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Slogging to Byzantium
More from BooksYeats was a great poet who was also the industrious adept of a batso mystical philosophy. Do we have to absorb the philosophy before we can appreciate the poetry? If we are lucky enough to be in a state of ignorance, the question won’t come up. The poetry will get to us first. Suppose you’ve heard this much: that Yeats’s best stuff came late. So you pick up the 1950 edition of the Collected Poems and start from the back. The last few lines in the book are the first you see. And now my utmost mystery is out:A woman’s beauty is a storm-tossed banner:Under it wisdom stands, and I alone —Of all Arabia’s lovers I alone —Nor dazzled by the embroidery, nor lostIn the confusion of its night-dark folds,Can hear the armed man speak.
30 August 2003
Finding a way to beat Catch-21
More from Books‘You’re not losing; we don’t care for that type of play here. Just cash in your chips and collect your check.’ Thus the Caesar’s Palace pit boss to your reviewer in the Sixties when in fact, contrary to what the author says, the casinos did already know about, and object to, players counting the cards at blackjack. Even if bits in the blurb such as ‘utterly gripping’ (of the book), ‘utterly corrupt’ (of Las Vegas) and especially ‘rich, sharp’ (of the dialogue) are something of an exaggeration, the story of how a group of young, highly intelligent MIT boys and girls took on Las Vegas, and beat them for millions of dollars, is fun.
Trying to be one of the boys
More from BooksA group of bored American fighter pilots liven up their posting in cold war Germany with round-the-campfire joshing, petty squabbles, and some traditional extramarital frolicking. But hey — it’s all locker-room stuff: the banter is kept within acceptable boundaries. For safety’s sake a code of behaviour, however peculiar, is observed. Everyone seems to know the rules, written and unwritten. Into this frustrated pride of alpha males arrives an anomaly, Lieutenant Robert Cassada. Cassada is ambitious, aloof, reticent and therefore different. He lacks the carelessness or the natural talent of his fellow officers. He is also Puerto Rican, a fact which causes confusion and suspicion: ‘Well, how’d he get in the American Air Force?
When seeing is not believing
More from BooksWaking Raphael has all the ingredients one could hope for from a thriller set in Italy: corruption, art, religion, food and very nasty, mafia-style murders. Among the characters are a prim English art-restorer ripe for unbuttoning, a bimbo television presenter, a dodgy aristo, and a butcher who sings as he slaughters. The result is imaginative and entertaining but also highly informative about Italian history and the murky world of the Renaissance (did you know that poor Umbrians sometimes sent their sons to be gelded by the area’s skilled slaughterers in the hope that they might find fortune as castrato singers? In the context of this novel it is information one receives with a shudder). The novel is set in the Umbrian city of Urbino, in 1993.
Settling in Seattle
More from BooksIn Waxwings Jonathan Raban triumphantly transfers the skills of an award-winning travel writer to his second novel. (The first was written 18 years ago.) Like the author, the principal character has moved from Britain to Seattle, ‘where herring gulls were a traffic hazard and all streets led down to the water’. Tom Janeway is Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Washington with a minor reputation for his short radio talks. But this is not the satirical university world of David Lodge and Malcolm Bradbury.
Endless stint of stunts
More from BooksTo be apparently always affable, a person everyone is pleased to see, ‘dear old Johnners’, as it seems was the broadcaster Brian Johnson, takes a nerve of steel, and that is apparent in this slightly awed biography by his son. Perhaps it is true, as Barry Johnson suggests, that the early death of Brian’s father — swept out to sea off Cornwall in a swimming accident when Brian was ten — left him insisting for the rest of his life on a world of japes and jokes. Certainly, insist he did, with astonishing persistence. First there was Eton, where he played jokes and cricket, then there was Oxford, where he did the same, life one gloriously extended house-party.
A sane cuckoo in the nest of art
More from BooksThis is a hugely impressive but somewhat exhausting book, the justification for which — from a brutally commercial viewpoint — I fail to grasp. It is a collection of Sir Frank Kermode’s literary criticism, selected by the author and drawn chronologically from all periods and aspects of his oeuvre. Short prefaces, outlining genesis and context, precede 19 essays (some of them lectures, some of them chapters from full-length works), followed by seven briefer articles, taken from the London Review of Books. In libraries if not in bookshops, the great majority of these pieces are readily available in their original published form, where they make better sense — Kermode’s arguments are so delicate and complex that they do not comfortably stand out of context.
