Iain Sinclair`s Olympics

Iain Sinclair’s Olympics
volume 34 number 16 30 august 2012 £3.50 us & canada $4.95
David Trotter: Lady Chatterley’s Sneakers
Karl Miller: Stephen Spender’s Stories
Stefan Collini: Eliot and the Dons
Bruce Whitehouse: Mali Breaks Down
Sheila Heti: ‘Leaving the Atocha Station’
London Review of Books
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David Trotter
Lady Chatterley’s Sneakers
4
Letters
Karuna Mantena, Rosinka Chaudhuri, Amit Pandya, Ananya Vajpeyi,
Andrew Whitehead, Miles Larmer, Marina Warner, A.E.J. Fitchett,
Stan Persky
8
Steven Shapin
World in the Balance: The Historic Quest for an Absolute System of Measurement
by Robert Crease
11
Karl Miller
New Selected Journals, 1939-95 by Stephen Spender, edited by Lara Feigel and
John Sutherland
12
Bill Manhire
Poems: ‘Old Man Puzzled by His New Pyjamas’, ‘The Question Poem’
13
Stefan Collini
The Letters of T.S. Eliot, Vol. III: 1926-27 edited by Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden
17
Bruce Whitehouse
What went wrong in Mali?
18
John Burnside
Poems: ‘A Frost Fair’, ‘The Wisdom of Insecurity’, ‘First Footnote on
Zoomorphism’
19
Stephen Sedley
Living Originalism by Jack Balkin
21
A.W. Moore
Writing the Book of the World by Theodore Sider
23
Julian Bell
At Tate Modern
25
David Conn
Football and Money
26
David Bromwich
Short Cuts
editorial board: Linda Colley, Michael Neve,
Steven Shapin, Inigo Thomas, Jenny Turner,
James Wood, Michael Wood
Frederick Seidel
Poem: ‘The Lovely Redhead’
29
Lidija Haas
Georgette Heyer by Jennifer Kloester
31
Sheila Heti
Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner
33
Benjamin Lytal
Seven Years by Peter Stamm, translated by Michael Hofmann
34
Michael Wood
At the Movies
35
Emily Witt
Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea by Donovan Hohn
38
Iain Sinclair
Diary
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2 london review of books 30 august 2012
I
n a letter written in July 1926, a
couple of months before he embarked on
the first version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover,
D.H. Lawrence gave voice – as he often did –
to the hatred he felt for ‘our most modern
world’. Tin cans and ‘imitation tea’ feature
prominently on his list of things not to like
about being ‘most modern’. Tin cans often
featured on such lists, either as litter or as
culinary short cut, in both cases signifying
degeneracy: ‘modern world’ was then and
still remains an expression that summons
up a familiar tableau of emblems. But imitation tea is a nice touch, because it recovers
the starkness of the contrast between the
organic and the inorganic which knowing
that you’re most modern always involves.
Lawrence couldn’t help describing what he
meant to hate before he dissolved it in allegory. Like the other iconic banned books of
the period between the world wars – Ulysses,
The Well of Loneliness – Lady Chatterley’s Lover
has long since ceased to be notorious. Unlike them, it has not yet acquired a different
kind of fame. But what it does best, better
than any other novel of its time, better than
most published since, is to describe the
modern world as it was, and in some measure still is.
In George Orwell’s Coming Up for Air,
published in 1939, the dyspeptic hero,
George Bowling, finds himself at one point
in a fast-food outlet sawing away with his
ancient false teeth at the rubbery skin of a
frankfurter. Suddenly the skin bursts, filling his mouth with ‘horrible soft stuff ’
which tastes a lot like fish. This rancid
mouthful unleashes a memorable tirade
against the ersatz in all its forms:
It gave me the feeling that I’d bitten into the
modern world and discovered what it was
really made of. That’s the way we’re going
nowadays. Everything slick and streamlined,
everything made out of something else. Celluloid, rubber, chromium-steel everywhere,
arc-lamps blazing all night, glass roofs over
your head, radios all playing the same tune,
no vegetation left, everything cemented over,
mock-turtles grazing under the neutral fruittrees. But when you come down to brass tacks
and get your teeth into something solid, a
sausage for instance, that’s what you get.
Rotten fish in a rubber skin. Bombs of filth
bursting inside your mouth.
Tin cans are missing from this list, but
even without them the allegory alert sounds
immediately. By the time the mock turtles
have started to graze under the neutral fruit
trees, like refugees from a poem by Wallace
Stevens, there’s no contrast left between the
organic and the inorganic. Even the something else has been made out of something
else.
Orwell’s hero is a lot funnier than the
most famous gamekeeper in English literature, but his jeremiad descends directly
from Oliver Mellors’s explanation of why
Constance Chatterley is the woman for
him. The great thing about her, he says, is
that she isn’t ‘all tough rubber-goods-andplatinum, like the modern girl’. She has a
tenderness which has ‘gone out’ of the ‘celluloid women of today’. Before long, Connie will describe Sir Clifford and his set as
celluloid nonentities, unappealingly tough
and ‘india-rubbery’ in appearance and manner. Connie and Mellors are fully united by
hatred before they are fully united in sex.
Lady Chatterley’s Sneakers
David Trotter
Platinum, india-rubber, celluloid: all have
been dissolved in metaphor.
Embarking on the short journey from allmod cons Wragby Hall to the ancient forest
which contains the gamekeeper’s hut and
cottage, Connie gets ready to swap celluloid
and radio sets for forget-me-nots woven
into pubic hair: signs made in anger for
signs made in tenderness. Something similar happens to Bowling in Coming Up for
Air, when he revisits the market town in
which he grew up. The danger in all such
exchanges is that the second performance
will simply cancel out the first, without
either transforming it in the process or cutting loose from it altogether. The result is
stalemate. In an essay on John Galsworthy’s
Forsyte Saga written while he was completing the second version of Lady Chatterley’s
Lover, Lawrence argued that ‘the thing a
man has a vast grudge against is the man’s
determinant’. Something similar seems to
be true of Mellors.
Connie is a different matter. In September 1927, shortly before he began the
novel’s third and final version, Lawrence
finished translating a collection of short
fiction by Giovanni Verga which was to appear as ‘Cavalleria Rusticana’ and Other Stories.
In his preface, he made the case for a ‘formlessness’ in fiction which would more fully
capture what happens in the transition
from one deed or mood to another. ‘A great
deal of the meaning of life and of art lies
in the apparently dull spaces, the pauses,
the unimportant passages.’ The dull space
Lawrence created in Lady Chatterley’s Lover
is found in Connie’s movement between
Wragby Hall and the gamekeeper’s hut and
cottage. In that space, description flourishes.
The most important change of emphasis,
as Lawrence revised the novel heavily on
two separate occasions, concerns Connie’s
emergence in these passages as a particular
kind of modern woman.
It’s her understanding of the things she
takes with her when she leaves for the forest which bids fair to protect her not only
against emblematically celluloid Sir Clifford, but also against emblematically supple
and rooted Mellors: a pair of rubber-soled
tennis shoes, a lightweight mackintosh, a
bottle of perfume by Coty. There is of course
a narrative reason for her to avail herself at
such a time of these particular accessories:
truants need shoes that don’t squeak; an
overcoat keeps off the chill night air; perfume can mask as well as entice. But the accessories acquire a further salience because
the journeys undertaken involve a complex
negotiation between the self-consciously
contemporary and the self-consciously
archaic. The condition of that salience is
rhetorical rather than narrative. On each
occasion, a Bowling-esque rant against the
modern world’s artificiality provides a context for the description of these products
of modern artifice. The emphasis thus laid
lightly on them creates the possibility of a
story different not only from what has gone
before, but also, we begin to suspect, from
what is to come. It gives shape to an attitude
unlikely to flourish either in the big house
or in the gamekeeper’s cottage.
It seems to me that Lawrence, whose
temperament and prose style might be
thought to tend perpetually to the condition
of molten lava, was in fact, when the mood
took him, an advocate of cool. In Cool Rules:
Anatomy of an Attitude, Dick Pountain and
David Robins define cool as a ‘new secular
virtue’ – the official language of a private
or subcultural rebelliousness retuned from
generation to generation, as well as of
worldwide commodity fetishism. According
to Alan Liu, in The Laws of Cool, it’s a ‘way or
manner of living’ in a world structured by
technological and other systems. Cool exploits the element of ‘give’ or ‘slack’ in any
such system. It is information designed to
resist information: ‘information fed back
into its own signal to create a standing interference pattern, a paradox pattern’. Cool
doesn’t want to have to choose between the
competing demands of technique and technology, free will and necessity. It’s a serious
business. According to Pountain and Robins,
cool provides the ‘psychological structure’
by means of which the ‘longest-standing
contradiction in Western societies’ – between the need to work and the desire for
play – may yet be resolved.
These, evidently, are definitions for the
21st century. But Lawrence’s novel may be
thought in some ways to prefigure them.
3 london review of books 30 august 2012
Various genealogies of cool have been proposed, ever more speculative in tendency as
they reach back into the 19th century and
beyond. It’s not altogether impossible that
one or other of them may have crossed his
path. In The Virgin and the Gypsy, in some respects a dry run for Lady Chatterley’s Lover,
virgin and gypsy demonstrate their mutual
affinity by displays of coolness. His has to do
with the way he moves (he’s a proto-rapper),
hers with the ‘nonchalance’ she exhibits
from the moment of her first encounter
with him. ‘Nonchalance’ was the contemporary translation of sprezzatura, the doctrine
of the well-rehearsed concealment of effort
first put forward by Baldassare Castiglione
in his Book of the Courtier. She has, we later
learn, ‘that peculiar calm, virgin contempt of
the free-born for the base-born’. This classbased understanding of nonchalance was,
however, already out of date. In revising
Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Lawrence removed
from it the last traces of the propaganda for
a new aristocracy which had driven his writing in the years after the end of the First
World War. Connie’s rebellion will be private, apolitical, consumerist. Mellors, like the
gypsy, moves well. But, as an ex-blacksmith
and horse whisperer turned game warden,
he’s an anachronistic figure: an exponent
and advocate of artisanal technique as an
alternative to technology. It’s Connie who,
for better or worse, speaks most directly to
the 21st century.
