I was intrigued to see Armando Iannucci’s new film The Death Of Stalin. It had been called “revolting” by the Russian Communist Party, and “disgraceful” by the Mail on Sunday’s Peter Hitchens. According to some it reflected on Vladimir Putin, while according to David Cameron it reflected on Theresa May. It was praised as Iannucci’s deepest work, and condemned as a gross lapse from form. As I write, it has not yet received a Russian licence, and it grossed twice in its opening weekend what In the Loop did in 2009. I went fully prepared to hate it and walk out. In the event, I stayed in my Everyman armchair to the credits’ end, so may now toss my own ha’pennyworth into the furore.

First the facts. Insofar as they are known about such a fact-averse period, this stylised comedy is surprisingly close to them. This is largely thanks to the graphic novel on which it is based — La mort de Staline by Fabien Nury and Thierry Robin (2010). This writer-illustrator duo had clearly read the eyewitness accounts, such as Khrushchev’s 1960s memoirs and Svetlana Alliluyeva’s Twenty Letters to a Friend.

Khrushchev’s recollection that the doctor eventually summoned to Stalin’s deathbed touched his hand gingerly, before being roughly ordered by Beria to take it properly, is reproduced exactly in a couple of the comic’s frames. The novel’s madly-   orthodox Molotov is a fair reconstruction from the interviews that Molotov himself gave to Soviet journalist Felix Chuev between his forced retirement in 1962 and his death in 1986, in which he castigated Khrushchev and Beria as non-Communists, praised Stalin for his terror (“of the three who spoke at the funeral, I was the only one who spoke from the heart”), and described the Cheka leader Felix Dzerzhinsky as “a radiant, spotless personality”. These interviews were published in the Soviet Union in 1991, just in time to give inspiration, if not success, to the coup plotters of August 199l — and in plenty of time to give inspiration to this novel.

That said, the novel’s relative fidelity to its sources has not bound Iannucci with equal fidelity to the novel. The latter’s mild liberty of portraying Marshal Zhukov as young (which he was not) as well as lantern-jawed and large (which he was), is magnified many times by the casting of a swaggering Jason Isaacs with chest padding and a Yorkshire accent. In fact, Zhukov had been exiled to the provinces by Stalin out of jealousy at his post-war popularity, but was summoned by Khrushchev and his co-conspirators to be one of the military leaders led by air defence commander General Moskalenko to arrest Beria. Khrushchev recalls that he was the first to enter the room at Malenkov’s pre-arranged signal: “‘Hands up!’, Zhukov commanded Beria”. In the film, he is the commander of the Red Army and leads the plot.

The novel observes the three months that elapsed between Stalin’s death and Beria’s arrest; the film comically exaggerates the Politburo’s competitive disarray by having this take place in a matter of days. Rather than being tried by a military court, as he probably was, Beria is lynched and burned by his colleagues, which he certainly wasn’t. The film makes comic capital out of the Orthodox priests’ presence at Stalin’s funeral by Beria’s invitation; the novel rightly does no such thing. As Khrushchev recalls, after Stalin’s cerebral haemorrhage two days before his death, the Orthodox Patriarch and Chief Rabbi of Russia were ordered to say prayers for him. After all, it had been Stalin himself who had re-permitted religion in Soviet life.

The film also exaggerates the role of the Christian anti-Stalinist pianist Maria Yudina, to the point of making her write a note to Stalin denouncing his crimes, and making this the cause of Stalin’s stroke. This makes no sense on its own terms; a character intended to be positive should not risk the lives of her innocent employers. Nor did she play at Stalin’s funeral; Richter did. I suspect that her role was exaggerated in order to include one person of moral backbone; but Stalin’s daughter Svetlana, whom the film makes a cracked comic counterpart to her dissolute brother, might have played this role more realistically. 

The film, not the novel, implies that Khrushchev was given a raw deal in being asked to organise Stalin’s funeral; on the contrary, it was an honour. Stalin had organised and spoken at Lenin’s funeral, as he reminded people throughout his life.

As far as the film’s interpretation of Stalin is concerned, it is worth recalling the fraught history of his reputation. Non-Soviet Communists, as well as anti-Communists, had denounced his crimes well before his death, as Orwell’s 1945 Animal Farm exemplifies. Inside the USSR, Khrushchev led the way with his (not very) secret speech to the 1956 20th Party Congress, which expanded the blame for the crimes of the Terror and Gulag beyond Beria — on whom it had been concentrated since 1953 — to include Stalin himself. This speech denied him a significant role in the Soviet victory over Nazism, leaving the military to claim this as its own. Thereafter, however, renewed claims have been made for Stalin’s significance as a wartime leader — in Britain by historians such as Geoffrey Roberts; in the Soviet Union with the effect of provoking Khrushchev to write his memoirs as a counter. In the West, Stalin has remained a source of debate between some left- and right-leaning people over his equivalence or otherwise to Hitler. (Peter Hitchens asked, in response to this film, “whether anyone would think the final days of Hitler, the other great European mass-killer, torturer and tyrant, would make a good comedy, with Goebbels, Himmler and the rest of the Nazi elite played for laughs. No, of course not.”) In Russia during the 1990s, Stalin became the focus of patriotic nostalgia for some of those who were suffering most at that terrible time, even while testimony to his crimes was encouraged by NGOs such as Memorial, and an increasingly powerful Orthodox Church. He is now a focus of admiration particularly among Communists (the largest opposition party by far), the elderly, and Georgians. The many Stalin monuments restored in the post-Soviet period, and the very few built new, are predominantly local initiatives by elderly people, or are in Georgia. Stalin’s image in Russian society as a whole is therefore in the balance between Communism-saving defeater of Hitler, and monster. At the same time, a less fraught version of this dispute rumbles on in the West.

The film implicitly dismisses Stalin as a wartime leader by the simple expedient of making Zhukov a hero (albeit one caricatured beyond, I would imagine, the patience of his many admirers). The most-quoted line in the film is Zhukov’s: “I fucked Germany. I think I can take on a flesh lump in a waistcoat” (which is dubbed in the Russian trailer as: “I took Berlin; somehow I’ll manage with a fatty in a pince-nez”). We see Stalin only in the last days of his life, at which time even disciples such as Molotov admitted that he was “not completely in control of himself”. It has even been suggested that he had a stroke in 1948, which led to a personality change, and to the increasingly contemptuous treatment of his Politburo of which Khrushchev so vividly complains.

But we hardly even see this; we hardly see him at all. We get little sense of the man who would call his colleagues to the Kremlin when he rose in the afternoon, conduct state business in the intervals of films that he would put them through, drag them to boozy all-night suppers at his dacha, then send them to their morning’s work. If Khrushchev was self-serving in representing Stalin as the perverter of a system, and he and his colleagues as his victims (“the abuses of Stalin’s rule were not committed by the Party but were inflicted on the Party”), then the film, which otherwise owes so much to his memories, is having none of it.

Malenkov, Khrushchev, Beria, Mikoyan et al are represented as facilitators and confrères, whose careerism (a major sin in the Soviet catechism) and collusion in moral and intellectual madness becomes painfully exposed when their lynchpin is removed. Their lack of unity is indicated by their crazy range of accents: Khrushchev has a Brooklyn accent, Malenkov a Californian one, Mikoyan and Stalin are Cockney, while Zhukov is a Yorkshireman; this is in no way intended to represent the actual range of accents on the Politburo. So Iannucci takes the system at its own word. In theory there was no King or President, merely the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In that case, he suggests, the responsibility was collective. As Molotov lamented of A. Avtokhanov’s (Paris-bought) book Enigma of Stalin’s Death, which his interviewer had given him to read and comment on: “He depicts us all as a gang of brigands!” So does this film.

Admittedly, the most clearly evil character is Beria. He is shown about to rape a woman arrested for the purpose (though not in the act, unlike the novel, which shows him raping a child over his desk). But he is merely the nastiest. He is not shown as having the peculiarly close relationship to Stalin that existed during the preceding years (Khrushchev recalls: “When Beria and Stalin fought, Beria could always pretend it was just a lovers’ quarrel. When two Georgians fight, they’re just amusing themselves. They’ll always make up in the end.”) Beria’s colleagues are not shown as shocked — as they were, and as was Svetlana — by the way in which Beria spoke contemptuously of Stalin while he was unconscious after his haemorrhage, then fell to kiss his hand the moment he revived. They are shown as colluding in Beria’s crimes — and in that the film is right, even if the full extent of their horror, including the rape of more than a hundred girls and women, only emerged after he was arrested.

Stalin’s acolytes line up beside his body as it lies in state: from left to right, Molotov, Voroshilov, Beria and Malenkov (© PhotoQuest/Getty Images)

The result is that Khrushchev (played by Steve Buscemi) comes out of the film rather less well than the novel, let alone Khrushchev’s own memoirs; the film will do little to revive his reputation from the low point at which it has stood — in Russia as well as outside it — ever since his displacement by Brezhnev in 1964. If T.S. Eliot refused to publish Animal Farm on the grounds that it was Trotskyist, this film could not similarly be called Khrushchevite.

Having said that, given the alternatives, the audience is pleased to learn from the film’s concluding surtitles that Khrushchev finally wins the power struggle in 1957. He is shown as sincere in his desire to liberalise, in clear contrast to Beria. But the film does not give him his due to the extent of noting that, when Brezhnev ousted him in his turn, he was not imprisoned or killed — in large part because of the culture change that he himself had brought about. He had broken a tradition of conducting Russian power struggles stretching back centuries. When in 1957 Molotov and Malenkov launched a Stalinist coup which failed, they were expelled from the Politburo, and a few years later from the party, but were not otherwise hurt. No Russian leader has lost his life with his office since then.

So much for fact. Now for value. Peter Hitchens, in his sharp formulation of a point made by many, argues: “We are so free and safe that we can hardly begin to imagine a despot so wholly terrifying that his subordinates are even afraid of his corpse. This trivial and inaccurate squib does not help us to do so . . . misery, pain, fear and mass murder are milked for feeble giggles.”

Certainly, the film is guilty of misusing humour on occasions, although not quite as Hitchens suggests. The woman who sparked the “Doctor’s Plot” conspiracy theory by denouncing her Jewish colleagues is referred to by Beria — who has just described her previous fellatio of him and others — as “Lady Suck-Suck”. This elicits a knee-jerk laugh, but it is Beria’s joke, and in laughing the audience is sharing his humour. An orchestra member, when told of the need to dampen the acoustics for a music recording demanded by Stalin at short notice, suggests inviting his wife because she is “so fat”; this is a surprisingly lumpen and passé form of humour. “I don’t think any of these people have heard of Mozart”, comments the music director about the proletarians hauled in off the streets to be audience members. Yet, since Soviet education had been in existence for three decades by this point, the claim is unlikely. Indeed, the conductor dragged from his bed to make the recording in his dressing-gown provides an unintentional visual metaphor for the Soviet Union’s imposition of high culture on the mass of the people, however crudely dressed.

The swearing for which Iannucci’s characters are famous, and which I find tiring even when at its exuberant wittiest, has here degenerated into “fucks” spread across all characters indiscriminately. This is not just unfunny, but an unjustified lapse from fact. Tony Blair may have imported bad language into Downing Street and thus into Iannucci’s oeuvre, but 1990s London is not 1950s Moscow; Russian taboo language is far stronger than its English equivalent and consequently less used, as the Russian translation of Zhukov’s boast indicates. Stalin swore on occasion, because he could, but in this he was the exception. As a result, the film’s Politburo members appear cruder and less educated than they were, and the important differences between them are eliminated (Khrushchev was palpably less educated than his peers, and always painfully aware of it).

I sympathise with Hitchens’s implied irritation at those responses to the film which demonstrate the modern servility towards comedy. According to the forelock-tuggers, everything is appropriate material for humour, everyone should be able to take a joke, the only criterion on which funny things should be judged is their funniness, and comedy has sacred rights but no duties. For those who feel Stalin’s crimes the most strongly and personally, this comic film might be painful watching, best avoided.

Where I part company with Hitchens is on his claims that the film is useless to those with no prior understanding of these crimes, and that Iannucci milks the horror itself for cheap laughs. This is because I perceive something that he, in common with those who have praised the film as comedy gold, seem to have missed. The gold is mixed with the blackest tar — such as ran through the Lubyanka, the construction sites of the White Sea Canal, the Kolyma Gulag, and Moscow’s House on the Embankment, where NKVD staff regularly called at four in the morning.

It is acceptable to mix comedy with such terror and pain because, the film persuasively suggests, there was a terrible comedy intrinsic to the insanity of Stalin’s system. As long as the comedy is intrinsic to the terror, rather than being a varnishing and obfuscation of it, it is not only acceptable but points to a truth. The preface to the graphic novel, after the usual disclaimer of artistic licence, ends: “Having said this, the authors would like to make clear that their imaginations were scarcely stretched in the creation of this story, since it would have been impossible for them to come up with anything half as insane as the real events surrounding the death of Stalin.”

Take, for example, Khrushchev’s account of Beria’s arrest. It was planned that Malenkov, who chaired the Presidium of the Council of Ministers at which it took place, would call first on Khrushchev and then on other members to speak. They would all accuse Beria in turn, Malenkov would propose a motion to arrest him, this would be carried, Malenkov would press a button, Zhukov and his fellow marshals and generals would enter the room, and Malenkov would order them to arrest Beria. In the event, the last person to speak was Mikoyan, who suggested that Beria would surely appreciate the comradely criticism offered, reform his ways, and continue to be useful. During the perplexed silence which followed, Malenkov lost his nerve. So Khrushchev took the floor to propose the vote, at which Malenkov, panicking, and without waiting for the vote, pushed the button, and ordered the arrest in the tiniest of voices. At this point the conspirators realised that they didn’t know where to put Beria, since all the prisons were under his control (he was eventually transferred to a bunker at Moskalenko’s headquarters). It seems incredible that the planning would be so lax, but Khrushchev had nothing to gain from making this up.

Or take an event which neither the novel nor the film depict. Immediately after Beria’s arrest, the Politburo went to the Bolshoi to attend the première of Yuri Shaporin’s The Decembrists. At every interval in this opera about a coup which failed at considerable cost to its plotters, they dashed out to make phone calls to discover whether or not Beria had staged a counter-coup, before returning to their seats to try to sit impassively through the next part of the performance. The first indication that the public received of Beria’s fall was when Pravda listed the Politburo members present at the Bolshoi, and Beria’s name was not there.

There is humour in both incidents, but a humour inseparable from terror, which is not funny at all. The film is wise to this, and is itself in many places emotionally iridescent. It raises uncertain laughs, which are suddenly cut down. It moves from a hilarious scene of the meeting convened after Stalin’s death, to a mass execution which is messily halted by the delivery of a Politburo decree. The comedy here is not so much black as ice-cold and pale. Beria’s discomfiture at his undignified arrest arouses the viewers’ triumphal amusement, until the arrest turns into a lynching, and the comedy quickly sickens. A rueful laugh is raised by the closing surtitle informing the audience that Khrushchev is eventually toppled in his turn, but over the final credits people are wiped out of photos one by one, to Shostakovich’s music.

