Susan Jacoby
Alger Hiss and the Battle for History
Yale University Press, 2009
176 pages
£10.99
ISBN 978-0199559527

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When American journalist Susan Jacoby told her 86-year-old mother that she planned to write a book on “changing perceptions of the Hiss case”, her mother shot back an e-mail asking, “Who cares about that anymore?” For the younger Jacoby, the answer is axiomatic: everyone. Forty-nine years after a US federal court convicted Alger Hiss of perjury, Jacoby claims that the case still “strikes chords located along ideological fault lines”. If Jacoby had written those words a decade ago, they might have rung true. But Jacoby’s mother—who is impressively quick with the keyboard for an octogenarian—has her fingers more firmly on the pulse of America circa 2009.

After Hiss died in 1996, his ghost lingered for several years. According to search statistics from the Lexis-Nexis database, US newspapers mentioned Hiss’s name in 274 articles in 1997, and Hiss references reached a post-Cold War peak of 350 in 1999. At that point, it might have made sense to ask (as Jacoby’s book does): “Why…does the Alger Hiss case still matter in such vastly changed geopolitical circumstances?” But since the turn of the millennium, Hiss has fallen into obscurity. In 2008, US newspapers made reference to Hiss on only 72 occasions. Perhaps the pertinent question is: why has the Hiss case ceased to matter to the vast majority of Americans?

For readers unfamiliar with “Hiss-teria”, the facts of the case are as follows: Harvard-educated Alger Hiss was a clerk to Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes; he was a Roosevelt administration official during the New Deal years; he was the secretary-general of the United Nations organising conference in 1945; and he was the president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace until 1949. He was also a Soviet spy.

Jacoby waffles on this last point: she says she is “98 or 99 percent convinced of Hiss’s guilt”, but she never explains why her certainty is less than complete. A few remaining defenders of Hiss insist that no single “smoking gun” has been found, but the evidence against Hiss amounts to an entire smoking arsenal. In 1948, a confessed Soviet agent named Whittaker Chambers turned over a cache of transcribed, top-secret State Department cables—some handwritten, others typed—to US House investigators. Forensics experts hired by Hiss acknowledged that the handwriting matched Hiss’s and that the typed transcriptions came from Hiss’s own Woodstock typewriter, serial number N230099.

Chambers claimed that Hiss provided material support—cash, a car, lodging—to underground American communists. Bank statements, automobile registrations, and real estate records supported Chambers’s charges. Hiss had the best defense attorneys money could buy—actually, better than money could buy, because top lawyers agreed to work for him pro bono. Two sitting Supreme Court justices, the governor of Illinois, and one former Democratic presidential nominee all agreed to testify as character witnesses on Hiss’s behalf. After two trials, which the generally liberal New York Times editorial board described as “full and fair”, Hiss was convicted by a jury of his peers. He served 44 months in a federal penitentiary, where by all accounts he was well-treated.

Memories of the case might have faded if not for a pair of post-trial events. First, two weeks after Hiss’s sentencing, Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy charged that communist agents had infiltrated the US State Department; the fact that Hiss had served at the department for nine years lent prima facie credibility to McCarthy’s claims. Then, two decades after the Hiss scandal surfaced, Richard Nixon was elected to the presidency. As a young congressman, Nixon had played an important role in bringing Hiss to justice. Nixon haters embraced Hiss as the enemy of their enemy—and thus, as their friend.

Jacoby argues that the Hiss case was—chronologically and symbolically—“the beginning of the McCarthy era”. More accurately, it was the end of the pre-McCarthy era. Senator McCarthy had no personal involvement in the prosecution of Hiss. From the vantage point of the 21st century, what is striking about the Hiss trial is not that the prosecution engaged in shameless red-baiting (it did not), but that Hiss’s defense team engaged in shameless gay-baiting. Unable to discredit Chambers based on the facts of the case, Hiss’s lawyers (with the defendant’s encouragement) sought to smear Chambers based on the fact that he was bisexual. Fortunately, the jurors in the Hiss case were not as horrifyingly homophobic as Hiss and his attorneys. In retrospect, if either side of the trial engaged in egregious behaviour, it was the defense—not the prosecution.

But for Jacoby—as for Hiss and his lawyers—the facts of the case take on secondary importance. “It is not my intention, in this slim volume, to reexamine or reevaluate the actual evidence in the Hiss case”, she writes. “Furthermore, my own view that Hiss lied is based less on the vast body of old and new evidence…than on Hiss’s own elliptical and emotionally unconvincing memoirs.” These sentences are disturbing in their own right: can anyone be “98 or 99 percent” certain of a defendant’s guilt because the defendant’s statements are “emotionally unconvincing”? I, for one, propose that Susan Jacoby be barred from ever serving on a jury.

Whether or not wishy-washiness on the Hiss case ought to be a disqualification for jury duty, it apparently is a disqualification for higher office in the US. In November 1996, Democratic diplomat Anthony Lake told NBC’s “Meet the Press” that evidence of Hiss’s guilt was not “conclusive”. The following year, when President Clinton nominated Lake to be director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Republican senators suggested that a Hiss apologist was unfit to serve as the nation’s chief spy. Ultimately, Lake withdrew his name from consideration.

