Rank insanity

Today the lunatics are running the asylum.

Trump thinks the US has invaded Ukraine. Biden sounds like a true Cold Warrior. Our Prime Minister is playing at Churchill. Our Foreign Secretary is geographically challenged. And our Defence Secretary hurls insults at the man who started it all – Putin. I’ve read hundreds of column inches of half-informed drivel in the so-called serious press, by commentators who ought to know better, but don’t. I think I’ve read two sensible articles.

Putin is running rings around the West, having had years to practise, and an increasingly clear, and very Russian objective: to rebuild the Empire; whether it’s the Soviet one or the Tsarist one hardly matters. And we don’t understand what’s going on. Western leaders do seem incapable of looking at the situation from the Russian point of view. Kennedy got stroppy very quickly when the Soviets started installing missiles in the US backyard, and we ended up with the Cuban crisis of 1962. And when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the West was ridiculously triumphalist: we won, our system’s better than yours, we are top dogs now.

For a while, there was caution, of a sort, but I don’t see how anyone could have imagined that to allow NATO to move right to the borders of Russia, and then to allow the – no matter how remotely in the future –prospect of Ukraine joining, was not going to have Putin as antsy as Kennedy was way back then. And I hold no cards for Putin, who is a nasty piece of work with all sorts of typically Russian skullduggery to his name, both at home and abroad. But you would have thought there might be a little common-sense somewhere in the Western camp… but no, it’s full of people who weren’t even alive during WW2 likening Putin to Hitler, wanting full-on war and I don’t know what else.

I’m fully in favour of peoples’ right to self-determination and independence if they want it; Ukraine hasn’t had much of a chance, really: thirty years of trying, and what seems like a fair amount of chaos and a hell of a lot of corruption. Many, though not all, of the countries that emerges from the Soviet yoke back in the 90s have had a difficult translation to democracy; several are clearly backsliding rather seriously. And again, Western triumphalism and the urge of businesses to make a killing rather than build real foundations for a peaceful and secure world order, are more than partly to blame.

The lunatics are running the asylum. I’m scared, horrified and appalled. I’ve always been against war, which ultimately solves nothing, but creates more business opportunities for arms manufacturers. And I’m thinking about a former student of mine, who is in Kyiv at the moment.

Rebecca West: The Return of the Soldier

     An early start with the book group choice for next month, and what an astonishing book this first novel by Rebecca West, published in 1918, was. As First World War literature was one of the topics I specialised in teaching towards the end of my career, I was surprised never to have encountered this short novel, but since the Great War is only incidental to its plot, perhaps this is not surprising.

An officer suffers from shellshock, and all memories of fifteen years of his life have vanished; he has no recollection of his wife, the death of their small son, any of the changes which have taken place at his home. His memories are stuck on the idyllic happiness of his first love years back, and the first message from the field hospital contacts her… you can imagine the complexities West has set up here.

You are quite shockingly thrown in at the deep end, and West’s style is brief, sparse, and yet very tightly focused in terms of close observation of characters’ movements, gestures; it felt cinematographic in many ways. I was struck by how she developed a complex, moving and ultimately tragic plot in fewer than a hundred pages, and mentally imagined how a contemporary writer might have wittered through several hundred more without any improvement… Equally, I realised the immediacy West achieved, a quality I’ve encountered in other writings from the war itself and its immediate aftermath, where the horrors are well-known and widely known, as opposed to today’s writers who have to weave in so much contextual information and background a century and more later.

The flaw for me, and obviously it’s a reflection of the time when West wrote, was the simplistic use of Freudian psychology as a trigger for the denouement; it’s a minor flaw as it’s merely a trigger and the ending itself is brief enough and tragic enough to overshadow it.

Although the story is ostensibly about the return of the soldier – and the multiple meanings of the title have only just leapt out to me – actually the main interest is the complex and evolving relationship between the three women, the soldier’s wife, his first love, and the cousin who is the narrator but also deeply involved with the events as they unfold.

From the time itself, all those years ago, the story seems to express a longing, a nostalgia for the time before, the world before, the innocence before the horrors, at the same time as perhaps unconsciously recognising that those times are gone forever, that you cannot rewind. It’s a very powerful, well-written and extremely moving novel.