Such troubled comedy requires and receives confident performances. To me the standout is not the much-praised Simon Russell Beale’s Beria (he is good, but this is a relatively straightforward villainous part), but Jeffrey Tambor’s hilariously witless Malenkov, and Andrea Riseborough’s bizarrely bizarre Svetlana. Between them, the ensemble produces some purely comic moments, such as when Stalin is dying and pointing at a picture of a lamb being fed from a horn. This happened, and Khrushchev seems unaware of the comedy in his account of how he immediately expounded to the others what this meant. The film permissibly broadens this into a hilarious contest of interpretations between competing Politburo members. Another gag is the search for a small girl with whom Stalin once posed, so that she can appear with Malenkov at the funeral. Once they have established that they want a girl who now looks like that girl did then, not the same girl, and once they have found and obtained such a girl, it turns out that only her hand can be seen waving at the crowds over the Kremlin parapet. But for the most part the humour is adulterated. Responsibly so.

Such humour can best be understood in relation to the film’s major model, The Great Farewell (Великое Прощание). This is a 75-minute film of Stalin’s funeral and related ceremonies on the occasion of his death which splices purpose-shot colour footage with black-and-white newsreel. It was intended for general release, but was dropped because of Beria’s fall (he could not easily be excised from it), and was in the end only released after the Soviet Union had collapsed.

Its influence on Iannucci’s film is palpable: the details of the coffin and the room in which it stood, the Politburo members standing by, the photogenic little girl, Beria’s dress sense and movements. Stalin’s son’s funeral speech in the Iannucci film, in which he hilariously cycles through the names of all the Soviet republics, may have been inspired by The Great Farewell’s iterated tours of Soviet capitals in which ceremonies are taking place, glossing the country concerned when this might not be known (for example, “Tirana — capital of Albania”).

In parts, The Great Farewell is moving. The geographic spread of the grief at Stalin’s death is awesome. The soundtrack is a compilation of grief-heightening classics from Grieg, Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Beethoven and Chopin. For all the choreography, real grief is on display. The emphasis is far less on the Politburo members than it is on the masses. And although the reverse is true of The Death of Stalin, it resembles The Great Farewell in its respect for that grief; in the modern film there is not a hint of ridicule of their desire to pay their respects, nor of their paying for this with their lives (1,500 were killed in a crush caused by the security forces).

On the other hand, at many points The Great Farewell makes one feel slightly sick. It is pompously mournful, rigidly deferential, and has constant voiceover in praise of Stalin. Individuals attract the camera’s eye in proportion to the demonstrativeness of their grief, but it is striking that nobody tries to linger for even an instant as they shuffle at fair pace past Stalin’s coffin. Such discipline carries with it the suggestion of severe compulsion; and these thousands of queuers are clearly habituated to queuing. The red banners bearing black and white portraits of Stalin unfortunately recall the Nazi colour scheme. This is particularly chilling in the footage of them being carried in their thousands through central Warsaw. The wreaths laid at the foot of the Kremlin wall, which stretch out of sight into the distance, eerily recall the German banners which were laid there eight years before — as though the people’s grief itself were a trophy of Stalinism. One of the bishops — of all people — is shown crying.

So, if this makes one feel sick, then The Death of Stalin is the vomit. Iannucci tears back the thick pall of mourning to say, “Cheer up! You’re better off without him!” As C.S. Lewis knew when he wrote The Screwtape Letters, sometimes the best response to Satan is to laugh at him.

Given all this, I am hopeful that the film will be granted a licence in Russia — after all, it was partly filmed there. It might be asked how many Russian films British cinemas show, and how tolerant the British government or people would be of a Russian satire on, say, the death of Churchill, or fall of Margaret Thatcher. Would this not, in the current climate, be denounced as Russian interference in British politics? But if it is to be granted a Russian licence, then why has this not happened yet? There are various sensitivities to be considered, including those of Stalin’s victims as well as his fans. During the War, the British and Americans felt able to caricature Hitler as a funny little mustachioed man with one ball, whereas Soviet propaganda — understandably, given the scale of Soviet losses — treated him only as a death-hungry monster. Similarly, Stalin is someone that the Russians, who are so much closer to him than we, are inclined to take soberly, whatever their perspective on him.

It may also not help the film’s reception that it is English, given British political hostility towards Russia, of which Russians are well aware. Hence the film may be more contentious than the current Russian succès de scandale Matilda (concerning Nicholas II’s relationship with the ballerina Matilda Kseshinskaya, although the Church has more reasons to oppose this than The Death of Stalin, having canonised its protagonist).

All of these issues are all the more sensitive now, at the centenary of the Revolution. The government has had to tread a careful line in its commemorations between the feelings of the Orthodox and of Communists, and it might well consider it prudent to wait with this film (which may be disliked by both these sizeable constituencies) until later in 2018. But I hope, then, that it will be permitted — both because there is no good reason to ban such a film anywhere, and because it is a remarkable film. And I wish for Russians that they can move beyond the trauma of the presence and the loss of Stalin, to the point when Iannucci’s genius for conveying the comedy of past insanities can be appreciated without unbearable pain.

The post Laughter in the dark: ‘The Death of Stalin’ appeared first on Standpoint.

Leander, who is fond of opining, at one point opines that “Spoilers are for disposable stories”. “If the ending only affects you once, then it’s a weak ending.” So here goes.

Like D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love and many another modernist novel, Carnivore emphasises space over time. Its 300 pages cover only half a week, whilst oscillating between a handful of London locations. The structure is cyclical: Leander takes drugs, creates havoc and/or experiences violence, travels by car from one venue to another, changes his clothes, and repeats. But these cycles form a spiral. Although for about half the novel I doubted it, there is a plot. Leander is a bisexual male prostitute, estranged from his parents but close to an older mother-figure, Dawn. The latter unwittingly becomes involved with a gangster whose mob traffics people to England for farmwork and sex. Leander desultorily if riskily pursues this mob, whilst trying to emotionally wound his on-off boyfriend Francis, who is Dawn’s biological son. Though he is beaten and raped more than once, Leander eventually secures the suicide of the villain, and blows up most of the latter’s sidekicks in a Brixton bar. By this point he has decided that he loves Francis after all, and the novel ends with their reconciliation.

The first point to make is that this plot is not physically possible. A real Leander would have died from his wounds and/or drugs well before the novel’s few days are out, meaning that he neatly combines in himself two of Mel Gibson’s most famous roles: the eponymous crazed pursuer of violent criminals in Mad Max’s post-apocalyptic Melbourne, and the Jesus of The Passion of the Christ, who would have died from his scourging long before reaching Golgotha. The gangster plot and the “love” plot are linked by Leander’s sociopathic sado-masochism: both his wish to wound, and to be wounded, are purportedly explained by the fact that he (like his creator) has for around a decade suffered from a combination of chronic pain and fatigue which the medical profession has failed to diagnose let alone cure. Leander seeks drugs, power, pain, play, performance and the risk of death, in order to achieve at least temporary dissociation from this condition. Rather like Judith Rashleigh in L.S. Hilton’s Maestra (reviewed here last year), he rampages the world with a selfishness presented as the response to a deep personal injury.

He explains his disease to his friends and readers repeatedly: “That pain needed harder drugs than the ones allowed by shops or doctors — it needed the heroin Dawn had promised me — and doctors had failed me long ago, anyway, as they had failed everyone else with my illness . . . And that made me cruel, probably. I wanted to make other people feel what I had to feel . . . Chronic pain isn’t interesting — people can’t relate to it.” The last point, of course, is a problem for the novel — although nobody can say that it doesn’t try its hardest to make its readers relate, if not to the pain, than to Leander’s modes of escaping it.

Thus we share in Leander’s often charmingly-brilliant synaesthetic hallucinations. When he has taken ketamine at an exhibition, “The row of photographs I was trying to focus on gave way to a plough of stars — driven by an ox down a terrace of moon-mansions — which each imploded as it passed.” When the villain Kimber lifts up Leander, “A reel of white tape spun up my spine. Spots of green light dappled the air — ladybrids hatched in my hair.” And when he has knocked Kimber out, “The air zipped itself open and zipped itself back up, adjusting to the absence of Kimber’s voice.” The description of Leander finally falling unconscious begs comparison with the death of Anna Karenina, which in Constance Garnett’s translation reads: “And the light by which she had read the book filled with troubles, falsehoods, sorrow, and evil, flared up more brightly than ever before, lighted up for her all that had been in darkness, flickered, began to grow dim, and was quenched forever.”

This is Leander’s near-death:

My sight shrank. I curled into a protective ball, but there was nothing to protect — I wasn’t a body anymore. I was glint above a cliff of almonds, drifting upwards into blackness. My heart’s last beat was tolled by the bell — and then it stopped, and the bell widened into an eyeball — and I sped into it — into a pupil that let only the light of the bell inside — until I was at the heart of the eyeball — and it blinked, and the glint was gone.

This writing is controlled. The narrator is writing sober and knows exactly what he is doing, both in conveying his previous states of consciousness, and in reflecting on his agency and its relationship to meaning. At one point Leander tells his mirror reflection: “Nihilism is for fragile heterosexuals. Meaninglessness isn’t meaningless. I can give meanings to whatever I want . . . chaos can be shaped into meanings by will. So I can contrive arcs, reversals, and endings until I have revenged my own fatigue.” In the exercise of his will to be artist of his own life, he takes “method acting” to the extreme of turning up half-dead at a film studio in order to play the part of a bruised beggar. (The director films him anyway, later to be scolded by Leander that her industry is “the same” as people-trafficking, in its exploitation of young bodies.) His rejection of static meaning is exemplified when he tells the director the story of his namesake, and reflects: “I don’t know what I am. I’m Hero and Leander and anti-Hero and anti-Leander and neither, depending on the lighting”.

Contrary to appearances, it emerges that Leander has not done an English degree at Oxford, but he does know and rely deeply on canonical authors. He intends to use his earnings from a particularly violent sex session to buy an edition of Emily Dickinson which reproduces her punctuation accurately. He recites seven lines of the corking Wallace Stevens poem “Esthétique du Mal” to his lover. When particularly drugged, he explains to a Costcutter bag why “Poetry isn’t dead”; on the contrary, “Poetry has won”, since chat threads and news feeds “aren’t prose”:

“We think in mosaics. All those failed late-modernist epics — with their collages and cut-ups and parodies — were just guessing at what was about to happen — the internet and wifi and phones — that altered our mode of writing — into poetry. Poetry has won. And so the secrets of the sublime perhaps moved to prose — because prose has been abandoned.”

I retched onto the stone floor, spinning in the chair.

“That’s not how I think”, the Costcutter bag said.

Again, one is reminded of Women in Love, which ends with Birkin telling his wife why he needs another, close relationship with a man: “‘You can’t have it, because it’s false, impossible,’ she said. ‘I don’t believe that,’ he answered.” Usually in Carnivore, as with Lawrence’s opinionated heroes, Leander’s agonist is not an inanimate object, but a woman. Dawn tells him that: “Being pretty made you lazy.” At times he falters in his repudiation of identity and love. When he tells the director Iris that “I want to be beaten on my own terms . . . I want a psychological equal”, she counters: “I think you are in love with him . . . You’ve found Francis . . . And you’re trying to convince me — and really more trying to convince yourself — that you’re the lonely villain and he means nothing.” Lawrence’s Ursula similarly tells Birkin, who has denied that he wants love, “I think you are very silly. I think you want to tell me you love me, and you go all this way round to do it.” Leander even has in common with Birkin the fact that he is physically slight, but capable of beating heavier men in a fight.

But whereas Ursula is emphatically and unambiguously female, Iris, it turns out, was until recently a man. The fact that she has had an even harder time of youthful self-fashioning than the myalgia-afflicted Leander draws even him out of self-absorption for a moment.

Occasionally there is evidence of unnecessary editorial intervention in the direction of clarity. Lyon’s prose has travelled a long way from the impressionism of the unpublished 2013 novel Absence; it has reached a highly-marketable clarity, and need not be pushed further into such explanations as “Next — according to this fantasia my mind was tracing as it drifted further from the kitchen — this mixture was stuffed into the pig’s washed intestines and boiled.” But the fact that the novel is marketable — and the more important fact that the man can write — come as a relief to me. Having taught Lyon as an undergraduate, having seen him shuffle pyjama-clad and Dorian-Grayish in and out of his tutorials, occasionally substituting a short story for his weekly essay, and then disappearing Isherwood-like to Berlin with a university English prize in tow — his is a career that I would like to succeed.

He might do well to revisit Lawrence’s 1923 essay “Surgery for the Novel — Or a Bomb”, which describes the tendency of the “serious novel” to be “self-consciousness picked into such fine bits that the bits are most of them invisible, and you have to go by smell. Through thousands and thousands of pages Mr Joyce and Miss Richardson tear themselves to pieces, strip their smallest emotions to the finest threads, till you feel you are sewed inside a wool mattress that is being slowly shaken up, and you are turning to wool along with the rest of the woollyness.”

Given that one of Lawrence’s examples is James Joyce, Lyon is unlikely to take this as criticism. But Lawrence goes on: “One has to be self-conscious at seventeen: still a little self-conscious at twenty-seven; but if we are going it strong at thirty-seven, then it is a sign of arrested development, nothing else. And if it is still continuing at forty-seven, it is obvious senile precocity.” Which is to say — I look forward to seeing how Lyon’s work develops. “Youth must go, ah yes. But youth is only being in a way like it might be an animal. No, it is not just like being an animal so much as being like one of these malenky toys you viddy being sold in the streets.” A Clockwork Orange ends when Alex wants a wife and son; Carnivore ends after Leander has apostrophised Francis: “I don’t believe it as a real me, or there are no real mes, but some are falser fictions than the others — and I can’t pretend to be the me that is indifferent to Dawn. I was wrong. And I can’t be indifferent to you. I was wrong. I can’t be the debonair libertine safe in my own vacuum-sealed balled. I’m leaking. And I can’t continue. Let me in.” Yet in neither case have youthful perspectives been left entirely behind. Leander and Francis end Carnivore slipping into a post-coital “unshared meaningless dream”. Alex ends A Clockwork Orange with the subverted prayer “Amen. And all that cal.” Lyon is not done with youth yet, oh my little brothers. Not by a long way. But he’s one to watch.

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My Anglo-Greek marriage has often caused me to reflect on the relations of our two countries. Their similarities are less obvious than their differences — but a moment’s reflection will summon a few. Britain and Greece are former centres of maritime empires lying at opposite corners of Europe. They strongly identify with their past glories, towards which their tourist industries are decisively orientated. Their cultures are particularly rich in literature. Each looks to a great power with which it has historically good relations: the United States and Russia. Late among Western countries to join the European Union, now they are early among them to be thinking of leaving it — thus sharing the “exit” suffix that has come into common parlance. 

