United States - Essays 1952-1992 by Gore Vidal.

I remember watching Gore Vidal on television, usually on one of those talk shows he seems to view with contempt. He seemed to be a living opinion. Switch him on and opinions stream out. But usually those opinions, though often partisan and colourfully stated, we’re always pertinent, well-informed and incisive, despite the fact that, verbally at least, he tended to play the Gore Verbose, often using five words where one would do. But what words they were.

In print, he is much more economical with language, and often delivers a point like a poniard stab. Succinct perhaps is a strange word to describe a book that runs just short of 1300 pages and around 600,000 words. But this is a collection of essays, criticisms and occasional pieces spanning forty years, 114 of them, loosely bound into three sections - State of The Art, State of the Union, and State of Being. Literary criticism forms the bulk of the material, with the politics the author became famous for largely intruding as asides and comments. There is very little here on the process of his own writing, so this is far from autobiography. When he does engage with his own work, it is often to answer criticism of what he wrote. In these instances, he does not pull the punches he throws.

The wit is certainly there, as are many of the super egos of US politics, media and literature, not to mention a sprinkling from Hollywood. But here Gore Vidal is mainly analysing the written word, both from his contemporaries and from the past. Here is my own selection of that wit.

On criticism. The best a serious analyst (of a novel) can hope to do is comment intelligibly from his vantage point in time on the way a work appears to him in a contemporary, a comparative, or historical light. 

On changing taste. The bad movies we made twenty years ago are now regarded in altogether too many circles as important aspects of what the new illiterates want to believe is the only significant art form of the twentieth century.

On education and Reagan. Obviously, there is a great deal wrong with our educational system, as President Reagan recently, and rather gratuitously, noted. After all, an educated electorate would not have elected him president.

On stars. In England, after Guelph-Pooters and that con-man for all seasons, Churchill, Bloomsbury is the most popular continuing saga for serious readers.

On Ford Madox Ford. Certainly, Ford never lied deliberately in order to harm others, as did Truman Capote, or to make himself appear brave and strong and true as did Hemingway, whose own lying finally became a sort of art-form by the time he got round to settling his betters’ hash in A Moveable Feast. Ford’s essential difference was the fact that he was all along what he imagined himself to be that latter day unicorn, a gentleman.

On attitudes. Today’s reader wants to look at himself, to find out who he is, with an occasional glimpse of his next-door neighbor.

On literacy. Having explained that rulers never wanted general literacy, on the grounds that it might provoke ideas of revolution. The more you read, the more you act. In fact, the French - who read and theorise the most - became so addicted to political experiment that in the two centuries sine our own rather drab revolution they have exuberantly produced one Directory, one Consulate, two empires, three restorations of the monarchy, and five republics. That’ what happens when you take writing too seriously. Happily, Americans have never liked reading all that much. Politically ignorant, we keep sputtering along in our old Model T, looking wistfully every four years for a good mechanic.

On empire. Historians often look to the Roman Empire to find analogies with the United States. They flatter us. We do not live under the Pax Americana, but the Pax Frigida. I should not look to Rome for comparison but rather to the Most Serene Venetian Republic, a pedestrian state devoted to wealth, comfort, trade, and keeping the peace, especially after inheriting the wreck of the Byzantine Empire, as we have inherited the wreck of the British Empire.

On ornithologists. To a man, ornithologists are tall, slender, and bearded so that they can stand motionless for hours, imitating kindly trees, as they watch for birds.

On a Moscow hotel. We had all met at the Rossya Hotel in Moscow. According to the Russians, it is the largest hotel in the world. Whether or not this is true, the Rossy’s charm is not unlike that of New York’s Attica Prison.

I confess I once stayed in The Rossya, and for more than one night. It was colossal and was demolished because its unimaginative glassed-in concrete box kept intruding into pictures of Red Square, Basil’s and the Kremlin. I was told not only which room to use, but also which entrance, with the qualification that “it might be difficult” if we use any of the other doors. Red rag to a bull… Yes, we accessed the place via one of those other entrances and we found that inside the place was a veritable rabbit warren, with floors in one part of the building not matching floors elsewhere. We got so lost that we had to find our way back outside and approach our room from our usual entrance.

It is an image that informs a review of this book, in that taken as a whole, it is a very long, arduous and at times repetitive read. I am sure that the publishers and certainly the author wanted these pieces to be read singly, and that way the ideas remain fresh.

Overall, we are reminded that the standard of debate, both political and literary, has declined since Gore Vidal left us these superb essays.

Shelley by Jon Addington Symonds

Consider these elements. A young, rich and gifted man is obsessed with revolutionary idealism. He attends prestigious schools and the most prestigious university but is expelled from the latter because of his outrageous outspoken views, opinions he chose to publish in pamphlets. He is disowned by his family, runs away with his girlfriend, gets into drugs and devote his time to writing poetry that no one else professes to understand. He gets bored with his wife, has a fling with a teenager and sets off with her to travel, apparently none too troubled by leaving his wife and children to their own devices. Soon afterwards, his estranged wife kills herself. He takes more drugs, regularly, wanders around on his travels with his new wife, gets in with a heavy crowd of fellow travellers, falls foul of authority and does stupid things.

He continues to write, but generally has to publish his work at his own expense, because others still find it baffling. He seems to be obsessed with a particular pastime, a practice that, for him, is positively dangerous and is eventually killed on an escapade where he pursues this risky activity, has an accident and dies, aged very young. His friends recover his body and they ritually burn it, but the heart seems to survive its roasting and is retrieved.

This is no 1960s hippie, no millennial millionaire millionaire’s misguided, spoilt son. This is Percy Bysshe Shelly, the English poet, in the first two decades of the 19th century. And reading J.A. Symond’s 1878 biography, with its copious quotes from the Romantic poet’s work, we view a portrait of the artist as a young man. He stayed forever the young man because he died well before he ever became old. But he was also young because he never seemed to shake off the infant’s need for attention, for the kind of special treatment that demanded other’s accommodate his whims whilst he, himself, did not seem to notice that others might need some of the same.  He was the artist because his entire life seems to have been a pursuit to express a platonic essence of life and experience, a life he seemed to reject, or at least take for granted, an experience he clouded with narcotics.

A 21st-century visit to Percy Bysshe Shelley‘s biography might persuade the reader to reject the whole as merely the pranks of a headstrong, spoiled sick boy, who was also rich boy. But this 19th century biography offers a more contemporary view of this great life than one clouded by more recent assumptions or interpretations about the individual and his era. It enables us to view Shelley’s undoubted genius more in the context of how it was received in its own time and, though it cannot be the last word on the great poet, it can offer interesting and arresting perspectives.

