Sylvia Townsend Warner and a Proposed Dorchester Effigy

 

This is the full version of a letter of which a small  extract appears in M.C.'s column at the Times Literary Supplement November 15 2024. A sketch of the proposed effigy was published in the TLS on November 8 2024.

Dear Editor

Sylvia Townsend Warner’s life and work are parts of living cultures: her books are readily available in print (I read that much credit is due to Professor Peter Swaab); they are enjoyed, discussed, and written about. Her biography gets attention and is complex, interesting, and open to many interpretations. What more can one ask for?

It seems that £13 000 has already been raised towards the £85 000 cost of placing a polite effigy of her on a park bench in Dorchester (M.C 8 November). If this unimaginative private project is completed, it will diminish her life and work.

Most new “public art” is doomed to scorn and neglect, usually deserved; apart from the obvious case of Banksy, it is strangled at birth by committee think. The only good effigies around are those burnt on Bonfire Nights.

Trevor Pateman 

Nick Bradley Four Seasons in Japan

 

This is a very well-conceived and structured book; it kept my attention throughout. Flo Dunthorpe living in Japan decides to translate an obscure though modern Japanese novel titled Sound of Water by Hibiki and pitches her material to a US publisher before she has completed the translation and before she tries to contact author and publisher for permission. The novel comprises her completed translation divided into sections each representing one of the four seasons. Sandwiched between and within sections are third person accounts of Flo’s troubled life, parts of which parallel the troubled lives of the main characters of the Japanese novel. A late section narrates the search to identify and find the reclusive author.

As I began reading I felt that the prose had been constructed deliberately to suggest a first draft (literal) translation of the novel; the prose was rather stilted and didn’t flow or transition easily - things which a re-draft would correct. But maybe it was meant to suggest something about Japanese formality and if so I think it succeeded.  However, I encountered prose choices which caused me unease

Flo Dunthorpe signs off in “Tokyo 2023” and the Hibiki novel appears to be set sometime after 1990 since the characters have smartphones; the Japanese LINE messaging app they are using dates from 2011. But the register of the novel often suggests an earlier period and even then some of the exclamations and idioms which characters use feel awkward. Some examples relating just to one of the three or four main characters, Ayako, the elderly and strict grandmother:.

“Put that blasted thing away …” said Ayako in reaction to her grandson consulting a Weather App. (p 118)

“Usually she [Ayako] would’ve made a cup of coffee for herself and sat down next to Sato for a decent chinwag” (p 125)

“Those were the kinds of stories Ayako used to like to overhear and snicker about …. Telling her the juicy news she so desperately wanted to hear” (p 223)

“Oh wow” said Ayako, in surprise (p 255)

“I kept going. I never gave up…. I was discovered by some Mountain Rescue guys who whisked me off to hospital” (p 267)

It suggests an author who is a non-native speaker who is looking online for idioms (a mixture of American and English ones) and not quite getting it right either for time or place.

I have other minor niggles; Nick Bradley uses “must’ve” and “would’ve” in authorial prose – see the example from page 125 above. I can’t remember the last time I saw ‘em used. They stick out.

Anna Reid A Nasty Little War - Review

 

There are people who reckon that war brings out the best in human beings; no one claims that for civil wars which unfailingly bring out the worst. Wars are orderly, conducted with etiquettes which often hold up, and historically they have usually been conducted intermittently as set-piece combats.  Civil war is unremittingly present and at its heart is always the fear and insecurity created by not being able to readily identify who around you can still be trusted and how close is the danger.

Anna Reid’s A Nasty Little War is a thoroughly researched, unsettling account of failed Western (Allied) intervention on the side of White forces in the Russian Civil War between 1917 and 1920 which ended in victory for the Red forces of the Bolshevik regime. A cover comment from Anne Applebaum that the book is “Witty and Elegant” seems misplaced; Reid quotes frequently from diaries and memoirs – usually American or British - which try to make light of things or are comically inept but they only add to the reader’s (or this reader’s) unease. The war was unspeakably cruel and merciless;  criminals and psychopaths, fanatics and sadists, had more or less unrestricted opportunity to loot, torture, rape (always including child rape) and murder – the victims casually and often mistakenly identified as enemies but sometimes systematically chosen, most obviously the Jews whose separate residential areas made it easy to conduct a pogrom.

