Lost in translation

The BBC’s Hugh Schofield wonders why French books – and especially modern French novels – don’t sell abroad. This is in spite of the fact that France has a thriving literary culture, and despite the popularity of books translated into English from other European languages, notably Spanish, Portuguese and Italian. The authors and readers interviewed by Schofield propose various reasons, ranging from the supposed elitism and intellectualism of French literary culture to the unexciting covers of French novels, and on the other side, the laziness and misconceptions of Anglophone publishers and readers.

I actually quite like French book covers, as well as French bookshops, which are described rather dismissively as ‘cramped and colourless’ in Schofield’s piece. Those unadorned cream covers, enlivened only by the author’s photograph, are surely what makes a book distinctively French - it wouldn’t look right to have a French novel that wasn’t in that familiar Flammarion, Gallimard or Livre de Poche style. I can see a number from where I’m sitting (see photo below), and they bring a breath of the Left Bank into the room. As for French bookshops, I’m rather fond of their uniform rows of identical-looking volumes and studiously highbrow demeanour – all very un-Waterstones, and long may it continue.

I wonder if the absence of modern French writing from British and American shelves has something to do with the fact that the small publisher Harvill (absorbed first into Harvill Secker and more recently into Random House), which was largely responsible in the post-war years for introducing English-speaking readers to contemporary European writers, had a bias towards other countries, such as Portugal, Russia, and the old Eastern bloc - or was it just that there happened to be a number of brilliant translators available from those nations? But then I've just remembered that Harvill published the detective stories of Daniel Pennac, so maybe I've got that wrong. (Perhaps my brother Michael, who used to work for Harvill, will read this and be able to help out here).


Whatever the explanation, Hugh Schofield is basically right in his assessment that a great deal of contemporary French literature remains untranslated into English. If a major Spanish author like Javier Marias or Javier Cercas brings out a new novel, you know it’ll only be a matter of time before an English translation appears, and that it will be enthusiastically picked up by the Sunday broadsheets, as well as by the LRB and New York Review of Books. But there’s rarely an equivalent process, or fuss, over a French literary success, apart from, as Schofield points out, the headline-grabbing Michel Houllebecq.


I confess to having a personal interest here, since I’ve developed a yearning to read a couple of recently-published French novels, and I’ve been frustrated at the absence of English translations. I discovered these books via one of my current favourite blogs – The Catholic English Teacher. I know it won’t appeal to my agnostic and atheist readers, but I think it’s one of the best literary blogs around - and I love the masthead. Despite the title, Roy Peachey, the blog’s author, is remarkably well-informed about a range of contemporary literatures in languages other than English, and especially in French. Having read his recommendations, I’m keen to track down L’art francais de la guerre by Alexis Jenni, which won the Prix Goncourt a couple of years ago, and also the work of Claire Daudin, who as well as being a prize-winning novelist is also an expert on Mauriac, Bernanos and Peguy. However, neither of these authors has yet had any of their writings translated into English.


There’s a particular pleasure in being able to read something, however brief – a short story, an article, a poem even – in the language in which it was written. But as it stands, my French isn’t quite up to it, despite the fact that I have an ‘A’ Level in the subject. You could see this as the fault of the British education system – a failure to teach languages so that people can actually use them – or a reflection of my own laziness and lack of linguistic flair. I did only get an ‘E’, after all. Mind you, I enjoyed sixth-form French: watching Mr Levine pacing back and forth, gesticulating expressively as he went into raptures over poetic passages from Zola.


As I mentioned in a recent post, I had a bit of a Mauriac phase around the time of our visit to Bordeaux last summer. As our driver, Marise, pointed out while transporting us from the station, Mauriac is one of the three local ‘M’s – the others being Montaigne and Montesquieu. My family mock my habit of having to read something by a local author wherever we go: it was Saramago in Lisbon, Hammett in San Francisco, etc.  On this occasion, I read Therese Desqueyroux before we left home, and Le Noeud de Viperes on the way back, both in English translations (sorry, can't seem to do the accents on Blogger). 
However, on our return I was keen to read more by Mauriac and searched online for a collection of his post-war political articles - or Bloc-Notes. (Mauriac, a devout Catholic, was nevertheless a staunch opponent of the Franco regime in Spain and a supporter of the French Resistance.) But I discovered that these were only available in the original French, and reading them has been a bit of a struggle, to say the least. (Those books in the photo above? They all belong to my Other Half, who was a much better student of French literature than I ever was.) 


And so I’ve gone back to basics. Since October I’ve been working my way through Hugo’s French in 3 Months, filling in the gaps created by failing memory. I’ve just reached the end, and after Christmas it’ll be on to the advanced course. Mind you, as I related last week, I made a similar resolution earlier this year with regard to Portuguese, and that fell by the wayside. And then there was the year I took a Pavese novel in the original Italian on holiday, but gave up after a couple of chapters. I love languages, and since childhood I’ve been deeply envious of those who were brought up to be bilingual, but I’m a bit of a magpie – I tend to know a little about a lot and don’t speak or read any single foreign language very well.  We’ll see how it goes.


