is a strong incentive to avoid
negative results, or to avoid writing them
up.
The worry is that scientific processes
have been undermined by perverse incent­
ives to the point that it’s difficult to know
what to believe. The crisis has hit psych­
ology, Ritchie’s own discipline, and biomed­
icine especially hard. These are crowded,
competitive fields, in which research groups
around the world are racing one another
to publish on the hottest topics. In these
circumstances, haste can win out over care.
The data in these fields tends to be noisy,
leaving room for interpretation and manip­
ulation in presentation and analysis, and
psychologists and biologists tend to be less
mathematically expert than their colleagues
in the physical sciences. It’s possible, how­
ever, that these fields have come in for more
than their fair share of investigation: it’s
more straightforward to redo a lab experi­
ment than, say, a field study of animal
behaviour. At the same time, research in
psychology, health and medicine also at­
tracts an unusual degree of scrutiny be­
cause its results can have direct effects on
our everyday lives. When schools base their
teaching practices on experiments in child
psychology or tabloids run scare stories
about everyday foodstuffs based on a single
study, it matters whether or not the original
research is repeatable.
In biomedicine, a reproducibility rate of
around 50 per cent equates to a lot of money
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spent on unreliable work – $28 billion a
year in the US alone, according to a study
from 2015. Pharmaceutical companies put
some of the blame for the slow progress
and high costs of drug development on the
unreliability of basic research. More than
90 per cent of the chemical compounds
identified as potential drugs fail to make it
to trials; in 2011, Bayer halted two-thirds
of its projects on target molecules because
its in-house scientists could not reproduce
results reported in the literature.
All this is bad enough, yet reproducibility
is just one of several intersecting problems
resulting from the ever more fierce compet-
ition for resources and prestige in science.
Both have become harder to secure as the
number of people working in research has
grown faster than the supply of money or
permanent jobs. Science publishes fewer than
7 per cent of the submissions it receives –
that’s typical for prestigious journals – while
roughly three-quarters of research grant ap-
plications fail. Because publication in high-
impact international journals is the decis-
ive measure of achievement, it shapes what
research is done, and the way it is done.
Work that focuses on the local is devalued,
especially if it is published in languages
other than English, and interdisciplinary
and unorthodox approaches are relegated
to less visible, lower-status outlets. The most
prestigious journals, meanwhile, occupy –
indeed, constitute – the mainstream in their
fields.
The pressure to churn out papers also
drives a culture of overwork – and in some
cases bullying – which bears down most
heavily on postgraduate and postdoctoral
researchers. These are the people who act-
ually do most of the laboratory and field-
work; they are usually on studentships or
contracts lasting between three and five
years, and their ability to build a public-
ation record depends heavily on the patron-
age of the senior researchers in whose labs
they work. None of this does anything to
encourage a diversity of viewpoints in the
scientific workforce, or to challenge biases.
If a brutally competitive environment help-
ed the best work rise to the top, there might
be an argument that the misery was just-
ified. You might, for example, think that a
system which can deliver several highly ef-
fective vaccines for a new disease in less
than a year must be doing something right.
Maybe so, but most research has to fight for
funding and attention in a way that work
on Covid-19 does not. A junior researcher,
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browbeaten by her boss and on a contract
that’s about to end, may be tempted to cut
corners. Funding bodies with low success
rates lean towards low-risk, short-term pro-
jects. Even when the science is reliable, the
knowledge produced may be trivial.
T
here is widespread agreement that
something has to be done about these
problems. Funding bodies and gov-
ernments are showing an increasing will-
ingness to act as regulators. In February
2020, the Chinese government introduced
reforms including a ban on cash incentives
for publications, a move away from using
impact factors in recruitment and promot-
ion, and a requirement that researchers
publish at least a third of their work in dom-
estic journals. In the UK, the government
is working with the country’s main public
research funder, UK Research and Innov-
ation, along with such influential bodies as
the Royal Society and the Wellcome Trust,
in an effort to improve the culture of re-
search. One proposal is that scientists be
given more recognition for all the things
they do besides producing papers, such as
writing computer code, giving policy ad-
vice, communicating with the public, and
working with companies and civil society
groups. And, given that nearly all research
is now collaborative, the focus of evaluat-
ion is shifting away from individual achieve-
ment towards teams and institutions.
Meanwhile, more than fift y universities
have signed up to the UK Reproducibility
Network, a bottom-up initiative to improve
British researchers’ training and methods.
Journals are making it easier for others to
check papers by requiring authors to make
their raw data publicly accessible, rather
than merely reporting their analyses. In an
effort to reduce the temptation of P-hack-
ing, many journals have begun to allow re-
searchers to submit their hypotheses, along
with plans for the experiments and ana-
lyses they intend to carry out, before they
start the work. There are efforts, national
and international, to make sure that the
results of all clinical trials are made public,
to prevent the concealment of negative re-
sults. And automated tools are now avail-
able that can help identify errors in data
and images.
All this is welcome, but one issue that
those in authority have shown little interest
in tackling is how to reduce the reliance of
the system on short-term contracts, which
far outnumber the permanent jobs avail-
40 london review of books 7 october 2021
able in publicly funded research. Is it even
possible to increase job security for re-
searchers at a time when teaching in uni-
versities is becoming ever more precarious?
A similar question might be asked about
universities’ ability to resist the forces that
drive competition in research. Can any part-
icular institution or nation afford to opt out
unilaterally? What happens if the kinder,
gentler universities start to slide in the inter-
national rankings, which are based partly
on measures of publications and citations?
Such reform as there has been is most
evident in academic publishing. Historic-
ally, as scientists see it, the largest for-profit
publishing companies have taken their free
labour as authors and reviewers and made
them pay through the nose to read the re-
sults. In 2019 Elsevier, the largest of these
companies, had a profit margin of 37 per
cent. The open access movement, begun by
activist scientists around the turn of the
century, makes the moral case that readers
shouldn’t have to pay to see the results of
science that has already been paid for with
public money, and the practical case that
freely accessible papers would be easier to
validate and build on. The movement has
made a lot of progress, at least in Europe,
where the EU and many other funders, in-
cluding UKRI and the Wellcome, have now
stopped the paywalling of publications re-
sulting from their grants.
Print journals have always been select-
ive because they have a limited number of
pages. Traditionally, they have sought to
judge not just whether a given paper is
sound, but whether its findings are import-
ant. Many still do; it’s part of their cachet.
But as most journals move entirely online,
space is no longer an issue. In the twenty
years since the open access movement
began, a new business model has emerged
in which subscriptions are replaced by pub-
lication fees charged to authors. We have
seen the rise of open access megajournals,
which ask reviewers to judge the validity of
results but not their significance, and ac-
cept all submissions, including replications
and negative findings. This approach is not
watertight; in 2016, the Public Library of
Science’s megajournal PLOS One, which cur-
rently charges a publication fee of $1695
per paper, carried a study reporting that the
human hand showed ‘the proper design by
the Creator’. But the model has proved pop-
ular both with researchers, who get a relat-
ively quick, painless and cheap route to
publication, and with publishers, who get a
cash cow.
PLOS One has an impact factor of just
2.7. ‘Ideally,’ Ritchie writes, ‘what we want
to see is an accurate proportion of null re-
sults, and more attempted replications, in
the glamorous, high-impact journals.’ But
that’s to take for granted that the ‘glamor-
ous journals’ should retain their status. The
argument can be made that the scholarly
publishing industry is beyond fixing, and
we would be better off without journals –
perhaps even without pre-publication peer
review. Publishers are no longer needed
for typesetting or distribution, and social
media – including specialist sites such as
ResearchGate, which has more than 17 mil-
lion users – can perform some of their
curatorial and marketing functions. What
value the journals retain lies in their brands,
and in their capacity to organise peer re-
view. But if peer review isn’t working, what
is the brand worth? Why not just let re-
searchers make their work public, and let it
thrive, or wither?
This approach is feasible thanks to pre-
print servers. These are online repositories
on which papers can be posted without peer
review, though most of them do carry out
vetting for plagiarism, health and security
risks, and general appropriateness. Publish-
ing studies as preprints has long been the
norm in many areas of physics and maths,
where pretty much everything in journals
will already have appeared – for free, in an
unreviewed but often very similar form –
on a site called arXiv (‘archive’). Biologists
were initially slower to publish preprints,
partly as a result of the worry that showing
their hand would make it easier for others
to beat them to a reviewed journal paper.
This reluctance had already begun to fade
before 2020, but the Covid-19 pandemic
has transformed attitudes. The imperative
to share findings as quickly and widely as
possible, so that others can test and make
use of them, is inarguable.
This is science working in the way many
would want it to: rapid, open, collaborat-
ive, and focused on the benefit to the pub-
lic. There is a downside: preprint servers and
journals have been swamped by shoddy
papers, sent out in a hurry to catch the
Covid-19 bandwagon. If scientists are the
only ones reading the work, this isn’t much
of a problem, but over the course of the last
year, journalists, patients, cranks and any-
one else with an interest have also been
monitoring the servers, and they don’t al-
ways distinguish between a preprint and
a reviewed paper. As a result, some papers
that would have been unlikely to make it
into a journal have received bursts of pub-
licity. In January last year, for example, a
paper appeared on the bioRxiv server, run
out of the august Cold Spring Harbor Lab-
oratory on Long Island, claiming that there
