Young Lisbeth

Stieg Larsson: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest

National Review, October 14, 2010 (November 1, 2010 issue)

Stockholm, December, 2009  © Andrew Stuttaford

I got Dan Brown, I really did. The history was bunk, the prose was Lego, and yet there was something there — that maddening, tantalizing what’s-going-to-happen-next — that kept me turning, turning, turning the pages deep into the night. By contrast, the success of Stieg Larsson, the Swedish thriller writer, who would — had he not died tragically young (only 50) in 2004, leaving just three (completed) novels behind — now be seen as a challenger to the impious Mr. Brown, leaves me more than a little amazed.

Collectively known as the Millennium trilogy, those three books have together sold over 30 million copies worldwide and quite a few bytes beside: Larsson is the first author to be downloaded over a million times on Kindle. Each installment has been made into a movie in Sweden. The first two films (I haven’t seen the third) were characterized by fine acting, land-of-Bergman pacing, and, of course, land-of-Bergman language, a tough sell anywhere much south of Malmo. Sure enough, a Hollywood remake is on the way, complete with James Bond, well, Daniel Craig, as Mikael “Kalle” Blomkvist, Larsson’s journalist-hero, and, for that matter, Larsson’s fantasy Larsson.

Craig was a smart choice: Borrowed glamour is better than none. Blomkvist may, in his painstakingly proper, pragmatically Scandinavian way, be something of a Lothario, but he’s also a middle-aged, excruciatingly priggish leftist, steeped in the shopworn pieties and bottomless paranoia of a certain strain of northern European political correctness. A bracing suggestion of 007 will be just what this tatty scribbler needs.

Mercifully, Hollywood’s filmmakers will probably follow the lead of their Swedish predecessors and dilute the “progressive” preaching that drones on throughout the Millennium saga, most loudly in the shape of a septic feminism fueled more by an apparent dislike of men than anything else. As a teenager, Larsson is said to have witnessed the gang-rape of a girl by some of his friends, a horror that he failed both to stop and to report. The form his feminism takes is thus a very public atonement. It’s not subtle — the Swedish title of the first novel is Man som hatar kvinnor (Men Who Hate Women), and its narrative is festooned with factoids designed to show just how hateful men can be. In all three novels his (almost invariably male) villains are brutish, sexist pigs, include abusers of prostitutes amongst their sleazy ranks, and, all too often, are in pursuit of underage entertainment.

Intriguingly, Larsson’s heroine and Blomkvist’s sometime lover, Lisbeth Salander, a busily bisexual 25-year-old hacker, is less than five feet tall, “doll-like,” and, until some breast-augmentation surgery in the second book comes to the rescue, “flat-chested, as if she had never reached puberty.” Make of that, Dr. Freud, what you will.

The more conventionally left-wing opinions that flavor the book are less bothersome and more predictable. The precincts of Schwedenkrimi (a subset of literature extensive enough to boast its own German compound noun) are a thoroughly Social Democratic (or worse) place. The genre’s pioneers (Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, co-authors of an enjoyable series of books between 1965 and 1975) were Stockholm-style soixante-huitards. Their most prominent successor, Henning Mankell (best known internationally for his marvelous Inspector Wallander), is another red-flag man, and a veteran of the embattled Gaza flotilla earlier this year. Under the circumstances, Larsson, an erstwhile Trotskyite who, like the fictional Blomkvist, spent much of his career working for a small leftist periodical, fits right in.

If Larsson’s politics are an irritant, his prose is a catastrophe. Nordic crime fiction tends to be written in a matter-of-fact way, but at his worst, Larsson is just a matter of lists:

She was back in Soder by 5.00 p.m. and had time for a quick visit to Axelsson’s Home Electronics, where she bought a nineteen-inch TV and a radio. Just before closing time she slipped into a store on Hornsgatan and bought a vacuum cleaner. At Mariahallen market she bought a mop, dishwashing liquid, a bucket, some detergent, hand soap, toothbrushes, and a giant package of toilet paper.

No, the translator is not to blame.

For all that, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo passed the Dan Brown test. Easily. There was something about the mystery that forms its dark core — a classic locked (more or less) room whodunit complete with truly hideous family secrets — that pulled me in. Even so, by themselves neither the dreadful doings of the decadent Vanger clan nor the occasional glimpses of hauntingly wintry landscape would have been quite enough to do the trick. Throw in a brilliant investigator compared with whom old cocaine-and-Stradivarius Sherlock is Andy Griffith, however, and airport bookstores’ Stieg-crammed shelves begin to make sense.

Heavily pierced and tattooed, Larsson’s surly, taciturn, and thoroughly antisocial Salander is a pattern-finding genius with a preternatural gift for hacking more typical of those modem-heavy movies that littered the dawn of the Internet age. She is also, Blomkvist realizes, someone who almost certainly plays for Dr. Asperger’s team. Oh yes, did I mention that Lisbeth is handy with a gun and good in a brawl? Absence of empathy, a surfeit of strangeness, and a comic-book collection of skills make her an ideal subject for Larsson’s surface-dwelling talents, yet somehow this plodding Swede also manages the remarkable achievement of persuading his readers to care about someone who would not, could not, give a damn about them. 

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a decent, self-contained story. If Larsson had stopped there, all would have been well. Unfortunately, he didn’t. The remaining two books are in fact one (they are separated by an abrupt break of Dickensian shamelessness) and they should have been none. Despite a MacGuffin involving sex trafficking (a suitably modish variety of XY villainy, and much in the Swedish headlines when Larsson was writing), The Girl Who Played with Fire is really all about Salander, the eponymous Girl. She shifts from being puzzle-master to puzzle, a transition that Larsson fumbles and, in the course of the final part of the trilogy, drops.

Part of what made Salander so interesting in the first place was the depth of her detachment, an idea that cannot survive her transformation in the second and third books into tough-grrl cliche, a lethal and seemingly indestructible combination of avenging angel, Modesty Blaise (an endearingly enduring heroine throughout Scandinavia), and, as underlined by a few sly hints in the text, Pippi Longstocking. Larsson had become so infatuated with his own creation (he had plans for ten books about her) that he came to believe that Salander, and the baroque background he dreamt up for her, would be enough to bring his readers along for the balance of the trilogy. Millions of the misguided have proved Larsson right, but your reviewer sticks to his opinion: Salander’s legend was allowed to overwhelm the story — and it wrecked it.

Mind you, as baroque backgrounds go, Salander’s is a doozy. It ranges far from the obligatory wretched childhood, venturing into territory that the borrowed 007 could easily call his own, all the while retaining an aura of suspicion and resentment that has a lot to do with the author, and not much with the plot. To read Larsson is to be given the impression of a Sweden where a handful of dedicated comrades struggle for their vision of justice against the overwhelming power of the Man. Given how much of Sweden’s ancient Social Democratic consensus still lingers on (notwithstanding any impression left by the recent election results), that is still, unfortunately, something of a stretch.

Nevertheless, Larsson sometimes allows a glimpse of a more authentic Sweden to slip through, something that will add to the interest in his writing to those living outside that remote Nordic bastion. Some of it — the leniency of the criminal justice system when compared with the American model — ought to take nobody aback, but other aspects will be more surprising. Henrik Vanger, an aged and ailing industrial titan, is allowed to come across as a sympathetic figure, a reminder that in Sweden — home, after all, of the powerful Wallenberg dynasty — social democracy has traditionally come with a notably corporatist tinge. It is the “yuppies” (itself a tellingly dated term), assertive, individualistic, and disruptive of time-honored Swedish ways, to whom both Larsson and Blomkvist object. The grandees who had run the companies that actually made things were fine: The “twenty-point stags of the old school” knew their place in the old consensual nation — even if it was close to the top of the tree.

Some may be taken aback by how ethnically diverse Larsson’s Stockholm turns out to be. In part, this is simply a reflection of the facts on the ground (nearly a fifth of the Swedish population is either foreign-born or a child of two foreign-born parents), but in part this glorious northern mosaic was also clearly an attempt by Larsson, much of whose journalistic career was spent in the anti-racist trenches, to remind his Swedish readers that their Folkhem had changed (in this case, the implication is that it’s for the better), a theme frequently echoed by other Nordic detective writers: A muttered racial slur is a good sign that a murderer has arrived on the scene.

But for a more evocative sense of Scandinavian locations alongside Scandinavian mayhem, there are better places to go. Wallander’s atmospheric Ystad is one obvious starting point, as is Jo Nesbø's sharply drawn Oslo, but I’d rather start with The Darkest Room, the sophomore novel by Johan Theorin: a spooky, beautifully written tale of a manor house on a half-deserted Baltic island that is the setting for the most exciting snowstorm I have read in years.

And Trotsky is nowhere to be seen.

