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All articles

- James Meek - Pandora’s Box: The Greed, Lust and Lies that Broke Television

- Letters

- Rory Scothorne - Short Cuts: Edinburgh’s Festivalisation

- Pankaj Mishra - Subcontractors of Guilt: Holocaust Memory and Muslim Belonging in Postwar Germany / Never Again: Germans and Genocide after the Holocaust

- Colin Kidd - America’s Philosopher: John Locke in American Intellectual Life

- Maureen N. McLane - Poem: ‘Rocks’

- Andrea Brady - The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet’s Journeys through American Slavery and Independence

- Deborah Friedell - All Sorts of Lives: Katherine Mansfield and the Art of Risking Everything

- Adam Mars-Jones - Corey Fah Does Social Mobility

- Edmund Gordon - Oil!

- Erin L. Thompson - Empires of the Dead: Inca Mummies and the Peruvian Ancestors of American Anthropology

- Lloyd de Beer - At the Cluny: ‘Voyage dans le cristal’

- Jeremy Harding - Zombie v. Zombie

- David Todd - The Revolutionary Temper: Paris, 1748-89

- Tom Shippey - Triumph and Illusion: The Hundred Years War V

- Diane Williams - Two Stories

- Michael Wood - Swann’s Way / The Swann Way

- Andrew O’Hagan - Diary: Stevenson in Edinburgh

Vol. 46 No. 1 · 4 January 2024

Do Anything, Say Anything

James Meek

Pandora’s Box: The Greed, Lust and Lies that Broke Television

by Peter Biskind.

Allen Lane, 383 pp., £25, November, 978 0 241 44390 3

Iread Peter Biskind’s book about the New Hollywood, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, long ago. Apart from scraps of celebrity anecdote, what I remember of it now is something more diffuse, a mood associated with the mysterious figures of the producers: an impression of flared trousers and shirts with the two top buttons undone, collar points two feet apart, of tanned white skin, gold, nice teeth, the smell of tobacco and aftershave and deodorant, of men outwardly confident, hungry, vain, bullying, concupiscent and covetous, but also charming, garrulous, fascinating, prone to infatuations with strangers and their stories, flitting from one intense interest to another, even as they held on stubbornly to ideas for years until the money and the creatives could be married and a film born.

The back office deity of that era was the seven-times-married Robert Evans, who ran production at Paramount for a decade from 1966, when the studio made The Godfather and The Godfather Part II, Chinatown and Rosemary’s Baby. The ghost of Evans haunts Pandora’s Box, which covers the time some perhaps premature nostalgists are already calling the golden age of television, from the debuts of Oz, Sex and the City and The Sopranos in the 1990s to the recently finished Succession. Bob Odenkirk, who played the bent lawyer Saul Goodman in Breaking Bad and the spin-off Better Call Saul, prepared for the role by listening to Evans reading an audiobook of his memoir, The Kid Stays in the Picture. Christina Wayne, who as a production executive developed Breaking Bad (2008-13) and Mad Men (2007-15), the two series that made the reputation of the once downmarket cable channel AMC, credits Evans with mentoring her in her earlier career as a screenwriter. In 2020 David Zaslav, head of the Warner-Discovery conglomerate that includes HBO, bought and renovated Evans’s home in Beverly Hills. Biskind writes that the house

had seen its share of drugs, sex and rock’n’roll, had succumbed to weeds, rot and decay, and become a fitting gravestone for the New Hollywood of the 1970s. By paying $16 million for it, Zaslav laid claim to the legacy of Evans – a mixed blessing, to say the least (he was convicted of cocaine trafficking, and pleaded the Fifth in the so-called Cotton Club Murder) – which committed him to salvaging Warner Bros as Evans had salvaged Paramount.

Easy Riders and Pandora’s Box don’t live up to the come-ons of their subtitles, though there’s no shortage of the six-apostrophe cliché in the earlier book, subtitled ‘How the Sex’n’Drugs’n’Rock’n’Roll Generation Saved Hollywood’. Open it at random and here’s the director Peter Bogdanovich on the set of The Last Picture Show telling the producer Polly Platt, to whom he’s married and who’s just had their second child, that he’s having an on-set affair with Cybill Shepherd: ‘Peter apologised, claimed he couldn’t help it, that he had never had a cover girl before, that he was in the throes of a sexual obsession.’ A couple of pages later we learn that the screenwriter and lyricist Jacob Brackman liked nitrous oxide so much he filled a six-foot tank with it at home and deducted it as a medical expense.

There are only glancing references to substance abuse in Pandora’s Box. As for sex, Biskind’s consciousness of the obstacles and attacks experienced by women in showbusiness – as well as by gay, lesbian and trans people, and not-white people – has been raised in step with society’s since the 1980s. The accounting of hurts in Pandora’s Box is scrupulous. Biskind’s best-known book after Easy Riders, published in 1998, is his 2004 tome about indie cinema, Down and Dirty Pictures, mainly about the rise of Miramax and the Weinstein brothers, Harvey and Bob. Although it does portray Harvey Weinstein as a violent bully, Biskind faced hard questions when the producer was exposed as a sexual predator in 2017 (‘You heard stories about hanky panky … I don’t remember what I heard in detail, but I think I would have remembered it if it was anything as serious as rape,’ Biskind told Isaac Chotiner at the time).

The premise of Pandora’s Box is that a series of daring, innovative shows on US cable channels, starting in the 1990s, blew away the anodyne output of the traditional TV broadcast networks, ABC, CBS and NBC (Fox, the fourth network, was launched in 1986). A harbinger of the new mode was the late Garry Shandling’s faux-documentary comedy about a chat show, The Larry Sanders Show (1992-98), which he co-produced and co-wrote for HBO, and starred in as the eponymous host. The chat show scenes were shot as if in a traditional studio, the hyper-cynical behind-the-scenes bitching and bickering on a handheld camera. Celebrities like Jim Carrey and Courtney Cox played themselves as ‘guests’, often self-mockingly. The critics loved it. It inspired Ricky Gervais and the later work of Larry David. It was loathsomely funny about the showbiz world it roasted and was part of. Yet, as it turns out, it wasn’t hard enough on itself. Biskind quotes Janis Hirsch, a seasoned writer who moved to the show from network sitcoms, who speaks of Shandling ruling with ‘passive malignancy’ over a ‘misogynistic writers’ room where women were called “slits” and where on one occasion, a flaccid penis was placed on my shoulder, you know, just for laughs’.

On the set of Sex and the City (1998-2004), another early HBO hit, the crew duct-taped Kristin Davis’s stand-in Heather Kristin to a gynaecological chair while the director and actors were away from the set, made crude comments about her body and took Polaroids of her. ‘I wanted to rip the tape off and run screaming out of Silvercup Studios,’ she said. ‘Instead, I just lay there knowing I had a job for another day and health insurance through the Screen Actors Guild.’ Years after the original series aired, the most prominent male member of the cast, Chris Noth, was accused by several women of sexual assault (accusations he denies).

At least in its early seasons, Sex and the City was a comedy in which four single, straight, middle-class white women riffed on urban relationships in groundbreakingly explicit terms, from farting in bed with your lover to circumcision preferences; it didn’t deserve its later reputation as a paean to brand shopping. Eight years after it ended, when HBO launched Lena Dunham’s Girls (2012-17), another sharp comedy about single, straight, middle-class white women in New York, Sex and the City no longer seemed authentic enough. Although it was based on columns by Candace Bushnell, Sex and the City’s creator and its second lead writer were gay men, Darren Star and Michael Patrick King, prompting one of the Girls cast, Jemima Kirke, to say of Dunham’s series: ‘It’s not Sex and the City … That’s four gay men sitting around talking.’ Meanwhile Issa Rae, the Black creator of HBO’s Insecure (2016-21), defended Dunham against allegations of ‘hipster racism’: ‘There could be more diversity, but I think that’s the fault of [HBO], rather than Lena’s.’

It’s never easy to distinguish between drama that breaks taboos cynically, as a way to exploit an audience eager for cheap thrills, and great drama intensified by portrayals of sex, violence and hate which happen to transgress old prohibitions along the way. Cunnilingus doesn’t seem like something the traditional networks would have allowed writers to build a storyline around, but HBO let Sex and the City and The Sopranos do it. In the former, Charlotte dates a man known around town as Mr Pussy, so notorious that when the women discuss him in the toilets in a bar, a stranger comes out of a cubicle and guesses who they’re talking about. Charlotte breaks up with him when, on a trip to convert his obsession to a more holistic view of her person, she sees him eating a fig. Among the extended mafia families of The Sopranos, oral sex performed by a man on a woman is a shameful secret for the man, and when Tony Soprano jibes his uncle Junior about it, Junior mulls a hit on his nephew. The path from menacing comedy – for giving his secret away, Junior smashes a lemon meringue pie into his girlfriend’s face – to outright menace is braided with a parallel story about Tony’s daughter’s school soccer coach. At first Tony’s crew try to stop him leaving for a new job by bribing him, then by kidnapping his dog. But it turns out that the coach has sexually abused one of the girls on the team, and the narrative swerves into a debate in the back room of the Bada-Bing, potentially fatal for the coach, about who has the duty and the right to punish transgressors, the family or the state.

Compare this to another HBO hit, the fantasy epic Game of Thrones (2011-19), which uses cable TV’s relative freedom from censorship not so much to render human complexity as to amp up the gore and show breasts and bottoms when the story doesn’t need them. Emilia Clarke, who plays Daenerys Targaryen, went along with the ‘fucking ton of nudity’ in the first season. ‘Eventually, however, she began to wonder if so much nudity was essential, and became less obliging,’ Biskind writes. He quotes her: ‘I’ve had fights on the set before where I’m like, “No, the sheet stays up,” and they’re like “You don’t wanna disappoint your Game of Thrones fans.” And I’m like, “Fuck you.”’

Even this oversimplifies the tension between the possibilities opened up when cable shows broke through the networks’ prudish barriers. If an actor didn’t want to take her clothes off, was she guilty of censoring the writer, who was, in TV, often the hands-on manager of the show, the so-called showrunner? Sometimes there was a woman on both sides. Jenji Kohan, the creator and showrunner of Showtime’s comedy Weeds (2005-12), was barely on speaking terms with Mary-Louise Parker, who played her lead, Nancy Botwin, a foul-mouthed, manipulative Californian soccer mom and marijuana dealer. Once Parker threw a script at Kohan and yelled: ‘My mother can’t watch this!’ ‘I don’t write for your mother,’ Kohan replied. Parker couldn’t forgive Kohan for making her do a nude bath scene. ‘I didn’t think I needed to be naked, and I fought with the director about it, and now I’m bitter. I knew it was going to be on the internet: “Mary-Louise shows off her big nipples.” I wish I hadn’t done that. I was goaded into it.’ Kohan later created Orange Is the New Black (2013-19) for Netflix.

Deadwood (2004-6), a Western set in an ultra-violent 19th-century gold-rush town in Indian territory, outside US jurisdiction, drew a committed audience, critical love and big prizes until HBO pulled the plug, probably for financial reasons. Biskind picks it out, with its grandiloquent, high frequency cussing, its corpse count and its brutal bordello – and its longer story arc, about a lawless town beginning to make law – as a landmark in the new, anything-goes TV. He also brings out its ambiguities. He talks to Ian McShane, who plays the brothel keeper Al Swearengen, about working with David Milch, the show’s creator, and Paula Malcolmson, who plays Trixie, Swearengen’s moll.

In one scene, Trixie gets roughed up by a customer and shoots him. McShane recalls, ‘I take her up to my room and I say, “You can’t do this, much as they abuse you.” We’re rehearsing, and we’re trying to figure out, “What’s Swearengen going to do to her?” Is he going to beat her up? He’s a pimp, after all. David, who was watching, said out of the blue, “You know Ian? I think you got to grab her cunt.” And Paula, who is game, said, “Absolutely. Absolutely.” Of course, you couldn’t say that now. They’d have an internal investigation. An intimacy expert would be hired. They’d ask, “Did anybody get offended by that?” You’d say, “Fuck no, man.” That sort of set the template for the entire show, that you could actually do anything, be anything, say anything, and you backed each other up.’

Malcolmson talked to Biskind about another scene where she walks bare-breasted down Deadwood’s main street with a gun in her hand. ‘Maybe some other actors might have said, “Well, do I have to bare my breasts? Is that necessary?” But I thought: “Trust the writing.”’

The arcs of the New Hollywood and the new TV are alike. The early optimism of Easy Riders fades when it turns out that American auteurs inspired by the French New Wave aren’t the future of popular big-screen entertainment: instead it’s the merch-rich, tech-heavy, super-franchisable kidult melodramas of the Star Wars series, with their exuberant faux-alien decors, portentous dialogue and reliable income stream. Some of the same processes are happening in TV.

At the turn of the 1990s, TV drama in the US meant broadcast network drama. A network show, a half-hour sitcom like The Golden Girls or an hour-long crime drama like Miami Vice, would be peppered with ad breaks that paid for its production and made the network its profits. The advertisers thought they knew what would offend their customers, and the networks thought they knew too. Federal regulators lurked in the background: the result was thousands of hours of lowest common denominator programming, comforting, predictable and morally neat – the good, the bad and the goofy. Sitcom audiences were prompted with laugh tracks; villainy and virtue were signalled with familiar cues. Crime didn’t pay. Lessons were learned within each episode, but episodes were ‘closed’ rather than ‘open’ – characters and storylines didn’t develop. Networks enforced safety with layers of executives and rewriting writers. Broadcast Standards and Practices departments made sure erogenous zones went unbared and unmentioned and that no writer tried to slip in any of the seven forbidden words: ‘shit’, ‘piss’, ‘fuck’, ‘cunt’, ‘cocksucker’, ‘motherfucker’ and ‘tits’. Writers could make a good living; for the most successful, there was a path from the writers’ room to becoming a producer and showrunner, which could bring huge wealth if a show went into syndication in the US or was sold overseas. David Milch was said to have made $100 million out of network cop shows like NYPD Blue (he is also said to have gambled it all away). But ambitious writers chafed at the restrictions. The best way to write more interesting material seemed to be to break into the movies, and in those days the movies looked down on TV from a great height. (In 2007, when Martin Scorsese agreed to direct the pilot of HBO’s Boardwalk Empire, it transpired that the director of Goodfellas had never watched The Sopranos.) Besides, whereas in film, as Biskind puts it, ‘writers are often treated like scum, television is a writer-driven medium.’

David Chase, the creator of The Sopranos, worked in network TV for years, notably on the detective show The Rockford Files. He called network executives ‘pissy little dolts’ who had ‘an unerring system for detecting whatever it is that gets you excited about a project and telling you to get rid of it’. To show HBO’s depravity, the president of NBC sent fifty top people in the TV industry tapes of the Sopranos episode where a mobster beats his pregnant girlfriend to death. Chase took it as a compliment. When Alan Ball was co-writing Grace under Fire for ABC, ‘people’s assistants were coming up and giving me notes, like “I don’t like the colour of the wall on that set.”’ When he moved to HBO to make Six Feet Under, the feedback on his pilot script was: ‘Could you make it just a little more fucked-up?’ Joey Soloway moved the other way, from Six Feet Under to ABC’s Grey’s Anatomy, and experienced the network cud-chewing system: ‘The writers would write an outline, then it would get rewritten, then another outline, rewritten – a script could get written literally twenty times.’ Todd Kessler was writing a successful crime show for NBC, which told him, ‘We do not accept the use of the words “mafia”, “mob”, or “mobbed up” on an NBC show that airs at eight o’clock on Fridays.’ He left for The Sopranos.

Cable, fed to half of American households by the mid-1980s, was an alternative to broadcast TV. There were ‘basic cable’ channels like FX, MTV, ESPN and American Movie Classics, or AMC, partly funded by ads and partly by a levy from the cable company to the channel of a few tens of cents per subscriber. Then there were ‘premium’ channels like Home Box Office, soon abbreviated to HBO, and Showtime, for which cable subscribers had to pay extra. But there was almost no original drama on these channels; they screened reruns, schlocky talk shows, sport and movies. HBO bulked out the films it licensed and showed ad-free with stand-up comedy, boxing, burlesque and documentaries. HBO’s screening of the third Muhammad Ali-Joe Frazier fight, the ‘Thrilla in Manila’, in 1975 caused the first big jump in the channel’s subscriber numbers. Because HBO wasn’t beholden to advertisers and had a higher tier of implied adult consent compared to the broadcasters, it had more leeway with risky material. It set a marker in 1977 by airing a stand-up comedy special with George Carlin. For the most part it was pretty safe material. Towards the end, a warning came up on the screen: ‘The final segment of Mr Carlin’s performance contains especially controversial language, please consider whether you wish to continue viewing.’ And Carlin pronounced the seven forbidden words.

It took years for HBO, then owned by Time-Warner, to run original drama. The channel made plenty of money, but the bosses fretted that they couldn’t justify the cost of scripted shows underwritten by subscriptions alone. There was a curious bit of showbiz received wisdom that cable was the hetero man’s domain: perhaps boxing, comedy and the occasional porn-adjacent documentary drama was enough? There was also a feeling among agents that HBO and AMC were trashy, the wrong side of the tracks, where talent should never stray, least of all in primetime. In the end, the premium cablers’ hands were forced by the threat to their business model from VHS and DVD, which offered an alternative way to watch films that had finished their theatrical run. HBO dipped its toe into original drama. Just before Larry Sanders came to an end, it aired the violent, explicit prison drama Oz (1997-2003), which aimed to portray unflinchingly the feuding, self-segregating racial factions inside an American jail, while leaving the way open for viewer empathy with the most repugnant offenders – ‘even the worst Aryan Nation thugs’, Biskind writes, ‘one of whom burns a swastika into the butt of another with the red-hot tip of a lit cigarette’. It was a series the networks would never have made. Chris Albrecht, head of original programming at HBO, hired Tom Fontana to write and run the show. Fontana told Biskind that Albrecht asked him what single thing he was never allowed to do on broadcast TV. ‘Kill the lead in the pilot,’ Fontana said. ‘Do it,’ Albrecht replied. Accordingly, at the end of the first episode, the lead character is burned alive. After Larry Sanders, Oz and the following year’s Sex and the City, HBO’s image among writers and actors changed from sleazy nowheresville to edgy anti-network. Then came The Sopranos.

It almost didn’t. HBO followed the then standard US routine for greenlighting a TV series: if the executives liked a script, they commissioned a pilot episode. If they liked the pilot, it became the first episode of a season they commissioned and put out; if the season went down well with the audience and/or critics, they commissioned another. If they didn’t like the pilot, that expensively produced fifty minutes of television, invested with all the care and hope and time of its cast and crew, was locked away. The disastrous and extremely expensive first pilot for Game of Thrones – a second, equally expensive pilot, with a different director, eventually got the show going – has never been seen outside the screening room; the Spike Lee-directed pilot for a rejected boxing series, Da Brick, has vanished into the vault, as have Noah Baumbach’s unfinished pilot for a TV version of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, starring Ewan McGregor, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Greta Gerwig, a Ridley Scott-directed pilot for a rejected show called The Vatican, and many others.

After Chase shot the pilot for The Sopranos, ten months went by before HBO got back to him. Albrecht’s boss fretted about the cost. Nobody had spent $2.7 million per episode on a drama series before. Fearing the worst, Chase had started negotiations for a writing gig on The X-Files, on the Fox network, when HBO got back to him with an order for a 13-episode season. The Sopranos was an instant hit, a cultural phenomenon: the saga of a family, the saga of a loyalty group, the history of a war played out in a supposedly peaceful country, and the slow flaying of the psyche of a bloody-handed patriarch tormented by his mother. Writers working on The Sopranos became celebrities to writers on lesser shows. The drivers and mechanics passed round copies of the scripts to read on set. Halfway through the series it was being watched by 11 million people a week. They’re still watching now. It only takes one of a multitude of elements to go wrong to spoil a TV series, and for most of the 86 episodes of The Sopranos, none of them does – not the story, the dialogue, the casting, the performances, the direction, the cinematography or the design.

It was the beginning of the off-network TV tsunami that John Landgraf, the head of FX, calls peak TV. By 2022, he estimates that there were 559 scripted original shows on American television. HBO followed The Sopranos with Curb Your Enthusiasm, Six Feet Under, The Wire, Deadwood, Entourage, True Blood, Boardwalk Empire, Game of Thrones, Girls, Veep, Westworld, Succession, Euphoria, Insecure, True Detective and The White Lotus. AMC brought out Mad Men, Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead. FX offered The Shield, Nip/Tuck, The Americans, What We Do in the Shadows, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and Atlanta. Showtime, which specialised in remakes of foreign series, made versions of the British shows Queer as Folk and Shameless as well as Homeland, a transposition of the Israeli Prisoners of War; it also produced Weeds, The L Word, Dexter, Californication, Nurse Jackie, The Big C and Yellowjackets. Comedy Central launched South Park in 1997, and it’s still going. These are only the best-known of the cable shows, a fraction of the pilots that got made into series.

This wasn’t simply a competitive scramble to drown the world in small-screen entertainment: it was a disorienting lurch from technology to technology and a concomitant set of asset grabs as billions of dollars’ worth of companies and the rights to old creations changed hands. In 2007, around the time HBO entered a fallow spell after parting ways with its two best show-pickers, Albrecht – arrested in a Las Vegas parking lot after a security guard pried his fingers from the throat of his fiancée, Karla Jensen – and Carolyn Strauss, Netflix launched its plan to take over television. That same year broadband reached more than half of American households. Reed Hastings, who made three-quarters of a billion dollars selling a software startup when he was 35 and went on to make Netflix a dominant force in online DVD rental, launched his streaming service. He saw further than his rivals. Netflix was a data-mining operation long before it got into streaming and Hastings believed his algorithm could be used to predict the films and TV shows subscribers would like, whether they’d been made or not; if not, he’d make them. He had his gaze set on streaming when the old giant of DVD rentals, Blockbuster, was still fixated on building more stores. Blockbuster, which passed on the chance to buy Netflix for a pittance in 2000, got together with the folks from Enron to look into streaming, but they gave up on it. Both companies later went spectacularly bust.

When Netflix started streaming, it had subscribers, but little content. Two things worked in its favour. One was its backers, who treated the firm as a tech startup that was bound to lose billions in infancy, rather than as legacy media, expected to turn a profit every year. The other was the short-sightedness of the networks and cable channels, which didn’t see Netflix or streaming in general as a threat, and sold Netflix the rights to stream their content. In less than a decade, the company borrowed $16 billion to build a huge library. At one point it had Breaking Bad from cabler AMC, Desperate Housewives from network ABC and superhero movies from the Disney-owned Marvel. By the time the cablers and networks realised what was going on, Netflix had moved on to the next stage of its plan: to make original series itself. It was no surprise when it leapt at the chance to make a version of the BBC’s House of Cards, with the first two episodes directed by David Fincher. What shocked its rivals was that when the Netflix algorithm forecast the US House of Cards (2013-18) would be a hit, Netflix’s chief content officer at the time, Ted Sarandos (he’s now co-CEO), didn’t commission a pilot: he commissioned two whole seasons, at a cost of $100 million. They were even more outraged when Netflix dropped the entire first season – thirteen episodes – all at once. Viewers could watch as much of it as they wanted, where, when and how they liked.

Netflix led the way in the shift of TV viewing to wireless internet from cable (although the internet may still enter your house through the same cable that delivers the TV). It has been adding nearly twenty million subscribers per year, from all over the world; it has almost a quarter of a billion now. It makes films. It churns out its own shows and buys others, in many languages. It made Orange Is the New Black, Stranger Things, The Crown, The Queen’s Gambit, Squid Game, Bridgerton, Beef and so, so much more. Netflix’s models tell it that as long as it keeps on producing fresh material, it’ll hang on to its subscribers, who will assume that they’re bound to find something they like. Netflix has reversed the classical publishing strategy of throwing content at the wall of public indifference in the hope something will stick. It sees a scattered public whose attention can be pinned under a toppling wall of content.

Netflix foresaw that the networks and the cablers would eventually claw back their shows; it probably foresaw that linear TV channels would launch their own streaming services, and that by the time they did, Netflix would be too big to catch. But did Hastings anticipate the competition from his own tribe, from the tech giants Amazon and Apple, which have cash on tap, and for which a billion is a basic accounting unit? These behemoths’ streamers, Amazon Prime Video and Apple TV+, are happy to make dozens of meh shows while they wait for one or two to be a hit. For Apple, the success came with Ted Lasso and Slow Horses. Amazon had a hit with Transparent (2014-19), written by Joey Soloway, a comedy about three solipsistic grown-up children reacting to a parent revealing herself as a trans woman, Maura. It won the big prizes, despite criticism for the casting of a non-trans actor, Jeffrey Tambor, as Maura; Tambor was later obliged to quit the show over allegations of sexual harassment.

Back in 2006, the head of Disney, Bob Iger, flicked the money switch and bought Pixar, Marvel and Lucasfilm, capping the spree off in 2019 with the purchase of Fox, minus Fox News, for $71 billion. Disney acquired FX and Hulu, with fresh TV hits like The Bear, but the new meant less to the company than the old. Disney got Toy Story. It got Iron Man and Captain America, Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia. It took possession of The Simpsons, The Sound of Music, Home Alone, Alien and uncountable prequels, sequels and crossovers, made and unmade. Disney launched its own streamer, Disney+, when it saw that licensing Marvel films to Netflix had been a mistake. ‘We’re basically selling nuclear weapons technology to a Third World country, and now they’re using it against us,’ Iger said, the apocalyptic geopolitical image coming with striking readiness to the leader of the Magic Kingdom. ‘So we decided at the time that we would stop licensing to Netflix and do it ourselves.’ The Disney binge was part of a wider trend. Execs from legacy media and big tech competed for the franchisable, the spinoffable, anything with a fanbase. Without enough proven talent and IP to go round, and seemingly infinite demand for more TV, showbiz inflation rocketed. HBO went for high-selling literary novelists, signing up Jeffrey Eugenides, Margaret Atwood and Jonathan Safran Foer. ‘HBO gained a reputation for going through pilots like Kleenex,’ Biskind writes.

He estimates Amazon will have scant change from a billion dollars for its Rings of Power series, based on Tolkien’s lesser-known writings: the rights alone, according to Biskind, were $250 million. Per episode costs rose remorselessly. Deadwood was estimated to have cost as much as $6 million per episode. By the fifth season of The Sopranos, an episode was thought to cost $10 million. Episodes of the Second World War series The Pacific came in at $21 million a pop; for season four of Stranger Things, it was $30 million. A lot of the increases came from cast and showrunner salaries, fattened by the wealth of the tech streamers. A-list film actors were coming to TV in numbers. When Reese Witherspoon moved from an HBO series to one on Apple, her per-episode fee went from about a quarter of a million dollars to more than a million, and when HBO needed her again, a million was the new baseline – a hike which then had to be extended to Witherspoon’s co-star, Nicole Kidman.

Looking for ways to fund these expenses, and their debt, the streamers offer top actors, writers and showrunners deals that seem lucrative, but cut them out of earnings from syndication. Further down the pecking order, writers are increasingly treated as casual workers – one of the causes of the recent strike. ‘The shrinkage of the networks’ 22-episode orders to the streamers’ 8-to-12-episode orders,’ Biskind says, ‘in addition to the increasing prevalence of “mini-rooms”, where fewer writers work longer hours for shows that may never be produced, adds insult to injury, forcing many writers, unable to pay their mortgages, to supplement their incomes by, say, driving for Uber.’

More and more, the streamers are coming to resemble the networks HBO wanted to be the opposite of. There are doubts that Netflix will go on dropping entire seasons all at once. Streamers are experimenting with cheaper subscriptions supported by ads; ad-free streaming might disappear altogether. Netflix is picking up shows cancelled by networks, while network TV, supposedly a dying medium, is broadcasting innovative shows. HBO’s shows are now folded into the streaming service Max, where they are mingled with Warner Brothers network shows. In the present-day oligopoly of American TV, the tech streamers face off against four legacy media conglomerates where networks and streamers nest together, like the takeover struggle between GoJo and Waystar that plays out in the latter half of Succession. There’s Disney, with Disney+ and ABC; Paramount, with Paramount+ and CBS, as well as Channel 5 in the UK; Comcast, with the streamer Peacock and NBC, together with the Sky channels in Britain and the nominally British streamer Now; and Warner Bros Discovery, which as well as streaming via Max controls CNN. Out in the cold is AMC, its glory days long gone. It got rid of Christina Wayne and grew dependent on the Walking Dead franchise, whose original showrunner, Frank Darabont, sued them for misappropriated profit share and won a $200 million payout. Darabont had been fired from the show halfway through the filming of the second season, and AMC was putting pressure on the cast not to speak to the media. The actors, an anonymous source told the Hollywood Reporter, were scared of being written out. ‘They’re on a zombie show,’ the source said. ‘They are all really easy to kill off.’

Being fired is a rite of passage in US TV, for writers and executives. Joey Soloway describes being fired from ABC by Shonda Rhimes in the time between Rhimes ordering lunch and its arrival. Hastings made his close friend Patty McCord head of HR at Netflix; she became known as the Queen of the Good Goodbye for her skills in easing people into redundancy. After fourteen years, Netflix fired her. Fontana, the creator of Oz, describes what happened when he was developing a show for NBC called The Philanthropist.

They had approved all our script outlines, but one day, they literally said to me, ‘We want this to be like Iron Man,’ because Iron Man, also about a philanthropist, had just become a hit movie. They fired me, and then they hired the guy who had done The Six Million Dollar Man, whom they had fired from the Six Million Dollar Man reboot. Then they hired me again, but by that point all the people who had fired me had been fired.

One of the fascinating things about the making of a TV drama series is the transformation of a writer, classically a powerless and irresponsible figure, into a producer, a showrunner, someone to whom the executives entrust their sinister superpower to take away another person’s job – usually another writer’s. On a show like The Sopranos, where an episode tends to contain at least one mob slaying, the power of life and death wielded by the mafia boss was echoed by the possibility of a real-life corporate hit from Chase, a perfectionist who’d waited decades to show the networks they were wrong about TV. He was in his fifties when HBO gave him the chance; the show was dear to him. He based Tony Soprano’s mother, Livia, on his own cruel, needy, anxious mother. But its success gnawed at him almost as powerfully as failure, with the pressure not to allow any fall-off in quality – to keep making it better. He raged. He threw things. He fired people. ‘I don’t think I hung any pictures up in my office the whole seven years I was there because I was afraid I might be fired,’ one of the writers, Terry Winter, said. ‘I’d never seen anybody fire people as quickly as David did. People would walk into his office and fifteen seconds later, the door would open again and they were leaving with their shit in a box.’ Once Chase asked Todd Kessler if he should fire Winter, whom Kessler shared an office with. Kessler said he should ask Winter. Later, after the two of them had worked together on an award-winning episode, Chase told Kessler he was going to fire him, then changed his mind. A few months after that, he fired him anyway. He fired Robin Green when the series was nearly finished. ‘When David fired me, he smiled,’ Green said. ‘I loved him so much. I loved him for so long, it was just so hard to deal with the fact that he really hated me.’

Part of the intense pressure on Chase was from the show’s own fans, a significant fraction of whom went beyond tolerance for the frailties of the Soprano family towards an uncritical fondness for the North Jersey mob’s often misogynistic violence. Joe Pantoliano, who played Ralphie (the character who beats his pregnant girlfriend to death), was ‘stopped on Fifth Avenue by little old ladies who were like “Oh my God, you were so bad to that woman,” feeling my arms. They were flirting with me, turned on that I was the guy who beat up this hooker. It was sick.’ Perhaps a little disingenuously, Chase said later that ‘he was troubled by how much the “less yakking, more whacking” contingent of his fan base loved his mobbed-up characters, no matter how badly they behaved. The show is “about evil”, he said. “I was surprised by how hard it was to get people to see that.”’

Anti-heroes like Tony Soprano, the man who garottes a fink while taking his teenage daughter on a tour of prospective colleges, were the distinctive mark of the new television. Shawn Ryan was the showrunner of The Shield (2002-8), FX’s early effort to emulate HBO, in which a crooked LA cop, Vic Mackey, played by Michael Chiklis, carries out a version of vigilante justice while lining his pockets. At the end of the pilot, he shoots a fellow policeman dead, knowing the man means to rat him out to their superiors. The audience identified with Mackey, so pumped with testosterone he looks as if his skin might burst. In season five, Forest Whitaker plays an internal affairs agent trying to catch Chiklis out. ‘Somehow, the audience was very much against him and for Vic,’ Ryan said. ‘What I realised as the seasons passed, it almost didn’t matter what we had Vic do, people had just decided that they liked him and wanted to see what he could get away with.’ On the street, people asked Chiklis, ‘How are you going to kill [Whitaker]?’ It was the same with Breaking Bad’s Walter White, the respectable chemistry teacher who starts cooking meth and discovers the wickedness he’s capable of: poisoning a child, letting his partner’s girlfriend die and enabling the murder of his brother-in-law. Anna Gunn, who played the wife, got hate mail for not being more supportive of her screen husband’s endeavours.

While I was writing this, I watched a few pilots of anti-hero series I’d never seen and a common narrative device stuck out that divided the less rewarding shows from greats like The Sopranos and Succession. Writers who’d supposedly broken free of simplistic network morality didn’t, in fact, always leave it to the audience to judge characters. Time after time, morally dubious heroes are presented as essentially virtuous by the blunt expedient of showing them saving, or protecting, women and children from sexual abuse by other men. In the first episode of The Shield, Vic Mackey murders a fellow cop, but he’s shown at heart to be a good man because he tortures a paedophile into revealing the whereabouts of the small blonde girl he’s kidnapped and imprisoned. In the first episode of The Americans, we’re led to believe it’s OK for the Soviet agent living in deep cover with his Soviet agent wife to kill a defector, because long ago in Moscow, the defector had raped the wife; the Soviet agent’s moral bona fides are shored up further when we see him beating up the creepy Amerikanets who hits on his underage daughter at the mall. In the pilot of Deadwood, the essential decency of the town’s otherwise murderous, cynical inhabitants is undergirded when they posse out to the scene of a supposed Indian massacre, actually carried out by a white drifter, and rescue another small blonde girl.

When Tony Soprano’s psychiatrist, Jennifer Melfi, is raped, and later encounters her assailant free and at large, she knows, and we know, it would take no more than a word from her for the rapist to suffer horrible retribution at the hands of her mobster client. In a lazier show, it would have happened. But Melfi never utters that word. She declines to be part of that form of personal justice. Tony never finds out, and we, the audience, experience the horror and fascination of anticipating something that doesn’t occur – experiencing all the complex human emotions that the sight of a man having his fictional brains beaten out in revenge for a fictional crime would have dispersed. When I think of the most memorable dramatic passages from a generation of the new television, they’re not obviously characterised by the dichotomy Biskind sets up between network and not-network. They’re when superficially peaceful encounters are suffused with Aeschylean ominousness, an immanent and inevitable but delayed violence, like the almost loving meeting between the Baltimore drug dealers and childhood friends Avon Barksdale and Stringer Bell in The Wire, where each knows the other is setting him up to be killed; or when powerful individuals enact a bloodless, tragicomic simulacrum of bodily punishment, as when Logan Roy humiliates his children, or they humiliate themselves.

For all the reasons Biskind describes, the old TV would probably never have made anything like The Wire, and it must have been a nightmare for writers to work with stack on stack of executive layers and their burden of assumptions. And yet no cabler or streamer has made a TV series more powerful, mysterious and disturbing, more strange, than David Lynch’s Twin Peaks (1990-91 and 2017) – a network show, its original run broadcast on ABC, ads and all. Chase, who idolised Fellini, and despised the output of the networks he worked at for so long, loved Twin Peaks. It was, he told Biskind in 2006, the first TV show that made him see the medium’s potential. ‘There’s a whole other level of stuff going on, this sense of the poetic that you see in great painting, that you see in foreign films, that’s way more than the sum of its parts,’ he said. Chase also said he’d wanted to make television that avoided the learning-and-sharing flim-flam of classic American network series. He wanted to dispense with huggable moments. It was as if he’d never heard of the fantastically popular network show that first aired on NBC a decade before The Sopranos, the one its creators Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld had explicitly determined should involve ‘no hugging, no learning’. Two years before Sex and the City, Seinfeld put a cunnilingus storyline out in primetime. The other story in the same episode involves the titular hero robbing an old lady in the street, shouting ‘Shut up, you old bag!’ as she tries to stop him running off with her loaf. The live studio audience laughed.

