Big Boi
Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty
Mercury, 2010
£8.95
ASIN B003FGWSL0

Late last year, the music journalist Sasha Frere-Jones announced the death of hip-hop in an article for the New Yorker. He was certainly not the first to make this sort of claim. Since the end of the so-called golden age of rap (circa 1986-1992) there have been perennial grumbles about generic decline. As far back as 2006, heavyweight New York MC Nas put a marker on the trend (with what one might have thought would have been a definitive finality) by releasing a superb single/album, unambiguously titled Hip Hop Is Dead. As in every other kind of pop music, belatedness is now an unavoidable fact of rap.

Speculations about hip-hop’s historical trajectory notwithstanding, examples of individual brilliance remain fairly thick on the ground. Moreover, following its ‘death’, the genre seems to have entered a phase of neo-classical sophistication. Many of the best albums of recent years have come from older, established figures rather than breakthrough delinquents. 2008 saw the release of Q-Tip’s The Renaissance and Lil Wayne’s Tha Carter III, while 2009 was graced by Raekwon’s Only Built For Cuban Linx Pt. II and Mos Def’s magisterial comeback The Ecstatic. Now, in 2010, we can place Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty—the first solo album proper by Outkast member Big Boi—alongside these albums in a new latter-day category: the instantly canonical, mature hip-hop classic.

This is not to say that Sir Lucious is cautiously traditionalist. Far from it. The fiendish synth riffs in intro “Feel Me” might recall Chronic- and Doggystyle-era G-Funk, but this is an isolated moment of derivativeness. More typically, the album offers a sonic palette that is richly innovative without being showily iconoclastic. In Outkast, Big Boi’s achievements have frequently been overshadowed by the theatrics of his partner, André 3000, with Big Boi cast as a phlegmatic, macho antidote to André’s antic disposition. In fact, as many are aware, and as Sir Lucious underlines, Big Boi can do rarefied, orchestral rap-futurism every bit as colourfully as his flamboyant sometime-counterpart.

With a dizzying array of producers (pretty much a different one for each track), Sir Lucious skillfully navigates a course between off-the-wall weirdness and austere pop concision. Opening track “Daddy Fat Sax” combines a sweeping pentatonic melody arranged for an awesome instrumental combo—accordion, strings, vibes—with Big Boi’s aquiline, quick-fire rhyming on the subject of his extravagantly pimped Cadillac (“six woofers and gold amps”!). “Turns Me On” is a sparser, funkier showcase for the effortlessly fluid MCing, while “Be Still” features another gorgeous oriental-sounding hook sung by Janelle Monáe, a standout guest appearance in an album with a number of well-judged collaborations (although, interestingly, the André 3000-produced “You Aint No DJ” doesn’t quite come off, suitably bizarre though it may be).

True, Sir Lucious offers microcosmic evidence of wider stagnation in the stylistic evolution of rap. For all the formal variety on offer here, many of the beats seem depressingly monotonous. As with much latter-day hip-hop, the production would have benefited from more organic breaks, and less 21st-century electro artifice. There are pointless blasts of misogyny in the gratuitous (yet mercifully brief) skit sections; and the less said about soulless Jamie Foxx collaboration “Hustle Blood” the better. However, with highlights like the utterly astonishing “Shine Blockas” to balance the books, occasional misfires can be forgiven. Hip-hop’s golden age may be long behind it, but Big Boi and his Sir Lucious persona suggest that, with a continuing preponderance of cultivated, Bowie-esque mavericks operating outside of trend-based, youthful scenes, the genre as a whole will remain in rude health for a good while yet.

Alex Niven is reading for a DPhil in English Literature at St John’s College, Oxford. He is a senior editor at The Oxonian Review.

“There are no second acts in American life”, Scott Fitzgerald once wrote: surely one of the most asinine statements on record. For if America is about anything it is about repeated acts of personal re-invention. None exemplify this more than John Cheever and Raymond Carver; each of whom, in and through their troubled and ultimately triumphant lives, bore a body of work sorely underappreciated in our own time.

At first sight Cheever and Carver could not seem more different: Carver, a shambling bear of a man from the saw-mill towns of the Northwest who struggled all his life to break into the Eastern literary establishment; Cheever the neat scion of a New England family, sleek laureate of the swimming pool-plotted suburbs of Connecticut and denizen in what John Updike called “the delicious glossy space” of the New Yorker.

Look deeper, though, and a similar, very American pattern emerges. Casualties of their parents’ pursuit of the American Dream, both Carver and Cheever started out as rootless misfits driven by dreams of making it, not just in literary but material terms; both were what Saul Bellow called “self-transformers” who improvised their lives, restlessly reaching out for fame, money, and a new sense of connection and community.

“A real mama’s boy” as one acquaintance described him, scruffy and dingy, unhandy and unlucky, Raymond Carver appeared the archetypical underdog. But there was always something detached and divided about him: he was both victim and observer of his own defeats. Throughout his life he spoke about there being “two Rays”, and Sklenicka captures well his inherent “doubleness”. And it perhaps served him well in his ambition, formed early on out of nowhere, to be a writer. People often described his life as a battle and Carver as the war correspondent who reported it. “He could not take care of himself. That’s how he survived”, a friend once said. Carver’s chief carer turned out to be a clever, competent small-town girl called Maryann, whom he married and who worked selflessly for years to support his literary ambitions. “Partners in the getaway”, Raymond and Maryann, like many before and since, headed for California to build a new life.

The dream did not come easy. Life became—between the odd grant and scholarship—a round of dead-end jobs, endless treks between anonymous apartments in beat-up cars, kids squalling on the back-seat, and Maryann waitressing at every truck-stop to keep them on the road. Children came all too soon but not the money or the inclination to nurture them. Drink provided a solution—and then the problem. Carver drank in part to soften the edges of a hard life, in part simply to deaden his sensitivities. He descended into a spiral of alcohol, violence, and guilt, followed by more alcohol. Like his parents’, Carver’s marriage eventually did not so much break up as unravel. The family, said his daughter, simply “disbanded”.

If Carver came from the margins of American society, Cheever claimed connections with its historic roots. “Always remember you are a Cheevah“, Cheever’s father told him, and throughout his life he delighted in tracing his lineage back through various New England luminaries. In reality Cheever’s origins were nowhere near as grand as he made out. His father was a shoe salesman, who fell early victim to the Depression. Personal disintegration and marital discord followed, with Cheever at one point summoned to an amusement park in order to talk his father down from the top of the roller-coaster from which he was noisily threatening to throw himself.

Distancing himself from the family wreckage, Cheever drifted, living for a time in a New York hovel so wretched that the famous Depression-era photographer Walker Evans used it as an icon of urban squalor. Saved by a talent for turning out short stories, especially the slight, smart social vignettes that appealed to the recently launched New Yorker, Cheever successfully put together a new life, adopting a strange, strangulated British-Bostonian accent, toughening his physique by a regime of sport, swimming, and chopping logs, and eventually marrying into the wealthy Whitney family and to all appearances becoming the model husband and father. But under the surface of the successful suburban paterfamilias, all was not well. “I came from nowhere and I don’t know where I’m going”, he wrote in his private journal. But for Cheever the grimmest skeleton in his Connecticut closet was what he termed his “sexual iridescence”—his bisexuality.

Always a heavy social drinker, Cheever, like Carver, joined that heroic American band of literary drinkers and substance abusers that stretches from Mailer back through Fitzgerald and London as far as Poe. Other countries have their boozing authors but there is something epic about American literary drunks. It is as if the land’s sheer scale and the mismatch between the overarching ambitions of its writers and their social marginality creates an emptiness and terror that can only be assuaged by Ahab-like voyages on the deepest seas of drink.