So You Want To Be a Rock 'n' Roll Star

Keith Richards: Life

The Wall Street Journal, October 29, 2010

Right at the beginning of "Life," there's a hint of the glorious Spinal Tapestry that Keith Richards's autobiography might have been. Using words that are rather less decorous than a family newspaper can permit, Mr. Richards recalls how: "[1975] was the tour of the giant inflatable [phallus]. It came rising up from the stage as Mick sang 'Starf—er.' It was great was the [phallus], though we paid for it later in Mick's wanting props at every tour after that, to cover his insecurities. There was a huge business of getting elephants on stage in Memphis until they ended up crashing through ramps and [defecating] all over the stage in rehearsals and were abandoned." With such grandiloquent kitsch (and the author's implicit acceptance of its absurdity) and a cleverly freighted jeer thrown at a bandmate, we have the ingredients of a definitive rock star memoir. A child of the 1960s and 1970s, I read on expectantly.

 I should have known better. Judging by the hype and circumstance that has surrounded its release, "Life" is a tome meant to be taken very seriously: less a deliciously barbed and baroque romp than an attempt to amplify—up to 11 perhaps—the legend of the world's "most elegantly wasted man."

It will succeed. Apparently shocked, shocked by the guitarist's calm, if obsessive, depiction of his drug use (too much detail, Mr. Richards, way too much) and the suggestion that such pastimes can be managed (if not always, the author admits, by him), Walt Disney is reportedly considering writing our hero out of the next "Pirates of the Caribbean" movie. By contrast, the most outrageous substance abuse described in the book—a recipe for bangers and mash involving HP sauce—has attracted none of the condemnation it deserves.

Drugs have been a big part of Mr. Richards's life, but they are part of his shtick too, and the emphasis upon them in this book will buttress the Rolling Stoner as an icon of dilapidated cool. But cool is not what it was. For all the laconic detachment of Mr. Richards's frequently amusing prose, there is something sweaty about the way this former choirboy (yes, really) is so determined to establish his machismo. It's not the girls (though there are plenty—and why not) that give the game away but the hard-man anecdotes—"so, boom, I fired a shot through the floor"—the (possibly helpful) tips on knife-fighting, the brandished Jack Daniel's, the references to himself as an alpha male, the disparagement of Mick Jagger's "todger," even a competitive approach to narcotics:

"I don't think John [Lennon] ever left my house except horizontally." Mr. Richards claims to feel imprisoned by his image ("like a ball and chain"), but, ever the professional, he's willing to play along: "Folks out there created this folk hero. Bless their hearts. And I'll do the best I can to fulfill their needs."That was the first rock and roll I heard. It was a totally different way of delivering a song, a totally different sound, stripped down, burnt, no bulls---, no violins and ladies' choruses and schmaltz, totally different."

That's good of you, mate. But preserving the illusions that feed the Rolling Stones franchise has made "Life" so much less interesting than it could have been. That said, if you're after a first-person impression of the band, especially one in which Jagger, Brian Jones and Bill Wyman have been brutally cut down, this is the book for you. Ronnie Wood's "Ronnie" (2007) is a cheery enough collection of postcards, but he only formally joined the band in 1976. Bill Wyman's "Stone Alone" (1990) ends with the storied 1969 concert/wake for Brian Jones in Hyde Park. It's OK, and the author tries to settle a few scores ("the crucial riff for 'Jumpin' Jack Flash' was mine"), but it is ultimately dragged down by historical minutiae: "Finally we ended up in the Bali restaurant in Park Street, where we had a nice lunch of curried prawns and Cokes. It was the first real meal we'd had for twenty-four hours!"

Mr. Richards disdains (or perhaps has just forgotten) such details. "Life" is impressionistic, something reinforced by its being structured as an extended monologue—Dionysus reminiscing in the pub—a process helped along by a friendly collaborator, the accomplished journalist and writer James Fox. At least one of the two of them is capable of startlingly evocative language: Brian Jones's contributions to "Let It Bleed" were the "last flare from the shipwreck."

And "Life" covers a lot of ground. After opening his story with a smug account of a potentially disastrous arrest by Dixie's finest (it turns out more "Dukes of Hazzard" than "Cool Hand Luke"), Mr. Richards takes us back to a shockingly normal working-class childhood distinguished mainly by a musical fascination that turns into an obsession. Then comes art college saving him "from the dung heap," music, more music, Jagger, the coming together of the band, and a brief period of struggle followed, astoundingly quickly, by distaff Beatlemania. After that, we're in more familiar territory: Anita Pallenberg, Altamont, the pharmaceutical adventure tour that drags on for decades, and the usual tales of studios, tours, tax avoidance and excess. This culminates—let the moralists weep—not in a junkie's death but in a successful second marriage, creative contentment and an old man's bibliophile pleasures in a Connecticut library full of George MacDonald Fraser and Patrick O'Brian.

Naturally, there's plenty for gossips (the Mars bar was on the table), armchair psychiatrists, rock archaeologists and—to borrow one marvelous phrase—"lyric-watchers" to savor, as well as revealing glimpses of the inexhaustible self-regard of this new royalty: "A jury of my peers would be Jimmy Page, a conglomeration of musicians, guys that have been on the road and know what's what. My peers are not some lady doctor and a couple of plumbers."

For the musically inclined, there's a master class in the "simple secrets" needed to make a guitar sing the Richards way, even if the source for all those "crucial, wonderful riffs that just came" remains elusive. (Bill Wyman is probably not the explanation.)

A more reliable clue can be found in the way that Mr. Richards caresses the memory of the siren songs of his youth: Jimmy Reed, Muddy Waters, Elvis and the others, soaring across the Atlantic to an island still not quite emerged from the drabness of a war concluded more than a decade before, and, of course, this: "The early days of the magic art of guitar weaving started then. You realize what you can do playing guitar with another guy, and what the two of you can do is to the power of ten."

And so it was. And so it still is, but, after this book, Mr. Richards may have to look for a new lead singer.

Irrepressible

Leslie Brody: Irrepressible - The life and Times of Jessica Mitford

The Wall Street Journal, October 2, 2010

Toffs remain big box office in Britain as, less classily, does Adolf Hitler. Combine both in one glamorous, self-mythologizing family, and it's easy to see why the six Mitford sisters have helped feed generations of English journalists and historians. The daughters of a wildly eccentric peer, they made a splash in Britain's interwar high society. Two of them then immersed themselves in the more questionable pleasures of fascism—Unity ornamented the Führer's inner circle, and Diana married Oswald Mosley, Britain's would-be Duce.

Meanwhile, Jessica (1917-96), the fifth sister, known as Decca, took a different course, to civil-war Spain (against Franco). What followed—as Leslie Brody outlines in "Irrepressible," the first biography of this particular Mitford—was an existence filled with the clichés of an Internationale-set life. Boho revolt in London and America, marriage to a left-wing Jewish lawyer (take that, Diana!), and Communist Party membership. She stuck up for spies (the Rosenbergs, naturally); she was harassed by the U.S. government (subpoenaed by the House Committee on Un-American Activities, of course); and, on occasion, she did brave, marvelous things. These were usually in connection with the struggle for civil rights: 1950 found her in Jackson, Miss., campaigning to save a prisoner lost in the state's lethal legal labyrinth. A decade later Mitford was a Freedom Rider.

But some freedoms were more equal than others. Jessica quit the Communist Party, tellingly late, in 1957. That was a year after the popular uprising in Hungary, a country that she had managed to visit in 1955 without finding much amiss, an example of a blindness all too typical of her life-long attitude toward the left—unforgivable, given the clarity with which she could see when she chose.

Her "The American Way of Death" (1963) was a brutally clever examination of the scams and sharp practices of the funeral business. It established her as a muckraking journalist, and it paved the way for her role as a droll, rickety, radical grande dame—a performance that only ended in 1996 with her funeral (costing $475, Ms. Brody informs us).

"Irrepressible" is a brisk, engaging and mainly admiring work, but the author—best known for "Red Star Sister," a memoir of her own years as an activist in the 1960s counterculture—seems neither worried nor terribly interested that Jessica hung on in a largely Stalinist party long past the usual wartime excuse, something that a more critical biographer might have used to suggest that the red sheep of the Mitford family was not so different from Diana and Unity after all.

Why all three women succumbed to the totalitarian temptation is to be found in their times, in their genes and in the brilliant mess of an upbringing that muddled the aesthetics of Blandings with the ethics of Berchtesgarten. But not, alas, in Ms. Brody's book.

Through A Glass, Darkly

John Carey: William Golding, The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies - A Life

National Review, July 28, 2010 (August 16, 2010 issue) 

We’ll never know for sure what the English writer William Golding (1911–93), a publicly private man, would have thought about the publication of this book. Thanks partly to Golding’s failure to cooperate, no biographies of him were published during his lifetime, but the assumption that follows from that would probably be wrong. Feast has followed famine: To help him in his work on this book, the Golding family granted John Carey, a prominent Oxford academic, distinguished literary critic, and acquaintance of Golding, access to the author’s previously closed archive. It was a hoard too extensive not to have been designed as an invitation, one day, to biographers, and this appears to have been exactly what Golding intended. He just had to die first. Safe in his grave, Golding couldn’t be pestered; but he could be remembered.

