No. 6210 the-tls.co.

uk
April 8 2022 UK £4.50 | USA $8.99

THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

Mikhail Epstein Satan in Russia | John Burnside Douglas Stuart’s Young Mungo
Caroline Moorehead Cooking the books | James McConnachie Eleven British ships

Refugee tales
Charlotte McDonald-Gibson on how to speak for those who cannot
 CONTENTS

3 REFUGEES CHARLOTTE My Fourth Time, We Drowned – Seeking refuge on the world’s

No. 6210 the-tls.co.uk
April 8 2022 UK £4.50 | USA $8.99

MCDONALD-GIBSON deadliest migration route Sally Hayden. The Naked Don’t Fear
THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT
the Water – A journey through the refugee underground
Mikhail Epstein Satan in Russia | John Burnside Douglas Stuart’s Young Mungo
Caroline Moorehead Cooking the books | James McConnachie Eleven British ships
Matthieu Aikins. Hope Not Fear – Finding my way from
refugee to filmmaker, NHS hospital cleaner and activist Hassan
Akkad. The Other Side of Hope – Journeys in refugee and
immigrant literature
DAVID HERD Hostile, not hospitable – On looking into the Brook House inquiry
A makeshift camp CAROLINE MOOREHEAD Alice’s Book – How the Nazis stole my grandmother’s cookbook
near the Greek Karina Urbach
village of Idomeni,
March 8, 2016 6 LETTERS TO THE Law, society and morality, Academic book prices, Dunwich, etc
© Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP
Refugee tales
Charlotte McDonald-Gibson on how to speak for those who cannot
via Getty Images
EDITOR

7 MEMOIRS CATHERINE TAYLOR My Own Worst Enemy – Scenes of a childhood Robert Edric.
No One Round Here Reads Tolstoy – Memoirs of a working-class
reader Mark Hodkinson

In this issue 8 RE-READING ROHAN MAITZEN Not afraid of Virginia Woolf – Re-reading the critical memoir of
a fellow novelist

I n Russia, great writers can take on the status

of prophets – think of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s
pronouncements that his country transfigured the
9 LITERATURE &
LITERARY CRITICISM
E. J. CLERY Lady Susan, The Watsons and Sanditon – Unfinished fictions
and other writings Jane Austen; Edited by Kathryn Sutherland.
Jane Austen, Early and Late Freya Johnston
experience of all suffering humanity. Secular western
readers who find such mysticism unappealing are 10 RUSSIAN LITERATURE & MIKHAIL EPSTEIN Stalin and Satan – The apocalyptic strain in Russian thinking;
nevertheless struck by the accuracy of his pre- HISTORY Translated by Oliver Ready
monitions and those of some other Russian authors. MUIREANN MAGUIRE Be as Children Vladimir Sharov
Dostoevsky’s Devils (1871) prefigures revolutionary LEWIS H. SIEGELBAUM Stalin’s Library – A dictator and his books Geoffrey Roberts
terror. Anton Chekhov’s Ward No 6 (1892) looks to
the medicalization of dissent, and long before 1984 12 HISTORY MAX HARRIS The Economic Weapon – The rise of sanctions as a tool of
(1949), Yevgeny Zamyatin’s science fiction fantasy modern war Nicholas Mulder
We (1924) anticipates the totalitarian state.
In recent decades two Russian writers have 13 ESSAYS DOUGLAS FIELD You Don’t Know Us Negroes Zora Neale Hurston
plotted Vladmir Putin’s trajectory. Vladimir Soro-
kin’s satire Day of the Oprichnik (2006) depicts a 14 ARTS PATRICK MCCAUGHEY Bridget Riley – Perceptual Abstraction (Yale Center for British
modern tsarist-like Russia, walled off from the West Art, New Haven)
apart from a few pipelines, where China pulls the NADIA BEARD Playing with Fire – The story of Maria Yudina, pianist in Stalin’s
strings. The late Vladimir Sharov’s novels dread the Russia Elizabeth Wilson
country’s slide to satanic catastrophe: “more hell!”.
The Moscow cultural commentator Mikhail Epstein 16 FICTION JOHN BURNSIDE Young Mungo Douglas Stuart. The Voids Ryan O’Connor
contributes an essay on Sharov, translated by former CHRISTOPHER SHRIMPTON Violets Alex Hyde
TLS Russia editor Oliver Ready. Epstein cites Putin’s ANNIE MCDERMOTT The Wonders Elena Medel
comment on a possible nuclear war – “We’ll go to
heaven as martyrs, while they’ll just die” – as evi- 18 HISTORY & LAW JAMES MCCONNACHIE The Ship Asunder – A maritime history of Britain in eleven
dence that the apocalyptic strain in Russian history vessels Tom Nancollas
identified by Sharov is virulent and potent. KIERAN PENDER The Poseidon Project – The struggle to govern the world’s
More than four million Ukrainians have fled west oceans David Bosco
to escape Putin’s horsemen of the apocalypse.
Europe’s welcome has been warm. Much seems to 20 BIOGRAPHY TIMOTHY BROOK The Perils of Interpreting Henrietta Harrison
have changed since 2015, when 1.5 million refugees
and migrants came to the EU to escape the Syrian 21 SCIENCE RICHARD LEA This Way to the Universe – A journey into physics Michael Dine
civil war and other horrors. A top European bureau-
22 RELIGION AMIR-HUSSEIN RADJY The Translator of Desires Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi
crat admitted in March that the bloc’s response last
ADAM SUTCLIFFE Come and Hear – What I saw in my seven-and-a-half-year
time had been “a failure”. Far-right populists stirred
journey through the Talmud Adam Kirsch
up hatred of the refugees, or “cockroaches”, as
they called them, and governments panicked.
24 POETRY STEPHANIE SY-QUIA Ephemeron Fiona Benson. Bioluminescent Baby Fiona Benson
In her review of four refugee tales, Charlotte
MARIA JOHNSTON Cheryl’s Destinies Stephen Sexton
McDonald-Gibson writes that even sympathetic
media distorted their story by seeking out the most 25 POETRY IN BRIEF The Acts of Oblivion Paul Batchelor, etc
extraordinary cases, turning compassion into “a
commodity”. Hassan Akkad’s Hope Not Fear tells 26 FREELANCE BEEJAY SILCOX Call it kismet – The unlikely meeting of two writers in Cairo
one emblematic story about teaching a nine-year-
old boy to swim in a hotel pool in Turkey, when 27 AFTERTHOUGHTS IRINA DUMITRESCU Plain speaking – How to write well
oblivious tourists assumed “we were just on holiday,
enjoying ourselves, rather than acting out what 28 NB M. C. Little magazines, Brazilian concrete, European navigations
could happen in a nightmare scenario”.
The perils of flight from home are clear. Alice’s
Book by Karina Urbach, reviewed by Caroline Editor MARTIN IVENS (editor@the-tls.co.uk)
Moorehead, tells the story of the theft of a Jewish Deputy Editor ROBERT POTTS (robert.potts@the-tls.co.uk)
refugee’s cookbook by her unscrupulous Viennese Associate Editor CATHARINE MORRIS (catharine.morris@the-tls.co.uk)
publisher. Is there nothing we can do to save today’s Assistant to the Editor LIBBY WHITE (libby.white@the-tls.co.uk)
migrants from such predators? Editorial enquiries (queries@the-tls.co.uk)
Managing Director JAMES MACMANUS (deborah.keegan@news.co.uk)
MARTIN IVENS Advertising Manager JONATHAN DRUMMOND (jonathan.drummond@the-tls.co.uk)
Editor
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2 TLS APRIL 8, 2022


Stories
of you
and me
Things lost and gained in the
telling of refugees’ tales
CHARLOTTE MCDONALD-GIBSON
MY FOURTH TIME, WE DROWNED
Seeking refuge on the world’s deadliest
migration route
SALLY HAYDEN
496pp. Fourth Estate. £20.
THE NAKED DON’T FEAR THE WATER
A journey through the refugee underground
MATTHIEU AIKINS
384pp. Fitzcarraldo Editions. Paperback, £12.99.
HOPE NOT FEAR
Finding my way from refugee to filmmaker,
NHS hospital cleaner and activist
HASSAN AKKAD
304pp. Bluebird. £18.99.
THE OTHER SIDE OF HOPE
Journeys in refugee and immigrant literature
Volume 1, autumn 2021. £7.
N
OT LONG AGO , journalists were not ques-
tioned when they said they wanted to give
a voice to the voiceless. Today, many of us
have learnt to question the lens through which we
tell other people’s stories and the harm we may
inadvertently cause.
On August 15, 2015, a man and his young family
arrived on a Greek beach in an overcrowded rubber
dinghy that had struggled across the Aegean Sea
from Turkey. Finally ashore, the man embraced his
family, his face crumpling into a tear-streaked
grimace of exhaustion and relief as he cradled his
two youngest children in his arms. A photographer
captured the moment, and the picture of Laith
Majid became one of the defining images of summer
2015, when more than a million people arrived in
the European Union seeking sanctuary from conflict
and hardship. If Majid had remained exactly what
much of Europe wanted to him to be – a victim of
a barbaric war who became an emblem of suffering,
then hope – his public story might have ended
there. But it didn’t, because he was something more
complicated: he was human.
The world wanted Majid and his family to be
Syrian, because at the time Syrians were deemed
most worthy of our compassion. In fact, they were
Iraqi, but they had followed their smuggler’s advice
and said they were Syrian because they wanted to
© CARLOS LUJAN/EUROPA PRESS VIA GETTY IMAGES
give themselves the best chance. After they had
spent six months living in Germany, Majid’s mother
became gravely ill, and he and his family made the
decision to go back to her in Iraq. In other words,
he did what most of us would do: assessed the
situation, then decided on the best course of action
for himself and the people he loved.
His return to Iraq was widely shared on social
media and reported by populist news outlets such
as Breitbart, which claimed his behaviour proved
that the narrative of “desperate ‘refugees’, fleeing
for their lives, has unravelled”. Majid was held up
as proof of the ingratitude of migrants, evidence
that people arriving in Europe were somehow
APRIL 8, 2022
fraudulent and undeserving of help. By now the
political debate and media coverage around the
refugee crisis had become so warped by conflicting
interests – on the one hand, those who wanted to
portray the refugees as a danger; on the other, those
who insisted they were only victims – that people
such as Majid were no longer allowed to deviate
from the binary roles assigned, saint or sinner.
Many people in the West are complicit in this
system, which has robbed migrants and refugees,
in particular those from different ethnic or religious
groups, of the right to be complicated and human.
There are the obvious offenders – those on the
far right who use terms such as “cockroaches”,
“aliens” and “hordes” – but sympathetic media
organizations have played a role too. Much of the
summer of 2015 was narrated by European journ–
alists who sought out the extraordinary: the Syrians
who had suffered the worst hardship; the person
whose journey beat the odds; the families who lost
children. Compassion became a commodity and the
bar for our sympathy kept rising.
As the war in Ukraine creates more than four
million refugees, the battle for our compassion
continues, with fierce debate over why Ukrainian
refugees, most of them white and Christian, are
being afforded more empathy than those from the
Middle East and Africa. And this adds urgency to
the question of how we portray people in crisis.
When are we, as journalists, justified in telling
other people’s stories, rather than finding ways to
ensure they can tell their own? Fleeing one’s home
is a chaotic and damaging experience, and there
undoubtedly is a need for people’s voices to be
amplified when events mean they cannot speak
for themselves. But we must examine how we tell
those stories, to ensure that the nuance of experi-
ence is preserved and that we can justify, through
some greater purpose, asking people to relive their
most traumatic memories in the public gaze.
The Irish journalist Sally Hayden makes clear
what she wants to achieve in My Fourth Time, We
TLS
REFUGEES
Drowned, an exposé of the unlawful imprisonment,
killing, torture, neglect and sexual abuse of thou-
sands of people in Libya’s squalid migrant detention
centres. She wants to “document the consequences
of European migration policies from the point that
Europe becomes ethically culpable”. Her investiga-
tions begin when a Facebook message arrives from
an Eritrean man trapped in one of Libya’s detention
centres. He has read some of her journalism and
asks for help. An astonishingly detailed account
follows of the torrid circumstances that men,
women and children are forced to endure in Libya,
while also navigating a tortuous global refugee
system that Hayden describes as “a modern-day
hunger games, a competition where their suffering,
and the horrors they had lived through, were evalu-
ated and weighed up against each other”.
The European Union’s mismanaged reaction to
refugee arrivals in 2015, when the bloc descended
into bickering and panic rather than uniting behind
a humanitarian solution, triggered a rise in support
for the far right. The EU responded with a security-
driven approach to migration and asylum, and has
since given millions of dollars in training, equipment
and other support to the Libyan coastguard, which
is now expected to intercept boats and return them
to Libya. There the migrants disappear into a net-
work of shady detention centres, many run
by militia or smugglers, which have become hubs of
extortion – a business model based on human suffer-
ing. People are tortured to extract money from their
families; traded and sold between different militia;
forced into slavery and bonded labour. Photographs
of the abuse are posted on Facebook so that ransoms
can be crowdfunded. Hayden sees a photograph of
a woman shackled by her wrists and ankles, an elec-
trical prod lying beside her. The post has “273 likes,
hearts, and crying emojis”. Hayden has collected tes-
timony from hundreds of former detainees and
builds a picture of systematic ill treatment.
Conditions are not much better at the semi-
official centres, where Hayden documents abuses
The Las Caracolas including sexual abuse, pregnancy resulting from
reception centre, rape, neglect and starvation. People die of treatable
Madrid, receives the disease; others take their own lives, including one
first refugees from man who drowns himself in a septic tank.
Ukraine, March 2, 2022 But My Fourth Time, We Drowned is not simply a
catalogue of misery: it is a meticulously docu-
mented record of the complicity of the very
organizations that are meant to be forces of good:
the EU and the United Nations, in particular its
refugee agency, the UNHCR. Here, then, is a clear
reason to speak for those who cannot, being
trapped in a purgatory of our making: the EU has
actively pursued a policy of offshoring border
security to unsavoury regimes, an “out of sight,
out of mind” approach, Hayden argues, that favours
the suppression of the extent of complicity in
human rights abuses. The EU is aware of the human
cost of its policies, she says, but is guided by fear
of a repeat of 2015. She accuses the UNHCR,
meanwhile, of “being used by the E.U. to sanitize
the devastating impact of migration policies…
effectively whitewashing a brutal system of violence
and torture”.
Hayden has an eye for details that give the lie to
the narrative of compassion. There is the UNHCR
country representative who blocks migrants on her
Twitter account because she is annoyed by the “du
du du, du du du nonstop” of people desperately
trying to raise awareness of their situation. A senior
official at the agency tells Hayden not to believe
what her contacts are telling her, and she wonders
“how often he repeated his comments in meetings
Charlotte McDonald- where refugees had no seat at the table and he was
Gibson is the author their only advocate”.
of Cast Away: Stories Her attempts to address other large societal issues
of survival from such as the shortcomings of the global aid industry
Europe’s refugee or the links between migration and colonialism can
crisis, 2016, and seem shallow, however. It is also a shame that her
Far Out: Encounters contacts in the detention centres never emerge as
with extremists, rounded human beings, instead remaining defined
which will be by their suffering. This is, perhaps, understandable,
published this month given that Hayden was communicating with them
3
 REFUGEES
via short messages focused on their urgent situa-
tions. “Today [we’re] not eating at all because so
many people have died”, she hears. “We’re still
sleeping beside the dead bodies.” Their very
remoteness is a part of the picture, and Hayden
recognizes “how unfair it was that the voices of
refugees in Libya were constantly filtered through
privileged journalists like me”.
S
uch self-awareness is mostly missing from The
Naked Don’t Fear the Water by Matthieu Aikins,
a Canadian journalist who was based in
Afghanistan. In 2016 his fixer and translator, Omar,
decides to leave the country on the underground
migrant trail for Europe. Aikins volunteers to
accompany him in the guise of an Afghan, his Asian
ancestry lending his face similar features to those
of Afghanistan’s Hazara minority.
Aikins is a courageous and talented journalist
with a poetic way of evoking the absurdities and
contradictions of global migration, in which “the
shortest distance between two points is rarely a
straight line… the space between two people clasp-
ing hands through a fence could be wider than a
desert”. But it is a sign of how far the debate about
representation has come that this central premiss
– of a western journalist impersonating a member
of a persecuted minority so he can explain the
experience of millions of people – feels dated. An
inability to empathize with hardship and persecu-
tion is evident early on. By 2016 Afghanistan had
Hostile, not hospitable
DAVID HERD
T
HE CRISIS OF FORCED D I S PL AC E M E N T
caused by Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine
has again compelled people in the UK to reflect
on how, as a state, we treat those seeking refuge.
Much has been said, rightly, about the way the pro-
gramme of policies we know as the hostile environ-
ment has produced an apparatus of refusal through
which a person fleeing the present conflict will find
it extremely difficult to pass. Much has also been said
about the profound hypocrisy of a government that
continually reannounces its historic support (rarely
documented by evidence) for refugees while forcing
through a bill that, by every measure other than the
government’s own, reneges on the UK’s commitment
to the UN’s Refugee Convention of 1951. These contra-
dictions cut deep. We should remember them for
future reference. As timing would have it, however,
there is currently another mirror we might look into
or through, another way of glimpsing the processes
of hostility that, as a state, the UK has come to per-
fect. That mirror is the inquiry, now concluding its
second phase, into abuses at the Brook House Immi-
gration Removal Centre, a series of hearings that, as
eloquently as any testimony might, tells us where we
have come to.
The hearings, which started in November and
resumed in February, are available on YouTube. Any-
body with an interest in these questions – which is,
perhaps, anybody – might want to take a look. The
proceedings are slow and the exchanges deliberate,
but periodically what they refer to is unbroadcast
footage from the television programme Panorama’s
undercover investigation into the treatment of
people detained in Brook House. The footage comes
with a warning. The inquiry is presented with images
of harm: the suicidal self-harm of people detained
arbitrarily and indefinitely, and the harm inflicted by
detention centre staff. As the harm is inflicted, the
people detained are taunted, verbally abused in gro-
tesque terms. The abuse is explicit and racist, and
as people speak in languages other than English,
4 TLS
become a destitute, war-ridden land, with each year
bringing record numbers of civilian deaths. Aikins’s
reflections on leaving Kabul, however, include
laments about the great parties he used to host. He
fondly recalls “a bar that grew sticky with home-
made punch”.
The power imbalance between author and sub-
ject is also clear. They first meet when Aikins needs
a translator to accompany him to southern Afghan-
istan, but does not want to pay the going rate of a
few hundred dollars a day for an Afghan to risk
their life. He hires Omar, a former NATO interpreter
keen for a new start in journalism. When Omar
decides to leave for Europe, he agrees to Aikins
accompanying him in spite of the dangers that
could befall them both if the subterfuge were
uncovered. One wonders if Aikins’s offer to pay for
the journey influenced the decision. During the
pair’s odyssey through Iran and Turkey, then across
the Mediterranean Sea to Greece, the dynamic of
employer and employee persists. Aikins recognizes
as much when he gets angry with Omar for refusing
to take a more dangerous route via Pakistan: “I was
treating this trip like another assignment where I
was in charge”.
Despite such rare moments of self-reflection,
Aikins fails to breathe much life into his protagonist.
The book is meant to be about Omar, but Aikins
informs the reader about his own reading material
(Toni Morrison; Elena Ferrante) and omits the
inner life of his friend. A particularly tone-deaf
How Britain treats detained immigrants
those languages are openly and brutally mocked.
The inquiry lingers over a moment when a member
of staff delays removing the ligature from a person
whose suicide attempt has been prevented, but for
whom the ligature is still causing visible pain. It is
extremely difficult to watch; and, if and when one
does watch, it is hard not to think that one is looking
into the dark heart of the UK state.
The inquiry has a specific remit. It is to “investi-
gate the decisions, actions and circumstances sur-
rounding the mistreatment of individuals who were
detained at Brook House Immigration Removal
Centre” between April 1 and August 31, 2017. The
time frame is determined by the Panorama investi-
gation, the period when Callum Tulley, an under-
cover reporter, bravely wore a hidden camera while
working as a member of the detention centre staff.
The inquiry appears to be probing, and the culture
of abuse disclosed by the footage is clearly well
established, so one can hope that in its findings
the inquiry will go beyond its prescribed scope. It
is possible that it will make far-reaching recommen-
dations, and, who knows, perhaps we live in a
political universe in which such recommendations
might be taken up; though the government’s con-
tinued commitment to offshore detention, with all
the horrors (as documented by the Australian
example) that this would bring, makes any positive
political action highly unlikely.
Whatever the findings, and whatever the recom-
mendations, and whatever the political outcomes of
the process, we have to understand what the Brook
House inquiry tells us. In legal and political terms,
yes, but much more importantly in cultural and in
human terms. We have to come to an understanding
of what the evidence playing out on YouTube tells
us about the practices of the UK state.
What we have to understand, first, is that deten-
tion – and the culture that produces and is gener-
ated by detention – is in no sense incidental to our
political culture as a whole. At some level, no doubt,
it is a desire to bracket the process, to annexe it,
that is driving the government’s fantasy of an off-
shore space. In fact, detention – which in the UK
“
moment comes when they are staying in an Athens
squat, where Omar spends all day in bed, glued
to his phone. Aikins assumes he is moping over a
Hayden has an girl and gets annoyed that he is not helping with
eye for details chores. More likely, Omar is depressed by his
newfound exile.
that give the “What kind of protagonist was he?” Aikins won-
lie to the ders. A short time later he announces that he is to
narrative of travel to New York for Christmas, one of the many
instances in which he uses his multiple passports
compassion to extricate himself from difficult situations without
much thought about the impact this might have on
Omar. There is also little reflection about why Aikins
is undertaking the voyage in the first place, or what
insight he believes he can bring to the experience
that someone else – Omar or one of the millions of
other displaced people – could not.
One writer we could turn to is Hassan Akkad, a
Syrian filmmaker and activist who has documented
his arrival via a similar route in the memoir Hope
Not Fear: Finding my way from refugee to filmmaker,
NHS hospital cleaner and activist. While it may lack
Aikins’s elegant turn of phrase and Hayden’s foren-
sic investigation, the book excels at conveying the
experience of becoming a refugee. Through Akkad’s
lean prose we understand the horrors at home that
would force you to flee; the raw emotion of leaving
behind a beloved country; the deep and lasting
psychological impact of exile; and the frustration
of battling to regain your own agency.
Hope Not Fear tackles many of the same themes
“
(as opposed to anywhere else in western Europe)
is indefinite – is integral and fundamental to the
hostile environment for which, as a state, the UK
The people has sought to be known. Thus, a person whose asy-
detained are lum claim is unresolved is vulnerable to detention
or re-detention at any moment. It is the brutal insti-
taunted, tutional fact that shapes their experience on a daily
verbally basis, and which underpins and reinforces every
abused in other form of degradation and abuse to which they
are subject. They can be detained without warning
grotesque and without process; and, when detained, they do
terms. The not know when they will be released. Detention is
not incidental or extraneous: it is hard-wired into
abuse is the political culture that, for more than a decade
explicit and now, the UK has projected to people who might
racist seek refuge.
But step back again. Take a look at the footage
and step back. What we see in those recordings of
harm and violence and racist abuse, of sustained
hostility towards human beings, is the institutional
space the UK has created at the heart of its asylum
process for geopolitically vulnerable persons. It is
shocking to watch, even if you thought you had
some sense of what goes on, even if you have read
accounts of the way people who are detained are
treated. What the footage confirms, which is surely
no surprise, is that the spaces of detention and the
practices they give rise to are one and the same: that
when the state decides that it can detain arbitrarily
and indefinitely, it has already decided that those
whom it detains can be harmed.
If you watch the footage embedded in the Brook
House inquiry, you could be forgiven for reaching
the bleak conclusion that the UK state has rendered
David Herd is Professor itself constitutionally incapable of welcome; that its
of Modern Literature at practices are such, its way of treating people is such,
the University of Kent that it has lost the capacity, institutionally, to wel-
and co-organizer of the come people in. But that is not a conclusion it can
project Refugee Tales. be tolerable to draw. What the inquiry footage tells
His book Writing us, what we must allow it to tell us, is that the UK’s
Against Expulsion in practices have to change. It must become a moment
the Postwar World will when the state begins to learn the language of the
be published by Oxford politics of welcome. And it can start by recognizing
University Press that detention must end. n
APRIL 8, 2022

