All posts tagged 2005

Joshua Reynolds: The Creation of Celebrity (2005)

This is the catalogue of a major exhibition of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s portraits held at Tate Britain back in 2005. I went, loved the exhibition and bought this catalogue. In my opinion the written content of the catalogue is poor, but the colour reproductions of 100 or so of Reynolds’s best paintings are spectacular.

The catalogue contains a biography of Reynolds by Martin Postle and four essays by Reynolds scholars:

‘The Modern Apelles’: Joshua Reynolds and the Creation of Celebrity by Martin Postle
Reynolds, Celebrity and The Exhibition Space by Mark Hallett
‘Figures of Fame’: Reynolds and the printed Image by Tim Clayton
‘Paths of Glory’: Fame and the Public in Eighteenth-Century London by Stella Tillyard

The essays are followed by some 100 full-colour reproductions, divided into the following sections:

With separate sections of images devoted to:

Reynolds and the Reproductive Print
Reynolds and the Sculpted Image

The concept of celebrity

As the title suggests, the idea is somehow to tie Reynolds’s 18th century art and career to 21st century ideas of ‘celebrity’. In my opinion all four essays fail to do this. Despite frequently using sentences with the word ‘celebrity’ in them, the catalogue nowhere really explains what ‘celebrity’ is.

The authors have a hard time really distinguishing it from the notion of ‘fame’ and the pursuit of ‘fame’ and the risks of ‘fame’ – subjects which have been thoroughly discussed since ancient Greek times.

In Greek mythology Pheme was the personification of fame and renown, her favour being notability, her wrath being scandalous rumors… She was described as ‘she who initiates and furthers communication’… A tremendous gossip, Pheme was said to have pried into the affairs of mortals and gods, then repeated what she learned, starting off at first with just a dull whisper, but repeating it louder each time, until everyone knew. In art, she was usually depicted with wings and a trumpet… In Roman mythology, Fama was described as having multiple tongues, eyes, ears and feathers by Virgil (in Aeneid IV line 180 ff.) and other authors.

In other words, the concept of ‘fame’ and the way it unavoidably attracts a spectrum of public comment, from dignified praise at one end through to scurrilous rumour at the other end – is as old as Western civilisation.

In my opinion the authors struggle to establish a really clear distinction between these multiple and time-honoured notions of fame with all its consequences, and their attempt to shoe-horn modern-day ‘celebrity’ into the picture.

The whole thing is obviously an attempt by Tate to make Reynolds and his paintings more ‘relevant’ to a ‘modern’ audience, maybe to attract in those elusive ‘younger’ visitors which all arts venues need to attract to sustain their grants. Or to open a new perspective from our time back to his, which makes his society, his aims and his paintings more understandable in terms of modern concepts.

I can see what they’re trying to do, and it is obvious that the four authors have been told to make as many snappy comparisons between the society of Reynolds’s day and our own times as possible – but flashy references to the eighteenth-century ‘media’ or to Reynolds’s sitters getting their ‘fifteen minutes of fame’, aren’t enough, by themselves, to give any insight. In fact, these flashy comparisons tend to obscure the complexity of 18th century society by railroading complex facts and anecdotes into narrow 21st notions and catchphrases.

Being modish risks becoming dated

The authors’ comparisons have themselves become dated in at least two ways:

the ‘modern’ celebrities they invoke have dated quickly (David Beckham is given as a current example)
it was written in 2005, before the advent of social media, Instagram, twitter etc, so has itself become completely out of date about the workings of ‘modern celebrity’

There is a third aspect which is – Who would you trust to give you a better understanding of social media, contemporary fame, celebrity, influencers, tik tok and so on – a social media marketing manager, a celebrity journalist or… a starchy, middle-aged, white English academic?

There is a humorous aspect to listening to posh academics trying to get down wiv da kids, and elaborately explaining to their posh white readership how such things as ‘the media’ work, what ‘the glitterati’ are, and showing off their familiarity with ‘the media spotlight’ – things which, one suspects, library-bound academics are not, in fact, all that familiar with.

The authors’ definitions of celebrity

The authors attempt numerous definitions of celebrity:

Reynolds’s attitude towards fame, and how it was inextricably bound up with a concern for his public persona, or what we today would call his ‘celebrity‘ status.

So Reynolds was concerned about his fame, about building a professional reputation and then defending it, but wasn’t every other painter, craftsman and indeed notable figure of the time? As Postle concedes:

In this respect he was not untypical of a whole range of writers, actors and artists who regarded fame as the standard for judging the worthiness of their own performance against the achievements of the past.

Postle goes on to try and distinguish fame from celebrity:

However, Reynolds [achieved fame] by using the mechanisms associated with what has become known as ‘celebrity‘, a hybrid of fame driven by commerce and the cult of personality.

Hmm. Is he saying no public figures prior to Joshua Reynolds cultivated a ‘cult of personality’ or that no public figures tried to cash in on their fame? Because that is clearly nonsense. And putting the word celebrity in scare quotes doesn’t help much:

Reynolds pandered to the Prince [of Wales]’s thirst for ‘celebrity‘ and fuelled his narcissistic fantasies.

The author doesn’t explain what he means by ‘celebrity’ in this context or why the prince thirsted for it and how he was different in this respect from any other 18th century aristocrat who ‘thirsted’ for fame and respect.

Through portraits such as these [of the Duc d’Orleans], Reynolds openly identified with fashionable Whig society; the Georgian ‘glitterati’ – liberal in the politics, liberated in their social attitudes, and libidinous in their sexual behaviour.

Does use of the word ‘glitterati’ add anything to our understanding?

He was also the first artist to pursue his career in the media spotlight.

‘Media spotlight’? Simply using modern clichés like ‘media spotlight’ and ‘celebrity’ and ‘glitterati’ didn’t seem to me to shed much light on anything. The reader wants to ask a) what do you understand by ‘media spotlight’? b) in what way did Reynolds pursue his career in a media spotlight?

As experience of the modern media tells us, a sure sign that an individual’s fame has been transmuted into ‘celebrity’ is when press interest in his or her professional achievements extends to their private and social life.

I’m struggling to think of a time when there hasn’t been intrusive interest in the lives of the rich and famous, and when it hasn’t been recorded in scurrilous satires, squibs, poems.

People gossiped about Julius Caesar, about all the Caesars. We have written records of the way Athenians gossiped about Socrates and his wife. Prurient interest in the personal lives of anyone notable in an urban environment go back as far as we have written records.

Here’s another definition:

In a process that seems to prefigure the ephemeral dynamics of heroism and redundancy found in today’s celebrity culture, the exploitation of celebrity typified by Reynolds’s representation of [the famous soldier, the Marquess of] Granby depended not only on the glorification, in portrait form, of individuals who had already gained a certain kind of renown within the wider realms of urban culture, but also on a continual replenishment – from one year to the next – of this hyperbolic imagery of bravery, beauty and fame.

I think he’s saying that visitors to the annual exhibitions liked to see new pictures – or, as he puts it with typical art scholar grandiosity, ‘a continual replenishment of this hyperbolic imagery’.

‘The ephemeral dynamics of heroism and redundancy found in today’s celebrity culture’? Does that tortuous definition have any relevance to Kim Kardashian, Beyonce, Taylor Swift, Rihanna et al?

What these authors are all struggling to express is that Reynolds made a fabulously successful career by painting the well-known and eminent people of his day, making sure to paint army or naval heroes as soon as they returned from famous victories, making sure he painted portraits of the latest author after a hit novel or play, painting well-known courtesans, carefully associating his own name (or brand) with success and fame.

It was a dialectical process in which Reynolds’s portraits, often hung at the annual Royal Academy exhibition – which was itself the talk of the town while it lasted – promoted both the sitter and their fame, but also kept Sir Joshua’s name and reputation as Top Painter Of The Famous continually in the public eye.

That’s what the essay writers are trying to say. But you have to wade through a lot of academic rhetoric to get there. Take this questionable generalisation thrown out by Stella Tillyard, which sounds reasonable, until you start to think about it.

Like so much else that defines us in Europe and America now, celebrity appears to have been made in the eighteenth century and in particular in eighteenth century London, with its dozens of newspapers and print shops, its crowds and coffee houses, theatres, exhibitions, spectacles, pleasure gardens and teeming pavements. (Stella Tillyard, p.61)

‘Like so much else that defines us in Europe and America now’? What would you say defines modern society in 2020? I’d guess the list would include the internet, mobile phones, social media, webcams and digital technology generally, big cars, long-haul flights, cheap foreign holidays, mass immigration, multi-cultural societies, foreign food… things like that.

Quite obviously none of these originated in eighteenth century London.

Tillyard’s essay is the best of the four but it still contains highly questionable assertions. She thinks there is a basic ‘narrative’ of ‘celebrity’ which is one of rise, stardom, fall and rise again. The examples she gives are Bill Clinton getting into trouble because of Monica Lewinsky, and the footballers Francesco Totti and David Beckham. She thinks this basic narrative arc echoes the story of Jesus Christ, rising from obscurity, gaining fame, being executed, and rising from the dead. You have to wonder what drugs she is on.

Nonetheless, Tillyard’s is the best essay of the four because she’s an actual historian and so has a wide enough grasp of the facts to make some sensible points. She also gives the one and only good definition of celebrity in the book when she writes that:

Celebrity was born at the moment private life became a tradeable public commodity. (p.62)

Aha. Right at the end of the four essays we get the first solid, testable and genuinely insightful definition of celebrity.

According to Tillyard’s definition, the really new thing about celebrity is not the interest in gossip about the rich and famous – that, as pointed out, has been with us forever – it is that this kind of fame can be packaged into new formats and sold. It has become part of the newly mercantile society of the 18th century.

Celebrity, among other things, is about the commodification of fame, about the dissemination of images representing the individual celebrity, and about the collective conversations and fantasies generated by these processes. (p.37)

The assertion is that Reynolds was able to capitalise on his reputation. He made money out of it. He was able to exploit the new aspects of mid-18th century fame in order to build up a successful business and make a fortune.

He developed a process for making his portraits well known. The lead element in this was ensuring they were prominently hung at the annual exhibition of paintings by members of the new Royal Academy and so became the subject of the enormous amount of comment the exhibition attracted in the scores of newspapers, magazines, cartoons, lampoons, caricatures, poems and plays which infested Georgian London.

Deftly riding this tide of gossip and talk and critical comment, Reynolds was able to assure his sitters that he would make them famous – and he made himself famous in the process. And, as a result, he was able to charge a lot of money for his portraits.

He was able to turn the insubstantial, social quality of ‘fame’ into hard cash. That’s how the argument goes. I’ve put it far more plainly than any of these four writers do, and it’s an interesting point, but still begs a lot of questions…

Robert Orme’s 15 minutes of fame

When Postle says that the soldier Robert Orme got his ‘fifteen minutes of fame’ (p.27) it strikes me as being a flashy but misleading reference.

Andy Warhol’s expression, ‘in the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes’, refers very specifically to the 15-minute time slots allocated on the kind of American TV programmes which are punctuated every 15 minutes or so with ad breaks. Its merit derives from its source in a very specific technology and at a very specific moment in that technology (the later 1960s).

Whereas Robert Orme took part in an important battle of the Seven Years War (surviving the massacre of General Edward Braddock’s forces by French and Indians in July 1755), returned to England and was for a while feted and invited to dinners to give first-hand accounts of the massacre.

OK, so interest in Orme petered out after a while, but his story hardly conforms to the ‘fifteen minutes of fame’ description in the very precise, TV-age way Warhol had intended.

It’s an example of the way the authors are prepared to twist the historical record in order to shoehorn in their strained comparisons with modern ‘celebrity’ or the ‘glitterati’ or ‘the media spotlight’.

My point is that just chucking modern buzzwords at historical events doesn’t help us understand the historical events and doesn’t shed much light on the buzzwords or the ideas behind them, either. Not without a much more detailed analysis, anyway.

What was new about 18th century ‘media’

The one place in the four essays which comes alive i.e. presents new facts or insights, is in historian Stella Tillyard’s essay, where she explains that a new concept of ‘fame’ was being driven by some genuinely new developments in mass publication. She suggests four factors which account for the rise of a new type of fame in the mid-18th century:

1. A limited monarchy – the mystique surrounding the Divine Right of Kings which had clung to the Stuart Monarchy (1660-1714) drained away from the stolid Hanoverian monarchs who replaced them after 1714. Their powers were circumscribed from the start by Parliament and this made them much more human, much more worldly and, well, sometimes boring figures, for example. George III, widely known as Farmer George.

2. Royal glamour migrated – instead of surrounding the monarch in a nimbus of glory the human desire to have glamorous figures to look up to and gossip about migrated to new categories of ‘star’ or ‘celebrity’, namely top military figures, successful actors and even writers.

3. The lapse of the Licensing Act left the press a huge amount of freedom. By 1770 there were 60 newspapers printed in London every week, all looking for gossip and tittle tattle to market. Combined with a very weak libel law which allowed almost any rumour and speculation to be printed. Well before the tabloids were invented, the taste for an endless diet of celebrity tittle tattle was being catered to.

4. A public interested in new ways of thinking about themselves or others. This is the tricksiest notion, but Tillyard argues that this huge influx of new printed matter, combined with shops full of cheap prints, to make literate urban populations think about themselves and their roles as citizens of a busy city, and as consumers, in new ways.

Now all this chimes very well with the picture painted in Ian McIntyre’s brilliant biography of Reynolds, which clearly shows how almost every incident, not only from his personal life but of the lives of all his famous friends (e.g. the writer Dr Johnson, the actor David Garrick, the historian Edmund Gibbon, the poet Oliver Goldsmith) was quickly leaked to scurrilous journalists, who reported them in their scandal sheets, or made cartoons or comic poems about them.

Reynolds’s world was infested with gossip and rumour.

By contrast with Tillyard’s authoritative historian’s-eye view, Postle’s art critic assertions are less precise and less persuasive:

Reynolds grew up in an age that witnessed the birth of modern journalism.

Did he, though? ‘Modern’ journalism?

Googling ‘birth of modern journalism’ you discover that ‘modern journalism’ began with a piece written by Defoe in 1703. Or was it during the American Civil War in the 1860s? Or maybe it was with Walter Lippmann, writing in the 1920s, often referred to as the ‘father of modern journalism’?

In other words, the birth of ‘modern’ journalism happened more or less any time you want it to have done, any time you need to add this cliché into your essay to prop up your argument. And that little bit of googling suggests how risky it is making these kinds of sweeping assertions.

In fact it suggests that any generalisation which contains the word ‘modern’ is dodgy because the term ‘modern’ itself is so elastic as to be almost meaningless. Historians themselves date ‘the modern period’ to the 1500s. Do you think of the Elizabethan era as ‘modern’?

The modern era of history is usually defined as the time after the Middle Ages. This is divided into the early modern era and the late modern era. (Define modern era in history)

Postle’s assertion that there was something uniquely and newly journalistic about Reynolds’s era sounds fine until you think of earlier periods – take the turn-of-the 18th century and the reign of Queen Anne (1702-1714) which was packed with coffee house publications and scurrilous poems written against each other by leading figures. Alexander Pope’s entire career exemplifies a world of literary gossip and animosity.

Going further back, wasn’t the court of Charles II the subject of all kinds of cartoons, pictures, scurrilous paintings and poems and plays? Lots of John Dryden’s poems only make sense if you realise they’re about leading figures of the day, either praising or blaming them. During the British civil wars (1637-51) there was an explosion of pamphlets and leaflets and poems and manifestos denouncing the actions of more or less every notable figure, and giving a running commentary on the political developments of the day. Wasn’t Shakespeare’s time (1590 to 1615) one of rumour and gossip and pamphlet wars?

And in fact I’ve just come across the same idea, on page 4 of Peter H. Wilson’s vast history of the Thirty Years War, where he writes:

From the outset, the conflict attracted wide interest across Europe, accelerating the early seventeenth-century ‘media revolution’ that saw the birth of the modern newspaper.
(Europe’s Tragedy by Peter H. Wilson, page 4)

So surely the widespread availability of gossip sheets and scandal mongering publications was a matter of degree not kind. Artists of the late-17th century (van Dyck, Peter Lely, Godfrey Kneller) had earned types of ‘fame’ and certainly tried to capitalise on it. By Reynolds’s day there were just more outlets for it, more magazines, newspapers, journals – reflecting a steadily growing urban population and market for all things gossip-related. Between 1650 and 1750 the British population increased, the population of London increased, the number of literate people increased, and so the market for reading matter increased.

So when Postle asserts that newspapers played an increasingly important part in the critical reception of art, well, they played an increasingly important role in the critical reception of everything, such as war and politics and religion, such as the Seven Years War, the American War of Independence, the French Revolution and every other kind of debate and issue.

1. That is what newspapers do – tell people what’s going on and editorialise about it – and 2. there were more and more of them, because the population was growing, and the number of literate consumers was steadily growing with it.

Reynolds didn’t invent any of this. He just took advantage of it very effectively.

Reynolds’s strategies for success

But was Reynolds unique?

As mentioned above, the four essayists have clearly received a brief to make Reynolds sound as modern and edgy and contemporary and down with the kids as possible.

But the tendency of the essays is also to try and make Reynolds sound unique – in his painterly ambition, in the way he used connections and pulled strings to paint famous sitters, promoted himself socially (by being a member of many clubs and inviting all the famous men and women of the time to large dinners), promoted his work through public exhibitions, tried to wangle key painting positions to the royal family, and by having prints made of his portraits which could be sold on to a wider audience.

The trouble is that – having just read Ian McIntyre’s brilliant biography of Reynolds which presents an encyclopedic overview of his times, its clubs, newspapers, magazines, his colleagues and rivals, of the mechanisms of a career in art and an in-depth overview of all Georgian society – I realise these were the standard procedures of the day.

For example, the authors point out that Reynolds was keen to paint portraits of famous people to boost his career – but what portrait painter of the day wasn’t? Allan Ramsay and Thomas Gainsborough, to name just two contemporary painters, lobbied hard to win aristocratic patrons, to promote their portraits to other potential clients, to expand their client base, and so on. It was a highly competitive and commercial world.

The catalogue contains sections on the portraits of aristocratic ladies, military heroes and courtesans as if Reynolds had invented the idea of painting these kinds of figures – but paintings of aristocrats go back at least as far as the Renaissance, and statues of emperors, notable figures and military leaders go back through the ancient Romans to the Greeks.

There’s a section devoted to showing how Reynolds used prints extensively to promote his career, not only here but abroad, where British art prints commanded good prices. (One of the few new things I learned from the essays was that British mezzotinting was so highly regarded as to become known as la maniere anglaise, p.51)

But all his rivals and colleagues did just the same, too – otherwise there wouldn’t have been a thriving community of printmakers and of printbuyers.

And the authors strain to prove that the kind of high-profile aristocrats, military leaders, and top artists-writers-actors of the day that Reynolds portrayed were often discussed, profiled, ridiculed and lampooned in London’s countless scurrilous newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, poems, broadsides, gossip columns and so on.

But this was just as true of all the notable figures that all the other portrait painters of his day painted. It was an extremely gossipy society.

In other words, none of the activities the authors attribute to Reynolds was unique to him – they were being energetically carried out by scores of rivals and colleagues in the swarming ant hill of rivalry and competition that was Georgian London. What is interesting, is the extent to which Reynolds did all these things best (when he did), or where he failed, or where he pioneered a new aspect of this or that activity.

Unfortunately, the four authors don’t really have much space to make their cases. The four essays are relatively short. They have nowhere like the 550 closely-typed pages that Ian McIntyre has in his masterful biography of Reynolds. Therefore, to anyone who’s read McIntyre, the four essays come over as fleeting and superficial sketches of subjects and issues which deserve to be dealt with in much, much greater detail if you want to understand why Reynolds was the towering figure that he was.

It wasn’t that he did all these activities listed above – it’s that he did many of them better, more comprehensively, and more systematically than his rivals.

And also that he just worked harder at it. He was extremely disciplined and professional, working a solid 6 or 7 hour days, every day, often on Sundays. He produced, on average, well over one hundred commissions a year, an extraordinary workrate. This isn’t mentioned anywhere in the essays, but it is a key reason for his success.

Or the even more obvious fact that a his success was down to the fact that he was, quite simply, the best portrait painter of his time. He may well have adopted the canny career strategies listed above, but they’d have been meaningless if he hadn’t also been a painter of genius.

Art scholarship prose style

This section contains no facts and is devoted to an analysis and skewering of pretentious artspeak. Art scholar prose is very identifiable. It has at least three elements:

use of fashionable, pretentious buzzwords such as subvert, interrogate, engage, gendered, identity, desire, site, gaze, other
combined with a curiously starchy, old-fashioned locutions such as whilst, amongst
thin actual content

1. Buzzwords

In terms of his desire to associate himself with the celebrity of others, the most compelling paintings by Reynolds are surely his portraits of prostitutes… (p.29)

‘Wish’ wouldn’t be a better word?

When the ancient philosopher, Socrates, visited the artist’s house with friends, the courtesan was to be found under the gaze of the painter (p.29)

The word ‘gaze’ now has the adjective ‘male’ attached to it in all contexts, and is always a bad thing.

[At the new public exhibitions of the 1760s] the visitor’s encounter with the painted images of celebrities was crucially informed by those other burgeoning cultural sites of the period, the newspaper and the periodical. (p.35)

Do you think of a newspaper or magazine you read as a cultural site? Alliteration is always good, makes your ideas sound grander and more important.

In arranging that his pictures of such women [the royal bridesmaids at the wedding of George III and Queen Charlotte]… Reynolds… was contributing to, and trading upon, a burgeoning cult of aristocratic celebrity within the sites and spaces of urban culture. (p.39)

Tillyard in particular likes the word and idea of the ‘site’:

In response to the overwhelming attention of the London public [Jean-Jacques Rousseau] took himself off to the wilds of Derbyshire and began to write his Confessions, in which he demanded the right to be heard on his own terms rather than to become the site for others’ imaginings. (p.66)

Omai [a South Sea islander Reynolds painted] is both sophisticate and innocent, celebrity and savage, an eloquent but mute subject whose lack of the English language and inability to write allowed his audience and the picture’s viewers to make him a site for their own imaginings. (p.69)

It is surprising that Omai isn’t taken as an example of The Other, an almost meaningless word commonly used to describe anyone who isn’t a privileged white male.

The press functioned as one vital counterpart to the exhibition space in terms of what was emerging as a recognisably modern economy of celebrity… (p.37)

The ‘modern economy of celebrity’ sounds impressive but what does it mean, what is an ‘economy of celebrity’ (and remember the warning about using the word ‘modern’ which is generally an empty adjective used solely for its sound, to make the text sound grand and knowledgeable).

Reynolds painted a number of portraits of aristocratic patrons such as Maria, Countess Waldegrave and Elizabeth Keppel. This allows art scholar Mark Hallett to write:

In being invited to track the shifting imagery of such women as Keppel, Bunbury and Waldegrave, attentive visitors to the London exhibition rooms thus became witness to an extended process of pictorial and narrative transformation, choreographed by Reynolds himself, in which his sitters became part of a gendered, role-playing theatre of aristocratic celebrity that was acted out on an annual basis in the public spaces of the exhibition room. (p.39)

If you read and reread it, I think you realise that this long pretentious sentence doesn’t actually tell you anything. It is prose poetry in the tradition of the mellifluous aesthete, Walter Pater, just using a different jargon.

‘Narrative’, ‘gendered’, ‘theatre’, ‘spaces’ are all modish critical buzzwords. What does ‘gendered’ even mean? That some portraits were of women and some of men? Hmm. And a gallery isn’t really a theatre, no matter how hard art scholars wish their working environment was more jazzy and exciting. It’s a gallery. It consists of pictures hung on a wall. Therefore to say a gallery is a ‘role-playing theatre’ is simply a literary analogy, it is a type of literary artifice which makes absolutely no factual addition to our knowledge.

