Christopher Hitchens
Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens
Twelve, 2011
816 Pages
£30.00
ISBN 978-1455502776

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During an interview on 60 Minutes, the writer Christopher Buckley recounted the story of an epic ten and a half hour lunch with Christopher Hitchens, in which he personally imbibed so much alcohol that by midnight “I would have happily checked into the nearest hospital to have oxygen, blood, and extensive liver work.” And how did Hitchens’s famous ox-like constitution stand up to this liquid assault? “He went home and wrote an essay on George Orwell.” Whether it is drinking, speaking, or writing, Hitchens partakes in quantities that dumbfound normal human beings. (Though sadly, all three have slowed down during his ongoing battle with oesophageal cancer.) The essays in this collection, harvested from articles published over the last decade in Slate, the Atlantic, and Vanity Fair, stack up to nearly 800 pages, and constitute only a smudge of ink on Hitchens’ total journalistic output.

Writing on America’s Founding Fathers, Hitchens tells us how the little-known Barbary Wars “gave Americans an inkling of the fact that they were, and always would be, bound up with global affairs.” Hitchens seems to have had a similar hunch about himself upon exiting the womb, though his real intellectual call to arms came in September 2001, the moment that brought the long overdue confrontation between everything he held dear: reason, science, free inquiry, and the terrors wrought by the “old unchanging enemies – racism, leader worship, superstition.” For Hitchens, the events of 9/11 were not the onset of a battle of civilizations, but a battle for civilization itself. And as we see in his admiration for feminist critic Rebecca West, “one of those people, necessary in every epoch, who understand that there are things worth fighting for, and dying for, and killing for,” there is no patience reserved for conscientious objectors. Hitchens’s blood was stirred so strongly in support of the Iraq War that he severed friendly relations with many of his old comrades on the Left, who now appeared to him as a “bodyguard of apologists”, excusing the actions of genocidal dictators in a misguided commitment to anti-imperialism.

Orwell once said “every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism”. Hitchens borrows the same thought in his preface, with every word he has written since 2001 dedicated to resisting the “hateful and nihilistic propositions” professed by those willing to murder the innocent in the name of a holy text. He has previously referred to the agents of al-Qaida as a “medieval cult of death”, imbued with a hatred for life, culture, liberty of conscience, and most importantly, humour. As he warns us, an absence of mirth is the hallmark of tyranny: “The people who must never have power are the humourless.”

For Hitchens, the imminent threat is a world of “soft censorship”, where Danish cartoonists are forbidden to publish religious doodles lampooning holy prophets, or where the fear of causing offense is taken more seriously than the guarantee of free speech. Like every good satirist, Hitchens knows that parody and mockery, whether delivered via the cartoonist’s pencil or the vocal chords, are the slings and arrows of “the sort of society that knows to keep the solemn and the pious at bay”. When asked by Jeremy Paxman how calling the Qur’an “laughable” helped the spread of reason, Hitchens replied, “one of the beginnings of human emancipation is the ability to laugh at authority.” This is a continuation of the Enlightenment project, to eschew divine authority and follow the dictates of reason and science. If Richard Dawkins is Darwin’s Rottweiler, Hitchens is the Enlightenment’s Bloodhound (though to capture his relative ferocity, a three-headed Cerberus might be a more apt canine of choice.) The teeth and claws are always bared at those who attempt to rob us of the treasures bequeathed to us by Thomas Paine, David Hume, and Thomas Jefferson. Hitchens maintains that the gold standard of this secular inheritance is embodied in the American Constitution: “The secular republic with the separation of powers is still the approximate model”.

This is all well-worn territory for fans of Hitchens, however. The real delight of this collection is the inclusion of his literary essays, in which the stalwarts of English prose are subjected to the rigorous “Hitch” treatment (“it took me decades to dare the attempt, but finally I did write about Nabokov”). Intriguingly, Hitchens’s pinnacle of literary bliss is extremely close to that of his friend Stephen Fry, who once cited his influences as W.W.W.: Wilde, Wodehouse, and Waugh. Though for Hitchens the acronym needs extending to OWWW, as Orwell always comes first. The mix is intriguing. One could see how Hitchens’s contrarian views can find cozy ground with a subversive nonconformist like Oscar Wilde. But how does Hitchens, as an ex-Trotskyist atheist radical, find common ideological ground in the collected works of arch-reactionaries like P.G. Wodehouse and Evelyn Waugh? These are the public schoolboys who championed traditional hierarchy and longed for an antiquated picture of England that probably never existed. For Hitchens, the answer is a question of virtues, as he partly concedes; “moral courage may be shown by reactionaries” and “good prose produced by snobs”. Even Edmund Burke, defender of feudal hierarchy and founder of modern conservatism, gets an entire essay, and is credited with having the foresight to put forward “the first serious argument that revolutions devour their own children and turn into their own opposites”. But more importantly, Hitchens understands that these authors’ virtues are an upshot of their vices: “Waugh wrote as brilliantly as he did precisely because he loathed the modern world.”

Yet there is no gushing adulation here. Despite a deep devotion to Wodehouse, we are told that the old master “wrote too much”, and, although clearly an admirer of John Updike, Hitchens savagely excoriates his ill-judged 2007 novel Terrorist, which he sent “windmilling across the room in a spasm of boredom and annoyance”. Even his beloved Orwell is taken to task for his misogyny and pessimism, and despite “loving Philip Larkin”, the great poet is revealed to be an asexual prude. Contrast the latter with Hitchens himself, who indulges us with an extended meditation on the All-American blowjob, and claims to have spent every waking moment in Afghanistan obsessed with sex.

Amongst these literary critiques are some wonderfully fresh insights, as when Hitchens points out the vast debt Wodehouse owes to The Importance of Being Earnest, which shares all the staples of a Jeeves and Wooster romp: terrifying aunts, idle bachelors and their butlers, and frivolous farces in country houses. Moreover, in his piece on Evelyn Waugh, Hitchens effortlessly makes the connection between Waugh’s unyielding cruelty to his protagonist in Decline and Fall and his staunch Catholicism: “he wanted to bring the Book of Job to life for those who had never read, or who feared, it.” This perfectly captures the callousness with which Waugh treats the innocent in his work, where characters are repeatedly shown “how cleverly and suddenly their creator could bring them low”.

It is unusual though, that these themes of religious guilt and idle rich bachelors should be of any interest for Hitchens, a man who claims to “still think like a Marxist”. Despite his anti-conservatism, Hitchens’s literary tastes are most comfortable with country houses, drawing rooms, and the exploits of boarding school chums. This is what he has often referred to as his Divided Self. During his studies at Oxford, the young Trotskyite was just as comfortable dining at high table with the masters of All Souls College as he was resisting arrest in an anti-Vietnam demonstration. This was the boarding school boy with revolutionary sensibilities, the Jew raised as a gentile (Hitchens did not find out of his Jewish lineage until his late 30s), the Englishman with a vigilant eye toward the open plains of America (He was sworn in as a US citizen in 2007, and now considers himself an Anglo-American, “a nice synthesis”).

Arguably also re-acquaints us with the ruthless polemical side of Hitchens we have come to know best, including his trademark critiques of lauded public figures: Prince Charles is branded a superstitious moony and a “moral and intellectual weakling”, Dickens is blamed for leaving us with the “grisly inheritance that is the modern version of Christmas”, and the cult of Kennedy-worship amongst American Democrats is derided for its support of a man “whose presidency was punctuated by more or less gangsterish conduct.” Further provocations come from an essay on “Why Women Aren’t Funny”, and a scrupulous denouncement of all Ten Commandments (along with a revised list for the modern secularist). If there are criticisms to be made of Hitchens, it is in his brief forays into moral philosophy, where his polemical certainties come at the cost of analytical rigour. For example, Hitchens clearly believes it self-evident that atheists can possess moral certainties, but at no point sees it necessary to get down to the grubby philosophical task of justifying this crucial assertion. Once again, we see the divided self: too thoughtful to be politician, too polemical for academic philosophy.

But Hitchens has little patience with over-thinkers, and openly vents his frustration at a certain breed of intellectual, who are “often a little reluctant to trust their guts” in the face of their opponents. For this polemicist, the role of a public intellectual is not reserved to ink on a page; it asks one to stand up to bullies and affirm “enduring virtues” in the face of those who seek to threaten them. And in an age of moral ambivalence, over-cautious tolerance, and “sniggering relativism”, this virtue of conviction should be cherished whenever it is deployed in the service of reason; it requires more guts than ever.

Stephen Hussey is reading for a DPhil in Political Theory at University College, Oxford.

Hitler’s personal architect Albert Speer narrowly dodged the scaffold at the Nuremberg war crime trials. He then busily spent the second half of last century attempting to convince the world that he was the most reluctant of enthusiastic Nazis. One who saw most clearly through his denials was Australian essayist and critic Clive James, whose father died fighting the Japanese in World War II. In a classic article published in the Observer in 1983, James skewered the shared megalomania of Speer and Hitler by describing a visit to the derelict Zeppelinfeld outside Nuremberg. Once the scene of vast Nazi pageants and rallies, it had become nothing more than an overgrown field littered with empty Fanta bottles.

James began that piece by describing Speer’s architectural “Theory of Ruin Value”. The idea was that Nazi buildings should be designed to appear in the distant future as “the great shards of the far past”—even in ruins they would remind the world of the power of the regime. In Nuremberg, James found the decades-old ruins of the 1000-year Reich not impressive, but “just sad”. And it had to be so: the Nazis’s pretense of building a great civilization was never more than a chimera. James found in Nuremberg that “the glory has not departed. It was never really there. Mostly it was made of cheap white light, and the free people came to turn off the power.”

It is almost impossible to describe adequately the life’s work of so varied and accomplished a writer as James—but one could do worse than begin with his description of Nuremberg. It is packed with James’s characteristic dry wit and delight at pointing out historic linkages and irony. Also revealing is the forum in which the article was first published; James cannily used the mainstream press and that most vapid of literary vehicles—the travel article, of all things—to tackle themes of Nazi guilt and historic memory. Part of James’s appeal is that he is a Cambridge-educated thinker who will use any medium available, from poetry to magazines, from travel-writing to television appearances, to speak to the public. James is an elite talent who has always refused to become elitist, driven foremost by the desire to be heard.

Last month, James, now 71, revealed that he had been diagnosed last year with leukemia. The announcement put in context a poem James had published in the New Statesman just a fortnight before. In this clearly autobiographical piece on mortality, James describes how his “year of feebleness” had killed “whatever gift I had for quick success”. One of the most prodigious writers of his generation had watched himself slow to “a single page/of double spaced” in half a day.

The somewhat maudlin tone of the poem might come as a surprise to those who are more aware of James the lively critic with an eye for the devastating put-down. This, after all, is the man who once described Arnold Schwarzenegger as looking like a “condom full of walnuts”, and Sydney Opera House as a typewriter stuffed with “oyster shells”. In fact, themes of time and mortality have often been features of James’s work. They are captured in the famous quip, frequently attributed to James (although its provenance is unclear), that we should “stop worrying—nobody gets out of this world alive”. It was also a central theme in his television series “Fame in the Twentieth Century”, which looked at the impermanence of celebrity and happiness. A revealing choice, given that James was by this time a household name in both England and Australia. Of fame, he was to conclude that “like happiness, [it] ruins anyone who pursues it for its own sake, and exalts only those who have proper work do to.”

