China Miéville's "October": Book Review

Known for his post-modern fantasy and science-fiction, China Miéville enriches these genres with his expertise in international relations and critical legal studies. Educated at Cambridge and the London School of Economics, he argues in the 2005 adaptation of his doctoral thesis: "The attempt to replace war and inequality with law is not merely utopian but is precisely self-defeating. A world structured around international law cannot but be one of imperialist violence. The chaotic and bloody world around us is the rule of law." Recently a very unsuccessful Socialist Workers Party candidate for the House of Commons, he has since helped to found the anti-capitalist "red-green" Left Unity party.

His biographical data assist the reader of this version of the Russian Revolution. Although a fellow-traveler alongside many of those whose tales he retells, Miéville sustains a detached stance, if an implicitly radical affinity, for the rebels and malcontents within the nine months of 1917 he explores.

He offers the pre-history of that year, especially the anti-tsarist tumult in 1905. That earlier October, Moscow's print-workers started a strike. The reason? Having been paid by the letter, the typesetters demanded added remuneration for punctuation. Massive unrest spread. Debating such resistance, Bolsheviks agreed that the time for a socialist uprising led by proletariat and peasantry remained premature. Their semi-rivals the Mensheviks counter that a democratic and capitalist insurgency is acceptable, given the need of the bourgeoisie to guide under-prepared factions in a backward land.

Miéville commences his chronology of the pivotal year in February of a century ago, in the former St. Petersburg. The imperial capital witnesses its mill-workers rallying. They turn to meet Cossack cavalry facing off against. then letting through, thousands of marchers again on strike. The horsemen stay still as protesters duck under their mounts. "Rarely have skills imparted by reaction been so exquisitely deployed against it." With so many of the military turned against their royal commander, by March the Mensheviks are in charge. Under Alexander Kerensky, the moderate leftists struggle to keep order. Vladimir Lenin returns from exile to incite a new "second stage" revision of his earlier opinion that the revolution could wait. He regards Russia as ripe for leadership by the workers allied with the poorest peasants. Rejecting collaboration with the Mensheviks, the Bolsheviks edge towards the seizure of the councils, the soviets, established by the proles and farmers. They want power now.

However, triumph will not hurry itself. The First All-Russian Congress of Peasants' Soviets convenes during May in Petrograd. Out of 1200 delegates, nine are Bolshevik and 14 affiliated. Urged on by Lenin and his comrades, their numbers will soon balloon. But others contend against them for a share of the action. Anarchists attempt to occupy a right-wing press. Not amused, the authorities push them aside. "Up with these anarchists, they decided, they would not put." A rare glimmer of levity lightens the recital of figures and the recording of events that may sink heavily, for this is quite a dense story.

While Miéville provides a glossary of key characters and an annotated reading guide, keeping the zemstov straight from the Trudovski remains a challenge for any novice inquirer unfamiliar with this milieu. To his credit, Miéville patiently lists the constantly warping factions and their fleeting moments of notoriety. Still, the pace of change occurs so rapidly that it requires very steady attention.

By July, the Kerensky government weakens. Bolsheviks bicker. Hearing armed masses approaching, someone "in the room gasped: 'Without the sanction of the Central Committee?'" Miéville remarks on the gap between party and populace: "How easy to forget that people do not need or await permission to move." This showdown nudged the Bolsheviks against the soviets, now dismissed as counter-revolutionary. Although they numbered 8000, a tenth of the Menshevik ranks, momentum was theirs. Under Lenin and Leon Trotsky, they sought "direct seizure of power by workers and the party."

August witnesses Kerensky despairing. "I want to take the middle road, but no one will help me." A right-wing military coup fizzled. September opens as the Petrograd Soviet finally adopts the Bolshevik militancy as a socialist wedge against the Provisional Government of the Mensheviks and their wavering allies. But this policy is rejected by a pro-Kerensky committee. Worsened by insistent opposition to Russia's entanglement in the Great War, troops desert and mutiny, filling the cadres of radicalized Bolsheviks back in Petrograd. Europe itself appears to tip towards the long-anticipated socialist revolution. German's kaiser totters towards chaos. Lenin reckons the time to act has arrived.

The titular month starts with Lenin returned from his flight to Finland. Disguised in a grey wig, he enters crime-riddled Petrograd. The last bastion between the Eastern front and it having been abandoned, those within the tense capital prepare for second overthrow of a Russian regime that year. "Upheaval was traced over a regular city dusk." Strollers continue; gunfire peppers cold air nearby.

Over an attenuated 26th of the Julian calendar (November 5th by the Gregorian reckoning superseding it the following year), Miéville depicts not a dramatic raid by eager recruits on the Winter Palace, but a stultifying endgame. Shots from a naval vessel meet with little response from cadres on the ground. Inside the grandiose redoubt: "Men skirmished in stairwells. Any creak on the floorboards might be the revolution." The victors find a dim dawn, with a hint of lightening above.

In a necessary epilogue, China Miéville charts the trajectory of the Bolshevik overthrow. While never diminishing the human costs of the Soviet triumph, he insists upon a balanced tally of the progress achieved for millions, in a dim but persistent era of advancement away from serfdom and bigotry, oppression and submission. "Twilight, even remembered twilight, is better than no light at all. It would be equally absurd to say that there is nothing we can learn from the revolution. To deny that the sumerki of October can be ours, and that it need not be always followed by night." At the close of Miéville's narrative quest, he considers the metaphor and fact of 1917 as a "revolution of trains." He aptly concludes: "The question for history is not only who should be driving the train, but where." (Spectrum Culture 6/8/17; in slightly different form to Amazon US 6-1-17)

Stanley Spencer's "Looking to Heaven: Vol. 1": Book Review

Two million words from this English artist's manuscripts fill notebooks and diaries at the Tate. Stanley Spencer's grandson, John, edits what he confesses to be "an almost impossible task." His forebear kept starting and stopping attempts to create his definitive account of himself. "I don't want a tidy book," the senior Spencer''s cited here, for "life is not tidy." This statement may surprise those who visit the well-preserved (if far more trafficked today) Berkshire village of Cookham, site of his birth. There a small museum displays many of his skewed depictions of his neighbors placed into biblical or visionary scenes, alongside his accomplished pastoral paintings of the place where he spent most of his life. That hamlet remains neatly preserved in its heart. There many of Spencer's landscapes remain recognizable to the careful viewer over a century after Stanley began his storied and odd career.

John Spencer observes that his grandfather "has been variously presented as a village simpleton, an eccentric, haunted by the erotic, a recluse, an egoist, a victim of circumstance--and also a visionary, a complete original, and one of the greatest British artists of the twentieth century." Finally, readers can begin to judge for themselves, from Stanley's diligent letters and lists, the first stages of his British success.

Volume one commences with Spencer's recollections of his youth. Born in 1891, his sketches from his teens appear gracing the margins of this handsome publication. Already a command of line draws one's attention. At fifteen, he began watercolor lessons. These prepared him for matriculation at the premier Slade School of Fine Art, from 1908 to 1912. He commuted to London and back each day.

Tellingly, his classmates nicknamed him "Cookham." Yet he admits that what he "felt" in his village could not be expressed at the Slade. "My knowledge developed by the experience of a series of drunken experiences," unrelated to each other. The key adjective here denotes not inebriation from alcohol, but elevation from his environment, and what he calls an oracular sense of contact with the "Grand Vision." This encompassed his work and his life's perspective, as an alchemy stirring up the quotidian into the mystical. Although a Christian, his faith remained peculiar, generated from within.

His canvas, "John Donne Arriving in Heaven," by 1911 confirms his direction. The Pre-Raphaelites and Giotto combined with modernist elements and foreshortened angles at this formative juncture. The characteristics evident early on would motivate him for a half-century. His return from Slade to his "earthly paradise" back in Berkshire inspired him to create "Apple Gatherers." The wide-eyed or off-handed depiction of faces and gestures looms out of the surface. Limbs distend; bodies contort.