The Golding papers contain (amongst much else) early drafts of what was published, and copies of what was not — including novels or their fragments, two autobiographical works, and a 5,000-page warts-and-all journal maintained more or less daily for 22 years. As a resource for Carey, this trove was essential — and it was not wasted. This book must be one of the most closely observed portraits of an author ever written. If you are looking for a perceptive, marvelously written close-up of a body of work being shaped and reshaped, this is the book for you. And if you want to know when Golding upgraded chess computers — and to what model — this is also the book for you.

As a picture of both the man and his oeuvre, this makes for an engrossing (if sometimes overly pointillist) read, but I finished it unconvinced that Golding was worth all the effort. As Carey’s title reminds us, his subject’s reputation has dwindled. Golding no longer needs no further introduction, and so he has been given that implicitly condescending identifier, “The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies.”

Carey explains that this was meant both ironically and as bait to lure new readers in, but I doubt that Golding himself would have been greatly amused. The book may have made his fortune (since its publication in 1954 Lord of the Flies has sold 20 million copies in the U.K. alone) and his reputation (there would have been no Nobel Prize without it), but Golding himself later described it as “boring and crude.” False modesty? In part, but as with so much else about Golding, the truth was more complex than the performance. The disdain Golding came to feel for his first published novel was genuine, and very revealing. And it’s no less revealing that Carey, a biographer convinced of his subject’s genius, makes so little of it.

Could the reason for this be that Golding’s most brilliant book was, in some crucial ways, among his least representative? To be sure, its big theme — man’s fallen nature — became the leitmotif of much of Golding’s writing, and, yes, like so many of his novels, Lord of the Flies is characterized by passages of astounding power and almost hallucinatory beauty. Nevertheless, by Golding’s standards it is a remarkably spare and uncluttered work. Its message may be profound, but its language and its storyline are stark, straightforward, and unburdened by the rococo rambling that bedevils so much of his later writing.

Much of this was thanks to the efforts of Faber and Faber’s Charles Monteith, the novice editor who was the first to see what Golding’s much-rejected typescript could become. The fruitful relationship between the clever, long-suffering, and benignly manipulative Monteith and his histrionic, pathologically self-absorbed discovery is wonderfully described by Carey — and is essential for a proper understanding of Golding’s career. The two men were to work together for four decades, but it is reasonable to assume that Monteith’s creative influence was at its peak right at the beginning of their relationship. Golding wanted to be published, and Monteith appeared to be the only person who could make it happen. So Lord of the Flies was slimmed down, losing both back-story and, more significantly, a messiah. Golding had originally envisaged the character Simon as a Jesus figure. His death was to have been an act of self-sacrifice: noble, mystical. After Monteith’s intervention, it is reduced to a cruel accident, the result of hysterical misunderstanding. The only god on this island was the devil that the children had dreamt up for themselves. They are — we are — alone.

Monteith was right. Horror is amplified by hopelessness. But the change, I suspect, may have left Golding thinking that the book that made his name was not quite his. He was deeply (if unconventionally) religious. He had, he disclosed, seen spirits and apparitions. Psychiatrists can make of that what they will (while Carey generally has plenty to say about what made Golding Golding, he shies away from medical commentary, which is a mistake), but to Golding such fancies were fact. Taking the Jesus out of Simon must have seemed to him an unnatural and arbitrary act. Years after Lord of the Flies was published, he was, as Carey notes, still talking up the sanctity of Simon — and still failing to reverse the effects of Monteith’s shrewd editorial pen, a failure he finally tried to remedy with Matty, the enigmatic central character in the largely incoherent Darkness Visible (1979), a figure who may be an angel, a holy fool, or both, but either way remains overshadowed, like all Golding’s later characters, by a handful of feral schoolboys.

Golding found himself on firmer ground when he returned in book after book to the wickedness of you and me. “Man produces evil,” he wrote, “as a bee produces honey”: a typically melodramatic overstatement redeemed by the subtler suggestion that we have no real choice in the matter, it’s just who we are. When the last dumb but decent Neanderthals of The Inheritors (1955), the novel with which Golding followed Lord of the Flies, are wiped out by the New People (your ancestors and mine), their annihilation is merely the inevitable consequence of the arrival of smarter, more assertive Homo sapiens. It’s just what we do.

The sources of Golding’s misanthropy were complex and (I’ll take psychological speculation a little further than Carey is prepared to go) rooted in a disordered, depressive psyche, lunatic spirituality, and the need for an alibi to assuage the overwhelming sense of guilt that descended upon him during his (distinguished) service in Britain’s wartime navy and never went away. The war, explained Golding, generated “a sort of religious convulsion” within him, giving him for the first time “a kind of framework of principles.” Once they were in place, however, he realized that he had not lived up to them. “I have,” he claimed, “always understood the Nazis because I am that sort by nature” — a characteristically absurd, characteristically self-important exaggeration. The similarities that Golding saw between himself and the Hitler crowd lay in what he now — eyes freshly opened — believed to have been the “viciousness” and “cruelty” of his younger self. To be sure, there was that clumsily attempted (and mercifully unsuccessful) date rape, and the smashed heart and mind of an abandoned fiancee (her traces can be detected in 1959’s Free Fall), as well as some more persistent suggestions of sadism, but, for all that, he was a long, long way from the Third Reich.

This overwrought sense of his sin would only have been exacerbated by — he was a child of his era — a mix of curiosity and unease about his obvious homosexual leanings. But after fantasies of sodomy and hints of the lash came the reality of rum. As Carey records in sometimes spectacular detail, Golding was for decades a guzzle-yourself-prone drinker, and obnoxious with it: not an unknown phenomenon in literary circles, but in his case it could come with a distinctive twist. We may laugh (well, I did) at the tale of a drunken Golding attacking another author’s Bob Dylan puppet, but that’s before discovering that Golding had mistaken the marionette-troubadour for Satan. That sense of his sin may have helped drive Golding to drink, but it also followed him there. How much better if Golding could soothe himself with the idea that he was not really as bad as he thought. In the absence of a sense of proportion, the next best thing would be the conviction that everyone else was just as bad. It’s not a case that Carey makes, but some of Golding’s onslaught on the Old Adam must have been an attempt to conscript his fellow man into sharing the burden of the wickedness that he could not bear to shoulder alone.

But perhaps he drank to deal with something else too. Lord of the Flies is an extraordinary creation, a ghastly glimpse of a very dark place, but much of the rest of Golding’s work (with the exception of 1956’s remarkable Pincher Martin) is dreary, pretentious, and sometimes just nuts. Carey would certainly not agree, but for all his canny, well-crafted explanations of some of Golding’s more puzzling writing, and despite his deployment of a series of enthusiastic mid-century critics to hosanna his hero, the suspicion must remain that Golding’s talents were more second-division than first. After Lord of the Flies, Golding had shot his bolt and, I reckon, he knew it. He was, after all, smart enough and insecure enough to be his own fiercest critic. If that obsessive guilt of his was not already reason to turn to the bottle, the growing realization that he would never repeat the success of his debut would surely have done the trick, particularly if, like so many high achievers, he already felt like a fraud. And he often did.

All this may also help explain Golding’s prickliness, rumored plagiarism (a topic too quickly passed over by Carey), money worries that lingered even as his bank balance fattened, and — he was British after all — undignified scramble for a knighthood and, presumably, the validation that some might believe a “K” could bring.

But, still: One masterpiece ought to be enough for a reputation. The island transformed by this bleakest of Prosperos into mirror and hell will endure long after the booze and the bluster have passed into trivia:

Toward the end of the afternoon, the mirages were settling a little. They found the end of the island, quite distinct, and not magicked out of shape or sense. There was a jumble of the usual squareness, with one great block sitting out in the lagoon. Sea birds were nesting there. “Like icing,” said Ralph, “on a pink cake.”

What could go wrong?

Tower of Power

Norbert Lynton: Tatlin's Tower - Monument to Revolution

The Weekly Standard: June 14, 2010

Imagine that a critic had written a book centered on Olympia and Triumph of the Will without emphasizing the fact, however well known, that the Nazi ideology to which the director of those movies had dedicated her talent had led to the slaughter of millions. You can’t. It would be inconceivable. Few can deny that, at their best (if that’s the adjective), Leni Riefenstahl’s films were works of genius, but their hideous context should never be ignored. And generally it isn’t.

The artists who promoted Soviet communism are given an easier ride. To take perhaps the most prominent, Sergei Eisenstein is remembered today as a stylistically revolutionary filmmaker. Fair enough. But who mentions that he, no less than Riefenstahl, was a flack for totalitarian savagery? And Eisenstein was not alone. As the Bolsheviks hacked their millennial way to a radiant future built on slaughter, medieval despotism, and the annihilation of the society that had preceded them, they were cheered on by some of the brightest creative spirits of their era, by Malevich, by Rodchenko, by Mayakovsky, by—well, take your pick.

