FEBRUARY 2007 £3.

00

THE WORLDLY EDITH WHARTON

Tennessee Williams’s Journal ★ Beaumarchais’s Seville
Hitchcock’s Music ★ More Mitford Letters
9 770144 436041

Jonathan Keates on Garibaldi

Paul Johnson on Talleyrand
Anne Somerset on Cromwell
Leslie Mitchell on Walpole
INTERVIEW WITH DORIS LESSING
02

The Adventures of Leo Africanus

The Great War in Africa
The Books We Take to War
HOW TO LIVE FOREVER
FICTION: Norman Mailer ★ Irène Némirovsky ★ Walter Mosley ★ Rachel Seiffert
 FROM THE PULPIT
C YRIL C ONNOLLY WAS always J EREMY
fascinated by the ways in which
writers scraped a living. Shortly
after the end of the war he sent a
questionnaire to various eminent
WRITE OR PUBLISH?
authors asking them what jobs or
means of earning money were most compatible with the
literary life, and published their answers in Horizon.
Connolly himself recommended a rich wife: a common
ideal among his less worldly contributors was a job, prefer-
ably manual, which wasn’t too exhausting, left the mind
free, and didn’t compete with the business of writing.
Wood-turning and vegetable-growing were among those
mentioned, I seem to remember. None suggested a job in
publishing, so confirming Connolly’s own belief that the
enemy of promise was not so much the pram in the hall as
work in what he termed ‘cultural diffusion’ – publishing,
journalism, broadcasting, the British Council and other
agreeable, convivial and literate activities which brought
one into contact with writers and could all too easily
become a substitute for writing itself.
Despite such warnings, publishing houses inevitably
include among their staff an above-average number of
would-be wr iters, part-time wr iters and wr iters
manqués. Every now and then one of them moves to the
other side of the desk, and becomes a full-time writer –
myself among them. Most of them, no doubt, had gone
into publishing for reasons which Cyril Connolly would
have found deeply suspect. Forty years ago, when I was
looking for my first job, I assumed that all publishers
were rather like the late Colin Haycraft of Duckworth:
bespectacled, articulate, immensely well-read characters
with double firsts from Oxford and a good line in cor-
duroy jackets and colourful bow-ties.
I eventually landed a very junior job in the publicity
department at Collins, and I soon realised how miscon-
ceived I had been. There were plenty of literate, well-
read individuals working as editors, Philip Ziegler and
Richard Ollard among them, but the salesmen ruled the
roost; and although the formidable Billy Collins was a
product of Harrow and Magdalen, he was no more of a
literary or academic type than Allen Lane or Jonathan
Cape, neither of whom had much in the way of formal
education, and was far happier haranguing the reps or
moving Collins titles to the front of the pile in book-
shops than discussing new trends in poetry with John
Lehmann or lit crit with F R Leavis.
From there I moved on to André Deutsch, where more
salutary lessons were learned. Like all the best publishers,
he was shrewd, parsimonious, had a good nose for a
book, and was adept at picking other people’s brains. The
literary side of publishing – reading and assessing works
offered to the firm, and then knocking them into shape –
he could safely leave to Diana Athill and others; and it
formed only part of his job, competing for his time with
the demands of printers, binders, papermakers, literary
1
L EWIS agents, booksellers, wholesalers,
librarians, libel lawyers and literary
editors. He was workaholic,
monomaniacal and possessed of
just the right amount of tunnel
vision – all qualities that distin-
guish the publisher proper from the mere editor.
The great publisher has to have something of the actor
about him, able to simulate (and yet at the same time
genuinely feel, if for an instant only) overpowering
enthusiasm, excitement, rage and disappointment, as the
occasion demands. ‘This is the most amazing book I
have taken on in my entire publishing career,’ he will
declare, and he will believe it for the next six months at
least. What made Tom Maschler the most brilliant pub-
lisher of our time, apart from stylishness and a feeling for
the spirit of the age, was his ability to persuade his col-
leagues, and then his salesmen, and then the world at
large, that all his geese were swans, and that Cape books
were synonymous with both excitement and distinction.
However much the editor-cum-writer manqué may enjoy
his work, he almost always has one eye on the clock and
one foot in the door; and however much he may admire
the authors whose books he edits, he is hard-pressed to
indulge in the wholehearted suspensions of disbelief that
distinguish the genuine publisher from his more apathetic
and less driven colleagues. The most extreme example of
the editor as Doubting Thomas was the poet and critic D J
Enright, my colleague at Chatto for many years. Dennis
thought that only a handful of books deserved to be pub-
lished in any one year, and since he completely lacked the
competitive spirit so essential to the successful publisher, he
didn’t mind whether we or Faber or Secker or Cape pub-
lished the few titles he thought worth taking on. A firm
run by Enrights would soon die from inanition, publishing
far too few books to cover the overheads, let alone make a
profit; and since literary men employed by publishers tend
to steer clear of the business side of things, this might not
occur to them until it was too late.
T S Eliot of Faber was the most famous writer-pub-
lisher of recent years; others included C Day Lewis and
Andrew Motion at Chatto, Graham Greene and J B
Pr iestley at The Bodley Head, Nigel Nicolson at
Weidenfeld, and Diana Athill and Nicolas Bentley at
Deutsch. They provided useful contacts, they looked
good on the notepaper in the days when directors’
names were still listed there, and they could be invoked
to impress or overawe recalcitrant authors: ‘I would like
you to meet Professor Enright,’ Norah Smallwood
would declare, summoning the sage from his lair with a
peremptory blast on the internal telephone. Although
some of the most interesting books of the last century
were published by part-time writer-publishers like
Leonard Woolf, John Lehmann and Alan Ross, publishing
and writing call for very different attitudes and abilities.
They are not easily combined in a single individual.
LITERARY REVIEW February 2007

THIS MONTH’S PULPIT is written by
Jeremy Lewis. His most recent
book, Penguin Special: The Life and
Times of Allen Lane, is available in
paperback from Penguin. He is cur-
rently working on a book about the
Greene family for Jonathan Cape.
J ONATHAN K EATES ’s most recent
book, The Siege of Venice, is pub-
lished by Chatto & Windus.
ANNE SOMERSET’s book The Affair
of the Poisons is available in Phoenix
paperbacks. She is currently working
on a biography of Queen Anne.
SAUL DAVID is the author of Zulu and
Victoria’s Wars. He is writing a history
of the British Army, and was recently
appointed Visiting Professor of Military
History at the University of Hull.
L UCY W OODING is a lecturer in
Early Modern History at King’s
College London, and the author of
Rethinking Catholicism in Reformation
England (OUP).
LESLIE MITCHELL is Emeritus Fellow
of University College, Oxford. His
most recent publications include a life
of Bulwer-Lytton and a study of the
Whig Party entitled The Whig World.
GILLIAN TINDALL’s books include The
Man Who Drew London: Wenceslaus
Hollar in Reality and Imagination, and,
most recently, The House by the Thames,
and the People Who Lived There.
P J KAVANAGH’s Collected Poems was
published in 1992, the year he won
the Cholmondeley Award for poetry.
His most recent collection is
Something About (Carcanet).
M ICHAEL J ACOBS ’s most recent
book, Ghost Train Through the Andes:
On my Grandfather’s Trail in Chile and
Bolivia, is published by John Murray.
Contributing Editors: ALAN RAFFERTY, SEBASTIAN SHAKESPEARE
LITERARY REVIEW February 2007
CONTENTS
PULPIT 1 J EREMY L EWIS
HISTORY 4 S AUL D AVID Tip & Run: The Untold Tragedy of the
Great War in Africa Edward Paice
6 J ONATHAN K EATES Garibaldi: Invention of a Hero Lucy Riall
8 A LLAN M ASSIE Forgotten Wars: The End of Britain’s Asian
Empire Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper
9 J A N E R I D L E Y Mrs Duberly’s War: Journal and Letters from
the Crimea, 1854–6 (Ed) Christine Kelly
10 JEREMY PATERSON Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient
Civilizations Martin Goodman
LITERARY LIVES 12 GILLIAN TINDALL Edith Wharton Hermione Lee
14 RICHARD GRAY Notebooks Tennessee Williams
16 MICHAEL JACOBS Beaumarchais in Seville Hugh Thomas
17 BERNARD O’DONOGHUE Lives and Legacies: TS Eliot Craig Raine
18 WILLIAM PALMER Edgar Allan Poe and the Murder of Mary
Rogers Daniel Stashower
INTERVIEW 20 JESSICA MANN TALKS TO DORIS LESSING
NUNS & MONKS 22 MARY KENNY Nuns: A History of Convent Life Silvia Evangelisti
23 BRENDAN WALSH An Infinity of Little Hours Nancy Klein Maguire
BIOGRAPHY 24 PAUL JOHNSON Talleyrand: Betrayer and Saviour of France Robin Harris
26 ANNE SOMERSET Thomas Cromwell: The Rise and Fall of Henry
VIII’s Most Notorious Minister Robert Hutchinson
27 LESLIE MITCHELL The Great Man, Sir Robert Walpole:
Scoundrel, Genius and Britain’s First Prime Minister Edward Pearce
28 LUCY WOODING Edward VI: The Lost King of England Chris Skidmore
FOREIGN PARTS 30 J ASON G OODWIN Trickster Travels: In Search of Leo
Africanus, A Sixteenth-Century Muslim Between Worlds
Natalie Zemon Davis
32 S ARA W HEELER The Long Exile: A True Story of Deception
and Survival amongst the Inuit of the Canadian Arctic Melanie McGrath
33 N ORMAN S TONE Realm of the Black Mountain: A History of
Montenegro Elizabeth Roberts
LETTER FROM BASRA 34 PATRICK HENNESSEY
Editor: NANCY SLADEK
Deputy Editor: TOM FLEMING
Editor-at-Large: JEREMY LEWIS
Editorial Assistant: PHILIP WOMACK
Business Manager: ROBERT POSNER
Advertising Manager: TERRY FINNEGAN
Classified Advertising: DAVID STURGE
Founding Editor: DR ANNE SMITH
Founding Father: AUBERON WAUGH
Cover illustration by Chris Riddell
Issue no. 340
2
 FEBRUARY 2007

LETTERS & MEMOIRS 36 J W M THOMPSON Decca: The Letters of Jessica Mitford Ed N ORMAN S TONE is Professor of
Peter Y Sussman International Relations at Bilkent
University, Ankara. His The Eastern
37 LIZA CAMPBELL In My Father’s House: Elegy for an Obsessive
Front, 1914–1917 is being reissued
Love Miranda Seymour by Penguin in July.
38 D AVID W ATKIN Grass Seed in June John Martin Robinson
JANE RIDLEY is writing a biography
ART & MUSIC 40 J OHN M C E WEN William Powell Frith: A Painter and His of Kind Edward VII, to be pub-
lished by Chatto & Windus.
World Christopher Wood
41 F RANK M C L YNN Hitchcock’s Music Jack Sullivan DAVID WATKIN is Professor of the
43 P ATRICK O’C ONNOR Somewhere: A Life of Jerome History of Architecture at the
Robbins Amanda Vaill University of Cambridge. His most
recent book is Radical Classicism: The
Architecture of Quinlan Terry (2006).
GENERAL 44 ALEXANDER WAUGH How to Live Forever or Die Trying
He is now writing a book on the
Bryan Appleyard Roman Forum.
45 P J KAVANAGH Selected Poems Derek Mahon
46 F RANCES W ILSON Imagining Childhood Erika Langmuir L IZA C AMPBELL grew up in
47 M I C H A E L B U R L E I G H Time to Emigrate? George Walden Macbeth’s castle. Her funny,
scabrous memoir on the subject,
Title Deeds, is published in paper-
FICTION 48 J OHN D UGDALE Killing Johnny Fry Walter Mosley back this month by Doubleday.
49 PAMELA NORRIS David Golder Irène Némirovsky
50 L INDY B URLEIGH Measuring Time Helon Habila R ICHARD G RAY gave the Lamar
51 CHRISTOPHER HART The Story of Blanche and Marie Per Lectures in the USA this autumn on
the literature of the American South
Olov Enquist
and is currently working on a book
52 SAM LEITH The Castle in the Forest Norman Mailer about the literary and cultural rela-
53 OPHELIA FIELD Afterwards Rachel Seiffert tions between the South and Europe.
54 ANDREW ROBINSON The Peacock Throne Sujit Saraf
Fireproof Raj Kamal Jha G RAHAM H UTCHINGS , former
China Correspondent of the Daily
55 RICHARD GODWIN The Song Before it is Sung Justin Cartwright
Telegraph, is the author of Modern
56 SEBASTIAN SHAKESPEARE The Speed of Light Javier Cercas China: A Companion to a Rising
56 E DMUND G ORDON Imposture Benjamin Markovits Power (Penguin) and Editor of The
57 S IMON B AKER ON F IRST N OVELS Oxford Analytica Daily Brief.

ANDREW ROBINSON is the author of

SILENCED VOICES 59 L UCY P OPESCU
biographies of Satyajit Ray and
CRIME 60 J ESSICA M ANN Rabindranath Tagore, among other
AUDIOBOOK 63 S USAN C ROSLAND books. Formerly literary editor of
CLASSIFIEDS 64 The Times Higher Education
POETRY COMPETITION 62 Supplement, he is now a visiting fel-
low of Wolfson College, Cambridge.
LR BOOKSHOP xx
LR CROSSWORD xx ALEXANDER WAUGH is the author of
LETTERS 58 Time and God, and, most recently,
Fathers and Sons. His life of the one-
armed pianist Paul Wittgenstein will be
published by Bloomsbury next year.

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3
LITERARY REVIEW February 2007
 HISTORY

S AUL D AVID “bow-and-arrow fighting”, or game of “tip and run”, in

Africa’. Such a state of affairs was doubly unnecessary

‘Bow-and-Arrow given that so many top British generals – Kitchener, Haig,

Fighting’
T IP & RUN : T HE U NTOLD T RAGEDY OF THE
G REAT WAR IN A FRICA
★ fighting “mobile”, as opposed to static, wars and dealing
By Edward Paice
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson 488pp £25)
THE DUSTJACKET HERALDS Edward Paice’s new book as
the ‘first’ proper history of the Great War in Africa.
Certainly the fighting in Africa in 1914–18 was long
neglected by historians – until recently that is. One of
the chief merits of Hew Strachan’s brilliant First World
War: To Arms (2002) was the way it underlined the truly
global nature of the Great War by emphasising the
importance of the non-European campaigns in Africa
and elsewhere. He followed this up in 2004 with The
First World War in Africa,
while that same year saw
the publication of Ross
Anderson’s The Forgotten
Front 1914–18: The East
African Campaign.
Yet Tip & Run is undoubt-
edly the most comprehensive
of these recent histor ies.
Paice has visited no fewer
than seventeen archives in
eight different countries, and
covers all aspects of the fight-
ing in sub-Saharan Afr ica
from South Afr ica’s easy
conquest of German South
West Afr ica (moder n Camouflage tactics by the East African Mounted Rifles
Namibia) to Belg ium’s
impressive mobilisation of African troops in the Congo.
Yet inevitably he concentrates on the East African the-
atre, and the extraordinary campaign fought by the
undefeated German commander-in-chief, Paul von
Lettow-Vorbeck. For four years Lettow-Vorbeck defied
an Allied force of 150,000 troops and one million
African porters – more than ten times the size of his
own army – with his hit-and-run tactics. It earned him
the reputation with friend and foe alike as ‘one of the
greatest guerrilla leaders in history’.
It helped that Lettow-Vorbeck was opposed by a succes-
sion of sub-standard Allied generals. Part of the problem,
says Paice, was the ‘dismissive attitude among the British
“top brass” to what they were wont to refer to as the
French, Roberts, Hamilton, Allenby and Smith-Dorrien –
had cut their teeth on the African continent. And yet few
lessons were learnt. ‘It was as if the Anglo-South African
War [of 1899–1902] was an aberration,’ writes Paice. ‘But
the German General Staff studied that same war closely,
with the result that German Schutztruppe commanders and
NCOs in Africa were instructed to become well versed in
with the Sisyphean logistical and medical challenges inher-
ent in such warfare.’
Lettow-Vorbeck’s initial incursion from German into
British East Africa (modern Tanzania to Kenya) in 1914
was not a success. Far more disastrous, however, was the
British response, a bungled attempt to capture the
German port of Tanga by amphibious landing. Despite
outnumbering the defenders two to one, the mainly
Indian expeditionary force was easily repulsed, suffering
more than 800 casualties and leaving behind a huge
stockpile of supplies, including eight machine-guns, 455
rifles, half a million rounds of ammunition, telephone
gear, coats and blankets.
German losses were just 125.
Small wonder the battle was
later described by the official
history as ‘one of the most
notable failures in Br itish
military history’.
In late 1915, after a string
of British reverses, General
Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien
was appointed commander
of Br itish troops in East
Africa. Smith-Dorrien had
extensive exper ience of
Afr ican warfare and was
credited with having ‘saved’
the Br itish Expeditionary
Force at Le Cateau in 1914.
Unfortunately he fell seriously ill on the voyage to
Africa and had to be invalided home. How British for-
tunes would have fared with him at the helm is one of
the great ‘what ifs’ of the East African campaign.
Instead it was left to General Jan Smuts, the Boer War
hero and South African deputy premier, to pick up the
reins. Smuts made good early gains, clearing the border
region of German troops and advancing 250 miles into
German East Africa in six weeks. By September 1916,
following a number of successful amphibious operations,
all of the coastline of German East Africa was in Allied
hands. So sure was Smuts of imminent victory that he
assured the War Office his forthcoming autumn offen-
sive would be ‘final’. It was anything but, and by January

4
LITERARY REVIEW February 2007
 HISTORY

1917 had ground to a halt. Smuts had already relin-

quished command so that he could travel to London for
the Imperial War Conference.
His successors had no more success trying to bring
Lettow-Vorbeck to heel, though by late 1917 they had
managed to pen all German troops into a small corner in
the south-east of the colony. From there Lettow-Vorbeck
chose to invade Portuguese East Afr ica (moder n
Mozambique) rather than surrender, brushing aside a fee-
ble Portuguese defence. Now down to just 300 German
troops and 1,700 askari (African levies), he easily outwit-
ted all Allied attempts to capture him. He was still on the
loose, having just invaded British Northern Rhodesia,
when news finally reached him of the Armistice in
Europe. So cut off was he from reality that for some time
he ‘remained convinced that the conclusion of hostilities
must have been favourable … to Germany’.
Aside from the nuts and bolts of the campaign, Paice
includes many fascinating vignettes: the lengthy and inge-
nious operation to sink the German cruiser Königsberg,
holed up in the Rufiji Delta; the outrageous but ultimately
successful plan to ship two gunboats, Mimi and Toutou,
from Britain to wrest control of Lake Tanganyika back
from the Germans (the subject of a recent book by Giles
Foden); and, most bizarre of all, the German attempt to
resupply Lettow-Vorbeck by Zeppelin (it had covered a
record-breaking 4,340 miles in ninety-five hours before it
was ordered to abandon the mission).
Paice believes the Great War in Africa was far more
significant than has hitherto been acknowledged. He
cites the huge cost of the fighting in East Africa alone
(£70m or £2.8bn in today’s money) and the death toll
of 100,000 men, which ‘equated’ to the number of
British soldiers killed at the Somme. Such statistics are
disingenuous. The actual number of British troops –
European and African – killed in the entire East African
campaign was only 11,189; the vast majority of fatalities
were among porters, who died of disease and overwork.
Therein lies the true tragedy of the campaign – as the
author duly acknowledges.
Yet Paice is right to stress that all the combatants –
Germany, South Africa, India, Belgium, Portugal and,
after 1916, even Britain – viewed the East Africa cam-
paign as one of huge importance for the future of
empire. One British newspaper editor even went as far
as saying that ‘to the German, Africa is the key conti-
nent of the world. Its owners will possess the balance of
power between the old world and the new’.
Paice’s fine book is a worthy tribute to the men who
fought and died in this fascinating, yet much neglected,
theatre of the Fir st World War. Exhaustively
researched, well written and admirably balanced, it
proves the old adage that the real victims of war are not
soldiers but civilians.
To order this book at £20, see LR Bookshop on page 30

LITERARY REVIEW February 2007

 HISTORY

J ONATHAN K EATES Italy’s first railway by Francis’s father, Ferdinand II.

Having decisively crushed the royal army on the river

RISORGIMENTO PALADIN Volturno, Garibaldi could have seized control of the

Neapolitan kingdom, suppressing rural unrest and sum-
moning an elected assembly to establish the terms on
G ARIBALDI : I NVENTION OF A H ERO which the Two Sicilies would become part of the new
★ Italian realm under King Victor Emmanuel of Piedmont
By Lucy Riall and his wily premier Camillo Cavour. As it was, the
(Yale University Press 482pp £25) general, mysteriously demoralised, retreated to his farm
on the island of Caprera, while a plebiscite, rigged with
THE SICILIAN WRITER Luigi Pirandello, best known as a the help of the city’s mobsters, bundled Naples and its
dramatist, was also a master of the short story. In one of territories into Piedmontese control. The abruptness of
his tales (many of them set in his native island) a half-mad the process left his followers, the Garibaldini, leaderless
peasant crone, speaking in the last years of the nineteenth and made its own contribution to that ‘problem of the
century, tells of her son, who went to the bad and South’ which has bedevilled Italy ever since.
became a bandit. ‘Is he still alive?’ the narrator asks. ‘No,’ The whole episode, a brilliantly swashbuckling Sicilian
comes the answer, ‘he was killed in the days of the great invasion followed by a bizarre failure to seize the revolu-
chief Cunebardo.’ She doesn’t know anything about this tionary advantages offered him in Naples, reveals the
Cunebardo, save that he came to Sicily, made a lot of Risorgimento paladin at his best and worst. Focused less
noise and went away again. Her interlocutor is puzzled, on the man himself than on the multiple images emerg-
until it finally dawns on him that the old woman is refer- ing from the nineteenth century’s various distillations of
ring to Giuseppe Garibaldi, whose invasion, at the head romantic radicalism, Lucy Riall’s Garibaldi: The Invention
of his famous ‘Thousand’ in 1860, overwhelmed the of a Hero emphasises the readiness of his contemporaries
army of the Bourbon King Francis of Naples and made to indulge his occasional false steps, moments of naiveté
the island part of a united Italy. or sheer human weakness. Devout Catholics, led by the
Pirandello’s story enshrines a classic ambiguity, that Irish Archbishop Cullen, may have viewed him as the
of the hero figure making a species of history with no ultimate Antichrist in his determination to wrest Rome
obvious impact on the lesser folk over whose lands from Papal sovereignty. For Piedmontese politicians he
armies march in the cause of a national destiny. The was the loose cannon they tried vainly to restrain as
expedition of Garibaldi’s Thousand was indeed the his political alienation from the status quo after 1860
kind of adventure which launches whole bookcases of intensified rather than lessened. To almost everyone else
memoirs. Landing at Marsala, the commandos and throughout Europe and America he was a figure of
their red-shirted chief were met with initial indiffer- undiminished glamour, an apparently invincible hero in
ence by the Sicilians. Victory over a superior Bourbon an age whose acquisitive materialism seemed likely to
force at Calatafimi, followed by violent street battles to kill off the breed altogether, or at least turn it into an
gain control of Palermo, induced such panic among endangered species.
the island’s garrisons that in a mere few weeks an entire Just as the Sicilian campaign had depended on skilful
army of 20,000 men had surrendered to Garibaldi’s ill- timing for its success, so Garibaldi’s arrival in Italy from
equipped raiders. South America at the climax of the 1848 revolutions
The chance to mop up resistance on the mainland offered an ideal demonstration of ‘Cometh the hour,
and swoop on Naples itself was irresistible. While local cometh the man’. The mythic avatar of national regen-
peasant uprisings had helped eration might have looked to
Gar ibaldi in Sicily, his certain Italian patriots like
seizure of the Bourbon capi- ‘an obvious charlatan from
tal was made easier by the ten miles away’, but his
dithering and ineptitude of charisma at close quarters
King Francis and his gov- was irresistible. ‘He reminded
er nment, whose eventual MA Degree in Biography us’, said an artist, ‘of nothing
Starting January 2007
retreat from the city before a Appreciate the art of biography while learning the skill in this one or so much as Our Saviour’s
shot had been fired enabled two-year taught MA. The Buckingham MA in Biography was the first head in the galler ies. We
the bearded war r ior to postgraduate programme in this field to be offered in the UK. worshipped him, we could
Course director: Jane Ridley
arrive peaceably by train. not help it.’
Contact: jane.ridley@buckingham.ac.uk or write to her at
Ironically, the line along The University of Buckingham, Buckingham MK18 1EG
Lucy Riall acknowledges
which he travelled from Tel: 01280 814080 the self-conscious theatricality
Salerno had been opened as of Garibaldi’s performance