The Romanovs who ruled Russia for three centuries were constantly enlarging their Empire by expanding the contiguous land mass they controlled; only Sakhalin and Alaska (plus some scattered islands) were sea crossings away unless you add northern California. To the west they expanded into what are now Finland, the three Baltic states, and half of Poland. To the east they not only went in a straight line to Vladivostok but occupied what are now the -stans (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikstan, Turkmenistan Uzbekistan). In addition, they pushed into Mongolia and northern China whenever possible and on the Pacific coast down to the border with Korea at Port Arthur (later Dairen, now Dalian). To the south there was all of what are now Ukraine and Moldova together with the Caucasus (Georgia, Azerbaijan, Armenia) reaching the border with Persia. As territorial gain from the First World War, Nicholas the Second’s governments had their hopes set on Austrian Galicia, the northern coast of Turkey, and Constantinople. The Greek isthmus of Mont Athos also featured in their thoughts as did Afghanistan and the North West Frontier of British India. At the same time, and hardly surprisingly, the government in far-away St Petersburg felt permanently insecure about its borderlands but seems to have believed that by constantly expanding the extraordinary length of its borders they would gain security not lose it.

The relationship of St Petersburg to most of its Empire was essentially colonial ; ethnically and linguistically hugely diverse, the empire was ruled over by Russians who spoke Russian and would not contemplate any other language. In contrast, both the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires accepted linguistic diversity; the early Soviet Union took the same approach. The Romanovs were intolerant of all religions other than the compliant Russian Orthodox and discrimination against Jews was legally enshrined long after it had been removed in other European countries. And, of course, serfdom was not abolished until 1861. As is usual with empires, the relation of centre to periphery was extractive; wealth was piled up at the centre.

The fabulously wealthy Tsarist regime was harsh, incompetent and unfeeling; the lives of this Leviathan’s oppressed native and colonial peoples  nasty, brutish and short. But in the end the awful Nicholas II was brought down not by the Bolsheviks but by a coalition of his own army officers and powerful commercial and industrial interests with a liberalising agenda. By the time of their downfall, the Romanovs inspired no love or loyalty; even the White armies which fought against the Bolsheviks did not propose the restoration of the Romanovs. They had to wait for  Tsar Putin and his puppet Rolex-wearing Orthodox church to rehabilitate them and their ambitions.

No sooner had the Allies achieved victory in the First World War and divided the territorial spoils, which their populations were supposed to regard as compensation for all the dead young men, than they embarked on - albeit modest – adventurous interventions in support of those forces seeking to bring down the Bolsheviks. Only Finland did not deserve support: the victorious side in its own civil war sided with Germany as it did its government in World War Two.  But those who got support hardly had their credentials checked, something which still happens whenever the West decides to “intervene” and finds itself tied to some crook, psychopath or simple incompetent who has no popular support. The dishonesty about who they were dealing with (the reality of  anti-Jewish pogroms routinely denied by all the intervention commanders) and why is recounted in disturbing detail by Anna Reid. I shan’t try to summarise it; it’s worth reading in its own right.

Reading the book, it occurred to me that in civil wars everyday life does go on in the background of fighting and atrocities. Reid has something to say about this. In Russia from 1917 to 1920 various local and regional governments did function though only partially and never disinterestedly. If they received aid from well-meaning foreign relief organisations you could be sure that very little of it would reach the intended recipients; later, Herbert Hoover’s American Relief Administration which operated in early Soviet Russia insisted on control over distribution by its own representatives.

One indicator of “everyday life” a hundred years ago is provided by the post: could you send a letter and would it be received? This index produces a startling result which indicates the weakness of the Bolshevik regime at the height of the civil war.  From 1 January 1919 to early June 1920, it was not possible to send a letter abroad from any part of Bolshevik-controlled Russia. The Bolsheviks had no access to ports or only to blockaded ports, had no official relations established with immediate or distant neighbours, and probably  had no foreign currency to pay third-party costs. Going round the clock, they did not control Archangel, Vladivostok, the Black Sea ports or any of the Baltic ports; Petrograd was at least partially blockaded. In addition, since a lot of mail going abroad would probably be written by hostile elements mail censorship would need to be in place and for the Bolsheviks that meant a centralised organisation in Moscow or Petrograd. When postal services were restored in June 1920, foreign mail was always routed via the centre except in the Far East where there was still a notionally independent government in Vladivostok (the Far Eastern Republic). A large censorship office was created, its activity readily identified by special cancellations with three triangles at the base. At the height of the civil war period, it was in any case unrealistic to route mail through to Moscow or Petrograd since the constantly shifting front line would mean that mail would be endlessly delayed and subject to capture by White forces who might be able to glean significant information from reading it.