as Hayden and Aikins’s books: the thin, arbitrary-
seeming line between those who can and those who
cannot freely cross borders; the human consequen-
ces of the EU’s security-focused approach to migra-
tion; the inequity of the West’s hierarchy of suffering
when assessing refugee claims. These concepts come
to life in Akkad’s hands. He teaches a nine-year-old
boy to swim in a hotel pool in Turkey ahead of their
trip across the Aegean Sea, their splashing taking
place under the eyes of oblivious tourists who
assumed “we were just on holiday, enjoying our-
selves, rather than acting out what could happen in
a nightmare scenario”. When they make it onto the
raft, it deflates soon after they leave shore. Akkad
sums up the folly: “we’d spent more than 60,000
pounds on a boat that was sinking”.
Akkad is a skilled filmmaker, and footage of his
experiences featured in the BBC documentary
series Exodus: Our journey to Europe (2016). When
he eventually arrived in England, the series won
a BAFTA award and Akkad soon found himself in
the company of celebrities, including the actress
Emma Watson and the model Sophie Dahl. (“It
wasn’t until I looked her up afterwards that I
realized she was well known.”) He is asked to speak
at conferences, where, among “the super-rich,
CEOs of multinational companies and newspaper
editors”, he feels himself entering “a parallel
universe”; these people could “eradicate global
poverty if they felt like it”. Akkad soon realizes
that he is generally valued only when he plays the
part expected of him: the grateful refugee. “I was
pigeonholed… the subject of a film rather than a
filmmaker or co-creator.” When he tries to produce
work on his own terms, travelling to interview
other refugees about their experiences, he is
unpaid and uncredited. He also criticizes the
methods of some story-hungry journalists: “They
re-traumatized someone, in order to get the exact
reaction that they wanted for the film.”
Akkad never loses faith in his fellow humans,
however, and, driven by a desire to contribute to
the society in which he now finds himself, he signs
up to work as an NHS hospital cleaner during the
Covid crisis. In some ways the final chapters of
Hope Not Fear feel as if they belong to a different
book, as he details the excruciating emotional toil
of working in a Covid ward early in the pandemic.
But a connecting thread is the value society places
on different people. Akkad eventually uses his
photography skills and large following on social
media to elevate the experiences of the cleaners
he works alongside in a series of powerful por-
traits, all the time making sure his subjects have
control over their own image. “People have the
right to tell their own stories, to own their own
narratives”, he says.
Ensuring that there are outlets for people to do
this is crucial, and a new literary journal – The
Other Side of Hope, established in 2021 – features
fiction, poetry and essays by people from refugee
or migrant backgrounds. Some of the contributions
directly address exile. Others do not. The magazine
shows that “refugee literature” is anything but a
static category; there are simply writers attempt-
ing, with varying degrees of style and success, to
address matters of universal human experience –
a desire to fit in; the weight of other people’s expec-
tations; the loneliness of exile; the distance
between parents and children. In The Other Side
of Hope, writers are released from the narrow para–
meters expected by much of the media, where, as
Bänoo Zan, an Iranian-born poet and translator,
observes in her poem “To the Editor”: “In your
pages / My religion is perfect / My community is
perfect / My country is perfect / You exercise /
self-critique – the authentic critique – / but deny me
the same right”.
As more people arrive in the EU every day, fleeing
the war in Ukraine, it is crucial that we allow them
to retain their complexities, conflicts and weak-
nesses, because there is no line between “you” and
“me”, only a set of circumstances that can change
in a heartbeat. n
APRIL 8, 2022
Cooks and
crooks
A story of stolen copyright
CAROLINE MOOREHEAD
ALICE’S BOOK
How the Nazis stole my grandmother’s
cookbook
KARINA URBACH
Translated by Jamie Bulloch
368pp. MacLehose Press. £20.
A
LICE U RBACH WAS THIRT Y-FOUR , recently
widowed from a loveless marriage in which
her gambler husband had squandered her
money, when she began to cook. This was in 1920s
Vienna, and she had two young sons to bring up. A
new generation of middle-class women, impover-
TLS
REFUGEES
ished by the recent financial crises, were facing a life
with fewer servants. As Viennese society picked up,
supper parties resumed. Alice, friendly, maternal
and long interested in pastry baking, began to cook
for a rich older sister’s receptions. She invented
“bridge bites”, aspic-covered sandwiches secured
by toothpicks. Soon, women of all ages and back-
grounds clamoured for classes. Alice opened a
cookery school and set up a delivery service of
ready-made meals, hitherto unheard of. Her business
flourished as did her first cookbook, So kocht man
in Wien! (1935; Cooking the Viennese Way!).
The days of prosperity and success did not last.
Soon Alice and her sons, Otto and Karl, were
refugees, Jews in an increasingly antisemitic Austria.
Much of the narrative follows Alice on her wander-
ings, frantically in search of asylum, terrified for
her now grown sons, grappling with formidably
complicated papers and permits. Finally offered a
visa as a domestic servant in Britain, she was forced
to leave everything she possessed in Vienna. She
counted herself lucky to escape.
Growing up in Berlin long after, Karina Urbach,
Caroline Moorehead Alice’s granddaughter, heard little of this story. She
is the author of a knew that her grandmother had been a famous chef,
quartet of books on but never thought to ask why her parents kept two
resistance in the copies of the same cookbook on the shelf, one bear-
Second World War ing Alice’s name, the other that of a stranger.
Many of the best memoirs arise out of unexpected
troves of papers. Karina Urbach was already an
established historian when a cousin presented her
with a case containing dozens of letters and seven
cassettes relating to Alice’s life. Papers took her back
to the family’s beginnings, in a ghetto of what is now
Bratislava, then to the founding of a successful textile
firm in Vienna. Most interesting, perhaps, was the
story of Alice’s cookbook, and what it revealed about
the German and Austrian publishing world.
Hitler’s decision to burn books in 1933 had been
intended to cleanse the German-speaking world of
undesirable Jewish writers. As antisemitism spread,
800 Jewish and anti-Nazi publishers and booksellers
emigrated from Germany and, after the Anschluss in
1938, Austria. Those who took their places often felt
no scruples about helping themselves to the books
left behind, substituting the Jewish authors’ names
with Aryan ones. Alice became Rudolf Rösch. While
plagiarists and book thieves made good money,
especially on dictionaries and medical textbooks, the
real authors, most of them now destitute, fled; some
committed suicide.
Karina Urbach tells us what Alice did next. After
reaching Britain she found a position as pastry chef
in a grand country house, and Alice’s Book contains
entertaining passages dealing with the travails of this
good-humoured woman as she navigates wartime
British food and British domestic service: “For a
pastry chef like Alice, the jellies so popular in Britain
were a culinary crime”. She was not a complainer.
In time she ran a hostel for refugee Jewish girls in
Windermere, and later made her way to the US,
where her sons had managed to find safety. She had
not seen them for almost ten years. Energetic and
cheerful, she was soon cooking again, eventually
appearing on television as “the oldest cookery
teacher in the world”. She died in 1983, at the age
of ninety-seven.
Unlike Nazi art theft, about which there are many
excellent books, there has been surprisingly little
research into the Nazi theft of Jewish authorship.
Alice’s own publisher, Ernst Reinhardt Verlag, con-
tinued, long after the war, to stall and prevaricate,
dismissing her as both an incompetent writer and a
bad cook while continuing to publish her cookbook
under the name of Rösch. Other firms, too, found it
inconvenient when Jewish writers survived the war
and returned to reclaim their books. It was not until
2020 that exploitation by publishers was properly
investigated. Only in 2021 were the rights to Alice’s
book posthumously returned to her. As this engaging
memoir, smoothly translated by Jamie Bulloch,
makes clear, the theft of the cookbook remained for
Alice’s entire life the symbol of everything that had
been stolen from her. n
5
 LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

Academic book prices

Sir Brian Vickers is absolutely right
to draw attention to the exorbitant
cost of many academic books
(Letters, March 25). As he notes, the
cost of the new Oxford University
Press edition of Francis Bacon is
now so high as to put its volumes
beyond the reach of any but the
largest libraries, and of all inde-
pendent scholars. Volume XIII on
the Instauratio Magna, for example,
includes three texts never before
published, as well as a wealth of
new research and analysis. It is
currently listed by OUP at £327.50,
with no electronic edition available.
But there is a deeper issue. What
is the point of university presses if
they only focus on new sales to the
richest customers, and do not make
scholarly works available over time
at sensible prices and online for
the widest possible readership?
Why do they enjoy their very con-
siderable inherited privileges and
current tax advantages, generating
tens of millions of pounds in profit,
if they are not interested to serve
this important public good?
n Jesse Norman
House of Commons, London
SW1
Sylvia Townsend Warner
It is splendid news that Michael
Alec Rose has created an opera
from Lolly Willowes, which by the
sound of it would have delighted
Sylvia Townsend Warner (Letters,
March 18); but this is not, as he
claims, the first opera to be based
on one of her novels. In the late
1930s the American composer Paul
Nordoff created an opera from Mr
Fortune’s Maggot, and on June 4,
1937, Warner wrote to him giving
him retrospective permission for
this, and advising him to get in
touch with her American publisher
to avoid any hitches in perform-
ance. She seems to have heard a
version of the opera by Nordoff
(who became her close friend)
The addition to your edition
Law, society and morality that his poems intone and radiate.
There is a steadfast trill of Beet-
hovian joy, and a majestic organ-
tone of triumph, which bursts forth
J onathan Sumption makes a persuasive case for
understanding the development of law in evolution-
Islamic, sought to guide individuals along a divinely
ordained path and poured out volumes of philo-
repeatedly: and I think this was
heard clearly by Nadezhda Mandel-
ary terms in his review of my The Rule of Laws (March sophical reflection. Chinese imperial dynasties for over stam and Anna Akhmatova, who
25). Laws as we now know them, he argues, arose in two millennia controlled vast empires, but discipline, preserved his work, and also by
Europe to satisfy the need for security, which a law- not security, was their legal imperative; Chinese laws many readers around the world,
based state can provide, along with a stable system of property were woefully unsophisticated and the who are charmed and transfixed by
of land tenure. These imperatives would, sooner or emperors always resisted being subjected to the rule these hymns from the depths of the
later, have led to similar developments elsewhere, he of law. twentieth-century furnace.
suggests, even without the dynamics of European If there is a single thread that unites these cases, it n Henry Gould
colonialism. These new forms pushed aside old laws is that laws set out a vision of how an articulate class Minneapolis MN
shaped by religious and traditional concerns. thinks its society should be. Now, that vision is a demo-
I am very grateful for this generous and thought- cratic nation state, which aims to provide security,
provoking review, but, if I may take the opportunity pursue economic progress and safeguard the rule of Cowper’s shopping list
for some general reflections (which Sumption feels the law. But modern China is hardly an enthusiastic sup- Norma Clarke may well be correct
book lacks), I would like to ask whether this is fair to porter of the rule of law, and Islamic legal scholars to say in her review (March 25) that
the many sophisticated and long-lived legal systems still command followings by the million. We need to William Cowper berated female
that pre-dated the rise of Europe. Mesopotamian rulers, understand what law has been and done in the past “shoppers” for badgering shop
4,000 years ago, promised justice to their citizens and if we are to understand what challenges the global assistants, but he was not loath
endeavoured to create laws that would constrain legal order faces today. An evolutionary account, how- to shop for fashionable items and
future rulers. Roman citizens were concerned about ever elegantly expressed, cannot capture this diversity leave the badgering to others. In a
debt more than land tenure, and the republican assem- of human intentions. letter to Samuel Rose on June 5,
blies regularly sat in judgement on corrupt officials. n Fernanda Pirie 1789, he commands his corre-
Religious legal scholars, whether Jewish, Hindu or Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, Oxford spondent: “You must buy for me,
if you please, a cuckoo-clock, and
now I will tell you where they
while she was in New York in the Concrete poetry in the TLS you can’t get much more establish- are sold… They are sold, I am
summer of 1939, for her letter of It may be true that concrete poetry ment than that. informed, at more houses than
June 21, 1939, returning “your copy “went down like a lead balloon n Andrew McCulloch one, in that narrow part of Holborn
of Mr Fortune with an inscription”, with British readers” ( Jeremy Noel- Marple Bridge, Greater which leads into Broad St Giles’s.
thanks him warmly: “I wish I could Tod’s review of Concrete Poetry: A Manchester It seems they are well-going clocks,
convey half the pleasure and excite- 21st-century anthology, April 1), but and cheap, which are the two best
ment your music gave me… It was in 1964 the TLS gave it serious recommendations of any clock.
a wonderful evening, and one that consideration in two issues devoted Osip Mandelstam They are made in Germany”. On
I shall never forget” (Letters of Sylvia to what it called “the new avant- Benjamin Paloff ’s excellent review June 20 he acknowledged receipt
Townsend Warner ed. William Max- garde”, a movement whose origins of Peter France’s new translations of his clock, “which arrived per-
well, 1982, pp 44-45 and 53-54). the deputy editor, John Willett, of Osip Mandelstam (March 18) is fectly safe, and goes well, to the
The opera Warner listened to in traced back to the French republi- astute, concise and very useful. amusement and amazement of all
1939 must have been a private per- can belief that art and politics were But when he states that France’s is who hear it”.
formance with a piano score. (No part of “a single glorious human “the first edition that consistently n John Stevenson,
orchestral score of Mr Fortune’s advance”, and whose time, in the reflects the sound, sense – and Down St Mary, Devon
Maggot has survived.) Mr Rose’s countercultural 1960s, seemed to resistance to sense – of Mandel-
Lolly Willowes is certainly the first have come round again. One of stam’s poems”, I think he may
such opera to have been publicly the most striking elements of the have missed David McDuff ’s trans- Dunwich
performed, and as chairman of the edition of August 6 was a double- lations from 1973 (Osip Mandel- I was interested to read Peter
Sylvia Townsend Warner Society, I page collage by Richard Hamilton s t a m : S el ec t e d p o e m s ; R ive r s Conn’s letter (April 1) drawing
offer him my warm congratulations. that featured a poem by Edwin Press, FSG). McDuff ’s versions also attention to Henry James’s remarks
I hope that his Lolly Willowes will Morgan, consisting of twenty-six strike the right balance between on the lost Suffolk port of Dun-
be performed in England before one-line anagrams of the twenty- Mandelstam’s sonorous, soaring, wich. The letter implies a century’s
too long. six letters of “The Times Literary delicate diction and his sharp contrast between “a place of neat
n Janet Montefiore Supplement”, a series of photo- directness – his streetwise, report- g a rd e n s a n d a f i n e p u b” ( a s
Canterbury, Kent graphs of Emmett Williams giving orial witness. described by Nat Segnit in his
a public reading of Mauriac’s The Paloff contends that France’s review, March 18), and the absence
Son of Man, and “three cards for translations reflect well “how con- that James purported to find a
hospital events”. s i s te n t ly Ma n d e l s t a m’s ve r s e century ago. In fact, there is little
Hugh MacDiarmid said concrete pushes back against the affirming difference between the physical
poems could not be called poetry mythology that has grown up appearance of present-day Dun-
“any more than mud pies can be around his political oppression: wich and what James would have
called architecture”, but Morgan that of the endurance of the poetic seen – one church ruin resited, but
defended their playfulness on the word against death and decay”. otherwise a collection of the same
grounds that all poetry is ludic to This is a subtle critical contention pleasant cottages along what was
a degree. The computational lin- – and it is certainly worthwhile, the medieval road out of town,
guist Margaret Masterman went always, to probe beneath the i n c l u d i n g a Vi c t o r i a n p a r i sh
further, hoping that the “indefi- clichés that have built up over church. James was right to medi-
nitely large number of variants of decades around Mandelstam and tate on the town lost to the sea,
any type of combination of words” other embattled eastern European but the present-day visitor can look
of which computers were capable poets. Paloff is right to emphasize forward to enjoying much the
(Morgan’s poem “The Computer’s the critical limitations of looking same visual experience that he did.
First Christmas Card” also to this poet for easy “answers [or] I wonder whether James would
appeared in this edition) might reassurances”. There is indeed have availed himself of the one
allow us to study “the complexity such a powerful cry of anguish, major addition: an excellent fish-
of poetic pattern which intuitively extremity and suffering running in and-chip shop beside the beach. I
we all feel to exist if only we were different keys all through his work. thoroughly recommend it,
able to grasp it”. Yet I think Mandelstam’s high n Diarmaid MacCulloch
Less seriously, perhaps, many of
the lines in Morgan’s “TLS” poem
Pushkinian literary ethos, his abso-
lute commitment to the “Fourth
Oxford

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– “THEY SLIT RARE TIME SUPPLE-
Thea Lenarduzzi is joined by a variety of guests, from novelists
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rooted, Dantesque power of poetry letters@the-tls.co.uk

6 TLS APRIL 8, 2022

 MEMOIRS

and he endlessly released these.” Edric records

earning pocket money by doing a paper round,
something he enjoyed and was good at, before his
father spitefully prevented him from continuing –
even though, as a teenager, he was expected to earn
“bed and board”.
While Edric’s matter-of-fact and melancholic
book distils a time and place, No One Round Here
Reads Tolstoy, the memoir of the journalist, writer
and publisher Mark Hodkinson, is effusive, enter-
taining and sprawling (at times to a confusing
degree). Born almost a decade after Edric, Hod-
kinson grew up in Rochdale, Greater Manchester,
in a “modest, boxy house” on an estate. His was an
“Every family... everyone watched the telly, lots of
telly”. Young Mark, however, was a dreamer and a
collector – of beer mats, comics, conkers – and he
developed an obsession with reading in a household
that only possessed one book (Folklore, Myths and
Legends of Britain, which his father kept on the top
of a wardrobe along with his son’s cycling profi-
ciency certificate). Hodkinson estimates that he
now owns about 3,500.
No One Round Here Reads Tolstoy is a frustrating
work. It is too long, and Hodkinson admits himself
that he can come across as a bit of a pub bore in
his endless evangelism not only for books, but also
for music and football. There are selfconscious
passages of literary criticism, or perhaps less self-
conscious than lacking in self-awareness, but he
enthuses memorably about his early reading of
The Catcher in the Rye (its “great strength... is that
it feels so exceptionally personal. The paradox,
then, of the author wilfully hiding himself away is
viewed as outright betrayal of his integrity”); and
we share in his excitement when he commissions
and edits Kenneth Slawenski’s J. D. Salinger: A Life
(2011), and meets contemporary author heroes –
among them Hunter Davies, Simon Armitage
and Alan Sillitoe. (Sillitoe, then just turned eighty,

Our friends in the north
Two memoirs that recall growing up in Sheffield and Rochdale
CATHERINE TAYLOR A few local pits remained in operation, and it was
evident everywhere that this had once been an
industrial landscape. Despite the fields and wood-
MY OWN WORST ENEMY lands and reed-fringed ponds, this was still coal and
Scenes of a childhood steel country.
ROBERT EDRIC Edric’s family lived near the vast Parson Cross
272pp. Swift Press. £14.99. estate, which was built on farmland after the First
World War, and expanded throughout the 1940s
NO ONE ROUND HERE READS TOLSTOY and 1950s as people were moved from dilapidated
Memoirs of a working-class reader Victorian housing in Attercliffe and Heeley. In 1962,
MARK HODKINSON by then with the addition of Edric’s younger sister
and brother, they moved into the city proper, to a
368pp. Canongate. £16.99.
cramped two-up two-down on Idsworth Road, near
Firth Park, a street that would some thirty years
later feature in the film The Full Monty.
had “inky rapt eyes that flashed”.) Among writers,
Virginia Woolf alone seems to represent “woman-
kind”. Yet every time the book palls, Hodkinson
comes up with another diverting and often moving
segue. A beloved grandfather, who seems to have
had bipolar disorder, flits in and out of the narrative
like a revenant; in one passage we read of the
Sheffield, 1966 strange behaviour he started to exhibit soon after
he married Hodkinson’s grandmother. “He drew on
the wedding photographs. On the wide-angle shot
of the assembly outside the church he daubed a pair
of horns on his head and an arrow pointing down at
his feet.” Hodkinson’s parents were not unkind, as
Edric’s father was; but there were misunderstand-
ings. When Hodkinson desperately needed glasses,
his mother thought he was “showing off ”.
Edric passed the eleven-plus and went to gram-
mar school. His memoir ends in 1974, when he
left Sheffield for university in Hull; he was the first
in his family to go on to higher education. Hod-
kinson’s rattles on into a different era, of recession,
unemployment and underachievement. He went to

R
OBERT E DRIC WAS BORN in 1956, the year
Anthony Eden’s government passed the Clean
Air Act to reduce the heavy smogs known as
“pea-soupers” – caused largely by coal-burning fires
– in which British towns and cities were regularly
cloaked. Even so, the Sheffield that emerges in his
tense and vivid memoir My Own Worst Enemy is not
dissimilar to the one that left George Orwell, in 1936,
spluttering in shock: “It seems to me, by daylight,
one of the most appalling places I have ever seen”.
Edric spent the first six years of his life in the “semi-
rural” village of Ecclesfield, on the city’s northern
edges, and he evokes it with all the economy and
skill of recall of the novelist he would become (his
first book, Winter Garden, won the 1985 James Tait
© SIMON WEBSTER/ALAMY
By the early 1970s the “smokeless zones” estab-
lished by law had extended to encompass the
whole of Sheffield. The paradox of this industrial,
part-rural city, surrounded by the hills and gritstone
edges of the Peak District, comes alive in Edric’s
book (originally published by the Nottingham-based
Shoestring Press). Each short, fluent chapter pro-
vides a pen portrait of family members, rituals,
happenings, violent enmities and uneasy commu-
nity ties, under a fug of beer and cigarette smoke:
“Almost every adult I knew smoked... twenty to forty
cigarettes a day would be considered normal, sixty
not unusual”. Edric’s grandfather is glimpsed in his
allotment in overalls, but the memoir is dominated
by the figure of Edric’s father – a vain, preposterous
a secondary modern, and his evocation of those
years, witty and compassionate, is one of the best
parts of his book. Barry Hines’s novel A Kestrel for
a Knave (1968) and Ken Loach’s film adaptation, Kes
(1969), are ingrained in the psyche of the north: the
small unloved boy, his nasty older brother and his
pet kestrel. Their spirit imbues My Own Worst
Enemy, but it is Hodkinson who explicitly nails it:
“Billy Casper, the book’s protagonist, was the defini-
tive emblem of a ragged generation. Everybody
knew a Casper – half-boy, half-pigeon, disowned by
his family and his school, left to hobble through life
in a ten-bob anorak and half-mast trousers”.
One of the Caspers Hodkinson knew took his
own life in the mid-1980s. In the note he left for his

Black Memorial prize):
Along the valley bottom, amid scattered patches of
untended woodland and slowly settling slag heaps,
there were forges, mills and a coking plant, all of
which pumped smoke and steam into the air and
which made the sky glow at night. The beating of
distant machinery could almost always be heard.
bully of a man whose ruinously expensive toupée,
bought on hire purchase, was his pride and joy. One
chapter is splendidly and contemptuously devoted
to his jewellery: “he favoured heavy gold”, and
wouldn’t be seen in public without it. Cufflinks, sig-
net rings, a link bracelet. “In summer the pale blond
hairs of his chest caught in the links of his chains
Catherine Taylor is mother, read out at the inquest, he wrote that he
editor of The Book of was “fed up with not having a job and feeling like
Sheffield: A city in I can’t get on properly with life like everyone else”.
short fiction, 2019. Forty years on, in an era of food banks and cuts to
The Stirrings, her universal credit, not to mention renewed concern
memoir of the city, will about the quality of the air we breathe, it seems that
be published in 2023 Billy Casper has never gone away. n

APRIL 8, 2022 TLS 7

 RE-READING
Not afraid of Virginia Woolf
Re-reading the critical memoir of a fellow novelist
ROHAN MAITZEN
“P
LEASE TREAT ME with perfect frankness,
like the dead”, Virginia Woolf wrote to
Winifred Holtby in March 1931. Holtby, her-
self an established novelist, journalist and activist,
was writing a study of Woolf’s fiction; it would be the
first book of its kind published in English. Woolf was
wary of such projects – “I must not settle into a
figure”, she wrote in her diary. She reluctantly
agreed to an interview, which she reported on to her
sister Vanessa Bell with unpleasant condescension:
“she is a Yorkshire farmer’s daughter, rather
uncouth, and shapeless”. To her friend Hugh Wal-
pole, Woolf sniffed that Holtby had “learned to read,
I’m told, while minding the pigs”.
After this inauspicious meeting, Woolf provided
Holtby with details of her family history and
arranged for her to get an advance copy of The Waves.
Beyond that she kept a principled distance: “the less
I poke my finger into your book the better”. When
Virginia Woolf: A critical memoir was published, it
opened with a disclaimer that its subject had “neither
read my manuscript nor authorised any statement in
it”. Woolf told Holtby that she was glad of this,
because “I dont [sic] want to seem to prompt or
inform my critics”. Yet she copied Holtby’s praise for
The Waves into her diary, and when she finally
brought herself to read Holtby’s book, she was grati-
fied, telling Holtby that “you have made an extremely
interesting story out of [my] books, & I only wish,
for all our sakes, that they had as much virtue in
them as you make out”.
They met in person at least once more; their con-
versation then about “professions” may have influ-
enced Woolf ’s later, most overtly political book,
Three Guineas. Woolf even proposed that Holtby
write a memoir of her own for the Hogarth Press (an
idea that sadly went nowhere). After reading Vera
Brittain’s tribute to Holtby, Testament of Friendship,
she wrote to a mutual friend that “she had a good
deal more to her than V.B. saw”.
As Woolf clearly came to realize, Holtby was always
more than a provincial petitioner. But Woolf’s initial
disdain foreshadows the dramatic asymmetry in
their later reputations: today Woolf is pre-eminent in
both literary history and the public imagination,
while Holtby is known, if at all, primarily for her last
and best novel, South Riding. One unfortunate conse-
8 TLS
quence of this imbalance is that relatively few have
read Holtby’s examination of her celebrated contem-
porary, who to her was not a “figure”, but “Mrs.
Woolf ” (as she refers to her throughout): a real
woman and a peer, deserving of courtesy but not
deference. Unaware and thus unafraid of the Virginia
Woolf we know today – high priestess of modernism,
feminist icon, tragic genius – Holtby is as frank about
her limitations as she is articulate about her achieve-
ments. “I found it the most enthralling adventure”,
she said of her decision to undertake a study of the
writer “whose art seemed most of all removed from
anything I could ever attempt”. That spirit of bold
discovery shines through the book, which is at once
generous, rigorous and – a rarity for literary criticism
– exhilarating.
Holtby opens with a blunt assessment of “The
Advantages of Being Virginia Stephen”. While she
acknowledges the difficulties of growing up the
daughter of a stern Victorian patriarch, Holtby
highlights young Virginia’s privileges, chief among
them having “free run of her father’s library”. This
laid the foundation for what Holtby considered
Woolf’s foremost virtue as a thinker and writer: her
“great regard for the truth”. “For all her delicacy,
sensitiveness, and restricted contact with the world”,
Holtby says, “she was intellectually free, candid, and
unafraid.”
That confidence could manifest as offhand elitism.
Holtby quotes with wry amusement Woolf’s com-
ment in an early essay that “every second English-
man reads French”: “that particular hyperbole was
only possible to a woman brought up as Leslie
Stephen’s daughter had been brought up”. Yet Holtby
vigorously counters the still too commonplace view
of Woolf as a loftily detached aesthete: “her own
sense of reality and of the importance of human
beings kept her feet firmly on the ground”, counter-
acting “the temptation to be rarefied”. She under-
stood that Woolf saw art as “an extension of reality”
and welcomed both “innovations in technique and
innovations in social custom”. Because Woolf chose
“the aesthetic method” rather than the didactic,
however, her engagement with history and politics
is at once omnipresent and subterranean – thus, for
instance, although the First World War is present in
everything Woolf wrote after 1919, “we are allowed
to see its effects, not its actions”.
Holtby’s book tells the story of Woolf’s ultimately
triumphant quest for new literary forms to fit her
innovative vision. The Voyage Out proved that she
could handle the traditional novel “with ease and
mastery” if she wanted to; Night and Day, however,
“a domestic story on the Jane Austen model”, was
a failure – happily so, as it “drove Mrs. Woolf to seek
new forms of expression”. The stories in Monday or
Tuesday show her “seeing how far it was possible to
discard description, discard narrative, discard the
link-sentences which bind ideas together”. Holtby
sees Woolf as moving towards first poetry, then paint-
ing and music:
Why not set picture beside picture, phrase by
phrase, as in a poem, and let their juxtaposition,
unexplained, form its own meaning? Music does
that; poetry does that. Why not prose?
With Jacob’s Room, “a picture-maker’s novel”, Woolf
for the first time approaches this ideal. It is, Holtby
declares, “a triumphant experiment in a new tech-
nique”, as well as a moving commentary on the costs
of war, presented “without a word of theorising”:
When such a young man was killed ... what was lost
then? What lost by him? What was lost by his friends?
What exactly was it that had disappeared?
In Jacob’s Room, she answers, “It was this”.
Jacob’s Room is “a tour de force”; only because of
Woolf’s later novels do we know it is “not the best
she could do”.
Holtby’s chapter on Mrs Dalloway and To the Light-
house – “The Adventure Justified” – is both astute and
joyful. “There is very little ‘story’” in these
novels”, she observes; they rely instead on symbolic
and metaphysical unities. Where Jacob’s Room was
cinematic, Mrs Dalloway is orchestral: “mind, senses,
the memory, external action, reference, like so many
Winifred Holtby by instruments, flutes, violins, drums, trumpets, playing
Frederick Howard together”. In To the Lighthouse Woolf’s metaphors
Lewis, 1936; Virginia “have grown more fluid and they have overflowed
Woolf, 1925 into the action of the novel”: Mrs Ramsay “is the
lighthouse, in some subtle way. The action, which in
the first half of the book passes through her, is, in
the second part, illuminated by her”. To the Light-
house is, as Holtby sees and celebrates, a rare and
perfect fusion of means and ends.
Holtby’s study ends with The Waves, which com-
pletes Woolf’s journey from prose to poetry. It is also
her most profound engagement with death.
In all of her novels, Holtby observes, Woolf “sets
life against death as though thus to discern more
clearly what it means”, always asking “what is the
permanent, tangible thing left over when the flow
and surge of time has stilled?”. In The Waves,
death is explicitly the enemy – “death, not only of
the body, but of the mind, the perceptive spirit,
“
the faculty by which man recognises truth” – and
Bernard’s ecstatic defiance at its conclusion might be
taken as Woolf’s own: “Against you I will fling myself,
Holtby opens unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!” Against
© PRINCIPAL AND FELLOWS OF SOMERVILLE COLLEGE, OXFORD; MONDADORI VIA GETTY IMAGES
with a blunt death, the author herself set this extraordinary
novel, which like all of her art is “an affirmation of
assessment life”.
of ‘The “Prophecy is dangerous”, Holtby concludes about
Advantages of what lies ahead for Woolf. She may “continue to grow
in breadth and power as she grows in wisdom,” and
Being Virginia perhaps “the changing shape of the novel may make
Stephen’ her obscurities clear and her strangeness familiar”.
Holtby was not to know: she died of Bright’s disease
in 1935, too soon to read The Years (which, like Three
Guineas, may well have been influenced by their
encounters) and well before Woolf’s suicide in 1941.
For us, her unwitting ignorance turns out to be a gift.
The Woolf she knows has “a radiant acceptance of
life”; Holtby’s exuberant study frees us to read her
hopefully as well. Virginia Woolf: A Critical Memoir
is insightful and eloquent: it and Holtby both deserve
to be better known. Re-reading it doesn’t just bring
Holtby out from under Woolf ’s shadow, though:
through it, Woolf too steps out into the light. n
For biographical information I am indebted to Herm-
ione Lee’s Virginia Woolf (1996) and Marion Shaw’s
Rohan Maitzen is an The Clear Stream: A Life of Winifred Holtby (1999).
English professor and Stephen Barkway edited and published the text of
literary critic. She lives Woolf’s letters to Winifred Holtby in the Virginia Woolf
in Halifax, Nova Scotia Bulletin (Volume 32, September 2009)
APRIL 8, 2022