Lady Chatterley’s Lover is generally regarded as a primitivist text, the ancient woods in
which Connie and Mellors achieve consummation representing a world not merely
pre-industrial, but primeval. Lawrence’s
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Jeremy Mynott
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See our E-Books at
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Letters
Gandhi and After
Perry Anderson believes that to attribute
political acumen or historical agency to
Gandhi (for the mass mobilisations that
led to decolonisation) or Nehru (for shaping and stabilising post-independence
democracy) is to play into the ‘Indian ideology’, a fantasy that runs from the early
days of Indian nationalism right down to
Manmohan Singh (LRB, 5 July, 19 July and 2
August). But Indian assessments of Nehru
and Gandhi have ebbed and flowed, arguably reaching a critical low in the 1980s,
in the wake of the Emergency and widespread disillusionment with Congress politics. Gandhi himself has always been a
polarising figure: the hagiography is met
with an equally insistent counter-narrative
that purports to unmask Gandhi as a political manipulator and/or a religious crank.
In India today, under the veneer of official
reverence, the public attitude to Gandhi
is one of rebuke and disavowal, from the
Hindu right, on one side, and Dalits, on
the other. The current reassessment of
nationalist-era leaders and thinkers – the
rehabilitation of Nehru especially – is not,
as Anderson argues, simply the latest episode in an unbroken tradition of blind
self-congratulation and collective egoism.
Rather, it is an effort at an intimate criticism of India’s democratic experience – one
that seeks to understand the specificity of
that experience, its contradictions, failures
and future trajectory.
Instead of engaging directly with these
analyses of the intellectual and institutional foundations of Indian democracy,
Anderson opts for a ‘cosmopolitan’ broadside against nationalism as such, in which
modern Indian politics appears hopelessly
atavistic, parochial and saturated in Hindu
superstition. The most startling of his simplifications is his obsessive return to latent
‘Hinduism’ and ‘caste’ as the explanation
for the limits of Indian politics and political imagination. Plenty might be said
about the Orientalism of his description of
Hinduism and the ‘iron’ laws of caste. But
most egregious is his wish to reduce the
deep dilemmas of modern representative
democracy to religious belief and sectarianism. The struggles over majority and
minority representation before and after
partition are genuine conflicts about the
meaning and practice of democracy, and
have very little to do with arguments about
religious worship, belief or authority. Congress can and ought to be taken to task for
neither understanding nor taking seriously Muslim anxieties about Hindu political
dominance. But why describe the problem
of entrenched majoritarianism as a ‘confessional’ issue? In plural postcolonial societies especially, democratic competition
has repeatedly reconstituted and exacerbated communal divisions, making them
politically salient in new and often threatening ways. The causal force here is not
religious piety or premodern superstition
but the logic of modern politics. Where
has hard secularism permanently cured the
threats of majoritarian entrenchment and
minority exclusion? Where has universal
suffrage led to the massive redistribution
of wealth that 19th-century liberals feared
and socialists hoped for?
In his detached historical judgments
Anderson offers a style of political criticism he wishes Indian intellectuals would
emulate, ridding themselves of romantic
intoxications and deference to Hindu social norms. His concluding hope and recommendation is that the rough and
tumble of Indian politics be corrected and
purified by the exit of Congress and the removal of ‘caste consciousness’ and ‘Hindu
superstitions’ (which may, on his account,
amount to the same thing). On both counts
– but especially in the dream of a secular
politics free of irrational and prideful desires – political fantasy is offered in the
language of cool realism. To Weber this
would look very much like an ethics of
conviction where the purest radicalism is
prized over political truth.
Karuna Mantena
Yale University
New Haven, Connecticut
Why does Perry Anderson, in ‘Gandhi Centre
Stage’, rehearse in such detail what we’ve
heard about India so many times before?
I will take just one example, his use of Macaulay’s minute of 1835. ‘The modernising
force of the Raj,’ Anderson writes,
was not limited to its locomotives and law
books. It was official policy to produce a native elite educated to metropolitan standards,
or as Macaulay famously put it, ‘a class of
persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in
intellect’ . . . Two generations later, a layer of
articulate professionals – lawyers, journalists, doctors and the like – had emerged, the
seedbed of Congress nationalism.
Teleological and developmentalist, this
classically colonial interpretation is a
gross misrepresentation of events on the
ground. Long before it was ‘official policy
to produce a native elite educated to metropolitan standards’, Indians had for their
own reasons been demanding of reluctant
British officials an English education. British government policies at the start of the
19th century were tilted in favour of the
classical languages of India and against
the study of English. Gauri Vishwanathan,
in Masks of Conquest, showed how, in 1816,
in an attempt to change those policies, Rammohun Roy and other eminent Indians approached the chief justice of the Supreme
Court, Sir Edward Hyde East, to tell him
of their desire to form, as the judge recorded, ‘an establishment for the education of
their children in a liberal manner as practised by Europeans of condition’. Further:
When they were told that the government
was advised to suspend any declaration in
favour of their undertaking, from tender regard to their peculiar opinions, which a classical education after the English manner might
tread upon, they answered very shrewdly, by
stating their surprise that they had any objection to a liberal education, that if they
found anything in the course of it which
they could not reconcile to their religious
opinions, they were not bound to receive
it; but still they should wish to be informed of everything that the English gentlemen
learned, and they would take that which they
found good and liked best.
A wish to plunder Western knowledge,
adapting it so as to take only ‘that which
they found good and liked best’, remained
the predominant national attitude to Western thought throughout the following
century. Later, Tagore, Nehru and Gandhi
all endorsed that point of view when they
spoke of the beneficial effects of inflecting
Indian philosophies with Western science.
The hybrid national life that was a modernising force in colonial India was not
gifted to the Indians by the Raj alongside
‘locomotives and law books’, but wrested
from it by different classes of Indian for
their own purposes and profit.
But perhaps Anderson’s evocation of Macaulay is appropriate in an article that dismisses a swathe of contemporary Indian
intellectuals – Meghnad Desai, Ramachandra
Guha, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Amartya Sen,
Sunil Khilnani – while also failing to engage with the full spectrum of Indian intellectual history. While I’m sympathetic to
his irritation that these writers ‘fall over
themselves in tributes to their native land’,
I wonder that he couldn’t find a few Indian
scholars in more oppositional mode; or is
he saying there are none? In their place, he
finds only Kathryn Tidrick to praise, reminding us of that other infamous Macaulay quote, that ‘a single shelf of a good
European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.’ One can
only ask, after Said’s epigraph to Orientalism, taken from Marx, if we must continue
to be represented because we cannot represent ourselves.
Rosinka Chaudhuri
Centre for Studies in Social Sciences
Calcutta
Perry Anderson understates the extent of
collective leadership and mass politics in
Congress under Nehru and ignores the
political pluralism within the party at the
time of Nehru’s supposed passing of the
mantle to his daughter. He suggests a seamless succession and elite consensus, whereas the process was protracted and messy, and
the outcome uncertain. The Congress leadership, the old guard known as the Syndicate,
understood Indian politics as a collective effort and their own role as a shared
endeavour, while acknowledging Nehru
as primus inter pares. In the years after
Nehru’s death, the Syndicate did not understand Indira Gandhi’s appointment to the
party leadership as anointing her as leader of the country. They persisted in the
illusion that they could control her, and
fought hard to preserve their collective
power in the party. Her struggle for dominance against the Syndicate was based
almost entirely on a forceful appeal to the
aspirations of India’s poor and marginalised to economic and social inclusion.
Measures such as the abolition of the privy
purses of former Indian royalty, and the
nationalisation of banks to promote lending transformed the nature of Indian political discourse. Such policies were of course
a populist ploy by a thoroughly elitist politician, but the aspirations and expectations they unleashed permanently opened
up Indian politics in unanticipated ways.
Anderson’s suggestion that the wealthy
farmers’ break from Congress in 1977 was
a break from their caste subordination in
the Congress system is belied by the substantial benefits Congress policies had long
4 london review of books 30 august 2012
conferred on them. Their break with
Indira’s government had everything to do
with economic interests and policy. The
‘wealthy farmers’ were a broad group including the moderately well-to-do, and
were practising capitalist farmers rather
than feudal elites or latifundists. They included groups enriched and empowered
as a result of agrarian and fiscal policies
after independence.
Anderson’s discussion of the pernicious role of caste in the Indian polity deserves credit. But to suggest of Nehru’s
Congress party that ‘at the summit of this
hierarchy, and at the controls of the state
machine, were Brahmins’ is incorrect, as
the figure of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel (cited
often by Anderson) and the presence of
other Vaisyas, Kshatriyas and even Muslims in the senior leadership of party and
government demonstrate. An Uncle Tom
the Dalit Jagjivan Ram may have been, but
he proved one of the most powerful politicians of his era.
Anderson misses something vital about
contemporary caste politics. Whatever the
distractions and dysfunctions of symbolic
identity politics, and whatever the weaknesses of a fractured polity, the big story of
modern India is that the newly empowered political forces Anderson describes are
the result of social, economic, occupational
and educational empowerment of historically disadvantaged castes by state actions
and policies. The alliances of convenience
between castes with disparate interests,
which Anderson finds distasteful, could
just as well be seen as a sign of political maturity. They are little different from
the interest group politics, coalitions and
policy-making found in most democratic
societies.