Yet even to mention these similarities is to summon the differences by which they must be qualified. These all point to the power differential which has pertained at least since Western Europe’s “early modern” period began, and which has over the last two centuries expressed itself in the actual domination of Greece by the United Kingdom. The latter period was symbolically opened in 1801 by the British ambassador to Istanbul, Thomas Bruce, who — it is claimed — grossly exceeded the remit of his firman (permit) from the Sultan to make drawings and casts of the Acropolis sculptures. Controversy over the seventh Earl of Elgin’s acquisition of a third of these sculptures started almost immediately. A British Museum select committee questioned him closely as to the legality of their removal when he tried to sell them to the museum in 1816. The Hellenophile Byron, Keats, Shelley, and Thomas Hardy, all supported their return to Greece well before my husband’s aunt, Melina Mercouri, upped the ante on becoming Greek minister of culture in 1981. Byron complained thus:

Curst be the hour when from their isle they roved,And once again thy hapless bosom gored,
And snatch’d thy shrinking gods to northern climes abhorred!

 

But whatever the contents of the (lost) firman, and the rights or wrongs of the case, Britain simply had — and has — the greater power.

The marbles are not all that it has taken. At the Congress of Vienna, Britain took the Ionian Islands from France, which had taken them from Venice. Lawrence Durrell described the traces of English culture still palpable in the Corfu of the 1930s (the islands had been returned to Greece in 1864) as follows:

The discreet picnics among the olive-groves, the memoranda, the protocols, the bustles, sidewhiskers, long top-boots, tea-cosies, mittens, rock-cakes, chutney, bolus, dignity, incompetence, book-keeping, virtue, church bazaars; you will find traces of all of them if you look deeply enough. The flash of red hunting coat through the olive-groves as the officers galloped over the island on their dangerous paper-chases; the declarations of love among the cypresses, the red-faced sportsmen setting out for Albania. Big Tom, Adams, Leech, and “Fusty” Andrews; Lockler, Jones, and Jervis White-Jervis. Dr Anstead fussily visiting these “embayed seas” to record the lamentable venality of the islanders. Edward Lear’s gloomy pictures of Perama and the Hyallic Gulf.

The deposition in 1862 of the Russophile King Otto Wittelsbach, and his replacement by the Anglophile George Glücksberg, were managed under British influence. In the following decade Britain took de facto control of Cyprus, which it retained for nearly a century, formalised after the First World War, and maintains in attenuated form through its extant military bases on the island. The abdication of King Constantine in 1917 (when he leant towards Germany), and his reinstatement in 1920 (when he was willing to invade Soviet-inclined Turkey and the Soviet Union itself), were both managed under British influence. In the Second World War, the British first helped the Greeks to eject the Italians and Germans, then helped the monarchists to win the subsequent civil war. Accordingly, Britain, like the United States, supported the Colonels’ military dictatorship of 1967 to ’74.

This history of dominant relations with Greece is apparent, in one way or another, in the variety of Anglo-Greeks of whom I am aware. My husband’s grandfather, Theodore Stephanides, grew up as an English-speaker in India because his father had married into the Anglo-Greek Ralli family. He therefore had a Raj childhood, in common with the Durrell children whom he was to befriend in the 1930s. His wife, née Mary Alexander, was the daughter of the British consul in Corfu and a Corfiot aristocrat. Lawrence Durrell spent his career in those parts of the British Empire which mapped onto those of ancient Greece: Corfu, Alexandria, Cyprus. The Duke of Edinburgh is a scion of the Greek Glücksbergs, who married back into Queen Victoria’s family. London was the obvious place of refuge for the last King, Constantine II — as it was for my husband and his parents — when all of them variously fled the military dictatorship.

Yet — just as the Romans felt ambivalently towards the Greeks, so too have the British. This fitted with the Victorian self-identification with the Romans. The Greeks may, to the Romans and British, have been the dominated people — but they possessed something which the dominators knew that they lacked. For centuries the British education system was deferentially orientated towards ancient Greek culture. Just as the Romans were conscious of accepting Greek gods into their pantheon, so — later — both they and the British were conscious of the shaping influence of Greek philosophy in their state religion of Christianity.

Certain Victorians came to see the English education system’s veneration of the ancient Greeks as excessive. George Eliot exemplified such modernising, cosmopolitan impatience. But her male counterpart, Matthew Arnold, identified the “Hellenic” with precisely that cosmopolitan openness of inquiry, fineness of culture, and lightness of spirit which he diagnosed to be lacking among the anti-intellectual, xenophobic, “Philistine” English. The Greeks today continue to represent the spirit of internationalist culture — at least in their administration (currently under my father-in-law’s presidency) of the Cultural Capitals of Europe scheme.

British veneration of the Greeks overlooked entirely the millennium of Byzantine history, which was degraded into a mere negative adjective for complexity. Early 19th-century philhellenism, despite being anti-Turk, was less interested in promoting Christianity than it was in reviving Greece’s ancient past. The attitude of many patriotic Greeks of the present, such as my anti-clerical father-in-law, is similar.

But the philhellenes also put their own, distinctively northern European, imprint on the British understanding of Greece. Since their time, Greece has connoted qualities quite other than those which Englightenment neoclassicism had associated with ancient Greece. The Romantics, in short, made Greece Romantic — and such it has remained. Thus it took its place alongside Italy as one of those places in southern Europe which liberated pale northerners into the experience of suntan, sex, and Life itself.

Gerald Durrell’s 1956, ’69 and ’78 memoirs of Corfu in the 1930s are clearly the recollections of a pre-pubescent, and sexual matters are downplayed even to the dramatic extent of excising all mention of Lawrence’s wife Nancy, Theodore’s wife Mary, and Theodore’s daughter Alexia, whom Theodore hoped that Gerald would marry. Nonetheless, they describe the ascent of an English person into a heightened sensuous existence, deeply attuned to the glorious sun, fauna, flora and food. The British lack of such things is summed up in the famous opening of My Family and Other Animals, in which Larry suddenly expostulates to his family — variously indisposed as the result of foul August weather — that life in England is impossible, and they must all move to Corfu forthwith. “Why do we stand this bloody climate? What we all need is sunshine — a country where we can grow . . .  So we sold the house and fled from the gloom of the English summer, like a flock of migrating swallows.”

As Michael Haag’s illuminating new biography of the Durrells makes clear, this was not at all how the decision was made. But his book also stresses how unhappy the Durrell boys were in their various stints at English boarding schools, and what a liberation back into the unregimented days of their Indian childhood the move to Corfu was. The very beauty of Gerald’s prose recreates the paradise in the reader’s mind:

In the low growth the pansies pushed their velvety, innocent faces through the leaves, and the violets drooped sorrowfully under their heart-shaped leaves. The bougainvillaea that sprawled luxuriously over the tiny front balcony was hung, as though for a carnival, with its lantern-shaped magenta flowers. In the darkness of the fuchsia-hedge a thousand ballerina-like blooms quivered expectantly.

Meanwhile Lawrence’s 1945 Corfu memoir, Prospero’s Cell, reveals a world of naked bathing which is the response of a mature sexual being — and one who had passed through London’s Bohemia at that — to Corfu’s nature.

But they were not the only contributors to a post-war intensificiation of the British association of Greece with hedonism, liberation, and general (to use D.H. Lawrence’s word) unEnglishing. Willy Russell’s 1986 monologue play, and 1989 film, Shirley Valentine, liberated a middle-aged English housewife into renewed sexuality and self-confidence (somewhat as the 2016 and 2017 ITV television series The Durrells have unhistorically liberated the widow Louisa Durrell). When Nikos Kazantzakis’s 1946 novel Zorba the Greek, translated into English in 1953, became a smash-hit film in 1964, the mainland Greek protagonist was significantly turned into an Anglo-Greek. Basil’s intellectual detachment is broken down by his connection to the vital Zorba, who teaches him how to love santuri, sirtaki, and taking days as they come. Four years earlier, Never on Sunday, starring Melina Mercouri, used a similar plot — except that the pale northerner was an American called Homer, who gave up on trying to restore the Piraeus prostitute Ilya to ancient Greek glory after recognising the lack of vitality in himself. He ends the film by drowning his notebooks, shedding his Classicist scholarship and scholarly attitudes together.

In the following decade came Peter Shafer’s 1973 play Equus, in which the Hellenophile psychiatrist Dr Dysart ends the play by doubting his own profession of making people sane, and wanting instead to become fully alive. He tells his colleague Hesther, with reference to his wife:

I tell everyone Margaret’s the puritan, I’m the pagan. Some pagan! Such wild returns I make to the womb of civilisation. Three weeks a year in the Peloponnese, every bed booked in advance, every meal paid for by vouchers, cautious jaunts in hired Fiats . . . Such a fantastic surrender to the primitive . . . I sit looking at pages of centaurs trampling the soil of Argos — and outside my window he [his patient Strang] is trying to become one, in a Hampshire field! . . . Then in the morning, I put away my books on the culture shelf, close up the kodachrome snaps of Mount Olympus, touch my reproduction statue of Dionysus for luck — and go off to hospital to treat him for insanity. Do you see?

Such attitudes as those embodied in these works may well have been therapeutic for north Europeans deficient in vitamin D and spontaneity. And they recovered a real aspect of ancient Greece — the Dionysian — which neoclassicism, Arnold’s Hellenism, and the bleached architecture and sculpture that we have inherited and find hard to unimagine — have all denied.

But this attitude significantly mistakes modern Greek culture, shaped as it has been by centuries of Orthodox and orthodox Christianity. The Durrells’ memoirs and their recent adaptations downplay the disapproval aroused by their Bohemianism among not only the Anglo-Corfiot high society to which Theodore Stephanides belonged, but the Corfiot peasantry, who deeply objected to Lawrence, Nancy and friends bathing naked; according to Haag, “They were known to have been stoned by the village priest and boys.” Neither Lawrence nor Gerald mention the fact that their brother Leslie made one of their maids, Maria Condos, pregnant (as my mother-in-law recently told me). When the maid’s brothers threatened to kill her for disgracing them, she fled to England to work for the Durrells there. Around the same time, according to Kazantzakis’s imagination, a Cretan widow was stoned and beheaded alive for a one-night stand with an Englishman. Theodore’s writings such as Island Trails (1973) and the posthumous Autumn Gleanings (2011), contain several anecdotes of this kind of patriarchy.

The clash between the British vision of Greece and the reality came to a head during the dictatorship, when British tourists continued to flood in, only to find mini-skirts, beards and holding hands illegal in the “Greece of the Christian Greeks”. On finding tourist income to have collapsed, the Colonels quickly unbanned these things for foreigners. Nonetheless, my husband’s recollection of arriving as a small boy in the London of 1968 was that it was like moving from a black and white film into technicolour — the reverse of the trope of grey England and colourful Greece. History since then has produced further instances of this clash — as on Mykonos, where the film of Shirley Valentine was shot, which later became the Cycladic capital of British hedonism. Lawrence, Gerald and Theodore were all appalled by the Anglicised Corfu of their several post-war visits, which they had themselves helped to create.

Thus it was that, visiting Greece for the first time with my future husband, I started on a steep learning curve. He explained: northern women were seen, especially by the older generations, as barbaras: strong, attractive, liable to be drunk, sloppily dressed, and sexually available. Like their male counterparts, they liked to do eccentric things such as turning brown, lying on sand, walking round ruins, or flogging round an island in search of its fauna. All this explained much: why I was looked at askance when I poured myself a second glass of wine at table; why I was the only person I saw jogging in the royal palace’s gardens; why my future father-in-law, on seeing how I was dressed for dinner, turned to his son and commanded, “Buy her some shoes”; why Mount Hymettus (supposed location of the forest in A Midsummer Night’s Dream) turned out on closer inspection to lack the infrastructure for walking to which the Peak District had accustomed me.But these cultural differences are not the sole source of British misapprehension of Greece. It is, of course, in the nature of most tourism to focus on a country’s timeless aspects — its safely-past history, or its nature — rather than its political near-past and present. This is especially the case if the latter are painful, and/or the climate is pleasant; one visits Berlin, for example, in a different kind of tourist mode. In Greece, this dynamic is exaggerated by the fact that many tourists visit the islands, where contemporary political and economic events are less manifest than in Athens. I would say that in Greece, by European standards, there is a particularly great discrepancy between the apolitical idyll purveyed by the likes of Gerald Durrell and experienced by many visitors, and the exceptional grimness of its 20th- and 21st-century history.
I was on a steep learning curve on my first visit, when I approached it as a country that had had its rough patches in the 20th century, certainly, but which but was now essentially one among other picturesque South European countries; not as rich as north Europe, to be sure, but not so different either. It was in small details that I realised that I was wrong, and that I whiffed not so much the Middle East as Latin America. The man with the machine gun who stood on permanent guard outside the house next to my future parents-in-law, which was inhabited by a former minister. The holes in the traffic signs part way up Mount Hymettus, which I slowly, horrifyingly, realised had been made by bullets. The ubiquity and anger of the grafitti of central Athens. The high, barbed wall which surrounded the villa of the  family lawyer, despite the fact that it was located inside a gated community that was itself surrounded by a high, barbed wall. In explanation of this last, my husband told me about November 17 — a terrorist organisation named after the date of the 1973 student uprising against the junta, which every year had published a hit-list of wealthy Greeks in the national press. It was understood that if these targets left Greece they were safe, but of those who stayed, two would be killed each year. My mother-in-law herself had witnessed two such assassinations — drive-by motorbike shootings in the Athenian district of Kolonaki. All these were aspects of modern Greece that my Greece-loving friends and relatives, with their taste for retsina and rembetika, seemed to have missed or overlooked.

Of course, it is part of the point of the Gerald Durrell memoirs to represent pre-war Corfu as an ahistorical paradise. My Family and Other Animals and The Garden of the Gods do not mention the war at all, and the former mendaciously describes the family as returning to England for Gerald’s education (they left in June 1939 precisely because of the approaching war). Birds, Beasts and Relatives, however, ends with an elegiac letter written by Spiro the chauffeur to Margo: “Dear Missy Margo, This is to tell you that war has been declared. Don’t tell a soul. Spiro.” Lawrence’s more adult memoir, Prospero’s Cell, contains an “Epilogue in Alexandria” (he and Nancy left Corfu only in September 1939), which ends with a reminiscence of April 1941 when he sailed to Crete: 

I found myself thinking back to that green rain upon a white balcony, in the shadow of Albania; thinking of it with a regret so luxurious and so deep that it did not stir the emotions at all. Seen through the transforming lens of memory the past seemed so enchanted that even thought would be unworthy of it.

Theodore had a similar Brideshead Revisited moment when he went to fight in Crete in the same year. In the Epilogue to the 1973 Island Trails he wrote: “Some of the chapters of this book were roughed out while I was serving with the R.A.M.C. in the Western Desert.” He describes his 1933 touring visit to Crete with the following prolepsis:

Little did I guess then under what unexpected circumstances my next journey to Crete, in May 1941, was to be made. I did not see the ruins of Knossos; but I saw the ruins of Canea and the parachuted thugs who were spewed on that helpless town from the skies.

