The Times Literary Supplement - 22 July 2022

28 Pages·2022·35.3 MB·English

No. 6225
July 22 2022

the-tls.co.uk
UK £4.50 | USA $8.99

THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

Beejay Silcox Women without men | Joe Moran X Factor for the destitute

Barbara J. King Dogs co love | Molly Clark The first true-crime play

*,

Smile, please

Miranda Seymour's biography of Jean Rhys, by Amber Medland
THIS WEEK

TLS

Digitally coloured
portrait of Jean Rhys
© TLS; ARCHIVIO
GBB/Alamy

Smile, please

In this issue

ean Rhys found literary fame late in life. The

daughter of a white Creole mother from Domin-
ica, she kept her lilting West Indian accent, and
never quite fitted into gloomy, dank England.
Between the wars she lived a rackety life on the
Continent, while perfecting her prose. Publication
of Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), her postcolonial
prequel to Charlotte Bronté’s Jane Eyre - written
from the point of view of Mr Rochester’s Creole
wife, Antoinette - resurrected her from postwar
oblivion. “Very tactless of me to be alive”, joked
Rhys after an actress seeking to dramatize Good
Morning, Midnight (1939) took out a personal ad
asking for her whereabouts.

After Wide Sargasso Sea a new generation sought
out her bleak masterpieces from the 1930s. Yet
Rhys’s fame turned to notoriety as stories about her
alcoholic rages and paranoia surfaced. The Lear-like
writer was the standout among three female writers
profiled warts and all by David Plante in Difficult
Women (1983). Life in a Devon backwater didn’t
improve her temper; “when angered the ageing
Rhys could still spit, bite or scratch a perceived
opponent”, writes Miranda Seymour, the author of
a new biography, I Used to Live Here Once, reviewed
by Amber Medland. Inevitably, Rhys’s early novels
were then quarried as autobiography - “critics
confused the writer with her ‘less literate, more victi-
mised creations”. Yet in real life, Medland writes,
Rhys found agency through writing. Vainly she
protested that she was not always the abandoned
one. Her minimalist style and emotional honesty
should recommend her to generations to come.

One of Rhys’s three husbands was a bigamist, and
another a fraudster. Beejay Silcox considers fictional
worlds without men - “what might women dare ...
if they were freed from all that patriarchal dead-
weight?” - in her review of Sandra Newman’s con-
temporary The Men and J. D. Beresford’s A World
of Women, published in 1913. Gendercide novels
first “appeared at the tail end of the women’s
suffrage movement, evolving into novels of revenge
and exultant female power, although nowadays they
have dispensed with utopian dreamscapes”. Silcox
judges that “very few de-manned books have made
a lasting cultural dent”, unless they are funny.

Perhaps the cynical admonition “if you want
loyalty, get a dog” holds true. Jules Howard, the
author of the scientific study Wonderdog, “joyfully”
concludes that dogs can love. Chaser, the border
collie who can recognize more than 1,000 different
objects and follow a human sentence, sounds
brighter than many men too.

MARTIN IVENS
Editor

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3 BIOGRAPHY & AMBER MEDLAND I Used to Live Here Once - The haunted life of Jean Rhys
LITERATURE Miranda Seymour
SARAH CURTIS Richmal Crompton, Author of Just William - A literary life
Jane McVeigh
6 LETTERS TO THE Celts in history, How religions begin, Slavery, etc
EDITOR
7 ~~ SPORT DAVID GOLDBLATT Routledge Handbook of Sport in the Middle East Danyel
Reiche and Paul Michael Brannagan, editors. The Business
of the Fifa World Cup Simon Chadwick et al, editors
8 POLITICS JOE MORAN Tenants - The people on the frontline of Britain’s housing
emergency Vicky Spratt. Down and Out - Surviving the
homelessness crisis Daniel Lavelle
10 PHILOSOPHY JAMES KRAPFL Confronting Totalitarian Minds - Jan Patocka on politics and
dissidence Aspen E. Brinton. Living in Problematicity
Jan Patocka. Care for the Soul - The selected writings of Jan
Patocka Jan Patocka
11. THEATRE JOHN STOKES Pinter and Stoppard - A director’s view Carey Perloff
MOLLY CLARK Arden of Faversham; Edited by Catherine Richardson. The
Family of Love Lording Barry; Edited by Sophia Tomlinson.
Love’s Cure John Fletcher and Philip Massinger; Edited by
José A. Pérez Diez
14 ARTS COLIN GRANT In the Black Fantastic (Hayward Gallery)
JAMES COOK The Sound of Being Human - How music shapes our lives
Jude Rogers
16 FICTION KEITH MILLER The Twilight World Werner Herzog; Translated by Michael
Hofmann
LUCY SCHOLES The Seaplane on Final Approach Rebecca Rukeyser. Nobody
Gets Out Alive Leigh Newman
BEEJAY SILCOX The Men Sandra Newman. A World of Women J. D. Beresford
18 POETRY IN BRIEF ISABEL GALLEYMORE Garden Physic Sylvia Legris
DECLAN RYAN Venice Ange Mlinko
RACHEL HADAS My Hollywood and Other Poems Boris Dralyuk
SANA GOYAL Quiet Victoria Adukwei Bulley
19 HISTORY MADOC CAIRNS Hoax - The Popish Plot that never was Victor Stater
20 LETTERS & LITERATURE MICHAEL HOFMANN Man lebt von einem Tag zum andern - Briefe 1935-1948
Irmgard Keun; Edited by Michael Bienert
J. S. TENNANT Books of the Brave - Being an account of books and of men in
the Spanish Conquest and settlement of the sixteenth-century
New World Irving A. Leonard
SAMANTHA SCHNEE The Invisible Borders of Time - Five female Latin American
poets Nidia Hernandez, editor
22 CLASSICS & RELIGION JULIA KINDT The Hera of Zeus Vinciane Pirenne-Delforge and Gabriella
Pironti; Translated by Raymond Geuss
ANNE BRAUDE A History of Islam in 21 Women Hossein Kamaly. Women
Remembered - Jesus’ female disciples Joan Taylor and
Helen Bond
FIONA ELLIS Iris Murdoch and the Others Paul S. Fiddes
24 IN BRIEF The Schoolhouse Sophie Ward, etc
26 SCIENCE BARBARA J. KING Wonderdog Jules Howard
27 AFTERTHOUGHTS REGINA RINI The global village fractures - Our need to access the news
28 NB M. C. Being well read, Modernists at Blackwell’s, Thatcher’s poets,

Larkin in Latin

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

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MORNING,
MIDNIGHT

A way to earn death

A life of adversity, drunkenness and literary triumph

| USED TO LIVE HERE ONCE
The haunted life of Jean Rhys
MIRANDA SEYMOUR
432pp. William Collins. £25.

LIENATION WAS A CONSTANT for Jean Rhys,
in life and fiction. Born in 1890 to a Welsh
doctor and a white Creole mother, Rhys was
one of a few hundred whites out of Dominica’s
29,000 inhabitants. People called her a “white
cockroach”. In her unfinished memoir Smile Please
(1979), Rhys wrote that from the start she felt like
n “outsider; a changeling”. She was always afraid.
Her mother ridiculed her sensitivity and flogged
her until she was twelve, at which point she gave
up: “I’ve done my best. You'll never be like other
people”. Her doting father trained her to mix
drinks for his friends, one of whom told Rhys, then
fourteen, to imagine an island where she would be
his slave, bound with ropes of flowers and whipped.
(“It fitted like a hook to an eye”, Rhys wrote years
later. “After all ’d been whipped a lot.”)

When she was sixteen Rhys left for England,
expecting to find a fairy tale, but London was a
disappointment. At the Perse School in Cambridge,
she was nicknamed “West Indies” because of her
“lilting” accent. (“Later on I learnt to know that
most English people kept knives under their
tongues to stab me.”) Her peers were gleeful when
reading Jane Eyre: Charlotte Bronté’s Bertha, a
spitting, red-eyed monster, was, like Rhys, a white
Creole. Having lost a place at Rada because of her
accent, she trained herself to speak softly. After her
father died she joined a touring company and
acted a chicken laying an egg. Soon a forty-year-old
bachelor set her up in Primrose Hill. He wouldn’t
marry her, but gave her a dress allowance and paid
for an abortion.