Translated, that sentence means that regular visitors to the Royal Academy exhibition often saw portraits of the same famous sitters and so could judge different artists’ treatment of them, or gossip about how their appearance changed from year to year. That’s what ‘pictorial and narrative transformation’ means.

The artist’s portrait of Granby can now be understood as just one element within an unfolding iconography of military celebrity that was being articulated by the artist in the exhibition space during the 1760s.

Translated, this means that Reynolds painted many portraits of successful military heroes. As did lots and lots of other portrait painters of the time. But it sounds more impressive the way Hallett expresses it using key buzzwords.

We can even suggest that such details as the Duchess [of Devonshire]’s ‘antique’ dress and rural surroundings… transform her into a figure of pastoral fantasy, a delicately classicised icon of aristocratic otherness… (p.43)

Ah, ‘the Other’ and ‘otherness’, it was the last empty space on my bullshit bingo card. What does ‘otherness’ mean here? That aristocrats aren’t like you and me? That, dressed up in fake Greek robes, leaning against a classical pillar in a broad landscape, they seem like visions from another world? Better to say ‘otherness’. Makes it sound as if you understand complex and only-hinted-at deeply intellectual ideas (taken, in fact, from Jacques Lacan and other French theorists).

2. Starchy prose style

It’s peculiar the way art scholars combine these flashy buzzwords from Critical Theory (interrogate, subvert, gender, identity, The Other) with creaky old phrases which sound as if they’ve come from the mouth of a dowager duchess.

It’s as if Lady Bracknell had read a dummy’s guide to Critical Theory and was trying to incorporate the latest buzzwords into her plummy, old-fashioned idiolect. For example, art scholars always prefer ‘within’ to ‘in’, ‘amongst’ to among, and ‘whilst’ to while – versions of common English words which help them sound grander.

Some contemporary critics thought Reynolds’s experiments with oil and painting techniques meant his works would eventually decay and disintegrate. Mark Hallett says:

The fact that an exhibition including paintings such as these is now taking place, more than two hundred years after Reynolds’s death, helps put paid to such aspersions.

‘Helps put paid to such aspersions’? Isn’t that the voice of Lady Bracknell? ‘I should certainly hope, Mr Moncrieff, that in future you shall keep your aspersions and animadversions to yourself.’

3. Thin content

See above where I’ve highlighted the relative lack of new or interesting insights in the four critical essays, which can’t be concealed by tarting them up with references to the eighteenth century ‘glitterati’ or Andy Warhol.

Sometimes the essays descend to the bathetic. When we read that scholar Richard Wendorf has written a paper in which he observes that

Reynolds was adept at cultivating patrons through observing the rules of polite society

we are straying close to the University of the Bleeding Obvious.

When we learn that Reynolds sometimes flouted these rules in order to create a Bohemian effect, in order to copy the more raffish end of the aristocratic spectrum of behaviour, it feels like a variation on the obvious, and hardly something which required an entire essay to ‘explain’.

Conclusion

Having read the four essays twice, what you take away is that Reynolds specialised in painting portraits of famous people, this ensured the portraits were much talked about, written about and commented on by the larger-than-ever number of daily newspapers and magazines, and encouraged other famous people to commission their portraits from him, all of which boosted his professional career.

And that he was canny in using the means available to him – aristocratic patrons, choosing famous people to paint – famous soldiers, sailors, aristocrats, courtesans, writers and fellow artists – socialising and hosting grand dinners, joining top clubs, getting supporters to talk him up in the press, and encouraging the distribution of prints of his work – to build a successful and profitable career.

All of these were strategies adopted by most of his contemporaries were doing. He just did it better.

I’m confident making a statement like that because I’ve just read Ian McIntyre’s brilliant biography of Reynolds which places the great man in the incredibly busy, buzzing, competitive, dog-eat-dog environment of Georgian London, and gives extended portraits of scores and scores of his peers, rivals, colleagues and competitors.

It shows how British society changed during Reynolds’s long career, from his earliest paintings in the 1740s to his last ones in 1790. He changed, art changed, society changed.

None of the essays in this catalogue have much space to play with and so these art scholars play very fast and loose with the historical record, yanking together quotes and events which were actually far separated in time, in order to impose on the people and culture of a very different society the modish contemporary art scholar concerns of ‘gender’, ‘identity’ and ‘celebrity’.

The point being: these essays are actually quite an unreliable introduction to the life and career of Joshua Reynolds, written at the behest of a gallery with an agenda and a marketing plan. By all means buy or borrow this book for its wonderful reproductions of the paintings. But read the McIntyre biography to understand the man and his times.

Unanswered questions

Having read both MacIntyre’s book and this catalogue, I still have a couple of unanswered questions:

1. They both tell me that History Painting was meant to be the highest and most prestigious genre of the day. In which case, how come the greatest painter of the age, Reynolds, didn’t paint any history paintings, and neither did his closest rivals, Allan Ramsay or Thomas Gainsborough?

2. Why are there so many black servants in 18th century portraits?

Blog posts about the 18th century

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Tamara Drewe by Posy Simmonds (2005)

Tamara Drewe was a weekly comic strip serial by Posy Simmonds, which ran for 13 months in The Guardian newspaper from 24 September 2005. At the end of the run it was published as a stand-alone graphic novel in November 2007.

The strip is based on a modern reworking of Thomas Hardy’s nineteenth century novel Far from the Madding Crowd, in that it focuses on a very attractive young woman who is pursued by three very different lovers – Nick Hardiman the successful novelist, Andy Cobb the local handyman, and Ben Sergeant the former rock star.

There’s not much subtlety about the reference since the frontispiece to the entire book features an ad torn from a fictional newspaper’s small ads column advertising the writers’ retreat at the centre of the novel, and given a big bold capitalised title – FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD.

In its deep structure Tamara is not that different from its predecessor, Gemma Bovery, which was also about a very attractive, sexy young woman and her three lovers (Patrick the restaurant critic, Charlie the furniture restorer and Hervé the aristocratic law student).

Two books in a row about impossibly foxy babes who surround themselves with male lovers. Hmmm.

The picture on the front cover of Tamara immediately conveys the stereotypical babeliciousness of the central figure – a tall, leggy, lithe, sexy fox, with massive come-hither eyes and pert red lips, a babe who likes to flirt with all the men in range, gives men the eye, likes to draw attention by dressing provocatively (in shorts so tight the other women characters comment on them), who likes being eyed and ogled in shops and to walk arm-in-arm with a rock star down the local high street, drawing everyone’s eyes.

Here’s the impression she makes on American novelist and critic Glen Larson:

Of course I fall in love with Tamara, along with everyone else… As she moves round the gathering I watch people succumb. It’s as if she’s picking us off one by one, each of us receiving the full force of her radiance, her smile, her warmth, her interest, all of it seemingly genuine and unforced. She’s Princess Charming…

And here is Tamara’s first appearance as she wanders into a gaggle of writers at a writers’ retreat in the country, instantly drawing all eyes. She is wearing the crotch-displaying shorts which – in case we hadn’t noticed them ourselves – Nick the writer will later fantasise about, and his long-suffering wife, Beth, will disapprove of, at length.

Tamara makes an entrance, joining the group of writers enjoying a pre-dinner drink

The setting

The story is set in Stonefield, a writer’s retreat run by Beth and Nicholas Hardiman, where the American novelist Glen Larson is staying to find inspiration for his latest novel. All the gardening and maintenance around Stonefield is done by Andy Cobb.

Andy’s family used to own a nearby farm, Winnards Farmhouse, but his Dad ran into financial difficulties, as small dairy farmers will, and it was sold to the Drewe family. They had two posh daughters, now grown up, one is a successful lawyer (natch), while the younger, Tamara, has gone to London and become a fashionable gossip columnist.

Tamara makes her first appearance when she sets off the burglar alarm at her family farm by accident and tough, man-of-the-soil Andy goes to investigate, eventually finding her, long-limbed and oblivious of his presence, astride a rocking horse in the old nursery on the phone to her mum.

Andy the handyman discovers leggy Tamara astride a rocking horse in the attic

It is later that day that she makes her casual appearance among the gaggle of writers gathered for pre-dinner drinks in the garden of Stonefield. Wherever she goes she draws all eyes towards her, towards her and her own enormous doe-like eyes, looking up flirtatiously from under her fringe.

Writers writing about writing

Having waded through Literary Life, the volume collecting Simmonds’s cartoons and strips about all aspects of the writers’ life (sitting alone in a room with a computer, sad book-signings, packed paranoid literary parties, jealousy envy and back-stabbing abounding) I was initially down-hearted to confront yet another seventy pages chronicling the comfortable, secure and bourgeois lifestyles, smug cultural superiority and attitudes of yet another bunch of middle-class, middle-aged, middle-brow white writers. And I’m not alone. Most of the writers are ambivalent about their trade, and Beth describes literary festivals as:

rutting grounds of viciousness, jealousy, vanity, disgusting displays of male ego – well, and female – ‘My queue’s longer than your queue’, etc. Loathsome.

So the setting – writers writing about writing, and snoopily watching each other out of jealousy or in order to pinch pieces of each other’s lives for their books – tired and repelled me. But I forced myself to persevere and quickly came to appreciate that the complexity of the intertwining relationships among all the characters in the book soon builds up to something greater than the sum of their parts. Although I cordially despised the clichéd setting and bourgeois self-centredness of the characters, their interplay soon becomes absorbing.

Colour

The book is immediately more interesting than Gemma Bovery because it is in colour. Sounds trivial but colour adds a whole new dimension of interest for the reader, and of expressive possibility for the artist.

Maybe it’s because the use of colour gives the pictures more depth, but there are a number of pages in this book which are almost wordless, which allow a sequence of pictures to tell the story without text – like the succession of frames in a movie. This is particularly true of the climax of the novel, which features the death of one of the main characters, a fact introduced wordlessly, solely by means of changing visual framing.

Saturday 6.30 pm

Wordiness

But the complete absence of words on some pages contrasts with the extreme wordiness of others.

Some pages consist are more than half made up of densely-printed text. The page below portrays the American Glen Larson remembering back to an argument he had with his lover Maggie, who has abruptly told him their relationship is over and that she wants him to leave.

Note how the two time zones are indicated by colouring (and maybe, more subtly, by positioning) – the present day where Glen is doing the remembering, is coloured brown, while his memory of the scene is coloured blue and white, a form of grisaille. Note how neatly the past is sandwiched between the ‘present’ scenes at the top and bottom. Note how the text – and there is a lot of text – still feels neatly balanced by the pictures, elegantly integrated into the overall design.

Glen Larson remembers arguing with his partner, Maggie, back in London

Arguably the quality of the drawing has not progressed that much since the end of her Posy strip days in 1987 (look at the face of tearful Maggie in the centre of the page, many of the faces, particularly in group scenes, are surprisingly rough).

What feel so much more mature and powerful in this book are:

the use of colour to indicate mood and situation
the subtle placing of the pictures around the page, to the same effect and
the interaction between pictures and the really extensive text, which gives the reader huge amounts of information about the characters and their backstories.

The overall design and layout feel more mature and integrated than Bovery.

Narrators

Tamara is also more interesting because it has a number of narrators who all interweave their perspectives and stories.

Gemma Bovery‘s narrator was a middle-aged man, Raymond Joubert, who overlooked – or overheard – key bits of plot, and pieced the story together from what he’d seen and heard, combined with what he read in Gemma’s posthumous diaries – and he was also in love with the central figure – which made for a complex stew of perspectives and feelings.

Tamara also features a fat, middle-aged man who lusts after the babelicious doll at the centre of the story, but doesn’t stand a chance – the observant, self-aware, overweight American critic and novelist Glen Larson. (In case you think I’m being fattist, Larson makes a point of telling us that he is so overweight he [and the retreat’s owner, Beth] are worried he might break the designer toilet in his writer’s apartment – so he’s allowed to come down into the main farmhouse and use the more robust toilets there – which is also how, rather neatly, Glen gets to overhear various revealing conversations.)

But Glen is joined by a number of other voices telling their version of events, notably Beth, the middle-aged and plump wife of philandering Nick the novelist. Her suspicions of Nick, her dislike of his roving eye, is combined with her sense of the endless duties and work required to keep the writers’ retreat going (she does all the cooking, for example), as well as the way she slavishly manages all his business matters for him – taking his hand-written manuscripts at the end of the day and typing them up, liaising with his publishers and PR people, arranging his social calendar and so on.

I found Beth’s character immediately attractive, in the sense of believable and sympathetic. I’ve met lots of capable, bustling, large-sized mums – and also a number who were caught in the bind of loving, serving and acting as doormats for men they know aren’t worth it.

I also strongly like her for the way she wasn’t a babelicious sexpot like Tamara or Gemma Bovery.

Tamara herself is sort of another narrator, because the text is punctuated by examples of her ‘column’, like so many thousands of columns in popular newspapers and magazines, an only lightly touched-up version of her own life and experiences. Thus it is that we see her newspaper column, reporting the latest exciting developments in her life, inserted into the text, providing another – highly stylised – perspective on events.

And there are also newspaper cuttings and clips from the celebrity mags Casey and Jody read. I think this type of multi-textuality is not uncommon in graphic novels, which often include newspaper headlines or clips from letters or diaries – but nonetheless, it gives variety and interest to Tamara Drewe.

Affair world

As with my initial dismay at realising we are in the world of writerly writers writing about writing, I had a powerful sense of déjà vu and claustrophobia when I also realised we are back in middle-class Affair World, a world where everyone is having affairs, or struggling with ‘relationships’ which snap like twigs at the first pressure, and where everyone is spying on everyone else’s affairs, sneaking and eavesdropping on their illicit goings on. On one level it felt as cloying and claustrophobic as the supermarket magazines which obsess about the love affairs of the rich and glamorous.

God, do these people really have nothing better to do? Short answer: No. They’re ‘writers’. Their first duty appears to be to snoop on everyone around them, while themselves trying to sneak off unseen to clandestine shags. Thus:

Glen is splitting up with his lover Maggie who, at 36, tearfully insists the clock is ticking and she needs to find a man to have babies with
Nick was having an affair with a pretty young Asian babe up in London (Nadia Patel), until his wife Beth twigs to it – and also the ungrateful little thing dumps Nick
later Nick has a fling with Tamara
Tamara has a prolonged relationship with Ben Sergeant, but he has only recently broken up with his girlfriend, Fran, and not got over it
while man-of-the-soil Andy carries a torch for Tamara throughout the novel, repeatedly asking her out or trying to help, only to be snubbed
the dads of both the working class girls in the story had affairs and abandoned their mothers, to their abiding bitterness
and both the girls obsessively read celebrity gossip mags and use the rhetoric and clichés of that world to describe their own activities and situations

This girly obsession with relationships at the expense of anything else in the world prompted me to look up chick lit, which is defined as ‘heroine-centered narratives that focus on the trials and tribulations of their individual protagonists’. Sounds about right.

At its onset, chick lit’s protagonists tended to be ‘single, white, heterosexual, British and American women in their late twenties and early thirties, living in metropolitan areas’. (Wikipedia)

Well, that describes Gemma Bovery and Tamara Drewe to a t. Apparently American critic Alex Kuczynski criticised Helen Fielding’s character Bridget Jones as ‘a sorry spectacle, wallowing in her man-crazed helplessness.’ That’s a handy description to bear in mind as we follow Tamara’s adventures.

Working class

Another element which makes Tamara more interesting than it might initially seem is the presence in the background of the disaffected, bored teenage yobs from the nearby village, Ewedown. These lads liven up their boring existences by nicking stuff from Stonefield and throwing eggs at the swanky cars of the writers on their way to and from the retreat.

It’s sooo boring, this village. Nowhere to go, nothing to do. Nothing happening, except when Gary Pound and his mates nearly set fire to the Coronation Tree on the green. (Casey)

They provide a pleasing background hum of disaffection and revolt, I say ‘pleasing’ because that’s my class, the youths who hung around vandalising bus shelters and throwing supermarket trolleys in lakes because there was nothing else to do – and chucking things at the passing cars of the posh, white, affluent, middle-classes who liked to isolate themselves in ‘writers’ retreats’ so they can cultivate their oh-so-finer feelings while, in reality, ceaselessly leching and snooping on each other.

The working class girls Casey and Jody get off the local bus and discover some of their male mates kicking and vandalising Nick the writer’s car

Anyway, it soon becomes more than a background hum because two figures who slowly emerge to play a central role in events are the teenage schoolgirls and best mates, Judy and Casey. Casey emerges as the third of the novel’s narrators, her version of events written in a different typeface from the other two narrators (Beth and Glen).

Through Casey’s eyes we enter the world of teenage girls in a remote provincial village, Ewedown, who read gossip magazines, fantasise about their pop star heroes, and try to avoid the greasy clutches of the local boys their own age. Here they are hanging out in one of the village’s few public spaces, the much-vandalised village bus stop.

Casey and Jody, the two working class teenage girls who lust after rock star Ben Sergeant

The plot

August

Beth collects American author Glen Larson from the station and drives him to Stonefield, the writers’ retreat which she runs. We learn her husband, Nick, the successful crime writer, is having an affair with an Indian girl up in London. Nick tries to deter Beth from coming with him to attend a writer’s party in London but she smells a rat and gets Nick to admit he’s having an affair. The argument spills out into the courtyard of the retreat where she tells Nick to fuck off loud enough for all the writers to hear.

Andy the handyman comes into the kitchen to comfort Beth, ‘he’s not worth it’ etc. Meanwhile, Glen remembers the tearful argument he had with his lover in London (as show above).

Later Glen is using the main house loo when he overhears Nick returning, telling Beth a pack of lies about how he’s dumped Nadia, then giving Beth a big hug. She goes to recycle some bottles and Glen hears Nick on his mobile phone extremely cross with Nadia for dumping him. Glen is resentful of Nick for his easy success, and how he always mockingly refers to him at dinner or in the garden as ‘our resident academic.’

That night, in bed, Beth quizzes Nick about Nadia but he reassures her it meant nothing and it’s all over and she lets him shag her, but then lies awake feeling used and wondering why she is so good to him.

Next morning Andy and Beth are out in the vegetable garden when the alarm goes off from the nearby Winnards Farm, which used to belong to Andy’s parents till his dad went bankrupt and was forced to sell it to rich Londoners. Glen accompanies Andy over to the farm to see why the alarm is ringing, but leaves Andy to go into the building, wander round then go upstairs, where he discovers leggy Tamara on a rocking horse phoning her mum about the alarm. Andy tiptoes back out.

Walking the long way back to Stonefield through the village, Andy tells Glen about the Drewe family, the two sisters, how Tamara has a newspaper column for which she write a piece about having a nose job to reduce her big hooter to the pert little nosette it subsequently became.

At drinks in the garden that evening Tamara makes an entrance wearing only tight denim shorts and a white vest. All eyes are on her. Tamara works her way round each of the writers and Beth, casting her spell, batting those wonderful eyes. People drift off for dinner and Glen volunteers to walk Tamara back to her farm, but on the way makes a pass at her, for a blissful moment touching her wonderful body till she shrieks and tells him to piss off.

Next morning Beth is cooking and chatting to Nick, who wanders into a reverie, remembering five years previously when he met Tamara when she was assigned to him by his publishers as the publicity girl for a tour of bookshops and festivals he was doing. He made a pass (what else do male writers do in Simmonds World except make passes at every pretty girl who crosses their path) but she irritatedly told him to get lost. We see all this in grisaille flashback.

Sunday evening and Glen strolls past Andy’s cottage and stops for a chat which turns to the subject of Tamara. Glen tells Andy that a young fit man like him, he should make a pass at her.

Glen telling Andy to try his luck with Tamara

Later Andy is working in the garden remembering Tamara, remembering how he knew her before the nose job – sweet girl – and met her subsequently and disapproved of her new glamorous identity – as the girl herself walks in, and asks if he would kindly come and help her set up a vegetable garden at Winnard’s Farm. Well, OK, I suppose so, he says, noticing her laying her hands on his shoulders.

Autumn

Out walking, Glen reflects on Tamara and her ‘charm’. Having tried it on and been rejected, he is biased, but he thinks he sees through her now.

It’s weird talking to her. You think she’s coming on to you: she aims this scorching look and you’re transfixed with lust, I’m not kidding. But she’s kidding. It’s as if she has an erotic stun gun and you’re just target practice. Just her bit of fun…

Glen also gives a jaundiced description of Nick during the retreat’s evening meals, holding court while he brandishes an electric carving knife, gently deprecating his own (sizeable) success, a gaggle of female writers hanging on his every word.

Beth thinks the nanny goat Astrid is in heat and looks everywhere for Andy, looking after situations like this is his job. She discovers him giving Tamara’s garden a major overhaul and gets cross. Beth pays his wages: if he’s going to do all this work for Tamara, she’ll let him go and get another handyman. Beth knows Andy can’t afford that.

Later that day Tamara persuades Andy to let him accompany her to a nearby farm so the nanny goat can be mounted by a billy goat. She learns all about it, films it on her phone and then writes a sarcastic metropolitan magazine column about it. On the way back Andy blurts out his feelings for her. Tamara takes it as her due – isn’t every man in love with her? Lets him down gently and asks if he’ll still do her garden. Then gives him one of those infuriatingly chaste pecks on the cheek which pretty girls use to control foolish men. Cut to Andy standing on a hillside looking moonily into the distance…

Cut to Tamara a few days later in a stylish London cocktail bar, noticing a celebrity at the bar, Ben Sergeant, ex-drummer of rock group, Swipe. She approaches him, gets chatting, says she’s a journalist but only for a silly gossip column, everything will be off the record, shall they go somewhere more intimate and… they end up snogging then shagging.

Tamara approaches Ben Sergeant at a swanky London club

Cut to Andy telling Glen he’s just going over to Winnards’ Farm to pick up some kit he left there, but as he approaches he sees a yellow Porsche parked outside, and an unknown dog, a boxer left outside and then, the ground floor window opens and a hairy bloke, bollock naked, asks if he’s Andy and would he kindly let the dog in. So. Tamara’s got a boyfriend. And walks away unhappy.

Next thing Beth gets a text telling her a strange dog is running wild and scaring the cows in a field they own but rent to a neighbour. The neighbour, Penny is livid, the dog might have frightened her pregnant cows into miscarrying. Beth apologises (even though it’s not her dog) and phones Tamara – is this bloody boxer dog here? Tamara, naked in bed with Ben, picks up and apologises profusely.

Ben turns up half an hour later roaring his yellow Porsche into the forecourt and disturbing all the writers. Beth shows him round but he is surly and then gets angry at the fact his boxer is chained up. When Nick says he ought to be grateful, next time he worries livestock a farmer might shoot him, Ben sinisterly replies well, then, he’d shoot the shooter.

Ben drives off with his dog but not before dropping a broad hint that Tamara’s told him all about Nick – as if they have a past. Beth confronts Nick about it. Nick furiously denies it. Beth laments to the reader:

We’ve always had an open sort of marriage. Affairs are OK, up to a point. Lying about them is not. Which sounds sensible and realistic, but in practice Nick needs the flings and I don’t. He always admits them – in so many words – and I absolve them. I just hate it.

Back at Winnards’ Farm Ben paws Tamara and says he hated the retreat, bunch of self-satisfied wankers. A few days later Beth sees Tamara in the local town, Hadditon, arm in arm with leather-jacketed Ben, both looking like movie stars and turning heads.

Ben and Tamara putting on the style in Hadditon High Street

Tamara announces she’s going to marry Ben. They have regular weekends for all their posh thirty-something London friends, staying up all night and throwing frisbees around next day. The teenagers from the village hang around hoping to catch a sight of the Londoners, especially Ben who the teenage girls fancy.

