The Times Literary Supplement Dec 04, 2009 No. 5566

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Hermione Lee John McGahern back in his place Stephen Abell Nabokov's new-old marvels Matthew Cobb Our relatives the mushrooms Patrick O'Connor Wystan, Ben and the boys DECEMBER 4 2009 No 5566

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THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

Who killed J n Keats?

UK £2.70 USA $5.75

John arnard

Fanny Brawne's bonnet Frances Wilson

ILS Times House, I Pennington Street, London E98 IBS Telephone: 020 7782 5000 Fax: 020 7782 4966 [email protected]

ESSAYS

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Hermione Lee

LlTERAR Y CRITICISM

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Jack Lynch

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

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HISTORY

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Erin Mackie Rakes, Highwaymen, and Pirates - The making of the modern gentleman in the eighteenth century Felipe Fernandez-Armesto W. B. Carnochan Golden Legends - Images of Abyssinia, Samuel Johnson to Bob Marley. Terence Cave, editor Thomas More' s 'Utopia' in Early Modern Europe - Paratexts and contexts Funding for the humanities, Old Mrs Lazibones, Beauteous river, etc George Walden Stephen Kotkin Caroline Finkel

ohn McGahern (below), who died three years ago, left a body of work - novels, plays, short stories - that keeps returning to the same ground, literally a farm in County Leitrim, metaphorically his own life story, as his readers suspected and the publication of his Memoir confirmed. Now a volume of his essays reveals again how autobiographical but at the same time how self-effacing a writer he was; "it brings McGahern", says Hermione Lee, "richly back to life on the page" . A very different novelist, Vladimir Nabokov, also published a non-fiction volume that offered glimpses of some of the sources for his incom-

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THEATRE

12 Terry Eagleton

David Edgar How Plays Work. Peter Gill Apprenticeship

POETRY & MEMOIRS

13 Jon Stallworthy

Adam Zagajewski Eternal Enemies; translated by Clare Cavanagh Tomas Venclova Vilnius - A personal history ; translated by Margot Bettauer Dembo

Matthew Cobb

Donald Rayfield

COMMENTARY

14 John Barnard

AJ

Michael Ruse and Joseph Travis, editors Evolution - The first four billion years. Jonathan Silvertown, editor 99% Ape - How evolution adds up

A sleepless night - Charles Cowden Clarke's letter makes clear how much "sensative-bitterness' Keats fe lt after attacks on him by the critics

ARTS

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Hugo Williams Then and Now

Freelance TLS May 31, 1923 - Forster and Cavafy in Alexandria

Patrick O'Connor

Alan Bennett The Habit of Art (Lyttelton Theatre). Peter Jeffreys, editor The Forster-Cavafy Letters - Friends at a slight angle Taking Woodstock (Various cinemas). Gimme Shelter (Warner Home Video) Bright Star (Various cinemas)

Leo Robson Frances Wilson FICTION

19 Stephen Abell Toby Lichtig Joshua Marcus Tom Bailey Rozalind Dineen Michele Gemelos

Major works by both of these noveli sts suffered critical disfavour, scandal and public opprobrium - and both writers went on to widespread acclaim and success. The critics' attacks on John Keats were so ferocious that his death two years later was blamed on the reviewers of Blackwood's and the Quarterly. Keats himself denied that he had suffered as much at their hands as he did from his own self-criticism; but, argues John Barnard, a letter written by his former teacher Charles Cowden Clarke shows that he was more deeply wounded than "his admirers then, or subsequently, have been willing to admit". Was Fanny Brawne incensed on her suitor's behalf? Or impressed by his "Bright Star" ? We do not know, but in Jane Campion' s film of that name she is a minx with more of a knack for bonnets than sonnets, who, "beautiful, graceful, silly" , shares with Keats "the noisiest kiss in cinema history", according to Frances Wilson.

David Priestland The Red Flag - Communism and the making of the modern world Peter Pringle The Murder of Nikolai Vavilov - The story of Stalin's persecution of one of the twentieth century's greatest scientists Shirine Hamadeh The City's Pleasures - Istanbul in the eighteenth century. Dana Sajdi, editor Ottoman Tulips, Ottoman Coffee Leisure and lifestyle in the eighteenth century. Ates Orga, editor Istanbul - A collection of the poetry of place

NATURAL SCIENCE

parable fictions: the "originals", if you like,

on which the writer bestowed his lavish gifts of transmogrification. The Original of Laura, the novel he was working on when he died in 1977 - or rather the set of index cards on which he had drafted it - has been published to "a mild flurry of' (in Stephen Abell's view) "needless controversy". Nabokov wanted the "novel" burnt after his death ; we should be grateful, Abell says, that his widow and son both disobeyed him.

John McGahern Love of the World - Essays; edited by Stanley van der Ziel

Vladimir Nabokov The Original of Laura - A novel in fragm ents ｇｯｮｾ｡ｬ＠ M. Tavares Jerusalem ; translated by Anna Kushner Horacio Castellanos Moya The She-Devil in the Mirror; translated by Katherine Silver David Vann Legend of a Suicide Anita Shreve A Change in Altitude Victor Lodato Mathilda Savitch

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Thomas Charles-Edwards Katherine Forsyth, editor Studies on the Book of Deer Rebecca RushCorth R. M. Thomson A Descriptive Catalogue of the Medieval Manuscripts of Merton College, Oxford - With a description of the Greek manuscripts by N. G. Wilson David Pearson Ted Striphas The Late Age of Print. Gabrielle WatIing and Sara E. Quay, editors Cultural History of Reading

CLASSICS

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Oliver Taplin

IN BRIEF

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LANGUAGE

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John A. C. Greppin

Derek Bickerton Adam's Tongue - How humans made languages, how language made humans

SOCIAL STUDIES

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Paul Barker

Alain de Botton A Week at the Airport - A Heathrow diary

NB

Anne Carson An Oresteia. Sophocles The Theban Plays - Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone; translated by Ruth Fainlight and Robert J. Littman William T. Rowe China's Last Empire. Dennis McCarthy Here Be Dragons. Juan Goytisolo Juan the Landless. lan Hawkey Feet of the Chameleon. Brian Glanville The Real Arsenal. Bella Millett, translator Ancrene Wisse - Guide for Anchoresses. Peter Graham with Ginette Vincendeau, editors The French New Wave

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This week's contributors, Crossword

32 J. C.

Perambulatory Snyder, 0 ' Hagan' s love letters, The Tartar tartan

Cover picture: John Keals by Charles Armitage Brown, 18 19 © National Portrait Gallery, London; p2 © Dave Hogan/Getty Images; p3 © Wolfgang Kaehler / Corbis; p4 © IIC I Axiom I Getty Images; p5 © Museurnslandschaft Hessen Kassel / The Bridgeman Art Library; p9 © akg-images; pl2 © Evening Standard / Getty Images; pl4 © National Portrait Gallery, London ; pl 7 © Nigel Norrington ; p25 © Donald Cooper I Photostage; p30 © Bethany Clarke The Times Literary Supplement (ISSN 0307661 , USPS 021-626) is published weekly by The Times Literary Supplement Limited, London UK, and di stributed in the USA by OCS America Inc, 49- 27 3 1st Street, Long Island City, NY IIIOI -3 11 3. Periodical postage paid at Long Island City NY and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: please send address corrections to TLS, PO Box 3000, Den vi ll e, NJ 07834, USA

TLS DECEMBER 4 2009

ESSAYS

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A sly twinkle John McGahem showed how art replaces religion, and how writing reveals the spirituality of a lost Ireland hree years after the death of John McGahern at the age of seventytwo, comes, as a slight consolation for the silencing of one of the finest writers of the twentieth century, this collection of his non-fiction. Love of the World contains autobiographical essays, pieces on writing, introductions and reviews. It prints some highly interesting essays, a number of them hitherto unpublished. It brings McGahern richly back to life on the page, and it comes with an eloquent and informed preface by Declan Kiberd. The collection provides a retrospective insight into this extraordinary Irish writer, whose fictional worlds - unlike this big book - were always spare, narrow and contained, but whose imagination was deep and wide. To an almost startling extent, the non-fiction here confirms our sense of how autobiographical the fiction was. We learned that from Memoir, the story of his childhood and youth which McGahern published the year before he died, and we learn it again from these essays, many of which anticipate Memoir. Over and over again, like Michael Moran in Amongst Women , McGahern "walks the fields" of his places and people, his memories and his history, his strong likes and dislikes, his local territory. He was not a fast or a prolific writer. In the 1960s and 70s he published four bleak and daring novels of Irish life, The Barracks (1962) , The Dark (1965), The Leavetaking (1974) and The Pornographer (1979). They dealt with what he called the " moral climate" in which he grew up: "terror of damnation", "the confusion and guilt and plain ignorance that surrounded sex" , the power of the Church, violence and abuses within the family and the Catholic education system. The same themes recur in Memoir and in the autobiographical essays in this book; he was always reworking his life story. All his readers know that he was the child of a gentle, educated woman, a teacher, a devoted mother who wanted him to be a priest, that his father was a bullying sergeant, that he grew up with his siblings during the war on a farm in County Leitrim , near Enniskillen and the border. The death of his mother when he was ten, his unhappy childhood with his father in the harracks, his early reading in the lihrary of eccentric Protestant neighbours, his education with the Presentation Brothers in Carrick-on-Shannon and then, in the 1950s, at St Patrick's College in Drumcondra, his training to be a teacher, his years as a writer in 1960s Dublin, the scandal that drove him out of Ireland, and his later return; these are the key stories of this writer's life. McGahern 's early novels provoked some outrage in Ireland. The Pornographer was a startling book for its time. An essay called "Censorship" recounts (as he does in Memoir) the banning of The Dark in Ireland

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HERMIONE LEE John McGahern LOVE OF THE WORLD Essays Edited by Stanley van der Ziel 448pp. Faber. £20. 9780 571 24511 6

in 1965, and McGahern 's subsequent dismissal from his job as a primary schoolteacher in Dublin. It is a comical but bitter story. While he was teaching, McGahern had married, abroad, a Finnish divorcee, his first wife. The official who dismissed him said: "If it was just the auld book, maybe we might have been able to do something for you, but by going and marrying this foreign woman in a registry office you have turned yourself into an impossible case entirely". McGahern went first to work in London, travelled widely, got

married again, to his life's companion, Madeline Green, and returned with her in the 1970s to farm and write in the same spot in County Leitrim where he grew up. From the 1970s onwards he also wrote plays, and four fine collections of short stories, collected in 1992. His magnificent, sombre novel of Irish family life, Amongst Women , was published in 1990. It begins: "As he weakened, Moran grew afraid of his daughters". That quiet, lethal first sentence tells you this is a writer who knows exactly what he is doing - and what a dark, troubling novel this would be. Michael Moran is a powerful and disappointed man, impotent in the outside world, a domestic tyrant in his own kingdom. The novel is intensely local. The farming cycle controls the shape of the book. Vicious local gossip registers every phase of Moran's life. Old local customs persist. On "Monaghan Day" poor farmers sell stock to rich ones; at Christmas the "wren-

01.12.09 Timbuktu, Mali "Here are great store of doctors, judges, priests and other learned men, that are bountifully maintained at the king's cost and charges. And hither are brought divers manuscripts or written books out of Barbary, which are sold for more money than any other merchandise". The reputation of Timbuktu as a centre of wealth and learning was at its height when Leo Africanus wrote his History and Description of Africa in 1550. In more recent times, the city has become a (Western) byword for inaccessibility, the wealth has disappeared -

but the manuscripts have survived. Now, the scattered collections of literary remains, mostly in Arabic script but in a number of African languages, and dating from as far back as the thirteenth century, have been given a new, climate-controlled home, the library of the Ahmed Baba Institute. The building, financed by the government of South Africa, will house 30,000 manuscripts, including some of the continent's "most important cultural treasures", according to former President Thabo Mbeki.

TLS DECEMBER 4 2009

boys" go from house to house to play at dances; the locals still bury their dead in the old graveyard of the ruined church out on the edge of the sea. All these habits and traditions are found, also, in his autobiographical essays, but more tenderly and nostalgically. Moran is a man of fixed behaviour. Every Monaghan Day for years, until they quarrel , he meets with his old companion-at-arms, to recall their exploits in an IRA flying column , fighting in the Anglo-Irish war of 1919- 21. (Ernie O' Malley, the leader of one such column in Munster, is an important figure in Love of the World, where McGahern is acute about his mixture of quixotic romanticism and manipulative violence). At the end, Moran's coffin is draped in a faded tricolour, and "as the casket stood on the edge of the grave a little man in a brown felt hat, old and stiff enough to have fought with Finn and Oisin", comes out ofthe crowd and with deep respect removes the flag. In an essay called "The Solitary Reader" , McGahern tells an ugly story about an incident at the Booker Prize dinner in 1990, the year Amongst Women was shortlisted. A. N. Wilson called out to the chair of the judges, Kenneth Baker, while he was talking to McGahern: "Do you realize, Mr Baker, that the novel glorifies the IRA?". McGahern comments: "Amongst Women glorifies nothing but life itself. All the violence is internalized within a family , is not public or political; but is not, therefore, a lesser evil". Moran is an embittered failure who detests the crowd of "small-minded gangsters" then running the country, and has no illusions about his part in the history of the Republic: "Don't let anybody fool you. We were a bunch of killers" . He is a gloomy, doggedly pious, short-tempered and brutal man. The novel describes, with alarming quietness, his domination over his second wife, Rose, whom he married so that she could look after his three daughters and his younger son. The older son, the one who got away, has escaped to London. Rose's creative endurance of an impossible marriage - a powerful study of female stoicism - is meshed in with the daughters ' painfully mixed feelings towards their father, and with the sons ' revolt. The family's conspiratorial resistance to their tyrant is wonderfully done, and Moran's dark turbulence is invoked in that grave, measured language which is McGahern 's signature. The light was beginning to fail but he did not want to go into the house. In a methodical way he set out to walk his land, field by blind field .... It was like grasping water to think how quickly the years had passed here. They were nearly gone. It was in the nature of things and yet it brought a sense of betrayal and anger, of never ha ving understood anything much. Instead of using the fields, he sometimes felt as if the fields had used him. Soon they would be He using someone else in his place

ESSAYS

4 continued walking the fields like a man trying

for him, and the book seems to have been written easily and rapidly. For his admirers it was a surprise, for he had always been a writer who preferred Flaubertian selfdisguise to confessional. In Memoir at one point he says that " masks make us free" . Having put on the masks of fiction, he must have felt finally released into telling his own story directly - though even then there was much that is kept dark and secret. Memoir told, at last, his essential story. Here, minutely done, is his love of his mother, and the heartbreak of her death ("A terrible new life was beginning, a life without her, this evening and tomorrow and the next day and the next") ; his cruel childhood with his sisters, ruled by their violent and unpredictable father, whom he said he never fully came to understand but had to write about all his life; the Catholic schooling, and his dismissal from his job. It moves between small everyday details - many of them, particularly his account of life in the barracks, quirky, fierce and funny - and his characteristic tone of stilled contemplation, which has an echo in it of the priest his mother meant him to be:

to see.

Dark had fallen by the time he went into the house.

So the dark falls, but what the book leaves you with is not a sense of darkness, but the feeling of illumination, of everything having been fUlly understood. Amongst Women gained great acclaim; critics stopped calling McGahern underrecognized. Prizes and honours began to fall in his lap - the Irish Times Aer Lingus Prize, the American Irish A ward, the ti tIe of Chevalier de I'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, the GPA Prize (awarded by John Updike) and, later, the Lannan Literary Award and the South Bank Literature Award. McGahern, meanwhile, remained on the farm in County Leitrim , appeared rarely at literary festivals, went to no literary parties, gave very occasional, powerfully intense readings, and took twelve years to write his next - and, as it turned out, his last - novel. That They May Face the Rising Sun, published in 2002, turned into fiction that quiet, reclusive, dedicated rural life. (In America it was called By the Lake, in case - he used to say - the original title might make readers think the book had something to do with Japan.) The setting was McGahern ' s own place, the remote and sparsely populated corner of County Leitrim where he lived, worked and is now buried. There are a few houses on a lake, a bog stretching away to the distant Iron Mountains, a small town with two bars and a roofless Abbey with the remains of a monks' graveyard. It is described in the novel meticulously and repeatedly, just as it is in Memoir, in the 1989 essay "County Leitrim: the sky above us", and in stories like "High Ground" or "The Country Funeral". Very little happens in the novel , but everything that happens is "news". Nothing goes unremarked. "Have you any news?" "No news. Came looking for news." That is a running joke between the two couples living on the lake, Joe and Kate Ruttledge, who have lived and worked in England but have returned to the place Joe knows from childhood, and Jamesie and Mary Murphy, natives of the country: "I've never, never moved from here and I know the whole world", Jamesie boasts. There is affection and dependency between the four, but also reserve and distance. Their visits are marked by ritual jokes and by the retelling of stories they already know. "I'm sure I told it all before." "Go ahead. There' s nothing new in the world. And we forget. We'll hear it again." Memories and stories recur. Clocks strike irregularly. ("What hurry's on you?") It's hard at first to work out when this is taking place: the 1930s, the 50s, the 90s? Then we see the Murphys compulsively watching Blind Date. Telephone lines are being put in, at last. Over the border, a few years ago, there was the atrocity at Enniskillen. The same few characters provide all the "news", The district's notorious womanizer, John Quinn, gets - and loses - a new wife. Kate's uncle, "The Shah" , a wealthy, selfmade businessman, passes on his business to his assistant. Bill Evans, a traumatized farm worker, has the small but intense pleasure of a weekly trip to town in a special bus. Jamesie' s brother is laid off from his poor job

We come from darkness into light and grow in the light until at death we return to that original

darkness. Those early years of the light are also a partial darkness because we have no power or understanding and are helpless in the face of the world. This is one of the great miseries of

childhood. Mercifully, it is quickly absorbed by the boundless faith and energy and the length of the endlessly changing day of the child. Not even the greatest catastrophe can

Co Leitrim at Ford's Dagenham plant, and threatens to move back in with the Murphys; they love him, but are aghast at the prospect. A local builder fails to finish the shed roof he is building for the Ruttledges. There are two deaths. As in Amongst Women , the farming cycle frames the lives on the lake: haymaking, market day, lambing. The same man sells his cabbages at the market every year. The lake like Chekhov ' s "magic lake" in The Seagull - is the book's central character, stirring with its own life and peculiarities: The surface of the water out from the reeds was

alive with shoals of small fish. There were many swans on the lake. A grey rowboat was

fishing along the far shore. A pair of herons moved sluggishly through the air between the trees of the island and Gloria Bog. A light breeze was passing over the sea of pale sedge

like a hand. The blue of the mountain was deeper and darker than the blue of the lake or the sky. Along the high banks at the edge of the water there were many little private lawns

speckled with fish bones and blue crayfish shells where the otters fed and trained their

young. What happens in nature is also "news",

"Everything will have started to grow", says Jamesie at the start of spring. "It's all going to be very interesting." It looks at first as if this is a benign antidote to Amongst Women's dark rural story. But this is not a pastoral idyll. Many of the life stories are appalling, such as the monstrous John Quinn' s brutal treatment of his first wife and her elderly parents, or Bill Evans's childhood sufferings at the hands of the sadistic Christian Brothers. Parents are humiliated by their children, brothers cannot tolerate the idea of living together, old

friends lash out at each others' faults. Evasions, compromises and weaknesses are in every life. The Murphys' gentle manners "dealt in avoidances and obfuscations .... Confrontation was avoided whenever possible It was a language that hadn ' t any simple way of saying no". The violence in Northern Ireland just over the border is very close; it colours the whole history of the region. An IRA man - who is also the local auctioneer - is at work in the local town. Every year there is a procession to commemorate a terrible history of an ambush by the Black and Tans of young rebels. McGahern ' s gentle alter ego, Joe Ruttledge, speaks out savagely against violence towards the end of the book. Ruttledge suggests to us how this intensely local story, shining with the visible world, opens out into larger meanings. Helping the builder with the shed roof, he notes "how the rafters frame the sky. How ... they make it look more human by reducing the sky, and then the whole sky grows out from that small space". "As long as they hold the iron , lad, they'll do", the builder replies. So this moving novel, which looks so quiet and so provincial , opens out through its small frame to troubling and essential questions. How well do we remember? How do we make our choices in life? Will there be any other life than this? What is to remain of us? Above all, what can happiness consist in? "The very idea was dangerous ... happiness could not be sought or worried into being, or even fUlly grasped; it should be allowed its own slow pace so that it passes unnoticed, if it ever comes at all." Three years later, in 2005, McGahern published Memoir. This was remarkably quick

TLS DECEMBER 4 2009

last the whole length of that long day. Memoir was about returning - to places , memories, losses and the past. It was the final reworking of his life by a writer who never let go of things. Kate, the wife in That They May Face the Rising Sun , says that "the past and the present are all the same in the mind. They are just pictures". McGahern painted in these pictures carefUlly, lovingly, repeatedly, minutely. He even rewrote some of his books, for instance The Leavetaking, which he revised ten years after its first publication. The slow pace at which he wrote is mirrored in the pace of the novels themselves. In Memoir, he said that "the people and the language and the landscape where I had grown up were like my breathing". Memoir embodied his credo that stillness can work best for the writer: "the best of life is life lived quietly, where nothing happens but our calm journey through the day, where change is imperceptible and the precious life is everything". Out of that comes the quality which he thinks all good writing must possess, "inner formality or calm".

There is a great deal in Love of the World about how to write and what writing is for, and all of it reflects back on his own work. Art is McGahern's alternative to, or replacement for, religion. Writing gives us "a world in which we can live ... a world of the imagination over which we can reign". Fictional writing, if it is to work well , must converge on and produce what he calls "an image": "the clean image that moves us out into the light". It must find the right rhythm, and it must be rooted in the local and the particular. "Everything interesting begins with one person and in one place." "All good writing is local and is made universal through clear thinking and deep feeling finding the right expression and in so doing reflects all the

ESSAYS & LITERARY CRITICISM particular form is capable of reflecting, including the social and the political". It must be controlled by reason, but it must also be able to let go and trust to instinct. There must be "emotional truth and accuracy". But it must not be uncontrolled "self-expression": for McGahern, as for his hero Flaubert, that is "the opposite of creativity". He does not think writing can be taught, and he thinks it should not be ideological or explicitly political. He likes fiction which renders "the whole life of a person as being formed by a succession of single days", as in the writing he admires: John Williams's novel Stoner, Alistair MacLeod's stories of Nova Scotia, some of Alice Munro's stories, Tomas 6 ' Criomhthain' s The Islandman , translated from the Irish by Robin Flower. He likes an art - whether it is poetry, fiction, painting or photography - which will bring to light the lives and voices of people who have never thought about being witnessed or recorded, like the unselfconscious working rural Irishmen in the Leitrim photographs of Leland Duncan. "The moment and the day were everything. The past was a cutaway bog or an exhausted coal seam on the mountain. The future belonged with God. Too much talk they saw as unlucky and essentially idle. They left no records. Their presences are now scattered on the mountain air they once breathed."