So, when it comes to contemporary French literature, I’ll have to wait, either for my facility with the language to improve considerably, or for some enterprising small publisher (do they still exist?) to develop a line in translations of modern French novels. Either way, I think I’m going to have to be very patient.

My fiction addiction

I’ve given up on Goodreads, the website (now owned by Amazon, I understand) that lets you tell people which books you’ve been reading, and what you think of them. Not only is the site counter-intuitive (or maybe it’s just me), but there’s a patronising whiff of the school report about its updates: ‘Martin made progress with Cousin Bette’, indeed. On the other hand, what’s the point of reading a book if you can’t share the experience with your friends?  So today I’m writing a post about my recent reading.

I'll begin with a confession. Until a few months ago, my reading of fiction had fallen away and in the past year or two there have been very few novels leavening my diet of historical works and biographies. This, despite having not one but two degrees in English Literature: but then, as a student, my primary passion was always for poetry rather than prose. There was a brief Mauriac obsession last summer, after our visit to Bordeaux, but my most memorable reading experiences of late have been John Guy’s book on Thomas Becket, Amanda Vickery on the lives of eighteenth-century women, and James McPherson on the American Civil War. If asked to justify my focus on non-fiction, I would have argued that the best historical writing encompasses many of the characteristics of good novels: engrossing narrative, compelling characters, stylish prose.

But I began to think I was missing something, and so this summer my novel reading revived. It’s one more thing that I can credit the late Norman Geras with. As I wrote in my appreciation of him the other week, I never ceased to be impressed by his appetite for fiction and his insightful writing on his favourite novelists, from Jane Austen to Anne Tyler. When we visited him earlier this year, Norm described his daily novel-reading habits and quizzed me about my own preference for non-fiction, so that I began to feel rather embarrassed by my abstention from fiction.

Spurred into action, I took from the shelf a novel that I’d been meaning to finish for ages: Irene Nemirovsky’s Suite Francaise. If you look back at my Normblog profile, you’ll see that I claimed to be reading this as long ago as 2007, but in fact I never got beyond the first few pages. Returning to the book, I was immediately captivated by Nemirovsky’s account of refugees fleeing occupied Paris – made even more compelling by the author’s personal experience of her subject-matter, and by the knowledge that very soon after writing it, she would herself become a victim of Nazi terror.

Having realised what I was missing by excluding fiction from my imaginative diet, I went on to fulfill a long-overdue promise to myself, to re-read Dostoievsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. I’d seen that there was a new translation, by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, that supposedly captured the dynamism of the original Russian better than the Penguin version by Constance Garnett that I’d read many years ago. (I should add that my return to Dostoievsky was partly prompted by my renewed interest in religion: Karamazov was the book that inspired the actor Martin Sheen to return to Catholicism, and it’s surely one of the great Christian novels.) The new translation turned out to be every bit as lively and engaging as its was reputed to be, capturing the humour as well as the pathos of this greatest of Russian writers.

This doorstop of a novel book-ended, so to speak, my summer: I read about half before we went away on holiday and the other half when we returned. In between, I spent two weeks lying beside a Portuguese pool, but whereas normally I would have packed mostly non-fiction, this time I threw in a scattering of novels. On the long train journey south through France and Spain, I’d been reading a book about the little-known wartime hero Aristides de Sousa Mendes, the Portuguese consul in Bordeaux who was responsible for helping hundreds of Jews and others escape from occupied France. Then, on arrival in Portugal, I followed this with something I’d really been looking forward to: Neill Lochery’s account of wartime Lisbon, which included a fascinating collection of photographs of the city and the celebrities and spies who took refuge there. Unfortunately, the photos turned out to be the best thing about this badly-written and poorly-edited volume. Nevertheless, there was a connection between these two non-fiction appetisers and the first novel I read on holiday - Joseph Roth’s Radetsky March, set in the closing years of the Austro-Hungarian empire – since Otto von Hapbsurg had been one of those helped by de Sousa Mendes to escape to Portugal. I shall certainly be reading more by Roth. Then it was on to a non-fiction book with an Austrian theme: Alexander Waugh’s House of Wittgenstein, which I bought because of my interest in Ludwig’s philosophy, though he turned out to be just one member of a fascinatingly eccentric family, none more so than his brother Paul, an accomplished one-armed concert pianist.

Norm Geras’ influence was apparent in my next novel choice (he’d recommended it on his blog): John Williams’ reissued Stoner. My absorption in this slim volume was reflected in the fact that I read it in virtually one poolside sitting. However, I should add that I found the story of this obscure, disappointed mid-western teacher unrelievedly depressing, lacking any hint of possible redemption.