What motivated the Democratic defenders of Hiss, and why did they engage in this strange form of self-immolation? In part, the answer lies in the fact that if Hiss was guilty, then Richard Nixon was—at least on this point—correct. For Nixon foes such as Lake (who left the Nixon administration in protest in 1970) and former Senator George McGovern (who lost to Nixon in the presidential election of 1972 and continues to challenge Hiss’s conviction), that concession is a step too far.

But for a younger generation of American liberals (this reviewer included), Nixon was a tragic figure rather than an out-and-out evil one. He did more to protect the environment than any president previous or subsequent. Other Nixonian initiatives included the Earned Income Tax Credit, which Clinton ultimately embraced, and affirmative action, which has been a central plank of the Democratic Party platform ever since. Moreover, by engaging the USSR and China in direct dialogue, Nixon arguably did more to stabilize the Cold War world than any other single figure.

Yes, he was a criminal, and a war criminal to boot, but younger American liberals admit that Nixon was right on the environment, right on anti-poverty issues, and right on détente. From there, it is only a small step to say that he was right on Alger Hiss as well.

Today, the Hiss case does not, as Jacoby claims, “strike chords located along ideological fault lines”. To the contrary, the Hiss case is one issue upon which consensus transcends ideological divides. With the election of Barack Obama, the torch has been passed to a new generation of American liberals—post-Baby Boomers who remember Richard Nixon as a historical figure rather than a real-life foe and who are perfectly willing to admit Hiss’s guilt. The Battle for History thus appears at the precise moment that its subject has lost his place in the progressive pantheon. To its credit, this book is a lively read. But it is not a timely one.

Susan Jacoby is a talented writer, though one might wish she were a more obedient daughter. As far as the Alger Hiss case goes, her mother was the wiser. Unfortunately, Jacoby has chosen to channel her talents into a monograph at precisely the time that her subject slipped to the status of historical footnote.

Daniel Hemel is an MPhil student in International Relations at New College, Oxford. He is a senior editor of the Oxonian Review.

Peter Chelsom
Hannah Montana: The Movie
Walt Disney Pictures, 2009
102 minutes

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If you stop to discuss pop culture with a six-year-old girl, you quickly discover that Hannah Montana isn’t so much a television show as it is a cultural phenomenon. Since its debut in 2006, Hannah Montana has rapidly become the top programme on cable television for viewers aged 6 to 14, raking in millions in profits, spawning CDs, films, clothing, toys, makeup, bedding, video games, and a sold-out concert tour, and almost single-handedly revitalizing Disney’s programming for teens.

Like any cultural phenomenon, Hannah Montana is not ideologically neutral. The show is a thinly veiled programme à clef about work-life balance and self-fulfillment that depicts the difficulties of having it all to a young, impressionable, and overwhelmingly female audience. Miley Stewart (Miley Cyrus) dons a blond wig that makes her apparently unrecognizable, allowing her to moonlight as pop sensation Hannah Montana. With the guidance of her father and manager, Robby Ray Stewart (Billy Ray Cyrus), Miley becomes a global icon without compromising a normal teenage life where she worries about boys, friends, family, and popularity. The show puts a Disney spin on the tension between work and relationships that women have been expected to navigate for decades. And unlike young men on the Disney Channel, whose dilemmas usually involve get-rich-quick schemes or the pursuit of fame and fortune, Miley inevitably learns in the end that it’s more satisfying to be a friend, a sister, or a daughter than it is to be a superstar.

With the release of the much-anticipated Hannah Montana: The Movie, the show’s core moral ambivalence about balancing work with relationships, individuality with conformity, and exceptionality with the expectations of others comes to a resolution that never quite occurs on the show. The franchise is premised on the double life of a superstar who’s really just like us, and that premise only works insofar as Miley can successfully balance fame and the demands of friends and family. Arriving after two television seasons of Hannah Montana, the film finally sends a clear message that such a balance is, in fact, unsustainable. Miley dutifully grapples with the predictable difficulties of being two people at once—but this time, the schizophrenia of her daily existence begins to wear her down and the double life ultimately falls apart.

The difficulty of balancing two worlds is nothing new to filmgoers. Recent blockbusters like The Dark Knight, Spider-Man, and the upcoming Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince all depict the struggles of heroes who must balance being exceptional with being human. In that respect, Miley’s wig isn’t all that different from a superhero’s mask. But feminists holding out for a heroine who saves the day and gets what she wants are likely to be disappointed. While these blockbusters depict troubled men saving their worlds, Hannah Montana: The Movie depicts a woman who can’t manage the schizophrenia of her own.

