The Times Literary Supplement - 17 June 2022

38 Pages·2022·42.6 MB·English

No. 6220
June 17 2022

the-tls.co.uk
UK £4.50 | USA $8.99

THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

John Fuller The definitive Auden | Matthew Reisz Media scare stories

Craig Raine Bed-hopping | Michéle Roberts The return of Chéri

Happy 100th Bloomsday!

Paul Muldoon on the first words of Ulysses
THIS WEEK

Stencil of James Joyce
by Lawrence Mynott
© Lawrence Mynott

Happy 100th Bloomsday!

In this issue

ow should the neophyte approach Ulysses?

Plunge headlong in or prep for the ordeal by
tackling the critics first? T. S. Eliot thought only
instant immersion would do: “even the best com-
mentary on a work of literary art is likely to be a
waste of time unless we have first read and been
excited by the text commented upon without even
understanding it”.

But what then? The poet Paul Muldoon writes that
even an experienced reader will suffer the fate of
Moses, who saw the Promised Land from the top
of Mount Pisgah but was barred from entering. In
his celebration of the 100th anniversary of Ulysses,
timed to coincide with Bloomsday on June 16, Mul-
doon warns that “just when we have a sense we’re
about to get our heads around the essence of Ulysses
its meaning suddenly recedes”. That’s not our fault,
but “what Joyce as a writer has quite deliberately
set out to have us experience”. The provisional is
part of the plan. Muldoon, like Joyce a lover of puns
and etymology, brings his ingenuity to bear on the
first words of the first sentence of the novel,
“Stately, plump Buck Mulligan”.

That sense of flux in Ulysses disturbed the orderly
mind of W. H. Auden. He thought Joyce believed
“that order neither exists nor is possible”. But “if
order cannot be created, then no action can be
worthwhile”. This interpretation would make the
Irishman a bystander recording the chaos of
modern life.

John Fuller’s review of “The Poems” in The Com-
plete Works of W. H. Auden, edited by his literary
executor and biographer, Edward Mendelson, for
Princeton University Press, applauds a “magnificent
addition to our generation’s definitive Auden” and
salutes a “lifetime of patient scholarship”. The vol-
umes “above all ... will give us a more complete sense
of the poet’s view of his own canon, and of his
attempts to control it”. Some of those attempts to
create retrospective order failed. Auden never quite
managed to cancel “September 1, 1939”, despite his
later verdict that it was “trash” he was ashamed to
have written. Admirers of the celebrated poem, how-
ever, have thought this an unnecessary murder.

The diaries of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Rapture and
Melancholy, edited by Daniel Mark Epstein, are exten-
sive but not definitive, although the poet’s account
of her life “is raw, intense and rich in detail”. Mark
Wormald’s The Catch charts the relationship of Ted
Hughes’s fishing practice to his writing. Wormald
immersed himself in his subject, fishing all over the
British Isles where Hughes fished.

MARTIN IVENS
Editor

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3 POETRY JOHN FULLER The Complete Works of W. H. Auden - Poems, Volume I:
1927-1939 Edward Mendelson, editor. The Complete Works
of W. H. Auden - Poems, Volume II: 1940-1973 Edward
Mendelson, editor

5 LITERATURE MICHELE ROBERTS Chéri and The End of Chéri Colette; Translated by Rachel
Careau

6 LETTERS TO THE Burgoyne and Cornwallis, Christina Rossetti, Carlo Levi, etc

EDITOR

8 HISTORY ROBERT POOLE Conspiracy at Cato Street - A tale of liberty and revolution in

Regency London Vic Gatrell
MARK MAZOWER Muslims and the Making of Modern Europe Emily Greble

10 NATURAL HISTORY HELEN BYNUM Life’s Edge - The search for what it means to be alive Carl

Zimmer
KATE SIMPSON Endless Forms - The secret world of wasps Seirian Sumner

12. SCIENCE MATTHEW REISZ Beyond the Hype - The inside story of science’s biggest
media controversies Fiona Fox

14 COMMENTARY PAUL MULDOON Spinoza’s shillelagh - Some thorny issues in Ulysses

18 ARTS LUCY DALLAS Simmerdim - Curlew sounds (Various artists). For the Birds -
The birdsong project vol. I (Various artists)

LUCIA RINALDI Il buco (Various cinemas)
20 FICTION MIA LEVITIN Fight Night Miriam Toews
DIANA DARKE Bitter Orange Tree Jokha Alharthi; Translated by Marilyn
Booth
ALICE BLOCH Canzone di Guerra DaSa Drndi¢; Translated by Celia
Hawkesworth. Black Butterflies Priscilla Morris. Bolla
Pajtim Statovci; Translated by David Hackston

22 POEM IAN DUHIG Bitterning

24 CLASSICS SHUSHMA MALIK Imperial Women of Rome - Power, gender, context Mary T.
Boatwright

CATHERINE STEEL The Roman Republic of Letters - Scholarship, philosophy, and
politics in the age of Cicero and Caesar Katharina Volk

26 RELIGION JOEL MARCUS John the Baptist - His life and afterlife Josephine Wilkinson

ROBERT J. ASHER In Quest of the Historical Adam - A biblical and scientific
exploration William Lane Craig

28 MATHEMATICS ANNA ASLANYAN Uncountable - A philosophical history of number and humanity
from antiquity to the present David Nirenberg and Ricardo
L. Nirenberg. What’s the Use? - The unreasonable effectiveness
of mathematics Ian Stewart. The Art of More - How
mathematics created civilisation Michael Brooks. Shape - The
hidden geometry of absolutely everything Jordan Ellenberg

30 LETTERS & MEMOIRS LUCY MCDIARMID Rapture and Melancholy - The diaries of Edna St. Vincent
Millay Daniel Mark Epstein, editor

STEVE ELY The Catch - Fishing for Ted Hughes Mark Wormald
CLARE SAXBY On Agoraphobia Graham Caveney

32 IN BRIEF The Beats in Mexico David Stephen Calonne, etc

34 TRAVEL JONATHAN DRUMMOND Yorkshire - There and back Andrew Martin

35 AFTERTHOUGHTS CRAIG RAINE Bed-hopping - Wyatt’s perfect capture of the nocturnal stalker

36 NB M. C. Costa living crisis, Elif Batuman’s TLS problem, The poet as

smuggler

Editor MARTIN IVENS ([email protected])

Deputy Editor ROBERT POTTS ([email protected])

Associate Editor CATHARINE MORRIS ([email protected])
Assistant to the Editor LIBBY WHITE ([email protected])
Editorial enquiries ([email protected])
Managing Director JAMES MACMANUS ([email protected])

Advertising Manager JONATHAN DRUMMOND ([email protected])

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TLS JUNE 17, 2022
© BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES

Rummage
on the
desk

A definitive edition of Auden’s
poetic works

JOHN FULLER

THE COMPLETE WORKS OF W. H. AUDEN
Poems, Volume I: 1927-1939
EDWARD MENDELSON, EDITOR
848pp. Princeton University Press. £48 (US $60).

THE COMPLETE WORKS OF W. H. AUDEN
Poems, Volume II: 1940-1973
EDWARD MENDELSON, EDITOR
1120pp. Princeton University Press. £48 (US $60).