Ben gives Tamara an expensive ring which a chance remark reveals he actually bought for his former lover, Fran, but Ben hastens to reassure Tamara that it’s her he loves now.

A week in the life of Tamara as the deadline for her weekly piece hangs over her and saps all pleasures (going for drinks, socialising).

Tamara stresses over the deadline for her next column

Contrasted with Nick working away in his writing shed, at the end of the day loyal Beth collecting his papers to type and telling him about invitations and work.

Nick benefiting from Beth’s care and concern as she collects up his manuscript and informs him of the week’s messages

A two-page spread devoted to a book-signing Nick does at the Hadditon bookshop. Having read Simmonds’s collection Literary Life I feel I’ve read and seen enough cartoons about dismal book-signings to last me a lifetime.

Next day Andy overhears Ben arguing with Tamara. He’s sick of living in the farm and the nearby village, it’s all so boring, why not sell it go to LA or France? But Tamara refuses to think of leaving. This is where she grew up. Ben then collects the Christmas goose from Andy who explains how they’re shot and gutted which revolts Ben, who is also antsy with Andy because the latter so obviously hangs around the place solely to get a look at Tamara.

Winter

Introducing the two pissed-off local teenage girls, Casey Shaw and Jody Long. Casey narrates their adventures, Jody is the more rebellious, experimental, out-there of the two. Jody’s got a mega crush on Ben so they spend a lot of time huddling in the village bus shelter on the off-chance of seeing him drive by.

Simmonds builds up a very persuasive picture of how awful and stifling the two girls home lives are, with Jody’s mum working long shifts at Tesco, and Casey hating being at home because of her step-father.

It’s Jody who persuades Casey to break in to Winnards farm when Tamara and Ben are away – more precisely, she knows where the latchkey is hidden for Andy. Thus they let themselves in and wander round the bedroom where Jody fantasises about Ben being naked and ‘doing it’. Second time they go back (Boxing Day) Jody nicks one of Ben’s t-shirts and forces Casey to take away Tamara’s Chloë bag. Their parents don’t notice. The local lads on their BMX bikes yell rude things at them.

Jody is determined, She scores blow and E in the local town and smokes dope. She describes in great detail losing her virginity (‘losing her V plates’) to Ben and how romantic it will be. On Valentine’s Day Casey chat to local youth Ryan (19, drives a Vauxhall Nova) who she really fancies but knows he’s only talking to her because he wants to get to Jody.

Casey meets Jody at the farmhouse and discovers she’s dressed entirely in Tamara’s clothes, including a dazzling leopard-skin coat. And she’s pissed. She’s found Tamara’s laptop and hacked straight into it without needing a password. She’s discovered that Tamara’s writing a novel (titled Tick Tock – a title which reminds us of a cartoon strip from back in Simmonds’s ‘Posy’ strip period [1977-87] featuring Stanhope Wright and his wife Trisha).

Jody opens up Tamara’s email and – drunk – addresses an email to Ben, Nick and Andy, subject: ‘Love’, text: ‘I want to give you the biggest shagging of your life’. And before petrified Casey can stop her, Jody presses send. Because she cc-ed the others, all three can see the message was sent to the other two as well as themselves.

Andy receives the email and is understandably confused. He’s having a drink down the local pub (The Rick) and asks the barmaid what she thinks the email means. Barmaid says it sounds like they’re kinky. Or Tamara was pissed. Yes, probably pissed.

Arriving on Ben’s laptop in London, the email prompts a fight between Tamara and Ben, she accusing him of always having his ex, Fran, in the back of his mind, he saying she’s going to leave sooner or later.

Meanwhile Beth tells us she read and deleted the email, puzzled by it but doesn’t want to cloud Nick’s concentration as he heads towards completion of his current novel. Doesn’t stop Andy bumping into Nick in the snow-covered fields and asking Nick what he made of it. Nick, accurately, says he knows nothing.

Tamara writes a column about it, gets a call from Andy and says the email was nothing to do with her, and asks Andy to go and have a snoop round the farmhouse, see if anyone’s broken in. At which point Ben staggers into their stylish London loft, badly beaten up and bleeding.

Casey and Jody are in the bus stop, reading gossip mags while Jody explains why and what it’s like to have most your pubic hair shaved off, when they see a paparazzi photo of Ben beaten up and gripped by bouncers, after a fracas with his ex-girlfriend Fran. It’s clever of Simmonds to set up Ben coming through the door bleeding on one page, and then have the explanation given a hundred miles away in the countryside, and via the medium of a cheap gossip mag.

As you might expect, the evidence that he’s prepared to fight for his ex, leads Tamara to have a furious row with Ben, pack her bags and return to Winnards’ Farm.

At the end of another day, Beth picks up the papers from Nicks’ desk and, back in her study, starts to go through them sorting out which ones to type up and sometimes having ideas of her own. Till she comes to a scrap of paper which isn’t part of the novel and not for her eyes, which describes in graphic detail how bored he is, how flat and dull and empty his life seems. How he hurts her!

Casey fields loads of calls from Jody who is gutted that Tamara and Ben have broken up because now he won’t be coming down to Winnards. Part of the pleasure of reading Casey’s narrative is how everything is expressed in teenage girl magazines: thus Casey thinks Ben has been a Total Love Rat. When they spy Tamara walking round she has the look of someone who has been Betrayed. When they feel sorry for Beth they related it to Brad and Angelina breaking up.

Nick lies his head off on his mobile phone to Beth, telling her he’s at the London Library whereas in fact he drives (in his swank Range Rover) round to Tamara’s house where he finds her sitting in the gloom, alone and depressed. He is tall and successful. She can’t exist without a man in her life. She takes his glasses off. They snog.

Nick pays a visit on Tamara. Note the look in her eyes

They go to bed. There’s realistic lovers’ chat, him saying he’s not just a rebound shag, is he, her saying no, no she likes him, both telling each other to be careful.

Nick arrives home, some hours later, into Beth’s waiting arms and gives her a gift of tea from Fortnum and Mason’s. She falls for it, thinks he is much invigorated after his trip to London, he should go more often, and Nick heartily agrees!

Spring

The American novelist Glen is back at Stonefield after a break in Paris (hard life, eh?). He tells us he’s ripping through his novel, and how cosy and companionable he finds Beth. Beth for her part feels in her bones that Nick is having an affair but can’t prove it. She hates getting into this mood where she ends up checking every aspect of his life for tell-tale signs: such a waste of effort. Glen is helping a lot round the kitchen and she finds his company soothing. (Hmmm so is a Beth-and-Glen thing on the cards?)

Casey is pissed off with Jody who’s bored and drinking a lot. They see Andy’s car pull up outside Winnards and watch him go to the door, ring the bell, and wait for Tamara. She opens up a little sheepishly, Andy asks if she fancies a drink and she says no, and he walks off cursing his stupidity. Only minutes later the same door opens and Tamara lets Nick out with a kiss.

The girls see this and spend days reflecting on it, Jody in particular grossed out that Nick is so old. It also reflects on their own lives, in which both their dads ran off with younger women, so they feel badly for Nick’s wife, Beth. When Beth walks through the village Casey and Jody can’t bring themselves to look at her or reply to her ‘Hi’.

In bed Beth reads one of Nick’s old novels to about adultery to remind herself of all the tricks the male character uses. But when she phones up the friends Nick says he’s going for a drink with, dammit! He actually is going from a drink with them. Try as she might, she can’t catch him out.

Tamara goes for a walk with a girlfriend through the countryside and tells her all about her affair with Nick. Note: Tamara avoids the field with the big cows in it, they scare her. Reminds me that Glen, at an earlier stage, refused to go through the cow field, insisted on going the long way round.

The girls get the bus back from Hadditon, though it’s a pain because the bus no longer goes all the way to Ewedown and it’s full of teenage boys i.e. vandals with spray paint. They come across Nick Hardiman’s car, empty, and the lads let the tyres down.

Jody and Casey hang around, hiding in the bushes, waiting for Nick to come back to his car. When he does and discovers the tyres have been let down, he angrily phones Tamara asking if she’s got a foot pump and if so can she bring it out to meet him at his car. Ten minutes later she turns up and they pump up the tyres. Then they have a great snog. And Casey takes a great close-up photo of it on her new mobile phone.

On another day, Casey and Jody break into Winnards Farm, again, Jody wandering round touching everything as if it will put her in touch with Ben. She picks up various bottles of booze and then a tin of compressed computer cleaner gas, Does Casey know it gives you a nice little buzz? Casey say. Don’t be so silly, she knows Casey has asthma and can’t even smoke.

They break into Tamara’s laptop again, and read emails from Ben asking them to meet again and, when Tamara says No she needs her space, asking if she would babysit the boxer dog (Boss), while Ben goes to LA for three months, but again Tamara replies No. Now Casey sends an email claiming to be from Tamara saying she knows a good dog-sitter in the village, and giving her – Jody’s – mobile phone number!

Cut to Beth walking through the village, stared at by all the kids as if they know something, herself deeply suspicious of Nick but unable to prove anything. He is off to a literary festival. Beth organises his travel, accommodation and timings of his interviews, and he gives her a big hug and pats her on the head like a good dog, before leaving Beth, fuming. It’s at that moment that her phone chirps and she receives the mobile phone photo Casey took of Nick and Tamara having a snog!

She is gutted. Later Tamara drops round to Andy’s to pick up some fresh eggs and he quizzes her about her affair with Nick, she says it’s none of his business, he says he hates to see Beth getting hurt and goes on to mock how cheap and easy and convenient it is for old Nick. Tamara phones Nick (in London en route to the literary festival) as she trudges along a country lane in her wellies and tells him Andy Cobb knows about them. Nick curses but then says maybe it’s for the best, this means she and he can start making plans for their life together. ‘What?’ Tamara exclaims – ‘You’d leave your wife for me’ – but at that moment Nick’s daughter (who he’s staying with) comes in and he has to ring off.

Meanwhile Beth is still furious. She quizzes the local girls she sees hanging round the bus stop if it was they who sent her the photo and they of course deny it. Now Beth realises why all the youths look at her. It’s pity. She decides not to make a scene with Nick, let him tell her in his own sweet time. But later on, she passes Tamara’s car in town and on impulse crumbles a fish stock cube into the air intake. And she can’t help replying to some innocent letters sent to Nick in a fiery rage.

Nick is with Tamara at the Monksted Literary Festival – but she is not happy. Nick tells her he is sick with his cosy life and the cosy farm and his cosy wife and churning out a book a year like clockwork – he wants to drop all that and live, feel again, be with Tamara and be young again. She can’t hide her dismay; this is not at all what she planned.

But Beth has followed him to the festival and sees him hanging round smooching with Tamara before his on-stage interviews. At one of these he announces he’ll never write another Dr Inchcombe novel, to general gasps, since that is the character which made his fortune. The fact that he does so without even consulting Beth makes her see red and determine to go straight home and find a good divorce lawyer.

Cut to Casey who is well pissed-off with her friend Jody. 1. Ben rang, Ben phoned her, right in the middle of helping Casey with her maths revision, and Jody told all kinds of lies about having dog baskets and bowls and so on when she has none! 2. That night at a party, Casey was chatting to Ryan, who she fancies, when Jody came along in a flimsy stop ‘flashing her teapot lids’ with the result that it’s Jody who ends up snogging Ryan later. God! She hates Jody!

Next day the sheepdip hits the fan when Jody tells her mum she’s agreed to babysit someone else’s dog. Her mum flat out refuses. And Ben’s driving all the way down just to hand Boss over. She gets all stressed and tries on different outfits and perfumes but in the event Ben doesn’t show up and she is gutted. Nothing ever happens in their crap village and she storms off.

Jody breaks into Winnards farm again and starts to try on some of Tamara’s clothes in the bedroom when she hears a voice. It is Ben!

Jody sneaks into Winnards Farm and tries on a dress of Tamara’s

When he asked Tamara about the message Tamara had supposedly sent, giving Jody’s name and number as a dog minder, and Tamara denied it, Ben realised it was a con. But Jody is so pathetic, so apologetic, tells Ben she loves him. She at least gets him to listen to her when she says she’s always loved him, ever since she saw him drumming in the band on Top of the Pops. ‘How old are you?’ Ben asks her. ’16’, she says. ‘Liar’, he replies.

At this moment Casey rings up and says Ben’s dog is running around outside her house. Yes, can she catch it for him, Jody replies. Ben’s really come down just to collect some of his stuff and he’s just kissed me!!! and given her an early Swipe CD and agreed to give them advance notice of gigs etc.

Saturday Cut to Tamara parked by the side of a road and on her mobile to her friend Cate. She brings us up to date with events at the literary festival, namely that Beth was there and texted him the photos of Nick and Tamara snogging. Nick was in Tamara’s bedroom and appalled at his own behaviour and decides there and then to tell Beth the truth when he gets home, split up with Beth and move in with Tamara. Who, we know, is terrified at the thought.

‘I didn’t want this to happen.’

He tells her he’ll come to her house tomorrow evening.

Saturday afternoon in Beth’s kitchen and plump, amiable Glen Larson is there. Glen has done all the menial chores and is now telling Beth how well his book is going, while she chops vegetables. Beth isn’t hearing a word because she is seething inside and speculating what will happen if Nick wants a child with Tamara. Then the little so-and-so will find out what a selfish brute he is! (This reminds me of the Posy cartoon strip which radiated the Anger of the Mothers against their lazy do-nothing husbands.)

Glen notices Ben’s dog, the boxer named Boss, crapping on Beth’s lawn. Beth says that’s Ben’s dog, he’s probably come her to beat up Nick. Glen is puzzled, so Beth explains that Nick is having an affair with Tamara, so she’s going to divorce him and sell Stonefield. Glen is appalled – what about his book!? He needs the peace and quiet of Stonefield to finish it. He tries to calm Beth down and assure her they can get back together, and before he knows it spills the beans that Nick’s last lover, Nadia, chucked Nick, not the other way round as Nick told Beth. In other words Nick only went back to Beth once he’d been jilted. This makes Beth insensate with anger, not only against Nick but against Glen who’s know all this time and not told her.

Saturday afternoon 5.30pm The change of font alone tells us that this is now being narrated by Casey. She sees some mindless teenagers chucking clods at the big cows. She also hears Ben’s dog barking. She sees that Beth’s caught it and tethered it to a post. At this moment Nick appears up from his writing shed in the field and begins to apologise to Beth but she’s had it up to hear and roars her grief and anger at him. ‘Go. Go away. Go now. Go to her,’ she shouts.

Casey had started to take long distance pap shots of this funny couple but it became too upsetting and she goes off in tears. The bloody dog is still yapping so Beth lets it off its leash and tell it to bugger off, too.

6.30pm This is the famous page with no text on it, just seven colour panes, which I included earlier int he review. Successive frames show Tamara at her window waiting for Nick, the cows around the water trough, then they walk past the trough, it gets darker, we see a body lying by the trough, close up on the body, then a big wide shot of the sun setting over the distant hills.

10pm Tamara on the phone to her friend Cate. She’s furious because Nick stood her up, obviously gone back to his wife BLOODY MEN!!! Tamara goes down the pub where she sharply rebuffs Andy’s offer of a drink.

10pm Casey is at a loud house party. She lost her phone in the woods so can’t ring Jody to ask why she’s not there. Last thing she heard was Jody talking to her all loved-up, insisting talking to Ben was the best thing ever. (Simmonds drops in some frames parodying love-bird, valentine’s day scenes amid flowery bowers and swags of love hearts – something she’s amused herself parodying from at least as long ago as 1981’s True Love.)

Now Ryan comes up to her and, mirabile dictu, actually wants to talk to her. They go outside and start having a snog when an ambulance screams by. An ambulance! In Ewedown! That never happens. Then she realises it’s stopped outside number six – Jody’s house!

Cut to another silent wordless page, with panels showing the rain pouring down on Stonefield, Beth looking out her bedroom window, Beth in the big double bed looking at the empty space where Nick should be, and cutting to a light on in one of the writer’s flats, and then a close-up of Glen Larson looking out the window into the rain looking worried.

Sunday morning Casey is the narrator and tells us that the night before, her mum took her back to her house and explained that Jody had been found dead! Her mum went upstairs wondering why she wasn’t going to the party and found her in a pretty party dress, dead on the floor holding in her hand an aerosol spray of Air Dust, a kind of computer cleaner. Casey knew that Jody sucked up lungfuls of the stuff from time to get a little buzz. This time it simply stopped her heart.

Now the change of typeface tells us we are reading Beth’s narration. Some of her writers found Nick’s body the next morning. He had been trampled to death by the cows (remember all those little references to the cows being scary and people going out of their way to avoid them which have been threaded through the book?).

Beth calls the police. When they start questioning her she immediately blurts out that she must have killed him by letting the bloody dog loose which stampeded the cows. The detective is certainly suspicious why she didn’t report it when Nick didn’t come back last night. Beth is forced to admit that they’d had a row and she expected he was sleeping at a neighbour’s. The police motor over and tell Tamara. She is in floods of tears.

Another font tells us we are now reading Glen’s narration. He tells the police a sanitised version of the events (leaving out the fact that Beth and Nick had rowed).He timidly goes down to the kitchen to find Beth and begins to apologise but she poo-poos that and asks if he will stay, to lend a hand, there are some things she and her daughter (who’s come straight down from London) can’t face. Like the reporters at the gate.

Through Casey’s eyes we read all the reports in the papers. Mum finds girl dead. Dr Inchcombe author Found Dead in Field Author’s Sex Tryst Led To Tragedy. Pop Star Ben last To see Tragic Jody. Nothing like this has ever happened in Ewedown before: two tragic deaths on the same night!

Casey explains how she kept schtum about their breaking into the farm, but it was Jody’s mum found a post-it note from Ben, and Ben’s number was on her mobile, and the media quickly put two and two together and joined Ben to Jody and Tamara and Nick! A festival of sex and death, ‘telly crews everywhere!’

Andy walks past the press camped out at Tamara’s drive and asks if there’s anything he can do for her. Tamara’s quite rude, telling him he’s always Mr bloody perfect, but then relents, says thanks but no thanks.

Andy calls on Tamara to see if she’s alright

Glen watches the comings and goings, describes how the finger pointed at Ben, the jealous rival for a while till CCTV footage showed he was a service station miles away. Forensics say cause of death was being trampled by cows after a collision with the water trough.

And only now does he reveal what really happened. After telling Beth about Nadia he didn’t go to his apartment but went for a walk through the fields. It was here that Nick spotted him and called him over, called him a fucking bastard for telling Beth all about Nadia, accuses him of trying to suck up to Beth and take his (Nick’s) place. On and on Nick goes, telling him he’ll never have the income or success he (Nick) enjoys, capping it all with ‘Mine’s bigger than yours!’

Right. That was it. Glen snaps and punches Nick. Nick stumbles backwards and hits his head against one of the concrete pillars of the cattle trough. He gets up again, groggy and dazed, Glen goes to help but Nick tells him to fuck off and, at that moment, the famous herd of big pregnant cows comes barging into the field running after that bloody boxer dog, Boss. Terrified of animals, Glen runs off as fast as he can, not looking back, assuming Nick, younger and fitter than him, can look after himself. But turns out he couldn’t. Somehow he got stuck against the trough and trampled.

Glen is sitting on the trough weeping for what happened when Tamara comes up and gently puts her hand on his shoulder and tries to reassure him but suddenly… it feels like an interview and Glen – who has babbled too many times in the story – gets to his feet without telling the truth, and sets off back to Stonefield.

Here he finds Beth in the garden drinking tea and reading the paper. She looks happy and relieved as she tells him the police have closed the investigation and now officially consider it an accident. Glen looks at her and considers telling her the truth about what happened i.e. his responsibility in punching Nick, making him hit his head against the trough, making him too dazed to escape the rampaging cows — but she has found closure, why ruin it?

Cut to Casey’s point of view. Ryan, the boy she fancies, has spent a lot of time with her, talking things through. Casey tells Ryan everything, about breaking into Winnards, hacking Tamara’s computer, sending the shag email, Jody’s obsession with Ben, her taking the pap shots of Nick snogging Tamara then sending them to Beth. What should she do? ‘Keep quiet’, advises Ryan. After all, what would their sort do for her if she was in trouble? Nothing.

Beth’s narrative. She cuts Tamara when they bump into her. But then she receives an email from Casey explaining that it was her and Jody who sent the shag email, for a joke, and she who texted Beth the photos of Tamara and Nick snogging. She’s really sorry for all the hurt she’s caused. This prompts Beth to make a pilgrimage over to Winnards to confront Tamara, where she’s surprised to discover Casey is present, having also gone to apologise to Tamara.

The other two stand in the kitchen while Beth gives them a bollocking but then explains life’s too short, she might as well forgive them, we’ve all got to live here together etc. Beth realises she feels like a cigarette, Tamara too, but they’ve both given up. Luckily Casey has one and the three women, now reconciled, pass a fag of closure among themselves.

The cigarette of closure

Late that night Tamara is mooning over her laptop. Suddenly she shuts it, leaves the farm, sets off at a run across the fields, arrives at Andy’s cottage, knocks, looks stunning and helpless – Help me, I’m a poor helpless vulnerable woman! – And Andy takes her in his arms – big stwong man pwotect helpless woman!!! They kiss.

Tamara must have gone all of two, maybe three days, without a man in her life! Is she, to quote American critic Alex Kuczynski, ‘a sorry spectacle, wallowing in her man-crazed helplessness’? Tempting to think so…

A few days later Beth describes her trip to the local church for the funeral of Jody Long. She realises it’s an event for the real locals – in other words, the working class inhabitants of Ewedown, not the posh, down-from-London writers and second home-owners. But there’s Tamara on Andy’s arm – she is, after all, always on some man’s arm, not complete unless she has a man to cling onto – then hugging Casey, and working the crowd.

Then Tamara spots Beth and makes an operatic gesture to do a Big Hug of Closure, but Beth turns and melts away. Not ready to forgive, not yet.

One year later

Beth gives a summing up. She’s still at Stonefield. They launched a young writers’ prize in Nick’s honour. Beth handed over Nick’s shed to Casey and the other yoof as a meeting place. Andy moved in with Tamara and she had a baby in January. And her novel comes out in September.

The last page has a couple of images of Glen Larson. Beth has written him a letter congratulating him on the success of his novel, Excess, and telling him that Tamara’s novel is due out in September. But when Glen reads that it is about a writer’s retreat, he clutches his head, ‘Oh no!’

All in all, Tamara may be the titular centre of the story, but I think Beth is the heroine.

Credit

All images are copyright Posy Simmonds. All images are used under fair play legislation for the purpose of analysis and criticism. All images were already freely available on the internet.

Other Posy Simmonds reviews

Posy Simmonds: A Retrospective @ the House of Illustration

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by Simon on June 19, 2019 • Permalink

Posted in Books, Cartoon, Graphic novel

Posted by Simon on June 19, 2019

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Bury the Chains: The British Struggle to Abolish Slavery by Adam Hochschild (2005)

In all of human experience there was no precedent for such a campaign. (p.97)

Executive summary

The abolition of slavery took place in two parts:

abolishing the slave trade (1807)
abolishing slavery itself (1834)

1. Abolishing the slave trade

After a whole century when anybody suggesting that African slavery be banned would have been considered a mad eccentric, the issue suddenly exploded into public consciousness in the years 1788 to 1793 when there was an extraordinary eruption of pamphlets, articles, petitions from every town and city in Britain, plays and polemics and debates in parliament, calling for the abolition of the slave trade.

It suddenly became the topic of the day and Hochschild is able to quote diarists and letter writers saying how heartily sick they are of every single dinner party or coffee house conversation being about nothing but abolitionism.