What is doubly interesting about this work is that it’s author, John Addington Symonds, was himself a rebel in his own time, apart from society because of his homosexuality. And strangely, the author was buried in Rome, not far from the grave where Shelley’s ashes were interred. Poetry, it seems, is alive and well.

The Life of Lord Byron by John Galt

John Galt published his Life of Lord Byron in 1830, just six years after the poet's death in Missolonghi, in what is now modern Greece and then was part of the Ottoman Empire. Byron had been legging it around the Mediterranean for a number of years, his entourage significantly greater than a backpack. Modern reads will need to readjust their ideas of travel when they read details of the veritable caravan that accompanied the Good Lord and will then immediately understand why it was that everywhere he went he was immediately able to access elite society. In modern day terms, this is like a dot-com-owning billionaire moving into the local estate that in feudal times used to own the locality. His presence, it seemed, demanded attention. Having said that, he was always short of money.

Apart from occasional vocabulary that we no longer recognise, John Galt's work reads easily, its tenor remarkably modern, except in matters of race and religion, where a modern interpretation might just confuse. It is important to understand the assumptions of these people in order to understand their work. Yes, Wagner was anti-Semitic, but wasn't everyone else at the time? Rejecting his work on that basis would lead to an equal rejection of other people and institutions that shared the same beliefs, which would automatically include anything to do with Christianity and most writers. Two centuries ago, people did not see the world in the same light and it is through their eyes, not ours, that their work must be seen.

Paradoxically, the Lord Byron was perceived as a Liberal which, at the time, must have placed him in sympathy with at least some of the aims of the French Revolution. This is interesting, given his title, but understandable given his relative penury. He supported the Luddites in Britain, but his domestic political life in the House of Lords was not easy and he was not chosen or perhaps suited for a life in public affairs. His identification with liberal politics is exemplified in this passage from Galt, though it must be noted that at the time liberalism did not extend far into the realm of gender relationships (a cicisbeo is a lover, by the way).

“but young Italian women are not satisfied with good old men, and the venerable Count did not object to her availing herself of the privileges of her country in selecting a cicisbeo; an Italian would have made it quite agreeable: indeed, for some time he winked at our intimacy, but at length made an exception against me, as a foreigner, a heretic, an Englishman, and, what was worse than all, a Liberal.”

His liberalism did extend to the support of liberation movements, however, particularly those in Greece, where still today he is seen by some as a national hero. That is not to say that he was particularly fond of the people.

 “Do you know,” said he to the doctor, “I am nearly reconciled to St Paul; for he says there is no difference between the Jews and the Greeks, and I am exactly of the same opinion, for the character of both is equally vile.”

The significance of the above reference to Wagner's anti-Semitism now becomes clear. Perhaps we ought to reject much of Romantic poetry from the canon if we deny Wagner a place. What would be left? Answer – very little...

So what was it that Byron saw worthy of struggle and sacrifice in liberating people for whom he had little respect? The key, which becomes clearer as Galt's biography progresses, is that Byron, like other Romantics, possessed an internal motivation, a personal interpretation whose vivid emotion perhaps raised a screen that was capable of obscuring, even contradicting experience. His response to reality, it seems, is not directly born of the real, but of an idealised knowledge, perhaps pre-formed via education, birth-right and culture, that was more important, at least for the poet, than hard evidence, which could be dismissed or ignored. Galt sums up the process thus.

“that is another and a strong proof too, of what I have been endeavouring to show, that the power of the poet consisted in giving vent to his own feelings, and not, like his great brethren, or even his less, in the invention of situations or of appropriate sentiments”

The author describes how Byron was ambivalent towards the reality of Classical sites, not really showing much interest in the archaeology or the history. Perhaps, via his English public school education, he was au fait with the detail all along and so did not need to absorb direct experience. Perhaps the assumptions of his social class and culture did not admit contradiction of an already internalised ideal that was simply more important than any concrete reality.

Galt's account of Byron's life, however, seems to lack evidence of the hours that the poet devoted to writing. Given that he died in his mid-thirties, spent eight years on the road and did fifteen years in the House of Lords and several years in education, one would expect to find him at work with pen and paper much of the rest of the time. But Galt offers little evidence of this, preferring to concentrate on the travels, themselves, the people he met and the consequences of the complete breakdown in his family and marital relations. But Galt does quote extensively from the poems which, once we absorb the author's analysis that the work is rarely descriptive of anything but the poet's own emotional state, become distinct statements of personality. One feels that Lord Byron was not prone to great self-analysis or soul-searching. He had his opinions, and those were made from granite.

He did campaign for Greece's independence and he did much to achieve what the Greek people wanted at the time. But one feels that for Byron he was working towards the re-establishment of a Classical ideal, a quintessence of democracy that existed longer in school textbooks than it did in ancient Greece. Perhaps "liberal" is too strong a word for Byron... Perhaps "libertarian" would be closer to the modern equivalent. He was for individual freedom, what he saw as the natural order and more democracy, though this probably did not include either women or the lower orders.

How far we have progressed in the last two hundred years can be judged by the fact that Byron secured both personal fame and prestige of office in his own time with certain personal characteristics. He went to public school and Oxbridge, studied ancient Greek, achieved political status and public fame while being largely ignorant of the scientific advances of his day, was a libertarian and had distinct failures in both personal and familial relationships. Couldn't happen now, could it?

Time Regained by Marcel Proust

All we have is the present. Our future, if it might exist, is a mere proposition of whose eventual reality none of us can be sure, may only be imagined, until it arrives, when it becomes the present. Then, like every present, it instantly passes us by into our past, a fragile, self-interested fiction we are condemned to recreate, to reimagine via a memory capable of invention. All experience thus becomes malleable, capable of being reshaped to fit whatever mould into which we might desire to contain it. Though we might often want to deny the tangibility of the present, its reality still pains the toe that kicks the stone, whereas memory anaesthetises time remembered and allows any surgical intervention to create whatever painless past we desire.

After six volumes of re-creating the past in “A la recherche de temps perdu”, Marcel Proust entitled the last work in the series, at least in English, “Time Regained”. It is worth remembering, however, that a literal translation of Proust’s series title refers to ‘lost time’, experience possibly mislaid, or even wasted in a continuing past. But that time can indeed be regained, reimagined, recreated, and it takes a person with a mission to carry out the threat, a mission that itself becomes a new present, which can be transformative. I was no longer indifferent when I returned from Rivebelle; I felt myself enlarged by this work I bore within me (like something precious and fragile, not belonging to me, which had been confided to my care and which I wanted to hand over intact to those for whom it was destined). And to think that when, presently, I returned home, an accident would suffice to destroy my body and that my lifeless mind would have for ever lost the ideas it now contained and anxiously preserved within its shaky frame before it had time to place them in safety within the covers of a book. Now, knowing myself the bearer of such a work, an accident which might cost my life was more to be dreaded, was indeed (by the measure in which this work seemed to me indispensable and permanent) absurd, when contrasted with my wish, with my vital urge, but not less probable on that account since accidents due to material causes can take place at the very moment when an opposing will, which they unknowingly annihilate, renders them monstrous, like the ordinary accident of knocking over a water-jug placed too near the edge of a table and thus disturbing a sleeping friend one acutely desires not to waken. And, while accidents can happen, the creation of several thousand pages of recreated past cannot be achieved by accident, but only in the doing, the regular application of re-creation in whatever present remains.