NUSUAL AMBITION and a lifelong habit of
| application turned the poet W. H. Auden into

first a passable schoolboy Georgian and then
an ostentatious undergraduate modernist, restlessly
trying on different styles like disguises. When he
found his own voice at the age of twenty, it was the
voice of an alienated stranger in his own family,
class and country: admonitory, fatalistic, teasing,
scientific. His public success with Poems (1930) and
The Orators (1932) can never be overstated. His
name became almost uniquely associated with that
troubled decade. Yet, despite his immense energy
and resolve, he never seemed quite satisfied with
his achievements. He almost immediately described
The Orators, a work of great genius, as “miserably
obscure, and I’m fed to the teeth with all that”.

Auden’s consequent determination to be simple
led to a breadth of tone and material that demon-
strated a deliberate cultural inclusivity, as well as a
desire to reanimate the traditional verse forms
neglected by the modernists. It led to work for films,
radio and theatre, and coincided with a period of
public crisis. He described this revolution inspiringly
in his verse “Letter to William Coldstream”: “We’d
scrapped Significant Form, and voted for Subject”.

Between 1933 and 1939 he produced a body of
work that engaged its readers with the troubled real
world of class struggle, psychological dualities,
ethical choice, culture, history and war. Auden’s
emigration to the US and return to the Christianity
of his upbringing gave his poetry a more applied,
intense focus. False starts, abundant drafting and
rewriting are still to be found, but the confidence that
comes with maturity allowed him a clearer view of
what he had in mind and eventually, after some dry
patches, a more relaxed and resourceful way of cast-
ing it in language. It is notable that in Volume II of
this edition, containing the poems from The Double
Man (1941) onwards, there is far less extraneous and
unpublished material than in Volume I.

Edward Mendelson, in his multiple roles as
Auden’s principal literary executor, bibliographer,
editor and literary biographer, has always remained
loyal to the poet’s own conception of his work,
issuing a Collected Poems in 1976 (revised 1991) that
would have met Auden’s expectations in terms of
exclusions, choice of versions and formal arrange-
ment. But readers have nonetheless always felt that
this was merely a staging post in the journey towards
a definitive text, one that would (among other things)
restore early readings, cancelled passages and vetoed
poems, some of these included in the valuable The
English Auden (1977).

JUNE 17, 2022

This new edition of the Poems contributes the

seventh and eighth volumes to a definitive Princeton
series that already contains the Plays, the Libretti,
and four volumes of Prose (ninth and tenth if you
count Katherine Bucknell’s Juvenilia and Arthur
Kirsch’s reconstructed Lectures on Shakespeare), and
it sensibly follows their historical focus by reprinting
the original volumes together with chronologically
interwoven sections of uncollected poems and
appendices of unpublished and fugitive work. There
is a masterly introduction by Mendelson: fifteen
concentrated analytical pages based on Auden’s
understanding of the psychology of his vocational
maturing process (which he smuggled into his review
of the poetry of Louise Bogan). The contextual
details of composition, publishing history, textual
variants and other matters of significance are fully
set out in textual notes that are models of lucidity
and kindness to the general reader. Without the
convenience (and tedium) of a critical apparatus,
with its lemmas and listed detail, this textual infor-
mation can feel a little long-winded, but it is always
pertinent and comprehensible. The range of
patiently acquired information is extensive: we
learn not only about a poem’s journey through the
selected and collected editions, but about the poet’s
hesitations and second thoughts, about emendations
made in friends’ copies and about the manuscripts’
fortunes in the salerooms. Mendelson even bothers
to remind readers of the character and aims of the
periodicals that Auden published in.

Inevitably, given Auden’s productivity (“slap-dash”
was his own self-accusation), the edition arrives in
two volumes and a total of 1,968 pages. This is not
far off the 2,032 pages of the Ricks/McCue T. S. Eliot,
yet is without their explicatory focus and their
extensive noting of sources and verbal analogies,
though Mendelson does annotate names and provide
useful instances of interpretation. And there are
some commentaries (the now obscure bequests in
“Last Will and Testament” from Letters from Iceland,
for example, done with the assistance of Richard
Davenport-Hines, or the textual notes to the notes to
“New Year Letter”) that are remarkable editorial
achievements. There is a lifetime of patient scholar-
ship behind this edition.

A work of this kind, attempting completeness and
including revisions and variants, is like a privileged
but limited rummaging on the poet’s desk, with its
working notebooks and files of potential material not
yet in finished form, neither published nor destroyed.
In the case of a poet who began writing a hundred
years ago, whom we can neither offend by our

TLS

W. H. Auden

John Fuller is a poet
and novelist. His W. H.
Auden: A commentary
was published in 1998

POETRY

inquisitiveness nor flatter by our discrimination,
such an edition can also be seen as a kind of snapshot
of his archive, and becomes the means by which
a truer estimate of the poet’s stature can be made.
The archive (actually existing in many libraries and
private collections) is no longer so exclusively the
preserve of the travelling scholar. We can see not
only what Auden came to publish, but what he might
have published and even what he might have written,
for the insights of pointed annotation will give us a
context to the writing, with all the failed expectations
of the poet and the vicissitudes of the writing and
publishing process exposed. Above all it will give us
a more complete sense of the poet’s view of his own
canon, and of his attempts to control it.

Rewriting published poems is a vain endeavour,
though understandable. Trying to cancel them is a
lost cause. Auden came to feel that the somewhat
Yeatsian “September 1, 1939” was “trash which he is
ashamed to have written”, but it is in fact a poem
kept alive in the consciousness of his admirers and
always ready to resurface in different contexts, such
as the destruction of the Twin Towers or, this year,
in a Guardian editorial of April 29 headlined “Parlia-
ment’s low, dishonest year has ended”, which
silently quoted the poem’s third line. Clearly such an
iconic poem must be preserved here, not least so that
we can judge the grounds of the poet’s verdict on its
inauthenticity, or justify our own intuition that it is,
after all, a great poem.

We are reminded that Auden’s discovery of a lively
rhetorical idiom, with all its colour, metaphorical
resourcefulness and conceptual verve, could some-
times seem to tread a fine line between the brilliant
and the merely clever, between the truth and the
slogan. Ambiguously arresting, too, was his con-
tinued attraction to the manner and attitudes of
other poets. Therefore, shocking as it is, the charge
of “trash” (which he also applied to other celebrated
poems of his) must in some sense be respected, since
authenticity for the later Auden became almost a
religious duty. He said “it takes time to cure oneself”
of writing poems like “September 1, 1939”, as though
he had caught Yeats like a disease. Ten years earlier
he had felt that a poem in his first little pamphlet
(hand-printed by Stephen Spender) was “too Yeats-
ian at present”. He must have felt the disease
endemic in his system. This severe view of which of
his poems are acceptable is happily ignored in this
complete Poems, but continues to be respected in the
handier Collected Poems.