Then, astonishingly and against all odds, both men embarked on final journeys of reinvention. Cheever took his last drink in 1975, Carver two years later. “All I ever wanted”, Cheever had earlier written, “was to be rich, famous and loved”, and he at last got his wishes. Despite crippling attacks of depersonalisation from his years of drinking, he finished his masterpiece, Falconer, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award in 1979. Finally honestly confronting his sexuality, he reached out, with some belated success, to his family, and became until his death in 1982 a much respected figure on the literary scene.

Carver, too, achieved at last the stability for which he had always yearned, after settling down with a new partner, the poet Tess Gallagher. “Now for the other life”, he wrote, “the one without mistakes.” Thanks to film script sales and a munificent Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters he was able to enjoy the material fruits of success, including a Mercedes, a yacht, and a big house in the country—in all of which he took enormous childish pride. More importantly, it was during this period that he wrote the bulk of his work, seeing several important collections emerge into print before his death in 1988.

The overriding theme of Carver’s stories is isolation—but an isolation shot through with unexpected, epiphanic moments of connection and inter-subjectivity. The second acts captured in his stories are brief, compressed moments of communion. There is no Whitmanesque embraced multitude, no Beat-like cosmic orgasm. Think, rather, of the sudden flare of a Zippo lighter illuminating two faces over a shared cigarette in a deserted bar or on a cold park bench. In their lonely desolation Carver’s stories are the literary equivalents of Edward Hopper’s famous picture, Night Hawks.

If Carver has been variously described—with only partial accuracy—as a minimalist or “a dirty realist”, Cheever was pigeon-holed as the New Yorker’s in-house chronicler of the American suburbs. But, as Updike wrote after Cheever’s death: “He was often labelled a writer about suburbia; but many people have written about suburbia, and only Cheever was able to make an archetypal place out of it, a terrain we can recognise within ourselves, wherever we are or have been.”

At their best Cheever’s stories provide, in Updike’s words, “a lesson in the dark gulf between outward appearance and inward condition”. Cheever—a man who repeatedly said “I can’t connect my life”—found in the suburbs and in his stories of “untidy lives lived in tidy households”—a mirror for his own conflicts. Himself the supreme self improviser, Cheever described the affluent 1950s suburbs as “an improvised way of life” with their formal-informal round of poolside rituals, private infidelities, neurotic insecurities, and constant, uncertain jockeying for status—a territory, incidentally, which has been more recently evoked in the current TV hit series Mad Men, which traces the conflicted lives of Madison Avenue admen in the early 1960s.

When Cheever died in 1982 he was at the height of his fame, widely read and loaded with honours. Since then the reputations of the two writers have, if anything, see-sawed in respect of one another. Few read Cheever today, and his stories command little academic attention; Carver’s critical standing has grown but still remains modest. Neither writer, it might be added, has ever had a significant impact in the United Kingdom. Let us hope that their legacies, like their lives, will in time enjoy their own triumphant—and deserved—second act.

Peter Snow read English at University College, Oxford and is currently a freelance writer living in Oxford.

Ian McEwan
Solar
Jonathan Cape Ltd 2010
304 Pages
£18.99
ISBN 978-0224090490

…

…

In 2005, Ian McEwan and 19 other north London luminaries including Anthony Gormley, Rachel Whiteread, and Siobhan Davies were invited on the first Cape Farewell expedition to Spitzbergen. As part of a project formulated by the photographer David Buckland, they spent a few days on a boat frozen in the arctic ice, experiencing the effects of climate change first-hand in order to generate a cultural response to the problem. McEwan’s 12th novel, Solar, is one such response. It is one unlikely to be wholeheartedly endorsed by Buckland; Solar is damning in its assessment of the degree to which the arts can ever hope to influence environmental policy. Unfortunately, McEwan’s heavy-handed attempt at satirising the issue is equally ineffectual.

Split into three parts spanning the first decade of the 21st century, Solar orbits around the expansive Michael Beard, the latest and least sympathetic in a long line of self-regarding scientists that populate McEwan’s novels. He is a “bald, short, fat and clever” theoretical physicist whose enormous appetite becomes a relentless metaphor for humanity’s consumption. Armed with the rhetoric of Richard Dawkins and the body of Michael Moore, Professor Beard is also an unlikely Lothario, with a Nobel Prize and five marriages behind him. Since the “magic moment” of his breakthrough, he has rested on his Nobel laurels, chairing countless research groups and tweaking “colossal sums out of ignorant ministers and bureaucrats for one more particle accelerator or rented instrument space on a new satellite”. Science, like the arts, needs patronage, and the National Centre for Renewable Energy, which Beard heads at the outset of the novel, is presented as little more than an expensive way of appeasing (and profiting from) the wider public. A new fence for the Centre cost 17% of its annual budget, and the brilliant post-docs who flock there to bask under Beard’s leadership spend their days responding to environmental proposals from cranks ignorant of the basic laws of physics. Beard himself wallows in bureaucratic insignificance. Then he is invited to Spitzbergen.

McEwan has great fun with his version of the episode, which provides the farcical kernel of a book that sometimes tries too hard to be funny. The satire is laid on thickly as he describes “the guilty discharge of carbon dioxide from 20 return flights and snowmobile rides and 60 hot meals a day served in polar conditions”, which “would be offset by planting three thousand tress in Venezuela as soon as a site could be identified and local officials bribed”. Every kick-start of a skidoo is accompanied by “stinking black exhaust”, every night ends with comradely discussion between idealistic artists who are lampooned for their use of hazy scientific metaphors. The art they create is also shown to be preposterous: a swarthy ice sculptor called Jesus carves penguins, a choreographer organises a shuffling perambulation on the frozen sea, a sound artist rigs up microphones to capture the wailing of the arctic winds. For Beard—and, one senses, for McEwan too—these are mere “prayers” and “totem-pole dances…fashioned to deflect the course of a catastrophe”.

Beard is an even more myopic version of Joe Rose in McEwan’s Enduring Love (1997). He has little time for the arts, and as an undergraduate at Oxford successfully hoodwinked his first wife into bed by wooing her with a perfunctory reading of Milton. He concludes that the arts are a “monstrous bluff”, containing “nothing that could remotely be construed as an intellectual challenge”. The humanities are the playground of arrogant “lie-a-beds”, whereas physics offers real difficulty: “the mental equivalent of lifting very heavy weights”. The message Beard offers is straightforward: literature is for wimps, only science can save us now.

Since The Child in Time (1987), McEwan has engaged repeatedly and provocatively with the relationship between science and the arts, with what C. P. Snow termed the “two-cultures” debate, and this leitmotif is never far from the surface in Solar. Sometimes the scientific allusions are playfully subtle, as when Beard muses prophetically on his wife’s affair with a builder—“perhaps the entire entanglement was going to take an improbable course”—with a knowing nod to the peculiarities of particle physics. Elsewhere the insistent, dualist, contrapuntal treatment of science and life which so marred Saturday (2005) (in which every mental state was accompanied by a mechanical description of brain processes) can be intrusive:

Beard was not wholly sceptical about climate change. It was on his list of issues, of looming sorrows, that comprised the background to the news, and he read about it, vaguely deplored it and expected governments to meet and take action. And of course he knew that a molecule of carbon dioxide absorbed energy in the infrared range, and that humankind was putting these molecules into the atmosphere in significant quantities.

