The Times Literary Supplement Jan 01, 2010 No 5570

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Patrick Carnegy Opera for costermongers James L. Rice Dostoevsky's unwritten sequel Joanne Parker King Alfred, war and spin James M. Murphy An American samizdat JANUARY 1 2010 No 5570

www.the-tIs.co.uk

THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

We like it here! Ferdinand Mount

UK £2.70 USA $5.75

ILS

MUSIC & SOCIAL STUDIES

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Patrick Carnegy Ferdinand Mount

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

Utopian labours, Finnegans Wake, RNA, etc

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

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BIOGRAPHY

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James M. Murphy Peter Fawcett Catriona Kelly

D. D. Guttenplan American Radical - The life and times of I. F. Stone Dominique Fernandez Ramon Mary-Kay Wilmers The Eitingons - A twentieth-century story

POEMS

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Kit Wright Anthony Thwaite

Beak At a Loss

HISTORY

10 Vladimir Tismaneanu Tim Kirk Nicholas Birch

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he suburbs, to the smart and fashionable a byword for boredom, smugness and small minds, are where a surprising four out of five of us live - and where most of the others would like to live, according to Ferdinand Mount, who reviews an "enchanting and persuasive" pictorial essay. From Tudor times to Dunroamin and Mon Repos, from Bedford Park to Milton Keynes, the 'burbs, "far from being sunk in unenquiring apathy, are in constant flux"; and offer a model of "positive planning" for a crowded future. Emma Cons and Lilian Baylis (below) had a dream of opera for everybody - suburbdwellers presumably included - and English National Opera was born. Nearly 130 years later, Patrick Carnegy writes, it has survived "innovative" directors, financial deficits, government funding cuts and Arts Council initiatives to present "opera as theatre in the vernacular" to audiences as varied as those envisaged by its founders.

John A. C. Greppin

13 Stephen Mulhall

Genevieve L10yd Providence Lost

COMMENTARY

14 James L. Rice

Dostoevsky's endgame - ' Astounding' rumours about the fate of the characters in the sequel to The Brothers Karamazov - which was never written Freelance TLS January 4, 1947 - Enter Becky Sharp

August Kleinzahler Then and Now ARTS

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Patrick McCaughey

Lucy Dallas

FICTION

19 Joanne Parker Toby Lichtig Tadzio Martin Koelb Mark Kamine Jess Chandler

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Ruth Morse Lucy Scholes Graeme Richardson

LITERATURE

24 Ad Putter Francis Robinson

AJ

Marta Petreu Diavolul ｾｩ＠ Ucenicul sau - Nae lonescu - Mihail Sebastian Guy Waiters Hunting Evil - The Nazi war criminals who escaped and the hunt to bring them to justice Christopher de Bellaigue Rebel Land - Among Turkey's forgotten peoples The Armenian Gospel of the Infancy - With three early versions of the Protoevangelium of James ; Translated by Abraham Terian

PHILOSOPHY

REFERENCE BOOKS & LITERARY CRITICISM

Not opera for all but socialism for all was the dream of I. F. Stone (born Isadore Feinstein). From radical left-wing beginnings, Stone " lived long enough and wrote independently enough", says James M. Murphy in his review of a biography by his fellow- TLS contributor D. D. Guttenplan, to become "something of an institution" and "America's most improbable celebrity journalist" . Stone gave the Kremlin "the benefit of the doubt" over the show trials and purges of the 1930s which would have delighted Leonid Eitingon, an "NKVD stooge", one of Stalin 's most trusted hit men, and one of the principal characters in a study of her colourful ancestors by Mary-Kay Wilmers, the Editor of the London Review of Books. Catriona Kelly enjoys some "appealingly dry" observations. The poet August Kleinzahler, in his first Freelance column, enjoys a Chinese Christmas lunch. For those contemplating their new year resolutions, the state of the economy, or simply how to avoid robertsmen and sneck-drawers, the Middle English poem Speculum Vitae , 16,000-plus lines of " morally edifying" matter, should prove helpful ; Ad Putter welcomes a medal-worthy new edition.

Susie Gilbert Opera for Everybody - The story of English National Opera Paul Barker The Freedoms of Suburbia

Bauhaus 1919- 1933 - Workshops for modernity (Museum of Modern Art, New York). Barry Bergdoll and Leah Dickerman Bauhaus 1919-1933 - Workshops for modernity Mike Evans, editor The Beatles: Paperback Writer - 40 years of classic writing Beatles to Bowie - The 60s exposed (National Portrait Gallery) Bernard Corn well The Burning Land Antal Szerb Journey by Moonlight; Translated by Len Rix Herta Miiller The Passport; Translated by Martin Chalmers Jonathan Lethem Chronic City Su Tong The Boat to Redemption ; Translated by Howard Goldblatt Barry Forshaw, editor British Crime Writing - An encyclopedia Herschel Farbman The Other Night - Dreaming, writing, and restlessness in twentieth-century literature Joshua Weiner, editor At the Barriers - On the poetry of Thorn Gunn Stefania Michelucci The Poetry of Thorn Gunn - A critical study Thom Gunn Selected Poems; Edited by August Kleinzahler Ralph Hanna, editor Speculum Vitae - A reading text Ghalib Lakhnavi and Abdullah Bilgrami The Adventures of Amir Hamza - Lord of the Auspicious Planetary Conjunction ; Translated by Musharraf Farooqi

IN BRIEF

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NATURAL SCIENCE

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Jennie Erin Smith

J. F. M. Clark Bugs and the Victorians Peter Milward, SJ The Secret Life of Insects - An entomological alphabet

MEMOIRS

3U

Solka ZinovielI

Emma Tennant Waiting for Princess Margaret

NB

Declan J. Foley, editor The Only Art of Jack B. Yeats - Letters and essays. R. S. Thomas Letters to Raymond Garlick: 1951- 1999 Napoleon Bonaparte Clisson and Eugenie: A Love Story; Translated by Peter Hicks. Tim Burrows From CBGB to the Roundhouse - Music venues through the years. Louis A. DiMarco War Horse - A history of the military horse and rider. Vita SackviIle-West Twelve Days in Persia Byron Rogers Me - The authorised biography. Clive James The Blaze of Obscurity - The TV years

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This week's contributors, Crossword

32 J. C.

The death of Tolstoy, Fugitive Eliot, Facebook unfriended by Lear

Cover picture: "The next move and take a season ticket", a London Underground poster by Hendy, 1927 ; from the exhibition Suburbia at the London Transport Museum until March 31, 2010 ©TfI from the London Transport Museum collection; p2 © Lehrecht Music & Arts; p3 © Boris Grdanoski/AP; p4 © Donald Cooper/Photostage; pS © Philippa Lewis/Edifice; p7 © Diana Walkerffime & Life Pictures/Gelty Images; p8 © Henri Martinie/Roger-Violletffopfoto; plO © Guy Waiters; pl2 © Ed Ka shi/Corbis; pl3 © AKG; pl4 © Kobal Coliection; pl7 © MaMA, N.Y; pl9 © Laing Art GalieryfTyne and Wear archives and museum s; p23 © Charles Hopkinson/Camera Press; p24 © Kharbine-Tapabor/Boistesselinffhe Art Archive; p25 © Bodleian Library Oxfordffhe Art Archive. The Times Literary Supplement (ISSN 0307661 , USPS 021-626) is published weekly by The Times Literary Supplement Limited, London UK, and distributed in the USA by OCS America Inc, 49-27 31st Street, Long Island City, NYIII01-3113. Periodical postage paid at Long Island City NY and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: please send address corrections to TLS, PO Box 3000, Denvilie, NJ 07834, USA

TLS JANUARY I 2010

MUSIC & SOCIAL STUDIES

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Blood on the carpet How English National Opera, established to bring 'wholesome amusement' to the people, has survived revolutionary directors and Arts Council policing ondon's English National Opera has been in existence in one guise or another for nearly 130 years. Its story, by and large, is that of operatic life in England since the Victorian era. Jeremy Sams, witty translator for today's ENO, once said that opera appealed to the British precisely because it was foreign and sexy. Don't spoil the musical magic and the frocks by compelling us to pay attention to the words: let's just join Or Johnson and revel in the "exotic and irrational entertainment". But that has never been the way with ENO. From Emma Cons and Lilian Baylis's idealistic dream in the 1890s of providing "opera for everybody" down to the business-model ENO of today, the idea has always been that opera is living drama, intensified by music, and that unless you get the words you're not getting it at all. This, as Susie Gilbert explains in her impressive chronicle, was important to the indomitable founding ladies. Cons and her niece Baylis were missionaries, with equal commitments to art, religion and social reform. They believed that the diversions of the wealthy should be stripped of their foreign mystique and opened up to all as recreation that would get people to examine and improve their lives. "Wholesome amusement" , wrote a campaigning journalist in 1861, would lift costermongers out of "the moral mire". For the first sixty years of ENO's life, Shakespeare, dance and lectures were equal partners with opera. The much-loved Old Vic theatre, just south of Waterloo, close to the tenements of Victorian London's workers (and now run with his own brand of idealism by Kevin Spacey) became the company's first home. Finance came from public appeals and from the private purse of Cons, until her death in 1912, and thereafter from Baylis. Wages and backstage conditions were abysmal, ticket prices kept as low as could be. The quality of performance was doubtless variable. Baylis asked little more of performers than that they stand and deliver. When the first combined Shakespeare/opera season was run in 1914-15, it was the greater popularity of Carmen , Lohengrin and Don Giovanni that paid for the plays. After the war there was a fresh momentum, with the Old Vic putting on all thirty-six of Shakespeare' s First Folio plays hetween 1920 and 1923. Raylis strengthened her hand by bringing in the conductor Lawrance Collingwood, Professor E. J. Dent from Cambridge to advise on opera repertory, and the baritone Clive Carey to enliven stage presentation. The derelict Sadler's Wells theatre in Finsbury, north of the Thames, was refurbished to become the home of the operatic part of the Baylis enterprise. Through the 1920s the "poorer classes" were gradually supplanted, so that in 1932 the Radio Times could report a knowledgeable audience of teachers, students and enthusiasts, "scores under their arms, waving their coffee

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PATRICK CARNEGY Susie Gilbert OPERA FOR EVERYBODY The story of English National Opera 703pp. Faber. £25. 9780 57l 224937 cups and arguing about the performance" . The Vic-Wells's great reformer of the 1930s, Tyrone Guthrie, kicked against Baylis' s faith in art as social engineering, insisting that theatrical professionalism was what counted. He disliked the still prevalent Victorian notion of the proscenium stage as framing an illusory other world. Following William Poel's antilrving initiative of the 1890s, he returned to the naked actualite of the Elizabethan stage while at the same time opening up a new world with his modern-dress Hamlet of 1937. Unable to go so far with opera, which he never saw as part of the "native cultural tradition" , he believed that the answer was always to direct it as living drama, just like a play, and not to allow it to become a concert in costume.

Dent' s mission was the opening up of German, Italian, French and Russian opera by performing it in translations that he himself supplied. Guthrie' s suggestion that Rudolf Bing might run the Wells was swiftly scotched on the urging of Dent who, for all his Continental leanings, had a deplorable anti-Semitic streak and was seriously worried by the prospect of German Jews taking over opera in Britain. Baylis's original aims seem to have come closest to fulfilment during the Second World War, after her death in 1937. There were no performances at Sadler' s Wells after September 1940, but public subsidy was granted for the first time in 1941. Guthrie managed to get no fewer than five Vic-Wells opera and ballet companies out on tour, typically with a tiny cast and "orchestra" of five, visiting small mill towns in Lancashire and Yorkshire. Well-attended children's matinees were given in Wigan, but hardly anyone turned up for The Barber of Seville in the Black Country's Dudley because, says Gilbert, "they were saving up for the Christmas pantomime". The story of how Sadler's Wells separated

27.12.09 Skopje, Macedonia The complex history of Macedonia includes a period as a Roman province, from the second century BC. This Roman bronze figurine, on show at the Museum of Macedonia, is one of 10,000 pieces in an annual exhibition dedicated to archaeological discoveries in the Republic. The show has a political

as well as artistic purpose for a country whose name is the subject of a long-running dispute with Greece. The Macedonian Prime Minister, Nikola Gruevski, declared pointedly at the opening that "Traces left by past civilizations are the only witness of our past and an inseparable part of our existence".

TLS JANUARY I 2010

itself from the Old Vic and thrived at Rosebery A venue after the war under the inspirational direction of, first, Norman Tucker and then Stephen Arlen is well, if perhaps too cursorily, told. Gilbert is always aware of the wider context in which the growth of opera and ballet at Sadler's Wells and Covent Garden was dependent on burgeoning public subsidy. Inevitably, demand kept well ahead of the available funding, Norman Tucker making sure that Sadler's Wells stayed in the red in order to suck as much as possible from the Treasury (where he once worked). The Arts Council, created by Maynard Keynes in 1945, was supposed to bring a degree of discipline to state patronage and to some extent it succeeded in this aim. The tentative claims of the "native cultural tradition" had received an enormous boost with the arrival of Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes at Sadler's Wells in June 1945. On this foundation, the 1950s and 60s were to become glory days for Sadler's Wells. Tucker pressed on with opera as "radical theatre" by bringing in Michel St-Denis, George Devine and Glen Byam Shaw from the Old Vic. Katya Kabanova with Amy Shuard, introduced to the company and conducted by Charles Mackerras in 1951, was a revelation to most critics (though not to the unimpressed Ernest Newman), but sold few seats. Tucker nevertheless persisted with Janacek, over time winning the public round so that the introduction of his operas became one of the company's most impressive achievements. I had my own first experience of live opera in 1959 when I bicycled the twelve miles from Rugby to see the Wells on tour at the Coventry Hippodrome. I still vividly recall the thrill of the violin figurations in the overture to Tannhiiuser heard from a seat very near the front, and then Ronald Dowd in the title role in Anthony Besch's traditional pictorial staging - quaintly described by Gilbert as "tactful". The conductor was Colin Davis, whom I was lucky enough to meet afterwards in the theatre bar. He said he was meant to be rehearsing Oedipus Rex during the mornings but had unfortunately forgotten his score. So the next day I biked over again, taking my own score for him to borrow and catching Rossini's Cinderella in the evening. Davis was touched and grateful, posting it hack to me some days later with a nice note. With hindsight I can't believe that the company wouldn't have themselves conjured up a score, but the ruffled pages of my copy suggested that it may well have served its turn for him on the podium. So Sadler' s Wells became for myself and thousands of others a gateway into opera, at affordable prices whether on tour or back in Rosebery Avenue. Michel St Denis's stunning production of Oedipus Rex opened the following year. Such repertory did not always go down well outside London. A

