Nuclear Folly: A New History of the Cuban Missile Crisis
Serhii Plokhy, Allen Lane, 2021, 464 pages, £25
KEN BELL admires an unusually informed study of one of History’s nearest misses
Serhii Plokhy’s Nuclear Folly: A New History of the Cuban Missile Crisis is the first work to mine the KGB files that are stored in Ukraine. Out of this, Plokhy has synthesised a new understanding of the crisis which argues that neither side understood the other, and both operated on the basis of faulty intelligence.
Fidel Castro was a caudillo, rather than a Marxist, but he realised that if Paris is worth a mass then Cuba was certainly worth some Marxist rhetoric, so he decided to announce his conversion to the principles of Marxism-Leninism in the aftermath of his victory at the Bay of Pigs.
For Moscow, this was a dream come true, but it did create three issues that needed to be addressed quickly. The first was the need to keep Cuba communist, and the second was how to deter further American aggression against it. Finally, there was a need to keep Peking from seducing Havana into its version of communism.
The installation of medium range nuclear missiles, with the Soviet troops to man them, answered all those issues and gave Khrushchev the added bonus of finally being able to threaten the USA directly; the USSR in 1962 still lacked the intercontinental missiles that the USA had recently developed. Khrushchev remembered the way in which Kennedy had accepted the fact of a Berlin Wall and hoped that the Americans would do the same with Soviet missiles in Cuba, if they could be installed before the Americans discovered their presence.
Things began to go wrong almost immediately. The advance party that was sent to Cuba reported that the country was heavily wooded, and installing the missiles could be done under that forest canopy. When the missile troops arrived, they discovered that palm trees do not provide much cover and rain forests are too dense for large trucks to move through. The country lacked bridges that could stand the weight of the Soviet trucks, and even Soviet rations began to go bad in the tropical heat. The troops began to contract dysentery and the whole thing began to look like a farce before it had got off the ground.
Luckily for the Soviets, the decision was taken to install anti-aircraft missiles first. These were quickly discovered by the Americans, but they had expected them, so did not trouble themselves over the Soviet ships. This meant the strategic and tactical nuclear missiles could be set up courtesy of American misreading of what was actually going on.
When the Americans did find out, Kennedy’s reaction at first was hawkish. But he quickly realised that a nuclear world war was not in anyone’s interests so began to find a political solution. However, by then his aides and military were almost united in speaking for war, so the blockade of Cuban waters that he came up with seems to have been intended to buy time and keep the warmongers off his back until he learned exactly what Khrushchev was willing to concede. For his part, once Khrushchev realised that Cuba was far more important than Berlin to the Americans he was more than willing to reach an agreement, but the problem then became bringing that about against a backdrop of rising chaos.
For instance, an American U2 aircraft over Cuba was shot down seemingly against orders from Moscow. The commander of the unit was in his bed with dysentery, so a less senior officer, under extreme pressure as he and his men had not slept for days while they battled to get their antiaircraft missiles operational, gave the launch order.
At sea, a Soviet submarine had surfaced to recharge its batteries. It carried a nuclear torpedo, and control over that weapon was in the captain’s hands. It was the middle of the night when he went up to the conning tower to communicate with the American ships that surrounded him via a Morse lamp, and the USAF took the opportunity to ignore its orders not to do anything provocative and began to drop flares on the boat so photographs could be taken. The Russians thought that they were under attack, and the captain ordered a crash dive and the torpedo tubes to be flooded. Luckily, the man carrying the Morse lamp got stuck on the ladder and the captain was able to look back at the main American ship and read an apology from its captain. Had that man not been caught for a few seconds with his lamp, most of the American ships would have been destroyed by the nuclear weapon.
Back on land, Kennedy’s willingness to swap the Soviet missiles in Cuba for American ones in Turkey almost came to nothing when the Americans realised that the Turks might just object to a deal about their country that did not involve them, but Khrushchev agreed that part could be kept secret. Then Castro got in on the act and refused to allow American inspections of the Soviet missiles as they were loaded onto ships, so the Russians had to agree to inspections at sea. Both superpowers were quickly discovering that even junior partners could not be treated with that same indifference that the Americans used in central America and the Soviets in eastern Europe.
Yet, there was just enough to trade-off, and just enough willingness to do it, to allow Khrushchev to walk away with an American promise not to invade Cuba, which meant that it would remain a communist country. Awash with Soviet arms and subsidies, Cuba ignored Chinese entreaties and remained a reliable Soviet ally until the USSR finally ceased to exist in 1991.
However, as Plokhy shows, that peaceful end to the crisis was a matter of good luck rather than good management. His work takes us through this period with a lucidity that allows his readers to finally make sense of those autumn days in 1962 when the Cold War almost became a catastrophe.
KEN BELL is a Mancunian who fetched up in Mexico, and who now lives in shabby retirement in Edinburgh. He writes as a hobby in his twilight years; a fuller biography can be found at his Amazon author page
The U.S.S. Constitution, “Old Ironsides”, one of the United States Navy’s first frigates
The Gun, the Ship and the Pen: Warfare, Constitutions and the Making of the Modern World
Linda Colley, Profile, 512 pages, £25
KEN BELL finds a new way of looking at global constitutional history
A history of constitution making does not sound like a page turner at first glance, but in the hands of Linda Colley it becomes one, as she upends the notion that constitutions are necessarily liberal documents that helped only in the creation of the modern nation state. For her, their modern origins are imperial and grew out of the clash of empires in the 18th century. Many were not even born out of liberal thought; Catherine the Great spent long hours drafting a guide for legislatures that aimed at putting autocratic rule on a constitutional footing.
One of the questions that historians always seek to answer is why events occur at a particular moment in history, and not either before or after that moment. For Colley, the desire to write constitutions came about as a result of the “hybrid warfare” of the period, with empires clashing on land, at sea, and all across the globe. Those wars were costly in terms of lives lost, to say nothing of the financial terms. During the Seven Years’ War from 1756-1763, “Prussia lost an estimated 500,000 troops and civilians out of a pre-war population of 4.5 million.” The cost of those global wars to the taxpaying class was enormous, as just to build a 72-gun man of war took over 3,000 mature oak trees, along with acres of canvas, miles of rope and tons of iron for the nails to hold it all together.
Giving men constitutional rights made them more likely to put on a uniform and risk their lives for a cause. That is why so many generals were also constitutionalists, from Toussaint Louverture in Haiti to Napoleon Bonaparte in France, along with many of the men who met in Philadelphia in 1789 to draft the American constitution. At the same time, the men who paid the taxes would be more inclined to pay up with only minimal grumbling, if they had the right to vote for the governments that were levying the taxes to fight the wars.
The men who created the American Constitution met in secret, but as soon as the document had been finalised someone leaked it to the press. Then the jobbing printers got hold of it and ran off cheap pamphlets that contained the draft constitution along with essays that defended or attacked it. Ships carried these types of political works across the oceans, so what began as a Western affectation was quickly picked up by other cultures who wanted to get in on the cult of modernity. Simon Bolivar and the generals in South America swiftly created constitutions for the new republics that emerged in the wake of the defeat of the Spanish Empire and as Japan rushed to modernise from the middle of the nineteenth century, a constitution was swiftly adopted based upon the Prussian version.
Colley’s argument that these constitutions were often made by conservative military men, who wanted to ensure that other men would either serve in wars or pay for them, can also be used to explain why Great Britain did not adopt a written constitution. The English Civil Wars and the ‘Glorious Revolution’ that followed a generation later had already settled and legitimised the English, then British, constitutional dispensation. The King reigned with the consent of Parliament, and not by divine right. His Protestant subjects had the right to carry arms thanks to legislation passed in the wake of William of Orange’s accession. So the British already had what the rest were battling to obtain, just not in a single document. They also had Jeremy Bentham who was only too happy to offer advice to the political exiles who made London their home, and who could then use the London printing trade to produce their new documents and British ships to carry them wherever they needed to go.
As with most globalist histories, the odd error is bound to creep in, so the Americanists will immediately spot the mistakes in her comments about American technology during the Civil War. “Quick-loading rifles using high-calibre bullets that were potentially lethal at 600 yards or more replaced older, far less accurate, muskets,” she claims. I suspect that she meant to write high-velocity, rather than high-calibre, which is not true, either, but aside from that, both sides used muskets throughout the war, with the Union fielding Springfield rifles and the Confederacy the British Enfield. The fact that they had rifled barrels does not mean they were not also muskets, as they were loaded from the muzzle.
