Unfinished articles 1

Much as it may look like it- I have not gone away. The last month or so has been a rather tiresome time at work because I have been travelling a lot and that's reduced the time I've had to spend with my computer and I just haven't felt inspiration recently. One of the things I find about blogging is that I need an idea to animate a piece- it happens every so often that you read a book or see a film which sparks in you an idea- sometimes though you can feel you are stretching your material or are unsure of what you want to say. M.R. James in his ghost stories once wrote an article about unfinished stories- unfinished ideas that he had had- I'd like to borrow his concept- these are posts which are lurking in my subconscious as I write this piece. They may appear one day- they may never appear- but they are things I have started writing since April and haven't finished.

Religion and Realism: I am currently in the midst of the Brothers Karamazov. In the book at one point the narrator notes that Alyosha the religious one of the three brothers is the supreme realist. It is an interesting idea I think, particularly given that since Dosteovsky wrote the world has become more and more convinced that religion is separate from the natural world we live in. I think what he was trying to get at was that for Alyosha and for most premodern religious people, religion permeated their everyday perception of events and was not separate from it. This is true probably of many modern religious people and I think it marks out the fallacy of implying that religion is about faith or dreams or the supernatural, it is something that one perceives.

Burnt by the Sun: this film I was shown by a friend of mine over Easter- actually on the Royal Wedding weekend (which I avoided by going to Normandy). Its a very sad examination of Stalinism and I found it incredibly tragic- the kind of film that you cry over. I think its so powerful because it shows you ordinary lives effected by Stalin: the most pathetic character is a little girl who is sweet and curious and naive but over whom hangs a threat that she does not understand. It also perfectly gets who faced danger in Stalin's Russia- the Revolution really did eat its Children.

Hamlet: over Easter I went to the National Theatre's production of Hamlet. Its not a play I know well- I did Othello and Twelfth Night at School- but it was an amazing performance and really made me think both positively and negatively about life itself. I couldn't think of how to say anything new or interesting about Hamlet but I found it a very powerful experience- I'm not sure that this was an idea for an article or simply a platitude in search of a home!

Bloodlands: Tim Snyder's book is one I've been trying to review for ages but have never quite found the key to unlock it. Its about one of the most terrifying periods and places in history- Poland, Belorrussia and Ukraine from 1932 to 1945. Uncountable numbers of people were killed by the Stalinist and Nazi regimes in that period. What Snyder gives you is both a new reference point for the killings- more from starvation and 'low tech' murder than from gassing- and a new grasp of their horror for individual Jews, Poles and Ukrainians- but also a sense of how these two barbaric tyrannies squared off against each other for being the land based rival to the sea based atlantic imperiums to their west. Its a gruesome story and Snyder brings out elements that I had never understood. It is all the more powerful because for Snyder the individaul deaths are deaths of individuals- fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers. I find this one hard to write because reading it was difficult and writing about it would be worse: that Snyder and others can is something I admire. Thinking about Stalin or Hitler reduces me to depression!

These are just some of the thoughts which haven't quite made it out there over the last month- I apologise for the rambling nature of this post but I wanted to get something down on them all. Thoughts will flee and be replaced by others- what I hope is that some day all of these turn into articles: if not then I hope they can grow in the minds of others!

Review: Contested Will, who wrote Shakespeare?

William Shakespeare's life was like most pre-modern lives: unrecorded. What we know about Shakespeare comes from a handful of legal deeds and reminiscences: we have no personal letters or documents, no diary, no autobiography. Shakespeare the man vanishes into history leaving us alone with his plays and his poetry. For some, since the 19th Century, this has been both frustrating and tantalising. They argue that such a great poet would have left some kind of legacy- maybe it has been obscured because the real poet was the son of Elizabeth I or a political intriguer or some other conspiracy saw fit to conceal the true authorship. Proponents for this view have ranged from great novelists and psychiatrists, right through to the inhabitants of the internet's zanier zones. James Shapiro's 'Contested Will' is an attempt to diagnose why these people think the way they do. Almost all scholars of Shakespeare accept the view that Shakespeare wrote the plays and there is very little, to my seventeenth century historian's mind that would incline me to think otherwise. So why, asks Shapiro have some very intelligent and thoughtful men and women thought otherwise?

This is an interesting topic. We often think of history as the record of what happened: actually though events only matter as people think they happened. Take the Norman Conquest: as an event it is banal, one army was defeated by another but reimagined it became an epochal moment for the conqueror and his conquered people. How people imagine the past matters. Shapiro offers us several factors- mostly personal for people to have taken on the sceptical mantle about Shakespeare. The key factor, he believes, is the idea that any poet or writer draws from his past: this idea, first documented in a footnote on Sonnet 96 by the great 18th Century critic Edward Malone, has become incredibly influential. It has led to great scholars searching in the life of Shakespeare for events which are reflected in his plays. It has led others to speculate about whether the grand subjects of the plays were generated from a grander life. Sigmund Freud argued for example that the Earl of Oxford wrote Hamlet because his father had died before the composition date and because Shakespeare's had not. There are plenty of other cases that Shapiro documents in his book: the key argument against Shakespeare's authorship is that he could not have known what the plays declared he did know, because he could not have experienced it.

This and the absense of evidence (something we will come to in a second) is the key part of the anti-Shakespeare case. It is based on the fact that as the author wrote about the pursuits of the aristocracy and about books, he must have had direct experience of them. Of course this need not be true. He could have observed this on the many trips to aristocratic homes to perform: he would have had access to literature on how to be a gentleman, he would have had access to all sorts of sources for foreign climates- the kind of access that yes might allow to him to make the mistake that Bohemia had a coastline! But that's not really the point. What Shapiro is arguing is that its a mistake to infer from anything in the plays that this was something that happened to Shakespeare himself: he buttresses this with a quote from T.S. Elliot who was bemused by the number of biographical allusions people found in his poems, a poet may not be speaking merely of himself.

So why do we make Shakespeare talk about Shakespeare or Elliot about Elliot? Why can't we leave the Wasteland or Hamlet to speak for themselves? Shapiro's history of the suggestion that Shakespeare did not write Shakespeare supplies us with an answer which I think is interesting and comes back to why we read and how we read. He argues that the reason that so many have wanted to read the poetry in this way is partly a tribute to the poetry itself. We read and from the romantic era on have felt that we have to sympathise with the artist who created the work: we read the work not as exempla but in some sense as a psychological history. We also take that history and examine it- turning it into our own ideas- just as I am doing in this piece. We spin off, as Freud did, from Hamlet to the Oedipus concept or from Richard III to ideas about tyranny (see Delia Bacon) and these arguments, our arguments, from the plays are reinforced by the fact that we deemed the playwright to have seen these things. How much more convincing to say that Hamlet was an effort to get over the death of the Earl of Oxford's father- rather than an imagined father of Shakespeare- how much more convincing does it sound as a proof to a psychological theory.

