Letters

SIR: In his glowing review of Shootdown: The Verdict on KAL 007 (LRB, 24 July) Paul Foot comments that since the author’s original article in the Guardian (17 December 1983), R.W. Johnson has ‘enriched’ his story with ‘meticulous research’. In the article Johnson suggested that KAL 007 was used by the CIA because a ‘slow-moving aircraft with high-resolution cameras and electronic surveillance equipment’ can carry out better reconnaissance than a satellite: however, in the book, as Foot notes, he ‘convincingly rejects the notion that KAL 007 carried its own surveillance equipment.’ Similarly, in his article he cites Washington’s ‘consuming interest in the Soviet naval complex around the Sea of Okhotsk and in the new Soviet Typhoon submarine’ as its motivation for initiating such an operation, whilst, in his book, Johnson claims that it was America’s interest in the new radar site at Krasnoyarsk. The only point of congruence in Johnson’s two hypotheses – and that is all they are – is his belief that it was not an accident but a CIA-inspired spying mission. In both cases Johnson makes strenuous efforts to tailor the facts to suit his theory. Yet despite having been obsessed with the issue for three years now, he has failed to produce any direct evidence to substantiate this ‘verdict’.

The central plank of Johnson’s latest theory is that a deliberate incursion into Soviet airspace would activate all the air defence radars on its eastern borders, thus allowing US Intelligence to identify the ‘gap’ which the Krasnoyarsk radar was designed to plug. The desire to find out more about this radar, Foot claims, was because ‘the American far Right’ believed that the new radar system was ‘a clear breach of the SALT 2 disarmament treaty’. It is actually the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty which the radar is alleged, by the US Department of Defense, to have breached. The reason is that it is an ABM radar which is located neither within a 150-km radius of Moscow nor on the periphery of the Soviet Union. Moscow claims that it is simply intended for space tracking and not ballistic missile early warning: a claim hard to substantiate because the radar is not optimised for such a role, would make a negligible contribution to the existing Soviet space-tracking network, and is orientated to cover a gap in the Soviet Union’s ABM coverage on its north-east borders which Washington has known about for years.

The radar at Krasnoyarsk is not a dish, as most people might imagine, but a large fixed phased-array construction pointing in a north-easterly direction. For precisely this reason an intelligence-gathering operation of the type Johnson suggests took place is unnecessary. Moreover, activating short-range tactical Soviet air defence radars would tell the Americans absolutely nothing about the coverage afforded by long-range strategic ABM radars: a fundamental point blurred by both Johnson and Foot.

There are numerous other examples of Johnson twisting facts to suit his scenario. It is therefore highly misleading for the book to be subtitled ‘The Verdict on KAL 007’: not only is all of the evidence presented circumstantial but much of it is also irrelevant. The only verdict which one can reach is that the Soviet Union shot down an unarmed civilian airliner, killing its 269 passengers and crew. Unsubstantiated claims by the Soviet Union and more recently by R.W. Johnson that KAL 007 was engaged in espionage only serve to hide this brutal reality.

SIR: Frank Kermode’s ‘pregnant’ simile in his review of Martin Amis’s The Moronic Inferno (LRB, 24 July) is rather muddled, isn’t it? ‘It’s like having a baby without knowing you’re pregnant: no nausea, no check-ups, just the bother of getting the layette together in a hurry. Alas, such pregnancies are usually of the phantom variety …’ Alas for Frank Kermode, they are not! He is linking together two completely different things.

A woman who has a baby without knowing she is pregnant undoubtedly has a baby in the end, but, as far as physical awareness goes, has no pregnancy. On the other hand, a phantom pregnancy is all pregnancy and no baby at the end. I once had a most distressing encounter with a phantomly pregnant woman and so can speak from some experience. We had both, for some months, been attending the ante-natal clinic of a well-known London maternity hospital and were at the six-months stage when the encounter happened. This was many years ago (the result of my own pregnancy at that time is now the father of my four grandchildren), and in those days one was given a rather more extensive examination at the six-months stage than one had been subjected to hitherto. This examination resulted in the discovery of the woman’s non-pregnant state. However, at that time she looked far more pregnant than I did, and her preparations for the phantom baby’s arrival were far more advanced than were my own: she even had the pram and cot ready, and was, naturally, extremely upset at being told there was to be no baby. I found the encounter distressing partly because of a natural sympathy with the woman’s distress, but also, in some degree, because of the frightening insight it gave me into the terrible powers of the subconscious mind. It was brought home to me, with unforgettable emphasis, that this can produce in us physical symptoms and manifestations for which there are, in reality, no physical reasons or necessities. In this particular case, the manifestations were palpable enough to deceive not only the unhappy woman herself but her GP, who would have referred her to the maternity hospital, and the doctors and nurses with whom she came into contact during the several months that passed before the true state of things was revealed.