conflict that Mendelson has had to negotiate.
I can only touch on a few of them. One of the
most significant is the printing of mediocre unpub-
lished poems on the grounds that they exist “in ink
in legible fair copies”. Many of these can leap
momentarily into life when one encounters a phrase
later used in a canonical poem, for Auden was an
insistent cannibalizer of his own work, as Christo-
pher Isherwood explained: he would ditch a poem
that didn’t meet with approval, but carry over into
another one any line or image that received his
friend’s favour. However, the reproduction of source
poems of this kind can lead to much repetition of
material, and the very appearance of the mediocre
can dilute the effect of Auden’s achievement. Men-
delson is aware of all this, and omits some poems
of 1927-30 that are of “lesser quality”; also a few
poems after 1930 “too illegible to yield a usable
text”. But the whole notion of when an apparently
connected sequence of drafted writing has become
a “poem”, or, having been plundered for a later
poem, is still a poem in its own right, is in question
here. The reused material can feel somehow deval-
ued by the repetition. One bizarre example is a frag-
ment of the text for the documentary film event-
ually called God’s Chillun (begun 1935; appeared
1938), which turns up as part of the final duet
between the hero and his domineering mother in
The Ascent of F6 (1936).
This question of whether a plundered poem
remains a poem is debatable. The status of a poem

3

Te are a number of such points of canonical
POETRY

as never being finished but only abandoned is com-
monly attributed to Valéry’s investigations (in Tel
Quel and elsewhere) into the perfectionism of poets,
to whom the idea of a poem ever being finished is
meaningless. Valéry compares “le novissimum et
ultimatum”, the latest state of a poem and the final
state, and finds that a poem’s termination is always
accidental, due for example to the poet’s loss of
interest or (more significantly) the pressure of
another poem. In the second case the abandoned
poem has often been partially dismantled by the
emergence of a better context for its material, and
while the critic will take an archival interest in the
dismantling, many ordinary readers might be
puzzled or irritated by it. Mendelson has an odd
but fascinating theory that in America Auden set
about creatively reusing the technical characteristics
of most of his longer poems to produce superior
versions: the relationship of “The Quest” to “In Time
of War” is the most convincing example. This is a
more forgiving conclusion of the Valérian thesis that
“une chose réussie est une transformation d’une chose
manquée”, which allows a “deficient” work actually
to coexist with the more successful one.

Another point of canonical conflict occurs when
a poem for some reason may appear to lack sufficient
dignity or proper occasion to be admitted into a
poet’s completed works. Where, the informed reader
of Auden may ask, are his early poems written in
German? Where is the epithalamium for Cecil Day-
Lewis? Where is the wonderful Lawrentian pastiche
about Isherwood that begins: “Who is that funny-
looking young man so squat with a top-heavy head”?
Where is the pornographic “The Platonic Blow”?
Where are the poems for Chester Kallman printed in
Dorothy Farnan’s memoir? The clear answer to some
of these questions (but not all) is that there will be

a future volume of Personal Writings: Selected letters,
journals, and poems written for friends, which should
validate the decision here to include only poems
“intended” for publication. In any case, it isn’t clear
that intention to publish is an inevitable condition of
a poem’s eventual status in the assembled work of
a poet. We have to consider quality, character and
authenticity. A poem is like a child who must struggle
to be free of the hopes or requirements of its parent.
In the large and vexed matter of Auden’s revisions
of his earlier work, it may perhaps simply be said that
all the materials for a reader to make up his or her
own mind are now wonderfully assembled together.
Poems that have been decimated, for example, may
be read in their longer and shorter versions. Poems
that have had the characteristic Audenesque definite
article expunged, or their accuracy of rhyming tidied
up, may now be compared with the originals. These
last two areas of revision are, incidentally, a parti-
cular matter of regret. Auden’s complaint of his
youthful addiction to “German usages” doesn’t seem
relevant at all. The definite article has something like
a 4 per cent presence in poetry between Spenser and
Dryden. It rises to 8.2 per cent in the early twentieth
century and is 10 per cent in Eliot and Auden. More
accurate analysis of Auden shows a high point in the
mid- to late 1930s (13 per cent in “Spain 1937”), with
a gradual decline to 3.7 per cent in Homage to Clio
(1960). The generalizing power of the deictic definite
article gives Auden’s poetry a distinctly oracular
quality, emphasizing shared experience and the role
of the necessary in the particular. He ruined the
opening of “Journey to Iceland” (1936) by forgetting
this when collecting the poem thirty years later.
Getting rid of false rhymes in “In Time of War”
(1939) didn’t work either. Take the dead Chinese
soldier in sonnet xviii. “Under a padded quilt he

66

A poem is like
a child who
must struggle
to be free of
the hopes or
requirements
of its parent

closed his eyes / And vanished” was changed in
1966 to “Under a padded quilt he turned to ice / And
vanished”, simply to rhyme better with “lice” in the
previous line. This is bad because it entirely loses the
suggestive and moving reversal of closing your eyes
and the world vanishing (a common childish belief),
offering instead a simple criticism of the thermal
qualities of the padded quilt.

Finally, a word about the publisher’s role. This is
a complicated edition, and I think Princeton has
in general done a fine job in giving it space and
elegance, with a chosen font (New Baskerville)
that seems appropriate for Auden, since Bodoni, a
characteristic type of 1930s Faber Auden, followed
the ideas of John Baskerville closely. I do have a
criticism of the ugliness resulting from aligning the
run-ons of some long lines unevenly to the right,
resulting in a kind of diagonal sprawl, the lines being
sometimes broken long before they approach the
right-hand margin. This applies particularly to the
prologue to Our Hunting Fathers (ie “The Creatures”
in Another Time) and to the chorus “You with
shooting-sticks ...” from The Dog Beneath the Skin,
both of which were written in imitation of liturgy
and really require left-hand indentation, as the more
aesthetically pleasing Faber texts have it.

And it may be too late to protest at the now com-
mon exdentation in the printing of poetry, where,
if a line begins with punctuation, that punctuation
hangs outside the left-hand margin created by the
initial letters of the lines. There is an example in
“In the Year of My Youth ...” where double quotes
followed by an ellipsis stretch out absurdly far to the
left in isolation, like an empty bracket on a wall.

The number of misprints and errors is nugatory.
Mendelson is to be congratulated on this magnificent
addition to our generation’s definitive Auden. =

SEAN Nixoiy

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SEAN NIXON

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Longer Days
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AcROSS
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Introductions by Martin Hood, Martin Liithi,
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TLS

JUNE 17, 2022
© HARLINGUE/ROGER VIOLLET VIA GETTY IMAGES

MICHELE ROBERTS

CHERI AND THE END OF CHERI
COLETTE
Translated by Rachel Careau
336pp. Norton. $26.95.

earned her living as a journalist, war corre-

spondent and theatre critic. She worked as
literary editor for Le Matin from 1918 to 1924. One
day, having read some stories by a young Georges
Simenon, she summoned him to her office. She
told him: “you’re too literary. You must not make
literature. No literature! Suppress all the literature
and it will work”.