6
LITERARY REVIEW February 2007
 HISTORY
during the defence of Rome in 1849,
‘a poet’s dream’, as one modern histo-
rian calls it, and the ways in which his
subsequent bitter experience of flight
and exile, darkened yet further by his
wife Anita’s death, clinched his status
as a living martyr for the holy cause
of Italian unity. It was the runaway
print culture of illustrated papers and
cheap book production during the
1850s, however, which glamorised
the rebel as Europe’s guerrilla super-
star. From English novels representing
him as ‘beautiful, proud, frank and
generous’, with a smile ‘like that of a
father blessing his children’, it was
the shortest of steps to a blasphe-
mous engraving of him as Chr ist
Pantocrator, his fingers crooked in
benediction. No wonder the enraged
Catholic hierarchy sought to portray
him as a callous libertine, turning the
heads of innocent Roman nuns.
Women, as Riall’s book continually
demonstrates, played a major role as Garibaldian image-
makers. The hero of Calatafimi was a serial heartbreak-
er, siring several illegitimate offspring, and leaving a
trail of forlorn females across revolutionary Italy. Anita,
had she survived, would surely have had her work cut
out in seeing off groupies like the indefatigable Jessie
White Mario or the enterprising German baroness who
ghosted the general’s memoirs. Even his London hostess
Anne Duchess of Sutherland felt an unrespectable flut-
ter or two during his triumphant 1864 English visit, as
did her elderly mother-in-law. The pair wrote him
despairing letters in French – ‘Have you really not
understood, my General, that I have given you every-
thing I have?’, ‘Can you give me the friendship of your
beautiful spirit?’ etc – but their devotion was as nothing
to that of Mrs Mary Seely, who kept his cigar butt as a
sacred relic and sent him a Stilton cheese. Only Queen
Victoria, always merciless towards anybody who dared
to upstage her, remained unmoved, calling the whole
trip, with its banners, banquets and bouquets, ‘a very
absurd and humiliating exhibition’.
Riall handles this material with gusto, but her more
serious object is to show how Garibaldi himself sought
to draw women effectively into the process of shaping
the new nation. The visit to England had its own impact
on the evolution of British radicalism during the late
1860s and on the issues of franchise-extension and
female suffrage. ‘The myth of Garibaldi’, as Riall says,
‘may not be true, but it was uncommonly effective.’ This
was the greatest communicator of them all, using his
physique, his sexuality and an infinite array of personal
7
graces to show his countrymen how
best they could fit themselves for
being Italian. Unembarrassed by his
legendary status, he gave it a helpful
tweak from time to time, but its fun-
damental authenticity remains solid
against the debunkers.
Armed with an exuberance and
energy worthy of a true Garibaldino
(even managing to date the appear-
ance of the eponymous biscuit and
to trace Nottingham Forest’s football
strip to the general’s red shirt), Lucy
Riall gives us a book which is about
rather more than the myriad fan-
tasies projected onto the most
famous of Italy’s nation-builders, a
work with inevitable resonances for
our own age of celebrity-chasing
and willing enslavement to the
media. Her historical argument is
made more compelling by a lucid,
athletic and continuously engaging
prose style. We are only a month or
so into 2007, but I have no hesitation in naming this
among my books of the year.
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are in financial difficulties due to
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LITERARY REVIEW February 2007
 HISTORY
A LLAN M ASSIE
RULES OF ENGAGEMENT
F ORGOTTEN WARS : T HE E ND OF B RITAIN ’ S
A SIAN E MPIRE
★ Not so Malaysia and Singapore. There the late Empire
By Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper
(Allen Lane / The Penguin Press 672pp £30)
Forgotten Wars is the sequel to the same authors’ Forgotten
Armies, which told the story of our war against Japan in the
East. Like its predecessor, published in 2004, this new book
is very detailed, the fruit of vast research, not always easy to
read. Though it comes from a general publisher one would
suppose that its main readership will be among academics.
Old Asian hands may buy it, read in it, mutter disapproval
quite often, but probably not read it from cover to cover.
That is quite an undertaking, and it requires a considerable
effort to keep track of the hundreds of characters, some of
them going at different times under different names.
The subtitle, if not positively misleading, nevertheless
may arouse expectations the book doesn’t satisfy. For most
of us the principal event in the dissolution of empire was
the granting of independence to India, but far more of the
book is devoted to Burma and Malaya; even Indonesia, not
a British colony, receives almost as much attention as India,
while the chapter ‘1947 – At Freedom’s Gate’ deals almost
as much with Burma as with the partition of India and the
creation of the two states of India and Pakistan. Their
treatment of the scuttle from India is at times glib: ‘Wavell’s
martial paternalism and decency gave way to Mountbatten’s
breezy realism.’ ‘Breezy realism’ – not how everyone would
describe Mountbatten’s handling of what was admittedly a
very difficult business. It would have been good to have an
assessment of the responsibility of Mountbatten and the
Labour Government for the communal violence and mas-
sacres that followed their decision to pull out of India as
quickly as possible. The fact is that partition was only final-
ly decided on in late April 1947, four months before the
handover. Bayly and Harper do say this was done ‘with
almost indecent haste’; they might well have gone further.
‘The old Indian Army remained aloof from the mayhem
that broke out between March and October 1947’, but if it
had been required to supervise a transfer of population
before the new states came into being, some of that may-
hem might have been avoided. They quote one officer,
Lt-Col Mahommed Siddiq MC of the 7th Sikh regiment,
who said, ‘I am a most disappointed person today … A
fine machine [the Indian Army] is being disintegrated to
satisfy some of the so-called politicians.’
Still, whatever the horrors of their birth, the states of India
and Pakistan may be judged to have been to some degree
successful – especially India; though Pakistan of course was
8
LITERARY REVIEW February 2007
itself to be divided when East Pakistan seceded to become
Bangladesh. Burma, brought to independence by the rev-
olutionary Aung San, commander of the Japanese-tolerated
Burma Independence Army, has been an unmitigated
disaster. Could this be because its history within the Empire
was so short and British institutions never took root there?
Burma today is near the top of the league of failed states.
achieved its last victory: the defeat of the Communist-
inspired insurgency. The ‘Emergency’, as it was known,
lasted for most of the post-war decade, and, as our authors
say, it was defeated – partly by the security measures
adopted by the British Army under the command of
General Sir Gerald Templar but also, and perhaps princi-
pally, because the British secured the support of conserva-
tive Malay and Chinese interests. This was no mean feat.
Certainly not one matched anywhere else by European
empires faced with colonial demands for independence,
though the French came close to pulling off the same trick
in Algeria. That Malaysia and Singapore now rank among
the developed states of the world is the legacy of this
achievement. It would have been good to have a fuller
assessment of the part played by Malcolm MacDonald (son
of Ramsay), Governor-General 1946–48, then
Commissioner-General of South East Asia, 1948–55. My
father, a rubber planter in Malaya from 1926 to the middle
Fifties (except for his years in a Japanese POW camp), held
MacDonald in high regard, and thought he deserved more
credit than any other British politician or administrator for
the comparatively smooth transition from Empire to
Independence. One wonders how matters might have
gone in India if MacDonald, rather than Mountbatten,
had succeeded Wavell.
There was never any real chance that the European
empires in the East could be fully re-established after the
war with Japan; and it is surely to Britain’s credit that we
realised, and accepted this, so quickly. The essential prob-
lem was how to achieve the transition, how to leave
behind coherent states and a capable administration. We
brought this off in Malaysia, and failed in Burma. Bayly
and Harper follow the tortuous path with skill, and usually
with good sense. If I think they sometimes underestimate
the general and early acceptance by most of the British
involved – politicians, civil servants, soldiers, planters and
merchants – that independence was inevitable, and that the
real question was how the transition should be managed,
they will doubtless think this view evidence of post-impe-
rial complacency. All I can say is that this is what I was
brought up to believe by those who had been there at the
time; and though the authors do provide ample evidence
of reactionary views and of the persistence of racist atti-
tudes, nevertheless I still believe that the manner, as well as
the fact, of our disengagement from Empire remains
something we can be proud of.
To order this book at £24, see LR Bookshop on page 30
 HISTORY
J ANE R IDLEY
CHILBLAINS & PETTICOATS
M RS D UBERLY ’ S WAR : J OURNAL AND
L ETTERS FROM THE C RIMEA , 1854–6
★ far superior are the French to us in every way!’ Fanny
Edited by Christine Kelly
(Oxford University Press 355pp £16.99)
F ANNY D UBERLY WAS the horse-loving wife of a
Victorian cavalry officer. When the Crimean War broke
out in 1854 she was twenty-six, cheerful, childless and
strong-minded. She was among the handful of officers’
wives who sailed with their husbands’ regiments to the
Black Sea. Lord Lucan, who commanded the cavalry,
forbade her from entering the war zone, but Fanny
defied him. She insisted on accompanying her husband
Henry, and she stayed with the army throughout the war.
Fanny kept a journal of the
war, as well as writing letters
home to her family. Her journal
was published in 1855, and it is
reprinted here by Christine Kelly
for the first time, along with her
letters. Because the journal came
out so close to the events it
describes, it is necessarily circum-
spect and pruned of indiscretions.
Her letters are lively and chatty
and far more revealing. This is a
woman’s view of war. Fanny
wasn’t present at all the major
Cr imean battles – she missed
Alma and Inkerman. Although
she witnessed the charge of the
Light Brigade at Balaclava, her
account is disappointing. She
didn’t trust herself to ‘read’ a bat-
tle or descr ibe regimental
manoeuvres in the way a man
might. But she is excellent on the management of the
war, and she gives a vivid picture of what it felt like to be
with the army throughout the campaign.
Fanny’s husband Henry was paymaster to the Eighth
Hussars, and for the Duberlys the Crimean began as a
picnic beside the Black Sea. At Varna, where the regi-
ment disembarked, Fanny’s journal chronicles a blissful
riding holiday which turned to nightmare. The regiment
waited here in limbo for three months, and Fanny details
the breakdown of supplies, the cruel treatment of horses
and the callous neglect of the men by Lord Cardigan,
who did nothing as his troops literally rotted, dying like
flies in the heat from cholera.
Worse was to come. Fanny spent the appalling
Crimean winter of 1854–5 in a freezing ship anchored
outside the siege of Sebastopol. The decaying, stinking
bodies floating in the water made her retch, and on the
quay, which was ankle-deep in mud, she stumbled over
the corpses of Turkish soldiers. The incompetence and
mismanagement of the British was scandalous. ‘Oh how
told her sister. The French troops were housed and fed
and clothed, while the British froze in summer uniforms
and died of exposure in the mud. Lord Raglan, the
Commander-in-Chief, was invisible, never visiting his
troops, and he knew nothing of the horrors endured by
the men.
Her sister urged her to come home, but Fanny stuck it
out. She claimed that she couldn’t bear to leave Henry
in case he died. After the corsets and politeness of
England, she found the freedom to ‘go where you like,
do what you like, say what you like’ exhilarating. A fear-
less horsewoman, she rode thousands of miles on her
horse Bob – the importance of
the horse as an agent of
women’s liberation has been
underestimated by desk-bound
feminist historians. Being virtu-
ally the only woman in an army
of men made her a ‘swell’ or
celebrity. In the wooden hut
where she lived with Henry on
shore in the summer of 1855,
she entertained with gusto.
Pretty, flirtatious Fanny was the
life and soul of every party,
fêted by generals and admirals.
She was photog raphed by
Roger Fenton, sitting side-sad-
dle on the faithful Bob, and the
pr int became a pin-up with
officers.
As Fanny was only too well
Duberley: pin-up aware, her social position was
ambivalent. Jealous women cut
her, freezing her out as a brazen trollop. She was friendly
with aristocratic officers such as Lord George Paget, but
as soon as their wives appeared, Fanny was dropped. She
wore men’s trousers too, which broke all the codes of
Victorian respectability. ‘I shall be a sort of Bashi-Basouk
when I get home,’ she wrote, ‘defiant of all laws conven-
tional or fashionable – and then how women will fall
upon me like vultures over a mortally wounded man.’
In fact, Fanny was a faithful wife, devoted to her
husband Henry. She held strong moral views, consider-
ing nursing, for example, as ‘not decent’, especially for
unmarried women, working in hospitals crowded with
men making lewd remarks. (She never met Florence
9
LITERARY REVIEW February 2007
 HISTORY
Nightingale, but she had little time for her.) Even her
famous men’s trousers she wore out of necessity,
not choice. The mud in the Crimea was so deep that
riding in petticoats was an impossibility. She borrowed
a pair of thick men’s boots to keep out the cold, as
her feet were ravaged by chilblains. She was always
smartly dressed, and even when grievously ill, she wor-
ried desperately when a box containing new clothes
went missing.
Fanny sent letters to her sister to publish in the news-
papers back home, and as her fame grew, she found a
publisher for her journal. Edited by her brother-in-law,
Francis Marx, this was a bestseller, but it received some
savage reviews. Punch lampooned her as a frivolous
woman who wrote about the men’s business of war as
though she were going shopping. This was unfair. But it
J EREMY P ATERSON
ETERNAL CITIES
ROME AND J ERUSALEM : T HE C LASH OF
A NCIENT C IVILIZATIONS
★ demonstrates that most Romans and most Jews inhabited a
By Martin Goodman
(Allen Lane / The Penguin Press 638pp £25)
AT THE TOP end of the Sacred Way, as it runs up from
the Forum in Rome, stands the Arch dedicated to Titus,
who in AD 70, as son of the new emperor Vespasian,
brought the war with the Jewish rebels to a bloody
conclusion and razed the Temple in Jerusalem.
Within the arch are reliefs representing the
Roman triumphal procession, with soldiers
carrying as spoils the paraphernalia of the
Temple: the seven-branch candelabrum,
the shewbread table, the incense cups,
and the trumpets, which along with a
copy of the Torah were eventually to
become prize exhibits in Vespasian’s
ironically named Temple of Peace. The
destruction of the Jerusalem Temple was a
defining moment in the history of Judaism.
It was also an exceptional act of the Romans,
who normally did not treat foreign cults in
this way. Far from it – their basic principle The capture of Judaea, c. AD70 tions of sources) that this book, like so many
was that all the peoples included in the
empire should continue to worship as their ancestors had
done. Indeed, the incorporation of new gods was a
strengthening of empire, like adding to one’s insurance
policy; getting ever more gods on one’s side was a vindi-
cation and bolstering of Rome’s right to rule.
Should this be seen as the inevitable culmination of a
10
LITERARY REVIEW February 2007
reveals a deep unease that Fanny had transgressed the
boundaries of the female sphere and pushed her way
into a male preserve where she didn’t belong. In fact,
Fanny was a pioneer, the first woman war reporter, blaz-
ing a path later followed by Lee Miller and Kate Adie.
War and bloodshed didn’t revolt or frighten her; it
thrilled her. Unlike Florence Nightingale or W H
Russell, the famous Times reporter whose uncensored
Crimean copy shocked the Victorian public, Fanny had
no powerful supporters back home. She was an outsider,
and, as her letters show, she was acutely aware of the
issues of gender and class that her ambivalent position
raised. Christine Kelly has written an excellent intro-
duction, and her edition at last gives Fanny Duberly the
recognition that she deserves.
To order this book at £13.59, see LR Bookshop on page 30
clash of cultures? Were ‘all men either Jews or Hellenes’, as
Heine claimed in his lifelong struggle to reconcile his con-
version to Christianity with his Jewish origins? In the first
half of his splendid book, Martin Goodman argues power-
fully that this was not so. By comparing Roman and
Jewish senses of identity and of community, and attitudes
on everything from nudity to government, he amply
shared Graeco-Roman world with little difficulty.
Accommodation was made for recognised differences such
as the Jewish diet and the Sabbath. There was occasional
hostility, but, according to Goodman, Jews were generally
treated with ‘amusement, indifference, acceptance, admira-
tion and emulation’. He offers an outstanding pen portrait
of Herod Agrippa I, a Jew and Roman citizen, the
friend of emperors, who was equally at home
in Jerusalem and in the imperial court
in Rome.
Goodman, Professor of Jewish Studies
at Oxford, is the ideal commentator on
all this. His whole career has combined
study of both the history of the
Classical world and of Judaism. Indeed,
his remarkable breadth of expertise
means that he can be too readily side-
tracked to explain some fascinating detail
of Roman or Jewish life, whether or not it
carries the central argument forward. It is
one of the signs (the other is overlong quota-
produced now, needed a tough editor to
sharpen the focus. Goodman is also fully aware of the
problems of the very concepts of ‘Jewishness’ and
‘Romanness’, which are at the heart of his discussion. It
is difficult to define the ‘Romanness’ shared by, for
example, Cicero, Seneca (Spanish-born but educated at
Rome) and St Paul (a Jew with Roman citizenship from
 HISTORY
“Brooks treats his subject with much subtlety,
solid scholarship, and flexibility of mind.”
—Victor Brombert, author of Trains of Thought
Cilician Tarsus). There is also the problem of ‘which
Jews?’ or ‘which Romans?’. It is far from clear that all the Henry James
attitudes and views discussed were shared across the class-
es. Goodman recognises that in a sense he is constructing Goes to Paris
ideal types. Nevertheless, his argument vindicates his PETER BROOKS
approach, and no one will come away without profit and “Under the guise of simply
pleasure from reading these pages. ‘telling a story’ about the
If, then, the Jewish war and the destruction of the young Henry James’s stay
Temple were not the inevitable culmination of a clash of in Paris in 1875–76,
cultures, why did they happen? The war was probably Peter Brooks describes
unintended on both sides. It broke out as the result of a the progressive emergence
bungled policing action by a Roman governor intended to of the whole of novelistic
stop factional fighting within Judaea. It escalated because modernity during the
Vespasian, recent victor in Rome’s own traumatic civil turn from the nineteenth
to the twentieth century.
wars, needed a big victory to bolster his regime’s reputa-
You have to be, like
tion. The destruction of the Temple was in all probability Brooks, both historian
unintended – the work of troops on the rampage. But once and theorist, a scholar
it had happened, the sacrilegious act needed to be justified both of things French
and so began the claim that the Jewish Temple cult was not and American, to so
worthy to exist and its destruction an act of piety towards masterfully carry out
the traditional gods. For their own reasons Vespasian’s suc- this project.”
cessors continued the policy. When the Jews rose in protest —Philippe Hamon, Professor Emeritus, La Sorbonne Nouvelle
at their treatment, culminating in the Bar Kokhba revolt of Cloth $24.95 £15.95 978-0-691-12954-9 Due April
AD 132–135, they were savagely suppressed (over half a
million dead). Jerusalem became a Roman colony, from
which Jews were excluded, with a new name, Aelia “Lee’s immensely enjoyable study . . . should become
Capitolina; and at its heart was a new temple, but this one essential reading for aficionados of literary biography.”
was dedicated to Jupiter. The final piece of the jigsaw was —Publishers Weekly
added by the growth of the Christian Church. In seeking
to gain security in the Roman world, which was intermit- New in paperback
tently hostile to them, Christians found it in their interests
to distance themselves from their Jewish origins and join in Virginia Woolf ’s
the imperially inspired hatred of the Jews. It started very Nose
early on; the earliest of Christian texts, St Paul’s First Epistle Essays on Biography
to the Thessalonians (2:15), attacks the Jews ‘who both HERMIONE LEE
killed the Lord Jesus, and their own prophets, and have
persecuted us; and they please not God, and are contrary to “Lee’s tales of the battles
all men’. There is a profound lesson in the second half of of the biographers are
gripping and vivid. . . .
Goodman’s book. Anti-Semitism in the Roman Empire
The nose is a funny thing
was largely and decisively the creation of high politics, not anyway; stick it on to
some deep-founded social or cultural phenomenon. ‘Virginia Woolf’ or any
Without the actions of the emperors, such as Titus, other of the illustrious
Vespasian, Trajan, Hadrian, and Constantine, the Jewish names Lee discusses, and
story might have been very different – and (who knows?) you are bound to bring
so might have been world history. them down a peg. All part
Martin Goodman has produced a large, important and of the biographer’s power
very readable book, which makes accessible the fruits of a to make or unmake, sniff
rich body of modern scholarship. The title is no accident. out or sniff at, which Lee so
It is shared by a tract, Rom und Jerusalem, produced by the engagingly shows us.”
erstwhile socialist friend of Marx and Engels, Moses Hess, —Rachel Bowlby, Financial Times
who dreamed that the emergence of a unified Italy might Paper $12.95 £8.50 978-0-691-13044-6 Due April
presage a similar restoration of the ancient Jewish state: Not available from Princeton in the Commonwealth, except Canada
‘The liberation of the Eternal City on the Tiber marks
the emancipation of the Eternal City of Mount Moriah.’
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(0800) 243407 U.K. • 800-777-4726 U.S.
Read excerpts online at press.princeton.edu

LITERARY REVIEW February 2007

 LITERARY LIVES
G ILLIAN T INDALL
THE END OF LOVE
E DITH W HARTON
★ ambitious Lily Barts of life: she disapproved of the suf-
By Hermione Lee
(Chatto & Windus 852pp £25)
IT IS A strange fate for a celebrated writer to be remem-
bered as the friend of a still more famous one. Such, for
a generation after her death in 1937, was Edith
Wharton’s lot. Her novels were out of fashion, indeed
had been consigned to that limbo of all things
‘Victorian’ – ‘prim’, ‘mannered’, ‘violets and old lace’,
etc – by a consciously modern public who simply sup-
posed her books to be like that, from their setting in
old New York, without actually
reading them. Her personal image
was of a large, rich, imperious old
lady who – ah, ha – had seized on
poor Henry James who was too
polite to resist her and bore him off
on wild journeys across France by
chauffeured car. Did not James
himself write piteously to friends of
her ‘unappeasable summons’, and
refer to her as an ‘eagle’ swooping
down on him and as ‘the Angel
Devastation’? And had not others
complained about her bossiness,
her arbitrary changes of plan, her
chilliness to people who did not
measure up to her own high social
or intellectual standards, and her
nineteenth-century assumption
(correct, as it turned out) that her
life would always be well padded
with servants and that this was
her right?
It was, actually, all true, but what Edith: friends in high places
a partial truth. Like all proper writ-
ers, the creator of Undine Spragg and Lily Bart (not to
mention the lower-class Bunner sisters) was a far more
complicated, vulnerable and perceptive person than the
grande dame of posthumous myth. With R W B Lewis’s
sympathetic 1970s biography, the wheel of time had
begun to turn, and since then her best writings (The
House of Mirth, The Custom of the Country, The Age
of Innocence and a number of her shorter novellas and
stories) have delighted a fresh generation of readers who
are free to see her more limpidly in the context of her
own now safely distant times. New editions of these
books and others have been brought out; in recent years
12
LITERARY REVIEW February 2007
two good films have been made.
There has, inevitably, been a downside. The label
‘old-fashioned’ has been replaced, in some quarters, by
simplistic modern interpretations of her life and work.
She has been claimed as a feminist, which she certainly
wasn’t, in spite of her feeling for the mis-educated, over-
fragettes, and her sympathies with the modern world
(which she characterised as all-round ‘jazz’) seem to
have shut down fairly comprehensively after the First
World War. She has also, on the strength of an odd,
pornographic story of incest found among her papers
after death, been claimed as a child victim of paternal
abuse, and this is touted as an ‘explanation’ for her failed
marriage and the fact that many of her male friends
were more or less homosexual. There is, it should be
said, not a shred of real evidence that her father, from a
conventional New York family, ever laid an improper
finger on her, and the supposition
that a writer must have experi-
enced personally everything that
appears in his or her writing is
self-evidently absurd. Novelists
make things up: that’s what we do.
Hermione Lee deals briskly with
the abuse theory, as also with the
persistent story that Edith was not,
actually, the daughter of her moth-
er’s husband but the result of an
adulterous affair with one or other
of two possible candidates, both
more intellectual than the
Rhinelander-Joneses and their
usual set. Personally, this story has
always given me some pause for
thought. Edith must have got her
cuckoo-in-the-nest intelligence
from somewhere, her voracious
appetite for books, and also her
reddish hair.
But then the whole question as
to how much Edith repudiated
the world in which she was
brought up, and how much she remained, at some level,
inexorably part of it, is a complex one. It would be
mistaken to assume that because she criticised that
world, both implicitly in her novels and explicitly to
close friends, for its social assumptions, its snobberies
and hypocrisies and destructive repressions, that she
never fitted into it. Her whole life, Edith enjoyed what
was then called ‘worldly’ living: social occasions con-
ducted in great comfort, good food and drink, foreign
sightseeing, a huge number of rather posh friends and
acquaintances (an inborn snobbery of her own entered
in here, as with almost everyone of her generation) –
 LITERARY LIVES

and gossip. Hermione Lee’s sudden remark that ‘she material details, with the dates and places of Edith’s
liked her solitude and did not enjoy “society”’ seems constant travels, with plans being made and unmade,
inexplicable alongside everything else we are told. If with correspondence, with acquaintances met and re-
Edith had not relished ‘society’, and been part of it, she met – that it risks sinking under its own research.
would never have acquired the insider’s understanding The text runs to 756 pages, not counting Notes. Very
to depict it in the way she did: she would not have been few lives are best presented in such an exhaustive format,
able to chart Lily Bart’s subtle but lethal over-stepping which, by its very nature, tends to recapitulate the same
of ‘the narrow line between social success and moral facts in various places and blurs chronological outlines.
failure’, she would not have been able to present so The immensely detailed set-pieces – on this or that
sympathetically Newland Archer’s decision to turn his friendship, on Teddy Wharton’s manic depression and
back on the prospect of a different life abroad in favour their protracted divorce, on Edith’s one affair with the
of familiar values. American journalist Morton Fullerton – appear as pre-
As for Edith’s own ‘new life’, her escape to France and determined overviews, telling their own stories but not
adoption of that country, her abandonment of her necessarily The Story we are trying to follow. With
American marriage, her near-perfect command of the Fullerton, in particular, Lee seems to have conceived
French language, her great and generous charitable such a dislike for this ‘bounder’, that she creates the
efforts during the First World War – much has been impression that he humiliated Edith by neglect from the
made of all this as a whole new and more suitable iden- start. This, paradoxically, makes Edith’s eventual pursuit
tity. But she had already lived abroad as a child, with her of her perfidious lover look much more foolish than it
parents; in reality the world she occupied in Paris, else- was: indeed, if Fullerton was really as unrewarding as
where in France, and also across the Channel, was Lee suggests, why did Edith fall so heavily for him long
another version of her inherited American world, with before they actually got into bed? Their assignations in
its own social taboos. She was always very taken with the Charing Cross Hotel, to the sad sounds of night
European aristocracy, and the Americans she associated trains, were not the climax of love to her but its ending,
with in Europe, including Henry James and Walter and, as a writer, she had the judgement to see this and
Berry (the Paris head of the American Chamber of to make it all eventual grist to her mill.
Commerce), were not distinctly different from those she To order this book at £20, see LR Bookshop on page 30
had gravitated to on the other side of the Atlantic. If
anything, her social antennae were probably less acute in
Europe than on her home territory. This biography’s
rather over-extensive bottin mondain of her Paris circle
has some dubious names, including that of Paul Bourget
of Action Française, and among English county society
her great friend was the extravagant and amoral Mary
Hunter of Hill Hall. With her passion for house-buying,
Edith Wharton very nearly acquired her own country
house in England near the Hunters in 1913. I am
inclined to think that here she had her own lucky escape
from moral failure.
Hermione Lee gives proper prominence to the role
houses and their décor played in Edith’s active life and
in the iconography of her fiction. She quotes the won-
derful passage in the short story ‘The Fulness of Life’
about a woman’s life as a ‘great house full of rooms’
with one secret innermost room where ‘the soul sits
alone and waits for a footstep that never comes’. But
she does not relate this to Flaubert’s celebrated, analo-
gous remark, which Edith Wharton surely knew, about
each of us having a secret ‘royal chamber of the heart’
which, in some cases, is never visited. And here is a
central problem with this enormously comprehensive,
detailed, fair and in many ways admirable biography.
Although its estimates of the novels, when we get to
them, are perceptive and appropriate, as a writer’s life
this book seems so heavily weighted on the side of

13
LITERARY REVIEW February 2007
 LITERARY LIVES
R ICHARD G RAY
LITTLE BLUE DEVILS
N OTEBOOKS
★ calls, more than once, his ‘little blue devils’ of isolation,
By Tennessee Williams
Edited by Margaret Bradham Thornton
(Yale University Press 828pp £27.50)
IN 1936, JUST before his twenty-fifth birthday, Tennessee
Williams began keeping a journal. ‘Saw first robin today –
two in fact,’ reads the first entry, ‘pain in chest all morning
but okay tonite.’ ‘Felt rather stupid all day,’ it concludes,
‘but will write tomorrow – .’ Williams then continued
the journal intermittently until two years before his death
in 1983. It has now been published for the first time.
The notebooks in which Williams kept his journal are
unremarkable in appearance, the kind
that can still be bought at any
American drugstore. And the journal
entries, as that first one shows, are
often written in a kind of shorthand
and are always unpremeditated, like
random snapshots of the day. But it is
this very lack of premeditation that
makes them valuable. This is a record
of thoughts and feelings jotted down
almost as they happened, offer ing
glancing insights into one of the most
remarkable talents the American the-
atre has ever known.
‘This is where I record my less exu-
berant moments,’ Williams confesses in
an entry for 1936. Six years later, he
sounds a similar note: ‘I use this journal
mostly for distress signals and do not
often bother to note the little and
decently impersonal things which some-
times have my attention.’ Williams was,
by his own admission, ‘not the world’s
most tranquil person’; and, on those rare Williams: snapshots of the day
occasions when he does bother to
rehearse the casual passing of the days, even this is translated
into a kind of torture, an agony of waiting for something
real to happen. ‘End of another month,’ he notes in an
entry for 1939. ‘Oh, strange, trance-like existence – the
dreadful slipping by of the days, like oxen on a hot dreary
road toward some possible spring – dreadfully athirst but
not knowing where the spring is hidden.’
Public events slip by unnoticed here, with only a passing
reference to world war and its aftermath. Success, when it
comes, is greeted with equivocation or even dismay: ‘the
trouble is that I am being bullied and intimidated by my
14
LITERARY REVIEW February 2007
… fame,’ Williams complains in 1948, ‘and what people
expect of me and their demands on me.’ And, while the
writer’s friendships with the rich and famous are duly
recorded in the photographs that illustrate this volume,
they receive barely a mention in the actual journals. The
consistent theme here is utter loneliness. What Williams
inner division and incipient panic appear to be his only
faithful companions.
‘Why are there Two of me?’ Williams asks himself in a
1944 entry. ‘Why can’t there just be one? – Simple, sen-
sible, sane!’ ‘I wish I loved,’ he confesses elsewhere. ‘I
need a great love for someone beside myself. That would
keep me from being morbid and silly.’ ‘Keeping a journal
is a lonely man’s habit,’ Williams admitted once, adding
that any journal nevertheless has some value because it
‘keeps a recorded continuity between past and present
selves’. And continuity is kept here not only by the sense
of solitude, the social withdrawal, but by Williams’s sheer
bloody-mindedness, his determination
to face himself and meet his little blue
devils head-on. ‘Usually in the morn-
ings,’ Williams observes in 1940, ‘I
glance at myself and say – “Well, here
you still are, you old bitch!”’ The spry
defiance of that remark is typical; and it
is what saves this journal from its own
melancholy, from becoming merely
maudlin. This is the record of a man
whose confessional impulse never
stopped him from criticising or even
making fun of himself.
Sometimes the self-criticism can be
pretty harsh. ‘Dug this journal up out
of the trunk,’ Williams notes in 1938,
‘and was rather shocked to see what a
conglomeration of wretched whining it
contains.’ ‘When I read through this
book I’m appalled at myself,’ he adds a
year later, ‘ – what a fool I am! ... It is
valuable as a record of one man’s
incredible idiocy.’ The harshness of
such self-criticism, though, is of a piece
with the brutally candid way Williams
handles every element of his life, from the sad to the silly
to the desperate to the downright embarrassing. ‘Talking
to myself ’ is what Williams explains he is doing in this
journal. And, in eavesdropping on that talk, readers will
learn everything they would ever need or want to know
about Williams’s darker or uglier or more shameful sides:
the cruising and ‘sex adventures’ (usually meaning sex
with a stranger), the prodigious consumption of drugs
and alcohol, the anxieties and petty jealousies, the cor-
rosive self-pity and self-castigation, and the gradual dete-
rioration of Williams’s health. (‘Meanwhile the enemy
 LITERARY LIVES
‘Sadler’s Wells has struck gold with
its annual season of flamenco’
THE INDEPENDENT

Time, eats away at the biscuit,’ he notes in 1951. ‘What

misery, what anguish our bodies are capable of.’) This is Fri 23 - Sun 25 February
an autobiographical long day’s journey into night; over Ballet Flamenco Eva Yerbabuena
the course of the entire journal, Williams looks inward Sun 25 February
without flinching, and with a touch of dark humour,
and then, in recording what he sees, misses out nothing.
Iberia:Rosa Torres Pardo
Williams’s gaze is as intense when directed at only one Mon 26 February
other person beside himself, his beloved sister Rose, Estrella Morente
who was diagnosed as an acute schizophrenic when she
was eighteen. Thoughts about her appear randomly but Tue 27 February
constantly here. ‘Rose, my dear little sister,’ Williams Málaga en Flamenco
writes in one journal entry, ‘ – I think of you, dear, and
wish, oh wish so much that I could help.’ Unable to Wed 28 February
help her, Williams chose to write about her, first in his Isabel Bayón Compañía Flamenca
with guest artist Miguel Poveda
journal and then in his plays (she is the model for at least
fifteen of his characters, including Blanche Dubois in A
Streetcar Named Desire). What is striking in the journal
entries about his sister is Williams’s understanding of
what he calls the ‘living nightmare’ of her life, and his
admiration for the queer, strangely cheerful stoicism
with which that nightmare was borne. Rose helped
Williams to stare further into the abyss of his own per-
ilous hold on sanity, and to see more clearly that ‘solitary
confinement in our skins’ to which, as he put it once,
‘we’re all of us sentenced… for life’. But she also offered
him a vision of simple endurance. As Williams explains
in one of his last journal entries, ‘she … defined a true
nobility to me and gave to my life what I have known of
grace’. She showed him how to face his own demons
and, in the process, rescue something from the wreck. LONDON
What also rescued Williams from the wreckage of his
life was his writing; as this journal bears witness, work
was a saving routine for him. ‘I write from my own ten-
sions,’ Williams admitted in an interview. ‘For me, this is a
form of therapy.’ And his journal entries represent the first
stage in that therapeutic process; they are the raw material
out of which came, eventually, a rare form of drama. The
plays of Tennessee Williams offer us a series of intensely
poetic examinations of the injured spirit, the private pains
and passions of lonely individuals for whom the task of
living is almost, but not quite, unendurable. Williams felt Thu 1 March
a wry, compassionate complicity with those individuals Gerardo Núñez Quintet
because, as this journal discloses, he was one of them, with guest artist Carmen Cortés
inhabiting exactly the same state of dread. ‘Perhaps I was
never meant to exist,’ Williams suggests in an entry for Fri 2 March
1979. ‘But if I hadn’t,’ he then adds defiantly, ‘a number Compañia Flamenca Carmen Cortés
of my created beings would have been denied their pas- Sat 3 March
sionate existence ... The best I can say for myself is that I
worked like hell.’ That remark could act as an epigraph to
Gala de Sevilla: Joaquín Grilo, Isabel Bayón,
this extraordinary book, meticulously edited and annotated La Moneta, Manuel Liñán, Olga Pericet &
by Margaret Bradham Thornton. It needs to be read by Marco Flores
anyone interested in Williams or the American theatre –
or, for that matter, in that strange, alchemical process by
which some writers manage to turn anxiety into art.
Fri 23 Feb -
To order this book at £22, see LR Bookshop on page 30 Sat 3 March