The case for and against Shakespeare as the author of his plays is interesting but as Shapiro argues through his book, what is almost more interesting is the history of how people have responded to the plays. We look into the past for legitimations of our own ideas- Hobbes called this practice prudence, the utilisation of experience to suggest what will happen in the future. We do this with literature as well as with history and the other arts. We have preferred since the 19th Century to base this sense of legitimation on a connection between art and reality: this actually happened, he actually saw this, that's why his account is correct. But that is precisely not what history gives us. Many artists simply imagined what happened: Homer was not present at Troy, Virgil imagined the world of Aeneas. Even worse the past is incomplete. A jobbing actor and playwright (see Shakespeare, Marlow, Johnson, Dekker, Fletcher et al) did not leave much more than invoices behind them: if they did, even that evidence is fragmentary. Reading Shapiro it struck me how much evidence there is for Shakespeare: he has a missing twenty years but then so do senior politicians during the period (Henry Ireton for example). Several figures from the seventeenth century- from the civil war fifty years after Shakespeare- appear, are prominent for a moment and vanish again. The point is that the past has left small traces of itself behind- but the evidence is always incomplete and always fragmentary.

Shapiro's book is very interesting. I would reccomend it and it touches on things I haven't touched on here yet- the lives of the sceptics are fascinating- in particular the tragic figure of Delia Bacon. But his central point is the one discussed above: Shakespeare ultimately would not do for Bacon or Freud or any of the others here listed, they had to find someone better who had the experience to write the plays. That little revelation tells us a lot about the sceptics but also about ourselves.

Laughter in the Name of the Rose

Umberto Eco's novel the Name of the Rose is about monks. Fundementally it is about theology and the way that a theology which is taken seriously can lead to real world consequences. Eco reflects on many ideas- the role of learning, the Renaissance, science and the begginings of modern society- but one of the key themes of the book is about laughter. Is laughter ultimately justified in the sight of God, or is it a signal of the dominance of Satan in the world? One monk Jorge argues that laughter is the principle of all evil:

Certainly one who accepts dangerous ideas can also appreciate the jesting of the ignorant man who laughs at the sole truth one should know, which has already been said once and for all. With his laughter the fool says in his heart 'Deus non est' (God is not)

Jorge's position is based on his belief that he knows what is true. Think about it for a second. In his universe, there are only two kinds of statements. The first are statements which are true. They are either descriptions of God's mercy and power or prayers to God. To laugh at these is to imagine that God's sovereignty is funny. The second set of statements are statements that attack God or condemn him or ignore him. These again should not spark laughter but rage and denounciation. Jorge's position is set out from a position of power: Christianity is, and to laugh is to say that it is not. It is to disturb the single truth and single rule of God.

In contrast to this Eco develops another character William of Baskerville who argues against Jorge. I take William's arguments to be dual: interestingly they imagine a world in which knowledge is much more unstable than in Jorge's world. Baskerville's first challenge concerns scriptural and other examples of the persecuted: they laugh at those who persecute them. He sets up the Christian not as an authority or an authoritative presence but as the subordinate: his point therefore is akin, and Eco would know this, to Christ's to the inquisition in the Brothers Karamazov. Secondly he argues that there are things which scripture does not declare upon:

God demands that we apply our reason to many obscure things about which Scripture has left us free to decide. And when someone suggests you believe in a proposition, you must first examine it to see whether it is acceptable, because our reason was created by God, and whatever pleases our reason can but please divine reason, of which for that matter, we know only what we infer from our own reason by analogy and often by negation. Thus you see to undermine the false authority of an absurd proposition that offends reason, laughter can sometimes also be a suitable instrument.

Laughter for Baskerville serves to mark the division between propositions which are absurd and those which are plausible. Tell me that a secret cabal of aliens runs the world and I'll laugh, argue in favour of Keynesianism or Monetarism and I'll respond seriously. The key point here though is that William admits of a whole set of questions that Jorge does not admit of: questions which are ambiguous where our judgement is uncertain and God does not provide a rule. Laughter is a device within a continuous argument.

What I think is so interesting about Baskerville's position and Jorge's position is that Eco cleverly exposes one of the functions of laughter. In a world where everything was known, where the world was revealed, Jorge might well be right. Laughter would be silly: either indecorous or positively slanderous of truth. This is not the world that we live in: Baskerville's view of truth, that we do not know much and that that that we do know must be constructed painstakenly from argument and inference is much more familiar to a world of laughter. His is a reminder that we are strangers in our own land and what we understand is much less than what we do not understand. Jorge is wrong, the fool who laughs has not said in his heart Deus non est, he has said that he is a fool!

Dumas's Revolution

One of the reasons that I find the Count of Monte Cristo fascinating is its context. Villefort, the corrupt lawyer at the centre of the book, expresses an analysis of the French Revolution which is precise and fascinating in the light of today. He compares Robespierre and Napoleon thus:

The only difference consists in the opposite character of the equality advocated by these two men: one is the equality that elevates, the other is the equality that degrades; one brings a King in reach of the guillotine, the other elevates the people to a level with the throne. Observe... I do not mean to deny that both men were revolutionary scoundrels, and that the 9th Thermidor and 4th of April in the year 1814 were lucky days for France.

Pause there and consider what Villefort says because what he does is express a classical doctrine which has some interest. The French lawyer discusses the roles of Napoleon Bonaparte and Robespierre: he suggests to us that both were advocates of equality. Robespierre took down a King to the level of a criminal and had Louis executed by the Guillotine. That is easy enough to understand. His words about Napoleon though are more confusing, how did Napoleon elevate the people to a level with the throne. Unbundle those words and they become the signature of plebiscitory dictatorship: the reason Bonaparte did that is that his acclamation as Emperor depended upon them. They were elevated to a throne because they created his new title.

This perception on the part of Villefort of the two alternatives- Democracy and Tyranny- comes from a third perspective. Villefort is speaking here as a royalist, to other royalists. Implicit in his remarks therefore is that he likes neither alternative: both are signatures of equality and he seeks to reduce Napoleonic monarchy to Robespierran democracy. Equality though in Villefort's eyes is here opposite: I think what he means here is that Robespierre's equality is a means to execution, whereas Bonaparte's is a means to dictatorship. I think its fascinating to watch Villefort upon this dilemma both because of the interest of what he says and because it exposes how vulnerable he and we are to words. His stress on the difference between the two forms of government is lost in his stress on the same word- equality- that he uses to describe them. It reveals his argument is too clever: interestingly none of his interlocutors understand what he means. Perhaps that shows their stupidity, perhaps it demonstrates that Villefort's cleverness is really sophistry.

The Geography of the Count of Monte Cristo

The geography of the Count of Monte Cristo is very instructive for a Northern European. This is a mediterreanean novel. The main action takes place in Marseilles, then in the Chateau d'If just off Marseilles, then in Corsica, in Monte Cristo itself, in Rome and lastly in Paris and the sea itself. This may seem a blase comment but its not. The entire book is suffused with the Meditereanean. The last fourteen hundred years have seen most people in the West think about Europe as an entity that centres around the Rhine valley, with its appendages to the West (Britain), the south (Spain), the East (Poland into Russi) and the north (Scandinavia). Our political imagination sees the capital of Europe as naturally Brussels or Strasbourg and its political centre naturally running between Paris and Bonn or Berlin. There are many political and geopolitical reasons behind that: it is a longstanding political fact as well, Charlemagne's empire still rules our imagination of what Europe is.