Culture of shame
More from BooksI really thought I had made it when I went to give a talk at my old Oxford college. But when I got there I discovered that there had been an attempt to have me banned. I was accosted by a dusky beauty in the quad who, practically incoherent with indignation, told me that this was because I produced ‘the worst kind of neo-colonial travel writing’. In other words, I had once described an arranged Afghan marriage between a 14-year-old girl and a 38-year-old man as ‘legitimised rape’. I thought I had rather understated the horror of it. My thought-crime was ‘Orientalism’, the depiction of eastern cultures as strange and inferior to the West, rather than portraying them as both equally bad. In future I will give any cultural relativist this book.
More funny peculiar than ha-ha
More from BooksA shilling life will give you all the facts, or at least a £20 one will. And in the case of Humphrey Carpenter it comes with a guarantee of research, honesty and fair play. Nothing flash, no tricks of style and perhaps not too much humour, but at the end a feeling that what you have read has been as close a likeness as you will get. Auden and Pound, Tolkien and Benjamin Britten, all subjects of Carpenter biographies, not one of them has much of a case for appeal. But his biography of Spike Milligan is different. It has a tension, for, while the author seems to have set out to write a celebration of a man whose Goon Show scripts had made him laugh as a boy, it ended up as not that at all: in the process he began to dislike him.
Kissing and telling with gusto
More from BooksHarriette Wilson’s Memoirsintroduced by Lesley BlanchPhoenix, £9.99, pp. 471, ISBN 1842126326 What do a modern New York psychoanalyst and a Regency London courtesan have in common? Both offer escape, relaxation and individual attention; both are expensive. ‘In place of the alcove there is the analyst’s office. But basically the functions of both analyst and courtesan have the same principle,’ explains Lesley Blanch in her expansive introduction to the memoirs of the most famous of English courtesans, Harriette Wilson. For some 15 years Harriette Wilson was all the rage in London political society. Men were desperate for her favours, just for a night if they could not be her long-term protector.
19 July 2003
Captain Yossarian rides again
More from BooksClosing Time by Joseph Heller Scribner, £7.99, pp. 464 ISBN 0743239806 Fortune granted Joseph Heller’s generation, raised during the Depression, not only service in a war whose good intentions were universally applauded but, once in uniform, a standard of living previously unknown to a boy like Heller himself, brought up on Coney Island in a modestly poor immigrant family. Thank you, Hitler and Mussolini. ‘For war there is always enough,’ Heller’s father says. ‘It’s peace that’s too expensive.
A one-man Dad’s army
More from BooksIt isn’t good manners for somebody to criticise a great-uncle after his death, but I know from first-hand experience that my great-uncle, Lord Longford, either didn’t mind criticism or at least grew so used to it that he looked like he didn’t mind. After he appeared in an Oxford Union debate in the early 1990s attacking the porn industry, I asked him whether he minded the tactics of his opponent, a porn-film director. The director had tried to ridicule him by offering him a part in a film. ‘Oh, I rather enjoyed that,’ he said, ‘Anyway, you must be here because you’re interested in politics. Would you like to be a Tory prime minister or a Labour one?
The horror! The horror!
More from BooksI have to declare an interest. In the late 1980s, I travelled with the author of this book. After university we went to run the bulls in Pamplona together, while our neighing contemporaries were being strapped into their first pinstriped suits. Then we went to Africa, where his family had lived since the 1930s. That Grand Tour was the beginning of the rape of ideology by reality for both of us, a lurch to the right, an end to half-baked student leftyism. Then our paths diverged and I have not seen him for many years. But Aidan Hartley’s subsequent odyssey is much more frightening. He has continued to use his experiences to question theory but has seen, in Somalia, humanity in Hobbes’s state of nature and, in Rwanda, the utter evil of our species.
