Richard King

Novel look at the digital war (The Australian, January 2010)

2012-01-30T17:36:00.002-08:00

An award-winning freelance journalist, Heather Brooke has distinguished herself as a model of diligence and determination. In 2005, she entered the freedom of information request that led, four years later, to the UK parliamentary expenses scandal, when a startling number of British MPs were discovered to be over-claiming on their expenses. For Brooke, this scandal was symptomatic of a culture of political secrecy – a culture she sought to anatomise in her 2010 book The Silent State. Though the thesis of this book was far from original (it was Richard Crossman, many years ago, who described secrecy as ‘the British disease’), it nevertheless made the crucial point that freedom of information is not incidental to democracy but a necessary precondition of it. [More here.]

More than a whiff of prejudice (On Line Opinion, 19 January)

2012-01-18T18:26:00.001-08:00

In The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), George Orwell delineates the varieties of prejudice ranged against the working class by its middle and upper class overseers. In a passage that was often used by his enemies to suggest, quite wrongly, that he was a closet snob and no friend of the people whose cause he championed, Orwell notes in particular the role of smell in class relationships. As he puts it:

Here you come to the real subject of class relations in the West – the real reason why a European of bourgeois upbringing, even when he calls himself a Communist, cannot without a hard effort think of a working man as his equal. It is summed up in four frightful words which people nowadays are chary of uttering, but which were bandied about quite freely in my childhood. The words were: The lower classes smell. [More here.]

Thatcher's tragic legacy (The Drum, 19 January)

2012-01-18T01:02:00.000-08:00

Gone was the heightened reality of the ‘Iron Lady’, scourge of the trade unions, victor of the Falklands War, the best man in the Cabinet. These were old ladies’ clothes. And her hair now – on these walks at least – was nearly an old lady’s hair: not grey (it still had a kind of honeyed glow), but worn close to the head with little of the volume blown and lacquered into it for her appearances in public.

Thus the narrator of Born Yesterday, Gordon Burn’s 2008 novel, describes the diminished figure of Margaret Thatcher, as glimpsed in a London park. It is an affecting portrait, all the more so of course for the fact that its subject was once so powerful, respected even by those who regarded her as a disaster for her country and the world. [More here.]

Things that go bump in life (Sydney Morning Herald, January)

2012-01-08T17:08:00.008-08:00

In Sarah Hall’s ‘She Murdered Mortal He’ – one of a number of absorbing stories in Granta 117: Horror – two lovers pay a visit to Mozambique. Travelling up from the South African border, their driver asks them what they do for a living. ‘I’m a lawyer’ replies the male half of the twosome, while his partner replies that she arranges ghost tours. The conversation continues:

- Oh, what, to see ghosts?
- Places where people have seen ghosts, in London. There are lots of places.
- But not the ghosts? No. That’s good. Then they can’t ask for their money back.
- Not really, no. [More here.]

7/22 - Only the truth is revolutionary (The Ember, December 2011)

2011-12-14T01:57:00.004-08:00

Either Guy Rundle has an odd sense of humour or his proofreading skills are not what they should be. In the first of his three contributions to On Utøya, an e-book dealing with Anders Breivik and the massacre in Norway earlier this year, he permits himself a moment of meteorological wistfulness: ‘The penultimate weekend of July 2011 was a warm one in Norway, with clear blue skies.’ Thus begins ‘July 22, 2011: Anders Breivik as a group of one’. Jumping forward to ‘Commonwealth of Fear: The Right and the manufacture of hate in Australia’, we find Rundle in more sardonic mood:

‘Monday morning September 11 was a clear and bright day …’ the official US Government report into the 9/11 attacks began, in unusually evocative fashion for a dry official document (it was rumoured that John Grisham had been brought in to give it a polish).

[More here.]

Offence Goes Viral (Meanjin, December)

2011-12-14T01:44:00.002-08:00

As we’re charging our glasses this New Year’s Eve, and mulling over an extraordinary year – a year of civil war and uncivil strife, of natural disasters and unnatural acts of violence – we should spare a thought for the good men and women of the American Dialect Society, whose mission it is to select just one word from the multitudinous melting pot of English that will stand as a monument to this turbulent twelve months. Inaugurated in 1991, the ADS’s Word of the Year has been dominated in recent times by coinages of a technological nature. In 2010, ‘App’ took the honours, while in 2009 the laurels fell to ‘Tweet’. Nominations for the Word of the Decade showed a similarly hi-tech bias. ‘Blog’ and ‘Wi-Fi’ both made the shortlist, while the winner, ‘Google’ (the verb, not the noun), looks perfectly at home next to its predecessor, ‘Web’. [More here.]

Read Stephen Romei's comments on this essay, and other comments, at Ragged Claws, here.

When success becomes excess (The Australian, November)

2011-11-18T23:15:00.003-08:00

The activist filmmaker Michael Moore grew up in a suburb of Flint, Michigan, a city synonymous with working-class struggle. The site of one of the most notable events in US labour history – the 1937 strike, in which the fledgling United Automobile Workers took on, and triumphed over, General Motors – Flint was also one of the first casualties of the neoliberal economic policies introduced by President Ronald Reagan. In the 1980s, General Motors, till then the city’s biggest employer, moved many of its operations abroad and laid off the majority of its Flint-based workers. The city never recovered from this trauma and is now one of the most economically depressed areas in the US. [More here.]

Review of Granta 116: Ten Years On (The Australian, October)

2011-10-29T21:34:00.004-08:00

In a piece published on the first anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Martin Amis described the space that opened up on the New York skyline in the wake of the collapse of the Twin Towers as a ‘window on a changed world’. An allusion to the name of the restaurant that used to occupy the top floor of the North Tower, this image was intended to register the sense of exposure and fallibility felt by many Westerners in the weeks and months after 9/11. As Amis put it: ‘The collateral catastrophe of September 11 is our sudden introduction to a barely recognisable planet, a planet which is not going to leave us alone.’ [More here.]

Note: Picture reprinted with permission from Nadia Shira Cohen, whose photoessay 'Flee' appears in Granta 116.

The Best Australian Poems 2011

2011-10-29T21:30:00.003-08:00

I'm happy to say that my poem, 'Expat', will be included in this year's Best Australian Poems, published by Black Inc. in November 2011.

Poets include: Robert Adamson, Ali Alizadeh, Jude Aquilina, Ken Bolton, Pam Brown, joanne burns, Sarah Day, Bruce Dawe, Kate Fagan, Michael Farrell, Angela Gardner, Geoff Goodfellow, Lisa Gorton, Jennifer Harrison, Sarah Holland-Batt, Jill Jones, Cate Kennedy, Andy Kissane, Mike Ladd, Kate Lilley, Jennifer Maiden, David McCooey, Les Murray, Ouyang Yu, Felicity Plunkett, Peter Rose, Gig Ryan, Jaya Savige, Thomas Shapcott, Craig Sherborne, Pete Spence, Peter Steele, Maria Takolander, Andrew Taylor, Tim Thorne, Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Alan Wearne and many more…

On Simon Leys' The Hall of Uselessness (Sydney Morning Herald, September)

2011-09-27T03:57:00.003-08:00

Simon Leys, The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays
Black Inc; $49.95; 453pp

Simon Leys (aka Pierre Ryckmans) is living proof of Benjamin Franklin’s dictum that a really cultured individual should be a jack of all trades and master of one. An eminent sinologist whose achievements in his field include translations of ancient Chinese texts, books on Chinese history and culture and the supervision of Kevin Rudd’s honours degree, Leys is also a literary critic, essayist and historical novelist. Born in Belgium in 1935 and resident in Australia since 1970, he corroborates, too, the oft-mooted theory that emigration can be helpful to a writer, loosening as it does the shackles of provincialism. The emigrant may become a foreigner in two countries, but he moves a little closer to humanity as a consequence. [More here.]

Laying waste to language rules (The Australian, September)

2011-09-26T01:39:00.004-08:00

There’s an amusing scene in George Eliot’s Middlemarch in which Mrs Garth, a retired schoolteacher, attempts to instruct her two youngest children in the finer points of English grammar while preparing a batch of pies in her kitchen. Defective syntax, Mrs Garth believes, is disadvantageous to one’s social status, a point she tries to impress on her son, who is proving rather less malleable than the pastry. Indeed, good grammar is, for her, as important as civilisation itself; as Eliot puts it, referring to the author of English Grammar (1795), a popular guide to usage at the time: ‘in a general wreck of society [she] would have tried to hold her “Lindley Murray” above the waves’. [More here.]

On Christopher Hitchens's Arguably (Sydney Morning Herald)

2011-09-11T22:18:00.003-08:00

Why does Christopher Hitchens – veteran of the anti-Vietnam War movement, tormentor of Henry Kissinger and scourge of many a US President – begin his latest collection of essays with a number of largely admiring pieces on the Founding Fathers and other notable Americans? Is it conceivable that his critics are right, and that this ‘drink-soaked former Trotskyist popinjay’ (George Galloway) has completed the journey from radical to conservative – a journey made by so many ex-comrades? Could it be that Hitchens is now more blue than red, and that his face, as if stained by the commingling of the two, will soon turn that special shade of purple reserved for late-stage reactionaries? [More here.]

The Lives of Others (The Weekend Australian)

2011-09-11T22:16:00.001-08:00

The timing of Griffith Review 33, Such is Life, is fortuitous. Since submissions were called for well in advance of the phone-hacking scandal currently engulfing Rupert Murdoch and his British tabloids, its editors could have had no idea that our apparently insatiable appetite for information about other people’s lives was set to become the topic du jour. And yet this is precisely the topic addressed in the latest issue of the Brisbane-based journal. ‘[T]he desire to learn from the stories of others,’ writes Julianne Schultz in her editorial, ‘is something that is deeply embedded.’ It sure is, though the question of where learning ends and prurience and morbid curiosity begin is not always a straightforward one. The desire to learn from the stories of others and the desire to know what is none of our business are often hard to tell apart. [More here.]

On Bob Katter's comments about same-sex marriage (The National Times)

2011-08-25T20:24:00.003-08:00

Of all the stupid and spiteful things said at last week’s rally against same-sex marriage, one of the dumbest, and indeed most clarifying, fell from the lips of Bob Katter. Quoting from Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock – ‘Belinda smiled, and all the world was gay’ – and lamenting how the terminal word is now pressed into service as a synonym for homosexual (as opposed to a perfectly healthy adjective meaning happy or merry or brightly coloured), Katter croaked, ‘Nobody has the right to take that word off us.’ [More here.]

The Best Australian Science Writing 2011

2011-08-25T20:19:00.003-08:00

My essay, 'Flesh and Stardust', which appeared originally in Meanjin, will be republished in The Best Australian Science Writing 2011, out in November from New South Books.

Written revolutions (Australian Literary Review, August)

2011-08-25T19:58:00.002-08:00

Three hundred years ago this year, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele launched a daily periodical, which, despite its short-lived existence (1711 to 1712, with a six-month revival in 1714), changed the course of literary history. It was called The Spectator and its effect was to popularise a way of writing about serious subjects that would spread right across the eighteenth century, influencing such writers as Henry Fielding, Oliver Goldsmith and Samuel Johnson. With an estimated readership of around 60,000 (about ten percent of London’s population at the time), its reach, by eighteenth-century standards, was remarkable. Nor was its influence confined to the capital; according to contemporary evidence, it was read in places as far away, and as far apart, as Boston and Sumatra.

Each number consisted of a shortish essay written by either Addison or Steele under the guise of the eponymous Spectator, whose habit it is to wander around London, reporting on its inhabitants and on the ‘Spectator Club’ in particular. This fictional club includes Sir Roger de Coverley, Tory foxhunter and country squire; Will Honeycomb, rakish man-about-town; Sir Andrew Freeport, businessman; and Captain Sentry, retired soldier. Each character represents a social type, a device that allowed the paper’s authors to construct a sort of allegorical satire on contemporary manners, tastes and habits. The publication was thus a blend of diversion and didacticism, of the light-hearted and the serious. Its aim, as the Spectator puts it himself, was to ‘enliven Morality with Wit, and to temper Wit with Morality’.

A revolution in both form and content, The Spectator was a response to changing conditions. In 1695, the English parliament had declined to renew the Licensing Act, which had greatly limited the freedom of publishers. Consequently, the early eighteenth century was alive with new opportunities for men of letters such as Addison and Steele. Moreover, a new and changing readership was emerging from England’s increasingly affluent, non-aristocratic middle class. The Spectator was aimed at precisely this readership. As Addison put it in an early edition: ‘It was said of Socrates, that he brought Philosophy down from Heaven to inhabit among Men; and I shall be ambitious to have it said of me that I have brought Philosophy out of the Closets and Libraries, Schools and Colleges, to dwell in Clubs and Assemblies, at Tea-tables and in Coffee-Houses.’

This ambition was reflected in the style of The Spectator, whose writers favored clarity and simplicity. Eschewing pomposity and meaningless cant, they were, in their own words, ‘nearer in our styles to that of common talk than any other writers’. Needless to say, such efforts were dismissed by the more established writers of the day as pandering to the semi-educated masses. But in point of both their sympathy for the emerging mercantile middle class and their determination to express that sympathy in language that class could understand, Addison and Steele were on the side of history.

Three centuries on from the periodical’s heyday, we are witnessing another revolution in the progress of the written word. Indeed, the spread of internet technology and proliferation of online content, while not precisely analogous to the eighteenth-century publishing boom, has stimulated a widespread debate about the future of newspapers and magazines not entirely dissimilar to that which greeted the periodicals. Once again, the discussion is couched in terms of quantity versus quality; once again, the right to comment is set against a person’s qualification to do so; and once again, the vested interest and literary snobbery have their parts to play.

Take, for example, the reaction to the rumours that one of Australia’s most esteemed literary journals may cease to exist in printed form. Last year, the seventieth anniversary of Meanjin was rather overshadowed by the news that its editor, Sophie Cunningham, had resigned, citing as her reason for doing so an unsatisfactory working relationship with Melbourne University Press, which took over the running of the magazine from Melbourne University in 2008. A suspicion, or rumour, that MUP was planning to move Meanjin online also seems to have been a factor, and it was this which caught the imagination of many in the Republic of Letters. Here, for example, is Peter Craven, writing in The Age towards the end of last year:

If Meanjin is taken online, it will cease effectively to exist. Yes, there are very effective magazines of opinion, such as the ABC’s The Drum or Crikey, which thrive online, but Meanjin – the magazine that in its day published Patrick White and Ezra Pound, and which functioned as a who’s who of the Australian literary and intellectual worlds – will shrivel in the online desert for the very reason that the best of what it has published down the years has had claims to permanence.

This last is a curious point indeed, since permanence is the very thing the internet appears to guarantee, as shown by the fact that every number of the original Spectator can now be downloaded from a website linked to Montclair State University. But it is Craven’s assumption that the literary arts will fail to thrive in an online environment that really cries out for closer inspection. Later in his piece he writes: ‘They have to preserve Meanjin as a magazine a kid might pick up in a library or a punter might see in a bookshop. Anything else will be barbarism.’ Precisely why it would be ‘barbarism’ to move Meanjin out of the shops and onto the internet Craven does not say. But perhaps this strident non sequitur, with its implicit appeal to the constituency of the civilised, is revealing of something deeper than reason.

Clearly, Craven’s opinion on this issue has a lot to do with his love of books. This is a love many people share. I myself own thousands of books, many of which I couldn’t bear to part with. Nevertheless, we make a big mistake if we confuse the wisdom contained in books with the technology of the book itself. ‘Does poetry need paper?’ asked Don Delillo in a recent interview with American PEN, dilating on the relationship between language and internet technology. But poetry, traditionally understood, should not need paper or the internet. Poetry appeals to that part of the brain that is attracted to the patterning of sounds; it has its roots in pre-literate societies where information was passed on orally. Notwithstanding such modern poems as make a fetish of their own textuality, paper is no more fundamental to poetry than the proscenium arch theatre is to drama.

This is not to say, of course, that the internet won’t change the way we read and write. It will; indeed, it already has. But the point is that writing is a technology too – one that in its early days attracted its share of criticism. Indeed, no less a figure than Socrates, whose example Addison wished to follow, worried that the spread of literacy would steer the young away from true wisdom and towards the mere appearance of it. No doubt he was partly right. And no doubt there is much to be said for the view that internet technology not only gives us a false sense of erudition but also serves to undermine the very capacity for deep learning upon which true erudition is founded. But just as only a fool or a dictator could think that the spread of literacy constituted a net loss for humankind, so only the most confirmed reactionary could fail to appreciate that the internet is a wonderful tool in the service of knowledge.

In any case, and when it comes to the internet, it isn’t so much how we read as what we read that excites the doomsayers. Because there is so much trash on the internet, the internet itself is presumed to be at fault, rather as if the blame for Dan Brown could be pinned on Johannes Gutenberg. Certainly this would help to explain the tone of casual elitism that sometimes surrounds debates on the issue, a tone that tends to put one in mind of a desiccated fifteenth-century abbot attempting to defend the scribal tradition. (The subtitle of Lee Siegel’s Against the Machine – Being Human in an Age of the Electronic Mob – tells you all you need to know about its thesis.) In this, the critics of the internet really do resemble the critics of The Spectator. As the historian and biographer Jenny Uglow has said of the eighteenth-century publishing boom: ‘The danger, as some saw it, was that culture itself was going to be defined by the new, “vulgar” public.’ And yet The Spectator, which in 1711 would have been unceremoniously tossed back and forth in London’s bustling coffeehouses, is now so esteemed in literary circles that any collection of the best English essays would be incomplete without something from its pages. I don’t think it’s going too far to say that a website such as Arts and Letters Daily – which provides daily links to the best reviews, essays and articles from around the world (and which, I notice, is designed to resemble an eighteenth-century broadsheet) – may one day be seen as a comparable leap forward.

Of course, for those of us who write for a living the internet represents an enormous challenge. With so much material available online, the decline of so-called ‘dead tree journalism’ is as inexorable as it was inevitable. Nor is it clear what business model will come to replace the current one, or even if there is a model that will allow the fourth estate to flourish in a way that protects the professional writer. But the situation is what it is, and literary magazines such as Meanjin are probably in a better position than most to respond to the new environment, partly insulated as they are from the rigours of the marketplace by the fact that they draw a large part of their revenue from public bodies and institutions – a reality that Meanjin’s new editor, Sally Heath, recognises implicitly when she writes, ‘Meanjin cannot be a publicly funded exercise aimed at bringing private pleasure to a fortunate few’. Certainly it would be an opportunity missed if literary magazines were not to try to take advantage of their unique position.

It is here that Addison and Steele’s example may serve as a guide and inspiration. Two points of comparison suggest themselves. The first has to do with circulation. Cheap to produce and widely available, The Spectator and other periodicals had massive readerships by the standards of the day, the market for printed material having grown enormously in the last twenty years. Moreover, the majority of The Spectator’s readers were not themselves subscribers to it but patrons of one of the subscribing coffeehouses. It is easy to see the parallels with the situation in the twenty-first century, where everyone is his own publisher and the readership is (potentially) vast. If Addison and Steele were around today I imagine they’d be online like a shot.

The second point is less obvious and has to do with the content of The Spectator. Clearly, the rise of the periodicals went hand in hand with a change of attitude. In The Literary Critics, George Watson notes how Addison, in his Spectator essays, revolutionised the idea of literary criticism, turning it from an elitist exercise preoccupied with literary precepts to one in which taste was the guiding principle and the general reader the intended audience. The Spectator was thus not only widely available but also peculiarly accessible; without talking down, it managed to bring the man in the street (or the man in the coffeehouse) into the cultural conversation. Needless to say, the capacity of the internet to extend this involvement is almost limitless. But notwithstanding the inclusion of blogs and reader-comment facilities, most magazine and newspaper websites maintain a fairly traditional, we-talk-you-listen relationship with their readers. If literary magazines can find some way of enriching that relationship – by making contributors available for questions, say, or by convening their own online book groups – they may move the process of cultural enfranchisement beyond the merely tokenistic.

Sometimes, in order to see the way forward, one needs to take the long view back. To return to The Spectator and peruse its pages three hundred years after they first appeared is to be struck by the extent to which its editor-authors cherished the flux of eighteenth-century life. Instead of lamenting the spread of high culture, and the ways in which that culture was changing, Addison and Steele embraced the new reality, and, in so doing, helped to shape it. No mere spectators to history, they responded to rapidly changing conditions with vigour and originality. Perhaps we should take a leaf out of their book.

22 Going on 50 (The Smart Set, July 2011)

2011-08-01T03:55:00.002-08:00

On November 11 1961, readers of The New York Times were confronted with a huge advertisement for a novel, published the previous day, by a little-known writer named Joseph Heller. Running from the top to the bottom of the page and covering five of the paper’s eight columns, the ad showed an angular, panic-stricken figure, apparently in military uniform, in flight from some unspecified threat. ‘WHAT’S THE CATCH?’ the caption screamed – a reference to the novel’s title, which, in itself, threw no light on the matter. Readers would have to buy the novel and work their way through fifty-odd pages in order to find out the answer to that question. I dare say it was worth the effort. [More here.]

On The Quotable Hitchens (The Weekend Australian)

2011-06-30T21:08:00.002-08:00

Speaking in a recent interview, the author and journalist Christopher Hitchens said that he is always conscious of writing for posterity. By this he did not mean to imply a fixation on his posthumous reputation but an attachment to a principle: only by writing as if what one writes will be read when one is no longer around can one maintain intellectual integrity. Nevertheless, the question of posterity has rather come into focus of late, Hitchens having been diagnosed with stage four oesophageal cancer in the middle of a promotional tour for his superb memoir Hitch-22. Since, as he puts it, ‘there is no stage five’, it is natural to wonder how he will be read in the future. [More here.]

Winning no sin in Oprah's house (The Weekend Australian)

2011-06-10T18:11:00.003-08:00

On 14 December 2010, the Sydney Opera House became the Sydney Oprah House. In a remarkable coup for Tourism Australia, Winfrey descended on Bennelong Point to a welcome so rapturous it bordered on the devotional. Even cynics were forced to admire the perversity of the spectacle, as the building nominally dedicated to the most exclusive of cultural pursuits was recast as the backdrop to what Ian McEwan, in The Child in Time, calls ‘the democrat’s pornography’: the daytime television talk show. [More here.]

On Elizabeth Bishop's Poems (Sydney Morning Herald)

2011-06-03T17:12:00.002-08:00

Elizabeth Bishop, Poems
Chatto & Windus; $46.95; 352pp

‘If you want to read some of the poems your great-great-grandchildren will be reading,’ wrote Randall Jarrell in 1955, ‘these are the books for you to buy.’ I don’t think my great-great-grandparents ever read The Yale Review (in the East End of London in the mid twentieth century it was The Harvard Advocate or nothing at all), but had they done so they might well have scoffed at its poetry reviewer’s audacious prediction. Jarrell, however, was right on the money. The books he was referring to were by Robert Graves and Elizabeth Bishop – two names that must appear on any list of the greatest poets of the twentieth century. It is thus with a sense of reinvigorated pride in the predictive powers of book reviewers that I take up the centenary edition of the latter poet’s collected poems – a volume that, though not without its problems, is insured against catastrophe by dint of the illustrious name on its front cover.

Though Bishop’s reputation is not in doubt, it has been a little obscured over the years by the fact that her art ran slightly counter to the prevailing poetic mood of the time. Like many of the so-called confessional poets, Bishop had a difficult life. Her father died when she was eight months old and her mother was committed to a mental institution – events that left her effectively orphaned. Later she fell foul of depression herself and attempted to drown her demons with alcohol. But while there are hints of her harrowing life story sprinkled throughout poems such as ‘One Art’, Bishop disliked the indiscreetness of poets such as Robert Lowell, especially when it came to romantic relationships. (Her own romantic relationships were with other women, so she knew the value of privacy.) Instead of candour, Bishop chose reticence, and not just on moral or ethical grounds but because it suited her poetic gift. While the confessionals peered inward, Bishop gazed outward, and the results were rarely less than dazzling.

The best description of Bishop’s poetry is to be found in a letter from the poet herself, the subject of which isn’t poetry at all but the prose of a certain English naturalist. ‘[R]eading Darwin,’ Bishop writes, ‘one admires the beautiful and solid case being built up out of his endless heroic observations … What one seems to want in art, in experiencing it, is the same thing that is necessary for its creation, a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration.’ That last phrase especially meets the case. Bishop’s poems have an ocular intensity; it is the very act of looking that excites her. Take these lines from ‘Cirque d’Hiver’, which describe a mechanical horse and dancer:

He feels her pink toes dangle toward his back
along the little pole
that pierces both her body and her soul

and goes though his, and reappears below,
under his belly, as a big tin key.
He canters three steps, then he makes a bow,
canters again, bows on one knee,
canters, then clicks and stops, and looks at me.

One can almost see the movement of the horse, such is the imitative power of these lines, with their repetitions and heavy caesuras. But this technical brilliance is its own reward. In the final stanza, the poet and the horse are ‘Facing each other rather desperately’. Neither, in the end, has anything to say except ‘Well, we have come this far.’

Given this fascination with seeing, it is little wonder that representation emerges as a theme in Bishop’s poetry. In ‘The Map’, the poet describes a map as if it were a work of art rather than a merely functional item: ‘These peninsulas take the water between thumb and finger / like women feeling for the smoothness of yard-goods.’ Sometimes the poems take themselves as a subject. The remarkable early poem ‘The Man-Moth’, inspired by a newspaper misprint for ‘mammoth’, is as much a study of imagination as it is a vision of loneliness. Bishop’s is a self-delighting art. Like ‘the imaginary iceberg’ in the poem of that name, her poems cut their ‘facets from within’. When the miracle of the loaves and fishes is re-imagined with coffee and buns the miracle is really the poem itself, its sestina form the perfect match to the brilliance of its soup line conceit.

Such miracles as occur in Bishop’s poems could best be described as epiphanies of seeing. In ‘The Armadillo’ the eponymous critter is suddenly glimpsed when an illegal fire balloon splatters ‘like an egg of fire / against the cliff behind the house’. Similarly, the titular star of ‘The Moose’ appears unexpectedly on the ‘moonlit macadam’, leaving the poet with a ‘sensation of joy’. Or here, in full, is Bishop’s ‘Sonnet’, one of the last poems, if not the last poem, she wrote before she died in 1979:

Caught – the bubble
in the spirit-level,
a creature divided;
and the compass needle
wobbling and wavering,
undecided.
Freed – the broken
thermometer’s mercury
running away;
and the rainbow-bird
from the narrow bevel
of the empty mirror,
flying wherever
it feels like, gay!

Great stuff! And only slightly marred by the fact that the publisher has decided to print it, and all the other poems in the book, a centimetre from the left-hand side of the page.

This new edition of Bishop’s poems contains everything the poet wanted to save. One important addition is the inclusion, in an appendix, of a number of unpublished manuscript poems, which are printed opposite facsimiles of the originals. Interesting though this material is, the editor has rather fudged the selection by including more-or-less finished poems alongside ones which are not only not finished but which Bishop herself had clearly rejected by the time-honoured means of drawing a line through the draft. No trust is being broken here: Bishop gave complete discretion to her editors. But I do think that greater sensitivity might have been exercised in the editor’s selection.

These, however, are merely quibbles. In the end, no dodgy pagination or editorial lapse of judgment can take away from the solid achievement of this most original and scrupulous of poets. Suffice it, then, to say: If you want to read some of the poems your great-great-grandchildren will be reading, this is the book for you to buy.

On David Malouf and Michael Foley (The Weekend Australian)

2011-04-16T19:32:00.002-08:00

Towards the end of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Denisovich settles down to sleep after a hard day’s graft in the Soviet Gulag. He is, says the narrator, ‘completely content’, having managed not only to avoid the cells but also to snaffle an extra bowl of porridge. Set to work during the day on a brick wall, he was, the narrator assures us, ‘happy’ – an odd word in the circumstances, though the pleasure and pride Denisovich takes in the task appears to justify it. [More here.]

Pricklier than thou (The Weekend Australian)

2011-03-27T22:47:00.002-08:00

Contra George and Ira Gershwin, no one laughed at Christopher Columbus when he said the world was round, because Columbus never said the world was round. Columbus said the world was pear-shaped, and there are days, taking up the morning newspaper or switching on the evening news, when I think he may have been on to something. Genocide, terror, imperialism, torture – these evils are not blots on the human landscape but permanent geographical features. Kant suggested that human beings were fashioned out of ‘crooked timber’. One only has to glance at the century just gone to conclude that we’re a lot wonkier than that. [More here.]

On Philip Larkin's Letters to Monica (Sydney Morning Herald, January 2011)

2011-02-02T20:54:00.002-08:00

Philip Larkin, Letters to Monica (edited by Anthony Thwaite)
Faber/Bodleian Library; $49.99; 475pp

Philip Larkin’s Selected Letters, published in 1992, did little to enhance his posthumous image. By general consent one of the greatest poets of the second half of the twentieth century, and perhaps the greatest writing in English, Larkin was exposed as an occasional racist with a fondness for spank-mags and scatological humour – hardly the sort of preferences to endear him to a modern readership. One critic spoke of his ‘quasi-fascist views’, another of his ‘insidious philistinism’, while some of the more thick-witted reviewers even took the opportunity to downgrade his poetic reputation, as if having the wrong ideas about life were a bar to turning life into art.

In fact, in Larkin’s case, the opposite was true: his bitterness and disappointment were essential to his poetry. As he put it in 1979, ‘Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for William Wordsworth.’ Larkin didn’t just feel deprived; he nurtured his feelings of deprivation. That, above all, is the story that emerges from this new volume of correspondence, which charts the progress of Larkin’s relationship with the academic Monica Jones, whom he met in 1946 and with whom he corresponded for the rest of his life. Letters to Monica is a wonderful read, but short on existential uplift.

Having said that, it is a softer Larkin that emerges from these 500 pages than the one that contrived to end his letters to Kingsley Amis with the word ‘bum’ (as in, ‘Smoking can damage your bum, Philip’). Indeed, in an almost poetic symmetry, most of these letters begin ‘Dearest bun’, a cutesy salutation to be sure, though not as saccharine as ‘Dearest Ears’, ‘Dearest Furry-Face’ or ‘Dearest Loppit’, all of which, thankfully, appear only once. Nor does the leporine emphasis stop there: the letters are peppered with drawings of rabbits and references to Beatrix Potter, as well as angry passages about the introduction of myxomatosis, the subject of an early poem. Clearly, Larkin was not afraid to show his sentimental side when his correspondent was sympathetic.

On the whole, however, it is Larkin the misanthrope who dominates these grim missives, with their gripes about the ‘toad’ work, bungling publishers, food and toothache (‘Like dockers’ unions other teeth are coming out in sympathy’). There is also plenty of personal rancour, and not a little wallowing in what he calls his ‘psychic cripplehood’. ‘The adjective I shd choose so far is “drab”’ he writes in October 1950. Certainly he possessed no flair for the exotic; one self-satirising passage reads: ‘I yielded to the temptation of buying an anti-perspiration atomiser today … I lingered longingly over “Body Mist” but lacked the courage to buy it.’

As the poet Peter Levi once observed, the best literary criticism is workshop shavings, and Letters to Monica is strewn with fine insights of the kind to which only a craftsman is privy. (A case in point: ‘I often feel poems have to have some falsity in them, like yeast, or they won’t “rise.”’) Jones was a useful sounding-board for Larkin when it came to the progress of individual poems; the poet clearly trusted her judgment and her judgment appears to have been pretty good. She was also a much-needed source of encouragement. ‘I have no great opinion of my creative springs’ wrote Larkin in 1953. But Jones endeavoured to excavate the ego buried under the rubble of his low self-esteem.

Why, then, could he not marry her, when it is clear from these letters that that is what she wanted? Partly it had to do with other women (none of whom he married either), partly, perhaps, with lack of ardour (‘I’m sorry that our lovemaking fizzled out in Devon …’). In the end, however, it was Larkin’s suspicion that his ‘selfish life’ was essential to his art that stopped him taking up with Jones. Possibly it was the right decision; after all, his poetry continued to improve, culminating in the incomparable ‘Aubade’. But one can’t help feeling sorry for Jones, who died, alone, in 2001. Being left on the shelf is no nice thing, even when you share the shelf with High Windows.

From the PN Review archive (subscription required)

2011-02-02T20:45:00.003-08:00

I Feel Lurve: On Fred D'Aguiar

Self-Sufficent in Poetry: On Australian Anthologies

Domestic Exile: On Andrew Sant

Cross-Pollinations: On Poetry Anthologies

Putting the Va in Value: On Albert Wendt

On Simon Schama's Scribble, Scribble, Scribble (Sydney Morning Herald, January 2011)

2011-01-19T02:16:00.003-08:00

When, in 1969, the art historian Kenneth Clark walked across our TV screens in the opening sequence of Civilisation – thus cutting the ribbon, so to speak, on the current era of televised history – he looked endearingly out of his element, almost as if he was trying to remember how to put one foot in front of the other. By contrast, Simon Schama’s first appearance in A History of Britain thirty-one years later was an essay in presentational energy. Gliding through the sceptred isle, a slightly oversized leather jacket sliding around on his narrow shoulders as he body-popped his way through the script, Schama was clearly raring to go. No problem here for the show’s director in getting his boy to walk and talk. The problem was going to be keeping him in shot. [More here.]

On Tony Judt's The Memory Chalet (The Australian, January 2011)

2011-01-19T02:13:00.002-08:00

In Ill Fares the Land, the last book he published before he died in 2010 from a progressive neurodegenerative disorder, Tony Judt makes a subtle connection between the state of his own ravaged body and the state of liberal democracy. The clue is in the book’s title, which is taken from Oliver Goldsmith’s poem The Deserted Village (1770): ‘Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, / Where wealth accumulates, and men decay.’ The book is an attack on neoliberal economics and a Social Democratic call to arms. But the literary allusion is just enough to give it the air of a valediction. [More here.]

Self-appointed saviours (Australian Literary Review)

2010-12-03T00:06:00.001-08:00

There are some political words, like ‘fascist’, which begin life as specific labels and are later pressed into service as insults. And there are others, like ‘Tory’, which begin life as insults and are then adopted as political labels. But there is one word that has suffered both these fates in the space of less than fifty years. I mean, of course, that brash young impostor at the political party, ‘neoconservative’. [More here.]

Self-introspection a psychedelic trip (The Australian)

2010-12-01T01:17:00.004-08:00

Will Self’s fiction has always had a trippy quality, and Walking to Hollywood is no exception. In fact, the book is trippy in two senses, for its flights of psychedelic fancy emerge in the course of three walking trips. Moreover, the author’s accounts of these trips (all of which, in a Sebaldian touch, are interspersed with Polaroids of things described in the narrative) are steeped in a specific mental pathology from which its author/narrator is suffering or believes himself to be suffering. Even by Self’s high standards of weirdness, it is a very peculiar book indeed. [More here.]

Here come the neo-coms (Australian Literary Review, October 2010)

2010-10-30T23:02:00.003-08:00

In 1852, Karl Marx wrote the following:

Hegel remarks somewhere that all great events and characters of world history occur, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.

Marx did not mean that history repeats itself. What he meant is that regimes and ideologies do not just disappear overnight, but are imitated by subsequent generations eager to claim continuity with the past. Genuine leaders reappear as clowns, profound ideas as stale rhetoric. Yesterday’s theatrical coup, hailed by the critics as a tour de force, is resurrected as a period piece: a sideshow to the real action of history.

Of course, Marx didn’t realise at the time that he was giving a tremendous hostage to fortune. Nor is it very original to point out that the process he identified is nowhere better demonstrated than in the progress of ‘scientific socialism’. But just because it isn’t original doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it. For the fact is, communism is back in town, and its aspect is more than a little farcical.

The occasion for this recrudescence is, of course, the financial crisis. Certainly there are other factors in play. The rise of illiberal capitalism in China has cast doubt on the neoliberal assumption that democracy and the free market are inextricable, while the twentieth anniversary of the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe inspired a certain scholarly retrospection. But it is, in the end, the crisis on Wall Street and not the crisis in East Berlin to which the revival of communism speaks. In 2008, the new communists claim, an ideological gap opened up, a tear in the neoliberal matrix through which it should be possible to glimpse the contradictions at capitalism’s core. In his recent book, The Idea of Communism, the British author Tariq Ali likens capitalism to a ‘nervous disease’, while Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, in First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, invokes the shade of Mao Zedong: ‘Everything under heaven is in utter chaos; the situation is excellent.’

