The TLS blog

In this week’s TLS – a note from the Deputy Editor

The United States has spawned many millenarian sects, but what makes the internet religion emanating from Silicon Valley – complete with its own prophets, salvific narrative and eschatology – different from all of them is the way it has insinuated itself in our lives. Michael Saler reviews two new books about the internet as force for (mostly) evil, exposing cyber-culture’s totalitarian tendencies, messianic pretensions, technological amnesia, “complete indifference to history” and contribution to the growing disparity in wealth and power in Western populations. Even more (so far) than the internet, “the car and truck reshaped everything” – people’s lives, the environments in which they lived. Somewhat akin to developments in the virtual realm, though, “many of the changes wrought by cars were embodiments of one fantasy or another”. Paul Barker reviews a “richly informative” exploration of the internal combustion engine’s impact on England. Coventry was “the Metropolis of Motordom” in the 1930s, and Dagenham became “the Detroit of Europe”. Now, Barker writes, “the most flourishing parts of the British economy are huge sheds in truck-filled acres of parking space near a motorway junction, all serviced by online ordering”.

This world had its proleptic poet in J. G. Ballard; and it haunts the imaginations of his most talented admirers, such as Will Self and Martin Amis. The latter has “a walk-on part” in Greg Bellow’s memoir of his famous father, Saul (above) – but he played a slightly more important one in the great American novelist’s dreams, according to our reviewer Clive Sinclair. “A Lady, tall, dark, strongly built, wishes to meet a gentleman going to Socialist colony, with a view to union”: this and other personal ads like it graced the radical periodicals of the fin de siècle, a study of which is reviewed by Leah Price. They generated “what theorists of online media call a long tail: niche monthlies or weeklies addressed to a small but loyal following whose subscriptions defined their identities”. Sound familiar?

Alan Jenkins

Iggy Pop, the one and only

By ADRIAN TAHOURDIN

George Christie, the chairman of Glyndebourne Opera, said something very interesting (to me at least) on the radio the other week. According to him, a lot of people in their twenties, thirties or forties make a transition in their music-listening habits from pop/rock to classical music.

This certainly happened to me in my twenties, when I made a conscious and deliberate switch: the 80s were in danger of becoming the lost decade, music-wise, and I knew there was a whole repertoire of classical music out there waiting to be discovered. The film Amadeus fired many of us with an enthusiasm for Mozart; Round Midnight put people on to jazz. Music suddenly became more interesting and rewarding again.

The work of Gustav Mahler held particular appeal and I now know that I’ll be listening to his symphonies and song cycles for as long as I’m still listening to music. The same goes for Dmitri Shostakovich – well, the symphonies mainly: Nos 4, 5, 8 (in the recording by the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by its dedicatee Yevgeny Mravinsky), 10 and 15. Sibelius became another favourite.

And then there was Schoenberg and Berg, and Bartók, and Messiaen, and Ligeti . . .

But the music you grow up with stays with you and, in my case, none more powerfully than that of Iggy Pop (né James Osterberg) and his Detroit band The Stooges. This was music not to grow up to. Their album Raw Power (1973) is the one from my adolescent years that I know I could not do without – it represents nihilism raised to an art form. Will Hodgkinson recently described it in The Times as “one of the greatest – and nastiest – rock albums”.

Iggy and the Stooges re-formed a few years back and gave a compelling performance at the Hammersmith Odeon three years ago, the sexagenarian Iggy displaying the energy of a twenty-year-old. There were fewer crowd dives than before – a relief. The audience was one big midlife crisis. The music (quite loud) was driven by the guitarist James Williamson, who left the Stooges and went on to become a high-up in Sony Electronics, took early retirement and returned to the band. Good career move.

Iggy Pop himself has of course had an on-and-off-the-rails solo career in between the two Stooge incarnations. David Bowie salvaged it in the 70s, and worked with him on two of his best albums, The Idiot, whose cover (below) echoes Bowie's Heroes, and Lust for Life. (Danny Boyle made great use of the title song in the film Trainspotting.) Bowie went on the road with him – his backing vocals (and keyboard) can be clearly heard on the brilliantly shambolic live album TV Eye. “China Girl” was a hit for Bowie but there’s a better version on The Idiot. There were some other fine moments later: “I’m Bored”, “I’m a Conservative”, and, as if to counter that, the hilarious “Don’t wanna be no Squarehead”.

It's heartening to discover that Johnny Depp is a big Iggy fan. His account of first meeting his hero is very funny (it's on the World Wide Web). Even more hearteningly, Iggy and the Stooges have released a new record, Ready To Die, and it’s really not bad. James Williamson’s guitar playing is as menacing as ever, and Iggy’s remarkable voice (well, you either love it or . . . ) sounds in pretty good shape.

Iggy Pop has always written and sung wonderful ballads, and there are a couple on this one, including the majestic “Beat That Guy”, which I have listened to eighty times, at a conservative estimate: “Runnin’ out of space / I’ve run out of time / I’m runnin’ out of reasons / Though I don’t know why” . . . . Thankfully he shows no signs of ageing gracefully. The raw power is still there.

All’s well that’s Boswell

By MICHAEL CAINES

Unless you’re an avowed enemy of the biografiend, today is a good day to raise a glass to the art of biography and, in particular, to James Boswell. This is the 250th anniversary of Boswell’s first meeting with his subject, Dr Johnson – or, as James Knox, the chairman of the Boswell Book Festival put it this morning, Boswell’s “creation” Dr Johnson – at the house of the actor and bookseller Thomas Davies, in Russell Street near Covent Garden.

The book festival, which opens tomorrow at Auchinleck House, was preceded this morning by a gathering at the house of the publisher John Murray on Albemarle Street – ahead of a symposium hosted by King’s College London and Dr Johnson’s House, Professor Gordon Turnbull and the actor John Sessions made an excellent double act, the first running lightly through the story of Boswell’s life before Johnson, the second supplying the necessary range of accents – Ayrshire, Cockney, Lichfield – to bring the occasion to life.

For an audience, the speakers had some of Boswell’s descendants, both lineal and literary, biographers, academics, hangers-on (guess which category I put myself in); for a set, they had the magnificent Murray drawing room. “Literary London” seldom looks so good at half past eight in the morning.

Raise a glass to booksellers, too, then; Boswell knew the first John Murray, and Boswell and Johnson share their Russell Street plaque with Davies. In fact, Davies is the crucial link between them, and if his wife Susanna wasn’t so notoriously beautiful, Johnson might not have enjoyed calling there so often. (Professor Turnbull pointed out that Boswell didn’t record in his journals that she was present at the celebrated first meeting, but added her name to the version in his Life of Johnson; a telling detail, since when the Doctor put down the unknown young Scot, for the first of many times, he was very likely showing off in front of her.)

Boswell had hoped to meet Johnson through their mutual friend Thomas Sheridan, but by the time he got to London, in 1762, they were no longer on speaking terms. It was Davies who invited Boswell to meet Johnson, initially on Christmas Day, 1762, when Johnson opted instead to go to Oxford, and Boswell had to settle instead for Robert Dodsley and Oliver Goldsmith, “a curious, odd, pedantic fellow with some genius”, with whom he disagreed over the merits of Shakespeare and Thomas Gray.