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MUSIC & SOCIAL STUDIES

Brigadier Hargreaves complained, "Why do we have to fill up the touring rep with things like Odious Rex and the Mackerras Case?" . I returned again and again for fine performances of the classic repertory and to be stretched by less familiar fare: Mahagonny, Attila, The Makropulos Case, From The House of the Dead and exciting works given by the New Opera Company, among them Henze's Boulevard Solitude, Szymanowski's King Roger and Shostakovich 's The Nose. This education culminated in the Reginald Goodall's Mastersingers in 1968, which I must have seen three or four times. It was a watershed in the fortunes of the Wells (1,499 seats), precipitating its move to the very much larger Coliseum (2 ,354 seats), where Wagner and the grander works of Verdi were going to sound so much better. Inevitably, this brought to a head the longSarah Tynan as Papagena in Nicholas Hytner's English National Opera production ofMozart's The Magic Flute, conducted by standing tension between the Wells and Nicholas Kraemer; London Coliseum, March 2004 Covent Garden, the latter now under threat because of the proximity of the two theatres. breaker's yard), Hansel and Crete!, Queen of Edwards became music director, there was a who' d directed festivals (Belfast and Perth) Gilbert unravels the tortuous story of how Spades and Lady Macbeth of Mtsenk. It was huge financial deficit. However nominally but had no experience of running an opera that tension was managed, and of the political farewell , meanwhile, to the old-style natural- appealing the idea of a "people's opera company. It was on his watch that the newly pressures to rehouse the company in a ism of ENO stalwarts John Copley and Colin house" may have been to Tony Blair's first established Lottery Fund came to the rescue, purpose-built theatre far away on the South Graham. Elder raised the lacklustre standard Culture Secretary, Chris Smith, the govern- enabling the Coliseum to reopen in February Bank. While the company remained at of the orchestra by replacing many of its ment couldn't bear the cost of funding it. 2004 at a cost of £41 million, of which £23m Sadler's Wells it was relatively easy for players. He and Pountney campaigned Smith revived the notion that Covent Garden came from the Lottery and £ 18m from pripeople to accept it as the London equivalent against opera as "a Fortnum and Mason should become a "hosting house" for perform- vate donations. Doran 's tenure, however, of Paris's Opera Comique and Berlin ' s window", insisting it should have a "healthy ances by the opera and ballet companies of was far from happy. His departure in 2005 Komische Oper, giving medium-scale works vulgarity and terrifically wide range of both the Royal Opera and ENO as "equal part- proved no less controversial than his arrival in the vernacular with British and Common- appeal". The bracing interrogation of the ners". Was he surprised when Richard Eyre's had been when, without advertising the posts, wealth singers, while Covent Garden did the Pountney and Alden productions (by no subsequent report, which he had commis- the Board replaced him with the twosome of grand stuff in its original language with inter- means always as popular as they hoped) was sioned, forthrightly rejected any such drastic Loretta Tomasi , former finance director, as national casts. The move to the Coliseum balanced with gentler but no less potent trans- reduction of ballet and opera provision in chief executive, and John Berry, formerly in compelled both companies to re-evaluate formations from Jonathan Miller (a Mafioso the capital? There was yet more government charge of planning, as artistic director. Since themselves, though the greater burden fell on Rigoletto, 1982, and a Savoy Hotel romp of a pressure to curb ENO's activities and move it then, and with Edward Gardner as music English National Opera (as the company Mikado , 1986) and Nicholas Hytner (Xerxes, to a smaller theatre away from the West End. director from 2007, things appear to have became in 1974). Its singers had to learn to 1985, The Magic Flute, 1988) which have Marks fought as well as he could, but retired steadily improved. Against all odds, both Covent Garden and ENO have managed to from the field in September 1997. make themselves heard in the largest theatre lasted to this day. Gilbert reveals that Pountney ' s confrontaNext into battle arrived the well-armed rebuild their beautiful theatres to near univerin the West End, and there was a loss of intitions with the "audience's susceptibilities" Nicholas Payne and the conductor Paul sal acclaim, however much blood may have macy for the medium-sized repertory. ENO's strategy under, first, Stephen Arlen were not always to the liking of his generally Daniel , who rallied the audience against the been spilt on their backstage carpets. Gilbert has a distinguished track record as (until 1972), then Lord Harewood (until supportive boss, Lord Harewood, concerned threat of possible closure with post-perform1985) and Peter Jonas (until 1993), was to as he had to be about the mounting cost of ance speeches from the stage. Winning a an archival researcher (working on her play to its strength of presenting opera as the revolutionary programming. Sharing his reprieve, Daniel proved a strong music direc- former husband 's biography of Winston theatre in the vernacular, winning laughter in concerns was the Arts Council, now under tor, though Payne's own quietly sage taste in Churchill) and her long book is meticulously comedies and visceral shocks in the more Thatcher's axe man, William Rees-Mogg, adventurous theatre (bringing in David documented. She has read every minute of violent works. In this there was an embodied which raised a very old and silly spectre of McVicar for Alcina and The Rape of Lucre- every management meeting and questioned censure of the Covent Garden audience's ENO and the Royal Opera sharing a single tia) deserted him when he hired the Spanish many living actors in the drama, though by taste for sumptuous undemanding entertain- theatre. (This was the critical moment when director Calixto Bieito for despoliations of no means all she should have. She gives a fair ment. ENO's provocative stagings were an the Arts Council swung from being the Don Ciovanni and A Masked Ball. It must picture of ENO's development and the probimplicit condemnation of the operatic taste defender of the publically funded theatres to have been hard for Payne to accept that the lems that have bedevilled it, much of it diffiof the wealthy in much the same way as the taking on the role of stern policeman.) Peter big successes on his watch were revivals cult to unscramble. The down side, unfortuseverely abstract Bolshevik stagings of Jonas, taking over from Harewood in 1985, from previous eras - Hytner's Xerxes and nately, is that the 700 pages are not an easy 1917-23 had been of the imperialist aesthetic was more in tune with the goals of what Magic Flute , and Miller's Mikado and Rigo- read. Too many of them are written in the lanof Tsarist Russia. Harewood wanted operas became known as the "Powerhouse" artistic letto. The deep trouble was that Pay ne, who'd guage of a judicious civil servant, concerned to be "made real in terms of contemporary directorate at ENO. At this time of great been forging ahead with the restoration of the lest any crucial fact be left out, although as it anxieties, taboos and shibboleths". So in financial pressure, Jonas had the courage to theatre, didn't get on with the investment happens, many of these are omitted: the list came German directors Joachim Herz and deride Fortnum and Mason productions such banker Martin Smith, who had been chairman of first performances is skeletal, lacking the Harry Kupfer from the Komische Oper, and as Comte Ory and The Pearl Fishers, which since 2001. To wide dismay, Payne was names of conductors, producers, designers British and American directors such as David had somehow crept into his nest and were ousted by Smith in the summer of 2002. As and singers, the latter all too seldom given Pountney and David Alden, excited as they enjoying full houses. Tarred with the same Gilbert observes, this marked a sea change in their due. A chronology would have been brush was The Magic Flute which, Hytner the direction of the company when it passed helpful. The reportage of board meetings and were hy what they ' d seen on the Continent. This heralded an overdue awakening of said, "delighted audiences, but backstage this from artistically knowledgeable bosses to political and financial negotiations hangs heavily on the narrative. British opera-goers to the radical reappraisal was a badge of shame". In Power House managerial accountants. There followed a period of serious demoralIt is always hard to recreate theatrical perof performance that had been going on (1992), the retrospective book celebrating abroad since Meyerhold in Russia (from their adventures, Jonas, Pountney and Elder ization and compulsory job losses, to which formance on the page. Gilbert does her best 1909), Toscanini at La Scala (from 1923) and wrote of having happily driven "the Mer- the chorus responded by staging a protest by quoting from press reports as she inevitaKlemperer at the Berlin Kroll (1927- 31). cedes on the wrong side of the road, put a few outside the office of Gerry Robinson, now bly must, even honouring "The Critics" with Things took off with the arrival in the early dents in the body work and filled the boot the Arts Council's chairman. They sang an appendix of their own. But few of the 1980s of Mark Elder as music director and with muddy Wellington boots (not to men- the "Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves" from performances that I can personally recollect Pountney, whose seventeen productions were tion suitcases, trilbies, wonky bedsteads, Nabucco and "Defend Our Homes and across the past half-century spring to life. Children" from Khovanshchina. Robinson Gilbert must surely herself be a fan of ENO to include iconoclastic versions of Rusalka, dark glasses and other gnomic properties)". A heavy price was paid for the Power- described it as "the most beautiful protest" he and have seen many of their productions. It is Orpheus in the Underworld (designed by Gerald Scarfe, who put Margaret Thatcher on house revolution. By 1993, when Dennis had ever heard. heard. Smith eventually a shame that she couldn ' t have given us some stage as "Public Opinion"), Carmen (set in a Marks took over from Jonas, and Sian replaced Payne in 2003 with Sean Doran idea what she thought of them.

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SOCIAL STUDIES

Life on the edge of things he late J. G. Ballard was famous for FERDINAND MOUNT living in suburbia, Shepperton to be precise. He thought it odd that anyone Paul Barker should think thi s odd. The suburbs were, in THE FREEDOMS OF SUBURBIA his view, the logical subject for any writer 240pp. Frances Lincoln. £25. seeking to track shifts in culture, for the 9780711229785 important post-war cultural trends had started there. The 'burbs were where it was at; they were socially as well geographically edgy, to in a more formal academic fashion. The book is sumptuously illustrated, givuse the sort of language he wouldn't have used. ing us on every page a marvellous range of It is hard to think of a more unfashionable semis, bungalows, villas, prefabs, shacks, claim. To the intelligentsia, the suburbs were chalets and mobile homes in every imaginaand always have been the place where noth- ble style - classical, Tudor, Queen Anne, ing happens, or nothing good. While the fates Gothic, Arts and Crafts, even modernist. of the city and the countryside vex every Nine out of ten of these dwellings sprang bien-pensant breast, nobody pays much atten- from a collaboration between the speculative tion to the people who live in between, builder and the client, without the sniff of an except to finger them as the Enemy. Lewis architect. From about 1830 on, after John Mumford, in his heyday as the urban guru, Nash built the cottages ornes in Park Village declared that the flight to the suburbs "carries East, the architectural profession largely withno hope or promise of life at a higher level". drew from the suburbs to await orders from D. H. Lawrence wrote in Kangaroo of the grander clients, such as the Grosvenor Estate "utterly uninteresting" suburbs of Sydney and the London County Council. Thereafter (where he had been for all of a fortnight): architects built town halls and lunatic asythose myriads of bungalows offered " no lums and company headquarters. They did inner life, no high command, no interest in not accept and were rarely offered commisanything, finally". From Byron to Graham sions for HDunroamin" or "Mon Repos", not Greene and Cyril Connolly, the "leafy middle- least because most of them believed such class suburbs" have been denounced as abominations should have been strangled at smug, small-minded and spiritually derelict. birth. Build up, not out, they chorus. HighArchitects and planners made common rise equals civilized, a theme recently cause with novelists and poets to deplore the reprised in Richard Rogers 's paper "Towards relentless advance of the little boxes and the an Urban Renaissance", which, as Barker little people who lived in them. Clough points out, is a plea for London to become Williams Ellis and his wife Amabel Strachey more like Lord Rogers ' s native Florence. launched two famous polemics between the Barker, by contrast, speaks up for Nonwars: England and the Octopus (I 928) - the Plan against Plan, for Jane Jacobs against octopus being ribbon development - and Brit- Lewis Mumford, for higgledy-piggledy plotain and the Beast (1937) - the beast being the lands against streets in the sky, for the human bungalow. The latter was a volume of essays and the individual against the machine a written by, among others, Maynard Keynes, vivre. But he does so temperately and with Cyril Joad, G. M. Trevelyan and Patrick Aber- a generous eye. He reminds us that architects crombie, the great planner and preserver, and and planners can build desirable suburbs: endorsed by a blaze of luminaries - Lloyd Norman Shaw's Bedford Park, Raymond George, George Lansbury and Julian Huxley. Unwin's Hampstead Garden Suburb and Every sword in Bloomsbury leapt from its Letchworth Garden City. So can benevolent scabbard to fight against the development employers and landowners: the Cadburys at of Peacehaven on the cliffs above Brighton. Bournville, Lord Leverhulme at Port SunAnd they did indeed make sure that such a light, the Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpes in thing never happened again, for the Town Edgbaston. and Country Acts of 1947 introduced state Above all, there is Milton Keynes. Here in control of land use on a scale that even the flattish bit of Bucks, the planners have William the Conqueror might have thought created a remarkable city which has now excessive. grown almost to the size of Nottingham and Even today when four out of five of us live whose inhabitants still love it and call it MK, in the suburbs, they are little studied, let on the analogy of LA. One of MK's charms alone defended in print. The publisher's is that it contains a variety of building styles: blurb introduces The Freedoms of Suburbia , from Bovis' s reed-thatched black-and-white Paul Barker's enchanting and persuasive pic- executive homes at the top end to cheap modtorial essay, with a nervous defiance as if the ernist bungalows designed by the Norman book were proposing free heroin for toddlers. Foster partnership in its early days. The This is not a systematic history like F. M. town's enormous grid, studded with roundL. Thompson's Rise of Suburbia. Barker, a abouts, is also enlivened by the occasional former Editor of New Society and a prolific ancient village centre which has long been writer on architecture and planning, proceeds swallowed up: Woolston and Wolverton, ambulando. These are Suburban Rides, Woughton on the Green and Shenley Church which in a gentler style echo Cobbett' s suspi- End. cion of people who take pleasure in bossing Those villages have been suburbanized, other people about. By this seemingly just as Thomas More's Chelsea and Pope's oblique method, Barker manages to convince Twickenham and Keats 's Hampstead were the reader of several propositions which turned from delectable villages into London might have made little impact if presented suburbs, as highly prized in their new role as

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in their old. Suburban change is remorseless and unpredictable. Islington was once the home of London 's dairies, and the playing fields where Thomas Lord turned out as a bowler for White Conduit Cricket Club; then it was developed as a "walking suburb" for city clerks, then it slipped downhill into bedsitshire and has spent the past fifty years climbing back to gentility. When Eric Hobsbawm, a newly demobbed sergeant, moved into a flat in Gloucester Crescent, Cam den Town, just after the war, he thought of it as "the western outpost of the vast zone of London's bombed and yet ungentrified East End". To think of this epitome of metro chic, the home of Mark Boxer's Stringalongs, as part of the East End takes some stretching now, as much as regarding present-day fashionable Hoxton as an extension of the West End.

Hampstead Garden Suburb; from the book under review Far from being sunk in unenquiring apathy, the suburbs are in constant flux. Barker points out that H. G. Wells would scarcely have recognized a single building in the high street of his native Bromley. The old shopping parades of the 1930s have been eclipsed by the out-of-town hypermarkets. Colin Ward, the doyen of anarchist anti-planners, regards the unfinished, transitional nature of the suburbs as one of its great attractions for a child. There were secret places for solitude in the fields and copses that had ceased to be farmland and were not yet residential. This edge-of-things feeling is beautifully caught in Spies, Michael Frayn 's child's-eye novel. When asked to choose their preferred type of home, Britons always put the bungalow top, with the Manhattan-style loft and the tower block nowhere. The Bengali peasant hut, the banggolo, triumphs over the officially approved ziggurat. Anthony D. King, in his social history of the ultimate low-rise residence, declares that " in the first half of the twentieth century, the bungalow was the

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5 most revolutionary building type established in Britain" . It was the people' s choice, not designed, directed or even approved by the artistic establishment. Nor will it do to sneer at the suburbs as smug enclaves for the middle classes. There are working-class suburbs at Dagenham and Barking, as there are at the scruffier edges of most conurbations. There are plutocratic suburbs at St George's Hill and Wentworth and Winchmore Hill. Every morning a fleet of white vans swarms into the capital from the suburbs of Kent and Essex and Herts to minister to the plumbing, plastering and electrical needs of the bankers of Notting Hill and Chelsea. The suburbs themselves become workplaces, as back offices migrate to cheaper premises on the M2S , and Croydon becomes Edge City. Beyond the Green Belt, towns like Newbury become "ex urbs", the most desired places of all to live in, just as Lakeside and Bluewater are the most popular places to shop in. These malls are not to be put down as tawdry American imports, since they derive ultimately from the glassed-in galeries and gaUerie of Continental Europe - Thomas Jefferson was so impressed by the Palais-Royal that he wanted to copy it back home in Virginia. Barker begins his book by watching a tower block in Hackney being blown up. He ends it by reflecting that scarcely any semis have ever been demolished, except when they stood in the way of road-building schemes. The sourest critics eventually succumb. John Betjeman, after all, began as a modernist, but by 1940 had repented to become the laureate of the suburbs. Even Slough forgave him in the end. But the orthodoxy was strong. Stationed in the Middle East during the war, J. M. Richards wrote a homage to the suburbs, Castles on the Ground, but on his return to the Architectural Review he toed the modernist line. The planning laws in their present rigid state give rise to the only serious corruption in British politics: they enable landowners to capture enormous unearned profits; even in a time of prosperity such as we have just enjoyed, they cause crippling housing shortages. Above all, in an age when thousands of acres are no longer needed for agriculture, they prevent ordinary people from living where they would most like to live (and from fostering biodiversity in their back gardens). As the Treasury report on land supply pointed out in 2003, current policy is bringing about "an ever widening economic and social divide". Paul Barker does not press these lines of argument too far. He stresses that he is not proposing to "concrete over" the English countryside; he is as keen as anyone to protect the Lake District and the Yorkshire Dales. He argues only that "' positive' planning is hest done with the lightest of hands". He urges too a gentle bias towards preserving the streets as they are, for they are a city's memory bank. But none of these things should be achieved at the cost of preventing people living the life they wish to live. Planning either slows change down to a glacial pace, or it is swift and destructive, as we can see from the post-war history of Liverpool , Birmingham, Bradford and Hull, to name but a few great provincial cities that have had their hearts ripped out. Better to yield to the mild incursions of the suburbs, and to the preferences of the people.