The new TV/old TV boundary looks even less clear-cut if you take countries other than the US into account. How do you fit Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s World on a Wire (1973) or Edgar Reitz’s Heimat (1984-2013) into the schema? Netflix’s new Arabic, Hindi or Japanese shows make you wonder what they were watching in Damascus or Osaka while America was enduring The Dukes of Hazzard. In Britain, we saw Bob Peck as the policeman Ronald Craven in the BBC’s Edge of Darkness briefly kiss his murdered daughter’s dildo when going through her things: a very post-network moment, in Biskind’s US framing, but we were watching it on ad-free broadcast TV, in a four-channel world, in 1985. Will Smith, the British lead writer of Slow Horses (2022-), namechecks Edge of Darkness as an influence, along with The Sopranos, The Shield, The Wire and Deadwood, but also I, Claudius from 1976 and the recent Happy Valley (2014-23).

The old global TV landscape was one in which American TV pushed out domineeringly into the world, but national TV ecosystems like Britain’s had autonomy, both cultural and financial. The current relationship, especially among the English-speaking countries, is more amorphous. British writers like Armando Iannucci (Veep, Avenue 5) and Jesse Armstrong, who created Succession, went to the US having made their names in British TV with The Thick of It and Peep Show; Michaela Coel, who created and had the lead role in I May Destroy You (2020) for the BBC, became one of a handful of Black women to win a primetime writing Emmy after her show ran on HBO. British studios and technicians can barely keep up with demand. Game of Thrones was an American series, made for first broadcast on HBO, based on an American book, with American lead writers, but most of the cast was British, and the production was based in Northern Ireland. Still, the BBC’s UK-confined streamer, iPlayer, looks threadbare these days. Behind Netflix, the other American streamers are moving in. When more and more TV comes streamed, British shows can get easier access to American audiences, and hence to American money, but American shows can get easier access to British audiences, and they were made with American money to begin with. In absolute terms, Britain isn’t the 51st state, but in TV terms, it kind of is – just to the north-east of Maine, a large and valued tile in the greater American entertainment production mosaic. It will have its own shows, with its own subject matter, locations, actors, writers, directors, but it will be increasingly less likely to own them.

Robert Evans was a clothes salesman and occasional radio actor when he got into the movies. He was spotted by Norma Shearer poolside at the Beverly Hills Hotel in 1956 and, at her suggestion, cast to play her late husband, Irving Thalberg – Thalberg, the model for Monroe Stahr in Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon, the production prodigy who arrived in LA from the East Coast in 1919 at the age of twenty, became head of production at MGM, and did much to make Hollywood Hollywood. In 2023, the Hollywood sign was a century old. New Hollywood, old Hollywood, network TV, streamers – whatever the conditions, there has always been just a handful of great movies and series in an ocean of the ho-hum, and few who have liked any of them know or care which studio or network or channel or streamer made them. Even Disney has become too vast for a brand identity. For more than a hundred years, there has been only one constant. Everything runs through California.

Letters

Vol. 46 No. 1 · 4 January 2024

Painting is terribly difficult

Julian Barnes writes that the ‘realistic social subjects’ of Monet’s earlier career were ‘as far as Zola was able to go with him’ (LRB, 14 December 2023). It was in fact Monet’s seascapes that Zola most admired. In his art criticism, he never failed to draw attention to the painter’s unequalled talent for depicting water. And in his preparatory notes for L’Oeuvre (1886), he reminded himself to try to describe the Seine à la Monet. That novel continues to have a distorting effect on our cultural histories. The most persistent myth is that its publication marked the definitive end of any contact between Zola and Cézanne: not even the discovery, a decade ago, of a letter Cézanne sent to his lifelong friend the year after L’Oeuvre appeared has discouraged art historians from rehearsing the more dramatic personal story first told by John Rewald in 1936.

Jackie Wullschläger’s new biography of Monet refers to the novel as a ‘betrayal’ on Zola’s part. It is further evidence of Monet’s ego that his letter to Zola of 5 April 1886 expresses the fear that he might be identified with Claude Lantier, Zola’s fictional painter. His contribution to the novel’s composite portrait is marginal at best. But Zola’s notes specifically mention that Monet was driven by commercial imperatives to produce works too fast, resulting in mere sketches lacking both structure and finish. This simply repeated what he had written in his art criticism in 1879-80 about Monet’s ceding to the temptations of facilité de production. The painter virtually admitted that such criticism was justified. What he may have recognised in L’Oeuvre was his inverted image: Claude Lantier refuses to compromise his artistic integrity by catering to popular taste. For Monet, when it came to making money, painting wasn’t all that ‘difficult’.

Robert Lethbridge

University of St Andrews, Fife

Julian Barnes writes that London and Venice were ‘about the furthest’ that Claude Monet ‘took his brushes’. It’s true that Monet was no great traveller (the Impressionists, as Barnes says, were above all painters of the familiar), but he did make it a hair further with his visit to Norway in 1895. There, he made 29 views of snow-capped hills, icy forests, bright winter cabins and fjords as turquoise as the Mediterranean. It was an uncharacteristically trendy choice: thanks to Ibsen, ‘la Norvègerie’ had fully gripped Paris by the time Monet took his two-month trip.

And though no paintings survive from Monet’s military service in Algeria in 1861-62, he would later say that the works he completed there were central to his artistic development.

Emily Cox

Yale University

Julian Barnes quotes Robert Hughes’s claim that David Sylvester ‘would demand gifts from an artist whose work he was about to honour with a review’, and fleshes it out with Hughes’s quote from Lucian Freud that ‘the expected rate was usually two pieces.’ From this pair of falsehoods, Barnes concludes that ‘critics and curators at the top of their profession … had become institutionally – and constitutionally – corrupt.’

Lucian Freud and Robert Hughes were mischievous and malicious gossips and in the case of David Sylvester, both men might have had a professional and personal agenda. Anyone who ‘knew David Sylvester for decades’ – or even days – would know that he was honest, straightforward and above board in all his dealings with the art world, probably to a degree that pissed off both these men during the course of their careers. That the LRB, who knew and published David Sylvester during his lifetime, printed these assertions so casually and unquestioningly, is disgraceful.

Xanthe and Naomi Sylvester

The David Sylvester Literary Trust

Deal or No Deal

John Lanchester cites the conviction rate of 99.5 per cent in US federal cases and remarks that ‘it’s hard to contemplate that number without thinking injustices must occur’ (LRB, 2 November). Injustices do certainly occur, but there is another way of looking at that bit of statistical information. Federal prosecutors choose their cases extremely carefully and take them to court only when a conviction is practically guaranteed. In 2022, according to an analysis carried out by the Pew Research Centre, nearly 80,000 people were defendants in federal criminal cases but just 2.3 per cent of them went to trial; 0.4 per cent were acquitted.

This continues a lengthy trend. The share of federal criminal defendants who entered guilty pleas rose from 82 per cent in 1998 to nearly 90 per cent in 2022, while the share of defendants who went to trial fell from 7 per cent to 2.3 per cent. In just over 8 per cent of cases in 2022, the charges were dropped before the trial began. Add to the mix the fact that federal convictions are overturned at a rate as high as 20 per cent. What we can deduce from all this is that if you are caught by the feds, make a deal. Otherwise, they will come down on you like a ton of bricks.

Vassilis Serafimakis

Athens

Statement from the Heart

Rosemary Hill writes about her stay in Yulara and Australia’s recent No vote in the referendum for an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice to Parliament (LRB, 14 December 2023). The Uluru Statement from the Heart is not a petition, as Hill refers to it. The statement was published in 2017 by the First Nations Constitutional Convention, which consisted of 250 First Nations delegates, drawing on six months of consultation with more than 1200 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander representatives across Australia. It makes three demands: a First Nations Voice enshrined in the Australian constitution; a Makarrata Commission to supervise agreement-making between governments and First Nations peoples; and truth-telling. Its advocates summarise these three demands as Voice, Treaty and Truth.

The first proposal, the Voice, went to a referendum because it is only through a referendum that the Australian constitution can be changed. The Uluru Statement did not, as Hill suggests, request that Parliament create a constitutionally entrenched advisory body, because constitutional change is beyond Parliament’s power. This is a significant point: between 1973 and 1990, three First Nations advisory bodies were created by Parliament to consult with the federal government. Because they were created by Parliament, they could also be abolished by it, which happened in each case. Constitutional entrenchment for the Voice would have given it protection: it would have taken a further referendum to disestablish it.

The three demands of the Uluru Statement are not chronological; it does not specify that Treaty was to follow Voice. The government decided to pursue Voice first, thus opening it to attack. Among the opponents of the Voice was the Progressive No movement. For one of its leading figures, Senator Lidia Thorpe, a descendant of the DjabWurrung, Gunnai and Gunditjmara peoples, the Voice was ‘window-dressing’: in her view, substantive justice for First Nations peoples could only be achieved through a treaty recognising Indigenous sovereignty. On this line of argument, Voice was a danger to Treaty, not a precursor to it.

Following the outcome of the referendum, it was not the Yes campaign that called for a week of silence, but First Nations leaders involved in the campaign, who explained that the week was a time to mourn the result. That this was not a call from all members of Yes (a group that included the prime minister, Anthony Albanese), but specifically First Nations peoples, is indicated in their description of the referendum as ‘a chance for newcomers to show a long-refused grace and gratitude and to acknowledge that the brutal dispossession of our people underwrote their every advantage of this country’.

David Kearns

University of Queensland, Brisbane

Straight from the Udder

John Gallagher writes that London hawkers sold local milk because ‘goods spoiled fast’ (LRB, 2 November 2023). No description of the ‘fresh’ milk drunk by Londoners in former times can give a better – or more appalled – impression than that provided by Tobias Smollett for his irascible correspondent Matthew Bramble in The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771). This is Bramble’s account of the milk used for strawberries and cream:

but the milk itself should not pass unanalysed, the produce of faded cabbage-leaves and sour draff, lowered with hot water, frothed with bruised snails, carried through the streets in open pails, exposed to foul rinsings, discharged from doors and windows, spittle, snot, and tobacco-quids from foot-passengers, overflowings from mud-carts, spatterings from coach-wheels, dirt and trash chucked into it by roguish boys for the joke’s sake, the spewings of infants, who have slabbered in the tin-measure, which is thrown back in that condition among the milk, for the benefit of the next customer; and, finally, the vermin that drops from the rags of the nasty drab that vends this precious mixture, under the respectable denomination of milk-maid.

A perceptive critic of Smollett’s own time remarked that this author was truly a poet, if the designation could be invoked for a writer of prose; and this passage (among many others equally vivid) surely justifies the claim.

Damian Grant

Villeneuve d’Ascq, France

Reasons to Learn French

Rosa Lyster remarks that Shirley Temple Black prepared for her job as US ambassador to Ghana ‘by taking a crash course in French (she seems to have forgotten that Ghana had been a British colony)’ (LRB, 16 November 2023). It is unlikely that she or the US State Department were quite so ignorant. Probably, since this was her first overseas diplomatic posting, it was considered essential that she learn what was still the international language of diplomacy, French.

Bruce McClintock

Perth, Western Australia

National Evil

Jonah Goodman’s essay on the ‘national evil’ of the goitre in Switzerland brings to mind what used to be called Derbyshire Neck, referring to the prevalence of goitre in parts of that county up until the early 20th century (LRB, 30 November 2023). It is thought that iodine deficiency in the local environment may have been the result of the binding of iodine in the alkaline soils of the area, which meant that less of it made its way into local farm produce.

David Bell

Oxford

Jonah Goodman may be right that goitre is ‘all but forgotten’ in Switzerland, but the table salt I have in my kitchen comes with added iodine (0.0025%), and a reminder in French and German: ‘Un apport suffisant d’iode empêche la formation d’un goitre; Genügende Iodversorgung verhindert Kropfbildung’ – which means ‘sufficient iodine intake prevents goitre.’

Graeme Pearson

Zürich

Jonah Goodman writes that ‘in today’s prosperous and healthy Switzerland’, goitre has been ‘vanquished so completely it has been all but forgotten’. Not quite everywhere. Riehen, a small town in the canton of Basel-Stadt, calls one of its carnival groups the Chropf-Clique. Chropf is the local Swiss German word for ‘goitre’, for which Riehen was a hotspot.

Doris Tranter

Basel

Vol. 46 No. 1 · 4 January 2024

Short Cuts

Edinburgh’s Festivalisation

Rory Scothorne

The first humans settled in Scotland around 14,000 years ago. They must have arrived in summer; nobody in their right mind would choose to live here during the winter. Even as far south as Edinburgh, the sun emerges late only to disappear before 4 p.m., the rain eats umbrellas for breakfast and the Arctic gale is as rough as sandpaper. We don’t have much of a Christmas celebration to distract us from the gloom: the Scottish Reformation stamped out idolatrous Yuletide celebrations and Christmas only became a public holiday in 1958. Instead, we have Hogmanay.

Since the 17th century, the people of Edinburgh have celebrated the New Year with an informal street party outside the Tron Kirk on the Royal Mile. The church would ring the bells at midnight, sending people off first-footing around the houses armed with coal and booze. Such gatherings were especially important as the city became more socially segregated: the construction of the New Town, which began in 1767, emptied the Old Town of affluent citizens, leaving behind the poor. At the Tron, according to the historian William Knox, ‘social rank often became meaningless and a spirit of conviviality and general bonhomie enveloped the gathered crowds.’

Not always. On New Year’s Eve 1811, several New Town gentlemen were relieved of their valuables and a widely despised police watchman was beaten to death by Old Towners. The violence was blamed on gangs (which were certainly involved) and the corrupting influence of prostitutes. In the next few months, 68 youths, most of them apprentice tradesmen or demobbed soldiers, were arrested. Several of the culprits were deported and on 22 April three teenagers – Hugh MacDonald, Hugh McIntosh and Neil Sutherland – were hanged. Hundreds of police and soldiers lined the streets for the execution, in what Knox calls ‘a pageant of civil and military power’.

In 1993 the party was moved to the New Town. Princes Street had more space for what was by then a dangerously popular event, attracting tens of thousands to the slippery cobbles of the Royal Mile. The city council, enterprise board and the police teamed up with the party promoters Pete Irvine and Barry Wright, whose company, Unique Events, symbolised a new, quietly corporate Caledonian cool. In 1995, more than 400,000 people attended (close to the size of the population of Edinburgh) and with them came barriers, security guards and ticketing. Today, locals wishing to attend their own street party must compete for access with thousands of tourists.

It’s not just Hogmanay. The city also plays host to the Edinburgh International Festival, the accompanying (and far larger) Festival Fringe, the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo, the Edinburgh Jazz and Blues Festival, the Edinburgh Science Festival, Art Festival, Book Festival and Children’s Festival. Other cities suffer from overtourism, but only Edinburgh is a non-stop event on the urban calendar.

Edinburgh was once famous for its special brand of middle-class joylessness and snobbery, and locals who complain about the city’s ‘festivalisation’ are easy to caricature. In 1967, Tom Nairn wrote that ‘Edinburgh’s soul is Bible-black, pickled in boredom by centuries of sermons, swaddled in the shabby gentility of the Kirk – what difference could 21 years of Festival make to this?’ The city’s churches now see more performances than sermons. Tolbooth Kirk, built to house the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, whose neo-Gothic spire looms over the Royal Mile, is now the headquarters of the International Festival and has been renamed ‘The Hub’.

The latest addition to the calendar is Edinburgh’s Christmas, which runs throughout December. The Walter Scott Monument in Princes Street Gardens – once the biggest memorial to a writer in the world – is dwarfed by an enormous fairground ride called Around the World XXL, which lifts customers hundreds of feet in the air and swings them round the gardens, their trailing feet narrowly missing the local worthies depicted on the monument. A German Christmas Market offers artisanal tat and warm alcohol at London prices. Edinburgh’s Christmas is run by a company called Unique Assembly, a recent merger of Unique Events with a major Fringe venue company. Why put it on at all? There are obvious economic benefits to the cash-strapped council, but these depend on something harder to describe. David Harvey calls it ‘collective symbolic capital’, the ‘special marks of distinction that attach to some place, which have a significant drawing power on the flows of capital more generally’.

Edinburgh’s USP is a combination of historical fiction and spectacular geology: a fantasy city of classical and medieval inspiration, perched on an old glacial rubbish heap behind the vast dolerite crag that protects Edinburgh Castle. Nearly every landmark – whether a church, a castle, a university building, a monument or an ancient volcano – predates the 20th century; there are no corporate skyscrapers here. But there are two hotels on the skyline. The Balmoral, with its handsome clocktower, comes from an older, more exclusive age of tourism. The other hotel is new: a great twisted golden-brown blob of steel crowned with a cow’s lick. Publicists have tried to nickname it the ‘walnut whip’. Locals refer to it as the ‘Golden Jobby’ (‘jobby’ is a Scots word for excrement).

You can’t buy what Edinburgh has. You can, however, rent out certain kinds of access to it. This, as Harvey writes, is a recipe for self-destruction. The influx of international capital produces homogenisation, or worse, Disneyfication. The Golden Jobby would disgrace the skyline of any city; there is nothing particularly ‘Edinburgh’ about it, or about the new shopping centre that surrounds it or the bland Caltongate development nearby. The streets of the Old Town are given over to shops selling kitsch Scottish souvenirs, not really an improvement on the ubiquitous Harry Potter and Marvel memorabilia.

In Who Runs Edinburgh? David McCrone attempts to explain the fate of his adopted city (Edinburgh, £14.99). The answer to his question is no one. Edinburgh’s distinctiveness – its size, skyline, layout, demography – emerged from a complex local power structure sustained by particular patterns of culture, politics and economics. The city’s character reflects its curious entry into modernity: industry there was smaller, more stratified and more artisanal for longer, its workers were led by a moderate ‘labour aristocracy’ buoyed by luxury consumer demand from an exceptionally large professional class. This remains true: Edinburgh has ‘consistently and proportionately more managerial and professional workers than either Scotland or Britain’.

The city’s middle classes organised themselves through a series of secretive clubs and an insular education system (even today, one in every five teenagers in Edinburgh attends a fee-paying school). The collapse of Edinburgh’s two world-conquering banks in 2008 left the city leaders scrambling for external support. The St James development – which includes the Golden Jobby – has been passed between American and Dutch pension funds. A polluted brownfield site in the north of the city, currently being turned into houses and shops, is part-owned by Canada’s Public Sector Pension Investment Fund. Projects such as these rely on public money to attract private capital, but locals have little say in what gets built and much of the money flows out again: the catastrophic trams ‘mega-project’ saw decisions about the city’s transport network farmed out to bodies with almost no democratic oversight, and foreign companies were contracted to build trams and tracks that could have been made in Scotland. There were huge delays in the building of the tram lines, and the project ended up massively over budget.

Councillors can no longer promise the stable, steady governance that used to characterise city politics: today’s council is a febrile five-way fight between Labour, the SNP, the Liberal Democrats, Tories and Greens. Such competition has its advantages, but these are rarely on display when the council has so little power. A decade of funding cuts and decades more of centralisation have left it flailing. Its reliance on outside companies is not just an attempt to cut costs: it no longer has the capacity or experience required to run its own projects. The Scottish government’s decision to freeze rather than reform council tax next year won’t help.

McCrone doesn’t shy away from the obvious cliché. Edinburgh, birthplace of the author of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, is a place of ‘interesting dualities’. It’s a success story, and a victim of its success. Walk around central Edinburgh and you can’t avoid the scaffolding that covers half the buildings, hinting at growth, or decay, or both. Money cascades into the city, but it’s hard to see how the city itself benefits. Rents in Edinburgh have risen by 16.6 per cent in the last year, more than anywhere else in the UK. In November, the council declared a housing emergency. Five thousand households face nightly homelessness.

The most interesting programme for urban renovation in recent years has been the so-called Preston model (pioneered by Preston council). It involves identifying ‘anchor institutions’ in your town or city – colleges and universities, housing associations, the police and so on – and encouraging them to use their powers for good, by spending money locally, for instance. But this is a strategy for places that don’t have money to begin with. Edinburgh has a different problem: money is coming in, but not going to the right places. What we need is a way of diverting it to where it’s needed.

Some new initiatives are trying to tackle this, with help from conservation groups such as the Cockburn Association and the more radical Living Rent Tenants’ Union. A control area limiting new short-term lets should discourage the conversion of homes into Airbnbs, though efforts to apply the regulations retrospectively are held up in court. The council is considering a visitor levy on overnight stays in the city, which might be introduced next year. The Scottish government’s proposals for nationwide rent controls, also due next year, should further challenge the power of property speculators to decide the city’s fortunes. These interventions represent an overdue statement of self-respect from a city that was beginning to seem desperate. Without serious consideration from above, resentment from below can spill out in all sorts of ways, and not just on Hogmanay.

Vol. 46 No. 1 · 4 January 2024

Memory Failure

Pankaj Mishra

Subcontractors of Guilt: Holocaust Memory and Muslim Belonging in Postwar Germany

by Esra Özyürek.

Stanford, 264 pp., £25.99, March, 978 1 5036 3556 2

Never Again: Germans and Genocide after the Holocaust

by Andrew Port.

Harvard, 352 pp., £30.95, May, 978 0 674 27522 5

In March 1960, Konrad Adenauer, the chancellor of West Germany, met his Israeli counterpart, David Ben-Gurion, in New York. Eight years earlier, Germany had agreed to pay millions of marks in reparations to Israel, but the two countries had yet to establish diplomatic relations. Adenauer’s language at their meeting was unambiguous: Israel, he said, is a ‘fortress of the West’ and ‘I can already now tell you that we will help you, we will not leave you alone.’ Six decades on, Israel’s security is Germany’s Staatsräson, as Angela Merkel put it in 2008. The phrase has been repeatedly invoked, with more vehemence than clarity, by German leaders in the weeks since 7 October. Solidarity with the Jewish state has burnished Germany’s proud self-image as the only country that makes public remembrance of its criminal past the foundation of its collective identity. But in 1960, when Adenauer met Ben-Gurion, he was presiding over a systematic reversal of the de-Nazification process decreed by the country’s Western occupiers in 1945, and aiding the suppression of the unprecedented horror of the Judaeocide. The German people, according to Adenauer, were also victims of Hitler. What’s more, he went on, most Germans under Nazi rule had ‘joyfully helped fellow Jewish citizens whenever they could’.

West Germany’s munificence towards Israel had motivations beyond national shame or duty, or the prejudices of a chancellor described by his biographer as a ‘late 19th-century colonialist’ who loathed the Arab nationalism of Gamal Abdel Nasser and was enthused by the Anglo-French-Israeli assault on Egypt in 1956. As the Cold War intensified, Adenauer determined that his country needed greater sovereignty and a greater role in Western economic and security alliances; Germany’s long road west lay through Israel. West Germany moved fast after 1960, becoming the most important supplier of military hardware to Israel in addition to being the main enabler of its economic modernisation. Adenauer himself explained after his retirement that giving money and weapons to Israel was essential to restoring Germany’s ‘international standing’, adding that ‘the power of the Jews even today, especially in America, should not be underestimated.’

Such was the ‘unprincipled political gamesmanship’, as Primo Levi called it, that expedited the rehabilitation of Germany only a few years after the full extent of its genocidal antisemitism became known. A strategic philosemitism, parasitic on old antisemitic stereotypes but now combined with sentimental images of Jews, flourished in postwar Germany. The novelist Manès Sperber was one of those repulsed by it. ‘Your philosemitism depresses me,’ he wrote to a colleague, ‘degrades me like a compliment that is based on an absurd misunderstanding … You overestimate us Jews in a dangerous fashion and insist on loving our entire people. I don’t request this, I do not wish for us – or any other people – to be loved in this way.’ In Germany and Israel: Whitewashing and Statebuilding (2020), Daniel Marwecki describes the way that visions of Israel as a new embodiment of Jewish power awakened dormant German fantasies. A report by the West German delegation to the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961 marvelled at ‘the novel and very advantageous type of the Israeli youth’, who are ‘of great height, often blond and blue-eyed, free and self-determined in their movements with well-defined faces’ and exhibit ‘almost none of the features which one was used to view as Jewish’. Commenting on Israel’s successes in the 1967 war, Die Welt regretted German ‘infamies’ about the Jewish people: the belief that they were ‘without national sentiment; never ready for battle, but always keen to profit from somebody else’s war effort’. The Jews were in fact a ‘small, brave, heroic, genius people’. Axel Springer, which published Die Welt, was among the major postwar employers of superannuated Nazis.

Figuring Israelis as Aryan warriors – Moshe Dayan was like Erwin Rommel, according to Bild – wasn’t a contradiction but an imperative for some beneficiaries of the German economic miracle. Marwecki writes that Adenauer made a major loan and the supply of military equipment ‘dependent on the Israeli handling of the trial’ of Adolf Eichmann: he had been shocked to learn of Mossad’s discovery of Eichmann just weeks after his meeting with Ben-Gurion (he didn’t know that a German Jewish prosecutor had secretly informed the Israelis about Eichmann’s whereabouts) and feared what Eichmann might reveal. He went to extraordinary lengths to ensure that his closest confidant, Hans Globke, wasn’t fingered as an exponent of Nuremberg racial laws at the trial. Many sordid details remain locked up in the classified files of the German Chancellery and German intelligence. Bettina Stangneth found enough in the archives to show, in Eichmann before Jerusalem (2014), that Adenauer enlisted the CIA to delete a reference to Globke from an article in Life magazine. It is also now known that, acting on Adenauer’s instructions, a journalist and fixer called Rolf Vogel stole potentially incriminating files on Globke from an East German lawyer at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem.

Much to Adenauer’s relief, his new Israeli allies protected Globke, keeping up their end of what Marwecki describes as the ‘exchange structure specific to German-Israeli relations’: moral absolution of an insufficiently de-Nazified and still profoundly antisemitic Germany in return for cash and weapons. It also suited both countries to portray Arab adversaries of Israel, including Nasser (‘Hitler on the Nile’), as the true embodiments of Nazism. The Eichmann trial underplayed the persistence of Nazi support in Germany while exaggerating the Nazi presence in Arab countries, to the exasperation of at least one observer: Hannah Arendt wrote that Globke ‘had more right than the ex-Mufti of Jerusalem to figure in the history of what the Jews had actually suffered from the Nazis’. She noted, too, that Ben-Gurion, while exonerating Germans as ‘decent’, made no ‘mention of decent Arabs.

In Subcontractors of Guilt: Holocaust Memory and Muslim Belonging in Postwar Germany, Esra Özyürek describes the way that German politicians, officials and journalists, now that the far right is in the ascendant, have been cranking up the old mechanism of sanitising Germany by demonising Muslims. In December 2022, German police foiled a coup attempt by Reichsbürger, an extremist group with more than twenty thousand members, which was planning an assault on the Bundestag. Alternative für Deutschland, which has neo-Nazi affiliations, has become the country’s second most popular party, partly in response to economic mismanagement by the coalition led by Olaf Scholz. Yet despite the undisguised antisemitism of even mainstream politicians such as Hubert Aiwanger, the deputy minister-president of Bavaria, ‘white Christian-background Germans’ see themselves ‘as having reached their destination of redemption and re-democratisation’, according to Özyürek. The ‘general German social problem of antisemitism’ is projected onto a minority of Arab immigrants, who are then further stigmatised as ‘the most unrepentant antisemites’ in need of ‘additional education and disciplining’.

Both Judaeophobia and Islamophobia have increased in Germany in the wake of the Hamas attack, Israel’s scorched-earth assault on Gaza and the German government’s crackdown on public displays of support for Palestine. The German president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, recently urged all those in Germany with ‘Arab roots’ to disavow hatred of Jews and denounce Hamas. The vice chancellor, Robert Habeck, followed with a more explicit warning to Muslims: they would be tolerated in Germany only if they rejected antisemitism. Aiwanger, a politician with a weakness for Nazi salutes, has joined the chorus blaming antisemitism in Germany on ‘unchecked immigration’. To denounce Germany’s Muslim minority as ‘the major carriers of antisemitism’, as Özyürek points out, is to suppress the fact that nearly ‘90 per cent of antisemitic crimes are committed by right-wing white Germans.’

Netanyahu, too, has learned from Germany’s postwar efforts at whitewashing. In 2015 he claimed that the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem had persuaded Hitler to murder rather than simply expel the Jews. Three years later, after initially criticising a move by the Law and Justice Party in Poland to criminalise references to Polish collaboration, he endorsed the law making such references punishable by a fine. He has since legitimised Shoah revisionism in Lithuania and Hungary, commending both countries for their valiant struggle against antisemitism. (Efraim Zuroff, a historian who has helped bring many former Nazis to trial, compared this to ‘praising the Ku Klux Klan for improving racial relations in the South’.) More recently, Netanyahu accompanied Elon Musk to one of the kibbutzim targeted by Hamas, just days after Musk tweeted in support of an antisemitic conspiracy theory. Since 7 October, he has seemed to be reading from the Eichmann trial script. He regularly announces that he is fighting the ‘new Nazis’ in Gaza in order to save ‘Western civilisation’, while others in his cohort of Jewish supremacists keep up a supporting chorus. The people of Gaza are ‘subhuman’, ‘animals’, ‘Nazis’.

This vengeful rhetoric from a damaged fortress of the West is echoed in Europe and America. White nationalists have long identified with Israel: an ethnonational state that violates international legal, diplomatic and ethical protocols with its language of ethnic homogeneity, unwavering policy of territorial expansion, extrajudicial killings and demolitions. Today, an extreme manifestation of what Alfred Kazin, writing in his private journal in 1988, called ‘militant, daredevil, fuck-you-all Israel’ also serves as a palliative to many existential anxieties within the Anglo-American ruling classes. In Our American Israel (2018), Amy Kaplan described the way an American elite projects its fears and fantasies onto Israel. But the state-enforced philosemitism that shapes Germany’s relationship to Israel belongs to another order of convolution and ferocity.

Shortly before the Hamas offensive, Israel secured, with American blessing, its largest ever arms deal with Germany. The Financial Times reported in early November that German arms sales to Israel have been surging since 7 October: the figure for 2023 is more than ten times as high as the previous year. As Israel began to bomb homes, refugee camps, schools, hospitals, mosques and churches in Gaza, and Israeli cabinet ministers promoted their schemes for ethnic cleansing, Scholz reiterated the national orthodoxy: ‘Israel is a country that is committed to human rights and international law and acts accordingly.’ As Netanyahu’s campaign of indiscriminate murder and destruction intensified, Ingo Gerhartz, the commander of the Luftwaffe, arrived in Tel Aviv hailing the ‘accuracy’ of Israeli pilots; he also had himself photographed, in uniform, donating blood for Israeli soldiers.

In a more unnerving illustration of the postwar German-Israeli symbiosis, the German health minister, Karl Lauterbach, approvingly retweeted a video in which Douglas Murray, a mouthpiece of the English far right, claims that the Nazis were more decent than Hamas. ‘Watch and listen,’ retweeted Karin Prien, deputy chair of the Christian Democratic Union and education minister for Schleswig-Holstein. ‘This is great,’ Jan Fleischhauer, a former contributing editor at Der Spiegel, wrote. ‘Really great,’ echoed Veronika Grimm, a member of the German Council of Economic Experts. The Süddeutsche Zeitung, which in 2021 ‘outed’ five Lebanese and Palestinian journalists at Deutsche Welle as antisemites, with equally flimsy evidence exposed the Indian poet and art historian Ranjit Hoskote as a calumniator of Jews for comparing Zionism with Hindu nationalism. Die Zeit alerted German readers to another moral outrage: ‘Greta Thunberg openly sympathises with the Palestinians.’ An open letter from Adam Tooze, Samuel Moyn and other academics criticising Jürgen Habermas’s statement in support of Israel’s actions provoked an editor at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung to claim that Jews have an ‘enemy’ at universities in the form of postcolonial studies. Der Spiegel ran a cover picture of Scholz alongside his claim that ‘we need to deport on a grand scale again.’

‘German officials,’ the New York Times reported – belatedly – in early December, ‘have been combing through social media posts and open letters, some going back over a decade.’ State-funded cultural institutions have long penalised artists and intellectuals of Global South ancestry who show any hint of sympathy for Palestinians, retracting awards and invitations; the German authorities are now seeking to discipline even Jewish writers, artists and activists. Candice Breitz, Deborah Feldman and Masha Gessen are just the latest to be ‘lectured’, as Eyal Weizman put it, ‘by the children and grandchildren of the perpetrators who murdered our families and who now dare to tell us that we are antisemitic’.

What then of Germany’s much lauded culture of historical memory? Susan Neiman, who wrote admiringly of Vergangenheitsbewältigung in Learning from the Germans (2020), now says she has changed her mind. ‘German historical reckoning has gone haywire,’ she wrote in October. ‘This philosemitic fury … has been used to attack Jews in Germany.’ In Never Again: Germans and Genocide after the Holocaust, which examines the German response to mass killings in Cambodia, Rwanda and the Balkans, Andrew Port suggests that their ‘otherwise admirable reckoning with the Holocaust may have unwittingly desensitised Germans. The conviction that they had left the rabid racism of their forebears far behind them may have paradoxically allowed for the unabashed expression of different forms of racism.’

This goes some way to explaining the widespread indifference in Germany to the fate of the Palestinians, and the conviction that any criticism of Israel is a form of bigotry (a stance that negates Germany’s own historic support of many UN resolutions against Israeli infractions). Port could have strengthened his argument by discussing Germany’s failure fully to acknowledge, let alone pay reparations for, its first genocide of the 20th century: the mass killings by German colonists in South-West Africa between 1904 and 1908. Port also gives too much credit to German memory culture, which maintained an appearance of success only because the German ruling class had, until recently, less occasion to expose its historical delusions than, for instance, the Brexiteers dreaming of imperial-era strength and self-sufficiency.

In reality, official attempts to bolster Germany’s image in the present by denouncing its past have faced much domestic resistance. Rudolf Augstein, the founder and editor of Der Spiegel and another early patron of former Nazis, remarked in 1998 that Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial was designed to satisfy American ‘East Coast’ elites. Historical memory is too volatile to be fixed by political and cultural institutions; it always seemed implausible that a collective moral education could produce a stable, homogenous attitude across the generations. There are too many other factors determining what is remembered and what is forgotten, and the German national subconscious is burdened by a century of secrecy, crimes and cover-ups. Speaking at Weimar in 1994, Jurek Becker, a rare Jewish novelist who lived in both East and West Germany, blamed the resurgence of violent neo-Nazism in unified Germany on the Nazis who, indulged and even embraced by Cold Warriors, had continued to flourish in West Germany:

They saw to it that the look back at the Nazi past turned out as mild as possible, not brutal, and where it was possible they tried to prevent it … They supported one another mutually and supplied influence for one another. They prevented the progress of those who had seen through them. They said that not everything had been bad in those days, you couldn’t throw out the baby with the bathwater. Sometime or other they got the idea of asserting that fascism had simply been the answer to the real crime of our epoch, to Bolshevism.

Many well-placed men worked to compromise West Germans’ understanding of their complicity in the Third Reich. Franz Josef Strauss, a veteran of the Wehrmacht in the ‘bloodlands’ of Eastern Europe who became Adenauer’s defence minister and later prime minister of Bavaria, thought that the ‘task of leaving the past behind us’ was best accomplished by defence deals with Israel. Ralf Vogel, who claimed that ‘the Uzi in the hand of the German soldier is better than any brochure against antisemitism,’ now seems an early exponent of this mode of leaving the past behind – what Eleonore Sterling, a survivor of the Shoah and Germany’s first female professor of political science, was by 1965 calling ‘a functional philosemitic attitude’ that replaces ‘a true act of understanding, repentance and future vigilance’. Frank Stern’s unsparing diagnosis in The Whitewashing of the Yellow Badge (1992) holds true today: German philosemitism, he wrote, is primarily a ‘political instrument’, used not only to ‘justify options in foreign policy’, but also ‘to evoke and project a moral stance in times when domestic tranquillity is threatened by antisemitic, anti-democratic and right-wing extremist phenomena’.