Finally, Anderson’s outrage at the Indian
state leads him to a puzzling indulgence of
Indian fascism. He downplays the fascist
potential of the RSS on the grounds that
there is no ‘subcontinental equivalent of the
interwar scene in Europe’: a strange basis
on which to judge. But most egregiously he
downplays the significance of the Gujarat
pogrom – massacres, rapes, dismemberment and displacements sanctioned at the
highest levels of state leadership, directed
by state politicians and officials, and carried out or permitted by state officials and
police. He argues that these were no worse
than other massacres that had occurred in
the past. But they were. When such atrocities come out of the blue in peacetime,
they carry a distinct significance and are
peculiarly threatening to their victims.
Amit Pandya
Silver Spring, Maryland
Perry Anderson’s critique of Gandhi recapitulates a number of problems in the
historiography of modern India that have
become staples over the past three decades, ever since Ranajit Guha’s Dominance
without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (1997) and Elementary Aspects of
Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (1983).
The possibly derivative character of Indian
modernity; the belatedness of the arrival of
capitalism; the continuities between the
colonial and the postcolonial state; the
conundrum of a caste society before, during and after colonialism; the eccentricity
of Gandhi as a man and a leader; the
dissonance between the effort to build a
non-violent independence movement and
the reality of a violent partition; the incompleteness of India’s revolutionary transition from feudal colony to democratic
nation-state; the gap between the historical experiences of subaltern and elite
classes: historians of India, and especially
those on the left, have debated these claims
with exemplary thoroughness. Anderson
makes no reference to Ranajit Guha,
Partha Chatterjee, Shahid Amin, Dipesh
Chakrabarty, Gyan Prakash or others of the
Subaltern Studies school, whose books
might have strengthened his argument on
a number of fronts. Nor does he do justice
to the Indians he quotes in his opening
salvo, all of whom, while being occasionally
appreciative of the achievements of Indian
nationalism, have also provided detailed
analyses, criticisms, correctives and models that have laid the foundation of a new
history of political thought in modern
India.
As for the essay itself, to say that Gandhi
did wrong on numerous occasions is one
thing. But the claim that India’s anticolonial and anti-imperialist movements,
including the national movement led by
the Congress (which treated Gandhi as its
leader for the three decades leading up to
independence), were in no way responsible for the decolonisation and democratisation of India is indefensible. Gandhi
may have called off this or that mobilisation, withdrawn from active politics when
he ought to have stayed in the game, backed a worse rather than a better candidate
for some position of influence within the
party, or made any number of miscalculations or bad decisions in the course of
his political life. But what counted was that
he, together with his associates in the Congress, the ashrams and the public at large,
inculcated habits of personal and communitarian praxis (charkha, or weaving by hand;
khadi, or making hand-spun, hand-woven
cloth; satyagraha, or non-violent resistance),
created and sustained a climate of ideas
(swadeshi, swaraj, ahimsa), and made the quest
for sovereignty so paramount, that achieving independence became the principal
political project of the age. With the freedom of India the path was cleared for the
decolonisation of huge swathes of Asia,
Africa and Latin America. No doubt the
Second World War hastened the dissolution of the British Empire, but neither
Allies nor Axis powers came to rescue
India: in the end, India liberated itself.
Ananya Vajpeyi
Centre for the Study of Developing Societies
New Delhi
Perry Anderson says that Kashmir became
part of India in 1947 ‘with a forged declaration of accession’, and that the document
then disappeared for ‘over half a century’.
Not quite. The maharajah of Kashmir was
pushed into joining India by an invasion
of Pakistani tribesmen, and there’s little
doubt that he signed the instrument of
accession. A facsimile of the crucial page
bearing his signature was published more
than forty years ago, and the entire document was posted on the website of India’s
Ministry of Home Affairs. However, when
I sought permission to consult the original, I was told – it would be nice to think
that the play on words was intentional –
that the Indian government had ‘not acceded’ to my request.
There is certainly something fishy about
the circumstances of the accession. The
evidence is compelling that the maharajah
signed on 27 October, but was told to record the date as 26 October. In other words,
he put his name to the document a few
hours after India began an airlift of troops
to the Kashmir valley (the beginning of a
military presence that continues to this
day), but in a manner which suggested it
had been signed before the military operation began.
Andrew Whitehead
London NW5
While Perry Anderson’s analysis of the disastrous process and poisonous legacy of
decolonisation and partition in India is welcome, his focus on the (undoubted) personal shortcomings of Gandhi, Mountbatten and Nehru distracts attention from the
more structural factors at work, in which
the handover of power in India and Pakistan served as a blueprint for the wider
process of decolonisation. Central to this
was the overriding aim of British politicians
and administrators (supported by the United States) to hand the keys of newly independent nation-states to a single nationalist party and its (usually moderate,
Western-leaning) leader, in whom the diverse interests of complex societies were
vested and conflated, and who received
the covert or overt sponsorship of the colonial administration in the years immediately before and after independence.
In this process – carried out with increasing haste across the diminishing British
Empire in the 1950s and early 1960s – complex, disparate and conflicting anti-colonial
movements were, as in India, reduced to
monolithic nationalist parties. In colonies
such as the Gold Coast, Tanganyika, Kenya
and Northern Rhodesia such parties, modelled on Congress, conflated their particular interests (political, economic, social,
cultural) with those of the proto-nationstate, mapping their party symbols and
slogans onto the nation. This had the effect
of rendering illegitimate, anti-nationalist
and even treasonous the interests and perspectives of those sections of these diverse
societies that could not or would not be
subsumed under the leadership of such
men as Kwame Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta
or Kenneth Kaunda. The British national
archives demonstrate the significant extent to which the departing colonial power
contributed to the rapid transition to de
facto or de jure one-party states and dictatorships in many newly independent nationstates, the logical consequence of prioritising the self-serving myth of national unity
over democratic self-determination.
Miles Larmer
University of Sheffield
Of Time and Temples
John Gale rightly points out that the word
temenos, a word frequently used for a
shrine or sacred precinct, depends on an
underlying metaphor of cutting and demarcating, from the Greek verb temno,
used literally for slicing and hewing and
wounding, and metaphorically for a ship
cutting the waves or a plough furrowing a
field (Letters, 2 August). The difficulty that
imagining or describing time presents to
the human mind led to a further spatial use
of this metaphor to mark off duration. Ernst
Cassirer connects this to time-keeping
before clocks, which might be done by observing the passage of the heavenly bodies
and shadows on the ground: ‘The simplest spatial relations,’ he writes in The
Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, ‘such as left
and right and forward and backward, are
differentiated by a line drawn from east to
west, following the course of the sun, and
bisected by a perpendicular running from
north to south – and all intuition of temporal intervals goes back to these intersecting
lines.’ This idea of sectioning and marking
off became a metaphor we live by, and produced the Latin tempus and templum, and
myriad derivatives – maybe even ‘temperature’, another kind of measurement.
In my piece about Damien Hirst, I was
quoting the Catalan philosopher Eugenio
Trías from an illuminating collection of
essays, Religion, edited by Jacques Derrida
and Gianni Vattimo. Trías notes the contemporary turn towards the sacred as a
symbolic communal event rather than inward prayer or a private act of faith. I
did propose a connection between ancient
temples and contemporary museums, but
I didn’t mean to say (as Gale thinks) that
time is made to stand still in these precincts. Rather, it is being told there –
marked or counted down – at a different
pace that is powerfully seductive to artists
and their audience.
However, the connection between mass
assemblies, their precincts and stretching
time seems to me even stronger in the
wake of the Olympic Games, which have
led to such intense and fervent displays of
secular public symbolism. I hadn’t noticed
before just how important accurate demarcations of the lanes, the pitch, the track, the
field and the ring are in every sport during
the Games: all those shots of the ground
being examined to ascertain exact measurements, talk of split seconds being shaven
off speed records, world champions surpassing their nearest rivals’ highest and
longest jumps by infinitesimal increments.
But even as the athletes were running or
swimming faster than anyone ever had, the
effect of all these sections and truncations
was to prolong the passage of time. For a
sports virgin like myself, it was unimaginable that a nanoslice – how long is 0.014 of
a second? – could count at all, let alone
make a difference after a race of ten kilometres. And it was astonishing to experience an interval of less than ten seconds as
a momentous event: the 100 metres race
seemed to take longer than I would shuffling along for miles. In the setting of a
temple on a global platform, the athletes
were in effect cutting up the passage of
time in different ways, according to the
logic of imagining space-time, and the
stadium turned into a gigantic and special
kind of clock, in which time was moving
both faster and slower in front of our
eyes.
Marina Warner
London NW5
5 london review of books 30 august 2012
Pain and Peril
Diarmaid MacCulloch sees ‘overtones of
purification from ritual uncleanness’ in the
service for ‘thanksgiving of women after
childbirth, commonly called . . . churching’ in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer
(LRB, 24 May). Perhaps MacCulloch is thinking back to the similar service in the 1549
first prayer book of Edward VI, which indeed refers to purification. The 1662 service,
however, has no suggestion of uncleanness
or purification: it is a simple service of
thanksgiving for delivery from ‘the great
pain and peril of childbirth’. The Church
did not wait for the ‘revolution in gender
relations’ of the 1960s to remove all references to uncleanness and purification.
For that reason, when in 1987, during
its work on a New Zealand Prayer Book/He
Karakia Mihinare o Aotearoa, the General
Synod of the Church of the Province of New
Zealand proposed to remove ‘The Churching of Women’ from the list of authorised
services, and replace it with one of Thanksgiving for the Gift of a Child, I successfully
opposed the deletion of the 1662 service.