Self-obsession was necessary to Rhys’s writing;
she scrutinized herself and lent her fictional women
aspects of her personality. From the start critics
confused the writer with her “less literate, more
victimised” creations. In a late interview, Rhys

JULY 22, 2022

sounds frustrated: “I wasn’t always the abandoned
one, you know”. Still, she drew on her experience
of being ditched by the bachelor for her third novel,
Voyage in the Dark (1934), in which Anna Morgan
slides from mistress to manicurist before sleep-
walking into prostitution. Rhys herself slept a lot,
then sat down and filled several exercise books
with “what he said, what I felt”, ending gloriously:
“Oh God, I’m only twenty, and I’ll have to go on
living and living and living”. As volatile as Rhys, her
characters are vain, ruthless, and vulnerable (the
protagonist of one short story is advised to “grow
another skin or two ... before it’s too late”). But
“Rhys women” aren’t writers; they have no pur-
pose; their lives depend on their sexual allure,
which fades, leaving them drunk and alone. Rhys
exercised her agency on the page: “I must write”,
she noted in her diary. “If 1 stop writing my life will
have been an abject failure.” Writing was the only
way she could “earn death”.

During the First World War she volunteered for
two years at an army canteen in Euston station,
where she worked nine-hour days. Throughout I
Used to Live Here Once: The haunted life of Jean Rhys,
Miranda Seymour draws attention to her subject’s
“tenacity”, her “capacity to endure hardship, ill
health and mental breakdowns”. Her difficulty in
controlling fits of furious despair was also matched
by a capacity - with a new dress, or superstition -
to “believe in a glorious future”. She married three
times: first there was Jean Lenglet, Dutch journalist,
bigamist and jailbird (later, hero of the Dutch
resistance); then Leslie Tilden Smith, a publisher’s
reader who died of a heart attack in 1945; and finally
Tilden Smith’s cousin Max Hamer, who proposed
to Rhys while still married to his wife of more than
thirty years.

In 1919 Rhys moved to Paris with Lenglet. At three
weeks old, their son caught pneumonia and died
in hospital. The Guardian’s review of Seymour’s bio-
graphy hands down the kind of cold verdict Rhys
came to expect from English men: her son “died as
a baby while she was out drinking”, but in her own
words “he was dying, or was already dead, while
we were drinking champagne”. (Lenglet bought
the champagne to make up for fighting with Rhys,
who wanted her son baptized.) She never forgave

TLS

Amber Medland is

the author of Wild
Pets, a novel published
last year, which will be
released in paperback
in August

herself. In 1922, when the French police turned up
on the doorstep, demanding that Lenglet return to
his first wife, Rhys had recently given birth to their
daughter, Maryvonne. For two years she lived alone
in grinding poverty. Her short story “Hunger”
counts how many days - five - a woman can live on
bread and coffee.

Rhys believed in fate. In 1924 her short story
“Vienne” (written on fleeing Vienna after Lenglet’s
foreign currency dealings attracted the attention of
the authorities) hooked Ford Madox Ford, who was
then editor of the short-lived Transatlantic Review.
There she made her debut - alongside Ernest
Hemingway and Gertrude Stein - under the name
“Jean Rhys” (Ford disliked her married name).
Although Ford was with Stella Bowen at the time,
Rhys swiftly became “Ford’s girl”. While acknowl-
edging Ford as a mentor, Rhys “maintained an
impenetrable discretion” about the affair. She was
ignored in the memoirs of the artists who flocked
around Ford. She didn’t like parties: “I’m a person
at a masked ball without a mask”. James Joyce
“recalled only having been asked to zip up Miss
Rhys’s dress while sharing a lift”.

Lenglet was jailed for two years in 1925, and later
banished from France. Rhys visited their daughter,
who was temporarily in an orphanage. (This wasn’t
a completely unusual arrangement for parents who
lived a peripatetic life; Ford’s daughter was in one
too.) Bowen and Ford offered Rhys their spare
room. Bowen later insisted that she didn’t know
about the affair, but she probably turned a blind
eye. Ford taught Rhys compositional tricks - trans-
lating a “difficult passage” into French, for example,
before attempting to rewrite it in English. He
introduced her to Maupassant, Flaubert and the
Russians. He helped her revise her sketches of
Dominica and Paris, published as The Left Bank in
1927. His preface (the first twelve pages are Ford’s
own recollections of Paris) gave Rhys literary clout.
But her tendency to drink too much whisky and fly
into a rage, claiming she was being manipulated,
grew tiring. With an appetite for sex, but not
drama, Ford ended the affair. Rhys drew on the
heartache for Quartet (1928), her first and most auto-
biographical novel. Like her stories it was praised for
its “originality” and deplored for its “squalor”.

In After Leaving Mr Mackenzie (1931), Rhys’s
second novel, Julia Martin is recovering from being
dropped - a “sore and cringing feeling”. She swaps
London for Paris, where things are not much better.
The “lights across the river” are “cold, accusing,
jaundiced eyes”. People muttering are “shadows ...
gesticulating”. Judgements are harsh and immediate
(“the maid thought: tart”). To pay the rent Rhys
had found work as a life model, a teacher and a
typist; unlike Julia, a “habitual parasite”, she hated
feeling “beholden”. Friends had to invent reasons
for money arriving in her account. The novelist
does lend her protagonist her own love of dressing
“with voluptuousness”, however, “her hands
emerging from long black sleeves”. (In Rhys’s
stories, as in her life, clothes - which Seymour
describes with relish - are a kind of armour against
a hostile world. Perhaps using such details allowed
Rhys to conjure a “sense of space around each
word”.) Seymour acknowledges this and other
similarities between Rhys and Julia - both grew up
in hot countries, both stayed in a “cheap hotel on
the Quai des Grands-Augustins” - before coming
back to Rhys’s brilliance and how her prose
“approaches poetry”. The world she creates in After
Leaving Mr Mackenzie is both “uniquely alien and
recognisably mundane”.

She divorced Lenglet at his request in 1933. A year
later she married Tilden Smith, who quickly
became a literary wife: cooking, typing, editing,
trying to limit his spouse’s alcohol consumption.
They had screaming matches, sometimes in the
street, often ending in blows. He warned her that
she risked making no money and being identified
with her characters. He had a point: Voyage in the
Dark concerns a woman haunted by her Caribbean
childhood. In Rhys’s original draft Anna Morgan

3
AFRICA’S

STRUGGLE
ea Lil

c

BENEDICTE SAVOY

A major new history of how African
nations, starting in the 1960s,
sought to reclaim the art looted by
Western colonial power

Jhumpa
Lahiri

Luminous essays on translation and
self-translation by the award-winning
writer and literary translator

AND NOT BELONGING

MARY JACOBUS

A look at how ideas of translation,
migration, and displacement are
embedded in the works of prominent
artists, from Ovid to Tacita Dean

{> PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

BIOGRAPHY & LITERATURE

Jean Rhys

dies during a botched abortion. But in the mid-
1930s nobody wanted a depressing book: the
publisher accepted it on condition that Anna would
survive. In the reluctantly revised version Anna
watches a chink of light under the door “like the
last thrust of remembering before everything is
blotted out ... I lay and watched it and thought
about starting all over again. And about being new
and fresh”. Reviewers expressed familiar regrets
about the author’s obsession with “dreadful” and
“difficult” subjects.

Whisky impeded Rhys’s progress on her fourth
novel, Good Morning, Midnight (1939). She also
threw her husband’s typewriter out of the window.
Sasha Jansen, an ageing ex-mannequin, is fierce,
bitter, sarcastic and paranoid. Her fur coat has
seen better days. She tries drinking herself to death,
then roaming the streets to forget her past. Here is
a woman who has called in every favour; she
knows that death will come when there is nobody
left to help: “When you sink you sink to the
accompaniment of loud laughter”. Rhys’s private
writing was often wry, and her fiction darkly
funny. Seymour points out the relief brought by
moments of silliness: “Very light”, remarks a
chambermaid in a room facing an external wall.
The reviews were terrible. Rhys didn’t publish again
for twenty-seven years.

In May 1940 Hitler invaded the Netherlands. All
lines of communication were cut; there was no
way for Rhys to know if Lenglet and Maryvonne
were still alive. Tilden Smith got a desk job with the
RAF; they relocated to Norfolk, where Rhys was
arrested for being drunk and disorderly. In 1942
husband and wife were drinking in a pub when
Rhys shouted “Heil Hitler”. It was reported, and
Tilden Smith lost his job. After the war they moved
to Dartmoor, where he died. Transmuting the loss
into her short story “The Sound of the River”
brought Rhys close to breakdown.

Her dread of publicity throws obstacles in the
path of any prospective biographer - she destroyed
letters - and Seymour is the first of her biographers
actually to visit Dominica and offer a long-overdue
exploration of its impact on her work. She doesn’t
begrudge Rhys her privacy, but laments her “pecu-
liar” coyness in concealing how much she read.
Seymour’s investigations into Rhys are inseparable
from her sensitive close readings of the novels. She
is shrewd and careful (“it’s reasonable to assume”),
unlike Rhys’s first biographer, Carole Angier (Jean

TLS

Rhys: Life and work, 1985), who was more interested
in Rhys as a badly behaved woman than as a writer,
and filled in the gaps in her (valuable) research
with speculative italics, diagnosed a personality
disorder and asserted that Rhys “could only write
instinctively, unconsciously”. It’s hard to imagine
anyone saying that about Hemingway, who was also
published by Ford.

