Rachel Cusk writes austere postmodern novels without plots, with nameless characters designated only by a single letter. Fortunately, her books are slRachel Cusk writes austere postmodern novels without plots, with nameless characters designated only by a single letter. Fortunately, her books are slender, so that you can easily carry them about and be noticed perusing them in coffeehouses in university towns. In Aftermath she seems to identify herself with Clytemnestra, though so far as one can tell the only harm her estranged spouse did to their daughters was to feed them ‘pizza and chicken curry from the supermarket’ instead of the gourmet meals he used to make, ‘pasty and boeuf bourguignon . . . his own mincemeat at Christmas . . . little parcels of ravioli . . . crimped . . . around the edges’. Actually, most children prefer simple meals to recipes out of Bon Appetit! I fear Cusk’s versions of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon and Sophocles’ Antigone (where she gives Antigone a brother named ‘Polylectes’) would get a Beta minus on a Classics exam, and she really should reread Genesis 18:23-33, where God does not ‘thunder at [Abraham] for having the temerity to hold an opinion’ but rather bargains with him like a rug buyer in a bazaar. Granted, no one is on oath to tell the truth when describing the wreck of a relationship, but minimal accuracy when displaying one’s classical attainments is good form....more
Victor Davis Hanson is both a Classical scholar and a military historian. When he ventures into commentary on contemporary political iussues, I sometiVictor Davis Hanson is both a Classical scholar and a military historian. When he ventures into commentary on contemporary political iussues, I sometimes find it difficult to share his opinions, but when writing about the past, he is always insightful and original. This book describes the fall of one Greek city state and three empires, the Carthaginian, Byzantine, and Aztec. And for both an amateur classicist and military history buff, I particularly enjoyed learning not only what happened to the losers, but also why the victors won. One thing struck me is that whilst the winners were thoroughly unattractive - especially in their unquestioned assumption that extirpating or enslaving the defeated is simply the right of a victor - both the Carthaginians and the Aztecs with their human sacrifices make the Roman and Spanish Empires look positively beneficent by comparison. Indeed Hellenism and Roman civilization were arguably great contributions to human history (especially from a Christian viewpoint). And in the case of the Aztecs, the Spanish Inquisition looks positively enlightened in contrast....more
Whilst the German theologians who resisted the Nazi state are yet celebrated, especially Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who came close as a Protestant can to beWhilst the German theologians who resisted the Nazi state are yet celebrated, especially Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who came close as a Protestant can to being canonized, the names of the German churchmen who embraced Hitler’s regime have mostly perished from the earth and their memorial is not to be found. I’d scarcely heard of Gerhard Kittel; it is his father’s name that figures on the titlepage of the BHS, the still standard edition of the Old Testament. And Paul Althaus and Emanuel Hirsh were new to me. But their careers are still instructive even for Americans, whether they think Donald Trump is King Cyrus, or the Antichrist. Their collaboration with the third Reich took different forms. Kittel was a scholar of the Hebrew sources of the New Testament. His expertise made him a useful consultant on what the Nazis called “the Jewish question” and though he had no active role in the “solution” the Nazis chose, he suffered a term of imprisonment after the war and died not long afterwards. Althaus tried to mediate between the Confessing Church, the German Protestants who rejected Naziism, and the German Christians, who whole-heartedly supported the New Order. Despite his attempts to accommodate Christianity to that New Order and his criticisms of the Confessing Church, Althaus lost faith in the Nazi cause before the war began and his wartime sermons exhibit a growing sense of national guilt. After the war he was cleared by the denazification board and allowed to continue his teaching career. Hirsch is the most fascinating, and perhaps the most opprobrious. He was an expert on Kierkegaard, though you’ll not find his name amongst famous Existentialist theologians such as Tillich and Bultmann, whom Hirsch excoriated as unpatriotic and un-German. You might say that Hirsch made the Kierkegaardian Leap of Faith, but it was a leap into Naziism. Kittel, Althaus, and Hirsch were all deeply attached to the idea of the German Volk, cognate with our word folk and usually translated as people. But there is no American, or British or even French equivalent. Until after the war, for many Germans it had the kind of reverential aura that many Americans give to the word democracy. So if one believed that Hitler was the embodiment of the Volk—the essence of National Socialism—one’s faith in Christ was in danger being subsumed by völkische ideology, as these three churchmen were. One suspects that contemporary hybrid Christians—nationalist, environmentalist or progressive (and the many other such varieties) may have much more in common with their purely secular fellow believers than with other Christians throughout the world....more