6

Sud et Nord Sir, - A careful reader of my book Paris-New York et retour would have realized that my attribution of victory in the American Civil War to the South was the result of a proof-reading oversight, the words "du Nord sur le" after the word "victoire" and before the word "Sud" having been left out in the final printed text (Letters, December 11). Had Patrice Higonnet continued his quotation where he left off, he and your readers would have seen that the result of that victory was that " I'egalite des races s' accomplirait hardly the likely un jour" outcome of a Southern victory. Of greater consequence than the obvious misprinting of my text is Professor Higonnet' s notion that my attempt to argue against prevailing trends in art, trends which he himself regards as dubious, is " not helpful", or irrelevant. He seems to place himself squarely among the ranks of those whom Trotsky once aptly described as "the worshippers of the fait accompli". MARC FUMAROLl

Sir, - Felipe Fermindez-Armesto's review of Thomas More's " Utopia " in Early Modern Europe: Paratexts and context (December 4) misrepresents the aims and achievements of our book. He asserts that, despite the "enormous investment of effort" that went into the book, "readers should expect only modest returns" . Perhaps: our aims were indeed relatively modest. Yet we provide the first complete map of the translations and editions of Utopia up to 1643, offer transcriptions (with English translations) of all the prefatory materials of the translations, and uncover innumerable local stories of transmission , such as the association of the 1524 German translation with the Erasmian city of Basel, the trajectory of Lando's translation via Sansovino's Il Governo to the pirated French version of Gabriel Chappuys, and the interesting cluster of Latin, Dutch and French editions printed in and around Amsterdam between 1629 and 1643. Many historians have written about Utopia , but none of them has attempted this task or had these materials at their disposal. Fernandez-Armesto also lists "a number of editorial blemishes or regrettable judgements". These are largely spurious. He accuses Vibeke Roggen of confusing the reader by offering two interpretations of a Latin phrase; in fact, she (not "he", as Fernandez-Armesto has it) provides the standard meaning of the phrase, then argues that it had another meaning in this case. He claims that Trond Kruke Salberg fails to make good a promise to decipher a cryptic signature; the signature is, in fact, deciphered two pages later. He says "The appendix

College de France, I 1 place Marcellin Berthelot, Paris 75005.

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Gases and growth Sir, - Towards the end of his review of five recent books on the future of the planet (December 11), John Godfrey relays Al Gore' s warning that "human reproduction makes solving the climate problem even more difficult". The emphasis is misplaced. No amount of tinkering with industrial effluents will benefit mankind if unrestricted population growth is allowed to continue. Malthus wasn ' t wrong, just premature. With the population at 6 billion, it is sustainability that will determine whether mankind will survive. One of the many exhaust streams, Green House Gases (GHGs) , has received undue emphasis. It is merely one part of the larger problem. How this wrong-headed priority came into being is curious. Godfrey writes that it is now "scientifically quaint" to doubt whether man is causing disturbing climate changes. It is not quaint: it is scientifically rigorous. Some earthly temperatures have risen over the past century, although there have been larger temperature swings in the history of Earth. Levels of GHGs have also risen. There may be a link, but correlation is not causation. The linkage might have been persuasively established (or disproved) over the past decade if many scientists had objectively studied the temperature patterns at various altitudes, latitudes and

1939, though fragments of Work in Progress appeared throughout the preceding decade. If I dropped the point here I could no doubt leave

Utopian labours, Abyssinian travels

[email protected] omits Latin editions, except, curiously, for a Milanese edition of 1620", but, as we twice explain (pp. xii and 145), Milan 1620 has the only new Latin preface; all the others date back to the early Latin editions and are easily available in modern editions. He asserts that "the omission of the notes - which include some of the most revealing paratexts - leaves the work feeling truncated" . Yet, as everyone who has read early printed books knows, they are peppered with marginal indications designed simply to draw the reader's attention to important points in the text; to have reproduced all the notes in editions of Utopia would indeed have been an enormous labour with meagre returns. A few which are the subject of censorship are discussed in the relevant chapters of Part One. His remark that "The book's coverage of the Dutch editions seems disproportionately short" is equally misplaced. Since the Dutch translations of Antwerp 1553 and 1562 appeared anonymously and without prefatory materials, they do not lend themselves to detailed analysis or contextual study. The new editions of the seventeenth century carry an

anonymous preface to which we gave proportionate attention. Finally, Felipe FernandezArmesto's reference to Norwegian Romantic utopianism is relevant neither to the early modern Utopia nor to the situation of modern Norwegian academics. There is no "superficially curious concentration of utopian scholarship in Norway": the contributors to this book, as the preface and credits make abundantly clear, were (in the main) younger scholars from departments of literature and languages who had the requisite skills to do research of this kind but who had not previously worked on More's Utopia. A team of scholars in Spain or Japan might have done the same work, but they did not. TERENCE CA YE St John 's College, Oxford. Sir, - In his review of my "capricious little book" about Abyssinian travellers, Golden Legends, Felipe Fernandez-Armesto says I am often "sneering or snide" . If so, I regret it - but "capricious little book" brings to mind pot and kettle. As for the travellers, Fernandez-Armesto thinks I "traduce" them. I invite any reader to compare (for example) his description of Dervla Murphy, "deluded by the quest for the modern equivalent of the Blue Bloom - herself', with mine, in which she appears as " indomitable", and then decide who is the real traducer of character. W. B. CARNOCHAN English Department, Stanford University, Stanford,

some readers convinced that I have read Finnegans Wake. But I must confess that I have not; I do read in it, from time to time, with great

delight until boredom sets in. Will someone, by the way, someone who has read this unreadable work, tell me whether that first "m" in the

first "brimgem" is a typographical error? You don ' t know? Or care? We are in trouble, you and I.

This is from The Rhetoric of Fiction (University of Chicago Press, 1961), page 30 I , footnote 26. DA YID F. STOYER 2970 S. Columbus Street, I B, Arlington, Virginia 22206.

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Van Gogh Sir, - In pointing out, in his review of Van Gogh's Complete Letters (December 18 & 25) , that the Germans were the first Van Gogh collectors, Frank Whitford seems almost over-eager, in the same parenthesis, to say they were also the first forgers. More to the point is that the first selection of Van Gogh's letters was collected and edited by Margarete Mauthner, a German-Jewish art historian and collector, and published in Berlin in 1906. The Germans were also Van Gogh's first serious exhibitors, with some twenty exhibitions (not all devoted exclusively to him) showing his work in Germany before 1914, and Van Gogh's first biographer (1912) was the German art historian Julius Meier-Graefe (English translation, 1933).

California 9430 I. NICHOLAS JACOBS

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26 Lady Margaret Road,

longitudes, instead of seeking confirmation of their premature beliefs. The data already exists. We just need a Darwin to make sense of it. Instead we've got Trofim Lysenko. Some of the suggestions for reducing GHGs would also contribute positively to sustainability. This includes better auto fuel economy and other conservation measures.

However, suggestions of trapping or converting industrial effluent GHGs are dead wrong because they would encourage the world's industrial blast furnace to continue roaring at full tilt. It is unfortunate that global warming has attracted all the attention, while population growth is almost an aside. This is partly due to media overplay of the lack of consensus among scientists on global warming. This is the normal state of

affairs in unsettled areas of science. But the media has portrayed this as a conflict for dramatic purposes. And too many scientists have taken the bait, abandoning good science for advocacy.

a sentence. Jespersen .

Some,

like

But need I go on? Let us hope Mr Jespersen does not mind the inclusion. It is, after all , a reasonable skip from those other "mammals" to him.

LOUIS HAROYITZ 453 Stewart A ve ,

A. E. SANTANIELLO

Staten Island, New York 10314.

280 Riverside Drive, 4K New York 10025.

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Many a skip. Sir, - What better title for John A. C. Greppin ' s review of Adam 's Tongue by Derek Bickerton than "A Skip of the Tongue" (December 4)? While skipping into the second paragraph, we are delighted to read: Animals, perhaps from bacteria to mammals, have always had a mode of communication, whether it is just a chemical odour, a chirp, or

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London NW5.

OltO

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Finnegans Wake Sir, - Doubtless J. C.'s report (December 18 & 25) of Professor Knowles's difficult relationship with Finnegans Wake was a great relief to many of us. But there is a precedent for everything. No less an authority than Wayne C. Booth had this to say, almost fifty years ago: The novel was first published in

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RNA Sir, - In a recent letter concerning the prebiotic soup (Letters, December 18 & 25), I recommended that John Walton should read Thomas Cech ' s 1989 N obel Prize address, "Exploring the New RNA World". Unfortunately, that sentence was telescoped during drafting. It should have read "Thomas Cech ' s 1989 Nobel Prize address, or his 2004 essay 'Exploring the New RNA World"'. Apologies; the overzealous editing was mine. STEPHEN FLETCHER Department of Chemi stry, Loughborough University, Ashby Road , Loughborough.

BIOGRAPHY sadore Feinstein was born to a poor, immigrant family in the working-class district of Philadelphia but grew up in Haddonfield , New Jersey, an idyllic small town. But Yiddish was spoken at the Feinstein home where his mother kept a kosher kitchen, and according to D. D. Guttenplan, "even as a grown man, he never entirely lost the little boy' s awe for those who could sing in school the line ' land where my fathers died' without feeling awkward about it". In 1937, the same year Buchenwald opened its doors, he changed his name to Stone: as a rising young journalist, he later said, he had not wanted to turn an anti-Semitic reader off before he had even read his work. He felt uneasy about this, but eventually would convert " I. F. Stone" into a nom de guerre whose reputation as public scold probably turned off far more readers than his birth name would have. For the next forty years he created a unique place for himself in American journalism, writing against the grain of national political consensus and raising issues which governments of neither party wanted to hear: a one-man Greek chorus of dissent carrying on the Popular Front traditions of the 1930s. He lived long enough and wrote independently enough to end up, like Mencken, something of an institution. Guttenplan has given us a highly readable and well-researched biography, that draws on a considerable volume of unpublished material and personal interviews as well as Stone's own prolific output. Stone' s career began in the dark shadow of the Depression at the same time as anti-Semitic violence in Germany was sending a chill through Jewish communities around the world; Stone felt that there was reason to fear something more substantial than fear itself. He boasted he was a red, not a liberal, and while Guttenplan finds no evidence he ever joined the Communist Party, John Gates, once Editor of the Daily Worker, has been cited in the press as saying that he had been a secret member for a time. Moscow ' s actions often set its own sympathizers at each other's throats, beginning with Stalin ' s purge trials of the late 1930s. Stone gave the Kremlin the benefit of the doubt that time - a dubious start, perhaps, for someone later to make his name as the scourge of official prevarication and deceit. By 1939, ideological stresses within the American Left rose to the surface when the Committee for Cultural Freedom declared Soviet Russia to be as much a totalitarian regime as Nazi Germany, and warned liberals not to be beguiled into glorifying "the color and cut of one strait jacket rather than another". In response, Stone was one of 400 who signed an open letter defending the Soviet Union and appearing to lump such figures as John Dewey and the Socialist Party

I

leader Norman Thomas among "the fascists

and their allies". The letter appeared in the Nation two days after the signatories and everyone else had been stunned into confusion by the announcement of the Nazi-Soviet pact. When the winter of the Cold War drew on, Stone became a pacifist, and put the blame for growing international tension on his own country. He saw America as a failed experiment, rooted in the exploitation that defines capitalism and - as the Depression had already demonstrated - headed for inevitable breakdown. "The socialism we believe in is coming every-

7

Weekly outrage JAMES M. MURPHY D. D. Guttenplan AMERICAN RADICAL The life and times of l. F. Stone 592pp. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $35. 9780374 183936

where", he wrote: the Soviet variety, for all Russia's inherited backwardness and expedient brutalities, was part of its irresistible progress. "The average American capitalist is frightened", Stone argued: it was not George Kennan ' s brand of containment America needed, but the kind to "get the average American capitalist to contain himself'. The emerging states in Eastern Europe he saw as a natural consequence of the recent war, offering a new and promising beginning for those shattered societies, rather than evidence for the myth of Moscow's imperialist ambitions in Europe and elsewhere which underpinned the doctrine of containment. The invasion of South Korea came as a devastating rejoinder to such a reading of international affairs, rendering moot any debate about the reality of the Cold War and making containment look more like the defensive strategy it claimed to be than the gratuitous provocation which its critics alleged. Stone,

I. F. Stone's Weekly, a four-page mimeographed sheet of news and opinion which would for the next twenty years afford him the luxury of being the most independent journalist in the world. It was, ironically enough, both a capitalist venture and an example of American samizdat - although , unlike his Russian counterparts, Stone would acknowledge the courteous and helpful service of the local post office. Had the Russian Revolution not occurred, Guttenplan would have had an easier task of setting Stone in the tradition of Thomas Paine, to whom he is sometimes compared. As it is, allegations emerged after his death that he had a covert relationship with Moscow ' s never-sleeping intelligence service. Guttenplan's most persuasive rebuttal is that the FBI itself could not firmly identify Stone with BUN (translated as PANCAKE), the radical journalist described in the Venona decrypts as recepti ve to an approach by a Soviet intelligence officer in 1936. The notes which Alexander Vassiliev made from Soviet intelligence archives, however, are more damaging, and Guttenplan buries them in a footnote. There he cites Vassiliev's book (written with two US historians, John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr), Spies: The rise and fall of the KGB in America, and even gives the page references concerning

I. F. Stone, March 1983 however, was not convinced. In France at the time and relying on a close reading of the New York Times, he challenged the national consensus with his Hidden History of the Korean. War. Not quite claiming South Korea started the war, he suggested that the South provoked the fighting, partly encouraged by warmongers in Washington. Even if a valid analysis - and later revelations from Communist sources suggest it was not - it was one America did not want to hear in the year of the Rosenberg trial. Stone found himself unemployable, with no savings and a young family to support. Even the Nation could not find a job for him. Feeling, he said, like a ghost, he decided to build his own pulpit. With borrowed capital and an inherited mailing list, he launched

Stone, but curiously fails to mention that they identify PANCAKE as Isadore Feinstein. Guttenplan asserts, but does not demonstrate, that there are "ample grounds for skepticism" ahout

Vassiliev's

reporting

and

mentions

that "a British jury found against Vassiliev in a libel action", which could suggest that Vassiliev's credibility had been undermined in a court of law. In fact, it was Vassiliev who claimed to have been defamed and the jury agreed that he had been. The accusations against him, however, were described as the defendant's opinions, and as such, "fair comment" for which damages could not be awarded. (Guttenplan's extended comments on Vassiliev's material can be found in the Nation, May 25, 2009, or at www.thenation. com/docI20090525/guttenplan.)

