Wagner’s anti-Semitism
Sir, – David Matthews (July 25) terms me “the severest of Wagner’s critics”
and quotes Edward Said’s description of me as “a fundamentalist . . . a
Khomeini of the arts”. Though I take any insult from Said (himself a noted
patron of extremism in the arts and politics alike) as a compliment, the
more serious point at issue – whether Wagner’s anti-Semitism can be read
into his operas – is one where many more moderate listeners may incline to
Said’s view that Wagner’s anti-Semitism stopped at his musical doorstep. I
am afraid, however, that this comforting thought is coming increasingly to
be seen as a false friend. Analysis of the musical, as well as the dramatic
and philosophical content of the operas, clearly shows an anti-Semitic
intent. For example, Jean-Jacques Nattiez has exposed how Wagner cleverly
inserted a nasty little musical parody of Meyerbeer’s “Jewish” style into
Alberich’s exchanges with the Rhinemaidens, even to the point of doubling
the voice line in the cellos à la Meyerbeer. And there are of course the
well-known more blatant caricatures of Jews in Meistersinger and Siegfried,
whose first act was described by no less a Wagnerian than Mahler as soaked
in anti-Semitism, both musically and dramatically.
Said, of course, in his usual extremist way, would take it that analysis of
this kind would doom one to perpetual stagings of Wagner that would
accentuate the anti-Semitic content of the operas. At the notorious Bayreuth
conference on Wagner and the Jews in 1998, I was pointedly asked about this.
Not at all, was my answer – how boring it would be to have a party-line
prescription for a sole, politically correct way of doing Wagner. What Said
and his admirers refuse to admit, though, is that anti-Semitism is certainly
one of the central themes of Wagner’s operas, along with broader human
concerns, and it is certainly worth bringing this out on occasion, as with
Patrice Chereau’s centenary Bayreuth production of the Ring. No one – not I,
nor my like-minded colleagues including Barry Millington, Marc Weiner and
Gottfried Wagner – would wish to spoil anyone’s enjoyment of the operas if
they wish to remain oblivious to their intrinsic anti-Semitism. But for any
self-styled critical expert or even enthusiast to keep on denying that the
anti-Semitism is there is a failure of critical honesty and indeed of real
understanding of Wagner. As the late Michael Dibdin wrote in reviewing my
book, knowing the anti-Semitism is there, “we must continue to listen to
Wagner, but listen uncomfortably”.
PAUL LAWRENCE ROSE
Department of History, Pennsylvania State University, University Park,
Pennsylvania.
‘September Song’
Sir, – Adam Kirsch’s thoughtful and thought-provoking review of Geoffrey
Hill’s Collected Critical Writings (July 18) takes us back to Hill’s
“September Song” and to its parenthesis “(I have made / an elegy for myself
it / is true)”. Kirsch under-reads that parenthesis and thus undervalues
Hill’s poem. Kirsch sees the parenthesis only as “a confession of
solipsism”. Were this the case, then Kirsch’s argument – that the poem
should not have been written or not have been published – would carry
considerable weight. This, in turn, leads Kirsch to conclude that “Silence,
in this context, would be repentance”. On the contrary, a more adequate
reading of that famous parenthesis reveals that silence might be
unpardonable.
The parenthesis is not merely a confession of solipsism. Readers must consider
the meaning of “it” at the end of the second line. The poem is indeed saying
“It is true that I have made an elegy for myself” but it is also saying “I
have made an elegy for myself; nevertheless it (the historical event that
was the Holocaust) is true; such events did happen; and, however awkwardly,
such events must be remembered and recorded as having happened.”
JOHN LYON
Department of English, University of Bristol, 3/5 Woodland Road, Bristol.
‘Fireflies in the Mist’
Sir, – Having read the original in Urdu, I was surprised that Hirsh Sawhney
omitted the implausibilities in Fireflies in the Mist by Qurratulain Hyder
(July 18). It is simply laughable that an important British officer would be
so careless as to leave security papers for his native maidservant to see. A
character, Rosie, throws a hand grenade, causing the death of a bystander,
presumably injuring many others, and goes to prison for her action. She is
released after only a brief period of imprisonment, by the efforts of a
missionary. During British rule, when such crimes were severely punished,
this is not plausible. Also in the novel, it defies belief that Rehan,
without being significantly active in Communist politics for a long period,
becomes a leader of Communist movement, just on the strength of his LSE
degree. Hyder was certainly the best novelist in Urdu literature, and in
many ways pathbreaking, but this particular novel was her weakest.
MUSTAFA KARIM
Campion Close, Scalby, Scarborough.
V for victory
Sir, – In his review of Tinou Dutry-Soinne’s book Les Méconnus de Londres
(July 18), John Rogister repeats the commonly held view that the “V for
Victory” sign first originated in a BBC broadcast on January 14, 1941.