The meeting that took finally place in the back-parlour of Davies's shop, around 7 in the evening of May 16, 1763, wasn’t planned. Boswell later “remembered” that Davies had announced Johnson’s arrival with a presciently symbolic line from Hamlet, as if he were alerting the prince to the presence of his father’s ghost: “Look, my Lord, it comes . . .”. Davies’s role doesn’t end there. He reassured the would-be acolyte that Johnson actually liked him, despite the initially ambiguous reception, and later that it would be acceptable for Boswell to call on Johnson. When Boswell was back in Scotland, he could rely on Davies for publishing advice and reassurance despite the lack of news from Johnson himself: “I am sure he has a true respect for you”, he wrote in August 1766, “but you know the Indolence of his temper”.

As Kate Chisholm wrote in the TLS recently (the whole piece can be read for free here), it is through Boswell’s Life of Johnson that we know about his views on “women preachers, Scottish savages, the temptations of the theatre and a man who is tired of London” – to the extent that this biographical “creation”, to use James Knox’s term again, eclipses the author of the Rambler, the Idler etc. “How, then, do we go back to read Johnson as if the Life, with all its anecdote and conversation, did not exist?”

It’s a good question. What greater tribute could a biografiend wish for?

In this week’s TLS – A note from the History editor

On the face of it, the nineteenth-century Russian writer Nikolai Leskov and the early twentieth-century American writer Sherwood Anderson would seem to have very little in common. Leskov came from “a long line of priests”, and his work was inspired by the traditions of Russian orthodoxy. Anderson was a “hardworking businessman” who, according to literary legend, walked out of his office at a paint factory one day, and devoted the rest of his life to writing “fables of estrangement”. But both A. N. Wilson, reviewing new translations of Leskov’s stories, and Michael Dirda, on a Library of America edition of Anderson, see a connection between their subjects and Anton Chekhov. It was Leskov who prepared the ground for Chekhov, Wilson argues. But where Chekhov’s characters seem universal types, Leskov’s remain “pungently” Russian. Dirda sees Anderson himself as an equivalent “John the Baptist” figure in the development of the American short story, foreshadowing William Faulkner, for example, who declared that Anderson was “the father of my generation of American writers”. Anderson’s “distinctive tenderness for his characters, despite all their flaws and foibles” reminds Dirda not of American forebears, however, but of Russian ones: Turgenev – and Chekhov.

In an age of academic specialization, history books that establish a new orthodoxy across a great swathe of time and distance are increasingly rare. But Theodore K. Rabb believes that Geoffrey Parker’s magnum opus, Global Crisis, does precisely that. Parker makes a “monumental statement about the nature of seventeenth-century history”, which sets the “General Crisis” of that period firmly at the centre of its history. If the “essential background” is the Little Ice Age, “misguided policy decisions” of leaders across the globe account for the century’s “world-wide agonies”.

In Commentary, Mark Davies offers an intriguing new candidate as the model for Lewis Carroll’s (and John Tenniel’s) Mad Hatter.

 

David Horspool

 

Very shirty

By ADRIAN TAHOURDIN

“A shirt is the closest to the heart, so that is why I use shirts. The person is there.”

Thus the Finnish sculptor Kaarina Kaikkonen whose latest work, co-commissioned by the Brighton Festival, is on exuberant display in the high-ceilinged Fabrica art gallery, a former Regency church in the centre of Brighton.

If you feel you've become too sexy for your shirt, why not send it to Kaarina Kaikkonen? She clearly has a use for it. The shirts in this exhibit were donated by Brighton residents and will then be passed to Oxfam.

Kaikkonen is, according to the display leaflet, “best known for several major works using hundreds of discarded men’s jackets, items that have a highly charged and personal significance for her. Though ambiguous in meaning, her works evoke associations of personal loss, collective memory and local histories”.

Her work has been displayed outdoors to wonderful effect, where the shirts take on the appearance of linked soaring kites.

For good measure the artist draped the clock tower in the centre with items of clothing (see below), lighting up a dull sky.

The shirt hang, or "Blue Route", is on until May 27.

Brighton ballads

 By ADRIAN TAHOURDIN

 

Almost certainly a first: three Dutch poets reading in Brighton. On the opening weekend of the three-week-long Brighton Festival, the Frisian threesome were joined by one French poet for an event organized by Modern Poetry in Translation. It was easy to tell the French poet: she was the one wearing the beret. The four - Menno Wigman, Ester Naomi Perquin, Valérie Rouzeau and Toon Tellegen - were eloquently introduced by the editor of MPT, Sasha Dugdale.

The Brighton Festival traditionally has a Guest Director and this year it’s the turn of Michael “We’re Going on a Bear Hunt” Rosen, whose enthusiasm for Erich Kästner’s Emil and the Detectives is evident in the programming. But as is usually the case, the choice of events is nicely varied. A couple of years ago, the organizers cheekily (I thought) invited Aung San Suu Kyi to be their guest director. I don’t imagine she had much of a hand in organizing it, but she obliged with a gracious introduction to the programme; there were a number of performances relating to The Lady, of, er, varying quality. Last year the guest director Vanessa Redgrave saw the invitation as an opportunity for a mini season of her own films. Brian Eno, a few years back, gave things a strongly musical flavour.

The MPT poetry reading was a success, partly because (in my case at least) three of the poets were unfamiliar. First up was Menno Wigman, who is currently city poet of Amsterdam, in which role, he explained, he is occasionally asked to write elegies for people who have died alone or on the street  (he read one of these). Wigman has been described as the “dandy of disillusion” and he writes melancholy poems of urban solitude and despair, eloquently conveyed by his translator David Colmer. 

Ester Naomi Perquin, meanwhile, has drawn on her experience working as a guard in a prison in her home city, Rotterdam. Her poems, on the evidence here, are quirky, occasionally confessional, with arresting lines: “Strange tracks lead down to the drink”. Her work has been Englished by the eminent Dutch translator Paul Vincent (who wasn’t able to attend). Rather charmingly Perquin chose to read one of her poems in English, claiming that Vincent’s version was better than the original.

Tellegen’s expressive reading of a long sequence in Dutch made demands on the audience that Judith Wilkinson’s translations (read by David Constantine) didn’t quite meet: something profound and metaphysical but . . . . I found more nourishment in some of Tellegen’s poems in the MPT volume: “If you were to ask me: how old would you like to be, / I would say: 2420 years. / For then, as a boy in Athens, / I would have seen / Aristophanes’ plays”, . . .

Valérie Rouzeau has published twelve collections. Her work has been superbly translated into English by Susan Wicks as Cold Spring in Winter (2009), which was described by the TLS reviewer Patrick McGuinness as a “book of rare cumulative power”; indeed Wicks won the Scott Moncrieff Prize for translation for her rendition of Rouzeau’s lament for her dead father, Pas Revoir. As Rouzeau exclaimed at one point as Wicks was reading her translations of new work, “She’s such a fucking good translator!” Wicks  writes that “preserving the essence of Rouzeau’s work in English isn’t easy”, and that “the boldness of the poetic procedures in French was asking an equivalent boldness of me as their translator”. She describes her language as “contemporary, slangy, playful, childlike . . . “.

