Review: Sarah Ogilvie The Dictionary People

The Victorians were terrific collectors of both the animate and the inanimate, often indiscriminately and always excited by the rare and exotic. Each variety of collector had its name, usually confected out of school Latin or Greek: there were the butterfly collectors (lepidopterists), stamp collectors (philatelists), coin collectors (numismatists), inscription hunters (epigraphers), book fiends (bibliophiles), the magpie collectors of junk in general (antiquaries or antiquarians).  The leading figures in each field were often obsessives who neglected others and themselves – their personal hygiene could not be relied upon – and, as in the notorious case of the bibliophile Sir Thomas Phillips, they could rack up very large debts in pursuit of their hobbies.

As part of this cast of thousands there were also the word collectors - the logophiles, philologists, and lexicographers - who form the subject matter of Sarah Ogilvie’s wonderfully researched,  beautifully conceived and well-executed book in which she narrates the story of how the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) was created in the period preceding the First World War when James Murray was its long-term editor.

I have my doubts about dictionaries and have never been a great user let alone reader. I possessed a Shorter OED as an undergraduate but don’t have one now.

The Victorian dictionary-makers claimed inspiration from the latest movements in German philology which to the Victorians was really one word, Germanphilology. Ogilvie alludes to Germanphilology but does not really tell us what its achievements were or why we should be concerned with them.

In dictionaries like the OED the living and the dead - words we might use and words we never will - are side by side, the living ones are supposedly illuminated by their history. Their ancestors are to be found in written texts - there was no sound recording of the past available to the Victorians - though the descendant language exists, of course, in both speech and writing. The heart of the lexicographer’s work is the tracking of the way words have been used through time, how their meanings have changed and expanded..

The OED was built very largely on the voluntary efforts of thousands of readers who read not for pleasure but to locate occurrences of words in print which could be dated from the publication in which they occurred and which fairly clearly indicated the sense in which they were being used. Just as stamp collectors hunt for the earliest date on which a Penny Black was used so the OEDs readers tried to push back in time the first occurrence in print of a word which – well, it may now be completely obsolete just like the Penny Black. There are some complications created by the fact that spellings change which are a small part of the problems around treating a word which was used then as the ancestor of a word which is used now.

In the case of what came to be called dialects it is almost exclusively in spoken form that they exist or existed (that’s what got them called dialects in the first place) and before the invention of sound recording they were hard to study unless some writer decided to try their hand at that excruciating genre known as the dialect novel. It was the institutionalised creation of “the English language” which created the dialects in the sense we now understand them.

But though a living language has the past in its DNA it has its meanings in the present, in the current inter-relations of its words as part of active and always mobile semantic fields many of them culturally reflected upon and policed to ensure that we get it right and, among other things, do not cause offence. It is a headache for the Office of Standards that nowadays so many Advanced Warnings are announced in bold letters and so many claims refuted daily in the newspapers

Ogilvie discusses the headaches which sexual words and swear words - she has nothing to say about blasphemous words - caused the Victorian makers of the OED. Alongside what it included there existed all that it excluded; despite the aspirations of its makers to achieve inclusivity. The OED belonged to the cancel culture of its time if only because Oxford University Press believed itself - as it still does - a guardian of morals. (Surprisingly, perhaps, Ogilvie’s book is not published by OUP but under the Chatto & Windus imprint of Penguin/Random House. But neither OUP or the University of Oxford come out of the story she tells in a particularly favourable light).

Propriety lasted well past the Victorian era: Lesbianism did not appear in the dictionary until 1976 before which time the entry for “Lesbian: of or pertaining to the island of Lesbos” was designed to enlighten no one (see Ogilvie page 226). The only concession to modernity was to provide an entry in English, not the Latin once used to keep knowledge of sexual matters away from the lower orders.

Of course, there might sometimes be a good reason for keeping a word out:

“Blandford wrote to him [James Murray] that aphrodisiomania, an abnormal enthusiasm for sexual pleasure, was a word coined by an Italian professor and ‘doubtful whether it can rank as English’. (Murray did not put it in the Dictionary).” (page 161). After all, since there was no abnormal enthusiasm for sexual pleasure anywhere in Victorian England, there was no need for a word anyway.