My ‘big read’ of the holiday was Os Maias – The Maias – by the nineteenth century Portuguese novelist Eca de Queiros. One of my New Year’s resolutions had been to improve my knowledge of Portuguese to the extent that I’d be able to be read something by this author, or perhaps by Pessoa or Saramago, in the original, by the time we went on holiday. However, this went the way of most of my resolutions, and I ended up, once again, opting for a new English translation. I’d bought the Carcanet edition following our first visit to Lisbon seven years ago, when we’d stayed in a small hotel that had been the model for the family home in de Queiros’ novel, but had never quite got around to reading it. Then I read that Margaret Jull Costa, whose renderings of Saramago and of Spanish authors such as Javier Marias I had long admired, had produced a new translation. I wasn’t disappointed: the novel is compendious, rollicking, moving, a great nineteenth-century realist novel, with some Dickensian touches but without any Dickensian caricatures or sentimentality. I thoroughly recommend it.

De Queiros was influenced by the great French realists, and especially by Balzac, another embarrassing gap in my reading, so on my return I plucked Cousin Bette from the shelf and jumped into the middle of the ‘Comedie Humaine’ cycle. The experience was rewarding, but it didn’t really whet my appetite for more by the same author, not just yet anyway. However, I was now feeling inspired to plug other shameful gaps in my literary knowledge, and at the same time wanting to stick with the nineteenth century for a little longer, so this autumn I turned back to the English classics. From Balzac I went on to Dickens, rapidly consuming The Old Curiosity Shop – sentimental and maudlin at times, but still compelling – and Oliver Twist – apprentice work for the far superior David Copperfield, but a lively youthful narrative all the same. Then from George Eliot's oeuvre I selected Adam Bede, which I’d never read, and found completely absorbing, not least because of my identification with its Methodist theme, and at the moment I’m rather plodding my way through The Mill on the Floss.

Another novel I’d never got round to reading was Charlotte Bronte's Villette, which starts very engagingly, but then kind of loses its way. What critics describe as a fascinating double narrative replete with fluid identities, I thought was a flawed and poorly structured piece of work, in which personal biography was never quite fully transformed into imaginative literature. But the highlight of my autumn reading so far has been Vanity Fair, another unforgivable omission from my literary knowledge. There were many similarities with The Maias - another thoroughly engaging, inventive and light-filled imaginative experience.

So, after a dry period with no novel-reading at all, I’ve now become reliant on my regular fiction fix and have to have a novel in progress all the time. (This doesn't mean I've stopped reading history books: I'm part-way through Hugh Thomas' classic account of the Spanish Civil War and am just finishing Mark Kishlansky's Penguin history of seventeenth-century Britain.) Now, I’m planning my December reading schedule. Nothing is set in stone yet, but I definitely want to be reading Dickens at Christmas. Christmas Carol would be too obvious but should I re-read Great Expectations or Bleak House, or seek out the unread Pickwick Papers or Our Mutual Friend?

Watch this space for updates. And please feel free share your own recommendations, or your opinions of any of the books mentioned here.

'It's not about them. It's about us.'

The debate about Christian attitudes to Israel continues apace in the comments thread to my Greenbelt post. I've promised to say more, at some point, on why I think anti-Zionism has taken root among religious 'progressives', but by way of an introduction to that vexed topic, I thought I would make reference to the thoughts of one M.Gove.

Inspired by my close encounter with the Secretary of State for Education whilst on holiday in Portugal, I've been reading Celsius 7/7, his spirited critique of western responses to Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism. Although I'm as fierce a critic as anyone of Gove's educational policies, and I don't agree with every word in the book, I found it a surprisingly insightful and historically well-informed analysis of the roots of jihadi violence and of both left and right-wing reactions to it.

Despite his Conservatism, Gove knows his stuff when it comes to the history of the Left (apparently he was a Labour supporter in his youth), and his explanation of how progressives moved from enthusiasm for the fledgling state of Israel to outright anti-Zionism is convincing. Some of it can be explained by Israel's economic and military successes, which put at risk its 'victim' status in the minds of some western supporters. More important, though (in Gove's view) were changes in the nature and outlook of the radical Left - and later the wider liberal Left. He traces these back to 1968, the New Left and the influence of the Frankfurt School, which saw the emphasis shifting from opposition to capitalism and the fight for economic equality to struggles around culture, identity and national liberation:

Instead of history being viewed as a matter of class conflict, it was increasingly seen as an anti-colonial, anti-Western process. The place of the proletariat in the affections of the Left, as a group onto whom fantasies of revolution could be projected, was assumed by the non-Western peoples of the globe.

An overly simplistic analysis, perhaps, but there's surely some truth in Gove's claim that during this period many on the Left moved away from agitating for economic improvement for the working-class at home, and became absorbed in 'a perpetual quest for new victims onto whom they could project their need to feel righteous anger'. And increasingly, as Gove says, 'the cause that has proved the most useful in satisfying this emotional need has been the Palestinian movement'.

