Back in January I was asked to continue my Year in Reading series here at LH, and how can I say no? At first I was thinking “I didn’t really read much this year,” but then I looked through my appointment book (if that’s what you call those little week-at-a-glance thingies, which I mainly use to keep track of reading and movies) and discovered that actually I read quite a bit. I’ll list most of them (in more or less chronological order) with cursory evaluations, linking to posts if I’ve written about them, and at the end I’ll be more expansive about a couple I’m reading now with great pleasure.
I enjoyed Vladimir Sorokin’s Blue Lard, though it’s not my favorite Sorokin (LH). My wife and I spent many happy hours listening to Zadie Smith read her recent novel The Fraud (LH). I reread Gaito Gazdanov’s Вечер у Клэр [An Evening with Claire], which I last read shortly after moving to NYC in 1981 (I checked it out of the much-missed Donnell, with its superb foreign-language collection); I don’t know why I didn’t post about it, but I enjoyed it even more than I had before, since I had more background, both historical (it’s about the Russian Civil War) and literary, and I’m sure Bryan Karetnyk’s translation is well worth reading if you want to investigate it. I read Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March (LH), Percival Everett’s I Am Not Sidney Poitier: A Novel (my wife and I thought it was very funny, if frequently discomfiting, as he intends), Veniamin Kaverin’s Художник неизвестен [Artist unknown, tr. as The Unknown Artist] (LH), Ann Patchett’s Tom Lake (LH), Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep (see JC’s 2019 comment; again, I don’t know why I didn’t write about it here, but it was a fun read), Nabokov’s Подвиг [The feat] (LH) and Приглашение на казнь [Invitation to a Beheading] (LH), and Juan Filloy’s Caterva (LH).
One book I really wanted to post about and somehow didn’t manage to was Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven. It got rave reviews (you can see some quotes at Mandel’s site), and I’d been wanting to read it for quite a while before it came into my hands as a birthday present this year; I found it gripping and well written, but I somehow couldn’t find anything worth saying about it. If you have any interest in post-apocalyptic fiction that isn’t about zombies or civil war but about ordinary people trying to get by, get along, and deal with their memories, you will almost certainly like it.
I was disappointed by Négar Djavadi’s Disoriental (LH) and by Marietta Shaginyan’s Кик [Kik] (LH) and entertained but not impressed by Irina Polyanskaya’s Читающая вода [(The) reading water; Water that reads] (LH); my wife and I found Lore Segal’s autobiographical novel Other People’s Houses involving but often depressing (Segal has a very disenchanted view of humanity), and we are now rereading Anthony Powell’s A Question of Upbringing, the first novel in his sequence A Dance to the Music of Time (LH) — I’m enjoying Powell’s leisurely, Latinate prose as much as I did a decade ago.
And now to my current reading. For some reason I decided to treat myself to Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, which I’d been wanting to read since it came out over a decade ago (I’ve always been fascinated by WWI), and I’m very glad I did — his emphasis on the importance of both historical and personal factors feels right to me, as does his insistence on contingency (the older I get and the more awareness of the world I acquire, the more ridiculous I find ideas of historical inevitability). Here’s a section on Edward Grey (of “The lamps are going out all over Europe” fame):
Unlike Stolypin and Kokovtsov or their German colleagues Bülow and Bethmann Hollweg, the British foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, had no reason to fear unwanted interventions by the sovereign. George V was perfectly happy to be led by his foreign secretary in international matters. And Grey also enjoyed the unstinting support of his prime minister, Herbert Asquith. Nor did he have to contend, as his French colleagues did, with over-mighty functionaries in his own Foreign Office. Grey’s continuity in office alone assured him a more consistent influence over policy than most of his French colleagues ever enjoyed. While Edward Grey remained in control of the Foreign Office for the years between December 1905 and December 1916, the same period in France saw fifteen ministers of foreign affairs come and go. Moreover, Grey’s arrival at the Foreign Office consolidated the influence of a network of senior officials who broadly shared his view of British foreign policy. Grey was without doubt the most powerful foreign minister of pre-war Europe.
Like most of his nineteenth-century predecessors, Sir Edward Grey was born into the top tier of British society. He was the descendant of a distinguished line of Whig grandees – his great grand-uncle was the Earl Grey of the 1832 Reform Bill and eponym of the popular scented tea. Of all the politicians who walked the European political stage before 1914, Grey is one of the most baffling. His aloof and lofty style did not go down well with the rank and file of the Liberal Party. He had long been a Liberal MP, yet he believed that foreign policy was too important to be subjected to the agitations of parliamentary debate. He was a foreign secretary who knew little of the world outside Britain, had never shown much interest in travelling, spoke no foreign languages and felt ill at ease in the company of foreigners. He was a Liberal politician whose vision of policy was opposed by most Liberals and supported by most Conservatives. He became the most powerful member of the faction known as ‘the liberal imperialists’, yet he appears to have cared little for the British Empire – his views on foreign policy and national security were tightly focused on the European continent.