More respected than admired
More from BooksAt the Italian seaside last week I flicked through the hotel’s copy of a translation of Gombrich’s Story of Art. The publisher had reproduced Reynolds’s portrait of his friend Giuseppi Baretti to a larger size than any other British picture. ‘Ottimo,’ said the text, and by some odd process of displacement I was all the more happy to read the praise of a favourite picture in Italian. It is a picture of a short-sighted and unhandsome man squinting at a book, his scrunched sleeve rubbing the velvet of the chair. But to me — and many others — it is one of the greatest examples of male character ever captured with a brush, a piece of cloth, and some wet paint.
From one hustler to another
More from BooksDear James, Thanks for sending me a copy of your … what shall we call it? Memoir? Novel? Anyway, I really enjoyed it. You’ve completely captured what it was like to be an Oxford undergraduate in the mid-80s — all that Sloane Ranger crap, the Pimms, the seccies. Every time I turned the page I had a horrible jolt of recognition. ‘Oh Christ,’ I kept thinking. ‘Were we really that bad?’ (We were, we were.) The drug stuff, too, is absolutely spot on. I don’t think I’ve ever read such an accurate account of what it’s like to smoke dope. Or drop acid. Or take shrooms.
For the union dead
More from Books‘When I die,’ Robert Lowell told me, three days before he did die, in 1977, at the age of 60, ‘Elizabeth’s shares will rise and mine will fall. But mine will come back.’ Elizabeth, in this context, was Elizabeth Bishop, who with Randall Jarrell was Lowell’s correspondent and best friend in the art. His temperament at once generous and competitive, Lowell’s prediction was right. Thirty or more years ago he was by some margin the most celebrated poet in the English-speaking world. A blurry impression of his features by Sidney Nolan even appeared on the cover of Time. Today, he seems to be treated as an Old Master, a museum piece. Contemporary poets are no longer ambitious in the Lowell way.
Courtiers and communists
More from BooksCourts can be a tool for understanding the present as well as the past. The behaviour patterns of courts and courtiers are often a better guide to the workings of modern regimes than constitutions or ideologies. In The Last Days of Hitler, Hugh Trevor-Roper analysed the government of the Third Reich as a ‘cannibal court’. In his spectacular new work Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, Simon Sebag Montefiore does the same for the Soviet Union under Stalin. He analyses the lives and ‘informal power and customs’ of the top 20 men in the Soviet leadership, as well as Stalin himself, in the years from the suicide of Stalin’s wife Nadya on 8 November 1932 to his death on 5 March 1953.
5 July 2003
I’m boring, I’m ugly and I can’t write
FeaturesMy new book, Thinly Disguised Autobiography, is not just good. It's absolutely bloody amazing. The drug scenes make Irvine Welsh look like Mary Poppins; the sex scenes are more realistic than the real thing; it's the finest dissection of the English class system since Evelyn Waugh; the dialogue rocks; it's funny and moving, pacy, and lyrical enough when it needs to be but never so purple that you get bogged down in descriptions of trees or furniture; it's at least as wittily post-modern as Dave Eggers but without the cloying sentimentality; the squalid bits outfoul Martin Amis; it's better edited than The Corrections; and the ending, when with sorrow you reach it, turns out to be so blindingly brilliant that you go, 'Bugger me. That was a brilliant ending.
21 June 2003
Don’t mention that Mussolini saved Jews: it is Politically Inconvenient to do so
Any other businessWeidenfeld and Nicolson is about to publish a big biography of Mussolini by my friend Nicholas Farrell, which contains the following passage: 'Just as none of the victorious powers went to war with Germany to save the Jews neither did Mussolini go to war with them to exterminate the Jews. Indeed, once the Holocaust was under way he and his fascists refused to deport Jews to the Nazi death camps thus saving thousands of Jewish lives – far more than Oskar Schindler.' Mussolini saved more Jews than Schindler! For once, the word 'controversial', so often used to describe any old bit of routine leftism, is justified. That Mussolini saved Jews has long been known, especially to non-left-wing Italians, though that includes few Italian intellectuals.