To the extent that the new communists constitute a milieu, Žižek is at the heart of it. Tattily apparelled in T-shirt and jeans and with a fidgety, not to say manic, demeanour, he looks like the kind of career paranoiac you’d duck behind the photocopier to avoid at your local library. Nevertheless, he is a celebrated philosopher, one whose intellectual juggling act – a little Lacanian theory here, a reference to Kung Fu Panda there – has secured him a dedicated following. Another key figure is Alain Badiou, the former chair of philosophy at the École Normale Supérieur and a founding member of the militant group, L’Organisation Politique, which describes itself as post-Leninist/Maoist. In 2009, Žižek and Badiou organised a conference, ‘The Idea of Communism’. Its one proviso was that the word ‘communism’ should acquire again a ‘positive value’. Among the speakers were Michael Hardt and Toni Negri, co-authors of Commonwealth, which, like Empire and Multitude before it, posits a centreless, neoliberal ‘Empire’ and a new heterogeneous, supra-national ‘multitude’ ready to wrest control from the capitalists. A hugely influential figure on the Italian left in the 1970s, particularly in the autonomist movement that advocated direct worker action, Negri was arrested in 1979 on suspicion of involvement in the kidnap and murder of former Prime Minister Aldo Moro. Though cleared of that charge, he was convicted on others and it was while serving time in prison that he co-wrote the first two books in his trilogy.

It is easy to mock these neo-communists as opportunists and conceptual poseurs. But it would, I think, be a big mistake not to take them as seriously as they take themselves. As the French philosopher Raymond Aron wrote in the The Opium of the Intellectuals, ‘the fact remains that the putting of feelings into rational or pseudo-rational form is of great importance to men of thought, and that it is neither wise nor convincing to answer ideologies with a contemptuous: “It’s just silly.”’ To those, like me, on the liberal left, the thought of society’s progressive element wasting their time with this stuff is painful. But nothing is to be gained by dismissing it out of hand. It is important to challenge, in the clearest terms possible, the assumptions on which these ideas are based.

So what is being argued here, by these keepers of the communist flame? One thing they argue, at times convincingly, is that capitalism is not an ideology-free zone. Žižek, for example, is particularly good on the rhetorical strategies employed after the credit crunch, on the way in which systemic factors such as the need for growth in capitalist economies are translated ‘into a matter of personal sin’ – i.e. into problems of greed and consumption. (One remembers that in March 2009, the then-British Prime Minister Gordon Brown addressed a function at St Paul’s Cathedral, the setting serving to underscore the atmosphere of righteous hypocrisy as Brown condemned the global ‘free-for-all’ for which he was in no small part responsible.) For Žižek, the real challenge for radicals is to see beyond the critical rhetoric of left-of-centre politicians – rhetoric that obscures the true nature of capitalism. Both Žižek and Badiou reject the idea of the ‘real’ economy as something separable from ‘irresponsible’ financial speculation. As Badiou writes in The Communist Hypothesis: ‘Finance capitalism is – and always has been – a central and constituent element of capitalism in general.’

The title of Žižek’s recent book, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, is a mischievous misapplication of the idea with which I began this article, namely that the movement of history is such as to keep defunct ideas in play beyond, as it were, their use-by dates. Needless to say, the idea in this case is not communism but capitalism, or, more accurately, neoliberalism, by which is meant the amalgamation of a broadly liberal political outlook with a strong emphasis on free market economics. For Žižek, the tragedy for neoliberalism was the terrorist attacks of 2001, while the farce was the crisis of 2008. On the first occasion, Žižek suggests, the idea that the world was moving towards an era of democratic stability and ideological integration crumbled to so much rubble and dust, while on the second the economic system on which that liberal-democratic ‘utopia’ was based was unmasked as blatantly ‘irrational’. On both occasions, Žižek continues, a threat to the American ‘way of life’ was invoked in order to justify the suspension of American values: civil liberties with the Patriot Act and free enterprise with the bail-out plan. The post-1989 euphoria of neoconservatives such as Francis Fukuyama, who saw with the collapse of communism the prospect of a post-ideological world committed to the principles of democracy and free trade, was itself revealed as ideological.

The notion of dominant ideology is as central to the new communism as it was to the old. Badiou coins the phrase ‘capitalo-parliamentarianism’ to describe the neoliberal world-view – the set of assumptions that serves to sustain the capitalist ruling class in power – while Žižek, referring to the ‘end’ of ideology, suggests that ‘Utopias of alternative worlds have been exorcised by the utopia in power, masking itself as pragmatic realism.’ This idea – that capitalist ideology is ‘utopian’ – sits at the heart of Žižek’s analysis. For him, the way in which ‘market fundamentalists’ react to the failure of their economic policies – by calling for less regulation, not more – is reminiscent of those ‘utopian’ leaders in the USSR or Nazi Germany who would place the blame for all setbacks and reversals on the compromises made in a policy’s implementation. No doubt he overstates the case. But he also has the ghost of a point.

The aspect of the dominant ideology to which Žižek gives his closest attention is the phenomenon he terms ‘false humanisation’, which describes the way in which modern capitalism presents itself as the servant of choice as opposed to the ruthless master of demand. We imagine that we are in control of our lives and that the market is at the service of our identities. But in fact we are merely consumer-machines whose ‘identities’ are at the service of ‘postmodern’ capitalism.

Again, one can just about see his point. There is a sense in which modern consumers derive, or seek to derive, an identity from the things they have or the services they consume, at the cost of a deeper understanding of self. But what is remarkable is that Žižek (and others) would put forward these ideas in the name of communism, an unambiguously utopian ideology with, to put it mildly, a bad track record. Never mind ‘false humanisation’; communism, in its twentieth-century manifestations, entrained a radical dehumanisation. Asked to choose between the dominant ideology – the distortion of thought inevitable in a society set up along certain lines – and the kind of emanicpatory ideology that seems to lead invariably to chaos, even a broadly objective observer, one whose eyes had been opened to the former, would surely not throw open his arms to the latter. And if Žižek countered, as indeed he might, that our happiness is not his principal concern – that what he desires is the end of a system that excludes or exploits the super-poor – then it is, I think, incumbent upon us to point out that in the twentieth century the super-poor were not exempt from the stomping boot of communism. On the contrary, they were its most numerous victims.

But of course it isn’t that communism for which the new communists are arguing but rather the idea of communism. According to the blurb on Ali’s book the communist idea is ‘simple and noble’. And so, in a certain soft light, it is. Communism grew out of the Enlightenment principles of human freedom and liberty. Fascism, in contrast, spat on those principles, and it is for this reason that Žižek and others are so desperate to disentangle communism from the idea of totalitarianism, which they think implies a moral equivalence between the two ideologies. Indeed, the new communists, echoing the old ones, often portray fascism as an outgrowth of capitalism – an outgrowth for which communism is the only cure. As Ali puts it in The Idea of Communism: ‘Fascism was the punishment which capital inflicted on the working class for toying with the idea of revolution.’

To the extent that they separate the idea of communism from the communist reality, the new communists echo Jean-Paul Sartre, who asked the world to judge communism by its intentions and not by the crimes committed in its name. But this, as well as being morally unsound, is also philosophically disingenuous. For historical materialism, as far as Marx was concerned, was not an idea but a description of reality, a reality, moreover, in which history moves in a particular way towards a particular end, which is to say the end of history. And it was precisely this air of inevitability that led to the crimes committed in its name. In short, the ‘idea’ and the reality are inseparable. This is why the confessional essay was such a feature of anti-communist writing in the 1940s and 1950s, as literary intellectuals such as Arthur Koestler strove to give a sense of the mania that had gripped them when they were under communism’s spell. For Koestler, communism was the ‘God that Failed’ – a millenarian religion in all but name. Similarly, when Aron coined the phrase ‘the opium of the intellectuals’ he was referring to communism’s religious aspects, for it was, of course, as the ‘opium of the people’ that Marx himself had characterised religion in his ‘Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’. Communism was not an idea. It was the Truth.

For the original communists, history was God; it had a plan for humankind. The new communists are pretty wary of this view, though they don’t completely dispense with it. Badiou, for example, in The Communist Hypothesis, quotes from his own ‘novelopera’ The Red Scarf: ‘No one has the strength to make the mill of history run backwards for any length of time.’ (Ah, the mill of history, with its human grist!) On the whole, however, Badiou and Žižek prefer to eschew ‘scientific socialism’ in favour of something more philosophically nebulous – a reworking of Hegel’s ‘absolute idea’: an evolving rational unity towards which mankind is groping its way, like a man in a desert groping towards an oasis. Communism, for them, is not an ‘idea’ in the pedestrian sense implied by Ali. Nor is it an ideology. It is, rather, an ‘eternal’ Idea.

This is some distance from Marx’s philosophy, in which ideas, far from being eternal, are revealed as directly related to the world and the material conditions that obtain within it. But then Marx, of course, sought to turn Hegel ‘on his head’. The new communists, in going back to Hegel, cut out materialism altogether, and head straight for the existential pay dirt. No need to bother with economic relations; communism is now a ‘concrete universal’. No wonder the new communists occasionally sound like converts to some zany cult. ‘Jesus is my hero’ declared Žižek recently, in an interview with the BBC. In his book, he flirts with the idea of an alliance between communists and fundamentalist Christians, whose ‘apocalyptism’ is, in his view, aligned with the requisite ‘emanicpatory logic’ of millenarian communism. In Living in the End Times, he reprises this theme, suggesting that liberal capitalism is fast approaching its apocalypse and arguing for a resurrection of emancipatory ideology. Nor is Žižek the only neo-com to put one in mind of fanatical religion. Reading certain passages in Hardt and Negri’s communist trilogy is like being doorstepped by some grinning evangelist. At one point, they talk about the ‘irrepressible lightness and joy of being a communist’.

Since, for them, the Idea of communism has come to replace historical materialism, Žižek and Badiou can dispense with the grand narrative and celebrate instead the historical fragment, rather in the way that certain Christians celebrate Jesus’s special appearances on church walls and potato crisps. For Žižek, the fragment par excellence is the Haitian Revolution of 1791–1804, in particular the moment when Napoleon’s forces approached the army of liberated slaves and were greeted with a rendition of La Marseillaise – a moment which, in Žižek’s words, cuts through the ‘postmodern poetry of diversity’ to a recognition of fellow feeling and, indeed, of fellow suffering. For Badiou, it is the Paris Commune that constitutes the key event – one, he argues, that needs to be extricated from mawkish left-wing ‘commemoration’ in order that it might live again as a genuine ‘site’ of revolutionary potential. Similarly, Hardt and Negri write of moments of ‘supranational relevance’ such as the Palestinian Intafada and the race riots in Los Angeles in 1992. Events such as these, Žižek suggests, ‘enact universality as a political category’. They are, in his phrase, ‘momentary opening[s]’ in the ideology of neoliberalism.

For Žižek and Badiou these revolutionary fragments are utopias in and of themselves. At one point, Žižek even writes of ‘the genuine utopia of the revolution itself’ (he means the Iranian Revolution), while Badiou calls communism an ‘Idea which persists, exploding from time to time’. That many of these moments end in failure or betrayal doesn’t seem to bother them. On the contrary, Žižek quotes Samuel Beckett’s 1983 novella Worstward Ho: ‘Try again. Fail again. Fail better’, while Badiou, with even greater callousness, quotes Mao Zedong’s psychopathic injunction to ‘fight, fail, fail again, fight again’. Badiou, indeed, is deeply interested in failure as a category and seeks to delineate a ‘space of possible failures’ within which we are required to ‘theorise the point at which we are now forbidden to fail’. In a passage of unbelievable fatuity, he invokes Pierre de Fermat’s ‘last theorem’ in order to suggest that the communist hypothesis, like Fermat’s mathematical hypothesis, should not be discarded for the simple reason that to do so would hinder its future proof. This, I put it to you, is stupidity cubed.

It is here that the intellectual recklessness of the neo-communists becomes dazzlingly apparent. For what does ‘failing again’ entail if not more terror, more bloodshed, more bodies? Both Žižek and Badiou are apt to flirt with violent revolutionary rhetoric. At one point, Žižek recommends the ‘Jacobin-Leninist’ paradigm of ‘centralised dictatorial power’ and a dose of ‘disciplinary terror’ (italics in the original). Badiou, whose love for Mao and Maoism apparently knows no bounds, goes further, embracing the Cultural Revolution as a necessary corrective to the power of the Party and the essential paradigm for the struggle to come. Here, the new communists, for all their talk of salvaging the ‘idea’ of communism, stand revealed for what they are: intellectual bovver boys in thrall to violence.

Of course, one finds almost nothing in these books about how a communist society would be organised. Such vagueness has an illustrious history. Marx himself was famously fuzzy when sketching the contours of the communist paradise, preferring to leave it to the God of history to work out the details as He went along. His position, or lack of one, had a certain logic. After all, he believed that communism was inevitable; he believed, as it were, in the wisdom of history. The new communists, in contrast, have no such excuse, and it is interesting to note that, more often than not, the point at which the question comes up is the point at which the prose descends into philosophical impenetrability. I don’t like writers who make a show of their ignorance. But honestly what on Earth does this mean?

How are we to concentrate the political truth of the Commune today? Without neglecting textual and factual supports, what is at stake here is to reconstitute, by means that will be largely philosophical, this episode of our history in its irreducibility.

That’s Badiou. And Žižek is no clearer. Nor do Hardt and Negri say much about what a post-capitalist ‘commons’ will look like. Their thesis mirrors Marx’s prediction that workers forced together into factories will eventually overthrow the system of ownership and exploitation that keeps the proletariat in chains. However, since the system is changing from one of factory exploitation to one of ‘immaterial’ services, the potential for and character of revolutionary activity is changing too; the revolution, when it comes, will be based on creative self-organisation. Unfortunately, it is never very clear what creative self-organisation entails. Certainly the internet increases the opportunities for outreach and unsupervised effort. But the likelihood of a new society emerging from the cyber sphere is, to put it mildly, slim.

On the first page of The Communist Manifesto, Marx likens communism to a ‘spectre’ haunting Europe. But today’s communism looks more like a zombie than a spectre. It is the soulless, empty-headed version of a once-energetic, though flawed, ideology, the shambling carcass of a political movement that has long since ceased to be relevant. A stiff-limbed, dead-eyed, slack-jawed thing, it seems to be beseeching us. But what does it want? What is it saying? Ah yes, I think I hear it now: ‘Intellectuals of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your brains.’

Taking a walk on the Fry side (The Australian, October 2010)

2010-10-30T22:57:00.002-08:00

Stephen Fry doesn’t like reviewers. But this reviewer likes Stephen Fry. To be sure, I can’t think of a writer-entertainer who has given me more pleasure over the last quarter of a century, certainly not in the field of humour. From his appearances on BBC Radio 4 as the desiccated Professor Trefusis, to his verbally dazzling sketches with Hugh Laurie, to his wonderful early novels The Liar and (even better) The Hippopotamus, Fry has been, and remains, great company – an ungainly amalgam of wit, urbanity, erudition and linguistic dexterity. Indeed, it is exactly these qualities that he brings to his role as the host of QI, the quiz that blends old BBC values of educational broadcasting with the silly-surreal comedy of a new generation of humorists. And Fry too seems to inhabit two epochs: the one all Bramley apples and tweed; the other Apple Macs and Twitter. Needless to say, he is also ‘quite interesting’. [More here.]

The Finkler Question, by Howard Jacobson (Sydney Morning Herald, October 2010)

2010-10-11T19:59:00.003-08:00

Howard Jacobson’s novel, The Finkler Question, begins with a mugging – of a man by a woman. Superficially at least, the female assailant relieves her victim of more than his belongings. She relieves him of his manliness. (Nothing is as unmanning as being manhandled by a woman.) The story, however, is more complicated than that … [More here.]

Core issue for the Big Apple (The Age, 11 September 2010)

2010-09-11T18:09:00.005-08:00

In the sweltering summer of 1948 the author and journalist E. B. White wrote his famous essay ‘Here is New York’ while staying at a hotel in Midtown Manhattan. Published in Holiday magazine and later developed into a modest book, this essay paints an inspiring picture of the twitchy energy, aggressive individuality and unsentimental diversity that make up one of the great modern cities. There are, says White, three separate New Yorks: the commuter’s New York; the native’s New York; and the New York of immigrants and (American) settlers. He continues: [More here.]

The idiocy left behind (The Australian, September 2010)

2010-09-07T20:30:00.007-08:00

From where on the ideological spectrum do you imagine the following sentence derives?

Ayaan Hirsi Ali has brains and beauty and is a gift to those of us who like our prejudices confirmed.

No, it’s not some snarly ex-Trot sounding off on Spiked.com; nor some male-chauvinist cleric putting Hirsi Ali in her place for daring to criticise Islamic dogma. It is, in fact, the impeccably liberal writer and publisher Hilary McPhee, writing in The Age in July of this year. And McPhee goes further, describing Hirsi Ali as ‘disturbing’ and ‘delusional’ and more than implying that if she didn’t exist we in the West would have to invent her. Even her books, McPhee suggests, wear their ‘single-word titles like brand names’. [More here.]

Between the mind and the modem (The Australian, August 2010)

2010-09-07T20:25:00.006-08:00

Some twenty years after Tim Berners-Lee designed and built the first Web browser, anxieties relating to internet usage continue to proliferate. Moral anxieties over online material are, perhaps, the most conspicuous, though concerns that the internet is unconducive to healthy social relationships are also much in evidence. But perhaps the most absorbing set of internet-related anxieties is emerging from the field of neuroscience. It is, predominantly, those anxieties to which Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows gives voice. [More here.]

Do Worry and Don't Always Be Happy (The Australian, August 2010)

2010-08-12T20:27:00.003-08:00

Ideas are big again. A decade of Islamic terrorism, US-led wars and financial excess has sent intellectuals back to the archives to check the small print on the social contract. Evangelical progressives, evangelical conservatives, even evangelicals, set out their stalls in the marketplace of ideas, with many an intellectual trinket to tempt the jaded passer-by. Moreover, communism, the very ideology whose death, according to Francis Fukuyama, was supposed to herald the end of ideology, is undergoing a modest recrudescence, with philosophers such as Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek leading the way. The liberal-democratic consensus, if it ever existed, is showing signs of strain. Intellectuals are going back to the future. [More here.]

Shooting Sacred Cows (Australian Literary Review, August 2010)

2010-08-12T20:19:00.001-08:00

In 1492, Muhammad XII, the last Islamic ruler of Granada, stood on a hill overlooking the city now under the control of the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand II and Isabella I. From there he took one last look at the Alhambra and, legend has it, broke down in tears. The spot became known as ‘the Moor’s last sigh’. [More here.]

Great Poetry is No Scandal (The Australian, August 2010)

2010-08-12T20:13:00.005-08:00

Traditionally, the Oxford Professor of Poetry has tended to get much less publicity than the British Poet Laureate. Employed as he is by the royal household, the Laureate is obliged, though not required, to write poems about the royal family – a practice that makes him an easy target for what Alfred Lord Tennyson, a Laureate himself, called ‘the parasitic animalcules of the press’. By contrast, the Oxford Professor of Poetry is required to give three lectures a year on subjects of his or her own choosing – a far more dignified operation all round and, for that reason, less subject to scrutiny. [More here.]

Review of Full Circle, by Ferdinand Mount (Sydney Morning Herald, July 2010)

2010-08-12T20:07:00.003-08:00

According to a recent piece in the UK’s Daily Telegraph, Ferdinand Mount’s eleven-year stint as editor of the TLS was a happy time for all concerned. Certainly the author, journalist, baronet, politician and former speech-writer for Margaret Thatcher sounds nice enough. In fact, he sounds like a pussycat. ‘Lovely, lovely’ was his stock response to contributions that took his fancy, while for those that didn’t meet with his approval he reserved the hardly-wrathful ‘stale buns’. [More here.]

My poem, 'It's Said', has won the Fremantle Press Villanelle Competition.

2010-08-12T20:02:00.002-08:00

Read it here.

Flesh and Stardust: C. P. Snow's Two Cultures Fifty Years On

2010-07-19T01:19:00.008-08:00

[An abridged version of this essay was published in Meanjin, Vol. 69 No. 2 2010. The edited version can be found here.]

When I was growing up in England, I didn’t have a chemistry set, but I did have a television set, and on that television set, once a week for what seemed like an age, a man called Johnny Ball would appear and tell me, not just about chemistry, but about all manner of science subjects, from geology to biology to physics and astronomy. A presenter of preternatural energy, Johnny was an entertainer and teacher whose enthusiasm for his subject was obvious and whose ability to convey often complex ideas with the aid of eccentric and implausible gizmos remains, as far as I know, unsurpassed. He was, and indeed still is, regarded with enormous affection in the United Kingdom – an affection given extra depth for my generation of thirty-somethings by the fact that he’d also presented Play School and thus seems, in a benign way, to have presided over whole childhoods. But the real reason for Johnny’s popularity is that he managed to instil a love of science. A one-man Enlightenment, he kindled our interest.

And the flame continued to burn, for a while. It burned in the form of Mrs Maclaren, who took us for chemistry lessons at school. In fact, ‘burned’ is precisely the word. For Mrs Maclaren could not go an hour (or an hour and ten minutes) without burning something, usually a little strip of magnesium, which, when held over a Bunsen flame, would flare up suddenly into a brilliant white nova. Or else she would take a small ball of sodium and place it in a water-filled dish, where it skipped and fizzed and whizzed around, slowly dissolving to nothing as it did so. I can’t recall the point of these experiments but I do remember loving them and being more than a little upset when Mrs Maclaren was pensioned off and replaced by a teacher whose name I forget but whose lugubrious demeanour and patchy beard made me feel strangely queasy.

Mr Beard didn’t have a beard, but he did have a big ginger helmet of hair that looked as if it might be concealing a brain of extraterrestrial proportions. Mr Beard took us for physics and biology and, like ‘Matches’ Maclaren before him, managed to keep the flame of science alive in my scrawny sixteen-year-old breast. Despite the proximity of Alison Bunch, whose sixteen-year-old breasts demanded most of my attention, the salient facts found fertile ground. Such information as I’m able to recall about, say, photosynthesis or Isaac Newton’s prism experiment is largely due to Mr Beard and his easy way with both his students and his subject. You could even talk politics with Mr Beard. I remember telling him, loudly no doubt, that I thought all private schools should be closed. He replied that if it was up to him he’d make the public sector so good – I imagine he looked very earnest at this point – that private schools would simply disappear. Even at sixteen, I thought that was naïve, but now I think that if all state schools were staffed by teachers of Mr Beard’s calibre his plan just might be in with a chance.

Nevertheless, and as you can see, I was beginning to move away from science and towards the world of human affairs, to questions of morality and motivation. Thus, when the time to choose arrived I chose in favour of the humanities. English, History and Sociology: two solidly non-scientific subjects and one upstart hybrid with scientific pretensions. And since it was only English Literature for which I showed any real aptitude, that is the thing I went on to pursue and, indeed, have pursued ever since. At university I buried myself in the poetry of the English Romantics, with their slurs against Newton and Francis Bacon (‘sheath’d in dismal steel, their terrors hang / Like iron scourges over Albion’, wrote William Blake in Jerusalem), and science became a sort of background noise against which the real action was happening. I wouldn’t have recognised it at the time, but I was becoming slightly anti-science, an attitude reciprocated by many of the scientists at what was in fact a fairly technical university. On my first day there, I knocked on the door of an engineer called Richard Harris, known to his friends as ‘Harristotle’ on account of his philosophical tendency to put his opinions into question-form (as in, ‘Is it or is it not the case that the only reason English students keep their curtains drawn in the morning is so they’ve got something to do in the afternoon?’) The conversation went something like this:

RH: (answering the door) Yeah?
Me: Hi. I’ve just moved in downstairs.
RH: Richard. Pleased to meet you. What subject?
Me: English Lit.
RH: Oh right! They still do those courses, do they?

Well, I thought, if that’s your attitude, let’s call the whole thing off, mate. And call the whole thing off we did, we budding Byrons and would-be Wordsworths, with our shoulder-length hair and Collected Eliots. Leave them to their plastic goggles, their conical flasks and their eggy smells! Science was Apollo to our Dionysius, a Gradgrind to our Rochester, Mr Spock to our Captain Kirk, though of course we’d never have split that infinitive.

I have never regretted my choice of subject. Literature, and poetry in particular, has given my life a direction and meaning that I’m certain it would have lacked without it. When my son was born two years ago, my mind flew immediately to the opening line of Sylvia Plath’s early poem, ‘Child’: ‘Your clear eye is the one absolutely beautiful thing.’ No, I don’t regret knowing that. But I do regret the comprehensiveness with which I turned my back on science, and sometimes this regret extends to a wish that is, perhaps, less secret than it should be (and now, of course, is no secret at all): that my children will not make the same mistake and may even take the road less travelled. The other day, our little boy was staring up at the lights in the kitchen with a faraway look in his big blue eyes. Perhaps, I said, you’ll be an astronomer. Hearing this, and utterly frazzled from a day spent chasing this nascent Galileo from one scene of devastation to the next, my wife gave the only sensible response: ‘Perhaps he’ll be an electrician.’

In any case, in recent years I’ve tried to mend the holes in my knowledge, or at least slow the rate at which my ignorance is, like the universe, constantly expanding. Of course, I tend to come at the subject, tend to come at any subject, from a literary rather than a technical perspective and in this respect the popular science books that have made such a splash in recent decades – books by Paul Davies, Stephen Jay Gould, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jones, Stephen Pinker, Richard Dawkins and Carl Sagan – are an obvious and indispensable boon. However, I can’t spend my life reading science books, attractive though that sometimes sounds, and so tend to rely on high-end literature to do the investigative spadework for me. And herein lies the problem as I see it. For notwithstanding excellent novels like Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005), with its scalpel-like descriptions of brain surgery, literature that treats of scientific themes appears to be very thin on the ground. Perhaps the greatest disappointment is that poetry has remained almost entirely science-free – determined, indeed, to translate new experiences back into the myths and legends of the past (witness not only all the new translations of literary classics such as Beowulf and the Iliad but also the number of lyric poems that continue to draw on the mythological and the legendary). Where are the poems that take as their subject the great discoveries of the twentieth century: special and general relativity, quantum mechanics, black holes, the double helix? Where is the interdisciplinary osmosis? Where, indeed, is the osmosis, or the fossil record or the cosmological constant? A theoretical physicist in Ian McEwan’s The Child in Time (1987), articulates my frustration perfectly:

Shakespeare would have grasped wave functions, Donne would have understood complementarity and relative time. They would have been excited. What richness! They would have plundered this new science for their imagery. And they would have educated their audiences too. But you ‘arts’ people, you’re not only ignorant of these magnificent things, you’re rather proud of knowing nothing.

But for a bit of role reversal this would be called philistinism. And while I certainly don’t want to give the impression that the ignorance is all one way, it does seem to me to be more pronounced on the literary than on the scientific side. ‘When I find myself in the company of scientists,’ wrote W. H. Auden in ‘Poet and the City’, ‘I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.’ But Auden was exceptional. In Unweaving the Rainbow (1998), Richard Dawkins swaps the costumes on this little playlet, suggesting that, more often than not, it’s the scientists who feel like shabby curates and the poets who are regarded as dukes. Of course, such timidity is entirely misplaced. Dawkins’s title refers to Lamia (1819), in which Keats accuses Isaac Newton of having destroyed the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to prismatic colours. But Newton, of course, had done nothing of the kind. He had made one of the great discoveries of all time, a discovery that led on to spectroscopy, which has, in turn, immeasurably deepened our understanding of the observable cosmos, surely as proper a subject for poetry as any nightingale or Grecian urn.

Dawkins’s book began life as a lecture, delivered in 1997 in honour of the author C. P. Snow. And it so happens that last year marked the fiftieth anniversary of Snow’s Rede Lecture for 1959, in which Snow identified, or claimed to identify, a division between ‘literary intellectuals’ on the one hand and scientists and engineers on the other. Delivered at Cambridge University and entitled ‘The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution’, its effect was to ignite a widespread debate – such, indeed, that the term ‘The Two Cultures’ was quickly absorbed into cultural life. It begins with a biographical passage in which Snow describes his growing sense of a sort of mutual indifference on the part of literary intellectuals and scientists. Snow, a scientist and a novelist, had friends on both sides of this divide and was keen to understand why it was that scientists spoke only to other scientists and literary intellectuals to other literary intellectuals. As he puts it:

I felt I was moving among two groups – comparable in intelligence, identical in race, not grossly different in social origin, earning about the same incomes, who had almost ceased to communicate at all, who in intellectual, moral and psychological climate had so little in common that instead of going from Burlington House or South Kensington to Chelsea, one might have crossed an ocean.

Snow identifies a sort of fatalism on the part of literary intellectuals starkly at odds with the ‘optimism’ of science. Certainly Snow was optimistic: some of his predictions look ludicrous in retrospect. For example, he says that science and technology will soon abolish third-world poverty! But his general point seemed to strike a cord and, indeed, to touch a nerve. Three years later, in 1962, F. R. Leavis gave a lecture, also at Cambridge University, in which he made it very clear that he regarded Snow’s ‘Two Cultures’ thesis as an all-out assault on the sanctity of literature. Lionel Trilling described Leavis’s lecture as ‘an attack of unexampled ferocity’ (legend has it that one academic was so disgusted he climbed out of a window). And remember we’re talking a strong field here: Leavis was infamous for his odium literarium.

Had Snow identified a genuine divide? Or something temporary and peculiar to England? Certainly, it’s far more usual these days to hear of the conflict between science and religion than of the conflict between science and literature. Indeed, in this respect science and literature have rather joined forces in recent years, as popular scientists like Richard Dawkins and literary intellectuals like Martin Amis attempt, according to their different lights, to combat the rise of fundamentalist religion. (The alliance is not entirely new. John Milton visited Galileo when the latter was under house arrest for daring to suggest that the Earth moved round the Sun rather than the other way around. However, we would do well to remember that his sympathy did not extend to his poetry: the universe of Paradise Lost conforms to the old Ptolemaic model.) But that Snow had put his finger on something, some mutual distrust or disregard, is surely not to be seriously doubted. In 1882, Matthew Arnold gave a lecture (it was, in fact, the Rede Lecture for that year), in which he caused a similar controversy to the one provoked in 1959. A response to T. H. Huxley’s attack on classical education in ‘Science and Culture’, Arnold argued that literature, not science, should lie at the heart of education. Huxley, the Richard Dawkins of his day, shot back that Arnold’s ideas were outmoded. And so it went, and so it goes. Historically, science and literature just don’t get along as well as they might.

Nevertheless, there are certain commentators who think that Snow overstated the case. One such was the late great Stephen Jay Gould, who, in 1959, was an undergraduate at Antioch College, yet to establish himself as one of the greatest and subtlest science writers of all time. In The Hedgehog, the Fox and the Magister’s Pox (2003), he takes up Snow’s own observation that ‘the number 2 is a very dangerous number’. As Gould puts it: ‘From the dawn of recorded human rumination, our best philosophers have noted, and usually lamented, our strong tendency to frame any complex issue as a battle between two opposing camps.’ Gould suspected that this predilection lay deep within our mental architecture, as an evolved property of the human brain. But whatever the reasons for this quirk, or glitch, Gould sees Snow’s ‘Two Cultures’ lecture as evidence of the dangers of dichotomisation. ‘In arguing that academic life had become riven by a split of scholars into camps of suspicion, disrespect, and mutual incomprehension, and in designating the sides of his putative dichotomy as “literary intellectuals” versus “scientists” (with physical scientists the “most representative”), I believe that Snow had identified a local English phenomenon – and largely a snooty Oxbridge parochialism at that – and elevated his observations into a fallacious general case.’ (It’s true that there’s an attitude prevalent among the British upper crust that regards all practical knowledge as ‘trade’. But perhaps this isn’t a British speciality. In a spectacular combination of snobbery and ignorance, Yeats dismissed science as the ‘opium of the suburbs’.)

Gould’s thesis is that the animosity between literary intellectuals and scientists is essentially a ‘pseudo-conflict’ born of an understandable vigilance, or ‘scrappiness’, on science’s part, when it first began to emerge as a rival to other, older forms of knowledge. (‘One can scarcely blame science for a little pugnacity in its infancy.’) Nascent scientists like Francis Bacon expressed ideas that inevitably clashed with ‘the hidebound traditions of humanistic scholarship’. But the conflict has become ‘unseemly and inappropriate’. Both science and literature, Gould suggests, should adopt the strategies of the fox and the hedgehog, which is to say that there will be times when it is useful for the two ‘magisteria’ to collaborate (as the fox is able to modify its tactics) and times when both must go their own way, adopting strategies peculiar to each (as the hedgehog invariably rolls itself into a spiky ball to put off predators).

Well, he’ll get no argument there. But to say that the conflict between science and literature has become ‘unseemly and inappropriate’ is not to say that it doesn’t exist. And, if the conflict does exist, Snow was right to identify it and any unconscious parochialism on his part is ultimately beside the point. Moreover, Gould writes of ‘occasional strife’ between the humanities and the physical sciences. But the briefest foray into literary history reveals that the strife is far from occasional. On the contrary, it immediately strikes one as chronic.

Snow made no particular attempt to put his ideas into historical context, perhaps because he took it for granted that people could supply their own examples of literature’s lack of love for science. Certainly, one doesn’t want for evidence. Despite the metaphysical poets, who would sometimes include scientific discoveries in their intricate intellectual exercises, and despite Pope’s famous epitaph for Newton – ‘Nature and Nature’s Laws lay hid in Night: / God said, let Newton be! And all was Light’ (a no-show, alas, on Newton’s tomb in Westminster Abbey, for which it was written) – literature, and poetry in particular, has shown a bizarre negativity towards science. To take the most well known example – the Romantic segregation of Reason and the Imagination – we don’t have to dig very far at all before we discover some bone of contention or fossil of poetic invective. The scientist Peter Medawar paints an incomparable word picture of this habit of mind in his 1972 book The Hope of Progress:

The official Romantic view is that Reason and the Imagination are antithetical, or at best that they provide alternative pathways leading to the truth, the pathway of Reason being long and winding and stopping short of the summit, so that while Reason is breathing heavily, there is Imagination capering lightly up the hill.

For Edgar Allan Poe, science was a ‘Vulture, whose wings are dull realities’; For Keats, it ‘will clip an Angel’s wings, / Conquer all mysteries’ and ‘Unweave a rainbow’; Wordsworth, no enemy of science on the whole (in Lyrical Ballads, he envisages a time when the ‘remotest discoveries of the chemist, the botanist, or mineralogist, will be as proper objects of the poet’s art as any upon which it can be employed’), could still write, in ‘The Tables Turned’,

Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;
Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things: –
We murder to dissect.

And then there is my personal favourite: Walt Whitman stomping off from the astronomy lecture to gaze ‘in perfect silence at the stars’ – a Romantic tantrum in a class of its own. But perhaps I’m being too hard on old Walt. After all, he had the misfortune to live in the century before the Hubble telescope began to beam back images of space that seem to attest to Albert Einstein’s notion of ‘cosmic religious feeling’. When, each morning, I turn on my computer, I am greeted by one such photograph: Supernova Remnant LMCN 63A – an exploded star that hangs in space like a rare and exquisitely delicate jellyfish. ‘“Knowledge” has killed the sun, making it a ball of gas with spots’, wrote D. H. Lawrence in ‘A Propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover’. But in my opinion the opposite is true. Science can be a source of the numinous, and is no less inspirational than poetry.

Even poets in sympathy with science, or supposedly in sympathy with it, don’t always do a brilliant job of conveying that sympathy to their readerships, and when they do they are usually so minor that they’ve fallen out of the charts altogether. Shelley recognised, or claimed to recognise, a profoundly poetical element in science, though still thought facts and calculation served to dull the poetic spirit. And while it’s true that Samuel Taylor Coleridge attended lectures at the Royal Institution in order to renew his ‘stock of metaphors’, he, like Keats, had it in for Newton. Erasmus Darwin, whose The Botanic Garden anticipates the Big Bang theory of the universe, nevertheless sought to leaven his epic with Gnomes, Sylphs, Nymphs and Goddesses. And then there is the kind of poem that even as it welcomes science onto the peak of Mount Parnassus is apparently possessed of an ironic awareness that it looks a bit out of place up there. John Updike’s ‘Ode to Entropy’, though great fun, is a case in point, with its knockabout mock-Augustan idiom. ‘Entropy! / thou seal on extinction, / thou curse on Creation.’ (Incidentally, Updike’s ‘Ode to Entropy’ is the only poem I can think of that refers to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states that in a ‘closed system’ – a system isolated from the environment – everything tends from order to disorder, and which explains a dizzying range of phenomena from why your cup of tea goes cold to the predicted ‘heat death’ of the universe. For Snow, an ignorance of the Second Law was equivalent to never having read Shakespeare.)

Of course, it isn’t only the poets who display a lack of love for science. Novelists, too, are guilty of coldness. As with poetry, the principal problem is really one of indifference, but that is not the whole story. Of the novels that do engage with science most take a largely negative view. From Mary Shelley to Robert Louis Stevenson to H. G. Wells to Honoré de Balzac – novelists, not all of them hostile to science, have given us a veritable Rogues Gallery of scientists to which no alternative Heroes Gallery of scientists can be said to exist. Models of hubris whose reckless curiosity has invariably set them on the road to ruin, these scientists are less Promethean than Faustian. Indeed, the literary archetype I’m describing goes back at least as far as the Faust legend and probably goes back further than that – to the medieval tales of alchemists, such as Chaucer’s Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale. Even science fiction is more often concerned with the dangers of science than it is with its successes, while the very designation ‘science fiction’ is revealing of a pejorative attitude that regards all literature dealing with science as a discrete and slightly dubious category, as if Jules Verne’s delightful stories belonged with the drivel of L. Ron Hubbard and not with the works of Charles Dickens.