Rachel Careau, in the comprehensive introduc-
tion to her new translation of Chéri and La Fin de
Chéri, quotes this story to emphasize how Colette
took her own advice, developing a narrative style
that was taut, stripped-down and lacking decorative
touches. Raymond Mortimer, in his introduction
to the translation by Roger Senhouse published by
Penguin Classics in 1954, compared Colette’s imagi-
nation to that of Picasso and asserted: “She can
foreshorten the French language as boldly as
Mallarmé; she has it trained to obey her caprices
like a pony in a circus. All of which is a perpetual
feast to the reader, a chronic headache to the
translator ... The difficulty of translating her is more
nearly desperate than anyone can know who has
not tried his hand at it”.

Colette’s commitment to this worked-for simp-
licity seems emblematically revealed by her use of
a mononym. Christened Sidonie-Gabrielle, called
Gabri inside the family, nicknamed Minet-Chéri
(darling puss) and Soleil d’Or (golden sunshine) by
her mother, she became Madame Gauthier-Villars
on her first marriage and Madame de Jouvenel on
her second. That first husband, the man about town
known as Willy, who as an adventurist journalist
employed many pseudonyms, ran a factory of
ghostwriters. He signed his wife’s first books as his
own. Later the young woman came out as Colette
Willy. After 1923 she signed herself simply Colette.

This was a surname inherited from her father,
Jules Colette. Willy seems to have been the first to
bestow the soubriquet, referring to the teenager,
during their courtship, as his “pretty little Colette”.
Her subsequent use of this name mingling mascu-
line and feminine identities was appropriate: in the
age of the belle époque and its ambivalent relish of
exaggerated femininity, Colette took pride in what
she called her own “virility”. Her novels character-
istically both underline and undermine gendered
conventions concerning sex and love.

Colette outstripped Willy, the would-be writer
suffering from chronic writer’s block who had
swallowed up her literary identity. She also out-
stripped her father, who had ambitions to write and
who kept his bound manuscript books on a shelf in
his library. After his death these volumes, adorned
with grandiose titles, were found to be blank. Per-
haps Colette swallowed up her father’s ambitions.
At any rate, masculine vulnerability became one of
her recurrent themes, underpinning both Chéri and
La Fin de Chéri.

Colette’s novels enjoyed great popular success, as
well as being praised by her peers Marcel Proust and
André Gide. The latter admired her grasp of the
realities of modern life, high and low, the power
struggles involved in love and sex, expressed in a
diction that, as Careau puts it, “shifts seamlessly
from high to low, from classical and archaic to con-
temporary”. Perhaps Colette’s linguistic freedom

C OLETTE, WHEN NOT WRITING NOVELS, also

JUNE 17, 2022

Chic lit

The enduring fascination of Colette

derived partly from her background. She grew up in
Burgundy, the daughter of well-read, independent-
minded bourgeois parents in whose library she
could flick between Charles Perrault and Emile Zola.
Her brothers were sent to boarding school and
trained for professions, but an onset of family
poverty saw Colette educated at the village school.
Childhood escapades with country friends were
opportunities to pick up slang and dialect words.
Later, in Paris, mixing in bohemian and demi-monde
circles, and for a while involved in lesbian coteries,
she learnt the various codes of their inhabitants,
while her experiences earning her living as a
music-hall artist and actress gave her access to rich
seams of argot.

The vivacious range of Colette’s literary language
matches that of her formal experimentation. She
became one of the great French modernists,
reinventing the French novel and wrestling it away
from tired naturalism. For example, in her master-
piece Break of Day (1928), she names herself as both
protagonist and narrator (while warning the reader
that “Colette” is a fiction), and she exhilaratingly
mingles memoir, letters, storytelling and outbursts
of loving praise addressed to her mother, Sido. Her
mapping of adult lovers’ bodies onto the maternal
body and the southern French landscape is startling
and moving.

In France Colette received the highest literary
awards and was given a state funeral. Her work is
canonical. Biographies continue to appear: those by
Michéle Sarde (1978), and by Claude Francis and
Fernande Gontier (1997), for example, make a case
for the solid achievements of a serious experimental
writer. In the UK Colette’s appeal has been muted,
partly by an uneven flow of translations of relatively
few works, and partly by a prejudice, in some
quarters, that her books, celebrating earthiness and
sensuality, are therefore frivolous and unimportant:
chick lit not chic lit. A Guide to French Literature:
From early modern to postmodern by Jennifer Birkett
and James Kearns (1997) writes Colette off in a
single paragraph, in a section devoted to lesbian
writing, as a “more important contemporary” of
post-decadent producers of “fairly minor work”
such as Renée Vivien and Liane de Pougy, and
faintly praises her “luminous novels of childhood,
her cats and her sensuous landscapes”.

A certain sort of critic may have continued to
undervalue her writing, but Colette’s readership in
the English-speaking world has widened. When

TLS

Colette, 1937

Michéle Roberts is
Emeritus Professor of
Creative Writing at

the University of East
Anglia. Her most recent
novel is The Walworth
Beauty, 2017

LITERATURE

feminists began challenging the male-dominated
literary canon in the 1970s, Colette’s novels were
reappraised and properly celebrated. In 1979 the
newly founded Women’s Press reissued Enid
Macleod’s 1961 translation of Break of Day. Colette’s
early champion Margaret Davies was joined by
critics and biographers such as Diana Holmes,
Judith Thurman and Nicole Ward Jouve, all of them
alert to their subject’s flaws as well as her gifts.
Angela Carter, for the prosecution, wrote tartly
about Colette’s genius for manipulating publicity.

Now, fresh translations are at last appearing.
Belinda Jack is preparing hers of Chéri for a Penguin
series of new editions of Colette’s works, and Rachel
Careau gives us here her version of two key novels,
produced for an American readership.

Chéri and La Fin de Chéri were first published in
1920 and 1926 respectively. Both are short, compact
and intense. Chéri explores the changing relationship
and power play between Léa, a wealthy Parisian
courtesan, and her much younger boyfriend-gigolo,
whom she keeps, cherishes maternally and finally
discovers she loves. La Fin de Chéri tracks the return
of Chéri, disillusioned and cynical, from the First
World War. Re-encountering Léa, who has survived
by switching from selling herself to making money
through canny investments, only deepens his sense
of futility. Where Chéri is staged fundamentally in
Léa’s opulent pink bedroom, with its vast bed dis-
played in rosy light like the interior of an iridescent
shell, La Fin de Chéri opens out into the dark Pari-
sian streets Chéri haunts at night. Both novels rely
on masterly dialogue and precise, telling sensual
details. Both show how a woman’s sense of self-
worth derives from her youth and beauty. She is a
commodity, whether as wife or courtesan. Women
over fifty are ugly and repellent, since they are not
desirable to men. They flounce and compete in a
harem world, adept at subtly bitchy exchanges,
drawing comfort from rivals who are familiar
enemies. The wit, silkiness and sparkle of Colette’s
prose sometimes veils the cruelty of this culture,
sometimes flourishes it.

Translating texts embodying the diction and
slang of a particular milieu and past epoch is tricky,
and becomes more so when Colette’s sinuous
prose has to be transformed into either British or
American English. Careau deprecates Senhouse’s
“mystifying” British locutions, such as “done a
bunk” “skivvy” and “wheezes”, which might, to a
British ear at least, reliably create a landscape of
the past. She also deplores his omissions, inconsist-
encies, embellishments, alterations, and disregard
for sentence structure, paragraphing and space
breaks. Where Senhouse allows himself poetic
licence, Careau stays close to literal meaning. This
fidelity goes along with Americanizing the novels:
“cookies”, “playing hooky”, “
“barkeeps” et cetera.