Haag’s biography supplies some of the history which the Durrell memoirs lack — including an extraordinary vignette of Lawrence living in Cyprus in the 1950s. He and his second wife Eva would sit at opposite ends of a table with their typewriters — Lawrence writing The Alexandria Quartet in which Eva appears as Justine, while Cypriot bombs shook the very windows around them. When Gerald looked into setting up his pioneering zoo on the island, he quickly realised that the political situation — of a terrorist campaign to achieve union with Greece — made this impossible. Haag notes that “Larry himself was nearly killed by a terrorist’s bullet and an incendiary bomb was placed in his garage”. But he does not mention the dictatorship, which was in power when the BBC took Gerald and Theodore to Corfu to film the 1967 documentary The Garden of the Gods. In this, the son of the Greek ambassador to London, then aged ten, ran about recreating the role of Gerald of the mid-Thirties. At the same time, both of  Theodore’s grandsons were under house arrest in Athens.

The St Lucian poet Derek Walcott made a similar complaint about European attitudes towards the Caribbean. In his 2000 poem Omeros he mapped the Caribbean onto the Aegean, and satirised the English who sought “somewhere, with its sunlit islands/ where what they called history could not happen”. Yet St Lucia’s 20th-century history has been far more pacific than that of Greece. The one post-war work which has brought this turbulence into the British consciousness is Louis de Bernière’s 1994 novel Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, which describes events in the Ionian island of Cephalonia before, during and after the Italian and German occupations. Much criticised in Greece for its pro-British and anti-Resistance politics, this novel has nonetheless served the purpose of yoking the idea of Greece to some of the most terrible aspects of its recent history in the British imagination. Somewhat less-known, the 1969 Franco-Algerian film Z — nominated for Best Picture and Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards — successfully evoked the sinister Greek pseudo-democracy that preceded the 1967 coup.

When I first started visiting Greece in the early 2000s, it was a far stabler, happier place than that depicted in either of these works of fiction. Since then, it has declined again. The economy has staggered. Tens of thousands of refugees have arrived as a result of unrelated wars. Degrading acts of austerity have been imposed by the EU, including the privatisation of coastlines, and the much-resented enforced opening of shops on Sundays. Greeks have proved powerless to effect any improvement in their situation through the ballot box.

The resultant tension is manifest in behaviour that was unknown before. My husband was recently mugged by a taxi driver. I witnessed a spectacular example of road rage in Athens two months ago. Thus the anger that is glimpsed periodically in British news footage of demonstrations on Syntagma Square is between-whiles dissipated in tiny, life-degrading acts of fury. In the meantime, Mykonos has probably grown fractionally more tolerant of the barbaras behaviour of tourists who will keep its economy afloat.

And yet, despite all their grounds for complaint at the EU, there is no significant appetite to leave it — only the euro. They look upon the British decision to leave with bewilderment, perceiving the British to have had the fat end of the EU while they have received its sharpest. The most conservative and wealthiest Greeks are uniformly opposed to leaving even the euro, and thus are even more bewildered by the British referendum result. And a post-Brexit Britain that defines itself as anti-immigrant might no longer be the obvious place of refuge for Greek kings in exile.

In the light of Brexit, a Greek passport has suddenly become more attractive to me. Perhaps the frailest European barque into which I might jump, the Greek one is nonetheless the one available to me. Or so I thought. It emerges that Greeks do not dispense their citizenship lightly. The website detailing the required residency requirements, language test, and history and culture examination, is significantly written in Greek alone. The days when the son of one of Greece’s more famous families could procure citizenship for his Anglo-German wife are, it seems, over.

Thus modernised — thus EUropeanised — is Greece today, for all its current desperation. And so I am holding fire on my learning of Greek grammar. I will wait and see, and find out where our two countries stand in five years’ time. But I also fervently hope that the Greece to which we plan one day to retire is one in which I will feel no compulsion to disengage from the historical present in order to bathe (properly clothed) in an uninformed Arcadia.

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“Swift was obsessed by shit,” opined my best friend in his undergraduate essay on the Dean. “So, it seems, are you,” shot back our supervisor in his marginal annotation. Dr Colin Burrow, who echoed Swift in his wit and directness, would later supervise John Stubbs’s doctoral work. But although Stubbs would likewise dismiss the view of Swift as shit-obsessed, he is not one of those authors drawn to write about those whom he resembles (unlike, say, John Carey, who like Stubbs has written on Donne). 

From his base in Slovenia, where he is also a schoolteacher, copy editor and translator, Stubbs has produced a magisterial biography of Swift which is strikingly unlike its subject: consistently moderate, undemonstrative, even-tempered, open-minded, and tactful. Not that he presents his subject as the opposite of all these things; that would not be moderate or open-minded of him. He is sufficiently responsive to the disparate moral claims of Irish peasants, women, and Swift himself, to calibrate precisely how far the latter was responsive to the formers’ interests, and to state his findings without moralism: “Like most if not all of us, Swift’s personality was surely made up of many parts. One of these parts sympathised with the victims of his society; another concealed pain and insecurities in the language and attitudes of an oppressor.” The book is laden with controversy — between Catholics and Protestants, Anglicans and Dissenters, English and Irish, Whigs and Tories — but if there is anything controversial in its presentation of Swift’s positions on these matters, a reader would not know it from its tone. If it appears fractionally more sympathetic to the High Anglican Tory position than any other, it feels that this is only because it must focus on Swift.

Despite Stubbs’s disciplinary background, the biography is far more historical than literary. There are no extended passages of criticism; he does not rip Swift’s works out of the history into which they are stitched. As a result, individual works are discussed briefly and repeatedly, whenever they become relevant to the history being described (in what — after an introduction starting in medias res in 1710 — is a broadly chronological book). Yet Stubbs’s style also reveals a literary flair for compression: A Tale of a Tub “shocked all who weren’t entirely confused by it”; Swift “bonded with personalities that recognised and in their own ways equalled his unusualness as a person”; “There is much innuendo in the Swift-Vanessa letters, but innuendo rarely refers to a consummated urge”; and, concerning the “freedom” that Swift professed to champion: “Freedom is only meaningful in a world of restricted options. The strict limits Swift himself abided by were the preconditions of his audacity in literature and politics.” If Augustan poetry can be prolix, it can also be felicitously compressed. This may have rubbed off on Stubbs.
Stubbs also has a taste for architecture, and has clearly visited many of the places that Swift knew. “The Regal interiors Gulliver visits . . . are never described at length” is the observation of someone who would have made such a description, had he been Gulliver. Being a historicist biographer, he also tries to give a sense of what St Patrick’s Cathedral, or its Deanery, or a London coffee house, would have looked, felt, sounded and smelt like in Swift’s own time. He not only describes the portrait made by the young Charles Jervas of Swift, but what the room in which Swift’s sittings took place must have looked like.
Broadly speaking, Stubbs defends Swift from charges both contemporary (of Jacobitism and irreverence) and subsequent (of misanthropy and madness). He reminds us that Swift’s reputation sank fast from a peak of popularity after his death — and was kept down by subsequent comments from W.M. Thackeray, D.H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley and George Orwell. He argues convincingly not only that Swift’s High Anglicanism wavered towards neither Catholicism nor Dissent, but that his promotion to the Deanery of St Patrick’s, Dublin, (and no higher) was retarded in part precisely by his loyalty, whereas the loyalty of others was bought by their faster promotion. He dispels the image of Swift as a loner with detailed accounts of his friendships, for example with Sheridan. He stresses Swift’s aptitude as a scholar of Greek and Latin at his school and University, rather than the fractiousness that earned him a BA “by special grace”.

On the vexed question of whether he ever had affairs or married, Stubbs concludes that he never married, probably never had an affair, and if he did it was more likely with Esther Vanhomrigh than with his greater soul-mate Esther Johnson. He rebuts the theory that he was asexual, and highlights Swift’s own comment that he would be very hard to please in the matter of a wife.
On the question of Swift’s alleged misogyny, Stubbs is clear that he was often misogynistic in the abstract, but not the concrete. His relationship with Esther Johnson showed that he sought in a woman an intellectual equal. He was a good son, movingly grieving for his mother in what may well serve as a cut-out-and-keep quote for use at funerals: “I have now lost my barrier between me and death; God grant I may live to be as well prepared for it, as I confidently believe her to have been! If the way to heaven be through piety, truth, justice, and the charity, she is there.” Swift proved himself to be ahead of his time on the question of rape, arguing about a rape trial in 1711 that: “Tis true, the fellow had a lain with her a hundred times before; but what care I for that?” Stubbs argues, less convincingly, that in Swift’s poems evincing disgust at ageing females’ toilette, he is in part satirising men’s willingness to accept female deception for the sake of their own sexual gratification. If true, this opens up a further set of questions as to whether “making the best of oneself” — albeit using the grimly lead-compounded methods of the age — is deception; as to what is more deceitful about an older than a younger woman’s toilette, given the period’s anti-natural fashions; and as to what on earth is wrong with lust for older women, be they deceivers or otherwise.

On the question of whether Swift was a Conservative or a rebel, Stubbs’s thesis is summed up by his subtitle “The Reluctant Rebel”. He was, Stubbs argues, instinctively conformist, but driven to protest by what he perceived as the outrageous behaviour of — for example — the English towards the Irish, and the Whigs towards the fabric of society itself. But he goes beyond, and somewhat contradicts, this thesis with his idea of Swift’s split personality: “At one and the same time he was a stern authoritarian and a daring cultural bandit. Managing as he could the torsion these tendencies created would make up a large part of the business of his life”. Stubbs adds “a marauding unholy ghost” to make up his trinity: his attacks of what is now thought to be Ménière’s Disease, which combines tinnitus and vertigo, and which Swift endured with spirit.

Stubbs draws tellingly on Swift’s scholastic education, which had taught him to argue on both sides of a question. If he later satirised this practice, it at least gave him the training to inhabit a different persona on which his satire so heavily drew. The Puritan children’s literature with which he would have had contact as a child left its imprint on his ethics, and gave him a model for both his sincere and his faux didacticism. Taking us as far back as Swift’s grandparents’ generation, Stubbs shows him to be the product of the High Church on his paternal side, and Dissent on his maternal side. Although his conscious allegiance was to the former, his moral rigour, and insistence on physical and mental cleanliness, bears the impression of the latter.

The book does well at clarifying the desperately convoluted politics of the period, in which Irish Protestants found themselves split between supporting the Catholic Confederacy for the sake of their monarchism, and supporting regicides for the sake of their Protestantism; in which the pre-Reformation English in Ireland were split between loyalty to their original country, and to their religion; in which Swift’s maternal grandfather moved to Ireland because Dissenters were more tolerated there than in England; and in which the Scots sacrificed their Parliament for the sake of union with England, whereas the Irish, who retained their Parliament, found that they now had fewer privileges than the Scots. There is madness in this method, which Swift, with his intuitive understanding of madness, was well placed to point out — thus revealing how supposed lunacy might show greater sanity and humanity than philistine propriety.

Stubbs is rightly concerned to give a sense of the roughness of the time in which Swift lived. I was reminded of Barry Hines’s A Kestrel for a Knave: the back cover of its Penguin edition called it “as real as a slap in the face to those who think that orange juice and comprehensive schools have taken the meanness out of life in the raw working towns”. This biography is as real as a slap in the face to those who think that the Glorious Revolution and coffee houses took the violence out of life in 18th-century England. “Late, very late, correctness grew our care/ When the tired nation breathed from civil war,” claimed Pope. But by the mid-1730s, when he wrote this, we still had some way to go. When Anne died and the Whigs gained the ascendancy under George I, Tories might expect to lose their liberty or even their lives. For a while Swift lived in fear of the Mohacks, a marauding band of young Whig aristocrats who terrorised London’s Tories, cutting off noses, ears and fingers. Swift defused a bomb which was sent to the Lord Chancellor, and was forced off the road by Whig hoodlums outside Dublin. Britain’s most spectacularly tortuous form of execution, hanging, drawing and quartering, was applied throughout Swift’s lifetime.

Yet Swift, and therefore this book, are also relevant to the present — as my iPhone’s auto-correction of the adjective “Brobdingnagian” suggests. Twenty-first-century Britain feels its connection to Swift more than to most other people of his century — albeit not to those aspects of Swift which Stubbs chooses to stress. He predicted the end of Anglicanism as the established Church in Ireland, and, if anything, would be surprised to hear that at the futuristic date of 2016 his beloved Anglican Church, and its state, remain united. He anticipated modern discontents with what is now known as crony capitalism, and his sympathies would have been with the Occupy Movement, if not with the presence of tents on the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral. He would have supported, at least to a degree, the anti-consumerist movement, anti-makeup feminism, and animal rights. He was ahead of his time in personal hygiene (he changed his underwear daily), but also anticipated his fellow Dubliner James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, and Sigmund Freud in his explicit acknowledgment of bodily functions. Perhaps where he differs most from that majority of people today, who would not have been happier had they lived in the 18th century, is in his veneration for those ideals which reality does not match. In his falsification of Augustan idealism lies “a large part of his lasting appeal to a more modern readership that accepts decay, mess and sometimes downright chaos as all but unavoidable — and in some cases a source of vibrancy and excitement. This is not to say, either, that Swift would not have preferred the Augustan version to be true. He very clearly would.”

The post Pinned Down At Last: The Dean Of English Satirists appeared first on Standpoint.

Maestra is a spectacular act of revenge — on the English upper class, and on men. This revenge is more direct on the part of its protagonist; less so on the part of its novelist; and it is accomplished in a manner coldly furious, exuberant, wish-fulfilling, and, in its own way, snobbish. Whatever the truth of the author Lisa Hilton’s claim that “I actually live a really boring life. My hobbies are reading and cookery and I dress like a homeless person most of the time,” the life of her mind is far from this. 

It should be acknowledged immediately that the novel ends “To Be Continued”, and opens a projected trilogy. Every word in this review might have the carpet pulled out from under it by the successor novels — especially, as is the way of these things, the last one. But in that case, they would be pulling out the carpet from under this novel itself — which I would like to bet would resist pretty fiercely, since it is aloof, independent-minded, and has ample wherewithal to defend itself from redemption. So: watch out for the false ending, heroine Judith Rashleigh! But no need for paranoia. Odds on you’ll survive and thrive to be an immaculately-dressed octogenarian, hiring the very best gigolos, and with your very own collection of Artemisia Gentileschis.

