Céline on the run
Sir, – Ramona Fotiade’s attack on me (Letters, July 3) for daring to defend
the literary importance of Louis-Ferdinand Céline was carried out with the
verve of a prosecuting attorney. She uses emotive imagery to condemn Céline
and myself.
It is not true that Céline’s pamphlets are impossible to find. They are freely
downloadable from the web. The attack on Céline by Ernst Jünger came from a
man who had sworn an oath of allegiance to the Führer. Jünger sent an
apologetic letter to Céline for having written thus about him.
Editions Denoël, which published several anti-Semitic tracts, was, due to
political connections, exonerated after the war. It is a prime example of
the double standard applied to Céline. Many of those who collaborated with
the occupying forces escaped with no punishment. Céline did not collaborate.
Using him as a smokescreen to hide the deeper culpability of French society
is wrong. Céline paid his dues in full under the laws of France.
There is no mention by Fotiade of the attacks Céline made on Hitler and the
Vichy hierarchy, his damning comments on Aryans, or his refusal to turn in
people he knew to be Resistance fighters. Céline is a satirist in the
tradition of Swift. When he wrote “urns for the Jews” he had no idea about
gas chambers, crematoria and the Holocaust. Céline was a doctor – anyone who
knows the importance of eugenics in the medical field is well aware that
race theory was hardly a German invention.
Céline said he should never have meddled in the “Jewish question”. When Pound
was released from St Elizabeth’s Hospital, the first thing he did on
arriving in Italy was give the Nazi salute. Where is Fotiade’s condemnation
of Pound, or of Sartre, who blindly promulgated an ideology that cost more
than 20 million lives in Russia alone? The reason Céline is reviled is
simple. He reminds us of the lies people have written to cover their shame
at allowing the Holocaust to happen, and the shame of the French in
particular at their collusion in it.
Ramona Fotiade could perhaps have helped her case by mentioning Céline’s
comment to the effect that the Jewish people had been racist for 2,000
years. The emotive shock that comment sparks in us is due to the cultural
singularity Jewish suffering has now assumed in Western society. The
Holocaust is the most evil act ever perpetrated against a single people.
However, the fact we cannot admit is that the guilt was spread throughout
many countries and peoples. Trying to make Céline appear responsible for the
Holocaust is ridiculous.
I do not exonerate him. I never set myself up as his judge. I am neither a
Holocaust denier nor a revisionist. My maternal family were Jews from
Poland. But Fotiade’s letter is not about Céline. It is about the pain she
feels – many people feel – at the Holocaust, manifesting itself through her
revulsion against a man who made anti-Semitic comments and anyone who states
that he is a great writer.
KARL OREND
24 rue de Condé, 75006 Paris.
Crusaders
Sir, – I fear that Andrew Jotischky (July 3) is mistaken in blaming Osama bin
Laden and George W. Bush for the extraordinary preponderance of books on the
Crusades in the field of medieval history. It has been visible, and growing,
since long before 2001. It is doubtless attributable, in the first place, to
the talent and enthusiasm of their authors, from Steven Runciman down, but
also in large part to the absurd but self-fulfilling belief among academic
historians – mostly modernists – that students who now have to be seduced
rather than dragooned into courses cannot be interested in more serious or
central aspects of medieval history; to a similar conviction about their
readers seemingly shared by literary editors in their allocation of review
space; and to the failure of too many of us who work on such topics to
present our findings with the flair and conviction that might persuade them
otherwise. But the familiar dangers of intellectual complacency and
self-referentiality when relatively small historical fields are
over-cultivated by enthuasiasts are not averted in this case by the dubious
claim to “relevance” conferred by current political rhetoric. The popularity
of crusading history has contributed very little to the understanding of
either Latin Christian or Islamic society. On the contrary, the Dungeons and
Dragons mentality to which much of it panders underpins the romantic
conception of “the Middle Ages” as a never-never land which may safely be
ignored by those whose concerns are with the real world. Since the real
world that we now inhabit acquired its shape and substance in those
centuries, that is a dangerous as well as a foolish misapprehension.
R. I. MOORE
107 Moorside North, Newcastle upon Tyne.
Tudors?
Sir, – Reflecting on Clifford Davies’s Commentary article on why we are wrong
to talk about “the Tudors” (June 13, 2008), received, Davies says, in
silence (Letters, July 3), I note his claim that historians have elevated
1485 as representing a “fundamental break” in British history. His article
contained much interesting comment on how neither sixteenth-century monarchs
nor their subjects used the term “Tudor” to refer to themselves. But much
excellent work over the past forty years has explored the nature and
distinctiveness of Tudor monarchy. I took it, and I believe that Kevin
Sharpe was right to do so, that this has become and remains a necessary term
of use in historical parlance. It did not occur to me that I was being
indiscriminate over the term which Yale University Press, the publisher,
adopted in presenting his book, Selling the Tudor Monarchy. Its resonance,
after Sharpe and others, is hardly misleading.
