I am so at home in Dublin, more than any other city, that I feel it has always been familiar to me. It took me years to see through its soft charm to its bitter prickly kernel - which I quite like too.

Louis MacNeice

We’re the Brits and We Don’t Care

“Can the Great British public be made to care passionately about the EU referendum?” asks The Spectator above a recent column by Hugo Rifkind. Not really, Rifkind answers, and he seems rather happy about this.

Here and now … I do not see the looming spark which will ignite the dry tinder of the Great British public into giving a toss. Which I think is something that people who are passionate about this argument, on either side, do not quite see. They think it will be fiery. Apocalyptic. Four Horsemen, Eurogog and Euromagog, and a beast crawling out of the sea with a € or a £ on its forehead, depending. They see the fight coming for which they have been preparing almost for ever, and they think everybody else will care.

Curiously another article offering pretty much the same sentiment – or perhaps lack of sentiment ‑ on Europe appeared in the British press at almost exactly the same time. In a Financial Times column (republished in The Irish Times on October 13th), Janan Ganesh argues that the jibe “perfidious Albion”, often applied by other nations (and in particular France) to the British should really be accepted as a compliment.

Nothing has brought out Britain’s talent for half-measures like the European project. We were absent at the creation, then we joined, then we voted on whether to leave, then we conceived the single market, then we dodged the single currency, then we pushed the EU’s borders to the east and complained about the consequences, and now we are trying to revise the terms of our membership before voting again on whether to leave.

“This,” writes Ganesh, “is perfidy, and it works.” If Britain votes to leave, he continues, it will not really leave since it will be able to hammer together some kind of association deal. And if it votes to stay it will remain semi-detached, “never becom[ing] a truly European nation” (you can say that again) and simply defending its interests, which  in Ganesh’s view seem to be identical to those of the City of London. For if the euro zone integrates into something resembling a state for the sake of its own survival, “Britain would have but one purpose  … to prevent laws applicable to all members being decided by the currency bloc, especially those affecting our financial services sector”.

Reading between the lines, one suspects that Ganesh would on balance prefer Britain to stay in than to go, but he has a clear and very unromantic notion of what staying in is likely to involve: “a vote to stay is a vote for decades of loveless, defensive diplomacy on Europe’s sidelines”.

So, it seems, for some of Britain’s leading commentators (in the Conservative-leaning press at least) it doesn’t really matter too much one way or the other. While Ganesh focuses on the economic, financial and administrative arrangements that might best suit Britain, Rifkind unambiguously echoes his view that the country will never become – can never become – “a truly European nation” since it has in fact no “vision” or feeling for Europe in its gut.

We are not that sort of European. Some of us are, obviously, and you’ll perhaps find a handful of Europhile jet-setting city types whose pockets jingle with euros and Swiss francs, and who cannot quite get their heads around the fact that most people’s pockets don’t. Such an identity, even so, does not map neatly on to EU membership, as evidenced by Lord Lawson cheerleading the [Eurosceptic] Conservatives for Britain group on the BBC’s Today programme the other week from his house in France. Whether we stay or go, we are who we are.

So, they are who they are and they’ll be staying that way. Good for them, but it is surely not indecent to ask where this might leave the rest of us – if indeed we have any say in the matter. Janan Ganesh’s dry summary of Britain’s involvement with the European project (fourth paragraph above) is accurate enough. But the same set of “facts”, which to him represent an on the whole rather satisfactory state of affairs, to others can represent a wound or a betrayal. Michel Rocard, a grand old man of the French left, former prime minister, Socialist Party general secretary and MEP, wrote an article in Le Monde last year reminding the English (whom we should now perhaps be prepared to distinguish politically from other Britons like the Scots and possibly the Welsh) that while Churchill was enthusiastic after the Second World War about European union, even a “United States of Europe”, he didn’t see Britain being a member of it. “What part of this did you not understand?” Rocard asked.

But you wanted to do business, and that is all you thought of. Once the president of the republic [de Gaulle] was gone, in you came. Never again afterwards – not once – did you allow the slightest step forward towards a little more integration, a little more space where decisions could really be taken communally. The Community is engaged in trading, which suits you, because it calls itself economic, but as regards the heart of the economy, taxation, company law, the representation of social forces, you demand, indeed insist, that decisions can only be taken on a basis of unanimity. What you wanted was paralysis. Lots of neighbours remark on our initial successes and are envious. They’d like to come in. You support every enlargement – us too it must be said; we hadn’t figured out yet what you were up to: all of this diluted the Community. You would never allow the least deepening. Europe remains hampered and poorly directed, an economic giant and a political dwarf.

It seems to be the consensus in Ireland that a Brexit would be very bad economically for Ireland, though some commentators, like Patrick Smyth in The Irish Times, have suggested that just as important is the fact that Britain has been, is and will continue to be, bad for Europe and that Ireland could in time adjust to any temporary economic or trading damage caused by a British departure.

Of course not everyone here believes that Britain is bad for Europe or that British positions on key questions are to be deprecated. Only this month our European Affairs minister, Dara Murphy, said that it was important that Britain produce written proposals on the “reforms” it wanted, adding that Ireland would be “particularly supportive of British requests in the sphere of competitiveness and economic governance”. In the decade or so after we joined the EEC, Ireland most frequently found itself primarily aligned with France rather than Britain on most questions. Whatever else Haughey and FitzGerald may have disagreed on, they seemed to share this orientation. Part of it of course came from a desire to boost Irish farm incomes through the Common Agricultural Policy, of which France was a strong supporter. But it was also rooted in a strategic vision which saw European involvement as a mechanism through which Ireland might emerge from the shadow of a dominant single relationship ‑ an often difficult and embittering one ‑ with the neighbouring island into a broader engagement with the several individual nations of Europe and with their economic and political common expression in “the institutions” in Brussels and Strasbourg.

Certainly there was a sense of a drift away from this strategy during the period of dominance of the Ahern/McCreevy/Harney axis, as Ireland increasingly aligned itself with our neighbour’s neoliberal and “money first” perspectives, without there having been any real debate on the subject here. I think I have a shrewd idea what David Cameron and the British Tories want in the sphere of competitiveness (hands off, low wages and as little worker or consumer protection as possible) or European economic governance (piss off, we can do that ourselves). I’m not sure though if that is what is best for Europe or for Ireland, and I’m not sure why Dara Murphy seems to think it is.

20/10/2015

Christ Never Made It As Far As Here

Many decades ago I remember skimming through a publisher’s catalogue – Penguin’s, I’m fairly sure it was – and coming across, in the fiction section, the name “Levi, Carlo”. I noticed it principally because it was adjacent to another name “Levi, Primo”, whom I did know. But I never really got to learn that much more about Carlo Levi, except the name of the sole book by him which Penguin published, Christ Stopped at Eboli. I continued to regularly bump up against his name and the name of his book in the process of leafing through the catalogue to order stock for the bookshop where I worked but I was never curious enough to order a copy to see what it was about. It could be that the title – or rather my misinterpretation of the meaning of the word “stopped” in the title, which suggested to me a somewhat pietistic work – put me off.

In fact, Carlo Levi and Primo Levi had a number of things in common in addition to sharing a surname. Though Carlo was nearly a generation older (born 1902), both were Italian Jews from Turin. Primo (born 1919) is best known for his books about his Auschwitz experiences If This Is a Man and The Drowned and the Saved, though his other books, including his collected journalistic essays, are well worth reading too. Both Levis were (non-communist) socialists, Carlo much more prominently involved and at a higher level than Primo. Primo was an industrial chemist by training and Carlo a doctor, though he rarely practised and lived chiefly as a painter. And both men were punished for their anti-fascist political activity, Carlo being exiled to the remote and malaria-ridden southern region of Lucania, Levi dispatched to Auschwitz, not because he was a member of a partisan group but because the camp where he was interned after his capture was taken over by the Germans and because he was a Jew.