Chronic rage is a strange beast. It can be generated by one terrible circumstance, or a series of adverse conditions. But its other parent is a certain personality type, which is capable of sustaining it. It is often egotistical and always unwise — destructive of self and others, of quality of life, and of life itself — but is rarely without a worthy target. It usually pertains to something very wrong with the world — man-made and curable or otherwise. Dostoyevsky’s anti-heroes, such as Ivan Karamazov, have a sharp perception of the latter — those things that make the very conditions of human life outrageous.The rest of us may be more or less aware of these wrongs, but we do not take them to heart — have not had personal cause to, or cannot bear to, or have lost the energy to, or with a great moral effort have overcome having done so. In one of the most famous passages of George Eliot’s Middlemarch, the narrator reflects: “If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.” In context, this concerns compassion. But keen vision and feeling can perceive injustice as well as the pain which it can cause. And the same applies. Most of us do indeed walk about well wadded with apathy about injustice. Society could not function otherwise. Beware of those who are stripped bare.

Judith Rashleigh, protagonist of Maestra is, let us say, thinly-clad. Some of her rage results from, or is at least facilitated by, an unstable upbringing by an alcoholic single mother. Late in the novel she tells a lover how she was sexually abused by one of her mother’s boyfriends — then bursts out laughing at his credulity of this hackneyed story. So that’s a maybe. But it is certain that her home life was in many senses poor. She was bullied at her Liverpool school by other girls, in part, presumably, because she stood out as bright and swottish — a type of anti-intellectual bullying which, in England, is connected to the class system. After rejection by her own kind as an intellectual, and having escaped into “an environment where confession to an interest in anything apart from fucking reality shows wasn’t an invitation to a cracked jaw”, she is patronised and exploited at the London auction house where she works after her Oxford degree, as a “Northerner” of the wrong class and accent.

By the time that she is fired for looking too closely into an art fraud that her boss is in the process of committing, she has come to the conclusion that meritocracy (she is bright, gifted and hard-working) will never cut it, that she will never be on the inside. “Somewhere inside the house was a hidden casket of Alice in Wonderland keys that I would never possess, keys that unlocked ever tinier gardens whose walls were all the more impregnable because they were invisible.” The names of the novel’s parts are directed at this concept of belonging — respectively “Outside”, “Inside”, “Outside”, “Outside”, and “Inside” — a summary of the novel which both reprises the sexual activity which Judith particularly enjoys, and indicates that by the end she has after all, in some sense if not the English aristocratic one, made it.

Her rage at the privileges conferred by hereditary wealth is accentuated by her education, which gives her both analytic clarity about derogations from meritocracy in the way the world works, and the opportunity to feel those derogations in application to herself. Without an Oxford degree she would not be permitted close enough to the London art world to feel excluded by it. She is, therefore, an Angry Young Woman. One of Jimmy Porter’s problems was that he was of a generation of working-class men which had been university-educated but not de-classed, and which felt the contradiction keenly. In the same year as Look Back in Anger, Evelyn Waugh (responding to Nancy Mitford’s essay “The English Aristocracy”, itself responding to the linguist Alan Ross’s essay “U and Non-U”) characterised this generation thus: “I could make your flesh creep by telling you about the new wave of philistinism with which we are threatened by these sour young people who are coming off the assembly line in their hundreds every year and finding employment as critics, even as poets and novelists.” This caricature has astonishing relevance to a novel published 60 years later. Just one year later, in 1957, John Osborne had parodied the same sentiments thus: “Then these ungrateful little bastards shout their loutish heads off and bite the hand that feeds them.” Maestra does some shouting and some biting.

Judith gets a certain way up in the English class system, and reaches an impasse: “I read hundreds of novels, scouring them for details of the customs of the strange country of class, of how to speak, the vocabulary that marks out those who belong to the invisible club from those who don’t. I worked endlessly at my languages: French and Italian were the tongues of art. I read Le Monde and Foreign Affairs, Country Life and Vogue and Opéra Magazine and Tatler and polo magazines and Architectural Digest and the Financial Times. I taught myself about wine, about rare book bindings and old silver; I went to all the free recitals I could, first for duty and then for pleasure; I learned the correct use of the dessert fork and how to imitate the accent on which the sun has never set.”

Waugh would have been amused, both at Maestra as a novel in itself, and at Judith’s attempts to learn the ways of the ways of the upper classes from novels: “Their novelists seem to be aware of a rather more expensive world than their own — bars in which spirits are regularly drunk in preference to beer, loose women who take taxis, crooks in silk shirts — but of the ramifications of the social order which have obsessed some of the acutest minds of the last 150 years, they know less than of the castes of India. What can their critics hope to make of the undertones and innuendos, the evocative, reminiscent epithets of, say, Tony Powell or Leslie Hartley?” Maybe this novel, and Judith, don’t know those details (and Waugh himself admits that they are of small importance), but they do know a great deal about “loose women who take taxis” and “crooks in silk shirts”.

Understandably, Judith gives up trying with the English, and launches herself onto the sea of Eurowealth, where structures are less rigid, and Steve “the hedgie” (on whose yacht she spends several weeks of anxious hedonism) is of no sharply or importantly different order to that of the hereditary  Euro jeunesse dorée among whose yachts he docks his own. Here “the vocabulary that marks out those who belong to the invisible club from those who don’t” is not linguistic — they are after all an international bunch — but the vocabulary of brands.

Judith’s social climbing is tracked by the brands that she buys, and facilitated by her ability to recognise brands as worn by men — the “shoe and watch check”, as she and her girlfriends call it. One can only hope that Hilton was paid for product-placement, in which case she has already earned riches indeed. If not, then she will be for the film of the novel, for which the rights have been sold. In this sense, as in others, the novel enacts what it describes. Not only is every item of clothing, every pair of shoes, and every watch branded, but so are pieces of furniture. At a moment of supremely high tension, Judith’s first person narration mentions a brand of chair. The “U” (as opposed to “non-U”) of wool is “cashmere” — a word used more than most others in the novel, frequently with a brand name attached.

Brands are markers of what Thorstein Veblen called “conspicuous consumption” — a sign of money-without-responsibility, which is itself a feature of more recent history (The Theory of the Leisure Class was published in 1899). In this novel, they are conspicuous indeed — to those who can a) recognise them when seen, and b) assess their relative status. Readers who do not know their Louboutin from their Lanvin will be as at sea in this novel as the working-class reader of the “undertones and innuendoes . . . of, say, Tony Powell or Leslie Hartley”. And if the latter is a world of snobbery that Judith has given up on, brands, being more accessible, are one that she enthusiastically embraces, with only a slight, untroubled awareness of their absurdity.

The contrasts with Sofia Coppola’s 2006 biopic Marie Antoinette are instructive. First, the life of the born-aristocrat at Versailles, with its macarons, infinite variety of (non-branded) dresses, vast wigs, and louche girl- and boyfriends, is presented as a whole lot of fun. By contrast Judith, though she has no illusions about the grind that a low-income life in London can be, gives very little sense that modern mega-wealth is actually fun at all. Slogging round brand shops and luxury yachts seems to bring her scant pleasure, and her delight in her immaculately-branded clothes and Parisian apartment consists chiefly of relief that these are no longer the clothes and flat of her old life. Which begs a question.

Nonetheless, Marie Antoinette more than Maestra is a satire on today’s mega-rich (as the rock music soundtrack, American actors, and pair of Converse trainers, included in a panning shot of 18th-century shoes, indicate). The excess may be delightful, but it is also ignorant of its conditions of existence, and unsustainable. The film gives a sense of why the Revolution happened. Maestra, by contrast, has no hint of a socialist consciousness. The victims of the hedge funds’ carving up of the world are glimpsed or considered no more than are the victims of the mafiosi to whom Judith sells a fake Stubbs. The politics are of meritocracy in a cut-throat world — and more than a little Thatcherite.

The merits on which she climbs are female attractiveness, astuteness, and cold-heartedness, all of which she has in abundance. The first is crucial. In St James or Cannes, she enters a world in which women sell their attractiveness, and men sell access to the trappings of their wealth, plus shopping expenses. She therefore has it easier than the Talented Mr Ripley, who makes it through his talent of impersonation. Sufficiently attractive young women need no unusual talent in order to enjoy the same yacht-lifestyle.

Part of Judith is happy with this deal. Certainly, she more cheerfully prostitutes her body to the obese businessman who first takes her to the Riviera than she prostituted her mind to the employers who despised her. She doesn’t have the maths brain to be a hedgie, and if Steve’s brains buy him a yacht, which Judith’s art-historical brains do not, this is not an injustice which seems to exercise her. If men more than women have the brains and/or will to make a successful hedge-fund manager, good luck to them, and let any women whose brains are less marketable at least sell their looks for a stay on the yacht. She enjoys sex anyway, even with men who are sub-optimally attractive, which helps in operating in this world.

Yet, in another part of herself, she hates the power imbalance — the fact that (unless a marriage is managed; and to her credit Judith never contemplates it) men-the-buyers can drop women-the-goods at a moment’s notice. The women’s life on the yachts is anxious and contingent, and, though the novel doesn’t mention it, time-limited, because it is dependent on beauty. This intensifies a resentment against men which, if it does not originate in childhood rape, certainly goes back as far as an episode in which Judith is sent by her auction house to evaluate the collection of a retired colonel in St John’s Wood. This man is — as she is not forewarned — a would-be rapist. (She escapes by biting him and threatening to film his assault on her mobile phone.) In order to make the kind of money denied to her by her employers, she turns to a bar in St James’s where the waitresses are paid by “tragic paunchy men” for their company alone (not for tolerating assault), and, once she is sacked from the auction house, agrees to go with her most regular bar client to the French Riviera for £3,000.

Her resentment against men resembles her resentment against the class system, in that she identifies in it a derogation from meritocracy — or rather, a treatment of arrogance, superior physical strength, and a love of dealing in numbers, as merits worthy of particular social and financial reward. That the novel was repeatedly rejected by middle-aged male publishers, as Hilton has mentioned in interviews, is not surprising: “You could tell in their rejections that the book had kind of gotten under their skin, it bothered them. I felt quite pleased that I’d succeeded in putting the wind up the old man.”

The novel’s murders — Judith commits four — are in part a revenge for her accumulated resentments. But only indirectly. She kills an art dealer (to steal the fake Stubbs which she sells on to the mafia); her girlfriend (who has betrayed her to a detective); the detective (who is about to turn her in to the police); and the owner of a Parisian sex club (who gets in her way when she is trying to escape). Although three of these are men, none is upper-class (except perhaps the owner of the club, who had always been kind to her). Her murders are not even particularly pragmatic. Only the first helps to make her money; the others are all getaway murders of questionable wisdom. She kills, first and foremost, because the world makes no moral sense to her, and she has therefore lost her moral sense. She also finds that she is good at it (at least in this world of heterodox and slow detectives), and gains a taste for it. She is almost completely psychopathic. (She retains real feelings of friendship for Dave, a porter at her auction house, who is sacked along with her for investigating the fake Stubbs. He, like her, is working-class, highly intelligent, and has a strong commitment to art which goes underappreciated and underpaid in London’s art world.) But by and large, the springs of morality are broken in her.

With the murders the novel also leaves the realm of realism, which until then it had comfortably inhabited. Serial killers exist, but they cannot write the narrative that Judith narrates, from wherever and whenever (as we may discover by the end of the third novel) she is doing so (an asylum? Malibu Beach?). Nor do killers like Judith get away with their murders for as long. The fact that her name is that of the woman who kills Holofernes in the Apocryphal story (painted among others by her female artist heroine, Artemisia Gentileschi) is the kind of felicity that art has the freedom to confer — and her own murders also exist within this freedom.

This is the more true of art which contains other art within itself, since the self-consciousness of meta-artistry always disrupts realism. This is apparent in that other art-thriller novel, Michael Frayn’s 1999 Headlong, in which the “real-life” plot, also centring on an art fraud, intertwines with the historical reality with which a painting is supposedly concerned.

But there is also, in Maestra, a touch of Jonathan Coe’s 1994 anti-Thatcherite novel What a Carve Up!, which concerns the writing of a biography of a maleficent family by a man who has suffered from that family. The plot is of (heightened) realism until the novel’s final section, which reprises the dénoument of the 1961 mock-horror film which gives the novel its title. The family members are gathered together in a spooky house, and are killed off one by one in a manner appropriate to their various crimes. One of the villains, as it happens, is an art dealer who sexually harasses female artists who come to him for advancement. The tone is one of hysterical laughter and wish-fulfillment. Justice, in a morally mad world — also that of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None — is done. But Coe’s novel, like Christie’s, is aware of the boundaries that have been crossed. The biographer discovers that he is in fact related to that family, and implicated in its guilt. In a spectacularly improbable plot twist, he is killed in a plane crash by a mad great-aunt.

Maestra is far less concerned to be morally coherent, or poised, as a work of art. There is a kind of vengeful third-wave feminism, summed up in the title, at work — but even that does not strike a moral pose. Judith ends on a point of success, bumping into the boss who had sacked her, at the Venice Biennale. He does not recognise her, such is the elegance of her “cobalt suede Celine shift, her impeccable pumps”, which “existed in another dimension from Judith Rashleigh”. He leers at her, but cannot follow her into the party to which she is going: “No, er, NFI actually, no fucking invite. Oh Rupert . . . I took a glass and stood alone at the parapet, and looked at the waves, and they lifted my heart. To Be Continued.”

Like Tamburlaine in Marlowe’s play, she just keeps rising and rising, and betraying, and killing. It is in the nature of such arcs, as generally presented in art, that the protagonist — in Marlowe’s case a Scythian shepherd-turned-Emperor of Africa and Persia — must finally come crashing down. Yet he finishes the play at the height of luxury and success, marrying the daughter of the Egyptian king. The play was a giant, money-spurting success. And so there was a Part II, in which one again expects him to be brought down eventually, and again he keeps having successes, and killing and humiliating more people (one can imagine Judith getting her conquered men to draw her chariot to her next battlefield), and finally he dies, bequeathing the conquest of the remaining parts of the earth to his sons.

Admittedly, there is in the second part some distancing of the play from the protagonist. As for Maestra, we shall see. Maestra and its heroine have conceived of success from the outset, following Tamburlaine’s precept:

Nature, that fram’d us of four elements
Warring within our breasts for regiment,
Doth teach us all to have aspiring minds:
. . .
Wills us to wear ourselves and never rest,
Until we reach the ripest fruit of all,
That perfect bliss and sole felicity,
The sweet fruition of an earthly crown.

With the film deal, an earthly crown seems in sight. A filmable novel can get into the same league as fine art when it comes to money-making at point of sale, only there is no equivalent of a fraud. People will read, and watch, what they like. In the case of Maestra, the masses, not the cognoscenti, will decide.

One thing that has made it the more marketable is the sex scenes. It was apparently at the behest of her agent that Hilton wrote a novel that would contain some, in the wake of the commercial success of the 2011 pulp-fiction novel of female masochism Fifty Shades of Gray. This will doubtless work, just as Judith being flexible about whom she has sex with plays some role in her success. But it does not actually play a crucial role with Judith; sex is generally incidental to her murders and frauds. Nor should it be central to whatever long-term success this novel has. It is not about sex, any more than Judith is. She merely happens to enjoy it in an intense yet shallow way, and, when it happens, describes it straightforwardly. D.H. Lawrence once expressed impatience with those, like Freud, who brought sex into everything. Contrary to his reputation, he said that he wanted it to be kept under the table — not undescribed, but described only in its time and place. So it is in this novel. Judith does not crave sex all the time, just some of the time, and when she gets it, she tells us. She likes her sex common-or-garden, if on the rough side; no non-consensual sex occurs; even at sex parties nothing particularly offbeat takes place; and the descriptions are not laboured.