The opening of Pas Revoir illustrates the challenges for the translator: “Toi mourant man au téléphone pernoctera pas voir papa. / Le train foncé sous la pluie dure pas mourir mon père oh steu plaît tends moi me dépêche d’arriver". Wicks renders it: “You dying on the phone my mum he will not last the night see dad. / The train a dark rush under rain not last not die my father please oh please give me the get there soon”. Elsewhere Wicks ingeniously opts for “by the why dopen doors” for “près des portes béates”.    

Rouzeau’s most recent collection, Vrouz (how, one wonders, will Wicks translate that?) won the Prix Apollinaire in 2012. Rouzeau has that slightly baffling French habit of reading fast, almost like a hangover from the classroom. But the new work, more upbeat perhaps, had her inimitable stamp: “Don’t rent a lorry I can move your stuff / I’ve got a little van your things will fit in fine / Smile you’re just moving house you’re off to better days . . . “.

 

In this week’s TLS – A note from the History editor

From its very beginnings, the story of America has resisted “attempts to impose a particular shape and meaning”, in the words of Amanda Foreman. Reviewing the Harvard historian Jill Lepore’s collection of essays on American origins, Foreman observes that, from Captain John Smith in Jamestown in the early 1600s, to successive American Presidents in their inaugural speeches, “truth has been, not the standard-bearer of history, but the servant of politics”. Lepore’s own approach to her country’s past responds to overarching views of a nation imbued with manifest destiny by breaking them down into “microhistories”. These studies of past lives take “small mysteries about a person’s life as a means to exploring the culture”.

The larger mysteries of the brain are Raymond Tallis’s subject, specifically the advances in functional magnetic resonance imaging, and how much they can tell us. Some contributors to a collection on the subject are running before they can walk, worrying about the legal and ethical implications of reading a person’s thoughts before any such thing is within the realms of possibility.

The frontiers of science, and as yet unrealized breakthroughs, are perhaps more properly the province of science fiction. Michael Saler addresses a new edition and critical study of one of the first examples of the genre, Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. Though “packaged as a philosophic novel”, and taking in classical and Christian tropes as well as the more familiar Gothic, Shelley’s precocious production (she was nineteen when she wrote it) was also an exploration of the scientific cutting edge. Luigi Galvani and Humphry Davy would have been sources of inspiration, as would her husband Percy’s own dabblings in experimental chemistry.

The popularity of fictional versions of servants’ lives, from Upstairs, Downstairs to Downton Abbey, has made the task of recovering the realities of lives in service even more worthwhile. Paul Addison finds that Lucy Lethbridge’s Servants is “social history at its most humane and perceptive”.

David Horspool

 

NB See the TLS website for our Poem of the Week, "Song" by George Barker, and the contents page in full for this week's issue.

A forbidding shadow . . .

By MICHAEL CAINES

Today is the bicentenary of Søren Kierkegaard’s birth – an event that is being celebrated, later in the year, with Fear & Trembling in Berlin (a play), seduction in Israel (an evening of music and film in Tel Aviv, inspired by the “Johannes the Seducer” part of Either/Or) and other events, listed here, including an exhibition in Copenhagen, where he was born, inspired by his battle with Hans Christian Andersen.

Philatelists will no doubt mark the occasion by splashing out 8 krone for the philosopher’s stamp:

Others may wish to swot up on the rhetoric of spiritual anguish etc.

Not that it will help them, if the author himself is to be believed. In Alastair Hannay’s translation of the philosopher’s journals:

“nothing is learnt from history. The illustrious of bygone times stand there in their glory; even persecution and the like have their attraction. No closer understanding is conveyed. And then a youngster rushes off and misunderstands . . . .”

Then again, Kierkegaard has characteristically hard words for those who do take heed:

“Many arrive at a life’s result like schoolboys; they cheat their teacher by cribbing from the key in the maths book, without having done the sum themselves.”

These views didn’t prevent him from looking into the future and seeing the kind of figure he himself would cut one day. Without claiming to be a thoroughgoing authority on his oeuvre, I’m struck by the conviction, in the works that I do know, behind his repeated glances in the direction of posterity:

“Ah, once I am dead, Fear and Trembling alone will be enough to immortalize my name as an author. Then it will be read, and translated into other languages. People will come to the point of trembling at the frightful pathos in the book. Yet when it was written, when he who is considered its author went about in an idler’s disguise, looking like flippancy, wit, and frivolity itself, no one could properly grasp its seriousness. O ye fools!”

Does Kierkegaard matter today? Well, it's funny you should ask . . . there's a piece on his contemporary relevance forthcoming in the TLS.

An 800-page biography appeared a few years ago; see Jonathan Lear’s superb review for the TLS to get an idea of the idler’s disguise and the world out of which Kierkegaard’s extraordinary works emerged. And see Jonathan Rée’s equally fine piece from 1998 for an account of Kierkegaard’s legacy and the problems of translating and trembling in his presence. To qualify/contradict what I’ve said about his concern about his own status in the future, though, here’s a request Lear quotes from the end of the Concluding Unscientific Postscript:

“My wish, my prayer, is that, if it might occur to anyone to quote a particular saying from the books, he would do me the favor to cite the name of the respective pseudonymous author”.

(“His wish comes to mind every time I am in the ‘Kierkegaard’ section of a bookstore”, Lear adds.)

For Laura Riding, however, writing in 1937 in response to a leading article in the TLS, it was most interesting that Kierkegaard, sceptical about the power of history lessons, looked instead to “some poet of the future” to secure his own reputation – to recognize his “gesture against the masses” and his place “among those who have suffered for an idea”.

On the one hand, Riding remarks, “Such an appeal to the authority of poets is so rare that one would love Kierkegaard if one could”. But for deeper reasons, she couldn’t: his philosophy is based on “the insanity of egoism”, and his “spiritual intelligence” is only proof of the “furious energy of his egoism” rather than “spiritual greatness”. “So at least it seems to me as a poet. For me a forbidding shadow of evils hangs over his work . . . .”

It’s not a response that will be widely echoed, I suspect, around the world during the commemorative events to come. But it could perhaps be considered revenge for Kierkegaard’s characteristically unhappy description of a poet:

“A poet is an unhappy being whose heart is torn by secret sufferings, but whose lips are so strangely formed that when the sighs and the cries escape them, they sound like beautiful music . . . And men crowd about the poet and say to him: ‘Sing for us soon again’; that is as much as to say, ‘May new sufferings torment your soul . . .’ And the critics come, too, and say: ‘Quite correct . . .’.”

Franco-German discord

By ADRIAN TAHOURDIN

Franco-German relations are, it seems, destined never to be straightforward. What was supposed to be the highpoint of the events celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Elysée Treaty, or Friendship Treaty between France and Germany, signed by Charles de Gaulle and Konrad Adenauer, has generated controversy of the kind I imagine both parties would rather have avoided.

