Mary Beard

The American Dream starts from a covered wagon; it takes mobility for granted. Recent censuses show that more than 43 million Americans move house each year. This is an annual migration roughly equivalent to the entire population of Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin (or, alternatively, every single American in their twenties) relocating every 12 months; and it all seems to pass relatively unnoticed. I asked in a Cambridge (Mass) bookstore last week for a guide to moving house – not intending to join the migration, but simply out of a vague cross-cultural curiosity at how a nation manages to get itself rehoused at such an astonishing rate. But the sales assistant just looked baffled (in a ‘what on earth would there be to write about that?’ sort of way) and politely suggested I call a truck rental company. A shop that had self-help manuals to cover every crisis of American life, from starting fourth grade to burying a pet, could only offer the Yellow Pages when it came to house moving.’

Cancer must sell almost as many books as cookery: not just old-fashioned self-help guides to detection or prevention, tips on how to survive the chemotherapy or colostomy (now lavishly illustrated with the kinds of photograph that were once allowed only in medical textbooks), but also a vast range of new-style ‘cancer journals’. These are first-person accounts – diaries, memoirs or letters – that chart the progress of ‘me and my cancer’ from the moment of discovery, through diagnosis and treatment, to life again on the other side. They range in tone from something close to Gothic horror to naive optimism.’

‘All you need to do, if you want the nation’s press camped on your doorstep, is to say that you once had a wank in 1947.’ Alan Bennett’s remark is quoted with obvious feeling by Kenneth Dover in a late-inserted footnote to his autobiography, Marginal Comment. Someone, he explains, had leaked part of the typescript of his book to the Evening Standard, who, on the scent of celebrity masturbation, had splashed (under the headline ‘Oxford Don Takes Memoirs In Hand’) his account of a ‘strange occasion’ in 1944 in the Italian hills. The beauty of the day, the blue sky and the snow ‘struck directly at my penis, so I sat down on a log and masturbated; it seemed the appropriate response.’’

There are more than ninety Holocaust Museums in the United States. Thousands of Americans, it seems, are forsaking their traditional Sunday-afternoon session of art-appreciation or dinosaur-gazing, in favour of an hour or two in front of some of the most horrifying images of the 20th century: naked corpses, emaciated survivors, gas-chambers. Film footage, of murder, death and dying, that would cause an outery if shown in the local cinema (let alone on prime-time television) has become ‘family viewing’ in the safety of the museum. The official publicity for all this, of course, is unwaveringly high-minded. It talks piously of commemoration and education: the modern museum should encourage us not only to wonder at the glorious achievements of the past, but also to reflect on, and learn from, its ‘mistakes’. Who could fail to be moved by these displays? Who could fail to welcome a new role for the museum as stirrer of the nation’s conscience?

Ancient religion has attracted some outrageous scholarship. And women’s religion in the ancient world – from cave people to the early Christians – has been blessed with far more than its fair share of lunacy. Part of this lunacy has, it is true, been confined to the wilder shores of popular imagination: vestal virgins having a dangerously good time with the highest-ranking senators of Rome; primitive mother goddesses ruling the roost in the never-never land of Stone Age matriarchy; beautiful Christian virgins speedily converting their thuggish Roman (would-be) lovers, then firmly leading them by the hand into the lion’s mouth. I am not only thinking of the licensed inaccuracy of film and fiction, however. Otherwise serious academics still offer arguments about women and religion that would be promptly – and rightly – laughed into the dustbin in almost every other field.’