Culture

Nicola Shulman’s study of Sir Thomas Wyatt and his times, Graven With Diamonds, is both sparkling and scholarly. Nothing I’ve ever read about the court of Henry VIII has made it so vivid. For the first time one could really grasp Anne Boleyn’s wit and intelligence, both of which she must have needed, to keep the king off for seven years — seven years! — until they could marry. The book is marvellous about Wyatt’s poetry: indeed, about the point of poetry in general. A gem. I loved the young German writer Judith Hermann’s short story collection, Alice. The stories are beautifully written, very precise in their detail, yet enigmatic. Finally, a novel, New Finnish Grammar by Diego Marani.

The TS Eliot Prize hedge-fund furore has been making headlines for more than a week. Even the Spectator has devoted space to the controversy caused by John Kinsella and Alice Oswald, whose motives were initially unclear. Kinsella has since taken to the pages of the New Statesman to explain himself. He says that he has spent ‘life enjoying the sublimity of a golden wheatcrop on the verge of harvest’. He opposes the ‘colonising culture’ of harvest and husbandry. Poetry is an ‘active entity’ that should ‘work against violence’. He has embarked on a campaign of ‘linguistic disobedience’ against the ‘scourge of salinity’ and the other ‘damages’ caused by the need to feed 7 billion souls and counting.

Christopher Hitchens is dead. His reputation as a stylist, polemicist and independent thinker is such that his legacy looks certain to be secure. Here he is talking about the art of writing, and life in general.

Last week saw poets Alice Oswald and John Kinsella withdraw from the shortlist of the TS Eliot Prize. Their refusal to be in the running for this prestigious award was on the grounds that the Poetry Book Society, which runs it, is sponsored by hedge fund manager Aurum Funds. Oswald said that she thought ‘poetry should be questioning not endorsing such institutions’. But, in this austere time of government cuts, when many arts organisations like the Poetry Book Society are about to lose their funding from the Arts Council, can we really blame them for accepting some ready cash from a hedge fund? Well, judging from the angry comments following any article in their defence, yes we can.

Even in translation, Michel Houellebecq’s novels are witty, mad (particularly in translation) and sickeningly funny. I’m reading his latest, The Map and the Territory, which won the Prix Goncourt last year. As expected, author and characters are superb in their disgust with and contempt for the world in general, and especially France, art, tourism and gastronomy, all of them hideously related. The sex and atrocities have been rationed, though; the writing has new polish and finesse; and a shocking sympathy has crept into the proceedings. Even if it did not win the Man Booker Prize after I backed it at 8-1, I thought Stephen Kelman’s Pigeon English was miraculous. I’m not saying that Sam Leith’s You Talkin’ To Me?

American author Russell Hoban died yesterday, aged 86. I’ve never read a word of Hoban, nor do I know anything about him: so the obituaries made for very interesting reading. There appear to have been two Russell Hobans. The first was the dreamy writer of children’s books; the second was an émigré in London who wrote experimental science fiction, of which Riddley Walker is the most famous and challenging example. The book opens: 'On my naming day when I come 12 I to gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long before him nor I aint looking to see none agen.' That sentence discouraged me, but less faint-hearted souls have elevated the book to cult status.

Naguib Mahfouz would have been 100 years old last Sunday (he died in 2006 aged 94). Mahfouz was the first Arabic writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. He was renowned for describing, in the words of the New York Times’ obituary,  ‘the scent, colour and texture of life in the streets of his native Cairo’. Those qualities were particularly apparent in his best known work, The Cairo Trilogy — a historical trio spanning the two world wars, published in the mid ‘50s during Colonel Nasser’s rise. The trilogy is a native counterpoint to Lawrence Durrell’s Levantine Alexandria Quartet.

In her biography of William Morris Fiona MacCarthy opened a window onto the brilliantly talented yet curiously anaemic world of the Pre-Raphaelites and their associates. In The Last Pre-Raphaelite she switches her attention to Morris’s once great friend and later stern critic, Edward Burne-Jones. Her scholarship is exemplary; her style fluent; her judgment discriminating; above all, she makes her weird galère come vividly alive. Her book is fun to read. No one could say the same of Ian Kershaw’s The End.  Kershaw is not into fun: his cool yet remorselessly horrific account of the last days of Hitler’s Reich should be compulsory reading for any ruler contemplating taking his country into war.

‘Castrati were even said to know the ‘secret des Lesbiennes’ when it came to giving women sexual pleasure, cheerfully making up for their cruel loss with improvised dildos made of wax.’ Helen Berry’s The Castrato and His Wife, a broadly biographical study of a castrated Italian opera singer named Giusto Ferdinando Tenducci, describes the sexual potency a eunuch could pose, or at least be considered to pose, in eighteenth-century England. While castrati (castrated men) were hardly rare in Italy at this date — it was estimated that 4,000 Italian boys were castrated each year to keep their voices juvenile for operatic training — in London they remained a curious, if not entirely rare, exotic import.