Newdigate Prize poems

Sir, – H. R. Woudhuysen writes (July 11) that the “slim volumes” of Oxford Newdigate Prize poems from the nineteenth century are “notoriously rare, especially when – as with Oscar Wilde’s Ravenna . . . their authors become famous”. Actually the reverse seems to be true. Newdigate winners from the pens of the subsequently famous, though uncommon, are much easier to find than those written by the entirely obscure. Wilde’s Ravenna is a case in point. The ledger of Thomas Shrimpton, publisher of the Newdigate from c1840 to c1880, shows a print run of only 168 copies, although the pamphlet’s modern availability implies that this figure is probably too low. At least two copies are currently for sale on the internet and others turn up quite frequently in catalogues. A pirated edition, published in 1904, suggests that almost from the start its desirability to collectors must have drawn copies on to the market.

Other Newdigate poems by future luminaries – Ruskin’s Salette and Elephanta (1839), for example, or Arnold’s Cromwell (1841) – are by no means unobtainable, if only obtainable at a price. Cromwell, still in print at 1/6d when Wilde’s poem was published in 1878, was offered at £1,200 in a recent catalogue of Simon Nowell-Smith’s books. The exception may be John Buchan’s The Pilgrim Fathers, which won the prize in 1898 and is less often seen than either the Ruskin or the Arnold. But has anyone ever seen a copy of W. P. James’s Alfred the Great Contemplating Oxford University at the Present Day (1856) or – a rare sally into contemporary issues by the prize’s setters – T. Ll. Thomas’s Coal Mines (1863)?

J. R. MADDICOTT
9 Spindlers, Kidlington, Oxford.

Blood sacraments

Sir, – Fernando Cervantes (July 4) believes that “classical and sacred texts were much more persuasive than the brittle facts that humans could gather from mere empirical observations” for an understanding of the true beliefs of the “uncivilized” people in the New World. He cites the Dominican Alonso de Espinosa, who found “puzzling similarities between certain native practices and Christian rites”.

D. H. Lawrence, as a critic, came to similar conclusions in his discussion of Herman Melville’s writings about Polynesian people. In the chapter on Melville’s Typee, in his Studies in Classic American Literature, Lawrence dwells on the writer’s description of the “pastoral idyll” that he found in the Marquesa Island of Nukuheva. It was filled with “cannibal savages” but they “were gentle and generous with him”. Initially, Melville was horrified by their cannibalism, but changed his mind when he learnt that they ate “the bodies of slain enemies alone”. On this, Lawrence put the Christian gloss. He says that Melville “might have spared himself his shudder” because he no doubt “had partaken of the Christian Sacraments many a time. ‘This is my body, take and eat. This is my blood. Drink it in remembrance of me.’ And if the savages liked to partake of their sacrament without raising the transubstantiation quibble, and if they liked to say, directly: ‘This is thy body which I take from thee and eat. This is thy blood, which I sip in annihilation of thee,’ why surely their sacred ceremony was as awe-inspiring as the one Jesus substituted”.

A. BANERJEE

53 Mayfield Close, Walton-on-Thames.

Robert Birley

Sir, – In her review of Ferdinand Mount’s Cold Cream (June 20), Fiona MacCarthy’s remark about “the so-called liberal headmaster Dr Robert Birley . . . ceremoniously beating” a pupil at Eton in the mid 1950s “for some minimal offence” is unworthy.

Birley was bound by the disciplinary code of the mid-50s in the same way as any other headmaster of an equivalent school. On his arrival in South Africa, following his retirement from Eton in 1963, he attended my trial, in Johannesburg, as a member of the illegal South African Communist Party, visited me in prison, arranged for me a British passport and a United Nations scholarship for postgraduate study at the University of Sussex. He then welcomed me to his home on my arrival here as an exile. He had previously arranged for the education of the daughters of Nelson Mandela.

William Rees-Mogg’s memory from his time at Eton, that Birley “grounded a sense of historical liberalism in all of us”, is more just.

PAUL TREWHELA

31 Berryfield Road, Aylesbury.

Mao’s monotone

Sir, – In “Mao’s monotone” (NB, April 18) I was pleasantly surprised to find a poem by Li Bo (no longer Po, but Bo in the universally accepted Pinyin romanization). While the monotone problem is one that certainly plagues Chinese verse in English translation, the NB example of Li Bo’s poem is perhaps not ideally selected. Originally titled “Inscribed at the Summit-top Temple”, the poem was not included in any of the early (Song dynasty, 960–1279) collections of Li’s works. It first entered the corpus in the edition prepared by Wang Qi (1696–1774) in the 1750s, and then only appended as a “lost poem”. Wang Qi accepted the poem based on its “discovery” by Zeng Fu, a scholar-official who flourished in the mid-eleventh century. According to Zhao Delin’s Houjing lu (circa 1090), Zeng Fu, then the local magistrate in Huangmei County (extreme southeastern part of modern Hubei province), had occasion to visit the Summit-top Temple. He learned that the temple had been abandoned and was only able to locate it with the help of a local peasant. In the rafters of the deserted temple he found a rectangular board, covered with dust. On the board, written in a heroic hand, was this poem and an attribution to Li Bo. This was over 300 years after Li Bo’s death. Other scholars over the years, therefore, have argued that “Inscribed at the Summit-top Temple” is actually the work of another poet (actually several authors have been proposed, each with some textual support). Moreover, many modern Li Bo specialists, such as An Qi and Zhan Ying, believe the poem is simply a forgery by “a later poet”. In any case, all scholars agree that the simple style of this poem suggests it was a puerile effort and thus the comparison to Mao’s verse may be apt.