So let us say that Snow was right and that literature is out of love with science. What, if anything, can we do about it? Indeed, what sort of relationship can exist between the two ‘magisteria’ beyond just the obvious and boring one of simply swapping bits of information. (‘I’ll quote Pope in the preface to my book if you write a poem comparing memory to a trilobite.’) Can literature adopt the techniques of science? Daft though it sounds, it has been tried. Think of the novels of Emile Zola, whose Naturalism was influenced by evolution and who saw heredity and environment as determining influences on human behaviour – influences he sought to lay bare in his novels as a scientist studies bacteria on a slide. Or think of William Carlos Williams’s ‘relatively stable’ poetic line – a nod to Einstein’s relativity, which also influenced the modernist poetry of Louis Zukofsky and Charles Olson. Sounding every bit as batty as those scientists in Gulliver’s Travels who try to extract sunbeams from cucumbers, such writers are obviously in the minority. As John Carey remarks in The Faber Book of Science, ‘Poetic equivalents to relativity theory were at best vague … for lines of verse do not move relative to the observer at speeds approaching that of light, and if they did their lengths would become variable without any help from the poet.’

Perhaps the most ambitious book to deal with the divide between the sciences and the humanities is E. O. Wilson’s Consilience (1998), in which Wilson argues that science’s role in respect of literature (and the arts in general) is largely one of interpretation, or should be one of interpretation. Consilience means ‘a jumping together’ – in this instance, a jumping together of facts and fact-based theories across the disciplines to create ‘a common groundwork of explanation’. ‘The greatest enterprise of the mind’, writes Wilson, ‘has always been and always will be the attempted linkage of the sciences and the humanities.’ But Wilson, who regards this jumping together as a consolidation of the Enlightenment project, leaves the reader in little doubt that it is to science and not to the humanities that the lion’s share of work must fall when it comes to this ‘attempted linkage’. For example, he writes that,

Artistic inspiration common to everyone in varying degree rises from the artesian wells of human nature. Its creations are meant to be delivered directly to the sensibilities of the beholder without analytic explanation. Creativity is therefore humanistic in the fullest sense. Works of enduring value are those truest to these origins. It follows that even the greatest works of art might be understood fundamentally with knowledge of the biologically evolved epigenetic rules that guided them.

Needless to say, many writers and artists regarded this as a bridge too far and, indeed, as a road to nowhere. In The Hedgehog, the Fox and the Magister’s Pox, Stephen Jay Gould suggests that Wilson has misunderstood the meaning of consilience and suspects him of wanting to incorporate all knowledge into a single hierarchy, with science at the top (he talks of ‘the chimera of false unification’). New Yorker critic Louis Menand put it less diplomatically. Consilience, he wrote, is a ‘bargain with the devil’.

Of course, the sciences have plenty to tell us about the nature and origins of literature and, indeed, of the arts generally. Take the story of Adam and Eve. I’ve heard it said that it is the story that is responsible for ophidiophobia – i.e. the human fear of snakes. But cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker has demonstrated that a fear of snakes is a property, not of culture, but of the naturally evolved brain. Monkeys bred in captivity will scream when introduced to a snake or even a length of rubber tubing. It is far more likely, in other words, that the myth bears the lowly stamp of our origins than that our fears bear the stamp of our founding texts. Or consider the mathematical constant known as the golden section or ratio. The poet Don Paterson explains it well in his introduction to 101 Sonnets:

It can be defined as follows: if a straight line is divided at the point where the ratio of the smaller part to the larger is the same as that of the larger to the whole, then that point occurs at the golden section. The ratio can be derived mathematically from the Fibonacci series of numbers (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, etc.); each successive pair of digits slowly converges – after a bit of wobbling – more and more accurately on the ratio. [Expressed as a decimal, the golden section occurs at 1.6180339 …] Both the golden ratio and the Fibonacci series itself are omnipresent in nature: in the whorls of the pine-cone or the seedhead of the sunflower, in the number of the daisy’s petals, in the spirals of the nautilus or the snail’s shell.

But not only are they present in nature. They are also present in human culture: in the proportions of classical architecture; in paintings where the line of the horizon occurs at almost precisely the point described by the golden ratio; and, indeed, in the Petrarchan sonnet, where the traditional division into octave and sestet is one number shy of the magic convergence.

Of course the sciences must study art! Quite apart from anything else, the products of the human mind cannot be treated in isolation. But this is not what Wilson is arguing for. He is arguing for a subsumation, a homogenisation based on the idea that human beings are naturally evolved creatures and that such works of art and culture as they’ve produced must therefore have a natural explanation. In fact, his approach has much in common with that of the so-called Literary Darwinists, whose stated aim is to bring the theory of evolution to bear on literature, largely as an interpretive tool. Reading this stuff, I have to say, is like trying to eat an entire lettuce, albeit a lettuce lightly tossed in a vinaigrette of unintended humour. How to respond to a serious study of mating patterns in Jane Austen’s novels or a survey designed to test the hypothesis, put forward by Barthes, that the author is dead, if not by falling off one’s chair and rolling around in an agony of laughter? ‘Is narrative well-engineered to perform a fitness-promoting task?’ asks one of the contributors to The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative (which includes a foreword by E. O. Wilson). I don’t think it’s putting it too strongly to say that here an understandable bullishness on the part of the devotees of science has left a heap of bullshit in its wake. Quite apart from anything else, the Literary Darwinists miss the fact that criticism is conterminous with literature. Indeed, it is a branch of literature. Its aim is not to explain it away, but understanding and appreciation. The best literary criticism aims to exalt literature even as it attempts to comprehend it.

Then again, the Literary Darwinists could claim to be fighting fire with fire, or at least to be fighting bullshit with bullshit. And indeed it is true that Literary Darwinism is in part a response to the ‘constructivist’ project to claim all knowledge in the name of culture, an undertaking that would make of science just another official ‘discourse’. This, of course, is a sharp departure from the golden age of big literary criticism, when Northrop Frye, in his Anatomy of Criticism, wondered if criticism could be a science. (He was careful not to overstate the case: ‘I understand there is a Ph.D. thesis somewhere which displays a list of Hardy’s novels in order of the percentages of gloom they contain, but one does not feel that that sort of procedure should be encouraged.’ Literary Darwinists please take note.) Just as a passing illustration, I can’t resist quoting the title character in Sebastian Faulks’s novel Engleby, whose contempt for literature and regard for science is to be taken as an early sign that all is not quite right ‘up top’:

Something else looked briefly promising. This was called ‘Theory’ and it was just coming in. The point about Theory was that it didn’t matter if you read Jane Eyre or a fridge installation manual: what you were doing was studying how you studied them, and the important thing was not the (anyway unquantifiable) ‘value’ of the original work but the effectiveness of the theory. Vanity Fair or Biggles was the guinea pig; the vaccine being tested was the –ism. Some of the theories came from linguistics, which was partly based on neuroscience, and for a moment the poor English dons, so fed up with being looked down on by their scientific colleagues, could boast that they too had a ‘real’ subject with truths that could be tested in the lab.

Soon, however, these idle fantasies were blown apart by relativism, which proceeded to leak across the humanities, into the social science departments, and thence into the sciences proper. Thus began the ‘science wars’ and the rise of so-called Science Studies, in which soldier-scholars on the postmodern side characterised scientific knowledge as a discourse no more objective than theology. In his 1998 essay, ‘Oppressed by Evolution’, American anthropologist Matt Cartmill gives a magnificent summary of this world-view:

The postmodern critique of science runs something like this: There are no objective facts. All supposed ‘facts’ are contaminated with theories, and all theories are infested with moral and political doctrines. Because different theories express different perceptions of the world, there’s no neutral yardstick for measuring one against another. The choice between competing theories is always a political choice. Therefore, when some guy in a lab coat tells you that such and such is an objective fact – say, that there isn’t any firmament, or that people are related to wolves and hyenas – he must have a political agenda up his starched white sleeve.

If the guiding principle of Wilson’s consilience is that everything can be known through science, a principle of postmodern cultural studies is that nothing at all can be known through science, or indeed through any other form of knowledge. This view, of course, was most famously satirised by the physics professor Alan Sokal, who claimed to have seen the postmodern light and conned the journal Social Text, one of whose editors was Frederic Jameson, into printing an essay entitled ‘Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity’, which, among other points just as ludicrous, called for an ‘emancipatory mathematics’.

Needless to say, these minor scuffles in the strip-lit halls of academe are a sideshow to the main event, which is literature’s apparent inability to meaningfully engage with scientific subjects. But they do allow us to begin to think of the limits imposed on any engagement by the irreducible differences that obtain between the disciplines. Indeed, one tenet of post-structuralist theory – that language, or ‘discourse’, is essentially unstable – cannot be underestimated, though of course philosophers since time immemorial have been aware that this is the case. Words are not passive, univocal counters; they do not suffer reality, but are constantly engaged in recreating it. Thus, when the British critic Al Alvarez writes that the Czech poet Miroslav Holub brings ‘the habits of mind of a scientist’ to his poetry and that ‘he takes clarity and common sense for granted and uses language as a slide in an experiment: as a transparent medium in which to fix the specimen – the event, the moment, the feeling’, we know that he is overreaching. Indeed, you don’t need to be a post-structuralist to see the inadequacy of this idea. The slightest acquaintance with literature will do. Language is not a slide in an experiment, but more like a pane of frosted glass. Dr Johnson puts it well in the preface to his Dictionary:

I am not yet so lost in lexicography as to forget that words are the daughters of the earth, and that things are the sons of heaven. Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas: I wish, however, that the instrument might be less apt to decay, and that signs might be permanent, like the things which they denote.

The language of physics is mathematics. Its characters, as Galileo said, are numbers and geometrical figures. The language of literature is, well, language. And while language can do a lot of things, there are lots of things it cannot do.

Primo Levi understood this. An industrial chemist as well as a writer, he was aware that science and literature cannot exist in a frictionless relationship. The final chapter of The Periodic Table (1975), ‘The Story of a Carbon Atom’, is a matchless piece of science writing but is drenched in an awareness of the limits of language. Then there is the title story in his posthumous collection, A Tranquil Star, which begins with a wonderful demonstration of the fact that language has ‘our dimensions’:

Once upon a time, somewhere in the universe very far away from here, lived a tranquil star, which moved tranquilly in the immensity of the sky, surrounded by a crowd of tranquil planets about which we have not a thing to report. This star was very big and very hot, and its weight was enormous: and here a reporter’s difficulties begin. We have written ‘very far’, ‘big’, ‘hot’, ‘enormous’: Australia is very far, an elephant is big and a house is bigger, this morning I had a hot bath, Everest is enormous. It’s clear that something in our lexicon isn’t working.

‘[T]he trade of clothing facts in words is bound by its very nature to fail’, writes Levi in The Periodic Table, echoing the physicist Niels Bohr, who wrote that, ‘When it comes to atoms, language can only be used as poetry.’ Both the science of the very big and the science of the very small reveal the limits of human perception and intuition unaided by mathematics. As Dawkins puts it in Unweaving the Rainbow: ‘The art in thinking of analogies for large numbers is not to go off the scale of what people can comprehend.’ The same thought underlies this strophe from Douglas Adams’s comic masterpiece, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: ‘Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.’

Needless to say, this hasn’t stopped scientists attempting to put scientific data into terms the non-scientist can understand. To this end, they have adopted various strategies designed to appeal to readerships unused to scientific thinking. One such is the importation of figures and narratives from literature. Indeed, it is striking how many science books allude to literary works in their titles: The Ancestor’s Tale, by Richard Dawkins; The Nothing that Is, by Robert Kaplan; The Goldilocks Enigma, by Paul Davies; Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast, by Lewis Wolpert. It is science writing itself, however, that must be regarded as an exciting new branch of the humanistic literary tradition (albeit one with some impressive antecedents: remember that Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species, not as a dry academic treatise or technical monograph, but as a book for the non-specialist). According to Gould, such popular writers are regarded by many in the scientific community as pedlars of gee-whiz simplification – an irrelevant caste to be treated with disdain. Most scientists, he suggests, take a kind of pride in their own lack of stylistic acumen, immersing themselves in technical jargon that is so much white noise to the reader-for-pleasure. And yet the popularisers, taken as a group, strike me as profoundly exciting. Many display a stylistic aptitude that would be the envy of certain novelists. (One of the most depressing things about E. O. Wilson’s Consilience is that it is so incredibly boring as compared to his wonderful descriptions of ants, of which he must be accounted the laureate.) There is even a prize, the Lewis Thomas Prize, awarded for popular science writing that provides ‘not merely new information but cause for reflection, even revelation, as in a poem’.

Great poems describe familiar things in thrillingly unfamiliar ways and, in so doing, throw the reader into a new relationship with the world. Simultaneously a disengagement from and re-engagement with the world, this can be a profound experience – one not a world away, in my view, from the feeling engendered by the best science writing. The examples one could cite are numerous. But let us take one that clearly shows the influence of Primo Levi, in particular his ‘Story of a Carbon Atom’. Colin Blakemore, in The Mind Machine (1988):

A single atom of gas, baking in the unimaginable heat at the surface of the sun, suddenly shifts from one energy state to another, and spits out the surplus energy as a photon – the smallest, indivisible unit of light … Eight minutes or so after its birth, our chosen photon slows down a little as it hits the atmosphere of the Earth and a fraction of a second later it reaches the surface. It strikes the wrinkled skin of an old woman but, as chance has it, the wavelength of our charmed photon of light is such that it is not captured by the pigments of her skin. It is reflected, and 10 microseconds later it shoots into a tiny black hole, just 3 millimetres across. This hole is the pupil of a man’s eye.

Reading this, I am immediately aware that the world will never look the same again. The best science writing, it seems to me, combines two senses of the verb ‘to wonder’: to wonder about – to speculate – and to wonder at – to be amazed.

The great science writer puts pen to paper and whole new worlds open up in vista. Or rather, our world opens up in ways we could never have anticipated. One of my favourite science writers is the celebrated J. B. S. Haldane, a geneticist and evolutionary biologist whose ‘On Being the Right Size’ (1927) must be accounted one of the great scientific essays. In it, Haldane demonstrates that all animals have an optimum size and that observations such as the common one that if a flea was as big as a human being it could jump a thousand feet in the air are so much unscientific nonsense. Haldane begins with an illustration from John Bunyan’s allegory, The Pilgrim’s Progress, a book that, with the King James Bible and the Collected Works of Alfred Lord Tennyson, would once have graced the spartan bookshelves of many a home in Middle England. Here, he considers the feasibility of Giant Pope and Giant Pagan:

These monsters were not only ten times as high as Christian, but ten times as wide and ten times as thick, so that their total weight was a thousand times his, or about eighty to ninety tons. Unfortunately the cross-sections of their bones were only a hundred times those of Christian, so that every square inch of giant bone had to support ten times the weight borne by a square inch of human bone. As the human thigh-bone breaks under about ten times the human weight, Pope and Pagan would have broken their thighs every time they took a step.

He goes on in this vein, debunking, demystifying, always with a view to showing how facts can often be more interesting than fiction. Indeed, it is on the greatest fiction, the fiction that a creator-God intervenes in the affairs of human beings, that he turns his gaze most penetratingly. A little further on, he writes: ‘An angel whose muscles developed no more power weight for weight than those of an eagle or a pigeon would require a breast projecting for about four feet to house the muscles engaged in working its wings, while to economise its weight, its legs would have to be reduced to mere stilts.’

Of course, too much stylistic facility can work against the material. Stephen Jay Gould cites Sigmund Freud and his ‘cockamamie’ theory of the human psyche as one such example of style gone mad. And Gould himself has been accused, by Richard Dawkins, of ‘bad poetic science’ – of allowing his thesis to be led by metaphor rather than the other way around. On the whole, however, good science writers seem to grasp, intuitively, that the secret of good style is not to try to have a style but to put things down as simply as one can and ensure that those things are interesting and pertinent. Science writers, in my experience, are far less likely to mix a metaphor or engage in elegant variation than most so-called creative writers. Probably this is helped by the fact that the content is sometimes so astonishing it doesn’t need to be dressed up. ‘In a sense human flesh is made of stardust’, writes Nigel Calder in The Key to the Universe (1977). To try and express that thought by analogy would be like drenching a truffle in ketchup.

To generalise massively, one could say that while science partakes of the techniques of literature, literature partakes of the content of science. A novel can contain an explanation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. But the Second Law of Thermodynamics can obviously not contain a novel. Art and literature move across disciplines. This is why we get writers in residence and not (or do we?) scientists in residence. But while literature moves across the disciplines, it often does so incompetently. Snow was very funny on this point. ‘Now and then’, he writes in ‘The Two Cultures’, ‘one used to find poets conscientiously using scientific expressions, and getting them wrong – there was a time when “refraction” kept cropping up in verse in a mystifying fashion, and when “polarised light” was used as though writers were under the illusion that it was a specially admirable kind of light.’ (One example of a poet not getting it wrong. Nick Drake begins one poem with the lines, ‘Displacing exactly and only yourself / you glissade into the bath’ – an image that manages not only to reference Archimedes’s ‘Eureka!’ moment but also to combine the relevant mathematics with a flash of real sensual power.)

But literature that seeks to incorporate science has higher hurdles than this to clear. For example, there’s its attachment to metaphor, the effect of which is to turn phenomena into indicators for something else. John Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ is not an attempt to understand nightingales but rather a poem of lyric crisis. Similarly, Hardy’s darkling thrush is not a real thrush at all but the beruffled emblem of beleaguered hope. This is a problem, if it is a problem, that tests relations between science and literature, as the first looks outward to objective phenomena and the second tends to focus inward.

Sometimes, however, a metaphor comes along that no sane writer can resist adopting. One such is the world of Quantum Mechanics, which is to say the baffling world of subatomic particles, where nothing seems to move as it should and in which Newton’s laws don’t appear to apply. And indeed it is this that so appeals to the literary imagination – a perfect metaphor for human behaviour, volatile and unpredictable as it is. Michael Frayn’s play, Copenhagen, a work that manages to convey the excitement of modern scientific enquiry, is exemplary in this regard. Centring on the mysterious meeting between Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr at a crucial stage of the Second World War (Heisenberg was a German, Bohr a Dane whose country was under German occupation), the question of Heisenberg’s motivation (did he visit Bohr to warn him, to recruit him, or to spy on him?) is figured by the ‘Uncertainty Principle’ to which the physicist gives his name. Various scenarios are dramatised, with all versions happening simultaneously, just as particles appear to be able to be in more than one place at a time. All this against the frightening prospect of the Nazis managing to develop the Bomb.

But perhaps an even better example of a play that links human unpredictability with the unpredictability of the universe is Tom Stoppard’s dazzling Arcadia. One of the most scientifically literate literary men of the twentieth century, Stoppard has often tried to incorporate science and mathematics into his drama. But it is in Arcadia that science makes its most triumphant appearance on stage. Moving backwards and forwards in time, it links ‘deterministic chaos’ with the attempts of modern literary biographers to discover what went on in the past. The plot is complicated, but a key passage comes as Valentine, who is trying to model grouse populations using two hundred years’ worth of game books and isn’t having much success, is talking to his sister, Chloë:

Chloë: Valentine, do you think I’m the first person to think of this?
Valentine: No.
Chloë: I haven’t said yet. The future is all programmed like a computer – that’s a proper theory, isn’t it?
Valentine: The deterministic universe, yes.
Chloë: Right. Because everything including us is just a lot of atoms bouncing off each other like billiard balls.
Valentine: Yes. There was someone, forget his name, 1820s, who pointed out that from Newton’s laws you could predict everything to come – I mean, you’d need a computer as big as the universe but the formula would exist.
Chloë: But it doesn’t work, does it?
Valentine: No. It turns out the maths is different.
Chloë: No, it’s all because of sex.
Valentine: Really?
Chloë: That’s what I think. The universe is deterministic all right, just like Newton said, I mean it’s trying to be, but the only thing going wrong is people fancying people who aren’t supposed to be in that part of the plan.
Valentine: Ah. The attraction Newton left out.

Thus the world of Quantum Mechanics figures the world of human relations, while unpredictable human relations figure the world of Quantum Mechanics. And Stoppard even manages to incorporate the Second Law of Thermodynamics, wittily linked to the subject of sex with the phrase, ‘The action of bodies in heat.’

But Quantum Mechanics and human relationships, even as they stand in for each other, cannot be accorded equal status in a literary work of art. It is saying nothing original, of course, to note that scientific knowledge and literary ‘knowledge’ differ intrinsically, that many of the questions posed by one discipline cannot, in principle, be answered by the other. Strangely, there is often confusion on this point. ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’, wrote Keats in his ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ (1820), a line that one finds time and again on the lips of scientists and mathematicians eager to be seen in the poet’s company. But the truth and beauty available to science is not the same as the truth and beauty available to literary works of art. When, in ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, Yeats writes, ‘An aged man is but a paltry thing, / A tattered coat upon a stick, unless / Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing / For every tatter in its mortal dress’, he isn’t putting forward an objective truth: not even Yeats is daft enough to think that a life is less important than art. But we recognise these magnificent lines as true at the emotional level, for we have all felt something like that, have we not? Conversely, that energy is equivalent to mass multiplied by the speed of light squared is objectively true and true for all time. It is also ‘beautiful’, as Einstein saw, but not in the way that Yeats is beautiful. Still, we are not to be blamed for wishing that William had at least acknowledged Albert. If only Yeats had come down from his tower and taken the short journey to Birr Castle, home to the 72-inch reflector built by the earl of Rosse, William Parsons. He might have glimpsed the infinite and put to bed, once and for all, all those ridiculous faeries and gyres.

The real action of Stoppard’s Arcadia is to be found in the human relationships, not in the unpredictability of particles. The immediate object of art is us. By contrast, the human element, or angle, can only get science and scientists so far. It is fun to reflect that a glass of Evian contains at least one water molecule that passed through the bladder of Oliver Cromwell. And it is good to remember the human drama that so often attends scientific discovery. It is this with which Brecht is concerned in Galileo, and indeed it is a thrilling story that attaches to the father of modern astronomy. Ultimately, however, it’s the astronomy that matters. Before long, the human element recedes and the reader is faced with the movement of the planets – with the science and the mathematics. That is all I mean when I say that science and literature differ intrinsically. Jacob Bronowski – a poet, historian, teacher, inventor, mathematician, literary critic and philosopher of science – put it well in a New Yorker profile: ‘One of the theorems in Euclid is that an angle cannot be trisected with the ordinary tools – a compass and a ruler. But King Lear was not written to tell us that you cannot trisect a kingdom.’

‘I like mathematics’, wrote Bertrand Russell, ‘because it is not human.’ But the arts, as the late Kurt Vonnegut put it, put humankind at the centre of the universe whether it belongs there or not. Indeed, it puts it at the centre of everything. In a wonderful book called Why Birds Sing, David Rothenberg asks, ‘Is science still willing to admit it needs poetry to grasp the full meaning of birdsong?’ But poetry doesn’t help us to understand birdsong, only our reactions to it. Furthermore, the traditional poetic metres are directly derived from human speech. When birdsong is incorporated into poetry it becomes something fundamentally human, just as when a lyric poet adopts a bird as a metaphor it ceases, in a sense, to be a bird, or at least becomes a bird + x.

However, there is a kind of writing that seems to me to point the way to a healthy and mutually respectful relationship between the physical sciences and literature and it is by drawing attention to this that I want to end this leisurely ramble through the territory delineated by ‘The Two Cultures’. This kind of writing does not have a name, but one finds it novels as well as in poems, in popular science and (especially) in nature writing. Perhaps it is better described as an attitude than as a literary style or mode of approach. In any case, its guiding principle, if it has one, is observation of the world as it is – a due respect for what is in front of you as opposed to, or as well as, what is inside you. A good example can be found in a book of almost excruciating beauty: Nature Cure, by Richard Mabey. The book, a memoir of depression and recovery, begins as the author is leaving the one state and tentatively entering upon the other. This passage comes close to the start of the book:

In the morning we came across a fledgling swift beached in the attic. It had fallen out of the nest and lay with its crescent wings stretched out stiffly, unable to take off. Close to, its juvenile plumage wasn’t the enigmatic black of those careering midsummer silhouettes, but a marbled mix of charcoal-grey and brown and powder-white. And we could see the price it paid for being so exquisitely adapted to a life that would be spent almost entirely in the air. Its prehensile claws, four facing to the front, were mounted on little more than feathered stumps, half-way down its body. We picked it up, carried it to the window and hurled it out. It was just six weeks old, and having its maiden flight and first experience of another species all in the same moment.

One paragraph later, Mabey writes:

I tried to imagine the journey that lay ahead of it, the immense odyssey along a path never flown before, across chronic war-zones and banks of Mediterranean gunmen, through precipitous changes of weather and landscape. Its parents and siblings had almost certainly left already. It would be flying the 6,000 miles entirely on its own, on a course mapped out – or at least sketched out – deep in its central nervous system. Every one of its senses would be helping to guide it, checking its progress against genetic memories, generating who knows what astonishing experiences of consciousness. Maybe, like many seabirds, it would be picking up subtle changes in air-borne particles as it passed over seas and aromatic shrubland and the dusty thermals above African townships. It might be riding a magnetic trail detected by iron-rich cells in its forebrain. It would almost certainly be using, as navigation aids, landmarks whose shapes fitted templates in its genetic memories, and the sun too, and, on clear nights, the big constellations – which, half-way through its journey, would be replaced by a quite different set in the night sky of the southern hemisphere.

Note how the facts do not detract from, indeed enhance, the poetry of this passage. Note, too, how they act as a kind of ballast to the bird’s plainly metaphorical status. The ‘beached’ swift metaphorically figures the slough in which the author finds himself, or rather has found himself up to this point, just as its flight metaphorically figures the trembling first steps on the road to recovery. But the bird is so obviously more than a metaphor. The facts – those breathtaking facts! – set it free. In flight, it becomes a metaphor for its own non-metaphorical existence.

It should be a source of huge satisfaction that Australian poets are among the adepts of this kind of observational writing. Perhaps because Australian poets have retained a sense of the strangeness of their environment, they have given nature poetry in English a new (and much needed) lease on life. Not only Les Murray, but Anthony Lawrence, Judith Beveridge and Robert Gray have shown the way to a vision of nature that accords it dignity and independence even as voice and imagination go about their human work. This is from Robert Gray’s ‘The Creek’:

But today there is only the egret’s ancient Egyptian
delicatesse, its foot
professed
in profile on the bevel
of sand-
tipped shore. With its mosquito-fine
placement
I see it again
accomplish
a step, towards the swirl
of rain or of a fish.

Or take these lines from Anthony Lawrence’s ‘One for the European Wasps’. Here, it is nature and the facts of nature that are the poem’s reason for being and that constitute a source of the numinous:

See how they attend to this
many celled, aerial castle
with a singular purpose –
the sensitive wires of their feelers
calculating perspectives, legs
aligning seams, each cell
cemented into place with globes
of clear fluid, wiped as mortar
from the unvisored fissures of their mouths.

These lines owe as much to David Attenborough as they do to Keats or Thomas Hardy. But that is not to diminish them. On the contrary: About time too!

Writing in 1959, the same year that Snow gave his ‘Two Cultures’ lecture, Vladimir Nabokov, a talented lepidopterist as well as a more than talented novelist, wrote, ‘I cannot separate the aesthetic pleasure of seeing a butterfly and the scientific pleasure of knowing what it is.’ I can’t think of a better summary of the kind of writing I’m trying to describe. It is a kind of writing in which, I think, analogy must edge out metaphor, as the poet or writer tries to puncture the ‘anaesthetic of familiarity’ (Richard Dawkins’s excellent phrase) without trying to turn the thing described into a signpost or counter for something else. ‘Does sense so stale that it must needs derange / The world to know it?’ asks Richard Wilbur. Well ‘yes’ is my answer, but not too much; not as much as Keats and the nightingale, though of course I wouldn’t be without them. Not that I want to give the impression that this kind of writing is entirely new. On the contrary, it has an illustrious history. Elisabeth Bishop, in a letter to Anne Stevenson:

[R]eading Darwin, one admires the beautiful and solid case being built up out of his endless heroic observations, almost unconscious or automatic – and then comes a sudden relaxation, a forgetful phrase, and one feels the strangeness of his undertaking, sees the lonely young man, his eyes fixed on facts and minute details, sinking or sliding giddily off into the unknown. What one seems to want in art, in experiencing it, is the same thing that is necessary for its creation, a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration.

It is fitting, perhaps, that it should fall to a poet describing the prose of our greatest scientist to end this little mental adventure. But let me add one final thought. It happens that 2009, as well as marking the fiftieth anniversary of C. P. Snow’s ‘Two Cultures’ lecture, also marked the bicentenary of Darwin’s birth in 1809 and the sesquicentenary of his greatest work, On the Origin of Species (1859). It would, I think, be a fitting tribute if the literary world could begin to consider the ways in which literature can better do justice to the natural richness that he helped to explain. And, indeed, to the fact that this richness began as nothing more than stardust.

The Icarus Syndrome, by Peter Beinart (Sydney Morning Herald, July 2010)

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Peter Beinart, The Icarus Syndrome
MUP; $34.99; 482pp

Peter Beinart’s The Icarus Syndrome is an eloquent and deeply knowledgeable account of US foreign policy over the last hundred years and of the ideological trends that have shaped it. At once an intellectual audit and an argument for a liberal foreign policy based on the principles of democracy and self-interest, it explores the complex symbiosis of events and ideas with uncommon thoroughness. Only one thing concerns me, and that is the title, not because it is inappropriate but because the nounal double whammy is jarringly reminiscent of Robert Ludlum.

But perhaps this isn’t accidental. After all, there is a tantalising mystery at the heart of this intellectual thriller: why did its author, an American liberal, support the US-led invasion of Iraq? That is the question that obsesses Beinart, and that gives this book its moral urgency. Having come to regret his support for the war, Beinart seeks to subject it to scrutiny, not in any mawkish show of public self-examination, but in an attempt to get at some deeper truths underlying US foreign policy.

The central truth that Beinart identifies is that the US is peculiarly susceptible to outbreaks of political hubris. Born of optimism and fuelled by success, this hubris invariably leads to tragedy, just as the mythological Icarus, grown so confident in his DIY wings, soared too near to the sun and perished. But while there is a danger of flying too high, there is also a danger of flying too low: foreign policy doves, the author suggests, can be just as hubristic as foreign policy hawks. The trick for the liberal intellectual is to find a cruising altitude at which both idealism and realism can be satisfied. Of course, this is easier said than done.

Beinart anatomises three kinds of hubris, each corresponding to a particular moment in recent US history. The first kind of hubris is ‘the hubris of reason’, the moment for which was Woodrow Wilson’s ambition to erect a ‘scientific peace’ – a world order predicated on disinterested reason and intolerant of self-interest and barbarism – on the ruins of the First World War. The missteps taken in pursuit of this goal, Beinart argues convincingly, prepared the ground for the Second World War, idealism having driven out realism at precisely the time that realism was needed.

The second kind of hubris is ‘the hubris of toughness’ – a mutation of the post-war strategy of containment set out by the political scientist George Kennan. Originally a limited political strategy directed at the Soviet Union, containment morphed into a global crusade against communism everywhere – a policy that led eventually to the catastrophe of Vietnam. Once more, success gave birth to tragedy. As Beinart puts it: ‘America’s mounting global strength, as it filled the gap left by Europe’s evaporating empires, combined with the terror of weakness inherited from World War II, had turned every foe into Hitler and every compromise into Munich.’

In the third kind of hubris, ‘the hubris of dominance’, the Munich analogy is also much in evidence. Indeed, for the neoconservative intellectuals who inspired a resurgence of the toughness ethic in the 1970s, Beinart suggests, it was ‘always 1938’. Emboldened by the collapse of the Berlin Wall and military victories in Iraq and Kosovo, and traumatised by 9/11 and the prospect of a nuclear weapon falling into terrorist hands, neoconservatives led the way in making the case for war in Iraq, the essentially hubristic nature of which should have been discernable in the sweets-and-flowers rhetoric of its architects, if not in General Tommy Franks’s suggestion that US technology afforded his soldiers the ‘kind of Olympian perspective that Homer had given his gods’.

The movement from one form of hubris to the next is essentially a dialectical one, with each generation of intellectuals reacting to what has gone before, often invoking some mistake in the past as justification for the new doctrine. Indeed, one symptom of the Icarus Syndrome, along with overconfidence, unilateralism and excessive fear, is too smooth a rehashing of historical precedent. In the 1960s, the Munich analogy helped make the case for war in Vietnam, while in the 1990s the Vietnam analogy was used to justify non-intervention in Bosnia. In this sense, a little historical knowledge really is a dangerous thing: those who understand the past insufficiently are condemned to relive it.

This book is an impressive achievement and it comes as no surprise to discover that it is already required reading in the White House. Just pray that a befuddled intern doesn’t put The Icarus Agenda on President Obama’s desk by mistake. The prospect of a foreign policy based on Ludlum’s cuboid page-turner, in which a terror network attempts to take over the governments and economies of the Middle East, is not a particularly happy one.

Inheritance, by Nicholas Shakespeare (The Australian, July 2010)

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Nicholas Shakespeare, Inheritance
Harvill Secker; $32.95; 254pp

For Nicholas Shakespeare’s illustrious namesake, music was the food of love. But at Camões restaurant in Ladbroke Grove, the music is merely an irritation: neither Andy nor Sophie is particularly impressed by the Portuguese fado pouring out of the loudspeakers. The food isn’t going down too well either. Sophie regards her chicken with indifference, Andy his cod with disappointment. It is Valentine’s Day 2005 and Sophie has just served up a bombshell. She has been seeing Someone Else:

Andy flushed. He wiped his face with a napkin. ‘Who is he?’ he heard himself say.
‘He works for Lehman Brothers. I don’t know how it happened. But it’s unstoppable,’ her voice rising to a defiant falsetto before it became small again. ‘Do you hate me? I haven’t been to bed with him. Say something.’ Her red lip trembling.
He pushed his plate away. ‘I’ll get the bill. Or do you want pudding?’

No, Sophie does not want pudding. And Sophie doesn’t want Andy either. Sophie wants Richard, of Lehman Brothers. But what does Andy Larkham want? That is the question at the heart of this novel, which also raises another question: what on Earth is happening to Shakespeare’s prose.

The first question is about to come into focus not just because Andy has been dumped by his fiancée but because he is about to inherit some money. Rather a lot of money, in fact. A junior editor of self-help books at a London publisher called Carpe Diem – which students of Horace will know translates approximately as ‘seize the day’ – Andy has just attended the funeral of his one-time teacher, Stuart Furnivall. Or rather, he hasn’t just attended it. He’s attended another funeral by mistake – the funeral of one Christopher Madigan. And it is from him that he stands to inherit a cool £17 million.

Why? Because he attended his funeral. That he attended it in error matters not. Nor does it matter that he never met Madigan, real name Krikor Makertich, an Armenian who grew up in Western Australia. Apart from Makertich’s lawyer, Godfrey Vamplew, the only other attendee at the funeral is Maral Bernhard, Makertich’s housekeeper. She too will inherit £17 million. Makertich’s daughter, Jeanine, arrives late. Consequently, she stands to inherit nothing.

Thus does Andy, at twenty-seven, find himself redesignated an ‘ultra-high-net-worth individual’ – which is to say cashed-up to the eyeballs. He quits his job, buys a new flat and throws a lavish party for his friends. Soon, however, the dream begins to fade, as Andy comes to the realisation that there’s more to life than loose cars and fast women. He finds himself wondering about his mysterious benefactor and, with the help of his best friend David, goes in search of Makertich’s story.

That story is far more engaging, in my view, than the clichéd tale of unanticipated wealth and subsequent soul-searching in which it is couched. One reason for this is that it is narrated by Maral, in the course of a conversation with Andy. Consequently, the prose is relatively free of Shakespeare’s stylistic oddities, of which a Yoda-like inverted syntax (‘And to the end of the road he came’), heavy-handed imagery (‘the all-concealing burka of her gloom’) and mixed metaphors (‘Makertich still had hurdles to cross’) are some of the most conspicuous. Sometimes we go beyond infelicity and enter the realm of solecism. Take, for example, the following sentence:

Four days after crossing the Channel, outside a hotel in Cluny, next to the monastery, Andy was showing off his new iPhone to a girl called Lenka, who had stopped to admire his car, when it vibrated.

Any suspicion that it is Andy’s car and not his mobile phone that is vibrating is put to bed in the subsequent paragraph, which describes the contents of a text from David. By then, however, the misplaced modifier has brought the attentive reader up short. Nor is this the worst example of faulty sentence structure in the novel. The following strophe appears on page 1: ‘He walked on, at the angle of a rheumatic finger, made crooked by the weight of the sun and by what he carried in his pack.’ Since a rheumatic finger is the kind of thing that might conceivably be described as ‘crooked’, a reader would have to be telepathic to realise straight-off that it’s the person walking and not the angle at which he is walking to which that particular adjective refers. For those of us not blessed with ESP, the effect of the sentence is to throw us off our stride.

