Culture

‘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.

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’?

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’.