Jane’s
juvenilia
The burlesque works that baffled
Austen’s own family
E. J. CLERY
LADY SUSAN, THE WATSONS AND
SANDITON
Unfinished fictions and other writings
JANE AUSTEN
Edited by Kathryn Sutherland
368pp. Oxford University Press. Paperback,
£6.99.
JANE AUSTEN, EARLY AND LATE
FREYA JOHNSTON
296pp. Princeton University Press. £25
(US $29.95).
T
HINK TWICE before crossing the threshold
into Jane Austen’s unpublished writings. She
will become unknowable. Gone will be Jane
the purveyor of perfectly calibrated romance in
muslin frocks, the font of gently corrective satire and
plain good sense, the dispenser of worldly wisdom
on every topic from grammar to dating. You will lose
your soulmate and solace. The earliest composi-
tions, mostly written before the age of seventeen,
were carefully preserved in the form of three slender
notebooks, leather-bound and grandly announced
on mock title pages: Volume the First, Second and
Third. The neat handwriting that emulates type-
script, and the elaborate dedications to family and
friends, belie the contents. Enter and you will find
the world associated with her turned upside down,
as the young apprentice undertakes a rip-roaring
demolition of the sentimental tradition of fiction she
inherited: mantraps in the shrubbery, elopements
and adultery in abundance, assault and battery,
murder and suicide, civil war and even cannibalism.
In the first of the stories, “Frederic and Elfrida”,
the intimacy between three families in a country
village (later her signature plot) reaches such a pitch
“that they did not scruple to kick one another out
of the window on the slightest provocation”. Lady
Susan, fair-copied during the fallow period of nearly
two decades between childhood scribbling and
publication, and the basis for Whit Stillman’s film
Love and Friendship, is a Machiavellian fable with no
comeuppance. Two later fictional works survive as
substantial fragments, neither of them conforming to
the familiar romance template, both giving centre
stage to disruptive minor characters who won’t stop
talking. It is difficult to find safety even in the occa-
sional verse. While a handful of poems dutifully
memorialize family events, more characteristic is the
© WESTERLY FILMS/LIONSGATE/PICTORIAL PRESS LTD/ALAMY
hymn inspired by a suggestive surname:
Oh! Mr Best, you’re very bad,
And all the world shall know it;
Your base behaviour shall be sung
By me, a tuneful Poet. –
The works unpublished in her lifetime have some-
thing of the unsettling effect on readers as the awk-
ward, half-finished sketch by her sister, Cassandra,
that remains (in spite of strenuous efforts) the only
authenticated portrait of the writer.
The close-knit Austen family has often been
described as the key to the unpublished writings.
One argument goes that these private works are dis-
tinguished from the public novels by their “confid-
ential” nature, and that the codes for interpretation
are lost along with the members of the family circle
in which they were shared and enjoyed. After Jane’s
APRIL 8, 2022
untimely death in 1817, they came into the possession
of Cassandra, who distributed them to the next
generation at her own death in 1845. A nephew and
two nieces then became guardians of the flame. They
conferred and, after considerable agonizing,
tidied-up versions of the later draft manuscripts were
reluctantly offered in the second edition of Edward
Austen-Leigh’s Memoir of “Aunt Jane” in 1871. The
only sample brought forward from the juvenilia was,
aptly, “The Mystery”, a minuscule dramatic skit writ-
ten at the age of twelve, revolving hilariously around
total frustration of the audience’s curiosity. This
clampdown is most commonly put down to Victorian
prudery and clannish protectiveness, but another
possibility is the genuine bafflement of descendants.
As one of them tried to explain, “I have always
thought it remarkable that the early workings of her
mind should have been in burlesque and comic exag-
geration, setting at nought all rules of probable or
possible – when of all her finished and later writings,
the exact contrary is the characteristic”. They too
had lost the key. They resisted intense pressure from
a peer of the realm to make public the poem she had
composed three days before her death, riffing off a
newspaper item on cancellation of a horse race meet-
ing due to bad weather. Here, as in the other with-
held pieces, Jane Austen did not seem to be herself.
Even in the course of the twentieth century, when
every last jotting came under intense scrutiny, mis-
givings remained about the dark side of her literary
output. The Oxford don R. W. Chapman, who
devoted a large part of his life to the editing of
Austen’s writings, declared it might have been for
the best if the private material had been destroyed.
Having published the first five volumes of his
standard Austen in 1923, it was not until 1954 that
he finally added a sixth volume of unpublished mis-
cellaneous pieces, pointedly titled Minor Works. The
appalled reaction of E. M. Forster and others to the
scholarly transcription of Sanditon in particular
reached its zenith with D. A. Miller’s dramatic pro-
nouncement in Jane Austen and the Secret of Style
(2003) that it amounted to “the formal ruination of
the Austen Novel, as we have come to know it”. The
puns, the alliteration, undermining the pellucid
technique synonymous with her name, were intol-
erable! Still worse was the evidence of false starts:
“the actual sight of her revisions is... as disturbing
as if, at the bottom of a vase filled with beautifully
arranged flowers, we had caught a glimpse of thin
filigrees of blood where the stems had been cut”.
By this token, the fifty pages of notes recording
revisions to the text at the back of the new Oxford
World’s Classics edition of Sanditon and other
TLS
L I T E R AT U R E & L I T E R A RY C R I T I C I S M
working drafts, along with a sizeable portion of the
introductory matter devoted to them, represent a
veritable Grand Guignol. Yet the revelation of the
seamy side of Austen’s writing has an undeniable
fascination for those who seek, against the odds,
to catch her “in the act of greatness”, in Virginia
Woolf ’s memorable phrase. For true devotees, the
new scholarly editions of these working drafts pro-
vide a golden opportunity to reconsider brother
Henry’s claim that “Every thing came finished from
her pen”: where exactly did her genius flow, and
where did the deletions, insertions and additions on
patches attached with a pin accrete?
There are more upbeat adherents to the Disconti-
nuity school of thought regarding the unpublished
writings, such as Margaret Anne Doody, who in the
introduction to her World’s Classics edition of the
juvenile writings (1993) and elsewhere argued tren-
chantly that in the notebooks we find the genuine
Jane Austen, free of the compromises required by
the print market of the day. Here Austen could give
greater licence to cutting social satire and her pen-
chant for pure silliness. Here and in the later manu-
scripts can also be found many rousing instances of
revolt against the class system and the patriarchy,
from “The beautifull Cassandra”, the heroine of a
youthful jeu d’esprit, who runs wild through London
for the day and doesn’t hesitate to floor a male spoil-
sport, to impoverished Emma Watson, delivering a
verbal knockout blow to a sauntering lordling.
Kate Beckinsale as Both Kathryn Sutherland’s Jane Austen’s Textual
Lady Susan in Love Lives (2007) and Michelle Levy’s Literary Manu-
and Friendship, 2016 script Culture in Romantic Britain (2020) represent
subtle elaborations of this thesis, demonstrating
the distinctive artistic achievement of the “scribal”
works. Yet, as Levy adds, traces of overlap in the
“contact zone” between Austen’s two authorial
halves can also be found.
A list of shared features would include, for exam-
ple, her resistance to the domestic happy ending in
both published and unpublished works, chafing
against convention through irony and digression in
the former, and simply abandoning the story in the
latter. For many readers the idiosyncratic speech of
the minor characters is the chief joy of Austen’s
fiction, and Sanditon, featuring the enthusiastic sea-
side entrepreneur Mr Parker and his hypochondriac
siblings, makes it very clear that it was hers as well.
Private jokes carry over into print. Anne Toner in Jane
Austen’s Style (2020) argues that the remarkable
economy of means that distinguishes the published
writings is the outgrowth of the compressed parodies
of the early years. Freya Johnston’s appropriately
meandering Jane Austen, Early and Late is a contri-
bution to the “Continuity” school, questioning
assumptions of linear development in Austen’s
career, but quite as likely to wander into reflections
on Wordsworth’s asynchronous approach to curating
his poems, or the influence of Pope. Six thematic
chapters trace paths through the wilderness of the
manuscripts into the uplands of the celebrated
novels. Johnston observes connections, for instance,
between young Jane’s spoof “History of England”
parodying Oliver Goldsmith (several pages of her
marginal heckling of his textbook History are repro-
duced from the family copy as an appendix) and
mature Austen’s treatments of change, temporality
and the act of chronicling or interpreting the past.
Sutherland, along with the late Brian Southam
and the editors of the Cambridge University Press
volumes of early and late manuscripts, has laid the
foundations for the current flourishing of interest. In
her new edition of the unpublished works of the
middle to later years, as in the equivalent Cambridge
E. J. Clery is Professor edition, the most substantial pieces keep company
of English Literature with other surviving scraps, poems, opinions collected
at Uppsala University from family and friends on Mansfield Park and Emma,
and the author of and “Plan of a Novel”, a farcical compilation of “help-
Jane Austen: The ful” hints received from readers in her circle. It is
banker’s sister, 2017, the sign of a major shift in critical opinion that Lady
and Eighteen Hundred Susan, The Watsons and Sanditon have been removed
and Eleven: Poetry, by Oxford World’s Classics from their ignominious
protest and economic position, tucked away at the back of Northanger
crisis, 2017 Abbey, and granted the dignity of standalone status. n
9
 R U S S I A N L I T E R AT U R E & H I S TO RY
Stalin and Satan
The apocalyptic strain in Russian thinking
MIKHAIL EPSTEIN
Vladimir Sharov, who would have turned seventy this
week, died on August 17, 2018, shortly after publishing
his ninth novel, Tsarstvo Agamemnona (The Kingdom
of Agamemnon). Later that year the Russian-Ameri-
can philosopher and literary scholar Mikhail Epstein
coined the term “satanodicy” in an essay arguing that
Zhestovsky, the novel’s protagonist, articulates a pat-
tern in Russian thought and history whereby “the
heavenly kingdom exists and, in order to gain it, one
must undergo torments in this life and be cleansed of
all sins through the death of the innocent”. Epstein
traces this idea from the seventeenth-century Schism
in Russian Orthodoxy to Alexander Dugin, the radical
nationalist “magus” whose influence on the highest
political circles in Russia has long been a matter of
speculation, and who has written that “through the
Russian people will be realized the last thought of God,
the thought of the End of the World”.
“Satanodicy” was published in the commemorative
volume Vladimir Sharov: Po tu storonu istorii (Vlad-
imir Sharov: On the far side of history, 2020), edited
by Mark Lipovetsky and Anastassia de La Fortelle.
The following translation is based on an extract that
appeared on snob.ru on the third anniversary of
Sharov’s death.
W
HAT V LADIMIR S HAROV discovered in
his books has not remained in the past:
it defines the twenty-first century, and
not only in Russia. A mixture of politics and sect-
arianism, madness and pragmatism, utopia and
apocalypse. Although the chronology of Sharov’s
novels is limited, as a rule, to the Soviet era, they
accurately divine the historical vector that extends
into the post-Soviet era.
Two months after Sharov’s death, in October
2018, the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) veered
sharply onto the path of schism by taking the deci-
sion to cut itself off from universal Orthodoxy. In
other words it allied itself, in spirit and jurisdiction,
with the Old Belief, going back in time by reversing
the seventeenth-century reforms of Patriarch Nikon,
which had brought Russian Orthodoxy closer to the
Greek rite. As a result, the ROC ceased to be “Greek-
Catholic”, or “Greek-Russian”, as it was often offi-
cially known. Instead, the “truth of the Old Belief”
won the day in the ROC. Now it is not only the
western, Catholic-Protestant world but also the
contemporary Orthodox and, first and foremost,
10
“brotherly Ukrainian” world that, from the view-
point of the ROC, “lieth in evil” and has succumbed
to the Antichrist. On October 15, 2018, the Synod of
the ROC decided on complete cessation of full com-
munion with the Patriarchate of Constantinople. If
in the eleventh century the Russian church, together
with the Byzantine church, broke away from western
Christianity, now, a thousand years later and before
our very eyes, it has split from its Orthodox brothers
to the west and embarked on further schism, that
is, a kind of self-immolation of faith.
The monk, theologian, Gulag inmate and informer
Nikolai Zhestovsky, protagonist of Tsarstvo Agamem-
nona, has the following epiphany:
“So he, Stalin, erects an enormous altar and, to
make us pure, offers sacrifice after sacrifice. Vast
purgative sacrifices – entire hecatombs – are needed
to redeem our sins… He does everything he can to
save us. The innocent dead will intercede and pray
for us before the Lord, which is why, for as long as
the world is still in the grip of the Antichrist, we
too must help them save themselves from sin;
after all, there’s no place for them on Earth either
way. The main thing is this: by accepting their
suffering here, they will be spared the torments of
the Last Judgement.”
Stalin, in this sectarian vision, becomes a kind of
saviour precisely because he is a relentless murderer
and the spawn of hell. According to this logic, God
allows Satan to take over the world before His second
and final coming in order to save as many souls as
possible and gather them into His heavenly kingdom.
In this schismatic belief that the world lieth in
evil and the more evil there is, the sooner it will
blaze with a purgative fire, we find precisely the
“inside-out” faith that has impelled powerful polit-
ical, surreptitiously religious movements in the
twentieth and twenty-first centuries, both in Russia
and in the world at large.
Sharov left us when the Russian world began
sliding headlong towards the kind of catastrophe
modelled by his own novels: “more hell!”. By this
logic, the world will become entirely “Russian” not
when a few more territories of Russia’s near abroad
fall into its hands, but when it (the world) no longer
exists at all. The void will open, or nuclear ash will
fall, and all Sharov’s sectarians and passion-bearers
will find their place at the end of history towards
which they have striven so single-mindedly. Sharov,
to an even greater extent than Andrei Platonov, is a
writer of the apocalypse bearing down on the planet
from the direction of those well-armed “Magi of the
TLS
Great Tradition” who see in this their mission.
“As victims of aggression, we’ll go straight to
heaven as martyrs, while they’ll just die – because
they won’t even have time to repent.” Vladimir
Putin’s famous words of October 2018 about possible
nuclear war initially prompted laughter among the
audience, then universal bewilderment even among
his like-minded associates. What was this – a sinister
joke, a cruel warning, a gesture of readiness for sacri-
fice or revenge?
The meaning of those words can be most easily
grasped by those familiar with the work of Vladimir
Sharov. His characters are seekers of the end of the
world, martyrs and hedonists of the impending
apocalypse, who, splitting off from one and all, have
made the death of humanity their craft and trade.
Nobody can explain better than Sharov, to readers
all over the world, that which cannot be explained:
this obstinate, absurd but theologically justified will,
in one separate country, to universal ruin. It was for
this, beginning with Peter the Great, that Russia
assimilated technology, science and all civilization,
whose collateral – and in essence undesired – prod-
ucts turned out to be great literature and music.
The main impetus was to increase the energy of
“antimatter”, “anticivilization”, sufficient to destroy
the world. Those schismatics who considered Peter
the enemy of Holy Rus were mistaken. In turning to
the West for the fruits of civilization, he was seeking
the means to make Russia stronger than the West.
Sharov allows us to trace the religious roots of the
will to apocalypse that is generating special alarm
Vladimir Sharov, 2014 today, when satanodicy is acquiring a technological
embodiment worthy of its name. Missiles of the
“Satan” class (as dubbed by NATO) are the most
powerful of all nuclear intercontinental ballistic
missiles. “On the vast lands of the USA and western
Europe”, one Russian website promises menacingly,
“these Russian missiles will create hell.” Perhaps it
is no accident, but “providential”, that “Satan” is
produced at the Russian nuclear centre that was built
on the site of the Sarov Monastery, where the great
saint Serafim Sarovsky lived out his days. In fact, in
2007 the saint was declared the heavenly protector
of nuclear weapons and their builders, and the
federal nuclear centre in Sarov has purchased a large
“
consignment of icons bearing the saint’s image. The
centre boasts a staff in the tens of thousands and
the most powerful supercomputer in Russia, which
Sharov left us specifically serves, among others, the “Satan”
when the nuclear fleet. There could be no clearer illustration
of the profound interdependence of the theology and
Russian world technology of hell.
began Sharov’s books, which trace the sources of his
sliding towards country’s satanodicy, may serve as an ironic and gro-
tesque commentary on “Satan’s” missiles. As if to say
the kind of to readers: here is Russia’s gift to you, while from the
catastrophe novels you can learn just why it is that Russia loves
you so much and wants the end to come so soon.
modelled by You’ve forgotten such a thing exists –
his own novels: a love that burns and kills!…
‘more hell!’
We love flesh – its taste, its colour,
its stifling, deathly smell…
Are we to blame if your bones crunch
in our heavy, tender clutches?
This “Scythian” love note, which Alexander Blok
addressed to the world in 1918, was continued and
completed precisely a hundred years later in
Tsarstvo Agamemnona. Sharov’s narrator sets out a
sectarian world view that, he claims, has survived
even the deaths of its teachers and followers in the
Mikhail Epstein is Gulag. “The Antichrist – he is here already… which
Samuel Candler Dobbs means that the Promised Land itself, our land with
© ARTYOM GEODAKYAN/TASS/ALAMY
Professor of Cultural all it has contained and contains, has given itself up
Theory and Russian to Satan and become an unclean kingdom.” By such
Literature at Emory reasoning, it is out of love for “our” brothers, for all
University and the humanity, that “we” must save this kingdom from
author, most recently, itself. This logic, Sharov shows, is rooted in the very
of Ideas Against nature of schism, which is splitting the “Russian
Ideocracy: Non-Marxist world” from the rest of the world and which, in the
thought of the name of “salvation”, burns and kills. n
late Soviet period
(1953–1991), 2022 Translated by Oliver Ready
APRIL 8, 2022