McGahern's heroes (and they are mostly heroes, not heroines) are clearly strong influences on his work: Proust, Flaubert and Chekhov, Joyce (especially Dubliners), John Butler Yeats as letter-writer as well as painter. In spite of his admiration for Proust, his highest term of praise is "plain", and he applies the word with equal strength of feeling to a writing style as to a landscape. "In its plain way I think it beautiful", he says of his local small town. He is attached to the minor, enduring features of landscapes he knows: "There are also small trees that I find very moving", he says of a coastal road in Galway. One anecdote repeated in this collection is of the IRA fighters Ernie O'Malley and Paddy Moran, who, in jail, "retrace in their minds the walk down the right bank of the Shannon from Lough Alien to Carrick, and in the evening come back up the opposite bank, each time adding fresh details along the way". Those IRA fighters haunt his landscapes, and the essays, like the novels and stories, are constantly harking back to the wars, the killings, the vendettas, the betrayals and failures and exiles, of twentieth-century Ireland. These are not idyllic writings, for all that they are full of the love of a landscape and an old way of life. They have a great deal to say, coldly and furiously , about the barbarities of

the Catholic education system in his time ("I think that nearly all the children of that generation went to school in fear"), and about the damaging social and religious politics of Ireland between the 19lOs and the 1970s. In McGahern's view, the "spirit of the Proclamation was subverted in the Free State ... rights and freedoms were whittled away from the nation as a whole in favour of the dominant religion" . "Church and State became inseparable, with unhealthy consequences for both." The essays spell out forcefully the political opinions which provoked, and darkly underlay, his deliberately nonpolitical fictions. Yet the religion he was brought up in and which he associates profoundly with his mother always colours his language and his ways of thinking. It upset him to be accused of anti-Catholicism, however much he loathed the theocracy that controlled and monitored expression in his youth. In 1993 he wrote: "I have nothing but gratitude for the spiritual remnants of that upbringing, the sense of our origins beyond the bounds of sense, an awareness of mystery and wonderment, grace and sacrament, and the absolute equality of all women and men underneath the sun of heaven. That is all that now remains. Belief as such has long gone". Much of McGahern's Ireland is long gone

5 too, but in these essays vanished figures come back with vivid energy: the boorishly quarrelsome man of genius Patrick Kavanagh, the charmingly argumentative painter Paddy Swift, bluff, shy, sensitive Michael McLaverty, his childhood neighbours the Moroneys, eccentric bee-keepers and astronomers. His characterizations are no more sentimental than his fictions. He can be caustic and unforgiving; there are some biting short reviews of writers he considers to be "too literary", such as J. M. Coetzee and Isabel Allende. (In fact there are too many short, minor reviews piled into this baggy holdall of a book, which, as a piece of editing, is awkwardly constructed by themes, under-annotated and repetitive.) In a number of the essays McGahern refers with pleasure to the kind of person who has "a very sly twinkle" or makes "a sly pointed comment" , who is shrewd or humorous. At one point he talks of himself at school as "hiding behind a kind of clowning" . He himself was funny and mischievous in company, looking like a country farmer, ruddy-faced and bright-eyed, and talking wickedly about literary folk. But under his courtly, jocular, affable loquacity was a deep reserve; in interview he was guarded and wary. Well, he is gone: as he says here, of his friend Michael McLaverty, "Now only the work remains".

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Old masculine opportunities ames Boswell was in high spirits in 1763, having just " met two very pretty little girls" who seemed receptive to his charms. Funds were short, he explained - "I am a poor fellow. I can give you no money"but he insisted he had something to offer: " if you choose to have a glass of wine and my company and let us be gay and obliging to each other without money, I am your man". When the girls "agreed with great good humour", Boswell took them to an inn. "I surveyed my seraglio", he proudly recorded in his London Journal, "and found them both good subjects for amorous play." After drinking some sherry, he launched into a song, " Youth ' s the Season Made for Joys", that Captain Macheath sang to Jenny Diver, Suky Tawdry and the other wenches who populate John Gay's Beggar's Opera. Boswell was prompted by more than the similarity of his situation to Macheath ' s, as a young man surrounded by booze and sexually available women. Boswell saw himself in the opera's criminal hero: "I ... thought myself Captain Macheath". Why Macheath? A liar, thief, polygamist and condemned felon was hardly a model for the socially aspiring son of a respected Scottish laird. And yet Macheath remained appealing, for he was dashing, witty and endlessly charming. Both sides of Macheath' s character appealed to Boswell, who liked to imagine himself both a wit and rake, and he recorded his experiments with different characters in his diaries. As Erin Mackie points out in her important study of eighteenthcentury masculinity, Boswell's "journal constitutes a kind of sourcebook for stock masculine characters current in mideighteenth-century Britain". Mackie is not

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JACK LYNCH Erin Mackie RAKES , HIGHWAYMEN , AND PIRATES The making of the modern gentleman in the eighteenth century

235pp. Johns Hopkins University Press. $55; distributed in the UK by WiIey. £28.50. 9780801890888

the first to sort through that sourcebook, but she makes an original contribution by juxtaposing the three characters in her title "Rakes, Highwaymen, and Pirates" - with the one in her subtitle - "the modern gentleman". The "gentleman", defined in Johnson's Dictionary as "A man of birth" or "A man raised above the vulgar by his character or post", seems to have little to do with rogues, villains and ne'er-do-wells: the gentleman embodies politeness and restraint, the rake or highwayman riot and excess. Modern students of gender have treated the two types separately; as Mackie puts it, "this juxtaposition hetween the criminal and the gentleman

is overlooked by contemporary scholarship, which usually divides its attention between the two types: ideas of the modern gentleman emerge from the history of manners, and those of the criminal from histories of dissent and labor". Mackie, on the other hand, treats them together as part of a larger story. The late seventeenth century, she argues, transformed what it meant to be a man. The traditional social hierarchy - what Michael McKeon has called "patriarchalist patriarchy" - was on its way out, and notions of sexual identity were being rethought. At

"The Wanton Student" (1678) by Arie de Vois the same time, sex differences were being internalized as gender differences, leading to what historians of gender have called " modern gendered subjectivity". Viewing the eighteenth century as a time of transition, Mackie notes how often modern masculinity was defined in terms drawn from the previous century. It is no coincidence that the famous highwaymen had connections with the seventeenth-century Cavaliers, or that Richardson's rake Lovelace uses obsolescent forms like "thee" and "thou" as he invokes the ethos of the heroic drama of the Restoration: masculinity was about cultural nostalgia, harking back to a time when men knew how to be men. The new century produced an explosion of texts that sought to

TLS DECEMBER 4 2009

make sense of manhood: conduct manuals and essays delineating gentlemanly manners, but also thieves' biographies, novels about highwaymen and buccaneers, poems describing sexual conquests, and so on. "All these texts share with the conduct literature a foundational concern with masculine behavior", writes Mackie, "how it develops for good or ill, what limits should be imposed upon it, what ideals guide its best, or worst, manifestations." And, as she notices, its best and worst manifestations were sometimes difficult to distinguish: the most highly regarded gentleman could betray a streak of criminality, and the most appalling criminals could reveal a kind of nobility. Even the basest acts could still be excused as minor sins; rape and assault could be brushed aside as spirited high jinks. Erin Mackie owes a debt to McKeon and shares many of his strengths, not only in his attention to eighteenth-century domesticity but in his ability to describe large-scale changes in social mores in sweeping generalizations. This gives the book an impressive scope, but at times the abstractions crowd out the details, and it is possihle to turn page after page without encountering a concrete example. She also leaves open the question of how real life and literature are supposed to be connected. Her study depends on the work of social historians who describe actual people, yet most of her examples are characters drawn from imaginative literature; it is not always obvious that what is true of reality is equally true of its representations, or vice versa. Still, the book impresses with its attentive close readings of important texts, and makes a valuable contribution to gender studies of eighteenth-century Britain.

6

DNA Sir, - The belief that we share this planet with supernatural beings is an old one. Students of magic and religion have identified innumerable varieties of them - gods, devils, pixies, fairies, you name it. A familiar motif is that they operate at the very fringes of perception. While the scullery maid sleeps, they are busy in the kitchen making the milk go sour. For a society with no concept of bacteria, this is, perhaps, a forgivable conceit. But for a modern university professor to take this idea seriously is, I think, mindblowing. In the recent TLS "Books of the Year" (November 27), Thomas Nagel recommends Stephen C. Meyer's Signature in the Cell: DNA and the evidence for Intelligent Design. "Intelligent Design" is of course a code phrase to obscure a malicious and absurd thesis; namely, that a supernatural being has interfered in the evolution of life on this planet. If Nagel wishes to take this notion seriously, very well, let him do so. But he should not promote the book to the rest of us using statements that are factually incorrect. In describing Meyer's book, Nagel tells us that it " . is a detailed account of the problem of how life came into existence from lifeless matter - something that had to happen before the process of biological evolution could begin" (my italics). Well, no. Natural selection is in fact a chemical process as well as a biological process, and it was operating for about half a billion years before the earliest cellular life forms appear in the fossil record. Compounding this error, Nagel adds that "Meyer takes up the prior question of how the immensely complex and exquisitely functional chemical structure of DNA, which cannot be explained by natural selection because it makes natural selection possible, could have originated without an intentional cause" (my italics again). Again , this is woefully incorrect. Natural selection does not require DNA; on the contrary, DNA is itself the product of natural selection. That is the point. Indeed, before DNA there was another hereditary system at

work, less biologically fit than DNA, most likely RNA (ribonucleic acid). Readers who wish to know more about this topic are strongly advised to keep their hardearned cash in their pockets, forgo Meyer's book, and simply read "RNA world" on Wikipedia. STEPHEN FLETCHER Department of Chemistry , Loughborough University,

Ashby Road , Loughborough.

Funding for the humanities Sir, - Stefan Collini clearly shows the difficulties which the Research Excellence Framework will impose on the humanities (Commentary, November 13). If the humanities were not so sickly, though, REF's effect would not be so serious. Out of curiosity this summer I looked up enrolment in the humanities for Britain, Canada and the United States. HESA, Statistics Canada! Postsecondary students, and US Department of Education/Digest of Education Statistics give these figures on the internet. They show only to per cent of university students in Britain were studying any of the humanities (English, History, Languages, Theology, Philosophy). In Canada, just II per cent of university degrees were granted in the humanities, and in the United States a mere 9 per cent. Earlier in the year, the New York Times had found , in fact, no more than 8 per cent of US students were studying any of them and lamented that only children of the rich, unworried about employment prospects, would be studying the humanities in the future. To some degree this situation has been brought about by the universities themselves. When I graduated in English from Oxford after the war, I could enter quite a lot of different callings because employers provided on-the-job training. The universities took aim at this market and started offering all sorts of training courses and job-preparation degrees. Consequently employers stopped giving training, and students had to get it in their university education. Because humanities graduates are considered trained only for teaching or the priesthood, and then only partially, can you blame students for

lectual and political engagement of its citizens. The scholarly output of humanities departments is an integral part of those citizens' intellectual and political landscape, and supporting that output regardless of "impact" is consequently a constitutional responsibility of our government. In failing to offer that support, the REF is not only anti-intellectual, but also anti-democratic. [email protected]

JUSTINE PI LA St Catherine's College, Oxford.

fleeing them? Even schoolchildren are running away. Over two-thirds of those sitting GCSEs do not take history, preferring more practical subjects (and where does that leave history teachers?). There seem to be only two courses open. Government, employers and universities must decide quickly to give disproportionate favour and weighting to the humanities so that their students cease to be so vulnerable. This special treatment could also include immunity from REF. Or humanities departments should nerve themselves for a last stand, like Classical Languages sixty years ago, advertise themselves as an endangered species, prepare for the end, and confess inability to meet the requirements of REF. PATRICK LYNDON Suite 503, 1575 Esquimalt Avenue, West Vancouver, British Columbia.

Sir, - For those interested in supporting British literature, the government's new Research Excellence Framework, analysed so cogently by Stefan Collini, is alarming. Enmeshed in dense bureaucratic language, it reveals a deep misunderstanding of literary standards and values. The imposition of a presumed pragmatic theory of "impact" will curb genuine innovation and scholarship, and tempt universities to replace them with an inappropriate marketing policy in pursuit of government funding. We suggest that the humanities, which have already lost funding in recent years, despite high scores in the assessment exercises, will be at further risk if the new guidelines are imposed, and would like to see them better treated. We urge the Government to amend its proposals, which can only undermine and marginalize the study of literature.

Sir, - According to Tim Nau (Letters, November 27), "Stefan Collini's problem with the policies of the Higher Education Funding Council for England seems to be that he doesn't recognize how democracy works". B ut the strength of any democracy depends on the intel-

MICHAEL HOLROYD, ANNE CHISHOLM , MAGGIE GEE, VICTORIA GLENDINNING , RONALD HARWOOD, PHILIP PULLMAN, COLIN THUBRON, CLAIRE TOMALIN Royal Society of Literature, Somerset House , Strand, London WC2.

evidence, which cannot be replaced by any form of reproduction or scholarly report. Yet printed books and manuscripts (especially books of the past two centuries) will continue to be in danger as long as there is a failure to recognize them as artefacts, and thus to understand the importance of their physical features.

has since been anthologized ten times by leading publishing houses here, always with my name firmly attached. How can I reclaim it?

essential study of his late friend; to date, the only book on Rawicz in any language. Blood from the Sky, published by Elliott and Thompson, is now available from Menard Press. SALL Y MERCER 6 Bowness A venue , Headington ,

Oxford.

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Egyptian Ireland Sir, - John Waddell's letter (November 20) rightly corrects Gerald MacLean ' s reading, in his review (November 6) of my Irish Orientalism, of John Whitley Boswell ' s 1790 pamphlet. His colleague, Joseph Fenwick, recently documented it as a "juvenile prank" (to quote Waddell) on General Charles Vallancey in Lost and Found (2009). Boswell's risible and naive narrator claimed to have found an upside-down pyramid in Ireland. My reading only questioned once whether he was writing "coyly or earnestly", and instead focused on his representation of Ireland's Eastern origins then championed by Vallancey. B ut the Irish had been linked for centuries to the "Orient", Egypt included, in hundreds of (now laughable) histories, genealogies, letter collections, philological arguments, pamphlets, romances and antiquarian studies. Making a joke of the matter, as the young Boswell did, gave the punch line a clear target, yet the parody differed from the original mostly in the narrator' s foolishness. For the prank to work on Vallancey and the fledgling Royal Irish Academy, Boswell must have assumed his readers had a keen awareness of Vallancey's theories. Boswell does not seem to have been then aware, however, of the long history of similar accounts.

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JOSEPH LENNON

Books as artefacts Sir, - I should like to add a footnote expanding one of the points made by Jerome McGann in his reflections on digital texts (Commentary, November 20): "we have to protect our paper-based inheritance". The most fundamental reason for this necessity - this increasingly urgent necessity - is simply that manuscripts and printed books are artefacts; and all artefacts, being physical survivors, give us direct access to parts of a vanished world. They not only carry with them clues to their own production history; they also furnish the basis for reconstructing the visual and tactile experiences that their physical form provided for individuals in the past. The study of both the textual history and the reception of verbal works is dependent on this

G. THOMAS TANSELLE 420 East 51st Street, New York 10022. ＭｾＬﾭ

Old Mrs Lazibones Sir, - Several US and Canadian internet sites quote my poem for children, "Old Mrs Lazibones", as an anonymous work - "Author unknown" and even as "traditional". In fact, the poem first appeared in my Knockabout Show (Chatto, 1978), and

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GERDA MAYER 12 Margaret A venue, Chingford ,

London E4. ＭｾＬ

Piotr Rawicz Sir, - Happily one of Frederic Raphael's Books of the Year (November 27) is Piotr Rawicz's masterpiece, Le Sang du cieL, published in 1961 and deserving of a wider readership. Potential Englishspeaking readers should know that Anthony Rudolfs revised version of the 1964 translation (Blood from the Sky) is in print, as is Engraved in Flesh, Rudolfs illuminating and

Manhattan College, 4513 Manhattan

College Parkway, New York 10471. ＭｾＬ

Beauteous river Sir, - The "beauteous River", which "came, / Behind my Father' s house", this time to destroy rather than "blend his murmurs with my Nurse's song", was not, as you write under the photograph of the house (page 3, November 27), the Cocker (which flows into the town of Wordsworth' s birth from the south), but the Derwent. Words worth might have appreciated the sudden metamorphosis of the "delightful rill" into an object of fear, rather than beauty. TED HOLT 19 Kimberley Road, Cambridge.

LITERARY CRITICISM uckily, most utopias never happened. Real-time creators of supposedly ideal societies have usually relied on pretty crude crafting to achieve perfection - bloodily excising or enslaving everyone not orthodox enough, or pure enough, or Aryan enough, or proletarian enough to maintain standards. The more innocent versions include suicideinspiring societies of social-democratic welfare, planned to Swedish degrees, and the mind-sapping inanity of Disneyland. Even purely fictional utopias always seem to slide unstoppably into dystopias, albeit rather of ennui than of evil. Who could endure Plato' s creepy Republic, with its morally dodgy guardians, or Cabet's egalitarian paradise, where elastic clothes would ensure onesize-fits-all uniformity, or Charlotte Perkins Gilman's feminist-socialist neverland, where everyone would eat communal meals from central kitchens, or Fourier's with its enervatingly well-organized orgies? Heaven, I suppose, was the first utopia the human imagination ever devised. And how dreary it seems, even to the most timid of sinners. How boring to have nothing to do but comply and adore. The sound of harps would soon grate on minds closed to gangsta rap. Even foie gras and the sound of trumpets would get wearisome after a while. Around that glassy sea the glaze, I suspect, would be in the eyes of the beholders. I find it easy to believe in purgatory because no one attuned to life in this world could be ready for heaven at death. We can see why Satan wanted to escape. Like all utopias, heaven is, at best, boring or cloying and, at worst, a tyranny, where the chains of conformity clink in tiresomely predictable harmony. For similar reasons, Or Johnson's hero, Rasselas, wanted to escape from Happy Valley, the playground of inexhaustible pleasures, where the princes of his dynasty were confined to dissuade them for contending with one another for the lesser attractions of power in the outside world. According to W. B. Carnochan ' s capricious little book, Golden Legends, subsequent writers in English - or, in Bob Marley' s case, English of a sort - sought Ethiopia for the opposite reason. They were escaping reality, creating or burnishing golden legends of a land almost as isolated or enclosed as Johnson's imaginary Abyssinian valley. James Bruce' s Abyssinia was a fantasy of a virgin land, from which he suppressed or dismissed all records of earlier explorers. Here Bruce practised arts of seduction, delicately narrated in his Travels To Discover the Source of the Nile (1790), without risk of censure until he got back to Britain, where his longpostponed version of events was greeted with readers' obloquy and critics' lampoons. Mansfield Parkyns travelled to a romantic land of his own imagining "to challenge European values". Richard Rurton took the opportunity to write about sex with anthropological disinterest. Writings generated by the Magdala expedition in the 1860s produced a myth of "barbaric splendour". Wilfred Thesiger was a late victim of the myth. Sylvia Pankhurst boosted it in defiance of Italian invaders' assessment of the savagery and brutality ofthe Abyssinian empire. Even Evelyn Waugh, who rejected the romantic image of Ethiopia, substituted comic falsehoods of his own, and Dervla Murphy, whose restrained language represented an effort to defy the fanciful traditions of travel

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Nowhere land FELIPE FERNANDEZ-ARMESTO W. B. Carnochan GOLDEN LEGENDS Images of Abyssinia, Samuel lohnson to Bob Marley 173pp. Stanford University Press. $29.95; distributed in the UK by Eurospan. £28.50. 9780804760980

Terence Cave , editor THOMAS MORE ' S " UTOPIA " IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE Paratexts and contexts 302pp. Manchester University Press. £50. 97807190 7730 2

writing, ended up deluded by the quest for that modern equivalent of the Blue Bloom herself. Her claim to have established spiritual communion with Ethiopians, whose language she did not speak and whose customs she could not understand, marks her Ethiopia as hardly more real than that of Rasselas. Other travellers came on equally unrealistic escapades - searching for the mines of Sheba or adolescent adventures that lead to manhood or, in Thomas Pakenham's case, the mountains of Rasselas. All the journeys end in deserved bathos. Against this background, the Rastafarian project of "return" to an Ethiopia that never existed, "thou land of our fathers", where Haile Selassie was a god "who liveth and reigneth I-tinually" , seems hardly more mad than those of the white pilgrims who preceded it. It all makes for jolly reading, and somewhere around the middle the author relates an interesting scholarly discovery which would ornament the pages of Notes and Queries or the commentary pages of the TLS: Carnochan explains convincingly how Sophie Veitch, who never went to Ethiopia, might have gathered material for her captions to illustrations of Ethiopian landscapes in a book of 1868. Some serious defects, however, mar the rest of his work. There seems no good reason to pick on writing in English, which hardly makes for a coherent subject. The author undermines readers' confidence by claiming that Job Ludolfs History of Ethiopia (1681) introduced English readers to Abyssinian subjects. This ignores the fact that works in Latin and Portuguese had earlier English readerships, and sidelines the contribution made by what in Ludolfs day was the standard text in English: Samuel Purchas's early seventeenth-century synthesis. There are pointless excursions on T. E. Lawrence and Edward Montagu. All the writers the book covers are dealt with briefly and dismissively. Carnochan can write fluently but has difficulty establishing tone. Sometimes, when he wants to sound sceptical, he is simply sneering or snide. The unflagging superiority with which he traduces every writer he deals with becomes self-subverting. Burton comes across as largely egotistical , Waugh as merely flippant, Thesiger as chiefly deluded and Pakenham, who fares a little better from Carnochan's critique, as "an amateur who makes the most of his amateur standing" .