There was a curious dissonance between Grey’s persona – private and public – and his modus operandi in politics. As a young man, he had shown little sign of intellectual curiosity, political ambition or drive. He idled away his years at Balliol College, Oxford, where he spent most of his time becoming Varsity champion in real tennis, before graduating with a third in Jurisprudence, a subject he had chosen because it was reputed to be easy. His first (unpaid) political post was fixed up through Whig family connections. As an adult, Grey always cultivated the image of a man for whom politics was a wearisome duty, rather than a vocation. When parliament was dissolved in 1895 following a Liberal defeat in a key vote, Grey, who was then serving as an MP and parliamentary under-secretary of state for foreign affairs, professed to feel no regrets. ‘I shall never be in office again and the days of my stay in the House of Commons are probably numbered. We [he and his wife Dorothy] are both very relieved.’ Grey was a passionate naturalist, birdwatcher and fisherman. By the turn of the century, he was already well known as the author of a justly celebrated essay on fly-fishing. Even as foreign secretary, he was apt to leave his desk at the earliest opportunity for country jaunts and disliked being recalled to London any sooner than was absolutely necessary. Some of those who worked with Grey, such as the diplomat Cecil Spring-Rice, felt that the country excursions were getting out of hand and that the foreign secretary would be well advised to ‘spare some time from his ducks to learn French’.74 Colleagues found it difficult to discern political motivation in Grey; he struck them as ‘devoid of personal ambition, aloof and unapproachable’.
And yet Grey did develop a deep appetite for power and a readiness to deploy conspiratorial methods in order to obtain and hold on to it. His accession to the post of foreign secretary was the fruit of careful planning with his trusted friends and fellow liberal imperialists, Herbert Asquith and R. B. Haldane. In the ‘Relugas Compact’, a plot hatched at Grey’s fishing lodge in the Scottish hamlet of that name, the three men agreed to push aside the Liberal leader Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman and establish themselves in key cabinet posts. Secretiveness and a preference for discreet, behind-the-scenes dealing remained a hallmark of his style as foreign secretary. The posture of gentlemanly diffidence belied an intuitive feel for the methods and tactics of adversarial politics.
That gives me a better sense of Grey than I’ve gotten from my previous reading, and a passage about Conrad von Hötzendorf’s long liaison with Gina von Reininghaus, the wife of a Viennese industrialist, is equally enlightening:
It would be difficult to overstate the importance of this relationship; it was at the centre of Conrad’s life throughout the years from 1907 to the outbreak of war, eclipsing all other concerns, including the military and political questions that came to his desk. Its obsessive quality may help to explain some features of Conrad’s professional demeanour – his willingness, for example, to risk his professional standing by associating himself with extreme positions, and his relative immunity from the fear of being exposed or discredited. He even came to see war as a means of gaining possession of Gina. Only as a victorious war-hero, Conrad believed, would he be able to sweep aside the social obstacles and the scandal attaching to a marriage with a prominent divorcée. He fantasized in a letter to Gina about returning from a ‘Balkan war’ draped in the laurels of triumph, throwing caution to the winds and making her his wife.
If you prudishly ignore that kind of thing, you miss something vital. I strongly recommend the book to anyone interested in the period.
I’ll finish with one of the best gifts I received this year. Trevor Joyce, the poet laureate of LH (see Fastness and Trem Neul), sent me his latest book, Conspiracy; there’s a description at the site of the publisher, Veer2:
Conspiracy is a set of 144 twelve-line poems, written one or more per day in Shandon, Cork, between May 18 and July 10, 2020.
These eight weeks saw the initial onslaught of the pandemic and the first panicked responses: mass hospitalizations and lockdowns, shortages of oxygen and protective equipment, lip-service to emergency workers, and political manoeuvring. It was also marked by the murder in the USA of George Floyd, street demonstrations, the leap to prominence of Black Lives Matter, and the spread of rumour and paranoia as lockstep faltered. Everywhere, this was played out on screens, as the language of voiceover often peeled away from the observed realities.
The title, Conspiracy, puts front and centre the human activity of breathing together, a shared need felt urgently at that time when much else ceased. The phrases stagger onward, interrupting and speaking over one another, as obsessive doomscrolling gives way to other reading and concerns — a book on cave art, a Victorian manual of stage magic, a coroner’s inquiry into the collapse of Dublin tenements in 1913 — yet returns again to supplant them.
The poems are interset with photographs of stencilled sidewalk art from Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles, Feb. 2020, images which echo or anticipate the apprehensions of the days they separate.
It’s a lovely little volume, and I’ve been reading it slowly, letting it infuse my awareness of the passing days; I like Peter Manson’s description: “It’s not really enjambment, more as if a dozen voices were speaking in turn, so well-rehearsed as to flow perfectly and still retain their distinctness.” You can download a pdf sample at that publisher’s page; here’s poem 106, to give you an idea:
more precious than
certain rare metals
the flat spalted timbers
of the lid display
in startling turquoise
a compacted history
telling how the felled woods
rot yet they reveal
nothing of what is closer
to hand that is what is
within the box if
anything at all
I am always refreshed and stimulated by his sense of how words interact and how language can be used to engage with the complexity of its own and the world’s history; especially in these difficult times, I need poetry like that. If you like the sample, why not try the book?
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