Children
of the
Revolution
Sharov’s alternative history of
Soviet Russia
MUIREANN MAGUIRE
BE AS CHILDREN
VLADIMIR SHAROV
Translated by Oliver Ready
493pp. Dedalus. Paperback, £12.99.
I
N M AY 1923 , something strange happens in the
sleepy Russian coastal town of Taganrog: hun-
dreds of children, armed with stolen weapons,
take over the local orphanage. Sons and daughters
of local Communist Party members reinforce the
orphans. The children refuse to surrender the build-
ing, even when the Cheka, the much-feared Soviet
security police, surround it. On the night of May 23,
seven brigades of children clad in white chiffon
tunics – their faces obscured by brown paper masks
– march in formation down to the shoreline and
onto the liquid surface of the Sea of Azov, following
a shimmering pathway of moonlight towards the
distant Holy Land. Their geography teacher, a
former Orthodox priest, prays over them with
increasing fervour whenever the miraculous path
threatens to fail. Whether thanks to his words or to
In the margins of history
Stalin’s favourite reading
LEWIS H. SIEGELBAUM
STALIN’S LIBRARY
A dictator and his books
GEOFFREY ROBERTS
272pp. Yale University Press. £25.
“R
E VOLU T IONA RY , state-builder, modern-
iser, monster, genius, genocidaire, war-
lord – these are just a few of his featured
lives”, writes Geoffrey Roberts towards the end of
this, the latest of many biographies of Stalin. And
now, “bookworm”. The author of biographies of
Georgy Zhukov (“Stalin’s general”) and Vyacheslav
Molotov (“Stalin’s Cold Warrior”), Roberts has pro-
duced a relatively compact, engagingly written study
of the Soviet leader as an intellectual. Contrary to
some other analyses that stress the segmented
nature of Stalin’s life, even his capacity to reinvent
himself as circumstances dictated, Stalin’s Library
emphasizes continuity. “The young Stalin and the
mature man are recognisably the same person”,
Roberts argues, in the sense that he “read and
marked books in 1952 in much the same way he did
in 1922 – actively, methodically and with feeling.”
Basing his interpretation both on what Stalin read
and on how he did so, the author contends we can
not only “get to know him from the outside in”, but
also “glimpse the world through his eyes”.
Stalin’s library is estimated to have contained
19,500 books, mostly the classics of Russian, Soviet
APRIL 8, 2022
the purity of their mission, the children continue
safely, “and only at the line that divided sea and sky
did the path begin to play up again, whether
because of a sudden squall or simply because it was
tired of supporting them”. The brigades disappear
over the horizon, watched silently by the townsfolk.
Only a handful of bodies are ever found.
This astonishing set piece, which the narrator of
Vladimir Sharov’s Be as Children frames as a piece
of archival research, typifies the intermingling of
magic realism and historical context in this extra-
ordinarily rich and delicately plotted novel. The
abundance of bezprizorniki, or homeless children
(literally, “the unsupervised”; translated here as
“the untended”), did pose an existential threat to
the emergent Soviet Union. Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda
Krupskaya, the chair of the government’s education
committee, counted seven million of them in 1923;
now scholars estimate the number to have been up
to ten million. Despite numerous initiatives to con-
fine and re-educate them, state resources and
infrastructure were inadequate to manage the
masses of children abandoned or orphaned after
the successive traumas of the First World War, the
Civil War, poverty and famine. Felix Dzerzhinsky,
the Cheka’s notoriously brutal leader, served from
1921 on a special children’s commission dedicated
to rescuing and rehousing street children in state-
run institutes.
Sharov rewrites this history in his own way. The
real Lenin suffered his first stroke in 1921 and died
in 1924. But he never underwent a religious conver-
sion, as implied in the novel; nor did he insist that
homeless children were essential to redeeming
the human suffering of the Revolution, as Sharov
suggests. He certainly never exchanged letters with
Trotsky and Dzerzhinsky about organizing and
equipping a Soviet children’s crusade to Palestine.
Sharov’s Lenin, already drifting into aphasia, learns
a code of communication by touch from a deaf-and-
dumb orphan – which the dying man schemes to
adapt for use by his army of homeless, crusading
and world literature. But how many of them did he
read? The majority did not contain his ex-libris
stamp. Among those that did, Lenin’s publications
were most numerous – no surprise there – followed
by Stalin’s own books; those of Grigory Zinoviev,
his one-time ally in the intra-party squabbles of the
1920s and eventual victim of the Great Terror; then
Marx; then Nikolai Bukharin and Lev Kamenev,
leading Bolsheviks who suffered the same fate as
Zinoviev; and Molotov, who survived Stalin by
more than thirty years. His arch-enemy Trotsky
was represented by some twenty-eight titles, the
same number as the German Social Democrat
Karl Kautsky. Interestingly, Stalin not only read
but occasionally indicated approval of what Trotsky
wrote, including the latter’s attacks on the “rene-
gade” Kautsky.
We know about Stalin’s reactions because almost
400 books have survived with his markings, or
pometki. It turns out that Stalin marked up his books
the same way most people do, or at least the way
they did before digitization. He underlined certain
passages, sometimes with double lines; placed verti-
cal strokes or “NB” in the margins to otherwise
indicate importance; and made brief comments.
Some of these, such as “yes, it is” (tak) and “spot
on” (metko), he used to register support, as in the
case of Trotsky’s comments on Kautsky. Others
expressed doubt (m-da) or bemusement – as in “ha
ha” (kha-kha) and “hee hee” (khi-khi). Still others
such as “fool”, “swine”, “liar” – epithets directed at
both Trotsky and Kautsky – conveyed irritation.
More loquacious comments were rare.
TLS
R U S S I A N L I T E R AT U R E & H I S TO RY
children. In another fictional set piece, Lenin uses
his fingertips to spell out words on the sleeping
Krupskaya’s body. She misreads this as a prelude to
passion, hoping she will conceive a child in old age
like the biblical Sarah, only to be disappointed when
Lenin dozes off mid-composition.
This alternative history of Soviet Russia is medi-
ated by an epileptic narrator who retells the linked
life stories of several half-mad, peripatetic visionar-
ies. Through their journeys he explores the bounda-
ries and intersections of the tsarist and Soviet
empires and the Orthodox Church. Be as Children
revisits many familiar Sharovian themes: fugue
states and senility; homelessness and state institu-
tions; religious apocalypse and symbolic self-sacri-
fice. New here is the emphasis on childhood. While
none of the main characters is a child, they all strive
(or urge others) to become childlike, whether
through playacting, genuine innocence, Shake-
spearean second-childishness or an eerie game of
hide-and-seek transformed into a search for a mis-
laid soul.
Sharov died in 2018, after completing his final
novel, Tsarstvo Agamemnona (The Kingdom of Aga-
memnon). Be as Children was first published in Rus-
sian in 2008; it is the third of Sharov’s novels to
appear in English, all sensitively and skilfully trans-
lated by Oliver Ready. As the storyline switches
among invented lectures, imaginary memoirs, dia-
logue, prayer and confession, the tone varies unpre-
Muireann Maguire is dictably from the casual to the elegiac. Narrative
Professor of Russian chains of apparently serendipitous recollection and
and Comparative association barely mask a profound religious sym-
Literature at the bolism. Ready matches Sharov’s tone and style,
University of Exeter. even when challenged by a passage of unconven-
Her most recent tional verse (a keen, commissioned for Lenin’s
collection of death) or a Russo-Aramaic counting rhyme. This
translations, White edition includes a foreword by the translator and an
Magic: Russian afterword by Caryl Emerson, who is (with Ready)
émigré tales of the foremost anglophone authority on Sharov’s
mystery and terror, semi-fictional peregrinations through the haunted
appeared in 2021 tundra of Russian history. n
Stalin also read widely in biography, history, inter-
national relations, military affairs, philosophy and
science. Bismarck seems to have fascinated him, as
did the works of Robert Vipper, the (non-Marxist)
historian of antiquity and medieval Europe, espe-
cially his biography of Ivan the Terrible. So is Vipper
to blame for Stalin’s rehabilitation of the sixteenth-
century tsar and his security apparatus, the dreaded
oprichniki? Roberts isn’t so sure. Vipper’s history of
the Roman empire may have been marked up more
than any other book in Stalin’s collection, but “Alas,
these pometki are probably not Stalin’s”.
Roberts concedes that “no smoking guns are to be
found anywhere in the remains of Stalin’s library”.
The Stalin who comes across here is “no psycho-
path”, “not the self-pitying type”; he is, by contrast,
“willing to learn from even the most despised
opponents” and, at times, quite genial. The author
largely agrees with the Dutch historian Erik van
Ree, who also studied “every single one of Stalin’s
annotations”, that they reveal “a creature of the
rationalist and utopian west European revolutionary
tradition that began with the Enlightenment”. He
apparently did little, if any, recreational reading.
Movies screened at Stalin’s dacha in Kuntsevo, a
short ride from the Kremlin, seemed to play that
role. Rather, he was moved to read material that
“reflected immediate and pressing political con-
cerns”. From his books he received not only
information, but formulations and ideas. Not an
original thinker, he used what he read to simplify,
clarify and popularize.
Even as he slaughtered erstwhile comrades, to say
nothing of recalcitrant peasants and others deemed
Lewis H. Siegelbaum “enemies of the people”, Stalin remained commit-
is Jack and Margaret ted to the “unremitting pursuit of socialism and
Sweet Professor communism”. The world glimpsed through his eyes
Emeritus of History was a frightening place. It has become so again.
at Michigan State Whether or not dictators of Stalin’s ilk will emerge
University once more, they are unlikely to be as well read. n
11
 HISTORY
By other
means
Rethinking the past application
of economic sanctions
MAX HARRIS
THE ECONOMIC WEAPON
The rise of sanctions as a tool of modern war
NICHOLAS MULDER
448pp. Yale University Press. £25 (US $32.50).
“P
ENS SEEM SO MUCH cleaner instruments
than bayonets”, William Arnold-Forster
commented sardonically in 1920. To be
sure, during the First World War a desk officer in
Whitehall could push paper all day, then head to
the Savoy for dinner, dapper in his uniform and a
world away from the gore of the trenches. But as
a former administrator of the allied blockade of
Germany, Arnold-Forster knew that, no matter how
spotless his jacket, his pen shed more blood than
any bayonet. The blockade he helped to design
contributed to mass starvation and hundreds of
thousands of deaths. Operating under the brutal
calculus of total war, it aimed, he wrote, “to make
12
our enemies unwilling that their children should
be born”.
Although he acknowledged the blockade’s horrific
reality, Arnold-Forster was not advocating for the
abolition of economic warfare. On the contrary,
he thought the instrument offered much hope for
the postwar world. Transform the wartime practice
of blockade into a peacetime policy of sanctions and
the League of Nations would have a powerful tool
to prevent revisionist states from undermining the
international order. The imperative of economic
intercourse would trump the lust for land. Indeed,
the consequences of isolation appeared so grim
that proponents believed the mere possibility
TLS
might deter aggressors from spoiling the peace.
Of course, economic sanctions – or the “economic
weapon”, in the words of interwar observers – did
not forestall another world war. Discussed much,
they were used little. When deployed against
Mussolini in 1935 after his invasion of Ethiopia, they
were half-hearted; in response to Hitler’s machina-
tions, they were nonexistent. As with the League,
their reputation during this era is generally one of
weakness and irrelevance.
That sanctions failed to stop the fascist powers
is clear. But, as Nicholas Mulder argues in The
Economic Weapon, his superb study of sanctions
during the interwar era, failure does not mean
insignificance. Sanctions had an immense impact
during those two volatile decades. Far from an after-
thought, they were a crucial factor in geopolitical
strategy. But rather than bring aggressors to the
negotiating table, sanctions unleashed a perverse
dynamic: according to Mulder, the fear of imposi-
tion provoked a determination to achieve “blockade
The Paris Peace resilience” (Blockadefestigkeit), which often involved
Conference, 1919 the very territorial aggrandizement that sanctions
were intended to prevent. International animus
ratcheted up in turn.
This dynamic surely was not what the victors
gathered at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919
intended. They believed multilateral coercive power
was essential for their new liberal order to survive.
The economic weapon appeared well suited to the
task. In an interdependent global economy, it had
enormous potential as punishment; it could also
be nimble, targeting imports or exports, finance or
travel. The delegates thus incorporated sanctions
in the League’s Covenant, and the policy had some
success in the 1920s, with the threat of sanctions
halting border clashes in the Balkans.
“
The true test, however, was not against bit players,
but great powers. Here, collective security failed. In
confronting fascist aggression, the League operated
Rather than in difficult circumstances, not least the absence of
prevent the the United States and the onset of the Great
Depression. Mulder adds to our understanding of
Second World this failure by arguing that interwar sanction policy
War, he was itself destabilizing. Memories of the allied
suggests, the blockade – and what he considers the erroneous
belief in its military decisiveness – pushed Berlin,
prospect of Rome and Tokyo to seek self-sufficiency. This imper-
sanctions ative manifested through territorial conquest as well
as economic policy (even trying to turn available
hastened it coal into much-needed liquid fuel). The demo-
cracies then worried that vigorous use of the eco-
nomic weapon would accelerate these efforts and
thus rarely pulled the trigger, leaving the aggressors
unpunished. It should be noted that economic
appeasement – the idea that peace required guaran-
teeing, instead of restricting, access to raw materials
– also explains some of this hesitancy, though
Mulder does not explore this angle in depth.
Rather than prevent the Second World War, he
suggests, the prospect of sanctions hastened it.
While his analysis is trenchant throughout, one
cannot help wondering whether an earlier, more
forceful, more universal application of the eco-
nomic weapon might have made a difference; at the
very least, one wishes the liberal powers had tried.
The dictators were certainly glad they did not.
When sanctioning Italy, the League decided against
© PHOTO 12/UNIVERSAL IMAGES GROUP VIA GETTY IMAGES
an oil embargo, one of the toughest options on the
table. Had the League cut off access to oil, Mussolini
told Hitler, “It would have been an unmistakable
catastrophe for me”. But it did not, and the Italian
flag flew over Addis Ababa for half a decade.
Mulder’s fascinating story weaves together poli-
tics, economics and law. If the narrative drifts on
occasion, much of that may be ascribed to the
nature of the subject: the debate surrounding sanc-
Max Harris is the tions – how broad, how deep, what risk, what cost
author of Monetary – recurs across time and space. Mulder’s book pro-
War and Peace: vides invaluable insight into the experience with
London, Washington, sanctions one hundred years ago. It has become
Paris, and the especially timely in the weeks since publication.
Tripartite Agreement There is little doubt, however, that this contentious
of 1936, 2021 debate will be just as pressing a century hence. n
APRIL 8, 2022

‘I am not tragically colored’
Essays by a leading light of the Harlem Renaissance
DOUGLAS FIELD
YOU DON’T KNOW US NEGROES
And other essays
ZORA NEALE HURSTON
464pp. HQ. £20.
I
N HER ESSAY “Characteristics of Negro Expres-
sion”, published towards the end of the Harlem
Renaissance, Zora Neale Hurston asserted that
fighting in African American culture is a high art
in which “Discord is more natural than accord”.
Hurston, whose career spanned the New Negro
movement and the early days of the campaign for
civil rights, was one of the twentieth century’s
great contrarians, for which this collection provides
bountiful evidence. Her short story “Spunk” was
published in the landmark anthology The New Negro:
An interpretation (1925), a volume of fiction, poetry
and essays by leading African American and Carib-
bean authors, but she was at loggerheads with its
editor, Alain Locke, the soi-disant midwife of the
Harlem Renaissance.
Hurston’s story, which drew on her childhood in
the all-Black town of Eatonville, Florida, employed
regional dialect to capture the superstition of the
rural South. When a bobcat confronts the epony-
mous protagonist, he believes the animal is the mani-
festation of the man he recently killed, that “it was
Joe done sneaked back from Hell!”. Although Locke
claimed in the introduction to The New Negro that
new Black art would revive the “folk spirit”, he
believed the use of Black dialect simplified and cari-
catured African American culture. Hurston’s use of
folk culture sat at odds with his aesthetic for the New
Negro, which celebrated Black American culture –
provided that it sat within the bounds of propriety
– even as he championed European modernism.
During the 1920s W. E. B. Du Bois counselled Black
© EVERETT COLLECTION INC/ALAMY
American writers on the politics of respectability
while insisting that all art should be propaganda, two
directives Hurston wilfully ignored. She marched out
of step with the Black bourgeoisie as well as “the
overseers” of the New Negro movement, as she
dubbed Locke and Du Bois. In the mid-1920s Hurston
founded the literary magazine Fire!!, along with the
poet Langston Hughes and other bright young things.
The ill-fated publication, which produced only one
issue before folding, included stories of prostitution
APRIL 8, 2022
and gay male desire, scandalizing its readers and
casting Hurston as a troublemaker. Her close friend-
ship with Hughes, at first an ally who shared her
conviction in the artistry of folk culture, ended acri-
moniously as the pair feuded over the co-authorship
of their play Mule Bone, the subject of Yuval Taylor’s
recent volume Zora and Langston: A story of friend-
ship and betrayal (TLS, May 22, 2020).
Hurston’s spats with leading male cultural and
political luminaries, which exhibited her trademark
blend of Southern eloquence and venom, are among
the most engaging pieces in You Don’t Know Us
Negroes. In New Masses, a notorious Marxist maga-
zine, Richard Wright condemned her most famous
novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), for pan-
dering to white readers; Hurston, rising to this
challenge, wrote a withering review of Wright’s Uncle
Tom’s Children (1938), calling the stories “so grim
that the Dismal Swamp of race hatred must be where
they live”. In the academic journal Opportunity,
meanwhile, Locke accused her of simplifying her
Black American characters. “But when will the Negro
novelist of maturity who knows how to tell a story
convincingly”, Locke asked, “come to grips with
motive fiction and social document fiction?” Hurston
wrote an essay in response – which the journal
declined to print – in which she claimed that Locke
“pants to be a leader, and in his eagerness to attract
attention he rushes at any chance to see his name
in print, however foolish his offering”.
Hurston’s debates with Wright and Locke under-
score her opposition to those who insisted that the
literary culture of Black America should be one of
protest. “I am not tragically colored”, Hurston
declared in “How It Feels to Be Colored Me”, adding:
“I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood
who hold that nature somehow has given them a
lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all
hurt about it”. In “Art and Such” she laments that
“The one subject for a Negro is the Race and its
suffering”, concluding that Black American art has
suffered as a consequence: the “idea was not to
produce literature – it was to ‘champion the race’”.
And while she made her name during the Harlem
Renaissance as a short-story writer, in the titular
essay of this volume she claims that “Negro reality
is a hundred times more imaginative and entertain-
ing than anything that has ever been hatched up
over a typewriter”. As the editors explain in their
introduction, “what she wanted instead was a
revelation of the richness and complexity of Black
TLS
E S S AY S
life behind ‘the Veil’, as W. E. B. Du Bois famously
put it in 1903 in The Souls of Black Folk”.
Drawing on her training as a folklorist, ethno–
grapher and cultural anthropologist, Hurston cham-
pioned the art of the everyday, explaining that
“prayers and sermons are tooled and polished until
they are true works of art”. In contrast to Locke,
she stressed the dynamism of Black American cul-
ture. “Negro folklore is not a thing of the past”, she
reminded her readers, “it is still in the making.”
Hurston slipped with ease between folklorist and
anthropologist. “The Last Slave Ship” contains
sections of her interviews with Cudjo (Cudjoe)
Lewis – presumed to be the final survivor of the
Middle Passage – who became the subject of Barra-
coon: The story of the last “Black Cargo”, a book that
she began in the 1920s, but that was not published
until 2018. Other essays give snapshots of the Black
Holiness and Pentecostal Churches, in which Hurs-
ton explains that “the religious service is a con-
scious art expression”. “Characteristics of Negro
Expression”, an early exploration of how “the
American Negro has done wonders to the English
language” (and one of Hurston’s better-known
essays), was written at a moment in African Amer-
ican history when her contemporaries were chang-
ing Black vernacular forms into Standard English.
“This”, the editors write, “was a most radical act,
a spirited declaration of the need to recover the
essence of Black creativity in the sublime artefacts
of the Southern unreconstructed slave past.”
Elsewhere, anticipating the taut, confident prose
of James Baldwin’s early essays, “What White Pub-
Zora Neale Hurston, lishers Won’t Print” boldly claims: “For the national
Belle Glade, Florida, welfare, it is urgent to realize that the minorities do
1935 think, and think about something other than the
race problem”. Other essays employ an idiom more
obviously rooted in folklore, including “High John de
Conquer”, where a trickster figure who survived
slavery “waits to return when his people shall call
him again”. Hurston’s caustic wit is frequently dis-
played, as in her satire of the Jamaican activist
Marcus Garvey, who with “rare insight... saw that the
redeeming of the continent of Africa would take
time”. Some essays unravel the tapestry of scholar-
ship that depicts Hurston as an unimpeachable
feminist, a role she has enjoyed for thirty years.
In “The Lost Keys of Glory”, one of several pieces
that explore the intersections of race and gender,
feminism is described as a “mirage” and “the light
that failed”. Hurston proclaims here, “let no woman
“
deceive herself that she ever impresses men by her
intellect”, explaining that women “get along in the
professions or in public life because some man in
Hurston’s power is impressed by our femininity”.
debates Race and gender would become the focal point of
her journalism during the last decade of her life.
underscore her Writing for the Pittsburgh Courier in the 1950s, she
opposition to covered the trial of Ruby McCollum, a well-to-do Afri-
those who can woman who murdered her lover, a white doctor
and state senator-elect. “Here was a woman – a Negro
insisted that woman”, Hurston wrote, in a rare moment in which
the literary her voice can be heard from within the constraints
of reportage, “with the courage to dare every fate,
culture of to boldly attack every tradition of her surroundings
Black America and even the age-old laws of every land.”
should be one During the 1940s and 1950s, Hurston drifted
further to the right. Her deep-seated suspicion of
of protest communism – “it is amazing how commies can hang
on to a mere notion in the face of facts” – was
matched by her disillusionment with the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People,
the leading political organization for Black Ameri-
cans. Most surprisingly, perhaps, she opposed the
Supreme Court’s decision to desegregate schools,
insisting that Black American schools should see
“Growth from within”. As the editors point out,
“Hurston maintained that the purpose of the Black
Douglas Field teaches writer was both to lift the Veil and to allow the Black
at the University of experience to speak in its own voice, in all of its
Manchester. He is the sublime resonance – good and bad, positive and
co-editor of Harold negative”. The essays in You Don’t Know Us Negroes,
Norse: Poet maverick, served well by careful notes, allow Hurston to emerge
gay laureate, 2022 as contradictory, uneven, lively and brilliant. n
13
 ARTS
Optical
sensations
Bridget Riley’s bold and beautiful
paintings
PATRICK MCCAUGHEY
BRIDGET RILEY
Perceptual abstraction
Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, until July 24
B
RIDGET R ILEY AT NINET Y looks magnificent
in her survey exhibition at Yale. Courtney
Martin, the director of the Yale Center for
British Art, has made good use of the Louis Kahn
building. She has hung the black-and-white paintings
of the early 1960s in the compressed galleries of the
third floor, thus adding to their power to transfix the
viewer’s gaze, and given the increasingly brilliantly
coloured paintings from 1967 onwards the flowing
spaces of the second floor, allowing them to breathe
and float. The division perfectly mirrors an artistic
career spread over seven decades.
The early black-and-white paintings won Riley
immediate fame and a superficial sobriquet as the
14
leading Op Art artist, a term she has lived down and
outpainted. The reputation came in part from her
intense desire to arrest and hold the viewer’s atten-
tion. The repetitive monochrome compositions,
tightly and intricately composed, had a dizzying,
even migraine-inducing effect – what the curator
John Elderfield once described as “a highly, even
alarmingly, mobile visual field”. Riley herself has
referred to “stabilities and instabilities” in her paint-
ings. In 1965, William Seitz, then curator of paintings
and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New
York, selected Riley’s painting “Current” for the
cover of the catalogue for the museum’s exhibition
The Responsive Eye. It brought her worldwide fame.
TLS
The descending waves of black-and-white stripes in
“Current” go beyond the “alarming” or “unstable”:
it is as if a tsunami, a flow of unstoppable forces,
has been released, held back only by the fragile
frame of painting. This calamitous and traumatic
visual sensation abounds in these classic early
Rileys. The blandly titled “Movement in Squares”
starts with a checkerboard sequence of black and
white squares, then all of a sudden the squares
diminish, recede into the fictive space of the
painting, dragging the viewer’s eye with them, a
suffocating experience, until the squares re-emerge
and continue their checkerboard sequence.
Riley’s path to these black-and-white paintings
had not been an easy one, punctured by both a
breakdown and a break-up. They are dogged by a
sense of trauma. It is all too easy to lose one’s visual
grip in “Shuttle 2”, as the eye traverses the painting’s
uneven, tilted passageways and knife-edged ridges.
The threat is that the viewer will be forcibly ejected
from the world of the painting. We sense that we
“Rêve” by Bridget are getting along by the skin of our teeth. We can
Riley, 1999 just stop ourselves from being swallowed by the
vortex of “Blaze 4” as it curls and circles downward
to its over-bright plughole.
I am not so sure how long we could exist in the
world of “Exposure”, the epic fifteen-foot painting
that launches the entire show. How could we stand
or withstand the endless surging movement that
sweeps from corner to corner? The beauty and
lyricism of its rhythmic progression do not
disguise our fear of being swallowed by this flow
of natural forces.
Riley emancipated herself and her art from the
constrictions of the black-and-white paintings with
the adoption of grey as a tone midway between the
two, and of the atmospheric qualities grey naturally
“
possesses. In these early works grey gives the
impression of fading the edges of a composition,
loosening its obsessive grip over the eye. In time
The repetitive grey became an expressive force in its own right,
monochrome like a fog or force between the viewer and picture.
By 1968 Riley was painting in colour with such
compositions, conviction and confidence that she won the inter-
tightly and national prize for painting at the Venice Biennale,
intricately the first woman and the first Briton to do so. Her
early colour paintings, such as the “Late Morning”
composed, had series or “Chant 2”, were as original and innovative
a dizzying, as the black-and-white paintings had been earlier.
Large in scale, they consist of tightly knit vertical
even migraine- stripes of colour with a narrow interval of canvas
inducing effect between them.
For all the austerity of the composition, the
effect is strikingly rich and ambiguous, with an
abundance of after-images unsettling the taut
frame-to-frame structure. These are light-generating
pictures. It is clearly daylight that filters through
the “Late Morning” paintings. The richer the
chromatic effect (as in “Chant”), the more palpable
the glow of light.
Colour changed the relationship between Riley’s
paintings and the world. Brought up on the Cornish
coast, she has always been acutely aware of her
BRIDGET RILEY COLLECTION, © 2022 BRIDGET RILEY, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
environment, but without any suggestion of land-
scape in her art. Indeed, her horizontal paintings
in the new manner lack the implacable quality of
the vertical ones. A pair of paintings from 1979, “2
Colour Twist” and “Series 41 Red Added”, have the
strongest suggestion of looking at vegetation under
water through to a sandy bottom. A longstanding
admirer of Monet’s Nymphéas, Riley paid her first
visit to the Orangerie in 1954 when she found them
“in a sorry state, the galleries dark and gloomy… But
even in that state the paintings were glorious, the
greatness and grandeur clearly apparent. This visit
made a deep impression on me and I drew inspira-
tion from it… years later”. She lists the colours of
paintings in their titles – for example, “2 Colour
Twist – Blue/Red and Violet/Yellow, Series 41 –
Green Added” (1979) – to make the point that colour
is both the subject and the means of the work.
Colour became a way of organizing experience.
On a momentous visit to Egypt, Riley was struck by
the contrast between the arid desert and the rich
APRIL 8, 2022