Amongst those who cheered the loudest was Vladimir Tatlin (1885-1953), designer of the immense (perhaps 1,200 feet tall) unbuilt structure that became a defining emblem of revolutionary élan. He is the subject of this fascinating, if in one sense tellingly uncritical, study completed by the noted British art historian Norbert Lynton shortly before his death in 2007. Scholarly, densely argued, and rendered more opaque still by the gaps in Tatlin’s foggy biography, the book is wonderfully illustrated but not the easiest of reads. That said, persevere for long enough and you will be left mourning the brilliant culture of Russia’s imperial twilight, struck by the strangeness of what replaced it, and appalled by the moral vacuum at the heart of Lynton’s book.

Already deservedly (as Lynton demonstrates) famous as one of Russia’s leading modern artists, Tatlin began planning his building, the “tower” of Lynton’s title, in early 1919, shortly after taking a senior position in the ministry run by Anatoly Lunacharsky, Lenin’s commissar for enlightenment. The tower was to be a monument to the Third International (the Comintern) and thus to global revolution. As such, it would have been a celebration of massacres past, present, and to come. Dreamt up as a wonder of the modern world, Tatlin’s tower was to be the lighthouse of some nightmare Pharos, a beacon illuminating only the way to destruction.

None of this seems to have bothered Lynton overmuch. He confines himself to anodyne remarks about the tower’s role as an incitement to revolution without worrying too much what that revolution might mean in practice, a peculiar omission from a man (a Jewish boy in Hitler’s Reich) who had himself been forced to flee the rage of a state.

On the other hand, one of the strengths of this book is the manner in which Lynton links Tatlin’s plans for his tower to the curious (and now largely forgotten) fusion of mysticism and futurism (Lynton’s suggestion that the tower also reflects Christian imagery is less convincing) that could be found in the thinking of some sections of the pro-Bolshevik intelligentsia: His “temple” would, Tatlin gushed, be the precursor of a future “temple of the worlds—which would .  .  . move in infinite space,” emancipating “all the world from bondage to gravity” and paving the way for the “expression .  .  . of mutual love of all the generations,” of a mankind that must become “sky-mechanics and sky-physicists.”

A marginally less overexcited Nikolai Punin, future lover, companion, and heartbreaker of the poetess Anna Akhmatova, and a man ultimately destined to perish in the Gulag, explained how the tower, home to the coming world government, would be an “organic synthesis of architecture, sculpture, and painting.” It was to encompass three large halls, one “for legislative purposes,” shaped like a cube, that rotated annually, one pyramidal (for bureaucrats) that rotated monthly, and one cylindrical, dedicated to “disseminating information to the world proletariat,” which was meant to rotate daily. These halls would be enveloped within a double helix framework that hinted at the ziggurats of antiquity and myth. Location, too, was crucial. The idea was that this vast, asymmetrical edifice of steel, iron, and glass would squat in the middle of the former St. Petersburg. Taunting and overshadowing the elegance and grandeur of the old imperial capital that had itself once represented a new direction for Russia, it would stand as a rebuke to history and homage to the future.

Spiraled, pointing, angled, closer in appearance to a giant telescope or piece of artillery than to a building, Tatlin’s work conveyed both an impression of coiled power and energy unleashed. This was an architecture parlante intended to roar, a stupendous symbol of the new age. Statues of men on horseback were, like the aristocrats—the individuals—they depicted, to be consigned to the past. Tatlin’s tower would be utilitarian, a manifestation of the collective will, a “living machine” made of industrial materials yet somehow organic, functional, more-than-modern and, like the revolution, in perpetual motion.

Of course, it was never built. The resources were not there; the political will was not there (those running the new Soviet state preferred their monuments representational, solid, and stolid); and the technology was not there. Failing to take account of the last was a rare lapse for Tatlin, the son of an engineer and a man who took pride in his technical savvy, unless the tower was (as plausibly claimed by John Milner in the fine monograph on Tatlin he wrote in the 1980s) not so much impractical as explicitly utopian from the get-go, a manifesto rather than a blueprint.

Tatlin did manage to build at least three large-scale models of his tower, photographs of which are included in Lynton’s book. The first stood around 15 feet high above a circular base (in which someone could crouch, turning the cranks that moved the tower’s halls); the second, slightly smaller and decidedly more elegant, was exhibited in 1925 in Paris, home of the Eiffel Tower that had partly inspired it; and the third, stripped down and simplified, made an appearance, like some futurist fetish, at a ceremonial parade in Leningrad the same year. All three have since vanished, long since lost like so much else in the Soviet junkyard, but Tatlin’s original vision itself endured in the leftist imagination as a statement of the what-could-be and, later, the what-could-have-been. Artistically, its status as one of the 20th century’s most influential icons of architecture unbound remains undiminished.

As for Tatlin, his career went into a decline in the culturally more conventional years of full Stalinism, neither out of favor, nor quite in. His became a life of smaller-scale projects, from furniture design, to stage sets, to art more traditional than anything he had produced for decades. What was left of his old utopian obsessions revealed itself in prolonged attempts to perfect the Letatlin, his final challenge to “the bondage of gravity.” A man-powered flying machine of remarkable beauty—oddly, no images of this craft are included in Lynton’s book—it was inspired by the work of Leonardo da Vinci, another artist uncomfortable with strict divisions between the aesthetic and the practical, in the same field. It never flew.

Towards the end, Lynton includes a picture of an older Tatlin. He looks sad, beaten, crushed, an Icarus who had fallen to earth without ever reaching the heavens.

King & the Commissars

David King: Red Star over Russia

The New Criterion, March 1, 2010

To be asked to pick the best book that you have read in the past year is usually an invitation to equivocation, but that was not the case on one evening in the late 1990s when my interrogator—and that’s the word—was the Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven. “Well,” I replied, “The Commissar Vanishes.”

She hadn’t heard of it. Good. Liked the book’s concept. Better. Told an aide to write down the title. Better still. Didn’t know that it was written by an unreconstructed lefty. Ah, just as well.

David King’s The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin’s Russia (1997) remains one of the finest and most unusual pieces of Sovietology ever produced. To start with, it is based on photographs, posters, and illustrations drawn from its author’s massive 250,000-piece collection of images relating to Russia, the former Soviet Union and “Communist movements everywhere,” a unique resource that King has been assembling for decades. This reddest of hoards is a monument to King’s political leanings—he has published more than is entirely healthy on the topic of Leon Trotsky—but, thanks to its range, it has ended up as something far grander than that. The same might be said of The Commissar Vanishes. Inspired by the way in which the Soviets wrote Trotsky out of history, King’s command of his material transforms what might have been a mildly interesting Fourth Internationalist lament into a startlingly original evisceration of the Stalinist method.

Specifically, the book revolves around the way that images and, in particular, photographs were repeatedly chopped, changed, juggled, retouched, altered, and manipulated by a regime determined to remove inconvenient traces of inconvenient people from the historical record. Execution was not enough. The lives that had gone before that concluding bullet in the skull had to be retrospectively reshaped to fit Stalin’s Procrustean view of how the Soviet story should be told.

It was a campaign that recognized no distinction between public and private, and it was a campaign that nobody could safely ignore. King highlights the precision with which the famous artist and photographer Alexander Rodchenko inked out the faces of the purged from his personal copy of a book he had himself produced. Blackly blank-faced, these remnants, these apparitions, these Banquos at the apparatchiks’ dangerous feast, linger on the page alongside those still in favor, a warning, a reproach, an act of insurance. As the countless scribblings over, hacked-out heads, and other precautionary mutilations of books from this era bear witness, such ad hoc self-censorship was commonplace, if too crude and small-scale for the needs of a modern totalitarian state. To fill that gap, specialists emerged, dedicated to the wholesale reengineering of history into a malleable, constantly reedited narrative.

But it was not enough to lie about the past. Those lies had to work. They had to be buttressed and reinforced. They had to be illustrated. In one characteristic sequence, King shows how Trotsky, the commissar of King’s tellingly elegiac title, was among those subsequently “vanished” from a frequently published photograph of the second anniversary of the October revolution. With tinkering such as this, history could be continuously (the party line was always changing) reshaped, reinvented, and manufactured in a process only occasionally—and incompletely—redeemed by the archetypically Soviet slovenliness of those who sliced and diced their way through the past but sometimes allowed the faintest suggestion of the truth to slip through. In another photograph of those same celebrations republished in 1987, most of Trotsky has been edited out, but his elbow survives, unexplained, unidentified, somebody’s elbow, nobody’s elbow.

As an explanation of history through its manipulation, The Commissar Vanishes is a technical tour de force. As an examination of the wider pathologies of the Stalinist state it is a masterpiece. It was followed by Ordinary Citizens: The Victims of Stalin (2003), a collection of over a hundred mugshots from the NKVD/KGB archives, glimpses of the doomed hours or days from their annihilation.

Compared with the narrower focus of those two earlier works, Red Star over Russia is an unruly sprawling epic, “a fast-forward visual history of the Soviet Union” from 1917 until just after the death of Stalin. Based again on King’s archive, this book is another extraordinary creation, but to understand it properly it helps to look at the reasons King gives for concluding his narrative when he does:

The subsequent “period of stagnation”, when Leonid Brezhnev was in charge, was generally as dull and sluggish on the visual front as it was politically, and for this reason has been left out. So too have the final years of collapse under Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin.”