No objective reader will find these writers as dim as Carnochan makes out. Like all the best utopias, Johnson's Happy Valley was satirical. No one could believe in it and even the dullest reader would see it as an indictment of schemes for perfecting society. After heaven, the next utopia documented in Western tradition was - as far as I know - the Nephelococcygia of Aristophanes, with the same ironic character, which has gone on enlivening the tradition ever since. But what about the ascribed daddy of the genre, Thomas More's Utopia? Was it really meant as a model for statecraft, or as a caution to statesmen; a recommendation of Utopia or another satire on the folly of utopianism? Was it trick or tract? In a new collection of studies of the paratexts in early editions, Terence Cave and Ronny Spaans tell us about a Dutch version, printed in 1629, that demonstrates contemporaries' uncertainty on this point. Where More explicitly dismissed many of the Utopians' reported customs as "absurd", the translator substitutes, "There was much that I should have rebuked or condemned", which suggests under-appreciation of the humour of the original. In the text, where More distances himself from the "common opinion" that personal property is unnecessary in a functional society, the translator drops the phrase, effectively undermining the irony. An enormous investment of effort has gone into Cave's collection of studies of Utopia's paratexts. Readers, however, should expect only modest returns. The book is among the results of a big research project on cultural exchange in early modern Europe, centred at the University of Oslo, where ten of the fourteen contributors are based. There is, perhaps, a little amusement to be wrung from this superficially curious concentration of utopian scholarship in Norway: the makers of a sense of Norwegian nationality in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries pursued utopian illusions of their own - dreams of a nation of Nordic purity, animating romantic landscapes of the sort Johann Christian Dahl depicted. An overview of Latin editions by Vibeke Roggen lists the editorial agendas to which the study of paratexts might provide clues: "to emphasise More's martyrdom , to encourage local politicians, to see to it that such an interesting and entertaining text was made available to the reading public, or just to make money". The analysis excludes what emerge from the remaining essays as the main, and disappointingly prosaic, reasons for changes in the paratextual material: censors' excisions and printers' need to save

space or money. Some of the essays manage to extract important insights from the paratexts. With the aid of the self-revelatory preface Ralph Robinson added to his translation of 1551 , Terence Cave brings the first English translator of Utopia to life. The unusually abundant puffs included in the Spanish translation of 1637 enable Randi Lise Davenport and Carlos F. Cabanillas Cardenas to make some interesting speculations about the literary and political network to which the translator belonged. Terence Cave and Warren Boutcher do val-

TLS DECEMBER 4 2009

7 iant jobs in providing overviews - the former tying into the notion of the "versatility" of Utopia some of the strands the other contributors pluck from the tradition, the latter reminding us of the purpose of the Oslo project as a whole: to show how new technologies " multiplied possibilities of transporting knowledge" without helping readers discriminate between what was fictional and what was true. Users of the internet will know the feeling. Too often, however, the exploration, edition by edition, of changes to the paratextual materials yields no useful conclusions. Several early editions played with the implicit pun in the name of Utopia or innocently miscorrected it to "Eutopia" . But none of the contributors can specify why. Some contributors run out of interesting things to say about the paratexts and turn to the more obviously rewarding task of scrutinizing the variants in the translated text. Kristin Gjerpe notices that Anton Francesco Doni stamped the frontispiece of his edition with his usual printer's mark, but after several pages of scholarly investigation of the iconography she can suggest nothing in consequence except - rather unconvincingly - that he must have identified strongly with More's sentiments, whatever they were. Vibeke has a particularly hard task in confronting the Latin editions: there are so many that his coverage is inevitably perfunctory and tantalizing. He explains, for instance, that the compiler of the Index of Prohibited Books in 1583 did not list More's commendation of a society of few priests because the expurgator was using an edition in which the editor had replaced all the notes; but as we never hear what the new notes had in common, we remain in the dark about the purpose of the changes. Vibeke draws attention twice to what he regards as a curious phrase in an edition of 1601 from Frankfurt about rescuing Utopia from "the graveyard of books" . But he confuses us by interpreting the phrase variously as an allusion to Wittenberg and a complaint about the rarity of copies of the text. This is one of a number of editorial blemishes or regrettable judgements. Trond Kruke Salberg, for instance, in his essay on the German translations, tells us that he will return to the teasingly raised problem of a cryptic signature under an engraving in a Leipzig edition of 1612, but never does so. The book' s coverage of Dutch editions seems disproportionately short. And although one of the great virtues of the collection for Utopia scholars is the appendix of painstakingly edited written prefatory materials, the omission of the notes - which include some of the most revealing paratextsleaves the work feeling truncated. The appendix omits Latin editions, except, curiously, for a Milanese edition of 1620, while dealing with the problem of the intractably copious material by listing it in a table. The idea of arranging the essays according to the languages of the editions may have had practical advantages from an editorial point of view; but it is not of much help to the reader. It makes it virtually impossible to track whatever the paratexts might tell us about changes over time in the readership and interpretation of Utopia. Questions such as how seriously readers took the book, how far they identified it as, say, Platonist or Stoic or Catholic, whether Utopia acquired or lost esteem as a work of practical political philosophy, and whether interpretations converged or diverged as time went on, are all unraised or undeveloped.

HISTORY

8

Qing " made serious efforts to create a new Chinese culture". She did not. I was there for three years at the time and sat through a couple of her operas. After she included the grand piano alongside the two-stringed fiddle (she had gling" people into confessions at exactly the lived in Moscow and adored Rachmaninov). I GEORGE WALDEN moment when hundreds of thousands were read articles in the Chinese press justifying its being struggled to death. Or there is Simone use on the grounds that it was built by the David Priestland de Beauvoir's denial that there was a dictator- working classes. THE RED FLAG If Priestland has no direct experience of ship in China after her visit, or the refusal for Communism and the making of the modern world many years of Professor Eric Hobsbawm to these times to offer, and no new insights, what 880pp. Alien Lane. £35. criticize Stalin. No one is asking Priestland is the purpose of retelling a now familiar 9780713994810 to write a book about it - that has been done- tale, other than to provide a somewhat loaded just to acknowledge the enormity of what hap- survey to comply with the requirements of his thesis? Nothing is more dated and partisan Priestland's focus is on the Soviet Union, pened. His writing contains some strange assump- than moral equivalence, and only if we are Eastern Europe and China, but he ranges over Africa and South America as well, in purport- tions. "The use of rocket technology to convinced that Priestland has outgrown it can ing to answer the question as to why millions conquer space for the whole of mankind we begin to take his book seriously. But of people supported Communism. He has lit- suggested that Communists really had devoted he still hasn' t, quite. After the comments tle new to say on the subject, however: ideal- their energy to the service of peace and human- about the achievements of Communism ism, the Nazis, anti-colonialism, the suffering ity rather than war and division." One year quoted above, he goes on: "But its harshness and inequalities bred by capitalism in the raw after Khrushchev's exposure of Stalin's and authoritarianism also generated its own - his answers are familiar, and often convinc- crimes in 1956, who except fellow-travellers injustices, cruelties and inefficiencies, which ing. But they are also selective, and in major or lazy journalists purported to think that? A compared unfavourably with a more inclusive respects evasive. There is little discussion of sense of dutiful summary pervades the sec- post-1945 liberal capitalism". Many things the continued support for Communism by a tions on China. Sometimes they are adequate, have been said about Communism on all sides generation of Western intellectuals well after though characterized by a sort of bloodless of the debate this book is said to transcend. its systemic cruelties and mendacities were rationalism. Human suffering is glossed over Some have seen its cruelties as the devil's known. His publicist might groan that this is or dealt with briefly. Proven cases of cannibal- work, others as necessary to the cause, on the old-think which we must "go beyond" , but ism, one might have thought, deserve a men- breaking-eggs-for-omelettes argument. But no Priestland must do better than that. tion in any account of the Great Leap Forward. one has ever said that the death of 70 million How is it possible to discuss the appeal of Would that be partisan? In Priestland's ver- Chinese under Chairman Mao, the murder or Communism without examining the duplicity, sion, Mao' s attempt to reconfigure human sufferings of millions in the Gulag, or the interirresponsibility, fashion-consciousness or intel- nature (he once toyed with the idea of substitut- ventions in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, lectual dishonesty that in so many cases under- ing numbers for names) or, in the Cultural "compared unfavourably" with life in the lay it? He must account for people like the Revolution, to stoke a civil war with a similar West. If we are going to have revisionism, revered Oxford Sinologue Raymond Dawson, purpose, emerges almost as a reasonable reac- let' s do it in style, as in the work of Giovanni whose book The Chinese Chameleon, pub- tion to recalcitrance by the populace or foot- Arrighi, who claimed in Adam Smith in Beilished in 1967, the worst year of the Cultural dragging by the Party bureaucracy. In the jing (2007) that the Cultural Revolution laid Revolution, defended the practice of "strug- same vein he writes that Mao's wife Jiang the basis for China's current prosperity.

Death by numbers s summed up by his publicist, the aim of David Priestland, a lecturer in modern history at Oxford, is "to go beyond the old partisan debates on the Cold War", and see Communism "through a new prism". Priestland himself writes of Soviet communism in the 1980s that "In many ways it could not have been more different to the world portrayed by Orwell", and that Communism as a whole promised to bring equality and modernity, and "achieved some of these objectives at certain times and in some respects". So there we are. The academic reaction against the final discrediting of Communism twenty years ago, predictable from the day the Berlin Wall came down, is upon us. The predictability of an argument does not of course make it invalid, and Priestland says things of which we need to be reminded. A graduate student at Moscow State University in 1987-88, he met Russians who were idealistic and patriotic, proud of what their country had achieved, with a "real, if often naive", attachment to peace and global harmony. As a postgraduate at the same university twentyfive years earlier, I met similar folk. I played football with them, argued with them, and we swore eternal friendship in the sentimental Russian fashion. But I did not conclude, naively, that there was not so much difference between their lives and my own. It is good to remember that in totalitarian systems life goes on, and that there remain sympathetic, cultivated human beings, but that hardly detracts from the brutalism of the regimes in question.

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n 1934, the geneticist Nikolai Vavilov published an essay, "What World Flora Can Impart to the Soviet Subtropics", in a special issue of the illustrated mass magazine Ogonyok. Vavilov noted that much of the verdant plant life of California and Florida had been imported by human hands, and that he had personally discovered the same throughout the African Mediterranean in the 1920s. He went on to list a fantastic assortment of citrus varieties that, once gathered from around the globe by teams of Soviet researchers, could flouri sh in the Soviet Union. " We are convinced that in just a few years the Soviet subtropics will be unrecognizable", Vavilov concluded, promising a Soviet Florida or California. Such hopes of abundance remained unfulfilled. After his arrest on fabricated charges in 1940, Vavilov died of malnutrition in Stalin's Gulag. He had accumulated more seeds abroad ("We cleaned out all of Afghanistan" , he boasted to a friend) than could be studied or exploited in a reasonable period of time, and Stalinist time frames were far from reasonable. Today, the erstwhile Soviet subtropics lie partly in breakaway Abkhazia, disputed between Georgia and Russia. Peter Pringle, a former correspondent in Moscow, has rendered Vavilov 's life in a crisp, poignant narrative. Although Vavilov (1889-1943) was probably not "one of the twentieth century' s greatest scientists", as Pringle asserts, he was one of the two internationally best known scientists of the pre-war Soviet Union, the other being Ivan Pavlov (1849- 1936). Pavlov, winner of the Nobel

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A better rye STEPHEN KOTKIN Peter Pringle THE MURDER OF NIKOLAI V A VILOV The story of Stalin's persecution of one of the twentieth century's greatest sc ienti sts

370pp. JR Books. £18.99. 9781906217914

Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1904, died a natural death in his eighty-seventh year. Vavilov, instead, tangled with Stalin and Trofim Lysenko. Vavilov and Lysenko shared the aim of revolutionizing Soviet agriculture by enhancing plants, hut they clashed over method. Vavilov practised pith-helmet science, seeking out wild varieties of wheat, rye and many other crops, to which he applied Gregor Mendel's rediscovered theory of genes for crop breeding. Vavilov's book Origin and Geography of Cultivated Plants (1926), based on travels and research in many countries over many years, won the Lenin Prize. He lugged ingots of platinum to pay for his acquisitions and, among other coups, scored samples of heavily guarded quinine from Peru, not for personal gain, but for the motherland. The son of a former million-

aire textile salesman and the grandson of a peasant, he was a loyal child of Soviet power. Lysenko, eleven years younger than Vavilov and lacking the latter's formal scientific training, nonetheless developed expertise in plant physiology and soil science, while trumpeting his ignorance of genetics. En route to becoming absolute dictator of Soviet biology by the I 940s, the ressentiment-driven Lysenko annihilated not just Vavilov but Soviet genetics. For a long time, Vavilov had tried to treat him like a proletarian protege, despite colleagues' admonitions and his own doubts. Vavilov comes across as the calf who, finally , learns where veal comes from. The Lamarckian calamity of Lysenkoism is well plumbed, and on Vavilov there's a splendid hook in English, The Vavilav Affa ir (1984), by the emigre Mark Popovsky, the first to access Vavilov 's secret police dossier and to track down scientists, police and prison inmates who knew him. Pringle, who relies on Popovsky, conveys more fully Vavilov' s extraordinary family and upbringing, personal life and loves, and international links with the likes of William Bateson (who coined the term genetics) and Thomas Hunt Morgan (of fruit fly research). What Pringle does not do, and what no one has ever done with complete success, is confront the ostensible paradox of how Soviet

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scientific achievements were possible, on such a broad scale, given the absence of free exchange, the restricted connections to the international scientific community, and the often politicized peer review. The Soviet Union combined huge budgets for science with persecution of scientists, and genuine breakthroughs with inveterate fraud. Despite bureaucratism far worse than in other countries of scientific advance, there was a lot of creative, world-class science under dictatorship. Was it all in spite of Soviet institutions and norms? Popovsky - whose father wrote a hagiography of Lysenko decades before the son took up the cause of Vavilov - also published a lasting, if overstated, general expose, Science in Chains (1980), but that only served to make Soviet scientific successes seem that much more inexplicable. Around the same time, Mikl6s Haraszti, the Hungarian dissident, wrote The Velvet Prison , a bleak, brilliant work showing how artistic production and unfreedom were utterly compatible. Vavilov oversaw the Soviet Union's most important agricultural institutes during collectivization. His brother, Sergei Vavilov, became president of Stalin's Academy of Sciences just two years after Nikolai wasted to death. A socialist and a patriot, Nikolai Vavilov would compromise his political integrity for the sake of science, but he would never compromise science, even to save his life. His immensely valuable plant collection lives on, having survived even the siege of Leningrad, when starving geneticists trained by Vavilov refused to eat the seeds and fruits.

HISTORY ll war and no play? Or at least not in public. The perception that the Ottomans could only enjoy themselves in private, behind the closed shutters of the harem, dies hard, despite the evidence of ubiquitously reproduced images such as William Bartlett's illustrations to Julia Pardoe's The Beauties of the Bosphorus. That the people of Istanbul besported themselves in the Bosphorus parks of Karabali or Kii9iiksu or Kalender with the same delight as their contemporaries in the Vauxhall Gardens or the Tuileries is revealed in The City 's Pleasures: Istanbul in the eighteenth century, a lavishly illustrated volume by Shirine Hamadeh, who describes "women lounging leisurely on the grass, smoking, eating, dancing, or engaged in musical gatherings ; ... men walking, chatting, sipping their coffee, or napping . young boys and in the shade of a tree; girls riding swings and climbing on trees". "Fun" and "Ottoman" are words rarely found in the same sentence. Frequent war and bloody murder at court have made for a grim story - it is as if there were no "Greensleeves" to our soundtrack of Tudor England, only the crunch of the axe as it slices through Anne Boleyn 's neck. The gloom is penetrated by only a few chinks of light when culture and humanity come centre-stage. Symbolic of these is the reign of Siileyman, the larger-than-life contemporary of Henry VIII, with its magnificent artistic achievements and, famously , the Sultan's love for and marriage to a Ruthenian concubine. Or the few years of respite in the early eighteenth century - albeit that they began and ended with the deposition of a sultan that are popularly known as the "Tulip Age". War and dynastic murder were part of the history of the empire, but these aspects of early modern life have not dominated our view of other societies so absolutely as they have that of the Ottoman. Dana Sajdi's introductory essay to Ottoman Tulips, Ottoman Coffee surveys the background to the turn to the cultural history of the empire that is at last peopling the eighteenth century with sociable, acquisitive, curious beings just like us. The coffee house and the tulip garden have long been recognized as the haunts where the social life of the people of Istanbul spilled out from domestic settings and recreation could be enjoyed in the company of strangers. Leisure in the Ottoman Empire, as elsewhere, became a commodity to be consumed like any other. This thoroughgoing transformation has been glimpsed in the work of previous historians, but The City's Pleasures is a consummate treatment that allows us to imagine ourselves as denizens of eighteenth-century Istanbul. "The Ottoman capital in the eighteenth century was a perpetual source of sensory

A

Fountains of pleasure CAROLINE FINKEL Shirine Hamadeh THE CITY'S PLEASURES Istanbul in the eighteenth century 350pp. University of Washington Press. $60; distributed in the UK by Combined Academic Publishers. £39. 9780295986678

Dana Sajdi, editor OTTOMAN TULIPS , OTTOMAN COFFEE Leisure and lifestyle in the eighteenth century 262pp. Tauris. £52.50. 978 I 8451 I 5708

Ates Orga, editor ISTANBUL A collection of the poetry of place 159pp. Eland. Paperback, £5.99. 9780955010590

present and to be remembered in the hereafter. The building boom accompanied the reinstatement of Istanbul as the permanent seat of the imperial court after some forty years. Mehmet IV had abandoned the city in 1663 for Edirne, the old Ottoman capital in Thrace. He ascended the throne in 1648 as a minor, ruling under the regency of his grandmother and then his mother, and his move was a calculated proof of his maturity. From Edirne he and his successors presided over the empire's loss of prestige in the wars of the late seventeenth century that

succeeded the failure of the siege of Vienna in 1683. Following the deposition of Mustafa II in 1703, Sultan Ahmed III returned to the Bosphorus and initiated the reconstruction of the neglected capital and thereby a transformation of urban society. Ahmed had thirty daughters - the many who survived married high-ranking officers of state, and this expanded ruling class was swollen by the retainers needed to keep it functioning. The waterways of the city became showcases for the light and airy palaces of the Muslim moneyed classes - non-Muslims were not welcome to live on the shore - and the Bosphorus a thoroughfare constantly in motion. Gone was the preference for seclusion announced by the high walls of Topkapi Palace, as the rich advertised their wealth unabashedly. Administration and diplomacy moved outside the confines of the old city, as the sultan progressed between its suburbs to meet his ministers and foreign guests at banquets and festivities in opulent settings conforming to the very latest canons of taste. The drain of war on public and private purses does not seem to have dented the urge to spend and spend. The ideal of Ottoman sovereignty had long been a sultan who was all-powerful but never seen. During the Edirne years, however, he had become so invisible as to lose stature to rivalrous dynasts such as the Kopriilii viziers who guided affairs of state for some fifty years. Defeat in war, the violent events of 1703, and the court's peremptory return to the capital demanded a rethinking of the relationship between ruler and ruled. The flashy

pleasures" , writes Hamadeh. Palaces, pavil-

ions and kiosks sprang up along the Bosphorus and the Golden Horn, and public parks, gardens and squares provided venues where rich and poor mingled. This unprecedented urban freedom was recorded in all its detail in poetry and painting. Twenty-six palaces and pavilions are known to have been built or renovated in the eighteenth century, along with ninety free-standing monumental fountains that served as the focal points of public spaces. This abundance is an index of the widening network of patrons, including artisans and craftsmen, who sought visibility in the

"Audience Given in Constantinople by the Grand Vizier Aimali Carac for Fran90isEmmanuel Guignard Comte de Saint-Priest, 18th March 1779" by Francesco Giuseppe Casanova

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9 visibility of the court and its hangers-on was a bold formula to reinvigorate sultanic sovereignty and permit the re-establishment of state control over an urban middle class of increasing confidence. Ottoman records reveal a landscape in flux. Keeping up appearances cost time and money, and as the eighteenth century went on, former imperial estates that had become dilapidated were turned into public parks. Some neglected estates provided lairs for undesirable types whom refurbishment was intended to displace. Turning private property into charitable endowment was a traditionally favoured option. The owner of an estate would build a mosque, with its accompanying range of commercial and charitable facilities , and the land surrounding this core of a new village would be opened to the public. Parks were places of relaxation but the limits of relaxation were bound by rules. The state intervened to "contain public life": a corps of guards maintained order; regulations restricted women's visits to segregated areas or certain hours or days of the week; and sumptuary laws, flouted more than ever now that the middle classes had found a stage where they could compete in the fashionability and daringness of their attire, were enforced. But coffee houses, once execrated as dens of sedition, had become essential features of the eighteenth-century pleasure garden. The uglified urban landscape of modern Istanbul shows few traces of the palaces and parks that once graced its shores and uplands. The stone monuments of earlier and later periods have weathered the years more or less well, while the fragile structures favoured in the eighteenth century are all but gone. But absence of evidence is not evidence of absence: some visual, as well as archival, clues remain. Most resilient are the free-standing fountains that are still a familiar sight. Profusely decorated with poetic epigraphy, they display naturalistic reliefs of fruit baskets and flowers akin to those in the Mughal repertoire, yet with a long prehistory in the Ottoman aesthetic. Whereas fountains had once been expressions of good works, the epigraphy now told a different story - that these fountains were architectural objects in their own right, intended to produce pleasure in the beholder. Poetry provides another clue to sensibilities, but is rarely drawn upon as a tool of historical inquiry in Ottoman studies. Hamadeh remedies this to great effect to show how the changing social environment made for a shift from the courtly style of esoteric and abstract references to a simpler vocabulary and range of allusions. Ordinary people preferred realism in their verse as much as in the reliefs on their fountains. Naming particular puhlic gardens was one novelty, allowing the action of the poem to be imagined in the very spaces familiar to the audience. Earlier attempts at popularizing had met with a less than enthusiastic reception, for novelty had hitherto resided in the refinement of known models. The mood had changed. No longer was innovation suspect. The shock of the new was relished, and immortalized by writers who dwelt lovingly on the beauty of the architecture and praised the interplay of light, water and reflection on internal and external surfaces alike. There was no window tax on the Bosphorus, and seemingly infinite fenes-

NATURAL SCIENCE

10 tration was married to ornate surface decoration, to theatrical effect. And while poets and the people looked from the outside, for those within, then, as now, the view was everything, and structures that blocked the prospect of others provoked neighbourly dispute. Few today can decipher with any fluency the verses inscribed on the monumental fountains, although they can read the date if it is written in numerals. The fountains provided a generous canvas for lines culminating in a chronogram, the traditional " literary arithmetic" that supplies the date in the final line of verse and concludes the eulogy of the patron. Ahmed III botched his attempt at this tricky form - the chronogram he composed for his fountain outside the gate of Topkapi Palace was four years short of the correct date. He was saved from eternal ignominy by the court poet Vehbi who added the requisite syllable. Ahmed III' s palace of Saadabad , built in 1722, has long been regarded as a local hybrid of Versailles and Fontainebleau, both of which had been visited by an Ottoman envoy shortly before construction began. A contributor to Ottoman Tulips, Ottoman Coffee concurs with Hamadeh in exploding this myth. Both put forward evidence that makes the stronger case that it was cultural interaction with Safavid Iran, rather than with France, that influenced Saadabad' s form and layout. The destruction of the palace in the revolution which deposed Ahmed in 1730 has been interpreted as a sign that the Ottomans were not ready for westernization, that they experimented with this alien culture and were found wanting. The truth is that the attack on Saadabad was sanctioned by Ahmed's successor Mahmud I, as a sop to the hotheads who temporarily ruled the city - it was soon rebuilt - and many more palaces sprang up to join it. It certainly seems counter-intuitive that the pavilions of a complex conceived in France would be given poetic Persian names, or that the palaces of the supposedly westernFatainclined elite would be called ｎ･ｾ｡ｴ｢､＠ bad (Abode of Joy) and Hlirremabad (Abode of Happiness). Among the poetry deliciously evoking Istanbul ancient and modern in Ates Orga's pocket anthology is a couplet by Nedim, the poet of the "Tulip Age", that spells out the competitive spirit of the Ottomans towards their eastern neighbour. His panegyric to the city includes the jibe, "One single stone of thine, methinks, of greater worth by far / Than all the treasures of Iran". The search for "origins" can be hard to resist, and the direction of ""influence" as a current that flows from West to East often seems predetermined. Ottoman cultural historians like Hamadeh make a strong case for recognizing synchronicity in the impulses transforming society, particularly in the eighteenth century and particularly in Istanbul. "Western" stylistic references are no more prominent than those from the east, and borrowings from the Safavids, whom the Ottomans took as their rivals at this time, as conspicuous, along with those of the Mughals. The Ottoman idiom of the eighteenth century, Shirine Hamadeh writes, was "a dynamic synthesis of foreign traditions with local forms and aesthetics" . The promenaders in the parks of Istanbul would surely have been proud to know that they were firmly at the heart of things.