And, after seven volumes of this life recreated, a reader is left to marvel at how small it was, how insignificant these important people eventually became and how small a universe they themselves imagined, let alone inhabited. To describe the procession of attitudes as petty might be ascribing greater consequence than it deserves. And, for all their airs and graces, for all their wealth, property and influence, these upper-class subjects were most at home when indulging their personal predilections in their eternal present, tastes that were sometimes as mundane as eating a snack and at other times distinctly more individual, though no more significant.

Take for example, the war memories of Mme. Verdurin. On the morning the papers headlined the sinking of the Lusitania, she clearly had her own enduring priorities. …they thought about those hecatombs of annihilated regiments, of engulfed seafarers, but an inverse operation multiplies to such a degree what concerns our welfare and divides by such a formidable figure what does not concern it, that the death of millions of unknown people hardly affects us more unpleasantly than a draught. Mme Verdurin, who suffered from headaches on account of being unable to get croissants to dip into her coffee, had obtained an order from Cottard which enabled her to have them made in the restaurant mentioned earlier. It had been almost as difficult to procure this order from the authorities as the nomination of a general. She started her first croissant again on the morning the papers announced the wreck of the Lusitania. Dipping it into her coffee, she arranged her newspaper so that it would stay open without her having to deprive her other hand of its function of dipping, and exclaimed with horror, "How awful! It's more frightful than the most terrible tragedies." But those drowning people must have seemed to her reduced a thousand-fold, for, while she indulged in these saddening reflections, she was filling her mouth and the expression on her face, induced, one supposes, by the savour of the croissant, precious remedy for her headache, was rather that of placid satisfaction.

And what about the moral rectitude (no pun intended) of these pillars of society? Always ready to cite themselves as examples of behaviour in order to enlighten the labouring, and thus less than worthy classes, sometimes these elite, privileged classes plumbed the depths of their own depravity whilst no doubt simultaneously passing moral judgment on the tastes of those below them. Aberrations are like passions which a morbid strain has overlaid, yet, in the craziest of them love can still be recognised. M. de Charlus' insistence that the chains which bound his feet and hands should be of attested strength, his demand to be tried at the bar of justice and, from what Jupien told me, for ferocious accessories there was great difficulty in obtaining even from sailors (the punishment they used to inflict having been abolished even where the discipline is strictest, on ship-board), at the base of all this there was M. de Charlus' constant dream of virility proved, if need be, by brutal acts and all the illumination the reflections of which within himself though to us invisible, he projected on judicial and feudal tortures which embellished an imagination coloured by the Middle Ages. This sentiment was in his mind each time he said to Jupien: "There won't be any alarm this evening anyhow, for I can already see myself reduced to ashes by the fire of Heaven like an inhabitant of Sodom," and he affected to be frightened of the Gothas not because he really had the smallest fear of them but to have a pretext the moment the sirens sounded of dashing into the shelter of the Metropolitain, where he hoped to get a thrill from midnight frictions associated in his mind with vague dreams of prostrations and subterranean dungeons in the Middle Ages. Finally his desire to be chained and beaten revealed, with all its ugliness, a dream as poetic as the desire of others to go to Venice or to keep dancing girls. And M. de Charlus held so much to the illusion of reality which this dream gave him that Jupien was compelled to sell the wooden bed which was in room No. 43, and replace it by one of iron which went better with the chains.

But perhaps we should not judge, merely exist in an eternal present, free from recollection, reinterpretation and, of course, from comparison. A work in which there are theories is like an object upon which the price is marked. Further, this last only expresses a value which, in literature, is diminished by logical reasoning. We reason, that is, our mind wanders, each time our courage fails to force us to pursue an intuition through all the successive stages which end in its fixation, in the expression of its own reality. The reality that must be expressed resides, I now realised, not in the appearance of the subject but in the degree of penetration of that intuition to a depth where that appearance matters little, as symbolised by the sound of the spoon upon the plate, the stiffness of the table-napkin, which were more precious for my spiritual renewal than many humanitarian, patriotic, international conversations. More style, I had heard said in those days, more literature of life. One can imagine how many of M. de Norpois' simple theories "against flute-players" had flowered again since the war. For all those who, lacking artistic sensibility, that is, submission to the reality within, may be equipped with the faculty of reasoning for ever about art, and even were they diplomatists or financiers associated with the "realities" of the present into the bargain, they will readily believe that literature is a sort of intellectual game which is destined to be eliminated more and more in the future. Some of them wanted the novel to be a sort of cinematographic procession. This conception was absurd. Nothing removes us further from the reality we perceive within ourselves than such a cinematographic vision.

But perhaps, in our age of the demonstrable, the provable, the reproducible, the cinematographic vision provided by a photographic memory might just be an advantage, especially when our memory or perhaps our understanding plays tricks. The library which I should thus collect would have a greater value still, for the books I read formerly at Combray, at Venice, enriched now by memory with spacious illuminations representing the church of Saint-Hilaire, the gondola moored at the foot of San Giorgio Maggiore on the Grand Canal incrusted with flashing sapphires, would have become worthy of those medallioned scrolls and historic bibles which the collector never opens in order to read the text but only to be again enchanted by the colours with which some competitor of Fouquet has embellished them and which constitute all the value of the work. Does anyone care if San Giorgio Maggiore is not actually where the author remembers it? Perhaps, we may presume, that he is merely confusing it with Santa Maria della Salute, whose whiteness and elegance ought to carry the attachment “maggiore” in proportion to the impression it makes upon a visitor’s memory. And, in an age of mass consumption and marketing, do any of us scoff at the use of “the greatest”, “the best” or “five star” when it is habitually associated with the mundane mass-produced products of Capitalism? And precisely when was the last time you heard a new pop singer described as “original”, and was such a label accurate? Clearly, there is room for fiction in the present, and, because we are all eventually flawed, what can be wrong with inaccuracy in memory? The impression was received as expressed and it is the indefinable emotion that was real, not the name of the thing that provoked it. But from the moment that works of art are judged by reasoning, nothing is stable or certain, one can prove anything one likes. Whereas the reality of genius is a benefaction, an acquisition for the world at large, the presence of which must first be identified beneath the more obvious modes of thought and style, criticism stops at this point and assesses writers by the form instead of the matter. It consecrates as a prophet a writer who, while expressing in arrogant terms his contempt for the school which preceded him, brings no new message. This constant aberration of criticism has reached a point where a writer would almost prefer to be judged by the general public (were it not that it is incapable of understanding the researches an artist has been attempting in a sphere unknown to it). And here Proust yearns for the kind of judgment that can only be gleaned from sales figures, the kind of evaluation that makes burger and beans washed down with carbon dioxide pressurised burnt sugar solution apparently the ideal food. The publicist involuntarily associates the rascals he has castigated with his own celebrity… but there is a difference between a memory tricked and a deliberate attempt to falsify, to offer cliché to apparently eager market. 

