Saturday 4 October 2014

Bloody Baghdad

Bloody Baghdad

Baghdad, 2014

Book Details

Justin Marozzi

BAGHDAD

City of peace, city of blood
512pp. Allen Lane. £25.
978 1 84614 313 6

Reuven Snir

BAGHDAD

The city in verse
384pp. Harvard University Press. £20 (US $29.95).
978 0 674 72521 8

A history of violence in the City of Peace

NADIA ATIA

As British and Indian troops stood poised to make an ill-fated attempt to occupy the city of Baghdad in the winter of 1915, Lord Crewe, Secretary of State for India, reflected that the city held a special place in the world's imagination. Baghdad was uniquely placed to impress both Oriental and Occidental alike: "nobody will dispute the . . . glamour attaching to the capture of the most famous city" he wrote, "even in the European mind, and still more in the Eastern". Despite the fact that by the early twentieth century Baghdad was a shadow of its former glory, perceived by many Britons to be a neglected Ottoman backwater, governance of this evocative city still held the potential to restore British prestige after the devastating recent losses on the beaches of Gallipoli. Even before Galland's editions of the Arabian Nights made Harun al-Rashid's jaunts about this fabled city accessible to millions in eighteenth-century Europe, Baghdad's libraries, its reputation as a cultural hub and its fame as the seat of one of the world's greatest empires was well established: a prize for many a would-be conqueror. A mixed blessing indeed, as these two impressive books deftly illustrate.

Mansur's eighth-century round city would become fabled for its wealth, opulence and grandeur. Such was the power of Galland's visions of glittering minarets that in March 1917, when they finally entered the city victorious, British troops still saw in Baghdad's civilian population echoes of Ali-Baba's thieves. But it is not Scheherazade's Alf layla wa-layah that twenty-first-century Baghdad evokes; the contemporary city is defined by many in terms of violence, haunted by the legacy of Saddam Hussein. The carnage and destruction wrought by two Gulf wars bracket years of sanctions which crippled the Iraqi economy and starved its people of food and medicine. Such hardships seem to hide any vestige of the city's former glory.

Justin Marozzi and Reuven Snir offer us a chance to see beyond the bloodletting of the past century; each narrates the story of the City of Peace through the ages. Though it may seem that a history of Baghdad that takes bloodshed as its central theme would only serve to reinforce a short-sighted, violence-oriented view of the place, there is much hope to be found in Marozzi's sympathetic and thoughtful account. Far from simply emphasizing the city's melancholy fate, in pages that vividly capture centuries of heartbreak Baghdad: City of peace, city of blood offers a much-needed sense of perspective. Marozzi is not the first to see Baghdad through the prism of violence. As one of the epigraphs to his study reminds us, Richard Coke's 1927 history of the city described it as a place plagued by misfortune: "where there is not war, there is pestilence, famine and civil disturbance". The City of Peace, Marrozi shows, was ironically marked by violence from the start:

In 634 . . . an army of the first caliph, Abu Bakr, swooped on Souk Baghdad . . . plundered every piece of gold and silver they could find before galloping off into the desert and leaving the devastated community to sink back into obscurity, until Mansur's epoch-making arrival in 762. It was the first recorded instance of the violence, bloodshed and slaughter that would become tragically dominant features of the city's life in the centuries to follow.

In a history that takes death and destruction as its central premiss, one might expect Coke's conclusions to resonate. It is more surprising, perhaps, that in a collection of verse on Baghdad, Snir concludes his introduction with exactly the same passage. "More than eighty-five years later", Snir writes, "one cannot maintain that Coke was wrong in his historical judgment of Baghdad. In other words, the glorious Baghdad is only an image and memory of the remote past; the Baghdad of the present evokes only sadness, distress and nostalgia for bygone days." It is no surprise that violence and nostalgia should be so paired in Snir's study; both are intimately linked with pain.

Nostalgia, a term coined by Johannes Hofer in 1688 for a disease from which young Swiss soldiers had died, wasting away deprived of their homeland, has pain embedded within its etymology. The word combines the Greek Nostos, "return to the native land", with "Algos, [connoting] suffering or grief". Hofer wished to capture from the "force of the sound Nostalgia . . . the sad mood originating from the desire for the return to one's native land". Nostalgia haunts many modern Iraqi reflections on Baghdad and is central to Snir's collection of verse. Unsurprisingly, it is a particular feature of the work that has been translated into, or originally written in, English, much of which is written by migrant Iraqis: exiles, refugees, forming a growing diaspora of nearly 5 million from the last war alone, according to UN figures quoted by Marozzi. In Dreaming of Baghdad (2009), Haifa Zangana's memoir of torture and brutality in Saddam's Iraq, an exiled, traumatized woman observes the emergence of an unexpected new emotion. "For years I believed I was immune to emotion, nostalgia, and dreams of returning to the places of my childhood. Now I am sitting here alone . . . waiting apprehensively for the next news bulletin on TV. Yes, after the ads, the newscaster will read a few items about the Iran–Iraq war." Salah Al Hamdani's Baghdad Mon Amour (2008) is a lament for a lost homeland. Nostalgia marks much of Al Hamdani's verse, aptly combining the pain of longing with the pain of torture and fear which has driven so many Iraqis from their homeland: "As for me, the bird about to take flight / Nostalgia plucks at my soul / Like the victim of the torturer".

Reuven Snir is particularly attuned to this longing for home, or – more accurately – the longing for a now-lost idea or memory of home. The collection is partly inspired by his own Iraqi Jewish father's love of his homeland's poetry, instilled in Snir from an early age. Part of a generation of Jews who were forced to leave Baghdad in the mid-twentieth century, Snir's family emigrated to Israel. "I was", he writes, "suffering from thirst but unable . . . to quench the deadly thirst with water so readily at hand." As he suggests, the object of nostalgia is always elusive; the real city will never be what the nostalgic heart longs for.

In both of these books Baghdad stands, like so many capital cities, as a metonym for the nation as a whole. All nations, as we know, are "imagined communities" in Benedict Anderson's familiar phrase. Marozzi's Baghdad essentially tells the story of regime change and its ramifications in Iraq from the founding of the city to the present day; it is as much a history of Iraq in that sense as it is a history of the city. In Snir's collection, too, verse about Iraq as a whole stands alongside evocations of Baghdad. In a nation as heterogeneous – or as fragmented – as Iraq, this metonymy may be perceived as more problematic than most. But especially in Marozzi's history, the inclusion of seemingly extraneous material is useful. He includes salient details of the massacre of Kurds in the north of the country, for example, to illustrate the way in which Saddam's government terrorized its own people. Nevertheless, the interchangeability between Iraq and Baghdad in lines such as "I am longing / for her. 'Iraq,' I cry!" in Badr Shakir al-Sayyab's "Because I am a Stranger", a poem that makes no mention of Baghdad itself, may be seen as unacceptable by many a non-Baghdadi.

Marozzi's history may have bloodshed at its core, but his book ends with hope, not despair. He leaves the final words to an Iraqi friend: "the cycle that sees Baghdad lurching between mayhem and prosperity has been long and gory, but of course we must have hope. May the City of Peace live up to its name before we ourselves depart to eternal peace". Whether in the voices of poets captured in Reuven Snir's impressive new translations, or in Justin Marozzi's evocation of the city's highs and lows, there is a faith that just as the city rose from the ashes of Hulagu's disastrous invasion in 1258, just as it recovered from the towers of skulls left by Temur's troops, so it will recover from its more recent calamities.

Friday 19 September 2014

Caught in the landscape

Caught in the landscape

JONATHAN TAYLOR

Roger Ebbatson

LANDSCAPE AND LITERATURE, 1830–1914

Nature, text, aura
221pp. Palgrave Macmillan. £50 (US $90).
978 1 137 33043 7

J. B. Bullen

THOMAS HARDY

The world of his novels
256pp. Frances Lincoln. £20 (US $29.95).
978 0 7112 3275 4

Roger Wardale

ARTHUR RANSOME ON THE BROADS

96pp. Amberley. Paperback, £14.99 (US $24.95).
978 1 4456 1152 5

Stephen Bailey and Chris Nottingham

HEARTLANDS

A guide to D. H. Lawrence's Midlands roots
168pp. Matador. Paperback, £9.75.
978 1 78306 057 3

In The Primacy of Perception, Maurice Merleau-Ponty states that "the world is all around me, not in front of me". The landscape, for the philosopher, is something lived "from the inside", so that the observing self is subjectively "caught in the fabric of the world", rather than merely looking on it. In his sophisticated and ambitious book, Landscape and Literature, 1830–1914, Roger Ebbatson cites Merleau-Ponty and the critic Tim Ingold as theoretical touchstones for his own discussion of literary landscapes:

The landscape . . . is not a totality that you or anyone else can look at, it is rather the world in which we stand, taking up a point of view on our surroundings. And it is within the context of this attentive involvement in the landscape that the human imagination gets to work in fashioning ideas about it. For the landscape, to borrow a phrase from Merleau-Ponty, is not so much the object as the "homeland" for our thoughts.

This notion of a "homeland" is also shared with Martin Heidegger, for whom people "must ever learn to dwell" in their landscape. The self is then "caught in the fabric of the world" – rather than observing, and hence exploiting, that world from an outside and privileged position – and for Heidegger it is poetry that lets us do this. Poetry is a "transcendent mode" of responding to nature, allowing the reader to experience the landscape from within, whereas landscape painting – arguably – presents the observer with a flat, impermeable surface. All of the literature Ebbatson discusses, including work by Tennyson, Hardy, Ruskin and Edward Thomas, seems to induce in its readers this feeling of "dwelling", of "being-in-the-world".

In Hardy's case, the feeling would seem to be particularly acute, at least according to J. B. Bullen, in the beautifully produced Thomas Hardy: The world of his novels. "Above all", Bullen writes, "Hardy's stories take us out into the landscape", sometimes not only fictionally speaking, but literally, too – to the point that a minor tourist industry has built up around the perceived overlap between real-world places and Hardy's fictionalized Wessex. "Hardy, beyond any other English novelist", Bullen writes, "has been powerfully identified with a single region", so that "scores of writers, photographers and artists, amateur and professional, have gone off in search of more and more accurate details, hoping to pin down the topography of Wessex."

Of course, Bullen's own book is testament to this ongoing fascination – a fascination which is "much more than simple curiosity", he argues. Rather, it is bound up with Hardy's dynamic conceptualization of the two-way relationship between human subjects and landscape. By "being there", readers can take the place of the fictional characters in this distinctive landscape, and become part of an "expressive relationship" between human beings and nature. For Bullen, Hardy's peculiar power as a landscape writer inheres in this "expressive relationship" – in, that is, the ways in which human subjects affect the landscape and, crucially, vice versa.

To illustrate this point, Bullen gives the example of Egdon Heath in The Return of the Native, which is interpreted, he says, in human terms: in the long description that opens the novel, Egdon is personified, and "given a human face". Conversely, many of the characters in the novel are also interpreted in terms of Egdon, such as Clym Yeobright, who is "so interwoven with the heath in his boyhood" that "he was permeated with its scenes, with its substance, and with its odours". In the figure of Clym, heath and character, the landscape and the human, overlap. In Hardy's world, landscape interacts with character to generate drama. As Bullen writes, Hardy "categorised his most popular works as 'Novels of Character and Environment'"; here, the "villages, buildings, woods and fields play an active part in the plot".