As we were harles Darwin's On the Origin of Species contains only one illustration, and a rather dull one at that - a simple image of the tree-like branching relations between hypothetical species, with the present at the top (not all branches reach the top), and common ancestors deep in the past. In fact, the drawing does not look much like a tree - it is more like some kind of spindly weed. Although it might not seem impressive, this figure was a revolutionary way of representing life, summing up Darwin's central idea of evolution by natural selection. This image was not the first that Darwin chose to represent his hypothesis. Shortly after his return from the voyage of the Beagle, Darwin drew a corallike diagram and wrote "I think" alongside it. In his notebooks he later mused that "The tree of life should perhaps be called the coral of life". Over the decades, however, the "tree" image and terminology gradually predominated. They were given particular and literal force by Ernst Haeckel, who at the end of the nineteenth century drew a sturdy oak-like tree with the names of organisms scattered around its branches. Down at the bottom were the monera (single-celled organisms without a nucleus), while at the very top - literally the pinnacle of evolution - were humans. We now know that Haeckel's representation was wrong in so many ways. Not only are humans not at the top of the tree - we are no more or less "evolved" than the monera Haeckel put down at the bottom - if the tree of life were to be drawn to scale, in terms of either the number of organisms, or species, or the duration of their existence on the planet, then monera would take up almost all the space. Life on earth began 4 billion years ago, a mere 500 million years after the planet formed. If you represent our common history as lasting sixty seconds, life is mainly composed of monera, before proliferating in the last seven seconds, following the massive diversification of animal life that occurred with the "Cambrian Explosion" around 542 million years ago. On this scale, the appearance of our species lOO,OOO years ago is subliminal. We now know that the species on our planet split, evolved and died out in only one sequence - there is only one true tree (or coral) of life. But what was that sequence? Given the number of species that have lived on the Earth over the past 4 billion years, there are more ways of arranging those species in an evolutionary diagram than there are atoms in the Universe. For example, if you have just ten species, there are about 3.6 million possible trees. With twenty species, there are more than 2 quintillion (that is, 2 x J018) trees. We have no idea how many species have been around over the last 4 billion years - anywhere from a few dozens of millions upwards. Of all the zillions of possible trees we could draw with those species, there is just one that is right. It seems unlikely we' ll ever find out precisely which one it is, although a subset of probable trees will be identified. For the moment, we can only try and get the big picture right (are humans more related to goats or dogs?), and to ensure that we understand the fine detail at the ends of the various branches (the relations between various modern species

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MA TTHEW COBB Michael Ruse and Joseph Travis, editors EVOLUTION The first four billion years

I,008pp. Harvard University Press. Paperback, £25.95 (US $39.95). 9780674031753 Jonathan Silvertown, editor 99 % APE How evolution adds up 224pp. Natural History Museum.

Paperback, £14.99. 978056509231 3 of fruitfly are a particular favourite, and are now defined with near-certainty). These points are well made in Francisco Ayala's chapter on molecular evolution in Evolution: The first four billion years, a book that contains an odd mixture of magisterial summaries of key subjects and a selection of briefer encyclopedic entries. The subtitle is a bit of a swizz, as the vast bulk of the book is devoted to roughly the last eighth of that time span - the Phanerozoic eon, which began with the rise of multi-cellular organisms. On one level , this is quite understandable, as most of what we know about evolution relates to this period - these are the organisms that have left clear fossils, and we have been reasonably successful in using molecular techniques to determine their evolutionary relationships. Further back in time, things get a bit hazy, producing squabbles about precise relations down at the bottom of the coral of life - "are humans more related to mushrooms or algae?" and so on. In the last year, two major, and contradictory, studies of the relations between the major groups of organisms have been produced. We still do not know which - if either - is right. Studies of the first 3.5 billion years of life's history have produced some of the most thought-provoking science of the last century. An early chapter in Evolution summarizes views of how life originated. It also deals with the exciting and apparently contradictory suggestion that life first appeared within something like a cell. This is not quite as unlikely as it might seem. Although cell membranes are made of proteins and are created by the organism itself, the three key functions of the cell are that it is protective, permeable, and that it can divide. Amazingly, non-organic vesicles in clays can also show these features. A Ithough Darwin suggested that the molecules of life first appeared in "some warm little pond", the actual location must have been some minuscule bubble, where fragile molecules could safely meet and combine. Experiments have shown that cell-like vesicles made of fatty acids on clays can help RNA molecules string together the first molecules of life, living in a strange and fragile "RNA world" that preceded our modern "DNA world" . The incredible diversification of animal life that occurred during the Cambrian period was particularly intriguing - and worrying - to Dar-

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win. Where did all that variety come from? We now know that things had begun to take off before the Cambrian period, and an excellent article in Evolution on "Organismic evolution and radiation before the Cambrian" describes the major hypotheses for why multicellular life suddenly became so diverse and widespread. These include changes in oxygen levels, the " invention" of sex, and the appearance of new genes controlling the shape of organisms. Strikingly, however, Evolution contains almost nothing about the enigmatic Ediacaran biota, named after the 580- to 650million-year-old rocks of the Ediacara hills in the Flinders Range of South Australia. This omission is disappointing, for the Ediacara are some of the most curious organisms that have ever existed. There is still no consensus about exactly what they looked like - or even whether they were animals, plants or something else entirely. They were mainly soft-bodied, so fossils are rare. Those that do exist are often hard to assign even to a particular kingdom the same shape can be seen as a kind of sanddollar (related to sea urchins), the hold-fast of a seaweed or a sea-pen (a kind of sessile jellyfish) , or a bizarre mattress-structured animal that has apparently left no descendants. In the 1990s, the geologist Adolf Seilacher suggested that these extinct organisms represented an utterly novel group, which were like quilted, stingless jellyfish. These animals, he argued, had a completely different way of organizing their bodies from modern animals, which appear immediately afterwards in the fossil record, during the Cambrian Explosion. Sadly, neither Seilacher's views, nor the opposition they have aroused, are dealt with in the pages of Evolution. (99% Ape: How evolution adds up also skips over the early history of multi-cellular life - astoundingly, it does not even mention the Cambrian Explosion, never mind the Ediacaran biota. The editors of both books have missed an opportunity to enchant and tantalize the reader with vistas of bizarre extinct oceanic life forms , to explore arguments at the frontiers of science and to provide an insight into how scientists deal with material that is, at least partly, forever unknowable.) Evolution attempts to summarize the whole of our knowledge of evolution by natural selection, and in so doing commits sins of omission and commission. For example, there are substantial entries on Crustaceans and Dinosaurs, but not on Chelicerates or Molluscs. And interesting as it is, did the co-editor Michael Ruse's own book From Monad to Man really deserve a specific entry, given that its theme (evolutionary "progress") is dealt with separately? Similarly, allowing the Jesuit philosopher Teilhard de Chardin and Piltdown Man separate entries (de Chardin was fingered by Stephen Jay Gould as the probahle perpetrator of the Piltdown hoax) seems over-indulgent, while devoting a whole entry to Richard Dawkins's notion of " memes" as units of cultural information is simply eccentric. 99% Ape, on the other hand, is brief, pithy and delightfully illustrated, and will be particularly attractive to secondary school students. It concisely presents the evidence for evolution, from the beaks of Darwin's finches to changes in rib-numbers on the tails of trilobites, and outlines the evolution of eyes, vertebrates and humans (the "99% Ape" of the title). However, not all of its content is similarly solid. The chapter on human behaviour

NATURAL SCIENCE is based on the modish ideas of "evolutionary methodological flaws , although 99% Ape is psychology"; although the authors accept that imprudently uncritical. However, their main the way our evolutionary past affects our psy- conclusion has apparently been supported by chological present is an "open question", they the work of the late Michael Majerus. Just as give no real sense of why that is the case. the lepidopterist J. W. Tutt suggested back in Above all, they do not emphasize the neces- 1896, the moths that do not match their backsity of experimentally distinguishing between ground (dark moths on light trees, or light valid hypotheses and "Just So" stories based moths on dark trees) are subject to higher preon vague guesses about our evolutionary past. dation rates by birds. The birds can see them, Both books are more comfortable when so they eat them. Moths that are eaten tend dealing with well-established knowledge. not to reproduce so well , and the balance of One of the clearest examples of how natural the two colours in the next generation shifts selection can change a population of organ- slightly. In this case, predation is the major isms is that of the peppered moth, Biston cause of evolution. Anti-evolutionists may betularia, which in the second half of the take heart from the fact that Majerus died nineteenth century saw a near-complete before his work could be published in peertransformation of its coloration. In 1848, reviewed journals. However, they would be the first dark-coloured moth in this tradition- wrong to do so: the evolution of the peppered ally speckled grey species was found in moth populations is not in doubt; the arguManchester; by 1895 around 98 per cent of ment has been over what exactly has been peppered moths in the Manchester region causing that evolution. were dark. This change took place in less While evolutionary biologists have always than fifty generations, and shows the power argued about the pace and causes of natural of natural selection. A century later, the dark selection, and the precise shape of the coral of melanic form has declined to 5 per cent. life, the very idea of evolution has been subThese dramatic shifts are correlated with ject to a 150-year long offensive by a vast varichanges in the colour of tree-trunks around ety of religious thinkers. Both Evolution and the world's first industrial city, which 99% Ape deal with the thorny relation became soot-blackened in the nineteenth between evolution and religion, and both century, only to return to their naturally light books disappoint, ceding ground where they colours following the Clean Air Acts of the should be at their most confident. In Evolu1950s. In the 1950s, Bernard Kettlewell tion, David Livingstone points out that "relicarried out a series of experiments to find out gious believers have reacted in vastly different exactly why the moth population changed col- ways to evolution, and their stances do not our. These studies have been criticized for follow any straightforward taxonomy of theo-

logical orientation". The key point, which explains why so many believers find evolution inimical, is that "opponents of Darwinism have been haunted by the spectre of materialism" . What Livingstone fails to conclude is that although scientists, and indeed all those who want to understand how the universe works, can believe whatever fairy stories they wish, when an individual - or a religion or a state - uses religious belief as the measure by which facts are accepted or rejected, there is an irreconcilable contradiction between the theology and scientific knowledge. This is the implicit subject of a chapter on "American antievolutionism", by Eugenie C. Scott. In the USA , the "debate" between evolution and religion has largely taken place in the courtroom, as Christians have tried to introduce their ideas into state-funded schools. Even though some of the people Scott describes are eccentric "young Earth creationists" inspired by Archbishop James Ussher - the man who worked out that the Creation "fell upon the entrance of the night preceding the twenty third day of October" in 4004 BC - her account is disconcertingly uncombative. A more robust rebuttal of the absurd and lightweight claims of creationist "science" (Scott drops the quotation marks early on) is necessary. Furthermore, although the United States is the source of some of the most rabid and well-organized forms of antievolutionism, it is by no means alone. In the UK, creationists and their sneaky cousins, the "intelligent design" crew, are growing in

11 influence; Intelligent Design was given public backing in the Spectator earlier this year by Melanie Phillips, who absurdly claimed that it "comes out of science" not religion. On a more ambitious scale, the Turkish Islamic anti-evolutionist Harun Yahya has produced a lavish and ludicrous Atlas o/Creation, which he has dispatched to educational establishments throughout Europe, in a bizarre attempt to convince his readers that evolution is not a fact. An exploration of the ideological similarities between fundamentalists of all stripes would have been invaluable; sadly, neither Scott nor Livingstone provides us with that. Worse, neither of them seems to realize that fundamentalist attitudes towards science are part and parcel of religion - the irrational rejection of the facts of evolution flows from the irrational belief in the veracity of ancient, self-contradictory folk texts, and in the power of an imaginary supreme being. The authors of 99% Ape make clear their opposition to creationism of all stripes , too, but seem strangely reluctant to do battle on a favourable terrain. They quote various popes who argued that accepting evolution and believing in God are not contradictory, but they (like the popes) do not specify that this is only true if God is reduced to the role of a celestial clock-winder, who set the Universe running billions of years ago and then settled back to watch things unfold. In other words, it is only true if God is reduced to something that in practice is indistinguishable from a figment of imagination.

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THEATRE

12

Never-ending drama heatre and theory make uneasy allies. Theory is a cerebral affair, while theatre is among the most fleshly of art forms. The theatre of ideas is a fairly meagre current in British dramatic history, and one of its most celebrated practitioners - Shaw was not British at all. The British stage is one of the last great redoubts of liberal humanism, preferring experience to doctrine, the personal to the structural, the concrete to the conceptual. One would not expect Sarah Kane to have been especially deep in structuralism, or Alan Ayckbourn to quote Hegel on tragedy. David Edgar, however, has always been something of an exception. As one of our more intellectually high-powered artists, one would indeed expect him to know about Russian Formalism as well as Chekhov, Wilhelm Schlegel as well as Tom Stoppard. The 200 or so pages of How Plays Work are sprinkled with allusions to hundreds of dramatic works from Plautus to Pinter; but they also bring to bear on them a set of rigorously analytic categories. Unlike many of his theatrical colleagues, Edgar isn ' t afraid of going abstract. Waiting for Godot and Look Back in Anger could scarcely differ more as dramatic experiences, but if you stand a bit further back, as this book does, you realize that both of these ground breaking mid-1950s London productions have one set, five characters, one crucial offstage character, long speeches, music-hall turns, people taking off their trousers, the first half being echoed in the second, nothing much happening, and the two protagonists spending the play trying to leave, but ending up agreeing to stay. Drama, Edgar considers, concentrates experience to expose patterns and connections we might otherwise miss, and this lucid, deeply intelligent little study does much the same. All plays, it suggests, draw on a limited repertoire of actions or basic plots, and many of these revolve on contradictions - between justice and mercy, truth and harm, desire and duty, expectation and results, character and circumstance, actual and ideal. In an astute deployment of the Formalist distinction between plot and story, Edgar shows how Oedipus the King and most of Ibsen's plays start late in the narrative, so that the drama is generated by the process of the back -story coming alive in the present. Shakespearean drama, by contrast, has little back-story, and, in Edgar's opinion, is not particularly subtle in its exposition of the past. Other illuminating distinctions abound. There are "time actions" which centre on the pursuit and reversal of desire, and "space actions" which focus on the gap between ourselves and others. Both represent different kinds of human failure. Characters can be categorized in terms of their plot functions (the Leader-astray, False Friend, the Pillar of the Community, the Vixen, the Joker, the Shoulder-to-cry-on and the like), though the most memorable moments in drama occur when these figures step abruptly or rebelliously out of their roles. Traditionally speaking, the term "character" suggests fixity rather than fluidity , a set pattern rather than an open-ended process;

T

TERRY EAGLETON David Edgar HOW PLA YS WORK 220pp. Nick Hem. Paperback, £ 10.99. 978 1 85459371 9

Peter Gill APPRENTICESHIP 124pp. Oberon. £8.99. 978 1 84002 871 3

and this poses a problem for a liberal society in which "character" and "person" may be sometimes synonymous, yet which prizes individual freedom and uniqueness. It thus comes as no surprise that the word can also mean "admirably idiosyncratic", as in "' Gad, you ' re a character, sir!". Edgar turns this ambiguity to good use: character as plot function presents the audience with a predictable set of traits, which character as sheer wayward individuality may then subvert. This, in fact, is the book's overall formula for a successful drama - one which holds in tension the fulfilment of audience expectations

girl-in-a-boys' -gang pieces, and so on). There is also the basic gay comedy, pithily summarized by Edgar as "Act I: son comes out; Act 2: Mum comes to terms". The last two decades, he points out without much by way of explanation, have witnessed literally dozens of plays exploring the credibility of memory. A section on dramatic structure notes that disrupted or disconnected time sequences have proved especially popular with women playwrights. There are some revealing comments on the place of formats, protocols, rubrics and ceremonies in the theatre, and a survey of dramatic devices all the way from tempo, repetition and drop lines to "rhyming", false exit and the curiously persistent presence of ghosts. Throughout this remarkably busy text, the author combines theoretical acumen with the assured know-how of a working dramatist - a radical dramatist, to be sure, but one who at times emerges here as fairly conservative. He believes, for example, that plausibility and coherence are key factors in a play's effectiveness, a view that would have come as a surprise to Artaud or Brecht. Why should a play "fit with our

Jeremy Brett and Sandra Caron in a production of Arnold Wesker's The Kitchen at the Royal Court Theatre, London, 1961 and the disruption of them. One might add that poetic devices such as rhyme, metre, assonance, metaphor and so on foster a similar interplay between difference and identity. There is an informative ragbag of a chapter on dramatic genre, which claims among other things that the main generic peculiarity of a soap opera is that it never ends. "Gumshoe" British drama from the 1950s to the 70s - the "flawed, isolated, pained but articulate" protagonists of John Osborne, David Hare and Simon Gray - eventually gave way to "predominantly male gangshows" (feel-glad and feel-sad gay dramas, boys-bonding plays,

knowledge of the suhject or our experience

of life" , rather than aggressively unsettle it? What is so precious about a plausible representation of a dinner table? As for coherence, it is remarkable how the arbitrary doctrine that works of art should never have a hair out of place - that everyone of their components should slot seamlessly with every other persisted all the way from Aristotle to I. A. Richards. It was not until the twentiethcentury avant-gardists that this aesthetic piety was put seriously into question. If content in art can be shot through with conflicts, why not form as well?

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As far as the moral point of drama goes, Edgar is not so much conservative as liberal. The theatre encourages empathy, and to feel the experience of others from the inside is to avoid doing evil to them. It would be agreeable if this ethical claim, one which runs all the way from Adam Smith to Ian McEwan, were true. But evil is not merely a breakdown of the imagination. Sadists know well enough what their victims are feeling , and would be disappointed if they did not. It was not failing to put themselves in the place of Jews that made the Nazis indifferent to their suffering; they simply did not care. In any case, moral conduct is not primarily a question of feeling. You can do the right thing without the least tremor of empathy, and may be all the more meritorious on this account. The writer and director Peter Gill recently discovered an old diary he kept when he was a young actor with Peter Hall's Royal Shakespeare Company in the early I 960s, and has published it, along with a rather ramshackle essay on those glamorous theatrical times, as Apprenticeship. The diary is in fact the least fascinating part of the book. It is overshadowed by Gill's retrospective comments on his early years as an actor with the Royal Court, which provide us with an unforgettable cameo of that golden era. There is a brutally honest, superbly nuanced portrait of the holy directorial trinity of Lindsay Anderson, Bill Gaskill and John Dexter, which speaks of their "thuggish" treatment of one another, but is generously prepared to praise as well. The Court was, in Gill ' s view, the one place "where an idea of a serious theatre prevailed over individual ambition It was like a family that was at once morbidly dysfunctional and yet amazingly competent". As well as being an invaluable historical record, Apprenticeship is full of unerring critical aper9us. Gill writes of the "curious, reactionary anguish and violence" of Look Back in Anger; of how the young Vanessa Redgrave, playing Rosalind in As You Like It, "wore her height like a trophy", before arguably succumbing later to a certain theatrical eccentricity; and of the difference between the "poetic, almost palpable recreation of being" of D. H. Lawrence' s plays, which Gill himself introduced to the theatre, and the more abstract impulse of much modern European drama. "The absence of parasols and middle-class melancholy", he writes ofthese pieces, "make [Lawrence] inimical to many old European directorial vanities." He also describes the early Royal Court as "full of English suspicion and a scepticism that was no more than a cutting-down-to-size, with a disdain of intellectual pretension that was often a front for timidity and good taste, and a kind of schoolboy embarrassment and sneering and envy that are signatures of an Oxford and Cambridge education" . "At the Court", he notes, "they were all from Oxford; at the RSC from Cambridge." These are abrasive judgements, yet they hardly ever come through as sour, malicious or self-serving. In the end, what is most striking about the book is how little the author talks about himself. In the annals of theatre memoirs, that is a finer achievement than playing Hamlet at Stratford.

POETRY & MEMOIRS dam Zagajewski's "Try to praise the mutilated world", first published in the post-September II "black" issue of the New Yorker, takes its title from its opening line: Try to praise the mutilated world.

JON STALLWORTHY

Remember June 's long days, and wild strawberries, drops of rose wine.

Adam Zagajewski

A

The nettles that methodically overgrow

Light in the grime ETERNAL ENEMIES

the abandoned homesteads of exiles. You must praise the mutilated world.