But not to judge would excise the reality of memory and with it the raison d’etre of the writer. He (for this author is a “he”) who pontificates from distance, both physical and temporal, imposes possibly invented opinion on those he cannot wait to judge. And, from the safety of temporal distance, that judgment is often driven by jealousy. Jealousy is a good recruiting sergeant who, when there is an empty space in our picture, goes and finds the girl we want in the street. She may not be pretty at first, but she soon fills the blank and becomes so when we get jealous of her. But whatever the motive for changing how we view our recollections, the act of trying to communicate them can lead to a process of clarification, albeit via avenues where we deliberately embellish them.  It is uncertain whether in the creation of a literary work the imagination and the sensibility are not interchangeable and whether the second, without disadvantage, cannot be substituted for the first just as people whose stomach is incapable of digesting entrust this function to their intestines. An innately sensitive man who has no imagination could, nevertheless write admirable novels. The suffering caused him by others and the conflict provoked by his efforts to protect himself against them, such experiences interpreted by the intelligence might provide material for a book as beautiful as if it were imagined and invented and as objective, as startling and unexpected as the author's imaginative fancy would have been, had he been happy and free from persecution. The stupidest people unconsciously express their feelings by their gestures and their remarks and thus demonstrate laws they are unaware of which the artist brings to light.

But it might even be the present that is defective. We encounter people we once knew, whom we have fixed in our memory with particular and recognisable attributes. Then years pass and we meet again. We recognise them, but at the same time they are transformed by age into something that contradicts the reality our memory has fixed. It’s a two-way process. As I went near to him, he said with a voice I well remembered: "What a joy for me after so many years!" but what a surprise for me! His voice seemed to be proceeding from a perfected phonograph for though it was that of my friend, it issued from a great greyish man whom I did not know and the voice of my old comrade seemed to have been housed in this fat old fellow by means of a mechanical trick. Yet I knew that it was he, the person who introduced us after all that time not being the kind to play pranks. He declared that I had not changed by which I grasped that he did not think he had. Then I looked at him again and except that he had got so fat, he had kept a good deal of his former personality.

Time passes, people pass away, become part of the past, a past that continues. The living can then say what they really thought all along, without ever previously having the courage to come clean, a state they probably never did, nor ever will attain. Hearing that Mme d'Arpajon was really dead, the old maid cast an alarmed glance at her mother fearing that the news of the death of one of her contemporaries might be a shock to her; she imagined in anticipation people alluding to her own mother's death by explaining that "she died as the result of a shock through the death of Mme d'Arpajon." But on the contrary, her mother's expression was that of having won a competition against formidable rivals whenever anyone of her own age passed away. Their death was her only means of being agreeably conscious of her own existence. The old maid, aware that her mother had not seemed sorry to say that Mme d'Arpajon was a recluse in those dwellings from which the aged and tired seldom emerge, noticed that she was still less upset to hear that the Marquise had entered that ultimate abode from which no one returns. This affirmation of her mother's indifference aroused the caustic wit of the old maid. And, later on, to amuse her friends, she gave a humorous imitation of the lively fashion with which her mother rubbed her hands as she said: "Goodness me, so that poor Mme d'Arpajon is dead." She thus pleased even those who did not need death to make them glad they were alive. For every death is a simplification of life for the survivors; it relieves them of being grateful and of being obliged to make visits.

And such caustic observation is not surprising, since the author of these judgments suffered permanent disability, illness, relative disadvantage in the competition of life that was conjured by these recreations from those with whom he mixed. And his revenge was to remember, to describe, perhaps to invent. Eventually he would hold the pen and write, an activity of which no-one thought him capable. Thus he created his own past in an evolving present which may become our own as we share his gift.

Against Interpretation by Susan Sontag

 

Against Interpretation by Susan Sontag was first published in 1961. It is hard in 2020, to accept that this was almost 60 years ago, especially since many of the works reviewed in this volume of criticism, containing essays as late as 1966, would probably not make it into the mainstream today. If - and if must be repeated for emphasis - if the objects of her criticism in the 1960s were manifestations of the current mainstream in the arts, then 60 years ago, at least to this reader, then contemporary theatre, film and art of today seem much more conventional, even conservative. No-one now, it seems, takes risks.

There are names that remain familiar in Susan Sontag’s critiques. We have a Genet, Sartre, Camus, Ionesco, Godard, Brooke, Arthur Miller, but there are many others who would now claim only anonymity. But what is truly interesting is how reluctant Susan Sontag is even to mention trends from popular culture, the term I personally regard as a misnomer.

Indeed, the essays are, by contemporary standards, elitist. Ironic, isn’t it, that they come from the decade which became notorious for challenging elite status? Perhaps we forget that an element of 1960s culture was to invade elite structures, to cram them with experience it would find both challenging and uncomfortable. Susan Sontag herself obliquely refers to this attempt at change by noting “…the American theater is ruled by an extraordinary, irrepressible zest for intellectual simplification. Every idea is reduced to cliché, and the function of cliché is to castrate an idea.” The implication is that much needed change via infiltration was already happening. One wonders what her opinion might be today.

As already stated, these essays on criticism unashamedly intellectual. There is not a hint that they also want to address popular themes in popular language or on its own terms. Susan Sontag does address popular culture, but sometimes, as in her analysis of science fiction movie scenarios, to record her belief that it relies on the formulaic. She was not alone in casting an apparently academic eye over mass market culture. At the same time in Britain, we had Kenneth Tynan and Bernard Levin, both young Mavericks in their way, but also both securely establishment figures, despite Tynan’s enduring celebrity drawn from his use of the f-word on a live television chat show. And Bernard Levin, for those who care to remember, offered a satirical and critical monologue late on Saturday nights on That Was The Week That Was, the satirical revue populated by largely upper-class intellectuals who would later become superstars and pillars of the establishment. This was a fate not to befall Susan Sontag and some of her ideas still sound contemporary.