McEwan does better when such sentiments are satirised, as when the perky ponytailed postgraduate Tom Aldous (himself reminiscent of the more ominously zealous Jed Parry in Enduring Love [1997]) outlines his plan for a nano-solar revolution with a new-age flourish. “The laws of physics are so benign, so generous”, he whines, his naïve idealism a sure sign that he won’t go unpunished.

Solar is in part a satire on the solipsism of apocalyptic thinking. It’s a subject that has increasingly interested English novelists of McEwan’s generation. Martin Amis’s Einstein’s Monsters (1987) examined the “unthinkability” of nuclear holocaust, and his London Fields (1989) was filled with an undefined foreboding of something or other, which in turn recalled the “airborne toxic event” in Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985). McEwan takes a more benign view, arguing that narratives of destruction are simply a product of man’s self-regard, comfort blankets against the anxiety of insignificance:

there was an Old Testament ring to the forewarnings, an air of plague-of-boils and deluge-of-frogs, that suggested a deep and constant inclination, enacted over the centuries, to believe that one was always living at the end of days, that one’s own demise was urgently bound up with the end of the world, and therefore made more sense, or was just a little less irrelevant.

In an article for the Guardian in 2008 McEwan rehearsed similar arguments. Relying heavily on Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium (1957), McEwan noted that “we have need of a plot, a narrative to shore up our irrelevance in the flow of things”.

In Solar he does a nice job of parodying the fabulations involved in creating, and exploiting, secular narratives of apocalypse. Despite Beard’s frustration with postmodernists—who challenge the reductive claims of science and label him “hegemonic”, much to his confusion—his respect for the scientific metanarrative is as shaky as his respect for women. Indeed, in its account of the dirty tactics involved in securing funding and prestige, Solar is prescient. The brouhaha over the leaked emails from UEA’s Climate Change Unit last year could easily have been culled from its pages. By the end of the novel, potential apocalypse is for Beard mainly a moneymaking opportunity. As he says to his business partner, worried about the impact climate-change deniers might have on their potential profits, “Toby, listen. It’s a catastrophe. Relax.”

Yet as a potential catastrophe, climate change operates somewhat differently to the threat of the second coming, or of the bomb. If it occurs, it will be caused not by one madman with his finger on the button, but incrementally, as a series of miniature catastrophes. Apocalypse born of passivity is not a theme that lends itself particularly well to dramatic fictional treatment. In a writer whose real strength lies in constructing taut dénouements, the aimless accumulation of ominousness that so characterises Solar doesn’t really add up to much. The aesthetic pleasures McEwan offered in Enduring Love, Atonement (2001), and On Chesil Beach (2007) are provided by well-crafted extrapolations of misunderstanding, by following the forking paths of human lives to their terrible conclusions. The best of his novels distil these elements into perfect studies of passivity, wherein the consequences of inaction are meticulously set up and explosively played out. The passivity of humanity en masse is too big a theme for McEwan’s method, even when channelled through a single, self-regarding consciousness. Against this challenge his structure loses its unifying thread, and Solar lurches from romantic comedy to Waughian farce to campus thriller, with little cumulative effect.

Because of this, Solar does not so much climax as descend into entropy. At the end of the novel a messy conflation of the untied threads of personal and professional life assault Beard as he sits in an American diner. McEwan has tried this kind of formal tragic ending before, at the end of Amsterdam (1998), in which two old friends and rivals murder each other with poisoned chalices, like they would in a bad Elizabethan drama. But the unravelling of Beard’s world is too delayed, too lethargically played out over the final section of the book, to hold our interest. As Solar concludes only one question remains: when will it all end?

Jon Day is reading for a DPhil in English at St John’s College, Oxford.

Graham Foust
A Mouth in California
Flood Editions, 2009
96 Pages
£10.36
ISBN 978-0981952017

There’s an interesting study waiting to be written on the abuse of catchphrases and commonplaces in contemporary poetry; so many poets have wrung great lines out of them. In the following passage from J.H. Prynne’s early masterpiece, “Sketch for a Financial Theory of the Self,” for instance, we find the spirit of self-help advice torqued into something cuttingly beautiful:

We give the name of
our selves to our needs.
We want what we are.

Here, we encounter a poetic logic not dissimilar from that which governs many of the best poems in Graham Foust’s (b. 1970) fourth collection, A Mouth in California. It is a logic that loves to resolve itself into canny, warped aphorisms about the tragicomedy of human desire. And in Foust’s hands, it’s also apt to resolve itself into something bleak, funny, curt, and self-effacing (the back cover of A Mouth in California refers to Foust’s “unique idiom of tragicomic pratfalls”, his “ballet of falling down”). In his “Poem with Rules and Laws”, one of a dozen poems titled “Poem with [Something],” he conducts some cliché-torquing of his own:

You don’t lust
for what you
want. You lust
for what you
can get.

“We want what we are.” “You lust for what you can get.” We want these to say “you can’t always get what you want”, but we can’t always get what we want, can we? In “Poem with Television”, Foust asks:

What part of
“What part of no
don’t you understand?”
don’t you understand…

Behind this kind of writing lies the understanding—so important for writers over the past century—that everyday speech, set slightly out of joint or context, can deliver both personal and collective revelation. Emily Dickinson called this telling the truth but telling it slant. Prynne knew it in the late 60s, and Graham Foust knows it today.

Yet Foust is no prophet or poet-philosopher, brilliant craftsman or bard. “Wordsmith” might be closer to the mark, though it’s a touch unfair. His poems hardly ever exceed two pages (not a judgment, just a fact) and have titles like “Poem with Premature Ejaculation” and “Perhaps I Have Not Mentioned That I Am Dismantling a House”. He doesn’t take himself too seriously, yet he’s a seriously good poet. Writers and former English majors will revel in their ability to tease out his references to the likes of Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Pierre Reverdy, Jack Spicer, Johnny Knoxville, O.J. Simpson, and “Home on the Range”. And best of all, Foust is subtle:

What Woke Me

Not the minor
quake but

the dissonant
taste

of a paint
chip.

Stephen Ross is reading for a DPhil in English Literature at St John’s College, Oxford. He is the executive editor at the Oxonian Review.

As a result of record companies’ continual search for something new to grab listeners’ attention, pop musicians now come in all shapes and sizes, and from every different background. Notable acts to have emerged in the last year include an Italian-American with a passion for Rilke (Lady GaGa), a Sri Lankan Tamil rapper (M.I.A.), and most famously, an ordinary middle-aged woman from West Lothian (Susan Boyle). Frequently, this diversity is a cause for celebration, as it suggests that music fans listen without prejudice. This makes all the more surprising the hostile reactions to an American band playing at this weekend’s Glastonbury: Vampire Weekend.

The group, singer Ezra Koenig, multi-instrumentalist Rostam Batmanglij, bass player Chris Baio, and drummer Chris Tomson, look conservative and inoffensive, the sort of young men who might work for Google. Like so many other bands, Vampire Weekend was formed at college, but the band’s alma mater happened to be the Columbia University in New York, part of the prestigious Ivy League. Musically, the group combines the clean and crisp guitars of the British New Wave with a sprinkling of African and Latin American sounds and instruments. The pop sensibility of the former means that the songs are catchy; the novelty of hearing the latter makes the band stand out. The group’s eponymous debut album, released in 2008, was a runaway commercial success, selling over 500,000 copies in the United States. Their sophomore effort, 2010’s Contra, reached number one in the United States and number three in the United Kingdom. However, both albums, and the band as a whole, have polarised fans and critics.