LITERARY REVIEW February 2007

 LITERARY LIVES
M ICHAEL J ACOBS
SKETCHES OF SPAIN
B EAUMARCHAIS IN S EVILLE : A N I NTERMEZZO
★ taken this work as a light relief from his exhaustive, monu-
By Hugh Thomas
(Yale University Press 177pp £16)
‘BUT BEAUMARCHAIS WAS never in Seville!’ asserts Hugh
Thomas at the beginning of his study of the author whose
Sevillian-based plays inspired, among other works,
Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro and Rossini’s Barber of Seville.
Thomas points out that Bizet was not there either, and nor
was Verdi or Beethoven, both of whom also set operas in
this part of Andalusia. He could have mentioned numer-
ous other eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers and
musicians whose visions of southern Spain were no less
imaginary, for instance Victor Hugo, who did much to
establish the legendary status of Granada’s Alhambra with-
out ever having been there himself.
‘Spain’, wrote Beaumarchais’s contemporary Voltaire, ‘is
a country which we know no better than the wildest parts
of Africa, and which does not merit being better known.’
Increasingly cut off from the rest of Europe in the wake of
its own political and economic decline in the early seven-
teenth century, Spain was renowned in Beaumarchais’s day
for bad roads, bandits, atrocious inns, and an overall back-
wardness. However, it would not be long before these
same factors (ever more exaggerated in the telling) would
help bring to Spain a burgeoning tourism fuelled by
romantic notions of a land of exotic remoteness. In stark
contrast to a destination such as Italy, Spain came to attract
visitors not so much for its culture but for an image based
on the most fanciful preconceptions of the place.
When tourists finally began coming to Spain in signifi-
cant numbers, from around 1820 onwards, their main goal
at first was less frequently Granada than Seville, a city
whose sensual, fun-loving reputation owed a huge amount
initially to the writings of Beaumarchais. Why he himself
never went there at the time of his lengthy stay in Madrid
in the 1760s is not known; and his reasons for choosing to
set his plays in this city can likewise only be guessed at.
Seville’s glamorous past as the port to which all the riches
from the New World were brought could well have formed
a large part of its appeal to him, as could perhaps the city’s
former importance as a centre of popular theatre. There are
scholars too who have suggested that Seville’s distant situa-
tion and political neutrality allowed Beaumarchais to put in
the mouth of Figaro proto-revolutionary ideas that would
have been unacceptable in the context, say, of Paris. In the
prologue to the first edition of The Barber of Seville,
Beaumarchais also expressed the view that an implausible
plot and overblown characters and language gain acceptability
16
LITERARY REVIEW February 2007
if placed within a seductive, fantastical setting.
This prologue is curiously not quoted by Thomas, who
indeed barely concerns himself with Beaumarchais’s choice
of Seville as a theatrical setting, let alone with early percep-
tions of Spain. His book has been given the operatic subtitle
‘An Intermezzo’; and you strongly feel that he has under-
mental studies of Spain and the Hispanic world. Luxuriating
in Seville in a ‘magnificent patio in a restored palace of the
seventeenth century’, and revelling in the evocation of a
period of European history in which ‘socialism did not
exist, not even as a word’, Thomas is happy merely to reflect
on what a pity it was that ‘Beaumarchais never came here!’
There are moments too in this book when Thomas
seems to have temporarily relaxed his meticulous stan-
dards. A near-identical sentence is repeated within a
couple of pages; and he refers to the Andalusian township
of La Carolina as if it were the only one of the several set-
tlements founded by Charles III’s minister Pablo de
Olavide to have survived. More seriously, he makes no
mention of Francisco Trujillo Rodríguez’s excellent La
ópera y Sevilla (Seville, 1991), the one major work in
Spanish on this fascinating subject. Had he read it, he
would have come across the theory that the name Figaro is
derived from the Catalan town of Figaró, which obviously
sounded to Beaumarchais as quintessentially Spanish as the
Basque name Hernani did to Victor Hugo.
But it would be unfair to allow such pedantic quibbles
to mar the enjoyment of this delightfully readable and
engrossing book, whose main intention is to relate the
extraordinary circumstances that led a former watchmaker
to write two of the most influential and popular plays of
the eighteenth century. This was a story which so capti-
vated Beaumarchais’s contemporaries that it was even
turned, by the young Goethe, into a successful comedy.
The story goes back to the February of 1764, when
the charming, womanising, and socially ambitious
Beaumarchais discovered that one of his sisters, resident
in Madrid, had been seriously let down by her intellec-
tual and capricious Spanish suitor, José Clavijo y Fajardo.
Beaumarchais went off immediately to Spain to try and
redeem the family honour, and to make Clavijo keep to
his word and marry the sister. He also had other motives
to travel to Madrid, the most straightforward of which
was the recovery of money owed to his father by some
Spanish grandees and their wives. A more dubious task,
entrusted to him by a leading French financier, was to
try to obtain for France the much coveted licence to sell
slaves to the Spanish empire.
The ins and outs of the intricate plot (which includes
such digressions as Beaumarchais’s attempt to get a French
marquesa to bed the Spanish king) are related by Thomas
with a panache that amply shows how the facts of history
can be made as entertaining as any fiction. Thomas, who
has edited an excellent anthology of writings on Madrid,
 LITERARY LIVES
also brilliantly conveys the Madrilenian world in which
Beaumarchais moved, with its stimulating and social the-
atrical life, Bourbon reforms, and ambivalent attitudes
towards France and the French. Not least, he creates an
unforgettable portrait of Beaumarchais himself, who,
ironically, appears to have had much in common with the
enlightened and contradictory Clavijo. Beaumarchais
emerges as someone with a remarkable capacity to adapt
to social situations, and who was as much a figure of the
B ERNARD O’D ONOGHUE
STILL OLD POSSUM
L IVES AND L EGACIES : T S E LIOT
★
By Craig Raine
(Oxford University Press 202pp £12.99)
CRAIG RAINE’S LIVELY new book on T S Eliot conforms
to its series by simply naming the poet as its subject; but
it has a marked thematic line which could have bor-
rowed its title from Matthew Arnold’s poem ‘The
Buried Life’. Raine concludes that Arnold is ‘Eliot’s
powerful, repressed father figure’; as with Arnold and
other predecessors and early contemporaries (Henry
James in particular), Eliot’s great dread is of life not fully
lived, left interred. In this way Eliot is placed in an odd
position between Romanticism, with its ‘careless claim
to passion’, and Classicism, with its deflationary gift for
bathos or Pope’s ‘sinking’. The challenge for the writer
of Eliot’s era was to reconcile the Romantic desire ‘to
live with all intensity’ with a Classical distrust of ‘violent
emotion for its own sake’. Raine’s broadly chronological
discussion of Eliot’s work is framed by this duality.
The book is rather oddly constructed though, with a
Preface as well as an Introduction preceding its six chap-
ters, and a series of Appendices at the end, the first of
which is a return to Raine’s concern with ‘Eliot and
Anti-Semitism’. The first two chapters, ‘The Failure to
Live’ and ‘Eliot as Classicist’, deal with the successful
early poetry which preceded Eliot’s masterpiece The
Waste Land, the subject of Chapter Three. Chapter Four
is about Four Quartets, and Chapter Five deals with the
drama, concluding with an uncompromising recognition
that the plays ‘fail in varying degrees, because we
couldn’t care less what, say, Edward Chamberlayne really
feels. Edward isn’t a character. He is an illustration –
almost a slide.’ The sixth chapter is an original account of
the criticism (which of course is generally seen as Eliot’s
great strength, alongside the poetry). Raine’s view is that
Eliot’s philosophical training empowered him to bring to
his literary criticism a ‘theoretical inclination’ and an
17
French Enlightenment as he was of the ancien régime.
Beaumarchais’s journey to Spain was largely unsuc-
cessful in its professed intentions. However, as Thomas
so persuasively shows, his Spanish experiences provided
him with the basis of his greatest creations. And with
Figaro in particular, he gave generations of travellers to
Seville an excuse as good as Carmen and Don Juan to
confuse fiction and reality in their appreciation of Spain.
To order this book at £12.80, see LR Bookshop on page 30
‘Anyone?’
‘instinct for definition’. Strikingly, he concludes that
Eliot’s famous critical concepts (‘dissociation of sensibili-
ty’, ‘objective correlative’, ‘the auditory imagination’ and
the rest) are, like Arnold’s, mostly well-turned shorthand
for pretty familiar thoughts. His great gift, according to
Raine – again perhaps like Arnold’s – was for reading
particular writers, or for just happening on a profound
insight with an ‘occasional flash of helpless, counterintu-
itive, fearless brilliance’ (though the example Raine gives
of this seems to me less than overwhelming: ‘perhaps no
drama has ever been greatly and permanently successful
without a large melodramatic element’. To borrow
Raine’s verbless dogmatism: Not so breathtaking).
Thus far I have accounted for any reservations Raine has
about Eliot, to clear the way, more representatively, for his
campaigningly positive apologia. He rises with energetic
wit to the linguistic and idiomatic strengths of the poetry
up to 1928 (when Eliot made his famous avowal of classi-
cism – a classicism which, by Raine’s definition, was
operative already). Prufrock is ‘a thin-skinned sensitive – a
dithering compass of cowardice and crippling lack of self-
esteem’; Madame Sosostris ‘is a tabloid Tiresias’. Raine’s
emphasis in the early chapters is on Eliot as a complex last
Romantic in the English tradition, reflecting Wordsworth,
Tennyson, Browning, Dickens and George Eliot, as well as
Arnold. He proves too the importance for Eliot of another
of Raine’s heroes, Kipling – particularly the direct influ-
ence of the short story ‘They’ on a crucial passage in Burnt
LITERARY REVIEW February 2007
 LITERARY LIVES
Norton. There are some insights of great critical originality,
notably when the dryness of The Waste Land is related to
the ecological damage caused by the westward march of
the railways in America. Best of all is the way he shows us
exactly why the unforgettable passages in Eliot are so pow-
erful, like this lyrical description of one of ‘our intenser
experiences of other human beings’, correctly diagnosed
by Raine as falling in love:
I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Raine, then, is strongest where Eliot is strongest; he is
predictably less compelling where he finds Eliot less
engaging. Though he has excellent things to say about
some of the great passages in Four Quartets, his imagina-
tion doesn’t fire as he tries to capture their more
programmatic mysticism. As an idea, the ‘simultaneity of
time’ lacks the complexity and force of its medieval,
Neoplatonic discussions. And, of the two definitive ele-
ments of the book’s series, lives and legacies, Raine is
better on the legacies. In a way, the book is written
against Raine’s belief that Eliot’s life has already been
drawn upon too much in glossing the poems.
In returning to the question of anti-Semitism in Eliot’s
writings, Raine seems to be struggling for fairness,
conceding for example that some letters not yet available
may establish after all that Eliot was guilty of this most hate-
ful attitude – what Eliot himself called a ‘terrible slander’.
Raine is already on record in vigorous defence of Eliot
against the charge, and I am not convinced of the wisdom
of returning unprovoked to it in such circumstantial detail
now. Raine’s appendix replaces Christopher Logue’s list as
the fullest brief itemising of the accused passages. Some of
them, for whatever reason, make grim reading: for instance
the ‘Dirge’ in the Waste Land manuscript that Raine
acknowledges as ‘tasteless and distasteful’. His impulse to
explain away such offences leads to a rather embarrassing
piece of self-aggrandising: having made the interesting
suggestion that the anti-Semitic passages in the poems are
dramatisations of anti-Semitism, Raine muses ‘This new
interpretation will seem implausible for a time, in the way
that radical re-readings do before they become accepted’ –
a self-assessment, oddly enough, most famously made by
George Steiner, with whom Raine is crossing swords here.
It will be a pity if this is what this brilliant reading of Eliot
comes to be remembered for. This book is an ingenious and
convincing demonstration that Eliot is still the Old Possum:
lying unassertively low, but anxiously aware that the disin-
terment of the buried life is an undeniable imperative. Most
of the time it is open-minded about the weaker points in
Eliot: the plays, or occasional linguistic defects in the poems.
But most importantly, it shows perceptively why Eliot’s
poems work with their unique compulsiveness.
To order this book at £10.39, see LR Bookshop on page 30
18
LITERARY REVIEW February 2007
W ILLIAM P ALMER
MURDER MOST FOUL
E DGAR A LLAN P OE AND THE M URDER OF
M ARY ROGERS
★
By Daniel Stashower
(Oneworld Publications 328pp £16.99)
IN 1842, EDGAR Allan Poe sold a long story to the Ladies’
Companion, a New York magazine. It was not the jour-
nal’s usual fare; it advertised itself as being for women of
‘exquisite refinement and taste’, and Poe’s tale was of the
brutal rape and murder of a young woman. However, the
editor could not resist; Poe had sold him the story on the
premise that ‘The Mystery of Marie Rogêt’ was based
firmly on the real and sensational case of the unsolved
murder of Mary Rogers in New York the previous year.
Although Poe’s story was transferred to Paris, the chief
characters involved in the real case were only lightly dis-
guised, and Poe promised a dramatic solution to the case.
Mary Rogers was born in 1820 and moved with her
mother to New York in 1837. The two women settled in
the house of John Anderson, and it was not long before
Mary found herself working behind the cigar counter of
Anderson’s Tobacco Emporium on Broadway. She was by
all accounts an extremely beautiful young woman and
began to attract many admirers who came to the store to
gawk at ‘the comely seegar vendor’. The newspapers
wrote up the new Broadway attraction. The New York
Herald ran an appalling poem in her praise:
She moved amid the bland perfume
That breathes of heaven’s balmiest isle:
Her eyes had starlight’s azure gloom
And a glimpse of heaven – her smile.
Her celebrity has a very modern feel to it; as one newspa-
perman said, ‘her notoriety is unencumbered by position
or achievement’. There was a minor sensation in 1838
when she disappeared, leaving a suicide note. The news-
papers wrote of an unhappy love affair. She reappeared
two weeks later and soon afterwards left Anderson’s
Emporium, her mother having started up a boarding
house. Mary became attached to one of the lodgers, the
amiable, heavy-drinking Daniel Payne. A rival admirer in
the house, Alfred Crommelin, accused them of indulging
in ‘unseemly intimacies’ in the front parlour. It must have
been quite a comedown for Mary to have to help with
domestic chores, but in 1841 she was back in the head-
lines in a new and more terrible way.
One Sunday morning she dressed in her best clothes
and told Payne that she was going to visit her aunt across
the city. She arranged to meet him that evening but did
not turn up. It was on the following Wednesday that her
 LITERARY LIVES

body was fished from the Hudson rewrite the third part, now includ-
River. The coroner’s report stated ing a confession by a Madame
that she had been beaten, ‘violated Deluc/Mrs Loss that she was impli-
by no fewer than three assailants’, cated in the murder and that Dupin’s
and then garrotted with strips torn ‘solution’ still held. It was not satis-
from her own clothing. factory and Poe further modified
The New York press had a won- the story when it was published
derful time with the story, particularly in book form. Daniel Stashower
the Herald. Even by our present low himself puts forward a theor y
standards, the Herald was a sensation- that Anderson of the Tobacco
alist rag. Its editor, James Gordon Emporium may have been deeply
Bennett, delighted in causing outrage. implicated in Mary’s murder, but
A journalist who could call the then whether in fiction or real life no
Pope ‘a decrepit, licentious, stupid culprit was ever firmly identified.
Italian blockhead’ has to be admired, A book concerned with Mary
if only for his nerve. His paper, lin- Rogers alone would have been a bit
gering over the ‘salacious details’, had on the slim side and Stashower alter-
already covered murders that his rivals nates chapters about the murder with
did not see as fit subjects. Bennett other quite detailed ones on Poe’s life
combined his coverage with an attack From Poe’s ‘The Mystery of Marie Rogêt’, 1852 in the years before and after he wrote
on the incompetent New York police about the case. In ‘The Mystery of
force, calling them ‘corrupt loafers’. He laid the blame for Marie Rogêt’ Poe went at least halfway to inventing the
Mary’s death on an attack by one of New York’s many ‘true crime’ novel; it is unlikely that the mystery of Mary
gangs. Other candidates were put forward: a philanderer Rogers’s miserable end will ever now be resolved, but
called Morse; a young sailor who lodged at the Rogers’s Stashower presents all of the available evidence for the
house; her admirers Payne and Crommelin; all were ques- reader to try and go one better than Poe.
tioned and had alibis for the presumed time of death. The To order this book at £13.59, see LR Bookshop on page 30
case went cold until, a few weeks later, more of Mary’s
clothes were found in a thicket, close to a tavern kept by a
Mrs Loss. The tavern was on the shore, not far from
where the body had been found. Astonishingly, Daniel
Payne visited this scene and committed suicide on the L ubricate your
spot with an overdose of laudanum. For a time his guilt
was assumed, but after a short while the story died away,
and was inevitably replaced by the next gruesome story.
The case fascinated Poe. His Murders in the Rue Morgue
L exicon
had introduced the figure of the amateur detective, and
C Auguste Dupin was the father of Sherlock Holmes and “This is just
a thousand others who, by applying the powers of deduc-
tive reasoning, outguess the plodding police force. In
what’s needed:
‘Marie Rogêt’ Dupin comes up with an ingenious solu- tricky words
tion involving a naval officer who had met Mary/Marie in with witty
1838, been away on a tour of duty until 1841, and then
jealously murdered her on his return. The story was definitions.”
20,000 words long and was split into three parts for publi-
cation in the Ladies’ Companion. Just before the publication John Humphrys
of the third part, and Poe’s much heralded solution to
Mary Rogers’s murder, a headline appeared in the New
BBC Radio 4
York Tribune: ‘The Mary Rogers Mystery Explained’.
Mrs Loss, keeper of the tavern near to where Mary’s
clothes were found, died in a bizarre shooting accident, Available from all good bookshops
and was revealed to have been an abortionist. The new
theory was that Mary had died undergoing an abortion £7.99
and that the ‘murder’ was an attempt to cover this up. Ergo Press 0-9552758-4-9
This was a disaster for Poe. He had to hurry and

19
LITERARY REVIEW February 2007
 INTERVIEW

DORIS LESSING’s dislike of interviews Cold War, and an honorary Angry

is notorious, but when I arrive, rather J ESSICA M ANN TALKS TO Young Man in Fifties London; she is
nervously, at her West Hampstead a feminist who despises feminists, a
home she is welcoming and hos- D ORIS L ESSING realist who has believed in thought-
pitable. We sit in a room full of a transference, a rationalist who half
comfortable, colourful clutter of believes in reincarnation, an icono-
Persian carpets, strong twentieth-century paintings, clast who has accepted countless decorations and honours.
African carvings, cards, flowers, and precarious piles of Her most famous book, The Golden Notebook (1962), was
books on an unlimited variety of subjects. Lessing is a a seminal work for the women’s liberation movement.
polymath, infinitely well read, always equipped with a Her new novel, The Cleft (Fourth Estate 260pp £16.99),
cogent argument and at the age of eighty-seven still acer- is an alternative creation myth, describing what happened
bic and still rebellious. She was a Communist during the after our ancestors first crawled out of the primeval slime.

I know some readers will object to the vocabulary – women as
‘clefts’ and men as ‘squirts’. But I wondered why you made
the females utterly passive, with only the men having any
curiosity or energy?
I was fascinated about two years ago by odd remarks
about the primal stock being female, as though that was
all there was to be said. But what happened when the
men came? And how did the men come? I think there
was some kind of little breath of evolution and suddenly
boys were being born, and people got more curious, with
an enlivening spirit abroad. For the females, lying around
on rocks for centuries, there was no reason to be curious.
A provocative idea for a feminist.
I don’t think the feminists did me much good because
The Golden Notebook became part of Women’s Studies,
which put men off. That did not help me at all.
In the 1960s there was a cartoon about a bored graduate wife
weeping into the nappy bucket, which could have been based on
me, so I found The Golden Notebook a revelation. You put
into words things about life and sex and motherhood and feelings
that hadn’t been expressed before. I still remember how liberating
that seemed, it was the year before Larkin said sexual intercourse
began and in those days conventional behaviour was based on the
principle that many things were best left unsaid.
It wasn’t like that for me, but it was in my mother’s
generation, she was a great one for that.
[Lessing was born in Persia. When she was six her family
moved to farm in Rhodesia. Her father was ill, her mother dis-
contented, and at fourteen Doris escaped to work as a nurse-
maid and was soon publishing short stories in South African
magazines. Aged nineteen, she got married, had two children,
John and Jean. Both that and her second marriage to Gottfried
Lessing, a German refugee and Jewish Marxist, ended in
divorce. In 1949 she left the two older children with their
father, and set off to London with her baby son Peter Lessing
and the manuscript of her first book, The Grass is Singing,
which was published to great success a year later.]
I was brought up by two people who believed in the
British Empire, and were British to the point of caricature,
and as far as I am concerned I was educated by reading
English Literature; this was my education, I didn’t have
any other. I think many writers, especially if they studied
English, were damaged by going to university. They were
hurt by it, some kind of damper was put on them. But
then when I first came to London I was meeting people in
a ferment of intellectual curiosity and discussion about
everything. Everybody was political, everybody read,
everybody had read everything. I remember violent debate
all the time. I was writing about what everybody was talk-
ing about at that time, and feminism was part of it. If you
were a Communist you were discussing the role of women
automatically. We talked about it all the time, you can
imagine the debates that went on; when I made tea for
Gottfried I asked why he wasn’t making tea for me.
That kind of argument seemed revolutionary to me when
The Golden Notebook came out.
The point is that women have always talked about men,
they talk about them all the time. I’ve been listening to
women talk about men and men talk about women all my
life; on the farm there were the men talking about how
bloody awful women were and how they couldn’t take the
life, and there were the women talking about men, all the
time. Yet when I wrote about it people were astounded.
Did you feel liberated when you abandoned Communism?
Well, it took such a long time, it wasn’t just overnight.
We had all this information [about conditions in the
Soviet Union] coming through, a lot of people in the
Party were very unhappy and a great many left, fell out
or drifted out; that is why, when I wrote The Golden
Notebook, half the people I knew were having mental
breakdowns or becoming religious or committing
suicide or something. Koestler made this interesting
comparison: he said losing faith in Communism was like
coins dropping out of your pocket, one by one.
[Having shed religion in her teens, embracing ‘the brave sto-
icism of atheism’, and later abandoned Communism, Lessing
searched for something different and in 1962 found and began a
lifelong study of Sufism – ‘Sufi is a way of life, not a belief.’
During the 1950s Lessing published a book a year, her influen-
tial and famous series of African novels.]

20
LITERARY REVIEW February 2007
 INTERVIEW
I believe you also wrote several plays.
My real love is the theatre but I was not a good play-
wright, I used too many words. Good playwrights have
always been curtain-pullers in some local rep, like
Harold Pinter.
And you started writing books in the fantasy or science-
fiction genre in the late 1970s, though you’ve said you don’t see
them as either non-realistic or something new but just telling a
story. Some are stories which I read as ‘awful warnings’.
I have always written about global warming and the
future of the planet, I’ve been immersed in it; it’s creepy,
what is happening. What is happening to the world
is not a new thought. Scientists generally have been
talking about what we do to the world; it may be new
for politicians.
One of the countless academics studying your work complained
of your ‘rapid and unpredictable evolution’ from realism to fantasy.
I’ve always liked science fiction. In
the Sixties and Seventies all the kids
and young people read science fic-
tion. I don’t know if they still do.
Have you looked at interactive online
worlds?
I can’t use computers. I know I
should, but there’s something about
that thing sitting there, always going
wrong in some minor way ... I
work on a machine which a friend
threw out from his office, and I
said, I’ll have it. I used to be a typist
for my living but now I depend
entirely on a typist who can sort
out my horrible pages.
Are you working on the next book?
I’ve been saying to myself that I
have started what will be my last.
Have you said that before?
No, never. It is just that I find that living is very hard
work, and you know this business about a book, the sheer
weight of it – I think voluntarily doing this I must be
insane. But I’ve started a new book about my parents. In
their own different ways they were quite remarkable peo-
ple, but they were both done in by the First World War, I
mean really badly, my father evidently badly and my
mother not so evidently badly. I am going to write about
what my parents would have been like not screwed up by
war, and that gives me a great deal of pleasure because the
wars weigh on me. They sit on me like a nightmare. So
my thought was, supposing there had never been a First
World War, what would they have been like?
What would the world have been like?
If there had been no First World War there would
have been no Russian Revolution, no Hitler, no Stalin.
I don’t think I can cope with the fact that people in
Russia should regret Stalin, I find that almost impossible
21
to believe. A friend of mine was here from Moscow and
she said that they have completely forgotten about all
the horrors and what they remember is the order.
Do you write to see what you think, or to say what you think?
It is all an amazing discovery when you are writing.
When you start, do you know where you are going?
Well, it depends. The last book I wrote, I had quite a
nice neat plot, but the only thing is that one of the char-
acters actually emerged, which hadn’t happened to me
before. It took the whole plot away. He took the book
over suddenly, and what was I to do now? The thing
was out of shape. I then dreamt what was going to
happen, so the thing came back into shape.
Have you ever had to abandon something?
Oh yes, often, but thank God I have always torn them up.
Do you keep a diary?
Yes, I am going to leave it for anyone who wants it.
[Lessing’s papers are deposited in the
Harry Ransom Humanities Research
Center at the University of Texas.]
Your two volumes of autobiography
only take you up to the early 1960s.
I had a problem about that,
because in the Sixties I was that
familiar thing, an earth mother, and
my house was full of young people
aged between fourteen and twenty-
four, and now some of them are
middle-aged and well known so I
cannot possibly write that book. So
what I did was to write The Sweetest
Dream, in which I wanted to give a
flavour of the Sixties, but I kept real
people out of it.
[Any autobiographical writing since
then, in factual or fictional form, has
protected Lessing’s privacy, giving away less information than
the appearance of candour suggests.]
There has been one unauthorised biography.
Well, that was a very difficult thing. This woman
assumed that I would be absolutely delighted for her to
write my biography, and she had already signed a contract.
It never crossed her mind that I wouldn’t want to do it. So
I simply said to her, look, I am going to tell my friends not
to co-operate. What happened then was she went all over
the place finding people that I had either never met, or
only met once, who gave all kinds of information about
me. She didn’t care and it was enormously inaccurate.
And there is a website.
It’s kept by the original archetypal fan who knows
more about me than I know about myself. It is flattering
and marvellous. But I don’t look because I know that I
would get involved in enormous controversy. I’ve
changed my mind about so many things and I still do. In
fact, I don’t think I’ve always thought anything.
LITERARY REVIEW February 2007
 NUNS & MONKS
M ARY K ENNY
SUPERIOR SISTERS
N UNS : A H ISTORY OF C ONVENT L IFE
★ in nunneries. In Milan, three-quarters of the daughters
By Silvia Evangelisti
(Oxford University Press 304pp £17.99)
THE LIFE OF a nun – in comparison to that of a wife –
has many advantages. No cooking and cleaning; no
skivvying at the kitchen sink or schlepping around the
supermarket; none of the boring and interminable
chores of running a household, starting with making
lists, day after day after day, of what must be done. (I
have left instructions for an inscription to be put on my
grave: ‘She is at rest – she will never again push a trolley
around Sainsbury’s.’)
The nun, by contrast, holds sacred
the idea of vocation – the calling, as dic-
tated by talents, which, as the New
Testament story tells us, we must never
bury. The nun may be a contemplative,
but she may also be an intellectual; a
musician; a mathematician; an artist; a
wr iter; a doctor; and of course a
teacher. And should she have any of
these gifts, she is enjoined to be pro-
ductive with them – not to spend her
time cutting up vegetables and drag-
ging out the garbage. A nun, anyway,
will have servants to do that kind
of thing – other nuns of more lowly
status. These are the Marthas who see
to the kitchen while the Marys – who
Our Lord said had chosen the better
part – attend to the life of the spirit
and the mind.
I speak, to some extent, historically,
but to some extent from my own
experience. I was schooled by nuns
and the example set by these conse- ‘Portrait of Veronica Welser’, Holbein, 1504 distressed son eventually became the
crated virgins was of confident female
authority and a serious attention to the work of the
mind. True, they were limited by their epoch and their
milieu, but not more so than their lay contemporaries;
indeed, those nuns who had been ‘on the missions’ in
Africa and India had seen a little more of life than the
spinster lay teachers who were embittered, we felt, by
the disappointment of an unchosen single state.
Silvia Evangelisti’s scholarly study of nuns is itself lim- creativity, and Luther wanted women safely under the
ited by its time frame, which is 1450–1700, but it is
broadened by its wider Continental context. Nuns, like
other people, came in all shapes and temperaments:
22
LITERARY REVIEW February 2007
mystics and nutcases; queens and radicals; intellectuals
and misshapen ugly daughters walled up in a convent for
their families’ convenience. Sometimes there were far
too many women in convents for it to be anything like a
vocational choice: in Florence, between 1500 and 1799,
46 per cent of women from the patrician families were
of the aristocracy lived in convents. Small wonder some
became decadent.
Sometimes women were sent into convents because
their fathers couldn’t, or wouldn’t, pay the dowry neces-
sary for marr iage (ah, patriarchy, of course!), and
although the convent also required a down payment for
bed and board, it was usually less than might be
demanded by a grasping suitor.
Sometimes convents contained abandoned and bat-
tered women, and not a few contained retired prostitutes
and former floosies. There is a beguiling account –
which Ms Evangelisti does not
include here – of Jeanne de Chantal’s
decision to set up the Visitation Order
of nuns, with two colourful compan-
ions. Charlotte de Bréchard had sur-
vived an extraordinary childhood as
the lone survivor of a plague which
had killed all around her, growing up
as a street child. Marie-Jacqueline
Favre had led a life of aristocratic
riotous pleasure and non-stop dancing
until, one day, she saw death in the
ballroom, and realised her call to live
her life as a nun.
The story of Jeanne de Chantal’s
own vocational call is here recounted
with academic austerity; the more
dramatic version is that Jeanne
stepped over the prostrate body of her
teenage son, who begged her not to
leave the family, while Jeanne
responded (as in a French movie)
‘C’est plus fort que moi!’ There was
also a significant family sequel: the
father of Madame de Sévigné.
During the Protestant revolution, convents were
forcibly shut, as it was a Lutheran view that they were
useless places which imprisoned women. The social his-
torian Lawrence Stone has suggested that Luther’s real
motivation was that he disliked women being free from
the control of men, and Evangelisti concurs, in part.
Convents were places of ‘female agency’, and often
control of a husband. Like all revolutions, the outcome
was mixed: where convents were being used to dump
women, the Lutheran impact was reforming. Yet many
 NUNS & MONKS
nuns protested passionately, and affirmed their vocations
in the face of Lutheran coercion.
Nuns were feminists avant la lettre: some consider St
Teresa of Avila a feminist. The Venetian nun Arcangela
Tarabotti, who entered her convent aged sixteen, dedi-
cated her life to studying – particularly Dante – and
produced many works of feminist polemic, including
Women Are No Less Rational Than Men, in 1654. She
influenced another Venetian, the beautifully named
Moderata Fonte, who wrote The Worth of Women in the
later seventeenth century, arguing passionately for the
education of women and encouraging women to chal-
lenge paternal authority.
Nuns were always pioneers of women’s education, and
the author gives due acknowledgement to St Angela de
Merici, who founded the Ursuline Order, which was to
B RENDAN WALSH
LIFE ON THE INSIDE
A N I NFINITY OF L ITTLE H OURS : F IVE
YOUNG M EN AND THEIR T RIAL OF FAITH IN
THE W ESTERN WORLD ’ S M OST AUSTERE
M ONASTIC O RDER
★ ex-monks – at the original Grande Chartreuse in
By Nancy Klein Maguire
(Public Affairs 258pp £15.99)
I DON’T THINK anyone has tried to get under the skin of
a group of monks in quite this way before. Nancy Klein
Maguire closely follows the lives of five young men –
Paddy, Hans, Bernie, Chuck and Dave – over five years
between 1960 and 1965 as they each test their vocation
as a monk at the St Hugh’s Charterhouse in Parkminster,
Sussex. Founded 900 years ago by St Bruno in the
mountain wilder ness near
Grenoble, the Carthusians are
the most strictly enclosed order
in the Catholic Church, living
alone and in almost perpetual
silence and prayer. The Trappist
monk Thomas Merton
described them as
the ones who have gone the
furthest, climbed the highest,
lifted themselves up above all
the others, out of this world
and concealed in God. All
day long, except for offices
in choir, the Carthusian is
with God alone.
We learn from the start that four Weekly walk
23
become the template for women’s education and a bea-
con for Miss Beale and Miss Buss. Angela’s story is more
dramatic than this academic account allows – like many
pioneers she was orphaned young, and spent her forma-
tive years travelling around Italy on horseback.
Nuns is a serious and readable study of convent life: it
rescues from history the lives of women whom British
and American feminists have tended to ignore because
they have generally searched in secular places. It would
benefit from a sequel, following the history of nuns up
to the present time. The nineteenth century, with its
missionary energy, is particularly rich. Memoir and
autobiography in our time have shown that nuns can
also be neurotic and cruel – indeed, just like the rest
of us.
To order this book at £14.39, see LR Bookshop on page 30
of the five young men at the centre of the story find rela-
tively quickly that they are not cut out to be Carthusians,
and the one who stays goes on to enjoy a slightly rocky
career in the order. But all of them have their noses as
close to the window as we are ever likely to get.
This is a serious and honest book based on ferocious
rounds of faxes and emails exchanged over six or seven
years, culminating in a reunion of the former novices
and a meeting with the author – the wife of one of the
France. It has many of the virtues of last year’s popular
television series, The Monastery, which cleverly mixed a
human-interest story with insights into the Benedictine
monastic tradition. There’s both meat and gravy in An
Infinity of Little Hours. The five central characters are
likeable and real and you come to care about them, and
wonder who will stay and who will leave. Which of
them has the Right Stuff?
The monk in charge of finances is a former partner
in a distinguished international law firm; the other
monks include a for mer
French cavalry officer, a for-
mer rugby international, and
a German prince once short-
listed as a possible consort for
the Queen. It is touching to
read how stubbornly human
the monks are, for all the
strangeness of their chosen
way of life. Even in solitude,
they manage to wind each
other up. One monk, incan-
descent with fur y at the
behaviour of one of the oth-
ers, can bear it no longer and
seeks an interview with the
Prior. ‘Why do you hate him
LITERARY REVIEW February 2007
 NUNS & MONKS
so much?’ he is asked. ‘Didn’t you see the way he han-
dled the bell rope last week?’ he replies. One novice
dreams of a skiing holiday, another can’t dislodge the
memory of an old girlfriend, another yearns for pork
chops. In the case of one novice, it’s not the hair shirt
or the cold and damp that does for him, it’s the infuri-
ating determination of his fellow monks to sing off-
pitch during the Divine Office.
As the slightly silly subtitle hints, ex-monks are occa-
sionally guilty of ascetic one-upmanship. I recently spent
ninety minutes with the superior of an enclosed con-
vent, who chatted gently about my comfortable and
worldly life, but scoffed with derision at the compromises
made by some other communities she could mention.
‘They even have a radio’, she tut-tutted. Life at
Parkminster is certainly stunningly austere, but it has its
consolations. One novice’s father visited his son’s private
entrance hall and walled garden, with the lumber and
fuel room and separate workshop on the ground floor,
and the wood-panelled study and bedroom upstairs.
‘You call this a cell? Your mom and I never had it so
good.’ One monk leaves to join the Trappist order, giv-
ing up the lonely grandeur of his cell because he needed
the comradeship of a community life. Another monk
has travelled in the opposite direction, leaving a
Benedictine monastery for a Charterhouse and immedi-
ately finding himself at home: the food is better, he no
longer has to milk cows and pull turnips, and he finds
the solace and space simply to be with God that he had
hungered for all his life. While the former novices are
generous with their reflections, the solemnly professed
Carthusians themselves don’t give much away, though if
they did they would probably insist that they weren’t
doing anything special. They are only doing the most
ordinary and natural thing in the world – seeking and
being sought by God – in their own idiosyncratic and
uncluttered way.
It is sometimes deeply sad. Alone in his freezing cell
on Christmas Day, a novice climbs up onto his win-
dowsill so that he can look over the wall of the
monastery. He hears the children of the neighbouring
farmer playing with their new toys on the other side. ‘If
you are unhappy, why do you stay?’ one of the novices is
asked. ‘I’ve come here to be alone with God,’ is the
reply, ‘and I’ll pay the price.’ There are moments, too,
where you sense a monk is savouring a feeling of com-
pleteness granted to few of us. There is a lovely scene of
a monk in his private oratory after Vespers, with the sun
going down, sitting in his fold-down chair, feeling ‘like
a farmer with the day’s chores completed, enjoying the
rhythm of the seasons and the quiet of the early
evening’. As one former monk reported to Maguire, ‘I
didn’t see the promised land, but I did see the glow of
the promised land.’
To order this book at £12.79, see LR Bookshop on page 30
24
LITERARY REVIEW February 2007
BIOGRAPHY
P AUL J OHNSON
MERDE EN BAS DE SOIE
TALLEYRAND : B ETRAYER AND
S AVIOUR OF F RANCE
★
By Robin Harris
(John Murray 448pp £30)
O NE REASON WHY Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-
Périgord (1754–1838) has proved such a popular subject
for biography is that there is plenty of meat in him. His
life was long and spanned a tumultuous period; he was
active almost throughout it, and often centre-stage. He
was born the same year as the decapitated French King,
Louis XVI, and was a few months older than the tragic
Marie-Antoinette. Yet he survived into Victorian times,
dying the year after the young queen came to the
throne, the same in which Dickens published Nicholas
Nickleby and Surtees his Jorrocks’s Jaunts and Jollities.
Talleyrand lied all the time, especially about himself.
And people lied about him. As he himself remarked:
‘People always say too much ill or too much good of
me. I enjoy the honours of exaggeration.’ His latest
biographer, Robin Harris, has to steer his way between
many pitfalls, and on the whole does so with commend-
able judgement. His book is lively, convincing, clearly
written and not too long. The determining factor in
Talleyrand’s life was his debility in one, perhaps both, of
his legs. He attributed this to the carelessness of a nurse
but it was more likely congenital – a club foot, Harris
thinks. At all events it ruled out a military career. Hence
his father effectively disinherited him and forced him
into the Church, where he became Bishop of Autun, a
few months before the Revolution began with the sum-
moning of the Estates General.
To Talleyrand, a life-long liberal though also a moderate
traditionalist in important respects, the opening phases of
the Revolution came as a relief. He resigned his bish-
opric, laicised himself and took an active part in politics.
During the Terror he escaped to London and thence trav-
elled to Amer ica. He became familiar with the
Anglophone world, and after his return to France, via
Germany, he was made Foreign Minister under the
Directory (1797). He was instrumental in creating the
Consulate and laying the foundations of Bonaparte’s
personal rule, and served him as Foreign Minister till
1807. Thereafter their relations were ambivalent or
stormy, the Emperor denouncing him before the Court as
‘Merde en bas de soie’ (shit in silk stockings). After
Bonaparte’s first fall in 1814 Talleyrand became head of a
provisional government, played the leading role in restor-
ing the Bourbons and was one of the chief architects,
 BIOGRAPHY

along with Castlereagh and received an authority from nature

Metternich, of the Congress and to refashion or obliterate the
Treaty of Vienna. But the restored truth.’ He had many admirers in
Louis XVIII soon got rid of him, as England, however, ranging from
a liberal who believed in constitu- Lord Holland, a close friend and
tions and the freedom of the press, correspondent, to the Duke of
and he passed into opposition, Wellington, who valued him,
helping the Duke of Orléans to despite his faults, as a buttress of
benefit from the Revolution of European peace and stability. He
1830 and become King of the also admired his wit. The Duke
French. In return, Louis Philippe was present at the famous dinner
made him ambassador to London given by Mrs Crawford in Paris in
(1830–34), where he served with July 1821, when it was finally con-
distinction. The Prince (Bonaparte firmed that Bonaparte was dead.
had made him Prince of Benevento To her ‘Quel événement!’
in 1806) had married, unlawfully in Talleyrand drily replied: ‘Plus un
Rome’s eyes, in 1802, though the événement. Une nouvelle’ (no
union did not endure long, and longer an event, just a news-item).
almost his last act, on his deathbed, He himself had a cur ious
was to negotiate a reconciliation Talleyrand: plenty of meat metaphor to describe his career
with the Church, under the influ- and to dismiss the criticisms he
ence of his long-time companion the Duchesse de Dino. had constantly provoked: ‘I am an old umbrella on which
So he died in an atmosphere of sanctity and cynicism. it has rained for forty years. What do a few more drops
This brief résumé of Talleyrand’s career leaves out matter to me!’ He would be amused to learn that books
much and glosses over many dubieties. No one really are still being written about his glittering and shady life,
knew what went on inside his head, not even Madame and enjoyed, as this one will be, by many readers.
de Dino. He had no fixed moral or political principles, To order this book at £24, see LR Bookshop on page 30
beyond a general preference for peace as opposed to
war, and for order as opposed to radical change. But he
was at all times perceptive and quick to seize opportuni-
ties, an expert at taking advantage of events as they
occurred. He was, in his own stealthy way, a superb
negotiator and diplomat. His weakness was a failure to
understand the military factor, which led him to many
misjudgements. He was incorrigibly and perpetually
corrupt, taking money from individuals and govern-
ments in the most shameless manner, and thus acquiring
several fortunes, which he also lost by foolish specula-
tions in banking. He became the owner (in 1803) of the
splendid chateau and estate of Valençay, and at one time
or another occupied some of the grandest houses in
Paris. He always lived luxuriously and (it was said) spent
an hour each morning with his chef de cuisine, discussing
his dinner in detail. A really thorough investigation
of his personal finances would be helpful to our under-
standing of him, though it may be the materials no
longer exist.
Contemporar ies were divided about Talleyrand.
Chateaubriand, his rival and enemy, regarded him with
detestation. Following a speech by the Prince in the
Chamber in 1823, he recorded: ‘When the peddler of
these calm assertions gets down from the Tribune and
goes and sits impassively in his place, you follow him
with your eyes, suspended between a sort of horror and a
sort of admiration. You wonder if this man has not