Careau can in turn be misleading, for example
translating “lingerie” as linen closet rather than
linen room, the place where washing can be hung
to dry as well as stored, a status symbol in a large
house such as Léa’s. Sometimes I think she also
makes mistakes. For example, when Léa and Chéri
are lying in bed post-orgasm, Colette employs the
subjunctive: “ils attendaient l'un et lautre, dans une
immobilité respectueuse, que la foudre décroissant
du plaisir se fut éloignée d’eux”. Senhouse captures
this mood, if imprecisely: “Both were waiting, con-
centrated and motionless, for the abating tempest
of their pleasure to recede”. Careau has: “they
waited, each of them, in a respectful stillness from
which the decrescent thunderstroke of pleasure
had distanced them”. Waves of sexual pleasure may
ebb away, but Colette’s enduring importance and
fascination as a writer will not.

gotten”, “ice water”,
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

Christina Rossetti

As well as the 1885 gift of Time Flies
mentioned by Dinah Roe (“Tale of
Tender Lizzie”, June 10), inscribed
to “Dr Hare, from his old friend
and patient Christina G. Rossetti”,
her sometime physician was earlier
presented with her poem “Looking
forward”, written “in her own neat
handwriting” and dated June 8,
1849. This was at a time when she
was acutely unwell, self-harming
and suffering vertiginous halluci-
nations that the walls were falling
forward and the floor undulating.
It suggests that Hare encouraged
Rossetti to write, unlike common
prescriptions of the era that
banned reading and studying by
mentally stressed women, and
perhaps comparable to the poetry
workshops for carers organised by
Roe. The poem’s opening line,
“Sleep, let me sleep, for I am sick
of care”, inadvertently anticipates a
later sense of onerous care-giving.
@Jan Marsh

London N10

Carlo Levi

May I add just three points to David
Aberbach’s stimulating re-reading
(June 3) of Carlo Levi’s 1945
memoir Cristo si é fermato a Eboli
(Christ Stopped at Eboli)? To be fully
appreciated the book should, as
Raymond Rosenthal (a translator
of Primo Levi) pointed out in a
review in 1947, be read in close con-
junction with the author’s earlier
essay collection Paura della Liberta
(Fear of Freedom). Second, what
Professor Aberbach doesn’t suffi-
ciently bring out is that the local
peasants’ titular saying disguised
the extent to which their world-view
and spiritual practices were pagan,
that is, not just non-Christian, but
pre-Christian. It’s odd to think that
Levi’s terribly impoverished Matera
of 1935-6 is also the Matera that
served as a European Capital of
Culture in 2019. Finally, in 1979,
a truly terrific film based on the

to philosophers and poets to cult

Burgoyne and Cornwallis

was not misstating facts, as Norman S. Poser alleges

(Letters, May 20), when I pointed out that social class
had nothing to do with the very different treatment
meted out by George III and the North government to
Sir John Burgoyne and Lord Cornwallis after their sur-
renders at Saratoga and Yorktown respectively.

When Poser denies that Burgoyne intended to
embarrass Lord North’s ministry as much as possible,
he ignores Burgoyne’s speech to the Commons of
May 28, 1778, only a fortnight after his return and after
he had met the opposition leader Charles James Fox,
in which Burgoyne said: “The salvation of the country
depends upon the confidence of the people in some
part of the government. The ministry have it not; the
whole nation see, or think they see, their insuffi-
ciency”. He later had the speech printed at his own
expense. Before that he had written privately about
“the peremptory tenor of my orders” and how “the
expedition I commanded was evidently meant at first
to be hazarded”.

The reason that the government tried to send Bur-
goyne back to America was because he had, disgrace-
fully in their view, deserted his men in captivity and
returned to Britain without leave, thus fulfilling Con-
gress’s hopes to cause maximum trouble in London.

Unless Professor Poser is being deliberately obtuse,
it is surely obvious why Burgoyne’s possibly being the
illegitimate son of Lord Bingley would have made him
less socially inferior to Cornwallis than Poser thinks he
was. As for Burgoyne not being considered “a trouble-
maker”, if a public elopement with the daughter of
the Earl of Derby isn’t making trouble, it’s hard to
know what is.

When Poser states that “It is beyond belief that the
king would have made [Lord George] Germain a peer
if he had not been an aristocrat by birth: the younger
son of a duke”, in fact George III created viscountcies
for St Vincent (the son of a barrister), Hood (son of
a vicar), Melville (son of a judge) and Sidmouth (son
of a doctor), none of whom was an aristocrat by birth.

As I stated, and the debate in parliament on his
appointment attests, Germain received the viscountcy
of Sackville for his loyal promotion of the king’s
American policy; his social standing was immaterial.
Similarly, the fact that Cornwallis returned without any
intention to cause trouble for the government explains
why he was welcomed by George III and the govern-
ment, not the fact that he was an earl.

The obsession among some historians to see class
rather than politics as the driving force in eighteenth-
century politics can go too far, and often betrays an
unsure touch as to how the British class system actually
worked in the eighteenth century.

@ Andrew Roberts
London SW1

Unsaid by Andrew Roberts (Letters, April 29) and
Norman S. Poser (Letters, April 1) is another current
pushing against a peerage for George Germain. In The
Men Who Lost America (2013), Andrew O’Shaughnessy
discusses Germain’s long-known homosexuality or
bisexuality, little disguised by him, causing latent fear
that the nation had become effeminate and was in
dangerous decline. The playwright Richard Cumber-
land - who, Mrs Thrale declared in her diary, “did like
the Masculine gender best” - was Germain’s neighbour
and wrote most affectionately of him after Germain
picked him for a diplomatic mission. The American
loyalist Benjamin Thompson, described as a “shop
lad” from Massachusetts, spoke freely of living with
Germain, with whom he “always breakfasts, dines and
sups”, was dubbed by Marquess Wellesley “Sir Sodom
Thompson, Lord Sackville’s [ie Germain’s] under
Secretary”, and repeated private remarks of George III
made to Germain. Germain was thought “extremely
incautious in trusting his conversation with the King”
to pillow talk with young Thompson.
Simply “everyone” knew it.
@ Michael Smith
San Francisco CA

novel was directed and co-written

by the great Francesco Rosi, star-
ring Gian Maria Volonte as Levi and
the Greek actor Irene Papas, among
others. Rather extraordinarily, the
film also did considerable justice to
the fact that Levi was not only a
writer (and a medical doctor), but
also a most accomplished painter:

lth

ests, from novelists

“ommentators.

Subscribe to the podcast today at the-tls.co.uk/podcast

one full-length Italian study of
him is indeed subtitled The painter
as writer.