The OED fosters an illusion that there is such a thing as “the English language” which is more than a social construct or matter of belief and aspiration. In relation to vocabulary the longer you make the vocabulary list the more implausible it is to suppose that what you are cataloguing is “a language”. What you are really doing is attempting a cultural encyclopaedia from small fragments and with no clear boundaries. Ogilvie notes many cases where a word entered into the OED has just one known use (often in a novel or medical textbook) and seems to be unperturbed by that. But to admit words with one known use is really to admit that you are creating a bricabrac shop, a cabinet of curiosities mostly covered in dust.

If there was such a thing as “the English language” at the level of words it would be a fairly simple matter to decide if a word is in it or not. In printed text the presence of a word thought foreign is often indicated by use of italics. Would that it were that simple; loan words cause headaches for the typesetter: is “ennui” an English word and therefore not needing italic?  Does a person’s possession of a “je ne sais quoi” require italic? (See on this site my review of Richard Scholar’s Émigrés on 28 October 2020).

If that is not enough, consider the formation of words by analogy, a favourite of Germanphilologists and something which now excessively happens in the case of -philes and -phobes. I doubt that anyone would challenge the status of “Francophile” as a current English word nor give it italics. But if I am a lover of Australia can I call myself as Australophile ? Or just a lover of Australia? What gets a word into a (living) language is not that some obscure or awkward squad author invents it for a one-off occasion of use but that in some sense it catches on. Clearly, -phobes catch on more easily than   -philes –  that tells you a lot about our culture, I suspect. This morning, I read that Dmitry Peskov has been talking about Russophobia. Smart move; no one wants to be thought a  -phobe.

But because we understand the formation of words by analogy we don’t need a dictionary to know what someone means when they declare themselves an Australophile or Christophobe. It makes no sense to try to create a dictionary out of an indefinitely long list of personal idiosyncracies, including those favoured by the forgotten inventors of forgotten wheezes (see Ogilvie’s chapter on “Glossotypists”). This is the stuff of antiquarianism not of authoritative language guides.

I guess that out there are various answers to the question, How big a vocabulary do you need before you can be counted a fluent speaker or writer of language X? A few hundred? A couple of thousand? The contents of the Shorter version of the Longer dictionary? You can be perfectly fluent in English without knowing what’s in the OED though if you want to write like James Joyce or Vladimir Nabokov it will come in helpful when you want to bamboozle. Most often we identify non-native speakers not by their lack of vocabulary – which may be larger than our own – but by their accent which we can immediately and unreflectively identify as foreign without having any knowledge at all of phonetics, phonology or prosody. And in writing, it is small syntactic oddities not misuses of words which give the game away.

Whatever the English language might be (see footnote for my own answer), one might say that it is at least as much about phonetics, phonology, prosody and syntax as it is about words and their meanings.

Ogilvie records a regret which James Murray had towards the end of his life as the OEDs editor in chief: “If he had his time again, he said that he would have directed his Readers [ those who sought out quotations for the OED] differently, with the instructions, ‘Take out quotations for all words that do not strike you as rare, peculiar, or peculiarly used’”

But looking for the rare is exactly what all Victorian collectors/hobbyists did: they looked for rare butterflies (until they rendered them extinct), rare stamps, and exotic curios. They were uninterested in the ordinary, the everyday, things as common as ditchwater. They often went to great lengths to track down the rare and the exotic and that is what the makers of the OED did too. Like many or most collectors, they were attracted by escapes from everyday life..

 

Note

Trevor Pateman, “What is English if Not a Language?” in J. D. Johansen and H. Sonne, editors, Pragmatics and Linguistics. Festschrift for Jacob L Mey, Odense University Press 1986, pages 137-40.

Revised and republished in Trevor Pateman, Prose Improvements, degreezero 2017, pages 85-94.

Trevor Pateman Culture as Anarchy

 

My latest small book (64 pages) offers five inter-connected semi-academic/informal essays on the theme of cultural change. They develop ideas and arguments about Nature and Culture, Social Construction, Cultural Appropriation, and the inevitable failure of  social controls (cultural policing) to check cultural change. Most of the references are to popular cultures and minor cultural forms; included are discussions of creoles and tribal practices.

I don't  think many people now want to buy books when so much can be got for free on the internet so this limited edition (300 copies) book is being given away. Initial reception has been positive and I have received some nice emails about the style used to present my arguments.

To obtain a copy you just need to write to me with your name and full postal address But since our Royal Mail no longer aims to provide affordable postage, especially for overseas shipping, I ask that you show you are serious by sending  a letter or postcard to me rather than an email. 

