KEN BELL enjoys an amusing and observant, if ultimately insubstantial, account of an eventful political period
The Diary of an MP’s Wife, Sasha Swire, Little, Brown, 544 pages, £8
A diarist needs a good eye for the little details that makes the reader feel that he is in the room where the events are happening. Sasha Swire has that diarist’s eye in good measure and uses it to full effect in The Diary of an MP’s Wife. Thus when meeting the Countess of Wessex, Lady Swire notes when the Countess talks about giving up her career in PR that there is “real regret in her eyes and sadness that this part of her life is gone and not allowed to return”. Meanwhile, Prince Edward, husband to the Countess, comes over as “over-excitable like a puppy”, which rather sums up his whole life when you think about it.
Along with her good eye for the small details, this authoress is also the mistress of the cutting, throwaway, dismissive comment, as she demonstrates on almost every page of the diary which covers the years 2010 to 2019 when her husband, Sir Hugo Swire, who is known as “H” throughout the volume, was in government. One of my favourites is her conclusion that Kate Middleton and her family displayed “middle-class dignity” during the 2011 royal wedding. Only the genuine upper-class can damn with faint praise like that.
Reading this volume, I was struck by how little there is about the great events of the period and how much is dedicated to sticking the boot in to people that Lady Swire does not like. The fact that most of them seem to be in the Conservatives, the party that her husband represented in the Commons, rather suggests that Harold Macmillan had it about right when he commented that a man’s political opponents are on the other side of the House, and his enemies are all around him on his side.
The greatest event covered by the diary must be the 2016 Brexit vote, but it is really only covered in passing. Having seemingly done very little during the campaign, Sir Hugo and Lady Swire decided to go to Scotland for a few days in the Highlands on polling day, and left on the sleeper train, thinking that victory was theirs. However, as the dawn rose and the news came through that victory had gone to the other side, Lady Swire dragged her husband out of his bed and they both returned to London to hold David Cameron’s hand. On the way back, one of the daughters rang up to cry that “old people and White Van Man have stolen her future”. Her mother, who presumably is aware of just how wealthy, privileged and connected the family is and that the little girl is in no danger of being reduced to taking in washing, has no sympathy and tells her that “she should have made more of her friends get out of bed and vote”.
Aside from paying back old scores, the diary really succeeds as an account of just how incestuous the Tory leadership crew is. This is the chumocracy in action, with people who are part of that magic circle getting a respectable naming and everyone else receiving a mocking nickname. So, David Cameron is referred to throughout as “DC” and Theresa May is dismissed as “Old Ma May.” George Osborne is “Boy George” in the diary, probably because he is only an honorary member of the magic circle, having been a day boy at his public school and his father being something in trade. I went to a secondary modern so all this is Greek to me, but it means something to this crowd.
It is not just that they all know each other, but they have been friends for years. So, Amber Rudd, who has now returned to well-deserved obscurity and will only merit footnotes in the histories that will be written of this time, seems to feature on far too many pages as if she is a really important person. Actually, she has been a friend of Sasha Swire since both were in their teens, and it shows in the diary in the sympathetic way she is portrayed and the amount of references to her.
This is all very much a book written by a member of the higher caste for other members of the caste who understand instinctively the cultural references. Thus, H goes to meet DC one Saturday morning in his casual attire and DC looks at his brown shoes, lifts an eyebrow and says, “Brown in town, Hugo?” To which Hugo replies that it is the weekend and he should not be in town but in the country, and so on and so forth.
There is nothing wrong with an authoress writing a book for her social set, and Sasha Swire is certainly a quite excellent writer with a fine turn of phrase who has crafted a work that it was a pleasure to read. The sad thing about her book is that it is unlikely to be referred to by future historians because the bulk of it is concerned with people who will be of interest only to the hardest of hardcore historians; thus it will date very quickly for the general reader.
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
KEN BELL reads a useful analysis of what led to the 2016 vote
Brexitland, Maria Sobelewska and Robert Ford, Cambridge University Press, 2020, 408 pages, £11.99
Porfirio Díaz, the man who dominated Mexican politics for a generation until his downfall in 1910, once remarked that nothing ever happened in his country until it happened. What he meant was that there has always been an enormous time lag between cause and effect in Mexican politics, and in Brexitland, Maria Sobolewska and Robert Ford show that the same is true of Britain.
In doing so, they have also managed to demolish the myth that is now an article of faith in Guardian-reading circles that nobody was bothered about the EU until a couple of years before the 2016 referendum. What the authors demonstrate rather well is that many issues that were of importance to the population were suppressed by the main political parties from just after the Second World War. Viewed in that light, Brexit is about more than just leaving the European Union; it is shorthand for a lot of long-standing factors that have led to a new political division in Britain.
Immigration, of course, is the most important factor and for that reason several chapters of Brexitland are devoted to it. Starting in 1948 when the great and the good created a nationality act which allowed Commonwealth citizens to settle freely in the UK, the aim was to tie the fully independent white Commonwealth states to their mother country and to create an Anglosphere long before that word was even coined. What nobody realised was that New Commonwealth people would take advantage of this liberalism, even though since most of their countries were not independent at that time they did not need this legislation. As Sobolewska and Ford point out, both parties supported immigration even when it became obvious that many of their traditional supporters did not.
The opposition to that policy, begun in places like Smethwick in 1964, continuing on via Enoch Powell’s ‘rivers of blood’ speech in 1968 and culminating, possibly, with Margaret Thatcher’s 1978 comment about people being afraid of being ‘swamped’ by new Commonwealth immigrants certainly helped the Tories acquire a reputation in the public mind as the party that was sounder on immigration than Labour. However, as Edward Heath proved when he decided to allow around 30,000 Ugandan Asians to enter the country, that soundness was often more in word than deed. As the country moved into the 21st century, with Labour allowing a major influx of eastern Europeans – many of them settling in areas that had no previous experience of immigration –people woke up to the fact that neither party was prepared to speak for them on that issue, so they began to support Nigel Farage and UKIP.
Other factors were in play, such as the growth of the university sector, which led to many inner city areas becoming home to students and graduates, who often made common cause with ethnic minorities to create a new voting core for Labour. That new core strategy was based on the gamble that the party’s traditional, collectivist, industrial working class voters would stay onside as they had nowhere else to go, but UKIP proved the flaw in that argument. As the authors also make clear, the new core was not as tribally loyal as the old one had been and was quite willing to dump Labour if they disagreed with particular party policies.
Out of all this churning, new identities were created, and a new political division was created. The referendum campaign, with its binary choice, forced people to choose one side or the other – and having made their choice they often found that they had more in common with people on their side of the referendum debate than they had with the parties with which they had once identified. Leading on from that, as the authors do, we can see that the referendum campaign made people aware of this new division, as well as helping to shape it. At the end of it, Britain had “two new tribes aware of who they were, what they stood for and what they opposed”.
A good example of this in action is not included in Brexitland, probably because it happened too late for inclusion. During the European election campaign in 2019, Featherstone Working Men’s Club (near Wakefield) played host to a Brexit Party rally. One of the main speakers was Anne Widdecombe, arguably one of Thatcher’s more ghoulish ministers, who was nicknamed “Doris Karloff” back in the day. The club’s members, men who had stood on the picket lines during the miners’ strike of 1984/85, cheered her to the echo, to the utter disgust of the Guardian.
The 2016 referendum was very much the victory of one identity, which was the geographically rooted, socially conservative, but often economically radical section of the population against the Metropolitan, white-collar graduate element. Although the authors do not quote Theresa May, she may have had a point when she spoke about people from somewhere clashing with people from nowhere. Brexitland is a heavyweight, academic text that should be essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand this new political alignment in Britain and how it came about.
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
Winds of Change: Britain in the Early Sixties, Peter Hennessy, Allen Lane, 2019, 603pp
STEPHEN GARNETT is reminded of a time when Britain faced challenges with hope
It was on 3rd February 1960 that UK Prime Minister Harold Macmillan spoke to the South African parliament in Cape Town, famously warning them that “The wind of change is blowing through this continent”. Having led the Conservative Party to election victory in 1957 following the resignation of Anthony Eden over the Suez crisis, Macmillan – 1st Earl of Stockton and a veteran of the Somme – had been victorious again in October 1959, increasing the government’s majority to 100 seats. The party had campaigned under the slogan “Life’s better under the Conservatives”, citing a strong economy, low unemployment and a rising standard of living.
However, even as he made that speech, just a few months after the country had voted for him, the popularity of Macmillan and his government was already on the wane, with an increasing number of people in the country questioning whether a 66-year-old, tweed-suited Edwardian who packed his Cabinet with fellow Old Etonians was the right man to lead Britain into the 1960s. At the same time, developments in the UK, Europe and the USA were setting daunting challenges that would force Macmillan to brace himself against winds of change much closer to home. Many of these would be storm-force, rattling venerable national institutions, uprooting many of the old certainties of post-war Britain, and blowing and tossing the ship of state in directions that he was powerless to control.
Tony Benn inspects ‘the white heat of technology’
In this third part of his trilogy, which follows Never Again: Britain 1945-51 (1992) and Having it so Good: Britain in the Fifties (2006), Peter Hennessy paints a vivid picture of the country, its government and people at a time of great social change. At the centre of it all is Harold Macmillan and his attempts, through what he called his ‘Grand Design’, to reposition the country so it could prosper economically and continue to play an important part in world affairs. In terms of GNP Britain lagged far behind Germany, Italy, France and the Netherlands, and Macmillan’s top priority was to take the country into the EEC (then comprising six member states) with all the benefits for trade that joining the increasingly influential bloc offered. He also viewed a strong EEC – with Britain a key player – as an essential bulwark against the expansion of communism, then regarded as a threat both economically and militarily. The author allows us to eavesdrop on the Cabinet meetings, and subsequent Parliamentary debate, in which Macmillan put his case for opening negotiations, with much discussion about the effect membership would have on British agriculture, on our relations with the Commonwealth and on national sovereignty.
Of course, it wasn’t only the Cabinet, Conservative Party, Opposition and, ultimately, 50 million Britons that Macmillan had to convince: the great barrier to UK membership was the resident of the Elysée Palace. French president Charles de Gaulle opposed British membership for a variety of reasons. Our history as a maritime nation with strong trading links to the Commonwealth and our very different agricultural sector made us incompatible and a potentially destabilising and divisive influence. He did not want to risk France losing her dominant position in the bloc. He was suspicious of the effect our close relationship with the United States would have on our commitment to the European ‘project’ – and he felt some personal resentment at what he perceived as France’s exclusion from the Anglo-American nuclear partnership. The accounts of their meetings and the verbal duelling that took place at the Chateau de Rambouillet, the President’s summer residence in the le-de-France, and at Birch Grove, the Macmillan family home in Sussex, are fascinating.