was an ‘uncanny similarity’ between Sars-
Cov-2 and HIV, which was ‘unlikely to be
fortuitous’. This fuelled wild talk that the
coronavirus was an engineered bioweapon.
The article now bears a red ‘withdrawn’
label, but it is still easy to find and free to
read. (To preserve the integrity of the liter-
ature, retracted papers usually aren’t delet-
ed.) The following month, the Fox News
presenter Tucker Carlson cited a preprint
posted on ResearchGate claiming that the
Wuhan wet market suspected of being the
origin of the outbreak was close to a corona-
virus research lab. The author later took it
down, telling the Wall Street Journal that it
‘was not supported by direct proofs’; Carl-
son said the paper had been ‘covered up’.
This problem isn’t confined to preprints:
plenty of journals have retracted Covid-
19 studies that had passed peer review and
been published. And science has always been
open to misappropriation; making it less
accessible, if that were possible, wouldn’t
end that. But papers, whether journal art-
icles or preprints, are still the most import-
ant interface between scientific research and
wider society. The increased potential for
the rapid dissemination of bad-faith inter-
pretations of scientific publications gives
researchers one more good reason to take
pains over their work. 
L Unknowables
ast MaRch, in response to the pan­
demic and the confinement of daily
life to the walls of my home, one of
the pictures in my care as a curator at the
National Gallery assumed a new signific­
ance: Antonello da Messina’s St Jerome in
His Study. Here, a Sicilian artist working in
Venice in the mid­1470s represents the
early Christian saint in the nonpareil of
home offices. St Jerome sits reading at his
desk on an elevated podium; other books
and artefacts line the shelves around him.
The architecture is lofty, gothic and fantast­
ical. Framing the scene is a stone archway
with a peacock, a partridge and a metal
bowl on the threshold. In the seclusion
of prayer and study, the painting suggests,
the world reveals all its riches. I felt rather
jealous.
Little is known about the artist who
painted this image. Antonello was born in
the harbour city of Messina in Sicily around
1430 and died in 1479. No more than forty
of his paintings survive and they are wide­
ly dispersed. Relatively few institutions are
willing to lend their Antonellos, partly be­
cause of their scarcity and partly because
most of the works are painted on wood,
so that moving them is especially fraught.
Nonetheless there have been four exhib­
itions outside Sicily in the last fifteen years
– in New York (2005), Rome (2006), Rover­
eto (2013) and Milan (2019). These shows,
and the books that accompanied them,
have been an important means of consol­
idating our knowledge of Antonello and
appreciating the quality of his work. Only
two of the books – from the Met show in
New York and the more recent Palazzo
Reale exhibition in Milan – are currently
available in English. (It is a particular shame
that Mauro Lucco’s catalogue of the Rome
exhibition – the model for the Milan cata­
logue – and his catalogue raisonné of 2011
are no longer in print.)
These exhibitions indicate Antonello’s
enduring popularity in Italy. Like Vermeer,
he has always inspired praise from novel­
ists and poets as well as art historians and
collectors. His portraits invite comparison
with Leonardo; his religious images are as
moving – in different ways – as Raphael’s;
his landscapes are as mesmerising as any­
thing by Giovanni Bellini. The reason he
hasn’t enjoyed the same fame as these
artists is partly the result of longstanding
confusion as to who he was and what he
created, and also the geographical biases of
later periods. Take St Jerome in His Study. The
earliest description of the painting (an im­
portant loan for the Milan show, as it was
in Rome thirteen years earlier) comes from
an account of 1529 by the Venetian noble­
man Marcantonio Michiel. He was describ­
ing the collection of Antonio Pasqualini, a
silk merchant, and already – only fifty years
after it was painted – the question of St
Jerome’s authorship troubled Michiel. Could
it really be, as some people claimed, ‘by the
hand of Antonello da Messina’? Or had the
figure of St Jerome been reworked by that
obscure yet talented Venetian artist, Jaco­
metto Veneziano? Others – Michiel implic­
itly includes himself – ‘attribute it to Gianes
[Jan Van Eyck] or Memelin [Hans Mem­
ling]’. Several years later, in January 1533,
he returned to take further notes on the
painting. He praised the ‘buildings in the
Caroline Campbell
Antonello da Messina
edited by Caterina Cardona and Giovanni Carlo Federico Villa.
Palazzo Reale/Skira, 299 pp., £35, April 2019, 978 88 572 3898 2
Flemish style’, the ‘natural, minute and
finished’ landscape, and the study itself
with its ‘portraits’ (ritratti) of a peacock, a
partridge and a barber’s basin. Finally, he
was tantalised by the little piece of paper
(litterina) attached to the desk. As Michiel
points out, it appears to bear the name of
the artist but, on closer inspection, reveals
not a single discernible letter.
It’s hard not to share Michiel’s frustration.
Antonello’s facility with different styles of
painting – Northern European, Provençal,
Venetian – has meant his works have often
been attributed to others. In the 18th cent­
ury, St Jerome was thought to have been
painted by Dürer; in 1854, when the pict­
ure  was sold at Christie’s to the banker
Thomas Baring, it was once again under the
name of Van Eyck. At this point, another
scholar examined the vexed question of
authorship. Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle
(1819­97), an Italian nationalist and art
historian of modest means, visited Baring’s
London house three times in a month to
study and to draw St Jerome. His notes –
like those of Michiel – are deposited at the
Marciana Library in Venice (and are the
subject of an excellent essay by Giovanni
Villa in the Milan catalogue).
Cavalcaselle’s connoisseurial methods
were meticulous. First, he diligently copied
41 london Review of booKs 7 octobeR 2021
‘St Jerome in His Study’ (1474-75) by Antonello
da Messina; overleaf, the San Cassiano altarpiece
(1475-76).
the painting. On his second visit, he ana­
lysed closely the view from the window
and certain details: the ceramics beside the
cat, which looked to him Venetian, and the
partridge, ‘popular in the Veneto school’. A
week later, he made a detailed drawing of
St Jerome himself, commenting on the way
the hood and cap recalled Bellini, while
the folds of drapery were characteristic of
Antonello. By the end of September he was
certain and St Jerome featured among Caval­
caselle’s manuscript catalogue of Anton­
ello’s autograph works. Several decades
later, in 1894, the painting entered the
National Gallery’s collection. Its attribution
to Antonello has never been in doubt since.
Working out what Antonello di Giovanni
d’Antonio (as his contemporaries knew him)
painted is complicated by the fact that
the documentary record relating to his life
and work is so sparse. This is not unusual
of Quattrocento painters, even those whose
reputations have remained high. There are
only 44 surviving documents that mention
Antonello’s name, and around half of them
were discovered in 1902 by two historians,
Gioacchino Di Marzo, prefect of the Palat­
ine Library in Palermo, and Gaetano La
Corte Cailler. The destruction of Messina’s
city archive in an earthquake six years later
ended any hopes of finding anything more
than footnotes.
Most of the surviving documents con­
cern the prosaic life of small­town Italy
five centuries ago: trade consignments, mar­
riage negotiations, sale agreements and
contracts. From these we learn that Anton­
ello was the son of Giovanni, a stone or
marble cutter, and his wife, Margharita.
His paternal grandfather owned a ship
that traded between Messina and Reggio
Calabria on the Italian mainland. His name
is first recorded in a document of March
1457 concerning a banner that was being
made for a confraternity in Reggio. We
know that Antonello founded a workshop
there, but by 1460 he seems to have re­
turned to Messina: there is a record of the
arrival of his household in a brigantine
crewed by six men, hired by his father. By
this time he was married and had children,
servants and household furnishings that
needed transporting. Five years later, he
bought a house in his home city. These doc­
uments show that Antonello was extreme­
ly busy in Southern Italy and Sicily, but all
the artworks they mention are now lost.
We know nothing more of Antonello’s
life until October 1471, when he signed an
agreement to make a painting for the con­
fraternity of Santo Spirito in the hill town
of Noto, where his sister lived. In 1473 he
married his daughter, Caterinella, to Bern­
ardo Casalayna, a goldsmith, and in the
same year delivered his only public com­
mission for Messina, a polyptych or many­
panelled altarpiece for the church of San
Gregorio, the central panel of which is the
first of his works to be legibly signed and
dated. It seems certain he had travelled to
Venice before 1475. Later that year, the
duke of Milan, Galeazzo Maria Sforza, re­
quested his ambassador in Venice to seek
out this ‘ceciliano’ and lure him to Milan
to replace the court portraitist, who had
recently died. At this time Antonello was
working on an altarpiece for the Venetian
church of San Cassiano (fragments remain
in the Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna).
It was still incomplete in March 1476 when
Pietro Bon, who commissioned the altar­
piece, estimated that ‘maistro Antonelo’
would need at least twenty days to bring to
fruition ‘what will be among the most ex­
cellent works of the brush, within and be­
yond Italy’. By September Antonello had
returned to Messina to pay the last instal­
ment of Caterinella’s dowry. He died there
sometime after 14 February 1479, when he
dictated his will ‘lying ill in bed’, and before
11 May, when the will was opened and
read. He would have been about fifty. In
November that year, his widow, Giovanna
Cuminella, married a Messinese notary.
The Venetian evidence apart, these frag­
ments give little insight into Antonello’s
career and personality or what contemp­
oraries thought about him. We don’t know
where and with whom he trained, or any
details of his early career in Sicily and
Southern Italy, or why so much of his
surviving oeuvre comes from a handful of
years at the end of his career. The absence
of any documentation between 1465 and
1471 has allowed art historians to impose
their own ideas. Like Piero della Francesca,
the other exceptional Italian painter of this
period to work largely outside Florence or
Venice, Antonello has become a means of
justifying and explaining a range of ideas
and practices.
This process began in the decades after
his death. Giorgio Vasari (1511-74) was the
first to suggest that Antonello went to the
Low Countries. According to his narrative,
Johannes of Bruges (Jan Van Eyck) was
charmed by Antonello and taught him all
his secrets. This was a clever way of ex-
plaining Antonello’s exposure to Northern
Renaissance painting, and of accounting
for the arrival of oil painting in the Med-
iterranean basin, but there is no evidence
for it whatsoever. Antonello could have seen
Northern European painting, or derivatives
of it, without travelling there, and if he
went anywhere outside Italy, it is more like-
ly to have been Southern France. Further-
more, Antonello used oil paint in a way
that would have horrified Van Eyck. If you
scrutinise a painting by Antonello under
the microscope, it begins to dissolve before
your eyes. Although he appears to have