This is not the first time invocations of Staatsräson have been used to conceal democratic deformations. In 2021, for example, while pursuing defence deals with Israel, Germany challenged the right of the International Criminal Court to investigate war crimes in the Occupied Territories. In mid-December, with twenty thousand Palestinians massacred and epidemics threatening the millions displaced, Die Welt was still claiming that ‘Free Palestine is the new Heil Hitler.’ German leaders continue to block joint European calls for a ceasefire. Weizman may seem to exaggerate when he says that ‘German nationalism has begun to be rehabilitated and revivified under the auspices of German support for Israeli nationalism.’ But the only European society that tried to learn from its vicious past is clearly struggling to remember its main lesson. German politicians and opinion-makers are not only failing to meet their national responsibility to Israel by extending unconditional solidarity to Netanyahu, Smotrich, Gallant and Ben Gvir. As völkisch-authoritarian racism surges at home, the German authorities risk failing in their responsibility to the rest of the world: never again to become complicit in murderous ethnonationalism.

Vol. 46 No. 1 · 4 January 2024

Antidote to Marx

Colin Kidd

America’s Philosopher: John Locke in American Intellectual Life

by Claire Rydell Arcenas.

Chicago, 265 pp., $25, October, 978 0 226 82933 3

Among the enduring riddles of American exceptionalism is the absence in the political mainstream of an overtly socialist party. Whereas in Europe socialist and social democratic parties emerged to tame the excesses of private enterprise, the much rawer, more carelessly exploitative forms of capitalism found in the United States failed to provoke a political response of a similar character or on anything like the same scale. The paltry 6 per cent of the popular vote won in the 1912 election by Eugene Debs remains the best performance by a Socialist Party presidential candidate. In the 1930s Franklin D. Roosevelt deliberately rejected the idea that there was any socialist intent in the New Deal, presenting it instead as a pragmatic, non-doctrinaire response to a highly particular crisis.

The classic explanation of the American avoidance of socialist politics appeared in Louis Hartz’s The Liberal Tradition in America, published in 1955. Hartz, a Harvard professor of political science, argued that Americans were instinctively liberal. Born free and equal in a continent largely devoid of feudal aristocracies or clerical oppression, they had in an intuitive and inarticulate way absorbed the classical liberal precepts associated with the 17th-century English philosopher John Locke: adherence to limited government, respect for personal liberty and the sanctity of private property. Americans hadn’t needed a revolution of the French kind to win these freedoms: the country had gained autonomy from Britain without having to overthrow an ancien régime. From the absence of a genuine revolutionary moment, other consequences flowed: no reactionary right had formed that was committed to the re-establishment of a (non-existent) former hierarchy, and the lack of class consciousness – either above or below – meant there was no need for a socialist tradition to combat the right or to advance the interests of a self-aware proletariat. Instead all shades of opinion across the political spectrum subscribed unselfconsciously to the American Way of Life, which Hartz labelled ‘mass Lockeanism’. Locke, he insisted, ‘dominates American political thought, as no thinker anywhere dominates the political thought of a nation’.

Hartz was alert to the loopholes in his thesis. In The Founding of New Societies (1964), he and a team of collaborators tried to account for the flourishing of social democracy and a more activist state in other colonial societies, such as Australia. Hartz attributed this to inheritances from the politics of the mother country at the time of a colony’s formation. His work is in crucial respects unconvincing, but its focus on Locke finds a loud echo in prevailing popular myths about America’s origins. According to Claire Arcenas, most educated Americans have some sense that Locke is the nation’s founding philosopher-grandfather: ‘Oh, I know Locke! I think we read his Second Treatise in school. He’s the small government, life, liberty, property guy, right?’ It’s widely assumed that Locke’s political philosophy fed a ‘continuous stream of American political thought’ from the 18th century to the present. But, as Arcenas shows in her original and surprising book, the standard view of Locke’s place in American culture rests, at best, on a very partial appreciation of his significance in the American past. It wasn’t until the 20th century that he came to be associated principally with political thought, and in particular with the supposedly ‘liberal’ ideas of his Second Treatise of Government (1689).

Locke never visited America. Born in Somerset in 1632, he became a tutor at Christ Church in Oxford, where he developed interests in medicine and natural philosophy. The patronage of Anthony Ashley Cooper, later the 1st earl of Shaftesbury, drew him into public life. His service as secretary to the Council of Trade and Plantations brought him into contact with American affairs, though at an ocean’s remove, as did a similar scribal role on behalf of the Lords Proprietors of the Carolina colony, foremost among whom was Shaftesbury. Despite Locke’s commitments to religious toleration and his personal associations with heterodoxy, he spent the last part of his life engaged in researches on the Epistles of St Paul.

This wholesome attachment to scripture, Arcenas argues, was a crucial component of Locke’s profile in the 18th-century colonies. The Reverend Ezra Stiles, a prominent New England theologian and educator, noted in the 1770s that Locke’s ‘reputation as a scripture commentator’ stood ‘exceeding high with the public’. Though a lifelong bachelor, Locke was also an unlikely ‘childrearing guru’ for colonial Americans, by way of Some Thoughts concerning Education (1693). But 18th-century Americans knew him primarily as a philosopher of mind, the author of An Essay concerning Human Understanding (1689). Here he exploded the notion that there were innate principles imprinted on the mind, arguing rather that knowledge derived from sensory experience of the world around us and internal reflection on such sensations. By the 1740s the Essay concerning Human Understanding was on the logic curriculum at both Harvard and Yale. It was almost impossible to graduate without confronting it, though many students probably read only chunks of this massive work in abridgement. By contrast, his Second Treatise of Government, ubiquitous in university curriculums in the second half of the 20th century, was wholly neglected. In Yale’s 18th-century library catalogues, there was nothing by Locke in the category ‘Political Essays’. By the time of the American Revolution his standing hadn’t changed in any appreciable way.

Some of the revolutionary patriots of Boston, Philadelphia and Virginia thought they were conserving in America the essential substance of England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688, but Locke’s place in that story was strangely precarious. Although his Two Treatises were published in 1689, they were, as Peter Laslett showed in the 1950s, largely written before it, in the context of the Exclusion Crisis of 1679 to 1681. In the wake of the largely imaginary fears aroused by the Popish Plot of 1678, English Whigs under the leadership of Shaftesbury unsuccessfully tried to exclude King Charles II’s Catholic brother, James, Duke of York, from the succession. Locke’s First Treatise was also a response to the posthumous publication in 1680 of Patriarcha by the early 17th-century royalist Sir Robert Filmer, which claimed that absolute monarchy derived from the paternal authority that Adam and subsequent biblical fathers exercised over their families and servants.

More recently, scholars have slightly qualified Laslett’s findings, pushing the completion date of the Second Treatise to 1682. But the central thrust of his analysis remains valid: the Two Treatises weren’t written as a justification of the Glorious Revolution. Not only did Locke’s apparent ‘contribution’ diverge significantly – as Gerald Straka, Mark Goldie and John Kenyon have demonstrated – from the main lines of discussion, but his strikingly sophisticated efforts were barely mentioned by others. More representative of mainstream opinion were the providentialist case that God’s favour had overseen the peaceful transfer of the English throne from James II to William and Mary; practical questions about when, after moments of rebellion or usurpation, it was proper to give de facto allegiance to a newly ‘settled’ government; and historical arguments about the preservation of the ancient English constitution. The term ‘contract’ did surface in political usage, but not in the Lockean sense; it was more often used in connection with the king’s coronation oath. Contrary to later mythology, far from defining the new regime, Lockean theories only slowly gained traction in 18th-century English political culture.

In contrast to their marginality in the revolution of 1688, Locke’s political ideas proved more influential in the revolution of 1776, though not to the degree modern American folklore might have you believe. Arcenas recognises that Locke was frequently cited in the 1770s, but challenges the view that this makes the American Revolution Lockean in any meaningful sense. Rather, she argues, contemporaries regarded Locke’s ideas about contract and consent as broadly typical of English constitutional doctrine. It’s true that Jefferson knew his Locke, but the Declaration of Independence doesn’t straightforwardly reiterate Lockean arguments. Its commitment to ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ sounds like a tweak on Locke’s formulation that political society was created for the ‘mutual preservation’ of its members’ ‘lives, liberties and estates’. But, contrary to the myth that from its founding document America was dedicated to capitalism, private property and the personal accumulation of wealth, ‘happiness’ in its 18th-century definition meant public – not private – wellbeing. Happiness was not a synonym for property.

Locke’s ideas weren’t singularly influential during the American Revolution either; they had no more purchase on the rhetoric of patriots than those of the early 18th-century British journalists John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon or the Swiss jurist Emer de Vattel. After 1776, in any case, Locke’s influence as a political philosopher declined sharply. By the 1780s Americans of the founding generation were much more likely to invoke the ideas of Montesquieu or William Blackstone – a decided critic of Locke. A 1779 advertisement by one Boston bookseller of a 1773 pamphlet version of Locke’s Second Treatise reflected the fact, Arcenas contends, that ‘it had not sold well and excess inventory remained.’

As Arcenas explains, another political document generally attributed to Locke, the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina (1669), came to dog his reputation, especially in the decades following the French Revolution when politicians were highly suspicious about speculative theories of government devised by philosophers. Locke was probably not the sole author of Fundamental Constitutions, but, as secretary to the Lords Proprietors of the colony, was almost certainly involved in its drafting. Either way, it appeared in print under his name in 1720, and by 1751 was included in his collected works. It stands as an ironic caveat to Hartz’s thesis about a non-feudal Lockean America, since it envisages Carolina precisely as a feudal colony. Between the Lords Proprietors at the top and enslaved Blacks at the bottom were two further orders of hereditary nobility – margraves and caciques – as well as some free landholders and a class of hereditary serfs called ‘leet men’. The only countervailing feature – one that may suggest Locke’s influence – was a very generous measure of religious toleration; atheists alone were barred from landholding. More telling still on the matter of Locke’s authorship, in 1671 the Lords Proprietors rewarded his efforts in shaping the colony’s form of government by elevating him to the rank of a hereditary landgrave of Carolina. Needless to say, the neo-feudal fantasy of the Fundamental Constitutions didn’t survive contact with the realities of colonial life.

Locke’s misguided attempt to draw up a constitution for Carolina stood in sharp contrast, Arcenas notes, to the achievement of the men who formulated the American constitution in 1787. Nathaniel Chipman, a Vermont Federalist, complained in Sketches of the Principles of Government (1793) that if Locke had possessed a keener understanding of public administration he would not ‘have fallen into such impracticable absurdities, in his constitution of Carolina’. Modern Americans might assume that their forebears celebrated Locke as the inspiration behind Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, but in the mid-19th century at least, he was more often a butt of Fourth of July orators. In his 1835 oration, George Hillard, a Boston lawyer, said that there was no need to seek out examples of ‘monstrous abortions of government’ from modern France, when Locke’s scheme for the Carolinas provided evidence of speculative folly much nearer to home. Frederic Henry Hedge, a Unitarian minister in Bangor, Maine, talked in 1838 about ‘bubble constitutions, which burst as soon as blown’, singling out for ridicule Locke’s plan for distinct orders of nobility. The glory of America was that it had not adopted a fanciful constitution of this sort. ‘Locke’s status as a negative example’, Arcenas contends, long clouded his reputation in America as a political philosopher.

His political ideas proved ‘increasingly poor navigational aids’ in a modern industrial society, and by the start of the 20th century his works – of which the Essay concerning Human Understanding was still the most prominent – occupied a backwater in the history of philosophy. But during the interwar era the rise of fascism and communism led journalists and academics to embark on the construction of a persuasively American alternative. Locke emerged in the 1940s as the presiding genius of ‘what was beginning to be called the American political tradition’. Jefferson was also integral to this heritage of liberal moderation, but according to the influential journalist John Chamberlain of the New York Times, Fortune and Life, the Declaration of Independence largely restated ‘the principles of John Locke in American terms’.

The expansion of postwar higher education marked a further vital stage in the Americanisation of Locke. Reinvented as ‘America’s antidote to Marx’, his works, especially the easily digested Second Treatise of Government, became firmly entrenched in the undergraduate curriculum. Wrenched out of their context – England during the Exclusion Crisis and its aftermath – and unobtrusively mangled, Locke’s political ideas were repackaged as inoffensive bourgeois liberalism. Between the publication of The Vital Centre by Arthur Schlesinger Jr in 1949 and the appearance in 1960 of The End of Ideology by the sociologist Daniel Bell, America witnessed a decade of conspicuous consensus. It helped that Eisenhower was a centrist, who, though wooed by the Democrats, decided in the end to run for president as a lukewarm Republican. But consensus was also grounded in social attitudes: what Hartz possibly misdescribed as an intuitive, common sense Lockeanism.

The first direct challenge to the Hartzian consensus came from the conservative movement’s most exotic coterie, a grouping that, perversely, didn’t celebrate American institutions in any straightforward way. The Chicago-based German émigré Leo Strauss and his followers championed the high ideals enshrined in the political philosophy of the Ancients, at the expense of the Moderns, such as Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke and the authors of the Federalist Papers, with their depressingly low view of humanity. Straussians bemoaned the checks and balances of the American constitution, mechanisms premised on man’s sordid self-interest. Strauss read Locke as a benighted Modern, dismissing his purported vision of bourgeois acquisition as ‘the joyless quest for joy’. But others involved in the conservative revival had different views. On its libertarian wing, Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia (1974) built the case for a minimal nightwatchman state on Lockean assumptions about an original state of nature.

In the interim the historical foundations of the Hartz thesis crumbled. From the mid-1960s the works of Bernard Bailyn, Gordon Wood and J.G.A. Pocock demonstrated that the revolution and constitution owed more to a participatory language of virtue, duty and civic activism derived from the Ancients via Machiavelli and late 17th-century English Commonwealthmen than to the rights-based idioms of liberalism. Daniel Walker Howe went on to trace the persistence of these classical republican tropes well into the mid-19th century in the ideology of the American Whig party. Insofar as a distinctive tradition has shaped American political culture and institutions, it derived from Aristotle, Livy and Polybius, not Locke.

These insights have failed to dislodge Locke from his place in American popular memory, however misremembered or historically dubious. But a growing awareness on the progressive left of his shareholding in the Royal African Company and his broader complicity in slavery and colonialism has seriously dented his reputation. Arcenas anticipates Locke’s eviction from the liberal canon, and wonders whether he might be replaced by another icon – John Stuart Mill, say. Locke’s curious American afterlife remains an unfinished story, like the unresolved history of the word ‘liberal’ itself, which carries a raft of seemingly incompatible meanings – sometimes pejorative – in current Anglo-American usage; denoting, variously, the middle ground of politics, a vast range of positions on the left, and, less often but just as plausibly, the free-market right. These ambiguities are generally understood, but there is also a less well-known difficulty, an anachronism of the sort that makes historians twitchy. Since the term ‘liberal’ acquired a political hue only in the early 19th century, in what sense can any 17th-century philosopher really be said to belong to the liberal canon?

Vol. 46 No. 1 · 4 January 2024

Poem

Rocks

Maureen N. McLane

The rocks individuated as people

if you register people

as individuals, which I do,

haplessly, helplessly, when forced,

fright or flight or love or _______.

The plants need water.

The rhododendrons are drooping.

Your lust for the contemporary

is understandable but mildly disappointing.

She made me a latte,

today’s small gift.

They must be annoyed, the ones

living now next to a construction site.

Lorca had a lover in New Hampshire.

Perhaps McKay did too.

Mpox cases explode,

fade … O homophobia.

And now of a sudden: rain

when I’d just told her it would hold off.

I am unreliable,

once again proven unreliable.

The weather app is no oracle.

Knowledge of, knowledge that:

it is raining.

*

It will have rained

by the time you read this.

There are infinite plausible sentences

by which I mean grammatical

only as long as this clause.

It was a summer of cardinals.

Crows bickered on lawns

across the Northeast.

Granite outlasts us.

If you bite into the beach rose’s fruit

you’ll find it tart and refreshing,

a smaller, firmed up, aerated tomato,

all skin crunch, some seed, no juice.

The rhododendrons are listless.

Today’s pathetic fallacy,

empiricism … whatever –

they want rain. Watering.

Vol. 46 No. 1 · 4 January 2024

Victory by Simile

Andrea Brady

The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet’s Journeys through American Slavery and Independence

by David Waldstreicher.

Farrar, Straus, 480 pp., £24, March, 978 0 8090 9824 8

The name given to Phillis Wheatley by her family is lost. She may have been born in modern-day Senegal or Gambia, and was called ‘Phillis’ after the ship in which she was forcibly transported to Boston in 1761. Wheatley was the name of the prosperous merchant family who purchased her ‘for a trifle’ – ‘a slender, frail, female child, supposed to have been about seven years old, at this time, from the circumstances of shedding her front teeth’, and dressed in ‘a quantity of dirty carpet’, according to Margaretta Odell, an unreliable Victorian descendant of the Wheatleys. Phillis was so ill on arrival that ‘the Captain had fears of her dropping off his hands, without Emolument by death.’ Susanna Wheatley had recently lost a daughter of around Phillis’s age; there’s some speculation that she imagined the child as a replacement.

In an essay of 1983, Alice Walker writes of her grief for ‘this sickly, frail Black girl’ whose ‘loyalties were completely divided, as was, without question, her mind’. Walker ridicules Wheatley’s ‘bewildered tongue’, the ‘stiff, struggling, ambivalent lines’ of her verse. But she also offers understanding to the child who brought in the milk while imagining Liberty as a golden-haired goddess. For Walker, Wheatley ‘kept alive, in so many of our ancestors, the notion of song’. Her poetry may cling to the conventional verse forms that Walker associates with whiteness, but she also hears in it an echo of the songs Wheatley’s mother might have sung to her.

Efforts have been made to trace in Wheatley’s verse residues of African spiritual practices and memories of her birthplace. John Shields has argued that her elegies are compatible with African animist traditions, and proposes that her background was with the Fula people. Odell said Phillis described her mother pouring water ‘before the sun at his rising’, which has led some to suggest she had Muslim heritage. But the references to her past or to Africa in Wheatley’s work are often generic. When she writes about ‘pleasing Gambia’ in a poem to a British naval officer, she represents it as a locus amoenus where

With native grace in spring’s luxuriant reign,

Smiles the gay mead, and Eden blooms again,

The various bower, the tuneful flowing stream,

The soft retreats, the lovers golden dream,

Her soil spontaneous, yields exhaustless stores;

For phoebus revels on her verdant shores.

This Gambia is an idealised abstraction unmarked by the violence of the slave trade or by any particularity. When invited to journey as a missionary (or missionary’s wife) to Africa in 1774, Wheatley refused: ‘Upon my arrival, how like a Barbarian Should I look to the Natives; I can promise that my tongue shall be quiet for a strong reason indeed being an utter stranger to the Language of Anamaboe.’

Other memories may be scattered across her poetry, however. Wheatley’s verse is haunted by perilous sea voyages and chained figures. The ‘lash for horrid crimes’ endured by a dead infant, the ‘iron hand of pain’, ‘lengthen’d chain’ of life and ‘heavy fetters’ of death in her elegies are reminiscent of the horrors of the Middle Passage. She often writes about the pain of separation, particularly of children from their parents. In a poem on the appointment of William Legge, earl of Dartmouth, as secretary of state with responsibility for the American colonies, she recounts her abduction. If Dartmouth wonders why she loves freedom so deeply, he need look no further than her own past:

I, young in life, by seeming cruel fate

Was snatch’d from Afric’s fancy’d happy seat:

What pangs excruciating must molest,

What sorrows labour in my parent’s breast?

Steel’d was that soul and by no misery mov’d

That from a father seiz’d his babe belov’d:

Such, such my case. And can I then but pray

Others may never feel tyrannic sway?

Wheatley is strategic in making reference to her Blackness. Following the conventions of modesty that were typical of the time, she apologises for her limitations: her verse is the product of an ‘untutor’d African’ and ‘groveling mind’. ‘African’ was becoming a distinct identity in this period, in large part due to the slave trade. Wheatley came to enjoy the rhetorical authority that being ‘African’ gave her in addressing people of higher status. ‘Must Ethiopians be employ’d for you?’ she asks in ‘An Address to the Deist’, underscoring the urgency of her moral critique with a nod to her lowly ‘employment’. In ‘America’, Wheatley rejoices that Liberty ‘makes strong the weak/And (wond’rous instinct) Ethiopians speak’. Elsewhere she invokes Terence, ‘an African by birth’, and calls herself a ‘vent’rous Afric’ or an ‘Ethiop’, using ‘sable’ to refer to her skin colour and the word ‘negro’ only once.

A short poem, ‘On Being Brought from Africa to America’, directly addresses her status as an enslaved person. Wheatley says it was ‘mercy brought me from my Pagan land’: the fortunate fall from her African paradise gave her ‘benighted soul’ a chance ‘to understand/That there’s a God, that there’s a Saviour too.’ Slavery enabled Christian redemption. But the poem criticises white people who ‘view our sable race with scornful eye’ and who refuse to extend the promise of redemption to people of colour, seeing in them the curse of Ham and mark of Cain. Wheatley reminds them: ‘Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain,/May be refin’d, and join th’ angelic train.’ Rhyming Cain’s sin with the angel’s glory, Wheatley promises an alchemical transformation of those who are elevated by grace. The paratactic arrangement of the nouns asserts that Negros can be Christians – and that Christians can also be marked by a diabolic dye of sin. Is this ‘artful whiteface mockery of pious racists’? In his new biography of Wheatley, David Waldstreicher encourages us to think so, and to read the lines in a ‘mocking or satirical instead of a beseeching voice’, so that we can hear Wheatley ‘become the organic intellectual of the enslaved’.

The poem shows Wheatley working within narrow limits to offer a subtle critique of racialisation. Sable becomes the Blackness of Cain through white scorn: this racecraft is a vicious inversion of the transformation of the darkness of sin into angelic light that the poem anticipates. To access that transformation, Wheatley needs to prove in her writing and her life that she is virtuous, marked in Calvinist terms not by Cain’s infamy but by the signs of election.

That need is what makes ‘On Being Brought from Africa to America’, in Walker’s terms, ‘sickly’. Henry Louis Gates Jr called it ‘the most reviled poem in African American literature’. It contributed to the view of readers in the 1960s and 1970s who, informed by Black nationalism and the Black Arts Movement, found nothing in Wheatley’s poetry but ‘self-hatred’ and a refusal to engage with the ‘liberation of the Black man’. Amiri Baraka said Wheatley’s ‘pleasant imitations of 18th-century English poetry are … ludicrous departures from the huge Black voices that splintered southern nights with their hollers, chants, arwhoolies and ballits’. Alain Locke said she was an example of ‘the Old Negro from whom one must turn away’. For June Jordan, she assimilated all sorts of ‘iniquitous nonsense found in white literature’. Listening not to the vital music of her African contemporaries, but to the dumb drawing-room tinkling of the white bourgeoisie, the argument goes, Wheatley composed verses as weak as she was.

Wheatley’s reception in her own time was mixed. Abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison held her up as an example of Black intellectual perfectibility and recommended keeping Wheatley’s poems at hand ‘so we might have some conception of the amount of genius that slavery is murdering’. But Thomas Jefferson compared her to a parrot and thought her poems ‘below the dignity of criticism. The heroes of The Dunciad are to her as Hercules to the author of that poem.’ In a context where figures including Kant and Hume used aesthetics to confirm racist claims about the abilities of people of African descent to think and reflect, Wheatley’s poetry was both lauded and ridiculed. Some white readers were filled with admiration for her ‘pure, unassisted genius’; others saw her poetic inventions as nothing more than a talent for mimicry. Francis Williams, a Black Jamaican slave owner, praised her verse in assimilationist terms: ‘Thy body’s white, tho’ clad in sable vest.’ A reader sneered in 1788 that ‘an ourang outang has composed an ode.’ This is why, for Gates, Wheatley was not only trying to prove that she was a good poet, but ‘auditioning for the humanity of the entire African people’.

A collection of Wheatley’s verse was first proposed in the winter of 1772. The advertisement for the book stressed her youth and genius: ‘being but a few Years since she came to this Town an uncultivated Barbarian from Africa’. It also included an authentication by ‘the most respectable Characters in Boston’ that she was indeed the author of her work. Her poems had been ‘seen and read by the best Judges, who think them well worthy of the Publick View; and upon critical examination, they find that the declared Author was capable of writing them.’ Gates is one of several critics who work backwards from this statement to the assumption that some kind of ‘trial’ of Wheatley’s authenticity had taken place. For Gates this ‘was the primal scene of African American letters’.

There was no trial, but the witness statements of Boston’s worthies set a precedent for the framing of Black-authored works that persisted long into the 19th century (and in some cases beyond). They were deemed necessary for Wheatley not just because of her Blackness, but also because of the prodigious nature of her learning. Within sixteen months of her abduction, she had ‘attained the English Language, to which she was an utter Stranger before, to such a Degree, as to read any, the most difficult Parts of the Sacred Writings, to the great Astonishment of all who heard her’. Her first recorded poems are from 1765, when she was eleven or twelve; her first published work, a poem about two sailors caught in a storm, appeared in the Newport Mercury in 1767, when she was thirteen. She had no formal schooling, but was taught to read and write by Susanna Wheatley and her daughter Mary.

Wheatley’s precociousness is evident in a poem written when she was about fifteen, addressed to students at Harvard. Her audacity is striking: she cites Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, warns the students against sin and gives her own synopsis of their learning. The same ‘Powerfull hand’ of God that had ‘Brought me in Safety from the dark abode’ of Africa gave the students knowledge of ‘the ethereal Space/And glorious Systems of revolving worlds’. She warns them to ‘Improve your privileges while they stay:/Caress, redeem each moment,’ eschewing the ‘sable monster’ of vice.

According to the Wheatleys, Phillis began writing out of ‘curiosity’ and acquired small Latin. She knew Homer in Pope’s translations, and her poetry indicates some learning in geography and history. She continued writing in her ‘leisure Moments’ without any intention of publishing, or so the preface to her book later claimed. She was gentle, affectionate, without any sign of literary vanity and ‘never indulged her muse in any fits of sullenness or caprice’, according to Odell. ‘She was at all times accessible.’ The Wheatleys insisted that they asked little of their frail ‘servant’ (a euphemism often used for enslaved people in colonial America) beyond light domestic duties, but she waited on her mistress and acted as her companion until Susanna’s death in 1774. Wheatley referred to her as ‘my best friend’. After Susanna died, she wrote: ‘I feel like One forsaken by her parent in a desolate wilderness.’ Vincent Carretta and others suggest that in mourning her mistress Wheatley was really grieving the loss of her own mother many years earlier. The family was eager to promote this affective tie, claiming that she was bound to them by ‘the golden links of love and the silken bands of gratitude’. This image of softened fetters recurs in Wheatley’s own work.

In fact she enjoyed little freedom or leisure time. She was called on to exhibit her talents for the Wheatleys’ guests and several poems were written in response to their challenges. ‘Recollection’ was suggested by ‘some young ladies’, who recorded that ‘the African (so let me call her, for so in fact she is) took the hint, went home to her master’s, and soon sent what follows.’ In addition to occasional poems prompted by political events or local deaths, Wheatley wrote a number of abstract odes – ‘On Virtue’, ‘On Friendship’, ‘On Imagination’ – in which the language of ‘Fancy’ allows her to escape the constraints of enslaved life, to traverse ‘the unbounded regions of the mind’.

But while Wheatley took pleasure in allowing her ideas to ‘range/Licentious and unbounded o’er the plains’, she was conscious that the liberation was only ever temporary. ‘On Imagination’ may celebrate the power ‘Whose silken fetters all the senses bind,/And soft captivity involves the mind’ – the same sensual power that supposedly bound her to the Wheatleys’ service – but the pleasures of this version of captivity are short-lived. The poem crashes back to earth, into a wintery seascape frozen in ‘iron bands’ that ‘may’ relent eventually to imagination’s warming powers. For now: ‘Winter austere forbids me to aspire,/And northern tempests damp the rising fire.’

Wheatley did not only engage in a poetics of escape. She also developed networks of white and Black friends and supporters. Waldstreicher estimates that in the late 18th century Boston’s population was around 10 per cent Black. Although their social lives were controlled, and sale threatened to break their bonds to one another, Black people found solace and community together. Wheatley and other people of colour, including Zingo Stevens, Bristol Yamma and John Quamine, shared stories of their pasts. Several of the men were members of the Newport Free African Union Society, founded in 1780. Wheatley sustained a long friendship with Obour Tanner, an enslaved woman who lived in Newport and may also have been shipped aboard the Phillis. Together they formed what Katherine Clay Bassard has called the ‘earliest Black women’s writing community’.

At the same time, Wheatley was beginning to draw power from her singularity as an African writer. ‘She becomes a colonial informant,’ as Waldstreicher puts it, ‘a highly visible expert on tyranny, liberty and slavery.’ In the Wheatley home on King Street, she had a front-row view of protests against the Stamp Act, whose repeal she celebrated in a poem. While her early works declare loyalty to the paternal King George, she later used parent-child metaphors to depict the colonies as suffering from cruel discipline and neglect. By 1770 she was prepared to write an ‘arch-patriot’ elegy for a child killed in an affray, joining the ‘illustrious retinue’ at his funeral. According to Waldstreicher, ‘it’s the only instance in Wheatley’s surviving oeuvre where she depicts herself as part of a crowd.’

Navigating the hazardous political terrain of 18th-century America, Wheatley offers praise and blame in her commentaries on the progress of revolution. She articulates colonial grievances while flattering the British administrators who might assuage them. In an early draft of her poem on Dartmouth’s appointment, she hopes he will ensure that ‘No more, of Grievance unredress’d complain,/Or injur’d Rights, or groan beneath the Chain,/Which wanton Tyranny, with lawless Hand,/Made to enslave, O Liberty!, thy Land.’ The language of chains and slavery is typical of Whig polemics from this period, and was also used by Mary Astell and Mary Wollstonecraft to lament the predicament of women.

Wheatley was among many writers who pointed to the hypocrisy of patriots who decried the enslavement of white colonial subjects while ignoring the plight of enslaved Africans. In ‘On the Death of General Wooster’ from 1778, Wheatley argues that it is ‘presumptuous’ for American patriots to anticipate heavenly acceptance while the nation continues to ‘disgrace/And hold in bondage Afric’s blameless race’. As a ballad writer put it,

The same men maintaining that all human kind

Are, have been, and shall be, as free as the wind;

Yet impaling and burning their slaves for believing

The truth of the lessons they’re constantly giving.

One formerly enslaved man in Massachusetts implored the patriots in 1774: ‘Would you desire the preservation of your own liberty? As the first step let the oppressed Africans be liberated; then, and not till then, may you with confidence and consistency of conduct, look to Heaven for a blessing on your endeavours to knock the shackles … from your own feet.’

A similar sentiment can be found in Wheatley’s 1774 letter to the Mohegan preacher Samson Occom. She agrees with Occom’s ‘Vindication of [the] Natural Rights’ of Black people. She rejoices that ‘the divine Light’ of Christianity ‘is chasing away the thick Darkness which broods over the Land of Africa’. But she notes that political and religious freedom are bound up together; and that ‘in every human Breast, God has implanted a Principle, which we call Love of Freedom; it is impatient of Oppression, and pants for Deliverance; and by the Leave of our modern Egyptians I will assert that the same Principle lives in us.’ There is some audacity in her association of the African diaspora with God’s chosen people. She prays for divine judgment on those who ‘forward the Calamities of their fellow Creatures’, that they too may be enlightened and come to understand ‘the strange Absurdity of their Conduct whose Words and Actions are so diametrically opposite. How well the Cry for Liberty, and the reverse Disposition for the exercise of oppressive Power over others agree – I humbly think it does not require the Penetration of a Philosopher to determine.’

Wheatley may have taken inspiration from the godly republicanism of Milton. Her blank verse poems frequently echo his epic invocations and biblical allusions. In an epyllion on David and Goliath, for example, Wheatley calls in Miltonic cadences on ‘Ye martial powers, and all ye tuneful nine’ to ‘Inspire my song and aid my high design.’ But her poetry was also informed by Pope’s worldly wit and finely balanced heroic couplets. In describing these influences, Waldstreicher sometimes tries a little too hard: Pope was ‘a literary rock star’, couplets were the ‘tweets’ of the 18th century, ‘Americans’ became a ‘meme’ in 1764-65, Wheatley’s subtleties are a form of ‘trolling’. But his close readings attend with enormous care to the possibilities of Wheatley’s verse. A line from ‘America’ is central to his appraisal of her work: ‘Sometimes by Simile, a victory’s won.’ This is ‘a one-liner so modest yet so powerful, and so trippingly seductive with assonance and internal rhyme, that it gets away with introducing a complex, almost counterintuitive idea’: that there is a likeness between African and British Americans’ struggle for freedom. ‘Writing is fighting by other means.’

Although her political verse may now be of most interest to readers, Wheatley was a profoundly religious writer, influenced by the Great Awakening and the evangelical Christianity of the Old South Church. Her career and poetic education were shaped by ministers and their wives. Waldstreicher suggests that it was Susanna Wheatley and Susannah Kelly Wooldridge, the wife of Dartmouth’s factor, Thomas Wooldridge, who ‘cooked up the occasion’ for Wheatley’s address to Lord Dartmouth. The poem was a turning point in Wheatley’s efforts to gather her poetry in a book. After the first proposal of 1772 came to nothing, the Wheatleys took a different approach. The family collected testimonies, shared poems in manuscript and print, and undertook a trip to London to drum up support, preserving Phillis’s modesty by claiming that it was a sea voyage to promote her health.

On her arrival in the metropolis, Wheatley wrote a bold letter of introduction – the wax sealed with her initials – to Selina Hastings, countess of Huntingdon. Huntingdon was the patron of a network of Methodist preachers and chapels whose evangelism ‘bridged classes and reached out to natives and Africans’. She was also a friend of George Whitefield, a charismatic revivalist and accommodationist on matters of slavery who had preached to Wheatley’s congregation just before his sudden death in 1770. Wheatley’s elegy for him was published as a broadside with black funereal borders, the author described as ‘a Negro Girl, in Boston’. It celebrates Whitefield’s sympathies with America’s suffering and ventriloquises one of his sermons: ‘Take HIM, “my dear AMERICANS”, he said,/Be your complaints in his kind bosom laid:/Take HIM ye Africans, he longs for you,/Impartial SAVIOUR is his title due:/If you will chuse to walk in grace’s road,/You shall be sons, and kings, and priests to GOD.’ This promise of equality wasn’t fulfilled in Whitefield’s lifetime. Huntingdon inherited his fifty enslaved people and four thousand acres in Georgia when he died.

Huntingdon had patronised the publication of A Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, an African Prince, as Related by Himself (1772), one of the earliest slave narratives in English. Impressed by this ‘luminous and sepulchral’ girl, she offered to support the publication of Wheatley’s work and requested that a portrait of her be commissioned for use as a frontispiece. The painting, probably by Scipio Moorhead, an African artist enslaved by the Wheatleys’ friends John and Sarah Moorhead, depicts Wheatley in thoughtful repose. She is simply dressed, her throat encircled by a black ribbon that faintly suggests her chattel status. In gratitude, Wheatley wrote a poem to Scipio anticipating their reunion in heaven.