It is worth remembering that that does not have to be what Europe is, nor is it what Europe meant in the past. For the Greeks and Romans, Europe was the northern shore of the Meditereanean and that northern shore formed a geographical unit with its southern shore- rather than the barbaric swamps of Germany. Gaul was to the Romans a massive armed camp, Britain a massive cold and wet armed camp. For Monte Cristo France leads into Italy and Spain not into Germany and Britain. The English make an appearance as exoticisms: the Count disguises himself as the English Lord Wilmott and uses the English offices of Thompson and French to bank with. But his imagination is of the East: he has a Greek mistress, he has Greek art and Greek music, oriental custom excites him and his friends rather than anything from Berlin or Bonn. Furthermore in a book which takes its characters to the Papal States, Lombardy, France, Spain, Corsica, Algeria and the East: none ever goes north or crosses the Northern seas. One of the reasons to read the Count of Monte Cristo therefore isn't just that it is amazingly fun (though it is) but because its Europe is not the same as the Europe that we all think about.

The Postman always rings twice

Reading a book about a story that you have seen and enjoyed on the screen is very interesting. The book brings out facets that you never realised were there. Reading 'The Postman always rings twice' several things come out of the book that are not in the film: the book was far more sexually explicit than the film, take this passage

I ripped all her clothes off. She twisted and turned slow so that they would slip out under her. Then she closed her eyes and lay back on the pillow. Her hair was falling over her shoulders in snaky curls.... She looked like the Great Grandmother of every whore in the world. The devil got his money's worth that night.

The thing though that is most noticable isn't the sex or the violence- both of which are more visible- but the story itself. Postman is about infidelity- Cora and Frank get together and then murder her husband and face the legal consequences of that. In the film this is represented as a blighted love story: in the novel things are different.

Two things are different. The first is the background of the characters. In the film they are a drifter and a wannabe star. In the book, the drifter has prison sentences in at least two if not three states. He is not so much a drifter- a happy go lucky hitcher- as a sinister petty criminal. The route from fights in bars and petty theft to murder isn't as shocking as the route from a good time boy to a killer. The girl in the book is idealist: in the novel, she was a waitress at a cheap resturant and spent 'two years of guys pinching your leg and leaving nickel tips and asking how about a little party tonight, I went on some of them parties'. Both of these characters live in the seedy margins of the law and exhibit attitudes to match: he never seems to want to work or understand what it is to work, their relationship is based on violence. Just as importantly their contempt for her husband is based on race. In the film this is never mentioned, in the novel it is explicit. Cora turns to Frank at one point and says about her having a kid with her husband 'I can't have no greasy Greek child'. This isn't the sole example of her prejudice, again the film shows nothing of this.

So what to conclude. The Postman always rings twice is a far nastier and grittier book than the film. What does this show? In my view it shows a couple of things: firstly of course how the Hays Code made Hollywood much more covert in its approach to sex and violence, Lana Turner's legs are no substitute for what the devil had Frank and Cora do that night. But also I think it shows how Hollywood at a particular point in time moved away from reality: Postman is not a realistic film and the choice to make it not realistic was conscious. The source material is realistic and gritty: racism, the seedy underworld, deception and anger are all present in ways that you do not find on the screen. The book is grounded in a reality, in a 1930s America, complete with slang, vocabulary and attitude: the film is a much more universal thing, it is less tied to a class or a place. One of the things that cinema with its universal aspiration has done through the blockbuster is create or try to create universal languages: when you watch Postman and read Postman you can see that process taking place.

The Ghost Rider

Across Europe in the middle of the night, a horse carries a rider and his passenger towards Albania. They pass from Bohemia down through Austria, through province after province of the medieval empire and beyond into the territories of Venice, Hungary and Ragusa until their ultimate destination is reached: Albania. During this ride, they pass from the world of Catholicism- secure in its Germanic and Italian fastnesses- into the world of Orthodoxy. They pass from the Western Empire into the Eastern Empire. They arrive in Albania and the girl, the passenger, dismounts from the horse to tell her mother she has come back, to tell her mother that her brother brought her back. The girl married far away and does not know that her brother- that all her twelve brothers- died before her voyage took place. When her mother hears the news, she screams and both women in shock take to their deathbeds. Whatever happened now resonates through the village to which Doruntine, the girl, has returned and through the wider world, consumed as it is by theological speculation about the nature of life and death and the worship of a resurrected Christ.

We enter this story with the police inspector- Stres. Stres's job in this novel is to reconcile what is irrational and nonsensical with the official narratives of the truth. Stres has to show that whatever happened, several things did not happen. The brother did not rise from the dead and come back to carry his sister to their mother: no mere mortal could usurp the prerogative only granted to the supreme mortal. He has to demonstrate to a village seething with superstition and gossip that everything has a rational explanation: that the world has a reason to it. He has to ensure that in all of this he has regards to the far away Prince of Albania down on the plains. Lastly he is in our position. This story is written about an ancient folktale from Albania. We therefore stand like Stres before a story that we know has been told but we cannot beleive is true: we, Kadare the novelist and Stres the police officer have to understand, have to reconcile what we hear in the tale with what we know cannot be or can be true. Girls do not ride through Europe on the backs of horses with their dead brothers, do they? There must be another possibility- a lover, an imposter, an intrigue of some sort.

Kadare takes us through all of these possibilities and he through his character expresses the view that they are the most probable. They must be right. Yet all the possibilities disappear as soon as they are mentioned. If a man confesses to being an imposter, under torture he reveals the confession is false. If a lover is rumoured, then relatives from Bohemia turn up to deny that Doruntine, the girl, ever had a lover. If the journey is invented, then we learn that those same relatives have evidence that Doruntine set off from Bohemia on one night and we know, through our author's eyes, that she arrived in Albania several days later. At one point Stres goes up to interview Doruntine before her death, his questions rebound off her blank face. In her presence he and we have to believe that what she says is true, that she believed she was riding across Europe with her brother Konstandine. The facts before us, as so often in life, are blank and contradict our theses. Konstandine's grave is disturbed. Doruntine's story was the same in Bohemia as it was in Albania and even tantalising hints, a crossed off word in the note she left her husband, remain just that tantalising and unexplained.

Ultimately all our resources- intellectual and coercive- cannot extract from this story what it means or what it is. Stres with his powers of police work fails to find any rider who came in to Albania with a girl that night and yet the girl is here. Neither the local Archbishop nor the Prince seem able to assist. The puzzle cannot be solved. We cannot do it either- this is not a case in which we know more than the character. Indeed what Kadare does emphasizes how much less we actually do know: we cannot treat the myth as an investigation because we lack any of the sources that Stres has. To investigate the myth we need to create a fictional investigation. The past is blank and looks back to us with a blank face when we ask it whether these things happened or when they did or what they were. Kadare doesn't tell us to give up, he tells us to redirect our energies. This would be an unsatisfactory novel if you wanted to know what happened when the ghost rider took his carriage across Europe into Albania- but there are other subjects worth investigating, worth understanding.

Right at the end of the book, Stres gives a speech about his findings. What he finds he says is not that the girl was lying or any definitive proof of what happened. What he finds is the power of a myth: it was not neccessarily Konstandine who brought Doruntine back to her mother but the power of his promise. He promised a Besa to his mother, a sacred oath, that when Doruntine went away to marry, should she ever be required to return he would fetch her back. Whether Konstandine came back from the grave to fulfill that promise hardly matters besides the fact that the promise was fulfilled. Whoever did whatever they did believed in that promise and enacted what they did as a ritual fulfilment of that promise. We have a hint of who might have done it towards the end of the novel but Stres is clear that that is not what matters. What matters is that the promise became a fact which led to Doruntine's return. What matters is that human action was predicated upon something- something that may or may not be an illusion- but the action and the reactions are not illusions. Kadare directs us to remember the most interesting reflection about folklore and myth is not about whether it happened, but about its power once the story has been repeated.

