Christopher Howse

Wonderful year for Pevsner, or rather for us who use the guides as we potter about. Four new vols: Bedfordshire, Somerset, Cornwall, Cambridgeshire, too big for the pocket, but a reasonable £28 a kick, thanks to Yale. A triumph of perseverance. Raymond Edwards’s biography Tolkien (Robert Hale, £25) is the best one could hope for while the letters and papers remain locked in the Bodleian. Tolkien embraced the northern theory of courage: ‘Defeat is no refutation.’ That was just as well, surrounded as he was by death, delay and failure. It was amazing that he wrote even The Lord of the Rings.

Charles Saatchi, the gallery owner, has created his own Chamber of Horrors in this thick, square book, ‘inspired by striking photographs’. One of the most successful of these is a black and white image of male and female figures: ‘Gruesome and gaunt, they look like extras from an early piece of zombie cinema.’ They are, it soon becomes clear, oddments saved by firemen from a blaze at Madame Tussauds in 1925. Madame Tussaud, the author reminds us, ‘would ‘tiptoe through the piles of corpses behind the guillotine to discover the most illustrious of the heads, and would promptly make casts of them, her hands bathed in their blood’.

An untitled photograph by Jerry Uelsmann from 1991 shows a rock like Magritte’s floating in the sky between an Ansel Adams mountainside of conifers on one side and a bare mountain on the other; concentric ripples on a lake in the foreground are mirrored in the sky above. It will, I fear, remind readers of that BBC2 ident with Zen-ish sky-ripples. Each of Uelsmann’s photographs, always in black and white, is composed from three or five negatives meticulously aligned to make a single composite print. Naked female bodies float above water or clouds; anonymous silhouetted male figures observe from doorways; cupped hands grow from a tree stump. The connotations are surreal and Gurdjieffian.

What the title promises is not found inside. It is a tease. John Sutherland says he has ‘been paid one way or another, to read books all my life’, yet he does not regard himself as well read in the genre of novels. With two million languishing in the British Library vaults, nobody could be, he insists. And although the publishers have given it the subtitle ‘A guide to 500 great novels and a handful of literary curiosities’, the author declares in his admirably succinct preface: ‘This book is not a guide.’ He’s right. It is an engaging game, or a compendium of games (as the Gamages Christmas catalogue used to describe a chess board with snakes and ladders on the back). I started off by seeing what the Prof thought of some of the books I like.

In the reminiscences of Bertie Wooster we find this: As I sat in the bathtub, soaping a meditative foot and singing, if I remember correctly, ‘Pale Hands I Loved Beside the Shalimar’, it would be deceiving my public to say that I was feeling boomps-a-daisy. The sentence is quoted for its use of ‘meditative foot’, in the Winter 1973 issue of the learned journal Linguistic Inquiry, by Robert A. Hall in his ‘Transferred Epithet in P. G. Wodehouse’, now as well-thumbed as any article can be that is perused principally online. Stephen Fry is always citing it. Mark Forsyth, however, quotes the sentence as an example of litotes — affirming something by denying its opposite.

The game that Charles Saatchi plays in The Naked Eye is to find photographs of subjects that look surprisingly like something else. A stork in mid-flight seems to have a jet-trail streaming from it; an ant silhouetted on the rim of a cup seems to be the same size as a helicopter hovering in the sky next to it. An elephant, if you really suspend disbelief, looks as though it is balancing on outstretched trunk (but it was done, with the help of a taxidermist, by Daniel Firman, who wanted, for some reason, to show what an elephant might do in low enough gravity).

Do you think you can tell things about writers from the way they look in a painting or photograph? A more demanding test: from their books can you predict how authors look? It sounds unlikely, yet, upon seeing a photograph of an author, we do find ourselves exclaiming: ‘That’s not how I thought he’d look!’ In Portrait of the Writer there are 250 photographs with a potted biography opposite each. ‘In the best instances,’ says Goffredo Fofi in the foreword, ‘we can see in the photograph that the writer (although not just the writer) has discovered something about himself or herself that he or she was unaware of or had not reflected upon sufficiently.’ Can we, though? Take E.E.

The weight of bacteria that each of us carries around is equal to that of our brain, a kilogram of the creatures, billions of them, ten times as many in the gut alone as the number of human cells in the body. There may be 10,000 distinct kinds, with a different community on the forehead from that on the sole. There are fewer kinds in the mouth or stomach than at the back of the knee, which has a more diverse population than any other part. This is surprising and interesting, and we would like to know more about this teeming personal nature reserve.

How did the cherubim, solemn figures of beaten gold in the Holy of Holies of the Hebrew Temple, become chubby toddlers (such as the pair in Raphael’s Sistine Madonna), popular on greetings cards? It was surprising in the first place that their graven images should be set up at all, with eyes cast down and wings spread out, shielding the cover of the Ark of the Covenant, where the very glory of the Lord, the shekinah, descended with dangerous power. For Philo of Alexandria, a Platonist interpreter of Jewish belief, they were the same cherubim that guarded the gates of Paradise (from which mankind had been banished).

  Since I began to watch films on video and not so much in cinemas, I have found that I sometimes get the itch to rewind reality itself, in order to check on what I have seen. There must be many oddities in my way of seeing of which I am less aware. Julian Rothenstein, a one-man art movement, intends to expose some of them in The Redstone Book of the Eye, a collection of almost 300 full-page pictures with very little commentary. It’s about seeing, and the eye is secondary, really, even though we are drawn to others’ eyes in daily conversation. Or in some cases we avoid eye-contact. In British culture this may signify guilt; in Caribbean culture it may signify deference. It is a pity to mistake the one for the other.