The TLS blog

Double issues

The TLS goes to press on Tuesday for publication on Friday. Every Tuesday, that is, except for two Tuesdays per year. In the last week of August, and the last week of December the TLS staff take a “reading week”, an office half term. To compensate, there is always a double issue the week before “halfers”: the summer double issue and in this case, the Christmas double issue.

The current Christmas double issue, dated December 23 & 30, includes Martin Amis on Nabokov, James Campbell on the letters of Ernest Hemingway, A. N. Wilson on the letters of P. G. Wodehouse; pieces on Christopher Hitchens and Steve Jobs; reviews of Swallows and Amazons at the Vaudeville Theatre, the film Hugo and the film Margaret; Joseph Heller, Georges Simenon, Harold Bloom, Alice Oswald. The list goes on. And then there’s the Christmas quiz.

Many longstanding subscribers will know off by heart not to expect a new issue today, December 30. Some will understandably get caught out, and might call in, to say they are missing a TLS. The week before was a double issue, we explain, everyone needs a week off.

But it was not always thus.

The unseen Jane Austen?

© Paula Byrne

Is this Jane Austen? On Boxing Day at 9pm, BBC2 broadcasts Jane Austen: The unseen portrait?, in which the biographer and Austen scholar Paula Byrne suggests, with the support of art historians and costume experts, that it is.

Other authorities on Austen have suggested that this could be an “imaginary portrait” or a “memorial portrait” of the novelist, but Byrne can counter such objections:

Babies from Cambridge

 

By PETER STOTHARD

The cover of the latest Cambridge Literary Review (not illustrated here) shows a baby in a glass box.

The butterfly mobiles and bedroom pictures suggest that she has been there for longer than for post-natal intensive care.

Peridot is the daughter of a professor from Cambridge, Massachusetts whose early concern for ‘perfect control of her environment’ creates a woman both saucy and sexless.

Or so she is at the beginning of Donald Barthelme’s uncollected story, ‘The Ontological Basis of Two’, originally published under a pseudonym in 1963 for the men's literary magazine Cavalier (a 1966 issue illustrated above).

Later Peridot is freed — to the pleasure of the narrator and one of many post-modern pleasures in CLR 5, edited by Boris Jardine and Lydia Wilson, which also includes a fine essay by David Hendy on another forgotten magazine, Wireless World, and some ‘intoxicating’ techno-fiction of fifty years before.

Perambulatory Christmas Books, part 11

 

JC

 

Perambulatory Christmas Books, 5th series, part XI: Our purpose has been to stave off Christmas gift-book blues by touring the capital’s secondhand bookshops, in search of a neglected work by an established author, for about £5. We do not seek collectibles or firsts (although each has come our way). All our books are bought to be read.

The best used bookshop in London, from our lowly perspective, is Any Amount of Books in Charing Cross Road. It was there, five years ago, that we found in the outdoor barrows Edmund Blunden’s The Face of England (1932), priced £1, and read the opening paragraph. No one could write like that now, we thought; the tune has been lost. We asked ourselves why, and with that the good ship Perambulation was launched.

Our most recent purchase at Any Amount was that unusual thing, a novel by George Gissing which is neither New Grub Street nor The Odd Women. Thyrza was published in three volumes in 1887. It is a romantic story with a tragic ending – damn you, Gissing – but we recommend it highly. In Chapter IV, poor but beautiful Thyrza sings in the Prince Albert pub down the Lambeth Walk. The stroll to the pub shows the author doing one of the things he does better than almost any English novelist, painting street scenes:

Christopher Hitchens in pictures

 

When our friends are dying, we know what we think we will remember of them.

I had meant to have a lengthy obituary of Christopher Hitchens ready here to post when the thunderously advancing news of his death finally arrived. And, if I had done so, it would have contained many of the accolades that are crowding down today.