Dangerous Times

Warning: politics ahead

I do have the feeling that we are all living in very dangerous times.

I lived through the Cold War; I have a very vague childhood memory of my parents looking terribly worried one evening after they’d listened to the seven o’clock news on the wireless as I got ready for bed: this was the Cuban missile crisis. I demonstrated several times against Thatcher and Reagan’s cruise missiles in the early 1980s, and supported the Greenham Women’s march on one occasion. I remember being concerned as a school student in the early seventies, when news about how we were polluting and wrecking the environment first hit the headlines. But I don’t think I’ve ever felt quite so alarmed, and for so long, as I am at the moment.

There was – still is – the menace to American democracy and the world that is Trump, and his toddler imitation this side of the Atlantic, our very own PM. And France seems to have vomited up an imitation ready for its presidential election this year. We take democracy for granted at our peril; once we have lost it, it’s only regained at enormous cost. Ask Germans, ask most East Europeans.

There is China, to an extent understandably flexing its muscles after years of humiliation by the West, Russia behaving no differently from the imperialist ways it has espoused for several centuries, and the West unable to think outside its self-righteous, US and NATO-inspired box. What happens if China and Russia decide to work together, I don’t know. Meanwhile, the idiots who own Britain have decided to cut us off from our nearest neighbours, doing enormous and very evident damage to the country and its people.

There is the menace to our planet, to the survival of our own species, brought about by our own actions, our own greed, our own wilful blindness. Most of the indications I read suggest that we are pretty much too late now to be able to do anything about it. We are taught and manipulated to want endless new and shiny stuff, to burn up natural resources that heat the world up, causing disasters that are regularly reported on the news, but… The planet would survive after a fashion without us, yet I can’t help feeling that would be a bit of a shame…

And there is the role and the irresponsibility of social media in all this: profit is its first motive and driving force, and turning people against each other, fostering division and conflict, certainly generates far more ‘engagement’ and thus far more money than any kind of peaceful co-operation. Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon have a hell of a lot to answer for, but first we have to make them…

What is to be done? To be honest, I don’t know, and I’m even more worried when sometimes I find myself thinking, I’m too old to care, let someone else sort it out. That’s, let younger people sort it out, and yet my generation let all this happen, on our watch. Yes, many were deluded, many were uninterested. And many have been part of the problem.

Things only look set to get worse: there are two years left before an election in this country, long enough for enough people to have forgotten the chaos of the last five years and been bribed to vote for more torment; although there are two more years before an election in the US, it’s clear things may seriously worsen after the midterm elections this autumn. And as for the poor old planet: are we actually doing anything to remedy the emergency. How much does my bamboo toothbrush help? My vegetarianism? My not flying? What do we elect governments for?

And this is my final point: there are now forces at work convincing people that democracy does not work, that there is no point voting because the same people always get in… so other choices, other measures are required. If people give up on politics, then there is no hope. Then I look at the electoral systems in the UK and the US, and I do give up…

On choices and prejudices

My reaction to The English Patient has had me thinking. Regular and long-term readers of this blog will know that I have occasionally admitted to gaps in my reading, and to certain preferences – prejudices, even – in what I choose to read.

We all make choices about what we read or don’t read; as I get older, mine are increasingly based on limited time. But that won’t do as an excuse. There are fellow bloggers I follow with interest who only write about women’s fiction, or science fiction, for example; I’ve no way of knowing whether these are deliberate choices or their exclusive reading matter. I write about every book I read; very occasionally, if I’ve re-read a book quite quickly but have nothing to add, I won’t write about it a second time.

So where have all my prejudices and predilections come from?

Science fiction from my childhood, and from my student days, but I read very little of it now, and most of that is re-reading of old favourites. I used to have the run of the Science Fiction Foundation library as a postgrad and wrote reviews for Foundation magazine. My prejudice now, when I reflect, is due to my impression that fantasy has long overwhelmed the market, and I’m not interested in fantasy. Science fiction made me reflect on the world I live in; fantasy is merely escape and doesn’t cut it for me on those grounds.