25
LITERARY REVIEW February 2007
 BIOGRAPHY
A NNE S OMERSET
AN AGENT OF TYRANNY
T HOMAS C ROMWELL : T HE R ISE AND FALL OF
H ENRY VIII’ S M OST N OTORIOUS M INISTER
★ Such a huge revolution in Church and State inevitably
By Robert Hutchinson
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson 368pp £20)
THOMAS CROMWELL HAS had his apologists. The late Sir
Geoffrey Elton hailed him as Henry VIII’s not-so-evil
genius, admiring him for his political vision and struc-
tural innovations in government. Yet even he could
never make Cromwell an appealing figure, and for many
he has remained the arch-villain of Tudor England. In
this gripping and solidly researched biography, Robert
Hutchinson zestfully presents the case for the prosecu-
tion. Cromwell is convincingly presented not only as a
frighteningly efficient agent of tyranny but as a cruel and
grasping individual whose contempt for
justice and human rights transformed
the kingdom into a near-totalitarian
state. It is no defence that Cromwell’s
ruthlessness merely reflected that of his
master Henry VIII, who ultimately
repaid his servant’s loyalty by casting him
to the wolves. Hutchinson relates the
story of Cromwell’s downfall, like that of
his career, with tremendous verve, and
while it is hard to feel compassion, the
account of how he was destroyed by ‘the
bloody laws’ he had introduced reads
like Greek tragedy.
Cromwell occupied high office for just
under ten years, and it is astonishing
what he achieved in that short time.
Having avoided being dragged down
when his first employer, Cardinal Cromwell: hatchet job
Wolsey, fell from power, Cromwell had
entered the Privy Council by January 1531. His path to
power was assured when he succeeded, where Wolsey
had failed, in devising a way of annulling the King’s
marriage to his first wife, Catherine of Aragon. It was
he who masterminded England’s break with Rome,
drafting the statutes that gave it legal authority and pilot-
ing the measures through Parliament by skilful exploita-
tion of lay anti-clericalism. It was also probably at
Cromwell’s suggestion that the King then proceeded to
the dissolution of the monaster ies, descr ibed by
Hutchinson as an ‘audacious act of legal pillage that
remains the greatest single act of privatisation in the
history of England’s governance’. The abbey lands were
parcelled out to the nobility and gentry, ensuring that
26
LITERARY REVIEW February 2007
they went along with this wholesale despoliation, but
Cromwell did not neglect his own interests, and much
monastic property and treasure ended up in his hands. In
addition to the riches acquired from such sources, his
income was supplemented by bribes, often slipped to
him in gloves or a handkerchief, or left under cushions
by previous arrangement.
aroused protest but Cromwell showed no compunction
when it came to crushing dissent. Cardinal Fisher and
Thomas More were early victims, and other opponents
met still more grisly ends at Tyburn or Smithfield.
Under his auspices the definition of treason was
widened in 1534, so that anyone held to have wished
harm to the King in speech or writing could be accused
of the offence. The result was that ‘many an innocent
word’ brought people to the scaffold. Even so,
Cromwell found it too cumbersome to obtain convic-
tions through criminal trials, and therefore the legal
procedure was modified so that in cases of treason the
death sentence could be passed by act of attainder.
In 1536 the rebellion known as the
Pilgrimage of Grace posed a formidable
challenge to Cromwell. Norther n
England rose up in protest at the suppres-
sion of the monaster ies, blaming
Cromwell rather than the King for the
attack on the Church.
Cromwell’s rivals at court were sure
that he would be ruined, but he survived
the crisis because the rebels dispersed
after receiving assurances that their griev-
ances would be considered. Another
minor outbreak of insurrection then
afforded Henry and his minister the pre-
text they needed to punish those who
had defied them earlier.
It is distinctly uncomfortable to read a
biography of this unscrupulous politician
and to be struck by modern parallels.
Not only did words become criminal
under Cromwell, but parliamentary scrutiny was enfee-
bled by the passage of an act granting the King the
power to legislate by issuing proclamations. The pream-
ble to this measure soothingly insisted that it was essen-
tial for national security, but Hutchinson insists that ‘in
truth it was carte blanche for despotism’. Chillingly he
adds that nowadays, whenever primary legislation is
amended by ministerial order without parliamentary
debate, this is done by invoking ‘Henry VIII powers’.
Hutchinson concedes that all historians have a debt of
gratitude to Cromwell on account of his 1538 order that
all parish churches must maintain registers of births,
baptisms and marriages. However, just as now we fear
that identity cards and computerised medical records
 BIOGRAPHY
might be used by governments for sinister purposes, so
then it was thought that Cromwell had a hidden agenda,
and that he was compiling this database in order to
impose new taxes.
Cromwell was invulnerable so long as the King sup-
ported him, but once the capricious and unpredictable
monarch turned against him he was doomed. For
Cromwell, as for so many others, Henry’s complicated
matrimonial affairs ultimately proved fatal.
The minister should have procured his master’s ever-
lasting gratitude not only for dissolving his first marriage
but also for arranging for Henry’s second wife, Anne
Boleyn, to be executed on fabricated charges of adultery
when the King grew weary of her.
Unfortunately, in 1540 Cromwell made the mistake of
persuading Henry to marry the German princess Anne
of Cleves, and the King never forgave him for saddling
him with someone so unprepossessing. Even before
Cromwell could find a way of effecting a legal separa-
tion, Henry became enamoured of Catherine Howard,
niece of Cromwell’s greatest enemy, the Duke of
Norfolk. Since Henr y was already vexed with
Cromwell, it was not difficult for the Duke to persuade
the King that Cromwell was giving illegal encourage-
ment to Protestant reformers. Within three weeks of his
arrest at the council table in June 1540, Cromwell had
been sentenced to suffer death as a heretic or traitor, at
the will of the King. In the end he was spared burning,
but the incompetent axeman chosen to despatch him
took nearly half an hour to hack off his head. On the
same day that Cromwell was beheaded, Henry married
Catherine Howard.
Hutchinson tells his story with infectious relish and
vividly evokes the politics and personalities of this
extraordinary decade. Ably charting both the early years
of the English reformation and the related faction strug-
gles at court, his account is studded with memorable
anecdotes and well-chosen quotes. More space could
perhaps have been devoted to Cromwell’s administrative
reforms, for though we are told that these were his
greatest achievements, Hutchinson barely elaborates
further. While this ensures that the narrative pace never
slackens, a few more bureaucratic details would surely
have been acceptable. I was mystified too that
Hutchinson felt it necessary to convert all distances in
the text into metric measurements. It is not particularly
helpful to learn that Anne of Cleves was met by a wel-
coming committee ‘1 mile (1.61 km) outside Calais’.
Cromwell himself, who proudly proclaimed ‘this realm
of England is an empire’ when outlawing appeals to
Rome, would certainly have been aghast. Then again, it
is arguably a delicious irony that the biography of such
a singularly unpleasant nationalist should conform to
directives from Brussels.
To order this book at £16, see LR Bookshop on page 30
27
L ESLIE M ITCHELL
EVERY MAN HAS HIS PRICE
T HE G REAT M AN, S IR ROBERT WALPOLE :
S COUNDREL , G ENIUS AND B RITAIN ’ S F IRST
P RIME M INISTER
★
By Edward Pearce
(Jonathan Cape 485pp £25)
TO ATTEMPT TO write a life of Robert Walpole is to
climb one of the highest mountains in biography. He
dominated English politics for over twenty years, and
established a model of government that lasted until 1832
in substance, and beyond that date in spirit. It takes a
brave man to undertake the task. Only J H Plumb
attempted the summit, and, after two volumes, could
not face a third. More recent biographers have preferred
to stay in the foothills, and Edward Pearce must be
counted among their number.
Quite simply, the amount of material to be gone
through is intimidating. The massive correspondence of
the Pelham brothers in the British Library would, alone,
defeat all but the most determined researcher. Since
Walpole was everywhere, his footsteps have to be fol-
lowed through the complexities of religious controver-
sies, the byways of diplomacy, and the intricacies of
domestic politics. One reason why he was called ‘The
Great Man’ was that little could be done without his
express connivance. As a result, a full study of the man
would probably take a decade to research and write. No
academic, labouring under the lash of research assess-
ments, has the time to think of such a project. Few non-
academics would care to make such a sacrifice of time.
So we are left with a series of partial studies. Pearce
attacks the problem by, first, weighting his book towards
Walpole’s early years. Nearly half of it is taken up with
events before Walpole’s system was fully established. The
second device is to give the flavour of the period in
colourful, set-piece essays on matters such as the South Sea
Bubble, the Excise Crisis and Walpole’s battle with the
Wits. They make entertaining reading. The third tactic,
however, that of getting into Walpole’s career as quickly as
possible, is less satisfactory. The introductory chapter has a
rushed and breathless character that may leave the general
reader more confused than enlightened. Haste may also
account for the odd error of fact. William III, for example,
was importantly not ‘James’s nephew by marriage’.
Once into his stride, however, Pearce sets a brisk pace.
He has a breezy, inviting style. It is uncompromising in
its judgments, and pitiless in its condemnations.
Archbishop Laud, for some reason, was ‘a dervish-like
Primate’, while ‘the element of damn fool in Louis XIV
LITERARY REVIEW February 2007
 BIOGRAPHY
should never be underestimated’. The English, on the
whole, despised ‘Johnny Foreigner’. Alluring compar-
isons are made to ensure that the reader is kept on line.
The South Sea Company is compared with the BBC, as
a national monopoly, with all the benefits and problems
of being in that situation. George II and his wife are like
the Proudies in Trollope’s Barchester Towers, and the
Tories of the 1720s are like the Labour Party of the late
1950s. This may not be nuanced writing, but at least the
reader knows where he is.
Given this approach, Walpole should expect rougher
treatment at Pearce’s hands than he has had from a number
of other biographers. And so it turns out. This Walpole
‘was all about power’. The destruction of the careers of
Carteret and Pulteney, the elaboration of corruption into a
system, and the inability to countenance rivals of any kind,
all point in the same direction. So blatant was this process,
that Pearce is tempted into a confession. He admits that
there is nothing ‘to celebrate’ in chronicling the way
power was ‘hoarded and cherished by a long-lived oli-
garchy’. He also speculates that Plumb abandoned his
Herculean labours out of a growing distaste for his subject.
A slightly different approach might have made the task
more palatable. This is a severely political biography. It tells
the story of Walpole the consummate manipulator of men
and opinion. He was, after all, the coiner of the expression
‘Every man has his price’. But there are other Walpoles.
He was one of England’s leading connoisseurs, whose pic-
ture collection now hangs, for the most part, in The
Hermitage. More to the point, his taste was his own, and
he was not afraid of buying Dutch art of the seventeenth
century when it was at its most unfashionable. Then there
is the Norfolk Walpole, who lived in London, but was
never exclusively of London. He never distanced himself
from his country roots and built Houghton to prove it.
Hunting to hounds and hanging criminals with his brother
Justices kept him in touch with his electorate in ways that
many modern politicians could usefully emulate.
And then, was it all ‘corruption’? It was only called
such names by those who were outside the Walpole sys-
tem. For those inside, rewarding men of property with
jobs and sinecures merely reflected the claims of property
to be the principal preoccupation of politics. After 1688,
property-holders were identified as the best qualified to
run the nation’s affairs, by reason of being educated, hav-
ing the leisure to act, and having something to lose if
matters went wrong. Walpole was their man. By rallying
most English property-owners around the Hanoverians
and rewarding them for their loyalty, Walpole brought
England a stability which it had not known for a century.
Some called this process ‘corruption’; others thought it
could only be the work of a political genius. The real
problem with this book is that, after reading it, it is hard
to see how anyone could have taken the latter view.
To order this book at £20, see LR Bookshop on page 30
28
LITERARY REVIEW February 2007
L UCY W OODING
THE HOPE OF THE REALM
E DWARD VI: T HE L OST K ING OF E NGLAND
★
By Chris Skidmore
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson 346pp £20)
RARELY CAN A son have been more longed for than the
future Edward VI, born on 12 October 1537 to a father
who had been waiting twenty-seven years for a legiti-
mate son and heir. Henry VIII had moved heaven and
earth to ensure that his dynasty would continue,
renouncing the authority of the Pope, taking control of
the English Church, rewriting the rules of kingship and
the laws of succession and treason to safeguard his third
marriage, and his only son. The birth of Edward seemed
more than just a lucky chance; for Henry, it was the
divine seal of approval on his bold innovations, a vindica-
tion of policies that many thought brutal, unlawful, and
misguided. Yet, as this book makes clear, the ambitions
and pretensions of Tudor kingship were constantly at the
mercy of human frailty. Henry VIII died leaving his son
to inherit at only nine years old, and Edward himself was
to die, slowly and painfully, a teenager on the brink of
adulthood and power, just six years later.
It is very hard to write the biography of someone who
never came to maturity; it is equally hard to write the
biography of a Tudor monarch. On the one hand, there
is the lack of material and the difficulties of teasing out
an individual identity which was still only half formed,
and on the other there are the enormous quantities of
gossip, speculation, conspiracy theories, and wishful
thinking which surrounded the person of a monarch
then, and which continue to grow after any royal
demise. Chris Skidmore is to be congratulated on his
nerve for tackling this project, but also on the result,
which is a lively and engaging account of a life which
was extraordinary, even if it was short. Edward’s early
years were spent as his father’s most treasured possession;
as Henry himself phrased it, ‘this whole realm’s most
precious jewel’. With Henry’s death, the young king was
at the heart of a court in which noble rivalries were
played out against a background of religious change,
economic distress, the strains of war and the social
disturbances resulting from all three.
Henry had seen trouble coming, and wanted power to
reside with a carefully balanced regency council whilst
his son was still too young to rule. Before the old king
was quite dead, however, Edward’s uncle, Edward
Seymour, had plotted his course to power, and duly took
over as Protector and Duke of Somerset. Somerset’s rule
was brief and contentious, and encompassed ruinous war
 BIOGRAPHY
with Scotland, the execution for treason
of his own brother, and a range of reli-
gious and economic policies which left
the realm in upheaval. When factional
politics brought about his fall from
power, the Duke of Northumberland
controlled the government in his place,
with a steadier authority but policies no
less contentious. It was in these years
that England’s ancient Catholic religion
was thoroughly dismantled and replaced
by a new, eager, awkward, often tem-
pestuous Protestantism. In these reli-
gious changes, as well as in anything
pertaining to his own royal dignity, the
young king was deeply involved. His
realisation of his own impending death
led to an extraordinary attempt to divert Edward and friend
the succession away from his Catholic
elder sister Mary and to safeguard Protestantism through
the coronation of Lady Jane Grey, who briefly became
Queen Jane until Mary swept to power.
The problem with a biography such as this is how to
separate a history of one individual from the history of his
reign. In the case of Edward, there is very little historical
evidence of a purely biographical nature. Skidmore’s work
is the usual mix, then, of political and religious narrative,
with just the occasional insight into Edward’s personal life.
As a history of the reign, it might have been expected to
engage with historical debate, or examine more closely
the veracity of some of its sources, but since this is a book
for the general reader, Skidmore largely sidesteps these
issues to continue with the story. There are occasional
errors: Edward was born on the eve of St Edward’s Day,
not the feast day itself; Anne Boleyn was accused of adul-
tery with more men than just Mark Smeaton; it was not
William Forrest but John Forrest who died at the stake in
1538. There are some hackneyed moments, too, but
mostly this book is written with enthusiasm and insight.
It is the details that make this kind of book: Edward’s
christening, which was such a splendid and pompous affair
that the baby did not make it into the chapel until mid-
night; the baby prince howling when confronted with the
German ambassadors; the Renaissance trappings of the
young prince’s study – these bring the child to life. With
the young king’s accession, the stage admits a wider range
of characters, but the human touches again add the best
relish: the imperial ambassador, disgruntled at being inter-
rupted in his speech at the coronation and told to speak in
Latin instead, or the Queen Dowager, at odds with the
Protector, writing to her new husband that it ‘was fortu-
nate we were so distant, for I suppose else I should have
bitten him’. The dramas of the reign are told well here,
but the story is at its best when it returns to Edward,
arguing with his sister over their divergent views of the
true faith, talking with his tutors,
observed by the foreign ambassadors,
painfully learning the brutal but sophis-
ticated skills of Tudor politicking.
Who or what Edward VI was, or
represented, was debated furiously at the
time, and has not been settled since. He
was the great hope of all Protestant
reformers, but since these men could
not agree among themselves about the
Protestant Church they hoped to build,
it is hard to disentangle the King’s own
convictions from amongst the propaganda
and flattery of his own and subsequent
ages. He was appealed to as King, and as
the epitome of justice, by both those
who rose in rebellion in 1549 and those
who brutally suppressed those rebel-
lions. His father, to whom he was the
focus of every hope for the future, could write ‘there is
nothing in the world so noble, just and perfect’; it appears
that he tried to return the compliment by emulating his
father as best he could. It is hard to find the human face
within all this, and mostly hints and fragments are all we
have. Yet his life makes a wonderful story, and this retelling
is accomplished thoughtfully and with zest.
To order this book at £16, see LR Bookshop on page 30
The British Academy
Eleventh Annual
Br itish Academy
Lecture
The Devil in Holy Water : Political Libel in
Eighteenth-Centur y France
By Professor Robert Darton, FBA Princeton University
The underground literature of pre-revolutionary France contained
a heavy dose of 'libelles' or slanderous attacks on the most eminent
figures in the kingdom. Many libelers operated from a colony of
French expatriates in London, which the Parisian police attempted
to suppress in a series of secret missions. By following the trail of
the police through the French archives, it is possible to see how
the state dealt with an ideological threat. And by tracing the inter-
textual connections among the libels, one can study a variety of
literature that led from court politics under Louis XV to the
polemics of the Revolution at its most revolutionary.
5.30pm, Thursday 22 February 2007
The Br itish Academy, 10 Carlton House
Terrace, London SW1Y 5AH
Br itish Academy Lectures are freely open to the public and
everyone is welcome
Further details about the British Academy’s lectures are available at
www.brit.ac.uk/events
Telephone: 020 7969 5246 or email: lectures@britac.ac.uk
29
LITERARY REVIEW February 2007
 FOREIGN PARTS
Literary Review Bookshop
J ASON G OODWIN

The Adventures of
a Crafty Convert
T RICKSTER T RAVELS : I N S EARCH OF L EO
A FRICANUS, A S IXTEENTH -C ENTURY
M USLIM B ETWEEN WORLDS
★
By Natalie Zemon Davis
(Faber & Faber 435pp £20)

NATALIE ZEMON DAVIS is best known for her book The

Return of Martin Guerre, a study of identity and dissimula-
tion in the late medieval world which was turned into a
successful film. Trickster Travels revisits some of those
themes, moving from Islamic Spain to Morocco, Egypt
and papal Rome at the beginning of the sixteenth century.
20% discount on all Al-Hasan al-Wazzan was born to a Muslim family in
Granada in the late 1480s, the last years of Islamic rule
in Spain. Granada was always to be an evocative and bit-
titles under review ter memory for the Andalusian émigrés who found their
way to Fez; al-Hasan, Davis says, remembered it in the
colour of Spanish tiles, and in the cut of his mother’s
knee-length white veil, which she wore in the street.
Memory and exile were to play a huge role in al-
Call our Order Hotline Hasan’s life, as he went on to crisscross some of the
deepest divides in the political and religious world of his
0870 429 6608 time. By the age of sixteen, al-Hasan was travelling on
behalf of the sultan of Fez, gathering the material which
All major credit and debit cards was later to appear in his description of Africa. Davis
downplays the drama – and as a simple biography,
Trickster Travels could be something of a disappointment;
By email: its value lies in the broader picture she paints of the
send your order to sixteenth-century Mediterranean, and in her forensic
literaryreview@bertrams.com analysis of al-Hasan’s surviving writings. For this diplo-
mat and scholar also left behind him in Rome tantalising
By post: fragments of memory and observation, whose signifi-
send your order, enclosing a cheque made payable to cance Davis teases out in a tour de force of historical
‘BOOKS BY PHONE’ to: research and speculation.
Literary Review Bookshop, Bertrams, Travel, as Davis explains, fitted into a Muslim context
1 Broadland Business Park, Norwich NR7 0WF as an exploration of the meaning of Islam – too much
time spent in infidel nations was not considered a good
thing; the hardships of the road were viewed as ascetic
By fax:
challenges, and a scholarly tradition had grown up
send your order, quoting Literary Review, to around travel accounts, or rihla – the most famous being
0870 429 6709 that of Ibn Battuta, who visited China. ‘Whether on a
mountain horse-trail, a desert caravan, or a vessel cross-
ing the Mediterranean, al-Hasan al-Wazzan always had
£2.45 P & P books and writing materials in his pouches,’ Davis notes.
Al-Wazzan had plenty of travel opportunities. As a diplo-
No matter how many books mat he was always busy, for he lived through a turbulent
you order!
 FOREIGN PARTS

time in Mediterranean history, at a very high level, after all,

and Davis’s focus on al-Hasan’s for he was catechised by men
travels illuminates the world from the Pope’s own circle.
through which he passed. The Yet dissimulation was recog-
Spanish were attacking the nised as a possibility by both
coast of Morocco while to the Muslims and Chr istians.
east Sultan Selim extended the Within Islam, outward obser-
Ottoman Empire through Syria vance of the alien faith was
and the Holy Cities to Egypt, permissible under coercion; it
becoming the most powerful was called taqiyya, and had
Islamic ruler of the age. been expressly permitted to
Al-Hasan had anxieties the Muslims of Granada in
about travelling by sea, at that 1504. The Inquisition perhaps
time infested with Christian Sultan al-Hasan of Tunis: they may have met had some basis for its belief
pirates. In the east, the Knights that ‘all Moriscos are secretly
of Rhodes preyed on Muslim shipping; in the western Muslim’. Leo’s scant references to Mohammed and Jesus
Mediterranean, the Spaniards did the same. Sure enough, can be read this way, certainly; yet Davis argues a more
in the summer of 1518, on his way by sea from Cairo to interesting case, by which Leo practises taqiyya and yet
Fez, al-Hasan was captured by Don Pedro de Cabrera y remains fascinated by aspects of Christian theology and
Bobadilla, who quickly recognised the value of his prize. organisation. Christian theologians worked on texts to
By October, al-Hasan was in Rome, a prisoner of the reconcile them, unlike the four schools of Sunni law; the
Pope. The Vatican librarian issued him with books, ‘to Pope himself offered a version of authority which would
Hasan faqih, Hasan, man of Muslim learning, orator of have interested a Muslim aware of the divisions within
the King of Fez, prisoner in the Castel Sant’Angelo’. Islam and the decline of the caliphate.
So begins the strangest chapter in al-Hasan’s life: his nine Flitting back and forth through his writings, Davis
years of writing and translating in Rome as the Christian assembles a convincing case for Leo’s motives and state of
convert Leo Africanus. Al-Hasan has allowed Davis to mind; perhaps it takes one boffin to understand another.
explore the Islamic Mediterranean, and sub-Saharan In an atmosphere of agreeable scholarship, Leo was guilty
Africa, of the early sixteenth century; but with his arrival of a little academic self-puffery; everyone bowed to his
in Rome, he and his books become the prism through knowledge of Arabic and the Quran, and he would have
which she can investigate a spectrum of attitudes and been aware of the opportunities of Roman high society
assumptions which characterised the relationship between and the intellectual circles he moved in; he may even have
Islam and Christianity, while mining the confluences and taken up with – and married – a Jewish woman.
contiguities of learning and tradition in a divided world. So he turned his hand to the Vatican library of Arabic
In spite of his formal conversion, Leo’s huge Description books, to which he added a few of his own. He wanted to
of Africa is aimed at two distinct and different audiences, be useful – not so useful, Davis speculates, that he would
in Renaissance Italy and the Maghreb. ‘He had to write a annotate his writings about Africa with maps that might
book about Africa’, Davis suggests, ‘that would one day help a Christian general, but enough to secure his own
allow him to go back and write another.’ So she decodes position and to spend his time doing what learned men,
his work, and what emerges in this fascinating exercise is like him, would do anywhere they found a breath of civili-
the breadth of Leo’s knowledge, his assimilation of sation: writing things down.
European literary norms and As Davis points out, ‘a
trends, and his occasional book on Africa is the one
ability to fuse the two, estab- al-Wazzan would have been
lishing an author ial voice most likely to compose even
which would find echoes on if he had never left the
both sides of the faith divide. world of Islam.’ He did, in
He uses selected affinities, fact, retur n to Muslim
and also diplomatic silences, North Africa, but his fate
to maintain what Davis calls there remains a mystery;
‘his strategies of flying back
and forth’. One such silence
www.lifelinespress.co.uk almost certainly he never
again wrote anything of
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would surround his conver- “This is a fantastic idea” - Lutyens and Rubinstein, literary agents
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sion to Christianity. How sin- To order this book at £16, see
cere was it? It was conducted LR Bookshop on page 30

31
LITERARY REVIEW February 2007
 FOREIGN PARTS

S ARA W HEELER
THE TRIALS OF NANOOK
T HE L ONG E XILE : A T RUE S TORY OF
D ECEPTION AND S URVIVAL AMONGST THE
I NUIT OF THE C ANADIAN A RCTIC
★ Inukjuamiut in an ‘experiment’ that was part of ‘the
By Melanie McGrath
(Fourth Estate 302pp £16.99)
THIS IS THE story of a documentary film – perhaps the best
documentary ever made – and the treacherous truth that
lurked behind the celluloid. It is a gripping tale, a kind of
minor epic infused with the plangent loneliness of the
polar regions, and Melanie McGrath tells it with panache.
The film was Nanook of the North, the director a dogged
Irish-American called Robert Flaherty who pitched up, in
1920, among a group of Inuit on the Ungava Peninsula, in
Inukjuak on the east coast of Hudson Bay. He had been
trying to make a film in the Arctic for years. This time he
used Akeley cameras fitted with gyroscopic tripod heads
and lubricated with graphite rather than oil (which froze).
For a year, living in the abandoned cabin of a fur-trader,
Flaherty filmed the daily life of his neighbours. Difficulties
queued up – insufficient daylight, dry snow in the lenses,
film which shattered in the cold (that was only the start of
it), but Flaherty sailed home to New York with 75,000
feet of film. The edited version was and remains a triumph.
Who can forget the image of the hunter Nanook steadying
his kayak while, from the impossibly tiny hole at the stern,
one wife emerges, then another wife, then a series of chil-
dren of ever decreasing size, and, finally, the dog?
Nanook’s story captured the imagination of the world.
‘To this audience,’ writes McGrath, ‘still reeling from the
trenches and the mustard gas of the First World War,
Nanook and Nyla [one of his wives] were innocent wan-
derers in an as-yet unblemished world.’ A still of the
plucky little hunter was used to sell ice cream; the 38-
year-old Flaherty became a household name; in Malay,
nanuk entered the language as
And much later it emerged that there had in fact been
romance all round. Flaherty had an affair with Maggie
Nujarluktuk (the woman who played Nyla), and when he
left the Arctic – never to return – she was pregnant with
their son. The half-breed Josephie never met his father.
The second half of The Long Exile deals with an event
thirty years after the making of Nanook, when the
Canadian Government decided to resettle some
Canadianisation of the Arctic’. Josephie Flaherty’s family
were packed off to the vast and uninhabited Ellesmere
Island 1,500 miles away – as McGrath convincingly argues,
they were more or less coerced into going, even though it
was anathema to any Inuit to leave the all-important nunat-
uarigapku, or homeland, imbued as it was with the spirits of
their ancestors. (The families travelled on a ship that usually
carried Inuit consumptives down to southern sanatoria.
She was known to government officials as The Shakespeare
Ship – TB or not TB.) Of course, the flora and fauna were
totally different up there in the High Arctic, so the
newcomers more or less starved at first. It was a botched,
cockeyed and criminally irresponsible scheme, one of
many in the desperate annals of modern Inuit history.
The author fills in the historical background with
detailed accounts of a range of topics – the role of traders
and missionaries in the far north, for example, Inuit child-
rearing, and the fluctuating prices of fox fur. But she is
most interested in the emotional topography of the Inuit
world. In her best pages McGrath inches towards an exe-
gesis of the symbolism and power of the polar landscape
and the complex traditions and beliefs of its indigenous
peoples, reworking themes most notably covered by Barry
Lopez (in Arctic Dreams) and Hugh Brody (in The Other
Side of Eden). She is a fine descriptive writer too, conjuring
the shadows cast by the shallow sun, the whiff of a blubber
stove and the rasp of the sledge runners over new ice.
Only an unfortunate insistence on supposition brakes the
narrative drive (‘Then ... she would have pressed her new
baby’s nose to her own and given her an Eskimo kiss’).
The book concludes with a concise account of the 1993
Royal Commission in Ottawa, when the truth was finally
told (Flaherty’s granddaughter

