For the first time in over 20 years, I didn’t finish the book for my CAE bookgroup. Partly, it was because I forgot that we had changed the day of our meeting, bringing it forward. But also it was because at 367 small-print pages this is a far longer, denser book than I anticipated.
The story is narrated by an elderly professor, Leo Hertzberg about his life in New York between about 1975 and 2000. It is prompted by the discovery of five letters written to his neighbour and friend, the artist Bill Wechsler by Violet, the woman who was to become Bill’s second wife. They were to become neighbours, with Bill and his first, then second, wife living upstairs with their son Mark, and Leo and his wife Erica living on the floor below with their son Matt, who was of a similar age. Marriages disintegrate under the pressure of infidelity and tragedy. Leo finds himself acting as an indulgent-uncle type figure to his friend Bill’s son Mark, who proves himself unworthy of the love and indulgence extended to him as he disappears into the rave culture of New York and comes under the influence of the menacing artist Teddy Giles.
Leo is an art historian (one of the wankiest genres around, I reckon) and Bill is an artist and so there are long- far too long- descriptions of Bill’s contemporary artwork. Violet researches hysteria, anorexia and representations of the body and identity, and this is described at length too. Indeed, there is much in this book about representation and reality, and it all became rather precious and over-intellectualized.
The book starts off fairly slowly as a domestic narrative within a New York setting, but becomes far more urgent and fast-paced- dare I say, a thriller?- in the second half of the book. It really feels like a book of two halves. Leo is a gracious, self-deprecating first-person narrator, and so it felt comfortable to be in his company. The second half of the book was compelling enough that I continued to read it, even though our book group meeting came and went, but I found the descriptions of art and the self-conscious intellectualizing of the book rather tedious.
My rating: 6.5/10
Sourced from: A left-over book from the former Council of Adult Education
Read because: it was The Ladies Who Say Oooh (ex CAE) bookgroup selection.
When I first heard about Richard Flanagan’s Question 7, I thought “But that’s just a rehash of everything he’s already written”. It’s true that there are flashes of his earlier work, almost as if he’s tipping his hat to it in passing. The Tasmanian section evokes The Sound of One Hand Clapping, Wanting and Gould’s Book of Fish, his mentions of his father’s wartime experience sparks memories of Narrow Road to the Deep North and his mother’s death was explored in The Living Sea of Waking Dreams, and the final chapter brings to life Death of a River Guide. But this makes the book sound like a glorified ‘greatest hits’ and it’s much, much more than that. It’s brilliant.
The title is taken from a Chekhov story, where a question is posed in the form of those schoolroom maths questions that still give me a sinking feeling in my stomach:
Wednesday, June 17, 1881, a train had to leave station A at 3am in order to reach station B at 11pm; just as the train was about to depart, however, an order came that the train had to reach station B by 7pm. Who loves longer, a man or a woman?”
Who, indeed. The real question is love, not the train or the timetable, and it’s a question that is unanswerable. So too, is the question of causality that brings each of us where we are.
Without Rebecca West’s kiss H. G. Wells would not have run off to Switzerland to write a book in which everything burns, and without H. G. Wells’s book Leo Slizard would never have conceived of a nuclear chain reaction and without conceiving of a nuclear chain reaction he would never have grown terrified and without growing terrified Leo Szilard would never have persuaded Einstein to lobby Roosevelt and without Einstein lobbying Roosevelt there would have been no Manhattan Project, and without the Manhattan Project there is no lever at 8.15 am on 6 August 1945 for Thomas Ferebee to release 31,000 feet over Hiroshima, there is no bomb on Hiroshima and no bomb on Nagasaki and 100,000 people or 160,000 people or 200,000 people live and my father dies. Poetry may make nothing happen, but a novel destroyed Hiroshima, and without Hiroshima there is no me and these words erase themselves and me with them. (p.237-8)
We meet all these contingencies and people in this book, written as a series of small shards within ten chapters: the Enola Gay pilot Thomas Ferebee, physicist Leo Slizard, the writers H.G. Wells and Rebecca West, his parents, his childhood in Roseberry, Tasmania, the Burma Railway and indigenous dispossession. Themes arise, drop and rise again, and parts of the book are an extended reflection on death and memory, encountered over and over. It’s hard to fit in into any one genre: it’s history, non-fiction, memoir and philosophy all rolled into one. The most compelling writing in the book comes at the end, when he tells his experience of nearly dying – indeed, did he die and is all this just a dream?- that he fictionalized in Death of a River Guide. My dinner was ready, and I was being summoned with increasing impatience, but I had to keep reading, even though I knew that clearly, he did, survive – and if it was a dream, then we’re all enmeshed in it too.
I have always loved Richard Flanagan’s right from Gould’s Book of Fish, which was the first of his books that I read. I’ve read interviews as part of the publicity for this book, where Flanagan said that he didn’t know if he’d write another book and I must admit that I closed it, feeling that he had written himself completely into the book, wondering how he could ever write anything else after this.
The best book that I have read in ages.
My rating: 11/10
Sourced from: borrowed for a friend (for far too long!)
I’ve had this book reserved at the library for some time, and when I finally received it I was disappointed that it seemed to be a rehash of the excellent podcast series that I mentioned back in November 2024, before this whole Trump 2.0 nightmare began. But it isn’t. Her podcast was called ‘Autocracy in America’, and in the podcast she applies the principles that she spells out in this book Autocracy Inc to the American context, with much prescience, I’m afraid.