Harder still not to wonder about Rhys as a
mother. Two months before the war ended she
finally learnt that Maryvonne was safe. In 1948 Mary-
vonne scraped together enough money to come over
and introduce Rhys to her baby daughter. She had
been working for the Dutch resistance while Lenglet
rescued downed RAF pilots. Speaking of her
marriage, Maryvonne neglected to mention that the
danger of “being recognised by a German registrar
had been so great that [she] smuggled five grenades
into the ceremony”. For Rhys’s part, motherhood
did nothing to narrow her ruthless self-awareness.
On one occasion she wrote to Maryvonne, apolo-
gising for having never “helped you enough or
been the right sort of person for you”. To a friend,
Maryvonne admitted that Rhys had “a supreme
egocentric view of life”, but understood that such
self-absorption was “a must for her kind of writing”.
Maryvonne emerges from this account as a stoic
who did all she could to keep the peace. Perhaps,
as Seymour says, she understood her mother’s
“childhood terrors”. Perhaps, too, Rhys was easier
to manage at a distance.

Rhys’s third husband, Max Hamer, a solicitor,
made her laugh and owned a house in Beckenham,
but he was gullible and optimistic, a magnet for
“silver-tongued crooks”. Often Rhys was left alone,
which she hated. Her consolations were her books
and three cats. When two of them were killed by
the neighbours’ dog, Rhys threw a brick through
the neighbours’ front window, resulting in the first
of several visits to Bromley Magistrates’ Court. Out
of necessity, Hamer and Rhys took in lodgers. The
first argument was triggered by a racket at night
while Rhys was writing. Drunk, Rhys hurled antise-
mitic abuse at her tenants before accusing a police-
man called to the scene of being a member of the
Gestapo. In a footnote Seymour acknowledges that
Rhys’s “insults were frequently anti-Semitic but
almost always inconsistent”. After several such
incidents she spent five days in the hospital wing
at Holloway Prison, where she gathered material
for her short story “Let Them Call it Jazz”. Then,
in 1950, Max wound up in Maidstone Prison for
attempted fraud. On his release they settled in
Devon. The literary world thought Rhys was dead.
But the BBC learnt of her whereabouts via an
advertisement in the New Statesman, and Good
Morning, Midnight was adapted for radio. The
broadcast, in May 1957, elicited letters from Francis
Wyndham and Diana Athill, editors at André
Deustch, to whom Rhys rashly promised a novel by
the end of the year.

That promise was empty, but a novel did emerge.
It took Rhys seven years to finish Wide Sargasso Sea
(1966), and in describing the circumstances of its
creation Seymour’s book becomes something of a
psychological thriller. Years past her deadline, Rhys
drafts and redrafts, flying into drunken rages and
tearing up her pages. Local boys call her “a witch”.
“I am envied and hated”, Rhys wrote to a friend
in 1963, adding, two months later, “the gossip is
dreadful”. Max was in and out of hospital, and in
her correspondence Rhys “misrepresented her sit-
uation” as hopelessly lonely, even though “loneli-
ness was always more a state of mind than a fact
of her existence”. (Or, as Emily Dickinson, from
whom she borrowed the title for Good Morning,
Midnight, wrote: “It might be lonelier / Without the
Loneliness”). Rhys seemed oblivious to how many
people were looking out for her. After losing her
temper over a barbed-wire fence, she struck up a
rapport with the local vicar. Soon he was visiting
regularly, bringing with him a bottle of whisky and
shocking the villagers. During Rhys’s nineteen
years in Devon, Seymour posits, her correspond-

JULY 22, 2022

© FAY GODWIN/BRITISH LIBRARY BOARD/BRIDGEMAN
ence makes it almost possible to predict the onset
of a mental health crisis by the increase in her
allusions to the unwelcome presence of largely
imaginary rodents”. She wrote to Wyndham about
creating a barricade: “quite useless of course. Also
there are alarming sounds from above where the
hot water pipes are. (Things larger than mice?)”.

In 1960 someone prescribed Rhys amphetamines.
She compared the sensation the bright red pills
brought on to flying. Her progress was punctuated
by fights with Max and fits of hopelessness. Her
publishers tried everything to keep her writing:
enlisting a local typist, telling another to feign an
allergy to alcohol. Nothing worked, yet in May
1963 Wyndham received “the makings of an extraor-
dinary book”. By 1964 Rhys was “living entirely in
the world of her novel”. Just as she was finishing
the novel, Max died. Maryvonne visited, but resisted
pressure to become a full-time carer: “I am very
lonely”, Rhys said. “Perhaps you will be the miracle
that will bring me to life”.

Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) tells the story of
Bronté’s “mad wife in the attic” before Rochester
(who is not mentioned by name in Rhys’s novel)
marries her for money, drives her mad with cruelty
and locks her up in England. A prequel to Jane
Eyre, it is set after the emancipation act of 1833:
Rhys wanted to challenge Bronté’s crude portrayal
of the white Creole class, but in doing so she had
to confront her family’s complicity as descendants
of slave owners. The operations of historic guilt are
sensually personal. Just as, to Rhys’s way of think-
ing, Dominica - beautiful but menacing - seemed
to have rejected her, so the Coulibri estate in
Jamaica, where Antoinette Cosway (whom Roches-
ter renames “Bertha”) grows up, is haunted, a
place where the “smell of dead flowers mixed with
the fresh living smell”. Critics didn’t respond to
Wide Sargasso Sea as the publishers hoped; it
wasn’t read in its “colonial context”, but as an
affront to Bronté. Yet it won the W. H. Smith award
in 1967; and in 1972, in the New York Review of
Books, V. S. Naipaul recognized Rhys as a great
writer, describing her women “not as self-portraits
or alter egos” but women “cruder, and less gifted
than herself”, “schooled by their society in the arts
of survival”. Rhys is likely to remain primarily
known to readers for this novel, and Seymour’s
biography will enrich their understanding of it.

In the final chapter of this compelling biography,
Seymour adopts the tone of a resigned yet affect-
ionate godmother. After it became clear that Rhys
could no longer live alone, she moved into the
Hampstead house of Diana and George Melly, where
a suite was redecorated in her favourite pink. Of
the three months she spent there, the first two were
“an almost unqualified success”. Rhys thrived as
the “acknowledged queen” of the bohemian house-
hold. Asked whether, if she had her life over again,
she would choose to write or be happy, Rhys cried
out, “Oh, happiness!”. There were good times:
shopping trips; evenings at Ronnie Scott’s; in 1978,
a CBE. But with age the soft voice and manners that
veiled a forceful will grew thin. She screamed and
spat. She pounded the floor when she wanted
another drink and raved about being trapped by
some woman who “produced hideous clothes
which her imprisoned guest was then compelled to
buy”. Rhys, feeling “both beholden and insecure”,
passed beyond reason. She threatened to slash her
host’s paintings. Writing to a friend in Paris, Diana
Melly admitted that she had thought she would be
able to make Rhys happy: “I can’t do that, I can’t
even make her feel all right”.

Back in Devon, Rhys suffered a series of falls. In
1979, for six weeks, she lay in the Royal Devon and
Exeter Hospital. Paying a visit to her, a friend didn’t
recognize her without the customary make-up. The
hospital misspelt her name as “Joan” above the bed
where she died. “Well, you are a fighter”, one of her
nurses had said when Rhys insisted on trying to
walk without a cane. Maybe so, she wrote in one
of her final notes, but “What exactly am I fighting
for?”. =

JULY 22, 2022

BIOGRAPHY & LITERATURE

Just Richmal

An author who started writing for adults but became an enduring hit with children

SARAH CURTIS

RICHMAL CROMPTON, AUTHOR OF
JUST WILLIAM
A literary life
JANE McVEIGH
310pp. Palgrave Macmillan. Paperback, £17.99.

O ANYONE WHO GREW UpP in the 1950s,
the Just William books were as the Harry
Potter books are to children today. We girls
identified with the rascally but well-meaning William
rather than the lisping Violet Elizabeth. Like the
eleven-year-old William himself, we considered Miss
Bott soppy, ignoring how feisty she was, as she
shouted, “‘[i]Jf you don’ play houth with me I’ll
thcream n’thcream till I’m thick. I can’”.
Jane McVeigh is an Honorary Research Fellow in
the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at

Sarah Curtis was a
Youth Court Magistrate

HOW THE CLINIC
MADE GENDER

The Medical History of a Transformative Idea
SANDRA EDER

“A stunningly original book.’
—Thomas W. Laqueur, author of Making Sex

Paper £24.00
ISBN: 9780226819938

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

press.uchicago.edu

Trade Enquiries to Yale Representation Ltd. [email protected] 020 7079 4900

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the University of Roehampton, where the Richmal
Crompton Collection is housed. In her biography
of Crompton, she explains with insight and sensi-
tivity how their creator conjured up William’s
misadventures from 1919 until her death in 1969,
and why they are still read or listened to - a record-
ing made by Kenneth Williams of some of the sto-
ries was reissued only a year ago.