Travel writing is a relatively recent pleasure, though it’s now fading, ironically, when I can’t do very much of my own. Specifically, I link it to the recommendation by a very helpful bookseller in a shop in Dinan who persuaded me to buy a couple of books by the Swiss traveller Ella Maillart about 20 years ago. I’ve never looked back. My prejudices here are about the kind of travel and the traveller: I like travel that borders on exploration, that involves effort and hardship, where the writer observes and reports rather than centring the narrative around themselves – so a lot of more recent stuff doesn’t get a look-in from me. I’m also picky about where: deserts and isolated places are what I most enjoy reading about; South America, the Far East and a lot of Oceania don’t interest me at all. What’s going on here?

English and American literature I studied for my degree; I necessarily met the ‘classics’, a lot of which I liked, many I didn’t. Dickens and Hardy, for example, bored me stiff and I cannot be bothered with them, a statement many will find rather shocking, no doubt. Most stuff written in the eighteenth century, apart from the very earliest novels, I have completely forgotten. And there was a fair amount of very dull American literature. I’m surprised that the student-era reactions have stuck, and I’ve never gone back to such writing. My main feeling was of twentieth century writing in English largely disappearing into self-obsession and triviality, almost as if there was nothing real left to write about; my regular readers will perhaps recall my saying that I found much more meaningful and relevant writing in other languages, all of which apart from French I have to read in translation.

My deep interest in, and exploration of, Eastern European literature is perhaps a positive prejudice and deliberate choice, given my family background: I seek to understand something of my origins, the history of my father’s country, and the troubled and strange choices made by, and forced upon, nations in that part of the world over the last century or so.

Looking back at what I’ve written, there are clearly some pretty lame excuses! There’s a brief, and not very long-lasting sense of regret about some of the lacunae in my reading, but in the end there’s so much out there to read that I will never get to the end of; I sometimes joke that I’m compiling reading lists for my next existence… And when students used to express amazement at how well-read I appeared to be, I disabused them, referring to my age compared with theirs, and telling them about some of the gaps, and prejudices I’ve confessed to earlier.

There was a time – centuries ago – when it was possible for someone to know or be familiar with everything in their field. I’m both humbled and astounded by people like Athanasius Kircher, who some have described as the last man to have known everything in his time, or Isidore of Seville, patron saint of the internet, who wrote the first encyclopaedia, containing all that was known in his time, the seventh century. My translation of his Etymologies has about 400 pages. So, choices are now inevitable. I’ve made mine, or mine have made me. So be it. What about you?

These I have loved

Brooke’s poem

 

I’ve long loved this simple poem, detailing pleasurable sensations experienced by the poet; he surveys all five senses, and brings each pleasure vividly to life in few words, but in a way the reader can almost instantly appreciate and usually empathise with. It was a very ‘useful’ poem to me as a teacher, when I wanted to lead students to the possibility of trying to write their own poetry – which is not an easy task, either to set or to assess. We could discuss which of our five senses we valued the most, which one we would reluctantly agree to do without if we had to… And they could list a few sensations and experiences that brought them small moments of enjoyment, and then try and find the language which might convey more precisely to someone else just exactly what it was they had experienced… they usually enjoyed the attempt, and were often successful.

When I’m out along walking in forests, I love the sounds, particularly the birdsong, which can often be deafening in the springtime; these’s also tuning into smaller, quieter, less identifiable sounds, which sometimes lead to my seeing creatures. I can stand or sit on the seashore for ages, especially in the evening, listening to the sea, the endless crashing of the waves. And music! Bach can take me onto completely different planes of consciousness, the nearest I’ve ever got to experiencing the divine. At the same time, I’m aware I have hearing problems, and so surely miss out on many sounds: I first realised this years ago when on holiday in France. In the evening, everyone else could hear the not so gentle noise of thousands of crickets chirping away; I couldn’t…

Because I enjoy reading so much, I think I’ve always put the premium on sight. On a cold, crisp winter’s night, I love staring at the sky. Some of the constellations I can recognise; I can seek out planets if I know where they are. But it’s the sense of my infinitesimal smallness against this backdrop that moves me most.