WILLIAM H. NIENHAUSER, JR

Department of East Asian Languages and Literature, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin 53706.

Offensive words

Sir, – The all but silent elision in Dylan Thomas’s play (see NB, July 4) reminded me of a case in Dorothy Sayers’s Five Red Herrings. My Avon edition (1968) introduces Waters’s view of “all foreigners”. Later I picked up a Brewer, Warren & Putnam edition (1931), and I was surprised to read that Waters, “like all Englishmen, was ready enough to admire and praise all foreigners except dagoes and niggers”.

But just who is meant may be vague, since “‘Nigger,’ to a Miss Timmins, may mean anything from a high-caste Brahmin to Sambo and Raustus at the Coliseum – it may even, at a pinch, be an Argentine or an Esquimaux”, according to Lord Peter in Unnatural Death. Avon (1964) left this in, likely due to its critical tone.

I doubt we’ll see the original Waters again, but we who might read novels to learn of contemporary social habits should make sure to read original editions.

ARTHUR SHIPPEE

72 North Lake Drive, Hamden, Connecticut 06517.

Rembrandt

Sir, – In his otherwise fair review of new publications on Rembrandt and the Jews (July 4), Steven Nadler uses a quotation from my book of 2006, Rembrandt’s Universe, in a misleading way.

I wrote (p304): “Compared with artists who demonstrably entertained ties with the Jewish community, like Romeyn de Hooghe (1645–1708), starting with his 1665 drawing of a circumcision in the home of a Sephardi family, or Emanuel de Witte (1617–92), with his paintings of the 1670s of the Portuguese synagogue, no earlier master, including Rembrandt, can be said to have taken contemporaneous Jews and Jewry seriously”.

Nadler plucks a few words from this sentence, casting them in a completely different form. “Schwartz, in fact, has gone even further, denying that Rembrandt had any particular interest in the Jews at all. True enough, if this means only that he was no more interested in Jews than he was in Christians. But Schwartz then goes on to make the less plausible claim that Rembrandt ‘\[cannot\] be said to have taken Jews and Jewry seriously’”.

As the reader can see, I was making a completely different point. Not a claim about Rembrandt, but one about the shift that took place in seventeenth-century attitudes towards the Jews at the end of Rembrandt’s life. An argued and I believe well-grounded statement about the emergence of true interest in Jewry on the part of Dutch artists has been distorted by Nadler into a straw-man claim about Rembrandt alone that he then dubs implausible.

GARY SCHWARTZ

Herengracht 22, NL–3601AM Maarssen, The Netherlands.

Holy Sepulchre

Sir, – In his review of Jerusalem: City of longing by Simon Goldhill (July 11), Jonathan Riley-Smith writes, “The rotunda of the Holy Sepulchre was not rebuilt in the twentieth century; its dome was”. In fact, the dome was restored, whereas the pillars of the rotunda were entirely replaced. The latter process, involving the erection in the early 1970s of new stone columns, each weighing more than 22 tons, is described in Raymond Cohen’s Saving the Holy Sepulchre (2008) – which also contains a fascinating discussion of the political background to the restoration of the church.

BERNARD WASSERSTEIN

7 De Clercqstraat, Amsterdam.

‘Prince Caspian’

Sir, – I applaud the fact that the TLS reviews popular films, often from a scholar’s perspective. However, I don’t think it should get into the business of stating that a particular film such as Prince Caspian is the “twenty-second highest grossing film of all time” (as Jerome de Groot states, Arts, July 4).

Anyone with any savvy in the film industry knows that these figures are not at all adjusted for inflation and, therefore, given the enormous rise in ticket prices over the past twenty years, are rather artificially skewed to recent works. They are based on dollar figures, not the number of tickets sold. This is how the film industry prefers it, as it is good for marketing purposes.

Sales of books on bestseller lists are still tallied honestly by copies sold. On these terms, Harry Potter really is the bestselling book series of all time. Film insiders know that when adjusted for inflation, the “bestselling” movie of all time remains Gone with the Wind, though many lists will tell you it is Titanic. In the properly inflation-adjusted list, Prince Caspian is not even in the top 100.

JONATHAN HARVEY

860 Marshall Drive, Palo Alto, California 94303.