The same might well be said of Arthur Ransome, the subject of Roger Wardale's lavishly illustrated Arthur Ransome on the Broads. Discussing, in particular, the settings for Ransome's popular children's novels Coot Club and The Big Six, Wardale demonstrates how the plots of these books grew out of the conjunction of fictional characters and real-life landscape. The "first hint" of Coot Club, for example, came in a letter in which Ransome stated that his next book would be "placed on the Broads, with all those rivers and hiding places in the dykes and little stretches of open water". At this early stage, he also had "five youthful characters" in mind "and one old lady". Out of the interaction of these two basic elements – characters and setting – the plot developed.

Wardale's book provides the reader with a fascinating and detailed insight into Ransome's writing process in this respect, demonstrating how a writer's "almost poetic response to landscape" can provide the germ for everything that comes after. Indeed, in this sense, it is not just the addition of fictional characters to setting which produces the plot, but, even before that, the author's own response to the landscape which can generate powerful landscape fiction. In Coot Club, for instance, Ransome was "set on turning his [own] Broads cruising experiences into fiction, and he seemed to . . . relish . . . the challenge of using a completely true-to-life setting and real-life incidents".

As with Hardy, many of Ransome's readers since seem to have wanted to experience that "true-to-life setting" themselves. One of those readers is Wardale himself. He talks about his experience of visiting the village of Horning after first reading about it in The Big Six: "When I first visited the village of Horning in the 1950s, it felt almost as if I were returning to a place that I knew well. I suspect that many have been drawn to Horning village, as I was, after reading the first page of The Big Six". Wardale's literary guidebook will delight his fellow Norfolk-bound "Ransome enthusiasts".

A similar literary guidebook – though to a very different kind of landscape – is Heartlands: A guide to D. H. Lawrence's Midlands roots by Stephen Bailey and Chris Nottingham. The book is "intended as a practical guide to the district in which . . . Lawrence grew up", specifically, that is, "the region around Eastwood in Nottinghamshire, where he grew up and lived until the age of twenty-three" – an area which he "famously christened 'The Country of my Heart'". As with Bullen's book, Heartlands argues that "visiting the sites of [the novels'] . . . creation can intensify [their] . . . impact". Bailey and Nottingham describe their book as "an invitation to approach Lawrence through his Eastwood roots, to walk with him in his 'Heartland'" – and they attempt to reconstruct Lawrence's own walks in the Eastwood district, as well as those described in Sons and Lovers and other novels. "A walk with him", Aldous Huxley said, "was a walk through that marvellously rich and significant landscape which is at once the background and the principal personage of all his novels." By tracing a five-mile route taken by Lawrence himself, for example, alongside another taken by Paul Morel and his mother, between Eastwood and the railway station at Kimberley, Bailey and Nottingham discover fascinating and sometimes unexpected resonances, connections and disjunctions between Lawrence's "teenage schoolday routine", the fictionalization of that routine in Sons and Lovers, and contemporary Nottinghamshire, with its IKEAs, takeaways and boarded-up old breweries. This is criticism-as-walking: not only is the original writer interacting with or "dwelling within" the landscape, but so are his contemporary critics.

Heidegger suggested that people had forgotten how to "dwell" – that "homelessness is coming to be the destiny of the world". Clearly, as Ebbatson points out, there is an ecological subtext here: "Notions of land and presence . . . are rendered increasingly impermanent", which ultimately results in a modern sense of "placelessness". This progressive destruction of place and home haunts not only Heidegger, but Hardy, Lawrence, Ransome and others. Bullen refers to Hardy's "poetics of loss", and how his work stands as a "memorial to the continuity of rural culture where human labour moved to the rhythm of the seasons", a vanishing culture which "involves concordances and subtle reciprocities between the animate world and the inanimate one". Similarly, Bailey and Nottingham suggest that Lawrence felt acutely the changes "in the relationship of the people with the countryside", and they quote him to that effect – "When I was a boy, the whole population lived very much more with the country. Now . . . they never seem to touch the reality of the countryside" – while Wardale remarks that "Ransome championed the environmental cause at a time when only a handful of naturalists were aware of what was happening to the area". His work is a kind of "social history" which captured "the essence of the Broads" and "a vanishing way of life" before much of it was destroyed by the "overuse, ignorance and complacency" of a burgeoning tourist industry (albeit one that has derived some of its allure from Ransome's fiction).

No longer enthralled by landscape, no longer "dwelling" in it, modern human beings, it would seem, stand homelessly apart from it. What writers like Hardy, Ransome and Lawrence manage to do, as Heidegger might expect, is to reconnect their readers with the earlier, more transcendent response to nature; through their writings, readers re-learn how to dwell.

Tuesday 9 September 2014

The Night of the Zeppelin

The Night of the Zeppelin

D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, Frieda Lawrence and John Middleton Murry

A fragment of an unknown play by Tennessee Williams: Katherine Mansfield and D. H. Lawrence reimagined

GERRI KIMBER

Recently, while on a Research Fellowship at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, I came across the first act – ten typewritten pages, with autograph emendations – of an unpublished and unnamed play by Tennessee Williams, with two separate scenes, the first, eight-page scene called "The Night of the Zeppelin" and the second, "Armistice". The play is listed in Tennessee Williams: A bibliography by Drewey Wayne Gunn as one of the holdings in Texas, and Margaret Bradham Thornton refers to it in a footnote in Tennessee Williams: Notebooks. But the play seems never to have been discussed by scholars until now.

There are four characters in the play: Katharine [ sic ] Mansfield, John Middleton Murry, D. H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda. Mansfield and Murry's friendship with the Lawrences is well documented elsewhere, and was significant to all four of them. Having initially met in mid-1913, the two couples became firm friends almost immediately. Both Frieda and Mansfield were technically married to other men when they first met, and the families of both Lawrence and Murry were shocked at the women their sons had taken up with. In July 1914, Mansfield and Murry were witnesses at the Lawrences' wedding and Frieda gave Mansfield her old wedding ring, which Mansfield wore for the rest of her life – indeed she was buried wearing it.

However, the relationship between the couples reached a crisis in Cornwall in mid-1916. They had been brought together by Lawrence's keen desire to found a community, which he wanted to call "Rananim", a word taken from a Hebrew psalm that their Ukrainian Jewish friend S. S. Koteliansky was fond of singing. Such was Lawrence's overwhelming enthusiasm for the project that Mansfield and Murry were browbeaten into returning to England from France, where they had just spent three blissful months in Bandol, with Mansfield rewriting "The Aloe" and turning it into what would become one of her most famous stories, "Prelude".

Of the grey granite cottage at Higher Tregerthen, near Zennor, just outside St Ives, rent £16 per annum, into which Mansfield and Murry moved in April 1916, Lawrence had written: "It is only twelve strides from our house to yours: we can talk from the windows: and besides us, only the gorse and the fields, the lambs skipping and hopping like anything, and sea-gulls fighting with the ravens, and sometimes a fox, and a ship on the sea". As Murry wrote to Ottoline Morrell from Bandol on February 26, 1916: "We are going to stay with the Lawrences for ever and ever as perhaps you know; I daresay eternity will last the whole of the summer".

Here is Mansfield's own take on life in the Cornish "idyll", in a letter to Koteliansky written on May 11, 1916:

You may laugh as much as you like at this letter, darling, all about the COMMUNITY. It is rather funny. Frieda and I do not even speak to each other at present. Lawrence is about one million miles away, although he lives next door. He and I still speak but his very voice is faint like a voice coming over a telephone wire. It is all because I cannot stand the situation between those two, for one thing. It is degrading – it offends one's soul beyond words. I don't know which disgusts one worse – when they are very loving and playing with each other or when they are roaring at each other and he is pulling out Frieda's hair and saying 'I'll cut your bloody throat, you bitch' and Frieda is running up and down the road screaming for 'Jack' to save her!!

This early "Rananim" was a disaster and, as Murry correctly guessed, eternity lasted barely two months. However, it remains a celebrated episode in twentieth-century English literary history; many people have written about it, analysed it, fictionalized it. Amy Rosenthal wrote a play about it, called On the Rocks, which was staged in Hampstead in 2008. I interviewed her at the time, and she said she felt compelled to write about this episode because it was so comical and so obviously doomed to fail on every level. More recently, Professor Robert Fraser has written another humorous play based on these events in 1916, called Bugger the Skylarks: Lawrence and Mansfield at war (published in Katherine Mansfield Studies, Volume 2, 2010).

Tennessee Williams openly acknowledged that he was profoundly influenced as a writer by Lawrence. Of course Williams never knew Lawrence personally, but he did correspond with Frieda. In his first letter to her, written on July 29, 1939, he wrote: "I am a young writer who has a profound admiration for your late husband['s] work and has conceived the idea, perhaps fantastic, of writing a play about him, dramatizing not so much his life as his ideas or philosophy which strike me as being the richest expressed in modern writing". Having requested a meeting, Williams visited Frieda's ranch in Taos, New Mexico just a month later, on August 29, 1939. As James Fisher notes: "Lawrence's experience connected with Williams's, whose plays were similarly steeped in representations of sexuality previously unseen in American drama . . . . As a nomadic and restless writer, Williams seemed to be seeking validation from Frieda as Lawrence's surrogate".

Williams's poem "Cried the Fox" (1939) is dedicated to Lawrence, as is the play Battle with Angels (1941). Two further plays, The Case of the Crushed Petunias (1941) and You Touched Me (1945), are based on short stories by Lawrence. But perhaps Williams's best-known "tribute" to Lawrence was the one-act play, I Rise in Flame, Cried the Phoenix (1941), depicting Lawrence's demise. "Tribute" might be the wrong word, however, for in his introduction to the play, Williams writes of Lawrence: "Much of his work is chaotic and distorted by tangent obsessions, such as his insistence upon the woman's subservience to the male". Norman J. Fedder remarks in his commentary on the play: "The short work . . . is, in effect, a rather uncomplimentary dramatization of these 'tangent obsessions'", since the play "consists, for the most part, of a series of hysterical quarrels between Lawrence and his wife, Frieda". Indeed, Frieda Lawrence's preface to the play is almost, in Fedder's words, "a refutation of the work it introduces". This is a complex business.

As for Mansfield and Murry, they have walk-on parts in Williams's literary life. He mentions them several times in his notebooks. On March 13, 1936, while studying a course at Washington University College on Contemporary British and American Literature, Williams recorded: "Got 'A' on Mansfield paper last night . . . . It didn't deserve such a good grade". In another paper on the "Nature of Artists", he had written: "the greatest of the moderns were afflicted with respiratory disorders: Chekhov, Mansfield died of tuberculosis". In 1937 he wrote: "Read Murry's autobiography 'Between Two Worlds' – Fascinating portraits". In a letter to Joseph Hazan of September 3, 1940, Williams commented:

Read the collected letters of D. H. Lawrence, the journals and letters of Katharine [sic] Mansfield, of Vincent Van Gogh. How bitterly and relentlessly they fought their way through! Sensitive beyond endurance and yet enduring! Of course Van Gogh went mad in the end and Mansfield and Lawrence both fought a losing battle with degenerative disease – T.B. – but their work is a pure shaft rising out of that physical defeat . . . . They live, they aren't dead.

And so to "The Night of the Zeppelin", the title clearly a reference to Lawrence's poem "Zeppelin Nights":

Now, will you play all night!
Come in my mother says,
Look in the sky, at the bright
Moon, all ablaze!
Look at the shaking, white
Searchlight rays!