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Charges like these against Stone can seem more significant than they are. It is hardly a surprise that a young radical journalist in Depression-gripped New York was flattered , never mind intrigued, by an approach from the curia of a faith he half believed in. The question for us is what to make of it all. Unlike Harry Dexter White or Alger Hiss or (to skip a few decades) Ph am Xuan An, who became indispensable to important American journalists in Vietnam, Stone had little to offer America' s enemies. He wore his radicalism on his sleeve and no one can believe that any relationship he may have had with Soviet intelligence exerted the slightest effect, one way or the other, on his highly personal journalism. (We might speculate, of course, with what pious outrage he would have exposed a covert relationship between an American journalist and the intelligence services even of his own country.) Objectively speaking, as Marxists say, Stone's journalism perhaps did Moscow some service by its relentless effort to discredit the policies and leaders of the United States. But to speak objectively, it is reassuring that during a time of amateur, often farcical war against subversion , the country had room for such an inconvenient and confrontational figure. What Stone stood for publicly, in the end, is a more rewarding historical topic than the interest which a foreign service took in him, and which we cannot fully evaluate. Over more than two decades of standalone journalism, Stone became expert in mining an alluvial flow of public records to find nuggets of contradictions, absurdities and distortions with which to hold official America up to ridicule. Guttenplan praises him as a pioneer of confrontational, investigative reporting, but some will question how much there is to be proud of in anticipating the modern newsreaders' fashionable conceit (in both senses of the word) that everybody in public life is lying to them - a conceit which, with rich irony, has become as much a mantra of radicals on the Right as of adversarial journalists generally. Stone was as much a polemicist as a journalist and one can be moved by his passion and transparent outrage. One can also be numbed by his relentless contumely and snide mockery meant to get a derisive chuckle from likeminded readers. His criticism of the Soviet bloc and its moribund leadership was sharp, if infrequent, but all the more effective given its source. In time, his repudiation of the Cold War and its foreign entanglements made him a particularly prominent critic of the Vietnam War, during which he found many of his old left-wing audience returning now accompanied by their even more radical New Left offspring. He hecame a valued contributor to the New York Review of Books, and was welcomed back to the National Press Club: the Nieman Foundation now awards a medal in his honour. After a screening of Jerry Bruck's I. F. Stone 's Newsletter as a non-competing documentary during the 1974 Cannes Festival , the sixtyseven-year-old Stone qualified as America's most improbable celebrity journalist. As he became in his later years "domesticated", to use Guttenplan's word, he was even reconciled with some old adversaries like Arthur Schlesinger, Jr, or those, like Isaiah Berlin,

BIOGRAPHY

8 who had once distrusted his radicalism. D. D. Guttenplan's study is obviously written out of deep personal respect for Stone and his work, and Stone admirers will regard it as a vindication, if not apotheosis. Others may be put off by the feeling they are being pressed to join in the celebration. No doubt, a biographer must be sympathetic towards his subject; but here he is something of a champion, and the reader is shown the world the way Stone wanted it to be seen. Stone's sometime rivals among the anti-Communist Left are marginalized, and we hear little about establishment liberals such as Dean Acheson or Averell Harriman whose policies Stone so passionately opposed. Guttenplan is so much on his sub-

ject's side that he has even imported some of the acrimony that once clouded the dinner parties of politically committed New Yorkers so many years ago. His dismissive quip, for example, that Lionel Trilling - surely one of the ornaments of American liberal culture - demonstrated the "rebirth of an American Jew as an English gentleman", strikes an unwelcome note of undergraduate spite. The narrative of the twentieth century did not turn out the way the young 1. F. Stone expected. His own country, where he expected the worst and found so much to criticize, secured an increasingly better life for the great majority of its people, and made genuine progress in remedying the crimes

and lesser cruelties of racial and other forms of discrimination. (To take an example close to Stone's own history: Jews, numbering around 2 per cent of the American population , account for 51 per cent of Pulitzer Prizes for non-fiction in recent years. It is unlikely that an Isadore Feinstein today would feel it necessary to change his name to get a hearing.) The Communist world, with plenty of time to adjust and reform, proved unable to do either: it crumbled away, its governments nowhere capable of establishing a viable democracy and everywhere imposing a life of want and repression on their peoples. Some were disappointed, even shamefaced, by this lack of parallelism and salvaged what

they could of journalistic self-respect by focusing attention on the lifestyle illnesses they saw in one system, rather than the genetic malignancy slowly killing the other. Stone was not one of these, always convinced that there was enough cant on both sides to go around. He died on May 21, 1989, before he could witness the anti-Communist landslide in Poland the following month, the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia and the opening of East Germany in November, or the collapse of the Soviet Union itself two years later. A minor voice, but a major figure of dissent in American political journalism during the last century, it might be said that he missed the biggest story of his lifetime.

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ver since, not quite fifteen , he led his father' s funeral procession through the streets of occupied Paris, the novelist Dominique Fernandez has lived with the knowledge that he was the son of a traitor. When he took his seat in the Academie fran9aise in December 2007, he made a point of evoking the memory of his father, who, he said, deserved to be there more than he did. Now in his eightieth year, Dominique Fernandez attempts in this full and frank memoir to understand what made one of the most influential left-wing literary critics of his generation join Jacques Doriot' s Parti Populaire Fran9ais (PPF) in 1937 and end up as a Nazi collaborator. Ramon Fernandez was born in Paris in 1894, the son of a future Mexican diplomat and a Toulon sugar merchant and minor poet' s daughter, whom Ramon's father met while riding in the Bois de Boulogne. Following her husband's untimely death in 1905 after being thrown from a horse, Jeanne Fernandez embarked on a highly successful career as a journalist, which led to her founding the French edition of Vogue and writing a daily column in Le Jour between 1933 and 1940. In her grandson's unforgiving portrait, she is presented as an inveterate snob and an archetypal genetrix, domineering and destructive in her maternal love. When her son emerged from the Sorbonne in 1916 with a degree in philosophy, she refused to allow him to train for any profession and encouraged him rather to live off a string of aristocratic mistresses. Apart from a brief spell teaching at the College du Montcel, near Versailles, Ramon Fernandez would never hold down a proper job in his life. If he always lacked the strength of character to match his undoubted intelligence, his mother was largely to blame. Equally harsh is the treatment Dominique Fernandez accords his own mother. Born into extreme poverty in the Auvergne, Liliane Chomette rose through the French educational system to come top in the concours d'entree to the Ecole de Sevres in 1919 and the agregation des lettres in 1923, before selflessly devoting herself to a lifetime's career in schoolteaching. While at the Ecole de Sevres, she had been the favourite pupil of the renowned humanist Paul Desjardins who, forty-two years her senior, conducted an impassioned and highly inappropriate correspondence with her during her first two years as a teacher. Between 1922 and 1939, the deconsecrated Cistercian abbey of Pontigny, near Auxerre, was the setting for a series of residential summer conferences, started

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Family demons •

• •

PETER FAWCETT Dominique Fernandez RAMON 807pp. Grasset. €24.90. 9782 246 73941 8

by Desjardins: the Entretiens de Pontigny, which brought together the elite intelligentsia of Europe. It was there in 1925 that Liliane first met Ramon. By this time, he was a regular contributor to the NOllvelle Revue Franraise and had a reputation as a playboy, famed for introducing the tango to France and for his love of fast cars. The attraction was mutual. Liliane was dazzled by Ramon's brilliance, whereas he saw in the austere Sevrienne someone who was not only extremely pretty but also capable of helping him resolve his personal contradictions, at the same time as freeing him to some extent from the dominance of his mother. Despite the latter' s fierce opposition and Liliane' s own increasing misgivings, they were married in December 1926. In her son's account, Liliane stands accused of failing to share her husband's instinctive joie de vivre, being emotionally repressed and incapable of communicating her feelings to others. Although he admired and feared her, her son never loved her as he did his father, who paradoxically took little interest in him. If Dominique Fernandez's resentment of his mother and grandmother is clearly apparent, his adoration of his father is no less plain. It has been the inspiration for many of his novels, which can be placed under the heading "Prestige and Infamy" . His own militant homosexuality even leads Dominique to attrihute a secret homosexual past to his

father on the basis of an early, unfinished novel. Ramon ' s first published work, Messages (1926), was greeted by Charles Du Bos as the most outstanding debut since the war. It was followed by pioneering studies of Moliere (1929) - seen by his son as not just his best book, but the best book ever written on Moliere - and of Andre Gide (1931). Only when his marriage began to fall apart after he won the Prix Femina for his novel, Le Pari, in 1932, did Ramon become actively involved in politics. Not having fought in the First World War on account of the Mexican

Ramon Fernandez nationality he renounced in 1927, he had joined the Socialist party in 1925 under the influence of his friend Jean Prevost, but remained essentially uncommitted until the right-wing riots of February 1934 drove him, first to proclaim his Communist sympathies and then, after the failure of Leon Blum's Popular Front government two years later, to veer to the Right, supporting Franco's Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War. According to his son, it was the collapse of his marriage - he and Liliane finally separated in 1936 - which left him completely at sea and looking for a strong leader to cure both the nation ' s and his own ills. Although he wrote a regular weekly column in Marianne, he did not produce a full-length critical study for over ten years until a late flurry in the final year of his life saw the publication of major works on Proust and Balzac and, less happily, the first volume of a projected two-volume study of Maurice Barres. As Dominique Fernandez explains, apart from some of its outer trappings and the uniform much beloved by his father, the Parti Populaire Fran9ais (PPF) was not initially an overtly fascist organization. Led by Jacques Doriot, a former Communist steelworker and the mayor of Saint-Denis, north of Paris, it chose a third way, equidistant from Berlin and Moscow, based on French nationalism. Only gradually did anti-Semitism become part of the mix and, after the defeat of France,

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the German vision of a new European order was enthusiastically adopted. Ramon joined the party in May 1937 and was rapidly promoted to its Bureau politique, becoming a kind of minister of culture, responsible for the Cercles Populaires Fran9ais designed to counter the Communist-inspired Maisons de Culture. What seems incomprehensible to his son is that he should have continued to regard Doriot, who was little more than a common thug, as a potential saviour even after the emergence of de Gaulle in June 1940. In the various articles his father wrote in praise of Doriot, Dominique Fernandez detects a deliberate irony where none is readily apparent. According to his second wife, the socialite Betty Bouwens, Ramon even thought of joining de Gaulle in London in October 1940, but was prevented from doing so by the intervention of his mother. In the final part of the book, Dominique Fernandez examines his father's war record in forensic detail and is gratified to find little that is truly reprehensible, other than his participation , as a late replacement for Marcel Arland, in the notorious delegation of French intellectuals to Weimar in October 1941, and his sharing a platform with the notorious anti-Semite George Montandon just three months before the round-up of Jews, in the Vel' d'Hiv' in July 1942, in which members of the PPF were active. After 1942, he more or less ceased his political journalism. He resigned from the Bureau poiitique of the PPF in August 1943 and from the party itself in October. He performed acts of kindness to individual Jews and insisted on riding in the last carriage of the Metro, reserved for wearers of the yellow star. At the same time, he seems to have determined to drink himself to death. He died of an embolism in August 1944. His name had been on the Resistance' s blacklist and, had he survived, as one of Doriot's principal lieutenants, he might well have faced the firing squad. Dominique Fernandez' s courage in confronting his family ' s demons with brutal honesty should certainly be admired. His work is extremely well documented and provides a rich panoply of French literature and politics in the first half of the twentieth century. At times, his own strongly held opinions obtrude too much and he indulges in gratuitous attacks on Sartre, Malraux, Claude Roy, Leon Werth, the nOllveau roman and all modern exegetes of Proust. Now that he has finally laid his father's ghost to rest, it is to be hoped that Dominique will go on to compose the autobiography he hints at once or twice in these pages.

BIOGRAPHY

"D

isrespect for one' s ancestors is the first sign of savagery and immorality", says a character simply known as "the Russian" in Alexander Pushkin' s novel fragment "The Guests Arrived at the Dacha" (1828). However, Pushkin ' s own tributes to his ancestors brought him as much mockery as admiration from contemporary critics. For some exacting readers, those who chronicle earlier generations of their own family cannot win: the memoirist is suspected of snobbery if the ancestors are distinguished, and of blind family piety and indifference to the boredom thresholds of others if they are not. Mary-Kay Wilmers' s study of the Eitingon family goes some way towards disarming such positions. To begin with, the ancestors here are by any standards remarkable. Uncle Motty, born in 1885, relocated to Leipzig in 1902 and to New York in 1920, where he wheeled and dealed to win fur concessions from the newly fledged Soviet government. Later he became a purveyor to the American public of treated sheepskin, labelled "Bonmouton" which, according to its advertising, offered "the sleekness of nutria. . and the rich gleam of beaver". His companies made and lost fortunes. Slippery, yet able to expound with winning charm his schemes to investors - including Wilmers's own fatherMotty is easily the most memorable character in the book. Motty's brother Max, also a maternal great-uncle of Wilmers, shaped his life quite differently in terms of place and vocation. A philosophy graduate who became a pupil of Freud and a prominent figure in the psychoanalytic movement, he ended his life in Palestine where " he had a world map in his study on which little flags marked the exact position of every Freudian analyst in exile". Implicated in the disappearance of the emigre General Miller through his friendship with the suspects (the singer Nadezhda Plevitskaya and her husband Nikolai Skoblin), he may have been darkly associated with the Soviet secret services, but he comes across as more of a socialite than a politico - an almost smotheringly generous host and, as Wilmers's relations remembered, "a sweetie". The tritagonist, Leonid Eitingon, an employee of the Soviet secret police, is best known for his role as accessory to the murder of Leon Trotsky, playing a bit part in biographies of the Bolshevik leader. While Wilmers's account of the trio opens, rather opportunistically, with this murder scene, Leonid' s other assignments as an agent "licensed to kill", from Spain to China, were if anything even more lurid. Over the decades, he worked his way through a large number of mistresses as well as corpses. Wilmers suggests, quite reasonably, that the former may have heen useful camouflage, since a couple would have been less noticeable than a single person; but old adages about mixing business with pleasure come to mind. The prominence of these Eitingons, then, is not in question; indeed, in the case of Leonid, " notoriety" is more the word. At the same time, association with an NKVD stooge personally commended by Stalin (" As long as I live not a hair of his head shall be touched") is not the type of family connection most Western memoirists might be eager to flaunt. It is clear that Wilmers ' s decision to investigate her ancestors' history stemmed

9

Famil y romance CATRIONA KELLY

Mary-Kay Wilmers THE EITINGONS A twentieth-century story 476pp. Faber. £20. 978057123472 I

from genuine curiosity, not the desire to add retrospective lustre to her own, in any case distinguished, biography (since 1992 she has edited the London Review of Books). She remarks about her handsome and dapper father, "Even now I am pleased when someone who doesn't know him catches sight of him in a photograph, as if his being so goodlooking were an achievement of mine" skewering in advance pretensions to inherited stature. If descendants can take no credit for their forebears , then it is quite logical that they should not have to apologize for

This approach leads to a certain unevenness of tone. At times Wilmers makes claims to privileged knowledge of motive and reaction: "Argeloff wasn't glamorous and nothing in her life had led her to expect attention such as Mornard lavished on her" . On other occasions, she makes play of her bewilderment. Seeking out Leonid's surviving descendants in Moscow, she discovers that they are unwilling to break the code of silence that had so long been essential for survival. Blood relationship confers no insider knowledge. Indeed, it is not even clear where Leonid fits into the Eitingon family tree, and according to one tradition among some of Wilmers's relations, he may simply have used the name as an alias - though the espousal of such a strikingly non-Russian surname would have been an odd decision at any period of Soviet history. On meeting Leonid's relations in Moscow, Wilmers writes that Victory Day was cele-

Leonid Eitingon in the late 1940s with his stepdaughter Zoya Zarubina and her daughter them either (hence the absence of regret when Leonid' s work is described). At the same time, self-congratulation is not always eschewed, being displaced on to Wilmers's own admiration for her investigative project: "I was impressed with my own boldness in choosing to speak on the phone with the family of a high-level KGB functionary who was also a high-level killer. And a relative of mine". The Ritingnns is one of several " alternative" family chronicles published in the past few years to focus on the fate of assimilated Russian Jews after 1917. However, it differs from Masha Gessen ' s Two Babushkas (2004) and Igor N arsky ' s Fotokartochka na pamyat (A Snapshot as a Memento, 2008) in not dealing primarily with the immediate family. Max and Motty were a generation back even from Wilmers's mother, who in any case was not that interested in her family roots. Rather than a work of affectionate reminiscence, this is "history of an era" told through the lives of a few key figures.