It might have also offered items from what an anthologising publisher once called ‘The Quotable Hitchens’. Something on Kissinger, ‘that rare and foul beast’, or Princess Diana, ‘like a dog being washed’, or himself. ‘I am, I hope, never offensive by accident’.

Or perhaps the passage from September 2010 where he conceded that ‘more than once in my time have I woken up feeling like death’ but that ‘nothing prepared me for the early morning last June when I came to consciousness feeling as if I were actually shackled to my own corpse’.

But the bits and pieces, the brightly earned words of praise, don’t quite do it this morning.

There are random pictures that do more:

* the first evening that I ever saw him, in 1970 at the Oxford Union when he led the shouting of ‘murderer’ and the hanging of a noose in the face of a Labour Foreign Secretary deemed over fond of the war in Vietnam.

* the day at the White House when he quoted from what is the very little surviving of his poetry.

I Am the King of China, 

I’m A Patron of the Prize-Ring.

And Every Time My Man’s On Top

I Can Feel My Boxer Rising.

* the afternoon in a tent when he explained how the Boxer poem, composed to strict Oxford rules of versification, and the Vietnam War, fought at the same time to laxer rules, were nonetheless connected — via George Steiner and a rhyme sequence that does not seem appropriate to quote today. Readers of Hitch 22 can find it for themselves.

* the New Year in Palm Springs when Gerald Ford died and Saddam Hussein was hanged, when it seemed easier and more pleasant to sit together in a bar and deplore the faraway cell-phone footage, but somehow more necessary to drive to the airport and see Airforce One and a dead president’s coffin for ourselves.

Well, it was more necessary for him. From Bosnia to Belfast to Baghdad (he had an alphabet of places scarred by religious bigots and those were just the Bs)  he never missed a chance to get close. The rest of us went for the ride. There was a misunderstanding about cars and car parks. It was still good to have gone.

* the night in Hay on Wye when we sat together before what seemed to me a stadium of his admirers, with me tasked with ensuring that the talk was about his life, about his new autobiography, and not about god, Clinton, Iraq or Mother Theresa. He played his greatest hits anyway. He was a rock star writer and he never disappointed, certainly not on the last show he did here before the news of cancer came.

 * the nights with him and Carol and Laura Antonia in Washington DC, the party when we first arrived in George Bush Senior’s time, the party when we left, the warmth and depth of hospitality over so long, the love of his friends, the anxiety of friends and the admiration of millions in the months now over. Those pictures are the sharpest today of all.

Christmas without the humbug

BY DAVID HORSPOOL

Who is our most Christmassy writer? Everyone knows the answer to that one, especially in this year-before-the-anniversary year: yes, Dickens, again, whose Christmas Carol was merely the best known and most successful of several Christmas stories. You will be relieved to learn that this is not yet another Dickens blog, or even a blog about having had enough (already) of Charles Dickens. No, I would like to offer instead an alternative Christmas literary champion. The thought arose when I attended a rousing evening of prose, poem and song at St Mary's Old Church in Stoke Newington, North London last Sunday, at which an assortment of reasonably familiar (but not so familiar I remember their names) performers gave us readings in between perfectly-pitched a cappella renditions of carols and Christmas songs from all over the world by a choir a dozen strong, to whom our hostess, Selina Cadell, referred, gratefully, only as "those guys" (I have since discovered that they are known to some as the Occasional Choir). Considering that it was all part of a fundraising drive for an arts centre to be based at the church , a project that could hardly look more alien to the Victorian conception of what churches are for, this was an enjoyably old-fashioned type of evening, one in which it was hard to believe that the gale rattling the seventeenth-century window-frames was blowing across inner-city Hackney rather than wilder country heaths. There was no printed programme -- "too much faff, frankly", our MC explained -- but the readings I can reliably source came from Dickens (of course), from Thomas Hood, Hilaire Belloc, John Betjeman and Harold Nicolson, among others.