In London, Wheatley paid her respects to the evangelical network that helped her publishing initiative, but cast her net wide to secure more secular patrons. She was ‘conversed with by many of the principal Nobility and Gentry of this Country’, including the earl of Dartmouth, who gave her money to purchase a folio edition of Pope’s Works. She visited the new British Museum, as well as Westminster Abbey and the Royal Observatory at Greenwich. There was an awkward meeting with Benjamin Franklin, but for the most part she was treated with ‘complaisance’ by her British hosts. She accompanied the anti-slavery activist Granville Sharp to the Tower of London, where they viewed ‘Lions, Panthers, Tigers etc’ in their cages. Sharp had recently been engaged in the Somerset decision, which declared that forcibly removing an enslaved person from Britain was an illegal ‘act of high dominion’. Wheatley understood the importance of the case. Having travelled to London under the guardianship of her enslaver’s son Nathaniel, she could not be compelled to return.

Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral was published in September 1773. On being presented with a copy, Ignatius Sancho noted that ‘these good great folks – all know – and perhaps admired – nay, praised Genius in bondage – and then, like the Priests and the Levites in sacred writ, passed by – not one good Samaritan among them.’ Wheatley’s reception was in part predicated on her status as an enslaved person. Nonetheless, she returned to Boston with a copy of the manumission papers she had left with her agent in London. She specified in a letter that ‘the Instrument is drawn, so as to secure me and my property from the hands of the Exectutrs, administrators etc of my master, & secure whatsoever should be given me as my Own.’

The negotiations over her emancipation are not documented, though Waldstreicher offers several possible scenarios. Perhaps the profits on book sales paid for her freedom, or public opinion and her new friends demanded it, or the Wheatleys were shamed into it, or Wheatley herself insisted on it as the condition of her return. Either way, the book was key to her emancipation. As she wrote in October 1773, ‘I am now upon my own footing and whatever I get by this is entirely mine, & it is the Chief I have to depend upon.’ When she returned to Boston, Susanna was dying and Wheatley’s own status was precarious. Delivery of the printed copies of her book on the Dartmouth was delayed when patriots objected to the chests of tea in its hold.

As Boston hunkered down under the British blockade, Wheatley’s poetic production quietened; no poems by her from 1774 or early 1775 have been found. In October, she wrote two flirtatious ones to the Royal Navy lieutenants John Rochfort and John Greaves. Waldstreicher attributes to her a very different anonymous poem, ‘Thoughts on Tyranny’, which considers British history up to the time of Charles I. Like most Bostonians, Wheatley was displaced by the War of Independence, leaving the city to stay with friends in Providence. She addressed a tribute to George Washington, who replied in 1776, at a moment when he was deliberating over whether to allow free and indentured Black soldiers to enlist in his new army. She had plans to publish another volume, which was advertised in 1779 but came to nothing.

Wheatley may have begun experimenting with more agonistic forms of poetic address. In January 1778 a splenetic, racist poem called ‘The Constitution’ was published anonymously in Boston’s Independent Chronicle. A response to it appeared in the same newspaper a month later, and Waldstreicher believes it was written by Wheatley. ‘Reply to “The Constitution”’, composed in tetrameter, sets out to ‘answer scorn with scorn’, accuses the author of the original poem of scurrilous race-baiting and condemns him to ‘dark oblivion’s sable deep’. This would be Wheatley’s first real satire, and ‘a key work in her oeuvre, a culmination of her development as a politically engaged anti-slavery writer’ – that is, if she wrote it.

A poem addressing white supremacy directly would be a fitting climax to Waldstreicher’s story of Wheatley’s evolution. His biography could perhaps have attended more explicitly to the intersection of gender and race in Wheatley’s life, and to the elements of misogynoir that influenced her public reception and representation. These elements come to the fore in the underexplored history of her life after emancipation, to which Waldstreicher’s book makes an important contribution.

Wheatley is now often cited as Phillis Wheatley Peters, the name she took on marrying the free Black grocer John Peters in 1778. The Wheatley family had reason to portray her married life as one of penury and suffering and to malign her husband. Alice Walker had her own for portraying Wheatley as burdened ‘not only with the need to express her gift but also with a penniless, friendless “freedom” and several small children … she lost her health, certainly. Suffering from malnutrition and neglect and who knows what mental agonies, Phillis Wheatley died.’ But Waldstreicher shows that the Peters family struggled in ordinary ways. Conditions in the commonwealth were difficult. John tried to protect his wife from hard domestic labour; but his businesses failed and he was briefly consigned to a debtors’ prison. Wheatley proposed a new edition of her book, but died in December 1784 before it could be realised.

For her contemporaries, Wheatley’s poetry presented a problem and an opportunity. Her writing was the supposed product of her leisure time rather than her enslaved labour. She imitated white aesthetics while drawing attention to her Blackness in ways that mixed humility with boldness. She was held up as a prodigy who merited exceptional liberation and as proof that all people had an inalienable right to freedom.

Readers today remain divided over whether Wheatley fawned on her white masters and denied her Blackness; or wrote poems that rejected slavery and racialisation with almost miraculous prescience. Her work is ripe for revisionist readings that look beyond her habits of accommodation and flattery to her willingness to confront her century’s disasters. The flattery is still there, in the allusions and prosody of a verse culture from which we have been largely alienated by Romanticism. But for many writers of colour Wheatley has become a symbol of resistance and survival, of Black artistry, and a voice for the millions destroyed in the Middle Passage. A conference at Jackson State University in 1973 celebrated Wheatley as an example of ‘the creativity of the Black woman kept alive, year after year’, as Alice Walker put it. Walker, Lucille Clifton, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni and others came together to honour Wheatley as the mother of Black American poetry. Clifton remembered them ‘holding hands and singing cause/you such a good mama we/got to be good girls’.

Several recent works help to fill in some of the gaps in Wheatley’s biography. In her second collection of poems, A Half-Red Sea (2006), Evie Shockley imagines Wheatley and Sally Hemings downing whiskeys together in the ‘halls of the ancestors’ and signifyin’ on the legacies of their mutual nemesis, Thomas Jefferson. The Age of Phillis by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, published in 2020, considers the relationship between Wheatley and Obour Tanner, with Tanner addressing Wheatley: ‘My Dearest Sister:/Spell me how you wish, for you have saved me./Before your letter, no one gave a care for my name.’ This concern for one’s name is also present in Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake (2016), in which Wheatley is invoked on seeing a photograph of a little Haitian girl with the word ‘ship’ taped to her forehead:

When I look at this photograph I see a young girl, to quote Jordan on Phillis Wheatley, ‘a delicate body, a young, surely terrified face’ … It occurs to me that the person who affixed that word Ship to her forehead emerges as another kind of underwriter, here, whose naming operates within the logics and arithmetics that would also render her a meagre child, as in one who occupies less space in the hold of a ship.

Drea Brown’s Dear Girl: A Reckoning (2015) includes a concrete poem shaped as a cross section of ‘the schooner phillis’. The poem’s inventory of deck, body, sugar, molasses, rum, pickled mackerel and turpentine floats on a sea of indigo, waves and bodies. The shape is taken from a 1789 engraving of the slave ship Brookes; here the outlines of the human cargo are replaced with words. Such works have contributed to the reassessment of Wheatley’s work; but the archive itself may have more to reveal. An elegy recently discovered in a Quaker commonplace book suggests that Wheatley spent some of her early years in Nantucket, on ‘loan’ to the Rotch family. The biographies will need updating.

Vol. 46 No. 1 · 4 January 2024

I behave like a fiend

Deborah Friedell

All Sorts of Lives: Katherine Mansfield and the Art of Risking Everything

by Claire Harman.

Vintage, 295 pp., £10.99, January, 978 1 5299 1834 2

Virginia Woolf wasn’t sure what she felt when she heard that Katherine Mansfield was dead. The cook, ‘in her sensational way’, had broken the news to her at breakfast: ‘Mrs Murry’s dead! It says so in the paper!’

At that one feels – what? A shock of relief? – a rival the less? Then confusion at feeling so little – then, gradually, blankness & disappointment; then a depression which I could not rouse myself from all that day. When I began to write, it seemed to me there was no point in writing. Katherine won’t read it. Katherine’s my rival no longer.

While Mansfield was alive, Woolf had found her ‘cheap and hard’, ‘unpleasant’ and ‘utterly unscrupulous’. It bothered her that she wasn’t sure if Mansfield liked her – letters and invitations often went unanswered. And she sensed that Mansfield was holding something back: ‘We did not ever coalesce.’ But, on balance, she hadn’t wanted her dead, even if she had sometimes wished that she didn’t exist: ‘Damn Katherine! Why can’t I be the only woman who knows how to write?’ She decided that she would have preferred for Mansfield to ‘have written on, & people would have seen that I was the more gifted – that wd. only have become more & more apparent’.

And on Mansfield’s side? ‘How I envy Virginia; no wonder she can write,’ she told her husband, angry that he wouldn’t take care of her the way that Leonard Woolf took care of his wife. ‘That’s one thing I shall grudge Virginia all her days – that she & Leonard were together.’ Mansfield thought that if only she’d had Woolf’s life (‘her roof over her – her own possessions round her – and her man somewhere within call’), she might have written novels too. But although she had sometimes looked up to Woolf (six years her senior) and admired the ‘strange, trembling, glinting quality’ of Woolf’s mind, she couldn’t forgive her ‘intellectual snobbery’, ‘arrogance and pride’, ‘boundless vanity and conceit’. The ‘Blooms Berries’ had made Mansfield feel like a ‘stranger – an alien’, never letting her forget, as she wrote in her journal, that she was ‘the little Colonial walking in the London garden patch – allowed to look, perhaps, but not to linger’. She wanted to ‘be bold and beat these people’; she flirted with them at their parties while plotting to ‘crush’ them.

Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp was born in Wellington in 1888 to parents who had both been born in Australia but for whom ‘home’ would always mean England. She died 34 years later in France. Much of what happened in between is up for grabs: no two biographies seem to be describing the same person. She thought of herself as containing ‘hundreds of selves’, and often went by different names depending on which self was on top: ‘Katherine Mansfield’, her usual favourite, jostled for prominence with Käthe Schönfeld, Matilda Berry, Elizabeth Stanley, Julian Mark, Mrs K. Bendall, Kass, Katharina, Katoushka and Kissienka. The stories she told about herself often didn’t add up – biographers pick and choose which to believe, and hope for the best. Her handwriting was close to illegible, so quotations from Mansfield’s letters and diaries tend to be all over the place too. The title of Claire Harman’s biography, All Sorts of Lives, points to the volatility of her subject and the difficulty of her task. But at least some facts are incontrovertible. The Beauchamps had five children who survived infancy; Kathleen was in the middle. Her father was chairman of the Bank of New Zealand. Her mother was a socialite.

In ‘The Garden Party’, Mansfield attempted to recreate the Victorian-Edwardian idyll of her childhood: tennis courts, servants, ‘exquisite sandwiches’, strict separation from the neighbours who lived just down the road, ‘an endless family of half-castes who appeared to have planted their garden with empty jam tins and old saucepans and black iron kettles without lids’. The mother character has firm views about calla lilies and hat trimmings, and the death of a workman nearby means nothing to her:

‘Mother, a man’s been killed,’ began Laura.

‘Not in the garden?’ interrupted her mother.

‘No, no!’

‘Oh, what a fright you gave me!’ Mrs Sheridan sighed with relief, and took off the big hat and held it on her knees.

Harman describes a taped interview from the 1960s in which Mansfield’s three sisters, well into their seventies, ‘talk animatedly about their mother’s femininity, daintiness and fastidiousness’. There was also, one of them suggests, something lacking in her personality: she was ‘quite unmoved by other people’. A friend of the family remembered watching Annie Beauchamp reunite with her children in Wellington harbour after a long trip abroad. Kathleen would have been about ten.

I stood beside Mrs Beauchamp as she gazed down in a detached way at the group and to my mind didn’t seem overjoyed as I thought she would be after such a long absence. Finally it was to Kathleen she spoke first, for everyone to hear. ‘Well, Kathleen,’ she said. ‘I see that you are as fat as ever.’

In Katherine Mansfield: The Early Years (2016), Gerri Kimber suggests that ‘if Annie Beauchamp had deliberately set out to create a difficult child, she could not have made a better job of it.’ Teachers, classmates, relatives would remember Mansfield as ‘completely self-centred’, ‘careless’, ‘lazy’, ‘impatient’, ‘the last child in the world they ever expected to become a writer’, less sweet than her sisters, and less obliging – ‘those who were not her particular friends on the whole disliked her.’ It was assumed that her night terrors, panic attacks and fainting spells were ‘stunts’ she pulled for attention. When she started writing stories, the Beauchamps thought she was trying to show off, probably in imitation of her older cousin ‘Elizabeth von Arnim’ (Mary Beauchamp), then famous for her novel Elizabeth and Her German Garden (1898), later for The Enchanted April (1922). The first story in Mansfield’s collected works, written when she was nine, is set in the English countryside. She had never seen it, but imagined it to be like New Zealand, with ‘a great many nice ferns and some beautiful moss’.

In 1903, when Mansfield was fourteen, she made her first journey to England aboard a small cargo ship: her family was with her, plus a canary, a cello and a clavichord. With her two older sisters, she was installed at Queen’s College in Harley Street, which their father intended as a kind of finishing school. Queen’s College was more progressive than he’d probably had in mind, and in her journal Mansfield regrets that she didn’t make more of it:

My wasted, wasted early girlhood … Is there another grown person as ignorant as I? But why didn’t I listen to the old principal who lectured on Bible history twice a week instead of staring at his face that was very round, a dark red colour with a kind of bloom on it and covered all over with little red veins with endless tiny tributaries that ran even up his forehead and were lost in his bushy white hair … I never came into contact with him but once, when he asked any young lady in the room to hold up her hand if she had been chased by a wild bull, and as nobody else did I held up mine (though of course I hadn’t). ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘I am afraid you do not count. You are a little savage from New Zealand.’

In Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life (1987), Claire Tomalin argued that Mansfield’s lies were ‘more for effect than advantage’ – she wanted to write fiction, so ‘the obvious thought is that she was trying out her plots on her friends.’ One of Mansfield’s not-quite-friends would remember that ‘her great delight was a game she played of being someone else. She would act the part completely, until she even got herself mixed up as to who and what she was. She would tell me that the acting became so real to her that she didn’t always know which was her real self.’ But if it was a game, it didn’t draw in other people. Mansfield complained that although ‘there are many people that I like very much,’ she didn’t know how to reach them: ‘They call me false, and mad, and changeable.’ One of her stories, told to two of the girls she lived with, was that a man had drugged and raped her, and that she ‘might be pregnant’. The other girls didn’t believe her, and neither have most of Mansfield’s biographers; Harman does, arguing that ‘the very fact that she told only these friends, and did so in tears, gives this distressing story credence.’ I’m not sure that I follow Harman’s reasoning: why would the story be less credible if Mansfield had told more people about it, or if she hadn’t cried? But Harman’s not wrong that Mansfield nearly always wrote from life, and that ‘once you tune in to it, Mansfield’s stories show themselves to be full of non-consensual sex’: date rape, attempted assault, incest. Harman suggests that, whatever its origins, ‘one senses some deep damage had been done’ – and on that much, the multitude of Mansfield biographers would almost certainly agree. Mansfield often imagined her own suicide: ‘I shall end – of course – by killing myself,’ she wrote in her journal. She craved another person ‘to nurse me – love me – hold me – comfort me – to stop me thinking’.

At Queen’s, she met the person she would later refer to as her ‘wife’, and also as ‘the monster’. Ida Baker, just a few months older, was a ‘colonial’ too: her family was from Suffolk, but she’d spent the first years of her life in Burma, where her father, an expert in tropical diseases, had been a doctor in the Indian army. She was taller than the other girls – the reason Mansfield would also sometimes call her ‘the mountain’ – and clumsy, timorous, with few friends. In the memoir Ida published when she was 84, she described watching Mansfield ‘lean out of the window, breathing, listening, absorbed and dreaming’, not imagining that she might condescend to be her friend. But ‘one day she suddenly asked me what I would do if I found she had done something really awful, like killing somebody with a hat-pin. I replied that I imagined that my first reaction would be to do something positive, not to criticise.’ Pass! And with that, she wrote, Mansfield became ‘the roadway of my life’. For Ida, their evenings together were ‘precious beyond all things … like pearls slipped onto a string, to be counted and treasured’. Mansfield wrote that she found Ida’s body repulsive – ‘I don’t know why I always shrink ever so faintly from her touch. I could not kiss her lips’ – but knew that she needed her, and would make use of her.

When Mansfield was seventeen, she was sent back to New Zealand with her sisters – for good, her father thought. Ida ‘lived on her letters’. Mansfield wrote in her journal about the ‘Suitable Appropriate Existence’ that she thought awaited her: ‘the days full of perpetual Society functions, the hours full of clothes discussions, the waste of life’. She missed ‘London. O London – to write the word makes me feel that I could burst into tears.’ New Zealand girls were fools: ‘I am longing to consort with my superiors.’ Her parents resisted letting her go back to England: according to Ida, Mansfield ‘had written of something that had happened at a ball when she had sat out one of the dances with her partner, and which her mother discovered. In her usual fashion, Katherine had embellished the facts when writing them down, and her parents, taking them seriously, not unnaturally thought twice about letting her go.’ But she wore them down, and two years later was allowed to return to London by herself, with an annual allowance of £100.

She took a room in a hostel for women students near Paddington, with a plan to write and study the cello. What happened next is fuzzy – ‘Katherine took care to cover her traces,’ Harman writes – but within months she was pregnant by one man, a violinist, and married to another, a music teacher called George Bowden. In her memoir, Ida writes that Mansfield thought she was in love with the violinist, who also came from New Zealand, but his parents hadn’t liked her and wouldn’t consent to their marriage (required since he wasn’t yet 21). When Mansfield realised she was pregnant, she persuaded Bowden – ‘a kindly person and, I believe, very much in love with Katherine’ – to marry her immediately (she lied that she was of age). The evening after the ceremony, she ‘turned cold and distant’, and left him. When Mansfield told her mother some version of what had happened she was written out of her will, and in August 1909 she was dispatched to a convent in the Bavarian spa town of Bad Wörishofen to wait out the pregnancy alone. Ida wanted to go with her, but ‘Mrs Beauchamp wished to separate us.’ Ida knew that she was being talked of as Katherine’s ‘lesbian friend’, but ‘I did not know then what a “lesbian friend” meant.’

The vignettes Mansfield would write during her confinement, mostly set in a Bavarian spa town, rarely tell a story, but they create a sense of place and mood. They were darker than anything Mansfield had written before – Elizabeth Bowen was struck by her ‘terrifying faculty for contempt’ and ‘compulsive brooding upon the ugly’. Harman suggests that the ‘anti-German atmosphere’ in England as war approached probably worked to her advantage: editors wouldn’t object that her German characters are almost unvaryingly coarse, cruel, sweaty, beer-drinking and gluttonous. In Katherine Mansfield: The Story-Teller (2010), Kathleen Jones notes that the pieces are also almost overwhelmed by allusions to pregnancy and childbirth, and to how little young women know about what’s in store for them:

Frau Lehmann’s bad time was approaching. Anna and her friends referred to it as her ‘journey to Rome’, and Sabina longed to ask questions, yet, being ashamed of her ignorance, was silent, trying to puzzle it out for herself. She knew practically nothing except that the Frau had a baby inside her, which had to come out – very painful indeed. One could not have one without a husband – that also she realised. But what had the man got to do with it?

According to Ida, Mansfield wouldn’t tell anyone how her pregnancy ended, only that she wasn’t going to be a mother. It’s usually assumed that she had a miscarriage or stillbirth, but Harman is right to acknowledge that it might have been an abortion. None of Mansfield’s biographers seems to have worked out what to make of what she did next except to say, as Harman does, that it’s ‘strange’. Mansfield, ‘depressed and miserable’, decided that what she needed to recover was a temporary child. Ida procured for her a ‘delicate’ eight-year-old boy, persuading his parents that he would benefit from a holiday. He was ‘labelled like a package and put on the boat train, and spent a few weeks being petted and sung to by Katherine (or “Sally” as she asked to be known)’.

It seemed to work: Mansfield’s mood lifted and she had a brief relationship with a new man – Floryan Sobieniowski, a young Polish émigré – and, more durably, with Chekhov’s stories, which Sobieniowski had given her to read. Harman thinks that Mansfield was ‘determined to emerge from that desolate time in Bavaria with something to show for it’. When she came back to London after seven months away, Bowden, legally still her husband, gave her a place to stay. He later wrote that he had assumed she’d left him because she was a lesbian, and felt sorry for her. He also introduced her to Alfred Orage, the editor of the socialist weekly the New Age, then in the ascendant as the publisher of George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells.

Mansfield’s first story to be published in England, ‘The Child-Who-Was-Tired’, appeared in the New Age in February 1910:

The Frau got out of bed, walked in a determined fashion into the kitchen, returning with a bundle of twigs in her hand fastened together with a strong cord. One by one she laid the children across her knee and severely beat them, expending a final burst of energy on the Child-Who-Was-Tired, then returned to bed, with a comfortable sense of her maternal duties in good working order for the day.

The Child-Who-Was-Tired is a maid-of-all-work – sweeping, lighting fires, drawing water, caring for children, all while being terrorised by the beastly Germans who employ her. In the end, exhausted, unable to get a baby to stop crying, she has a ‘beautiful, marvellous idea’: ‘She laughed for the first time that day, and clapped her hands. “Ts-ts-ts!” she said, “lie there, silly one; you will go to sleep. You’ll not cry any more or wake up in the night. Funny, little, ugly baby,”’ and smothers him to death. A decade on, Mansfield would write that she couldn’t ‘go on foisting that kind of stuff on the public. It’s not good enough,’ and wouldn’t allow the story to be republished. In 1951, a letter in the TLS argued that the real reason Mansfield had turned against ‘The-Child-Who-Was-Tired’ was that it had been plagiarised, and she worried about being found out. Chekhov’s story ‘Spat khochetsya’ (‘Sleepy’ or ‘Sleepyhead’), written in 1888, also ends with an exhausted servant girl deciding to ‘kill the baby and then sleep, sleep, sleep’. Harman acknowledges that ‘there really is no doubt that Mansfield had “Sleepy” in mind all the way through her own composition,’ but valiantly insists that ‘it remains her own composition, quite emphatically so.’ She lists Mansfield’s emendations, none of which was an improvement. Chekhov wasn’t yet widely read in English translation, and during her lifetime she got away with it.

The joke at the New Age was that the paper should really have been called the ‘No Wage’ – contributors were mostly paid in prestige. A small publisher reprinted Mansfield’s ‘Bavarian short stories’ as a book, also for almost no money, and it probably disappointed her hopes – the circulation of In a German Pension (1911) wasn’t great to begin with, and copies bound for America went down on the Titanic. But socially, the New Age gave Mansfield a place in the world: she was ‘meeting people with a mental capacity nearer to her own’, Ida wrote. ‘I began to know the almost physical ache that comes with the realisation of being inadequate.’ At one dinner party of New Age contributors, Mansfield – who was going by Yékaterina – met John Middleton Murry, an Oxford student who was starting up an art and literary magazine of his own, Rhythm. He was already her fan: ‘In a German Pension seemed to express, with a power I envied, my own revulsion from life,’ he would write in his autobiography. Beside her, he felt ‘clumsy’ and ‘very provincial’.

She was 23, older than he was by a year, took taxis and said ‘auf Wiedersehen’ instead of ‘goodbye’. He’d grown up in Peckham, the son of a clerk in the Inland Revenue; the only money he had was from his Oxford bursaries. ‘It was my duty, I knew, to work at least moderately well and get the First that was expected of me.’ But instead of sitting his exams, he moved into the flat Mansfield was renting on the Gray’s Inn Road, decorated in what she took to be the Japanese style: ‘brown paper on the walls, rush matting on the floor, and hardly any furniture’. Ida prepared a ‘cupboard with good things to eat – hiding a £5 note among the provisions’, then left them alone. Murry thought he was ‘finished with women’ – he’d recently had a bad experience. When Mansfield said, ‘Why don’t you make me your mistress?’ he refused, then relented. Their plan was to edit Rhythm together, supported by Mansfield’s allowance. Ida would pick up the slack: she tried to charge society girls for ‘scientific hair brushing’, which didn’t take off, so put her small inheritance at Mansfield’s disposal. Even so, in her memoir, Ida writes of how anxious she was, always, that Mansfield would tire of her. When she missed the last bus home, she slept ‘on the stone staircase outside Katherine’s and Murry’s door’ rather than ‘putting them to the trouble of arranging somewhere for me to sleep’.

Murry admitted that he had no idea how to run a magazine: ‘When the printers, who were also the publishers, told me to print three thousand copies, I took their advice supposing it to be disinterested.’ He was locked into a contract even though ‘not one-sixth part had been really sold,’ and went into debt. He was determined for Rhythm to be avant-garde; nowhere in his memoir does he articulate anything like an artistic vision, but he possessed, as Tomalin puts it, a ‘quick responsiveness to fashions in taste’ and an ‘earnest enthusiasm’ that charmed contributors. Rhythm was often uneven, but at its best published poems by Rupert Brooke and drawings by William Rothenstein and Picasso. D.H. Lawrence called it ‘a daft paper, but the folk seem rather nice’ and gave them a story for free.

Lawrence was 28 and about to publish Sons and Lovers when he asked to call on the Rhythm offices. He had ‘formed the curious idea,’ according to Murry, ‘that we were wealthy and important people: the kind of people, I suppose, who finance daft magazines. We liked one another, and when it emerged, as it quickly did, that Katherine and I were not married, and that Katherine like Frieda was waiting to be divorced, it began to appear … that we were made for one another.’ For a while, it was ‘all straw hats, and sunshine, and gaiety’, and the four of them tried living together in Cornwall. But Lawrence didn’t believe friendship with a woman was possible, and Murry writes that Mansfield finally tired of watching him fight with Frieda:

One evening when Katherine and I were sitting by the fire … we heard a shriek. Suddenly, Frieda burst in at the door crying: ‘He’ll kill me!’ Lawrence followed, white as a ghost, but in a frenzy of fury. Round and round the long table they went, Lawrence crying: ‘I’ll kill her, I’ll kill her!’ The chairs were scattered; I just managed to save the lamp. Katherine sat still in a corner, indifferent, inexpressibly weary … Quite suddenly, Lawrence collapsed into a chair by the fire. The frenzy had left him, bleached, blanched and inert.

The two couples fell out, but not before Lawrence may have put some of Mansfield’s early erotic experiences into The Rainbow and Women in Love: Mansfield liked to shock people by talking about her sexual experiences with both men and women, and Harman suspects that the scene in The Rainbow of Ursula and Winifred swimming together naked came directly from one of Mansfield’s anecdotes about an affair she’d had with a woman artist in New Zealand. Lawrence may also have given her tuberculosis – he had it when they lived together, but was trying to downplay his symptoms. Tomalin writes that Murry and Frieda were probably ‘robust enough to be resistant’, but Mansfield was already ill from gonorrhoea. Ever since her affair in Bad Wörishofen she’d had irregular periods (she often assumed that she was pregnant), fevers and horrible arthritis; she told people that she had rheumatism. ‘I can do nothing,’ she wrote in her journal in February 1915. ‘My head is so hot, but my hands are cold. Perhaps I am dead and just pretending to live here. There is, at any rate, no sign of life in me.’ When she wanted to have a baby with Murry, she realised that she’d become infertile. In his memoir, Murry admits to being useless in a crisis and terrified of illness. Mansfield needed Ida to nurse her, even though listening to her talk ‘nearly makes me die with fury’: ‘Katie mine, who is Wordsworth? Must I like him? It’s no good looking cross because I love you my angel from the little tip of that cross eyebrow to the all of you. When am I going to brush your hair again?’

When the war began, Murry was able to avoid conscription on spurious medical grounds. Mansfield wrote patriotic sketches of Belgian refugees, and told her family that she felt well enough to report from France, ‘not far from the firing line’, for a newspaper, though actually she went to the front illegally (with false documents) in 1915 for an assignation with a soldier in the French army, which she wrote up as the short story ‘An Indiscreet Journey’. Harman calls it ‘one of the most unusual stories to come out of the Great War’, with ‘syntax and grammar that continually defy expectations, and a perspective that places us in what seems like an adjacent reality’:

Is there really such a thing as war? Are all these laughing voices really going to the war? These dark woods lighted so mysteriously by the white stems of the birch and the ash – these watery fields with the big birds flying over – these rivers green and blue in the light – have battles been fought in places like these?

What could be more thrilling than to sneak into a war zone to have sex? The sentences are jaunty, excited, as banal as catalogue copy:

I buttoned on my age-old Burberry. (That Burberry was very significant. It did not belong to me. I had borrowed it from a friend. My eye lighted upon it hanging in her little dark hall. The very thing! The perfect and adequate disguise – an old Burberry. Lions have been faced in a Burberry. Ladies have been rescued from open boats in mountainous seas wrapped in nothing else. An old Burberry seems to me the sign and the token of the undisputed venerable traveller, I decided, leaving my purple peg-top with the real seal collar and cuffs in exchange.)

Narrative convention tells us that the tone is going to change: we know, even if the narrator doesn’t, that she’s on a journey to hell. Only that’s not what happens. ‘What darlings soldiers are!’ Her papers aren’t questioned; her lover is waiting to meet her in the Zone of the Armies, just as he said he would. Until they’re alone, they have to pretend not to know each other, which only adds to the fun:

Terribly pale, with a faint smile on his lips, his hand at salute, stood the little corporal. I gave no sign, I am sure I gave no sign. He stepped behind me.

‘And then follow me as though you do not see me,’ I heard him half whisper, half sing.

Harman calls the story ‘irrepressibly joyful’. It’s unlike the other stories Mansfield would write during the war, after her friends started dying and her brother, Leslie, was killed in a training accident. She hadn’t seen him since childhood, but they met when he passed through London on the way to join the British army, and he gave her the money she needed to go to France. Talking to him about ‘all the remembered places’ made her want ‘to write recollections of my own country … until I simply exhaust my store’. The story ‘Prelude’ describes the move from Thorndon to Karori when Mansfield was five years old. In her journal, she decides that she’s no good at plots, but that it doesn’t matter; she urges herself just ‘to tell everything, even of how the laundry-basket squeaked’:

The dining-room window had a square of coloured glass at each corner. One was blue and one was yellow. Kezia bent down to have one more look at a blue lawn with blue arum lilies growing at the gate, and then at a yellow lawn with yellow lilies and a yellow fence. As she looked a little Chinese Lottie came out on to the lawn and began to dust the tables and chairs with a corner of her pinafore. Was that really Lottie? Kezia was not quite sure until she had looked through the ordinary window.

Mansfield was proud of the story’s form: fragments, short sections, no transitions, no narrative arc, ‘stream of consciousness’ before the term had made the jump from psychology to literary criticism. ‘I expect you will think I’m dotty when you read it,’ she told Murry. ‘Its queer stuff.’ Virginia Woolf wasn’t sure ‘how much I like it as literature’, but would spend almost a year setting it by hand for the Hogarth Press, only just established and in need of material. The two women first met because Lytton Strachey thought they should – he wrote to Woolf in 1916 that he’d met ‘Katherine Mansfield – if that’s her real name’ at a party; he was dismissive of her ‘storyettes’, but thought Woolf would ‘find her entertaining’. At first Woolf was ‘shocked by her commonness’ and wrote that Mansfield ‘stinks like a – well civet cat that had taken to street walking’. But she admitted that she ‘was fascinated’ by her too: ‘She’s had every sort of experience.’ Woolf would write in her diary that she was ‘jealous of her writing – the only writing that I have ever been jealous of’, though later clarified that actually she’d stopped reading the stories because of their ‘cheap sharp sentimentality’; it was only ‘because they were so praised’ (she doesn’t say by whom) that she’d been jealous. ‘I must read her someday.’ When Mansfield’s stories didn’t win the Hawthornden Prize, Woolf knew that she was a little too pleased, and noted in her diary: ‘I write this purposefully, to shame it out of me.’

In letters to friends, Mansfield writes that the ‘Woolves’ are ‘smelly’ and ‘I don’t like them either.’ But she wooed Virginia with praise, and in a letter urged her to ‘consider how rare it is to find someone with the same passion for writing that you have, who desires to be scrupulously truthful with you – and to give you the freedom of the city without any reserves at all.’ Harman suggests that Woolf ‘never really appreciated how ill Mansfield was’ and assumed she was being snubbed when Mansfield didn’t reply to letters. But what most stung was that although Mansfield told Woolf that Night and Day (1919) was ‘an amazing achievement’, her review in the Athenaeum presented it as pointlessly old-fashioned, as though Woolf were trying too hard to be ‘Miss Austen up-to-date’ instead of accepting ‘the fact of a new world’. In a letter to Murry, Mansfield said that Woolf’s novel was a ‘lie in the soul’, pretending that nothing had changed since 1914. ‘The novel can’t just leave the war out. There must have been a change of heart … as artists we are traitors if we feel otherwise: we have to take it into account and find new expressions new moulds for our new thoughts & feelings.’

Woolf’s next novel, Jacob’s Room (1922), would be as experimental as Mansfield could have wished, but she would be too ill to read it. By 1918, Mansfield’s handkerchiefs looked like they belonged to ‘a pork butcher’, and although her doctor told her she would die unless she went to a sanatorium, she wouldn’t go, telling Ida that it would be like checking into a ‘lunatic asylum’; her main worry was that she wouldn’t be allowed to write. Instead, she wanted to convalesce in the South of France, even if it meant crossing a battlefield; Ida made it happen, then moved heaven and earth to get her out again (wartime France wasn’t very comfortable). Mansfield tried Switzerland and Italy too before going back to England, then France again. ‘I seem to spend half of my life arriving at strange hotels. And asking if I may go to bed immediately.’ She would have a surge of energy that would allow her to finish a story – ‘Bliss’, ‘Miss Brill’ – then collapse.

She thought that she’d finally figured out what she was doing: ‘I begin to wish to God I could destroy all that I have written & start again.’ Her themes were loneliness, disappointment, the fear of being forgotten after death. In 1920, when she was 31, she wrote that ‘nearly all my days are spent in bed or if not in bed on a little sofa that always feels like lying in a railway carriage,’ but was still ‘working very hard’. She was dependent on Ida, though she found everything about her irritating. Ida’s lack of confidence meant that she was always interrupting Mansfield with questions about how she wanted things done, or would be too frightened to ask her and then get it all wrong. According to Harman, one of Mansfield’s running jokes with Murry was that she was ‘tempted to shoot Ida with the revolver they had for self-defence, except the body would be such a nuisance to dispose of afterwards’. Mansfield’s letters to her are either cruel or apologies for having been cruel:

You mustn’t be so silly as to imagine because I am such a horrible creature I don’t love you. I am a kind of person under a curse, and as I don’t and can’t let others know of my curse you get it all. But if you knew how tenderly I feel about you after one of my outbreaks. You do know. I can’t say ‘nice’ things to you or touch you. In fact I behave like a fiend. But ignore all that. Remember that through it all I love you.

In Mansfield’s notebooks, she insists that Ida is a character worth pinning down – ‘had a long talk with Ida, and suddenly saw her again as a figure in a story’ – but for years couldn’t work out how to do it. Before she became ill, she tried writing a novel, to be called Maata, in which ‘Rhoda’ devotes herself to her more talented friend – but, like all Mansfield’s attempted novels, it doesn’t go beyond the first few chapters. Almost all of the stories she wrote in her last few years are about women ‘who find themselves at the mercy of monsters’, as Tomalin puts it, and none more so perhaps than ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’. The germ of it was Ida’s journey to Rhodesia to care for her father. In her memoir, Ida writes that no one else ‘could tolerate and manage the occasional fierce outbursts of temper from which he suffered, a legacy of long years of service in India’. She left him to go back to England because she thought Mansfield needed her more, then blamed herself when ‘he had a fatal “accident” with his gun.’

In the story, the colonel has been dead a week, but his daughters haven’t understood – and may never understand – that they’re free of him.

Josephine had had a moment of absolute terror at the cemetery, while the coffin was lowered, to think that she and Constantia had done this thing without asking his permission. What would father say when he found out? For he was bound to find out sooner or later. He always did. ‘Buried. You two girls had me buried!’ She heard his stick thumping. Oh, what would they say? What possible excuse could they make? It sounded such an appallingly heartless thing to do. Such a wicked advantage to take of a person because he happened to be helpless at the moment.