However, this broadcast comes a close second to an article that had appeared
on November 29, 1940, in the wartime magazine War Illustrated. This hugely
popular 3d magazine was published as a patriotic morale-booster throughout
the war. In his weekly foreword, “Jottings from the Editor’s Wartime Diary”,
Sir John Hammerton wrote:
"motored along the South Downs today at sunset. Passed near Firle where I
saw a strange thing: a vast V-shaped blaze in the sunset sky! The letter “V”
must have been a mile or so in height, and the left limb of it thinned away
at the top into white vapour. For about 20 minutes the letter as a whole
stood solid and vividly aflame, thanks to the red tincture of the sinking
sun. V is the letter of Victory . . . . I also saw that afternoon a
Hurricane pilot who, in his ecstasy of victory, traced a gigantic V by
making a dive of a mile or so and zooming up to the same height again at the
appropriate angle."
This account was taken up by, among others, the BBC’s Radio Belgique in
London, and broadcast on January 14, 1941 by Victor de Lavaleye, who urged
his listeners in occupied Belgium to adopt the “V” as a rallying sign.
BRIDGET MARTYN,
8 Jeune Street, Oxford.
Sir, – With reference to the opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth, John Rogister
(referring to Madame Dutry’s account) may well be right. However, I have
always been led to believe that the suggestion was originally that of the
legendary C. E. (“Tom Brown”) Stevens of Magdalen, Oxford. At least, so he
told me himself. It is confirmed in his Obituary in The Times of September
2, 1976.
A. W. HARRISON-BARBET
14 Connolly Street, Bandon, Co. Cork.
Charles Williams
Sir, – J. R. R. Tolkien’s attitude to Charles Williams may well have been
ambiguous and complex (Letters, July 15): but he summed it up clearly enough
in a letter of 1965 to Dick Plotz (quoted in Humphrey Carpenter’s The
Inklings) as follows: “I was and remain wholly unsympathetic to Williams’s
mind. We liked one another and enjoyed talking (mostly in jest) but we had
nothing to say to one another at deeper (or higher) levels . . . . I had
read or heard a good deal of his work, but found it wholly alien, and
sometimes very distasteful, occasionally ridiculous . . . . I remained
entirely unmoved. Lewis was bowled over. But Lewis was a very impressionable
man, and this was abetted by his great generosity and capacity for friendship”.
One would have valued reading Tolkien’s opinion of Williams’s Arthurian epic
Taliessin through Logres.
COLIN LEACH
159 Southwood Lane, London N6.
V. S. Naipaul
Sir, – I have just read a review in your paper of The World Is What It Is by
Patrick French (May 23). It is incorrect that Gillon Aitken was sent to tell
me about Vidia’s marriage. I found out from the newspapers.
MARGARET GOODING
Buenos Aires, Ayacucho 1867, Argentina.
Sebald’s search
Sir, – Marina Warner (“The lost life of things”, July 11) gets her facts
wrong: Sebald’s Rings of Saturn, first chapter, does not “open with the
skull of Sir Thomas Browne, which Sebald describes coming across in the
Norwich Castle Museum”. The point of those Desperately Seeking Susan pages
is that Sebald does not come across Browne’s skull, despite his persistent
search, because, as he eventually finds out, though disinterred from its
resting place in St Peter Mancroft church, Norwich, in 1840, where it had
lain since 1682, the skull went back there in 1921, long before Sebald was
born. The eight decades’ interlude was not, in any case, spent in the
Norwich Castle Museum, to which Sebald makes no reference whatever, but
partly in private hands and then in the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital, where
Sebald was a patient at the time.
What no doubt induced Warner into this, one among several mistakes she makes,
is the photograph of a skull placed on top of two copies of Browne’s Religio
Medici, which appears prominently on page 11 of the English version of The
Rings (translated neither by Anthea Bell nor Michael Hamburger as she
implies, but, splendidly, by Michael Hulse). Curiously, in a talk devoted
mostly to the importance of photography in the work of Sebald, Warner
wrongly takes that picture for a true likeness of Browne’s skull. Yet, since
it should be obvious to all readers that the skull is not Browne’s, the
picture is intended to convey an irony: that of a contrived, false
arrangement, a silent comment not of an “is”, but of a “might have been”; a
state, this, which is primordial to Sebald’s melancholy view of literature,
and also perhaps of life.
DANIEL WAISSBEIN
Via della Chiesa 351, 55050 Gattaiola, Lucca, Italy.
Black Athena
Sir, – Robert Hinton (Letters, July 25) introduces his rude dismissal of Mary
Lefkowitz’s Not Out of Africa (1996) with “as I remember it”. He should have
checked his recollections. Her argument is not that “those ancient Greeks
who thought that they had been influenced by Ancient Egypt were mistaken”.
It is that those ancient Greeks who thought that their forefathers had been
influenced by Ancient Egypt were mistaken. The Greek who most often advances
that opinion, Herodotus, seems not to have known Egyptian. It was the
decipherment of hieroglyphic, which allowed scholars to compare Egyptian and
Greek ideas directly, that caused Greek guesses about their ancestors’
dependence on Egyptian culture to be largely rejected.
ROBERT PARKER
New College, Oxford.
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