Vampire Weekend’s lyrics, which often delight in obscure etymology (”Walk to class/In front of you/Spilled kefir/On your keffiyeh”), give the first hint of why the band has proved so divisive. Their confidence of their fit within an intellectual hot-house hasn’t helped (”Raggedy wisdom falls from my hand/As the ladies of Cambridge know who I am”), nor has their description of their sound as “Upper West Side Soweto”. For Spin’s Andy Greenwald, Koenig’s willingness to cherry-pick from sounds from all over the globe is obnoxious: “He seems to possess encyclopaedic knowledge of every major era of pop music…but he speaks in a clinical, removed way, as if it were all a glorious steam table that had been laid out specifically for him to feast upon”; Pitchfork’s Ryan Schreiber sees the band as “globe-trotting sons of distinguished men clumsily exploring different cultures, despite being passively, naively invested”; while Village Voice smelt “the putrescent stench of old money, of old politics, of old-guard high society” coming from the group’s debut album.

These comments, particularly Greenwald’s, reveal that in spite of the wild popularity of shows like The X Factor and American Idol, which demonstrate how unashamedly calculated the music business can be, listeners still like musicians to be authentic, people who sing or start bands because of some pre-ordained talent or drive, those who were born to do it. To its detractors, Vampire Weekend is the polar opposite. Its members are boys with sensible college degrees who have a world of opportunity open to them, which they have rejected in favour of adventures in the crowded and cut-throat pop industry. No matter how prejudiced the view, its angry repetition by critics and listeners has revealed that music is still regarded as something that should be a destiny rather than a career option.

Furthermore, the Ivy League degrees and the (incorrect) assumption that the band hail from privileged, WASP-y backgrounds seems to have made Vampire Weekend’s interest in world music more unpalatable. Schreiber is accusing the band of an imperialistic cultural appropriation, of sucking the blood out of foreign musical styles without paying due deference. Beyond the inverse snobbery of such a comment, this is an anachronistic view. One of the consequences of our shrunken, globalised world is that we now have greater and easier access to music from each of its corners. If this flowed in only one direction, enabling the Ezra Koenigs of the United States to plunder the sounds of distant lands, Schreiber may have a point. However, cultural appropriation is practised by everybody, from the Tuareg nomads of North Africa, who have picked up the electric guitars of the West and used them to play songs about their desire for political freedom, to the aforementioned M.I.A., whose electro-rap combines sounds from at least five continents.

More relevant to Vampire Weekend is the idea of trans-cultural diffusion. It is because of its widespread appropriation that African music is having a moment in Europe and the United States, with acts, such as Amadou and Mariam, Tinariwen and Staff Benda Bilili, receiving greater attention in the media (and selling more records) as a result of their influence on a new generation of bands, typified by Vampire Weekend. After listening to African music filtered through the brains of Koenig and his peers, listeners are investigating the source material. However, Koenig himself has taken this line of argument further. Not only does he reject claims of appropriation (”the two main writers in the band are Jewish and Persian…We’re certainly not all fresh off the Mayflower”), he doesn’t feel like an agent of diffusion as much as a product of it: “We’re in a context that’s coming after instances of people actually stealing from each other.”

He has a point: the invention of the sampler, for instance, has meant that musicians can lift, steal, and appropriate from each other more easily than ever before, while the Internet allows music to be distributed further and faster. It is no longer a shock to hear two hitherto unconnected pieces of music, even those from different continents, stuck together as something new. But this fails to explain why Vampire Weekend, in particular, has proved so provocative. The reason behind it may be surprisingly simple. From the early days of Merseybeat, to punk and then rave, pop has always stretched the boundaries of taste and acceptability. Its edginess has been a critical part of its appeal to young listeners. But the music and images of these eras have since been absorbed into the canon, diminishing their power to shock. John Lydon (the Sex Pistols’ Johnny Rotten) has become a reality TV regular, while it now seems inconceivable that The Prodigy’s Keith Flint was once considered a threat to society. The perennial search for something new that has thrown up both Lady GaGa and Susan Boyle shows how diverse the musical landscape has become. However, the reception received by Vampire Weekend has shown that listeners are still uncomfortable with music as a career option. The marrying of rock with education and opportunity shows there is one taboo that still has to be broken down: there is still prejudice against preppiness in pop.

Mike Jakeman graduated in 2006 with a BA in English from Keble College, Oxford. He now works for The Economist.

Mavis Gallant
The Cost of Living: Early and Uncollected Stories
Bloomsbury Publishing, 2009
368 Pages
£20.00
ISBN 978-1408806104

…

…

There are several pitfalls to avoid when reviewing books of “early and uncollected stories”. One of them extends to any collection of short fiction, and requires that the reviewer expend as few words as possible when summarising the events of each story he means to discuss. Otherwise, you know how it can be: nothing but a succession of short stories made shorter. In this case, no summaries are required, as Mavis Gallant possesses a Chekhovian gift for opening sentences. With each story’s first paragraph, the reader is able to find his feet in a single breath. “The three Marshall children were dressed and ready for the picnic before their father was awake”; “Jane and Ernestine were at breakfast in the hotel dining room when the fog finally lifted”; “Sitting next to the driver, who was certainly his father, he saw the fine rain through the beams of the headlights, and the eyes of small animals at the edge of the road.”

Which brings us to another pitfall: comparing the short-storyist to Chekhov at the earliest opportunity. With that out of the way, we can move to the third (and most dangerous) hazard, which is to treat the fledgling and previously unpublished works of an internationally renowned writer as merely noteworthy or, worse still, of biographical interest.

Gallant has published over a hundred stories in The New Yorker since 1951. She has two novels, over a dozen collections of short fiction, and an array of articles and reviews. The Cost of Living gathers stories written in the first 20 years of her career, between 1951 and 1971, when she lived in Europe (London, then Paris) after having spent her childhood in Canada and adolescence in New York. Like most debutantes, her early efforts were autobiographical. In Gallant’s case this produced stories populated with a cast of émigrés—people with multiple-nationality disorders, strays, and general lost souls. One wonders if Gallant’s early experiences mirrored those of, say, Madeline (of her story “Madeline’s Birthday”):

The days of her lifetime had been spent in so many different places – in schools, in camps, in the houses of people she was or was not related to – that the first sight of day was, almost by habit, bewildering.

Here and elsewhere, Gallant’s protagonists are adrift and estranged, often far from home—that is, if they ever had an idea of home to begin with—or else they are parentless or husbandless, jobless or at any rate, critically penniless. All of them, in one way or another, are lost in the world in which they find themselves.

Following in Gallant’s footsteps, Patricia, the narrator of the titular story, moves to Paris for an artist’s life. Instead of the “easy, dreamy city, full of trees and full of time” that she hopes for, Patricia finds Paris “full of brats and quarrelling mothers”. For her, along with the majority of Gallant’s protagonists, the idea of home is only rentable, temporary, and in many cases, ultimately fleeting. In these stories of hotel rooms and strangers’ houses, we find that the greatest irony of the well-travelled is that they are inescapably tied to their lives as travelers, in constant pursuit of a life which stands still, if only for a moment. In contrast, those who have never travelled—the landlocked or abandoned—look to others who have left home with a painful longing, and the unavoidable conclusion that they are trapped. Stick or twist, in Gallant’s world there is no escaping one’s internal condition; for whatever satisfaction migration brings, it is a distraction at best, and at worst, a repression. These stories provide a chorus of echoes for Robert Louis Stevenson’s quip: “To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.”