Mansfield would say that when she started writing the story she’d seen ‘the two sisters as amusing; but the moment I looked deeper (let me be quite frank) I bowed down to the beauty that was hidden in their lives … All was meant, of course, to lead up to that last paragraph, when my two flowerless ones turned with that timid gesture, to the sun. “Perhaps now.”’ It’s not too late for them, even though they don’t know it yet. Mansfield wrote it in a rush ‘for fear of dying before the story was sent’, and finished it in the middle of the night, just as Ida was bringing her tea and egg sandwiches. ‘It’s about you,’ Mansfield told her.

Vol. 46 No. 1 · 4 January 2024

Camden Town Toreros

Adam Mars-Jones

Corey Fah Does Social Mobility

by Isabel Waidner.

Hamish Hamilton, 160 pp., £12.99, July, 978 0 241 63253 6

There’s no better ballast for a fantasy narrative, something solid to keep all the impossible elements grounded (time travel, biodrones), than a numbered bus route: ‘the 88 bus passes by noisily’; ‘the 214 bus from Pratt Street to Old Street’. In Sterling Karat Gold, the Goldsmiths Prize winning novel of 2021, Isabel Waidner showed a shrewd sense of how to balance registers. In the world of the book there are small mutant creatures – ‘cuties’ – resembling or genetically based on boars and giraffes (among other animals), which are both potentially dangerous and somehow legally protected. But there are also passages that soberly describe a recognisable London:

Where aerial bombing left dents in the terraces, social housing went up post-WW2. Chachki’s brown-brick, low-rise estate, L-shaped at the corner with Arlington being one example, typical with its external walkways along the façade connecting the blue or black front doors of the flats on the first and second floors. Small windows are designed to reduce traffic noise – deceptively residential, Delancey Street is a major through road connecting Camden to Central, with two bus routes running along it all days of the week.

This is closer in tone to a Pevsner guide than to psychogeography of the Iain Sinclair school.

Waidner seems to be revisiting the distinction made by Iris Murdoch in Under the Net that some parts of London are necessary, others contingent. The ontological standing of Camden Town is high in Sterling Karat Gold, with the Fairfield and Three Fields estates glowing particularly brightly, but there are other hotspots that can claim super-contingent status, such as Chariots Roman Spa, a gay sauna in King’s Cross, though for a melancholy reason. It was the last place the gay black footballer Justin Fashanu visited before his suicide in 1998.

In general though, reality is prone to rippling or laddering. Sterling, who is wearing elements of a bullfighter costume (red velvet jacket and a black montera hat) along with a white football shirt, yellow socks and black loafers, is confronted by a group of toreros wielding English-branded banderillas – barbed sticks wrapped in the colours of the St George’s Cross. Soon three or four banderillas are hanging from Sterling’s shoulders ‘like patriotic hair pins’. Sterling, the victim, is charged with assault by the assailant, Nimo Bosch, whose surname (there’s also a Hiero Moussi involved in the case) is echoed in the grotesque imagery of the judicial proceedings: ‘At the head of the courtroom, the judge’s highchair … On top of the chair sits the judge – a tall, blue-bodied frog, spindly, with the head of a fledgling bird. A rose-coloured sash wraps round his lap, then drapes onto the floor in front of him. On his head, a cauldron as a hat.’

Recognisable daily reality doesn’t disappear for good. The authoritative factual tone used to describe the housing estate is produced on special occasions. Waidner favours a hybrid, even mutated, form able to sprout wings without losing its sharp little teeth. Sterling is kept in detention in Margate pending trial, and the unfairness of this is not personalised but laid out in statistical terms: ‘Of everyone leaving detention in the last decade, 66 per cent were detained for less than 29 days, 17 per cent for 29 days to under two months, 14 per cent for two months to six months, 3 per cent for six months to a year, and just under 1 per cent were detained for a year or longer.’

The book’s genre might be described as ludic dystopia. Sterling offers various versions of personal history, starting in the first paragraph: ‘Lost my father to Aids, my mother to alcoholism. Lost my country to conservatism, my language to PTSD. Got this England, though. Got this body, this sterling heart.’ The threefold ‘this’ is classic rhetorical heart-stirring, and though you might expect ‘Britain’ in so multiculturally aware a book, there’s no question which word taps into a deeper vein of feeling (later on it’s a ‘big British heart’).

Other riffs overlay this first version with half-comic fantasy, while leaving the possibility that it is in some way true: ‘My father, Franz Beckenbauer, played for Birth-Town FC. He used to carry my sister in one arm, myself in the other, practising kick-ups. I lost him to penalty shootouts and my sister to international migration.’ Or:

I lost my father, Franz Beckenbauer, to his serial gay love affairs. During the 1980s and 90s he fucked his way through the intergenerational fantasy football league. Fucked Karlheinz Förster. Fucked Jürgen Klinsmann. My father’s betrayal got to my mother, even through the barbiturate haze. I lost her to that. I lost her to a variety of prescription drugs and to magnum bottles of Asti Spumante. Ultimately, I lost her to Lidl champagne flutes.

Later elaborations add to the Beckenbauer storyline, and propose Fashanu as a stepfather figure, although one who obliquely enlarges the family trauma: ‘I lost my mother to a bottomless money hole and my birth country to an area code. My first language is rendered in aspic, and I no longer know what to say to my sister, nor how.’ No family member is a presence in the book.

The book’s science fiction elements come in charmingly homely, even dinky versions. The time machine/spaceship seems to be run on the same basis as Street View: you follow white arrows and can’t enter buildings. When Sterling’s best friend, Chachki Smok, returns from an excursion to the near future, it’s with some clothing advice that Sterling rejects on style grounds. Does two-tone clothing really confuse identification software? It seems both absurdly plausible and plausibly absurd, like the three pints of beer Arthur Dent in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is advised to down immediately before involuntary interstellar travel, to cushion the shock of a matter transference beam on a system not used to such things. There’s some acknowledgment that the bits of kit that give us so much joy in our digital lives were developed to reinforce surveillance and state control, but it’s easily forgotten.

Sterling is rescued from the Camden Town toreros by a stranger, ‘a person in trackie bottoms and a jumper, with short hair, sharp side parting’, carrying a football and a referee’s whistle. The stranger shows them a red card, making escape possible under cover of a sending-off. Sterling is smitten with the stranger, but in the absence of a name resorts to the designation ‘Trackie’. Nevertheless, Sterling intuits ‘they’ as the appropriate pronoun, a choice that survives the discovery that Trackie’s name is the superficially unambiguous Rodney. In this world pronoun identity (despite the word’s derivation of ‘standing in for a name’) precedes and outranks personal identity. It’s disconcerting to find that even the biodrones harvesting information about people’s skin colour, voice timbre, heart rate and facial dimensions, whose entire mission is oppressive, are too scrupulous to squash gender diversity into an oppressive binary, yielding for instance ‘gender: femme of centre’, along with ‘complexion light’, ‘moderated Oxbridge accent’ and ‘Balham regional undertones’.

One version of cultural politics would like to see male and female pronouns die out, but there are plenty of ‘he’s and ‘she’s in Sterling Karat Gold, even if it’s unclear whether people know how to honour invisible preferences. As for the actual narrator, Waidner is too canny to limit the reader’s choice of how to define this person with ‘boy breasts’ (‘sensitive topic, best kept under wraps’). First-person narration is a rich medium in which difference can simply be suspended, without the need to announce the fact. For readers of a novel, the question ‘What is the gender affiliation of this narrator?’ may not seem particularly important. It certainly ranks much lower than ‘Do I want to go on reading?’ from which Sterling Karat Gold has nothing to fear.

Maureen Duffy wrote two novels that play with gender ambiguity, Love Child (1971) and Londoners (1983). The earlier novel has a child narrator, Kit, gender undisclosed, whose mother is having an affair with her husband’s secretary, Ajax, who might also be either male or female. It might be possible to read the book without noticing the indeterminacy, but it’s more likely that readers will be nudged into an exploration of the social role of gender – not necessarily determinant, compared with wealth and class. In Londoners gender cues for the narrator are withheld, but this is a more delicate experiment. Not everyone will notice that the option has been left open, some assuming that female writers use female narrators, others that the name Al is more likely to be a shortening of Alfred or Albert than of Alice or Alma. For readers who do notice, there may be other clues. The narrative space of the book is not gendered, but the social and professional spaces through which the central character moves are. Al is preparing a radio programme for the BBC about François Villon – wouldn’t a female contributor of the time have her ideas patronisingly indulged or dismissed? One of the privileges of masculinity is not to be reminded of it.

The modern range of gender identifications wasn’t available to Duffy (though she gave a transgender woman prominence in her play Washouse), but they might not have been particularly useful. The assumption behind the acronym LGBTQ in its various shortened and extended forms is that its component parts stand shoulder to shoulder, but minorities often gain ground at the expense of other minorities and smooth sailing is not to be taken for granted. Sterling remembers that at school ‘queer youths bullied each other. We put that distance between each other, saying I’m not like you.’ The pattern doesn’t end with school. There is plenty of room for colour clashes in the rainbow flag. Transsexuals, for instance, who have braved surgery to achieve or restore bodily harmony aren’t likely to have a lot in common with those attuned to the non-binary. It isn’t a sense of the gender boundary as fluid and essentially unreal that has guided their actions.

The acknowledgments of Sterling Karat Gold include: ‘Thanks to the queer, trans, black, poc and working-class writers showing us how it’s done.’ The assumption is that working-class values and sexual difference are necessarily in harmony. A dissenting view (argued in Sarah Schulman’s The Ties that Bind) is that the family, irrespective of class, is where sexual minorities learn about their worth, or lack of it. Some families manage a welcome (the writer Tom Wakefield, son of a Staffordshire coal miner, often talked about his family’s clear-eyed acceptance of him), some do not. It’s noticeable that in Sterling Karat Gold the only families (apart from Chachki Smok’s mother, not characterised apart from being described as loving and beloved) are the ones people have chosen. They are atomised individuals, though the ghosts of traditional working-class values also sustain them. Council estates have the same cultural meaning as they did before the right to buy. Football seems to retain some potential healing power, despite the racism and homophobia that was directed towards Fashanu. Sterling has hopes that the Justin Fashanu All-Stars (a real team founded in 2009) will build ‘alternative worlds of amateur football’, where ‘new socialities and support systems’ can come to fruition. Non-fans will be mystified that the phrase ‘the beautiful game’ can be used with little or no irony.

Who in this very polarised world, with its strong sense of us and them, is the enemy? The ultimate culprits, the pullers of the strings, are ‘Western regimes’ and Conservative governments, a disappointingly standard conclusion, but then conspiracy theorists have exhausted all the more imaginative options. Lower down are uncreatives, functionaries, the badly dressed. One of the underlings who arrest Sterling wears pink joggers and a matching sweater; the other sports a similar ensemble in soft orange. In a cosmology so strongly based on self-presentation and personal style, it was always on the cards that the devil would wear Primark. Is it cheeky to describe this very us-and-them worldview, minimising or discounting tensions within and between minorities, as rather binary?

It’s overstating the case to describe Sterling Karat Gold as a rewriting of The Trial (though the cover copy has a good go), even if Kafka’s novel appears in its end credits and the ending of The Trial is revisited at the end of Waidner’s. In their final pages the two books converge most fully and diverge most sharply. The details of Josef K’s miserable end are retained – the knife twisted twice in the heart, the blankly sadistic interest his killers take in his last moments – but Waidner turns the tables. Sterling is not victim but executioner. In Kafka’s story the reasons for the death are both irrelevant and existential. Sterling doesn’t express the motive here as ‘Because I hate you’ or ‘Because it’s either you or me’ (both cogent reasons) but in a series of rhetorical questions. ‘Is this the moment he realises what he has let himself in for? What it means for him to give up control … ? What it’s like to exist on someone else’s terms?’

It isn’t easy to imagine what it would mean, politically and philosophically, to exist on your own terms. Even the plutocrat whose chauffeur-driven car gets stuck in traffic inhabits a set of collective restrictions on the freedom of the individual. And if the goal is to exist on your own terms, and to enact revenge on those who prevent you from doing so, then there is no such thing as society, just individual men and women (and those who would prefer not to say), with the result that the book’s system of values comes uncomfortably close to arriving, by way of a strange ideological wormhole, in Margaret Thatcher’s lap.

Actual wormholes – back doors that connect different places and times – orchestrate the action in Corey Fah Does Social Mobility, Waidner’s follow-up to Sterling Karat Gold. In 2024 Corey Fah encounters in a run-down park – and brings home – a mutant fawn with a strong element of arachnid who seems to have arrived from the forest of a parallel world in 1942, the year of Bambi. The creature is christened Bambi Pavok. Corey’s life partner, Drew Szumski, goes back to the same park and encounters – and brings home – a mutant rabbit that acquires the logical name of Fumper. Drew ‘cried often and easily, usually on behalf of someone else. A descendant of first-generation immigrants, they had love for anything vulnerable and a pronounced sense of injustice.’ That ‘descendant of first-generation immigrants’ is oddly vague, as if claiming a status rather than sketching a family history. It sounds precise but could describe a vast swathe of the population. As with the earlier book, the narrator suggests no self-pronoun, though some chapter titles are non-binary (such as ‘Corey Fah hates on their younger self, but doesn’t admit to it’). But the author’s biography on the cover, which for Sterling Karat Gold omitted pronouns, uses ‘they’, implying a definite push towards the indefinite.

The Camden Town specificity of the earlier book has gone: the bubblegum flavour of the detergent the council uses for street cleaning, ‘the industrial-scale burning of coffee, like always, Camden Coffee Shop forever selling the same five, six types of beans, Continental, Kenya AA Estate’. It’s replaced by a generic depressed urban setting. Drew and Corey live ‘in a one-bed flat on Sociální Estate, a 1960s social housing estate in the Huàirén part of the capital’. Scraps of familiar pop culture survive in this new world, but the joke of (for instance) referring to an episode of Countryfile set in Chernobyl seems wan when set beside the comic energy of Sterling Karat Gold. Drew’s favourite television programme is St Orton Gets to the Bottom of It, whose host obsessively interrogates guests about wormholes – the proper word in this world is ‘červí díra’, plural ‘červí díry’. The obsession is understandable since the host is a version of Joe Orton, saved in 1967 from murderous attack when a červí díra whisked him to an alternative 2014.

As Corey and Drew are in possession of two mutant creatures arrived from another time and place it’s hardly surprising that they end up on the show. Corey finds the host snide and arrogant, but Drew comes close to being seduced. Unless červí díry have sensitivity training installed as standard it seems unlikely that Orton (Sean St Orton in this timeline), insistently masculine in demeanour, would establish a rapport with non-binary Drew, to the point where the offer of a ‘hook up in the men’s toilet’ doesn’t strike Drew as anywhere near as horrible as it should.

Later in the book Corey witnesses the 1967 assault, though this time, the červí díra being blocked, the scene plays out. All the props are there, apart from the weapon with which Kenneth Halliwell killed Orton: the hammer is here transformed into the trophy for a literary award. There are dirty Y-fronts on the floor, collages on the wall, plates on the desk next to the typewriter bearing the remnants of disgusting meals (rice and tinned fish, rice and golden syrup). Halliwell rages, his ash blond wig sliding out of position, at an Orton who ignores him. Sirens can be heard, coming closer. Then comes a curious sentence: the spatiotemporal visitors leave the premises and head back to 2024, just as ‘the police barged their way in, as ever infiltrating gay personal spaces when it was too late by far.’ This is a jarring combination of scolding attitudes – if the police are ‘infiltrating’ they shouldn’t be there at all, though it’s hard to see the argument against entering a crime scene because of the sexual orientation of the residents. If they’ve arrived too late, they should have gone in earlier.

The Orton material is drawn from John Lahr’s biography, Prick Up Your Ears, which plays the part in Corey Fah Does Social Mobility that The Trial did in Sterling Karat Gold – a text to be ‘put to work’, in Waidner’s phrase. Orton’s literary executor was his agent, Peggy Ramsay. She entrusted the material to Lahr, who not only wrote the biography but edited Orton’s diaries for publication. Prick Up Your Ears won the Gay News Book Award in 1978, a slightly surprising choice since, though the subject was gay, the author was not. The choice was tactical, as minority politics needs to be. It sent two messages at once: that gay subjects could be of interest to the wider culture, and that an award from ‘the World’s Largest Circulation Newspaper for Homosexuals’, as the masthead of Gay News proclaimed with pride at the time, was not the kiss of death for a mainstream publisher, but could tickle sales along very nicely.

No one who has read his book could say that Lahr de-gayed the material, but there are emphases that an insider might place differently. It’s not a radical piece of work, and makes no claims to be. Waidner might have cited Simon Shepherd’s Because We’re Queers, published by Gay Men’s Press in 1989. Shepherd argues that Lahr helped to create an Orton industry (of which Shepherd himself cannot avoid being a part), in which Halliwell was offered up as a sacrifice – not in his role as killer but as someone perceived to be effeminate. Orton could be dragged down, or the threat he posed tamed, by making the relationship between the men seem like a sickly copy of a heterosexual marriage. When the diaries were published in 1986 John Osborne felt able to trumpet in the Spectator that Halliwell was ‘the almost perfect type of that familiar social hazard, the homosexual “wife”’. Waidner’s use of Lahr’s book doesn’t really amount to ‘putting it to work’. It’s more a matter of its value as collage material, without the mischievous flair Orton and Halliwell gave to their own collages. It was their collaging of library books that got them sent to prison, after all.

When the follow-up to a prize-winning novel is a weaker performance in the same mode it’s tempting to speculate that the second was in fact written first, but this can’t be the case here, for the simple reason that winning a £10,000 literary prize is the starting point of the plot: when Bambi Pavok so distractingly appeared Corey Fah was waiting at a designated location (Koszmar Circus) for the teleportation of the Award for the Fictionalisation of Social Evils. The rendezvous was missed, and a second delivery attempt (shades of Amazon) also failed. The prize organisers are adamant that they won’t pay out until winner and award are united. After their memorable part in an episode of St Orton Gets to the Bottom of It, and the subsequent disappearance of the host, Corey is offered the job, and the programme becomes a reality show called, yes, Corey Fah Does Social Mobility, with the gimmick that if Corey manages to capitalise on the opportunity by a certain date then, award or no award, the programme makers will come up with the ten grand themselves.

Why should winning a literary prize lead to a loss of confidence, when its purpose is to encourage? In this case, winning involves the loss of a cherished status as outsider. Granted the Goldsmiths isn’t as bourgeois an accolade as the Booker, but even so niche a validating force can have an alienating aspect. The sentence about the writers ‘showing us how it’s done’ returns at the end of Corey Fah Does Social Mobility, but although you can publish a book in solidarity with the writers you feel constitute your creative community, you can’t win a prize in solidarity with them. It’s possible to become so accustomed psychologically to being faced with closed doors that you are paralysed by the sight of an open one. In Waidner’s imagination, the not-quite-acceptance, not-quite-refusal of the award threatens reality itself:

If reteleportation was needed, that is, if for whatever reason normal collection wasn’t achieved, if the winner fluffed it, the risk of the spatiotemporal continuum caving in increased exponentially. Laid the risk firmly with recipients who didn’t know shit about collecting prizes; who didn’t have anyone in their extended social circle who did; who hadn’t had the right sort of training, like Sean St Orton or myself.

In effect, the Award for the Fictionalisation of Social Evils becomes a social evil in itself. It’s a symbol of co-option, and capitalism’s requirement that you turn yourself into a product and then market it.

There’s a remarkably mean-spirited portrait of the prize’s co-ordinator. Corey would know that ‘shoulder-length wave with the fringe anywhere, her saucer-sized glasses on a lanyard, and her flouncy blouse with the #DecoloniseLiterature pin. Another one saying “Ally”.’ When the co-ordinator opens her mouth she moves from naff to insidious: ‘Most people from my background would kill for the platform. Case of self-sabotage here. Why they (plural pronoun, denoting the international, multi-racial working classes) keep doing this to themselves, was incomprehensible to her. Was like, they were throwing the widening participation agenda back into their faces.’ There’s nothing wrong with biting the hand that feeds you, of course, something Orton practised almost on the level of an Olympic sport.

Sterling in the earlier book, offered a coercive deal (immunity for a friend in exchange for the judge’s being offered a starring role in a performance piece), resisted co-option, or rather agreed to it and turned the tables, but it’s not so easy for Corey Fah. As reality contracts to a succession of ten-minute time loops, no one but Corey can take the drastic action that will restore a version of stability. Perhaps some sort of sacrifice is the answer, either of writing itself (a high price to pay) or the nomination of another winner. That’s the trick that finally breaks the spell: Corey stipulates that the prize be delivered to another person in twenty years’ time. The designated recipient is someone even more disadvantaged socially, in fact someone who has been trying to kill Corey with some persistence. This act of selflessness has the effect of turning the other person from misfit into writer, as well as freeing Corey from the paralysis of a corrupt success.

Clearly right action is important in the novel, and it’s unreasonable to expect quite such high standards from the author outside it. The acknowledgments page of Corey Fah Does Social Mobility churns with uneasy subtext. Waidner places the emphasis squarely on cultural politics, singling out the book’s editor, Simon Prosser, as ‘being an agent of progress’ – though the idea of progress in literature isn’t a straightforward one. There’s a shout-out to Peninsula Press, publishers of Sterling Karat Gold, and one editor in particular, Sam Fisher. Presumably Fisher too has vision. Peninsula Press puts out a handful of titles a year; Hamish Hamilton is four times as productive, while its mother ship, Penguin Random House, has a publication capacity of 15,000 titles. By all means express gratitude to your agent – in this case Tracy Bohan of the Wylie Agency. There are any number of reasons for choosing to be represented by the Wylie Agency, if they’ll have you, but agents are in business and that business does not involve setting the world to rights. Wylie clients include the late Henry Kissinger and King Abdullah II of Jordan.

The consequences of equating literature so directly with social justice can be ticklish. Waidner is preoccupied with structural privilege, but these are structural privileges too, awkward and inconvenient things when purity of action is seen as a priority. Careers can have their own upward mobility, one that may come at a cost. A writer signing up with a multinational corporation would have to be naive to ignore an element of righteousness-by-association in the continuity of image. Great care has been taken to make Corey Fah Does Social Mobility look just like the previous book. Strong background colour (green for Sterling, blue for Corey) – check. Title in large caps encroaching on a photographic collage dominated by a mammal (giraffe for Sterling, deer for Corey) – check. Anyone buying both books at the same time would take it for granted that this was a uniform edition, rather than a move towards the corporate. Certainly it makes commercial sense to maintain the connection with a prize-winning predecessor, but there’s a sneakier element involved, the subliminal affirmation of a status quo that no longer exists. The Body Shop didn’t drop its logo when Anita Roddick sold the brand to L’Oréal, nor did Cadbury change the packaging of Green & Black’s chocolate. But it’s in the references to the Goldsmiths Prize that the tone goes most badly astray. Waidner names and thanks the founders and administrators of the prize, adding that ‘winning in 2021 – as a writer lacking the structural privileges related to class, native status and cisgender heteronormativity – has made a significant difference to my practical circumstances.’ That’s the whole idea behind literary prizes! The proportion of writers able to support themselves solely from their writing shrank from 40 per cent in 2006 to 19 per cent in 2022. Waidner goes on to name and thank the judges personally. The way gratitude is being framed here suggests that the judges were expressing solidarity with the writer as much as admiration for the work. As this winner seems to see it, though not exactly an award for the fictionalisation of social evils, the prize amounts to a compensation for them. But why would you want the sum of your disadvantages honoured rather than the talent that has managed to beat them back?

Vol. 46 No. 1 · 4 January 2024

How to Hate Oil

Edmund Gordon

Oil!

by Upton Sinclair.

Penguin, 572 pp., £15.99, January, 978 0 14 313744 3

Upton Sinclair was born in 1878 to a Baltimore family of rapidly diminishing respectability. His father was a whisky salesman who drank a good deal more than he ever managed to sell. When things got especially bad, Sinclair’s mother would seek refuge in the home of her own father, who was secretary-treasurer of the Western Maryland Railroad, or that of her sister, who was married to one of the richest men in Baltimore. Sinclair’s early childhood was a study in social contrasts – a bedbug-infested room in a boarding house one week, ‘silk coverlets’ and ‘terrapin suppers’ the next – and his most successful novels contain similar juxtapositions between the extremes of wealth and poverty.

Reading and writing were Sinclair’s main distractions from the ‘long moral agony’ of his father’s alcoholism. He claimed to have taught himself to read at the age of five, and by his fourteenth birthday he had entered the City College of New York, paying his way by writing pulp stories in which swashbuckling American lads pitched their wits and muscles against malevolent foreigners. He worked fast – producing an average of eight thousand words a day – and on graduating in 1897 got a job with a firm of junk publishers, turning out adventure stories for boys. None of this helped to establish him as a serious writer, and his first novel for adults, Springtime and Harvest, a dainty romance, was rejected several times before he self-published it in 1901, a year after his marriage to Meta Fuller, a childhood friend. It sold a total of two hundred copies. His next few books didn’t fare much better, and Sinclair was forced to move with his wife and infant son to a three-room cabin outside Princeton. In this bucolic setting he soon abandoned his Romantic inclinations and developed in their place ‘a savage hatred of wealth’. He joined the local chapter of the newly founded Socialist Party of America and over the next few years became obsessed with the idea of using fiction to convert the American public to the cause.

Sinclair’s first serious attempt at this came in his fifth novel, The Jungle (1906), an exposé of the exploitative and hazardous conditions in the meatpacking industry. It was a radical departure from his earlier work, both in its proselytising spirit and in marrying its sensational plot to painstaking research – he spent seven weeks touring the stockyards and slaughterhouses of Chicago and interviewing workers. Its publication made him a household name at the age of 27. Meat consumption in the US is said to have dipped for several years after the novel appeared. Some of its influence can be attributed to the backing of President Roosevelt (‘the greatest publicity man of that time’, according to Sinclair), who sent the young author a three-page analysis of The Jungle and an invitation to visit him at the White House for further discussion. These events led directly to the passing of the Federal Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act (although not, to Sinclair’s chagrin, to the drafting of new legislation promoting workers’ rights. ‘I aimed for the public’s heart,’ he said, ‘and by accident hit it in the stomach’).

It was perhaps inevitable that Sinclair would have trouble living up to what his own publicist described as ‘an almost overwhelming inundation of fame’. He sank most of his earnings from The Jungle into an experiment in communal living in Englewood, New Jersey, which came to a sudden and ignominious end when the site burned to the ground. The tabloids hinted at bohemian sexual goings-on, a suggestion that seemed to be borne out when, not long after the whole thing unravelled, Meta left Sinclair for his best friend. None of this affected his productivity: he continued to bash out several thousand words a day while running unsuccessfully for Congress on a socialist ticket and, for a brief period, editing a magazine from his living room. But by the beginning of the 1920s, his sales were in decline and the critics agreed that he was no longer grappling with the important issues that had made The Jungle a hit.

Oil! (1927) was intended to change all that. It follows the career of a character closely modelled on the oil tycoon Edward L. Doheny, as seen from the perspective of his son. Doheny did more than anyone to usher in global petroleum dependency. In 1892 he drilled the first oil well in Los Angeles. The crude oil he found there was too viscous to be turned into kerosene economically, but it could be used as a substitute for coal in combustion engines. He persuaded the Southern Pacific Railroad and the Santa Fe Railroad to try it. By the outbreak of war in 1914, oil was being used to power tanks, trucks and planes; it was clear that control of its supply would be central to future geopolitical considerations. Doheny (who had by that point expanded his operations into Mexico) emerged from the war years a figure of outlandish wealth and huge political influence.

It was Doheny’s political connections that got him mixed up in the Teapot Dome affair, the biggest scandal in American public life before Watergate and the inspiration for Sinclair’s novel. In 1921, Albert Bacon Fall, an associate of Doheny’s from his time as a prospector, was appointed secretary of the interior by President Harding. The following year, he was accused of leasing drilling rights to two naval oil reserves for his own enrichment. During the subsequent congressional investigation, it emerged that Doheny’s son had delivered $100,000 to Fall ‘in a little black bag’. It was corruption at the highest levels of government. The Senate hearings began in October 1923 and on 5 June 1924 Doheny was formally indicted. Fall was convicted of accepting the bribe, becoming the first American cabinet member to spend time in jail, but in a feat of legal escapology, Doheny was acquitted of having paid it.

At the time of the Senate hearings, Sinclair was living in Pasadena with his second wife, Mary Craig. It was her job to manage their finances (Sinclair had a high-minded aversion to anything money-related) and at some point she began making small investments in the local real-estate market. When oil was discovered near some vacant lots she had bought on the west slope of Signal Hill, her gamble seemed to have paid off. She clubbed together with the other local owners to discuss a joint sale. Sinclair accompanied her to ‘many disputatious meetings’ and took notes. The greed displayed by some of the owners – who argued that their lots were worth more than others of the same size – appalled him.

Scenes based on the Signal Hill meetings went straight into the manuscript of Oil! By June 1925, Sinclair was predicting it would be ‘the best thing I have ever done’. The story begins in 1912, when the oil-powered world was still in its infancy. We first encounter our protagonist, thirteen-year-old Bunny Ross, belting down the freeway with his father, J. Arnold Ross (the Doheny figure, but just ‘Dad’ to Bunny):

Any boy will tell you that this is glorious. Whoopee! you bet! Sailing along up there close to the clouds, with an engine full of power, magically harnessed, subject to the faintest pressure from the ball of your foot. The power of ninety horses – think of that! Suppose you had had ninety horses out there in front of you, forty-five pairs in a long line, galloping round the side of a mountain, wouldn’t that make your pulses jump? And this magic ribbon of concrete laid out for you, winding here and there, feeling its way upwards with hardly a variation of grade, taking off the shoulder of a mountain, cutting straight through the apex of another, diving into the black belly of a third; twisting, turning, tilting inwards on the outside curves, tilting outwards on the inside curves, so that you were always balanced, always safe – and with a white-painted line marking the centre, so that you always knew exactly where you had a right to be – what magic had done all this?

Dad’s answer is ‘money’, which establishes him as wrong-headed from the get-go (the correct answer is ‘labour’), but he isn’t exactly a villain, and we aren’t invited to scorn Bunny’s feelings about the pleasures afforded by oil. The opening chapters have many of the elements – speed cops, hitchhikers, fender-benders – that road movies still use to reel in audiences a century later.

In his introduction to the new Penguin Classics edition, Michael Tondre calls this ‘a procedural problem that Oil! never resolves, but rather converts into a source of ongoing fictional intrigue. How to more properly hate oil … becomes both an ideological impasse and a literary plot.’ His confidence that the ultimate target is oil, as distinct from the oil industry, rests on the belief that ‘the question at the heart of Sinclair’s novel’ is ‘how may we transition to a post-carbon democracy?’ It isn’t clear what led him to this conclusion. While it would be nice to find Sinclair anticipating our current ecological concerns, there’s little evidence that the notion of ‘a post-carbon democracy’ ever crossed his mind. The novel draws a sharp contrast between the American oil industry (‘a little ruling group of operators, who wouldn’t pay their men a living wage, but would work them twelve hours a day’) and the Soviet system (‘a state trust, in which the workers’ unions were recognised, and given a voice in labour affairs … a new culture, based on industry instead of exploitation’), but it doesn’t offer any alternative to Dad’s view that ‘there has got to be oil … This is an oil age, and when you try to shut oil off from production, it’s …like you tried to dam Niagara Falls.’

Sinclair wanted to use the novel not only to lambast oil capitalism, but to stake his claim on Southern California as a literary setting. As well as automobile culture (and the new sexual freedom it enabled), he describes the burgeoning movie industry (Bunny dates a well-known Hollywood actress) and the ‘weird cults and doctrines’ that were already coming to define Los Angeles County (one character, a preacher, becomes an early radio evangelist and ends up in real estate). There’s even a brief cameo from a woman who has had ‘surgical operations performed on her face to keep it from “sagging”’. The novel dips into these different spheres without ever taking its eye off oil, which sets them all in motion.

The modernity of Sinclair’s California is at odds with his style. He had no time for recent developments in literary technique and his primary models were Zola (from whom he learned the importance of shoe-leather research) and Dickens (from whom he derived a sense of social scale, but not a sense of humour, unless you count the sledgehammer irony that occasionally batters his descriptions into a conspicuous point). His handling of the plot is so laborious that you almost wince in recognition when he comes to describe an oil well starting up: ‘Bunny moved the lever, and the engine gave a thump, and the chain gave a pull, and the gears gave a rattle, and the rotary table gave a turn.’ He’s pedantic with social detail (which partly accounts for the book’s length) and inept with psychological detail (he once told his daughter-in-law that he was ‘indifferent to personal individual affairs’, something he had the grace to recognise was ‘a bad handicap in a novelist’). At times he asks the reader to do the work – ‘You can imagine what fun Bunny had’ – as if his job stopped at sourcing the raw material for a story.

Paul Thomas Anderson therefore had room to experiment when he adapted the novel for the screen as There Will Be Blood (2007). His protagonist, Daniel Plainview (the role for which Daniel Day-Lewis won his second Oscar), is a much richer and more disturbing version of Doheny than Sinclair attempted. Even before he commits the first of two murders, his sociopathic tendencies are evident in the sadism with which he treats everyone around him; his only tender feelings appear to be for oil. At the height of the Teapot Dome scandal, the real Doheny tried to persuade Cecil B. DeMille to make a movie about his life. It’s safe to say There Will Be Blood wasn’t what he had in mind.

Anderson’s film was made almost twenty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, which accounts for some of its other deviations from the source material. Although it retains a prominent role for the sanctimonious Prophet of the Church of the Third Revelation (Eli Watkins in the novel, reborn as Eli Sunday in the film and played by Paul Dano), it has considerably less use for his brother Paul (also played by Dano) and none whatsoever for Paul’s left-wing activism. Plainview, with no son to secure his empire, adopts one when the opportunity arises – the blood of the title is as much corporate strategy as dark prophecy – before sending the boy away after a mining accident leaves him deaf. Bunny, by contrast, grows up to become a socialist, while managing to stay on excellent terms with his industrialist father. The film has a visionary quality: it starts out as a punk-Western and ends up somewhere between expressionism and myth. The mode of the novel is socialist realism.

Bunny’s political awakening begins early in 1917, when the workers at his father’s mines go on strike, and accelerates later that year, during the Red Scare. These events teach him not to trust the government, the police or anything he reads in the newspapers. He comes to see that the war in Europe is killing and maiming working-class boys in their thousands, while making the oil men richer, and that the American military maintains a presence in Siberia only because the government wants access to the oil fields. Soon he’s using phrases such as ‘class consciousness’ and ‘exploitation of the workers’ and bankrolling a Bolshevik magazine.

His sister calls him an ingrate, and she has a point. Bunny spouts off about socialism without renouncing his playboy lifestyle or having it out with Dad. Sinclair, however, treats him with patience and respect, because it’s through Bunny that the reader can be shown both the insensitive rich and the exploited poor. His political education is a conduit for our own, and the novel is full of moments when things ‘become clear to him’, usually in the form of unwieldy propositions such as ‘the present system could not go on forever – the resources and wealth of the country thrown into an arena, to be scrambled for and carried off by the greediest.’

Christopher Hitchens once wrote that in The Jungle ‘Sinclair’s realism … got in the way of his socialism.’ Nobody could say the same about Oil! Sinclair flexes his research, but it’s always pressed into the service of the socialist cause. Once the attempt to buy the naval reserves comes to light, Dad repents of his part in it: ‘How many, many times he wished that he had listened to the warnings of his young idealist and kept clear of this mess of corruption!’ He flees to Europe, where he dies of pneumonia. Paul is beaten to death by a right-wing mob. In the final pages, the narration rises to fire-and-brimstone pitch warning of ‘an evil Power which roams the earth, crippling the bodies of men and women, and luring the nations to destruction by visions of unearned wealth’. We’ve encountered this register elsewhere in the novel, but not in the narrator’s voice. ‘Upon these hills have I tended my father’s herds, like the prophets of old,’ Eli declaims, ‘and have harkened unto the voice of the Holy Spirit, speaking to me in the storms and the thunders.’