These contortions prefigured his entry into a war that would end this idyll. Stanley's older brothers enlisted. He with a younger sibling joined a Home Hospital Service in the Royal Medical Corps. But he confides to his close friend, Henry Lamb, also now in uniform, that he himself fears being called a slacker. Returning to Cookham, those "wounded are always quiet and never say a word about our not joining." Reading Dostoevsky's The Possessed and hearing a Beethoven movement that portended to Stanley the end of the world reveal his troubled conscience. He tries to align his resistance to brutality with the need to be "a manly man" as a stereotypical loyal young zealot ready to march off.

By his mid-twenties, already known by poet-soldier Rupert Brooke and patron Lady Ottoline Morrell, Stanley felt pressured to do more for patriotism. In mid-1915 he followed his younger brother Gil into the St. John's Ambulance Corps. Assigned to the Beaufort Lunatic Asylum serving as a War Hospital. Stanley survives its "crushing atmosphere" bu "means of my own creative feelings." At this point, John's edition lacks illustrations. Instead, a few facsimiles of letters under a YMCA letterhead appear. Stanley longed to flee the "beastliness" of serving as an orderly. He volunteered for a Field Ambulance as Britain mobilized for the "big push" on the Somme, the massive offensive mid-1916.

That September, Spencer landed in Macedonia. In its mountainous terrain north of Salonica, he yearns for "something findable." For two-and-a-half years, this region "became the goal and place wherein spiritually I wanted to find the redeeming and delivering of myself in all the activities the unexpressed me had lived through and in." The verbiage of this phrasing does not belie its sincerity.

Pencil sketches and ink and wash appear in the margins of John's compilation, signalling Stanley's productivity between his duties. His inspiration comes "by praying for the Power to live purely and absolutely you get that power." He acclaims the intense "feelings" resulting as necessary for an artist.

Shakespeare and Hardy, Chaucer and Milton, music and poetry pepper his letters. Despite hospitalization for malaria, Stanley Spencer sustains his cheer. He requests Robert Louis Stevenson and a little book on Raphael. He misses hot cross buns. He envisions martial splendor from the Book of Joshua. He paints his comrades scrubbing shirts in the overflow from torrents. He compares this to "how the old Greek women do their washing." His imagination fired, he writes to Henry Lamb. "I am a thousand times more determined to do something a thousand times greater than anything when I get home, and am storing up energy all the time." Whether betraying a touch of Orientalism or merely expressing his drive to create and to incorporate thus the Other, he tells another recipient: "Yesterday I drew the head of an Asiatic man. It was nearly as exciting as Columbus discovering America."

Early in 1918 he transfers into the Royal Berkshire Regiment. Their foe, "the Bulgars," moves him typically, as Stanley "got the impression of them as beings which came from an essential and permanent night, and that each night we approached their dark abode as midnight drew near and as the morning descended and came away with it." This sentence shifts from echoes of verse to cadences of the Bible, and given Spencer's immersion into literature then, reflects his own mystical reactions.

After he quotes Paradise Lost to a correspondent, he adds: "That's the sort of thing I live on, along with Army rations." He goes on digging, loving God, and reading Milton as his main occupations. This retreat for introspection ended when in May Spencer applied for a War Memorial promotion "scheme" and to be employed by the Ministry of Information to "paint pictures relating to the war."

Then, an extended passage from Stanley's later recollections is inserted in the chronicle by John. This narrates a bivouac, a long march away from battle, and a sense of dreaminess as distance brings peace. Suddenly, scouting a gradient, Stanley met an armed officer who "wished me well out of the way." He was in the British Army. "No wonder they were still annoyed to see that I still existed."

Soon, combat commences. After, Spencer carries blankets to camp. His Regimental Sergeant Major passes by: "I expect you'd rather be painting, wouldn't you, Spencer?" He might have, given malaria again laid up Stanley back in Salonica. There he reads "the Testament nearly all day," in spite of "paganistic sentiments" in "many things." Looking back twenty years later on his Army treatment, Spencer acknowledges the right and wrong issues. But he laments how the "last war was exploited and used as a means of abusing people in their professions so as to be able to give vent to their jealousy of distinguished persons." Parsed in context, by implication, Stanley declaims that artists in the ranks "did not (AS THEY THOUGHT) serve in any way the immediate needs of the country."

The army's "anti-intellectual prejudice" rankles him. Around 1936, he looks askance at his fellow citizens who refuse to accept that Stanley aspires rather to a "true spiritual life." Therewith he strives towards "the model of essential humanness." While imperfect, he nonetheless insists on being treated fairly. Stanley Spencer's humanity, emphasized as this compendium closes, reminds his audience of the aims he would continue to seek through another war and into another stretch of partial peace.

His 1914 self-portrait takes up the cover of this elegant edition. A dark-haired man with dark eyes. A bold, confident, subtly defiant look. He captured himself well.

The final sentence from this manuscript edited by his grandson sums up much to come for Stanley. "I wish always to stress my own redemption from all that I have been made to suffer." His subsequent life, which it is to be hoped will be documented in the next installment(s) of this series, attests to Stanley Spencer's prickly pride, his dogged individuality, and his spiritual transformation through art.
(Spectrum Culture 4/24/17; Amazon US 5/9/17)

Clan Committment: Armenia + Ireland, 100 years on

 

This photo, "Remnants of an Armenian Family," reminds me of photos taken from An Gorta Mór, the Great Hunger, known popularly if not exactly correctly, according to many, as the Irish Famine. Change the costumes or headgear, and these five could be an evicted family from a stone cottage far northwest.

Nothing to Celebrate in ANZAC in Solidarity Net criticizes those who from colonies and dominions were encouraged to fight in useless battles for capitalism, imperialism, warlords, and false ideals. It questions the tributes to troops at Gallipoli. About 88,000 for the Ottoman and 44,000 for the British Empire died there. This slaughter and that in Armenia echo, as death returns in a region today. Small nations hunted and hated by armed fanatics, hunted for their allegiance, their clan, their religion.

James Connolly, when asked "What Should Irish People Do During the War?", after denouncing cooperation with the Crown to defend its Empire and admitting if Germany could free Ireland from Britain, that would not be rejected, finally rallied against Kaiser or King. "Should the working class of Europe rather than slaughter each other for the benefit of kings and financiers, proceed tomorrow to erect barricades all over Europe, to break up bridges and destroy the transport service that war might be abolished, we should be perfectly justified in following such a glorious example and contributing our aid to the final dethronement of the vulture classes that rule and rob the world."

Reflecting this May Day on an Irish history full of invective against its nearest and oldest enemy, I wonder about the psychic cost of raising generations a century later on what riled and inspired our families' desperation: to rage against rulers, to take up arms, to revenge eras culminating in ravaged decades filled with famine, rape, emigration, rack-rent, landlords, conscription, death fast or slow. 

While for years much of my reading and writing focused on The Cause, I find the past few years, and after all nearing two decades since truces were called and arms decommissioned and dumped in Ireland, I'm a bit weary of a sustained diet of study of these events. How, I mulled over as I studied Judaism, can people craft careers in analyzing the records of the Shoah, or literature of the Armenian genocide? It reminds me off hand somehow of the professor of Hitler Studies in White Noise, but no parody is intended by me. Primo Levi's books are being retranslated this autumn and reissued, and the publisher has to remind the press and audience he's not only a survivor-testifier from the deathcamps. 

Watching the shows that John Walsh produces as his son was killed years ago and led him to produce America's Most Wanted as the first of many successful get-tough programs on t.v., my wife and I muse over what that career must do to one's spirit. How far do you capitalize, however well-intended, on death or harm caused to you or your family? Does that market or brand you always? Levi wrote fables like his fellow storyteller Italo Calvino; he dramatized the life of workers, he crafted stories, and he told some of his best tales set before the war, in The Periodic Table, as when he hiked with his little dog. Those moments tend to get subsumed into the great drama. Some veterans never get over the most vivid and harrowing moments of their service, and I suppose for prisoners, hostages, those freed from slavery or torment, kidnapping or disaster, the life after can never create the same energy. 