The Whites could get mail abroad thanks principally to the good offices of the warships of Britain, France,  USA and other intervention countries which did not charge for carrying it though they might require that it be franked with whatever stamps were locally in use. At the time the most popular indoor hobby in Western Europe and the USA was stamp collecting and stamp dealers did a good trade in the ports of Archangel, Odessa, Riga, Tallinn, and Vladivostok exporting whatever stamps were being locally produced to replace Imperial Russian ones. In some cases, the dealers were involved in the production of the stamps themselves and their names remain associated with those stamps. In contrast, the Bolsheviks issued no stamps of their own until 1921; they used up old Imperial ones and reprinted them as necessary on inferior paper and generally without perforations - the machines were out of use.

*

A few picky points: The town of Valk /Walk  which straddles the Estonian/Latvian border is quite wrongly located on the Baltics map as inside Russia; page 228 “Bermondt-Avalov” was at the time, I think, more often referred to as “Avalov-Bermondt” though Wikipedia opts for the B-A order; transliteration rules change – at the time it was “General Wrangel” in both the UK and USA not the anachronistic “Vrangel” used by Reid; in the literature “Grigoriy Semyonov” is usually referred to  as “Ataman Semenov” though Wikipedia uses Reid’s version. The “Ataman” is a Cossack title he awarded himself.

Rebecca F Kuang Yellowface - Review

 

It’s nearly impossible to buy a new novel in a bookshop; unless it’s a Fitzcarraldo edition you have to buy a more-or-less lurid and ludicrous package. The packaging around Yellowface starts as it means to go on: “Addictive” is the first word you see (top left), predictable because lazy critics are addicted to the word. Turn to the back cover and a graduate of Instincts of the Herd 101 at Glamour magazine gives us “The book that everyone is talking about”, not quite A-grade because “that” is redundant. It does the job of making you feel you could be the one sitting out the dance.

But step inside the back cover and a standard-issue glamorous author pic is paired with an unusual set of credentials: a Master’s degree from Cambridge, ditto from Oxford, and a Ph D in progress at Yale. Rebecca F. Kuang is more than clever; she’s serious.

In the novel, she creates as first-person narrator a white woman in her twenties who has some talent but not quite enough to bring her major success in the world of modern fiction. This does create one problem which I don’t think is fully resolved: her narrator, June Hayward aka (at her publisher’s urging) Juniper Song, will undermine the identity Kuang needs for her character if this fictional narrator writes too well or is too funny in her own right. The tricky task is then to engage the reader and make them laugh or think by exploiting the gap which we know exists between the very talented author-creator Kuang and the novel’s lesser ranked narrator Hayward/Song. In other words, the task is to create ironic distance because no one really wants to read flat prose created to make a narrator credible. It does not always come off: there are some flat passages (bottom p 181, too many “I”’s) and there are a couple of occasions when a tone-deaf DumbDown App takes over (perhaps at the publisher’s instigation):

“I get my first Royalties statement … I’ve earned out. This means that I’ve sold enough copies to cover my already sizeable advance and that from here on out I get to keep a percentage of all future sales” (p 93) In this passage DumbDown directly addresses the ignorant reader and does so again here:

“The paperback edition just came out, which generates a nice sales bump – paperbacks are cheaper, so they sell a bit better” (p 193). Well, I never would have guessed.

And at page 63 the narrator offers a Wikipedia paragraph on what “sensitivity readers” do. I find it simpler to characterise them as Sunday School teachers who have missed their vocation of telling cross-legged children that Jesus doesn’t like it if you fart.

The plot is simple enough: White American June’s Korean friend Athena Liu – a much more successful writer - chokes to death while they are getting drunk together leaving behind the typescript of a nearly-completed novel which June steals and plagiarises to create her own best-seller. The thoroughly-researched story-line of that novel concerns the many thousands of Chinese workers who were shipped to act as (more-or-less indentured) labourers on the Western Front in World War One. So weighty stuff.  June does have to fill in some missing bits and mug up the history to make herself credible as the supposed author. Jointly with her editor they delete or soften passages which might not go down well in Disapprove-of-Everything-America-Online. It is here that Kuang has a lot of fun and makes us laugh though there is sufficient (and clever) ambiguity to allow opposing sides to laugh at the same gags.  I began to think reading these passages that Kuang has a fully-fledged essayist inside her just waiting for opportunities.