One writer's influence, however, both direct and indirect, was felt above all: Thomas Hardy. As you might expect, we had a reading from "The Oxen", with its extraordinary image of the beasts kneeling before the manger. Hardy manages to avoid Christmas schmaltz by painting the picture at one remove. The poet has not seen the remarkable sight, he has merely heard about it, and wants to believe it: "We pictured the meek mild creatures where / They dwelt in their strawy pen, / Nor did it occur to one of us there / To doubt they were kneeling then." The last line of the poem "Hoping it might be so", sums up with perfect economy the well-disposed doubter's feelings about faith and the festive season. Kit Wright used it as the title of a very much darker poem, which wishes that "There must be a place where the whole of it all comes right" in a world populated by murderers and rapists. Hardy's world has plenty of room for pain, of course, but his Dorset was brought to Stoke Newington in its more cheerful form, echoed by contemporary poets such as Catherine Simmonds, whose poem "The Stour at Hammoon" we heard, recalling the listless cattle and quiet riverbank of a Dorset summer (and recalling for me the tiny hamlet of Hammoon, where, as it happens, I got married ten years ago). There was also the very Hardyesque story of the church musicians whose home-brewed attempts to keep warm during the sermon lead inevitably to disaster. If it didn't actually come from Under a Greenwood Tree (no programme, you see), it was certainly in the spirit of that novel, which begins on a snowy Christmas Eve. The Hardy effect was still working for me as I strode home across sodium-lit pavements, imagining the rather more intrepid walks of the poet, who thought nothing of covering miles on foot to hear a decent sermon. Dorset had come to London, and Christmas had been rescued from the monopoly of London's most famous literary son.

Life after The Hare with Amber Eyes

BY CATHARINE MORRIS

Edmund de Waal’s book The Hare with Amber Eyes traced the history of his Jewish diasporic family through its collection of Japanese netsuke carvings, acquired in the 1870s by the wealthy art collector and historian Charles Ephrussi. When the book was published eighteen months ago, de Waal thought that his work was over, that he could go back to being a ceramicist. In fact it wasn’t, and he couldn’t. The main problem, as he would probably term it, was the scale of his success: there were glowing reviews and prize nominations, and the book entered the bestseller lists. The publicity tour, it became clear, was going to be a long one.

At an Economist Books of the Year event at the Southbank on Friday, de Waal told us in detail about the unexpected difficulties such success brought with it. First of all, he had to talk about the book. He didn’t want to read from it (“The number of times I’ve fallen asleep when listening to people I respect read from their own work . . .”), so he had to find a new language in which to reinvigorate it. Then there were the interviews: in New York Public Library the questioning was adversarial; in Paris the conversation – a short one – began “So, you write about Proust . . .”. De Waal also had to reconcile himself to different publishers’ tastes and marketing strategies: the American paperback edition has photographs in the “obligatory sepia” on the cover, and the hardback a subtitle of the “kitchen sink” school (“A family’s century of art and loss”). The book has just come out in Brazil packaged in a velvet envelope.

Rock-hard Jersey Boys

By PETER STOTHARD

The convention of theatre criticism is that everyone notices a show’s opening. Few care about a closing. And fewer still care when a show rolls on night after massive-earning night all over the world.

Six years after its Broadway debut, Jersey Boys is one of the biggest theatrical hits of our time. Any TLS reader who is not a fan of Franky Valli and the Four Seasons (an easy group to find, I guess) will be barely aware that it exists. 

Which perhaps does not matter except that when I saw it in London last week, it did trigger a few thoughts. Three years after opening here, the theatre was absolutely packed. The audience was permanently about to bounce out of the seats — and periodically did so. Not a whiff of recession anywhere. A terrific reminder that people will spend money if they are sure they are going to have a good time. 

Certainty is often seen as akin to sterility. But the direction here was still as tight as a perfect first night. The cast was so well drilled you might think that a Chinese general was permanently parked in the stalls, any slightest deviation from the original will being punished by the Jersey Boys’ less savoury gangland characters. 