To be thrown off one’s stride by an arresting image, impressive turn of phrase or plot twist is one of the joys of literary fiction. But one doesn’t expect to be thrown off one’s stride by ambiguous or defective grammar. It is the job of a writer to make us think, but not about whether the central character is receiving a message on his mobile phone or revving the engine of his new convertible.

Mockingbird Hits False Note (The Weekend Australian, June 2010)

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The publication of To Kill a Mockingbird fifty years ago next month is one of those literary near-miss stories that manage to instil fear in aspiring writers even as they hold out hope of a breakthrough. In the mid 1950s, Harper Lee was in New York, working as a reservation clerk for the British Overseas Airways Corporation. Having written a number of essays and short stories, none of which had set the Hudson on fire, she received a gift of a full year’s wages from two friends, Michael and Joy Williams Brown. On the advice of her agent, she started work on a novel, at one point becoming so frustrated with it that she tossed it out of a window into the snow. She then called her editor at Lippincott, who persuaded her to retrieve the manuscript. A good job too, for To Kill a Mockingbird, which had almost perished in a puddle of slush, was soon to make an almighty splash.

It was published on 11 July 1960 and was both a critical and a popular success. In 1961, it won a Pulitzer Prize, while in 1962, a movie adaptation, starring Gregory Peck as Atticus, won the book a wider audience as well as three Academy Awards. By 1988, according to Charles Shields, author of a major biography of Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird was being taught in 74 percent of public schools in the US. The novel has never been out of print and has sold over thirty million copies. It still sells a million copies a year.

Though To Kill a Mockingbird is a popular book it hasn’t received much critical attention. Indeed, there is something about the novel that seems to deflect deep critical engagement. Even some of the early reviews were equivocal about its worth as literature. The reviewer for The Atlantic Monthly called it ‘sugar-water served with humour’, implying that, despite its themes, the book was not morally exacting enough to be thought of as a great work of literary fiction. Flannery O’Connor damned the book in praise so faint it was practically non-existent: ‘I think for a child’s book it does all right’, she wrote; ‘It’s interesting that all the folks that are buying it don’t know they’re reading a child’s book.’

Though this was rather snootily put, and possibly even meanly intended, O’Connor had the beginnings of a point. For however much one loves Lee’s novel – however much one thrills to its warmth, its native wit, its moral centredness, to its folksy-decorous, naïve but knowing and at times unconvincing narrative voice – one can’t escape the sneaking sense that these effects are bought at the cost of a far more horrible reality than the one that intrudes on the lives of its protagonists when Atticus is appointed to defend Tom Robinson. Consciously pitched between innocence and experience, the novel is too suffused in the former to allow the latter to show through adequately. It is, in both senses of the term, a good book. The question is: Is it a great one? And to this we might add a second question: Does the book’s goodness preclude its greatness?

It is set in Alabama in the 1930s, though only the occasional passing reference to a presidential speech or a New Deal program places the novel in the twentieth century. In other respects, the town of Maycomb, modelled on Lee’s hometown of Monroeville, seems to belong to an older epoch, steeped in the attitudes of antebellum America. A conspicuous exception is Atticus Finch, a lawyer with comparatively liberal attitudes, especially on the racial question. A widower, Atticus has two young children: Jeremy (Jem) and Jean Louise (Scout). When Atticus is appointed to defend Tom Robinson, a black man accused of raping a white girl, Jem and Scout are forced to confront the reality of racial prejudice in Maycomb. Robinson is convicted on the flimsiest of evidence and killed attempting to escape police custody, while his accuser, the ‘victim’s’ father Bob Ewell, wages a campaign of intimidation against all those involved in his defence. One night, he attacks Jem and Scout in the woods and is stabbed to death by the mysterious Boo Radley, a strange recluse who up till that point has served as a figure of fascination and terror in the children’s imaginations.

The book is deeply autobiographical. The tomboyish Scout, who narrates the novel, is clearly based on Lee herself, while the character of Dill, who befriends Jem and Scout, is closely modelled on Truman Capote, of whom Lee was a childhood and lifelong friend, and who, like Dill, spent his summers with an Aunt on whom he was foisted by his feckless parents. Like Atticus, Lee’s father practiced law and was the principal influence in his children’s life. (Lee’s mother suffered from a nervous condition that rendered her effectively absent.)

It is, of course, the character of Atticus that forms the moral centre of the novel, and helps to explain its enduring appeal. Even the name is a stroke of genius, suggestive as it is of something adamantine as well as something aged and wise. At several points in To Kill a Mockingbird Scout describes her father as ‘dry’. But his dryness – his ‘last-will-and-testament diction’ and ‘courteous detachment’ – is part of his strength. At a key point in the book, Atticus is called upon to shoot a rabid dog in the street. The dog is symbolic of racial prejudice, but its slaying also raises Atticus to the status of a hero in the eyes of his children, as they realise that his pacific nature is borne not of weakness but of strength and self-confidence. Courageous but not macho, sensitive but not touchy-feely, Atticus is that precious thing: a strong man in control of his emotions.

At the heart of Atticus’s moral philosophy is the principle of empathy. At one point, he tells Scout, ‘You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view.’ The injunction to try on the other man’s shoes or ‘climb into his skin and walk around in it’ is set against the background of prejudice – prejudice of which both Boo Radley and Tom Robinson are, in different ways, the victims. Atticus’s philosophy of empathy, in other words, is set against its opposite, and the way the two combine and conflict is the source of the novel’s emotional power.

Sentimentality and oversimplification are the two accusations levelled at the novel and neither is entirely without justification. One writer has described To Kill a Mockingbird as a sort of ‘moral Ritalin’ and indeed there are times when it lends itself a little too readily to a lesson plan for a course in Citizenship and Society. Fittingly, it is in the classroom scenes that the moralising becomes most obvious and, indeed, most tedious. At one point, a teacher attempts to contrast the prejudice in Hitler’s Germany with life in a democracy: ‘Over here’, she says, ‘we don’t believe in persecuting anybody.’ It’s the sort of thing a teacher might say in 1930s Alabama but the reader can’t escape the sense that it’s us that are being lectured to and not the children in Miss Gates’s class.

The association of Boo Radley and Tom Robinson with the novel’s central symbol of innocence is moralistic in a different way. It’s a sin to kill a mockingbird, says Atticus, because mockingbirds merely sing for our pleasure. Similarly, it would be a sin to convict Robinson or, indeed, to charge Boo Radley with the murder of Robinson’s accuser, Bob Ewell. But Robinson’s innocence is a legal matter not an existential one. In associating him with a creature of beauty, Lee appears to insist on his goodness. But why does he need to be good at all? Robinson’s appearance on the witness stand reveals him to be a gentle soul. And yet he has every reason to be furious.

The central problem, in other words, with this novel about relations between black and white, is its black-and-white morality. It’s a problem perfectly caught in the contrast between Robinson’s accuser, the egregious Bob Ewell, and the Negroes Ewell so despises. Ewell, Lee lets it be known, lives in squalor; his family is a prey to parasites, congenital defects and various diseases ‘indigenous to filthy surroundings’. In contrast, the Negro settlement a few hundred yards from Ewell’s house is a picture of domestic pride: ‘In the frosty December dusk, their cabins looked neat and snug with pale smoke rising from the chimneys and doorways glowing amber from the fires inside.’ This passage comes as Scout is watching Ewell take the witness stand. She continues: ‘All the little man on the witness stand had that made him any better than his nearest neighbours was that, if scrubbed with lye soap in very hot water, his skin was white.’

But he isn’t just white. He’s beyond the pale. Consequently, he is unrepresentative of the great majority of Maycomb’s white residents, most of whom, we are frequently assured, are essentially decent, despite their racism. Essential decency, however, is a myth and in forcing Ewell to carry the can for a whole society’s moral failings Lee effectively scapegoats him. Nor does Lee make up for this by sentimentalising the Negro community. On the contrary, she compounds the error. Of course, to have included complex black characters would not have made artistic sense, as the book is written from Scout’s point of view and Scout’s interaction with Negroes is minimal (the one exception is Calpurnia, the family cook). But by sentimentalising the black community, she condemns it to another kind of invisibility: it becomes a sort of fantasy, a picturesque backdrop against which the action is allowed to take place undisturbed. To Kill a Mockingbird ends happily for the Finches, but on the Negro settlement little changes.

To compare To Kill a Mockingbird with the novels of great Afro-American writers such as Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright and James Baldwin is to leave it looking rather thin. Nevertheless, there are different ways in which a novel can enter history and To Kill a Mockingbird entered history with a force that is rare for a work of fiction. For while Lee had no direct involvement in the civil rights movement of the 1960s, her novel is thoroughly mapped into its progress. The civil rights movement, to be successful, had to convince whites of the rightness of its cause, and To Kill a Mockingbird, for all its flaws, helped it do precisely that. In this sense, its influence is analogous to that of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). When Lincoln met Stowe, he is reported to have said, ‘So this is the little lady who made this big war’ – implying that her popular novel had energised the abolitionist cause. When George W. Bush presented Lee with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, he might have paid her a similar compliment.

Perhaps this is overstating the case. But the fact is that Bush’s successor is a black man who came to power some hundred years after an African-American could still be lynched for exercising his right to vote. The publication of a modest novel in 1960 is a part of that victory. That’s not bad for sugar-water.

Ill Fares the Land, by Tony Judt (The Australian, May 2010)

2010-06-22T23:15:00.004-08:00

Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land
Allen Lane; $29.95; 237pp

In 2008, the historian Tony Judt was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s Disease, a progressive neurodegenerative disorder. The disease, which has left Judt paralysed from the neck down, is, for the majority of sufferers, fatal. Mercifully, however, and as Judt himself notes in a recent piece for the New York Review of Books, the pain involved is negligible and cognitive function rarely impaired. ‘In contrast to almost every other serious or deadly disease,’ he writes, ‘one is thus left free to contemplate at leisure and in minimal discomfort the catastrophic progress of one’s own deterioration.’

In his latest book, Ill Fares the Land, Judt does not refer to his illness except in his acknowledgments; it is not the catastrophic progress of his own body that concerns him here but the catastrophic progress of society. Nevertheless, one catches the note of valediction in the title of this treatise, in which Judt sets down the political vision that has informed his entire oeuvre, from his early histories of socialism in France to his excellent collection of essays Reappraisals. That title is borrowed from Oliver Goldsmith’s 1770 poem, The Deserted Village. The full couplet is quoted as an epigraph:

Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates, and men decay.

Needless to say, ‘hastening ills’ has a personal as well as a political resonance, though the two are often hard to separate. In a recent interview in the London Review of Books, Judt refers amusedly to the appellation ‘differently abled’ to describe disabled people like himself. His objection to the label is a political one: those who employ it are attempting to mask or to downplay the serious inequalities that obtain between people with different abilities. As he puts it: ‘You describe everyone as having the same chances when actually some people have more chances than others. And with this cheating language of equality deep inequality is allowed to happen much more easily.’

Thus does Judt identify the principal themes of Ill Fares the Land: ‘deep inequality’ and its consequences for society; and the ‘cheating language’ of modern politics. For Judt, the two phenomena are inseparable: only if we change our political language will we be able to change the political landscape. ‘Our disability’, he writes, ‘is discursive.’

Sprinkled with references to alpha thinkers such as John Stuart Mill, Adam Smith and George Orwell, Ill Fares the Land begins with an analysis of the increasing levels of inequality in the west. This change carries with it a number of ill effects. As wealth becomes increasingly concentrated, mobility between the classes declines, with the result that depression, alcoholism, obesity, gambling, minor criminality and other social problems increase. Much of the data in the opening chapters is taken from Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s book, The Spirit Level, the subtitle of which, Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better, is a fair indication of Judt’s thesis. When the wealth gap increases, social problems increase too, while countries in which the gap is narrower show markedly higher levels of wellbeing.

For Judt, inequality is corrosive of trust. ‘There is quite a lot of evidence’, he writes, ‘that people trust other people more if they have a lot in common with them: not just religion or language but also income.’ In the political field, less trust translates into a greater suspicion of redistributive taxation. Since less taxation means more inequality, the decline of trust is self-reinforcing. It is locked into a downward spiral.

An increasing lack of confidence in the state lies at the root of this phenomenon, and one of the salutary things about this book is that it serves to remind us that in the twentieth century the state was mobilised for considerable good as well as for considerable ill. Social security, Judt suggests, used to mean exactly that: better security for society as a whole. It wasn’t to the market that post-depression and post-war reconstruction was left. It needed the hand of government. In the US, the New Deal set the country on its feet, while in Europe social democracy flourished.

Though the decline of the redistributive state was due in part to the incompetence of governments, it was the ‘intellectual revolution’ of the 1980s that really undermined it. That the administrations of Thatcher and Reagan also happened to coincide with the implosion of communism in the late 1980s is another reason for the right’s ascendancy. As Judt puts it: ‘With [communism’s] collapse, there unravelled the whole skein of doctrines which had bound the Left together for over a century. However perverted the Muscovite variation, its sudden and complete disappearance could not but have a disruptive impact on any party or movement calling itself “social democratic”.’

In fact, the left’s problems go back further than that – to the ‘privatisation’ of left-wing politics that took place in the 1960s. With the working class shrinking and the middle class growing, the left began to focus less on society and more on personal needs and rights. The politics of the 1960s, writes Judt, ‘devolved into an aggregation of individual claims upon society and the state’. That the left-of-centre parties in Europe have failed to take political advantage of the 2008 financial crisis comes, for him, as no surprise.

It is here that the issue of language comes in. ‘If we do not talk differently, we shall not think differently’, writes Judt, before calling for ‘a language of dissent’. We need to challenge the ubiquitous language of self-interest and economic efficiency, to take the concepts of wealth and abundance beyond their merely material application. What, he asks, if we were to count humiliation as a ‘charge to society’? What, indeed, if we decided to quantify the harm inflicted by one citizen on another as an ‘economic’ cost to us all? Might not our lives improve as a result?

It is to the young that this book is addressed, and it is written with an urgency that is no doubt due in very large part to the circumstances in which its author finds himself. Judt’s condition aside, however, Ill Fares the Land is piercingly relevant. It puts the case for social democracy in strenuous and unapologetic terms. One has to admire this vigorous thinker’s determination to go down swinging.

Hitch-22, by Christopher Hitchens (The Australian, June 2010)

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Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22
Allen & Unwin; $35; 435pp

The UK politician ‘Gorgeous’ George Galloway does not appear in Hitch-22, but I can’t help thinking that the hard-left Scot has unknowingly furnished Christopher Hitchens with one of the principal tropes for his memoir, which is (let’s get this out of the way) the best-written and most engaging book I’ve read, and probably will read, this year. The relevant moment came in New York, in a debate about the war in Iraq, which Hitchens supported and Galloway did not. Having praised his opponent for his distinguished record of socialist internationalism, Galloway delivered the following gibe: ‘What you have witnessed’, he told the audience, ‘is something unique in natural history – the first ever metamorphosis of a butterfly back into a slug.’

Of course, it is a caterpillar, not a slug, that changes into a butterfly, but the lepidopteran metaphor does rather capture something of this book, which contains a number of references to the pupation and metamorphosis of its author. Nor is this a simple case of Hitchens’s changing corporeal form, though the lean young man in the earlier photographs is only barely recognisable as the paunchy specimen on the book’s front-cover. No, we are talking ideology here; specifically, left-wing ideology and Hitchens’s renunciation of it in or around 2002. That, to be sure, is the key event in Hitchens’s life as a public intellectual and the framing concern of Hitch-22.

Hitchens was born in 1949, in Portsmouth, a city on the south coast of England. His mother, Yvonne, was a vivacious woman whose feeling of having been somehow thwarted led her into an ill-starred affair, which ended in a double suicide in an Athens hotel in 1973. (In the first of many intersections of the personal and political, Hitchens is required to travel to Athens in order to identify his mother’s body at precisely the time that the military junta is brutally reasserting itself in the wake of the Athens Polytechnic Uprising.) His father, Eric, was a Navy Commander who saw active service in the Second World War. His part in the sinking of a Nazi raider is, writes Hitchens in a revealing passage, ‘a better day’s work than I have ever done’.

This pride in his parents is underwritten by an awareness of the financial sacrifice that they had to make in order to send him to a ‘public’ (which is to say private) school, his mother having taken the position that if Britain was going to have a ruling class then Christopher (never ‘Chris’) was going to be in it. Though Hitchens seems to have enjoyed these years, they nevertheless provided him, as they did his hero George Orwell, with a sense of the essentially sadomasochistic nature of authority. They also provided him with his first awareness that language could be used as a weapon (‘My tongue sharpened itself mainly in my own defence’) and, indeed, that this weaponisation could sometimes take exquisite shape in poems and other works of literature. For it was here that he first encountered the works of Wilfred Owen and the abovementioned Orwell and thus began his slow metamorphosis into a political man of letters.

It was at Oxford University, where he studied philosophy, politics and economics, that Hitchens’s politics took a radical turn – a turn that was due in no small part to the ongoing calamity of the Vietnam War. Initiated by Peter Sedgwick into the International Socialists (a Trotskyist/Luxemburgist faction), he became a Left Opposition Marxist and vociferous force in what was known as the revolution within the revolution. The debates with other left-wing factions were clearly important in the development of his style, in which the polemical and the exegetical combine to often devastating effect.

Needless to say, these austere commitments were balanced by more Dionysian ones, of which booze, fags and the ‘polymorphous perverse’ constituted the unholy trinity. It was also in his university years that Hitchens met the poet James Fenton, to whom the book is dedicated, and the ‘bewitching’ young novelist Martin Amis, with whom he is clearly deeply in love but in whom, in a Gore Vidal-ish aside, he acquits himself of any carnal interest. There were, however, sexual dalliances, including two homosexual ones with future members of Margaret Thatcher’s government. Later, when reporting on the Tory conference, he is spanked by the Iron Lady herself, in a playful display of discipline that no doubt had her male colleagues fanning themselves with their order papers. Such are the masochistic cravings laid down by the English public school system!

Thatcher, of course, was no ordinary Tory and it didn’t take Hitchens long to realise that he had attained political consciousness at a time when the right was becoming more radical than the official (and much of the unofficial) left. It was partly for this reason that he decided to emigrate to the US in 1981 and it was here that he made, and makes, his living as a reporter, reviewer, lecturer and polemicist. Though he now lives in Washington, it was to New York that he went to live originally, and I was interested to learn that his walk-up on East Tenth Street afforded a view of the World Trade Centre. Interested, because the spectacular immolation of this feature of the Manhattan skyline was, for Hitchens, as it was for so many, a turning point of profound proportions.

The terrorist attacks of 2001 were a catalyst in the proper sense: that is to say, they accelerated a reaction rather than set a reaction in train. For Hitchens, it became very quickly apparent that the left was more interested in blaming the victims than it was in confronting ‘Islamofascism’ – a coinage that Hitchens has done much to popularise. But this was not a new feeling on his part. He had seen a similar masochism at work in crises stretching back to Bosnia, where any ‘western’ intervention was assumed to be an imperialist one. The reaction to 9/11, however, convinced him that the only revolution worth witnessing for was the American one. It also convinced him, if he needed convincing, of the poisonous influence of organised religion, his relentless and ongoing battle against which has been his crowning achievement as a public intellectual.

I once suggested that Christopher Hitchens was in danger of becoming too comfortable in his role as an ‘uncomfortable presence’. I now regret that diagnosis and see that he is as challenging as ever – a scourge of intellectual complacence, of the second-hand thought and the second-hand phrase. Not a slug, indeed, but an irrepressible slugger.

Solving Ambiguities: The Troubled Poetry of Northern Ireland (The Australian, May 2010)

2010-06-17T17:04:00.003-08:00

Imagine for a moment that poetry is heat. What would a map of contemporary poetry look like through a thermographic camera? In my view, one thing is beyond all doubt: the brightest reds (or is it yellows?) would be reserved for Northern Ireland. Indeed, so vivid would the Six Counties be that Britain and Australia would look pale by comparison, the US and Canada positively ashen. Nor is this simply a question of density – of a few poets crammed into a comparatively small area; Northern Ireland, in my opinion, can lay claim to more important poets than any other country in the Anglosphere. That its population is less than two million makes this impressive, not to say strange. What on Earth is going on in there?

This question could be asked at any time, but the reason I’ve chosen to ask it now is that the great generation of Ulster poets that includes Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley and Derek Mahon is in the process of turning seventy. (Heaney and Longley turned seventy last year; Mahon will do so in 2011.) Of the three poets mentioned, only one – Michael Longley – actually lives in Northern Ireland, so the characterisation of that part of the world as a poetic hotspot is not without its problems. Looked at in another way, however, Heaney and Mahon’s absenteeism is a reflection of the artistic values to which these poets – all three of them – subscribe. For while I say in my opening paragraph that Northern Ireland can ‘lay claim’ to these poets, that is precisely what it cannot do – what the poets in question won’t allow it to do. Indeed, not allowing Northern Ireland to define them is one of the things that does define them; which is not to say that the troubled history of Northern Ireland doesn’t concern them, but that it concerns them in a particular way – as a challenge to the very idea of poetry as a space in which the individual conscience and imagination can move unmolested.

If these poets have a common ancestor, it is the Anglo-Irish poet Louis MacNeice, who was born in Belfast in 1907 and died in 1963. He it was who was able to combine the public event with the private concern, yielding neither to political partisanship (unlike many 1930s poets he was never a card-carrying communist) nor to political indifference, and whose deeply ambivalent attitude towards Ireland – half adoring, half appalled – is in one respect a metaphor for the country of Northern Ireland itself and certainly seems to prefigure the poetry of the region’s most significant poets. A year or so after MacNeice’s death, three of those poets visited his grave in Carrowdore churchyard, County Down, each of them contemplating an elegy. The poets were Heaney, Longley and Mahon. Here is the end of Mahon’s poem:

This, you implied, is how we ought to live –

The ironical, loving crush of roses against snow,
Each fragile, solving ambiguity. So
From the pneumonia of the ditch, from the ague
Of the blind poet and the bombed-out town you bring
The all-clear to the empty holes of spring;
Rinsing the choked mud, keeping the colours new.

Thus ‘In Carrowdore Churchyard’ concludes with one eye on the realities of war and one on the ‘solving ambiguities’ that the sensitive poet applies to them, carefully, delicately, even ineffectually, but in such a way as to delineate a space to which the horror cannot penetrate – a spiritual ‘all-clear’ amidst the bluster and bloodshed. And that is what the major poets of Northern Ireland are all about. Registering the awful reality of the violence, these poets have attempted to create a poetry that stands as a sort of reproach to it simply by being true to itself.

The violence to which I’m referring, of course, is the period usually known as ‘the Troubles’ – the effects of which continue to this day, though mercifully in attenuated form. That period, which began with civil rights demonstrations by Catholics in 1968 and ended with the ceasefires of 1994, was one in which a careless word could have the most appalling consequences. In an interview with the literary journal, Thumbscrew, Longley gives a brilliant analysis of the importance that language assumed in these years:

Unavoidably, the poet’s role here has been more public than the role of a poet living in a more settled society. I don’t think that has made any of us feel self-important – the reverse probably. In its language the Good Friday Agreement depended on an almost poetic precision to get its point across. The good poetry that has emanated from here is like that too, and for exactly the same reasons.

The poetry written in Northern Ireland, Longley has suggested in another interview, is very often ‘ironic, stylish, suspicious of obvious “sincerity”’. That is not to say, of course, that such poetry is non-political or that it displays a postmodern playfulness, though sometimes it is and sometimes it does. But the best Ulster poetry, it seems to me, is born of the attempt to keep poetry relevant while keeping factionalism at a necessary distance. It is a negotiation between autonomy and engagement.

The process is most impressively played out in the poetry of the Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney – more so because Heaney’s attitudes to poetry have changed significantly over the years. Though Heaney was never openly partisan, his early poetry is haunted by a sense that for art to be meaningful it must be engaged with, and not an escape from, political reality. In his great poem, ‘Digging’, he describes his pen as ‘snug as a gun’ between finger and thumb, while other poems, such as ‘Requiem for the Croppies’, display an active sympathy for the struggle against British colonialism in Ireland. And yet this early poetry can also seem restrained or restricted, caught between two ways of seeing. The poetic and the political spheres appear, at some deep level, to conflict.

More recently, Heaney has determined to sound a more autonomous note in his poetry, saying in his Nobel speech, delivered in 1995, that he has ‘straightened up’ and decided to attend to what he calls the ‘diamond absolutes’ – to make a space ‘for the marvellous as well as for the murderous’. In his 1996 collection The Spirit Level, a rain stick stands for this new resolve. A musical instrument made from a cactus, the rain stick is for Heaney a metaphor for the ‘self-delighting’ nature of art.

Who cares if all the music that transpires

Is the fall of grit or dry seeds through a cactus?
You are like a rich man entering heaven
Through the ear of a raindrop.

The poet is like the bubble in a spirit level – the bubble that slips from left to right and back again but remains unbroken. In his early poem ‘Casualty’, Heaney described a victim of the Troubles whose lack of interest in poetry served as a kind of judgment on it (‘my tentative art / His turned back watches’). Now, in ‘The Flight Path’, he describes a meeting with an Irish nationalist on a Belfast train:

So he enters and sits down
Opposite and goes for me head on.
‘When, for fuck’s sake, are you going to write
Something for us?’ ‘If I do write something,
Whatever it is, I’ll be writing for myself.’

Needless to say, ‘Writing for myself’ does not mean keeping quiet about politics. Rather, it means that any authority the poet has in such a context must begin with what makes poetry special: its celebration of the individual voice and the individual imagination. Heaney has written that ‘lyric action’ can itself be a kind of ‘radical witness’. What it witnesses to is the human desire to say what we want in the way we want. This may sound like a platitude, but in Northern Ireland it is a platitude that matters.

Derek Mahon is similarly concerned to investigate the relationship between the creative and political spheres. In his outstanding poem, ‘Courtyards in Delft’, he explores this relationship through a meditation on the 1658 painting by Pieter de Hooch from which the poem takes its title. Painted three decades before the Glorious Revolution, when James II was chased from power by William of Orange, later William III, de Hooch’s great work is a paradigm of tranquillity – serenely oblivious to the collisions of history. The poet notes the ‘Oblique light on the trite, on brick and tile – / Immaculate masonry’. But the beauty of the architecture is a kind of lie: a façade behind which hatreds are forming and political positions calcifying. In the final stanza, the poet registers his sense of being at odds with this mindset:

I must be lying low in a room there,
A strange child with a taste for verse,
While my hard-nosed companions dream of fire
And sword upon parched veldt and fields of rain-swept gorse.

The rain-swept gorse is in Northern Ireland, where William put his rival to flight, the parched veldt in South Africa, where the Dutch would also leave their mark. To what extent, the poem seems to ask, can the artist remain outside these events?

The fact that poets such as Heaney and Mahon have had to deal with the Troubles obliquely has tended to give their poetry a resonance it might not have attained in other circumstances. A case in point is Mahon’s poem ‘A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford’, in which the poet uses the hundreds of mushrooms growing within the eponymous shed as a metaphor for the dispossessed of history. These are the forgotten victims of violence. They plead with us to tell their stories:

They are begging us, you see, in their wordless way,
To do something, to speak on their behalf
Or at least not to close the door again.
Lost people of Treblinka and Pompeii!
‘Save us, save us,’ they seem to say,
‘Let the god not abandon us
Who have come so far in darkness and in pain.
We too had our lives to live.
You with your light meter and relaxed itinerary,
Let not our naïve labours have been in vain!’

One of the great poems of the twentieth century, ‘A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford’ highlights one of the abiding questions to emerge from the poetry of Northern Ireland. To what extent, and in what ways, can poetry speak for the victims of violence?

This is one of the principal themes in the poetry of Michael Longley, who was born in Belfast to English parents and whose humane concern for the victims of violence is given a deeply personal twist in a number of his most accomplished poems. For in ‘Wounds’ and ‘Wreathes’ his own father’s death is the emotional channel through which he is able to broach the issue of violence in Northern Ireland. Since his father fought in the First World War and never entirely recovered from his wounds, this gives Longley’s poems about violence an emotional intensity and a wider resonance. Like Mahon, he is able to set the conflict in Northern Ireland in a broader context. In ‘Wounds’, he writes:

Now, with military honours of a kind,
With his badges, his medals like rainbows,
His spinning compass, I bury beside him
Three teenage soldiers, bellies full of
Bullets and Irish beer, their flies undone.

Similarly, in ‘Wreaths’, he describes the deaths of ten linen workers in Northern Ireland – victims of sectarian violence – and, in a bold and macabre passage, links them to his father’s death through the personal items strewn about the corpses: ‘spectacles, / Wallets, small change, and a set of dentures’. The poem ends:

Before I can bury my father once again
I must polish the spectacles, balance them
Upon his nose, fill his pockets with money
And into his dead mouth slip the set of teeth.

Poets, of course, will often try to fuse the personal and the public spheres but to meld the two together so vividly makes for something quite unique. It’s almost as if individual instances of sectarian violence are underground eruptions with the power to disinter the poet’s father. The result is to put us back in touch with the circles of grief that radiate from violence in a way that very few poems do.

‘The writer today’, wrote Louis MacNeice in his 1938 book Modern Poetry, ‘should be not so much the mouthpiece of a community … as its conscience, its critical faculty, its generous instinct.’ What he did not say, but what his descendants prove, is that such a role is only possible if one has a powerful sense of poetry as a radically individual phenomenon. In writing for themselves, Heaney, Mahon and Longley also write for others. Long may they continue to do so.

Southerly at Seventy (Sydney Morning Herald, April 2010)

2010-05-07T23:58:00.002-08:00

David Brooks and Elizabeth McMahon (eds.)
Southerly at Seventy
Brandl & Schlesinger

In ‘The Function of the Little Magazine’ (1946), the US critic Lionel Trilling considered the role of the literary journal (or ‘little magazine’) in American letters. It was, he argued, a crucial one, for literary journals such as Partisan Review are the places in which new talent is nurtured, artistic counter-currents encouraged and the ‘official representatives of literature’ taken to task from outside the main stream. Above all, he wrote, they seek to treat literature as something worthy of serious study: ‘To the general lowering of the status of literature … the innumerable “little magazines” have been a natural and heroic response.’

Trilling’s comments are no less applicable to Australia in the twenty-first century. Many indeed are the poets and novelists who have honed their skills in the illustrious pages of Meanjin, Heat, Overland and Island; many, too, the writers and journalists who have found in them a natural home for the essay and essay-length review. Moreover, such journals can still provoke. Recently, the combative Gideon Haigh, writing in the first number of Kill Your Darlings, set the literati atwitter by decrying the state of book-reviewing in Australian newspapers such as the one in your hands. I thought he overstated the case (I suppose I would!) but I’m glad he made it.

From our newest literary journal to our oldest one: Southerly, which emerged in 1939 from a bulletin of the English Association, has reached its three score years and ten. In one sense, at least, it is showing its age: the cover design is a retouched facsimile of the original, 1939, number. But what of the contents of this birthday issue? Is Southerly still a breath of fresh air? Or is it beginning to feel the draught?

The answer is a bit of both. There are some outstanding things in the latest volume, including John Carey’s hilarious poem, ‘The Aunt’s Story – a Pinewood Classic’, which weaves a madcap narrative around a sentence from the Berlitz Book of English (‘my aunt is unmarried and spends most of her time travelling’), and Chris Conti’s surrealistic short stories ‘Cordon’, ‘Empty’ and ‘Labyrinth’. I also enjoyed ‘Skipping Lectures with Raskolnikov’ and ‘Chewing the Fat with Captain Ahab’ – two poems from a sequence entitled ‘Out to Lunch’ by the Sydney poet Andy Kissane. Despite some eccentric lineation, these poems contain some wonderful touches – in particular, the image of Captain Ahab ‘three-quarters of the way / up a Norfolk pine, staring out to sea’.

However, there are also disappointments. In particular, the essays, with the admirable exceptions of Kevin Hart’s study of Robert Gray and Jill Dimond’s article on Henry Lawson, are written in the kind of academic patois that merely serves to obscure the topic. In ‘Opening the Gates of Hell’, for example, Laura Joseph suggests that the novelists Elizabeth Knox and Alexis Wright eschew what she calls ‘the category of nation’ in favour of ‘the space of region’, adding, ‘This essay will demonstrate how this regional space constitutes an emergence from colonial topographies of inhabitation’. What she means (I think) is that regional settings, as employed by these two novelists, have a broadly political resonance. Okay, but why not make the point in language the non-specialist can understand?

More generally, I wonder whether Southerly is hamstrung by its near-exclusive emphasis on Australia. In her editorial, Elizabeth McMahon reminds us that in its early years Southerly was primarily concerned with the analysis of British literature. For her, the new emphasis is a sign of health, of ‘the increasing value of Australian literature’. A. A. Phillips’s ‘cultural cringe’ (the subject of an essay by Ian Henderson) is, in this view, largely vanquished. But one should be wary of protectionism, which is a different symptom of the same disorder. McMahon’s co-editor, David Brooks, begins his review of two works of criticism, ‘I can’t imagine any new book on Australian poetry that would not be welcome’. Really? How about Colonial Topographies of Inhabitation in the Poetry of Banjo Paterson? Don’t scoff. It could happen.

To reiterate, there are some good things in this number as well as some pretty average ones. Perhaps it is time for Southerly’s editors to widen the pool of available talent and throw open its doors to the northerly.

Review of Popeye Never Told You (The Australian, April 2010)

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Rodney Hall, popeye never told you
Pier 9; $29.95; 277pp

Memoirs are creative ventures, autobiographies factual ones. Thus, while sportsmen lean towards the latter, poets and novelists favour the former. The sportsman has a story to tell; he is not interested in language as such, except as the means by which experiences are recorded, facts related, results set down. By contrast, the writer is of interest to us not only because of who he is but also because of the way his experiences get turned into art through the medium of language. There is thus an overlap between content and form: the memoir may tell the story of a life, but it is also another chapter in it. The sportsman says, ‘I am what I’ve done’. The writer says, ‘I am how I write’.

Neither the sportsman nor the writer, I imagine, says ‘I yam what I yam!’ unless, like the poet and novelist Rodney Hall, they are remembering the comics they read as a child with a view to finding a title for their book. The title of Hall’s new book, by the way, is a good indication not only of its theme – masculinity and its attendant confusions – but also of the idiosyncratic way in which that theme is investigated. For as the coolly postmodern lower case suggests, popeye never told you is an experimental memoir. And therein, I’m afraid, lies its fundamental weakness.

Hall was born in England in 1935, with the result that a significant portion of his childhood was overshadowed by the Second World War. Accordingly, his memoir begins with an air-raid, with Hall and his family huddled under a piano. That family includes his mother Doris, his brother Mike and his sister Di. Conspicuous by his absence is Hall’s father, who died when the author was six months old.

This is the great tragedy in young Rodney’s life and popeye never told you is essentially the story of its author’s search for a model of masculinity with which he can identify. Closest to home is his older brother, who, as older brothers tend to be, is both his protector and his tormentor. Then there is the eponymous Popeye, good with his fists and lethal to bullies. Then, of course, there are the military men: models of politeness and humanity, like the RAF man who carries Rodney to the hospital when he splits his tongue, and crapulous, violent locals on leave. Often, reverence and fear combine, as when Hall describes the man who saves him when his street is hit by incendiary bombs:

so i look at his face and there are flames behind his head and behind his bristly hair and he turns his head on his neck and his necks all bristly and he shouts and the flames glint on his teeth and fill his open mouth and then he looks down at me with tiny flames in his eyes,
he says ‘you okay, son?’

As this passage demonstrates, popeye never told you is less a recollection than a re-imagining. To be sure, it is a sort of prose poem, written in the first person present tense and incorporating some exquisite images, such as the hum emitted by the family piano when an enemy bomber passes overhead – an incomparable figure for the way in which Hall, the incipient artist, absorbs events. One recurrent motif is the butterfly, ordinarily a symbol of beauty and freedom but also associated in Rodney’s mind with the butterfly bombs dropped by the Germans. In one of a number of subtle juxtapositions, Rodney’s fondness for Lepidoptera finds an echo in his search for unexploded devices. Later, at an auction in a nearby house, he finds a case of Australian butterflies, a discovery that seems to prefigure his emigration, or escape, to Australia after the war.

The above quotation also reveals the assorted typographical quirks that Hall has chosen to employ in his memoir, in particular the use of lower case ‘i’ and the omission of apostrophes. The reason for these eccentricities is unclear. If Hall is trying to imitate the rhythm of a young boy’s thought, then why bother employing them? After all, they don’t alter the ‘sound’ of the prose. If, on the other hand, Hall means to demonstrate his younger self’s limited grasp of prose, why not go the whole nine yards, or at least the whole nine parts of speech, and employ grammatical errors too?

More to the point, these peculiarities make the book very difficult to read, as one is continually brought up short by such strange contractions as ‘wholl’ and ‘whatre’. Also, the use of the child’s ‘voice’ means that the book is light on description, or light on the kind of detailed description that one would expect from such an accomplished writer.