I love to look at a well-made book: nice paper, well-bound (I love the feel and weight of it in my hands, too), and all maps I find incredibly beautiful. Turner’s Modern Rome I can stare at and never tire of, and I am so glad that I got to see it in real life once. The small and permanent sameness of some of my collection of cacti I also find very attractive. And forests… it must be genetic, but I feel at home and I can find endless, different beauties in trees, mosses, flora, fungi, the light and shade playing on the landscape.

Touch doesn’t feature that much in my pleasures. I share Brooke’s enjoyment of the sensation of climbing into a freshly made, slightly cold bed with its crisp sheets. I’ve always loved the sensation of the hot sun on my skin, and the soft feel of wool I enjoy very much.

I focus a good deal on taste and smell, for those who know me know I find much enjoyment in food and drink, not to excess, but just the act of consuming nice things. Belgian chocolate, Trappist beer, a really good malt whisky, and cheese… Camembert or Pont L’Eveque just au point is something almost to die for, in my books. And taste and smell often – but not always – combine to multiply the pleasure. I’ve baked my own bread for over forty years now, and there’s still nothing to beat the crust off a fresh-out-of-the-oven loaf, as Brooke also acknowledged.

You don’t need to be an astute reader to see I’ve made no attempt to versify my pleasures. I can’t. There are things we can’t do ourselves, but we can recognise them when others do them well. What Brooke also does, for me, is to underline that so many of the things that bring us great joy, or maybe just contentment, are actually quite simple, daily, run-of-the-mill things, and it’s good to be reminded of that.

Write your own list, now.

Five senses in fiction

Ursula Le Guin: The Left Hand of Darkness

     I’m always glad to re-read anything by Ursula Le Guin. This time, it’s for my book group, and it’s also only a couple of years since I last read this one. Since then, I’ve learnt rather more about her background in anthropology, which casts an interesting light on her ‘thought experiments’ as she calls them, in the range of Hainish novels and stories. It’s the way she can make the reader think about our own particular species of humanity, its greatnesses and limitations, by imagining variations on the template, particularly in this novel in terms of gender and sexuality, that is the great success of her oeuvre.

The Left Hand of Darkness was written over half a century ago now, in the early days of the second feminist wave, and Le Guin’s later reflections on what and how she wrote back then are also interesting: she acknowledges that she comes across as having made the reader picture the androgynous Estraven as basically male, and being focused only on heterosexuality in her imagined society… However, what struck me most in reading around the novel this time was that she apparently started off with the premise of a planet which did nthought experiments,ot know war, and the androgyny of the inhabitants only came along after that.

We see the Envoy’s awkwardness – he is apparently a Terran, as we are – faced with the Gethenians; he cannot grasp the implications of their sexuality and often seems to put them down or demean them for not being clearly one gender or the other; this is significant, as clearly we are invited to remove our own blinkers when he is narrating the story.

So this novel is an anthropological experiment as much as a political story, with obvious undertones of the Cold War era whence it originates. The science fiction elements include faster-than-light travel and the ansible, an instant communication device which keeps the many planets of the Ekumen in contact with each other. Parts of the anthropological experiment are the skill of ‘foretelling’, and also ‘mind speech’, both of which are self-explanatory. The two nations of the planet which concern us are very different, one clearly a Soviet-style state and the other almost mediaeval; the well-intentioned Estraven, who can see what becoming part of the Ekumen will mean for his fellow-humans, attempts well-intentioned manipulations and duplicity, which inevitably lead to personal and political misunderstandings and disaster.

The title of the novel comes from the Tao Te Ching, and Le Guin produced what she called a ‘version’ of it in English; I have to say that when I read it, I felt that for the first time I was attaining some understanding of its wisdom. I came across a reference to someone writing a biography of Le Guin; I’m not normally one for reading biography but I shall be keeping an eye open for that, most certainly.

Finally I have to mention how well Le Guin writes; this is no run-of-the-mill, plot driven science fiction with wooden characters and stilted writing. This is literature that deserves to last, and, at the moment, I think it will.