How about this as a plea to writers that they should imagine a status other than Godly? “The immediate cozy recognition that the lifelike in most novels induces is, and should be, suspect… I wholeheartedly sympathize with what she objects to in the old fashion novel. Vanity Fair and Buddenbrooks, when I read them recently, however marvelous they still seemed, also made me wince. I could not stand the omnipotent author showing me that’s how life is, making me compassionate and tearful, with his obstreperous irony, his confidential air of perfectly knowing his characters and leading me, the reader, to feel that I knew them too. I no longer trust novels which fully satisfy my passion to understand.” How many subsequent writers took note of this advice? My suggestion is a few, but none of them popular.

At the heart of Susan Sontag’s ideas about art, theatre, literature and criticism is the need for audiences to be open to challenge. She writes “Hence, too, the peculiar dependence of a work of art, however expressive, upon the cooperation of the person having the experience, for one may see what is ‘said’ but remain unmoved, either through dullness or distraction. Art is seduction, not rape. A work of art possesses a type of experience designed to manifest the quality of imperiousness. But art cannot seduce without the complicity of the experiencing subject.” Perhaps the 60 years that intervened have conspired to reduce this willingness to tolerate the unexpected? Or perhaps nothing has changed. Audiences were never very good at it.

In the Modern Classics edition of her work, Susan Sontag had the opportunity, some 30 years after publication, to offer her own reflections on the significance of the writing. She reflects on how the artistic climate had already changed and on the characteristics of the decade in which her critical essays were written. These three short quotes from the final essay from the 1990s indicate why Against Interpretation is now an achievement in its own right, and not simply a response to the work of others.

“Perhaps the most interesting characteristics of the time now labeled the Sixties was that there was so little nostalgia. In that sense, it was indeed a utopian movement.”

“Now the very idea of the serious (and of the honorable) seems quaint, ‘unrealistic’ to most people and when allowed - an arbitrary decision of temperament - probably unhealthy, too.”

“The judgments of taste expressed in these essays may have prevailed. The values underlying those judgments did not.”

Truly we live in a different age.

Mary Swann by Carol Shields

I have just completed four years of thinking through a project. There were several false starts, many rejected, some reworked ideas. What I wanted to achieve was tangible, but I could not grasp it. When I thought I had it held, it would melt away or fly out like squeezed soap. Some six months ago things gelled and I began in earnest to write Eileen McHugh, a life remade. It’s the story of a sculptor who left no work, but who, by accident in this case, had become sufficiently recognized for a biographer to reconstruct her life and remake her lost work.

With the book complete and published, I decided it was time to relax and took up Mary Swann by Carol Shields. I found and bought it in a charity shop bag-full because I knew the author, not the book. I began to read and the experience was uncanny.

Mary Swann concerns of life and work of a poet from rural Canada. The town of Nadeau was both small and insignificant, until, that is, the world discovered a slim volume of a hundred or so poems by one Mary Swann, insignificant herself, until she was murdered - shot, bludgeoned, dismembered - by her husband in 1965.

Born in 1915, the exact date still debatable, she lived out her anonymous, almost hidden life, even from locals, on the farm. Elsewhere in the world this would be called a peasant holding and her life would be characterized as mired in poverty. Mary Swann had no domestic help, no appliances, none of the trappings of modern life. She never drove a car. Isolated, remote, poor, dilapidated are words that applied equally to the setting of the life and the person who lived it. Nothing much is known of her relationship with her husband, who killed himself after murdering his wife. The erasure was complete, except that they had a daughter who is alive, but is unwilling to discuss family matters.

But Mary Swan wrote. She wrote pithy, crunchy verse that inhabits the world this side of the garden gate but seems to dig deep into the infinite internal space of being. Academics, having discovered her work, likened her to Emily Dickinson. Mr. Crozzi who originally accepted her poems for publication and produced a couple of hundred copies of Swann’s Songs, the perhaps appropriately titled slim volume, was the last person to see her alive, apart from her husband. There are estimated to be about 20 extant copies of the collection. But the content has found its admirers and champions. There are even academics whose reputation is built on the critique of Mary Swann’s verse.

There is to be a symposium on the poet and her work and Carol Shields follows the lives, testimonies and experience of a group of interested parties. There are academic researchers, who cooperate by competing. There is Rose, the Nadeau town librarian, timid, self-effacing and suffering. There is Crozzi, perhaps a little crazy, the publisher and a long-standing journalist in the local press, though himself an immigrant. He is an eccentric, opinionated type who dearly misses his deceased wife. He also likes a drink or two. There are Sarah and Morton, academics with their own lives to live who have championed Mary Swann’s work.  And there are others. Via the experiences of these characters and others, we piece together something of the life and work of Mary Swann, though, like everyone else involved, we never know her and her work remains enigmatic.

What for me was utterly uncanny, was that this was the exact form I had chosen for Eileen McHugh. Exactly what makes an artist? Why do we try to express ourselves in these arcane, often esoteric forms? What is authorship? What constitutes recognition? Who controls that process? How does life influence art, or vice versa? How do we recall our interactions from the past with someone we never thought we would remember? At eighty per cent through Mary Swann, I felt like I was reading a different version of my own book and I concluded I was very glad I had not read Carol Shields’s book before inventing my own.

But eventually, things diverged. Carol Shields’ Mary Swann concludes with the symposium on the poet’s work, a meeting that brings together the characters we have been following and constructed in the form of a screenplay. A particular thread of the plot begins to dominate. Competition surfaces, insults are perceived, and offense is taken. Difficult to explain events coalesce to identify and conclude what really has been going on in the background throughout the book. By the end of this superbly crafted and constructed novel, we are intimately involved in considerable slices of the contemporary characters’ lives.  Mary Swann, however, lingers in a continued, enigmatic anonymity that remains entirely her own, just as, thankfully, does that of my own Eileen McHugh.

Last Stories by William Trevor

Painters know that the viewer’s gaze can be tricked. Perhaps led is the better word, for this deception’s aim is merely to communicate more effectively. In visual art this can often mean placing a single line or mark, rather than spending hours with a hair-thin brush trying to capture detail. The trick, if it is one, is to convey all the detail by suggestion, so that the viewer’s mind creates it and therefore sees it.

The equivalent for writers is surely the ability to convey meaning both effectively and succinctly. But the idea goes beyond this. If we want to describe the life of a character, for example, we cannot and must not seek to include every detail. Salient points, finely formed, provide a complete picture. A single word, correctly chosen can create personality in a way that description alone can never achieve.