The claim that the Confederacy had a rail network similar to that in the United States will also raise a few eyebrows. The South had about 10,000 miles of track, with a myriad of gauges and very little that linked up to anywhere else; the aim was to get cotton to a river or port, rather than connect the South’s few urban areas. So the railways that ran into Richmond, Virginia, from the south could not then go through to the north as there was a gap of several miles in that city between northern and southern lines, that was covered by draymen with carts. But however enjoyable such pedantry may be, minor details of this kind do not detract at all from Colley’s fascinating and highly original argument.
KEN BELL is a Mancunian who fetched up in Mexico, and who now lives in shabby retirement in Edinburgh. He writes as a hobby in his twilight years; a fuller biography can be found at his Amazon author page
Ralph Geis (ed.), Hirmer, 2020, hardback, 336pp, fully illus., €45/£42/$50
ALEXANDER ADAMS immerses himself in disquiet and dreamscapes
Berlin’s Alte Nationalgalerie exhibition of Belgian Symbolists, Decadence and Dark Dreams: Belgian Symbolism, closed last month. As few were able to attend, for obvious reasons, this article will review the exhibition from the catalogue1.
Symbolism – like its precursor, Romanticism – is a school that thrived, and had its premier exponents reside, in Northern Europe. Belgium produced some of the best Symbolist art in the era 1860-1914. Artists of the new nation of Belgium in search of an identity reached back to the Flemish Primitives as a strong regional model and nation achievement.
Symbolism was a rejection of the deracinating impact of greater homogeneity in industrial production, education, and news dissemination, and the dwindling of traditional religion, farming and attachment to the land and homeland
Symbolism was a rejection of the deracinating impact of greater homogeneity in industrial production, education, and news dissemination, and the dwindling of traditional religion, farming and attachment to the land and homeland. In the same way the Arts & Crafts movement was a reaction against industrialisation, Symbolism was a reaction against rationalism.
Symbolism had two leading mediums: art and literature. The best Symbolism includes Maeterlinck, Mallarmé, Rodenbach and Verlaine, all of which followed the example of the pre-eminent spirit of Symbolist literature: Baudelaire. For artists, there was a resistance to the domination of portraiture and the preoccupations of the picture-buying middle class, as evidenced in the Salon.
What are the themes of Symbolism? Eros and Thanatos: sex/love and death. These are frequently mingled in art which plays on the fear of venereal disease (the prostitute as Death) and death and the maiden. One also finds an attraction-repulsion complex regarding death, wherein artists fear death but seek the endless slumber of oblivion. Others? Vanitas and memento mori, the supernatural, primal fear of night, dreams, the grotesque, the outcast, criminal, flanêur. Deviant social, political and sexual behaviour – often in a context heroizing or celebrating it – becomes a key feature of the Decadent Movement, a sub-group of Symbolism. States of narcolepsy, hypnosis, hysteria and ecstasy, all beyond conscious control and revealing the darker urges and hitherto hidden truths. Unorthodox approaches to religion meant that Symbolists were involved (on levels superficial and profound) with occultism, Theosophy, Satanism and Paganism and fringe sects of Catholicism. Non-Western and non-Abrahamic religions are subjects of interest.
In other words, it was a hugely diffuse movement. One can spot it easily enough, even if one has trouble pinning down all its qualities, and finds it impossible to identify a unifying principle.
Featured artists include Félicien Rops, Jean Delville, James Ensor, George Minne, Fernand Khnopff, Xavier Mellery, Léon Spilliaert and Léon Frédéric. Prints were important (especially those of Ensor and Khnopff). Sculpture – especially polychrome stone carving and stone-metal busts – by Minne, Khnopff and Charles van der Stappen confirmed the breadth of Symbolism’s versatility. Symbolism found channels to intellectuals and public through exhibiting associations Les XX (1884-93) and La Libre Esthétique (1894-1914). Symbolist art frequently appeared in art journals and had wide currency through book illustrations, not least for Baudelaire’s books. Many public commissions required symbolism, even though the art that derived from such public schemes is a touch generic and has little to distinguish itself from standard academic and civic art.
Nocturnal interior by Xavier Mellery
William Degouve de Nuncques’s moonlit views of Venice and Bruges are atmospheric and less familiar than Spilliaert’s nocturnal street views of Ostend. Mellery’s dim nocturnal interiors of churches and house stairwells are masterful scenes of crepuscular tension. They have a dreamlike quality and beautiful finish – detailed enough to be immersive, but not so polished as to lose their liveliness of facture. The low-key disquiet of these scenes is very effective. Mellery’s public commissions include images featuring rather lumpen angels against gilded grounds, which are illustrated but excluded from the exhibition, happily.
Ensor is represented by works from his youthful and mature periods. His painterly approach marks him out from his compatriots. Ensor’s skeleton and mask pictures are very appropriate for this exhibition, even though Ensor as an artist is very mixed and individualistic.
Khnopff is the dominant presence in this selection. His paintings and drawings are well known. Caresses (1896) is the classic oddity of Belgian Symbolism. A cheetah with a woman’s head nuzzles a male warrior, who has a female face. It is absolutely ridiculous, yet iconic. Two scenes of satanic manifestations by Rops, featuring female nudes, are complemented by prints from the suite Les Sataniques (1882). Rops’s imagination attains the perversity of a true libertine in the latter. Von Stuck’s women are generally types – with the exception of a portrait of actress Tilla Durieux in character – and perform the role of dangerous seducers. In Berlin, his work is usefully paired with that of Böcklin. Here we see him near Khnopff’s eternal woman, based on his sister. Art by peripheral artists such as the Pre-Raphaelites shows how Belgium (a geographical and intellectual hub) was connected to other countries’ art scenes. Spilliaert’s nocturnes, marines and figure pictures (as seen recently in London) are excellent and ambitious, as a whole.
Supplemented by classic Symbolist paintings by non-Belgian artists, including Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead (1883), Edvard Munch’s Jealousy (1913), Gustave Moreau’s Oedipus the Traveller (c. 1888), von Stuck’s Tilla Durieux as Circe (c. 1900), as well as paintings by Klimt and others. There are mistakes. Vilhelm Hammershøi’s Interior Strandgade 30 (1901) is a nice painting but it does not carry the charge of Mellery’s interiors, which was clearly the comparison the curators were making. A mysterious atmosphere is not enough to make a piece of art Symbolist. Belgian Antoine Wiertz’s La Belle Rosine (1847) is a foundational work and perhaps the best proto-Symbolist paintings, as haunting as anything made later.
The art selected is excellent and a tour de force of Symbolism’s highlights, as well as including lesser known artists. The sculptures – principally busts of young women as enigmatic allegorical personages – remind us of the importance of that medium in 1900. The catalogue includes short essays and many comparative illustrations, as well as full-page illustrations. The biographies of more obscure artists are welcome; there is no bibliography.
ALEXANDER ADAMS is an artist, art critic, novelist and poet. His most recent book is Artivism: The Battle for Museums in the Era of Postmodernism (Societas/Imprint Academic, 2022)
This article first appeared in The Jackdaw, and is reproduced with permission. [↩]
KEN BELL says a prominent Remainer still doesn’t comprehend Brexit
I have just finished reading Heroic Failure and Three Years In Hell, both by Fintan O’Toole, which is good for you as it means you don’t have to. I was attracted to these volumes by the fact that O’Toole as an Irishman might bring something new to the pro-EU debate, but unfortunately all he does is regurgitate lines British writers have already done to death.
Three Years In Hell is the lesser volume, and the easiest to dismiss, since it is essentially a diary covering dates in the years 2016 to 2019. Most of the entries became moot once Boris Johnson took over, so the entries that deal with Theresa May are little more than space fillers. Much is made in both books of the supposed fact that Brexit was an ‘English revolution’ – an engagingly off-the-wall line the Guardian emits regularly.
In the first place, the Brexit plebiscite was specifically set up as an all-UK vote. That is why Nicola Sturgeon could scamper off to campaign for ‘Remain’ in southern England. Now, you cannot have an all-UK vote and then dismiss its results because you come from an area that ended up on the losing side. Well, you can, if you are Nicola Sturgeon, but that does not mean that the rest of us have to take your whining seriously. That applies to writers as well as politicians, by the way.
Secondly, and this is where the much longer Heroic Failure takes over, to dismiss the Brexit vote as being a purely English victory when proportionally as many Welsh voters supported Brexit is to dismiss the people of Wales with an airy wave of the hand, which is what O’Toole does repeatedly. Not just Wales, either – pretty much anyone who is not part of the Guardian-reading metropolitan bubble is only referred to in passing. Thus, when discussing the makeup of the Brexit vote, he makes great play of the English middle class component and tries to slight the much larger working class element by saying that a majority of them were working class Conservative voters already! That may be the case, but it only leads us to a question of why did people who had historically voted Labour decide to switch parties, something which started to happen in 1997? It may be that Labour has changed and they haven’t. O’Toole does not even raise that theme in his books, being content to dismiss working class Brexiteers as people engaged in an act of self-harm.