Tonight they're coming!
It's a full moon!
When you hear them humming
Very soon,
You'll stop that blooming
Tune –

[Children sing on unheeding:]
Sally go round the sun!
Sally go round the moon!
Sally go round the chimney-pots
On Sunday afternoon!

Lawrence himself remembered "the war horror drifting in, drifting in, prices rising, excitement growing, people going mad about the Zeppelin raids". The first zeppelin raid in London occurred on May 31, 1915, and killed seven people. Initially the zeppelins flew too high for the anti-aircraft guns to reach them, but by 1916, incendiary bullets were bringing zeppelins down and as a result by September 1916 they were more or less phased out as a means of attack on London (with just one more raid to come in October 1917), replaced instead by aeroplanes. Witnessing a zeppelin raid in 1915, Lawrence wrote:

Then we saw the zeppelin above us, just ahead, amid a gleaming of clouds: high up, like a bright golden finger, quite small, among a fragile incandescence of clouds. And underneath it were splashes of fire as the shells fired from earth burst. Then there were flashes near the ground – and the shaking noise. It was like Milton – then there was war in heaven.

Mansfield also recorded witnessing a zeppelin raid while she was living in Francis Carco's apartment on the Quai aux Fleurs in Paris. Two zeppelins had flown over Paris, bombing areas near the railway yards. The day after the attack, on March 21, 1915, she wrote about her experience in a letter to Murry:

There came a loud noise like doo-da-doo-da repeated hundreds of times. I never thought of zeppelins until I saw the rush of heads & bodies turning upwards as the Ultimate Fish . . . passed by, flying high with fins of silky grey. It is absurd to say that romance is dead when things like this happen – & the noise it made – almost soothing you know – steady – and clear doo-da-doo-da – like a horn. I longed to go out & follow it . . . .

In "The Night of the Zeppelin", the setting is

the room of a shoddy lodging place in London, 1916. The Murrys, John Middleton and Katharine Mansfield are visiting the Lawrences. It is near Christmas. Some German cookies, made by Frieda and a bottle of wine are on a little table and there is a small artificial tree with home-made decorations. The legend, PEACE ON EARTH, crowns the tree.

In a few humorous opening lines, the four are playing charades, with Frieda and Lawrence trying to act out "Nero Fiddles While Rome Burns": "Lawrence clasps his knee, Frieda rows energetically". This first scene centres on the character of Katharine, who has by far the most lines.

Katharine: (slight and dark and feverishly bright, a radiant bird-like being)
It's something to do with boating.
John: Rowing isn't it?
Katharine: (Exultantly shrieking) NERO!
(She coughs)

As Katharine continues to cough, Frieda is anxious that she is not warm enough, but they have run out of coal for the stove – just two lumps left. Lawrence makes the point that just one torpedo cost £4,000 and that they could live on that for the rest of their lives: "And they shoot them like firecrackers". For the price of two torpedoes "we could live in ivory towers for the rest of our lives". Katharine acerbically notes, "An ivory tower on the Mediterranean. With central heating". When Lawrence starts talking of the four of them "going off and making a new life somewhere", Katharine, wearily – and not without a hint of sarcasm – gives him some suggestions: "Brighton Beach? Cornwall? . . . Avalon, perhaps".

The sound of an air raid brings such trivial discussion to an abrupt halt. John rushes out to see if it's a raid and immediately disappears into the night. Katharine asks Lawrence to "Call John back in. He loses his head whenever there is any excitement and runs around on the streets like a headless chicken". She expresses her exasperation with the war: "It's all so silly and messy. Why doesn't the kindergarten teacher make these bad little boys stop throwing blocks at each other?"

Meanwhile, Lawrence at the window admires the pyrotechnic display. Katharine, her distress increasing at John's disappearance, announces to Frieda's horror that she is going to look for him. She and Frieda tussle as Lawrence cries "It's the zeppelin!" And echoing language Williams must have remembered from his reading of Lawrence, the stage directions note: "THE SKY THROUGH THE WINDOW IS CRIS CROSSED BY SILVER BEAMS. INTO THE LIGHTED AREA SAILS SERENELY THE CURIOUS SILVER OVAL OF THE ZEPPELIN". After a detonation, Katharine, becoming hysterical, begs to be let out: "I feel stifled!" Shortly afterwards, in a long soliloquy, she exclaims: "A woman isn't really lonely, I mean terribly lonely, until she falls in love. – (And then she's alone on the desert – completely, completely alone!)". And a little further on in the same speech, in a clear reference to Mansfield's story "Bliss", Katharine says: "Frieda, did you ever see a pear tree early in the evening?… It's just like a perfect host of little silver birds had come to roost on the branches".

Katharine's anxiety over the detonations and John's absence make her cough up blood, and in another long speech she talks of her heart bleeding, not her lungs, and her youthful "mistake of believing in the possibility of things being lovely – instead of like they are". Eventually John re-enters, "breathless and hatless". Berated by Katharine for his absence, he says, "Little Kitty, I'm so sorry". Katharine's response: "Nobody's sorry. Everybody knows that this is the way of the world . . . so they grin and laugh and go running about on the streets like the bombs were April showers! – raining down May flowers!" When she reveals to John that she has coughed up some blood and that she thinks she's dying, Lawrence interjects: "I bring up blood from the heart myself now and then. All of us are dying I believe. But we're a Phoenix race, we'll rise from our ashes".

Frieda's sharp retort: "Lorenzo, quit preaching", brings the atmosphere back down to earth. "Go and get a cab, the raid is over." John carries Katharine, who, "smiling wanly and blowing them a kiss", calls out "Merry, merry Xmas!", out to the cab. Once they have gone, Lawrence comments "poor Kitty! Not a great artist, perhaps, but a fine and delicate artist. She's like that pear tree she mentioned – covered all over with ghostly silver birds". After more theorizing about the horrors of war, Frieda interrupts with the announcement that it is starting to snow, and Lawrence suddenly hears "choir boys singing carols!"

FROM THE STREET COMES THE PURE SINGING OF A BOY'S CHOIR –

"God rest ye, merry gentlemen,

May nothing ye dismay –"

CURTAIN

In the second, much shorter scene of one and a half pages, called "Armistice", the setting is exactly the same, except that this time only Lawrence and Frieda are present. Frieda is ironing as a shocked Lawrence enters the room to announce that the war is over. Frieda, ecstatic, laughs uncontrollably, as Lawrence starts to make plans for them finally to be able to leave the country. In a violent manner, "LIKE A MAN POSSESSED he capers and flings out his arms. – Stiffly, awkwardly, crazily! – He dances about the ugly little room".

What to make of this experimental fragment? There are niggling factual errors, which are hard to ignore. The last zeppelin raid in 1916 took place on September 23, three months before Christmas. Murry calls Mansfield "Kitty" but she was never, to my knowledge, called "Kitty" by anyone. Lawrence tended to misspell Mansfield's name as Katharine, hence perhaps Williams's spelling. Mansfield did not have a haemorrhage of the lungs until February 1918, considerably later than the events described here. As for "Armistice", by November 1918 Frieda and Lawrence were in fact living in some poverty in Derbyshire, having been forced out of Cornwall under the terms of the Defence of the Realm Act, because of Frieda's German nationality and fears she was a spy.

And yet, there are elements that ring true: Mansfield's sharp sense of humour and her perceptiveness (though perhaps not the overt self-pity and helplessness as witnessed here); Murry's absence for almost the entire time – as was so frequently the case when Mansfield needed him – and his seeming inability to deal with "life"; Frieda's practicality and calling a spade a spade; and finally Lawrence's philosophizing about the ways of the world and how he thinks things should really be. As noted above, Williams had read Mansfield's works – including the early editions of the journal and letters – as well as Murry's autobiography, and the relationship between both couples clearly fascinated him, as it has so many other authors since.

Never having been published, this piece has been almost entirely forgotten. Mansfield scholars will appreciate the fact that Tennessee Williams centred the scene "The Night of the Zeppelin" on her character, and relish this connection to an iconic American writer.

————————————————

Quotations from play: Copyright © 2014 The University of the South. Published by kind permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc. for the Estate of Tennessee Williams, and the Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin. The full text will appear in Volume 7 of Katherine Mansfield Studies, to be published in September 2015 by Edinburgh University Press.

Goncharov’s breakthrough

Goncharov's breakthrough

BORIS DRALYUK

Ivan Goncharov

OBLOMOV

Translated by Stephen Pearl

540pp. Alma Classics. £7.99.

978 1 84749 344 6

Although Ivan Goncharov was never a prolific author, producing only three novels in as many decades, his masterpiece, Oblomov (1859), has earned him a permanent place in the top tier of nineteenth-century Russian novelists. And yet, despite high praise from James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, who adopted "Oblomov" as a pen name in his correspondence, Goncharov has had as hard a time breaking into the canon of Russian classics in English as his titular hero has getting out of bed. Stephen Pearl's deft translation may finally give both the author and his creation the push they need.

Goncharov's sluggish progress towards recognition in English is not altogether surprising. Oblomov, a 500-page narrative centring on a stunted character whose brief, half-hearted awakening comes to naught hardly fits the mould of the Russian novel as English readers saw it at the turn of the twentieth century. It does not appear to be a novel of ideas, offering little insight into the grand universal questions of crime and punishment or war and peace, and lacking the moral weight of, say, Anna Karenina. If anything, Oblomov's fecklessness might call to mind certain of Chekhov's characters, like The Cherry Orchard's impotent Ranevskys, who let their estate disappear from under them. Indeed, it's worth noting that Chekhov himself was just beginning to win an English-speaking audience when C. J. Hogarth published the first English translation of Goncharov's novel in 1915 and a modernist sensibility more congenial to plotless depictions of intractable human complexities was taking root.

But Goncharov was not a modernist, and Oblomov is, if only in part, a novel of ideas. Russian readers were quick to recognize an essentially Russian mentality, if not pathology, in the unbudging Ilya Ilyich Oblomov – the oblomovshchina that Pearl, in his thoughtful and informative afterword, rightly calls "not just a single symptom, but a syndrome". From the time of the novel's publication, left-wing critics like Nikolay Dobrolyubov interpreted Ilya Ilyich as a type, and oblomovshchina as a national malady. Oblomov's apathy and lethargy were not to be understood as individual idiosyncrasies, but as a malignant infantilism conditioned by the institution of serfdom. Russia's barbarous feudal system allowed its landowning Oblomovs to go to seed; in turn, these Oblomovs, reliant on income from estates they cannot be bothered to visit, as well as the care of aggrieved but loyal manservant-nannies like Ilya Ilyich's Zakhar, brought Russia to a standstill. Decades later, Lenin – who was born in Goncharov's hometown, Simbirsk (now Ulyanovsk) – would take up this reading of oblomovshchina and apply it to his own political ends, condemning all foot-draggers on the road to socialism as latter-day Oblomovs, regardless of class origins. In Speak, Memory (1951), Vladimir Nabokov, who was never a proponent of big ideas in fiction, calls Goncharov one of the "stupefying bores" of Russian literature; he points up the "Leninist" legacy of his novel in The Gift (1939), with Fyodor protesting to a fellow émigré: "Don't tell me you have a kind word for Oblomov – that first 'Ilyich' who was the ruin of Russia – and the joy of social critics?"