The exhibition at the Louvre, De l’Allemagne, 1800-1939: German thought and painting, from Friedrich to Beckmann, brings together more than 200 works, most never before exhibited in France. The venue could not be more prestigious, the project was jointly conceived by the museum and the German Center for the History of Art in Paris. The title De l’Allemagne alludes to Mme de Staël’s work of that name, copies of which were seized and destroyed by Napoleon’s police in 1810.

But the exhibition seems to have met with displeasure in some quarters in Germany, most prominently in Die Zeit, where the columnist Adam Soboczynski, while conceding that it’s a fine display “as long as one concentrates exclusively on the selection of wonderfully contradictory paintings”, draws attention to what he sees as a teleological interpretation of German art that links its cult of Romanticism in art to the barbarities of the twentieth century. The piece was provocatively headed “Auf dem Sonderweg”, a reference to the theory that German history in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries took a “special path” that paved the way for the rise of Hitler. (The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung also talked of the Sonderweg.) Soboczynski goes on to say that “to call the [exhibition’s] concept over-simplistic would be an euphemism”. The apparent references to “pulsions primitives” certainly sound unfortunate. According to Soboczynski, an unequal struggle is posited between Apollonian and Dionysian impulses; he also raises suspicions about the cut-off point: “That the exhibition should end in 1939 (although in the entrance area there are impressive new works by Anselm Kiefer) is hardly open to misunderstanding. Horror is historically and philosophically inscribed in German art since the time of Goethe. The nostalgic landscapes of Italy and Greece, the contemplation of the Gothic, the German enthusiasm for the Middle Ages, . . . are all, in the interpretation we are offered, mere stages that lead to the German catastrophe”.

Soboczynski secured an interview with the director of the German Center for the History of Art in Paris, Andreas Beyer, who claimed, angrily, to have been excluded from the curatorial process, a decision he found “highly irregular”, although he acknowledged that the Louvre would be the main player in the project. Bizarrely, Soboczynski suggests that a sense of economic inferiority may have provoked what he saw as an intention to put a contentious interpretation on the art.  

The German ambassador in Paris, no less, Suzanne Wasum-Rainer, felt obliged to reject the criticisms. In Le Monde she is quoted as saying: “The Louvre is staging the most important exhibition of German art ever seen in France . . . . To suggest that [it] intended, in the context of a European crisis, to bring out the ‘particular path’ which led Germany to the politics of national-socialist extermination is to misrepresent the goodwill, erudition and engagement of the people involved in this project”. Elsewhere, an article by Bernhard Schulz in Der Tagesspiegel also rejected his fellow countrymen’s criticisms, and praised the exhibition – “Seldom has interest in German art and culture been as great as it is today”.  

Le Monde’s excellent art critic Philippe Dagen reviewed De l’Allemagne under the heading “Who said there was no such thing as German painting?” – an allusion to a commonly held French view (much as the Germans long thought of England as “das Land ohne Musik”), up until quite recently. It was a long and appreciative piece, which concluded by saying that the last work in the exhibition, Max Beckmann’s “The Hell of Birds” (1938, below), is “perhaps the only painting from the last century that could be hung opposite ‘Guernica’ and hold its own”. 

  

Dagen and Le Monde’s Berlin correspondent Frédéric Lemaître have since published an eloquent rebuttal of the criticisms, coming to the defence of the Louvre, whose director Henri Loyrette expressed himself “surprised and profoundly saddened” by the comments. Dagen and Lemaître deal with the widely made observation that movements such as Blaue Reiter and Bauhaus are excluded from the exhibition by pointing out that they were broadly international in their personnel even if they had a German origin. And, as the Louvre tactfully chose not to mention in its defence, the Bauhaus was shut down by the Nazis in 1933 and its leading lights went into exile. They also point out that Die Zeit has rowed back, publishing a long article by Michel Crépu in which he claims this is perhaps the first time that Paris has embraced the history of German art in all its complexity.

More recently Le Monde ran a piece in its books section by Nicolas Weill about a proposed museum of Romanticism in Frankfurt. The article was headed “Les Allemands et leur romantisme embarrassant”. In it, Weill approvingly cites a book by the German historian Rüdiger Safranski, Romantik: Eine deutsche Affäre, which dismisses any idea of a direct link between German Romanticism and Nazism: “Nazi ideology was leagues away from the elitist individualism which characterizes so many of the outstanding figures of German Romanticism and the Führerprinzip had little in common with the contemplative passivity that suffuses the atmosphere and semi-dreamlike landscapes of the painter Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840)", whose "Tree of Crows" from the exhibition is below. 

I have to confess that I haven’t seen De l’Allemagne and don’t think I’ll have the chance to see it – much as I’d like to (it’s on until June 24). I did, however, see a wonderful Friedrich exhibition at the Centre Culturel du Marais in Paris in 1984. The curators had the clever idea of playing the Prelude to Wagner’s Parsifal on a loop, as each room in the intimate gallery opened up onto another spectacular landscape. It was my introduction to Friedrich as well as to the music of Wagner, and they complemented each other thrillingly.  

In this week’s TLS – A note from the Deputy Editor

The circumstances of Marc Blitzstein’s murder at the hands of three merchant seamen in Martinique in 1964 remain mysterious, while his musical legacy remains in limbo, with much of the music he composed virtually forgotten, unpublished and unrecorded. Homosexual, charming and irascible, described by Orson Welles as “fine-tuned rather than highly strung”, Blitzstein enjoyed the good life but devoted himself to employing “the sophisticated resources of modernist art music in the service of ‘the People’ – no easy task”, writes David Schiff, reviewing a “massive new study” which fills in some of the gaps left by earlier scholars. Is Blitzstein still paying the price for his communist beliefs and adherence to the Party line, or do those beliefs “continue to give the music a critical aura it may not deserve”? Blitzstein, we are told, “suffered to some extent from depression and alcoholism, but then again so did Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald”. And so did Charles Newman, the novelist, editor, essayist and dog-breeder whose magnum opus remained unfinished at his death in 2006. Douglas Field reviews a volume that offers “a tantalizing glimpse” of Newman’s folie de grandeur.

The folie Sainte-Beuve attributed to Charles Baudelaire was somewhat different: both an exotic folly, “highly decorated, highly tormented . . . where people recite exquisite sonnets [and] intoxicate themselves with hashish, where they take opium and thousands of other abominable drugs”, and a form of madness. Lauren Elkin reviews a study of Baudelaire, the “ambivalent philosopher of modernity as well as its exemplar”, by Roberto Calasso. Samuel Johnson, himself tormented by depression and fear of madness, found “through the balancing of alternative propositions in a single sentence” a pathway to sanity, writes Kate Chisholm, reviewing two new books – one of which offers a very twenty-first-century Johnson, much concerned with vegetarian diets and the benefits of exercise.

Alan Jenkins

Project Colony

By TOBY LICHTIG

"Are you here for the party?", asks the girl. 

She's wearing red lipstick, a summer frock and an expression of benign wonderment. We tell her we are. 

"Oh good!" she cries, clapping her hands. "We're so excited!"