Thoughts about time and decay permeate James’s travel writing. Over 30 years ago, in another great Observer piece, James described his trip to Rome: looking down from the plane he reflected that “those strings of lights were roads all leading to the one place”. Describing his visit James captured a common feeling among Australians in Europe, identifying it as a kind of vertigo or even discomfort at the extent of Europe’s history. Of Rome he concludes,

I still like the idea of what Lucretius describes as the reef of destruction to which all things must tend, spatio aetatis defessa vetusto -– worn out by the ancient lapse of years. But I don’t want to see the reef every day.

James wrote those words while a member of a close-knit set of London literary figures which included Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, and Christopher Hitchens. Propped in city cafés, they shared long hours discussing words and writing. They were part of a marvelous, unparalleled generation of writers. And this generation is growing old.

Sadly, Hitchens too has recently revealed his own struggle with serious illness. That diagnosis was made during the promotion tour for his recently published autobiography Hitch 22. On hearing of Hitchens’s recent illness, his friend Martin Amis remarked that every writer is motivated by a desire to outlive their own life. So of Hitchens he explained “the desire for immortality explains all the extraordinary achievements, both good and bad.”

Amis’s words ring true. The desire to write is, at its heart, an exercise in hoping one’s own creations, theories, or ideas take on a life greater than their author’s. In a sense, it is an act of great egotism to wish that your innermost thoughts be captured in time and shared with other generations. For every writer who wants their work to be immortal, writing contains an implicit desire to outlive death. This is truer of James than most, as he has been driven to produce a prodigious amount over his life whilst rarely being out of the public eye. The great criticism sometimes made of James is the claim that he is an attention-seeker, but to an extent this misses the point of James’s writing. A diarist loves to write, but a writer loves nothing more than to be read.

In Australia, James is best known for his first autobiography, titled Unreliable Memoirs. Most Australian households seem to have a copy. James describes growing up in the suburbs of Sydney, before going abroad to attend university with other famous Australian ex-pats Germaine Greer and Robert Hughes (both thinly disguised in the book by pseudonyms), leaving Australia for “the mother country”. The book remains immensely popular: James’s nervous adolescence in the suburbs and ultimate success in England in some ways parallels Australia’s own growth away from England and into a more confident and independent country.

In an essay about the writer and performer Barry Humphries, another successful Australian ex-patriot, James pinpointed the reason for Humphries’s hometown popularity. James recognised the key to Humphries’s work in one sentence of his stage show dialogue, which read simply, “snails in the letterbox”. This would be baffling to any other audience, but Australians familiar with this particular problem “shouted with recognition”, finding joy in having their own strange country, and its gardens, reflected back at them. James claimed that Humphries was the first to discover that “in Australia the familiar is seen to be bizarre as soon as it is said. Or else the English language, fatigued by 12,000 miles of travel, cracks up under the strain of what it is forced to connote.” In this comment, though, James also reveals the secret to his own great popularity at home. At its best, much of James’s writing tells Australians things they already knew about themselves.

James’s third autobiography is almost equally treasured. In May Week Was in June (the title refers to the Cambridge tradition of postponing May Day celebrations until a time of their own convenience), James describes his years as a Cambridge student and member of the London writing scene. The book is notable for its unique description of English college life. While much has been written about arriving at Oxford or Cambridge in the full spring of youth, James tells a story about arriving as a rounded man, a graduate in a paradise for undergraduates, of respecting the fellows and dons without any risk of being in awe of them. In capturing the dissonance of being a fully formed person at an institution where most people come to find themselves, May Week Was in June remains the best description of the Australian post-graduate experience.

Though we may look forward to James’s career continuing for many more years, already by Amis’s measure James’s work has achieved a life of its own. The breadth of James’s work is immense, much of it now, happily, collated and accessible on a compendious website that contains hundreds of his varied essays. In a sense, James has achieved what he recognized as missing from the theory of ruin value and Speer’s vain attempt at immortality. James understood that a man cannot be outlasted by a greatness that never existed in the first place. Such is his skill and the joy already provided to decades of readers, he needn’t worry about his own legacy.

Benjamin Jellis is reading for a BCL at Magdalen College, Oxford.

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Oscar Wilde would describe his undergraduate years at Magdalen College (1874 – 1878) as the most “flower-like” of his life; he may also have been thinking of his time there when he remarked: “I may not have sown any wild oats, but I did plant a few orchids.” The young Irishman had decided, in 1874, to complete in Oxford the classics degree he had begun at Trinity College, Dublin three years previously.

At Magdalen, Wilde flourished in variegated ways. He mastered the rigors of the literae humaniores or “Greats” course, carrying off a first in his honour moderations examination in 1876, a success which prompted him to contemplate pursuing an academic career. During his undergraduate years Wilde also perfected the persona—part aesthete, part Disraelian dandy, and part Athenian philosopher—with which he would later make a splash in London’s artistic and social circles.

The aesthetic flaneur who liked to pose as a “dilettante trifling with his books” at Oxford was really only pretending to be wicked. The truth was, Wilde read hard “surreptitiously, into the small hours” in a bedroom bursting with books and cigarette smoke. Along with all the primary and secondary set texts of his Greats course, he devoured at Magdalen the writings of Hegel, Kant, Schopenhauer, Darwin, Clifford, Buckle, and Spencer, drawing from them the central tenets of his own intellectual credo. He wrote out quotations from these authors into a series of marble-boarded notebooks, which evidence the perspiration as well as the inspiration behind his extraordinary culture. Wilde’s poetry also blossomed at Oxford. It was at Magdalen that he refined a poetic voice and language that was eclectic and flexible, penning verses that impressed the editors of various Oxford and Dublin magazines.

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Wilde made another extravagant advance at Oxford—in the art of English prose. It was Walter Pater, the Brasenose Classics tutor, and sinless master of purple aesthetic prose, who influenced him in this context, as in so many others. “Why do you always write poetry?” the diffident don asked the Magdalen undergraduate at their first meeting, “Why do you not write prose? Prose is so much more difficult”. Wilde later confessed that he “did not quite comprehend what Mr. Pater really meant,” having always supposed, from his reading of Carlyle and Ruskin, that prose sprang “from enthusiasm rather than from art. I did not [know],” he admitted, “that even prophets correct their proofs.” “And it was not,” he remembered, “until I carefully studied [Pater’s own] beautiful and suggestive essays on the Renaissance that I fully realised what a wonderful self-conscious art the art of English prose-writing really is. Pater’s essays became to me ‘the golden book of spirit and sense, the holy writ of beauty’.”

Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873)— the book that, as Wilde famously remarked, had “such a strange influence over [his] life”—contains essays on philosophers, poets, and artists of the Renaissance such as Leonardo, Botticelli, and Michelangelo. Pater enters into a work of art imaginatively, elucidating the impression it makes on him and defining its especial character. He calls this the “true truth” about an artwork, next to which the factual truths concerning its production and history are insignificant. Pater developed a distinctive impressionistic, and unashamedly subjective style, in which he could at once convey these ‘true truths’, vividly evoke the works of art under discussion, and also celebrate the ecstasy of the “aesthetic experience”, art offering, in his view, a heightened form of sensual and spiritual pleasure rather than moral or intellectual instruction. The baroque prose poems Pater carved with such fastidious care were aimed at a cultivated general readership, rather than at scrupulous Oxford scholars, who were not slow to point out their inaccuracies.

Pater probably advised Wilde to commence his apprenticeship as an author by imitating the best prose models. The don had a considerable gift for mimicry, which Wilde admired intensely; he later praised Pater’s ability to echo, in his critical prose, “the colour and accent and tone” of whichever writer he happened to be analysing. The idea of imitation as the best beginning for a budding writer was, in any case, a commonplace of the period, and the practice was second nature to classicists such as Pater and Wilde. As part of his Greats course Wilde regularly translated lines of Greek and Latin into particular styles of English verse or prose (and vice versa), rendering Homer into colloquial Elizabethan English or Wordsworth into the ancient Greek characteristic of the comic verse fragments. Wilde had learned how to replicate the style of authors such as Euripides or Virgil as a schoolboy in Ireland, where the “flowing beauty” of his imitations and translations were, according to his peers, “a thing not easily to be forgotten.”

In the early days of his apprenticeship Wilde attempted to “play the sedulous ape” to Pater himself. The Irishman copied many of the stylistic effects of the man he addressed as “the great master” in the review he penned in 1877 of the paintings in the Grosvenor Gallery, his first substantial published prose work. In the article, Wilde’s syntax, cadences, and rhythms are consciously Paterian: “The picture is full of magic;” he writes of a Burne-Jones, copying Pater’s rococo manner, “and the colour is truly a spirit dwelling on things and making them expressive to the spirit, for the delicate tones of grey, and green, and violet seem to convey to us the idea of languid sleep, and even the hawthorn-blossoms have lost their wonted brightness, and are more like the pale moonlight to which Shelley compared them, than the sheet of summer snow we see now in our English fields.”

Wilde proudly showed his Grosvenor Gallery article to Pater, who discovered within it clear evidence of “cultivated tastes”, as well countless “pleasant expressions”—which is hardly surprising as so many of them were borrowed from his own writings. The don must have been especially gratified by Wilde’s rhapsodic coda on “that revival of beauty which in a great part owes its birth to Mr. Ruskin, and which Mr. Swinburne, and Mr. Pater, and Mr. Symonds, and Mr. Morris and many others, are fostering and keeping alive, each in his own peculiar fashion.”

It seems likely that Wilde attempted, during his Oxford days, to imitate, and so absorb into his own writing, the styles of all the authors he names in this roll call of personal favourites. The assimilation of their styles was achieved by long and concentrated reading, and by conscious mimicry. This was certainly the Magdalen man’s method with two of the writers he mentioned in his article—John Addington Symonds and Algernon Swinburne. I will focus on Wilde’s intense engagement with this pair of English authors here.

The choice of these two particular Wildean prose models is dictated by circumstance. Wilde’s undergraduate copies of Symonds’s Studies of the Greek Poets and Swinburne’s Essays and Studies have survived, and the copious annotations and markings they contain allow us to recreate something of Wilde’s readerly-writerly encounter with the prose styles of these authors. The whereabouts of his volumes of Ruskin, Pater, and Morris is, on the other hand, currently unknown. Wilde’s library was sold at a public auction, during the time of his trials for “acts of gross indecency” in 1895, at the insistence of his creditors. Secured at the sale by book dealers and collectors, Wilde’s beloved books were subsequently dispersed throughout the world. Today we know only the whereabouts of 70 or so volumes from his collection of over 2000 volumes.

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John Addington Symonds’s two-volume Studies of the Greek Poets (1873 & 1876) was another of Wilde’s “golden books”. He read the first volume, Studies (first series), at 20, while studying for his classics degree at Trinity. Purchasing the book in the year of its publication, he dated it “Dec 73” and autographed it “Oscar Wilde”. A Trinity contemporary would recall Wilde’s love of Studies—the book was, he remembered, perpetually in Wilde’s hands. Three years later, Wilde, now at Magdalen, purchased Studies (second series) (i.e. volume II), hot off the printing press, dating his copy “May ’76”, the month of the book’s publication, and autographing the title page “Oscar F. O’F. W. Wilde. S. M. Magdalen College, Oxford.” Wilde’s copy of the two-volumed Studies is now in the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York. The extensive annotations and markings inside it testify to the strong impression the book made on the young Wilde.

