Review: Sarah Bakewell, How to Live or a Life of Montaigne

I read this book after giving up on Robert Heilbroner’s The Worldly Philosophers, which I found intolerable. Heilbroner’s leading idea seems to be that you spin out a noisy yarn about your subject of the moment (I got no farther than Adam Smith – absent minded, he was, did I already tell you that? Well, he was absent minded. D’you know what he did one day? No? Well, I’ll tell you   …) and then, when the reader is open-mouthed with amazement, you shove a spoonful of disgusting Economic Theory down their throat. Not painful at all, you see, give it a Human Interest and, see, you’re away.

So Sarah Bakewell’s book was something of a welcome contrast. It is not technical or difficult and it provides a Life of Montaigne. At the same time it seeks to engage us with his writings in an organised and developed manner. I think it works very well. You get a strong sense of how writings celebrated for their digressiveness are held together by a fairly coherent body of thought.

I’ve never read Montaigne’s Essais, but I now know that I owe to Montaigne an idea I have liked and deployed on several occasions – but drawing on a version of Montaigne’s thought found in Malebranche. It’s the idea that paying attention – being able to pay attention, being in the habit of doing so, valuing the time it takes – expresses a natural piety of the soul. It’s a way of acknowledging the importance of the world and our own unimportance in face of it. It may be a phenomenon of nature or a work of art or simply another person – but if we can’t or don’t stop, look, listen - then we are not only letting down the object which invites our attention but ourselves. Maybe you could say: we don’t live our lives unless we pay attention to our situation at this or that moment in time.

I always think of very young children, capable of extraordinary absorption in tasks they have set themselves and at which they persist until disturbed, usually by some adult in a hurry.

Then I am reminded of something in my life which provided me pleasure but which now, in retrospect, makes me feel a bit proud. I once had a lover who after showering in the mornings, plumped herself down on the bed  to dry her hair. She had lots of hair and drying it was a serious business. I always sat and watched, at a distance and without speaking. I never tidied away the breakfast things, read the newspaper or otherwise distracted myself. It was such a pleasure just to sit and watch, her and all the intricate work involved in drying that hair. I was very happy.

I digress from Sarah Bakewell’s book. It runs to over 300 pages, has a fine Apparatus of Notes and References but isn’t written by an academic – the outside funding to assist the work’s completion came from literary Funds. You may take that as a recommendation.

Review: Caroline Walton and Ivan Petrov, Smashed in the USSR

This book is a testimony to the strength of the human body. Ivan Petrov lived to the age of 67 (1934 - 2001) despite a brutal upbringing in a polluted Soviet industrial town, the hunger and cruelty of Soviet labour camps, police beatings, the hazards of life as a tramp, and above all alcohol - not just vodka but home-made varieties: eau de cologne, paint stripper and furniture polish. 

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, he ended up in London as an asylum seeker (though what he was seeking asylum from is not indicated) who, though continuing his career as an alcoholic, made contact with Caroline Walton and entrusted to her his tape-recorded life story. It is published a dozen years after his death, with no indication of the cause of the delay - except perhaps Caroline Walton's identification of herself as also an alcoholic.

It would be foolish to take Ivan Petrov as a reliable narrator and we do not know how much Caroline Walton has had to edit his words to make it the fascinating read that it has become. But the fascination is not in the "truth to self" of the book but in the details of the underbelly of Soviet life out in the Urals, Central Asia and the Caucasus. It's the details about domestic violence, vodka shops, casual labour, riding the trains, run-ins with the police, improvised alcohol, sleeping rough, Soviet rehab centres, and much more - including the fact that in the Soviet Union even tramps read books - that makes this book thoroughly worthwhile - and more informative than Oliver Bullough's Last Man in Russia reviewed previously on this Blog. 

Review: Shereen El Feki, Sex and the Citadel

This is a book of many surprises. Not the least the fact that someone exists to write it. Towards the end of the book, El Feki defines herself as a "liberal Muslim woman" (page 292). She has an Egyptian Muslim father, who she identifies as her "research associate" ( p 334), and a Welsh mother, a convert from Christianity to Islam. Shereen El Feki grew up in Canada.