Goncharov, for his part, was overjoyed by Dobrolyubov's long essay on his novel. As Galya Diment notes in her introduction, he even went so far as to claim that the critic had helped him better understand his own work. It is indeed impossible to ignore the ideas embedded in Oblomov: the conflict between ineffectual romantic contemplation, associated with the slothful "Asiatic" component of the Russian character, and productive rational action, associated with modern Europe. Goncharov presents almost too neat a contrast between the indolent Ilya Ilyich, with his iconic "dressing gown of Persian cloth, a real oriental robe without the slightest European touch", and his best friend Andrey Ivanovich Stoltz, a driven, diligent, yet kind-hearted half-German, half-Russian entrepreneur. Stoltz introduces Oblomov to a dynamic and intellectually curious young woman, Olga Ilyinskaya, and the pair fall in love. Inspired by Stoltz's encouragement and his love for Olga, Oblomov embraces a life of action, leaving his gown behind and tending to his affairs. But this new Ilya Ilyich is tragically short-lived, flourishing for a single symbolic summer. Settling back into his old ways, and into his decadent gown, Oblomov withdraws from his responsibilities and his relationship with Olga, who goes on to marry Stoltz. Oblomov, meanwhile, marries his widowed landlady, Agafya Matveyevna, spending "days on end lying on his divan, doing nothing but admire the way her bare elbows moved to and fro as she plied her needle and thread". He regresses into childhood and lives in a "kind of golden frame . . . surrounded exclusively by a circle of good-hearted, simple, loving people, unanimous in devoting their existence to supporting his and insulating him against noticing or feeling anything". It is Stoltz and Olga who inherit the future.

But if we reduce Oblomov to an exploration of social types and social forces, we will rob it of its remarkable charms, its psychological depth, and its rich ambiguities. These ambiguities – which continue to resonate with readers and trouble any schematic interpretation of the novel – haunt Oblomov's hilarious, infuriating, yet touching relationship with his manservant Zakhar, who both resents his master and cannot imagine life without him. They also haunt Goncharov's evocation of Ilya Ilyich's childhood home on the Volga, the beguilingly idyllic and disturbingly stifling Oblomovka. The chapter devoted to Oblomovka and Ilya Ilyich's relationship with his mother, which was first published separately in 1849 as "Oblomov's Dream", is a key to the novel's continued appeal, and Vladimir Korolenko's penetrating comment of 1912, cited by Diment, has lost none of its force: "Goncharov, of course, mentally rejected 'oblomovshchina', but deep inside he loved it with profound love beyond his control". This inner conflict comes to life in Pearl's imaginative translation: "Oblomov, seeing in his dream his long-dead mother, started quivering with joy and his heart contracted with a fierce spasm of love for her as two warm tears slowly slid from beneath his eyelids and hung motionlessly on his lashes. His mother smothered him with passionate kisses and devoured him hungrily and anxiously with her eyes". The blurred boundaries between dream and reality, between selfless and selfish love, lend this chapter its peculiar power, and Pearl has done full justice to its spirit and tone, occasionally choosing verbs that are stronger than Goncharov's – such as "smothered" for "showered" (osypala).

Pearl's translation first appeared with the New York press Bunim and Bannigam in 2006, largely escaping the notice of British readers. Its republication with Alma Classics should bring this masterly Oblomov the audience it deserves in the United Kingdom as well. Pearl's approach is more adventurous than that of his predecessors. His text flows naturally, capturing Goncharov's carefully modulated tone, the gentleness of his humour, and the colloquial flavour of his dialogue. Pearl is particularly adroit in his handling of idioms, and is sensitive to important differences in Russian and English usage. For instance, while describing his hero in the third paragraph, Goncharov twice uses the word dusha, which is usually translated as "soul", but occurs far more frequently than the English word and is far broader in implication, incorporating "heart" and "mind". While other translators have settled for the more literal "soul" or "spirit", Pearl offers a daring and evocative alternative, introducing the words "essence" and "being":

Sometimes an expression of something like weariness or boredom would darken his brow; but neither the weariness nor the boredom could for a minute erase the mildness, which was not merely the dominant expression of his face, but the very essence of his whole being – an essence that glowed naked and clear in his eyes, in his smile, in the least movement of his head or his hand.

Stephen Pearl has indeed caught the very essence of Oblomov.

Dads playing bop and trad

Dads playing bop and trad

Humphrey Lyttelton with a dancer, 1949

Book Details

Dave Gelly

AN UNHOLY ROW

Jazz in Britain and its audience, 1945–1960
176pp. Equinox. £25.
978 1 84553 712 8

The unruly post-war years of jazz in Britain

RUSSELL DAVIES

The first undisputed jazz recordings were made in 1917, so a century has not yet passed since the industrial spread of the music began. But even that thought gives no real idea of the historical compression that jazz underwent. Take the fifteen-year period covered in An Unholy Row: Jazz in Britain and its audience, 1945–1960 by Dave Gelly, the journalist, broadcaster and tenor-sax player. It ends in 1960, the year Ornette Coleman's album Free Jazz heralded a decade when everything jazz had been thought to offer – persuasive swinging solos, agreed chord patterns, musical wit etc – would be jettisoned by the avant-garde in favour of a kind of informed chaos. People were asking "Is jazz finished?"

Yet the start of Gelly's era came just twenty-eight years after the Original Dixieland Jazz Band went into the studio. In 1945, gramophone records spun at 78 rpm, and broke if you dropped them. Jazz still stuck to a seemingly linear course of development, though the speed of change had lately accelerated – the newest style or method being bebop, with its agitated lines and bewilderingly extended harmonies. Some young British experimenters worked their way to New York to see how "bop" was really done, and in later years, the likes of John Dankworth and Ronnie Scott would exchange memories of the musical indignities they had suffered mid-Atlantic, playing waltzes and hokey-cokey in the ballroom bands of "Geraldo's Navy". (Geraldo, alias Gerald Bright, a cockney tailor's son, was one of the better commercial band leaders of the day, but also a booking agent for ocean liners.)

Back in Britain, meanwhile, musicians of a similar age went the opposite way. Their concern was not to learn how Charlie Parker was fangling new musical phraseology in Manhattan, but to rediscover, by attempted recreation, how the New Orleans pioneers, pre-eminently King Oliver and Jelly Roll Morton, had chosen to express themselves on record in the 1920s. Gelly is right to insist, early in his argument, on the importance of recordings in post-war British jazz of all types. When the modernists returned from their oceanic jaunts laden with early bop masterpieces, they brought enlightenment, not simple entertainment.

But the true "record collectors" were usually to be found among traditionalists, who exchanged, at their rhythm-club meetings and published in their journals, endless questions about the minutiae of long-ago recording sessions. This still goes on. How many takes survive of such-and-such a number? Was a third cornet to be heard lurking in the ensemble? Who contributed that dreadful vocal chorus? The collectors' habit of interrogating the past had unfortunate consequences later on, when veteran American musicians began to appear regularly in British clubs and concert halls. All too often, a tired touring instrumentalist would stagger off stage and be buttonholed by a provincial jazz scholar accusing him of being the phantom slide-whistle player on some record he probably had not made, on a forgotten August afternoon in 1928.

In fact, opportunities to meet revered creators rarely arose in the period Gelly discusses, for the foolish reason that the Musicians' Union had banned American jazz instrumentalists from appearing in the UK. The Union view, passed on to the Ministry of Labour, which enforced it, was that the visitors would take work from British players. Even the uniqueness of Louis Armstrong was denied in the service of this dreary veto. When it was suggested that the Festival of Britain might benefit from Armstrong's instrumental uplift, the MU's General Secretary, Hardie Ratcliffe, rejected the proposal with an appeal to what he saw as reason: "Why do we need Louis Armstrong when we've got Kenny Baker?" Baker was powerful and a much-loved trumpet virtuoso, but he himself would have bought a ticket to see Armstrong in 1951. Two years earlier, an impudent exception to the no-Americans ruling had been contrived, and Gelly misses a trick, perhaps, in not mentioning it. Humphrey Lyttelton's band gave a concert at the Winter Garden Theatre, in the course of which the great New Orleanian Sidney Bechet (clarinettist and soprano saxophonist, or "clt, sop" as the discographies put it) was discovered in the audience, allegedly on holiday and enjoying the show. Naturally, he was "persuaded" to join the band on stage, so that the spectacle turned briefly into the showcase event it should have been in the first place. Lyttelton and his men cannot have been wholly stunned to see Bechet in his stage-side box, since they had recorded with him for the Melodisc label earlier the same day. Bechet's approach to that session, authoritarian but not wrong-headed, both impressed and amused Lyttelton and it is notable that Lyttelton's own band "got its act together", in the most literal way, shortly thereafter.

Without being burdened explicitly with the task, Lyttelton acts as a guide through these unruly post-war years. Gelly's account begins with the scene outside Buckingham Palace on VE Day, where a trumpet could be heard (still can, on a BBC recording) bleating "Roll Out the Barrel" above the tumult of the revellers. This was Lyttelton, making a precarious circuit of the Victoria Memorial in a handcart, heralding the dawn of peace. A few years later, it was Lyttelton again who, simply by giving a saxophone houseroom in his band, provoked the waving of a concert-hall banner reading "Go Home Dirty Bopper" – the most celebrated expression of the Trad vs Modernist antagonism. By the late 1950s, Lyttelton was leading a small swing band, and, as Gelly points out, this was in chronological terms the same sort of revivalism that the diehard traditionalists had undertaken. "In 1945, George Webb's Dixielanders had dedicated themselves to playing the classic jazz of twenty years before, and now here were Humphrey Lyttelton and his Band, in 1957, looking back twenty years to the swing era."

For explorers who wished to move faster, Ronnie Scott and Johnny (as he was known then) Dankworth were also useful guides. If you kept your eye on these three men, you would know roughly how British jazz was faring. Dankworth's big-band ambitions quickly made him an expert arranger, with involvements in film and television, and his domestic partnership with Cleo Laine encouraged the wider view of musical engagement which eventually acquired the name of the "Allmusic Plan". Scott kept pace with American developments, as bop moved into hard bop; he pioneered, with his nine-piece band, a take-it-or-leave-it school of stage presentation (Rule One: make every effort to avoid ingratiating yourself with the audience); and developed, through the medium of Britain's best-known jazz club, an internationalist view of the jazz fraternity. At Scott's memorial service at St Martin-in-the-Fields – as close to Soho as could be arranged – the critic John Fordham said in the Order of Service that Scott "would announce the arrival of performers like Coleman Hawkins and Dizzy Gillespie in an exasperated, gravelly East End drawl, as if their presence on his premises were somehow interrupting some absorbing private pursuit, like watching the racing in the back room".

The connections between personal eccentricity and musical individuality or style are extremely strong in jazz. The names suggest as much: I remember feeling as a newcomer to the genre that any art form treasuring the contributions of Jabbo Smith, Eddie Lockjaw Davis and Spanky DeBrest must be worth further research. Britons seldom matched Americans in nomenclature, though the foibles could be just as weird. Gelly celebrates several oddballs, notably Bruce Turner, the excellent saxophonist who attracted the "Dirty Bopper" protest. It is true, as Gelly recalls, that Turner called everyone "Dad", but that does not quite suggest the extremes to which he could take the habit. A fellow bandsman of his once told me that Turner's idea of a chat-up line was to loom over a young lady and hiss in her ear, "Gotta have you, dad!" – a tactic which must surely have remained perpetually innocent of success.