She shows that Crompton’s output was astonish-
ing. As well as the thirty-seven William books, over
five decades Crompton published forty novels and
more than ten volumes of other stories. The Will-
iam books were initially intended for adults, per-
haps as a way to bemoan or cherish the exploits
of the readers’ own young. Born in 1890, in Bury,
Crompton was schooled in classics by her father,
read classics at Royal Holloway College, then
taught classics at Bromley High School from 1917
for six years. In the period during and after the
First World War, there was a lack of young men
whom Crompton might have met and married; this
was also a period, after the death of her father,
when she supported the rest of her family through
her writing. She suffered polio in her early thirties,
which permanently damaged her right leg. She
always concealed her disability. She had a mastec-
tomy in her forties, but she never seems to have
complained about her physical lot.

A devoted daughter and aunt, Crompton was
witty but unassuming when her books became
famous. She continued to live an orderly life in
Kent. She said in 1952 that, at the beginning, she
had written the stories “rather carelessly and hur-
tiedly”; but she was serious about her writing. The
first Just William film was made in 1939 and her
celebrity grew after William stories were broadcast
on the wireless from 1946. She did not stop writing
William’s cursus opprobrium until 1969.

It is clear from McVeigh that it is misleading to
put the William books in a category. They cannot
be shelved as humour or farce because the adven-
tures of the gang are so carefully placed between
fantasy and realism. Adults have always enjoyed
them as well as children. As McVeigh says, there is
much that is ridiculous in them, but nothing
vicious. It is amazing to learn from her that the
stories were censored in Franco’s Spain because
they were considered subversive, but perhaps some
mothers might agree that William’s antics were
intolerable. His background is middle-class and red-
olent of the home counties of Crompton’s era, but
his speech is idiosyncratic. McVeigh does not
explore why Crompton created William’s diction,
with his dropped consonants and elisions, rightly
assuming that readers would work out what Will-
iam, Ginger and the rest of the gang were saying.

McVeigh does not think Crompton had any
particular models, but conjured up her characters
and the dialogue in the stories partly from aspects
of people she knew and snippets of conversations
she overheard, and partly from her imagination. As
her niece Margaret said, “She had a superb sense
of the ridiculous”. She would scribble on scraps of
paper everyday conversations she remembered.
McVeigh attributes to Crompton an open personal-
ity that enabled her to be on terms with Harold
Macmillan, her publisher before he became prime
minister, and to remain polite when interviewers
did not know she had written many novels in
addition to the William sagas. This is a model
biography for the way it delivers the facts about
the life of its subject and analyses the attraction or
magic of the stories for subsequent writers, as well
as readers across generations. The best praise of
this biography is that it will send many readers back
to encounter the thrills of reading once more of
William’s misadventures. =
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

How religions begin

In discussing the argument over
whether Axial Age religions spring
from inspired visions of ineffable
reality or anthropomorphic fabri-
cations of “Moralizing High Gods”
that serve to keep people in order,
Karen Armstrong seems to smuggle
in another utilitarian account of
religion (July 15). She asks why
religions have persisted in trying to
comprehend the incomprehens-
ible, and argues that doing so
lessens suffering and sustains a
moral imperative, the so-called
Golden Rule, of treating others as
you would wish to be treated. Such
a principle is hard to imagine com-
ing from a Moralizing High God,
who would presumably intimidate
rather than suggest compassion.
But Armstrong also distracts from
the religious impulse, namely that
religious practitioners, in a variety
of ways, and in different times and
places, have felt themselves to be
participating in a living reality and
aligning with what is most funda-
mentally true. This brings its own
reward, and without such a root,
any religious fruit, socially and per-
sonally beneficial or not, will die.
™@ Mark Vernon

London SE5

Slavery

May I add a note to John Samuel
Harpham’s fascinating review on
slavery (July 8)? Apart from his
neat summary of the chief defini-
tions of servitude, one should also
include the tradition that stretches
from Franz Baermann Steiner
(1949) via Paul Bohannan (1963) to
Claude Meillassoux (1986) and
David Graeber and David Wengrow
(2021). This has become one of
the most dominant schools in the
modern scholarship on slavery.
Steiner’s encyclopedic analysis of
the topic, written as a penance
for the Jews incarcerated in the
camps, hinges on the insight that
slavery amounts to kinlessness: it is

to philosophers and poets to cult

Celts in history

St Simon Jenkins is a fine journalist. However, his
response (Letters, July 15) to my review of The Celts:
A sceptical history (July 1) is weak on facts and strong
on rhetoric. Tilting at windmills, he associates me
with ideas I have never espoused, such as “a coherent
tribe of ‘Celts’ charging across Europe”. I described
as a fantasy Jenkins’s idea that pre-Roman lowland
Britain was Germanic-speaking. He replies that he is
“not a ‘fantasist’ in finding it implausible that easterners
spoke a Celtic language under the Romans, then
switched almost overnight to a Germanic one”. That
is a quite different proposition, and not my view; I
think it likely enough that there were some Germanic-
speakers in eastern England before the Romans left
and agree with Peter Schrijver that many lowland
Britons would have been bilingual in Latin and Celtic
by then.

Regarding “the eradication and replacement of mil-
lions of ‘eastern Celts’”, Jenkins carelessly asserts that
I “cannot have read Susan Oosterhuizen’s 2019 study
of the evidence”, even though I discussed Oosthuizen’s
book - spelling her name right - and mentioned con-
trasting views. Jenkins notes, with apparent dismay,
that a Saxon conquest “is still taught in schools” (ie
Key Stage 2: “Anglo-Saxon invasions, settlements and
kingdoms: place names and village life”). My opinion,
as quoted extensively by Oosthuizen, is that Gildas,
Bede and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle should not lead
us to present an over-lurid picture of these invasions.
If the Department for Education took notice of Jenkins,
however, that part of Our Island Story might disappear
altogether. For which there’s a precedent: in 1284,
following the Edwardian conquest, the Archbishop of
Canterbury commanded the Welsh bishops to teach
that Britain’s first peoples, long before the Welsh

turned up, were a “Germanic race called Albyon, from
whom come the Saxons”. Like Archbishop Pecham,
Sir Simon tries to prop up the Union by peddling
myths and caricatures. Wouldn’t killing Home Rule by
kindness be more effective? He begins his letter by
quoting - or rather misquoting - Tolkien’s remarks on
the “fabulous Celtic twilight”. Ignoring Tolkien’s con-
text, Jenkins supposes him to be criticizing “Celtic
studies”. For Tolkien it was in fact “people outside the
small company of the great scholars, past and present”
who dwelt in that “twilight ... of the reason”. People
like Simon Jenkins.

@ Patrick Sims-Williams

Aberystwyth

Simon Jenkins’s account of post-Roman Britain
ignores the evidence of place names, which incoming
colonizers often adopt or adapt. German settlements
in the east often retained the Slavonic termination
“itz”, as in Colditz. Incoming Europeans, overwhelm-
ing the First Australians, still preserved versions of
local names such as Cootamundra, while Norman
barons simply added the family moniker to their new
manor, as in Ashby-de-la-Zouch. Yet place names
of Celtic origin are conspicuous by their absence in
southern and eastern England, apart from London
itself, and possibly Penge. Anglo-Welsh hybrids such as
Penkridge occur well to the west, on what may once
have been a linguistic boundary. Thus, place-name evi-
dence points not to “genocide”, but to the widespread
“ethnic cleansing” reported in written sources.
The Old English word “walas” (“Welsh”) always meant
“foreigners”.

John Coutts

Stirling

neither possession, power nor a
form of objectification, but - in a
view developed from Simmel’s
formal sociology - the state of
being excluded from kinship rela-
tions. This radical isolation enables
the other states of being Harpham
lists. Today, after decades of obscu-
rity, Steiner’s thesis “A Compara-
tive Study of the Forms of Slavery”
has thankfully been made access-
ible in digital form by the Bodleian
Library. At last it has become
possible to understand Steiner’s

lth

ests, from novelists

“ommentators.

