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 volume 34 number 16 30 august 2012 £3.50 us and canada $4.95

3 David Trotter Lady Chatterley’s Sneakers editor: Mary-Kay Wilmers deputy editor: Jean McNicol senior editors: Christian Lorentzen, 4 Letters Karuna Mantena, Rosinka Chaudhuri, Amit Pandya, Ananya Vajpeyi, Paul Myerscough, Daniel Soar assistant editors: Andrew Whitehead, Miles Larmer, Marina Warner, A.E.J. Fitchett, Joanna Biggs, Deborah Friedell Stan Persky editorial assistant: Nick Richardson editorial intern: Alice Spawls contributing editors: Jenny Diski, 8 Steven Shapin World in the Balance: The Historic Quest for an Absolute System of Measurement Jeremy Harding, Rosemary Hill, Thomas Jones, by Robert Crease John Lanchester, James Meek, Andrew O’Hagan, Adam Shatz, Christopher Tayler, Colm Tóibín consulting editor: John Sturrock 11 Karl Miller New Selected Journals, 1939-95 by Stephen Spender, edited by Lara Feigel and publisher: Nicholas Spice John Sutherland associate publishers: Margot Broderick, Helen Jeffrey advertising director: Tim Johnson 12 Bill Manhire Poems: ‘Old Man Puzzled by His New Pyjamas’, ‘The Question Poem’ advertising executive: Siddhartha Lokanandi advertising manager: Kate Parkinson classifieds executive: Natasha Chahal 13 Stefan Collini The Letters of T.S. Eliot, Vol. III: 1926-27 edited by Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden circulation manager: Suzanne O’Brien subscriptions manager: Chris Larkin subscriptions executive: Eleanor Crane 17 Bruce Whitehouse What went wrong in Mali? subscriptions assistants: Michael Coates, Karen Horan, Zuzana Minarikova 18 John Burnside Poems: ‘A Frost Fair’, ‘The Wisdom of Insecurity’, ‘First Footnote on marketing manager: Renée Doegar uk marketing manager: Jill Tytherleigh Zoomorphism’ office managers: Andy Georgiou, Anikó Dobos rights: Vanessa Coode finance manager: Taj Singh 19 Stephen Sedley Living Originalism by Jack Balkin finance: Marija Radonji´c, David Ridge cover: Beth Holgate 21 A.W. Moore Writing the Book of the World by Theodore Sider typesetting: Sue Barrett, Brenda Morris, Anna Swan paste-up: Bryony Dalefield 23 Julian Bell At Tate Modern production: Ben Campbell web: Rachael Beale, Jeremy Harris 25 David Conn Football and Money editorial board: Linda Colley, Michael Neve, Steven Shapin, Inigo Thomas, Jenny Turner, James Wood, Michael Wood 26 David Bromwich Short Cuts address: 28 Little Russell Street, London wc1a 2hn, UK 28 Frederick Seidel Poem: ‘The Lovely Redhead’ editorial telephone: +44 (0)20 7209 1101 editorial fax: +44 (0)20 7209 1102 editorial email: [email protected] 29 Lidija Haas Georgette Heyer by Jennifer Kloester website: www.lrb.co.uk advertising telephone: 718 797 3130 31 Sheila Heti Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner advertising fax: 718 797 3156 advertising email: [email protected] classified email: [email protected] 33 Benjamin Lytal Seven Years by Peter Stamm, translated by Michael Hofmann subscriptions (toll free): 1 800 258 2066 subscriptions fax: 386 447 6460 subscriptions email: [email protected] 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 In the next issue: James Meek writes about 38 Iain Sinclair Diary Britain’s electricity.

Julian Bell is a painter and the author of Lidija Haas is between contributor’s notes. A.W. Moore is professor of philosophy at Iain Sinclair’s latest book is Ghost Milk. Mirror of the World: A New History of Art. Oxford. The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Sheila Heti’s novel How Should a Person Be? Making Sense of Things appeared earlier this David Trotter is the King Edward VII Pro- David Bromwich is co-editor of the Yale will be published by Harvill in January. year. fessor of English Litera ture at Cam bridge. edition of On Liberty. Next year Harvard will publish Literature in Benjamin Lytal teaches at the University of Stephen Sedley, a former Lord Justice of the First Media Age. John Burnside’s Black Cat Bone won the For - Chicago Graham School. His forthcoming Appeal, is currently a visiting professor at ward Prize and the T.S. Eliot Prize last year. first novel is called A Map of Tulsa. Oxford. Bruce Whitehouse teaches anthropology and global studies at Lehigh University in Stefan Collini teaches at Cam bridge. What Bill Manhire’s Selected Poems will be pub- Frederick Seidel’s new book of poems, Nice Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. He recently con - Are Universities For? came out earlier this year. lished next month. Weather, will be out in September. cluded ten months of field research in Mali. David Conn writes for the Guardian. Richer Karl Miller was the Lord Northcliffe Pro - Steven Shapin teaches at Harvard. Never than God, his history of Manchester City, is fessor of Modern English at UCL and the Pure, a collection of essays on the history of Emily Witt lives in New York. She is work- out now. founding editor of the LRB. science, is out in paperback. ing on a book about female sexuality.

LRB annual subscription rates: UK (post free): £76.80; Europe and Rest of the World (including postage): £98.40; USA (post free): $42; Canada (including postage): US$50. Canada Post, Canadian GST #R125261792. US Postmaster: send address changes to ‘London Review of Books’, PO Box 433060, Palm Coast, FL 32143-9978, USA. Periodicals postage paid at Miami, FL and additional mailing offices. ISSN 0260-9592, Vol. 34, No. 16 (US No. 747). The LRB is published semi-monthly (24 times a year). The journal is distributed in North America by ProCirc, 3191 Coral Way, Suite 510, Miami, FL 33145. 2 london review of books 30 august 2012 n a letter written in July 1926, a Various genealogies of cool have been pro- couple of months before he embarked on Lady Chatterley’s Sneakers posed, ever more speculative in tendency as Ithe first version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, they reach back into the 19th century and D.H. Lawrence gave voice – as he often did – beyond. It’s not altogether impossible that to the hatred he felt for ‘our most modern David Trotter one or other of them may have crossed his world’. Tin cans and ‘imitation tea’ feature path. In The Virgin and the Gypsy, in some re- prominently on his list of things not to like Platinum, india-rubber, celluloid: all have unlikely to flourish either in the big house spects a dry run for Lady Chatterley’s Lover, about being ‘most modern’. Tin cans often been dissolved in metaphor. or in the gamekeeper’s cottage. virgin and gypsy demonstrate their mutual featured on such lists, either as litter or as Embarking on the short journey from all- It seems to me that Lawrence, whose affinity by displays of coolness. His has to do culinary short cut, in both cases signifying mod cons Wragby Hall to the ancient forest temperament and prose style might be with the way he moves (he’s a proto-rapper), degeneracy: ‘modern world’ was then and which contains the gamekeeper’s hut and thought to tend perpetually to the condition hers with the ‘nonchalance’ she exhibits still remains an expression that summons cottage, Connie gets ready to swap celluloid of molten lava, was in fact, when the mood from the moment of her first encounter up a familiar tableau of emblems. But imit- and radio sets for forget-me-nots woven took him, an advocate of cool. In Cool Rules: with him. ‘Nonchalance’ was the contemp- ation tea is a nice touch, because it recovers into pubic hair: signs made in anger for Anatomy of an Attitude, Dick Pountain and orary translation of sprezzatura, the doctrine the starkness of the contrast between the signs made in tenderness. Something sim- David Robins define cool as a ‘new secular of the well-rehearsed concealment of effort organic and the inorganic which knowing ilar happens to Bowling in Coming Up for virtue’ – the official language of a private first put forward by Baldassare Castiglione that you’re most modern always involves. Air, when he revisits the market town in or subcultural rebelliousness retuned from in his Book of the Courtier. She has, we later Lawrence couldn’t help describing what he which he grew up. The danger in all such generation to generation, as well as of learn, ‘that peculiar calm, virgin contempt of meant to hate before he dissolved it in alleg- exchanges is that the second performance worldwide commodity fetishism. According the free-born for the base-born’. This class- ory. Like the other iconic banned books of will simply cancel out the first, without to Alan Liu, in The Laws of Cool, it’s a ‘way or based understanding of nonchalance was, the period between the world wars – Ulysses, either transforming it in the process or cut- manner of living’ in a world structured by however, already out of date. In revising The Well of Loneliness – Lady Chatterley’s Lover ting loose from it altogether. The result is technological and other systems. Cool ex- Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Lawrence removed has long since ceased to be notorious. Un- stalemate. In an essay on John Galsworthy’s ploits the element of ‘give’ or ‘slack’ in any from it the last traces of the propaganda for like them, it has not yet acquired a different Forsyte Saga written while he was complet- such system. It is information designed to a new aristocracy which had driven his writ- kind of fame. But what it does best, better ing the second version of Lady Chatterley’s resist information: ‘information fed back ing in the years after the end of the First than any other novel of its time, better than Lover, Lawrence argued that ‘the thing a into its own signal to create a standing inter - World War. Connie’s rebellion will be priv- most published since, is to describe the man has a vast grudge against is the man’s ference pattern, a paradox pattern’. Cool ate, apolitical, consumerist. Mellors, like the modern world as it was, and in some meas- determinant’. Something similar seems to doesn’t want to have to choose between the gypsy, moves well. But, as an ex-blacksmith ure still is. be true of Mellors. competing demands of technique and tech- and horse whisperer turned game warden, In George Orwell’s Coming Up for Air, Connie is a different matter. In Sept- nology, free will and necessity. It’s a serious he’s an anachronistic figure: an exponent published in 1939, the dyspeptic hero, ember 1927, shortly before he began the business. According to Pountain and Robins, and advocate of artisanal technique as an George Bowling, finds himself at one point novel’s third and final version, Lawrence cool provides the ‘psychological structure’ alternative to technology. It’s Connie who, in a fast-food outlet sawing away with his finished translating a collection of short by means of which the ‘longest-standing for better or worse, speaks most directly to ancient false teeth at the rubbery skin of a fiction by Giovanni Verga which was to ap- contradiction in Western societies’ – be- the 21st century. frankfurter. Suddenly the skin bursts, fill- pear as ‘Cavalleria Rusticana’ and Other Stories. tween the need to work and the desire for Lady Chatterley’s Lover is generally regard- ing his mouth with ‘horrible soft stuff’ In his preface, he made the case for a ‘form- play – may yet be resolved. ed as a primitivist text, the ancient woods in which tastes a lot like fish. This rancid lessness’ in fiction which would more fully These, evidently, are definitions for the which Connie and Mellors achieve consum- mouthful unleashes a memorable tirade capture what happens in the transition 21st century. But Lawrence’s novel may be mation representing a world not merely against the ersatz in all its forms: from one deed or mood to another. ‘A great thought in some ways to prefigure them. pre-industrial, but primeval. Lawrence’s deal of the meaning of life and of art lies It gave me the feeling that I’d bitten into the in the apparently dull spaces, the pauses, modern world and discovered what it was the unimportant passages.’ The dull space really made of. That’s the way we’re going Dostoevsky Lawrence created in Lady Chatterley’s Lover nowadays. Everything slick and streamlined, A Writer in His Time everything made out of something else. Cel- is found in Connie’s movement between luloid, rubber, chromium-steel everywhere, Wragby Hall and the gamekeeper’s hut and Joseph Frank arc-lamps blazing all night, glass roofs over cottage. In that space, description flourishes. Edited by Mary Petrusewicz your head, radios all playing the same tune, The most important change of emphasis, With a new preface by the author no vegetation left, everything cemented over, as Lawrence revised the novel heavily on “No one could produce a better one-volume mock-turtles grazing under the neutral fruit- two separate occasions, concerns Connie’s biography of Dostoevsky than the author of a trees. But when you come down to brass tacks emergence in these passages as a particular much-acclaimed five-volume biography. . . . A and get your teeth into something solid, a kind of modern woman. masterful abridgement.” sausage for instance, that’s what you get. —Bryce Christensen, Booklist (Starred Review) Rotten fish in a rubber skin. Bombs of filth It’s her understanding of the things she bursting inside your mouth. takes with her when she leaves for the for - “[T]he essential one-volume commentary on the est which bids fair to protect her not only intellectual dynamics and artistry of this great Tin cans are missing from this list, but against emblematically celluloid Sir Clif - novelist’s impassioned, idea-driven fiction.” even without them the allegory alert sounds ford, but also against emblematically supple —Michael Dirda, Wall Street Journal immediately. By the time the mock turtles and rooted Mellors: a pair of rubber-soled Paper $24.95 £16.95 978-0-691-15599-9 have started to graze under the neutral fruit tennis shoes, a lightweight mackintosh, a trees, like refugees from a poem by Wallace bottle of perfume by Coty. There is of course Stevens, there’s no contrast left between the a narrative reason for her to avail herself at Birdscapes organic and the inorganic. Even the some- such a time of these particular accessories: Birds in Our Imagination and Experience thing else has been made out of something truants need shoes that don’t squeak; an Jeremy Mynott else. overcoat keeps off the chill night air; per- “The finest book ever written about why we watch Orwell’s hero is a lot funnier than the fume can mask as well as entice. But the ac- birds. . . . Mynott’s lightness of touch, combined most famous gamekeeper in English liter- cessories acquire a further salience because with his depth of knowledge, experience and above ature, but his jeremiad descends directly the journeys undertaken involve a com plex all perception, create a thought-provoking and from Oliver Mellors’s explanation of why negotiation between the self-consciously compulsively readable book.” Constance Chatterley is the woman for contemporary and the self-consciously —Stephen Moss, Guardian him. The great thing about her, he says, is archaic. The condition of that salience is “With this marvelous look at what birds mean to the that she isn’t ‘all tough rubber-goods-and- rhetorical rather than narrative. On each human imagination, lifelong twitcher Mynott offers platinum, like the modern girl’. She has a occasion, a Bowling-esque rant against the a birdwatching memoir which takes graceful swoops tenderness which has ‘gone out’ of the ‘cel- modern world’s artificiality provides a con- around art, philosophy, and science.” luloid women of today’. Before long, Con- text for the description of these products —Benjamin Evans, Sunday Telegraph nie will describe Sir Clifford and his set as of modern artifice. The emphasis thus laid Paper $19.95 £13.95 978-0-691-15428-2 celluloid nonentities, unappealingly tough lightly on them creates the possibility of a and ‘india-rubbery’ in appearance and man - story different not only from what has gone See our E-Books at ner. Connie and Mellors are fully united by before, but also, we begin to suspect, from press.princeton.edu hatred before they are fully united in sex. what is to come. It gives shape to an attitude 3 london review of books 30 august 2012 of wealth that 19th-century liberals feared they found good and liked best’, remained conferred on them. Their break with Letters and socialists hoped for? the predominant national attitude to West - Indira’s government had everything to do In his detached historical judgments ern thought throughout the following with economic interests and policy. The Gandhi and After Anderson offers a style of political critic- century. Later, Tagore, Nehru and Gandhi ‘wealthy farmers’ were a broad group in- Perry Anderson believes that to attribute ism he wishes Indian intellectuals would all endorsed that point of view when they cluding the moderately well-to-do, and political acumen or historical agency to emulate, ridding themselves of romantic spoke of the beneficial effects of inflecting were practising capitalist farmers rather Gandhi (for the mass mobilisations that intoxications and deference to Hindu soc- Indian philosophies with Western science. than feudal elites or latifundists. They in- led to decolonisation) or Nehru (for shap- ial norms. His concluding hope and re - The hybrid national life that was a mod- cluded groups enriched and empowered ing and stabilising post-independence commendation is that the rough and ernising force in colonial India was not as a result of agrarian and fiscal policies democracy) is to play into the ‘Indian ideo - tumble of Indian politics be corrected and gifted to the Indians by the Raj alongside after independence. logy’, a fantasy that runs from the early purified by the exit of Congress and the re- ‘locomotives and law books’, but wrested Anderson’s discussion of the pernic- days of Indian nationalism right down to moval of ‘caste consciousness’ and ‘Hindu from it by different classes of Indian for ious role of caste in the Indian polity de- Manmohan Singh (LRB, 5 July, 19 July and 2 superstitions’ (which may, on his account, their own purposes and profit. serves credit. But to suggest of Nehru’s August). But Indian assessments of Nehru amount to the same thing). On both counts But perhaps Anderson’s evocation of Mac- Congress party that ‘at the summit of this and Gandhi have ebbed and flowed, argu- – but especially in the dream of a secular aulay is appropriate in an article that dis- hierarchy, and at the controls of the state ably reaching a critical low in the 1980s, politics free of irrational and prideful de- misses a swathe of contemporary Indian machine, were Brahmins’ is incorrect, as in the wake of the Emergency and wide- sires – political fantasy is offered in the intellectuals – Meghnad Desai, Ramachandra the figure of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel (cited spread disillusionment with Congress pol- language of cool realism. To Weber this Guha, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Amartya Sen, often by Anderson) and the presence of itics. Gandhi himself has always been a would look very much like an ethics of Sunil Khilnani – while also failing to en- other Vaisyas, Kshatriyas and even Mus- polarising figure: the hagiography is met conviction where the purest radicalism is gage with the full spectrum of Indian intel- lims in the senior leadership of party and with an equally insistent counter-narrative prized over political truth. lectual history. While I’m sympathetic to government demonstrate. An Uncle Tom that purports to unmask Gandhi as a polit- Karuna Mantena his irritation that these writers ‘fall over the Dalit Jagjivan Ram may have been, but ical manipulator and/or a religious crank. Yale University themselves in tributes to their native land’, he proved one of the most powerful polit - In India today, under the veneer of official New Haven, Connecticut I wonder that he couldn’t find a few Indian icians of his era. reverence, the public attitude to Gandhi scholars in more oppositional mode; or is Anderson misses something vital about is one of rebuke and disavowal, from the Why does Perry Anderson, in ‘Gandhi Centre he saying there are none? In their place, he contemporary caste politics. Whatever the Hindu right, on one side, and Dalits, on Stage’, rehearse in such detail what we’ve finds only Kathryn Tidrick to praise, re- distractions and dysfunctions of symbolic the other. The current reassessment of heard about India so many times before? minding us of that other infamous Mac- identity politics, and whatever the weak- nationalist-era leaders and thinkers – the I will take just one example, his use of Mac- aulay quote, that ‘a single shelf of a good nesses of a fractured polity, the big story of rehabilitation of Nehru especially – is not, aulay’s minute of 1835. ‘The modernising European library was worth the whole nat - modern India is that the newly empower- as Anderson argues, simply the latest epi- force of the Raj,’ Anderson writes, ive literature of India and Arabia.’ One can ed political forces Anderson describes are sode in an unbroken tradition of blind only ask, after Said’s epigraph to Oriental- the result of social, economic, occupational was not limited to its locomotives and law self-congratulation and collective egoism. books. It was official policy to produce a nat - ism, taken from Marx, if we must continue and educational empowerment of histor - Rather, it is an effort at an intimate critic- ive elite educated to metropolitan standards, to be represented because we cannot re- ically disadvantaged castes by state act ions ism of India’s democratic experience – one or as Macaulay famously put it, ‘a class of present ourselves. and policies. The alliances of con venience that seeks to understand the specificity of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but Eng- Rosinka Chaudhuri between castes with disparate interests, that experience, its contradictions, failures lish in taste, in opinions, in morals and in Centre for Studies in Social Sciences which Anderson finds distaste ful, could and future trajectory. intellect’ . . . Two generations later, a layer of Calcutta just as well be seen as a sign of politic- articulate professionals – lawyers, journal- Instead of engaging directly with these ists, doctors and the like – had emerged, the al maturity. They are little different from analyses of the intellectual and institut- seedbed of Congress nationalism. Perry Anderson understates the extent of the interest group politics, coalitions and ional foundations of Indian democracy, collective leadership and mass politics in policy-making found in most democratic Anderson opts for a ‘cosmopolitan’ broad- Teleological and developmentalist, this Congress under Nehru and ignores the societies. side against nationalism as such, in which classically colonial interpretation is a political pluralism within the party at the Finally, Anderson’s outrage at the Indian modern Indian politics appears hopelessly gross misrepresentation of events on the time of Nehru’s supposed passing of the state leads him to a puzzling indulgence of atavistic, parochial and saturated in Hindu ground. Long before it was ‘official policy mantle to his daughter. He suggests a seam- Indian fascism. He downplays the fascist superstition. The most startling of his sim- to produce a native elite educated to metro- less succession and elite consensus, where - potential of the RSS on the grounds that plifications is his obsessive return to latent politan standards’, Indians had for their as the process was protracted and messy, and there is no ‘subcontinental equivalent of the ‘Hinduism’ and ‘caste’ as the explanation own reasons been demanding of reluctant the outcome uncertain. The Congress leader- interwar scene in Europe’: a strange basis for the limits of Indian politics and pol - British officials an English education. Brit- ship, the old guard known as the Syndicate, on which to judge. But most egregiously he itical imagination. Plenty might be said ish government policies at the start of the understood Indian politics as a collect- downplays