The brevity of these stories emphasises the entrapment theme. Despite their geographical scope, there is a claustrophobic locality to each story, a constriction imposed partly by the form, which together with Gallant’s careful distribution of detail creates what V.S. Pritchett called the “glimpse through” effect so common in modern short fiction. We view the lives of her characters “from the corner of the eye, in passing”. In this regard she joins the company of Eudora Welty, Jane Anne Philips, and Raymond Carver: writers who harnessed the inherent domesticity of the short form by making the world seem a small, unchanging place. Gallant’s characters often wallow in a Carveresque funk. In his essay “Fires”, Carver recalls a bleak epiphany after a long wait at the laundromat. It was 1960, before he became a full-time writer, and he had been working long hours in menial jobs to support his wife and children. He writes:

I realized – what had I been thinking before? – that my life was a small-change thing for the most part, chaotic, and without much light showing through.

It is this very blend of chaos and small-change (reflective, perhaps, of a similar frustration in her early career) that pervades Gallant’s early stories. Despite the miles that some of her characters have travelled in order to satisfy their urges to begin afresh, they stumble upon the same realisation: that their lives for the most part are small-change things, that poverty is a universal constraint, and that—what had they been thinking before?—the one place from which they cannot escape is their own disillusion. Gallant begins in “Travellers Must Be Content” with the idea that “Success can only be measured in terms of distance travelled”; yet it is this notion which her characters repeatedly question.

Many of the stories collected here address the aftermath of the Second World War. Europe itself has become a broken home, fractured most obviously by the Iron Curtain, but also by the multitude of refugees, foreign troops, and disgruntled expatriates populating central Europe. The characters in “Willi”, “One Aspect of a Rainy Day”, and “A Day Like Any Other” struggle to retain their identities in the wake of the Allied victory. Post-war German citizens, particularly those still living in France, prove good subjects for Gallant’s abandonment theme—more so than the British, French, or Americans. Perhaps this is because Gallant, like Carver, preferred to write about losers. Her characters feel “disapproval almost as an emanation” or are “lonely in the daytimes, and terribly shy and unhappy at night”. Her losers are so good at losing that they risk overdosing on self-pity. Patricia, for instance, remarks: “I came home tired every night, disinclined to talk. I saw that everyone in this hotel was as dingy, as stationary, as I was myself, and I knew we were tainted with the same incompetence.”

Yet the collection is not some monolith of despair, and Gallant is not immune to offering lifelines to some of her lost souls. It is clear that, while autobiographical, the stories engage in a thoroughgoing exploration of the traveller’s psychology. They show characters searching for home, for a sense of relief—some emotional reunion with the root chord of their lives—and at times such a reunion seems possible. In “Going Ashore”, Emma Ellenger approaches Gibraltar with an ecstatic optimism:

A tide of newness came in with the salty air: she thought of new land…A new life. She knelt, patient, holding the curtain, waiting to see the approach to shore.

Yet Gallant teaches us elsewhere that such optimism is to be distrusted. For others in the collection, all Romantic notions of journeys and foreign lands must be put to rest. By the end of “Travelers Must Be Content”, Wishart’s “tirelessly creative” mind finally wears itself out. There is a feeling, when we leave him, that some moment of reconciliation has cured his compulsion for travel:

He took good care not to dream, and when the bus drew in at the Grasse, under the trees…he did not look like a failed actor assailed with nightmares but a smooth and pleasant schoolmaster whose sleep is so deep that he never dreams at all.

Gallant’s elegant sentences mark her arrival as a master of the short form. These are stories from a writer finding her feet, about people finding theirs, and it is with the greatest literary symmetry (and a touch of injustice) that a third of the included works have been homeless until now.

Paul Sweeten is reading for an MSt in Creative Writing at Kellogg College, Oxford.

James Shapiro
Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?
Faber and Faber, 2010
384 Pages
£20.99
ISBN 978-0571235766

Stanley Wells
Shakespeare, Sex and Love
Oxford University Press, 2010
282 Pages
£16.99
ISBN 978-0199578597

It is always useful to remind ourselves of how little we know about William Shakespeare. Despite his status as the most famous playwright in the English language, much of his life is a mystery. In his book on the person behind the plays, Stephen Greenblatt notes the “abundant but thin” evidence of Shakespeare’s life. The primary sources that have survived are mostly administrative—a marriage licence, christening records, tax bills, affidavits, the odd cast list, and a will—the cumulative effect of which is to make Shakespeare seem “a drabber, duller person” than the one that we imagine from the exuberance of his plays.

Ironically, this dearth of biographical detail has not deterred literary critics as much as liberated them. It is, after all, easier to speculate, often wildly, on a shadowy subject than on one whose life is well documented. The result has been an extraordinary volume of criticism: British Library records reveal that over 2,000 books on Shakespeare were published in the last ten years, or a little over four each week. Another two works can now be added to this tottering pile, by two heavyweight Shakespeare scholars: James Shapiro and Stanley Wells. Their subjects—authorship and sex—are among the most contentious and well trodden areas of Shakespeare studies, but the authors shared approach is to show the necessity of reading the Bard in the context of his age.

The cover of Shapiro’s Contested Will, which shows a rogue’s gallery of Elizabethan dramatists and courtiers and asks us “Who Wrote Shakespeare?”, is a red herring; Shapiro is less interested in examining the credibility of each of the contenders than considering why particular men were championed when they were. This proves to be a fertile approach, and a useful position from which to question the theories of those who argue that Francis Bacon (the “Baconians”) was the real Shakespeare, and those who contest that the Bard was really Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford (the “Oxfordians”).

But why doubt Shakespeare as an author at all? Shapiro identifies the source of the authorship debate in the writing of Edmond Malone, a Georgian-era Shakespeare scholar, who, frustrated by the lack of evidence available to write a biography of Shakespeare, wondered if the works themselves might hold some clues. Given the size of the Bard’s oeuvre, it is not surprising that Malone spotted parallels between the plays and contemporary knowledge of Shakespeare’s life. Hence the “pathetic lamentations” expressed by Constance at the death of her son, Arthur, in King John, could be a dramatic echo of Shakespeare’s feelings when his own son, Hamnet, died in 1596. Underlying Malone’s thesis was the thought that “he could only write about what he had felt or done rather than heard about, read about, borrowed from other writers or imagined.” If one is to believe this rather dubious assumption, the opposite must also be true—that Shakespeare was incapable of writing about what he had not experienced. It was this leap that began one of literature’s strangest quests: to prove that Shakespeare, our greatest dramatist, did not write his plays after all.

In essays on each of the two major schools, Shapiro, a committed “Stratfordian”, shows how the Baconians and Oxfordians made the same mistake: they were unwittingly influenced by the fashions of their ages, and thus failed to put Shakespeare in the context of his own. The Baconians’ conviction that their man had left verbal clues of his identity hidden in Shakespeare’s works is shown to be a reflection of the 19th century’s interest in sequences and ciphers, following the development of Samuel Morse’s code. Moreover, an unlikely revival of interest in the Oxford theory in the 1970s and 1980s is put in the context of renewed public interest in conspiracies in the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination and Watergate.

However outlandish their attempts to discredit Shakespeare might be, Shapiro treats his predecessors with respect. There is something undeniably comic in Shapiro’s description of the mad dash across the Atlantic undertaken by a Baconian, Elizabeth Wells Gallup, who becomes convinced that manuscripts were hidden in Islington’s Canonbury Tower; in her rival Orville Ward Owen’s determination to dredge the Severn river in search of the same item; and in Percy Allen’s attempt to solve the mystery through séances. Yet one suspects that Shapiro gives them more credence than they deserve in order to provide a stiffer opponent for his final essay, a barnstorming piece of rhetoric in which he uses the kind of unglamorous historical research absent from the work of the Baconians and Oxfordians to construct a robust defence of Shakespeare.