The film is premised on the idea that Miley’s double life is unsustainable, as Robby Ray yanks Miley out of California and drags her to the family compound in Crowley’s Corners, Tennessee after sensing that she is becoming too comfortable with her fame. (The litmus test is that one feels entitled to tackle Tyra Banks for a pair of shoes.) Having learned nothing from 60 years of sitcoms, Miley runs a predictable gamut of mistaken identities, double-booked dinner engagements, and rapid-fire costume changes. The duplicity strains her already fraught relationship with Robby Ray and ruins her budding relationship with a corn-fed farmhand, which, in turn, triggers an existential crisis and the decision that she must cut Hannah loose. At the climactic benefit to save Crowley’s Corners, Hannah breaks down on stage and pulls off her wig, revealing herself to be ol’ Miley Stewart, the country girl who always did like to sing.

Here, I may have gasped aloud and startled the preschooler sitting next to me. In its first two seasons, Hannah Montana consistently resolves the tension between work and relationships in favor of relationships—but those episodic resolutions never undermine Miley’s determination to try to have it all. In Hannah Montana: The Movie, Miley decides for the first time that she’s prepared to sacrifice Hannah for her father and her potential boyfriend. Like Abraham’s thwarted sacrifice of Issac, the self-immolation of Hannah Montana is prevented by a kind of deus ex familia. The thousand-strong crowd of residents from Crowley’s Corners insists that the world needs Hannah Montana and vows to keep Miley’s secret with the kind of discipline that one might find in Stepford or Castle Rock.

By the end of the film, it is unclear whether Miley actually wants to bear the burden of being Hannah Montana at all. When Miley reluctantly puts her wig back on to comply with the town’s demands, the choice is no more her own than when her father and would-be boyfriend spur her to peel it off in the first place. As the film goes on, Miley seems less and less like the spunky, self-possessed heroine of the show and increasingly like a peer-pressured teenager, frantically trying to please her family, friends, and peers—not to mention her publicist, the media, and legions of screaming fans.

If anything makes the film seem sappy instead of insidiously anti-feminist, it is that everyone is prepared to make sacrifices for the sake of others. Unlike the show, Miley is not the only one who sacrifices ambition, passion, or individuality to preserve relationships. When a paparazzo has the chance to expose Hannah’s identity, he opts to denounce his boss and quit his job instead of shattering the illusion for his teenage daughters. Miley’s best friend forgives her for ruining her birthday and rushes to rural Tennessee to be at her side, and the whole town pitches in to save Crowley’s Corners from a developer. Most of all, Robby Ray breaks off a promising romance to devote his attention to Miley’s teen angst, and Miley responds by giving up the one thing—Hannah Montana—that is causing them both grief and ultimately coming between them.

Miley ends up keeping Hannah, reconciling with her father, and landing a boyfriend, but only by learning that careers are secondary to relationships, individuality is secondary to conformity, and exceptionalism is secondary to the expectations of the community. Apart from any resolution, the film makes it abundantly clear that family comes first, that rural Tennessee is more authentic than Rodeo Drive, and that even a superstar must work to be a good daughter, friend, and girlfriend. Hannah Montana: The Movie could simply be a morality tale about growing up and taking responsibility for one’s actions and their effects on others, except that it stands in such stark contrast to films marketed to young men. While young men are offered a Batman who loses the woman he loves to save Gotham City, young women are offered a starlet who gives up what she loves—and what makes her exceptional—to mend fences with her father and would-be boyfriend.

Part of Hannah Montana’s appeal as a television show is the empowering idea that one can really have it all. But the way that Miley learns her lesson in Hannah Montana: The Movie should give feminists pause. Its relentless emphasis on relationships and family makes Hannah Montana: The Movie a fairly standard Disney film—but to the extent that the target audience for this message contains thousands upon thousands of captive young girls, it seems especially retrograde to tell viewers to squelch their talents to meet the expectations of others. And in doing so, it transforms the TV series’ message of independence and possibility into something disappointingly domesticating.

Ryan Thoreson is reading for an MPhil in Social Anthropology at Hertford College, Oxford. He is a contributing editor of the Oxonian Review.

Margaret MacMillan
The Uses and Abuses of History
Profile Books, 2009
194 pages
£11.99
ISBN 978-1846682049

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Historical narratives are duplicitous. Behind the mask of apparent “truth”, our accounts of the past conceal subtle value judgments, beliefs about human decision-making and implicit claims about national and group identity. Marxists reveal the determinacy of class structures, intellectual historians show a world transformed by ideas, and social historians strive to show that race, gender, and sexuality are not fixed categories. Whether one realizes it or not, every historical account is an argument about how we see our world.

As Margaret MacMillan demonstrates in The Uses and Abuses of History, the power of historical narrative is often employed for nefarious ends. Initially inspired by George W. Bush’s manifest ignorance of the Iraqi past, MacMillan moves beyond a mere attack on American stupidity (terrain covered by Al Gore and Susan Jacoby) to an international assault on the misuse of history. Trotting the globe in 194 pages, she indicts political leaders, media elites, and popular opinion at the bar of historical judgment. MacMillan also critiques the public’s willingness to accept flawed historical accounts, especially where they carry overdetermined “lessons” for the future.