My postal address is Trevor Pateman, Unit 10, 91 Western Road, Brighton BN1 2NW, United Kingdom.

Granta Issue 163 Best of Young British Novelists

 

Oh dear. Is this really the best?

The current issue of Granta (number 163) showcases in 270 pages the work of Young British Novelists who appear on its “once in a decade list of twenty of the most promising writers under forty living in the UK” (page 12). Each author has posed for a publicity photograph taken by Alice Zoo. More about that in a moment.

At some point in my life I began to encounter debut novels and debut novelists. In a British context that links semantically to the debutante, a well-endowed young woman of impeccable breeding who was presented to Queen Elizabeth the Second wearing virginal white dress before coming-out into a season of balls and parties where she would seek to attract the attentions of well-endowed young men looking for brood mares. The tradition had become sufficiently embarrassing for Elizabeth to abolish it in 1958. Of course, some of the debutantes went on to do non-debutantey type things, most notoriously Bridget Rose Dugdale who stole masterpiece paintings for the IRA and married an IRA gunman in her Irish prison. But most did their duty to reproduce the ancien regime.

For their coming-out photographs most of our debs of 2023 dress impeccably; they would not look out of place in Harvey Nichols or Debenham and Freebody (I borrow those two class indicators from Jean Rhys Good Morning, Midnight (1939)). Among those who don’t fit, K Patrick also contributes one of the better pieces - edgy and tightly constructed.

For the most part, the authors do not trouble us with obscenities, profanities or other breaches of etiquette. They have been schooled by their agents and publishers and before that their Creative Writing classes not to upset anyone. Lie back and think of the book clubs! Maybe for this decade’s crop of debs sensitivity nurses have combed through  the texts, squashing any lurking nits. It’s true, however, that Saba Sams’s prosaic low-life reportage has been allowed in, perhaps as a lesson to us all.

Eleanor Catton gets into this collection with a restrained piece which did not remind me at all of the confident, exuberant author of The Rehearsal, reviewed here on 6 January 2014 and reckoned “very,very good”.Of course, you are still allowed to howl but in that kind of restrained way which allows the Creative Writing seminar to co-exist on the same corridor as its neighbour, the Flower Arranging class. Yes, you can howl but of course not in the manner of that ugly face in Mr Munch’s nasty painting. 

The howling in these pieces is first-person in small family settings usually against the backdrop of natural scenery. In contrast, Isabel Hammad’s unusual piece is interesting because it directly connects to what one might call a bigger picture and Tom Crewe’s because it convincingly imagines how it feels to be one of the little people in someone else’s bigger picture.

But, overall, the picture is a modest watercolour or still life in oils. There is very little that jumps out of the page to demand attention or punches you in an unprepared gut or astonishes you with the virtuosity of its prose.

 

 

 

We Need to Talk about Diacritical Marks

 

At school in the early 1960s we had a History textbook which devoted a chapter to the Reign of Lewis XIV. My  teenage self was scornful: He’s called Louis XIV. Why are you removing useful information about how his name is actually spelt? I went on to find fault with other “translations”: Rome when it should be Roma, Joan of Arc when it should be Jeanne d’Arc and so on - but soon bumping up against the awkward squad of names which required diacritical marks. But I persisted and felt that such marks should be preserved too.

Now I’m having some doubts, partly occasioned by the fact that it’s a pain to type or typeset many or most letters which require diacritical marks, but partly for other reasons. Recently, I bought and read a new translation of Marguerite Duras’s 1944 novel La Vie Tranquille (translated with some acknowledged hesitation as The Easy Life (2022)). It’s very short and the publishers have typeset it rather elegantly with wide spacing. There are just a handful of named characters and places, all French and some requiring a diacritical mark (Clémence, Noël, Tiène, Ziès) and one which requires two: Jérôme. That name is actually the first word in the novel.

These accents are carried over faithfully from the French original which I have in front of me. The pages of that original are, of course, littered with diacritical marks of which French is very fond though that fondness is decreasing and some are being abandoned. But in the translation all of those are lost, except those attached to proper names. The opening three paragraphs of my French copy rack up a total of forty one diacritical marks; the English version has just eight, all generated by the repetition of the single word Jérôme. And on the page they simply look intrusive. Could the accents be left off so that we begin the novel reading about Jerome or would that just recreate the horrors of Lewis for Louis?

