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Saturday

Peter Porter

Learning to weep in a museum

It is reasonable to assume that this is the first instalment of Robert Hughes’s autobiography. After 400 pages he takes us to his appointment as Time Magazine’s chief art critic in 1970, so The Shock of the New, The Fatal Shore and Goya lie in the future. Some might think that his choice of title gives a hostage to fortune. Australians are notoriously members of the Quiz Kid Fraternity — Clive James, Barry Humphries, Germaine Greer and the rest of us who have much smaller claims to fame. But Hughes plays fair throughout: he modifies his assured assertions on art and society with humiliating instances of his ignorance, over- confidence and poor judgment. His renunciations are epiphanies in reverse. Memories of writing for Richard Neville’s Oz are pure mea culpa.

Judith Flanders

The bad old East End

‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.’ L. P. Hartley’s famous opening is used by Gilda O’Neill as an epigraph to her delightful foray through 19th-century murder and mayhem, but in truth, as she shows in The Good Old Days, the past is our native country. Things were not different then: they were exactly the same. Mass murder has not disappeared; nor has the sale of women and children for sex; nor has robbery, nor street crime, nor mindless violence. The East End of London is O’Neill’s real focus, and she writes of it with the passion and understanding of an insider. She was born there, as were her parents, themselves the children of Victorian East Enders, with a great-grandmother working in the Whitechapel music halls.

Pj Kavanagh

John Bull as a master of delicacy

This is a book that tells the reader a great deal about a certain kind of Englishman in his interesting times (1753-1828), and also raises the irritating question — the distinction, if any, between art and craft. Thomas Bewick, wood-engraver, was a ‘provincial’ craftsman who became a great artist. John Ruskin saw this: ‘The plumage in Bewick’s birds is the most masterly thing ever done in woodcutting; it is worked just as Paolo Veronese would have worked in wood if he had taken to it,’ thereby, it seems, promoting Bewick to the artistic top table. However, Ruskin remains loftily puzzled. ‘Ruskin and his followers,’ says Uglow, ‘placed Bewick as a country clod...

Johnny Grimond

Uncle Sam on the couch

According to George Walden, the United States is a country with a psychosis, which the dictionary defines as a serious mental disorder characterised by, for example, delusions and a lack of insight into his condition on the part of the patient. No wonder that even sympathetic foreigners, says Walden, understand less than ever what makes America tick. This book is his attempt to enlighten them. ‘How can America’s intellectual and technological sophistication be reconciled with primitive attitudes on gun law and capital punishment?’ asks Walden. ‘How can its creed of self-seeking be combined with its religiosity? And how can its culture be at once infantile and highly mature?’ Why, in particular, is American society ‘manically sexualised’?

Rupert Christiansen

A good man among ambiguities

The second volume of this superb biography opens in 1939, as William Empson returns to London after two years of high adventure and real privation in a China up against Japanese invasion. Resolved to do his bit against Hitler, he drops poetry and literary criticism to join the BBC’s propaganda operation, where he put his expert knowledge of the Far East to subtle use. George Orwell became a colleague and friend — both of them liberal leftists, albeit of profoundly different literary bents. At the BBC, Empson encountered the Amazonian figure of Hetta Crouse, a splendidly forthright and fearless South African sculptor, whom Haffenden aptly describes as a ‘seminal hippie’.

Robert Stewart

A shortage of wine and olives

War and religion are the enduring themes of history and they, or at least war and the Church (for theology gets short shrift), are the chief matters in John Julius Norwich’s latest book. It attempts the difficult job of making a coherent entity of the history of Mediterranean lands from antiquity to the close of the first world war and it does not altogether succeed. The idea of a discrete Mediterranean history makes most sense for the millennium when Greece, then Rome, had reason to think of their compass as the ‘known world’ and the Middle Sea as their lake. A coherent theme is also provided by the mediaeval contest for mastery between Christian Europe and successive Arab empires.

Digby Durrant

Going under and coming up

It’s understandable that a man fails to kill himself with a puncture repair outfit or drown himself in a bucket but rather miraculous if he can’t throw himself under a bus successfully. Yet this is the melancholy achievement of ex-Sub-Inspector Swaminathan, Swami, from Mullaipuram in the state of Tamil Nadu in southern India. A good man unjustly struck down by fate after cracking the rib of a Very Guilty Suspect during a routine inquiry, he suffers a cerebral haemorrhage leaving him barely able to walk or speak. Even when a white man throws himself out of a hotel window and lands in front of his wheelchair he’s silent and only feels a strange peacefulness as he shares the dying man’s last moments.