I would still advise her to adopt my own lifestyle. I have a Nokia dumbphone never upgraded to a smartphone though the handset has had to be replaced a few times since 2000; I don’t always carry it. I use a desk computer for writing Blog posts like this and a laser printer so that I can do manual proofing sitting in an armchair.  Smartphones ruin lives; when their users are about to cross the street they feel a sudden compulsive urge to consult the screen.

One named reviewer whose take on Kuang’s gags is probably different to mine reads Yellowface as a “take on white privilege” which rather misses the irony that “Yellowface” white American narrator June is the creation of a Chinese-born author doing what I suppose for symmetry should be called a “Whiteface” job. But how can Ivy League-Kuang know what it’s like to be a less talented white woman?

Warning: The next paragraph reveals a further twist to the plot.

I enjoyed the book – and especially the earlier part -  though I did guess the first of the final two twists to the story as early as page 194 of the 319. June/Juniper is stuck for what to write next after both The Last Front and her subsequent Mother Witch are outed for thorough-going plagiarism of the late Athena Liu’s work. She gets anxious and depressed but then realises that the way out of the room is through the door of a full-on confession which turns into - you guessed it - Yellowface.

Have You Read Any of These Books?

This is an old advertisement and trevorpateman.com is defunct. My books are still sold by Blackwells and generally cheaper there than on Amazon where my 64 page Sample Essays is currently on offer at £84.24 perhaps because Blackwells is out of stock. You can get one free from me, if you like. Just send a note with your address to Trevor Pateman, Unit 10, 91 Western Road, Brigfhton BN1 2NW, England

By the way as they say,  I have a new specialised Blog where I publish transcriptions of historically interesting old letters: trevorpatemans.blogspot.com 

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Review: Francis Mulhern and Stefan Collini, What Is Cultural Criticism?

 

I read in the newspapers (and so betray my age) that we are in the middle of world-wide culture wars, fought on multiple fronts by many millions firing off tweets, some of which land on newspaper pages where I encounter them. The title of this book may lead some unsuspecting browsers to think that it will have something to say about those wars. It doesn’t; the bulk of the text was written before Twitter was invented in 2006 and comprises exchanges between Francis Mulhern and Stefan Collini in which they praise and criticise each other in about equal proportions.

In What Is Cultural Criticism? Francis Mulhern provides the Marxist Super Ego. He thinks that there is no privileged position from which we can criticise; neither old-fashioned pre-1939 Kulturkritik (as he calls it, without italics) or more recent Stuart Hall-style Cultural Studies can provide a neutral metadiscourse about our culture. We should face up to this and embrace the truth that the only coherent interventions in cultural space are political ones and Cultural Politics the only viable option to discredited alternatives. We have to take the plunge: Mulhern’s latest book (2024) is thus appropriately titled Into the Mêlée. (The title includes two diacritical marks which Microsoft does not, in this case, supply automatically – I have had to insert them manually; it treats melee as an assimilated word (like hotel). Verso sticks with the traditional and Francophile-signalling version. The book could have been titled more simply Into the Fray.)

In relation to Mulhern’s Super Ego, Stefan Collini plays the part of persecuted Ego who patiently defends a practice of cultural criticism which, in relation to literary texts, attends closely to both words on the page and collateral information but doesn’t proceed on the assumption that the important thing is to assign the text to a box in some prior schematism, Marxist or otherwise. If this means you get to be accused of “liberalism”, so be it.

In this case, I think Collini’s fastidiousness wins. He has an outstanding record as diligent historical researcher and careful expositor and critic who writes lucid and vigorous prose. Those virtues are on display here. Mulhern I feel (and Collini uses the expression) over-theorises, as is the habit of punitive Super Egos. But as Collini observes, Mulhern’s own interventions in his other writings including some of those included in Into the Mêlée are not particularly schematic except insofar as he shows enthusiasm for chunking history so that Periods and Movements succeed each other rather like Modes of Production. But, in my view, Periods and Movements only exist so that academics can have Specialisms.

I have two criticisms and a bit of Id which needs to stage a fight.

I am getting older and have a habit now of repeating myself but surely not on the scale of Mulhern and Collini and even in this relatively short book.

More substantively – and this is especially in relation to Collini’s work – they are both rather too accepting of the inherited canon of authors about whom they are expected to have something to say. They don’t upset applecarts. The names of Matthew Arnold, T S Eliot, F R Leavis, Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart appear repeatedly. Stuart Hall gets in briefly as originator of Cultural Studies as we now know it.