Building from these concerns, MacMillan argues that knowledge of the past “in all its richness and complexity” can do extraordinary good. Where one-sided, moralistic, and factually inaccurate histories entail a Pandora’s Box of harms (jingoism, ethnic conflict, and human rights abuses top the list), textured histories can equip a citizenry to challenge facile generalizations, resist totalizing ideologies, and comprehend current events. Inconvenient to autocrats and ideologues, a proper understanding of history encourages humility, respect for differences, and wariness about simple “lessons”.

For MacMillan, the ministers of this remedy will not be non-academic amateurs, but professionally trained scholars. This faith in the academy motivates a scathing critique of cultural history: MacMillan asserts that professors—who should be concerned with changing public discourse—have a self-indulgent preoccupation with “imagining”, “constructing”, and “contesting”. In short, cultural historians have forgotten that their “training is worth something”. This “fascination with ourselves”, she said at a recent conference, has the “dangerous tendency” of divorcing historians from the public that pays their salaries. Accordingly, the time has come for historians to do something about the abuse of their special domain.

While MacMillan’s account of the misuses of history overflows with fascinating examples, this diagnosis unduly blames academics for the status quo and unimaginatively suggests that only professionals can rescue the world’s politics and people.

Amateurs are not the agents of ignorance that Macmillan presents them to be. Works authored by non-professors have sold well in Western publics for a long time, frequently landing atop best-sellers lists. There are also good reasons to take non-professionals’ impact on public discourse seriously. Taylor Branch’s definitive history of the American Civil Rights Movement, Robert Caro’s meticulously researched biography of Lyndon B. Johnson, and A.N. Wilson’s acclaimed Victorians suggest that one need not occupy a chaired professorship to write phenomenal history. As Tom Holland noted in The Observer, it seems far-fetched to insist that “history is so potentially lethal in its effects that only academic specialists can be trusted to handle it.”

Moreover, the success of books by professional historians Eric Foner, Drew Gilpin Faust, and Simon Schama belies MacMillan’s image of a disengaged, battle-weary profession. These accusations are not new. In the late 19th century, the establishment of a formal historical discipline pitted newly minted professionals against popularizers, historical societies, and literary gentlemen in a contest for intellectual authority. Professors successfully carved out a niche for themselves, but their capacity to control and elevate historical consciousness remained in question. In 1884, the president of the American Historical Association worried that “never was this want of broad historical views in leaders of American opinion more keenly felt than now.” Angst about “relevance” has an equally long life, flaring up periodically as part of historians’ disciplinary self-consciousness.

MacMillan is right that historians receive less public deference than their colleagues in the natural sciences. As recent controversies over Japanese, Chinese, and American history textbooks illustrate, she’s also right that many governments prefer impoverished, nationalist histories aimed at sculpting good citizens to critical accounts of the past. Here, MacMillan has pinpointed a serious problem. But her diagnosis of the cause, the abdication of professional responsibility, misses the point. Ultimately, the abuses she explores spring from more—and more complex—sources than a “linguistic turn” amongst professionals. Rather, we must look to the institutions and individuals— schools, political and religious leaders, family members, the media, and popular literature—that more significantly shape critical and factual understanding of the past.

In the end, MacMillan’s critique is more interesting for the questions it raises than the answers it provides. Perhaps most importantly, The Uses and Abuses of History pushes us to explore the extent to which professional historians are obligated to act in the public domain. Of course, a professional historian’s influence on public discourse is limited—it is hard to imagine massed ranks of historians marching forth in academic regalia, bearing primary sources for shot and shell, to battle misstatements by Chinese, Turkish, and American leaders about Tibetans, Armenians, and Native Americans. Heads of state are not students, subject to examination viva voce, and victims of history do not attain absolution in ivy-encrusted lecture halls.

Beyond these limitations, there remains a complicated question about whether academics have a professional duty to change public beliefs. It is fine, perhaps even commendable, for historians to act as public intellectuals and speak truth to power. But this may be a step beyond the limits of their professional calling. After all, historians are scholars, not politicians. It is not cowardice for them to focus on research and pedagogy, which have a subtler but no less important potential for social change.

What MacMillan really wants is a smarter, nuanced, and better-informed public. Books like hers are one step in that direction, but a proper solution requires that we ask how families, leaders, and culture shape our understanding of history. Dismissing amateurs is not only implausible; it is also unfair to the many people who turn to history with questions outside the traditional scope of the academy.

Ultimately, MacMillan would be well served to remember that the real, extraordinary, and surprisingly quotidian power of professional historians is concentrated most forcefully in the classroom. There, while shaping the present and imagining the future, historians and their students most fully explore—in all its magnificent diversity and humbling complexity—the past that belongs to us all.

Joshua Matz is reading for an MSt in American Studies at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He is an associate history editor of the Oxonian Review.