Wilde’s ostentatiously advertised fondness for Symonds may have been part of the aesthetic persona he was inventing for himself, and parading before others. Symonds’s impressionistic form of aesthetic criticism was not unlike that of Pater; moreover, in the first volume of Studies, the word “aesthetic” is used on a number of occasions to characterise Greek morality, in contrast to Christian ethics. Wilde was, however, first drawn to Symonds’s book as a student of classical literature. Studies (first series) was well known to the Reverend J.P. Mahaffy, one of Wilde’s classics tutors at Trinity, and also recommended reading for Greats students at Oxford.

Studies offers an imaginative analysis of most of the surviving corpus of Greek literature; Symonds also discusses Greek historiography, mythology, philosophy, and the genius of Greek art. In the late 19th century, classical works were often regarded, in Mahaffy’s words, as “mere treasure-houses of roots and forms to be sought out by comparative grammarians”, with many classicists focusing solely on the linguistic minutiae of the texts. The historicist school of scholarship was also prominent in the period, just as it is in our own day. Its aim was to place and interpret classical works exclusively within the historical context in which they were produced.

In Studies, Symonds eschewed both philological and historicist approaches. He attempted instead to enter into a stimulating dialogue, across the centuries, with the ancients. He regarded the Greeks as essentially modern men, whose literature spoke directly to 19th-century readers. He also believed that the ancients had exercised a profound influence on contemporary culture. “Except the blind forces of nature,” he declared, “nothing moves in this world that is not Greek in its origin”—a phrase that Wilde would quote with approval. Symonds drew attention to the many points at which modern and ancient cultures touched, comparing Aristophanes to Mozart, Aeschylus to Shakespeare, Greek Myth to Medieval Romance, and Greek drama to European Opera. Wilde marked many of these parallels in his copy of Studies.

Wilde enthusiastically embraced Symonds’s approach to the ancients. At the beginning of July 1876, a couple of months after he had purchased Studies (second series), Wilde took a viva voce as part of his mods exam. When asked to discuss Aeschylus, he talked, among other things, of Shakespeare and Walt Whitman, thus employing Symonds’s specific parallels as well as his general method.

The style of Studies was as essential as its subject for the young Wilde, eager as he was to master the “difficult” art of English prose. Years later Wilde would criticise the “rhetoric and over-emphasis” of some of Symonds’s writing—when it was good, he believed, it was very, very good, but when it was bad, it was florid. During his undergraduate days, however, Wilde adored Symonds’s style, excrescences, fustian bombast, and all. With an eye to identifying Symonds’s stylistic mannerisms, he marked, in his copy of Studies, the more than usually extravagant metaphors, such as the author’s comparison of the Hermaphrodite “in whom the two sexes are hidden” to “a bitter and a sweet almond in one beautiful but barren husk.” Next to a typically poetic phrase “Calm mornings of sunshine visit us at times in early November, appearing like glimpses of departed spring,” Wilde has written the words “very charming”. Reading this, we can almost hear the young aesthete murmur the words to himself with pleasure, “turning over the leaves” of the volume, as he would say in another context, “tasting” the words, “as one tastes wine.” (Incidentally, Wilde seems to have literally, as well as metaphorically, tasted wine while he read Symonds. On page 12 of the first volume of Studies there is a marginal blemish which appears to have been made by a drop of red, or as Wilde called it, purple wine.)

As part of his bid to assimilate Symonds’s style, Wilde copied phrases from Studies into his marble-boarded notebooks, sometimes giving them a personal inflection as he transcribed. Symonds’s sentence “The Greeks had no past: ‘no hungry generations trod them down’: whereas the multitudinous associations of immense antiquity envelop all our thoughts and feelings” became, in Wilde’s rendition: “Life came naturally to the Greeks, we ‘whom the hungry generations tread down’, barely attain to the gladness that was their immediate heritage.” Here we see the fledgling author measuring his style against that of one of his masters.

Wilde was so taken with Symonds’s book that he decided to write about it. In the summer of 1876, during his long vacation in Ireland, the Magdalen man embarked on an essay concerning Studies titled “The Women of Homer”. This lengthy prose work, which is probably the first essay Wilde wrote with a non-scholarly audience in mind, survives in unfinished and fragmentary manuscript form. Wilde took his title from a chapter in Symonds’s book, in which the Homeric heroines are evoked in painterly prose. In a letter to an Oxford friend, Wilde referred to his essay as a review of Studies, and on occasion, in “The Women of Homer”, he adopted the imperious tone of a reviewer: “but Mr Symonds is perhaps right” he commented at one point; “I think Mr Symonds is open to censure”, he said at another.

Most of the piece, however, is comprised of Wilde’s own translations and renditions of the scenes from the Odyssey and the Iliad in which Homer’s heroines feature. It is likely, therefore, that the essay is Wilde’s own attempt to write a vivid introductory essay on Homer’s heroines, rather than a conventional critical appraisal of Studies. Wilde may have hoped to place the piece in a magazine aimed at general readers, or in an encyclopaedia or school textbook. Alternatively, the essay may have formed the basis of a lecture he gave (or planned to give) in Dublin. Either way, Wilde abandoned the manuscript of “The Women of Homer” some 8,500 words in and would publish no essay on the theme at this time. The manuscript is today held at the Morgan Library, and has recently been published, for the first time, both in its unfinished manuscript form and as an edited and reconstructed reading text in Oscar Wilde: The Women of Homer (eds. Thomas Wright & Don Mead).

In “The Women of Homer”, Wilde was outlandish in his praise of Symonds’s style, at one point suggesting that it was expressive and elegant enough to convey even the beauty of Helen of Troy. Symonds’s prose, Wilde gushed, evinced “a strong love of all that is really beautiful and really pathetic”, along with “all the picturesqueness and loveliness of words that we admire so much in Mr Ruskin and Mr Pater.” Picturesqueness was, in Wilde’s view, the defining quality of Symonds’s style; he would later employ that epithet again in the newspaper reviews he penned of the books Symonds published in the 1880s.

Throughout “The Women of Homer” Wilde played the sedulous ape to Symonds. His general approach to Homer’s heroines is identical to that of Studies—the Magdalen man produced a form of impressionistic or aesthetic criticism in which Homeric scenes were summarised and vividly evoked through paraphrase and translation, rather than dissected analytically. The young Magdalen man’s style, like that of Symonds or Pater, was subjective and richly coloured by enthusiasm and emotion.

Wilde also directly echoed Symonds in many specific instances. “And so it is”, he wrote, “with consummate art that Homer has drawn [Nausicaa] following the cunning Circe and the enchantress Calypso. When we come face to face with Nausicaa it is like leaving a hot conservatory for the fresh spring air, or a crowded gaslit room for the soft breezes and silver glories of the night.’” These lines mimicked Symonds’s own comments on Nausicaa: “Odysseus,” he says, “passes straight from the solitary island of Ogygia, … into the company of this real woman. It is like coming from a land of dreams into a dewy garden when the sun has risen.”

Wilde audaciously attempted, on occasion, to “out-Symonds Symonds” for richness of word music and poetic extravagance. “The scene”, wrote Wilde of Andromache’s final parting from Hector, “is as the white blossom of an almond tree that our hands can not reach, though its perfume is brought to us by the wind; it is an eternal flower on the trees of sorrow, bright with the dews of many tears.” Reading these lines out of context, it would be impossible to say whether they came from the pen of Symonds or Wilde.

Wilde’s imitations are hardly a form of plagiarism, but there are occasions in “The Women of Homer” where he borrowed Symonds’s ideas, in the process of mimicking his style—something that could be classed as a species of literary theft. Wilde’s phrase, “Yet Helen did not all die. Marlowe made Faustus bring her from the dead to be his paramour”, is clearly derived from Symonds’s remark that “the Romance of Helen of Troy…blazed forth again in the pregnant myth of Faustus. The final achievement of Faust’s magic was to evoke Helen from the dead and hold her his paramour”. In this case, it could be argued that stylistic imitation has become, almost imperceptibly, the unacknowledged appropriation of an idea.

“The Women of Homer” was an ambitious experiment in style for a young Oxonian to have undertaken. Having marked his favourite Symonds phrases in his copy of Studies, and having transferred some of them into his notebooks, Wilde tried his hand at producing variations on the style of one of his masters. The result is uneven, with Wilde sometimes reproducing the worst excesses of his model and often lapsing into a “Wardour Street English” that is embarrassingly quaint; yet as an attempt to master Symonds’s style, the exercise was a resounding success.

*

A year after the apprentice author wrestled with Symonds’s style, in the margins of his copy of Studies, in his notebooks, and in the manuscript leaves of “The Women of Homer”, Wilde picked up Algernon Swinburne’s Essays and Studies (second edition, London, 1876). His copy, which is autographed “Oscar Wilde / Magdalen College. / July. 1877”, has recently come to light.

Wilde’s devotion and indebtedness to what he called the “very perfect and very poisonous” poetry of Swinburne is well known. At Magdalen the English spokesman of aestheticism was the Irishman’s “only poet”. Wilde often read the “marvellous music-maker” in his college rooms, mischievously describing himself, in one Oxford letter, as lying “in bed with Swinburne (a copy of)”. Wilde declared that he would rather have written Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads (first series, 1866) than any other book. According to some critics, he came perilously close to doing so in his own volumes of poetry, which were so saturated with Swinburnian echoes that they would be uncharitably dismissed as “Swinburne and water”.

Much less is known about the influence of Swinburne’s prose style on Wilde, though the markings in Wilde’s copy of Essays and Studies suggest that it was profound. Swinburne’s volume is an anthology of 11 lengthy critical essays, nine of which were originally written for the distinguished monthly the Fortnightly Review, and two as introductions to volumes of Byron’s and Coleridge’s poetry. Along with his appraisals of those two authors, Swinburne surveys the works of Hugo (in two separate articles), Rossetti, Morris, Arnold, Shelley, and John Ford. The collection ends with the two art essays: “Notes on Designs [i.e. drawings] of the Old Masters at Florence” and “Notes on Some Pictures of 1868”.

Swinburne served up an intimate and idiosyncratic brand of aesthetic criticism. Like Symonds and Pater, he offered vivid evocations of works of art rather than detached scholarly analysis; he was invariably more interested in the impression they made upon him than in their intrinsic qualities or the facts concerning their history. In mimicking this style of writing, Wilde was consciously aligning himself with the aesthetic movement and moving away from the academic style required of him as a Greats student, or indeed as an aspiring don. At Magdalen, Wilde was, as we know, uncertain as to which professional route he would follow—that of an Oxford academic or that of a popular writer in London; the aesthetic style of Pater, Symonds, and Swinburne worked on him like a siren song, luring him toward the latter path.