A.E.J. Fitchett
Dunedin, New Zealand
Where have all the gay writers gone?
Christopher Glazek asks how we can account for ‘one of the more puzzling features of the postwar literary era . . . the collapse of the gay novelist’ (LRB, 19 July).
That’s like asking about the ‘collapse’ of
the Eastern and Central European dissident novelist. Just as the collapse of communism diminished the need for ‘dissident’ novels, the success of the gay movement in North America and much of Europe diminished the need for ‘gay’ novels.
Gay novels may no longer be necessary
in the way they once were, but representations of same-sex relations remain open
to writers who can figure out their relevance to present conditions. When books
like Edmund White’s A Boy’s Own Story
(1982), Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the
Dance (1978) and even Armistead Maupin’s
Tales of the City (1978) appeared, they had,
for their mainly gay readership, the function of newspapers, dispatches from the
front. Indeed, Maupin’s book was first published in serialised form in the San Francisco
Chronicle. Their merits as realist novels were
inseparable from their political function.
Glazek asks where the significant contemporary gay writers can be found. He should
look in places (and there is no shortage of
them) where homosexuality is still a contested issue. The Hungarian writer Péter
Nádas is one example, Poland’s Michal
Witkowski (Lovetown, 2005) another.
Glazek’s brief history of contemporary
gay writing and writers who were homosexual doesn’t mention the ‘new narrative’
group of mostly gay writers, active from
about 1985 to the mid-1990s, who were explicitly interested in modernist and postmodernist prose. The best known of these
is Dennis Cooper, whose cycle of half a
dozen novels from Closer (1989) to Guide
(1997) explores the queer punk scene; other
examples include Robert Gluck’s Jack the
Modernist (1985), Kevin Killian’s various
books and my own Buddy’s (1991).
Stan Persky
Vancouver
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6 london review of books 30 august 2012
primitivism, we are told, was a primitivism
of the most conventional kind, forever
finding alternatives to techno-industrial
modernity, whether in ancient England or a
contemporary elsewhere. But that’s not the
whole story, or indeed the most interesting
part of it. In Chapter 13 comes the passage
I have already mentioned, in which Connie,
having dined with her husband and roundly
condemned him in her own mind as a dead
fish of a gentleman with a celluloid soul,
puts on ‘rubber tennis-shoes, and then a
light coat’, and slips out of the house to
spend the night, for the first time, in Mellors’s cottage. Such ‘unimportant’ descriptive passages constitute the slack in narrative’s system. Lawrence establishes by means
of their matter-of-factness a view of the
modern world not determined by any ‘vast
grudge’ against it. The tennis shoes (as such,
enough to guarantee a silent exit) only became rubber tennis shoes in the novel’s
second version. I’ve often wondered why.
T
here’s a long answer to that
question. Rubber began as a natural
plastic, familiar to the indigenous
peoples of the Amazon basin, but proved of
little use industrially until, in the late 1830s,
someone (in fact, two people separately)
worked out how to combine it with sulphur
at a high temperature: a process known
as vulcanisation. Rubber was, and is, semisynthetic: a product of both nature and
culture, of the plantation and the chemical
laboratory; or, where the British Empire was
concerned, of colony and metropolis. By
the 1920s, a large proportion of the worldwide supply of rubber derived from Malaya
and Ceylon. In 1907, a Rubber Growers’
Association (RGA) was founded in London
to protect and develop the interests of British firms operating in South-East Asia. In
1921, the RGA established a publicity department to develop ‘press propaganda
advocating the use of rubber for all conceivable purposes’.
The most significant initiative undertaken by the RGA publicity department in
the 1920s concerned the exploitation, primarily for the leisure market, of the ‘crudeness’ of crude rubber. After collection, the
coagulum from the rubber trees was prepared for export either as crêpe or as ribbed
smoked sheet. The distinctive feature of
crêpe was that it didn’t need to be vulcanised
before use. The material out of which a commodity was to be made could be prepared
on the plantation itself, by ‘native’ artisanal
labour, rather than by a chemical process in
a factory in Europe or the United States. The
proportion of raw material to added mineral matter in any commodity made from this
material was very high indeed.
The supreme opportunity for the marketing of crêpe rubber came with the increasing popularity of that ultimate modern
fashion accessory, the sports shoe. The
RGA campaigns characterised sports shoes
and boots with crêpe rubber soles as a way
to rekindle hitherto dormant energies and
aptitudes. ‘The cushion of “live” rubber lessens fatigue and makes walking a pleasure,’
the advertisements claimed, ‘adding hours
to endurance and a spring to every step.’
For nothing had been done, chemically or
otherwise, to ‘impair the natural live quality
and nerve of the virgin product’. By putting
the emphasis on unvulcanised rubber, the
‘virgin’ product of colonial abundance, the
RGA cleverly sold reinvigoration to the
(literally) well-heeled metropolitan middle
and upper classes: a bit of wildness on golf
course and tennis court. Today, the marketing of Nike’s Air Jordan basketball shoes,
made plausible by association with their
talisman’s legendary ‘hang time’, strikes the
same note. ‘High-end forefoot foam and a
Zoom Air heel deliver lightweight, responsive cushioning for insanely quick cuts,
jukes, spins and stops.’
The RGA’s crêpe rubber campaign
amounted to techno-primitivism in action,
by working on, and provoking a strong
awareness of, the compound quality of synthetic and semi-synthetic substance. That
awareness could itself be considered ‘primitive’, despite its focus on plastics, in so
far as it drew primarily on the evidence of
senses which Victorian psychophysiology
had classified as primitive: touch, taste and
smell. Techno-primitivism, exploiting slack
in the system of consumption of luxury
goods, makes cool possible. In Lawrence’s
fiction, it became a way to think about how
cool works.
Connie Chatterley puts on her semisynthetic rubber tennis shoes in order to
make the transition from the civilised space
of the hall to the primitive space of the
woods. In Chapter 15, she and Mellors meet
at the hut in the woods in which they first
made love and she dances naked in the rain
clad only in her Air Jordans. The dance, as
modern in style as the shoes she wears to
perform it, is a response to another of his
rants against the ‘industrial epoch’ and its
reduction of men and women to ‘labourinsects’. Techno-primitivism is cool, however, because ancient practices echo to its
modern beat. In April 1927, after completing his first revision of the novel, Lawrence
undertook an extensive tour of Tuscany, in
order to examine the famous painted tombs
and other vestiges of the ancient Etruscan
civilisation in which he had for a long time
taken an interest. By the end of June, he had
written pretty much all he was ever to write
of his posthumously published Sketches of
Etruscan Places. The ease, naturalness, and
‘abundance of life’ revealed to him by the
tomb paintings became the latest in a series
of antidotes to modern commerce and empire. So, another gang of happy, conquered
sensualists. Except that what he most liked
about this lot was their sprezzatura, their
apparent ‘carelessness’. In a poem written
in 1920, he had imagined the men of ‘old
Etruria’, naked except for ‘fanciful long
shoes’, transacting ‘forgotten business’ with
‘some of Africa’s imperturbable sang-froid’.
In 1927, it was the friezes representing dance
that most delighted him: men wearing only
sandals and a kind of scarf, a woman who
‘throws back her head and curves out her
long strong fingers, wild and yet contained
within herself ’, all equally caught up in the
‘archaic earnestness of insouciance’. Connie, naked except for her no less fanciful
shoes, dances herself ‘ruddy’: the flesh tone
Lawrence most readily attributed to his
old Etrurian men. Techno-primitivism has
brought her to her senses. It recovers the
starkness of the contrast between the organic and the inorganic involved in being
most modern.
As striking as the tennis shoes, in this respect, is the ‘little bottle of Coty’s Woodviolet perfume, half-empty’, which Connie
leaves among Mellors’s things after her
second night at the cottage, where it is subsequently discovered by his malevolent wife.
‘She wanted him to remember her in the
perfume.’ Spraying perfume on your lover’s
shirts doesn’t seem like the coolest thing
you could possibly do. Connie herself subsequently dismisses the gesture as childish.
The devil, however, is in the detail, as it
always is in this novel. The manufacturer’s
name was an addition in the final draft.
Coty did not in fact create a perfume called
Wood-violet. As Lawrence was revising, in
January 1928, they launched L’Aimant (or
The Magnet). L’Aimant was a wholly synthetic perfume. But wood-violets feature
earlier in the novel: as with the tennis
shoes, Lawrence has chosen for Connie a
combination of old and new: the natural
in the synthetic, not before or beyond it.
Connie’s strong awareness of synthetic and
semi-synthetic substance – an awareness
coolly established by description alone –
saves her both from Sir Clifford and from
Mellors: from too much civilising, and too
little.
I
t’s striking that Lawrence attributed a productive techno-primitivism to
women far more readily than he did to
men. Nobody tries harder, or to less effect,
than hapless Sir Clifford Chatterley, after
the arrival of a specialist nurse and companion, Mrs Bolton, has provoked in him a
resurgence of energy. ‘Somehow, he got his
pecker up.’ The ruthless application of his
researches into the ‘technicalities of modern coal-mining’ restores him to a sense
of himself as ‘lord and master’. His interest
in the radio, mentioned in passing in the
second version of the novel, takes centre
stage in the third. He no longer wants company at Wragby, we learn at the beginning
of Chapter 10, or the sort of wide-ranging
intellectual debate he had once encouraged.
‘He preferred the radio, which he had installed at some expense, with a good deal
of success at last. He could sometimes get
Madrid, or Frankfurt, even there in the uneasy Midlands.’ Radio is the novel’s emblem
of technological system, of that to which
there is no conceivable outside. When Connie wonders whether one could ‘go right
away, to the far ends of the earth’, Lawrence comments tartly that one could not.