This book can be extremely moving and its theme of growing up without a father in a world disfigured by lethal violence is an important and engaging one. But its style is awkward and unconvincing. One admires the ambition, but regrets the execution.

Identity Cheek (The Australian Literary Review, April 2010)

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Melissa Katsoulis
Telling Tales: A History of Literary Hoaxes
Hardie Grant; $24.95; 328pp

Simon Caterson
Hoax Nation: Australian Fakes and Frauds, From Plato to Norma Khouri
Arcade; $18; 168pp

Nathan Garvey
The Celebrated George Barrington: A Spurious Author, the Book Trade, and Botany Bay
Hordern House; $64; 327pp

Kirsten McKenzie
A Swindler’s Progress: Nobles and Convicts in the Age of Liberty
New South; $34.95; 344pp

Last year, the conservative magazine Quadrant published an article about biotechnology entitled ‘Scare Campaigns and Science Reporting’. The thrust of the piece was that popular scares about biotechnology are often unfounded – a function of the way in which science is handled by politicians and the popular media – and that important scientific studies are often abandoned as a consequence of the misunderstanding that results from them. For that last charge, the author provided plenty of evidence from a range of apparently credible sources.

Unfortunately, much of that evidence was invented. A clue to the article’s fraudulent character was given in the opening paragraph, in a reference to the scientist Alan Sokal, who in 1996 conned the journal Social Text into printing an essay entitled ‘Transgressing the Boundaries’, which called for an ‘emancipatory mathematics’. In short, the Quadrant article was a hoax, the details of which were published online – in a diary written by the article’s author and on the Quadrant-unfriendly Crikey.com.

This hoax is interesting for a number of reasons. First, it took place in Australia, where the hoax has a long and (ig)noble history. Second, Quadrant’s founder, James McAuley, was one of Australia’s most famous hoaxers. He it was who in 1944 and in collaboration with Harold Stewart perpetrated the Ern Malley hoax, submitting a sheaf of meaningless poems to the surrealist magazine Angry Penguins in order to embarrass its editor Max Harris and, by extension, Australia’s avant-garde. Third, it seemed to be specifically aimed at Quadrant’s editor, the historian Keith Windschuttle, who, in the past, has made rather a point of exposing shoddy scholarship, particularly in the field of Aboriginal studies, where, he argues, left-wing historians have fostered a ‘black armband’ view of history at odds with the available evidence. For Windschuttle, much Australian history is, if not a hoax, then a ‘fabrication’. The inference behind the Quadrant ruse was that Windschuttle’s vigilance only applies to scholars of a certain ideological stamp.

The Quadrant hoax, then, brought together two issues: the history of hoaxing and the hoaxing of history. But what is the relationship between the two? Taken together, the books under review allow us to begin to answer that question.

Melissa Katsoulis’s Telling Tales serves as an excellent point of departure. For here we have hoaxing as a universal phenomenon: a story of human credulity complicated by nationalism, religious hatred and personal ambition; of hidden acrostics, fictional non-fiction, dodgy diaries and made-up memoirs. Proceeding through portraits of individual hoaxers, and dealing specifically with literary hoaxes, the book gives a marvellous overview of the methods and motivations of the hoaxer.

Katsoulis divides hoaxes into three broad types. The first type is the ‘genuine’ hoax, in which the hoaxer attempts to defraud or deceive for financial, ideological or emotional gain. Examples of this type of hoax are numerous. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which purports to be a faithful transcript of a meeting of the world’s top Jews and has licensed more anti-Semitism than any other book in history with the possible exception of the Christian Bible, is perhaps the most egregious example. Others include Clifford Irving’s biography of the aviator, industrialist and director Howard Hughes, which, despite Irving’s claims to the contrary, was written entirely without Hughes’s knowledge, and the controversial Hitler Diaries, for which the German forger Konrad Kujau received 2.5 million Deutschmarks and three years in gaol.

The second type of hoax is the ‘entrapment’ hoax, in which the aim is usually the humiliation of a particular publisher or intellectual community. Examples include the Sokal hoax and the Ern Malley hoax, both mentioned above, but plenty of other examples could be cited. In the Spectra hoax of 1916, two poets sought to lampoon the pretentiousness of poetic movements such as Vorticism by inventing the Spectrist school of poetry, in which ‘the theme of a poem is to be regarded as a prism, upon which the colourless white light of infinite existence falls and is broken up into glowing, beautiful, and intelligible hues’. Collected into a single volume, the poems were taken seriously by no less a poet than William Carlos Williams.

Finally, we have the ‘mock’ hoax, in which a genuinely experimental writer plays conscious tricks with the notion of authorship. This type of hoax is commensurate with a high degree of artistic integrity, though not necessarily with artistic ability, as the case of Fern Gravel demonstrates. An Iowa woman who captured the hearts of many Americans in the 1940s with her fantastically drippy nature poetry (written, she claimed, when she was nine-years-old), she was, in fact, not a woman at all, but an ageing male writer of adventure stories motivated by a belief that the US was being ruined by industrialisation.

It seems to me that many mock hoaxers are genuine hoaxers with delusions of decency. The cross-dressing teenage rent-boy and junkie, J. T. Leroy, is a case in point. Leroy’s creator, Laura Albert, suggested that her fictional creation was more in the manner of a veil than a hoax and that her own grim history of abuse and abandonment gave her an insight into many of the issues arising from her bogus oeuvre. James Frey, whose memoir A Million Little Pieces was exposed as a hoax in 2006, claimed that although he’d changed certain details his book was still true to the essence of his experience. Little wonder that the name Oprah Winfrey is sprinkled through this book like raisins in a muffin. For while Winfrey is often the victim of these hoaxes, or is often their unwitting facilitator, it is precisely the kind of morbid voyeurism and hysterical self-exposure found on Oprah that allows these misery hoaxes to flourish.

Katsoulis makes the observation that nearly all Australian hoaxes are related to issues of race and multiculturalism. Sometimes the motivation is benign, as in Nino Culotta’s (i.e. John O’Grady’s) 1957 book They’re a Weird Mob, which purported to be an Italian journalist’s jocular look at Australian habits. Often, an element of bitterness is evident. When a cab-driver from Adelaide called Leon Carmen conned Magabala Books in Western Australia into publishing his fake memoir My Own Sweet Time under the name of Wanda Koolmatrie (a fifty-year-old Aboriginal woman), his aim was to expose a publishing scene that was colour-sensitive and quality-blind. For Katsoulis, such multicultural hoaxes reveal a young country’s ongoing anxiety about its own identity and I think she makes an excellent point. From Marlo Morgan to Helen Demidenko, the subjects of Australia’s settler history and multicultural politics are rarely far from the hoaxer’s mind.

Simon Caterson’s Hoax Nation allows us to go a little deeper into this relationship between hoaxing and identity. For while Hoax Nation covers much of the same material as is covered in Katsoulis’s book, its narrower focus – Australia – allows its author to put the question of Australia’s apparent addiction to hoaxes into some kind of historical perspective. For Caterson, indeed, Australia is a nation notable not only for the hoaxes it produces but also for the hoaxes of which it is the target. Physically cut off from the civilisation to which it owes its modern character, Australia was for many years the ambitious hoaxer’s terra nullius.

Though anchored in exclusively Australian waters, Caterson throws his net out wide and brings up all manner of exotic creatures, including the platypus (an example of a ‘false hoax’: i.e. a hoax that isn’t a hoax) and that peculiarly Australian chimera, the bunyip. He also looks at Aboriginal art, ‘Kellyana’ and the Australian landscape. (Apparently, there are more than fifty places in Australia officially called ‘Deception’.) But the real value of Caterson’s book lies in its historical emphasis. For Australia’s history as a civilisation removed from other civilisations has sanctioned all manner of strange speculations. As Caterson writes, ‘when interest in other parts of the world runs ahead of verifiable first-hand knowledge hoaxes are likely to arise’.

In one sense, the pattern was set by Plato, who used the concept of the Antipodes in order to speculate on the shape of the Earth. Later, terra australis incognita became the natural site for utopian writers to set their more fantastical stories. The first writer to refer to Australians by that name was the Frenchman Gabriel de Foigny, whose La Terre Australe Connue appeared in 1676 and painted Australians as big red hermaphrodites. Australia, writes Caterson, was the ideal location for writers to set fake travel books. The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont, for example, was published in 1898, and is notable for its accounts of wildlife. I, for one, was particularly moved by de Rougemont’s thrilled and thrilling description of ‘flocks of wombats rising in the dusk’.

George Barrington, born in 1755, is a key figure in this narrative of counterfeit narratives and Caterson gives his story its due. But for a closer look at this fascinating tale of how an entirely spurious authorial career concocted for a famous thief helped shape the European image of Australia one could not do better than to pick up a copy of Nathan Garvey’s The Celebrated George Barrington. An exhaustive work of scholarship, it is nevertheless an exhilarating read. Moreover, it provides an important clue to how the history of hoaxes in Australia is connected to the history of Australia itself.

George Barrington cut a paradoxical figure in eighteenth-century London society. On the one hand, he was a common thief – a pickpocket with a tendency to get caught in the act. On the other, he resembled the ‘man of feeling’ – the effete protagonist of sentimental novels. (In court, he was renowned for his silver tongue.) Once, he attempted to steal a snuff box from a Russian count in a London theatre. The choice of venue was appropriate. There was something theatrical in Barrington’s character.

Not that it did him much good in the end. In 1790, he was convicted of pickpocketing and sentenced to deportation to Australia. Even before he got their, however, his life had begun to split into two, as the press, bewitched by this ‘protean filcher’, invoked the infamous Barrington name in order to discredit politicians (who, it might be claimed, had been seen in his company) or simply spice up a story or two. Thus begun Barrington’s long involvement with the rapidly changing publishing world of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries – a culture that would, eventually, rob him of his identity with all the brazenness of a practised pickpocket.

First came the biographical narratives: two competing biographies published within a month of his trial. These books gave an account of Barrington’s life, fleshed out with novelistic detail, sensational episodes and apocryphal anecdotes, all of which were endlessly plundered and rehashed in later piratical volumes aimed at a growing popular readership. But it was not until a few years later that the Barrington name began to be associated not just with the contents of these sensational narratives but also with their authorship. From 1792, according to Garvey, reports had begun to filter back to Britain that Barrington had become a constable – a not unusual development for trusted convicts in Australia. This information was seized upon by the publisher Henry Delahay Symonds, who saw an opportunity to exploit both interest in Barrington’s life and curiosity about the Botany Bay scheme set up under the government of William Pitt. The result was A Voyage to New South Wales, published in 1795 and the first ever text ascribed to Barrington. Itself a blend of plagiarism and fiction, it subsequently appeared in a dizzying range of republications and adaptations – such that, Garvey speculates, it is probably the most widely read account of early European settlement in Australia.

A Voyage to New South Wales was a hoax. But Barrington, too, was something of a hoax, a criminal whose aristocratic demeanour gave him a sort of celebrity status. As such, his story fed into an idea of Australia as a place of reinvention. Barrington set class relations on their head. And so, in a certain sense, did Australia.

Kirsten McKenzie’s A Swindler’s Progress, which centres on another stolen identity, makes an excellent accompaniment to Garvey’s book. In its opening pages, it tells the story of how, in 1835, a man purporting to be Edward Lascelles, heir apparent to an English earldom, appeared before a Sydney court on a charge of forging a promissory note. Indicted under the name John Dow, the man insisted on his high-born status. So who was this man and what was he up to?

Though McKenzie is interested in these questions for their own sake, she also wants to put this story into its social and historical context, and it is to the history of the Lascelles family that she turns first of all in order to do so. The Lascelles, it turns out, were not true bluebloods but had made their money from sugar plantations. They thus had a double social problem: the stigma attached to new money and the popular anti-slavery sentiment that had, by the early nineteenth century, spread across the political spectrum. That Edward’s father, Henry Lascelles, was a political ally of William Wilberforce, the leader of the movement to abolish the slave trade, served to further complicate matters.

Henry’s political days were numbered. But the family’s fortunes were damaged further by the fact that Edward, in 1818, married a girl of ‘low situation’. Separation followed but divorce was impossible and so Edward was shunted off to Europe. And although his wife died in 1831, leaving him free to return to England and reassume his duties as heir, Edward decided to stay on the Continent and renounce his claim to pile and title.

The disappearance of Edward Lascelles cleared the way for a certain John Dow. Dow, it appears, was a serial hoaxer. His favourite role was that of the ‘lost heir’ and it was one such performance that, in 1825, led to his being convicted for fraud and sentenced to transportation to Australia. It was, it seems, en route to Australia that he adopted the Lascelles identity and ludicrous though his assertions were one should bear in mind that his destination was one in which hierarchies were unstable and unpredictable, where convicts became constables and escapees bushrangers. Australia, in short, was a cultural melting pot. Thus, when his seven-year sentence expired, Dow could cast himself in the role of aristocrat. As McKenzie writes:

In a colony where ‘criminals’ and ‘innocents’ lived side by side, where social and political power were all too rapidly evolving, shrugging off one life and taking up another was part of marking out a new society. If anyone could understand the rules of that game, it was a serial impostor.

An aristocrat’s fall from grace in Britain became a commoner’s assumption of a title in Australia. Australia, like Plato’s Antipodes, turned the Old World upside down.

All hoaxes are about identity and in Australia identity has always been unstable. No wonder, then, that we are addicted to hoaxes, and no wonder that the themes of history and forgery continue to collide in our literature. In Richard Flanagan’s Gould’s Book of Fish the principal character is a convict and a forger whose ‘soul is in a process of constant … reinvention’. What is true of Gould’s soul is true of Australia – such that historians continue to argue over even the most fundamental questions. Aimed as it was at one such historian, the Quadrant hoax was in one sense revealing of this obsession with Australian identity. In fact, and now I come to think of it, did not the hoaxer, Katherine Wilson, assume the alias Sharon Gould? Another clue? It would be nice to think so.

Review of Worse Than War, by Daniel Goldhagen (Sydney Morning Herald)

2010-04-13T22:42:00.001-08:00

Daniel Jonah Goldhagen
Worse Than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity
Little, Brown; $60; 658pp

Daniel Goldhagen is no stranger to controversy. In his 1996 book Hitler’s Willing Executioners, he argued that a unique variety of ‘eliminationist’ anti-Semitism had been at work in Nazi Germany and that far from being coerced by the Nazis ordinary citizens were eager participants in the torture and murder of European Jews. Nazism, he suggested, should be understood not as the cause of radical anti-Semitism but as a lethal manifestation of it, a thesis that seemed to run the risk of criminalising the German people while letting the Nazis off the hook. Goldhagen, it was felt by many in the field, had opened up a can of worms at the cost of burying a nest of vipers.

In Worse Than War, Goldhagen seeks to broaden his analysis of political violence to include phenomena as ostensibly separate as, inter alia, the Soviet Gulag, suicide bombing in the Middle East, the genocidal war in Rwanda, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and British imperialism in Africa. His aim is to construct a theoretical model for understanding eliminationist violence with a view to framing political measures for its prevention in the twenty-first century. Unfortunately, it is clear from the first few pages that Goldhagen has bitten off more than he can chew. Worse Than War is an ambitious book but it is also a monumentally bad one.

Goldhagen’s pivotal argument is that mass-murder is a political act to be understood not in isolation but as one of a number of ‘eliminationist’ policies available to political leaders. These include expulsion, repression, transformation (assimilation) and the forced prevention of reproduction. Why leaders opt for particular policies at particular times is a complicated question but Goldhagen urges us to avoid ‘determinism’, which comes in one of three main forms: political, social or psychological. For him, it is political leaders and their followers who are to blame for genocide, with the exterminationist policies of the former acting as a positive sanction to the pre-existing hatreds of the latter. Above all, he stresses the importance of free will.

All this is laid out at length and in detail, and with an odd combination of detachment and bluster. Goldhagen’s attitude to other ‘theorists’ is surly and antagonistic, though as often as not it isn’t clear who these other theorists are: the notes, which run to a modest thirty pages, are sprinkled with references to Goldhagen’s own articles but are rather light on the opposition. Who is proposing not to blame political leaders and their followers for mass-murder? Either Goldhagen isn’t telling us or he just enjoys the controversial register.

Mass-murder is such an important subject that it may seem like a failure of decorum to raise the subject of Goldhagen’s style. But much of what is wrong with this book can be intuited from the way in which it is written. As anyone who has ever marked an academic essay will know, verbosity often sails under the colours of ostensibly scientific verbiage. More often than not, such pseudo-precision is designed to disguise a flimsy thesis, and Goldhagen’s prose is no exception. Take, for example, the following passage:

Just as eliminationist assaults are predicated upon a preparatory eliminationist discourse laying out the conceptions of problems and people putatively causing them, which provides the foundation for thinking that acting against those people is necessary and urgent, preventing such assaults requires an analogous, countervailing anti-eliminationist, or pro-human, discourse.

Placed on a low heat and allowed to simmer, this sentence eventually boils down to the insipid and insubstantial platitude that ideas are important things to have in the war on eliminationist terror. Well, that would be hard to argue with, but in putting it like this Goldhagen implies that he’s hit upon an issue so thorny it tests the very limits of language. Either that or he’s having a seizure.

Towards the end of Worse Than War, Goldhagen suggests a number of measures for the prevention and punishment of mass-murder in the future. These include replacing the UN with a United Democratic Nations committed to liberal intervention and using bounties in order to encourage the assassination of genocidal leaders. On the whole, these ideas are rather half-baked, though I find myself in sympathy with Goldhagen’s underlying frustration at the international community’s indifferent response to genocide and mass-murder. As Europe knows to its cost, coexistence with genocidal leaders is not just undesirable, it’s impossible.

Perhaps, then, buried in this work of scholarship there is an engaging pamphlet trying to get out. In general, however, Worse Than War falls victim to Goldhagen’s too-bold ambition to both complicate the picture and simplify the issue. In my view, he has obscured the first thing and fundamentally confused the second.

The Reid Planet (The Weekend Australian)

2010-04-13T22:28:00.004-08:00

The number of poetry prizes in existence can sometimes seem like compensation for the fact that poetry is so little read. Condemned to talking amongst themselves, poets devise awards and accolades in order to feel a bit better about it. But when the British poet Christopher Reid won the Costa Book Award earlier this year, something else was going on. For the Costa is not a poetry prize; it is a prize in which poetry, fiction and non-fiction battle it out against each other. Reid took the honours for his collection, A Scattering, and received £30,000 in cash. Needless to say, that’s a sum of money most poets only ever dream of, perhaps while smashed on opium or kicking the heads off daffodils on a hillside in the north of England.

In fact, the Costa, formerly the Whitbread, has been awarded to poets in the past: on five occasions in its forty-year history, the award has gone to a book of poetry. But the occurrence is still unusual enough to warrant a minor celebration in that district of the Republic of Letters where serious readers of poetry congregate. Not that its inhabitants will be at all surprised, for Reid is a fantastically gifted poet – one who is able, as the best poets are, to press ‘refresh’ on reality.

He was born in Hong Kong in 1949 and has worked as Faber’s poetry editor, which is to the world of poetry what the General Secretaryship of the United Nations is to the world of diplomacy. His first collection, Arcadia, was published in 1979 and led James Fenton to identify him as an adept of so-called ‘Martianism’: the tendency to describe familiar things in radically unfamiliar ways, as if, like a Martian, one were seeing them for the first time. Fans of Ian McEwan’s Saturday will remember the poet Daisy Perowne and her description of a rose’s ‘shark-infested stem’ – an image borrowed from the poet Craig Raine, Reid’s fellow Martian and his current publisher. Examples from Reid’s own work are numerous: a rugby scrum is a thirty-two-legged spider giving birth to a leather egg; a salt-cellar is a chorister in a fluted surplice; a crouching weightlifter is a mantelpiece frog. Such similes have an alienating effect but can also refresh our sense of an object, in the same way that a box of marzipan fruit can refresh our sense of the real thing.

The title poem of Arcadia describes one of Reid’s many alternate realities, one in which the ‘chimneys think smoke / and every house is lovingly / Battenberged with windows’ and the inhabitants have smiles like ‘black bananas’. This is the other side to Reid’s Martianism – the side that takes us to strange new worlds with a view to throwing our own into relief. Often, these worlds have a childish feel, as when, for example, he describes the duties of an ambassador to a child’s playroom. Then there’s the dream-like city of Sara, which sprang to life from a child’s doodle and in which ‘no dog is without its necessary bone’. Other fantasies include Balloonland, the peculiarly British dystopia of Bollockshire and – my favourite – Bermudapest, where, by mid morning, the beach cafés are ‘loud with the laughter / of chess-players and philosophers’.

Reid’s abundant imagination is more than matched by his formal invention, his impish delight in unlikely rhythms and ambitious, not to say audacious, rhymes. In his brilliant poem, ‘Two Dogs on a Pub Roof’ (collected in Expanded Universes), every one of the 101 lines rhymes with every other line. Of course, the poet is forced to fall back on half-rhymes in order to achieve this feat, but a feat it most assuredly is in a language notable for its sonic diversity. (It is much easier to rhyme in Italian than in English, hence the English, or Shakespearean, sonnet, which contains seven rhymes to the Petrarchan’s five.) Nor is it an arbitrary feat, for the rhymes – which all proceed from ‘roof’ – echo the relentless barking of the dogs, which becomes, for Reid, a symbol of aggression and the starting point for an exploration of its manifestations in the human world.

Reid’s inventiveness – his formal playfulness – has led some critics to suggest that his poetry is often in want of a serious subject. Certainly, the poet’s fondness for personae can seem like an evasion at times. His 1985 collection, Katerina Brac, is composed entirely of poetic ‘translations’ of a fictional Eastern European poet. But looking back over Reid’s career from the perspective of his recent triumph, it is clear that one particular subject – his wife – has been there all along. Both the opening and the closing poems in his 2002 collection For and After are addressed to his wife, Lucinda Gane, as, indeed, are a significant number of the better poems in his other collections. Prominent amongst these is ‘Survival: a Patchwork’, collected in In the Echoey Tunnel. Composed entirely of squarish stanzas arranged on the page in patchwork fashion (every second stanza is heavily indented), this poem links Gane’s recovery from breast cancer to her skill as a maker of patchwork quilts. The result is an ingenious and moving poem – one that more than any other points forward to Reid’s award-winning collection.

Gane, an actress as well as a quilt-maker, died of brain cancer in 2005, and A Scattering is Reid’s tribute to her. Comprising four poetic sequences, the book is understandably less exuberant than any of the poet’s previous collections. Its title, which might appear to be a reference to the scattering of his wife’s cremated remains, is in fact an allusion to the peculiar obsequy performed by elephants with the bones of their dead. The elephants (the size and slowness of which make them the ‘very / embodiment of grief’) take up the bones and scatter them, a ritual that puts the poet in mind of the way he sets his own ‘sad thoughts’ into ‘hopeful arrangements’, i.e. poems.

One of the central themes of A Scattering is the way in which language can sometimes fail us when it bumps up against our deepest emotions, in particular the emotions of love and grief. Reid has often described his wife and his relationship with her in terms of language. In Arcadia, he depicts her smiling ‘in quotes’, while in ‘Zeugma’ (Pea Soup, 1982), he writes, ‘We are two words set free / from the common dictionary’. In A Scattering, however, it is the inadequacy of words to which the poet turns his attention. In one poem, Gane’s ‘skulking sarcoma’ is compared to the mythological Minotaur who dwelt in the centre of a Cretan labyrinth. The poem ends:

Glib analogies!
Makeshift rhymes!
Please pardon the crimes
of your husband the poet,
as he mazes the pages
of his notebook, in pursuit
of some safe way out.

Here, the poet ignores the reality, preferring to describe his attempt to describe it: a ‘safe way out’ indeed. Though perhaps a little glib at times, this self-reflexive strategy can also be profoundly touching. In the unsettling sequence ‘The Unfinished’, for example, the poet describes his wife’s final moments. Or rather, he doesn’t describe them – quite:

Listening and hugging hard,
between mouthings
of sweet next-to-nothingness
into her ear –
pillow-talk-cum-prayer –
I never heard
the precise cadence
into silence
that argued the end.
Yet I knew it had happened.

Here, linguistic terminology intrudes upon the intimate scene, the more intimate for those wonderfully subtle half-rhymes, hard … heard, ear … prayer, cadence … silence, end … happened. But there is nothing tasteless or improper about them: in describing the event in such a way as to highlight the act of description itself the poet is able to give the reader a sense not only of his immeasurable grief but also of the near impossibility of turning that immeasurable grief into poetry.

There is nothing ‘therapeutic’ about A Scattering. It is a poet’s tribute to a much-loved wife but also a book about poetry itself – about its limits when confronted with grief and loss. In one sense, it’s ironic that Reid should be honoured for a collection of poems that seems, at times, to question poetry’s efficacy. But that he has been so honoured is a very good thing. For Reid is an outstanding poet, and A Scattering is an exceptional achievement.

*
Christopher Reid’s A Scattering can be purchased online from www.aretemagazine.com.

Sins of Emission (Sydney Morning Herald, March 2010)

2010-03-13T22:03:00.002-08:00

Clive Hamilton, Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth about Climate Change
Allen & Unwin; $24.99; 286pp

Considered in strictly moral terms, the case for international action on climate change is unassailable. Quite apart from the fact that scientists are overwhelmingly in favour of it, a simple risk analysis will demonstrate that the cost of doing nothing and those scientists turning out to be right far outweighs the cost of doing something and those scientists turning out to be wrong: the cost in the first instance is an uninhabitable planet; the cost in the second is restricted growth. If there is doubt, then the benefit of it has to go to the pro-action lobby. For the ‘sceptics’ to argue otherwise is to put the future of the planet at risk.

So why, Clive Hamilton wants to know, have we failed to act on climate change, or failed to act with the urgency needed in order to prevent a catastrophe? That is the question posed by this book, the title of which is intended to indicate that such a catastrophe is now inevitable. Whether a catastrophe is inevitable is a question that will no doubt prove contentious, but Hamilton makes a powerful case – one that survives my deep-rooted desire not to be persuaded by it. Requiem for a Species is not without its faults but on the central question it is hard to argue with.

In his first chapter, Hamilton sets out the facts that underpin his argument that a climate crisis is now unavoidable. To that end, he takes the best-case scenario, concluding that even if maximum optimism is matched with maximum resolution and we see the ending of deforestation, a halving of emissions associated with agriculture and global emissions peaking in 2020 and then falling steeply in the decades thereafter, we still have no chance of preventing emissions rising above the ‘tipping point’ that will spark uncontrollable climate change. In a chapter towards the end of the book, Hamilton paints a depressing picture of the kind of world we can expect to see when the temperature increases by four degrees. Mass immigration, epidemics, cyclones, famine and fresh water shortages are some of the scarier scenarios in prospect.

Having established his underlying thesis, Hamilton dedicates the rest of the book to answering two fundamental questions, which are really two halves of a single question: How did we get here? and What should we do now? The answer to the first question will come as no surprise, reminiscent as it is of such polemical broadsides as Affluenza and Growth Fetish and involving as it does much Hamiltonian talk about consumer greed and materialism. By contrast, the second question inspires a bold philosophical meditation on the pernicious effects of the scientific worldview. Of course, if it weren’t for the scientific worldview we wouldn’t have the climate science on which the author bases his thesis, but it is Hamilton’s forays into metaphysics that I found really unconvincing, in particular his rather mystical notion that the world is a living organism and that seeing ourselves not as sovereign beings but as intimately connected to all living things is the only way to break our addiction to unrelieved growth and consumerism. As a consumer of ideas, I just didn’t buy it.

Nor do I like the terms in which Hamilton sets out some of his arguments. No doubt it is true that human rationality has to contend with some powerful forces, of which greed is one of the most intractable. But Hamilton’s characterisation of consumers as grasping imbeciles is simplistic and smug. Hamilton can sometimes come across as a sort of intellectual Prius, running off cool analysis one minute and pumping out moral gas the next. I think he should be rather more careful, especially since he raises the prospect that democracy itself may be put at risk in a world beset by climate change. A sneering attitude towards ‘ordinary’ people will do nothing to discourage authoritarianism.

This is an important and engaging book but its central point is often clouded by Hamilton’s puritanical emissions. Nevertheless, that central point is a crucial one to take on board, even if the cost of doing so is to realise that we are already taking on water.

Review of Must You Go? (The Australian, March 2010)

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Antonia Fraser, Must You Go? My Life with Harold Pinter
Weidenfeld & Nicolson; $55; 328pp

Of all the interesting anecdotes in Antonia Fraser’s Must You Go? one keeps coming back to me. Fraser’s lover, the playwright Harold Pinter, is in Hong Kong with his wife, Vivien Merchant. His affair with Fraser is just a few weeks old but there is little doubt about its seriousness. He sends her two poems, a long one and a short one. The short one is called ‘I Know the Place’:

I know the place
It is true.
Everything we do
Connects the space
Between death and me,
And you.

This, writes Fraser, ‘became a favourite poem of Harold’s to mark this stage in our lives’. Initially, however, Fraser herself was a little more equivocal. ‘[W]hen the poems arrived on the pale banana-coloured paper of the Peninsular Hotel,’ she writes, ‘I protested about the comma after “me” which divided us and left him on the side of death …’ Consequently, the comma was removed, though not, adds Fraser a little grumpily, ‘put immediately after “death” as I wanted’.

For Pinter to have changed his poem in this way is in one respect as powerful a testament to his feelings for Fraser as the poem itself. But what makes this story aesthetically significant as opposed to just incidentally touching is the fact that it is set down in the knowledge that Pinter is ‘on the side of death’ – that Pinter and Fraser are divided. Life, in this instance, has imitated art. Or rather, death has imitated art.

Closely based on Fraser’s diaries, Must You Go? is an affecting book, one in which this kind of detail is deployed with an artist’s lightness of touch. That it is written by a gifted biographer who shared over thirty years of her life with one of the great twentieth-century playwrights makes it an intriguing portrait – a fascinating insight into a creative personality given to bouts of turbulent inspiration. Essentially, however, the book is a love story. By turns hilarious and harrowing, it is less the story of a celebrated couple than the story of two people who celebrated each other.

Their relationship began in 1975, at a dinner party in central London. Though it feels a little corny to say so, it appears to have been a case of love at first sight. ‘I was slightly disappointed not to sit next to the playwright who looked full of energy, with black curly hair and pointed ears, like a satyr’, writes Fraser. On the face of it, they made an unusual couple. Fraser was a Catholic aristocrat, while Pinter’s background was working class Jewish. They did, however, have two things in common. Both had successful literary careers – Pinter’s stock had been rising steadily since the success of The Caretaker in 1960 and Fraser had scored a major hit with Mary Queen of Scots in 1969 – and both were stuck in unhappy marriages. Not one to keep his feelings secret, Pinter proposed to Fraser in June, just a few months after their first liaison. After a brief hesitation (two days) he was accepted (though the marriage didn’t take place until 1980).

A peculiar blend of comedy and menace, Pinter comes across as rather cuddlier than plays such as The Birthday Party would lead one to expect. Fraser has a wonderful knack of distilling Pinter’s personality into a single descriptive phrase. Of her first expedition to watch Pinter play cricket (a game with which he was famously obsessed), she writes: ‘As usual, triumph and tragedy, or just drama, attends Harold in all he does.’ Or consider this, on Pinter in Haiti: ‘Harold even swims towards evening, thrashing round and round the pool with great attack, his eyes rolling fiercely. I am reminded of a dog thrown into a pool who wants to get out.’ Fraser is also very funny about Pinter’s ‘hysterical hatred of flies’, the swatting of which was a ‘creative activity’.

Of course, it is Pinter’s creativity in respect of his plays that really fascinates. It is now well known that in the 1960s Pinter had an affair with the journalist Joan Bakewell and that this affair was the inspiration for Betrayal, which he wrote in 1978. At dinner with Fraser in Dubrovnik, however, Pinter makes a comment about the Bakewell affair that illuminates his work as a whole: ‘Harold mentions dinners in the past with Joan Bakewell and their respective spouses: and how different levels of knowledge among four people in a room might make a play.’ Equally interesting is the following exchange, which perfectly encapsulates the essential difference between two great twentieth-century playwrights: Pinter (instinctive) and Tom Stoppard (cerebral):

Dinner with Tom and Miriam Stoppard. The latter tackles Harold about the swearing in No Man’s Land: ‘This must be something in you, Harold, waiting to get out.’ Harold: ‘But I don’t plan my characters’ lives.’ Then to Tom: ‘Don’t you find they take you over sometimes?’ Tom: ‘No.’

Pinter was diagnosed with cancer of the oesophagus on 13 December 2001. Despite successful surgery, he never quite recovered his health, later developing cancer of the liver. Nevertheless, his final years were in many ways a jubilant period, marked as they were by a Nobel Prize and critically acclaimed performances in Krapp’s Last Tape and as Max in The Homecoming. He died on Christmas Eve, 2008.

Thirty years before, in 1978, Pinter asked Fraser to be his literary executor. Fraser writes: ‘I was enormously flattered and promised to be sterner than any literary executor has ever been before: “Not a comma will be changed, not a pause unpaused.”’ A more fitting tribute could not be paid. That it is paid by perhaps the only woman for whom Pinter did unpause a pause makes it all the more appropriate.

Review of It's a Don's Life (The Australian, January 2010)

2010-03-13T21:55:00.001-08:00

Mary Beard, It’s a Don’s Life
Profile; $23.99; 277pp

Distracted, shambling, eccentric, vituperative: these are the traits I tend to think of when I think of the typical Oxbridge don. Invariably old, and invariably male, he wobbles to lectures on an aged bicycle, its wickerwork basket stuffed with books. Accustomed to a life of cloistered solitude, he puts one in mind, in his academic robes, of the wing-clipped ravens in the Tower of London – never venturing outside his college lest the entire university should perish as a consequence.

It is one of Mary Beard’s many achievements to have exposed this picture for what it is: a stereotype. That she has done so so comprehensively is a consequence of all her other achievements, which include combining a distinguished career as a professor of classics at Cambridge University with an ability to explain the ancient world in terms the non-specialist can understand. Not only has she written scholarly books accessible to the general reader, she has also made the perilous journey from the ivory tower to the dives of Grub Street. A regular contributor to the London Review of Books, she is the classics editor of the Times Literary Supplement and, since 2006, its most esteemed blogger.

That latter role is the one reprised, or recorded, in Beard’s new book, It’s a Don’s Life, a selection of posts from her blog of that name together with some of the more intelligent responses. Whether we need the Book of the Blog is a question I want to come to in due course. For now, let me say that It’s a Don’s Life is, by turns, enlightening, funny, outrageous and thoroughly infuriating.

Beard’s brief, as set out by the TLS, is as follows: to give the reader/browser a sense of life inside one of the great universities and also to comment on classical subjects as the opportunity presents itself. On the first topic, she is nearly always engaging. Beard is an unwavering defender both of Cambridge as an institution and of the idea of a liberal eduction. Taking issue with the utilitarianism and ‘tick-box’ mentality of politicians, Beard encourages ‘imagination, independence and eccentricity’. Moreover, she is bracingly unapologetic about the difficulty of her chosen field, and about its limitations. Latin is important, she writes at one point, not because it ‘trains the brain’ but because it allows us to read Latin literature.

When it comes to matters classical, Beard is a marvellous explicator. Whether talking about the origins of the Olympic Torch ceremony in Nazi Germany (a conspicuous instance of ‘invented tradition’) or the mysterious case of the marble head dating from c. AD 130 adorned with ‘two bright red lipstick kisses’ (bestowed en route from the Louvre to Leeds, though by whom remains a mystery), Beard is always entertaining. Several of her posts are of the debunking variety (‘10 things you thought you knew about the Romans … but didn’t’), though their tone is never highhanded or imperious. One feels more tutored than lectured at.

It is only when Beard adopts the role of political commentator that her good sense deserts her. Analogies between the ancient world and the modern one are rarely fruitful and sometimes they are downright cretinous. Here, for example, is Beard on terrorism:

In terrorising the occupying forces [Boudica] was said to have had the breasts slashed off the Roman civilian women and sewn into their mouths … But in the face of invincible imperialism, [the Iceni] must have felt they were using the only option they had. Does it sound familiar?

Well yes, since you ask, it does sound familiar. It sounds like Michael Moore at his silliest. The assumption is that acts of spectacular brutality committed by men in poorer countries than our own are an inevitable backlash from within the imperium: a racist supposition not only because it denies any freedom of choice to the perpetrators but also because it implicitly suggests that the perpetrators are representative of the very communities they seek to enslave. Beard provoked a storm some years ago by suggesting that, apropos 9/11, the US (‘world bullies’) ‘had it coming’. It’s depressing to find that she hasn’t learnt her lesson.

No comments are included for the abovementioned post, which is interesting because there were plenty at the time. Of course, the publishers are not to be criticised for screening out the nastier responses. But this does raise the question of why we need a paper version of the blog at all when the digitised version is so much livelier. Moreover, one of the things that Beard most values about the new technology is the opportunity it gives the reader to jump directly to other websites simply by clicking on hyperlinks. Since the old medium removes that possibility, what is to be gained by adopting it?