Swiunburne’s essays were also aesthetic in the more obvious sense that they zealously expounded the credo of aestheticism. The young Wilde absorbed wholesale many of Swinburne’s aesthetic pronouncements, marking them in his copy of Essays and Studies and rehearsing them in his later writings. On page 47 of Wilde’s copy there is a tick next to the phrase: “For art is very life itself, and knows nothing of death; she is absolute truth and takes no care of fact; she sees that Achilles and Ulysses are even now more actual by far than Wellington and Talleyrand; not merely more noble and interesting as types and figures, but more positive and real …” In “The English Renaissance of Art”, the first talk Wilde would give during his 1882 lecture tour of America, where he was billed as the “spokesman of Aestheticism”, these lines are repeated almost verbatim: “For art is very life itself and knows nothing of death;” Wilde remarks, “she is absolute truth and takes no care of fact; she sees (as I remember Mr Swinburne insisting on at dinner) that Achilles is even now more actual and real than Wellington, not merely more noble and interesting as a type but more positive and real”. (It is rather amusing that Wilde claimed to have heard Swinburne utter these words at dinner. As the pair are said to have only ever attended one dinner party together, and on that occasion, apparently spoke only briefly. Wilde must have made the anecdote up in a bid to impress his audience.)

In his essay on Arnold, Swinburne declares that there are two qualities of an artistic production that are bound to please the elect and annoy the many—”perfection of the work, and personality in the workman”. Wilde echoed this artistic formula on numerous occasions, the first occasion being in his 1882 essay “L’Envoi”, where he writes: “Whatever work we have in the Nineteenth Century must rest on the two poles of personality and perfection”. Wilde marked another of Swinburne’s famous aesthetic tenets in his copy of Essays and Studies: “The essence of an artist is that he should be articulate”. Once again, Wilde recycled this in “The English Renaissance”, where he remarked: “‘The artist’, as Mr. Swinburne says, ‘must be perfectly articulate.’”

Wilde’s markings suggest that he paid as much attention to the style of Essays and Studies as he did to its substance. He evidently read with the aim of divining and absorbing the secret of Swinburne’s manner, just as he had done in the case of Symonds’s Studies. In a letter written to a friend in 1877, the penultimate year of his Greats course, Wilde mulled over the possibility of taking up art criticism as a career. We might, in consequence, reasonably expect him to have paid especial attention to the two art essays included in Essays and Studies. In particular, we might assume that he would have been drawn to Swinburne’s lush evocations of pictures, as they are precisely the sort of impressionistic prose set pieces out of which Wilde built his own 1877 essay on the paintings in the Grosvenor Gallery exhibition.

The following description of a drawing of Salome by Andrea del Sarto is representative of Swinburne’s style: “Salome dances before Herod, an incarnate figure of music, grave and graceful, light and glad, the song of a bird made flesh, with perfect poise of her sweet slight body from maiden face to melodious feet; no tyrannous or treacherous goddess of deadly beauty, but a simple virgin, with the cold charm of girlhood and the mobile charm of childhood; as indifferent and innocent when she stands before Herodias and when she receives the severed head of John with her slender and steady hands; a pure bright animal, knowing nothing of man, and of life nothing but instinct and motion.”

This long and luxuriant sentence, in its elegant use of assonance and antithesis, and in its addiction to alliteration, as well as in its measured cadence, is so close to Wilde’s later prose that it might be mistaken for it. Yet neither this phrase, nor the countless other vivid lines that illuminate Swinburne’s art criticism, have been marked in Wilde’s copy of Essays and Studies. As he read, Wilde was evidently able to saturate himself in the music of Swinburne’s style without needing to mark specific passages.

Instead of underlining Swinburne’s purple passages, Wilde chose to place vertical lines throughout his copy of Essays and Studies, next to the author’s aphorisms and paradoxes. He marked Swinburne’s comment, apropos of Arnold, that “Some men are right without being reasonable, he is reasonable without being right”. A tick is also visible next to the remark that Byron had “much to fight against; and three impediments hung about him at starting, the least of which would have weighed down a less strong man: youth, and genius, and an ancient name.” Swinburne has never been regarded as an influence on Wilde the epigrammatist, but these markings strongly suggest that possibility.

The young Oxonian seems to have especially relished Swinburne’s maxims when they were illustrated with evocative images and metaphors. Swinburne’s phrase “Nothing that leaves us depressed is a true work of art. We must have light though it be lightning, and air though it be storm” has been marked, as has the following comment on the organic quality of Coleridge’s style: “Thus it has grown: not thus it has been carved”. Vivid aphoristic phrases such as these famously appear throughout Wilde’s later writings, and it is seems possible that Swinburne’s prose helped inspire this motif of his mature style.

Wilde was the most fastidious of readers (legend has it that he refused to read on whenever he came across the ugly word “magenta” in a book), so it is hardly surprising that he appears to have been offended (or perhaps amused) by the occasional excess and coarseness of Swinburne’s style. In his essay on Byron, Swinburne remarks that while “Coleridge and Keats used nature mainly as a stimulant or a sedative; Wordsworth [used it] as a vegetable fit to shred into his pot and pare down like the outer leaves of a lettuce for didactic and culinary purposes.” In the margin next to this phrase, Wilde has made two bold vertical lines and scribbled a large exclamation mark—which we may take to indicate distaste or amusement, or perhaps a combination of both.

Just as he had done while reading Symonds’s Studies, Wilde transcribed some lines from Essays and Studies into one of his undergraduate commonplace books. One entry there, titled “Beauty”, begins:

‘Rien n’est vrai que le beau’ [nothing is true except the beautiful]. Beauty may be strange, quaint, terrible, she may play with pain as with pleasure, handle a horror till she leaves it a delight. Art is one though the service of art is diverse. Beauty also may become incarnate in a myriad of diverse forms but the worship of beauty is simple and absolute.

Wilde was quoting from the penultimate and the ultimate pages of Essays and Studies. Swinburne had written “Rien n’est vrai que le beau [an Aesthetic slogan originally coined by Alfred de Musset]…Beauty may be strange, quaint, terrible, may play with pain as with pleasure, handle a horror till she leave it a delight.” Wilde copied these lines out with only one or two minor alterations (he added the word “she”, and wrote “leaves” instead of “leave”); his eye then skipped a few lines in Essays and Studies until it alighted on the phrase: “The worship of beauty, though beauty be itself transformed and incarnate in shapes diverse without end, must be simple and absolute”. This time Wilde was not content to simply transcribe the lines; rather he transformed them: “Beauty also may become incarnate in a myriad of diverse forms but the worship of beauty is simple and absolute.” Here we see the apprentice writer streamlining his source, rendering Swinburne’s phrase more lucid and memorable. The example, once again, evidences the extent of Wilde’s ambition as well as his skill.

So far as we know, Wilde never wrote an essay on (or in imitation of) Algernon Swinburne during his time at Magdalen. Nevertheless, the evidence of the markings in his copy of Essays and Studies, and in his notebooks, suggest Swinburne’s pervasive influence on the young author, an influence that would bear rich fruit in Wilde’s later critical writings.

*

Wilde’s undergraduate encounters with Symonds and Swinburne at Magdalen were not only fruitful in the short term; they may also have served as a paradigm for his future practice as an author, convincing him (if he needed convincing) that imitation was the best way to proceed. Throughout his career, before embarking on a new work, Wilde always selected a literary model (or models) to follow. He used Hans Christian Anderson’s celebrated tales as exemplars for his own fairy stories; the plays of the “Belgian Shakespeare”, Maurice Maeterlinck, provided the prototype for his French-language drama Salome. In the course of writing his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde imitated exponents of countless genres such as the Gothic novel (i.e. Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde) and dandy literature (i.e. Benjamin Disraeli’s Vivian Grey), as well as several masters of different varieties of popular Victorian fiction such as the “magic picture novel” and the “mesmeric novel”.

Wilde would speak openly about his derivative method of composition. He declared that imitation, and admiration, were “the portal to all great things” in literature, and identified the 18th-century English poet Thomas Chatterton as his model of authorship. Chatterton composed, in the 1760s, pastiches, or “forgeries”, of medieval poetry, passing them off as the original work of the 15th-century monk Thomas Rowley. The poet had, as Wilde explained in his 1886 lecture on Chatterton, also effortlessly absorbed the language of his contemporaries: scribbling off, by the yard, “polished lines like Pope, satire like Churchill…[and emotive verse like] Gray, Collins, Macpherson”.

Wilde characterised Chatterton, the marvellous boy of English literature, as an author “of the type of Shakespeare and Homer: a dramatist [who] claimed for the artist freedom of mood.” The poet’s “forgeries” and imitations were motivated by “the desire for artistic self-effacement” rather than by creative sterility or kleptomania; to accuse him of literary petty larceny would, Wilde argued, be to confuse an aesthetical with an ethical question. The “forgeries” were inspired too, by the delight Chatterton took in playing with the poetic postures and styles of his literary precursors—a form of literary dressing up Wilde himself relished.

Imitation, Wilde would claim, had nothing to do with plagiarism or lack of originality, for no one could ever be truly original. Every writer was “the child of someone else”, insofar as he copied, consciously or otherwise, his predecessors. True originality, therefore, could, “be found rather in the use made of a model than in the rejection of all models”; and great poets were those capable of drawing new music from reeds that had been “touched by other lips”.

Inevitably, Wilde’s method would leave him open to the charges of plagiarism, an accusation that dogged him throughout his career. The line between mimicry and theft is an extremely fine one, and Wilde was not always careful about crossing it. Once again, he was perfectly candid about his peccadilloes: “It is only the unimaginative who ever invents;” he would say, “the true artist is known by what he annexes, and he annexes everything”. “Of course I plagiarise”, he confessed to a friend, “it is the privilege of the appreciative man. I never read Flaubert’s Tentation de St Antoine without signing my name at the end of it…All the Best Hundred Books bear my signature in this manner”.

With characteristic ingenuity Wilde would come up with a definition of plagiarism that would effectively absolve himself of the charge. Plagiarism, he declared, only ever really existed where the imitator failed to surpass his source in brilliance: “When I see a monstrous tulip with four wonderful petals in someone else’s garden”, he explained, “I am impelled to grow a monstrous tulip with five wonderful petals, but that is no reason why someone should grow a tulip with only three petals.”

*

In the summer of 1878 Wilde achieved a first in his finals examination, thereby becoming one of only a handful of Magdalen men to achieve a “double first” in Greats in the entire 19th century. Despite his spectacular success in schools, however, he decided not to embrace the academic life. Fear of becoming “a dried up Oxford don” weighed heavily with him, as did his inordinate ambition to become “famous, and if not famous, notorious”. The development of a lush and epigrammatic aesthetic prose style—his newly-acquired skill in playing music on a “reed” that had been “touched” by the lips of Pater, Symonds, and Swinburne—was also a factor, for it was a manner that could serve him well as a lecturer and as a writer in the popular press. Sometime in 1879 or 1880, Wilde left Oxford for London, comparing the move to leaving “Parnassus for Piccadilly”.

Wilde carried with him to the English capital his impressive academic qualifications, along with numerous copies of his recently published poem “Ravenna” (with which he had carried off Oxford’s Newdigate poetry prize in 1878) and a trunk full of the manuscript leaves of countless other verses he had scribbled at Magdalen. And it was as a classicist and as a poet that he first attempted to make a name for himself in the English capital.