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

compendious project. His vast field
of comparison stretched from Asia
to Africa and North America; and
his system embeds slavery into a
wider pattern of institutions com-
prising what he calls “detached
persons”. The slave inhabits a
“no-man’s-land” that remains
unstructured by social life. He/she
is the totally isolated being. This
hugely ambitious, curiously incom-
plete DPhil remains one of the
most insightful studies of the field.
™@ Jeremy Adler

King’s College London

Suze

In addition to what Peter Cogman
offers as the “realism” of Suze (Let-
ters, July 15), it has a few interesting
cultural ramifications. Bob Dylan’s
first long-term girlfriend was born
Susan Rotolo, but didn’t much like
her forename. She did, though, like
Picasso’s paintings, and when she
came across “Glass and Bottle of
Suze”, as she tells us in her auto-
biography, A Freewheelin’ Time, she
found the alternative by which she
has been known to generations of
Dylan fans. In Paris in 1956, Sylvia
Plath came across a kiosk adver-
tising the drink and was sparked
by it into her very lively drawing
“Colourful Kiosque near Louvre”
(reproduced in Drawings).

Peter Cogman implies that the
drink itself hasn’t travelled far
beyond its national borders; but its
representations have.

@ Neil Corcoran
Oxton, Wirral

TLS

Navel gazing

Any god who can make a creature
as gorgeous as Michelangelo’s
Adam from the dust of the earth
(Genesis 2:7) clearly has the skill to
create him with or without a navel.
(See Robert J. Asher’s review of In
Quest of the Historical Adam by
William Lane Craig, June 17.) The
presence of a navel, the scar left
by the detachment of the umbilical
cord that had connected baby and
placenta, is consistent with the
now usual development and birth
of a human baby, but it is not proof
of it. Indeed, at the time of Adam’s
creation, there was no female
human around. Eve, according to
Genesis 2:22, was created after
Adam had had time to name all
the creatures of Eden. If Adam
was the product of a conventional
pregnancy, he must have been
conceived almost nine months
before the creation of the universe,
and have matured from newborn
to well-developed adult during the
twenty-four hours of the sixth day
of creation.

Earlier on that sixth day, before
creating Adam, God created the
terrestrial animals, specifically
including cattle (Genesis 1:24),
another mammalian species. Did
they also have unnecessary navels?

Literal analysis becomes ridicu-
lous. Let us learn from the eternal
stories and enjoy the images while
we can. A little further down
the Sistine Chapel is the Last
Judgement.

@ Anthony Woodward
Portland OR

The Buddha's Tooth

Natasha Heller, reviewing John S.
Strong’s The Buddha’s Tooth (July
8), asserts of the venerated
Dathadhatu at Kandy that “there
was no question that it was a relic
of the Buddha”. No question in
whose mind? To this day there may
be no question of its authenticity
in the minds of many Sri Lankans,
Thais and other devout Buddhists,
but not everyone has been con-
vinced by it.

In October 1858 two Burmese
bonzes arrived in Kandy, sent by
the Burmese emperor to examine
the tooth in order to ascertain by
comparison the authenticity of a
purported tooth of Buddha, eight
inches in length, preserved at Ava.
The governor gave permission for
the tooth to be displayed and a
general festival ensued, with the
temple magnificently decorated
and the entire population flocking
for this rare opportunity to view it.
According to one observer (see J.
Barthélemy Saint-Hilaire’s The
Buddha and His Religion, 1914): “The
piece of ivory which is supposed to
have graced the Buddha’s jaw is
about the size of the little finger; it
is of a fine tawny yellow colour,
slightly curved in the middle, and
thicker at one end ... On looking at
the transversal veining of the ivory,
it is easy to see that it is only a piece
of a tooth, and not a complete one;
but it would not be advisable in this
country to throw a doubt on the
perfect authenticity of an object
held in such veneration”. The Bur-
mese priests were also, apparently,
unimpressed, donating only “a
paltry sum” to the temple.
™ Graham Chainey
Brighton

Et in Arcadia

Other readers who are as impressed
as I am by Jonathan Bate’s review
of Paul Holberton’s A History of
Arcadia in Art and Literature (July
15) might be interested to know that
Arcadia has had yet more American
afterlives in geography and liter-
ature. Early mapmakers designated
the whole North American coast
north of Virginia as Arcadia. New
France was founded in an area
known as Acadia - it was Cham-
plain, a Canadian founding father,
who removed the “r”. In their
eighteenth-century contest with
France, the British “ethnically
cleansed” the area, removing its
inhabitants to American territories,
especially Louisiana. When Long-
fellow wrote of this process in his
narrative poem Evangeline (1847) he
saw the significance of the nomen-
clature and another lost paradise.
The poem has been several times
adapted by American and Canadian
film-makers.

BJohn M. Smith

Basingstoke, Hampshire

CONTACT

1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
[email protected]

JULY 22, 2022
© KHALED DESOUKI/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

AY cial

A political game

How the Middle East has bought up global sporting events

ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF SPORT IN
THE MIDDLE EAST
DANYEL REICHE AND PAUL MICHAEL
BRANNAGAN, EDITORS
AO6pp. Routledge. £190.

THE BUSINESS OF THE FIFA WORLD CUP
SIMON CHADWICK, PAUL WIDDOP,
CHRISTOS ANAGNOSTOPOULOS AND
DANIEL PARNELL, EDITORS
276pp. Routledge. £120 (paperback, £34.99).

N QaTAR THIS NOVEMBER and December, the
Fifa World Cup will be played for the twenty-

._second time, but in a number of ways it will be
unique. The timing, necessary to avoid the blistering
heat of a Gulf summer, and which has required the
reordering of the entire world football calendar, is
a first. It will also be the first sporting mega-event
to be held in the Middle East. At a conservative
estimate the Qataris will have spent more than $200
billion on a transformation of the country that has
centred on staging the tournament, making it the
most expensive ever, while the media coverage of the
conditions of the millions of migrant workers who
have built the stadiums and associated construction
makes it the most closely scrutinized ever. Finally,
given recent viewing trends and the country’s
favourable time zone between Europe and Asia,
Qatar 2022 will attract the largest broadcast audience
ever for a World Cup, Olympics or anything else.

Given how little has been published on sport in the
Middle East, or on the non-sporting side of the World
Cup, these two books are welcome contributions
that put Qatar 2022 in context: The Routledge Hand-
book of Sport in the Middle East by offering a range
of essays on the history and the cultural and political
significance of sport in the region; The Business of the
FIFA World Cup by covering the ways in which past
tournaments have been planned, financed, built,
organized and marketed.

Two clear themes emerge from Danyel Reiche and
Paul Michael Brannagan’s collection. First, that in
the Middle East, football is king. This is true in much
of the world, but the gap between the game and any
sporting competitors is much more pronounced here
than anywhere else. Why this should be remains
unclear. Given the sport’s huge cultural and political

JULY 22, 2022

weight, the second theme is no surprise; football
across the region is inexorably and tightly bound to
political power and political identities. Again, this
is not a relationship on which the Middle East has
a monopoly, but one in which it clearly excels.

In some states football is primarily a space in
which domestic political conflict is played out. In
Iran it has pitted conservatives against progressives,
especially over the enduring and much contested
ban on women attending men’s football matches. In
Syria the Assad regime has used the men’s national
football team as an ersatz symbol of national unity.
In Egypt football has been an arena for conflict
between successive regimes and the public for
decades. The ultra groups that support the country’s
biggest teams - Al Ahly and Zamalek - challenged
Hosni Mubarak’s rule inside the stadium, and in
2011 were part of the coalition that toppled him.
Since then their opposition to the military regime has
seen them prohibited and politically crushed.

In other states, above all in Saudi Arabia, the UAE
and Qatar, football is primarily a matter of inter-
national politics, presence and influence. All three
countries have bought a big European football club
(Newcastle United, Manchester City and Paris St
Germain) and staged minor international football
tournaments. Qatar has gone much further than its
larger neighbours: establishing the pre-eminent foot-
ball broadcaster in the region, BeIN Sports; hosting
the World Cup this year as the apex of its foreign
policy of visibility; and making the game a primary
instrument of urban development. These policies
may be recent, but a number of contributions to
the Handbook remind us that football has deeper
domestic roots in Qatar than one might imagine,
with the country’s accession to Fifa in 1970 and first
international football games, then its miraculous
journey to the final of the 1981 under-20 World Cup
(beating Brazil and England on the way), serving
as vital moments in the collective imagining of the
Qatari nation.

Some of the best chapters in the book deal with
minority sporting interests, helping to correct the
cruder, flatter accounts of Middle Eastern societies
that an exclusive focus on football generates. The
ethnic complexity of societies is illuminated by the
story of David Saad, a Lebanese Jewish judoka
excluded from international competition in the 1970s
as Lebanon’s repression of its Jewish community
intensified. (He eventually competed at the Montreal
Olympics in 1976.) An excellent chapter on the story
of cycling in Qatar conjures up a bike-friendly Doha
before the motorway and the 4x4, and explains how

TLS

An Egyptian protester
waving Al Ahly

and Zamalek football
flags, 2012

David Goldblatt’s books
include The Age of
Football: The global
game in the twenty-
first century, 2019

European cycling teams came to love the Tour of
Qatar, whose harsh desert environments and fear-
some crosswinds made it a gruelling and much
respected preparation for the cycle tour’s European
Spring Classics. The pieces on the Bahraini royal
family’s support for professional mixed martial arts
(MMA), and the popularity of falconry as a “heritage”
sport in the UAE are no less absorbing.