She writes as an experienced journalist and and her approach in this book is that of a serious journalist - there is an impressive Bibliography. Her stance is firmly sex-positive: "sexual rights can be realized, and exercised, in an Islamic framework ....Religion is not black and white, as conservatives would have us believe; on sex, as with so many matters in life, Islam offers at least fifty shades of grey" (p 293).

That kind of cheeky humour runs through the book as she narrates her travels around the Arab world, but focussing on Egypt, engaging with people, talking with them about their sexual practices, satisfactions and frustrations and then setting the interviews into a broader historical and social context. No one seems unwilling to talk to her - women, men, Imams, doctors, lawyers, police officers, taxi drivers. And she writes about everything you could think to put on a list: heterosexual relations, same sex relations, prostitution, female genital mutilation (though she uses the word "cutting"), sex toys, porn, rape and harassment, HIV, marriage and its alternatives ...

I found one section particularly interesting, where she talks critically about "identity politics" (chapter 6). Some of her interviewees see "Identity Politics" as a Western ideology which has the potential to be divisive and to get in the way of creating a tolerant (liberal) environment in which everyone can get on with their own lives without harassment. It doesn't help, so the line of criticism goes, if groups seem to be arguing for special treatment or privileges or a kind of recognition which goes beyond that involved in giving mutual respect. I felt sympathetic to this position - but simply as someone who is irritated by the endless supply of English newspaper columnists who make their living banging the drum for their favourite group rather than for everyone who is oppressed. 

Interesting, intelligent, funny - a really good book!

Essay: Holocaust Education

Fifty years ago, around the time of my 17th birthday, I travelled to Sweden for a long summer holiday job in the Hotel Siljansborg, Rättvik. I travelled by train and on the way back through Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium sat opposite two midddle-aged women, one dressed as a Nun. The woman who wasn't a Nun started a conversation with me, in English, explaining that her sister spoke only Polish. They were going - or had been - to collect an Award, a Medal conferred on the Nun. Even the Polish  communist government has to recognise that she is a brave woman, said her sister. She was in Auschwitz, she continued and - taking her sister's arm - rolled up her sleeve to show me a number tattooed on her forearm.

My Holocaust education did not  begin in school - we did Tudors and Stuarts [but see Footnote] -  though my private reading as a teenageer included a book of Yevtushenko's poems, published by Penguin, and including his Babi Yar. As a young child, even in primary school, I knew the word "Belsen". (Adults might say that a very thin and ill-looking person was "like someone out of Belsen")

Fast forward thirty years and in the mid 1990s I took my two daughters to Amsterdam and - I think at the instigation of my then partner - we visited the Anne Frank house. It was more interesting than I had imagined likely and quite moving. A couple of years previously I had visited Yad Vashem, about which I had mixed feelings: I disliked the American sponsorship-cum-memorial plaques which I felt out of place - tacky, if you like. I was moved by the black basalt columns which show the death toll of Jews for each European country.

Until now, I had never read Anne Franks' book. It runs to over 300 pages in the expanded 1990s edition but held my interest all the way through. Even though you open the book knowing how things end in August 1944 when the Frank family's hiding place was betrayed, it has a "What Happens Next?" page turning readability. It's well written, the candour is astonishing, and the topics discussed range widely over family relations, life in the Secret Annexe, teenage anguish, world politics, history and literature, Jewishness and religion - though very little, actually, of those last two. Anne Frank's religion is of the most simple and humane kind and commands immediate respect.

If you were a Minister of Education, it would be very tempting to say that this is a book which all teenagers should read. Not because it tells you much about the Holocaust (though there is some of that via radio broadcasts heard and word of mouth picked up) but because it shows you someone who could be your friend in school, socially advantaged though with pretty much the same preoccupations as anyone of your age - but to whose extermination a vast pan-European organisation was dedicated.