Meline Toumani, an Armenian-American writer originally from Iran, warns in the New York Times: "Armenians Shouldn't Let Genocide Define Us." She speaks of how Jews are accused of self-hatred if they take issue with the prevailing notion that one must conform to the narrative of what I borrow from the saga of the Irish as "Most Oppressed People Ever." (MOPE: I don't agree with much of that last link's writer, but it's for ease of cyber-reference for this acronym.) Historian Alvin Jackson, a more reliable source, cites colleague Paul Bew who reminds us of the dubious claim "that the most oppressed people in Europe in the 1940s were to be found in Ireland." (671; Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish History.) It's almost, but not quite given the fatal lack some carry now, superfluous to say that this was a decade which few countrymen and fellow sufferers who were interned with Primo Levi survived. So, that takes us back to Toumani. Noting Kim Kardashian's support of the centennial, Toumani submits her thesis: "Watching the dubious intersection of celebrity worship and genocide commemoration, I couldn’t help but reflect on some of the less obvious things Armenians have lost since 1915: not just people and property, but a kind of existential confidence. The genocide recognition campaign itself, in the name of restoring Armenia’s losses, has been so all-consuming as to stand in the way of other kinds of development--in Armenia and in the diaspora." It should not be all Armenians, admittedly a long time away from this event, should focus on for their identity.

She argues that it's too limiting to expect members of small ethnicities and their diasporas should or must conform to a narrow range of banal exhortations to carry on or insistent dehumanization of the enemy nation or empire which committed the violence. She went to Turkey to try to learn from the other side's intransigence and denial. Therefore, in her estimation, she has been accused of "self-hatred." She defines this: "The idea is that you are embarrassed by your true nature — your ethnic nature — and so you mock it or speak out against it. The label is used not to engage in meaningful criticism, but to dismiss such criticism by chalking it up to shame. And yet the behavior labeled self-hating often reflects the opposite of shame; it reflects confidence." Comparing the plight of Armenians to that of the Jews, she continues: "The common phrase, 'Is it good for the Jews?' is implicitly present, too, for Armenians: but what does it mean to be 'good' for the Armenians, if survival means blocking out uncomfortable ideas and clinging to simplistic symbols?"

No, neither she nor I are denying horrors perpetuated. Turkey's refusal to take responsibility, Britain's collusion to worsen the potato blight's devastating impacts by pushing millions off the land and on the emigration boats if not the sides of the road to starve, or the black whirlwind of the Shoah all stand as blots on the record of what we do to each other. But how long do we stand in as "survivors"? 

Back to Ireland, similar questions can be raised. I am no great fan of the revisionists who try, as one wag put it, to tidy it all over, as if the English had a small misunderstanding with their subjects. Yet,  as the commemoration of the Easter Rising's centennial looms and politicians and pundits bicker over whether to invite the British, this drawn-out fracas, to some apart from the scrum, appears very petty.

Toumani concludes, for her small ancestral nation (one that like Ireland has clung long to an ideal of an embattled faith, a bastion of learning amid idiocy, an outpost of beauty and tradition and language apart from its brutish neighbors far greater in power, greed, and cunning): "But the question of what healing looks like beyond the use of a single word; of how children can be taught about their histories in a way that does not leave them hating the descendants of their ancestors’ killers. Of how a country can grow in meaningful ways so that there won’t be a Kardashian-size gap in its national confidence. Taking positions that don’t track with your ethnic group’s orthodoxies, or indeed living your life in a way that is not defined by clan commitment, are not signs of self-hatred but rather an indication of learning to value oneself. And this is at the heart of what it means to be not erased but fully alive."

My friends in Ireland are learning slowly how to learn a more inclusive history, as that nation itself becomes more diverse than any other time, rapidly, ever before. Some like me one generation apart from the homeland grapple with that old language, not easy to learn at home, but far more difficult pverseas, at least from my struggle. Many at home and abroad begin to drift from from clerical orthodoxies, and those who do not feel emboldened to speak out against ecclesiastical abuse. Those of us in the diaspora, passing on our heritage to our children, grapple with how much to pass on about past wrongs, and whether so much of our identity consists of commemorating ancestral pain. Clan commitment remains. But our pride does not overshadow an awareness of nuance or honesty.

"To End All Wars: the Graphic Anthology of the Great War": Review

Harry Patch, World War One's last surviving British veteran, was asked what he would tell young people. Defining war as "organised murder", he responded: "Don't join the army." Pat Mills in his introduction adds that this comment was scrubbed from the finished version of Patch's interview. This graphic collection opens with the greatest of such cover-ups; Brick's "The Iron Dice" sketches how millions were sent to slaughter, by imperial cabals protecting profits and peddling patriotism. This anthology's website sums up the consequences: "The so-called ‘Great War’ was the first truly multinational war, the first heavily mechanised war, the first oil war, the first fought to the benefit of capitalists on both sides, the first to murder millions of civilians and the last orchestrated by kings, barons and lords as if it were a ripping game of polo." 
  
26 contributions by 53 artists and writers from 13 nations represent the global impact of this subject. Depicted over four continents are the four theaters of war: land, sea, air, and the home front. A century later, few graphic novels have depicted these early horrors (and heroics, deluded, desperate, or gallant as they may be judged in sober retrospect), compared with the media attention devoted to its successor, WWII. This stark, chiaroscuro, thick compilation begins to redress this deficit. It promotes a humanitarian view of the worldwide conflict as witnessed by not only famous and everyday men and women, but also by a diligent elephant, hounds, purported angels, and an Alpine cat. (A share of U.S. and British profits go to Médecins Sans Frontières/ Doctors Without Borders.) 

Familiar names such as Winston Churchill, Rasputin, Baron Von Richthofen, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Mata Hari appear, but most entries feature unheralded men and women. Mostly inspired by true accounts, those who volunteered talents to script and illustrate these boldly drawn or softly delineated stories share sympathy for the plight of those cajoled, conscripted, or, as in Colm Regan's "No More Than Cattle", among hundreds of thousands of Africans under German or British colonialism forced to participate as porters or combatants. While the full list of over two dozen selections cannot be covered in a brief review, a few examples reveal its range of concerns, biographies, and approaches. 

Clode's "The Coward's War" takes up a topic which remains controversial today. "If an army is the reflection of the society for which it was created, Thomas Highgate was the first crack in its mirror." Executed for desertion in 1914, he was one of over three hundred Commonwealth soldiers who met that fate, in a time when very little was understood about stress, shell-shock, and fragility under fire. Clode's dramatic shading (here as in his other inclusion, "The Black Chair" about the Welsh bardic poet Hedd Wyn) deepens the ambiguity of this tribute. It portrays uncertainty. when those leaders ordered to force troops into battle no matter their condition were also victims of this era's ignorance. Prejudice persists. Clode reports how Highgate's hometown in 1999 refused to let his name be added to that feature of many towns, schools, and village squares among the Allies, its local war memorial.

"Il Gatto" saddened me. It follows an intrepid cat who crosses Italian to Austrian lines during the bitter war in the Alps. At one point, Stuart Richards places the feline facing the frozen front, its head above the icy trench, alongside a long line of helmeted soldiers, dug in with rifles drawn for assault.

Sean Michael Wilson's "Live and Let Live" cheered me. It narrates the stand-offs arranged tacitly on the front, so neither German nor Allied troops would fire on each other, as long as no mortal threat was raised. This sensible compromise allowed many soldiers to survive, and affirms common sense.

Yet, that solution could never be published during the war. The plight of journalists, whom the British would shoot as spies, meant that front-line, honest reporting would not emerge for those on the home front. "Truth Be Told" in Pippa Hennessy's unsparing words and Danos Philopoulos' scorching illustrations claw at the page. These convey the quest of one bold correspondent who fought to live.

Survival, in Dan Hill's take on solidarity, "Where Others Follow", educates readers. It explains how sheep have evolved to protect their pacifism. Watch-sheep emerge to guard the flock. Although a single herd rallies against predators, the group recognizes individuals and remembers each one's presence, If in a flock as with troops a single member is subsumed into a collective, an evolving balance endures which meets individual needs and demands of the group. It's a clever lesson, or fable.

But crammed together, endurance drags many down, crushed by the pressures of killing. A U-Boat commander succumbs. After a series of Allied sinkings, he lets his submarine be rammed by a British destroyer. Similarly, elite aces in planes give in after one too many dogfight victories, once the cost to their psyche has been tallied. Tanks explode and bodies shatter across wastelands. Many German versions of testimonies wallow in mud and grime. Dark pages overwhelm the light in  acrid, gloomy evocations of bomb craters and gray hell. "Poppies" depicts the artist Otto Dix, whose engravings acidly commemorate the searing visions he could not escape, as deftly rendered by Kate Houghton.