painted every detail, in fact his technique
is often loose and, as Gianluca Poldi de-
scribes in the Milan catalogue, the impress-
ion of dazzling precision is actually the
result of countless rapid strokes.
Vasari’s account was followed in 1648 by
that of the Venetian art historian Carlo Rid-
olfi (1594-1658), who claimed that Bellini
had visited Antonello’s studio in disguise
to learn how to paint in oils. This was
believed well into the 19th century and the
scene was even made into a painting by
Roberto Venturi as late as 1870. But it’s
clear that Bellini (and others) were adept at
oil painting long before Antonello visited
Venice. More recently, the art historian Rob-
erto Longhi (1890-1970) viewed Antonello
as the link between the Flemish and Venet-
ian traditions, and argued – in the absence
of any documentary evidence – that Anton-
ello must have spent time in Central Italy
and been exposed to the work of Piero
della Francesca. During this interlude, he
argued, Antonello travelled to Venice, where
his knowledge of perspective and his
method of painting light inspired the
experimentation for which Bellini and his
many followers became so famous. Despite
Longhi’s eloquence, and the passion of
many of his intellectual followers, includ-
ing Ferdinando Bologna (co-curator of the
Rovereto exhibition in 2013), there is no
need to accept this assessment of Anton-
ello as a frustrated genius who needed the
example of Piero to break free. This has
more to do with later constructions of
centre and periphery, and the continuing
bias against Southern Italy in historical nar-
ratives, than with a measured assessment
of the evidence.
Antonello’s significance as an artist can’t
simply be attached to his years in Venice.
He is better understood, as Gioacchino
Barbera argues in the Metropolitan Mus-
eum catalogue of 2005, as a Southern Ital-
ian, and a Sicilian.* Recent work, especial-
ly that of Mauro Lucco, has made it possible
to ask why there has been so much resist-
ance to the idea that one of the greatest
*Antonello da Messina: Sicily’s Renaissance Master
edited by Gioacchino Barbera. Out of print but
available online via the Met.
42 london review of books 7 october 2021
artists of the early Renaissance worked in
Calabria and Sicily rather than Florence
and Venice, and what we can reasonably
infer about Antonello’s formation and art-
istic career from the evidence available.
A
ntonello seems to have been
destined for an artistic career. He
and his younger brother, Giordano
(their father’s favourite), were initially plac-
ed with a local draughtsman. Drawing was
the basis for working as a mason, a painter
or a sculptor, so the training might have
taken the brothers in any direction. Mes-
sina, a city of about twenty thousand in-
habitants, was ruled for most of Anton-
ello’s adult life by King Alfonso of Aragon
and his illegitimate son, Ferrante. As a
consequence there were strong links with
other territories connected to the Aragon-
ese dynasty, including Catalonia and the
Balearic Islands. Messina was also an im-
portant stop-off for three Venetian convoy
routes, connecting the Low Countries, Prov-
ence and the Western Mediterranean.
It’s very likely that Antonello first saw
copies of Northern European and Provenç-
al painting in Sicily. As well as having
their own distinct synthesis of classical
Greek, Italo-Byzantine and Islamic trad-
itions, Sicilian painters were receptive to
ideas from further afield. We know that
by late in Antonello’s career paintings by
Petrus Christus, Jan Van Eyck’s successor in
Bruges, were in Sicily. Antonello would also
have seen avant-garde Flemish and South-
ern French painting in Naples, where he ap-
pears to have studied with Niccolò Antonio
Colantonio, the city’s leading painter, some-
time after 1445.
Colantonio is known as a copyist of
Van Eyck, so Antonello’s first encounter
was probably one of these works. Other
works by or derived from Van Eyck could
also be seen in Naples, most important of
which was the (now lost) Lomellini triptych
owned by Alfonso of Aragon, though it
is debatable whether it would have been
accessible to the young Antonello. Even if
he didn’t see it first-hand, he may never-
theless have responded to the panel show-
ing St Jerome in his study: a St Jerome by
Colantonio, painted in the mid-1440s, is
almost a mirror image of Van Eyck’s surviv-
ing example of the subject, now in Detroit.
In 2001, another St Jerome by Antonello was
displayed beside Colantonio’s painting in a
special exhibition in Naples. The juxtapos-
ition usefully illustrated the way Antonello
worked through and adapted the Eyckian
model. Van Eyck and Colantonio both paint-
ed the saint’s study as a closed, coffered,
even claustrophobic room. In Antonello’s
version, the room – although crowded with
books and shelves – is open to the world
and, by implication, to ideas.
In Naples, Antonello would have been
exposed to other artists from north of the
Alps. The angular, almost abstract quality
of some of his early works – including the
Virgin and Child with a Franciscan Donor, the
Virgin Reading (a work not accepted as auto-
graph by all scholars) and the Portrait of a
Man, now in Pavia – has most in common
with Provençal painters such as Enguer-
rand Quarton, who was probably in Naples
between 1438 and 1442 in the entourage of
René d’Anjou (the duke controlled Naples
for four brief years before being expelled
by Alfonso).
 Some have suggested that Antonello did
travel north, but to Provence rather than
Flanders, before his next documented pres-
ence in Southern Italy in 1457. We are un-
likely to know for sure. What’s important is
not where he was exposed to these trad-
itions but that he was. In a small paint-
ing  of the Crucifixion now in Sibiu, gener-
ally agreed to be an early work, the mourn-
ers are striking for their stylised, simpli-
fied faces and expressive hands. The fore-
ground landscape and the figure of St John
recall the work of artists at the Burgundian
court, as well as the Bruges painter Petrus
Christus (some scholars have pointed, less
convincingly, to connections with Fra Ang-
elico and Domenico Veneziano, who were
active in Florence).
The landscape of the Sibiu Crucifixion
is clearly based on the town of Messina
and the nearby straits. Several identifiable
monuments can be discerned, including
the Basilian monastery of San Salvatore
and the harbour. The galleys coming and
going speak to the centrality of trade and
transportation to the Messinese economy.
Another early painting, the tiny double-
sided Ecce Homo/St Jerome, similarly connects
Antonello’s ‘real world’ with the continu-
ing reality of Christ’s suffering – a leitmotif
of the devotio moderna, the main theological
trend of Antonello’s time. As Federico Zeri
has suggested, the considerable damage to
St Jerome’s body may have been caused by
the owner’s having carried the painting in
his pocket.
The outstanding work of this period is
a small portrait of an unknown man, now
sumably made for private devotion, al-
though we don’t know for whom, is quite
different.
Taking the approach he had developed
in his portraits, Antonello invites us to wit-
ness a supremely private moment. Here is
a young girl, her head covered in a heavy
cloth of apparent simplicity, although its
bright ultramarine indicates that this is
no ordinary teenager. The image is pared
down to its bare essentials: the girl, her
book and her inscrutable face. We aren’t
participants in this action – as Luke Syson
has pointed out, this would have been too
much for even the most ardent exponents
of the devotio moderna – but privileged ob-
servers. Mary’s measured self-possession
is astonishing. She raises her right hand,
to silence the archangel (and us), and pre-
pares to turn back to her book. There is
nothing quite like it in Renaissance Italian
art.
Because of the gaps in the document-
ation, art historians have tended to assume
that Antonello was a slow developer, goad-
ed into action and innovation by his visit to
Venice and by what he might have seen – in
Urbino, Rimini, Pesaro, Ferrara and Padua
– on his hypothetical route to the Republic
of St Mark. These are unknowables, but
works like the Annunciation and the Portrait of
a Smiling Man demonstrate the exceptional
ambition, novelty and achievement of his
work before Venice. It is likely that some
of this, at least, was known to his Venet-
ian patrons: it’s hard to imagine an exper-
ienced Venetian statesman like Pietro Bon
taking a chance on an unknown artist.
For all this, the quantity, and quality, of
the paintings made as a result of Anton-
ello’s stay in Venice is remarkable in an art-
ist with so few surviving works. Writing
from the city in 1475, Matteo Colacio, a Sic-
ilian living in Venice, commended Anton-
ello as one of the very few contemporary
artists whose work was comparable to the
masters of antiquity. From the little more
than a year of Antonello’s visit we have por-
traits such as the Louvre Condottiere, whose
slightly pursed lips and defiant expression
explain why he has been identified as a mil-
itary man, and the National Gallery Portrait
of a Man, a sitter of more modest status, in
a red hat and dark doublet, who disarms
us with the frankness of his gaze. We have
private devotional works, such as the St
Jerome, and the Antwerp Crucifixion, partic-
ularly striking for the contrast between the
contortion of the thieves’ bodies and the
quiet beauty of the landscape (a more ideal-
ised view of the Straits of Messina than that
of the Sibiu painting). The Annunciation,
now in Palermo, may have been painted in
Venice. And perhaps most significant of all
– certainly in a Venetian context – are the
San Cassiano altarpiece and the St Sebastian
executed after Antonello had left the city.
We find praise of the San Cassiano
altarpiece shortly after it was installed – by
Matteo Colacio; the Venetian diarist Marin
Sanudo; the Florentine Giovanni Ridolfi;
Raphael’s father, the painter and writer Gio-
vanni Santi; the Venetian humanist scholar
Marcantonio Sabellico; and later by Marc-
antonio Michiel. At some point before the
late 1630s it was damaged and cut down,
and is now known through copies by
David Teniers the Younger, but in its time
it was an important step towards the most
significant development of Venetian public
art, the sacra conversazione, where divine,
sainted and human figures participate, as
apparent equals, in a single narrative in a
single space.
Antonello’s St Sebastian makes one wonder
what he might have achieved had he lived
longer. Painted for the altar of St Roch
in the Venetian church of San Giuliano, it
must have been commissioned as an ex-
voto offering during an outbreak of plague.
St Sebastian is tied to a tree in the middle
of the image; the arrows shot at him have
pierced his flesh, but haven’t yet killed him.
In the background, the men and women of
a lagoon city, presumably Venice, go about
their business. Soldiers loaf and chat, un-
aware that the martyred saint is still alive;
one of them snores (his open mouth de-
monstrates Antonello’s command of fore-
shortening); a woman holds her sleeping
child close to her chest while she walks;
others idly observe the scene from a bal-
cony. Many of the later achievements of
Venetian narrative painting – from Bellini’s
St Mark Preaching in Alexandria to Carpaccio’s
Ursula series – were influenced by this altar-
piece, made not in Venice but in Messina.
Given the history of Sicily, and in particular
of Messina, ravaged by a succession of
earthquakes and other natural disasters,
we are lucky that so many of Antonello’s
paintings have survived, even in comprom-
ised form. This itself contributes to the
power of the remaining works. 