Sinclair’s zeal was at least authentic. He seems reflexively to have discounted the legitimacy of anything that showed the left in a less than admirable light. On 16 September 1920, a bomb was left in a cart outside the J.P. Morgan building on Wall Street: it killed forty people and injured hundreds. Detectives established that the device had been made from TNT and packed with iron weights. They didn’t find the person responsible, but did recover four printed flyers bearing the message: ‘Remember we will not tolerate any longer. Free the political prisoners or it will be sure death for all of you. American Anarchist Fighters.’ The incident was a PR catastrophe for the radical left. This is the way it’s depicted in Oil!:

It chanced that a wagon loaded with blasting material, making its way through Wall Street with customary indifference to municipal ordinances, met with a collision and exploded. The accident happened in front of the banking offices of Morgan and Company, and about a dozen people were killed. A few minutes after the accident, the bankers called in America’s sleuth-celebrity to solve the mystery; and this able businessman, facing the situation that if it was an accident it was nothing, while if it was a Bolshevik plot it was several hundred thousand dollars, took three minutes to look about him, and then pronounced it a plot.

There’s something chilling about Sinclair’s readiness to slash more than two-thirds off the death toll, not to mention his insouciance in pulling a conspiracy theory out of his hat. He may genuinely have suspected, as he wrote in an op-ed for the socialist newspaper Appeal to Reason, that the official version of events was ‘a deliberate plot of the authorities to discredit the radical movement’, but he knew beyond doubt that his own version was hogwash. The passage does at least clarify one thing: a novel like this isn’t trying to achieve literary distinction. It wants its success to be measured in political terms. The Jungle owes its current reputation less to its enduring relevance than to its status as a work of fiction that demonstrably changed things. Oil! belongs to a much larger category: works that didn’t.

Vol. 46 No. 1 · 4 January 2024

Even the Eyelashes

Erin L. Thompson

Empires of the Dead: Inca Mummies and the Peruvian Ancestors of American Anthropology

by Christopher Heaney.

Oxford, 358 pp., £22.99, September, 978 0 19 754255 2

The Spanish garrotted Atahualpa, the last Inca emperor of what is now Peru, in 1533, but their control over their new territory was far from certain. One way they tried to solidify their claim was to promote alliances between those loyal to the Spanish crown and the remaining Inca aristocracy. When the conquistador Pedro Pizarro went to ask one Inca nobleman for permission to arrange a marriage involving a woman in his family, he got a surprise. ‘I thought that I was going to speak to some living Indian,’ he wrote, ‘but they took me to the figure of one of these dead men.’

When they died, Inca royalty had their viscera extracted and their bodies treated with preservatives including antibacterial tree resin. They were bound with cords in a seated position and had calabash rinds inserted under their cheeks, so their skin remained tight and glossy as their flesh dried. After a year, they were reintroduced into Inca society. Dressed and wearing jewellery, they moved back into their palaces, where they were attended by servants who wore golden masks while interpreting the wishes of the dead. Two of these speakers told Pizarro that ‘their lord the dead man agreed’ to his proposal, as Christopher Heaney describes in his chronicle of five hundred years of encounters with the lively Andean dead.

Soon after capturing Atahualpa, the conquistadors looted the palace of his father, Huayna Capac. They took his gold ornaments but left his preserved body behind, which must have mystified the Inca, who secreted Huayna Capac in a more secure place. The former emperor was thought capable of such powerful acts as bringing or stopping rain. Rival imperial aspirants sometimes seized or even burned the bodies of one another’s ancestors in order to cut off such sources of power.

The Chinchorro culture began mummifying their dead in what is now southern Peru and northern Chile around 6000 BCE, making South America’s earliest mummified bodies two thousand years older than those of Egypt. When the Inca conquered much of the Andes in the 15th century, they found that their new subjects practised many ways of preserving the dead. The hot sand near the coast preserved bodies buried there through desiccation, while in the mountains bodies were freeze-dried in caves or special mortuary towers. Communities often continued to care for their preserved ancestors, bringing them out of their resting places to help settle disputes or to assure good rains and harvests.

The Spanish wanted to convert Indigenous Peruvians to Catholicism and so tried to bring an end to this veneration. In 1599, Jesuits staged the Last Judgment in Lima, using mummified bodies to represent the resurrected dead. Early in the next century, clerics presided over what Heaney calls ‘round-ups’ of preserved bodies. Indigenous Peruvians were summoned to watch as hundreds of their mummified ancestors were thrown onto bonfires; those who had hidden the bodies were whipped. Royal bodies were treated with more respect, especially once the Spanish realised the power that resided in being seen to control them. Huayna Capac had an especially active afterlife. Handed over by one of his converted sons for burial, he was stolen from his tomb and spent several decades at large, sometimes hidden alongside other imperial bodies in storage bins for dried maize. In the mid-16th century, Cusco’s royal magistrate, Polo Ondegardo, took Huayna Capac into custody to ensure the obedience of his descendants. Essentially capitulating to the Inca way of death, Ondegardo allowed Huayna Capac to be wrapped in a white sheet and carried in a litter around Cusco to receive veneration. One chronicler recorded that local people ‘knelt in the streets and bowed with tears and groans’. Even the Spaniards took off their caps, as befitted the passage of a king. The chronicler touched Huayna Capac’s finger and reported that it was ‘like that of a wooden statue, it was so hard and strong’. The last reliable record of Huayna Capac came 111 years after his death, when an Augustinian friar reported in 1638 that he was on display in a hospital in Lima.

Empires of the Dead takes us from pre-contact display of emperors and ancestors to the present day, when thousands of Andean bodies are held in museum collections around the world. The Smithsonian Institution currently holds bones from at least 4851 Peruvians. Heaney draws on a rich assortment of chronicles, museum records, journalistic and scientific reports, archives on three continents and an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (featuring a life-sucking ‘Inca Mummy Girl’) to rewrite the history of anthropology in the Americas, showing its origins in colonial attempts to understand and control Indigenous subjects, and discussing the way it was used to support successive claims to power.

Heaney shows the anxieties that underpinned academic disputes about what to call the Inca dead. As soon as they began receiving descriptions of Huayna Capac and other imperial bodies in the 1530s, European scholars started to debate whether they were preserved, embalmed or mummified. Each alternative carried alarming implications for the Europeans, who placed the dead, like the living, in clear hierarchical categories. Had Huayna Capac simply failed to decay, like an incorruptible saint? Was he embalmed, proving that the Inca had technical knowledge and resources equal to the embalmers who served royalty in Europe? Or was he mummified, which would put Peru in competition with the ancient Egyptians? The last category was the least threatening to the existing belief in the superiority of the Old World. But Europeans still felt uneasy about Peruvian bodies, ‘wanting neither Hair on the Head, nor Eye-brows, and even the very Eye-lashes’, being better preserved than Egyptian ones. As Peru moved towards independence in the late 18th century, its inhabitants began to make use of these comparisons, employing the ancient dead to assert their place in the modern world. In a speech celebrating the opening of Lima’s first anatomical theatre in 1792, a Peruvian doctor claimed that the Inca had perpetuated the life of their ancestors ‘while the Egyptians only prolonged the death of their own’.

Peru’s national museum was founded in 1826. Its main gallery – which displayed mummified bodies from the Andean highlands – had once been the hall of judgment of Lima’s Inquisition. Heaney argues that the presence of the ancestors effectively ‘reconsecrated’ the site, turning a ‘terrifying colonial instrument of Christian discipline and bureaucracy’ into a ‘republican temple to national Peruvian science and history’. Most Peruvian scientists and intellectuals – known as the ilustrados – were ‘creoles’, from mixed Spanish and Indigenous families. They often claimed to be the scientific heirs of Inca knowledge, including the skill of preserving the dead. In 1891, one of them performed a public autopsy in Lima’s cathedral on the body of the long-dead Francisco Pizarro. Many ilustrados were responsible for sending ancient bodies to museums and collections outside Peru. Heaney found that there were at least fifteen mummified Peruvians in British museums by 1848, including one body that had been imported accidentally, in a shipment of guano.

The export of ancient bodies became so important to Peru that the laws protecting them were changed. Although in 1822 the newly independent country had declared that all contents of ancient burial sites were national property, the government reversed course in 1839. It decreed that ‘all Peruvians that might desire to work in the discovery of hidden treasure’ in ancient tombs ‘could do so freely’. (In 1929, it changed tack again, declaring that all newly excavated ancient human remains and artefacts belonged to the state.)

Not all Peruvians, however, believed that mummified bodies were the result of ancient skill. Heaney found one scientist who insisted that the bodies were so well preserved because of Peruvian soil’s abundant minerals and nitrates. Not coincidentally, he was trying to attract foreign investors to mine those natural resources. The interweaving of science, economics and politics proved dangerous at the turn of the 20th century, and some leading scientists, who were seen as too closely allied with deposed political leaders, were sent into exile. When archaeologists from Yale were excavating at Machu Picchu in the 1910s, Peru’s president, Augusto Leguía, eager to encourage foreign scholarship, dispatched the national police to force the local population to work as diggers at the site. Some of them, seeing the ancient bodies they had unearthed being packed up, came to believe the excavations were part of a territorial dispute between Peru and Chile. They reported that the Yale archaeologists planned to smuggle the bodies out of the country, reanimate them and deploy them as mummified soldiers fighting for Chile.

Well into the 20th century, North American scholars tried to use Peruvian remains to demonstrate the superiority of white European settlers. In The Mismeasure of Man (1981), Stephen Jay Gould showed not only that such theories were based on the disproved belief that cranial capacity predicts intelligence, but that the artificially shaped skulls of preserved ancient Peruvians had often been taken to prove they were a naturally ‘small-brained’ race.

Heaney adds to this intellectual history by chronicling the personal and intellectual disputes between Peruvian and foreign scholars, most notably between Julio César Tello, celebrated as the Americas’ first Indigenous archaeologist, and Aleš Hrdlička, the founding father of physical anthropology in the United States. Tello, born to a Quechua-speaking family in an Andean village in 1880, succeeded despite the Peruvian elite’s anti-Indigenous prejudices in qualifying as a doctor. In 1909 he went to Harvard to study anthropology, taking with him a thousand ancient skulls. He intended to use them to fund his work and to demonstrate his contribution to the study of his ancestors. They were especially valuable because many showed signs of trepanation, a surgical operation to cut away fractured bone or relieve pressure on the brain after an injury. Observers had long noted that there were holes in many ancient Andean skulls, but had believed them to be the marks of fatal violence or post-mortem modification. That had changed in 1863, when a Peruvian antiquarian and surgeon convincingly showed that an ancient Peruvian skull with a quadrilateral hole had been trepanned. Only around 25 per cent of modern patients survived trepanation until the late 19th century, when the French anthropologist and surgeon Paul Broca, in part inspired by Andean examples, popularised a modernised procedure. By contrast, around 75 per cent of the trepanned Peruvian skulls showed signs of healing. This inverse success rate, Heaney notes, ‘turned global hierarchies of science, civilisation and savagery on their head’.

Tello’s history shows, however, that even when the skill of ancient Peruvians was indisputable, that of modern Peruvians could be discounted. Hrdlička, who had recently returned from an expedition to Peru, tried to buy the skulls from Tello for the Smithsonian, saying they would write a book about them together. But as the sale neared completion, Tello found out that Hrdlička had no intention of keeping his promise, so he sold the skulls to Harvard instead. Heaney has found archival evidence that Hrdlička subsequently took every opportunity to snipe at Tello, writing letters about how difficult he was and advising the Yale academics at Machu Picchu not to work with him. While earlier Peruvian scholars had claimed trepanation was an innovation of the Incas, Tello always argued that it had been used for far longer. His theory eventually became the consensus in the US – but only because North American scholars used his skulls, data and photographs without crediting his intellectual contribution. They didn’t regard him as a fitting speaker for his own dead.

The skulls now at Harvard were far from the only ancient remains that Tello sold from the many tombs he emptied in the course of his career. Heaney, who is attentive to the complex personal and cultural factors shaping intellectual history, suggests that we view Tello’s actions as a new development in ‘Andean mortuary creativity’ rather than as acts of destruction. The ‘constant negotiation’ over changing ‘rituals of knowing, mourning and care’ for the Andean dead need to be taken into account in the debates over the best way to address the ‘non-metaphorical skeletons in museums’ closets’.

Yale, Harvard and the Smithsonian have in recent years been among the many institutions to apologise for collecting human remains, and to consider whether they should continue to display and study these bodies or repatriate them. But even the increasing tendency to stress the humanity of what were once regarded as specimens, by identifying them as ‘mummified bodies’ rather than ‘mummies’, echoes earlier arguments over the terminology of preservation, embalming and mummification. Heaney doesn’t say what should happen to the Peruvian remains. He thinks that coming from him such pronouncements would seem like a Hrdlička-like attempt by an outsider to seize control. But Empires of the Dead should shape current debates, if only by reminding us that today’s museum collections are more accurately understood as ‘re-collections’. Before ending up in a foreign institution, an ancient Peruvian body might have been paraded to bring rain, buried by priests and disinterred by reluctant converts. The museums are merely another temporary resting place, no more permanent than their tombs.

Vol. 46 No. 1 · 4 January 2024

At the Cluny

At the Cluny

Lloyd de Beer

In 2005, during preparations for a new underground train line in Cologne, a treasure trove of precious stones was uncovered close to the city’s Gothic cathedral: tiny polished cabochons, diamond-shaped pyramids and thousands of fragments of beautiful unworked shards. Archaeologists were quick to identify this hoard of disjecta membra as the offcuts and unused scraps of a 12th-century workshop specialising in cutting rock crystal, a material which has ranked since our earliest history as among the rarest to be worked by human hands. Writing in the first century ad, Pliny the Elder considered it superior to ivory and gold: ‘Of objects that lie upon the surface of the earth, it is crystals that are most highly esteemed.’

The Saint-Denis Crystal (c.850).

Rock crystal’s status stemmed from its rarity and its extraordinary beauty, made even more glorious through carving and polishing. But above all it was the stone’s unparalleled clarity that provoked wonder in those who beheld it. Up until the Renaissance, when Venetian craftsmen discovered a way to produce colourless glass – which they called cristallo – rock crystal was by some measure the clearest known solid. It was for this reason that Pliny argued it wasn’t like other stones at all but was, in fact, petrified water. He believed that rock crystal could only ‘be found in places where the winter snow freezes with the greatest intensity’; in his case, Alpine riverbeds, the major source of rock crystal in Europe at the time. From this idea of the stone’s cold, magical transformation, it was given the name krystallos (Greek for ‘ice’). In fact it is a variety of quartz, formed from cooling magma in the earth’s crust.

Voyage dans le cristal at the Musée de Cluny (until 14 January) explores the myriad ways humans have manipulated rock crystal. The exhibition’s title derives from George Sand’s novella of 1864, in which two cousins called Alexis and Laura find a way to enter a crystal, discovering a fantastical realm within. Among the first – and earliest – objects in the Cluny’s crystal world is a tiny prehistoric rock crystal arrowhead or spear, discovered in the 19th century at the grotte du Placard in Vilhonneur, and dated to between 21,000 and 16,000 bc. It’s shaped like a bay leaf and is no longer than a matchstick. The rock crystal treasures on display from the ancient Mediterranean include engraved cylindrical seals from Mesopotamia, miniature divine statues from the Hittite empire and carved cats and hippopotamuses from Egypt. Many of these objects share an equivalent scale; their form derives from the shape of naturally occurring crystal shards. But other ancient fragments signal the existence of monumental forms: a curious life-sized crystal hand, perhaps that of a Roman emperor, is remarkable for its verisimilitude.

Rock crystal carvings from the Middle Ages are particularly enchanting. In certain parts of Europe, in workshops patronised by royalty, highly skilled sculptors learned to manipulate the optical properties of the stone for dramatic effect. A bulbous ninth-century cabochon, the size of a large goose egg and known as the Saint-Denis Crystal (from its historical association with the royal abbey), is one of the best examples of this optical playfulness. On its flat side, a scene of the Crucifixion has been engraved, with Christ at the centre, his arms outstretched, and Mary and John the Evangelist below. When turned over and viewed through the thickness of the egg-shaped cabochon, the scene of Christ’s painful sacrifice is magnified. Depending on the light source and your viewpoint, his body contorts this way and that, and Mary and John’s grief seems all the more intense.

The Lothair Crystal (c.855-69).

More spectacular still is the Lothair Crystal, named after the Frankish king who ordered it, possibly in Reims in the ninth century. It’s an idiosyncratic work, on a par with the best manuscripts of the period – the equivalent, say, of the Utrecht Psalter. Scenes from the story of Susannah and the Elders are painstakingly engraved into the crystal surface in expressive and minute detail, each image topped by a millimetre-sized inscription in Latin to identify the story. Its gilded silver frame dates from the 15th century; unlike many of the earlier carvings in the exhibition, the Lothair Crystal remained in use for the best part of a millennium, perhaps remounted to a precious reliquary or fixed into a royal throne. What exactly it was used for when it was first produced remains unclear.

Reliquary chest with rock crystal plates (c.1200).

Reuse is central to the story of rock crystal in the Middle Ages. Europeans desired and sought out carvings from the Islamic world, particularly those produced during the Abbasid and Fatimid caliphates. Islamic rock crystal was sourced not from the European alps but from Madagascar, which goes some way to disproving Pliny’s theory that the stone had an icy origin. Islamic trade networks at the time stretched from China to Africa. A small group of seven pitchers, made around 1000 ad in Cairo, are among the most awe-inspiring works ever created in rock crystal. (Sadly, they are too fragile to have been included in the show, but the catalogue describes them in detail.) Each jug was made from a single large piece of crystal, which was carefully hollowed out and decorated with images of plants and beasts: lions, birds of prey, ibexes. Despite having been made for reigning caliphs, several of these objects later entered church treasuries in Europe, including those of San Marco in Venice and Fermo Cathedral, where they were equally prized for their beauty and the skill of their fashioning. Other smaller, less dramatic items from the Islamic world also made their way to Europe. Finger-sized crystal phials, possibly produced as perfume vessels in the tenth century (and perhaps as a by-product of larger vessels), were transformed after their arrival in Europe into miniature Christian reliquaries. Some still contain wrapped silk relics and the handwritten label describing their saintly contents.

Vol. 46 No. 1 · 4 January 2024

Zombie v. Zombie

Jeremy Harding on the new Pan-Africanism

In the past three years there have been seven military coups in former French colonies, all in West or Central Africa. Two coups in Mali, in 2020 and 2021, saw a president and then an interim president deposed. Assimi Goïta, a colonel in his early forties, is now running the country. In Guinea, Alpha Condé, a president in his eighties, was removed by the military in September 2021 after he tried to swing a third term. The president of Burkina Faso was forced out of office by the army in 2022. Eight months later the military head of an interim regime was toppled by Ibrahim Traoré, a junior officer in his thirties. Last July, the president of Niger was removed from office and replaced by General Abdourahamane Tchiani. In Gabon in August, Ali Bongo Ondimba, heir to his father’s presidency, was replaced by General Brice Oligui Nguema: Omar and Ali Bongo had run the country for more than half a century. A radical impatience with older men presiding over younger men and women is a key to this upheaval, but France’s lingering postcolonial influence is decisive.

Guinea is an outlier here: it broke with France at the end of the 1950s, opting for complete independence rather than membership of the Franco-African ‘community’ proposed by de Gaulle. By 1960 the others had signed up to his vision: independence in name – and eventually membership of international bodies such as the UN and the Organisation of African Unity – but always in the shadow of the former metropole. A dozen former French colonies still operate (mostly to their detriment) with a shared currency: the CFA franc, pegged first to the franc and now to the euro – for all the control they have over their money, they may as well be in the Eurozone. For sixty years, France has kept a vigilant eye on defence policy in its former colonies and clung tenaciously to military bases. To the fury of opposition movements, it has propped up leaders it favours. Bongo père et fils were typical. So was Blaise Compaoré, who toppled Thomas Sankara – president of Burkina Faso, and still a hero for young West African opposition activists – in 1987. Sankara was murdered during the putsch and Compaoré went on to run the country for more than 25 years. After an uprising in 2014, French security forces spirited him out of the country.

But the clock has run down on these arrangements. The CFA is under review; if it survives it will be under another name, with more lenient terms for members of the zone. France’s military presence is shrinking. It deployed its armed forces in Mali in 2013 to slow up a jihadist advance, but bitter arguments with the government in Bamako as the jihadists made gains led to the coup eight years later. France has since pulled back from Mali – and reduced its forces in Niger – under pressure from public opinion in Africa and the new khaki regimes. ‘La France doit partir’ (‘France must go’) has been the word on the street for three years. In December, the regime in Ouagadougou announced that copies of Le Monde would no longer be distributed in Burkina Faso: after reporting a massacre by an al-Qaida affiliate, it had been accused of complicity with the killers.

This cycle of anti-colonial anger has taken on a ‘Pan-Africanist’ inflection. Or rather, the term Pan-Africanism has done the rounds, especially on social media, in support of the coups, as though the officers in charge were acting not only on behalf of their own countries but the entire continent. Even Emmanuel Macron used the word during an address to the French diplomatic corps last summer. Caught off-guard by the coup in Niger and reluctant to recall the French ambassador, he complained of ‘pseudo Pan-Africanists’ – the putschists and their supporters – opening the gates to ‘new imperialists’, i.e. Russia and China. Pan-Africanism is morphing rapidly into a warrior term, for those who approve of the coups and for those, like Macron, who deplore them. No one is on steady ground when they invoke the Pan-Africanist model.

In 2021, the Côte d’Ivoire journalist Gauz – real name Armand Patrick Gbaka-Brédé – announced in Jeune Afrique that Pan-Africanism had become a relic. Pan-Africanism, in his view, had always been a gentleman’s club. Search in vain, he wrote, for women of note, or women at all. But what of the Canadian suffragist Anna H. Jones or the author and scholar Anna Julia Cooper, both of whom addressed the First Pan-African Conference in 1900? Or the journalist Amy Ashwood Garvey who spoke at the first postwar conference in the UK, in October 1945? ‘We are here,’ she said, ‘to tell the world that black peoples, supported by the semi-colonial people in America and millions of other people, are determined to emancipate themselves’? The Sixth Pan-Africanist Congress of 1974 in Dar-es-Salaam – the last, and the only one to be held in Africa – was organised largely by African American women, including Sylvia Hill, who went on to become a dogged anti-apartheid activist.

This new shorthand Pan-Africanism has little in common with the compelling political programme that survives today as a set of interlocking cultural assumptions – in the Caribbean, Africa and the US – steeped in a history of opposition to racism and colonialism. The cultural dimension of Pan-Africanism, for younger generations of would-be adherents, has been reduced to a feud with a single colonial master – its language, its media, its flag, its lofty Declaration of the Rights of Man – while their sense of a political dimension seems to begin precisely where their predecessors failed, in the quest for national sovereignty.

How to become a nation was one of Pan-Africanism’s most pressing concerns. ‘The claims of no people,’ Martin Robison Delany wrote in 1852, ‘are respected by any nation, until they are presented in a national capacity.’ Delany was an early advocate for Black autonomy – most scholars call it ‘Black nationalism’ – and threw his weight behind an oppressed diaspora and their political rights. ‘Here were we born,’ he wrote of the US, ‘and from here will we not be driven by any policy that may be schemed against us.’ But it wasn’t enough, in his view, to be ‘a nation within a nation’. ‘Where shall we go?’ he asked. One answer seemed to be Liberia, which he visited in 1859; he returned in two minds. Nonetheless by the 1860s he was urging ‘Africa for the African race and Black men to rule them. By Black men I mean men of African descent who claim an identity with the race.’

Decades later, W.E.B. Du Bois, the monumental figure of the Pan-Africanist movement, was still wrestling with this challenge. In 1921, at the second meeting of the Pan-African Congress, Du Bois called for the ‘rise of a great, Black African State’: a continental federation that could ensure ‘absolute equality of the races’ across the board – and by implication a single, postcolonial Africa whose delegates would take their place at the international conference tables. Hopes were high: the assembly of the League of Nations, a representative sample of states rather than Great Powers in conclave, had convened in 1920. But unitary statehood was an elusive ambition, nurtured mostly in the diaspora and impossible to transpose to Africa. It remained elusive even when the symbolic leadership of the Pan-Africanist movement passed from Du Bois to a generation of anti-colonialists, led by the rising star of the Gold Coast, Kwame Nkrumah.

That moment came at the Fifth Pan-African Congress in Manchester in 1945. The point man between the diaspora and the African delegates was the Trinidadian George Padmore, who had joined the Communist Party in the US in the 1920s, spoken out in the 1930s against Stalin’s conciliatory approach to European imperialism and been expelled from the Comintern for consorting with ‘bourgeois’ groups and ‘striving for race unity’ instead of ‘class unity’. (His childhood friend in Trinidad C.L.R. James, who had given Nkrumah a letter of introduction to Padmore, was then at work on The Black Jacobins.) A version of socialist internationalism emerged from the conference, with Soviet influence in parenthesis, seeming to offer Pan-Africanism a promising future. Du Bois, who had spent the 1890s wondering whether Pan-Slavism and German Romantic nationalist theory held the keys to the movement he envisaged, certainly thought so. Nkrumah was in no doubt. He invited Padmore to Ghana. Together they would lay the groundwork for a Pan-Africanist International and turn Accra into its continental HQ.

Padmore’s experience of Nkrumah’s Ghana was mixed. Two shifts in Pan-Africanist ideology took place during his lifetime (he died in 1959). Like Du Bois, the movement had come a long way from 19th-century European theories of race: the urgent questions, in the interwar period and beyond, were how to achieve justice for Black people in the New World and colonial Africa, and what institutions – if any – could conjugate Africa and the diaspora as a real political community. The second change took place between the Bandung Conference of 1955 and the formation of the Non-Aligned Movement a few years later. It was triggered by Nasser’s decision to nationalise the Suez Canal and the tripartite invasion of Egypt by Israel, Britain and France that followed. The peak of Nasser’s anti-colonial prestige coincided with the Battle of Algiers (1956-57), a deadly acceleration of the Algerian struggle against French rule.

Until then the Africa of Arab and Berber peoples had been stranded beyond the Pan-Africanist imagination; now it could no longer be ignored. Nkrumah wasn’t the only leader who had seen this coming. The Organisation of African Unity, convened in Addis Ababa in 1963, was full of honourable Pan-Africanist intentions. But most heads of state who inherited colonial possessions were reluctant to fritter away their sovereignty in a nebulous federation on a continent divided by Cold War sponsors, glaring disparities in natural resources and separatist passions. Nkrumah’s vision of a United States of Africa remains as distant as it was in 1966, when he was informed in Beijing that he’d been toppled in absentia by the Ghanaian army and police, with a helping hand from Washington. He had travelled east to attend a peace conference in North Vietnam.

Muammar Gaddafi was the last influential African leader to claim the mantle of Pan-Africanism and call for the creation of an African superstate. By the end of the 1970s, with his hopes for Pan-Arabism dashed, he was doubling down on Libyan influence in Africa. In the 1990s he led the call for a new organisation to replace the OAU. The African Union was launched in 2002 ‘to achieve greater unity and solidarity between African countries’. In 2004 it created a Pan-African Parliament, a legislative body that sits in South Africa. In 2021 a procedural row about the way the Parliament’s president should be elected ended in violence. Two MPs, both women, were injured. Julius Malema, leader of South Africa’s radical populist Economic Freedom Fighters Party, threatened to kill a fellow MP.

Gaddafi, the chair of the AU in 2009, didn’t live to witness these scenes. In office he spoke out quixotically for an EU-style African passport and – as Macron has in Europe – for a pan-continental army. He was a believer in governmental institutions: the BRICS model of vigorous rising economies meant less to him than committees in permanent session proposing rules by which very few member states could abide. He tried in vain to cling on to the AU chairmanship as his term was ending. The following year, during the Nato intervention in Libya, he was murdered by opposition forces. He was a polarising figure in Africa, mistrusted by some for backing insurgencies, by others for supporting corrupt regimes. But his admirers, who include very few Libyans, still see him as a pan-anti-Westerner – and thus an honorary Pan-Africanist – martyred during a violent foreign intervention: one in a list of leaders undermined by European and US interference in several countries, among them Congo, Ghana, Angola, Chad and Central African Republic.

Last September, the Cameroonian political theorist and historian Achille Mbembe published an analysis of the situation in former French colonies. He took ‘Pan-Africanist’ to be a misdescription of an ‘imagined emotional community’ in West Africa and other parts of the continent. What was gaining ground, he argued, was ‘a poor person’s version of Pan-Africanism’. A better term, he thought, was ‘neo-sovereigntism’: an absolutist model of self-government with zero interference by external forces. For Mbembe, African neo-sovereigntism is a rhetoric of entrenchment and a reaction against disempowerment. Its origins lie in a series of reversals that began in the 1980s when structural adjustment bit deep into public spending programmes. It persisted in the 1990s as the rapid transformation of one-party states into multi-party democracies became mired in difficulties.

The greatest of those difficulties, for Mbembe, was that states often ended up with a multi-party system in principle and one-party rule in practice. Ruling parties, he argued, tended to champion ‘good governance’ at any price, though this turned out to be a euphemism for subservience to the evangelists of prosperity: foreign banks and global financial institutions proposing balanced budgets and wafer-thin state expenditures as bulwarks of democracy. The results in Africa have been mixed. In Mbembe’s view, they have led to a decisive turn against Western-style democracy – long regarded as a foreign ‘gadget’, first by intellectuals and activists in the 1980s and thirty years later by a rejectionist tide flooding social media across Africa. Any perceived encroachment on sovereignty by Western capital is a call to arms. Migrants, too, can fall foul of neo-sovereigntist ideology, especially in South Africa, where the ringleaders of Operation Dudula (‘beat back’ in Zulu), an anti-immigrant vigilante movement, plan to run in this year’s elections.

Mbembe isn’t the only commentator to detect a liking for strong men in these ‘imagined emotional communities’: on the one hand, the putschists, who can explode the democratic gadget; on the other, the two no-nonsense patrons, Russia and China, who can clear away the debris. In 2022, the Senegalese opposition figure Ousmane Sonko, who has called for ‘the total emancipation of Africa’, spoke out after the second putsch in Burkina Faso against ‘our Burkinabè brothers applauding a coup d’état with Russian flags. I say there’s a problem. You don’t replace France with Russia … Above all, we wish to be free and dignified. But Africans imagine they should always be under somebody else’s wing.’ If there’s any truth in that gloomy remark, African army officers exploring ties with Moscow have a contradiction on their hands.

The strength of Pan-Africanism today lies not in its failed ambitions for a united Africa, but in the wealth of curiosity about Black cultures which was present from the movement’s inception and lives on in the diaspora, enriched by the modest trickle of migrants from Africa and the Caribbean into the US, where one in ten Black people are now foreign-born, according to the Pew Research Centre. The interaction of African and New World cultures in the US, a Pan-African synthesis that went unnoticed during the melting-pot craze of the 1970s, is an enduring part of the movement: the evolving musical canon, mostly lenient about borrowing, quotation and repurposing – like European modernism – is one of its strongest suits. To take the measure of fiction lists in the US today, along with (beleaguered) humanities options, hybrid African fashion codes, Afro-fusion cuisine, even the plethora of Afro-futurist genres (music, movies, graphic fiction and blockbuster sci-fi), is to see that this is much more than heritage-churning.

Neither France nor its former colonies were fully at the heart of the Pan-Africanist movement. Delegates from French colonies attended the various Pan-African Congresses yet Pan-Africanism made its great political strides from the mid-1940s through the 1950s among the English-speaking majority in the New World diaspora and colonial Africa. The French were running their colonies from a battered metropole recovering from Nazi occupation. In Paris, the Négritude movement was hailed as a stylish performance of African specificity that strengthened the case for decolonisation. But by 1954, when the Algerian war began, the Anglophone internationalists and a new breed of French anti-colonial thinkers, above all Frantz Fanon, were making the running.

The latest round of coups in West Africa signals an impatience with the old European order, largely because French imperialism still brings back ambivalent memories of what Du Bois described in his ‘Forethought’ to The Souls of Black Folk (1903) as ‘double consciousness’: ‘this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others … two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings’. Half a century later, in Black Skin, White Masks (1952), Fanon was incensed that Black children working through the French colonial curriculum were still being taught to identify with ‘the civilising coloniser’. Forty years after Fanon, in The Black Atlantic (1993), Paul Gilroy tilted the idea of double consciousness towards a more elastic, miscegenated doubleness, proposing that cultures ostensibly defined by ethnicity – and divided historically as slaver and slave, coloniser and colonised, white and Black – are not ‘sealed off hermetically’. In Gilroy’s reading, for all their stark distinction, they are also in sinuous dialogue.

Ever since the independence wave of 1960, dialogue between the ex-colonised and the former coloniser in French West Africa has been strained. The wish for a definitive break – and a new single-mindedness – is clear from the exasperation of the coup leaders and their large, populist followings. No one can predict how long a generation of Russian or Chinese emissaries will preside over African regimes cultivating a defiantly anti-white, anti-European position. No one can tell how long it will take for memories of the Cold War, which also play a part in the African preference for Russia, to fade. The Soviet bloc and Yugoslavia were committed to the national liberation struggles that dragged on through the 1970s and 1980s in South Africa, Namibia, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau. France, like Britain and the US, stood in the way of this second drive for independence, led mostly by Marxist insurgents – heirs, in spirit, of the Fifth and Sixth Pan-African Congresses – until the Soviet Union finally came apart. To this day, Europeans remain under a cloud of suspicion in many parts of Africa.

France continues to operate a share of extractive industries: mostly gold in Burkina Faso and Mali; in Niger, a diminished interest in uranium. But its role in the slow post-colonial reconfiguration of Africa may no longer be critical. During Mitterrand’s fourteen-year presidency, high-level military interventions came thick and fast in former French colonies. Mitterrand damaged France’s diplomatic reputation in Africa – and elsewhere – by aligning with the Hutu leadership during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. Under Chirac, a hesitant interventionist, military deployments in Africa were kept to a minimum. It was François Hollande who dispatched the expeditionary force to hold back Islamist insurgents in Mali. He hoped to contain the spread of jihadism in the Sahel, pre-empt its passage across the Mediterranean to France and perhaps reduce asylum claims from fleeing West Africans as part of a net reduction of immigration from Africa. But revisionist Pan-Africanism in France’s former colonies favours freedom of movement for Africans to the metropole. In November, the junta in Niamey revoked a law, enacted in 2015 and championed by the EU, that was designed to choke off the transit route through Niger for tens of thousands of migrants heading towards the Mediterranean. The law cost the Nigerien army valuable income from deals with people smugglers, but now everyone is back in business.

Hollande’s objectives were political, with no short-term economic gains in prospect. France is facing stiff global competition in Africa and a conspicuous turn away from French to Arabic, English, Hausa and Swahili as the languages of commerce. Its market share of international trade with African countries has fallen since the turn of the century from 11 to 4 per cent. In 2012, one of its high-profile companies, CFAO (Corporation for Africa and Overseas), was acquired by Toyota: from trading groundnuts, cocoa and rubber in the 1850s, CFAO had gone on to become a dealership and distribution giant (cars, pharmaceuticals and supermarket premises) before the sale. In 2022, the French billionaire and media baron Vincent Bolloré sold his holdings in African container terminals and railway lines to a Swiss-Italian shipping company for €5.7 billion. Increasingly, smaller French investors in Africa are looking for opportunities in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania.

France is not wholly diminished as a neo-colonial power but it’s on the back foot, with less hubris about its role in West Africa. In the history of colonial acquisition, European states followed their traders and adventurers into Africa. The French temptation must be for the neo-colonial state to follow them out, but that’s unlikely: too many subsidiaries of French mega-companies – Total and Orange, for example – are embedded in Africa for the game to be up. The CFA currency works to their advantage. Army rule, a familiar version of revolutionary statecraft in West Africa, can only lay feeble claim to the Pan-Africanist programme championed by Du Bois, Padmore and Nkrumah, while France bears no resemblance to the country that negotiated the decolonisation of Algeria with the National Liberation Front at Évian in 1962. This is an impasse without reliable interlocutors who can agree about the past. It could well turn out to be a case of zombie anti-colonialism rising up against a zombie predator.