the significance of the Gujarat about the Orientalism of his description of 19th century were tilted in favour of the ive effort and their own role as a shared pogrom – massacres, rapes, dismember- Hinduism and the ‘iron’ laws of caste. But classical languages of India and against endeavour, while acknowledging Nehru ment and displacements sanct ioned at the most egregious is his wish to reduce the the study of English. Gauri Vishwanathan, as primus inter pares. In the years after highest levels of state leadership, directed deep dilemmas of modern representative in Masks of Conquest, showed how, in 1816, Nehru’s death, the Syndicate did not under - by state politicians and offic ials, and car- democracy to religious belief and sect- in an attempt to change those policies, Ram - stand Indira Gandhi’s appointment to the ried out or permitted by state officials and arianism. The struggles over majority and mohun Roy and other eminent Ind ians ap- party leadership as anointing her as lead- police. He argues that these were no worse minority representation before and after proached the chief justice of the Supreme er of the country. They persisted in the than other massacres that had occurred in partition are genuine conflicts about the Court, Sir Edward Hyde East, to tell him illusion that they could control her, and the past. But they were. When such atroc - meaning and practice of democracy, and of their desire to form, as the judge record- fought hard to preserve their collect ive ities come out of the blue in peacetime, have very little to do with arguments about ed, ‘an establishment for the education of power in the party. Her struggle for dom- they carry a distinct significance and are religious worship, belief or authority. Con- their children in a liberal manner as prac- inance against the Syndicate was based peculiarly threatening to their victims. gress can and ought to be taken to task for tised by Europeans of condition’. Further: almost entirely on a forceful appeal to the Amit Pandya neither understanding nor taking serious- When they were told that the government aspirations of India’s poor and marginal- Silver Spring, Maryland ly Muslim anxieties about Hindu political was advised to suspend any declaration in ised to economic and social inclusion. dominance. But why describe the problem favour of their undertaking, from tender re- Meas ures such as the abolition of the privy Perry Anderson’s critique of Gandhi re- of entrenched majoritarianism as a ‘con- gard to their peculiar opinions, which a class- purses of former Indian royalty, and the capitulates a number of problems in the fessional’ issue? In plural postcolonial soc- ical education after the English manner might nationalisation of banks to promote lend- historiography of modern India that have ieties especially, democratic competition tread upon, they answered very shrewdly, by ing transformed the nature of Indian pol- become staples over the past three dec - stating their surprise that they had any ob - has repeatedly reconstituted and exacer- itical discourse. Such policies were of course ades, ever since Ranajit Guha’s Dominance jection to a liberal education, that if they bated communal divisions, making them found anything in the course of it which a populist ploy by a thoroughly elitist pol- without Hegemony: History and Power in Colon - politically salient in new and often threat- they could not reconcile to their religious itician, but the aspirations and expectat - ial India (1997) and Elementary Aspects of ening ways. The causal force here is not opinions, they were not bound to receive ions they unleashed permanently opened Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (1983). religious piety or premodern superstition it; but still they should wish to be inform - up Indian politics in unanticipated ways. The possibly derivative character of Indian but the logic of modern politics. Where ed of everything that the English gentlemen Anderson’s suggestion that the wealthy modernity; the belatedness of the arrival of has hard secularism permanently cured the learned, and they would take that which they farmers’ break from Congress in 1977 was capitalism; the continuities between the found good and liked best. threats of majoritarian entrenchment and a break from their caste subordination in colonial and the postcolonial state; the minority exclusion? Where has universal A wish to plunder Western knowledge, the Congress system is belied by the sub- conundrum of a caste society before, dur- suffrage led to the massive redistribution adapting it so as to take only ‘that which stantial benefits Congress policies had long ing and after colonialism; the eccentricity 4 london review of books 30 august 2012 of Gandhi as a man and a leader; the I sought permission to consult the origin- used literally for slicing and hewing and Pain and Peril dissonance between the effort to build a al, I was told – it would be nice to think wounding, and metaphorically for a ship Diarmaid MacCulloch sees ‘overtones of non-viol ent independence movement and that the play on words was intentional – cutting the waves or a plough furrowing a pur ification from ritual uncleanness’ in the the real ity of a violent partition; the in - that the Indian government had ‘not acced - field (Letters, 2 August). The difficulty that service for ‘thanksgiving of women after completeness of India’s revolutionary trans- ed’ to my request. imagining or describing time presents to childbirth, commonly called . . . church- ition from feudal colony to democratic There is certainly something fishy about the human mind led to a further spatial use ing’ in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer nat ion-state; the gap between the hist - the circumstances of the accession. The of this metaphor to mark off duration. Ernst (LRB, 24 May). Perhaps MacCulloch is think- orical experiences of subaltern and elite evidence is compelling that the maharajah Cassirer connects this to time-keeping ing back to the similar service in the 1549 classes: hist orians of India, and especially signed on 27 October, but was told to re- before clocks, which might be done by ob- first prayer book of Edward VI, which in- those on the left, have debated these claims cord the date as 26 October. In other words, serving the passage of the heavenly bodies deed refers to purification. The 1662 service, with exemplary thoroughness. Anderson he put his name to the document a few and shadows on the ground: ‘The sim - however, has no suggestion of uncleanness makes no reference to Ranajit Guha, hours after India began an airlift of troops plest spatial relations,’ he writes in The or purification: it is a simple service of Partha Chatterjee, Shahid Amin, Dipesh to the Kashmir valley (the beginning of a Philo sophy of Symbolic Forms, ‘such as left thanksgiving for delivery from ‘the great Chakrabarty, Gyan Prakash or others of the military presence that continues to this and right and forward and backward, are pain and peril of childbirth’. The Church Subaltern Studies school, whose books day), but in a manner which suggested it differentiated by a line drawn from east to did not wait for the ‘revolution in gender might have strengthened his argument on had been signed before the military oper - west, following the course of the sun, and relations’ of the 1960s to remove all refer- a number of fronts. Nor does he do justice ation began. bisected by a perpendicular running from ences to uncleanness and purification. to the Indians he quotes in his opening Andrew Whitehead north to south – and all intuition of tempor - For that reason, when in 1987, during salvo, all of whom, while being occasionally London NW5 al intervals goes back to these intersecting its work on a New Zealand Prayer Book/He appreciative of the achievements of Indian lines.’ This idea of sectioning and marking Karakia Mihinare o Aotearoa, the General nationalism, have also provided detailed While Perry Anderson’s analysis of the dis- off became a metaphor we live by, and pro- Synod of the Church of the Province of New analyses, criticisms, correctives and mod- astrous process and poisonous legacy of duced the Latin tempus and templum, and Zealand proposed to remove ‘The Church- els that have laid the foundation of a new decolonisation and partition in India is wel - myriad derivatives – maybe even ‘temper - ing of Women’ from the list of auth orised history of pol itical thought in modern come, his focus on the (undoubted) per- ature’, another kind of measurement. services, and replace it with one of Thanks- India. sonal shortcomings of Gandhi, Mountbat- In my piece about Damien Hirst, I was giving for the Gift of a Child, I successfully As for the essay itself, to say that Gandhi ten and Nehru distracts attention from the quoting the Catalan philosopher Eugenio opposed the deletion of the 1662 service. did wrong on numerous occasions is one more structural factors at work, in which Trías from an illuminating collection of A.E.J. Fitchett thing. But the claim that India’s anti- the handover of power in India and Pak- essays, Religion, edited by Jacques Derrida Dunedin, New Zealand colonial and anti-imperialist movements, istan served as a blueprint for the wider and Gianni Vattimo. Trías notes the con- including the national movement led by process of decolonisation. Central to this temporary turn towards the sacred as a Where have all the gay writers gone? the Congress (which treated Gandhi as its was the overriding aim of British politicians symbolic communal event rather than in- Christopher Glazek asks how we can ac- leader for the three decades leading up to and administrators (supported by the Unit- ward prayer or a private act of faith. I count for ‘one of the more puzzling feat- independence), were in no way respons - ed States) to hand the keys of newly in - did propose a connection between ancient ures of the postwar literary era . . . the col- ible for the decolonisation and democrat- dependent nation-states to a single nat - temples and contemporary museums, but lapse of the gay novelist’ (LRB, 19 July). isat ion of India is indefensible. Gandhi ionalist party and its (usually moderate, I didn’t mean to say (as Gale thinks) that That’s like asking about the ‘collapse’ of may have called off this or that mobilis- Western-leaning) leader, in whom the di- time is made to stand still in these pre- the Eastern and Central European dissid- ation, withdrawn from active politics when verse interests of complex societies were cincts. Rather, it is being told there – ent novelist. Just as the collapse of com- he ought to have stayed in the game, back- vested and conflated, and who received marked or counted down – at a different munism diminished the need for ‘dissid- ed a worse rather than a better candidate the covert or overt sponsorship of the col- pace that is powerfully seductive to artists ent’ novels, the success of the gay move- for some position of influence within the onial administration in the years immed- and their audience. ment in North America and much of Eur- party, or made any number of miscalcul - iately before and after independence. However, the connect ion between mass ope diminished the need for ‘gay’ novels. ations or bad decisions in the course of In this process – carried out with increas- assemblies, their pre cincts and stretching Gay novels may no longer be necessary his political life. But what counted was that ing haste across the diminishing British time seems to me even stronger in the in the way they once were, but represent - he, together with his associates in the Con- Em pire in the 1950s and early 1960s – com- wake of the Olympic Games, which have ations of same-sex relations remain open gress, the ashrams and the public at large, plex, disparate and conflicting anti-colonial led to such intense and fervent displays of to writers who can figure out their relev- inculcated habits of personal and commun- movements were, as in India, reduced to secular public symbolism. I hadn’t noticed