In that context we can invert everything I have written up until that last paragraph. What the novel shows is not the weakness but the strength of the human imagination. Kadare, writing under communist tyranny, produces a story which shows that even at inception, a myth is more powerful than any intellectual or coercive power deployed against it. This is the reverse of 1984: you will remember in 1984 that Big Brother seeks to wipe out ancient rhymes and rituals (even down to 'Oranges and Lemons'): Orwell imagines that eventually Big Brother will succeed. Kadare argues that it never can and never will.

Jane Austen couldn't spell

So Jane Austen couldn't spell. Spelling is an odd issue. Several people today believe they have the right to regulate and to be infuriated about how others spell. For some it is testament to the march of radicalism and the end of reading itself, this is bizarre. Spelling became important in the eighteenth century when the first dictionaries were published. Grammar became important at the same time as part of an effort to latinise English, to give it a formal structure and rules. Its not true that earlier writers couldn't spell or were not interested in those rules, but many of them included varient spellings and many of them did not write in what we would consider correct grammar. Austen was apparantly one of them- Oliver Cromwell incidentally, a fine styllist, was another. The idea that this, as Heffer argues, made either of them a lesser thinker is ludicrous: Heffer himself is not that great a thinker when compared to either Austen or Cromwell. One of the worst spellers and grammarians I know is currently coming to the end of his Oxford PhD!

So what is the point of grammatical correctness? I think it has two points: one is useful, the other baleful. Curiously it is most useful in education. It is useful, for the same reasons as lists of great books, because it creates access to language. Without grammar a kid starting off her education in language and their structures has no structure to grasp. I learnt to read literature by devouring the Penguin Classics: if Penguin and Everyman are the mothers of literary autodidacts, then grammar and spelling are the fathers of linguistic autodidacts. Autodidactism is something we should encourage. The second unimpressive use for correct grammar and spelling is the use to which Heffer and Truss put it. What they are interested in is putting down others, feeling superior and generally ignoring someone else's point because of a misplaced apostrophe. Its the equivalent of school kids in a playground laughing at someone because they wear glasses, and forgetting that he or she can explain something better than they can. A reverence for form is joined here to a contempt for substance: one of the blessed things puritanism has taught me is that the latter is much more important than the former.

Who cares whether something is spelt correctly or where the commas are, so long as the ideas expressed are important or right. Simon Heffer argues that bad spelling implies someone is a bad logician and so rejects any applications he sees for a job on that basis: I'd argue that looking at someone's spelling before their logic suggests Mr Heffer needs to learn a little more about logic!

An old fashioned mode

One of the participants in Elizabeth Baines's reading group criticised a novel recently (I am plucking one sentence from a very interesting blogpost about what seems to be a fascinating discussion). She said it was put in an

an old-fashioned long-winded mode which nowadays she just can't stand any more.

The phrase interested me. Firstly because it opens up a possibility- that no idea of the beauty of a text can ever be separated from its time- ie that fashions change and that that means that what was acceptable for people to laud a work for in 1900 has become a flaw today. Secondly it opens up the reversal of that possibility- that a virtue in a novel by Dosteovsky has become a flaw in a novel written today. There may be something in that- afterall Dosteovsky, my representative classic author, did whatever he did for the first time- copying is not a creative virtue. But there is a deeper sense in which this is interesting- in the sense that it is acceptable for Shakespeare to use 'thou' but not for Zadie Smith.

I wonder if this can be explained if we expand what we mean by conventions within story writing. Let me expand: novels tell a story through a set of conventions- the most commonly known are a set called languages, these are generally accepted norms of communicating in that community. In a sense though the structure of the story, the way it works, the types of incident and the types of explanation are also conventions- like the camera movement in cinema- and those become acceptable and unacceptable and are anchored to a period of time as much as language is or camera work is. In this sense Elizabeth Baines' contributor is exactly right: having long philosophical passages in novels might be as misplaced as seeing a modern English novel written with thee and thou used instead of you. That brings us though to a question that I have never thought about as much as I should which is the ways that conventions change, the ways that languages slip and the ways that innovations in the convention of writing are accepted.

Catullus and the way to read Roman poetry

This review of a new book on Catullus reminds me of two things. The first is the excitement with which I read Catullus for the first time, of all the Latin poets I have read, Catullus and Martial were my favourites and though they may not remain so, the biting intensity of their short lines still has an impact upon me. The second thing though is less personal and perhaps more interesting and that is about how Catullus himself should be read, how any Roman poet indeed possibly any poet before a certain point should be read. Catullus, this author comments, must be read out loud: "reading Catullus with the eye is like studying the libretto of an opera without listening to the music". The same thing could be said of so many of the texts that we have left to us from the past- obviously dramatic pieces like Shakespeare and things that were originally meant to be read aloud like Homer or Beowulf, but also the simpler poems and passages that we come across in ancient texts were often designed for their rhetorical flow as well as their look on a page. St Augustine noted with amazement that St Ambrose read silently: to miss the rhetorical flourishes in Cicero or Tacitus or even the sound of Catullus not to mention of Shakespeare, Jonson et al. is to miss what the author was trying to do, what his intention was. In a sense, in order to appreciate everything that can be appreciated about some art, you have to consume it as it was meant to be consumed- loudly and not silently!

Endless Lists of Ancient Names

Plenty of people who read this blog will have struggled through the parts of the Bible or Homer that just list page after page of names. Whether they are place names or the endless series of begats it is often difficult not to be incredibly frustrated by an author who wilfully seems to want to tell us that Macedemus fell in this fight without telling us anything else about him or her!

A rather interesting article in the Bryn Mawr Book Review journal reviews a book that attempts to get to the bottom of these lists and why the poets included them. Some of the suggestions are ingenious and leave you impressed by the skill that poets like Homer and Virgil demonstrated. For example both of the above poets say at one point in their poem that a group of soldiers scatttered- from them on for a page, the names of those soldiers are literally scattered through the text in irregular ways without pattern. They use names to slow the tempo, to demonstrate the running forwards of time or to give a context to vast numbers. Catalogues can also deliver clues- when Ascanius son of Aeneas is introduced by Virgil, his placed between two dense lists one of the Trojans (of whom in a way he is the last), the second of the Latins (whom in a sense he will give a foundation to).

The artistry of ancient poetry is something I've been aware of ever since a Greek teacher at school pointed out to me that Homer's line that tells you that Nausicaa is taking Odysseus home to her palace sounds like a carriage running along a street. The beauty of the rhythm of Homer or the terseness of Tacitus is something that you cannot appreciate in modern translation as much as in the original and I suspect these catalogues like 'Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter, Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester' sounded better in their native tongue than in translation. As a consequence we ought to be more charitable to translated works, particularly in languages we shall never hear again, things that seem ugly to us might not have been to them, things that seem meaningless to us might not have been to them. Perhaps I should give those begats another chance.