The technique is particularly noticeable in that much used but rarely mastered genre, the short story. And William Trevor offers a superb example of how it should be done in his Last Stories. These pieces are about people, their lives, loves, losses, hopes and fears. What happens to them is only as important as the how. And by the end of each story, we feel we have met the characters, shared their lives for a few pages. But we also feel we know them individually, and in depth.

William Trevor’s technique is startling. If this were visual, it would present a large canvas, most of which would be blank. Here and there would be marks, dabs, lines, almost randomly scattered across the surface. But when we stand back, these would coalesce and sum to reveal utterly convincing detail, which would then fill the rest of the picture. It is so easy when creating a short story to concentrate on the minuscule, to conclude that the form is better suited to the containable. Here William Trevor lays this idea to rest, elegantly, succinctly and in suggested, but vivid detail.

The Master of Petersburg by J M Coetzee

J M Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg had a particular effect on this reader in that it prompted me to read From The House of the Dead by Dostoyevsky. It’s a book I have wanted to read literally for decades and have never been before properly begun. And the motivation comes directly from J M Coetzee’s analysis of the Fyodor Dostoyevky’s conscience, or perhaps his lack of it in The Master of Petersburg. Coetzee’s book is a novel. It does not claim to be history, nor does it base itself on historically recognizable individuals, except for the principal protagonist, Fyodor Dostoyevsky. But the scenario it examines becomes compellingly convincing, the dilemmas posed both credible and realistic.

The novel starts in 1869, a year when Fyodor Dostoyevsky was resident in Germany. The setting is more than a decade after his experience as a political prisoner in Siberia, a decade on from anything that is described in From The House of the Dead. The past may have been water under the bridge, but the flow was apparently continuous.

Dostoevsky has received a note saying that his stepson has died in St. Petersburg. There are administrative issues to settle, debts, possessions, people to inform, so the author returns to his own city and embarks upon the reconstruction of his stepson‘s life and death. There is an element here of who-done-what because the circumstances surrounding the end of the stepson’s life remain unclear.

The author has to live somewhere. There is a landlady and she has a family. There are the stepson’s contacts to trace, contacts which he made for a variety of reasons, not all of them completely legal. There are political movements to understand, perhaps penetrate, because that is the only reliable way to encounter untainted memories of a life passed away, a life that lived its own version of action. And, inevitably in Czarist Russia, there are police who are interested in the nature of every contact Dostoyevsky makes. They shed light not only with his stepson’s possible associations with the officially undesirable, but also on the author’s own past and the origins of his own incarceration as a political prisoner.

In pursuing this quest, Dostoyevsky encounters people and memories from his own past, and it has to be acknowledged that he has form. In reality, he can do nothing in this town in his own name without it being noticed by someone, registered by some authority. It is inevitable that something will be dragged up from the past, even if merely to facilitate interests in the present

And inevitably, the writer forms new relationships and these further complicate already complex relationships. There are debts to honour from the past and there will be new ones as a result of unfolding events, of that we are sure. There are previous associations. There is, eventually, perhaps the very reason that he himself came under the official scrutiny all those years ago, events that led to his conviction and incarceration as a political prisoner, and thus provided the experience that led to From The House of the Dead. And, most important of all, there is a contemporary political movement known to his stepson, involvement in which could potentially repeat the allegations and charges the previously led to his own conviction. People within those movements are aware of the author’s quest and his need for information. The problem with some of this information is that it comes with its own health warning.

But what J M Coetzee accomplishes in the midst of all this is a historical context, in The Master of Petersburg, is the creation of a scenario and as associated narrative that never enters polemic. We feel that we are in the same voyage of discovery as its principal character and we experience events alongside his own perception. We are never told what to think.

J M Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg is a superb book that surprisingly even displays relevance to contemporary events. It reminds us that societies often can often be constructed by those with an interest in finding in the world precisely what they seek.

The Life of Ezra Pound by Noel Stock

A review of The Life of Ezra Pound by Noel Stock must begin by acknowledging the phenomenal achievement of its author. It is comprehensive, detailed, forensic, appreciative, critical and illuminating, a massive achievement of analysis, research and insight. At around 200,000 words it is also a commitment, not for the fainthearted or for anyone with only a passing interest in either poetry or the history of the twentieth century. But it is also something else, something that, despite the magnificence of its scholarship, provokes this reader to focus on issues that are external to the text, itself. But more of that later: first, the book.

Ezra Pound was undeniably one of the greatest figures of twentieth century literature. Unlike his illustrious contemporaries and friends, however, Joyce, Eliot and Yeats among them, his name has seemed to slip from the mainstream since his death in 1972. I read his great achievement, the Cantos, when I was at college. I did not understand them. In some ways they feel less like a work of poetry than a lifetime achievement, a creatively conceived and sometimes over-presented commonplace book into which fell, in poetic form, a distillation, a reflection or sometimes mere mention of whatever disparate material that Pound obsessed over at the time. The Cantos were Pound’s creative life, but we must not forget the massive amount of other material, his journalism, music, prose and economics, for want of a more accurate word.

Pound was one of the founders and movers of literary and artistic movements: Imagism and the Vorticism among them. They were perhaps not the most enduring of directions. He was American but seemed more at home in England and then Italy, neither of which chooses to honour his achievements on their soil. But what is strongly felt about this man from the start is his conviction of, perhaps his obsession with his own genius. He was utterly sure he would contribute to the arts and perhaps even change their direction. He seemed to consider his legacy immortal, even before it had been created. He felt he was something new, original and enduring. And all this when apparently no-one even wanted to read his material, or formally give him time of day. And not only did he seem to deny his failures, he didn’t even seem to register them. The limitations were always somewhere else. In the early years, he thus seemed like a self-publicist, with is achievements acknowledged before they were achieved, like a modern self-published author who writes five-star, best-seller reviews of his own work. Nowadays, that surely would never do!

But eventually, perhaps by sheer dogged application alongside considerable talent, Pound received the recognition he thought he deserved, though perhaps never in our own contemporary, blunt instrument yardstick of success – sales. Certain academics loved him. Others did not. He himself had high hopes of a Nobel Prize.

Noel Stock includes copious quotations from Pound’s verse, always with critical assessment, sometimes with criticism. The Cantos were so far reaching in their intellectual coverage that it may appear from the outside that no-one without the full gamut of requisite skills would understand them. And given that these skills comprise, amongst other things, a knowledge of Dante and medieval Italian poetry, Confucius, Mencius and Lao-Tze in the original Chinese, troubadour songs in their original langue d’oc, Noh theatre texts in Japanese, Pound’s own experimental English, besides knowledge of the Classics and their metres, one might presume that there might be few modern readers of his work. This is probably accurate. But there is more to the modern shunning of Pound’s work than its overtly elitist intellectual demands. And it is here that this review needs to diverge from literature, poetry and indeed Ezra Pound, himself, to address the related concepts of fascism and racism.