Lucania, which is roughly equivalent to the modern province of Basilicata, was a remote and backward region where the writ of Rome scarcely ran. Michael McDonald, a Washington attorney and former contributor to the Dublin Review of Books, writes in an article in the Wall Street Journal:

Much of Levi’s memoir portrays the peasants of the two towns [Grassano and Aliano], who sought out Levi for his medical knowledge. He describes the lives of simple people who believed in irrational forces (such as demons and gnomes) and displayed a complete indifference to life beyond their “arid and lonely settlements, remote even from neighboring villages, and so backward and impoverished that … Christ never came to them; Christ stopped farther north, at Eboli.”

Christ Stopped at Eboli also carries, McDonald argues, a strong critique of rationalism and liberal progressivism, the notion that support for fascism was a product of ignorance and that any problem subjected to the clear light of reason and logic can be solved.

Levi argued that an “eternal fascism” was embedded in each person’s soul and that Fascism had triumphed because of a widespread fear of taking responsibility and of individual self-determination, an innate human desire to stand with and not apart from the group. In this respect, Levi pointed to similarities between the supposedly “barbarous” Lucanian peasantry and Rome’s supposedly “civilized” Fascists.

Rather than feeling superior, McDonald concludes, we would do well to consider the possibility that there “is a Lucania in each of us” which we should acknowledge but be vigilant against.

Christ Stopped at Eboli is published in the Penguin Classics series.

19/10/2015

Michael McDonald in the Wall Street Journal: http://on.wsj.com/1jwOYAN
Michael McDonald on Italian writer/editor Roberto Calasso

The Consolations of Coltrane

Having an interest – in two senses ‑ in books and book publishing but having to work the rather odd pattern of afternoons/evenings rather than the normal mornings/afternoons that everyone else works means that one very rarely gets to attend that quintessential book trade event the launch. However, as circumstances become slightly more relaxed for me as I move to an easier work regime, I managed to attend two in the past fortnight. And to enjoy myself at both.

The first, in Hodges Figgis, was of the new book (also first book) by my work colleague Chris Dooley. It is reviewed in this issue of the Dublin Review of Books by Frank Callanan, who writes:

It is not journalistic (a favourite term of professional disparagement among historians) but it is informed by journalistic technique. It is written in the present tense as forward narrative with contextual flashbacks. It is impressively dispassionate. Redmond’s final rise and fall is by no means an easy story to tell, and Dooley has given shrewd consideration to how it is to be done.

I first met Chris Dooley, who is now foreign editor of The Irish Times, when he was a young journalist (at one stage agriculture correspondent) and active trade unionist in the Irish Press, which sadly disappeared twenty years ago ‑ and not, it is probably still necessary to add, because of the actions of its staff or their trade unions. Chris was joined by many old colleagues at the launch, including former Irish Press news editor Ray Burke, now chief news editor in RTÉ and the author of Press Delete (2005), the definitive account of the demise of the newspaper group. And the book was formally launched by John Horgan, former senator, TD and MEP, doyen of journalism education in Ireland, historian, anthologist and political biographer and recently retired press ombudsman.

The second launch, in Books Upstairs on D’Olier Street, was of the novel A Lonely Note by Kevin Stevens, whom regular readers of the Dublin Review of Books will know is a frequent contributor on literary – and occasionally musical ‑ subjects, specialising in the great tradition of North American fiction writing (Bellow, Salinger, Roth, Updike, Munro, [Lorrie] Moore, Richard Ford, Kent Haruf, who died late last year, and James Salter, who died in June of this year.

As well as being one of the best critical writers you will come across, Kevin has long been himself a writer of fiction. Before A Lonely Note he had written three novels, Song for Katya, a love story set in the Soviet Union during the Brezhnev era, The Rizzoli Contract, a political thriller set in 1980s Boston, and Reach the Shining River, a story of political corruption, race and class in 1930s Kansas City. He has also published two books for younger readers, This Ain’t No Video Game, Kid, a novel for young adults set in Seattle and The Powers, which was designated a Dublin Citywide Read by the Unesco City of Literature programme. His nonfiction includes The Cops Are Robbers, an account of New England’s largest bank burglary, which was made into an NBC Movie of the Week, and The Bird Era, a history of the Boston Celtics basketball team from 1978 to 1988. He has also written reviews and criticism for The Irish Times.

Musing, on his blog, on the kind of research he had to carry out for Reach the Shining River, Kevin wrote:

Write about what you know, the old chestnut advises. But how much sense does that make? Writers write. They are usually not out in the world solving crimes or running for Congress or manning spaceships. Yet readers want slices of life, so what does a writer depend on? Observation and research. And if you are writing a historical or genre novel, it’s mostly the latter, because the past is past and the only way to bring it back is through imagination. And the imagination needs raw material.
So I did the research. Online, in the libraries, history books, other novels. And then I let it sink in. Because it can’t come across as research – not in a novel. Whether or not I’ve been successful in re-creating the lost world of machine politics, racism, Negro baseball and Southwest jazz that characterized Depression-era Kansas City my readers will have to judge …

A Lonely Note is about jazz too, and about the situation of immigrants from what is considered a “suspect culture” – in this case Iraqis – in small-town America, and so would have required more, and different, research. It’s also about the confusions of adolescence, the oppressive weight of authoritarian parenting, prejudice and bullying, and possibly the redemptive powers of music, including jazz and Iraqi choubi music, love and friendship. The novel’s original working title, publisher Siobhan Parkinson of Little Island told us at the launch, was A Love Supreme, which is a famous track by the jazz saxophonist John Coltrane. But of course A Love Supreme sounds rather like the title of a Silhouette Romance and there was never going to be any way out of people making that instant (and wrong) judgment, so A Lonely Note it became.

In the third chapter of the novel, the young Tariq, a clarinettist, is at home and listening casually to a radio station which sometimes plays jazz. Tariq has been practising the glissando that opens Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue.

But this music was unlike any jazz he’d ever heard. The sax was crashing through rapid arpeggios, cascades of notes that ripped and looped into tangled clumps that were anguished and intense. Yet the notes were controlled. They were meant. Like the cry of a wild animal, but articulate and emotional and technically incredible. How was he doing it? How was the player getting those sounds?
He turned it up even louder. In spite of its violence, the music was soothing. It was as if the song was playing his own fears. He stood motionless among the fancy pillows and antique rugs of the living room, listening the tune through to its drawn-out ending, hearing in its wrenching solo all the twisted feelings that had knotted him up since the day before. But feeling less anxious, too. As if the player were saying with his instrument: Yes, I know, I do. I know what it’s like.

Tariq has been listening to – without knowing what he is listening to it – Coltrane’s A Love Supreme. Not the least of the pleasures of the launch in Books Upstairs was the accompanying music by Mike Stevens on guitar and Kelan Walsh on clarinet and tenor sax, who played Duke Ellington’s In a Sentimental Mood and “Acknowledgement”, the first movement of A Love Supreme. A Lonely Note is published by Little Island at €12.99.