In each available style, there were post-war British musicians who emerged as magnificently "different" in ambition and immediately identifiable in sound – the best things most jazz performers can hope to be. Some, like the clarinettist Sandy Brown, and saxophonists Joe Harriott and Tubby Hayes, lived much too short a span, all of them still developing in their last years: Brown in the direction of African music, Harriott towards his own notion of free jazz and Hayes beginning to enjoy an international virtuosity only compromised, in the end, by drugs and general ill health. To keep up with the likes of Hayes required formidable technique, though he himself was self-taught and outspokenly proud of it.

If there was one attitude British jazz fans of most persuasions shared, it was a suspicion of music that sounded like the outcome of academic programming. It was rather like the sporting public's fondness, in those years, for productive waywardness in cricketers and footballers. Audiences favoured a kind of organic tang in their soloists and were prepared to put up with a certain amount of erratic playing in the search for it. This didn't matter too much to most jazz listeners, but among the New Orleans devotees it amounted to an obsession with "authenticity" (the watchword of their purism) and an almost moral matter.

Their theory was that the original jazz of the Crescent City – the streets, the picnics, the rudimentary dance halls – had been uprooted and taken north to Chicago and New York, where it was contaminated by the demands of showbusiness. That much was true; the argument was really about the musicians who stayed behind. They, for the authenticists, were still the guardians of the mysterious essence of New Orleans, and their work, valuing the ensemble texture over bravura soloing, should be revered and emulated. For those who contrastingly favoured the Oliver/Armstrong/Morton traditions, the stay-at-homes were limited players who knew their chances of making it in Chicago and beyond were slender. As if to prove it, some of them did venture briefly north, only to retreat to Louisiana and stay there.

Thus the charge against the British purists was that they were imitating inferior and now elderly, musicians – possibly because these unpolished results were the best they could hope to achieve. But they defended their position passionately, with the bandleader Ken Colyer as their symbolic leader. Colyer had not only spent time in New Orleans, but had overrun his shore leave there and been jailed. Sin and saintliness were satisfactorily combined, and Colyer naturally continued to follow the same uncontaminated musical path until the end of his life.

Colyer did not participate in the brief, mad spell when the "Trad Boom" elevated a music-hall parody of early jazz into the hit parade. Comical outfits, banjos and commercialism – and yet, one of the worst offenders, Acker Bilk, with his striped waistcoat, bowler hat and press agency (the Bilk Marketing Board) turned out to be a maturing soloist, whose best music was yet to be heard. Once a Colyer acolyte, Bilk survived to make affecting records with Lyttelton, among others. But that belongs to a later story, which Dave Gelly will perhaps tell. Sadly, he no longer has Philip Larkin to compare notes with, as he did in 1985. The correspondence gave rise to this rueful note, which Gelly keeps for his envoi: "During our exchange of letters I preferred not to tell Philip Larkin I was sorry to learn that he had found one particular record 'not to be jazz as he understood the word', since I was one of the players on the record in question". Larkin once wrote of the sax-man Cannonball Adderley that he "has the rare virtue of sounding neither screwball nor neurotic, yet always pushing towards excitement". He might well have said the same of this book.

Typical Greeks

Typical Greeks

"The Tomb of the Diver", National Museum of Paestum

Book Details

Edith Hall

INTRODUCING THE ANCIENT GREEKS

From Bronze Age seafarers to navigators of the Western mind
304pp. Norton. £17.99 (US $26.95).
978 0 393 23998 0

The continuous process of intercultural exchange in the ancient Near East

FRANCESCA WADE

The Cup of Nestor, found at Ischia in 1954, is an eighth-century BC vessel inscribed with one of the oldest pieces of Greek writing and the oldest-ever game of Consequences. Three lines of poetry, each scratched in a different hand, bear teasing witness to an ancient party where friends gathered to drink, laugh and compete, enjoying their shared frame of cultural reference by cracking jokes about Nestor, the staid old sage from the Iliad. Yet, as Edith Hall shows in Introducing the Ancient Greeks, the cup is also significant evidence that even by this early date, travelling Greeks were establishing networks far and wide. Our partygoers had travelled from the island of Euboea to a new trading post in the Bay of Naples, to drink wine from a cup made at Rhodes, and mark it in an irreverent game of wits using an alphabet they'd learnt from abroad: they were, in other words, "absolutely typical Greeks".

Who were the disparate group of Mediterranean peoples known as "the ancient Greeks", and how were their culture, technology, literature and thought disseminated, via Rome, down to us? Hall's answers, emerging from a very readable survey of ancient history from 1600 BC to AD 400, lie in ten broad qualities that, she argues, were shared by most of the Greeks, most of the time. This slightly contrived framework traps Hall into some dangerous generalizations. She is projecting a collective mindset, however broad, onto a huge civilization with wide gulfs between rich and poor, free and slave, man and woman. Openness to new ideas is well attested at Athens, as Hall shows, manifesting itself in the agora with the creation of democracy, and in the theatre with tragedy's examination of raw human emotions, yet the Spartan constitution was notorious in ancient legend for remaining resolutely unchanged across centuries. Other qualities from her list, particularly the Greek love of seafaring and intellectual inquiry, provide themes Hall traces fruitfully from earliest Mycenae to the Greeks under Roman dominion, in a fresh demonstration that the story of Greek culture's predominance over later intellectual tradition is, perhaps above all, the history of Greek travel.

Plato wrote that the Greeks lived "like frogs or ants round a pond", never settling too far from the sea nor venturing out too far from land. Travel brought early Greeks into productive contact with other cultures – Hall emphasizes the "continuous process of intercultural exchange" between Greeks and Near Eastern civilizations, especially the Phoenicians, with all their technological knowhow – and expanded Greek horizons in a literal sense, as a spate of colonizations in the seventh and sixth centuries extended the Hellenic world across the Mediterranean and beyond. The classic Greek symposium quickly reached the colonies: at Posidonia (Paestum in southern Italy), where the famous Tomb of the Diver portrays guests singing, dicing and embracing over drinks in a host's home, local potters began to make their own distinctive symposium pottery. A joint Greek shrine, the Hellenion, was built at a Greek trading post at Naucratis in Egypt, while at the sanctuaries of Olympia, Pythia and Nemea, Greeks came together for shared religious festivities and athletic contests celebrating another of Hall's Hellenic traits – admiration of "excellence in talented people". Gradually, ancient Greece was being formed.

Greek ideas travelled as fast as their proponents. Ionia was a trailblazer of philosophical thought: at Miletus, Hall convincingly suggests, a gradually silting harbour inspired the first inquiries into natural science. After the defeat of the Persian Empire, which had held Ionia under its sway, many Ionian intellectuals travelled to Athens, the self-appointed cultural centre of the Greek world. Later, Philip and Alexander of Macedon made a concerted effort to tempt "world-class brain-power" to court, most prestigiously securing Aristotle as tutor to Alexander. Inspired by their example, the rulers of Hellenistic Alexandria made a business out of the travelling Greek intellectual. So determined were the Ptolemies to make their Library the prime repository for Greek wisdom that they confiscated books from ships docking in Alexandrian harbours, refusing to return them until scribes had made hurried copies. The Library sponsored poets including Apollonius, Theocritus and Callimachus, the composer of sophisticated epyllia (mini-epics) who also developed the Library's catalogue system. Polybius complained that convenient library access made historians' work too easy, preferring the old-style personal adventures of Herodotus and Thucydides. But following conquest by Rome in the mid-second century BC, Greek travel became increasingly donnish. Neatly linking the Greeks of the Second Sophistic period with their classical forebears, Hall successfully demonstrates the continued flourishing of Greek thought under Roman rule, its survival enabled by the longstanding Greek penchant for travel. Since Greek remained the dominant language in the East, authors such as Diodorus, Plutarch and Polybius gave public lectures across the empire, reviving "the classical Greek figure of the travelling sophist" and becoming the first "celebrity intellectuals".

As well as up-to-date evidence and informed analysis of battles, constitutions and alliances for the general reader, Introducing the Ancient Greeks is full of colour and human touch. Hall's Spartans are not just the hardy souls who were exposed at birth if weak, forbidden to carry torches in the dark lest their guard ever lapse. They are also the wittiest of the Greeks – the word "laconic" comes from Laconia, the ancient name for the area around Sparta. Hall punctuates her narrative with spotlights on important characters (paeans to Herodotus and Aristotle; a shudder at the grisly Pontic warlord Mithridates), teasing out the interactions between individual Greek minds and their cultural contexts. There are enterprising leaders with ruthless PR strategies, from Alexander the Great, who faked the untying of the Gordian knot to fulfil an oracle affording him domination, to Ptolemy I, who maintained Alexander's stolen body as a tourist attraction in a magnificent tomb at Alexandria. Hall's Greeks remain, broadly, the traditional males who dominate our sources (three of the seven index references for "women" are under "as slaves"), though notable women are picked out for praise, including the poets Sappho and Nossis, and the democratic women of Kerkyra who attacked their oligarchic adversaries with tiles from their roofs. Hall ends on the sorry figure of Palladas, the fourth-century Alexandrian epigrammatist forced to sell his Pindar, Callimachus and even his Greek grammar, as pagan statues were melted down at Christianity's rise. Gone, but, as this book engagingly shows, certainly not forgotten.

Rome in riddles

Rome in riddles

Archangels Michael and Gabriel, Byzantine icon, tenth century

Book Details

Judith Herrin

UNRIVALLED INFLUENCE

Women and empire in Byzantium
328pp. £24.95 (US $35).
978 0 691 15321 6



MARGINS AND METROPOLIS

Authority across the Byzantine Empire
365pp. £27.95 (US $39.50).
978 0 691 15301 8

Averil Cameron

BYZANTINE MATTERS

164pp. £15.95 (US $22.95).
978 0 691 15763 4
All Princeton University Press.

Redefining the medieval history of the Roman Empire in the East

CHRISTOPHER KELLY

To be clear right from the start: Byzantium never existed. It is a modern fiction. Byzantium is the imaginative coinage of the sixteenth-century German humanist, Hieronymus Wolf. In 1557, Wolf published under the title Corpus Historiae Byzantinae a set of Greek chronicles of the history of the "Byzantine" Empire from its inception, with the foundation of Constantinople (modern Istanbul) in AD 324 by Constantine – the first Roman emperor to embrace Christianity – to its demise, with the city's capture in 1453 by the Ottomans under the twenty-one-year-old Mehmed II.

Wolf's neologism revived the name of the town on the Bosphorus – Buzantion – which had earlier occupied the site selected by Constantine for his new imperial capital. Constantine judged Rome too distant from the wealthiest provinces of empire (Asia Minor and Egypt), too strategically vulnerable and perhaps too committed to the old gods. Constantinople was intended as a New Rome. Neither its rulers nor its citizens ever referred to themselves as "Byzantine". In their view, they remained indisputably and unequivocally Roman. Arabic and Turkish texts echoed this claim: Mehmed the Conqueror had subdued Rum and its Christian population, the Rumis.

These claims to continuity and conquest were strongly resisted by the invention of Byzantium. To label the Roman Empire in the eastern Mediterranean "Byzantine" after the foundation of Constantinople is to suggest that the East is somehow much less Roman than the West. Or – conversely – that it is the West which should properly be considered to be the heir of Rome's greatness. The traditional timeline of European achievement quickly tidies away a fragmented (western) Roman Empire in the fifth century, carefully preserves antiquity's heritage in medieval Catholic courts and monasteries, and loudly celebrates its liberating rediscovery in the city-states of the Italian Renaissance.