This is not to say that the Palestinian case is without merit, or that the Palestinians don't have a claim to statehood. But Gove argues that the reason why this cause 'absorbs so much more political energy than any other campaign for justice' is 'not about them. It's about us'. He continues:

The reason the Palestinian cause is so central to modern left-wing activity [...] is because it is the contemporary rallying point for the dominant radical impulse of our time - anti-Westernism. And attachment to the Palestinian cause is an emotionally satisfying and morally exalted way of attacking Israel - the country that is the West's front line, the state that embodies Western values in a region and at a time where they are under particularly vicious assault.

Now, as I wrote recently, I'm uncomfortable with talk of defending 'Western' values, as if democracy, freedom of expression and belief, and the rights of women and minorities, were the exclusive property of Europe and America. I believe these are universal aspirations, and in fact that labelling them as 'Western' is to play into the hands of those religious fundamentalists and secular 'anti-imperialists' who want us to believe that supporting (say) gay rights in Iran or women's education in Afghanistan is somehow 'colonialist'.

But, having said that, I think Gove's central thesis is a sound one. As to why religious progressives, in particular, have bought into the 'Israel-bad-Palestinians-good' narrative: that involves (I believe) a whole other layer of historical, theological and psychological explanation. Which will have to wait for another post.

From a bridge to a journey

I've coming to the end of David Remnick's The Bridge, which sets the rise of Barack Obama in the context of the long struggle for civil rights. If you've read Dreams From My Father, Game Change and David Plouffe's book about the 2008 campaign, and think you know everything there is to know about Obama's background and his historic run for the presidency, then think again. Remnick is particularly good on Obama's political formation in Chicago and his relationship with an older generation of African-American politicians.

After Remnick, I had a whole stack of books lined up and waiting to be read. Before we went on holiday I was halfway through re-reading The Making of the English Working Class, then there was that book about Tom Paine I started in St. Ives, not to mention the thick tome that is Wolf Hall, which I took to Portugal but never quite got round to reading, and which still sits on the floor by the bed unopened, like a reproach.

But I'm afraid they'll all have to wait. For, like half the nation, I have succumbed to the siren call of Mr. Tony and bought my half-price copy of A Journey from Waterstones. Yesterday I took the book on a long train journey and was immediately hooked. Don't believe those who say Blair has a dull literary style. He may not be Doris Kearns Goodwin or Robert Caro, or even Barack Obama, but it's an absolutely riveting read. If, like me, you are fortunate to have a partner who is as obsessed with politics as you are, and if you have the kind of relationship where you are always reading out bits of your books to each other, then you'll find Blair's book impossible. You'll be wanting to read all of it to each other. In fact, I almost bought H. her own copy so that we could read it at the same time: I could hardly wait for her to share the experience with me.

Maybe it's just me. After all, I did re-join the Labour Party the day after Blair was elected leader, and my political trajectory - from the Bennite Left to a kind of progressive centrism - has tended to follow his. Leafing through the photos in the book, it struck me that even our hairstyles have moved in a similar direction, from unkempt long locks in Seventies, via the blow-dried Eighties, to the receding hairline with touches of grey today. I'm sure those who find Blair politically and personally anathema wouldn't enjoy the book half as much as I'm doing.

Mind you, there are some odd passages in the book. Most reviews have mentioned the explicit sexual passages, but there are other parts where the author seems unaware of his own double entendres. Surely any sub-editor who had a passing acquaintance with Freud should have taken a red pencil to this paragraph about Alastair Campbell and Peter Mandelson, with its only half-acknowledged phallic imagery:

During the course of the conversation [with Campbell] I discovered something I hadn't been a hundred per cent of previously: he had clanking great balls. This was someone you would have to pull back, not push forward [...] He and Peter Mandelson might fight (and my goodness they did, occasionally literally), but in tandem they would be as formidable a political force as could be imagined. Peter would slip into the castle through a secret passageway and, by nimble footwork and sharp and incisive thrusts of the rapier, cleave his way through to the throne room. Meanwhile, Alastair would be a very large oak battering ram destroying the castle gates, and neither boiling pitch nor reinforced doors would keep him out.

I'm sure I'll have more to say as I read on. For now: back to the book...

What we did (and who we saw) on our holidays

As promised, then, a brief account of our trip to Portugal. We were staying in the hills a few miles from Lisbon, within easy reach of the city, and of Sintra and Cascais. Much of the time was spent, as is our custom, sitting in the sun and working through a pile of books, but we made a few forays out to explore our surroundings.

Sintra (see photo in last post) was the retreat of Portuguese monarchs, and home to a number of wealthy eccentrics, who’ve left their mark in the architecture and landscape. For me, the charm of the place was somewhat undermined by the large number of crumbling, neglected buildings, and by the tourist coaches cramming the narrow streets and squares. However, we enjoyed our visit to the Palacio Nacional, and found refuge from the crowds in the Loja do Vinho, right on the main square, where the young maitre d' allowed us to sample a range of fine ports with our coffee. And on the way back to the railway station, we came across the Fabrica das Verdadeiras Quijadas da Sapa, which makes some of the finest cakes in the region.