We've arrived at The Colony, the penal settlement of Kafka's imagination, now relocated to Trinity Buoy Wharf, just opposite the Millennium Dome, on the north bank of the Thames. This place is rich in London history; it is the site of the city's only lighthouse, as well as the former workplace of Michael Faraday. Tonight, however, the wharf has become a faraway British outpost, its development arrested at some point in the 1950s.There are around eighty other guests and twenty wide-eyed natives. 

"We've never left the island", one girl confides to us. "Our parents used to tell us all about life in England."

We're led to a former chain warehouse, kitted out with balloons, a stage, a bar and round tables. Locals chat to us. One mentions that times have changed. Things are looking up. The former Commandant of The Colony was not a nice man. But his replacement is kinder. He wears a striped shirt, a thin moustache and has the air of a hotelier at a British postwar seaside resort. We sit down and have a drink.

Suddenly the mood changes. Several more locals arrive, dressed in white shirts and braces, silent and menacing; they beckon for a group of us to leave. We're led out, along the wharf, the City of London glimmering in the charcoally pink dusk, and down a flight of stairs to a dark basement, where an ominous torture contraption lies in the centre of the room. We take our seats and watch on as a weary traveller, dragging a wheely case, is introduced by an army officer to the mechanics of the elaborate apparatus. In the corner, an uncomprehending prisoner awaits her just deserts.

Fourth Monkey’s Project Colony is an innovative reworking of Kafka's 1914 short story "In the Penal Colony", and an excellent evening out. The basement play itself is an impressive dramatization of the text, but what makes the event so compelling is the theme of complicity that it teases out. We are both revellers and spectators, audience and participants, drawn into the action. Like Kafka’s “explorer”, we are encouraged to question our role as tourist or agent of change. As the explorer comments in the original story: “It was always a ticklish matter to intervene decisively in other people’s affairs”.

After the first part of the play – which ends with a strap breaking off the device, much to the chagrin of the eager executioner – we are led back upstairs, swapping places with another group of guests. We have some more drinks and play a game of pick-up sticks. There are lollipops for the winners and then a quiz. A band plays a couple of songs.

Later, we are rejoined by everyone from the basement, including the other half of the audience. Kafka’s sinister tale resumes. The officer must come to terms with the obsolescence of his mechanism and the inhabitants of the colony are confronted with the results of their inertia.

Even if the play becomes rather baggy at this point, with several inadvisable interpretative liberties, and the acting isn’t quite first-rate (shouting seems to be an all-too-ready substitute for projecting), our role as uncomfortable witnesses is emphatically underlined. With an audience-cast ratio of 3–1, we are pleasingly immersed by the drama. We are strangers in a strange land, unsure of our function, stuck somewhere between a party and a nightmare.

Alexandria: The Last Nights of Cleopatra, at Fowey and Hay on Wye

BY PETER STOTHARD

In December 2010 I felt suddenly frustrated at a long-time failure to write a book about Cleopatra -and took off to Alexandria to see if I could better complete it in the city where once she had ruled.

The onset of the Arab Spring became just one of the obstacles that freshly complicated the task. My daily diary entries became as much memoir of dead and living friends as history of a dead queen.

That diary is now Alexandria: the Last Nights of Cleopatra, a book, even if not quite the book I long intended. It is about to be published by Granta and its first outings are at the Du Maurier Festival at Fowey on May 12 and at Hay on Wye on May 26.

It would be wonderful to find there some festival-going TLS readers and Facebook friends.   

 

 

Muriel Spark makes the case for abridgement

By MICHAEL CAINES

“Complete and unabridged” – the reassuring phrase isn’t deployed by publishers now as often as it once was. Drastically abridged editions of classic novels were once a staple part of the book business, going back, as far as England is concerned, to at least the early eighteenth century.

(For example: the Bancroft Books series for children, with their nostalgia-inspiring covers, manages to reduce the length of Ivanhoe by about 300 pages.)

In the midst of such contrivances, discerning readers could be flattered with the prospect of the real McCoy. Hence Sidney Lee’s deployment of a powerful word – “pure” – to describe the unabridged, complete “Universal Library” he edited for Methuen. One wonders what he would have made of the later habit of abridging, say, Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. It’s hardly a door-stopper, but you can imagine a medieval poem inspired by the Trojan War daunting English literature undergraduates for other reasons, and OUP et al astutely taking note of this abridgement-sized gap in the market.

In contrast to the Sidney Lee mode of textual idealism, consider the curious case of The Last Man.

In this week’s TLS, Kathryn Hughes reviews the (latest) reissue of Muriel Spark’s “critical biography” of Mary Shelley, first published in 1951. At the back of the book is an appendix. Thirty-two pages long, its opening paragraphs outline the state of things to come before giving way to indented quotations set in smaller type – quotations of only a few lines at first, which soon grow to fill whole pages. The appendix ends with the lines that furnish the novel with its title:

“Thus around the shores of deserted earth, while the sun is high and the moon waxes or wanes, angels, the spirits of the dead, and the ever-open eye of the Supreme, will behold the tiny bark, freighted with Verney – the LAST MAN.”

This is, of course, an abridgement of Mary Shelley’s third novel, The Last Man (1826), and Spark justifies her apparent act of literary heresy on practical grounds.

By her reckoning, Shelley’s original is around 170,000 words long. It’s “almost unknown” to the general public, and is “unobtainable except in very rare editions”. In an earlier chapter devoted to it, she concedes the novel has its faults, but concludes by comparing it to Frankenstein and calling it “wonderful”.

The appendix seeks to support that point. Suspecting that The Last Man “will hold a more pertinent appeal for present-day readers than it did even in Mary’s time”, Spark offers her “utilitarian” version of it in the hope that “wider recognition of its merits may lead to its being reprinted”. (To translate for the internet age: she's uploaded as much data as she can, but doesn't have sufficient bandwidth to upload the whole thing. Hence the abridgement.)

Fourteen years later, the University of Nebraska Press obliged, and their example was followed, some decades on, by Oxford World’s Classics and Broadview Press (overwhelmed with excitement, confused by this copiousness, Amazon currently prints praise for Broadview next to the Oxford edition).

And now The Last Man is available on Open Library, Project Gutenberg etc. So in this instance the practical case for abridgement seems to have disappeared.

What remains is the point that Spark’s eloquent chapter on The Last Man and the abridgement make good, complementary companions. You could do worse than enjoy the later novelist’s appreciation of her predecessor’s work while testing your reactions to Shelley’s prose, via the abridged Last Man.

And: to remove the appendix now would be to abridge Spark’s book . . . as it is, its original title, Child of Light, is long gone.

André Gide and Catherine Gide

By ADRIAN TAHOURDIN

Catherine Gide, the daughter of André Gide, and probably the last surviving link to early-twentieth-century French literature, has died at the age of ninety. Some will no doubt be surprised to read that the writer, who made his homosexuality public, had a daughter at all (she was his only child). Catherine was born in 1923, when Gide was in his early fifties.