It would, however, be as a prose author that Wilde ultimately established his reputation. In 1882 he declared his genius in America, impressing large audiences with lectures on art in which he rehearsed the aesthetic credo of Pater, Symonds, and Swinburne (among others) and offered an elegant pastiche of their style. At the end of the 1880s he penned the platonic critical dialogues that would be published in Intentions (1891) as “The Decay of Lying” and “The Critic as Artist”, in which he reprised, once again, the aesthetic style of his youthful models, mixing it this time with a wit and an intellectual range that were entirely his own. In 1890 the first version of his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray was issued in a magazine to critical consternation and outrage, which ensured that it would be a succès de scandale.

Wilde eventually passed from prose to drama (before passing on from drama to prison), achieving his greatest triumph, in 1895, with the enormously popular plays An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest. Yet it was in prose that he first made his mark. The exercises in style he completed during his years at Magdalen, using authors such as Symonds and Swinburne as his models, consequently assume a great significance, and can be regarded as among the most productive seeds Wilde planted at Oxford. Those seeds would later blossom into some of the most strangely shaped and curiously coloured hothouse flowers of 19th-century literature.

Thomas Wright is the author of Oscar’s Books: A journey around the library of Oscar Wilde (Vintage, 2009) and of Death in Genoa, an audio drama about Wilde, which can be downloaded, free of charge, from The Independent.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the Wilde scholar Tracey Carroll (Drew University, New Jersey) for her extremely helpful comments on an early draft of this article, and Don Mead, chairman of The Oscar Wilde Society (www.oscarwildesociety.co.uk), for his excellent advice. I would like to thank the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York for access to manuscript material, and Wilde’s grandson, Merlin Holland, for his support and for permission to quote from material still in copyright.

…

Protruding through the clouds of dust and smoldering dung, majestic, curving horns salute the sun as it rises over South Sudan. Custom forbids the number of cattle ever being counted but there must be thousands resting in each of the endless camps of the Dinka. Sleeping beneath the stars, living on the milk of the cows, and wandering with their herds from pasture to pasture, the youth of South Sudan’s largest tribe repeat the daily scene of their ancestors. Yet this May morning a single calf runs through the camp, the new flag of South Sudan tied to a pole on its back. In just two months, on 9 July, South Sudan will become the newest state on Earth. After almost 50 years of constant fighting against the Sudanese army, all corners of the country will mark the day with celebrations. However, AK47s still remain rife, scattered beneath trees, slung over the shoulders of girls, and gripped in the hands of men. These Apuk Dinka youth are armed as though they were soldiers at war. Conflict still troubles this young land.

Since the end of the North-South civil war in 2005, inter-community violence in South Sudan has continued to escalate. Another May morning this year, these same camps of the Apuk Dinka were raided without warning. Armed with AK47s and shining new “Khartoum Guns”—guns rumoured to be supplied by Khartoum—the attacking Nuer started their massacre before dawn. The fighting lasted until the sunset, Dinka chiefs, politicians, and youth rushing to defend. On that day, over 90 people were killed and many more injured. Similar battles further south saw over 80 killed earlier in 2011. This inter-community violence has not only killed thousands of people in the last six years; it has also undermined the transition to independence by weakening nationhood, peace, and development. While South Sudan has achieved state borders, its national identity has only been defined, through years of conflict, in opposition to Khartoum. The withdrawal of the Northern threat now brings the new challenge of a positive, united national identity, a prospect undermined by continued friction.

Conflict in South Sudan has a more ancient rhyme and rhythm than that introduced by the AK47. Between the pastoralist communities such as the Dinka Apuk, it would traditionally take the form of deadly cattle-raiding. Without the option of judicial redress and compelled by a duty to seek retribution for loss of life, each victimised community would mount a retaliatory attack, with further cattle and lives taken. And so the cycle of violence would continue.

The North-South civil war added new dynamics to these old conflicts. It brought widespread use of firearms, and fatalities increased exponentially. Today, South Sudanese civilians use these firearms against each other. As you drive through the bush to cross the river to Gogrial, the remains of the killed lie unburied in the parched grass. With gun battles continuing around the bodies, there had been no opportunity to bury them within 24 hours as is customary, thus aggravating the loss for the families of the deceased. Current fighting in Jonglei is seeing as many as two dozen killed per day. Fresh with the confidence lent by their AK47s, the cattle-keeping youth of the Dinka are now attempting revenge attacks they once considered too risky. Thousands have been killed in the six years since peace; these fatality rates would have been unthinkable before the influx of these new weapons.

The greatest danger firearms bring is the dependency they induce. Before the 1980s, when spears and clubs predominated, the community itself could manufacture the tools of war. Guns, however, need to be imported, giving external parties vested interest in the perpetuation of conflict and making the warring communities reliant upon the support of those with resources. Powerful local individuals or external players can now buy a voice in the conflict, supplying guns and ammunition, and turning the communities into their own veritable militia.

The Titweng—the cattle-guard—are the main perpetrators of local violence amongst the Dinka during inter-community conflict. Untrained yet armed, the youths of the Titweng defend the community herds against raids or advance to reclaim stolen cattle. In Warrap State, the Titweng have been armed since the height of the civil war in the mid-1990s. Yet in these violent times, with firepower seen as crucial to the survival of the community, politicians pursue electoral success through material support for these groups. One aspiring candidate for commissioner amongst the Apuk is currently said to be the largest supplier of ammunition to the Titweng and is frequently visible during periods of conflict. Even incumbent politicians maintain their position through a reputation for strength in battle.

The approach of independence complicates this situation. Opposition to the governing Sudan People’s Liberation Army/Movement (SPLA/M) is mounting, with various military and political leaders expressing their dissent, often in violent confrontations. While 2006 saw some of the leadership of the other large militarised group in the South, the South Sudan Defense Force, absorbed into the SPLA/M, the remainder are now acting on their disagreement. The raid into Gogrial East this month was not the usual Titweng offensive; the heavy black boots and the Khartoum guns of the attackers suggested the involvement of a dissenting faction. Caught in political conflict, with their continuing duty to preserve the cattle, the Titweng must defend against an opposing force much better equipped.

Under a tree, on locally crafted chairs, opposite his smart new office building, the leading chief of Warrap State explains the history of the Council of Traditional Authority Leaders (CoTAL). Established after deadly conflict in Greater Gogrial, the CoTAL draws chiefs together for the purpose of preserving and creating peace. Even though statehood has transformed the old conflicts, the key to the re-establishment of peace may yet lie in these traditional leaders, with their local authority over the Titweng. Chiefs resource the conflict with ammunition supplies and participate in fighting. During times of heightened tension, these chiefs will be found amongst the youth, coordinating the defence of the cattle; one Apuk Dinka chief was even killed during recent defensive attacks against the Nuer. Furthermore, their executive and judicial authority over the youth and the community grants them sway over the ebb and flow of hostilities. So long as the youth remain obedient to their elders, external players who want to help end this local discord must address the chiefs.

Some aid agencies, however, are beginning to reject the role of the chiefs in peace-building, who are accused of being little more than puppets of the state and other national groups. Growing dependency on the Government of South Sudan (GOSS) for salaries, cars, budgets, buildings, and guns limits a chief’s ability to be an independent agent. Chiefs have even been accused of interrupting peace negotiations to communicate with national players to ensure their consent. Yet the chiefs need not remain pawns of the government; throughout history, they have often been pragmatic in seeking political allegiances. To the extent that their power and legitimacy stays rooted in their proximity to, and knowledge of, the community, and not in the government’s support, they are able to act independently.

As the sun starts to fall from the sky, the chiefs sit together beneath a reaching mahogany tree. Their grandfathers witnessed the independence of Sudan from the British, and they promise to slaughter countless bulls when they see the independence of the South. However, the conversation concerns the continuing conflict. They discuss the count of the dead and the defence of the cattle in their grazing lands. Satellite phones sit in their pockets, a sign of their connection to some external influence. Yet with the armed youth under their control the chiefs are indispensable to the realisation of peace in this new nation. They have the potential not only to lead an evolution of community values, but also to act as a check on the power of the state.

Naomi Pendle graduated in 2005 with a BA in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics from Merton College, Oxford. She currently lectures in South Sudan both at the University of Bahr al-Ghazal and Marol Academy (Warrap State).

This past August, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Justin Kaplan asked me, “What was it like to study with Seamus Heaney?” I fell silent for a bit, just as I often did around Heaney. Even now, it remains a difficult question to answer.

I first met Seamus Heaney in January in Warren House, the graduate English office at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I was about 22 years old.

I recall hearing him speak to the gathered crowd of students with his distinctive Irish accent. “I will be teaching two poetry writing classes: RBR and SBR.  If you are interested, you should submit a manuscript of poems.” I very clearly recall first hearing him say, “RBR and SBR” (the course identification codes). With his accent, those letters sounded sort of thick and rubbery. He probably specified how many poems we should submit, perhaps around five.

In a brief letter of introduction I included with my poems, I’m sure I mentioned that, “I met with William Alfred, and he had read my poems.” Alfred suggested I mention his name in my letter. I had told Alfred in one of our informal conversations in his parlor at his house on Athens Street, “My mother’s maiden name is Haney.”

Alfred said, “Put that in your letter to Heaney, too.”

I gained a seat in one of Heaney’s two classes, “The Practice of Poetry”. In class Heaney almost always wore a jacket and tie, and that term he often wore a gray, tweed jacket. He put on a cockney accent on one occasion, and this over his Irish accent produced the intended comical result.  It seemed everyone was glad to be there.

Heaney would introduce us to poets like Czeslaw Milosz and Zbigniew Herbert, with the assumption that this was the contemporary poetry he most admired.  Although now I cannot recall exactly which eastern European poets and poems Seamus Heaney presented, I do vividly recall the Rilke poems he shared with the class: “The Panther”, “Archaic Torso of Apollo”, and the first of the “Sonnets to Orpheus”, which mentions a “tree growing in the ear.”

He helped us appreciate these poems’ distinctive and remarkable qualities. What he pointed out in these poems, which helped me develop and refine my own poetic practice, was that power lay in what was not there; the power was present in absence, in what was missing.

At the time, I shared with Heaney a poem I had written that was inspired by Rilke, which concluded: “though his heart was a wounded animal.”  The poem described a bleak, snow–covered landscape, a scene of emotional desolation.  But Heaney thought “animal” too strong, and not quite right; he suggested “creature”.

Heaney was not a small man; he had a certain physical stature and seemed strong and agile.  I recall once inadvertently dropping something, perhaps a pen on the floor as we stood conversing in Warren House, and he swooped down to pick it up very quickly, as if to say, “I’m still quicker than you are even though you are half my age.”

His hair was longish and grayish and seemed sort of unruly.  I never thought of his connection to the counter-culture or hippie movement of the 1960s or 1970s, but perhaps his hairstyle was connected to that generation.  He was somewhat stocky, though not quite burly.

He seemed to appreciate his students’ poems; I recall Antonia’s beautiful poem describing a single sculler rowing on the Charles River.  Another classmate, a young man, shared a fine poem which described another more turbulent river, and I complimented the student’s poem by relating it to the work of Dylan Thomas. Heaney didn’t quite assent, and noted that Dylan Thomas’s work was often too overstated. With my poems he made specific suggestions on cutting parts of lines.  He wasn’t always specific, but I did gain a sense that he felt that I would unnecessarily prolong my poems.  The original version of “Sky Dark, Small Stars”, for instance, originally ended: “… and I am obviously alone.”  He found this last bit superfluous, and he was correct.