‘While the wireless is active, there are no far
ends of the earth. Kings of Dahomey and
Lamas of Tibet listen in to London and New
York.’
Clifford, however, mastering radio, is
mastered by it. The radio loudspeaker
‘bellowing forth’ hour after hour has reduced him to a trance-like imbecility which
infects all his relationships. This ‘astute
and powerful practical man’ now worships
his wife ‘with a queer craven idolatry, like
a savage’. He will later prove equally craven
in his idolatry of his wife’s replacement,
Mrs Bolton. Clifford’s is a bad technoprimitivism: one as vividly conscious of
the archaic as it is of the contemporary, but
unable to establish a productive connection
between them. That Connie is at the point
of establishing just such a connection becomes clear later in the chapter, when, on
7 london review of books 30 august 2012
the evening of the day after she first had sex
with Mellors, she once again seeks him out
at the hut, ‘to see if it were really real’. Clifford has chosen to listen in to a lecture
about ancient street cries delivered in an
‘idiotically velveteen-genteel sort’ of modern
radio voice. This parodic techno-primitivism
provides the rhetorical context for a reassertion of cool. ‘She pulled on her old
violet-coloured mackintosh, and slipped
out of the house at the side door.’
Lawrence found it hard to imagine men
as cool. Men were absolute, women relative
(as cool is). To put it more charitably, Lawrence believed that men had become caught
up in masquerades of earnestness, to adapt
his own term for the performative dimension he discerned in many kinds of ‘most
modern’ behaviour. The Etruscan tombs
taught him that the only thing you should
be in earnest about is insouciance. Connie,
slipping out of the house, slips insouciantly
out of the masquerade. ‘She got very warm
as she hurried across the park. She had to
open her light waterproof.’ In the novel’s
previous version, the mackintosh had been
blue. Now, like Connie’s perfume, it is associated with an ancient woodland flower.
But Lawrence added a further detail during
revision. Connie’s mackintosh is a light
waterproof garment.
Mackintoshes were made of rubber. In
1823, Charles Macintosh discovered that
naphtha drawn from coal-tar stabilised raw
latex into a liquid which when spread between two layers of fabric made for an
excellent waterproof material. Macintosh
gave his name to a whole range of rubberised silk or cotton garments – or almost
gave his name, since mackintosh with a
‘k’, the variant spelling, is now standard.
There was a problem, however. Rubberised
cotton stank. So severe had this problem
become by the end of the 19th century that
mackintosh-wearers were often denied
entry to omnibuses. The garment remained
highly fashionable throughout the 1920s
and 1930s. But it had to be admitted that in
this case modern chemicals, far from eliminating aboriginal odours, had in fact done
a great deal to enhance them. George Bowling, in Coming Up for Air, returning to his
wife and family in the knowledge that for
him there will be no escape from suburbia,
returns to the bad techno-primitive. ‘I fumbled with the key, got the door open, and
the familiar smell of old mackintoshes hit
me.’
‘Women are learning that the thick rubber waterproof coat is uncomfortable for its
lack of ventilation,’ a 1920 guide to hygiene
pointed out, ‘and they are discarding it for
a lightweight and rainproof cloth.’ Connie
has chosen a lightweight garment. It’s a
garment in which she will sweat a little, on
her way out of the big house into the forest,
but, we’re allowed to assume, not too much.
Rubber’s constitution as a semi-synthetic
substance has once again enabled Lawrence
to capture with a sang-froid all his own the
robustness of a properly self-aware technoprimitivism. Connie’s taste in rainwear, her
inhabitation of a garment, has enabled her
to exploit an element of give or slack in
the relation between technique and technology, free will and necessity, as she leaves
the big house for the hut in the forest.
c
Connie is cool.
T
he geeks at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology are fond of
merry japes, locally known as ‘hacks’.
One of the more memorable happened one
night in October 1958 when an MIT fraternity had the idea of initiating new members
by making them measure a bridge over the
Charles River connecting the Cambridge
campus with Boston. Crossing the bridge
was often a wet, windy and unpleasant business and it was thought that students returning at night from downtown would like
to know, by visible marks and with some
precision, how far they still had to go. The
older fraternity brothers decided to use one
of the new pledges as a rule, and selected
Oliver R. Smoot, the shortest of the lot at
5ft 7in. The other pledges laid Smoot out
at one end of the bridge, marked his extent
with chalk and paint, then picked him up
and laid him down again, spelling out the
full measurement every ten lengths, and
inscribing the mid-point of the bridge with
the words ‘halfway to Hell’. In this way, it
was determined that the span was 364.4
smoots long, ‘plus or minus one ear’ (to
indicate measurement uncertainty).
The hack was too good to let fade away,
so every now and then the fraternity makes
its pledges repaint the markings. You might
think this isn’t the sort of vandalism the
police would tolerate, but they do. The
smoot markings soon became convenient
in recording the exact location of traffic
accidents, so (as the story goes) when the
bridge walkways needed to be repaved in
1987, the Massachusetts Department of
Public Works directed the construction
company to lay out the concrete slabs on
Plus or Minus One Ear
Steven Shapin
World in the Balance:
The Historic Quest for an Absolute System of Measurement
by Robert Crease.
Norton, 317 pp., £18.99, October 2011, 978 0 393 07298 3
the walkway not in the customary six-foot
lengths but in shorter smoot units. Fifty
years after the original hack, the smoot
markers have become part of civic tradition:
the City of Cambridge declared 4 October
2008 ‘Smoot Day’. MIT students ran up a
commemorative plaque on a precision milling machine and created an aluminium
Smoot Stick which they deposited in the
university’s museum as a durable reference
standard: the unit-smoot is now detached
from the person-Smoot. Through the legions of MIT graduates driving global hightech culture, the smoot has travelled the
world. If you use Google Earth, you can elect
the units of length in which you’d like distances measured: miles, kilometres, yards,
feet – and smoots.
The history of the smoot recapitulates
much of the deep history of measurement
standards. Most stories about the emergence of length measures track back to the
human body. The cubit ran from the elbow
to the fingertip; the yard was the distance
from the tip of an outstretched hand to the
middle of the chest (or to the tip of your
nose); the fathom was the distance between
the extremes of a person’s outstretched
arms, and the ell (an abbreviation of elbow)
was traditionally an arm’s length, though
English, Scottish and Flemish ells were reckoned differently. Human bodies and their
parts vary in size and so do the measures
derived from them.
Central European foot measures generally ranged from 101/2 to 121/2 modern
inches, but the Sicilian foot was 8.75 inches
and the Genevan foot 19.2, so we can’t be
certain that all foot standards really did
come from any human foot. Maybe the
Genevan or even the 12-inch foot belonged
to heroic specimens, or maybe the original
foot measure included a generously proportioned shoe. Maybe both human feet and
the length that the foot measure measured
increased over time. Maybe too there were
other ways of establishing the foot. Sixteenth-century writers claimed that French
workmen calculated it by joining the extremities of their thumbs, clenching the
fingers, and extending the thumbs as far as
they could. Try it yourself and you’ll see that
you can get pretty close to a 12-inch foot.
The concept of the ‘average foot’ (understood as the mean of the population) probably wasn’t intelligible before the emergence in the 19th century of the notion of the
‘average man’, but a 16th-century German
source reported an ingenious way of arriving at a reliable foot measure: lurk outside
church on Sunday and, when the worshippers come out, ask 16 men to stop – both
short and tall – and make them line up their
left feet, one after the other. The length you
get will constitute the local land measure
called the rood, and a sixteenth part of that
‘shall be the right and lawful foot’, even if it
corresponds to the foot length of no one of
the 16. Similarly, one story about the inch
says that it was taken as the width of a
man’s thumb at the base of the nail, and
another derives it from the Latin word for a
twelfth (uncia), as in 1/12th of a foot is an
inch and 1/12th of a Troy pound is an ounce.
Length units could be systematically related because bodily dimensions were
understood as organically related. ‘Man is
the measure of all things,’ and Leonardo’s
Vitruvian Man represented confidence in
the proportionality of human body parts:
‘The length of the outspread arms is equal
to the height of a man; from the hairline to
the bottom of the chin is one-tenth of the
height of a man; from below the chin to the
top of the head is one-eighth of the height
of a man.’ Tailors as well as artists knew
some of these systemic relations: the Lilliputian seamstresses in Gulliver’s Travels measured up their giant guest using a rule of
thumb – ‘twice round the thumb is once
round the wrist.’ The human body was a
cosmologically and aesthetically resonant
measuring-kit. It was metrically intelligible,
useful and, above all, it was at hand. ‘Traditional measures were “human” in many re-
8 london review of books 30 august 2012
spects,’ the Polish historian Witold Kula
wrote in his great study of Measures and Men.
‘They were expressive of man and his work.’
But anthropometric units don’t get you
very far in measuring volume, weight and
time. Any appropriately shaped vessel whose
general dimensions were recognised by a
relevant community could serve as a volume measure and, it might be expected, as a
measure of the weight of stuff the vessel
contained. The passage of time might be
measured in many ways: by the length of a
day, and parts thereof, in which case you
wouldn’t be greatly bothered by annual
variation; or by reference to noon, solstices,
equinoxes and lunar motions; or by the
amount of time it took to perform some
locally well-understood task – for example,
how long it took to cook a pot of rice or
plough a furrow.