Interestingly, perhaps, I didn’t react adversely to Clémence or Noël and no doubt because acute accents and what I call umlauts are quite freely used in English to such an extent that, though I am typing in English, Microsoft automatically supplies the accent for café which is a thoroughly anglicised usage. So part of what is at issue is how the page looks as one reads and my experience when reading The Easy Life was that Jérôme is obtrusive though not more than that.

Now I turn to a novel I have just finished reading, Oyinkan Braithwaite’s My Sister, The Serial Killer. It’s a very good novel and I recommend it. First published in Nigeria in 2017, it has become a best seller in its US and UK editions, both published in 2019 and shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. It was written in English but contains a handful of short, untranslated, passages in which a character speaks in Yoruba. If you think written French is clotted with diacritical marks you’ve clearly never encountered written Yoruba. At page 113, for example, one and a half lines are occupied by nineteen or twenty words which rack up over twenty marks, one letter attracting two marks - a mark above the letter and a mark below.

Is Braithwaite a bi-lingual writer? No. In her Acknowledgments, she writes “Thank you to Ayobami Adebayo for taking the time to add the accents to my Yoruba” (page 226).   I google the name and up comes Wikipedia with Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀, a Nigerian writer with seven accents around her Yoruba name (five above and two below the o's). But Braithwaite in her Acknowledgments gives up on the accents and substitutes an accentless, anglicised version. Should her friend be offended?  

The general justification for diacritical marks is that they provide a pronunciation guide though often enough we will know the pronunciation already: an English child knows how to pronounce café before starting to read about such places. In the past, such marks proliferated in the hands of (often colonial and missionary) linguists trying to index in writing how native words were pronounced in everyday speech without having the benefit of a tape recorder to illustrate them directly. 

I am going to guess that the Yoruba accents we see in Braithwaite's book are the legacy of a colonial past. [ See now the footnote]. I am also going to guess that they are sufficiently complicated to be usable only by quite highly educated people.  And I assert more confidently that they gave me absolutely no help in figuring out how to pronounce the Yoruba passages; I don’t possess even the minimal expertise which I possess for French and German marks. Ah! But should I try to acquire some minimal expertise in written Yoruba? If I’m right, maybe such minimal expertise is not possible - maybe I’m staring at a very complicated system when I look at the words on Braithwaite’s pages, a system which will defy the average person’s attempts to understand it and which did not derive from the work of people trying to make life easy for us.

So what are the marks doing on her pages but missing in her Acknowledgments?  The options are not reassuring. They could be virtue signalling - I care enough about my Nigerian heritage to get it right. Or they could be adding exoticism to the Yoruba - and nowadays we might well regard that as problematic. Yoruba is one language among thousands, but one which happens to be spoken by over fifty million people - so up there with, say, Italian. So why make it more distant from us by retaining the diacritical marks in a book aimed at English language readers very few of whom will understand the  marks as something other than marks of Otherness?

The question becomes this: What would have been lost (and to whom) if Braithwaite had offered us an accentless Yoruba? After all, when I read her Acknowledgments I reckon I have a rough idea how to pronounce the name of Ayobami Adebayo. And so I think do you. And then, to complete the questions, What would have been lost if  Jérôme had become Jerome in my English Duras?

Note

Here is where to start: 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoruba_language

Josephine Tey Miss Pym Disposes

 

I suppose it was commercial publishers who invented the genre novel as something which could be packaged and sold as Crime, Mystery, Horror, Romance ….. That packaging created a handy distinction between low-brow and high-brow literature. Those who regarded themselves as above Genre novels  could simply walk away from shop shelves labelled with those identifications. Bloomsbury never became a Genre section though it clearly is for many readers.

The novelist Josephine Tey (1896 - 1952)  - also known as the playwright Gordon Daviot (author of Richard of Bordeaux 1932) but rarely as  the Miss Elizabeth Mackintosh of her Times obituary - was shelved as a Crime writer rather as John le Carré was later assigned to Spy fiction. Josephine Tey probably didn’t mind very much since she wrote, she said, for fun.  At page 178 of Miss Pym Disposes, her friend Henrietta puts down Miss Pym - who could well be taken as the alter ego of Josephine Tey - as having “an extraordinarily impulsive and frivolous mind”. (Tey, incidentally, had just pointed out to the reader that Henrietta has missed an allusion to Kipling’s “Make me different from all other animals by five this afternoon”).