Shapiro also calls upon the work of an ally, Stanley Wells, whose work has shown that several of Shakespeare’s works were produced in collaboration with other contemporary dramatists, which has strengthened the Stratfordian claim. Yet although Wells sides with Shapiro on the authorship question, his latest study, Shakespeare, Sex and Love, shows how slippery the arguments can be.

His discussion of the sonnets is key. Given their first-person perspective, they are uniquely valuable to those determined to read Shakespeare autobiographically. While Shapiro is keen to highlight the dangers of assuming that the speaker is Shakespeare, Wells cannot resist speculating. His argument “that some, indeed many of them, reflect circumstances of the author’s own emotional and sexual life” is threefold: the poems are believed to have been written at the height of the craze for sonnet sequences in the 1590s, but were not published until much later, in 1609, suggesting that they were an expression of something personal rather than an attempt to cash in on a literary trend; second, the break with the tradition of addressing sequences to fictitious romantic lovers (such as Sir Philip Sidney’s Stella) by naming the protagonist after himself; and finally the unintelligibility of the events that are recorded in the poems, which suggests Shakespeare was purposefully being elusive and concealing details from his readers.

This groundwork laid, Wells goes a step further to ask, “If we read the sonnets in autobiographical terms, what do they tell us? One, they show us that he [Shakespeare] was indeed, and probably frequently, unfaithful to his wife.” (When reading this, it might be possible to hear the muffled thud of Shapiro banging his head on his desk in frustration.) Wells takes a step back from the debate in his conclusion, where he admits to the impossibility of sifting “the imagined from the real”, but his delight in projecting a vision of Shakespeare through the prism of his poetry shows the enduring appeal of the authorship debate.

Elsewhere, Shakespeare, Sex and Love is a breezy jaunt through the sexual highs and lows of the Renaissance. As is required for such a subject, Wells is an unflinching guide, as happy to discuss pederasty as Polonius. His early chapters on what was considered acceptable sexual behaviour (just about everything, it seems) are a riot, and he avoids the all too common pitfall of putting Shakespeare on a moral pedestal. Wells is not naïve enough to suggest that Shakespeare must have participated in all of the sexual practices that appear in his plays, but he is gossipy enough to reprint several enjoyable rumours about the Bard’s virility. This is probably the greatest contrast in the authors’ approaches: Shapiro’s prose is taut and rhetorical, Wells’s flabbier and more divergent.

Where Wells and Shapiro are united is the belief that declarations of love and desire in Shakespeare can be literary devices, rather than personal confessions. Wells quotes one of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, Thomas Nashe, who suggests that the sonnet was used as a form of verbal jousting, while Shapiro cites the example of Giles Fletcher, a middle-aged courtier who wrote in the rather different voice of a love-struck youth. This shows the difficulty faced by any scholar in trying to disprove Shakespeare’s authorship through his texts. Even if the Bard’s own voice could be detected, it would be impossible to prove that he was speaking of his own feelings. This points to the ultimate futility of centuries of autobiographical readings of Shakespeare. The frustrating disconnection between his humdrum, demonstrable life of christenings, taxes, and courts and the extraordinary imagination that is evident on the page will remain. Despite the best efforts of future generations of literary grave-diggers, Shakespeare will continue to be more ghost than man.

Mike Jakeman graduated in 2006 with a BA in English from Keble College, Oxford. He now works for The Economist.

The author of hundreds of short stories and over 80 novels and essay and poetry collections, Joyce Carol Oates is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University and a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Born in Lockport, New York in 1938, Oates received her B.A. from Syracuse University in 1960 and her M.A. from the University of Wisconsin in 1961. She taught English at the University of Detroit in the 1960s, during which time she lived amidst turbulent race relations in “Murder City, U.S.A.” Upon leaving Detroit in 1967, Oates taught at the University of Windsor in Ontario, Canada until 1978. Before the passing of her first husband Raymond Smith, she worked as the associate editor of the literary magazine Ontario Review, which she co-founded with her husband in 1974.

Oates is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, the PEN/Malamud Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Short Story, the Common Wealth Award for Distinguished Service in Literature, the Chicago Tribune Literary Prize for Lifetime Achievement, the Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement, the O. Henry Prize for Continued Achievement in the Short Story, and the National Book Award. Her novel What I Lived For was a Pulitzer Prize and PEN/Faulkner Award finalist, Blonde (based on the life of Marilyn Monroe) was a National Book Award Finalist and also a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and The Gravedigger’s Daughter was a New York Times bestseller and a National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist. Oates was recently honored with the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award. Her most recent works include the novel Little Bird of Heaven, Dear Husband (an omnibus of 14 stories), and In Rough Country (a compilation of essays and literary criticism). Sourland, a collection of stories, will be published later this year.

A few months ago, you finished writing A Widow’s Memoir, an account of the death of your first husband, Raymond Smith. Can you comment on the process of writing it?

It isn’t a time I remember very clearly now. I had difficulty sleeping and would often write late at night, on sheets of paper folded lengthwise, which can fit neatly into a book which I might be reading, or trying to read. My normal concentration was shattered and so I “took notes” in the hope that some time in the future I could bring these fragmented passages into some sort of coherent whole. The effort seemed enormous at the time—like hauling myself up by hand, pulling on a thick rope.

I expect that reviewers will compare your memoir with Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking.

Joan’s memoir is very like her non-fiction work—poised, rather cool, dispassionate, analytical.

You have called yourself the ideal reader of John Updike and John Cheever. How do you envisage the ideal reader of your own novels?

I don’t envision any “ideal readers”—or any readers at all, I suppose. My imagination doesn’t work in that way. My concentration is turned inward, upon the work itself—beyond its perimeters, I can’t speculate.

Do you read works by other writers more than once? Is there any particular work that you regularly return to?

I’ve read the poems of Emily Dickinson numerous times—they are always mysterious and new. I have read short fiction by Chekhov, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, D.H. Lawrence many times, as well as the great modernist novels of the 20th century.

What is your favourite work or author to teach to your students?

I don’t have any single “favourite” work, but students do respond well to the early work of Hemingway.

When you taught at the University of Windsor, you enjoyed a degree of anonymity. Do you miss teaching there for that or for any other reason?

I’ve enjoyed teaching—my students and my colleagues—at each university at which I’ve taught. My Princeton students have been my most impressively prepared students, but I’ve always had outstanding students at other universities. I didn’t have any more or less “anonymity” at Windsor than at Princeton, in fact.

You encountered tales of H.P. Lovecraft in your early teens and his writing made a lasting impression on you. Can you discuss your affinity for the gothic genre?

Lovecraft was impressive to me when I was quite young—14, 15. I would not say that Lovecraft had any significant influence upon my writing. “Gothic” is a term that, to me, is somewhat synonymous with “surreal”—“dreamlike”. I’m not interested in the “real” monsters of gothic literature, or the bizarre cosmology of Lovecraft’s Ancient Old Ones. It’s really the psychological drama in which I’m interested.

Do you do equal amounts of reading and writing each day? How often do you devote an entire day to just one of those activities?

Reading is ideal for the evening. My husband Charlie Gross is a great reader also, and we often read and discuss the same works.

How important is it to read or write literary criticism?

How important? I’m not sure that it is “important” for everyone—I can’t imagine Emily Dickinson, William Faulkner, or James Joyce taking time to write criticism. I love to read serious criticism and to write it as well—there is nothing so pleasurable as analysing a work of fiction which one has admired. (I am not so keen about writing negative reviews, and try to avoid this whenever I can.)

In Wild Nights!, you create vivid stories about Emily Dickinson, Henry James, Poe, Twain, and Hemingway. How did you decide which writers to write about?