A whole chapter of Heroic Failure is devoted to Boris Johnson’s journalistic pieces devoted to mocking the EU, with O’Toole then pointing out the errors and, by implication, the stupidity of the plebs who believed those tales. This theme is not original to O’Toole, but it is what his readers believe, just as Boris’s believed his lines about prawn-flavoured crisps. Actually, Boris was on fairly solid ground with his EU reports, because even if he got some details wrong, there was a greater truth that he got right. When we joined the European Economic Community we were told that it was a big trading bloc and nothing that it did would ever affect us in any way. It was all about trade, nothing more.
Then we noticed that local council jobsworths were giving grief to market traders who wanted to sell their produce in pounds and ounces. We noticed that our children were coming home from school and talking about heat in Celsius and distance in metres. We battled to keep beer and milk in pints and road markings in miles, but in our hearts we knew that all we had bought was time, and that the jobsworths were just licking their lips at the thought of earning a tasty butty as they forced us to think the European way.
This brings me close to the end, with O’Toole convinced that the Brexit vote was due in no small measure to a desire to recreate the British Empire. It wasn’t, of course. It was a desire by millions of people, many of whom had never voted before and probably haven’t since, to be allowed to live their lives as they wanted under the jurisdiction of politicians who may be dubious characters – but they are our dubious characters and we can get rid of them every four or five years if we are bored with their faces. The EU may not really have instructed its provincial legislatures to enact laws against prawn-flavoured crisps, but the story illustrated a great truth that Brussels did order Westminster around on many issues, and Westminster did duly enact the legislation as instructed.
One day a pro-Brussels writer will investigate the mindset of the British people who voted freedom’s way, and a light will come on in his mind. He can then pass this information on to his readers, and his side will finally start to come to terms with the reasons for their defeat. Alas, Fintan O’Toole is not that writer.
KEN BELL is a Mancunian who fetched up in Mexico, and who now lives in shabby retirement in Edinburgh. He writes as a hobby in his twilight years; a fuller biography can be found at his Amazon author page
ALEXANDER ADAMS revisits the rich oeuvre of one of 20th century France’s finest thinkers
Albert Camus (1913-1960) confessed that he had one wellspring of inspiration: his Algerian childhood. His silent unlettered mother, his absent father (killed in the Great War) and the ever-present warmth of the sun and the presence of the sea: all these were the foundations for his insights into the world:
A man’s work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened. This is why, perhaps, after working and producing for twenty years, I still live with the idea that my work has not even begun.
Ironically, Camus would be dead less than two years later, not even 50, killed in a car accident.
This idea of a return to an immutable emotional locus is something Camus reprises in the 1958 introduction to The Wrong Side and the Right Side, some of his earliest writings. This is the first part of Personal Writings, which also includes the 1939 collection Nuptials (Noces) and Summer (L’Été) of 1954. The essays of The Wrong Side and the Right Side (L’Envers et l’Endroit, previously translated as Betwixt and Between) were written 1935-6 and published in 1937 in Algeria. The book was initially little known – partly due to the low edition size – but Camus’s receipt of the Nobel Prize in 1957 turned French acclaim into international demand. The increase in attention led to Camus agreeing to a reissue of the book in 1958. Writing the introduction and re-reading the texts of The Wrong Side and the Right Side also inspired Camus’ last novel The First Man, published posthumously in 1994.
Camus held to his youthful arguments but found their forms “clumsy”. “I can confess that for me this little book has considerable value as testimony.” He also thought that in that roughness, he revealed too much of himself:
Clumsiness and disorder reveal too much of the secrets closest to our hearts; we also betray them through too careful a disguise.
The pieces are partly essay, partly story, partly memoir, each with the air of a parable.
Suddenly he realizes that tomorrow will be the same, and, after tomorrow, all the other days. And he is crushed by this irreparable discovery. It’s ideas like this that kill one, men kill themselves because they them – or, if they are young, they turn them into epigrams.
Thus, the youthful Camus is able to ironise his insight. The author dips into his familiarity with the legends of the Greeks, mentioning stories well known and obscure.
There are prose sketches of his native Algiers. The biographical element is ever present. He describes his mother’s silence and simplicity, which held talismanic significance for him of the good person who resists the buffets of fortune. He mentions the fate of his father:
Probably he was very ordinary. Besides, he had been very keen to go to war. His head was split open in the battle of the Marne. Blinded, it took him a week to die; his name is listed on the local war memorial.
‘Death in the Soul’ describes a formative experience. Camus toured Prague, speaking only a little German – which many inhabitants did not speak – and felt ill, wandering around the landmark churches and museums. In the room next to his was a dead body. A male guest had died (Camus supposed due to suicide) and Camus saw the body when it was discovered. Banality, suffering and mortality co-exist, lacking inherent meaning. Only in retrospect did their proximity did the experiences mean anything consequential.
Nuptials contains four lyrical essays set in North Africa and Italy. It contains some beautiful description of the landscape and buildings of the coast.
The violent bath of sun and wind drained me of all strength. I scarcely felt the quivering of wings inside me, life’s complaint, the weak rebellion of the mind. Soon, scattered to the four corners of the earth, self-forgetful and self-forgotten, I am the wind and within it, the columns and the archway, the flagstones warm to the touch, the pale mountains around the deserted city. And never have I felt so deeply and at one and the same time so detached from myself and so present in the world.
Camus dwells on what he understands of life, ideas that will inform his Existentialist ideas of the 1940s and 1950s:
I tell myself: I am going to die, but this means nothing, since I cannot manage to believe it and can only experience other people’s death. I have seen people die. Above all, I have seen dogs die.
Not a profound thought, but a true one. He takes the insight as a call to live well every day. Sometimes he finds more unexpected truths –
Everyone wants the man who is still searching to have already reached his conclusions.
Camus took his morals from the working-class district of Belcourt, Algiers.
They have their code of morality, which is very well defined. You “don’t let you mother down”. You see to it that your wife is respected in the street. You show consideration to pregnant women. You don’t attack an enemy two to one, because “that’s dirty”. If anyone fails to observe these elementary rules “He’s not a man”, and that’s all there is to it. This seems to me just and strong.
A 1939 travelogue lauds Oran as ready to become a hub of international culture – “Oran, a happy and realistic city, no longer needs writers. It is waiting for tourists.” It is a sad hope that failed. The nightmare of civil war, exodus of the colonists, mismanagement under independence and further civil strife has obliterated Algeria from the world’s consciousness. Oran still awaits its tourists. Camus had odd criteria for a holiday destination. “All the bad taste of Europe and the Orient meets in Oran.” The cafés are dirty but cheap; amenities are crude; the youth follow fashions picked up from American movies.
Camus is not being only satirical – although he is; he is suggesting one gains as much understanding of the world by observing the streets of this ordinary town as the glories of Italy or Greece. As Camus later admits,
Sometimes, in Paris, when people I respect ask me about Algeria, I feel like crying out: “Don’t go there.” Such joking has some truth in it. For I can see what they are expecting and know they will not find it. And, at the same time, I know the attractions and subtle power of this country, its insinuating hold on those who linger, how it immobilizes them first by ridding them of questions and finally by lulling them to sleep with everyday life.
The companion volume, Committed Writings, is very different in tone and content. It is a collection of more polemical pieces: Letters to a German Friend, ‘Reflections on the Guillotine’ and ‘The Nobel Speeches’. The former is four articles published clandestinely in occupied France in the journal Combat. They critique Nazi ideology and the treatment by German occupying forces of the French. Although they address the recipient as “you”, Camus explains,
When the author of these letters says “you”, he means not “you Germans” but “you Nazis”. When he says “we”, this signifies not always “we Frenchmen” but sometimes “we free Europeans”
He analyses how the Nazis might see the French:
I know, you think that heroism is alien to us. You are wrong. It’s just that we profess heroism and we distrust it at the same time. We profess it because ten centuries of history have given us knowledge of all that is noble. We distrust it because ten centuries of intelligence have taught us the art and blessings of being natural.
Camus seems to set up a false dichotomy between the value of heroism and the value of peace. Peace comes from a willingness to defend one’s land and people with adequate controlled savagery and endure suffering.