The Franks were arrested in August 1944 and in September shipped on the last transport to leave the Netherlands for Auschwitz. None of them were gassed. Anne's mother died in Auschwitz in January 1945 but Anne's father survived there until the camp was liberated by the Russians, after which he was repatriated to the Netherlands.

Anne and her sister Margot were shipped from Auschwitz back to Germany in October 1944, to Bergen-Belsen. Hannah Arendt's book categorises Belsen as a camp for "high value" Jews, who might be traded for goods or money, one step down from Theresienstadt - the show camp (and only camp) which was open to inspections by the International Committee of the Red Cross. But though at the end of 1944, Himmler called a halt to the Final Solution - reckoning that more could be made from using those Jews still alive as hostages - the break-down of the Reich as the war drew to a close meant that Belsen degenerated into a hell of starvation and disease. Both Anne and her sister Margot died of typhus, at the end of February or beginning of March 1945. British troops liberated the camp in April and in my childhood "Belsen" was shorthand in England for all that was inhuman about the Nazis. (I vaguely recall seeing the photographs). I don't think I even knew the names of the death camps in the East - Chelmo, Majdanek, Sobibor, Treblinka.

Hannah Arendt at one point in her forceful and wide-ranging book estimates that those Jews who went into hiding in Nazi Europe had a 50 - 50 chance of survival. Those who didn't had a less than ten percent chance.

Fifty years after its original publication, it reads well as a stimulus to thinking about many of the complex threads which have to be woven together in any programme of Holocaust education - motivation, levels and degrees of responsibility, appropriate punishment and reparation and much more.

The well-off and relatively well-connected family of Otto Frank nearly made it through the War. The deaths of Edith Frank and her daughters were no longer even policy when they happened, other than insofar as they were part of Hitler's last wish that everyone die together.  

Note: Proofing this Blog before posting it, I did have a flashback to seeing a Holocaust educational film (it must have been Resnais Night and Fog (1955)) but I don't know if this is something I saw as a sixth former at Bromley Grammar School for Boys or watched much later as a school teacher alongside a class of my pupils.

Review: Stephen Grosz, The Examined Life

Stephen Grosz begins this book by telling us that for twenty five years he has worked as a psychoanalyst, spending more than 50,000 hours with patients. I calculated:  that's 2000 hours a year which implies 40 hours a week, 50 weeks of the year. He's working too hard.

He has lots of stories to tell and each of the thirty plus short chapters is a well-crafted vignette of encounters with patients, mostly in private practice in London and making use of the traditional Freudian couch. The text is double spaced which means you turn pages quickly and finish in a few hours.

All the stories are readable and some - especially those which deal with serious illness and dying - are moving.

I think that broadly Freudian psychoanalytic theory is the best of the bunch, despite attempts by some of its adherents to make of it a cult (their own) rather than the theoretical basis of a regime of treatment. Many of the criticisms are misguided. In particular, critics fail to realise that all theories are undetermined by data - another theory will always fit the same data - which does not mean that theories are useless or that none are better than others. The weak point in Freudianism is not the theory but whether a curative therapeutic practice can be founded on it - on that, there is reason to doubt.

One of the most challenging stories in the book (pp 158 - 165) concerns a young boy (seen in a public health service context) who eventually puts it to the analyst that his brain doesn't work - not like other people's - and says that it's sad. And all the analyst can do is agree, "Yes, it is really, really sad" (page 165)

For me, the strong point in Freudianism has always been the theory of dreams and the possibility which arises from that of using them diagnostically and therapeutically. So illiterate have we become that some people think that Freud's dream theory is a theory of dream symbols when it starts out, quite explicitly,  to demolish the dream symbol approach and replace it with one which argues that meaning is created in a context - and that the key context for a dream is the events of the recent past (in the strictest theory, the previous day). So you do not look up a Symbol in a Dream Book which tells you what it Stands For - no, you lead your patient back to the recent past and link the Unicorn in the dream to some event,some conversation, some book recently read and work from that link.