As expected, de Gaulle vetoed the UK’s application for membership, in January 1963, but the shift towards Europe and away from the Empire had been set in train and was an historic moment. The speed and scope of the retreat was also astonishing, with 26 countries achieving independence, within the Commonwealth, in just ten years.
London’s Post Office Tower, opened 1964
When it came to domestic policy, Macmillan spelt out what needed to be done: increase productivity, eliminate restrictive practices, take advantage of new technology and bring Britain up to date in almost every sphere of life. Macmillan was a believer in a planned economy, a philosophy which towards the end of his life brought him into conflict with Margaret Thatcher, and in September 1961 he launched the National Economic Development Council (NEDC) to bring together management, trades union and government. This attempt at co-operation was the idea of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Selwyn Lloyd. Unfortunately, so too was the deeply unpopular ‘pay pause’, which restricted wage increases to between 2% and 2.5% and was an important cause of the shock defeat suffered by the Conservatives at the Orpington by-election on 14th March 1962. A swing of 30% saw the Liberal Party take the formerly safe Tory seat by a majority of more than 7,000. Four months later, in what became known as the ‘Night of the Long Knives’, Macmillan sacked a third of his Cabinet, with Reginald Maudling replacing Lloyd at the Treasury.
This undercurrent of discontent was reflected in the satire boom, with writers, actors and comedians using humour to poke fun at those in authority. On television, That Was The Week That Was, presented by David Frost, produced by Ned Sherrin and first broadcast in November 1962, broke new ground by making fun of political figures. It had great appeal for the increasing number of educated, idealistic young people in Britain who had benefited from the opportunities offered by the Education Act of 1944. Four bright Oxbridge graduates (Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller, Alan Bennett and Dudley Moore) were also creating a stir on stage, first in Edinburgh then in London with their satirical revue Beyond the Fringe. This included Peter Cook’s brilliant parody of Macmillan, considered quite shocking at the time. The ageing Macmillan was often compared unfavourably with JFK, whom he met for the first time in March 1961.
In the opening chapter of the book, Peter Hennessy describes his teenage years in the Cotswold village of Nympsfield. Although in many ways life in the rural community had not changed much from how it was before the war, even people living in a remote settlement such as that (during the winter of 1962-63 the village was cut off for two weeks under eight feet of snow) could not escape the ever-present threat posed by a more permanent chill: the Cold War. The 350 souls who called Nympsfield home would have been astonished to learn that just 25 miles away, near Corsham in Wiltshire, was a top-secret bunker that was to be used by the government and up to 4,000 officials in the event of a Third World War. Codenamed ‘Stockwell’, it was 90 feet underground and in 60 miles of tunnels comprised 800 offices, dormitories, kitchens, signals areas, sick bays etc.
For those who didn’t live through the period it must be difficult to understand how the threat of nuclear war was always there in the background, its likelihood rising and falling and rising again in tune with events. It certainly exercised the minds of those in government, as the preparation of that huge nuclear bunker demonstrates. But if the existence of that 240-acre site would have shocked and alarmed the British people, the way in which the Prime Minister was to be informed of a likely nuclear attack if at that moment he were travelling in his car would probably have provoked derision – or disbelief. The plan was to use the AA radio link to inform the PM’s driver, who would then take Macmillan to a phone box so that he could call Downing Street. This led to some concern about what would happen if the Prime Minister or his driver didn’t have the four pennies needed to make such a call, and whether it would be sensible to take out AA membership as drivers would then be given keys and access to AA boxes across the country.
The ability of the Prime Minister’s driver to locate a phone box was never put to the test, but there were numerous flashpoints between East and West in the early Sixties: the ongoing crisis in Berlin (the wall was erected in August 1961), the unmasking of spies on both sides of the Iron Curtain, the belligerence of Khrushchev in Moscow and the fear of a Soviet pre-emptive strike or sudden military advance into Western Europe. But it was the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962, made even more dangerous by the shooting down of a US spy plane flying over the island, that brought the world to the brink of nuclear war. As tensions rose, the author, then a schoolboy, set off with some friends for a walk in the Black Mountains, “thinking that if the world was going to end, this was as beautiful a spot as any in which to finish one’s part in it”.
So much happened during 1963 it is unsurprising that the author devotes a whole chapter to those 12 months, and many of the events and people involved continue to colour our view of the early part of the decade. The year began badly, with De Gaulle vetoing the UK’s application for EEC membership, causing Macmillan to write in his diary: “All our policies at home and abroad are in ruins”. A few days later, Hugh Gaitskell, leader of the Labour Party, died suddenly; following a ballot he was replaced by Harold Wilson. In March, the Beeching Report, The Reshaping of British Railways, was published. One of the great delights of this book is the way that the author, as well as given us facts and background information, occasionally inserts personal anecdotes. Steam railway enthusiasts will enjoy his memory of an encounter he had at Tebay station in the Lake District in August 1961.
The biggest story of the year was what became known as the “Profumo affair”, and Peter Hennessy expertly – and often humorously – analyses all the ins and outs, taking us back to that unforgettable summer when, stoked by hostility to the government, the national newspapers made household names of figures such as Stephen Ward, Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies. The public couldn’t get enough of what the author describes as a “heady cocktail of sex, secrecy and scandal” and rumours swirled about other Establishment figures being up to no good. When Lord Denning’s eagerly anticipated report was published in September people queued to purchase copies, and although it wasn’t overly critical of Macmillan, the whole business, as well as his poor health, weakened him, precipitating his resignation a month later. Amidst all the scandal in high places, what was possibly Macmillan’s greatest achievement was overlooked: the vital contribution he made to a Partial Test Ban Treaty which prohibited future atmospheric testing by the nuclear powers.
The author gazes far and wide – the Great Train Robbery, domestic nuclear power, Maudling’s “dash for growth” – and is especially entertaining in dealing with the political intrigue that eventually led to the appointment of Sir Alec Douglas-Home as Macmillan’s successor. It is good to be reminded of some of the key political figures of the time: Lord Hailsham, Rab Butler, Iain Macleod, Enoch Powell and others. It is easy to see why Harold Wilson’ famous “white heat” of technology vision, linking science and socialism, had such wide appeal, resulting in a Labour victory in the General Election of October 1964. To read the account of the lively campaign that preceded the vote is to realise what a powerful speaker Wilson was (“We are living in the jet-age but we are governed by an Edwardian establishment mentality”).
The Beatles, package holidays, Telstar, CND, Doctor Who… it was a lively, colourful, exciting period on so many levels. Those of us who lived through it should be grateful to Peter Hennessy for reminding us how lucky we were.
Nicholas J. Higham, Yale University Press, 2018, 380 pages
LIAM GUILAR marvels to see a sledgehammer being wielded against castles-in-the-air
People in Britain have been telling stories about an ‘Arthur’ since at least the 9th century, possibly earlier. In the Middle Ages, those stories include some of the finest literature ever produced in Europe, culminating in Sir Thomas Malory’s 15th century masterpiece.
Scholarly arguments over the existence of an historical King Arthur, a single figure as point of origin for these stories, are more recent. In the mid-20th century, the idea that there was an historical figure gained ground, but the high-water mark of scholarly attempts to argue the case had passed by the 1980s. Leslie Alcock (Arthur’s Britain) and John Morris (The Age of Arthur) were both respected academics, but both their books, especially the latter’s, received the kind of academic reception about which scholars must have nightmares.[i].
Despite repeated attempts by experts in the field of ‘post-Roman’ or ‘Dark Age’ or ‘Early Medieval’ British history to discredit the various candidates, and despite the lack of evidence to support any of them, the arguments rumble on. Nicholas Higham’s new book is an attempt to demolish the idea that there is an identifiable historical figure who is the real King Arthur. It seems doomed to fail. He is not the first scholar to announce that the historical Arthur did not exist. It’s unlikely he’ll be the last.
In 1977, David Dumville, one of the leading authorities on the sources for early medieval history in Britain, concluded an article that discussed the Welsh evidence for an historical King Arthur:
The fact of the matter is there is no historical evidence about Arthur; we must reject him from our histories and, above all, from the titles of our books
In 2013 an equally exasperated Guy Halsall, an expert on early medieval history, wrote a book offering “a corrective to the shelves of pseudo-Historical ‘Arthurian’ nonsense available in practically every bookshop in Britain”, concluding,
No sane scholar will now argue that there is definitely a “King Arthur” figure in 5th– or 6th-century history about whom anything solid can be said
In 2018 Nicholas Higham, who specialises in what used to be called ‘The Dark Ages’, produced this encyclopedic refutation of the varied and various arguments for an ‘Historical King Arthur’. He lines up the contenders – the Sarmatian Arthur, the Greek Arthur, the list of nominees with names sounding like Arthur or those whose names sound nothing at all like Arthur – the ‘if this, then this, and then that means we’ve found Arthur’ arguments, and one by one he knocks them over.
Higham’s conclusion is that
[…] we can now agree to discount King Arthur as a ‘real’ figure of the past, leaving him and his deeds to the ‘smoke’ and ‘highland mist’ of make-believe and wishful thinking; it is there that he properly belongs
I distrust that first person plural which Higham is fond of using. Reading the book is like being bludgeoned, very thoroughly and very carefully. It should settle the argument. But it won’t. Even the blurb on the cover hedges its bets. Max Adams, identified as the author of In the Land of the Giants, is quoted: “Riveting…brings the historical Arthur to what may be his last decisive battle”. “May be” because, given the nature of the evidence, there is never going to be a final, irrefutable argument.
Candidates for the historical King Arthur have their partisans. But if the experts have become more wary, the field is still held by enthusiasts who fly on a combination of ill-informed speculation and wishful thinking. They simply cherry pick ‘information’ and don’t bother with the usual rules of evidence, source analysis, linguistics or logic. If anyone is arrogant enough to believe that lacking the skills and knowledge required to move through the tangle of evidence puts them in a position to argue with people who have spent their professional careers studying that evidence, then nothing is going to dent their self-confidence.