As these texts are intended as moral arguments, they function quite differently from the lyrical discourses of The Wrong Side and the Right Side. They are argumentative, yet no response from the supposed recipients, the German occupiers, would have been expected. Camus is arguing his points without expectation of counterpoint. His generalisations are rather grand; instances given could be actual, inaccurate or invented. While one sympathises with the position of the author and the occupied French, these arguments are not especially strong as arguments, whatever their merits as utterances of moral superiority and personal resolution. These are the weakest pieces in the two books.
The experience of national doubt and being detached from the certainties of tradition inculcated a suspicion of the given standards of French society after the Great War. The rapid defeat of the Second World War and the sight of many compatriots collaborating with the occupying army was the immediate spur for Existentialism and Absurdism. For Camus, the absurdity came from man without God, country, king or tradition, forced to find meaning in a universe both inhospitable and without objective morals. Camus’s humanism came – paradoxically – from the barbarity and cowardice of war and occupation. When God and the generals turned their backs upon France, it was the ordinary man (at great risk to himself) who found meaning in sacrificing his life so that his compatriots might go free. Camus’s experience of the war, during which he put his life at risk in the resistance movement, and his reading of Kafka’s The Trial, that shaped his Absurdism. The Trial is a parable of an everyman caught in a system that judges and sentences without transparency. It is, of course, a reflection upon life.
‘Reflections on the Guillotine’ (1957) is an essay on capital punishment, which accompanied a text by Arthur Koestler. Camus’s father apparently witnessed a public guillotining, which he found distressing. The account of his father’s reaction fascinated Camus his whole life. Camus’s argument against capital punishment in France and her colonies is interesting and well-argued. One argument against state killing, which was no longer public in France after a 1939 execution (quite a late date for a public execution), is that the very concealment of the horror of killing sustained support for the act because supporters did not have the opportunity to confront the reality. He adds the remarkable fact that a vast majority of the executed had, before committing their crimes, attended a public execution. (James Boswell had confessed his fascination with attending executions, whilst finding the compulsion degrading.) This tends to undermine the argument that the death penalty – and its spectacle – provides a deterrent against crime.
‘The Nobel Speeches’ covers Camus thoughts on the role of art during the Cold War and the responsibilities of writers –
All artists must find the solution to this problem according to their sensitivities and abilities. The greater an artist’s revolt against the reality against the reality of the world, the greater the weight of that reality needed to counterbalance it. But that weight can never overpower the unique requirements of the artist.
He was positive about the importance of art.
Tyrants know that great works embody a force for emancipation that is only mysterious to those who do not worship art. Every great work of art makes humanity richer and more admirable, and that is its only secret.
The speeches feature his political outlook –
What characterizes our times, in fact, is the tension between contemporary sensitivities and the rise of the impoverished masses. We know they exist, whereas before, we tended to ignore them. And if we are aware of them, it is not because the elites, artistic elites or others, have become better.
This awareness also leaves artists prey to the desire to display false class solidarity and to mouth expected political pieties, in contradiction from their experience and insight. The explicit social function of art can conflict with honesty and integrity, both of the artwork and the creator.
All considered, on the evidence here, it is baffling that a writer of Camus’s intellect and unvarnished insight could have believed that anarchism and non-centralised socialism to be anything other than unrealistic responses to the truth of human head and human heart. It could be that Camus’s optimism regarding the human spirit outstripped his judicious consideration and one might fault him for not his Absurdism but his overestimation of the power of rationalism, in the face of all the evidence Camus himself marshalled in these essays. Readers of these excellent new editions will be able to assess that point themselves.
ALEXANDER ADAMS is an artist, art critic, novelist and poet. His most recent book is Artivism: The Battle for Museums in the Era of Postmodernism (Societas/Imprint Academic, 2022)
Colin Wilson, Eyewear Publishing, 2018, 412 pages, £16.65
GOMERY KIMBER welcomes a resurgence of interest in one of the cleverest ‘Angry Young Men’
If the novelist, philosopher and critic, Colin Wilson is remembered at all it is as one of the ‘Angry Young Men’, and for his first book, The Outsider, (1956) – “the definitive study of alienation, creativity, and the modern mind”, as it is described on the front cover of the Victor Gollancz paperback that lies on my desk. And if The Outsider made Wilson’s reputation, it was the media circus surrounding the ‘Angries’ which destroyed it. When his second book, Religion and the Rebel, appeared the following year, highbrow critics who had lauded The Outsider were quick to recant and declare Wilson a fraud.
But there is much more to Wilson than half-remembered newspaper publicity from the 1950s, as this republished volume, Eagles and Earwigs, attests. The book originally appeared in 1965, and Todd Swift, PhD of Eyewear Publishing is to be commended for producing such a handsome volume (I thought I’d purchased a paperback copy, and so was delighted to receive this well-designed, well-printed hardback). It is worth quoting a paragraph from Dr Swift’s Introduction, as it both gives an overview of Wilson the writer and mirrors my own attitude to him:
As I have written elsewhere, I believe Colin Wilson to be a visionary thinker and writer of at least near-genius, whose reputation, like that of a fellow outsider fascinated by extreme states of consciousness, science, and mystery – Poe – has equally been side-lined. He is a competent stylist, capable of writing exceptionally readable books, a brilliant collector of both facts and anecdotal wonders, but also a master analyst, able to distil and refine what he has read and thought about.
Eagles and Earwigs, a collection of essays of existential criticism, is indeed a showcase of Colin Wilson’s admirable talents. The book is divided into three parts, the first being titled, ‘Literature and Philosophy’, and containing essays on the modern hero, phenomenology and literature, and the existential temper of the modern novel. What, then, is existential criticism?
Gary Lachman, author of a biography of Wilson, explains in the Preface:
It is concerned with how a writer sees the world, his actual perception of it, and with his or her qualifications for making general assessments about that mysterious thing, life. As Wilson writes, for him, it is “…necessary to scrutinize the writer’s qualifications for imposing his vision on his contemporaries”
Existential criticism is an examination of that vision, to decide how much of reality it incorporates. Or conversely,
…it examines how far a writer’s attitude toward the world is parochial, based on some temperamental defect of vision
Existential criticism therefore differs from traditional academic literary criticism which concerns itself primarily with technique, style, and with the influence of writers on each other. When compared to more recent critical approaches, such as those of Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes, the difference is even greater. Postmodernism and deconstructionism see no merit in examining the life experiences of the novelist in order to throw light on the novel; the text is to be considered only in and of itself, as a self-contained entity.
Wilson’s brand of literary analysis is based on Edmund Husserl’s insight that perception is intentional, and since Husserl was the founder of the phenomenological school, Lachman suggests that existential criticism might more accurately be called “phenomenological criticism”. For Wilson, intentionality was of fundamental importance. Human beings not only have perceptions, but a “will to perceive”. Intentionality reveals reality. The stronger our intention, the more it reveals. It is the difference between the vision of a poet like William Blake and that of nihilists such as Samuel Beckett, who, like Oblomov, could see no reason to get out of bed in the morning.
The second part of the book is comprised of essays on writers who interested Wilson, and upon whom he employs his existential critical technique. Some, like Hemingway, Bernard Shaw, and Henry Williamson, are familiar names; others, such as L H Myers and David Lindsay, less so.
L H Myers, by William Rothstein
Myers was the author of The Near and the Far, the first novel of a tetralogy. For a while, Myers was regarded as a member of the Bloomsbury group, then became a communist and broke with most of his old friends. He committed suicide in 1944, which may have been due to a fear that he had cancer. According into his friend L P Hartley he was always something of a hypochondriac, a fact the traditional literary critic may disregard but which Wilson, the existential critic, does not:
The contemporary with whom he has most in common is Aldous Huxley, and even more than Huxley he is an intellectual essayist rather than a creative writer
Wilson finds him a frustrating novelist.
In the early chapters of any of his books one has sense of being in the hands of a true novelist, but as the novels progress, they seem to lose direction, and the characters and their actions become more and more arbitrary; finally they peter out like a stream disappearing into the sand
Why then does Wilson hold Myers in such high esteem, regarding The Near and the Far as probably one of the half dozen great novels of the 20th century? It is because Myers was tormented by the existential Lebensfrage, and his books are attempts to grapple with it.
World-rejection is one of the fundamental constituents of [such a writer], even though he may eventually overcome it and become a life affirmer. Myers belongs to this . . . class, and all his work is a drama of world-rejection and the struggle to affirm.
The meaning of the novel’s title is explained on the first page of the novel. Prince Jali, Wilson writes,
…stands on the balcony of a palace and experiences the sense of delight and awe at the sight of the desert and distant mountains. The desert has always fascinated him; evidently it was a symbol for Myers as it was for T E Lawrence – a symbol of freedom from the sticky prison of one’s own humanity.