As you read Grosz's vignettes, you see him constantly probing for a context not only for dreams but for all symptoms and odd behaviours. Only when you find their context do they begin to yield up their meaning. In particular, he looks for a context where something otherwise bizarre makes sense as a way of achieving satisfaction or avoiding a feared outcome or as indirect acknowledgment of something known but not acknowledged.

Review: Waitman Wade Beorn, Marching Into Darkness

This academic study of the Wehrmacht and the Holocaust in Belarus is an exemplary work. It is clear, concise and meticulous in its presentation of primary material and balanced and open-minded in its evaluation and explanation of the events - the crimes - that it describes. At no point when I was reading this book did I feel that I was engaging with anything other than a thorough, patient and honest study.

Beorn's study looks at the early stages of the Holocaust in the Bloodlands of eastern Europe - the so-called Holocaust by Bullets which accompanied the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941-2 and which saw over a million Jews in the Baltics, Belarus and Ukraine shot either by Einsatzgruppen dedicated to the task or by units of the Wehrmacht. (By way of addition to the tally, of the three million Soviet POWs captured by the Germans in 1941 some two million were dead within a year, by starvation or disease or execution).

His specific focus is on the involvement in 1941-2 of regular German military units in village and town-level round-ups and executions of Jewish civilians in Belarus. These were units behind the front lines, initially responsible for administration of the civilian population until this role was partly or largely taken over by German civil administrative organisations and Nazi outfits.

He tries to show how Wehrmacht involvement in the killing of Jews increased and became routinised but was never completely unproblematic: there were unit commanders and individual soldiers who declined to take part (and suffered no subsequent harm) and there were others who dragged their feet or passed the buck onto subordinates. Beorn tries to tease out the factors which made soldiers and their leaders enthusiastic or reluctant to murder non-combatant civilians, including women and children.

If I have a criticism it is that though Beorn evokes it in various ways, he does not fully recognise that ethnic cleansing and genocide were embedded in European and other "civilised" cultures, right up to the 20th century. "Who now remembers the Armenians?" asked Hitler, referring to the Turkish genocide of 1915. And when German soldiers went Jew-hunting in the forests of Belarus in 1941, that was only a dozen years after the last "Abo Hunt" in Australia. (Hitler also referred to the extermination of Aborigines and Red Indians as a context for the grand Plan to clear the conquered Ostlands for new German settlers). One consequence of evoking the broader context is, unfortunately, to suggest that there is much less needing to be explained when it comes to looking at ordinary men as killers. They do it only too easily. That is one reason for always trying to avoid wars, even just ones, because your own side will certainly behave badly given half a chance.

At one point (page 242), Beorn expresses dismay and bewilderment that ordinary soldiers could (for example) package up the clothing of murdered Jewish children and ship it back to their own families. But just twenty years before, Red Army soldiers re-taking Ukraine and South Russia from Whites and Cossacks were doing pretty much the same. Their very large parcels home could be sent at special, cheaper Red Army tarriffs. Later, the post office documentation (with postage stamps affixed) which accompanied the parcels was retrieved from the archives and sold off for foreign currency through the Soviet Philatelic Association. You can find them now in collections and auctions. The same is true for their later German equivalents.

If you read this book along with Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands (previously reviewed here) you would have a very good picture of the eastern European killing fields where World War Two was fought out at its most horrific.

Review: Douglas Thompson, Stephen Ward Scapegoat

Stephen Ward was born in 1912 and died in 1963. Except for Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, nearly all his friends and acquaintances who were of the same generation are dead and so can be written about freely without fear of British libel laws. Douglas Thompson's book contains much gossip about the Forbidden Pleasures once enjoyed by the now deceased.