Perhaps the perestroika era was omitted because the break in the narrative would have been too tricky to manage. Perhaps. Given his ideological orientation, it is difficult to avoid the suspicion that King might have found this terminal renunciation of 1917’s once radiant future just too awful a development to contemplate. That said, his assertion that it was largely aesthetic considerations that led him to pass over the stodgy Brezhnev era rings true. As the art editor of the London Sunday Times’s magazine between 1965–75, he was at the helm during the magazine’s creative zenith, a time when its striking layout was, none too coincidentally, often highly suggestive of the early Soviet and pre-Soviet avant-garde, an approach successfully repeated in Red Star over Russia.

King has a good eye and a Fleet Street–sharpened sense of how to lure the reader in. Red Star over Russia’s cover is of a dramatically charging Red cavalryman, designed in civil war–era Kiev but anticipating Roy Lichtenstein by four decades. Meanwhile the beautiful Tamara Litsinskaya graces the cover of Ordinary Citizens. Pause for a moment to remember her: she was twenty-seven years old, “non-party,” and, on August 25, 1937, she was shot. Inevitably, there is the suspicion that King’s pursuit of the aesthetically (and commercially) effective could tempt him to ignore other, higher, considerations. A mugshot is not a pin-up. Then again, human nature is what is. To the observer—and that’s what buying Ordinary Citizens makes us—the loveliness of this young woman only adds to the poignancy to us of her terrible fate, and thus to the power of King’s message. Now we will remember Tamara Litsinskaya. And so we should.

To take another example of how the search for the right image risks clashing with the dictates of good taste, consider the inclusion in Red Star over Russia of the best-known of Dmitri Baltermans’s photographs of peasant women grieving over the victims of a Nazi massacre near Kerch. It is one of the greatest war photographs ever taken. It helped define the conflict for many Soviets. It belongs in the book. Nevertheless, thanks to the passing of time and to Red Star over Russia’s superior production values, Baltermans’s bleak, unforgivably beautiful image also becomes an objet d’art, glossily packaged for our contemplation, but increasingly disconnected from the tragedy it records. More troublingly still, the relatively poorly and rarely photographed Holodomor (1932–3), the genocidal man-made famine in which as many as seven million Ukrainians may have died, merits just one small photo, a snapshot really. Seven million dead. One photograph.

Red Star over Russia is also a volume that, however inadvertently (it was clearly not King’s intent), forces its readers to ponder their reaction to beauty deployed in the service of evil. That’s a topic that can generate a safely academic debate when it comes, say, to the artistic qualities of artifacts used by the Aztecs in their rites of human sacrifice. It becomes rather less comfortable the closer we come to our own time. Too often the response is denial or evasion. The Nazis never produced anything of aesthetic interest. The creative successes of Fascist Italy were always a despite, never a because. The artistic explosion of the early Soviet era was a gorgeous false dawn, tragic symbol of the nascent Utopia that Stalin cut down. None of these claims is true.

So far as the best of that Soviet art is concerned, the extent of its creators’ achievement should be acknowledged—many of the works reproduced by King are first rate—but so should the fact that this was art knowingly put at the disposal of a regime set on mass murder from the very beginning. That’s an ugliness King is unwilling to confront, quite possibly because this long-time admirer of Trotsky retains some allegiance to the conceit of the Revolution Betrayed, and thus to the assertion (to use a polite word) that the Bolshevik experiment was a glorious dream that went astray—an assertion that would, had it any connection with reality, do much to get many of the regime’s early cheerleaders off the moral hook.

It’s an attitude that can also be detected in King’s handling of some of the mugshots included in Red Star over Russia: those of the defendants in the first and second great Moscow show trials of the late 1930s. To be left unmoved by these portraits (and they are portraits—the NKVD used natural light, eliminating the frozen artificiality of the flashbulb photo) of these broken, terrified, furious, stunned individuals would be monstrous. At the same time, it’s impossible not to wonder over what horrors these members of the old Bolshevik elite had themselves presided. King never tells us. It’s perhaps no less significant that while King puts together a vivid indictment of the Stalin regime, most of the images he deploys to illustrate the early years of the revolution (with the exception of some harrowing photographs of the Volga famine of 1920–1) convey a sense of dynamism, of progress on the move. Where atrocity is depicted, it is only obliquely, in a few posters and in a civil war photograph of captured Red Army soldiers held, naturally, on a White “death ship.” To be sure the Whites frequently reverted to a near-primeval savagery in their fight against Bolshevism, but of the almost unimaginable, almost ecstatic cruelty unleashed on Russia by the revolutionaries we are shown nothing.

For all that, no page of Red Star over Russia is wasted: there is enough in this book to sustain more than one interpretation both of the revolution and of what it became. Many of the images, most notably the reproductions and photographs of the regime’s initially utopian, increasingly deranged, and ultimately surreal iconography, can, if read properly, be used to help pinpoint Communism for the millennial cult that it really was. At its core, there was nothing progressive about it. I doubt that King would agree with this diagnosis. He concludes Red Star over Russia with the snide observation that the fall of the Soviet Union brought “a united sigh of relief” to “the capitalists of the world.” The liberation, however imperfect, of tens of millions of ordinary citizens by that collapse doesn’t rate a mention. Some people never learn. Faith can be like that.

Walking With Destiny

Paul Johnson: Winston Churchill

National Review, December 9, 2009

One of the most remarkable aspects of Winston Churchill’s sprawling epic of a life was the way that he was able to cram it all in — to do all that — in a mere 90 years. It is only marginally less miraculous that Paul Johnson has now managed to make an excellent job of summing up that life — and, no less important, offer up a good measure of the man who lived it — in a book of a little under 200 pages.

This is not a “definitive” Churchill. For that, turn to the massive official biography begun by his son and taken to a triumphant conclusion by the indefatigable Sir Martin Gilbert. Nor is it a full-length (if not Gilbertian in size) work on the lines of Roy Jenkins’s Churchill (2001), a fine, feline interpretation (Johnson rates it as the best single-volume account of Churchill’s life) made all the more interesting for having been written by a man who had, like Churchill, been Britain’s home secretary and chancellor of the exchequer, although not, mercifully (he was a socialist of sorts, and a Europhile of conviction), prime minister.

Paul Johnson’s take is something else, a deft, brisk, admiring Life of a Great Man, a book for a country-house weekend, perhaps, crafted in vintage style and best read, I’d think, in the company of some vintage port. A distinguished journalist (and a regular NR contributor) and successful popular (in the best meaning of that term) historian, Johnson writes in a slightly archaic rhythm, a lavish, lively prose that is sometimes old-fashioned (“At this moment providence intervened”) and occasionally orotund (“the two worked together to bring the great fleet of measures into harbor, wafted by the winds of their oratory”). This is an author who cares about narrative, and who relishes grand, sweeping (frequently, very sweeping) judgments, faintly irritating pulpitry (“It is a joy to write his life. . . . None holds more lessons, especially for youth”), well-chosen anecdotes, and neat, shrewd observations (“Churchill had always used clothes for personal propaganda”). The resulting mix comes as a rich treat after the dense jargon and denser preoccupations that characterize the efforts of so many contemporary academic historians. Readers looking for an attempt to squeeze Churchill into the straitjacket of early-21st-century attitudes will be disappointed, as will those looking for some rote revisionism, but then they probably should not have been reading Johnson in the first place.

Despite going a little easy on his subject over what were, at least arguably, his two most notorious (and very different) blunders — the Gallipoli campaign and his 1925 decision to put Britain back on the gold standard at too high a parity — and making no mention of some of the more harebrained schemes Churchill dreamt up in World War II, Johnson shows that he is prepared to criticize, at least on occasion. Thus he takes aim at Churchill’s quixotic, last-ditch defense of the poisonous Edward the Abdicator, and at more serious, if lesser known, errors of judgment, such as the role that Churchill played in carelessly pushing 1920s Japan on a path that was eventually to transform the Japanese from allies into antagonists. There was, Churchill told the then–prime minister of Britain, not “the slightest chance” of a war with Japan in their lifetimes. The eerie intuitive sense that enabled him to be one of the first Englishmen to understand the true nature of both Nazism and Bolshevism was, this time, nowhere to be seen. Less than 20 years later, Singapore fell.

But if Johnson has (for the most part) avoided the temptations of hero worship, he has an appreciation for the heroic qualities of Churchill’s life. This is only underlined by the obvious pleasure he takes in demonstrating how far Churchill could stray from more conventional notions of how heroes should behave, perhaps most charmingly in the story of when, in 1946 and aged 17, Johnson (lucky fellow!) had the opportunity to ask the greatest of Britain’s leaders to what he attributed his success in life: “Without pause or hesitation, he replied: ‘Conservation of energy. Never stand up when you can sit down, and never sit down when you can lie down.’ He then got into his limo.” A seasoned veteran both of dusty, sand-blown imperial campaigns and of the mud of the Western Front, who had, as prime minister and aged nearly 70, to be dissuaded from showing up for the D-Day landings, Churchill was a warrior as much as he was a warlord, yet somehow I suspect this is not the sort of reply, self-deprecatory and sly, that an Achilles would have given.