There are many so-called ‘juke-box musicals’. But this one works — and has always worked — because of the simple technique of allowing each band-member to alternate in describing his disfunctional relationship with all the others. Nothing flashy — except the Seasons’ suits. Nothing soft or slack. a rhythmically adjusting point of view. I left feeling that I could come back in another decade and it would still, rock-solidly, be there.

Hot Chocolate with Dickens

By THEA LENARDUZZI

 

The 1970s pop act Hot Chocolate are confirmed to play at Dickens World in February 2012. I can think of no better way to mark Dickens’s birthday on the 7th than a rendition of “Sexy Thing” or “It Started With a Kiss”.

 

“Enough already?”, asks Michael Caines, and, after umpteen Dickens events, from Holborn to Houston and from museum exhibitions to egg-laying in an “eco-school” in Southwark (though, to be fair to students of the Charles Dickens Primary School, the eggs produced by their “Charles Dickens Chickens” were on sale before the bicentenary celebrations began), I felt inclined to reply in the affirmative. But thinking of Mr Jobling in Bleak House – “what I may think after dinner . . . is one thing, my dear Guppy, and what I may think before dinner is another thing” – I stopped at the Museum of London’s “Dickens and London” show after breakfast.

To pulp or to praise him? Divided views on Robert Hughes in Rome

By PETER STOTHARD

The art critic and historian, Simon Schama, writes enthusiastically for our friends at The Daily Beast about Robert Hughes' Rome, a book that, without being itself reviewed in the TLS, has caused a certain amount of discussion here this year.

We did not review it ourselves because it was, in one sense, absurd. As our classics editor Mary Beard pointed out in The Guardian, it deserved to be pulped for the extraordinary number of falsehoods and misunderstandings that it contained.

Despite being a paper much committed to Roman studies, there are many fine books which we cannot review each year. So why waste space, we thought, on one which, as a work of history was, for its first 200 pages at least, so full of error as to constitute a confidence trick on its purchasers?

But this week Simon Schama, one of the finest people with whom to walk through a gallery of art, argues that Hughes’s critics have missed the point.

"So although", he writes, "the ostensible subject of his book is the Eternal City, the real tour d’horizon it offers is a walking tour of the hard-structured, brightly lit, and capacious expanse that is the Hughes brain. It’s an organ that is Olympian — in that it can survey, in a unified vision, the rolling sweep of the centuries — but without any other sort of lofty detachment."

Fine, one might think. Other art critics too, in Britain and the US have, either ignored or failed to notice the historical nonsense of page after page. It is the art and the author’s critical brain that counts. This seems to be the dominant view.

Others at  the TLS have argued that we ought anyway to have reviewed the book. We could have pointed out that, while as a tour inside the writer’s head it may be matchless, the casual bookshop purchaser could be misled into thinking that he or she might rely on it for other purposes.There is some force in that.

I set out my own best account of the problem in the Australian Book Review which, quite reasonably, had a particular interest in their fellow countryman.

There it should have ended. My assumption, I happily admit, was that the first edition would be rapidly withdrawn, that the pulpable errors would be discreetly erased, and that later Australian editions would lead readers to the writer’s brain without leading them into absurdity along the way.

We do not want to seem too pedantic here at the TLS (excessive love of exactitude is sometimes sometimes seen as our vice). Surely the embarrassment would disappear.

So far, the Knopf copy of Rome has not yet arrived from New York. The Weidenfeld & Nicolson edition still sits here alone on the shelves. But a reader from Rome, Michael Mewshaw, has looked at the New York offering for Christmas shoppers and writes this week to suggest that all is still not well.

Some corrections have been made, he says. I do hope that the emperor Antoninus Pius (coinage above) is not still a Christian. But many others have not.

Mr Mewshaw's judgement has also reached The Independent newspaper. I cannot yet vouch personally for what he says. I hope he is wrong.  But, before TLS readers are tempted to risk their holiday dollars on a history book that is a brain scan, this is what he tells me.