The question of Arthur’s existence hinges on a very limited number of sources, and the combination of skill, knowledge and training required to assess the reliability of those sources is very rare. There is a world of difference between ‘looking stuff up’ on the internet, or in the library, or in the museum, and doing research. The failure to understand that difference, which is becoming increasingly widespread, lies at the heart of the ‘Arthur Was Real and Eureka I’ve Found Him’ phenomenon.
A scene from John Boorman’s Excalibur
The scarcity and unreliability of the surviving written sources can be hard to grasp. Imagine if 1,000 years from now, you are tasked with writing the history of the Trump Presidency. Your only piece of evidence is a copy of a copy of something from a newspaper. The copy was made in 2320. There’s a name attached to it, but you know nothing else about the journalist. You don’t know which newspaper the text is from, nor do you know if it is from an editorial, factual report, opinion piece or work of fiction. You have no way of checking anything in it against other sources.
And if you think that reconstructing four years from such a fragment sounds difficult if not impossible, then spare a thought for the historian of the 5th and 6th centuries in Britain, who can put the only surviving piece of contemporary insular ‘narrative history’ on a couple of PowerPoint slides. That oldest surviving narrative, written by Gildas within living memory of the battle of, or at, Badon, does not mention anyone called Arthur[ii].
All the other surviving sources were written much later and they all need to be handled with care. The problem with the sources can be demonstrated with one example,
What may be Arthur’s earliest appearance in an insular text comes in a collection of eulogistic stanzas of early Welsh poetry collectively known as y Gododdin
While often referred to as ‘a poem’, Y Gododdin, as Higham rightly states, is a collection of verses commemorating a Northern British raid on the Saxons at Catreath. The raid was a complete disaster and the verses celebrate the men who died. The problem is that Y Gododdin only survives in a 13th century manuscript. The work is generally credited to Aneirin, who is said to have lived in the 6th century. It’s worth pausing to remember that the distance in time between ourselves and Shakespeare is less than this. How much of the material, if any, in the manuscript dates back to the 6th century is a matter of scholarly controversy. Obviously, the date of the ‘Arthur reference’ makes a huge difference to the value of that reference.
Higham is willing to accept an early date, and he quotes the relevant stanza in English. The last four lines read:
He used to bring black crows down in front of the wall
Of the fortified town – though he was not Arthur –
among men mighty in deeds
in front of the barrier of alder wood-Gorddur
Gorddur is the warrior’s name, and he is being praised for his ferocious deeds in battle, although ‘he was not Arthur’. That’s all there is.
The enthusiast says it’s obvious that here we have a reference to a famous Arthur, and this proves stories of King Arthur must have been circulating (off-stage) when this verse was written.
The sceptic asks for evidence that independent stories circulated about a real character called Arthur at the time this verse was composed. The enthusiast points to the poem. Aneirin must have been able to rely on his audience to know the stories, in order for the allusion to work. The allusion proves the existence of the stories and the stories guarantee the validity of the allusion. Dizzying?
Nor does it tell us anything about Arthur except it was a famous name. It doesn’t help us to identify an Arthur, or tell us when or where or if he lived.
A literate person with the necessary patience can follow Higham’s summary of the complicated problems of dating Y Gododdin in general, and of that line in particular. But there are very few people who can read the manuscript, or its facsimile, and the number of people on the planet who have the expertise to negotiate the dating arguments and evaluate the evidence for themselves probably wouldn’t fill a coach for a day trip to Catreath.
And therein lies the real problem. Early British, post-Roman history, is a highly specialized field, but Higham, as did Guy Halsall before him, bemoans the fact that in many ways the specialists have withdrawn from the debate:
Today most specialists distance themselves from the whole issue of Arthur’s reality, citing insufficient evidence to be able to judge his place in history and declaring themselves agnostic on the matter. But their silence leaves the history-reading public with insufficient guidance to the competing claims and without the specialist knowledge to judge between them effectively, for these are highly complex issues
Higham is critical of ‘agnostic’ scholars who refuse to be drawn into a conclusion on the subject. Ironically, Max Harris, whose comment is quoted on the cover of Higham’s book (see above), wrote, in his introduction to In the Land of the Giants:
And then there is Arthur. Historical references to this legendary Romano-British warlord are very few: a list of 12 battles; a great victory recorded at a place called Badon (perhaps Bath in Somerset) a death notice, a possible mention in a battle poem [iii]
This short reference to King Arthur continues with a classic piece of professional ‘agnosticism’: ‘Arthur may be, as many historians have argued, an irrelevance, a distraction’ (p.14). Adams also includes the ‘dates’ from the Annales Cambriae for the battles of both Badon and Camlann in the timeline of the Dark Ages he appends to the book (Adams, Appendix two, p. 429). That ‘may be’ that leaves the door open – just as the inclusion of the Annales Cambriae dates for Badon and Camlann in a timeline with verifiable dates gives them a spurious authenticity [iv].
For all the evidence Higham can marshal, (his bibliography runs for 23 pages of small print) there’s never a knockout punch. If Y Gododdin demonstrates the problems inherent in the evidence, Higham’s detailed discussion of the Historia Brittonum demonstrates why it’s not possible to close the argument.
The 56th ‘chapter’ of a document known as the Historia Brittonum (hereafter HB) is the crucial piece of evidence for enthusiast and scholar alike. HB chapter 56 contains a list of Arthur’s 12 battles. It’s the oldest surviving piece of extended writing about an Arthur. It names him as a victorious war leader against the Saxons.
‘Chapter’ might be misleading. It runs to 23 lines of continuous Latin prose in John Morris’ edition. Though written in Latin, compiled in the early 9th century and ascribed to ‘Nennius’, for most of us, our access to this strange text is through John Morris’ 1980 translation, which is not without its own problems[v].
Higham, like many before him, quotes the ‘chapter’ (p. 185). But I think that misrepresents the HB. The focus on chapter 56 allows people to treat this strange compilation as far more factual than it is. My own interest is in the earlier story of Vortigern (HB 31-49) who takes up much more of the HB than does Arthur. The Venerable Bede, writing at the beginning of the 7th century, following a hint in Gildas, had made Vortigern instrumental in the fall of Roman Britain. In the HB he has become an incestuous, bigamous, drunken fool in a bad folk tale about a beautiful princess. It is not history as understood in the 21st century. Ambrosius Aurelianus, who also appears as an historical character in both Bede and Gildas, has become a vatic child who was born without a father[vi], and St Germanus of Auxerre, who is perhaps the one person in this motley crew who can be established as undeniably historical, has become a spell-working magus who prays Vortigern to a fiery death in his tower[vii]. Reading the whole text does not inspire confidence in its factual accuracy[viii].
Higham, to his credit, takes on the whole of the HB and he’s very good on what it reveals about how different 9th-century attitudes to writing about the past are to our ideas of writing history. His chapter on the HB is worth the price of admission, even if you have no interest in ‘Arthurs’, although he has written about this, at length, before.
However, it’s not possible to dismiss the ‘Battle List’. It’s not enough to point out that no one has identified the battle sites with enough conviction to convince everyone else. (Guy Halsall reported one attempt to do so based on the names of modern pubs (Halsall, 2013, p. 154)); or that if the enemies are Saxons they seem to have been much further north much earlier than any other source suggests; or that the number 12 in a work riddled with biblical echoes seems more than a bit suspect and Arthur’s 12 battles mirror Patrick’s miracles as R.W. Hanning pointed out in 1966 (p. 120): or that some of the battles seem to have been fought by a leader who chose his battlefields because their place names rhymed: or that single handedly killing 960 enemies in a single charge sounds a tad unrealistic. Even with ten hours of daylight, how many deaths is that per minute, every minute, without a break for ten hours[ix]?
There’s more. At least three centuries have passed between the events described and the time of writing. Despite decades of attempts to find one, there is no evidence for an earlier source for the list. A lost poem is the best candidate, but then it would have to be a very strange poem and a list of rhyming battles might still be unconvincing. Anyone who claims that HB 56 is based on accurate oral transmission has to explain how, given that at least 14 generations have passed between writer and event, any oral story could be passed down without alteration. As a rule of thumb, students of oral history accept accuracy is possible in a story passed down for three generations: from your grandparents to you. Not, as Higham points out, a story passed down about your “great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents (give or take a generation either way)”.
Despite all this, the weight of evidence can only say: ‘it is highly unlikely that this is a reliable source’. Higham’s analysis of the way Nennius uses other names in the HB whom we know to be historical, leads him to the perfectly demonstrable conclusion that:
This was a scholarly community prepared to manipulate the distant past, shift individuals around and invent characters to make British history fit for purpose. They amended names to better suit their needs, misquoted from and rode roughshod over earlier testimony, fictionalized historical figures and made up others de novo. The harvesting of names from their original setting to be reused in a different context was commonplace
But he can’t prove this is what happened to Arthur. He can only suggest it is likely. He also claims that to understand the HB,
Our treatment of it must depend on understanding why it was written, where the author obtained his information, how he used what he had gleaned and the ways in which he expected his work to be understood
In his discussion of these features, he’s as guilty of speculation as anyone. Granted his speculation is much more well-informed, he’s still straying out of the world of facts. He is attempting to construct not only the context of a text that does not fit any modern genre, but its contemporary purpose and reception when there is no external evidence for these. Without knowing anything about the Real Author of this text, he’s going to draw conclusions about his intentions.
When Higham lists what can be inferred about the author from the text he’s constructing an Implied Author. It’s the reader’s idea of the author. We have no way of knowing who ‘Nennius’ was, let alone why he wrote what he did, if in fact he did write it. The ‘context’ of a written text is always a construct[x]. In the absence of corroborating evidence independent of the text, such a construct is never going to be the final word on the subject.
I’d back Higham’s informed speculation against most people’s, but there’s no escaping the fact it’s still speculation. He slides from qualified statements, ‘the prologue if accepted as original……in that case he is likely…’ (my italics) to declarative ones:
These were Latin texts written by churchmen tasked with repositioning the Britons within a tradition of European history that centered on Rome
It’s that ‘tasked’ that rings the alarm bells. His reading of the evidence supports his hypothesis, but there’s no way he can prove it.