5/10/2015

Turned Out Nice Again

In a glowing review of Alexandra Harris’s Weatherland in The Guardian’s books supplement (October 3rd), AS Byatt recalls some lines from a poem by Rossetti that she learned as a child:

Who has seen the wind?
Neither I nor you.
But when the leaves hang trembling
The wind is passing through.

This feeling that the wind, though invisible if not intangible, was something quite real, and therefore in a different category from elves or fairies or mermaids, made the young Byatt oddly happy, she recalls, though she turned out to be someone for whom weather often posed problems, her asthma aggravated by Sheffield smog and her mood, in adulthood, depressed by lack of light, which we now call seasonal affective disorder, though why it is seasonal I don’t know as in Ireland at least there can seem to be as much, or as little, light in winter as in summer and it is lack of light rather than cold that is most lowering.

Early modern weather was, it seems, often dismal (Donne’s “the whole world’s sap is sunk” might have applied to many more days than just St Lucy’s in December). Things picked up a bit in the eighteenth century, though light also revealed smoke and dirt, and eighteenth and nineteenth century writers and painters (Coleridge, Ruskin, Constable, Turner) were prone to ecstasy about skies and storms. Byatt quotes Harris quoting the wonderful Gilbert White, the Hampshire parson-naturalist, on this occasion observing his pet tortoise’s aversion to rain:

No part of its behaviour ever struck me more than the extreme timidity it always expresses with regard to rain; for though it has a shell that would secure it against the wheel of a loaded cart, yet does it discover as much solicitude about rain as a lady dressed all in her best attire, shuffling away at the first sprinklings, and running its head up in a corner. If attended to, it becomes an excellent weather-glass.

Dr Johnson brusquely rejected Boswell’s suggestion that the weather can affect our moods or personalities, managing in the process himself ‑ and not for the first time ‑ to be both breezy and somewhat windy.

One of the consequences of course of our walking on two legs, and thus having no problem in surveying the sky as well as the grass or the path beneath us, is that we quickly got around to finding something up there intimately related to our essential being – gods or a God. Even as religious faith began to ebb after the Enlightenment, rapt observation often continued. In the winter of 1859-60, Ruskin counted the “streets” of high cirrus clouds, “not just seven or eight but 150 distinct streets. Sixty clouds in each row, he thought, on average. Nine thousand clouds in one rank, then, and about fifty thousand in the field of sight.”

Dogs of course do not stare at the sky, being more interested in the ground and the fascinating things –principally the squeezings and squirtings of their own kind – that they may find there. When they do look up all they see is us, and it is evident ‑ and of course greatly gratifying to our vanity ‑ that we seem to be all the God they need.

Alexandra Harris’s Weatherland is published by Thames and Hudson at £24.95. The image is JMW Turner’s Ullswater from Gobarrow Park.

4/10/2015

AS Byatt on Alexandra Harris

Port In A Storm

Andrew Lees writes: Liverpool is Glasgow and Belfast rolled into one and a haunted echogenic ancestral diaspora space. Perhaps it is the soft stinging rain on that drive down to the river or the subversive hurrying shared accent that makes the Irish feel at home in this grey threatening chocolate port that clings tenuously to the edge of England like a limpet. This city, closer to Dublin than London, is a devil-may-care rebellious familiar face and a mythical cosmic crossroad linked with the Sargasso Sea and Hy-Brasil.

Liverpool is up to her eyes in it when it comes to the history of the Old Sod, beginning with the innocent trading of horses and cattle between the Irish ports stretching back hundreds of years. In 1649 God’s Executioner dispatched his New Model Army from his trusted Liverpool garrison to leave a Via Dolorosa in Drogheda and Wexford and deport the rebel prisoners to Liverpool, from where they were promptly dispatched to Montserrat to work in the fields as indentured servants. They became known as the Black Irish. The English planters rich on rum and sugar returned from Britain’s dunghill in the Caribbean to be rewarded with farmland in Ulster.

An Gorta Mór (The Great Hunger) forced more than half the population of Ireland to flee and cross the bowl of tears to the unwelcoming middle ground of Liverpool. Many left on the coffin ships for New York and Boston but thousands stayed behind and settled in grim courts to the north of the Prince’s Landing Stage in a narrow strip of land between Vauxhall and the Scotland Road, or in the South End between the docks and a line running along Park Lane, St James Street and Park Road. The lucky ones found jobs as sailors, navvies and dockers but many were forced to beg. The educated Irish also arrived, seeing Liverpool as a step upwards in the world and a launching pad for the El Dorado of America

Most of those who stayed behind had a shared grievance and a resolute defiance of the king and country Protestant rulers of the city. Their massive presence in some parts of the town led to sectarianism and certain Liverpool constituencies returning nationalist candidates to parliament. The Liverpool Scotland ward councillor Pat Garton allowed his fishing skiff to be used in the daring rescue of the Irish Republican Brotherhood leader James Stephens from a Dublin jail, consolidating the links with Ireland. The international trade unionist Big Jim Larkin, involved in the Dublin lockout, was also a Scouser. By the beginning of the twentieth century a third of Liverpool had Catholic roots.

It was the influx of the Irish that laid the foundations for Scouse, although it is also easy to discern the singsong conciliatory influence of the Welsh and even the sound of the Potteries in some Liverpool accents. Scouse is fast and exclusive, resonating with the world’s great ports, especially New York, and in its vowels you can discern the fraternity and tragedies of friends and the memory of streets. Its phonological peculiarities stem from the raising of the back of the tongue towards the soft palate, something that sounds to outsiders like catarrh. At the end of each sentence there is that rising inflection that to the English gives even formal exchanges a built-in air of Ulster mongrel belligerence that contrasts sharply with the lilting Irish blarney.

Scousers share with the Irish a love for novelty in speech and create a demotic vocabulary of fantastic rotten English. They are never at a loss for a pun or a witty repartee and can talk the hind leg off a donkey. John Lennon’s Merseypropisms and verbal near misses in A Spaniard in the Works stem from the Liverpool Irish subversion of upper class English. When asked why he disrespected standard English Lennon replied: “I change words because I haven’t a clue what a lorra words mean half the time.” In the south docks the Irish invented a characteristic banter called dockology. Between the wars no one on the docks went by their own name. Surnames were abbreviated or lengthened, nicknames recalling a funny incident, a memorable fight or a relationship with a woman abounded and new arrivals on the waterfront that couldn’t “take the Mick” were frozen out of the job market. Jokes tick-tacked through the workforce. Sobriquets included “the drunken caterpillar” for the stevedore seen every night crawling out of The Cabbage pub. Vat 69, a brand of whisky, was referred to as the pope’s phone and a Paddy Kelly was a dock policeman. Sandwiches were “abnabs” and a stick of liquorice “sticky lice”.

Although many Irish families maintained the traditions of the homeland, a few Mary Ellens married black seamen and contributed to the remarkable cosmopolitan mosaic that JB Priestley described during his English Journey. In the early sixties many of the old Irish docker families were shifted out to Huyton, Kirkby and Skelmersdale. Parties of young buckos still arrive on Friday nights on the ferries to have some good crack, take in some footy and perhaps pair up with a pretty Liverpool judy. Many also have a relative or two in town, usually maintaining the old traditions of shamrockery, the ceili band and St Patrick’s Day celebrations.

To be Irish in Liverpool was first to be a despised Catholic then to be a dangerous revolutionary and finally to be trendy and sexy. On Saturday nights Seel, Wood and Hardman are now full of plastic Paddies and despite the credit crunch the Celtic Tiger continues to own more and more of a city which denied it for so long. The Irish ghettoes are gone but those echoes remain in the Vauxhall pockets. To most of England Liverpool is beyond the pale but for the Irish it is their second capital and a bleeding heart.