After such tales sink in, the reader reflects on the legacy left for us a hundred years later. Growing up, I heard very few scattered memories from WWI veterans, rambling anecdotes passed down from two old men. Fewer seem to understand today (with few films let alone novels or testimonies taught in schools today) this fatal march to a war that wiped out, disproportionately, about ten million young men in uniform, along with seven million civilians who never signed up or resigned themselves to fight for empires. The anthologists rouse readers to resist seductive, sinister calls for yet more war.

While a few entries dithered about despite their brevity, dissipating their force by narratives revealing gaps or leaps in time or space, most succeed very well at teaching this persistent lesson of peace. "Perhaps the decision to go to war should never be decided by men in wood paneled offices of state, but by a committee of mothers on both sides, advised by those who have seen war and what it does to soft human bodies, to the fragile mind and very soul." So Joe Gordon concludes this collection with his "Memorial to the Mothers". He reflects on a Royal Scots gravestone he passes often; the father buried beneath died on a 1918 battlefield. There, his son rests too, suffering the same fate in 1940. Gordon wonders about the unheralded mothers left to grieve. He speculates on these women's sorrow and anger and loss, as our inheritance during every war erupting after WWI. "And then perhaps we might finally learn to stop, for what mother really, truly believes anything was worth her bonny boy?"
(Amazon 9-15-14; Pop Matters 8-25-14; Author's website)

David Goodway's "Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow": Book Review

This fills a need among not only literary critics but political historians. It's an in-depth survey of eleven British-centered thinkers, most of whom attempted to put their written theories and favored tracts into practice. They pursued their commitment to varieties of left-libertarian and anarchist thought--always as individuals, but more often sympathetic to a syndicalist-union or especially libertarian-communist (as in common grassroots management of the resources we hold in common and the means of sharing them equitably) system. Goodway burrows in, and his notes show a meticulous analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of not only the main subjects of each chapter, but of their colleagues, foes, and critics. He calls to task a lazy scholar, he cites a conflicting tidbit in one account that clashes with another's assertion, and his attention to such detail is astonishing. It proves how seriously he takes this enterprise.

Yet, it moves along, given the generally hefty subject matter and the need to cover biography, literary themes, political clashes, economic models, religious and secular contexts, and philosophical digressions of the past century, quite well. This is not light reading, not should it be. It's important as a guide to how crucial ideas energize thinkers and encourage autonomy. It instructs one in many currents of the British intellectual contributions to an encouragement of a truly liberal individual. He starts with William Morris and the guild socialism of his later career, 1880-1920, and then he moves into the impact of Edward Carpenter, the first of a few whom Goodway champions who are now generally neglected by mainstream culture. It's inspiring to find in Carpenter such an insistence on forging and forcing from one's circumstances the means for personal and social transformation. His gay identity means that much of his contribution is seen retroactively by critics since as filtered accordingly through his necessarily then-somewhat circumspect expression of his sexuality, but the larger concerns, as with Oscar Wilde, remain open to all. Goodway delves into Wilde's anarchist statements and by archival investigation uncovers fresh material for research, no easy feat for an author whom, as he notes, has been scoured by respectively gay rights advocates and English Lit scholars, both of whom, one suspects, often misread his admittedly scattershot essay on socialism.

Socialism often tugs away many who occupy left-libertarian niches here. Those who resisted the allure of the new Soviet and survived suspicion or Red Scares remain sometimes on the fringes, at least as far as the once-celebrated lecturer and author John Cowper Powys. He earns two chapters, and Goodway makes no apologies. Originally issued in 2006, this preceded by a year Morine Krissdóttir's biography (reviewed by me), but Powys' novels ("baggy monsters") and prolific career earn devoted attention herein. So does his individualist anarchism, which for this friend of Emma Goldman retreats from the political platforms erected by most in this collection, and whose works (as with Joyce, who Goodway finds shares Powys' predilection for what he called "ecstasies" and Joyce "epiphanies") can be an acquired taste. Powys demands articulation by a patient critic, as evading (not the first or last herein) facile summation. While he claimed to be a "philosophical anarchist" (as did Joyce, according to Kevin Birmingham's 2014 study [reviewed by me] of the impact of Ulysses on the regimes of state censorship), Powys to Goodway appears more of a sympathizer with a delayed encouragement of anarchism as an ideal but an impracticable one for the present time. Powys retreated into a personal stance of defiance. This is what earns Goodway's attention and deep focus.

Herbert Read's similarly long career was even more diverse, as art criticism channeled his talents along with literature and politics. WWI shifted this medal-winning recipient soon after into pacifism: "The whole war was fought for rhetoric--fought for historical phrases and actual misery, fought by politicians and generals and with human flesh and blood, fanned by false and artificially created mob passions..." (loc. 4508 qtd.). One finds when reading Read here a man able to express ideas precisely.

Pacifism gets a separate chapter, if a brief one. Akin to George Orwell here profiled, this stance stirred dissent and debate as another conflict loomed, predicted by the Spanish predicament of the anarchists, trapped in Catalonia between fascists and the Stalinists. Both men have been cursed by some who regard their shifts as untenable or signs of weakness, but Goodway while cognizant always of their inconsistencies allows each critic his fair chance for rebuttal, or clarification, over careers that found them taking on many complicated issues. Same for Aldous Huxley, and the uneven nature of his fiction and the wide range of his non-fiction gain him a central stage in this thorough presentation.

Best known for his Joy of Sex, Alex Comfort is lesser known at least abroad and nowadays for his own commitments to libertarian leftism. Along with Huxley and Bertrand Russell, his high-profile stances gained him notoriety as a proto-countercultural icon before the hippies ever marched. On the CND Committee of 100, Comfort's lifelong pacifism guided him into a recognition of anarchism as the best fit for him, a trajectory shared by many in this collection. He avers that "centralized power should be reduced to the practical minimum and individual responsibility increased to the practical maximum" (loc. 6133), a sensible ambition. I'd have liked to find out more about how his sexual affirmations aligned deeper with his libertarian vision, as this Goodway elides.

E.P. Thompson, Marxist historian of Morris and of the English working class, also worked for nuclear disarmament along with these figures. He also taught often, and to many. Like Comfort, he is taken to task for blind spots. While chastising Orwell for premature anti-Stalinism and the like, this pioneering scholar ignores the many points of agreement he had with Orwell and other dissidents.

Christopher Pallis, as with Comfort, combined a prestigious medical career with a parallel one. For Pallis (whose cousin Marco wrote a memorable travelogue of mountaineering turned spiritual quest in Peaks and Lamas, reviewed by me), he had to disguise his dogged libertarian socialism under pen names Martin Grainger and Maurice Brinton. The excerpts here felt stodgy, more "poli-sci" than his comrades, but it's amazing how he and Thompson and Comfort pursued dual research so prolifically. Here, Goodway observes: "All the ruling groups in society encourage the belief that decision taking and management are functions beyond the comprehension of ordinary people." (loc. 7118).

One problem with anarchism, which flourished 1860-1940 and then, beaten down by Bolshevism and fascism, sensationalized for its violent minority, suppressed by spies and infiltrators in capitalist societies, is that "its numerical weakness inhibits its intellectual strength." (loc. 7389) Even after its countercultural resurgence (part due to Situationists, part libertarian socialists), few thinkers since have applied it to practical rather than historical or theoretical analyses, and few workers apply their leisure to advancing its real-world manifestations, given the great obstacles to implementation.

But, the final subject shows how it can work around us. Colin Ward, whose Anarchism: A Very Short Introduction I have reviewed, gains an affectionate tribute. No surprise as the book "Talking Anarchy" combines the two men's conversations and concerns. Like busy Pallis and Comfort, Ward as an architect recycles (a verb Goodway often uses, as he is very alert to all his subjects' printed records, and how they overlap, clash, and contend) much of his writings, given a demanding career. But this chapter feels ultimately perfunctory. One waits for Ward to step in, as an engaging comrade.