Nothing, I suppose, except that the reader gets to hold a book in his hand – much nicer than staring at a computer screen. If that sounds like a good enough reason to buy the book then by all means buy it. Otherwise visit http://timesonline.typepad.com/dons_life/ and join the discussion.

Eliot's Letters (The Weekend Australian)

2010-01-21T21:21:00.001-08:00

Valerie Eliot and Hugh Haughton (eds.)
The Letters of T. S. Eliot:
Volume 1: 1898–1922 (871pp)
Volume 2: 1923–1925 (878pp)
Faber; $89.99 each

Last year, the publisher Faber and Faber celebrated its eightieth birthday with an exhibition at the British Library, ‘T. S. Eliot the Publisher’ – a tribute to Faber’s most famous employee. Featuring original manuscripts, correspondence and sound recordings, it was, by all accounts, absorbing. But for Eliot scholars the real action was happening down the road, in Cornwall, where the long-awaited second instalment of Eliot’s letters was flying from the presses. That a revised edition of the first instalment – over 200 pages longer than the original – was also being loaded into boxes did nothing to temper their enthusiasm. Here, after all, was the correspondence that, according to an article in the Guardian in 2005, Eliot aficionados ‘would kill for’.

No one, so far as I know, has been killed, though doubtless a few of the older academics have collapsed under the combined weight of these volumes, while some of the less excitable reviewers have affected to keel over from the tedium of their contents. Certainly, they aren’t a thrill-a-minute. But they do contain some fascinating insights not only into Eliot’s character and the ways in which that character both did and didn’t get into his poetry but also into the literary culture in which that poetry came to fruition, if ‘fruition’ is the word I want for an oeuvre so dominated by images of sterility. Moreover, they show just how instrumental Eliot was in transforming that culture. Even before he got to Faber, he had changed literary taste out of all recognition.

Edited by the poet’s widow, Valerie Eliot, and Professor Hugh Haughton, the letters begin in 1898 and end in 1925. The first volume is the more eventful, running to the end of 1922, the year in which Eliot published The Waste Land and began to edit the Criterion, the influential critical quarterly. The second volume covers just three years – years in which Eliot attempted to combine a full-time job at Lloyd’s Bank in London with his (unpaid) work for the Criterion, while also caring for his first wife, Vivienne, whose health was a constant source of anxiety. Indeed, so exhausted was Eliot in these years that it’s questionable whether he would have survived into his forties had it not been for the intervention, in 1924, of Geoffrey Faber, who wanted Eliot for Faber and Gwyer, which in 1929 became Faber and Faber. There is very little uplift in these letters but the story of how the publisher whose initial appears at the bottom of the spine befriended the man who appears on the cover is a happy ending of sorts.

The key event in Eliot’s life up to 1925, apart from his decision to move to London (he was born in Missouri and educated at Harvard), was his marriage to the volatile Vivienne Haigh-Wood. There has been not a little salacious speculation about this topic in recent decades but the simple truth, as revealed by these letters, is that Vivienne was extremely sick and that Eliot cared for her to the best of his ability, worrying himself nearly to death in the process. Eliot’s accounts of Vivienne’s symptoms (migraines, colitis ‘explosions’) are harrowing, while Vivienne’s letters, with their italicisations, exclamations and underlinings tell their own story of a mind in distress. It would be both too neat and too presumptuous to describe Eliot’s first wife as a tragic Muse but it’s clear from the letters that Eliot’s greatest poem, as well as describing a shattered civilisation, also describes a shattered mind. Part II of The Waste Land, ‘A Game of Chess’, contains a passage of fragmented speech (‘My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad’) that one strongly suspects is drawn from life.

Not all of the letters are depressing, however. Eliot could be a lively correspondent, especially when writing to literary friends, though the racist, misogynistic verses with which he furnishes Conrad Aiken are less amusing, in my opinion, than the joke-scholarly annotations that accompany them. Eliot’s letters to his cousin Eleanor Hinkley are particularly entertaining. Unfortunately, they are also the first to register Eliot’s anti-Semitism, which runs through these books like a trickle of sewage. Indeed, the new letters do nothing to dispel the charge of anti-Semitism that has, for some years, marred Eliot’s reputation. In one letter, to the patron John Quinn, he writes, ‘I am sick of doing business with Jew publishers who will not carry out their part of the contract unless they are forced to’ – an outburst made all the more depressing by the fact that Eliot wrote to his friend, the patron Sydney Schiff, on the same day. Perhaps he didn’t realise that Schiff was Jewish.

As a picture of literary society in early twentieth-century London, these volumes will be hard to beat. Modernism, when it got to England, was dependent on a peculiar mixture of aristocratic salonnières and evangelical firebrands for its protection and dissemination, and Eliot, though reliant on this milieu, appeared to regard it a little askance. (‘I have just been to a cubist tea’, he writes to Eleanor in 1915.) The impression one has of Eliot in these years is of a man who donned a series of masks. The letters to Lady Ottoline Morrell and other hostesses are unfailingly courteous, while those to poets such as Ezra Pound, Eliot’s de facto literary agent, are vigorous and sometimes wildly funny. Needless to say, the letters from Pound are some of the most enjoyable. Effectively bullying Harriet Monroe into publishing ‘Prufrock’ in Poetry, he manages to sing his client’s praises while simultaneously blowing his own trumpet – a neat feat if you can manage it.

The correspondence in the second volume is almost exclusively taken up with Eliot’s editorship of the Criterion – a role he fulfilled with extraordinary diligence. Most of the letters are rather dull but a number of controversies leaven the mix. Wyndham Lewis’s unflattering portrait of the literati in ‘The Apes of God’ (which appeared in 1924) did not, unsurprisingly, sit well with the Sitwells, some of whom were friends with Eliot. Fortunately, Eliot was fairly adept at rubbing such backs as were bitten in his pages. Indeed, he was a natural diplomat. Explaining his decision to move the work of one contributor to a later issue, he writes, ‘I do not want to spread the butter too thick by putting all the star performers in one number’ – thereby laying on the butter so thick it would clog the arteries merely to look at it.

Eliot once told the Paris Review that holding down a full-time job had helped him survive and develop as a poet but the evidence here is all to the contrary. While working for the bank, he wrote hardly a thing. Pound, aware of his friend’s dilemma, attempted to raise money on his behalf. Undoubtedly, the gesture was handsomely meant but Eliot was so sensitive to public exposure that it caused him more embarrassment than pleasure.

One of the last letters in the second volume is from Geoffrey Faber to Lady Rothermere, from whom Faber acquired the Criterion. It ends: ‘Eliot has just returned from La Turbie and is a different man after the change. But I fear he has a difficult time ahead of him.’ This, to put it mildly, is to put it mildly. Eliot would eventually separate from Vivienne, who would die in an asylum in 1947. Nevertheless, one gets the sense that Faber’s arrival was a turning point for Eliot. ‘[T]o make an end is to make a beginning’, wrote Eliot in his Four Quartets. We await the next volume on tenterhooks.

Full Marx for Lit Crit (The Weekend Australian)

2010-01-21T20:57:00.003-08:00

Terry Eagleton and Matthew Beaumont
The Task of the Critic: Terry Eagleton in Dialogue
Verso Books; $39.95; 342pp

When I studied literature at university, Terry Eagleton was something of a celebrity. The author of such influential books as Criticism and Ideology and Literary Theory: An Introduction, he seemed to have found a critical register that rejected both ‘appreciation’ in the narrowly belletristic sense and the wilful obscurantism of most post-structuralism. He was, and indeed still is, a Marxist, and his literary criticism, like Marx’s philosophy, was an attempt to understand the world with a view to actually changing it. Needless to say, this latter idea was one that appealed to earnest undergraduates.

It helped that the university in question was in the northern British city of Salford, where Eagleton was born in 1943. Described by Engels as a ‘working-class quarter … unhealthy, dirty and dilapidated’, Salford was a tough environment even in the 1990s. Eagleton himself has described his childhood as ‘a perpetual narrative of suffering’ and this background is clearly fundamental to his later intellectual development. As Matthew Beaumont writes in his preface to The Task of the Critic: Terry Eagleton in Dialogue, perhaps a little overdramatically, ‘the Marxist critic reads literature through the eyes of our enslaved ancestors, in the name of our liberated grandchildren’.

The book takes the form of a series of interviews, each with its own bibliography. The structure is chronological, the emphasis both biographical and intellectual, such that the book effectively serves as an intellectual biography. Thus we move from Eagleton’s childhood in a working-class Irish Catholic community, to his various academic posts in Cambridge, Oxford and Manchester, to his recent, very public spat with Martin Amis in the British press. Beaumont, though clearly sympathetic to Eagleton’s criticism generally, does an excellent job of guiding the discussion in such a way as to elucidate the consistencies and inconsistencies in Eagleton’s positions over the years. The Task of the Critic can be a difficult book but it’s one that repays, and rewards, careful study.

The abovementioned Eagleton-Amis controversy, in which Eagleton took the novelist to task for his injudicious comments about Muslims, is one of a number of public interventions to have hit the headlines in recent years. Another was Eagleton’s sharp review of Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion in the London Review of Books in 2006. This coincided with a more theological or metaphysical ‘turn’ in his writing but if one point emerges from The Task of the Critic it’s that as far as Eagleton’s politics go religion is there in the DNA. Eagleton’s early attempts to reconcile Christianity and socialism coincided with Vatican II, when the Catholic Church threw open its doors to the prevailing winds of the twentieth century, and Eagleton was clearly impressed with its attempt to rethink the role of the Church in the world. His own attempt to liberate ‘the critical-utopian’ core of Christianity from literalists and evangelicals is one of which I’m highly sceptical but it is a fascinating contribution to the often polarised debate between Christians and ‘evangelical’ atheists.

It was, says Eagleton, at Cambridge University that these ideas began to take shape, and at which his ‘class instincts’ were first aroused. Cambridge in the 1960s was ‘a deeply patrician sort of place’ and Eagleton’s sense of class disloyalty was given a grimly symbolic twist by the fact that he learned of his father’s death as he was sitting the entrance exam. Throwing himself into political activism, he came to the notice of Raymond Williams, the radical left-wing cultural critic, against whose work, one way or another, Eagleton has defined his own. Williams it was who encouraged Eagleton to pose what he calls ‘some meta-questions’ (‘What am I supposed to be up to here?’) and to study literature not just for its own sake but as a means to understanding the culture and social conditions from which it emerges.

Since then, he has sought to formulate a muscular political criticism, the centrepiece of which is his 1983 book Literary Theory: An Introduction, which traces the history of literary criticism from the Romantics to postmodernism from an unashamedly Marxist perspective. For Eagleton, all literary criticism is political, even when – especially when – it is loudly proclaiming not to be so. (As he puts it in The Task of the Critic, ‘only those who have an “interest” can be disinterested’.) Despite this, there is nothing doctrinaire about Eagleton’s literary criticism. ‘Marxism’, he suggests, is principally a text ‘open to many different meanings and readings’. Rather than simply fight his corner, he has sifted critical developments such as feminism and psychoanalysis, attempting to find what is useful in each, while also assessing the claims of ‘theory’ and the theoretical approach more generally.

A problem for the Marxist literary critic is how to talk about the notion of value. One of the gains of cultural criticism has been to create an intellectual environment in which the grounds and conditions of value (and of valuation) are up for discussion. But in challenging the notion of eternally fixed value, the Marxist critic runs the risk of rejecting any notion of value whatsoever – of reducing the work of literature to an ideological document. Eagleton himself has been guilty of this. In 1993, he wrote and presented a television programme about Philip Larkin in which he managed to reduce the work of one of the great twentieth-century poets to a series of reactionary attitudes. In general, however, he has attempted to reconcile the notion of aesthetic value with his broadly historical-materialist approach and, indeed, to salvage such concepts as beauty and imagination from the recycling pile of post-structuralist criticism. One brilliant passage in The Ideology of the Aesthetic – one reiterated in The Task of the Critic – concerns the critical efficacy of the concepts of truth, morality and beauty, which, writes Eagleton, are ‘too important to be handed contemptuously over to the political enemy’.

Referring, in The Task of the Critic, to the lectures he gave at Cambridge University, Eagleton says, ‘I began speaking in public when I was twenty-one and I still haven’t shut up’. This, I can report, isn’t strictly true. In 1993, the year in which I graduated, Eagleton was awarded an honorary degree by Salford University. Incongruous in his academic robes, he stood on the dais at the end of the ceremony noticeably not singing ‘God Save the Queen’. Had he forgotten the words? I doubt it.

Navigating by Limelight (Sydney Morning Herald)

2010-01-21T20:51:00.001-08:00

Clive James, The Blaze of Obscurity
Picador; $34.99; 325pp
Clive James, Opal Sunset: Selected Poems 1958–2008
Picador; $39.99; 179pp

Is Clive James ‘a brilliant bunch of guys’, as a writer on The New Yorker once asserted, or just one guy in whom the disciplines of literature bunch together brilliantly? The question is intended seriously, for it seems to me that while James’s bank balance has clearly benefited from his versatility, his reputation as a writer of genius has all too often suffered from it. The assumption varies according to who is making it: those who know James from ‘the crystal bucket’ are liable to regard his life outside it as a dilettantish claim to seriousness, while those who know James from his poetry and prose are liable to regard his TV work as an unpardonable distraction from the main event. In either case, the inference is the same: the more strings to his bow a person has, the smaller the feathers in his cap must be.

In the latest and probably penultimate instalment of his Unreliable Memoirs, The Blaze of Obscurity, James continues to make the case that what looks like literary tourism to some and fatal dissipation to others is in fact a far more interesting phenomenon: a career built on the twin assumptions that the artistic instinct is as pertinent to making a television programme as it is to composing a villanelle and that there is no such thing as a shallow subject, only a shallow treatment of it. It’s a point that some of James’s companions in the Modish London Literary World were perhaps a little slow to accept. But then James himself was slow to accept it. To get to the position where it became a principle, he had to swap his readership for an audience. He had, as he puts it, to ‘navigate by limelight’.

Here, then, are the TV years, and mightily entertaining they are, though as always with James the wisecracking delivery belies the serious brain beneath: the reader is having so much fun he doesn’t always notice that he’s getting an education. Here, the education is partly technical – one learns, for example, about the massive effort involved in making the travel documentaries for which James became particularly well known – and partly philosophical. The philosophical element tends to centre on the phenomenon of celebrity, the underlying theme of the book. Particularly interesting from a psychological point of view are those celebrities whose celebrity status has either overturned their sanity or is in the process of doing so. Peter Allen comes across as an egomaniac, while Tony Curtis provides ample evidence that limelight can eat away at the mind as decisively as quicklime decomposes the body.

I say that celebrity is the theme of the book but really it’s the changing relationship between celebrity status and real achievement that emerges as its principal focus. Fittingly, it is while shooting a programme in the US that James begins to realise that the democratisation of celebrity entails the marginalisation of talent. At a (so-called) talent pageant in Kentucky, he watches as ‘a hundred spherical mothers’ encourage their children in the belief that they are exceptional when all the evidence is to the contrary. ‘I would indeed be evoking a story about a logical development of democracy, in which everyone must be special, a uniformity of uniqueness.’

It is also while filming at the Louisville Pageant that James begins to develop his theory that ‘a documentary special must be built like a poem, first planned, then modified as the texture emerged’. It’s unclear if this relationship works both ways. Of course, one accepts James’s many assertions that TV allowed him to go on writing poetry simply by making him financially independent. But in one or two poems in Opal Sunset, James’s new selected poems, one gets the sense that at some deep level poet and performer are fundamentally at odds. Take, for example, the following stanza from ‘A Valediction for Philip Larkin’, written while James was filming in Kenya:

It is perhaps the right time to concede
That life is all downhill from here on in.
For doing justice to it, one will need,
If not in the strict sense a sense of sin,
More gravitas than fits into a grin.

Half of the poems in Opal Sunset are taken from the last five years. The reason for this, writes James in a note, is that he has hit ‘a productive streak’. ‘Winning streak’ would be more like it. For the fact is that the later work has increased in both technical skill and gravitas. In ‘Ramifications of Pure Beauty’, for example, James pays tribute to a technical marvel – the Focke-Wulf Ta-152: a Luftwaffe fighter-interceptor – in lines that are scarcely less accomplished. That, indeed, is the point of the stanza: to suggest that the instincts of the engineer are the same, in essence, as those of the artist:

What pulled it through the sky was left implied:
You had to know the turning blades were there,
Like the guns, the ammo and the man inside …

An aeroplane is a work of art. A poem is a feat of engineering. That, in a nutshell, is James’s aesthetic – one he has arrived at because of his versatility and not, as some might argue, in spite of it.

Fully Booked (Sydney Morning Herald)

2010-01-21T19:26:00.003-08:00

Susan Hill, Howards End is on the Landing
Profile Books; $35; 236pp

Let me begin by declaring an interest. It so happens that I’m moving house in a few days and am really looking forward to it. In particular, I’m looking forward to the unpacking, as the greater proportion of what I will call, at the risk of sounding pompous, my library has remained in boxes since it first arrived on Australia’s shores some years ago. The new house will have space for the whole caboodle. I can’t wait to get my mitts on it.

The novelist and publisher Susan Hill would appreciate my eagerness. She, too, is fond of her library, which is, undoubtedly, much larger than mine. Indeed, she has so many books that she’s beginning to rather lose track of them. In Howards End is on the Landing, she describes the sudden realisation, while hunting for an elusive paperback, that her shelves are crammed with books she’s forgotten, books she wants to read again and books she’s never read at all. That last fact in particular leads her to a resolution: no new books for an entire year! Beginning in the ‘Small Dark Den’ and ending on the eponymous landing of her farmhouse in the English Cotswolds, she will get to know her library again.

Since Hill’s books are in no particular order, Howards End is on the Landing has a rather rambling quality, the author flitting from one thing to the next like an absent-minded and opinionated aunt. Of the authors that she most enjoys, Virginia Woolf is top of the list, closely followed by Charles Dickens, V. S. Naipaul and W. G. Sebald. She is honest about what she hasn’t read (The Great Gatsby, Nineteen Eighty-Four) and about what she doesn’t like. (Interestingly, Jane Austen leaves her cold.) For some reason she never condescends to explain, she doesn’t like Australian books. Of Murray Bail’s Eucalyptus she writes, ‘Someone told me that this was a great novel so I bought it, but then discovered that it was a great Australian novel so I put it away.’

Hill is now in her sixty-eighth year and has plenty of literary anecdotes with which to entertain the reader, though most of these are pretty underwhelming. There is an awkward audience with Edith Sitwell, a star-struck encounter with Ian Fleming and an exchange of glances with T. S. Eliot. There is also the time in the London Library when she happened upon E. M. Forster himself in the Elizabethan poetry section. Forster dropped a book on her foot. ‘The wonder of that encounter has never faded.’

Hill ends with a list of her top forty books, one of which is printed twice, making it a list of thirty-nine. Such carelessness is prevalent. Indeed, Hill gives the distinct impression of having tossed off Howards End is on the Landing between meetings at her publishing house. Anne Fadiman, author of the wonderful Ex Libris, would have prised an entire essay out of the little messages that one finds scrawled in second-hand volumes. All Hill can manage, by contrast, is this: ‘Who were they? Why did they give this book to that person? Did that person enjoy it? Why did they not keep it?’

Contrary to her stated aim, Hill reads hardly anything new over the course of her non-book-buying year, preferring instead to revisit old favourites. This wouldn’t matter, or would matter less, if what she had to say about the latter was original or interesting. Unfortunately, however, most of her judgments are so insipid as to be not worth making. At one point she writes, ‘I think the greatest satisfaction of reading published diaries is that of being admitted into other people’s worlds … and at the same time being party to their views of it all’ – which would indeed be hard to deny.

So where to put this book in the new library? In with the memoirs or the books about books? Or should I simply trade it in for credit at my local bookshop? Yes, I think that’s the way to go. Maybe I’ll give Eucalyptus a whirl.

The Profession of the Cod (Sydney Morning Herald)

2010-01-21T19:18:00.000-08:00

Robert Adamson (ed.), The Best Australian Poems
Black Inc; $24.95; 240pp
Alan Wearne (ed.), The Best Australian Poetry
UQP; $24.95; 131pp

When, as a student of English literature, I became aware of the Poetry Wars, I declared myself a belligerent neutral. They seemed to me not a war at all but more like an amateur football match between two equally awful teams. On the one hand you had the formalists, many of whom appeared to regard traditional rhyme schemes and metrical patterns as moulds into which the blancmange of sentiment could be emptied willy-nilly. And, on the other, you had the iconoclasts who regarded any concession to form as a declaration of conservatism, if not a confession of something worse. This latter group was, and perhaps still is, especially prominent in Australia, where the kind of poems that rhyme and scan are often suspected of being in thrall to the aesthetic values of the mother country.

Both The Best Australian Poems 2009, edited by Robert Adamson, and The Best Australian Poetry 2009, edited by Alan Wearne, confirm what should never have needed confirming: that the best poems are neither arbitrarily formal nor wilfully iconoclastic. Form is not something grafted on. Form, if it is to be aesthetically successful, should bring us closer to the ‘truth’ of the poem, should underpin the poem’s content. Conversely, poets who don’t employ forms should treat the resulting ‘freedom’ as a challenge and not as an excuse to assail the reader with whatever phrases pop into their heads. I can’t remember who said it exactly, but whoever it was was exactly right: free verse is a contradiction in terms.

As an example of formal poetry at its best, take this stanza from Peter Steele’s poem, ‘Mending Gloves at Anglesea’, included in the Wearne anthology:

Uphill from Demon’s Bluff and the long blue haul
To pack-ice and white night,
The curtains drawn, slow bubbling at the stove
For company, a year and a day near done,
I’m needling the soft leather, with all
A male’s half-lost, half-won
Belief in patience, pleasure at putting right
Something gone wrong, and an eye to the next move.

This complex stanza, rhyming abcdadbc and containing lines of different lengths, is repeated throughout the entire poem, which is quite an achievement in itself. But the stanza is also intimately mapped into the content and overall atmosphere of the poem. Sewing is an intricate act and this stanza appears to mirror it, while also mirroring, it seems to me, the mood of contemplation or reverie that the act of sewing induces in the speaker. Here, the form is doing real work and emerges organically from the content of the poem.

Or take Stephen Edgar’s ‘Murray Dreaming’, included in the Adamson anthology. In this poem, Edgar describes the experience of a boy in an aquarium. In particular, he describes the boy’s enthrallment with a glass-walled room displaying a giant Murray cod. Here is the penultimate stanza:

Out in the day
Again, he saw the famous streets expound
Their theories about speed, the cars obey,
Racing to catch the sun,
The loud fast-forward crowds, and thought it odd
That in the multitudes not everyone
Should understand as he did the profound
Profession of the cod,
That held time, motionless, unknown to sound.

Again, a fairly complex stanza, and again a stanza that seems to echo or to underpin the mood of the poem. The combination of long and short lines allows the poet to contrast the traffic and the ‘fast-forward crowds’ with the stillness of the cod – a stillness subtly emphasised by the heavy pairing of ‘odd’ and ‘cod’ and the pauses in the final line. Once more, the form and content are in concert; they act together to produce their effects.

It seems to me that Edgar’s cod is to some extent a symbolic proxy for the ‘profession’ of the poet himself. Poetry, it is occasionally said, is a stay against eternity. That is why there is such an affinity between poetry and the subject of grief. A number of excellent poems in these anthologies appear to underscore that connection. Kevin Hart has a poem in each volume – one about his mother and one about his father – while Jaya Savige’s poem ‘The Pain Switch’ appears in both anthologies. All three poems demonstrate that control is far from synonymous with form. Take the first four lines of ‘The Pain Switch’, with their exquisitely harrowing rhythm and imagery:

The moon’s white knife, etching
its cold signature in your skin, strikes bone.
Butoh shapes snap across the ruin
of your face, taut as a top sheet in a ward.

There are, as is usual in these anthologies, a glut of wonderful nature poems with which to indulge our spring sensibilities. What is it about Australian poets that they manage to produce such fine nature poetry? My theory is that Australian poets have retained a sense of the strangeness of their environment that simply isn’t available to poets elsewhere in the Anglosphere. True or not, it remains a fact that Australian poets lead the way when it comes to the poetry of flora and fauna. Take, for example, the following lines from Michelle Leber’s ‘Heat Wave, Melbourne’:

A transparent shrimp
treads water – its swimmerets
on fast-flipper – crunches a piece

of eel grass with maxilliped-snatch,
does a ninety-degree shift,
drops the fragment,

then return-butts a dark-mouthed conniwink …

Owing more to David Attenborough than to William Wordsworth, these lines are a knockout. How to describe them, except to say that I know how that dark-mouthed conniwink feels?

Life is Meaningful (Australian Literary Review, December 2009)

2009-12-07T23:44:00.001-08:00

John Potts, A History of Charisma
Palgrave Macmillan; $59.95; 265pp

Stephen Miller, The Peculiar Life of Sundays
Harvard University Press; US$27.95; 310pp

Benet Davetian, Civility: A Cultural History
University of Toronto Press; Can$39.95; 607pp

Daniel Miller, The Comfort of Things
Polity Press; $32.95; 302pp

In a recent issue of Intelligent Life, the journalist and critic Jonathan Meades deplores the ubiquity of the word ‘iconic’. Having wrestled free of its religious denotation, the word, he writes, is now ‘fuzzily approximate’. The OED definition of ‘iconic’ is, he adds, ‘no longer adequate, for this is a word whose meanings have forked and forked again in a delta formation’. Two images – of Jesus and a jar of Marmite – and an extensive survey of contemporary usage (including such bathetic juxtapositions as ‘iconic wig’ and ‘iconic wheelchair’) serve to underscore his point.

Funny and interesting though Meade’s article is, I can’t help feeling that it is predicated on some questionable assumptions. First, there is the implication that language is less precise than it used to be, that the immoderate contemporary use of ‘iconic’ is revealing of a general decline – a decline for which the growing army of ‘marginally literate word-operatives’ (i.e. journalists) appears to be largely responsible. Second, and carrying on from this, one gets the sense that this decline is part of a wider spiritual decline, that emotional depth and moral seriousness have given way to shallowness. ‘We live in an era of incontinent celebration and exponential hyperbole’, writes Meades, before going on to enumerate some other instances of adjectival intemperance, such as the use of ‘legendary’ to describe any rock band that re-forms in ‘wizened middle age’.

If these four books have one thing in common it’s that they all, in very different ways, challenge the notion that people’s lives are less ‘meaningful’ than they used to be. Their authors would no doubt agree with Meades that religious values are in decline, but all, I think, would also contend that meaning, far from declining with them, has relocated to other spheres. In fact, Meades himself makes a similar point when he writes, ‘If churches can’t provide appropriate gods, we must make our own.’ But the pejorative note is unmistakable and it is this – this note of disapproval – with which these books implicitly take issue. Yes, we may be less religious. But the notion that we are increasingly shallow as a consequence is itself journalistic hyperbole.

In his absorbing book, A History of Charisma, John Potts explores another word that has moved from the religious to the secular sphere. As employed by Paul in his New Testament writings, ‘charisma’ means broadly ‘the gift of God’s grace’. Charisma implied miraculous powers such as prophecy, healing and speaking in tongues. Absent from Paul’s definition of charisma was any implication of leadership or authority; the gift of charisma was to be used for the community rather than for personal prestige. By community, Paul meant the Christian community, every member of which, writes Potts, ‘was held to possess a charisma’. Indeed, it was in order to distinguish the Christian community from its religious ‘competitors’ that Paul originally employed the term. ‘The concept of charisma,’ Potts suggests, secured for these miraculous powers ‘a specifically Christian explanation.’

Paul’s vision of the early Christian church as a charismatic community was formulated against a background of widespread belief in prophets and magicians. As the church began to grow, however, the ‘significance of the supernatural gifts described by Paul was marginalised’. The official church preferred to invest its ministers with spiritual power; indeed, it began to regard ‘charismatics’ as radical and idealistic, a challenge to the church’s authority. By around the middle of the third century, suggests Potts, the concept of charisma had largely disappeared.

It was not until the twentieth century that the concept burst back into popular consciousness, thanks to the sociologist Max Weber. In Economy and Society, published posthumously in 1922, Weber put forward a tripartite taxonomy of ‘legitimate domination’ in which ‘charismatic authority’ is identified as a countervailing force to bureaucracy and rationalisation. Channelling Nietzsche’s notion of the ‘overman’, Weber effectively redefined charisma as a broadly secular phenomenon. He also moved the concept away from the Pauline emphasis on community. For Weber, charisma was a quality of leadership in the political and religious spheres.

Today, of course, the term ‘charismatic’ is pressed into service in all manner of contexts. Potts, however, does not regard this as evidence of increasing triviality. Charting the rise of the Hollywood ‘celebrity’ in the first half of the twentieth century, Potts suggests that the concept of charisma has survived as a way of attempting to distinguish authenticity from artificiality. (Not all celebrities have charisma; indeed, it is often conspicuous by its absence.) Easy to identify but difficult to define, ‘charisma’ implies some ineffable quality, some irreducible spirit or essence. In short, a little of Paul’s definition is retained in the modern concept of charisma, though our sense of charisma as a personal quality owes more to Weber’s definition.

It is impossible, in such a short space, to do justice to the subtlety of Potts’s dissertation. Suffice it to say, it is brilliantly argued and, though deeply scholarly, fully accessible to the general reader. Not even academics, however, can avoid the pitfalls of fashionable usage. ‘In the post-Kennedy world,’ Potts writes at one point, ‘Clinton became an iconic figure and reference point for political charisma.’ Jonathan Meades would not like that.

In his peculiar The Peculiar Life of Sundays, Stephen Miller explores another concept that has, depending on your point of view, either suffered or benefited from secularisation: Sunday, or the Christian Sabbath. Once a day for religious contemplation, it is now more widely regarded as a break – as a holiday rather than a holy day. Like the concept of charisma, however, Sunday retains a sort of spiritual charge. Whether you’re a practising Christian or an atheist, or fall, as it were, between the pews, Sunday feels like a special day.

While the Roman Emperor Constantine’s conversion to Christianity hastened the decline of Pauline charisma, it heralded the birth of the traditional Sunday. In the fourth century AD, Constantine decreed that Sunday should be a day of rest, though he refrained from calling it the Lord’s Day, for fear of antagonising his sun-worshiping subjects (the Latin name for Sunday is dies solis: literally, ‘day of the sun’). Not until the fifth century AD did Augustine attempt to Christianise Sunday while also seeking to persuade practising Christians that Sunday should replace Saturday as the Sabbath Day. Augustine also expressed concern that Sunday had become a day of diversions. This theme was taken up by Caesarius, Bishop of Arles, one hundred years later. His solution – not especially subtle – was to lock his congregation into his church.

Jumping forward to Elizabethan England, Miller shows how Sunday observance sat at the centre of religious disputes between radical Protestants and Anglicans. By the eighteenth century, Miller suggests, a sort of romantic primitivism had come to challenge traditional Sabbatarianism, with figures such as the poet Thomas Gray suggesting that God was more likely to be found on a mountaintop than in a fusty old church. But the eighteenth century also saw the rise of Christian evangelism and with it a renewed interest in Sunday observance.

This conflict between romanticism and evangelism continued throughout the nineteenth century. As Christian societies and Sunday schools spread the Sabbatarian word, others began to articulate a more ‘aesthetic’ conception of Sunday. John Ruskin, whose parents were evangelicals, was exemplary in this regard, suggesting that the appreciation of art was of greater spiritual benefit than listening to preachers and dreary hymns. Of the American writers that Miller looks at, Ralph Waldo Emerson is particularly interesting. A man whose prominence coincided with a spike in evangelical activity, Emerson favoured nature over religion. Like Henry David Thoreau (a self-declared pagan), he talked a great deal about the sun. ‘I love the picturesque glitter of a summer’s morning landscape’, he wrote; ‘It kindles this burning admiration of nature and enthusiasm of mind.’

Though Miller’s largely literary approach is, for the most part, beneficial, by the end of the book it has ceased to pay dividends. Close readings of poems by Wallace Stevens and Robert Lowell, though interesting, do little to advance the book’s thesis, which founders on some generalities about the spiritual nature of American life (‘Most Americans’, according to Miller, ‘subscribe to Emerson’s gospel of enthusiasm’). I also had a sneaking sense that Miller was pushing a secret agenda, attempting to pass off opinion as fact. Can it really be the case, as Miller asserts, that ‘no major American writer has been a secularist’? Robert Frost, who declared himself a secularist, is dragged back into the fold by Miller on account of the ‘religious feeling’ in his poems. This strikes me as intellectually slippery.

There is a significant thematic overlap between Miller’s book and Benet Davetian’s Civility: A Cultural History. For the Christian societies that sprung up around England at the height of the evangelical revival were not exclusively concerned with the Sabbath but sought to promote good manners as well. Thus, the philanthropist Hannah More, born in 1745, emerges as an important figure in both books. For her, good behaviour and Sunday observance were different sides of the same Christian coin.

Both of the puffs on the back of this book describe it as a ‘tour de force’. Unfortunately, at over six hundred pages, it feels more like the tour de France. To be fair, civility is a massive subject and Davetian has 800 years to cover, and three nations in which to cover them (England, France and the United States). Still, his rather clinical prose does nothing to make the journey any happier. To take one example from his introduction: ‘Thus, I will be arguing that the manner in which trust, distrust, pride, and embarrassment/shame are managed are the ultimate measures of a culture’s civility ethos and an important variable in the construction of a locally and cross-culturally valid theory of contemporary civility.’ Note how the ostensible precision of this sentence is unsupported by the fact that ‘the manner’ and its verb (the second ‘are’) don’t agree. Still, this is a book on civility, so perhaps they can agree to disagree.

Davetian defines civility as ‘the extent to which citizens of a given culture speak and act in ways that demonstrate a caring for the welfare of others as well as the welfare of the culture they share in common’. However, he also demonstrates how the early medieval ‘courtesy writings’ promoted a system of deference and not ‘a philosophy of generalised kindness’. Their role was largely to inhibit violence. Not until the modern state successfully monopolised violence did mutual consideration emerge as a factor in the discourse of civility.

Things began to change radically in the Renaissance. As people began to free themselves from a medieval theology predicated on self-denial, the perception of civil behaviour was transformed. The medieval conception of modesty was, argues Davetian, liberalised, with the result that individual style ‘emerged as a valued part of personality’. Similarly, virtue no longer implied adherence to a set of social rituals but an inner, individual quality. By the mid sixteenth century, courtesy writers had begun to talk about public conduct rather than proper behaviour at court. The concept of public civility was born.

The split between Protestant and Catholic Christianity is, argues Davetian, a decisive event in the evolution of western civility. ‘In the Protestant communities,’ Davetian writes, ‘civility now acquired a religious function; to regulate the civic relationships of men and women so that the community might appear better in the eyes of a demanding God unwilling to provide easy assurances of salvation.’ The removal of the confessional led to a kind of ‘mutual surveillance’ and a graver ‘interactive style’.

Davetian’s initial historical survey of the development of western civility concludes with the Enlightenment and the emergence of the modern idea of rights. From here, the narrative splits into three as Davetian embarks on a comparative study of England, France and the United States. Of these, I found England the most interesting case. Davetian shows how the English system – ‘a constitutional monarchy tempered by an active parliament’ – had a considerable influence on English civility, as indeed did the Anglican Church and the networks of credit established by merchants. His analysis of the nineteenth century and the rise of evangelical Christianity also makes for absorbing reading. I was particularly interested to read of the conflict between conduct writers and etiquette writers – of how the latter were sometimes suspected by the former of favouring manners over morality and thereby encouraging corruption and hypocrisy.

Nevertheless, there is a massive problem with Davetian’s analysis of England. He neglects to mention the Civil War. Since a civil war can be usefully defined as a time in which normal civility is suspended to the point of out-and-out hostility, this strikes me as eccentric at best. That the Civil War is inextricably linked to two major elements in Davetian’s thesis – the rise of radical Protestantism and the Glorious Revolution of 1688 – makes its exclusion even more bewildering. I can’t help feeling that Davetian has got rather carried away with the idea that the British would rather have a cuppa than a coup and neglected the facts that don’t suit his thesis.

It was their puritanical legacy, of course, that led the Victorians to worry inordinately about the ‘paradox of moral propriety living side by side with ornamental splendour’. This moral anxiety has survived into our own time. Clive Hamilton, Oliver James and other commentators insist that materialism is bad for the soul, that ‘affluenza’ is to the spirit what swine flu is to the constitution. I’ve never particularly liked this view and if one thing can be said for Daniel Miller’s The Comfort of Things it’s that it seeks to challenge it. That’s all that can be said for the book, however, for it is, in all other respects, preposterous.

The book is a series of about thirty portraits of people all living in the same street in London. Miller’s aim is to study the ways in which people express themselves through possessions. Challenging the Hamiltonian view, Miller suggests that spiritual maturity is in fact closely linked to material possessions. The closer our relationship with objects, he posits, the better our relationships with the people around us.