What Achilles would have recognized, however, was Churchill’s relentless pursuit of glory and fame. Along with his romantic ideal of nation, and his gargantuan appetite for excitement, it is as close as we can come to finding a key to understanding what drove this complex man. With the idea of an afterlife appearing as unlikely to Churchill (for all practical purposes an atheist, but in a very English way: he was, he once said, a buttress of the Church of England, “support[ing] it from the outside”) as to the heroes of the Iliad, his achievements could be the only sure route to the immortality that he craved.

In bidding farewell to the outgoing Labour members of his wartime coalition, Churchill told them “the light of history will shine on all your helmets.” To make sure that it shone on his, he became his own Homer. “Words,” he had once remarked, “are the only things that last forever.” The sole reward he requested for his services during the war was that a large quantity of Britain’s wartime papers be classified as his personal property. By effectively gaining exclusive access to so much of the official record, he was able to be among the first to get in his word (or, more accurately, more than 2 million words) on the topic of the war; and so, aided by a dedicated team, he did. The six volumes of his The Second World War were to shape our understanding of the conflict for a generation, and in no small respect they still do. They also made Churchill a great deal of money ($50 million, at today’s value, not including serialization rights), something that was never a small consideration for a man so skillful at turning ink into gold.

His account is highly partial and, even allowing for what was known at the time, it leaves out much of the story, but, as Johnson explains, “by giving his version of the greatest of all wars . . . he was fighting for his ultimate place in history. What was at stake was his status as hero. So he fought hard and took no prisoners. On the whole he won the war of words, as he had earlier won the war of deeds.” But then, given Churchill’s way with language, a talent so profound that there was a time when it seemed only his speeches stood between the island race and defeat, this could not have been an entirely unexpected result.

And it’s a mark of Johnson’s sensitivity as a writer — and his keen eye for good material — how often he is prepared to let Churchill speak for himself. If there’s a drawback to this biography it is that it doesn’t contain much fresh detail for those already familiar with the story: The only two things new to me were the revelation that Churchill couldn’t stand the sound of whistling (by contrast, Johnson relates that Hitler was “an expert and enthusiastic whistler: he could do the entire score of The Merry Widow, his favourite opera”) and the claim that Churchill’s liver, “inspected after his death, was found to be as perfect as a young child’s,” something that might suggest that this peripatetic and famously bibulous statesman regularly included Lourdes in his wanderings.

But this lack of new information, almost inevitable in a brief summary of a well-known life, is compensated for by the pleasure of rereading the quotations from Churchill, familiar, well-loved friends for the most part, that Johnson weaves through his text as the best of all guides to the man who first said them. There are the jokes, the asides, and, of course, extracts from those great, rolling, resonant speeches. To read them is to hear again that voice, a voice (in this case speaking on the threat to British India) capable of conjuring up imagery that has not yet lost its power to chill or, in what may be our own coming age of Western retreat, sound the alarm: “Greedy appetites have been excited and many itching fingers are stretching and scratching at the vast pillage of a derelict Empire.”

And then there’s this, from 1940, on the Anglo-American “special relationship”: “The British Empire and the United States will have to be somewhat mixed up together in some of their affairs for mutual and general advantage. For my own part, looking out upon the future, I do not view the process with any misgivings. . . . No one can stop it. Like the Mississippi, it just keeps rolling along. Let it roll. Let it roll on full flood, inexorable, irresistible, benignant [regrettably, Johnson omits that splendid ‘benignant’], to broader lands and better days.”

If I admit that rereading those words in the age of the EU, of Gordon Brown, and of Barack Obama left me sad, I hope that you will understand.

A Proper Revolution?

Steve Pincus: 1688 - The First Modern Revolution

National Review, October 15, 2009

Infuriated by the high-church, high-Tory critiques of a British historian impertinent enough to suggest that the tercentenary of England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688 was not worth celebrating, Mrs. Thatcher’s then Lord Chancellor jibed that “academic historians never make their money by saying that the established truth is true.” I’m not sure what the late Baron Hailsham of St. Marylebone would have made of a new account of that same revolution by Yale professor Steve Pincus. Meticulously researched and deftly written, Pincus’s book demolishes established truths (actually untruths) about the Glorious Revolution only to cram 1688 into a corset (“the first modern revolution”) that might be meant to be sexy, but ultimately doesn’t fit. That said, this is so evidently serious a book that old Hailsham might have been not only forgiving but even, maybe, something of a fan.

The 1688 revolution was traditionally believed to derive much of its gloriousness from its absence of significant bloodshed, except in Ireland (which, revealingly, was not thought to count), a blessing usually put down to the fact that its central drama — the overthrow of James II, England’s last Roman Catholic king — was an essentially conservative affair. According to this version of events, the replacement of James with the dual monarchy of the Dutch prince William and his wife (and James’s daughter) Mary was an easy sell, a restoration as much as a revolution, intended by a good number of its supporters to return hallowed (if sometimes fictional) English liberties to their central place in a constitution threatened by the newfangled ways of a monarch in thrall to a foreign religion and, no less sinisterly, to the absolutist ideology of “Lewis XIV” (to use the contemporary, splendid, and unapologetically English spelling), the foreign tyrant who was the wretched James’s ally, mentor, and paymaster. Yes, the Glorious Revolution may have paved the way to more radical changes in the way England was run, but so far as possible (even during the tricky 1688–89 hiatus) it did so in a way that was in accord with existing law — and who could object to that?

The distinction between this happy tale and the chaos and slaughter of subsequent revolutions abroad is obvious and, for those remaining Britons who know their history, a source of pride, clinching proof of a sensible people’s innate talent for moderation. When, in a classic exposition of both this view and her indomitable tactlessness, Mrs. Thatcher took advantage of the bicentenary of the French revolution to remind Le Monde that the Glorious Revolution was an example of the way that English liberties had evolved in a process marked by “continuity, respect for law, and a sense of balance,” the Iron Lady was making the point that the French Revolution was everything that 1688 was not — and that it was all the worse for it.

Ironically, the survival of this “Whig interpretation” of (to borrow Mrs. Thatcher’s description) 1688’s “quiet revolution” has been helped by the persistent disappointment of leftist British historians that, despite a possible near miss in the 1640s, their country has never enjoyed the imagined benefits of a “proper” revolution. Lord Macaulay and Edmund Burke, the two most influential exponents of the Whig analysis, may have shaped their narratives in a manner designed to persuade their countrymen that the revolutionary upheavals then raging on the Continent (Macaulay’s The History of England from the Accession of James the Second was published in 1848, while Burke was writing when the guillotine was at its busiest) were not the British way, but it was an approach that played into the hands of later, lesser writers only too keen to dismiss James’s dethroning as just another aristocratic putsch. The 1688 revolution was, sniffed Engels in 1892, a “comparatively puny event.”

That’s not Professor Pincus’s view. He maintains that the 1688 upheaval was not only enormously significant (which it was), but that it should be considered — dubious compliment — the first “modern revolution.” Sadly, he never quite succeeds in satisfactorily establishing what that term means, coming closest when he writes about “a structural and ideological break with the previous regime . . . and a new conception of time, a notion that they [revolutionary regimes] are beginning a new epoch in the history of the state and . . . society,” an idea of Year Zero that is, awkwardly, difficult to square with the painstaking quest for precedent that was such a feature of 1688.

These definitional problems should come as no surprise. Stripped of its already imprecise chronological sense, “modern” is in this context too vague and too broad an adjective to mean very much: Even the most archetypically “modern” revolution — the Russian, with its strong strains of murderous millennial fantasy and traditional peasant Jacquerie — came with distinctly medieval aspects.

If there’s one thing we do know about modern revolutions, it’s their tendency to extreme violence. Unfortunately, Pincus’s determination to demonstrate the modernity of 1688 occasionally appears to have led him to paint a portrait of its convulsions in colors somewhat closer to the blood-drenched hues of revolutionary France than to the discreet, largely decorous tones that this most proper of revolutions really deserves. Even if we include (as we should) the Irish campaign and the fighting in Scotland, the Glorious Revolution can be blamed for perhaps some 20,000 deaths, almost none of them in England. By contrast, the revolution that tore England apart in the 1640s cost 190,000 lives in England alone (as a percentage of the population, a total higher than that accounted for by World War I — and in Scotland and Ireland the relative toll was even worse). It was a catastrophe so terrible, and in its social implications so potentially dangerous, that it goes a long way toward explaining the restraint displayed by the revolutionaries of 1688. That earlier conflict had come close to being a “modern revolution” — and there was little appetite to repeat the experience.