at the Museo Mandralisca in Cefalù, which

was included in both the Milan and New
York exhibitions. The man appears to be
smiling, but there is something ironic, even
mocking, in his expression. The scratch
across the mouth and eyes may be the re-
sult of deliberate vandalism – a response to
a painting that on close inspection proved
too provoking. The Sicilian writer Vincenzo
Consolo drew on the theory that the man
02. The Power
was a sailor for his novel The Smile of the
Unknown Mariner (1976), about the histor-
ical figure Baron Mandralisca, who acquir-
Behind the Throne MONDAY 25 OCTOBER, ONLINE
ed the painting on the island of Lipari, Conversations about power: who Reimaging Power: Adom Getachew
where the local apothecary was using it
as a cupboard door. (In fact we know wields it, where it resides and why in conversation with Mahmood Mamdani
now that the painting is of a nobleman.)
Consolo characterised the smile as belong-
ing  to ‘someone who has seen much and 25-29 October 2021 TUESDAY 26 OCTOBER, ONLINE AND
IN-PERSON AT CONWAY HALL
knows much’; his friend and contempor-
ary Leonardo Sciascia (best known outside Individual tickets (online): £7 Exercising Power: Hilary Mantel
Italy for The Day of the Owl) commented on Individual tickets (in-person): £15 in conversation with David Runciman
the ‘Sicilian’ nature of Antonello’s portrait.
Festival ticket (online only): £20 and Helen Thompson from Talking Politics
‘In Sicily, the game of resemblances is . . .
delicate, sensitive . . . Who does the un- Festival ticket incl. in-person for
known man of the Museo Mandralisca re- Mantel: £30 WEDNESDAY 27 OCTOBER, ONLINE
semble? . . . He just resembles. That’s all I
can say.’
Projecting Power: Mary Beard
Festival ticket-holders will be sent a limited edition in conversation with Michael Wolff
Antonello’s ability, in the Cefalù man
and other portraits, to create distinctive
LRB collection of the pieces about power that inspired
and beguiling characters, is matched in the programme. FRIDAY 29 OCTOBER, ONLINE
achievement by his interpretation of the
Annunciation. Most 14th and 15th-century Power Dynamics: Emma Cline
depictions of the subject are similar in their
For tickets and info: in conversation with Adam Phillips
iconography: Mary is shown within some
man-made structure – whether a porch, lrb.me/power
as Fra Angelico conceived it, or a private
room, as Carlo Crivelli did – to underline
her virginity and her separation from the
world. Antonello’s Virgin Annunciate, pre-