NEW AUTHORS
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32
LITERARY REVIEW February 2007
 FOREIGN PARTS
N ORMAN S TONE
MICE THAT ROARED
R EALM OF THE B LACK M OUNTAIN : A
H ISTORY OF M ONTENEGRO
★ ‘caused’ the crisis – has become the popular historical
By Elizabeth Roberts
(Hurst & Co 521pp £25)
THE FALL OF European Communism began and ended
with a roaring of mice. Estonia declared ‘sovereignty’ in
September 1988 and started a process that brought down
the USSR. Slovenia in 1991 did much the same as far as
Yugoslavia was concerned, and the whole business came
to an end last year when Montenegro declared indepen-
dence. Montenegro had been a part (and, as this book
shows, a part more generally enthusiastic than others) of
Communist Yugoslavia, and her defection had a signifi-
cance out of all proportion to her size and weight.
What was it about nationalism, even micro-national-
ism, that spelt the end of Communism? Almost every
commentator on Communism, including this writer,
swallowed its propaganda and thought that the nationality
problem (which from Ireland to Flanders to the Basque
Country is, in Western Europe, a persistent bore) had
been solved, at least in the sense that children in primary
schools could use their mother tongue and unreadable
provincial writers could publish freely. We were all
wrong. The fact is that under the surface Communism
consisted of clashing mafias, and, as Noel Malcolm
remarks, even getting a modest job as a hospital manager
in Sarajevo would depend on belonging to one.
The paradox is that the nationalism produced under
Communism was much more hate-filled than anything
produced in Western Europe, where nationalism – those
idiotic signs on motorways in Welsh – is just tiresome.
The Party monopolised power, and nationalists were a
mafia within it and fought each other under the surface.
When Communism was declining, they took over. It was
a considerable error of foreign ministries everywhere not
to appreciate this, and in her new book on Montenegro
Elizabeth Roberts, who knows the diplomatic problems
concerning Yugoslavia from the inside, perpetuates one of
these errors. The Germans moved to recognise Slovenia
and Croatia as independent states late in 1991, she com-
plains, and that contributed to the Yugoslav problem. It
did not: it stopped Serb attacks on Croatia.
At the time – as Roberts recognises – Dubrovnik was
being brutally vandalised. There was a sign in the old city
(it is a city recognised as world-class by the relevant bodies)
to the effect that this and that piece of damage had been
caused by ‘Montenegrin thugs’, and in the countryside
or the hotels round about there was a grotesque level of
33
vandalism. The same happened with old Austro-
Hungarian spa buildings in Slavonia – even the park trees
were carefully sawn. You shook your head and wondered
at the savagery. When Germany forced the dithering
Europeans to recognise Slovenia and Croatia, that at least
stopped, though it was to carry on in far worse form in
Bosnia. Somehow, Roberts’s version – that Germany
account. After a while, the Europeans (with American
prodding) came round to the view that the separatist
nationalists were to be supported, and we had Kosovo.
Interestingly, Roberts shows that the Europeans were not
really very enthusiastic about an independent Montenegro.
Javier Solana ran the show, sometimes autocratically, and –
though Roberts does not suggest this – maybe as a good
Spaniard he just found the prospect of endless meaningless
Galicias and Valencias depressing and pointless. By 2006,
the local Communist-turned-nationalist, Djukanovitch,
stage-managed a referendum in which 55 per cent of the
electorate, in an 85 per cent turnout (of about a quarter of
a million), voted for independence. And so another inde-
pendent flag wobbles up a flagstaff, and a new national
anthem (in this case an old folk song about the buds in
May) gets intoned; embassies trot back and forth, and there
are essays on ‘the Montenegrin identity’. The best part of
Roberts’s book concerns this later period, and as she has
observed it at first hand it contains important new material.
One of the great fuellers of nationalism, especially under
Communism, was the sense of a forbidden history. The
textbooks and the academies would be presenting one ver-
sion of the story, peasant revolts generally being given
prominence. In homes, there would be another ‘narrative’
altogether. In the case of Montenegro, there is an heroic
myth: the little mountain country defying the Turk century
in, century out. What is its relationship with Serbdom,
given that language and religion are the same? Roberts
devotes much of this large book to a historical exploration
of the question. She has dutifully followed the obvious
authorities, but you are better off with the originals (espe-
cially that wonderful old pan-Slav romantic Dmitry
Obolensky on Byzantium and the Slavs, or John Fine on
the mediaeval Balkans; Noel Malcolm’s Bosnia and Kosovo
remain classics). This book should be started from the
point where it reaches the middle of the nineteenth century,
when Montenegro, in the context of the Turkish decline
and fall, came to take a place in European affairs dispro-
portionate to her size and GDP (which then, as now,
mainly came from smuggling tobacco). An old rascal set
himself up as King in 1910, married his daughters in high
places – including Italy and Russia – and tried to use these
Great Power connections to keep his country separate
from Serbia. But in the end it was too small, too poor, too
disunited (tribes fought, as they did in Albania, no doubt
mainly over smuggling rights) and at the end of the
First World War it was brought into Serbia and Yugoslavia.
LITERARY REVIEW February 2007
 FOREIGN PARTS
The strange thing was that Montenegro could assemble
such a parade of admirers in the West. Ranke, for
instance, went on and on in a youthful exercise about the
guzla, a one-stringed instrument with the aid of which
epics were sung, as flaxen-pigtailed maidens stirred por-
ridge for grizzled old warriors in Kaspar-David Friedrich
landscapes. Tennyson wrote some embarrassing verse on
‘Bloody Black Mountain! Arise! The time is ripe! For
dreadful tripe!’ lines. Mount Gladstone rumbled (he
always exaggerated when it came to Ottoman matters)
and British Liberals were downright starry-eyed when it
came to small Balkan peoples fighting to be free – Lloyd
George later on prompted the Greeks into calamity when
he got them to invade the Turkish heartland. But at least
Gladstone knew the problem at first hand because he had
been Governor of Corfu and could see the contrast
between go-ahead Ionian Greeks and the rotting
Ottoman circumstances on the nearby Albanian coast.
Roberts rather skips over the interwar period and its
tensions, and supplies an almost blow-by-blow account of
the subsequent Partisan war. Montenegro and partly-Croat
Herzegovina had in common that they were mountainous
and had traditions of smuggling and banditry. The one
went largely Communist, the other more markedly Croat-
LETTER FROM BASRA
TRYING TO DESCRIBE how hot it P ATRICK H ENNESSEY
is in Iraq in June becomes quite
difficult when well-meaning J UNIOR O FFICERS ’ R EADING C LUB - ing on how one views these
friends and family fail to sympa-
thise on the satellite phone: ‘Yes, T HE B OOKS WE TAKE TO WAR
but it’s pretty hot at home too,
well into the thirties this weekend.’
At 56ºC the pages of Wilfred Thesiger’s The Marsh
Arabs begin to fall out of the book and are scattered by
the wind into the desert and marsh whence they first
came. Melting books pose one of the lesser challenges of
the life of an infantry soldier in Iraq, but one not to be
discounted. (Interestingly, Penguin Classics are the worst
afflicted by this problem, with Vintage paperbacks prov-
ing the most impervious to the Basra summer.)
I think that when the Literary Review invited me to write
this letter – perhaps by the eerie blue light of a cyalume,
under the table during a boring mortar attack, dripping
sweat on the paper while the air-conditioning is down –
its editors were rather sweetly hoping for a nice little piece
about some antiquarian bookshop in Al Amarah that has
managed to stay open throughout the war, or perhaps to
learn about the inaugural Basra Literary Festival, which
one day hopes to emulate Hay-on-Wye. Alas, if such
stories exist they are well hidden and out of the reach of
the British soldier, who these days only sees the streets of
Basra through the slit at the back of a Warrior Armoured
34
LITERARY REVIEW February 2007
Fascist (Ustasa) than any other part of that country, and
each embarrassed the people of its own heartland with
violence. In Montenegro, the Communist Partisans came
to dominate, and throughout Communist Yugoslav history,
Montenegrins were well to the fore in managing things,
although their own republic remained backward.
Montenegrin mafias were at least as cunning as the others.
It was such a network that produced the current leader,
Djukanovitch: he seems to have slid from ardent late-
Communist populism to present-day independent nation-
alism without too much difficulty, and has cleverly
managed the various Serbian or European or local obsta-
cles very well. Roberts defends him from ‘rumours’ of
corruption (he is said to be very rich), but she should ask
the opinion of the Italian police. Montenegro always was a
robber-barony: such an identity is not necessarily all wrong
(any more than it was in the Highlands of Scotland), and
the place has produced more than its share of local heroes.
Milovan Djilas is indeed a European classic (another
remarkable one was John Plamenac, who taught political
philosophy at Oxford and is well remembered). This book
is useful and valuable for the latest period of Montenegro’s
history, when Communism was shading into nationalism.
To order this book at £20, see LR Bookshop on page 30
Fighting Vehicle. It has been the
misfortune, or privilege depend-
things, of my regiment to have
been in Iraq at possibly the most
decisive time in the last three
torrid years. Everything is at stake and the various groups
within the country are fighting harder than ever for what
they want. This, I suppose, includes the Coalition Forces,
who are in as difficult a situation as at any time since the
end of the ‘war-fighting phase’.
All the more important, therefore, to be able to escape
during precious downtime to a good book. With two
English graduates in the humble tent I call home, there is a
dusty corner of a foreign field that is forever the Bodleian
and we’ve initiated the ‘Junior Officers’ Reading Club’. If
Powell was right and books do furnish a room (or tent),
what can we learn of a man by the painstaking choice he
makes of a few precious volumes to take with him to war?
Having scanned the bookshelves of various messes
across Iraq, I have been disappointed: I don’t know about
‘hearts’ but how on earth can we expect to win ‘minds’
when it seems that all that is read in theatre is Dick
Francis, John Grisham and Jeffrey Archer? Glancing
around our tent, the first thing I notice is that escapism is
not necessarily high on the agenda. Michael Herr’s bril-
liant Despatches – seemingly the most guttural and relevant
 LETTER FROM BASRA
Shaibah Logistics Base, Southern Iraq: ‘The Day of the Locust’ is
being enjoyed by the author (centre) while the other volumes, most
likely ‘Don Quixote’, ‘Glamorama’ and some sort of surfing tome,
are being preserved in the ample shade of Lt Harrison (left) while Lt
Tiernan (right) takes a break from something more weighty.
book on Vietnam around – is accompanied on the shelves
by Chickenhawk from the same war and other, less literary
but perhaps more relevant, discussions of recent conflict
and peacekeeping operations: Cockburn and Cockburn’s
eerily prophetic Saddam: An American Obsession, General
Rupert Smith’s Utility of Force and even – with shocking
disregard for the baggage allowance – a handsome
Everyman Classic hardback copy of Clausewitz On War.
War is also a theme in the fiction we have brought.
Catch-22 resonates particularly. Right now the British
Army’s very own Major Major Major Majors are scouring
the desert for soldiers wearing illegal sunglasses, and even
Heller would have been impressed by some of the bureau-
cratic nonsense which stems from the hundreds of desks
behind which administrators and staff officers spend entire
tours at the Basra Air Station (something like one in ten of
the 7,000-odd troops currently in theatre does a ‘staff ’
job). Perhaps our own Catch-22 is that we can’t do our job
of effective reconstruction unless we go out into the streets,
but when we do go there we seem to get blown up a little.
Yossarian would doubtless have loved the mightily impres-
sive field hospital and found every reason to linger at
Shiabah’s bizarrely incongruous Pizza Hut. Another
appropriate choice given the weather and the ban on
drinking we currently enforce (not to mention how keenly
the bars at home are anticipated by those on the verge of
returning) is Christopher Landon’s Ice Cold in Alex. The
Count of Monte Cristo and Don Quixote are perhaps more
swash and buckle than fire and manoeuvre (not to mention
indulgently big) but are still very much soldiers’ tales. Don
Quixote was perhaps an ambitious book to bring out – I
have never managed to finish it and periodically resume the
fight with such an assurance of failure that I am worried
now that if I do finish it out here it might be tempting fate.
On a flight up to Baghdad a US Marine observed to
me, not without displeasure, that Hunter S Thompson’s
35
Kingdom of Fear is vituperatively anti-war. Working closely
with the Americans only increases my respect for the
enormity of the tasks they routinely undertake (certainly in
comparison to what we do in the south), not to mention
admiration for their untiring professionalism (their tours of
duty last twelve months compared to our six) and embar-
rassment at how lazily our media portray them as amateur-
ish cowboys. Thompson’s opposition to what we are doing
here is especially interesting as Kingdom of Fear demonstrates
how exhilarated he would have been by the anarchic chaos,
of Baghdad in particular. For many weeks after reading the
book my letters home took on a distinctly Thompson-
esque tone of breathless, adrenalin-spiked ramblings.
Other American books in the tent include The Day of
the Locust and Brett Easton Ellis’s Rules of Attraction and
Glamorama. Period and contemporary portraits of
Western consumer indulgence and decadence, the joke
becomes that (like the box-set DVD of the complete
three series of The OC) we have these to remind us of
the greed and the label culture we defenders of the West
are fighting to uphold. Certainly Rules of Attraction
smacks of nostalgia for the boys for whom halcyon uni-
versity days have never seemed so far away.
There is a scene at the end of Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies
in which the drunk Major, now a Field Marshal, offers the
bemused protagonist a bottle of champagne from the back
of his limo in the middle of ‘the biggest battlefield in the
history of the world’. Munching black-market Stilton in
the General’s garden in Baghdad (part of a building which
by all accounts used to be one of Saddam Hussein’s sons’
pleasure palaces), playing an idle hand of bridge occasion-
ally disturbed by the odd burst of automatic fire from
across the Tigris, I knew I was right to bring out a book I
already knew by heart. My other comforter from home is
Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, which is perhaps even
more appropriate. Uncle Toby is, after all, a suitably mili-
tary man. But, more profoundly, Tristram Shandy has an ill-
fated beginning, a confoundingly muddled story and no
coherent ending. It is touched, as I realise are all the books
we have been enjoying out here, by a sense of the surreal,
an acute sense of the slightly mad. Thesiger’s escapism,
Herr’s sense of fear, Heller’s bewildered sense of the
absurd, Easton Ellis’s psychosis, Thompson’s rage and
Cervantes’ Knight of La Mancha’s deluded faith are all
things which seem more immediate in the strange alterity
of war. Most affecting of all, though, are the determina-
tion and hope of Landon’s ambulance crew and the
humanism that permeates every page of Tristram Shandy –
‘This world is surely wide enough to hold both thee and
me’ says Uncle Toby. A difficult and often confusing and
frustrating job is being done out here by some very hard-
working people. I think what we’ve chosen to read reflects
our own uncertainties but also our aspirations, our sense of
humour and our sense of hope in the middle of our very
own cock-and-bull story.
LITERARY REVIEW February 2007
 LETTERS & MEMOIRS
J W M T HOMPSON
FROM HON TO REBEL
D ECCA : T HE L ETTERS OF J ESSICA M ITFORD
★ and Lenin to swallow. The rift between Diana and
Edited by Peter Y Sussman
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson 744pp £25)
THE MITFORD INDUSTRY (as the author of this correspon-
dence cheerfully labelled it) has been so prodigiously
productive over the years that the mere sight of this enor-
mous new volume takes one aback. Another 744 pages
about the joys and miseries of that extraordinary clan?
More about Nancy and Debo and Unity and the rest of
them? The fact that it turns out to be a readable and
enjoyable book is, of course, thanks to the personality of
the writer. Jessica Mitford (always known as Decca) was a
one-off. From her childhood in sheltered ignorance (Lord
and Lady Redesdale did not believe in education for their
daughters), by way of elopement with Winston Churchill’s
nephew to a career as a left-wing agitator in the United
States, she followed her own naturally rebellious nature.
What is more to the point when considering this
massive collection of her letters is that she became a
witty and engaging writer, capable of being serious and
funny at the same time, who maintained an energetic
correspondence with a far-flung network of friends and
colleagues. Clearly writing and receiving letters was a
central part of her daily life. Indeed at times it seems
that it was the most important part, she ended so many
of her letters with the urgent instruction ‘WRITE!’
And a postal str ike once had her wailing, ‘I’m
marooned, stranded!’ As Peter Y Sussman, who has
edited this collection, observes in his introduction, the
very notion of such a correspondence is an antiquated
one for those living in the computer era: the ‘exciting
little pile’ from the postman that Decca waited for so
eagerly would today (he sighs) mostly include computer-
personalised junk mail. Even if he is a little gloomy to
dismiss letter-writing as a ‘nearly extinct art’, certainly
few cor respondents on the grand scale of Jessica
Mitford can flourish in the age of the e-mail.
Because of the idiosyncratic life she led, the range of
matters she wrote about was very wide. She kept up a
lively commentary on her political activities alongside
events in the lives of her family and friends. There are
family jokes: when Debo became engaged to the future
heir of Chatsworth, Decca cabled her congratulations on
‘an excellent season’s duking’. Also there are family
griefs. The letters from the time she spent at Versailles
with her dying sister Nancy are poignant. Their rela-
tionship was affectionate, but prickly. Politics frequently
cast a cloud over family matters, too. Early in the
36
LITERARY REVIEW February 2007
wartime years Decca refers to her ‘filthy fascist family’.
Well, her parents were Nazi sympathisers, her ghastly
sister Unity fell in love with Hitler and happily pro-
claimed herself a ‘Jew-hater’, and another sister, Diana,
was married to Oswald Mosley at the house of Josef
Goebbels. Quite a lot for a feisty young disciple of Marx
Decca was unbridgeable. Decca reports that when in
1955 her mother tried to engineer a lunchtime meeting
she refused, saying that she ‘did not care to break bread
with murderers’. Lady Redesdale, it appears, ‘got very
cross’. Her ladyship took her own line on political mat-
ters. When the young Decca accused her mother of
being an Enemy of the Working Class she indignantly
denied it: ‘I am not an enemy of the working class! I
think some of them are perfectly sweet.’
When Decca’s first husband, Esmond Romilly, was
killed early in the war, serving with the RAF, Decca was
in the United States with their small daughter. She decid-
ed to remain there, supporting herself with such jobs as
came her way. These were usually modest as she was une-
ducated (she put ‘autodidact’ in her CV) and included a
spell in a dress shop. She married a radical civil rights
lawyer, moved to Oakland, California, and threw herself
into left-wing causes. In later years, she often returned to
Britain and was amused by the minutiae of post-war class
distinctions. Her sister Nancy refused to use air mail,
holding it to be too middle-class, whereupon Decca
called it Non-U Mail. The more savage racial conflicts in
post-war America, by contrast, enraged her. In spite of
her long membership of the Communist Party her politi-
cal activism seems to have been largely concerned with
the battle for civil rights and justice for blacks.
Reading these letters, written over the greater part of
an exceptional woman’s lifetime, is rather like overhearing
an amusing conversation, interrupted and then resumed,
again and again. The writing is always animated and
candid. For the benefit of Mitford junkies, it does throw
some light on the dynamics of that celebrated tribe (or
Industry). It is not uncommon for families to have their
own set of private words: the Mitfords had their own pri-
vate language (useful, of course, for distancing outsiders).
And the conversation, though amusing, does at times
seem rather noisy. The principal characters are forever
emitting ‘shrieks’ of laughter or ‘roaring’ with mirth.
They also relentlessly cling to their nicknames, which are
numerous and often unexplained. Why, one wonders idly,
should the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire habitually be
addressed as ‘Henderson’? Or Nancy as ‘Susan’? Not that
it matters to the reader who is enjoying the bustle and
comedy of Jessica Mitford’s special world. It is clear that
her political activities were entirely sincere, but at the
same time it is not surprising to learn that in the end she
left the Communist Party because it had become dull.
To order this book at £20, see LR Bookshop on page 30
 LETTERS & MEMOIRS

L IZA C AMPBELL different floor from

his aunt and uncle,

SINS OF THE FATHER in a chilly attic said

to be haunted by a
housemaid who
I N M Y FATHER ’ S H OUSE : E LEGY FOR AN had hanged herself
O BSESSIVE L OVE from a skylight. He
★ was surrounded by
By Miranda Seymour staff whose sur-
(Simon & Schuster 270pp £14.99) names read like
characters from
HAVING WRITTEN ABOUT Mary Shelley, Robert Graves, Gormenghast (Miss George and grandson
Henry James and Ottoline Morrell, Miranda Seymour has Death, Mr Crush
now turned her biographical skills onto her own family. and the head butler, Mr Shotbolt), but happily, far from
Her childhood memoir, the biblically titled In My Father’s being the gothic horrors their names suggested, they
House, focuses on her father, George Fitzroy Seymour, indulged and cosseted their little charge. Since he experi-
and his obsession with their family home, Thrumpton. enced the inexplicable disappearance of his mother at
Seymour grew to dislike her father very quickly. As a such a young age, it is easy to see why tiny George
small child, she prayed deep into her pillow that he would considered it safer to bestow his affections on sturdy
die. George Seymour is described as finicky, horribly surroundings rather than slippery human beings. His role
precious, vain, and snobbish. The author’s grievances model was an aging vicar, and this, coupled with an all-
against her father comprise countless small cruelties: consuming passion for Thrumpton’s place in history,
George called his daughter ‘big’, begged her to wear a turned him into an insufferable little tick. Unpopular at
wig when she cut off her hair, and had no sensitivity school, George wrote pompous essays that prompted an
whatsoever to her prickly teenage gaucheness. Later, exasperated English tutor to remind him that he was
when Seymour presents him with her latest novel, he thirteen, not seventy. We are told of his pathetic preoc-
happens upon a passage he perceives (probably correctly) cupation with every grand connection of family and
to be a dig at him and rather hilariously carries it dangling
between finger and thumb into the garden and drops it
into a flowerbed. Explaining why she delayed for a decade
after his death before writing the memoir, Seymour says
‘anger and self-pity kept me on hold’.
George’s devotion to Thrumpton, a beautiful honey-
bricked house in South Nottinghamshire, allowed him
effectively to keep the intimacies of family relationships
at bay. His love of the house sprang from curious seeds.
George had not been in line to inherit, being of no
blood relation to the owner, Lord Byron (a man of the
cloth and rather a dull descendant of the poet), and his
eventual succession came only after the premature deaths
of distant Byron cousins. George became a member of
the Thrumpton household by chance. His father, Dick
(whose promising Foreign Office career had inexplicably
stalled), reluctantly accepted a dead-end diplomatic post
in La Paz. Life at an altitude of 14,000 feet was consid-
ered unhealthy for children, so Dick and his wife Vita
resolved to sail to Bolivia alone. Their older son and
daughter were left at boarding schools, but, as George
was aged only two, it was finally agreed that he would
be sent to stay at Thrumpton, where the childless Lady
Byron – Vita’s eldest sister Anna – agreed to have him
‘as long as he caused no disruption’. George was, it was
claimed, the first child to live there in 300 years.
It was not a promising situation for a toddler. The
house had no electricity, and George slept alone, on a

37
LITERARY REVIEW February 2007
 LETTERS & MEMOIRS
house – but, paradoxically, it is Miranda Seymour who
lists the minutiae for the reader.
George’s boyhood isolation finally lifted when he forged
a deep and loving friendship with his cousin Oliver
Fitzroy, only to be completely heartbroken when Oliver
was killed at the outbreak of the Second World War. To
his lasting unease, George was bogusly invalided out of the
forces, although losing Oliver Fitzroy probably affected
him more, and it was decades before George could form
another such wholehearted attachment (his marriage to
Rosemary Howard de Walden had an effervescent start,
but any initial thrill soon fizzled out). Although the writ-
ing is never anything other than compelling, Seymour says
so often that, notwithstanding his charm and style, George
was too self-absorbed to be an interesting man, that one
begins to wonder why one should be reading about him.
Thankfully, eccentricities develop after a midlife crisis.
George employs an enigmatic Ethiopian who wanders
the grounds naked. Soon after, he becomes entranced by
motorbiking. A deep, satisfying friendship is forged with
a large, uneducated man called Mike with whom
George goes on many touring holidays. Seymour points
towards her father’s homosexual leanings.
Although In My Father’s House is extremely well crafted
and holds the reader’s attention throughout, the author’s
D AVID WATKIN
MONKS AND MONUMENTS
G RASS S EED IN J UNE
★ Japanese industry, and a
By John Martin Robinson
(Michael Russell 175pp £16.95)
FROM THE VERY first words, ‘I have never lived anywhere
commonplace’, the reader is gripped by this frank and
intensely aesthetic account of a unique career. Dr John
Martin Robinson, known to his countless friends and
admirers as Mentmore, is Maltravers Herald
Extraordinary, Librarian to the Duke of Norfolk, prolific
author, architectural historian, and campaigner for the
preservation of historic buildings. He leads us entertain-
ingly and thoughtfully through the first twenty-five years
of his life, beginning with a relatively impoverished
childhood on a remote farm, moving to a truly grim
public school, then to St Andrews University where
he achieved a First in mediaeval history, followed by a
tour of Baroque monasteries in Germany and Austria to
celebrate his twenty-first birthday in 1969, and finally
to Oriel College, Oxford, as a post-graduate student
working under Howard Colvin.
Explaining that ‘as a family we were Tories and
38
LITERARY REVIEW February 2007
low opinion of her father, so constantly expressed,
serves, conversely, to induce sympathy for the object of
her loathing. ‘I want to like him,’ Seymour says, but by
the next sentence she’s writing about George ‘gloating’
about being given better seating at a wedding than
g rander cousins. She speculates that her mother
Rosemary – whose often wretched discussions about the
memoir are wound into the narrative – was haplessly
mar r ied for her money, although it is clear that
Rosemary is quite as entranced by Thrumpton as her
husband, and indeed, Seymour herself.
Having found some sort of release from the strictures
of his house by embracing the open road, George is
struck by tragedy once more. His adult life is book-
ended by another untimely death: that of the adored
Mike. Depressed, separated from his wife and plagued by
money troubles, Mike commits suicide using one of
George’s guns. Seymour dutifully attends the funeral,
but remains dry-eyed and contemptuous of her father’s
grief. It is a pain from which George never recovers and
it causes a terminal estrangement from his wife. Within
months he is dead. Seymour’s response is to rush into
Thrumpton’s garden, tear blossomed branches off a tree
and shriek ‘Free! Free!’
To order this book at £11.99, see LR Bookshop on page 30
Catholics’, he describes the
various activities in which
its different branches were
involved, including farming,
a grit stone quarry, cotton
mills, recycling metal for
manufactory for iron bed-
steads and munitions. In the
narrative of his childhood,
with an unusual dwelling
on circumcision, we are
charmed to learn that he JMR, aged 14 3/4
constructed a church out of
matchboxes in which he ‘was able to perform full scale
Masses with a congregation of teddy bears’. This happy
innocence was rudely interrupted at Fort Augustus
Abbey, Invernessshire, established in 1878 as ‘the most
northerly Benedictine establishment in the world’. Here,
this sensitive plant ‘was educated on the same latitude as
Tobolsk’ in a monastic school which had ‘started as a
noble dream mingling Celtic saints, Jacobite Catholicism
and the Victorian Gothic Revival’ with the aristocratic
blessing of Lord Bute, Lord Lovat, and Abbot Sir David
Hunter Blair, Bt. But this world was shattered in the
1930s by a brutal headmaster who appointed a monk as
‘boxing instructor and spiritual adviser to the boys’. Our
author suffered in the 1960s from a regime of cruelty,
 LETTERS & MEMOIRS
philistine thuggery, bullying, and pilfering, not offset by
any pleasurable intimacies with other boys, for ‘There
was little real sexual activity at school.’
The loss of the civilised literary culture of Fort
Augustus, which had not been dominated by compulsory
games, combined with the wilful destruction of the liturgy
of the Roman Mass at the Second Vatican Council to
make him feel that ‘I was witnessing the collapse of not
just an institution but a wider culture. My generation was
the last ... to be able to marshal a shield of quartered arms,
compose a Latin epitaph, read old books for pleasure,
value formal manners, or tell the difference between Dec.
and Perp.’
Staying at an historic Austrian monastery such as
Altenburg, its main façade a quarter of a mile long, he
recalls how ‘splendidly different’ it all was from the
‘all-pervasive Post-Vatican II American-social-suburban
“religion” with its close-carpeted churches, Happy Eater
hymn-sandwich liturgy, drip-dry vestments and compla-
cent, sentimental hand-shaking congregations.’ Oxford
also confirmed his attachment to historic architecture and
its preservation, for he realised there that ‘it is a fallacy to
claim that keeping old buildings is retrograde and ties
society to an anachronistic or outdated environment’.
This is because, as he explains paradoxically, ‘old buildings
have a chameleon character and change their appearance
P R I Z E C R O S S W O R D
1 2 3 4
7
8 10 Transgression we rejected by showing fibre (5)
9
10 11
15 16
18 19
20 21 22 23 24
28
29
30
Pan Macmillan have generously decided to sponsor the prizes for this
month’s crossword. Five winners will be selected from the correct puzzles
received by noon on February 15th 2007. Each will receive a copy of the
20th Anniversary Edition of the indispensible Writer’s Handbook 2007,
edited by Barry Turner.
The winners of our December competition are Mrs D Pope of Harrow, Cecilia Metcalfe of Bradford, John
Sparrow of Buckingham, JB Vent of Coventry, John Grandy of Oxford.
Each will receive a copy of the The Writer’s Handbook, published by Macmillan.
Answers to the December crossword:
ACROSS: 1 Hecuba, 4 Enamel, 9 Brigadoon, 10 Plead, 11 Yoga, 12 Renal, 14 Swoon, 15 Futon, 17 Poker,
19, Blip, 21 Lupin, 23 American, 24 Yellow, 25 Stream.
DOWN: 1 Hopper, 2 Cape, 3 Bob Dylan, 5 Neat, 6 Moorcock, 7 London, 8 Dingo, 13 Nutshell, 14
Supplant, 15 Friary, 16 Float, 18 Ransom, 20 Dido, 22 Pike.
from century to century’, a quotation which I hope to set
as a question in a Cambridge examination.
One of the charms of the book is that the author always
takes us disarmingly into his confidence, admitting, for
example, that ‘Secretly I am quite proud of my distinctive
appearance and features and am glad to be a rara avis’,
though the word ‘secretly’ now seems somewhat otiose.
He relishes the fact that ‘it would be difficult to be more
of a minority figure than a ginger, circumcised, intelligent,
lower-upper-class Brit’, explaining that ‘I don’t drive, I
hate all games, I don’t type, I don’t take photographs. I can
hardly dial a telephone.’ Other information of varying
degrees of interest which we learn about him en passant
is that he does not eat chocolate, sunbathe, wear either
glasses or belts, preferring braces to the latter on class
grounds, and does not watch television, though he
confesses that ‘from the age of four to seven I was an
incorrigible television addict’.
This short, funny, beautifully observed book would
have fitted like a prawn in aspic into the list of John
Murray as it was until recently, but the survival of
Michael Russell as an independent publisher has enabled
him to publish it with a characteristically elegant type-
face and layout, as well as an excellent jacket designed by
Humphrey Stone.
To order this book at £13.59, see LR Bookshop on page 30
ACROSS
4 Wife gets odds on receiving flower? (6)
5 6 7 Welsh poet sat back around home mostly (6)
8 Cattle breed from this place by river crossing (8)
9 Kingsley almost getting 2 down? (4)
12 Statute needed with new area of grass (4)
18 Horse shown by the French to be suitable for farming (6)
12 13 14
19 Ordinary piece of land for recreation (6)
17 20 Head of chapter showing martial art expertise around east (4)
23 Equipment for diving off South Island (5)
27 Bloomer cut short on platform (4)
28 First man with venerable scholar in novel (4,4)
25 26
29 Insignificant type in George and Weedon’s diary? (6)
30 Saggitarius author (6)
27
DOWN
1 Culinary herb for bird, we hear (5)
2 A girl is not quite right (5)
3 Colourless article about Haggard novel (5)
4 Scatter rice firstly in slow-cooked dish (5)
5 Items of food from Cornish river (5)
6 Small creature tamed by Petruchio (5)
11 Man, say, is somewhat misled (4)
13 A jolly year with soldiers (4)
14 Indian bread given to a Newfoundland dog? (4)
15 Group prohibited according to the radio (4)
16 Girl attending a social occasion (4)
17 Mistake whichever way you look at it (4)
21 Duck and fish eaten by the Queen (5)
22 Young dragonfly getting to New York with speed (5)
23 Direct bovine animal (5)
24 Overturn when getting out of bed with intent (5)
25 Brick making slight alteration to abode (5)
26 Follower of Indian religion seen in south Indus (5)
 ART & MUSIC
J OHN M C E WEN
VIGOUR AND PITH
W ILLIAM P OWELL F RITH : A PAINTER
AND H IS WORLD
★ invaluable business details.
By Christopher Wood
(Sutton Publishing 272pp £20)
IN HIS MID-VICTORIAN heyday William Powell Frith
(1819–1909), best remembered as the painter of
Ramsgate Sands (1852–54), Derby Day (1856–58) and
The Railway Station (1860–62), was the most highly
priced artist in the world. Even as late as 1875 his
period piece Before Dinner in Boswell’s Lodgings, first
exhibited in 1868, fetched £4,500 at Christie’s, the
record price for a work by a living
artist – easily comparable with the
million-plus equivalents currently
paid for contemporary art.
Now, in apparent anticipation of his
centenary, this biography by the
Victorian art dealer and historian
Christopher Wood coincides with the
exhibition William Powell Frith:
Painting the Victorian Age at the
Guildhall Art Gallery (until 4 March
and then at the Mercer Art Gallery,
Harrogate), the artist’s first exhibition
since 1951. Although Derby Day (Tate
Britain), Ramsgate Sands (The Queen’s
Gallery) and The Railway Station
(Royal Holloway College) are perma-
nently viewable, the exhibition offers
a rare chance to see them together.
Frith was the son of a Harrogate
hotelier and benefited from a board-
ing-school education. In a reversal of
the norm, his parents were convinced Detail from ‘The Railway Station’, 1860–62
he should be an artist, whereas he
was not so sure. When Frith was sixteen father and son
travelled to London to show the boy’s drawings to Henry
Sass RA, a well-known teacher. It was agreed that if Sass
liked the drawings Frith would be an artist; if not, he
would be allowed his own preference to train as an auc-
tioneer. Sass approved and Frith entered his school. That
the schoolboy Frith was exceptional is confirmed by the
exhibition, not the book. He remained modest about his
ability. ‘I know very well that I never was, nor under any
circumstances could have become a great artist but I am a
very successful one,’ he wrote in his autobiography as an
old man. As in the case of Hogarth, whom he venerated,
it was the engravings of his work which brought him his
40
LITERARY REVIEW February 2007
immense popularity.
Wood plunders the artist’s autobiography, a bestseller
late in Frith’s life, to good effect, quoting some of its
passages verbatim (the most interesting an after-dinner
speech by Turner), its insights compounded by 700
recently discovered letters written by artists (150 by
Frith) to Thomas Miller, a leading patron, which supply
Frith made his reputation painting pictures of ‘the
olden time’, one of them praised by Turner for being
‘beautifully drawn, well composed, and well coloured’,
but it is for his three great documentaries of modern life
that he remains renowned. They were painted in his
youthful prime and proved a pictorial pinnacle. They owe
much to Frith’s contemporaries David Wilkie, John
Leech (sporting illustrator and Punch cartoonist, whose
biography he wrote) and Charles Dickens, who commis-
sioned him to paint his portrait. Oscar Wilde, not a fan,
quipped that Frith had elevated paint-
ing to the dignity of photography.
Frith did employ photographers but
did not slavishly copy photographs.
He also employed specialist artists to
paint some of the non-human subject
matter, but it was his own eye for
telling and charming details and his
orchestration of large and various
casts which produced such timeless
and enthralling story pictures. Wood’s
description of the three masterpieces
shows how much there is to discover,
not least the portrait of the artist and
other identifiable characters.
Frith had a mistress, Mary Alford,
much younger than he was, who
bore him six children, and they mar-
ried after the death of his wife, with
whom he had thirteen children. But
for all Wood’s researches the lady
remains an enigma, and the secrecy
with which Frith cloaked their long
arrangement remains largely intact,
although it was common knowledge almost from the
start – so much so he was terrified it might jeopardise
his career, especially with regard to royal favour. In the
event Queen Victor ia bought Ramsgate Sands for
£3,000 and for the same extravagant sum also commis-
sioned The Marriage of the Prince of Wales (the future
Edward VII).
The Marriage is an unavoidably stultified effort which
neglects to show the entertaining spectacle of the future
Kaiser Bill biting the knees of Prince Leopold and
Prince Arthur during the ceremony. The painting was a
chore from which the Queen emerges far better than
her relatives, one of whom was silenced by a withering
 ART & MUSIC

regal look when booming ‘I didn’t know artists lived in
such big houses’ on a royal visit to the studio.
Frith was a witness for the defence in the Whistler v
Ruskin libel case, his forthright conservatism impressing
Whistler more than the milder reservations of Burne-
Jones. Frith was opposed to Whistler’s aestheticism as
much as to French Impressionism and died a long-outdated
if not quite a forgotten figure. A sale in 1946 marked the
nadir of his posthumous neglect, pictures today worth
hundreds of thousands fetching £100 or so.
Christopher Wood’s enthusiasm is compelling but his
book could have done with more stringent editing. The
splendid exhibition catalogue (edited by Mark Bills and
Vivien Knight, Yale University Press, £20) is the better
buy, although the two are complementary.
To order this book at £16, see LR Bookshop on page 30

F RANK M C LYNN contemplated collaboration with all of the above.