She notes that the old cartoon image of the ‘bad man’ autocrat is outdated.
Nowadays, autocracies are run not by one bad guy but by sophisticated networks relying on kleptocratic financial structures, a complex of security services- military, paramilitary, police- and technological experts who provide surveillance, propaganda, and disinformation. The members of these networks are connected not only to one another within a given autocracy, but also to networks in other autocratic countries, and sometimes in democracies too. Corrupt, state-controlled companies in one dictatorship do business with corrupt, state-controlled companies in another. The police in one country may arm, equip, and train the police in many others. The propagandists share resources- the troll farms and media networks that promote one dictator’s propaganda can also be used to promote another’s- as well as themes: the degeneracy of democracy, the stability of autocracy, the evil of America. (p.2)
In this book, she sweeps her searchlight onto the strongmen who lead Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Angola, Myanmar, Cuba, Syria (possibly outdated), Zimbabwe, Mali, Belarus, Sudan, Azerbaijan in particular- although she mentions some three dozen others. What a depressingly large list! Autocracy Inc, as she calls them, collaborate to keep their members in power by ignoring multiple international agencies, buoyed by a conviction that the outside world cannot touch them.
Her opening chapter ‘The Greed That Binds’ looks particularly at Putin, and the schemes he established to enrich oligarchs in the breakup of the Soviet Union. These oligarchs have invested in America and Britain.
Her second chapter ‘Kleptocracy Metastasizes’ turns to Chavez’s Venezuela, where Autocracy Inc. stepped in after Chavez’s death in 2013, where Russian and Chinese money poured into the country to enable Chavez and then Maduro to postpone any kind of financial reckoning as they destroyed the economy. Cuba joined with Venezuela in an anti-American agenda, and Maduro and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan share a dislike of democracy and anti corruption movements in their own countries. Improbably, Venezuela and Iran, despite their many differences, relate on the basis of shared grievance, with Iranians buying Venezuelan gold, and sending food and gasoline in return and assisting with the repair of Venezuelan oil refineries. She looks at Uebert Angel, an evangelical pastor and British-Zimbabwean businessman who is involved in gold-smuggling schemes, some associated with Zimbabwe’s ruling party and its president Emmerson Mnangagwa. The ruling party has a long standing relationship with the Chinese Community Party and Putin’s Russia.
Chapter 3, ‘Controlling the Narrative’ looks at cybersecurity and firewalls as a way of rewriting history, as for example, in China with Tiananmen Square. Spyware and surveillance is a way of autocracies justifying their abuse of electronic technologies. Domestic propaganda in Russian state television devotes huge slabs of time to America’s culture wars. China has made an enormous investment in international media, which makes possible the spread of misinformation internationally, and RT (Russia Today) has sites which writes material, is translated into other languages, and published on ‘native’ sites to make them seem local. Yala News, run by a Syrian businessman for example, has taken material from Russian state media and spread it through Arabic news sites. As we know, websites and videos can be fake.
Chapter 4 ‘Changing the Operating System’ looks at the ‘rules-based order’ (something that powerful countries feel themselves exempt from) and the removal of language that constrains Autocracy Inc from the international arena altogether. Instead of ‘human rights’, China wants to prioritize the ‘right to development’. The term ‘sovereignty’ is used in different ways. ‘Multipolarity’, a word preferred by the Russian information networks, is meant to be fair and equitable, but is now the basis of a whole campaign systematically spread on Russia Today in English, French, Spanish and Arabic, and repeated by information-laundering sites such as Yala News. Alternative institutions in a ‘multipolar’ world agree to recognize each other’s ‘sovereignty’, not to criticize each others’ autocratic behaviour and not to intervene in each other’s internal politics. Not every member of BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization is an autocrat, but she asserts that
…if the old system was designed to inculcate the “rule of law”, these new institutions are meant to promote “rule by law”- the belief that “law” is whatever the current autocrat or ruling party leader says it is, whether inside Iran, Cuba, or anywhere else in the world. (p. 107)
She looks particularly at the Syrian Civil War and the Russian-led campaign against the White Helmets, and the involvement of the Wagner Group.
Chapter 5 ‘Smearing the Democrats’ looks at ways that the people have fought back in Poland, Venezuela, Burma and Hong Kong- although this is a very discouraging list (except for Poland). The response of autocratic government to challenge is to mount smear campaigns and make accusations of foreign interference. More sophisticated autocracies have moved beyond just killing their opponents, and now prepare legal and propaganda campaigns in advance, designed to catch democracy activists before they gain credibility or popularity.
Applebaum’s book is dedicated “for the optimists” but it’s hard to find much cause for optimism here. Her epilogue ‘Democrats United’ brings the book even more up to date by looking at Ukraine and Israel. She emphasizes that in no sense is the modern competition between autocratic and democratic ideas and practices a direct replica of the 20th century cold war. Many countries do not fit neatly into the category of either democracy or autocracy and divisions run inside countries as well. She urges a reconceptualization of the struggle for freedom as not against specific states or countries, but against autocratic behaviours, where-ever they are found- in Russia, China, Europe and the United States. She spells out a number of steps
Put an end to transnational kleptocracy through ending the whole financial system that makes it possible e.g. in real estate transactions and money-laundering and through an international anti-kleptocracy network.