43 london review of books 7 october 2021

Diary
A
RchitectuRal plans are often
issued with the instruction: ‘build
to match existing.’ It means what
it says: make something new look like
what is – or was – already there. Build to
match the existing kitchen cabinets. Build
to match the existing decking. Build to
match what remains of the house after the
roof and the dining room wall were ripped
off during Hurricane Laura, one of the
strongest to have made landfall in Louis­
iana. Do it like that again when Delta
comes through six weeks later, lifting the
roof like a lid and driving a tree through
the kitchen wall. Do it like that again in
seven months, when the mayor is on TV
saying that the amount of rainfall – eight­
een inches in two hours – has eclipsed a
hundred­year flood. If by some improb­
able sequence of events you manage to get
the insurance adjusters to agree to it, you
must build to match existing when another
flood marches through a month later.
I heard the phrase for the first time in
Lake Charles, Louisiana, listening to an
architect called Jolee Bonneval talk about
what she did all day. I’d been introduced to
her through her mother, Suzette, whom
I’d sat next to on the plane from New York
to New Orleans, and who hadn’t so much
as raised her eyebrows above her mask
when I said I was going to Louisiana to
write about the water crisis there and that I
wanted if possible to speak to some archi­
tects. Like many people I met over the next
few weeks, Suzette wasn’t surprised by
coincidences, and didn’t make much of
details that I’d then think about for days.
Before she mentioned that her daughter
was an architect in a place called Lake
Charles, she’d briskly told me a story
about a recent trip to Texas, the conclus­
ion of which was that if you’re in an
active shooter situation and you hear the
fire alarm, don’t go out into the passages
because that is when you’ll be killed. She
didn’t think her daughter would mind if I
got in touch, and even if she did I should
go to Lake Charles anyway, because it
would amaze me.
Lake Charles is a city of around 80,000
people in south­west Louisiana, six hours
by train from New Orleans. The drive is
quicker, but the train affords more op­
portunities for sizing up bodies of water
through the window: the Mississippi, but
also the Atchafalaya, and then the Calca­
sieu, and then the bayous, and then the
streams too small to name, and then the
drowned fields, sheet after sheet of water
reflecting the rain clouds above. The city
itself is bordered by a river, two lakes,
three bayous and a shipping channel that
connects it to the Gulf of Mexico, thirty
miles away. I hadn’t yet grasped that being
surrounded by water doesn’t mean being
surrounded by places to go swimming, and
as Jolee drove me along the edge of Lake
Prien on my first night in town I suggested
a dip. The surface of the lake was opaque
and periodically illuminated by flares from
one of the nearby petrochemical plants,
but the drone of the heat made a com­
pelling case for submersion in water. It
hardly needs saying that it gets very hot
in south­west Louisiana in July, but the
experience is like being hit with a metal
sheet, so that the corners of your vision
start to throb and you keep taking out your
phone to look up whether or not you will
die. A swim, please. Jolee turned to me,
startled. ‘People don’t really do that here,’
she said.
Jolee had moved to Lake Charles six
months earlier, to take up a job at a firm
whose workload had tripled since Hurricane
Laura last August. She wasn’t what you’d call
enchanted by the city – on the phone, she
described living there as like ‘being in a hor­
ror movie, except not scary’ – but she was
pleased to have got her first proper job out of
college. Could she have done without spend­
ing her first few weeks fielding calls from
desperate people whose houses had fallen
down for the second time in three months?
Yes. Had she envisioned working out of
a building that had come close to falling
down itself ? No. The 150 mph winds had
torn off the ceiling and half the top storey
of her firm’s office and dislodged an awn­
ing which sailed across the street into the
windows of the library opposite.
The office had now been restored and it
looked the same as it had before, but the
library was still covered in Tyvek, as was
the church on the corner, as were the roofs
of most of the buildings on the block. She
couldn’t say for certain if the damage was
from Laura or from Delta or from the
floods. People were trying to return every­
thing to its former state, but there is a
shortage of materials in Lake Charles, and
of labour, and there’s just too much to do.
Four federally declared disasters in ten
months: it was a lot for the firm to handle.
‘Build to match existing’ was a normal
thing for architects to write on plans, but
Jolee said that much of what they were
doing in Lake Charles wasn’t architectural
work at all. ‘It’s more like working in an ER.
It’s a lot of deodorising carpets in libraries,
for example. There is nothing like the
smell of a library carpet after a flood.’
I asked her if she thought what happened
last year could happen again – I hadn’t
been in Louisiana long enough to know
that this was a ridiculous question – and
she said yes, absolutely, and yes, absolutely
the damage would be the same. Another
stupid question: why not rebuild the homes
in a way that stopped them from fall­
ing  down again next time? She gave me
a patient look and explained that hardly
any of the materials needed exist, and be­
sides, the insurance companies won’t pay
for them. ‘You’re not going to go back and
44 london Review of booKs 7 octobeR 2021
redesign the whole structure of the build­
ing,’ she said. ‘You’re just going to replace
the things that got wet and broken.’
There used to be ten years on average
between major storms, Jolee told me. I
asked her whether she worried about
climate change, now that the gap seemed
to be closing to a vanishing point. She said
it was a difficult question, given that we
know the Earth goes through cycles, and
who’s to say this isn’t one of them? I asked
her what it was like to rebuild houses that
she knew would soon fall down again and
she said it was just part of living on the
coast: the Days Inn that looked like some­
one had put a foot through it, the blue
tarps on the roofs, the uprooted trees,
A house in Point-Aux-Chenes, Louisiana, after
Hurricane Ida.
the caravans next to the Queen Anne­style
new builds with boarded­up windows,
the signs offering cash for flood­damaged
homes in street after street of buildings
that were never coming back.
That’s the way people in Lake Charles put
it. They’d point at a community centre with
collapsed supporting walls and announce
that it was never coming back, as if the
buildings themselves had taken note of
the atmosphere and concluded that it was
best to stay away. It’s hard to blame them.
There are a great many people who aren’t
coming back either. They talk about stay­
ing, but the emphasis is on the word
‘hope’. October is hurricane season, and
as it approaches the word that keeps com­
ing up in conversation is ‘praying’.
The acknowledgment that something
similar or worse is coming down the line
can be found even in the language of
Louisiana real­estate magazines, which
advertise houses in terms of their readi­
ness to face the next disaster. Properties
without carpets are desirable, as are those
with new roofs. In Homefinders someone has
taken out a full­page ad that says: ‘My name
is Calcasieu Parish, and I have a drainage
problem,’ accompanied by photographs
of people standing around in chest­high
floods next to what little of their cars
remains visible above the water. Some­
times the ads will say that a house was a
champ through both the 2020 hurricanes,
or that its bones are good even if Laura
caused a few setbacks.
The bones of the buildings in Lake
Charles don’t look good at all. In neigh­
bourhoods such as Greinwich Terrace,
where in May the floods came on so fast
that people didn’t have time to get into
their cars to escape, the houses look as
though they could be taken apart by hand.
In Oak Park they look as though they could
be pushed into the concrete gully that
runs down the central boulevard, flooding
it every time it rains for more than fifteen
minutes. Even in neighbourhoods at higher
elevations, where owners can afford to sit
on the phone for six months and harangue
the insurance adjusters into building to
match existing, the houses have the air of
objects put down distractedly by the edge
of a table. The only structures that appear
robust enough to emerge intact after what­
ever comes next are the petrochemical
plants, the smell of which announces their
presence long before they can be seen, yet
another reminder of who’s responsible for
what’s happening in Louisiana.
A recent report by the Environmental
Integrity Project identified Lake Charles as
one of the top three regions in the US for
toxic emissions, along with the Houston
area and the coast of Lake Erie in Ohio.
One afternoon I went out to the new Sasol
plant, ranked second on the project’s list of
the top hundred polluters in the country,
which makes carcinogenic products used
in the manufacture of things you might
need after your home has been flooded
and your belongings destroyed: cloth­
ing, upholstery, carpets, pillows, fibreglass,
detergents and soap. Altogether Sasol re­
leases 32 poisonous chemicals, mostly from
stacks and flares, adding up to 92.9 mil­
lion tons a year in toxic emissions.
The plant slithers out like a robot’s int­
estines on the other side of the highway
from Mossville, or more accurately, what
used to be Mossville, a town founded by
former slaves at the end of the Civil War.
Six years ago, Sasol started offering locals
buyouts in order to make room for an
expansion, with its spokesman saying that
he didn’t think – he actually used the word
‘think’ – that the plant represented an
environmental hazard or a safety hazard,
but that Sasol ‘felt it appropriate to honour
the request to give those individuals the
opportunity to move’. Some people chose
not to take that opportunity, having always
lived in Mossville, but they then had to
leave anyway: too many hurricanes, too
many floods, too many things in the water
that will kill you. Hardly anyone lives in
Mossville now, and you can drive along the
highway for block after empty block and
see nothing but street signs and post boxes
near the faint outlines in the grass that
indicate where houses used to be. The
plant was damaged by Laura, and then by
Delta, and its operations were suspend­
ed for six weeks while labourers on short­
term contracts worked to get everything
going again.
Ten miles away, close to the Calcasieu
River, is the Citgo complex, which includes
an oil refinery and a lubricants plant.
In April it was announced that several
petrochemical companies, including Citgo,