The seaside town of Cascais was another scene of faded glory, its fine villas now overwhelmed by English pubs, tourist shops and badly-planned overdevelopment. We walked along the seafront, past beaches thronged with Lisboetas on day trips, to the equally faded resort of Estoril, once the playground of European royalty and apparently the inspiration for Casino Royale.

There was no disappointment of any kind, though, in our two train trips to Lisbon, the first from Sintra, through the multi-racial working-class suburbs of the city to Rossio station, the second from Cascais, overlooking the sea and the Tagus estuary, to Cais do Sodre. As we had 'done' Lisbon pretty intensively four years ago, we felt under no pressure to rush around the sights, but instead strolled about, soaking up the endless charm of one of my favourite cities. On our first sortie, we wandered through the Baixa to the vast Praca do Comercio, taking coffee at the Café Martinho da Arcada, Fernando Pessoa’s regular haunt, before shopping in the Chiado and having lunch at a theatre restaurant, in the very square where the great man was born. On our second visit, we climbed up the Rua do Alecrim, stopping briefly for coffee at a cool bar with free wifi, then wandered through the alleys of the Bairro Alto, before descending for lunch at the excellent, book- lined Café no Chiado, which we first visited back in 2006.

During our stay, the Portuguese media were dominated by news of forest fires throughout the country, due to the unusually high temperatures. We had a close call of our own last Saturday, when the hillside opposite us burst into flame and thick smoke billowed across the valley, until the local bombeiros and a water-spraying helicopter finally extinguished the fire.

It was on the same day that we bumped, almost literally, into a member of the British Cabinet. I have a habit of coming across celebrities when we're on our travels: previous sightings include Nancy Pelosi taking tea in San Francisco, Shami Chakrabati in Tuscany, and the Archbishop of Canterbury at Land's End. This time it was none other than Michel Gove, on holiday with his wife and children. Watching Mr Gove en famille and in vacation mode, it was quite difficult to maintain my one-dimensional image of him as school-wrecker and right-wing ideologue. And googling him on our return hasn't helped: he is, after all, a member of the Henry Jackson Society, opponent of Section 28, admirer of Tony Blair, and author of Celsius 7/7. If this were America, he'd probably be a centrist or conservative Democrat. Anyway, close encounters with politicians certainly play havoc with one's prejudices and preconceptions.

Since this is not one of those gossipy political blogs, and I'm not an MP-stalking Twitterer, I'll reveal no more. Except to let slip that Gove's holiday reading included Robert Wilson's A Small Death in Lisbon. I recognised this instantly, as I'd packed a copy of my own for the holiday. Wilson's lurid murder mystery jumps back and forth between the 1940s and the present, linking Nazi gold, the Salazar dictatorship and contemporary Lisbon (incidentally, can anyone recommend a good book - in English - on the Portuguese Carnation Revolution of 1974?).

While we were away, I also read Jose Saramago's Balthasar and Blimunda, a compelling and often very funny romp through eighteenth century Portugal, which takes swipes at monarchy and religion and includes elements of Marquezian fantasy. I also enjoyed Philip Graham's brief memoir of his year in Lisbon, which started life as a series of blog posts, and is reminiscent of the writings of Adam Gopnik. And I almost finished Jenny Uglow's splendid The Lunar Men, her engrossing narrative of the overlapping lives of 18th century inventors and innovators such as Erasmus Darwin, James Watt and Joseph Priestley.

That's the holidays done with, then. Time to catch up on what I've missed in the blogosphere during my absence.

The paradoxes of Rational Dissent

I listened to a particularly good edition of Melvyn Bragg's In Our Time on Radio 4 today. The subject was Mary Wollstonecraft and one of the contributors was Barbara Taylor, author of one of my favourite books of 19th century social history (see this post). Taylor and the other participants made much of Wollstonecraft's debt to the tradition of Rational Dissent, and the importance of her time living and working in Newington Green, then a hub of religious and political freethinking.

It's a milieu that continues to fascinate me on a number of levels. I suppose my interest in the period and its politics was first sparked by the writings of E.P.Thompson (see this post), but then in the 1980s I found myself working on a community project in Stoke Newington, and I spent many lunchtimes wandering around the area, trying to detect traces of its radical past among the Turkish cafes and Caribbean grocery shops.

My interest has been intensified by recent researches into my family history. One of my great grandfathers on my mother's side was named after a noted leader of Rational Dissent (I won't say which one, or it might compromise my already fragile anonymity) - by his Baptist shoemaker father, who lived for a while very close to the Dissenting Academy and chapel in Hackney (though I've yet to find any firm evidence of involvement in either radical religion or radical politics). On my father's side of the family, by contrast, I've discovered an ancestor who was a Scottish clergyman and minor poet who wrote verses warning against the evils of Jacobinism.