Still, to second-wave feminists who think that the way to deal with a male-dominated world is not to don a bikini and leap onto a yacht, and/or to kill four people and set up an art gallery, this novel is deeply depressing. That, 40 years on from the crest of its wave, the world of Maestra, and of the 2006 Audrey Tautou film Hors de Prix (in which a female gold-digger and the gigolo who loves her operate in the same hotel in the South of France) still exists. In his one-star review of Hors de Prix, Peter Bradshaw complained that “the whole movie slavers over bling, and has a nasty, dated air of pseudo-worldliness”. This novel does slaver over bling (while not actually, as noted, evincing much delight in it), and it does feel dated, but only because it seems bizarre that, as it once was, it still is now. And shall forever be? This is, after all, also a novel that testifies to the relevance in 2016 of Nancy Mitford’s Noblesse Oblige. To say that this is the world’s fault is also to admit that it is, in small part, the fault of the Judiths of the world, who perpetuate the status quo by chasing what that world chases, and getting it where they can.

The post An Orgy Of Revenge In A Man’s World appeared first on Standpoint.

Literature, with its centuries-old fixation on marriage either as anticipated, or as experienced (the latter especially in works of last 150 years), helped me to think this through. The century-old but startlingly modern conversation at the opening of D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love struck a particular chord:

“Ursula,” said Gudrun, “don’t you really want to get married?” . . .

“I don’t know,” she replied. “It depends how you mean.” . . .

“Well,” she said, ironically, “it usually means one thing! But don’t you think anyhow, you’d be . . . in a better position than you are in now.”

A shadow came over Ursula’s face.

“I might,” she said. “But I’m not sure.”  [. . .]

“You don’t think one needs the experience of having been married?” she asked.

“Do you think it need be an experience?” replied Ursula.

“Bound to be, in some way or other,” said Gudrun, coolly. “Possibly undesirable, but bound to be an experience of some sort.”

“Not really,” said Ursula. “More likely to be the end of experience.” [. . .]

“Of course,” she said, “there’s that to consider. [. . .] You wouldn’t consider a good offer?” [. . .]

“I think I’ve rejected several,” said Ursula. [. . .]

“Really! But weren’t you fearfully tempted?”

“In the abstract but not in the concrete,” said Ursula. “When it comes to the point, one isn’t even tempted — oh, if I were tempted, I’d marry like a shot. I’m only tempted not to.” The faces of both sisters suddenly lit up with amusement.

“Isn’t it an amazing thing,” cried Gudrun, “how strong the temptation is, not to!”

Even in 1915, these women feel that they have a choice. Ursula has already had a disastrous affair. Now she can take marriage or leave it. Even when she meets her true mate and match, she prevaricates at length about marrying him.

Today’s choice is far more obtrusive, having become increasingly so since the 1950s. When Ted Hughes met Sylvia Plath at Cambridge, a man could be sent down for having a woman in his room. My father, who overlapped with Hughes at Cambridge, quipped to me regarding William Empson, who was sent down for having a condom in his room: “Nowadays you’d be sent down if you were caught without a condom in your room.” Today’s couples need no longer ruminate, as Hardy’s Jude the Obscure does, that there is “something wrong in a social ritual which made necessary a cancelling of well-formed schemes [. . .] because of a momentary surprise by a new and transitory instinct which had nothing in it of the nature of vice, and could be only at the most called weakness.”

Even children are no longer determinative. “Bastard” is a rude word as applied to someone’s character; as applied to someone’s illegitimacy, it is impermissible. Long gone are the days of Dorothy Sayers’s 1934 The Nine Tailors, in which a man dies because an innocent bigamist wishes to avoid his daughters’ illegitimacy becoming known.

The legal advantages of marriage are now so much diminished that, unless one plans divorce from the outset, one is hardly likely to enter marriage as Sue Bridehead criticises it to Jude, as “a sordid contract, based on material convenience in householding, rating, and taxing, and the inheritance of land and money by children, making it necessary that the male parent should be known”. True, the disadvantages for women are also gone. No longer is marriage the patriarchy described by George Eliot in Daniel Deronda: “There may come a moment when even an excellent husband who has dropped smoking under more or less of a pledge during courtship, for the first time will introduce his cigar-smoke between himself and his wife, with the tacit understanding that she will have to put up with it.” A modern Gwendolen could not only not put up with it, but would have got to know Grandcourt better before marrying in the first place. She would not rely on what Eliot calls, à propos of Dorothea’s decision to marry Casaubon in Middlemarch, “the pilulous smallness” of “the cobweb of pre-matrimonial acquaintanceship”.

I therefore felt little institutional or social inducement to marry. But I also had a positive distrust of marriage, on two counts: that it was infra dig, and that it was risky.

Part of me had an instinctive sense that private relationships were precisely that, and that the state — the ultimate manifestation of the public — had no right to a knowledge of them. Here my inner libertarian found a voice and spoke thus: if we object, as some of us do, to the state knowing whom we telephone, why do we rush to tell the state with whom we live? What business has the state to require a correlation between emotional attachment and sexual practice? Marriage assumes both sexual activity and sexual fidelity, since it may be annulled in the absence of the former and dissolved in the absence of the latter. But in an era of widely-available contraception, and little desire for population growth, the state’s interest should be in the durability of social units, not in sexual behaviour — the correlation between the two being something for individuals to work out for themselves.

Individuals who sought a literal and metaphoric rubber-stamping of their relationship by the state were, it seemed to me, potentially insecure. Afraid that their wish to live together might not endure, they sought in state and society third parties to restrain them, rather as Ulysses ordered his crewmates to lash him to the mast whilst passing the Sirens (since against the siren voice of love and desire for others we have limited means of stopping our ears). Or they resembled the person who advertises his intention to give up smoking to his friends, in order to be answerable to them in case of failure. Such outsourcing of self-control in the most intimate aspects of one’s life seemed to me demeaning even when successful.

Moreover, marriage was not what it once had been. The state, in facilitating divorce progressively since the Married Women’s Property Acts of 1870 and 1882, was behaving humanely. It did not assume lifelong compatibility to follow inevitably from the decision of two parties to marry, in contrast to the romantic-bourgeois assumption, encouraged by Queen Victoria, that marriage constituted eternal connection. The problem was that the latter idea was, to my inner romantic, far more attractive — to the extent that I found the Church callous in defining marriage only as “till death do us part”. Was this connection, probably felt at its strongest at the moment of death, suddenly non-existent? Was there not some emotional and ontological sense in the (sexist and cruel) Indian suttee? By contrast, the current UK register-office ceremony, in a tellingly tautological formulation, unites the couple “for the rest of their married lives”. If marriage is not necessarily to last even as long as the partners’ mortal lives, then what is it? How can something which sells itself as permanence contain get-out clauses?

Celebrities who marry in Las Vegas and start divorce proceedings the following day mock marriage, but also highlight its mockability (at least, in the UK, one must wait a year before moving divorce proceedings). Even as early as the 1890s of Jude the Obscure, marriage is made ridiculous by Jude and Arabella’s, and Sue and Phillotson’s, divorces and remarriages.

Marriage has therefore become something of a romantic gesture, like tattooing one’s forehead with one’s beloved’s name: public, costly to acquire, costlier to get rid of, and impossible to completely expunge. In going through the effort and expense of a wedding, and taking on oneself the risk of the misery, cost and embarrassment of a divorce, one makes a statement of love.

This is marriage at its better end. It has less dignified aspects. Since it no longer, for many, signifies the beginning of a new lifestyle, the only thing of which it marks the beginning is itself. Sherlock (in the BBC version’s 2014 episode “The Sign of Three”) is understandable when he responds to his landlady’s remark: “So — it’s the big day, then!” “What big day?” “The wedding! John and Mary getting married!” “Two people who currently live together are about to attend church, have a party, go on a short holiday and then carry on living together. What’s big about that?”

The self-referentiality of marriage has helped to inflate wedding ceremonies in inverse proportion to the length of marriages. The growing gap between content and form mirrors that of our monarchy. Today’s coronation ceremony is not far from the heights of pomp reached in the early 20th-century Durbar, when the monarch was being crowned to reign over the world’s superpower. Just as the ostentation of our monarchy helps to compensate for Britain’s declined power, the ostentation of weddings helps to compensate for their insecurity.

Royal weddings are themselves taken as a model. Not only has getting married filtered down over the last three centuries from the upper classes (who had land to unite and allegiances to guarantee) to everyone, but its most aristocratic trappings are desperately imitated, even at the expense of debt (although it is now the case that the poorest marry less, feeling unable to afford what is de rigeur, or, worse, what is half the point). For that aspect of a wedding which allows spouses to hold court amongst their friends is now a considerable part of the attraction of marriage itself. Often a fairy-tale element is included; weddings may take a theme from a work of fiction, or be conducted in a place, such as a tropical beach, far outside the couple’s normal life. This fictionalising element purports to stitch the relationship into eternity, but it risks leaving the marriage itself stranded in a prosaic reality. It is a feature of many novels until the late 19th century, and most comedy from Menander onwards, to end in marriage. Fiction in that sense is a poor model for a wedding.

Finally, so much about English weddings, as their traditions have ossified in the twentieth century, seemed to me to be kitsch. The white dress’s suggestion of bridal virginity was as inapposite as sexist. The Mendelssohn, the cake-top couple, the confetti, all seemed to fit the fact that weddings in the 20th century are largely celebrated in lowbrow fiction — Mills and Boon and cinematic rom coms — whilst serious literature since Lawrence has left them behind. The perceived vulgarity of other marriages can put one off one’s own; after seeing the couples preceding them at the register office, Sue says: “Jude — I don’t like it here! I wish we hadn’t come! The place gives me the horrors: it seems so unnatural as the climax of our love!”

Marriages today are partly entered in order to write “The End” under varied sexual experience and the emotional strain which it entails. As Marie demands of her fiancé in When Harry met Sally: “Tell me I’ll never be out there again.” Or, as Betsy Tverskaya in Anna Karenina explains: “By marriages of prudence we mean those in which both parties have sown their wild oats already.” But precisely because the moment at which this decision is made, and the fact that it is made at all, are matters of choice, conditionality is built into marriage from its outset.

But I not only had a distaste towards modern marriage, but anxiety. One has the more liberty to indulge anxiety about something that is not compulsory, as contrasted to the widow in Jude the Obscure who remarks: “Nobody thought o’ being afeard o’ matrimony in my time, nor of much else but a cannon-ball or empty cupboard! Why when I and my poor man were married we thought no more o’t than of a game o’ dibs!”

So, far from resembling a game of dibs, if it is to be entered seriously at all, it means entering into an awesome responsibility: “for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health.” Many have gone through much pain in honouring this vow. Purely celebratory weddings seem to deny this. Should they not also contain a space for leave-taking from one’s previous life, and acceptance of the great, possibly dreadful, unknowns which even now follow a wedding? Literature has done poorly at reflecting this. It has given us the wedding-eve anguish only of heroines being forced against their will. Any wedding eve should contain, for both partners, some grief and some awe. Thereafter, both parties are expected to lean on each other, but therefore to be individually off-balance. They become correspondingly more vulnerable to mutual loss, with no insurance options.

Marriage also, far from liberating people into sexuality as it did in the past, closes down all sexual options, but one, for life. Promiscuity or serial monogamy are for many tasted fruits which it can be hard to promise to abjure, let alone to want to abjure, for life. One can feel in bad faith promising something which it is not necessarily in one’s power to perform. Hardy describes the wedding of Jude and Arabella thus:

And so, standing before the aforesaid officiator, the two swore that at every other time of their lives till death took them, they would assuredly believe, feel, and desire precisely as they had believed, felt, and desired during the few preceding weeks. What was as remarkable as the undertaking itself was the fact that nobody seemed at all surprised at what they swore.

There is also in marriage the fear of making a hash of it, all the greater because one need not have made the attempt in the first place. And so a marriage is, like a child, watched in its development, health and longevity by its creators. Or else, it is carried like a fragile and precious vase; its carriers cannot skip about as they used to.

After marriage, sexual relations beyond one’s partner are reclassified and condemned as adultery. Unmarried partners have the privilege of fluidity, because they are undeclared. Indeed, since even same-sex partners may now marry, partners who do not may be interpreted as making as clear a statement — of non-commitment — as those who do.

Finally, whereas marriage was previously a licence for gold-digging men who appropriated their wife’s wealth, it is now a license for gold-digging poorer partners. No-fault divorce with equal division of assets makes marriage an invitation to robbery, so that it now more than ever fits the description of it given by Sue to Jude: “a sort of trap to catch a man”.

Sue also decides against marriage because she believes that love should be a daily plebiscite, “whose essence is its voluntariness”; “it is foreign to a man’s nature to go on loving a person when he is told that he must and shall be that person’s lover. There would be a much likelier chance of his doing it if he were told not to love. [. . .] Fancy the secret meetings between the perjuring husband and wife [. . .] There’d be little cooling then.” By contrast, the landlord of the remarried Jude and Arabella, who “doubted if they were married at all, especially as he had seen Arabella kiss Jude one evening” [. . .] “was about to give them notice to quit, till by chance overhearing her one night haranguing Jude in rattling terms [. . .] he recognized the note of genuine wedlock; and concluding that they must be respectable, said no more.”

The film which captures the confusions of modern marriage better than any is 1994’s Four Weddings and a Funeral. It ends with Hugh Grant, after much throat-clearing, asking Andie MacDowell whether she would agree “not to marry me? And do you think not being married to me might be something you might consent to do for the rest of your life?” “I do.” Between 1981 and 2011 the number of marriages conducted each year in the UK dropped by a third.

And yet — I married.

Partly, I admit, this was an act of conservatism. I couldn’t quite be bothered to be at the cutting edge of history, given that I had a partner in whom I felt utterly secure, knew a few older people who still sniped at the idea of a spinster, and found that none of my highly-educated, unmarried friends sniped at the idea of marriage at all. I had a timid sense of relish at the idea of being completely approved of in my doings, by God, government, everybody. If the forbidden has its attractions, so does the approved.

I also understood the semantic dimension of marriage. I looked at such ancestral portraits as my family has, and liked the simplicity of seeing the couples together in one frame. Who knows the complexity of their sexual lives, let alone of their hearts? But marriages render history more legible; whatever other relationships existed, those ones certainly did. If posterity were to peruse me, I would wish my most important relationship to be read. But, most importantly, the decision to marry is a joint one by definition and par excellence. The feelings about marriage described above were mine alone. In deciding to marry, I was uniting myself to my husband’s feelings about marriage too.