5 April 2003
Among the goys and philistines
More from BooksFor some reason, almost every time I plunge into too hot a bath I find myself thinking of my days as a public schoolboy - presumably a 'tosh' must have been one's principal pleasure at an impressionable age - and more often than not a half-remembered line from Frederic Raphael's haunting School Play, shown on television many years ago, flickers across my mind. 'Are you trying to burn my ballocks off?' (or words to that effect), demands the rather Simon Ravenish senior boy (played by Denholm Elliott) of his junior (Michael Kitchen), who has drawn the bath as part of his fagging duties.
These foolish things
More from BooksPerhaps this strange volume is a bang on the nose for political correctness, but one cannot be sure. It could have been written in the 18th century by a deranged sage determined to scotch the more famous Encyclopaedia of the Enlightenment and its absurd faith in progress and human perfectibility. Published on April Fool's Day, it may have been a hoax of the dwarf variety, like the peas I have been stupidly planting in spring sunshine, observed by their ultimate beneficiaries circling in smug silence overhead. The author is said to be an Amsterdamer, a man of letters who has been researching stupidity for over 20 years, but he may be one of those crows.
The heart of whiteness
More from BooksHappiness writes white, it's said: so too, one would think, does Antarctica. How is it possible to describe an environment which tolerates almost no life, which is derived from a single substance, and which is for the most part a single colour? Early explorers were simultaneously horrified and enthralled by the continent's awesome singularity. Scott wrote of its 'silent, wind-swept immensity'; Shackleton's surgeon, Alexander Macklin, of its 'same unbroken whiteness'. Given Antarctica's unsurpassed simplicity as a landform, one might expect writers to have shied away from it. And yet this fearsomely meaningless place has, especially in the 20th century, generated an enormous literature.
Master of the merry-go-round
More from BooksSprawling, teeming with people and flooded with an almost malevolent brilliance, this book is the literary equivalent of some vast conurbation. As with a conurbation, it is difficult to identify the heart - and heart here means not merely centre but humanity. Trapped, as in one of Mark Gertler's most famous pictures, on a constantly accelerating roundabout, the characters all seem to be in imminent danger of being hurled into oblivion by the centrifugal force of a powerfully churning imagination. Two of the most important of these characters are a father and son. Digby, once the heir to a company that rivalled Wedgwood in the manufacture of pottery, is now an antique crock among the antique crockery that still remains to him as a reminder of past affluence.
The best committee that ever sat
More from BooksThere are two literary facts in English which it is almost impossible to examine, to see clearly. They are Shakespeare and the King James Bible. In both cases, the impossibility derives from the same point; that critical standards of what great English writing means stem so completely from Shakespeare's peculiar virtues and from the values of the prose in the King James Bible that all commentators and, indeed, all English-speakers subsequently have lived within their limits, and have been unable to step outside and discuss their subjects with any clarity, as one can step outside Spenser or Wordsworth, and see their world whole and distant, with an awareness of alternative models of excellence.
29 March 2003
Serving Christ and colonialism
More from BooksFergus Fleming is the author of three volumes of narrative history, the best of which, Barrow's Boys, gives a rollicking account of 19th-century Arctic exploration. Now he has lighted on the 'conquest' of the Sahara, and it is a gripping saga, little known beyond the popular image of a kepi-wearing French officer riding into the desert on a white camel while hordes of Tuareg mass silently on the horizon. The Sword and the Cross begins with a trot through the history of Algeria, or the Barbary Coast as it was known to white men, and of Ottoman North Africa in general.
A parable of a lost talent
More from Bookstranslated by Krishna Winston The advantage of Crabwalk is that it is only a third as long as G.
Still on his feet in the twelfth round
More from BooksNorman Mailer was 80 years old on 31 January 2003, so let us salute the last of all the knights. He was very famous very quickly, with The Naked and the Dead, and for nearly six decades he has poured forth rich and provocative novels, biographies, non-fiction bouts of reportage - it's hard to know what they are any more. Fiction as documentary? Concealed memoirs? He's certainly unstoppable. The accounts of Marilyn Monroe and Picasso show him as the critic-as-artist; the treatise on Vietnam or the moon landings, his history of the CIA and the investigation into the life and death of Lee Harvey Oswald, make him America's Tolstoy.
Tormented Prince Charming
More from BooksThe story begins at the ch.