Jali reflects that
…there were two deserts: one that was a glory for the eye, another that it was weariness to trudge. Deep in his heart he cherished the belief that someday the near and afar would meet . . . one day he would be vigorous enough to capture the promise of the horizon. Then, instead of crawling like an insect on a little patch of brown sand, swift as the deer he would speed across the filmy leagues.
For Wilson, Myers had here
…found a symbol to state the most fundamental problem of human existence. Most human beings have had glimpses of ‘the promise of the horizon’; but when they investigate and discover that the reality is hard and dull, they usually assume that promise was an illusion.
Wilson believed the answer lay in a positive vitality.
If one were strong enough, healthy enough, it might not be necessary to trudge so painfully through the present. This is the answer that Nietzsche suggested in Thus Spoke Zarathustra – the idea of great health. If human beings could jar themselves out of the self-pity that is so fundamentally a part of the human condition, if they could cease to nurse a certain amount of weakness to furnish them with an excuse for opting out should life prove too difficult, there might be some chance of living in a present that is more like the poet’s vision of ‘the promise of the horizon’. The main problem so far has been that the poets have been weak and sensitive men, and have simply lacked the courage to start the work of self-discipline.
And here Wilson returns to Myers the hypochondriac: “one knows in advance that his quest will be a failure”. For all Myer’s independence in rejecting the Bloomsbury set,
…he was never able to rid himself of our modern tendency to identify strength with brutality and stupidity, and weakness with sensitivity and intelligence.
David Lindsay is another Wilson favourite. He believed that Lindsay’s “gnostic” fantasy novel, A Voyage to Arcturus, was nothing less than a masterpiece and its author a writer of genius. The traditional literary critic may well balk at this assessment since Lindsay’s prose is so amateurish. But to the existential critic this is of little concern. What matters is the sweep of the author’s vision. Wilson states,
Literature may be divided into two kinds: one accepts the values and limits of the ‘natural standpoint’; the other is always striving to get beyond them, to probe the question of existence itself. For the existential critic, the first kind must always be regarded as of a lower order, even though most of the world literary masterpieces belong to it.
For Wilson, A Voyage to Arcturus is literature of the second kind, and David Lindsay is revealed as a master existentialist, seeing through the everyday world we take for granted to the reality beneath, a vital actuality that Lindsay presents to the reader with such skill that what we take for ‘reality’ is brought starkly into question.
Wilson’s initial reaction to Ayn Rand was dismissive, rating her as “a kind of modern Marie Corelli, much given to preaching and grandiose language”. But when he made a concerted effort to read Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, he changed his mind:
I had to admit I had done Miss Rand a considerable injustice. Atlas Shrugged, having a great deal in common with A Brave New World, is a tirade against collectivism and government interference with individual freedom, but the heroes of Huxley . . . are little men, modest souls [e.g. Huxley’s Gumbril: “I glory in the name of earwig”]. Ayn Rand’s book has a romantic sweep, and undeniable grandeur.
When Wilson attempted to contact Rand, sending her some of his books, he discovered that the grandeur extended to her person. Try as he might, he could not bypass her gatekeeper, Nathaniel Branden.
This kind of self-importance was foreign to Wilson himself. The third part of the book relates how, after sickening of the media circus around the ‘Angry Young Men’, he left London for Cornwall. He bought a house there and raised a family, and over the next 50 years produced more than 100 books, including the seven volume Outsider Cycle. In The Age of Defeat (1959; retitled The Stature of Man in the USA) and The Strength to Dream (1962), he further outlined his ideas about existential criticism. Wilson liked nothing more than to be left alone to think and to write; trips to London brought on bouts of “people-poisoning”. But unlike Ayn Rand, he was easy to contact and happy to correspond with his admirers. He was certainly encouraging of this particular tyro.
Colin Wilson died, aged 82, in 2013. Since then, there has been a resurgence of interest in the man and his work. His books are being published in new editions, both at home and in translation. His bibliographer, Colin Stanley, has organised Colin Wilson conferences at Nottingham University, where Wilson’s manuscripts and books have been collected. His novel, Adrift In Soho, has been turned into a feature film by Pablo Behrens, and a documentary film of his life has recently been crowdfunded.
Wilson’s prediction, that in the future there would be more Wilsonian writers, appears to be coming true as well. Gary Lachman, David Moore and myself have all been influenced by him. Lachman and Moore, however, write factual books in the Wilson tradition, whereas I am an author of fiction, deeply indebted to Colin’s attempts to produce existential and evolutionary fiction more worthy of eagles than earwigs.
GOMERY KIMBER’s novel London Lies Bleeding, the first in a trilogy featuring Justin Martello, is published on Amazon on 22nd December. A free review copy can be downloaded here, or the book can be purchased here. Martello returns in Assassin of London at the end of February 2024. The third book of the trilogy, Live Not By Lies, is in the planning stage
KEN BELL praises an exceptionally historically-informed Brexit explainer
The small numbers who read the Guardian will no doubt disagree, but the argument over Brexit is now as much a part of history as the Free Trade debate that dominated life in the 19th century. As such, Robert Tombs in This Sovereign Isle has written the first of the many volumes that will dominate the reading lists for student historians. Luckily for the public at large, the book is also eminently accessible to the general reader as well, so I predict that this volume will go through many editions in the years to come.
Although Tombs never falls into the trap of arguing that Brexit was inevitable, he does make the point that for the British, membership of the EU was always a transactional issue and not an emotional one. Thus, when the downside of membership began to tell, there was no emotional appeal that could be made by the other side to try and even the balance. The Remainers lacked an Abraham Lincoln who could deliver a Gettysburg Address, because their side of the debate was just as transactional as that of the Brexiteers. Thus they were forced to rely on an increasingly hysterical version of the ‘Project Fear’ that had helped win the 2014 Scottish independence referendum. The problem in 2016 was that people just didn’t believe the howls, which allowed Boris Johnson to ask mockingly which catastrophe would come first, the world war or the economic collapse.
For the British, membership of the EU was always a transactional issue and not an emotional one
To be fair, as Tombs argues, Brexit was certainly helped over the line by the fact that the UK had managed to stay out of the Euro. Had we joined that common currency, the UK would have been in a similar position to the Scotland of 2014 and it is quite likely that Remain would have won. As it was, the result was close enough to argue that ‘Project Fear’ had a considerable effect on the final tallies.
On the other side of the English Channel, the Euro certainly helps keep difficult countries in line, as the EU demonstrated against the Greeks when it looked as if they were about to strike out for freedom. The mafia type threat: Nice economy you have here – be a shame if something happened to it, may very well be the one issue that keeps such countries voting the right way. Or to carry on voting until they get to the right way according to Brussels. That threat could not be used against the UK, and we owe a debt of gratitude to Gordon Brown for keeping us out of the Euro’s clutches.
Staying in Europe for a moment, Tombs makes the point that most of those countries were desperate to draw a line under their immediate pasts. The original six had the memories of defeat in the Second World War and political systems that had become illegitimate in the eyes of the populations. Later on, the post-Cold War entrants wanted to forget all about their Soviet experiences and similarly had discredited systems that needed to be put out of their misery. The EU for all those countries was in large part a stab at legitimacy and an exercise in forgetting the recent past.
The UK by way of contrast emerged from the two World Wars on the victorious side, with a legitimate political system intact. Thus roughly half the Brexiteers who were asked to give a single reason for their vote, answered that they wanted Britain to govern itself. They were able to say that because they had confidence in the British parliamentary system. It really was as simple as that.
The Remainers never seemed to understand that desire and so they discounted it as a factor. To them the Brexiteers were a caricature that they had created in their own minds and then decided that it represented the reality of their opponents. We were uneducated, old and we hankered after the British Empire, when actually, as Tombs shows, we just wanted to govern ourselves. Nevertheless, that mistake, which came about because Remainers tended to be concentrated in particular parts of the country where they did not come into day to day contact with Brexiteers, led them to overestimate their own numbers, and underestimate the need to get their vote out. As Sasha, Lady Swire, noted in her Diary of an MP’s Wife (https://brazen-head.org/2020/12/16/chumservatives) when her daughter called her as the results came in and complained that “white van man” had stolen her future, the result might have been different had the darling girl got her friends out of bed and chivvied them along to the polling stations.
One area that the author really should have been expanded upon was the 2017-2019 period that I think history will call the Rogue Parliament. If there is any truth to the argument of British exceptionalism, then this period provides a plethora of evidence for it. Many countries would have unpacked the rifles long before the period ended, but the British bided their time, seethed with rage at the antics that went on and waited for an election when they could exact their revenge against the guilty men who were responsible for it all.