Pincus makes much of the rancorous controversies, sharp ideological divisions, and (in an attempt to debunk the argument that the revolution was little more than the maneuverings of shifting aristocratic cabals) popular enthusiasms that characterized England’s politics in the aftermath of the revolution and on deep into the 1690s. He demonstrates that these struggles had revolutionary consequences. Nevertheless, those who fought in them generally did so within well-established legal and political structures. 1688 was indeed a proper revolution, but in both senses of the word.

Another element in Pincus’s definition of a modern revolution is that it typically represents a clash not between the old order and the new, but between two conflicting visions of modernity. That’s a contention that could be disputed when it comes to some of history’s later revolutions, but it works well for 1688, in particular as an explanation of why so many conservatives were prepared to throw in their lot with the revolutionaries. As Pincus shows, by 1688 James had taken England a long way down the road to Versailles. The machinery of a Continental-style centralized absolutist state was being put in place. To add insult to injury, this was linked to an aggressive recatholicizing effort (albeit often camouflaged by bogus calls for wider religious toleration) that left little doubt that James’s ultimate ambition was to impose upon England a “national” Catholicism equivalent to the Gallicanism then being preached from French pulpits. Under the circumstances, many traditionalists, however deep their philosophical (and, not infrequently, religious) scruples about turning against their lawful king, felt that their vision of England left them with no choice other than revolt or (almost as devastating to James) sullen neutrality.

But with James consigned to history by his 1690 defeat (at the Battle of the Boyne, in the Roman Catholic Ireland that was his last redoubt), what next for England? Many studies of the 1688 revolution conclude with the former king’s final flight to France and a quick canter through the Bill of Rights (sound familiar?) and the other legislation most associated with the post-revolutionary settlement. If the biggest weakness of Pincus’s book (other than sporadically subjecting 1688 to the Eisenstein treatment) is an at times elliptical approach to narrative, its biggest strength is the way that the author takes the story far deeper into the 1690s than is customarily the case. We could argue about whether, as Pincus claims, the changes seen in those years constituted a continuing revolution, but that they were revolutionary is indisputable.

While these changes bear strong hallmarks of the improvisation and desire for compromise that are a characteristic of English political history, Pincus makes a forceful case that they were more cohesive than is usually understood. They were certainly comprehensive. By 1697, England had reset its foreign policy. Equally, attitudes to political and religious freedom had been altered in ways almost unimaginable a decade or so before, and the financial system had been restructured in a manner that was a death knell to the ancient aristocratic ideal of land as the source of wealth. The bourgeois trading and manufacturing Britain that was to dominate the planet was very clearly taking shape. Perhaps the greatest pleasure to be found in reading this book, however, comes from the prominence that Pincus gives to the debates that accompanied this transformation: often overlooked and almost always fascinating discussions that, in their sophistication, breadth, depth, and cleverness, foreshadow the brilliance of the thinking that was to emerge in America during the course of the third, and most glorious, English revolution of all — the one that caught fire in 1776.

Lord Ha-Ha

Peter Dickinson: Lord Berners - Composer, Writer, Painter

The Weekly Standard, August 9, 2009

It is easier to describe the appearance of Gerald Tyrwhitt (1883-1950), the 14th, and strangest, Lord Berners, than the man himself. In his short story The Love-Bird, Osbert Sitwell gave his hero (a version of Berners) a "natural air of quiet, ugly distinction." Cecil Beaton thought that Berners resembled "a bald wax figure in a cheap clothes shop," while the cat-loving author Beverley Nichols was suitably feline, claiming that there was "a legend that nobody who has ever seen Gerald in his bath [was] ever quite the same again."

The mismatch between this once-renowned aesthete's disappointing looks and his lifelong pursuit of beauty was too much fun to overlook.Understanding the elusive, talented, and complex Lord Berners is altogether more difficult. He was a composer, a painter, and a writer, sometimes of merit, sometimes less so. He was a creative force who created, in the end, not that much. He was a prankster--on occasion tiresomely so--and a parodist, a satirist, a dryly laconic, sporadically cutting wit, a surrealist in a buttoned-up suit, a modernist in a country house, and he may (or may not) have had lunch with Hitler. An introvert who knew "everyone," Berners, a lover, appropriately, of masks, manipulated his own famously eccentric image so skillfully that in many respects his public persona was, three or four decades before Andy Warhol, both protective shield and his most successful, and possibly most enduring, artistic achievement.

Under the circumstances, it's fitting that this life of Berners by the British composer, pianist, and critic Peter Dickinson is not a conventional biography--for that, turn to Mark Amory's marvelous Lord Berners: The Last Eccentric (1998), essential reading for anyone looking to fill in the gaps left by Dickinson's patchy, distinctly non-narrative approach--but a fascinating collage of impressions, recollections, and analysis of different aspects of this multi-faceted individual's life, work, and career. It's impressively buttressed by a well-researched discography, a nicely reproduced selection of his paintings, some of his poems, a few unpublished writings, and even details of Berners's record collection.

Partly funded by the Berners Trust, this is Berners for completists. If you think that there's a touch of the Trekkie about the whole project, you'd be right. Dickinson "has been interested in Lord Berners for over thirty years." He has written a great deal about him, he arranged for an important revival concert of Berners's work, he was "prominently involved" in events to mark Berners's centenary, and he has done much else besides to focus attention on his lordship's career.

The book's intriguing core is made up of interviews conducted over the years with a clutch of ancients who had known Berners well, including Sir Harold Acton, the choreographer Sir Frederick Ashton, the widow of Britain's would-be Führer, Berners's chauffeur, and Robert ("mad boy") Heber-Percy, the much younger man with whom Berners lived for the final quarter of his life, despite the inconvenience posed by the mad boy marrying and, adding issue to injury, fathering a child.

The usual place to begin for those who agree that Berners deserves scholarly treatment of this sort is his music. Music was the art form that meant the most to him, and musically he was at the very least a minor talent from a country unable to boast much in the way of the major. He was dubbed the "English Satie" (Satie objected); he worked with Diaghilev and Balanchine. Stravinsky praised a youngish Berners as "a composer of unique talent," but it was a talent that was not exercised as much as it might have been: There was simply too much else that interested and entertained him.

In any event, as a rich man, Berners never had to produce anything. To be sure, he was an artist, but he wasn't confined to a garret--he owned a number of properties in England and abroad--nor did he starve: His table was legendary. Maybe this shrewd and remarkably (although largely self-taught) knowledgeable judge of good music just knew his limitations. (For what it's worth, his compositions do nothing for me, but then I'm no expert, nor am I an enthusiast for the serious music of that period. For those who are, I suspect that Dickinson makes a convincing case that Berners still matters.)

As for his paintings, they are a mixed bunch, competent enough, pleasant enough, but with exceptions, not enough. Kindly comparisons have been made with Corot, but the reaction of the reliably unkind Evelyn Waugh to the news that a 1931 exhibition of Berners's work had sold well was, for once, only slightly unfair: "[This] shows what a good thing it is to be a baron."

By contrast, if we discount (and we must) The Girls of Radcliff Hall (1937), a high camp roman à clef, Berners's writing, at its best, merits more than a second look. That said, to claim, as some have done, that his Far from the Madding War (1941) ranks somewhere close to Waugh's Put Out More Flags is, notwithstanding moments of sharp insight and a good joke or two, a stretch. Berners's short stories lurch from sub-par Saki to interminable whimsy.

His memoirs, however, are a delight. Taken as a whole, First Childhood (1934) and A Distant Prospect (1945) are, with the posthumously published Dresden and The Château de Résenlieu, a charming, engrossing, and frequently very funny portrait of a late-Victorian/Edwardian upper-class upbringing that is too knowing to fit comfortably into the prelapsarian myth-making so typical of many of the reminiscences of that epoch, yet is made poignant by our sense, and Berners's sense, of the civilization that was so carelessly and yet so carefully destroyed in 1914.

Tellingly, as the 20th century ground relentlessly on, the outbreak of a second world war drove Berners to the edge of psychological collapse. Not even the ruins of what had already been lost were, he feared, to be spared destruction.

These characteristically slight, slyly profound autobiographical scraps also come as near as Berners ever came to really revealing something of himself, the aesthete who came of age in a society of hearties, the Englishman with, for his time and island, an astonishing appreciation of Europe far grander, and far finer, than anything now likely to emerge from the gimcrack European Union, the fabulist who understood the loveliness, the escape, and the magic of absurdity. Not for nothing did Nancy Mitford give the lightly fictionalized Berners who appears in The Pursuit of Love the name Lord Merlin, proprietor of a hallucinatory, fabulous estate where a "flock of multi-coloured pigeons tumbl[ed] about like a cloud of confetti in the sky" and the dogs wore diamonds.

With Lord Merlin, it was impossible to know where "jokes ended and culture began." And not for nothing had Berners himself conjured up a similarly resplendent menagerie (more or less, in reality the canine jewelry came from Woolworth's) for his own estate at Faringdon. PETA types may relax: The dye used on the pigeons was harmless. And with Lord Berners, too, the border between the art and the jokes was ill-defined and unpoliced, each in their own way aspects of a far greater composition.