The End of the Affair

The End of the Affair, a novel by Graham Greene, written in the shadow of the Blitz and the devastation of war, is a private drama about the lives of three individuals- Maurice, Henry and Sarah- who are bound together by ties of love and religion. Henry is a civil servant working in a senior capacity within the wartime government. His life is his work- filled with plans for pensions and provisions. Sarah is his wife- a woman who married young and who has no children, but retains her glamour- a beauty that has not faded since she married. Maurice is a writer, still unsuccessful enough to be literary but gradually beggining to emerge from the seraphical sphere that snobs look to. He had an affair with Sarah and the novel begins about two years after that moment. She walked out on him in the midst of a missile attack by the Germans and never returned again. The novel in a sense is a long explanation of that moment, she did not hate him indeed at that moment she loved him as much as she loved him before. Maurice's jealous love cannot believe it but slowly as he sets a private detective on her trail, slowly as he meets Henry in pubs on Clapham Common and surveys the wonderland of Oxford Street, he works towards that realisation.

In a sense the novel is bound up in that moment- so it is worth considering what moment that is when she leaves him. A missile, a V2, crashes into the house in which the lovers are lying in bed. It submerges Maurice's body under wreckage but Sarah survives- she survives and takes from that moment a lesson that since she prayed Maurice should survive and vowed to God that she would give up Maurice should he survive, and he does survive, that God exists and binds her to her vow. Sarah comes in that sense to the crisis of her life- she faces the alternatives that the man she loves should not exist or that the man she loves should exist but not with her and chooses. Her choice rules the fates of both Maurice and Henry. But it goes further than that for her choice is a choice to beleive- it is the invisible line that Julia speaks of in Brideshead revisited that is being reeled in, the Catholic returning to the choir. In a sense Greene's novel therefore is the otherside of Brideshead, whereas that novel is about the recall of tradition and the power of the church, the priests that appear here are pathetic but it is war that recalls a generation to the fundementals of Catholicism and to the wisdom in the traditions of Rome.

Make no mistake, this is a book about Catholicism. All of the characters are one might say afflicted with Protestant problems- with the issue of individual conscience and the desire for rationalistic explanation. Sarah who finally rises out of that, rises out of it by learning to relent her conscience, to disclaim her ability to understand and to enjoy the pain that authority- God- inflicts. In a sense this is the religion of sado-psychology- seeing in suffering the end of human nature and fufilment the idea of separation. Maurice's character in this sense is both the least and most resistant- for unlike Henry, whose suffering seems outside himself, unlike Sarah whose interior we only infrequently see, Maurice's suffering and guilt we see always. His guilt and suffering are related to her but by the end of the book we are beggining to see that he is progressing along a Platonic line, from hate of a woman to love of a woman, from disbelief in God to hatred of God to love of God. This is the progression that Greene marks out for the atheist- the end of the affair might well be titled the stairway to heaven and that would not give away its argument.

The psychology is believable because the guilt that all the main characters feel is beleivable- that guilt is directed to each other for obvious reasons. The interesting way that Greene makes it feel natural that this guilt then becomes directed to a fourth person God is really the centre of the book and the most thought provoking thing about it. The only criticism I have of the book is that- and it is fundemental- I wondered reading it whether it preached to the converted more than to those who were not converted. The Platonic stairway ultimately seems constructed- I can see the balustrades and steps- it all seems too logical and theological- and the novel in a sense becomes as it turns religious an examination rather than a portrait.

Time and Loyalty History and Nationalism

Partly inspired by this post by Vilno I am writing about different aspects of nationalism-now here I seek to look a bit at the role history plays in nationalism. Observe the Low Countries from space-and how lacking it is is in natural borders. It is history not Geography that has created the nations and states that exist within it.

Partly this can be explored using the example Vilno gives Belgium. For a start why should the overwhelmingly Catholic southern Netherlands not have joined in the 1830revolt that created modern Belgium? Vilno I think rightly identifies history as the major reason. They'd been subjects of the Dutch state for centuries- and thus identified with it. -while a mere fiteen years had been the case for what's now Belgium.

I think there are other reasons Wallonia at least was experiencing enormous economic growth for example which would have aided self confidence (the legacy of Belgium's early industrialisation can be seen in a map of European railways-they're cantered on Belgium|. Over centuries loyalty had been given to a state in whose wars Dutch Catholics had fought. Meanwhile a modus operadi to their second class status had been set up(note the king of the Netherlands abdicated in part because marrying a Catholic was so unpopular!) - Dutch Catholics may have wished to change the status quo but they had adjusted to it. The same was not true of Belgium Catholics-indeed the Habsburgs had been much more intolerant of Protestants than the Dutch state was of Catholics. Thus it was a shock to become second class citizens-and they battled it fiercely.

Lastly I suspect history mattered another way- the Spanish Netherlands/Austrian Netherlands/south Netherlands/ Belgium had been the result of a massive Dutch gain in 1815- the south of the Netherlands proper was part of the Dutch patrimony-the core of the state the heartland . The Southern Netherlands by contrast was territory that had been acquired but was not central to part of the nation. It's notable that in public perception the former can become the latter (and the latter the former) one reason why Algeria was so divisive o long for France and then abandoned by 90%-even very rightwing and nationalist Frenchman no longer regarded it as of the heartland. In a sense it’s a kind of mental map of the land-which effects how hard people will fight for it. Mahinda Rajapaka’s mental map of Sri Lanka clearly includes the whole island- and for that he is willing to use the military to make this a living reality. If he and his electorate did not the reality on the ground would not exist.

Simple length of time a border has existed then is enormously powerful effect on national identify- because nationalism is to a certain degree the story people tell themselves about whose side they are on. However odd a border may appear it can work given enough time - German Belgium’s seem as far as I can tell quite happy with being Belgium-even though it is pure historic accident they are on the side of the border they are and they used to be violently opposed . Similarly a rebellion against grievances like the American (and if successful the Confederate one) can by providing a legacy of blood and enmity create a new nation.

There is also another way history can influence such decisions and that is much more subtle by the changes in what cleavages matter. Vilno emphasise the importance of the rise of literacy. I think that's part of the story but I would put it differently what matters is what matters for the operation of the state. So as the state rose in its impact what language it operated in mattered more and more (obviously the rise of literacy further helped expand this). Once you have government schools or government jobs-then what language they are in matters a great deal indeed it strikes me one explanation for the rise of Flemish nationalism post war is that the size of the Belgium welfare state. By contrast under the Austrians the language of the rulers (German) was barely used below the ruling council of the whole of Belgium (I'm not sure even they used German rather than Latin) - a set of civic and ecclesiastical bodies used a wide variety of languages as they saw fit the "German" nature of the state did not matter.

Again this is not a matter unique to Belgium. For example the Czechoslovakian government post World War 1 fired around half of its German civil servants because they failed an exam in Czech! If any one policy decision explains why the Nazis in Czechoslovakia were as popular among the German community as to be the biggest party not just among them but in the entire country that would be it.
Similarly where a state (however secular) continued to use religion as a marker for treatment then it could still stay as the ultimate marker. An example of this is the population transfers between Greece and Turkey after the Greco-Turkish war. The language of the treaty arranging the repatriations uses the "Christian religion " and the "Muslim religion" as markers-and indeed thousands of Greek speaking Muslims entered Turkey and thousands of Turkish speaking Christians Greece. Thus even though the Turkish regime was militantly secular religion remained a powerful marker of the Turkish state- unless you are broadly "Muslim" (under a broad definition that includes Muslim atheists and Alawites) then it is very difficult to be Turkish however secular you or your government are.

Finally another historical issue that matters is confidence and feelings of strength. Flanders was the poor backwater of Belgium in the 19th and early 20th century-by the post war era they're superior growth led to a huge surge in Flemish confidence that in turn helped precipitate the surge in nationalism.

