Europe Since Napoleon by David Thomson

 

Some time ago and in relation to a different book, I wrote a review that in essence began, “Occasionally, just occasionally, one comes across a book so impressive, so scholarly and so communicative that it leaves a reader both in awe of its achievement and completely rewarded by the experience of reading it.” I did not expect to encounter another book in the near future to which that description might also apply. I have done just that, and my life is immeasurably richer as a result.

The title, Europe Since Napoleon, communicates what the book addresses. This is not a history of the United States, Asia, China, South America or Africa. Europe is the focus, but the vision is in no sense myopic. During the period in question, history of course documents that some European powers were imperial powers, claiming ownership and rule of colonies across the globe, indeed on every continent. There was also the detail of two World Wars, which have been granted that title because the conflict was near global in scale. Hence Europe Since Napoleon addresses many aspects of history, politics and economics that relate to the global interests of the European nations and, as such, this book, at least in the opinion of this reader, becomes more of a Eurocentric view of world history, rather than a narrower discussion of a specific continent. And it must also be added that any Eurocentrism arises nearly out of the focus, and not from any form of bias or sense of superiority.

There is a problem with the book’s title, however. Europe Since Napoleon implies that it might begin at the end of the French Imperial era, but Europe Since Napoleon begins by analyzing the circumstances and events that allowed Napoleon to assume power. We start, therefore, with the discussion of pre-revolutionary France and the revolution, itself, because it was out of these events that the arose the opportunity for Napoleon to assume power.

The Napoleonic Wars, the peace, reform, revolution, socialism, labor, economy, Russian expansion, nationalism, the creation of Italy and Germany, the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune all pass by and we have yet to complete half of the book’s two centuries of coverage. Of course, there follows the Berlin Conference, the partition of Africa, the lording it over the rest of the world to shape it into European advantage zones, the Great War, another revolution, boom, depression, strike, greater war, atomic bombs, the Iron Curtain, the suggestion of international cooperation, the rise of science, the nuclear age and the molecular age.

Of course, Europe Since Napoleon, like any summary work cannot even address the claim of being comprehensive. But in his book, David Thomson regularly illustrates how the big issues of the day re-drew the map, forged new alliances, created opportunity and transformed people’s lives. The author wrote over 400,000 words spanning almost 1000 pages and at the end provides a thorough bibliography of works he has no doubt read to provide greater depth across most of the issues covered in the book.

But the real strength of Europe Since Napoleon is not its coverage, nor its description of the events it lists, but its narrative. Throughout David Thompson resists the temptation merely to list facts, opting instead for a fluid, narrative style that does, it has to be said, assume a modicum of prior knowledge. But what if the reader gains from this apparently stylistic ploy is quite brilliant contextualization, synthesis and thereby understanding. This is a thousand-page history book that is simply a joy to read, from page one to page 946, to be precise, not counting the appendices.

And, if the foregoing were not enough praise, the author’s final observations, written in the 1960s are ostensibly predictions of where the human race may go over the following decades and it is nothing less than revelatory. Not only does David Thompson have a bigger view of history, but he also demonstrates a true intellectual vision that is both breathtaking in its scope and exciting in its optimism. Reading this vision sixty years on, one can only ask the question, how on Earth did this happen, how on earth did we end up here? And, after reading this book, the one thing that history has taught us repeatedly, is that we may catalogue, describe and understand, but also that we should not predict, and we should not take anything for granted. History is a guide, but never repeats itself, never returns us to the familiar. That is how it happened. What a superb book!

Sweet Caress by William Boyd

Sweet Caress, the tile of William Boyd´s 2015 novel, refers to the gentle contact the individual makes with the very surface of existence, the contact we loosely call “life”. It presents “The many lives of Amory Clay” that are contained in its principal character’s existence. As has become the author´s forté, William Boyd again brings to life a character who lives through the history of the twentieth century, impinging upon it, influencing it, being influenced and changed by it and thus consumed by it. It´s called life, and it’s linear, constantly reviewed but never relived, always surprising, but at the time apparently predictable. Like history, it’s just one thing after another.