Anne Carson
An Oresteia
Faber & Faber, 2009
272 pages
£18.00
ISBN 978-0865479029

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Aeschylus’s Oresteia begins in a world full of madness and ignorance, and ends in the enlightened Athenian democracy. Performed on a single day at the festival of Dionysus in 458 BC, its three plays form the only extant trilogy of Greek drama (Sophocles’s three Theban plays were written separately). The Oresteia chronicles the cursed House of Atreus through a succession of bloody actions and reactions, concluded finally by divine intervention. Its three plays teach the lesson, spoken by the chorus of elders in the Agamemnon, that “by suffering we learn;” amidst some of the most profound darkness ever staged, Aeschylus shows us the light of justice.

Anne Carson is not interested in justice. An Oresteia brings together plays of three Greek dramatists—Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides—to create an alternative trilogy to the Aeschylean one. Where Aeschylus (or as Carson spells the name, Aiskhylos) uses the trilogy form to trace a path from guilt to redemption, Carson uses it to pile wrong upon wrong. In place of Aeschylus’s concern for civic morality, Carson concentrates on individual psychology and the mind in extreme states. This very modern take on ancient tragedy leads her to push every element of language to its breaking point: the diction of her renderings, her frequent and apparently unmotivated line breaks, even her spellings of ancient Greek names all seem calculated to make the texts strange, abyssal, even schizophrenic.

She begins with the Agamemnon, the first and darkest play of Aeschylus’s trilogy, depicting the return of the titular king from the Trojan War and his subsequent murder by his wife and the lover she has taken in his absence. The next play, the Elektra of Sophocles, treats the same subject as Aeschylus’s Libation Bearers. Orestes, the son of the house, returns from exile, reunites with his sister Elektra, and takes revenge for their father’s murder. But Sophocles’s play is written in a far bleaker tone than Aeschylus’s. Elektra’s Elektra does not suffer decorously. Powerless in a house of murderers, “there is only one thing she can do”, Carson writes, “make noise.”

Most discomforting is the third play, Euripides’s Orestes, a late work of the last great Athenian playwright. Like the Eumenides, the final play of Aeschylus’s trilogy, it considers the consequences of Orestes’s and Elektra’s revenge. In Euripides’s text, though, they are judged, not in Aeschylus’s divinely sanctioned courtroom, but by a hostile, self-interested assembly. Orestes and Elektra, condemned to death and on the brink of madness, turn murderous themselves, and are only held back from senseless slaughter by a deus ex machina that, improbably, resolves the play’s tensions. The unexpected reconciliation only makes the work more incomprehensible—pushing it, Carson suggests, toward comedy. “I wonder”, she muses, “if Euripides saw the very texture of reality as ironic.” There may be irony, but there is no justice at the end of An Oresteia.

Carson’s biographical note tells us, somewhat disingenuously, that “she teaches Ancient Greek for a living.” Though this is true (she is appointed in the classics, comparative literature, and English departments at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor), she is better known as a poet and translator, one of today’s most powerful voices for the classics. In addition to numerous volumes of poems and essays, many on classical themes, she has already brought out a collection of Euripides entitled Grief Lessons (2006), as well as a highly regarded translation of Sappho fragments, If Not, Winter (2002). Carson is attracted to the borderline between sense and nonsense—her Sappho translations feature extensive empty spaces and brackets representing lost lines—and each of the plays making up An Oresteia offers characters who seem to live in that space.

Thrust into situations awful beyond enduring, Elektra and Orestes cannot but become monsters. Euripides’s Orestes, Carson writes, “is a peculiar customer–not exactly insane but strange and unknowable”, and her translation portrays his stormy emotions and crazed hallucinations with harrowing intensity. Likewise, Carson’s translation of the role of Elektra in Sophocles’s play brings out the vehement language of her despair, transliterating her many cries directly from the Greek. Here, she responds to false news of Orestes’s death, a sadistic trick played by brother on sister (beginning with a cry that would normally be translated “oh, I am wretched”):

OI’GO TALAINA
My death begins now.

The transliterated Greek effectively breaks down any sense that we are reading (or, better, watching) a conventional character experiencing a conventional grief. For Carson, tragedy is about the individual’s confrontation with an incomprehensible chaos. All we can do, faced with such a world, is make noise.

The test of Carson’s Oresteia, though, must be the Agamemnon. First, because it is the only one of these translations that has not appeared previously (Elektra and Orestes were commissioned years apart, and for unrelated occasions), and thus should be the book’s raison d’être; and second, because Aeschylus’s profound exploration of right and wrong seems the least congenial to Carson’s psychological approach. The play demands that she treat themes outside of her comfort zone, enlarging her canvas from the individual to society as a whole.