@ Paul Cartledge

Cambridge

Age of distraction
Irina Dumitrescu writes that “It has
become commonplace to call this
era ‘an age of distraction’” (After-
thoughts, June 3). Her examples
are only too well known. They
paint distraction, resulting in lack
of focus and inattention, in a dark,
negative manner. Contrast that with
what the poet George Meredith, in
“Modern Love XXVII” (1862),
shouted from the rooftops:
Distraction is the panacea, Sir!
I hear my oracle of Medicine say.
It has been suggested that Meredith
had in mind Janet Duff Gordon, “of
golden hair, or raven black, com-
posed?” If so, what better advice to
rely on in our “age of distraction”?
After all, omnia vincit amor.
@ Alastair Conan
Coulsdon, Surrey

The invention of the blues

Thellen Levy (Letters, June 10)
takes gentle exception to my sug-
gestion (May 20) that the blues is
(are?) a Scottish invention. There is
a hoary tradition that the form was
inspired by the sound of bagpipes

TLS

on migrant ships heading west.
There are also strong harmonic
connections between the blues and
piobaireachd, which doesn’t clinch
the influence, but is, to put it mildly,
interesting. And in recent times
Scotland has punched well above
its weight in producing blues and
jazz singers: Maggie Bell, the saintly
Lulu, Jack Bruce, Frankie Miller, the
Average White Band, Alex Harvey
et al. The reference was intended
lightly. No cultural (re)appropriation
should be imputed. Woke up this
morning, read a letter of complaint.
I said, woke up this morning, read
a letter of complaint.

| Brian Morton

Campbeltown, Argyll

County Kilburn

The review of Patrick McCabe’s
Poguemahone (May 20), and its
references to “Killiburn”, reminded
me of when I was a junior assistant
in the Kilburn branch of Hamp-
stead Public Library of blessed
memory in the late 1950s. The
area was so Irish then that it was
widely known as “County Kilburn”.
learnt a lesson in library collection
development that I never forgot in
fifty years of library work. The
book stock was excellent for a small
library and featured many books
on Ireland. I read a lot of them,
partly because they were always

available. By contrast, the far fewer
books on countries like the US, Aus-
tralia and Canada flew off the
shelves. So much for wallowing in
the memories of the Ould Sod.

@ Michael Gorman

Chicago IL

Canadian bilingualism

In his article about Daniil Trifonov’s
concert at the Maison Symphon-
ique de Montréal (May 20), Adam
Foulds mentions that Marianne
Perron, director of musical pro-
gramming at the Orchestre Sym-
phonique de Montréal, explained
the context of the event, “switching
between English and French in
official Canadian style”. I feel
compelled to point out to Mr
Foulds that this “Canadian style”
of bilingualism is a myth, for most
of the country at least. Only in
Montreal would such a statement
be delivered in both languages;
outside Quebec it would have been
made in English only. The truth is
that Canadian bilingualism only
goes one way, and the burden of it
falls disproportionately on the
shoulders of French-speakers.

@ Mathieu Thomas

Montreal, Quebec

Family fictions

Writing of the royal family, Nicola
Shulman (May 27) struggles to
think of any other “whose life
has been subsumed to a fictional
version of itself while they are still
living, unless it be the Family Von
Trapp”. Another family comes to
mind: the film Hilary and Jackie
(1998) presents a highly fictional-
ized account of the relationship
between the cellist Jacqueline du
Pré and her sister, Hilary. Jacqueline
du Pré died in 1987, but the pain
such prurience causes can be felt
in the comment by her husband,
Daniel Barenboim: “Couldn’t they
have waited until I was dead?”.

@ Sharon Footerman

London NW4

Bad geography

In his generous review of Jeff
Deutsch’s In Praise of Good Book-
stores (June 3), Oliver Balch mis-
locates the esteemed Seminary
Co-op Bookstore to Downtown
Chicago, whereas local book lovers
know it is on 57th Street on the
city’s South Side, some eight heavily
congested miles from Downtown.
™@ Paul Schlueter

Easton PA

Reviewing Shaul Magid’s book on
Meir Kahane, Uri Dromi locates
the site of Kahane’s assassination
in Brooklyn (June 3). It was at the
Marriott hotel in Manhattan.

®@ Yisrael Medad

Shiloh, Israel

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HISTORY

Detail of “The Cato Street Conspirators” by George Cruikshank, 1820

Underdog history

A plot thickened - the foiling of Regency revolutionaries

ROBERT POOLE

CONSPIRACY AT CATO STREET
A tale of liberty and revolution in
Regency London
VIC GATRELL
47A4pp. Cambridge University Press. £25
(US $34.99).

fellows well armed” could do the job,

reckoned the group’s founder, Thomas
Spence, in 1795, as he weighed the chances of
capturing London in a coup. Captain Despard, before
he actually attempted one in 1802, had put it at 1,500
- with another 50,000 to hold the capital. Arthur
Thistlewood had fewer than fifty in February 1820,
but the plan at least was straightforward.

The conspirators planned to leave their hideout
at a stables on Cato Street, Marylebone, rush in on
the Cabinet dinner at Lord Harrowby’s house, a mile
away in Grosvenor Square, with pistols and home-
made grenades, murder all its members (the Duke of
Wellington included), and decapitate Lords Castle-
reagh and Sidmouth to parade their heads on pikes.
Meanwhile, another party would raid the Artillery
Ground in Finsbury for cannon, attack the Bank of
England and the Mansion House, then start fires
across London - “nothing will call the people
together like fires”, thought Thistlewood. Once the
symbols of power had been exploded, a popular
rising would surely follow.

It was a trap. The Grosvenor Square dinner was
a decoy. Thistlewood and his dwindling bubble of
conspirators had for months been tracked by
multiple spies and informers who sent daily reports
to the Home Office; the agents included his right-
hand man, George Edwards (codename “Windsor”.
After a skirmish in the loft at Cato Street, during
which Thistlewood ran through and killed a con-
stable, the culprits were rounded up and tried for
treason. They died a traitor’s death, the decapitators
decapitated.

The Cato Street conspiracy of February 1820 was,
writes Vic Gatrell, “the most violent and precisely
aimed assault on the British political order since Guy
Fawkes”. The Jacobite armies might disagree, but it
was certainly the most dramatic of the many after-
shocks of the Peterloo massacre of August 1819, when
armed cavalry sent by the magistrates to disperse a
pro-democracy rally in Manchester killed fifteen

(74 A FEW THOUSANDS of hearty determined

8 TLS

people and wounded 700. The calls for redress were
fiery and prolonged: Thistlewood imagined himself
announcing to the startled Cabinet ministers, “the
blood of Manchester cries out for justice - enter,
gentlemen, and do your duty!”.

For the historians who have paid most attention
to it, the Cato Street conspiracy belongs to the history
of political radicalism and organized labour. Some-
how, though, the narrative of “the making of the
English working class” has never really connected
with other accounts of the Regency period; online
word searches show that the cliché “Regency ele-
gance” has achieved viral status, while “Regency”
and “radicalism” are rarely found together, Peterloo
notwithstanding. Taking a passing swipe at “miser-
abilist histories” of industrial revolution, Gatrell
eschews what he sees as the stifling pieties of labour
history in favour of individual character and lived
detail, professing a Dickensian empathy for the
“muddled attitudes, slogans and resentments” of
ordinary Londoners. “A story of deprivation, of gov-
ernmental malignity, guilt, and panic”, he declares,
“Cato Street is underdog history at its purest.”