Don’t Fight the Information War- Undermine it by challenging the information systems at a government level (fat chance, with Musk in power) and joining forces to make Reuters, the Associated Press and other reliable outlets the standard source of global news instead of Zinhua (China) and R.T. (Russia)
Decouple, De-risk and Rebuild – ensure that countries do not remain dependent on other autocracies
She finishes by noting that:
There is no liberal world order any more, and the aspiration to create one no longer seems real. But there are liberal societies, open and free countries that offer a better chance for people to live useful lives than closed dictatorships do. They are hardly perfect. Those that exist have deep flaws, profound divisions, and terrible historical scars. But that’s all the more reason to defend and protect them….They can be destroyed from the outside and from the inside,too, by division and demagogues. Or they can be saved. But only if those of us who live in them are willing to make the effort to save them (p. 176)
I feel as if much of this book has been superseded by recent events in America, which is really demonstrating where these links between autocracies are operating. There is one serious omission. Until the afterword, she is largely silent on Israel (I think that she herself is of reform Jewish heritage) and its provision of surveillance and military technologies to autocracies, that was described in Antony Loewenstein’s The Palestine Laboratory (which I see is now a documentary). There are other chapters earlier in the book when she could have looked at Israel earlier.
However, particularly since Trump’s inauguration, her articles in The Atlantic, bring her analysis to current events at both the American and international level, and she is an active and articulate participant in current political commentary. This book ranges over a huge number of countries and their leaders, and she told us quite clearly how Trump fits into the Autocracy Inc. model in her recent podcast. Americans can’t say that they weren’t warned, and the whole word is bearing the consequences.
If nominative determinism was a real thing, this book would be about a wealthy woman, her affluent son and their convention-shattering lives. Instead, Mary Fortune worked all her life as a writer and died in poverty, and her son George Fortune spent much of his adult life in jail.
However, ‘Mary Fortune’ is a wonderful name for a writer, even though she always wrote under many other pseudonyms, especially Waif Wanderer and W.W. Although many in literary bohemia knew her real name, it was not widely broadcast. Between 1855 and 1920 she wrote articles, serialized novels, poetry and short stories in various local periodicals, particularly the long-running and popular Australian Journal. From 1868 she contributed a column called ‘The Detective’s Album’, featuring a male detective Mark Sinclair, under the initials W.W. This eventually amounted to over 500 narratives and formed the basis of her book The Detective’s Album, published in 1871 and the first book of crime short stories published in Australia, and the first detective collection by a woman in the world. In her Ladies Page columns, writing variously as Mignon, Nemia, Nessuno and Sylphid, she was both journalist and flâneur (flâneuse) walking the streets and observing – an unusual thing for a woman- and she wrote lively descriptions of Melbourne life, similar to those being penned by Marcus Clarke at the same time, but from a woman’s perspective. She wrote a fictionalized memoir in the 1880s, Twenty Six Years Ago but there is little other personal correspondence. When you read her lively, whip-smart writing you find yourself wondering why you haven’t heard of her before.
She was born Mary Helena Wilson in Ireland, and emigrated with her father to Canada probably in the early years of the Great Famine. They were Protestant, and her father worked as an engineer. In 1851, aged 18 she married surveyor Joseph Fortune, who was to give her that very rather theatrical surname. When the gold rushes erupted in Australia in 1851, her father left, and in 1855 so did she, leaving her husband behind. She and her three year old son George, travelled to Scotland, then on to Australia to find her father, no easy feat in this raucous colonial colony where identities could be erased and redrawn easily. A woman leaving with her child, especially the only child of an only child in a fairly prosperous family, was unusual but she lived an unusual life. She had a second illegitimate child while living on the goldfields, and said nothing of her earlier marriage when she married policeman, Percy Rollo Brett, claiming widow status. The marriage did not last long and they separated, throwing Mary onto her own resources, first on the goldfields, and then in Melbourne.
In the introductory chapter, the authors write:
When the search behind this biography began, little was known beyond her name: Mrs Fortune. To find her meant following her lead as a detective writer, seeking the clues hidden in her vast bibliography. A process of literary detection began. Her game was to drop self-referential fragments- names and events from her life- into her writing. Reading an author through their work can be a trap: the biographical fallacy- the assumption that writing always derives from life. Such was not true in Mary Fortune’s case, for she had a wild imagination. She could write as vividly of a vampire or a vengeful Roma sorceress as of the Victorian goldfields. Yet even at her most sensational her default mode was realist, fed by a tenacious memory. She held grudges interminably and rehashed them in print. Details repeat through the decades of her work, and – thanks for the increasingly digitised world of archives and newspapers- they can be investigated and explained. (p. 4)
Despite the availability of her work in digital form, few readers are likely to immerse themselves in Mary Fortune’s prolific output, and thus to a certain extent we have to take on trust that Mary’s writing does throw light onto her biography. I, for one, think that the authors have identified sufficient parallels and repetitions between Mary’s life and her literary output to validate this as a way of proceeding. That said, though, without Mary’s writing, it would have been a rather thin biography.
One of the most fascinating aspects of this biography, and one which the authors bring out really well, is the paradox that Mary Fortune built her literary reputation (albeit under a nom-de-plume) on criminal activity through her ‘Detective’s Album’ columns, while her only son was completely enmeshed in the criminal system as perpetrator and prisoner. George Fortune’s life, from the age of fourteen was a series of arrests and imprisonments, starting with his arrest for stealing a hat in July 1871. From here he was committed to industrial schools, farm placements, youth imprisonment at Pentridge and eventually long stints in jail in both Victoria and Tasmania. There was no glamour in his criminal history of crime and recidivism.
