Ben Jonson’s foot voyage
Sir, – I am delighted that such distinguished scholars as P. N. Furbank and
Gabriele Bernhard Jackson (Letters, September 25 and October 9) have taken
up the challenge posed by the reference to Henry Ogle in the account of Ben
Jonson’s “foot voyage” I discussed in your September 11 issue. However, I
fear that in her concern to ensure that readers are not misled by my
perfunctory references to Thomas Dekker’s Satiromastix, Jackson is herself
in danger of giving the misleading impression that the references to Jonson
in that play can uncontroversially be stripped of homoerotic connotations.
Other eminent critics think otherwise: Lorna Hutson argues instead that this
portrayal of a poet and his male friend is “flavoured” with “sexual
innuendo”, and that the play as a whole offers “an extremely camp portrait
of Jonson”.
Some of Jackson’s other assertions are also perhaps a little tendentious.
Though most printed instances would appear to date from the later
seventeenth century, the phrase “to make someone one’s mistress” can indeed
mean “to initiate an erotic relationship” in early modern English. It may
not be a synonym for “casual sex”, but that’s probably because the latter is
our notion and locution, not theirs. The work of recent decades on the early
modern interweaving of homoeroticism and other social bonds further suggests
we should eschew over-categorical statements about what could be done, said,
or countenanced between the men of the period. In particular, we shouldn’t
assume that “sodomy” is the best, simple or only name for what may or may
not have happened between Jonson and Ogle.
Still, the reference must mean something, and I’m grateful to P. N. Furbank
for his suggested reading. It is certainly possible that Jonson made Ogle
the mistress of the household when he was its temporary master, though even
this doesn’t seem obviously devoid of homoerotic resonance. We also have to
take into account the fact that the reference to Ogle occurs in defining
isolation at the very beginning of the section describing the poet’s Welbeck
adventures, and more than a page and a half before the narrative of his
activities in Cavendish’s absence. This in itself may endow the colourless
sentence with the affective charge Jackson thinks it lacks, as if the author
judged this relationship to be one of the most noteworthy aspects of the
whole visit, and possibly something more than comic.
There is, in fact, a good Jonsonian parallel for this hermeneutic challenge.
At the very end of the 1616 text of Every Man In His Humour, the final
ordering gesture of the “old merry magistrate” Justice Clement is to make
Brayne-worme, another gentleman’s servant, the person “to whom all my
addresses of courtship shall have their reference” – to make him, in other
words, and as Clement puts it, “my mistris”. Perhaps this gesture, too, need
not carry homoerotic implications, given its ceremonial context. But it’s
far from unreasonable, I think, to entertain the possibility that it does.
JAMES LOXLEY
Department of English Literature, University of Edinburgh, George Square,
Edinburgh.
Black separatism
Sir, – Writing as an American of radical political persuasion, who has never
been an Obama partisan, I must take issue with the concluding remark in
Michael O’Brien’s otherwise quite interesting review of several books on
American slavery (“Where the slaves slept”, September 25). O’Brien writes,
“The fashion [black separatism] will return, of course, especially if
President Obama proves another Sally Hemings, just someone who makes
treaties with white power, and neglects to add clauses of benefit to the
field hands at the bottom of the mountain”.
First of all, the comment is obliquely sexist, although I am sure the author
did not intend it in this way, in that it portrays Obama’s possible betrayal
of the hopes of black Americans in gendered terms: Obama = Sally Hemings =
whore.
Secondly, the “fashion” of black separatism has never entirely disappeared in
the United States since Marcus Garvey’s time: take, for example, Malcolm X,
the Black Panthers, the attack on the MOVE compound in Detroit in 1978. The
Nation of Islam under Louis Farrakhan is still active, and I occasionally
see them distributing The Final Call in my neighbourhood. My impression is
that while radical Left politics in America, with a strong emphasis on
issues of race and gender, may indeed become more fashionable during
President Obama’s administration, black separatism as such is a moribund
philosophy.
Finally, Obama is not just appeasing “white” power; he is appeasing the power
of the military-industrial complex, the power of the banks and insurance
companies, of the health care industry, of the Israeli lobby, etc. The list
of his betrayals of his constituents’ hopes is growing, and goes well beyond
racial boundaries.
DEREK DAVIS
7635 N. Bosworth, Chicago, Illinois 60626.
To Pol Pot
Sir, – Jonathan Mirsky repeats the canard that “Washington’s ill-considered
efforts in Cambodia led straight to Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge” (September
11). It was neither straight (it took five years from Sihanouk’s ousting to
the fall of Phnom Penh) nor causative (had there been no US-backed army
under Lon Nol, the Khmer Rouge would have won in any case). The carpet
bombing was illegal and barbaric, to be sure, but to derive some redeeming
meaning from it by claiming that the Khmer Rouge, and hence the genocide,
both resulted from it, is illogical. Post hoc ergo propter hoc.