And then, just as the cause of abolition had become so unstoppable that it seemed poised to succeed in Parliament, the French Revolution broke out which led to two major events which set back the cause of abolition by a decade:

The outbreak of the largest slave rebellion anywhere, in the French sugar colony of St Domingue, led by Toussaint L’Ouverture, in November 1791. This is a long story, in which both the French and the British sent armies which were eventually defeated or, more accurately, abandoned the war in the face of deaths from tropical sickness and the slaves’ successful guerrilla tactics. But reports of the brutality on both sides of the conflict had undermined the image which abolitionists tried to foster, of slaves as helpless, saintly victims.
The French revolutionaries executed Louis XVI in January 1793 and declared war on Britain in February 1793. War always halts reforms. A nationwide outburst of patriotism was accompanied by repressive laws banning seditious writings and political meetings. Abolitionism became ‘tainted’ by association with some of the wilder English Jacobins, who included it in general calls to overthrow the monarchy, the House of Lords, please for universal male suffrage and so on.

The movement which might have led to the end of the slave trade in just four or five years from its inception in 1788, because of the interruption of the French revolutionary wars, ended up taking nearer to 20 years.

The movement’s representative in parliament, the short, correct and conservative MP William Wilberforce, introduced an abolition bill into each new sitting of parliament from 1788 onwards, but they were always swamped by the pressing urgency of measures to deal with the war and the eruption of other crises throughout the British Empire.

It was only after the Peace of Amiens of 1802 led to a pause in the war with France, that the abolitionists were able to rally. Although war with France resumed in 1803, a new burst of campaigningy led to the final abolition of the slave trade in 1807. It became forbidden for British ships to carry slaves. Soon the Royal Navy was instructed to stop all ships carrying slaves of whatever nation, and confiscate them.

2. Abolishing slavery

There was then a long lull as Britain focused its energies on defeating Napoleon, first in 1814, then all over again in 1815 after he escaped from St Helena. The period 1815 to 1820 was characterised by immense social unrest in Britain caused by the mass unemployment of huge numbers of men who’d been serving in the army and navy simply being dumped back on the market, and also the social disruption of the industrial revolution.

The government responded with a whole series of repressive measures. Paul Foot’s biography of the poet Percy Shelley is a surprisingly thorough account of the repressive laws enacted during this period, as well as a doleful record of the many working class activists who were arrested, convicted, hanged or shipped off to the new penal colony in Australia.

It was only in the 1820s with a new government in place, with better harvests damping down rural protest, with working people finding more work, that the sense of crisis eased, and a new wave of young abolitionists took up the struggle, this time to abolish slavery altogether.

In 1823, the Anti-Slavery Society was founded in London, its members including Joseph Sturge, Thomas Clarkson, William Wilberforce, Henry Brougham, Thomas Fowell Buxton with the women Elizabeth Heyrick, Mary Lloyd, Jane Smeal, Elizabeth Pease, and Anne Knight.

The most interesting aspect of the story, in Hochschild’s telling, is that most of the running of this second phase was made by the women. William Wilberforce was still there in Parliament. Thomas Clarkson was still the great collector of facts and information. The Quaker networks provided the basis of publicity and campaigning. But they all took a cautious, gradualist approach. By contrast, a number of the women and women’s groups pressed for immediate abolition. Most notable was Elizabeth Heyrick.

Elizabeth Heyrick Wikipedia article

During the 1790s the first generation of abolitionists had organised a sugar boycott i.e. they stopped buying and using sugar. Heyrick went one further and went to grocers shops asking them not to stock it at all.

Again the cause became entangled with a much bigger issue – in the 1790s it had been the French Revolution, in the late 1820s it was the titanic struggle to pass the Reform Act of 1832 to reform Britain’s ludicrously out-of-date electoral system.

Abolitionists realised this was their cause too, and put their energy into this struggle, and it was only after a reformed parliament had been elected in 1833, that direct campaigning for abolition continued and almost immediately was a success.

The Slavery Abolition Act 1833 abolished slavery throughout the British Empire BUT even then, it was in two phases: as of 1834 only slaves below the age of six were freed, all adult slaves had to continue working for their masters as ‘apprentices’.

Full and complete abolition – i.e. full and complete emancipation of all British slaves – had to wait until midnight on 1 August 1838. Hochschild amply describes the celebrations.

Bury the Chains

This is a long, detailed, very readable and profoundly moving account of the movement to abolish slavery in Britain.

Some of Hochschild’s most interesting points are made in the introduction, namely:

In the 1780s, when the abolition movement got going, not just African slaves but maybe as many as three quarters of the world’s population was unfree.
The abolition movement was the first mass civil society movement, not the product of a particular class or particular special interest group or trade – it joined all classes, all genders, all ages and all occupations across all the regions of Britain (‘Something new and subversive was making its first appearance: the systematic mobilisation of public opinion across the class spectrum.’ p.138)
It was the first such campaign in human history that was not motivated by self-interest; none of the campaigners stood to gain anything and they, and the British population as a whole, stood to lose out economically – but nonetheless the righteousness of the cause outweighed self-interest.
The abolition movement invented, or brought to perfection, a whole range of campaigning tactics which are still used around the world.

An unfree world

The first stirrings of the abolitionist movement occurred during the American War of Independence (1775-1783), around 1780. This is where Hochschild begins his narrative (although some strands require stepping back a bit in time to explain the background and development of slavery, and of specific elements in the story, such as a brief history of the Quakers.)

Anyway, I found it riveting that the first few pages are devoted to explaining that most human beings in the world at that age, in 1780, were not free.

When native Americans fought each other they often took captives prisoner as slaves. The Aztec and Inca empires had seized conquered peoples as slaves. Then the Spanish turned the entire population into peons to work for their European masters. But slavery was widespread in African kingdoms, too, and existed long before the Europeans touched the coast in the late 1400s.

For centuries before that there had been a) a slave trade taking African slaves north to serve in Muslim countries of the Mediterranean, and particularly to the heart of the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East, and b) victorious African rulers routinely enslaved their defeated enemies.

The condition of slavery, selling of slaves, slave trails and slave entrepots were established well before the Europeans arrived.

The enormous landmass of Russia was characterised by serfhood where illiterate peasants were tied to land, and bought and sold along with it. In most of the rest of Europe illiterate peasants were similarly virtually the property of their lords and masters. In India and other parts of Asia, tens of millions of people were in outright slavery (‘tens of millions’, p.2), while tens of millions more lived in a form of debt bondage which tied them to specific owners.

Hochschild doesn’t mention China, but millions of Chinese peasants lived in various forms of servitude.

Even in the most ‘civilised’ parts of Western Europe and north America, there was a deeply engrained social hierarchy, by which everyone deferred to those above them, and the aristocracy and landowners could use, whip, beat, punish and abuse their servants and staff, almost at will.

It is chastening, sobering, terrifying to read Hochschild’s convincing account of how most people for most of the past, have not been free. Count your blessings.

18th century violence

Not only were most people either not-free, or lower down the pecking order of deferentiality, but the 18th century world was one of quite staggering brutality. When you don’t know much you sort of think that the disgusting brutality meted out to slaves was uniquely bestial. But violence of every sort existed quite freely far beyond the slave world. Ordinary men and women could be punished for simple misdemeanours with public whipping or even the death penalty. As James Walvin’s book on slavery highlights, and as Hochschild repeats, deaths among the crew members of slave ships were, proportionately higher than deaths among the slaves.

And then there was the British tradition of press-ganging. Any halfway fit man walking the streets of London, Portsmouth, Bristol and any other major port city was liable to be bought drinks till he was legless, or simply seized by the notorious press gangs, carted off to serve on a slave or Royal Navy ship, for years at a time, with no legal redress.

Alan Taylor, in American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804, describes some atrocity happening in the 1700s and ironically remarks, ‘all this took place in the supposed “Age of Enlightenment”‘.

But the whole point of the Age of the Enlightenment is that it was a movement to try and reform a fundamentally brutal, backward, obscurantist and reactionary society. It was light amid darkness, profound darkness. Of course the Age of Enlightenment was often brutal; that’s precisely what the relatively small number of philosophers, thinkers, poets, writers, artists and enlightened citizens were struggling against.

Execrable Human Traffick, or The Affectionate Slaves by George Morland (1789), according to Hochschild, the first painting depicting the slave trade

The Quakers

This makes Britain’s 20,000 Quakers stand out all the more remarkably from all the other social and belief systems of the Western world. For the Quakers believed that all people are equal – and put their belief into practice. They didn’t use any linguistic forms of deference, refused to say Mr or Sir or Your worship, insisted on only saying ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ since these were the non-deferential versions. They refused to fight in wars. They refused to take vows to any monarch or magistrate. They insisted their only allegiance was to God the Creator of All. (p.107)

And they believed not only that all men, but that all people are equal. Thus, with ramrod logic, Quakers were the only one of the countless religious denominations anywhere in the New World who spoke out against slavery in the 18th century. They refused to own slaves. If they came into possession of slaves through land deals, they promptly liberated their slaves and, in some cases, Hochschild says, paid them compensation.

Compare and contrast with the Church of England which not only failed in its duty to speak out against slavery, but was itself a large owner of slaves through various companies and committees, notably the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts.

Among other properties the Church owned the Codrington estate, the second largest slave estate on Jamaica. On the governing board of the Society for the Propagation etc, and therefore aware of their slave profits, were the Regius Professors of Divinity at Oxford and Cambridge and the Archbishop of Canterbury.

All slaves working for the Society had the word SOCIETY branded into their chests with a red hot iron. Disgusting, eh?

It was Quakers who, in 1783, set up the first committee to lobby for the end of slavery. They got nowhere because they were ignored as cranks. It was only when Anglican luminaries came on board that the powers that be were inclined to listen. The most important was the Divinity student Thomas Clarkson, who, at the age of 25, underwent what amounted to a religious conversion, deciding to devote his life to the abolitionist cause.

Still, it was symptomatic that when a new committee for abolition was formed in 1787, nine of the twelve members were Quakers.

Thomas Clarkson

For Hochschild the central character of the entire story is Thomas Clarkson, 6 feet tall, red haired, who was converted to the evils of slavery aged 25 and became an indefatigable campaigner and investigator.

It was the investigations that mattered. In London, Bristol and Liverpool Clarkson spent months befriending slave ship captains, crews and merchants (where possible – many became firm enemies; on more than one occasion Clarkson’s life was threatened). He visited all the main posts gathering eye witness accounts of the brutality of the trade.

Using figures freely available from the authorities of the slave ports, Clarkson assembled statistics showing the appalling loss of life among the white crews of slave ships. As a proportion, more white sailors died on a slave journey, than slaves.

His aim was to refute one of the central the pro-slavery arguments, that the crews of slave ships provided a kind of rough apprenticeship for the Royal Navy. On the contrary, Thompson proved that most slave ship crews were press ganged, desperate to flee the ships, and only kept in place by punishments every bit as savage as those meted out to the slaves. He assembled copious testimony testifying to the way white sailors were flogged, sometimes to death, put in chains, tied to the deck or thrown into tiny spaces belowships, and died like flies on these long voyages.

Clarkson aimed to assemble the broadest possible case, showing that the slave trade degraded and brutalised everyone who came in touch with it. When he came across ship’s chandlers in Bristol or Liverpool openly selling chains, shackles and thumbscrews – implements of torture – he bought them as exhibits to show on his lecture tours, he sent accounts of them to the Times and to Parliament.

All this testimony and equipment, all the statistics existed and were publicly available, but nobody had ever set out to assemble all the evidence, to buy and display the implements of torture, to assemble all the statistic, to do the basic investigative groundwork which could then be recycled into articles, pamphlets, books and speeches.

Clarkson and colleagues listed the negative arguments against slavery, but also tried to formulate arguments emphasising the positive results that would stem from ending it.

One of these was the attempt to prove that free trade with African nations and peoples would yield larger profits than slavery; that the slave trade was not only morally reprehensible, degrading, lethal to ships crews, but that it was preventing the development of more profitable free trade with African countries.

To prove his point, on his visits to the slave ports, Clarkson came across products from Africa and began collecting them into what became known as ‘Clarkson’s box’. These included carved ivory and woven cloth, along with produce such as beeswax, palm oil and peppers.

Clarkson could see the craftsmanship and skill that went to produce many of the items and used them to refute the notion that blacks were savages, little more than animals. Quite clearly they were not, they were craftsmen and women of great skill. The idea that such imaginative and talented designers and craftsmen could be kidnapped and enslaved was horrifying.

Official Medallion of the British Anti-Slavery Society (1795) by Josiah Wedgwood and William Hackwood

Campaign tactics

How did the abolitionists achieve all this?

It’s a long story which first of all requires a good sense of the nature of British society in the 1770s and 1780s, which is why it takes a book to tell how various strands of social, religious and moral thought came together.

But Hochschild also points out how the abolitionists pioneered campaigning techniques which have endured to this day:

posters
pamphlets
lecture tours
investigative journalism designed to stir people to action
books and book tours
mass petitions
targeting individual MPs
lobbying parliament
organising boycotts of sugar

Hochschild devotes a couple of pages to the origin of one of the most powerful icons of the movement and what he calls ‘one of the most widely reproduced political graphics of all time’.

The chairman of an abolitionist branch Clarkson had set up in Plymouth sent Clarkson a diagram of the slave ship Brooks which he had come across at the owners’ offices. It showed the optimal way to cram the ship full of African slaves. Clarkson seized on the diagram’s importance and worked with the committee’s publisher and designer to expand and fine tune it.

Diagram of the slave ship Brooks (1814 version)

The slave packing diagram quickly began appearing in newspapers, magazines, books and pamphlets. The abolitionists and thousands of other supporters around the country hung it on their walls as a constant reminder. To this day it has the power to harrow and shock.

Morality trumped self interest

The British decision to abolish slavery was taken against the economic interest of Britain.

Not only this, but many communities and economic sectors which stood to be specifically damaged by the decision, nonetheless supported abolition. Towns whose wealth was based on slave imports nonethless produced lengthy petitions against slavery. It was, therefore, a decision taken on moral and religious principles, and these trumped economic self interest.

Scholars estimate that abolishing the slave trade and then slavery cost the British people 1.8 per cent of their annual national income over more than a century, many times the percentage most wealthy countries today give in foreign aid. (p.5)

Why 1788?

Hochschild lists the precursors, describes the events leading up to the formation of the abolition committee and gives accounts of the personal conversions to anti-slavery of key personnel. But it might still have remained an eccentric fringe group. Why did the cause suddenly catch fire, and become a country-wide phenomenon in 1788-89?

In 1780, if you had suggested banning slavery, everyone would have thought you were mad. Nobody discussed it, it didn’t appear in newspapers, magazines, parliamentary debates or coffee house conversations.

By 1788 Britain was aflood with a tsunami of anti-slavery propaganda. Petitions flooded Parliament as never before, thirteen thousand signed one in Glasgow, 20,000 one in Manchester; books and pamphlets flooded from the press, lectures and sermons were given about it, newspaper and magazine articles poured forth – it was everywhere, the burning topic of conversation, it was like the Brexit of its day.

But why? Why did the campaign to abolish slavery spread like wildfire and unite all classes, regions, towns and cities so suddenly? And why in Britain and Britain only? After all, France, Spain, Portugal, Denmark, Holland and Sweden all owned colonies in north or south America which employed large numbers of slaves. There was no movement to abolish slavery in any of those six other European nations. Why not?

Hochschild gives a list of secondary causes, before he unleashes what he thinks is the prime and main cause (pp. 213-225).

The secondary causes amount to a thorough profile of British late-eighteenth century society and indicators of it economic, technological, social and political advancement beyond all its European neighbours.

massive investment in well-kept toll roads which made widespread travel easier in Britain than anywhere else in Europe
the world’s best postal service
more newspapers than any other country, and more provincial newspapers which passed on developments and debates in the capital to the remotest provinces
the coffeehouse, a British institution in every city and town, which had up to date copies of all the magazines and newspapers, and where news and issues of the day could be debated
more than half the population of Britain was literate because Protestantism insists that each individual can read the Bible in their own language
libraries in every town and city, with over a hundred in London alone
well over a thousand bookstores, which often offered hsopitality while you sat and read
no censorship; anyone could set up a printing press and publish what they liked compare with, for example, the 178 censors who censored everything written in France before it was published
debating societies which became widespread during the 1770s

So although fewer than 5% of the population could vote, an extraordinary number of people knew what was being debated and discussed by parliament, read and understood the issues of the day, and created a ‘public opinion’ which couldn’t be ignored by the country’s rulers.

The rule of law. Unlike most continental nations, Britain had age-old common law which had been continually influenced and modified by trial by a jury. Obviously the law was weighted towards the rich, towards aristocrats and landowners. But in theory at least, a labourer could take a lord to court and win. After the Somerset case of 1772, the leading abolitionist Granville Sharp helped a number of slaves take their masters to court – and won.

These are all mighty fine aspects of British society circa 1790, but none of these by themselves amount to a sufficient cause.

The primary cause, Hochschild thinks, is the uniquely British institution of press-ganging.

He gives four or five pages describing in some detail the mind-blowing examples of the powers of the press gang to kidnap any man whatsoever between about 14 and 40 and whisk them off to a life of brutally hard work and vicious discipline aboard the Royal Navy’s vast fleet.

Grooms could be kidnapped at the altar, in front of bride, vicar and congregation, and whisked off. Some gangs were so large they fought pitched battles with customs officials or soldiers. The pages he devotes to press-ganging are quite an eye-opener.

But his point is that many Britons had experienced, or knew of, a form of slavery themselves; knew an institution whereby perfectly free young men could be kidnapped and sold into a life little better than slavery, subject to appallingly brutal punishments, with a fair certainty of death from disease, rotten food or combat.

Alongside all its positive aspects, British society also contained this brutal institution – and it had led over the decades to a widespread sense of grievance and resentment. It was this feeling (among others) which the abolitionists were able to tap into.

Personally, I find this theory a bit far-fetched. I would have thought there were several other social trends which Hochschild mentions elsewhere but not in his list of causes, which were far more important than press-ganging.

Chief among these would be the Great Religious Awakening from the 1750s onwards, which led to the rise of non-conformist sects, chief among them the Methodists. This movement converted people rich and poor to the belief that society at large only paid lip service to Christian values, and that individuals really had to experience the grace of God for themselves to be born again into a purer, more devout, more moral Christian life.

It was to these newly awakened consciences that much abolitionist propaganda appealed, and it is notable that non-conformists – building on the heroic work of the Quakers – were at the forefront of disseminating and spreading the movement.

Fascinating and eminently readable though his book is, I don’t think Hochschild quite drills down into the immense spirituality and religiosity of the era, and how that influenced every thought and feeling of millions and millions of Brits.

Summary

This is an absolutely vast subject, because the campaign, in total, stretched across fifty years, and was hugely affected by two great historical events: the French Revolution and the twenty years war it led to; and then the immense struggle to pass the 1832 Reform Act – not to mention acknowledging the huge social changes caused by the industrial revolution which was trundling along in the background throughout the period.

Vast as it is, this really brilliant book probably comes as close to doing the subject matter justice as one volume can.

Despite the horror of much of the content, Bury the Chains manages somehow to be a humane and uplifting story, because it shows how evil can be conquered, and it shows how even when a wicked system or institution is in place, millions and millions of good-hearted people can rise above their own self interest to organise and work for its overthrow. And succeed.

The British are often damned for perfecting the Atlantic slave trade and making vast fortunes from it. But they should also be praised for rising up in their millions and forcing their government to change its policies and then to spend a lot of money policing the seas to try and eradicate this truly evil trade.

Related reviews

One Shot by Lee Child (2005)

‘True randomness is impossible for a human to achieve. There are always patterns.’ (p.382)

The plot

James Barr, a soldier Reacher knew from back his army days, is conclusively proven to have parked in a multi-story car park in an unnamed city in Indiana, waited for rush hour workers to leave their offices at 5pm, and then calmly executed five of them using a long-range sniper rifle, packed up and driven home, where he is tracked down and arrested by the police a few hours later.

Call Reacher He refuses to say anything to the investigators except, ‘You’ve got the wrong guy’ and ‘Get Jack Reacher’. In fact, Reacher has already seen the story of the massacre on TV news in a bar and, as soon as he hears the culprit’s name, catches a sequence of buses to the (unnamed) city in Indiana (buses because Jack has no ID, therefore can’t hire cars).

Dramatis personae Here he encounters the cluster of characters surrounding the killer:

Barr’s sister, Rosemary, who is convinced her brother is innocent
Barr’s lawyer, Helen Rodin, who happens to be the daughter of the city’s district attorney, who will be defending Barr
the cop who led the successful investigation, Emerson
the city’s District Attorney, Alex Rodin, descendant of Russian immigrants (p.36), who only likes to prosecute cases which are 100% slam dunks
Bellantonio, the thin, tall, dry forensic scientist who’s assembled a battery of irrefutable evidence
Ann Yanni, the ambitious local NBC news reporter, who Reacher takes an instant dislike to but who he recruits to the cause with the promise of a scoop
as it happens, Rosemary Barr, the killer’s sister, works for a law firm and they take pity on her for being associated with her mass murder brother and so commission their regular investigator, Franklin, to look into the case. Later, he is hired by Ann Yanni, who has a much bigger budget, and turns up some useful leads.

There are several strands to the plot.

Kuwait Helen and Rosemary hope Reacher has come to somehow vindicate and save Barr. But it’s the opposite. Reacher was the military policeman who assembled the conclusive evidence that Barr, after years of training as an Army sniper in the late 1980s, and after being forced to sit out Operation Desert Storm in Iraq in 1991 (because it was mostly an armoured and artillery war) snaps, holed up in a car park in Kuwait City, and shot dead four civilians emerging from a house.

The Kuwait coverup The four victims turn out to be American soldiers so you’d have thought Barr would be court martialled and banged away for life. But the investigation uncovered that the four had themselves been gruesome thugs, raping and looting their way across Kuwait City. Any trial of Barr would have inevitably brought this to light with terrible consequences for the reputation of the U.S. Army and the Allied Coalition. Therefore, to Reacher’s intense disgust, the case was suppressed and Barr was given an honourable discharge from the army.

He called for Reacher because a) he had made Reacher a promise to go straight but b), it slowly dawns on Reacher that it was a subtle call for help. Because Barr had seen, at first hand, during the Kuwait investigation, what a meticulous investigator Reacher had been and hopes that, once again, he will be able to use his forensic skills and meticulous logical approach to revealing the real killers…

The Russians The reader is ahead of Reacher because Child, from quite early on, alternates the Reacher sections of narrative, with the parallel thoughts and activities of a group of Russian criminals.

These guys are really hard. Their leader, the Zec, is eighty years old, has lost most of the fingers on both hands, and has lived through extraordinary suffering which is only fleetingly referred to – surviving appalling suffering in the gulag, and through the Second World War. ‘Zec’ is, in fact, Russian slang which simply means gulag prisoner (p.383). We are told that the Zec chewed some of his own fingers off rather than succumb to frostbite and then gangrene in the camp. All his ‘men’ are terrified of him.

His number two is Grigor Linski who, among other experiences he suffered in a similar Russian background, at one point had every one of his vertebrae systematically smashed with a hammer, surviving, but with a telltale limp and stoop (p.219).

The Zec and Grigor have some younger muscle to help, Chenko and the big goon Vladimir. When a sidekick, Raskin, screws up tailing Reacher, he is ordered by the Zec to commit suicide, digs his own grave and shoots himself in the mouth. That’s the kind of terrifying grip the Zec exerts.