The first real world historic event I can recall from my childhood is a Pathe News report (yes, before television we watched 'newsreels' at the moviesThe first real world historic event I can recall from my childhood is a Pathe News report (yes, before television we watched 'newsreels' at the movies) of the Berlin Blockade. As a nine-year old I followed newspaper accounts of our forces advance towards the Yalu River and the resulting cataclysm when Chinese intervention punished MacArthur's hubris. For the fall of Dienbienphu we had Life magazine and of course the Vietnam War was a television nightly news staple. So I literally grew up with the conflicts recounted in this book and they proceeded throughout my lifetime - the book ends with an account of the first year of the Ukraine conflict. Our joint authors, a distinguished British historian and America's most successful (unfortunately that's not saying a lot) general officer, have created a fascinating though uneven book. (Delighted they seem to have agreed to call the season betwixt summer and winter 'autumn' however), held together by a definition of strategic success. I agree with one of their judgements I'd not seen expressed before, that the Vietnam War can actually be placed on the positive side of the ledge because postponing the Communist triumph from 1954 to 1975 saved much of Asia (especially Indonesia) from much worse. The book concludes with speculations on how drones, precision weapons, and AI will continue to affect warfare....more
For inhabitants of the secular sphere, reading Rumor Godden’s In This House of Brede is the closest we come to experiencing life in a cloistered religFor inhabitants of the secular sphere, reading Rumor Godden’s In This House of Brede is the closest we come to experiencing life in a cloistered religious community. But whilst Godden was assisted in writing her novel by actual members of the English Benedictine community, she was herself very much on the other side of the grille, not at all a ‘participant observer’. But when I saw Catherine Coldstream’s Cloistered: My Years as a Nun reviewed in the TLS, I was a much attracted to the name of the author as to the subject. And indeed she is the daughter of the English painter William Coldstream, whose most famous model was Sonia Brownell, also perhaps the model for Julia in George Orwell’s 1984, who married Orwell on his deathbed after serving as editorial assistant on Cyril Connolly’s Horizon. Catherine Coldstream’s conversion to Roman Catholicism and entrance into the religious life was greatly impelled by grief on the death of her father.
There is a literature going back to the Middle Ages displaying that monastic life is no safe refuge from the sins of the flesh and the devil, especially when we recall that Saint Paul classified slander, pride and envy amongst that category. From Coldstream’s account, though community life never quite descended to the level of Browning’s ‘Soliloquy in a Spanish Cloister’, cliques and favouritism became rampant. ‘We’ve always done it this way’ remains a shibboleth. More surprising to me was the rampant anti-intellectualism of the community. Many of Godden’s Benedictine nuns were engaged in cultural, artistic, and scholarly projects (the real-life prioress of Godden’s Benedictines wrote a marvellous biography of Helen Waddell, author of The Wandering Scholars, that treasured book on the Goliards). Coldstream’s order was thee discalced Carmelites of St John of the Cross and St Teresa of Avila, many of them found The Dark Night of the Soul and The Interior Castle too demanding. More surprising was the lack of spiritual direction—if you can’t find spiritual direction in a monastery, just where can you go? Coldstream found it regarded as poor form to share one’s difficulties and doubts with one’s superiors or other sisters. The incongruous phrase ‘macho spirituality’ seems appropriate to the attitude she encountered, something like the ‘suck it up and get with the programme!’ spirit one finds in the armed forces or a hospital emergency department.
Cloistered is a great suspense story as well. We know that Catherine Coldstream is now married and living in the world (Cambridge, happily) as a scholar and musician. But we are breathless to find out how her years in the monastery will unfold and how they will end. If you want to imagine a spiritual equivalent of The Colditz Story, her escape from this exterior and interior castle is riveting....more
We're currently reading Jay Shetty's Think Like a Monk in a spirituality reading group I belong to, and the author asks why we might chose to sail rouWe're currently reading Jay Shetty's Think Like a Monk in a spirituality reading group I belong to, and the author asks why we might chose to sail round the world alone. Many times in my sailing days I wondered about what such an adventure would be like. For myself, I doubt I possess the mental stability to face the loneliness and constant anxiety. The only single-handed sailor I had the pleasure of encountering was a very quiet and unassuming London solicitor named Mary Falk - you can find the obituary describing her accomplishments on Google. I sailed with her on a fully-crewed race. She was quite a stickler for safety and carefully steering the course. But single-handed round the world sailing also brought to mind another sailor who faked a round the world passage. Donald Crowhurst was a contestant in the Sunday Times Round-the-World nonstop single-handed race. As his trimaran Teignmouth Electron was supposed to be on her way to a triumphant final lap to the south coast of England, she was found by a passing motor vessel drifting calmly in the mid-Atlantic, abandoned. Examination of the log books revealed that the circumnavigation was faked. Crowhurst sent false radio reports of rounding the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Horn. His boat had never sailed beyond the South Atlantic and indeed, had made a secret landfall in South America that would have disqualified him. In addition to the log books and the recordings and video tapes he had made for the BBC, Crowhurst left behind thousands of words of delusional philosophical and theological ravings about God, Creation, and the meaning of human life. Apparently too fearful to face being exposed as a fraud, Crowhurst had jumped overboard. He had set sail on 31st October 1968, the deadline for starting, with an untested new boat that