The constitutional position, as Tombs makes clear, is that when a government has lost the support of the Commons, it should be voted down by a motion of no-confidence. Once carried, the rascals are thrown out and a new set of rascals elected in their place.
That did not happen during that roguish time, as an alliance of neo-Jacobin MPs, a compliant Speaker who clearly sympathised with them, coupled with a judiciary that seemed willing to flout established precedent all came together to try and force the government to act as they wished. The Fixed Term Parliament Act prevented the government from calling an election, and it looked for many long months as if the situation would continue to resemble the 17th century crisis that led to civil war, only this time as Tombs says, with “tragedy repeated as farce.”
Yet it ended, sooner than many of us expected, when the opposition folded and an election was called. Boris Johnson was given an 80 seat majority on the promise to get Brexit done and the Neo-Jacobins were packed off to a lifetime of obscurity. Readers of the Guardian will continue to whine and the rest of us will just get on with our lives, having rid ourselves on an undemocratic layer of government based in Brussels, which is all we ever wanted to do.
KEN BELL is a Mancunian who fetched up in Mexico, and who now lives in shabby retirement in Edinburgh. He writes as a hobby in his twilight years; a fuller biography can be found at his Amazon author page
Shadi Bartsch, Profile Books Ltd., 2020, 400 pages [Book VI only for this review]
Aeneid Book VI
Seamus Heaney, Faber and Faber, 2016, 53 pages
LESLEY SAUNDERS compares two notable translations of The Aeneid’s pivotal Book VI
It feels peculiarly apt, and particularly poignant, to be reading Book VI of the Aeneid now, as the death toll from the Covid-19 pandemic surpasses two million (in January 2021). The image of Aeneas trying in vain to embrace the shade of his father seems uncannily to foreshadow the thousands of people over the past year who have not been able to hold the hands of their dying relatives:
Virgil:
ter conatus ibi collo dare bracchia circum,
ter frustra comprensa manus effugit imago,
par levibus ventis volucrique simillima somno.
(lines 700 – 702, echoing exactly lines 792 – 794 of Aeneid Book II, when Aeneas tried to embrace the ghost of his wife Creusa as he escaped the burning city of Troy)
Bartsch:
… Three times he tried
to wrap his arms around his father’s neck; three times
his hands passed through the insubstantial shade, as if
it were the merest breeze, a fleeting dream.
Heaney:
Three times he tried to reach arms round that neck.
Three times the form, reached for in vain, escaped
Like a breeze between his hands, a dream on wings.
Clearly the two English versions are translations of the same original: on the basis of a mere three lines, could you say which you prefer, and why?
More broadly, supposing your bookshelves are already creaking with translations, in prose and poetry, of the Aeneid, how do you decide whether to try and squeeze in another one? Including Bartsch’s, six well-received English translations of the whole Aeneid (others are by Stanley Lombardo 2005, Frederick Ahl 2007, Robert Fagles 2008, Sarah Ruden 2009 and David Ferry 2017) have been published this century. This is not to mention the John Dryden, the C. Day Lewis, the Jackson Knight, the Robert Fitzgerald, the Allen Mandelbaum, of previous centuries. What makes a particular translation the one you end up keeping, the one you always take down from the shelf?
It is a truism – also true – that translation is always an act of interpretation; there can be no ‘carrying-across’ from one language to another without some additional baggage being smuggled or declared. Importation of cultural assumptions and/or of cultural critique is unavoidable in the case of Aeneid Book VI. The book encapsulates the whole epic, of which it is the centre and pivot. It is an encounter with both past and future, with ancestors and descendants; it is where the old world of Ilium meets the new world of Italia; it is a hymn to sorrow and the knowledge of loss; an extended meditation on the phrase sunt lacrimae rerum that appeared in Aeneid Book I; a vivid evocation of the wasteful horrors of war; a humane plea for compassion towards the dead and defeated; a nation’s foundational narrative; a triumphalist exposition of Rome’s destiny as a colonial power; a paean to the glorious achievements of Augustus Imperator; a moment of crisis in the arduous journey of a reluctant hero who must be persuaded of the rightness of his mission; a re-telling of the mythic descent into, and return from, the underworld in order to bring back more-than-ordinary knowledge.
The Golden Bough, by J. M. W. Turner
In a perceptive monograph, Evelyn W. Adkins contrasts the choice of vocabulary and its effect on the tone of voice in different translations – chosen from across five centuries – of the Aeneid by Gavin Douglas, Thomas Phaer, John Dryden, C. Day Lewis, Robert Fitzgerald, Allen Mandelbaum and Stanley Lombardo. Adkins is particularly interested in how translators see their own political concerns reflected in Book VI; as she shows, the translators’ emphases on the book’s complex and ambivalent themes may fall very differently depending on the way they translate specific phrases, with the effect of giving the text greater militaristic force, for example – or of stressing the literary linkage and lineage of the Aeneid from Homer to Dante.
I had already decided before reading Adkins to take a comparative look at Bartsch’s and Heaney’s translations of Book VI because they are each prefaced by thoughtful notes about their interpretative decisions. Heaney’s rationale is less explicit and systematic, more of a poet’s apologia, than Bartsch’s deliberative investigation, but both translators being conscious of the need to say something about the why and how, the personal investment each of them has made because of the lasting influence Virgil has had on them and their sensibilities.
Both bring autobiography to bear on their reasons; in her Translator’s Note, Bartsch writes that a large part of her motivation was:
… all translators bring a certain world view with them, and to date this view has mostly been a male, European-American point of view. Perhaps, then, it is not insignificant that I grew up as a foreigner in other people’s countries (including Indonesia, Iran and the Fiji Islands as well as Europe) … And I am a woman in a discipline that was still marked by gender imbalance when I was doing my studies.
And yet, she writes, ‘I don’t think the Aeneid brings those biases with it’ – the epic’s superficially dominant perspectives serve in effect to ‘undermine their own authority’. This viewpoint informs her approach to the interpretative labour of line by line translation; she sees her task as not so much revisionist as expository, revelatory.
In his Translator’s Note, Heaney tells us that his translation of Book VI is:
… more like classics homework, the result of a life-long desire to honour the memory of my Latin teacher at St Columb’s College, Father Michael McGlinchey… The set text for our A level exam in 1957 was Aeneid IX but McGlinchey was forever sighing ‘Och, boys, I wish it were Book VI.’
Heaney’s acquaintance with the Aeneid might therefore seem to sit squarely within the male-dominated Eurocentric tradition that Bartsch is concerned to question and relativise. But Heaney had deeply personal reasons for embarking on the journey that echo Aeneas’ own. The poet and critic Ruth Padel (in ’Beyond the Golden Bough with Seamus Heaney’) explains that Heaney had been working on translating Book VI from the 1980s until the month before he died, the work being brought into the fullness of being by two life events – the death of his father in 1986 and the birth of his first grandchild in 2006.
So we shall want to find out whether and how these different kinds of personal engagement play out in practice in the two translations. However, I probably ought first to say a little about poetics, by which I mean the specific mix of metre plus diction plus music/sonic effects that constitutes literary form and underlies the art and craft of translation. Aaron Poochigian bewails the lack of ‘loftiness’ in modern translations (Heaney’s had not appeared at the time of writing), and fears that
…free verse is incapable of sustaining a lofty tone because irregular rhythms break the incantatory spell and prosaic expressions undercut the elevation.
So another question we might ask is: ‘how do we, with our current poetics, translate a sublime but very formal poem?’
Bartsch’s approach is to try to “create a radically different reading experience by being attentive to the pace of Vergil’s epic” (original emphasis). She says she ‘compromised between the familiarity of Shakespearian blank verse and Vergil’s [quantitative] meter by allowing six, sometimes five, beats in my iambic lines.’ Bartsch’s explanation of her method is too long even to summarise here but is worth reading for its discussion of what she calls her “conscious philosophy of translation” – which foregrounds a commitment to the audience, whether classicists or general readers.
Padel contrasts “the long English line” Heaney used in his earlier poem ‘The Golden Bough’ (a translation of lines 98 – 148 of Book VI, published in Seeing Things, 1991) to represent Virgil’s 14-syllable hexameters with the “loose pentameters, generally 11-syllable lines of blank verse, which flow beautifully” of the finished book.
So what do these metres – the beats and the flow – look and sound like? Here are the extraordinary lines that describe the approach of Aeneas and the Sibyl to the Underworld:
Virgil:
Ibant obscuri sola sub nocte per umbram
perque domos Ditis vacuas et inania regna,
quale per incertam lunam sub luce maligna
est iter in silvis, ubi caelum condidit umbra
Iuppiter, et rebus nox abstulit atra colorem.