William Boyd´s characters are always carefully but lightly drawn. They are never easily caricatured, and even less easily summarised, rather like people, in fact. Their identity is amassed from their experience of life, congeries of circumstance and chance. And, like a great artist, the author manages to create rounded, credible people from the very lightest strokes of his brush, leaving the reader to create whatever detail makes sense. But they also retain a complexity that makes them convincingly real. These different lives of the subtitle always evolve apparently authentically from Amory Clay´s circumstance and so the transition from one setting to the next, though often abrupt, appears possibly inevitable, but always credible.

Amory Clay, female, lives this sweet caress of life, despite having been described at birth as her parents' son. She is taught an intriguing habit by a relative of describing people in four adjectives. Complex, indulgent, direct, driven. It´s a game that Amory Clay plays throughout her life and one she passes on to others, so this activity emerges occasionally throughout the book and introduces the reader to people that otherwise might take pages to describe. It is the verbal equivalent of a snapshot, a partially accurate freezing in time of a view of another person, but inevitably always taking a selfie.

Amory Clay´s family is inoffensively middle class, dangerously so, especially after her father returns a changed man from the First World War. Parcelled off to boarding school because someone else is paying for the opportunity, Amory does well, resentfully well, until events change her life. There will be no going back. Life´s sweet caress becomes a push onto a different and diverging path.

Photography motivates Amory. From her first click of a box camera, she is captivated by its possibilities. She turns her back of what the average professional might pursue to make a living to explore the possibilities of social record, photojournalism, the bizarre or images of chance. And then she pursues a photographer’s life, making her living from whatever genre of her chosen profession presents opportunity. She is afraid it will not pay the rent, but it does, and often things go quite well, for a while. She has ideas that it might even make her famous, but infamy is always near, always an option, sometimes preferred. Circumstances are often dangerous, both for her and the objects of her gaze, but then danger often unlocks new doors and paves a way via a new chapter to security.

Professionally and personally, Amory Clay visits various countries and continents, places and events, wars and country estates. She has relationships with men she encounters, but rarely on a short-term basis. She both drinks and makes love copiously. She is injured and recovers, partially, she thinks. She endangers her own life and places others in peril, but she adds emotional and experiential value to the lives of all she encounters, including the readers of William Boyd’s invention of her history. She even once kisses a woman, albeit one dressed as a man, in a doorway as a ruse to divert the attentions of potential attackers on the rampage.

By the end of this beautiful novel, we feel we not only know Amory Clay, but we also empathise with her and identify with her. Saying goodbye leaves almost a sense of bereavement. We have lost someone close and dear, perhaps we have even lost a part of ourselves, as a certain Lady Farr comes to the end of her adopted aristocratic life. It is she who writes her contemporary journal as a commentary to the memories of Amory Clay, the photographer, and who is, we know from the start, that same Amory Clay who became Lady Farr. How she became a titled landowner is just another story, completely unlikely, but no more so than any of the rest and, in the hands of William Boyd, utterly credible. Our encounter with Amory Clay’s many lives takes us to places we have never been and will never go, allows us to share a life we will never live and enriches our own memory via its shared, imagined, experience.

As ever in William Boyd’s writing, there is always one real gem only partially hidden amongst the history. In Sweet Caress it appears via a photograph taken by chance in Vietnam by Amory Clay, a record that will have to be expunged from the record if history is to remain written in its usual partially inaccurate way. But why single out one particular gem in this veritable jewel box of a novel?

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.

Eros and Psyche by Ludomir Rozicki

Opera reviews usually carry no spoiler warnings. On the contrary, they usually begin with an exhaustive, sometimes exhausting blow-by-blow account of every contrived detail of plot. So let this be no exception. Eros and Psyche by Ludomir Rozicki could be just another nineteenth century classical rewrite, just another femme fatale tear-jerker, but it is much more than that.

Psyche dreams of being swept off her feet by love. We feel that these Arcadian maidens occupying a green room to make up for a performance are almost imprisoned so that they might beautify themselves. Psyche is enamoured of, perhaps obsessed with a man, who has taken to visit her nightly. It´s a good time to pop in!

She reveals to a friend she has been seeing someone. Eros reappears and offers eternal love, but only on his terms. Somehow he has managed to conceal his identity, if not his intentions, until Blaks, the caretaker, inadvertently casts light on Eros’s face and then all hell is let loose. Eros condemns Psyche to suffer an eternal life of constant wandering and disappointment, a life in which Blaks will regularly reappear to deny her any fulfilment. It’s a judgment delivered by Perseus, who announces exile and eternal wandering as he hands over a passport and tickets for both Psyche and Blaks. As Psyche embarks upon her fate, we realise we must not blame the messenger.