No room here for a New Rome. No place in this grand narrative for the eastern half of the Mediterranean world once comfortably part of the Roman Empire. Byzantium – Greek-speaking and resolutely autocratic – is to be severed from its Roman past and denied Rome's political and intellectual legacy. After all, there was no Renaissance in Byzantium: rather a still-born culture of stifling imitation and stultifying repetition; an ossified society of empty pomp and pointless ceremony; a failed state that was unable to defend Christendom's holiest places. It is a register of the dispiriting success of this prejudicial project that "byzantine" has established its own unflattering common currency (according to the OED): "reminiscent of the manner, style, or spirit of Byzantine politics; intricate, complicated; inflexible, rigid, unyielding".

But there is a slow recovery in progress. Byzantium – a term now so fixed in modern historical scholarship that it will not be dislodged by a mere TLS review – has undergone a quiet revolution. In the past forty years, a small group of scholars, perhaps no more than half a dozen, has offered a strikingly different view of Byzantium as a sophisticated and dynamic society with its own impressive intellectual and theological tradition deep-rooted in the classical past. Judith Herrin (Professor of Late Antique and Byzantine Studies at King's College London from 1995 to 2008) is a key member of this revisionist gang. Her significant contribution to the redefinition of Byzantium has been honoured by two volumes from Princeton University Press which reprint (lightly edited with brief introductions and some updated bibliography) twenty-five of her essays and adds five previously unpublished.

Unrivalled Influence: Women and empire in Byzantium offers a thirty-year conspectus on a project that Herrin presents as inspired by the radical feminism of her Cambridge undergraduate days in the late 1960s. Her insistent aim is the recovery of women's priorities and experiences. Her chief tactic is as a "suspicious and wary" historian. Byzantine texts are not to be understood on their own terms, but deliberately unsympathetically "read against the grain and around the intention of the male authors who created them". That approach allows Herrin, in one of her most interesting pieces, to suggest that female devotion to icons should not be understood – as some (male) theologians asserted – as proof of women's inability to grasp complex religious ideas. Rather, in Byzantine houses, icon corners, their painted panels venerated with lights, incense and flowers, demarcated a private and defiantly non-institutional space in which "women could express their belief in an unmediated, direct engagement under their own control" without the need of (male) priests.

Herrin's careful attention to often recondite material uncovers a wide range of particularly female preoccupations: with family, education, the household and (for the very privileged few at court) high politics and imperial office. She offers a welcome corrective to long-standing cartoon-like images of Byzantine women as over-sexed in public and over-pious in private. The broad patterns of empowerment and subjugation which she exposes are also familiar from the medieval West and Islamic East. Byzantium does not stand alone. As elsewhere in the Mediterranean, the position of women was established, exercised and experienced within and against the confines of a conservative, and unapologetically patriarchal, society.

A second volume of collected essays, Margins and Metropolis: Authority across the Byzantine Empire, is aimed at defeating the characterization of Byzantium as too byzantine: monolithic, unresponsive, inflexible, rigid, unyielding. Sixteen studies survey the organization and workings of Empire and Church from the provincial periphery to the urban splendours of Constantinople. Again, Herrin delights with her unpicking of unfamiliar texts and her eye for detail. Particularly pleasing is an essay constructed around a pipe organ (which provided the sonorous soundtrack for Byzantine court ceremonial) presented in 757 by the Emperor Constantine V to Pippin III, King of the Franks. A second piece takes as its starting point the Byzantine fascination with mathematical riddles. These were often packaged in an amusing narrative. For many educated Byzantines, the stark number grids of modern Sudoku would have lacked finesse: too obviously an invitation to arithmetical hard-grind. It was much more fun to puzzle over apple scrumping on Mount Helicon. How many apples did Love pick before each of the nine Muses claimed a share?

Aphrodite spoke to downhearted Love as follows: "Why, my child, do you look upset?" And he answered:

"The Muses snatched the apples I was bringing from Mount Helicon, each one taking a different share. Clio took a fifth of them, Euterpe a twelfth, while divine Thalia took an eighth. Melpomene made off with a twentieth part, Terpsichore a fourth and Erato followed with a seventh. Polymnia robbed me of thirty apples, Urania of 120 and Calliope carried away a load of three hundred. So I come to you light-handed, bringing only these fifty apples that the Muses left me.

This puzzle is just one item in a meticulous essay which traces the role of Byzantine mathematicians in copying and studying the greatest works of Greek antiquity – Archimedes, Euclid, Apollonius and Diophantus – and in the transmission of that knowledge to the West. That is the start of a long trail. In the 1630s, it was in response to one of Diophantus's propositions on number theory, now in Latin translation, that Pierre de Fermat claimed, "I have discovered a truly marvellous proof of this, which however the margin is not large enough to contain".

Mathematics, as Herrin emphasizes, is just one example of a millennium-long intellectual engagement with ancient Greek learning. The classical past did not have to be re-discovered by Byzantine scholars. If there was no Renaissance in Byzantium, there was also no Dark Ages. Importantly, too, the transmission of mathematical knowledge (like King Pippin's pipe organ) was part of a web of diplomatic, economic and scholarly contacts that stretched across the entire Mediterranean. These connections with a wider medieval world are important. One of Herrin's most significant achievements in these essays is to lay the foundations for a history of Byzantium that is much less isolated, much less exotic and – at least in premodern terms – much more normal. At last, Constantinople can be moved closer to Rome.

Yet it is also clear that Byzantium still remains under-recognized in recent work on the medieval Mediterranean or (currently more modish) Eurasia. There has been no boom in Byzantine studies to match the recent explosion of interest in late antiquity: the Mediterranean and Middle East from the Roman Emperor Constantine to the Umayyad Caliphate in the seventh century. This regrettable and frustrating state of affairs is the driving concern of Averil Cameron's Byzantine Matters. This is a robust, insider critique of the field by an important and highly influential scholar with a formidable international reputation (who, before moving to Oxford, preceded Herrin in the chair of Late Antiquity and Byzantine Studies in London). At the core of Cameron's concern is the methodological tardiness of Byzantine studies, "for Byzantium is an undertheorized field as well as an understudied one". Four elegant chapters, dealing in turn with empire, identity, visual culture and religion, demonstrate with clarity and economy the extent to which too much recent work on Byzantium continues to wall itself off from new lines of inquiry that have proved fruitful in classics, medieval history and late antiquity.

And it must be said that, for all its scholarly excellence, Herrin's approach to Byzantium cannot fairly claim to be theoretically informed. Indeed, she puts "high-flown theory" firmly to one side: "I am intolerant of theoretical jargon that fails to deliver understanding of the human experience". On the whole, Herrin's work is innocent of any productive engagement with (for example) postmodernism, literary theory, ideas on pre-modern economies and state formation, identity or gender studies. Her feminism (of which she is rightly proud) is straightforward: "an analysis of the unacceptable state of affairs that arises in deeply unfair, unequal patriarchal societies in which men exploit women".

Does that matter? Of course, it would be risible to suggest that any historian's achievement should be measured principally by her attentiveness to theoretical concerns. The problem – and this is Cameron's key point – is that the deep-seated reluctance of the great majority of Byzantinists to exploit more theoretical lines of inquiry contributes to the continuing marginalization of the discipline. It sharply separates them from the common practice of historians in other periods. After all, it might be argued, only in an area as methodologically backward as Byzantine studies would it be regarded as cutting-edge to propose to read texts "against the grain".

Byzantine Matters – it must be emphasized – is not a bid to propel Byzantinists from an intellectual backwater to the forefront of postmodernism. Rather it is an impassioned and sympathetic plea to fellow scholars to be much more ambitious in exploiting ideas developed for the understanding of other premodern societies and in making Byzantium both fully part of the history of the Mediterranean and a key period in any comparative study of empire. For these projects, Byzantium matters. Cameron's feisty and provocative manifesto should immediately be placed under every Byzantinist's pillow. And it should also be read by medieval and late- antique historians. That might perhaps mitigate another of Cameron's concerns, namely that, if it is pressured to take account of wider trends, "Byzantine scholarship might turn in on itself in response".

But, in the end, Byzantium is too important to be left to balkanized Byzantinists. As Averil Cameron urges, what is most pressingly needed is a major new history and one that moves beyond the recent rush of handbooks and companions to offer an innovative and coherent approach to the medieval history of the Roman Empire in the East. Perhaps (on a smaller scale) the most profitable next step – and here Judith Herrin's solid work securely points the way – is to set the carefully recovered detail of Byzantium in a broader, comparative context. It was, after all, the tracing of a wide pattern of significance (which reached right across the Mediterranean world) which gave Byzantine brain-teasers their historical interest and importance. Otherwise, who really cares – to end the frustration of any still puzzling – that if Love had not encountered the Muses he would have left Mount Helicon with 3,360 apples?

Sunday 24 August 2014

Seamus Heaney’s Ireland

Seamus Heaney's Ireland

Seamus Heaney by Ross Wilson, 1994

A year on from the death of a universally loved yet once controversial poet

ROY FOSTER

Ideas and images which have to be understood and loved by large numbers of people, must appeal to no rich personal experience, no patience of study, no delicacy of sense . . . . Manner and matter will be rhetorical, conventional, sentimental; and language, because it is carried beyond life perpetually, will be as wasted as the thought, with unmeaning pedantries and silences, and a dread of all that has salt and savour. After a while, in a land that has given itself to agitation over-much, abstract thoughts are raised up between men's minds and Nature, who never does the same thing twice, or makes one man like another, till minds, whose patriotism is perhaps great enough to carry them to the scaffold, cry down natural impulse with the morbid persistence of minds unsettled by some fixed idea . . . while a secret feeling that what is so unreal needs continual defence makes them bitter and restless . . . . Even if what one defends be true, an attitude of defence, a continual apology, whatever the cause makes the mind barren because it kills intellectual innocence; that delight in what is unforeseen, and in the mere spectacle of the world, the mere drifting hither and thither that must come before all true thought and emotion.

W . B. Yeats's essay "J. M. Synge and the Ireland of his Time" was written over the summer of 1910, after Synge's death, and is Yeats's meditation on how the artist retains intellectual independence in the face of a tide of popular sentiment that tries to carry him or her elsewhere; and how the pressures of "abstract" feelings need to be combated. He wrote much of it while staying with Maud Gonne in Normandy, and she appears between the lines: as where he reflects, later in the essay, that the "continual defence" of political propriety can make a whole generation "like an hysterical woman who will make unmeasured accusations and believe impossible things, because of some logical deduction from a solitary thought which has turned a portion of her mind to stone". In a less prejudiced way, and more importantly, Yeats's great essay is also a meditation on the way that a writer reflects and reacts to the political and social context of his or her times, retaining integrity while responding to the flux of contemporary history. At the same time, the injunction is clear: the writer must also guard against "unmeaning pedantries and silences", seeking and preserving the necessary "salt and savour" in language and finding an anchorage in "rich personal experience, patience of study, and delicacy of sense".