It is a shame, then, that there was no space in
the collection for cricket - the game of the South
Asian migrants who have built the modern Gulf -
or horseracing - long the obsession of the region’s
aristocrats and monarchs. Above all, there was no
space for a piece on Islam’s changing relationship to
sport. Religion is by no means the only or dominant
cultural force in shaping sport in the region, but in
some places - Iran, for example - and on some
issues, including women’s participation in sport, it
has been profoundly important.

The Business of the Fifa World Cup has its moments.
The account of the first tournament, held in Uruguay
in 1930, draws some nice parallels with the present
- a small, almost unknown country of fewer than
three million people using the World Cup to adver-
tise itself and its social and economic progress to
the world. For the most part, however, the historical
contextualization that should have been on offer is
disappointingly thin. The book’s coverage of the
role of domestic politics in shaping tournaments,
the impact of critical global media coverage and the
staging of political protests, all vital fields of research
in looking at Qatar, are at best pedestrian. In the
case of Russia 2018, for example, no mention is
made of the regime’s long-standing use of football
as a political instrument at home, or the way in
which the huge anti-pension-law protests that swept
the nation in non-World Cup cities were obscured
by the tournament. Nor is there much in the
account of past stadiums and urban development
programmes at World Cups to clarify the scale and
intentions behind Qatar’s construction bonanza -
bigger than all the other twenty-one World Cups
put together.

Politics aside, much of the book, the editors
explain, is focused on questions of “leadership and
brand management”, and covers the institutional
and procedural infrastructure of actually making
the media spectacle happen. These chapters on,
among other topics, competition design, securing
the integrity of the games and making the tourn-
ament environmentally sustainable, not to mention
marketing, broadcasting and social media strategies,
certainly lay bare the long to-do lists of World Cup
organizers, but offer little insight into the political
processes and choices they conceal.

A final, stronger chapter on Qatar and culture
takes us a little further down this road, looking at
the ways in which the norms of global sporting
events and federations, shaped in the global north,
interact with the culture of a conservative and
Islamic society such as Qatar, where homosexuality
remains illegal and alcohol consumption is strictly
regulated. A similar dynamic, underinvestigated in
both of these books, has been the impact of global
trade unions, human rights and media organizations
on Qatar’s kafala system of labour migration and
control which has effectively been dismantled over
the past decade.

This is a significant absence. While that process is
incomplete, and the new labour system is hardly
Scandinavian, it probably constitutes the single
biggest domestic policy change induced by hosting
a sporting mega-event - another superlative for Qatar
2022. It is a consequence of the now unparalleled
popularity, visibility and significance of football,
and, compared to recent hosts of flagship global
events like China or Russia, the relative openness of
Qatar to the world’s media, and its greater vulnera-
bility as a small state to global pressure and negative
coverage. At their best these books help us to make
a bit more sense of these extraordinary events, but
neither, even in passing, can begin to address the
question it all prompts. Why is football, of all things,
asked to bear this kind of political weight?
Housing the homeless

The flaws in a property-owning democracy

TENANTS
The people on the frontline of Britain’s
housing emergency
VICKY SPRATT
352pp. Profile. £20.

DOWN AND OUT
Surviving the homelessness crisis
DANIEL LAVELLE
304pp. Wildfire. £18.99.

IKE ACCESS TO CLEAN, DRINKABLE WATER,

the right to adequate housing is recognized by

the United Nations. In the UK, in the space of
a generation, this right has been gradually eroded
by stark housing inequalities. These inequalities are
the product of political will, market ideology and
the unintended consequences of both. The forty-
year property boom has been so spectacular that
many houses now earn more in equity than their
occupants do in their jobs. Attempts to help those
priced out of the market through optimistically
named “affordable housing”, stamp-duty cuts and

Help to Buy schemes have only tinkered at the
edges of the problem or inflated the market further.
Meanwhile, the selling off of council housing has
pushed most tenants into the private rented sector,
where they have few of the legal protections of
tenure available in other European countries.

Two new books by Vicky Spratt and Daniel
Lavelle address this intricate ecosystem of housing
inequality and the ways in which it is reshaping
Britain’s social and economic landscape. Both
authors have lived at the sharp end of the problem.
When Spratt was seven she learnt never to answer
the door to bailiffs, but still her family lost their
home. As a young adult she rented tiny box rooms
in houses with damp and mould, and lost a fortune
in deposits to dodgy landlords. She is now the i
Paper’s housing correspondent, writing not about
property hotspots and fantasy house hunts, but
about the human costs of the housing crisis. Lavelle
grew up in care, moving between special boarding
schools, foster homes and children’s homes. After
leaving university he was homeless for two years,
living in tents and hostels, or sleeping on friends’
sofas. In 2019 he co-wrote the “Empty Doorway”
series in the Guardian, recording the lives of home-
less people who died on the streets.

Tenants is the more densely researched book,
being based largely on interviews Spratt conducts

The Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize
for Arabic Literary Translation

Announcing the Judges
of the 2022 Prize

Charis Olszok Katharine Halls

Susheila Nasta Becki Maddock

Charis Olszok (Chair),Associate Professor, Modern Arabic Literature, University of Cambridge

Katharine Halls, translator of fiction & plays, joint winner of 2017 Sheikh Hamad Translation Award

Susheila Nasta MBE, Wasafiri magazine founder, Professor Emerita Queen Mary College & the Open

University, Royal Society of Literature Council Member, Honorary Fellow, the English Association

Becki Maddock, Banipal Trustee, toponymist, linguist, translator, Royal Geographical Society Fellow

View the full list of 2022 entries at
www.banipaltrust.org.uk/prize/award2022

The Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize aims to raise the profile of contemporary Arabic literature as well as honouring
the important work of individual translators in bringing the work of established and emerging Arab writers to
the attention of the wider world. It was established in 2006 by Banipal, the magazine of modern Arab literature

Banipal Trust for Arab Literature, | Gough Square, London EC4A 3DE
[email protected] * www.banipaltrust.org.uk

f facebook.com/SaifGhobashBanipalPrize

TLS

Joe Moran is a
Professor of English
and cultural history
at Liverpool John
Moores University

with evicted tenants, grassroots activists, support
workers and experts in housing law. Down and Out
is rawer and more personal, combining Lavelle’s
own story with those of the insecurely housed and
homeless people he keeps in touch with from his
time in care and in hostels. Spratt focuses mainly
on tenants facing or experiencing eviction; Lavelle
explores a twilight world of sofa-surfing, hostels,
night shelters and rough sleeping. Taken together
they make plain how paper thin is the divide
between the cheaper end of renting and being
thrown out on to the street. They show that all it
takes to be made homeless is to be surprised by
illness, redundancy, a break-up or simply a landlord
who decides on a whim that they want you out.
Section 21 of the Housing Act 1988 allows private
landlords to evict tenants at short notice without
giving a reason. In the Queen’s Speech of December
2019 the government pledged to abolish these
“no-fault” evictions, but it has yet to do so.

Both books consider the Thatcher era to be, in
Spratt’s words, “ground zero for the mess we are in
now”. The 1980 Housing Act gave millions of council
house tenants the right to buy their homes, at
market discounts of up to 50 per cent. As Spratt
points out, this was no rocket boost for home-
ownership, which in England has increased only
slightly from 56.6 per cent in 1980 to 64.6 per cent
in 2020. More than 40 per cent of ex-council homes
sold under Right to Buy are now owned by private
landlords. For Spratt, the key driver of housing
inequality was the political decision to outsource
he rental sector to unqualified and unregulated
individuals, private landlords, many of whom have
neither the time nor the resources to manage their
properties properly. Nearly half of housing benefit,
about £10 billion a year, goes straight to them.

Lavelle, with typical pungency, calls Right to Buy
the greatest heist in modern history, a heist perpe-
trated under the guise of giving people a stake in
public assets they already had a stake in”. In truth,
as the more restrained Spratt concedes, Right to Buy
was not an original Thatcherite policy. A less heavily
discounted version of it appeared in the Labour
Party’s election manifesto in 1959. The traditional
Conservative policy of encouraging home owner-
ship - Anthony Eden’s espousal in 1946 of a “nation-
wide property-owning democracy” - gradually
became a cross-party consensus in the postwar
years. Labour retained plans for ambitious council
house-building, but New Labour shelved them as
it tailored its policies to existing homeowners.
Between 1998 and 2010, 6,330 council homes were
built, just over a third of the total built in 1990 alone,
the last year of the Thatcher government.