would pay $5.5 million to the Environ­
mental Protection Agency for costs incurred
while investigating the contamination of
the Calcasieu Estuary. The settlement is
the latest in a series of state and federal
cases brought against industrial plants for
their role in poisoning the region over the
last century. Citgo’s refinery operations
have discharged hazardous substances into
all these bodies of water with beautiful
names: Moss Lake, Bayou Verdine, Bayou
d’Inde. According to the complaint, which
was filed in federal court, this includes
naphthalene, slop oil, ethanol, zinc, nitro­
gen ammonia, chlorine and phenolics.
There are now warnings posted along 350
miles of the river, with instructions that
swimming should be avoided, that women
of childbearing age and children younger
than seven shouldn’t consume fish caught
in the river, and that contact with the river­
bed sediment should be kept to a min­
imum because of the risk of exposure to
polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), which
cause liver cancer, gall bladder cancer,
biliary tract cancer, gastrointestinal tract
cancer and brain cancer.
I couldn’t sleep in Lake Charles. The
door of my hotel room stopped four inches
above the carpeted floor, and I found myself
unable to stop imagining how neatly some­
one’s eye would fit in the gap, swivel­
ling up to look at me. Walking around the
neighbourhood at 1 a.m. seemed preferable
to sitting on the nonsensically high single
bed, clutching my knees and waiting for
the eye to settle on me. Something I could
have done without, though, was hearing
people shout ‘be careful’ as I walked past.
They shouted it from their porches and
from their cars and, once, from a bicycle.
The first time it happened I thought the eye
had made me hysterical. The second time
I heard it I thought it was a threat. The
third and fourth and fifth times I heard it
I thought it was exactly the kind of thing
that would come out of my mouth if I hap­
pened to live in a place like Lake Charles,
a place that is being dismantled, where
the only big institutions invested in its sur­
vival are the ones taking it apart. They
know that the violent weather patterns
created by their emissions are only going
to get worse, and they appear to have
calculated down to the decimal point ex­
actly how much they can extract, and for
exactly how long, before the whole place
disappears.
When people in Louisiana say that a city
will disappear, they don’t just mean that it
will be taken over by industry, or aban­
doned after one too many hurricanes or
floods. They mean that it will actually sink
into the Gulf of Mexico. Erosion is eating
away at the coast at a rate of an acre every
hundred minutes, dramatically increasing
the state’s vulnerability to hurricane storm
surges. Some of this can be attributed to the
construction of the levees and flood con­
trol systems, which made the continuing
existence of New Orleans possible, but
which cut off the marshes from some of
the river sediment that sustains them. There
is also the problem of subsidence, as sedi­
ment that has accumulated in the river
presses down on the water and gases be­
low the surface. Parts of New Orleans are
sinking at a rate of two inches a year.
These things would have happened even
if the state’s infrastructure wasn’t deter­
mined at every level by the concerns and
priorities of oil and gas, but there is signi­
ficant evidence that the petrochemical
firms have a great deal to do with Louisiana
falling into the gulf. Their unregulated
pumping of groundwater contributes to
the subsidence, further increasing the
threat to the levees. Industrial emissions in
general contribute to the rising sea level,
and the rising sea level means that an
estimated five thousand square miles of
the Louisiana coastline will be underwater
by 2100. Finally, and most destructively,
there is the vast network of canals built
and maintained by the firms, which are
hastening saltwater intrusion and killing
off what remains of the marshes, and
which a recent report by the US Depart­
ment of the Interior says are responsible
for between 30 and 59 per cent of the loss
that has already taken place.
The companies don’t admit liability,
but the erosion is now severe enough to
threaten the pipelines and canals whose
construction caused it in the first place. BP
is funding restoration projects across seven
square miles of coastal habitat east of New
Orleans and in lower Plaquemines Parish,
where the flooding from Katrina was so
bad and so sudden that there were cows in
the trees. The money comes from a $7.25
billion settlement reached after the Deep­
water Horizon spill, which killed off plants
holding the marshes and estuaries together,
leading to further land loss.
Back in New Orleans, no one shouted
from their car window to say I should be
careful. Hardly anyone’s voice got thinner
and higher as they explained that all this
was just part of living on the coast. Almost
no one looked as though they were drown­
ing. Lake Charles hasn’t even begun to
recover from Laura, and it’s not certain
that it will. People in New Orleans haven’t
forgotten about Katrina, or what it felt like to
see 80 per cent of the city underwater – but
that was 16 years ago, and the emergency
response phase is in the past. As the scope
of the post­Katrina relief effort demons­
trated, a lot of people are rooting for New
Orleans to survive, and not all of them
work for the industry that is taking Louis­
iana apart. When people in New Orleans
say they’ll never leave, it doesn’t sound as
though it’s because they have no other
choice. But everything that has recently
happened to Lake Charles can happen to
New Orleans, and it has. New Orleans is
also an impossible place, in an impossible
position, governed by the same relentless
prioritisation of short­term goals and the
same belief that problems can be fixed by
putting everything back the way it was and
by spending as much money as possible in
service of that goal.
I met another architect, David Waggon­
ner, who for the last ten years has been
attempting to show that there is another
way of doing things. His firm’s water
management plan for New Orleans is
founded on the argument that the water
has to be accepted and accommodated, as
it is in places like Amsterdam and Rotter­
dam. New Orleans is built on water and
surrounded by it on all sides. But when
you’re inside the city, behind the levees and
flood protection structures, it’s possible to
forget the fact. If you want to get to the
water you have to visit it: walk over the
bridge in By water to get to the park along
the river, climb up the ridge of one of the
levees, drive 24 miles across the Lake Pont­
chartrain Causeway (the longest contin­
uous land bridge in the world). People talk
45 london Review of booKs 7 octobeR 2021
about water incessantly in New Orleans –
they worry about the next storm surge,
they complain about the ineptitude of the
sewage and water board, they tell you a
story about having to go to hospital after
Screen
falling into a pothole caused by subsidence, at Home
they turn to you on your way to dinner and
say with a straight face that the air is
pregnant with rain – but it’s easy to spend
..................
days without coming into contact with a LRB Screen at Home
body of water. The plan devised by Wag­
gonner’s firm proposes bringing water into is back for a fourth
New Orleans, building canals and storm­ season:
water storage systems that will ease the
burden on the overworked drainage sys­ Framing Resistance,
tem and reduce the city’s vulnerability to in partnership with
flooding.
The clearest expression of this vision
Second Run DVD
is the Mirabeau Water Garden, which is ..................
designed to turn land donated by the Sisters
of St Joseph into wetlands, covered in 6 October
native grasses that will absorb stormwater Azadeh Moaveni on
run­off and remove pollutants through filtr­ Kim Longinotto and
ation. The garden was approved and paid Ziba Mir-Hosseini’s
for years ago. Everyone likes the idea of Divorce Iranian Style (1997)
a group of nuns getting together to do
something practical about the effects of 20 October
climate change, and everyone likes the idea
John McDonnell MP on
of a water garden, but ground still hasn’t
been broken and the project hardly exists Joshua Oppenheimer’s The
beyond a blueprint. When I asked Wag­ Globalization Tapes (2002)
gonner why it had made so little pro­
gress, he said that it’s because people want 3 November
things to stay the same. ‘The idea in New Eileen Myles on
Orleans was that if a drop of rain falls, Andrea Luka Zimmerman’s
it must go away. It’s really hard to break Taşkafa: Stories of the Street
that idea, because the people who say that
(2013)
are the ones who want the money to ad­
minister their system, the pumps, the
17 November
pipes.’ After Katrina, Waggonner said,
there was a moment when a different ap­
Roxanne Varzi on
proach seemed possible. ‘You had to be Mania Akbari’s One. Two. One.
here to understand the emotional toll that (2011)
the complete failure of a levee system
creates. It’s like someone who has a near­ 24 November
death experience, and they come back and Fatima Bhutto on
look at the world slightly differently. We Anand Patwardhan’s
had that, but it fades, and people want to War and Peace (2002)
go back to the status quo.’
One morning, a friend drove me out 1 December
to Delacroix, which lies beyond the levee
Adam Shatz on Avi Mograbi’s
system. He was taking me to a place called
the End of the World, where the land turns Avenge but one of my two eyes
to water. There is no detectable drop in (2005)
elevation as you go beyond the floodgates,
but it still feels like a descent, like walking 15 December
down the steps into a swimming pool. Jacques Rancière on
There is no way to pretend that you aren’t Pedro Costa’s Vitalina Varela
surrounded by water on all sides. About (2019)
ten minutes’ drive from the floodgates,
houses on stilts lurch up from the drench­
..................
ed lawns abutting the freeway. The stilts
are of standard height at first, but the closer
Tickets: £5 each,
you get to the End of the World the higher or £30 for the season
they become, so that by the time I could
see actual alligators in the bayou next to For tickets and more information
the road, the houses looked a bit like a about the guests, films and
child’s drawing, a box for a face and long, Second Run DVD:
wavery legs ending in structurally un­
sound feet. I had now been in Louisiana lrb.me/screen
long enough to know the question was ..................
ridiculous, but still I asked my friend what
would happen when a flood came along All screenings and livestreams
and splintered the stilts. They’ll just build available globally. Films will be sent
them higher, he said. to ticket-buyers a week before each
conversation,which will take place live
at 7 p.m. BST/GMT.
Rosa Lyster
 ■ CHARITIES ■ SPECIALIST BOOKSELLERS