ance to present conditions. When books itarian praxis (charkha, or weaving by hand; monolithic nationalist parties. In colonies before just how important accurate demarc - like Edmund White’s A Boy’s Own Story khadi, or making hand-spun, hand-woven such as the Gold Coast, Tanganyika, Kenya ations of the lanes, the pitch, the track, the (1982), Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the cloth; satya graha, or non-violent resistance), and Northern Rhodesia such parties, mod- field and the ring are in every sport during Dance (1978) and even Armistead Maupin’s created and sustained a climate of ideas elled on Congress, conflated their partic- the Games: all those shots of the ground Tales of the City (1978) appeared, they had, (swadeshi, swaraj, ahimsa), and made the quest ular interests (political, economic, social, being examined to ascertain exact meas- for their mainly gay readership, the funct - for sovereignty so paramount, that achiev- cultural) with those of the proto-nation- urements, talk of split seconds being shaven ion of newspapers, dispatches from the ing independence became the principal state, mapping their party symbols and off speed records, world champions sur- front. Indeed, Maupin’s book was first pub- political project of the age. With the free- slogans onto the nation. This had the effect passing their nearest rivals’ highest and lished in serialised form in the San Francisco dom of India the path was cleared for the of rendering illegitimate, anti-nationalist longest jumps by infinitesimal increments. Chronicle. Their merits as realist novels were decol onisation of huge swathes of Asia, and even treasonous the interests and per- But even as the athletes were running or inseparable from their political function. Africa and Latin America. No doubt the spectives of those sections of these diverse swimming faster than anyone ever had, the Glazek asks where the significant contemp- Second World War hastened the dis sol - societies that could not or would not be effect of all these sections and truncations orary gay writers can be found. He should ution of the British Empire, but neither subsumed under the leadership of such was to prolong the passage of time. For a look in places (and there is no shortage of Allies nor Axis powers came to rescue men as Kwame Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta sports virgin like myself, it was unimagin- them) where homosexuality is still a con- India: in the end, India liberated itself. or Kenneth Kaunda. The British nation al able that a nanoslice – how long is 0.014 of tested issue. The Hungarian writer Péter Ananya Vajpeyi archives demonstrate the significant ex- a second? – could count at all, let alone Nádas is one example, Poland’s Michal Centre for the Study of Developing Societies tent to which the departing colonial power make a difference after a race of ten kilo- Witkowski (Lovetown, 2005) another. New Delhi contributed to the rapid transition to de metres. And it was astonishing to exper- Glazek’s brief history of contemporary facto or de jure one-party states and dictat- ience an interval of less than ten seconds as gay writing and writers who were homo- Perry Anderson says that Kashmir became orships in many newly independent nat ion- a momentous event: the 100 metres race sexual doesn’t mention the ‘new narrative’ part of India in 1947 ‘with a forged declar - states, the logical consequence of prior itis - seemed to take longer than I would shuf- group of mostly gay writers, active from ation of accession’, and that the document ing the self-serving myth of national unity fling along for miles. In the setting of a about 1985 to the mid-1990s, who were ex- then disappeared for ‘over half a century’. over democratic self-determination. temple on a global platform, the athletes plicitly interested in modernist and post- Not quite. The maharajah of Kashmir was Miles Larmer were in effect cutting up the passage of modernist prose. The best known of these pushed into joining India by an invasion University of Sheffield time in different ways, according to the is Dennis Cooper, whose cycle of half a of Pakistani tribesmen, and there’s little logic of imagining space-time, and the dozen novels from Closer (1989) to Guide doubt that he signed the instrument of Of Time and Temples stadium turned into a gigantic and spec ial (1997) explores the queer punk scene; other accession. A facsimile of the crucial page John Gale rightly points out that the word kind of clock, in which time was moving examples include Robert Gluck’s Jack the bearing his signature was published more temenos, a word frequently used for a both faster and slower in front of our Modernist (1985), Kevin Killian’s various than forty years ago, and the entire doc- shrine or sacred precinct, depends on an eyes. books and my own Buddy’s (1991). ument was posted on the website of India’s underlying metaphor of cutting and de- Marina Warner Stan Persky Ministry of Home Affairs. However, when marcating, from the Greek verb temno, London NW5 Vancouver 5 london review of books 30 august 2012 T H E NEV E R SINK LI B R A R Y

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6 london review of books 30 august 2012 primitivism, we are told, was a primitivism the emphasis on unvulcanised rubber, the As striking as the tennis shoes, in this re- the evening of the day after she first had sex of the most conventional kind, forever ‘virgin’ product of colonial abundance, the spect, is the ‘little bottle of Coty’s Wood- with Mellors, she once again seeks him out finding alternatives to techno-industrial RGA cleverly sold reinvigoration to the violet perfume, half-empty’, which Connie at the hut, ‘to see if it were really real’. Clif- modernity, whether in ancient England or a (literally) well-heeled metropolitan middle leaves among Mellors’s things after her ford has chosen to listen in to a lecture contemporary elsewhere. But that’s not the and upper classes: a bit of wildness on golf second night at the cottage, where it is sub- about ancient street cries delivered in an whole story, or indeed the most interesting course and tennis court. Today, the market- sequently discovered by his malevolent wife. ‘idiotically velveteen-genteel sort’ of modern part of it. In Chapter 13 comes the passage ing of Nike’s Air Jordan basketball shoes, ‘She wanted him to remember her in the radio voice. This parodic techno-primitivism I have already mentioned, in which Connie, made plausible by association with their perfume.’ Spraying perfume on your lover’s provides the rhetorical context for a re- having dined with her husband and roundly talisman’s legendary ‘hang time’, strikes the shirts doesn’t seem like the coolest thing assertion of cool. ‘She pulled on her old condemned him in her own mind as a dead same note. ‘High-end forefoot foam and a you could possibly do. Connie herself sub- violet-coloured mackintosh, and slipped fish of a gentleman with a celluloid soul, Zoom Air heel deliver lightweight, respons- sequently dismisses the gesture as childish. out of the house at the side door.’ puts on ‘rubber tennis-shoes, and then a ive cushioning for insanely quick cuts, The devil, however, is in the detail, as it Lawrence found it hard to imagine men light coat’, and slips out of the house to jukes, spins and stops.’ always is in this novel. The manufacturer’s as cool. Men were absolute, women relative spend the night, for the first time, in Mel- The RGA’s crêpe rubber campaign name was an addition in the final draft. (as cool is). To put it more charitably, Law- lors’s cottage. Such ‘unimportant’ descript - amounted to techno-primitivism in action, Coty did not in fact create a perfume called rence believed that men had become caught ive passages constitute the slack in narrat - by working on, and provoking a strong Wood-violet. As Lawrence was re vising, in up in masquerades of earnestness, to adapt ive’s system. Lawrence establishes by means awareness of, the compound quality of syn- January 1928, they launched L’Aimant (or his own term for the performative dimens- of their matter-of-factness a view of the thetic and semi-synthetic substance. That The Magnet). L’Aimant was a wholly syn- ion he discerned in many kinds of ‘most modern world not determined by any ‘vast awareness could itself be considered ‘prim- thetic perfume. But wood-violets feature modern’ behaviour. The Etruscan tombs grudge’ against it. The tennis shoes (as such, itive’, despite its focus on plastics, in so earl ier in the novel: as with the tennis taught him that the only thing you should enough to guarantee a silent exit) only be- far as it drew primarily on the evidence of shoes, Lawrence has chosen for Connie a be in earnest about is insouciance. Connie, came rubber tennis shoes in the novel’s senses which Victorian psychophysiology combination of old and new: the natural slipping out of the house, slips insouciantly second version. I’ve often wondered why. had classified as primitive: touch, taste and in the synthetic, not before or beyond it. out of the masquerade. ‘She got very warm smell. Techno-primitivism, exploiting slack Connie’s strong awareness of synthetic and as she hurried across the park. She had to here’s a long answer to that in the system of consumption of luxury semi-synthetic substance – an awareness open her light waterproof.’ In the novel’s question. Rubber began as a natural goods, makes cool possible. In Lawrence’s coolly established by description alone – previous version, the mackintosh had been Tplastic, familiar to the indigenous fiction, it became a way to think about how saves her both from Sir Clifford and from blue. Now, like Connie’s perfume, it is as- peoples of the Amazon basin, but proved of cool works. Mellors: from too much civilising, and too sociated with an ancient woodland flower. little use industrially until, in the late 1830s, Connie Chatterley puts on her semi- little. But Lawrence added a further detail during someone (in fact, two people separately) synthetic rubber tennis shoes in order to revision. Connie’s mackintosh is a light worked out how to combine it with sulphur make the transition from the civilised space t’s striking that Lawrence attribut - waterproof garment. at a high temperature: a process known of the hall to the primitive space of the ed a productive techno-primitivism to Mackintoshes were made of rubber. In as vulcanisation. Rubber was, and is, semi- woods. In Chapter 15, she and Mellors meet Iwomen far more readily than he did to 1823, Charles Macintosh discovered that synthetic: a product of both nature and at the hut in the woods in which they first men. Nobody tries harder, or to less effect, naphtha drawn from coal-tar stabilised raw culture, of the plantation and the chemical made love and she dances naked in the rain than hapless Sir Clifford Chatterley, after latex into a liquid which when spread be- laboratory; or, where the British Empire was clad only in her Air Jordans. The dance, as the arrival of a specialist nurse and com- tween two layers of fabric made for an concerned, of colony and metropolis. By modern in style as the shoes she wears to panion, Mrs Bolton, has provoked in him a excellent waterproof material. Macintosh the 1920s, a large proportion of the world- perform it, is a response to another of his resurgence of energy. ‘Somehow, he got his gave his name to a whole range of rub- wide supply of rubber derived from Malaya rants against the ‘industrial epoch’ and its pecker up.’ The ruthless application of his berised silk or cotton garments – or almost and Ceylon. In 1907, a Rubber Growers’ reduction of men and women to ‘labour- researches into the ‘technicalities of mod- gave his name, since mackintosh with a Association (RGA) was founded in London insects’. Techno-primitivism is cool, how- ern coal-mining’ restores him to a sense ‘k’, the variant spelling, is now standard. to protect and develop the interests of Brit - ever, because ancient practices echo to its of himself as ‘lord and master’. His interest There was a problem, however. Rubberised ish firms operating in South-East Asia. In modern beat. In April 1927, after complet- in the radio, mentioned in passing in the cotton stank. So severe had this problem 1921, the RGA established a publicity de- ing his first revision of the novel, Lawrence second version of the novel, takes centre become by the end of the 19th century that partment to develop ‘press propaganda undertook an extensive tour of Tuscany, in stage in the third. He no longer wants com- mackintosh-wearers were often denied advocating the use of rubber for all con- order to examine the famous painted tombs pany at Wragby, we learn at the beginning entry to omnibuses. The garment remained ceivable purposes’. and other vestiges of the ancient Etruscan of Chapter 10, or the sort of wide-ranging highly fashionable throughout the 1920s The most significant initiative under- civilisation in which he had for a long time intellectual debate he had once encouraged. and 1930s. But it had to be admitted that in taken by the RGA publicity department in taken an interest. By the end of June, he had ‘He preferred the radio, which he had in- this case modern chemicals, far from elim- the 1920s concerned the exploitation, prim- written pretty much all he was ever to write stalled at some expense, with a good deal inating aboriginal odours, had in fact done arily for the leisure market, of the ‘crude- of his posthumously published Sketches of of success at last. He could sometimes get a great deal to enhance them. George Bowl- ness’ of crude rubber. After collection, the Etruscan Places. The ease, naturalness, and Madrid, or Frankfurt, even there in the un - ing, in Coming Up for Air, returning to his coagulum from the rubber trees was pre- ‘abundance of life’ revealed to him by the easy Midlands.’ Radio is the novel’s emblem wife and family in the knowledge that for pared for export either as crêpe or as ribbed tomb paintings became the latest in a series of technological system, of that to which him there will be no escape from suburbia, smoked sheet. The distinctive feature of of antidotes to modern commerce and em- there is no conceivable outside. When Con- returns to the bad techno-primitive. ‘I fum- crêpe was that it didn’t need to be vulcanis ed pire. So, another gang of happy, conquered nie wonders whether one could ‘go right bled with the key, got the door open, and before use. The material out of which a com - sensualists. Except that what he most liked away, to the far ends of the earth’, Law - the familiar smell of old mackintoshes hit modity was to be made could be prepared about this lot was their sprezzatura, their rence comments tartly that one could not. me.’ on the plantation itself, by ‘native’ art isanal apparent ‘carelessness’. In a poem written ‘While the wireless is active, there are no far ‘Women are learning that the thick rub- labour, rather than by a chemical process in in 1920, he had imagined the men of ‘old ends of the earth. Kings of Dahomey and ber waterproof coat is uncomfortable for its a factory in Europe or the United States. The Etruria’, naked except for ‘fanciful long Lamas of Tibet listen in to London and New lack of ventilation,’ a 1920 guide to hygiene proportion of raw material to added miner- shoes’, transacting ‘forgotten business’ with York.’ pointed out, ‘and they are discarding it for al matter in any commodity made from this ‘some of Africa’s imperturbable sang-froid’. Clifford, however, mastering radio, is a lightweight and rainproof cloth.’ Connie material was very high indeed. In 1927, it was the friezes representing dance mastered by it. The radio loudspeaker has chosen a lightweight garment. It’s a The supreme opportunity for the mar- that most delighted him: men wearing only ‘bellowing forth’ hour after hour has re- garment in which she will sweat a little, on keting of crêpe rubber came with the in- sandals and a kind of scarf, a woman who duced him to a trance-like imbecility which her way out of the big house into the forest, creasing popularity of that ultimate modern ‘throws back her head and curves out her infects all his relationships. This ‘astute but, we’re allowed to assume, not too much. fashion accessory, the sports shoe. The long strong fingers, wild and yet contained and powerful practical man’ now worships Rubber’s constitution as a semi-synthetic RGA campaigns characterised sports shoes within herself’, all equally caught up in the his wife ‘with a queer craven idolatry, like substance has once again enabled Lawrence and boots with crêpe rubber soles as a way ‘archaic earnestness of insouciance’. Con- a savage’. He will later prove equally craven to capture with a sang-froid all his own the to rekindle hitherto dormant energies and nie, naked except for her no less fanciful in his idolatry of his wife’s replacement, robustness of a properly self-aware techno- aptitudes. ‘The cushion of “live” rubber less- shoes, dances herself ‘ruddy’: the flesh tone Mrs Bolton. Clifford’s is a bad techno- primitivism. Connie’s taste in rainwear, her ens fatigue and makes walking a pleasure,’ Lawrence most readily attributed to his primitivism: one as vividly conscious of inhabitation of a garment, has enabled her the advertisements claimed, ‘adding hours old Etrurian men. Techno-primitivism has the archaic as it is of the contemporary, but to exploit an element of give or slack in to endurance and a spring to every step.’ brought her to her senses. It recovers the unable to establish a productive connection the relation between technique and techno- For nothing had been done, chem ically or starkness of the contrast between the org- between them. That Connie is at the point logy, free will and necessity, as she leaves otherwise, to ‘impair the natural live quality anic and the inorganic involved in being of establishing just such a connection be- the big house for the hut in the forest. and nerve of the virgin product’. By putting most modern. comes clear later in the chapter, when, on Connie is cool. c 7 london review of books 30 august 2012 he geeks at the Massachusetts spects,’ the Polish historian Witold Kula Institute of Technology are fond of Plus or Minus One Ear wrote in his great study of Measures and Men. Tmerry japes, locally known as ‘hacks’. ‘They were expressive of man and his work.’ One of the more memorable happened one But anthropometric units don’t get you night in October 1958 when an MIT fratern- Steven Shapin very far in measuring volume, weight and ity had the idea of initiating new members time. Any appropriately shaped vessel whose by making them measure a bridge over the World in the Balance: general dimensions were recognised by a Charles River connecting the Cambridge The Historic Quest for an Absolute System of Measurement relevant community could serve as a vol- campus with Boston. Crossing the bridge by Robert Crease. ume measure and, it might be expected, as a was often a wet, windy and unpleasant busi- Norton, 317 pp., £18.99, October 2011, 978 0 393 07298 3 measure of the weight of stuff the vessel ness and it was thought that students re- contained. The passage of time might be turning at night from downtown would like the walkway not in the customary six-foot arms, and the ell (an abbreviation of elbow) measured in many ways: by the length of a to know, by visible marks and with some lengths but in shorter smoot units. Fifty was traditionally an arm’s length, though day, and parts thereof, in which case you precision, how far they still had to go. The years after the original hack, the smoot English, Scottish and Flemish ells were reck- wouldn’t be greatly bothered by annual older fraternity brothers decided to use one markers have become part of civic tradition: oned differently. Human bodies and their variation; or by reference to noon, solstices, of the new pledges as a rule, and selected the City of Cambridge declared 4 October parts vary in size and so do the measures equinoxes and lunar motions; or by the Oliver R. Smoot, the shortest of the lot at 2008 ‘Smoot Day’. MIT students ran up a derived from them. amount of time it took to perform some 5ft 7in. The other pledges laid Smoot out commemorative plaque on a precision mill- Central European foot measures gen- locally well-understood task – for example, at one end of the bridge, marked his extent ing machine and created an aluminium erally ranged from 101/2 to 121/2 modern how long it took to cook a pot of rice or with chalk and paint, then picked him up Smoot Stick which they deposited in the inches, but the Sicilian foot was 8.75 inches plough a furrow. and laid him down again, spelling out the university’s museum as a durable reference and the Genevan foot 19.2, so we can’t be Intelligibility, accessibility and at-hand- full measurement every ten lengths, and standard: the unit-smoot is now detached certain that all foot standards really did ness were among the virtues of traditional inscribing the mid-point of the bridge with from the person-Smoot. Through the leg - come from any human foot. Maybe the measures; among their vices were their the words ‘halfway to Hell’. In this way, it ions of MIT graduates driving global high- Genevan or even the 12-inch foot belonged variability, imprecision and the difficulty of was determined that the span was 364.4 tech culture, the smoot has travelled the to heroic specimens, or maybe the original converting between them. Travelling through smoots long, ‘plus or minus one ear’ (to world. If you use Google Earth, you can elect foot measure included a generously pro- France just before the Revolution, Arthur indicate measurement uncertainty). the units of length in which you’d like dist- portioned shoe. Maybe both human feet and Young was distressed at the ‘infinite per- The hack was too good to let fade away, ances measured: miles, kilometres, yards, the length that the foot measure measured plexity of the measures’ used: ‘They differ so every now and then the fraternity makes feet – and smoots. increased over time. Maybe too there were not only in every province, but in every dis- its pledges repaint the markings. You might The history of the smoot recapitulates other ways of establishing the foot. Six- trict and almost every town.’ A quarter of a think this isn’t the sort of vandalism the much of the deep history of measurement teenth-century writers claimed that French million distinct units of weights and meas- police would tolerate, but they do. The standards. Most stories about the emerg - workmen calculated it by joining the ex- ures were employed in different parts of the smoot markings soon became convenient ence of length measures track back to the tremities of their thumbs, clenching the country. Worried by the high price of grain in recording the exact location of traffic human body. The cubit ran from the elbow fingers, and extending the thumbs as far as in 1796, the British government was con- accidents, so (as the story goes) when the to the fingertip; the yard was the distance they could. Try it yourself and you’ll see that cerned that uncontrollably varying systems bridge walkways needed to be repaved in from the tip of an outstretched hand to the you can get pretty close to a 12-inch foot. for measuring it out were contributing to 1987, the Massachusetts Department of middle of the chest (or to the tip of your The concept of the ‘average foot’ (under- political unrest – ‘an evident fraud on the Public Works directed the construction nose); the fathom was the distance between stood as the mean of the population) prob- consumers of bread, and an advantage to company to lay out the concrete slabs on the extremes of a person’s outstretched ably wasn’t intelligible before the emerg - none but the jobbers in corn, who, from ence in the 19th century of the notion of the practice, are as well acquainted with the size ‘average man’, but a 16th-century German of every farmer’s bushel as with his face.’ source reported an ingenious way of arriv- From long experience, and with much effort, ing at a reliable foot measure: lurk outside