The 2008 financial crash made things vastly worse
in two ways. First, banks wanted bigger deposits and
tightened affordability checks for mortgages. They
ploughed money into buy-to-let mortgages, with
investors being seen as a safer bet than first-time
buyers. This pushed many more people into renting.
Second, austerity made life more brutal for renters
on low incomes. In 2010 George Osborne cut hous-
ing benefit and barred single people under thirty-
ive from claiming it to live in a place of their own.
Cuts to local-authority budgets meant less money
or hostels, shelters and drug and alcohol depend-
ency services. Councils are now so strapped that
they operate what Lavelle calls “a misery contest
or housing, a sort of X Factor for the destitute”.
While living in a tent along a bridle path in Saddle-
worth, Greater Manchester, he was told he was not
a “priority need” because he did not present with
any other vulnerabilities. He was “homeless, but not
homeless enough”.

These two effects of the financial crash combined
catastrophically with one non-effect: house prices

JULY 22, 2022
© GUY CORBISHLEY/ALAMY

and average rents carried on rising. Adding more
renters to the mix drove up demand, and landlords
put up prices accordingly. Each chapter of Spratt’s
book is preceded with data on the sales and rental
market in the area she is writing about, which
underlines how hopeless the situation is for many.
In Peckham, south London, for instance, the average
price of a flat in 2021 was £450,865 and the average
monthly rent for a one-bedroom home was £1,394.

Housing inequality bears out Claudius’s maxim
that sorrows come “not single spies, but in
battalions”. Its victims are invariably dealing with
contributory and aggravating factors: casualized
work, stagnating wages, welfare cuts and debt.
Spratt compares the housing crisis to a virus that
“infects its hosts and multiplies to make everything
more difficult for them”. Living in cramped, ugly,
broken-down surroundings is bad for anyone’s
mental health. Damp and mould bring respiratory
problems and other illnesses. Those in poor, over-
crowded housing suffered most in lockdown, and
were more likely to catch and spread Covid. Having
to move all the time is stressful and makes it much
harder to build support networks. Mindy Fullilove,
an American professor of urban policy and health,
calls this phenomenon “root shock”, after the
trauma a plant experiences when it is moved
carelessly to shallow soil.

The homeless people Lavelle speaks to struggle
with three big problems: experience of abuse,
mental illness, and drug and alcohol addiction. One
reason that spice (a synthetic cannabinoid) is so
popular on the streets and in hostels, Lavelle says,
is that it makes time go quickly. He is open about
his own problems. The victim in infancy of a family
trauma that he can’t write about for legal reasons,
he spent much of his childhood being excluded
or expelled from school and attending special
educational establishments. The psychiatrist who
diagnosed attention deficit hyperactivity disorder
when Lavelle was seven “didn’t need to strain his
diagnostic skills too much”. He does not sound like
the most compliant hostel dweller, getting into
arguments with other residents and with the super-
visor who, when Lavelle has the flu, refuses him
Strepsils because they contain alcohol. At one point
he punches a hole in a windscreen. “If being one’s
own worst enemy was a sport, I’d be a Hall of Fame
world champion”, he concedes. His point is that the
people who end up in hostels and shelters are often

JULY 22, 2022

hard to handle, but that this should not affect the
support they receive. The NHS, after all, does not
require character references before admitting you
to A&E. Adequate housing is a human right, not a
reward for good behaviour.

Lavelle’s béte noire is what he calls “philanthro-
capitalism”: the voluntary sector, charities and
private companies that have taken over homeless
provision in the age of austerity. These organizations
are self-regulating because they provide “support”
rather than “personal care”. They are not monitored
by the Care Quality Commission or Ofsted, even
though those they support may be as young as
sixteen. Nor do they have to comply with Freedom
of Information requests. They can ask hostel resi-
dents to work for a meagre weekly allowance rather
than the minimum wage, impose strict rules on their
behaviour and evict them for minor breaches.

Both Spratt and Lavelle advocate the Housing
First model pioneered in the 1990s by Sam Tsem-
beris, then a clinical psychologist at New York
University. Housing First provides homeless people
with their own home straightaway, with no precon-
ditions. They are not required to move gradually up
the ladder from a night shelter to more secure
housing. They do not need to get a job first, or obey
someone else’s house rules, or abstain from drugs
and alcohol. Only when they have been housed
are their other needs addressed. Tsemberis tells
Lavelle that Housing First is more about providing
treatment for addiction and mental health problems
than about housing, but says “you can’t really talk
about the treatment unless the person is housed,
otherwise the whole conversation is only about
survival”. Housing First has been successful in the
American states and cities where it has been rolled
out, as well as in Finland, the only EU country where
homelessness is falling.

These books argue convincingly that investing in
more social housing would benefit everyone, not
just those who live in it. It would ease pressure
on the rental sector and make private landlords
compete with an alternative source of good-quality
and secure homes. It would take the heat out of
the housing market and start to counter the
inheritocracy in which older people sitting on equity
pass it on to their children. It would alleviate other
forms of injustice, since housing inequality falls
disproportionately on Black, Asian and minority
ethnic tenants. It would make the kind of housing

TLS

A rough sleeper’s
belongings in an

underpass in east
London

POLITICS

safety scandal exposed by the Grenfell Tower fire
less likely. And it would reduce homelessness, which
places immense strain on the police, the criminal
justice system, the NHS and councils.

More subtly but profoundly, investing in social
housing would soften, for millions of people, that
repeated blow to their self-esteem that comes from
being beholden to someone else. It is fatiguing and
confidence-sapping to live with stained mattresses
and broken shower curtains; to show potential
buyers, your would-be evictors, around your home;
to be fearful of provoking your landlord by making
a fuss about repairs; to feel stuck in a limbo of
enforced adolescence, waiting for grown-up life to
begin. All this makes for what Spratt calls “an
uneasy and constant refrain, your life sung to the
tune of the privilege of others”. People waste
hulking portions of their lives looking for rented
rooms, dealing with bad landlords, extricating them-
selves from nightmare house shares and moving
their stuff from one room to the next. What could
be achieved with all that energy if it were expended
more creatively?

Perhaps something is stirring. Spratt highlights
the work of the community union ACORN and
organizations such as Generation Rent and Safer
Renting, which fight for tenants’ rights. She reports
on eviction resistance bootcamps and renters fight-
ing back against gentrifying regeneration schemes.
In 2016 she fronted a successful campaign to get
letting fees banned and deposits capped. Ultimately,
though, her book leaves you with the sense that
nothing much will change while the haves (home-
owners and investors) outnumber the have-nots
(renters and the homeless).

Housing inequality has barely been mentioned in
recent election campaigns. Spratt is told that when
David Cameron was prime minister, the phrase
“housing crisis” was banned in government. In the
early 2010s, while working as a junior producer on
Newsnight, she suggested covering more housing
stories, but her editor - homeowning and privately
educated - told her that they were “just not that
interesting”. The same kind of willed obliviousness
allows newspapers to place the blame for the
housing crisis on immigrants, or on young people
who are buying too many avocados or espressos
to save for a deposit. In the face of such simplistic
explanations, these books enrich our impoverished
sociological imagination. Their case studies are as
bleakly memorable as Raymond Carver stories. A
Brighton man sleeps in his work van at the height
of the pandemic, after losing his flat just before
the second lockdown. A woman evicted from
her flat in Peckham, who has recently attempted
suicide, is told that if she does not accept a flat in
Croydon she will have made herself “intentionally
homeless” and forfeited any right to support.
When she asks how she is meant to get to work or
take her daughter to school, the placement officer
tells her to “get up earlier”. Lavelle spends a wet
and freezing November night wandering around
Oldham, making endless circuits of the shopping
centre until it closes and “laughing maniacally
about what a parody my life had become”, before
huddling underneath a bridge.

Both books retell the story of Gyula Remes, the
Hungarian national who, just before Christmas 2018,
died in the underpass leading from the Houses of
Parliament to Westminster Tube station. At forty-
three, he was one year short of the mean age at
death of a homeless person in England and Wales.
This story received wide coverage because it seemed
shocking that MPs could routinely walk past the
effects of the austerity for which many of them had
voted. But it is not really so shocking - because MPs
are no different from the rest of us, we who avert
our eyes from the daily disaster playing out in the
pile of blankets on the other side of a pavement.
These books succeed in reinserting a whole person
into that human-shaped heap: someone with a
name, a family, a life history that led them there
and a body just as achy as ours would be if our bed
were made of stone. =
PHILOSOPHY

Living in truth

The philosopher who inspired resistance in communist Eastern Europe

JAMES KRAPFL

CONFRONTING TOTALITARIAN MINDS
Jan Patocka on politics and dissidence
ASPEN E. BRINTON
300pp. Karolinum Press. Paperback, £16.