Years later, in the winter of 1995-96, when I was working for Princeton University, I picked up the New York Times on the table and read on the front page that Heaney had won the Nobel Prize in literature. This event inspired me to write about one of my office visits with Heaney when he suggested revising my poem “Moss Hollow”. Heaney wrote on my poem by drawing a sort of rectangle around the poem’s middle section, showing me the lines to revise.  I still recall that office visit upstairs in a tall, Victorian house on Prescott Street, which was then the undergraduate English office.  Up in the eaves, on the third floor, I remember the warm light of a lamp, and Heaney noting a “broken line” in my poem. On that same meeting Heaney autographed my paperback copy of his book Field Work, signing in it: “For Daniel Picker  Seamus Heaney  Slainte!”

During that spring term, I met Heaney at a small gathering at the Grolier Bookshop, and as he stood on the stone steps outside by the door on that bright afternoon, he flicked ashes from his Merit cigarette onto the ground and joked, “Heaney was here.”

The spring term culminated with a reading Heaney gave; in fact, it was a dual reading with James Merrill. The auditorium was packed and Heaney read first, but briefly; he deferred to Merrill, although most were there to hear him.

During the term, Heaney and I sometimes ate dinner in Adams House together with other students and perhaps I was too in awe of him.  He reminded me once to: “Eat your good lamb”, as I perhaps listened too closely to the conversation and let my dinner get cold.  So, I have described what it was like to study with Seamus Heaney. But perhaps my poem “Blackbird” for S.H. says it even better:

Sitting beside there then you matched
your tweed sleeve to mine, yours thatched
black and white hatched grey, mine green –
blue and black.  You asked, “What are you reading?”
“Patrick Kavanagh,” I said before your reciting:
“Clay is the word and clay is the flesh
where the potato – gatherers like mechanised
scarecrows move . . .”  I fell silent after
“The Great Hunger.”  Then back to my poem
“Moss Hollow”: “That grey graveled muddy
road I walked down . . . past gurgling gutter
streams of the soft shoulders.”  Then at
the heart you boxed in that broken line
and proffered, “the flint wing of a blackbird.”

During that same office meeting I mentioned Edward Thomas and his verse; Edna Longley had recently delivered a fine lecture at Harvard on the friendship between Robert Frost and Thomas as seen in comparative poems written of the time when Frost lived in England before Thomas was killed in World War I.  Thomas may have been Frost’s greatest writer friend.  Heaney noted the “sense of isolation” in my work and in Edward Thomas’s also.

I recall last seeing Seamus in Warren House, and shaking hands and saying, “Good-bye”, and “It was nice meeting you”, and “I enjoyed your class.” “God Bless”, he said.

Daniel Picker studied English Literature at Lincoln College, Oxford. His work has appeared in the Harvard Review and elsewhere.

Mark Doty
The Art of Description
Graywolf Press, 2010
304 Pages
£8.99
ISBN 978-1555975630

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Most of us have felt it, and not only the writers among us: the urgent desire to describe an event, a feeling, an object as precisely and evocatively as we can, followed by a frustrating sense of our language’s inadequacy to the task. In The Art of Description, Mark Doty writes that we have a sense of “life not having been really lived until it’s narrated”, which, as Whitman understood, is both demon and bird, a curse as well as a blessing. One need not be a deconstructionist to recognize that moment when language gives out; “you just had to be there” has become the customary signal for such a failure. But even within that depleted phrase is a desire to connect, to share one’s experience—and by extension oneself—with someone else. Description, Doty writes, is a “real gift”, as “the pleasure of recognizing a described world is no small thing.”

Luckily for us, Doty—a prolific poet and prose writer himself—has got it bad. His contribution to Graywolf Press’s “The Art of” series is less a how-to book than a meandering meditation on how description works, and why we bother in the first place. Though he humbly claims to fail in his own borderline-purple description of a fireworks show (he may just be trying too hard), he is transported by the descriptive powers of poets as diverse as Elizabeth Bishop, Henry Vaughan, George Herbert, Allen Ginsberg, Hart Crane, May Swenson, and Susan Howe. Doty’s wide reading lends him the requisite authority, but it also enables the breadth and quality of attention that description requires. What is often invoked in his readings is where and how beautifully description fails: “Description is made both more moving and more exact when it is acknowledged that it is inevitably incomplete.” Aware that the pernicious theoretical “mistrust of language” threatens to smother the baby in its crib, he makes an appeal for a “middle ground” between renouncing referentiality altogether and “cleaving to an outdated notion that words can be controlled.”

Doty implies that a poem by definition is a description, not only of the world but, even more often than prose, of the writer’s self.  This is nothing new; most of what Doty has to say isn’t. The concept of translating the “world into word” (the phrase is emblazoned across the book’s cover) is particularly tired. But this does not necessarily detract from the book’s value; any reminder to pay attention to our surroundings and revisit even the most familiar poem is always worthwhile. English literature students who may have wearied of Bishop’s “The Fish” (which gets a chapter-long treatment) or Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” will be invigorated by Doty’s enthusiasm, while those new to poetry will get lessons in how to read a poem and in how to balance between “saying what you see and saying what you see.”

Indeed the central, gentle plea—“argument” is too strong a word—of Doty’s idiosyncratic book is for us to pay attention. One cannot observe in a hurry: Doty suggests that such “looking and looking causes time to open; sustained attention allows us to tumble right out of progression.” Doty links physics and poetry, stating that we can never be certain of the truth of what we see because our observation affects reality (quantum mechanics must have been in the air when Blake wrote “For the Eye altering alters all”—or perhaps 19th-century physicists were just breathing in all that metaphysical lyric). It is the poet’s task to record these shifts in reality as well as the uncertainty that they carry within them. And it is the tension between precision and uncertainty that fuels the most powerful description.

It is to his credit that Doty does not allow his eagerness to cloud his understanding of some ethically problematic issues, such as assigning voices to animals—an ability they neither want nor need—in order to somehow “understand” what they must be thinking and feeling.  Language is the human compensation for existential distance; to give speech to animals, even in poetry, is to force this distance upon them. Throughout his discussion of Elizabeth Bishop’s “heroic” fish, Doty points out how precise observation and metaphor allow the speaker to begin to apprehend the fish’s experience of being caught, and yet—and this is the trick—how such precision leaves space for, and even becomes about, the “strangeness” that “persists”. It is easy to forget that when we are making a poem, searching for, according to Coleridge, “the best words in their best order”, that we can never really say what we mean.  Doty reminds us that “It’s the unsayability of what being is that drives the poet to speak and to speak, to make versions of the world, understanding their inevitable incompletion, the impossibility of circumscribing the unreadable thing living is.”

Because Doty shows himself to be this careful with language, it is especially surprising to find that, at times, he views the real-life effects of language rather uncritically for a poet. He forgets, for instance, that the Nazis, with their corrupt poetry of propaganda, did not quite subscribe to the view that “the more we can name what we’re seeing, the more language we have for it, the less likely we are to destroy it.” It was the power of naming that helped destroy “undesirables”; one need only think of the various invented names for Jews and the meanings imposed upon the word “Jew”. Doty reasons optimistically that if we can name the plants in a forest, the less likely we are to raze it, but he does not seem to consider that language can also “mean” in the wrong direction.

“Every object rightly seen unlocks a new faculty of the soul”, wrote Emerson. If there were such a thing as secular religion, the act of description might be its practice: close attention always contains an element of reverence for the thing observed, and to describe it “rightly” is akin to the “unlocking” of the soul that is prayer. When that object is the Divine, the dilemma becomes even more urgent: after that first soul-unlocking, how dare we presume that our fallen language is adequate to describe, let alone communicate with, a power beyond all speech? Doty cites George Herbert’s “Prayer” as an example of just this conflict. Herbert, a 17th-century scholar and Anglican priest, was keenly aware of the paradox of prayer, how the ultimate failure of description (a form prayer often takes) can actually be its fulfillment: only when one’s faith in language is exhausted can that faith be reanimated by the unspeakable mystery of God. Specific and evocative throughout most of the poem—he compares prayer to an “Engine against th’ Almightie, sinner’s towre,/ Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear”—Herbert ends with the indeterminate phrase “something understood”, a moment of divine contact in which language becomes hazy and falls away.

Good description knows when to resist its own energy, to “name the object of…attention without the least depriving it of any of its mystery.” It seems a cosmic joke that vision, our primary sense and the one from which we draw our metaphors for understanding, more often “wrongly” than “rightly” sees, and in fact cannot see the connections between us which we most desire. It is no accident that Herbert ends his poem not with sight, but with the sound of church bells, the feeling of the soul’s vitality, and the imagined scent of spices. Finally, though, it is “Something understood”, something metaphorically seen, that is the prayer’s answer. Doty suggests that the act of writing, of shifting between world, self, and word, is thus a kind of faith, a “joy and scruple, privilege and duty” whose moment of failure might also be one of transcendence.

Rachel Abramowitz is reading for a DPhil in English literature at Christ Church, Oxford.

A stream of slender youths from the Apuk Dinka tribe meander past us and disappear in the direction of the Jur River. Bare-foot, guns slung over their shoulders, they wear impassive expressions despite their lethal intentions. We are standing in the pounding Sudanese sun; beyond this final mud hut there is nothing but the nomadic cattle camps that line the last couple of miles to the Jur River. This morning, on a scrap of paper, with frayed edges and a crumpled corner, we collected the names of the 16 tribe members killed in the raids the day before. Now the youths are leaving to claim back their cattle and avenge their tribe’s dead. During January 2010, over 150 people were killed and over 50,000 head of cattle were taken in this kind of inter-tribal raiding between the Apuk Dinka of Warrap State and the Nuer of Unity State (South Sudan).

In the vast wilderness of northern South Sudan, the dry months of November to April bring the necessary movement of cattle from the villages to the waters and swampy terrain near the river. This draws the opposing tribes into physical proximity, with the river marking their only boundary. The cattle are the prime store of wealth for the semi-nomadic pastoralist tribes, allowing them to save for marriage, times of famine, and illness. The proximity of the tribes during the dry season induces the temptation of violent raiding. Although these raiding patterns are thousands of years old, in the peace between North and South Sudan since 2005, inter-tribal raiding in the south has escalated in scale and frequency. In 2009, more people died in these raids in the south than died in the notorious conflict of Sudan’s Darfur region.

Simultaneously, in this post-war era, schools are starting to emerge, with trees as classrooms and sticks for stationary. It is these schools that finally offer an alternative to this insidious and increasingly violent cultural habit. Since the 1990s, in the most remote reaches of South Sudan, a growing demand for formal education has been driven by a personal desire for survival. With this increase in classroom education, there is finally a promise of pacifying the raiding of the Apuk Dinka cattle camps.

When formal education was first introduced amongst the Apuk Dinka by Europeans, it was seen as nothing better than a punitive measure for delinquent youth. A former commissioner from the Apuk Dinka, Deng Mariak, recalls the attempts by the British authorities to force him to attend education. Not only did he flee school for days through lion-laden scrub land, but his family hid him from armed soldiers searching the mud huts of the village to return this escapee to the classroom. No respectable father would allow his child to attend school, and adulthood was found in the training and rites-of-passage of the cattle camps.