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brated with "a great deal of food, laid out and eaten in no particular order: pizza, chicken, fish, caviar, crab salad (those dismaying tasteless sticks), other salads, bread, chocolate cakes, meringues, slices of orange, vodka, champagne, brandy and Fanta". The Eitingons offers a similarly startling combination of materials. Spy-story skulduggery is mixed with family gossip, passages of historical resume with first-hand reminiscence. Igor

Narsky handled his multifaceted project by using visual keys (like symbols on a map) to highlight passages of differing ambition: a miniature camera for meditations on family photographs, and so on. Wilmers, on the other hand, leaves readers to wander the labyrinth unguided. When she is speaking of her own experiences, Wilmers's style is often appealingly dry. She remembers how in Moscow in 1991 , during the contradictory and fractious period of transition, "No one on the street looked at anyone else, at least not in the eye. Doors slammed in your face; if you tried to buy something, the assistant barked". A plank over a puddle "seemed an outstandingly civic gesture" , yet "one of the surprising facts of late Soviet Russia ... is that the phone boxes always worked". There are endearing cameos: Aunt Mats, for example, whose cache of letters started up Wilmers ' s interest in the family's past, and Leonid's stepdaughter Zoya Zarubina. But the historical establishing shots are often of a "meanwhile in Europe" kind: "The centre of Shklov was looking trim, almost manicured" ; "Entire nations ... were transplanted from one part of the Soviet Union to another" . Early in The Eitingons, Wilmers represents her project as something rather like an act of filial defiance, imagining how her parents might have persuaded her to "drop the idea of writing about the Eitingons" in favour of " a professional". She herself takes the Sunday historian's proprietorial attitude towards the object of study ("a document in my possession"). Yet this is not quite a literary work. The backtracking between present and past makes it hard to lose oneself in the narrative, while the portraits given are often oddly unreflective. This is partly due to the book' s central characters: Motty and Leonid were both, in their different ways, energetically on the make, while Max must have been one of the least self-scrutinizing psychoanalysts ever to have walked Freud ' s earth. But the disengaged character of the depiction is also a result of Wilmers's own narrative preferences. While it was brave to eschew the hackneyed strategies of the "quest for the truth" or "voyage into the self', the main dynamic in the book becomes a constant worrying at the material ("I don't know what Max said", ''I'm sure Motty and Bess were there", "Do secret agents have address books that they leave lying around?"). At one point, Wilmers alludes to the Russian scholar Alexander Etkind's "unusual ability to romance the facts and still be taken seriously". Might this contain a flicker of envy from a writer who appears to have pondered so much on and round her ancestors' lives that facts and romance prove equally elusive?

Beak To the clicking of knitting needles, I fell asleep on the train And I dreamed of knitting, is this what they call woolgathering, Dreamed of my mother purling and plaining to patterns In Woman's Own and Woman. I woke to a woman Whose long mauve thumbnail was sharpened into a spike And she texted, texted, texted, with that pecking beak.

KIT WRIGHT

HISTORY

10 annah Arendt once wrote about the difficulty of passing judgement on various individuals caught up in the "intellectual storms of the twentieth century". She was right: what appear to us today as crystal-clear choices were, especially during the interwar period, maddeningly complex reactions to the crisis of liberalism and democracy. Mihail Sebastian, a Jewish-Romanian playwright, novelist and essayist, epitomized this dramatic, and often traumatic, situation. Born Iosif Hechter in the port of Braila in 1907, Sebastian yearned all his life to be accepted by his peers as a genuine Romanian intellectual. He desperately tried to become a Jewish-Romanian writer in a country where far-Right zealots (and some mainstream politicians) emphatically questioned the "Romanianness" of all who were not Orthodox Christians. One such guru was Nae Ionescu, a professor of metaphysics and pseudo-theological oracle who, especially after 1934, became the main intellectual voice for Romanian Fascism (the third-largest movement in Europe). Sebastian fell in love with Ionescu and from 1927 to 1934 served as an editor on Ionescu ' s paper, Cuvantul (The Word). This affiliation lasted even after the paper moved closer to the Iron Guard, the mystical revolutionary movement that hoped to cleanse Romania of foreigners and liberal "rottenness". Hitler's coming to power radicalized all political factions in Romania. As a testament to his tribulations, Sebastian wrote the novel For Two Thousand Years (1934) and asked Ionescu to contribute a foreword. The

H

A faustian pact VLADIMIR TISMANEANU Marta Petreu DIAVOLUL ｾｉ＠ UCENICUL sAu Nae Ionescu - Mihail Sebastian 287pp. Iasi and Bucharest: Editura Polirom. RON32.95. 978973 46 1492 9

professor did so, and the result was an egregiously anti-Semitic text based on time-worn theological dogmas. Attacked in left-wing, liberal and Jewish circles for accepting Ionescu ' s toxic preface, a wounded Sebastian responded with How I Became a Hooligan (1935), a passionate pamphlet against intolerance which described Fascism and Communism as equally inimical to individual freedom. In this and subsequent writings, Sebastian strove to present himself as a pristine democrat and defended his collaboration with lonescu at Cuvantul. During the Second World War, a victim of ignominious persecution, Sebastian kept a journal which was published in the 1990s to international acclaim, earning frequent comparison with the diaries of Victor Klemperer. He died in 1945 after being run over by a truck. One of his pre-war novels carried the prescient title The Accident. Marta Petreu has written an absorbing,

trenchant and truthful book. The author of An Infamous Past, a superb analysis of E. M. Cioran's Fascist youth (reviewed in the TLS, October 13, 2006), she is well qualified to deal with the divisive topic of Sebastian's early political extremism. Diavolul ｾｩ＠ Ucenicul si1u: Nae lonescu - Mihail Sebastian (The Devil and His Disciple: Nae Ionescu Mihail Sebastian) explores Sebastian ' s antiliberalism and anti-rationalism, and his attraction to Italian-style Fascism during the seven years he was Ionescu ' s most trusted lieutenant at Cuvantul. Petreu pierces the veil of half-truths and lies regarding Sebastian ' s early writings and his enduring infatuation with lonescu. The professor' s bigoted preface failed to shake Sebastian's loyalty towards a man he compared in his diary to the Devil incarnate. Indeed, the two seemed bound by a strange, unfathomable complicity. Ionescu, who would serve as the prototype for the Logician in Eugene Ionesco's play The Rhinoceros, died in 1940, but his image continued to haunt Sebastian ' s dreams during the Holocaust. Petreu's fundamental argument, carefully documented, is that Sebastian ' s youth was imbued with Fascist propensities which he later chose to conceal rather than examine. She has read hundreds of articles written by Sebastian in full agreement with Ionescu's

collectivist, religiously based vision of the ethnic community. Sometimes, she stretches a point, insisting on meanings that may not have been intended; and while it is true that Sebastian had lots of admiring things to say about Mussolini's Fascist state, it is also important to remember that, until 1938, Italian Fascism was not racist and some Jews (including Vladimir Jabotinsky) praised some of the Duce's policies. Nevertheless, this is a persuasive study which shows how ostensibly lucid intellectuals could fall in love with perverse ideas and grotesquely exclusive fantasies. It also has much to say about political demonism, revolutionary nihilism and religious fundamentalism - the three diseases that devoured Romania (and East Central Europe) in the 1920s and 30s. Sebastian ' s tragic encounter with Fascism was in many respects part of a general European trend to question the power and value of reason (a topic Petreu might have explored further). In How I Became a Hooligan, Sebastian wrote: "Critical spirit does not wear uniforms. Critical spirit is a civilian". He was right, yet, as Marta Petreu shows, before (and even after) he wrote those appealing words, he was himself all too ready to emasculate his critical faculties. In exchange, he received the disdainful blessing of a Mephistopheleslike prophet of the far Right. This necessary book does not diminish Sebastian's alleged stature, as some angry Romanian critics have hastened to proclaim. Rather, it justifiably questions the dubious iconic status of a "human, all too human" intellectual.

Ｍｾ

U nforgotten if unpunished he persistence of Nazi hunters in seeking those war criminals who have defied both death and statutes of limitations seems to many to be increasingly anachronistic, more than half a century after the end of the war. Yet so much of what happened during and after the Second World War remains obscured by the "year-zero" consensus and the need for reconstruction and reconciliation, that the pursuit of the guilty is still a rewarding occupation. Guy Waiters's compelling and thoroughly researched account of the war criminals who escaped justice, the halfhearted attempts of the Allies to pursue them, and the unwavering support they received from sympathizers is a timely reminder of the many skeletons in Europe's cupboard. Exhausted by the effort of defeating Hitler, Waiters tells us, the Allies had neither the material nor the psychological resources to catch war criminals. The Central Registry of War Criminals and Security Suspects (CROWCASS), established towards the end of the war, was unable to publish its 80,000-strong "wanted" list because of a shortage of typewriter ribbons. The Canadian war crimes unit cabled London with repeated requests for copies of Cassell's German-English dictionary, while the American Counterintelligence Corps (Cl C), although better resourced, and reputedly more gung-ho, suffered from a lack of personnel because war crimes units were "seen as backwaters". Consequently most of the small fry - and many of the big fish - managed to slip through Allied fingers - in so far as the Allies' interest in justice was not

T

TIM KIRK Guy Waiters HUNTING EVIL The Nazi war criminals who escaped and the hunt to bring them to justice 518pp. Bantam Press. £18.99. 9780593 05991 3

eclipsed by the new expediencies of the Cold War. The ones who got away did so with more than a little help from their friends. "Poglavnik" Ante Pavelic, leader of the murderous Ustasha movement, benefited, like many Croatian war criminals, from the help of Monsignor Krunoslav Draganovic, who saw hundreds of his countrymen provided with safe passage to Argentina. Draganovic, who was himself involved in the expropriation and forced conversion of Serbs, could rely on the Vatican' s sympathy for Croatian "refugees", and Pius xn, naturally sympathetic to regimes that supported the Church, felt Pavelic was a "much maligned man and not guilty of murder". But the Croatian dictator seems to have had many friends: after his escape he was apparently sheltered near St Gilgen by a sympathetic Austrian, and was said (by Tito, Stalin and the Americans) to be working for the British, before making it to Rome, where he was rumoured to be a guest at the Pope's summer residence; or, according to American intelligence, living in church property in the Trastevere district. Much of the story of his escape - and that

The concentration camp guard Erna Wallisch at her flat in Vienna in 2007; from the book under review of many others - is a mixture of hearsay, disinformation and speculation. The Allies lied not only to each other but also to their own political masters about the war criminals they employed for intelligence purposes, and there is much debunking to be done as Waiters tries to get at the facts. The ODES SA network was less the sinister society evoked by thriller writers and conspiracy theorists than an aggregate of ad hoc organizations and sympathetic individuals, in Italy, Spain, the Balkans - and Britain, where Oswald Mosley and his wife were

TLS JANUARY I 2010

keen to do their bit. More gratifyingly, most of those who did manage to reach the welcoming arms of Peron's Argentina arrived not with Nazi gold but with little more than did the Jewish refugees they had driven from Europe over the previous decade. Waiters's withering scepticism is impartial, and its most high-profile target is Simon Wiesenthal, the very personification of the Nazi hunter. At the very least, Wiesenthal's own accounts of his past are conflicting and unconvincing; at worst they raise questions about his whereabouts at times during the war, and about his ability to survive, that recall Bruno Kreisky's accusations of collaboration with the Gestapo. Waiters does not reiterate the accusation directly, but he makes it clear that Wiesenthal lied, most significantly about his role in the hunt for Adolf Eichmann; whether for the good of the antiNazi cause, for personal glory or for other reasons will never be clear. It is unlikely that anyone would now dispute the ineptitude - to put it most charitably - of many of Wiesenthal's investigations, but he had a key role to play in the founding mythologies of the notionally anti-fascist post-war Europe that existed between the mid-1940s and the 1980s. His truth is not the only one that has unravelled with the passing of the post-war world and the rehabilitation of neo-fascists under the weaselly rubric of "post-fascism". A final vignette - the author's encounter in Vienna with the SS camp guard Erna Wallisch - reminds us that the Nazi hunters' work is not yet done. Waiters could do nothing about the Austrian government's refusal to prosecute her, but it was worthwhile making it clear to her that her crimes, if unpunished, are not forgotten.