Orlando Figes: Natasha’s Dance

Anyone who has read any Russian literature or history must be aware of how different a nation Russia feels compared with ourselves or other European nations; sadly this awareness never seems to percolate down to politicians… Agains the current backdrop of the Ukraine crisis, I was constantly struck by the lack of ability or willingness of Western leaders and politicians to see the world from the perspective of Russia and its people, which might actually inform a more helpful and sensible response to them. But we are incapable of going beyond the triumphalism of “we won the Cold War”. It was in the hope of digging deeper and understanding more, that I finally opened this tome which I’d bought nearly 20 years ago.

Figes offers an excellent, clear and detailed contextual background at the start, and this is possibly the best part of the book, as he takes us far back into the country’s history. Russia had no experience of the Renaissance, and no religious Reformation: here are two major differences which set it apart from the rest of Europe. Then there is the power of Orthodox Church rule, which I’d never really grasped, and it gradually became clear how the church developed into an arm of the state and its power as time passes, far more a part of the establishment than the Church of England is here, for example, with there being only the one faith in Russia. Then there were the long years of Tatar rule. And serfdom, an idea we have no conception of here in the West, and it struck me quite forcefully how Stalin’s labour camps were in many ways a return to that idea, an almost endless supply of slave labour at the service of the rulers.

The idea that you could send troublemakers to Siberia – thousands of miles away – reminded me that we transported criminals to the American colonies and later to Australia, but Russia sent away clever people, intellectuals, dangerous thinkers, and then eventually allowed a lot of them to return home.

Figes documents the relationship between Russia and Europe, or rather the relationship between the Russian intellectuals, aristocracy and bourgeoisie and Europe, for the peasantry and serfs were a class completely apart. Does Russia belong in Europe or not? This is a question which still poses itself today, even though in different terms. From an incredibly wide knowledge of Russian history, art, literature and culture generally, Figes shows us the love/hate relationship which has endured for centuries: Russian feelings of inferiority when they compared themselves with what Europe had attained culturally and economically, and equally the Russian sense of purity and superiority when faced with what they perceived as our decadence…

Russians sought to imitate us, and then to derive and develop something better and more specifically Russian from their encounters with the West, but the pull (and the repulsion) has always been there. This ambivalence has been long-lasting as over centuries the country sought to define and understand itself in relation to the west. Is the famed Russian soul, the Russian psyche, really different from ours?

We eventually move on to the idea that Russians are somehow prone to collective emotion and political excess, which Figes illustrates by reference to the Populists of the 19^th century and the Bolsheviks of the 20^th. He sees a quasi-religious angle to the Russian revolution, anchored in the nation’s past. Soviets wrestled with how to transform the backwardness of Russian society, and their attempts were too radical and wide-ranging to have succeeded anywhere, perhaps least of all in such a backward nation. Excesses developed easily and were widespread.

Where the book falls down, in my estimation, is in the burden of too much detail, too much reference to the minutiae of various paintings, operas, ballets etc. In places it’s repetitive, in others it doesn’t make for clarity when you can’t see the paintings, for example; there are some illustrations included, but too few for the general reader to follow Figes’ analysis.

The section on Soviet art and culture feels very much tacked on to the rest of the book and not linked with Figes general thesis; clearly late capitalism and its effects were much more extreme in that country than in the rest of Europe, which links in with the idea that Russia did not go through the bourgeois phase, in the Marxist interpretation of history and economic development. I got the impression that Figes regards the art and culture of the Soviet era as an aberration; he is almost dismissive of it. He spends as much time on emigres as the homeland. However, he is interesting on artists’ experiences of exile, and how its effects were far broader than we can imagine.

Russia is obviously a country of extremes, and this must be connected with the sheer physical vastness of the country; even the USA, another vast and extreme nation in some ways, is only half the size. The church is very much a tool of the state; it reinforced Tsarist power, and was even invoked by Stalin in the darkest days of the Great Patriotic War. It is very different from Western Christianity, anchored in ritual, rather than based on theology.

It’s a useful book and I learned quite a lot from it; my sense of the background to Russian history is rather clearer, and yet the overall effect was not as coherent as I had hoped.