Determined, perhaps, to secure his hero's place in the cultural pantheon, Dickinson seems almost embarrassed by the stunts, japes, and trickster exploits that underpin Berners's reputation, but prefers, instead, to downplay them in favor of the music which, "everybody agrees .  .  . was his most important single contribution."

Everybody? This misses the point that Mitford, if imperfectly, grasped: "Lord Berners" was Berners's finest creation, that greater composition, a brilliant, if accidental, anticipation of our era, and a gentle rebuke to the conventions, pretensions, and the horrors of his own.

And that's something for which Dickinson should give this most gifted of amateurs a little more credit.

Heart of Darkness

James Palmer: The Bloody White Baron: The Extraordinary Story of the Russian Nobleman Who Became the Last Khan of Mongolia

National Review, June 18, 2009

To find even a quick allusion to the White Russian civil-war commander Baron Roman Nikolai Maximilian von Ungern-Sternberg (1886–1921) is to be pulled into a past too strange to be believable and too terrible not to be. Three years ago, I was working on an article on Mongolia for National Review. When the text I’d submitted for editing was returned, a reference to the country’s “brief, brutal, and bizarre rule [by] a crazed Baltic baron” was questioned: “Are you certain about this?” As James Palmer’s absorbing, wonderfully written new biography of this gargoyle khan, exterminationist anti-Semite, paranoid mystic, and (some thought) reincarnated god shows, when it comes to Ungern, certainty has a way of vanishing into myth, rumor, and whispered campfire tale: There is much about the baron that remains, in Palmer’s perfect adjective, “elusive.”

An earlier, and profoundly influential, biographer (of sorts), the Franco-Russian Communist Vladimir Pozner, came to the same conclusion (Ungern “kept on escaping me”) but took a different tack in response. His Bloody Baron (1938) openly blended fact with fiction and, more surreptitiously, well-crafted Soviet propaganda, to recreate the baroquely cruel baron of legend — but not just legend. There was indeed an Ungern, a killer, a torturer, a burner-alive, who battled the Bolsheviks with a heedless bravery and primitive ferocity so devastating that he was able to turn a corner of Siberia into a charnel-house realm all his own. And yes, he later did the same with a swathe of Mongolia that he transformed into an anticipation of Babi Yar and a reminder of Genghis.

But that was not enough for Pozner. His baron is, almost, a creature of nightmare seemingly lurking in the thin space between reality and the darker side of the human imagination, yet not without a certain atavistic grandeur that was, in fact, entirely lacking from Ungern’s shabby, psychotic, ragtag crusade: “From a distance came a call of trumpets. The street filled with Ungern’s squadrons, riding slowly. The Baron leant out of the window. A stream of horsemen flowed along the roadway. On their shoulder-straps two-headed eagles were foreshortened: legions of silver eagles ready to wing northwards.”

This is the baron who can be glimpsed in comic book (in one of Hugo Pratt’s Corto Maltese series), in video game (Iron Storm), and even in the lyrics of “Ungern-Sternberg,” a song by French punk rockers Paris Violence: “Ungern-Sternberg, chevalier romantique / Tu attends la mort comme un amant sa promise . . .” (“Ungern-Sternberg, romantic knight / You wait for death like a lover . . .”)

Faced with, and fascinated by, epic monstrosity, we — as a species — seem disturbingly willing to keep ourselves at a comfortable emotional and intellectual distance from its deeper, even more hideous implications. In The Bloody White Baron, Palmer does not hold back from detailing the horrors (this is not a book for the faint-hearted) for which that chevalier romantique was responsible, but he does so clinically, analytically, immune to their dark spell: “Ungern’s sadism . . . was appalling and inexcusable, but also explicable. The obsession with . . . whipping was an exaggerated version of the discipline of the old Russian imperial army, where fifty lashes were considered a light punishment. Ungern favored ‘a hundred blows to each part of the body.’ . . . ‘Did you know,’ he mused, ‘that men can still walk when the flesh and bone are separated?’”

By contrast, when Ungern makes an appearance in Buddha’s Little Finger, a 1996 novel by the Russian writer Victor Pelevin, it is as the stern, laconic guardian of an infinite, coldly beautiful Valhalla, and if anything, an oddly admirable figure. Of the maniac there is barely a suggestion; of the chevalier romantique, there is all too much.

It’s no surprise that the other two best-known biographical accounts of the baron are themselves “elusive.” In Beasts, Men and Gods (1922), Ferdinand Ossendowski, a Polish adventurer, writer, and Munchausen detained by the baron in Urga (today’s Ulaanbaatar), paints a vivid portrait of a soldier lost to mysticism, madness, and massacre, a warlord startlingly reminiscent of Apocalypse Now’s Colonel Kurtz. Ossendowski’s accuracy is as disputed as the role he came to play in Ungern’s entourage, and Palmer jeers that the Pole “was not always the most reliable of storytellers.” No, he was not; but — notwithstanding Palmer’s use of an impressive range of archival material — Ossendowski’s flawed, sometimes fantastical yarn remains a significant, and unavoidable, influence on this latest biography of a man who seemed to relish the speculation he provoked: “My name is surrounded with such hate and fear that no one can judge what is the truth and what is false, what is history and what myth.” Naturally, the source for that quotation is Ossendowski.

There’s more than a trace of Ossendowski in Dmitri Alioshin’s Asian Odyssey (1940), a memoir by one of Ungern’s veterans, and another major (possibly even reasonably accurate) resource for Palmer. Typically for some of Ungern’s earlier chroniclers, little is known about Alioshin: We cannot even be sure that that was his real name. This lurid, frequently stomach-churning volume is also, if unintentionally, a revealing account of its author’s own moral disintegration: “A few days later we caught a Bolshevik commissar, a former army officer. We tied him to a pole and marched a detachment past him. Each man struck him as hard as he could in the face. He died in fifteen minutes. The next commissar we caught was beaten to death with a nagaika, a strong army whip which tears the flesh from the bones.”

Note the echo of Ungern’s obsessions. Note too that “we”: The once-idealistic officer was descending into barbarism, a process that ground on as the young Russian’s odyssey unfolded on its dreadful course. Tragically, his was a story not so different from that of many others swept into the maelstrom of an empire collapsing into revolution, ruin, and civil war of an atrocity that might have shocked even Hobbes. It’s also a story that helps us peer deeper into the abyss into which Ungern so ecstatically jumped.

But unlike Alioshin, Ungern did not have to fall so very far to leave civilization behind. The baron may have been the scion of one of those ancient German families that retained their hold over Russia’s Baltic provinces until almost the last days of the czars, but arguably the most important thing he inherited from his forebears was a streak of insanity. Violent, charmless, impulsive, and uncontrollable, the baron, as Palmer demonstrates, was from the beginning a Junker amok, noblesse with no hint of oblige. He made a nonsense of his education, and his career in the imperial army was a stop-go fiasco redeemed, and then only partly, by World War I.

It was the Bolshevik revolution that finally gave Ungern his chance to shine, if that’s the word. Within months of Lenin’s coup, the baron’s bravery, energy, and fanatical opposition to a new order that he believed to be literally demonic had allowed him to carve out a prominent role in the White forces ranged against the Red Army in Siberia’s Transbaikalia. Russia’s Calvary was Ungern’s opportunity. Like Conrad’s Mr. Kurtz in the Heart of Darkness on which Apocalypse Now was modeled, the baron had “immense plans”: He dreamt of building a great Asiatic empire as bulwark and spearhead against the revolutionaries (and anyone else) who “threaten[ed] the Divine Spirit” in mankind. And like Conrad’s Kurtz, Ungern appears to have been beguiled, emboldened, and inspired by the wilderness in which he found himself, far from home, far from convention, far from conscience.

Palmer deftly and briskly (this is not a long book) guides his readers through a conflict that raged throughout southeast Siberia and, ultimately, Mongolia. Given the remoteness of time and place, not to mention the bewildering range of characters, factions, and causes, Palmer’s success in telling this tale as clearly as he does is no small achievement. More than that, he brilliantly conveys a sense of the savagery, scope, and strangeness of this war, a war of telegraphy and sorcery, a war at the intersection of ancient and modern, of European and Asian, a war fought in a distant ghastly nowhere, a blood-drenched free-for-all where the most effective forces included huge armored trains, mounted cavalry, and lethal squads of Tibetan dobdobs, “monk-enforcers, their clothes lightly smeared with butter and their faces painted with soot to strike fear into the enemies of the faith.”

But of all the images that crowd this evocative book, there is none more haunting than one that Palmer borrows from Alioshin, a description of Ungern leading his troops during their final retreat: “[He] rode silently with bowed head in front of the column. [He] had lost his hat and most of his clothes. On his naked chest numerous Mongolian talismans and charms hung on a bright yellow cord. He looked like the reincarnation of a prehistoric ape-man. People were afraid to look at him.”

And so they should have been — but as much for what Ungern says about all of us as for what he might have done to them.