4/10/2015

Andrew Lees author of The Hurricane Port: A Social History of Liverpool, published by Mainstream in 2011.

A Literary Terrorist

One critic has compared reading Charles Maturin’s Melmoth to climbing Mount Everest, yet the novel continues to appeal, in part perhaps because of its role in creating a genre that is still potent in global culture –in Hollywood movies, popular music and manga animation.

Melmoth the Wanderer was written by Charles Maturin, an impoverished and mentally unstable Irish clergyman, who died – it would seem by suicide ‑ a few years after writing this novel. His Gothic masterpiece has never been out of print since it was first published in 1820, and is generally regarded as a classic of the genre.

Maturin has been acknowledged as the literary ancestor of Irish horror and fantasy writers such as Sheridan Le Fanu, Lord Dunsany and Bram Stoker – the creator of Dracula. His legacy is also evident in the work of his grand-nephew Oscar Wilde – particularly, in Wilde’s only novel, A Picture of Dorian Gray. Following his release from prison, Wilde even adopted the name of Melmoth.

Maturin’s wish to create a sense of “visionary terror” has not only been appreciated by other Irish writers. He also influenced work by Edgar Allen Poe (The Fall of the House of Usher); Pushkin (Eugene Onegin); Balzac (who wrote his own sequel to Melmoth); Baudelaire, (Histoires Grotesques); Hawthorne (who edited Melmoth); HP Lovecraft, (“The Picture in the House”) and Vladimir Nabokov, (Humbert Humbert drives Lolita across the USA in an imaginary Melmoth saloon). In more recent times, Maturin has been widely recognised as playing an important role in the development of American Gothic fiction. His contemporary champions include Joyce Carol Oates and Anne Rice – whose vampire hero Lestat sometimes uses the alias of Melmoth.

Maturin wrote at a time when Ireland was caught up in a vortex of political unrest, mass starvation, religious conflict, economic collapse and epidemic disease – and much of this turbulence surfaces, in vivid and unexpected ways, in his novel. Maturin wanted to “paint life in extremes”, and he conjured up his own paranoid vision of a disordered and hugely dysfunctional universe.

Melmoth is set in 1816: a highly significant year – both for Maturin and for Ireland. In 1815, the island of Sumbawa in the Dutch East Indies had been blown apart by a gigantic volcanic eruption, an explosion that is considered to have been the biggest in human history and which sent many millions of gaseous particles into the stratosphere. These were carried by the trade winds, and reached Ireland in the spring of 1816 ‑ where they effectively blocked the sun’s rays, and led to “the year with no summer”. Without sufficient light, the crops failed, famine ensued, and a epidemic of typhus swept through the country.

After Ireland, the country most affected by this unprecedented natural catastrophe was Switzerland. The wet, cold and dark weather conditions meant that a party of English tourists near Geneva had to spend a great deal of time indoors. To distract themselves, they began to tell each other horror stories. Among their number was Mary Shelley, and, of course, the story which she related that miserable summer would become known as Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus.

For Maturin, 1816 was a year of great personal extremity. Lord Byron had arranged for his play Bertram to be staged in Drury Lane, in London. The lead role was taken by Edmund Kean – the leading actor of his day ‑ who delivered a bravura performance. The play proved a commercial success and earned Maturin a good deal of money. However, it also attracted the attention of Samuel Taylor Coleridge – who denounced Maturin’s work as “depraved” and “atheistical”. This was a serious charge since, at that time, atheism was considered a criminal offence. Coleridge’s scabrous reviews also helped to ensure that Maturin would receive no further preferment within the Church of Ireland.

Later that year, Maturin stood bail for one of his cousins in a sensational murder trial. His relative absconded to America, and the bail was forfeit. This reduced him to a state of penury from which he was never to recover. Indeed, in his introduction to Melmoth, he writes that the only reason he has written the book is because he is in dire financial straits. At that time, he was serving as the curate of St Peter’s Church in Dublin’s Aungier Street – which Robert Emmet had once attended. St Peter’s was then one of the most fashionable churches in Dublin – which may also have exacerbated Maturin’s awareness of his own poverty. At any rate, there can be little doubt that his financial insecurity helped to inform the sense of desperation that infuses so much of his novel.

This feeling is accompanied by an underlying fear of dispossession – of power, property and privilege – which is characteristic of other Irish Protestant writers of the period. In Maturin’s case, the neurosis is given further resonance by his French Huguenot background. He was part of the dominant religious minority in Ireland, but he was also somewhat isolated within that minority by his own history and culture. It seems more than a coincidence that a large part of Melmoth takes place in the years that immediately followed the repeal of the Edict of Nantes – the event which had led Maturin’s ancestors to seek refuge in Ireland. 1816 was the last year in which religious services were performed in French in St Patrick’s Cathedral for the Irish descendants of those Huguenot immigrants. The sense of historical loss may also help to explain Maturin’s attraction to the darker aspects of the fractured society in which he lived.

The world that emerges from Melmoth is fuelled by Maturin’s creative energy, and his writing frequently generates its own form of inchoate mania. He writes about a series of nightmares – and a variety of horrors. The Catholic Church is the subject of some of his most obsessive fantasies – attracting and repelling him in roughly equal measure. No doubt, he would have been appalled to learn that one of his grandsons would become a Jesuit priest and a prominent Catholic writer.

Perhaps above all, Maturin seems frightened by the prospect of his own encroaching insanity. In this context, it is worth noting that Ireland’s first public mental health facility also opened in 1816, and, within a few years, the asylum in Grangegorman was full to overflowing. Indeed, the incidence of insanity recorded in ireland in the 1820s was the highest in Europe.

Melmoth contains many of the features of the so-called “terrorist” school of Gothic fiction. It is deliberately written to excess, and constantly emphasises the capacity of the past to overwhelm the present, and the irrational to overcome human reason. Its sombre themes and extreme emotions allow deeply repressed thoughts to rise to the surface – which may explain the particular interest which Gothic novels like Melmoth held for Freud. It has even been claimed that modern psychoanalysis was born in the Gothic imagination.

Maturin was writing at the same time that Francisco Goya was creating his remarkable images of madness, brutality and desolation. In London, William Blake was writing and illustrating “Jerusalem” – his vision of a stupendous, impending Apocalypse. This is the context in which Maturin’s intense and claustrophobic vision may best be understood. Despite its unusual and demanding nature – one recent reviewer compared reading Melmoth to climbing Mount Everest ‑ the novel continues to appeal to modern readers. This may be, in part, because of its formative role in creating a genre that remains a potent feature of global culture – whether in Hollywood movies, popular music, or manga animation.

Perhaps the continuing appeal of this strange and disturbing book is simply because ‑ as Angela Carter once observed ‑ “we still live in Gothic times”.

David Blake Knox

12/9/2015

The Pleasures of Destruction

The book historian Andrew Pettegree credits Martin Luther with ushering in a new phase in the conflict of ideas and the history of the book. With his ceremonial public burning outside Wittenberg on December 10th, 1520 of the papal bull of excommunication against him, Exsurge Domine, along with a copy of Canon Law and the pamphlets of some orthodox Catholic propagandists, he was, perhaps unwittingly, introducing an era in which books were to become not just protagonists but often victims of ideological struggle.