I had been invited by James Atlas to write “short lives” biographies of both Emily Dickinson and Ernest Hemingway, but I very much preferred the form of fiction, of course! It’s my aim to evoke the experience of being rather than take the reader through the more familiar experiences of reading about.

What gave you the idea of an Emily Dickinson RepliLuxe?

What gives anyone an “idea”? The appropriation of a great artist or poet by the bourgeoisie—in somewhat attenuated form—is obviously part of our lives; it has its ironic aspect, but its poignancy as well. The husband has not a clue what “Emily Dickinson” is about—her poetry, her soul. The wife does have a clue. (Yes, this is a playful feminist parable.)

The mysterious life of Emily Dickinson has attracted a multiplicity of writers, from Susan Glaspell to Jerome Charyn, whose novel, The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson, you recently reviewed for The New York Review of Books. What do you find most appealing about Dickinson and her poems?

Dickinson is a profound artist. She and Walt Whitman are our great 19th-century poets. One can read her poetry endlessly, always with surprise and admiration.

In your Journal: 1973-1982, you praised Quentin Bell’s biography of Virginia Woolf, and contemplated writing a biography yourself. Who would make a good subject for such a book?

I would never write a biography; I would be impatient with the constraints of “reality” as well as the formal aspects of gathering historical fact in great, great detail.

You were influenced by Thoreau when you were young, and you enjoy outdoor activities like walking, gardening, hiking, and cycling. What have you learned from nature?

Everything. There is nothing in our brains that is not “from nature” in some way. I was born and raised on a small farm in upstate New York…

You have written many naturalistic and romantic novels. To what extent is your writing influenced by Greek tragedy? (I’m thinking of your lyrical Little Bird of Heaven, which is set in Sparta, New York and deals with the brutal murder of singer Zoe Kruller.)

My earliest reading as a “serious reader”—between the ages of 18 and 20—were of the Greek tragedies. As an undergraduate I took a number of courses in classics—in translation—and so I was imbued from this relatively early age with a sense of the ritual underpinnings of the elemental experiences of our “ordinary” lives. Virtually all of my novels depict crimes—from a perspective of the tragic rites of sacrifice, redemption, and the passing of the old order—that is, an older generation—to the new order—the younger generation. It’s somewhat unusual that a novel of mine, like Blonde, is purely tragic, without any apparent hope of redemption.

Rhoda Feng is a freshman at Stony Brook University in New York.

Peter J. Conradi
Iris Murdoch – A Writer at War: Letters & Diaries: 1939-45
Short Books Ltd, 2010
256 Pages
£16.99
ISBN 978-1906021221

…

…

“Human affairs are not serious, but they have to be taken seriously”—so said Iris Murdoch, discussing Plato’s analysis of art in her celebrated 1977 essay The Fire and the Sun. Her life’s work, an extraordinary body of literature and philosophy, both explored and exemplified this idea. Novels, such as the Man Booker Prize-winning The Sea, the Sea (1978), for instance, demonstrate a deft and sensitive engagement with moral and psychological themes. In Murdoch’s hands, the ridiculousness, the futility of human existence is addressed with patient insight and sincere respect. Unfortunately, A Writer at War: Letters and Diaries 1939-45, edited and introduced by Peter J. Conradi, does not display similar virtues in its presentation of the young Iris.

Conradi begins his introduction by disparaging Richard Eyre’s 2001 film Iris (on which Conradi admits he acted as a consultant) for failing to portray Iris as what she primarily was—a writer—instead perpetuating the tired stereotype of her as simply “bonking (younger Iris) or bonkers (elderly Iris)”. That Conradi, even as he attributes the vulgarity of the sentiment to others and not to himself, cannot resist such tactless wordplay on the second page offers an ominous foretaste of the collection’s overall tone.

Conradi’s own portrait of Iris “the writer” is fleshed out in clichés. “To the good writer”, he announces solemnly, “even the uses of adversity are famously sweet: and everything is grist to the creative mill”. According to Conradi, we are meant to find in Iris’s letters and diary the raw material—painful experiences, interactions, love affairs, and betrayals—that will eventually make its way into her novels and philosophical thought.

This claim turns out to be a little hard to swallow. For example, the collection begins with a fascinatingly dull diary (“Then we went down to the Hall & cleared up & packed the cars & trailers. We didn’t start till pretty late, owing to late rising […]”). The diary was written by a 20-year-old Iris as she toured the English countryside with a theatre group on the eve of war, and Conradi attempts to justify its inclusion with reference to the descriptions of the theatre in The Sea, the Sea. It is not impossible that Murdoch’s experiences travelling with a rag-tag band of student actors were relevant to her portrayal of the London theatre scene. However, it is left quite unclear how the diary is supposed to aid our understanding of a fictional work written over 30 years later.

The troupe visits Oxfordshire villages, stays in country houses, bickers, sings, and mends costumes. Throughout, Iris herself remains blithely indifferent to the developing international crisis. In spite of this, Murdoch’s observations about her friends and their sheltered world are not without charm. Nevertheless, the most engaging aspects of the diary are excisions she made several years later: at various points in the text, the reader is treated to such tantalising lacunae as “[2 lines missing]” or “[end of text; a page torn out]”, usually after a reference to a conversation or an evening spent with Hugh Vaughan James, one of her fellow actors and clearly a romantic interest. These absences, however, provide the only real points of interest in the first third of the book.

The second third of A Writer at War, containing some of Iris’s correspondence with Frank Thompson, a fellow classicist and communist posted during the war to the Middle East, is perhaps the most appealing part of the collection. At the age of 18 or so, Frank had been infatuated with Iris. By the time of their wartime letters, the relationship between the two had matured. Their correspondence—containing thoughts on poetry, language, love, and sex, as well as portraits of their drastically different surroundings—offers an insight into a tender and profound friendship.

Conradi’s presence at this part of the book is reasonably restrained. His footnotes helpfully explain certain abbreviations, Latin and Greek words and phrases, and allusions to classical or mythical figures. He also provides brief biographies of various mutual friends referred to in passing in the letters (although, bizarrely, several of these break off in mid-sentence—just one example of lax proof-reading from an irritatingly long list of errata). In the introductions to the two sets of letters, however, Conradi seems determined to play up the pathos of the relationships. For instance, he makes much of Iris’s and Frank’s discussion of tragedies (Shakespeare and Aeschylus, among others), observing “an unconscious aptness” in the presence of these tragedies in their writings. Conradi insists on pushing a narrative centering on Iris’s realisation that she has fallen in love with Frank just before he is killed in action in 1944. The actual content of the correspondence is overshadowed by this melodramatic storytelling; the letters are prevented from simply speaking for themselves and for the reality of Iris’s and Frank’s relationship.

The book’s final section charts Iris’s correspondence with David Hicks, the man who was to jilt her in 1946. Her calm and wryly indulgent response to David’s letter explaining that he will not marry her—“Thank you for having the guts to write so frankly (even lyrically, if I may say so.)”—is possibly the highpoint of the collection. However, the flaws present in the previous section reappear in this final section. The selection of letters published, along with Conradi’s increasingly intrusive voice, combine to sketch a relationship laden with portents and headed inexorably to its dramatic conclusion. In one footnote, Conradi explains that a line quoted in Iris’s letter is a lyric from Greensleeves. Not content to leave the annotation as it stands, he goes on to state that it is “[h]ard not to read this phrase […] prophetically”, quoting further lines from the song in order to import a sense of impending doom into what is actually quite a cheerful and innocent letter.