Sir Bedivere casts Excalibur back into the lake
Higham does need to be applauded for his willingness to accept that medieval authors made stuff up. There’s a peculiar strand in medieval studies, both amongst professionals and enthusiastic amateurs, that works on the assumption that everything that interests us has a prior source. Put like that, it sounds ridiculous. But the unstated assumption is that fiction is a post-medieval invention. So, when Higham surveys the evidence and writes
Wace’s introduction of the Round Table to Arthurian literature was a practical solution to an imagined problem, which there is every likelihood he came up with himself
it’s one of the best moments in the book.
The Tudor invention of Arthur – the “Round Table” in Winchester Cathedral
Given that none of the evidence for an historical Arthur seems convincing, why the persistent arguments? I think people want to believe, and don’t understand or care that the existence of an historical figure, like Alfred the Great or Lady Godiva, is not a question of belief but of provable fact. The arguments over Arthur repeatedly illustrate one peculiarity of early British medieval history. Given the lack of sources for the 5th and 6th centuries in Britain, it’s almost impossible to prove someone didn’t exist. Therefore, says the ‘agnostic’, we have to accept the possibility he did.
Higham is strongly, justifiably against this. He quotes Bertrand Russell:
’Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of sceptics to disprove received dogmas rather than the business of dogmatists to prove them. This is, of course, a mistake.’ He illustrated the point by supposing the existence of a teapot in orbit around the sun that is too small to be visible through even the most powerful telescope. That this assertion cannot be disproved does not mean that it should be allowed to influence our thinking about the solar system. That way only chaos lies, for such speculations are infinite
Beyond a desire to believe, what reason is there to even entertain the idea of an historical Arthur? The answer to that probably lies in a bad metaphor which should have been dismissed the first time it was used. A long time ago someone advanced the argument that since ‘there is no smoke without fire’ there must be a factual, historical basis for the medieval stories about King Arthur. Higham returns to this metaphor in his final chapter and tries to replace it with another, but it’s time someone got rid of the habit of arguing based on inappropriate metaphors.
There may well be no smoke without a fire, but stories aren’t smoke. They are stories. The metaphor implies that all stories have some kind of factual basis. That’s demonstrably not true. If we throw out the inappropriate metaphor, there’s nothing left but wishful thinking.
Anachronistically-armoured knights feast with Arthur, who is in the Round Table
For all the detail, the knockout blow never arrives. Each chapter has its conclusion which sums up the case against the particular contender/argument, and then everything is summed up again in a concluding chapter. This makes the book laboured and repetitive. While the marshalling of scholarly argument is impressive, as the book progresses and Higham goes after some of the ‘fringe’ dwellers, it starts to sound brittle.
I admit to bemused admiration for Graham Phillips. He has made a career out of finding things Arthurian. He found the Grail. He found Camelot. He identified the ‘Real King Arthur’ as Owain Ddantgwyn using a chain of reasoning that was so circular it makes a spin cycle look linear. He has not let scholarly opposition or derision stop him. Give the man his dues: he’s held his line. Recently he claims to have found Arthur’s grave[xi]. The idea that Arthur’s 5th century grave can be found by reading Sir Thomas Malory’s 15th century text has so little to recommend it that it shouldn’t require pages of detailed refutation. It is a fine example of Russell’s orbiting teapot.
And despite what Higham has written about not being obliged to disprove the existence of orbiting teapots, he’s put himself in the position where he has to do so. If the purpose of the book is to educate the history-reading public, then he has to engage with Phillips’ argument. Reading his three-page explanation of the flaws in a portion of Phillips’ argument (pp. 264-267) is like watching someone trying to swat an annoying but mobile ant with a very large, very heavy hammer. It’s hard not to think that all this erudition could be put to a better use.
Despite all the knowledge, despite the careful explanations, despite the clear statement of intent, it is hard to assess how successful this book is. Who is its target audience? Higham claims,
The purpose of this book, is therefore, to set out the main arguments which are on offer, test each one against the sources on which it relies, and determine which, if any deserve support
But it’s difficult to avoid the feeling that the conclusions were written before the tests had been done.
Anyone interested in Arthurian studies, historical or literary, will benefit from reading the book. It’s an encyclopedic survey of the subject, written by an expert. It gathers together disparate information, and the Sarmatian, Nart and Greek chapters are a welcome summary of those diverse cases. But I wonder if Higham really thinks that someone inspired by the Clive Owens’ 2004 film King Arthur which was advertised as “The untold true story that inspired the legend”, is going to read his detailed, painstaking deconstruction of the argument that Lucius Artorius Castus was the original Arthur (pp 14-39)?
I suspect the people who need to read it probably won’t. And if they do, it probably won’t change their minds[xii]. The growing cult of the self-appointed expert means there is an increasing number of people who think access to the internet puts them in a position to discover what the experts have missed, and to challenge the experts’ arguments. We’ve seen this in the 2020 pandemic; it’s not confined to Arthurian studies.
For experts in the field, they’ve heard most of it before. They’ve read some of it in Higham’s earlier work, especially King Arthur: Myth making and History (Routledge, 2002). I suspect there will be those with recognized expertise in some of the more unusual fields that he has picked his way through who might object to the finer points in some of his arguments, but most of us won’t be in a position to follow the ensuing discussion, let alone play referee.
Those who don’t have the patience to read the book will stay happily deluded. Anyone who honestly thinks Arthur was an Ancient Greek Constellation before he had a career as a medieval king is not going to let the problems of transmission get in the way. Worse, as a contributing factor, there’s someone out there willing to publish your theory, or turn it into a documentary, because people like to watch the little amateur sticking it to the experts, even when the audience has no idea what’s at stake. It’s hard not to love a story that declares the Holy Grail has been discovered in an attic in Coventry, or Excalibur has been found[xiii]. Throw in the idea that there’s an academic conspiracy to hide the truth and there’s a small industry aimed at exploiting those who want to believe. Detailed arguments about manuscript dating, linguistic borrowings, or the problems of editing and dating early Welsh poetry simply do not make great television even if they are being presented by Michael Wood.
While the arguments over the historical Arthur are fascinating for all kinds of reasons, for many who are interested in the stories that accumulated around the name, it has always seemed an interesting irrelevance. Even if it were possible to identify a single person as the point of origin for all these disparate stories, and even if the proof were so convincing Higham publicly retracted everything he’s written here, ‘Arthur’ would be a brutal thug whose claim to fame was his ability to organize the slaughter of other violent thugs. He would have nothing in common with Malory’s Arthur except, perhaps, a shared name.
Acknowledgements
My thanks to those who read early versions of this essay, and in particular to Peter Hart whose painstaking proofreading saved me from serious embarrassment. All the remaining errors are mine
Works Cited
Adams, M (2015) In the Land of the Giants. Head of Zeus Ltd
Alcock, L (1971) Arthur’s Britain. Harmondsworth, Penguin Books
Dumville, D (1977) ‘Sub-Roman Britain-History and legend’. History 62:173-92
Halsall, G (2013) Worlds of Arthur: Facts and Fictions of the Dark Ages. Oxford University Press
Hanning, R W (1966) The Vision of History in Early Britain. Columbia University Press
Morris, J (1973) The Age of Arthur. Weidenfield and Nicholson
Morris, J (ed.) (1980) Nennius – British History and The Welsh Annals. Philimore & Co
Author’s Notes
Despite the comprehensive mauling it received from the experts, Morris’ The Age of Arthur is still on sale, and if the comments on Goodreads are any indication, still encouraging the unwary to believe
2. Gildas The Ruin of Britain. (De Excidio et conquestu Britanniae)
3. Ironically, Higham’s book denies the ‘Historical’ status of everything Adams refers to here
4. The entry before the one for Badon reads: ‘Bishop Edur rests in Christ [i.e dies] he was 350 years old.’ It tends not to be quoted by those who want to believe in the reference to Badon. Higham’s discussion of the Annales is on pp. 222-225. They are included in Morris’ edition of Nennius
5. See Higham p. 178-9 for a discussion of the problems of ‘establishing the text’ in general and with Morris’ edition in particular
6. It’s typical of the HB that in chapter 41 the boy has no known father and in chapter 42 he does
7. The HB faithfully records that there are three stories circulating about Vortigern’s death, one of which involves the ground opening up to swallow him.
8. My own interest is in the way these stories developed, rather than any desire to sort fact from fiction. You can read about the development of Vortigern’s story across time, as well as those of Hengist’s daughter and St Germanus at: http://www.liamguilar.com/the-legendary-history
9. I once pointed this out and was told that Arthur would have been using Excalibur and ‘we all know’ Excalibur was an alien artefact
10. I thought this phrase was Peter Barry’s, from Literature in Context (Manchester University Press, 2012) but I can’t find it
12. The repeated use of ‘probably’ here is nothing more than a conventional stylistic avoidance of declarative statements in an attempt to appear undogmatic. If I were a betting man, I’d bet they won’t.
13. Amateur Sleuth traces ‘Holy Grail’. The Courier Mail, August 14, 1995 p.12
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)
Bethesda Constellations, Peter Hughes, Oystercatcher Press, 2020 28 pages
The Celestial Set-Up, Zoë Skoulding, Oystercatcher Press, 2020, 24 pages
LIAM GUILAR combs through two new poetry pamphlets
Oystercatcher Press is one of the many small presses keeping poetry alive and well and providing readers with the opportunity to sample a writer’s work for a relatively small cost. Both these pamphlets are by poets with substantial back catalogues.
Peter Hughes’ Bethesda Constellations contains three short sequences of that name, samples from two works in progress, and some individual poems.
The three Bethesda Constellations provide mini-galaxies of images:
the rain in all these
seaside Brexit towns
goes into the night
a single taxi
never moving
from the station.
The stand-alone images collaborate to evoke place, but also a range of moods from the serious to the whimsical.
The other poems range from these sparkling details to pieces that tetter on the edge of what C.S. Lewis called ‘Privatism’; the feeling you get as a reader that you’re overhearing one side of a conversation about a party you weren’t invited to and know nothing about. Often this can occur in individual poems. ‘re;lode26’ starts in specific kitchen details, not just garlic but “& four fat cloves/ of this year’s garlic” to:
I saw you stick
a mini octopus
on the front
of your SG
which served
as temporary amp
& living strumbuddy
It’s difficult so know what that means, or what the context is that would give it meaning. The three ‘Re:lode’ poems are part of an ongoing collaboration, and therefore taken out of their own contexts, though Re:lode30 with its seamless integration of song, local history and imperialism is one of the most enjoyable pieces in the pamphlet.