True there had been book burnings before. In the closing years of the fifteenth century Girolamo Savonarola had organised “bonfires of the vanities” in Florence, where books (including those of Boccaccio and Ovid), as well as art, mirrors, cosmetics and musical instruments, were confined to the flames while squads of young men and boys –Savonarola’s message was particularly popular among the young – went round the streets accosting those thought to be wearing immodest dress. The medieval church too had occasionally lobbed the odd book into the fire when it felt it necessary to burn a heretic, but in general, Pettegree argues, there was considerable resistance, at least initially, to the notion of burning books. For one thing, they were expensive. When Luther planned to up the ante by burning copies of the works of the scholastics Aquinas and Duns Scotus the notion had to be abandoned as no Wittenberg scholar was willing to abandon their copy.

In the longer term, however, passions could not be contained.

In the second half of the century the battle between Catholic and Protestant took on a murderous intensity. Luther and his Catholic opponents had swapped insults, but in Paris in 1572 the Catholic population hunted their Huguenot neighbours through the streets. The return of religious enthusiasm led to conflicts of a previously unimaginable bitterness. The disputes over religion had sowed the seeds of a genocidal rage in which whole populations were at risk.
In the polarised societies of this era governments exercised new care over what their subjects read. And in this they were right [emphasis added], because much of the toxic energy of the conflict came from the printed page.

Pettegree’s somewhat throwaway aside here constitutes a rather rare scholarly apologia for the practice of censorship in certain circumstances – circumstances of heightened civic danger. Our most pervasive modern ideology (Nous sommes tous Charlie) seems in its purest form to insist that nothing – even good sense – should ever stand in the way of us saying just whatever comes into our heads. Interestingly however, some people in Germany, as Derek Scally has reported in The Irish Times, have recently begun to ask why Facebook, which is apparently quick to erase an image in which there is a suggestion of female nipple is so slow to take down racist and incendiary comments – some in this case referring to Buchenwald, Auschwitz and Sachsenhausen ‑ in a situation where there have been repeated attacks by far-right elements on the hostels where migrants and asylum-seekers live.

In book history, the burning of offending items has tended for the most part to be replaced, and rendered unnecessary, by stricter regimes of pre-censorship and regulation, measures that human ingenuity (and commercial opportunism) have usually found means of evading. Public burnings of course, of people or things, will always be popular, as indeed is any form of destruction of symbolic goods (American or Israeli flags, for example, or water charge bills).

Indeed there is nothing that will keep a mob up and about after bedtime quite as much as the lure of destruction. I remember, on the evening of October 5th, 1968, seen by many as Day One of the Northern civil rights movement, observing an interesting act which was taking place at the corner of William Street and Little James Street in Derry. Earlier in the day the RUC had batoned a civil rights march in Duke Street in the Waterside (on the other side of the river), the spectacular footage making the teatime news on British television. That evening the town was in uproar, with running clashes between RUC and possibly B Specials and “rioters”, some ‑ but far from all ‑ of whom may have earlier been on the march and seen what had happened to peaceful demonstrators. Sometimes, in the course of the evening, the “forces of order” would be beaten well back, allowing an area of freedom in the inner city Catholic working class area that was later to be denoted as simply “the Bogside” and later “Free Derry”. On the corner of William Street and Little James Street stood a bakery, and in its window, behind strong plate glass, stood a very high tiered wedding cake. A couple of worthies had their hearts set on it and stone after stone was lobbed at the window until finally, after five or ten minutes the glass gave way and the prize was carried off, no doubt to be divided up into small pieces as is the custom. With every sound of the window cracking the crowd, of a hundred or so people, gave a cheer. I was there myself and perhaps I cheered too.

A few days later, the Derry Journal (a twice-weekly) sold a perhaps unprecedented number of copies, with photographs of the police riot and the disturbances, and the damage that attended them, in the city afterwards. There was political analysis too, with the usual elements condemning the considerable destruction of property. Our most radical commentator and political actor however, then a mere twenty-five-year-old stripling, spoke rather of the people’s “anger”. Of the existence of this anger in Derry there can have been little doubt. Unemployment in the city was huge, and Catholic unemployment bigger still, with discrimination in housing and employment institutionalised. People were in a mood of rebellion and they had a right to be. All the same, as I’m sure has been observed before, something like a wild joy can be experienced in a sudden liberation from restraint and supervision: what I saw on the faces of the heroic liberators of the wedding cake that evening was not exactly anger.

The Book in the Renaissance by Andrew Pettegree is published by Yale University Press.

1.9.2015

Women in the Library

The place of the library and the librarian in film culture is, one would be inclined to think, at least partially determined by the nature of the audience. It is for the most part, except on the art house circuit, a popular audience, not particularly educated or particularly cultured, young – after the 1950s or 1960s perhaps increasingly teenage – and one which is inclined to find value not in quiet or concentration but in breakout, fun and making whoopee.

The library in film, therefore, can be a place that has the potential to be somewhat comical or ludicrous, and occasionally even sinister. Hollywood, one feels, would probably have portrayed the church in the same way if it thought it could have got away with it; but it couldn’t. The library scene is the one where the snappy, quickfire dialogue we’ve been getting up to this point must be suspended, or reduced to whispers, where if voices are even slightly raised the straitlaced librarian or the other users – often creepy – will, frequently in unison, shout SSHH! or point with exaggerated irritation at the notice reading QUIET or SILENCE. (The library is where Sally Bowles in Cabaret memorably announces to her boyfriend, Brian, in a loud voice, “God damn it, I’m going to have a baby!” But perhaps the disturbed readers, given that they are German, don’t understand her.)

There is of course in film a great temptation to violate the sanctuary of the library and scenes of mayhem, pursuit and murder, even sexual congress, among the stacks are not uncommon. Order is to be disturbed, silence broken, and won’t those enormous tall shelves look great crashing down like dominoes? Then there are the librarians, irascible bow-tied men of uncertain masculinity or sour, disapproving spinsters. George Bailey (James Stewart) in It’s A Wonderful Life, doubting the value of his existence, is shown by his guardian angel what would have happened to his lovely and loving wife had he not been there for her: yes, she would have remained unplucked and ended up as that dried-up, bespectacled little librarian. Ingo Tornow, in a chapter on film in a sumptuously illustrated German history of the library, Die Weisheit Baut Sich Ein Haus (Wisdom Builds Itself A House), notes that while in popular cinema almost no one wears spectacles women librarians almost invariably do. It is of course a marker of unattractiveness and frigidity … and yet, and yet, there is the very attractive bespectacled Gloria Mundy (Goldie Hawn) in Foul Play, and others. The Hollywood librarian, can on occasion it seems, like the Hollywood secretary (“Why Miss Jones, you’re beautiful!”) be quite dramatically transformed simply by removing her glasses and shaking loose her hair. In America no one is beyond redemption.

Moving to more mundane – if more important – matters, the employment of women as librarians was pioneered in the United States, as Robert Crawford tells us in a recently published essay. It certainly had a political, or emancipatory, context, being one of a relatively small number of white collar (or “respectable”) employments open to women. It may also have had an economic one, as one can be sure library guardians were disinclined to pay women what they might have felt obliged to pay men. Speaking in London in 1877 the recently appointed librarian of Harvard and president of the American Library Association announced with pride that at Harvard

they take lady assistants into the library at £100 a year, and gradually raise their salary to as high as £200, and £240 in exceptional cases. They obtain ladies having a fair knowledge of Latin, Greek, French and German, and a usable knowledge for library work of Italian … They had present, he was glad to say, a representative of the American lady librarians (loud cheers), one who had been librarian of Wellesley College, eight miles from Boston, where the president is a lady, all the professors are ladies, and 400 ladies are the students.