The book is very clumsily written, but the gushing, self-indulgent style (this in a book purporting to be a work of social anthropology) is as nothing to the staggering impertinence of its author. Take the unfortunate George, for example. ‘George’, writes Miller, ‘is more than just a royalist. One could imagine the appeal for him of a movement such as fascism …’ George, I should add, says nothing to invite or indeed to merit this observation. But George is a lonely, loveless man with very few material possessions. As such, he is grist to the Miller mill.

It is here, perhaps, that we begin to glimpse an alternative danger to the one represented by Meades in his article in Intelligent Life: not a reflexive disillusion with the present but an over-exuberant acceptance of it. What do you imagine is being described by Miller in the following phrase: ‘the aesthetic totalisation of her existence’? A photograph? A painting? A family heirloom? Nope. A McDonalds Happy Meal. Yes, modern life is meaningful, but surely not that meaningful.

Toy Story: The Tin Drum at Fifty (The Weekend Australian, December 2009)

2009-12-07T23:38:00.002-08:00

Towards the end of Book One of The Tin Drum, Günter Grass’s great first novel, we are told of the fate of Musician Meyn, who, despite his ‘conspicuous bravery on the night of 8 November’ (Kristallnacht), has been expelled from Hitler’s Brownshirts on account of his having beaten some cats. ‘For inhuman cruelty to animals’, we are told, ‘he was stricken from the membership list. It was not until a year later that he gained admittance to the Home Guard, which was later incorporated in the Waffen SS.’

Thus does the German author lay bare the moral perversity at the heart of Nazism, an ideology that condemns a man for taking a poker to a sackful of cats and congratulates him for torching a synagogue. But this passage, which occurs at a time in the book when the Second World War is fast approaching and is couched in an incongruous fairy-tale past tense that seems to announce the coming catastrophe, is also interesting for another reason. For in 2006 Grass dropped a bombshell. In an interview with a German newspaper about his forthcoming memoir Peeling the Onion, he revealed that in 1944 he too had served in the military wing of the organisation responsible for supervising the extermination of the Jews. He too had served in the Waffen SS.

Though Grass saw very little fighting, his hypocrisy was manifest. For years, he had fairly revelled in the role of Conscience of a Generation, and here he was, at the age of seventy-eight, confessing his part, however small, in the greatest crime of the twentieth century. Grass, who had frequently criticised Germany for its moral failure to face up to its past, had evidently failed to face up to his own.

Despite this fact – and, I shall argue, to a large degree because of it – The Tin Drum remains a magnificent achievement. Like Ulysses and Moby-Dick, it is huge and hugely difficult, and yet one feels, as one does with those novels, that both the hugeness and the difficulty are essential to the work, integral to the aesthetic experience. A gargantuan gothic structure of a novel, complete with puking gargoyles, it is prolix and yet it is also perfect.

Set largely in Langfuhr, a borough of Danzig, it is the story of Oskar Matzerath, a sardonic, misanthropic cripple with the power to shatter glass with his voice and to summon up the past with the aid of a tin drum, on which he plays relentlessly. Oskar has the physical stature of a child, having stunted his growth at the age of three by throwing himself down some cellar steps. However, he is also highly intelligent, describing himself as ‘one of those clairaudient infants whose mental development is completed at birth’. Part seasoned adult, part little drummer boy, Oskar is thus a strange combination of innocence and experience. He is peculiarly alive to ugliness, to the exact constitution of a pool of vomit, to armpit hair and unpleasant smells. Above all, he is an oblique witness to history and, in various subtle ways, its conduit and representative. In one famous chapter, he climbs to the top of the Stockturm Tower in the heart of Danzig and lets out a scream that ‘unglasses’ the Stadt-Theatre, an act that seems to prophesy the coming saturnalia of Kristallnacht.

When the novel opens, Oskar is in his thirties and an inmate of a mental hospital. From here, he describes the hypocrisy-ridden, lower-middle-class milieu into which he was born in 1924. His mother, Agnes, is a Kashubian Pole. She marries Alfred Matzerath, a self-important German grocer, but pursues an affair with her cousin, Jan Bronski. When his mother dies from a bizarre eating binge, Oskar becomes increasingly isolated. Jan Bronski, his uncle, is executed after the siege of the Danzig Post Office, while Matzerath (described as ‘my putative father’) marries Maria, Oskar’s first love. Maria gives birth to a son, Kurt, whom Oskar firmly believes is his own. However, the aggressive Kurt rejects him and Oskar joins a troupe of dwarves performing to German soldiers on the front line. Later, he falls in with a criminal gang, the Dusters, of which he becomes the leader. At the end of the war, Matzerath dies attempting to swallow his Nazi pin and Oskar resolves to support ‘his’ family. Willing himself to grow again and dispensing with his drum, he develops a hump. In Düsseldorf, he becomes a stone mason’s apprentice, an artist’s model and celebrated jazz drummer. He falls in love with a nurse, Dorothea, of whose murder he is eventually accused.

The symbolism of the book is exceptionally rich, as one set of images – of whiteness, for example: a freshly whitewashed graveyard wall; a huddle of frantically feeding seagulls – bleeds, so to say, into another set of images: the red and white of Poland’s flag or the serrated red and white fields of the drum, with their suggestion of streaks of blood or of flames – another recurrent motif in the novel. And yet Oskar is frequently openly hostile to symbolic interpretation or analysis. Indeed, he is less an unreliable narrator than he is an antagonistic one. At one point, he invites us to find significance in the ethnic ménage of his family circumstances. Is the romantic rivalry between Alfred and Jan an allegory for the German-Polish struggle for Danzig? Oskar appears to imply that it is. In so doing, however, he rather undermines it, revealing it as mere artifice.

All this throws the central symbol of the book – the tin drum – into sharp relief. For the drum is, above all, a symbol of art. It is through his drumming that Oskar is able to recall the past in such lavish detail; the drum, in a sense, is his imagination. However, it is not an innocent instrument. Much has been made of the scene in which Oskar disrupts a Nazi rally with his drumming but this is just one of many events that Oskar contrives to sabotage. Moreover, the drum is a martial instrument; it is, so to speak, an instrument of war. (It is interesting to reflect that Adolf Hitler was described, and described himself, as ‘the drummer’.) To be sure, it is very difficult to uncouple the themes of art and destruction in The Tin Drum. When Oskar climbs the Stockturm tower and shatters the windows of the Stadt-Theatre, he describes it as the beginning of his ‘productive period’.

It seems to me that it is only in the light of Grass’s 2006 admission that we can fully appreciate the significance of this theme of the culpability of art and the artist. Grass, it appears, is glancing critically both at his art and his own guilt and at the relationship between the two. The abovementioned business with Musician Meyn – he of the cats and the Waffen-SS – was added late on in the writing process, one of a number of what John Reddick terms, in his introduction to the Everyman edition, ‘moral-political’ additions to the text. (Meyn plays the trumpet, another martial instrument.) In the thrilling final pages of the book, Oskar is arrested in the very Paris street – Rue d’Italie – where the book was written. He is thirty, as was Grass when he finished the manuscript.

In a piece published in 1974, Grass talks of how his magnum opus ‘abandoned’ him when he finished it in a way that no other book has done since. He adds, ‘I’m still not sufficiently prepared to examine my conditions and impulses from that time; I’m almost afraid of finding myself out.’ Reading The Tin Drum in 2009, fifty years after its first publication and three years after Grass’s confession of complicity in the Nazi war effort, it seems to me increasingly clear that personal guilt was Grass’s muse when he wrote his first and greatest novel. Little wonder that the rise of the author’s moral-political public persona coincided with the decline of his work, all of which was clearly written from a more decided moral standpoint.

I will always think of Grass as a hypocrite, but his failings as a man were the making of his art, and for his art he deserves to keep his laurels. For while Auden was wrong when he wrote that time ‘Worships language and forgives / Everyone by whom it lives’ (‘In Memory of W. B Yeats’) he was right when he wrote, in ‘The Novelist’, that the writer of fiction must ‘be subject to / Vulgar complaints like love, among the Just // Be just, among the Filthy filthy too …’ That last line especially meets the case. Steeped in the filth of history, The Tin Drum is a magnificent novel.

Shakespeare in Love? (Meanjin, December 2009)

2009-12-07T23:33:00.002-08:00

Four hundred years ago this year, a book of poems appeared in Quarto (which is to say in a small edition about the size of a modern paperback), probably without the author’s knowledge and almost certainly without his consent. This book, which is often referred to as Q, consisted of 154 sonnets and bore an oblique dedication or inscription: TO. THE. ONLIE. BEGETTER. OF. THESE. INSUING. SONNETS. MR. W. H. ALL. HAPPINESSE. AND. THAT. ETERNITIE. PROMISED. BY. OUR. EVER-LIVING. POET. WISHETH. THE. WELL-WISHING. ADVENTURER. IN. SETTING. FORTH. This dedication is signed T. T., for Thomas Thorpe, the publisher. About the identity of Mr W. H. there has been much informed conjecture, and not a little wild speculation. About the author of the poems, however, there is very little disagreement. He, of course, is William Shakespeare. Or, as the printer prefers, SHAKE-SPEAR.

Even before one gets to the poems a number of mysteries present themselves. Who was Mr W. H.? William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke? Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton? William Harvey, Southampton’s stepfather? And what did ‘onlie begetter’ mean? Inspiration for? Procurer of? Even ‘ever-living poet’ isn’t without its difficulties, as it wasn’t customary to refer to a poet actually living as ‘ever-living’. Might it refer to Ovid, or to Horace? Many academics have built their careers on attempting to answer such questions as these – more, it seems, than have built their careers on an appreciation of the sonnets themselves. As Michael Schmidt writes in Lives of the Poets, ‘no title page in history has been more pored over’.

These preliminary mysteries are as nothing, however, to the mysteries presented by the sonnets themselves, which appear to fall into two distinct groups. Sonnets 1 to 126 are addressed to an unknown young man, the Fair Youth; sonnets 127 to 154 to a mystery woman, the Dark Lady. Both are addressed in amorous language, and both are accused, or appear to be accused, of sexual infidelity, probably, though by no means certainly, with each other. Elsewhere in the poems, Shakespeare alludes to, but does not elucidate, some scandal or controversy, and also refers to a Rival Poet, whose attempts to win the Fair Youth’s affections rouse our poet to jealous self-defense. (It’s probable that both Shakespeare and his rival, whatever ‘love’ they felt for the Youth, were also engaged in a bid for patronage.) In short, the sonnets are an emotional jigsaw puzzle with a few pieces obstinately but tantalisingly missing. Or rather, the sonnets would appear to be comprised of a number of different jigsaw puzzles. And while some pieces can be fitted together, the whole remains a stubborn conundrum. ‘There are many footprints around the cave of this mystery,’ wrote Sir Walter Raleigh in his life of Shakespeare; ‘none of them pointing in an outward direction.’

So little is known about Shakespeare’s life that the playwright is effectively anonymous, a fact that has sanctioned all manner of theories – some of them wilfully controversial – as to Shakespeare’s true identity. Naturally, then, the appeal of the sonnets is linked to their biographical content and the critic-as-sleuth is much in evidence. From A. L. Rowse’s stakhanovite unearthings in William Shakespeare and Shakespeare the Man to students thrilled by the possibility that Shakespeare was gay or at least bisexual, the explicators are thick on the ground. Little wonder that writers of fiction have also taken up the subject. In ‘The Portrait of Mr W. H.’, Oscar Wilde speculates on the identity of the mystery dedicatee, while Anthony Burgess, in Nothing Like the Sun (which takes its title from sonnet 130), suggests that the Dark Lady may have been African. Nor was Burgess under any illusions as to the prurient character of such investigations. As he put it in a magazine article: ‘[I]s there one person living who, given the choice between discovering a lost play of Shakespeare’s and a laundry list of Will’s, would not plump for the dirty washing every time?’

Consequently, every comma and dash of the sonnets has been subjected to scrutiny, scanned for biographical consequence. This has led to some notable follies. It takes a special kind of insensitivity to suggest, as does the assiduous editor of my New Shakespeare edition of the sonnets, that the lines,

That time of year thou mayst in me behold,
When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang

‘may have been apt to a prematurely bald man as the Stratford bust suggests Sh. to have been’, but such statements are not unusual. (Incidentally, the recently unveiled Cobbe portrait shows Shakespeare with a handsome set of locks. But then it might not actually depict Shakespeare.)

In his own introduction to an edition of the sonnets published in 1964, W. H. Auden put the case against such biographical readings:

Probably, more nonsense has been talked and written, more intellectual and emotional energy expended in vain, on the sonnets of Shakespeare than on any other literary work in the world. Indeed, they have become the best touchstone I know for distinguishing the sheep from the goats, those, that is, who love poetry for its own sake and understand its nature, from those who only value poems either as historical documents or because they express feelings or beliefs of which the reader happens to approve.

To establish the identity of the Fair Youth or the Dark Lady or the Rival Poet, continues Auden, would be to throw no light at all on the quality or even the meaning of the sonnets. Nor would it matter particularly if Germaine Greer, say, could establish beyond doubt that some of the sonnets are addressed to Anne Hathaway. Indeed, and as Jonathan Bate suggests in his recent (and brilliant) Soul of the Age: The Life, Mind and World of William Shakespeare: ‘When Shakespeare’s purpose is to write about the power of art to defeat the ravages of time or the feeling of loss or rejection or disillusionment in love, the identity of the addressee is immaterial.’

Not all critics are so preoccupied. Some – Helen Vendler, Auden himself and, most notably, William Empson – have eschewed the biographical approach in favour of a technical one that treats the sonnets as individual artefacts to be criticised in isolation. The danger of this approach, perhaps, is that context will be forgotten altogether, but this is by no means inevitable. The important thing is to recognise that unless new information comes to light about the identity of W. H. then the identity of W. H. or of anyone else referred to in the sonnets is liable to remain a mystery. The sonnets themselves are all we have and, more important, all we need. Moreover, the question of who is addressed is less important, at the end of the day, than the question of who is doing the addressing, and this is a literary critical question not a biographical one. It makes no difference who the Fair Youth is. But the question of who the poet is, of what version of himself he is putting forward – that is genuinely fascinating.

It is my contention that the voice of the sonnets is the voice of a poet and not of a lover, or at least that the love expressed in the sonnets is of secondary importance in the overall scheme. In the popular imagination or consciousness, Shakespeare’s sonnets are all about love, are even in some sense symbolic of it, such that Cole Porter in ‘You’re the Tops’ compares his lover to a ‘Shakespeare sonnet’. (Then again, he also compares her to Mickey Mouse and a Bendel Bonnet.) But this is something of a simplification. As has been noted, it is very likely that Shakespeare was involved in a bid for patronage. As Bate suggests in Soul of the Age, such bids were apt to conflate or collapse the language of courtship and the language of courtiership. Love poems, in other words, were very often coded bids for patronage or preferment. (Certainly Shakespeare had money on his mind: financial language peppers the sonnets, such that one imagines the poet unable to tear his eyes from the accounts.) Thus, whatever Shakespeare felt or didn’t feel for this golden-haired boy, the strong possibility that cash was a factor in his motivation should be borne in mind. That this lends a certain tension to the sonnets will, I think, be readily admitted, as indeed will the proposition that this poetic ‘conflict of interest’ may account for the peculiar sense of a double focus in many of the poems, as if the poet were trying to reconcile the need for flattery with his own integrity.

The Fair Youth himself is never described physically, a fact that appears to have caused some friction between the poet and his would-be patron, who seems as a consequence to have transferred his attentions and indeed affections to the Rival Poet. Of course, this adds a layer of mystery to the mystery-enshrouded publication. But as well as adding a layer of mystery, it also lends to the sonnet sequence a certain literary sophistication. For the strong predilection amongst sonneteers was for precisely the kind of physical inventory – ‘your eyes are like sapphires, your lips are like rubies, your teeth are like pearls etc. etc.’ – of which our poet refuses to partake. Nor does Shakespeare merely refuse to rehearse the well-worn sonnet conventions. He is also concerned to challenge them. Sonnet 130, for example, begins, ‘My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun / Coral is far more red, than her lips red, / If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun: / If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head …’ Furthermore, and as Bate suggests, this critique of the conventions associated with the sonnet was not confined to Shakespeare’s poetry. It appears to inform his drama, too. In Twelfth Night, for example, Olivia enumerates her own corporeal attributes in what is perhaps a sarcastic allusion to the perfunctoriness of the conventional sonnet (‘item, two lips, indifferent red’). Evidently, Shakespeare was not content merely to go through the poetic motions.

In the Fair Youth sonnets in particular, the love expressed will often strike one as artificial or insincere. Of course, we must tread carefully here: the sonnets are over four centuries old and it may be that we are ill-equipped to understand the conventions attendant on poetry written by one man for another. Nevertheless, it seems to me that there is something bloodless about the Fair Youth poems. For one thing, one cannot discern in these sonnets anything resembling sexual desire. Only in some of the poems to the Dark Lady does one feel the hot breath of authentic passion, as in the sonnet beginning ‘Th’expense of spirit in a waste of shame’ (note, for example, the panting assonance of ‘Had, having, and in quest, to have extreme’). Again, it may be a question of convention. But it may also be that genuine feelings were experienced only fitfully. At the very least, one is forced to admit that much of the praise in the sonnets is perfunctory. There are times, indeed, when Shakespeare sounds like an eighteenth-century Poet Laureate: ‘There lives more life in one of your fair eyes, / Than both your poets can in praise devise.’

It’s possible that Shakespeare found himself trapped by the technical aspects of the English sonnet. If so, he would not be the only one. For whereas the Petrarchan sonnet, which divides very naturally into octave and sestet and has a certain ‘rightness’ to it (such that Don Paterson, in his introduction to 101 Sonnets: From Shakespeare to Heaney, notes its close mathematical correspondence to the Fibonacci sequence of numbers, which recur with conspicuous regularity throughout the natural and non-natural worlds), is an incomparable tool for conveying emotion, the English sonnet – three quatrains and a couplet – tends to lend itself to more abstract thought. Indeed, in the hands of inferior poets, the English sonnet tends to become a three-pronged argument and a concluding epigram. Consequently, it can sometimes seem rather glib. As Bate puts it in Soul of the Age: ‘The very form offered an incentive to multiplication and digression that encouraged sonnets to be expressions of their authors’ wit and ingenuity as much as – perhaps more than – outpourings of their real feelings.’

So does the English or ‘Shakespearean’ sonnet militate against the expression of emotion? No, not necessarily. For one thing the poet can still divide his poem into octave and sestet, retaining the traditional ‘volta’ – or change of mood – at about line nine. Here, for example, is Shakespeare himself in one of his most famous sonnets. There is nothing pat, or trite, about this:

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed,
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course untrimmed:
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,
Nor shall death brag thou wand’rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time tho grow’st,
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Note how the concluding couplet is not an epigrammatic summary of everything that has gone before but an additional salvo of thought and feeling. Clearly, Shakespeare could, when inspired, use the English sonnet form to excellent and emotional effect. But the point is very few of the sonnets achieve this level of excellence. What, then, is the essential difference between the best and the weakest sonnets and what does this tell us about Shakespeare’s inspiration?

Never less than technically brilliant, it is the technical brilliance of the sonnets that has made them slightly suspect to some ears. Syntactically dense, semantically playful, many are little more than exercises – ingenious conceits ingeniously set out but devoid of genuine sentiment. ‘They seem to be full of fine things said unintentionally – in the intensity of working out conceits’, wrote Keats, just one of a number of Romantic poets to have noticed a lack of emotion in the sonnets, most particularly in those sonnets – those expressing love – in which emotion is most insisted upon. Conversely, it is precisely those sonnets that tackle subjects other than love, or that tackle the subject of love more generally, that seem to me the most successful from the point of view of authentic emotion. The principal subjects are mortality and posterity, and mortality as it relates to posterity, which is to say the power of art to overcome our inexorable decay.

The importance of this theme is demonstrated by the fact that, in the opening sonnets, Shakespeare’s attempts to convince the Fair Youth to settle down and conceive a son – in order, so he says, that succeeding generations may partake of his preternatural beauty – slowly give way to the theme of poetry’s own capacity to record that beauty. Progeny and poetry are linked explicitly, as in the lines, ‘But wherefore do not you a mightier way / Make war upon this bloody tyrant, Time? / And fortify your self in your decay / With means more blessed than my barren rhyme?’ (My italics.) In the next sonnet (17), Shakespeare reiterates: ‘But were some child of yours alive that time, / You should live twice, in it and in my rhyme.’ In sonnet 11, sexual reproduction is linked to the paraphernalia of writing. Nature, writes Shakespeare, ‘carved thee for her seal, and meant thereby, / Thou shouldst print more, not let that copy die.’ Just as a man conceives a son who carries his likeness into the future, so the poet, in writing a poem, bestows upon that poem’s subject a degree of immortality. And not only upon the poem’s subject but also upon the poem’s creator, which is to say upon himself. Indeed, this latter point is crucial to an understanding of Shakespeare’s sonnets, which can be read as the cri de coeur of a poet suddenly and anxiously alive to his significance as a literary artist.

In one sense, all art is an attempt to freeze time, to render a likeness so that it may be revisited or record an emotion so that it may be re-experienced. But of poetry this is especially true, or rather it is true in a special way. The reason for this has to do with its origins. Poetry affords illiterate societies a way of recording information. Rhyme and metre are aids to memory. Perhaps it is only natural, then, that the theme of immortality, and of poetry’s ability to confer immortality, should come up so often in the poetry of the great. From Anonymous to Auden, the notion that poetry represents a sort of stay against eternity is commonly encountered as a theme in its own right.

So too with Shakespeare – the Shakespeare of the sonnets. The sonnets, indeed, are crammed with references to the enduring power – the permanence – of poetry. To take a few examples at random: sonnet 63 concludes with the lines, ‘His beauty shall in these black lines be seen, / And they shall live, and he in them still green’, while sonnet 100 contains the petition, ‘Return forgetful Muse, and straight redeem, / In gentle numbers time so idly spent’. These lines are from sonnet 55:

Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme,
But you shall shine more bright in these contents
Than unswept stone, besmeared with sluttish time.

And here, in full, is sonnet 60:

Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,
So do our minutes hasten to their end,
Each changing place with that which goes before,
In sequent toil all forwards do contend.
Nativity once in the main of light,
Crawls to maturity, wherewith being crowned,
Crookéd eclipses ’gainst his glory fight,
And Time that gave, doth now his gift confound.
Time doth transfix the flourish set on youth,
And delves the parallels in beauty’s brow,
Feeds on the rarities of nature’s truth,
And nothing stands but for his scythe to mow.
And yet to times in hope, my verse shall stand
Praising thy worth, despite his cruel hand.

That this sonnet is one of the best in the sequence and also one of the most impersonal is, in my view, no coincidence. Not until the final line does the Youth himself afford a mention. Here, indeed, we find the poet looking past his immediate object to more general themes of death and decay. That this is accompanied by an increase in quality seems to suggest that it is those themes and not the Youth that interests the poet – that the poet experiences the wider focus as something of a liberation. The same may be said of the sequence as a whole. The less personalised the sonnet the better it is.

One clue as to Shakespeare’s state of mind when composing his 154 sonnets is the way he refers, as it were, to his day job. The sonnets are peppered with disparaging references to drama and to makeup in particular, which Shakespeare uses as a metaphor for the kind of sickly art he despises. In sonnet 110, he writes: ‘Alas ’tis true, I have gone here and there, / And made myself a motley to the view’ – a reference to his appearances on stage. Why he took such a low view of drama cannot be known and so shouldn’t detain us. But that Shakespeare did take such a view is consistent with his deepening interest in non-dramatic poetry. Was Shakespeare thinking of his own posterity? And had such thoughts attached themselves to the sonnets written to his would-be patron? As noted earlier, the sonnets dealing with the theme of poetry’s permanence are more successful when set in the context of death and decay and the passing of time; those that attempt to link the theme to the Fair Youth’s immortality are, in general, less successful. It is likely that many of the sonnets were written in the early seventeenth century. Shakespeare, then, was no longer a young man. That questions of posterity and questions of age should be linked in his mind is hardly surprising. Nor is it surprising in the circumstances to find Shakespeare wrestling with the age-old question of poetry’s time-defeating qualities. It is, as Anthony Burgess suggests, ‘the common stock of all poets – the opposition of the moving river to the static stone, the agony of transience, the need to build something on which to rejoice’.
I don’t say Shakespeare wasn’t in love, but I don’t think the 126 sonnets addressed to the Fair Youth convince us that he was so. Bate suggests that Shakespeare’s sonnets may have appealed to a courtly milieu in which bisexuality was newly fashionable. Certainly he makes a convincing case. But in the end all any critic can do – all any reader of poetry can do – is listen for the note of authenticity, is to cast his being towards the poem and wait for the divine afflatus, which comes in suddenly, like a sea breeze. When I do this with Shakespeare’s sonnets, I hear, not a lover’s voice but a poet’s – concerned, above all, for the survival of his craft – that fragile, storm-tossed ‘saucy bark’ set free on an ocean of inspiration. For so it must have seemed to him, when the name of Shakespeare was known about town as that of a reasonably respectable playwright but hadn’t yet contracted its aura of artistic infallibility and could still be misspelled by professional printers. Now we are more likely to talk of the ‘proud sail’ of Shakespeare’s verse, as Shakespeare himself describes the efforts of the Rival Poet to woo the Fair Youth. But Shakespeare never had any guarantee that his name would be remembered to history. Or, indeed, that four hundred years on academics would still be mining his sonnets for veiled references to premature hair-loss.

Review of Timothy Garton Ash's Facts Are Subversive (Sydney Morning Herald, October 2009)

2009-11-06T22:26:00.002-08:00

Timothy Garton Ash
Facts are Subversive: Political Writing from a Decade Without a Name
Atlantic Books; $34.95; 441pp

C. P. Scott’s celebrated remark ‘Comment is free, but facts are sacred’ lives on in the newspaper of which he was the editor. Or rather, one half of the remark lives on, in the form of the Guardian’s Comment is Free website. The journalist Timothy Garton Ash, himself a contributor to Comment is Free, is worried about the other half, especially in the light of the enormous challenges currently facing the newspaper industry. ‘In the news business today,’ he writes sardonically in his outstanding collection Facts are Subversive, ‘comment is free, but facts are expensive.’

His title thus has a double function. First, it serves to remind the reader of the forgotten half of Scott’s dictum. Second, it seeks to persuade that reader of why the forgotten half is important. Facts are sacred because they are subversive – subversive, as Garton Ash writes in his preface, ‘of the claims made by democratically elected leaders as well as dictators, by biographers and autobiographers, spies and heroes, torturers and post-modernists’. They are also, one hopes, subversive of indifference, though that firewall can be hard to breach. When, early in 2006, Garton Ash implored the readers of Comment is Free to consider Belarus, then in the middle of a sham election in which President Lukashenko held all the cards, one reader, ‘thedacs’, responded thus: ‘Nah, still don’t give a toss …’ When comments are free, they are very often cheap.

Containing pieces originally published in Prospect, the New York Review of Books and various other publications, Facts are Subversive is the substantial opus of someone who most certainly does give a toss. Garton Ash is a journalistic gumshoe of seemingly inexhaustible energies, touching down in Serbia (there to witness the fall of Milosevic), Ukraine (to witness the Orange Revolution), Burma (to witness totalitarianism’s survival into the twenty-first century) and many other political hotspots. Determined to put events into context, his journalism is almost always augmented with wide-ranging and apparently impeccable scholarship (his is, he writes, a ‘mongrel craft’). He is also a political man of letters of a kind not much in evidence these days. The book contains a number of pieces on writers who exist at what the literary critic Lionel Trilling called ‘the bloody crossroads’ – the point at which literature and politics meet.

It so happens that Trilling used that phrase in an essay on George Orwell and ‘the politics of truth’ and Garton Ash is a devotee of ‘the Saint George of English political writing’. Orwell is everywhere in Facts are Subversive. More precisely, ‘Orwellian’ is everywhere, not just as an adjective to describe the ways in which the powerful tend to manipulate the truth but also as an adjective denoting the kind of journalist that Garton Ash aspires to be. For Orwell it was who, in his own words, had ‘a power of facing unpleasant facts’ and the facts that Garton Ash must face, or ends up facing, are often unpleasant. He also has Orwell’s ear for language. Here he is at his brilliant best, in a review of Stefan Collini’s book about intellectuals, Absent Minds:

Intellectuals begin at Calais. ‘British intellectual’ is an oxymoron, like ‘military intelligence’. The river of colloquial English carries a heavy silt of mildly pejorative or satirical epithets: egghead, boffin, highbrow, bluestocking, know-all, telly don, media don, chattering classes, too clever by half. The qualifier ‘so-called’ travels with the word ‘intellectual’ like a bodyguard. The inverted commas of irony are never far away.

Is Garton Ash an intellectual? He certainly is, but he’s also a journalist – one for whom the second appellation is never in danger of being overshadowed by the first. As ‘dead tree’ journalism continues to suffer and C. P. Scott slowly turns in his grave, one writer at least holds firm to the view that reporter journalism is the first draft of history.

Review of Lawrence Weschler's Everything that Rises (The Australian, October 2009)

2009-11-06T22:23:00.001-08:00

Lawrence Weschler, Everything that Rises: A Book of Convergences
Atlantic Books; $39.95; 238pp

Creativity, wrote the South African author, poet and editor William Plomer, ‘is the power to connect the seemingly unconnected’ and many are the cultural commentators who endeavour, via a colourful juxtaposition, to prove themselves worthy of the creativity that it is their job to describe and critique. To take one recent example from my own notebook: In 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first human beings to walk on the Moon. Forty years later, as images of the Moon landing flickered across our TV screens, another pioneer, Michael Jackson, died. And what was Jackson’s signature dance move? The ‘backslide’, also know as the ‘moonwalk’. Well, it may serve as an introduction to an article somewhere down the line.

For the New York writer Lawrence Weschler, this kind of connection would be more likely to form the subject of an article than its introduction. For in essays written for McSweeney’s, The New Yorker, Artforum and other publications, Weschler has developed a journalistic style in thrall to ‘uncanny moments of convergence, bizarre associations [and] eerie rhymes’. These convergences range, as he says himself, from the silly to the transcendental, while ‘others veritably revel in their manifest unlikelihood’. Now he has brought his pieces together in Everything that Rises, ‘a convergence of convergences’ brimming with exquisitely reproduced artwork.

Weschler’s technique owes a lot to John Berger, whose 1972 book Ways of Seeing attempted to show how paintings and images relate to each other across the centuries and often contain ideological messages. Similarly, Weschler, in a number of essays, attempts to demonstrate how images in one context are often influenced by images from another. Thus, in his first piece – a dialogue with Joel Meyerowitz – he endeavours to show how the latter’s photographs of the devastation after 9/11 draw on such canonised images as Jean-François Millet’s painting The Gleaners. Elsewhere, he wonders whether Jackson Pollock may have been subliminally influenced by images of deep space in the 1950s and whether the line of the floating lips in Man Ray’s A l’Heure de l’Observatoire: les Amoureaux is a reference to the contours of the Rokeby Venus.

Weschler makes some interesting connections but his tendency to overreach is marked. In one essay, he badly misreads Rembrandt’s painting The Anatomy Lesson in order to make a point about hands. (The figures in the painting are not, as he argues, looking at the surgeon’s hand at all but at a book at the foot of the operating table.) Other connections are simply daft, as when, for example, he compares a photograph of a father and son standing at Ground Zero with Grant Wood’s painting American Gothic.

At times, Weschler has a legitimate point but his featured convergence merely serves to obscure it. For example, in an essay on The Spinners, by Velázquez, he ably demonstrates how class distinctions are mirrored by the composition, with the eponymous spinners at the front of the painting and the aristocratic women dallying at the back. Imagining the actual Spanish aristocrats viewing this painting in the seventeenth century, Weschler writes that a ‘veritable ziggurat of perception opens before our eyes’. The keyword here is ‘ziggurat’, which leads him to think of ‘an open pit mine, an inverted ziggurat, like the one, in our own time, that the Chilean-American art-photographer Alfredo Jaar came upon in the summer of 1985’. He continues:

Jaar hit upon the inspired notion of slotting close-ups of the faces of the exhausted miners into elaborately ornate gold-leaf frames, replicating for a moment the same vertiginous ziggurat of perceptions first broached by Velázquez back in the middle of the seventeenth century.

The idea that there is anything ziggurat-like about Jaar’s framed photographs is without foundation. But Weschler is so trapped in his own poeticism that his visual faculties have ceased to function. And what is the poeticism doing, anyway, apart from taking attention away from the fact that Weschler’s central idea – that Jaar and Velázquez are both concerned with the relationship between rich and poor – is a pretty uncontroversial one?

These are purely aesthetic concerns and as such not especially serious. It is when the author attempts to apply his journalistic technique to politics that its limitations begin to matter. In ‘Pillsbury Doughboy Messiahs’, for example, Weschler remarks on the physical similarities between Newt Gingrich and Slobodan Milosevic. It is, to be sure, a striking resemblance: ‘the same jowly countenance, the bouffant grey mantle of hair, that identical out-thrust, righteously aggrieved little button of a chin’. But when Weschler compares the siege of Sarajevo to Gingrich’s siege of Bill Clinton’s presidency, the comparison is revealed for what it is: an idiotic bit of moral equivalence.

There are some good things in Everything that Rises. I like, for example, Weschler’s idea that Mark Rothko’s 1969 painting Untitled may have been influenced by images of the Moon landing. In the end, however, I had the sense of a journalist who can no longer tell the difference between a ‘small step’ and a ‘giant leap’ and who, while seeming to travel forwards, is actually moving very stylishly backwards.

Love and Summer, by William Trevor (review for The Australian)

2009-10-19T15:56:00.002-08:00

William Trevor, Love and Summer
Viking; $45; 212pp

Though principally a short story writer – perhaps the greatest now writing in English since the death of V. S. Pritchett in 1997 – William Trevor is also a novelist, and indeed novellaist, of uncommon power. The attributes he brings to the longer form are in essence no different to those used in the shorter. First, there is his ear for speech, for English as it is spoken by ordinary people. Second, and carrying on from this, there is the astonishing range of his empathy, his feel for the unexalted life, for the banal and the quotidian. Above all, there is his flare for compression, for the allusive and the quietly suggestive. Unassuming and unobtrusive, Trevor reminds us that a ton of feathers weighs precisely the same as a ton of bricks.

Take, for example, the opening paragraph of his latest novel, Love and Summer:

On a June evening some years after the middle of the last century Mrs Eileen Connulty passed through the town of Rathmoye: from Number 4 The Square to Magennis Street, into Hurley Lane, along Irish Street, across Cloughjordan Road to the Church of the Most Holy Redeemer. Her night was spent there.

So, a woman goes for a walk. Except she doesn’t walk, she passes. The streets glide by, apparently unheeded; no detail seems to ground them in reality. The woman spends the night in a church; or rather, her night is spent in a church: an odd thing to do and an odd way of putting it. And yet the passive voice is appropriate, for Mrs Eileen Connulty is passive. Mrs Eileen Connulty is dead.

Set in 1950s Ireland, in a fictional town where nothing much happens, except that people are born and die and fall in love with one another, Love and Summer thus begins with the death of a ‘disappointed’ woman. Eileen Connulty is survived by her children, ‘Miss Connulty’ and Joseph Paul. Miss Connulty runs a lodging house (the abovementioned Number 4 The Square) and Joseph Paul runs the family pub. The family once owned a cinema, too, but that burned down some years ago. Mr Connulty died in the fire.

It is on the way to photograph the ruins of Rathmoye’s former picture house that Florian Kilderry, from nearby Castledrummond, happens upon Mrs Connulty’s funeral. Deciding to photograph that, too, he catches the eye of some of the mourners, in particular that of Ellie Dillahan, who is married to a local farmer. Ellie’s marriage is somewhat loveless, her husband having killed his former wife in an accident seven years ago and Ellie herself having come to him by way of the nuns at an institution for ‘foundlings’ attached to a nearby convent. Florian is in the process of selling his house, which he inherited from his bohemian parents. His plan is to leave Ireland altogether, possibly for Scandinavia. The encounter with Ellie, and the affair that follows it, is thus a heartbreak waiting to happen, though for whom we will not know till the end, when the novel arrives, with a delicate shock, at its exquisite and exquisitely painful denouement.

Trevor left Ireland in the 1950s but much of his fiction remains rooted there. Some of the best stories in Cheating at Canasta, his 2007 collection of short stories, were set in modern Ireland, which, being Ireland, is never quite modern. The lilt of his prose and the subject matter are, in this novel, perfectly matched. He writes as he speaks, with a soft Irish accent, occasionally holding back the main verb in imitation of his characters. ‘A ceremony her afternoon adorning of herself had become this summer …’ Of course, this is partly the free indirect style championed by the literary critic James Wood but it is also something slightly different: a sort of authorial warmth or affection. Trevor, one feels, really loves his creations.