I read first The Franchise Affair and now Miss Pym Disposes in both of which the author has lots of fun. She can be eccentric, whimsical, acid, thoughtful…as the mood takes her. And to that degree she doesn’t seem to care very much who is looking over her shoulder. That seems quite admirable.

Most maybe all authors have at least one or two people peering over their shoulders. The obvious one is the combined double-headed figure of publisher and censor who will put a stop to things currently disapproved of so there is no point in writing them down now only to have them taken out later. At page 10 in my copy Miss Pym is rudely awakened by unwanted noises and “said something that was neither civilised nor cultured and sat up”. The trick here is to leave it to the reader’s imagination and let them pick between “What the devil?" and “What the fuck?” Kipling uses the same trick in Kim as I previously discussed elsewhere on this Blog. Leaving it to the reader  avoids the humiliation of the dashes which litter Victorian novels, usually following the letter D, and the childishness of those carefully calculated  modern asterisks designed to allow you to retrieve the word intended. We are all so adept at this now that in context (for example, as spoken by Boris Johnson) we will know exactly what is intended by   ****. But if we don’t already know the words of Philip Larkin’s This Be The Verse - and American freshmen students often won’t - then the internet versions of the poem available may well leave us puzzled as to what it is that your parents do to you. That is not a good state to be in if you have an essay to write..

But Josephine Tey is not troubled by the more extensive and ever-expanding modern sensitivities which authors now have to pre-empt. Fortunately, she has recently come out of copyright and so the old Copyright holders (The National Trust) can no longer authorise or require bowdlerised versions of her novels. I don’t propose to offer a list of things which some enterprising corporate publishing censor might now use as a crib. It would be a long chore anyway, if nothing more. You have been trigger-warned and that ought to be enough.

But the second person at the shoulder is what for short might be called the author’s super ego: the rather punitive figure on the look-out for guilty secrets, the search for pleasure, shameful revelations and such like. Josephine Tey - who all the sources say was a very private person - may have had a fairly active super ego. I wait to read the biography by Jennifer Morag Henderson [ See now the footnote to this Blog post].  Miss Pym Disposes published in 1946 is set in an all-female establishment where live-in teenage girls learn gymnastics, dancing, outdoor sports, massage therapies and more under the supervision of a staff of live-in unmarried women. The scope for writing a novel in the genre of Lesbian fiction or simply Erotic fiction is enormous and modern super ego sensitivities would oppose not much of a  bar to making use of the opportunity, provided political correctness was maintained.

It’s true that the tragic events which conclude the novel arise from the conjunction of two sets of complex relationships: on one side the misplaced favouritism of the college Principal for an unappealing and dishonest student; on the other the close relationship between the most brilliant student Mary Innes and her beau Pamela Nash, nicknamed Beau Nash. They are planning to celebrate their graduation by going off to Norway together. But what might seethe beneath the surface is left to the reader to infer or imagine. However, on the surface and in very marked contrast, the novel is open about the successful heterosexual relationship which develops between an outsider  Brazilian student, the colourfully dressed Desterro (who the college girls nickname The Nut Tart) and the very decent young mixed-ethnicity (Brazilian- English) man Rick. Desterro has to live with the college girls calling him her gigolo.

The only erotically explicit passage in the novel depicts at some length (pages 216-17) a solo dance which Desterro performs to a public audience which includes Rick. At the end, the audience clap “like children at a Wild West matinée” (217). And, Reader, at page 245 she marries him. The novel ends at page 249. 

One might say that this spoken love story provides a structural counterpart to unspoken repressed desire which runs through the main narrative. But whether that is or isn’t a reasonable way of putting the novel in context, I found the novel absorbing and striking in its language, its metaphors and comparisons. An author who can imagine The Nut Tart as a nickname which girls in a Physical Training establishment could pin on one of their number must have something going for her.

Footnote

The biography is very thoroughly researched but for my taste  is too prim and too defensive of its subject. It does show that the author was unusually keen to inform herself about the subjects about which she wrote and that clearly contributes to the interest which her prose is able to sustain in the reader. In relation to Miss Pym Disposes the primary research consists in the fact that Josephine Tey graduated from a Physical Training establishment very much like the one she describes in the novel.

 

 

 

 

 

Martin Wolf The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism

 

Martin Wolf was born in London in 1946, the first son of war-time Austrian and Dutch Jewish refugees. His is a powerful voice at The Financial Times where he is Chief Economics Commentator and one of the reasons why I pay for an online subscription to the only daily newspaper of which I am a regular reader.