Britain and Ireland may have lagged a little behind American progressive practice, but there were a few women librarians in eighteenth century England and certainly one much celebrated one. Esther Caterer (née Esther Saunders) took over the running of her father’s Sheffield subscription library on his death. A library in an industrial city, with a clientele that was working class and mercantile, “the approach was bad; the staircase was winding, the room was dark and inconvenient, but still there was no small number of good books”. And Esther herself was a character, given to hiding away books for her regulars and much loved by the library members: “She was a great favourite on account of her easy good temper; and she was a great newsmonger too. Marriages were whispered in her little room long before they took place; deaths were known as soon as the bell tolled; and all the affairs of the town and country were amply discussed.”

On Caterer’s death in 1818 the poet John Holland wrote an extended elegy to her memory in the affectionate mock-heroic style of Robert Burns. I think it’s worth quoting in full as it’s not often that librarians get the praise that is their due:

Ye book-worms, a’ wi’ sorrow meet,
Nor wi’ few tears your een be weet;
For eens, spite o’ the warld’s deceit,
By pity led,
Be yours the wail o’ Surrey-street,
Auld Esther’s dead!

She was a canty clattering dame,
A servant gude; abroad, at hame,
She had an honest matron’s frame;
Nor could I spread
A mickle stain owre a’ her name ‑
Auld Esther’d dead!

When gentles came, in studious mood,
To fash their brains ’mang learning’s brood,
Or tak’ their meal o’ mental food,
Wi’ ready head
She ken’d where every volume stood. ‑
Auld Esther’s dead!

An’ when the storm blaw’d hard an’ reekit,
An’ the warm room ye ran an’ seekit,
‘Tis fearless truth, an sic I speak it,
Free frae a’ dread.
Wi’ heer the hours like minutes sneakit. ‑
Auld Esther’s dead!

The books are grievin, ’mang themselves,
From folios fat down to lean twelves,
As if sad ghaists and wailing elves
A clamour spread;
And sighing a’ alang the shelves:
Auld Esther’s dead!

Sigh for her, every ancient book,
Auld Chaucer i’ the poet’s nuik;
A’ ye romances, dolorous look,
Your gude friend’s fled;
For muckle pride in you she took. ‑
Auld Esther’s dead!

Robert Crawford’s essay “The Library in Poetry” is published in The Meaning of the Library: A Cultural History (Princeton University Press), which will be reviewed in the Dublin Review of Books in the autumn.

31/08/2015

Hope Springs Eternal

“It’s easy to confuse democracy with democracy,” the always acute David Runciman writes in the current issue (dated August 27th) of the London Review of Books. It is indeed, largely because the word is so polysemous. Many of that growing tribe of media commentators mysteriously attracted to the attitudes of the far left (is it just that they’re bored?) felt that because the Greeks, or more precisely three and a half million Greeks out of the almost ten million electorate, voted No to the bailout conditions offered to/imposed on them then everyone else in the EU (population 503 million) should have felt bound by that democratic decision and gone back to the drawing board for another hard think. The only thing standing in the way of this common sense solution, we were told, was “the Germans”, or more specifically, Angela Merkel and Wolfgang Schäuble, frequently referred to in comment as “Frau” Merkel and “Herr” Schäuble, in a way that the bien pensants seem to think is quite funny and of course not at all racist. As it turned out, it was not just the Germans, and not just the Finns, and not just the Slovaks and the Slovenes and the Latvians, and not just the Austrians who did not feel absolutely morally bound by the Greek Oxi but in the end the talented gambler Mr Tsipras himself and a large majority of his parliamentary deputies. Democracy is one thing (or rather more than one thing), and political reality, and making the best of that frequently difficult and sticky reality, another.

David Runciman, however, is not thinking particularly about Greece but about the British Labour Party, which seems to be about to select young Jeremy Corbyn (66) as the man best qualified to lead it into the radiant future. The benefit of having a political party’s leader chosen by members and supporters rather than by a more restricted or artificial electoral college (MPs, party branches and trade union leaders for Labour, the famous “men in the grey suits” for the Tories) looks like a no-brainer. And that’s exactly what it seems to be boiling down to, since the collective of British Labour Party branch members, with added “new supporters”, appears indeed to have no brain, or a brain that looks as if it is programmed to shut down the body. Runciman’s particular point is that the micro-democracy of the current Labour exercise may not necessarily be good for the British macro-democracy –insofar as it could well have the effect of putting the Tories in power forever. And for this he –a little unfairly it seems to me – blames Ed Miliband and the abrupt manner of his departure.

Runciman compares the probable election of Corbyn as party leader to the Tories’ choice, in 2001, of Iain Duncan Smith (they could have had Ken Clarke, who would certainly have been a more broadly popular figure, but he was pro-European and didn’t appeal to the party rank and file). IDS was an old-style conservative in a way that David Cameron is not. His Euroscepticism and social conservatism appealed to the constituency organisations in spite of his standing a little apart from them in background: he was, and is, a Roman Catholic, while they are, for the most part, either the ladies who do the flowers for the (Anglican) church, boneheaded farmers or “go-ahead” businessmen, frequently dodgy. Cameron and Osborne are all in favour of money and people who have money and in the past that has often been enough for the Tory party; but there are of course other ways of being conservative, some of them perhaps even slightly interesting. To quite a few British voters at the time, however, Duncan Smith, as his party colleagues soon began to realise, came across as something of a weirdo, and if that was how he was going to be perceived it was quite likely that the electorate wouldn’t notice that Tony Blair, with his earnestness, somewhat piercing niceness and enthusiasm for bombing Iraq into democracy (and also en route to being “received” by Rome), was a bit of a weirdo too, although set against Iain Duncan Smith or Michael Howard he seemed like Mr Normal. And actually many voters, it appears, quite liked the niceness thing.

“Corbyn’s supporters,” Runciman argues, “are under few illusions that he fits the mould of a mainstream party leader. They know he’s at best an acquired taste and unlikely to be the man to win back voters lost to the Tories in the key marginals. A recent YouGov poll found that barely a quarter of Labour members believed that understanding how to win an election was one of the key qualities needed in a Labour leader (62 per cent wanted him or her to be ‘in touch with the concerns of ordinary people’).” “Ordinary people” of course, in this context, is not to be understood as statistically average sort of people or even as those people who don’t have a lot of money but rather as a vague amplification of “people who think like me”.

Breda O’Brien has been writing on this subject in The Irish Times (today, August 22nd) and as it happens she has been reading the same issue of the London Review of Books as I have, though she seems less taken by David Runciman’s analysis, partly because she too wants to take a swipe at “the mainstream”. One way to understand the apparent popular enthusiasm for Corbyn, Runciman writes, “is as a manifestation of what political scientists call the expressive, as opposed to the instrumental, theory of voting. If voting is instrumental then it’s presumed that voters are primarily motivated by the results they hope to achieve: leaders and parties who can deliver real benefits …” The growth of expressive voting on the other hand “seems to chime with the world of social media and online communication, where self-expression rules and echo chambers proliferate. The internet is much more effective as a vehicle for expressing disgust with mainstream politics than it is for organising pragmatic reconfigurations of it.” You can say that again, Dave.