Mary Fortune had been married to a policeman, and in many ways she mined this connection for the rest of her life. She may have herself been a ‘fizgig’, a police informant. The ambiguous relationship between law and crime lies at the heart of any number of detective series, and it is given an extra frisson in relationships between police and informants, especially women informants. However, her literary career and her son’s criminality came into collision when she published a column in the Ladies Pages of the Herald, where she wrote as ‘Nemia’, that described her visit to Pentridge jail in Melbourne to visit a young, unnamed man. Soon after, for fear that ‘Nemia’ would be linked to the prisoner George Fortune, Mary was sacked from the Herald. She would not return to the newspaper for several years, and then only with fiction.
Mary Fortune lived in the ambiguous space between ‘upper’ and ‘lower’ Bohemia. Other writers knew her, and she conducted a long rivalry with Marcus Clarke whose Peripatetic Philosopher columns were a masculine version of own columns. She would ever only be a contributor, and an anonymous one at that, while her rival Clarke became ‘conductor’ of the Australian Journal in 1871, and as a result her presence in the journal declined. But she was a denizen of ‘lower’ Bohemia as well, with constant money worries, arrests for drunkenness, and a stint in the Benevolent Asylum in North Melbourne before shifting as a lodger between various charitable women. Her son predeceased her, dying in jail in Tasmania, and she died penniless and for many years forgotten.
But not by Lucy Sussex, who had first encountered Mary Fortune when she was working as a researcher for Professor Stephen Knight at Melbourne University, who was researching the history of Australian crime fiction. She wrote her PhD and a subsequent book on the Mothers of Crime Fiction, and a novel based on her search for Fortune called The Scarlet Rider. She edited and published a selection of Mary’s memoirs and journalism in 1989 as The Fortunes of Mary Fortune. Megan Brown completed her PhD on Mary Fortune, and they have co-presented at various conferences. In a closing chapter, Sussex describes an academic joust with another historian whom she dubs ‘Rival Researcher’ who took a rather malicious glee in obscuring her sources, and interactions with Melbourne historian Judith Brett, a descendant of Mary’s policeman ‘husband’, who helped her to start to look at Mary’s son George as a narrative thread in piecing together Mary’s life.
I’m always interested by books that are a collaborative venture because, to me, writing seems such an individual and personal endeavour. The authors only present separately in their closing chapter, yet I wonder if the seams between the authors can still be detected (the book has infected me, now I’m playing detective too!) The introduction frames the authors’ search as a game of literary detection and certainly the conclusion, which evokes the academic rivalry of A. S. Byatt’s Possession, returns to this topic. This theme of literary detection runs subtly through the narrative, reappearing when the authors interview current-day detectives and undertake computer-based forensic linguistic testing of Mary’s writing style to clarify her authorship of individual stories. While cautioning against the perils of applying modern day diagnoses to peoples’ behaviour in the past, they do so nonetheless, suggesting that George Fortune today might be diagnosed with Anti Social Personality Disorder. The reference to Nicola Gobbo as police informer was instructive for me as a Melburnian, but it will date the text and soon be irrelevant. I wonder if these eruptions of current-day commentary reflect the preferences of one of the two authors, or whether they both saw these present-day parallels. Likewise, the introduction of subheadings on just three occasions seemed to jar a little from what was otherwise a flowing narrative, and perhaps reflects the joint authorship- but I don’t know.
Mary Fortune’s good fortune was to have two biographers in Lucy Sussex and Megan Brown who have worked hard over so long to bring her name, and her full-rounded life story before 21st century readers. Their biography is deeply researched, readable and imbued with admiration and sympathy for a trail-blazing woman writer, whose writing is still brisk and lively today.
My rating: 8/10
Sourced from: Review copy from Black Inc., with thanks
I recently watched the Netflix series based on this book, and instantly wanted to read the memoir on which it was based. My curiosity was piqued by a comment in the ‘Making of’ documentary, also on Netflix, that they had changed the modern day part in the television series because the author is still a young living, working, active writer in Germany, and they didn’t want the series to affect her present-day life. When I was about 7/8 of the way through the book, and she was still in New York, I realized that the book and the series were quite different.
Deborah Feldman was raised by her grandparents in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Her family was part of the Satmar sect of Hasidic Judaism, a sect with Hungarian roots that had been very much shaped by the Holocaust. Believing that God had allowed the Holocaust as punishment for assimilation and Zionism, the group embraced extreme conservatism in custom, dress and language, speaking only Yiddish. Her father, who was largely estranged from his daughter, seemed rather intellectually and socially challenged, and her mother had deserted the sect while Deborah was small. Although her aunts, particularly Aunt Chaya, have an influence on her upbringing and prospects, it is actually her grandmother Bubby and grandfather Zeidy, who bring her up in a loving but strict environment, where family and religion are paramount. Being brought up by elderly grandparents gives her freedoms that she would not have had in a family of siblings: she is well-educated for a Satmar girl, and she becomes an inveterate reader. As she approaches womanhood, the family orchestrates her arranged-marriage to Eli, a man equally in thrall to his own family and religion. Although Eli is in many ways more liberal than some other men, he can veer between domination and permissiveness, and when they cannot consummate their marriage, they are both under pressure from each other and their families.