One month intervened between our register office ceremony and our (German) church wedding. I confess that I did not enjoy this month. I had a lurching sense that, having found a comfortable armchair in which I wished to sit for the rest of my life, I had affixed straps to the chair, and could not move if I would. My husband told me that I had not built for myself a prison, but a home. Jude makes a similar correction to Sue once they become lovers: “The little bird is caught at last!” she said, a sadness showing in her smile. “No — only nested.”

But the evangelisch church wedding felt right: awesome, loving, and active — the reverse of the passivity of being stamped. With it I shifted the genre of my life. Modern marriage may be a mess. State, churches, and individuals should think hard about how its contradictions and absurdities can be removed. But, even as it is, thousands choose to enter it in good faith and to their benefit. Like Ursula in Women in Love, I did not predict this of myself. It was contingent on the sheer good fortune of finding the man that I did. Whereas Ursula was “tempted” “in the abstract but not the concrete”, for me it was the other way round. But, as for her, as for Lawrence, and as for many people past and present that I respect, it feels right.

The post Reader, I Married Him appeared first on Standpoint.

The director, Jed Mercurio, has recently remarked that since the novel’s struggle to represent sex has been successful, he didn’t want to labour this aspect of it. There has been much comment in the press about his adaptation’s relative lack of visual and verbal sexual explicitness, as compared both to the novel and to its earlier adaptations. But the novel’s battle was not in fact to represent sex explicitly per se, but to depict it in a way that would achieve the aim stated in “A Propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover”, the essay written by Lawrence in the year after the novel was finished, and placed as the introduction to the second authorised edition.

The essay is a variation on Lawrence’s central theme that in European civilisation the mind and the body have become damagingly separated. The solution which it proposes is not — as elsewhere in his writings — to lose mental consciousness in “blood consciousness”. Rather, it is to force the mind to make a connection with the body:

In the past, man was too weak-minded, or crude-minded to contemplate his own physical body and physical functions, without getting all messed up with physical reactions that overpowered him . . . Yet they should be related in harmony. And this is the real point of this book. I want men and women to be able to think sex, fully, completely, honestly, and cleanly. Even if we can’t act sexually to our complete satisfaction, let us at least think sexually, complete and clean.

The last sentence resonates poignantly with Lawrence’s position of writing the novel whilst dying. But the sentence which precedes it makes it clear that the book is not an incitement to action (“Far be it from me to suggest that all women should go running after gamekeepers for lovers. Far be it from me to suggest that they should go running after anybody.”) Its stated aim is to be profoundly read and thought. The descriptions of Connie’s and Mellors’s “fucking” — so much less realistic and vulnerable to a certain kind of ridicule on the page than in film adaptations — are not aiming at clinical mimesis, but at jolting the reader’s mind into an awareness of what sex, as approved of by the mind, is.

Thus Mellors mirrors the novel’s function, since in talking sex to Connie he helps effect a similar integration in her. But her accompanying practical lessons are not, it turns out, necessary. It is sufficient to learn by overhearing Mellors and Connie’s consciousness when love-making: “Today, the full conscious realisation of sex is even more important than the act itself. After centuries of obfuscation, the mind demands to know and know fully.”

Of course, for Lawrence to “know” sex “fully” did not mean to know it as Don Juan, Swinburne or Freud knew it, but to have “a proper reverence for it”. In his essay “Pornography and Obscenity”, written at the same time as “A Propos”, he argues that what is considered obscene not only varies between cultures and over time, but between the judgment of what he calls the “mob self” and the “individual self”. The former, which is allied to public opinion, is defined by Lawrence as itself obscene, because it has turned sex into a dirty secret. The innocent understanding of sex which characterised Chaucer was lost in the Renaissance, since when European art has either denied its existence (as in the art of Gainsborough), or treated it as a forbidden fruit (as in Jane Eyre). To do the latter is, to Lawrence, pornographic: “Pornography is the attempt to insult sex, to do dirt on it. This is unpardonable.” It is also far more likely to incite masturbation than the “moderate rousing of our sex” which is produced by, for example, Botticelli’s Venus. Hence “Boccaccio at his hottest seems to me less pornographical than Pamela . . . or a host of modern books or films which pass uncensored” — or vulgar seaside postcards or smoking-room anecdotes: “ugly and cheap they make the human nudity, ugly and degraded they make the sexual act, trivial and cheap and nasty.”

There have of course been many literary and film representations of sex as not degraded since Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and many of these are in the novel’s debt. But Lawrence was less interested in blazing a trail in art than in souls. And the latter work is, to put it mildly, unfinished — at least, if not especially, in Anglo-Saxon countries. Certainly Lawrence considered England to be peculiarly pornographic: “I am sure no other civilisation, not even the Roman, has showed such a vast proportion of ignominious and degraded nudity, and ugly, squalid, dirty sex. Because no other civilisation has driven sex into the underworld, and nudity to the W.C.” Even the young bohemians, kicking against their parents’ “eunuch century”, “have the grey disease of sex-hatred, coupled with the yellow disease of dirt-lust.” Waxing (as Lawrence tends to) physiological, he explains that the sex and excretive functions are opposite “in direction” despite being proximate — tending respectively towards creation and disintegration. In healthy people the distinction between these is sharp; in degraded people it is obliterated, and “sexual excitement becomes a playing with dirt”. It is obvious how strong this connection remains, especially in what is today called pornography.

Lawrence’s attempted solution is a frankness which will dispel the masturbatory “dirty little secret”. The giggling media reactions to such sex as there is in the latest adaptation confirm that the representation of sex is almost invariably treated as the “rubbing of the dirty little secret”. The “mild little words that rhyme with spit or farce” (or punt or cluck) remain restricted by BBC decency guidelines which Mercurio chose not to push. Lawrence wanted us to be “able to use the so-called obscene words, because these are a natural part of the mind’s consciousness of the body” — and I am sure that many a modern couple refers lovingly to “fucking” and the “cunt”.

But if what Lawrence called “word-prudery” was in his own time directed at any use of these terms, it has now morphed into a fatigue at those aggressive and contemptuous uses of the words, which Lawrence himself would have shared (“even I would censor genuine pornography, rigorously”). Mercurio’s sparingness with taboo words may have in part been acquiescence with the BBC’s decency guidelines (Mercurio commented to me: “Currently fuck is strongly discouraged and cunt is unacceptable. They count number of uses and proximity to programme start. Every use of fuck would have to be approved at Controller level”; and the Controller might of course judge with his “mob” self). But if so, it was acquiescence with a rule which in the balance of cases today Lawrence would have thought well applied.

It is equally clear that Lawrence would have condemned a high proportion of the books and films which his novel’s unbanning (and its establishment of precedent for application of the 1959 Obscene Publications Act) helped to bring into the world. Lady Chatterley’s Lover not only didn’t shrink the volume of pornography in the world, it encouraged a deluge of it, and remains associated with it in the popular consciousness. Mercurio’s adaptation recently occasioned a newspaper article on “racy period lingerie”; “A Propos” explicitly deplores modern men’s greater concentration on female underwear than on sex itself. If Mercurio was right that the battle to represent sex has been won, his decision not to reprise that victory was tactful in the light of the novel’s flagrant unintended consequences.

Yet Lawrence’s contempt for the modern bohemian manner of taking sex “lightly” also made him aware that bohemians in his own time would condemn the novel: “They despise a book like Lady Chatterley’s Lover. It is much too simple and ordinary for them. The naughty words they care nothing about, and the attitude to love they find old-fashioned. Why make a fuss about it? Take it like a cocktail.” This too is echoed in the present. Holliday Grainger (who plays Connie) was recently quoted saying of the novel that she “doesn’t see what all the fuss is about”, and Richard Madden (Mellors) has said, “Come on guys, we’ve got Google . . . There’s nothing that’s going to shock us that we’re going to do in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, is there?” Plus ça change — but also true, and preferable to the attempt to read the novel pornographically.

Still, the novel’s contempt for bohemianism led me to question a moment in an early draft of the script in which Connie — at the ball at which she meets Clifford — asks the musicians to switch from their sedate classical music to ragtime. This echoed not only a similar moment in the 1987 film Dirty Dancing, but the scene in Ken Russell’s 1969 Women in Love in which Birkin mischievously asks a pianist accompanying Hermione’s Ballet Russe to switch to ragtime. This latter detail (like many in the film) was more Russell than Lawrence, and in the context of Lady Chatterley’s Lover it was even more unfortunate, since jazz is throughout the novel associated with shallowness. Tommy Dukes (the closest thing to a Lawrencian in Clifford’s Cambridge crowd) characterises modern love as “Fellows with swaying waists fucking little jazz girls with small boy buttocks”. Connie finds Venice as “almost enjoyment”, “all the lying in warmish water and sunbathing on hot sand in hot sun, jazzing with your stomach up against some fellow in the warm nights, cooling off with ices, it was a complete narcotic. And that was what they all wanted, a drug: the slow water, a drug; the sun, a drug; jazz, a drug; cigarettes, cocktails, ices, vermouth. To be drugged! Enjoyment! Enjoyment!”

In fact, Connie is a middle-class, cosmopolitan, highly-cultured Scot — more Howard’s End Schlegel girl than proto-flapper. I therefore successfully suggested to Mercurio that the events be reversed. Rather than Connie requesting that the music be changed from classical to ragtime, she could be given the opposite request, and would make her first connection with Clifford whilst doing so. Similarly, I questioned Clifford’s being made to manifest indignation on discovering that his new bride was not a virgin, because it contradicted his character as someone to whom neither sex nor virginity were of much importance. Lawrence too cared little for virginity, but for the crucially different reason that he saw someone’s sexual history as irrelevant to their sexual present.

Just as “the mob” has over the decades read Lady Chatterley’s Lover looking for the “dirty bits”, so it has watched its various adaptations. This is a risk which any adaptor faces. But there are others. It is likely that Lawrence would have disapproved of audiences watching naked actors, and would have classified their acceptance of money in order to appear naked as literal and metaphorical prostitution. He may also have classified the interaction between them and an absent film audience as an ersatz connection bearing a similar relationship to real physical encounter as First World War warfare did to sincere hand-to-hand combat. Of course, he presented naked bodies abundantly to the eye in his paintings (as exhibited, then imprisoned, in the year following Lady Chatterley’s Lover), but these remain firmly within the artistic sphere of the imitative, as the nudity of an actor cannot.

On set last October my sense of this was reinforced when seeing how abruptly the actors were moved between non-contiguous scenes. They were indeed being paid to — all of a sudden, and acording to a shooting schedule of military-style discipline — snog a near-stranger; this must perforce be done with more sang-froid than mind-body connection. Economic imperatives demanded that the lead actors be more visually attractive than in the novel, and this is of course a problem faced by all adaptations of novels of which the protagonists are not spectacular beauties. As is the way with “costume” dramas, the costumes assumed a large visual importance, recalling (if not justifying) Lawrence’s point in his essay “Introduction to these Paintings” about “Hogarth, Reynolds, Gainsborough”: “The coat is really more important than the man. It is amazing how important clothes suddenly become, how they cover the subject.”

But Lawrence concedes the intrinsic difficulties of the visual medium. “It is easy in literature . . . You can get some of the lusciousness of Hetty Sorrell’s ‘sin’, and you can enjoy condemning her to penal servitude for life. You can thrill to Mr Rochester’s passion, and you can enjoy having his eyes burnt out . . . But in paint it is more difficult. You couldn’t paint Hetty Sorrell’s sin or Mr Rochester’s passion without being really shocking.” Here he implicitly admits why it is harder for a film adaptation to achieve the aims of Lady Chatterley’s Lover than the novel itself.

Mercurio and I therefore had considerable discussions about the advisability of including oral sex. In one draft there were a few instances as performed by Mellors, and yet I thought the act anachronistic, depicted nowhere in Lawrence, and likely to have been disapproved of by him had he thought about it. Mercurio thought that there was less historic variation in sexual practice than I did, and that in any case he was adapting the novel for the present in the sexual language of the present. We discussed masturbation similarly, and this was cut entirely, so strong was Lawrence’s condemnation of it as solipsistic, barren, and that towards which “pornography” tends.

The scenes which enraged Second Wave feminists (Connie’s worship of the penis and Mellors’ disparagement of the clitoris) were not included. Much needed to be cut in order to contract the novel to 90 minutes, and in any case Mercurio felt that the novel on balance was pro-women, and that Mellors (like Clifford) was a knowing representation of aspects of the fractious, dying Lawrence.

Many viewers will not have noticed their absence. So successfully did Second Wave feminism knock Lawrence from the perch on which 1950s and ’60s adulation had placed him that he is now relatively little read, and the offending passages, like the outrage about them, have been largely forgotten.

There is one final irony in the novel’s fate — subtler but no less pervasive than those mentioned above. Lawrence’s idea that meaningful sex is part of a good life has become distorted into the idea that if you aren’t having lots of “good sex” (not what Lawrence meant by this), then you are somehow inadequate. Sex to us is still a cocktail, but it is important to our sense of self-worth that we drink — or are thought to be drinking — very many very good cocktails. And yet we are also — especially when we think about porn — beginning to wonder whether we have lost our way in our relations to sex. It might help to revisit the novel which, more than any other, got us to where we are in the first place, and which more than others tries to remedy precisely this problem. Revisiting it in this wisely restrained adaptation — or still better in its original words — we might see what medicine Lawrence was really trying to give us, and decide whether we want to — or can — take it.

The post Why ‘Lady Chatterley’ Still Provokes Us appeared first on Standpoint.

The book is long, like the marriage it documents. But it feels more uneven than that marriage, since its partners wrote only on the rare occasions of their separation by necessities of health, career, or family. (A touching exception is Nabokov’s 46th wedding anniversary greeting, addressed from and to the Montreux Palace Hotel.) During a six-week separation in 1926, Nabokov wrote more than 50 letters, whereas between 1945 and 1965 he wrote only six.

The effect is that of an irregularly kept diary, which makes no attempt to summarise what has occurred during its gaps. On one page he tells Véra that she is to join him living in London; on the next, two years later, he tells her that he is soon to find work in Massachusetts.

The timing of these periods apart makes it unsurprising that he fails to mention certain important events in his life: the death of his brother in a concentration camp in 1945; the publication of Lolita in 1955. Other omissions, however, lack this explanation. Former Russian prime minister Kerensky, meeting Nabokov in 1945, was “horrified that I am so apolitical”. Despite living, and writing these letters, during Weimar hyperinflation, the application of the Nuremberg Laws to his Jewish wife, the Second World War, and the onset of the Cold War, he makes almost no reference to any of these things.

He writes about himself — his reading, writing, social life, eating, carefulness with money, and difficulty obtaining visas — interspersed with striking vignettes. In these respects his letters resemble those of his contemporary D.H. Lawrence (to whose newly published and banned Lady Chatterley’s Lover he makes snorting reference) — but unlike Lawrence, he does not broadly analyse the state of the societies in which he finds himself. He is concerned instead with detail, of that which he can see.