Vol. 46 No. 1 · 4 January 2024

When Paris Sneezed

David Todd

The Revolutionary Temper: Paris, 1748-89

by Robert Darnton.

Allen Lane, 547 pp., £35, November, 978 0 7139 9656 2

On 8 December 2018, at the peak of the gilets jaunes crisis, a helicopter stood ready to take off in the gardens of the Élysée Palace. Protesters had threatened to storm the president’s residence, and Emmanuel Macron feared that the anti-riot police – although eight-thousand strong and equipped with armoured vehicles as well as water cannon – would fail to contain them. On social media it was rumoured that police bosses didn’t trust their officers to carry out orders if they were asked to use firearms against ordinary French citizens. Was France on the verge of another revolution?

The gilets jaunes invoked the revolution of 1789 time and again. Protesters wore the red Phrygian cap, sang the Marseillaise and staged mock guillotine executions of Macron. The rumoured hesitation of police forces – credible since a majority of officers support Marine Le Pen’s National Rally and have little sympathy for the centrist president – conjured up memories of the defection of the Gardes françaises to the Parisian insurrection that stormed the Bastille on 14 July 1789. There was of course no revolution in 2018: the police remained loyal, the government caved and Macron survived, literally and politically. In 1789 Bernard René de Launay, the Bastille governor, wasn’t so lucky. Although hot-air balloons enjoyed great popularity in 1780s France, he didn’t have one ready to take off from the fortress’s courtyard, and died at the hands of the mob. His head was stuck on a pike and paraded around the streets of Paris.

French people, it seems, have no wish to forget the extraordinary events of their great revolution and often want to re-enact them. This sense of extraordinariness was initially shared across Europe and the world. Two days after the storming of the Bastille, even Lord Dorset, the British ambassador in Paris, couldn’t conceal his enthusiasm: ‘The greatest Revolution that we know anything of has been effected with, comparatively speaking – if the magnitude of the event is considered – the loss of very few lives. From this moment we may consider France as a free country.’ By the end of the Reign of Terror in 1793-94 and two decades of war with other great powers, the loss of life had turned out to be much greater than Dorset thought. Yet the awesomeness of 1789 as a model of human emancipation inspired revolutionaries of various kinds – liberal, socialist, anticolonialist – worldwide until at least the mid-20th century. Only the Anglo-American world, perhaps because it thought itself already emancipated, has remained largely immune to the messianic allure of 1789. By hailing France’s sudden accession to the status of ‘free country’, Dorset meant that it had abruptly attained a state of political bliss that Britons had built over centuries.

I was schooled in France and well drilled in the cult of 1789. Indeed, I remember feeling moved to tears when, aged about seven, I read my first account of the storming of the Bastille, the abolition of privileges, and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. It was the closest I’ve come to a religious experience. This makes me certain that I understand the extraordinariness of 1789 better than non-French readers. But one should also beware the biases that such a background induces. The passage of time, including twenty years living in a British society not famed for its revolutionary fervour, have dented my youthful enthusiasm. But when I think or read about those events, I still feel emotional and – I make this confession because it reveals the cult’s purpose – proud to be French.

The revolution of 1789 brought down an eight-hundred-year-old monarchy, which despite many setbacks remained Europe’s most powerful state in the 1780s: the most populous, one of the most prosperous and one which enjoyed undisputed intellectual dominance across the continent. Even Herder, a strident defender of cultural diversity, admitted that French was ‘the most widely spoken and indispensable language of Europe’ because it was ‘the most suitable for the purposes of narrative, logic and reasoning’. Notwithstanding Carlyle’s grotesque caricature of the French aristocracy as an instance of ‘debauchery and depravity … perhaps unexampled since the era of Tiberius and Commodus’, popularised by Dickens and other Victorian moralists, the political elite of Ancien Régime France was astonishingly reform-minded and open to Enlightenment ideals. At the time it was swept away, the monarchy was trying hard to curtail the tax privileges of the aristocracy and the Church; it had granted civil rights to Protestants in 1787 and abolished judicial torture in 1788.

So why did the French not only topple the Ancien Régime, but opt to create an entirely new political order, at the price of so much bloodshed and upheaval? Contemporaries and historians have offered numerous, often contradictory answers. The early adversaries of the revolution invoked divine punishment and an odious atheist cabal. Tocqueville, the most celebrated French liberal thinker of the 19th century, viewed the revolution as the unintended consequence as well as a formidable acceleration of the Ancien Régime’s centralising state-building efforts. Marx and subsequent historical materialists pointed to class struggles, casting the overthrow of the nobility by the bourgeoisie as a model for the coming overthrow of the latter by the proletariat. Republican positivists in the late 19th century portrayed the revolution as the beginning of their struggle for secular democracy against the dark forces of clerical reaction. Post-Marxist historians, embracing the linguistic turn, highlighted the forging of a new political culture in the later 18th century, including novel words and concepts, which ultimately rendered possible both pluralist democracy and totalitarianism in the 20th century. Recent advocates of a global turn have undermined exceptionalist claims, stressing the French Revolution’s debt to the American Revolution of 1776 and pointing to the equal extraordinariness of the Haitian Revolution of 1791-1804, the first to enact a durable abolition of African slavery – though historians of the French Revolution, in France and elsewhere, are the most prone to dismiss this global perspective as a fad.

Grandiose theorising often ages badly, not least because with hindsight it becomes easy to see how theories reflect contemporary concerns. Could historians not produce a more modest account but one more likely to stand the test of time? An account that pays more attention to the how and less to the why? Enter Robert Darnton, the author of a dozen major books on Ancien Régime France. Darnton is not averse to theory. His work bears, lightly but discernibly, the imprint of his collaboration with the cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz, with whom he taught a seminar on history and anthropology at Princeton. Darnton’s dialogue with anthropology enabled him to spearhead a broadening of cultural history, from an account of high culture to an ethnographic inquiry into ‘the way ordinary people made sense of the world’. One of the most celebrated results of this approach was The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (1984), in which Darnton dissected seemingly anecdotal events, including the rounding up, mock trial and execution of several cats by printing-shop apprentices in 1730s Paris, to show what they revealed about the day-to-day workings, tensions and ‘cosmology’ of Ancien Régime society.

Darnton’s work has earned applause and caused controversy. Like a great deal of cultural history, it has also been confronted with the polite indifference of mainstream historians: the tale is well told and entertaining, but how does it shed light on political or economic transformations? Can cultural anthropology help explain the outbreak and extraordinariness of the French Revolution? In The Revolutionary Temper, Darnton answers such interrogations with a subtle and gripping account of how ordinary Parisians became revolutionaries between 1748 and 1789. It’s a book that no one else could have written, a captivating exploration of how Parisians gradually became passionate enough about their political and social order to contemplate overthrowing it.

Darnton offers 46 snippets of what Parisians became excited or indignant about, including war and peace, court intrigues, the sex lives of their monarchs, taxes and speculation on the stock exchange, the long-running power struggle between the Crown and parlements (the high courts of the Ancien Régime), the price of bread. Less obviously, he also looks at mesmerism – the medical doctrine of Franz Mesmer, who sought to cure ailments through the harnessing of animal magnetism – and hot-air balloons, which more convincingly showcased the possibilities of modern science.

Consider the so-called ‘scandal of the sacraments’. In the late 1740s, Church authorities prevented those with heterodox Jansenist beliefs from receiving the last rites. This enraged the Parisian populace, who considered the persecuted Jansenists holy men and women. In Darnton’s deft telling, this theological quarrel is revealed as an early example of ordinary Parisians – through the dissemination and public reading of royal edicts and judicial decisions – encountering such novel notions as the ‘legitimate liberty of citizens’ and ‘the nation is above kings.’ To quell the disturbance, the monarchy imposed a policy of silence – an 18th-century version of ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’ – on Jansenist opinions. But the crisis exposed the weakening grip of the Catholic Church on Parisian minds and the stirrings of a new, popular political consciousness.

Even more striking is the Kornmann Affair. From 1787 until 1789, this scandal captured the attention of ordinary Parisians as much as the financial and political crisis that was engulfing the Bourbon monarchy. The wife of Guillaume Kornmann, an Alsatian banker, had been seduced by Daudet de Josan, a dashing man of the world with powerful connections at Versailles. Kornmann had his wife sequestered by lettre de cachet (executive Crown order). Daudet, using his court connections, enrolled the help of a former lieutenant general of police and of the playwright Beaumarchais, so he could keep up the affair. What shocked Parisians wasn’t the attempt to sequester Kornmann’s wife, but the unofficial intervention of a despotic police official and the depraved Beaumarchais to prevent Kornmann from asserting his rights as a husband and a citizen. Pamphlets recounting the details of the case sold in the hundreds of thousands, and Kornmann’s lawyer went on to become an advocate of revolutionary change in the Estates General turned Constituent Assembly in June 1789. Darnton’s dissection of the affair and its impact conveys what ordinary Parisians came to detest about the absolutist monarchy – not least the fear of its intrusion into their private lives, including the increasingly sacred space of the family, as a bourgeois sensibility displaced the libertine moeurs of the aristocracy. It also prefigured the short-changing of women during the revolutionary 1790s, and the popularity of a Napoleonic regime after 1800. Although Napoleon’s rule was in many ways more despotic than the old monarchy’s system of government, it was more respectful of the husband’s domestic authority: ‘The husband owes protection to his wife, the wife obedience to her husband,’ the 1804 Napoleonic Code infamously asserted.

Darnton’s analysis of Parisian perceptions of high politics from 1787 to 1789 is punctuated by snippets about the unusually harsh weather and how it nurtured popular anxieties. On 13 July 1788 hailstones weighing as much as a pound and a half ravaged the wheat fields around Paris. Fear of famine seized the capital and the price of a four-pound loaf of bread increased from eight to twelve and a half sous. From November 1788 until March 1789 Parisians experienced one of the coldest winters since records began at the beginning of the century: snowfall, temperatures as low as -12.5 degrees centigrade and a frozen Seine conspired to push the price of bread even higher. Newsmongers feared that the extraordinary weather might cause a ‘horrible revolution’.

The Revolutionary Temper relies almost exclusively on immediate accounts rather than recollections and sometimes reads like contemporary journalism. Darnton probably wouldn’t take offence at this description. His father was a war correspondent for the New York Times, killed in action in the Pacific in 1942, and his younger brother was a contributor to the same paper for forty years. Darnton himself had a short spell working for the New York Times in the 1960s, and while holding a visiting academic position in West Berlin in 1989-90 he suspended his researches in order to write a chronicle of the democratic revolution then unfolding before his eyes in East Germany. The result was Berlin Journal, in which he compared East German protesters to the Estates General and the fall of the Wall to the storming of the Bastille. The Revolutionary Temper could have been titled Paris Journal, with Darnton assuming the role of a reporter dispatched to the late 18th century.

If an explanation of the revolution emerges from Darnton’s sketches, it is rooted in the development of a vast, complex and multifaceted ‘information system’ that spread news but also emotions across Paris. A great deal of Darnton’s work has consisted in unravelling the various components of the Ancien Régime’s information system, from the circulation of censored books by librarians and peddlers to the communication of news by nouvellistes de bouche in the public space or by authors of popular nouvelles à la main. The absolute monarchy became increasingly tolerant of these and other means of bypassing official censorship, using it to gauge public feelings or manipulate them – at its peril, Darnton’s account implies.

These days we know very well that more news doesn’t always result in more truthful information. The ideas and emotions that galvanised the Parisian news-consuming public were different from the lofty principles expounded by canonical Enlightenment thinkers. Newsmongers would spread craques (‘fibs’, or ‘false news’ in Darnton’s translation). The news that caught the attention of 18th-century Parisians often took the form of rumours that the mighty were plotting to starve or ruin ordinary people, or even kidnap children in order to satisfy their sexual and other appetites. It was a swirl of rumours that precipitated the fall of the reform-minded minister Charles-Alexandre de Calonne in 1787. Calonne wished to abolish the tax privileges of the aristocracy and the clergy, yet he was so vilified for his alleged ‘depredations’ of the public purse that, fearing for his life, he had to flee to London – an unprecedented cancellation of sorts for a minister of the Crown. The tribunal of public opinion was growing more powerful, but it wasn’t necessarily fairer than the Ancien Régime system of government.

Darnton’s emphasis on information systems as a factor in modern political change has an obvious appeal. Before the age of revolutions, the printing press had already facilitated the Reformation. The emergence of mass media around 1900 ushered in an age of mass democracy and totalitarianism. Anticolonial movements learned to use radio and TV as well as printed news to undermine European rule, even when they were outgunned by the colonial state: the classic case is the triumph of the Algerian nationalist movement, which despite being crushed on the battlefield attracted sufficient sympathy around the world to force France to concede independence in 1962. The rise of social media has also played an important part in more recent revolutionary uprisings, including the Arab Spring of 2011 as well as the gilets jaunes movement. Conversely, the heavy-handed censorship of the internet in China testifies to the regime’s perception of circulating news as a threat.

Darnton’s argument may reflect our own concerns about the ‘age of information’, just as previous interpretations of the revolution’s origins projected contemporary anxieties. But then he never claims to have identified a single cause, merely to be highlighting how the notions that took hold of Parisian minds, from ‘love of liberty’ to ‘familiarity with violence’, went on to shape the revolution’s unfolding. There’s also a question about his focus on Paris, which was anything but representative of France’s still overwhelmingly rural society. It’s hard to deny, however, that Paris played a crucial role in the eruption and radicalising of the French Revolution, and insurrections in Paris set off revolutions or attempts at revolution again in 1830, 1848 and 1871, in France and across Europe. In 1831, Heine described Paris as the ‘new Jerusalem’ of revolutionaries and made it his home for 25 years. The Parisian revolutionary temper also filled conservatives with dread: ‘When Paris sneezes, Europe catches a cold’ is the plaintive quip attributed to Metternich, the incarnation of counter-revolution.

When and how did this temper cool off? The failure of the Paris Commune in 1871 offers useful clues. In part, it was its increasingly socialist undertones that made the Parisian taste for revolution too frightening, for the new middle classes and small rural property owners as well as the old aristocracy. This gave the conservative provisional government of the Third Republic – appropriately headquartered in Versailles – the legitimacy to put down the insurrection by violent means: between five thousand and twenty thousand Parisians were killed during the Bloody Week of 21-28 May 1871. Another factor was the embourgeoisement of Paris, encouraged by successive French governments in the 19th century. Haussmannisation sought to make Paris cleaner, more beautiful and better suited to modern economic exigencies, but also less prone to revolution. New broad avenues were designed to facilitate the traffic of city-dwellers and commodities, but also of soldiers and gun-batteries.

Since 1871, Paris has ceased to spark French or European revolutions. The student riots of May-June 1968 re-enacted some revolutionary gestures, but they didn’t involve much of the Paris populace and weren’t a serious attempt to seize power. In the following decades, gentrification completed the eradication of the revolutionary temper. Today Faubourg Saint-Antoine conjures images of late-night café culture rather than sansculottes yearning for a new political order. Unlike the revolutionaries they wished to emulate, the gilets jaunes of 2018 overwhelmingly hailed from small-town provincial France. They chartered buses to come and act out revolutionary rituals on the Parisian stage, where they met not only with the violent response of the police, but also with the contempt or hostility of Parisians. Darnton’s book suggests that today’s social conditions in Paris – a modern urban sprawl in which the ‘dangerous’ classes are kept away from the seats of power – make a 1789-style revolution unlikely. Macron might be advised to cease comparing himself to Jupiter, and to give up spending his weekends at the Lanterne, the hunting lodge of the Versailles palace, lest his monarchical provocations trigger more riots. But he can probably dispense with the helicopter on standby at the Élysée – the sansculottes are long gone.

Vol. 46 No. 1 · 4 January 2024

Who’d want to be English?

Tom Shippey

Triumph and Illusion: The Hundred Years War V

by Jonathan Sumption.

Faber, 977 pp., £35, August, 978 0 571 27457 4

There can be no doubt about the scale of Jonathan Sumption’s achievement in his history of the Hundred Years War. Five massive volumes, published between 1990 and this year, each more than six hundred pages of narrative and notes. Together, they total nearly four thousand pages, not counting the bibliographies, with their ever expanding lists of secondary contributions as well as primary sources in Latin, French, Middle English, Dutch, Catalan and Portuguese. And all this done in Sumption’s spare time from his work as a barrister and then a justice of the UK Supreme Court.

But what is the result? Was the Hundred Years War special in anything except its duration? One answer is that it created a sense of nationhood, especially in France, or as Sumption puts it in his concluding remarks to this final volume, ‘war created the state and the state created the nation.’ Regional loyalties, to Brittany and Normandy, Maine and Burgundy, became subordinated, and in later centuries would have been seen as treasonable. Kings managed to impose systems of taxation. In England, the Anglo-Norman dialect, once the native tongue of most of the gentry, died out, and though French was still part of the equipment of ladies and gentlemen, it was Parisian French they learned, and they learned it as a foreign tongue. In France, speaking English was enough to get your throat cut – because, after all, who spoke English except the English? There was no point in anyone else learning an insular jargon.

The initial cause of the war was a dispute over succession. In 1314, Philip IV of France died, leaving three sons. But none of them reigned for more than a few years, each dying young. His daughter Isabella, however, married Edward II of England, and they had a son who became Edward III. That was Edward’s claim to the throne of France, by right: Dieu et mon droit, as the royal motto still declares. But it was the son of Philip’s brother Charles who became king of France, reigning as Philip VI. Who had the better claim? If you accepted the notion of primogeniture, then Edward did, but if you believed that claims couldn’t descend through the maternal line, then the rightful king was Philip – unless you backed Charles the Bad, king of Navarre, who was also descended from Philip IV, also in the female line, but now in the third generation. While the argument may have been relevant in the 1320s, when Philip IV’s last son died, it was meaningless by 1453, after more than a hundred years of war. By then it was obvious that no matter his heredity, a king of England couldn’t be king of France, precisely because he was English. Dynastic history had become national history.

Another effect of the Hundred Years War was the long subsequent history of opposition, or active enmity, between the two nations: the Wars of Religion, the Wars of Spanish and Austrian Succession, the Seven Years War, the Napoleonic Wars and the wars of empire, including the American War of Independence. Rosbifs and la perfide Albion on one side; counter-accusations too nasty to cite on the other. Sumption’s first two volumes, Trial by Battle and Trial by Fire, tell the part of the story most familiar to English readers. In the first volume, the Battle of Crécy and the Battle of Neville’s Cross against the Scots (both 1346). In the second, the Battle of Poitiers (1356): English archers mowing down French cavaliers and Scottish spearmen, total victory, the Black Prince winning his spurs and, by the end of the year, both John II of France and David II of Scotland safely locked up in the Tower of London awaiting ransom. Mission accomplished.

Except it wasn’t. Sumption takes us on through the chevauchées – the large-scale mounted raids that the English used to weaken and demoralise the French in the years after 1356. Other events altered the nature of the war, in particular the Black Death, which significantly reduced English manpower. In volume three, Divided Houses, we get the premature death of the Black Prince, which left as Edward III’s successor a ‘vulnerable child’ who became, as Richard II, ‘a neurotic and unstable adult’, deposed and murdered by his cousin, Henry IV, in 1399. This revived the French war, since one way to unite a divided nation is, as Shakespeare put it, ‘to busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels’, advice which led to the third English victory, at Agincourt in 1415. But Henry V also died prematurely, leaving the throne to his baby son, Henry VI, who as an adult was rather worse than neurotic and unstable, being (so far as we can tell) intermittently of unsound mind. Cursed Kings, Sumption’s fourth volume, gives us the French problems and divisions created first by the accession of Charles ‘the Mad’ in 1380 and then by two assassinations: that of Louis of Orléans, effective regent of France, in 1407; and then, in reprisal, of Jean Sans Peur, duke of Burgundy, in 1419. English patriotism gives Henry V the credit for many victories, but they are better understood, Sumption says, as ‘a chapter in a French tragedy’. These events took place, moreover, in a whirl of treaties and negotiations and complex pressures on all parties.

Sumption’s final volume opens in 1422, the year in which both Charles VI of France and Henry V of England died. Technically, as per the Treaty of Troyes signed in 1420, both men left the same person as their heir: the 11-month-old Henry VI of England. But Charles VI’s teenage son, the dauphin, who had been disinherited in favour of Henry V, refused to accept his diminution, ruling in those parts of France not under English occupation. Both countries were in trouble, but the state of France was especially dire. The Dauphinists, as they were called on account of their support for someone not yet crowned king, perhaps pinned their hopes on their old allies in Scotland. The Scots responded, not by the usual method of staging a diversionary attack on northern England, but by sending an expeditionary force to France of some seven thousand men, a good half of them ‘wild Scottish axemen’.

The Scots made a dangerous move, however. Before the Battle of Verneuil in 1424 they announced that they would take no prisoners (three hundred years later the war-cry of the Covenanters was once again ‘Jesus and No Quarter’). One can imagine how this went down in the English camp, and indeed few prisoners were taken: the Scots were ‘all but wiped out’. Sumption says that Verneuil was ‘the bloodiest fight of the Hundred Years War’: the heralds counted 7262 of the dauphin’s army dead on the field, while the victors also lost unusually heavily, perhaps as many as 1600 men.

Things only improved for the English cause, such that ‘the summer of 1427 can be seen in hindsight as the high point of the house of Lancaster’s fortunes in France.’ Sumption includes a map showing that, by 1429, England and its Burgundian allies controlled the whole of northern France, including Paris, and the east as far south as Mâcon, along with (this time with Gascon allies) the area around Bordeaux. In terms of territory, this was close to a 50/50 split between the supporters of Henry VI and those of the dauphin. For the English to finish the war, they needed to cross the Loire barrier by seizing one of the bridge towns. The one they selected was Orléans, and the siege began on 4 September 1428.

At this point of near victory, Joan of Arc arrived. Also known as Jeannette, La Pucelle or the Maid of Orléans, she was the daughter of a serf living in Domrémy, Lorraine – territory disputed between supporters of the still uncrowned dauphin and the Burgundian allies of the English. In 1425, when Joan was thirteen, she heard a voice from God, which she eventually identified as that of the archangel Michael. The voice told her that ‘her mission was to lead the dauphin to Reims to be crowned,’ according to royal tradition. Before that, it was her duty to break the English siege of Orléans.

By the time she gained access to the dauphin he must have been getting desperate: his receiver-general admitted privately that he had only four écus in hand. Joan was given a bodyguard and allowed to join the fighting; on 7 May 1429 she led an assault on one of the besiegers’ fortified camps. While climbing the ladder she was shot in the neck with a crossbow bolt, but she came back as soon as her wound had been dressed and urged on the French stormers. The English withdrew the next day, with great loss to their prestige. Joan went on to nag and bully the dauphin’s advisers into further action, until on 17 July he was finally crowned as Charles VII in Reims Cathedral, Joan standing beside him, holding her banner. (In response, Henry VI was crowned at Notre Dame.)

Reims was Joan’s triumph. On 23 May 1430 she took part in a sortie from the besieged town of Compiègne, but was cut off and captured when the sortie failed and the defenders raised the drawbridge. She was taken for trial to Rouen, but it wasn’t clear what charges could be brought against her. Eventually her interrogators decided to play the ecclesiastical card and tried her on some seventy charges, including sorcery, heresy and wearing male clothes. Sumption notes that ‘the leading actors at the trial were all native Frenchmen’ and ‘churchmen with their own interest in the suppression of unauthorised and heterodox revelations’. Peasant girls claiming direct inspiration from archangels were a challenge to the learned doctors of the Université de Paris, and not to be tolerated. After a good deal of uncertainty – perhaps they should go to the pope for guidance? – she was convicted, to be released from church custody to the state, which would impose the sentence of death by burning.

But then Joan recanted, at which point she became a penitent, and could only be taken back to prison; until once again she was found wearing men’s clothes, for her a point of principle. She may also have realised that the alternative to death was only commutation to life imprisonment on bread and water. She accordingly took back her recantation and was handed over to the Rouen commander, an Englishman, and sent to the stake. There was little protest at the time, and she would be rehabilitated in her own country only two decades later, when the political situation was very different.

The military situation was changing too. The English had long relied on their combination of longbowmen on the flanks and armoured infantry in the centre, but the French grew wise to this formation and found ways to counter it. Don’t charge into the killing ground. Go for the archers first, from flank or rear. And the English now found themselves opposed by steel-bolted crossbows, which could match their archers’ range, if not their rate of fire. There were guns, too, not assembled from staves as formerly but cast in one piece, along with projectiles that fitted instead of the bore having to be packed with loam, which then had to dry out before firing. For many years, the best weapons against fortified towns had been surprise, ladders and bribery: Montargis was taken in 1433 by the captain’s barber’s girlfriend, with the assistance of a professional échelleur, or ladderman – not the kind of approach one could count on. New cannons were useful only against large and static targets, but that’s exactly what walls are. Garrisoning a fortress was no longer a low-risk job, especially once the practice of hanging defenders became common.

As for the financial situation, Sumption provides many figures, which must have taken a deal of working out. Essentially, England, even more than France, was broke. Its negotiators were also, in European eyes, notoriously incompetent, frittering away at the conference table advantages won in the field. In 1441 there was a scandal that further distracted attention, when Eleanor, wife of the duke of Gloucester, was accused of sorcery and ‘sentenced to a humiliating public penance in the streets of London’. Her husband, the main opponent of any peace process, never recovered. Soon afterwards, England descended into thirty years of civil war.

The Hundred Years War ended in August 1475, when a deal was struck at Picquigny on the Somme, with Louis XI and Edward IV agreeing a truce. Part of the deal was that the French should make an annual payment to the English Crown; it was paid for seventy years and amounted in the end to three million écus. Calais remained English until it was lost in 1558, though English kings continued, meaninglessly, to claim the title of Rex Franciae until 1801.

The French won the war, in the end. But if we ask who profited by it, English nobles did very well out of ransoms for many years, notably Sir John Fastolf, whose money eventually went to endow Magdalen College, Oxford. By the time of Henry VI, however, the English were paying out far more than they were taking back. As a result of the loss of all French possessions, English attention turned increasingly away from Europe to a world in which ‘the European empires in Asia and the Americas were the focus of international tension.’

Vol. 46 No. 1 · 4 January 2024

Two Stories

Diane Williams

All Day Rainbow Swirl

We had our shoes off and maybe this was a place where we were washing for gold, somewhat lost in the world.

I see myself at my ease fifty years ago in this old photograph, and I have held on to a vial of gold dust – I don’t know where it is – and a ruby – a ruby crumb really. It is red.

She had begged us – the woman in the picture – to take her along. Some would think her very beautiful – and she was with us for several months, but she did nothing to help us.

Well, it was as if she was a child. There was this child angle to her that eliminated the possibility of considering her as a woman.

Nonetheless, Theo and I agreed that if over time our feelings about her changed, that is – we would make sure to stay clear of being tempted. You just do it. We treated her like a younger sister. I did miss home.

In this old photo nearly everything now is a shade of creamy pink.

Did I have a moustache yet? I did! – and why sit in the water on the tree stump? It looks pointed, painful.

The all-day candy rainbow swirl in my hand?

Once you start with it, you’re stuck with it. The ants will climb over it if you put it down anywhere.

You can dunk it in the sea.

In Cape Town the wind was the highest. I was on my hands and my knees, so that I could not be blown over.

I found a corner of a building to hold on to, the pitted surface to pin myself to.

If I stay on this earth, I still feel screwed to the wall.

Pleasure of the Day

Before things fell apart, she had her first pleasure of the day.

She asked for the number six please! – which was served up on a tin tray, layered with paper that catches and preserves the grilled treat’s grease and crumbs.

If she could, she would eat her favourite food every minute of this day, or any other.

A sudden hiccup in the voice of a crooner, whose piped-in song was playing, reminded her of the type of gulp-weeping she had often done as a child.

But she was sanguine now in a region that has a lot to offer – what we used to think was unmissable.

On this day she thought the steam from her hot drink made the air more lovely and she struck the sides of her shoes together in time to the music – her shoes that had not yet shed their sequined blossoms.

Might she get another smile from the barista? – no open arms of course – but surely a further reminder of kindness.

The even wider grin she received was well worth the cost of the cream horn.

And thus, an ordinary citizen was indulged, plus her footwear features wide, bull-nosed toes and is comfortable, and the splits on the top permit air to circulate.

Stop it all there.

But no, she is posed wearing a dress she has outgrown, holding a crushed napkin and through the window she sees only a bad, old picture of things and trees, nowhere the delicacy and fineness of her swollen pastry.

The world … yes, the world can look pretty shitty when you’ve finished eating the Plain Jane, or the Triple Threat, the Big Top, or the Baby Princess Louise.

Vol. 46 No. 1 · 4 January 2024

Break your bleedin’ heart

Michael Wood

Swann’s Way

by Marcel Proust, translated by James Grieve.

NYRB, 450 pp., £16.99, June, 978 1 68137 629 5

The Swann Way

by Marcel Proust, translated by Brian Nelson.

Oxford, 430 pp., £9.99, September, 978 0 19 887152 1

Ala recherche du temps perdu is founded on a gesture so famous that it’s hard to retain the idea of its risk. The narrator (and to some extent Proust himself) decides to build a whole long novel on an involuntary memory. Involuntary here means not only unintended but barred from the realm of intention. Whatever it is, it won’t happen if you try to make it happen. There is an element of myth and drama in the claim, a mild slighting of philosophical good sense, but that is part of the picture too.

In discussions of translation, we hear a lot about difficulty, impossibility, loss, riches, invention, triumph – all justified and interesting avenues. But texts may suggest something else: agreement, for example, or honourable hard work. In Proust’s case, when the topic is memory and chance, the convergences are remarkable. The original text says, ‘Il y a beaucoup de hasard en tout ceci,’ and we get to read, in the different translations I will describe in a moment:

There is a large element of chance in these matters. [Terence Kilmartin]

Chance plays a large part in all of this. [James Grieve]

There is a great deal of chance in all this. [Lydia Davis]

There is a great deal of chance involved in all this. [Brian Nelson]

It’s true that the first English version, Scott Moncrieff’s, has ‘There is a large element of hazard in these matters,’ but this has to be a mistake, or a visit from a linguistic false friend, since hasard is the ordinary French word for ‘chance’. A happy mistake, of course. The game of involuntary memory is full of hazards.

James Grieve’s new/old translation of Du côté de chez Swann was first published in Australia in 1982. Recently reprinted, it is a perfect invitation to time-travel in the world of translation. There are other remarkable prompts to such a journey. In 2017 Brian Nelson published a translation of a large portion of the same novel. And now Oxford has brought out his version of the complete Swann volume. This is the first part of a new translation of À la recherche du temps perdu, edited by Adam Watt. Nelson will also translate the last volume, but no announcement has been made about the intervening ones. Christopher Prendergast’s six-volume edition for Penguin (2002) is still in print and much read. The translators there are Lydia Davis, James Grieve, Mark Treharne, John Sturrock, Carol Clark, Peter Collier and Ian Patterson.

The afterlife of Scott Moncrieff’s 1922-30 version is interesting too. First, not all of it is his. He died before he was able to turn to Proust’s last volume, which was translated first by Stephen Hudson and later by Andreas Mayor. In 1981 Terence Kilmartin published a revision of the whole text, making ‘extensive alterations’ but hoping to ‘have preserved the undoubted felicity’ of much of the work. The new wordings were a matter partly of getting things right, and partly of trying to be a bit less ‘purple and precious’ than Scott Moncrieff is often taken to be. The French source text was different too, a 1954 Pléiade scholarly edition rather than the scattered single volumes of the first publication. In 1992 Kilmartin and D.J. Enright offered a new version corresponding to a later and different Pléiade text of 1983-84. At this point the old title, Remembrance of Things Past, was dropped, and the plainer In Search of Lost Time taken on.

There is more. In 2013, the first volume of William C. Carter’s ‘revised, annotated’ version of Scott Moncrieff’s work appeared from Yale. Four other volumes of the set are now also available, with one still to come. Carter speaks of Scott Moncrieff’s ‘missteps’, and of his style being ‘at times overblown’, but mainly he wants to leave the old text intact, describing it as ‘extraordinarily fine’. He thinks Kilmartin and Enright’s work was ‘not always felicitous or accurate’ and that ‘Scott Moncrieff seems to have been more sensitive … to the cadence of Proust’s sentences.’ It’s worth adding that Carter’s notes are excellent and that Watt’s introduction to the Oxford volume admirably sets the scene for reading Proust.

Du côté de chez Swann was published in 1913. The whole was to be composed of two volumes. In this one the adult narrator reflects on time and memory, has an extraordinary experience that restores the full, rich past to him, as distinct from the paltry, loaded stuff that ordinary, intentional remembering provides. On the basis of this experience, he narrates a piece of his rural childhood, and then inserts, as a kind of prelude to his own sentimental education, the story of a love affair, that of Charles Swann and Odette de Crécy, which took place around the time of his birth. He then picks up his own later life in Paris, and his desperate, teenage passion for Swann and Odette’s daughter (when the love affair ended, they felt it was time to get married). In the second volume the narrator would have passed through various social and amorous disappointments, and finally, inspired by recurrences of the involuntary memory event, would evolve a redemptive theory of time in which nothing was lost or wasted, though nothing could be guaranteed to return. There is ‘a great deal of chance involved in all this’, as Proust reminds us, including the possibility of dying too soon.

A version of this concluding volume did appear, as Le Temps retrouvé, in 1927, five years after Proust’s death, but the novel had acquired five other volumes in the meantime. The narrative encompassed plenty of new material, including the death of a grandmother, the Dreyfus Affair, male homosexual life, the elusive same-sex life of women, portraits of a crumbling high society, a world war, and much more. And of course, it includes the story of a novel in the writing, either this one or one deceptively like it. Fashions change in the interpretation of these matters, and much depends on the way we see Proust’s relation to his narrator. My current sense is that it is like Eliot’s relation to Prufrock, or Joyce’s relation to any of the voices he parodies in Ulysses: in one sense intimate and confessional; in another sense a linguistic show, dedicated to the high-wire risks of overacting. Translation is a great place from which to look at how this all works.

There was a moment when translators, even the best of them, made quite a few basic mistakes, like old-style classical pianists. They also often felt that their job was to rework, rather than render, the text they were working on. Mistakes are fewer now, and reworking is usually frowned on. We no longer need to rush to judgment about what’s best; we can think about the value of differences. ‘Translation is not a zero-sum game,’ Prendergast says in the introduction to his edition of In Search of Lost Time, ‘nor is it a competitive agon in which sons slay fathers.’

In many respects Grieve represents the old school. He doesn’t make mistakes, but he does believe Proust needs a new, properly English home. In Swann’s Way one of the narrator’s great-aunts makes a little speech about the irrelevance of social difference, saying: ‘What does it matter whether [a man] is a duke or a coachman? Kind hearts and coronets, after all!’ The reference to Tennyson (or an English movie) is entirely Grieve’s contribution. As is the later idea that the narrator’s mother used to ‘send [him] to Coventry’ when he misbehaved. And when things change because of a ‘turn of the tide in the affairs of men’, we may be surprised to hear a French narrator adapting Shakespeare – though why shouldn’t he? No need to go for Racine every time. I think this method is entertaining but perhaps not generally to be recommended, even if it is what Samuel Beckett does on a well-known occasion where he translates himself from the French. A character in Molloy reports that his employer said life is a beautiful thing, ‘une bien belle chose’; in English he opts for ‘a thing of beauty and a joy for ever’. Still, Keats doesn’t have anything to do with the great punchline. Moran, the person listening to this report, says: ‘Do you think he meant human life?’