Gide had married his cousin Madeleine Rondeaux in 1895. In his autobiography Si le grain ne meurt, Gide wrote "Mon amour pour celle que j'avais décidé d'épouser me persuadait de ceci: qu'elle avait besoin de moi, si moi je n'avais pas besoin d'elle, de moi spécialement, pour être heureuse" (My love for the woman I had decided to marry convinced me of this: that she had need of me, even if I had no need of her, of me specially in order to be happy). As is so often the case when Gide writes about himself (and he did so a great deal), it results in questionable sentiments beautifully expressed – carefully calculated self-revelation dressed up as naked confession.

The (unhappy) marriage was unconsummated and it was in the early stages of it that Gide properly discovered his homosexuality – an awakening that led to books such as L'Immoraliste and Les Nourritures terrestres. He took up with the very much younger Marc Allégret, the son of a family friend and later a filmmaker, with whom he travelled widely, including to the Congo: Gide's Voyage au Congo, in which he denounced the brutality of Belgian colonialism, is one of his best books.

The relationship that produced Catherine was with Élisabeth ("Beth") Van Rysselberghe, the daughter of the Belgian painter Théo Van Rysselberghe, who was a friend of the writer. Théo's wife Maria was one of Gide's closest confidants. Élisabeth had been Rupert Brooke's lover. She travelled frequently in company with Gide and Allégret. And brought up their daughter.

André Gide with his daughter Catherine Lambert, Lake Maggiore, 1947

In his fine biography of the writer (1998), Alan Sheridan relates how Gide gave Catherine her first piano lesson when when she was six and how he would read to her from the 1,001 Nights.

According to Sheridan, Gide had to adopt Catherine when, in 1938, he sought to have her recognized officially as his daughter – "because she was the child of an adulterous relationship, 'recognition' would have no legal binding". It's clear from Sheridan's biography that Gide held his daughter in great affection: "he had no wish to live with her, but he wanted to be on hand, to supervise her progress and give her the benefit of his tuition".

Again Sheridan: "Catherine interested Gide to the extent that she showed a desire to be educated by him: the pedagogue/pederast would make allowances for her sex. The eighteen-year-old Catherine was now a jeune fille en fleur, one who showed no interest whatsoever in her father's work and only perfunctorily in matters intellectual".

In his voluminous Journals (which Gide himself regarded as his most lasting work), he writes on July 26, 1941: "I came away delighted from Catherine's dancing class, which I have just attended". In what must rank as one of the more inappropriate juxtapositions in print, he goes on: "Were I a ballet-master, I should go and recruit on the beach some of those little Italians (perhaps French boys) with tanned bodies whom I was watching yesterday . . . and whose elegant and rhythmical way of swimming I was admiring. Trained in dancing, they would seem so provocative that, out of regard for public morals, no one would dare to 'produce' them".

Later, he writes, "I am rereading Genesis for Catherine's intention" (one can picture the high-minded solemnity). And then: "Catherine might have bound me to life; but she is interested only in herself – and that does not interest me . . . . I had rejoiced immoderately over those lessons I was preparing to give her in Nice . . . . All her time is taken up with other lessons (dancing, singing , elocution), which merely directs her attention to herself".

But Gide approved of her choice of marriage partner in 1946, Jean Lambert, who, according to Sheridan, was "an academic specialist in German and English".

Sheridan writes that when visited by Dr Delay in his final days Gide lamented "I'm afraid that my sentences might become grammatically incorrect" (Gide died in February 1951).

(What strikes one particularly from Sheridan's biography is the staggering amount of movement in Gide's life, right up until his final years – he never seems to have stayed in one place for long – from the early years of vagabondage across North Africa to . . . "Gide and the Lamberts then moved out to an hotel at Sorrento" . . . .)

Catherine became a true keeper of the flame for her father's work, overseeing its appearance in the prestigious Pléiade series. In 2007 she set up the Fondation Catherine Gide whose resources she made available to writers and researchers (The Fondation have published a death notice in Le Monde for April 25). She also wrote a foreword to the posthumous Le Ramier (woodpigeon), which was published in 2002 and recounts a sexual encounter between the writer and a young farm boy. She revealed that she had found among her father's papers "a short erotic novella, dated 1907 and titled The Woodpigeon". Later she writes "This short text is full of joie de vivre" – "Toute perversité en est totalement absente".

 

 

In this week's TLS - A note from the Deputy Editor

Though the past few years have seen the super-injunction, a super-expensive means of ensuring that no newspaper can publish what someone would prefer not to be known, applied with increasing frequency, no one, to our knowledge, has recently brought an injunction against themselves. Yet this is just what Robert Southey did in 1817, in an attempt to prevent publication of a youthful folly – the play Wat Tyler, celebrating the Peasants’ Revolt and advocating political reform. Twenty-two years after it was written, the unpublished play had been conveniently forgotten, and Southey, by then Poet Laureate, was enjoying the fruits of a very different political stance. He was “aghast” to see an advertisement announcing the “inflammatory” play’s publication. Kelly Grovier, reviewing four volumes of Southey’s Later Poetical Works, uncovers the story of its missing years.

Richard Brautigan hitchhiked to San Francisco in 1956, intending to pursue poetry, but, out of step with the Beat movement – Allen Ginsberg called him “a neurotic creep” – he struggled to make a mark. Switching from verse to prose, he claimed “I don’t want to sit at the children’s table any more”, but it was with the Flower Children of the hippy movement that he found success. When they lost interest, he struggled again, this time against drink and adverse criticism, living “in a macho milieu of hard drinkers, gunslingers and philanderers” and eventually shooting himself with one of his beloved Smith & Wessons. Michael LaPointe, reviewing a biography that attempts the rehabilitation of Brautigan as a major American author, concludes he was more of an authentic American lunatic. While Brautigan liked to frighten hosts with his .357 Magnum, the poet Edward Dorn produced a magnum opus in Gunslinger, written over seven years from 1967. Dorn once expressed the view that poetry was “obsolete”, but a new Collected Poems reviewed by Jules Smith runs to almost 1,000 pages. His career went “without official honours” and, writes Smith, “he seemed content about that”.

Alan Jenkins

I’m A. N. L. Munby, I am . . .

By MICHAEL CAINES

Talking of conferences and innovations in typography: here's an unusual view of a bibliophile and sometime TLS contributor, the ingenious A. N. L. Munby, holding court. (More book historians should dress like Henry VIII, I say, or some other monarch.) I'm speaking at a centenary conference to be held in Munby's honour at King's College, Cambridge, where he was a Fellow and Librarian, at the end of June. The research has, so far, been nothing but a pleasure.

The conference website explains why Munby is such an important figure for the study of books, his activities ranging from downright collecting, cataloguing and lecturing, to surviving as a POW by writing ghost stories and co-founding the Cambridge Bibliographical Society. He wrote the five definitive volumes of Phillipps Studies, about the nineteenth century's most avid collector of manuscripts, and, just to be sure he'd made his mark, succeeded in persuading the scholarly world that booksellers and auction catalogues could be crucial resources, rather than negligible ephemera.