Still, the closing section which channels anarchist theory into current currents, stays fluid. Goodway holds that "a society which organizes itself without authority" always exists, "like a seed beneath the snow, buried under the weight of the state and its bureaucracy, capitalism and its waste, privilege and its injustices, nationalism and its suicidal loyalties, religious differences and their superstitious separatism." (loc. 7469)  Recalling in this titular metaphor Gustav Landauer's vision, which guided Ward, Goodway finds an anarchist today widens the old thinkers' perspectives. It "is selective, it rejects perfectionism, utopian fantasy, conspiratorial romanticism, revolutionary optimism,; it draws from the classical anarchists their most valid, not their most questionable, ideas." (loc. 7644)

In conclusion, I return to Goodway's introduction. He acknowledges his own life spent immersed in Marxism as much as anarchism, and admits his conviction that the latter proves more urgently relevant for our own challenges. Rather than utopian, it is rather "the belief that voting for a political party--any party--" that is unbelievable if one believes that by voting one "can bring about significant social change": after all as he quotes, "if voting changed anything, it would be abolished." (loc. 133)

Nestled near the end, we find a reminder of the modesty and ambition that combine for anarchism: crucial it "is for individuals to be able to take command of their everyday circumstances and determine the course of their lives, almost certainly collectively: to institute personal and communal autonomy, so far as they are possible, and to exercise individual responsibility." (loc. 7956) A little share of property and the control of one's means of production, combined with a social control over resources that all need to share in common: this may appeal to a few and more, if they read this book.
(Amazon US  5-10-14)

Adam Thorpe's "Ulverton": Book Review

Readers of "Cloud Atlas" by David Mitchell (2004) or even the far less known debut novel by the well-known Alan Moore "Voice of the Fire" (1995) may admire this 1993 predecessor in the same mode of storytelling (I reviewed both). Over time, voices and registers shift as a locale takes in generations who convey overlapping themes, concerns, mysteries, items, and predecessors. Thorpe even fits himself into the final chapter from 1988. This circles back neatly to the start, where in 1650 a soldier from Cromwell's depredations in Ireland returns to Ulverton, a vaguely placed hamlet in the southwest of England (think of Hardy's Wessex).

That takes place in an efficient style nearly our own, but most chapters after will hearken to the tone and vocabulary of the period. Similar to Moore, this will challenge the reader, as it forces you into dialect and regionalisms. Facts tying each section to others flit across the page, but rarely and briefly. Considerable concentration is needed, perhaps too much in one part which as with other chapters seems to go on too long for the detail and the mood necessary to place the reader within the situation, and some of this moves slowly--if fittingly so for a rural account, after all.

1689 comes with a more Bunyanesque feel, set on the barren places in a terrible winter. A religious revelation bursts in, as an Anglican clergyman must tell of a Quaker's conversion in grotesquely twisted circumstances. 1712 brings in a fussy tone about a diligent landowner's earnest attempts to modernize as the land's enclosed and its farmers set later to toil for the gentry and the wealthier class who have taken over the commons. Thorpe introduces here an effect I like and which he uses later, hesitation by a narrator: brackets here fill in what the writer loses control over or leaves illegible.

In epistolary style, one side of an exchange between a lady of the estate and her departed lover happens in 1743. Pay attention already to items that are repeating in later chapters. 1775 I had to read to myself aloud in parts. It's a barely literate tailor's transcription of a phonetic rendering of dialect and while compelling--a mother's plea for her son sentenced for stealing a hat to Newgate prison in London--it demands very close attention, but it rewards the same. This can be said of the entire novel. Few passages leap out, but the accumulative effect pleases in incremental, subtle, and embedded fashion.

I felt the 1803 part an amusing if moral shaggy-dog story--and a long one set in a tavern suitably over a long if one-sided conversation-- but it does in retrospect show how the cutting down of so much of England's woodlands altered the landscape and furnished its houses in a time of fuel and expansion. In 1830 a backlash against mechanization by farmers sets laborers to revolt, as taken down by a legal functionary, as he intersperses the testimony of those arrested and facing execution or transportation to Van Diemen's Land with his appeals to his beloved. Thorpe plays off the concerns of the law and gentry skillfully, as they attend to agrarian matters as they must, but often in offhand fashion compared to their domestic concerns, as their own jobs interfere with their own pleasures, as with us all.

A female photographer's 1859 commentary on the plates she takes around Ulverton as well as in Egypt captures Thorpe's ability to channel his chosen styles well--here a George Eliot phrasing comes across very smoothly. Light in the Middle East hits her differently: glare makes a scene "as unintelligible as newsprint in a foreign country." (188) A stream-of-consciousness 1887 poacher's ruminations take the most effort, even more than that of the prisoner's mother, to decipher. A short part, it felt much longer.

Still, these set up if laboriously the impacts of the last century. Here, the sections start to coalesce, as surnames you've seen from centuries before repeat and as places sound more familiar. 1914 juxtaposes an amateur archeology dig at the barrow through an official retired from India with the recruitment by the squire of the local lads to enlist and fight. As if a parlor opened once a year for visitors, so, the narrator reflects, are the mentalities of the villagers, exposed to an idea beyond their workaday and parochial concerns. "To reveal the dead is not to release them." (245) A standalone chapter, it successfully dissects imperial imperatives and ironies.

Following is another intriguing perspective: a 42-year-old woman transcribes the fulsome and tiresome obsession of a cartoonist to record his life and times before it all blows up in 1953. A bonfire of old carts and farming tools commemorates the Coronation and the passing of agrarian ways as the motor car and the plastic wonders of the modern age enter the markets and the streets. She demurs: "Why can't folk leave the past alone?" (289)The ellipses and hesitations of the narrator assume a poignant role and the starts and stops in her own asides challenging or easing her honesty grow as this section unfolds. This modulation memorably displays Thorpe's control of character.

Finally, Thorpe makes a cameo as in 1988 a native son turns developer. It's a post-production script for a documentary as a housing estate is built and the barrow makes another appearance, so to speak. Thorpe tells the two sides fairly, the need for saving a village's economy by ensuring jobs to build houses aimed at young families able to keep a few businesses there going, and the need for preservation and respect for fading folkways in a place where every field stands for so much more and where every field bears a telling name.

It's a challenging novel. While parts slow you down, and some of this proves too prolix, the experience of immersion in a dialect and a thought pattern foreign to us makes the lessons Thorpe labors long to inculcate convincing. For its prose experiments and as a novel of ideas, this will appeal. (8-13-13 Amazon US ... or here )

Kenneth Pople's "Stanley Spencer: A Biography": Book Review

With the attention given the First World War a century later, a look back at one of its greatest if most unpredictable artists, Stanley Spencer, rewards renewed examination. Published in 1991 on the centenary of his birth, drawing on interviews with his two daughters, family and friends, and the Tate Gallery archived writings, Spencer in his first in-depth biography emerges not as the subject of dull critique, but of respect through a diligent effort by Kenneth Pople to let the artist's words speak for themselves. They channel Spencer's interior struggle, evoked and expressed by slow craft or long difficulty. 

While very congenial towards Spencer, Pople provides a skilled interpretation of the rational and genesis for what can often be initially baffling or perplexing art. Painstaking in his observations, he charts Spencer's professional and personal growth in chronological chapters documenting his self-awareness which emerges on canvas, as he sketched and painted from an early age. Pople pauses to offer "suggestions as to their emotional origins" of his art, supported by Spencer's mostly unpublished writings, supplemented by testimony of those who knew him. The sympathy between biographer and subject proves powerful.

Although a readable five-hundred-plus-pages, detail may overwhelm those seeking a précis. Pople doggedly pursues his subject, but rarely distances himself from him. Duncan Robinson's overview rewards readers with enough illustrations and descriptions to begin. After Kitty Hauser's and Fiona MacCarthy's respective monographs, if preceding Pam Gems' pithy play, the still-curious may plunge into Pople for immersion into the steady or turbulent flow between the life and the works. Keith Bell catalogued a necessary survey of hundreds of Spencer's works, but inevitably despite the heft of Bell's contribution, individual paintings cannot all earn the scrutiny that this prolific artist merits.