Intelligibility, accessibility and at-handness were among the virtues of traditional
measures; among their vices were their
variability, imprecision and the difficulty of
converting between them. Travelling through
France just before the Revolution, Arthur
Young was distressed at the ‘infinite perplexity of the measures’ used: ‘They differ
not only in every province, but in every district and almost every town.’ A quarter of a
million distinct units of weights and measures were employed in different parts of the
country. Worried by the high price of grain
in 1796, the British government was concerned that uncontrollably varying systems
for measuring it out were contributing to
political unrest – ‘an evident fraud on the
consumers of bread, and an advantage to
none but the jobbers in corn, who, from
practice, are as well acquainted with the size
of every farmer’s bushel as with his face.’
From long experience, and with much effort,
the wide-boy jobbers might come to know
the difference between the bushels used
in Winchester and Basingstoke, but those
whose sphere of familiarity was more restricted might not. And even in Basingstoke, the ordinary purchaser might get a
nine-gallon bushel while, in ‘a shameful
fraud on the consumer’, a gentleman might
get 101/2 gallons. A bushel for measuring
wheat could be a different size from one for
measuring barley. And bushels of the same
volume might contain different amounts of
grain if they were heaped or levelled, filled
from a greater or a lesser height. You might
heap a bushel if the grain was of low quality
or you might do it if the purchaser was of
high quality. Not all grain was the same and
not all transactions between people were
the same. Traditional measures persistently
linked quantity and quality.
You use standards to measure – and
that’s a practical matter – but measures are
not merely more or less, they may be just or
unjust. There is no way to disentangle their
instrumental and moral aspects. Standards
were norms, just as the Roman norma was a
tool for obtaining right angles, the usage
later extending to standards of right moral
action. God traditionally kept standard
weights and measures in his kit: ‘A just
weight and balance are the Lord’s,’ Proverbs said: ‘All the weights of the bag are his
work.’ He created the world by ordering ‘all
things in measure and number and weight’
and his measures were an index of justice:
‘Thou shalt not have in thy bag divers
weights, a great and a small. Thou shalt not
have in thine house divers measures, a great
and a small.’ Ancient and medieval thought
ran together the notion of measure and
moderation – proportion, due measure, just
measure. Double standards were no standards at all. The scales held by Lady Justice
on top of the Old Bailey express both unbiased scales and an unbiased weigher.
(This Justice, atypically, is not blindfolded
because she is taken to personify fairness.)
G
od kept weights and measures in
his bag, but in human society the
objects tended to be enshrined in
the houses where authority lived – on the
Acropolis, on the Capitoline Hill, in the
Temple at Jerusalem, in Hagia Sophia in
Constantinople, later in the seats of secular
government and in institutions linked to
government. The Saxons kept their standards of volume – bushel, peck, quart and
gallon – at their Winchester capital and the
Normans then had them removed to Westminster Abbey. In medieval Europe, you
could check your rule against metal rods
built into the walls of churches or other
public buildings. Just to the left of the main
entrance to the cathedral of St Stephen in
Vienna are two iron bars embedded in the
wall – the linen ell and the shorter drapery
ell. If you were a visitor and wanted to know
local standards, or if you wanted to check
your local rules against the references,
there they were. And if you needed to be
reminded of their authority, there it was.
Variability and imprecision were longstanding problems that might have local
solutions, if indeed they were seen as problems at all. This is the point at which Robert
Crease’s World in the Balance gets going.
He is indebted to Kula, as is every recent
historian writing about measurement and
modernity, but he takes the story onwards,
dealing in more detail with 19th and 20thcentury metrology and its engagements with
local variation. How did we get from the
body-reference yard to the artifact-standard
of a metal metre bar in Paris, to the metre as
1,650,763.73 wavelengths in vacuum of the
radiation corresponding to the transition
between the levels 2p10 and 5d5 of the
krypton-86 atom, to its present official definition as the length of the path travelled
by light in vacuum in 1/299,792,458th of a
second? Every modern scholar now accepts
that the seeming banality and just-so-ness
of standards mask massive contingency
and bloody struggle in their establishment
and maintenance, recognising, as the historian Ken Alder puts it, that ‘the price of
standards is eternal vigilance.’ Contingency
and struggle were the drivers of Thomas
Pynchon’s great metrological novel Mason
& Dixon, as they are of Crease’s book, whose
special strength is attention to the last
several decimal places of modern measurements, how they were arrived at through the
19th and 20th centuries, why and to whom
these things mattered.
The first move away from metrological
tradition was to cut down the heterogeneity: it’s easier to govern a country with
246 varieties of cheese – which De Gaulle
thought was hard enough – than with many
different weights, measures and time systems. Effective rule needs stable rulers.
That sensitivity to the link between stand-
ardisation and governance at a distance developed much earlier than the French Revolution and the metric system. Magna Carta
declared that ‘there be one measure of wine
throughout our whole realm . . . and one
measure of corn . . . and one width of cloth
. . . of weights also let it be as of measures.’
What was an irritant in transactions between millers in Winchester and buyers of
flour in Basingstoke became intolerable in
governing a nation-state from London or
Paris. The ability of standards to act over a
distance was useful if you meant to govern
over a distance.
The standardisation of the coinage was
the most visible of these concerns, with its
attendant enshrinement of reference standards, the establishment of assay offices,
standard-marks warranting composition
and judicial arrangements for punishing
counterfeiters. In England, the legal definition of composition standards was promulgated after Magna Carta but the regulation of purity standards was probably
Saxon. You can’t govern if you can’t control
your currency, so metallurgical standards
and their enforcement are tools of statecraft. So too is the ability effectively to levy
taxes – and to make visible their material
and legitimate bases.
The power of the British state, its capacity to wage war and extend empire in
the 18th and 19th centuries, was dependent
on excise taxes, and especially the excise
on alcohol: government ran on alcohol in
more than the usual sense. Yet the state’s
ability to enforce and collect that excise was
itself dependent on developing instrumental
practices objectively to establish alcoholic
proof. The excise was widely hated, resisted
and often subverted, so, as one assayer put
it in 1801, ‘a standard alone can put an
end to this contrariety of opinions.’ Crease
doesn’t discuss the use of standards in the
excise, but fine historical work by William
Ashworth has described the struggle over
determining proof standards during the
18th and 19th centuries and the role of both
bureaucratic procedures and the specificgravity measuring instrument called the
hydrometer in producing the ‘practical objectivity’ that underwrote empire.
The historical trajectory of standards,
Crease notes, is often described as disembodiment, as in the detachment of the smoot
from Smoot. But under another description
that process is a different kind of embodiment, the transference of standards from
flesh to metal. An official ell or Troy pound
just was the reference bar or lump constituted as such; it was the artifact that gave
meaning to the ell-ness or pound-ness of
all other things an ell long or a pound in
weight – and that is the sense in which Wittgenstein said: ‘There is one thing of which
one can say neither that it is one metre long,
nor that it is not one metre long, and that is
the standard metre in Paris.’ It was both
handy and politically necessary that the state
keep, guard and guarantee artifactual reference standards, and that is what was done
until, in the course of the 18th and 19th centuries, grounds of dissatisfaction emerged.
Discontent took several forms. One concerned the practices of reference which the
artifacts were intended to ensure. The
standard artifact, kept in one place, had
to generate authentic copies – sometimes
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technically called ‘witnesses’ – in order to
circulate, and yet, with demands for greater
and greater precision, both its physical use
as a reference and its physical instability over
time were gradually understood to compromise its integrity. Every time you took
the artifact out to use it as a reference, you
endangered its integrity, and even the physical environment in which you kept it safe
might, over time, have unpredictable effects
on its length or weight. A metal bar might
bend; a metal weight might corrode. Metallurgical improvements were made, but you
could never be absolutely certain of longterm stability. In 1948, it was discovered that
the ‘Kilogram of the Archives’, fabricated in
1799 and carefully looked after since then,
had lost weight, evidently (as Crease writes)
‘due to the escape of bubbles’ trapped in
the metal. Uncontrollably varying reference
standards aren’t what you want. Nor do you
want them to be lost or destroyed. But this
happens. Artifact standards of length and
weight, designed in the mid-18th century
and designated as the first imperial standards in 1824, were kept in the House of
Commons – until it burned down ten years
later, severely damaging the standards and
rendering them useless. What authorities
longed for was an order of standards that
wasn’t defined by any physical artifact or
patterned on the human body, wasn’t the
conventional outcome of human history or
geared towards any particular practice,
whether it was milling or carpentry or
ploughing. They wanted standard measures
that reflected the order of reality, standards
that could be reproduced anywhere, at any
time – even if all the existing metal bars and
weights and clocks ceased to exist.
The French invention of the metric system in the late 18th and early 19th centuries
was a big deal mainly because it allowed
easy, and, it was said, intelligible interconvertibility of units. What was intelligible
and systematically easy would be naturally
fit for global use. Moving from inches to
feet to yards to miles means multiplying
first by 12, then by 3, and then by 1760,
whereas, of course, every metric conversion
proceeds by tens and its multiples and there
are only a few prefixes designating scale –
kilo, centi, milli, micro etc. Metrication
made many calculations much easier, but
the problem of reference standards remained. What if, however, you could tie
measures not to a human artifact but to the
invariant order of terrestrial reality? If you
could do that, you would no longer be dependent on the integrity of a particular physical object. Essentially, anyone, anywhere,
could reproduce the standards. At that
point, standards would be not only nationally and globally uniform; they would be as
stable as reality itself, finally disembodied.