Where are the surprises? Who has been left out? There is a Penguin Classics edition of George Eliot’s splendid essays in cultural criticism but she is entirely absent. Queenie Leavis does not appear; it’s true her Fiction and the Reading Public (1932) won’t be on the shelves of a local bookshop - you will need to go to Amazon for a Print on Demand copy. It may not be a very good book but it might be thought a precursor of what later in Birmingham came to be called Contemporary Cultural Studies.

And in relation to Matthew Arnold and F R Leavis, is it not time to move on and find someone else to write about, let alone promote in  stylish paperback? Culture and Anarchy is written in a daft style which invites lampoon; it’s hard to take seriously especially if, like me, you are a non-conformist tea-drinker. F R Leavis just announces Who’s Who in the Great Tradition and if you don’t make the cut (Laurence Sterne “trifler”; Charles Dickens “entertainer”) then, tough. And Leavis wasn’t even a nice man; he appalled me when as a naïve undergraduate I joined a group taking tea with him back in 1967. Asked a question about someone’s work he replied to the effect that he hadn’t read him for a long time but he was surely nasty now. An eyebrow went up. Is this cultural criticism?

That’s enough of the Id.

The Foyle's Bookshop Strike 1965

 Edited extract from a 2012 Blog post:

I was 17. After A levels in summer 1964 I travelled to Sweden to spend the summer working in a hotel and then went back to school for the Autumn Term to do Oxbridge Entrance (I already had a place but was after a Scholarship). After that, I  needed to work to raise funds to buy all the things on my Oxford college's required list - gown, mortar board, dark suit, white bow tie, laundry bag, that sort of thing.

Christina Foyle interviewed me, as she interviewed everyone (including the shop lifters). Here is my Contract of Employment which shows that I started work on 4 January 1965.



I was set to work in charge of Foyle's Postal Library, supplying romantic fiction to dowagers in rural areas and banned books to readers in the Republic of Ireland.



Foyle's sought to recruit people like me who were not going to stay and acquire employment rights. Many staff were recruited outside the UK. In those days, you needed work permits and Foyle's had a production line for obtaining them. Probably ninety percent of the staff were students or young people "in transit". Nowadays, that's true of most restaurants and bars in London but in 1965 it was not so common. At the time, I thought Foyle's was Dickensian. Now they look more like pioneers of the casualisation of labour.

It happened that in a given week too many new workers might arrive or too many old ones fail to leave. And some people might be about to pass the six month period after which they acquired additional statutory employee rights

This is where Mr Ronald Batty entered the scene. He was the store manager and Christina Foyle's husband. He walked the shop floors sacking people. He inspired genuine fear and on Fridays there were always people in tears, many of them pretty girls.

I had never really seen pretty girls before and I became serially infatuated. I had absolutely no idea how to approach them or relate to them and I was terribly burdened by my own circumstances - on Boxing Day 1964, just a week before my start at Foyle's, my mother with whom I lived had been taken in an ambulance to a mental hospital. I made the 999 call from a call-box. It was snowing.

Technically, people held work permits that restricted them to employment with Foyle's. But even then I guess it was possible to work illegally. Nonetheless, I was affected by the girls in tears and I did not like the ruthless atmosphere.

Nor did other people. Some of them, inspired by a charismatic Australian, Marius Webb, had started a clandestine branch of the Union of Shop Distributive and Alled Workers (USDAW). It had to be secret because Foyle's did not recognise Unions and Mr Batty would simply have sacked you. I became responsible for collecting Union dues in the building which housed the postal library and wholesale order departments. There must have been meetings too but I don't really recall them; there were discussions in the toilets.

After a few months, I found myself another job in local government and nearer home and hospital. It was a stupid move which I have always regretted: at Foyle's, I was meeting the kind of people I should have been meeting at my age and with my aspirations. If I had stuck it out, I might even have got myself a girl friend.



Soon after I left, USDAW called an official strike at Foyle's for Union recognition, better pay and other things. It was wildly popular - all kinds of people came forward to say that they had once worked for Christina Foyle and could they please give a large donation to Strike funds. Private Eye did a lovely and very funny piece.

On Saturdays I used to go and join the picket line. And when it was all over in July The Daily Worker put two pretty girls on the front page - a tradition which nowadays only The Daily Telegraph keeps up.