My university English studies were heavily constrained by the dual influences of Leavis and modernism, and carefully avoided any protracted engagement with Romanticism: we skipped straight from the Metaphysicals and early 18th century to the late Victorians. H, my partner, studied at a different university and under different critical influences, and was a persuasive partisan for the Romantics when I met her. I think she's converted me, though it's the political and social ferment of the period (especially the 1790s) that fire my imagination as much as its literature.

One of my Christmas presents this year was a new biography of Anna Laetitia Barbauld, an almost forgotten figure of Rational Dissent, but one who is at last being rediscovered. My other reading at the moment is around American revolutionary history (over the holiday I've been enjoying David McCullough's gripping biography of John Adams, and I've another volume about Jefferson lined up to follow it), a context where the influence of Rational Dissent - 'reasonable religion' - was of course profound.

But Rational Dissent arouses contradictory feelings in me. In political terms, it was obviously a 'good thing'. Without it, we probably wouldn't have had the American Revolution, the abolition of slavery, and political reform (eventually) in Britain. But spiritually, it seems to represent a dead end. Unitarian services were noted for their high-mindedness, but they singularly failed to attract a following outside the educated and prosperous middle classes (which is one reason I remain sceptical about my impoverished shoemaking ancestor's involvement in the movement). The forms of Christianity that packed in the urban masses in Victorian England were Methodist revivalism on the one hand (another ancestor of mine worked for the Wesleyan East End Mission) and ritualistic Anglo-Catholicism on the other.

I've only ever been to one Unitarian service - a wedding. Lovely people - but I hated the service, with its utter lack of mystery and ritual, in which the participants seemed to make up the order of service as they went along. Unitarianism seems to make the common error of middle-class liberals in mistaking an emphasis on individualism and informality for real radicalism.

Inevitably, for many 18th and 19th century radicals, Unitarianism or Rational Dissent represented a halfway house on the road to scepticism and atheism. But would they have been such a powerful influence for progress without their belief in a Supreme Being guiding the world towards enlightenment?

Anarchism: a challenge

I've been tagged quite a few times recently by my fellow-bloggers, so it's about time I issued a challenge of my own.

It hasn't escaped my attention that a number of the bloggers whose writings I read on a regular basis are pretty enthusiastic about anarchism and have a particular fondness for the anarchists of the Spanish republic of the 1930s. So much so that two of them even name-check particular anarchist (or anarchist-allied) grouplets from that era in their blog titles / identities. Even those whose politics have moved right- or democratic-left-wards seem to retain a fondness for their anarchist roots, evidenced in their links and reading recommendations.

I write as somebody who has never, in the many twists and turns of his political journey (from Tribunite Labourism via Gramscian Eurocommunism to anti-totalitarian liberal-democratic socialism), been drawn to anarchism, and knows precious little about it. I'm intrigued that people whose opinions I respect are still influenced by this political tradition, and wonder why they think it still has relevance.

Moreover, I question (genuinely - this is not meant to be provocative) whether their fascination with the Spanish anarchists of the Thirties is anything more than misty-eyed nostalgia for the only movement of the revolutionary left that didn't 'go bad'. (Or did it? Were the anarchist murders of priests and nuns during the Civil War any less barbarous than the Falangists' slaughter of anyone with a copy of Rousseau on their shelves?)

So I'm issuing a challenge - in the spirit of genuine intellectual curiosity, rather than political point-scoring. I'd like some of my anarchist-inclined blogging comrades (or anyone else who cares to respond) to explain to me - as briefly as they can - why they remain attracted to anarchism. Specifically, I'd like them to answer these questions:

1. What exactly do you mean by anarchism (which key ideas and thinkers are important to you)?

2. Does the anarchist experiment in the Spanish Republic have any relevance today (and if so what), or is the continuing fascination with it simply rose-tinted leftist nostalgia?

3. What exactly would it mean to implement anarchist ideas in a twenty-first century, globalised economy and polity - and would it even be possible or practicable?

Answers in the comments please - or if you want to take more space, on your own blog. I promise to include extracts from the most interesting responses in a future post.

Update (Saturday)

Responses are already in (see comments below) from The New Centrist, Brian, Les and Roland, plus a 'holding' message from Bob (and a longer response from Brigada on his own blog). I'm impressed. I'll do a proper round-up (and offer my own response to the responses) after the weekend (which lasts three days here in the UK, thanks to the late-summer bank holiday on Monday). In the meantime, thanks to everyone who has contributed so far - anybody else care to join in?

Update (Sunday)

A longer answer just in from The New Centrist - over at his blog. And from The Plump in the comments.

Update (Monday)

Just waiting for a couple more responses (Bob's promised one, and I'm still hoping Poumista will be tempted) before doing a final round-up. Watch this space.

Update (Thursday)

It's been a busy week, so I haven't got round to posting my 'response to the responses' yet. Will try to do so tomorrow.