It requires no great effort to transfer thoughts to another great writer whose relationship to "the Ireland of his time" was central to his work and his impact – but who combated the pressures to conform, or to write to order, with a characteristic mixture of grace and inflexibility. Seamus Heaney's work contributed to the Ireland of his time, and – I would argue – in many ways reflected the changes in both Irelands, from his first publications in the early 1960s, until his death one year ago this week, at the age of seventy-four. Yeats, who died at seventy-three, and Synge (thirty-eight) both sustained a more obviously combative relationship to the Ireland of their day, and a sulphurous whiff of controversy still hung around them at the time of their death. The extraordinary, uplifting and somehow consoling outburst of national mourning that occurred after Heaney's death reflected something different: not only the fact that he had – as he himself said of Yeats – achieved authority within a culture, but also the fact that his work had entered the language and given cause for pride. I use the word advisedly, because here, too, there is a Yeatsian echo, when we remember Yeats's response to a question addressed to him in 1926, after the riots over Sean O'Casey's The Plough and the Stars. The question concerned Irish sensitivity to "the faults of a country being exposed". Yeats's reply was that a country which had reached intellectual maturity became proud rather than vain – the difference being that vanity meant wanting other people to think well of you because you didn't believe in yourself, whereas pride meant "indifference as to whether people were shown in a good or bad light on the stage; as a nation came to intellectual maturity it realised that the only thing that did it any credit was its intellect".

Ireland – meaning Irish intellectual as well as social and economic life – went through changes from the late 1950s which involved (sometimes traumatically) leaving behind self-sustaining vanity and slowly achieving some kind of pride. There are ways in which Heaney's work not only kept pace with, but kept faith with, those changes. In a real sense, Heaney had become the national poet; but he had achieved this authority through the kind of watchful independence expressed by the personae in so many of his poems, as well as the lacerating insights which made his work so unmistakable and, on occasion, scarifying.

These same qualities enabled him to overcome something else that is evoked in Yeats's essay on Synge: the kind of criticism, much more evident in Heaney's early than in his later career, which arraigned him for not writing as others thought he should. Many of these critiques are now forgotten, and several of his critics tended to self-destruct – either through pretentiousness, obscurantism, vindictiveness, or the envy of the second-rate. The titles alone of some of these essays are enough: expressing faux-bonhomie, as in "The Trouble With Seamus", or self-righteously turning a Heaney phrase back on himself, as in "Pap for the Dispossessed", and so on. More importantly, several of these early critiques were grounded in a very prescriptive idea, not only of the poet's role in general, but of the poet's duty to the Ireland of his time – most particularly and pompously in an essay by Desmond Fennell, which demonstrated exactly the difference Yeats pinpointed between national "vanity" and national "pride".

This kind of critique is different from, say, the absorbing interview with Seamus Deane in Crane Bag in 1977, where two old friends engage in a fencing match or an aggressive game of chess; or the adversarial analysis of Edna Longley, or the surprisingly sharp response of Ciaran Carson. Significantly, these more considered reactions were essentially occasioned by the collection North (1975), a landmark in many ways. Up to then, Heaney remarked, all his books were in a way "one book": this was a departure. The way in which it was seen to be a departure, however, depended on where you were standing. Helen Vendler, a close reader early on, judged it one of the most important single volumes of poetry since T. S. Eliot'sPrufrock and Other Observations (1917); critics north of the Irish border reacted differently. The uncompromising clarity, the blunt power of the imagery that juxtaposed Iron Age sacrificial victims preserved in the Jutland bog with the violent outrages of killings in Northern Ireland were taken as an offensive celebration of "noble barbarity", from someone becoming dangerously like a "laureate of violence" (Ciaran Carson, in Honest Ulsterman); the introspection of a poem such as "Exposure", which ends the book, was attacked from another angle.

Heaney would later defend the "right to life" of the poems in North, and also their oblique way of addressing the situation in Northern Ireland. He referred to them as "grimly executed" and described them as "odd and hard and contrary"; in conversations with Dennis O'Driscoll he repeatedly uses the metaphor of "clinker" for these poems – the irreducible desposit left after a fire in a range (or a furnace). The reaction in the Republic was different again. Without going as far as Ciaran Carson, the themes of violence and atavism came sharply though; and it is the violence of the imagery which Fintan O'Toole, for example, emphasized in retrospect, in a fascinating article on Heaney's work written twenty-four years later, from the vantage of 1999. But the sense of a breakthrough was inescapable, and of the poet as observer and interpreter not only of his times, but of "time" reaching back into an immemorial past. The concepts of tribes and atavism hung uneasily in the ether.

North placed the poet in the conning-tower (the kind of image which would recur in Heaney's poetry, along with look-outs, spies, reconnaissance men) but also – famously – interrogated the role of observer. Observer, not actor. "My temper", Heaney once remarked, "is not Brechtian." Didacticism was foreign to him, and time and again he discussed and evaluated his own evasiveness, along with the sense of alertness to sectarian strains and slights which he saw as coming from his mother's side (the cattle trade, he once remarked, conferred on his father a "trans-sectarian right to roam"). But he firmly rejected more comforting and comfortable commentary on Ulster peculiarities such as, perhaps, the BBC views voiced by Sam Hanna Bell and John Boyd in the 1950s and early 60s: what Brian Friel called "the wholesome Ambridge-like Ulster the BBC (NI) would have us believe". Heaney knew Northern Ireland was not a "good wee place". He had after all to go to the "man-killing" fields of Jutland to feel "lost, / Unhappy, and at home".

How important, in this context, is it that North was written in the South? Heaney wrote often of the sanctuary of the cottage at Glanmore in Co Wicklow that he and his family rented and later bought: a tranquil space for writing, but also a refuge from war. It was also, just as importantly, an escape from the network of attitudes and prejudices that Heaney eviscerated in several poems, and talked of in many interviews. His language in describing the warp and weft of sectarianism and discrimination is interesting: the adjective that recurs (especially in the interviews with Dennis O'Driscoll in Stepping Stones, 2008) is "noxious" and the idea of a poisonous miasma persists. At the same time Heaney's own direct experience is often different: relations with his Protestant neighbours while he was growing up are warmly evoked in Stepping Stones, and delicately portrayed in poems such as "The Other Side"; when he recalls his life at Queen's University Belfast, both as student and lecturer, the emphasis falls on interaction rather than separation – among the Honours students of English, he said, there was "a certain breeziness of style in handling all the noxious stuff" amid a clearly divided and stratified society. And he was always decisively clear that the reflections of social relationships in his poetry were

not intended as a contribution to better community relations; [that poetry] had come out of creative freedom rather than social obligation – it was about a moment of achieved grace between people with different allegiances rather than a representation of a state of constant goodwill in the country as a whole, and as such it was not presuming to be anything more than a momentary stay against confusion

– a phrase from Robert Frost, which Heaney uses more than once.

The move south, after teaching schoolchildren in Ballymurphy and university students in Queen's, is still decisively important; it lay behind the expansiveness that characterized Heaney's development from the late 1970s, and the way that this reflected an expansion and change in Irish society as a whole: hard-won, not always obvious at the time, but, in John Montague's words, old moulds were being broken. The hallmarks of the Heaney style were established early on, from his very first collection: what has been called the "axiomatic rightness" of words and phrases in poems which often ended with a Yeatsian flourish, and what Heaney himself, early in his career, described as the poet's business: "the summoning and meshing of the subconscious and semantic energies of words". But what accompanies this, as the volumes – which like Yeats's were "books" rather than "collections" – succeed each other, is a widening of horizons, reflecting not just the sojourns in Harvard or the "silence, exile and sunning", as Heaney put it, at Berkeley. The importance to him of Eastern European writers – Osip Mandelstam, Zbigniew Herbert, Czesław Miłosz, Joseph Brodsky – is equally striking, and shows the extension of a poetic authority which is also a preoccupation with how poets should live in their times, especially when those times are out of joint. In his introduction to The Government of the Tongue (1988), he makes an Irish parallel explicit:

I keep returning to [Mandelstam and other poets from eastern bloc countries] because there is something in their situation that makes them attractive to a reader whose formative experience has been largely Irish. There is an unsettled aspect to the different worlds they inhabit, and one of the challenges they face is to survive amphibiously, in the realm of "the times" and the realm of their moral and artistic self-respect, a challenge immediately recognizable to anyone who has lived with the awful and demeaning facts of Northern Ireland's history over the last couple of decades.

This was written in 1987. The next "couple of decades" would see, not only upheavals, liberations and unsettlements in those very Eastern bloc countries, but also tectonic shifts in Ireland, North and South. And it would become, perhaps, clearer that however out of joint the Irish times had been, an Irish poet had not witnessed what Mandelstam, or Miłosz, or the Jewish Hungarian poet Milos Radnoti had had to witness. In a deeply absorbing lecture on human rights and the artist, which Heaney delivered to the Law Society in 2012, he wrote of Radnoti's terrible fate under the Nazis, stumbling to his death on a forced march, before being shot and dumped in a pit; but all the time keeping a tiny notebook in which he inscribed defiant poems. The notebook was exhumed with his body from a mass grave, a testament in the literature of "witnessing", that theme to which Heaney turned again and again.

The world of suffering that writers in Central and Eastern Europe witnessed in the twentieth century might put Irish local difficulties in perspective, but observing them can lend an edge to one's own observations. Heaney's own commitment, as his work accumulated into an oeuvre, and times changed around him, remained determinedly un-simplifying in terms of possible parallels and echoes between Ireland and elsewhere. He himself was – it seemed, effortlessly – cosmopolitan, in the best sense of that awkward word. To Yeats's generation, the word suggested a debasement and dilution of properly autochthonous national cultures ("Antaeus-like"): to us, though, Yeats seems a model of cosmopolitanism, with his interests in Italian philosophy, Japanese theatre and Indian religion, his life spent between Ireland and England, his determination that Irish culture would look to the best international models. Heaney's cosmpolitanism was of a similar order – perhaps taking on as well something of that "rooted cosmopolitanism" advocated by Kwame Anthony Appiah, as a way of negotiating civic identity in a society with a history of internal divisions. The original sin of sacral nationalism, however, will keep bursting through such achieved or contrived polities, a fact of which Heaney was always aware. (Sarajevo, after all, was once one of the most cosmopolitan cities in Europe.) Heaney's classical education also became a more obviously sustaining inspiration in these years, a source of passion that would last to the end: the classical myths, stories and concepts that inform so much of his later work served as another route out of Irish exceptionalism.

A further, vital aspect of the expansion, interrogation and inclusiveness that mark Heaney's maturity is also his celebration and possession of the inheritance of English poetry. This is elegantly gestured at throughout the "Glanmore Sonnets", and fires his readings of Ted Hughes, Geoffrey Hill and Philip Larkin in his essay "Englands of the Mind". The solidity of the English tradition was something he rested on, and what it meant to him is unequivocally demonstrated in his lectures as Oxford Professor of Poetry, published in The Redress of Poetry, as well as the pieces in The Government of the Tongue and a great wealth of essays and lectures that remain uncollected. But as he repeatedly said, this saturation is completely consistent with his self-identification as an Irish, not a British, poet.