cultivation along the banks of the Nile. The master-
piece “Vein” (1985) is structured around five dark
green vertical stripes. They throw into relief the
rich, warm stripes bunched between these com-
manding greens. Maryam Ohadi-Hamadani, who
makes the point well in her essay in the online
catalogue, quotes Riley on the great change colour
brought to her work and her fundamental beliefs:
“The preoccupation with methods of perception
quietly shifted to the background. From then on, I
was trying to paint sensation”.
The final astonishment and acclaim must be
reserved for the brilliant series of paintings from
the mid-1980s to the early years of this century.
The first group shares the same structure: a
gridded surface is rained down on, assaulted,
threatened by a series of diagonal shapes that
seems to multiply ceaselessly even as one looks at
the painting. The grid sustains itself – it does not
buckle under – yet the encounter can be furious to
the point of annihilation.
True to the
spirit
The extraordinary life and work
of a courageous pianist
NADIA BEARD
PLAYING WITH FIRE
The story of Maria Yudina,
pianist in Stalin’s Russia
ELIZABETH WILSON
352pp. Yale University Press. £25 (US $35).
D
URING THE TITLE SCENE of Armando Ian-
nucci’s satire The Death of Stalin, the seventy-
four-year-old Soviet leader, standing in his
office at his dacha in Kuntsevo, is handed a gramo-
phone recording, which he hastily puts on. Over the
crackle of the disc, we hear the beginnings of
Mozart’s Piano Concerto 23 in A major, performed
by the Soviet pianist Maria Yudina. The night before,
Stalin had heard Yudina perform this on the radio;
he enjoyed it so much, he demanded it be recorded
so he could hear it again. A handwritten letter slips
out of the disc jacket onto the floor, and Stalin picks
it up. “I pray for your end and ask the Lord to forgive
you”, the letter – written by Yudina herself – begins.
At that moment, with the sound of Yudina’s inter–
pretation of Mozart playing in the background, Stalin
suffers a heart attack and drops to the floor.
It is a dramatic scene, but one that probably
never happened. In Playing with Fire: The story of
Maria Yudina, pianist in Stalin’s Russia, the first bio-
graphy of Yudina written in English, the writer and
cellist Elizabeth Wilson illuminates the life of one
of twentieth-century Russia’s most brilliant pianists
and uncompromising intellectuals. Through her
meticulous research, Wilson disabuses us of the
many legends that surround Yudina’s peculiar
character: she was probably not Stalin’s favourite
pianist, she did not send Stalin an angry letter, and
she did not sleep in a coffin. (It was a bathtub.) But
Yudina’s life was still a feast of the unlikely and
the sensational. Against the backdrop of continuous
Communist repressions, it is remarkable that this
Jew turned Orthodox Christian survived the most
oppressive years of Stalinism and avoided the
imprisonment, exile or execution that felled so
many of her contemporaries.
Yudina was born to a Jewish family in 1899 in
Nevel, a town in the Pskov region. Her gift for music
took her to St Petersburg and its conservatoire at the
APRIL 8, 2022
Riley’s understanding of the inherent volatility
and instability of colour is clearly on view. If the
abstract condition of the black-and-white paintings
of twenty years earlier is traumatic and calamitous,
the condition of the later paintings is nothing short
of heroic. Withstanding all forces, the grid is like a
central article of faith that sustains the artist
through all the tempests of life.
To be fair and accurate, not every painting is filled
with Sturm und Drang. The beautifully modulated
“Reflection 2” has a dense, intimate colloquy of
warm and cool tonalites. Each part of the painting
seems to be listening to the next, the whole is more
important than its parts and unity is all. Elsewhere
in this group, as in the clear and urgent “New Day”,
Riley takes her art into the fresh air, where strong,
clear light produces a labyrinth of overlapping
shapes. Shadow and substance vie with each other
for dominance.
Two extraordinary paintings, “Rêve” and
“Enchant”, end this multivalent exhibition. They
age of thirteen. She was only eighteen when the
October Revolution of 1917 replaced the centuries-
long system of imperial Russia with a radically trans-
formed socialist state, and like many of her age she
was swept up by revolutionary fever. “I too was given
a loaded rifle and was taught how to use it”, Yudina
wrote. “But the wretched thing went off by itself!”
The bullet pierced four storeys, but nobody was
hurt. Details like this, both amusing and alarming,
form the background to Yudina’s early Soviet life,
when the landscape of intellectual possibility had
not yet morphed into the brutal enforcement of
idealistic conformity.
Wilson, a former student of the legendary cellist
Mstislav Rostropovich and the author of books
including an exhaustive biography of Shostakovich,
provides vignettes of the influential thinkers and
writers who shaped the early Soviet intelligentsia
and became Yudina’s friends. It feels both surprising
and familiar to meet so many known cultural figures,
not as main characters, but in supporting roles: the
writer and satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko, the painter
Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin and the writer Yevgeny Zam-
yatin were all members of the philosophical circles
in which Yudina moved.
Rightly, Yudina’s extraordinary musical perform-
ances brought her fame, but her many eccentricities
also attracted ridicule. After receiving her fee at the
end of concerts, she would often distribute the
money among any members of the audience who
came to the green room. “Money is to be used, to
be spent”, she would say. On one occasion Yudina
borrowed shoes for a concert, only to take them off
while playing and leave them on stage under the
stool when she finished.
The intellectual freedom of these early years did
not last long, but Yudina, a disciple of philosophical
exploration, never conformed to Soviet dogma. By
1920 the persecution of religion in the Soviet Union
had already begun: monasteries were shut down
and the church and the state were separated under
Lenin’s orders. Yudina made it a rule not to talk
about religion with her students at the Leningrad
Conservatoire, but owned up to them when asked.
In an obligatory questionnaire at the conservatory in
1925, Yudina wrote that while she agreed with many
aspects of the Russian Communist Party, “I cannot
join it because of my idealistic and religious views”.
As Stalinism entered its most repressive decade,
Yudina, mocked as a “nun’s habit in the Faculty” for
her routine of always wearing a floor-length black
dress, was accused of religious fascism in a vicious
news article in 1930 and dismissed from her teaching
job at the Leningrad Conservatoire. This defence of
her religious beliefs also cost her the right to ration
cards: “effectively, the unemployed, priests and
vagrants were all treated as pariahs, and had to buy
food in open markets where it was sold at exorbitant
prices”, Wilson tells us. In a scene that encapsulates
the jarring contradictions contained within the
Soviet system, Father Pavel Florensky, a noted
TLS
ARTS
bring Riley to the threshold of abstract figuration.
Broadly drawn shapes, reminiscent of Matisse,
move in balletic rhythms that produce patterns of
flesh-coloured shapes interwoven with the green
and blue of nature. They could well form the decor
for a Diaghilev ballet, so mesmeric are their
rhythms.
For an artist who has made austerity an object of
belief and practice, “Rêve” and “Enchant”, with
their decorative opulence, are daring departures.
Their startling beauty carries the day and makes us
admire this artist, prepared to set out on a new path
in her late sixties. Bridget Riley: Perceptual abstrac-
tion has the feel of great art – a painter of our time
Patrick McCaughey’s who measures up to the founders of abstract art,
edition of The Diaries to Mondrian, Malevich and Kandinsky. How else can
of Fred Williams 1963– we explain why Riley moves us so deeply? n
1970 will be published
by the Miegunyah A digital catalogue for Bridget Riley: Perceptual
Press at the University abstraction is available from the website of the Yale
of Melbourne Center for British Art
electrical engineer and Orthodox priest who became
Yudina’s lifelong friend, was eventually forced into
working on plans to electrify the entire Soviet Union.
“Father Pavel started his work as an electro-techni-
cian still wearing his priest’s cassock”, Wilson writes.
A remarkable sight in such times.
Yudina’s unwavering devotion to her ideals was
discernible as much in her spiritual life as in her
musical one. Nowhere are her eccentric musical
tenets so crystallized as in her interpretations of
J. S. Bach and Beethoven. Her recording of Bach’s
The Well-Tempered Clavier eschews all expectations;
where one might expect a harmonic climax to
coincide with an increase in dynamics, there is often
the inverse, the consequence, according to Wilson,
of “an intellectual rigour combined with emotional
impulsiveness”. Yudina was faithful to the spirit,
rather than the letter, of the score, something that
Shostakovich, a fellow student at the Leningrad Con-
servatoire and occasional duet partner for Yudina,
admired. It is enlightening to listen to her recordings
while bearing his observations in mind. “Yudina
also had a deep understanding of Beethoven, and
her interpretation of [Beethoven sonata] op. 111 was
especially remarkable”, Shostakovich said. “She held
your attention completely in the second movement,
which is so hard to grasp; the music’s inner tension
never wavered for a second.”
During the Nazi blockade of Leningrad from 1941
to 1944, Yudina played repertoire that emphasized
the patriotic – from Glinka to Rachmaninov, Borodin
to Prokofiev – as well as Felix Mendelssohn in
response to the Nazi ban on his music. When the
Red Army eventually broke through the blockade,
Yudina was part of the Soviet government’s three
brigades of artists sent to entertain the city’s
exhausted civilian population. In an endearing
exchange that encapsulates Yudina’s guileless sus-
ceptibility to the passion of the moment, the revered
Soviet pianist and pedagogue Heinrich Neuhaus
asked her why she played Bach’s preludes and
fugues so loudly in a performance. “But Heinrich
Gustavovich, we’re at war!”, Yudina replied.
It is as disturbing as it is grimly unsurprising to
learn the extent to which the classical music world
bore the paranoid scrutiny that Stalin unleashed on
almost every other Soviet institution. Admittedly,
Yudina did not suffer as much as composer friends
such as Shostakovich and Prokofiev; but because she
refused to renounce religion and was dedicated to
helping victims of Soviet oppression, her career
oscillated between fame and disgrace. In 1960 she
lost another teaching job, this time at Moscow’s
Gnessin Academy. After a life of musical curiosity,
long-lasting friendship and spiritual contemplation,
Yudina died penniless in 1970, at the age of seventy-
one, in a Moscow hospital. Her death was caused by
an error in medication. She had never owned her
Nadia Beard is a own piano and had spent much of her life in debt,
writer and pianist but, spurred by her convictions, she had braved
based in Tbilisi many dangers to live “Con fuoco”. n
15
 FICTION
‘I recall
passing
through
pubs’
Redemption – and revenge – in
novels of Glasgow’s ‘lower sort’
JOHN BURNSIDE
YOUNG MUNGO
DOUGLAS STUART
400pp. Picador. £16.99.
THE VOIDS
RYAN O’CONNOR
288pp. Scribe. £14.99.
W
HILE THE TITLE of Douglas Stuart’s new
novel invokes Alexander Trocchi’s master-
piece, Young Adam (1954) – thus placing it
in a specific Scottish literary context – it is perhaps
even more significant that the central character,
Mungo, is named after Glasgow’s patron saint, a
gentle but determined man, known for bringing
dead birds back to life and standing strong, in spite
of his physical infirmity, against the pagan hordes
who once occupied the banks of the Clyde. Young
Mungo is Stuart’s follow-up to his Booker prize-
winning novel Shuggie Bain (TLS, September 11,
2020), and it covers similar territory in its explora-
tion of family dysfunction and gay identities on the
sectarian, homophobic and often brutal streets of
the author’s youth. However, while the fifteen-year-
old Mungo’s saintliness provides some interesting
narrative opportunities, it also poses serious ques-
tions about characterization that the earlier book
was not forced to address – existential questions
related to good and evil.
Mungo’s 1990s Glasgow is a drab and threatening
urban edgeland inhabited by the “lower sort”, an
ugly, monotonous, squalid domain where “the
shops are cheaper” and the buildings “not yet sand-
blasted back to their glorious golden colour” of
yore: “so many lives were happening only two
miles away from his and they all seemed brighter
than his own”. That other, more fulfilling life is
something our protagonist catches only in glimpses
from the passenger seat of a stolen car driven by
his fiercely anti-Fenian, homophobic brother, Ham-
ish, while the larger Scotland of lochs, glens and
heather-clad hills is even more remote – a place
where people of the lower sort are treated as out-
and-out deplorables.
It is for this territory that Mungo lights out at the
novel’s start, accompanied by a pair of dangerous
ex-cons named Gallowgate and St Christopher,
whom the lad’s negligent, drunken mother,
Mo-Maw, has randomly conscripted to take the boy
on a weekend fishing trip. The official motive for
this excursion is fresh air and clean living, but the
real reason is much darker, as revealed in a series
of flashbacks in which we witness Mungo’s first
meeting with a Catholic pigeon-fancier named
James, the Romeo and Juliet-like love affair that
ensues, and the backlash they risk, at the hands
of their sectarian community. Encouraged by the
fiercely independent James, Mungo had dreamed
of escaping his downtrodden life – something we
sense he could never achieve by himself. Now he
16
is humiliated and forever identified as a “fuckin
poofter”.
It comes as little surprise to discover that Gallow-
gate and St Christopher turn out to be the worst
possible companions for a rural idyll – and, indeed,
from the first the novel simmers with a sense of
foreboding. A central aspect of the banality of evil
is how crudely opportunistic the malevolent tend
to be. Once the boy has been characterized as an
outcast – as simply different – he becomes immediate
fair game for those who occupy the next level up
in the pecking order. Even worse for him is that,
within that pecking order, any semblance of good-
ness – gentleness, tenderness, the capacity for
compassion – is seen as weakness. The saint, in this
milieu, is not holy, and nor is his capacity for forgive-
ness exemplary. He is simply a fool, to be abused
at will – and when Mungo’s companions finally make
their move, it is depressingly predictable.
Herein lies the problem with this novel. Mungo
is indeed a saint, after his fashion. He continually
forgives his mother’s transgressions, no matter how
callous, and in spite of Hamish’s systematic bullying,
he feels nothing but tenderness for his brother.
He wants to believe the best of people; he does not
understand pettiness; in a brutal world, he is fatally
disinclined to malice. In short, he is good only in the
simplest sense: harmless as a dove, but lacking in
the wisdom of serpents – which means that, at the
dramatic and altogether unexpected turning point
that concludes the fishing trip, a moment in which
Mungo ceases to be saintly, the sudden shift may be
too hard for some readers to swallow: a matter of
magical thinking rather than fictional realism, which
sits oddly with everything preceding it. And while by
this point many readers will be rooting for some kind
of salvation, what is yet more difficult to reconcile,
from a moral perspective, is whether or not the
vengeful steps Mungo takes offer a just basis for the
new life he desires. Stuart seems to think so; I am
not so sure.
Young Mungo is set in Glasgow’s past, some years
after the Thatcher government “killed the city”. By
contrast, Ryan O’Connor’s startling debut, The Voids,
takes place in the bleak aftermath of that demise: the
title refers to recently vacated high-rise buildings,
awaiting demolition. As the book opens, the narrator
remarks that “everything has already happened.
The past and the future no longer exist. Either for
me or for you… If it were possible to disintegrate
time, I can show you how easily things fall apart”
– and, on first impressions, that is exactly what
TLS
The Voids sets out to do. Our narrator, we learn, lives
alone on the fourteenth floor of a condemned
high-rise where all maintenance has ceased. Until
recently he had worked as a journalist on one of
those free newspapers that the lower sort dole out
to inattentive passers-by outside railway stations, but
he has lost – or thrown away – this job, along with
the woman he allegedly loves, after a series of cringe-
inducing and quite hilariously related binges, and
he is now in full-on, self-loathing, nihilistic freefall.
Elaborate accounts of days-long benders are integral
to the Scottish literary tradition, but O’Connor sets
the bar high:
I recall passing through a series of pubs, like a
worn thread through the eye of so many needles.
There were parts of the city I didn’t recognise, and
rooms and flats in houses I didn’t recognise. There
were further cosmetic transformations. And per-
fumes and warm skin and mouths I was lost in. Yet
none of my memories stitched together. Rather, it
was an unstitching ... I remember calling my work
with one excuse for not being able to make it in,
forgetting I’d done so, then hours later, calling
again with a completely different excuse. I think
this happened several times. On one occasion I
had rabies, and on another I declared myself
deceased.
This unstitching continues through a series of
absurd, often squalid, occasionally quite visionary,
but always uproarious episodes – and it is clear that
the narrator, whom we only ever know by what
might well be a pseudonym, is both dangerously
Glasgow, 1990 unhinged and desperately vulnerable. Nevertheless,
he is aware of what he is doing to himself and
seems at times to regret the damage, just as he
seems helpless to put a stop to it – so that, as funny
as The Voids is, there are times when the hilarity
feels more than a little uncomfortable. As we laugh
along through an excruciating scene in which the
narrator and a couple of pals drunkenly order every
single item on a kindly Chinese restaurateur’s menu,
then forget having done so, or – even more uncom-
fortably – through an impossibly tense abduction-
cum-car-crash fiasco, during which the narrator’s
life is in genuine danger, we are obliged to accept
that the real triumph here is the triumph of the
grotesque. This is comedy at its most existential: the
more we laugh, the more we long for some kind of
redemption.
Portents of that redemption do, in fact, glimmer
“
throughout, from visions of the eerie beauty of
the abandoned tenements to poignant moments
featuring their displaced, dignified and often now-
Elaborate homeless inhabitants. (One of the most powerful
accounts of scenes concerns an older resident of the voids, Pete,
who takes his leave of the narrator accompanied by
days-long a fleet of paper aeroplanes.) Yet O’Connor knows
benders are that redemption is no simple – or, indeed, logical –
integral to matter. While Mungo might have a fair shot at
salvation simply by finding a place where he and
the Scottish James can be together, the problem for the self-
literary destructive narrator of The Voids is not practical but
existential. By now, the legacy of social and moral
tradition, but disintegration that Stuart’s “lower sort” justifiably
O’Connor sets attribute to Thatcherism and the destruction of the
the bar high Glaswegian working class has become an endemic,
almost casual anomie. As O’Connor’s narrator puts
it, having just performed the drunken cliché of
smashing his fist into a mirror:
Pete was right. Sometimes you wake up out of a
dream you didn’t want to leave and the life in front
of you is emptiness, and everything you ever loved
is back in that dream, and it hurts so much because
you know you can never go back there. I’d woken
up out of such a dream – only what hurt, what made
it unbearable, wasn’t leaving the dream, or being
unable to return to it – it was realising that I didn’t
© BARRY LEWIS/ALAMY
have a dream to go back to.
This is the point at which true redemption is
forged, though the shape it takes is provisional,
improvised and as subject to the elements as a
John Burnside’s latest paper plane thrown from the roof of an empty build-
collection of poems is ing from which the temporarily housed have
Learning to Sleep, 2021 recently been evicted. n
APRIL 8, 2022

Listen to
women’s
voices
Female solidarity in an era
of sexual discovery
CHRISTOPHER SHRIMPTON
VIOLETS
ALEX HYDE
256pp. Granta. £12.99.
A
LEX H YDE’S DEBUT NOVEL , Violets, opens
starkly: “There was the enamel pail of
blood”. Violet has suffered an ectopic preg-
nancy; now the foetus must be removed. “Placental,
uterine. She had seen the blood drop out of her into
the pail. It came with the force of an ending.”
What follows is a thoroughly humane, intimate,
even celebratory novel. Violets is a tribute to Hyde’s
own family: her father, the woman who adopted him
and the woman who gave him up. Here reimagined,
both of these women are named Violet, and their
interlinked stories of war and womanhood are told
alternately, in the third person. Woven throughout
is a third, poetic voice, addressing the foetus, and
later the baby, commenting as events unfold.
It is 1945. The first Violet is married to a soldier
named Fred. As she is convalescing after her opera-
tion, Fred informs her that he has been called over-
seas. “Sod’s law, he said.” The other Violet – who
does not at this stage know the first one – discovers
she has become pregnant by a visiting Polish soldier.
Money’s the thing
The monotonous merry-go-round of tough Madrileño lives
ANNIE MCDERMOTT
THE WONDERS
ELENA MEDEL
Translated by Lizzie Davis and
Thomas Bunstead
224pp. Pushkin. £14.99.
T
HIS DEBUT NOVEL by the poet Elena Medel
© BERT HARDY/PICTURE POST/HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES
tells the story of three generations of women
in Spain, and how money – or the lack of it
– shapes their lives. The fragmentary narrative,
which jumps between different perspectives and
moments in time, culminates in the 2018 Women’s
Strike, but begins some fifty years earlier, during
Franco’s dictatorship, in the southern Spanish city
of Córdoba. María, a teenage single mother, is visit-
ing her one-year-old daughter, Carmen, whom her
parents are bringing up while she works as a maid
in Madrid. María sends the pittance she earns from
looking after other people’s babies to her parents
to help with her own. “Money’s the thing,” she
reflects; “not having enough is the thing.”
Time passes and María’s hands grow ever more
calloused as she moves from one low-wage job to
the next. At work she is defined in relation to her
employer, or overlooked entirely. When caring for
APRIL 8, 2022
He sends a letter, two white pills and his condo-
lences. “Sorry for the trouble you find.” Both
Violets are now alone, and acutely aware of their
changed bodies: “Split nipples, nipples that cracked
and bled, red-orange and erect, flat to a gummy
gnaw, her stomach an empty sack”.
It is still wartime. One Violet begins work in a
munitions factory in Wales, the other joins the
Auxiliary Territorial Services and ships off to Italy.
They rather self-consciously take to their new
positions: “She tried to slide a pencil behind her
ear like the men in the factory did but it kept slip-
ping so she took it out”. But a bright new age is
emerging. Here is the other Violet in Naples, strid-
ing into the cavernous Royal Palace: “Not like
church but something bigger, built for men. She
thought it would make her feel small but it had the
opposite effect”.
This is also an era of sexual discovery. Maggie, a
beautiful, mysterious young woman also stationed
in Italy, catches Violet’s eye. A romance blossoms.
a wealthy elderly woman, she becomes “Doña Sisi’s
girl, from the third floor”. As an office cleaner, she
is simply a “body broadening each year, two arms
and two legs and a face, reduced to a uniform”. Even
outside working hours, her gender means she is
allowed a function, but not a personality. She gets
involved in local activism through her boyfriend
Pedro’s neighbourhood association, but her attend-
ance at meetings is only accepted because “someone
asked who would do the mopping if not María”. In
group discussions, she recalls, “the more I thought
for myself, the more uncomfortable it made Pedro”.
Meanwhile, Carmen grows up and gets married
young, to a wealthy restaurateur (who remains
unnamed). She enjoys a life of 1990s affluence: a
brand-new VCR, a television in every room, a desk-
top computer with a modem. Her name is broadcast
to the city: her husband’s new chain of steakhouses
is named after her. But the business hits the rocks
and the debts begin to mount. When the couple’s
eldest daughter, Alicia, is thirteen, the husband
hangs himself and the family is plunged back into
poverty. Now an adult, Alicia embarks on a life of
early-morning alarms and long commutes that
echoes María’s own. In Lizzie Davis and Thomas
Bunstead’s translation, Medel vividly evokes
working-class city life as a monotonous merry-go-
round of metro stations and dead-end jobs:
the café, a clothes shop, Puerta de Toledo, Pirám-
ides, another café, a bingo hall, Marqués de Vadillo,
TLS
FICTION
Maggie is a rather unreal, idealized figure (“like a
drawing in a fashion magazine”), who amazes Violet
by her lack of restraint: “What kind of person
expects the world to yield that way, to sway with
every bend of her wiry limbs?” She represents new
and hitherto unbelievable possibilities.
The feminine fellow feeling is well evoked.
Violets, in its interwoven form and sympathetic
tone, insists on connection. Mothers and sisters
menstruate in sync; they understand without
asking and know what to do. There are some lovely
moments, such as when Maggie slides into bed
with Violet, who is still concealing her pregnancy,
and places “her hand on Violet’s belly, on the firm,
round flesh”. In opposition are the men: animalis-
tic, lurching, leering. En masse, they are a menace:
“The men moved like sheep butting into one
another’s backs, thick-headed, eager to touch”.
Individually, they are little better: absent, evasive
or disappointing.
The narrative tone varies, the harshness leavened
by the interventions of the soothing omniscient
voice, which seems to watch over proceedings like
a parent leaning over a cot: “So hush, Pram Boy,
British munitions hush. / Listen to the women’s voices come in
factory, July 1941 waves, / sob, or sing you off to sleep”. This voice
changes over time, from its early frankness (“Wait
then, Pram Boy, clinging on, / with your Papa
seed, semen dried, long gone”) to playfulness
(“So sing a song of sixpence, / a pocket full of rye”)
to a tone of celebration (“Down through the heart-
beat, down, down, / and if your lungs fail, / there’s
purgatory waiting / or else hell, / so live!”). These
sections are often moving, though elsewhere the
prose can lapse into cliché, dampening the drama:
“Maggie’s eyes on her were sharp as knives”; “The
sound pierced the air like a knife”; “She was alert
like a cat”.
Violet and Violet continue on their distinct but
entwined paths – routes taken by so many women
of their generation. Alex Hyde succeeds in mapping-
vividly their changing bodies and in evoking the
Christopher Shrimpton attendant implications – how they are seen and how
is a writer based in they see themselves in this changing world of sex,
London family and work. n
several months of unemployment, Aluche, a clean-
ing company, Urgel, a supermarket, Eugenia de
Montijo.
By the day of the Women’s Strike in 2018, the thirty-
three-year-old Alicia is the longest-serving employee
of the snack shop next to the public toilets at
Madrid’s Atocha station, and has a fading identity
of her own to contend with: “the sweet shop girl
– Patricia, wasn’t that your name?”.
The Women’s Strike aside, The Wonders contains
few moments of solidarity. Money always comes
between the characters, whatever else they might
share. Celebrating in a bar after the landslide win
for the Socialist Workers’ Party in the 1982 elections,
María meets a woman called Lady, also a single
mother. “Two legs, two arms, a mouth, nose, two
eyes, a belly that carried a child: they have all of
that in common, but not… their ways of getting
home – a taxi for Lady, maybe a friend’s car, and
the night bus for María.” Economics seeps into the
most intimate human relationships. When Alicia
reluctantly moves in with her boyfriend, it is
because he had “fallen in love, and she had
grown tired of zeroing in on neighbourhoods,
clicking on low square footage and high prices on
rental websites”.
On the day of the Women’s Strike, a great rally
is held in the centre of Madrid. By the time the
poorer women from the distant suburbs arrive,
however, “the lights and the music had already
been turned off ”. With The Wonders itself, there
is a similar sense of things not quite coming
together. Though each vignette is compelling
and well observed, the novel as a whole can feel
Annie McDermott is somewhat repetitive, oddly weighted and therefore
a literary translator ultimately frustrating – much like the lives it
based in Hastings represents. n
17
 HISTORY & L AW
Behold the
threaden
sails
How Britain should memorialize
its seafaring past
JAMES MCCONNACHIE
THE SHIP ASUNDER
A maritime history of Britain in eleven vessels
TOM NANCOLLAS
336pp. Particular Books. £20.
I
USED TO OWN AN OLD BARN . Almost everyone
who saw it assured me that its mismatched
joists and rafters, its well-pegged and much-
mortised props and ties, would certainly have come
from ships. Everyone, that is, except a visiting
architectural historian, who pointed out that we
were 20 miles from the sea, up an unnavigable river.
The idea, he told me, is at least in part a popular
myth – one that flatters Britain’s belief in itself as
a seafaring nation.
18
What remains of old ships, and how Britain
should remember and memorialize its seafaring
past, are the questions posed by this rich, nuanced
and accomplished book. The author is a building
conservationist whose excellent first book, Sea-
shaken Houses (2018), was a study and tour of
offshore lighthouses. This one is a study and tour
of eleven historical ships and their remaining relics,
from the Bronze Age Dover Boat to the Great
Eastern, Lusitania and Rosebud, the last being a
TLS
“The Victory Returning Newlyn fishing boat that was sailed to Westminster
from Trafalgar, in in 1937 by Cornish fishermen protesting at plans to
Three Positions” by demolish their homes.
J. M. W. Turner, c.1806 Nancollas’s answer to the first question – what
remains? – is... not a lot. Ships are “definingly
perishable”. Consider Brunel’s unparalleled, gar-
gantuan SS Great Eastern, completed in 1859.
Almost all that is left of her is one mast (the
“Saturday” mast, to be precise: she had one for
every day of the week except the Sabbath). It now
stands near Liverpool’s Anfield stadium, where,
bathetically, it “has ceased to be a yardstick for
height, and instead communicates the stadium’s
depth”. Or take Francis Drake’s Golden Hind, the
pinnacle of Elizabethan seafaring, a ship that
circumnavigated the globe and looted so much
Spanish silver that the queen’s half share alone was
supposedly enough to pay off the national debt. It
represents a “fetishized” aspect of English history,
yet what remains, leaving aside unsubstantiated
claims, is a single chair made from salvaged wood,
which is displayed in the Bodleian Library’s Divinity
School. With all respect to the Divinity School, this
does not amount to due prominence.
Something similar is true of the Lusitania, which
was torpedoed by a German U-boat in May 1915. Its
once gleaming, “kingly” propeller now moulders
beside the Mersey, slowly eaten by the air it was
never designed to taste. Then there’s HMS San Josef,
a ship captured heroically by Nelson at Cape St
Vincent – he boarded her across another Spanish
battleship in hand-to-hand combat. You can see
some of her ribs in the vault of the little church of
St Nicholas, West Looe – Nancollas’s home town.
(Yes, in places, naval timber really was reused.)
Nancollas’s eleven ships and their survivals offer
more than just stories or opportunities to regret
failures of commemoration; they open up refresh-
ing approaches to history. His account of HMS
Lutine and her ship’s bell, rung every half-hour
during the six watches in a naval day, is the stand-
out example. She was lost in 1799, along with her
© SEPIA TIMES/UNIVERSAL IMAGES GROUP VIA GETTY IMAGES
cargo of bullion. The bell (but not the gold) was
eventually salvaged by Lloyd’s of London, the mari-
time insurers, and hung at headquarters, to be rung
twice every time an underwritten ship returned
safely to port. One ring indicated a loss. The bell
still hangs there, its sound a fragment of auditory
history. In Nancollas’s hands it also becomes “a
summons to consider what, over the years, we have
chosen to raise and display of our seafaring past”
– and what we have left in the murky depths.
This is an underlying theme. The book unearths
neglected stories, as histories of material culture so
often do. The bell, in particular, introduces an ele-
James McConnachie is gantly intertwined essay on themes of salvage and
an author and critic. slavery. Nancollas recounts the attempt in the 1540s
He is writing a book to retrieve armaments and other valuable goods
about Kanchenjunga from the Mary Rose. A specialist freediver, Jacques
APRIL 8, 2022