Translated by Clare Cavanagh

You watched the stylish yachts and ships ; one of them had a long trip ahead of it, while salty obli vion awaited others. You ' ve seen the refugees going nowhere, you' ve heard the executioners sing joyfully.

You should praise the mutilated world. Remember the moments when we were together in a white room and the curtain fluttered. Return in thought to the concert where music

flared. You gathered acorns in the park in autumn and leaves eddied over the earth' s scars. Prai se the mutilated world and the gray feather a thrush lost, and the gentle light that strays and vanishes and returns.

When I read it I was struck, first, by an awareness that, far from lecturing his reader, the speaker was speaking to himself; his use of " You" (a Zagajewski trademark) a welcome change from the self-important I-deology of so many contemporary poets. It struck me, then, that he had brilliantly obeyed his own imperatives - "Remember .... Remember .... Return .... Praise" - and had made me do the same. More generally, I was arrested by the authority of the voice, the courage and wisdom of a call to praise in a time (like any other) of mutilation: praise, a word with Christian associations, repeated with increasing urgency in the refrain, acquiring the force of a liturgical response, a prayer. Behind the distinctive new voice, one can hear a voice heard in Auden ' s "Musee des Beaux Arts" ("About suffering they were

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116pp. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Paperback, $ 14. 9780374531607 never wrong / The Old Masters"), juxtaposing "miraculous birth" with "dreadful martyrdom" in which "the torturer" plays a part. At some level, Zagajewski remembers this as well as his own love, a fluttering curtain (in a window Auden had opened), and a " mutilated world" where "the executioners sing joyfully". Surely, too, Auden's "expensive delicate ship" must be one of Zagajewski ' s "stylish ships" - perhaps one heading for the "salty oblivion" that awaits Icarus in the Bruegel painting on which Auden ' s poem is based. Zagajewski's praise poem has the variable line-length of Auden ' s which, despite its unobtrusive rhymes, gives it the easy assurance of the best free verse; and one cannot pay Clare Cavanagh a greater compliment than to say her English poem does not suffer by comparison with Auden' s. These poems have a similarly antithetical structure: Auden ' s moving from birth to death to life continuing; Zagajewski's, from "June' s long days" to " light that strays and vanishes / and returns" . They tell us "we must praise" the life continuing, the light returning. They are both Christian poets, intimately involved in human tragedy, yet endowed with the detached perspective of the Old Masters. Adam Zagajewski was born sixty-four years ago in Lvov and went to university in Cracow, two cities he loves and celebrates in his essays and poems. He emigrated to

France in 1982 and now lives between Cracow, Paris and Chicago. Early collections of his poems in English translation were presented in Without End (2002) - a title echoing the Book of Common Prayer - with a section of New Poems translated by Cavanagh. She has achieved something just as remarkable with Eternal Enemies. These are identified in "Epithalamion", a poem beginning "Without silence there would be no music", that goes on to assert: "Only in marriage do love and time, eternal enemies, join forces". An earlier poem, "Little Waltz", ends: " love sets us free, time kills us" . The coming together of man and woman is imaged in that of the earth and "The Sea", In love with the earth, always drawn to shore In love with the earth, thrusting into cities,

Stockholm, Venice, listening to touri sts laugh and chatter before returning to its dark, unmoving source.

The most frequent pairing and dis-pairing of the many antitheses in these poems are those of light and darkness (themselves linked to life and death), often in a religious context, as in "The Churches of France" , described as "dark vessels, where the shy flame of a mighty light wanders". Again, in a more recent poem , "At the Cathedral's Foot", [we] spoke softly about disasters, about what lay ahead, the coming fear, and someone said this wa s the best we could do now -

to talk of darkness in that bright shadow. Such poems remind us that when this Polish Roman Catholic Adam was born, "the pockmarked / Georgian still lived and reigned" . With a bitter parody of the opening of St John ' s Gospel, he now remembers: In the beginning, freezing nights and hatred.

Red Army soldiers fired automatic pistols at the sky, trying to strike the Highest Being.

The title of that poem, "Life is Not a Dream", is echoed by the end of the next, "It Depends" : "I push through a dense thicket of onlookers and ask: / What's happening? God's coming back. But it's just a dream". Zagajewski resembles Yeats in the skill with which he links poem to poem , so that the power of both poets' collections is greater than the sum of individual poems. The Archpoet liked to quote Blake: "Without contraries is no progression". Zagajewski would agree but, whereas the Irish agnostic celebrated the conflict of contraries that, in his "System", made the world and history go round, the Christian Pole seeks and celebrates harmony, love: "Remember the moments when we were together". The title of a key poem proclaims his creed, "Poetry Searches for Radiance", the creed of creative artists (made in their Creator's image) such as BlakeI watch William Blake, who spotted angels every day in treetops and met God on the staircase of his little house and found light in grimy

alleys and like others whom he celebrates: Milosz and Brodsky, Caravaggio and Vermeer, Bach and Schubert. Last but not least, the composers: indeed, Zagajewski would seem to believe that life as well as art "aspires to the condition of music". A sentence borrowed from Conrad Aiken - "Music I heard with you was more than music" - finds its way into three poems of his new book; and music in some form is the means of communication/communion in the joyful epiphanic moments to which he and his fellow makers aspire. The music of the translator's English free verse, in its happy marriage to the poet's European themes, makes Cavanagh's Zagajewski as rare and rewarding an experience as that of Milosz's Englished Collected Poems.

Ｍｾ

ilnius has long been a city of poets. When it was Wilno, Poland's Romantics Adam Mickiewicz and Juliusz Slowacki studied there. In the twentieth century it was linked to three internationally renowned poets: the Pole Czeslaw Milosz studied in Vilnius, the Russian Joseph Brodsky was transformed by five years in the city, while the Lithuanian Tomas Venclova, today the sole survivor, spent his early adult years there, knowing and loving the city intimately. Ignore the blurb comparing Venclova to Mandelstam and Babel: Venclova's evocation of Vilnius is as precise and diffident as Mandelstam ' s Petersburg is phantasmagoricalor Babel's Odessa melodramatic. The personal touches are few, while the history is a thorough survey of Vilnius from a pagan outpost in Christian Europe to the "Rome of the North", joint capital with Cracow of a Lithuanian-Polish state that stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea; and subsequently from "the Jerusalem of the North" , where Yiddish was standardized and Hebrew revived, to a city torn between Poles, Germans and Soviets, finally to become fully Lithuanian and thus oust Kaunas as a capital and Chicago as the largest agglomeration of urbanized Lithuanians. Ruthenian, Polish, Russian, Yiddish and Lithuanian have all competed for

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Precisely placed DONALD RA YFIELD Tomas Venclova VILNIUS A personal hi story Translated by Margot Bettauer Dembo

276pp. Sheep Meadow Press. Paperback, $16.99. 9781931357401 dominance, and Vilnius is still Europe' s most polyglot city. What remains is a charming Raroque heart, though lacking the art nouveau and the seaport elan of Riga or Tallinn, and ringed by Socialist concrete. Venclova guides the reader assuredly through the inner city's labyrinthine courtyards (where you will, without a map, inevitably get lost). Occasionally, Venclova's love of Vilnius leads to partiality typical of Lithuanians today. The horrors in Vilnius were in 1941-4: first Stalin deported or shot a sixth of the population - intellectuals, professionals, businessmen, non-Communist politicians , prostitutes, Polish prisoners of war; then the Nazis exterminated 60,000 Jews. Over the next five

years, Stalin expelled the Poles. Venclova devotes two pages to the Holocaust, focusing on Jakob Gens, a Jewish policeman who betrayed the ghetto uprising, and stressing that some Lithuanians rescued Jews. But for every saviour, a hundred joined the Paneriai riflemen who murdered Jews. Moreover, Vilnius's Jews suffered a pogrom before the arrival of either the NKVD or the SS (on October 28, 1939). Baltic "Museums of Genocide" deal with Soviet horrors but are silent about complicity with the Holocaust. Two of Vilnius' s greatest writers, who hoth have memorial museums in the city, are missing from this History: Vincas Kreve, who asked Molotov to incorporate Lithuania into the USSR, repented under the Nazis, and fled in 1944, finding a haven (like Venclova) as a professor in America; and Vincas Mykolaitis-Putinas, of whom Venclova has tactfully written that "under the Nazi occupation he published anti-Bolshevik verses". In all other respects , this book raises the city guide to a level of informative persuasiveness that Baedeker, let alone Lonely Planet, has never aspired to. It is exception-

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ally well translated from a German version of Venclova's unpublished Lithuanian text, and well edited. The absence of pictures, however, is a loss. In 2006 Venclova published Vilniaus vardai (Celebrities of Vilnius), whose portraits of 546 Vilniusians provide the biographical matter of this book, and which has breathtaking pictures, from a fourteenth-century fresco to a Curlionis painting of a phantom knight at the city walls. (An English version, Vilnius: A guide to its names and people, has just been announced.) This personal history is rounded off with Milosz and Venclova's eloquent Dialogue about a City (1981) - not so much a dialogue as one memoir (Wilno in the late 1920s) countered by another (Vilnius in the early 1950s). Milosz speaks nostalgically of the Freemason atmosphere of Vilnius University, which enabled Jew, Pole and Lithuanian to feel equal members of an intellectual community. The tragedy was not so much exile from VilniusWilno, but that, after it was annexed to Lithuania, any Polish intellectual expressing solidarity with Lithuanian Vilnius was despised as a traitor. Venclova grew to love Vilnius at its lowest point, when Stalin was repopulating and renaming the ruins in which the German army had left it. He despairs of returning, yet is consoled by seeing Florence as its replica.

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A sleepless night Charles Cowden Clarke's letter makes clear how much 'sensative-bitterness' Keats felt after attacks on him by the critics n Friday July 27, 1821, five months JOHN KEATS, THE POET. JOHN BARNARD TO THE EDITOR OF THE MORNING after Keats' s death, the Morning Chronicle printed, under the head- Keats and had been his teacher; Clarke's CHRONICLE. SIR, ing "John Keats, the Poet", a long Atlantic Monthly article similarly describes I find by the Daily Papers, that the letter written by someone identified only as its author as "AN OLD SCHOOL"Y". The letter was reprinted by Edmund FELLOW" (and also suppresses the origins young Poet, John Keats, is dead. I shall feel Blunden in his book Shelley and Keats as of the two men's relationship). The second gratified if you will allow a few remarks from they struck their Contemporaries (1925), with clue is an anonymous pamphlet published by his School-fellow and Friend, a place in your the warning, "Y. may have been C. Cowden Clarke in 1816, entitled, An Address to that Paper. It appears that Mr. Keats died of decline at Clarke, but the letter does not altogether Quarterly Reviewer who touched upon Mr. decide the point". A quarter of a century later, Leigh Hunt 's "Story of Rimini " , which has Rome, whither he had retired to repair the J. R. MacGillivray noted the existence of the only recently come to light. Clarke's target in inroads which the rupturing of a blood vessel letter in his Bibliography and Reference Guide his defence of Hunt' s poem, as in Y's letter had made upon his constitution. It is not impossible that his premature death (1949), and identified the writer as "almost to the Morning Chronicle , is the corrupt state of book reviewing. The style and tone of Y's may have been brought on by his performing certainly Charles Cowden Clarke". MacGillivray cited the letter writer' s letter exhibits the same "fisty-cuffish" style the office of nurse to a younger brother, who description of himself as Keats's "School- (Hunt's description) as Clarke' s pamphlet also died of decline; for his attention to the fellow and friend", and his claims to have and it has the same fondness for literary invalid was so anxious and unwearied, that his been present when Keats was first introduced quotations. friends could see distinctly that his own health to Leigh Hunt and to Benjamin Robert Haydon (facts which point to Clarke's authorship), and concluded by giving a short extract in which Y describes a night he once spent talking to the poet about the recent hostile reviews of Endymion. The letter's account of Keats's sensitivity to the critics' attacks has never been fully integrated into the poet' s biography. That may be partly because the identity of Y is not entirely certain, and partly because Blunden' s book, which was printed in a limited edition of 390, is a collector' s item usually lodged in rare book rooms. But there may be another more important reason. At the heart of the letter is a description of Keats lying awake "through the whole night" talking with "sensative-bitterness" [sic] about the attacks by his critics. This challenges Keats' s own claims that the hostile articles written about him in Blackwood 's and the Quarterly affected him less than his own self-criticism (claims always cited to rebut the myth that he was killed by a review). When Cowden Clarke published his "Recollections of Keats", forty years later, in 1861, in the Atlantic Monthly, he included a detail that identifies him as the Morning Charles Cowden Clarke by an unknown artist, mid-nineteenth century Chronicle's Y. Describing the effect the reviews had on Keats in the autumn of 1818, The importance of Charles Cowden had suffered in the exertion. This may have Clarke wrote: "He felt the insult, but more the Clarke's letter of July 1821 is that it was writ- been one cause, but I do not believe it was the injustice of the treatment he had received; he ten a quarter of a century before he began to sole cause. It will be remembered that Keats told me so, as we lay awake one night, when I compile the recollections which are a key received some rough and brutal usage from slept in his brother's bed" . When revising the source for much of our knowledge of Keats's the Reviews about two years since; particuarticle for Recollections of Writers, which he schooling and his early development. It was larly from the Quarterly, and from a Northern published jointly with his wife, Mary, in not until March 16, 1846, that he was spurred one; which, in the opinion of every gentle1878, he left out the two closing clauses. into writing the memoranda of Keats' s "early manly and feeling mind, has rendered itself Clarke's 1861 article makes the same claim Life" by Richard Monckton Milnes, who was infamous from its coarse pandarism to the as Y's letter of 1821 , that the writer heard gathering material for the first collected edi- depraved appetites of gossips and scandalKeats's reactions to the reviews while staying tion of Keats' s works. This was followed by mongers. To what extent the treatment he with him overnight, and adds the circumstan- Clarke's article in the Atlantic Monthly, which received from those writers operated upon his tial detail that he was sleeping in "his in turn provided the basis for his most widely mind I cannot say ; for Keats had a noble - a brother's bed" (that is, George Keats's empty known account, the chapter on Keats in Recol- proud - and an undaunted heart; but he was bed in the brothers' lodgings in Well Walk). lections of Writers. The Morning Chronicle very young, only one and twenty. He had all There are two further pieces of evidence letter, written only three or four years after the the enthusiasm of the youthful poet burning in for Clarke's authorship of the Morning events it describes, is by far the earliest him - he thought to take the great world by the Chronicle letter. First, Y describes himself as account of Keats' s reactions by his most hand, and hold its attention while he unburKeats's "School-fellow and Friend", even important early literary friend , and deserves to thened the overflowings of an aspiring and though he was in fact eight years older than be analysed carefully. This is the full text: ardent imagination; and his beautiful recasting

O

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of " The Pot of Basil" proves that he would have done so had he lived. But his ardour was met by the torpedo touch of one whose "Blood is very snow-broth;" and the exuberant fancies of a young and almost ungovernable fancy were dragged forward by another, and exhibited in gross and wanton caricature. It is truly painful to see the yearnings of an eager and trusting mind thus held up to the fiend-like laugh of a brutal mob, upon the pikes and bayonets of literary mercenaries. If it will be any gratification to Mr. Gifford to know how much he contributed to the discomfort of a generous mind, I can so far satisfy it by informing him, that Keats has lain awake through the whole night talking with sensative-bitterness of the unfair treatment he had experienced; and with becoming scorn of the information which was afterwards suggested to him ; "That as it was considered he had been rather roughly handled, his future productions should be reviewed with less harshness." So much for the integrity and impartiality of criticism! This charge would no doubt be denied with high and flouncing indignation; but he told me he had been given to understand as much, and I believe him. If the object of this hint was to induce the young Poet to quit the society of those whom he had chosen for his friends , and who had helped him in pushing off his boat from shore, it shows how little his character was known to his assailants. He had a " little body," but he too had a "mighty heart," as anyone of them would have discovered, had the same impertinences been offered to him personally which were put forth in their anonymous scandal-rolls. Keats' s great crime was his having dedicated his first production to Mr. Leigh Hunt. He should have cowered under the wings of Mr. Croker, and he would have been fostered into "a pretty chicken." I remember his first introduction to Mr. Hunt, and the pleasure each seemed to derive from the interview. I remember with admiration, all that Gentleman's friendship and disinterestedness towards him - disinterestedness, which would surprise those only who do not know him. I remember too, his first introduction to Mr. Haydon ; and when in the course of conversation that great artist asked him, "if he did not love his country," how the blood rushed to his cheeks and the tears to his eyes, at his energetic reply. His love of freedom was ardent and grand. He once said, that if he should live a few years, he would go over to South America, and write a Poem on Liberty, and now he lies in a land where liberty once flourished, and where it is regenerating. I hope his friends and admirers (for he had both, and warm ones) will raise a monument to his memory on the classical spot where he died; and that Can ova, the Roman, will contribute that respect, so amply in his power, to the memory of the young Englishman, who possessed a kindred mind with, and who restamped the loveliest of all the stories of his great countryman, - Boccaccio. And now farewel, noble spirit! You have forsaken us, and taken the long and dark journey towards "that bourne from whence no traveller returns;" but you have left a memorial of your genius which "posterity will not willingly let die." You have plunged into the gulf, but your golden sandals remain. The storm of life has overblown , and, "the rest is silence." "Fear no more the heat of the sun,

COMMENTARY Nor the furious winter's rages; Thou thy worldly task hast done, Home art gone, and ta'en thy wages.

******

Quiet consummation have, And renowned be thy Grave."

Y.

There is no reason to doubt Clarke's report of the exchange between Haydon and Keats during their first meeting. We know that Keats visited Haydon at the painter's studio in Great Marlborough Street with Clarke, on or shortly after October 31 , 1816, and Keats's ardent patriotism, and the swiftness of his physical responses when emotionally aroused, are both well attested. But the more important details in the letter concern Keats's reaction to the critical attacks on Endymion, and they suggest that Keats was more disturbed by these than either his friends or his biographers have been willing to admit. Members of Keats's immediate circle (like his later admirers) were anxious to discredit the unmanly story that the poet had been killed by a review. Robert Gittings asserts that the " most important by-product of this war of critics was the new maturity Keats showed towards it". Although Gittings admits that some of Keats 's later remarks about Byron show that "some unfortunate seeds" were "sown in his mind", he argues that Keats' s "reactions showed immense commonsense", and cites the letter to his publisher, James Hessey, of October 8, 1818: "My own domestic criticism has given me pain without comparison beyond what Blackwood or the Quarterly could possibly inflict ... when I feel I am right, no external praise can give me such a glow as my own solitary reperception & ratification of what is fine" ; Keats concludes, "In Endymion, I leaped headlong into the Sea ... I was never afraid of failure; for I would sooner fail than not be among the greatest. Gittings sees this as a "healthy attitude". It is the stance perpetuated by Keats's friends after his death and the one his publishers, and he himself, needed to maintain at the time: that Keats recognized the biased nature of the attacks on Endymion and could discount them rationally. Clarke's account of him lying awake all night, talking with "sensative-bitterness" about the " injustice" of the reviews, describes the poet pouring out his confused feelings in private to someone who had known him since he was a schoolboy. What is most striking about Clarke's framing of this incident is the violent, "fisty-cuffish" language with which he attacks Keats's reviewers, which is shared with Clarke's earlier pamphlet written in defence of Hunt's The Story of Rimini. Both the letter and the pamphlet protest too much , and risk undermining their own argument. In defending Hunt against the reviewer's charges of

indecency in 1816, Clarke writes: .. . suppose Mr. Hunt had retained his quondam mistress as waiting woman to his wife; suppose he were a gambler, and adulterer, or a debauchee - one or all three of these charac-

ters, - suppose he had been a horse jockey who had drugged his horse, that he might be the

gain er by that animal's failure; - what would that have to do with the merits, or demerits, of

his poem?