J. K. HALLIGAN
28 Ninth Street, Collingwood, Ontario.
John Brack
Sir, – Patrick McCaughey uses groundless generalizations about post-war
Australia (Arts, September 25) in his attempt to explain the work of John
Brack. The “barrenness of Australian urban and suburban life and the angst
which accompanied the boredom” is a description that sits uneasily next to
the photography of Max Dupain (one of Brack’s well-known contemporaries). In
contrast to Brack, Dupain’s photographs depict a remarkably energized urban
landscape (consider the vibrancy of the crowds and tramcars in “Peak hour
Kings Cross, 1938”, or the refreshing potency of “The Sunbather”). It is for
this reason I reject McCaughey’s notion that Brack has tapped into some
overarching “Australian experience”. “Brack’s view of the aridity of
Australian life” is more accurately a view of Melbourne life in the
mid-twentieth century.
MATTHEW ENDACOTT
St John’s College, University of Sydney, Missenden Road, Camperdown, New South
Wales.
‘Hind Swaraj’
Sir, – It was good to read the Commentary by Ramachandra Guha, “A prophet
announces himself”, marking the centenary of Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj (September
4). There is one point in Guha’s presentation that calls for comment. He
characterizes Hind Swaraj “as a book-length rejoinder” to an article by G.
K. Chesterton in the Illustrated London News.
Yet a careful reading of Gandhi’s essay of October 26, 1909, which gives a
lengthy account of Chesterton’s article, tells a different story. He is in
agreement with Chesterton’s criticism of the incongruity of Indians wanting
to build Indian nationalism on Herbert Spencer’s philosophy. Guha’s account
of Chesterton’s article omits all references to Spencer. This is a great
pity, because in Hind Swaraj Spencer is equally Gandhi’s target. Gandhi
cites Chesterton as saying: “What is the good of the Indian national spirit
if they cannot protect themselves from Herbert Spencer? I am not fond of the
philosophy of Buddhism, but it is not so shallow as Spencer’s philosophy. It
has some noble ideals, unlike the latter. One of their papers is called The
Indian Sociologist. Do the Indian youths want to pollute their ancient
villages and poison their kindly homes by introducing Spencer’s philosophy
into them? . . . But Herbert Spencer is not Indian; his philosophy is not
Indian philosophy; all this clatter about the science of education and other
things is not Indian. I often wish it were not English either. But this is
our first difficulty, that the Indian nationalist is not Indian”.
Gandhi is not only respectful of, but also in agreement with, Chesterton: “Mr
G. K. Chesterton is one of the great writers here. He is an Englishman of a
liberal temper. Such is the perfection of his style that his writings are
read by millions with great avidity. To The Illustrated London News of
September 18 he has contributed an article on Indian awakening, which is
worth studying. I too believe that what he has said is reasonable”.
If what Chesterton said had been reasonable, where is the need for a
“rejoinder”?
ANTHONY PAREL
University of Calgary, Calgary.
Tang poetry
Sir, – A further point should be made regarding the translation of “various
examples of Tang poetry” by Marie Jean Léon d'Hervey, marquis de
Saint-Denys, mentioned by Robert Irwin in his most interesting review of the
Dictionnaire des orientalistes de langue française (September 18). The
Marquis d’Hervey-SaintDenys’s Poésies de l’époque des Thang (first published
in 1862 and not republished until 1977) contains an introductory essay on
Chinese poetry and prosody and lengthy selections from the works of Li Po
and Tu Fu together with shorter selections from thirty-three other poets.
Each poet is given a biographical note and each poem extensive annotations.
In his 1977 editorial note to the volume, Guy Debord adds that these are by
far the best translations of Chinese poetry ever made into French.
JOHN McHALE
4 Sheringham Avenue, Manor Park, London E12.
Sir, – TLS subscribers limited to reading in English but intrigued by Robert
Irwin’s reference to the Polish Count Jan Potocki’s “extraordinary novel
Manuscrit trouvé à Saragosse” may be interested to know that there is an
English edition translated by Elisabeth Abbott and edited with a preface by
Roger Caillois (New York, 1960).
DAVID SKENE-MELVIN
Apartment 210, 30 Elm Avenue, Toronto.
The truth
Sir, – As David Horspool says in his review of Trevor Griffiths’s A New World
(September 18), Benjamin Franklin in the play both quotes: “Never mind the
facts. Just give me the truth”, and gives his “ahistorical” source, Groucho
Marx. Another “source” might be one of Yukio Mishima’s modern Noh plays,
Madame de Sade (tr Donald Keene): “You give me the facts but I want the
truth”. Any other offers? Is there a “classical” precedent?
ROGER MATTHEWS
75 Alpha Road, Cambridge.
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