This attitude prevailed until the late 1990s when circumstances demonstrated how formal education could lead to survival. Conditions had conspired to create one of the 20th century’s worst famines amongst the Apuk Dinka. A failed harvest, bombing raids from the north, and local militia raids on the ground resulted in a shortfall of food which caused the deaths of over 100,000 people. Locals still remember the road to the market lined with the corpses of those who had starved to death on the journey.

The food aid provided was consistently sourced and organised by the World Food Program. Coordination of the delivery of food involved the recruitment of local staff, and crucially, literacy and some English language were a key condition for employment. Employees and their families were guaranteed adequate provision of grain prior to its distribution to the rest of the community. For the first time, the local community equated literacy and education with survival and prosperity. Education suddenly made sense.

The continued, active, quasi-governmental involvement of the United Nations and international nongovernmental organisations (INGOs) in South Sudan has further cemented this perception. Demand has caused the price of education to rise to five cows per year in the leading schools, and even first-born sons are now being sent to classrooms instead of the cattle camps.

The increase in education is likely to result in a reduction in deadly cattle raiding for at least three reasons: first, the educated youths have new values and aspirations; second, the educated youth have alternative means of wealth acquisition; third, alternative means of wealth storage, other than cattle, are emerging.

The younger generation of literate Apuk Dinka profess to have abandoned some of the traditional values and aspirations that have historically fuelled cattle raiding. In order to acquire a wife, men pay from 31 and up to 200 cows (based on costs in 2010 amongst the Apuk Dinka). Conventionally, men would marry between three and five wives throughout their lifetime, requiring the acquisition of hundreds of cattle. This practice, in combination with the depletion of herds during 50 years of civil war, has inflamed the tendency for raiding.

In contrast, the educated youth repeatedly claim to aspire to take only one wife. Having received their education in the refugee camps of Kenya and Uganda, education in South Sudan has become synonymous with the adoption of their moral code, including the one-wife policy. Therefore, this changed aspiration results in demand for fewer cattle and a reduced propensity to raid.

Second, the educated youth have an alternative source of income that vastly exceeds that available through the herding of cattle. One INGO amongst the Apuk Dinka, for example, employs over a hundred literate, local staff. Employment for these INGOs often equates to a salary of ten cows per year. Traditionally, in contrast, a labourer in the cattle camps receives a wage of just one cow per year. With the possibility of amassing enough cattle for a good wife over a decade, the relative benefit of raiding is depleted. Because of the high cost of carrying out a raid, largely due to the significant risk of death or serious personal injury, it has become, on balance, more sensible not to raid.

Third, education offers understanding of an alternative means of wealth storage. Local and international currencies are in increasing usage, changing the economic mechanisms away from a barter economy with cattle as the central means of exchange. Exposure to global culture through education has also brought alternative expressions of wealth. Not only cows and wives, but also inanimate property such as permanent home structures, technology, clothes, and vehicles are now the desired acquisitions. Such items of wealth storage and expression are not found in the cattle camps where vulnerability to raids is more extreme. Instead such possessions foster a more sedentary lifestyle that does not create close tribal proximity.

The dichotomy between the choice of the classroom or the cattle camp can be exaggerated. Many youth will find themselves at the camps in the dry season and the schools in the wet season. Yet, the choice to return to the village for school, motivated by the desire for survival, offers the hope of an end to the ever more deadly inter-tribal raiding. With altered aspirations, sources of income, and sources of wealth storage, the educated youth, who have been in the classroom, are starting to reject the raiding of cattle camps.

As the sun sets Deng Mariak’s son walks home with me. “Yes, I’m scared for my brothers. The oldest brother just left to head north to the Jur River to see if our cattle and our younger brothers are okay. But I was away at school so long that I never learnt to fire our gun.”

Naomi Pendle graduated in 2005 with a BA in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics from Merton College, Oxford. She currently teaches at Marol Academy in Warrap State in South Sudan.

Howard Zinn, professor emeritus of political science at Boston University and author of many books, most notably A People’s History of the United States, died on 27 January of this year. Born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1922, the son of two immigrant factory workers, he worked at a naval shipyard and served as a bombardier during World War II before embarking upon a career in academia. An activist and sometime playwright, his interpretation of U.S. history emphasised the agency of ordinary people at the expense of political, commercial, and military elites, aiming to overturn what he perceived as the unremitting narrative of American greatness presented in the country’s textbooks. His approach proved wildly successful. Published in 1980, A People’s History sold more than a million copies and became a standard text for left-leaning American activists looking for a usable past to inform their present-day struggles.

Professor Zinn was himself a committed activist and his historical interpretation was a function of his engagement with contemporary political contentions. That engagement was deep and sustained. In 1963 he lost his job at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia, as a consequence of his involvement with the civil rights movement. And during the Vietnam War he called for civil disobedience. “Thousands of us were arrested for disturbing the peace”, he observed. “We were really arrested because we were disturbing the war.” He drew on his experience of civil rights activism to highlight the importance of persistence in the pursuit of social justice and of keeping faith in the possibility of fundamental societal change. Fittingly, he cut short his final class in order to join a picket line, encouraging his students to join him.

Mention of A People’s History‘s appearance in the 1997 blockbuster Good Will Hunting has been a ubiquitous, wearying fixture in Zinn’s obituaries, but it is illustrative of the broader purchase that the book has had amongst a popular readership. Few historians have garnered such an extensive audience beyond the academy. Few have held such celebrity cachet. And few have had their position as an historian so contested. In the wake of his death there has been some controversy over just this issue: could Professor Zinn properly be named an historian? Conservative critics were understandably perturbed by Zinn’s rejection of the moral superiority of the United States and his seeming dedication to pull apart the fabric of the nation’s political narrative. Jingoism and militarism, Zinn argued, were the inevitable corollaries of nationalism, evidenced, in his view, by the invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003. Zinn sought to debunk national heroes such as Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt, and denounced American territorial expansion in the 19th century as little more than a glorified land grab.

In short, his historical interpretation was a function of his political convictions rather than the other way around. The people were inherently progressive, and if reaction prevailed this could only mean that the popular will had been subverted by perfidious elites. That this jarred with right-wing sensibilities is obvious, yet Zinn was hardly a darling of the left. In one of the more notable critiques of Zinn’s work, Michael Kazin criticised him for not asking “the biggest question a leftist can ask about U.S. history: why have most Americans accepted the legitimacy of the capitalist republic in which they live?” Rather than historicising the left’s struggles with capital, authority, and power, Zinn offered no more than a “Manichean fable…gilded with virtuous intentions”. And if Kazin is right—if the American left does really understand itself in terms of such an uncompromising binary of good and evil—it is no wonder that it struggles to effect change in the world.

The go-to term for those looking to defend Zinn’s reputation at the hands of his critics (and there are many) is “polemicist”. The charge that Zinn had little interest in producing an objective portrait of the past is acknowledged, but blunted by the counter-assertion that he was merely offering a corrective to a dominant, even hegemonic, interpretation of the American past. Moreover, his defenders point to his broader intent: he sought to inspire protest and discontent in a world still marked by injustice. To this end, Zinn promoted a pragmatic and sober approach to political organisation, preaching patience and perseverance as favourable alternatives to zeal and enthusiasm. In this endeavour he undoubtedly achieved some success. As a further defence, Zinn’s sympathisers contend that all historical interpretations are conditioned by their political context. Professor Zinn wanted to challenge the hegemony of an equally narrow, jaundiced, America-as-beacon-of-liberty presentation of the past.

In 2010, writing history from the bottom up is hardly news, but this was not the case in the late 1970s. By challenging curricula on this score, Zinn’s long-term significance is secure. Yet the fact that he aimed for neither objectivity nor neutrality does nothing to suggest we ought to take him seriously as an historian. The question can be fairly asked: do the conscious, deliberate omissions in his account of American history—modern conservatism, for instance, or the popular anti-Catholicism of the middle decades of the 19th century—fatally undermine his claim to be read as an historian?

Certainly, A People’s History evinced a willingness to favour a unitary narrative over complexity and nuance in the interest of prosecuting a present-minded political case, but perhaps more damning is the thin sense of the people themselves that emerges from his work. This shortcoming is intimately connected with Zinn’s idiosyncratic conception of power and its distribution in the American republic. On the one hand, his oppositional, totalising, elites-versus-people model compelled him to emphasise the fundamental goodness of the American people and their ability to improve their world. Abolitionists, opponents of American aggression in the Philippines, civil rights activists, and the (sometimes violent) protesters of the Vietnam War: these are Zinn’s heroes, offering the hope of substantive, progressive change to the American body politic. As historian Christopher Phelps writes, these are the people who acted “as if change is possible in the face of decidedly unfavorable odds”, and in doing so, reshaped the historical trajectory of the United States. “The People”, the great unwashed masses, understanding perfectly their own interests, wield power.

Yet despite the power that inheres in the people, the American republic looks as it does. We can dispute the 2000 Presidential electoral returns, but 50 million people still voted for George W. Bush. Only the smallest fraction  will be corrupting, decadent millionaires set on frustrating the progressive evolution of American history. And perhaps we can assume that some had their vote “bought” under any reasonable understanding of that term, but surely this could only represent a minute number. But the majority are not, and did not. Bush was elected—twice—and it is dismissive and condescending to assume that “the people” got their own minds wrong somewhere along the line. Kazin’s point about the people accepting the legitimacy of the capitalist republic can be taken further: the people have actively colluded in building that republic, and they have done so in light of a rational assessment of their own interests. Professor Zinn pronounces upon the morality of this, and of course that is a proper subject for debate, but he does little or nothing to lay bare the power structures of the American state, family, or workplace. For this his work suffers.

In an interview conducted near the end of his life, Howard Zinn said, “The really critical way in which people are deceived by history is not the lies that are told, but that things are omitted”. By this standard, Zinn deceived his readers. But perhaps the application of this standard is too harsh. A People’s History was almost certainly meant to be read alongside the conventional accounts it sought to challenge. Ultimately, we can accept this partial defence but still find his interpretation dissatisfactory. Perhaps we expect more nuance and more honesty from historians of the left: they are supposed to speak truth to power. When they replicate the modes of narrators of the right, constructing noble lies to live by, we are disappointed.

David Sim is reading for a DPhil in History at Corpus Christi College, Oxford.

Photograph © Penguin Books Ltd.

Adrienne Rich
A Human Eye: Essays on Art in Society
W.W. Norton & Company, 2009
208 Pages
£11.99
ISBN 978-0393070064

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Adrienne Rich’s latest volume of essays, A Human Eye: Essays on Art in Society, gathers short lectures, prefaces, and reviews written and published between 1997 and 2008. Emphasising social awareness and engagement as the critical aims of art, these essays reflect Rich’s lifelong struggle to integrate political conscience with artistic creation.

Rich has been a major voice in poetry ever since W.H. Auden selected her debut  collection, A Change of World (1951), for the prestigious Yale Series of Younger Poets prize. Yet while the poems in this volume were remarkable in many ways, it was not until Diving into the Wreck, published in 1973 and winner of the National Book Award, that Rich gained canonical status. She is known not only as a poet—she has received nearly every major American poetry award—but also as a cultural critic and activist, and has been an outspoken participant in feminist and anti-war movements.