Michael Carlson

How many deaths?

‘Suspicion is a shifting shade,’ Mark tells the police lieutenant who’s questioning him, and no one appreciates the tensions of suspicion better than Thomas H. Cook.  Cook remains relatively unknown, though he’s garnered numerous crime-writing awards, including an Edgar for The Chatham School Affair. Places in the Dark and last year’s Red Leaves rank among the very best suspense novels of the past two decades.  The Murmur of Stones is typical of Cook at his best. Its small-town setting is gently New England, a timeless stage that is the present but could just as easily be 50 years ago. It’s more the New England of John Cheever than Stephen King or H. P. Lovecraft, yet just as horrific.

Olivia Glazebrook

Going round the bend in a bunch

If you had a friend who was an actress, and she was on the brink of a nervous collapse, what would you do to cheer her up? Or rather, what wouldn’t you do? I bet you wouldn’t take her to New York to visit a mutual friend, another actress, who was starring on Broadway — after all, that would be a bit vindictive, wouldn’t it? I mean, what’s more likely to give an actress a nervous breakdown than the success of a close personal friend? Well, Cissie O’Brien is a comedienne (ghastly, unfunny word), so perhaps she does it as a joke: she whisks her depressed actress friend, Maggie Salt, off to Manhattan to visit their pal Helena Cassidy who is the current toast of the theatre world. Nice work, Cissie.

Interconnect

A stay of execution

Oliver Rackham is quite clear from the beginning. This huge compendium of a book, the culmination of a lifetime’s work, will provide no answers. It will ask plenty of questions but has no theory to promote. It is not about the environment, the solipsistic idea that the world exists to surround man, but ecology, the interaction of organisms in the world. Trees are as much the actors as any woodsman, forester or conservationist. And where the idea of the environment is essentially simple — how does man either destroy or preserve what surrounds him — the idea of ecology is essentially complicated and even incomprehensible. Every detail counts, every relationship, however hidden, affects every other.

Gary Dexter

Surprising literary ventures | 28 October 2006

Jimmy Stewart and His Poems (1989) by Jimmy Stewart The most intriguing thing about this book is its title. Ernest Hemingway and His Novel by Ernest Hemingway would not work. Katherine Mansfield and Her Short Stories by Katherine Mansfield wouldn’t either. Poems by Jimmy Stewart would be ridiculous, as if he were pretending to be Auden. But Jimmy Stewart and His Poems by Jimmy Stewart is perfect, managing to suggest that Jimmy Stewart realises that writing poetry is a highly eccentric activity, but that he knows he’s a bit of an oddball in a loveable, self-effacing, gangling sort of a way, and so he thought he’d have a stab at it.

Ian Garrick-Mason

Making it up as we go

For the scales at which we live — the buildings we inhabit, the vehicles we drive, the sports we play — classical physics is a useful, highly accurate and reassuringly comprehensible system. But at scales we never personally encounter, at immense velocities, infinitesimal sizes or cosmic distances, things are not so simple. In these worlds, time passes more slowly or quickly depending on one’s own speed, light beams travel on bendy paths through a universe of dented spacetime and electrons are not distinct particles but rather probabilistic clouds which collapse into specific measurements only when we observe them. The novelist and playwright Michael Frayn is fascinated by such worlds.

Matthew Dancona

A chill Cabinet

In a taped diary entry for April 2003, David Blunkett describes a terrible dream: ‘a dream that had all the undertones of being on the outside, of being alienated, of being given the cold shoulder, of being friendless and leaning on a stick, having fallen out with Tony Blair and then having challenged him in the middle of a speech in the Commons and humiliating him by raising something that left him floundering.’ Well, you don’t have to be Freud to analyse that particular nightmare. This is an important book, though not for the reasons many anticipated.