was barely completed, and had found a leak in the starboard hull that convinced him the boat couldn't survive a round-the-world voyage. But his marine electronics business faced failure, and so Crowhurst hit on the plan to win the prize money by faking his positions. Of course I asked myself what I might have done in his place. I have no doubt that I'd have radioed thar my boat was not seaworthy, sailed for the nearest port, and tried to sell the boat for enough to cover a plane ticket home. Honour would have been satisfied. But I realise that if I ever had attempted to sail alone round the world, it would have been to prove to myself that I was the kind of person who could do something like that. Crowhurst seems to have been both a Narcissist and what was then called a manic-depressive, though even allowing for his mental state it's hard to imagine how he could have tried to perpetrate such a fraud. But his voyage has earned its place amongst great stories of madness at sea....more
Chindits! That name still resonates in the Valhalla of famous formations, the creation of Brigadier Orde Wingate, a strange military genius who based Chindits! That name still resonates in the Valhalla of famous formations, the creation of Brigadier Orde Wingate, a strange military genius who based his strategic concepts on the Old Testament, detested bathing and held staff conferences in the nude, and when dressed wore a filthy uniform, carried a rifle like an infantry private, and wore a pith helmet that looked like a relic of the Zulu wars. His doctrine was that ordinary British and colonial troops could penetrate deep behind enemy lines and beat the Japanese at their own game of jungle warfare. And they did, although many of the survivors emerged as physical wrecks, and military historians still debate the value of their contribution to allied victory. Fighting for the allies were Englishmen and Scots and native soldiers of the British Indian Army from a variety of ethnicities and cultures, as well as both West African and East African colonial troops, Burmese and Burmese hill tribes, as well as Americans and Chinese. Their skilled and fanatical enemy were the forces of Imperial Japan, aided by their own Indian and Burmese allies. But Wingate was but one actor in a cast of military eccentrics: the “Supremo” Louis Mountbatten, an aristocrat with the looks of a matinee idol (he had been played in a movie by Noel Coward) and the intellect to match (he tried to give General Slim the sack), along with the American Colonel Phil Cochran who inspired the hero pilot in a comic strip (Flip Corkin in Terry and the Pirates) and provided Wingate with his own private air force and performed med-evac before helicopters were available with Dakota transports catching gliders with towing cables on the fly. (I’d love to have seen that.) The American commander was General “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell, who hated both the British and his nominal Chinese superior Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek (who did “too little generaling and too much issimoing” according to Stilwell).
Despite many of the most sterling military achievements of the Second World War, one wonders at the futility of the entire campaign. In the case of the Japanese effort to conquer not only Burma, but India too in Operation U-Go (which sounds like a truck-hire firm), their entire army was annihilated for no purpose, though they fought tenaciously to the death in obedience to the Imperial rescript that life is to be held lighter than a feather. The Americans and British were at cross-purposes. The British were fighting to save the Empire and avenge the surrender of Singapore. FDR hated the British Empire, but he wanted to aid the Chinese Nationalists and defeat Japan. Stilwell and the American regiment Merrill’s Marauders (who adopted Chindit tactics and trained for tropical warfare in the Caribbean) were supposed to open the Burma Road to supply bases in China from which American planes would bomb Japan. As it turned out, the Pacific island-hopping campaign would provide the Americans with the bases they needed to attack Japan, and end the war with the atomic bomb. The Americans thought their businesses would make lots of money trading with the former British colonies. Three years after the war, India and Burma were both independent nations, but run by doctrinaire socialists and neutralists who wanted nothing to do with American capitalism. And China was Communist. Perhaps if Britain and America had simply allowed Japan to extend the benefits of the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere to Burma and India, history have turned out much the same, with India a capitalistic democracy but governed by Hindu nationalists, and Burma (aka Myanmar) a military dictatorship with the daughter of the hero of national independence under house arrest. History does not play fair....more
When Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne adopted an infant girl they would name Quintana Roo, they considered whether she should be raised in full knowWhen Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne adopted an infant girl they would name Quintana Roo, they considered whether she should be raised in full knowledge of her status. Joan consulted her friend the film actress Diana Lynne, telling us: “Diana herself, it seemed, had been adopted, but this information had been withheld from her until she was twenty-one and it had become necessary for some financial reason that she know. Her adoptive parents had handled the situation by revealing the secret to (this had not seemed unusual at the time) Diana’s agent. Diana’s agent had handled the situation by taking Diana to lunch at (nor at the time had this) the Beverly Hills Hotel. Diana got the news in the Polo Lounge. She could remember fleeing into the bougainvillea around the bungalows, screaming.” After untangling the syntax of this sequence of three sentences, I glowed with pleasure.