The main reason why today Pound’s name remains passé is his espousal of fascist ideas and his overt antisemitism. He went to live in Italy. He regarded Mussolini as rather a good thing. In Italy at the time he was hardly alone in this belief.  He adopted Hitler’s aggressive antisemitism because he was fundamentally opposed to capitalism, if it meant what he saw as a banking and economic system dominated by Jews, the foundation of this belief being a bank owned by the Rothchild family. He also took to broadcasting pro-fascist propaganda (in Italian and English) on radio during World War II.

Normally, my reviews are consciously detached. I try to review the book, not myself. Likes and dislikes are, to me, wholly nebulous and indefinable and even passing whims that are always less significant than considerations of communication or achievement of ends. In the case of The Life of Ezra Pound, the subjective “I” must be included, since our appreciation or not of this poet’s writing now seems to depend wholly on our individual take on his politics, despite his being be neither analytical or pro-active in his views, as this biography clarifies.  In some ways, his politics were as transient as his current interests, as expressed in the meanderings of the Cantos. But what now can we make of Pound? Should we even try to understand him? Is dismissal the preferred option? I would say that he is worth the effort. Not the use of “I”! And this is not because I think Pound is a particular genius, overlooked or even readable. And I certainly do not see his actions as pardonable! And here I beg your pardon for making this book review become something personal, something about me and not about the book, but I assure you it is relevant. Please exit here if you are wary of the personal.

I remember in the recent past a well-known British television presenter saying on-air that the music of Wagner was not played in her household because of the composer´s antisemitism. I remember another celebrity saying that antisemitism was the flavour of Wager´s age, and that rejection of the composer´s work on those grounds alone ought to prompt a similar rejection of everything artistic or otherwise that came out of mid-nineteenth century German culture.

In the not too distant past I re-read Adam Smith´s Wealth of Nations. In my review I concentrated on those aspects of the analysis that might contradict the completely neo-liberal interpretation of the work. I was perhaps wrong to do so, but I wanted to challenge the idea that there is just one way to read Smith´s notion of free trade.  Embedded within Smith´s thesis, however, are assumptions about human progress and worthiness. The Hindoo, the Mussulman and even the Catholic have their place in history and civilisation, but the heathen is judged to be a primitive sub-human. I do not recall Smith referring to ´The Buddhist´, but that may be my own failure of memory. In today´s politics, how many of the neo-liberal, perhaps neo-conservative supporters of their own notions of Smith´s concepts of free trade also regard those not associated with an organised great religion as both uncivilised and sub-human? And, given that the assumption appears to run throughout the work, should that alone disqualify Smith´s views on other subjects or his contribution to economics? Another position that almost dominates sections of The Wealth of Nations is that there is no economic activity that is or could be greater than the total that describes the state. How many of these same free marketeers would share Smith´s oft-stated revulsion of the very idea of a transnational corporation, which he regarded as necessarily market-distorting and almost automatically corrupt? This is recognized in antitrust and anti-monopoly legislation, but how often is this side of Smith´s work quoted? My point here is that we can choose to be selective, and usually do.

I am tempted here to introduce the composer Anton Webern into the argument. A member of the second Viennese School, Webern espoused the atonalism of his associate, Schoenberg. Webern was perhaps the artistic opposite of Ezra Pound, being prone to destructive self-criticism and a desire for an extreme succinctness of expression. But Webern, like Pound, thought that fascism might be more sympathetic towards “high art” to which he aspired than the mechanisms of capitalism that concentrated on what it could sell. He thus initially espoused fascism, eventually to his own and his associates´ cost.

After this considerable diversion, there is eventually a moral, and that is to beware anyone touting answers, especially those based on interpretations of the past in anything other than its own terms. Which brings me to Brexit! It might seem quite a jump, but it does follow. Trust me!

I have recent personal experience, albeit apocryphal, that suggests the prime motivation among the British working class leave voters who surely swung the referendum result was “getting rid of all the foreigners.” I use quotes to emphasise that this was expressed to me personally and verbatim, with stress on the “all”. I had just finished The Life of Ezra Pound and I felt immediately a strange yet strong link with Pound´s antisemitism, which was founded on nothing less than trying to find someone to blame.

Perhaps we should not judge Wagner, Adam Smith or even Ezra Pound using the moral perspective of our own time. For if we did that, and rejected any espousal of either racism or religious bigotry, how much of our human past would we retain? And, given the above Brexit opinion, is the moral perspective of our time significantly different from that of the 1930s, or even the 1850s, or 1770s or indeed any other time in our conflict-ridden blame game of history?

The Life of Ezra Pound is a forensic biography of a poet. It describes a life lived in its historical and cultural context. Like all books committed to communicating its subject, it is a masterpiece that takes the reader way beyond the confines of its subject and thereby achieves a permanent relevance. Revisit this past. We must never deny it existed or forget its consequences. But it reminds us that as individuals, communities and societies, there is no rule that precludes the repetition of error. And neither is there any rule that insists that a current moral ground need be any higher than any other existing folly, contemporary or past.

One Hundred Best Books by John Cowper Powys

In his One Hundred Best Books, John Cowper Powys confidently selects a reading list for all humanity. Written in 1916 by a man already in his forties, it offers a selection that can be labelled as distinctly pre-war, pre-First World War, that is. Given that the author was the product of an English public school - that means private, by the way, if you are not English - and then Cambridge University, one would expect the list to be dominated by the classics, ancient and modern. And, indeed it is, but there are numerous surprises.

One Hundred Best Books is a short text and offers only a potted critique of the works chosen. More often than not, John Cowper Powys chooses an author rather than a work. So, for example, Sir Walter Scott manages to have three books listed, and Dostoyevsky four, while Chares Dickens manages just one. So, in fact this list is not one hundred best books, more like a hundred favourite authors. The critiques, therefore, more often than not relate to the author’s perception of the writer’s overall oeuvre, rather than to a specific work.

This list might be almost a hundred years old, but it remains an enlightening and enjoyable tour of the literary perception and, to a certain extent, the bigotries of the time. Selections are often more revealing in what they omit rather than what they include and One Hundred Best Books by John Cowper Powys is no exception. Indeed, towards the end, the text appears to descend into mere advertisement, but this part can be safely skimmed or ignored.

A statistic that reveals much of its time is the stark reality that only two of the hundred writers listed are women. A third woman, who chose to write under a male non de plume, George Eliot, is omitted altogether, which, given that she had died over thirty years before this list was published, is a surprise. Though the list covers ancient classics and includes works from Russia, France, Italy, Germany and the United States, there is no place for the naturalism of Emile Zola.

