Roger Casement
Sir, – No pleasing some people, especially Casementalists. Angus Mitchell’s
muddled letter (October 17) claiming that I ignore Roger Casement’s record
as an anti-imperialist is at odds with the entire heft of my review – as of
Seamus Ó Síocháin’s indispensable book. I do, however, point out that
anti-imperialism came late, and that Casement’s early work as a British
government operative is now more fully illuminated. I also did make the
point, repeated by Mitchell, that in these more enlightened times homosexual
orientation and activity can be accepted without impugning Casement’s
reputation and achievement in other spheres. But Mitchell’s chief point
seems to be that he has not, as I speculated, abandoned his belief that the
“Black Diaries” are forgeries. I was clearly misled by his own lengthy
review of Ó Síocháin’s book in History Ireland (July/August 2008) where he
never expressed dissent from the author’s central thesis that the Diaries
are genuine, and gave no indication that the reviewer thought they are
forgeries. I am at a loss to understand his further innuendoes about my
attempts to “trivialize” Casement, or what he means by “polemicism” and
“gatekeeping”. But if he intends to insinuate lack of detachment and
tendentiousness, he might look closer to home.
I am unconvinced by the more temperate letter (also October 17) from Tim
O’Sullivan (secretary of the Roger Casement Foundation), suggesting that the
sexual entriesin the Diaries may be fictitious interpolations, since
Casement’s vulnerable public role was inconsistent with the secret life of a
compulsively cruising homosexual. I would refer him to Ó Síocháin’s
admirable appendix, to the work of Jeffrey Dudgeon, and to the fact that
history – even Irish history – records many high-profile cases of sexual
risk-taking on the part of people in the public eye.
ROY FOSTER
Hertford College, Oxford.
Translating Euripides
Sir, – Edith Hall comments justly that Euripides has “never found a translator
who could reproduce his complicated impact” (September 5). She does not
mention the series of translations of Euripides launched for Oxford
University Press (New York) in the early 1980s by the late William
Arrowsmith, of which the avowed intention was to employ poets who would
offer “poetry [which] aims at being dramatic poetry . . . realizing itself
in words and actions that are both speakable and playable”. The plays had a
scholar as co-author (for obvious reasons): in the case of Helen (1981) the
poet was the late James Michie, and I acted as the scholar. I add only that
we found the task immensely difficult, were far from satisfied with the
result, and were never aware of any performance.
COLIN LEACH
159 Southwood Lane, London N6.
Stephen Reynolds
Sir, – It is gratifying to his admirers that Stephen Reynolds should be so
prominently featured during the centenary of the publication of A Poor Man’s
House (see Max Saunders’s article, Commentary, October 3). Reynolds’s
coinage of the term “autobiografiction”, his identification of the
phenomenon and his own contribution to the genre all deserve much wider
recognition. By happy chance the same issue of the TLS contained a review of
a biography of Alan Sillitoe. D. J. Taylor cites Richard Bradford on the
1950s: “to make good literature from the lives of those outside the cultural
mainstream without diluting or patronising them was something that had
scarcely been attempted, let alone achieved, in English writing”. A Poor
Man’s House and Seems So!: A working-class view of politics (1911) must be
reckoned serious attempts. Reynolds wished the title to have read “From a
Poor Man’s House”, for he clearly wanted to be heard as from within; to drop
the preposition is to expose A Poor Man’s House to mistaken assumptions of
the patronizing and the picturesque.
Reviewing A Poor Man’s House, Ford Madox Ford was constrained to reflect: “It
is astonishing how little literature has to show of the poor”. That same
year saw the publication of W. H. Davies’s Autobiography of a Super-Tramp,
and 1910 yielded two rather original versions of pastoral: W. H. Hudson’s A
Shepherd’s Life and L. P. Jacks’s Mad Shepherds. Hudson was a friend of
Reynolds’s; like Gosse, Hudson was forty years his senior, yet it might well
have been Reynolds’s concept and practice of autobiografiction that helped
Hudson to shape his most successful book. As Saunders notes, Reynolds’s
essay is “astonishingly astute”. It was published in 1906 and may have
played a part in Edmund Gosse’s strategy of anonymity and indirection in the
composition of Father and Son, published in 1907.
CHARLES LOCK
Department of English Literature, University of Copenhagen, Njalsgade 130,
Copenhagen.