Unsurprisingly, Carson’s sympathy lies with the Trojan captive Kassandra, brought by Agamemnon as his consort and murdered alongside him. Kassandra’s gift is the ability to see the future; her curse, never to be believed. In an extraordinary interchange with the chorus, she foretells, in broken Greek, the slaughter about to take place. “Aiskhylos”, Carson writes, “sets her in the middle of his play as a difference you cannot grasp, a glass that does not give back the image placed before it.” Carson successfully conveys the vividness and foreignness of Kassandra’s words, mingling screams, nonsense cries, and untranslated Greek in a syntax that borders on the incomprehensible:

But yes think oh think of the clear nightingale―
    gods put round her a wing
        a life with no sting
             but for me waits
             schismos
             of the double-edged sword: schismos means
             a cleaving a cutting a slipping a chopping in two

Carson’s translation is jarringly alien, itself a kind of “difference you cannot grasp”. Why does she not translate and then translate schismos? What is going on with her line breaks and spacing? She is effective at conveying the idiosyncrasies of Aeschylus’s language, his unusual compound words (“dreamvisible”) and inscrutable turns of phrase (“ox on my tongue”).

Yet Carson’s de-familiarizing translation practice means that her range of tones is quite limited where Aeschylus’s is astonishingly wide, extending from the bored watchman of the prologue to the riddling chorus of the opening odes to the brutal strength of Klytaimestra in the final scene. To stay with Kassandra, though, Carson fails to do justice to the universal force of the character’s parting words, as distilled a statement of the essence of tragedy as ever was written:

But you,
             O humans,
                                         O human things―
when a man is happy, a shadow could overturn it.
When life goes wrong, a wet sponge erases the whole picture.
You,
             you,
                       I pity.

This passage deserves better: “things” is far vaguer than the Greek “pragmata” (affairs, deeds); “when a man is happy” and “when life goes wrong” are clunky and bland; and to what does “it” refer (grammatically and logically, the happy man is the object)? Most importantly, Carson insists on the speech being addressed to “you”, where Aeschylus’s apostrophe is more general (the lines, and Kassandra’s pity, are addressed to the “human affairs”). This makes the speech sound vindictive, as if Kassandra were excluding herself from the pity. But the point is precisely the opposite: Kassandra faces her death and we must face our own; we share the same fate.

Carson seeks psychological complexity at the expense of philosophical clarity, giving short shrift to Aeschylus’s search for order in chaos. Her translation of the chorus’s high-flown rhetoric is notably flat; she has little use for talk of divine justice. Yet Aeschylus’s cosmic concern distinguishes him from the other tragedians and makes the Agamemnon so powerful and thought provoking. In An Oresteia, Carson fashions Aeschylus in her own image: psychological, skeptical, willfully estranging. But this does not give us Aeschylus at his best, or Carson at hers.

Joshua Billings is reading for the DPhil in Classics at Merton College, Oxford. He is a senior editor of the Oxonian Review.

Since graduating from Keble College, Oxford in 1953 Geoffrey Hill has pursued a joint career as academic and poet. From 1988 until retirement in 2006 he taught at Boston University, where he co-founded the Editorial Institute with fellow academic and Oxford’s current Professor of Poetry, Christopher Ricks. Hill’s academic interests are unusually wide-ranging; his recent Collected Critical Writings (OUP, 2008) contains essays across a wide spectrum of poets, critics, theologians, and philosophers from the Reformation to the late 20th century.

His first publication was a pamphlet in the now-celebrated Fantasy Poets series, a joint-venture of the Eynsham-based artist Oscar Mellor and the Oxford University Poetry Society; this appeared at the beginning of his third undergraduate year at Keble, and, like other pamphlets in the series (which included Adrienne Rich and George Steiner), is now a “collector’s item”. Since that time he has published 12 individual books of poetry. A Selected Poems appeared from Penguin in 2006; a Collected Poems is scheduled for 2012. Hill is an honorary fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge (where he taught from 1980 until 1988) and of Keble College, Oxford. He is also a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has honorary doctorates from Leeds and Warwick.

What follows is an edited version of an interview given at Keble on the morning of 27 February. On the previous evening he had addressed the Lord Herbert of Cherbury Society at Jesus College on the theme “Strongholds of the Imagination”.

As a poet and as an academic, what do you think the poet’s place should be within the institution of the university?

I don’t have much faith in creative writing courses such as the Master of Fine Arts programmes so prevalent in the States and increasingly active in the UK. I believe that poets should be self-taught, based on an intensive programme of preferably serendipitous reading. I exempt the Oxford Chair of Poetry and the Christopher Tower Chair at Christ Church; these are currently in very good hands and the emphasis on traditional teaching methods is probably firm. Auden used to hold informal sessions, for those who cared to attend, in a coffee shop in the Broad; that also I find entirely acceptable. I’m sorry to say that among early practitioners of creative writing degree classes in the States were people I greatly respect, such as the poet Allen Tate and the novelist Caroline Gordon. But at the time they were struggling to live by their wits, and were probably at their wit’s end.

Have you ever taught creative writing?

Once only; that was 50 years ago in the States. To teach creative writing well requires a particular kind of self-confidence which I didn’t possess. Looking back over so many years I feel more sorry for the students than for myself. It must have been a dismal experience for them also.

What is the public role of the poet? Are they historians or journalists?