Indeed, the entire collection seems assembled so as to extract the most sensationalistic elements of Murdoch’s biography—namely, her many volatile love affairs and break-ups—from the most mundane of sources: a childish, unexciting diary and repetitive stream-of-consciousness letters to friends. In doing so, the book does a disservice to both, managing somehow to be intrusively intimate yet strangely unrevealing. Conradi is insistent in imposing his narrative of passionate failed romances and dramatically charged literary raw material onto a collection of rather unremarkable juvenilia, affectionately chronicling the friendships and loves of Iris’s youth. In choosing such an approach, Conradi ignores Murdoch’s own maxim: he fails to “take seriously” the very human affairs that could have formed the real content of the book.

Claire Kirwin is reading for a BPhil in Philosophy at Magdalen College, Oxford.

Jonathan Israel
A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the
Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy
Princeton University Press, 2010
296 Pages
£18.95
ISBN 978-0691142005

…

…

20 June 1789: the day radical thought became radical action. Or so Jonathan Israel would have us believe. This was the revolutionary moment when the National Assembly recognised that sovereignty rested with the people of France and declared its intention of “fixing” the constitution of France on the “solid foundations” of Enlightenment principles. Jacques-Louis David’s famous depiction of the Tennis Court Oath therefore appropriately adorns the front cover of this book. David’s masterpiece provides fitting imagery for Israel’s main thesis: that the revolution of fact was preceded, made possible, and given meaning, by “the revolution of the mind”. Yet Israel’s ambitious project, like that of the National Assembly, ultimately falls victim to the complexities of the political and intellectual landscape of the 18th century.

In this collection of essays (originally delivered as the Isaiah Berlin Lectures of 2008) Israel has extended his central ideas about the Radical Enlightenment. A Revolution of the Mind complements both Radical Enlightenment (2001) and Enlightenment Contested (2006), two weighty and influential works that celebrated the cohesion and relevance of enlightenment philosophy in response to the “dogmatic anti-intellectualism” of post-war Marxism and the relativism of postmodern multiculturalism. Frustrated by some historians’ attempts to break up the Enlightenment into a “family-of-enlightenments” dependent on respective socio-economic contexts, Israel champions the notion of an international intellectual movement. Moreover, he suggests, it is only by acknowledging this unified movement that we can understand the political thought of both the 18th century and today. It is no surprise, then, that this book concludes with an examination of the relationship between the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. This is indicative of Israel’s grand project, echoing that of the late Berlin: to draw philosophy and history into a more meaningful partnership.

Yet this latest instalment is more than a pithy introduction to the already considerable oeuvre of the Princeton-based historian. While the values set out in the 1948 U.N. Declaration of Human Rights are today part of the common parlance of Western democracies, Israel argues that their modern political hegemony is reliant upon “the astounding intellectual victories of the radical philosophes” in the “fraught, bitterly contested decades” between 1770 and 1789. The principles of freedom of thought and expression, religious tolerance, individual liberty, political self-determination of peoples, and sexual and racial equality are all traced by Israel to their phase of adolescent dynamism in the charged atmosphere of late 18th-century political and social thought. These are the principles of Israel’s Radical Enlightenment; the ideas that emerged as the official values of a major part of the world after 1945, and whose origins precipitated and informed the “General Revolution” of the late-18th century.

Central to understanding this great awakening of political modernity is the schism between radical and moderate enlightenments, which became both inescapable and irreparable by the 1770s. The Moderate Enlightenment of Locke, Montesquieu, Voltaire and Hume is characterised by Israel as one that upheld tradition and privilege. These thinkers sympathised with a providentialist (that is to say a “God-ordained”) conception of the universe and were reluctant to undermine the authority of kings and clerics. In direct opposition to this “moderate mainstream” were the intellectual heirs of Spinoza, whose influence is traced by Israel to the demands for radical reform and the condemnation of social inequality that intensified in the late-18th century. The Spinozist practitioners of the philosophie moderne are routinely referred to by Israel as “Diderot, d’Holbach, and their disciples”; a coterie of thinkers in the 1770s and 80s that coalesced around universal principles and democratic values.

Far from being Francocentric, however, Israel asserts that this radical/moderate schism was universal in scope. “The most crucial questions” of the Enlightenment project are presented as either/or: one was either for or against democracy, equality, a free press, the separation of church and state. The universal nature of this “vast chasm” between radical and moderate enlightenments proves a strong foundation from which Israel can expound his notion of a transnational “Revolution of the Mind”. Moreover, it allows him, in engaging and flexible prose, to incorporate a vast range of controversies over politics, economics, war, and moral philosophy, in all of which the radicals laid the foundations for a “General Revolution” out of Spinoza’s universal, egalitarian, and ultimately democratic principles. The result is a richly informative, coherent thesis that provides an original insight into the major controversies of the 18th century.

In this respect, Israel succeeds in his task of drawing history and philosophy closer together. But in his determination to identify within the Radical Enlightenment “the intellectual origins of modern democracy”, Israel has overstated the case. Throughout, Radical Enlightenment is “quintessentially defined” by its identification of “democracy as the best form of government”, but was there such consensus around democracy’s normative content in the 18th century? Israel insists that “it was plain what the radical thinkers intended” from the early 1770s, “when Diderot and d’Holbach began propagating their fully fledged democratic republican ideology”. We are told little, though, of the specific political institutions and reforms that this ideology entailed, whether constitutional monarchy, virtual representation, or universal suffrage. Israel’s thesis proposes that these issues were already settled amongst the radicals, yet the subsequent progress of the French Revolution suggests that this was not necessarily the case.

This conceptual confusion is frustrating, not least because Israel is ultimately attempting to identify the origins of “what we today would call ‘democracy’”. Yet this imprecision is a natural consequence of the variegated intellectual landscape in which Israel’s radicals operated. The likes of Paine, Sieyès, and Condorcet frequently used the terms “representative” and “republican”, but largely refrained from demanding “democracy”. To claim that these traditions constituted the same radical outlook is to neglect the inherent diversity of 18th-century political thought. As the recent scholarship of historian Mark Philp and others has shown, “democracy” did not become a popular term until the 1790s, and even then it lacked determinate political content. Israel is certainly correct in identifying monarchy, privilege, and civil inequality as the targets of Radical Enlightenment, but the radical camp had more conceptual confusion than Israel lets on. It takes more than a common enemy to create a “fully fledged ideology” between disparate radical thinkers, whether “republican”, “democratic”, or otherwise.

One is left with the impression that Israel has asserted this uniformity with contemporary debates in mind. By insisting so steadfastly on the primacy of mind over matter in history, he overlooks (ironically) the radical dynamism and rich variety of Enlightenment political thought. The complexities of a nascent radical politics are smothered and, to an extent, manipulated to fit a narrative of democracy’s march from Spinoza’s Dutch Republic, through the Atlantic revolutions of the 18th century, and down to Palais de Chaillot in 1948. Israel ultimately goes too far in imposing a universal dichotomy upon the Enlightenment, especially one that rests upon a nebulous notion of democracy, in an attempt to read into the 18th century the distant gestation of modern institutions.

That is not to deny the importance of A Revolution of the Mind. As a contribution to the history of late-18th century ideas it is informative and thought-provoking, invaluable in celebrating the role of ideas in history. However, one is ultimately reminded of David’s representation of the Tennis Court Oath. As a work of art, it magnificently celebrates the moment the National Assembly recognised the sovereignty of the French nation. Yet beneath history’s broad brush strokes lies a more complicated reality. Far from being the glorious realisation of radical thought, the Tennis Court Oath was in fact another rally in the Enlightenment’s grand contest of politics and ideas.

Oliver Cussen is reading for an MPhil in Political Theory at Pembroke College, Oxford.