Breda doesn’t think a lot of this expressive/instrumental dichotomy, which I find a bit surprising as expressivism is in fact even more clearly in evidence in Ireland than it is in the UK. A quarter or more of Irish people (as polled) seem at this point to be saying that they will vote for Independents rather than political parties in the next general election. That is to say they are not interested in contributing to the making of any particular possible government to run the country or the economy (Fine Gael and Labour, Fine Gael and Renua and the Social Democrats and Labour, Fine Gael and the same and a few more odds and sods to make up the numbers, Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, Fianna Fáil and Sinn Féin, Fianna Fáil and Sinn Féin and a batch of Independents). What in fact they are saying, by voting for the hospital candidate or the turf candidate or the make our RTC a university candidate, is that they have opted out of being active citizens of the Republic of Ireland and retreated into an emotionally satisfying local form of expressivism, or indeed simply that they have worked themselves up into a such a great lather of contempt for “them” that it must be indulged or they will burst. There are other ‑ in Ireland usually far left ‑ forms of expressivism too (“I’m a radical, me”) but we won’t go there just for the moment.

Breda suggests that the Corbyn surge may be less to do with “expressivism” and more to do with the fact that many people actually agree with his policies (the two, I would argue, are not entirely different things when you think about it). I have little doubt that the people who either have long been members of the Labour Party or have, for £3, newly declared themselves to be supporters and who are voting for Jeremy Corbyn agree with Jeremy Corbyn. The point is: how many other people do? For it to be an instrumental rather than merely expressive act to vote him in as Labour leader would require there to be a hell of a lot. Let us not forget that the reason this leadership contest is taking place in the first place is that Labour recently lost a general election rather badly, with a leader perceived (or painted by his enemies) as being firmly left-wing (“red Ed”). But of course Ed was a lot more moderately (or sensibly) left than is Jeremy.

It seems now that many Labour members realise that Corbyn will never take the party into power but they no longer care. The people have let them down and they are in a huff. There will be no more trimming, no dissimulation. There will be socialism, or at least socialist words. It should of course be no surprise that the Labour left has the wholehearted support of veteran Trotskyists like Eamonn McCann (Irish Times, August 13th) in this voyage to nowhere. For Trotskyists, worse is always better: sharpening the contradictions, don’t you know.

Perhaps the greatest single argument against this fat-headed experiment in verbal radicalism however is that it has all been done before. In 1980, after the resignation of Jim Callaghan, who had lost power in the previous year, the British Labour Party elected Michael Foot as its leader. Labour initially performed strongly in opinion polls (Thatcher was very unpopular) but as the party left wing increasingly asserted itself through takeovers of branches and constituency organisations and purges (deselections) of sitting MPs it didn’t like and some of the party right defected to the newly formed social democrats (SDP) that trend was to be spectacularly reversed. In the June 1983 general election Labour went to battle on a “real socialist” platform (MP Gerald Kaufman called its manifesto, “The New Hope for Britain”, “the longest suicide note in history”). The party lost sixty seats in what was its worst general election result since 1918. Michael Foot, a man of some intellectual distinction whom almost everyone seemed to like, was sixty-seven when he became party leader and on the cusp of seventy when the general election took place. Jeremy Corbyn, who by all accounts is a rather likeable chap too, is now sixty-six and will probably be seventy when he leads whatever remains of Labour into battle in the next election, quite possibly against a forty-eight-year-old George Osborne. It will be a fun time indeed for Daily Telegraph readers but I think I will try to be somewhere else when it is happening.

22/8/2015

Read David Runciman here

Yellow socks and guacamole

There is a well-known story that back in the 1990s Peter (now Lord) Mandelson dropped into a fish and chip shop while canvassing with local Labour Party members in his Hartlepool constituency and ordered haddock and chips; then, pointing to the mushy peas which are a favourite complement to that dish in the north of England, he is supposed to have added: “And I’ll have some of that guacamole too.”

The story is, of course, too good to be true, or at least too good to be true about Peter Mandelson. Apparently something of the kind did indeed happen to a young American intern working with the Labour Party around the same time and the story of her misapprehension came to the ears of Neil Kinnock, who found it highly amusing, could not resist retelling it and eventually had the bright idea of substituting as its protagonist his party colleague, a man whose cultural comfort zone was presumed to be strikingly at variance with that of his constituents in the safe northeastern seat that had been found for him after his successful stint as Labour’s director of communications (a post to which Kinnock had appointed him).

On one level this is simply a story of political fun ‑ somewhat spiteful fun perhaps, though at a fairly harmless level. But it also says something about how the British like to see themselves in relation to things culturally foreign, in this case particularly the British working class but arguably a broader swathe of society than that. In the Peter Morgan/Stephen Frears television film The Deal (2003), which revolves around the contest for the Labour leadership after the sudden death of John Smith, the wonderful Paul Rhys plays Mandelson as a softspoken, feline schemer, whose delicate transfer of his support from Brown to Blair proves to be decisive. Certainly Mandelson appears a strange fish to the hard-drinking Praetorian Guard of Scottish Labour MPs (remember Scottish Labour MPs?) surrounding Smith, one of whom stage-whispers just after he has left the room: “Were those socks yellow?” Gordon Brown’s chirpy cornerman Charlie Whelan meanwhile remarks: “That man smells of vanilla.” It is of course far from irrelevant that this exotic intruder into the macho political world of Westminster is gay, and perhaps not completely irrelevant that his family background is partly Jewish.

There is a long tradition of associating “sophistication”, particularly when that means a weakness for elegance or ostentation of dress or what is seen as a too refined or cosmopolitan taste in food or drink, with decadence, sexual licence, “effeminacy” and a decline in the homespun values (which have served us well). George Orwell, always a blowhard in such matters, routinely referred to some of the most accomplished poets of his era as “pansies”. Some of them were indeed homosexual or bisexual but Orwell, whom it would be inaccurate to call homophobic in the normal sense of the word, was thinking of many things other than sexual orientation. When he said that certain people (fashionable literary-political intellectuals) took their cookery from Paris and their opinions from Moscow, he was referring to what he saw as an unfortunate deviation from the natural, plain and decent, healthy and normal virtues – virtues he perhaps overvalued. Auden, one of Orwell’s favourite targets, was, curiously enough, referring to much the same cultural gulf between the plain and the sophisticated in his oft-quoted lines “To the man-in-the-street who, I’m sorry to say, / Is a keen observer of life, / The word intellectual suggests right away / A man who’s untrue to his wife.”

But how easy is it to establish what is plain and healthy and decent? Is an apparent lack of sophistication or intellectuality, a sturdy normality, an essentially English trait? Certainly it is one that can pay a political dividend: while poor Ed Miliband showed to the satisfaction of many through his inability to convincingly eat a bacon sandwich that he was not prime-ministerial material, Nigel Farage loves to be photographed with a pint of beer in his hand, and sometimes a cigar, just like a normal bloke. And the camera normally does not follow him into the restaurant, where it is said he has been known to polish off a bottle or two of Nuits-Saint-Georges.