The sports bar brawl It slowly becomes clear that these are the guys who somehow got Barr to commit the shooting spree. Reacher speculates that they threatened to hurt or kill Barr’s sister, the only person in the sad loner’s life. 250 pages in we still don’t know for sure whether this is the case or why they sponsored such a high level incident. Instead, we read through an atmosphere heavy with brooding threat. This is given physical form when the Russians commission a pack of redneck toughs to beat Reacher up in a sports bar. Bad idea. Reacher applies his Nine Rules of Barroom Fighting and pulps the first three, whereupon the last two run away.

Sandy More sickeningly, they’d used a local dolly bird named Sandy (real name, Alexandra Dupree) to chat Reacher up in the bar, then leap up and scream that he’d called her a ‘whore’. That was the prompt for the men to come over and ‘protect her honour’. The bar-room fight tactic fails, but the Russians need to stop Reacher snooping around, so a few days later they pick up the girl and kill her outside Reacher’s hotel, hoping to make it look like he eventually slept with her, but they argued for some reason.

The DA goes for Reacher Now the prosecuting attorney, Rodin, knows all about Reacher, met him in some of the meetings the lawyers have had about the Barr case, and has become fixated on the idea that Reacher is influencing his daughter’s handling of Barr’s defence. In a nutshell, Reacher is holding out hope that Barr might be innocent or there might be extenuating circumstances (which is indeed what Reacher increasingly believes). So when the police find the dead girl’s body and quickly establish a connection between her and Reacher in the brawl at the bar, Rodin is delighted, and tells detective Emerson to put out an all points bulletin to have Reacher arrested. From this point Reacher is on the run, and has to communicate with Helen, Rosemary and Ann from payphones in the dark, or at secret rendezvous. All undercover, on the run, fleeing as the cop car sirens come closer.

If you combine it with the brief scenes we have where Grigor and his men are closing in on Reacher, the whole setup makes for a very tense and dramatic read.

Complications

Barr beaten In the prison where Barr is remanded he is foolish enough to disrespect an extremely fierce Mexican crim, who shows up later with a pack of sidekicks and beats Barr to a pulp. He survives, is put in hospital, initially in a coma but, when he regains consciousness – has amnesia and can’t remember anything about the events of the last few weeks. He is genuinely heart-broken to learn that he shot those people. He has no idea why. A neurologist and psychiatrist test him and both agree it is genuine amnesia. Damn. There goes the main way of finding out what the hell happened.

An old flame Reacher foolishly let slip mention of the Pentagon to the investigator Rodin, who makes enquiries and has the officer in charge of the investigation, Eileen Hutton, subpoenaed to be interviewed. Now Reacher and Hutton had a passionate three-month affair in Kuwait back in the day (1991). They both got posted in different directions. He wonders if she’s changed and gets his hair cut and a close shave specially to meet her.

Love interest Hutton turns up, now an impressive Brigadier-General (p.262), but still hot and sexy like the best Reacher babes are.

When called to be formally interviewed by Rodin, she stonewalls him, denying Barr has any previous form for something like this shooting.
She and Reacher have already hooked up (he goes to meet her) and soon he is hiding out in her hotel suite, making occasional forays out to investigate, and in between enjoying the kind of large-scale, bed-shattering sex which Reacher specialises in.

Questions Was it the Russians who blackmailed Barr into carrying out the killing? Why? Why did they want it to be a copycat of his Kuwait City killing spree? Will Reacher discover their existence and role in the plot before they contrive to have him arrested or bumped off? What lies behind the whole plot, what are they up to? Is the secret in the background of Barr the killer? Or is it something to do with one of the five murdered civilians? If so, which one?

And how many more times can Hutton and Reacher have wild, championship sex?

You’ll have to read the book to find the answers for yourself 🙂

One shot

The title has several different meanings. When Barr shot the five commuters down, he actually fired six shots. One of them he deliberately fired into an ornamental pond they were walking past, knowing the bullet would be slowed down and easily recovered by police forensics. But it was also a message to an expert like Reacher, the type of glitch or anomaly which recurs in all the books, a slight blip which sets our hero thinking: Why did a drop-dead ace sniper, firing from less than forty yards, miss one shot? What was he trying to say?

Then in the second half of the book, Reacher travels to a shooting range in Kentucky which he has discovered that Barr used to visit to practice at. The range is owned by a tough, blunt ex-Marine who refuses to answer any questions about Barr (who is, by this stage, has been all over the TV news and the papers). But Reacher notices an old target paper with five near bull’s eyes, the record of a Marine winning some shooting contest back in the day, and realises it’s a trophy of the old Marine. Reacher compliments him on his shooting. Mollified, the Marine gets out his own personal rifle and challenges Reacher to do as well. Gives him one bullet.

The implication is clear. Reacher has one shot. If he can match the Marine’s accuracy, the guy will talk, tell him the story, clear up the mystery.

One shot to unlock the truth. Will he succeed?

Well, it turns out that Reacher himself won the U.S. Marine Corps Thousand Yard Invitational Competition in 1988. Will he succeed? Hell yeah.

One shot? That’s all Jack Reacher ever needs!

How to sound American

1. Vocabulary

the air = air conditioning in a car or building e.g. ‘The air was set very cold and smelled of sharp chemical flavours’ (p.166)

black-and-white = police patrol car

blacktop = anything covered in asphalt e.g. a highway, parking lot, drive

boardwalk = a constructed pedestrian walkway, often alongside a beach

done deal = an irrevocable agreement

duct work = external pipes and ventilators

dumpster = big metal container for rubbish, a skip

hardscrabble = adjective denoting origins in hard work and poverty

heartland = term for the U.S. states which don’t touch water, denotes down-home, traditional values

in back = at the back of something, especially a building

a laugher = a sporting match or competition which is so easily won by one team or competitor that it seems absurd

a lube shop = garage which specialises in changing the oil and checking lubrication of all moving parts on a car

mirandise = to read a suspect their Miranda rights i.e. ‘you have the right to remain silent…’

porch glider = a type of rocking chair that moves as a swing seat, where the entire frame consists of a seat attached to the base by means of a double-rocker four-bar linkage

prowl car = police patrol car

sidewalk = pavement

slam dunk = a type of basketball shot that is performed when a player jumps in the air, controls the ball above the horizontal plane of the rim, and scores by putting the ball directly through the basket with one or both hands; used to mean a dead certainty

squared away = American military term meaning above satisfactory level for a sustained period: good, neat, tidy, trim

a turnout = the triangular shaped junction of a country road with a bigger road

window reveal = recess surrounding a window, of which the bottom forms the ledge, on which people often set items like vases or books

2. Know your weapons

Americans love guns. Not necessarily all Americans, just enough to provide a steady supply of mass shootings. And, after all, this novel is about a mass shooter.

Here’s Child’s description of the weapon which James Barr uses to execute the five rush-hour commuters.

It was a Springfield M1A Super Match autoloader, American walnut stock, heavy premium barrel, ten shot box magazine, chambered for the .308. It was the exact commercial equivalent of the M14 self-loading sniper rifle that the American military had used during his long-ago years in the service. It was a fine weapon. Maybe not quite as accurate as a top-of-the-line bolt gun, but it would do. It would do just fine…. It was loaded with Lake City M852s. His favourite custom cartridges. Special Lake City Match brass, Federal powder, Sierra Matchking 168-grain hollow point boat tail bullets. The load was better than the gun, probably. (p.14)

This is the gun which ex-Marine sergeant Cash offers Reacher to test how well the latter can shoot on his firing range.

It was a Remington M24, with a Leopold Ultra scope and a front bipod. A standard-issue Marine sniper’s weapon. It looked to be well used but in excellent condition…
‘One shot,’ said Cash. He took a single cartridge from his pocket. Held it up. It was a .300 Winchester round. Match grade. (p.344)

And at the climax of the book, Reacher faces off with the Russian shooter, Chenko, who is armed with a sawn-off shotgun.

It had been a Benelli Nova Pump. The stock had been cut off behind the pistol grip. The barrel had been hacked off behind the pistol grip. The barrel had been hacked off ahead of the slide. Twelve-gauge. Four-shot magazine. A handsome weapon, butchered. (p.492)

Child has obviously done a lot of research into modern weaponry.

A man’s world

Reacher operates in the world of the police and army, against violent criminals. It is an unremittingly violent and generally very male world.

Intelligent women exist in it – lawyers, pilots, cops – in fact, Child takes a small but noticeable pleasure in upsetting sexist expectations and mentioning minor characters like a pilot or a lawyer or a doctor, letting you assume they’re men – and then revealing that they’re women (like Dr McBannerman in Tripwire, who Child assumes to be a grizzled old Scotsman but turns out to be a trim, professional woman doctor).

But the women are all, by definition, smaller and weaker than Reacher (everyone is smaller and weaker than Reacher) so he always ends up defending them.

Examples of hyper-violence include:

the sniper shooting five civilians, which kick starts the plot
the sniper, James Barr, is then beaten and stabbed in prison by an extremely hard Mexican gang
we hear a retrospective account of Barr’s shooting of four unarmed men in Kuwait City
five rednecks, led by Jeb Oliver, take on Reacher in a bar fight
the Russians murder Jeb Oliver, cut off his hands and head and bury the body parts in different places
the Russians murder Sandy the dolly bird by getting big Vladimir to punch her once on the side of the head
the finale in which Reacher:
- stabs one Russian in the neck
- bear hugs another to death
- throws Chenko out a third floor window

Jokes

Reacher has a rare but nice way with ironic asides.

‘You know much about head injuries?’
‘Only the ones I cause.’ (p.113)

‘You’re new in town,’ she said.
‘Usually,’ he said. (p.128)

‘I know who you are,’ she said.
‘So do I,’ he said. (p.326)

Reacher’s diet

For breakfast Reacher has the full monty, always including fried eggs and black coffee. For lunch and dinner, cheeseburgers and onion rings, washed down by beer. For another breakfast a ham and egg muffin followed by two slices of lemon pie (p.234). For lunch, a grilled cheese sandwich (p.254). Later, a big sirloin steak in Hutton’s hotel room.

How does he keep in any kind of shape?

Jack Reacher’s rules for bar fighting

Rule one – Be on your feet and ready
Rule two – Show them what they’re messing with
Rule three – Identify the ringleader
Rule four – The ringleader is the one who moves first
Rule five – Never back off
Rule six – Don’t break the furniture
Rule seven – Act, don’t react
Rule eight – Assess and evaluate
Rule nine – Don’t run head-on into Jack Reacher (pp.129-132)

Intelligent, thoughtful, hyper-violent, gun-crazy fun. Find a pool, find a lounger, turn off your phone and enjoy!

Credit

One Shot by Lee Child was published in 2005 by Bantam Press. All quotes are from the 2012 film tie-in edition.

Reviews of other Jack Reacher novels

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by Simon on August 7, 2018 • Permalink

Posted in America, Books, Novel, Thriller

Posted by Simon on August 7, 2018

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Surrealism by Michael Robinson (2005)

This is an almost square, thick, glossy art book (17.1 x 16.1 cm) whose 384 pages – after the brief foreword and introduction – contain nearly 200 colour reproductions of Surrealist works of art. Each work gets a 2-page spread, with the image on the right, the text giving the artist, title, medium and some interpretation, on the left. It’s kind of flip book of Surrealist painting, divided into four sections: Movement overview, Influences, Styles & techniques and Places.

The left-page analyses vary widely in quality, some telling you really insightful things, others little more than recaps of so-and-so’s career or an anecdote behind the picture. There is an obtrusive political correctness in many of them – Robinson is the kind of white man who has to make it quite clear he is on the side of feminists in their struggle against the patriarchy, and regrets the cultural misappropriation of colonial exploiters like Picasso, Matisse and the rest of those awful white men.

Here he is discussing Meret Oppenheim’s Occasional Table (1939):

Occasional table (1939) by Meret Oppenheim

In this work Meret Oppenheim continues with a number of Surrealist preoccupations, the most significant of which is the preconception of specific gender roles and stereotyping in a patriarchal society. At first this object may appear as an opulent or even decadent excess of Art Deco design for the bourgeois market, particularly in its use of gold leaf. Oppenheim is, in line with Dada and Surrealist ideals, commenting on bourgeois excesses, as well as on gender stereotypes.

Let’s just stop here and ask if you, the reader, can identify specifically how this work of art is tackling ‘the preconception of specific gender roles and stereotyping in a patriarchal society’. Spotted it? Good. Now, read on:

As a (male) viewer one is drawn to the legs to consider their shape before considering their functionality. There is an obvious parallel here with women being viewed in the same stereotypical manner. The viewer is also being denied access to the rest of the body, emphasised by the flatness and width of the table’s top. (p.224)

So, if I’m reading this correctly, Robinson is claiming that if you are struck by the fact that an ordinary-looking table is being supported by a pair of bird’s legs, this is not because it’s rather unusual and incongruous – in the deliberately disconcerting Surrealist/Dada fashion – it’s because you are always looking at women’s legs and sizing them up, because you are a misogynist member of a patriarchal society guilty of gender stereotyping. Unless you are a woman. In which case you just see a pair of bird’s legs.

Here is Robinson preparing to talk about a work by Wifredo Lam:

At the turn of the nineteenth century many modernists adopted and adapted ritualistic or totemic motifs from Africa, the Indian subcontinent and Oceania – in fact from most places that were European colonies. The use of these misappropriated motifs can be found in the so-called ‘primitive’ aesthetics of Paul Gauguin’s Post-Impressionism, the Cubism of Picasso and Georges Braque, much of German Expressionism and some of the Fauvism of Matisse. However, Surrealism differed in this regard thanks largely to the multi-ethnicity of its group and a genuine interest in anthropology. (p.184)

Will all those white European artists who ‘misappropriated’ motifs from non-European cultures please stay behind after school and write out one hundred times ‘Michael Robinson says I must only use subjects and motifs from European culture and not misappropriate motifs from any other source’. Naughty Picasso. Naughty Matisse.

Your use of non-European motifs is cultural misappropriation; my use of non-European motifs is valid because I have ‘a genuine interest in anthropology’.

Some notes

The sheer number and variety of art and artists in the book tell their own story about the Surrealists’ broad-spectrum dominance of the inter-war period.

First conclusion is there were so many of them – Paul Éluard, Benjamin Péret, René Crevel, Robert Desnos, Jacques Baron, Max Morise, Pierre Naville, Roger Vitrac, Gala Éluard, Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, Luis Buñuel, Man Ray, Hans Arp, Georges Malkine, Michel Leiris, Georges Limbour, Antonin Artaud, Raymond Queneau, André Masson, Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Jacques Prévert, and Yves Tanguy – just for starters.

Surrealism followed on from Dada, founded in 1916 in Switzerland as a really angry response to the pointless barbarity of the Great War.

By 1920 a lot of former Dadaists had gravitated to Paris and were experimenting with Freud-inspired ideas of accessing or depicting the unconscious via stream-of-consciousness prose or automatic writing. One of them, the bullish, domineering poet André Breton, decided the trouble with Dada was it had been too anarchic, chaotic, unfocused – which had led to its eventual collapse.

Breton decided to form a real movement, not just literary or artistic, but with social and political aims. This led in 1924 to the publication of the first of numerous Surrealist manifestos.

It was primarily a movement of writers – poets and novelists – not artists. Artists came later. Ironic, because now we are soaked in the artists’ imagery and I wonder if anyone reads the old surrealist prose works or could even name any.

And Surrealism was political, designed to undermine and overthrow the existing scheme of things, opposing traditional bourgeois values (kinder, küche, kirche), religion, the rational, the scientific – all the things which, it was claimed, had led Europe into the inferno of the Great War.

Breton conceived of Surrealism as a philosophy and a way of life, as rejecting the stifling repression of bourgeois society, setting free our deep inner selves. It wasn’t just teenage rebellion for its own sake. Breton and many of the others thought that Western society was really seriously crippled and doomed by its steadfast refusal to acknowledge the most vital part of the human being – the unconscious, source of all our creative imaginative urges, which can only be accessed via dreams and other specialised techniques.

Only if we can tap into our unused creativity, into our irrational minds, into the sensual part of our psyche, can we ever hope to change the repressed, uptight, bourgeois, scientific, technocratic society which is leading us to destruction.

You can see why this genuine commitment to radical social change led many Surrealists, as the 1920s turned into the Fascist 1930s, to declare themselves communists, and how this led to numerous splits and bitter quarrels among them.

In the sets of ‘rules for surrealists’ which Breton was prone to drawing up, he declared that surrealist writers and artists (and film-makers and photographers) could work in any medium whatsoever, depicting any subject whatsoever, with only one golden rule – it must come from inside, from the unconscious, from the free imagination untrammeled or restricted by conscious thought or tradition. You could use realistic figures and objects from the real world – but only in the service of the unconscious.

Of the scores of artists connected the movement, probably Dalí and Magritte created the most widely recognized images of Surrealism. Dalí joined the group in 1929 (after his brief abandonment of painting for film and photography) and played a crucial role in establishing a definitive visual style between 1930 and 1935.

Outliers

Assuming we’re all familiar with the usual suspects – Dali, Miro, Ernst, Arp, Magritte, Ray – one of the interesting facets of this book is how widely it casts the net, to include artists never part of the official movement but clearly influenced by it. I enjoyed the inclusion of English artists like Henry Moore, Paul Nash, Edward Wadsworth and, especially, Roland Penrose.

The real pleasure of the book was coming across quite a few artists I’d never heard of before:

Women surrealists

There were quite a few women surrealist artists and it was genuinely interesting to a) learn about them and their work, considered purely as artists b) to learn how many of them really were feminists, how they disliked the bullying male environment created by Breton, how many of them tried to develop an aesthetic which escaped male stereotyping and the sexualising of women’s bodies. From a crowded field I think Dorothea Tanning stood out for me.

Dejeuner en fourrure (1936) by Meret Oppenheim
A little later (1938) by Kay Sage
Muse of construction (1939) by Eileen Agar, whose work looked more interesting than Paul Nash’s own when I saw samples of both at Tate’s recent Nash exhibition.
Rivieres Tiedes/Tepid Waters (1939) by Ithell Colquhoun
The Spotted Ousel (1942) by Grace Pailthorpe
At the chateau Lacoste (1946) Toyen (pseudonym of Marie Čermínová)
Plain chant (1947) by Leonora Carrington (in the late 1930s Max Ernst’s lover and collaborator)
The Friend’s Room (1950) by Dorothea Tanning (married Max Ernst in 1946)
Composition with figures on a terrace (1939) by Leonor Fini

Lee Miller was an important muse for many of the male Surrealists. She had an intense affair with the photographer Man Ray, who taught her photography as well as making her the subject of many of his greatest works. Later she married Roland Penrose, the English Surrealist painter. His painting, Bien vise, above, depicts her naked torso. But Miller also painted, created surrealist objects and took surreal photos in her own right (as well as her later, awesome, war photos).

Surrealism and gender

The gender issue with Surrealism strikes me as simple enough: all these men thought they had a duty to express the unconscious; the dominating master and ‘discoverer’ of the unconscious was a man, Sigmund Freud; Freud insisted that the unconscious was drenched in repressed sexuality (only later adding aggression and violence in the form of the Death Wish); which meant that this large and influential group of male artists felt it was their moral and artistic duty to be as frank as possible about sex and sexuality, to be as shocking and provocative as they could be; and so they saturated their works with erotic images and symbols; and, being men, these tended to be images of women, their own objects of desire.

And almost all the women, in one way or another, reacted against this use of women as sex objects, as objects of desire, in male painting, and tried to redress the balance by painting women fully dressed or in poses where they obviously dominate men or as girls on the cusp of adolescence (or abandoned figuration altogether to paint abstracts).

The really interesting biological-anthropological question is about the difference in ‘desire’ which this tends to bring out. Men paint women, but women paint women, too. Everyone seems to take ‘women’ as a fit subject for painting. Very few of the women artists paint pictures of big naked men or fixate on the penis in the same way that men paint countless breasts and vulvas. Why?

Broadly speaking, feminists from de Beauvoir onwards say that gender differences are entirely due to social conditioning; the vast majority of the population and all the biologists and evolutionists I’ve read point out that there are certain unavoidable differences in DNA, physiology and behaviour between males and females of almost every species: why should we be any different?

All that said, I’ve just flicked slowly through the nearly 200 images in this book and only a handful of paintings – about ten – actually depict realistic images of naked women (and some of those are by women, for example, Dorothea Tanning’s Birthday; among the men Paul Delvaux had the most persistent in (admittedly dreamy zombie) naked women, for example, The Sleeping Venus).

If you go looking for naked women to support this thesis, they are in fact surprisingly absent from the classic surrealist images (by Magritte, Dali, Ernst).

Surprise

I had no idea that Desmond Morris, author of the immensely popular Naked Ape/Manwatching books, was an official member of the Birmingham Surrealist group while still an undergraduate studying biology. This work, painted when he was just 21, is immediately pleasing, in colour, design and the formal symmetric arrangement. It also demonstrates the general rule that Surrealism, which set out to turn society upside down, ended up producing charming and delightful images which could safely hang on the walls of any investment banker or corporate lawyer. Art changes nothing.

Rank and file (1949) by Desmond Morris

Conclusion

This book is a useful collection of the classic Surrealist images, but its real value is as a stimulating introduction to a far wider range of less well-known artists.

Credit

Surrealism by Michael Robinson was published by Flametree Published in 2005.

Surrealism reviews

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by Simon on November 8, 2017 • Permalink

Posted in Art, Books

Tagged 2005, André Breton, André Masson, Antonin Artaud, automatic writing, Benjamin Péret, Braque, Cubism, Dada, Dalí, Desmond Morris, Dorothea Tanning, Edward Wadsworth, Eileen Agar, Fauvism, Freud, Gala Éluard, Gauguin, Georges Limbour, Georges Malkine, German Expressionism, Grace Pailthorpe, Great War, Hans Arp, Henry Moore, Ithell Colquhoun, Jacques Baron, Jacques Hérold, Jacques Prévert, Joan Miro, Kay Sage, Lee Miller, Leonor Fini, Leonora Carrington, Luis Buñuel, Magritte, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Marie Čermínová, Matisse, Max Ernst, Max Morise, Meret Oppenheim, Michael Robinson, Michel Leiris, Oscar Dominguez, Paris, Paul Éluard, Paul Delvaux, Paul Nash, Picasso, Pierre Naville, Post-Impressionism, Raymond Queneau, René Crevel, Robert Desnos, Roger Vitrac, Roland Penrose, Salvador Dalí, stream-of-consciousness, Surrealism, the Naked Ape, the unconscious, Toyen, Victor Brauner, Wifredo Lam, Wolfgang Paalen, Yves Tanguy

Posted by Simon on November 8, 2017

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2017/11/08/surrealism-michael-robinson/

Queen Emma and the Vikings by Harriet O’Brien (2005)

Interestingly, this book seems to have two different sub-titles depending on which edition you buy. The edition I have is sub-titled ‘A history of Power, Love and Greed in Eleventh-Century England’, a bit generic. But the latest edition on Amazon is sub-titled ‘The Woman Who Shaped the Events of 1066’, which is stronger and more specific.

Emma of Normandy was the daughter of Duke Richard I of Normandy (993-996) and sister to his successor, Duke Richard II (963-1026). In 1002 she was married off to King Aethelred II of England, the ill-fated king who ruled from 978 to 1016 and by whom she had three children, including Edward, later to become King Edward the Confessor (who ruled 1042 to 1066).

After Aethelred died in 1016, and England was conquered by the Danish King Cnut, Emma found herself being recalled from the Norman court – where she had gone for safety – and, in 1017, quickly married off to the new Danish king. She bore Cnut two more children, a daughter and Harthacnut, who was to succeed Cnut as King of Norway and ruled briefly as king of England from 1040 to 1042.

Thus Emma occupies the unique position in history of having been married to two kings of England and being mother to two further kings of England – by different fathers.