Hitchcock knew only too well that if scripts provided

KNOWING THE SCORE structure, editing pace and the camera an image system,
it was above all music that created a movie’s mood, and
he therefore devoted more time and attention to the
H ITCHCOCK ’ S M USIC music in his films than any comparable director.
★ Drawing on the great, pioneering work of Christopher
By Jack Sullivan Palmer in 1990, The Composer in Hollywood (Marion
(Yale University Press 354pp £25) Boyars Publishers), Jack Sullivan definitely advances the
art of film music analysis by this careful, comprehensive,
FILM MUSIC IS a neglected topic, but an increasingly insightful and in many ways original study of the music
important one in a world where there is a bifurcation in Hitchcock’s films. He shows the many subtle ways in
between the increasingly banal universe of rock music which Hitchcock was as much musical conductor as
and the creative cul-de-sac that is contemporary classical visual director and demonstrates how he used music to
music. To declare an interest, I would rather listen to a counterpoint and in many ways ‘contradict’ his images,
concert of Sergio Leone than the desiccated tunelessness which allowed him to forge a ‘dialectic’ between
of Harrison Birtwistle. Composers for the movies humour and suspense, the conscious and the uncon-
tend to fall into three distinct scious, the natural and the super-
categor ies. In the first are the natural, reason and emotion.
incontestably great composers who Most of all, he evinces the origi-
have from time to time written nality with which Hitchcock
fine film scores: Prokofiev, moved in his music between the
Shostakovich, Copland, Vaughan worlds of ‘low’ and ‘high’ musical
Williams, Walton, Bliss, and so on. culture, most famously in the
In the second are the specialist remake of The Man Who Knew
movie composers, skilled profes- Too Much, where the finale is, in
sionals who cry all the way to the this inter pretation, a duel
bank about their lack of critical between Bernard Herrmann and
recognition in the concert halls: the LSO performing ‘The Storm
Dmitri Tiomkin, Franz Waxman, Clouds Cantata’ and Doris Day
Alfred Newman, Max Steiner, sing ing ‘Qué Será, Será’.
Maur ice Jar re, John Williams. Hitchcock, under perennial pres-
Finally, there are those who divide sure from the money men in
their time between the movies and Hollywood, also hoped that his
‘ser ious’ repertoire: Ber nard composers would come up with a
Herrmann, composer of an opera ‘hit’ song, on whose back he
on Wuthering Heights and a cantata could market the movie. With
on Moby-Dick; Miklós Rózsa, in Hitchcock and Herrmann: ended in tears ‘Qué Será, Será’ he got it, though
third place in the pantheon of the film itself, ironically, depends
Hungarian composers, after Bartok and Kodaly; and heavily for plot and mood on classical music. There is
Erich Korngold, prolific writer of operas and symphonic the further irony that Doris Day hated the song, rightly
music and once hailed as the greatest musical prodigy viewing it as silly and embarrassing; however, it turned
since Mozart. out to be her biggest hit.
Since Alfred Hitchcock was the greatest filmmaker of The marriage of high and low art reached its apogee in
all time, it is not surprising that he either worked or the television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents, aired in the

41
LITERARY REVIEW February 2007
 ART & MUSIC

1950s. This was the show where Hitchcock, by his director–composer collaboration in the history of the cin-
personal appearances, turned himself into a household ema. Probably Herrmann’s greatest ever movie score was
name and pioneered the idea of the director as star; but the incomparable music for the great masterpiece Vertigo,
the series convinced many superficial ‘intellectuals’ that he though it was the percussive modernism of Psycho that
was a mere showman, so that they did not look closely at caught on with the mass audience. As Sullivan remarks:
his cinematic genius in the feature films, and thus it was ‘Here is a poignant irony. Herrmann, who longed for
not until his death that his true stature began to be appre- acceptance as a concert composer rather than as a movie
ciated. Hitchcock liked to introduce himself on this show man, has finally been accepted into the concert establish-
with a silhouette and took as his signature tune the rather ment for Psycho, a movie that was denounced upon its
silly music from Gounod’s ‘Funeral March of a release as lurid trash.’ Alas, the great Hitchcock–Herrmann
Marionette’. This apparently ‘lowbrow’ attitude to music collaboration ended in tears when Hitch abruptly fired the
masked the fact that Hitchcock had an encyclopedic composer on Torn Curtain. Sullivan suggests that the truth
knowledge of classical music (including that of Boulez about the falling-out may never be known but proposes a
and Stockhausen) and had a superb instinct for how and threefold resolution: Herrmann never produced the ‘hit’
when to match sound and image. Sullivan’s many fine that Hitchcock pursued as an elusive holy grail; Hitchcock
analyses include, for example, a demonstration of how was angry and jealous about the insistent whispers that it
music almost takes over in Rear Window – surely the most was Herrmann’s music that had really ‘made’ his late
eclectic film score ever – and he is brilliant at investigating Hollywood movies; and, as a notorious control freak,
musical subtexts. For example, in Rebecca, he shows Hitch was incandescent that Herrmann would not do as
how the haunting music for the Manderley to which the he was told when given a commission for programme
heroine can never return is in some ways a metaphor for music but instead insisted on following his own creative
the lost world of pre-Hitler Europe from which refugee urges. Jack Sullivan’s incisive and convincing psychological
composer Franz Waxman was forever exiled. portraits of both director and composer help to make his
Sullivan is meticulous in pinning down the strengths book, with the exception of the few blemishes mentioned,
and weaknesses of each composer with whom Hitchcock a great triumph, one to rank alongside Christopher
collaborated as a writer for his movies. The author is Palmer’s seminal volume.
excellent at relating the musical themes and treatments to To order this book at £20, see LR Bookshop on page 30
recurring motifs in the Hitchcock oeuvre: the ‘wrong
man’ topos, the transfer of guilt, sexual obsession, the war
between conscious and unconscious and between order
and chaos. The notion of haunting provides a fruitful
central hypothesis: people neurotically haunted by their
pasts, by elusive tunes (The 39 Steps, The Lady Vanishes,
Shadow of a Doubt), or by ‘ghosts’ (Rebecca, who never
appears in the eponymous film, Carlotta in Vertigo, Mrs
Bates in Psycho, etc). The author knocks on the head the
fatuous but still pervasive notion that film music should
be unnoticed and unnoticeable to be truly effective.
Although he is usually excellent, Sullivan sometimes goes
astray in his critical judgement. I found his argument that
Shakespeare’s problem comedies are the true matrix for
Hitchcock movies one of those bright ideas that are not
ultimately convincing. And a signal weakness in his book
is the perfunctory two pages devoted to the music for
Marnie, one of Bernard Herrmann’s finest scores. Sullivan
makes it clear that he does not rate Marnie highly, though
in the opinion of many (myself included) it is a master-
piece. This alerts us to Sullivan’s main failing. When he
has enthusiasms, the analysis thus generated is invariably
good; when he does not feel enthusiastic, his apathy bids
fair to torpedo the viability of his entire project.
However, Sullivan gives us full measure on what must be
the centrepiece of any discussion of Hitchcock movies: the
director’s collaboration with Bernard Herrmann, which
the author rightly hails as the most famous and fertile

42
LITERARY REVIEW February 2007
 ART & MUSIC
P ATRICK O’C ONNOR
FAIRY FOOTSTEPS
S OMEWHERE : A L IFE OF J EROME ROBBINS
★ He was pronounced unfit for service. In late 1943, he
By Amanda Vaill
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson 352pp £25)
THE LIFE OF a choreographer, perhaps more than any
other artist working in music or theatre, is hard to describe
for those outside the world of ballet. All the tiny details
that go towards making even the slightest dance have little
meaning when described cold, away from the studio or
the rehearsal stage. Jerome Robbins, following the exam-
ples already set by the great pioneers of modern American
dance (Isadora Duncan, Agnes DeMille, Martha Graham),
succeeded in making a greater fusion between popular
dance steps and classical ballet than anyone else in his time.
Inevitably, Amanda Vaill has chosen a reference to his best-
known work, the dances in Bernstein’s West Side Story,
and in giving her biography the title Somewhere she is also
referring to what becomes the theme of this very long,
lovingly researched book. Robbins seems never to have
felt completely at home anywhere. His search for a com-
panion was always frustrated by his failure to come to
terms with his homosexuality. Even in the liberated 1970s
he was hiding behind the skirts of various glamorous
female partners, whilst pursuing increasingly anguished
crushes on younger and younger men. In his professional
career, the lure of Broadway and Hollywood took him
away from the strict world of the ballet, and in particular
his lifelong love–hate relationship with his mentor, rival
and inspiration, George Balanchine.
Even quite late in his life, Balanchine would lurk in
the wings and whisper to dancers as they came offstage
in one of Robbins’s works, ‘How do you like dancing in
the Fairy’s ballets?’
It would take Woody Allen at his most acerbic to do
justice to Robbins’s life. Growing up in the suburban
world of Eastern European Jewish immigrants in New
York, he was drawn to dance through what seems to
have been a mixture of fear and genius. At first he
gained acceptance as a characterful dancer, but soon
showed talent for choreography. Even at this very early
stage, he was prevented from joining the embryonic
American Ballet Theatre, because of a contract with an
unsuccessful musical comedy.
Once in the company, he failed to establish a rapport
with the great Bronislava Nijinksa, sister of the Nijinksy,
who just dismissed his early efforts in class with a shrug.
Long afterwards, Robbins took his revenge by choreo-
graphing his own version of her masterpiece, the
Russian peasant wedding ballet to Stravinsky’s Les Noces.
43
The whole of Robbins’s career was decided in the crucial
year from late 1943 to the end of 1944. He had avoided the
draft into the US Army, on the advice of Agnes DeMille,
who told him to answer yes to the key question about
homosexual experiences. When had been the most recent
one? ‘Last night’, Robbins told the interviewing officers.
joined the American Communist Party; a few weeks later
he had his first meeting with Leonard Bernstein, and by
the end of the following year they had created Fancy Free
and On the Town, the works that established them both as
major forces in the American musical world. It is to
Robbins’s credit that despite this great commercial success
he nevertheless offered to join Balanchine in the New York
City Ballet, under any conditions; and his contribution
was the most important one of any choreographer after
Mr B, through the company’s greatest days.
Side by side with his ballet work, he went on to
contribute to many other musicals: Gypsy, Funny Girl,
High Button Shoes and others, with West Side Story the
pinnacle. Although he and Bernstein worked together
again, they were never able to rekindle the sheer force
and enthusiasm of their greatest collaboration.
Robbins became the victim of the psychoanalyst’s
couch, rushing to discuss the details of every attachment
and affair. One wonders what chance any of the young
men, or often rather innocent-sounding girls, had
against the various shrinks.
Robbins appeared as a ‘friendly witness’ before the infa-
mous HUAC committee: he ‘named names’, and many
people never forgave him, nor was he ever allowed to for-
get this betrayal. It added to his general neurosis, and
although he seems to have freed himself from some of this
in later life, this is not a portrait of a happy or fulfilled man.
Amanda Vaill has had access to Robbins’s unpublished
journals and letters and the memoirs of many of the peo-
ple with whom he worked. The best parts of the book are
the accounts of the Rabinowitz family in the depression
years in New York (his parents changed their own name
to Robbins after the success of Fancy Free), and of those
waves of showbiz enthusiasm when everything goes well.
Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter collared
Bernstein in the lobby of the theatre at the first night of
West Side Story and told him, ‘The history of America is
now changed’. A slight exaggeration, perhaps, but at least
it left Robbins eventually with two Oscars and a lot of
money, which he put to good use, starting a foundation to
help young artists. He lived a long life, working almost to
the end, and making at least one ballet, Dances at a
Gathering, that is surely the equal of the best by any chore-
ographer. After his death a street was named after him in
New York. He would have been pleased, he might have
shared his enjoyment with friends and lovers, but then he
would have rushed to the shrink to discuss it.
To order this book at £20, see LR Bookshop on page 30
LITERARY REVIEW February 2007
 GENERAL
A LEXANDER WAUGH
ON AND ON AND ON
H OW TO L IVE F OREVER OR D IE T RYING
★ future resurrection?
By Bryan Appleyard
(Simon & Schuster 307pp £12.99)
HOW TO LIVE FOREVER – just what is needed right now
– is a concise, clear and phenomenally interesting
account of the immortality industry. Not that many of
us really want to live forever. Who could stomach an
eternal existence, with all its concomitant sorrows and
inconveniences, the inevitable collapse of all personal
ambition, the infinitely diminishing enthusiasm for
other people, places, activities and things, a dread of the
morrow, and a total boredom with oneself – who wants
all that? Yet while thinking folk might shudder at the
prospect of living on and on like Ariston, they still
refuse to embrace the alternative, for death remains
every bit as distasteful as immortality.
And so it is that Man is driven by this squeeze into
inventing all sorts of ways by which he might extend his
life – not in order that he may live forever, but only so
that he may never die; and out from the cracks of this
paradox there seeps, inevitably, the reassuring, if insidi-
ous figure of God. ‘Religion for the great majority of
our own race means immortality, and nothing else. God
is the producer of immortality.’ So said William James,
but what sort of immortality is God really offering? Not
a very good sort, certainly not good enough to die for.
Even the Prophet of Islam’s vision of an afterlife bursting
with virgins with swelling breasts, restrained glances,
large black eyes and ‘skin like ostrich eggs covered in
dust’ has not proved tempting enough for any more than
a tiny handful of demented Mohammed Attas to sacri-
fice their lives in their desire to attain it.
So the solution (if that is what we can call it) remains a
painful one: ‘stay alive at all costs’, we shall deal with the
irks of our longevity as and when they arise. In three
hundred fast-moving pages Bryan Appleyard outlines the
plots and guiles that people have invented in order to
stay alive and in so doing exposes the human species
as more foolish, more comic, sadder, and more insane
than any of the animal class. Did you know, for instance,
that in the 1920s a craven
Viennese endocrinologist, Dr
Eugene Steinach, g rafted
young men’s testicles onto
visit Literary Review online
some geriatrics’ crotches in
the hope that it might rejuve-
nate them? Or that, as we sit
www.literaryreview.co.uk
here, a company calling itself
44
LITERARY REVIEW February 2007
Alcor, in the suburbs of
Phoenix, Arizona, is cryoni-
cally freezing the upside-down
corpses of rich American fools
that were lured in their life-
times into believing in their
These examples may seem
funny or even rather disgust-
ing, but it would be wrong
to assume from them that
Appleyard’s book is motivated
only by satire or the need to
shock his readers. In places Appleyard: thought-provoking
he is indeed both shocking
and satirical but there is much more to it than that –
Simon & Schuster have decided to market this book in
the category of ‘Current Affairs’, but only a dim
librarian would shelve it there. Cannier ones will, I
suspect, find themselves acquiring at least four copies:
one for the philosophy shelf under ‘E’ for Ethics and
Eschatology, another for the Science section under ‘B’
for Biochemistry, one in the Psychology department
under ‘T’ for Thanatology and a fourth maybe (for
those who do not like all these long words) in a sec-
tion marked ‘H’: ‘Highly original works which defy
standard categorisation’.
The originality of How to Live Forever rests not just
in the cornucopia of novel, factual and anecdotal
material that the author has garnered for our amuse-
ment, but also in the radical, thought-provoking
games he plays with his readers. At once he cajoles,
flatters, teases and insults them, gets them to under-
stand and agree one novel idea only to have it dashed
to pieces as the page is turned. Of his own views he
is reticent: two chapters entitled ‘About Me’ give a
tantalising glimpse of his white ankles, a complicated
ambivalent attitude to immortality, the soul, ghosts
and religion.
Appleyard has clearly convinced himself of one particu-
larly galling fact: that there is no need for humans to die
(as 150,000 seem to do every day) from old age. Ageing
was never written into the evolutionary script. Science has
proved that that which breaks can soon be mended and
that human cells can be kept going under certain condi-
tions indefinitely. That science will (maybe quite soon)
find a way of keeping people alive for as long as they
wish to live seems inevitable.
Next we shall have to invent
an entirely painless – no, a
positively enjoyable – way to
commit suicide. Will that be
the end to all our problems?
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see LR Bookshop on page 30
 GENERAL
P J K AVANAGH
CLEAN IN THE OPEN AIR
S ELECTED P OEMS
★ but he qualifies it in the second verse:
By Derek Mahon
(Penguin Books 186pp £8.99)
IT IS DIFFICULT to isolate the special brilliance of Derek
Mahon, because he is so various, and inclusive. Perhaps
it lies in his overall tone, which is that of a man disgusted
by the world, who nevertheless celebrates the world, by
including just about everything that is in the world,
tempering his disgust with a kind of lightness of spirit.
He has Sappho say, of love, ‘a site of praise and not of
grievances / whatever the torment – which we meet, if
wise / in our best festive and ingenious guise’.
In an early poem, ‘Beyond Howth Head’, he allows
himself a snap of anger (‘and Washington, its grisly aim /
to render the whole earth the same’), which easily
swings, next verse, into celebration of his beloved things:
Spring lights the country; from a thousand
dusty corners, house by house,
from under beds and vacuum cleaners,
empty Calor Gas containers,
bread bins, car seats, crates of stout,
the first flies cry to be let out,
to cruise a kitchen, find a door
and die clean in the open air.
There are admissions of ‘torment’ mid-career (‘Dawn at
Saint Patrick’s’ – a hospital for alcoholics), but these are
in ‘ingenious guise’:
They don’t lock the razors here
as in Bowditch Hall. We have remained upright –
though, to be frank, the Christmas dinner scene,
with grown men in their festive gear,
was a sobering sight.
It is the sweep of many of the poems that excites, espe-
cially in the longer, more recent ones. ‘Christmas in
Kinsale’ stays firmly in Co Cork, but there are also
included Sinai and Everest, Patmos and Ararat, Druid
and Jacobite, the Battle of Kinsale, and the nuclear wind
from Windscale, as well as one of his beloved lists
of things.
I take out at mid-morning my Christmas rubbish...
the wet and dry, the garbage and the trash,
remains of rib and chop, warm cinders, ash
bags, boxes, bulbs and batteries, bathroom waste,
carcasses, tinfoil, leaves, crumbs, scraps and bones –
if this were summer there would be crowds of flies
buzzing for joy around the rubbish bins
– and he hears ‘a cock crow good-morning from an oil
drum / like a peacock on a rain barrel in Byzantium’.
45
The impression is of a man wounded by the world –
who has retired inside his skull the better to look out
at the world and notice everything that is in it: ‘soap
bubbles in a drain pipe and life begins’, he says in
‘Tractatus’. Mahon begins that poem with Wittgenstein’s
definition of the world as ‘everything that is the case’,
The world, though, is also so much more –
everything that is the case imaginatively.
This defines Mahon’s method: everything in the mind
can be included also – space, distant places, history, myth
(Irish and classical), yet the focus returns to the precise,
the actual case. In the last poem of this selection, the
wonderful ‘Harbour Lights’, he invites us to ‘Go wan-
dering with your stick on the back road...’.
Now, note that white sail where a dinghy moves,
a raw strand where Cúchulainn fought the waves,
a writhing Daphne thorn-tree, hands and hair,
mute but articulate in the Atlantic air,
chained in the ivy strings that bind her there
while somebody takes shape in the heat haze:
a young woman in track-suit and running shoes.
Derek Mahon’s career began strongly and, hearteningly,
his reputation grows even stronger, climbing towards
what he might call ‘the open air’, the last great connec-
tion, fact and imagination.
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LITERARY REVIEW February 2007
 GENERAL
F RANCES W ILSON
CRADLE TO CANVAS
I MAGINING C HILDHOOD
★ migrates from one age or milieu to another’.
By Erika Langmuir
(Yale University Press 263pp £30)
ART HISTORIANS TELL us what we are looking at. It’s a
tough job but someone has to do it, not many among us
having much idea how to read the images we crowd into
galleries to see. Hence Simon Schama is welcomed into
our living rooms on a Friday night to explain patiently that blond mop of hair blows bubbles with a clay pipe. The
the man on the canvas with his eyes rolling and his body
writhing is in fact in pain, while the woman depicted
plunging a dagger into the naked body lying on the bed is
feeling angry. As though he were taking a
child through the pages of a picture
book, Schama confirms that the myster-
ies of the world lie in the visible and not
the invisible. We spend so long believing
that we need to look beneath the surface
of a picture for its ‘meaning’ that we miss
seeing the picture altogether.
In Imagining Childhood, Er ika
Langmuir takes us through a plethora
of Western paintings and artefacts, both
in and out of galleries, and explains that
they are to do with how we have seen
children and childhood since antiquity:
If we look beyond the art of art
galleries to consider amulets, cult,
votive and funerary objects, devo-
tional and didactic prints, book
illustration and decoration … we ‘Bulles de Savon’, Edouard Manet, 1867/8 through a pipe with the other.
find that images of and alluding to
childhood have been commissioned, purchased,
viewed and otherwise utilised by a wider segment of
the population than any others.
Rather than examining each image in depth, she places
them in a broad historical context so that we find our-
selves being asked to look rather differently. Our gaze is
directed to the spaces between the object and picture
rather than to the objects and pictures themselves, what
Langmuir wants us to see being less the image than the
history and process of that image – how the representation
of the child and childhood is under constant redefinition.
There are pluses and minuses to this approach. Working
horizontally rather than vertically, connections are made
across time and genre but there is very little satisfying
analysis; Langmuir does not unlock her paintings so that
we feel as though we were seeing them for the first time,
nor does she ever question our need to see ‘childhood’ as
46
LITERARY REVIEW February 2007
a specific stage of human life in the first place. She is
interested simply in the relationship between images; her
aim being not to ‘deduce attitudes to childhood from pic-
torial images, but to examine the images of childhood for
what it tells us about the uses of images’. She will look at
‘the effects of images – sometimes of the same image as it
In Imagining Childhood, Langmuir takes a look at the
migrating images of dead babies, babies in swaddling
clothes, foundlings, babies taking their first steps, children
laughing and children crying; but it is in her final chapter
on ‘Bubbles’ that we can see best the effect her approach.
The chapter begins with a reproduction of the saccharine
Bubbles by Millais (1886), in which a big-eyed boy with a
picture was taken up by Pears to advertise their soap, and
we now recognise it as ‘the acme of Victorian kitsch’, but
Langmuir explains that Millais was drawing upon a picto-
rial tradition involving children and
bubbles going back to the Renaissance.
The early allegorical imagery of bub-
ble-blowing had less to do with captur-
ing childhood in all its heedless charm
than with embellishing the Latin con-
cept of homo bulla or ‘man the bubble’,
which was concer ned with the
ephemerality and futility of human life.
The first boy-and-bubble picture is
by Cornelis Ketel in 1574: a chubby
and cherubic boy is pictured blowing
bubbles, while a Greek inscription
over his head reads ‘Man’s life is like a
bubble’. This was followed by an
influential engraving by Hendrick
Goltzius of a child leaning on a skull
with one hand and blowing bubbles
Salvator Rosa, Jan Steen, Edouard
Manet and Jean-Siméon Chardin also have their boy-
and-bubble pictures, the power of each resting on
whether the bubble, and therefore the boy, represents to
the contemporary viewer joy, fun, abandon, reputation,
transience, or death. Throughout, Langmuir describes
what we are seeing in that art-historical way: ‘we watch
with bated breath the bubble straining at the end of its
straw, at that precise, wobbly instant before it either
bursts or breaks free and floats away’.
Like all Yale University Press books, Imagining Childhood
is a beautiful object, with thick waxy pages from which its
reproductions glimmer and shine. The pictures are so
numerous and the book so well designed that in a sense
we do not need the text to make the point, but then we
wouldn’t be told what we were looking at in that calm
and comforting parental voice.
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 GENERAL
M ICHAEL B URLEIGH
‘IT’S THE CULTURE, INNIT?’
T IME TO E MIGRATE ?
★ the worst of their culture with the worst of ours’, as in
By George Walden
(Gibson Square 234pp £8.99)
THE FORM OF George Walden’s new book is as arresting
as its content. Imagined members of his own family ask
‘Dad’, in the wake of an eight-year-old grandchild’s hav-
ing been knocked unconscious by some marauding
Somali, whether it is ‘time to emigrate’. Replying from
vacation in southern France, Walden hurries off a 200-
page reflection about modern Britain rather than a brief
email, fax or letter. The answer to the question in the title
is ‘try it for a bit’ – ‘it’ being America or France, although
I’d personally recommend John Howard’s Australia.
This epistolary form is a highly effective vehicle for
Walden’s thoughts on the current state of our nation. The
writing is brilliant in a leisurely sort of way, as befits a
retired homme d’affaires and senior politician, while the
tone ranges from the wincingly coruscating to the darkly
comic. Having educated himself up from a modest back-
ground in Dagenham (with the aid of a London grammar
school and Cambridge), Walden is well placed to com-
ment on the class-ridden cant that dominates much of
British life; and he has a poke at the lower end of the
social spectrum as well as the chancers, snobs and spivs
who unmeritoriously populate its summit:
Of all the countries in Europe the underclass the
British have spawned is the largest, the least literate,
the most drunk and drugged, the most anti-social,
the most violent and the most stubbornly unrespon-
sive to treatment. That’s why our jails are bigger and
fuller than theirs. Add to this the fact that nowhere
else in Europe are the disparities between the upper
and lower reaches of society so gapingly wide, the
gulf in educational opportunities so vast, or the
record of social mobility so miserably low.
Things will stay that way until we no longer have politi-
cians whose main priority is to be a ‘straight-talking kind
of guy’, when they actually turn out to be pretty good
liars, or (one of Walden’s bugbears) a new Tory leader
who, with a blond wig and kohl-ringed eyes, could be a
transsexual version of Princess Diana, feeling the pain of
the cowled hoodies who make our streets a misery.
The real ‘victims’ in our society are not simply the
underclass, but decent, tax-paying families like the
objects of Walden’s lengthy epistle, who cannot afford to
– or will not on principle – abandon state education or
health systems that are breaking under the strains of
ever-larger numbers of immigrants. We have no idea
47
how many immigrants there are (apparently enough to
repopulate Birmingham every decade) or whether they
make the cultural and economic contribution of legend.
Is it sane to cobble together random samples of the
world’s population in the hope that they might be cohe-
sive? As Walden says, migrants could just as well ‘couple
the case of those Asian youths who ‘have adopted that
peculiarly English air of immemorial resentment (the
endlessly aggrieved expression, the withered vocabulary,
the aggressively furrowed brow)’.
Immigration, accurately described as ‘a vast experiment
which no one ever planned and which – should it go
wrong – cannot be reversed’, is one of the major themes
of Walden’s book. The Left will – and has already begun
to – start spouting about the author’s suspected ‘racism’,
overlooking Walden’s damning verdict on Enoch Powell as
‘a romantic nationalist of a malevolent disposition’ revered
for ‘once having taught Greek in a provincial Australian
university’. That is merely a foretaste of some of the other
damning verdicts on various contemporary worthies, those
on Roy Hattersley, Chris Patten and Gerald Kaufman
being among the most trenchantly accurate. One recognises
the names, but does high name-recognition accompany
meaningful achievement?
As this suggests, Walden’s book is not an academic trea-
tise but a passionately felt result of his empirical observa-
tions of modern Britain, whether from being intimidated
on a London bus, visiting a GP, or driving with his wife
Sarah – often a metaphorical foot on the brake – around
our dismal northern cities where churches and pubs have
been closed throughout entire ‘quartiers’ in deference to
the rabid imams of the burgeoning ghettos. That brings us
to the second major concern of Walden’s book, namely
the grave threat represented by Islamist terrorism. He is
scathing about the BBC’s dishonest reporting of the threat,
and of the sort of contrarian patrician commentator who
thinks this all resides in the (government-manipulated)
vulgar imagination. As Walden comments, does that mean
that such knights-of-the-realm commentators would like
MI5 and the police to halt all their pre-emptive inquiries
about portable chemical or nuclear weapons ending up in
the hands of Al-Qaeda? Will they still think so when their
fancy houses in Holland Park or Notting Hill Gate have
become equal in value to a (contaminated) squat in
Hackney or Stoke Newington?
The fact that Walden himself continues to reside in
England suggests that there may still be hope for this
overcrowded island. He ends with an optimistic ‘wish
list’, whose adult suggestions are all the more worth lis-
tening to in view of the brilliant bleakness of his analysis
of modern Britain. This is an exceptionally timely book,
by one of our most incisive social commentators. Let’s
hope he doesn’t feel compelled to emigrate.
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LITERARY REVIEW February 2007
 FICTION
J OHN D UGDALE
SEXISTENTIALISM
K ILLING J OHNNY F RY
★ and Sixties settings allow him to give an African-
By Walter Mosley
(Bloomsbury 288pp £10.99)
TWO EVENTS CAUSE Cordell Carmel, a black freelance
translator probably in his early or mid-forties, to change
every aspect of his life in pursuit of ‘freedom’. The first
occurs when he drops in unannounced on Joelle, his
girlfriend of eight years, and finds her screaming in bliss
as a well-endowed lover, the eponymous Johnny Fry,
takes her from behind.
As his friend Brenda later underlines, part of what
gives this experience its transforming force is that it
reverses the white nightmare of a wife or daughter rav-
ished by a black stud: ‘A black woman taking a white
man in up her ass, and her man comes in on it? Her
black man? She should expect a bullet.’ But it’s Fry
whom Carmel vows to kill; Joelle he toys with before
finally confronting her, having sex with her in a master-
ful fashion that mimics his rival, and testing whether she
will maintain the pretence of being faithful to him.
The second decisive event is his purchase of a porn
movie, The Myth of Sisypha, immediately after seeing her
in flagrante. Carmel becomes obsessed with the film, and
it spurs him to reject his old life, in which sex was
insignificant and unadventurous (‘missionary position and,
every once in a while, doggy style’). He gives up translat-
ing to become a photographers’ agent, and, liberated
from monogamy, seizes every erotic opportunity going.
He finds willing partners everywhere in New York,
almost all of them in their twenties: Lucy, a photographer;
Sasha, who lives in the same building; Monica, a single
parent picked up on the subway; Linda, a receptionist; Tita,
a waitress; and Celia, a friend of Brenda. Others intimate
availability but can’t be fitted into his schedule; a lucky
neighbour (who is ‘my age’ and hence presumably debarred
from being bedded) achieves orgasm thanks to Sasha giving
her a running commentary on one session by phone.
Sporting a permanent erection that owes nothing to
Viagra, the insatiable born-again Casanova also displays a
new willingness to experiment. Anal sex is a speciality,
some of the encounters taking place where there’s a risk
of being seen by strangers, and dildos, drugs and an
electrical current are sometimes involved.
At one point Carmel spells out his credo, a belief in
‘making your own decisions and living by them’ and
‘taking your feelings and making them real’. ‘Our bodies
cannot know absolute freedom,’ he intones, ‘but our
minds can at least try.’ That this is a simplistic, sex-
48
LITERARY REVIEW February 2007
centric version of the ideas of Sartre and Camus can be
inferred from the name of Sisypha, the porn-movie
heroine who inspires him to get his groove back, and
from echoes of L’Etranger; it’s also implicit in the subtitle
that identifies Killing Johnny Fry as ‘a sexistential novel’.
In Mosley’s work as a crime-writer, the stories’ Fifties
American perspective on history normally seen through
white eyes. In this non-crime novel it’s the fiction of the
past that he reworks: turning Camus’ sentiment-free
alien into a pistol-packing Manhattanite, giving a manly
makeover to products of female sexual liberation such as
Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying, and answering the Sixties and
Seventies sex novels of Roth and Updike by installing
a black hero and updating them for an era when porn is
freely available and sex (in erotic ‘games’ secretly staged
every three years) has become a spectator sport.
Mosley’s Rawlins novels tend to be simple fables of a
good man overcoming obstacles in order to help others,
but with odd, jarring moments in which the author
intimates his awareness that reality is not so straightfor-
ward. Killing Johnny Fry is similarly compromised by a
wish to have his cake and eat it. Mosley undercuts
Carmel’s reclaiming of maleness, for example, because
he’s too smart not to anticipate a reading that sees his
urge to shoot Fry as displaced homosexual desire for
him, and so has him say ‘I had a hard-on for Johnny Fry.’
But if the hero’s perpetual potency derives from lust
for the man who cuckolded him, where does that leave
his gospel of men’s lib? Also blurring the message are the
Rawlins-like good deeds Carmel does for his lovers: for
example, getting Monica’s daughter into a top school –
highly commendable, but at odds with the creed of self-
realisation through promiscuity unrestricted by concern
for the other.
It’s not only confusions such as these, or the old-fash-
ionedness of preaching sex as salvation, that make Killing
Johnny Fry a rather embarrassing performance. Mosley
evidently intends it to be a print equivalent of The Myth
of Sisypha, a superior porn movie that ‘talks directly’ to
Carmel and so moves him far more than art films by De
Sica, Ray and Ozu, cinematic counterparts of Roth,
Updike and Camus.
But he makes no attempt to reinvent erotic writing, set-
tling instead for dully logging his alter ego’s positional shifts
and thrustings in the couplings that occur every few pages.
And his pretentious, ‘sexistential’ porn tale is often hard to
tell apart from crude male fantasy, as its priapic protagonist
sleeps with every woman he meets, earns rave reviews
(‘you’re the best lover I’ve ever been with’, ‘oh, Daddy!’) for
his ever-erect state, macho manner and acrobatic inventive-
ness, spurns the girlfriend who cheated on him although his
bedroom prowess now has her begging for forgiveness,
and ends up with a harem of partners half his age.
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 FICTION