Her first subsequent port of call is a party - perhaps a drunken orgy - in ancient Rome, a Rome that is of course not ancient for her. A couple of Greeks at the gathering lament what Romans have done to their culture, a culture inherited from their own people, including Psyche. She appears, but she is obviously out of place, of a different culture and time, and she is mocked by everyone, especially by the women, who ridicule her appearance. They label her mad and Blaks, who here is a Prefect, apparently in charge, delivers condemnation.

We move on to Spain during the Inquisition. Psyche embraces Christ crucified on the cross. There is sexuality in her obsession with the figure. She enters a convent, but still yearns for a life outside its confines. The other nuns do not trust her. She tells of her need for the sun and fresh air, but she is warned not to have ambition. She must do as she is told, because asking questions is sinful, here. There is to be a visit by the abbot, a man who recently condemned a nun to be burned at the stake. Psyche is thus warned. Her attitudes are described to the abbot, who condemns her. Blaks, of course, is the abbot, who wields power more easily than he exhibits faith. Eros appears, we think to save her, but all he offers is a facile song.

Our heroine’s next port of call is revolutionary France. She works while men drink. We learn that it was Psyche who led the storming of the Bastille in the name of freedom. She rejects an offer of marriage because she would rather serve the people. She wants to lead the commune into battle. She is too radical to be a revolutionary. She insists on principle and finds herself on the wrong side of politics. Guess who might be the pragmatic leader who condemns her beliefs.

A final scene is in a bar or nightclub, where psyche dances to entertain the drinkers, who are all men. Blaks, here called the Baron, is the owner of the club and the principal exploiter of the women who work for him. The women attract the men to the bar, they drink and the baron, not the women, makes money. Psyche laments her role, but the baron says it’s all her own fault. She laughs at offers of love, saying she wants to be independent. But, having achieved her liberation she finds she can’t cope with it.

Eros appears, perhaps to save the day. Psyche is still infatuated, but now also exhausted. Eros reveals he has an alter ego by the name of Thanatos, the personification of death, and thus Psyche learns she is doomed. Her response is to torch what remains of her life, a life that has now rejected her. Eros-Thanatos has the last word, however, by presenting Psyche with a sports car which has already crashed. He invites her to sit at the wheel and then paints her with her own blood to show the end has finally arrived.

Eros and Psyche was premiered in 1917 and Rozycki’s style is not unlike that of Symanowski, but there is also Richard Strauss in there, alongside not a little Debussy. Many of the short phrases are also reminiscent of Janacek, though usually without the bite. Given the opera’s date, we would expect Psyche, though still femme fatale, to be at least a little forward looking. She is certainly not a Violetta or Mimi, in that she is no mere victim of bad luck, disease or circumstance. She is closer to a Butterfly, but she does not accept her fate meekly and without protest. In classical terms, we may have here a Salome or Elektra, but these were anti-heroines who probably deserved what they got. Tosca got mixed up in politics that went wrong. One has the feeling that Psyche would have relished the opportunity, but it never arose.

Three other theatrically destroyed women of the era come to mind, Judith, Katya and Elena. Judith’s plight in Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle parallels Psyche’s here. Judith can only know Bluebeard by probing the psychological spaces of his mind. He resents this, but allows her to continue, knowing that once she knows him, he will have taken possession of her. Similarly, Psyche is punished because she gets to know Eros, thereby reducing his control over her, a control he must reassert by condemning her. The Bartok-Balasz character, however, is more modern than Psyche, despite the existence of castles and visions. It is only when Judith understands the mental make-up of Bluebeard that he has to punish her, because only then that she becomes a threat to him. She is eternally mummified alongside the wives who have preceded her.