There is no better guide to metropolitan high
and low life than Gatrell, the author of a history of
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century capital punish-
ment in The Hanging Tree (1996) and of eighteenth-
century London satire and its consumers in City of
Laughter (2007). In Conspiracy on Cato Street he
conducts a masterly and well-illustrated series of
historical tours of the “rebellious habitats” lying
between the City and the West End, some of the last
surviving neighbourhoods of pre-fire London, and of
the metropolitan radical milieu of militant artisans
surging through them. He feels “more warmth to the
conspirators than to the privileged aristocrats who
provoked them and then killed them”. His account
of the gory melodrama of the executions is a tour de
force, complete with the death-cell portraits and
testimonies of the five condemned men. In a final
flourish of detective work, Gatrell reveals that the
French artist Théodore Géricault, passing through
London with “The Raft of the Medusa”, made
unflinching sketches of what proved to be the last
public executions of traitors in England. Looking
at the face of Thistlewood, about to go under the
executioner’s hood, one wonders who had the
bleaker stare: the condemned man or the artist?

Thistlewood is at the heart of the story. A man of
gentlemanly bearing, he was by this time a self-made
underdog, having gambled away his wife’s fortune;
he suffered ever after from “a sense of exclusion and
thwarted entitlement”. His mysterious ability to tap

JUNE 17, 2022

© GUILDHALL LIBRARY & ART GALLERY/HERITAGE IMAGES/GETTY IMAGES
© SCOTT PETERSON/LIAISON

connections such as Jeremy Bentham for money has
led to speculation about accomplices in high places,
but Thistlewood (as the radical bookseller Richard
Carlile recognized) was at his core a scrounger and
a fantasist. Gatrell, who described him as
“unhinged”, admires his scaffold eloquence, but
leaves him skewered by a compliment: “Britain’s
greatest would-be terrorist”.

Thistlewood’s accomplices included two Black
conspirators of Jamaican origin, the secular preacher
Robert Wedderburn (who was safely in jail at the
time of the plot) and the well-educated William
Davidson (who was executed). Gatrell’s sensitive
and penetrating portraits of them are a significant
addition to Black British history. The rebels’ wives
also get a sprightly chapter to themselves, with Susan
Thistlewood and Mary Brunt spying out Harrowby’s
house the night before the action. Here, though, he
bypasses important work on the same subject by
Katrina Navickas, and Judy Meweezen’s carefully
researched novel Turtle Soup for the King.

The decision to focus the book tightly on London,
and on the few weeks before the conspiracy, pays off
handsomely in one way, but it comes at a cost. The
northern, Midland and Scottish radical movements,
which aimed at forcing out the government in
concert with London, are taken as read. Gatrell is a
Mancunian born and bred, and served an academic
apprenticeship counting cotton mills, which may
account for a historical empathy that seems to give
out north of Watford. He imagines “northern work-
ers galvanized” somehow by the Spa Fields riot in

London in late 1816. The Manchester “blanketeer”
rebels of 1817, who attempted to march on the capital
to demand reform, are dismissed as “desperate
weavers petitioning for relief”, while the Pentrich
rebels who followed them in the East Midlands are
both “desperate” and “deluded”. There are more
“desperate weavers” staging an unexplained rebel-
lion in Glasgow in 1820. There is a whiff here of low
life viewed from high table. When the former
London ultras Thomas Evans, father and son, leave
for Manchester, they are said to “disappear from
this story”. In fact Evans junior went to take up
the editorship of the combative Manchester Observer,
whose coverage of the Cato Street trial (available
online) is of some interest.

Thistlewood’s group could only ever muster large
numbers for rallies in co-operation with the much
more numerous radical Whigs or the popular orator
Henry Hunt (of Peterloo fame). Whenever they
struck out publicly on their own they were usually
humiliated, and in 1819 they became essentially par-
asitic upon the much stronger northern radical
movement. Gatrell largely fails to register the ultras’
campaign in the autumn of 1819 to organize simulta-
neous mass protest meetings in London and the
provinces. The aim was to overstretch the military
and bring part of the northern radical movement
south to fuel a rising in the capital. The ultras and
their provincial allies were, however, each minor-
ities within larger radical movements, and each
tried to persuade the other to take the lead in revolt
by spinning tales of armed multitudes ready to rise

66

There is no
better guide to
metropolitan
high

and low life
than Gatrell

Robert Poole is
Professor of History
at the University of
Central Lancashire,
Preston, and the
author of Peterloo:
The English uprising,
2019

HISTORY

in their home town. Only after all these schemes
failed did the ultras turn to terrorism, in the process
scaring off all the regular spies except Edwards. The
Cato Street conspiracy happened not because a
national rising was expected, but because one had
already failed.

Gatrell misses all this through concentrating
(understandably) on the large archival bundles
amassed by the Home Office and the Treasury
Solicitor for the trial of the conspirators. Yet the trial
was tightly focused on the conspiracy plot in order
to disguise the involvement of spies, which could
well have provoked the jury to acquit. The plentiful
material about the period before December 1819
scattered among the more general HO 42 corre-
spondence is only lightly sampled and erratically
referenced, while the “Private and Secret” corre-
spondence (HO 79) is, curiously, neglected.

Not the least of the mysteries is Thistlewood’s
almost wilful blindness to the presence of spies. He
always assumed they were there, and occasionally
addressed them in public, but he consistently failed
to spot every actual infiltrator. His provincial con-
tacts who visited the capital then spread the virus
of espionage throughout the country, dividing and
confounding their own movements. Amid all the
howls of betrayal, there is a case for saying that the
group’s chief betrayer was its own leader.

What remains is nonetheless an enthralling classic
of London history. “I die an enemy to all tyrants!”,
cried the butcher James Ings as he prepared to
swing. “Write that down!” =

A crisis
of
faith

A history of Muslims on the
Balkan peninsula since 1878

MARK MAZOWER

MUSLIMS AND THE MAKING OF
MODERN EUROPE
EMILY GREBLE
360pp. Oxford University Press. £26.99 (US $35).

loniki a few years ago, I was impressed by

how busy the place seemed to be. I was even
more surprised to learn that the document-hunters
around me were law clerks, not historians: they
were checking up on title deeds as part of their
routine conveyancing. The sultan’s empire had
vanished from the city during the First Balkan War,
but its impact was still being felt more than a
century later.

It was after the end of the Cold War, and particu-
larly after Yugoslavia disintegrated in the 1990s, that
the focus of much modern European history shifted
and the question of the fall of the Habsburg,
Romanov and Ottoman empires, and the legacy
they had left behind, became subjects of acute
scholarly concern. Emily Greble’s book Sarajevo,
1941-1945 (2011) was an outstanding example of the
work that emerged. In it she showed how even
during the Second World War, the city had managed
its affairs through a system of interactions among
notables of the main confessional groups, a system
that had largely endured intact since the late nine-
teenth century, and collapsed only in the face of the
political ambitions of Tito’s regime.