Such moments as the one quoted above are fortunately rare. On rereading, the movement away or towards the particular within a poem creates a feeling of exhilarating movement, as though you’re a passenger in a vehicle taking a blind bend at speed. This is particular true of the shorter pieces, like ‘Ant’ or ‘Choir’, which begins:
an amateur choir
is filling the hall
with love songs
on the last day of September
and proceeds to
rumours & a heart of gold
shuffle back onto the street
& on beyond the street light.
Zoë Skoulding’s The Celestial Set-Up seems to invite a different reading practice. ‘Why are you telling me this?’ seems the valid question.
The elusive Rosa Luxemburg
‘A Rose for Rosa’ opens the pamphlet. It begins,
This is not the grave of rosa luxemburg she is not here you will not find her neither will you find her at the memorial to rosa Luxemburg at the lichenstein bridge…
and so on for 29 lines of unpunctuated prose, in which variations on ‘she isn’t there’ and ‘you won’t find her’ link any number of statues, monuments, streets, buildings or institutes named after Rosa Luxemburg.
Many of the poems like this one feel like writing exercises. ‘The Bed’ begins:
Our bed was never made from a still-rooted olive
Our bed was never planed with a brazen adze
with its nod to ‘The Odyssey’ but then continues for another 26 lines each beginning ‘Our bed was…’
As a writing exercise encouraging students to consider metaphors and how they work, this might be fairly common, but the end result is a list that is rarely interesting for a stranger who doesn’t know who the first-person plural refers to and can’t make the plethora of images cohere and say something of interest about ‘us’ or ‘the bed’.
For much of this collection I was left wondering if my presence as a reader was essential or even if it had been considered as part of the process.
‘Displacement Fixing by Steerage’ sounds like a parody of officialise, but since I haven’t read the document in question, I’m left wondering what I’m supposed to do with lines like this:
No matter from what point of ebb’s northern hindrance you look at it, it’s always within one delivery of true note
The same is true of ‘A Divinatory Calendar’, a sequence of 13 five-line poems. They are verbally inventive, but phrases like “Get to the point just when it dissolves like salt in drizzle bristling the skin” or “The habits of highly productive people include lying down at the crossroads covered in ash” had an initial attraction that didn’t survive too much consideration.
‘A Strait Story’ is neither a story about the Menai Strait or a straight story about a boat trip. Something happened in the Strait, but the facts and the writer’s response to them are presented in a baffling way that suggests both are an opportunity for a bit of writing rather than a desire to engage the reader with the experience.
The piece is divided into prose paragraphs and short passages set out as poems. This could be a nod to earlier Celtic genres where the prose conveyed the narrative and the lyric was used for speeches or moments of intensity. But there’s little narrative, and of the four ‘lyrics’ two are simply lists that have gained little by being written out in verse.
Despite the invention of the internet and the explosion of opportunities for publishing and reading poems, pamphlets still play an essential role in the circulation of poetry. For many poets, their first collection still takes the form of pamphlet or chapbook. For the more established, pamphlets offer a wide variety of possibilities: the chance to try out new work and see what kind of reaction it receives, or to use as a calling card.
For the curious reader, pamphlets offer a cheap way of reading a lot of different poetry and sifting the cacophony of unfamiliar names and vaguely familiar claims. For a relatively small cost – these two cost five pounds each – you can dip into a poet’s work, spend some time with it, and decide if you think the poet’s publication list is worth pursuing. You, reader, should buy some pamphlets.
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)
Daniel Smith, The History Press, 2020, hb, 256 pages, £14.99
KEN BELL traces an old and sordid story uniting West End and East
The Sunday Mirror thought that it had the scoop of the century in July 1964, when it ran a front-page splash about a prominent peer and a London gangster who were having a homosexual affair. By the following Sunday, the Mirror had obtained photographs of the two men with drinks in their hands, clearly at ease in each other’s company, yet by the following month the paper had issued a grovelling apology and paid the peer the goodly sum of £40,000.
The peer was Bob Boothby, a very well-known radio and television personality in the post-war years. The gangster was Ronnie Kray, who ran the Kray Twins’ gang along with his heterosexual brother, Reggie. Daniel Smith’s book is the story of how and why the tale of these two charmers did not see the light of day for many decades.
Boothby was not a very popular man in senior Tory circles. He had been the lover of Dorothy MacMillan, wife of Harold, who just happened to be the Prime Minister for many of the years when the relationship between Boothby and Kray was in full swing. One would have thought that Harold MacMillan would have wanted to pay back Robert Boothby with interest for putting the horns on him, but the asexual MacMillan just seems to have shrugged his shoulders at the affair. That was probably Boothby’s first bit of luck.
His second came about because the story was set to break in the wake of the Vassall scandal (1) and then the Profumo affair which followed hard on its heels. A third sordid scandal was too much for the government to stand, so the order went out to give Boothby a helping hand. Thus a key hinge to the Mirror story, which was that the Metropolitan Police were investigating the Krays, was kicked away when the compliant Met obligingly denied that any such investigation was taking place.
Labour wanted to take over from the Tories as the government, but they chose to help save Boothby’s political skin. So Harold Wilson sat back whilst the Labour-connected lawyer, Arnold Goodman, went to work putting the screws on the Mirror. Ronnie Kray was not just involved with Bob Boothby, but also Tom Driberg, a homosexual Labour MP. For Wilson, this was about saving Labour as much as anything else. Boothby was obviously bisexual, but there was enough heterosexuality about him to suggest that he might have been able to shrug off the allegations of inversion. That was not the case with the ever-cottaging Driberg, who had no interest in women at all. Had the story been allowed to break, it is quite likely that Labour would have been dragged into it via Driberg, so Wilson seems to have decided that it was better to cover it all up.
The paper provided Boothby’s final card with its poorly-worded story which claimed that the affair was between the peer and the gangster. In fact, Kray had no interest in the fat, over-60, Boothby; what drew them together was a shared desire for “boys”, as they both called the late-teenaged, early-twenties young toughs that came within Ronnie Kray’s orbit and whom he passed on to Boothby.
The relationship between the peer and the gangster, stripped of its homosexuality, was really one of those classical upper-class and working-class meetings of minds based upon a set of shared values. Put bluntly, both groups enjoy their drink, change their bed partners regularly, and both loathe the uptight middle-class. That is probably one of the reasons why working class people vote for Boris Johnson, because he is what they would be if they had money. In mid-1980s Oxford, Boris was very popular with the former miners, steelworkers and dockers who made up the bulk of the Ruskin College junior membership and quite happily voted for him every time he stood for Oxford Union office – and that was at the height of the miners’ strike. I know, as I am the Ruskin man who introduced Boris to my fellows.
The unpleasant aspect of this affair was not the easy sex and louche attitudes of everyone involved. Rather it was the fact that thanks to an establishment cover-up the Krays were allowed to continue wreaking havoc for five more years that left at least two people dead and any number of young men coerced into having sex with Kray and Boothby. One of Kray’s victims was a very young reporter with the Daily Telegraph, who was only able to escape thanks to the intervention of Reggie Kray – but that did not stop Ronnie from sending him on his way with a kick or two, or stop him ordering some underthugs to go and dish out a serious kicking to the poor hack some weeks later. As he was left battered and bleeding on the road, the message was given that it was the price he had to pay for defying Ronnie Kray.
If that could be done to a broadsheet journalist, then the price that a young Eastender would have to pay for defiance does not bear thinking about. That Boothby knew that his playthings had been coerced is beyond doubt, since at least one was produced for him, battered and bruised, and told firmly that if he did not please Boothby he could expect more of the same. This is the sickening aspect of the Boothby/Kray story. It demonstrates that from Boothby via Jeremy Thorpe to Cyril Smith, the list of homosexual abusers really does seem to be never-ending, and all with the connivance of an establishment that seems to be indifferent to the fate of the victims.
Editor’s Note
John Vassall, 1924-1996, was a junior civil servant blackmailed by the KGB into providing the Soviet Union with sensitive naval information. His 1962 arrest and subsequent imprisonment (he was released in 1972) was a major embarrassment to the Macmillan government, and provoked a public investigation of the security services
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
Still Life, Ciaran Carson, Wake Forest University Press, 2019, 88 pages
LIAM GUILAR relishes – and mourns – a unique talent
There’s a picture of Ciaran Carson on the back cover of Still Life. He’s sitting on a bench seat. Tall buildings, trees and streetlights provide a diminishing perspective taking the eye towards an approaching bus. The bus is slightly out of focus. There’s something, perhaps someone on a bike, in front of it.
Ciaran Carson
The word dapper presents itself to describe the poet. Hat, blazer, tie, the refinement of a white handkerchief in the breast pocket. The facial expression is harder to read. Perhaps a hint of a mischievous smile? Perhaps Puckish is an appropriate description?
In a book of poems about pictures, this one seems carefully composed. Perhaps you know the story. You walk into the woods and meet a well-dressed man on a path you didn’t mean to take. He’s usually sitting on a log, or a style. If you share something with him, you’ll be rewarded with a story, though the story might take up several lifetimes and when you return to where you started, you’ll find the world has changed.
There’s an inviting space beside Carson on that bench. I would offer him the OED’s etymology of dapper, which I think he would enjoy. It suggests dapper was adopted at the end of the ME period “with modification of sense, perh ironical or humorous” since in Middle Dutch it meant “powerful, strong, stout, energetic”, which might be superfluous to requirement, as the saying goes. Modern Dutch gives “valiant, brave and bold”, and they don’t seem appropriate either.
I want to thank him for Last Night’s Fun: In and Out of Time with Irish Music, one of my favourite books, For All We Know, one of the most interesting of poetic narratives, and for the pleasure of all the other poems, translations and the weird and wonderful prose.
But he’s dead.
The first poem in the book concludes:
It’s beautiful weather, the 30th of March, and tomorrow the clocks go forward.
How strange it is to be lying here listening to whatever it is is going on.
The days are getting longer now, however many of them I have left
And the pencil I am writing this with, old as it is, will easily outlast their end
Carson died in October 2019. Still Life was published posthumously that November. It’s inevitable that those two facts colour any response to the book. They don’t need to. The book doesn’t need your sympathy.