ANTHONY FLETCHER
School House, South Newington, Oxfordshire.
Alexandrines
Sir, – Few subjects seem to provoke as much misunderstanding in speakers of
English as French versification. Hamish Robinson (Letters, July 3) is right
to correct Maya Slater’s erroneous view (Arts, June 19) that the alexandrin
classique has six stresses in its twelve syllables (an iambic rhythm), but
is wrong in his turn to say that it has, “when perfectly regular”, four
stresses and an anapaestic rhythm. Racine’s alexandrin demands a
twelve-syllable line with an accent falling at the sixth syllable (caesura)
and the line-end. Within this framework many permutations of
syllable-groupings are possible (e.g., 4 + 2 | 1 +5), predominantly with
four stresses (hence the loose qualification of the alexandrin as a
tétramètre). In the 366 lines of the first act of Phèdre (where the disputed
line occurs), only eighty conform to a 3 + 3 | 3 + 3 pattern; in over ninety
both hemistichs are composed of 4 + 2 or 2 + 4; and over 150 combine 3 + 3
with either 4 + 2 or 2 + 4. There are only three lines in which neither
hemistich contains any of these three basic combinations. The rhythmic
patterns thus created are more varied and flexible than Maya Slater’s iambic
trot, or Hamish Robinson’s cantering anapaests.
PETER COGMAN
141 Bellemoor Road, Shirley, Southampton.
The Forum
Sir, – I enjoyed Masolino D’Amico’s review of The Roman Forum by David Watkin
(July 3), and I am looking forward to reading the book. But the reviewer
seems to echo the author in suggesting that the cultivated antiquarian’s
balanced, judicious appreciation of ancient monuments is somehow to be
contrasted with the modern, pseudoscientific archaeologist’s petty obsession
with grubbing around in holes. This may well be true. But sometimes a hole
is a monument. There are two in the Forum: the Umbilicus Urbis or Municipal
Navel, and the enigmatic Lacus Curtius. Both embody a sort of eccentricity
or whimsy which complicates our prevailing attitudes to antiquity – but both
exist; and both owe their existence, or at least their disclosure, to the
grubbing-about of archaeologists.
KEITH MILLER
1 Priory Grove, London SW8.
Mussadeq
Sir, – In his presidential address to the Classical Association in the UK
delivered earlier this year (Commentary, June 19), Richard Seaford makes
reference to the fact that in 1953, at the same time that Gilbert Murray was
speaking of the USA as a “large and enduring island of true Hellenic Life”
in “an ocean of Barbarism”, the British and American intelligence services
had “replaced a democratically elected government of Iran by a dictatorship
that, although savage, was favourable to British and American oil interest”.
From which one can only observe that outside of his own field of study,
Professor Seaford appears to be a bit at sea. First, contrary to Seaford’s
comments, the Mussadeq regime was hardly by any definition “democratically
elected”, as anyone who has a minimal knowledge of Iranian history of the
time well knows. Second, the government which replaced that of Mussadeq,
while not democratic itself, was hardly, for some time to come, the “savage”
dictatorship of Seaford’s imagining. Finally, it should be noted that it was
only the Americans who called the operation “Ajax”; their British
counterparts called it “Operation Boot”; and, that the head of the British
operation, C. M. Woodhouse, was not only a classics scholar but also a
fervent philhellene.
CHARLES G. V. COUTINHO
32 West 86th Street, Penthouse-A, New York, New York 10024.
Marianne Weber
Sir, – Peter Ghosh’s generally persuasive review of Joachim Radkau’s important
Max Weber: A biography does not do justice to Marianne Weber (June 19). Her
chapter on “Die neue Phase der Produktion” in her Lebensbild arguably
remains the most perceptive, brief statement of her husband’s key ideas – or
so it seems to me after some fifteen intensive years of studying Weber’s
principal works, and teaching his methods at all levels. She may even have
been in one sense a co-author of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, in that the
structure into which she shaped what he left works remarkably well.
D. L. D’AVRAY
University College, Gower Street, London WC2.
Liberty Valance
Sir, – In her delightful review of The Last American Man by Elizabeth Gilbert
(June 19), Christine Bold mentioned some women who contributed strongly to
American frontier mythology, but she didn’t mention one of the very best,
Dorothy M. Johnson, whose excellent short stories include “The Man Who Shot
Liberty Valance” and “A Man Called Horse”, as well as many others that have
not (as yet) been made into films. She is worth remembering.
ROBERT SCHOLES
20 Fairway Drive, Barrington, Rhode Island 02806.