It was a project that ultimately succeeded, though not without difficulties and
never totally. In fact, the original metre was
supposed to be a natural standard, nothing
to do with fingers, arms and noses, everything to do with unvarying features of the
terrestrial world, and intended to be used
by all people, everywhere. As Alder puts it,
‘it was only fitting that a measure for all the
world’s people be based on a measure of
the world.’ The metre would be one tenmillionth of the distance along a meridian
passing through Paris between the North
Pole and the equator. That length was picked for historical reasons – because it was
estimated to be pretty close to a traditional
unit, the Parisian aune. (This ‘rational’
measure was therefore, as economic historians say, ‘path dependent’: it took its
form partly because of its intercalation in
the past history of human practices.) The
problem with a natural standard for the
metre, as more fully documented in Alder’s
sparkling book, The Measure of All Things
(2002), was, on the one hand, the fallibility
of the scientists sent to perform the meridional measurements and, on the other, the
annoying irregularity of the Earth’s shape,
not corresponding exactly to any theorised
geometrical figure.
The late 18th-century attempt to establish the metre as a natural standard did
not succeed, but in 1799 the ‘good-enoughfor-government-work’ measure was nevertheless embodied in a platinum alloy bar,
the so-called ‘Metre of the Archives’, and it
was this artifact that continued as the reference standard for most of the 19th century,
despite the fact that it was known not to correspond precisely to the one ten-millionth
of a quarter-meridian criterion. In 1889,
new, more stable physical artifacts were
constructed: the prototype metre was now
an alloy of 90 per cent platinum and 10 per
cent iridium, measured at the temperature
at which ice melts. The further adoption of
the metre was commended not because of
its naturalness but because, for a host of
political, cultural and scientific reasons, it
had already become (as Nature said) ‘a
cosmopolitan unit, widely recognised, and
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in general use among many nations’. Or, as
Crease writes, ‘the metre was universal because it was universal.’ Custom, convention
and artifact had not been eliminated, they
had been relocated to a new metrological
language, a new set of artifacts, and a new
group of administrative bodies that would
articulate and enforce standards.
The quest for natural standards was soon
to succeed. From the end of the 19th century, the financial resources and organisational energies dedicated to achieving the
final dream of standards that flowed from
the structure of reality grew enormously.
Both governmental and non-governmental
metrological commissions proliferated: 17
countries at the General Conference of
Weights and Measures in 1875 signed up
to the Metre Convention, establishing both
a physical institute to house the standards
and periodically meeting supervisory bodies.
The world had international metrological
government long before it had the League
of Nations. In 1960, an international commission of metrologists established the
krypton-86 spectral line definition of the
metre, and in 1983 further exactitude was
secured through its redefinition as the distance travelled by light in a precise span of
time. The physical standard, at that moment,
‘became a historic object; the new standard
was universal, everywhere, not localised’.
I
n 1887, an American scientist, William
Harkness, thrilled to the prospect that
the world would soon have natural
metrological standards, reproducible not
just in the absence of the usual artifacts but
even on distant worlds after the Earth itself
had fallen into the Sun and been vaporised. The science of the 17th and 18th
centuries could not do that, but today we
can, since modern metrologists can derive
natural standards by connecting their units
‘with the ultimate atoms which constitute
the universe itself ’. No one would now have
to go to Paris to check out a metal bar; by
the middle of the 20th century ‘any country
could realise the metre, provided it had the
technology.’ All that’s needed to achieve
this reproduction are a few simple scientific
instruments – a pretty good diffraction grating, a goniometer (to measure angles), and
the appropriate spectroscopic apparatus.
That is to say, you just need a well-equipped
physics laboratory, staffed by physicists rigorously trained in similarly equipped laboratories, and having access to the supervisory and regulatory bureaucracies which
would vouch for and enforce the standards
thus reproduced. Natural and universal
standards are, in this way, locally dependent on a very particular material and organisational culture. To reproduce natural
standards you just have to re-create a big
chunk of modern human culture. The standards have not escaped history; they are
rather markers of where history now is.
Attaining these standards was a heroic
cultural achievement. What has to be celebrated, however – if celebration is intended –
are not just heroic metrologists but much of
the fabric of the modern political and commercial order. In a coda addressing what he
calls the ‘dark sides of the metroscape’,
Crease reflects on the social distribution of
modern metrics. While in the past ‘metrological matters were never really in the hands
10 london review of books 30 august 2012
of the average citizen,’ he says, ‘comprehension generally was.’ Modern metrological units, he writes, are easy to apply, while
understanding their bases has become ‘too
complex for all but scientists to grasp’.
No reason for nostalgia. We used to live in
a world, it’s said, that had different measures, but we still do. It’s not just that planes
continue to fly around the world at 30,000
feet rather than 9,144 metres (except in
China, Mongolia, North Korea, Russia and
a few of the former Soviet republics) and
that Americans haven’t a clue how hot it is
when it’s 31ºC or how heavy people are
when they weigh 12 stones – a unit which a
table in Crease’s book equates to 14 ounces.
It’s also that we continue to use all sorts of
traditional and locally varying measures for
all sorts of everyday purposes. Horses continue to be hands high. A dozen bagels on
the Upper West Side of Manhattan counts
out at 13. I make risotto by filling up a
certain saucepan with stock; I have no idea
how much stock that is, but it works well
and I’ve screwed up when cooking risotto
in someone else’s kitchen. When I go to buy
a small rug, I pace out its dimensions with
my feet and only if the result is ambiguous
do I go get a tape measure.
The 19th and 20th-century drive to precision and to homogeneity of all sorts of
standards – quantitative and qualitative –
was powered by a range of practices that deliver us the goods and services we want and
whose ability to do so depends on effective
action over very long distances and exquisitely precise co-ordination of things and
people. The origins of the present-day International Organisation for Standardisation –
former president Oliver R. Smoot – trace
back to late 19th-century concern among
engineers over the specifications of nuts
and bolts. Telegraphic communication went
better with internationally agreed standards of electrical resistance; the railroads
called for national and international standards of time; manufacture of goods through
interchangeable parts depended on metrical
standards for precision engineering; burgeoning road traffic generated demands for
national, and later international, standard
signage; and that curiously placeless place,
the modern airport, was one of the sites in
which we learned how to interpret those
odd icons guiding us to the appropriately
gendered toilet.
During the 1914-18 war, the Fabian socialist Leonard Woolf spoke in praise of the
largely voluntary international organisations
that had given the world standards of
length, weight, colour, electrical resistance
and agricultural produce; he celebrated an
‘international commission for unifying the
nomenclature of apples’, and he looked
forward to a bright future in which ‘even
our chickens will be internationalised.’ The
worlds of science and commerce had shown
the way to a harmonious international order
in which voluntarily arrived at standards
would embody reason, enhance productivity, eliminate confusing and unfair local
customs, ensure peace and co-operation,
and be guided by the wise counsel of technical expertise. A pattern of rational international governance had been established;
modern metrology virtuously modelled
modern political order; and the world had
c
finally been made to measure.
S
tephen Spender was a visitor to
the city of Hamburg both before the
war and after, when he played a part
in the work of occupation and recovery. He
was well on his way to being the noted excommunist poet, whose lyricism of the left
spoke up in praise of pylons and the landing aeroplane, gliding over the suburbs,
‘more beautiful and soft than any moth’. It
was in shattered Hamburg that I reviewed,
in the uniform of a soldier and in a studio
of the British Forces Network, his autobiography of 1951, World within World. The
British Army of the Rhine was told of my
enthusiasm for it. I practically stood to attention at the microphone.
I went off to Cambridge, to study with
F.R. Leavis, who let few days pass without
enlarging on the badness of Stephen Spender. After prolonged exposure to the stir of
anti-Spender sentiment in more general circulation, I came to like him, in absentia, as
did the many others, I imagine, who stayed
with the intriguing literary eminence kindly characterised, eventually, in John Sutherland’s biography.* Nevertheless, a suspicion
persisted. Sharp little verses – by Thom Gunn
and John Coleman – were flighted; and Ian
Hamilton capped it all with a brilliant and
damaging New Yorker profile. Stephen grew
used to being abused. He abused himself.
He could seem generous and long-suffering,
but could hardly be blamed for resenting
a few of the more vocal of the new generation of critics, as figures of speech attest.
In 1980, he was interviewed by Hamilton:
‘hatchet-faced, looking as though cast for
the role of Third Murderer in a performance
of Macbeth’. When I went to see him in hospital at this point, I stepped forward as a
Fourth Murderer: ‘wearing a great coat with
leather lapels, which made him look like a
rather gloomy hussar of some Death Watch
Regiment’.
I went to see him because I was becoming a friend of his and of his wife Natasha.
He and I taught together at University College London in the 1970s. These personal
allusions may savour of the excessive. Let
me plead that they serve as an introduction
to the uncertainties and inconsistencies of
his experience of life, to his changing fortunes, contrasting reputations, to the human
interest and eccentric charm of Stephen.
Of the Stephen who would worry whether
artists could be saints. Those who have
seen a saint in him, as in Eliot, might
draw the line at most of the artists featured in his diaries. He counted himself the
luckiest of his writer companions, happy in
his personal life, ‘made up by Natasha,
Matthew, Lizzie – by all of these’. This
might sound faintly protesting. It also
sounds like the persuasive voice of a family
member.
This new edition of his diaries, 1939 to
1995, has abundant evidence of his conflicting qualities, and is enough to suggest that
diaries are his forte, or best vein. Various selections from them have already been published, and he himself did the choosing of
extracts for the edition of 1985: the stress
* Stephen Spender: The Authorised Biography was reviewed by Stefan Collini in the LRB of 22 July
2004.
† Journals 1939-83 were reviewed by Frank Kermode in the LRB of 5 December 1985.
Perhaps the most welcome entry in the
book is the celebrated riff about being cheered for breaking wind in the street (after hours
of Wagner): ‘Then a self-important thought
came in my mind. Supposing that they knew
this old man walking along Long Acre and
farting was Stephen Spender – what would
they think?’ Leavis, he reckoned, would not
have been amused. This is not the utterance
of the goose or juggins seen in him, on
this as on other occasions, by certain of
his peers. They are missing the point of
its self-parody, and the thought that such
thoughts are distinctively human. He is also
making a joke.