HISTORY n 2001 , the New York Review of Books published an erudite, well-sourced essay by a British journalist living in Istanbul , Christopher de Bellaigue, about Turkey ' s passage from Empire to Republic. A Harvard professor, James R. Russell , promptly wrote in accusing him of denying the Armenian genocide. Rebel Land is de Bellaigue's delayed response to the controversy he unwittingly sparked. As such, it serves as a sort of double exorcism. In place of what the author calls his erstwhile "Kemalist" standpoint, it tells the story of Turkey's twentieth century from the perspective of Anatolia's underdogs, the Armenians, the Kurds and the syncretistic Alevis, peoples crushed or coerced by the great rollers of nation-building and modernization. Moreover, while de Bellaigue hasn't given up on books, as his extensive bibliography shows, they take second place to his determination to "go to the back of the vessel and mix it in steerage with the forgotten peoples", and to get the story of "their loves, their losses and their sins". It is an excellent strategy for writing about a country afflicted more than most by reams of birds-eye commentary and tired generalizations about bridges - or clashes - between civilizations. De Bellaigue has chosen his berth well too. A district of some 50,000 souls in mountainous eastern Anatolia, Varto is not just divided on ethnic and sectarian lines, with Sunni Muslims and Alevis, speakers of Kurmanji Kurdish and the distantly related Indo-European language Zaza. It is also the home of individuals whose lives have created ripples far beyond the narrow confines of their birthplace. There is Mesrop Mashtots, the fourth-century ascetic who invented the Armenian alphabet; Halit Cibran, a mastermind of Turkey's first great Kurdish rebellion; Mehmet Serif Firat, an "amateur historian, foul-mouthed bully, sycophant" whose Kurddenying history of Varto, later promoted by the leader of Turkey's first military coup, is an emblematic product of the eagerness of early Republican Alevis to throw themselves into

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11

Back in steerage NICHOLAS BIRCH Christopher de Bellaigue REBEL LAND Among Turkey' s forgotten peoples 270pp. Bloomsbury. £20. 9780747586289

the embrace of the new nation-state; and Nizamettin Tas, a senior PKK commander who defected to set up his own party. Moulding oral histories into a narrative is quite an undertaking. Renowned among Kurds for their taciturnity, the people of Varto prove extremely unwilling at first to speak to this pale-faced, Turkish-speaking foreigner holed up at the dormitory for local teachers. When they do, they more often than not give diametrically opposed accounts of events from 100 years before or, indeed, from last week. Back in Tehran (his new home) after his first stint in eastern Turkey, de Bellaigue is reminded of E. H. Carr's dictum: "It does not follow that because a mountain appears to take on different shapes from different angles of vision, it has objectively either no shape at all or an infinity of shapes". "And yet that is what I saw: an infinity of shapes" , he comments ruefully. He did well to persevere. Rebel Land steps nimbly through the intricacies of a chaotic, bloodfilled century to create a chronicle that is gripping, moving and - with one significant exception - fair-minded. De Bellaigue's portrait of the most controversial period of Varto's recent history, the ethnic cleansing of Armenians in 1915, is exemplary. He describes how the Ottoman Empire, bereft of its former heartlands in Europe, flooded with refugees fleeing the violence of Bulgarian and Serbian gangs,

stumbled towards the First World War " scared and scabrous", primed for more bloodletting. In the pages that follow , he convincingly dismembers the claim touted by defenders of the official Turkish thesis that the mass murderthat began in May 1915 was the work of rogue gendarmerie units and unruly Kurds. There is space too for the bloody aftermath of the massacres, when Armenian militias who had entered the district in 1916 with the advancing Russian army exacted brutal revenge on Alevi villagers as they retreated. Like their Armenian former neighbours before them, de Bellaigue writes, the Kurds went to their deaths numb, listless or naively convinced no harm would come to them. The brief period of Russian occupation, he adds, left surprisingly positive memories in the minds of modern Vartolu: a just, red-bearded commander and sugar for the starving children. (The same is not true of neighbouring areas, where Russians haunt folk songs like ogres in a Scandinavian fairy tale.) Subsequent chapters on Sheikh Said's revolt of 1925, the shifting balances between Alevis and Sunnis in the interwar years, and the Alevi Kurds ' imperceptible slide from statism through leftism and Kurdish nationalism to a slow reappropriation of their disappearing religious heritage are similarly sure-footed. De Bellaigue is right to emphasize the role the junta' s new constitution of 1960 - with its contradictory mixture of Turkish nationalism and political liberalism - had in planting the seeds of Kurdish separatism in the 1980s. Still smarting from the torture they suffered from a much heavier-booted band of putschists in 1980, Turkish intellectuals of all stripes today have a tendency to view what came before as a time of Arcadian innocence. Where Rebel Land really warms up, though, is in its treatment of the Kurdish sepa-

Imagination URMILA SESHAGIRJ

ratist war since 1984. De Bellaigue seems just to have missed Aliza Marcus's rigorously objective Blood and Belief' The PKK and the Kurdish fight for independence, published months after he left Varto early in 2007. Yet, while his account is less detailed than Marcus's, its grounding in a place the reader has become familiar with gives it a particular plangency. We don't just hear PKK members musing abstractedly on the growth of the group from a hundred-strong band of hotheads to a guerrilla force of 15,000. We watch as they take the decision to drop everything and take to the mountains, we follow them on campaigns through terrain their fathers herd goats on, we eavesdrop as they creep home to visit relatives they haven't seen for years. De Bellaigue's account is full of resonant details. His observation that the senior PKK commander Nizamettin Tas is the grandson of the ostler of the high-born leader of an earlier Kurdish revolt encapsulates the way war and modernization have accelerated the corrosion oftraditional Kurdish society. The story of how a notorious state-backed hit man used to frequent a bar owned by a Kurdish nationalist deputy is strikingly suggestive of the thinness of the walls dividing sides in this double civil war: Turk against Kurd and Kurd against Kurd. De Bellaigue's book has one serious shortcoming, though: his even-handedness seems to dry up when it comes to Turks themselves. To an extent, this is understandable. He is at least partially right when he says that there are two Turkeys, a "soft one" and a "hard one": any reporter with a conscience finds shuttling back and forth between tourist-laden Istanbul and new excavations of ten-year-old mass graves in Cizre a morally disorienting experience. De Bellaigue doesn' t seem to have had much luck with the Turks he met in Varto either. The three snide, slovenly, sunflower-seed cracking teachers he shares digs with sound like nasty pieces of work. And then there is the gendarmerie captain, the real

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12 villain of the piece, as "fit and lupine" as he is contemptuously chauvinistic. But do these unhappy meetings really give him the authority to pass judgement, later in the book, on "the casually superior ruminations of the state's administrative class. . that familiar blend of revulsion and pity, refined by three years among the inferior dross of eastern Anatolia, that forms the attitude of Turk towards Kurd"? In the five weeks I spent late in 2007 travelling from village to vi llage across eastern Anatolia, not one of the scores of teachers I met struck me as fitting de Bellaigue' s description of his former rooming mates as "successors to the teachers who ... had beaten children for speaking languages other than Turkish", "the republic's eyes and ears [who] would be expected to inform the authorities of a spike in nationalist sentiment here, a nocturnal visit by a PKK guerri lla there". Instead I found young men and women who, for miserly wages, battled loneliness and prejudices of somebody else's making to perform a difficult job to the best of their abi lities. I recall the way one gallantly and angrily leapt to the defence of a little girl whose tattered shoes I had tactlessly remarked on. Nor am I convinced that it is fair to say that "It may help to look on Varto, in common with thousands of other towns and villages across south-eastern Turkey, as a place under occupation" . There are a lot of troops, but there is a war going on. And while ethnic and political differences undoubtedly do increase the distance between the governors and the

HISTORY & RELIGION

A Kurdish family living in Diyarbakir, Turkey, 2003, having been displaced from their village of Lice in 1992 governed in Kurdish areas, senior civil servants in western Turkish towns - also outsiders - are hardly model men of the people. De Bellaigue's eagerness to throw off the official ideology he claims once to have accepted almost unthinkingly seems to be behind the book' s occasional errors offact. He is right, for instance, to disparage the youthful district governor who denies there are minorities in Turkey, but not for the reasons he implies. A Sunni Muslim country despite its veneer of secularism, Turkey considers only non-Muslims to be minorities. Call it Stockholm syndrome if you will, but Alevis and Kurds don't like being referred to as minor-

ities either. They point out to well-intentioned Europeans who have flown in to sympathize with their plight that "We fought side by side with Sunni Turks to found this country". In many ways, Rebel Land is an accurate portrait of Turkey at the time de Bellaigue was doing his research. The years 2005 to 2007 were very strange indeed. Turkey had just begun European Union accession proceedings. Parliamentarians with a fondness for fisticuffs in the lobbies had settled down like diligent schoolchi ldren to pass one liberalizing law after another. And then suddenly, almost overnight, the country was engu lfed in malevolence. The streets seemed to be filled

with lynch mobs. A group of ultranationalist lawyers nobody had ever heard of opened dozens of insult cases against prominent liberals, triggering hate campaigns that led to Orhan Pamuk's exile and the Armenian-Turkish journalist Hrant Dink's murder on a crowded Istanbul street. Another lawyer sauntered into the High Court and gunned down a judge. Three hundred miles to the east, a mob of youths tortured a German pastor and two Turkish converts to death. De Bellaigue's bugbear, Yusuf Halacoglu, the nonentity in charge of Turkey's state-run History Foundation, made headlines with comments about how, "unfortunately", many Alevis were Armenian converts, while the "'uncircumcised" PKK hadn't even had the decency to convert to Islam. Small wonder Rebel Land is so pessimistic in its conclusions. True, these people and their minority ideology haven't gone away. But a sign ificant number of them are now in custody awaiting trial , some for membership of a group that prosecutors say was trying to trigger military intervention. The rest have sunk into oblivion. The novelist Alev Alatli once joked that Turkey was more difficult to predict than Schroedinger's Cat. But Turkey today does seem an infinitely sunnier place. The Turks who make up the majority of its population as well as being in many ways the truly forgotten people in Western accounts of these lands - deserve a little more slack than they are given in Christopher de Bellaigue's otherwise excellent book.

ＭｾＬ

hi s English translation of a littleknown apocryphal Infancy Gospel is taken from the Armenian version of a probable but otherwise unknown Syriac original. Apocryphal texts were initially presented as divinely inspired but were later deemed heretical by the early Church Fathers, and thus not part of the inspired canonical texts of the New Testament, most of which were established by the mid-second century. A reader of these apocryphal texts will find considerable differences by comparison with the familiar texts of the canonical New Testament. In addition to presenting new stories and narratives, they can on occasion show the Holy Family and the apostles in a different light: uncaring and even vindictive. There are also strong hints of Gnosticism. Gnosticism is a term from the early Christian period, referring to a philosophic movement starting most likely with Zoroastrian dualism. It was developed through Hellenistic philosophy. Gnosticism marched to a drumbeat slightly different from that of mainstream early Christian ity. Apocryphal writings often lack the humility and gentleness so common in the canonical New Testament; this is especially so in The Armenian Gospel of the Infancy , where the writing appears to be powered by a different engine, as if composed by imitators who misunderstood Christ's message. The apocryphal gospels include material attributed to Sts Peter, Thomas and Philip, among others. To give an example of their peculiarity, note the final verse in the Gospel of Thomas, verse 114: "Simon Peter said to them, ' Make Mary leave us, for females are not worthy of life'. Jesus said, 'Look, I shall guide her to make her male. So that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every female who makes herself

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Jesus's dark side JOHN A. C. GREPPIN THE ARMENIAN GOSPEL OF THE INFANCY With three early versions of the Protoevangelium of lames Translated by Abraham Terian I 89pp. Oxford University Press. £63 (US $140). 9780 19 954 1560

male will enter the Kingdom of Heaven '''. The other apocryphal books have simi lar surprises. The Armenian Gospel of the Infancy, which includes a solid commentary by Abraham Terian to complement his translation, tells the story, in considerable detail , of Jesus's infancy, childhood and early manhood. There are two principal Armenian manuscripts, one called "the shorter", and the other "the longer". Terian's translation is from a collation of both with reference to other small scraps sti ll floating around. There is little doubt that it was taken from a Syriac rather than a Greek original since the Armenian

translation reveals clear Semitic syntactic structures, especially in possessive and adjectival structures, for example, "sleep of depth" rather than "deep sleep". Another apocryphal Infancy Gospel attributed to Thomas has long been known, but is so brief that it could only be a skeletal reference for the Syriac text from which the Armenian is translated. The Syriac- Armenian text begins with an idiosyncratic description of the union of Mary and Joseph. Mary is a maidservant at the Temple in Jerusalem, to which she has been given by a couple,

Joachim and Anne, who are pious and charitable. When Mary reaches the age of fifteen , she is married off to a pious widower named Joseph. Before the marriage is consummated, Joseph has to go away to do a carpentry job. Some months later, he returns to find the young virgin Mary unmistakably pregnant. Joseph accepts Mary's explanation for her pregnancy (modelled after what is found in Luke 1:34-5), and Jesus is soon born. The Magi are there, and they see Jesus as an extraordinary figure, as do others present: kings and princes. When Jesus is two, an angel tells Joseph and Mary to flee Herod and go to Egypt. Here we get proof of Jesus's great powers: at Cairo there is a city gate which has statues of lions, bears, leopards and an eagle. As the infant Jesus approaches the gate, all the beasts begin to growl and roar; later, in the temple of Apollo, other clay and metal animals cry out that a great king is coming. These stories are nowhere mentioned in the canonical New Testament. Shortly afterwards, Jesus miraculously raises 182 people from the dead: those who died when the pagan temple crashed down. All have come to know of his powers. Later, and rather oddly, the young Jesus is blamed for the accidental death of a child with whom he has been playing. He brings the boy back to life so that the victim can say he was not harmed by Jesus . But Jesus keeps him alive for only three hours, and then tells him to "Sleep forever until the next resurrection" , showing a curious indifference. Elsewhere, when boys at play brush against him and knock him over, he

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strikes them all dead, only later relenting. On another occasion, Jesus is accused of causing the death of a three-year-old boy, and brought to trial. Having proclaimed his innocence, he urges the court to come with him to find the corpse. They do; Jesus brings the boy back to life long enough for him to say that Jesus had nothing to do with this; this being done, Jesus turns to the boy and says "sleep henceforth" . He falls asleep at once. In another section, a boy bothers Jesus, and Jesus blows a puff of air in his face , and causes him to become blind. The blinded child shrieks and cries, and Jesus returns his sight. These miracles are curious, and have little in common with those of the canonical gospels. Furthermore, Jesus is given teachers at the age of six, but shuns them because they cannot answer his questions about God. Elsewhere, Jesus meets a sick man. The man has heard of Jesus and asks him for a cure. Jesus demands gold, silver and precious gems. Jesus relents after the man renounces his pagan Roman beliefs and accepts belief in the Trinity. The brief final chapter tells the story of Jesus between the ages of fifteen and thirty. Jesus performs the standard miracle of healing; coming to the river Jordan he is baptized; the Father testifies from above that Jesus "is my beloved Son" . All in all, The Armenian Gospel of the Infancy speaks in a voice somewhat as we hear in the canonical gospels, but has an undertone that is sometimes frightening and cruel. It is clear that the writers are Christians but, as is true in the early phases of any religion, the dogma is in continuous flux. Abraham Terian ' s translation is mellifluous, and his commentary elaborate, reflecting wide study and knowledge. All libraries with a substantial ecclesiastical collection wi ll need this book.

PHILOSOPHY lthough Genevieve Lloyd's Providence Lost is almost entirely devoted to relating the history of the concept of providence, from the Ancient Greeks to Hegel, its primary purpose is to attain a better understanding of contemporary culture. For she believes that many of the modern world's most damaging moral and political discontents are engendered by the ways in which the withdrawal of the very idea of providence from secular public discourse has reshaped our patterns of thinking and living. What is doing the damage is thus the absence of something rather than its presence; hence the need to investigate the past, in order to see what we currently lack. But Lloyd is well aware that concepts mutate over time: since their significance is partly constituted by the other concepts with which they are con figured and the broader social and cultural contexts they inhabit, their meaning shifts as those configurations and contexts evolve. Accordingly, her historical narrative is genealogical in form - it discloses "providence" as a site of shifting and contested significance rather than a notion whose identity can be captured in a neat and timeless definition. This makes for a sophisticated and interesting exercise in the history of ideas; but it also creates difficulties for Lloyd ' s primary diagnostic claim. For when we come to her final chapter on the ills of contemporary culture, those genealogical complexities make it difficult to be clear exactly what it is (which idea of providence, in which specific configuration with which other ideas) whose absence is supposed to be so profoundly damaging. Lloyd's narrative begins with Euripides, in whose plays she sees a transition from conceiving providence as a matter of divine concern and provision for human needs to conceiving of it as a higher necessary order (a mode of cosmic justice) to which even the gods should conform. The latter conception is central to the Stoic vision of the universe, and provides a bulwark against fear and vulnerability in a world subject to chance; but it is rejected by the Epicureans, who found an exhilarating freedom in the rejection of cosmic design and necessity, arguing that only the repudiation of divine providence allows us to hold ourselves responsible for what we do. And in a certain sense, this debate is re-enacted at the threshold of modernity, although in a distinctively Christian key, by Descartes and Spinoza. For Descartes also makes the notion of human freedom central, although he recasts it in terms of the will, understood on the model of divine will that he inherits from Augustine; and he sees our ethical responsibilities as a matter of working out the proper limits and orientation of that will in a world that operates in accordance with its own necessities, although

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To bear necessity STEPHEN MULHALL Genevieve Lloyd PROVIDENCE LOST 369pp. Harvard University Press.