Back in the 1980s, when the course in Advanced Expository Writing in the University of Iowa English Department was just beginning its evolution into what is now a full-blown graduate degree program in Nonfiction Writing, complete with a full-time director and its own building on campus, Joan Didion’s The White Album was a cult icon. Reading over the passage I’ve just quoted, I recalled why. Didion has broken practically every rule of good grammar and style, putting a parenthetical clause between a proposition and its object, then doing it again in the next sentence, both times with a demonstrative “this” with no antecedent, and then ending with those wonderful plosives in “bougainvillea” and “bungalows”—sheer stylistic genius. But as a memoir of Didion’s daughter Quintana Roo’s prolonged decline into death, Blue Nights is a most frustrating read. It starts with Quintana’s marriage at New York’s Cathedral of Saint John the Divine and her father’s bridal toast, where he recalled Quintana’s childhood. And strangely, most of her appearances in the rest of the book are as a child. You would not realize from Didion’s account that the bride was 37 years old—practically a mature matron. Looking at a Google image of the wedding couple with "Mr. and Mrs. John Gregory Dunn" (Didion used the traditional form for a wedding invitation) I couldn’t help but recall how a younger Didion skewered the shoddy taste of a Nancy Reagan or Bishop Pike. I had to turn to Tracy Daugherty’s biography of Didion to get some Idea of what kind of life Quintana Roo had led, and discovered she had not only graduated Barnard, but been at Bennington with Brett Easton Ellis and Donna Tartt. She could have inspired a character in The Secret History; I almost think I have a candidate.
For me, Blue Nights represents Didion’s best and also the worst. Stylistically smooth and elegant, full of the names of almost famous people you think you’re supposed to have heard of, but morally and spiritually vacuous. Indeed, the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine too always felt that way to me. God’s house, but God’s not home today, and no, we don’t know when He’ll be back. If ever. Didion herself had a small private funeral service there, using the 1928 Book of Common Prayer. Good form to the end....more
I've been reading this with a book club devoted to spirituality and its optimistic view of human nature has been an antidote to so much I read on war I've been reading this with a book club devoted to spirituality and its optimistic view of human nature has been an antidote to so much I read on war and catastrophe. It was cheering to see a refutation of the notorious Stanford prison and Milligram experiments in social psychology, that appeared to show how easily our natures are suggestible to do evil. And I too believe that we naturally like to do good and to help each other and assist strangers. But Bergman also has to deal with the reality of human evil, and he seems to find it in greed and in authority. Personally, I think much depends on setting. Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men remains for me an evil touchstone on how unlikely people do terrible things, but Nazi Germany encouraged them to bring out their worst. But recently I read a book showing that authority and group identity can be spiritually destructive even in a religious community....more
Though twentieth-century British fiction is my passion and principal amusement, I’ve never read much of Elizabeth Jane Howard. Family sagas like the CThough twentieth-century British fiction is my passion and principal amusement, I’ve never read much of Elizabeth Jane Howard. Family sagas like the Cazalet saga rarely attract me. I enjoyed her Getting it Right, especially when Gavin’s mum is thrilled rather than scandalised by finding Minerva in the house, mistakenly imagining she is an aristocrat. But Howard’s personal life involved some of my very favourite people. Most importantly she was the second wife of Kingsley Amis, the funniest writer in the English language. She was also the first Mrs. Peter Scott, whom I recall fondly as the stiff-upper-lipped skipper of the unfortunate America’s Cup challenger Sovereign in 1964. (I know it’s judgemental, but Jane’s feeling neglected as a war-time spouse because Peter was more interested in Oerlikon guns and fitting out the destroyer he commanded than in her strikes me as awfully selfish. Hadn’t she seen In Which We Serve?) Her lovers after Scott and before Amis seem to have included much of literary London, including Laurie Lee (Emma Smith was smarter to resist him), Arthur Koestler, and C. Day-Lewis. Amis was a semi-alcoholic (I write “semi” because if an “alcoholic” is someone who cannot give up drinking, Amis was one of those – I knew a number of them in my ocean racing days – to whom it never crossed their minds to try). He also seems to have been a total slob and a spoiled child who left all the household tasks to Jane. But his absolute devotion to the discipline and craft of writing hilarious stories redeems him, at least for me as a reader.
Artemis Cooper, along with her spouse and sometime collaborator Sir Anthony Beevor, is surely one of England’s best contemporary nonfiction writers, and this biography is fascinating. ...more
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