Therefore, Pople's effort aligns the places and faces of Spencer's beloved village with their spiritual equivalents. As he put it, he walked around Cookham as if he saw heaven. Not that he strolled in heaven, but that he compared what he envisioned there with what he witnessed daily around him. A subtle but necessary distinction, for as Pople explains, Spencer's works attempted to record his own ecstasies, or terrors. "The places are not meant as symbolic or universal. They have no meaning outside of his experience of them. He presumes we all have such places in our memories which evoke similar feelings for us, and that we are able to recognize those that he shows in his painting are but signposts to personal feeling. It is that feeling which he is trying to capture and to universalize." (26) 

He treasured sensory elements of those he knew and settings he passed. Minutes or years later, his prodigious memory, sharp ear, and photographic eye could reproduce the scene or moment he wanted on paper or as a painting. The results may or may not match Cookham, but they usually emanate from it. Pople distinguishes the "observed" landscapes (often considerably sharper in technical execution, if removed of people) or portraits, by which Spencer made a living, from the "visionary" paintings he claims to have preferred, those conflating preternatural events into Cookham's domain. 

The process, Pople extrapolates from Spencer's accounts and art, depends on what that artist called "memory-feeling" as his imagined experiences became transfigured into the biblical inspirations he then interpreted. For instance, "The Centurion's Servant" (1913-14) halts in freeze-frame, as we see the before and the after of a miracle juxtaposed. Pople avers that Spencer sought to release his own delights or confusions (here he prepares that work as war and his call to duty looms) by setting down scenes which "redeem some bewilderments". (64) By shifting his own catharsis onto a biblical event or spiritual backdrop, he purged himself of confusion by a vivid creation as his, and our, memento.
  
"Christ Carrying the Cross" (1920) illustrates the maturation of his vision. Chastened by the Great War, back in Cookham he puts Christ on a village street, as workmen pass with their own ladders held aloft in a similar pose to that of the titular figure. All are doing their job, as Spencer observed. Villagers go about their duties, too, and few notice Christ's action. Neighbors who do stretch their necks out from the upper sills of an adjoining house. "The lace curtains blown out by the draught from the open windows on that sultry summer day have been transformed into wings. The onlookers in their silent commiseration have taken on the protectiveness of angels." (90) Neatly if suggestively, the painting's English residents pass by or peer out as if on sunny spring streets of ancient Jerusalem. 

In many of Spencer's works, if ignorant of his title to alert, a spectator may puzzle over a canvas without understanding who the main figure is, as so often a bustling, oddly elongated, or foreshortened depiction of a crowd challenges a facile comprehension of the theme. Instead, a viewer roams about his visionary work by eye, and becomes swept along in the crowd or gathering. Thus, the viewer shares Spencer's perspective, however skewed or off-kilter. Through such an unsettling immersion, an early twentieth-century modernist obsession with meticulous detail mixes with earlier depictions, drawn from Giotto as much as Gauguin, suggesting how faith then or indifference now contend within a contemporary participant, who examines Spencer and encounters his ambiguity. 

Off to war, Spencer followed three of his brothers. He did his job. Small of stature and not allowed into the fighting ranks until mass slaughter had eased entry requirements, he labored as a hospital orderly and with the ambulance corps in Salonika and Macedonia, followed by parched months in the trenches in 1918, Spencer toughed it out, with detachment from the humiliation he suffered and commitment to outlast his tormenters, until malaria sent him home. Only then did he learn, about six weeks before armistice, one brother had died. Spencer's mystical beliefs appear to have altered given the shocks he encountered during his enlistment. Commissioned as a war artist but with little to show for it, Spencer recorded more memorably he routines he followed in a series of post-war murals at the privately endowed Sandham Memorial Chapel, built for his display. He chose not to commemorate the battles but the behind-the-lines chores. He chose in the vast Resurrection painting at Sandham to depict a dramatic scene. Christ is rising, from beneath a heap of plain white crosses, pulled off of Him by soldiers, from both sides, who all climb out from tombs and trenches. This spectacle stretches to the horizon, as crosses pile up and, nightmare over and heaven at hand, bodies shake graves free.

His other great painting of the 1920s shares the theme of resurrection. Placing its imminence in the Cookham churchyard, this also features repetition. But whereas the Sandham murals portray duties as a human necessity, the 1926 Cookham Resurrection duplicates figures of Spencer and his villagers, with a significant addition. Not until his thirties did he experience sexual fulfillment, and his delayed marriage in 1925 to Hilda Carline fueled his belated integration of the erotic and the ethereal which had hovered in his paintings recently and restlessly. The joy of a humanistic scene of revelation, where his early sketches as Pople includes of an austere God give way to the embraces of a triumphant Hilda cradling their firstborn daughter testify to the invigorated perspective of the roused and redeemed male artist. Pople notes, however, how the idealized Hilda in the many archetypes her husband rushed her into, in person and in paint, early on complicated the messier reality of marriage. 

Pople draws deeply upon Spencer's writings, while he cautions that at times "a hurt overcoloured Stanley's reflections" (187). That is, he sharpened slights or smoothed out memories to fit his own recollections, which in turn filtered into his paintings. These grew in his mind into a whole, even if for practical reasons he had to sell of some of their renderings, while as with the Resurrection series he returned to themes again, or as in his larger murals spun off details as their own paintings to market. The totality of his work from the later 1920s on combines the real and the imaginary, the fabled and the factual, inextricably. In ink and by brush, Cookham, his friends, and his lovers recur.

When Patricia Preece entered his life, at first casually as a near-neighbor returned (in 1927 with her companion Dorothy Hepworth) to a place she had known in childhood, her erotic and emotional appeal for Stanley grew. Both she and her partner (Dorothy denied after Patricia's death any "physical relationship"; Patricia called her a "sister") painted; Patricia when seeking patronage or display of her art subsumed Dorothy's art under her own name. Placed as she was, Patricia manipulated a besotted Spencer to gain finery and dress herself in the manner she saw fit, as his reputation brought him a steady income, by requests for landscapes which kept him distracted from his visionary work. Eager for him to earn more, Patricia urged him to produce still lifes and landscapes steadily, instead. Pople estimates that Spencer spent about $60,000 in today's currency attending to her whims during this unstable period when, married to Hilda, he contemplated a ménage à trois. This led to complications.

Class tension between the humbly-born Spencer and genteel Preece has been exaggerated perhaps by some biographers, but the disparity of their perspectives arose early on. Pople cites her 1932 diary: "Now that he has decided to live here, I wish we had not chosen to come, for he is such a nuisance to us, and so jealous and quarrelsome unless one is continually praising his painting." (283) His compulsive energy increased. Pople propounds that for Spencer, Hilda remained his God-image while Patricia became his Cookham-image. He channeled these impulses into his art and his relationships, to join erotic with spiritual searches towards a fulfilled identity, his fundamental quest in the 1930s.

Hilda and he both painted Patricia; Spencer's wife (who "had heard it all before" as Preece recorded at the onset of finding herself the recipient of Spencer's conversation, evidently a constant chatter) found herself playing uneasy go-between. The going deepened, or detoured as Preece maneuvered it, by Preece's ambiguous-or-not relationship with Hepworth. Enticed, Spencer let his fancies loose. 

Pople explains that Spencer longed to break free of what he phrased as the "prison-wall-tapping" keeping people apart. His visionary series (e.g., "Love on the Moor," "Love Among the Nations," "Adoration of Old Men," "Sunflower and Dog Worship") reveled in unbounded lovemaking. His biographer explains the tumult. "He was in the strict sense of the adjective a 'pure' artist--one who in wonder interpreted the mystery of his own experience." Instead of asking our empathy or sympathy, Spencer forces us in the roiling and rotund depictions of freed bodies caught up in passion to accept the awesome miracle of life. In nudes, he painted Patricia unflinchingly as he would along her dimpled, mottled flesh the perspective, in his simile, as if an ant crawled over it. He stared down skin.

For good reason, Pople titles part six of this biography "The Marital Disasters: 1936-1939". Spencer acted boldly under Patricia's spell. He signed over his home to her, to fund her lifestyle. Unable to cope, Hilda and their two daughters left that home, and she filed for divorce. During the aftermath, Patricia continued to influence Stanley. Pople phrases this muddle as clearly as anyone might: "By an astute balancing act, she could arrange affairs to benefit her materially while freeing her from the sexual obligations of marriage, for which Hilda would be available." (361) Assuming marriage to Patricia would be but a "legal formality", Spencer married Patricia as soon as the law permitted. 