On a first reading the poems seem colloquial, easy to read, informative, with moments of arresting imagery –
My dreams are filled with wavering buildings, avalanches of astonished / glass
In characteristically long lines, with their deceptive appearance of artlessness, each poem is a reflection on a picture, which provides the poem’s title. ‘Reflection’ is inadequate because the colour and detail in each painting is a focal point, not always the beginning or end:
Because when looking at a thing we often drift into a memory of something else / however tenuous the link
But ‘reflection’ is also apt, because the pictures become distorted mirrors which reflect the observer’s life and pre-occupations. Each viewing is a reviewing, no matter how familiar he thought the picture was. The silent present ‘you’ – often Carson’s wife, Dierdre – notices things he hasn’t. Things unnoticed re-present themselves, and perception and memory shuffle the elements into new versions of the picture. A Carson poem is typically not a hermetic object, which I think is one of the reasons he was a fascinating writer. An intelligence was moving through time and space and recording the process.
The last poem ends:
And I loved the buzz of the one-bar electric heater as a bus or truck passed by
And I loved the big windows and whatever I could see through them, be it cloudy or clear
And the way they trembled and thrilled to the sound of the world beyond
The key phrases here are ‘whatever I could see’ and ‘the world beyond’.
There is no ‘high and low culture’, no misplaced sense that some things aren’t ‘appropriate’ subjects for poetry. The verbal registers move from colloquial to technical. Wittgenstein may be quoted, but he’s just as much at home as the small pot of daffodils broken by an idiot vandal, or the memory of “blue birds anticlockwise spiralling around the interior of the toilet bowl” (p. 84).
Carson once described a traditional music session:
Every tune recalls other circumstances in which it has been played; and the conversations and anecdotes sparked off by the tunes are essential to a good session. It’s a mix of tunes, songs, stories, drinking, eating – whatever happens to be going on, including smoking in the days when you could smoke in bars (1)
Think of each poem not as a single tune but a recording of the whole session. It’s an astonishing achievement, and he sounds like no one else:
I’d just found the book I had in mind –What Painting is by James Elkin
When the vandal struck. Thud. What the…? The gate clanged. I looked out
The bay window to see a figure scarpering off down the street to the interface –
What a book though. I have it before me, open at this colour plate, jotting notes
Into a jotter, which I’ll work up later into what you’re reading now
The poet doesn’t live in self-imposed exile on Parnassus, occasionally sending his effusions to the plebs below. Street names map a real Belfast and anchor him into the daylight world. You can reconstruct his daily walk which is recorded in many of the poems as possibilities on a map. Google maps and virtual art galleries, acts of minor vandalism, the insertion of a drip into the arm, a cat eating a bird, all find their way into the poems. Memory skips backwards, to bomb blasts, early attempts at writing, school days. A concern with the mechanics of writing is always present: the pen he’s using, the breaking of a pencil, memories of a typewriter, words and their possibilities. Sounds too are included, like the phone and the doorbell, the postman interrupting him while writing, but unlike that person from Porlock, the interruptions kick the poem onward.
However, although the poems are separately titled, this is a sequence; the intelligence and craft are in the architecture and that may not be immediately obvious on a first reading. The poems pick up, echo and alter words, phrases, and images. The more you look for the links, the more there are.
As a single example, which doesn’t exhaust its own possibilities, the sixth poem in the sequence is “Nicholas Poussin, Landscape with a Calm 1650-1651”. Although this is the first of three paintings by Poussin to be used as a title, the artist appeared in the first poem, where his habit of reaching among Roman ruins for a handful of marble and porphyry chips and saying to a tourist, ‘Here’s ancient Rome’ stands at the beginning of the book as shorthand for Carson’s method.
The sixth poem also refers explicitly to the second poem, “Angela Hackett, Lemons on a Moorish Plate 2013”, in which, “a fortnight ago” Carson had placed a blackbird to sing from a blackthorn “for the sake of assonance”. He’s driven to look up the difference between blackthorn and hawthorn (which also evokes the tune “The Blackbird”).
But the poem also sets up what comes afterwards. Carson records his daily walk and for the first time mentions Number 1 Hopewell Avenue, “a beautiful house back then”, now a building site. The construction work here will become one of the markers of time passing as subsequent visits in later poems will record the developments on the site. “We” remember the goldfinch “you saw” “two years ago” and so on and so forth…You can pick up a phrase, a word or a detail and watch it move through the poems, threading them together.
The most obvious link is the movement of time, which is not straightforward. Time moves forward as an accumulation of present moments, some dated, some sequenced by incidents. Time moves backwards to memory, some also dated. What is most obviously missing are references to the future.
Time is also built into the complicated game Carson plays with the idea of the poem as a record of its own performance. The pictures might look like time frozen, but the poems often create the impression of a performance in progress, unfolding.
Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the book, given the context, is that these poems manage to escape categories like Personal, Autobiographical or Confessional. Just as a Carson poem can challenge your idea of what a poem is and does, these labels are called into question because the poems are paradoxically none of them, and all of them. It’s easy to imagine someone else in this situation, not knowing if they were going to live, writing self-indulgent or embarrassingly personal poems. But here a craftsman is taking pleasure in his craft and inviting the reader to share his enjoyment.
Like the encounter with the man in the story, once you start paying attention, it’s hard to escape. The book invites rereading. Those possible etymologies of dapper which seemed initially inappropriate are perhaps apt after all: the poems are indeed “powerful, strong, energetic”, “valiant, brave and bold”.
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)
Visitors to Yadegar Asisi’s ‘Dresden 1945’ installation at the Panometer in Dresden in January 2015
Dresden, the Fire and the Darkness, Sinclair McKay, Viking, 2020
LESLIE JONES revisits the Dresden raid of February 1945
“Man is at bottom a savage, horrible beast” (Arthur Schopenhauer)
Historian James Holland, a ubiquitous presence on television programmes about World War 2 these days, featured in Lost Home Movies of Nazi Germany. In the undated footage in question, a group of Jews are being deported from Dresden. Holland confides that he had always considered the city “an innocent place”, bombed needlessly in February 1945. But having watched this amateur film, he reminds us that it was also a rail hub with over 140 factories producing war material. For example, from 1942 the Zeiss Ikon camera plant produced precision instruments and optical technology for the military. It employed slave labour, including Jewish women. In this “hotbed of Nazism”, Holland maintains, the Jews were dealt with as brutally as anywhere in Germany. He acknowledges, however, that the Dresden firestorm was “horrendous”, something of an understatement.
In Greatest Events of World War 2 – Dresden Firestorm, Holland returned to this contentious subject. He referred to the German air raids on England, notably those on London and Coventry but conceded that in all of these attacks, ‘only’ 40,000 people were killed. Dresden suffered more losses between the 13th and 15th of February. Holland blames the Nazi authorities in Dresden, notably the Gauleiter of Saxony, Martin Mutschmann (‘King Mu’), for failing to build air raid shelters for the civilian population (but not for himself).
In his review of David Irving’s The Destruction of Dresden (1963), Harold Nicolson, like Holland, conflates the Dresden raid and the Shoah, calling the former “…the single greatest holocaust caused by the war”. In Dresden, the Fire and the Darkness, in similar vein, Sinclair McKay notes that bomber crew survivors were proud of their service, as they considered Nazism “a tumour…[that] could not be cut out without damage to the surrounding flesh”. Or, put otherwise, they were “simply doing what they were told”.
Apropos the morality of incinerating 25,000 virtually defenceless civilians (there were no anti-aircraft guns or searchlights in Dresden by this time) McKay contends that the concept of a “war crime” implies “intentionality and rational decision-making”. He suggests, accordingly, that “these city bombings were not vengeful or consciously merciless” but “desperate reflexive attacks launched to make the other side simply stop”. War, he avers, creates its own momentum, its own desperate logic.
McKay evidently sympathises with Air Chief Marshal Harris’ contention that the Nazis were a fanatical enemy that “could be vanquished only by the trauma of complete, civic obliteration…” (McKay, p 20). He concedes, however, that Harris hated the Germans and was indifferent to the fate of German civilians. His sole concern was the heavy losses of airmen in Bomber Command. Four out of every ten bomber airmen were killed, wounded or taken prisoner. Any distinction between military and civilian targets was superseded by the concept of total war, as espoused by Harris, Churchill and his scientific adviser Lord Cherwell.
Dresden, the Fire and the Darkness is replete with graphic and compelling details about the raid. The author tells us that at the zoo, “the elephants bellowed and the gibbons chattered in wild distress”; that people’s shoes melted and their clothes self-combusted; that bodies of pregnant women were torn open to reveal unborn children; that in the Great Garden, body parts hung from trees but that elsewhere, they were sent skywards; and that after the raid, “distressed ownerless dogs” kept people awake at night.
The author endeavours to contextualise or relativise the effects of carpet/area bombing (or “worker de-housing”) by dwelling on the undoubted fear experienced by bomber air crews and on the persecution of the Jews. But German historian Sönke Neitzel is correct when he asserts that the objective of terror attacks, like the one on Dresden commencing on the night of February 13, was to kill as many civilians as possible in order to hinder troop movements and to paralyse infrastructure and industry.
In the British press, the Dresden raid was presented as an attempt to help Marshal Ivan Konev’s advancing forces. At the Yalta Conference, Stalin’s commanders had asked the Anglo-Americans to target Dresden, a transport hub. But, in the event, the Germans did not buckle. Stories of rape and mutilation by the advancing Red Armies were rife and encouraged German soldiers to fight on. A PR disaster in the neutral press, the destruction of Dresden enabled Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels to momentarily occupy the moral high ground.
Equivocation and jesuitry aside, Dresden, the Fire and the Darkness is unquestionably well written. The memoirs and diaries of those who survived the ordeal, notably the diary of Victor Klemperer, the former Professor of Philology and Romance Studies at the Technical University of Dresden, enliven the narrative. McKay evidently understands why the “German Florence”, with its fine art and architecture, was so treasured by its citizens. As he remarks, “To each and every Dresdener, the city had a unique and perhaps sacred beauty”. And, in due course, every citizen of Dresden also understood “the terrible fragility of historic beauty” (McKay, ‘Why the Dresden bombers weren’t war criminals’, The Telegraph, 13th February 2020).
Small Men on the Wrong Side of History –The Decline, Fall, and Unlikely Return of Conservatism, Ed West, London, Constable, 2020, 426 pages
DEREK TURNER likes a conservative critique of conservatism
The story of conservatism since 1945 has been one of failure wrapped up in frequent electoral success. While anatomising this oft-noted conundrum, Ed West outlines excellently the intellectual and stylistic differences between Left and Right, before concluding ruefully that the forces of conservatism are unlikely to regroup, let alone regain lost ground.