There are some important differences between the book and the television series. In the book, her liberation comes not through music but through surreptitiously attending higher education, and it occurs in America, not in Germany. She leaves after she has her child, not before; indeed it is her desire to protect her son from the misogyny and strictures of Hasidic Judaism that impels her to leave her husband who, initially at least, seems just as happy to have the marriage fail as she is. She is largely silent about the custody arrangements for their son, Yitzy.
The memoir (i.e. book) was written in 2012, when she was still in the midst of act of leaving. The entire memoir is written in the present tense, but the present becomes closer and closer. As a result, the pacing of the book moves from fairly slow reflection and narrative, to a present-day rush of emotion. Because it is a memoir, the narrative is shaped completely by her viewpoint and her own flaws and strengths. (An interesting critical review of the book by another Satmar woman who also left the community can be found here.) Is it a well-written memoir? Possibly not: there is no overarching theme, beyond that of grievance and longing for freedom, perhaps. For a memoir, it has a lot of dialogue which tips it into some other genre.
Nonetheless, I found this memoir fascinating, and hard to put down. Part of that stems from my curiosity about Hasidic Judaism, particularly within enclaves like in Williamsburg. (There’s an interesting photo-essay about Williamsburg here). Yes, I have borrowed her sequel as well, a recent retelling of her 2014 follow-up Exodus.
It amazes me that, of all countries in the world, IRELAND should have voted for gay marriage and legal abortion. My impression of Ireland is that it is mired in religion and conservatism, and I don’t think that I’m alone in this perception. In this book, Derek Scally, after many years of living in Germany, returns to Ireland, the land of his childhood, and asks himself how these changes came about. It is a story both of his own personal journey from a weakly-held Catholicism into a consideration of how Ireland, as a country, can come to terms with its past.
The book is divided into three parts. In Part I, ‘The Leaning Tower of Piety’, he writes of his own Irish upbringing and his own contact through St Monica’s Church with Father Paul McGennis, who was later to plead guilty to four counts of indecent assault. In going through the church archives, he learns of the league table on donations that existed between the parishes, and through speaking to old parishioners he learns of the suspicions about Paul McGennis, and the inability of parish priest Michael Geaney to impose any authority on him. In Part I he challenges the perception that there is a special type of ‘Celtic Christianity’, suggesting that this is the result of previous centuries’ public relations, generating important political momentum, emotional comfort and offering touchstones against historical events like the Penal Laws and Protestant/English occupation. It was not enough: he suggests that Irish Catholics perceived themselves the Most-Oppressed-People-Ever. Yet, when he looks back to his own education within the Catholic system in the 1980s by revisiting the text books used at the time, he feels patronized and short-changed by the experience.
Part Two ‘Implosion’ looks at the effect of the clerical sexual abuse revelations in the 1990s. He focuses on Fr. Brendan Smyth, who was investigated in 1975 but went on to abuse children for a further sixteen years. The fallout, when it came, spread beyond his own activities: Cardinal Brady, who was involved in the 1975 investigation, was also accused of cover- up. He interviews Sean Brady, a man whom some see as a modest figure who knew which boats not to rock; while others see him as a coward and an accomplice to a predatory paedophile priest. Australian readers will see parallels with Archbishop George Pell. He goes on to explore the Magdalene laundries and the treatment of inmates in religious-run institutions. He argues that when the Catholic Church lost its monopoly on giving meaning or creating a sense of community, coupled with the sense of betrayal over the hypocrisy and intransigence of the church regarding sexual abuse, many left the church.
In Part Three ‘Among the Ruins’ he talks about the reformulated religion that transformed Famine-era faith into an earnest, Rome-focussed Sacred Heart Catholicism. He draws on his experience of living in Germany to wonder if Ireland does not need some form of national reckoning, as a form of healing and reconciliation. He considers the roles of museum and memorials in this process. At the end of the book he writes:
This journey has taken me from apathy to ambivalence, then anger to acceptance…[For] whatever anger I harbour towards the Irish Church, echoing the anger of those whose lives were ruined by its institutional inhumanity, I see remnants of its noble aspirations through the many ordinary Irish people who tried- and try- to lead better, Christian lives. No one can draw a line under the past, or airbrush away their role in it, but- for perhaps the first time ever- Irish people can approach their history on their own terms. That is, if they want to. (p. 307)
I’m not quite sure how to rate this book, and my reading was interrupted by a two-week holiday and so I did not read it as a continuous whole. I was happy enough to pick it up again, but I don’t know if I really grasped his argument well. In fact, summarizing it here gives me a better shape of the argument than the actual experience of reading the book did.
Being RomanSoldiering for Softies Well, obviously not ALL Roman Soldiers were of chiselled jaws and flinty demeanour. In this episode, Mary Beard introduces us to Claudius Terentianus, who spends most of his letters moaning to his father, and asking for the most basic of equipment from sandals to swords. After a lifetime spent complaining, he eventually moves up the ranks a bit and ends up being able to retire quite comfortably.
History Extra. Native Americans: A History of Power and Survival. I’ve been listening to The Rest is History, where they are looking at Custer, Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, so I thought I’d catch up on this more generalized history of Native Americans. I’ve always been mystified by the way that indigenous/European relations in Australia draw on ‘black’ language and politics of African Americans, when Native American/settler relations are far more relevant. This episode features Kathleen Duval, whose book Native Nations just won the Cundill Prize, a Canadian award for the “best history writing in English”. Her book looks at 1000 years of Native American history, starting in the year 1000 when Native American society was at the height of its organization, and comparable to cities in Europe at the time. The Medieval Warm Period made urbanization possible, and when it ended, people left the cities by preference. Native American nations were marked by trade, reciprocity and consensus decision making in confederencies that ebbed and flowed. The second part of her book goes from 1750 onwards. Spanish and Dutch colonization hadn’t changed the power balance, but this was to change from this point on. Part III looks at rebirth into nations. It sounds good.