Francis, was brought all the way from Guinea, and
evidence he later gave in court represents “probably
the first Black person to have their voice recorded
in England as direct speech”. Those words, poign-
antly, are “not those of a slave, but of a salvor”.
In this same chapter, entitled “Bell”, Nancollas
notes that guineas, the gold coins created in 1663,
were named after the Guinea coast – the source of
much of the new wealth as well as the home of
Jacques Francis. He observes that until 1698 the
Royal African Company (RAC) held a monopoly in
slave trading – a fact that has an amplified resonance
today. And he tells the story of the Guynie, a ship
that sank in 1691 on its way back from Africa to
England, carrying beeswax, ivory and gold – a cargo
that Edmond Halley of the Royal Society, which had
links with the RAC, attempted to salvage using his
prototype diving bell.
Engaging with such troubling matters, Nancollas
says he has felt, in the past, “like a reluctant diver
in a primitive bell”. To properly memorialize the
history of slavery in the UK, he proposes that “on
every vacated pedestal” of some worthy whose
hands were plunged to the elbows in the trade
should be placed instead “a brute article of slaving
recovered from the deep”. We know where the slave
wrecks are, he points out. It is time to recover them.
Time, too, to recover stories of how the imperial
project oppressed people at home as well as abroad.
An essay centred on Chatham, and its surviving
ropery, opens with the “symbolic mast” of Nelson’s
Who
rules the
waves?
Modern challenges to ‘the
freedom of the seas’
KIERAN PENDER
THE POSEIDON PROJECT
The struggle to govern the world’s oceans
DAVID BOSCO
320pp. Oxford University Press. £22.99
(US $29.95).
B
ETWEEN 80 AND 90 PER CENT of all traded
goods spend time at sea. From fruit to furni-
ture, cars to coal, our globalized economy is
reliant on the 100,000-odd merchant ships – with
a total capacity of more than two billion deadweight
tonnes – that make the world go round.
Prior to the pandemic-induced supply-chain dis-
ruptions, few of us thought much about the oceans,
their governance and the shipping routes that
ensure our shops are full and our internet orders
can be delivered within a day. The port of Los
Angeles, one of the world’s busiest, was hitherto an
© BING GUAN/BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGES
infrequent topic of conversation; the analysis of
infrastructure investment and new ship orders was
confined to specialist publications; months-long
delivery delays were rare. But the challenges and
possibilities of global shipping are nothing new to
David Bosco, whose latest publication, The Poseidon
Project, offers a detailed historical account of the
law of the sea and ocean governance. The book is
compact, lively, thought-provoking and buttressed
by scholarly rigour in the form of thirty-odd pages
of notes. And while an interest in law or diplomatic
history would be of use to prospective readers, it
is accessible to a general audience.
APRIL 8, 2022
Column. Nancollas focuses not on the naval hero,
however, but on the overlooked yet gigantesque
coil of rope in front of which his statue stands. Rope
is “the least enduring of all a ship’s parts”, and a
quintessentially humble material, yet it is central to
a ship’s operations. At Chatham, Nancollas feels,
“past events feel slackly coiled, rather than held in
tension still”. Its ropery “keeps under tow an
increasingly remote past”. Far better than Nelson’s
flagship, Victory – whose timbers have in any case
mostly been replaced, like a ship of Theseus –
Chatham stands for the Georgian era, not least
because “it is in the coils of this age more than any
other that we are still entangled as a nation”.
It should be clear that this is sophisticated
writing, although compressing the weave of Nan-
collas’s metaphors into the space of a review
risks making them seem glib. Or knotty. He does
at moments teeter on the edge of drollery. Eliza-
bethans, talking of Drake’s Chair, are “part of the
national furniture”. And the Chatham ropery is a
“monument to the hands” – meaning both the
rope-makers’ literal hands and the hands, or ordi-
nary sailors, who served on the navy’s ships.
That mention of “hands” is telling. Strikingly, and
likeably, the book doesn’t just talk about material
culture; it seeks to capture its quiddity. The Thames
tide retreats, “unveiling a foreshore”. England’s
riverfront is “shaved of its rabble of jetties and
wharves”. One extraordinary set-piece paragraph
imagines the seawater flooding the Lusitania after
Bosco begins in the modern era, in the Senkaku
(Diaoyu) Islands, claimed by both China and Japan.
Recalling a diplomatic incident between the two
nations’ coastguards in 2020, Bosco observes that
the dispute raised “old questions in human affairs:
who controls the oceans and what are the rules for
their use?”. He then rewinds to ancient Greece.
Poseidon, the brother of Zeus, was believed to rule
the sea. Able to calm the ocean or “roil the waves”,
he was considered unpredictable and dangerous,
and so it goes today: Bosco cites a British politician,
who avers that “the high seas are in a state of
anarchy”, along with a piece of testimony submitted
to an American congressional committee that
describes them as “a lawless Wild West”.
Most of The Poseidon Project explores how
humanity has managed to tame the seas, from a
legal and governance perspective. Each section
looks at a different phase of ocean management,
from an early chapter on Britain’s enduring influ-
ence – “Britannia’s Rules (1750–1914)” – to later ones
on the development and implementation of the
United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea
(1982). The ominous penultimate chapter is entitled
“System Under Strain”.
TLS
HISTORY & L AW
“
the torpedo strikes – imagines how it “swallowed
the skirting and felt for the dado rails. It unpeeled
the wallpaper and dissolved the gilt” – until the ship
The ship bowed forward, lifting her stern and exposing the
bowed forward, brazen propellers, which, for a moment, “spun in
air, not water”.
lifting her stern While this is not a travel book, Nancollas is a
and exposing gifted travel writer. Kent is “pylon-trampled”.
the brazen Chatham “seems to be recovering from rather than
basking in its seafaring past”. Dover has “the feel
propellers, of a stone threshold step trodden to a scoop”.
which, for Coastal places, in general, are “like empty sherry
casks, drained of a potency yet still fragrant with
a moment, the scent”. The book captures the essence of each
‘spun in air, site, and each vessel, while also conjuring a pre-
not water’ siding mood. Here it is elegiac without a shred of
romanticization. Towards the end of the book,
Nancollas meets a retired Cornish builder, a maker
of bottled ships, who possesses a sawn-off section
of Rosebud’s forefoot. Nancollas asks why he keeps
the relic. It is just “a whim”, he is told, but also:
“because of what she stood for”. And because it is
a reminder of pre-industrial craftsmanship, “where
things just happened right in your hand”.
This is a first-class book. It is superbly readable
and entirely serious, questioning not just how
Britain thinks of its maritime past, and indeed itself,
but how history is written, understood and enacted,
including by people at some remove from the aca-
demy. It is a work of experiential historiography,
if you like – and a delight. n
The renowned Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius is a
central figure. In 1608, the Dutch East India Com-
pany contracted the twenty-five-year-old legal
prodigy to advance the view that “the seas should
be owned by nobody and free for all to use”. His
subsequent pamphlet, Mare Liberum (1609),
remains a seminal piece of work. It sparked a battle
of the books, including perhaps most notably a
response by the Englishman John Selden, Mare
Clausum (1635).
By and large, Grotius won: the “freedom of
the seas” doctrine has prevailed over subsequent
centuries, powering international trade. It is not
that far-fetched to draw a line from his intellectual
arguments to the sprawling global shipping
industry that exists today. But is this now
under threat? Hanging over The Poseidon Project is
the question of whether the rise of China and
growing naval tensions reflect an end to the
Grotian era.
Beijing’s increasing naval militarism, with the
country squaring off against Vietnam, the Philippi-
nes and American naval deployments in the South
China Sea, as well as Taiwan across the strait and
Japan in the East China Sea, bodes ill for maritime
freedom in the region. The UN Convention remains
Container ships fragile: the United States is not a signatory, while
anchored off the coast China and Russia, despite having ratified it, have
of California, 2021 shown disregard for its dispute-resolution mecha-
nisms. Elsewhere, Turkey projects naval power in
the Mediterranean and a number of Latin Amer-
ican states have oceanic ambitions. “Open conflict
about Asian or Mediterranean waters would have
unpredictable consequences”, warns Bosco,
underlining the potential for closed trade routes in
the event of contested waters, or even a “new spate
of line-drawing”.
Of course, global power relations have shifted
before, without an existential threat to Grotian
freedom of the seas, and Bosco concedes that
recent skirmishes (actual and political) can be
characterized “as the latest iteration of a long-
running contest” between different seagoing
ideologies, rather than a fundamental rupture. But
the author nonetheless ends on a note of caution.
Grotius may have won the battle, “but he is on
course to lose the war”. Perhaps this is too pessi-
mistic. But if David Bosco is right, then the conse-
Kieran Pender is an quences for all of us could be significant – and far
Australian writer more so than those recent pandemic-related sup-
and lawyer ply-chain disruptions. n
19
 BIOGRAPHY

of human interaction and political life to declare

that history had to take the path it took, that the
present is the only possible outcome of the past.
The past is essential to analysing how we got here,
but that doesn’t mean here is the destination we
had to reach.
Henrietta Harrison agrees. In this closely docu-
mented return to that meeting in 1793, she seeks
answers not by invoking big ideas and grand forces,
or great men and their follies, nor by retreating to
earlier historiographies. Instead she turns to the
little people who shaped the all-important details
and nuances of that meeting, the minor actors
without whom the great drama could never have
unfolded, and certainly not in the ways it did: the
interpreters. Harrison singles out two young men in
particular. One is Li Zibiao, born in 1760 in north-
west China, who entered the College of the Holy
Family in Naples, known as the Chinese College, at
the age of thirteen. The other is George Thomas
Staunton, born in 1781 to an ambitious Anglo-Irish
family, who at the age of twelve, having been taught
Chinese while accompanying his father as part of
Macartney’s mission, was put before the emperor
to say a few polite words by way of greeting. The
two met in 1792, when George’s father travelled to
Naples looking for Chinese interpreters for the
Macartney delegation. Harrison digs equally in
Chinese and European archives, finding abundant
vivid material from which to reconstruct their stories,

East meets West weaving them together to rewrite the opening

The opening chapter of Sino-British relations as a series of unfortunate events
TIMOTHY BROOK the emperor’s categorical refusal to make trade or
diplomatic concessions frustrated British ambition.
Every concession that Macartney lobbied for, Qian-
THE PERILS OF INTERPRETING long turned down. Every regulation that Qianlong
The extraordinary lives of two translators confirmed, Macartney wanted removed. The two
between Qing China and the British empire regarded each other across the gap that imperial
HENRIETTA HARRISON presumption opened up between them, a gap that
312pp. Princeton University Press. £25 both men understood, albeit based on very different
experience and knowledge of the world. Qianlong
(US $29.95).
understood himself as presiding over the largest,
most powerful polity in the world, which was close
chapter of Sino–British relations as a series of unfor-
tunate events in which a word, a look or a gesture
could alter the course of the encounter.
Harrison anchors her interest in what she calls the
perils of interpreting, perils arising from the
key problem of diplomacy: trust. Not only do negoti-
“Pingze Men, the ators not trust each other, they tend to distrust their
Western Gate of interpreters, whom they are ready to blame when
Peking” by William their messages don’t produce the effects they want.
Alexander, 1799 This distrust is only compounded when the inter-
preter is someone born in the target culture, as was
Li Zibiao when interpreting for Macartney. Even an
interpreter born in the home culture is vulnerable
to being suspected of “going over to the other side”,
a taunt Staunton faced for the rest of his otherwise
privileged life. When the interpreter does indeed go
over to the other side, as some Chinese felt Li had

T
HE SERIES OF MEETINGS that took place
outside Beijing in September 1793 between
Emperor Qianlong of the Qing Great State and
George Macartney, envoy from George III, did not
go well. Macartney’s insistence that full respect be
to the truth. Macartney saw himself as representing
the most expansive and dynamic polity in the
world, which was also close to the truth. But as
Macartney was the supplicant and Qianlong was on
home ground, the summit went Qianlong’s way.
done by dressing as an English gentleman for the
mission, then smuggling himself back into China as
a Catholic priest, where can that interpreter find
refuge in an imperial culture that thrives on sowing
distrust of foreigners? Neither Li nor Staunton could

shown to his monarch ruffled Manchu feathers, and We are still under the long shadow of that meet-
ing, and it is worth asking why. It used to be
thought, back in the 1960s and 1970s, that Qianlong
was hopelessly out of touch with the world beyond
his borders. But that’s too simple. He had people
around him who knew about Britain’s ascendancy
in South Asia. In the 1980s and 1990s, it was thought
that Macartney was out of his depth in misjudging
the nature of a Manchu polity whose doors he
hoped to push open, allowing British goods and
merchants to enter. The rise of global history over
the past two decades has put both judgements in
abeyance. We now see Great Britain and the Qing
Great State as co-generators of a global shift in
wealth and power. Qianlong’s empire was heading
towards a financial crisis he had yet to detect.
George’s empire was experimenting with financial
networks that would more than make up for the
loss of the United States, to a degree neither the king
nor his advisers could yet perceive. The contraction
of the one and the expansion of the other resulted
in conflicts that would haunt the next two centuries
and beyond: opium wars, imperial collapse, two
world wars, Communist revolutions – almost any-
thing else you want to include. The poltergeists are
still in the building.
Did this have to happen? Did imperialism, slavery
and civil war have to define the modern world?
Many historians, and I am one, do not find it useful
to treat what happened as what had to happen.
There is too much contingency at every moment
“
have imagined, when they first crossed over into the
inscrutabilites of the other language and culture, the
difficulties of living in two worlds.
Not only do The heart of the issue is difference. Should inter-
negotiators not preters diminish the differences across the language
gap to bring interlocutors into empathy, or should
trust each they accentuate what each side relies on to distin-
other, they guish its interests and absolutize its position? Li and
tend to Staunton both listed to the side of empathy, yet
even there they did so to different ends. Staunton
distrust their
© PICTURES FROM HISTORY/UNIVERSAL IMAGES GROUP VIA GETTY IMAGES
was a trusting twelve-year-old hoping to please the
interpreters grown-ups, though he would go on to use his Chi-
nese to build his fortune. Li was a canny adult who
exploited the trust he enjoyed from both sides to
pursue his own mission, adding religious toleration
for Catholics to the list of six requests Macartney
presented to Qianlong. Only when Qianlong explic-
itly rejected all his requests did a puzzled Macartney
learn that he had rejected seven, not six.
Watching the interpreters at work allows us to
view great events as they were taking place on the
ground. It’s an invigorating re-vision, though how
it revises the bigger picture is not entirely obvious.
Harrison’s strength is in narrating lives lived and
Timothy Brook is reminding us that the consequences were never
professor of history at preordained. Li and Staunton were lucky to survive
the University of British their perils into old age. The two empires were less
Columbia. His most fortunate. As the war currently under way reminds
recent book is Great us, what unfolds in the geopolitical stratosphere is
State: China and the not only geopolitics. We forget the contingencies
world, 2019 and costs to individual lives at our peril. n

20 TLS APRIL 8, 2022


I’m
pickin’ up
good
vibrations
On the appeal of string theory
RICHARD LEA
THIS WAY TO THE UNIVERSE
A journey into physics
MICHAEL DINE
352pp. Viking. £20.
I
T MAY HAVE A BORING NAME , but the standard
model of particle physics is one of the most
successful scientific theories ever proposed. Its
predictions have been tested to phenomenal accu-
racy; a team led by Gerald Gabrielse announced in
2008 that their measurement of the electron’s mag-
netic field agreed with the theory to the astonishing
level of one part in a trillion. And the novel particles
predicted by the theory have turned up with
impressive regularity. The top quark was identified
in 1995, the tau neutrino followed in 2000 and the
Higgs boson completed the picture at the Large
Hadron Collider in 2012.
These successes have been achieved with a theory
that was never meant to be the last word. Writing
to Gabrielse in 2006, Freeman Dyson looked back
to the beginnings of the standard model in quantum
electrodynamics (QED). “As one of the inventors, I
remember that we thought of QED in 1949 as a
temporary and jerry-built structure, with mathe-
matical inconsistencies and renormalized infinities
swept under the rug. We did not expect it to last
more than ten years before some more solidly built
theory would replace it.”
The infinities Dyson worked so hard to eliminate
arise because the standard model is based on the
implausible fiction that the particles the theory
describes are infinitely small. As you approach an
electron, the fields surrounding it increase. If the
electron is taken to be an infinitesimal point, then
you can get as close as you like and those fields keep
getting stronger and stronger – until, that is, you wield
your mathematical broom. Renormalization removes
these infinities by replacing them with measured
values, then allowing for the influence of the virtual
particles quantum physics predicts. It won Richard
Feynman a share of the Nobel prize, but he still
thought renormalization was a “dippy process” that
wasn’t “mathematically legitimate”.
Not only is the standard model mathematically sus-
pect, it’s also incomplete. The “hocus-pocus” that
Feynman devised for QED doesn’t work for gravity
at high energies, leaving an unbridgeable gap
between a successful theory of the very small – the
standard model – and Albert Einstein’s elegant theory
of the very large: general relativity.
String theory offers a way out of this predicament
with the straightforward suggestion that the uni-
verse is constructed out of tiny vibrating strings. The
© AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
menagerie of particles that physicists study in their
accelerators is produced by different modes of vibra-
tion, as if the strings were playing a different note
for an electron, a photon or a quark. The standard
model’s infinitesimal particles are replaced by
strings occupying a region of space, and gravity is
baked in, emerging naturally as soon as the theory
APRIL 8, 2022
includes the constraints of quantum mechanics and
special relativity.
Unfortunately, little else about string theory is at
all straightforward. While the universe you and I
experience has three dimensions of space and one
of time, string theory only works in eleven. These
extra dimensions are thought to be wound up so
tightly that they are currently undetectable. The
details of how these extra dimensions are wrapped
determine the particles, masses, forces and symme-
tries that exist, with the 10500 available options
describing a vast landscape of different universes.
Because the strings are so small, the energies needed
to probe their structure are so vast that they are far
beyond the reach of any conceivable accelerator.
And string theory depends on supersymmetry,
which predicts that each of the particles in the
standard model has a partner with a different spin,
requiring a smorgasbord of new particles that have
so far failed to show up in the accelerators we have
built. More than thirty-five years since string theory
became the dominant model in high-energy physics,
there is still no prospect of a testable prediction.
The development of the theory has been equally
knotty. String theory has its origins in a formula for
the strong force between two particles proposed by
Gabriele Veneziano in 1968. Despite hints that it
might offer a route to a quantum theory of gravity,
the theory’s awkwardness and the arrival in 1973 of
an alternative theory (the work of Harald Fritzsch,
Murray Gell-Mann and Heinrich Leutwyler) describ-
ing the strong force made it a minority pursuit.
Some theorists persisted, however, and in 1984
John Schwarz and Michael Green proved that super-
symmetric string theory could avoid the anomalies
that surround many attempts to unify the forces of
nature. A revolution was launched. As Schwarz
recalled in 2000, they got a phone call from Edward
Witten even before they’d finished writing up their
work. They Fedexed him a draft, and “the following
day everyone in Princeton University and at the Insti-
tute for Advanced Study, all the theoretical physi-
cists, and there were a large number of them, were
working on this… So overnight it became a major
industry, at least in Princeton – and very soon in the
rest of the world”.
The backlash started in 1986, when Paul Ginsparg
and Sheldon Glashow suggested that the theory
“depends for its existence upon magical coincid-
ences, miraculous cancellations and relations among
seemingly unrelated (and possibly undiscovered)
fields of mathematics”, asking whether “mathe-
matics and aesthetics supplant and transcend mere
experiment?” But for many theoretical physicists,
string theory was the only game in town. Over the
next ten years it became ever more complicated,
TLS
SCIENCE
with five versions competing to become the ultimate
unified theory. The second string revolution came at
a conference in 1995, when Witten suggested that
these five string theories were all versions of a theory
of surfaces, or “branes”, in eleven dimensions. This
unlocked a new round of theorizing, with notable
results including Juan Maldacena’s discovery that
under certain constraints string theory is identical to
some quantum field theories that are already well
understood. String theory still dominates theoretical
physics, but, despite all this progress, the criticism
that it is a mathematically interesting dead end has
not gone away.
As a witness to and participant in both string
revolutions, the physicist Michael Dine is well
placed to unpick the tangled story of this intricate
theory. In his first book for the general reader, This
Way to the Universe, Dine chooses instead to take
a broader perspective. He begins by arguing that
physicists should look to both theory and experi-
ment, before sketching the shape of the universe
according to Isaac Newton, James Clerk Maxwell
and Albert Einstein. The searing temperatures of
the big bang and its remnants in the cosmic micro-
wave background open up into a discussion of
quantum mechanics, where he arrives quickly at the
taming of infinities in QED. Dine pursues the story
of modern physics through the nuclear forces, the
Albert Einstein, 1931 standard model and the imbalance between matter
and antimatter in the early universe, but it takes
more than half the book before he arrives at super-
symmetry and string theory – the subjects in which
he has made his name.
These opaque concepts are approached, as so often
in This Way to the Universe, with a historical survey.
Dine introduces supersymmetry via unsuccessful
attempts by Paul Dirac and Leonard Susskind to
explain the large disparities between some physical
constants. He then compares it to isospin – an
abstract property of the strong force briefly
described eighty pages earlier – and introduces the
raft of new particles the theory predicts, before
admitting that the absence of these particles in
“
recent experiments at the Large Hadron Collider is
“becoming quite uncomfortable for supersymmetry
proponents”. Dine takes the historical route through
While the string theory as well, outlining how early versions
universe of the theory with twenty-six dimensions and parti-
cles travelling faster than the speed of light were
you and I gradually tamed, before tackling the revolutionary
experience contributions of Schwarz, Green and Witten. Readers
has three meeting these ideas for the first time may wonder
whether Dine delivers on his ambition to “make clear
dimensions why the possibility that nature has this additional
of space and symmetry is compelling, and eventually what makes
string theory so attractive”.
one of time, Dine was at Princeton when Schwarz’s Fedexed
string theory paper arrived, and was there in the room in 1995 as
only works Witten went through his transparencies on an over-
head projector, but he sometimes struggles to convey
in eleven the appeal of his abstruse subject matter or the
excitement it provoked in the physics community.
He treads a careful line on the place of maths in
physics, viewing it as “quite difficult but sometimes
a helpful tool” while confessing that he has “on occa-
sion been seduced by beautiful mathematics”, and
acknowledges both the contributions made and the
difficulties faced by women such as Chien-Shiung
Wu, Vera Rubin and Myriam Sarachik in a male-
dominated profession.
String theory may still be our best prospect for
a theory of everything, but Witten may have been
right when he warned Dine that it could be several
centuries before that promise was achieved. Thirty-
six years after Ginsparg and Glashow suggested
that “Contemplation of superstrings may evolve into
an activity as remote from conventional particle
physics as particle physics is from chemistry, to be
conducted at schools of divinity by future equi-
valents of medieval theologians”, their conclusion
Richard Lea is the holds up remarkably well: “we who are haunted
editor of Fictionable, by the lingering suspicion that superstrings, despite
which will be launched all the hoopla, may be correct are likely to remain
in June haunted for the foreseeable future”. n
21
 RELIGION
Religion of love
The Great Sheikh of mystical Islam
AMIR-HUSSEIN RADJY
THE TRANSLATOR OF DESIRES
MUHYIDDIN IBN ‘ARABI
Translated by Michael Sells
368pp. Princeton University Press. £20
(US $24.95).
A
ROUND 1180 , two of the greatest Arab thinkers
met in Spain. The philosopher Averroes had
heard of a young man who had visions at
night: Ibn ‘Arabi was probably no more than fifteen
years old, but he was well educated as the son of a
courtier in Murcia, so he was awed by the interest
that the elderly sage took in him:
When I was led to him, Averroes stood up, showed
his affection and consideration, and kissed me.
Then he said to me, “Yes.”’ I, in turn, said, “Yes.”
His joy increased upon seeing that I understood
what he was referring to. Thus, upon realizing the
reason for his joy, I added, “No.” He cringed, lost
his color, and was overcome with doubt. “So, what
have you found through the lifting of the veil and
divine inspiration? Is it identical to what speculative
thought gives us?” I replied, “Yes and no; between
yes and no, spirits take flight and necks come off.”
(Ibn ‘Arabi, Futuhat, I)
Living between “yes’”and “no” required a clarity of
mind that would lead the young man to abandon his
worldly place in Spanish caliphal society. Ibn ‘Arabi
withdrew to a cave in a cemetery, according to at
22
least one biographer, staying for fourteen months. “I
began my retreat before dawn and I received illumi-
nation before sunrise”, he later claimed. He called
himself the “seal of saints” – as Muhammad had been
the last and final “seal of the prophets”.
It is difficult to overstate the influence of this
immodest mystic, who, almost 900 years later, is
remembered as the “Great Sheikh” of mystical Islam,
and whose tomb in Damascus remains a place of
pilgrimage. Many of the subsequent developments
in Islamic thought after his death in 1240 – especially
in the Arab East and Persia – were in reaction to his
writings. While figures like Rumi or Averroes are pro-
verbial names – even if few people know why their
writings matter – Ibn ‘Arabi has yet to take his rightful
place high up in the global canon. The American
professor Michael Sells’s The Translator of Desires is
the first English edition of Ibn ‘Arabi’s poetic master-
work since Reynold Nicholson’s translation of 1911.
Ibn ‘Arabi’s account of his meeting with Averroes,
like much of the history of mysticism, veers
between the the meaningful and deeply silly. E. G.
Browne remarked that there were few eastern
thinkers who had surpassed the Great Sheikh for his
“abstruseness”. He was also one of the most prolific
writers of Islam, with some 400 works to his name
– among which his key text, Meccan Illuminations,
spans thirty-seven volumes. The twentieth-century
Egyptian scholar of Sufism, A. E. Affifi, sought to
reduce this vast and unruly corpus to a gnostic
philosophy of love. He wrote that Ibn ‘Arabi’s “ulti-
mate goal of love is to know the reality of love and
that the reality of love is identical with God’s
essence”. It is a measure of his influence, his diffi-
cult style and his wealth of thought that Ibn ‘Arabi
is best known by ideas that were thought up by his
successors, not himself – such as the “unity of
being” that was systematized by Persian thinkers in
the following few centuries.
There are few writers as overexplained as Ibn
‘Arabi, or as little understood. Medieval comment-
aries on the Great Sheikh number in the thousands
– beginning with Ibn ‘Arabi’s own commentary on
The Translator of Desires that he wrote to refute
accusations that his verse was erotic, rather than
allegorical. There was “a mystical signification to
the words used in ordinary speech”, he explained.
Bosoms, flowery scents, peacocks, along with the
pearly teeth and killer glances of the beloved, are
all explained away by cumbersome allegory and
allusions to the Qur’an. Sells has left out the Great
Sheikh’s line-by-line comments, substituting his own
TLS
lengthy endnotes for each poem and thereby adding
his explanations to a long tradition of exegesis.
Ibn ‘Arabi wrote far fewer poems than he did
scholarly works. Yet The Translator of Desires con-
tains what are, as Sells says, the “most anthologized”
verses in ‘Arabic literature:
My heart can take on any form
For gazelles a meadow
A cloister for monks
A temple for idols,
pilgrim’s Ka’ba,
tablets of Torah,
scrolls of the Qur’an
I profess the religion of love
Wherever its camels turn,
there lives my faith
Early European orientalists seized on these lines as
proof of Ibn ‘Arabi’s alleged pantheism. But then,
the uses and abuses of the mystic are many. In the
West scholars have tried to show how Ibn ‘Arabi
influenced Dante’s Divine Comedy, as well as to
show that he was really a Christian, or rejected
Islam altogether – the latter theories being the pre-
judiced fantasies of nineteenth- and twentieth-
century European thinkers.
Affifi, who trained under the Cambridge oriental-
ists Nicholson and Browne, likewise declared Ibn
‘Arabi a total pantheist. “There is no possible means
of reconciling his philosophy with Islam”, he argued.
“The orthodox garb with which he so persistently
drapes his pantheistic ideas is a sham appearance
purposely put there.” Affifi later wrote a history of
Entrance to the Sufism, which he declared the “true Islam”. This
tomb of Ibn ’Arabi, study remains a popular history of the subject for
Damascus, Syria literary Egyptians – many of whom still find them-
selves living in a society where outwardly they must
obey religion. The Harvard doyen of Islamic mysti-
cism, Annemarie Schimmel, delivered a cooler judge-
ment – somewhere between “yes” and “no”. She said
these verses professing “the religion of love” were “a
statement about the author’s own lofty spiritual
rank” rather than a call for tolerance.
Instead of dwelling on questions of Ibn ‘Arabi’s
pantheism – something of a red herring – Sells points
out that hadith, or the sayings of the Prophet, is the
key to understanding him. There is no better hadith
to illustrate this than that of this collection’s second
poem, when the Prophet addresses God: “I take ref-
uge from you in you”. This is the mind-bending
“
notion of the collapse of time that longing and desire,
or divine shawq, brings about in Ibn ‘Arabi’s thought.
Sells does well to highlight pre-Islamic poetry in Ibn
Ibn ‘Arabi ‘Arabi – it is often forgotten that he ends his famous
wrote his own lines about the “religion of love” by harking back, not
to any prophets, but to the legendary lovers Qays
commentary and Layla, and others of ancient ‘Arabia. To say that
on The Islam is the “religion of love”, as Affifi would have
Translator of us believe, begs the question of its firmly un-Islamic
roots in the ‘Arabic language.
Desires to The refusal of a clear “no” or “yes” throughout his
refute thought made for Ibn ‘Arabi enemies among the
orthodox both during and after his lifetime. As
accusations recently as 1979, there was a push in Egypt’s parlia-
that his verse ment to ban the sale of his books. The Great Sheikh
was erotic has, however, had no trouble making converts of his
own kind. It is a sign of how the dense spiritualism
of Ibn ‘Arabi and his followers resists analysis that the
academic field of Sufism seems irresistibly to take up
its language. It was later said of Nicholson that he
found his spiritual bearings through the study of
these mystics, after having been shaken in his
Anglican faith. The great French orientalists Louis
Massignon and Henry Corbin took up the language
of Islamic mysticism with vivid fanaticism – and
sought to bend Ibn ‘Arabi towards their own florid
ideas. Sells himself has reverently written of the
“mystical dialectic” elsewhere in his work.
© JOHN WREFORD/ALAMY
Perhaps the most moving conversion of Ibn
‘Arabi’s detractors was that of his father, who did not
share his son’s zealous regard for the afterlife until
he was on his deathbed. “My child”, he said, in his
last words to his son, “everything I heard you say and
Amir-Hussein Radjy is that I did not understand, and which I sometimes
a writer based in Cairo rejected, is now my profession of faith.” n
APRIL 8, 2022