the wide-boy jobbers might come to know church on Sunday and, when the worship- the difference between the bushels used pers come out, ask 16 men to stop – both in Winchester and Basingstoke, but those short and tall – and make them line up their whose sphere of familiarity was more re- left feet, one after the other. The length you stricted might not. And even in Basing- get will constitute the local land measure stoke, the ordinary purchaser might get a called the rood, and a sixteenth part of that nine-gallon bushel while, in ‘a shameful ‘shall be the right and lawful foot’, even if it fraud on the consumer’, a gentleman might corresponds to the foot length of no one of get 101/2 gallons. A bushel for measuring the 16. Similarly, one story about the inch wheat could be a different size from one for says that it was taken as the width of a measuring barley. And bushels of the same man’s thumb at the base of the nail, and volume might contain different amounts of another derives it from the Latin word for a grain if they were heaped or levelled, filled twelfth (uncia), as in 1/12th of a foot is an from a greater or a lesser height. You might inch and 1/12th of a Troy pound is an ounce. heap a bushel if the grain was of low quality Length units could be systematically re- or you might do it if the purchaser was of lated because bodily dimensions were high quality. Not all grain was the same and understood as organically related. ‘Man is not all transactions between people were the measure of all things,’ and Leonardo’s the same. Traditional measures persistently Vitruvian Man represented confidence in linked quantity and quality. the proportionality of human body parts: You use standards to measure – and ‘The length of the outspread arms is equal that’s a practical matter – but measures are to the height of a man; from the hairline to not merely more or less, they may be just or the bottom of the chin is one-tenth of the unjust. There is no way to disentangle their height of a man; from below the chin to the instrumental and moral aspects. Standards top of the head is one-eighth of the height were norms, just as the Roman norma was a of a man.’ Tailors as well as artists knew tool for obtaining right angles, the usage some of these systemic relations: the Lilli- later extending to standards of right moral putian seamstresses in Gulliver’s Travels meas - action. God traditionally kept standard ured up their giant guest using a rule of weights and measures in his kit: ‘A just thumb – ‘twice round the thumb is once weight and balance are the Lord’s,’ Pro - round the wrist.’ The human body was a verbs said: ‘All the weights of the bag are his cosmologically and aesthetically resonant work.’ He created the world by ordering ‘all measuring-kit. It was metrically intelligible, things in measure and number and weight’ useful and, above all, it was at hand. ‘Trad - and his measures were an index of justice: itional measures were “human” in many re- ‘Thou shalt not have in thy bag divers 8 london review of books 30 august 2012 weights, a great and a small. Thou shalt not ardisation and governance at a distance de- have in thine house divers measures, a great veloped much earlier than the French Revol - and a small.’ Ancient and medieval thought ution and the metric system. Magna Carta ran together the notion of measure and declared that ‘there be one measure of wine moderation – proportion, due measure, just throughout our whole realm . . . and one Literature measure. Double standards were no stand- measure of corn . . . and one width of cloth ards at all. The scales held by Lady Justice . . . of weights also let it be as of measures.’ & Spoken Word on top of the Old Bailey express both un- What was an irritant in transactions be- biased scales and an unbiased weigher. tween millers in Winchester and buyers of (This Justice, atypically, is not blindfolded flour in Basingstoke became intolerable in because she is taken to personify fairness.) governing a nation-state from London or Writing that breaks the Paris. The ability of standards to act over a od kept weights and measures in distance was useful if you meant to govern his bag, but in human society the over a distance. Gobjects tended to be enshrined in The standardisation of the coinage was the houses where authority lived – on the the most visible of these concerns, with its Acropolis, on the Capitoline Hill, in the attendant enshrinement of reference stand- Temple at Jerusalem, in Hagia Sophia in ards, the establishment of assay offices, Constantinople, later in the seats of secular standard-marks warranting composition government and in institutions linked to and judicial arrangements for punishing government. The Saxons kept their stand - counterfeiters. In England, the legal defin- ards of volume – bushel, peck, quart and ition of composition standards was pro - gallon – at their Winchester capital and the mulgated after Magna Carta but the re- Normans then had them removed to West- gulation of purity standards was probably minster Abbey. In medieval Europe, you Saxon. You can’t govern if you can’t control could check your rule against metal rods your currency, so metallurgical standards built into the walls of churches or other and their enforcement are tools of state- public buildings. Just to the left of the main craft. So too is the ability effectively to levy entrance to the cathedral of St Stephen in taxes – and to make visible their material Vienna are two iron bars embedded in the and legitimate bases. Join Will Self in a series of events with wall – the linen ell and the shorter drapery The power of the British state, its cap- writers who take inspiration from Modernism. ell. If you were a visitor and wanted to know acity to wage war and extend empire in Also this autumn, hear from great world local standards, or if you wanted to check the 18th and 19th centuries, was dependent leaders and from activists and thinkers from your local rules against the references, on excise taxes, and especially the excise the frontlines of the Arab Revolutions. there they were. And if you needed to be on alcohol: government ran on alcohol in reminded of their authority, there it was. more than the usual sense. Yet the state’s Variability and imprecision were long- ability to enforce and collect that excise was standing problems that might have local itself dependent on developing instrumental solutions, if indeed they were seen as prob- practices objectively to establish alcoholic lems at all. This is the point at which Robert proof. The excise was widely hated, resisted Crease’s World in the Balance gets going. and often subverted, so, as one assayer put He is indebted to Kula, as is every recent it in 1801, ‘a standard alone can put an historian writing about measurement and end to this contrariety of opinions.’ Crease modernity, but he takes the story onwards, doesn’t discuss the use of standards in the dealing in more detail with 19th and 20th- excise, but fine historical work by William century metrology and its engagements with Ashworth has described the struggle over local variation. How did we get from the de termining proof standards during the body-reference yard to the artifact-standard 18th and 19th centuries and the role of both of a metal metre bar in Paris, to the metre as bureaucratic procedures and the specific- 1,650,763.73 wavelengths in vacuum of the gravity measuring instrument called the radiation corresponding to the transition hydrometer in producing the ‘practical ob- between the levels 2p10 and 5d5 of the jectivity’ that underwrote empire. krypton-86 atom, to its present official de - The historical trajectory of standards, finition as the length of the path travelled Crease notes, is often described as disembod- by light in vacuum in 1/299,792,458th of a iment, as in the detachment of the smoot second? Every modern scholar now accepts from Smoot. But under another description that the seeming banality and just-so-ness that process is a different kind of embod- of standards mask massive contingency iment, the transference of standards from and bloody struggle in their establishment flesh to metal. An official ell or Troy pound and maintenance, recognising, as the hist- just was the reference bar or lump constit- orian Ken Alder puts it, that ‘the price of uted as such; it was the artifact that gave standards is eternal vigilance.’ Contingency meaning to the ell-ness or pound-ness of and struggle were the drivers of Thomas all other things an ell long or a pound in Pynchon’s great metrological novel Mason weight – and that is the sense in which Witt- & Dixon, as they are of Crease’s book, whose genstein said: ‘There is one thing of which special strength is attention to the last one can say neither that it is one metre long, several decimal places of modern measure- nor that it is not one metre long, and that is ments, how they were arrived at through the the standard metre in Paris.’ It was both 19th and 20th centuries, why and to whom handy and politically necessary that the state these things mattered. keep, guard and guarantee artifactual refer- The first move away from metrological ence standards, and that is what was done BOOK NOW 0844 847 9910 tradition was to cut down the hetero- until, in the course of the 18th and 19th cent - SOUTHBANKCENTRE.CO.UK geneity: it’s easier to govern a country with uries, grounds of dissatisfaction emerged. 246 varieties of cheese – which De Gaulle Discontent took several forms. One con- thought was hard enough – than with many cerned the practices of reference which the different weights, measures and time sys- artifacts were intended to ensure. The tems. Effective rule needs stable rulers. stand ard artifact, kept in one place, had That sensitivity to the link between stand - to gen erate authentic copies – sometimes 9 london review of books 30 august 2012 technically called ‘witnesses’ – in order to could do that, you would no longer be de- in general use among many nations’. Or, as of the average citizen,’ he says, ‘compre- circulate, and yet, with demands for greater pendent on the integrity of a particular phys - Crease writes, ‘the metre was universal be- hension generally was.’ Modern metrolog- and greater precision, both its physical use ical object. Essentially, anyone, anywhere, cause it was universal.’ Custom, convention ical units, he writes, are easy to apply, while as a reference and its physical instability over could reproduce the standards. At that and artifact had not been eliminated, they understanding their bases has become ‘too time were gradually understood to com- point, standards would be not only nation- had been relocated to a new metrological complex for all but scientists to grasp’. promise its integrity. Every time you took ally and globally uniform; they would be as language, a new set of artifacts, and a new No reason for nostalgia. We used to live in the artifact out to use it as a reference, you stable as reality itself, finally disembodied. group of administrative bodies that would a world, it’s said, that had different meas- endangered its integrity, and even the phys- It was a project that ultimately succeed- articulate and enforce standards. ures, but we still do. It’s not just that planes ical environment in which you kept it safe ed, though not without difficulties and The quest for natural standards was soon continue to fly around the world at 30,000 might, over time, have unpredictable effects never totally. In fact, the original metre was to succeed. From the end of the 19th cent- feet rather than 9,144 metres (except in on its length or weight. A metal bar might supposed to be a natural standard, nothing ury, the financial resources and organis - China, Mongolia, North Korea, Russia and bend; a metal weight might corrode. Metal- to do with fingers, arms and noses, every- ational energies dedicated to achieving the a few of the former Soviet republics) and lurgical improvements were made, but you thing to do with unvarying features of the final dream of standards that flowed from that Americans haven’t a clue how hot it is could never be absolutely certain of long- terrestrial world, and intended to be used the structure of reality grew enormously. when it’s 31ºC or how heavy people are term stability. In 1948, it was discovered that by all people, everywhere. As Alder puts it, Both governmental and non-governmental when they weigh 12 stones – a unit which a the ‘Kilogram of the Archives’, fabric ated in ‘it was only fitting that a measure for all the metrological commissions proliferated: 17 table in Crease’s book equates to 14 ounces. 