Dan Snow’s History Hit The British Agent Who Tried to Kill Lenin tells the story of Robert Bruce Lockhart, a British diplomat, spy, and propagandist. He was born into a wealth Scots family and intended to go to Malaysia to work in the rubber industry, but was waylaid by scandal (I didn’t note what the scandal actually was!). He was restless and proudly Scottish. He ended up in Russia during WWI where he was an astute observer and politically agnostic. He became a “British Agent”, not an official position, but a conduit to the British government and their man on the spot. He was tasked with getting the Russian government back into the war after the Communist takeover and withdrawal in a plot by France, English and the US to use disaffected Latvians to overthrow the Bolsheviks. He was arrested and imprisoned by the Checka when he was betrayed by Latvian plants, but he was released under a prisoner exchange. He continued to hang around the Foreign Office where he worked as a Rogue Agent.
This book is both companion and expansion of Barbara Minchinton’s The Women of Little Lon (my review here) which looked at the sex work industry in nineteenth century Melbourne. Madame Brussels is one of the brothel keepers that Minchin described in the earlier book as part of the ecology and economy of Melbourne’s brothel precinct, but here she deals with Madame Brussels as biography, rather than one name among others.
Madame Brussels is probably the best known of Melbourne’s ‘flash madams’, now immortalized with her own lane and roof-top bar. She was certainly well known in the late 19th century, too, through her political and policing contacts that largely shielded her from prosecution, court appearances and notoriety. Caroline Hodgson nee Lohmar was born in Germany, married in UK and arrived in Melbourne with her husband ‘Stud’ Hodgson in 1871, shortly after her marriage. She rode the exhilaration of the ‘Marvellous Melbourne’ land boom, suffered the 1890s recession, and was increasingly hemmed in by the ever-tightening moral strictures of the early 20th century.
Soon after her arrival in Melbourne her husband left her to work as a policeman ‘up-country’, returning twenty years later in the depth of the 1890s depression in poor health. Left in a strange city as a deserted wife, she opened a boarding house in Lonsdale Street and gradually began accumulating property adjoining her original purchase, later purchasing property in South Melbourne, Middle Park and Beaconsfield Parade in St Kilda. She presided over her brothels, but there is no evidence that she worked as a sex worker herself. Her brothel attracted politicians and magistrates and there were rumours that Alfred Plumpton, then music critic for The Age and composer, was her lover. Although she appeared in court several times, she was always well represented and almost magically the magistrate’s bench filled up with worthy JPs who were not otherwise active in the courts (but may well have been active in her brothel). She remarried after her first husband’s death, but this marriage to fellow-German Jacob Pohl was no more successful than her first, as he soon left her to live in South Africa for several years. After a couple of years’ absence from the brothel scene, she started up again but times and politics had changed.
In the years preceding the turn of the century she became increasingly name-checked by moral reformers, particularly Henry Varley, and became a regular object of scandal in John Norton’s Truth newspaper (which had plenty of the former, and little of the latter, despite the name). In April 1907, after appearing in court charged under new laws with “owing and operating a disorderly house”, she closed her brothel in Lonsdale Street, and died soon after in 1908. Despite an extravagant funeral, she had little to show for the wealth which had passed through her hands.
As might be expected of a notorious entrepreneur, the sources for her life are skewed by real estate transaction documents and court appearances reported breathlessly by the newspapers. There is a genealogical record, although it is patchy: for example, it is not clear whether her ‘adopted’ daughter Irene was actually her own daughter. There are the annual ‘in memoriam’ notices that she placed in the newspapers after her first husband’s death, as was the practice in the early 20th century. But in terms of letters, diaries etc, there is nothing.
In an afterword Phillip Bentley, who is credited as co-author writes:
…we have remained resolute our desire for all conjecture to have a basis in fact and so have resisted the temptation to speculate on how she overcame her early education towards ‘moral earnestness, humility, self-sacrifice and obedience to authority’ in order to become Melbourne’s most famous brothel madam of the nineteenth century (p. 253)
I’m not absolutely convinced that the authors fulfilled this resolution. There are many times that they raise questions which they leave hanging in the absence of evidence, but the questions are raised nonetheless, couched in “may” and “could” statements. The chapter ‘A Curious Gentlemen’s Club’ I found particularly unconvincing, where the question of flagellation is raised, largely on the basis of her first husband’s uncle’s involvement in the ‘Cannibal Club’ and the presence in Melbourne of journalist George Augustus Sala, who was said to have coined the phrase ‘Marvellous Melbourne’ as well as being the anonymous author of flagellation pornography. As the final paragraph of the ten-page chapter says:
In all the records and writings and newspaper reports examined to date there is no suggestion that Caroline’s establishments offered anything other than ordinary common-or-garden variety male-female sex. There are no wild rumours, no snide passing remarks from journalists or parliamentarians under privilege, in fact no hints at all of anything alone the lines of the ‘fladge brothels’ in London. That does not mean it was not happening of course: it means that if it was, we simply can’t see it. (p. 82)
Likewise the chapter where they raise the question of whether her first husband Stud was homosexual raises the question but then admits “There is no way we can know for certain whether Stud was gay” (p.140). I’m not sure that raising questions, identifying parallels and possible networks is sufficiently rigorous, although surely a temptation when writing a life of such notoriety which provided relatively barren and biassed documentary evidence.