Unlike other books I’ve recently read about this period – Cnut: England’s Viking King by M.K. Lawson or The Norman Conquest 1066 by Marc Morris – which have a lot of factual information to sift and a lot of events to get through, O’Brien’s book is much slower paced and goes out of its way to present a thorough sense of the world in which Emma lived. Almost every chapter opens with a vivid description of a key scene or moment, allowing you to really think through the emotional and cultural effects of the events which other historians sometimes race through rather hastily.

We learn how squalid and unhygienic Saxon England was, what the Saxon king and queen and nobles wore, how feasts were arranged, the role of jewellery and metal weapons, and so on. Some of her vivid scenes depict Emma’s departure from Normandy, her arrival in Canterbury, her wedding ceremony to Aethelred – as well as speculation about her feelings and emotions: What must it have been like to be sold off in marriage to a man probably twice her age (Aethelred), who already had at least one common-law wife by whom he had had no fewer than ten children, the oldest of whom were Emma’s age?

What a bear pit she was sold into – and how strong and clever she must have been to not only survive the murderous rivalries of the English court but then to live on into – and thrive in – the completely different ambience of the Danish king she was forced to marry. Both men had common law wives or mistresses – both, eerily, named Aelfgifu – against whom she had to compete, for affection (maybe) and power (certainly).

The story covers three nationalities – Norman, English and Danish – as well as a host of competing warlords and nobles so it’s no surprise that the book comes well-equipped with family trees of the three countries’ royal families, and a Dramatis personae featuring no fewer than 57 personages – all of whom you really have to know about in order to grasp the full complexity of the situation.

Some commenters on Amazon complain that we learn a lot about the doings of the various men and warlords of her time and less about Emma but a) I think O’Brien has done a heroic job in teasing out every possible incident, experience and emotion which Emma must have experienced and b) what any reading of this period conveys is that everyone’s lives, even the strongest kings, were immersed in the dense and complex matrix of royal and aristocratic marriages, power alliances and conflicts.

Cnut may have conquered England – but only as a result of the twin good fortunes of King Aethelred dying a natural death, and then his son Edmund Ironside unexpectedly dying soon after he and Cnut had made a pact to divide the country (O’Brien recounts the possible causes of that sudden death, injury, illness or assassination).

Cnut still had to travel back to Denmark to try and assert his authority there against his own brother, and went to war to conquer Norway in which he was miserably defeated. Meanwhile, back in the English court, Emma had to protect her newborn infants by Cnut from the jealousy of her own children by Aethelred, let alone the football team size brood of Aethelstan’s children by his earlier, Saxon, wife.

And seeing as every one of these children, male or female, was married off to the siblings of the rulers of Denmark, Norway, Scotland, France, Flanders, Normandy and Brittany, and themselves had numerous progeny, it is quickly mind-bendingly complicated to work out who thinks they’re entitled to inherit the crown of which nation or duchy, and who they’re likely to ally with, or be thrown into conflict against, while new allies or opponents are being born or unexpectedly popping off.

This web of conflicting forces comes into play when Cnut dies in 1035 and there is a period of uncertainty bordering on anarchy while the following contenders vie for the crown:

Cnut’s son by Aelfgifu – Harold Harefoot
Cnut’s son by Emma – Harthacnut
Aethelred’s sons by Emma – Alfred and Edward

To help understand it all, you need the family trees of the Duchy of Normandy, and of Saxon England and of Denmark to follow the dense weave of marriages and kin.

Chapter eleven opens with a particularly bravura recreation of the fate of poor Alfred, Aethelred’s son, who was persuaded to lead a force of Norman sympathisers to claim the throne. He landed with plenty of men and ships on the south coast, was courteously met and persuaded by Earl Godwine to go with him to Guildford, where in the middle of the night his men are disarmed and then brutally massacred – except for the ones kept to be sold into slavery. Alfred himself was tied up and taken on a three-day journey into the heart of Fen country where he was brutally blinded and left to die in the mud.

The narrative is as immediate and bloodthirsty as any contemporary thriller.

O’Brien guides us through this maze of conflicting sources and accounts, consistently seeing it from the point of view of her tough and Machiavellian heroine. Her emphasis on the day-to-day realities of early 11th century England, and on the emotional life of the key players, is a welcome relief from the sometimes crushing litany of battles, taxes and legal charters which tend to fill the accounts of other historians.

This is a very enjoyable and rewarding work not only of history but of historical imagination.

Emma of Normandy (c. 985 – 1052)

Timeline of Emma’s life

978 Aethelred II crowned King of England
985? Emma of Normandy born
1002 Emma marries Aethelred. In the same year he orders the infamous Massacre of Danes throughout England.
1005? Birth of Emma’s son Edward (to be the future Edward II the Confessor)
1006-13 A daughter Godgifu and son, Alfred, are born.
1013 Invasion of Swein Forkbeard prompts Aethelred and Emma to flee to her family in Normandy. Her two young sons, Alfred and Edward, are to be left in the Norman court for most of their boyhood and teens.
1014 Swein dies. Aethelred returns but quickly falls out with his son by his pre-Emma mistress, Edmund ‘Ironsides’.
1016 Swein’s son, Cnut invades with a Danish fleet. Aethelred dies of natural causes and, after he’s made a peace treaty with Cnut, Edmund dies in suspicious circumstances, leaving Cnut king of all England.
1017 Cnut marries Emma.
1020s Emma has a son Harthacnut and daughter, Gunnhild.
1027 Cnut goes on pilgrimage to Rome.
1028 Cnut is in Norway furthering his claims to the throne.
1030 Cnut appoints his son by his ‘consort’ Aelfgifu, Swein, earl of Norway to rule in his absence.
1033 Rebellion in Norway against the unpopular rule of Swein and Aelfgifu.
1035 Cnut was planning a military campaign in Norway and also managing the marriage of his daughter by Emma, Godgifu, to the son of the Holy Roman Emperor Conrad, the future Henry III, when he dies without naming an heir and with at least three possible contenders to the throne – Harold Harefoot, Harthacnut and Edward.
1036 The nobility call a witan at Oxford where it is agreed Harold Harefoot will rule England north of the Thames, Harthacnut England south of the Thames – in his absence run by Earl Godwine in alliance with Emma. Alfred lands from Normandy to press his claim but is kidnapped, blinded and dies. Meanwhile Emma’s best hope, Harthacnut, refuses to come to England, facing his own problems in Norway, and so the path is open for Aelfgifu of Northampton’s son, Harold Harefoot, to be acclaimed king, and Emma to be placed in a very dicey position, as mother of two direct threats to the new king.
1037 Emma flees, but not to Normandy a) because she has been implicated in the murder of her own son, Alfred, who had spent most of his life in exile in the Norman court and whose murder scandalised her relatives b) and because her nephew, the Duke Robert, had died young in 1035, leaving as his only male heir his eight-year-old son by his mistress – William ‘the bastard’ or has he would come to be known, William the Conqueror, so that the court was a snakepit of conspiracies. She goes to Bruges.
1040 Harold Harefoot dies unexpectedly young, aged about 23. Harthacnut, who had finally got round to assembling a fleet to take him to England, is now able to land and claim the throne unopposed. Emma returns with him as the official Queen Mother.
1041 Harthcnut swiftly makes himself unpopular by imposing harsh taxation. He commits a notorious atrocity when two of his tax collectors are killed by a mob in Worcester, and he leads an army west which lays the entire county to waste. O’Brien suggests it is Emma’s idea to invite her surviving son by Aethelred – Edward – back from the Norman court to come and be co-ruler with Harthacnut.
1042 But the arrangement has barely got under way before Harthacnut dies of a drunken fit at a wedding party. Edward II is crowned king.
Around this time a book she had commissioned about her life and times is published, the Encomium Emmae Reginae, a primary source for her life story.
1052 Emma dies, very nearly 70.
1066 Emma’s great-nephew, William of Normandy, seizes the throne of England.

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by Simon on May 22, 2017 • Permalink

Posted in Anglo Saxon, Books, European History, History, Middle Ages, War

Posted by Simon on May 22, 2017

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2017/05/22/queen-emma-and-the-vikings-harriet-obrien/

In Search of the Dark Ages by Michael Wood (2005)

Michael Wood

This was historian and TV presenter Michael Wood’s first book. Back in 1979 Wood burst onto our TV screens as the boyishly enthusiastic presenter of a BBC series about ‘the Dark Ages’, spread across eight episodes, his hippy-length hair and flapping flairs blowing in the breeze as he strode along castle walls and all over Iron Age forts. I remember chatting to a middle-aged woman TV executive who openly lusted after Wood’s big smile and tight, tight trousers.

Since this debut, Wood has gone on to present no fewer than 19 TV series as well as eight one-off documentaries and to write 12 history books. Time flies and I was surprised and dismayed to read that the former boy wonder of history TV is now nearly 70.

Dated

The first edition of this paperback was published in 1981 and its datedness is confirmed by the short bibliography at the back which recommends a swathe of texts from the 1970s and even some from the 1960s i.e. 50 long years ago.

The very title is dated, as nowadays all the scholars refer to the period from 400 to 1000 as the Early Middle Ages‘. No-one says ‘Dark Ages’ any more – though, credit where credit’s due, maybe this TV series and book helped shed light on the period for a popular audience which helped along the wider recategorisation.

But the book’s age does mean that you are continually wondering how much of it is still true. Wood is keen on archaeological evidence and almost every chapter features sentences like ‘new archaeological evidence / new digs at XXX are just revealing / promise to reveal major new evidence about Offa/Arthur et al…’ The reader is left wondering just what ‘new evidence’ has revealed over the past 40 years and just how much of Wood’s interpretations still hold up.

Investigations

It’s important to emphasise that the book does not provide a continuous and overarching history of the period: the opposite. The key phrase is ‘in search of…’ for each chapter of the book (just like each of the TV programmes) focuses on one particular iconic figure from the period and goes ‘in search of’ them, starting with their current, often mythologised reputation, then going on to examine the documentary texts, contemporary artifacts (coins, tapestries etc) and archaeological evidence to try and get at ‘the truth behind the myth’.

The figures are:

Boadicea
King Arthur
the Sutton Hoo Man
Offa
Alfred the Great
King Athelstan
Eric Bloodaxe
King Ethelred the Unready
William the Conqueror

Each gets a chapter putting them in the context of their day, assessing the sources and material evidence for what we can really know about them, mentioning the usual anecdotes and clichés generally to dismiss them.

Contemporary comparisons

Part of Wood’s popularising approach is to make trendy comparisons to contemporary figures or situations. Some of this has dated a lot – when he mentions a contemporary satirical cartoon comparing the Prime Minister to Boadicea (or Boudicca, as she was actually called) he is of course referring to Margaret Thatcher, not Theresa May. When he says that the late-Roman rulers of Britain effectively declared U.D.I. from the Empire, I just about remember what he’s referring to – Rhodesia’s unilateral declaration of independence from Britain back in 1965 – and it’s a thought-provoking comparison – but most readers would probably have to look it up.

Similarly, he writes that contemporaries remembered the bad winter of 763 ‘just as we do that of 1947’ – do we? He says the Northumbrians felt about Athelstan’s conquest of their kingdom ‘the same way as we feel about the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia’ (p.145).

That said, I found many of the comparisons worked well bringing these ancient people to life, in highlighting how their behaviour is comparable to the same kind of things going on in the contemporary world:

For example, he compares the native British merchants getting involved with Roman traders to entrepreneurs in contemporary Third World countries taking out, for example, a Coca Cola franchise from the modern commercial superpower. Or compares Boudica’s rebellion against the imperial Romans with rebellions against British Imperial rule – the most disastrous of which was probably the ‘Indian Mutiny’ – invigorating my thinking about both.

In the 440s the British King Vortigern invited warbands from Germany, Frisia and Denmark to come and help him fight against the invading Picts and Scots. As we know, a number of them decided they liked this new fertile country and decided to stay. Wood entertainingly compares the situation to modern mercenaries deciding not just to fight in but to settle and take over a modern African country.

The seventh-century English kingdoms were ruled by the descendants of the illiterate condottieri who had seized their chances in the fifth and sixth centuries. It is, let us say, as if Major ‘Mad Mike’ Hoare had founded his own dynasty in the Congo in the early sixties. (p.63)

I understood the reference the more since Hoare is mentioned in the memoirs of both Frederick Forsyth and Don McCullin who covered wars in Africa back in the distant 1960s.

Elsewhere he compares the builders of Offa’s Dyke to modern motorway construction companies, kingly announcements as sounding like modern propaganda by Third World dictators, the lingering influence of Rome on the 7th and 8th century kings comparable to the lingering afterglow of European imperial trappings on African dictators like Idi Amin or Jean-Bédel Bokassa.

He compares the partition of England between the Anglo-Saxons and the Vikings to the partition of Israel, and the readiness of armed civilians to mobilise against the invader as comparable to the readiness of Israeli reservists (p.124); the burning of Ripon Minster by the southern army of King Eardred marching north to confront Erik Bloodaxe ‘had the same effect that the shelling of Reims had in 1914’ (p.181).

Learning that King Athelstan was the first king to definitively rule the entire English nation and in fact to extend his mastery over Wales and Scotland, you might think ‘game over’, it’s all peaceful from now on, but far from it. The decades after Athelstan’s death in 939 saw the ravaging of the north of England by conflicting hordes of Saxons, Vikings, Northumbrians, Scots and Welsh, until it became a kind of ‘Dark Age Vietnam’, despoiled by the Dark Age equivalent of our modern ‘saturation bombing’ (p.165).

Quibbles and kings

Pedants might quibble that Boudicca’s rebellion against the Romans took place in 60AD, quite a long time before the official start date of the Dark Ages/Early Middle Ages, which is generally given as 400. But I can see the logic: a) Boudicca is more or less the first named leader of the Britons that history records and b) the themes of Roman colonialism and British resistance and c) the broader themes of invasion and resistance are set up very neatly by her story. In fact, given that a lot of the book is about invasion and resistance, leaving her out would have been odd.

For invasion is the main theme: the Romans arrived to find the native ‘Britons’ illiterate and so it’s only with the Romans that the written record begins, although archaeology suggests that successive waves of peoples had arrived and spread over Britain before them. But after the Romans there is a well-recorded set of invaders:

First the Angles and Saxons under their legendary leaders Hengist and Horsa in the 450s; the legend of King Arthur grew out of stories of native ‘British’ resistance to the Germanic invaders in the late 400s and Wood, like every other serious historian, concludes that there is not a shred of evidence for Arthur’s actual historical existence.
It is from the period when the Anglo-Saxon invaders settled into different ‘kingdoms’ – in fact themselves made up of loosely affiliated tribal groups – that dates the stupendous grave at Sutton Hoo with its wonderful Dark Age treasure: Wood goes ‘in search’ of the king who was buried there but, like every other scholar, says we will probably never know, though the name of King Raedwald of the East Angles is most often referred to in the scholarly literature.
King Offa of Mercia (757 to 797) was the most powerful king of his day – he was even deemed worthy of correspondence from the great Charlemagne, king of Francia (768 to 814) and Wood goes in search of his royal ‘palace’ at Tamworth.
It was King Alfred the Great (871 to 899) who had to deal with the arrival of a massive Viking army and, although pushed back into the marshy maze of the Somerset Levels, eventually emerged to fight the invaders to a truce, in which the Danes held all of England east of a line drawn from London to the Mersey – the so-called Danelaw.
It fell to his son, Edward, to successfully continue the fight against the Danes, and it was only in the reign of his son, King Athelstan (927 to 939) that all of England was for the first time unified under one ruler.
In fact, the Danes fought back and the Norse adventurer Eric Haraldsson, nicknamed Eric Bloodaxe, briefly seized and ruled Yorkshire from York. When he was finally overthrown (in 954), that was meant to be the end of Danish rule in England…
Except that the Danish King Cnut managed, after a long campaign led by his father, to seize the English throne in 1016 and reigned till his death in 1035, and was succeeded by his son Harthacnut, an unpopular tyrant who reigned for just two years (1040 to 1042). During Cnut’s reign England became part of his North Sea Empire which joined the thrones of Denmark and Sweden.
Cnut’s Anglo-Danish kingdom is generally forgotten because it, like a lot of Anglo-Saxon history, is eclipsed by the Norman Conquest of 1066, with which Wood logically concludes his story.

Brutality

Though he conveys infectious excitement at the achievement of an Offa or Athelstan, Wood is well aware of the brutality which was required of a Dark Ages king.

For most Dark Age kings had the inclinations of spoilt children and their moral sense was unrefined. (p.221)

We learn that after Offa’s death the men of Kent rose up against Mercian rule and were crushed, their king, Eadberht Praen, taken in chains to Mercia where his hands were cut off and he was blinded (p.107). The Vikings practiced a ritual sacrifice of their fallen opponents to Wodin, the blood eagle, which involved cutting the ribs and lungs out of the living man and arranging them to look like eagle’s wings (p.114). The great Athelstan himself barely survived an attempt apparently organised by his brother, Edwin, to capture and blind him (p.140). When the invading Danish king Sweyn Forkbeard died in 1014, his army elected his son, Cnut, as king to replace him. Ethelred took advantage of the hiatus to raise levies and attack Cnut in Gainsborough, forcing him to go to sea. But the Danes had taken a number of nobles or their sons hostage for good behaviour, and Cnut put them all ashore at Sandwich, after cutting off their noses and hands (p.216).

Ravaging not fighting

There was no shortage of battles during this period (the thousand years from Boudicca’s revolt in 60 to Hastings in 1066) but what I began to realise was the steady drip-drip of ‘campaigns’ which never involved two armies directly confronting each other; instead during which one or more armies rampaged through their opponents’ territory, murdering, raping, destroying crops and burning down villages, in order to terrorise their opponents into ceasing fire and offering a truce. The Romans, the Britons, the Saxons, the Welsh, the Scots and the Picts and the Irish, the Vikings, the Danes and the Normans – all in their time waged ‘military’ campaigns which amounted to little more than systematic murder, rape and plunder of completely unarmed peasants as a deliberate war strategy.

I’ve always wondered why there’s a massive statue of Boudicca opposite the Houses of Parliament given that one of her main achievements was burning London to the ground, after previously ravaging all Roman settlements in her native East Anglia; and a thousand years later William the Bastard, having defeated the main Wessex army at Senlac Ridge, then set about ravaging the countryside in a wide circle to the west and up and around London – then when the English in the north resisted him, William went on a massive campaign of destruction known as the Harrying of the North (1069 to 1070) resulting in huge destruction and widespread famine caused by his army’s looting, burning and slaughtering.

From Boadicea to the Bastard, a thousand years of horrific violence and destruction.

As David Carpenter points out in his history of the Plantagenet kings, direct confrontation in battle is risky; quite often the bigger better-led force loses, for all sorts of reasons. Hugely more controllable, predictable and effective is to ravage your opponents’ land until he sues for peace. You lose no soldiers; in fact the soldiers get all the food they want plus the perks of raping and/or killing helpless civilians, which saves on pay as well; if you do it long enough your opponent will cave in the end.

This is the depressing logic which means that, time after time, king after king and invader after invader found it cheaper, safer and more effective to kill and burn helpless civilians than to engage in a set piece battle. And it is a logic which continues to this day in horribly war-torn parts of the world.

Slavery

I’m well aware that slavery was one of the great trades of this era, that slaves were one of Roman Britain’s main exports and were still a mainstay of the economy even after William the Bastard tried to ban the trade a thousand years later, but Wood himself admits to being astonished by the range of breadth of the Dark Age slave trade (pages 183 to 185):

The Spanish Arabs engaged in a lucrative slave trade with the Dublin Norse who often planned their attacks on Christian towns to coincide with Christian festivals when they’d be packed, for example, the raid on Kells in 951 in which the Norse took away over 3,000 slaves to sell on.
The Church in Britain was economically dependent on its slaves.
The Norse settlements on the east coast of Ireland served as clearing houses for slaves seized from the interior or Wales or England and then sold on to Arab Spain, to North Africa or via the Baltic via the Russian river routes to the Islamic states of the Middle East.
An Arab traveller of Erik Bloodaxe’s time (the 950s) reported from Spain on the great numbers of European slaves in the harems and in the militia. The Emir of Cordoba, in particular, owned many white women.
Most British slaves seem to have ended up being sent via the Russian river route to the Middle East. The numerous Icelandic sagas mention the slave trade and even give portraits of individual named slave impresarios.
The Holy Roman Emperor Otto the Great (962 to 973) captured tens of thousands of Slavs in his conquests eastwards, sending them in chains back to be processed by Jewish and Syrian slave merchants in Verdun, and then shipped south into Arab lands, many of them castrated first so as to be fit servants in the harem.
An eighth-century pilgrim in Taranto saw nine thousand Italian slaves being loaded aboard boat, just one of countless shipments to Egypt.

Almost everything about the Dark Ages is terrifying, the never-ending warfare, the endless ravaging burning and looting, but I think the vision of an entire continent dominated by the trade in slaves is the most harrowing thing of all.

The inheritance of Rome

Chris Wickham’s book, The Inheritance of Rome (2009), makes the claim that only in recent times have we come to realise the extent to which the legacy of Rome lived on for centuries after the end of the Roman Empire in the West (traditionally dated to the death of the last emperor in 475). So it’s interesting to read Wood making exactly the same point in 1980:

For the so-called barbarians of the seventh and eighth centuries, the Roman empire cast the same sort of afterglow as the British Empire did in post-colonial Africa… The ruins of Rome stood around them in tangible form, of course. But it went deeper than that. The Northumbrian bretwalda, Edwin, unsophisticated but immensely proud, as Bede portrays him, made the point of having the insignia of Roman office carried aloft before him in public. He was baptised by a Roman missionary in the Roman city of York, and for all we know held court in the still standing Roman HQ building there. Such men were setting themselves up as civilised heirs of Rome… (p.108)

Conclusion

All in all this is a popularising and accessible account, dipping into the most dramatic highlights of this long period, a quick entertaining read, with many stimulating thoughts, insights and comparisons thrown in.

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by Simon on May 1, 2017 • Permalink

Posted in Anglo Saxon, Books, European History, History, Middle Ages, Old English, Saga, War

Posted by Simon on May 1, 2017

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2017/05/01/in-search-of-the-dark-ages-michael-wood/

The Cold War by John Lewis Gaddis (2005)

Lenin, following Marx, assumed the incompatibility of class interests: because the rich would always exploit the poor, the poor had no choice but to supplant the rich. [President Woodrow] Wilson, following Adam Smith, assumed the opposite: that the pursuit of individual interests would advance everyone’s interests, thereby eroding class differences while benefiting both the rich and the poor. These were, therefore, radically different solutions to the problem of achieving social justice within modern industrial societies. At the time the Cold War began it would not have been at all clear which was going to prevail.
(The Cold War, page 89)

John Lewis Gaddis (b.1941) is a renowned academic expert on the Cold War and has been teaching and writing about it since the 1970s. The preface to this book explains that his students and publishers suggested he write a popular, brief overview of the subject about which he knows so much, and that this book is the result.

The cover of the Penguin paperback edition promises to give you the lowdown on ‘THE DEALS. THE SPIES. THE LIES. THE TRUTH’ but this is quite misleading. Along with Len Deighton’s description of it as ‘gripping’, this blurb gives the impression that the book is a rip-roaring narrative of an action-packed era, full of intrigue and human interest.

Cover of the Penguin edition of The Cold War

Academic and theoretical approach

Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact the book feels much more like the textbook to accompany a university course in international studies. It doesn’t at all give a chronological narrative of the Cold War and certainly has no eyewitness accounts or personal stories of the kind that bring to life, for example, Jim Baggott’s history of the atom bomb, Atomic, or Max Hasting’s history of the Korean War.

Instead, the book is divided into seven themed chapters and an epilogue which deal at a very academic level with the semi-abstract theories of international affairs and geopolitics.