This is the sort of book which invites the appellation “magisterial” - the small print footnotes run to seventy pages - and the opening chapters provide a wide-ranging, detailed but always readable account of the emergence of those hybrid forms of societies and states in which market capitalism is combined with liberal democratic government. The combination is really very recent, not much more than a century on a generous interpretation, and though Wolf reckons it the best form of society which flawed human beings can achieve, it is fragile. Rapacious capitalists don’t like to be constrained by laws and taxation and personality-disordered would-be tyrants don’t like to be constrained by elections and parliaments. But such people do appeal to electorates which sometimes vote for their own disenfranchisement. They did so  in 1930s Germany, repeated the story in 2000s Russia, and capped it in the USA by turning out for Donald Trump - who figures largely in this book, held up as a warning to us all of the imminent peril in which we all now live: the implosion of American democracy. England’s pitiful old people’s vote to leave the European Union was provincial farce compared to these global tragedies.

There are blind spots in the narrative. The blindness of the victorious allies in framing the Treaty of Versailles opened Hitler’s route to power; the Wild East Americans who brought their brand of "freedom n mocracy" to Moscow in the 1990s paved the way for the rise of Putin; the subordination of the Democratic Party to the imperatives of Wall Street provided the plutocrat populist Donald Trump with a vast constituency of disaffected poorer white Americans. The capitalist liberal democracies have things to answer for - and I haven’t even mentioned their colonial adventures, also sidelined here. But, still, I can’t now disagree with Martin Wolf that nothing better than a social democrat version of capitalist liberal democracy is ever likely to be on successful offer. And the offers are often being rejected.

The first half of the book does a very good job and I was engrossed. But after that I was less impressed. What follows is a very extended wish list of things which if done would make our lives materially better and more secure. Now I am the same age as Mr Wolf and I have been reading these wish lists since I was a teenager. Probably he has too. If you took a course in British Politics at university (as I am afraid I did) then you would read books about the “Reform of Parliament” (The title of a once well -known 1964 book by Bernard Crick). Sixty years on, reformers are still whistling in the wind. Voters don’t want reform of Parliament - they turned down the chance of proportional representation when offered  in a referendum. MPs definitely don’t want reform of Parliament either, even left-wing  ones who often turn out to be as hidebound as the worst rural Tory squire. Think Michael Martin, who became a true-blue reactionary Speaker and Dennis Skinner who sat on his safe Bolsover seat for 49 years and to my knowledge achieved nothing. ( He was very upset when an uninitiated new MP once took his reserved clubland seat on the front bench).

Of course, I was pleased when I found things here which are also on my own wish list (see my The Best I Can Do 2016).  But many of them rate no more than a sentence or short paragraph and I can’t see any powerful party or group mobilising around many or most of  them. You might say that it is the achievement (so far) of Sir Keir Starmer to realise that his scope for doing anything of lasting significance if he leads his party to a General Election victory is almost zero. He can aim to be competent, that's all. A dozen years of Conservative incompetence of which Dr Kwarteng’s budget was the crowning glory ensures that there is little room for spending (kiss goodbye once again to hopes of new infrastructure). And if Sir Keir ventures into the culture wars then it will be a vote loser - the right-wing press has secured that already even though the irony is that most Woke policies (such as they are) are fairly reactionary, designed to secure the comfort and lifestyle of very small sections of the population - Martin Wolf briefly picks up on that in a critique of identity politics.  There is very little which is progressive about identity politics; politics is progressive when it advances progressive values like equality of opportunity, not when it advances sectional zero-sum claims to the best that’s on offer. 

People bandy around words like “Representation” without pausing to think what it might mean in many complex contexts; they just think it means they should get the job. (Once you start putting fresh faces on bank notes, you hit problems of representation which are fairly intractable and end up being resolved in favour of the most persistent lobbyists - see my Sample Essays (2020) for a discussion. The problem is perfectly general).

Nonetheless, it’s worth reading through the wish lists just to remind oneself of how daunting is the task anyone of goodwill and some influence would face. Martin Wolf can barely stop himself from saying that in the USA the battle has already been lost; the productive union of market capitalism and liberal democratic politics is already and irretrievably broken. The plutocrats have mastered the art of securing the endorsement of those whose lives are increasingly nasty, brutish and short but which won't get any better under plutocratic (and capricious) rule.