Nevertheless, his view of Ireland is never misty-eyed or romantic. Provincial Ireland is an environment in which the past is less a foreign country than a brooding and sometimes stultifying presence. Orpen Wren, a bewildered tramp who was once employed to catalogue the library of a local aristocratic family and who spends his days at the railway station awaiting the long-lost heir’s return, is in some ways a representative figure, mentally trapped as he is in the past. Moreover, the novel is full of ruins – not just the cinema, but Florian’s house (described as ‘eighteen dilapidated rooms’) and the estate of Orpen’s former employers. At one point, Florian himself is described as ‘the sole relic of an Italian mother and an Anglo-Irish father’ (my emphasis).

‘Man is in love and loves what vanishes, / What more is there to say?’ I thought more than once of W. B. Yeats’s ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’ when I read this novel, not because of Yeats’s depiction of Ireland as a ruined land but rather because of that magnificent description of the relationship between love and loss. What more is there to say? Not much. Only that Trevor, at the age of eighty-one, has produced another masterpiece.

Review of The Anthologist, by Nicholson Baker (October, 2009)

2009-10-13T20:29:00.001-08:00

Nicholson Baker, The Anthologist
Simon and Schuster; $25; 243pp

The history of poetic form can be usefully compared to the history of piecrust. Originally, piecrusts were protective casings: one didn’t eat them; one threw them away. It was only later that the outer shell became not only edible but also a compliment to the pie filling. Similarly, poetic form began as a way to make information memorable in illiterate societies. Poetic form, in other words, had a largely utilitarian function, though of course it very quickly acquired an ornamental and imitative one. Now, when a poem rhymes and scans one hopes that the form reinforces the content. One hopes that the piecrust compliments the filling.

I like to think that Nicholson Baker would enjoy this gastronomic analogy. For one thing, his surname would seem to suggest some culinary expertise in his ancestry. More to the point, his new novel, The Anthologist, is crammed with comparisons between food and poetry. At one point his protagonist writes, ‘What I’m doing when I’m writing poetry is I’m trying to make a little side salad.’ And later: ‘The Elizabethans really understood short words. Each one-syllable word becomes a heavy, blunt chunk of butter that is melted and baked into the pound cake of the line.’ Oh, and the narrator is called Paul Chowder.

Despite his surname, Paul is no clam. He wants to talk – about poetry. About some other things as well, but mostly about poetry. The reason for this emphasis is that he is himself a minor poet in the process of writing an introduction to his forthcoming anthology, Only Rhyme. Or rather he isn’t in the process of writing it; he is in the process of putting it off. His crisis of confidence has a lot to do with the fact that his own poetry is not going well. Paul wants to be a rhymer and a scanner, and yet the poetry he writes is just ‘slow motion prose’. He dreams of composing one great poem, good enough to take its place in some notional future anthology. He is broke and his partner Roz has left him.

‘When I look at the lives of other poets, I understand what’s wrong with me … They were so tortured, so messed up.’ It’s true that Paul, despite his crisis, comes across as obstinately twinkly, rather as Baker himself comes across in the interviews I’ve heard with him. Nor is the resemblance mere coincidence, for The Anthologist is really an essay on poetry thinly (and fetchingly) disguised as a novel. The plot is a sort of background murmur. Will Roz come back? Will she like the beads that Paul has lovingly strung for her? Will Paul improve his badminton? That’s about it for narrative tension. The rest is a brilliant riff on poetry – two hundred pages of musings about the muse.

So what does Paul Chowder think about poetry? His principal idea is that the four-beat line is ‘the soul of English poetry’ and that pentameter is not only secondary but has also caused ‘untold confusion’. (Even the three-beat line, he argues, is actually a four-beat line, because of the silent stress at the end.) He has some odd ideas about enjambment, citing Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’ as an example of that practice at its ugliest: ‘Two vast and trunkless legs of stone / Stand in the desert.’ Personally, I think those lines are a knockout but Paul is so enamoured of the idea that poetry is just music by another name (he is always setting poems to music) that he misses their mimetic function, how those two magnificent monosyllables plant themselves either side of the line-break. This reveals a weakness in his argument. For while I think that Paul is right to deplore the division between poetry and verse, the division between poetry and music is necessary. A song lyric’s music is imposed from without; a poem carries its music within it.

Fascinating stuff, if you’re interested in poetry. But what if poetry isn’t your thing? Well, perhaps I was overstating it when I said that the plot was just background noise, for the themes of love and poetry do come together in some striking ways. Without Roz, Paul is merely a half-rhyme. At one point, he imagines her back in his bed: ‘I could cup her upward hip or one of her dozing boobies with my hand … That cupping is rhyme – the felt matching of two congruent shapes.’ A little later he asks himself why he needs things to rhyme so much. Perhaps, he suggests, it’s a kind of ‘avoidance’: ‘It’s like chain smoking – you light one line with the glowing ember of the last.’

The world is out of love with poetry. ‘Maybe I could do a weekly podcast … Hello, this is Paul Chowder welcoming you to Chowder’s Bowl of Poetry.’ But poetry isn’t food; it isn’t consumed. Poetry – really great poetry – consumes us. For all that I wanted to quibble with Baker, it’s clear that he understands this much. He gets it: ‘the shudder, the shiver, the grieving joy of true poetry’.

The Lure of Desecration (Sydney Morning Herald)

2009-09-09T00:57:00.005-08:00

In July 1937, in Munich, the Nazis mounted an exhibition that purported to show the moral chaos and wilful ugliness at the heart of modernism, especially modernism as it was pursued by its liberal, socialist and Jewish adherents. Including works by Otto Dix, Piet Mondrian and Marc Chagall, Entartete Kunst (‘Degenerate Art’) was organised by Adolf Ziegler, the head of the Reich Chamber of Visual Art, which was subordinate to Joseph Goebbels’s Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. An integral part of the Nazi effort to control the culture of Nazi Germany, it was philistinism raised to the level of a crime against humanity. Indeed, the posters for the exhibition, which remained on show in Munich until November, placed the word ‘art’ in inverted commas, as if to endorse the aesthetic taste of every punter who had ever declared, squinting at a Monet sunset, ‘My three-year-old could do better than that!’

One of the most confronting exhibits in Entartete Kunst was by Ludwig Gies. Born in Munich in 1887, Gies was a sculptor and military medallist whose work was deeply influenced by the Expressionism so loathed by the Nazis. His dramatic carving Kruzifixus dominated Room One of the exhibition and showed Christ on the cross as never before, his body twisted and angular, his ribs protruding unnaturally from his torso, a huge and stylised gout of blood emerging, like toothpaste, from a hole in his side. Sculpted in 1921, it had served as a war memorial in Lübeck, and seems, indeed, to draw a parallel between the suffering of Christ on the cross and the suffering of soldiers in the First World War. Now lost, presumed destroyed by the Nazis, the carving lives on in a few grainy photographs from which its aura continues to radiate.

Now jump forward fifty years and witness the New York-born photographer Andres Serrano taking a picture of a small plastic crucifix submerged in urine. Yes, you are present at the birth of Piss Christ (1987), from which no aura radiates at all, save for the artificial one conferred on it by the $162,000 (US) for which it was sold in 1999.

What is the difference between these two artworks? No doubt Serrano and his many defenders would see his crucifix-pickled-in-piss as existing in the same tradition – the tradition of artistic transgression – as Gies’s expressionistic Christ, and some of the negative responses to the former, and to Serrano’s work in general, lend superficial credibility to this view. For example, when a number of his works were vandalised in a Swedish gallery by members of a neo-Nazi gang, the ghost of Goebbels and Entartete Kunst was (justifiably) felt to be present. That attack was in October 2007, ten years after the ridiculous George Pell, who was then the Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne, sought an injunction from the Supreme Court of Victoria to prevent the work being displayed in Melbourne – a comparable act of thuggery in my view. If, however, one takes the reaction provoked by Serrano as evidence of his seriousness, or of his work’s aesthetic merit, then one has profoundly misunderstood the general tendency of which it is an instance. But what is that tendency, and how did it develop?

In a recent article in City Journal, the British philosopher Roger Scruton gives an unimprovable definition of the kind of modern art I mean. The ‘culture of transgression’, Scruton argues, ‘achieves nothing save the loss that it revels in: the loss of beauty as a value and a goal’. Another way of putting this would be to say that such works as Piss Christ are really a kind of desecration – that they seek to destroy or overturn something once regarded as sacred. By ‘sacred’, incidentally, I do not mean holy, though clearly religion is a favourite subject, or better say target, of such works of art for the reason that religious people have proven so eager to take offence. (That is what makes Serrano’s photograph such a lazy piece of work.) No, by ‘sacred’ I mean to suggest the importance accorded to art itself as a vehicle for the transmission of truth and beauty, a role that would indeed have fallen to organised religion in the past. The point, in other words, of artworks like Piss Christ, if Piss Christ can be said to have a point, is not to open up debate, still less to excite our admiration, but to dirty and despoil, to deface and disfigure. They aspire to neither beauty nor truth.

For that reason, human and animal waste has proven hugely important to them. Piero Manzoni’s Merda d’Artista (ninety cans of excrement, purported to be the artist’s own); Chris Ofili’s The Holy Virgin Mary (a painting of the Holy Mother incorporating elephant dung as well as hardcore pornography); Wim Delvoye’s Cloaca installation (an ingenious contraption that is ‘fed’ twice a day and defecates accordingly) – all of these works make use of excreta in order to get their ‘point’ across. Interestingly, Scruton singles out opera as the art-form on which the desecrators seek to take the most violent revenge. Certainly, Australia’s own Barrie Kosky is a fine example of the general tendency. In On Ecstasy, he describes his scatological production of György Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre and is obviously in his element: ‘The climax of the opera occurs when a gigantic meteor crashes into the earth. This has been foretold by a mad prophet, Nekrotzar. In Berlin, he sat on a white plastic toilet while a never-ending stream of brown excrement poured out of the toilet and over him.’ Kosky goes on: ‘The baritone smeared himself with the excrement, ate it and sang. The more radiant the music became, the more he ate and smeared.’

The most famous case of desecration didn’t involve excreta at all, though I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that a lot of bile went into its creation. In 2003, the Chapman brothers – a self-consciously notorious artistic duo famous for their many artistic transgressions, including a number of child mannequins with genitalia instead of facial features – defaced a series of Goya prints depicting scenes from the Peninsular War of 1807 to 1814. Seeking, so they said, to ‘improve’ Goya’s work, the Chapmans added funny faces to a number of the original figures, stripping the work of its power and pathos and creating a storm in the public prints. The result was that a great work of art, The Disasters of War, became Insult to Injury, a rather less than great work of art.

Well, that’s my view. You may disagree. There really is no accounting for taste. The point I want to make, however, has nothing to do with taste as such (and certainly nothing to do with ‘bad’ taste) but rather with the motivation of Jake and Dinos Chapman in this instance – a motivation that can, I think, be usefully contrasted with Goya’s own when he produced the original work of art between 1812 and 1815. For Goya sought to represent the victims of war with revolutionary candour. In doing so – in moving away from images of martial glory and sacrifice – he committed a heresy in the eyes of some, and it is for this reason, among many others, that he is often regarded as the first of the moderns. By contrast, the Chapmans committed no heresy – not in the strictest sense of the term. For in order for art to qualify as heretical it has to express, in form or content, a new or eccentric vision of reality. Heresy, that is to say, has substance and Insult to Injury has no more substance than a swastika daubed on a Jewish gravestone or a dog turd pushed through the letterbox of an immigrant family in the North of England. No, the Chapman’s committed no heresy. They committed an act of desecration.

(Incidentally, the Chapmans are also responsible for a work entitled, simply, Hell, in which Second World War atrocities are recreated using toy-like soldiers. For the record, I thought this a powerful work – one that showed the influence of the very series of Goya prints that the Chapmans later chose to vandalize.)

This contrast between heresy and desecration explains, I think, our different reactions to Gies’s Kruzifixus and Serrano’s Piss Christ. Gies took a traditional subject and made of it something utterly new, a work that spoke of suffering in a language that a twentieth-century public could understand and appreciate. Similarly, the greatest modernists were trying to register a changed reality – a reality shocked out of all recognition by the psychology of Freud, the science of Einstein and the experience of the First World War. T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Pablo Picasso, James Joyce, Franz Kafka – all were trying to make it new, not for the sake of making it new, but because the old forms had ceased to serve, to represent reality. The art of Piss Christ and Insult to Injury represents something altogether different: an art enamoured of its own ability to shock, disgust, repel and revolt. Gies’s carving sought to unite the suffering of Christ with the suffering on the front and you don’t have to be at all religious in order to feel the power of that work, though one would have to be religious, or a philistine, in order to be offended by it. Serrano’s Piss Christ offers no such experience. It seeks to transgress for the sake of transgression. Retaining modernism’s dissenting element, but eschewing its mimetic one, it throws out the baby and exalts the bathwater.

Let us, then, put firmly to bed the notion that Serrano’s photograph and the artistic tendency of which it is an instance can be traced to the work of the greatest modernists. For while it was inevitable that artists trying to represent a radically changed reality would end up offending ‘bourgeois’ taste – one thinks of Baudelaire’s blasphemies, of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, of Molly Bloom’s scatological soliloquy in the final chapter of Ulysses – the giving of offence was incidental and never, or rarely, the point of the art. Confronted with the obscenity of Les Fleurs du mal (1857), one critic reached for the pomaded handkerchief: ‘Never, in the space of so few pages, have I seen so many breasts bitten – no, even chewed! – never have I seen such a procession of devils, foetuses, demons, cats and vermin.’ But Baudelaire did not write poetry in order to offend the critics at Le Figaro. He may have enjoyed doing so, but his principal goal was to make poetry relevant to the realities of modern existence. Les Fleurs du mal had plenty of shock value but it did not make a value of shock per se. The same could be said of Picasso and Joyce and, indeed, of Eliot, Woolf, Kafka and the other great modernists. All were heretics, but none was a vandal. That is why Peter Gay’s book Modernism is subtitled The Lure of Heresy and not The Lure of Desecration.

The artists featured in Entartete Kunst were the victims of desecration, not its servants. It is depressing to reflect that for many modern artists something like the reverse is true – that the very impulse against which Gies and his fellow artists had to contend has become an artistic value in itself. Depressing, and a little ironic. The Nazis thought modern art was crap. Throwing crap in the public’s face, some modern artists appear to agree. Now that really is adding insult to injury.

Review of Censoring an Iranian Love Story, by Shahriar Mandanipour (The Weekend Australian)

2009-09-08T01:51:00.002-08:00

Shahriar Mandanipour, Censoring an Iranian Love Story
Translated from Farsi by Sara Khalili
Little, Brown; $29.99; 295pp

The narrator in Shahriar Mandanipour’s novel, Censoring an Iranian Love Story, wants to write a simple romance. However, in the Islamic Republic of Iran writing a romance is never simple. Indeed, the politico-religious presumption that ‘any discourse between a man and a woman who are neither married nor related is a prologue to deadly sin’ rather serves to put the kibosh on writing a love story of any kind.

It is, perhaps, in recognition of the fact that relations between the sexes are so thoroughly mapped into Iranian politics that Sara and Dara meet on Liberty Street, in the middle of a demonstration. In fact, it’s a double demonstration, with liberals protesting against the regime and supporters of the regime protesting against the protestors. Oddly, Sara is holding up a sign that reads ‘Death to Freedom, Death to Captivity’ – an act that puts her at risk from both groups. Dara manages to remove her from danger and, eventually, to win her heart. Unfortunately, Dara, a former film student who has been in prison for distributing banned films, is not exactly the kind of husband Sara’s parents had in mind. More to their liking is her suitor, Sinbad, whose job as a government bureaucrat makes him a rather safer bet. Nor, indeed, is the relationship helped by the fact that a phantom assassin, or ‘hashashin’, seems to be trying to knock Dara off.

Clearly, this is the stuff of fairy tales, but Censoring an Iranian Love Story is in fact a lot more complicated than this outline of the plot would seem to suggest. For what we are given in Mandanipour’s novel is not one plot at all, but three. First, there is the censored story, purged not only of all sexual references but also of anything that reflects badly on Iran and the boring, bearded theocrats that run it. Second, there is the story proper – the story Mandanipour would tell if he could and which he has vouchsafed to us, his privileged (i.e. non-Iranian) readers. Finally, and hovering between these two, is the story of Mandanipour himself, and, in particular of his relationship with Petrovich, the sinister censor whose assent he must win if he is to publish his novel in his homeland.

The multilayered narrative is announced by the typography. The censored story is in bold type, while the uncensored story is in normal type. There are also numerous crossings out, though the original text is always discernable. Thus:

In the air of Tehran, the scent of spring blossoms, carbon monoxide, and the perfumes and poisons of the tales of One Thousand and One Nights sway on top of each other, they [crossed out] whisper together. The city drifts in time.

Note how the merest implication of sexual activity is eliminated. Violence takes many forms in Iran, but violence against the imagination is, perhaps, the most ubiquitous.

The contrast between the two kinds of text means that the ‘authentic’ story has a sort of ghostly quality, and indeed there are a great many ghosts in Censoring an Iranian Love Story. The ghosts of poets roam the city, while Persian classics such as One Thousand and One Nights, Khosrow and Shirin and The Blind Owl provide a sort of background noise against which the stifled love affair between Sara and Dara is falteringly played out. This emphasis serves to remind the reader that great literature is allergic to totalitarianism, a point made beautifully in Azar Nafisi’s memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran. The infamous blind censor who until 1994 was responsible for state television in Iran, and who makes a guest appearance in this novel, is in one sense symbolic of the entire system, for the totalitarian mentality is very often incapable of grasping what a novel is. ‘Wait! What is going on?’ exclaims Petrovich at one point, ‘there seem to be things happening in your story that I can’t see.’ For Petrovich and his fellow censors, the unpredictability of Mandanipour’s characters is an exasperating phenomenon.

Mandanipour, too, rather loses his grip on his characters towards the end of the book, entering his own narrative in an effort to catch up to them in the manner of a character in a Paul Auster novel. On the whole, such post-modern techniques work well in Censoring an Iranian Love Story, gainfully employed as they tend to be in the business of showing how protean and unpredictable (and anti-totalitarian) fiction can be. However, they do rather overwhelm the novel, with the result that the relationship between Sara and Dara is never particularly interesting. Possibly this is a calculated failure – the ultimate recognition of the power of censorship. If it is, then it must be accounted a success, though that doesn’t make it any more interesting.

Still, this is a timely novel, coming as it does at a point when Iranians are agitating for reform in their country and twenty years after the Ayatollah Khomeini condemned a British author to death for the crime of writing a work of fiction. Funny, I’m struggling to remember the date on which the old bastard sent down his verdict … Ah yes, that’s right: it was Valentine’s Day.

Review of The Testament of Cresseid and Seven Fables, by Robert Henryson and Seamus Heaney (The Weekend Australian)

2009-09-08T01:49:00.002-08:00

Robert Henryson and Seamus Heaney (tr.)
The Testament of Cresseid & Seven Fables
Faber; $35; 183pp

I like contemporary poetry, especially old contemporary poetry. Indeed, the older the contemporary poetry, the better it is, in my opinion. The poet who speaks to us from across the centuries, whose voice continues to echo and resonate, is, by definition, great. Studying literature in the 1990s, I asked a lecturer whom he considered the greatest poet of the twentieth century. He thought about this for a good half a minute, before replying, with all seriousness, ‘Shakespeare’.

Robert Henryson lived long before Shakespeare. Probably born in the 1420s, his death is recorded by William Dunbar in his 1505 poem ‘Lament for the Makars’. ‘Makars’, in this instance, largely refers to the poets of the fifteenth century who wrote in what is now called Middle Scots, at a time when medieval sensibilities were giving way to the Renaissance. However, and as Seamus Heaney writes in his dazzling new translation of Henryson, it is not to fifteenth-century Scotland that his marvellous poetry now belongs but to the ‘eternal present of the perfectly pitched’.

Containing both the original text and Heaney’s virtuoso rendering, The Testament of Cresseid & Seven Fables gives a good introduction to Henryson’s oeuvre, which comprises three major narrative poems as well as a number of shorter lyrics. The fables alone provide ample evidence of Henryson’s ability to combine ‘the homely and the homiletic’ (as Heaney puts it in his introduction), while The Testament of Cresseid takes a classical subject and injects it with a level of psychological realism quite staggering for a late medieval poem. Drawing on Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, which describes the Trojan warrior’s love for and ultimate betrayal by his lover, Henryson takes the story further. Cresseid having been betrayed in her turn, she returns home to her father Calchas, there to begin her recuperation. However, she rebukes the gods for her plight and is punished with a dose of leprosy, living out her final days as a beggar in a leper colony. One day, Troilus happens by and lays eyes on his former muse. The description of subliminal recognition that follows is quite wonderful:

Na wonder was, suppois in mynd that he
Tuik hir figure sa sone – and lo, now quhy:
The idole of ane thing in cace may be
Sa deip imprentit in the fantasy
That it deludis the wittis outwardly,
And sa appeiris in forme and lyke estait
Within the mynde as it was figurait.

No wonder then if in his mind he promptly
Received the likeness of her – this is why:
The image of a thing by chance may be
So deeply printed in the memory
That it deludes what’s in the outer eye,
Presenting a form similar and twinned
To that which had been shaped within the mind.

As you can see from this example, the Middle Scots is not entirely opaque, though difficult enough to demand translation. Since poetry is sometimes characterised as that which largely defies translation, the writer who resolves to take the job on must possess enormous skill. It helps, of course, if he’s a poet himself, and that Heaney is not just a poet but a great one not only makes him uniquely sensitive to what Henryson is trying to achieve but also means that he has the technique to pull his poetry into a new shape. That he has shown a genius for translation in the past does nothing to dent our confidence in him. His version of the Old English poem Beowulf is, for mine, a great translation – one that completely refreshed my sense of the richness of the English language.

The Scots presents certain technical difficulties. For one thing, Henryson’s backwards syntax means that Heaney must rewrite many rhymes in order to update the grammar. Thus, the following description of Saturn,

The ice-schoklis that fra his hair doun hang
Was wonder greit, and as ane speir als lang

becomes, in Heaney’s reworked version,

And lo too, and behold! Down from his hair
Hung icicles as long as any spear.

Another problem Heaney has to deal with is the unfamiliar vocabulary. Fortunately, his word-hoard is large enough to cope with the demand for fresh expressions and even to reproduce, in part, the alliteration in the original. Since this alliteration has an emphatic function rather than an onomatopoeic one, Heaney will often change the consonant repeated in the earlier poem. Thus, ‘Fell is thy fortoun, wickit is thy weird’ becomes, ‘Your fate will doom you, destiny destroy’, while the ‘loggerand leggis’ and ‘harsky hyde’ of the eponymous toad in ‘The Toad and the Mouse’, become, ‘Her lanky wobbly legs and wattled hide’. To do this once or twice would be something. To do it in almost every stanza of a fifty-page poem is something else.

‘Henryson is a poet whom you read not only for the story’, writes Heaney in his introduction, ‘but for the melody of understanding in the storytelling voice.’ We are fortunate to have a modern poet both sensitive and technically skilful enough to reproduce that voice for us.

Review of In Search of Civilization, by John Armstrong (Sydney Morning Herald)

2009-09-08T01:47:00.001-08:00

John Armstrong, In Search of Civilization: Remaking a Tarnished Idea
Allen Lane; $35; 197pp

Historically, the concept of civilization has tended to keep disreputable company. Pressed into service by politicians in order to justify colonial expansion, invoked by capital-letter moralists intent on protecting the status quo, ‘civilization’ frequently masks a multitude of historical sins. Consequently, in recent decades, the concept has fallen out of favour, at least amongst the intelligentsia. The terrorist attacks of 2001 did nothing to improve this state of affairs. Indeed, the fact that the attacks themselves and the subsequent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were described as a clash of civilizations or a battle for civilization itself served to reinforce the suspicion that the concept of civilization is deficient. ‘You can’t say civilization don’t advance,’ said the American actor and humorist Will Rogers in December 1929, ‘for in every war they kill you in a new way.’ Such brutal cynicism looks entirely at home in the opening decade of the twenty-first century.

For John Armstrong, this is a source of regret. In his new book In Search of Civilization, he seeks to ‘remake’ (as his subtitle has it) the ‘tarnished idea’ of civilization. Whether a tarnished idea needs remaking or just a bit of spit and polish is a question we should bear in mind, not because the muddled metaphor points to any stylistic inadequacy (though Armstrong can be an awkward writer) but because it’s never entirely clear whether our author is remaking an idea or simply dusting off an old one.

The book is divided into four main sections, each of which enlarges upon a particular idea of civilization and subjects it to analysis. Briefly stated, these four ideas are: shared values, religion, language etc.; economic and political development; the sophisticated pursuit of pleasure; and intellectual and artistic excellence. Armstrong himself is not attached to any one idea in particular but favours a more sophisticated notion of civilization that draws upon all four.

His method is thus to bring together what look to be opposing ideas and suggest that they are mutually beneficial. The underlying opposition – the one that comes up time and again – is described in the phrase ‘the paradox of freedom’, which is very like ‘the freedom paradox’ anatomised by Professor Clive Hamilton in his 2008 book of that name. This is the idea that spiritual prosperity has not kept pace with material prosperity, with the result that modern man is alienated, bereft of either meaning or happiness. Unlike Professor Hamilton, however, Armstrong regards material prosperity as essential to the pursuit of spiritual prosperity and the relationship between the two as the key to genuine civilization. They are locked together in a ‘mutual enhancement’.

I find myself in sympathy with this view but not entirely convinced by it. For one thing, Armstrong’s advocacy of material/spiritual civilization raises the spectre of unequal access. By adopting Matthew Arnold’s notion of the upper-class ‘barbarian’ – the aristocrat who declines to pursue ‘the best that has been thought and said’ – Armstrong avoids the charge of elitism. But the Philosopher in Residence at the Melbourne Business School, having committed himself to a materialist view, cannot quite escape its logical end-point, which is that the materially rich are, potentially at least, more civilized than the materially poor.

Moreover, the book is Eurocentric. Turning his attention to art and culture in the fourth and final part of the book, Armstrong concentrates almost exclusively on European artefacts. The effect of this is to undermine his recommendation earlier in the book that loyalty to ‘the community of civilized people’ should come to replace, or at least to augment, loyalty to one’s own civilization. That Islamic civilization is not mentioned once strikes me as particularly strange, especially given Armstrong’s ambition to rescue the concept of civilization from misuse in the political sphere.

Armstrong makes some interesting points and his use of literary sources to support them is never less than fascinating. But his book is rather less original than its ungainly subtitle would have us believe. The idea of civilization it puts forward is less a remaking, in my opinion, than a slightly clumsy restoration.

Review of Catalin Avramescu's An Intellectual History of Cannibalism (The Weekend Australian, 25/07/2009)

2009-07-26T22:57:00.003-08:00

Catalin Avramescu, An Intellectual History of Cannibalism
Translated by Alistair Ian Blyth
PUP; $55.95; 350pp

It’s a funny thing, this business of coincidence. On the very day that Catalin Avramescu’s An Intellectual History of Cannibalism was thrown against the side of my house by an overburdened postal worker, the website Arts and Letters Daily linked to a story in the London Observer, the subject of which was a recent discovery of a Neanderthal jawbone in southwest France. This jawbone, it appears, had been butchered by humans: cut marks consistent with those found on deer bones suggested the use of stone cutting tools. For Fernando Rozzi, of the National Centre for Scientific Research in Paris, the find was nothing short of momentous: ‘For years, people have tried to hide away from the evidence of cannibalism, but I think we have to accept it took place.’

Rozzi’s comments notwithstanding, the suggestion that early humans were cannibals is unlikely to cause any real apprehension in a public largely reconciled to the scientific view of life. In the not-too-distant past, however, the discovery of the butchered jawbone and the implications that flow from it would have had enormous consequences for our view of the world and of ourselves. But how did this shift in our thinking take place? How did the cannibal go from being a powerful figure of otherness to a scientific curiosity? In so far as this question is a philosophical one, Avramescu’s book attempts to answer it.

It is thus the story of a slow extinction, not of a species but of an idea. Avramescu’s cannibal is a theoretical creature, one that challenges and qualifies particular lines of philosophical enquiry. Once a widely recognised symbol of the boundaries of civilisation – one that throws the very idea of civilisation into relief – the cannibal is now, argues Avramescu, one of the ‘great forgotten figures of philosophy’. The image of man in a state of nature has ceased to serve as the philosophical backcloth against which modern man takes the stage, with the result that the cannibal has ceased to haunt the audience’s imagination.

An assistant professor of political science at the University of Bucharest, Avramescu shows how the cannibal makes frequent appearances in ancient literature, usually as a sort of quasi-monster of which the dog-headed cynocephalus is only the most exotic example. However, it was the discovery of the Americas and the subsequent explosion of travel literature – much of it highly sensationalised – that caused the cannibal firmly to enter the collective western imagination. It is easy to imagine the effect that this literature had on discussions of natural law, on which civil law was assumed by many to be morally and philosophically founded. If it is true that morality is innate, that our knowledge of moral norms is inborn, then how does one account for the cannibal? Is he subhuman, or merely a pervert? If neither, then what does that tell us about ourselves? Thus does the cannibal, argues Avramescu, expose the law of nature in two ways: ‘first of all negatively, as a deviation from it, and then positively, as the representative of it. The paradox is the royal road whereby the cannibal enters the history of philosophy.’

Needless to say, he also enters the history of theology. Indeed, he raises important questions about the nature of God Himself. Should the cannibal prove amenable to religion, ‘then this would obviously illustrate the general and benevolent will of God’. Should he prove unamenable to it then that would seem to suggest that God has earmarked some of his creations for sin. Of course, these issues did not exist in isolation from the world of events. They were employed in order to justify or attack the notion of natural slavery by which Europeans sought to subjugate and treat as chattel colonised peoples. Furthermore, the debate about cannibalism also served to throw certain teachings of official religion into relief, in particular the concept of transubstantiation by which the bread and wine of the Eucharist are said to become the body of Christ. Could it not be said, argued some, that Christians were in fact no better than cannibals?

Avramescu takes a thematic approach, the effect of which is to make his argument difficult, and at times impossible, to follow. Shuffling the pack of Hobbes, Locke, Montaigne, Rousseau and many others, he leaves the reader impressed but confused and, for that reason, on his guard against philosophical sleight-of-hand. Then there is the problem of his prose – a rather bland accompaniment to what is, or should be, a juicy subject. ‘Because the presence of the cannibal results in the material absence of other men, the anthropophagus plays the role of a negative operator in the political arithmetic of population.’ This is not a picturesque style. Indeed, it’s trying very hard not to be a style at all. After 350 pages of it I was ready to throw myself out of the window, thereby reducing the political arithmetic of population by precisely one.

Style is the physiognomy of the soul, and the style in this instance is only the reflection of a far more worrying aspect of this book: its indebtedness to postmodern theory. Clearly enamoured of Michel Foucault, An Intellectual History of Cannibalism is more than a little reminiscent of his pitiful Madness and Civilization. (Foucault begins with the Ship of Fools, Avramescu with the ‘raft of cannibals’.) Just as in the latter book Foucault seems to regret that insanity has gone from being a sign of otherness to something that can and should be cured, so in Avramescu’s book the pre-Enlightenment cannibal is seen as something beneficial to mankind’s ‘moral imagination’. The cannibal is ‘a subversive image of the subversion of the moral order’ and his disappearance from philosophical discourse is, for that reason, to be regretted. But the cannibal (as our author well knows) has also been invoked historically to justify horrendous crimes. That anthropophagy is now the preserve of scientists in southwest France and not of the moral imagination strikes me as a sign of progress.

Avramescu makes some interesting points in An Intellectual History of Cannibalism and his knowledge of philosophy is obviously profound. But his central idea that the world is worse off without the ‘radical alterity’ of the cannibal borders on the preposterous. I’m afraid that not even fava beans and a nice Chianti can induce me to swallow it.

Review of Margaret Drabble's The Pattern in the Carpet (The Weekend Australian, 11/07/2009)

2009-07-26T22:40:00.005-08:00

Margaret Drabble
The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History with Jigsaws
Atlantic Books; $49.95; 350pp

‘It isn’t an art. It isn’t a hobby. It isn’t even a craft.’ Thus does Margaret Drabble describe the recreation of the jigsaw puzzler in her delightful book The Pattern in the Carpet, which could itself be negatively described as not an autobiography, not a history of jigsaw puzzles, and not a meditation on life, the universe and everything. I imagine it’s the kind of book that people who work in bookshops fear, not because it’s hard to sell but rather because it’s hard to find. Perhaps there should be a special section for authors who take a hobby or pastime as the starting point for personal reminiscence or philosophical speculation. ‘Hmm let’s see’, says your local bookseller, running his finger from right to left: ‘Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. Simon Garfield, The Error World. Ah yes, here we are! Margaret Drabble, The Pattern in the Carpet. You’ll like it. It’s about …’

What is it about? Drabble never explains her title but I suspect it comes from Thomas Hardy, who wrote, in 1882,

As, in looking at a carpet, by following one colour a certain pattern is suggested, by following another colour, another; so in life the seer should watch that pattern among general things which his idiosyncrasy moves him to observe …

The ‘colour’ that Drabble’s ‘idiosyncrasy’ moves her to observe in this instance is her love of and interest in jigsaw puzzles. But – and this is Hardy’s point – in exploring that particular topic, a larger pattern suggests itself, a pattern combining childhood memories, England’s changing social landscape, questions of taste and authenticity, and a pervasive existential anxiety. In particular, it allows the author to explore her relationship with Phyllis Bloor, her mother’s younger and only sister, to whom the book is dedicated. (It was with Bloor, or Aunty Phyl, that Drabble began to do jigsaws in earnest.) And, of course, there’s the fact that Drabble, like Hardy, happens to be a novelist.

This contrast – one might almost say conflict – between the novelist and the jigsaw enthusiast lies at the heart of The Pattern in the Carpet. For there is, is there not, a sense in which jigsaws are antithetical to creativity. More often than not, a jigsaw puzzle is a disassembled work of art. The artist reinterprets reality; the puzzler merely reassembles the artist’s reinterpretation. Moreover, artists, like high-end novelists, tend to work from the inside out, not, like the puzzler, from the outside in. They begin, as Hardy implies, with the particular, discovering the limits of their subject as they go. By contrast, puzzlers begin with the borders and work to a predetermined design.

So what is a writer of literary fiction doing in such a neighbourhood? The first answer is the obvious one: she’s taking a break from literary fiction. Drabble likes doing jigsaw puzzles because, as she says, they can’t be done badly. By contrast, ‘The novel is formless and frameless’ and can be done very badly indeed. Needless to say, there’s an irony here which has to do with the fact that Drabble has sought to explore her jigsaw habit with the very tools from which it is an escape. But the fact withstands the irony. For Drabble, jigsaws are a vacation from the verbal.

The Pattern in the Carpet, Drabble tells us, was conceived as the sort of potted history that one might find in a museum gift shop. Having morphed into something altogether different, the book retains this historical element, though there is, I should say, nothing potted about it: the evolution of the jigsaw is explored in detail. One of Drabble’s principal findings is that this evolution had as much to do with education as it did with fun. The first jigsaws were dissected maps, composed not of interlocking pieces but rather of county or country-shaped chunks. Drawing on an impressive range of sources, Drabble traces the jigsaw’s development from an amusing educational tool to an incidentally educational amusement, proving, as she goes, that the jigsaw puzzle can be a source of aesthetic illumination. One would have to get awfully close to, say, Bruegel’s Children’s Games, and stare at it for a very long time, in order to gain the kind of insights that Drabble has clearly gained about it, simply by reassembling it one piece at a time.

About halfway through The Pattern in the Carpet, Drabble has a jigsaw epiphany. In London to visit the British Museum, a taxi driver convinces her to widen her search to include mosaics. The result is a starburst of associations. Tapestries, the restoration of churches, the physical remnants of the True Cross, the Earth’s tectonic plates, the Big Bang – all seem to fall within her brief. So too, indeed, do people themselves, composed as their characters are of experiences, which, if they could only be recovered, might allow us to piece them together rather as one pieces together a puzzle. To what extent, Drabble seems to be asking, can people be reconstituted in words?

It is here, of course, that Drabble’s enthusiasm for those herniated cardboard squares melds with her creative life. As I’ve said, the book is dedicated to Phyllis Bloor, the author’s aunt, and Drabble’s aim is to give this woman – a peculiar mix of stoicism and complaint – a literary afterlife. In so doing, she hopes to recover her own childhood, and, indeed, the vanished England against which it was, as it were, played out. ‘I see some of those childhood scenes at Bryn [Bloor’s house] in bright colours and clear blocks, like the large pieces of a child’s wooden jigsaw.’ Past times and pastime come together. Referring to the dissected maps from which the modern jigsaw derives, Drabble blends them beautifully, with a little help from A. E. Housman: ‘The “lost county” is a recurrent motif in jigsaw lore. It is the little land of lost content.’

That other great poet, Philip Larkin, wrote: ‘At death, you break up: the bits that were you / Start speeding away from each other for ever / With no one to see.’ It is one of high art’s highest aims to provide a stay against such oblivion. Perhaps this, and not the jigsaw puzzle, is what The Pattern in the Carpet is really about.