There would be more gossip available if the Public Records were opened but those relating to the Profumo Scandal (Ward, Keeler, Rice-Davies, Ivanov, Profumo) have been sealed beyond the normal period of fifty years. A week before I am writing this, Richard Davenport-Hines (author of An English Affair reviewed here a year ago on 13 January 2013) suggested that this is partly to protect the reputation of Prince Philip who met Dr Stephen Ward back in 1947 over lunches at the dissolute Thursday Club - a sort of older man's Bullingdon Club - and was later sketched by him.

Thompson's book and Davenport- Hines' (which does not appear in Thompson's Bibliography) are chalk and cheese. Hines is not an academic but writes at the academic end of the genre of political biography and political history. Thompson is a journalist who writes in sentences which aren't. He doesn't footnote the claims he makes and often you do not know whether you are reading cut and paste from newspaper gossip columns going back to the 1950s or whether you are reading interview material of  unknown vintage. Occasionally, he dates a claim and attributes it to an interview he has conducted but not often enough for anyone interested in getting closer to the truth.

Every society forbids some Pleasures, either by Law or Public Opinion or both. Every society makes the prices of transgression higher for some citizens than others. Often enough, it is the poor and powerless who are punished hardest but quite often the rich and powerful are hardest hit - if they are found out and if police or press decide (or are persuaded) not to turn a blind eye.

The desire to experience Forbidden Pleasures affects members of all classes and in any big city, there will be rich and powerful individuals seeking the forbidden. And where there is demand there will always be a supply. The rich and powerful soon find themselves in contact with criminals and lower class individuals on the make. And in the Cold War of the 1950s and 1960s, they also found themselves in contact with the Spies of the Other Side.

Drugs, Gambling but above all Sex provided the soft underbelly of the post - 1945 British Establishment and it was through it that Soviet spies hoped to extract juicy morsels of intelligence and even to recruit Agents willing to go in search of their own country's secrets. It was hardly Soviet rocket science which propelled Soviet Naval Attaché Yevgeny Ivanov into the hedonistic set around Dr Stephen Ward. It was the bleeding obvious.

The people around Ward could not protect themselves by Coming Out. What they were doing was either illegal (homosexuality, for example) or regarded by Public Opinion as incompatible with holding any position in politics or government administration, not to mention the Church and the Law. The British War Minister John Profumo and his wife the actor Valerie Hobson may have agreed between themselves to have an open marriage, but in the court of public opinion, that still left Profumo an adulterer - and, of course, a security risk the moment Christine Keeler began to share her pillow talk with Colonel Ivanov (and she says she did).

All this is well-known and much-written about. More importantly, Thompson agrees with Davenport-Hines' and others (including most recently Geoffrey Robertson QC) that the prosecution of Stephen Ward  for living on immoral earnings was a frame-up initiated by the then Home Secretary the very-Christian Henry Brooke, eagerly executed by officers of the Metropolitan Police (using quite a bit of intimidation of witnesses), assisted by the security services, hurried along by the Judiciary, and finally whitewashed in the Enquiry conducted by the very Christian Lord Denning. The whole affair shows the Nasty side of an Establishment fearful of being discredited in the eyes of its overseer, the US government, and, more specifically, fearful of Conservative electoral defeat.

Things have changed. When 48 or 49 year-old Stephen Ward first asked Christine Keeler for a dance, back in 1961, he had false teeth (this titbit from Douglas Thompson). Like his entire generation, his mouth tasted of tobacco and his clothes were impregnated with cigarette smoke. Cologne would have disguised lack of personal hygiene.

Nowadays, Ward would not have false teeth and might well not smoke. Some of the Forbidden Pleasures are no longer forbidden and can be talked about and enjoyed, most obviously, the homosexual ones. But overall, I doubt that much has changed. From time to time, the Gossip columns still finger government ministers they suspect of enjoying Forbidden Pleasures, occasionally a Minister still falls on his sword, whistleblowers are still given a nasty ride - and as for the spies, well, that's the biggest change; they have gone electronic.


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Note: Normally, the books I review here are bought from bookshop displays. On this occasion, the publishers of Douglas Thompson's book (John Blake) wrote to offer me a Review Copy.