In "J. M. Synge and the Ireland of his Time", Yeats remarked that the "casuistry" of political correctness (as he didn't call it) tends in Ireland to put a barrier, or "meshes" (a word Heaney loved too), between Irish readers and English literature, "substituting arguments and hesitations for the excitement at the first reading of the great poets which should be a sort of violent imaginative puberty". It is exactly that excitement and engagement which Heaney celebrated and conveyed when he wrote and lectured about John Clare, Wordsworth, Hardy, and others: claiming a "double inheritance" which came to him easily as to no other contemporary Irish poet. As he reflected at the end of those Oxford lectures:

There is nothing extraordinary about the challenge to be in two minds. If, for example, there was something exacerbating, there was still nothing deleterious to my sense of Irishness in the fact that I grew up in the minority in Northern Ireland and was educated within the dominant British culture. My identity was emphasized rather than eroded by being maintained in such circumstances. The British dimension, in other words, while it is something that will be resisted by the minority if it is felt to be coercive, has nevertheless been a given of our history and even of our geography, one of the places where we all live, willy-nilly. It's in the language. And it's where the mind of many in the republic lives also. So I would suggest that the majority in Northern Ireland should make a corresponding effort at two-mindedness and start to conceive of themselves within – rather than beyond – the Irish element. Obviously, it will be extremely difficult for them to surmount their revulsion against all the violence that has been perpetrated in the name of Ireland, but everything and everybody would be helped were they to make their imagination press back against the pressure of reality . . . . Within our individual selves we can reconcile two orders of knowledge which we might call the practical and the poetic . . . each form of knowledge redresses the other and . . . the frontier between them is there for the crossing.

This was prescient, in November 1993, just one month before the announcement of a new approach to multiple political identities taken by the Downing Street Declaration made by John Major and Albert Reynolds. In declaring that Britain had no selfish strategic interest in Northern Ireland, that the people of Northern Ireland had the right to decide on Union with Britain or unity with the Republic by mutual consent, and that a united Ireland could come about only by peaceful means, that Declaration allowed discourse to move on from the parameters prescribed by the Government of Ireland Act 1920 and the claims of the Republic under Articles 2 and 3 of its Constitution. The Good Friday Agreement would follow on from that. And here, too, I think Heaney was reflecting the Ireland of his time – a Republic which had moved from the introspection of the early 1960s through the dislocations and challenges of the 70s, through the cautious rethinking of attitudes to nationalism and unionism which progressed haltingly from the 1980s, and led to the reconfigurations of national and cross-channel relationships expressed by the ceasefires, framework documents and eventually agreements of the late 1990s. In those same years the North had lurched through the cycles of violence and trauma that so powerfully inflected Heaney's poetry, before coming to some kind of cautious moment of reassessment, which Heaney gestured towards in some key poems, as well as his play The Cure at Troy. Anchored as he was in his native ground, this sensitivity to a change in the weather never left him. Nor was he Pollyannaish about the extent to which sectarian division had become further entrenched during the Troubles, and was in some ways reluctantly underwritten by the "peace process" – along with some cutting of corners and double-think which may be causing problems now.

Heaney also expressed the sense that things need not ineluctably have reached the pitch they did; interestingly, in remembering the early 1960s in Stepping Stones, he anticipates the conclusions of some recent studies of the Troubles, that there was a feeling in the early 1960s that discrimination and inequality could and would be addressed, that a new dispensation was possible, that change was beckoning. And that the thirty years and 3,000 deaths that followed might be seen, not as the inevitable bursting of a long-anticipated storm, but as the advent of a malign tornado. These thoughts recur, and so did his examination of the peculiar institutions and attitudes of "the province". They were long-rooted. "Whatever You Say, Say Nothing", published in North and almost instantly reckoned canonical, had first appeared in the Listener in 1971, and in fact arose from verse letters written by Heaney to his friends. The injunction in the title was, nonetheless, as Heaney later clarified, "ironical rather than instructional; it was fundamentally an expression of anger rather than acquiescence". The fact that he felt this needed saying surely reflected the changed and relaxed circumstances of the early 2000s, when he was recording his interviews with Dennis O'Driscoll; back in the early 1970s, the anger blazed off the page. It's of a piece with what he called – in that 1977 interview with Seamus Deane – "the slightly aggravated young Catholic male" side of his contemporary persona. Certainly, a rage against what he called "the bankrupt psychology and mythologies implicit in the terms Irish Catholic and Ulster Protestant" remained, and grew; along with an enduring sense of linkage and mirror-imaging.

From 1972, Heaney's vantage was Wicklow and then Dublin, viewing the North from what Tom Paulin has called the "corrupt civility" of the Republic. But he also viewed the history of his times from a broader vantage still: "The Frontier of Writing". The ambition, range and sheer power of his writing benefited from displacement; a realization that came powerfully home to me when I read Station Island (1984), to me one of Heaney's supreme achievements and a key work – above all in the title poem, fusing ghosts, history and accusation. Reading it, Yeats's poem "Parnell's Funeral" came irresistibly to mind.

Come, fix upon me that accusing eye.
I thirst for accusation. All that was sung,
All that was said in Ireland is a lie
Bred out of the contagion of the throng,
Saving the rhyme that rats hear before they die.
Leave nothing but the nothings that belong
To this bare soul, let all men judge that can
Whether it be an animal or a man.

"Station Island" does not share this contemptuous tone, but it is full of contained anger nonetheless. Its sometimes jagged interrogations are expressed in many voices – the legendary Irish king Sweeny's, William Carleton's, mentors of the poet's youth, victims of sectarian killings, and finally James Joyce's. The visionary framework contains and expands longstanding preoccupations: the Dantean journey among the dead, the inheritance of Catholicism, the responsibilities of the poet in the world and his obligation to those who have gone before. This sense of writing as a negotiation with the dead, an act of revivification and questioning and retrieval, is a powerful theme in the poetry that Heaney identified with and referred to; after all, the ur-poet is Orpheus, and Rilke's Orpheus sonnets, retracing the poet's famous journey to the shades, may be much in Heaney's mind here. (Remember, too, his wonderful love poem, "The Underground".) But "Station Island" is also about the poet's duty to himself, expressed viscerally in the advice meted out by the poet's last interlocutor, James Joyce, in his voice "like a prosecutor's or a singer's, / Cunning, narcotic, mimic, definite". Joyce tells the poet to stay at a tangent, fly by the nets, claim the English language, stop raking at dead fires.

It is a Yeatsian injunction, though Yeats would not have been a likely denizen of Station Island, and he is not to be met there. But the themes focused in this powerful poem (a work that divides the critics) seem quintessentially Yeatsian in the end. Heaney wrote a celebrated essay called "Yeats as an Example?" with a question mark conveying an arched eyebrow and an ironic smile. (Even before Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize, the comparisons were mounting, and one of the most splenetic reactions from an early critic came when Clive James remarked "Sooner or later people are going to start comparing [Heaney] to Yeats".) In the essay Heaney sets down what Yeats means to a working poet:

What Yeats offers the practising writer is an example of labour, perseverance. He is, indeed, the ideal example for a poet approaching middle age. He reminds you that revision and slog-work are what you may have to undergo if you seek the satisfaction of finish; he bothers you with the suggestion that if you have managed to do one kind of poem in your own way, you should cast off that way and face into another area of your experience until you have learned a new voice to say that area properly. He encourages you to experience a transference of energies from poetic forms themselves, reveals how the challenge of a metre can extend the resources of the voice. He proves that deliberation can be so intensified that it becomes synonymous with inspiration. Above all he reminds you that art is intended, that it is part of the creative push of civilization itself.

This is personal, practical, nuts-and-bolts stuff; it deliberately avoids the extent to which Yeats was presented with the role of Ireland's public poet, even national poet – and took ingenious pains to subvert and evade the restrictions and banalities that too readily come with such a role. Here, surely, was another arena in which Heaney learned from "Yeats as an example": the sense of an impact on their times, the danger of becoming a "smiling public man"', and the necessity to distance yourself. Heaney gets closer to the assonances between life and work in their two lives when he referred to the lesson that Yeats learned from living in interesting times – "that you deal with public crisis, not by accepting the terms of the public's crisis, but by making your own imagery and your own terrain take the colour of it, take the impression of it". This is exactly what Yeats does in, for example, "Meditations in Time of Civil War", a sequence Heaney invokes more than once, and to which his own poetry owes an obvious debt. Clearly he absorbed the uncompromising directness and minute observation of "The Road at my Door" and "The Stare's Nest at my Window", but he also identifies with Yeats's self-questioning conclusion to "I see Phantoms of Hatred . . . ":

I turn away and shut the door, and on the stair
Wonder how many times I could have proved my worth
In something that all others understand and share;
But O! ambitious heart, had such a proof drawn forth
A company of friends, a conscience set at ease,
It had but made us pine the more. The abstract joy,
The half-read wisdom of daemonic images,
Suffice the ageing man as once the growing boy.

And to read Heaney, the prose and the interviews but above all the collections of poems as they succeed each other, is to acquire a sense of the growth of the poet: as with Yeats, or with Wordsworth's Prelude. "In certain great poets", Heaney said, "Yeats, Shakespeare, Stevens, Miłosz – you sense an ongoing opening of consciousness as they age, a deepening and clarifying and even simplifying of receptivity to what might be waiting on the farther shore. It's like one of those rare summer evenings when the sky clears rather than darkens."

More sombrely, the late work of both Yeats and Heaney is preoccupied with death. In "Yeats as an Example", Heaney puts as Yeats's final lesson to other writers his "large-minded, whole-hearted assent to the natural cycles of living and dying . . . the humility of his artistic mastery before the mystery of life and death". Both suffered dangerous illnesses in their last years, which conferred a sense that their time might not be long; both were haunted by ghosts, and possessed by the plangent and marvellous images of visits to the underworld which permeate classical literature, and were mediated for both men by Dante. For Heaney – and it's another of those dimensions of Englishness, perhaps – there are connections to the actual passages and tunnels of the London Underground railway system, which recur in his work; more profoundly and directly, there is his preoccupation with Yeats's deathbed poem, "Cuchulain Comforted" , invoked more than once in his own work, and presenting a "passport" across the Styx. Even as early as his Oxford lectures we hear this note, when Heaney celebrates the magnificent response to a self-questioning old age delineated in Yeats's "The Man and the Echo", posited against Philip Larkin's "Aubade".

In Heaney's own last poems there is a note of transcendence, and of traffic with the dead – with which his last collection, Human Chain, so eerily begins. These late preoccupations first become obvious, perhaps, in Seeing Things (1991), with its theme of transparency. It is also the culmination of what he expressed earlier as a desire for "plain, clear glass", striven for from his forties, rather than decoration and colour. He achieved it. But in remembering his wonderful technique, and the way his work lifts into transcendence, we should also remember that what he admired in Dante was an ability to handle both the transcendent and the political. In terms of the Ireland of his time, this meant coping with "the typical strains which the consciousness labours under in this country . . . to be faithful to the collective historical experience and to be true to the recognition of the emerging self" (Yeats again). The way Heaney balanced these makes him a uniquely interesting poet, as well as a great one; it also aroused fierce reactions, especially early in his career, which gained momentum against the background of troubled times.

Heaney died universally admired and mourned. Still, it is worth remembering, first, that he was at times controversial; second, the reasons why he was controversial; and third, the reasons why the controversy dissipated and was replaced by the affirmative and acclaimed role which he occupied in national life, so overwhelmingly demonstrated at the time of his death. His work will survive him, and all such controversy, most of all because it achieves what Eugenio Montale said poetry must do: "mak[e] an obscure pilgrimage through conscience and memory", eventually flowing back into the life of "everyday circulation", from which it took its first nourishment and inspiration. It kept faith with conscience and memory, and repudiated – as Yeats advised in his Synge essay – the pressure to be abstractly "rhetorical, conventional and sentimental". That is why the poetry of Seamus Heaney will remain a vital and enduring testament to the Ireland of his time.

*

This is the edited text of a lecture delivered at a Commemoration and Celebration of Seamus Heaney held at Magdalene College, Cambridge, on March 4, 2014.