Brighton Rock: the difference between film and literature

The film, Brighton Rock, is a masterpiece of British noir cinema- it is expertly photographed and filmed- but more importantly it has at its centre a thought about criminality that is worth considering. Brighton Rock has a murder at its centre- it concerns the cover up of the crime (which involves the seduction of a waitress Rose by the murderer Pinkie) and the investigation of the crime by a woman named Ida. The novel that the film was based upon is an intriguing work (I wrote about it here)- and very well written- and the film though its screenplay was written by Graham Greene too takes the same basic plot line and characters but does different things with them. In a sense the differences between the novel and the film show the different strengths of the two media- and how they can create different arguments in our head. Ultimately the film is not a lesser or better piece of art than the novel, but it is focused on different things: not so much the nature of Catholicism and guilt as the nature of crime. Both are about the internal situation of the criminal but the one treats his moral perdition and the second treats of his situation and its psychological consequences.

The film is about the latter. Pinkie in the film says at one point that he is not interested in love but interested in security: security from those looking for him for his crimes. What Richard Attenborough, playing Pinkie, does is give you a sense of the terror of being hunted. When the film begins he seems ultimately in control- but his control we see as the film goes on is very brittle. His control over his gang mates depends more upon sudden bursts of cold fury than it does upon real leadership. When we first see him, we get the sense of tense coiled control and aggression: but in reality what that aggression and control mask is a sense that the world is getting beyond him, a sense which is entirely accurate, the world, unlike the piece of string that he manically ties round his fingers, is actually not amenable to his own manipulation. Seeking for security, he keeps making mistakes that might lead to further insecurity. The irony is that the reason he has to secure himself is that he killed someone who did something he could not control which led to another disaster. In that sense Pinkie's crimes are merely pathetic- a failing attempt to safeguard himself.

Richard Attenborough plays Pinkie with sustained menace and frantic panic. He has the screen presence to control the pace of the film and its direction. The film narrows in on his face, the camera drawn to chart his emotions. Alongside him the members of the gang fade into the background, objects of his fear, contempt and eventual destruction. Ida the detective is much less of a figure than she is in Greene's novel. Rather Pinkie's antagonist is Rose- who he seduces into marriage and almost into a suicide pact. Rose embodies a different attitude to other people- whereas Pinkie is determined to secure himself from others and his Catholicism adds to his gloom- Rose is determined to live for others, specifically Pinkie, and her religion is ritual rather than guilt. Rose becomes central because she cannot leave behind the fact that Pinkie might be redeemed- she cannot ignore that idea and equally is willing to follow him anywhere- even at the expense of her religion and her eternal soul. Carol Marsh is charming, innocent and more importantly gets Rose's beneficence rightly. In a nice touch, whereas Pinkie greets every stranger with suspicion and manipulation, controlling the meeting, Rose treats every stranger with openness, ceding them control immediately of the situation.

I found the film very powerful- just as I found the novel. What the film does, that the novel cannot, is take you fully inside the situation. What it cannot do is deal with the complicated Catholic nihilism- the peculiar kind of religion that is irreligion- that the novel does deal with. In both works of art, the argument of the other is implicit but the nature of the work of art governs the message that can be delivered. What you have here is an excellent and interesting case of the way that films and books differ- not in the quality of what they deliver- but in the type of message they deliver. Brighton Rock is almost the perfect adaptation because it really does adapt the new work into another medium: rather than just putting the book on screen, or betraying the book, the film gives the story a new interpretation.

Pinkie's Devils

Brighton Rock is about a crucial distinction- that between right and wrong and that between good and evil. Right and wrong are the categories used by Ida, the amateur detective, who seeks to find out what happened to her friend who was murdered. She is a lively, sexual and vivacious woman who desires to live and lives within a set of rules- common sense principles of morality. Opposed to her is the criminal Pinkie and his girlfriend Rosie, Pinkie and Rosie are both ‘Romans’, Catholics. They live within the world of good and evil: invest the world with an eschatology that Ida never feels and believe in mortal sin- Pinkie believes that losing his virginity was worse than committing a murder- rather than in common sense morality. The novel is about a contrast between these two principles- two ways of looking at the world.

Some interpret this as a repudiation, not of Pinkie and Rosie, but of Ida. Her ‘totalitarian’ morality is what one introducer to Greene’s novel believes is at issue within the story. Common sense morality is rejected upon the basis that it is inferior to Catholic morality. This reading of the novel- and it may well be the intention behind the writing- has some merit: Ida is definitely viewed as disgustingly lively, her plump breasts are referred to by Greene with scorn as though they were overripe. There are pretty obvious echoes in Ida’s character of the barmaid in Elliot’s Wasteland. Rosie in particular is presented as battleground within the novel- she like the reader is poised between Pinkie and Ida and yet at the end of the day, she chooses Pinkie and not Ida. Ida’s confidence that she can reverse the girl’s decision by imposing her own view, not persuading but cajoling, is condescending and unpleasant.

Step back though and what Greene’s novel exposes is something that would be familiar to any observer of the nineteenth century novel. The insight of Dosteovsky that a higher morality does not justify immoral deeds- throughout so many of his novels, this point is expressed in different ways- seems to have been forgotten. What we have arrived at with Pinkie is a nihilistic Christianity which sees murder as less important than sexual taboo. What Greene argues, in my opinion, is that Ida’s morality is insufficient to properly live within the world- but that so too is Pinkie’s and Rosie’s morality. Right and wrong and good and evil must live together- or become enemies to each other. Ida’s sins come with a kindness that is no vice, Pinkie’s come with an ascetic contempt that is no virtue.

Greene appears to me to be directing his novel towards contemporary Catholicism: it should be read as a resounding call to Christianity not to abandon the common sense ideas of right and wrong, the underpinning of morality, as it becomes a minority faith. Perhaps instead of reading the book as a contrast between secular and Christian morality, we should read Brighton Rock as a terrible warning- that if Christianity becomes an aggressive minority culture, it might lose a sense of right and wrong in the search for good and evil. That warning is important- for it reminds us of the great danger of intellectual eschatology- whatever its source- that elevated ideas must be accompanied by moral intuitions unless they are to become perverted.

Pinkie, like Raskolnikov, is a warning of a type of nihilism- Raskolnikov warned the West of the dangers of Atheist nihilism. Greene through Pinkie warns us of religious nihilism and its dangers.

The Forerunner: Love, Evelyn Waugh and Plato

Three times in Brideshead Revisited, Charles Ryder's relationship with his student friend Lord Sebastien Flyte is described as being the forerunner, the shadow of his relationships to come. Once Flyte's father, Lord Marchmain, tells Charles this in Rome, twice Charles tells Sebastien's sister Julia that his love for her brother was an expression, a forerunner of his love for her- the grand passion of his life. Charles's sincerity is unquestionable- but it is also interesting for it demonstrates an echo within the novel- an echo of Plato deep into the 20th Century.

Plato of course in the Symposium established a hierarchy of loves- from heterosexual love to homosexual love to philosophical love. Christian philosophy with its stress that God is love found Platonic ideas about love attractive. The influence on Waugh's work is obvious- Charles's love for Sebastien is a precursor to his deeper and more mature love for Julia- and Julia who sees more clearly than her beau, sees that her love for him sets up a good against God: in order to love properly she understands that she has to progress to loving God. A progression that Charles himself makes at the end of the novel by becoming a Catholic.