P AMELA N ORRIS hair, but ‘a hint of that burn-

ing colour still remained at

A FINANCIER’S FALL his temples and at the back of

his neck, glowing, like a
flame half-hidden beneath the
DAVID G OLDER ashes’. This muted fire signals
★ the vitality which years of the
By Irène Némirovsky hard-headed pursuit of riches
(Translated by Sandra Smith) have not quite managed to
(Vintage Originals 159pp £7.99) extinguish. But it is a spark
that has never war med
IRENE NÉMIROVSKY RECENTLY shot to fame with the Golder’s relations with his
posthumous publication of her unfinished novel, Suite wife, Gloria, an avaricious
Française (published in the UK in 2006). The circum- woman who expects her hus- Némirovsky: uncompromising
stances of the book’s recovery attracted as much notice band to keep her in pearls
as its literary merits. The Jewish author had been arrest- and frocks, lovers and houses, but has never willingly
ed in the village where she and her family had taken shared his bed or given him love. As for Joyce, the
refuge during the German occupation of Paris, and she daughter he idolises, he is only too aware that she sees
died a few weeks later, in August 1942, in the infirmary him as ‘Dearest Dad, Daddy, Darling’, or more often
at Auschwitz. The notebook manuscr ipt of Suite ‘poor old Dad’, an endlessly replenished cash machine to
Française, which she had been working on during the fund her pursuit of sex and pleasure.
last months of her life, mouldered for decades in an old The novel begins with Golder refusing to rescue his busi-
suitcase until discovered by her daughter. ness partner from financial ruin. Shocked when Marcus
Suite Française was not Némirovsky’s first book. During unexpectedly commits suicide, Golder suffers a ferocious
the 1930s she was one of France’s most prestigious writ- heart attack. He survives, but his terror of death forces him
ers, publishing ten novels before she was silenced by new to examine the life he has created for himself. His story is
laws stigmatising Jews. David Golder, her second novel, told through a series of rapid, contrasting scenes which
published in 1929 when she was only twenty-six, quickly
established her credentials as a gifted storyteller and stylist.
This book also has an intriguing back story. It seems that
Némirovsky sent the manuscript anonymously to the
French publisher Bernard Grasset, who was astonished, “A chilling
when he finally tracked down the author, to meet a fash- reminder that
ionable, level-headed young woman, an émigrée from war journalists
Yiddish Kiev. Grasset’s surprise is understandable. David are human,
Golder is bold, unsentimental and accomplished, a as well as
remarkable achievement for so young a writer. a searing
David Golder describes several fateful months in the indictment of
life of a wealthy Jewish financier, as he negotiates a con- major news
tract for control of Russian oil. The portrait of Golder is conglomerates.”
uncompromising. He is a massive man in his late sixties,
with ‘flabby arms and legs, piercing eyes the colour of Chris Hedges,
water, thick white hair and a ravaged face so hard it former New
looked as if it had been hewn from stone by a rough, York Times war
clumsy hand’. He started in Russia as a ‘thin little Jew correspondent
with red hair … worn-out boots and empty pockets’, and author of
selling rags and scraps from a sack on his back. Now he War Is a Force
is a pitiless opponent. ‘Do you have any idea how many that Gives Us
people he’s ruined, how much misery he’s caused, how Meaning
many suicides?’ his wife asks her lover.
Through his obsession with making money, Golder
has transformed his fortunes, but at the cost of his emo- THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS
tional life. The ardour with which he began his journey Distributed by John Wiley • Tel: 1243 843291
out of poverty, ‘the hungry exuberance so particular to www.press.jhu.edu
young people of his race’, has faded, as has his vivid red

49
LITERARY REVIEW February 2007
 FICTION
deftly expose the corrupt, worldly society that is Golder’s
milieu, and chart his journey into bitter insight.
Némirovsky’s triumph is to reveal the humanity that
underlies the glittering façade. Gloria’s exploitation of
the husband she despises and fears is contrasted with her
tender intimacy with Hoyos, her long-term lover, a man
who lives off women and knows how to please them.
Joyce’s greed and recklessness are a product of youth and
her magnificent energy. ‘I’m so madly in love with all of
it,’ she cries, meaning fast cars, dresses, the ardent nights
she plans to share in Spain with a beloved gigolo.
Emotionally starved, Golder relishes money and power,
but his own wants are frugal. He clings to his battered
wallet, with its torn satin lining and an elastic band to
stop the notes from falling out.
Némirovsky was the daughter of a wealthy Russian
banker, forced to start afresh in Paris after the Bolshevik
Revolution. Her family had known the terror of
pogroms, poverty and exile, and the characters in her
novel may well have been drawn from observation. Even
so, it is a merciless exposé. Marcus’s grasping wife wears
an enormous pearl necklace ‘wound three times around
her long, wrinkled neck which she jerked about like an
old bird of prey’. Soifer, the German Jew who plays
cards with Golder, has ‘a look of pathetic nobility’, such
as ‘old criminals sometimes have’, but his ‘gaping, splut-
tering mouth’ inspires ‘a feeling of revulsion and fear’.
These are cruel descriptions, verging on caricature, but
they herald the unsparing realism that Némirovsky was
to develop to such great effect in Suite Française.
When it comes to her protagonist, Némirovsky doesn’t
falter. Golder appears centre-stage in scenes of tremen-
dous power. He is like Shakespeare’s Lear or Milton’s
Samson, men whose urgency and defiance battle with the
body’s weakness and the blows of fate. Alone and mortally
ill, he wrests his final contract from hardnosed Russian
oilmen, like ‘a sick dog, close to death, who still bares his
teeth, growls wildly and gives one last, powerful bite’.
The question that Némirovsky poses in this impressive
novel is whether it is ever possible to break free from
one’s origins. In the final scenes of the book, Golder
returns to the grim Russian
port from where he started
his odyssey. His history has
come full circle. But the
memor y with which the
book closes is one not of
struggle or success, but of
the dark street of Golder’s
childhood, a candle lit in an
icy window, and a voice,
perhaps his mother’s, calling
him home.
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see LR Bookshop on page 30
50
LITERARY REVIEW February 2007
L INDY B URLEIGH
PARALLEL LIVES
M EASURING T IME
★
By Helon Habila
(Hamish Hamilton 383pp £16.99)
THE PRACTICE OF abandoning twins at birth was one of
the traditions in the Nigerian village of Keti which didn’t
survive the onslaught of colonialism and the arrival of the
first missionary, Reverend Drinkwater, in 1918. Mamo,
the protagonist of prize-winning author Helon Habila’s
ambitious second novel, is grateful for the destruction of
this particular custom since he is a twin himself. As it is,
his mother dies giving birth to him. Mamo, born with
sickle-cell anaemia, is not expected to live beyond the
age of twenty. His twin, LaMamo, is everything that the
weak, introverted Mamo isn’t: physically robust, bold and
fearless. Neither twin, however, is cherished by their phi-
landering father, and if it wasn’t for their aunt Marina, an
evangelical Christian with an endless repertoire of
colourful stories, their childhood in the backwater of
Keti would be loveless and dull.
The two boys grow up dreaming of escape from the
stifling tedium of village life and hanker after fame and
fortune. When their father’s brother, Haruna, returns
after many years from the Biafran war, a broken man but
a hero, the twins determine to become soldiers too.
LaMamo realises his dream and goes off to fight but the
sickly Mamo is left behind and turns inwards, drawing
on books and his imagination to make the time bear-
able. His health improves and he falls in love.
Forced to abandon his university degree because of his
illness, Mamo takes the job of history teacher at his
favourite uncle’s school in the village and becomes some-
thing of a local historian, conceiving a project to rival the
Reverend Drinkwater’s extant History of the Keti Peoples.
He intends to model his history of his own people on
Plutarch’s Parallel Lives by
writing individual biogra-
phies of generations of Keti’s
inhabitants. But as his repu-
tation grows, Mamo is
coopted by the ruling family
to write their history, and
the fame and fortune for
which he has yearned are
within his grasp. Meanwhile,
he receives intermittent bul-
letins over the years from the
frontlines of such countries
as Chad, Libya and Liberia,
 FICTION
as his increasingly embittered and radicalised brother bat-
tles his way across the war-ravaged continent.
Habila’s literary objective – to capture the recent
history of Nigeria by following the lives of a family and
the passage of time in one ‘remote, unimportant’ village
– is mirrored in his fictional character’s historical under-
taking. His fiercely subjective narrative, like Mamo’s, is
designed to challenge Wester n inter pretations of
Nigerian history, retaining some of the immediacy and
vitality of traditional African oral storytelling. Measuring
Time is especially admirable because of its honesty in not
uncritically attributing all of Nigeria’s present ills, such
as endemic corruption and widespread abuse of political
power, to colonialism, and in bravely acknowledging
some of its benefits. Mamo owes his love of the written
word to colonialism as well as, less directly, his life.
C HRISTOPHER H ART
RADIUM RELATIONSHIPS
T HE S TORY OF B LANCHE AND M ARIE
★ for two or three decades after, radiation was regarded as
By Per Olov Enquist
(Harvill Secker 219pp £16.99)
PER OLOV ENQUIST’S last book to be translated into
English was the masterly and prize-winning The Visit of
the Royal Physician. Now, once again, he has taken an
historical story and used it as a vehicle for enquiry into
love, art and death. He treats these big themes with
miniaturist care and attention, while his characters,
trapped in history like insects in amber, are deeply and
sympathetically observed.
The ‘Marie’ of the title is Marie Curie, while ‘Blanche’
is the rather less well-known Blanche Wittman. Indeed,
as the conclusion tells us, we do not even know where
Blanche is buried. But her life was a fascinating if not a
happy one. At eighteen she began to exhibit ‘somnambu-
lar spasms’ and was officially diagnosed with ‘hysteria’ in
1878: a classic Victorian diagnosis, and about as humane
and scientific as our contemporary jargon about ‘paranoid
schizophrenia’. She was committed to Salpêtr ière
Hospital for sixteen years, where she met, and was studied
by, the great M Charcot, as well as his rather less likeable
assistant, Sigmund Freud. In the novel, about all the latter
ever demands of her is, ‘Did you ever feel desire for your
brother?’ ‘Of course,’ she blithely replies, thus foxing Dr
Fraud completely. Why isn’t she in denial? Charcot, how-
ever, was clearly a man with a soul, plagued by doubts
that all these neatly categorised ‘idiots, epileptics and
lunatics’ were ‘all … perhaps simply human beings’.
Finally Blanche was to emerge from her hysteria, or
51
Mamo’s position as court biographer compromises his
desire for the truth and he becomes quickly disillusioned
by the decadence and greed of the ruling elite. The
twins are reunited at last when LaMamo returns as
avenging warrior to a village torn apart by political cor-
ruption and religious conflict. The author is sometimes
a little too overtly didactic as subtlety of plot and charac-
ter are sacrificed in getting the message across, but his
artistic and personal integrity shines through. Habila
succeeds for the most part in bringing his native country
to life, involving the reader so much so that it’s a relief
when the novel ends on an optimistic note. Habila has
every reason to be optimistic about his own future and
you feel that this novel is just the beginning of what will
be a distinguished career.
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catalepsy, or whatever the scientists had designated it, and
become Charcot’s assistant. She then became assistant to
Marie Curie, and was present at the discovery of radium
in 1898.
The eerie blue glow of the radium fascinated Marie so
much that she kept a vial of it by her bedside. And indeed,
possessing magical and health-giving properties. As Enquist
drily tells us, ‘radioactive bottles of “Curie Hair Water”,
which was supposed to counteract hair loss, were sold in
great quantities’, and ‘A European pharmacopoeia from
1929 included eighty patent medicines with radioactive
ingredients, all of them miraculous: bath salts, liniments,
suppositories, toothpaste, and chocolate pralines.’ For
Blanche (as presumably for some of those poor praline guz-
zlers), the exposure to such radiation was brutally cruel. She
had to have three of her four limbs amputated. Pierre
Curie, dazed and suffering from radiation sickness, wan-
dered in front of a horse and cart in a Paris street and was
crushed to death. Marie’s own death in 1934, from ‘aplastic
pernicious anaemia’, was almost certainly caused by radia-
tion exposure as well. And so the three of them entered
into ‘the sullied history of modernity’.
Enquist warns us that this is a novel, and prefers not to
acknowledge any non-fictional sources, which is only
right. Instead he uses Blanche’s own notebooks, ‘The
Book of Questions’, to weave an extraordinary and mes-
merising tale: Enquist’s enquiry, Enquist’s inquest. Often it
takes no more than rapid note-form. But this is his style:
he is writing like a man in a hurry (he is in his eighth
decade), urgently, wanting to get hold of what truths he
can. Mere description makes him impatient, so that a sin-
gle line might read simply, ‘The terrace. The trees. The
foliage.’ He wants to dig deeper than that. ‘I don’t have
much time left,’ says Blanche towards the end. The result is
exhilarating, elliptical, concise, dense, and richly rewarding.
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LITERARY REVIEW February 2007
 FICTION
S AM L EITH
DT AND THE MAESTRO
T HE C ASTLE IN THE F OREST
★ listen what a miracle of nature the bees are: how perfectly
By Norman Mailer
(Little, Brown 496pp £17.99)
UNLESS I HAVE drastically misunderstood his latest novel,
I’m forced to conclude that, in his ninth decade,
Norman Mailer has completely dropped his conkers. The
Castle in the Forest is a preposterous book; a bafflingly
preposterous book. It is, at least ostensibly, trying to tell
us something about Adolf Hitler. But what on earth is it
trying to tell us about him?
As it opens, its narrator introduces himself as ‘DT’,
short for Dieter – a former member of an elite SS
Intelligence group under the supervision of Heinrich
Himmler. Himmler, Dieter tells us, is obsessed by incest.
Himmler thinks that, as well as magnifying and exacer-
bating congenital defects in the products of incestuous
union, on rare occasions it may lead to the strengthening
or doubling of positive genetic traits. DT and his
colleagues are, therefore, trying to please Himmler by a)
establishing that the Führer is a first-degree incestuary
(he ends up deciding that Hitler’s mother is his father’s
daughter, also incestuously conceived), and b) ruling out
any possibility that he might have Jewish blood.
The first three ‘Books’, as the chapters of DT’s mem-
oir are called (perhaps pompously; perhaps, in light of a
later twist, archly), describe his investigations into
Hitler’s ancestry, and the youthful philanderings of his
father Alois, among them the getting of his future wife.
They end with the moment of Hitler’s conception, a
rather purple passage (‘His mouth lathered with her sap,
he turned around and embraced her face with all the
passion of his own lips and face, ready at last to grind
into her with the Hound’) during the course of which,
curiously, DT announces that he himself was present.
How so? At the opening of the fourth chapter, all is
explained. It turns out that the Intelligence agency DT
is working for is a bit older than the SS. He is a devil –
charged by the Evil One (known here as the Maestro)
with cultivating the development of various potential
human ‘clients’. Devils, ranged in a sort of satanic civil
service, mooch about Earth sowing the seeds of corrup-
tion, tweaking thoughts, ‘etching’ suggestions into
dreams, and hoping that the angels (known as ‘cudgels’,
and serving under the DK – for ‘Dummkopf ’) don’t
catch them and throw them down the stairs.
Anyway, apple-cheeked Adi is indeed a promising client:
jealous, petulant, sadistic, preternaturally charismatic, and
with a strong enthusiasm for playing the commander in
52
LITERARY REVIEW February 2007
war games with his contemporaries. We watch him thrill to
his first taste of Wagner; we see him practising his bellow-
ing oratory in the forest; we are privy to his nascent deter-
mination to Forge a Will of Iron. Then there are the bees.
On retiring from his job as a customs officer, Adi’s father
Alois takes to apiculture, and explains to anyone who’ll
ordered their social structure, how intolerant they are of
the weak, how productive of the greatest honey if handled
properly. Watching his father exterminate a substandard
hive with gas, apparently, stuck in young Adolf ’s mind …
Scarcely any Freudian cliché is left unapplied to the
development of the future Führer. Excessive mother-
love that later sours? Check. Hatred of the father?
Check. A fascination with poo and a traumatic instant
when his big brother puts a blob of it on his nose? That’s
there. A thrilled guilt at the idea that – by infecting him
with measles – Adi might have murdered his younger
brother? Another direct hit.
Mailer is, as he always has been, a fine prose craftsman.
There’s nothing much wrong with the way he tells his
story – short though it is on incident, he gives DT a
drolly bureaucratic voice. But the plot frequently mean-
ders into irrelevancy and, again, however competently it
may be told, you are still left wondering what the point
of the whole project is in the first place. Without the
superstructure of the Pandaemonic secret service, The
Castle in the Forest would simply look like a crude and
silly book. With DT and the Maestro and the cudgels
and the dream-etching and the rest, it looks like a stark-
staringly mad one. It uneasily juxtaposes sophomore
psychoanalysis with metaphysics, and then undermines
both. The latter is domesticated with a cutesy cold-war
makeover, and the former is presented insistently but
apologetically. DT frequently suggests that though, say,
the gassing of the bees might look like a clumsy fore-
shadowing, things are a bit more complicated than that.
Nothing turns up to support his suggestion.
The six-page bibliography appended to the novel com-
plicates things further by seeming to suggest that this is a
serious historical project, rather than a jeu d’esprit. I am
truly at a loss as to how a novelist whose career began with
The Naked and the Dead, and who is rightly described on
the cover of this book as ‘a writer of the greatest and most
reckless talents’, could have come up with this guff.
Every one of the dressing-up-box staples of the
Führer’s image, from the stiff-armed salute to the tooth-
brush moustache, is given a psychosexual working-over.
As we finally take our leave of young Adi he is in early
adolescence, and our last glimpse is of how his style of
masturbation has changed. As a nipper, he liked to
whack off alfresco into bunches of leaves. Now, he finds
he gets off by holding his (other) arm ‘in the air at a
forty-five degree angle for a long time’.
Oh yes, and the ‘tache’? Another sex-fantasy. Adolf
 FICTION
becomes excited by a picture in the newspaper of the
Empress Elizabeth’s assassin Luigi Lucheni (another of
DT’s promising clients) – specifically, ‘the assassin’s small
moustache, fixed to his upper lip just below his nostrils’.
(Where else, incidentally, would you expect to find a
moustache?) This commingles in his head with the excite-
ment of catching a glimpse of his older sister’s burgeoning
O PHELIA F IELD
GUILT & CULPABILITY
A FTERWARDS
★ its own history – in this case,
By Rachel Seiffert
(Heinemann 327pp £14.99)
AS IF TO answer those who failed to see the preoccupa-
tions of her Booker Prize-nominated first novel, The
Dark Room, as universal, rather than specifically German,
Rachel Seiffert has returned to the same themes –
culpability, guilt and accountability – in a second novel
set largely in modern Britain.
The novel tells the love story of an ordinary young
couple, Alice and Joseph, who discover parallels between
themselves and Alice’s late grandmother and recently
widowed grandfather, David. Joseph is traumatised by
his experiences as a soldier in Northern Ireland during
the final years of the Troubles, while David remains
haunted by his part in the Emergency in colonial Kenya
during the 1950s. As a result, the women who love
these two men must tread the perimeters of conversa-
tional territory with caution, in case a buried memory
turns out to be a landmine.
Seiffert’s novel is structurally brilliant. The slow-moving
first half forces the reader into the position of a wife or
girlfriend waiting and gradually guessing at the thoughts
and feelings of men returned home from wars. The last
chapters are therefore powered by stored energy. Yet both
Joseph’s and David’s ‘secrets’ are laid out for us at the
beginning, which demonstrates that what we as readers
really crave, like the heroine Alice, are not the facts so
much as emotionally satisfying scenes of confession and
catharsis (‘Cry long enough and loud enough and you’ll
be a better person for it?’ Joseph wonders). Together with
Alice, the reader shares and then loses a simple, feminine
faith that talking will solve everything.
Seiffert never suggests that the horrors of British impe-
rialism are equivalent to Nazi horrors, but her novels
point out certain similarities: the impossibility of atone-
ment, the legacies passed down generations, and the
deceptive distances between the places where horror
happens and the places where others live in ignorantly
53
pubic hair – ‘that small peek a boo into Angela’s privacy so
much like the mad murderer’s upper lip’ – and the future
Führer falls to joyous self-abuse.
So, in a manner of speaking, the moustache was a way
of signalling that Adolf Hitler was a ****. We didn’t
need Norman Mailer to tell us that.
To order this book at £14.39, see LR Bookshop on page 30
blissful safety. Afterwards may
not have quite the dramatic
scale and pain of The Dark
Room, but it is just as accurate
at describing how a nation
can know and yet not know
the more ambivalent matter
of twentieth-century British
colonial and Irish history.
This is not, however, a his-
torical novel; its contemporary Seiffert: precise
relevance to the soldiers
returning home psychologically scarred from Iraq,
Afghanistan and elsewhere is implicit throughout. Even
David’s memories of being a pilot in Kenya suggest some-
thing about the inescapability of personal responsibility in
the context of modern technological warfare. Anti-war,
civilian views of the army as an institution are shown as
condescending, though not fundamentally incorrect. What
is revealed as incorrect, or at least naïve, is thinking that the
only big question for every individual involved in a political
conflict is which side they once stood or now stand on. As
Joseph’s sister puts it: ‘He was in the army. Chances are, he’s
done something or seen something done. What kind of
person comes away from that with peace of mind?’
Once again Seiffert has performed the remarkable feat of
writing about the suffering of perpetrators in such a way as
to take nothing away from their victims’ greater suffering.
It is achieved by prose that, at its best, can be as precise and
searing as J M Coetzee’s. Perhaps the price to be paid for
such a tough, unsentimental style is that some of the
novel’s characters fail to come fully to life or to remain
alive in one’s imagination. This might be expected from
the two central male characters – indeed one admires
Seiffert’s bravery in putting such chronic reticence and
coldness at the heart of her novel – but somehow the
details and subplots surrounding the other, mostly female
characters seem both superfluous and inadequate. Alice’s
nervous relationship with her absent father may explain
her behaviour, but does little beyond that. These are
minor criticisms, however, of a novel that is a wonderfully
different yet consistent ‘afterwards’ to The Dark Room, and
which confirms Rachel Seiffert as one of the most intelli-
gent and ethical writers of her generation.
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LITERARY REVIEW February 2007
 FICTION
A NDREW R OBINSON
DELHI MIX
T HE P EACOCK T HRONE
By Sujit Saraf
(Sceptre 754pp £12.99)
F IREPROOF
By Raj Kamal Jha
(Picador 388pp £12.99)
DURING THE 40TH anniversary of Indian independence in
1987, I interviewed Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in
Delhi for The Independent. I admit to giving him an easy
ride without reference to the breaking Bofors corruption
scandal, which would for ever dog his name. For I lacked
the confidence, and frankly the commitment, to enter the
labyrinth of Indian politics. Yes, India is the world’s most
populous democracy, but how many of us can name its
prime ministers since Rajiv Gandhi’s fall in 1989?
Sujit Saraf ’s massive novel about Delhi may be the first
to make the modern Indian political world interesting –
if hardly appetising – to outsiders. Novelists such as
Salman Rushdie have dealt with politics, but not put it
centre stage. A former prime minister, Narasimha Rao,
tried with The Insider in 1998. Saraf succeeds by focusing
on the pullulating bazaars around the Red Fort, the Jama
Masjid and Chandni Chowk. Created by the Mughals in
the seventeenth century, the Red Fort is still the symbolic
centre of power in the capital – hence the book’s title,
The Peacock Throne. Shahjahan’s jewel-encrusted throne
may be long gone – looted by a Turkish marauder – but
the Red Fort is where, each independence anniversary,
the prime minister addresses the nation.
Saraf ’s portrait is unflattering. Born in Bihar, schooled
and educated in Delhi, he now works in California as a
space engineer – a trajectory typical of Delhi-ites. His
novel calls Delhi variously a city that ‘admits all but loves
none’, that ‘belongs to no one, so it belongs to everyone’,
and a place ‘where everyone hates everyone else’. One
character, a prosperous Sikh trader who narrowly escapes
death in the anti-Sikh riots of 1984 after the assassination
of Indira Gandhi, calls it a city ‘of murderers and thieves’.
The large cast ranges from street boys who survive as
pickpockets, prostitutes and thugs to the wealthiest
members of the Hindu and Muslim political elite. Yet
almost all are cheats, many are thieves, and some
connive at murder. Remarkably, there is not one truly
sympathetic character, not even the humble tea-seller
Gopal, whose unexpected elevation to high office forms
the story’s main thread. Delhi lovers may bristle, but
Saraf evokes a place where people blatantly pursue
money and status and not much else. It is no accident
54
LITERARY REVIEW February 2007
that Mahatma Gandhi was
first assassinated in Delhi and
then canonised as the Father
of the Nation with a grandly
landscaped memor ial at
Rajghat. In the novel,
Rajghat hosts a political
demonstration – a phoney
hunger strike with demon-
strators hired by a Muslim
politician to protest against
Hindu fundamentalism – Saraf: deft
which gets a bit out of hand.
‘Fuck this Mahatma and fuck his grass’, thinks a young,
crippled Bangladeshi illegal immigrant who has barely
heard of Gandhi. Desperate for a piss, he relieves himself
on the Rajghat memorial, before being arrested.
Later that year, 1992, he is sent by the same politician
to blow up the Babri Masjid at Ayodhya, in an utterly
cynical plot to rouse Muslim anger. The politician’s hope
is that the bomber and his partner will die. But although
their bomb detonates, adding to the already frenzied
destruction of the mosque by Hindus, only the partner is
killed. Back in Delhi, the chief bomber eventually turns
against his paymaster and during the 1998 election dies in
a bomb attack probably instigated by the same politician.
Real places and real events are deftly woven together in
multiple subplots with unobtrusive invention, though it
is curious that the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party), which
supported the demolition of the Babri Masjid and came
to power in 1998, is renamed as the IPP, unlike other
parties. Saraf has a gift for showing how politics arises
from competing personal interests while never failing to
tell a gripping story. And on the way we slip effortlessly
through the overlapping milieux of street traders, whores,
perfumers, retail merchants, police officers, New Delhi
journalists and others. (The necessary glossary of Indian
words, however, is astonishingly incomplete.) Irony
abounds, and there are flashes of humour worthy of R K
Narayan, such as a tense moment when a wealthy mer-
chant struggling to conceal wads of cash about his person
hears a knock at the door, imagines that murderous riot-
ers are outside, screams ‘I’m in the middle of my puja!’
and then realises that he is being offered a cup of tea. But
the book is also bloated with repetition, and its promised
link with the Peacock Throne never quite convinces.
While the Mughal courtiers who built on the ruins of
earlier Delhis may well have been a rogues’ gallery,
as Saraf maintains, their achievements far outshine those
of their philistine present-day descendants. The Urdu
culture of old Delhi central to Anita Desai’s finest novel,
In Custody, is virtually invisible in The Peacock Throne.
Hindu–Muslim conflict preoccupies the author of
Fireproof, too, a novel based on the Gujarat riots of 2002,
which killed over a thousand people. The trigger was the
 FICTION
incineration of fifty-nine Hindus, including activists on
their way back from Ayodhya, in a train compartment,
apparently by a Muslim mob; the Hindu backlash was
abetted by the BJP-controlled state government, which
was soon re-elected with a landslide majority. Fireproof
attempts to resurrect some of the anonymous Muslim
victims through a mixture of stark reportage, imaginative
reconstruction and outright fantasy, garnished with three
news photographs of the aftermath.
Raj Kamal Jha is a newspaper editor and, in my view,
not a novelist. His first novel, The Blue Bedspread, was
R ICHARD G ODWIN
FRIENDS AND LOVERS
T HE S ONG B EFORE I T I S S UNG
★ ally, as people do, building up an intellectual case against
By Justin Cartwright
(Bloomsbury 276pp £16.99)
JUSTIN CARTWRIGHT HAS peculiar timing. As the camera-
phone footage of Saddam Hussein’s execution diffuses over
the Internet, he releases a novel that turns on a filmed
hanging. Here, it is Nazi resistor Count Axel von Gottberg
who has the noose placed around his neck and the camera
trained on him, executed for his part in a 1944 plot to blow
up Hitler. The film, when privately premiered six decades
later, is of such grim power that it leaves its sole viewer,
historian Conrad Senior, incapacitated for six months. I
wonder what they would have made of it on YouTube.
Cartwright’s fictional Gottberg is based on the real Adam
von Trott, a German aristocrat and Oxford Rhodes Scholar
who resisted the Nazi regime, lobbied Chamberlain and
Roosevelt not to appease Hitler and ultimately hanged for
his part in the Kreisau Circle’s attempt on Hitler’s life.
While he was at Oxford, Trott befriended Isaiah Berlin. It
is the conflicted friendship between the virile, romantic
German patriot and the charming, timid Jewish intellectual
that forms the backbone of The Song Before It Is Sung, told
in assured, axiomatic prose. We flit erratically between
1930s Oxford and contemporary Camden, where 35-year-
old Conrad is buried in marital woe and the papers of his
former tutor Mendel (the Isaiah Berlin stand-in).
Mendel and Gottberg’s friendship, involving plenty of
‘high-minded walking’, is riven when Gottberg writes a
letter to the Manchester Guardian seemingly dismissing
Nazi anti-Semitism. Mendel concludes that his university
friend, whom he has always suspected of arrogance, has
become a Nazi. Gottberg believes the West must under-
stand what drives the Germans to support Hitler and that
it his duty to show the world there is an alternative ‘secret
Germany’. Mendel sabotages Gottberg’s impassioned
55
non-political and confusingly written. Fireproof enjoys the
benefit of stronger material but is scarcely more coherent.
Leaving aside the pseudo-religious element, implausibility
sinks the plot – as when, for example, a major hospital
remains unaware, after more than 24 hours, of the barbaric
burning of two of its doctors and its head nurse in a hospi-
tal van. Fireproof claims to express the voice of individual
conscience raised against society’s indifference to collective
evil, but is merely distasteful posturing by a Delhi journal-
ist of a kind accurately satirised in The Peacock Throne.
To order these books, see LR Bookshop on page 30
attempts to lobby for peace before the war.
Sex has already altered the friendship. On a trip to
Palestine in 1933 they encounter a pretty pair of cousins:
Elizabeth Partridge is snapped up by the voracious Axel as
Rosamund Bower kindly removes Mendel’s virginity – only
to fall for Axel later. Conrad wonders if Mendel ‘was gradu-
Gottberg, which was really a cover for sexual jealousy’.
At one point in the course of his research, Conrad
toys with the idea of writing a stage play about the pair’s
final meeting in Oxford in 1939. I wish someone
would. There is potential here for a two-hander to rival
Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen or Christopher Hampton’s
recent adaptation of Sándor Márai’s Embers for intensity.
As the novel stands, it is hard to avoid the feeling that
Cartwright is merely scraping the surface with sketchily
drawn characters and half-baked historiography.
The modern strand is more fatally flawed. Conrad is an
arrogant, nasty, manipulative, self-pitying oaf and
Cartwright’s seeming endorsement of his self-absorption
undermines the novel’s emotional integrity. His play-away
doctor wife Francine is built up as a hate figure (she is not
into books), and yet her complaints against Conrad seem
perfectly reasonable; he is merely cruel to her and I fear
we are supposed to jeer with him. Francine’s lightly taken
decision to have an abortion without consulting Conrad
does not ring true, and I suspect Cartwright of wanting
to give Conrad the moral high ground. It feels cheap; at
no point has he expressed much interest in anything
beyond food and sex and I doubt he cared much about
his unborn child. In truth, even the research project that
spells the end of the marriage is only interesting to
Conrad in as far as it gives him a sense of worth.
It is typical of the novel’s North London-centric
absorption that when Conrad visits Palestine, he ends up
discussing how rough Hackney is with a local Arab and
returns reflecting on how the divisions of the Holy Land
has given him greater appreciation of the task of divvy-
ing up the marital possessions. The reader waits for
some kind of comeuppance, some wink on Justin
Cartwright’s part – and it never comes.
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LITERARY REVIEW February 2007
 FICTION
S EBASTIAN S HAKESPEARE
FRIENDS, FAME & WAR
T HE S PEED OF L IGHT
★ TV documentary to tell the truth about My Khe. The
By Javier Cercas
(Translated by Anne McLean)
(Bloomsbury 288pp £14.99)
J AVIER C ERCAS ’ S FIRST novel, Soldiers of Salamis,
addressed the moral confusion of the Spanish Civil War
and how it scarred a generation for life. The book was a
deserved success and went on to become an international
bestseller. His second novel, The Speed of Light, tackles a
different conflict, the Vietnam War, and how it affected a
generation of idealist Americans in the 1960s.
The story starts off in the 1980s when our young Spanish
narrator accepts a teaching post in Urbana in the American
Midwest. He tries to impress his new colleagues by rubbish-
ing the films of Pedro Almodóvar (‘Frankly, I think they’re a
bunch of queer crap’) only to discover that his interlocutors
are gay. He then rubbishes Hemingway (‘Frankly, I think
he’s shit’) in front of fellow tutor Rodney Falk, a self-con-
fessed Papa-phile. It is not a promising start, but he and Falk
strike up a friendship and talk into the early hours about art
and books. Falk is an enigmatic figure on campus who
never goes to parties, or faculty meetings: ‘He seemed like
a child lost among adults or an adult lost among children.’
One day Falk disappears and our puzzled narrator sets
out to track him down. He visits Falk’s father, who
entrusts him with his son’s correspondence from the
Vietnam War. Falk was a war hero but it seems his expe-
riences took their toll on his sanity. His letters back home
talk about the beauty of killing and how war allows you
to travel at the speed of light. Our narrator returns to
Spain after two years but he cannot escape his growing
obsession with Falk. What did happen to him at My Khe?
Much of this story is beguilingly told and it works well as
a quest narrative: a search for truth, for a mentor. The
cryptic Falk talks in teasing riddles. ‘Talent isn’t something
you have, it’s something you conquer,’ he says. There is also
a playful self-portrait of the author which lightens the tone
and provides a witty counterpoint. Our narrator has also
published a debut novel on the Spanish Civil War which
has become a huge success. He binges on alcohol and sex
and disputes the notion that the ideal condition for an artist
is failure, quoting the French writer Jules Renard: ‘All great
men were first ignored; but I’m not a great man, so I’d
prefer immediate success.’ While he struggles to come to
terms with being a celebrity – and to find a subject for his
second novel – Falk reappears and then vanishes again.
The novel explores the nature of friendship, fame and
war, and never yields up its answers too easily. But the
56
LITERARY REVIEW February 2007
problem lies in the resolution of the tale. It seems to lurch
into a different gear. Out of the blue a domestic tragedy
befalls our narrator; he thinks he is responsible and believes
Falk is the only person who will understand him. But it’s
too late. He travels to America to discover that Falk has
committed suicide after cooperating with an American
story becomes too schematic, and the coincidences are too
contrived. The improbable scenario is used to facilitate the
plot’s denouement and it’s never quite believable.
Even so, Javier Cercas is always a stimulating, thought-
provoking author, and full marks to translator Anne
McLean who has done another tremendous job in
rendering his rhythmic prose into pellucid English. If
nothing else, she makes you read the novel at the speed
of light, which is quite an achievement.
To order this book at £11.99, see LR Bookshop on page 30
E DMUND G ORDON
IN BYRON’S SHADOW
I MPOSTURE
★
By Benjamin Markovits
(Faber & Faber 212pp £10.99)
IN THE SUMMER of 1816, when Byron and the Shelleys,
stranded by heavy rain beside Lake Geneva, decided to
amuse themselves by composing ghost stories (the diver-
sion which led to Mary Shelley’s writing Frankenstein), they
were accompanied by Byron’s physician, John Polidori,
who joined the competition and began a supernatural tale
of his own. The Vampyre was published anonymously in
1819, and, such was the familiarity of its style, its author
was widely assumed to be Byron himself.
Benjamin Markovits’s third novel takes this confusion as
its premise, and imagines Polidori, recently dismissed from
Byron’s service, at the time of The Vampyre’s publication.
When he asserts his authorship to the governess Eliza
Esmond she assumes he is Byron, a mistake he doesn’t
correct, and they begin a relationship that involves him in
an increasingly intricate impersonation of his former
employer. The description of this affair is juxtaposed with
Polidori’s memories of Byron, and both narratives gradu-
ally converge around the strain placed on the young
doctor by ‘the force of impossible comparisons’.
Markovits’s greatest strength (what made his second
novel, Either Side of Winter, so affecting) is his understanding
of brittle, insecure personalities. What Imposture achieves
best is a darkly nuanced portrait of a minor author trapped
in the shadow of a successful contemporary, with whom
he wants, at any psychological cost, to feel equal. The
fragility of Polidori’s ego, his uneasy balance of self-
 FICTION
confidence and self-loathing, is rendered with admirable
subtlety. Unfortunately, this quality is not always present.
The novel opens with a Prologue in which Markovits
describes an enigmatic colleague he knew while teach-
ing at a New York school, a man who called himself
‘Peter Pattieson’. We are told that ‘Pattieson’ (an alias
taken from Scott’s Waverley novels) was the real author of
Imposture, and that the manuscript came into Markovits’s
possession only after the teacher’s death. Presumably, this
conceit is supposed to add resonance to the novel’s
themes in a couple of wr y, postmoder n strokes.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t work, and the opening chapters
(and the introductions of all main characters) are over-
shadowed by a lingering suggestion of artificiality.
Markovits’s powers of characterisation might entirely
G ILES M ILTON ’s excellent, S IMON B AKER ENJOYS A
Wodehousian debut, Edward
Trencom’s Nose (Macmillan Q UARTET OF F IRST N OVELS
260pp £7.99), is a perfect
example of eccentric English wit. The Trencoms have
been the proprietors of London’s leading cheese shop for
three centuries. Each eldest son has inherited the shop,
an unrivalled knowledge of cheeses, and the fabled
‘Trencom nose’ – an extraordinary appendage famous
for both size and sensitivity. In the late 1960s the current
proprietor, quiet, reflective Edward Trencom, seems to
have a perfect life, comprising a successful business, a
wonderful wife, and a career as a writer (on the subject
of cheese, naturally). His nose is the finest for genera-
tions: frequently he can divine not only the type of
cheese but also the very cow its milk came from (‘It’s
not Buttercup – it’s too creamy for her. And I don’t
believe it’s Daisy or Cowslip. Did the milk come from
Wittgenstein?’). But then he discovers a box of long-
forgotten family papers, and in doing so unearths a
grotesque fact: each of his forebears died a horrible
death, and every time Greeks were somehow involved.
Understandably, when he finds himself being followed
around London by a Greek man, he is terrified.
With a plot that merges the history of the Trencom
family with the history of Greco-Turkish conflict, before
ending with a set-piece of life-enhancing ludicrousness,
this elegantly written novel is clever and immensely
charming. Milton has written several works of history,
including Nathaniel’s Nutmeg, and while this is not in any
sense a work of realism, Edward Trencom’s Nose neverthe-
less benefits from its author’s sound historical knowledge.
A great tale of unlikely heroism, fortitude and fromage.
Following the success of Jarhead, his lauded memoir of
the Gulf War, Anthony Swofford begins his career as a
novelist with Exit A (Simon & Schuster 304pp £12.99), a
love story set against a military backdrop. At the start, the involved, Maria sets off across the harsh terrain in search
Pynchonesquely named Severin Boxx is a seventeen-
overcome this first impression, if it weren’t sporadically
revived throughout the book, for example by his occasional
self-consciousness about period detail; this is particularly
evident in the dialogue, some of which approaches
pastiche, as when Polidori imagines Eliza confronting him
with the words ‘I had taken you for a gentleman, but now
I find that you merely played the part, to seduce an inno-
cent girl, whose only sin was her sensibility’. Just as incon-
gruous are the moments of brief, lurid physical description
– one man’s head is ‘like a potato’; Eliza’s heart beats ‘a
sharp tattoo’ – that often jar against Markovits’s more deli-
cate observations of his characters’ psyches. These intrude
on the atmosphere of what is, generally, a subtle and con-
vincing psychological drama.
To order this book at £8.79, see LR Bookshop on page 30
year-old sports freak, the son of a
Colonel, living in a US military
base in Japan. He loves Virginia
Kindwall, the Base General’s
wayward yet beautiful daughter, but loses touch with her
when she is sent to prison. Fifteen years later Severin, now
in the US and embroiled in a dysfunctional marriage,
receives a postcard from General Kindwall: he is dying,
and wants Severin to find his now-estranged daughter.
There are a few hints of the first-time novelist here,
most notably in the way that characters occasionally do
things for the sake of the plot rather than because they are
likely to have done them. I also suspect the plan was for
this to be rather more hard-hitting and dark than in fact it
is. However, Exit A has qualities which make it highly
readable. The older Severin, now carrying a lot more
weight and a lot less drive, is like a slightly more educated
Rabbit Angstrom, trapped by his own emotional incom-
petence and forever looking backwards. Ultimately, in
spite of imperfections, this is an engaging book which,
although fairly self-contained as a story, leaves enough
unresolved at the end to invite the possibility of a sequel.
The boundaries between literary fiction, historical
fiction and crime fiction have become so blurred in
recent years that it’s best simply to take pot luck when
trying to define Stef Penney’s entertaining first novel,
The Tenderness of Wolves (Quercus 440pp £12.99),
which recently won the Costa First Novel Award and is
shortlisted for the overall Costa Book of the Year Award.
Set in the 1860s in a tiny Canadian town populated
mostly by expatriate Scots, it begins with Maria Ross’s
discovery of a brutally murdered Frenchman – a grisly
enough spectacle, but one made worse by the fact that
her surly teenaged son, Francis, a friend of the murdered
man, has gone missing. While the villagers put two and
two together and decide that Francis must have been
of her son, accompanied by a Canadian Indian tracker
57
LITERARY REVIEW February 2007
 FICTION
who agrees to help her find him.
So far, we probably have a crime novel, but then comes
an avalanche of subplots involving colonial capitalism,
male brutality, the possible discovery of a long-dead
written language of the Native Indians, relationships blos-
soming and fading, religion, and homosexual love.
Without throwing in too many ingredients and creating a
mess, Stef Penney brings to her nineteenth-century novel
a nineteenth-century scope and intricacy of design, and
pulls the strands together satisfactorily at the end. It’s not
an unqualified success – the prose is occasionally pedestrian,
and Penney never quite vivifies the glinting, malevolent
snowscape – but The Tenderness of Wolves is a strong,
ambitious debut which deserves its recognition and
promises great things for the future.
Icebergs, by Rebecca Johns (Bloomsbury 298pp
£12.99), opens in 1944 with a military aeroplane being
choked by frost while flying through Labrador, on the
Newfoundland coast. It crashes, killing its entire crew
except for Walt Dunmore and Al Clark. Walt builds a
makeshift shelter but Al dies of injuries received during
the crash. Walt is saved and returns to Dottie, his wife,
while Al’s widow Adele brings up her daughter Caroline
LETTERS
THE BALKAN BOOT
Sir,
Sir David Madden KCMG accuses me of bias (Letters,
Dec 2006/Jan 2007) but perhaps the boot is on the other
foot. All three sides in the Bosnian war were indicted for
war crimes, not just the Serbs and the Bosnian Serbs as
he tries to pretend. In any case, indictments alone do not
prove guilt. Furthermore, the UN war crimes tribunal in
The Hague does not recognise the concept of war guilt:
nowhere is one side formally blamed for starting the
fighting in Yugoslavia. Inasmuch as war guilt is implied
in the texts of the various indictments, it lies with the
secessionist states, ie Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia. What
a shame that Sir David relies on cheap shots and tries to
pull rank rather than addressing the substantive question
I raised, namely whether the West prolonged the
Bosnian war artificially by its contradictory policies.
Yours faithfully,
John Laughland
London, W6
WERE THE GREEKS SLAVES?
Sir,
In his kind review of my book, Breaking the Chains: The
Royal Navy’s War Against White Slavery, Giles Milton has
me ‘arguing that the Greeks were enslaved under the
58
LITERARY REVIEW February 2007
alone. By the late 1960s both the Dunmores and the
Clarks have moved to Chicago and Caroline is dating
Sam, Walt and Dottie’s child. By now Caroline has dis-
covered a secret about her late father, one that Walt also
knows but has kept hidden. Eventually we realise that
the ‘icebergs’ of the title are the characters themselves,
in whom so much lies hidden under the surface.
The opening sequence of this novel, in which Walt digs
his way out of the snow and then shelters for days with
Al, is brilliantly written and genuinely tense. Thereafter,
the novel dispenses with a propulsive, plot-driven narra-
tive and becomes a more leisurely examination of the
occasionally destructive dynamic of families; the influence
of The Corrections can be felt here, as can Larkin’s line
about your mum and dad, which could serve admirably as
the book’s subtitle. The earlier passages are undoubtedly
the more effective, but although the later ones occasionally
leave you wondering what the purpose of the novel is,
Rebecca Johns generally manages to bring the story into
check when it drifts for a few pages. If it does not quite
fulfil the promise of its incendiary opening, Icebergs is still
a good debut novel.
To order these books, see LR Bookshop on page 30
Turkish yoke’ (LR, Dec 2006/Jan 2007). On the con-
trary, I stressed that the Greeks were subjects of the
Ottoman Empire, free to practise their religion; some
prospered as farmers, traders, fishermen, shipbuilders,
shipowners and even as pirates. However, West
Europeans and Americans often saw them as Christian
slaves, fighting for liberation, offering them support
although the British Government regarded the Turks as
potential allies against an aggressive Russia.
Yours faithfully,
Tom Pocock
London, SW3
BEAUTY OF THE BORDERS
Sir,
Your reviewer of Alice Munro’s The View from Castle Rock
makes the mistake of thinking that beautiful rural
Scotland means the Highlands (LR, Dec 2006/Jan 2007).
The Ettrick Valley where James Hogg was born is in the
Scottish Borders, south of Edinburgh. Your readers may
be interested to know that there is a James Hogg exhibi-
tion at Bowhill, near Selkirk, open during the summer
months, if they take time to visit this countryside which
is so rich in literary inspiration and associations.
Yours faithfully,
Judy Steel
Ettrick Valley, Scottish Borders
 SILENCED VOICES
I KNOW I regularly focus on L UCY P OPESCU
Uzbekistan in these pages, but
President Islam Karimov’s tyranny D ZHAMSHID K ARIMOV
seems to know no bounds and,
recently, in a bizarre twist, it
appears that even his own family
are at risk. It was the poet and translator Richard
McKane who first alerted me to the fate of 39-year-old
Dzhamshid Karimov, an independent journalist and
nephew of the President, who disappeared on 12
September 2006 after visiting his elderly mother in hos-
pital. Richard was disturbed to read about the case on
Uznews, a Russian-language website dedicated to
reporting on Uzbek and human rights issues.
Karimov was missing for two weeks before friends and
family discovered that he was being held in a locked
ward in a psychiatric hospital in the central city of
Samarkand. Uznews reported that the journalist had
been given a six-month order to stay in the psychiatric
unit. Latest reports suggest that he is now held alone in a
barred ‘cell’.
In the aftermath of the Andijan massacre in May
2005, the Uzbek government has pursued a fierce
crackdown on civil society. President Karimov has
sought to eliminate independent or dissident voices,
including international correspondents, local human
rights advocates, and foreign-funded non-governmental
groups that support free media and democracy. The
Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) reports that reg-
ulations adopted in February last year gave the Foreign
Ministry wide discretion to issue warnings to foreign
correspondents, revoke their accreditation and visas, and
expel them. They also made it illegal for Uzbek jour-
nalists to engage in any form of ‘professional activity’
with outlets not accredited by the Foreign Ministry.
According to Human Rights Watch, at least twelve
human rights defenders have been convicted and impris-
oned on politically motivated charges this year alone.
Those brave enough to continue to work in Uzbekistan
are routinely followed by plainclothes men, videotaped
by the authorities and prevented from leaving their
homes on certain days (for example, to stop them from
monitoring a trial). When I was in Uzbekistan, in 2004,
on behalf of the writers’ organisation PEN, there was no
attempt to hide the fact that we were tailed at all times.
Our hotel room was evidently searched, and I was
followed so closely by one man that he was practically
tripping over my heels.
Families of dissidents and journalists are also harassed – Islam A Karimov and HE Mr Tukhtapulat
many were too frightened to meet us, and our inter-
preter was picked up and questioned after we had left.
Having the card of Craig Murray, then British ambas-
sador, in his pocket protected our guide from facing a
more brutal attack, but for the most part having foreign
associations or contacts in the international media has
59
become a massive risk.
Karimov has worked for the
London-based Institute for
War and Peace Reporting
(www.iwpr.net), in the central
city of Jizzakh, as well as report-
ing for various independent journals and websites.
Apparently he had been watched since covering the
demonstrations in Andijan, where he reported on the
civilian deaths. In August, Karimov’s family complained
about the high levels of police surveillance at their home,
but their demands that the listening devices be removed
were ignored. At the end of August, the head of the
regional administration allegedly visited Karimov, who
refused the offer of a position on two state newspapers.
Recently, the family’s long-distance phone service has
been cut. Few doubt that the journalist’s detention
is linked to his reporting on human rights abuses
in Uzbekistan.
The Uzbek authorities have confirmed that Karimov
is in psychiatric confinement, but are calling it a ‘pri-
vate’ matter. The forced psychiatric hospitalisation of
Karimov is reminiscent of Soviet tactics of repression,
particularly common in the 1970s. Worryingly, Galima
Bukharbaeva, editor of Uznews, reports similar incidents,
in which Uzbek authorities have used forced psychiatric
treatment to gag critics. And as CPJ Executive Director
Joel Simon points out, ‘If President Karimov is treating
his own nephew in this manner, it’s hard to imagine
how others might fare.’
Maybe forced hospitalisation is considered a less harsh
for m of punishment than detention in one of
Uzbekistan’s notorious prison camps, but it is just as
frightening to contemplate what could be happening to
this young journalist whilst locked in a psychiatric
ward. McKane, in a poem dedicated to the release of
Karimov, writes:
In one language it’s aminazine,
here it’s called ‘liquid cosh’, chlorpromazine.
In the Soviet Union they also called the punishment
drug Sulfazine,
all anti-psychotics are dangerous for the sane.
To express deep concern for Dzhamshid Karimov’s
forced hospitalisation in a psychiatric institution and call
for his immediate release, and further to urge that the
journalist, while deprived of his freedom, be granted
access to his family and independent legal advice, readers
may like to send appeals to:
Tursunovich Riskiev
Embassy of the Republic of Uzbekistan
41 Holland Park
London W11 3RP
Fax: 0207 229 7029
Email: presidents_office@press-service.uz
LITERARY REVIEW February 2007