This book stands on its own two feet, but I think that I appreciated it more for having previously read The Women of Little Lon, a book which has firmer evidentiary foundations than this one. But I guess that’s part of the challenge of biography: finding the individual person while confronting the dearth of evidence. Even Phillip Bentley admits that perhaps they have not unpacked her personality as much as they would have liked (p. 253), but certainly the authors have succeeded in bringing out the person behind the name now adopted by popular culture with such glee.
Some people seem to live not just one life, but many. Annie Besant was one such woman who went from parson’s wife, to public speaker and publisher, social worker and activist, to university student and Theosophist. Michael Meyer’s book, subtitled ‘Sex, Scandal and One Woman’s Fight in the Victorian Trial of the Century’ focuses particularly on the court case in which she and her colleague Charles Bradlaugh were charged with “unlawfully wickedly knowing wilfully and designedly” printing and publishing “a certain indecent lewd filthy bawdy and obscene book called Fruits of Philosophy” which would bring the subjects of Queen Victoria into “a state of wickedness lewdness debauchery and immorality”, as well as offending against the peace and dignity of the Queen. (p. 140)
Neither of the accused had actually written the book, which was quite an old text written forty years earlier by an American doctor, Charles Knowlton. In fact, Charles Bradlaugh didn’t think much of the book at all, but it was more the principle of making knowledge available at a cheap price (sixpence) that drove Annie and Charles to defend publishing the book in court. They wanted a high profile case, and they got it. Conducted in Westminster Hall (before it burnt down), it was a jury trial held before the Lord Chief Justice Sir Alexander Cockburn. Already an accomplished public speaker, albeit completely untrained in the law, Annie conducted her own defence, and from the extracts published in the newspapers in this widely-discussed trial, she did a damned good job of it too.
She, even more than her co-accused Charles Bradlaugh, had a lot to lose. She had married a clergyman, Rev. Frank Besant at the age of 18, without actually loving her husband but hoping, as a devout Christian, that the role of minister’s wife would be a way through which she could serve the Church and her fellow man. It was an unhappy marriage from the start. She had two children, a son Digby and daughter Mabel, and managed, through her brother, to procure a separation from her husband but he kept custody of her son, and refused a divorce. If found guilty, Annie would lose custody of her daughter as well.
She had lost her faith during her marriage, and after her separation became heavily involved in the National Secularist Society, where she met Charles Bradlaugh. They were very close, although Meyer does not explore whether their relationship was sexual or not. Both were still married, and as public figures, could not expose themselves to scandal. She wrote numerous articles for the National Reformer weekly newspaper published by the NSS and was an accomplished public speaker. It was this experience of debate and public discourse that stood her in good stead in the courtroom at Westminster Hall, but did not shelter her from the fallout of the case. Charles Bradlaugh went on to have a successful political career, being repeatedly re-elected and repeatedly refused being able to take his seat in Parliament because, as a secularist and atheist, he refused to swear on the Bible. As their lives split off in different directions, the obloquy of her atheism prevented her from being able to graduate from the University of London, once they accepted female students, even though she was clearly a brilliant student. She threw herself into social activism in the East End, particularly in leading the Match Girls strike about working conditions and the use of white phosphorous in making lucifer matches at Bryant and May. Over her life, she had been a devout Christian, a strident atheist, and eventually she moved into Theosophy, to which she devoted the latter part of her life. She abjured her earlier publications, and especially the book about birth control methods that she wrote after the court case which was even more explicit than Fruits of Philosophy. It really is as if she had several careers.
In the book, there are parallels drawn between Besant and two other women. The first of these is circus performer Zazel (Rossa Richter) who drew fame for being shot out of cannon, night after night. The second is Queen Victoria herself, who had a much happier experience of married life than Annie Besant did, and whose politics were diametrically opposed. Queen Victoria was not particularly aware of Besant, but she did record her disapproval of Bradlaugh in her diaries.
When I first started reading this book, I enjoyed its breezy tone and discursive narrative but I soon tired of it. In trying to contextualize Besant and her various campaigns, he draws on newspapers to illustrate what else was occurring at the time, and in the end it became a distracting lack of attention- as if he couldn’t bear to let a juicy tidbit pass, without reporting it. I enjoyed his reporting of the court case itself, but the lack of discipline elsewhere in the book detracted from his analysis of the case and its aftermath. Like the court case itself, it all felt a bit tabloid.
The author is a travel writer, which did not surprise me. He is also Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, which did.
Nonetheless, it’s a really interesting story and, despite his digressions, Meyer tells it in an engaging and entertaining style. I just wish that there had been a little less ‘colour’ and more analysis.
Expanding EyesEpisode 51 The Embassy to Achilles deals with Books 9-11. The three men sent to encourage Achilles out of his man-cave all used different approaches: self-interest, guilt and just bewilderment. Achilles responded as if he had been holed up an reading existentialism: that nothing mattered anyway. The Achilles Heel story does not appear in the Iliad, although there is a prophesy of a double fate facing Achilles- either dying in glory or having a long and unremarkable life. Note that Agamennon’s list of gifts to encourage him back does not include an apology for running off with Achilles’ wife (probably the one thing Achilles wanted). Although it seems very to-and-fro, there is a pattern to the interminable fighting in Book 10. Book 11 reveals the aristeia (i.e. high point) of Agamennon’s role in the battle. By now the main people in the Achaean army had received injuries which take them out of the battle. It’s in fact Nestor who first suggests that Patroclus take Achilles’ place on the battlefield.