Similarly, his intended argument in the Morning Chronicle is that Keats rose above the critical attacks on him in the Quarterly

and Blackwood's. But his line of argument is valuable" was, of course, to prove correct. confused. Clarke's opening claim that nursing Indeed , only a week after the dinner Keats Tom during his fatal illness had damaged told his friend and neighbour, Charles Dilke, Keats's health and "may have been one cause, that he was "obliged to write, and plunge into but I do not believe it was the sole cause" (of abstract images" in order to escape the presKeats's illness and death) is immediately fol- sure of tending his sick brother in the conlowed by reminding his readers of the "rough fines of their rooms in Well Walk. Three and brutal usage from the Reviews about two weeks later, writing to his brother George years since" . When Clarke comments, "To and his wife in America, Keats, responding to what extent the treatment he received from the attacks on Endymion , defiantly asserted, those writers operated upon his mind I cannot "This is a mere matter of the moment - I say", his italics suggest that Keats ' s critics think I shall be among the English Poets after were indeed a contributory cause of his death. my death". However, Keats's publishers and The images used for depicting the reviewers their adviser, Richard Wood house, were not ("coarse pandarism to depraved appetites", privy to his letters to his friends and family. "the torpedo touch", "the pikes and bayonets Hessey had given a sanguine report of the of literary mercenaries", "the fiend-like laugh poet's reactions to the Blackwood's review of a brutal mob") seem disproportionately at his dinner part of September 14. Nevertheviolent if, as Clarke claims, Keats's "proud. less, he was sufficiently worried about the undaunted heart" scorned their attacks. possible effects Croker's subsequent review Indeed, Clarke seems to be expressing Keats' s in the Quarterly might have on Keats, to send him the defence signed "J. S." (most likely by pain as much as proving his fortitude. The night Clarke describes must have been John Scatt) published in the Morning Chroniearly in September 1818, or at the beginning cle on October 3. It was this which provoked of October. Keats returned from his Scottish Keats into writing, by return, the eloquent letjourney on August 18, Lockhart' s harsh ter of October 8 asserting his indifference to review in Blackwood 's was published criticism quoted earlier. towards the end of August, and John Wilson On October 21 , Richard Woodhouse Croker's article in the Quarterly appeared drafted a long, much revised, letter to Keats on about September 27. Another piece of arguing at passionate length that "the wealth evidence provided by Clarke may help to of poetry is unexhausted & inexhaustible". narrow the timescale. His letter reports that it Ostensibly his letter was, like Hessey 's, trigwas "afterwards suggested to [Keats]" that gered by the "weak & silly article on End"his future publications should be reviewed ymion in the last Quarterly Review", which with less harshness" because Endymion had he had read while out of town , but its real subbeen "roughly handled". The most likely ject was "our late conversation at Hessey's". source of this otherwise unrecorded piece Wood house remembered Keats threatening to of information is Keats 's publisher, John stop writing poetry altogether, saying "there Taylor. On August 31 , Taylor wrote to his was now nothing original to be written in partner, James Hessey, reporting a conversa- poetry", "its riches were already exhausted, tion he had just had with William Black- & all its beauties forestalled", and, hence, his wood, who was visiting London. Blackwood decision to "write no more" . Woodhouse, likwas evasive about the review of Keats, and ening Keats to Milton, deplores the "evil while Taylor does not mention anything days" and "Evil tongues" of current criticism, about future reviews, the meeting of the two and tells Keats he is the "one bard ... who men is an obvious source for this informa- judges of the beautiful for himself'. Keats took a few days to answer, but his tion. It probably reached Keats via Hessey. On September 5, Hessey told Taylor he had carefully written reply of October 27, which not seen Keats since the appearance of the looks like a fair copy, defines the "unpoetical" Blackwood 's review, suggesting both were concerned about its effects on the young poet. Hessey arranged for Keats to dine with him on September 14, along with Hazlitt, Woodhouse and others. He described Keats's behaviour to Taylor as follows: "Keats was in good spirits. He slept here and staid some time next morning. He does not seem to care at all about Blackwood, he thinks it so poorly done, and as he does not mean to publish any thing more at present he says it affects him less". Less often quoted are the next two sentences: [Keats] is studying closely , recovering hi s Latin, going to learn Greek, and seems altogether rather more rational than usual - but he is such a man of fits and starts he is not much to

be depended upon. Still he thinks of nothing but poetry as hi s being 's end and aim, and sometime or other he will! doubt not, do some-

thing valuable. Hessey' s view of Keats as a not always "rational" man of "fits and starts" , but one for whom poetry was "his being's end and aim" , was no doubt coloured by the dealings over Keats 's ill-advised preface to Endymion which had to be replaced, at his publishers ' insistence, by a second version, only marginally less vulnerable. Hessey 's forecast that Keats would in the end produce "something

TLS DECEMBER 4 2009

15 nature of the "camel ion Poet" and is one of Keats's most eloquent and best-known formulation of his poetic beliefs. He concludes by saying, "I am ambitious of doing the world some good", and asserts his recommitment to poetry. On receiving his reply, Woodhouse very quickly sent Taylor a highly intelligent analysis of the ideas in Keats 's letter and on the comparative nature of his poetic genius. Woodhouse' s advocacy of Keats's preeminence, together with the carefulness of the case he makes for Keats's kind of poetry, including references to specific passages in Endymion , suggest that he was acting as much as Taylor's adviser as Keats's friend. It is conceivable that Taylor and Hessey had encouraged Woodhouse to write to Keats in the first place, and it is evident that all three men shared anxieties about Keats' s possible state of mind, despite his earlier letter to Hessey. Cowden Clarke's Morning Chronicle letter makes clear exactly how upset Keats was by the critical attacks in the autumn of 1818. Clarke's sleepless night at Well Walk most likely occurred before Hessey's dinner party on September 14, in which case Keats's "sensative-bitterness" was caused by Gifford ' s (in fact, Lockhart's) review of Endymion in Blackwood's. The concerns of Keats' s publishers, Taylor and Hessey, and their adviser, Richard Woodhouse, were well founded , even though Keats's letters to his publishers, friends and family show that he very quickly developed a rational and dignified response to his critics. By October 27 , 1818, he was thinking seriously about, and possibly beginning to write, Hyperion, the most courageous way of answering criticism, and a project Keats had proposed for himself ten months earlier (even though he was still completing Endymion). But Cowden Clarke's account of his initial response to Lockhart's attack in Blackwood 's indicates that Keats was more uncertain, more deeply wounded, and more affected, than his admirers then, or subsequently, have been willing to admit.

A longer version of this article will appear in Romanticism next year.

16

COMMENTARY

've been receiving sizeable weekly cheques for doing nothing more than being the offspring of the authors of The Grass is Greener, a comedy by Hugh and Margaret Williams, currently on tour with Christopher Cazenove in the part played by my father. The play was first produced in London in 1956 with Celia Johnson and Joan Greenwood, and was later made into a film starring Cary Grant, Robert Mitchum, Deborah Kerr and Jean Simmonds. My parents' plays have rarely been performed since my father's death in 1969, but this is not the first time I have been the beneficiary of The Grass

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is Greener. When film rights were sold in 1961 , my father was determined not to pay income tax; he thought the Inland Revenue owed it to him, having been bankrupted by them ten years earlier. The scheme concocted involved my leaving England before I was twenty-one and coming back after I was twenty-two, thereby breaking a trust fund , inheriting the money as a minor, untaxed, and placing it in the Australian stock exchange. I was a rich man in Sydney in 1964. All would have been well if the Australian stock market hadn ' t collapsed the following year, causing the loss of exactly what they would have paid in tax. My two-year absence from Britain was thus of no assistance to my parents, but the trip led to a travel book and the start of my writing for a living, so I have every reason to be grateful to the play. Brighton was always where we saw my father's plays as children, so one day last week I went down there. I walked on the seafront that I've known so well all my life, dark and deserted now, with a high rainy wind and huge waves illumined by the seafront lights. Nibbling chips on the half-shut pier, the collar of my father' s old overcoat turned up, I felt like a spectre roving the wastes of time. I bought a

HUGO WILLIAMS whisky in the Colonnade Bar next to the theatre, scene of so many celebrations long ago, my mother wearing a well-earned mink. The theatre was packed with drawingroom types, dressed to the nines on this rainy Monday night. They loved the play, but they didn't see what I saw. Hearing lines which so vividly conjured up their author provided a multi-dimensional experience for me. First, there were the actors moving about the stage, but shadowing them were other, more familiar faces , saying those same lines half a century ago: Celia Johnson' s big eyes, or Cary Grant wandering about in the background, having difficulty with my father's phraseology. It was like a play of a play. "He knows that stretch of river better than he knows his own wife - much prefers it too." And suddenly my father was standing there, large as life, and beyond him the origins of the play in our lives at the time. My own work is pretty autobiographical; I didn't realize how much theirs was too. Their play The Flip Side is about wife-swapping, which they had tried themselves long before the phrase became current. Of this experiment the story is told that as the two men passed each other in the corridor of their holiday hotel , my father muttered "Like shits that pass in the night" - a line my brother later worked into his own production. None of their plays was more autobiographical than The Grass is Greener, which turns on a wife's infidelity and the husband's way of coping with it and forgiving her. When I was seven, I was taken to Scotland by my mother and godfather, ostensibly for a

shooting holiday. It took us four days in his Bentley. Every night I was lifted out of the car, drugged on Phenobarbitone for car sickness, and put to bed in a different hotel. My godfather was an unlikely lover. A hearty, outdoor bachelor and wartime friend of my father, he spent every weekend with us for years and was like a member of the family. We were living in an unheated sixth-floor flat in a vast Elizabethan house called Cobham Hall, seat of the impoverished Earl of Darnley. My mother used to drive his daffodillorry to Covent Garden to pay the rent. My father took the bus to go to auditions for the first time in his life. He spent a year staring into the fire, then my mother got him writing. After a couple of successes - we had moved by now - he must have been looking around for a new subject and hit on Cobham Hall as a likely setting. The Grass is Greener followed. It isn ' t a hearty English bachelor who walks through the door marked "Private" while taking the tour of a stately home, but a handsome American tourist. He sees the Countess and the pair fall instantly in love. The Earl (my father) walks in, senses what has happened by the look on his wife's face and makes ironical banter with the camerawielding interloper - something about a squirrel with two heads and two tails which he says he once took a photo of and which his wife denies ever existed. "They're a fearful pest", he tells the American, "but do you know, I couldn't bring myself to shoot this one, not after I'd taken its picture." I remember delighting in the emphatic insincerity of his delivery, a code of humour which I picked up on for the first time. Under the guise of a shopping trip, his wife

IN NEXT WEEK'S

TLS Jonathan Benthall The afterlife of religion Stella Tillyard Secrets of Georgian London Alastair Fowler Sir John Harington, major poet Ruth Scurr Antal Szerb and the queen's necklace

TLS May 31 , 1923

Forster and Cavafy in Alexandria We look back to John Middleton Murry's review of Pharos and Pharillon by E. M. Forster. To see the review in full, go to www. the-tls.co.uk. he fortune of war cast Mr. Forster upon Alexandria, and Alexandria cast her spell upon him. He was eminently fitted to receive it. We know this, hecause he has heen ahle to communicate it to us, and to make us feel what in our minds we know, that only this debatable ground, where Greece and Asia strove for harmony and the human sought to include the infinite, could contain the music by which the god Hercules bade farewell to Antony. Strange and elusive and impalpable things have happened in this borderland. It belongs as much to the imagination as the actual. Monks battered in the heads of monks, and hanged bishops over their altars in the churches of Alexandria. But on the plains near by the veritable voice of Antony

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once whispered Unarm, Eros, the long day ' s work is done And we must rest

And many years before, in the great oasis of Siwa, Alexander had heard the summons of God. "A scare he did get," says Mr. Forster, with that subtle diffidence that is all his own, "- a fright, a psychic experience, 'a turn, '" . So the story of Alexandria, seen (or it may be refracted) through Mr. Forster's mind, becomes a manifestation of himself. Here is a world of events that he can comfortably inhabit; in this garment the very tricks of his mind can be accommodated. He was made for it and it for him - for his friend the Alexandrian poet, Cavafy, also, in whose diaphanous verses, as in Mr. Forster's prose, the outward incoherence of Alexandria that is and was seems refracted into unity. Cavafy, Mr. Forster presents to us as standing "at a slight angle with the universe." At the same slight angle we see Mr. Forster, who stands by him, also inclined. Being a dubious character, he goes off to a dubious city, to that portion of the inhabited world where there is most obviously a bend in the spiritual dimension .... At this point a spinning eddy marks the convergence of

TLS DECEMBER 4 2009

goes to London for a week and joins the American at Claridge's. Was this a version of our trip to Scotland five years earlier? It's odd to think of my parents sitting down together to write this comedic exposition of their troubles. Were they aware of its transparency, or did it go unnoticed because such things were the business of comedy then? My brother thinks the play was a sort of love letter to her, forgiving her and saying he understood. He certainly had enough to be forgiven for himself. My very Welsh father was fond of the dramatic gesture in times of emergency unexpected knight's moves which baffled the opposition. In the light comedy version of the affair, he rings Claridge's and invites the American down for a weekend's fishing. Oh, and would he mind giving his wife a lift, she's been in London herself? Now that the American/godfather figure is installed, as usual , for the weekend, the fun really starts. My father challenges his rival to a duel - an old-world gesture, no doubt expressing his resistance to England's burgeoning Americanization. They both miss, of course, but the butler-second has been primed to shoot the Earl in the arm. Blood flows, kisses follow , above all marriage is preserved. Wife to lover: "When I saw him wounded I remembered how much I love him. I'd forgotten for a whole week" . In another unexpected move he insists she goes away with her American for a while, to get him out of her system. Was this too an echo of our strange Scottish jaunt? In the light comedy version, she declines. When my brother got married, my father advised him, "For God's sake don ' t leave it too long before you're unfaithful, otherwise it'll become too big a thing to get over". There was a man who believed in the institution of marriage. Or was he just afraid of change in 1956?

two worlds, and in the vortex contradictories are reconciled. It is nothing less than a crack in the human universe. Mr. Forster wanders off to put his ear to it. He finds Mr. Cavafy already engaged in the enterprise. So they listen together. They hear the defunctive music which attended Mark Antony to his last triumph, the words which were whispered by the priest of Ammon to the Son of God, and the Bedouin singing "tunes to the camel that only he can sing to the camel , because in his mind the tune and the camel are the same thing." There is a vortex in Alexandria, and Mr. Forster, being sensitive to these disturbances, was drawn into it inevitably. That is how we would explain this book and the shimmering magic that dances in and out of its pages .... Therefore we conclude that in Alexandria Mr. Forster found a spiritual home; the queer fish found it easier to breathe in those suspiciously crystalline waters. Whether he knew what had befallen him the moment he arrived there, or whether it was his encounter with Mr. Cavafy and his recognition of him as a fellowexile from the world of things which simply are what they are called - no matter which of these encouraged him to expand his own idiosyncrasy in the favouring air, it is certain that Mr. Forster has never yet been so convincingly himself or so manifestly different from his fellow-writers.

17

W. H. Auden, Benjamin Britten and Alan Bennettrehearse the struggle to create

Last dances of attendance lizabeth Smart, in a late, unusually playful poem, wrote "What is art? Said doubting Tim". Part of her answer was, "It's not leaving your mark, / Your scratch on the bark, / No, not at all / ' Mozart was here' on the ruined wall". I couldn ' t help thinking of this, after seeing and reading Alan Bennett' s The Habit of Art. In this new play, a work more serious, more ambitious, and funnier than his last, The History Boys, Bennett uses the device of a play within a play to pursue questions about the nature of performance, failing memory, the unheard voices of the artist's cohorts, and perhaps above all the clash between reticence and licentiousness. The scene is a rehearsal room in the National Theatre. The company, minus the director, absent in Leeds, is gathered for a run-through of a play called "Caliban's Day" . The setting, elahorately recreated, is ofW. H. Auden's spectacularly messy rooms at Christ Church, Oxford in 1972. The actor cast as Auden is called Fitz (Richard Griffiths). He is visited in succession by an interviewer, supposedly Humphrey Carpenter, then by a young rent boy ("that's not a job description I answer to") and finally by Benjamin Britten, played by the actor Henry (Alex Jennings). The unnamed playwright (Elliot Levey) is questioned throughout the rehearsal by the actors and by Kay, the assistant director (Frances de la Tour). The play that Bennett has created for his author veers between realistic dialogue, peppered with recognizable quotes from many sources of writing about Auden and Britten, to moments of internal commentary and reflection provided by a chorus, male and female (a parody of The Rape of Lucretia, maybe), who represent the furniture ("I am the bed that he does not share"), the door, the clock, Time itself, two wrinkles on Auden's face ("Taken together, my colleagues and I constitute the TouraineSolente-Gole Syndrome") and at the climax of Part Two, Music and Words. The harassed author, after seeing crucial passages deleted by the unseen director, is forced to explain himself. Britten, Auden, and their biographer, Carpenter, are all dead. The unheard voice is the boy, the only living witness. He is Caliban; or, as the character declares, "We were in attendance, we boys of art". In "Caliban's Day", the imaginary meeting

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PATRICK O'CONNOR Alan Bennett THE HABIT OF ART Lyttelton Theatre

Peter Jeffreys, editor THE FORSTER - CA V AFY LETTERS Friends at a slight angle 191 pp. American University in Cairo Press. £25.50.

9789774162572

Myfanwy Piper as librettist, and pounces on what he sees as the failure of the story, the dream in which Aschenbach realizes the extent of his desire for the boy Tadzio: "This is a novelist. A self-proclaimed man of the world. He doesn't need a dream to tell him he fancies someone". Ry focusing on this passage, Bennett gives the poet the chance to urge Britten to expand his view of the subject to include his own sexuality. It is, of course, this very aspect of the opera, as we now know it, that still disturbs many people. Britten did indeed achieve what Auden - in the play - urges him on to, but stage directors, at least in all the productions I have seen, don't allow the music Britten composed for the dream to have its way. Auden and Britten' s argument is interrupted by the return of the sex worker, Stuart. The actor playing him, Tim (Stephen Wright), is given practical advice by Henry, who seems to have intimate knowledge of the kind of personal services the character is meant to provide. It is late, and Britten is about to depart, but rather than finishing with Fitz reciting Auden's poem on the death of Yeats, the author insists that they tryout his new ending, in which Stuart demands his own part in the proceedings. In his introduction to the play, Bennett describes this character as being the latest in a succession of at first seemingly unimportant figures, almost interlopers, who turn out to have more to say than anticipated. And so the rehearsal comes to an end, and the actors depart, Fitz to a voice-over recording for a Tesco advertisement. Long before this, though, we have come to realize that the play is not about Auden and Britten so much as about the struggle of any writer and composer, the battle

the enemy, the actors fear the audience" . Frances de la Tour brings off this scene with superb, almost musical, timing. The least satisfactory aspect of the play is the part allotted to the Humphrey Carpenter character, played by Donald (Adrian Scarborough). In "Caliban's Day", he acts as a narrator, as well as providing comical misunderstanding at his first meeting with Auden , who mistakes him for the rent boy and tells him to take his trousers off ("But I'm with the BBC"). Offstage, Donald is unhappy with his part, and improvises a new scene in which he appears in drag, singing ''I'm Doris, the Goddess of Wind" a la Douglas Byng. Even here Bennett is playing with memory, for did not Byng himself give one of his last performances on the stage of the Cottesloe? In reality, Britten and Auden hardly ever

Alex Jennings and Richard Griffiths saw each other after the poet visited Aldeburgh in 1953. ("Everyone was charming, but I was never allowed to see Ben alone.") Later he wrote of the estrangement "that is a constant grief to me" . Bennett has replaced this melancholy with anger, and although the depiction of Britten ' s schoolboyish manner is deliberately stereotyped, the confrontational scenes work well. Nicholas Hytner's produc-

between Auden and Britten comes about

between creator and interpreter; or, as Audenl

tion allows each shift from conversation to

because the composer is tormented by doubts over his work in progress, Death in Venice. He comes to Auden to seek some sort of encouragement, "Someone to say, 'Go on. Go on.' You used to be good at that" . Auden, reminding Britten more than once that Thomas Mann was his father-in-law, goes into attack. Britten is still hiding behind a little-boy image. He refuses to acknowledge himself, he is part of the thing that Auden despises and fears. "This is England talking, isn't it Ben? This is taste, modesty, selfrestraint." Auden is fired up, offers to replace

Fitz puts it, "Style is the sum of one's imperfections , what one can't do, as much as what one can" . Having been led to believe, too, that Stuart is the only unheard voice, Bennett springs another surprise: as in the closing moments of A Question of Attribution, in which the fifth man in the Kim Philby imbroglio is revealed beneath the pentimento, Kay here emerges from the shadows to deliver the final speech. It is a homage to the theatre itself, its absurdities, its urgency, the power of the plays themselves to overcome fear; "Actors are like soldiers. The soldiers fear

rehearsal to have its own weight. Only in the final debate over Stuart's part in the proceedings does it become hazy - who is acting and who is speaking the truth? Will he one day be able to say , " Your grandfather was sucked off by W. H. Auden" ? From the good-natured obscenity of much of the dialogue in Bennett's play, it comes as quite a contrast to turn to a correspondence between two writers of an earlier generation, whose friendship also seems to have been tinged with a certain tetchiness as well as concealed empathy. E. M. Forster was intro-

TLS DECEMBER 4 2009

duced to C. P. Cavafy in Alexandria, probably in March 1916, at the Mohammed Ali Club; Forster was thirty-six, Cavafy fiftytwo. They established a close acquaintance immediately; it was just at the time that Forster had met Mohammed el Adl, the Egyptian tram conductor with whom he embarked on what Peter Jeffreys calls "his first fullfledged romantic relationship" . Forster became a champion of Cavafy's poetry, and contrived to have translations published in several distinguished journals in London, as well as including a chapter about Cavafy in his book Pharos and Pharillon (1923). Whatever differences of opinion, and there must have been many, the two had over political and historical issues, throughout the letters Forster continually urges the older man to allow his work to be brought to a wider public. Cavafy seems to have had douhts , possihly hased on the idea of ridicule from an unsympathetic readership. Forster writes to Cavafy's translator, George Valassopoulo in 1924: "I don't think the British public is as silly as it used to be ... it stands Aldous Huxley and D. H. Lawrence, and I don ' t imagine Cavafy will be hotter stuff than they are" . Forster brought Cavafy' s work to the attention of Leonard and Virginia Woolf, and they immediately offered to publish a volume at the Hogarth Press. That this never came to pass seems to have been in part because of the poet's tardiness, and in part to do with some arguments over the translations. The letters from Forster have survived among Cavafy's papers. Forster lost or destroyed the other half of the correspondence, which is reconstructed here from Cafavy's meticulous draft copies, crossingsout and all. Peter leffreys has edited the volume with loving detail. He has gathered all the extant Valassopoulo translations, the ones that should have been published by the Woolfs, and they appear here together for the first time. W. H. Auden wrote, "I have read translations of Cavafy made by many different hands, but everyone of them was immediately recognizable as a poem by Cavafy, nobody else could possibly have written it". Cavafy could be addressing Alan Bennett' s characters when he writes, "Do not delude yourself, do not say that it is a dream, that your ear was mistaken".