But neither is the list merely a safety first trip through big names. A number of the French and Italians listed would not be immediately recognised by a contemporary reader. And some names, such as Gilbert Cannan, Vincent O’Sullivan and Oliver Onions have apparently almost disappeared.

John Cowper Powys is not afraid, however, to describe those he has chosen in colourful terms, sometimes revealing much about prevalent ideas of the day. How many people, in the twenty-first century, would advise the following: “a few lines taken at random and learned by heart would act as a talisman in all hours to drive away the insolent pressure of the vulgar and common crowd,” especially when referring to The Odes of Horace? And today would the phrase “the greatest intellect in literature” be attached easily to Rabelais?

On Nietzsche, we are advised that “To appreciate his noble and tragic distinction with the due pinch of Attic salt it is necessary to be possessed of more imagination than most persons are able to summon up.” Theodore Dreiser is lavished with praise: “There is something epic—something enormous and amorphous—like the body of an elemental giant—about each of these books…  All is simple, direct, hard and healthy—a very epitome and incarnation of the life-force, as it manifests itself in America.” What literature of the Unites States in the early twenty-first century, I wonder, aspires to simplicity coupled with directness, hardness and health? If it exists, I bet it’s not fiction.

Thackeray has one work included. One wonders whether John Cowper Powys really wanted it. “Without philosophy, without faith, without moral courage, the uneasy slave of conventional morality, and with a hopeless vein of sheer worldly philistinism in his book, Thackeray is yet able, by a certain unconquerable insight into the motives and impulses of mediocre people, and by a certain weight and mass of creative force, to give a convincing reality to his pictures of life, which is almost devastating in its sneering and sentimental accuracy.”

Charles Dickens is nowadays credited with being a great social realist. Powys includes only Great Expectations and seems to regard Dickens as something less than real. “His world may be a world of goblins and fairies, but there cross it sometimes figures of an arresting appeal and human voices of divine imagination.” And who, today, would say this about a writer? “Mr. Shaw has found his role and his occupation very happily cut out for him in the unfailing stupidity, not untouched by a sense of humor, of our Anglo-Saxon democracy in England and America.”

One Hundred Best Books by John Cowper Powys is a quick and easy read. It is always useful to remind ourselves that perhaps the way we think about the world changes our psyche as much as changes in fashion alter our appearance. 

The Master by Colm Toibin

In The Master, Colm Toibin offers the reader a style and content quite different from his other novels. In a sense, the book is an act of homage to Henry James, a recognition of a creative debt, perhaps, owed by Colm Toibin to the great American writer. On another level, like Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes, it is an attempt to enter an iconic writer’s own creativity to highlight its insecurity and doubt. Current writers know full well that their offerings are rightly subject to critical analysis and comparison, with some critics apparently taking delight in automatically belittling contemporary efforts. But when we read a book that has achieved ‘classic’ status, we often forget that in its own time it was treated no more reverently than current new issues.

In The Master Colm Toibin manages to penetrate the creativity of Henry James, bringing his character to life via the creative process that seems to be at his very core. Thus The Master is part biography, part family history, part observation of late nineteenth century society in England, America and in expatriate enclaves in Europe. It remains a novel, however, and its main character a fiction, despite the historical reality of both the setting and the achievement.

And this becomes one of the book’s strengths. The story is a series of reflections from the past married with often apparently mundane family or personal events. Chapters are dated, beginning in 1895 and ending in 1899, but there is no linearity of plot, no story, as such, apart from the development of the writer as he responds to reflections on his family, life and relationships. At the start, a play of his has just failed. Oscar Wilde’s trial is in the news, commented upon alongside reports of London society and its opinions. It is here that Henry James laments the death of his sister, before soon describing his brother’s participation in the American Civil War, a war that he, himself, declined to fight.

A suicide, that of a fellow writer, Constance Fennimore Woolson, has a profound effect on him. She was in Venice, a city that James then visits to assist her relatives with the necessary details. As ever, he is less than effective. In a later encounter with a sculptor called Andersen, James again comes close to standing idly by as events run past him. The author is always on the outside, it seems, an apparently uninvolved, disinterested observer, always apart from experience he could potentially share. He prefers to retain this role, the observer, the listener, making as few comments as possible. He sees life as a mystery, with only sentences capable of beauty. Ultimately, Henry James is cast as a selfish absorber of other’s experience, the raw material he stores to regurgitate later as plot and content. He lives his own rather self-centered life through the recording and later embroidery of other’s experience, others’ emotion. His psyche is a writer’s notebook, with human contacts neatly entered and filed for later literary use, his own emotions not revealed, or perhaps suppressed, his presence predatory. The Master is a remarkable achievement, a book whose writing mimics Henry James’s own literal but complex style, itself a discipline. View this book on amazon The Master

Prisoners of ideology - Angels and Insects by A. S. Byatt

Angels and Insects is an intriguing pair of novellas. At one level it examines the complexities of human relationships, especially those incorporated within marriage and the family. It identifies tension, dissipates it, anticipates expectations and then seeks resolution of conflict when they are not realised.

In Morpho Eugenia, William, a suitor, pursues his beloved and she becomes his wife. They breed with regular success, but there is a darkness that separates them in their marriage, a darkness that becomes light when William comes home from the hunt unexpectedly.

In The Conjugal Angel we enter a spirit world. For the inhabitants of the world, the spirit reality is as tangible, as rational a universe as any other. It is a world with familiar landmarks that reveal themselves easily to the accepting mind. Powerfully and engagingly interpreted by an influential writer, their significance enters the participants´ assumptions, their existence never questioned.

Angels and Insects is set in the mid-nineteenth century and, as such, deals with concepts, both social and intellectual, which are quite foreign, quite removed from those of the contemporary reader. In Morpho Eugenia, we have a scientist exploring the revolutionary ideas of evolution and applying these not only to the natural world he researches, but also the private human world, both physical and emotional, that he inhabits. Needless to say, his radical ideas are not shared by many close to him. In The Conjugal Angel, we encounter a group of people motivated by a reality they all share. 

But, for the contemporary reader, it is a reality that is utterly foreign, its literature and its analysis both apparently bogus in today’s judgment. Thus, eventually Angels and Insects is a novel about ideology. It illustrates how ideological assumptions about the nature of existence can drive an individual´s and a society´s approach to life, and how it can convince people of the truth of illusion, or vice versa. And in considering the works of contemporary poets, Angels and Insects illustrate how the literature of an age can become suffused with its ideology and, indeed, how this can feed back into the substance of life to reinforce assumptions.

As ever, A S Byatt´s use of language is virtuosic, making the process of reading Angels and Insects a delight throughout. It is an ambitious project which almost achieves its design. The shortfall, however, becomes a frustration.

View this book on amazon Angels and Insects