V ICIOUS C IRCLE
★ ★
By Robert Littell
(Duckworth 304pp £14.99)
A FEMALE American president and a
peace agreement between Israelis and
Palestinians: the beginning is as much
fantasy as futurology. But realism
quickly returns. An ultra-orthodox
rabble-rousing rabbi is abducted in
Jerusalem and held prisoner by a
blind but murderous doctor. These
two dreadful old men are equally
dangerous, devout, and bigoted.
While Mossad prepares the rabbi’s
rescue, he is interrogated, and spends
long nights in dispute with his captor,
demonstrating that fundamentalists
have more in common with each
other than with the people for whom
they purport to speak. Robert Littell
is one of the best and most intelligent
thriller writers, so Vicious Circle is
well worth reading even though real
events have overtaken its scenario,
and despite the gloom that this
knowledgeable analysis of a hopeless
situation inevitably evokes.
G ROTESQUE
★ Similarly decorative and apparently
By Natsuo Kirino
(Translated by Rebecca Copeland)
(Harvill Secker 480pp £17.99)
THE second of Natsuo Kirino’s thir-
teen novels to be translated into
English concerns the murder of two
Tokyo prostitutes. They and the nar-
rator met as young, ambitious girls
who were being groomed for success
at one of Tokyo’s most competitive
schools, which is saying a lot, since
moder n Japan, according to this
book, is defined and deformed by
lifelong, vicious competition. Be the
best or be trampled on. Conform
and obey. These female characters are
pitiable but not for a single paragraph
lovable or sympathetic. In a world
still directed by caste and men,
women must be seductive physically;
but their personalities become stunted
and warped like human bonsai. This
LITERARY REVIEW February 2007
CRIME
J ESSICA M ANN
is a fascinating, claustrophobic,
shocking image of a society that can’t
really be as horrible as it seems in
this dark and haunting thriller.
H IDDEN D EPTHS
★ a barrister specialising in commercial
By Ann Cleeves
(Macmillan 320pp £12.99)
INSPECTOR Vera Stanhope has some-
thing in common with Reginald
Hill’s famous ‘fat man’ Dalziel – she
even has a mollifying subordinate
who follows her round soothing hurt
feelings. But it is easier for men to
get away with being overweight and
rude. Vera’s own life is so lonely that
she has a dangerous tendency to
become emotionally involved with
suspects and witnesses. It is through
that empathy that she solves crimes
but her fantasies of friendship are
doomed to disappointment. This
case begins with the body of a victim
floating in perfumed water and
spr inkled with gaudy flowers.
motiveless murders follow. Cleeves
sets a good scene, this time in
Northumberland during a heatwave,
and she brings a large cast to life,
shifting points of view between
bereaved relatives, victims and sus-
pects in a straightforward, satisfyingly
traditional detective novel.
S ATURNALIA
★ tr ibal police, and retur ns to an
By Lindsey Davis
(Century 324pp £17.99)
SOME of the adventures of the private
eye in a toga have been too full of
slapstick for my liking but this one
gets the balance just right. The uxo-
rious Falco must trace a missing pris-
oner booked for a r itual, public
slaughter. One of the best in this
long-running series, with a nice mix
of wit and wisecracks.
60
A G REATER E VIL
By Natasha Cooper
(Simon & Schuster 336pp £17.99)
TRISH Maguire is a beguiling charac-
ter and an attractive series-heroine,
clever, kind, and sexy though far
more altruistic than most of us could
ever be. It is an unexpected quality in
law; while sustaining a successful
practice, Trish goes to endless trouble
for other people, even when they are
neither relations, friends, nor clients.
In this case Trish’s sense of justice
makes her rush to the rescue of a
famous but neurotic artist who is sus-
pected of battering his pregnant wife
to death. In the process of helping
him, Trish risks her relationship with
her lover, her friendship with the
policewoman in charge of the investi-
gation and her own career. This is a
humane account of an inhuman
crime and an illuminating analysis of
an insurance case that should be, but
isn’t, dry-as-dust. Very enjoyable.
T HE S HAPE S HIFTER
★
By Tony Hillerman
(Allison & Busby 288pp £18.99)
N O squaws, scalps or galloping
braves in Hiller man’s fascinating
Navajo myster ies – his Native
Americans are practical and peace-
able, firmly rooted in their ancestral
territory and trying to maintain the
traditional way of life. Lieutenant Joe
Leaphorn has just retired from the
unsolved case which has haunted
him since the early days of his
career. Leaphorn is equally at home
in the technological present and
with people who are closer to the
mystical society of their ancestors, so
the book includes a lot of compare
and contrast between the greedy,
ruthless white culture and the Native
American traditions, shown here as
peaceful, harmonious and in tune
with their surroundings.

E XILE
★ can tell who is the good guy and he
By Richard North Patterson
(Macmillan 684pp £12.99)
THIS is a current affairs lesson dis-
guised as entertainment fiction. ‘The
most controversial problem of our
time’ – the Israel/Palestine conflict –
is presented through two characters:
a secular American man, Jewish only
in name, and a Wester nised
Palestinian woman. They had an
affair when students at Harvard.
Thirteen years on, he is a successful
lawyer and aspiring politician. When
the Israeli Prime Minister is assassi-
nated in his motorcade in California,
she is arrested. Only her former lover
is prepared to take on her apparently
hopeless defence. The attor ney-
turned-investigator embarks on a
Middle-Eastern journey of discovery.
An even-handed exposition of the
r ights and wrongs on both sides
depicts a political problem without a
solution, though the personal out-
come is never in doubt. In North
CRIME
Patterson’s courtroom thrillers, we
always wins.
A G ENTLE A XE
★ ★
By R N Morris
(Faber & Faber 356pp £12.99)
WE are in familiar territory for crime
fiction: Russia under snow, corpses
frozen r ig id like logs, many
grotesque characters and the usual
sanctimonious monks, overbearing
aristocrats, prostitutes, suspects and
investigators with darkness and
melancholy in their souls. This book
is set in St Petersburg in 1867. When
a time-expired tart finds two bodies
in a park, one a dwarf, the other an
elderly peasant, it seems that an axe
murderer is on the loose and clues
must be pursued through brothels,
drinking dens and drawing rooms.
The name and attributes of Detective
Porfiry Petrovich are borrowed from
Crime and Punishment, which may or
may not be a recommendation. But
the narrative is direct and effective,
the place and people well drawn,
with, presumably, a series to follow.
T HE S EVENTH S ACRAMENT
By David Hewson
(Macmillan 360pp £12.99)
NOVELS and my archaeologist hus-
band’s working library overlap on a
crossover shelf in our house, labelled
‘the archaeologist in fiction’. Beside
heroes (eg Indiana Jones) and absent-
minded academics, David Hewson’s
archaeologist stands out because he is a
serial killer at large, the father of a
child missing and presumed dead in
unexcavated Mithraic catacombs
beneath Rome’s traffic-jammed
streets. It is an old case re-opened for
long-serving officers and an unfamiliar
one for the running heroes Costa and
Peroni, who, like all the best fictional
detectives, become more rounded and
interesting with every episode. Once I
had got to grips with the flashbacks
and timeshifts, I was hooked.
 N IGHT & DAY G RAND P OETRY P RIZE
THERE WAS A worry that, as a R EPORT BY T OM F LEMING
topic, ‘rain’ might have been a
little too clichéd. But perhaps
it simply encouraged originality. This month there for having used ottava rima. Next month’s subject is
were many poems I would have liked to print but ‘the moon’. Entries, with ‘moon’ written on the enve-
couldn’t. The standard and variety of this competition lope, should arrive to 44 Lexington Street, London
seem to be increasing, in fact. Francis Mullen gets W1F 0LW by 28 February.
FIRST PRIZE
RAIN – BURMA, 1942 by Francis Mullen
After a while you got used to the bugs,
The snakes, leeches and scorpions, and the Japs
Blazing away at us. I’d say, ‘We’re mugs!’
Approving nods came from the other chaps.
But the rain there never ceased to trigger moans.
It came right through your cape, your battle dress,
And on into your flesh, your very bones.
Strange fancies came from this continual stress
Of skin mutating into silver scales,
Of gills piercing the neck, of fins instead
Of arms and legs, and then, with trout and whales,
You would be in your element. Rain-fed,
The vision soon dissolved. Sadly you left
This pleasing dream behind, and felt once more
Drenched and bedraggled, miserable, bereft
Of all that makes for comfort. Once the war
Is over, I would vow, I’ll take the plane
To Chile, where a gorgeous panorama
Awaits me, sand, sand, sand, no trace of rain,
The earthly paradise, the Atacama.
SECOND PRIZE
GLOBAL WARMING JIHAD by Richard Charles
It’s all been analysed and proved and broadcast on TV.
The planet’s into meltdown and it’s mostly down to me.
They’ve run computer models and the truth is crystal clear:
Unless I mend my ways the human race could disappear.
It’s raining even harder where it always rained before,
And somewhere in the desert it’s not raining any more.
There’s floods and droughts and hurricanes, heatwaves
and lightning strikes,
Which goes to show that everyone should learn to ride
a bike.
I sometimes leave the lights on when they’re really not
in use.
I always shave electric though there just is no excuse.
Last night I turned the heating up, I’m quite ashamed of that.
I know I should be wearing woolly mittens and a hat.
62
LITERARY REVIEW February 2007
£350 for first place, Richard
Charles gets £150 for second,
and Alison Prince gets kudos
I didn’t mean to do it, didn’t know that I was bad,
And when I think how much I use the car it makes me sad,
But for each Tornado mission flown to pacify Iraq,
I could drive a Kia Rio to the bloody moon and back.
The journalists agree with politicians and the Church,
The scientists insist upon the need for more research,
And you will be ignored if to dissent you have the guts,
For mice will always vote for cheese and monkeys vote
for nuts.
Two fleas upon a fox’s back were locked in fierce debate
On how to save the fox’s life before it was too late:
‘We’ll try to drink less blood and keep our teeth clean if
we can.’
The fox stood in the road and got run over by a van.
LAST NIGHT I DREAMED by Alanna Blake
Last night I dreamed once more of teeming rain,
Of coolness splashing over naked skin,
Of spicy smells when tiny shoots begin
To pierce the armour of the sun-baked plain.
I saw clogged wadis crack and take the strain,
Rejoicing as new rivers flooded in;
Tin roofs gave off a corrugated din
And dead earth muddied into life again.
Today I wakened to this nightmare drought,
To shrunken lakes and shrivelled stems of maize,
To wizened babies weeping sand-clogged tears,
And herdboys barely strong enough to shout
At cattle starving in a red-dust haze,
As parched months pass, and lengthen into years.
WINTER RAIN by Alison Prince
I should remember Australia, the red
core of it, bleached cattle bones under a sky
blazing with heat, and be grateful that instead,
rain unleashes its heavy artillery,
exploding in great torrents over my head –
but in fact I’m simply glad my house is dry.
Sympathy for dead cows and waterless creeks
is not easy to maintain when your roof leaks.
Now, with the puddles gone from the kitchen floor,
Scotland’s sweet wetness ceases to be a pain.
The drifting mist is gentle, and the fierce roar
 N IGHT & DAY G RAND P OETRY P RIZE
of the burn flooding my garden yet again
brings a strange joy. We will never be at war
with our sky, never curse it and pray for rain,
for there is great wonder in watching the storm
and feeling a touch of fear while safe and warm.
THE RAIN IT RAINETH EVERY DAY
by Derek Muncey
Forget ‘Twelfth Night’. This simple piece of art
Shows Penzance seafront on a rainy day:
The damp bedraggled horse with two-wheeled cart,
The shining ground, wet roofs and tidal spray.
I stand before this picture and just stare,
Take two deep breaths and capture Garstin’s mood,
Taste the salt spray and breathe the sweetened air:
This picture’s to be lived in, not just viewed.
From the dry outback of Australia’s heart
Bring some poor bloke who’s never seen rain fall;
Show him this piece of unpretentious art,
And inside seconds he will know it all.
He’ll see the shimmering mirror at his feet,
Feel wet wind on his cheeks and dampened hair
And sense the angry sea and rain-swept street.
He’ll not just see the picture: he’ll be there.
Double its life: in 2–1–23
These waves will still roll in, this wet ground shine,
And future viewers very soon may be
Back in Penzance in 1889.
RAIN by D A Prince
Rain, worrying the windows, as it did
last night, like other nights, making its bid
for all the peeling paint and rotting wood,
and all that should have been repaired – the good
not done, as Larkin wrote. It finds the cracks
deep in the house’s heart, searches the tracks
of half-bodged work, of old remembered faults,
and all the wear and tear of life’s assaults.
At times it shifts to other voices – pleads
or cajoles; or threatens; whispers; needs
reasoned replies to its long argument –
or dies against the glass like something spent,
exhausted of the energy it had
when starting out. It weeps, emptied and sad,
with nothing left to say; it creeps as slow
as age itself, with nowhere else to go.
The storms, the violence; the nights when hate
drives it in spasms of rage, hurling the freight
from hurricanes two thousand miles away,
63
still stinging with the salt Atlantic spray.
So many voices. On the darkened glass,
the world beyond invisible, they pass
and speak to every thought you tried to hide,
reflecting, like a mirror, what’s inside.
RAIN QUATRAINS by Edward Murch
I
Black clouds conspire above the shrunken lake.
Wild winds sweep down from off the thirsty moor
The rain begins to fall and half awake
I hear an old friend tapping, tapping at my door.
II
Four herons fly across the lake in line.
The small birds chitter-chatter as they pass.
An owl takes flight against the day’s decline.
Two tumbling frogs shake raindrops from the grass.
III
Suddenly the rowan trees are red again,
Their berries brightening the woodland gloom.
I see them in late sunlight after rain
Like festive lanterns strung around a darkened room.
AUDIOBOOK
H ANNIBAL R ISING
★
By Thomas Harris
(Unabridged. Read by the author)
(Random House Audio. Six CDs. £16.99)
I F YOU WERE addicted to previous Hannibal Lecter
books, you may say that Thomas Harris can write ele-
gantly and movingly. But if you found that the evil he
depicts is somewhat cartoonish, you may feel the same
about this prequel concerning Hannibal’s youth. The boy
is the scion of ancient aristocratic Lithuanians. Until his
family is destroyed by the Second World War – his mother
burnt alive, his younger sister killed and eaten by Nazi
collaborators on the Eastern Front – he is normal. The
trauma makes the eight-year-old boy mute. He is adopted
by his uncle, a notable painter in France (where most of
the action takes place), and brought to speak again by the
ministrations of his uncle’s beautiful Japanese wife. Later,
Hannibal becomes the youngest person ever admitted to
the French medical school. Meanwhile, spurred by
revenge, he is like an insane knight, jousting with police
Inspector Popil to track down his family’s murderers and
dispatch them in a peculiarly grotesque manner. I much
enjoyed the author’s narration. Susan Crosland
LITERARY REVIEW February 2007
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