Not quite in the sense that I think you intend. Obviously the poet’s public role is to be first and foremost a poet. But it is not ‘philosophically’ wrong for a poet to be deeply, or heavily, involved with journalism and/or politics; it all turns on the matter of intrinsic quality. The public role of the poem is to be a stronghold of the imagination. I wish in a way that I hadn’t read English at Oxford even though I obtained a first, which I doubt I would have done if I’d read any other school (well, history maybe). If I’d read PPE [Philosophy, Politics, and Economics], in which no doubt I’d have got a lower second or a third, I could have taught myself the necessary contexts for writing English poetry (I virtually did so, anyway).

How do you envisage your own poetry’s readership?

Impossible to say. When I see my half-yearly royalties statements I seem not to have a readership at all. Yet in 2006 when I gave a reading in the Sheldonian the place was packed, chiefly with young people. And at poetry readings I continually meet older people who bring for signing a copy of every book since For the Unfallen (1959). A few even have the frail 1952 Fantasy pamphlet. There are obviously devoted readers, but it’s all rather subterranean, a bit like wartime resistance. When you ask about “public role” you have to take into account this aspect also.

You have said that you admire poetry which creates “strongholds of the imagination” and that is why you tend to write “strong poetry”. Was this the type of writing you had in mind when you first began composing poetry?

No. I became a poet because at the age of ten or thereabouts (and long before concepts like “strong poetry” would have had any meaning) I fell in love with English poetry. I was brought up in a Worcestershire village where my father was the local bobby. I sang in the church choir and attended Sunday school. And that year my good attendance prize was Palgrave’s Golden Treasury of English Poetry, a Victorian bestseller. I might be impatient, even scornful now of some of its preferences, but to a boy of ten, it was a revelation and an initiation. From then until now there has been no escape. What I say latterly about strong poetry and semantics and the choice that poetry has, either to resist the pressures of the age or be imploded by them, these are my variants of Auden’s “dyer’s hand”; but the first reaction was total unjudgemental love. I should add that at Bromsgrove High School I had, as early even as the second form, a marvellous English teacher, Anne Gledhill, who was showing us Auden’s Look Stranger! poems.

Do you intend to reinvent your writing persona with every new collection?

Anyone reading through my Selected Poems might very well get that impression. The change in style between Mercian Hymns (1971) and Tenebrae (1978) was severe and intentional: from loping prose-poems to reined-back exercises in traditional forms, in particular the English versions of the Della Casan Sonnet (see F.T. Prince’s splendid The Italian Element in Milton’s Verse, 1954). I wrote The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy in rhetorical quatrains modelled on Péguy’s own. Poets who had liked Mercian Hymns—and I was surprisingly popular for a brief while—hated Tenebrae and The Mystery. I have to admit that, in changing about, I’m setting myself formal problems in order to see whether I can solve them, carry them through, to my own satisfaction (which can be pretty demanding). I think that people who in some odd way respect me bear with me; and that those who, for understandable reasons, don’t, don’t.

Is there any kind of unity across your work?

If there is unity it probably resides in a sense of gratitude to past, partly erased, national and international human intelligence and in my desire to celebrate it formally. I’m an in memoriam poet; have been since my earliest days, the days of the Fantasy Pamphlet in 1952. In the English 17th century I admire equally Hobbes and his great opponent Clarendon (and have written critical essays on both). I have learned much of value from a Catholic (Péguy) and a Confucian (Pound). Salman Rushdie says somewhere—I hope my memory serves—that he has always believed that literature should conduct an argument with the world. I’m drawn to writers who seem to me to be brave, beleaguered, and cheerful—like John Dryden.

What motivated you to write your most recent collection A Treatise of Civil Power?

The initial impulse to put together a book may be trivial. In the case of A Treatise I wanted a work that would resemble in appearance a pamphlet by John Milton: the likeness is evident only in the original Clutag Press edition; later printings by Penguin and Yale have lost it. I have summoned the presiding genius of Milton several times: he features in Canaan (1996), in The Triumph of Love (1998), and of course in Scenes From Comus (2005). I greatly admire his political sonnets. I believe that, were he alive now, he would be the people’s champion against plutocratic anarchy.

Until very recently I thought that I had invented the term plutocratic anarchy, but it appears to have originated with William Morris. A few days ago I happened upon the text of a lecture delivered at University College, Oxford in 1883 (“John Ruskin in the Chair”). Morris’s term, to be precise, is “anarchical Plutocracy”.

Anarchical Plutocracy destroys memory and dissipates attention; it is the enemy of everything that is summoned before us in Bishop Butler’s great pronouncement of 1729; “Everything is what it is, and not another thing”. Bad poetry, bad art, also dissipate the sense of things at once exactly and numinously understood. Great poetry is an act of unfailing attention; its frequently cited “music” must so be understood.