The triple arrangement proved stillborn. He importuned his patrons; neither wife wanted him.  Doubling his feminine inspirations for art, he included Elsie, his Cookham maid, and Daphne, a generous friend. Another war drafted Spencer as a commissioned artist. He illustrated Port Glasgow shipyard. He envisioned typically a larger platform for his murals than even that war's duration could fulfill. Meanwhile, he tried to woo faltering Hilda. A devout Christian Scientist, her views never jibed with Stanley's eclecticism. As Patricia pithily put it when Hilda was institutionalized: "God talked to her. It is just that he talked a little more inconveniently than usual." (432) 

He painted two more resurrections, as the end of the war found here a touching depiction in joyful reunions, and in one, a portrayal of Hilda as needing support getting up after her own return from the dead, it seems. In Glasgow, he had met what Pople calls the "last of his major handholders", Charlotte. A married psychiatrist, a German émigré who had studied with Jung, she found Stanley a congenial sort given his mystical bent. After the war, he tried to keep all of his women content, as they came and went in his bachelor life then. He divorced Patricia on grounds of non-consummation, and while he continued to pine for female companionship, unstinting devotion to his art took precedence over his desires. He pursued Hilda, but slowly he convinced himself at last of the futility. 

After her death in 1950, the last nine years of Spencer's life found him feted. For a measure of how far he had progressed, yet how closely he had kept his focus, compare his 1914 self-portrait that graces the cover with the one near its closing pages, painted a few months before he died in 1959. He fixes his eyes upon himself, and he records his features in a direct, composed, and confident manner. 

He continued to work on enormous canvases, leaving as with his last giant epic, "Christ Preaching at the Cookham Regatta" some of the best unfinished. While Pople regards the posture of Jesus as encouraging His listeners, on seeing this depiction for myself recently at the Stanley Spencer Gallery in the converted Methodist chapel in Cookham, I regarded the pose as frightening, as if the Redeemer cowed the little ones, unable to resist His imposing posture or power. Ambiguity accompanies any interpretation of Spencer. Pople, despite his patience, attests to the difficulty of reconciling the underlying philosophy the artist formulated in his heap of largely unexamined and verbose letters and journals with the art itself to full satisfaction. "So personal are the associations that is impossible to follow him with his own degree of excitement into such territories of the imagination." (485)
 
All the same, this biography stands as the best introduction so far to these territories. Like Dante, Spencer fused a visionary element illuminated by a startling faith, a political critique, a disgust with contemporary cant, and a daring use of analogy. He made it all recognizable by fresh analogies and surprising juxtapositions of people at their best and worst. Spencer tolerated little opposition and his prickly ethics, and his own long battles with conformity, led to his insistence upon integrity. Pople interviewed many who were still alive and their memories of Spencer, along with careful archival research from him and many of his colleagues and teachers and friends, establishes this as essential. 
(Amazon US 2-1-14; Author's website)

Kitty Hauser's "Stanley Spencer": Book Review

While a few titles about this iconoclastic English painter introduce him in a short span, Hauser's book combines a convincing thesis with her combination of well-chosen illustrations and incisive, accessible text in this 2001 monograph. She packs a lot in eighty pages, and she places Stanley Spencer firmly within his Cookham village contexts. Neither romanticizing nor distorting his very rooted quality in his native place, Kitty Hauser strives to connect him to his time, his social connections, and his personal experiences during the first half of the twentieth century, more or less.

Of his penchant for integrating the miraculous and the mundane in Cookham, so that Christ, for instance, might blend in with Spencer's neighbors on the high street, so much one may not be able to distinguish Him from them, Hauser emphasizes how subject and purpose joined in Spencer's work from an early age. Even though he appeared when his contemporaries pioneered modernism, Spencer took its elements to blend oddly or juxtapose dramatically with natural and domestic settings. In this "secret topography of Cookham," where railings reveal and cordon off and where skewed angles and foreshortened perspectives reveal angels and curtains as nearly indistinguishable, concealment nestles alongside revelation. From Spencer's walks, his memories stored up from childhood abundantly fertile images, as he took the scenes around him and the figures he passed to populate his canvases.

Hauser shows how in his early biblical paintings "the sacred is perceived in our very midst, as if we might come across the birth of Christ on a walk in the country, or bump into a character from the Old Testament on our way to the shops; as if miracles go on all the time, unregarded, behind the high walls of gardens." (37) The idyll Spencer enjoyed between his stint at the Slade School ending in 1912 and his war service commencing in 1915 appears to have been his happiest time. All he did was wander the village and paint, living at his family's home with no other responsibilities.

The war, of course, changed him, and he returned to Cookham unsettled. Furthermore, after the age of thirty or so, he finally found intimacy with his first wife, Hilda Carline and then the strange obsession with the woman who became his second wife, Patricia Preece. Hauser documents how the latter woman strove to get out of the diligent artist whatever she could in terms of money or frocks, and the subsequent convolutions (as dramatized by Pam Gems in her 1996 play "Stanley), show another aspect in which the transcendental, through sexual obsession and delight and confusion, rubbed up against the quotidian. As Hauser relates in another tie-in, to Spencer's WWI memorial panels at Sandham depicting not battle or slaughter but petty chores of orderlies and a "painter's trick" by which heaven and earth interpenetrate in the unrecognized, uncelebrated duties that consume so much of our lives, the similar blur of insight glimpsed in sex or contemplation of the body, as Spencer's nudes of Patricia unsparingly display, show Spencer's refusal to separate the fleshy tones of his palette from the spiritual suggestions of his themes, enmeshed in the bible, his household routines and/or his neighborhood observations. For, these often conflated into a single expression.

Therefore, his work, where a saint may pop up on the high street and where a house may harbor an evangelical surprise or a naked shock evades the usual modernist rejection of narrative content for formal values. Hauser places Spencer in his material realm, and she concludes that his paintings "are an attempt to demonstrate the double life of things; in a sense they are lessons in seeing." (75)  But this took its toll. What he viewed around him pleased him far more than his lovers could, and he drew contentment from his beloved Cookham best by revisiting it on his canvasses, in his sketches, and in his compulsive letters to the woman he divorced but could never abandon, Hilda, which continued (up to a hundred pages in one example) after she suffered mental illness and then died.

Taking this into account, seeing the costs of Spencer's talent and the impact it had on those around him, Hauser cautions any who would promote him only as a "visionary prophet of love," (76) for only when situating Spencer in his birthplace (where he spent two-thirds of his life) can we understand "the very material contexts that fed him as an artist, the human muddle of bodged relationships, thwarted desires, egotism and social aspirations as well as marsh-meadow visions, religious feeling and domestic bliss." Taking the sordid with the sacramental, the earthy with the ethereal, as Spencer himself for all his failings and pride strove to do, appears the best answer to how we should approach the man in terms of his abundant and sometimes astonishing artistic legacy. (See also Fiona MacCarthy's book with a similar scope and focus. 12-21-13 to Amazon US)

Duncan Robinson's "Stanley Spencer": Book Review

The 1990 printing updates the 1979 version, subtitled "Visions of a Berkshire village"; Duncan Robinson draws upon fellow scholars to offer a valuable introduction in a brisk text to this influential and controversial English painter. Over 100 illustrations provide a look at his work (and sometimes his contemporaries) but some of the monochrome photos are nearly thumbnail. Better are the fifty depictions in color of his neo-Primitive paintings.

Spencer may seem to some one-of-a-kind and to others very much of his early 20c training. Everyone from Giotto to D.H. Lawrence, Burne-Jones to Wyndham Lewis, Gauguin to the Cubists, can be drawn upon for relevant connection, as well as closer contemporaries such as Eric Gill and poets and painters who fought alongside Spencer in the formative experience of the Great War. Robinson notes, however too briefly, Spencer's decision for his art not to emphasize brutality but the redemptive powers of the trenches and hospitals provides a logical extension of his service in the ambulance brigade. His paintings as a form of immersion allow the same odd mixtures of perspective and detail that enliven his village paintings. Both take everyday elements and blend them with the mystical and surreal, creating a dreamlike sensation of the palpable crossing over with the ethereal, obliquely.

