Letters

SIR: To my dismay, I find that the reviewer of my latest book, Marbot, has missed the point of the book: namely, the fact that the hero of this biography has never existed (LRB, 5 August). He is purely fictitious and has no model in cultural history (nor, for that matter, in history). The quotations from his writings, his letters, the letters of Lady Catherine, his diaries etc are my own and so are the English translations. The illustrations of his family portraits depict a certain Baron Schwiter, Mrs Robert Scott Moncrieff, a Herr von Boist etc. There is no Marbot Hall, neither in Northumberland nor anywhere else, nor is there Redford. On the other hand, all persons except the Marbot family, Father van Rossum and Anna Maria Baiardi have existed, including Sir David Brewster, the inventor of the kaleidoscope.

Marbot’s non-existence might easily have been found out by looking him up in the Encyclopedia Britannica, in Goethe’s Gespräche mit Eckermann, the Letters of Ottilie von Goethe, or Schopenhauer and Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, the diaries of Delacroix, Berlioz, Count Platen and Lady Charlotte Bury, the writings of de Quincey, Boisserée, Bunsen, Ruskin and others, the biographies of Byron, Rumohr, etc. You will look for him in vain.

In my view, it speaks for the book that the reviewer has taken Marbot’s existence for granted. In fact, he could have existed. My book might have begun as a joke – I don’t remember – but it became increasingly more serious. One does not work four years on a joke.

It speaks for the reviewer that the author of the book should take for granted an assumption, on the reviewer’s part, of Marbot’s existence.

SIR: A trawl through your pages seems to catch more cod than salmon these days. But if you are going to continue your series of spoof reviews may this reader say how very much he prefers the Borgesian Stern on ‘Marbot’ to the leaden Sturrock on ‘Blanchot’ (LRB, 5 August)?

The word from Shepton Mullet appears to be that we are getting worse, and that John Sturrock’s article was some sort of low. This is an error. We are getting better, and Sturrock’s piece was among the best we have been fortunate enough to land.

SIR: Oh dear oh dear – that ubiquitous e (Letters, 19 August). Perec, of course, wrote: ‘mais il n’y saisissait qu’un imbroglio confus …’ I don’t know if the fault was mine in transcription or the printer’s – let’s say it was the revenge of language.

As for Blanchot, I am baffled as to why so intelligent and well-read a reviewer as John Sturrock, in the same issue, should react so differently from me. We seem to be reading a different writer.

The anomalous ‘e’ was not the printer’s fault.

SIR: The hectoring captiousness of Donald Davie’s review of Sue Lenier’s poems (LRB, 19 August) is a replay of one of the oldest and easiest routines in the repertoire of critical scurrility. It operates on roughly the same intellectual level as the vacuous overpraise of her by some newspapers, and is likely to do her less harm. I don’t think she needs any defence from me.

But as one of the people included in the review’s lordly reference to ‘various academic persons’, I’ll just recall that Professor Davie is himself an academic person, and has been one for longer not only than most of us but than the entire lifetime of Miss Lenier.

I should also say, as a matter of simple fact or ‘accuracy’ (a virtue to which Professor Davie’s attachment is notoriously stronger in profession than in performance), that I have never been an ‘intimidated colleague of the late F. R. Leavis’, nor even an unintimidated one. Professor Davie was, on the other hand, both a colleague and intimidated, as he likes to remind us. It would be nice if he relaxed his habit of treating other people as if they were extensions of his own autobiography.

SIR: Discussing Bertolt Brecht and Karl Korsch (LRB, 5 August), Margot Heinemann remarks that Brecht refused to identify with the ‘Korschian version’ of Marxism. Yet when Brecht made his hasty departure from the United States, he took with him the revised manuscript of Korsch’s Karl Marx, first published in pre-war Britain, and tried without success to find a Swiss publisher. So even in the late Forties Brecht had a certain sympathy with Korsch’s ideas. Or else he put friendship ahead of the ideological purity that Miss Heinemann credits him with. She goes on to speak dismissively of Korsch as Brecht’s ‘ “teacher" ’ and refers to Brecht’s ‘sharp little pen-portrait’ of Korsch as a drop-out from the class struggle. That is one point of view. Another is that of Paul Mattick, the ex-Spartacist émigré who published Korsch in the magazine Living Marxism. In a tribute written after Korsch’s death, and reprinted in Anti-Bolshevik Communism (Merlin Press, 1978), Mattick said: ‘As in Germany, so in America, his main influence was that of the educator, of the Lehrer, as he was respectfully considered by his friends… The quality of his mind and his moral integrity set him apart, and excluded him from the opportunistic hustle for positions and prominence characteristic of both the academic world and the official labour movement.’