There is much more going on in the novel than this- but what is interesting about this is the deep psychological structure that Waugh, using Platonic progression of loves, builds into the framework of his story. His characters advance or regress in terms of that that they love and its closeness to the divine- furthermore it is that love that grants them grace. Sebastien who becomes an alcoholic for example is led eventually to God through a love of Kurt, a down and out German he encounters, and through his desire for alcohol. Sin is eventually forgiven as eccentricity- as Cordelia the most astute of the Flyte children tells Charles.

There are lots of ways of thinking about this presence in the novel- it unquestionably is there. Perhaps though it is the mark of an atheist to find Brideshead revisited to be a book with a disappointing ending- as its characters move from the love of humans to the love of the divine- I certainly felt and found that. And yet it is as Waugh said a statement about theology, to understand the novel we must respect it as such- and as such it encompasses a sophisticated doctrine which relates the earthly loves to the spiritual ones. In that sense, we have in Waugh's work a clear statement- amongst other things- of modern Catholic philosophy- which unsurprisingly is tied to an ancient metaphor about the human psyche.

In Cold Blood: Part 1

I'm reading In Cold Blood (Truman Capote's classic account of a group of murders committed at the Clutter Family farm in Kansas in 1959) at the moment- one of the interesting things that comes out of the book (as an immediate impression) is the way that in reality the value of the book stems from the fact that it is a summation of interviews. Capote skilfully interweaves the accounts of various people who were involved into a fictional narrative, composed out of actual interviews about actual events. What he does is perform a reconstruction through fiction of what his interviewees told him. There are real dangers in this approach in that obviously he mediates his evidence through his imagination- and there are dangers in that he does not take an impartial view of his own evidence. However it is worth saying that what he does do is provide a vivid account- which awakes the empathy of the reader. I'm not sure that this mode of writing- a fictional account of non-fictional events- is something that you can rely on purely to get the sense of an event- but it is an important view on an event. It allows us to recapture some of the emotion of the participants- who Capote got very close to- and it allows to understand what the case looked like to an interested and thoughtful observer. The fine writing probably does more to reawake the conservative world of the Holcombe congregation and the killers who came to destroy the lives of one of its leading members more than a number of dusty history books could: I have found in particular the account of the Clutters which forms the first part of the book more interesting than any of the rest. The Clutter family including Herb, the father, teetotal, godly and responsible, the psychologically enfeebled mother, the bright, pretty capable daughter and the physical son are captured wonderfully- and what Capote does is draw us into that world- so strange to him and to us- a world which is more interesting than that of the killers who came to so brutally interrupt it. This isn't rigourous history- but it is useful empathy- and that is a thing that every historian has to develop.

The Death of Christopher Marlowe: Charles Nicholl's The Reckoning

Christopher Marlowe's death in 1593 is one of the most famous literary whodunnits in English history. Marlowe, Shakespeare's peer, had arguably acheived as much as Shakespeare until that date- his plays, Edward II, Tamberlaine, the Jew of Malta and Dr Faustus are examples taught in English classes and seminars today of classic verse and his poetry too lives on. Marlowe however was killed at the age of 29, in a room in Deptford, by a man called Ingram Frizier. The Coroner's court which met soon afterwards decided that what had happened was that four men, Marlowe, Frizier, Robert Pooley and Nicholas Skiers had met in Deptford, in the house of a Mrs Bull (herself affiliated to the court, and related to William Cecil), and spent around eight hours talking. Later in the evening they had had an argument over the bill for the drink and food that they had consumed, Marlowe had stolen Frizier's knife and attacked Frizier with it, Frizier responded and their was a fight, during which Marlowe was stabbed through the eye and killed. Frizier the assailant was set free on the grounds that he had committed self defence- and that Pooley and Skiers backed up his story.

The coroner's inquest record was discovered in the 1920s- and ever since there have been arguments about whether the record tells the truth or not. I have to confess here to being ignorant of many of the arguments- but one recent attempt to reconstruct the truth of what might have happened comes from Charles Nicholl, in a study published by the University of Chicago Press. Nicholl argues that you can only understand the death of Marlowe if you understand the background of the participants. He establishes that the three men in the room apart from Marlowe all had shady pasts. Frizier was an extortioner. Skiers worked both for the Earl of Essex as an agent and for Frizier as muscle. Pooley was a station chief for William Cecil, Lord Burghley, and had worked for Sir Francis Walsingham in intelligence for years. Marlowe himself was almost certainly an agent too- he was allowed to take a degree in Cambridge despite the worries of the dons about his orthodoxy because of a special warrant from the Privy Council and had been involved in various nefarious activities in the Netherlands as well as being rumoured to have been interested in the succession to Elizabeth.

Nicholl's argument is that what happened in 1593 was that Frizier and Skiers and Pooley were trying to negotiate with Marlowe. Marlowe himself was being questioned by the Privy Council at the time about accusations of atheism- that Nicholl ties to factional struggles at court between the Earl of Essex and Sir Walter Raleigh. What may well have happened is that when the negotiation to get Marlowe to confess to atheism and implicate Raleigh failed, these lowly agents panicked and killed the poet spy. Based on what Nicholl writes it is a plausible reconstruction- the idea that this was a panicked killing which the participants then agreed to keep quiet makes sense. Panic is always a good historical explanation- better than any conspiracy at least. Whether Nicholl's precise constellation of facts is right I cannot be sure- there are too many 'musts' and 'shoulds' in his account, too many suppositions for us to express confidence in it as the total and unvarnished truth. Nicholl is addicted to supposing what happened in the gaps between the evidence- and whilst his explanation has the ring of truth to it, it depends on a chain of supposition and presumption. Marlowe's death ultimately may be an unresolved mystery.

Having said all of that, Nicholl's work is still worthwhile and what he has accumulated is interesting. It is interesting less because it reveals what actually happened on that dark day in Deptford, than because it reveals the world in which Marlowe passed. The world that Nicholl reveals is a world where criminality, spying and treachery are phases of a life- rather than divisions between different occupations. A character like Nicholas Skiers was a criminal (who manipulated people into contracts that they could not fulfill and who stuck closely to the letter of the law if not its spirit), a traitor (who consorted with Catholics and may well have had Catholic sympathies) and a spy. Robert Pooley, one of the men in the room, worked for Sir Francis Walsingham's secret service for years- and yet Walsingham never quite worked out which side Pooley was on and which side he worked for. Pooley was arrested for holding seditious literature for example, as well as procuring the arrests of others.

Marlowe himself fits into this world neatly. He was arrested for affray, for counterfeiting coins, was on the outside of circles around noblemen suspected of treachery and may have been stoking the flames there. Many of his friends were involved in the same kinds of activities- Thomas Watson for example another poet and playwright (though all his plays are now unfortunately lost) was a confidence trickster with a mean streak. Nicholl brings to life this world in fascinating detail- in a sense therefore it does not matter what happened in Deptford- because by analysing it we discover a lot more about Elizabethan life, politics and poetry.

The Black Tulip

Alexandre Dumas's novel, the Black Tulip (full text online here) is a book about Holland in the seventeenth century- superficially at least it is about politics and romance. The politics is that of Holland in the late seventeenth century- involving the brothers de Witt (Cornelius and Jan) who were prominent Republicans and their imprisonment and lynching in 1672. The actual story of the book takes place a little later- and involves their nephew (invented by Dumas and named Cornelius van Baerle) and his imprisonment by the Stadtholder William of Orange on charges of treason. Cornelius though is apolitical- his crime is to hold some letters which incriminate the De Witts in negotiations with France, but he knows nothing of the contents of the letters. The reason that he is actually imprisoned lies in the fact that he and his neighbour, Isaac Boxtel, are both racing to find a tulip which is black (hence the title of the novel). Cornelius is imprisoned by the state- and threatened with execution- under the governance of Gryphus, the harsh jailor of the De Witts, and his beautiful daughter Rosa.