Skoob Books
10 & 66 The Brunswick
off Marchmont Street
GIFTS FOR FILM LOVERS London WC1N 1AE
(Russell Square Tube)
Specialists in world, British, classic and Tel: 020 7278 8760
contemporary film
Blu-rays, DVDs, books and merchandise

Open 11:00-20:30 every day

BFI Southbank, Belvedere Rd,
Both Shops Open
London SE1 8XT
bfi.org.uk/shop Lots of space for social distancing.
shop@bfi.org.uk Fresh stock being added all the time.
E M A I L : classified@lrb.co.uk

w
S HwOw.
P Ss N
k oO oWb .OcPoEm
020 7815 1350
N
9 Mortlake Terrace,
Kew TW9 3DT
BFI Shop LRB Classified Ad 58x50mm.indd 1 Tel: 020 8948 2556 THE SAMUEL FRENCH
29/01/2020 17:19
Tues-Sat 10am - 5pm, BOOKSHOP AT THE
Sun 10am - 4pm
ROYAL COURT THEATRE
Situated just 10 minutes walk from Kew Gardens
station Lloyds of Kew is the ideal location for book Visit our specialist theatre bookshop to
lovers visiting the area. browse an extensive range of plays and
Lloyds of Kew Books is a general second hand drama books. Open from 11.30am till 7.45pm,
bookshop, with an ever-changing collection of works Monday to Saturday.
on horticulture, botany, photography, biography,
history, literature, poetry and reference.
Lined with floor to ceiling bookshelves and featuring a Samuel French Bookshop,
unique ‘Book Tree’, Lloyds of Kew is a great place to Royal Court Theatre,
browse for unusual and rare finds. Sloane Square, SW1W 8AS
lloydsofkewbooks.co.uk 020 7565 5024

BEST INDEPENDENT
BOOKSHOP
www.europeanbookshop.com London 2020

The languages and literatures NOW STOCKING

of Europe!
123 Gloucester Road London SW7 4TE
SECOND HAND BOOKS!
Available for house clearances
TEL: +44 (0)20 7209 1131

t: 020 7734 5259 • e: bookshop@esb.co.uk

and donations.
Please call or email: 02072492263
shop@burleyfisherbooks.com | @burleyfisher
400 Kingsland Road, London, E8 4AA

AMNESTY BOOKSHOPS
www.italianbookshop.co.uk

AMNESTY Bibliophile Books Mail Order Catalogue.

BOOKSHOPS
Est 1978, Royal Warrant holding publisher.
2500 titles, regularly changing stock of new
books at half price or less: art, biography,

We are a small but growing chain ofWesecond-hand

crime fiction, children’s, history, military,
erotica, cookery, religion, travel, music, crafts,
are a small but growing
bookshops raising money for Amnesty International.
philosophy, science and 30 more topics.
chain of second-hand
FREE literary catalogue or online
bookshops raising money
www.bibliophilebooks.com Tel: 020 74 74 24 74
customercare@bibliophilebooks.com for Amnesty International.

We have shops located throughout the UK.We have shops located

throughout the UK.
To find your nearest Amnesty
Green Ink Bookshop,
Booksellers visit:
To find your nearest
Amnesty Bookshop, visit:
of Hay-on-Wye
amnesty.org.uk/bookshops amnesty.org.uk/bookshops
CLASSIFIED

GOOD BOOKS BOUGHT

& SOLD All our shops are staffed by
volunteers, so if you’d like
All our shops are staffed by
L iTeraTUre , Hvolunteers,
iSTOry , P HiLOSOPHy ,
F irST e DiTiOnS , C HiLDren ’ S anD
so if to help contact your local
you’d like to help contact your M Orelocal bookshop.
bookshop.
We welcome book donations.
books@greeninkbooksellers.co.uk
We welcome book donations. 01497822870 Supporting our shops raises
money for Amnesty
International’s human rights
Supporting our shops raises money for Amnesty work in the UK and around
the world.
International’s human rights work in the UK
For more details
and around the world. email books@amnesty.org.uk
or call 020 7033 1653