Nuclear weapons and the theory of war

So, for example, the second chapter, about the atom bomb, certainly covers all the key dates and developments in the history of the bomb but is, at its core, an extended meditation on the German theorist of war, Carl von Clausewitz’s, famous dictum that war ‘is a continuation of political activity by other means’ (quoted p.51). The chapter shows how U.S. presidents Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy, and their Russian opposite numbers, Stalin and Khrushchev, worked through the implications of this profound insight.

If war only exists to further the interests of the state (as it had done through all recorded history up till 1945) then a war which threatens, in fact which guarantees, the destruction of the very state whose interests it is meant to be furthering, is literally inconceivable.

Truman showed he had already grasped some of this when he removed the decision to deploy atom bombs from the military – who were inclined to think of it as just another weapon, only bigger and better – and made use of the atom bomb the sole decision of the civilian power i.e. the president.

But as the atom bombs of the 1940s were superseded by the hydrogen bombs of the 1950s, it dawned on both sides that a nuclear war would destroy the very states it was meant to protect, with profound consequences for military strategy.

This insight came very close to being ignored during the darkest days of the Korean War, when the massed Chinese army threatened to push the Allies right out of the Korean peninsula and plans were drawn up to drop atom bombs on numerous Chinese cities. Again, during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, American generals were advising President Kennedy to authorise a devastating first strike on the Soviet Union with likely results not wildly exaggerated in Kubrick’s bleak nuclear satire, Dr Stangelove.

And yet both times the civilian authority, in the shape of Presidents Truman and Kennedy, rejected the advice of their military and refused the use of nuclear weapons. Truman signalled to both China and Russia that the Korean War would remain a conventional war limited to Korea only. And Kennedy made significant concessions to the Soviets in order to defuse the Cuba situation. We aftercomers owe an enormous debt of gratitude to the wisdom and restraint of both these men.

It is by following the ramifications of the new theory of war created by the advent of nuclear weapons, that Gaddis makes sense of a number of Cold War developments. For example, the development of regular meetings to discuss arms limitations which took place between the Cold War antagonists from the Cuban crisis onwards, talks which certainly continued to be fractious opportunities for propaganda on both sides, but which also proved Churchill’s dictum that ‘jaw jaw is better than war war’.

Capitalism versus communism

If chapter two considered the evolution of new military theory during the war, chapter three covers much the same chronological period but looked at in terms of socio-economic theory, starting with a very basic introduction to theories of Marxism and capitalism, and then seeing how these played out after World War One.

Gaddis deploys a sequence of significant dates each separated by a decade, which tell the story of the decline and fall of communism:

in 1951 all nations were recovering from the devastation of war, the USSR had established communist dictatorships in Eastern Europe and a newly communist China was challenging the West’s staying power in Korea
in 1961 Nikita Khrushchev visited America and gleefully told his audience that the communist countries would surge ahead in economic production and ‘bury’ the West
by 1971, as consumerism triumphed in the West, all the communist economies were stagnating and communism in China was accompanied by inconceivable brutality and mass murder
by 1981 life expectancy in the Soviet Union was in decline and Russia was mired in a pointless war in Afghanistan
by 1991 the Soviet Union and all the communist East European regimes had disappeared, while China was abandoning almost all its communist policies, leaving ‘communism’ to linger on only in the dictatorships of Cuba and North Korea

Capitalism won the Cold War. Marx claimed to have revealed the secrets of history, that the capitalist system was inevitably doomed to collapse because the exploited proletariat would inevitably grow larger as an ever-shrinking capitalist class concentrated all wealth unto itself, making a proletarian revolution inevitable and unstoppable. That was Marx and Engel’s clear prediction.

1. In direct contradiction to Marxist theory, living standards in all capitalist countries for everyone are unrecognisably higher than they were 100 years ago.

2. Marx predicted that his communist revolution could only happen in advanced industrial countries where the capitalists had accumulated all power and the proletariat was forced to rebel. In the event, communist revolutions turned out to be a characteristic of backward, feudal or peasant countries, namely Russia and China, later Cuba, and then a sorry string of Third World basket cases – Angola, Somalia, Ethiopia, Afghanistan. Communism only took hold in Eastern Europe because it was imposed by Russia’s military dictatorship, and was thrown off the second that Russia’s tyrannical grip was loosened.

It was the tragedy of both Russia and China that, in order to make their countries conform to Marx’s theories, their leaders undertook policies of forced collectivisation and industrialisation which led to the deaths by starvation or murder of as many as 50 million people, generally the very poorest of their populations. Communism promised to liberate the poor. In fact it ended up murdering the poorest of the poor in unprecedented numbers.

It wasn’t just their theory of revolution that was wrong. Lenin’s 1916 tract, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, is an interesting analysis of the history of the European empires up to that date and a contribution to the vast debate over the origins of the First World War. But its key practical suggestion was that capitalist states will always be driven by boundless greed and, therefore, inevitably, unstoppably, must always go to war.

Gaddis shows how Stalin and Mao shared this doctrinaire belief but how it led them to bad miscalculations. Because, in direct contradiction to the notion of inevitable inter-capitalist conflict, American presidents Truman and Eisenhower, both with direct personal experience of war, grasped some important and massive ideas, the central one being that America could no longer be isolationist but needed to create (and lead) a union of capitalist countries, to build up economic and military security, to ensure they never again went to war among themselves. The opposite of what Lenin predicted.

This was a big shift in American strategy. Throughout the 19th century America concentrated on settling its own lands and building up its own economy, happily ignoring developments beyond its borders. Despite President Wilson’s achievement in persuading Americans to intervene in the Great War, immediately afterwards they relapsed back into isolationism, refusing to join the League of Nations and indifferent to the rise of authoritarian regimes in Russia, Germany and Japan.

After the cataclysm of the Second World War, American policy shifted massively, finding expression in the Truman Doctrine, President Truman’s pledge that America would help and support democracies and free peoples around the world to resist communism. To be precise:

‘It must be the policy of the United States to support free people who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.’ (Truman’s speech to Congress on 12 March 1947)

The Truman Doctrine was prompted by practical intervention ($400 million) to support the anti-communist forces during Greece’s Civil war (1945 to 1949), which the Americans felt also had to be balanced by support ($100 million) for Turkey. In both respects the Americans were taking over from aid formerly provided by Britain, which was now no longer able to afford it. The doctrine’s implicit strategy of ‘containment’ of the USSR, led on to the creation of NATO in 1949 and the Marshall Plan for massive American aid to help the nations of Western Europe rebuild their economies.

Of course it was in America’s self-interest to stem the tide of communism, but this doesn’t really detract from the scale of the achievement – it was American economic intervention which helped rebuild the economies of, and ensured freedom from tyranny for, France, West Germany, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Belgium and Holland (in Europe) and Japan and South Korea in the Far East. Hundreds of millions of people have led lives of freedom and fulfilment because of the decisions of the Truman administration.

The power of weakness

Of course the down side of this vast new expansion of America’s overseas commitment was the way it also included a long and dishonourable tradition of American support for repellent dictators and right-wing rulers solely because they were the only available anti-communist figures available in many countries.

This lamentable tradition kicked off with America’s ambivalent support for Chiang Kai-shek, the semi-fascist Nationalist leader who America supported in pre-communist China, then the repellent Syngman Rhee in post-war South Korea, through Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam, General Pinochet in Chile, the Shah of Iran, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and so on and so on.

This dark side to American post-war foreign policy is well-known, but what’s thought-provoking about Gaddis’s account is the thesis he hangs his fourth chapter on, a teasing paradox which only slowly emerges – that many of these small, ‘dependent’ nations ended up able to bend the Superpowers to their will, by threatening to collapse.

Thus many of the repellent dictators America found itself supporting were able to say: ‘If you don’t support me, my regime will collapse and then the communists will take over.’ The paradox is that it was often the weakest powers which ended up having the the strongest say over Superpower policy. Thus Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist regime in China was able to summon up American support, as was the equally unpleasant Sygman Rhee in South Korea, because America regarded these states as vital buffers to communist expansion, which meant that, in practice, both dictators could get away with murder and still be supported, often reluctantly, by the U.S.

But the same could also go for medium-size allies. In 1950 both France and China very much needed their respective sponsors, America and the Soviet Union. But by 1960 both were more confident of their economic and military power and by the late 1960s both were confident enough to throw off their shackles: General de Gaulle in France notoriously withdrew from NATO and proclaimed France’s independence while in fact continuing to benefit from NATO and American protection. France was weak enough to proclaim its independence while, paradoxically, America the superpower had to put up with de Gaulle’s behaviour because they needed France to carry on being an ally in Western Europe.

Mao Zedong was in awe of Stalin and relied on his good opinion and logistical support throughout his rise to power in China in 1949 until Stalin’s death in 1953. This respect for the USSR lingered on through the 1950s, but China came to despise the weakness of Stalin’s successor, Khrushchev, and the feebleness of the USSR’s hold over its East European satellites, especially after they rose up in revolt (East Germany in 1953, Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968).

I didn’t know that border incidents between China and Russia flared up in 1969 and spread: for a while it looked as if the world’s two largest communist powers would go to war – making nonsense of Lenin’s thesis.

This of course presented the West with a great opportunity to divide the two communist behemoths, and Gaddis is favourable to President Nixon and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger for the brave decision they took to visit China, to meet Mao in person and try to develop better trade and cultural links.

The Chinese, surrounded by a menacing Russia to the north, neutral India to the West and the traditional enemy, Japan, to the East, realised there was merit in reaching an understanding with distant America. Nixon realised what an enormous coup it would be to prise apart the two largest communist nations, as well as helping sort out some kind of end to the disastrous war in Vietnam.

By this stage, 25 or so years into the Cold War, the relative simplicity of a bipolar world divided between two superpowers had become considerably more complicated, an increasing complexity created by the newly independent nations of the developing or Third World, and the growth of a would-be ‘non-aligned’ group of nations seeking to avoid entanglement with either side, but cannily playing both superpowers off against each other in order to extract maximum advantage.

Other themes

These first chapters deal with:

the realisation of the nuclear stalemate and its implications i.e. superpower war is self-defeating
the failure of both capitalism and communism to deliver what they promised
the realisation by ‘weak’ states that they could use the superpower rivalry to their advantage

Further chapters discuss:

Human rights

The rise of the notion of human rights and universal justice, which was increasingly used to hold both superpowers to ever-tighter account. Gaddis looks in detail at the slow growth of official lying and ‘deniability’ within American foreign policy (epitomised by the growth in espionage carried out by the CIA) which reached its nadir when the systematic lying of President Nixon unravelled after Watergate.

Gaddis compares the discrediting of American policy with the long-term effects of the Russian suppression of the Prague Spring of 1968. In a kind of mirror of the Watergate experience, the Soviet repression in Czechoslovakia planted seeds of doubt about the legitimacy of communist rule in the minds of much of the Soviet population and especially among its intellectuals. From the 1970s onwards the Soviets had to cope with home-grown ‘dissidents’, most notably Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov.

Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev worked hard to secure the ‘Helsinki Accords’, a contract with the West giving a permanent written guarantee of the security of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe. He allowed the declarations of human rights which made up its latter sections to be inserted by the West as a necessary concession, but was appalled when these began to be used by dissidents within Russia to measure the government by.

When a Czech rock band was arrested by the authorities in 1977, leading intellectuals protested and signed Charter 77, which politely called on the Czech communist government to respect the human rights which were paid lip service in both the Czech communist constitution and the Helsinki Accords. And when the first Polish pope, Pope John Paul II, visited his homeland in 1979, he also called on the Polish government to respect human rights as defined in the Helsinki Accords.

Gaddis identifies this emergence of human rights, a realm of authenticity over and above the laws or actions of any actual government, of either West or East, as a major development in the 1970s.

The power of individuals

A chapter is devoted to the importance of individuals in history, contrary to Marxist theory which believes in historical inevitabilities driven by the power of the masses, themselves driven by the ineluctable laws of economics. Thus Gaddis gives pen portraits of key players in the final years of communism, namely Pope John Paul II, Margaret Thatcher, Vaclav Havel and Lech Wałęsa, but most space is given to the key role played by Ronald Reagan.

Gaddis explains that détente, the strategic policy developed by President Nixon and continued by Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, and on the Soviet side agreed by Brezhnev, amounted to an acceptance of the status quo, especially the borders in Europe, and thus solidified Russia’s grasp in the East. With these borders defined and agreed, both sides could:

Settle down to a routine of talks about reducing nuclear weapons (which, by this stage, came in a bewildering range of shapes and sizes – hence the complexity of the Strategic Arms Limitations [SALT] talks).
Sublimate their confrontation into the developing world: hence the stream of local conflicts in far away countries like Ethiopia or Nicaragua. Fascinatingly, Gaddis quotes Kremlin advisers confessing that the Soviet leadership often had second thoughts about getting involved in some of these remote conflicts, e.g. in Angola or Somalia, but felt trapped by the logic of needing to be seen to support ‘national liberation struggles’ wherever they involved self-proclaimed Marxist parties.

At the time it felt as if Soviet communism was successfully funding revolutions and spreading its tentacles around the world; only in retrospect do we see all this as the last gasps of a flailing giant. According to Gaddis, the great political visionary who brought it to its knees was Ronald Reagan!

As someone alive and politically active during the 1980s I know that the great majority of the British people saw Reagan as a bumbling fool, satirised in the Spitting Image TV show in a recurring sketch called ‘The President’s brain is missing’. To my amazement, in Gaddis’s account, Reagan is portrayed as a strategic genius (one of America’s ‘sharpest grand strategists ever’, p.217) who swept aside détente in at least two ways:

Reagan thought communism was an aberration, ‘a bizarre chapter’ (p.223) in human history which was destined to fail. So instead of accepting its potentially endless existence (like Nixon, Ford and Carter before him) Reagan’s strategy and speeches were based on the idea that Soviet communism must inevitably collapse (for example, in his famous speech in Berlin when he called on Mr Gorbachev to ‘tear down this wall’).
Similarly, Reagan rejected the entire twisted logic of mutually assured destruction which had grown up around nuclear weapons: he was the first genuine nuclear abolitionist to inhabit the White House, hence his outrageous offer to Gorbachev at the Iceland summit for both sides to get rid of all their nuclear weapons. And when Gorbachev refused, Reagan announced the development of his Strategic Defence Initiative (nicknamed Star Wars) i.e. the creation of a satellite shield which would shoot down any incoming nuclear missiles attacking the United States, thus rendering Russia’s nuclear arsenal obsolete, but also dangerously disturbing the delicate balance of power.

At the time these destabilising words and actions seemed reckless and dangerous, and what Gaddis portrays as the entrenched détente establishment on both sides strongly criticised Reagan. It is only with the enormous benefit of hindsight – the knowledge that the Soviet Union and communism were to collapse like a pack of cards in 1989 – that Reagan’s approach and all his speeches take on the light not of a mad old man (he was 74 when Gorbachev came to power in 1985) but of a bold visionary.

The steady growth in Reagan’s stature is a salutary lesson in how history works, how what we think about a period we’ve actually lived through can be completely transformed and reinterpreted in the light of later events. How our beginnings have no inkling of our ends. An object lesson in the severe limitations of human understanding.

Conclusion

To summarise: The Cold War is not a straightforward historical account of the era 1945 to 1991; it is, rather, a series of thought-provoking and stimulating essays on key aspects and themes from the era.

Each chapter could easily form the basis of a fascinating discussion or seminar (of the kind that Gaddis has no doubt supervised by the hundred in his long and distinguished academic career).

In other words, coverage of specific incidents and events is always secondary to the ideas and theories of geopolitics and international strategic ideas which the period threw up in such abundance, and which are the real focus of the text.

It’s a fascinating book full of unexpected insights and new ways of thinking about the recent past.

I was politically active during the 1970s and 1980s, so I remember the later stages of the Cold War vividly. Maybe the biggest single takeaway from this book is that this entire era is now a ‘period’ with a beginning, a middle and an end, which can be studied as a whole. As it recedes in time it is becoming a simplified artefact, a subject for study by GCSE, A-level and undergraduate students who have no idea what it felt like to live under the ever-present threat of nuclear war and when communism still seemed like a viable alternative to consumer capitalism.

Although many of its effects and implications linger on, with every year that passes the Cold War becomes a distant historical epoch, as dry and theoretical as the Fall of the Roman Empire or the Thirty Years War. I try to explain how it felt to be alive in the 1980s to my children and they look at me with blank incomprehension. So this is what it feels like to become history.

Credit

The Cold War by John Lewis Gaddis was published by Allen Lane in 2005. All references are to the 2007 Penguin paperback edition.

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Communism in Russia

Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: Not Everyone Will be Taken Into the Future @ Tate Modern (January 2018) Russian conceptual artists depict the miserable squalor of life under communism.
Red Star over Russia @ Tate Modern (January 2018) The explosion of avant-garde art after the Russian Revolution and how it was slowly strangled by Stalin’s rise to power.
Revolution: Russian Art 1917–1932 @ the Royal Academy (March 2017)

Lenin on the Train by Catherine Merridale (2016) Account of how Lenin’s journey back to Russia to lead the 1917 Bolshevik coup was funded by German Military High Command.
Iron Curtain by Anne Applebaum (2012) How Russia imposed communist regimes on Eastern Europe after the Second World War.
Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan 1979-89 by Rodric Braithwaite (2011) The Russians try to export communism to Afghanistan leading to ten years of miserable war.
Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder (2010) includes chapters on the great famine in Ukraine caused by Stalin’s policy of forced collectivisation.
The Cold War by John Lewis Gaddis (2005)
Dr Zhivago by Boris Pasternak (1957) Love story set amid the brutal violence of the Russian revolution.
Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler (1940) Koestler’s fictional account of a Moscow show trial based on friends of his who were tried in Stalin’s Russia.
To the Finland Station by Edmund Wilson (1940) Literary critic Wilson set out to make sense of the great political issue of his time.
The White Guard by Mikhail Bulgakov (1926) A haunting novel about post-revolutionary chaos in Kiev.
Red Cavalry by Isaac Babel (1926) Horrifyingly violent vignettes from Babel’s time with the Red Army fighting the Whites.

Communism in China

The Tragedy of Liberation by Frank Dikötter (2013) The early years of communism in China.
China’s War with Japan 1937–1945 by Rana Mitter (2013) Mainly about Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalists but includes a description of the rising fortunes of the Chinese Communist Party under Mao.
China: A history by John Keay (2008) includes chapters about the mass murders commanded by Mao.

Communism in Vietnam

Embers of War by Frederik Logevall (2012) A brilliant account of the rise of the Vietnamese communist party and its long struggle against the French imperialists.
The Vietnam War by Mitchell Hall (2000) How the Americans lost Vietnam to the communists.

Communism in Germany

The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End 1917-1923 by Robert Gerwarth (2016) includes chapters on the abortive communist uprisings in German cities after the Great War.
The New Objectivity: Modern German Art in the Weimar Republic 1918-33 ed. Stephanie Barron and Sabine Eckmann (2015) Essays about Weimar art which make extensive use of contemporary Marxist cultural theorists such as Walter Benjamin, György Lukács and Siegfried Kracauer.
Bauhaus by Frank Whitford (1984) Includes an account of the communist members of the Bauhaus.
The Weimar Years: A Culture Cut Short by John Willett (1984) A visual history of the German avant-garde, often communist, of the 1920s.
The New Sobriety: Art and Politics in the Weimar Period 1917-33 by John Willett (1978) Willett a big fan of Brecht, Piscator and other socially committed i.e. communist artists.
Weimar: A Cultural History 1918-1933 by Walter Laqueur (1974) includes a detailed chapter on the German communist intelligentsia of the 1920s.
A Small Yes and a Big No by George Grosz (1946) Grosz was a communist party member in the 1920s. His autobiography includes an account of a trip to Soviet Russia in 1923 where he met Lenin and was put off communism by the atmosphere of bullying and poverty.

Communism in Poland

Warsaw 1920 by Adam Zamoyski (2008) How the Polish army stopped the Red Army’s advance into Poland in 1920 so preventing them pushing on to support revolution in Germany.
The Captive Mind by Czesław Miłosz (1953) A devastating indictment of the initial appeal and then appalling consequences of communism in Poland: ‘Mass purges in which so many good communists died, the lowering of the living standard of the citizens, the reduction of artists and scholars to the status of yes-men, the extermination of entire national groups…’

Communism in France

The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune (1870-71) of Paris by Alistair Horne (1965) details the rise and fall of the Paris Commune.
Dirty Hands by Jean-Paul Sartre (1948) A play depicting vicious in-fighting among communists in a fictional East European country.
The Rebel by Albert Camus (1951) Camus’s comprehensive rejection of communism in which he seeks to prove that communist rule will be necessarily tyrannical.

Communism in Spain

The Battle for Spain by Antony Beevor (2006) Comprehensive account of the Spanish civil war with much detail on how the Stalin-backed communist party put more energy into eliminating its opponents on the Left than fighting the fascists, with the result that Franco won.
Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell (1938) Orwell’s eye-witness account of how the Stalin-backed Spanish communist party turned on its left-wing allies, specifically the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification which Orwell was fighting with, and how he only just managed to escape arrest, interrogation and probable execution.

Communism in England

Animal Farm by George Orwell (1945) Orwell’s fable about the failure of the Russian Revolution.
Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (1949) Orwell’s vision of bombed-out England of the future under a totalitarian socialist regime, Ingsoc.

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by Simon on February 2, 2017 • Permalink

Posted in China, Communism, European History, History, Politics, Second World War, War

Tagged 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 2005, Adam Smith, Afghanistan, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sakharov, Angola, atom bomb, Berlin Wall, Brezhnev, capitalism, Charter 77, Chiang Kai-shek, China, CIA, Communism, containment, Cuban Missile Crisis, Czechoslovakia, deniability, dissident, Eastern Europe, Eisenhower, Ethiopia, General de Gaulle, General Pinochet, geopolitics, Gerald Ford, Germany, Greek civil war, Helsinki Accords, Henry Kissinger, history, human rights, Hungary, hydrogen bomb, international affairs, Iraq, Japan, Jim Baggott, Jimmy Carter, John Lewis Gaddis, Kennedy, Khrushchev, Korea, Lech Wałęsa, Lenin, Mao Zedong, Margaret Thatcher, Marx, Mikhael Gorbachev, Ngo Dinh Diem, Nicaragua, Nixon, nuclear weapons, Paul Simpson, Poland, Pope John Paul II, Russia, Saddam Hussein, SALT, Second World War, Somalia, Soviet Union, Stalin, Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, Strategic Defence Initiative, Syngman Rhee, the Cold War, the Shah of Iran, the Truman Doctrine, theory of war, Truman, Turkey, USSR, Vaclav Havel, Vietnam, von Clausewitz, Woodrow Wilson

Posted by Simon on February 2, 2017

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Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography by Claire Harman (2005)

Relevance of biography for Stevenson

Normally I don’t like biographies of writers, since they take you away from the hard-earned riches of the fictional text, and drag you back down into the everyday world of contracts and illnesses, of gossip and hearsay.

Thus Harman spends some pages trying to decide whether Stevenson’s penis entered the vagina of his older, married friend, Miss Sitwell, or whether the penis of his friend Sidney Colvin had already had that pleasure – or whether neither penis gained entry until Colvin and Sitwell married years later. This concern about who ‘became lovers’ with whom, exactly when and where, is precisely the kind of Hello magazine tittle-tattle I despise, and so I skipped these parts.

But a biography of Stevenson is worth reading because his published writings are so scattered and diverse – plays, poems, ballads, fables, ghost stories, horror stories, short stories, novellas, children’s adventures, adult tales, essays, reviews, appreciations of other writers, travel books – as to be difficult to reconcile and grasp as a complete oeuvre. It helps a lot to make sense of Stevenson’s output to understand the shape of his life and why he produced what he did, when.