Janacek’s Katya Kabova is a step back into the nineteenth century by virtue of originally having been a creation of Ostrovsky, but her achievement of a finality of death does ask some modern questions.  Ostrovsky’s nineteenth century provincial dramas general do away with their heroines, but it is the societies rather than the individuals that are seen at fault. When oppression and hypocrisy are cultural and structural, it is hard for any individual to oppose them. But here it is these attitudes that make female existence a tragedy. Yes, Katya takes her own life, but it is another woman, her own mother-in-law, who asks the community to witness the doing of justice and not to shed tears for a woman who brought her fate on herself. The music, in fact, ends with neither tragedy nor anger, but with a question mark. Elena Makropoulos presents a different challenge. In many ways she is in control. Like Psyche she has lived, or at claims to have done so, in many eras, has inhabited many roles and has had a string different lives. Her original fate, however, like Psyche’s, was imposed on her by a man, in Elena’s case her father. Like Psyche, Elena has become cynical about men’s motives and dismissive of their capabilities. Crucially, however, when Elena is offered the opportunity to take back control of her eternal existence, she rejects it, preferring death to repeating the same old things. Psyche was never offered control and its attainment was never in her grasp. But Psyche thinks she achieved a liberation from oppression at the end, though she was unable to cope with it. This makes her a more modern figure.

So, for a modern audience, Psyche cannot be merely a classical beauty who crosses a god. And in the production by Warsaw’s Polish National Opera, she isn’t. Each of the scenarios is transformed into a film set. Scene one is a giant green room, populated by women who clearly want to be stars. Whether Eros operated a casting couch is unclear, but the probability is high. From scene one’s green room, Psyche is cast her role in each of the other four scenes, each of which is destined to be part of a feature film in which she stars. When Blaks repeatedly frustrates her activities and condemns her, the two of them become near stereotypes for femme fatale and callous male power. If we ask if it has to be this way, we have to answer that it was a male god in the first instance that insisted it should be so.

By the end, Psyche has had enough and she torches the world that has exploited her. It ought to be a final act of self-destructive defiance but the god and men even then reassert their control. A car crash is organised and she is painted with blood. The car itself part of the trappings of the stardom she has sought, and thus Psyche potentially becomes a tabloid press headline, probably moralising about a life of debauchery or excess. Psyche thus becomes a modern victim. She is a Marilyn Monroe ruined by fame, or perhaps a Jayne Mansfield, epitome of womanhood exploited for male voyeurs.

Thanks to the internet and Opera Vision we can all view this production from Warsaw and thereby draw our own conclusions. Streamed via a smart TV or perhaps better in the case of Opera Vision via a laptop and cable, the opera even comes with subtitles for anyone who might not catch all of the  original Polish . Joanna Freszel as Psyche gives a stunning performance, being vocally up the task as well as combining the confidence, ambition and assertion of a modern woman alongside the naivete and vulnerability of anyone who might fall in love. Mikołaj Zalasiński as Blaks is brilliant at using his power whilst never really appearing to be worthy of its extent, which is exactly what the character of Psyche must be thinking. He also makes the role anti-intellectual, thus stressing the contrast between the use of power and any knowledge of its consequences. 

The broadcast was in 2018 and these days there are only extracts from this production. But they are still excellent.

Beneath the Wheel by Hermann Hesse

I can remember the days we used to sit around in South Kensington when I was a student talking about the latest Hermann Hesse we had just read. It’s over 45 years ago…and I´ve not read much of his work since then.

Beneath the Wheel is an early work, his second novel, published in 1906. Strangely, it does not feel like the work of a young man, despite dealing with adolescence as its central theme.

Hans is a studious young man from a modest background who outperforms his own estimation in entrance exams. He gets his place. He becomes very studious indeed and seems certain to graduate with sufficient achievement to become a pastor. Whether this is his own ambition is never particularly clear. But the assumption follows him around as he studies.

And then there appears Hermann, who may or may not be named after the Germanic opponent of the Roman Empire. Hermann is a direct, experience-led, let’s go for it type, the very opposite of Hans. They become friends. There is at least a suggestion that the thought of homosexuality, rather than the reality, formed part of their process of mutual change. Their relationships with their own intellects change, however, as does the way that intellect is approached by others. Hans is destroyed. But he is happier, we might think, than he would have been had his life never contained risk.

At least that’s one way of looking at things. It might also be read as a warning, a morality to encourage the young to stay on the straight and narrow. One might conclude that at the time Hesse himself was aware of a dichotomy within his own thinking, and this might have been his way of writing what he saw as a demon out of his system.

The style was recognizable from early on. There is a detachment about this writing. Dialogue usually seems said and difficult, and the roundness of the experienced is tempered by the fact that it seems rather removed from the reality in which it participates. Didn’t expect it to enthrall, but it did.