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18 t is to Ang Lee's credit that he has been pegged neither as a period filmmaker nor as a gay filmmaker, in spite of some daunting evidence, His films have been set in England and America in the nineteenth century (Sense and Sensibility, 1995, Ride with the Devil, 1999), and in China in the eighteenth century and the 1930s (Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, 2000, Lust, Caution, 2007); Brokeback Mountain (2005), his most accomplished work so far, concerns an affair between two men that begins in the early 1960s. Now there is Taking Woodstock , set at the other end of that decade, a coming-out tale set against Vietnam and the moon landings that also functions as a de-romanticizing account of the music festival. Lee's approach to depicting the past is the same as his approach to portraying homosexuality: he refuses to make a big deal about it. Refusing to make a big deal about period or sexuality, or anything at all , is close to being the vice of Taking Woodstock. The film is gentle to the point of lethargy. But once one has acclimatized - or decelerated - to the film's rhythms, it becomes clear that Lee is in the business of tickling cliches. The film sets out to reveal the boring reality behind the Wood stock myth, and its lack of propulsion is a requirement of this spoilsport enterprise. In the version of events provided by Elliot Tiber's memoir, weeks of bureaucracy and negotiation went into creating those "three days of love and music" . The son of eccentric and impoverished Catskill motel owners (Henry Goodman, Imelda Staunton), Elliot (Demetri Martin) holds the only permit for organizing a live music performance in White Lake, New York; and, having spent time in Greenwich Village, he has contacts in the music industry. The film portrays an alliance of shrewd hippies and men in suits conspiring to exploit the commercial potential of flower power. The revolution was

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bribery. Reality keeps generosity in check. Despite this revisionist agenda, Taking Woodstock exhibits a certain nostalgia and psychedelic silliness. But though it occasionally loses awareness of itself, it remains alert to the delusions of its characters. In the final scene, the hippie-entrepreneur Michael Lang (Jonathan Groff) announces that, having pulled this one off, his next challenge is to organize a free concert for the Rolling Stones. Hindsight inflects this moment with dark irony. We are expected to know that the eventual result of this project - which took place three and a half months after Woodstock - was a harrowing dream-gone-sour; "the Stones concert ... where they killed that guy" , in the words of the gormless music journalist (Shelley Duvall) in Annie Hall. There were in fact four deaths at the Altamont Speedway on December 6, 1969, but only one of them is credited with ending the 1960s. As the Stones played " Under My Thumb", Meredith Hunter, a young black man (with a gun) was repeatedly stabbed by Alan Passaro, one of the Hell ' s Angels hired as security. The Maysles brothers and Charlotte Zwerin were documenting the Stones's American tour, of which Altamont was the climax. They also captured the kind of administrative chatter dramatized in Taking Woodstock: frowning exchanges about parking facilities and public toilets. It all ended up in Gimme Shelter, released in 1970, and now available in the UK on DVD. The film is as persuasive as Taking Woodstock in its portrayal of assiduously orchestrated chaos, and considerably more dramatic. It is also unilluminating. The Maysles brothers were practitioners of Direct Cinema,

the movement in American documentary which aspired to emulate the properties of the fiction film in much the same way that Truman Capote and Norman Mailer sought to bring reporting closer to the novel. The Maysles' work is always either compelling (Meet Marlon Brando, 1966, Salesman, 1968) or chilling (the Altamont footage, Grey Gardens, 1975). But a documentary approach that rules out talking-head interviews and narration and the delivery of relevant contextual detail is ill-equipped to explain a significant event or to strip away celebrity personality, though these were the tasks to which the American verite aesthetic were most often applied. Without the potential for commentary, a documentary about the Rolling Stones is allowed to be nothing more than an another edition of The Mick Jagger Show - Jagger joshing with journalists, Jagger addressing the crowd at Madison Square Garden, Jagger looking on in dazed horror at footage of Meredith Hunter's killing. The film ends with a freeze-frame close-up of Jagger's face which insinuates his complicity in the menace and frenzy of the Altamont Free Concert. But that is as far as the film goes in providing an account, rather than a home video, of the day. What about the relevance of racial tension in late 1960s California? What inciting role was played by " Sympathy for the Devil" , that gleeful catalogue of mayhem? And who hired the Hell's Angels anyway? If the information wasn ' t communicated when the Maysles brothers were filming , we are simply left to guess. A documentary that is all drama and no insight is finally as frustrating as a work of historical fiction that is all insight and no drama. But placed together, their different strengths combined, Taking Woodstock and Gimme Shelter amount to a detailed and disturbing portrait of the moral cost - and financial rewards - of free love.

ally filling some other body". Fanny, whose body is amply filled already, embroiders pillow-slips, replaces linings, mends holes, reinforces what is wearing thin. The fabric of Keats's world is less sturdy, and Whishaw plays him as though he were on the verge of vanishing. His brother is dying of tuberculosis, the illness which will shortly kill him, too; he has no money, his poverty is pushing him down the social scale, his poetry receives excoriatingly bad reviews, his love for Fanny feels at times like madness. Much of the dialogue is lifted verbatim from Keats's letters, but this does not sound awkward. Whishaw makes these literary meditations seem like the natural sentiments of lovers. "I have met with women whom I really think would like to be married to a poem and given away by a novel" , he says. Fanny is not sure what a poem is and to the derision of Brown, a roaring beast in tartan played by Paul Schneider, she asks Keats to give her lessons. 'Is this really you or are you merely acting?' Brown snarls as Fanny struggles with a sonnet. The aggressive exchanges between Brown and Brawne are always fun and lead to the finest moment in the film, where Brown sends her, inexplicably, a valentine. Keats is jealous, Fanny is minx-like, and Brown is so baffled by his own behaviour that he can hardly speak.

But this is the only acknowledgement of Keats's emotional range; Whishaw excels at poetic inwardness but there are too few of the famous outbursts, and no sign at all of the man who confessed that "when I am among Women I have evil thoughts". Campion's concern is the whole process of falling in love: its everyday ordinariness, its violence, its precariousness, its damned inconvenience when the lover is first poor, and then dying, and then dead. In such intense states nothing much happens; the seaSons change, the cat purrs, the lovers wait in monastic rooms. Next-door neighbours, Keats and Fanny are acutely aware of their proximity: each moves their bed closer to the wall , he watches her in the garden, she wanders into his study with her sewing. He is always shocked by her presence. " You have absorb'd me", he says. "I have a sensation at the moment as though I was dissolving", and the scenes in which she herself dissolves when Keats is away from her are wonderfully done, as is their one kiss, surely the single noisiest kiss in cinema history. Fanny has no sense that the man she so briefly knew will one day be the brighter star; there is no winking at the camera that posterity will sort the whole sorry business out. Keats described Fanny as being "beautiful, elegant, graceful, silly, fashionable and strange". Bright Star is much the same.

High off the fumes LEO ROBSON TAKING WOODSTOCK Various cinemas GIMME SHELTER Warner Home Video, DVD. £17.99.

not only televized but capitalized. But the film not only refuses to perpetuate the image of the idealistic hippie-hero; it also denies hippie stereotypes of authority and conformity. After it transpires that the land surrounding the Ti bers' motel isn't up to staging a festival , the organizers turn to Elliot's neighbour and friend Max Yasgur (Eugene Levy), a dairy farmer who treats his negotiator-guests to second helpings of his famous chocolate milk, and expresses enthusiasm for their enterprise. It is characteristic of Lee's generosity that this traditional figure - in fact, a Nixon enthusiast and supporter of the Vietnam war - is not merely a figure of fun offered up for metropolitan scorn, just as the state trooper (James Hanlon) charged with patrolling the long traffic jam down to Yasgur's farm is no authoritarian brute, but a sceptic-turned-convert who admits to feeling "high off the fumes". Not everyone was so easily bidden. When Elliot's neighbours turn against him, on the grounds that his summer party is destroying their quiet way of life, we are prohibited from tarring them as squares; the film's heft of detail shows them to have a point. And there are continual reminders that Woodstock was not just the site of "song and celebration" , as Joni Mitchell put it, but a business venture and organizational nightmare, carefully stage-managed, facilitated by

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o one apart from Keats and Jane Campion has ever much liked Fanny Brawne. "She made him ridiculous in the eyes of his friends" , wrote the critic and poet R. H. Stoddard in 1878, after the publication of Keats ' s letters to her. "Look at her silhouette, and say if the cold, hard , haughty young woman who stood for that could love poetry." Charles Armitage Brown, with whom Keats shared a bachelor pad next door to the Brawnes in Hampstead, thought her an interfering flirt and even Keats himself complained that she was "ignorant monstrous in her behaviour, flying out in all directions, calling people such names that I was forced lately to make use of the term Minx". The Minx not only inspired the most per-

N

fect love letters in the language - "You are

always new", Keats tells her, " You always concentrate my whole senses" - but now Bright Star, written and directed by Campion, Fanny's new champion, makes those love letters look like utility bills. As nothing is known about Brawne outside Keats' s obsession with her (Fanny ' s own letters have not survived), Campion has had to invent her heroine, and she sees her as prickly, poised and quietly dazzling. It is now Fanny, flawlessly played by Abby Cornish, who is obsessed, and the story of her two-year affair with Keats is less about poems than about

Sew Romantic FRANCES WILSON BRIGHT STAR Various cinemas

sewing, and waiting. "Almost all women sewed", Campion has said in an interview; "they sewed and they waited". Like Jane Campi on' s earlier films, The Piano (1993) and Portrait of a Lady (1996), Rright Star is a costume drama, hut in this instance there is more costume than drama. In many ways Bright Star is a film about clothes, about what you wear while you sew and wait. Fanny is not just a seamstress but a fashion designer whose outre creations, from the "triple-pleated mushroom collar" with which she accessorizes her ball gown, to her witty take on a winter bonnet, would not look out of place on the Vivienne Westwood runway. Fanny's garments are, she announces, her identity. The poet, on the other hand, Keats (played by Ben Whishaw) explains. "has no identity", and is "continu-

TLS DECEMBER 4 2009

19

N abokov' s imperfect, unfinished last novel brings "unmixed delight"

The burning question STEPHEN ABELL Vladimir Nabokov THE ORIGINAL OF LAURA A novel in fragments 304pp. Penguin Modern Classics. £25. 9780141191157

n 1975 , Vladimir Nabokov had a serious fall (Davos, insect-hunting) from which he never fully recovered. In the same year, he began The Original of Laura, working on it "feverishly" right up until his death in 1977 from bronchitis. His final instructions were to burn the text in its imperfect form , but his wife Vera lovingly stayed her hand, as she had done when she twice preserved Lolita (1955) from the incinerator twenty years before. Dmitri Nabokov, son and custodian of the Nahokov name, has now decided to allow the unfinished text to be published, apparently against hi s father' s wishes, to a mild flurry of (needless) controversy . The ethical dispute should be set aside readily enough. Books are made to be read, not destroyed. And the work of epochal artists should be preserved and made public. The burning question is not, in the end, much of a burning question. However, it is important to make clear what has survived here: The Original of Laura is not, as Dmitri Nabokov puts it in his introduction, necessarily an "embryonic masterpiece" . It is not really, as the subtitle suggests, "a novel in fragments". It is an assembly of fragments of a novel, notes towards a final text that was clearly some years away from completion. It contains moments of expected brilliance, amid plenty of humdrum early drafting. The fragments have been lovingly compiled , of course: each page contains a colour reproduction of a single index card of Nabokov's writing (138 in total), together with a transcribed text below. Each card can be popped from the page and prankishly reshuffled, for a vicarious experience of the author's famous method of composition. We get to see what N abokov called in Speak, Memory (1967), his "own mousy hand and messy drafts", words scribbled and smudged in a pencil taken from his "bouquets of B3s". This is undoubtedly thrilling stuff, and publication will provide something for Nabokovian scholars to cluck over, and for literati to slip knowingly into each others' stockings this Christmas . But, one must simplistically ask, is there also a story worth reading here? What happens when we shift The Original of Laura from the coffee table to the bedside table? The narrative revolves around Flora, a promiscuous bohemian, who is married to Philip Wild, a " mad neurologist", obesely hoisting around a "trunkful of guts", oddly preoccupied with erasing his physical presence by mental exertion . Flora' s life is connected, via a postmodern

I

Three studies ofa Nude Dancer,c I878-9; reproduced from Degas in the Norton Simon Museum, Volume Two (596pp, Yale University Press, £60, 978 0 300 14884 8) suhplot (imperfectly realized at the stage Nabokov left it), to a novel called "My Laura", and we are asked to consider "identi fying her with an unwritten, half-written, rewritten difficult book". Indeed, at one point a woman called FLaura comes along to bemuse us further. The reader might ignore this metafictional mingling because the most striking thing about Flora is how much she reminds us of Lolita: there is plenty of Lo in this "Flo". Flora is a grown woman, but we soon learn that "the cup-sized breasts of that twenty four year old impatient beauty seemed a dozen years younger than she, with those pale squ inty nipples and firm form". We may be disconcerted by such juvenile nipples peering back at us, and the narrator goes on to place Flora' s " new marvels" in another childish context: "the mobile omoplates of a child being tubbed , the incurvation of a ballerina's spine, narrow nates of an ambiguous irresistible charm" . That sly tracing of the curved spine is rather Humbertish, who was swift to note Lolita' s "pre-adolescently incurved back" and the "oddly prepubescent curve of her back" (itself a visual echo of the Lolitaprecursor in The Enchanter and "the curve of her narrow back"). Nabokov makes the link more explicit when he introduces us to the boyfriend of Flora's mother, whose name "no doubt assumed, was Hubert H. Hubert" . This frail nod to the past seems to come accompanied by the weak smile of the dying author, but Hubert's fruitless attempts to seduce Flora form the most memorable set piece of the book. Hubert, we learn, "constantly prowled (rodait) around her, humming a monotonous tune and sort of mesmerising her, envelopping [sic] her, so to speak in some sticky in visible substance". Hubert hums but is no Hum: he seeks to mesmerize but is unsuccessful (and one might recall that one of Humbert's putative pseudonyms was Mesmer Mesmer); he is a "not too successful conjuror", rather than the enchanted hunter of Lolita; and - final

in sult - he is physically repulsive ("his fat porous nose with red nostrils full of hair"), unlike that "great big handsome hunk of movieland manhood" in Humbert's own selfdescription. The crisis point comes with Flora in a fever, and Hubert looming by her bedside with "a thoughtful present" : "a miniature chess set ... with tickly-looking little holes bored in the squares to admit and grip the red and white pieces; the pin-sized pawns penetrated easily, but the slightly larger noblemen had to be forced in with an enervating joggle". Most readers would recognize this as Nabokov at full pencil-scratching acuity : the pin-point attention to small details, the "harmony of trifles", as he has put it elsewhere, that informs his artistic method. Hubert leans forward , no doubt keen to replicate what Humbert saw as "the exquisite caloricity of unexpected delights" of the overheated nymphet, but the scene switches from horror to welcome, relief-bringing farce: freeing themselves from the tumbled sheets her

pedalling legs hit him in the crotch. As he lurched aside, the teapot, a sa ucer of raspberry

jam an[d] several tiny chessmen joined in the silly fray. Flora comes out of the account intact ("alive, unraped", as Humbert might have put it), and so does Nabokov's reputation. For the first time in The Original of Laura, the reader experiences what Nabokov called in one of his lectures "the tell-tale tingle between the shou lder blades". There are "divine details" to be enjoyed in this scene: Flora "clowning dully" with sick vu lnerabi lity, her mother entering the room to her screams "at a dancer's run", the "joggled" chess pieces, and so on. Nabokov has deliberately recalled his early triumph to suggest that, even as the end approached, his powers were waning at a slower rate than his life. And there are other moments - fleeting enough - to record where the writing hits awaited heights. There is the use of meta-

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phors that bring to life inanimate objects, so that "things participate" (something Nabokov praised in Dickens): "her small formless vanity bag, a blind black puppy"; "a number of unconsolable oils found themselves being shipped back to Moscow, while another batch moped in rented flats before trouping [sic] up to the attic". The hint of the hidden "unsaleable" within the stated " unconsolable" creates a recognizable flicker, the throbbing pulse within the author's descriptive method. This flicker is present also in his sensitivity to what he called "sense data, selected permeated, and grouped" . We are allowed to notice, for example, when "auroral rumbles and bangs had begun jolting the cold misty city", or that Flora's "bare insteps were as white as her young shou lders", or the feeling that "a cloudless September maddened the crickets" (recalling Speak, Memory and "a jasmine-scented, cricket-mad dusk"). Nabokov's powers of observation are such that he even sees clearly with his eyes shut: "the hypnagogic gargoyles and entoptic swarms which plague tired vision". Such flutters of life are also expertly followed by the swift rattle of death. Nabokov is the intrepid Atropos of the modern novel: cutting off the lifelines of his characters with unflinching dispatch. Humbert's mother was famously culled in two well-chosen words ("picnic, lightning") , and several here fall to killer asides : "Adam discovered that the boy he loved had strangled another, unattainable, boy whom he had loved even more" ; "poor Daisy had been crushed to death by a backing lorry on a country road - short cut home from school through a muddy construction site - abominable tragedy - her mother died of a broken heart"; "young Aurora Lee (who was to be axed and chopped up at seventeen by an idiot lover, all glasses and beard)" . The neat way in which Aurora's violent dismemberment is preserved in the body bag of brackets is also typical. Nabokov was known for the specificity of the essay titles he gave to students at Cornell ("discuss Flaubert's use of the word 'and"'), and one could similarly set a discussion of Nabokov's use of parentheses. Here, he tends to use them to break out of the narration, for either a wry comment " (the whole scene was pretty artificial in a fishy theatrical way)" or as a way of briskly summarizing action : "a three-year separation (distant war, regular exchange of letters)". But it wou ld be misleading to suggest that The Original of Laura is no less than a handy compilation of Nabokovian highlights. In Speak, Memory, Nabokov spoke of his need for " massacrous revisions and rewritings" and he has left us much that was unrevised at the time of his death. So there are drawing-board attempts at wry wordplay: "the potentate had been potent until the absurd age of eighty" ; "specters doing their

20 spectral job". Or images that need further polish before becoming clear: " her little bottom, so smooth , so moonlit ... remained inset in the medal[l]ion of every following day" . Spelling errors have been left in place, which can be confusing: when the narrator writes about Hubert "envelopping" Flora, is this a mistake, or a pun reflecting how he wishes to cut short her childhood? Some of the cards are no more than gnomic notes, cryptic references for later inclusion: "its tempting emptiness" stands stark, alone on one page; as does "heart or brain - when the ray projected by me reaches the lake of Dante [or] the island of Reil". It suggests what Henry James called the "sketch state of mind" of the dying author. And the end of the book contains just fragments and oddments, like James' s own "vague dim forms of imperfect perceptions" following his stroke in 1915. We feel that the gloom of Nabokov's predicament, his loss of "physical majesty", is being transmitted to the pages before us. Certainly, the second half of the book sees - and this is Freud made facile; how nonNabokovian - an interest in sex replaced by a preoccupation with death: Philip Wild takes over the narrative, and reveals his desire to imagine his body "upon his inner blackboard" , and then begin "erasing with more than masturbatory joy". The conceit is that he can creatively will away his flesh "from heel to hip, then the trunk, then the head when nothing was left but a grotesque bust with staring eyes" . This is something, one is asked to feel, that Nabokov wished for himself by the end: Dmitri's introduction to this book refers to his father ' s pain from "the incessant inflammations under and around his toenails", which is easily apparent in the "rubber and rot" of Wild' s feet. The last creative act described by Nabokov is, therefore, one connected most closely with destruction; and his last published work must be forever linked to ideas of loss and deletion. "The process of dying by autodissolution afforded the greatest ecstasy known to man" is Wild's notion, but one which Nabokov clearly does not treat as a wild notion. Indeed, The Original of Laura contains an effective thesaurus of annihilation: " selfextinction"; "self-immolation - tor"; "a process of self-obliteration"; " luxurious suicide, delicious dissolution"; "mounting melting". The last card contains only these words: "efface, expunge, erase, delete, rub out, wipe out, obliterate". There is a pencil smudge where one word has itself been rubbed out, as if in a mild tribute to its own message. In this context, the author's wish for his book to be itself destroyed seems thematically fitting, a final postmodern gesture, the natural conclusion to his examination of the desire for obliteration. Nabokov once said, thinking of Robert Louis Stevenson, that " sometimes the destinies of authors follow the destinies of their books". His final work, now that we have seen it, casts a typically ironic light on this. Ironic or not, it remains a matter of unmixed delight that The Original of Laura has survived its author's intentions, and the unforgiving fire. A book (even imperfect and unfinished) by Vladimir Nabokov should, of course, be preserved and made public.

FICTION

Theodor's hubris ｇ

ｯｮｾ｡ｬ＠ M. Tavares is a Portuguese writer with a growing reputation. Not yet forty , he has in the past few years published fiction, essays, criticism , poetry and a play and has won several national prizes. His best-known novel, Jerusalem (2005), is part of a series about contemporary society entitled "The Kingdom". It has now been translated into English by Anna Kushner. Claustrophobic, menacing, steeped in millenial angst, Jerusalem is part black comedy, part freak show, part philosophical treatise. The prose is bare; the plot barer still. In a Mitteleuropean city in the small hours, three characters - each of them lonely, tortured and mentally unstable - slowly come together in front of a church in a rendezvous which will conclude in carnage. En route, they philosophize. Ernst is on the brink of suicide; Hinnerk has "a terrible time relaxing"; and Mylia is dying. Only hunger can distract her from her torment: "How is it possible, Mylia asked herself, that this pain brought on by needing to eat can hurt me even more than my usual pain?". The answer is simple: "the pain of hunger is the pain of life" - which puts Mylia in a bind. What will happen when she eats? Hinnerk, too, is much preoccupied with appetite. "Every day was the same ... no matter what he'd eaten the day before, he still got hungry again - it was dull, stupid, unimaginative." Surely, he thinks, there is more to life than consuming. Killing, perhaps. Mylia is a materialist; Hinnerk a psychopath. Neither can be saved from fate. The church door remains closed.

TOB Y LICHTIG Gonc;:alo M. Tavares JERUSALEM Translated by Anna Kushner

222pp. Dalkey Archive. Paperback, £10.99. 978 I 564785558

Intersecting with their night-time rambles are a prostitute pimped by Hinnerk ("under the circumstances, she was more or less his girlfriend") and a renowned doctor, Theodor Busbeck, Mylia's ex-husband, who is the prostitute's client. "Discomfitingly, almost violently, beautiful", Mylia was initially Theodor' s patient; a few years into their marriage, he had her committed. In the asylum she met Ernst and became pregnant. Terrible, Kafkaesque things were done in revenge, and her husband was behind them. Vainglorious, pitiless, appallingly mathematical, Theodor is a scientist in decline. He has for years been working on a study of violence, a kind of graph of human depravity to ascertain "whether history is on the right path or the wrong path" . He isn ' t interested in war itself ("war isn't a pure sort of horror"), but in wanton cruelty, death camps and the like. He aims to treat history " like an organism", to understand its "pathology", and concludes that acts of evil are the engine of history - which casts a pall over his desires to become history's master. "Progress was solely dependent, it seemed, on the velocity of evil." Deep in his studies , he is interrupted by news of his father's death.

"Excellent! Excellent! " , he mutters, absentmindedly. Comic moments such as these give body to a narrative in danger of sliding into the purely theoretical. But Jerusalem never feels like a mere dance of the intellect. Its characters are sketched with irony, its pockets of compassion are surprisingly moving. While its darker reflections are redolent of Michel Houellebecq, its lighter ones bring to mind Milan Kundera. This is a very human novel, and at its centre lies the idea of human unpredictability. Theodor's hubris is the best measure of this. While he worries what will happen when he can control history and to underfears his "uncommon ability stand the mentally ill", it soon becomes clear that he is no more balanced in his opinions than anyone else. His sexual desire for Mylia led him to believe that he could cure her; his failure to do so resulted in an eruption of jealous rage. He is an egotist and a sociopath, incapable of sustaining a loving relationship. He dreams of effacing his private history the better "to concentrate on public history, on the history of all mankind". But he refuses to understand that if history is as erratic as the sum of its unpredictable components then so, too, must be the future. His judgement is ultimately undone by his faith. "Or Busbeck" , a reviewer of his magnum opus writes, "you aren't just a scientist - you are also a believer." This is a powerful little book and the Dalkey Archive should be commended for bringing it to an anglophone audience. Kushner's smooth translation makes good work of its deadpan humour and the atmosphere of oppression. The rest of the " Kingdom" series is forthcoming; if Jerusalem is anything to go by, Tavares's standing will soon be global.