As David Runciman observed in a clear-headed review of Martin Wolf in the London Review of Books, “this book leaves you feeling that what’s needed is a miracle”.

Adolfo Kaminsky by Sarah Kaminsky

 

On the internet there are numerous photographs which testify to the love Sarah Kaminsky felt for her father, Adolfo Kaminsky, who died in January 2023 aged 97. Her biography was published in France in 2018 and several translations have already been made. Sarah Kaminsky is the youngest of his children, born when Adolfo was in his fifties. Before then there were other children by other partners and then three by his last and longest-term parrtner, Leïla Kaminsky. As I read this book I lost track of how many partners and children there were in total but it’s clear enough that many were neglected. As a young man of nineteen, Adolfo is a handsome fellow in the photograph reproduced in the book; he remains handsome and well-groomed in the internet photographs of old age.

Sarah Kaminsky’s book is a monument to her father. It’s written as if by Adolfo, in the first person, and in the Prologue there is a sketch of what was involved in researching it: note-taking of conversations with her father; interviews with others. I read the book as if listening to a reliable narrator but then had doubts because the narrator built out of the research seems to have such perfect recall; more or less every narrative has a beginning, middle and end. Memory is just not that good. So it may be that the biography is more romanesque than it presents itself as being. It’s certainly a fascinating read and quite, quite different to another book by a forger previously reviewed on this site, Shaun Greenhalgh’s A Forger’s Tale (reviewed 19 July 2018). The aims, motives, satisfactions could not be more different except for the evident pride in technical accomplishment.

Another relevant book for comparison would be with Marie Jalowicz Simon Untergetaucht [Underground in Berlin] based on tape recordings made by her son towards the end of Marie’s life and narrating the life of a young Jewish woman living underground in Berlin during the War.

Adolfo Kaminsky was the child of Russian-Jewish emigrés of the leftist kind who sought refuge from the Bolsheviks in France, were expelled and made their way to Argentina (where Kaminsky was born) and then made their way back.  His parents reckoned they would be safe in rural France even after the Germans arrived in 1940; they weren’t. His mother was probably murdered by the Germans and the rest of the family ended up in Drancy bound for Auschwitz and only got out thanks to an intervention by the Argentinian consul - they still had Argentinian nationality.

Kaminsky began in his teens a thirty year career as a forger of false documents and worked first in the service of the French resistance, particularly those parts finding safe houses or escape routes for Jews. Later, he worked briefly for the immediate post-Liberation French security services and then for a long succession of liberation movements, notably the Algerian FLN, and for those fleeing repressive regimes. He retired from his always-unpaid work as forger in 1971 when he felt that he was about to be caught and go to prison. He produced false documents in prodigious quantities, dozens or more at a time, and not only French ones - forging Swiss passports was very satisfying because they were supposed to be the most highly protected against forgery. But he would only forge for those he believed to be morally and politically worthy of support. He tried to draw a firm line against organisations which used terrorist violence. That complicated his immediate post-war work for Zionist movements working to drive the British out of Palestine. One remarkable story in the book (pages 125-28) sees him agree to make the timer for a Stern gang (Lehi) bomb which will kill the British Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin. He makes the timer but with one special feature; it won't work. 

One must remember that the post-war France in which Kaminsky did most of his work was not a country of liberty, equality or fraternity but a repressive state more like those headed by Franco and Salazar and many of whose citizens were nostalgic for Vichy (and remain so to this day). A great deal of repressive violence was deployed, especially in Paris, where Maurice Papon became Chief of Police in 1958. He was eventually tried and convicted of wartime crimes against humanity - but not until 1998 when he was at the end of a highly successful police and political career spanning fifty years during which time he was directly responsible for the deaths of many innocent people, notably in the massacres of demonstrators in 1961 and 1962. To this day, it is unclear how many dead there were. See Papon’s Wkipedia entry.

Writing that about Paris, I remembered an occasion when I was invited to a private party (a small one) where the front door was opened not by the host but by his Security. The host, living in some Parisian banlieue, was from North Africa who even as late as 1971 might well receive unwelcome visitors. I forget the details and it’s pointless to speculate who invited me or why. Paris in 1971 is also the only place where I have ever been stopped and asked to show my papers to a police officer. I was walking back to my room from the cinema, late one evening. I was carrying my Carte de Séjour (it was obligatory to do so) and as he handed it back to me the officer saluted. I guess it helped to be English not North African.