£22.95 (US $29.95). 9780674031531

sian way of conceiving of these matters. According to Lloyd, the concept of providence allowed Descartes to draw a clear distinction between things that depend on human will and those that depend on the will of God, and it is this that makes bearable his emphasis on our responsibility for the orientation and exercise of our wills. The realm of our responsibility could thus be known to have determinable limits, and our vulnerability to forces lying outside those limits could be accepted in the knowledge that the world's unfolding was ultimately in God's control. But in late modernity, while the Cartesian concept of the will is ever more firmly entrenched, the associated concept of providence goes missing. And its retreat to the domain of seminary and sermon leaves us with a dual legacy of unlimited responsibility (who knows where, if at all , the reach of our

conclusion as an inherently ambivalent exemplar of what it might mean freely to accept necessity, as she strives to make something meaningful out of the ultimate necessity her own death. The elegant sweep and imaginative range of Lloyd' s narrative are undeniable, and they sometimes combine to deeply impressive effect - particularly in her pivotal assessment of Descartes' s attempts to accommodate the reality of the passions in his epistolary exchanges with Princess Elizabeth. Some qualms arise, even so, about the structure of her account. It isn't obvious that the Ancient Greek and Roman background to the Descartes-Spinoza controversy requires as much coverage as it is given (roughly half of the book); deism is barely mentioned, despite its enthusiasm for the idea of a law-governed realm of nature adapted to divine purpose that seems analogous to Lloyd's preferred Stoic model; and the claim that providence (in the guise of a purposive understanding of history) drops out of the philosophical scene after Hegel seems to overlook a variety of figures from Karl Marx to contemporary liberals such as Francis Fukuyama. But it is Lloyd's diagnosis of modernity's ills that raises the most fundamental questions - partly, perhaps,

"The Sacrifice ofIphigenia" (1757) by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo powers and our accountability, both individual and collective, might run out?), and unassuageable anxiety about the ways in which

always within the hroader context of God's

uncontrollahle

purposes. By contrast, Spinoza (despite his rejection of neo-Stoic visions) argues that freedom and necessity in fact converge; that all things happen of necessity, and that ethical wisdom is a matter of knowingly participating in the necessities that govern the whole of nature, of which we are merely one part. He thereby recasts providence as immanent, rather than as the expression of a divine will that stands outside both human nature and the natural order. But the fate of modernity was fixed by the fact that the basic parameters of its thought and practice were set by the Carte-

necessities might radically determine the trajectory and the value of our lives. Lloyd ends by wondering whether Spinoza - the route not taken into modernity - might provide a viable alternative here. Too much of his thinking remains alien to us, she admits ; but we might nevertheless learn from his central idea of shaping a life in accordance with necessity, and aim to take delight in the mind's fulfilment of its own nature insofar as it exercises its ability to perceive how nature must be, and to adapt its modes of existence accordingly. Euripides' Iphigenia is offered to us in

natural

contingencies

and

because that analysis is squeezed into the final thirty pages of her book, and so never receives the detailed elaboration that its significance for her purposes would merit. To begin with , why should the absence of a concept of divine providence make it impossible to draw a principled distinction of any kind between matters that depend on the human will and those that do not? Various wholly naturalistic accounts of human beings could surely view the world we inhabit as an independently existing domain, with its events unfolding in accordance with natural laws whose validity we might understand and exploit, but which represent external necessities from the perspective of our will. Furthermore, even if a belief in divine

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13 providence did mitigate our anxieties about our vulnerability to the world's vicissitudes, one might still regard it as a delusory source of false comfort, and the sense of exposure that results from its rejection as an all-toonecessary dose of reality. Indeed, in the work of a resolutely naturalistic philosopher such as Bernard Williams (whom Lloyd approvingly cites), Christian religious and ethical thought works to repress the reality of moral luck by distorting our conception of human agency, rather than being particularly wellplaced to accommodate it. Moreover, can Spinoza really provide even the beginnings of a viable alternative to these supposed ills? On Lloyd' s own account, Spinoza's way of dovetailing freedom and necessity exploits the thought that the distinction between them breaks down in the specific case of God (for whom will and intellect are inseparable). But if this really is Spinoza' s model for human attempts to conform their actions to the necessity of nature, its availability presupposes a theological perspective that Lloyd herself has no desire to resuscitate. Going behind Spinoza to the Stoics will not help matters here, either. For their idea of necessity embodies an essentially premodern notion of cosmic justice that looks equally inhospitable for her secular purposes. Once removed from either conceptual configuration , however, Lloyd's non-Cartesian moral alternative becomes hard to distinguish from the guidance offered by Niebuhr's Serenity Prayer - "Lord, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference". This may indeed be the beginning of wisdom; but if adhering to it counts as accepting providence, then that concept has surely shed much of its distinctive substance. More generally, we might ask: how much work is ultimately being done in Lloyd's analysis by the supposedly specific concept of "providence", as opposed to a correlative concept (at once more general and more complex) of religious belief? Insofar as it acquires concrete content through her narrative, "providence" appears to indicate either an idea of divine concern for human wellbeing in the world, or a notion of the natural order as intrinsically meaningful or purposive. But then the descriptive dimension of her genealogy - the claim that what Charles Taylor calls the "social imaginary" of modern culture is determined by the loss of the concept of providence - doesn't seem to involve anything more specific or controversial than the claim that we live in a secular age. And its evaluative component - the claim that, lacking any providential grounding, secular modernity's conception of the autonomous human will is simultaneously prone to huhristic expansions of its realm

of proper operation, and to paranoid interpretations of its vulnerability to contingency simply restates familiar elements of mainstream Christian critiques of putatively postChristian culture. Given that her tentative invocation of Spinoza and the Stoics fails to identify any genuinely viable way of mitigating our unhappy condition, Genevieve Lloyd's genealogy of "providence" threatens to dissolve into one more genuinely pained but ultimately unrevealing characterization of life in a decisively disenchanted universe.

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Dostoevsky's endgame 'Astounding' rumours about the fate of the characters in the sequel to The Brothers Karamazov - which was never written ome of the longstanding difficulties with The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky' s last and greatest fiction , stem from the fact that the novel is unfinished. The preface "From the Author", published with the first serial instalment (1879), unequivocally introduces a story to be followed in time by a sequel. Without the first novel, we are told, " much in the second novel would be incomprehensible", and the reverse is equally true, for the author proceeds characteristically with paradox, mystification, loose ends and vague foreshadowings. The future hero Alyosha, a reclusive eccentric living in a provincial monastery, is in time to become "a social activist", perhaps even a vitally focal figure of his epoch. However, the author suddenly died in early 1881 , from tuberculosis complicated by emphysema, having completed one novel hut leaving no draft or notes for the sequel. This poses insurmountable problems of interpretation for most readers, who hastily glance at the preface and lose sight of the projected sequel as they try to assimilate a massive novel full of cunning ambiguities and ingenious philosophical riddles. The problems were as real for some of the greatest intellectual figures of the early twentieth century. By the age of forty , Wittgenstein had read the book "an extraordinary number of times", certainly not for entertainment but in search of meaning that eluded him. Freud resourcefully contrived a measure of design in the Karamazov "family romance", but this was distorted by his ignorance of the author's own personality and complex medical history. Despite his extravagant admiration of the Russian writer, the father of psychoanalysis wryly suggested that Dostoevsky is in one respect a sadist: the way he treats his readers. Freud rightly saw that serious illness was at the dark heart of the Karamazov drama. (The family name connotes "a taint of black guilt".) However, he paid little attention to Alyosha, the author' s " main albeit future hero", declaring that he was the exception, the healthy sibling. In fact Alyosha's pathology, in the clinical understanding of the period, is the most severe mental affliction of them all. He presents a textbook case of hysteria, then and since antiquity considered "analogous to epilepsy" , especially in all the complex psychiatric aspects of the ancient morbus sacer - from which the author suffered all of his adult life. His writing is elaborately invested with his own symptoms, folk traditions, and the progressive medical literature of his age in Russian, German and French. (The range of his sources is indicated in my own Dostoevsky and the Healing Art, 1985.) In the medical history of the era, aspects of which are only now just emerging, one finds key symptoms that explain the puzzling behaviour of Alyosha and endow him with rich potentials of character that suggest a political destiny in revolutionary Russia. To

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JAMES L. RICE these discoveries we shall return below. Readers bring fabulous assumptions about Dostoevsky to their experience of his fiction , above all the belief that his innate piety blossomed into spiritual grace, thanks to an epiphany and "conversion" in Siberia - where he lived for a decade as a convict, sentenced (at first to death) for seditious conspiracy. There is no evidence of a conversion, and until some firm facts can be adduced, readers are best advised to consider him a secular thinker of exceptional intelligence and often bawdy wit, a rational military engineer by training, appalled but also obsessed by the atrocities of child abuse and sexual violence in "God's world" . And here I believe Freud got it right ("Dostoevsky and Parricide" , 1928): Dostoevsky was incapahle of overlooking a single difficulty to which religion leads.

Russian Orthodox spirituality). This novel , he says, is only a beginning, for the author died without finishing it; one major episode is brought to a conclusion, "but the matter of first interest, the entanglement of ideas, never gets anywhere" (my italics). Major characters endure abnormal mental states, yet also remain "intelligible and very recognizably human". Indeed, as is typical of all Dostoevsky's heroes, the Karamazov brothers suffer from forms of neurological taint and insanity - but only intermittently, until they meet their fate. These characters succumb to madness, suicide, Siberia: but Alyosha remains at the end, to face his destiny, uncertain whether it may be for good or evil. His bonding with the adolescent boys in the village, whose leader Kolya is unmistakably a future radical, points the way to the hero's role in the unwritten sequel.

Dostoevsky discussed his general plan for

Maria Schell and Yul Brynner in The Brothers Karamazov (1957), directed by Richard Brooks Unencumbered by the subsequent century of speculation and hearsay about Dostoevsky, in 1915 a young Edmund Wilson read The Brothers Karamazov with a profoundly lucid, insightful and accurate response. The novel (probably in Constance Garnett's translation of 1912) was thoughtfully chosen by a friend, as a curio by an author not yet in vogue in the West, unlikely to be known to the young scholar, then only nineteen years old. His "pithy dictum" is a useful guide to reading the novel, though none of the suspense is thereby lost. The book, he says, is a consciously calculated satire on the Russian people (and not, be it noted, a celebration of

the Karamazov sequel with a few people close to him, on different occasions with his

wife Anna Grigorievna, and the eminent publisher Aleksei Suvorin (a brooding and devoted friend who was later also a confidant of other complex writers, including Yasily Rozanov and Anton Chekhov). The author's concept found its way not only into their diaries and memoirs published after the Revolution, but also, through rumour " in Petersburg literary circles" , into the front-page report of an ephemeral Odessa daily newspaper on May 26, 1880 - when Book Ten of The Brothers Karamazov had yet to appear. The anonymous correspondent had attended the

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author' s public reading of bewildering excerpts from the forthcoming instalment. Despite great admiration for Dostoevsky' s genius, the critic complained that most of his characters were mental cases, who sometimes appeared to communicate by psychic means. Rumour in the tsarist capital had it that Alyosha would become the village schoolmaster, and by obscure "psychic processes in his soul" would arrive at "the idea of assassinating the tsar" (ideya 0 tsareubiistve). Although the Novorossiiskii Telegraf had a circulation of 6,000 and subscribers as far-flung as Kiev, Moscow, Petersburg, Warsaw and Paris, this astounding remark never reached the authorities. It tallies exactly with the diary of Suvorin published forty-three years later (1923), which directly quotes the novelist on Alyosha's future: "He would he arrested for a political crime. He would be executed" - very nearly the fate of the author himself in his youth. In the sequel there might have been, of course, any number of plots and paths to such a tragic outcome. In one plausible version, Alyosha retreats to the monastery as a clandestine revolutionary. The surest proof that The Brothers Karamazov was conceived with such a denouement in store is the very name Karamazov: it is very close to that of Dmitry Karakozov, whose point-blank shot at Tsar Alexander II on April 4, 1866, missed its target but heralded an era of terrorism in Russian politics. Karakozov was publicly executed in Petersburg on September 3, 1866. His deed, incidentally, had interrupted serialization of Crime and Punishment - its hero another deranged student dropout with murderous "Napoleonic" ambitions. The Karamazov plot unfolds at the end of August, 1866, so that Dmitry Karamazov's arrest for the murder of his father occurs at about dawn on September 3, precisely when in real life the would-be assassin Karakozov was led to the scaffold. Freud was, again, intuitively correct in equating the psychology of parricide and regicide in Dostoevsky ' s creative world. In the Karamazov courtroom scenes, the prosecutor makes the same point by citing other recent cases in which murders undermined authority in the social order. The novelist's orientation in theories of the (pre-Freudian) unconscious, and parapsychology of every stripe, explain a good deal in the behaviour of his fictive characters. Suffice it to cite a treatise he admired, by Or. C. G. Carus (Psyche, 1846, expanded 1851), a Swiss medical counsellor to the King of Saxony. Carus held that all human communication is fourfold, the unconscious and conscious minds both in touch with each of the interlocutor's levels of perception, not to mention signals from the animal and plant kingdoms and the cosmos (pace Bakhtin, whose reductive schemata are simply nowhere to be found in Dostoevsky's worldview). In 1852, Carus also published a pamphlet on "psychic epidemics of man-

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COMMENTARY kind" that generate revolutions (for example 1848). This theoretical background is indispensable to the putative Karamazov sequel, which was to resume Alyosha' s saga in the author's immediate and terminal present, 1880-81. The novelist died on January 28, 1881. The Tsar's actual assassination with dynamite bombs by the People' s Will group occurred a month later, March I, after at least six known attempts. The Russian people experienced the terrorist acts precisely as a psychic pandemic. Readers of today and indeed every era have been hard put to grasp the meaning of Alyosha's hysteria, although Dostoevsky meticulously establishes a hysteria motif at the outset: among the peasantry, in the hero's late mother, and in the girl he seems destined to marry (Lise), then in the hero's own convulsive seizures precisely like his mother's, in his abrupt character change towards "evil" (lust for the Oedipally compromised Grushenka, who also entices his father and brother Dmitry), and sublimely towards the Good in an ecstatic visionary hallucination (Book Seven, 4). In the first edition this climax concluded Part One (of two) in the novel we know, with its projected sequel never to be. The exceptional difficulty with "hysteria" in our day, apart from the recent vogue in feminist literary scholarship, arises because the psychiatric aspect of the convulsive disorder ("hysterical character") was overshadowed after Dostoevsky ' s lifetime by the sensational career of Charcot, then in the next generation by Janet, by Freud's fumbling (and misdiagnosis of Dostoevsky himself as hysteric), and at last by the termination of "hysteria" as a diagnostic category, around 1970. (See the richly documented medical history in Approaching Hysteria , 1995, and Hysterical Men, 2008, by Mark Micale.) I was intrigued by Dostoevsky's late acquaintance with Or Ivan Pavlovich Merzheyevsky (hitherto unknown in literary history), the president of the Petersburg Society of Psychiatrists from 1880, and, thanks to his postdoctoral studies in Europe, an early disciple of Or Richard von Krafft-Ebing of Graz, who was just launching his (later notorious) work on sexual perversion , Psychopathia sexualis (I 886). This subject fascinated Dostoevsky in his last decades. Krafft-Ebing published a massive " straight" textbook of psychiatry in three volumes (I 879-80), which was at once translated into Russian with commentaries by Merzheyevsky (1881-82). Volume Two contains a concise clinical overview of "Der hysterische Charakter" that elucidates all the multifarious complexities of Alyosha's personality, positive and negative, including the mysterious lapses of memory and moral commitment that are pivotal in the novel. A virtual template of the volatile young hero, it appeared just as the novelist (alerted hy the Petersburg medical community) arrived at Bad Ems, to begin drafting Book Seven ("Alyosha"). The most striking clinical symptom is "visionary ecstasy - analogous to epilepsy", and it invites comparison with Prince Myshkin from The Idiot and with the author himself. In the early drafts, Alyosha is indeed sometimes called "the idiot" . The details are complicated, of course, and exactly how the hero's pathology would have accommodated his destiny can only be imagined. The identical problem was posed, without a solution,