SIR: Since I did not attack Karl Miller’s own writings on the Falklands war, I was surprised that he should react quite so defensively to my criticism of others (Letters, 5 August). It is interesting to learn that the editor of a leading literary magazine thinks that to argue for the accurate use of language is to indulge in ‘professional cant’. I do not understand why he claims that I talk ‘darkly’ of torture. My point was quite specific: does he deny that large numbers have been tortured in Argentina in recent years? He proceeds to lecture me on the meaning of ‘holocaust’. In fact, the word originally meant a complete burnt offering, and was not in any sense derogatory. However, we all know about semantic change, and now, particularly in a context of journalistic rhetoric such as Tam Dalyell’s article, ‘holocaust’ (even without a capital letter) necessarily carries the overtones of the massive slaughter of the Jews which I attributed to it. It also should be apparent that, even if every member of the task force had died and an equivalent number of Argentines, appalling as this would have been, it would have amounted to nothing like events in Nazi-dominated Europe. I agree with Karl Miller that politicians may persuade us into unnecessary sacrifices, but then they can also persuade us against making necessary sacrifices (consider Chamberlain’s remarks on Czechoslovakia). Above all, my main point remains unanswered, which is that the abuse of English by two contributors suggests, seriously, a failure to come to grips with reality.

I wonder why Charles Martindale supposes that there is any onus on me to declare myself concerning the torture practised in Argentina (and if he supposes that it was a reason for the dispatch of the task force). I still think that his treatment of the word ‘holocaust’ represents an abuse of English, since the word need not refer to a genocide, and that his use of the expression ‘abuse of English’ (or indeed ‘failure to come to grips with reality’) is mostly a way of abusing those with whom he finds himself in disagreement.

SIR: I would like to add to Malcolm Deas’s excellent round-up of the Falkland Islands dispute (LRB, 19 August) the confirmation that Argentina’s claim against the United States, for damage caused to Luis Vernet’s settlement at Puerto Soledad in 1831, is still outstanding. Argentina’s protest was suspended, though not abandoned, circa 1890, when the State Department said it would not answer letters on the claim from Buenos Aires until the dispute over the Falkland Islands was settled with Britain. This is dealt with at length in the bilingual volume by the Argentine historian Ernesto J. Fitte: La Agresion Norteamericana a las Islas Malvinas (Emecé, Buenos Aires, 1966). Mr Deas is wrong to reject Hunter Christie’s assertion that Juan Peron revived the Malvinas issue. Although Argentina sent a written reminder of the dispute to Britain each year, as from 1946 Peron aroused popular feeling for the issue by, among other ways, introducing the history of the claim for the Malvinas to schoolchildren at a very early age.

SIR: I was so shocked by the reply of Tom Paulin to his critics (Letters, 19 August) that I felt compelled to make a contribution to your ‘Faculty at War’ debate. Firstly, it is sad that a distinguished academic and poet at a Northern University is patently unaware that we have now been in a post-literate society for nigh on fifty years, with film and television acting as the main replacement subjects for the narrow confines of English Literature and History. The modern media are, of course, the most important natural disseminators of education for the mass of people today. Secondly, Paulin’s views regarding the recently awarded and published PhD on a ‘soap opera’ (his inference) appear to cast doubt that such drama is literature. Well, Mr Paulin, it is not only literature that we are talking about but modern literature: a subject that we in Further Education have realised as fundamentally more important – critically as well as socially – than any English syllabus become ‘rigorous and much drier’.