Strange worship
A secular Jew’s tussle with a notoriously complex text
ADAM SUTCLIFFE
COME AND HEAR
What I saw in my seven-and-a-half-year journey
through the Talmud
ADAM KIRSCH
256pp. Brandeis University Press. £26 (US $32.50).
I
T HAS BECOME A TRADITION : every seven and
a half years, the MetLife stadium in New Jersey
is filled not with football fans, but with a crowd
of about 80,000 religious Jews, almost all male,
black-hatted and Haredi. The occasion is the conclu-
sion of the Daf Yomi (“daily page”) study cycle of
the Babylonian Talmud. In August 2012 this incon-
gruous gathering caught the eye of Adam Kirsch, a
literary critic and “avowedly secular Jew”. He
decided that, next time around, he wanted to be a
part of it. And 2,711 double-sided Talmud pages
later, in January 2020, he was.
Daf Yomi was initiated in 1923 by a Polish Hasidic
rabbi who hoped to bring world Jewry together by
creating a shared rhythm of study for the core text
of rabbinic Judaism. In recent times, the pro-
gramme’s popularity has surged. The Talmud is now
readily available in full English translation, both in
print and online, and Daf Yomi participants can sup-
plement their readings with an abundance of study
groups, commentaries, video lectures and podcasts.
The contrast between this boom and the role of
the text in sixth-century Babylonia, where it took
shape, is extraordinary. The Talmud, David Krae-
mer notes in his excellent History of the Talmud
(2019), was originally aimed at “the elite of the elite”.
Following its eclectic debates was extremely hard,
and that was precisely the point. The discussions
between rabbinic sages that it recounts are often
© EDUARDO MUNOZ ALVAREZ/GETTY IMAGES
meandering, highly technical and inconclusive.
For the students of the early medieval Babylonian
academies, or of modern Ashkenazic yeshivas –
from pre-Holocaust Poland and Lithuania to con-
temporary Jerusalem and Brooklyn – grappling with
this challenge is an exceptionally demanding act of
religious devotion. The pious scholar immerses him-
self in the boundless complexity of the relationship
between God and the Jewish people, and of living
one’s life in accordance with divinely sanctioned
halakha ( Jewish law).
What might grappling with the Talmud mean,
though, for those of us who do not share that
APRIL 8, 2022
religious outlook? Kirsch doesn’t go deeply into his
own motivations. He wanted to fill, he tells us, the
“Talmud-sized gap” in his Jewish understanding, and
his readily digestible essays on the forty Talmudic
tractates of the Daf Yomi cycle in Come and Hear
efficiently offer this service to his readers. At first
sight he seems like a latter-day Leopold Zunz: the
early-nineteenth-century pioneer of secular Jewish
studies, who was the first to argue that rabbinic texts
should be read and cherished as literature. Zunz
broadly agreed, though, with the criticisms of the
Talmud levelled by the early German Reform rabbis
of his day. The convoluted obscurantism of the
Babylonian sages, they argued, did not provide the
moral edification that modern Jews needed from
their religion. Talmudic Judaism, Zunz believed,
would soon fade away; the scholarly task of the
moment, his associate Moritz Steinschneider com-
mented, was to give it a “decent burial”. Two
centuries later the Talmud is hugely popular and
unprecedentedly accessible, entirely thanks to the
growth and vigour of the Orthodox and especially
the Haredi world.
Large chunks of the Talmud were never of practi-
cal relevance. One of its books is devoted to the
holiness of the Temple in Jerusalem and the ritual
animal sacrifices offered by priests there – until the
destruction of the Temple in AD 70, approximately
five centuries before the Talmud was written.
Another book, focused on civil and criminal law, is
eminently practical in its concerns, but not always
in its verdicts. This book has plenty to say about
problems that keep today’s neighbourhood Whats-
App groups buzzing, such as disputed property lines
and noisy neighbours. But, while many rulings seem
sensible, if unsurprising, others are unhelpful to the
point of silliness. If a two-storey building is suffering
from subsidence, the downstairs owner cannot
require the upstairs owner to co-operate in doing
anything about it until the second-storey floor has
sunk to “ten handbreadths” above the ground – the
Talmud’s calculation of the height of a property
domain. By this point, Kirsch points out, the lower
storey will have long been uninhabitable.
In legal disputes between Jews and non-Jews, the
Talmud encourages collective Jewish solidarity. We
even read of a sage who chopped off the head of
another Jew to prevent him from denouncing a
third Jew to the non-Jewish authorities. The tractate
Avodah Zarah (“strange worship”) is particularly
replete with hostility to Gentiles, and for this reason
has, since the sixteenth century, frequently been
TLS
RELIGION
subject to both Christian and Jewish censorship. Jews
shouldn’t employ Gentile nursemaids because they
might try to kill their children, and certainly not a
Gentile circumciser, who might chop off their son’s
penis. They mustn’t eat even kosher food prepared
by Gentiles, or drink their wine, because it might
have been used in idolatrous rituals. (The Talmud
gives further reasons: Gentile hygiene can’t be
trusted, and communal drinking might lead to
friendships and then to intermarriage.) Kirsch mostly
offers a straightforward summary of these rulings,
which he washes down with reassuring explanations.
These were the attitudes, he asserts, of “a powerless
and persecuted people” who lived “in profound fear
of their gentile neighbours and rulers”. Really? We
don’t know all that much about sixth-century life
under the Persian Sassanian dynasty, but relations
between Jews and their Zoroastrian and Christian
neighbours seem to have been largely harmonious.
As for the insularity of the most stringently observant
Jewish communities today, though these attitudes are
reinforced by such Talmudic injunctions, they are
the product of more recent historical experiences.
The Talmud is also rather hair-raising on sex. It
prohibits men from touching their penises in any
circumstances: anything that might lead to the “evil
inclination” must be rigorously avoided. There is no
equivalent concern for women because they, the
sages declare, cannot arouse themselves through
touch. In fact, the examination of women’s genitals
is a prominent Talmudic theme: the final tractate
of Daf Yomi, Nidda, covers the requirement of the
The 13th Siyum sexual separation between a husband and his
HaShas, MetLife menstruating wife, for which it is vital to determine
stadium, New Jersey, precisely when menstruation begins. A wife sus-
January 1, 2020 pected of adultery, according to the biblical book of
Numbers, must face a trial by magic potion: the drink
will not harm her if she is innocent, but will inflict
an agonizing death if she is guilty. A full Talmudic
tractate is devoted to discussing this ritual. Kirsch
strains to portray the sages here as proto-liberals,
“squirming”, much as we do today, in response to
the biblical requirement and doing what they can
to find clever ways to nullify it. But this wilful inter-
pretation goes against the grain of Kirsch’s own
description of it. The twists and turns of the
“
sages’ arguments seem to be shaped by all sorts of
theological and analytical interests, but not by any
particular concern for women’s welfare.
The Talmud Kirsch tells us a great deal about the Talmud, but
is rather he doesn’t give much of a sense of what it is like to
spend so much time in its company. Unlike Ilana
hair-raising Kurshan, whose recent account of her Daf Yomi
on sex: experience, If All the Seas Were Ink (2017), is as much
anything that about her as the Talmud, Kirsch is a reticent authorial
presence. He does observe, though, that while Daf
might lead Yomi didn’t make him “a better Jew”, it did give him
to the ‘evil a sense of greater Jewish connectedness and under-
standing, particularly of contemporary Orthodox
inclination’ Jews. But does a secular reading of a religious text
must be really bring one closer to a believer’s experience
rigorously of it? One strand of the Talmud that flickers only
occasionally in Kirsch’s reading, for example, is
avoided messianism. For the leading Talmudic scholar Jacob
Neusner, by contrast, the central thrust of the work
is to bring Jewish conduct into more perfect harmony
with God’s will in order to hasten the arrival of the
Messiah. This messianic expectancy will have suf-
fused the Talmudic study of many of the celebrants
who surrounded Kirsch at the MetLife stadium.
The Talmud is an inexhaustibly fascinating
window on a distant Jewish world, with an equally
fascinating fifteen-century afterlife. It is also an
unsettling text, and its impact on Jewish history
and practice has certainly not been entirely benign.
Why read it every day for seven and a half years?
Adam Sutcliffe is For Kirsch and many others, this commitment
Professor of European provides intellectual challenge, life-structuring
History at King’s discipline and a seductive sense of connection to the
College London. His thousands of simultaneous readers, and millions of
latest book is What past readers, of each page. But, as Zunz argued 200
Are Jews For?: History, years ago, a truly illuminating secular reading of
peoplehood, and rabbinic texts needs to be historical, unsentimental
purpose, 2020 and critical. n
23
 POETRY
Let’s talk
about
insects
Startlingly erotic poems about
cicadas and caddisflies
STEPHANIE SY-QUIA
EPHEMERON
FIONA BENSON
128pp. Cape. £12.
BIOLUMINESCENT BABY
FIONA BENSON
64pp. Guillemot Press. £10.
F
I O N A B E N S O N ’ S T H I R D C O L L E C T I O N of
poems is divided into four sections. The first,
“Insect Love Songs”, is drawn from her pam-
phlet Bioluminescent Baby (2021), which was written
in response to plummeting insect populations result-
ing from ecological collapse. These poems are exer-
cises in sustained attention. Benson luxuriates in the
task, roving over every jointed, pulsing part of the
insects in question with startlingly erotic language.
Cicadas shed their skins, “arching back / like an
orgasm”, a blue ghost firefly wears “epaulettes of
light” and a caddisfly larva has a “lemon belly / feath-
ery with gills … a touchy knuckle / emerging from
its foreskin, / intimate, clitoral”. “Mama Cockroach,
I Love You” hits a bum note, however, in the lines
“Because you cosy with the aunties in your / reeking
slums, and are intimate and sweet”: “aunties” is a
word coded as largely exterior to whiteness, and it
is unfortunate that here it is conflated with the cock-
roach, situated squarely in the slums, and placed
alongside the rather matronly “sweet”.
Belief and make-believe
Past, present and the possibilities of poetic form
MARIA JOHNSTON
CHERYL’S DESTINIES
STEPHEN SEXTON
112pp. Penguin. £9.99.
“W
HO ARE YOU GOING TO BELIEVE , me
or your own eyes?” The Belfast poet
Stephen Sexton’s second collection of
poems opens with the conundrum posed by a dis-
sembling Chico in the Marx Brothers’ anarchic film
Duck Soup (1933), famous for its much-imitated
“mirror scene” in which Harpo, impersonating
Groucho, pretends to be Groucho’s reflection in a
nonexistent mirror.
For the poet, as for the comic actor, it’s all about
timing and surprise, and the spring-loaded poems
of Cheryl’s Destinies foreground questions about
art and authenticity, belief and make-believe, the
inescapable presence of history and the contingent
self in crisis, in ways that leave the reader spinning
in discombobulation. In “High School Musical”,
the poem’s inconspicuous speaker performs
“Edelweiss” on guitar off-stage during a school
24
The insect poems in Ephemeron are a clear con-
tinuation of the poetics of maternity and myth that
Benson explored in Vertigo & Ghost (2019). By
imposing gender on her insect subjects, she probes
the mindlessness of self-perpetuation: “what sur-
vives is code”; “call it the fierceness / of our own
genetic code / call it love”. On a visit to a lab to
observe field crickets, the speaker is overwhelmed
by sexual frisson with the scientist: “oh my body
is a beacon, / it is panicking, it is screaming – it
thinks / we have not done enough to ensure the
survival / of the human race”; they are “goaded
by DNA, its gorgeous living chain”, its “endlessly
mutating song”. Later, after the mass death of the
specimens: “My single self sickens, understanding
itself / as a slave to DNA – all the blood-flesh agonies
of love / to end as husk on your knees”. Cupping
fireflies, “the raw green girl / who lives in me still
// trembles, ignites”.
The segue into the next section, “Boarding-School
Tales”, is padded with poems only tangentially
production of The Sound of Music, while the actor
playing the Captain fakes it on stage: “While he
dumb-thumbed a Spanish guitar / and sang Edel-
weiss for the fatherland, / I hunched on a stool in
the orchestra pit / and waltzed through the ache in
my forearms”. As a dark parable about the coercive
forces that shape our destinies, the poem seems
close in spirit to Paul Muldoon’s “Anseo”, but it
also suggests that the poet controlling our illusions
is uneasy in the spotlight of his own self-exposure,
preferring to throw his voice or assume various
disguises before disappearing into a shimmering
landscape of mirage and mirror images.
Tricksy forefathers such as Muldoon and John
Ashbery loom large. The book’s middle section
strains the limits of credibility somewhat with an
unlikely “collaboration” between W. B. Yeats and
Billy Corgan, as lines from Yeats’s greatest hits (“The
Song of the Happy Shepherd”, “The Lake Isle of
Innisfree”) sound alongside Corgan’s angst-ridden
lyrics from the Smashing Pumpkins’ second album,
Siamese Dream (1993). Musing on the album’s
composition, Corgan remembered feeling “this great
pressure to make [it] set the world on fire”, and
Sexton may have felt similar pressure approaching
his highly anticipated second collection at a time
TLS
about insects. With their placement, Benson
cheekily dares the reader to draw out what bugs and
teenage girls (“just kids / and silly with revision, but
also learning to be women”) have in common:
bodies in flux and at the mercy of desire, throbbing
with energy over which they have no control and
perhaps even experiencing the same feeling of
being trapped in a jar for all to gaze upon. In the
words of a poem that doesn’t migrate over to
Ephemeron from Bioluminescent Baby (luckily, as it
would have made the link too obvious), “Were we
like insects then?”. “You think of yourself locked-in,
pre-teen, / … moving in your bottle-green uniform.”
The “translations” of “the Pasiphaë” form the
collection’s core. Benson uses an imagined body of
texts as the departure point for a retelling of the
myth of the Minotaur. The point of view is mainly
that of his mother, Pasiphaë, “a body used by the
gods, // an instrument of myth – a body / the gods
whored out to punish a king”. The question of
whether Pasiphaë coaxes her husband’s prized
bull into inseminating her, as has been suggested
in myth, is left unanswered: mention is made of
Daedalus working to make the “cow frame” that
will facilitate the act. Polyperspectivity is created
through other poems spoken by figures including
Eileithyia (goddess of childbirth and midwifery,
who assists Europa at the birth of King Minos),
A cicada shedding its Daedalus, servants and several of Pasiphaë’s child-
exoskeleton ren. Pasiphaë’s last son, Asterios, is born with a
congenital abnormality, his “torso densely furred,
/ spindled legs, … / the unmistakeable muzzle, the
swellings on his skull” (as described by the mid-
wife). According to Pasiphaë,
He was beautiful, my son.
In his sleep, he shone.
I kissed the wet tufts of his fur,
his damp snout,
his long and delicate jaw.
The remainder of the Pasiphaë section reveals
myth as we know it to be a bruising thing, afraid
of tenderness and delicacy – a reprise of the central
theme of Vertigo & Ghost. The sequence is fre-
quently moving: “They took him away from me /
and they killed him in the dark, for years”. There
is a gorgeous, sunbleached quality to much of this
writing, which stuns and scorches. It will be a
Stephanie Sy-Quia’s pleasure to see which cycles of myth Benson takes
debut is Amnion, 2021 on next. n
of global lockdown; his grief-scored, multiple-
prizewinning debut, If All the World and Love Were
Young (2019), prompted comparisons to Seamus
Heaney. That several poems in Cheryl’s Destinies
(such as “The Curfew”, winner of the National Poetry
Competition in 2016) pre-date his debut effects a
sense of déjà vu in the reader.
This could all be part of Sexton’s time-travelling
plan, of course, as he artfully manipulates past and
present time frames, overlaying them in a way that
seems imitative of Corgan’s multitracked guitar lines.
The lurching sensation of living through the Decade
of Centenaries in Northern Ireland is heavily felt
throughout. In “Marshalls of Saintfield”, the rebel-
lion of 1798 overtakes the speaker’s present-day
reality as he sits tilted in a car that is having a slow
puncture mended. History is always with us, disturb-
ing the air, on repeat. Thus, many of the poems in
Cheryl’s Destinies vibrate not only forwards but back-
wards as Sexton continues to unlock the possibilities
of poetic form, expertly manoeuvring narrative
worlds across hairpin line-bends.
Fittingly, the book closes with an elegiac tribute
© KHAMP SYKHAMMOUNTRY/ALAMY
to the master poet of the detour and the double take,
Ciaran Carson, that locates not just the poet but the
future of poetry itself in a Belfast that is the shifting
centre of the arts of illusion, mystery, and endless
dynamism: “I know the road’s every inch; its urgent
Maria Johnston is a camber // and final curve at which the country
visiting research fellow falls away, / where like a diorama of itself, Belfast
in the School of // emerges shining”. A poet whose poems, to quote
English, Trinity College Eavan Boland, “are marked by ambition and inven-
Dublin tion”, Sexton can go even further than this. n
APRIL 8, 2022