1799 and carefully looked after since then, world’s people be based on a measure of countries at the General Conference of It’s also that we continue to use all sorts of had lost weight, evidently (as Crease writes) the world.’ The metre would be one ten- Weights and Measures in 1875 signed up traditional and locally varying measures for ‘due to the escape of bubbles’ trapped in millionth of the distance along a meridian to the Metre Convention, establishing both all sorts of everyday purposes. Horses con- the metal. Uncontrollably varying reference passing through Paris between the North a phys ical institute to house the standards tinue to be hands high. A dozen bagels on standards aren’t what you want. Nor do you Pole and the equator. That length was pick- and periodically meeting supervisory bodies. the Upper West Side of Manhattan counts want them to be lost or destroy ed. But this ed for historical reasons – because it was The world had international metrological out at 13. I make risotto by filling up a happens. Artifact standards of length and estimated to be pretty close to a trad itional government long before it had the League certain saucepan with stock; I have no idea weight, designed in the mid-18th century unit, the Parisian aune. (This ‘rational’ of Nations. In 1960, an international com- how much stock that is, but it works well and designated as the first imperial stand - measure was therefore, as economic hist- mission of metrologists established the and I’ve screwed up when cooking risotto ards in 1824, were kept in the House of orians say, ‘path dependent’: it took its krypton-86 spectral line definition of the in someone else’s kitchen. When I go to buy Commons – until it burned down ten years form partly because of its intercalation in metre, and in 1983 further exactitude was a small rug, I pace out its dimensions with later, severely damaging the standards and the past history of human practices.) The secured through its redefinition as the dist - my feet and only if the result is ambiguous rendering them useless. What auth orities problem with a natural standard for the ance travelled by light in a precise span of do I go get a tape measure. longed for was an order of standards that metre, as more fully documented in Alder’s time. The physical standard, at that moment, The 19th and 20th-century drive to pre- wasn’t defined by any physical artifact or sparkling book, The Measure of All Things ‘became a historic object; the new standard cision and to homogeneity of all sorts of patterned on the human body, wasn’t the (2002), was, on the one hand, the fallibility was universal, everywhere, not localised’. standards – quantitative and qualitative – conventional outcome of human history or of the scientists sent to perform the merid- was powered by a range of practices that de- geared towards any particular practice, ional measurements and, on the other, the n 1887, an American scientist, William liver us the goods and services we want and whether it was milling or car pentry or annoying irregularity of the Earth’s shape, Harkness, thrilled to the prospect that whose ability to do so depends on effective plough ing. They wanted standard measures not corresponding exactly to any theorised Ithe world would soon have natural action over very long distances and exquis- that reflected the order of reality, standards geometrical figure. metrological standards, reproducible not itely precise co-ordination of things and that could be reproduced anywhere, at any The late 18th-century attempt to est - just in the absence of the usual artifacts but people. The origins of the present-day Inter - time – even if all the existing metal bars and ablish the metre as a natural standard did even on distant worlds after the Earth itself national Organisation for Standardisation – weights and clocks ceased to exist. not succeed, but in 1799 the ‘good-enough- had fallen into the Sun and been vapor- former president Oliver R. Smoot – trace The French invention of the metric syst - for-government-work’ measure was never- ised. The science of the 17th and 18th back to late 19th-century concern among em in the late 18th and early 19th centuries theless embodied in a platinum alloy bar, centuries could not do that, but today we engineers over the specifications of nuts was a big deal mainly because it allowed the so-called ‘Metre of the Archives’, and it can, since modern metrologists can derive and bolts. Telegraphic communication went easy, and, it was said, intelligible inter- was this artifact that continued as the refer- natural stand ards by connecting their units better with internationally agreed stand- convertibility of units. What was intelligible ence standard for most of the 19th century, ‘with the ultimate atoms which constitute ards of electrical resistance; the railroads and systematically easy would be naturally despite the fact that it was known not to cor - the universe itself’. No one would now have called for national and international stand - fit for global use. Moving from inches to respond precisely to the one ten-millionth to go to Paris to check out a metal bar; by ards of time; manufacture of goods through feet to yards to miles means multiplying of a quarter-meridian criterion. In 1889, the middle of the 20th century ‘any country interchangeable parts depended on metrical first by 12, then by 3, and then by 1760, new, more stable physical artifacts were could realise the metre, provided it had the standards for precision engineering; burg- whereas, of course, every metric conversion constructed: the prototype metre was now technology.’ All that’s needed to achieve eoning road traffic generated demands for proceeds by tens and its multiples and there an alloy of 90 per cent platinum and 10 per this reproduction are a few simple scientific national, and later international, standard are only a few prefixes designating scale – cent iridium, measured at the temperature instruments – a pretty good diffraction grat - signage; and that curiously placeless place, kilo, centi, milli, micro etc. Metrication at which ice melts. The further adoption of ing, a goniometer (to measure angles), and the modern airport, was one of the sites in made many calculations much easier, but the metre was commended not because of the appropriate spectroscopic apparatus. which we learned how to interpret those the problem of reference standards re- its naturalness but because, for a host of That is to say, you just need a well-equipped odd icons guiding us to the approp riately mained. What if, however, you could tie political, cultural and scientific reasons, it physics laboratory, staffed by physicists rig- gendered toilet. measures not to a human artifact but to the had already become (as Nature said) ‘a orously trained in similarly equipped lab - During the 1914-18 war, the Fabian soc- invariant order of terrestrial reality? If you cosmopolitan unit, widely recognised, and oratories, and having access to the super - ialist Leonard Woolf spoke in praise of the visory and regulatory bureaucracies which largely voluntary international organisations would vouch for and enforce the standards that had given the world standards of POLITICS OTHERWISE thus reproduced. Natural and universal length, weight, colour, electrical resistance Shakespeare as Social standards are, in this way, locally depend- and agricultural produce; he celebrated an ent on a very particular material and org- ‘international commission for unifying the and Political Critique anisational culture. To reproduce natural nomenclature of apples’, and he looked Edited by Leonidas Donskis standards you just have to re-create a big forward to a bright future in which ‘even and J. D. Mininger chunk of modern human culture. The stand - our chickens will be internationalised.’ The ards have not escaped history; they are worlds of science and commerce had shown The book is comprised of essays that utilize rather markers of where history now is. the way to a harmonious inter national order Shakespeare as a productive window into topics of Attaining these standards was a heroic in which voluntarily arrived at standards contemporary social and political relevance. Its cultural achievement. What has to be celeb - would embody reason, enhance productiv- interdisciplinary qualities make the book relevant rated, however – if celebration is intended – ity, eliminate confusing and unfair local for students of political studies, literature, are not just heroic metrologists but much of customs, ensure peace and co-operation, philosophy, cultural studies, and history. the fabric of the modern political and com- and be guided by the wise counsel of tech- mercial order. In a coda addressing what he nical expertise. A pattern of rational inter- ISBN 978 90 420 3464 8 paper £33 194 pages. calls the ‘dark sides of the metroscape’, national governance had been established; RODOPI Tijnmuiden 7, 1046 AK Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Tel: ++31-(0)20-6114821 Crease reflects on the social distribution of modern metrology virtuously modelled RODOPI 248 East 44th Street - 2nd floor, New York, NY 10017, USA, Call toll-free 1-800-225-3998 modern metrics. While in the past ‘metro- modern political order; and the world had [email protected] www.amazon.co.uk www.rodopi.nl logical matters were never really in the hands finally been made to measure. c 10 london review of books 30 august 2012 tephen Spender was a visitor to Perhaps the most welcome entry in the the city of Hamburg both before the On the Feast of Stephen book is the celebrated riff about being cheer- Swar and after, when he played a part ed for breaking wind in the street (after hours in the work of occupation and recovery. He of Wagner): ‘Then a self-important thought was well on his way to being the noted ex- Karl Miller came in my mind. Supposing that they knew communist poet, whose lyricism of the left this old man walking along Long Acre and spoke up in praise of pylons and the land- New Selected Journals, 1939-95 farting was Stephen Spender– what would ing aeroplane, gliding over the suburbs, by Stephen Spender, edited by Lara Feigel and John Sutherland. they think?’ Leavis, he reckoned, would not ‘more beautiful and soft than any moth’. It Faber, 792 pp., £45, July, 978 0 571 23757 9 have been amused. This is not the utterance was in shattered Hamburg that I reviewed, of the goose or juggins seen in him, on in the uniform of a soldier and in a studio lay on talk about poets and poetry, while the don’t you think?’ Elsewhere again, we learn this as on other oc casions, by certain of of the British Forces Network, his auto- stress here is on his personal life.† He hated that Auden may have envied him his large his peers. They are missing the point of biography of 1951, World within World. The the fact that he had made his wife unhappy, penis. ‘Did I really like Wystan?’ he was cap - its self-parody, and the thought that such British Army of the Rhine was told of my ‘due to my being what I am’. He is referring able of asking himself, in the course of thoughts are distinctively human. He is also enthusiasm for it. I practically stood to at- to passionate friendships with men – with absorbing evocations of his ‘witch- doctor’ making a joke. tention at the microphone. the novelist Reynolds Price and with Bryan alter ego, in Ian Hamilton’s designation. In the field of literary judgment, Spender I went off to Cambridge, to study with Obst, a zoologist who died of Aids in 1991, Auden and Connolly are targets for the hard- can now and then outdo Auden, whose crit- F.R. Leavis, who let few days pass without and was buried to the sound of birdsong. est knocks in the book. ical or speculative prose is, to my mind, one enlarging on the badness of Stephen Spend - Stephen’s putative conversion to heterosex- The stories come in various sizes. Vir- of the false lights of the postwar period. er. After prolonged exposure to the stir of uality is treated here as a happy, if also un- ginia Woolf called Isaiah Berlin a ‘violent He cared for MacNeice, whose comparative anti-Spender sentiment in more general circ- happy myth. His accounts of intermittent Jew’ (I throw in a further story here, to the neglect is another false light, while not ulation, I came to like him, in absentia, as meetings with Obst are well judged and mov - effect that at his funeral or synagogue mem - responding to Day Lewis. When the time did the many others, I imagine, who stayed ing. The editors were right to include them. orial service an earwitness friend of mine came, he saw the point of Ted Hughes and with the intriguing literary eminence kind- Natasha, who died just before the book ap- heard two old Oxford panjandrums agree Thom Gunn, for all the latter’s youthful ly characterised, eventually, in John Suther- peared, did not want this. that the service had gone well – ‘but what scorn. Seamus Heaney he describes as ‘a man land’s biography.* Nevertheless, a suspic ion The edition goes, then, for the personal was all that Jewish stuff about?’). Then of immense good will’ who ‘wrote poems persisted. Sharp little verses – by Thom Gunn and anecdotal, and this, too, seems in gen- again, there is the lecture at which a student which are models of what we might call and John Coleman – were flighted; and Ian eral the right choice. The editors have fol- is vexed to find that the speaker will not be the late Georgian Yeatsian Irish peasant’. Hamilton capped it all with a brilliant and lowed the early versions of the text, and Edmund Spenser. In 1975 he writes: ‘One Here is the sentence of a poet who felt damaging New Yorker profile. Stephen grew have kept his idiosyncrasies of spelling and day I had a slight “affair” with Dick which himself to be a modernist and who on an- used to being abused. He abused himself. punctuation. This is not without its snags. was compounded of passion and lust on other occasion wrote about workers on the He could seem generous and long-suffering, Whose mistakes are we witnessing? ‘In- both sides, and was not in the least serious.’ land: but could hardlybe blamed for resenting aninity’? Did being in the same room as This paid-on-both-sides short story has been The peasant relapses to a stumbling tune a few of the more vocal of the new gener- Lukács give a feeling ‘almost of exultation’, supplemented by hearsay, which has a be- Following the donkey’s bray. ation of critics, as figures of speech attest. or exaltation? ‘A bit disinterested but very nighted Stephen struggling across a dark In 1980, he was interviewed by Hamilton: friendly’? Did Leavis’s father sell prams, as moor, spying a light in a cottage window Knowing and not knowing your way is a ‘hatchet-faced, looking as though cast for he heard from a sore I.A. Richards? We al- and being greeted at the door by none other concern of the diaries. It was said of Spend - the role of Third Murderer in a performance ways thought it was pianos. than Dick Crossman. er that he never seemed to know where of Macbeth’. WhenI went to see him in hosp- Leavis would say that Spender’s writings ital at this point, I stepped forward as a gave him the sense of a physical struggle Fourth Murderer: ‘wearing a great coat with to get the words on the page. The same “Thee lifliffeeof Cage is meticulously told” leather lapels, which made him look like a has been said of Leavis and of many others. —NNeewwY YoYorker rather gloomy hussar of some Death Watch But Stephen described the struggle. ‘Words Begin Again Regiment’. seem to break in my mind like sticks when A Biograaapphy of John Cage I went to see him because I was becom- I put them down on paper. I cannot see Kenneth Silverman ing a friend of his and of his wife Natasha. how to spell some of them.’ And yet he Paper 978-0-8101-2830-9 $24.95 / £22.50 He and I taught together at University Col- managed nearly a million words of diary, “Hart shines as a naattural lege London in the 1970s. These personal a quarter of which were chosen for this teacher” —Librarryy JJoournal allusions may savour of the excessive. Let edition. me plead that they serve as an introduction The feast of Stephen isn’t always deep The Living Moment to the uncertainties and inconsistencies of and crisp and even; it has its slips and pit- Modernism in a Broken WWoorl Jeffffrrey Har his experience of life, to his changing fort- falls. But these diaries are distinctly a feast, Paapper 978-0-8101-2821-7 $24.95 / £22.5 unes, contrasting reputations, to the human one which owes much to the stories, told of interest and eccentric charm of Stephen. Spender, by Spender and by others. Take “The new KKiittee Runner ” —MMarie Claire Of the Stephen who would worry whether the satirical extravaganza which commem- artists could be saints. Those who have orates a luncheon (the book is packed with The Lemon Grove A Novel seen a saint in him, as in Eliot, might luncheons) in honour of a departing John Ali Hosseini draw the line at most of the artists feat- Lehmann. ‘With infinite gravity’, Eliot said Paper 978-0-8101-2829-3 $18.95 / £16.50 ured in his diaries. He counted himself the that he shared three occupations – or should luckiest of his writer companions, happy in “Onee of the leadingpg poet he say professions? – with John Lehmann: as of her ggeneration, [whichis his personal life, ‘made up by Natasha, poet, businessman and publisher. He was quite sure that, whatever had happened – and a gratifffyying development” Matthew, Lizzie – by all of these’. This —TTiimes Literrarryy Suuppppplement might sound faintly protesting. It also he didn’t have any air of knowing in particular sounds like the persuasive voice of a family what had happened – that John would carry on with one of these. Olive member. Poem A. E. Stalling This new edition of his diaries, 1939 to John ‘then got up and was more banal than Paper 978-0-8101-5226-7 $16.95 / £15. 1995, has abundant evidence of his conflict- his introducers’. As an editor, he was ing qualities, and is enough to suggest that haunted by titles, stories and poems, which ““AAvA vividlyy wriitten, aavvidly researched diaries are his forte, or best vein. Various se- came flooding in on him, haunted by ideas for biographyh ” —WWaashington Post lections from them have already been pub- articles and poems suggested to him. He also lished, and he himself did the choosing of had to send out a great many rejection slips, American Radical extracts for the edition of 1985: the stress by the consciousness of which he was haunt- The Liffee and Times of I. FF.. Stone ed also. (We all shuddered. Cyril putting on D. D. Guttenplan Paapper 978-0-8101-2831-6 $21.95 / £19.95 an expression as though he were stuffed with * Stephen Spender: The Authorised Biography was re- John’s rejection slips.) viewed by Stefan Collini in the LRB of 22 July NorthwesternNorthwestern University Press The passage comes close to calling the grave 2004. InIn thethe U.S.:UU..S.: www.nupress.northwestern.eduwwww..nupres s.northhwwest er n.e du † Journals 1939-83 were reviewed by Frank Ker- Eliot banal. Cyril Connolly elsewhere invites InIn Europe:Europe: wwww.eurospanbookstore.comwww..eurospanbookstore.com mode in the LRB of 5 December 1985. Stephen to ‘look at me in my bath. Hot stuff, 11 london review of books 30 august 2012 he was going but always seemed to know, no doubt have been slighted too, had they Lara Feigel’s introduction deals well with posterity any more, but about what his that cunning goose, the shortest way to get been accessible earlier: they are his master- Stephen Spender’s troubles and struggles, death would mean for his wife and children. there. Meanwhile his son was credited with piece. Both men were hero-worshippers who which it would be harsh to make light of It takes confidence to try to grasp, as he a like skill by his father: ‘Matthew always sought fathers in the great, with Auden a – with what became of his art and with appears to have done in his last years, what seems not to know his way and then sur- less considerate and no less acerbic parent what became of his heart, as it grew old. had gone wrong with his life, and right prises you by knowing it.’ The father came than Johnson. He took to worrying, she relates, not about with it. c 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 remember- Two Poems by Bill Manhire ed. 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 Old Man Puzzled by His New Pyjamas failed or succeeded. What I blame myself for in a sense is that I didn’t have enough fail- I am the baby who sleeps in the drawer. ures – but that I so often put aside the things I most deeply wanted to do – the things that Blue yesterday, and blue before – were my own thing from inside myself – and and suddenly all these stripes. did things which were proposed from the outside.

The book is brave in causing you to feel that these really were his misgivings, and The Question Poem it was brave of him to state them and to face them. Was there a city here? He can’t have been helped by belonging to a Vanity Fair (the name spoke to him via a We were sitting with friends. It was a sunny day. title of the time) with quite so many cruel We were boasting about the local coffee. and spiteful people, to offset some excel- Strange self-congratulations, flat whites. lent friends. The word was that other peo- These were friends we had only recently ple were boring or vulgar. Virginia Woolf found our way back to. For a long time threatened that he might one day be boring. we were far apart. Stephen felt that it should be considered an honour to be insulted by the truly great: Did you all survive? ‘That’s the line we have to take,’ replied Isaiah Berlin. On that first day of school, I mostly remember At the zenith of vulgarity-detection is being terrified: the dark interior, the children in rows Diana Duff-Cooper, who disdained ‘that com- at their separate desks, and I was now to be one of them. mon word “common”’ (a postwar upper-class In a field by the school, there were bales of hay. catchphrase), and for whom the scientist I remember inkwells. Julian Huxley was vulgar. At a certain party That was perhaps a harder day. punishment was meted out by Evelyn Waugh. ‘I adored Evelyn but he had a very unkind Did you hear the bells ringing? side to him. He would keep on tormenting Julian Huxley. Though he was perfectly I keep trying to remember. aware he was head of Unesco, he insisted Somehow I learned to write my way round things. on treating him as though he were still The teacher made circles on the blackboard head of the zoo. “How are the giraffes?” and none of us said a word. Rubble, he kept on asking.’ then revelation: inside, we were stumbling. Two of the worst observations cited in And at the end of the day we all went home. the diaries relate to foreign writers, come to Britain. ‘Too bad that Mr Brodsky is try- Did you all survive? ing to push into the scene,’ meaning the refugee poet and the London literary scene, We will never sit in such places again. where, in another part of the wood, Auden A father chasing his small daughter, took pleasure in telling Robert Lowell, with both of them laughing. his history of mental illness: ‘Gentlemen The girl, a toddler, was calling out, No, no, Matilda! don’t go mad.’ This is the scene which Perhaps she knew the song from somewhere was and may still be regarded as the post- but I think that must have been her name. Bloomsbury 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 jour- nals, unknown till fairly recently, would 12 london review of books 30 august 2012