Some books

While I was away on holiday, Bob tagged me, seeking my response to this question:

Which books written for academic purposes deserve, should find (or in some cases have found) a more general readership among intelligent people who are either (a) non-academics, or (b) aren't academic specialists in the discipline that the book is written for?

You can find out which books others have suggested by following the links in this post. Bob himself has already stolen some of my thunder by nominating E.P.Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class, which would probably have been top of my list too, and I agree with everything he says about the book.

In coming up with my own list, I found myself in a quandary. Should I choose books that have been important to me in the past, but with whose ideas I now find myself at odds? For example, I would once have argued that everyone could benefit from reading some Foucault - The History of Sexuality, say, or Discipline and Punish - if only to have their received notions about how ideas develop up-ended. But these days, keenly aware as I am of the philosophical and political dead-end to which Foucauldianism can lead, I'd rather people read Janet Afary's and Kevin Anderson's Foucault and the Iranian Revolution to see the consequences of his variety of pseudo-Marxian anti-humanism and cultural relativism.

Book that have survived the ebb and flow of my changing opinions are rare: Thompson's classic is one of the few exceptions. A number of possibilities suggested themselves - including books about language, gender and identity that have shaped my thinking and my academic work over the years. But then, looking at the dog-eared, cover-less copy of The Making of the English Working Class on my bookshelf, I came up with a different criterion. I would only choose books that, like the Thompson, were falling apart through repeated use, offering some indication of how important they've been in my intellectual formation. This led me immediately to these three choices:

Culture and Society 1780 - 1950 by Raymond Williams

If I can't have Thompson, I'd better choose the book that was its constant companion on my bookshelves in my early twenties, and which had a comparable impact on my thinking as a young literature graduate, starting work in adult and community education, trying to unite his passion for literature and history with an equal passion for political change. I was fortunate enough to attend some of Williams' lectures as an undergraduate, and though (as with Thompson) I now find myself questioning many of the political positions that he took, his profound humanism, depth of cultural understanding and commitment to the emancipation of the class into which he was born, remain impressive, outlasting the shallow over-theorised posturings of those (like his former student Terry Eagleton) who rejected his ideas as outdated.

Selections from Prison Notebooks by Antonio Gramsci

I bought my copy in the early '80s, from Centerprise Bookshop on Stoke Newington High Street, when I was working on a community project in the area, and at the high watermark of my attachment to Eurocommunism, when I was an avid reader of Marxism Today and a partisan for the 'New Times' thinking of Stuart Hall et al. I took the book, and its ideas, with me when I moved into academia, and Gramsci's theories of hegemony, civil society, organic intellectuals, etc have continued to inform my thinking. Although I no longer espouse revolutionary communism, whether of the 'Euro' or any other variety, I think the Sardinian Marxist's ideas are still of enormous value in understanding the dynamics of social and political change.

Staying Power: the History of Black People in Britain by Peter Fryer

My well-thumbed copy comes from the same period of my life as the Gramsci. Most of the people I worked with, and for, in those days, were African or African-Caribbean and this was a book that enabled many to feel pride in their black British heritage - and opened the eyes of white people like me to a hidden dimension of our history. As well as being a terrific historical narrative, Fryer's book also offers a convincing analysis of the development of British racism, rooted in slavery and our imperial history. Over the years I've used extracts in teaching innumerable times, and I admire the book for many of the same reasons that I value Thompson's volume. My personal copy also has sentimental associations. I inherited it from one of my students, a young African-Caribbean woman, an ex-prisoner and former drug addict, who had just begun a new life as a sociology undergraduate, when she died suddenly of pneumonia.

To Italy and back

We arrived back from Italy on Sunday night, after two gloriously hot weeks renewing our acquaintance with our favourite valley in southern Tuscany. The highlights of our stay included sampling Brunello at an ancient vineyard outside Montalcino, and hearing white-cowled monks singing Gregorian chant at the beautiful Romanesque abbey of Sant'Antimo (see above).

Besides the excellent food and wine, the usual volume of holiday reading was consumed. After reading Arthur Herman's eye-opening book on the Scottish Enlightenment (which neatly brought together my interest in my Scottish family history and my fascination with the late 18th century) in St. Ives, I started off in Italy with David McCullough's 1776: Britain and America at War (who would have thought military history could be so gripping?), moved on to Iris Origo's autobiographical memoir (we visited her house and gardens during our stay), took an enjoyable diversion through Adam Gopnik's Paris to the Moon (every bit as witty and touching as his New York collection), then made a quick dash through Sarah Wise's The Italian Boy (in this case the link was with my early 19th century London ancestors), before launching into Doris Kearns Goodwin's monumental Team of Rivals: the Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, in which I'm still absorbed. (It's an Obama favourite, of course. I notice, by the way, that he's taken another McCollough volume - on John Adams - to Martha's Vineyard. Fat chance he'll get to do any historical reading with his health care reforms being assailed from both left and right.)

Now it's back to work - and to blogging, once I've caught up with what I've been missing while I've been away.

The first blogger?