THE ACTS OF OBLIVION
PAUL BATCHELOR
142pp. Carcanet Press. £11.99.
S ubstantial and very impressive,
The Acts of Oblivion is Paul
Batchelor’s first collection of
poems since the pamphlet The Love
Darg (2014), some pieces from
which, including the widely
a d m i r e d “ To a H a l v e r ” a n d
“Brother Coal”, reappear here in a
fuller historical and personal con-
text. The past is a presence; it’s
personal, too. Batchelor sets him-
self firmly in the line of post-1945
historian-poets such as Geoffrey
Hill, Tony Harrison, Douglas Dunn
and Jeffrey Wainwright, and earns
a place in their company, deserving
attention in any fresh consideration
of that tradition.
The book’s title derives from the
Civil War and its aftermath, from
attempts by both sides to seal off
history and have it forgotten. The
rumbustious ballad “Well Done
Thou Good and Faithful Servant”
recasts “Sir Patrick Spens” to tell of
the turncoat George Downing, who
during the Civil War tracked down
royalists and after the Restoration
brought regicides to the gallows.
His reward was the name of a cer-
tain London street. “The Rogue”,
a long poem of novelistic richness
displaying Batchelor’s character-
istic intricate and fleet-footed
musical assurance, is spoken by
the parliamentarian Colonel Henry
Marten. Marten’s attitudes were
perhaps too complex – at one point
he expressed sympathy for the
Irish rebels – even for a complex
age that he survived only by
imprisonment.
The forces of history can seem
too blunt for the human material at
their disposal. In a brief poem that
seems deliberately to evoke Hill’s
“Florentines”, Batchelor apostro-
phizes History: “A pointer bitch
fawns on your right royal sleeve /
while you stare down a plea for
clemency”. And in a series of
poems by turns vengeful, contemp-
tuous and self-accusing, Batchelor
explores how the presumptions of
rank and class perpetuate them-
selves even among those who
might consider themselves too
enlightened and sophisticated. The
intimate brutalities of the past
re-emerge in the guise of class
distinction, for example across
the apparently civil table of an
academic meeting. The disputed
property is knowledge itself – a
conflict familiar from Dunn’s “The
© BRITISH MUSEUM/WORLD HISTORY ARCHIVE/ALAMY
Student” (Barbarians, 1977): “Diffi-
cult Latin sticks in my throat / And
the scarecrow wears my coat”.
Batchelor claims his birthright as
both poet and translator, as did
Derek Mahon, for whom he writes
an elegy in tactful emulation of that
humane and cosmopolitan spirit.
Batchelor’s gifts have long been
apparent: now that he has served
them with such formal power,
range and subtlety, who in his
generation will take up the chal-
lenge offered?
Sean O’Brien
APRIL 8, 2022
A tomb decoration of the Lion of Knidos, c.350–200 BC
The forces of history
A round-up of recent poetry collections
TIME IS A MOTHER
OCEAN VUONG
112pp. Cape. £14.99.
L ike Night Sky with Exit Wounds,
his T. S. Eliot prizewinning
debut, Vuong’s new poetry collec-
tion, Time Is a Mother, opens with
a “threshold” poem. The titular
animal in “The Bull” is figured as an
entrance to the depths, and at the
end of the poem the speaker likens
the bull to himself. But the poem
does nothing to justify the choice of
a bull in particular. In general, there
is a turn away from the other and
towards the self in Vuong’s new
book, which loosens its connection
to the world.
At its crudest, this self-involvement
appears in statements such as
“Stand back, I’m a loser on a win-
ning streak” and “I used to be a
fag and now I’m a checkbox”. Such
self-pity is galling when the author
is enjoying popular and critical
success. One wonders how “the ace
team at Jonathan Cape” (“Notes &
Acknowledgements”; also “the ace
team at Penguin”, in the US edition)
feel about the checkbox statement,
since “everyone knows yellow pain,
pressed into American letters, turns
to gold”. Self-pity is not shame –
shame is honest, searing, and
makes the reader squirm. But we
read “Do you know how many
hours I’ve wasted watching straight
boys play video games?” and chuc-
kle knowingly.
The effect this has on the poetry
is detrimental: not only does
Vuong’s imagery lose precision, but
the poems lose their shape and
definition. Butterflies move not just
like but “so much / like a heart / on
fire”, and a Nissan is “the size of a
monster’s coffin” (we are not told
what kind of monster); more than
nine pages, constituting nearly 15
per cent of the book, are given over
to three long poems consisting of
random single sentences such as
“Time is a mother” – poems owning
the occasional fillip of metaphor
and the rhythm of basic repetition,
but lacking the adze of the line
break and the compass of the para-
graph or stanza.
Where the book focuses on
people other than the poet, as in a
poem about his partner’s Russian
Jewish grandmother and another
about a seven-year-old cousin, it is
genuinely moving. Dedicated to
Vuong’s late mother, the long poem
“Dear Rose” is clearly intended to
be the climax of the collection.
Weaving together the family’s his-
tory in Vietnam and America, the
behaviour of ants and the making
of fish sauce from anchovies, it is
a beautiful and often profound
tribute. But even here there are
slip-ups. A bullet does not “hover”,
a birth certificate may disintegrate
into dust but cannot be “thin / as
dust”, and the killing of one’s uncle
does not have a “perfect” analogue
in the “murder // -ous deletions” of
editing one’s poems.
Jee Leong Koh
PILGRIM BELL
Poems
KAVEH AKBAR
80pp. Chatto and Windus. £12.99.
K aveh Akbar’s second collection
of poems, Pilgrim Bell, has a
different sonic resonance to his
acclaimed debut, Calling a Wolf a
Wolf. The work here is a measured,
quiet pondering of intense subjects
and subjectivities: “My life / grow-
ing monstrous / with ease”. But it
would be erroneous to mistake this
for lack of force. Akbar is simply
interrogating his life and his place
in the world with greater stillness.
He invokes Anne Carson’s defini-
tion of a pilgrim as “a person who
is up to something”, and attaches
the title “Pilgrim Bell” to multiple
poems, examining how the profane
is inextricably entangled with the
sacred. The poems emphasize the
distance between, to quote one
such “Pilgrim Bell”, how “my
savior has powers and he needs.
To be convinced to use them”.
TLS
Elsewhere, Akbar writes: “Loudly.
All day I hammer the distance. /
Between the earth and me. Into
faith.” In these poems he uses full
stops to fragment his sentences
and mimic a kind of glottal stop.
In this way, Akbar represents
faith, writing about faith and writ-
ing in general as processes – such as
hammering. Several pieces, includ-
ing the epic finale, “The Palace”,
contextualize his and our own liter-
ary endeavours: what does success
in poetry mean in a system marked
by imperialism, American or other-
wise, while “the dead keep warm”?
What does this mean for us as
Muslim or Muslim-adjacent people?
In “Ghazal for a National Emer-
gency”, Akbar writes: “Embrace
your rage and this will be easier,
winks Washington”.
Some poems serve as forms of
echolocation. In “The Palace”,
Akbar is “elsewhere in America
(I am always / elsewhere in Amer-
ica)” as an Iranian-American; in
“The Miracle”, “Gabriel isn’t com-
ing for you. If he did, would you
call him Jibril, or Gabriel like you
are here? Who is this even for?”
The poems question the poet’s
identity and whether they are
themselves potentially supporting a
fetishizing western gaze. As Akbar
admits in the first lines of “Reading
Farrokhzad in a Pandemic”, “The
title is a lie; / I can’t read Farsi”.
Although poems such as “Escape
to the Palace”, which appears to be
about taking drugs in a bathroom,
are slighter and more indulgent,
other poems are simultaneously
lighter and more sage. Akbar’s
breaking up a prayer by laughing
uncontrollably with his brother, in
“How Prayer Works”, made me
rethink the idea, ingrained over
decades, that laughter “cancelled”
salat.
Pilgrim Bell insistently travels to
necessary places, with regard to
the intimacies of faith, the land-
scapes of empire and the perform-
ativity and honesty of poetry. The
poems are deeply considered and
POETRY IN BRIEF
show a contemplative maturation
of Akbar’s voice. What this pilgrim
is up to is necessary work.
Khairani Barokka
AMNION
STEPHANIE SY-QUIA
128pp. Granta. £10.99.
A n amnion is a membrane that
contains an embryo – in this
case the poet’s embryonic self.
Amnion is an epyllion in prose and
verse recounting a fragmentary
family history. In the opening sec-
tion alone, Stephanie Sy-Quia men-
tions her mother’s blue eyes, her
grandmother’s “two black eyes”
and the empty eye sockets of the
Lion of Knidos, symbolic of empires
that, “like milk teeth”, fall. Dis-
torted images of the past, both per-
sonal and global, and seemingly dis-
cordant, disparate elements of
history are collocated with the
poet’s self, a “cathedral for all my
colonialisms”. Sy-Quia’s figurative
language is rich and fluid (“skinned
soft with love”; “thighs moving like
nudity”) and the book is brightened
by a charming, breezy sense of
humour: “Of my parents’ early lov-
ing, I rightfully know little”, she
writes, and she describes the
parents of other children at her
school in their “Barbour-ed torpor”.
Sy- Q u i a i n s i s t s o n t h e l i n k
between etymology and her own
stratigraphic unearthing of heri-
tage: her grandmother’s newborn
baby, which “is the length of her
hands”, reminds us of the poet’s
child-self looking up at the Notre
Dame, which is “unfathomable … (A
fathom is the distance between
outstretched hands)” – from Old
Saxon fathmos, the distance of out-
stretched arms. There is a tendency
towards overemphasis, however.
The lists of similar-sounding words
(“language of engels and angles and
angels”; “ionic ironic iconic”; “Post-
colonial / Postcode / ... Post impe-
rial”) never actually plumb lan-
guage. There is also the matter of
the book’s title, which deliberately
echoes “Albion” – disappointingly,
“Albion” turns up as a single-word
sentence in the book, to make sure
we don’t miss the resemblance. The
word is described as “a corp / ulent
pearl”, and this enjambment, draw-
ing attention to the word’s root in
corpus (linking Albion to the body
in which the amnion fosters life, as
well as to an artist’s body of work),
is the equivalent of a neon sign
pointing at the meaning we are
meant to have found.
In one passage, Sy-Quia provides
some definitions of “buttress”,
explores the kenning banhus (bone-
house, ie body), then links church
architecture to the body, as if
sharing the preparatory notes for a
poem. But this connection is made
more effectively earlier with “the
clerestory of my mouth”. One
eventually gets the sense that the
poet is providing her own interpre-
tations straight, rather than entrust-
ing the mystery to her reader. n
Dominic Leonard
25
 FREELANCE
Call it kismet
The unlikely meeting of two writers in Cairo
BEEJAY SILCOX
M K
Y HALF OF THE STORY begins in Cairo in
the spring of 2018; a spring of heat-slurred
days and Iftar nights. My husband, Sam,
had been posted to the Australian embassy, and the
two of us were living in a hotel while we searched
for an apartment. Our room looked out to the Nile
and overhung the hotel function centre. At night,
fireworks erupted against the bedroom windows or
landed on the balcony and fizzed into a frenzy.
Between the jet lag, the fireworks and the raw new-
ness of it all, I gave up on night sleeping. I’d start
a book as the dark came down and finish with the
dawn call to prayer, then dream my way through
the hours of high sun.
One of those insomniac books was An Uncertain
Grace (2017), a novel-in-stories by the Brisbane-
based author Krissy Kneen. I knew nothing much
of it, or of them. In the days before we left for Cairo,
I had bought Aussie fiction haphazardly, ravenously.
A suitcase full of novels. A salve, I thought, for
homesickness. But Kneen is not in the business
of solace.
The opening act of the novel sees a professor
relive an affair with a former student as if he, the
professor, were inside her skin, by way of a virtual-
reality bodysuit. The professor remembers a mutual
surrender to pleasure; the student does not. Inside
the bodysuit, the professor experiences their con-
flicting accounts simultaneously, a kind of sensory
stereopsis. There is no penitent little fable here; the
encounter is as seductive as it is damning. There is
a dark power, Kneen argues – and a darker ecstasy
– in being both predator and prey. When you work
as a book critic, you read a lot of inoffensive novels;
volume after volume of amiably defanged fiction.
An Uncertain Grace was profane and sublime, a
novel snarled in techno-ethical knots and awash
in eco-grief: beautiful robot children lured sex
offenders; a ruined anthropocene sea quivered with
noxious jellyfish.
I finished the book in the thick, pre-dawn dark.
I can’t quite explain the compulsion, but I felt the
need to tell the author where the tales had found
me and where they had taken me; to tell Kneen of
26
my Cairo nights. So, for the first time in my life, I
wrote a fan letter.
rissy’s half of the story begins at the feet of
their grandmother, Lotty Kneen, the family
matriarch: a gifted paper artist, collector of
grisly folk stories and self-confessed witch. When
Krissy was a child, Lotty won the lottery and moved
the family to a remote property in the Queensland
bush, where they made life-sized papier-mâché
monsters – the beasts from Lotty’s favourite tales –
for a desolate theme park. At Dragonhall, Lotty’s
daughters and granddaughters could be shielded
from the evils of the world and the venal treachery
of men. The source of Lotty’s hyper-vigilance was
never explained; she guarded the past as ferociously
as she guarded her family. Questions were forbidden.
Over time, Krissy pieced together a bare outline:
Lotty had once been named Dragica and had been
born in what is now Slovenia; she had travelled
to Alexandria in childhood, then fled Cairo as a
married woman in the late 1950s, when President
Nasser expelled expatriates from Egypt. Lotty
arrived in England with two infant daughters –
Krissy’s mother and aunt – and a suitcase that had
been robbed of its contents, save for a human skull.
From there the exiled family made their way to
Australia, where that winning lottery ticket and a
life of self-imposed seclusion waited for them.
When Lotty died, it was as if some gatekeeping
spell had been broken. Krissy was freed to seek a
new story: a lineage, a history, a mooring. In the
spring of 2018, Krissy and their partner, Anthony,
flew to Slovenia, to try to find Lotty’s home village,
but with no photographs or documents, and few
full names, research soon stalled. On the streets
of Ljubljana, Krissy searched the faces of strangers
for some jolt of recognition; an echo of Krissy’s
own face.
A chance encounter in a bookshop unearthed a
lead: the Aleksandrinke, a group of Slovenian
women from the country’s western borderlands
who, from the 1890s, became nursemaids to the
children of wealthy European families in Alexandria.
The money they sent home saved their war-ravaged
villages from starvation, but the women often had
to leave their own children behind, and the sacrifice
TLS
was a source of shame. Many Aleksandrinke never
returned to Slovenia, and those who did – reappear-
ing in their Alexandrian finery, with heads full of
new cosmopolitan ideas – were ostracized.
As Krissy read of the Aleksandrinke, it became
clear that Lotty’s story was part of a long-neglected
history of economic desperation and cultural
reproach. The trail Krissy was chasing led to Egypt.
A last-minute trip before returning to Australia
seemed an impossible logistical scramble; and then
how to begin to trace one woman’s story in a
country of more than one hundred million people?
When Krissy checked their email in the bookshop
café, a fan letter from Cairo was waiting. “If you ever
decide to visit – and I hope you do – please know
you have a place to stay.”
K
rissy and Anthony arrived in Cairo bearing a
two-foot-long Slovenian sausage, a matchbox
full of Lotty’s ashes and the story of the
Aleksandrinke. Sam and I met the couple with a
travel schedule and a rough-and-ready research
plan: the staff at the Australian embassy had
arranged some hasty public events where Krissy
would share the developing story, and we would see
what happened. (The past is ever restless in Egypt,
especially those years surrounding the Suez Crisis
in 1956, when Nasser flexed his might.) Within a few
days, Krissy was sipping tea in the loungeroom of
a new-found family member in the outer suburbs
of Alexandria, and decanting Lotty’s ashes into the
sea from an overpass bridge. The whole grand,
improbable saga was poured into The Three Burials
of Lotty Kneen, the memoir Krissy wrote in the year
that followed.
It startles me still to read that book’s final act:
my invitation materializing, beacon-like, as if sum-
Cairo, 2017 moned by sheer force of wanting; a real-world plot
twist. How to explain the riotous luck of it all? The
lost diplomatic passports, for instance, that delayed
my departure to Egypt for an extra week – the week
I bought An Uncertain Grace. Or the email I received
from my literary agent, Jane, in the days after I sent
my one-and-only fan letter, introducing me to a
fellow client – a certain Krissy Kneen – who was
considering a last-minute trip to Cairo on the
strength of some somnambulant invitation from an
unknown Aussie expat. Might I accompany Krissy,
Jane asked, to make sure this wasn’t some kind of
Kathy Bates Misery situation?
It is easy to turn it all into a destiny-riven fairy
“
tale; that’s what memoir is, the literary collision of
memory and myth. Although what is extraordinary
to me is not the kismet of my offer, but Krissy’s
It is easy to emphatic assent. It’s the quality that animates their
turn it all into fiction, its wild receptivity. A quality Krissy learnt
– or perhaps salvaged – from those lonely days at
a destiny-riven Dragonhall.
fairy tale; Before Krissy learnt of the Aleksandrinke, and all
that’s what they relinquished, Lotty’s story was largely confined
to that empty theme park and its repressed trau-
memoir is, mas; it was a story Krissy survived. The story Krissy
the literary tells now is one of the world-shaping muscle of
women’s work, and of intergenerational resilience.
collision of It’s an inheritance Krissy is passing on to other
memory and children of the Aleksandrinke. That I can revisit the
myth birth of that story on the page is a quiet marvel to
me. When I read The Three Burials of Lotty Kneen,
my memory and Krissy’s memoir seem to play out
in tandem. I’m reminded of the futuristic bodysuit
in the novel that brought us together.
But if I’m honest, I only picked-up An Uncertain
Grace because of the cover: a gauzy jellyfish in a
dreamless cobalt sea. After dark, the Nile teems
with party boats: flat-decked, neon-draped motor-
© DAVID DEGNER/GETTY IMAGES
boats that blast shaabi music across the water.
The night I began Krissy’s book, the reflected glow
of the boats pulsed across the hotel ceiling and
the room felt like it was underwater. So did I. Egypt
was my third country of residence in two years;
Cairo, my thirtieth move. Much later, when that
Beejay Silcox is an well-storied city felt like a kind of home, I would
Australian writer and learn that the Arabic for jellyfish is qandeel al-bahr,
critic lantern of the sea. n
APRIL 8, 2022
 AFTERTHOUGHTS

Plain speaking
IRINA DUMITRESCU One fear is that by writing simply, we will come
across as simple – with all that word’s disparaging
associations with disability and low class. When a
“it could be argued”, making their claims too slip-
pery to pin down.
I think of this as “fortress” writing. It is impenetra-
ble. No critic can storm it, but no reader can enjoy
it either. Universities train their students to write like
this: not to teach, persuade or delight, but to resist
attack. The best argument is not necessarily the most

W
HY IS IT SO HARD TO WRITE CLEARLY?
I have had many opportunities to ask
myself this question lately. Over the past
few months I’ve been taking a class on the basics of
feature stories. Our teacher is a seasoned journalist
who insists that we learn how to edit our own prose
ruthlessly. (If he saw this paragraph, he would cut
“seasoned” – a cliché – as well as all the words ending
with -ly.)
What strikes me as I watch him work is his low
tolerance for jargon. I thought I knew what jargon
was: words such as “discourse”, “deconstruct” and
“problematize”. These are the cigarette-holders of
diction: showy, stretched out, more noxious than
they look. My teacher’s bar is much higher. If it’s
long and Latinate, it’s got to go.
I confess to having a soft spot for ten-dollar words.
Anyway, it’s easier to avoid jargon than it is to pare
down knotty turns of phrase. I once believed that
burdening a sentence with adverbs and circumlocu-
tions was a disease that only afflicted scholars. It
turns out that many writers do it, whether or not
they work in a university. It is as though we are
dancing around – and away from – what we mean
to say.
One might assume that people write difficult
prose because they don’t know any better. But it is
not enough to learn the principles of clear writing.
A writer can memorize Strunk and White’s The Ele-
ments of Style and still find herself using “the way
in which” instead of “how”. It is not ignorance that
makes writing convoluted. It is fear.
chorus of pundits insists that modern life is com-
plex, simplicity starts to seem old-fashioned. Once
we spoke of love; now we might talk about attach-
ment and co-dependency. Fear has transformed
into anxiety. The old words seem too plain to serve.
This prejudice is wrong. One of the fascinating
things I noticed when I was first learning to read
medieval languages was that poets tended to repeat
vocabulary. Instead of using varied terms for differ-
ent aspects of an emotion or an idea, they used
the same word over and over again. They did this
because the words were often richer in meaning.
Take Old English “mod”, the root of our word
“mood”. It was used for the mind, the emotions, the
spirit, as well as for certain qualities to be found in
a person, such as courage, pride or magnificence.
Or consider Middle High German “minne”, which
is often translated as “courtly love”. “Minne” could
also mean friendship, parental love, commemora-
tion and sex. The medieval poet repeated simple
words in order to reveal their layered senses.
Today’s translator must consider each word in
context and decide on the best modern equivalent.
This can mean rendering one medieval word in five
different ways on the same page.
But I think there is another, deeper fear that keeps
so many writers tied to their obscurities: the terror
that someone might understand what they are trying
to say. Many writers assume a defensive posture
when they sit down to their computers. They are
afraid of being taken to task for their beliefs, argu-
ments or point of view. So they slip in “perhaps” and
innovative or profound, but the one with the fewest
holes in it.
The alternative to the fortress is, to my mind, the
garden. “Garden” writing is inviting, colourful and
open to crowds. It allows each reader to find their
own way through a poem or an essay, crafting their
own meaning as they go. Gardens are also vulner-
able. They change with time. The guests might pluck
the roses or stomp on the flowerbeds. Someone
might be allergic to pollen. To write clear, welcom-
ing language is to open yourself up to complaints.
And yet there is nothing as powerful as plain lan-
guage, as this well-known Middle English religious
lyric shows:
Nou goth sonne vnder wod,
Me reweth, Marie, thi faire rode.
Nou goth sonne vnder tre,
Me reweth, Marie, thy sone and the.
The first line describes the sun’s rays slipping
behind the woods. But the poem’s early Christian
audience would have known that “wod” and “tre”
could also refer to the Cross. Perhaps we are not
looking at a forest, but at the sun reddening behind
Calvary, highlighting the crosses as it descends.
The speaker pities Mary’s beautiful blushing face, or
“rode”, as well as the Rood, lovely in its promise of
salvation despite being an instrument of torture.
Above all, the repetition of “sonne” – a sun, a son
Irina Dumitrescu and soon – would have recalled the sunrise, or
teaches medieval resurrection, to come. This quatrain was not written
literature at the to impress or deflect, but to invite its readers to medi-
University of Bonn tate with language both humble and rich. n

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 TLS CROSSWORD 1421 BY PRAXITELES

9 10
ACROSS
1 Man goes finally to place near Dumfries with daffodils rather than gladioli primarily; she wanted
flowers after all (3, 8)
11 12 7 This training programme is from France (3)
9 Take the last thing in leather about woven cord and what do you get? (4, 5)
13 10 Author with ego destroyed about the end of Fathers and Sons (5)
11 Name taken by Stephen’s daughter with ladies backing origin of fiction (5)
14 15 12 One of 16 11’s characters is signalled initially in her Miss Durrant (8)
14 Here’s a place in French author’s ship to rent (14)
16 17 As Pluto might be described in a screwball comedy (3, 1, 5, 5)
21 Complain about Spain’s intolerable civil assault primarily, this did (8)
17 18 19 23 Fast, nothing! Slowly, more likely! (5)
25 Miss Mitchison finally, one old bird that’s suffered a reverse (5)
20 26 Performing all together, including discordant cornet (2,7)
27 Yggdrasil, say, Norse god’s height (3)
21 22 23 28 American composer shelters Stones not wanted here (11)

24 DOWN
1 Native American doctor, a surgeon in M.A.S.H., lacking attention (6)
25 26 2 Encompasses R.U.R. rewritten in popular music (9)
3 “The — subdu’d Or Captive drag’d in Chains” (Paradise Lost) (4-3)
4 Author’s setback for Lively, being without covers (4)
5 New game’s clever, but it’s not done like this (10)
27 28 6 Fermented products made from game put up in Mongolian tents (7)
7 Letters coming in chains? (5)
8 For recreation we have this on vacation; that’s novel (3, 5)
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M E E U O S I R I S 15 One’s about to defame Huxley’s people perhaps (9)
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L A E L D O R A D O
I C A N E T C
Iain and Grace Macniven, of In 18 Norwegian composer celebrating daffodils rather than gladioli primarily (7)
P A R T Y G O I N G B A C K 19 Golden state, Ohio, or a city elsewhere (7)
E E E A U P A The sender of the first correct 20 Ascot races around about the end of June – scorer wanted (6)
R O N D I N O Y E A R E N D solution opened on April 29, 2022, 22 Product of fir tree growing up hard in Arden (5)
F O T T R O E will receive a cash prize of £40. 24 Greek shepherd is following a colt (4)
O H M S O T H E R W O R L D Entries should be addressed to TLS
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APRIL 8, 2022 TLS 27

 NB
Journal ease
N ews from Ireland: according to
the critic Sarah Lonsdale,
writing in the Sunday Independent
last week, the country is now
enjoying a resurgence of interest
in the “little magazine”. Several
decades after the age of Seán Ó
Faoláin’s journal The Bell, Seamas
O’Sullivan’s Dublin Magazine and
other noteworthy publications,
Ireland may boast once more of a
literary culture in “rude health”,
thanks to established journals such
as the Stinging Fly and the Dublin
Review – but also thanks to some
recent additions to the scene.
While making similar claims for
being cutting-edge, breaking-down-
boundaries types, these newer
magazines are also making promis-
ing noises about their regional
emphasis – Donegal, for example,
in the case of the Pig’s Back, and
Cork in the case of the Four-Faced
Liar. One of the Waterford-based
editors of the Waxed Lemon (none
of these titles is a belated April
Fool’s gag) tells Lonsdale that, for
a young Irish writer of the 1990s,
leaving the country might have
seemed to be the best course of
action; his own patch of it seems
now to be “more connected” than
it was, and “more accessible”.
This isn’t the first time in recent
years that the existence of such
favourable conditions for new Irish
Brilliant books
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28
writing has been pointed out. Only
last year the Irish Independent, the
Sunday Independent’s sister paper,
ran an essay in a similar spirit, cele-
brating the native little magazine.
The demand was easily explained.
“Irish people quote poetry”, an
editor of the Stinging Fly reasoned.
“You can be standing in a pub in
Ireland, and someone will spout a
familiar Yeats or Shaw quote; it’s
not like that in other countries.”
The Irish Times had, by then,
already described the “literary
magazine scene” as “thriving” in
2018. “There are”, said Brendan
Barrington of the Dublin Review,
“more well-established Irish jour-
nals now than at any time since we
started in 2000... It’s encouraging
to see that new journals generally
seem to be hanging on, rather than
fading away after an issue or two.”
Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,
of course. Scepticism puts in its
customary word of caution about
accepting any such claims without
the standard-issue pinch of salt.
The Waxed Lemon has only pub-
lished three issues as yet. And the
first issue of the Four-Faced Liar
won’t be publi shed until the
autumn, you know. Still, the profu-
sive praise may make readers in
England wonder if comparable
claims may be made here any time
soon – and if not, why not.
Our own contribution, for now,
is merely to confess to having taken
some pleasure in the magazines
that have found their way to us,
from various quarters, in recent
times. These include the glossy
Morocco Bound Review (which
operates out of a bookshop of the
same name in south-east London),
the less glossy Exacting Clam (in
the second issue of which Christo-
pher Boucher’s story “The Literary
Reading” has the narrator realize
t h a t e ve r y b o dy a ro u n d h i m ,
attending a reading in a bookshop,
is probably an author, and that the
disease may be catching; “I went
home and took a long, hot
shower”), the impeccably designed
Noon (which presses, as ever, on a
single whimsical note, but it’s still
a pretty good note to be able to
play) and the 246th issue of Ambit
(which is the last for its fiction
editor Kate Pemberton, who first
became involved with the maga-
zine as an intern in 1996).
Lastly, there is the welcome
return of Archipelago – the pick of
the bunch. Some readers will recall
that this is a literary magazine of
which twelve issues appeared
between 2007 and 2019 (readers
who don’t recall: see this column,
November 12, 2021). Those twelve
issues were edited by Andrew
McNeillie, with a weather eye kept,
at all times, on this “unnameable
archipelago”, this “constellation of
islands on the Eastern Atlantic
coast”, even if the magazine’s
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vision was always, it was claimed,
“by implication”, “global”. Now
Archipelago has returned; Mr
McNeillie had considered launch-
ing afresh under the title thirteen,
with a nod to the ominous Orwel-
lian hour that seems to have come
round once more. We are “well
past the eleventh hour for nature”,
apart from anything else. The
s e c o n d s e r i e s o f A rch i p el ago
absorbs this troubling notion while
also picking up where the first left
off. Issue 2.1 (£15) includes verse by
Michael Longley and Kate Bingham
(“Here comes spring, too soon for
its own good”) and prose by Kirsty
Gunn and David Wheatley, among
others. Apply to the Clutag Press
(PO Box 154, Thame OX9 3RQ) for
permission to come aboard.
S ome TLS readers will no doubt
be anxious to learn more about
concrete poetry after reading last
week’s review, by Jeremy Noel-Tod,
of Nancy Perloff ’s Concrete Poetry:
A 21st-century anthology, as well
as a little more on the subject of
concrete poetry in the TLS during
the 1960s in a letter to the editor
published this week (on page 6).
Behold: here we quote a couple of
“lines” from a concrete poem by
the Brazilian Déc io P ignat ari
(1927–2012). It was published in the
TLS in the issue of September 3,
1964, amid other works from the
concrete poets of the same coun-
try, translated by the redoubtable
Edwin Morgan. Those other poems
from Brazil are also worth a look.
Using only a few dates and the
word “goal”, “Brazilian ‘Football’”
by Augusto de Campos laconically
acknowledges that same year’s
coup d’état. “Descartes à Rebours”
by José Paulo Paes spreads the
words “cogito / ergo / boom” over
a pointedly wide area.
The “lexical key” to Pignatari’s
contribution, meanwhile, reveals
that the black circle stands for the
footballer Pelé, the diamond for
“the country in the amplified
family (with television set)” and
the rectangle for “at the end all
is right”. “The symbols by them-
selves”, as you will have spotted at
once, “compose an allusion to the
Brazilian Flag.” Attempt to trans-
late the playful Pignatari out of his
concrete form if you dare.
C orrespondence. From Glasgow
Alastair Sutherland writes to
express his pleasure at our refer-
ence to the Lobster Pot in Black-
ness (March 18) – the pub that is
running its own poetry competi-
tion – “but more elderly topers
might shrink from walking 19 miles
from Edinburgh” to Blackness, as
we overzealously suggested. A
more “leisurely” alternative would
to be travel to Linlithgow, “with its
excellent High Street bookshop”,
before walking the five miles
from there to Blackness. There is
also a bus.
Regarding the subject of how
people go about mentally mapping
the world (March 25), Nicholas
Cranfield of Blackheath has noticed
that, at present, the Post Office
publishes a colour-coded map that
assigns all of Turkey (not just the
Balkan portion), the Russian Feder-
ation and Greenland to Europe. “Is
this an undisclosed long-term
objective of HM Government?”
M. C.
© The Times Literary Supplement Limited, 2022.
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APRIL 8, 2022