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The leisured classes "HoW could such a tragedy have happened, my dear": that sentence opens and summarizes The SheDevil in the Mirror, first published in Spanish as La Diabla en et espejo (2000). alga Maria has been murdered in front of her children, and her friend Laura Rivera is telling the story to an unknown "my dear". Solving a murder in post-civil war El Salvador is tricky, though we do eventually learn the identity of " my dear". The path to this discovery is relentless and, as in his successful first novel, Insensatez (2004), translated into English as Senselessness , Horacio Castellanos Moya's narrator is delightfully paranoid and obsessed. Nevertheless, the denouement when it comes lacks surprise or consequence. Laura may be intent on solving the crime, yet her response to the police is, ''I'm only going to answer the questions I feel like answering". She describes alga Maria as "totally devoted to her husband" , yet many of her anecdotes involve the dead woman's love affairs. One of these was with a powerful coke-addicted politician whose enemies may be behind her murder. A private detective corroborates these suspicions and reveals that alga has also slept with Laura's former husband Alberto, a wealthy

JOSHUA MARCUS Horacio Castellanos Moya THE SHE-DEVIL IN THE MIRROR Translated by Katherine Silver

192pp. New Directions. Paperback, £7.99. 9780811218467

man whose financial empire has collapsed. alga's suspected hit man escapes from prison and Laura takes refuge in the apartment belonging to "my dear" . He seems to be pursuing her. Nevertheless, " my dear" does nothing to help her. Nor is there any dialogue between the pair anywhere in the novel.

One of the novel's themes is the gap between rich and poor in El Salvador. Laura drives a BMW that must cost many times more than the country's per capita GDP. She makes remarks such as, "The beach was lovely, empty that' s the good thing about going during the week: the lower classes can't get there". Nor do they appear in the rest of the story. Laura's peers live in a world cut off from reality; they only come to life in their desperate quests to hold on to money and power. Compared to the "masses" , there are very few of

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them, and as a result their relationships are emotionally incestuous; everybody is adulterous, drug-addicted, or schizophrenic. The one working-class character is alga's faithful Indian maid of twenty years. Julita is the only person Laura trusts. This recalls Clarice Lispector's novel The Passion According to C.H. (1964). The title character in that novel is also a member of the leisured classes and unmarried, narrating a personal hell. She spends nearly the entire book in her former maid's room and arrives at self-liberation through seeing herself through the maid's eyes. No such catharsis or transformation occurs with Laura. She remains like a character from the soap operas she loves, callous and superficial, just as Castellanos Moya wants her to be. His contempt for her and her class is understandable, but it imposes a limitation on her humanity and hence the intrigue of the story. The writing is colloquial, the sentences short and crisp: "I didn ' t feel like deciding so I ordered the same"; " You should really give him a whirl before he leaves". Katherine Silver's translation is good. Occasionally the narrative comes across as a bit too literal, but on the whole Laura' s voice has been faithfully rendered into English.

FICTION

Cold dark element he first two chapters of Legend of a Suicide recall Robert Lowell's experiments with literary confession in Life Studies, in particular "My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow", in which the young poet sifts for clues in the familiar memorabilia of the Lowell family , looking for signs that may lead to a bearable sense of belonging, or a credible history. Like Life Studies David Vann's new book reads like a set of etudes on struggling to remain sane while grappling with the inherited complexity of parents. Vann ' s acknowledgements and dedication make it clear that his book is to a certain extent autobiographical, the central characters of Roy and Jim Fenn being the personae of David and James Vann. James Vann committed suicide when David was a child, and his son's fictional memoirs are an attempt to exculpate the father and to unpick the vestiges of the father in himself. In a departure from the more extreme versions of American literature which deals with suicide, such as that of Lowell and John Berryman, Vann finds an eloquent means of etching out an unknowable past without slipping irretrievably into its melancholy darkness. Legend of a Suicide is made up from

T

TOM BAILEY David Vann LEGEND OF A SUICIDE 228pp. Penguin. Paperback, £7.99. 9780141043784

loosely connected short stories, each with the supple turns and understated insights that characterize its literary self-analysis. The iceclear prose slips along, punctuated by touches of humour and glowing description. Vann's citation of his literary mentors, though a little forced , will channel the reception of his work the way he wishes. Stylistically, he walks in the tracks of Cormac McCarthy and Elizabeth Bishop. A McCarthy-esque prose of punchy dialogue, spare expression and life-is-shit-but-wegotta-get-by humility suits this study of a father and son, though its biblical conjuncand") may strike tion of clauses ("and some readers as repetitive and occasionally platitudinous. But where Vann ' s writing, especially during the long section "Sukkwan Island", appears bland, he makes up for it in the deftness with which psychological recesses are unlaced by sharp observations of gestures, foibles and other details. These are

what give the novel its iridescence. The book's reticence is not down to incomplete expression; rather it is an outlining of the distances which fiction and memory try to brook: distances between buried memories and a consciousness trying to excavate them, between a father apparently lapsing towards inevitable death and a son able to witness but not comprehend. " Sukkwan Island" offers the most striking example of the fantasies experienced during the process of remembrance. In it Vann turns the suicide narrative on its head, sketching wildly alternative scenarios of death in the Alaskan outback. Against a grim backcloth of financial hardship, rifle-obsession and remote towns, the natural history shines bright. This is not a scientific natural history, but a poetic one, in homage to Elizabeth Bishop' s "At the Fishhouses". Shimmering scales, leaping salmon and arctic waters are the symbolic touchstones of Vann's work, and Roy recites Bishop's description of the ocean as "Cold dark deep and absolutely clear, element bearable to no mortal". But where Bishop's poem converts the fish colours and sea rhythm into a spiritual epiphany, Vann's novel has a darker reading of the line. Only in situations where life is "bearable to no mortal" do suicides take place. Following Roy and his father as they struggle through life like fish out of water makes Legend of a Suicide a compelling work, even when it feels as if there is more to be said.

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Time to get going hen Arthur and Diana are asked, over after-dinner drinks, "How did you two meet?", one of them does not skip a beat and rolls out the "marital legend"; throughout the telling neither husband nor wife looks at each other. This exchange (or lack of it) between a British married couple in their home in Nairobi is noted by Margaret, the American who lives in the guesthouse at the end of their garden. Margaret is newly married to Patrick, and has been brought to Kenya by his work as a doctor. There is a suggestion in the marital legends of both young couples that a personal desire to go to Africa has preceded the marriage that would take them there. By the end of the novel, however, Margaret wonders whether Western marriages can ever survive the "challenges and moral complexity of Africa?". Such complexities are neatly portrayed by Anita Shreve in her fifteenth novel, A Change in Altitude. Shreve, like Margaret,

W

ROZALIND DINEEN Anita Shreve A CHANGE IN ALTITUDE 291pp. Little, Brown. £16.99. 978 I 4087 007 I 6

on the Fourth of July, "The Africans barely touched their plates", and they do not mind saying that they find potato salad sour and strawberry shortcake too sweet. Much of the novel is based on coming to terms with a place that is strange and yet home. As important here as cultural habits or African politics is myth: it is the giving in to and accepting of the local story, rather than the day-to-day custom, which marks Margaret's gradual acceptance of the place. Patrick tells her that the Kikuyu hold Mount Kenya to be sacred, the home of their god Ngai. Another story is told about a Masai in New York who jumped from the tenth storey

like

of a skyscraper two months after arriving in

Margaret, lived in Kenya for some years and worked in journalism there. The streets, the slums, the manicured suburbs are plaited into the story with knowledge but without relying on the assumption of it in the reader. Foreign ways are set out to be absorbed rather than analysed: when Margaret and Patrick are invited to eat with a Kikuyu family, a goat is sacrificed in their honour and they are presented with the treasured inner organs which they eat, bravely: it would be rude not to. When the same family visit the couple for an American meal

the city. On first hearing this, Margaret recognizes that it is a cautionary tale, but is not quite sure what the moral is. When the novel opens she does not have a job but is busy preparing for a trek with Patrick, Diana, Arthur and another colonial couple up Mount Kenya. Arthur has directed her to a shop to buy boots for the hike, and has reassured her that the staff will "take care of you" , especially if she mentions his name. Margaret is uneasy about this phrase, which Arthur keeps repeating to her. Meanwhile, his cold wife Diana is always "impatient to

comes

from

outside

Roston;

she,

get going", but Margaret doesn ' t always understand where. The first part of A Change in Altitude (the group's attempt to climb Mount Kenya), although written with the sinister hum of a thriller, unfolds with an inevitability that frustrates the promised excitement. The exhaustion and arduousness of the climb are well described, but the denouement is awkwardly handled. The remaining twothirds of the novel follow Margaret doing good deeds; getting a job as a photographer on a newspaper, taking risks, and confronting again and again, the frustration of pleasure. A love affair is curtailed before it can "get going" , as is the promise of a baby. A trip to the island of Lamu is cut short before they get to the beach , because of a robbery at home (which itself is botched). The massacre of fifty students outside a university, important story that it is, cannot be told, not even (Patrick explains) to the New York Times. " We'd be immediately deported. Or worse."

It is perhaps this stunting of activity that causes Margaret's confusion to grow rather than clear up as the story progresses. All she knows, in the end, is that she does not want to leave Africa: "It was in her lungs and blood now"; but also, confusingly: " She'd thought she wanted to absorb Africa, but the continent had absorbed Margaret". It does not really matter in which direction this process takes place; the implication is that Margaret has acclimatized to the different altitude and is not leaving. At the very end, she manages to please the god of Mount Kenya and is told "Ngai will forget about you now". It is apparently preferable to go unnoticed by such a powerful god; this story at least she understands.

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One year gone MICHELE GEMELOS Victor Lodato MATHILDA SA VITCH 292pp. Fourth Estate. £1 5.99. 9780007322220

owever you spell the name, precocious literary creations called Matilda have had long, memorable lives in print, putting up with beastly parents and monstrous teachers (as in Roald Dahl's story) or "crying wolf' and meeting a tragic end (as in Hilaire Belloc's poem). Victor Lodato's American teenager is both tenacious and deceitful. Unlike the others, this Mathilda narrates her own tale, declaring boldly: "I want to do awful things and why not? Dull is dull is dull is my life" . Mathilda' s brash monologue begins one year after the death of her older sister, Helene - an event that throws a pall over the entire Savitch family. Believing that sixteen-yearold Helene was murdered, Mathilda resolves to find out who was responsible. Over the course of the novel, we become acquainted with her disturbing and mercurial sense of justice; as she embarks on her investigation, the line between wilfulness and wickedness becomes horribly blurred. As in Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time , the central mystery and the mysterious personality of the adolescent narrator compete for our attention. Ultimately (harsh as it might sound), the circumstances of Helene' s death are not particularly gripping; rather, it is Mathilda's neurotic pursuit of the truth using a net of lies that makes us read on. In a narration of awkward knowingness, Lodato channels Mathilda' s voice to create a haunting portrait of juvenile self-absorption that convinces the reader she is more than simply a vehicle for an unremarkable plot. The story's backdrop is of recognizable global terrorism and foreign wars, which Lodato is careful not to explore in too much detail lest it distract the reader from Mathilda's interior life. She declares "I've grown up in a time of terror. You get used to it", and wants us to believe she is not traumatized. But Lodato ensures that she reveals enough to show she is far from accustomed to the anxiety and alienation of life in the Savitch household and beyond. It is not surprising that this award-winning American playwright should have emhraced the dramatic monologue in his first novel. Lodato's dramas explore themes such as survival, escape, injury, confrontation and secrecy, but maintain their emphasis on expression and voice. Critics have likened Mathilda Savitch to coming-of-age fictions such as The Catcher in the Rye and The Lovely Bones. Less obviously, it shares common ground with Carson McCullers ' s The Member of the Wedding, in which Frankie Addams, the restless, fearful , overimaginative tomboy, agonizes over belonging, appearance and reality.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Two thousand years of

The Book THE OXFORD COMPANION TO THE

BOOK Edited by Michael F. Suarez, S.J. and H. R. Woudhuysen

Two clerics from 8t John's Gospel; from The Book of Deer

Guides, grants and deeds bout 1150, David I, King of Scots, THOMAS visited the north-east of his kingdom. CHARLES-EDW ARD8 At Aberdeen he presided over a judgment concerning the immunities of the Katherine Forsyth, editor monastery of Deer (at Old Deer, west of Peterhead, in the medieval province of STUDIES ON THE BOOK OF DEER Buchan). He confirmed that Deer was free 48 1pp. Dublin: Four Co urts. £75. of lay service and wrongfu l exaction "as has 978 1 85 182 569 1 been written in their book, and as they demonstrated at Banff and swore at Aberdeen" . The in her contribution to this volume. Towards judgment was then added to the same book, the end of the tenth century, the first of now known as the Book of Deer, by a scribe several additions was made: a liturgical text probably belonging to Deer itself. He used a to be used when a priest administered Comform approximating to a standard charter of munion to a dying person. Subsequently, the time and wrote in the usual Western Euro- probably in the early twelfth century, two pean script of the twelfth century. This judg- scribes added texts recording grants to Deer ment and its recording in a charter written that had been made from the early eleventh into the book may be responsible for the sur- century, and perhaps even earlier, up to their vival of a unique witness to the culture and own day. These two scribes also wrote in a society of north-eastern Scotland in the fine calligraphic Insular minuscule in the period before Buchan was assimilated to the form current in Ireland and Scotland from dominant cultural norms of Western Europe. dOOO. The quality of their performance The Book of Deer is a small gospel-book shows that Deer then remained a full particiwritten in the late ninth or tenth century. It is pant in the Gaelic scribal culture of the day. now preserved in the Cambridge University A little later, shortly before the cases heard at Library, but in the twelfth century it was kept Banff and Aberdeen, two further scribes, less in the precursor of the Cistercian abbey of skilled as penmen than their forebears, made Deer, where, in the eleventh and twelfth cen- additions; and, in one case, an earlier text was turies, some documents were written into the partially rewritten. Shortly afterwards, to margins or into vacant pages. The team of judge by the charter of David I, the Insular scholars led by Katherine Forsyth, whose minuscule was abandoned in favour of Carowork is presented in this handsome volume, line; but the level of scribal performance has made major strides towards interpreting showed a further decline. In the early thirthe gospel-book itself and the other texts that teenth century, at the end of the long reign of William the Lion, grandson of David I, a new came to be added to it. The scribe of the gospels wrote a calli- Anglo-Norman Earl of Buchan founded a Cisgraphic form of the Insular minuscule shared tercian abbey at Deer. Some, at least, of the between Ireland, Scotland and Wales up to possessions of the old community passed to the eleventh century ; and his colophon at the the new monastery and, with them , the eviend of the book shows a mastery of Old dence for their title contained in the docuGaelic (Old Irish). The gospel-book was ments written into the gospel-book. From this adorned by a series of miniatures, whose sig- one manuscri pt, therefore, we can gain a nificance is discussed by Isabel Henderson sense of the cultural affinities and attain-

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ground-breaking and authoritative reference work, written by over 400 of the world's best scholars in bibliography and book history, on all aspects of the book from ancient times to the present day. 1,408 pages 1180 illustrations

February 2010 ISBN 978-0-19-860653-6

Introductory offer: £175.00 until February 28th 2010 £ 195 thereafter

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ments of an important church in north-eastern Scotland between c900 and 1150, from the time when the old name of the kingdom, Pictland, was replaced by Alba, Scotland, to the time when David I championed a culture whose principal centre was Paris. Over this period the role of the Book of Deer changed radically. The book had three lives : as a working priest's book; as the sacred repository of record of grants to Deer; and as the earliest title deeds of the Cistercian abbey. The working priest's book is revealed by the first addition: the liturgy to be used by a priest visiting someone dying. This vital evidence for the early use of the book is elucidated by Gilbert Marcus, who compares the text with three other texts in the same tradition. It helps to clarify a paradox revealed by the contributions of Thomas O'Loughlin and Isabel Henderson: although the script is of high quality and the miniatures may well exhibit a consistent and unusual theological argument - leading from Abraham to Isaiah to Zacharias, father of John the Baptist, and fin ally to Christ - the actual text of the Gospels is inaccurate. Moreover, the scribe revealed an ignorance of a principal tool of exegesis, the ""Ammonian sections" or "Eusebian canons" used to guide the reader to parallel passages in other gospels. The Book of Deer was never a scholar' s book, as one may also infer from the fact that it contains only extracts from the Synoptic Gospels, although it has a full copy of the Gospel of John. Because of its small size, the Book of Deer has been compared with the Irish "pocket gospel-books". Yet the economy that they achieved by a small size of script, the Book of Deer secured by leaving out most of Matthew, Mark and Luke. Its readiness to accommodate wide margins and even blank pages allied to the handsomeness of the script and the illuminations enabled it to fulfil a

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BIBLIOGRAPHY new role, in what amounted to a second life, as the book kept by the community of Deer as "their book" in which were entered records of gifts made to them. This was a function performed at much the same period by such renowned gospel-books as the Book of Durrow and the Book of Kells. All these records, other than David I's charter, were written in Gaelic, not now the correct Old Gaelic of the original colophon, a language virtually without variation from west Cork to north-east Buchan, but a late Middle Gaelic; and, within the orthographical vagaries of these texts it is possible to discern , as Roibeard 6 Maolalaigh argues, features distinctive to the Gaelic of Scotland, and even of eastern Scotland. The documents written into the Book of Deer thus offer precious evidence for the history of Gaelic and for its expansion into what had been north-eastern Pictland: the layers of Pictish and Gaelic in Buchan are revealed by Simon Taylor's analysis of the place names. The documents are also vital for the social and political history of north-eastern Scotland, as Dauvit Broun shows in a contribution that offers a major challenge to the prevalent view of the past forty years. That envisaged a Scottish kingdom much more unified than its Irish counterparts, with two officers, the mormaer heading a province, such as Buchan, and a toisech (later called by the English term "thane") in charge of a local "small shire". Both mormaer and toisech were seen as royal officials. Broun, however, argues that the clergy of Deer had little to do with kings, at least until David I, but were concerned to free their lands from obligations imposed by local magnates. These were no longer seen merely as royal officials: the toisech, for him, was the head of a kindred. The value of his contribution should be to open a debate, not to establish prematurely a new consensus. Steps in his argument depend on phrases susceptible of more than one translation; and he himself presents his analysis as a possible reading of the evidence to be compared with older views, not as something incontrovertible. Broun and 6 Maolalaigh both confront directly the most important earlier work on the subject, Kenneth Jackson's The Gaelic Notes in the Book of Deer. This book marks a major advance on its precursor, above all because it clarifies the context of the manuscript and because it has as much to say about the gospel-book itself as about the documents subsequently written into it. Thomas Owen Clancy's chapter describes a landscape of local churches and saints' cults created several centuries earlier; and the editor's chapter on stone sculpture in the area makes a tentative case for placing the origin of the book as well as its twelfth-century provenance in north-eastern Scotland. The fragment of sculpture recently recovered at Ravenscraig, close to Peterhead, retains part of an inscription using letter-forms based on Insular half-uncial, a high-grade script, testimony in stone to local participation in the tradition of the grand Insular illuminated gospel-book. Studies on the Book of Deer is a book of fundamental importance for Scottish medieval studies. It was published by Four Courts Press just before the death of its founder, Michael Adams, a fitting reminder of what he contributed to early Irish and Scottish studies.

Problems with the library iven that many Oxford and Cambridge colleges have had a continuous existence since the Middle Ages, surprisingly few retain much of their medieval book collection; the majority instead owe their famous medieval manuscripts to the donations of early modern collectors. The fact that Merton College, Oxford owned most of its current collection before the Reformation is remarkable. Equally remarkable is the existence of a very large body of medieval archival material concerning the college's library, including complaints by Fellows about its shortcomings, many catalogues and lists of book distributions, and ex dono and pledge notes written inside the books themselves. Furthermore, the late fourteenth-century library building still survives - probably the oldest in Europe still in use. No other college in Oxford or Cambridge can parallel these survivals, and the Merton collection gives a unique insight into book history and medieval university education. The manuscripts at Merton are on the whole practical working volumes containing, often in multiple copies, the essential texts for the medieval university curriculum; works by Augustine and other patristic authors, Aristotelian material and scholastic texts predominate, together with standard commentaries on all of these. Few of Merton' S manuscripts are strikingly interesting in themselves, and it is as a long-established and unusually well-documented collection that they come into their own. R. M. Thomson's new catalogue of the Merton manuscripts has an introduction which provides a useful survey of the development of the library. The earliest documents mentioning the library date to 1276, not long after the college' s foundation in 1264. At this time, the books owned by individual Fellows were held to pass automatically to the college on their departure or death. Already in the late thirteenth century, some library books were chained to lecterns for security, and evidence survives that, in the fourteenth century, the collection was essentially in two parts: reference copies of important works kept permanently in the library building; and a larger collection of similar material which was always out on loan among the Fellows. Many of the latter contain notes about the process by which they were distributed, or pledge notes relating to their deposit as security for loans from various university chests. It is interesting that, although Merton produced a number of important scholars in the first half of the fourteenth century, no attempt seems to have been made at the time to collect their works in the college library: this was always a working student lihrary, not a special collection. As well as entries for each manuscript and for manuscript-fragments taken from bindings, Thomson catalogues book-related material from the account rolls and useful indexes. Each entry gives a detailed description of the manuscript's structure, including evidence for chaining in the form of rust spots and staple marks; identification of contents, giving incipits and explicits of texts, with references to editions and catalogues of texts; details of provenance; and a brief bibliography. A substantial amount of information is

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REBECCA RUSHFORTH R. M. Thomson A DESCRIPTIVE CATALOGUE OF THE MEDIEVAL MANUSCRIPTS OF MERTON COLLEGE , OXFORD With a description of th e Greek manuscripts by N. G. WiIson Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. £95. 978 I 84384 1883

provided for each manuscript in a format which is easy to understand and concise. The catalogue is also well illustrated, with a number of colour and black-and-white plates, not only reproducing the usual subjects of illumination but also showing provenance information, named scribes, bindings and the library building. Although the contents information in particular is very thorough, on occasion Thomson seems not to have fully absorbed the scholarly works he cites. One manuscript, MS 235, he refers to as Parisian, and reproduces with the caption "'Parisian initials", although the items in his bibliography agree that this manuscript is English. This catalogue will be a useful reference work for scholars interested in any Merton manuscript, and it deserves to reach a wider

audience because of the unique view the collection provides of medieval intellectual activity in England. It will be particularly interesting when read in conjunction with the author' s forthcoming Oxford volume in the British Medieval Library Catalogues series, which will provide annotated editions for twenty-three catalogues for Merton, shedding further light on the college' s remarkable medieval holdings.

THE FEDERALIST ALEXANDER HAMILTON, JAMES MADISON & JOHN JAY INTRODUCTION BY