I spent much of the holiday period reading Duncan Wu's biography of William Hazlitt. For anyone interested in the Romantic period, and in early nineteenth-century English radicalism, it's a fascinating read. Not everyone will be enamoured of Wu's occasional dramatisation of scenes from Hazlitt's life, though the prologue, which reconstructs the writer's life-changing meeting as a young man with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, is a tour de force.

Wu's account is fiercely partisan and combative, tirelessly refuting both contemporary and more recent critics of his subject with a defensiveness that must have alienated even some of his fellow Hazlittians. Nevertheless, the book makes a compelling case for Wu's thesis that Hazlitt was, in the words of his subtitle 'the first modern man'. (His suggestion that one of Hazlitt's boxing reports was responsible for the invention of the phrase 'they think it's all over' is more tenuous: I can't imagine that Kenneth Wolstenhome was paying homage to a 19th century essayist when he uttered those immortal words.)

It also occurred to me that an argument could be made for Hazlitt as a prototype of the blogger: Wu's description of him composing theatre reviews in his head as he ran back to the newspaper office to dictate them made me think how much he would have thrived on the immediacy of the internet.

I've now moved on to a radical writer of a later era: I've started reading Sheila Rowbotham's new biography of Edward Carpenter (another Christmas present). It will be interesting to compare the two.

Holiday reading round-up

Being a brief review of the books with which I've whiled away the hours this summer, on deckchairs and bar stools from St. Ives to San Quirico d'Orcia. 

I began with Charles Nicholl's The Lodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street, which takes a lawsuit in which Shakespeare was a witness, and that includes the only record of his spoken words, and uses it to reconstruct details of the Bard's life (and those of his landlords, neighbours and associates) in London. The book has obvious attractions for anyone as fascinated as I am by the social history of London, but to begin with I found it slow-going and thought it added little to James Shapiro's 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare. Earlier this year, I also read Clare Asquith's Shadowplay: The Hidden Beliefs and Coded Politics of William Shakespeare, which (even if you don't agree with its thesis about the playwright's secret Catholicism) throws fresh light on the plays' meanings by filling in much of the contemporary political and religious context. Nicholl's interpretations of the dramas seemed thin by comparison. However, the book grew on me, as I became caught up in the author's detective-like quest through the archives, its pleasures and frustrations reminiscent of those experienced by every amateur family historian.

On holiday a couple of years ago I saw a German man reading a book entitled Nachtzug nach Lissabon. This was shortly after my first visit to Lisbon, and during a period when I was reading everything about the city I could lay my hands on. I failed to find an English translation until recently: in the interim Night Train to Lisbon by Pascal Mercier has apparently become an international bestseller. The book is strongly reminiscent of Carlos Ruiz Zafon's The Shadow of the Wind, with its quest to uncover the secrets of a distinguished family living through political upheaval (for Barcelona read Lisbon, for the Spanish Civil War read Salazar and the resistance to his quasi-fascist regime), but with an overlay of literary and philosophical introspection. Initially I found the quest absorbing, with its knowing references to Pessoa, Eca de Queiros et al, but after a while I grew weary of the extended quotations from the invented works of the fictional philosopher at the heart of the story. The book was just far too long.

For light relief after Mercier's tome, I whiled away a day or two on Michael Tolliver Lives by Armistead Maupin, a kind of coda to his 'Tales from the City' series. It was light, frothy and mostly enjoyable, both updating and rounding off the stories of the characters from the original series. The best scenes were those in which proudly gay and newly 'married' Michael visits his straitlaced Floridian family, which demonstrated that Maupin has lost none of his flair for depicting the comedy of social embarrassment. But others things about the book I found irritating, such as its throwaway remarks about the Iraq war ('killing children for oil') and its assumption that the only people supporting the war on terror are right-wing fundamentalists. As in much infantile leftist reaction to 9/11, the characters who act as the author's mouthpiece evince much more anger over the inconvenience of new security measures than at the original crime, and the simplistic pieties of the Bush administration find a mirror-image in the narcissistic, black-and-white 'Left Coast' worldview of Maupin's characters.

Next up were a pair of books about World War Two. Firstly, War in Val d'Orcia: An Italian War Diary, 1943-1944, by Iris Origo, an Anglo-American who married an Italian count, restored the villa and gardens at La Foce, not far from where we were staying in Tuscany, and then found herself caught up in the German occupation and Allied liberation of Italy. The book is written in a simple, straightforward way, but is extremely moving and utterly compelling. The account of leading a party of refugee children across open country, dodging both German gunfire and Allied bombing, was like a much less sentimental version of the final scene in The Sound of Music.

Finally, I read Alan Furst's The Foreign Correspondent, a story of Italian emigres and resistance fighters in the late 1930s, which moves between Paris, Barcelona, Genoa, Prague and Berlin, and has Furst's usual compelling mixture of idealistic left-wing politics and rattling spy thriller. Not quite as satisfying as Night Soldiers, but still streets ahead of the competition.