LIVING IN PROBLEMATICITY
JAN PATOCKA
Translated and edited by Eric Manton
84pp. Karolinum Press and OIKOYMENH with
the Czech Academy of Sciences’ Institute of
Philosophy. Paperback, £14.

CARE FOR THE SOUL
The selected writings of Jan Patocka
JAN PATOCKA
Translated by Alex Zucker with Andrea Rehberg
and David Charlston
Edited by Ivan Chvatik and Erin Plunkett
392pp. Bloomsbury Academic. Paperback,
£22.49.

wrote Vaclav Havel in The Power of the

Powerless, “the spectre of what in the
West is called ‘dissent’”. The dissident playwright’s
revision of the first line of The Communist Manifesto
was more than playful criticism; it gave expression
to a philosophy of history that Havel hoped might
supplant that of Marx and Engels, and even save
the world from self-destruction. The author of this
philosophy, well known in France and central
Europe, but less familiar to anglophone readers, was
the Czech phenomenologist Jan Patocka.

Pato¢ka (1907-77) was a student of Edmund Husserl
and Martin Heidegger, and a “partner” with Hannah
Arendt, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and others in the
enterprise of probing our subjective relationships to
worldly phenomena. Appointed a professor at
Charles University in 1936, he was able to teach
formally for only a few years before and after the
Second World War, and following the Prague Spring.
He was never imprisoned, but the Nazis pressed him
into manual labour and the communists restricted
him to marginal academic positions. He was none-
theless famous for his informal teaching and for
the many writings in which he struggled with the
question of how to live in history.

It is tempting to explain Patocka’s importance
instrumentally, tracing a causal trajectory from his
underground seminars in Prague in the 1970s to the
demise of communist regimes across Eastern Europe
in 1989. This interpretation highlights Patocka’s
influence on Havel and the dissident association they
named after the year of its founding, Charter 77.
Havel dedicated The Power of the Powerless to
Patocka’s memory in 1978, and there is evidence
that the essay inspired the founders of the Polish
Solidarity movement in 1980. The revolutionary asso-
ciations in which millions of Czechoslovak citizens
participated in 1989-90 were directly modelled on
Charter 77. Seen this way, Patocka’s idea of “the
solidarity of the shaken” gave Solidarity and Czecho-
slovakia’s own Velvet Revolution a blueprint for
non-violent revolution.

The books reviewed here do not dispute this inter-
pretation, but their authors and editors insist that the
value of Patoéka’s philosophy of history transcends
its impact on history. For Patocka, Socratic question-
ing - and not class conflict or revolution - is history’s
locomotive. Dissidence inevitably results from such
questioning, and in Confronting Totalitarian Minds:

10

(14 A SPECTRE IS HAUNTING Eastern Europe”,

Jan Patocka on politics and dissidence, Aspen E.
Brinton explains how it gives life meaning in other-
wise hopeless situations. Two collections of Patocka’s
writings, meanwhile, can be read as manuals for dis-
sident practice. Living in Problematicity shows how
he analysed historical events philosophically, from
the interwar crisis of democracy to the normalization
that followed the suppression of the Prague Spring
in 1968. Care for the Soul: The selected writings of
Jan Patocka presents essays on subjects ranging from
history and philosophy to education and literature
that together address the question of how to live
meaningfully with others in historical time.

History, for Patocka, is “the shaken certitude of
pre-given meaning”. Brinton invokes Plato’s cave
allegory to explain. The prisoner questions whether
shadows on the cave wall comprise the full extent of
reality; questioning enables him to leave the cave,
but a sense of responsibility ultimately compels him
back to help liberate those who remain. If he suc-
ceeds, the community of questioners may constitute
a polis, a space where the soul - that element of a
human being not exhausted by the mere mainte-
nance of life - can be cultivated. Patocka contrasts
the history that results from questioning with a
“prehistory” in which unquestioned myth provided
meaning ready-made.

This history is driven (albeit to no certain end-
point) by those who practise “philosophy” in
Patocka’s universally accessible sense - who “care
for their souls” through the Socratic questioning of
pre-given meaning. Care for the soul entails “living
in truth” - a phrase that Havel made famous in The
Power of the Powerless - though it does not pre-
suppose any absolute truth. Patocka explicitly rejects
Plato’s belief that we can achieve absolute truth,
calling instead for “negative Platonism”. A more
straightforward way of expressing the idea of “living
in truth” might be “living in problematicity”: search-
ing for a truth that can never be absolutely known.
The problematicity of meaning is truthful in and of
itself, and those who care for their souls accept their
responsibility for whatever meaning they embrace in
a world of uncertainty.

One of the most arresting pieces in Care for the
Soul, edited by Ivan Chvatik and Erin Plunkett, and
translated by Alex Zucker with Andrea Rehberg and
David Charlston, is “Limping Pilgrim Josef Capek”, a
reflection on the life and death of the titular Czech
painter. As Plunkett explains in her insightful

TLS

“Fantomas” by
Josef Capek, 1918

66

Patocka gave
Solidarity and
Czechoslovakia’s
own Velvet
Revolution a
blueprint for
non-violent
revolution

James Krapfl is an
associate professor
of European history
at McGill University.
He is the author of
Revolution with a
Human Face: Politics,
culture, and
community in
Czechoslovakia,
1989-1992, 2013

introduction, the essay presents authentic human life
as a pilgrimage to an unknown place in which we
limp between two impulses, “that which would bind
us to the earth and the familiar, and that which leads
us to strike out again and again into the unfamiliar”.
Patocka offers another view of these impulses in
“Life in Balance, Life in Amplitude”, which Eric
Manton includes in Living in Problematicity. The
former is a life of pragmatism, governed by the every-
day; the latter is transcendence of the everyday.
Through the questioning that is care for the soul, we
can rise above the everyday - mere historicity - and
find our meaning in history.

The polis, once founded, never returns to a state
of prehistory, but its citizens can revert to myth
and a craving for the certain meanings that myth
provides. Thus it is that, though leaving the cave
made it possible to found the polis, the polis none-
theless executed Socrates. As Manton stresses in his
conclusion, “philosophy challenges the ideologies’
myths and dispels the illusions that society is led
and comforted by”. The fate of Socrates threatens
all “dissidents”. Yet some witnesses may be “shaken”
by violent attempts to preserve pre-given meaning.
If they establish a community with each other, this
“solidarity of the shaken” can become a force in
history, pushing humanity towards a polis where
Socrates can live.

It was this solidarity that Patocka hoped to nurture
in joining Havel as one of Charter 77’s first spokes-
men. Charter signatories expressed their sense of
“co-responsibility” and sought “to conduct a con-
structive dialogue” by drawing attention to the state’s
violation of its own laws, in hopes of fostering a
“humane society”. The cave-dwellers reacted pre-
dictably and, though persecution in most cases
stopped short of murder, Patocka, who had bronch-
itis when called for questioning in March 1977, died
of complications ten days later.

The Velvet Revolution of 1989 again exemplified
the solidarity of the shaken - this time uniting mil-
lions of citizens shaken by violence against students
calling for freedom in Prague. Yet even though the
revolution created a polis where Socrates was far
less likely to be killed, it was not a happily-ever-after
story. As Havel had emphasized in The Power of the
Powerless, techniques of manipulation in the West
were “infinitely more subtle and refined than the
brutal methods used in post-totalitarian societies”,
and with the revolution Czechoslovakia rejoined the
mainstream of what Patocka called “technological
civilization”. Though made possible by Socratic
questioning, this civilization places itself entirely in
the service of the everyday, neglecting questions of
human meaning. By reducing human beings to their
roles, it forces them to live in falsehood. Mobilizing
ever more force, it threatens humanity itself with
destruction, whether through nuclear catastrophe or
environmental degradation.

Confronting Totalitarian Minds addresses those
shaken by systemic violence in today’s world, what-
ever form it may take. Brinton clearly explains key
themes of Patocka’s philosophy before comparing
his thought with that of other dissidents: Havel, the
anti-Nazi theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Mahatma
Gandhi, student and anti-atomic activists of the
1960s, and environmental activists today. The com-
parisons are remarkably instructive. Bonhoeffer’s
“religionless Christianity”, for example, resembles
Patocka’s “negative Platonism” in its insistence on
the inaccessibility of absolute truth, suggesting that
similar approaches to living in problematicity can
proceed from both Christian and secular starting
points. Gandhi's life history shows “the general
applicability of Patocka’s philosophy to all who turn
to dissident politics as a way to move through life”,
helping to overcome an unnecessary Eurocentrism
in Pato¢ka’s oeuvre. Perhaps most importantly,
Brinton stresses that dissidents must be ever open to
questioning, rejecting absolutes, lest they suffer the
consequences of hubris or, worse, their efforts result
in new systems of oppression. The dissident path is
by nature uncertain, but that is precisely what makes
it the only path along which history can continue. =

JULY 22, 2022

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