Saturday

Justin Marozzi

Getting to know the General

It is a tribute to Pervez Musharraf’s powers of persuasion that after reading this book you’re not entirely sure which country he rules. Is it Pakistan or Fantasististan? The rational choice is Pakistan, but the country he describes belongs to another world altogether. Women are empowered, the madrassahs are being curbed, democracy is waxing, terrorism is waning, investment is up, poverty down, the economy is booming, it’s all marvellous. How on earth did Pakistan get by before the general came along? A quick corrective to this self-congratulatory tome is not difficult to find. Human Rights Watch, for example, says that in Azad Kashmir ‘the Pakistani government represses democratic freedoms, muzzles the press and practises routine torture’.

Anne Chisholm

Fighting free of Father

When the second world war began, Nicholas Mosley, the distinguished novelist son of the fascist leader Sir Oswald, who thought that Britain should not fight Germany and whose second wife, Diana Mitford, counted Goebbels and Hitler as friends, was a 16-year-old schoolboy at Eton. ‘At this time,’ he writes in his new book, in which he reconsiders and reflects on his wartime experiences, ‘I thought my father was a politician less lunatic than most.’ It was a help, he adds, that many Eton boys knew what it was like to be connected to ‘maverick politicians’. Even so, he felt self-conscious when in June 1940 his father was locked up under regulation 18b. However, ‘there were glances, but not much was said’.

John De-Falbe

Radium and the nature of love

For 16 years, from 1878, Blanche Wittman was a patient in the infamous Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, diagnosed by the famous Dr Charcot as a hysteric. Putting Blanche on display in a cataleptic state, Charcot explained to audiences that he hoped to reveal, through her ‘a certain system, a secret code, which … could point the way to the meaning of life’. He was no quack (he was the first person to identify multiple sclerosis); Freud was his assistant for a time; and Blanche not only admired him but also, it appears, loved him, and the love was returned. After leaving the hospital, Blanche was taken on by Marie Curie as an assistant to work in the Paris laboratory where, in 1898, radium was discovered.

Roger Lewis

Little and Large

T. S. Eliot was happily married to Valerie Fletcher for years, but it is only his relationship with Vivien Haigh-Wood that people want to hear about. (‘My nerves are bad tonight. Yes, bad. Stay with me. / Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak.’) Lauren Bacall’s second husband was Jason Robards — but who cares about him? In her memoirs and on chat shows it’s Bogie, Bogie, Bogie. Dame Plowright must be irritated to be eclipsed in the Larryographies always by Scarlett O’Hara. So it goes. It is as if there is room only for a single grand passion in a celebrity’s life, and though Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman were divorced in 2001 and have since moved on to new partners, they still belong together in the public mind.

Roger Coombs

John Betjeman: A Centenary Tribute

He was the People’s Laureate, of course,Observing things that others disregard:Post-Toasties, Craven A and HP sauce— Unworthy subjects for a royal bard?He wrote of tea-shops and the electric train;Of things familiar to the common man,Things which his critics sneeringly disdain,(Also maybe because he made his metres scanAnd took care to make his verses rhyme).

Allan Massie

A master carpenter

Who did Evelyn Waugh call ‘the only living studio-master under whom one can study with profit’? Answer: Somerset Maugham. Surprising answer? Perhaps. Others judged him more harshly; Edmund Wilson dismissed him as ‘a half-trashy novelist who writes badly, but is patronised by half-serious writers who do not care much about writing.’ Actually Maugham took a lot of trouble over his writing, as his notebooks show. They, incidentally, like Wilson’s own notebooks, are full of descriptive passages in embarrassingly purple prose. Hard to see the point of them; when did either author think he might take one of these passages and shove it into a novel? Maugham also resorts to cliché, on almost every page. This is not necessarily a bad thing, in moderation anyway.

Jonathan Mirsky

The meeting of the twain

Seize the Hour is an admirable example of the storyteller’s power. From Homer to the great playwrights and novelists whose works we can hear or read repeatedly, the telling is all. Achilles pursues Hector around the walls of Troy; we know how it will finish, but like Homer’s audiences we want to hear it again. Anna Karenina throws herself under a train — for us it may be the fourth time. Ahab raises his lance to kill Moby Dick; it will end badly for the captain, but this is the third time we have taken Melville’s mighty story on holiday. I’m sure Margaret MacMillan, Warden-elect of St Antony’s College, Oxford, won’t repine if I say she is neither Homer nor Melville, but she does what they do: she tells a good story.