His opportunities for epistolary engagement with Véra’s life were, in fact, limited. From his earliest letters onwards he complains of how little she writes (one letter to every five of his); and such letters as she wrote she destroyed. We can infer, however, that she was more anxious and depressive than her husband, who perpetually plays the role of comforter and entertainer. What we cannot infer are the mental and moral resources which allowed her to be Nabokov’s typist, editor, translator and agent. Particularly when she was supporting their son in 1937, while he was in Paris having an affair of which she had heard and which he denied, the difference of their roles is understandable.

But Nabokov is superbly gifted at supporting. His daily letters when Véra was in a sanatorium had each a new greeting: “Little old man”, “My grand ciel rose”, “Fire-Beastie”. He counsels: “My Sparrowling, don’t be too angry at the rain, it’s not its fault, after all, it can’t fall up.” His illustrations for their son in 1937 remind one of the father in the Italian film La vita è bella, comforting his son through make-believe, even after their move to a concentration camp.

His buoyancy lapses rarely, and such occasions indicate how much he had suppressed in order to keep Véra’s spirits up. After recovering from an attack of psoriasis he acknowledges that “I’d reached the border of suicide — which they wouldn’t let me cross because of you in my luggage.”

Much else that we learn of him is positive. Such descriptions of young girls as occasionally occur are reassuringly un-Humbert Humbertian (and even his love-drunk 1920s letters are never obscene). He is disgusted by cruelty to animals. He is moved by nature: “the Directorate of Western and Eastern Skies treated us to a monstrously beautiful sunset.” He is philo-Semitic and anti-racist, reminded uncomfortably by the expression “darkies” “of the patriarchal ‘Yid’ of western Russian landowners”. Only his distaste of homosexuality would earn him a black mark against the latest moral standards.

His letters are often delightfully playful, and, although they rarely reach the brain-bashing brilliance of his more consistently fictional works, they contain some excellent aperçus. Of the early drafts of Finnegans Wake he writes: “Ultimately: wit sets behind reason, and while it is setting, the sky is marvelous, but then it’s night.”

He gives another perspective on life in Weimar Berlin as an English tutor, to set alongside that of Christopher Isherwood. He gives another perspective on White Russian life in Paris, to set alongside the recently-published memoirs of his compatriot and acquaintance, Teffi. Returning to Trinity College, Cambridge, after 15 years’ absence, “one of the [soccer] balls, like a dog who’d recognised a passer-by, ran over to me a few times, but although it was heavy and muddy, like in the old days, my boot could not get out of it the ring of the past.” Thus, he reflects, “we also need not expect . . . life, heat . . . from our other return — to Russia.”

The edition is beautifully done. In contrast to the parodic Pale Fire (of which the notes dwarf the poem), or indeed Nabokov’s own four-volume Eugene Onegin (in which the Russian is relegated to small print at the back, and fully two volumes are notes), the manuscript original is frequently included in the main text, and the apparatus is ample but unobtrusive.

The puzzle is why this book is coming out first in English. Some of the letters were published in a Russian journal in 2010, but no Russian equivalent of the book yet exists. Certainly, Nabokov reached his greatest fame in English — but he wrote his letters in Russian, and in pre-revolutionary orthography at that. Just as he and Véra never made the return to Russia which he anticipated in 1937, these life-filled love-letters remain, for the moment, in exile.

The post The Real Life of Nabokov appeared first on Standpoint.

“No,” I thought but didn’t say, “I don’t think that it’s that at all.”

Yet the perception that the novel is romantic is as common as the perception that Shakespeare’s sonnets are. Let no one send a close-reading lover a Shakespeare sonnet (they are all too tricksy) — and let no one send any lover at all Anna Karenina.

Its adulterous heroine, after all, ends up as blood on the tracks — and it is by no means clear that a hypocritically disapproving society alone is to blame for this. It has long been debated what judgment the novel makes of Anna. Some readers have found Anna to deserve her fate, others have found her not to, and some of each kind have found the novel to agree with them. Early European critics including Arnold and de Vogüé approved of what they thought was the novel’s condemnation of Anna, whereas early Russian critics such as Shestov, Strakhov, and Svyatopolk-Mirsky interpreted the novel the same way, but criticised it for this. Certain modern critics, such as Mandelker, have found the novel not to condemn Anna at all. Steiner and Bloom thought that its condemnation was contradicted by Tolstoy’s love for Anna, while D.H. Lawrence thought that its condemnation was subverted by the novel’s own artistry.

On this question I stand with the early Russian critics. The Petersburg aristocracy’s toleration of ubiquitous casual affairs, and condemnation of Anna for the relative urgency and honesty of her own, are presented as loathsome. Yet the novel nonetheless suggests that Anna would have done better by herself, man and God had she conducted her affair in the manner of a Betsy Tverskaya — discreetly, fleetingly and with minimum disruption to her family. Thomas Mann was right to find “a certain contradiction inherent in the author’s originally moral theme, in the charge he raises against society; for one wonders what weapon of punishment God might use if society behaved other than it does”. And the punishment is extreme, anticipating as it does Pozdnyshev’s murder of his wife for adultery in The Kreutzer Sonata, on which Tolstoy had started work before completing Anna Karenina.

The novel’s famous epigraph has focused this debate. “Мне отмщение, и аз воздам” is the standard Slavonic translation of a divine prophecy quoted by Paul to the Romans. The passage from the King James Authorised translation (with the relevant words italicised) is:

Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord. Therefore if thine enemy hunger, feed him [. . .] Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good.

(Romans 12.19-21)

The second and third sentences quoted make clear that Paul is quoting in the spirit of the section of Leviticus in which God tells Moses:

Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself: I am the Lord.

(Leviticus 19.18)

But Paul is not in fact quoting this passage, but slightly misquoting from Moses in Deuteronomy:

To me belongeth vengeance, and recompence; their foot shall slide in due time: for the day of their calamity is at hand, and the things that shall come upon them make haste. For the Lord shall judge his people.

(Deuteronomy 32. 35-36)

To leave vengeance to the Lord is, however, merely to defer and outsource it. Can the epigraph be suggesting to its readers that they should not judge Anna, but leave it to the plot, which lies in the author’s godlike hands? Anna can be seen as the author of her own downfall, by degenerating into febrile narcissism and delusion. But this degeneration seems underdetermined by her character as initially presented (by an idealising masculine narrator), facing such opprobrium as it encounters. It too seems somewhat imposed by the author, and part of her punishment. It is as though the progression which Anna’s character had made through the novel’s successive drafts from a crude coquette to the Anna we know, is partially reversed. In making Anna as attractive as she initially is, Tolstoy may have been testing how lovable he could make an adulteress, and still show the wages of sin.

The novel’s subtitle “роман” (roman) is a euphemism for an affair, so connected were the concepts of the European novel and adultery — and of adultery and a finite piece of entertainment. The novel’s title and subtitle therefore hang above it rather as Pilate’s judgment hangs above Christ on his cross, stating the crime of the man he has condemned to death (having a roman) in a manner indeterminately ironic, honouring, and accusatory. Within the novel Tolstoy, Pilate-like, both condemns Anna’s society for condemning her, and imposes the death penalty (which that society did not possess) for the sake of a higher cause than that society can comprehend.

Today, only a few non-Western polities impose the death penalty for adultery, and our own society imposes so few penalties of any kind for it that the term, like “fornication”, is beginning to sound old-fashioned. Today, Anna’s friends would remain such. She could occupy a box at the Royal Opera House without incurring scandal or insult. Karenin would be obliged both to divorce her, and to give her custody of or access to their son. His career and social standing would be largely unaffected. In the novel Oblonsky, in his easy attitude towards his sister’s adultery, represents the liberal future in which women are ever less likely to commit suicide if they behave as she does. D.H. Lawrence and his professor’s wife, Frieda Weekley, read Anna Karenina during their elopement in a “how to be happy though levanted” spirit. Fewer than four decades after the novel’s writing, they became happy. A similar couple today would need neither to elope, nor to turn to the novel to work out how to avoid its kind of tragedy.

But the novel contains another story. Levin was introduced in the novel’s third draft, and his story was expanded over the remaining two drafts until it occupied slightly more than half the novel. A Boston Literary World review of 1886 noted that the novel oscillates from side to side “like an express train” on a winding route — and so it does. We are moved from Anna’s Petersburg to Levin’s estate, and back, with occasional mediation via Moscow and its consummate social mediator, Oblonsky. But the novel does not oscillate to its end. In its serialised version, the words describing Anna’s death were followed by a note indicating that the novel was to be continued. Clearly, it was not Anna’s life that was to be continued.

There ensued an impasse. Tolstoy’s editor did not want to publish his eighth and final part. He not only disapproved of its hostility to Slavophilism (Vronsky’s volunteering in Serbia has recently been echoed by Russian volunteers in the Eastern Ukraine), but thought that its concern with Levin to the exclusion of Anna was extraneous to the novel as a whole. Tolstoy therefore published the section privately, 15 months later. The long pause had permitted resonance to Anna’s tragedy. Or alternatively, as in life, and as in Levin’s life, other concerns had superseded it. Levin represents that which goes on — at least, for a further 19 chapters.

Yet most interpretations of the novel have overlooked Levin. Certain early translations, such as the French one consulted by Dole in 1886, reduced Levin’s story. The film adaptations of 1935, 1948 and 1967 all end with Anna’s suicide, as though returning the novel to its early state, in which Levin did not exist. Joe Wright’s 2012 version is exceptional in giving Levin’s story weight.

To be fair, Tolstoy named his novel for Anna, having dismissed the early working title of Два Брака (Two Marriages). When he wanted to emphasise contrasting principles in his titles, he did so: War and Peace, Master and Man. Nor did he trouble himself to create obvious connections between the stories. After Vronsky’s pursuit of Anna frees Kitty to marry Levin, the couples have no significant effect on each other. Levin and Vronsky meet thrice, Anna and Levin meet for a few hours, and Anna and Kitty meet for a few minutes.

Nonetheless, many critics of the last few decades have argued that the two stories are connected, following Tolstoy’s own claim that the novel was “законченный” (well-finished). Such critics point out the similarities of Anna and Levin as great readers, strongly invested in their relationships, who are capable of extreme mental states and suicidal thoughts. The fact that they end up filled by misanthropy and philanthropy respectively is indicative of how the managed contrasts between them work in Levin’s favour. Anna elopes as Levin marries; Anna honeymoons in Italy whilst Levin honeymoons on the land; they meet in Moscow, where Levin becomes a father and Anna commits suicide.

Yet the stories’ suggested contrasts fail to adequately encompass either. For one thing, Levin and Anna are at very different stages in their marriages. A fair comparison of Anna is not to the newly-wed Levin or Kitty, but to how they might be nine years later. A different justice operates in the two stories: Levin has had pre-marital affairs as Vronsky has, but comes away relatively unscathed by the novel’s plot and its implied judgment.

More importantly, Levin’s and Anna’s concerns are simply too divergent to allow their stories to shed much light on each other. At the end of the novel, Levin, happily married, is concerned with why to live under any circumstances given that he will one day die. Anna, unhappily married, had been concerned with how to live under her particular circumstances, which had obscured from view the largest questions such as occasioned Tolstoy’s own breakdown on finishing the novel. Alexandr Zarkhi, in his 1967 film version, interpolates into their one meeting a discussion about suicide — but even on this subject they, like their stories, have relatively little to say to each other.

The novel’s very composition as separate stories (Levin’s was spliced into Anna’s) permits a difference of genre, rather as people’s actual lives can seem to belong to different genres. Whereas Anna’s roman aspires towards the condition of the European novel (Madame Bovary precedes it by two decades), Levin’s story has the aspect of autobiography. Tolstoy’s diary has a gap during the composition of the novel, as though writing Levin’s story had replaced its function. In comparison to Anna’s omen-fulfilling tragedy, Levin’s muddling through to his final epiphany feels realistic.

But if Levin’s concerns are of limited relevance to Anna, of how much relevance are they to us? Most of us have no option of choosing life on a country estate over urban life, and the town-country divide carries a fraction of the moral weight which it did in Tolstoy’s time and country. Unlike Levin, who sees in the peasant Platon an incarnation of the Russian virtues, we no more seek for wisdom or virtue in one class than in any other.

Levin anticipates easy marital bliss, as none of us do now. We do not need Levin’s experience of post-marital readjustment to advise us that no cohabitation is stress-free. Certainly, the revulsion which some of us feel at Americanisation (its materialism, triviality, and contempt for individual and cultural age) echoes Levin’s and the novel’s dislike of Westernisation as represented by America’s 19th-century counterpart. The novel’s references to English fashions, goods, sports and names (such as Betsy) are nearly all connected to morally suspect, Westernising modernity. 

But where Levin is likely to retain the strongest interest is in his construction of his own problems. Anna seems to herself and us to be passive to her problems. She falls for Vronsky despite herself; she leaves Karenin because she feels that she can do no other; she declines helplessly into neuroticism. Levin, by contrast, struggles with how to live because of the enormous historical, moral and metaphysical significance with which he invests his choices. In this he is the opposite of Oblonsky — who denies significance to any of his decisions — and in this is likeable. If he ties himself in mental knots of his own making, there is something sympathetic and admirable as well as ludicrous in him doing so. He keeps changing his mind — wanting to improve his estate, marry Kitty, marry a peasant, marry Kitty again, wanting to die, wanting to live — but only because he embraces each position so firmly that he is temporarily blind to its limitations, and thereby reveals these limitations to us.

His lurch at the novel’s end into a perception of the meaninglessness of a finite life will be familiar to many people living in a society from which God has retreated further than from 1870s Russia. Those of us who have known it get around it in our different ways. Levin’s intellect almost prevents his attainment of faith, and his eventual compromise with it — that Orthodoxy is that form of truth which God has made accessible to him, as a Russian — is familiar to many people of faith today. Many of us have known religious joy, and have known its passing. Tolstoy kindly drops the curtain on his novel before Levin’s can pass. F.R. Leavis rightly found “that the breakdown of Tolstoy into the old Leo is here portended”. Tolstoy decisively rejected Orthodoxy, although, crucially, not Christianity, after finishing Anna Karenina.

In Russia, the novel — which was in its own time judged to be conservative, and was only tolerated in the Soviet literary canon on sufferance as a work of realism, now has little appeal. Modern Russian society resembles Tsarist society still less than does modern Britain, in that its class structure has been smashed, and divorce rates are even higher than those here.

If there is one thing that still appeals, it is Levin’s quest for how to live. It is as though the whole Soviet period represented Levin’s young adulthood, in which he turned atheist and ridiculed the Church. In the tough post-Soviet years, when secular society promoted nothing but Westernisation and wealth accumulation, many people returned to Orthodoxy, and its implicit patriotism. One does not know how long this will last. Levin’s perception was that the Russian people, and their perception of truth, would endure; and the post-Soviet revival of Orthodoxy might be evidence of that. But, as we feel at the ending of the passionate, anti-romantic, conflicted novel that is Anna Karenina — it is too early to tell.

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