Have the British, or the English, always been enthusiasts for plain “unmucked about with” food or is this merely a result of conditioning that derives from the introduction of mass-produced (highly spiced and salted) industrial branded grocery goods in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? One of the earliest English cookbooks, A Boke of Cokery, written about 1440, suggests that there may have been a considerable complexity and delicacy associated with English cuisine in the late medieval period, at least in the houses of the more prosperous. Here is a recipe for “custarde” ‑ not custard as we know it, rather something like a meat quiche:

Take Vele (veal), and smyte hit in lituƚƚ peces, and wassℏ it clene; put hit into a faire potte with faire water, and lete hit boyle togidre; þen̄ (then) take parcelly, Sauge (sage), Isoppe (hyssop), Sauerey (savory), wassℏ hem, hewe hem, And cast hem into flessℏ whan hit boileth; then̄ take powder of peper, canel (cinnamon), Clowes (cloves), Maces, Saffron̄, salt, and lete hem boyle togidre, and a goode dele of wyne witℏ aƚƚ, And whan̄ the flessℏ is boyled, take it vppe fro þe (the) brotℏ, And lete the broth kele. Whan̄ hit is colde, streyne yolkes and white of egges thorgh a streynour, and put hem (them) to the brotℏ, so many that the broth be styff ynowe, And make faire cofyns (pie crusts), and couche iij. or iiij. (three or four) peces of the flessℏ in þe (the) Coffyns; then take Dates, prunes, and kutte hem; cast thereto powder of Gynger and a lituƚƚ Vergeous (verjuice), and put to the brotℏ, and salt; then̄ lete the coffyn̄ and the flessℏ bake a lituƚƚ; And þen put the brotℏ in the coffyns, And lete hem bake till they be ynogℏ.

One of the main tropes of contemporary academic study (of almost anything in the humanities field, it often seems) is the notion of “the other”, the other being the people who are not like us, the uncivilised, the savage, the sinister, the threatening. For “Westerners”, a wide category extending from ancient Greeks to modern Canadians, the other has over time included any number of peoples, the Persians, the Scythians, the Mongols, the Arabs, the Ottoman Turks, “native peoples” of many hues and body shapes, the Russians, the Arabs (or simply Muslims) again, the Russians again. And as well as real others there have been mythical others, always lurking just beyond the known world: in Shakespeare’s words “the Cannibals that each other eat, / The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads / Do grow beneath their shoulders”. Of course it will usually be the case – and this seems to be less often emphasised in academic discourse – that those we consider to be other may very well look on us in the same way. Medieval travellers believed that the apparently well-attested race of dog-headed men lived somewhere in the Far East and when they first arrived there they asked where they might find them. But their hosts replied: “The dog-heads? We’ve heard of them of course. But we thought they lived among you, in the West.”

The Greek geographer, traveller and historian Strabo (64/63 BC – AD 24) believed that a people’s degree of civilisation could usually be measured by its degree of proximity to the Mediterranean (he himself was born nearer the Black Sea, in what is now Turkey). This said a lot about the Britons, but of course even more about the Irish, wilder yet, who according to Strabo ate their dead fathers and had sex with their mothers and sisters. And yet civilisation and its antithesis ‑ savagery, uncouthness, or, seen in a somewhat different and more positive light, simplicity of manners ‑ can be viewed in more than one way. Thus we can construe the Mandelson fable to suggest that a man who likes to wolf down a helping of mushy peas with his fish and chips is a man you can trust, while a man who mistakes it for some foreign muck he eats up in London is one you cannot. There can be virtue, it seems, in a lack of sophistication (or pretension), which should not of course be mistaken for a lack of intelligence: if a Yorkshireman tells you “I’m a plain man, me” that should not lead you to think that you are likely to best him in a financial transaction.

The historian Tacitus (AD 56 – c117) used his accounts of the military campaigns against the northern tribes and nations (Germans, Britons) to teach his Roman audiences some moral lessons: chiefly that their society was too decadent and soft and that if it wished to survive it might possibly learn something from the rude barbarians. Cassius Dio (AD 155 – 235), writing in the same vein, has the British warrior queen Boudica (Boadicea) encouraging her soldiers with reflections on the softness of their Roman enemies compared with their own sturdiness and adaptability: “They need bread and wine and oil, and if any of these things fails them, they die. For us, on the other hand, any grass or root serves as bread, the juice of any plant as oil, any water as wine.” She may well be just a woman, she tells her troops, but the real woman, she insists (in Charlotte Higgins’s translation), “is the emperor Nero, playing the lyre back in Rome, smeared in make-up. Free us from these Roman men, she begs – if they are men at all, with their warm-water bathing, their wine-imbibing, myrrh-perfumed homosexuality.”

As the anti-European ultras, well-organised and likely to be supported by two or three major newspapers, gird up in their campaign to take Britain out of the EU we can expect to hear a lot more about the unique qualities of the island race, its toughness, resilience, independence, robust common sense and contempt for Jesuitical or bureaucratical scheming, not to mention wine sauces. Curiously, the modern Boudica, Mrs Thatcher, was a lot less isolationist than many of those who would now claim her as an inspiration might like to think. “Britain does not dream of some cosy, isolated existence on the fringes of the European Community. Our destiny is in Europe, as part of the Community,” she told the College of Europe in Bruges in 1988.

Charlotte Higgins, in her wonderful study Under Another Sky: Journeys in Roman Britain, tells of the public reaction which flowed in 2011 from an article in Antiquity and subsequent coverage in the Daily Mail of the discovery in York of the skull of a young woman who became known as “the ivory bangle lady”. Under the headline “Revealed: The African queen who called York home in the fourth century”, the Mail quoted archaeologist Dr Hella Eckardt, who said: “We’re looking at a population mix which is closer to contemporary Britain than previous historians had expected. In the case of York, the Roman population may have had more diverse origins than the city has now … [The bangle lady’s] case contradicts assumptions that may derive from more recent historical experience, namely that immigrants are low status and male and that African individuals are likely to have been slaves.”

The readers of the Mail, or of its website, were not going to take this lying down. “More mult-cult propaganda and lies,” wrote “Oppenheimer” from Dartford. “Derrick”, in Nottingham, described the research as “insidious, neo-Marxist, multi-cultist propaganda”. And while “David” from Nottinghamshire thought it was all a “desperate attempt to fool us into thinking we’ve always had a multi-racial society”, “Ste” in Middlesborough took some comfort from the thought that “if we were multicultural once and managed to reverse it, we can do it again”.

There is a problem, however, in regarding the York find as a fake or as something insignificant freighted with too much meaning by academics with an agenda, for the evidence of the cosmopolitanism of Roman Britain – the thoroughgoing internationalism of its military and administrative machine – is lying about everywhere. In northwest Glasgow, Higgins, following the traces of the Antonine Wall, moves from New Kilpatrick Cemetery, full of the graves of Curries, Gillespies and Capaldis, to the prosperous suburb of Bearsden, where a set of Roman bathhouses can be found among the large gardens and adjacent to a 1970s block of flats. “When the archaeologists analysed sewage deposits from the Roman latrines,” she writes, “they found that the soldiers had been eating raspberries, strawberries and figs, and poppy- and coriander-seed bread. As were, I suspected, the middle classes of today’s Bearsden.”

It is, of course, possible to shut one’s mind to all of this cultural complexity and hybridity, to see Roman Britain as just a top layer, and Norman Britain another one, under which the unchanging life of the sturdy common people ‑ first Britons then Saxons ‑ went on uninterrupted and largely unchanged throughout the centuries. For the island-race ultras this is a comforting theory, but theories can often be undermined by evidence.

For the people that made itself great and painted the globe pink on a plain diet of roast beef and ale, wine, one can affect to believe, was until very recently a drink for toffs only, while hummus, tapenade or guacamole were, and are, indulged in only by funny folk. But in 2011 excavations in the buried Roman town of Silchester in Hampshire reached down below the Roman stratum to the ancient British settlement underneath, dating back at the very least two thousand years. Perhaps the most remarkable object they found there was an olive stone. And thus the idea of Britain’s “natural” cultural isolation from Europe seemed, yet again, to be compromised by a tiny piece of detritus half the size of a fingernail, casually tossed aside no doubt by some Iron Age metrosexual.

Charlotte Higgins’s Under Another Sky is published by Vintage at £9.99.

5/7/2015

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