In the field of literary judgment, Spender
can now and then outdo Auden, whose critical or speculative prose is, to my mind, one
of the false lights of the postwar period.
He cared for MacNeice, whose comparative
neglect is another false light, while not
responding to Day Lewis. When the time
came, he saw the point of Ted Hughes and
Thom Gunn, for all the latter’s youthful
scorn. Seamus Heaney he describes as ‘a man
of immense good will’ who ‘wrote poems
which are models of what we might call
the late Georgian Yeatsian Irish peasant’.
Here is the sentence of a poet who felt
himself to be a modernist and who on another occasion wrote about workers on the
land:
On the Feast of Stephen
Karl Miller
New Selected Journals, 1939-95
by Stephen Spender, edited by Lara Feigel and John Sutherland.
Faber, 792 pp., £45, July, 978 0 571 23757 9
lay on talk about poets and poetry, while the
stress here is on his personal life.† He hated
the fact that he had made his wife unhappy,
‘due to my being what I am’. He is referring
to passionate friendships with men – with
the novelist Reynolds Price and with Bryan
Obst, a zoologist who died of Aids in 1991,
and was buried to the sound of birdsong.
Stephen’s putative conversion to heterosexuality is treated here as a happy, if also unhappy myth. His accounts of intermittent
meetings with Obst are well judged and moving. The editors were right to include them.
Natasha, who died just before the book appeared, did not want this.
The edition goes, then, for the personal
and anecdotal, and this, too, seems in general the right choice. The editors have followed the early versions of the text, and
have kept his idiosyncrasies of spelling and
punctuation. This is not without its snags.
Whose mistakes are we witnessing? ‘Inaninity’? Did being in the same room as
Lukács give a feeling ‘almost of exultation’,
or exaltation? ‘A bit disinterested but very
friendly’? Did Leavis’s father sell prams, as
he heard from a sore I.A. Richards? We always thought it was pianos.
Leavis would say that Spender’s writings
gave him the sense of a physical struggle
to get the words on the page. The same
has been said of Leavis and of many others.
But Stephen described the struggle. ‘Words
seem to break in my mind like sticks when
I put them down on paper. I cannot see
how to spell some of them.’ And yet he
managed nearly a million words of diary,
a quarter of which were chosen for this
edition.
The feast of Stephen isn’t always deep
and crisp and even; it has its slips and pitfalls. But these diaries are distinctly a feast,
one which owes much to the stories, told of
Spender, by Spender and by others. Take
the satirical extravaganza which commemorates a luncheon (the book is packed with
luncheons) in honour of a departing John
Lehmann. ‘With infinite gravity’, Eliot said
that he shared three occupations – or should
he say professions? – with John Lehmann: as
poet, businessman and publisher. He was
quite sure that, whatever had happened – and
he didn’t have any air of knowing in particular
what had happened – that John would carry
on with one of these.
don’t you think?’ Elsewhere again, we learn
that Auden may have envied him his large
penis. ‘Did I really like Wystan?’ he was capable of asking himself, in the course of
absorbing evocations of his ‘witch-doctor’
alter ego, in Ian Hamilton’s designation.
Auden and Connolly are targets for the hardest knocks in the book.
The stories come in various sizes. Virginia Woolf called Isaiah Berlin a ‘violent
Jew’ (I throw in a further story here, to the
effect that at his funeral or synagogue memorial service an earwitness friend of mine
heard two old Oxford panjandrums agree
that the service had gone well – ‘but what
was all that Jewish stuff about?’). Then
again, there is the lecture at which a student
is vexed to find that the speaker will not be
Edmund Spenser. In 1975 he writes: ‘One
day I had a slight “affair” with Dick which
was compounded of passion and lust on
both sides, and was not in the least serious.’
This paid-on-both-sides short story has been
supplemented by hearsay, which has a benighted Stephen struggling across a dark
moor, spying a light in a cottage window
and being greeted at the door by none other
than Dick Crossman.
The passage comes close to calling the grave
Eliot banal. Cyril Connolly elsewhere invites
Stephen to ‘look at me in my bath. Hot stuff,
Knowing and not knowing your way is a
concern of the diaries. It was said of Spender that he never seemed to know where
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John ‘then got up and was more banal than
his introducers’. As an editor, he was
haunted by titles, stories and poems, which
came flooding in on him, haunted by ideas for
articles and poems suggested to him. He also
had to send out a great many rejection slips,
by the consciousness of which he was haunted also. (We all shuddered. Cyril putting on
an expression as though he were stuffed with
John’s rejection slips.)
The peasant relapses to a stumbling tune
Following the donkey’s bray.
Paper 978-0-8101-5226-7 $16.95 / £15.
“A vividlyy wriitten, avidly researched
biography” —Washington Post
American
merican Radical
The Liffe and Times of I. F. Stone
D. D. Guttenplan
Paper 978-0-8101-2831-6 $21.95 / £19.95
Northwestern
Nor
thwestern University Press
In the
In
the U.S.:
U.S.:
. www.nupress.northwestern.edu
www.n
. upress.northwestern.edu
IIn
n Europe:
Europe: w
ww..eurospanbookstore.com
www.eurospanbookstore.com
11 london review of books 30 august 2012
he was going but always seemed to know,
that cunning goose, the shortest way to get
there. Meanwhile his son was credited with
a like skill by his father: ‘Matthew always
seems not to know his way and then surprises you by knowing it.’ The father came
to feel that he had lost his way, and his
confidence, as a writer, and may perhaps
have lost his taste for writing verse, for the
struggle of the modern.
As far back as 1950 Stephen had told his
diary: ‘Accompanying everything I do there
is a voice which says: “You are wrong.”’
In time, he could think of only a handful
of poems of his that would be remembered. He had failed. He had even failed to
fail.
I blame myself not so much for failure – but
for not having pressed ideas of work original
work to the point of proof where they either
failed or succeeded. What I blame myself for
in a sense is that I didn’t have enough failures – but that I so often put aside the things I
most deeply wanted to do – the things that
were my own thing from inside myself – and
did things which were proposed from the
outside.
The book is brave in causing you to feel
that these really were his misgivings, and
it was brave of him to state them and to face
them.
He can’t have been helped by belonging
to a Vanity Fair (the name spoke to him via a
title of the time) with quite so many cruel
and spiteful people, to offset some excellent friends. The word was that other people were boring or vulgar. Virginia Woolf
threatened that he might one day be boring.
Stephen felt that it should be considered
an honour to be insulted by the truly great:
‘That’s the line we have to take,’ replied
Isaiah Berlin.
At the zenith of vulgarity-detection is
Diana Duff-Cooper, who disdained ‘that common word “common”’ (a postwar upper-class
catchphrase), and for whom the scientist
Julian Huxley was vulgar. At a certain party
punishment was meted out by Evelyn Waugh.
‘I adored Evelyn but he had a very unkind
side to him. He would keep on tormenting
Julian Huxley. Though he was perfectly
aware he was head of Unesco, he insisted
on treating him as though he were still
head of the zoo. “How are the giraffes?”
he kept on asking.’
Two of the worst observations cited in
the diaries relate to foreign writers, come to
Britain. ‘Too bad that Mr Brodsky is trying to push into the scene,’ meaning the
refugee poet and the London literary scene,
where, in another part of the wood, Auden
took pleasure in telling Robert Lowell, with
his history of mental illness: ‘Gentlemen
don’t go mad.’ This is the scene which
was and may still be regarded as the postBloomsbury stronghold of the national
literature.
There’s an affinity between the candour
and humour of Spender’s journals and those
of the pioneer diarist, egotist and owner-up,
Boswell, a performer, an actor, who, with
some degree of paradox, wanted everyone
to know what he was. Spender’s episode of
the famous fart is completely Boswellian.
Boswell was frequently taken with a pinch
of salt, as Stephen said of himself, and
his writings were often slighted. His journals, unknown till fairly recently, would
no doubt have been slighted too, had they
been accessible earlier: they are his masterpiece. Both men were hero-worshippers who
sought fathers in the great, with Auden a
less considerate and no less acerbic parent
than Johnson.
Lara Feigel’s introduction deals well with
Stephen Spender’s troubles and struggles,
which it would be harsh to make light of
– with what became of his art and with
what became of his heart, as it grew old.
He took to worrying, she relates, not about
posterity any more, but about what his
death would mean for his wife and children.
It takes confidence to try to grasp, as he
appears to have done in his last years, what
had gone wrong with his life, and right
c
with it.
Two Poems by Bill Manhire
Old Man Puzzled by His New Pyjamas
I am the baby who sleeps in the drawer.
Blue yesterday, and blue before –
and suddenly all these stripes.
The Question Poem
Was there a city here?
We were sitting with friends. It was a sunny day.
We were boasting about the local coffee.
Strange self-congratulations, flat whites.
These were friends we had only recently
found our way back to. For a long time
we were far apart.
Did you all survive?
On that first day of school, I mostly remember
being terrified: the dark interior, the children in rows
at their separate desks, and I was now to be one of them.
In a field by the school, there were bales of hay.
I remember inkwells.
That was perhaps a harder day.
Did you hear the bells ringing?
I keep trying to remember.
Somehow I learned to write my way round things.
The teacher made circles on the blackboard
and none of us said a word. Rubble,
then revelation: inside, we were stumbling.
And at the end of the day we all went home.
Did you all survive?
We will never sit in such places again.
A father chasing his small daughter,
both of them laughing.
The girl, a toddler, was calling out, No, no, Matilda!
Perhaps she knew the song from somewhere
but I think that must have been her name.
12 london review of books 30 august 2012