\ 7 istTING THE OTTOMAN ARCHIVES in Thessa-

JUNE 17, 2022

In her new book Greble has a broader ambition:

she wants to show up the shallowness and historical
ignorance behind contemporary debates that
problematize the place of Muslims in Europe. As she
points out, similar arguments over questions of
citizenship, culture, gender relations and faith
played out in the continent’s southeastern corner
more than a century ago. As the Ottoman empire
shrank, many of the new Balkan states inherited
substantial, long-settled Muslim communities whose
status, rights and expectations in the new national
dispensation were bitterly fought over.

Although Muslims and the Making of Modern
Europe is framed as a critique of European paroch-
ialism, its value is primarily as an analytic survey
of the history of Muslims in the lands of the former
Yugoslavia since the Near Eastern crisis of 1878.
Greble makes adroit use of rich material drawn
from numerous archives in Bosnia, Macedonia,
Montenegro, Croatia and Serbia, and supplements
this with wide reading. Her work also benefits from
the profusion of dissertations on this subject that
have appeared over the past few years.

The book starts off by painting a wide canvas
and treating the Balkans as a whole. But in fact it

TLS

Remains of a mosque
in Kosovo, 1999

Mark Mazower’s most
recent book, The Greek
Revolution: 1821 and
the making of modern
Europe, 2021, was
awarded the Duff
Cooper prize

has relatively little to say about the Greek, Albanian
and Bulgarian cases. That leaves more than enough
to be going on with. Even in the former Yugoslavia,
the umbrella term “Muslims” embraces a remark-
ably wide range of communities and fates, and it is
when the book moves away from its generalizations
on “Europe” and its Other, and gets to grips with
the differing predicaments of arms dealers in
Pljevlja, teachers in Skopje, muftis and landowners,
wandering mystics and Sarajevo intellectuals, that
its true value emerges.

What emerges is a story of contestation and
compromise. The emergence of the modern
bureaucratic state in the mid-nineteenth century
had forced the Ottoman empire’s leaders to try to
figure out what political and administrative frame-
work best suited the society’s multi-confessional
culture. Its different faiths were organized internally
in very different ways: a high degree of centralization
in the Catholic church contrasted, for instance, with
the decentred structures of the Jewish community.
But it was perhaps the Muslims of the empire,
precisely because they were members of the ruling
faith, who posed the most intractable case for Otto-
man reformers. Should religious leaders run courts,
schools and other internal administrative entities,
or should these be administered by the state? What
of the impulse to uniformity under the law pro-
moted by European theories of statecraft?

After the Balkan Wars, the questions remained
but the plight of Muslims worsened. Most of them
had to decide whether to abandon their ancestral
homes in order to remain under the sultan’s rule
or to stay, often in the face of hostility and outright
violence. Those who stayed had to figure out how
to organize themselves politically. The political
rulers of the new Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and
Slovenes, meanwhile, faced the challenge of defin-
ing what place Muslims would occupy in the new
state. On the one hand there was the ideal of a
universal citizenship buttressed by individual rights;
on the other there were demands for communal
self-government, now bolstered by the new concept
of minority rights advanced from Geneva by the
League of Nations. Emily Greble recounts the
arguments that erupted for decades over these
questions until the rise of an avowedly secular
Marxist state under Tito finally swept the old order
away, and transformed the place of Yugoslavia’s
Muslims for good. =
Land of the
living

What constitutes life

LIFE’S EDGE
The search for what it means to be alive
CARL ZIMMER
368pp. Picador. £20.

N HIS NEW BOOK, Life’s Edge, Carl Zimmer

attempts to explain what being “alive” means. In

elegant prose, he takes the reader on a fascinating
journey exploring the experiences of life for humans
and other primates, as well as bats, pythons, maple
trees, bacteria, viruses, liposomes and even four
lifelike blue droplets in a dish. His hope is to find
a neat, universal definition of “life” that everyone
will accept.

Zimmer starts the book by exploring life’s begin-
nings and endings (two of the many “edges” he iden-
tifies). He reminds us at the outset that our opinion
of what counts as life has changed over time. In a
laboratory in California there are globes known as
brain organoids, “the size of a housefly head ... made
up of hundreds of thousands of human neurones”,

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clearly not all, especially when compared “to the life
we know best, the benchmark against which we
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Technology has created new ways to help us
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compass has tried to rule on how we employ that
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TLS

Bacteria growing in
a petri dish

Helen Bynum is a
freelance writer. She

is the co-author of
Remarkable Plants
That Shape Our World,
2014, and Botanical
Sketchbooks, 2017

Instead it flows seamlessly through the generations.
As to the end of human life, Zimmer considers the
example of Jahi, a teenager from California who
was declared “brain dead” by the current standard
criteria. When her parents opted to maintain life
support, her body underwent puberty and it was
found that part of her brain, the hypothalamus, was
still functioning. Jahi’s body continued to operate so
long as she was ventilated, fed and generally cared
for. Zimmer observes that though the “cells in our
bodies are alive”, what he calls “our human life is
not defined by its parts alone. What matters for a
human life is how its parts are integrated”.

Next he considers what we can learn about being
“alive” from extreme adaptations in the animal
world. Zimmer visits Haydee, a Burmese python. Just
being alive requires energy in the form of calories
to keep the body’s cells ticking along. This minimal
amount of energy is known as the basal metabolic
rate. Humans are regular eaters, and we see only a
modest and short-lived increase in our basal meta-
bolism when we eat. This is in stark contrast to
Haydee. She is an extreme sit-and-wait, feast-and-
famine eater: an adaptation that allows her to remain
largely immobile, gorge when the opportunity arises,
then eat nothing. A python’s basal metabolism starts
from a very low level, but as it swallows its prey, and
during the days after a meal, it undergoes pheno-
menal changes. After dinner, some of Haydee’s
organs break their adaptive dormancy. They grow
rapidly and develop an enhanced functionality,
digesting, absorbing and distributing nutrients
before finally expelling the waste. To achieve this,
several thousand genes are switched on in a vast
cascade. Dormant pathways that other animals use
for normal growth, stress responses and fixing
damaged DNA fire up. When digestion is complete,
Haydee’s genes downshift equally quickly. The extra
tissues waste away and she returns to the remarkably
low minimal metabolism of her normal life.

Haydee’s evolutionary adaptations mean that
between meals parts of her body are quiescent, but
there’s no suggestion that she is not obviously
“alive”, especially when she is compared with the
stripped-back lifestyle of a virus. Viruses are just mol-
ecules of nucleic acid in a protein coat. They need
another cell to make copies of themselves, exhibiting
only a sort of “borrowed life”. Yet, unlike others,
Zimmer is reluctant to exclude such subcellular orga-
nisms from the roster of the living, given that they
“outnumber every form of cell-based life combined”,
and are blended into “life’s ecological web”. Viruses
and less complex organisms are the inhabitants of
deep time (and possibly deep space), and this brings
Carl Zimmer to his final “edge” of life: its origins.
“Life depends on genes for heredity and on proteins
for its metabolism, but it also needs membranes to
survive”, for life “cannot exist as a boundless cloud
of chemicals”. He tracks down the scientists develop-
ing exciting new ways of understanding the origins
of these constituent parts, and hence of life itself.
But even this only upholds his conclusion that our
understanding of life, at least for the moment,
remains incomplete and beyond words.

JUNE 17, 2022

© LEIGH PRATHER/ALAMY