Letters

SIR: An unfavourable review is one thing, an unfair review another. An unfair review, it seems to me, is one which intentionally or unintentionally misrepresents the contents of the book; it is unfair not only to the author but also to potential readers of the book, and it should not go uncorrected. I think that Julietta Harvey’s review of Nicholas Gage’s Eleni (LRB, 19 January) is such a review. Ms Harvey charges that ‘Mr Gage’s portrayal of the civil war is partial, misleading and undocumented.’ But the book is not intended to be a portrayal of the civil war, and it gives every evidence of being thorough, accurate and painstakingly researched as an account of his mother, his family and their village during the period covered by the story. Mr Gage describes his methodology: ‘Every incident described in the book that I did not witness personally was described to me by at least two people who were interviewed independently of each other …’ Nobody who has suffered the murder of his mother and the total deracination of his family from their home and way of life could expect to be completely objective about the circumstances. But Ms Harvey’s review does no sort of justice to the scrupulousness of Mr Gage’s method and wrongly contrives to present the book as biased and romantic.

Ms Harvey’s second criticism is more interesting, because it strikes at the heart of what is the subject-matter of the book rather than what is not. She describes Gage’s treatment of his mother as sentimental and him as ‘satisfied with the archetype of the Mother … or with the other archetype of the one noble person in an ignoble world determined to destroy her’. She goes on to say that Eleni does not fit this archetype because she is materialistic and cruel. Ms Harvey talks of the ‘resounding echoes of capitalised sentimentality in the Greek words Mana, Mitera’. Anyone who regards it as sentimental to describe an eight-year-old boy and his siblings as addressing someone as Mother has an austere view of the world indeed. But the charge that the author sees his mother as an archetype (always assuming that we know precisely what is meant by that word in the context) is more difficult to rebut and may be true; and, if true, may be one of the central strengths of this very strong book. Some people are more ‘archetypal’ than others, and find themselves in more ‘archetypal’ situations. For an author to convey the archetypal in such cases, provided that he does not ignore everything else (which, by Ms Harvey’s own account, Mr Gage does not) is not to render his account superficial or sentimental. I expect it would be anathema to Ms Harvey to see the shadow of Antigone behind Mr Gage’s Eleni, but to other readers it might be a provocative and natural line of inquiry. Certainly in trying to establish that Eleni is not noble (her word, not Mr Gage’s), she seems to go off the deep end. That ‘money and property mattered’ must have been, not a sign of ignobility, but a necessary prerequisite of life in the Mourgana mountains, and hurling stones at mules part of a means of transportation. (I would not wish to treat the fate of the poor old mule lightly, but it is interesting that a closer reading of the text reveals that Ms Harvey quite misreports this incident.)

There is no doubt that in the last paragraph of her review, Ms Harvey makes it clear that in her opinion Mr Gage should not have written his book but should, like Stephanos Tassis, have ‘listened silently … and returned to his card game’. It is my opinion that, had he done that, we would have been deprived of an honest, deeply moving and truthful book.

SIR: Lora Weinroth’s fatuous accusation against Christopher Ricks (Letters, 19 January) is the kind of excess that brings the venerable discipline of Jewish paranoia into disrepute. Ricks’s honest reply (gallantly suppressing embarrassment) proves that his critic’s fears are entirely misplaced. There is plenty of genuine bigotry around, by no means exclusively anti-semitic in character. A keen sensitivity may be invaluable (indeed, it has been literally vital to the Jewish people, in differentiating murderous rhetoric from the merely loathsome). However, this analysis should be reserved for appropriate texts.

SIR: I am currently preparing an edition of The Complete Works of George Orwell. In addition to new editions of the nine books, this will include the complete essays, letters and journalism. Great efforts have been made to locate all letters written by George Orwell and there have been some surprising discoveries. In the light of all the attention being given to Orwell in 1984, this seems a good moment to ask libraries, which might well have been checking to see if they have anything of Orwell’s to exhibit this year, whether I could be informed of material in any of the library collections not listed below. I have available for the edition material held by the following in England: BBC Library, British Library, India Office Records, Liverpool City Library, Newcastle University Library and the Library of St Antony’s College, Oxford. Also available for the edition is material held by the following libraries in the United States: Berg Collection, New York; Houghton Library, Harvard; Humanities Research Center, Texas; Lilly Library, Indiana; Lockwood Memorial Library, Buffalo; UCLA Library, California; and Yale University Library. If any other libraries have original letters by George Orwell, I should be most grateful if they would let me know.

We apologise for two errors in Charles Causley’s poem in the last issue. The last line of the poem should have read ‘For Frederick Smith, that will not reach the sea’. In the penultimate stanza there should not have been a full stop after ‘Died near this place in 1839’. The poem will be included in Charles Causley’s forthcoming collection, Secret Destinations.