The text moves quickly, and the digressions to others in his generation and his predecessors help to place Spencer more in his time than out of it as romantics might have it. The text seems to dip into his life and then draw back from it, but this may be an editorial imposition due to the short length of the text compared to the pictorial content in 128 pages. Robinson's expertise in British art allows him to go back and forth from the contexts intellectually and personally that Spencer navigated in his eccentric life with the greater forces that war and making a living necessitated. While more here on his religious attitude might explain more, the ambiguity of his very distinctive angle on the intersection of local with universal endures.

From his beloved Berkshire village of Cookham, he drew the innovative combination of the everyday faces he knew well in natural and man-made settings. He included his friends, wives, and neighbors into portraits, landscapes, and the religiously bold or even sexually charged imagery. While he had to depict war again, twenty-odd years later, he again chose to use his memorable poses, settings, and elongated or foreshortened figures to commemorate not destruction but energy. You can see in the results here Spencer's love for humanity.

As Robinson reminds us, the pressures of the time made Spencer no less determined to make his individual mark on artistic society. In what he dismissed unjustly as "potboilers" for hire we see him apply no less a fine brush and a careful eye to landscapes and portraits executed, even as he labored on vast canvases full of resurrections and frolic. He gained fame and a knighthood before his death, which barely finds mention herein, which may be somewhat appropriate for a man who tried to bring the joy of salvation down to English earth. (Amazon US 12-11-13 or in Britain, 11-12-13!)

Ag dul go Londain aríst, cuid a trí

Chuaigh muid trí músaeim Dé hAoine. Is maith Léna agus mé ealaine Breataine. Mar sin, iarr muid ag dul beirt is fearr i Londain.

Measaim go bhfuil an Tate Bhreatain is é mó fearr liom. D'fhóghlaim go raibh na deilbh le Jacob Epstein ar am seo. Chónaic mé "Tír gan fír" an deilbh cuimhneachain brúidiúl ó An Cogadh Mór le Charles Sargeant Jagger.

Sheoladh muid suas an Thames ar an bhád farontóireachta chuig Tate Nua-Aoiseach drámatúil. Nílím ábalta fháil ach seomra amháin a cur cuairt, faoi póstaeir propaganda Sóivéadach, áfach ann. Bhí suim agam níos mo i Músaem na Londain na nDugaí.

Tá Na Dugthailte áit plódaithe anois, an-iomhlán leis saibhreas óga agus trádála airgeadais. Ach, ní raibh siad mar mealltach nuair d'oibre na daoine bochta ann ar feadh na gcéadta ann.  B'fhéidir, tháinig mo shinste a obair i bPoplar ansin nó a fanacht anseo.

Thúg muid an traein go Canary Wharf go dtí dinnéar Indiach Theas ag Quilon in aice leis na Chlos na hAlba agus Pálás Buckingham. Ní raibh easca a fháil an bialann ann. Mar sin féin, bhí bia an-blasta againn ansin.

To London again, part three.

We went to three museums on Friday. Layne and I like British art. Therefore, we went to a pair of the best in London.

I think that the Tate Britain is the best. I learned this time about sculptures by Jacob Epstein. I saw "No Man's Land", a brutal memorial plaque of the Great War by Charles Sargeant Jagger.

We sailed up the Thames on a ferry boat to the dramatic Tate Modern. I was not able to find but a single room to visit, about Soviet propaganda posters. I had more interest in the London Museum of the Docklands.

The Docklands is a crowded place now, very full of young wealth and financial trade. But, it was not so glamorous when the poor worked there for many centuries. Perhaps, my ancestors came to work in Poplar there or to leave from here.

We took the train from Canary Wharf to a South Indian dinner at Quilon near Scotland Yard and Buckingham Palace. It was not easy to find the restaurant there. All the same it was a very tasty meal for us there. (Grianghraf/Photo: Thames)

Alan Jacobs' "The Book of Common Prayer": Book Review

For a book so rooted in the devotional tradition invented or revised for the English people, Alan Jacobs reminds us of its use for social and political control. A vernacular resource emphasized the unity of responses commanded by King Henry VIII for his new church. He and it demanded conformity. Beginning in 1544, Archbishop Thomas Cranmer wrote and disseminated the first Book of Common Prayer, exactly what its title promised. 

This entry in Princeton University Press’s Lives of Great Religious Books series surveys the nearly five centuries of responses to the sonorous rhythms and insistent appeals which fill the book’s pages. Cranmer as a reformer set out to bridge the tension between traditionalists sympathetic to the old Roman ritual and the evangelists champing to bring Lutheran fervor across the English Channel. Prayers for the dead, notably, were absent from the pages he penned. “In Cranmer’s collects the saints are merely exemplary figures, as dead as the statues and windows that portrayed them.” 

What replaced the intercession of the saints was a bifurcated direction for the soul seeking salvation and avoiding damnation. The resurrection of the body assumed importance, and salvation history itself took the people through their own daily version of what supplanted the Divine Office sung by monks as their “hours”. The Book recapitulates the fall of man, the coming of the Savior, the Last Days, and the Second Coming and the Last Judgment. It also guides the believer through more stages, of life from birth to death. The day’s own rise and fall provide another backdrop, from Matins to Evensong. Finally, time itself turns more manageable, conveyed through Cranmer’s accessible and uniform prayer book.

As Professor Jacobs interprets Cranmer’s mission, “one of the greatest challenges of creating a prayer book for English Christians was to find a way to enable ordinary people who had their own daily work also to pray faithfully, to keep their own way the vigil the first disciples had failed to keep.” That watch at Gethsemani had soon lagged.  Similarly, reviving passion for what proved all too familiar verses rendered by Cranmer dulled the long-range impact of the Book’s power. 

Subsequent chapters move across English history, as dissension grows between conformists and non-conformists politically and religiously. Meanwhile, the Empire expands and brings the little book to many lands, who then strive to adapt it in turn to dominions and their own cultural shifts away from the island’s polity. While the reader unfamiliar with the Book’s contents may not come away from this brisk guide thoroughly informed as to its details and organization, the pleasure remains as one discerns through famous readers the latent impact of its material, often forced upon generations far from the fervor of Cranmer’s mission.

Among these, Samuel Johnson took comfort. However Jane Austen, and William Thackeray sighed at its tiresome recital. By the First World War, the distance between the Book and reality, gauged in the trenches, led to protest, four centuries after Henry and Cranmer. The sixteenth-century diction seemed nonsense to many raised on compulsory services, full of woe, in intricate syntax.

During this shell-shocked generation, in Professor Jacobs’ summary, “the Book becomes a synecdoche for English society in time of war: civilian incomprehension of the war’s miseries illustrated through an ongoing sanctimonious recital of the Cranmerian cadences. The intrinsically repetitive character of liturgy reinforces the feeling of mindlessness, of saying without thinking, and the prayer book’s fixed place in the Establishment connects it with vast, pitiless, institutional forces—forces that blithely send young men to their deaths.” The old Book, the voice of those who sanctioned slaughter, had to go. 

Ritual dimmed and a renewal of the Book in modern language and simplified expression led to the 1928 revision. While this was passed in America, it failed to pass Parliament in Britain, again showing the endurance, if attenuated, of the old guard determined to remain faithful to the venerable standard. 

While Professor Jacobs underplays the tension over liberal Anglican and Episcopal factions with conservative ones around the 1928 book itself giving way to another revision in 1979 for the United States and 1980 for the Church of England, the drift away from the Cranmer edition continues, now to evoke the struggles as a modular, structural approach replaces the basis on language as innovations continue among restless congregations and their overseers. With the rise of technology allowing far more novelty and reshuffling of the pages, furthermore, the survival of the original prayer book itself appears threatened, as binders and electronic media, photocopies and PowerPoint, supplant the efforts of Cranmer. 

Alan Jacobs offers a handy introduction to the cultural and social effects that the presence and promotion of this book provided for centuries of English-speaking worshipers. Within its final chapters, poignancy emerges as the original text fades; the Anglican Church, full of its own debates as again traditionalists and progressives contend for control, revises and updates its core text. Whatever devotion endures for Cranmer’s original, perhaps, may persist among a few lovers of antiquarian lore and elegant rhetoric in the pews-- and a few devoted scholars. (New York Journal of Books 9-29-13)