An account of his life is necessary to show a) how all the different writings fit together b) what his own attitude towards them was; crucially, for me, how his thoughts about style and approach changed, evolved, or were deployed, for different texts.

Harman’s biography

There have been half a dozen biographies of Stevenson, from the circumspect one by his cousin Graham Balfour in 1901 to Frank McLynn’s magnum opus in 1994. Harman’s is the most recent one and takes advantage of the availability of more manuscript material, and especially the eight volumes of the Yale edition of Stevenson’s letters, which were published in the mid-1990s.

The main ideas which emerge are:

Stevenson the Unfinisher

Stevenson wrote a phenomenal amount, some thirty published books as well as scores of short stories and hosts of essays, as well as thousands of letters. This is why the Tusitala edition of his complete works amounts to an impressive 35 volumes.
BUT he was a chronic beginner of stories which he never finished. He was a starter not a finisher. Harman describes some stories he wrote for his school magazine, all of which ended with the phrase To be completed… and none of them ever were, and neither were scores of other plans. He was a great maker of lists of projects, Harman details the plans he made at one point at university: plans for thirteen plays, umpteen essays, long epic poems – ideas spurted out of him endlessly.
A complete guide to his prose works lists over 300 projects of which only some 30 were ever published. A biography of Hazlitt, a massive history of his own family, various plays, books of essays… the biography is littered with abandoned projects and ideas…

So Stevenson was the possessor of a striking fecundity, but a troubled fecundity, and this sheds immediate light on the works I’ve been reading towards the end of his career:

The Bottle Imp intended as just one of a volume of supernatural tales the rest of which were never written
Weir of Hermiston unfinished
St Ives unfinished.

It also sheds light on the speed and hastiness of many of his finished works, which often seem thrown together, written at tremendous speed, before the afflatus and inspiration fade and he abandons them.

Sometimes the speed is somehow captured in the text itself as energy and excitement – hence Treasure Island, Kidnapped.

Sometimes it isn’t transmuted into the text which feels more like a list of incidents than a narrative which engages and transports you, as with The Black Arrow.

And in his three collaborations with his step-son Lloyd Osbourne, the Osbourne factor amounts to a tremendous slowing down of Stevenson’s usual pell-mell effect – most notable in the grindingly slow first half of The Wrecker, which takes an age to get into gear and move towards the fast-moving and violent climax.

Doubles

Like everyone else who’s ever written about Stevenson, Harman is entranced by the really blindingly obvious idea of ‘doubles’ in his fiction, taking the duality which is blindingly central to Jekyll and Hyde and then detecting it in other ‘double’ stories, like Deacon Brodie or Ballantrae and so on. Of course it’s there to some extent, but an obsessive focus on it obscures the many many other aspects, themes and elements of his work.

Rebellion against parents

His father and his father before him were engineers, members of what became known as ‘the lighthouse Stevensons’, the dynasty which built many of the lighthouses around the notoriously dangerous Scottish coast. Stevenson was a rarity in the extended family, in being an only son, and his father made every effort to force him into the family business, making Stevenson study engineering for three years, touring the lighthouses his family had built and studying the ports and harbours where new ones were planned.

He remained a flop as an engineer, unable to tell one type of wood from another, incapable of the mathematics and physics required, but the extensive travel around the Scottish coast, meeting and staying with poor peasants in remote locations, stood him in very good stead when it came to writing his Scottish fictions.

Bohemian pose

The biography gives a fascinating account of Stevenson’s life as a very reluctant engineering student in dank and foggy Edinburgh, and his student-y predilection for roughing it in low-life pubs and brothels, sitting in the corner of smoky taverns while prostitutes plied their trade and dockers argued and fought. He and his friends were living La Vie Boheme before the term was coined and Stevenson is thought to have slept with one or more of the prostitutes he knew, experimented with hashish, and been a devotee of the debauched poetry of Charles Baudelaire. This taste for low life, again, stood him in good stead when he moved on to Paris, when he imagined life among bandits and outlaws and pirates for his adventure books, when he found himself among emigrants and cowboys in America, and then in his final guise, as friend and defender of South Sea Islanders against the incompetent colonial authorities.

Sick and well

Though always extremely thin and weedy in his young manhood, Stevenson was nonetheless extremely active, playing the gay blade at the artists’ colony in Barbizon, northern France, restlessly pacing up and down rooms, his feverish eyes drinking in his surroundings and his mind pouring forth an endless stream of repartee and humour. He is sent to the south of France and Switzerland to try and cure his lung disorders, but it is far from clear what he actually had. Was it TB or some form of syphilis?

The ill health seems to crystallise during the arduous journey across the Atlantic and then by train across America in 1879. By the time he arrives at Fanny Osbourne’s house he was really unwell, and it was during his stay in California that he experienced his first bad haemorrhage.

At some level, being accepted by Fanny – 10 years his elder – coincided with his official advent to the condition of invalid; somehow their relationship skipped the ‘lovers’ stage directly to ‘mother’ and ‘invalid’, and there it was to stay until his death.

The elusive masterpiece

Harman makes the point that right up to his death (in 1894, aged just 44) Stevenson’s friends and fans were hoping against hope that he would finally deliver The Masterpiece that would cement his place as a Master of English Literature. His precocious essays and stories promised so much, it was hard for everyone, including the man himself, to accept that he just couldn’t produce the kind of solid, consistent, three-volume novel typical of Dickens, Eliot, George Meredith. But he couldn’t and he didn’t. Instead, Stevenson’s oeuvre is a) extremely scattered b) littered with unfinished projects.

Worse than the non-arrival of The Masterpiece, was the way that his entire output from the South Seas was viewed by many as a calamitous abandonment of a conventional career. Instead of a bigger better Kidnapped or Ballantrae his fans were subjected to a pamphlet defending a missionary who worked with lepers, a series of rather boring letters to his friend Sidney Colvin, the long travel book In The South Seas which, unlike his other short witty travelogues, was long and weighed down with pages of local history and culture which quickly became boring. The few fictions seemed desperately diverse and unfocused: was The Bottle Imp the beginning of a series of fables setting a kind of Arabian Nights fantasy in Tahiti? And what to make of the short novel The Ebb-Tide which combined grotesque levels of violence with what seemed to be a sustained attack on Western civilisation in a fiction in which almost every white character is despicable.

Against this backdrop Harman makes the interesting point that the unfinished novel Weir of Hermiston, when it was finally published, was greeted with relief by Stevenson’s fans because it was so obviously a return to the Scottish setting of some of his greatest works and showed, without any doubt, a significant progress in psychological portrayal of character.

Thus Hermiston was enshrined as the pinnacle of his achievement – which involved ignoring the long potboiler, St Ives, which Stevenson had brought much closer to completion but is a regrettable reversion to the smash-bang-wallop style of earlier shockers – and, much worse, I think, involved downplaying or just ignoring the South Sea fictions, The Beach of Falesá and The Ebb-Tide, which are, I think, masterpieces of a completely new realistic-but-grotesque style, something new in his writing and immensely promising.

What I’ve learned

From this time round reading Stevenson, the main findings have been:

1. The travel books are brilliant. I thought they’d be dry and dusty and irrelevant, but they turn out to be short, punchy, engaging, funny and full of fascinating and vivid character studies, as well as providing a fascinating experiment in autobiography in instalments.

2. Stevenson’s emigration to the South Pacific led to a typical explosion of writing in all sorts of genres – travelogue, local history, cultural analysis, essays, pamphlets, letters to the press, letters home to friends, parables and fables. But head and shoulders above them stand the two longer fictions – The Beach of Falesá and The Ebb-Tide – which I wish someone had recommended to me years ago, and I think are among his greatest achievements.

A Stevenson bibliography

1878
An Inland Voyage – An immensely entertaining, witty and thoughtful account of Stevenson’s trip by canoe, with a friend, along the canals of Belgium and south into France, observing rural life and types along the way.
1879
Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes – More gritty than the Voyage, the Travels record 12 days walking with a recalcitrant donkey through south-central France in a book which has moments of freewheeling nature worship but comes to be dominated by Stevenson’s interest in the bloody Protestant revolt which took place in the region a century earlier.
1881
Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers – Essays including: Virginibus Puerisque i-iv including ‘On Falling in Love’, Crabbed Age and Youth, An Apology for Idlers, Ordered South, Aes Triplex, El Dorado, The English Admirals, Some Portraits by Raeburn, Child’s Play, Walking Tours, Pan’s Pipes, A Plea for Gas Lamp.
1882
The Old and New Pacific Capitals – Essays on the climate and history of Monterey and San Francisco.
Familiar Studies of Men and Books – Essays on: Victor Hugo’s Romances, Some Aspects of Robert Burns, The Gospel According to Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau: His Character and Opinions, Yoshida-Torajiro, François Villon, Student, Poet, Housebreaker, Charles of Orleans, Samuel Pepys, John Knox and his Relations to Women.
New Arabian Nights – A sequence of thinly-linked and not too impressive short stories.
1883
Treasure Island – One of the most famous adventure stories of all time. Andrew Lang says it single-handedly established the financial viability of a new type of short, action-packed story and inaugurated a golden age of adventure yarns from the likes of Arthur Conan Doyle and Henry Rider Haggard.
The Silverado Squatters – Another travel book, following immediately after the Atlantic crossing described in An Amateur Emigrant and the trans-America train journey described in The Open Plains, this one describes Stevenson and new wife Fanny’s honeymoon in an abandoned mining camp high on the flanks of Mount St Helena, north of San Francisco.
1885
Prince Otto – An action romance set in the imaginary Germanic state of Grünewald.
More New Arabian Nights: The Dynamiter – co-written with Fanny Van De Grift Stevenson
A Child’s Garden of Verses Classic volume of children’s poetry.
1886
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – One of the most famous fictions of all time about an Edinburgh scientist who devises a potion which releases his unconscious urges, his animal self, an alter ego which threatens to take over his personality.
Kidnapped – Gripping historical novel about young David Balfour plunged into a series of adventures in the aftermath of the Jacobite Rising of 1745.
1887
The Merry Men and Other Tales and Fables – Six short stories: The Merry Men, Will O’ the Mill, Markheim, Thrawn Janet, Olalla, The Treasure of Franchard.
On the Choice of a Profession – An essay.
Underwoods (poetry)
Ticonderoga: A Legend of the West Highlands (poetry)
1888
The Black Arrow: A Tale of the Two Roses – Historical adventure novel set during the Wars of the Roses as young Master Richard Shelton escapes from his wicked ‘uncle’ and rescues the girl he loves, young Joanna Sedley.
1889
The Master of Ballantrae – Two brothers end up on opposite sides of Bonny Prince Charlie’s rebellion of 1745, the Master being the one who goes into exile and adventures in America and India before returning to haunt the stay-at-home brother, until both are driven to a macabre and gruesome fate in the New World.
The Wrong Box – Comic novel mostly written by his step-son Lloyd Osbourne, but revised by Stevenson.
1890
Father Damien: an Open Letter to the Rev. Dr. Hyde of Honolulu Stevenson’s angry defence of Father Damien, Catholic priest to the leper colony on the island of Molokai, against a detractor.
1891
The Bottle Imp – Short story (collected in Island Nights’ Entertainments) about a magic bottle and the love of two South Sea island natives.
Ballads – poems
1892
The Wrecker (co-written with Lloyd Osbourne) – An immensely long rambling narrative telling the life story of American Loudon Dodds, from his days as a failed art student in Paris, to his business ventures with brash Jim Pinkerton in San Francisco, to the long puzzling case of the shipwrecked Flying Scud whose mystery dominates the second half of the book and, in the final pages, reveals a gruesome and bloody tragedy at sea.
The Beach of Falesá – (collected in Island Nights’ Entertainments) A powerful short story about a rough white trader and the harsh revenge he takes on the fellow trader who tries to get him expelled from the island.
A Footnote to History, Eight Years of Trouble in Samoa – factual history
Across the Plains – Travelogue following straight on from The Amateur Emigrant (which describes RLS’s 1879 journey by steamship from Glasgow to New York) and describes his ongoing journey by train from New York to California.
1893
The Isle of Voices – Short story (collected in Island Nights’ Entertainments) about a lazy South Sea islander who falls foul of his father-in-law who is a warlock with magic powers.
Catriona, aka David Balfour – A sequel to Kidnapped.
Island Nights’ Entertainments (aka South Sea Tales) – Contains the three stories referred to above.
1894
The Ebb-Tide – A novella, the third collaboration with Lloyd Osbourne, describing the ill-fated trip of three beach bums at the ends of their tethers, who unexpectedly get the opportunity to crew a schooner, plan to steal and sell it, but then meet their nemesis in the shape of a supernaturally powerful white trader.
—-December 1894 Stevenson dies, aged 44, on the South Sea Island of Vailima—-
1895
Vailima Letters – 44 letters Stevenson wrote to his friend Sidney Colvin, who published them with a preface and epilogue.
The Amateur Emigrant – A short intense account of Stevenson’s journey across the Atlantic in 1879, with descriptions of the squalid conditions of ‘steerage’ class passengers and reflections on the condition and character of the British working classes.
1896
Weir of Hermiston – Unfinished at Stevenson’s death, this fragment of nine chapters describes the childhood and young manhood of Archie Weir, sensitive son of the hanging judge old Adam Weir, how his father removes him from Edinburgh University for his subversive views and exiles him to the country estate of Hermiston where he falls in love with a local beauty, Christina Elliott – at which point a student acquaintance comes to stay, who it is hinted will become Archie’s bitter love rival – and the manuscript breaks off. Contains much mature and insightful portrayal of its characters especially, for the first time in Stevenson’s fiction, of its women characters.
In the South Seas – A collection of articles and essays describing Stevenson’s travels in the Pacific islands.
Songs of Travel and Other Verses – Poetry.
Records of A Family of Engineers – A personal history of his own family of lighthouse-building engineers, unfinished at his death.
1897
St. Ives: being the Adventures of a French Prisoner in England – A long novel which Stevenson had almost completed and was finished after his death by Arthur Quiller-Couch.

2005
Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography by Claire Harman

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by Simon on October 9, 2016 • Permalink

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Tagged 2005, Biography, Claire Harman, Fanny Osbourne, Gothic, horror, Literature, novel, poetry, Robert Louis Stevenson, Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography, short stories, South Seas

Posted by Simon on October 9, 2016

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A Feast for Crows by George RR Martin (2005)

Prologue On page one some magicians’ apprentices are discussing how they’ll save up the money to pay to deflower Rosie, the newest whore in the tavern they’re drinking in:

He could hear Emma’s laughter coming through a shuttered window overhead, mingled with the deeper voice of the man she was entertaining. She was the oldest of the serving wenches at the Quill and Tankard, forty if she was a day, but still pretty in a fleshy sort of way. Rosey was her daughter, fifteen and freshly flowered. Emma had decreed that Rosey’s maidenhead would cost a golden dragon.

On page 8 there’s the first use of the f word, in a typically crude exchange:

‘Your mother was a monkey from the Summer Isles. The Dornish will f*** anything with a hole between its legs.’

On page 17 Pate, the apprentice to whom these insults were addressed, having stolen the key to the maegicians’ Citadel and handed it over to a mysterious alchemist in exchange for the gold with which he hopes to pay to deflower young Rosey, instead falls to the cobbles, betrayed and poisoned and dying.

Yes. We are back in the steamy, sexually charged, treacherous, densely packed and wonderfully imagined fantasy world of George RR Martin and his vast sequence of novels, A Song of Ice and Fire.

Photo of Gethin Anthony as the ill-fated Lord Renly Baratheon in HBO’s ‘Game of Thrones’ broadcast on Sky Atlantic © HBO

Cornucopianism, or The problem of overflowing In this, the fourth book of the series, Martin has to deal with the problem he’s created for himself in the first three, namely that he has created so many characters pursuing so many plotlines that they won’t all fit into one book. I christen this problem ‘cornucopianism’. In their fecund sprawl the plotlines overflow themselves. In fact, several storylines have already ended, in that they had a beginning, a development and a decisive climax – but they continue anyway – such as the Threatened invasion by the wildlings, Brienne’s quest to return Jaime to King’s Landing, Robb Stark’s kingship, the Coming of Daenerys and her dragons.

Undaunted, Martin solves the problem of cornucopianism by splitting a manuscript which had become unmanageably vast into two more normal-size books. This one, ‘A Feast For Crows’, focuses on one set of characters – all the other characters are followed up in the next volume, ‘A Dance with Dragons’. But – important point – the second book doesn’t follow the first one; events in both take place in parallel. Which allows for some nifty timeshifts as characters in the second book refer hopefully to things which we know from the earlier book have or haven’t fallen out to plan.

I very much liked the result. In ‘A Feast for Crows’ the focus of the series shifts significantly from the previous books to follow events in three of the seven kingdoms of Westeros which had been previously ignored or overlooked – the southern kingdom of Dorne, the western sea-kingdom of Pyk – the Iron Kingdom – and the eastern kingdom of Arryn, dominated by its castle in the air, the Eyrie.

In this fourth novel, along with new locations, a new suite of characters is introduced. Two of the most striking are the Damphair or prophet (a religious leader of the Iron Men’s harsh seaworshipping religion) and The Captain of The Guards (who serves Lord Doran Martell, ruler of Dorne). These are powerful and ‘deep’ characters; which means they invoke deep associations – to the power and mystery of the Sea for one, to sheer mute strength with the other. But in addition there are other, new, “narrative characters”, ones who give their names to the chapters which see events from their point of view: the Kraken’s Daughter, The Soiled Knight, The Iron Captain, The Drowned Man, The Queenmaker. In the earlier novels the chapters were named after specific characters; in these later ones they’re as often named after generic types, a new wrinkle which gives them Tarot-card-like mythic associations.

The Iron Islands The Ironborn are Vikings who live in storm-lashed islands and love nothing more than to sail their longboats on raids along the vulnerable coastline of Westeros. Their king, Balon Greyjoy, has died in a freak accident and the novel follows their assembly at a great kingsmoot where the pretenders to the throne stake their claim. Will the Ironborn vote for Balon’s brother Victarion or his daughter Asha, or for the returned exiled eldest brother, Euron. The latter, it turns out, who offers a grand plan to raid right round the coast and sail for distant Essos to capture the fabled princess Daenerys and her dragons.

Photo of Carice van Houten as the priestess Melisandre in HBO’s ‘Game of Thrones’ broadcast on Sky Atlantic © HBO

The kingdom of Dorne This kingdom is evoked in a marvellous piece of scene-setting, painting the ailing lord of Dorne, Doran Martell, at his country water palace, watching children frolic in fountains, on the beach and in the sea. It is an eerie, strange and moving image. It reminds me of the landscapes of Entropy in JG Ballard’s collection, ‘Terminal Beach’. Lord Martell is himself in constant pain due to untreatable gout and arthritis, and is accompanied everywhere by the enormous, silent, totally obedient Captain of the Guard, Areo Hotah, and his 7 foot double-edged axe.

But a reluctant and ailing Martell is forced back from his pleasure palace to Dorne’s capital, Sunspear, to put down his brother’s illegitimate daughters, nicknamed the Sand Vipers. They want to invoke Dornish law to declare the 10 year-old Myrcella Lannister (sent to Dorne as a tactical ward by the powerful Lannister family) the true inheritor of the Iron Throne, and set her against her brother, the boy-king Tommen. But Lord Martell realises this will bring down the wrath of the Lannisters on a weak kingdom which couldn’t possibly stand up to them. But, unknown to him, his own daughter, Arianne, is seducing the member of the Kingsguard supposed to protect Myrcella, in a cunning conspiracy to start the very war Martell is striving to avoid…

The kingdom of Arryn After suave, scheming Petyr Littlefinger has brutally disposed of the woman he married, Lysa Tully, sister of Lady Catelyn Tully/Stark, he is free to rule Arryn as he wishes, with the 13 year-old Sansa Stark whom he rescued from King’s Landing in the ambiguous situation of being his pretended natural daughter. This thread of narrative revels in Littlefinger’s smooth cunning and Martin enjoys getting Littlefinger to explain to Sansa exactly how and why he’s manipulating the lords and ladies he meets. It’s like Holmes and Watson. For the bannermen (loyal lords) of Arryn smell a rat and want to take stewardship of Lady Lysa’s son, the sickly heir to the throne, young Robert. Petyr’s great.

Photo of Rory McCann as Sandor Clegane, nicknamed 'The Hound', in HBO’s ‘Game of Thrones’ broadcast on Sky Atlantic © HBO

Cersei If the first half of the book offers several refreshing changes of scene, the last part is dominated by the machinations of the wicked Queen Regent Cersei in the overfamiliar setting of the capital, King’s Landing. Convinced all her advisors are weaklings or out to get her, the increasingly paranoid egomaniac makes a series of rash decisions, unravelling the alliances crafted by her father, Lord Tywin, alienating allies, appointing highly dubious councillors and making terrible strategic mistakes like allowing the growing numbers of religious fanatics – the so-called ‘sparrows’ – to rearm and establish their own independent powerbase, a decision which she is soon to rue…

Sex This novel is noticably more pornographic than the previous ones. I marked all the pages which included the f or c word and there are about 50. For the first time in the series, entire chapters are about sex, for example the lavish description of Arianne Martell’s seduction of Ser Arys Oakheart of the Kingsguard, who she exploits to help her smuggle princess Myrcella out of Sunspear. The final part of the book is dominated by the wicked Queen Regent Cersei and includes, among her general decadence, how she takes her handmaidens to bed and has lesbian sex with them, in a typically exploitative joyless kind of way. Elsewhere soldiers and lords casually but continually refer to sex in the crudest terms. The ugly but heroic female knight Brienne of Tarth is subjected to sexual threats on almost every page of her sections.

Somehow I feel the hothouse eroticism of the sex passages and the football terrace sexual abuse let the book down. The superbrutality and the testosterone cynicism are all well and good; I’ve paid my money, I’ve signed up for a machiavellian swords-and-shields fantasy and GRRM delivers this in wonderful spades.

But the sex scenes risk the criticism of all sex scenes, that they’re heavyhanded and embarrassing; and the barracking is too much like being stuck in a pub with a coachload of football hooligans. It isn’t inspiring and terrifying like the violence. It’s lowering, it lowers the tone. In this book more than any of the others I think Martin lets himself down with too much swearing and the barely-veiled hostility to women which underlies it.

‘I think I’m going to fuck you up the nose, wench,’ Shagwell announced. ‘Won’t that be amusing?’
‘He has a very small cock,’ Timeon explained. ‘Drop that pretty sword and we’ll go gentle on you, woman. We need gold to pay these smugglers, that’s all.’
‘And if I give you gold, you’ll let us go?’
‘We will.’ Timeon smiled. ‘Once you’ve fucked the lot of us. We’ll pay you like a proper whore. A silver for each fuck. Or else we’ll take the gold and rape you anyway, and do you like the Mountain did Lord Vargo…’ (page 331)

Having said which, almost all the people I know who’ve read the series are women. I ask them, ‘Doesn’t the sexism, the raping and killing of women, the continual verbal abuse and threat against women characters, doesn’t that put you off?’ ‘Yes, they reply, but the story is just so exciting.’

So, compelling narrative trumps repellent subject matter, apparently.

But… This issue aside, there is still lots – lots and lots – of inspiring and breathtaking writing here. The opening scenes of the Ironborn thread, depicting the Damphair or prophet of the Drowned God performing the ritual by which he drowns and then revives initiates in the freezing northern sea, is inspired, brilliant, visionary.

Photo credits

The photos of characters are from the HBO TV dramatisation of the books. Series 1 is out on dvd. Series 2 transmitted last year and has just been released on dvd. Series 3 will start transmitting on Sky Atlantic on Monday 1 April.

All quotes are from A Feast For Crows, copyright George RR Martin.

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