He himself could claim, in an essay of 1952 – "Floreat Bibliomania", from which the conference takes its name – to own some 1,500 sale catalogues, but counted this as a "very modest" figure: "the late Seymour de Ricci had 30,000 sale catalogues, now in the Bibliothèque Nationale". A postscript added some twenty years later confesses that the 1,500 had by then grown to about 7,000 "and will be a major worry to my executors".

Yet Munby knew the dangers of overdoing a good thing. To quote again from the superb collection Essays and Papers (you don't need to be a bibliomaniac, by the way, to savour Munby's prose):

"The will-power necessary to get rid of books must be maintained at all costs. Even if one buys on a modest scale – say, one book a day on an average . . . . I once visited a house in Blackheath after its owner had died. It was solid books. Shelves had been abandoned years before; in every room narrow lanes ran between books stacked from floor to ceiling, ninety per cent of them utterly inaccessible. In one of the bedrooms there was a narrow space two feet wide round the bed, and there the owner had died, almost entombed in print. . . ."

Bibliophile: consider yourself warned. Again.

 

Photo copyright the Estate of A. N. L. Munby.

Celebrating Christine Brooke-Rose

By MICHAEL CAINES

Readers of the most recent TLS Poem of the Week will already know what Christine Brooke-Rose’s first contribution to the TLS was: “The Lunatic Fringe”, a poem published in 1956. She started reviewing for the paper a little later, and her first novel, The Languages of Love, appeared the following year.

In the 1960s, however, she set herself on a different course, with the books Out, Such, Between and Thru – an enthralling quartet subsequently republished as a bulky omnibus by Carcanet – with the predictable result of alienating anybody who didn’t care to put much intellectual effort into their reading. These were “language games” for those who liked their roman to be nouveau and their Joyce to be James not Cary. I’m not sure if it’s more a welcoming-in or a warning-off if I describe Xorandor, my current favourite, as a kind of computerized Compton-Burnett.

The Royal College of Art deserves great credit for hosting a symposium last week celebrating Brooke-Rose’s work. It was good to hear both Ali Smith and Tom McCarthy championing her, as well as the design expert Rick Poynor placing Thru in the context of twentieth-century innovations in typography and Natalie Ferris, the brains behind the operation, describing the shape of Brooke-Rose’s life and career, tracing the development of her “lexivore” mind.

Additional pleasures included a screening of the amusing Bookmark programme about Brooke-Rose (could the BBC produce such a good literary series today?), complete with a cameo from the rebarbative Margaret Thatcher at a summit meeting, and an interview with John Calder. Now in his eighties, Calder admitted that he couldn’t really remember his encounters with Brooke-Rose, but raged nonetheless against the conservatism of mid-century book reviewers who took against his kind of work, and hers, and slipped easily into stories from his publishing days: what happened when Beckett met Burroughs; how he kept Alexander Trocchi going (“he was a bit of a rogue . . . some writers are”). The dismissal of the current state of publishing as a “disaster” was balanced by the conviction that there will always be good new writers coming along.

I hope that the speakers’ enthusiasm persuaded anybody in the audience who hadn’t read at least one of those post-1960 novels to try them. The symposium left me with the impression that Brooke-Rose deserves a wider readership despite her off-putting reputation for “difficulty” – that question Edward Albee asks about Virginia Woolf comes to mind.

Is there any need to be afraid? Decide for yourself. Here’s a selection from that transformative quartet of novels mentioned above, beginning with the zoomed-in narrative of Out:

“A microscope might perhaps reveal animal ecstasy among the innumerable white globules in the circle of gruel, but only to the human mind behind the microscope. And besides, the fetching and the rigging up of a microscope, if one were available, would interrupt the globules. If, indeed, the gruel hadn’t been eaten by then, in which case a gastroscope would be more to the point. And a gastroscope at that juncture of the gruel’s journey would provoke nausea.”

Then there’s the astrophysics-inspired Such:

“The waves expand into a spiralling query from a small unstable nucleus of fear hidden like the square root of minus one deep inside the charm, the well-living swarthy flesh, the soft Levantine eyes and labyrinthine knowledge of law that makes up what you as a psychiatrist should know, I mean what happens to that thing you chaps call the unconscious when the body lies in the lowest state of life, if at all, well, they may put people on ice for years, I mean, what ought to happen, you must know the theory at least, does it tick on at a low imaginative level or what, did you dream, for instance?”

Brooke-Rose wrote Between without recourse to the verb “to be” (and it was published the year before Georges Perec’s lipogrammatic La Disparition, Friday’s symposium taught me):

“Inside [the plane] they have pressurized the comfort. The people sit hidden in their high armchairs but for a few head-tops bald fluffy blond curly back between the port and starboard engines, looked after cradled in their needs, eat drink smoke talk doze dream and didn’t catch what you said.”

And lastly, here’s what Thru can throw at you:

As well as:

There. Was that so bad?

There's another kind of difficulty, for the symposium's speakers and other readers: the critical one of knowing how best to place Brooke-Rose's work. She was, after all, a female academic working in Paris, trilingual by upbringing, wary of being grouped with either French or English contemporaries (the third language was German), in whose work classical influences may be felt at times more clearly than modernist ones, who grasped the expressive potential of typography in as-yet unequalled ways (see above), and wrote a ZBC of Ezra Pound. It's no surprise to see her being celebrated in an art college.

NB Here’s what Ali Smith had to say about the omnibus and a valedictory work, Life, End Of in the TLS a few years ago.

NB2 And here’s a coincidence: I’ve just been handed a review to edit of some of the reissued novels of B. S. Johnson, the innovative contemporary with whom Brooke-Rose is sometimes grouped. It appears that a “new genealogy” of English post-war fiction, hoped for by McCarthy, is already with us, if only we have eyes to see it .

'The ice-pick man cometh'

By ADRIAN TAHOURDIN

This was the heading John Sturrock gave to a TLS review of a biography of Leon Trotsky in the TLS some twenty years ago. The heading was so good that I think he may have used it more than once - perfectly reasonably; after all, if you've got a winner make the most of it.

I'm not sure how much readers of the TLS notice our headlines: their eyes will be drawn to see what's being reviewed, and then to the first (or last?) sentence. The headline is there, ostensibly to help of course, but it's also an optional item. That said, a really good heading can steer the reader, or encapsulate the reviewer's assessment of the book in a few words. Or it can intrigue – and, on rare occasions, even amuse. But above all it shouldn't mislead the reader (something of which I feel I’ve been occasionally guilty in giving headings to letters published in the TLS).

I had a quick look at the first issues of the paper (1902) to see how TLS editors approached headlining then – fairly austerely I’d say: “The Duke of Devonshire’s pictures”, “Railway reading”, “Ecclesiastical reprints”, “Mr Henry James’s new book”, “Automobilism and its literature” and so on. “A German defence of British policy in South Africa” is particularly snappy. Ditto “Sidelights on the Persian question”. But they’re certainly not uninformative.  

Skipping to the TLS for 1939, I see that quite a lot of agricultural titles were reviewed, giving rise to headings such as “”A plan for British agriculture” (Jan 39), “Towards better farming” and “British farming” (July), as well as “Cameos from the farm” (Oct). As the book reviewed under that last heading, Teamsman by Crichton Porteous, suggests, these publications weren’t about making contingency plans for the coming crisis: “to avoid the ruts Mr. Porteous seeks lodging away from the farm, studies in bed, reads Thoreau behind his ploughing team, contributes fragments to country papers . . .”.