by the earlier major fictions in the sagas of Raskolnikov, Myshkin and Stavrogin, which ended respectively in Siberia, a Swiss asylum , and suicide. Prince Myshkin agonizes over the bifurcation and "dialectic" of his own psyche, and the novelist himself on the one hand saw his post-ictal paranoid hallucinations as " mystical horror" , yet also sought to assure his young bride that the terrors of epilepsy were " merely mechanical". (The couple defied the medical wisdom of their time, and Russian folk superstition, by having three children.) Alyosha too, as he lurches between his first encounters with "evil" and "good", advances on that thorny path "mechanically" (an adverb thrice deployed), yet heroically. Not the least part of Dostoevsky's greatness lies in his conviction that epilepsy, fused in his own identity as a kind of alter ego, was no obstacle to action or heroism: he extolled one historic figure with the falling sickness "who even overturned half the world in his own way". Here Dostoevsky was referring to the Prophet Muhammad, whose visionary experiences Western detractors had for centuries ascribed to epilepsy. (This subversive identification with Muhammad followed the example of Pushkin, whose militantly revolutionary poem "The Prophet" Dostoevsky declaimed at the Pushkin celebration of 1880.) It might be objected (and has been) that a medical-textbook "template" for Alyosha's behaviour smacks of something ominously deterministic, contrary to the author's vaunted belief in free will. But in his world, pathology only lends an exacerbating urgency and suspense to the frenetic tradition from which his art brings forth such strange fruit. Alyosha's first hysterical attack occurs in the ghostly pine grove outside the monastery hermitage (the site of dead Fr Zosima's cell). Alyosha changes character profoundly, echoing Ivan ' s cynical rejection of "God's world", declaring himself "evil and base", breaking his funeral fasting for the late Zosima, and lusting after the "cannibalistic beast" of a woman, Grushenka, whose erotic involvement with his father and brother Dmitry has set the murderous plot in motion. His last hysterical seizure is followed by ecstatic religious hallucinations, and the conviction that a vague but guiding Idea ("of some kind, somehow") has taken control. He rises up no longer weak but "a fighter for ever more" - with no foe yet in sight. Now Dostoevsky felt free to defer explaining the medical problems of this "main albeit future hero", and to postpone resolving the dual nature of

his personality until the romantic and revolutionary peripetia of the sequel. Meanwhile, the author could dwell on the trauma endured by his other characters, the legal outcome of a capital crime, nuances of the Karamazov family taint and their collective guilt, with ramifications in the body politic. A curious private letter, written from Bad Ems when the author was drafting and serializing Book Seven, gives us a welcome, rather comic grasp of the secular craftsman executing his creative plan under the usual duress from the Russian civic and ecclesiastical censors, and from the remote but continuing threat of a return trip to Siberia and ruin for his family. Now he had just been cautioned by Konstantin Pobedonostsev, Procurator of the Holy Synod, the lay agency appointed by the tsar to initiate excommunications, coordinate calls to arms from the pulpit, and generally to fret about public morality in the Russian Empire. Book Five of The Brothers Karamazov had appeared, Book Six - a profile of the monk Zosima - would be published in a week. The author hastened to agree: he had not yet provided an answer to all of Ivan's "atheistic views" - "that negative side". Hence his great "trepidation" just then, lest his indirect refutation prove "inadequate" . Artistic necessity had "obliged" him to portray Zosima as a humble figure "albeit inwardly exalted". Moreover, he had been " involuntarily forced" by those same artistic demands to portray this monk as full of "triviality", full of "comicality", his teachings "absurdly rapturous" - "in order not to violate artistic realism". Pobedonostsev, a person of limited intellect yet dangerous, was thus cunningly told, in so many words, that if he did not sense the inward and spiritual exaltation of comical, trivial Zosima, then the inadequacy was only his, because the artist had obeyed a still more exalted though arcane Law of Creativity. Evidently Dostoevsky's flimflam succeeded, for he remained at liberty, free to finish his novel as he wished. Ivan would shout to the public in the courtroom that "everyone wants to kill his father! " , and at the finale Alyosha, aware that a devil's spawn resides within him too, tells his beloved schoolboys: "Maybe later on we shall all become evil men. On his deathbed, Dostoevsky had the parable of the Prodigal Son read over him. This alone might caution us to regard him as a secular artist of subversive bent. But a full revisionist account waits to be given by the coming generations, when the more than 15,000 closely printed pages of his collected

At a Loss At a loss for the word invisible I tried bare, And the pictures all tumbled out Into the endless inconspicuous air. They floated up, away, and out of sight. My eyes followed, but could not see Because of the abundance of light. Strange how a word can turn a mood round, Forgetfulness bringing its own reward. The stars displace the sun without a sound.

ANTHONY THWAITE

TLS JANUARY 1 2010

works have been fully assimilated by brave new readers. A few symptomatic episodes will serve to close this account, perhaps to suggest a way to proceed. Dostoevsky deployed in real life as well as fiction a series of atrocities and sexual perversions seemingly to "test" his readers, friends and enemies, perhaps as pathological aggression and defence. Indeed, his doctor and close friend Yanovsky, likewise his erstwhile colleague and posthumously authorized biographer Strakhov, are in complete agreement that his intermittent outbursts of paranoia (mnitel'nost ') were his dominant personality trait. Dostoevsky told Strakhov that his primary creative method was introspection, which involved from the first a certain pathological ambience, not only informed by his epilepsy, but in myriad hypochondriacal modes, announced by his Underground Man (in a fiction almost overlooked by critics of his day): "I am a man who is sick ... I'm an evil man. An unattractive man am I". Strakhov, who was and remained a uniquely valued friend of Leo Tolstoy, was at first a journalistic co-worker of Dostoevsky, and helped him in recovery after grand mal seizures, so knew him in his severest bouts of "mystical horror" (as the writer recorded these episodes in his notebooks). Later he also bore witness, in his correspondence with Tolstoy, to the frequent reports of child molestation and other sexual perversions that Dostoevsky habitually purveyed, sometimes even about himself. Recently, one more such anecdote has surfaced, purposefully suppressed (in 1936) by Russian archivists of the Soviet era, and sufficiently grotesque to make scholars in the West now also wince (Novyi mir, 1992, no 8). A brilliant young university graduate, Evgeny Opochinin, often walked with Dostoevsky in Petersburg and applied his stenographic talents to recording their conversations in 1880, when the novelist was serializing The Brothers Karamazov. One night Opochinin, who thanks to Dostoevsky became the pri vate secretary of a famous bibliophile, was horrified as the novelist told him about a Petersburg necrophile who scanned the newspapers for open-coffin funerals of adolescent beauties, to attend uninvited and plant very long farewell kisses on the lips of their corpses. The smell, he said, with a Baudelairean flair, did not offend him: it was like "the scent of pressed flowers". With the raconteur's coaching, Opochin in exclaimed that such monsters have no rightful place in human society, whereupon Dostoevsky countered with the ethical difficulties of that punitive position. (The episode recalls The Brothers Karamazov, in Ivan's manipulative bludgeoning of Alyosha with the atrocities of child abuse, and in the smell of corruption from Zosima' s corpse that shakes A Iyosha' s faith.) At the close of this performance, Dostoevsky cited without comment the verdict of Strakhov (whom he often encountered in the small world of Petersburg literati, though they had fallen out years before) apropos the amorous necrophiliac: "Strakhov even tells me: ' All of that is your fantasy. You ' ve invented such people, and they give no peace even to you " '.

A longer and more and fully documented version of this essay appeared last year in Slavic Review.

16

COMMENTARY

hristmas Day is as quiet as it gets in San Francisco, especially now, before dawn. On almost any other day I'd have already heard the streetcar rattle and squeal as it emerged from the Sunset Tunnel, only about sixty yards away, the first of the day, round about 4.30 or 5 am, making sure the track is clear all the way out to the ocean. And on any ordinary Friday, the garbage trucks, with their hydraulic whine and thumping, would already be at it not far off. But not today. It has become my custom on Christmas Day, when circumstances allow, to leave America behind and go visit the Orient, by way of Golden Gate Park; enjoy a lunch there, take in a movie, then repair to the sea, where I do not contemplate the year that has just passed by, nor my sins and inadequacies in the course of that year, nor the million bicyclists, nor even the belching satanic mills 5,000 miles over the horizon. I don't really think of anything at all, just take in the heaving, coppery waves and sea air, the little Snowy Plovers hopping about. In how many cities this size on earth can you go out to the ocean late on a beautiful winter's day and enjoy the sunset nearly all by yourself? As I lie in bed planning my day, I can hear the first street car of the day out of the tunnel - 6.54 am - and with it the first light. H. L. Mencken, who complained about much in America, found little to complain about in San Francisco, a town he visited in the 1920s. " What fetched me instantly" , he wrote, on his first visit here, "was the subtle but unmistakable sense of escape from the United States." In a subsequent essay, he wrote: "I confess to a great weakness for San Francisco. It is my favorite American town .... It looks out, not upon Europe, like New York, nor upon the Bible Belt, like Chicago, but upon Asia, the ancient land and the

Chinese from Hong Kong and the Mainland around 1965, the area became markedly Asian in character. Some 50 per cent of home-owners in the Richmond District are now Chinese. You want good eats of the Asian variety, this is the part of town to find them. On the way to the Dragon River, a Hakka Chinese restaurant, I pass a Jack-in-the-Box franchise with a handful of Caucasians sullenly picking at their french fries and burgers or whatever else was available that day on "Jack's Value Menu". I can understand why people eat that drek in Wyoming where there's nothing better to be had, but why here, where there are more marvellous, inexpensive restaurants per block than bars per street in Killarney? Hell-o, the Dragon River' s open , the woks are hot and the noodles are flying. Heaven. If I committed a heinous crime - say I dropped a piano from a helicopter on to Senator Joe Lieberman ' s head while he was walking down K Street, on his way to lunch with a health-care lobbyist - and was asked what I wanted for my final meal before facing the electric chair, I would almost certainly say, "Hakka wine-soaked, meatstuffed bean curd". And ten minutes later, here it is, coming my way. I tell you what, I was already having a merrier Christmas than Tiny Tim. I don't know when's the last time I had my Hakka bean curd. A long while, to be sure. And it was a long while since I'd been in a movie theatre, at least a year. I had a choice between Invictus and An Education. I don't know about you , but I find Clint the auteur more than a little strenuous going. I had

planned my day in advance, so had read up on both movies. As you will probably by now know, An Education is about a bright, very pretty sixteen-year-old girl from Twickenham who is seduced by a significantly older, Jewish con artist. Although I found the subject matter, well, rather inappropriate for Christmas fare, I decided on the latter. It just so happens that the last movie I went to was also about a young student, played by Penelope Cruz, having an affair with a much older man, her professor, played by Ben Kingsley. I don't recall now if his character was Jewish, as well. Certainly looked it, though, with that big honker. I had a date on that occasion with a woman close in age to myself. She clearly would have preferred seeing another feature that afternoon at the Cineplex and made that known, but I insisted that Ben Kingsley was a great favourite of mine. She muttered and tsk-tsk' d through the entire movie, presumably disgusted at the folly of older men in their pursuit of young women. It was very distracting. I, on the other hand, who have no opinion on the subject, would put the question to my fellow male or lesbian pedagogues: If you had Penelope Cruz in your Boolean Algebra or Urdu class and she plainly fancied you , would you not, quoting a line from a Frank 0 ' Hara poem, be "practically going to sleep with quandariness"? An Education turned out to be an excellent movie, on balance, I thought. Likewise the sunset out at Ocean Beach, which I just caught after hopping on a Geary bus to the sea: the vast, red molten orb sinking beneath the dark waves. Christmas was now over in Twickenham, and winding down quickly here. It seemed to me more or less safe at this juncture to get on the streetcar and return to America for a cocktail. Mencken, I feel certain, would have expected of me nothing less.

The novel that sets him, stripped of pseudonyms and initials, in the dryish air of reprinted classics, had a slow start. "It is doing everything except pay," he told a friend. Monthly publication may have made the Russell Square reader, who liked known vintages, cautious of mere strangers, though surely it was cheaper to taste the first month's shillingsworth and refuse the rest than to buy the thing in bulk, unsampled. Plainly there were readers who quickened when Amelia and Becky stepped out of Miss Pinkerton ' s academy into Mr. Sedley's coach. There was something new here. The solitary horseman, the lonely and lovely Orphan of many first chapters had been forgone. The Past-and the Regency was as dusty in the eyes of 1847 as Edwardian brilliantine in ours-was after all not a matter of being inside or outside the Tower of London. It was a breathing everyday in which-incredibly-one's parents and grandparents had once a lively, faulty being. The sparkle of life is in the very stones of Chiswick Mall as the Sedley chariot drives away and the Dixonary flies out of the window. It goes on sparkling, catching the light of ordinary days and the shift and break of their shadow, even in moraliz-

ing asides and what might now be called fireside talks. As month followed month readers were drawn in; to sit at Mr. Sedley's well-spread table in Russell Square, to adventure into Hampshire with Sir Pitt Crawley, to enjoy immorally Becky' s triumphs (what a spin of vitality there is in the scene where she hears of Sir Pitt' s death), to regret as immorally her defeats, to hear the sound of revelry by night in Brussels on the eve of Waterloo-does the modern reader think of Byron or of Becky and Jos Sedley and of Amelia "praying for George who was lying on his face, dead, with a bullet through his heart"? Not all his reticences, not even his resolute tilt of the scales against Becky-they keep flying up with her in spite of him-and his care to lay tiresome Emmy at last-at very long last-snugly in the arms of honest Dobbin can quench the life that stirs and lingers, drowses a while and then strikes full and fair just where it should. For the first time a novel had its being wholly in the sphere of common human character and of the event character dictates. We can touch hands with that Regency world and breathe in it as easily as in our own. He has shut some of its cupboards, but he leaves us chinks enough. In this he was at one with the convention of his age on which Victorianism was settling down with voluminous skirts.

C

AUGUST KLEINZAHLER changeless. There is an Asiatic touch in its daily life". Mencken goes on to say that "The town is rich in loafing places - restaurants, theatres, parks. No one seems to work very hard .... Puffs of Oriental air come with the fog. There is nothing European about the way life is lived; the colour is all Asiatic". It' s getting hungrier and meaner among the homeless these days, not a few of whom live in the park. The poor and undomiciled would have been called something else in Mencken's day - bums, tramps, hoboes - but he makes no mention of them. Now it is impossible not to. I decide to keep to the paved trails. One hundred and fifty years ago, this part of San Francisco was called "The Great Sand Bank", nothing here but wind-swept dunes. There are a couple of police cars parked in Sharpe Meadow , out of the ordinary, near the tennis courts when I pass through, before crossing over to the Dahlia Garden, near the big glass Conservatory of Flowers, then past Fuchsia Dell and out by Clarke Gate into the Richmond District. Clement Street, six blocks north of the Park and the heart of the Chinese shopping district in the Inner Richmond, is hopping, Chinese shoppers thronging the sidewalks, every shop open. It looks like downtown Canton on a Saturday, or as I imagine it to be. This augurs well for the Dragon River, my destination on Geary, the next block over, being open. The Chinese began moving into this part of San Francisco when restrictive ordinances were lifted after the Second World War, and with the later influx of

IN NEXT WEEK'S

TLS January 4, 1947

Enter Becky Sharp

Wendy Doniger Sufferings of sacred India Roger Scruton Protect animals and people Jonathan Keates E