Episode 52 The Horrors of War and the Value of the Heroic Code There’s a speech about the Heroic Code in Book 12, but it’s hard for me to find anything to admire in it. Michael Dolzani suggests that perhaps one good thing that comes out of it is a sense of competition, but it also spurred countless thousands of British men into the meat grinder of the WWI trenches. William James once suggested that we need a moral equivalent to war. Zeus decides to “look away” and the gods intervene, helping out their favourites, but the battle is going the Trojans’ Way. Meanwhile, Hera, who favoured the Greeks, distracts Zeus with sex.
The Rest is HistoryThe Fall of the Aztecs: The Night of Tears (Part 6) This episode focuses on the night of 30th June 1520, La Noche Triste, when the Spanish tried to break out of Tenochtitlan. Montezuma had been killed and they were surrounded by angry Mexica. They made their escape at night and were successful, but it was a bloody event. The Tlaxcalans rejected the Mexica’s pleas to join forces with them to get rid of the Spanish, and instead they joined forces with the Spanish. But another enemy was stalking: smallpox which had already wiped out the Taino people in the Caribbean (necessitating the importation of Africans as a replacement labour force- but that’s another story). It was probably introduced by Narváez, rather than Cortez. The harvest collapsed because there were insufficient workers, so when more Spaniards arrived, the place was deserted. Cortez was determined to wage a European style War, but the Tlaxcalan’s sacrificed and cannibalized their Mexica captives- but Cortez was powerless to stop them. In late 1520 ships were arriving all the time. Meanwhile, in Europe, Charles V was showing off the gold that Cortez had sent to him. A shipbuilder, who had survived La Noche Triste arrived with 12 ships that he had built and had carried overland, and so Cortez was set….
History ExtraGeorgian Grand Houses: the forgotten women who built them. Featuring Amy Boyington, the author of Hidden Patrons: Women and Architectural Patronage in Georgian Britain, this episode highlights the autonomy of heiresses, mistresses and widows in directing the design and construction of houses. Although the men in their families usually paid the accounts, a different picture of women’s involvement emerges from their correspondence (often with other women) where they display their practical concerns over, for example, where the sun would be shining in a dining room on a summer’s night, or how cold a room might be in winter etc. She gives many examples of women and houses, many of which were unfamiliar to me, but would probably be well known among British listeners.
The Philosopher’s Zone (ABC). Richard Rorty and America. I don’t often listen to this program, because it’s often too heavy for me, but I was attracted to the episode on Richard Rorty. I didn’t (don’t) know much about Richard Rorty, but I had heard of him because Inga Clendinnen responded to one of his books where he omitted history from his list of genres which could encourage the growth of our imaginative capabilities. (Inga’s essay Fellow Sufferers is available here). This episode features Chris Voparil who has co-edited a recent collection of the late Rorty’s essays (he died in 2007) called What Can we Hope For: Essays on Politics. In an essay that Rorty wrote in 1996 called ‘Looking Back from 2096’, he predicted the rise of a Trumpesque strongman. He was critical of identity politics, and especially compulsory college courses to raise awareness of Black, Women’s and LGBT identities, pointing out that ‘Trailer Trash’ was never seen as a marginalized group to be championed. Nonetheless, he argued that we get our moral stance from the group that we identify with- literally a form of ‘identity politics’.
Literature and HistoryEpisode 11 Who Was Homer? looks at Books 17-24 before then addressing the question of who Homer was and if he even existed. Aeneas pops up in the battle before being whisked away by Poseidon, which went down a treat with the Romans who were to later claim Aeneas as their own. We need to remember that Hector didn’t kill Patrocalus (instead the minor character Euphorbus did), but he did steal Achilles’ armour from him and disrespected his body. The funeral games, which seem to us to be completely incongruous and which take ages are part of a set piece to break up the narrative, and such a device appears in other similar epic poems. The ending is very inconclusive, but that’s because what we know as The Iliad is part of an 8-book poetic cycle, of which we have only Books 2 and 7. From flashbacks in these two books, we know that in Book 3 Achilles is killed, in Book 4 the Trojan Horse appears, in Book 6 Agamennon and Menelaus return, Book 7 is the Odyssey and Book 8 deals with Odysseus’ later adventures. He then moves on to the question of Homer’s identity, something you might have thought he would have done at the start. He suggests that Homer was probably not one man, but the works instead spring from a collective oral tradition. There are many narratives where a band of mates sack a wealthy trading city (Cortez and Tenochitlan spring to my mind) and it is in effect the story of the collapse of the Bronze Age in miniature. Troy was probably part of the Hittite empire. There have been many attempts to date The Iliad, using archeology of weapons mentioned in the narrative; linguistic patterns and the meter of poetry. Although there might not be one Homer the writer, it’s possible that there was one Homer to reciter. Milman Parry (the so-called Darwin of Homeric studies) basing his approach on Yugoslav oral folk songs, looked to the use of formulaic descriptions, rhythm and repetition as a mnemonic aids to remember such a long oral poem.
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 