But the global situation certainly wasn’t ignored elsewhere in the paper, and it’s gratifying to see, among the slew of reviews of books on the Nazi threat (and a sober editorial in the issue of Sept 9 on the importance of publishing books at such a time), a piece on October 14 headed “Why Nazi Germany can’t win”. The book being reviewed, by the way, was Nazi Germany Can’t Win by Dr Wilhelm Necker (see below). 

A few decades on, in 1982, the TLS reviewed Jean-Jacques Beineix’s film Diva, about a Paris dispatch rider on a moped who is obsessed with the diva of the title. Lindsay Duguid, who was in charge of the Arts pages at the time, headed the piece "La donna et Mobylette" - a heading so good it has passed into what passes for TLS legend. (On the same page there’s “Dearth of a salesman”.)

But generally I sense that giving headings to reviews unavoidably involves a good deal of recycling. I wonder how many times we’ve used “Command performances”, “Natural causes”, “Parallel perceptions”, “Exotic excursions”, or “Selective affinities”. Maybe not as often as I suspect. Or, in a slightly different mode, “Writing against oblivion”?  . . . Having said that, “Writing to hounds” for a review of a hunting and shooting anthology of R. S. Surtees is very good.  

The Letters page doesn’t give much scope for facetious heading (thankfully), but a couple of years ago we published a review by David Gallagher of Mario Vargas Llosa’s novel about the Irish nationalist Roger Casement who, in Gallagher’s words, “served the British crown with loyalty, was knighted in 1911, then hanged for treason five years later . . .”. There was discussion of the Black Diaries, in which Casement is said to have kept a detailed record of his homosexual activities in sub-Saharan Africa and South America. We then ran a letter from Casement’s biographer Angus Mitchell (January 14, 2011) in which he referred to the post-mortem carried out on Casement’s body - the letter contained the unimprovable sentence “Fortunately, a brief history of Casement’s anus can be collated from various medical records and correspondences”.  It was only after the issue had gone to press that I thought of heading the letter "Riddle of the sphincter". But I’m not sure it would have met with general approval.   

 

 

The Shed at the National – it’s got legs

by Thea Lenarduzzi

The Shed at the National Theatre. Photograph: Helene Binet

 

It’s been compared to Battersea Power Station, an Amish barn and “a giant's up-ended hen house” – and it’s only been around for three weeks. But the striking red structure jutting from the side of the National Theatre is, officially, The Shed: a 225-seat theatre erected to cover the year-long refurbishment of  the Cottesloe Theatre.

The theatre, designed by the architects at Haworth Tompkins, is intended by the National as an opportunity “to take risks” on emerging writers and performers. The year’s programme – which ranges from a piece devised by the New York based theatre company THE TEAM (“Gertrude Stein meets MTV”) to an adaptation of Ross Collins’s children’s book The Elephantom – opened on April 9 with Table, a new play by Tanya Ronder, directed by Rufus Norris.

Ronder is perhaps best known for her adaptations – including one of DBC Pierre's Vernon God Little in 2007 and another, of Peter Pan, in 2009 – but Table is a far, well, riskier endeavour, based on three years’ worth of improvising, work-shopping and writing. The result charts the events that shape six generations of the same family, played out, as you might have guessed, around, on and under their hand-me-down table.

Beginning in Lichfield in 1898, with a furniture maker on his wedding night giving his table a final polish, the play ends – and this is in no way a spoiler – in present day London, via Tanganyika in the 1950s and a Herefordshire free-love commune in the 60s and 70s.

The interest lies in how the Best family history – a miniaturization of that of the twentieth-century, and the beginning of the twenty-first – has left its traces on the table: the enlistment of an only son in the First World War (a long, deep scratch); a bleached area (the urine of a repressed young man who dreams of studying couture); scratches made by the claws of a leopard, and others by the nails of an impulsive nun; “Amor Patris” carved on the inside leg by an absent father; the burn from a stubbed out joint. Patterns emerge, births and deaths, celebrations and bust ups, comings and goings…. And there are invisible marks, too – “the tiny shards from 27 million boring conversations” and the flour from 5000 loaves of bread, for example.

Ronder’s is a hopeful, and often humorous, play (the family surname and a character called Hope are an opportunity for wordplay, readily taken – “Hope is with me”; “Do you have a message for Hope?”, etc) – despite the threat of a replacement glass table from Ikea (the assembling of which, I imagine, would occasion a few bust-ups of its own). The whole leaves one wondering: at what point does a prop become an actor in its own right?

The centrality of the piece of furniture has led some critics to compare The Shed itself to an upside-down table (I have yet to try my theory of an upturned beheaded pig on them), contributing to the general air of mischievous unpredictability that surrounds the National’s new venture. Haworth Tompkins is no newcomer to theatre redesigns or pop-ups developments, having revamped the Royal Court and Young Vic, and built two temporary theatres for the Almeida. Let’s hope that this latest project – fighting red and clad in rough-sawn timber boards intended, by the architects, as the “opposite” of Denys Lasdun's board-formed concrete building – proves as rebellious as first appearances suggest . . . .  

 

 

In this week’s TLS – a note from the Deputy Editor

 

NB In addition to the pieces linked below, we've also put this week's TLS diary column, NB, online, for a change . . . .

*

Having led the team that designed the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, J. Robert Oppenheimer emerged as the leading scientific sage of the post-war era, advising statesmen on atomic energy and urging restraint in the nuclear arms race. In 1953, though, an official inquiry concluded he was a security risk, a decision that “broke his spirit”. Daniel J. Kevles reviews a biography by Ray Monk which throws light on Oppenheimer’s beginnings as a wunderkind of physics, early left-wing sympathies, “deeply felt and lifelong patriotism” and the sense of duty he derived from his absorption in Hinduism. “After us the Savage God” was W. B. Yeats’s famous verdict after the stage premiere of Ubu Roi by Alfred Jarry, in 1896. The monstrous Père Ubu has for more than a century embodied all that is most grotesque in our social and political arrangements – yet he began life as a schoolboy joke at the expense of a physics teacher. Ian Pindar, reviewing a Life of Jarry, defies anyone to close the book “without a sense of sadness that somebody so rare and unworldly came to such a sorry end”; while John Stokes goes to see a new production of Ubu which manages, even now, to confront the audience with an upsetting image of itself – and ends by calling for bankers’ blood.

Bankers might not feature in The Merry Wives of Windsor but money, the possession of it, the lack of it, and how to come by it (by marrying it, for example) are very much to the point in this play, an odder and harsher work “than might be expected from a happy, sane, simple little comedy”, in Barbara Everett’s view. The citizens of Tudor Stratford, she writes in Commentary, would have recognized their own “tough good sense and rare eye for the main chance” in their Windsor counterparts. Raphael Lyne on The Tempest and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann on the Sonnets appear alongside her, to mark Shakespeare’s birthday next week.

Alan Jenkins