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“You spread our Free Range Duck/Breasts with your trade-mark mix/Of honey, soya, Chinese Five Spice/While I etch/A fingernail down your spine….” These words by Ruth Padel, the newly elected Oxford Professor of Poetry, lie at the centre of a controversy-in-verse: who, exactly, is spreading the Free Range Duck Breasts? According to the Times of London, it is “common knowledge” in the poetry world that Independent columnist John Walsh is the maker of the “trade-mark mix”. The Evening Standard also identifies Walsh as the devilish lover in fake Armani who appears in Padel’s The Soho Leopard. That’s the same John Walsh whose 28 April column dredged up charges that Derek Walcott, the Nobel laureate who faced off against Padel for the poetry professorship, was an “academic sexual predator”. Walsh acknowledges that Padel is an “old friend”; Padel says that she sees Walsh “once a year at parties“.

No evidence has emerged to suggest that Padel had a hand (or any other body part) in the anti-Walcott campaign—but the allegations against the great-great-granddaughter of Charles Darwin hark back to a storied classical tradition: University of Newcastle classicist Peter Jones turns to Tacitus and finds that since the time of Tiberius, “gutter crawlers [have] gained estates and high office from their efforts”.

Rough Times for Rhodies. Padel’s post at Oxford is a “high office” (past occupants have included Seamus Heaney, Auden, and Matthew Arnold) but it is hardly a rich estate: it comes with a stingy stipend of £6,901 per annum (plus £40 for travel expenses). That said, at least the occupant has access to toilet paper—which is more than can be said for another prestigious Oxford honor (the Rhodes Scholarship) circa 1955. In that year, Rhodes scholar Reynolds Price discovered that his new home, Merton College, was TP-free. The New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle review Price’s memoirs of his Oxford years, when the 22-year-old aspiring writer divided his time between traveling Europe and fending off the advances of the 47-year-old Stephen Spender. (Walcott would not be the first Oxford poetry don dogged by sexual harassment charges.)

Aside from these advances (all of which were rebuffed), Price still writes fondly of Spender. By the same token, Nicole Kelby, a former Walcott student who sued the Nobel laureate for sexual harassment in 1996, still writes fondly of her onetime teacher: in a Times of London essay, she calls him “the greatest living poet”. (In 2004, Slate.com agreed with that assessment.)

Rough Times for Romans. While Walcott blamed his Oxford opponents for “a low and degrading attempt at character assassination”, Cambridge classicist Mary Beard turns her attention to assassination of a more literal sort: a new book by TP Wiseman that choreographs Caesar’s final moments. Since these events occurred in the days before CSPAN televised the Senate, the historical record is marked by uncertainty, but one thing is for sure: “There must have been a lot of blood.” There must have been a lot of outrage as well; Wiseman shows that Caesar was widely popular; scholars who suggest otherwise are guilty of “conservative wishful thinking”.

Sarah Palin: Superhero? Speaking of “conservative wishful thinking”, Sarah Palin says that she is “excited to put [her] journalism degree to work”: the Alaska governor and failed US vice presidential candidate, who received a reporting degree from University of Idaho in 1987, has signed a book deal with HarperCollins. She won’t say what the deal is worth—although she insists that her writing won’t interfere with her governing (or her grandmothering).

While Palin tries to become a writer of a bestseller, Michelle Obama is already the subject of one: the Washington Post reports that Female Force—a comic book featuring the first lady as a superheroine—has sold out its first press run and is now on a second printing. But Palin isn’t jealous of the first lady’s magical powers: according to the Detroit News, Palin was the superhuman star of a previous Female Force instalment. Palin’s press run sold out too.

Blood Bath. Michelle Obama “is not a great beauty” but will “get better with age”, according to supermodel Iman, the wife of David Bowie. The New York Review of Books concludes that Madame de Staël (pronounced “style”) looked good at every age. The early 19th-century novelist’s network of correspondents included Byron, Gibbon, Goethe, Jefferson, and Talleyrand. We do not know how many of those intercourses were exclusively epistolary. But we do know that she got along poorly with Napoleon (whose own novel-writing attempts were less successful, as last week’s “Review of Reviews” duly noted). We also know that she would have been displeased to read Claire Harman’s new book Jane’s Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World (reviewed earlier this month in ORB by Jennifer Graham). Madame de Staël (who spent her life shuttling from capital to capital) looked down upon Austen (who spent her life shuttling from Basingstoke to Bath). De Staël went so far as to say that Austen was “vulgaire”.

Madame de Staël would not have been the only one displeased to read Harman. Professor Kathryn Sutherland of St. Ann’s College has accused her onetime student Harman of copying ideas that Sutherland set forth in a 2005 Oxford University Press book. Harman says that she gave credit where credit was due: “If [Sutherland] had read [Jane’s Fame], she would have found herself mentioned in the text, the notes, the bibliography, the acknowledgments, and the index.” Observers are hoping that these two “former friends” resolve their dispute more amicably than Colonel Brandon and John Willoughby.

One Little Peace. Speaking of amicable resolutions: Oprah Winfrey has buried the hatchet with the author of A Million Little Pieces, James Frey. In 2006, the talk show host hauled Frey in front of a national audience and forced him to admit that his ostensibly autobiographical book was a lie. Now, Vanity Fair reports that Winfrey has spoken with Frey on the telephone and offered a personal apology.