For more details

email books@amnesty.org.uk
or call 020 7033 1653
46 London Review of Books 7 octoBeR 2021
190627 Bookshop LRB Ad Winter 2018-19 JUNE UPDATE.indd 1 27/06/2019 17:38
 ■ BOOK BUYERS
THINKING OF MOVING?
We buy mainly ‘households’ of books; we
thin existing collections and clear
deceased’s libraries.
History, Art, Architecture, Travel,
other subjects.
Prompt payment; no commission or charges.
ROTHWELL & DUNWORTH
Tel: 01398 323169
Email: info@rdbooks.co.uk
■ FOR SALE
House for sale
in St Margarets, Twickenham, TW1.
St Margarets village between Richmond and
Twickenham, approx. 1350 sq.ft. Downstairs: Two
reception rooms, fitted kitchen and cloakroom, dry
basement room. Upstairs: spacious family
bathroom, currently ensuite to the master bedroom.
Second double bedroom with small walk-in shower
room. Spacious third bedroom located in the loft
extension.
The house retains many period features, such as
fireplaces, sash windows and original exposed
floorboards. Small front garden with an attractive,
secluded rear garden. A small shed attached to the
side of the house ideal for bicycle storage etc.
Popular local park situated at the end of the road.
River Thames is only a short walk away. St. Margarets
railway station on the South Western mainline route
to London Waterloo within a few minutes’ walk.
Price £925,000.
Contact: ruth_vanloen@yahoo.co.uk
London three-bedroom two-bathroom apartment.
Highgate Village’s most desirable mansion block. Lift.
Garden. Parking. www.zooid.co.uk/property.html
OPPORTUNITY
Large and beautiful 1730s house for sale
Retaining Georgian staircase,
panelling and fireplaces
South facing garden
Grand views towards the City
****
81 Stoke Newington Church Street N16 0AS
****
contact Brickworks London
0203 0960065
■ PROPERTY SERVICES
Wilde wrote “if property had simply pleasures, we could
stand it; but its duties make it unbearable.” Are you fed
up managing your rental property in London? It would
be our pleasure to let and manage it for you.
london@findprop.co.uk
■ NOTICES
genderlect.com
Having Irish parents or grandparents entitles you
to Irish citizenship and an EU passport. Enquiries to
irishroots365@gmail.com.
Proof-editing Services. I am an award-winning author
and qualified proof-editor and member of CIEP. I can
assess and edit your work.
Contact: barbaraunkovic@gmail.com
or visit www.barbaraunkovic.com.
Have you ever got stuck reading Proust? Search for
‘The Shorter Proust’, a one volume abridgement of the
whole of Recherche. putz@onetel.net
■ NOTICES (continued)
Philanthropic funding sought for pursuing ideas and
strategies that, in aggregate, may represent our best
hope for saving the planet. www.ecoideaman.com
Converting your doctoral thesis for publication? Skilled
developmental editor, reasonable rates. phdtobook.com,
andrew.rewriting@gmail.com.
Have you had an affair? Published author and
psychotherapist keen to interview under strict
anonymity for case studies in this underexplored aspect
of behaviour. Contact researchingtheaffair@gmail.com.
■ PROFESSIONAL SERVICES
Find Anybody
Anywhere
Beneficiaries – Fraud – Debt Recovery
Lost Family
call 07773 788389
Email jamesblackesq@gmail.com
www.jamesblackesq.com
James Black LL. B (Hons)
Legal Consulting, Investigation,
Legal Claims Drafting & Guidance.
Avoid high legal fees - email now
Mastertrace Ltd.
■ MUSIC
A charismatic, aging French rock star will compose
and record an original song for you, your mom, your
lover or your pet in French, English, or Franglais
(recommended). US $200. Contact:
lodbrogsagent@gmail.com. imrelodbrog.com.
Stylus over substance
All genres of music bought, sold and swapped,
including jazz, avant-garde, folk, Americana,
world, rock, pop, soul, reggae, rap, electronica,
dance, stage and screen and classical. Also sold,
CDs and music-related books and paintings.
Our trading hours are. Tuesday to Friday 12 to 6,
Saturday and Sunday 11 to 6.
Vinyl Vanguard,, Unit 19, CRATE Building,
35 St James St, Walthamstow E17 9BH.
Mike: 07495 030018 Simon: 07766 502263
Email: vinylvanguardrecords@gmail.com,
Instagram: @vinylvanguardrecords7
■ WRITING AND ARTS RETREATS
S
CASA ANA
CREATIVE WRITING RETREATS
IN ANDALUCIA
www.casa-ana.com
Mentored retreats
2021 & 2022
November 13 – 27
November 27 – December 11
March 19 – April 1
June 18 – July 1
July 9 – 16 (novel writing)
tylus Over Substance
July 23 – August 5
November 12 - 25
Mentors: Mary-Jane Holmes,
Tom Bromley, Sarah May,
Catherine McNamara
* highly experienced mentors *
one-to-one sessions * group
critiquing * quiet rooms with desks *
private chef * inspiring surroundings *
the company of fellow writers
“A perfect writing environment”
“Invaluable support and advice”
“Quite simply, excellent”
Early booking strongly recommended
info@casa-ana.com
47 London Review of Books 7 octoBeR 2021
■ WRITING AND ARTS RETREATS (cont.) ■ HOLIDAYS (continued)
Historic village house
SEAMUS HEANEY
Stylishly renovated, in beautiful Languedoc
COUNTRY BREAKS IN IRELAND countryside; sheltered garden and roof terrace
Our award-winning boutique guest house is the withpanoramic views of Corbières hills.
perfect place to stay for writers and book lovers. We Magnificent walks, lake and river swimming, Cathar
castles, markets, vineyards. A holiday base or
have a Seamus Heaney Exhibition and stunning
writing retreat for all seasons.
poetry-themed bedrooms. Our Guided Tour of
Short lets (€600-€750 pw); long lets negotiable.
Heaney Country celebrating the life & legacy of the
late Seamus Heaney is certified as 5 STAR by Web: www.corbiereshouse.com
Email: maisondelacamp@gmail.com
Tourism NI. Treat yourself to something really
special. Or buy a gift voucher for your friends/loved Through 2021, we will fully refund deposits if COVID-19
related government restrictions prevent clients from travelling
ones. Located just 10 mins drive from new Seamus
Heaney HomePlace centre in Bellaghy: ‘One of the
top ten outdoor activities in Ireland’ – the Guardian
‘Our holiday accommodation has obtained
CLASSIFIED
the Good To Go industry standard and
consumer mark, certifying that we
adhere to Government and Public
Health recommendations.’
Contact: Eugene or Gerardine at Laurel Villa,
02879 301459, MAGICAL PROVENCE IN 2021
info@laurel-villa.comwww.laurel-villa.com Seillans – ‘un des plus beaux villages de France’
Three family homes: full comfort, libraries for
■ HOLIDAYS adults/children, patios, pools, groves and stunning
views of medieval villages. Short walk to shops,
newspapers, restaurants, art galleries. Home of Max
Ernst, Manning, Doisneau and others.
http://www.provencemagique.com
provencemagique@gmail.com
TEL: +44 (0)20 7209 1131
■ LIVE-IN COMPANION
Sunny, secluded Provence — Live the Provençal life We are looking for a live-in carer/companion for a
in our enchanting stone country house, within walking sociable 83-year-old woman living in a busy family
(or biking) distance of the medieval village of Lorgues. home in North London. A bedroom will be provided
Sleeps eight comfortably; perfect for families. at first, and eventually a suite with own bathroom and
Lush old-growth gardens, gated grounds, kitchenette. Approx 20hrs/week. Reply to:
pool and pool house, BBQ, Wifi. Near wineries, annabel@liwme.com for salary and details.
local markets and restaurants.
■ PERSONALS
ProvenceRetreat.com
provenceretreat@gmail.com
Last love? Lovely, warm north London writer seeks
attractive, kind, engaging man 63-75. beautifulwriter@
hotmail.com
Converted apartment in medieval
castle one hour from Turin. Gay man, 76, tall, slim, fit, seeks friend/ lover to help
him survive Eastbourne: small mercies, Brighton is
Due to current uncertainty in travel restrictions,
nearby. In search of lost time and the music of time.
we invite prospective guests to plan for potential
sussex44@gmail.com
disruptions in travel. Cancellation conditions
will be relaxed.
London gent with cat (Thunderpaws) seeks delight,
The area is rich in medieval abbeys and churches, tower optional: b@hgp.is
wineries, and natural attractions. Ideal for hiking,
birdwatching, writers’ retreats. Sleeps up to eight.
Spring to autumn stays, own car is essential. Married creative (W, 42) seeks liberal minded confidante
for friendship and cultural adventures. Surrey based with
Base price €100 per day for up to four guests, €15/ free time weekdays. I’m an expressive and emotionally
day each additional guest. Cold weather heating unguarded synesthete who lives life in technicolour.
surcharge. Enquire about longer stay prices.
I’m passionate about art, literature and music.
For more information, email filipporadicati@gmail.
sirensynesthete@gmail.com
com or visit www.castellobrozolo.com,
or find us on Airbnb. Older attractive woman with full life seeks affectionate
lover/friend for occasional encounters in London. email:
sarahgillespie23@yahoo.com
Blonde f. 65, bohemian left/liberal assertive caring
professional London seeks m. friend/lover with similar
and/or compatible values.
E M A I L : classified@lrb.co.uk
Blondebohemian@hotmail.com
Chain free, period facade, copious rooms
sophie.lewis@yahoo.co.uk
Glasgow girl, 30, seeks thoughtful man willing to
compete with many intense female friendships.
datemybrilliantfriend@gmail.com
Boston-based F 26 artist searches for mentor to enjoy
literature, art, and philosophy together.
copperquitter@gmail.com
Playful Fox (SWF, 30s, 5’8”, fit, NYC) seeks clever Hound
for ongoing transatlantic courtship.
RedMinxEliza@gmail.com
Rome (Aventino) apartment (living/dining room,
bedroom, two bathrooms, kitchen) short-term rentals.
www.paulahowarth.net howarth.paula@gmail.com
+39 338 122 1191
Florence: San Frediano district, delightful cottage
impeccably appointed, set in secluded private garden,
sleeps two, €1200 per week. gigi.grassi@yahoo.it
North Norfolk traditional brick and flint cottage, sleeps
four, in peaceful Kelling near Holt. Weeks and short
breaks. Visit violetcottagekelling.co.uk
Paris St Germain – charming last floor, view, well
furnished. Maximum of three people.
nicusit3@gmail.com
Tuscan farmhouse. Beautiful landscape. Near Arezzo/
Perugia. Sleeps seven. £400 pw. 0207 267 7622.
www.casasanlorenzo.net. Follow us on Instagram
Tyne Valley, Northumberland holiday cottage. Thomas
Bewick landscape and village connections. Details at
@Londonreviewadvertising
https://www.elmhurst-ovingham.co.uk.
Self-catering for two (+ cot) in the quiet, rural
Shropshire Hills. Walks from the door; views from the
balcony; songs from the birds. www.ferndaleflat.co.uk,
email wendy@brogden.info, phone 01584 841649.
 New from University of Toronto Press

PAPER 9 78 1487521257 CLOTH 978 1 4875 0 8 2 3 4 PAPER 9781 48752720 4

"The best and most comprehensive work
so far on the vital question of how the
Sustainable Development Goals connect to
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author of Development and Human Rights:
Rhetoric and Reality in India
"Hua Li reminds us of the wonders of
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North Carolina State University
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Harvard University
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University of Ottawa

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