Dumas's point in the story is about this conjunction between the detailed politics of the Dutch republic and the life of Baerle. Baerle's life is swept off course by the politics of his relatives- but his real preoccupation is that of an artistic amateur, a developer of tulip bulbs. What Dumas does is give us a realistic portrait of how this obsession drives Baerle- there is a kind of comedy in the way that Baerle operates. When he is arrested, he cares less for himself than for the offsets of the black tulip, faced with a beautiful girl (Rosa) who offers him love, he gives her the idea that his tulips are worth more to him than her love. But despite the ridiculous nature of his obsession there is something healthy about it- there is something principled about a man who cares more for tulips than for worldly success. Though Dumas allows a current of satire to develop about his main character throughout the work, the satire is affectionate. Afterall as an autodidact in flowers, Van Baerle is Dumas's equivalent- the great novelist was equally an autodidact about history- and in this instance, makes a classic autodidact's mistake, thinking that William the Silent and William of Orange were the same person.

Van Baerle's obsessions look healthier when compared to those of others within the book. They are selfless for a start- Van Baerle is like the artist inspired by healthy competition, but not so focussed on that competition that like Boxtel or the mob he loses control of his estimation of the virtues of others. He is to some extent self aware. He is aware of Rosa's emotions for a start and her envy of the tulip as her rival. His real success within the novel lies in his innocence- it is in his innocence of the political motivations of others, that he is able to survive the political downfall of his relatives. The innocence also leads him to become the hero of Dumas's story. Innocence and obsession tie together- what Dumas presents us with is the portrait of the innocent artist, unaffected by the world through his obsession and also through his wealth (this mysterious independent wealth means that Baerle has no need for the world, apart from for the lore of tulips).

Dumas's novel is written with a formidable pace- at times, it feels slightly dated as Rosa faints when a man kisses her hand. Dumas's story is pacy and interesting though- worth reading both for its entertainment value and for its testament to the value of a life lived in the pursuit of a hobby.

Top Banana in the Shock Department

Breakfast at Tiffanies- the story not the film- is a bleak encounter with the modern world. It is a work that could only have come from the pen of someone who knew small town America and left it: the small town America whose heroes and villains were made epic by the author’s great friend, Harper Lee, in To Kill a Mocking Bird. Truman Capote does not focus so much in his story on what small town America did and would do about race- as about what the city did and would do with people- especially the young woman at the heart of the story Holly Golighty, traveller. Capote’s interest lay in the fact that this self described ‘independent’, like her tom cat a roamer with no home, finds modern society both the source of her dreams and the source of her inability to find them- like a diamond from Tiffanies, the modern world glistens and is cold.

Holly is a wonderful creation- in my fairly wide reading experience I do not think I have come across a woman so delightfully sexual In the whole of literature. She is a courtesan but no whore- having as she tells the narrator only slept with eleven men (not counting those before she was thirteen or the man she married when she was fourteen!) But she is incredibly seductive- our narrator ends up bewitched and as readers it is hard not to either be bewitched by this charm, this insouciance that proclaims that it hates snoops and mixes irreverently between languages and the cool speech of upper new York- ‘top banana in the shock department’ indeed! But charm is deceptive- throughout this novella, Holly is in trouble and part of our affection and that of the narrator for her is the affection of chivalry and protectiveness- a protective chivalry that on his part is misplaced because he no more than her is caught up in a process of society- the urbanisation of America.

Holly is a creature of anonymity- she is deliberately vague about where she has come from, deliberately vague about where she might be heading. She is introduced to us by the revelation that she might be in Africa. Throughout the novel, she is always moving. We find her in South America, we find her in Los Angeles, in New York and in Texas- as a friend of hers says ‘you don’t know if she’s a hillbilly or an Okie or what?’ We discover though what Holly is- she is like a bee, searching for the perfect flower- searching for a scent of home. She dwells in constant movement both because she is attracted by the prospects opened up to her as a citizen of the world, and because she cannot find a village to be a city of. She seeks a home- but she seeks a perfect home, rejecting what her mothers might have accepted- marriage to a dull Texan who wants her to bring up his dead wife’s children- but longing for the perfect home. It is the fate that the world has opened up to most of us- not by the way a condition of women alone but of all humanity who face a world in which we seek to find the perfect familiar in the strange.

How achievable is this vision, is this dream? Truman Capote faced the same issues as Holly Golighty- he like her was an immigrant from the small town to the big city, from the stultification of simplicity and solitude to the scary city with its boundless possibilities and opportunities for destruction. What Capote gives us is a vision of survival- it’s a vision of how to survive in this world of danger- of besetting problems. Golighty is both naïve and sensible- in the first lies her appeal and her craft, she inspires others to protect her and help her. Its what makes men give her hundreds to go to the powder room. And yet, and yet, she also knows her value- she is cynical enough to know the going rate to go to the powder room- and a suitor who sees her as a naïve little girl is in for a nasty surprise (as we see in her entry to the story proper when she reminds a retreating suitor who took her home that she won’t have sex with him and what’s more, she thinks that he is cheap!) Don’t think that that combination of naivety and cynicism is only sexual- it isn’t- it applies when she gets arrested, involved because of her naivety in delivering messages to a gangster, but cynical enough to know that noone will care if she just runs away- avoids bail and that whilst in New York, it might damage her reputation, no-one will know in Brazil! Ultimately Holly is wiser than our narrator, a penniless narrator for whom art is the thing, for Holly everything is interesting but ultimately only dollars can feed you.

Seeing Holly as a creature of sociology enables us though to see something else. What Capote exposes is the insecurity of living in a world of strangers. We have to trust others- of course- and normally that works. For Holly it does more often than not- and though perhaps she has to trust in her line of ‘work’ more sordid individuals, she finds as we all do that human beings are generally rats but only rats when they actually have to be. What Holly understands is that this nature of humanity makes us both vulnerable and safe in the world of the city- we are vulnerable because ultimately anyone can walk away from us, they can find a new friend, a new associate, a new partner- but we are secure because so can we. Anonymity is a loss because it is a loss of permanent relationships- a loss of permanence- but it is also a gain because relationships which do not work, the man who bites during sex classically for Holly or the selfish flatmate can be left behind like the flotsam and jetsom they are.

Modernity and its most basic condition- the great and teeming city- have bred a new kind of human relationship, farewell the chain of custom and everlasting friendships, welcome the fleeting felicity of closeness followed by forgetfulness. Whatever you think of that movement and that moment, it is a sociological fact, bred not so much by any moral change as by the growth of the great cities of the modern world. Holly Golighty is a heroine of the Jazz Age- she is its spirit and the age is not over- the music goes on and we choose and change partners as we will! That as Capote reminds us is neither good nor bad necessarily- it has good and bad aspects- but it is a change and its one that will dominate our era, and change the nature of our relationships in ways that really will be top banana in the shock department. The process began with Holly, quite when it will end or if it will reverse or what form our societies will finally take is anyone’s guess.