“A Human Eye”, her 29th book, takes its title from Karl Marx’s “Private Property and Communism”, which Rich quotes in her foreword: “the eye has become a human eye only when its object has become a human, social object.” She adds, “When art—as language, music, or in palpable, physically present silence—can induce that kind of seeing, holding and responding, it can restore us to our senses.” Whether dealing with Jewish identity, translation of Iraqi poetry, poets like Muriel Rukeyser and LeRoi Jones, or Marx himself, Rich’s commentary is always rooted in the ways art can, or should, reawaken our numbed consciousnesses to levels of physical and cultural awareness.

Art’s purpose, in other words, is to uncommodify the gaze, to replace the eye’s need to own an object with the eye’s need to “see” it and understand its unique physicality. This ideology of blending politics, poetics, and the body echoes lines from “The Demon Lover”, an early poem published in Leaflets (1969): “Only where there is language is there world/ In the harp of my hair, compose me a song.” Reality as language, language as physical act, whether by lips, or touch, or both.

Rich’s work has always aimed to discern real “truth” from the “truths” presented to us by the dominant capitalist discourse. This aim is nowhere more apparent than in her groundbreaking poem, “Diving into the Wreck”, in which she encases her flesh in “body-armor of black rubber/ the absurd flippers/ the grave and awkward mask” and dives into the deep searching for “the wreck itself and not the story of the wreck.” This wreck is both metaphorical and literal, representing not only the wrecks of history and culture, but the wreck of the body itself. Holding “a book of myths/ in which/ our names do not appear”, she sets herself the task of writing her body—and the bodies of the dispossessed implicit in the word “our”—back into the language and thus back into the world.

This was also the task of her eminent essay, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence”, a deliberate attempt to write lesbians into feminist discourse, and it remains the task of A Human Eye. Perhaps the greatest example of this can be found in her essay, “Jewish Days and Nights”, in which she characterises “true” Jewishness as being variegated in nature, insisting that “diaspora—a multi-faceted condition—means never always, or anywhere, being just like other Jews.” To follow this “truth” would be to dive into the wreck and discover bodies and voices not represented by dominant Jewish, especially American Jewish, discourse. She laments the highjacking of Jewish culture by fundamentalists groups, which she finds antithetical to “true” Jewish teaching.

Judaism envisioned in this way as something plural and shifting rather than fixed reflects the necessity of transmission within and between cultures. Rich further addresses this necessity in the preceding essay, Iraqi Poetry Today, where she interrogates the politics of translation with a battery of suggestive questions: “whose poetry is translated, from and into what languages, what of the poetry actually translated can get published and receive international distribution, what poets (and what poetics) are disseminated, and who decides these matters?” These inquiries beget others relating to the authenticity and trustworthiness of the translation. Beneath it all lies the question: what bodies are being left behind in the wreckage?

For Rich, poetry is in part untranslatable, “unmistakably human as the human face yet varied as faces are.” At the same time, the act of translation is a bodily event: it is to “make love with a new person, in a different body.” This romance can yield beauty and even understanding, though that understanding will always remain imperfect. Rich is wary of the pitfalls of translation yet conceives of it as a powerful vehicle for the dissemination of difference (of cultures, of bodies, of politics) that we must dive into in order to rescue individual and collective bodies from the wreckage.

Perhaps the most rewarding parts of Rich’s collection are those in which she allows other voices to speak. She is fond of presenting full quotations, laying the whole bodies of poems down in the middle of her text to converse with it, merge with it, and transform it. She is not afraid to pull back and allow other poems to deliver their own individual impact, without the distraction of her critical commentary. She also delights in exposing readers to poems which they might have never encountered; though LeRoi Jones (better known by his adopted name, Amiri Baraka), James Baldwin, and Walt Whitman may be household names to most readers, poets such as Thomas Avena, Fadhil al-Azzawi, Fawzi Karim, Nazik alMala’ika, Shulamith Hareven, Edmond Jabès, June Jordan, Judy Grahn, Yannis Ritsos, Dennis Brutus, and Rami Saari might not be.

Similarly, the social critics whom she quotes, such as  Che Guevara and Rosa Luxemburg are probably best known to many readers by name alone. Even Karl Marx is represented by less popular quotations (such as that referenced in Rich’s title),  thereby offering most readers “new” material from a major figure. Rich’s project is to rescue these figures and their bodies of work from the wreck, to restore them to the surface.

A Human Eye is an essential text that carries Rich’s joint political and artistic project into the 21st century. The essays included in this volume teach us to see differently, to think differently. Rich writes, “Amid profiteering language, commoditizing of intimate emotions, and public misery, I want poems that embody—make into flesh—another principle. A complex, dialogic, coherent poetry to dissolve both complacency and despair.” Rich herself has always provided us with this type of poetry, and these essays continue this legacy. Her voice is never self-important or self-involved, it never claims absolute authority; rather, it takes every chance to relinquish authority in the service of a greater and more impactful inclusiveness. Everything should be questioned; everyone should be given a voice. To read Rich’s new volume is to share in a communion of voices ranging from the forgotten to the dispossessed, who are all struggling, along with Rich, to be heard. Rich’s eye gazes on them all, and they all gaze back; survivors of the wreck, left out of the book of myths, but written here.

Erik Fuhrer received an MLitt from the University of Glasgow in 2009. He wrote his dissertation on Virginia Woolf.

The decision to award the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize to President Barack Obama was met with widespread surprise and confusion from the world’s media. The most plausible interpretation of the accolade was that the Nobel committee was eager to motivate Mr Obama and to remind him of how much he could achieve. In Africa, a Sudanese-born British entrepreneur, Mo Ibrahim, is trying a similar motivational trick, but with a prize even more lucrative than Mr Obama’s Nobel.

In 2007, Mr Ibrahim used a fortune made from selling mobile phones to create the Ibrahim Prize for Achievement in African Leadership. Worth over $5 million, the Ibrahim Prize is available every year to an African leader who has exemplified good governance. The size of the prize has given the Ibrahim Foundation plenty of headlines, but the implicit assumption that financial reward is the best way to nurture African leadership has not stimulated the debate that it should. Africa is a continent full of infant democracies, and there is great danger in encouraging its people to see wealth as a consequence of electoral success.

Yet wealth is what the prize provides. An Ibrahim Prize laureate receives the $5 million over an initial ten years, followed by an annual bursary of $200,000 for life and $200,000 for ten years for charitable purposes. The criteria for consideration are, as one would hope, fairly rigorous. Eligibility is restricted to those who have been democratically elected, have served their terms within the limits of their country’s constitution, and have left office within the preceding three years. The prize-giving committee is also appropriately heavyweight: members have included former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Maarti Ahtisaari, and the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei.

The purpose of the Ibrahim Prize is twofold. Although it exists primarily to reward those whose work and dedication deserve greater recognition, the prize also works as an incentive to those currently in power. Mr Ibrahim has made the point that African leaders often lack the opportunities—such as speaking engagements and authorship—available to retired Western politicians. However, if the prize gains sufficient international prestige, its winners may also enjoy greater status and access to post-retirement benefits. Failing that, in a time of global economic certainty, the possibility of a $5 million nest-egg ought to be enough to catch the eye.

This, however, is the first point of contention. If a leader is determined to have more funds at his disposal, it is difficult to imagine that the hope of future recognition from Mr Ibrahim would prevent him from indulging in the more traditional practices of corruption and embezzlement. Quite simply, $5 million is peanuts to a leader who is serious about getting rich illegally. (A former leader of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mobutu Sese Soko, was widely reported to have had billions stashed in European bank accounts, as did several other heads of state, such as Omar Bongo of Gabon and Gnassingbé Eyadéma of Togo.) The size of the award hints that it wishes to do more than reward, but it is not big enough to guarantee its effectiveness as an alternative incentive.

Beyond these practical concerns, the Ibrahim Prize begs a more ethical question about the validity of rewarding someone—and not just anyone, but an elected official—so handsomely for doing their job. This is no doubt a point with which Mr Ibrahim would quibble, pointing out that his two laureates to date, Joaquim Chissano of Mozambique and Festus Mogae of Botswana, have demonstrated much more than the mere ability to operate within the confines of democracy and resist plundering the treasury. Mr Mogae was cited for his ability to develop and diversify the economy while combating HIV; Mr Chissano received the prize for his commitment to democracy in the immediate aftermath of a civil war. On the whole, though, Africa has been hampered by two generations of post-independence leaders who abused their positions by rigging elections and hiding money abroad. The main weapon to combat the autocratic tendencies of African leaders is democracy, and the Ibrahim Prize aims to reward those who abide by the ballot box.

Yet the size of the award and the fact that it is given to an individual (and not his country) effectively undermine the democratic process. The Ibrahim Prize contributes to a problem that African countries have faced since independence: the concentration of power among the elite. The idea of the Big Man leader who oppresses the political opposition, lives extravagantly on plunder from natural resources, and surrounds himself with a corrupt coterie is becoming anachronistic. But it is also a reminder of the dangers of giving any single person or group too much influence. Awarding a prize to a head of state implies a level of control over a society that democracy attempts to limit. It would be grossly unfair to suggest that the Ibrahim Prize could result in—or even encourage—another generation of Big Men, but it is hard to shake the notion that an award meant to benefit the continent should emphasize rule by the many, not an individual leader.

When choosing its third laureate in October, the committee faced a difficult decision. Of the most high-profile candidates, Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria should have been ruled out when he unsuccessfully attempted to change the constitution and run for a third term. South Africa’s Thabo Mbeki was also eligible, but the lasting impressions of his presidency–his bizarre and damaging views on AIDS and his unwillingness to rebuke Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe–cast doubt on his leadership. Many commentators believed that this situation would clear the way for John Kufuor of Ghana, but his administration was hampered by rumours of corruption. Moreover, he is already handsomely rewarded by a hefty state pension.

Given these options, the foundation made the decision not to award its prize to anyone. This has always been a possibility—Mr Ibrahim has referred to the fact that the prize is not necessarily annual—but the decision still seemed antithetical to the foundation’s aims, not least because the decision prompted a blizzard of negative press coverage. Newspapers in the UK responded with pieces titled “Does anyone govern well in Africa?”, “No-one worthy” and “African ‘good leader’ award fails to find winner”. Headlines like these reinforce negative stereotypes about African governance and work against Mr Ibrahim’s goals.

Ultimately, though, Mr Ibrahim’s decision was as correct as it was unexpected. Recognizing the paucity of good governance rather than lauding an unworthy winner affirmed the foundation’s integrity, reinforced its independence, and disproved suggestions of inter-African cronyism. The decision also hints at the foundation’s wider aim to be a tool for African self-assessment—one willing both to praise and to rebuke.

In planning the evolution of the Ibrahim Prize, the foundation could do worse than follow the model of the Nobel committee, which has managed to subordinate the financial prize to the status of the award itself. To this end, the Ibrahim Foundation should reduce the value of its prize, which is grotesquely large as a pension but far too small to counteract corruption. The committee should also award the prize less frequently, raising the standard of its laureates and increasing its international prestige. These steps would allay the suspicion that the prize serves only to make richer the continent’s richest men.

Mike Jakeman graduated in 2006 with a degree in English from Keble College, Oxford. He now works for the Economist Intelligence Unit.

Photograph © Ibrahim Foundation