Politics is about ideas, morals, and practicality. It is also about radically oppositional personality types, reflected in culture and possibly rooted in neurobiology, which govern our aesthetics and outlooks, and compel us to choose sides in a culture clash that has been continuing since the Greeks dreamed up Cassandra and Pandora. Cassandra is an archetypal ‘conservative’, and Pandora the original ‘liberal’ – the former eternally seeking grounds for gloom, the latter reasons to hope. The author is instinctively in the Cassandran camp, although many of his allies are almost as little to his taste as the myrmidons of the other side.
West is the son of two conservative journalists, Mary Kenny and the late Richard West, and the brother of another (Patrick). Sometimes sympathies run in families, almost as persistently as physical features. Now in early middle age, West finds himself turning into his father, a man so reactionary he didn’t learn to drive, and spoiled his ballot papers. He was brought up in ‘bohemian conservative’ circumstances in London, encountering eccentrics like the buckled shoe and monocle-wearing French priest, ‘aristocratic-looking’ descendant of a palace guard killed during the Revolution, who called France the ‘regicide state’.
The broad-minded author loathes the limited philosophy expressed by British tabloids, climate change deniers, conspiracy theorists, Creationists, identitarians, incels, Objectivists, populists, ‘shock jocks’, Trump, or UKIP, all of whom he thinks make the Right much uglier than it ought to be. The American thinker Sam Francis famously called the Republican Party ‘beautiful losers’; West would dispute that ‘beautiful’. But however abysmal his opinion of many on the Right, his opinion of the alternative is lower yet. Union Jack waistcoat-wearers et al are embarrassments, but they’re his embarrassments.
He broods on the diminishing socioeconomic status of the Right’s supporters. The erstwhile party of the influential rich now draws ever-growing allegiance from the lower middle and working classes. The author favours uplift, and realises that the rough auxiliaries who founded his Europe of the faith were as unvarnished as today’s Trumpians, living in their centuries’ equivalents of Flyover Country. But short-term electoral success may entail longer-term irrelevance. Conservatism is retreating into older age-groups, less wealthy suburbs, left-behind towns and backwoods, while Leftists consolidate their control of the institutions that set agendas and the metropolises forming the future. They are assailed as ‘elitists’, and they are – but elitism is always more a help than a hindrance. Faiths, like fashions, filter downwards – and today’s minority opinion is often the mainstream view of tomorrow, with which the day-after-tomorrow’s conservatives will probably play catch-up.
It is a cultural commonplace that conservatives are boring, dim-witted, morally inferior and repressed. Sometimes, they even see themselves in such lights, leading them either to avoid engagement (except in the ballot box, whose ‘shy Tories’ surprise psephologists), or adopt perverse positions at least partly to provoke. Some Rightists actually are, as Barack Obama remarked of Al-Qaida, ‘small men on the wrong side of history’, overcompensating for existential fear with intemperate anger. Where Conservatives do cling on in prominent positions, they are imperilled islands, like Catholic recusants in the days of Dissolution.
5th century BC Attic vase depiction of Pandora (centre)
The Cassandra-Pandora dichotomy has reproduced itself in reality. In countless contretemps, conservatives have found themselves on history’s back foot, fighting implacable opponents with a gallantry touching because ultimately unavailing. The humorous 1930 classic, 1066 And All That, summarised one emblematic Left-Right confrontation – ‘The Roundheads were right, but repulsive. The Cavaliers were wrong, but romantic’. Today’s Right has been robbed not just of victory, but even of romance, its adherents now and retrospectively regarded as ‘phobes’ and rubes, carriers of contagions and false consciousness. Old icons have been pushed from the pantheon, as saints’ faces were scratched from medieval rood-screens – chivalry, Church, femininity, hierarchy, masculinity, monarchy, nation, race – and colourless, country-less, ‘rational’, sexless idols have taken their place on the shockingly bare plinths. This is the cruellest of outcomes for instinctive conservatives, who privately revel in ruination, so long as they can gild their myriad ‘lost causes’ with mythic lustre.
The Right’s old emphases on duty, emotional restraint, experience and realism are intrinsically less appealing than the Left’s freedom, novelty and utopianism. It is the perennial difference between Augustine and Pelagius, Burke and Rousseau, a Pope and a Pentecostalist, Churchill’s funeral and Diana’s, Margaret Thatcher and Michelle Obama, a soldier and a singer, a coat of arms and a rainbow flag. On what psychologists call ‘the Big Five personality traits’, Rightists score highest only on conscientiousness, leaving Leftists to lay claim to agreeableness, extroversion and openness. They also score more highly on the last trait, neuroticism, which they display abundantly on Twitter. They burnish their reputation endlessly through their dominance in academia, the arts, and the broadcast media. Conservatives wind up on the ‘wrong side of history’, because they rarely write histories – while, as Shelley noted hopefully, ‘Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.’ Often, the Right has good ideas, badly presented, and the Left bad ones, imaginatively expressed.
Leftists also practise solidarity. Strangely for those who so stress freedom, Leftists are frequently herd animals. They appoint and promote allies, decline to denounce each other, and ignore their side’s crimes while exaggerating those of the Right. There is even de facto ‘discipline’ through the antifa fringe, who routinely subject outspoken Rightists to ‘deplatforming’, ‘doxxing’, vandalism, and violence. To Leftists, political parties are communal, almost covenanting organisations – while for conservatives, parties are just means to an (indefinite) end. Everything, to true-believing Leftists, is political, while conservatives are usually content to expostulate, before abandoning events to individuals, or Fate. Individualism extends to the Right’s farthest fringe; while the Left has goon-squads, the most lethal terrorists of recent times have been lone wolf Rightists.
Another difficulty is that the conservative worldview is not reducible to simple statements, and varies between countries. It is an essence, not a set of rigid and (supposedly) universal ideas that even children can comprehend. Leftist values can be summed up (and have been consciously) in Sesame Street, Star Trek, and Harry Potter – and inculcation continues as those children graduate to Ibsen, Harper Lee, Margaret Atwood, Mad Men, or stand-up comedians. It matters hugely that women are increasingly un-conservative, as it is usually women who set a household’s moral tone. Young people no longer rove rightwards with age, if they ever did in recent decades.
The author enjoys puncturing priggish pretensions, while admitting to inconsistencies in his own argument. He combines the ancients and obvious authorities (Burke, Kirk, and Oakeshott) with moderns like John Derbyshire, segueing skilfully from classics to pop culture, neo-reaction, and social media folk-tales. It seems a pity to cavil with so likeable a contribution to the corpus, but arguably he is overly fastidious – for instance, ridiculing those who are fixated on the Frankfurt School, before admitting it really was influential. He asserts dubiously that Germany and Israel have ‘found inner peace’ after World War Two. He claims ‘memes…are perhaps the first art form in two hundred years in which the Right has excelled’, somehow overlooking Céline, Joyce, Marinetti, Pound, Yeats, and others. He disagrees with von Krafft-Ebing’s (surely incontrovertible) assertion that self-mortifying saints may have had masochistic urges.
Eventually, he undercuts his own side – a tradition in itself among conservative commentators. According to this desponding analysis, there is almost certainly no salvation in politics, and all that remains is retreat into religion. But this is unfeasible, and even if it wasn’t it wouldn’t alter much, because as he observes, ‘progressivism is a heresy of Christianity’ – albeit lacking Christianity’s charity, culture, humility, and transcendental quality. There were good reasons why the Romans tried to repress the upstart faith, with its imperially unsettling equality, eschatology, free will, individualism, ostentatious piety, sentimentality, and universalism (and sentimentality’s obverse, bitter hatreds of ‘heretics’).
Probably his resignation is born more of private diffidence than public despair, because, as he shows, liberalism is vulnerable – embedded for so long it is atrophying, its yawn-inducing clichés eliciting counter-rebellion among the least ‘awokened’ most awake. It has listened only to itself for so long that many of its members are automata, like the ‘non-player characters’ in Dungeons & Dragons. As the West shrivels, liberalism is becoming a luxury even liberals can’t afford – and their vapid ideas of identity politics will be overtaken by earthier, older variants. Where conservatives prove unequal, new parties will emerge, with more determined and lateral-thinking leaders, who understand metapolitics, and pay attention to presentation. These mightn’t all call themselves conservative, but on the other hand they might actually conserve.
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
The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein, Farah Mendlesohn, Unbound, 2019, hardback £20
CHRISTOPHER G. NUTTALL reviews an unusually fair appraisal of a sci-fi pioneer
“Over a period of twenty years, Heinlein’s attitudes had shifted noticeably. Were one to include the twenty years previous to that, the word would be ‘dramatically’. This was not always (from my 1980s feminist point of view) a good shift, but it was there, and I was fascinated. Here was a person sometimes ahead of his time, sometimes crosswise, and, towards the end, in retrenchment. As a historian how could I not be entranced?” (Farah Mendlesohn, introduction)
Robert A. Heinlein (1907-1988) is one of the founding fathers of modern science-fiction, responsible for such hugely popular and influential works as Stranger in a Strange Land, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Time Enough for Love, and Starship Troopers. It is therefore curious that his works been so rarely been given substantial analysis. Instead, many modern-day critics have judged Heinlein by 21st century standards and declared him to be sexist, racist and bigoted – while others have been completely uncritical of the man and his works. Indeed, to sci-fi devotees like me, attacking him can feel a little like treason. Farah Mendelsohn seeks to separate the man from monster or myth.
After a brief assessment of Heinlein’s life and career, Mendlesohn starts to assess the themes running through Heinlein’s works. One key theme is family. Although he is often branded an individualist, Heinlein talks often about the need for social support structures – familial, rather than governmental. Heinlein’s heroes are never true loners, but have support from their families and friends. Heinlein was very focused on the family, but the family one chooses rather than the family one has. This spans a range between the happy – and very 50s-typical – Stone Family (The Rolling Stones) to the family Lazarus Long built for himself in Time Enough for Love, which came out towards the end of Heinlein’s career. As Heinlein grew older, he grew more cynical; the Stones are an ideal family, in many ways, but the Farnhams (Farnham’s Freehold) are an utter disgrace.