(lines 268 – 272)
Bartsch:
They went, faded figures in the lonely night,
through the lifeless, empty realm of Dis,
as if through a wood under a clouded moon’s
thin light, when Jove has plunged the sky in shadow
and black night leaches color from the world.
Heaney:
On they went in darkness, through the lonely
Shadowing night, a nowhere of deserted dwellings,
Dim phantasmal reaches where Pluto is king –
Like following a forest path by the hovering light
Of a moon that clouds and unclouds at Jupiter’s whim,
While the colours of the world pall in gloom.
Let’s pause to consider that pair of transferred epithets in the first line: obscuri [dark] might normally be attached to the night, not to Aeneas and his eerie priestess companion; conversely, sola [alone] might be thought to belong not to the night but to Aeneas and the sense of abandonment he is feeling. The double transference serves, by the severing of the expected attachment between descriptor and described, to generate the absence that characterises, that indeed is, the domain of the dead. A literary convention has thereby been transformed into realised experience, present emotion; the sonorous metrical requirements of the epic form have been tempered by a tender lyric intuition. (I’m quoting myself, from my Axon article ‘Present absences and absent presences’.)
I think this might be another example of what David Wharton calls the productive ambiguity of Virgil’s poetry. As Wharton writes of ‘Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt’, “the line is sufficiently communicative at the level of implication without submitting to a definitive explicature… it disrupts the flow of our reading and draws us into explicit contemplation…”
How do the two translators address this grammatical ambiguity, and the way it opens up a psychological space? It is interesting in this context that Bartsch quotes Kate Kellaway in her praise for Heaney’s demonstration that “plain words are storm-proofed”. Whilst ‘plainness’ is a significant and valuable quality of Bartsch’s own translation, including in this instance, I’m not sure it accurately captures what Heaney accomplishes in, for example “the shadowing night”, “a nowhere of deserted dwellings” and a moon that “clouds and unclouds at Jupiter’s whim” – each of them an insight into, rather than a surface rendition of, the Latin words.
Book VI reaches its climax (in lines 757 – 859) with the parade of military heroes who will make prophecy come true and bring Rome’s great destiny to fruition. This is where we might expect Bartsch’s translation to bear the marks of her interpretative inclination not to “soften… features of antiquity that are unpleasant to us today”, perhaps even somehow to offer an alternative to the hegemonic / colonial perspective. Both translators have good reason to be suspicious of triumphalist narratives, but contrast Bartsch’s translation of lines 841 – 846, in which what she actually does is make good her intention to “maintain the tempo of the Latin”, so as to “reproduce… the excitement and immediacy of the poem”:
… Who’d omit great Cato, or you, Cossus?
Or the Gracchi and two Scipios, Libya’s
ruin, thunderbolts of war; Fabricius,
powerful though poor, Serranus sowing furrows?
You Fabii, why hurry? Maximus,
you’ll be the only one to save our land by lagging.
with Heaney’s:
Next, great Cato, you, who could not sing your praise
Or, Cossus, yours? Or the family of the Gracchi;
Or those two Scipios, two warrior thunderbolts
Who will strike down bellicose Carthage; or Fabricius,
The indomitable and frugal; or you, Serranus,
Sowing your furrowed fields? Nor is there a quick
Or easy way to scan the long line of the Fabii,
Down to the greatest, Fabius Maximus,
He who’ll contrive to stall and thereby save our state.
With these lines, which sound to my ear a bit too much like a translation, Heaney seems rather to have lost patience. In his Note, he says that this part of the poem is “something of a test for reader and translator alike”; indeed, by this point, “the translator is likely to have moved from inspiration to grim determination”. And it shows: the prolixity of Heaney’s version here (nine lines to Virgil’s, and Bartsch’s, six) does little to help our understanding of who these generals and heroes were or what they actually did. The play of words in “scan…. the long line” is entirely Heaney’s and feels more gratuitous than witty.
Nonetheless, it is to the parallel lives of man and epic hero that we owe Heaney’s determination (grim or otherwise) to finish this book, “for the sake of the little one whose ‘earthlight broke’ in late 2006”. And, even though he did not live to see it published, what an accomplishment it turned out to be! For what Heaney brought to this labour of love and duty was a lifetime of writing poetry himself. His gift for translation reveals itself through specific features which – for the sake of brevity – I’ll characterise with minimal explanation:
fluency: a feel for how one line (of thought), one fleeting image, one big idea (what James Rother calls a poet’s ‘rhythmus mentis’) links with the next – as Heaney’s translations of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, of Buile Suibhne and of Beowulf had already attested …
lexis: a generosity of vocabulary, which happily draws now and again on unusual words: for example, “a vast scaresome cavern” (“scaresomely” also occurs in ‘Seeing Things’); ”an outlander groom”; “snaffles the sop it has been thrown; “slobbered corpses”; plus turns of phrase that sound like Irish English: for example, “a mad moment came”; “’Out from here’, the seeress is shouting”.
‘music’: one word we use for this in poetry is ‘prosody’, which John Colapinto says “comes from the ancient Greek: pros, meaning “toward”, and ody, meaning “song”. We speak toward song”. It is an instinct for the subtle relationship between vowels and consonants, stressed and unstressed syllables, soft and loud, high and low – everything that one might call the ‘mouth-feel’ of a given language, which becomes manifest when you read the text aloud. Try this:
Then when they came to the fuming gorge at Avernus
They swept up through clear air and back down
To their chosen perch, a tree that was two trees
In one, green-leafed yet refulgent with gold.
Like mistletoe shining in cold winter woods,
Gripping its tree but not yet grafted, always in leaf,
Its yellowy berries in sprays curled round the bole –
Those flickering gold tendrils lit up the dark
Overhang of the oak and chimed in the breeze.
(Heaney, lines 271 – 279)
Neither ‘plain’ nor ‘lofty’ but tuned to an inner humanity, Heaney’s singular and expressive gift rescues the golden bough from cliché, makes it – as it was for Aeneas – a thing of wonder, an emanation of the soulfulness of the living world.
But I can’t finish without acknowledging that Bartsch gives us something special too, a vigorous, deeply-felt and genuinely exciting version of the whole story. And so both books are here on my shelf to stay.
LESLEY SAUNDERS is a poet and translator. Her sixth and most recent collection is Nominy-Dominy (Two Rivers Press, 2018). Her translations of the renowned Portuguese poet Maria Teresa Horta– including the poem that won the 2016 Stephen Spender award – were published in 2019 by Two Rivers Press, under the title Point of Honour. She has also translated another celebrated Portuguese poet, Luis Quintais, for The Brazen Head
LIAM GUILAR likes a radical reimagining of a venerable Welsh work
Isolated in Aber Cuawg
Harry Gilonis, Oystercatcher Press, 2020, 19 pages
‘Claf Abercuawg’ is a Welsh poem composed perhaps in the ninth century. Claf, as a noun, means a sick person, a patient or a leper1. Abercuawg is an area of north Wales. There is an ‘I’ who looks out at the landscape and speaks about it and his isolation.
This pamphlet contains an English translation of 32 three line stanzas, a short introductory essay, placed significantly after the poem, and some textual notes. The essay is a concise, necessary introduction to the differences between this poem and a modern English one. The pamphlet is visually attractive, robust enough to handle the rough usage it has received, and overall very good value for money.
The opening line announces the poem’s difference: “My mind’s requirement, to be sat atop a hill”.
In the 1970s, Glyn Williams translated this as “To sit high on a hill is the wish of my heart”2
Superficially, Williams sounds more natural, and perhaps immediately preferable. But the differences in word choice and order reveals the strength of Gilonis’ translation.
Generally3 the contemporary trend seems to be to assume that the people of the Middle Ages were modern people in funny clothes, suffering from bad ideologies and severe technological deprivation. The consequences of such assumptions are numerous and they are all bad. The logic runs that because these people are us, then their stories can be presented as we think they should have been written, or would have been written if the original composers weren’t so clumsy. And because they are ‘like us’ then they should have known better. Therefore, the things modern observers find reprehensible in medieval behaviour and ideals can be easily condemned and preferably erased, because both are easier than trying to understand the essential alterity of the period.
The most invidious and invisible form of this domestication is when a translator surreptitiously converts a medieval text so it operates to modern, post-Romantic assumptions of how poems should function, and how a modern person would behave or think in that situation.
Gilonis, to his credit, avoids these traps. Ironically, part of the effectiveness of this translation lies in what he hasn’t done. “My mind’s requirement” does not sound like modern English. But it’s grammatical and makes sense. He walks the fine line between respecting the alterity of the original and turning the poem into something that works in English. He does this without domesticating the original, or turning it into a museum piece.