V for victory
Sir, – As a boy of eight living in The Hague, I wondered why the Germans had
taken the trouble to put banners in the streets announcing “V = DUITSCHLAND
WINT OP ALLE FRONTEN” (Germany wins on all fronts – the official Dutch
spelling at that time was Duitsland, not Duitschland: see Letters, most
recently, August 15). This clumsy sort of propaganda must have been on show
before June 1942, the moment the army of occupation threw my family out of
our home, which became part of the Festung (fortress), being part of the
Atlantikwall. Our home housed female Luftwaffe employees during the
subsequent war years. Because of the colour of their uniforms we called them
the “grijze muizen” (grey mice) of the “Lustwaffe”.
WESSEL REININK
Kromme Nieuwegracht 26, NL–3512 HJ Utrecht.
Ginzburg on stage
Sir, – Has Joseph Farrell (In Brief, September 26) ever seen a play by Natalia
Ginzburg performed on an Italian stage? Ginzburg may well never have
“learned the sense of theatrical time, the sense of suspense, or the skill
of developing action or character”; she may well have “made a wrong turning
when she took up playwriting”. Still, her fellow countrymen – both actors
and audiences – have always loved her comedies, charming period pieces (most
of them belong in the 1960s and 70s) which were quite successful in their
day and are often revived even now. Professor Farrell points out that only
one was ever produced in England. True, but then the English have never
developed a taste for Italy’s greatest playwright of all time – namely
Goldoni – either.
MASOLINO D’AMICO
Department of Comparative Literature, Università di Roma Tre, via del Valco
di San Paolo, 00146 Rome.
REED
Sir, – I don’t suppose it will much help my case with Pamela King (October
10), but for many scholars of my generation the Records of Early English
Drama do not constitute the “radical vanguard” of a “quiet revolution”.
REED, we used to joke, is where drama goes to die. I’m gratified that King
likes my prose and my work on the Bible, but, speaking of the Bible, let’s
be honest: using the word “evolutionary” to mean “bad” is not cutting-edge.
(Think about it.) What is weird is the impression she gives that a book
about Marlowe and his English predecessors would be less “evolutionary” if
it were set in France and omitted Marlowe. Perhaps weirder still, that
theological commonplaces no longer need airing in a discussion of religious
theatre since those commonplaces were known . . . to Chaucer! If that’s what
King means by “medieval drama”, she is welcome to it.
JOHN PARKER
American Academy in Rome, via Angelo Masina 5, 00153 Rome.
Henry Stimson
Sir, – Ian Neary, reviewing Sean L. Malloy’s Atomic Tragedy (October 17), says
that Henry Stimson was Secretary of State to both Roosevelt and Truman. He
was not. He was Secretary of War. (He had earlier been Secretary of State to
Herbert Hoover, 1929–33, and Secretary of War to William Howard Taft,
1911–13.)
DAVID HAWKINS
130 Eighth Avenue, Apt 2A, Brooklyn, New York 11215.
Minuscule
Sir, – While studying medieval history as an undergraduate, I was given two
important pieces of advice by my personal tutor. The first was to read the
TLS (I think you should give the present Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical
History at Oxford a free subscription for her promotion of your
publication); the second, to beware of the monocausal explanation. I hope
her advice has paid off.
In his comments on Conrad Leyser’s review of Andrew Louth’s Greek East and
Latin West (Letters, October 3), Pierre MacKay suggests that the emergence
of minuscule, circa 800, was a “response . . . to the realization that \[due
to organic decay\] unless copyists got to work fast there might be nothing
left to copy”. More recently, R. I. Moore, reviewing Rosamond McKitterick’s
Charlemagne (October 10), proposed that the dispersed nature of
Charlemagne’s court was increasingly dependent on the use of written
communication. Could that be another reason for the emergence of minuscule,
at least in the West, or am I stating the obvious?
NEIL COOPER
Ormsby Hall, South Ormsby, Lincolnshire.
Indian Queens
Sir, – There is a Pocahontas Crescent in Indian Queens in Cornwall (see Ian
Leith’s letter, October 17). The local Cornish myth is that the lady spent
the night in that village on her way from Falmouth to London, thus giving
her name to the village. Others, more prosaically, point to a local inn,
dedicated to the Empress of India in a later century, as the more likely
source of the exotic name. Both seem equally exotic if you live down here.
TIM RUSS
26 St Francis Meadow, Mitchell,Cornwall.
‘Brideshead’ best
Sir, – Geoffrey Wheatcroft is correct that the new film version of Brideshead
Revisited is quite awful (Arts, October 10), but I do object to the
condescending remarks about Americans and the reception of Evelyn Waugh’s
novel over here. My generation, and it was in Southern California after all,
liked and understood the novel. It is still popular on- and off-campus. It
is Waugh’s best novel, but critics still keep saying it isn’t. It will
outlast them all.
WILLIAM GRANT
38 Oak Tree Lane, Aptos, California 95003.