Mendlesohn is quite adept at recognising the concealed racial markers encoded into Heinlein’s text (for example, an otherwise undescribed naval officer likes watermelons and other black-coded traits). But it should be remembered that Heinlein was often quite limited in what he could come out and say, in the climate of his times. It is possible that Heinlein’s early books would have been rejected, outright, if he’d featured openly black heroes or black men in positions of power. But he gave himself enough room to deny it, if necessary. One may argue that this was contemptible, but it was a fact of life. Later, Heinlein made it clear that he had created a series of multiracial worlds. But most of his coloured heroes were still, culturally speaking, Americans. Heinlein’s heroes might have been multiracial, but not multicultural. One might accuse Heinlein of a lack of cultural diversity, particularly in the juveniles, but it should be noted that different cultures are not always better, and it can be hard to empathise with someone from a culture so different to our own that their actions make no sense to us or even come across as evil. Heinlein’s early heroes are Americans because Heinlein saw the American ethos as being the best.
Mendlesohn also raises interesting points regarding Heinlein’s female characters, both lead characters (Podkayne of Podkayne of Mars, and Maureen Smith of To Sail Beyond The Sunset) and secondary characters (Betsy of The Star Beast, Wyoming of Moon). Some of them – Maureen and Betsy – start their careers as second fiddles, held back directly or indirectly by social conventions – and other women. They grow and develop as their stories develop; for example, Maureen couldn’t go back to motherhood, when her estranged children re-entered her life. She had outgrown the parental urge. Podkayne, by contrast, was the victim of failed parenting. Her parents were unable to give her the tools she needed for adulthood; nor, for that matter, was she surrounded by women who would aid her. (Duke Farnham was a similar victim.)
In some ways, however, Mendlesohn is guilty of “interrogating the text from the wrong perspective” (a term infamously devised by Anne Rice). Heinlein’s juveniles were written, first and foremost, for teenage boys – and teenage boys, by and large, are not interested in ‘feminine’ issues. Heinlein glossed over them because his audience would find it a turn-off. Successful female heroes – women, written by women – who appeal to men, do it, in a sense, by turning away from traditional femininity. They are either surrounded by men (Hermione Granger) or exist in male-shaped universes (like Elizabeth Moon’s heroine, Paksenarrion). They are rarely involved with female social groups; the only real exception, as far as I can tell, is Mildred Hubble (Jill Murphy’s Worst Witch series). But her books are written in a manner that allows boys to pretend that she isn’t classically feminine. Heinlein did not set out to be all things to all readers – a good thing too, as it is impossible.
This explains, I think, some of the weaker moments in his earlier juveniles. The main character of Red Planet (1949)shows signs of sexism, as Mendlesohn points out, but his sentiments would not be out of place for a teenage boy (particularly one of Heinlein’s generation). Heinlein clearly evolved, as similar sentiments expressed within Tunnel in the Sky (1955)lead to an embarrassing case of foot-in-mouth syndrome when the hero badmouths girls, only to discover that his friend ‘Jack’ is in fact ‘Jackie’. Indeed, Heinlein would intentionally start writing his juveniles for girls as well as boys, but he kept boys as the core audience – a wise move, as girls will often read boy-books but not vice versa.
This has other effects on his writing. Mendlesohn points to problematic moments within the text – the failure of a father to admit, for example, that his daughter is more than just his daughter – but this is caused by the male mindset. Maureen argues, at one point, that men assume that a woman is subordinate until she proves otherwise. It would be more accurate to say that people (men as well as women) are pigeonholed very quickly and, once pigeonholed, have the greatest difficulty in climbing out of the pigeonhole. The male mindset leads to the same problems as female intuition; when it’s right, it cannot explain why it is right, when it’s wrong, it finds it hard to truly believe it’s wrong. Heinlein depicted this process quite accurately – and, in other books, argued that the only true way to counter it is to give the wrong person room to retreat. This does, of course, require a sensitivity that few people develop.
Mendelsohn’s comments on racism in Heinlein’s works, notably Sixth Column (in which the United States is invaded by “Pan-Asians”) and Farnham’s Freehold, are interesting. Heinlein did not depict the Pan-Asians of Sixth Column very kindly, it is true, but the atrocities they committed are pitiful shadows of the atrocities committed by real-life Imperial Japan. To challenge Heinlein on this requires a certain willingness to ignore real-life atrocities, and Mendlesohn, to her credit, largely avoids it. She does point out that the ‘killing rays’ of the Sixth Column kill Asian-Americans as well as Pan-Asians, but this is an unfortunate – and logical – effect. The ray could not tell the difference between two different groups of Asians.
Farnham’s Freehold is one of Heinlein’s most controversial works, and perhaps his most sadly topical, in the light of recent bitter politics (see my 2018 Amazing Stories review here). It centres around Hugh Farnham – a very atypical hero for Heinlein, being something of a failure at life – and his family; his drunkard wife, his resentful son, his carefree daughter and her best friend and his African-American houseboy Joe. Following a nuclear war, Hugh and his family are pitched into the far future … a truth they only discover when they come face to face with the black masters of the future world, a world where whites are slaves. The remainder of the story follows their attempts to come to terms with the new situation.
Mendlesohn describes Farnham’s Freehold as an ‘if this goes on …’ book, and concludes that the book is, indeed, racist. To me, it is more of a ‘flipping’ book – an exercise in switching perspectives, and seeing things from another angle. Hugh Farnham and his family are slave-traders, starting in a position of ‘white supremacy’. Following revolutionary upheaval, they then go through a short period of ‘equality,’ followed by ‘black supremacy’ and ending with the ‘aftermath.’ In so doing, they are shown, time and time again, what it is like to be on the opposite end of the scale.
There is room for an entire essay here, but I’ll content myself with a handful of points. Heinlein, throughout his work, identified two different kinds of slaveowner – the thug, who treats his slaves as mere possessions, and the paternalist who tells himself that slavery is for the slave’s own good. When Farnham’s Freehold opens, it becomes clear that Hugh is a paternalist-type, while Duke – his son – is a thug. Their roles are so embedded within their personalities that neither of them really adapts to the period of equality. Worse, when they enter the period of black supremacy, they find themselves at the mercy of another paternalist-thug duo. They are to be denied everything, from freedom itself to the slight comfort of getting away with a little defiance. They may even be eaten alive – the slaveholders of Dixie did not practice cannibalism, as far as I know, but the slaves were certainly metaphorically cannibalised. By the end, Hugh has come to realise – perhaps – just what it is like to have a taste of his own medicine. He had all the answers … he could argue and browbeat his son into submission … but so could his ‘master.’ Farnham’s Freehold raised points that needed (and perhaps still need) to be raised. Mendlesohn judges that it was an overall failure, but it came as close as it could for a book of its time.
Mendlesohn’s assessment of Heinlein’s male and female characters may be pushing things a little too far. She notes that many of Heinlein’s main characters are less interesting than their supporting characters, although – again – this isn’t always a bad thing. Max Jones and John Thomas are bland, compared to Sam and Betsy (Starman Jones, The Star Beast) but that doesn’t mean they’re not heroes. Indeed, their simplicity may be part of the lesson. Max surpasses Sam and comes to safe harbour, at least in part, because he’s honest enough to admit to the deception they’ve pulled; John Thomas defends a friend because it’s the right thing to do, while Betsy, who over-thinks everything, makes things more complicated (and eventually worse). There is little to quibble with here.
Robert Heinlein
Her assessment of the underlying social structures Heinlein depicts is quite accurate – and, unlike some others, she refrains from blaming Heinlein for depicting them. Podkayne’s lack of support from other women has already been noted; Maureen’s financial dependency on her husband, in addition, was quite serious in a world where men controlled money. She also assesses the interaction between the public’ and ‘private’ lives of his characters, noting how they interact (and how things can go wrong.) She does, however, overlook a handful of contextual points. In Time Enough for Love, Lazarus buys and manumits two slaves – a brother-sister pair named Joe and Estrellita. Finding himself responsible for them, he tries to turn them into free people … a difficult task, as they have been raised to be slaves and dependent on their masters to tell them what to do.
Mendlesohn notes that Lazarus treats Estrellita as property, denying her agency, but one can reasonably argue that this was for Estrellita’s (and Joe’s) own good. He regards them both as children in adult bodies – a dangerous combination. Of course, this is also the argument that slaveholders made (as Mendlesohn notes) and, even though it is reasonably justified in this case it does leave a bad taste.
Mendlesohn demonstrates that Heinlein seems to have grown and evolved as he grew more confident, ranging from seemingly-trite adventures to pieces of literary merit. This may have been due to the influence of his second wife, who was a screenwriter and editor. She also makes it clear that Heinlein was very ‘woke’ for his era – he detested slavery, regarded rape as a great evil, created coloured and female characters in an era when no one would have noticed if he hadn’t. And she raises some interesting points about Heinlein’s relationship with guns, although I don’t agree with all of her conclusions. Unlike some modern authors, Heinlein did not fetishise guns, but regarded them as tools, to be used if necessary.
The author’s assessment of how Heinlein was influenced – and later, uninfluenced – by his life is also very good. Mendlesohn draws connections between his naval service and his wartime work and shows how it might have influenced his writing; Heinlein put female characters forward, at least in part, because he worked closely with women during the war. (He wasn’t blind, either, to the issues raised by women entering a formerly masculine sphere.) The influence of both his second and third wives on his career are also discussed, raising the issue of just how many of his issues Heinlein was working out on paper. She also notes that, in his later years, Heinlein lost (at least some) touch with the world around him. It is hard to know how seriously to take this, but it is an interesting point.
The Pleasant Profession is essentially an academic text, but it is well-written, and avoids many of the boredom-inducing pitfalls common to textbooks. But it does have weaknesses. It does not focus on each of the books, separately; it is easy to see how Heinlein evolved, but harder to place his words in context. In this, it is very like Alexei Panshin’s Heinlein in Dimension; it runs the risk of assuming that his characters speak for him, rather than accepting that Heinlein preferred to show us their weaknesses rather than beat us over the head with them. It also notes Heinlein’s weaknesses – the moments we would call ‘problematic’ – without always acknowledging that most of these would not have seemed problematic to Heinlein.
Heinlein was famously not fond of critics, but nevertheless he might have liked this book. Heinlein fans will not agree with everything Mendelsohn says, but in the end she does what few other critics do, and treats the great creator of deeply alien universes as essentially human.
CHRISTOPHER G. NUTTALL is the author of the science-fiction and fantasy novels Ark Royal, The Empire’s Corps, Schooled in Magic and The Zero Equation, and runs The Chrishanger blog