Grieve’s decision to represent the French lower orders as having comic English accents does seem distinctly old-fashioned. Bad grammar and dropped aitches abound, as in ‘I seen her earlier’, ‘good ’eavens’, ‘look ’ere’ and ‘’ot water’. ‘Break your bleedin’ heart, so it would,’ the housekeeper Françoise says, commenting on the narrator’s behaviour as a child and pronouncing her aitches for once, ‘to have a kid like that!’ The French phrase is idiomatic rather than incorrect (‘C’est-il pas malheureux pour des parents d’avoir un enfant pareil!’) and it doesn’t bring us quite so close to Monty Python.

Grieve is trying to understand Proust rather than imitate him, and his occasional awkwardness actually helps us see where we are. In his text, as in that of Lydia Davis, we begin to wonder who the writer is, or how many writers there are. This question doesn’t really come up in smoother versions. And Grieve’s ‘some original sin of unworthiness’ for ‘une indignité originelle’ is the perfect loaded counterpart to Nelson’s modest ‘original unworthiness’.

In fact, Proust is quite close to Monty Python in some ways. Another mistake by Françoise provides one of the best sly jokes in the book. She thinks ‘relationship’ and ‘parenthesis’ (parenté and parenthèse) are the same thing. As they are, almost: just an angle of accent and an extra sound away. And of course, as with all good/bad jokes, there is a kind of truth lurking in the mistake. How many parents don’t feel parenthetical sometimes? None of the available translations has a good time here. Three try to do something with ‘kith’ and ‘kin’, and three go for ‘genealogy’/‘geology’.

There is a lot more of this kind of stuff in Proust, including a very funny conversation that Charles Swann and Oriane de Guermantes have about the name Cambremer, and its fortunate lack of two letters that would turn mer into merde, ‘sea’ into ‘shit’. ‘It ends just in time,’ Oriane says. Swann counters by saying: ‘And it doesn’t begin any better.’ Cambronne was a general whose famous verbal response to defeat at Waterloo created a polite synonym. If you don’t want to say ‘shit’ you say ‘le mot de Cambronne’.

But of course there is no translation issue here. The characters speak English but allude to French matters, and the larger point is that translation, like language itself, involves contexts, conventions, class, irony, posture and many other regions where speech acts hang out. This is why it helps to compare translations, and why we may begin to understand how lucky we are with Proust in English, even more than we were in 1982.

In his translator’s note Nelson distinguishes helpfully between foreignness and otherness in translation. Reversing Grieve’s practice, we could make Proust sound foreign in English because he is French. Nelson thinks this is the wrong tack. What we need to keep, if we can, is Proust’s ‘verbal strangeness – a stylistic otherness’. He should sound strange to us in the way he once sounded strange to his compatriots. Nelson does very well in this respect, though Davis perhaps catches even more of this kind of otherness. In return Nelson does the best job so far with the title. Du côté de chez Swann mingles two idioms: ‘by way of’/‘down by’/‘in the direction of’/‘on that side’, and ‘at the house of’/‘in the zone of’. Swann’s Way sounds like a suburban address. Davis’s The Way by Swann’s is interesting, but we may feel something is missing: Swann’s what? The Swann Way leaves out the idioms, but creates space for double meanings, geographical and psychological. The narrator as a child is already mentally caught up in the Swann way, quite apart from his walks in that direction. And even before the narrator is born Swann was confusing a desire for possession with being in love and identifying love itself with a crippling anxiety.

Perhaps we should be collating rather than dividing the English versions of Swann. The moment when Proust’s narrator tries to explain how a sadist can be a fundamentally moral being is a good test. He is talking – in Nelson’s version – about ‘an impression’ he received as a child, from which ‘emerged long afterwards, my conception of sadism’. The child goes for a walk and falls asleep among some bushes very close to the house of Vinteuil the composer. Vinteuil is dead at this point, but the child, waking up, and looking through the house’s window, soon learns that the man’s daughter and her gay friend take a special pleasure in insulting his memory. The daughter pretends not to know why a photograph of her father is so visible (she has placed it in an obvious position), and her friend, accepting an implicit invitation, says she would like to spit on it. The daughter says: ‘Oh! You wouldn’t dare.’ The friend pretends to be angry (‘I wouldn’t dare spit on him? On that thing?’) and speaks ‘with calculated savagery’. This is all the child outside sees, since the daughter closes the shutters. Her manner, he says, ‘was at once weary, awkward, fussy, prim and sad’, and these feelings are what the whole story is about. The narrator thinks that even after seeing this action, Vinteuil ‘might still have continued to believe in his daughter’s goodness of heart’ because he would have understood how complicated her feelings were. ‘The appearance of evil’ was both a reality and an appearance, the narrator suggests, an act both in and against Mlle Vinteuil’s nature. ‘A sadist of her sort is an artist of evil, which a wholly wicked person couldn’t be, for then the evil would … seem quite natural to her … It was not evil that gave her the idea of pleasure … it was pleasure itself that she saw as evil.’ Throughout this scene the narrator insists on Mlle Vinteuil’s ‘scrupulous and sensitive heart’, on her being ‘so purely sentimental, so naturally virtuous’, along with her repeated failure to be ‘the depraved person she wanted to be’. This is all dizzying enough, even without the concept of being cruel to a photograph.

Here again the convergences in the translations are striking. But the minor variants talk to us too. Proust’s narrator speaks of ‘l’idée que je me suis faite du sadisme’. Nelson’s phrase ‘my conception of sadism’ is close to Scott Moncrieff and Carter’s ‘my idea of sadism’, while the original Scott Moncrieff version expands the phrase into a sort of commentary: ‘my idea of that cruel side of human passion called “sadism”’. Kilmartin and Davis respond more openly to the mention of the idea’s making – ‘the notion I was to form’ (Kilmartin), ‘the idea which I formed’ (Davis) – and Grieve does so at greater length: ‘a certain notion of the meaning of sadism was to form … in my mind.’ The little train of words Proust’s narrator offers to describe Mlle Vinteuil’s ‘air’ as she closes the shutters (‘las, gauche, affairé, honnête et triste’) creates a quietly interesting puzzle. All the translators but one start with ‘weary, awkward’ (Kilmartin goes for ‘languid, awkward’) and they all end with ‘sad’. ‘Affairé’ and ‘honnête’ turn out to be more elusive or questionable. The suggestions here are ‘fussy, prim’ (Nelson), ‘fussy, honest’ (Davis), ‘busy, trustworthy’ (Grieve), ‘bustling, sincere’ (Kilmartin and Carter), ‘preoccupied, sincere’ (Scott Moncrieff). Small differences, but our view of the narrator’s view of Mlle Vinteuil shifts quite a bit as it moves among them. And in this context, the choice between staying with Proust’s grammar and speeding it up is intriguing. Four translations out of six convert Proust’s ‘might perhaps still not have lost faith’ (‘n’eût peut-être pas encore perdu sa foi’) into ‘might still have continued to believe’; Grieve elaborates a little: ‘preserved some scrap of faith’. We are looking perhaps at the difference between relaying meaning and tracking movements of thought.

The last pages of Du côté de chez Swann bring together a lot of what Proust wants to display (and delay) in this first volume of his novel. The Bois de Boulogne, in Nelson, becomes a capitalised Garden, ‘zoological or mythological’, and although it is called a wood, it’s more than that for the narrator, for whom ‘it fulfilled a purpose foreign to the life of its trees.’ It created in him an ‘exhilaration’ quite different from anything inspired by the beauties of autumn that he came out to see. A question of ‘desire’, he says, but desire for what? All he knows is that he experiences an ‘unsatisfied longing’ that leads him to think of the high society women who used to take their walks in the Bois. He recalls ‘the happy days of my youth when I believed the world was a thing of beauty’. The echo of Keats passing from Beckett to Proust is an eerie accident, but perhaps says something about culture and translation.

There is something else going on here. Translators have a real difficulty with the narrator’s idea of an erstwhile creative faith, the life of his ‘croyante jeunesse’. Nelson, as we have seen, needs to find an object for it. Grieve turns believing into ‘trusting’, Kilmartin converts it into ‘unquestioning’, and Carter’s revision of Scott Moncrieff give us ‘credulous’. Davis is quite literal (‘my believing youth’), and the first Scott Moncrieff has ‘when I was young and had faith’.

Then the Fall comes – another thing that happens in gardens. The old carriages are gone, and people are driving cars. No mythological horses – just, to take Proust literally again, ‘moustached mechanics’. The women have terrible hats and dresses, and the men have no hats at all. ‘Quelle horreur!’ the narrator says, twice. Some of the women he sees now are the ones he saw then, having become old, ‘terrible shadows’ of what they had been, ‘desperately searching for who knows what in the Virgilian groves’. Zoological rather than mythological creatures after all, perhaps. The narrator suggests that we love what is old because we can’t bring ourselves to care about what is new. He can’t lend today’s women the kind of reality he feels they lack. ‘I no longer had any belief … to give them substance, unity, life.’ As he says a little more clearly much earlier in the book, ‘whether it’s because the spark of creative faith has dried up in me, or because reality takes shape only in memory, the new kinds of flowers I’m shown nowadays never seem to me to be real flowers.’ The narrator isn’t suggesting the flowers or the women are not real in an ordinary sense – they wouldn’t bother him if they weren’t. He is saying rather dramatically that a fully lived present reality requires more than a documentable existence, that it calls for an act of faith of the kind that religion offers to a god.

What we chiefly need to understand about this faith is that for Proust’s narrator it is irrevocably dead, and that conscientiously looking back is not going to help. Space collapses into disappearing time, and the last words of the book are: ‘the memory of a particular image is only regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fleeting, alas, as the years.’

I think Proust probably wants us to fall for this lyrical finality, and the narrator isn’t going to tell us any more in this volume. But we can prepare somewhat for the later action of involuntary memory, restoring space to time, replacing faith, so to speak, allowing us a perception of the material world that will feel real and contemporary, not lost. This is what we saw with the madeleine episode in the early part of the book, though the narrator was too preoccupied with the evocation of his complicated feelings to get far in understanding them. He does suggest that the senses remain active when all other instigations of memory are dead. Smell and taste especially are ‘more fragile but more enduring, more immaterial but more persistent, more faithful … remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest’. Of course, there is a great deal of chance involved in all this.

Vol. 46 No. 1 · 4 January 2024

Diary

Stevenson in Edinburgh

Andrew O’Hagan

It had been raining and the scent of jasmine hung over Moray Place. Most of the windows were dark and a notion of privacy seemed embedded in the stone. It must have been close to half past ten, because there was a sudden burst of fireworks over Edinburgh Castle – a nightly feast in August as the military tattoo concludes its parade. In his boyhood, Robert Louis Stevenson would sometimes be surprised while walking in the New Town to ‘see a perspective of a mile or more of falling street, and beyond that woods and villas, and a blue arm of sea, and the hills upon the further side’. I stopped at the corner of Howe Street and Heriot Row, where you are bound to feel the press of Stevenson’s young mind, for these are his ‘sleepy quarters’, his world of oil-lamps and dark coasts.

He lived at 17 Heriot Row, five floors of grey Georgian elegance facing the Queen Street Gardens, the dell of A Child’s Garden of Verses. Stevenson would dedicate that book to his nurse, Alison Cunningham, or Cummie, ‘the angel of my infant life’, whose ‘comfortable hand … led me through the uneven land’. To come from a family of lighthouse builders is perhaps to be recruited early to the cause of illumination and to fears of the dark, and we find the rudiments of Stevenson’s style in both, drawing on that special mix he found in his own father, ‘a blended sternness and softness that was wholly Scottish’. Thomas Stevenson was a curious but morbid man for whom darkness most immediately suggested the fiery regions of hell.

His only son suffered from a terrible cough – ‘I love my native air, but it does not love me,’ Louis wrote – and could often be found, at an early age, sitting up in bed wrapped in a shawl, crooning what he called his ‘songstries’ – prayers in blank verse. Before he’d seen the world, or even much of Edinburgh, he kept to his bed and painted in watercolours, or in words, the things in his mind. ‘Mamma,’ he is supposed to have said, ‘I have drawn a man. Shall I draw his soul now?’ The Presbyterian muse was never far from any nursery run by Alison Cunningham. A previous charge of hers, Walter Blaikie, recalled playing with the small RLS, the peely-wally sprite of Heriot Row. ‘Louis was particularly fond of anything dramatic,’ Blaikie wrote, ‘and his favourite game in our nursery was to play at church after the Scottish fashion. One child was minister and stood on a chair-made platform [and] Louis, who was fond of declamation, was generally the minister. Clad in some form of black drapery (probably Alison’s cloak) he would preach vigorously.’ (He also loved a game called mesmerism, in which he took the part of the victim.) Cummie almost certainly provoked the terrors that only she could soothe, but Louis was addicted like a Covenanter to her hellfire images, and without her care felt that he might have died in Heriot Row. ‘How well I remember her lifting me out of bed,’ he told his cousin Graham Balfour, ‘carrying me to the window, and showing me one or two lit windows up in Queen Street across the dark belt of gardens; where also, we told each other, there might be sick little boys and their nurses waiting, like us, for the morning.’

In Night Terrors: Troubled Sleep and the Stories We Tell about It, Alice Vernon argues the case for an entanglement between the nightmares we are bound to have and the stories we wish to relate:*

Dreams were sources of inspiration, the very foundations of fiction. But fiction could in turn provoke strange dreams, and thus the cycle continued. Robert Macnish, in The Philosophy of Sleep (1830), warned against the dangers of reading spooky stories before bed. ‘If, for instance,’ he says, ‘we have been engaged in the perusal of such works as The Monk, The Mysteries of Udolpho, or Satan’s Invisible World Discovered; and if an attack of nightmare should supervene, it will be aggravated into sevenfold horror by the spectral phantoms with which our minds have been thereby filled. We will enter into all the fearful mysteries of these writings, which, instead of being mitigated by slumber, acquire an intensity which they never could have possessed in the waking state.’

In his small bedroom, Louis was haunted by a peculiar shade of brown, ‘something like that of sealskin’, and his dream-nature became part of his talent (he called these creative nightmares his ‘Brownies’). Night terrors of intimate brutality might be expected to hasten a delicate literary style, but in RLS’s case the transit of phantasmagoria to a bold, sunny impressionism is startling. In ‘A Chapter on Dreams’, he described the process by which his Brownies became with time more ‘circumstantial, and had more the air and continuity of life’. He continues in the third person: ‘The look of the world beginning to take hold on his attention, scenery came to play a part in his sleeping as well as in his waking thoughts, so that he would take long, uneventful journeys and see strange towns and beautiful places as he lay in bed.’ He began to dream in sequence, ‘and thus to lead a double life – one of the day, one of the night – one that he had every reason to believe was the true one, another that he had no means of proving to be false.’

Time passes more intensely in dreams. It is an RLS hallmark, the quicksilver evolution of thought and the fabular turn, the victory of original perception. He was born with what he later called an ‘internal theatre’, a mode of production that serves to make the dramas of the mind visible. Stevenson’s work, almost alone among the Symbolists and first-rate prose writers of his day, seemed to involve a transfer of the spirit, imbuing the workaday world with fantastical energies and dimensions. His family would find Louis at his bedroom window at night, sending his imagination across the gardens like a beam from one of the family lighthouses, waiting for morning as the engineers must often have waited for calm. The boy was caught between the waking and the dreaming state; he yearned for the sleep he also dreaded, wherein the ‘horror of infinite distance and infinite littleness’ concertinaed through the landscape of his imagination.

Freud was six years younger than Stevenson, and there’s a glint of the unconscious in RLS’s prose, a hint of decay in the flower-scented tea, a touch of evil in the picturesque, that makes him modern, like Baudelaire or Wilde. It’s hard not to feel that his bedroom at Heriot Row was a diorama of sickly images. On the floor were pages from the illustrated newspapers, colouring-in books and religious texts. From the room he made the world as the room made him – all those stories! all those shadows! – and the spaces outside were simply playgrounds for the working out of his sentences. His task was to make it through the dark. ‘The whole sorrow of the night,’ he wrote, ‘was at an end with the arrival of the first of that long string of country carts, that in the dark hours of the morning, with the neighing of horses, the cracking of the whips, the shouts of drivers, and a hundred other wholesome noises, creaked, rolled and pounded past my window.’

A few weeks after that August night, I returned to Heriot Row and rang the doorbell. ‘Home of Robert Louis Stevenson, 1857-1880’ is carved into the stonework to the right of the door. From my own youthful reading, I had a strong notion of what the house would be like. I’d looked at photographs years before and could see in my memory the black marble fireplace, the Jacobean desk covered in inkwells and candlesticks, and surrounded by heavy volumes, the Victorian oil paintings above a little Arabic stool. I’d made a writer’s room in my own mind from the furnishings of Stevenson’s house, but now I was here, 150 years later, walking up the curling staircase and listening for distant coughs. The man who brought me into the drawing room – and sat me by a different fireplace and an old but different desk – was John Macfie, a tall and whiskery gentleman who lives there with his family. He poured me a whisky before sitting down in a red armchair beside the darkened windows. ‘At the front, in Louis’s bedroom, you get the punctuation of street noise,’ he said. ‘Noise is a key element in the Stevensonian imagination.’ He reminded me how grateful Louis was, in his teens, that the stairs were made of stone, allowing him to creep up to his room incognito, ‘pursued by fine arguments and sherry’.

Mr Macfie wore brown trousers and a cable knit sweater over a plaid shirt. He crossed his feet where he sat. He was wearing brown, elegant shoes. ‘I am the son and grandson of Edinburgh lawyers,’ he told me. His grandfather came to Edinburgh in 1895 from a farm on the Isle of Bute. His parents bought the Heriot Row house in 1971 for £19,500.† ‘Largely because my mother fell in love with it.’ His father was in the habit of lunching in the New Club in Edinburgh, and heard, one day, that the house was for sale. Colin Hercules Mackenzie, who sold the house to the Macfies, was the international marketing director for J. and P. Coats yarn company; he was an old Etonian, a student of John Maynard Keynes at Cambridge and a lieutenant in the Scots Guards, who had lost a leg at the Somme. When the Friday morning came for Mackenzie to sell Heriot Row, he invited Macfie’s parents for sherry at 11.30. Macfie’s father was asked to add £1000 for the furniture, and got a mortgage for £12,000.

John Macfie was ten years old then. His mother loved ‘networking’, she was Irish, she loved talking and ‘got keyed into the Stevenson mafia’. Macfie came to understand that it was ‘part and parcel of being in the house that you did your thing for the network’. People would ring the doorbell to ask about Stevenson, and they still do. John remembers James Pope Hennessy turning up when he was writing his book about RLS. ‘He was busy turning down a knighthood at the time,’ Mr Macfie said. ‘And I think they were keen to give it to him in thanks for all he hadn’t written about Queen Mary.’ Macfie’s wife trained in the hotel school at Lausanne and worked at the Balmoral Hotel. Together, they decided to run Heriot Row as a place of corporate hospitality as well as a family home. These days, weddings, funerals and overnight stays add to the life of the house.

I went out to dinner that evening and the people I was with had a strong memory of Mr Macfie’s mother, a formidable Edinburgh character, they said. I was staying the night, and it was dark when I came back to my room at 17 Heriot Row, and climbed the steps with muffled tread, holding the banister and making my way among ghosts, including the ghosts of previous life-writers and archaeologists of style. For a moment, I stood at the front window looking over the gardens, the lamps still burning. In my pocket I had a letter written by RLS’s cousin Maud Babington. I was given it in the 1990s and it’s one of my treasures. In it, Maud discusses (with Frank Greene, her relative, who was also a relative of the future novelist Graham Greene) the possible meaning of RLS’s story ‘Will o’ the Mill’. The speaker in the story looks out too, on a whole life, over the broad plain that lies before him. ‘If he could only go far enough out there,’ it says, ‘he felt as if his eyesight would be purged and clarified, as if his hearing would grow more delicate and his very breath would come and go with luxury.’ I went to bed in Heriot Row and the story persisted in my mind, the scent of RLS’s style. I reached to the bedside table and checked the book. ‘He was suddenly surprised by an overpowering sweetness of heliotropes,’ the story says. ‘It was as if his garden has been planted with this flower from end to end, and the hot, damp night had drawn forth all their perfumes in a breath.’

There is an ink drawing by RLS of his room. It appears in a letter he wrote in 1873, when he was 22 and beginning to discover himself as a writer. ‘I must tell you that I have a new bookcase in my room,’ he says.

I am very proud of my room so I give a plan. The long Bookcase (A.A.A.) is only about 3 feet 6, so it is nice to sit on the top of, especially in the corner; for I have a thorough child’s delight in perches of all sorts. The Box is full of papers. Of course you see where I sit – on the chair that I have cross-hatched, shut in among books and with the light in front during the day and at my right at night.

His childhood played very far into his life, into his creativity, and many of his first ideas came from staring into the gardens below, and from going down to lie on the grass and think of impossible lands. The ‘island’ of Treasure Island began with the small pond in the gardens. ‘No child but must remember laying his head in the grass, staring into the infinitesimal forest and seeing it grow populous with fairy armies,’ he wrote.

Somewhat in this way, as I pored upon my map of ‘Treasure Island’, the future characters of the book began to appear there visibly in the imaginary woods; and their brown faces and bright weapons peeped out upon me from unexpected quarters, as they passed to and fro, fighting and hunting treasure, on those few square inches of a flat projection.

After copying out that sentence, I stopped, put on my coat and walked to the gardens, gaining entry via my friend, the painter Alison Watt, who has a key. One of the trees was the colour of blood, thickly veined and knotted, its branches blocking our view of Heriot Row. The pond, with its little ‘island’ of sodden bracken and foliage, seemed stranded under the looming trees and the charcoal sky, but perhaps I was fixating on its former glories, when it was the subject of a young man’s feverish invention. We walked round the gardens and imagined how Edinburgh might have looked before the New Town was built. In his adult life, Stevenson often lived at the edge of tangled woods, as if their impenetrable nature and verdant, riotous existence suited his fictional turn of mind. Before leaving, I took a snap of his bedroom through a gap in the trees, imagining, through a smirr of rain, that I could see him in his nightshirt looking back.

His father was strung between the bogles of the church and the kelpies of free imagining. ‘One could almost see the struggle,’ Fanny Osbourne, Louis’s wife, wrote much later, ‘between the creature of cramped hereditary conventions and environment, and the man nature had intended him to be. Fortunately for my husband he inherited from his tragic father his genius and wide humanity alone.’ This was a telling-off from the American divorcee, who would, nonetheless, be scarcely more effective than Louis’s parents in demonstrating affection for him. Much of what he felt, in terms of love, he felt all his life for Cummie, a woman in the daily habit of pushing him towards ‘the high-strung religious terrors and ecstasies’ that drenched his dreams. He would later write an account of nurses, where he captures the true Alison Cunningham, that well-pressed Fifer, alone among the ‘quasi-mothers – mothers in everything but the travail and the thanks. It is for this that they have remained virtuous in youth, living the dull life of a household servant.’ But he loved her and she birthed more of his imagination than his mother did.

At Canonmills School, Louis was observed by a fellow pupil walking at Cummie’s side, ‘gaping at the universe’ (twenty years on he would write that his childhood was ‘a pleasing stupor’). He was bullied by the other boys for his strange appearance. He was ragged at Henderson’s, his next school, too, and James Milne recalled seeing him standing in the playground with the rim of his straw hat torn. He spent much time alone, and in the country, at Colinton Manse, where his grandfather lived, he used to hide under an old yew tree. One of his cousins described him putting his ear against the wall that divided the garden from the graveyard, declaring that ‘the spirits of the departed’ were speaking to him. For a writer who was to become such a sage of childhood – and who throughout his life, and afterlife, would be described as childish and childlike – it is remarkable how quickly he was rid of it. Childhood was a summer and then an autumn, and his innocence, such as it was, never impressed his friends’ parents as being of the genuinely innocent sort. ‘Mothers of my generation,’ one of them would say, ‘had an unacknowledged distrust of the thin, elfin lad with the brilliant eyes.’ It was as if his hunger for experience, a writer’s hunger, made him, to some, an unmanageable, inauthentic, over-watchful child. ‘What we lose in generous impulse,’ Stevenson writes in the essay ‘Child’s Play’, ‘we more than gain in the habit of generously watching others; and the capacity to enjoy Shakespeare may balance a lost aptitude for playing at soldiers. Terror is gone out of our lives, moreover; we no longer see the devil in the bed-curtains nor lie awake to listen to the wind.’

While he was at Edinburgh Academy, Stevenson is said to have fought a duel with another pupil, Bobby Romanes. ‘They had real pistols and real powder,’ according to a witness, Patrick Campbell, ‘but no real bullets – not even a charge of redcurrant jelly to add to the apparent tragedy of the encounter. No doubt Stevenson enjoyed this mimic warfare.’ The response of their teacher, D’Arcy Thompson, is not recorded, but probably involved the chief instrument of Scottish corporal punishment in Stevenson’s day (and mine) – the tawse. Leaving school, RLS was pleased to leave the daily fear of chastisement, and his devotion to playacting only increased, his wish to know the world he had dreamed of through the sun-comprehending glass.

‘Always there was some fresh weirdness in his imaginings of what had happened long ago,’ a contemporary at Edinburgh University said. Thrown by (and thrawn about) a number of religious and philosophical questions, Stevenson nonetheless enjoyed the democratic atmosphere at college. ‘Even when there is no cordiality,’ he wrote,

there is always a juxtaposition of the different classes, and in the competition of study the intellectual power of each is plainly demonstrated to the other. Our tasks ended, we of the North go forth as freemen in the humming, lamplit city. At five o’clock you may see the last of us hiving from the college gates, in the glare of the shop windows, under the green glimmer of the winter sunset. The frost tingles in our blood; no proctor lies in wait to intercept us; till the bell sounds again, we are the masters of the world; and some portion of our lives is always Saturday.

He was met with kindness at university, gaining a measure of liberal maturity, and was taken for a man of merit if not distinction. But as a student he would chiefly be remembered as a devoted truant. He plunked or dogged his classes and was scarcely to be found in lectures on Latin, Greek, engineering or law, sticking his head in at mathematics only because the tutor there could bring in the hangman, or some equivalent, if he didn’t. Professor Blackie, who taught Greek, once went so far as to say that he did not recognise Louis’s face. (‘None ever had more certificates for less education,’ the absent student would eventually admit.) Biographers have made too little of his pluming nonconformity. Oddly dressed in tight trousers, a velveteen jacket, an oversized bow tie and a fur cap, Stevenson was in no great hurry at Edinburgh to join the learned, though he wished to know the world and for the world to know him (he spoke excellent French but knew no grammar. The tutor liked him and let him away with it). He enjoyed drinking but had zero interest in sports, unless snowball fights may be counted (golf to him was as profitless as study). He spent his time writing poems, but at conversation he was sensational. He could make paintings or the Book of Job suddenly ‘live’ for his listeners, and they never forgot it. Despite what one friend called his ‘vagabond attendance’, Stevenson was awarded his degree and entered as an advocate, which pleased and surprised him, but in his head he was already travelling, a foreigner and a fugitive, honing his style with a strong Scots accent of the mind. ‘All through my boyhood and youth,’ he wrote, ‘I was known and pointed out for the pattern of an idler; and yet I was always busy on my own private end, which was to learn to write.’

Edinburgh was a constant fantasia of past and present. ‘I was wakened this morning by a long flourish of bugles and a roll upon the drums – the réveillé at the Castle,’ he wrote on 26 September 1873 to his friend Frances Sitwell.

I went to the window; it was a grey quiet dawn. A few people passed already up the street between the gardens, already I heard the noise of an early cab somewhere in the distance, most of the lamps had been extinguished but not all, and there were two or three lit windows in the opposite façade that showed where sick people and watchers had been awake all night and knew not yet of the new, cool day. This appealed to me of course with a special sadness; how often in the old times, my nurse and I had looked across at these, and sympathised!

The next day he lunched on omelettes and Burgundy with his cousin (he sometimes referred to him as his alter ego) Bob Stevenson, in a restaurant overlooking Princes Street. They argued about extinction, immortality and the non-existence of God. Imagining a world beyond his father’s belief, beyond the cold volcano of Edinburgh and its manners, was stimulating him into productivity. ‘Somehow, anyhow, I was bound to write a novel,’ he stated in the essay ‘My First Book’. ‘It seems vain to ask why. Men are born with various manias: from my earliest childhood it was mine to make a plaything of imaginary series of events; and as soon as I was able to write, I became a good friend to the papermakers … and still there shone ahead of me an unattained ideal.’ To RLS’s mind, most people don’t have even a bad novel in them.

For so long a time you must hold at command the same quality of style; for so long a time your puppets are to be always vital, always consistent, always vigorous. I remember I used to look, in those days, upon every three-volume novel with a sort of veneration, as a feat – not possibly of literature – but at least of physical and moral endurance and the courage of Ajax.

Lothian rains. Firth of Forth gales. There can’t be another writer in whom the local weather is more pleasingly instilled. ‘The delicate die early,’ he wrote,

and I, as a survivor, among bleak winds and plumping rain, have been sometimes tempted to envy them their fate. For all who love shelter and the blessings of the sun, who hate dark weather and perpetual tilting against squalls, there could scarcely be found a more unhomely and harassing place of residence. Many such aspire angrily after that Somewhere-else of the imagination, where all troubles are supposed to end.

But the distinctiveness of Edinburgh was to Stevenson a moveable and a copious feast. The London of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde feels so like Edinburgh because his home city was deeply ingrained in him and he carried it with him like a way of thinking. He entered it whenever he wrote a sentence, the rise and fall of his prose a secret reflection of tall chimneypots and small windows, cliffs and meadows, wynds and closes, laughing boys and tall professors, the complications of hearth and home working themselves out in the strange magic of his style. His talent was prodigious, but it never seems lavish, and there is always the feeling with his work that the reader is witness to common sense and boisterous enchantment lighting out for the territory. There is both classical proportion and Gothic romance: an Edinburgh of the mind. At the edge of every sentence he writes, you find the hum of intellectual gaiety and the echo of divine providence. The mixture is unmistakeable, and unmistakeably Heriot Row, a house turned inside out for the boy within. His writing style was on my mind as I climbed the stairs, spying the windows, observing the cornicing, believing as I made my way up that his vision was honed by the house itself.

He wrote a series of articles about Edinburgh for an art magazine called the Portfolio. ‘The feeling grows upon you,’ he writes in one of them,

that this profusion of eccentricities, this dream in masonry and living rock, is not a drop-scene in a theatre, but a city in the world of everyday reality, connected by railway and telegraph-wire with all the capitals of Europe, and inhabited by citizens of the familiar type, who keep ledgers, and attend church, and have sold their immortal portion to a daily paper.

He calls its inhabitants ‘chartered tourists’, but he was never less than one himself, still thinking at the end of his life about the breeze in Leith while writing Weir of Hermiston by a swamp in Samoa. For health reasons, and philosophical ones, Stevenson would go in search of the sun, for he was heliotropic, bound by nature and temperament to seek (or be) the flourishing flower made strong by the rains.

Heriot Row wasn’t the first house. He was born in a smaller dwelling at 8 Howard Place in Inverleith, near the Botanic Gardens. In September, for the first time in more than twenty years, the house came up for sale. Since being built in 1846 for Janet Buchanan Provand, it has had several owners, and was sold in August 2002 for £565,825 to the family who were selling it when I visited. The black ironwork of the gate spells out the letters RLS, and, beyond the blue front door, in the spacious porch, there is a plaster bas-relief of the Massacre of the Innocents. The asking price for the house was £1.2 million. The figure would have astonished Thomas Stevenson, who was described by one of his wife’s bridesmaids as a husband both ‘grave and scientific’. Their only child was born in the back room downstairs. His mother wrote to Thomas when he was on one of his lighthouse-building trips elsewhere in Scotland. ‘Good night sweet life,’ the letter closes, ‘think often of your own dear wee wife.’ In the solid grey house, in the crib downstairs, a little haunting machine was opening its eyes to the available light. I stood in his room and wondered how many children had come and gone since baby Louis had pawed the air.

Imagination is its own guarantor. No writer who is any good can be programmed by ideology, schools or scores, and the very best of them will coin the currency required for entry. As I write this now at my flat in Edinburgh, I can hear the single toll of the tram bell as it heads along Leith Walk. (The ‘ding’ is singular but not resonant. It is a recording of a bell, and there is no tintinnabulation, as Edgar Allan Poe named it, no lingering sound, because the recording cuts it off. The tram bell is like a bad music hall singer, always in the middle of a note.) If I pull the window up and lean out, I can see Calton Hill, and much nearer, at the top of my street, the corner of the building on Leith Walk that used to house Wilson’s, Alison Cunningham’s favourite newsagent, a shop that once stocked cardboard cut-out characters and scenes for a series known as Skelt’s Juvenile Drama. Stevenson was obsessed with them, and Cummie would take him to the shop every other Saturday, passing under my window. As much as the view across the private gardens, and as much as his idea of the worlds beyond, it was these dramas, ‘a penny plain and two-pence coloured’, that fired RLS’s imagination. They would always be Edinburgh to him, a furnace of the old and new and the richly improbable, Three-Fingered Jack, The Terror of Jamaica, The Forest of Bondy, The Smuggler, The Old Oak Chest, Aladdin. To him, they afforded a constant Christmas of foundling ideas and old standards, a lightning glance at pure storytelling, the spirit of his life’s enjoyment. The cardboard theatre in the window was like the ‘the silent theatre of the brain’. He went home to Heriot Row to apply his own paint, and something else: a yearning as big as the ocean, a need for the sun. ‘In this roll-call of stirring names you read the evidences of a happy childhood,’ he wrote, ‘and though not half of them are still to be procured of any living stationer, in the mind of their once happy owner all survive, kaleidoscopes of changing pictures, echoes of the past … That shop, which was dark and smelt of Bibles, was a loadstone rock for all that bore the name of boy.’

Cummie was obsessed with wrapping up well against the cold, getting ‘happed up’ as they say on the other coast, and treated every outing as if it were a journey to foreign parts, an expedition more than a stroll. I made my way up to Leith Walk, the tram bell sounding and rain threatening. Wilson’s newsagent is now a restaurant called Laila, its threshold enclosed in pink nylon roses. I had with me a book with a photograph of the shop taken as close as possible to Stevenson’s day, and the building is broadly unchanged. The three slanting steps up from the street are still there, and the half-hexagon shape of the frontage. I could see a dark patch on the stone where the old sign used to be, as well as the holes for the nails that held it in place. In my photograph a woman appeared to be standing at the shop window, looking in. The pages of the book began to flutter as I stood back to look up at the chimneys, glancing down at the photograph. Its shadows spoke about the amplification of reality. ‘What the photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once,’ Barthes wrote. ‘The photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially.’ It seemed to make some sense of the boy’s mind and the ghosts at the various windows.

Table of Contents

London Review of Books: Vol. 46 No. 1 · 4 January 2024

All articles

James Meek - Pandora’s Box: The Greed, Lust and Lies that Broke Television

Letters

Rory Scothorne - Short Cuts: Edinburgh’s Festivalisation

Pankaj Mishra - Subcontractors of Guilt: Holocaust Memory and Muslim Belonging in Postwar Germany / Never Again: Germans and Genocide after the Holocaust

Colin Kidd - America’s Philosopher: John Locke in American Intellectual Life

Maureen N. McLane - Poem: ‘Rocks’

Andrea Brady - The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet’s Journeys through American Slavery and Independence

Deborah Friedell - All Sorts of Lives: Katherine Mansfield and the Art of Risking Everything

Adam Mars-Jones - Corey Fah Does Social Mobility

Edmund Gordon - Oil!

Erin L. Thompson - Empires of the Dead: Inca Mummies and the Peruvian Ancestors of American Anthropology

Lloyd de Beer - At the Cluny: ‘Voyage dans le cristal’

Jeremy Harding - Zombie v. Zombie

David Todd - The Revolutionary Temper: Paris, 1748-89

Tom Shippey - Triumph and Illusion: The Hundred Years War V

Diane Williams - Two Stories

Michael Wood - Swann’s Way / The Swann Way

Andrew O’Hagan - Diary: Stevenson in Edinburgh