The translation, as translation, can be compared with different translations. Here are three versions of the last verse; Gilonis’ is the third.
I prefer Gilonis’ version, but the key objective difference is the disappearance of ‘leper’. While Jenny Rowlands goes to some length to show how the speaker of the poem is indeed a leper, she’s also aware that it is not the only option (pp.191-193). The original poem would not have excluded other interpretations. As she points out, the solitary figure in a hostile landscape, well-known to readers of Old English, is as much a symbol of life on earth (with or without God) as a literal character. But translating claf as ‘leper’ would be to choose one option and for the reader of the translation to limit those other interpretations. It also throws the poem into the distance.
Gilonis defends his decision not to translate claf as ‘leper’ in the notes. The poem isn’t distanced from the modern British or American reader and the other possible readings of the text remain open.
Obviously the idea of someone isolated due to illness has an immediate contemporary relevance. The temptation would be to push the point, the use of deliberate anachronisms being a popular technique. Gilonis writes: “The resonances, in 2020, don’t need ramming home” (p10). In 2020, ‘isolated’ was such a loaded word it should resonate without ventilators or prayers for vaccines turning up in the translation.
One of the strangest features of this poem is that, as in Old English poetry at this period, the speaking ‘I’ is an empty space anyone one reading the poem can step into. It’s merely a subject position, not an historical or fictional character, nor the product of autobiography. This is emphatically not a dramatic monologue in the Browning/Tennyson tradition, nor an ‘I’ in the tradition of English poetry from Wyatt onwards. While some speakers in the ‘saga poems’ of medieval Wales are characters in a fuller story, the speaker in this one exists only in this poem.
Some early Welsh verse, like this, simply don’t operate to the rules we assume govern modern poetry in English. There’s no clearly developed progression from an opening to an ending. There’s no ‘internal coherence’. The poems operate to their own rules, and those rules, leaving aside the complicated metrics, simply aren’t post-Renaissance or classically inflected English. There is description of landscape, but whether it’s meant to evoke the speaker’s mood or describe a place is questionable, and whichever answer you pick in one instance will be undermined in another.
Description is jammed against statement: but the relation of the two seems marginal, and the statements, as in the second line below, might be gnomic wisdom or just statements of fact. Either way, their relevance is never obvious:
Bright are the tops of the valleys; long the small hours.
Expertise is always praised.
Am I not to be granted the sleep due to the ill?
Temporally the poem hops around, sometimes in the same stanza. The overall effect is that the poem is swirling, but the swirl isn’t spiralling to any conclusion, just to the last word, where the poem stops. Gwyn Williams only translated ten of the 32 verses, but the ’extraction’ (his term) doesn’t seem to damage the poem in any way.
For general readers of English poetry, the pragmatic value of early medieval poetry, treated honestly as it is here, lies in the challenge it makes to the learnt reading practices of the school room and the lecture hall. A poem like this one, that obviously works, but not to ‘our’ rules, is a confrontation with the limits of our reading practice, and our assumptions about what a poem is, does, and can be.
This difference between what worked for a medieval Welsh audience and what a modern reader of poems expects gives the translation another level of interest. The original might have been written over 1,000 years ago, but this translation wouldn’t be out of place in something like Harriet Tarlo’s 2011 anthology of ‘radical landscape poetry’6.
As such, it’s a blunt reminder that any claims made by ‘avant garde’, ‘experimentalist’ or ‘postmodern’ poets in the 21st century for the ‘innovative’ or ‘ground breaking novelty’ of their work is undermined, if not flatly contradicted, by the history of poetry. Whatever ‘it’ is, ‘it’ has usually been done before. This should negate the familiar excuse for writing abstruse nonsense – ‘But it hasn’t been done before’ – and focus the question on ‘Was it worth doing?’
LIAM GUILAR is Poetry Editor of The Brazen Head, and the author of several poetry collections, including the series A Man of Heart, Presentment of Englishry and The Fabled Third (Shearsman), set in post-Roman Britain. His most recent publication is a translation of the Mabinogion folk-tale How Culhwch Won Olwen (Shearsman, 2026)
Welsh Poems Sixth Century to 1600, Faber and Faber, 1973, p.23 [↩]
‘Generally’ in terms of popular culture, films, books, and public discussions [↩]
Early Welsh Saga Poetry: a study and edition of the Englynion, D. Brewer 1990. p. 497. This is the essential encyclopaedic text, commentary, study and translation of these poems. Rowland makes no claim for her translations as ‘literature’ [↩]
The Earliest Welsh Poetry, Macmillan 1970. p.94. Clancy reverses the order of the last two verses so this is the penultimate in his translation [↩]
The Ground Aslant. An anthology of Radical Landscape Poetry, Shearsman, 2011 [↩]
DEREK TURNER finds a celebrated poet’s latest collection dazzling but lightweight
This slender assemblage comes weighted with prestige – Adam Crothers’ prize-winning history (Shine/Strong and Seamus Heaney Centre in 2017), and endorsements of his latest offering by equally well-regarded contemporaries. But any potential ponderousness is undercut even before opening. These are “political nonsense rhymes”, says the back cover. It is “a joybomb of wit, play, sass and Heideggerian thinginess”, Caoilinn Hughes enthuses – “linguistic pirouetting”, smiles Susannah Dickey – while for Thomas McCarthy, Crowther’s unmistakable Ulsterness has been given “a metallic spray-job in some garage near the English fens” (Crothers lives in Cambridge).
“Sass” has probably never been applied to anything truly substantial, and “linguistic pirouetting” sounds ominously like riddling for riddling’s sake. The terms are therefore unfortunately applicable to this corpus, notwithstanding many excellent qualities. McCarthy’s motoring metaphor may get closest of all, because these poems feel full of restless discontent – and below their pearlescent pigments you can see a running-to-rust cultural chassis. Crothers’ work glisters with novel imagery, unlikely rhymes, and humorous self-awareness, but all these painterly effects take priority over the bits of the vehicle that need to touch the ground.
The poems feel oddly evanescent, although they mask an ostensibly rational materialist philosophy. “Stuff” and “culture” in this worldview are almost-equivalents, as if culture derives ultimately from possessions. Clothes mostly make the man according to this outlook, culture is contextual and life transactional, and poetry is more about musicality than meaningfulness. The most irreducible ideas, identities, and issues are seen through a reductive prism, as if Brexit, colonialism, nationalism, Protestantism, the Troubles, Trump, the ‘male gaze’ and other conventional talking points are mostly traceable to the murky operations of markets, and Western moral bankruptcy. To go back to the back cover, Crothers is “unable to transcend the consumerist violence of the world”.
This is a glittering sports car being driven at speed across broken country; you admire, and sometimes wince, as you watch. And the poet may half-know, in ‘Cernunnos’ lamenting the
vocabularies of being away.
Vocabularies of an absent god.
Elsewhere,
Hell is other people having one hell of a year
Heaven is a half rhyme. God is queer
Is he avaunting the Void with his vast cleverness?
It feels difficult to care about archly-evoked STDs –
“Well excuse me while I feng-shui the universe
To accommodate your double-parked aura!
There’s something impolite behind your arras”.
It is tempting to flick past the rhyming dictionary-reminiscent
“dead mirrorballs throwing shades like it’s panties
Over my ruckus, I can scarcely hear Dante”
or the improbable pairings of blink, skink, mink, kink, stink and plinks in ‘Parrhasius’.
Yet there are fine moments when the playfulness is put away, as in ‘Muntjac’, a cold camera-trap snap of ultra-alertness –
“The night’s stick
Snaps beneath a beautiful frigid hoof.
Faith, frighted, yields what little ground was gained.”
It feels like genuine tenderness in ‘Goldfinch’ –
“Of the two finches glimpsed in the garden
I can filch no vocab to farewell the gone one”
But then the showing off comes surging back, like the wit-for-wit’s-sake ‘Deriding a horse’ –
“Slag nag. It’s nigh ridiculous that you’re
The gal in gallop and the can’t in canter
The sad in saddle-sores on the Infanta
Persisting in your grand vainglory. Lor”
To quote his ‘Nugget’, such touches make the reader want to “Make like the sheepdog and get the flock out of there”.
And this is a shame, because behind all the flourishes there is feeling, beyond the artifice a sense of a likeable man astutely alive in our too often nonsensical world.
DEREK TURNER is the editor of The Brazen Head, as well as a novelist (A Modern Journey, Displacement, and Sea Changes) and widely-published reviewer. His first non-fiction book, Edge of England: Landfall in Lincolnshire, was published June 2022. Some of his writing may be found at www.derek-turner.com He is also on X – @derekturner1964