I have never been able to feel myself absolutely certain of anything since that time.

SIR: David Norbrook (Letters, 24 July) makes some baffling assumptions about my theoretical assumptions – though they closely resemble those of a Times journalist who asked me, a couple of weeks ago, why I thought poetry and politics were divided by a thick partition. Were that the case, I countered, I would hardly have commissioned the Faber Book of Political Verse, would I? On the other hand, I don’t believe that every work of art is necessarily political. If I did, I would hardly have commissioned the Faber Book of Political Verse. It would have been enough to commission the Faber Book of Verse.

But my theoretical assumptions, especially those invented for me by Mr Norbrook, are neither here nor there. In my original letter, I stated clearly where I stood – unpersuaded. This was a polite way of saying that I thought Mr Norbrook hadn’t argued very well. Judging from the way his case has been mended, he agrees with me. Beelzebub has been dropped entirely. Formerly, he was a monarchist ‘working to erode a collective spirit in favour of giving supreme power to one charismatic leader’. In his place, there is now a sensible admission that there are ‘tensions and contradictions’ in Paradise Lost. A reference, I take it, to the way Beelzebub ‘can at times sound republican’.

Similarly, Mr Norbrook no longer suggests that Milton’s portrayal of God would be improved by the addition of ‘conventional courtly theatricality’. Instead, the portrayal would be given ‘more immediate imaginative impact, not by adding monarchical paraphernalia, but by subtracting the analytic passages, making God a figure more of mysterious imperial will than of rational law’. However, Milton chose not to do this because, according to Mr Norbrook, it would have been ‘inconsistent’ with his politics. More obviously, the elimination of analytic passages would have been ‘inconsistent’ with Milton’s theological aim – to ‘justify the ways of God to men’. No analysis means no justification.

But David Norbrook rests his entire case on Milton’s use of blank verse, rather than on direct topical allusions, since the latter are used inconsistently by Milton. I am pleased we agree that the ‘actual status’ of blank verse is neutral. Mr Norbrook, however, attaches an important qualification – the need to establish ‘full meanings’ by looking at the context. I thought I had done precisely that – just as certainly as I never mentioned E.M.W. Tillyard, whom Mr Norbrook wishes on me as an ally. The context I referred to is Milton’s 1668 note on ‘The Verse’. There Milton gives a perfectly adequate reason for disliking rhyme. He argues that rhyme vexes, hinders and constrains poets ‘to express many things otherwise, and for the most part worse than else they would have exprest them’. For this reason (‘not without cause therefore’) some Italian and Spanish poets have rejected rhyme. In this context, Milton makes no mention of the respective Italian and Spanish political situations. David Norbrook is prepared to concede ‘internal, linguistic explanations of metrical changes’ of the kind volunteered here by Milton, but he insists that there are also ‘extrinsic factors’ at work. Apparently, Derek Attridge’s ‘meticulous study’ of Renaissance prosody has shown that ‘internal, linguistic explanations’ are inadequate to explain metrical changes in Renaissance prosody.

This may be so. However, we are not discussing Renaissance prosody in general, but Milton’s blank verse and the entirely adequate explanation he gives for adopting it. Necessarily, David Norbrook widens the context and his letter is a justifiable boast that his context is bigger than my context. Very few people could match Mr Norbrook’s context. But it is also more nebulous. It stretches eruditely from Old English alliterative verse, via Dante, Castiglione, Denham, Dryden, Marvell, Goldsmith, Dr Johnson, to Blake and Shelley. And then still further, to an as yet unwritten history of rhyme in relation to political ideology, not to mention another crucial, convincing, but alas unwritten, ‘full semantic history of the relations in the period between literary and political senses of the words “reformation", “restoration", “revolution" and “imitation" ’. I find it hard to argue on all these fronts, but particularly hard to contain those fronts which are non-existent. One follows this vast chain of argument only to discover that it is stapled to a promise. Or two promises. Or nothing. Or everything. In this ‘context’, it scarcely matters, because it isn’t a context at all. It is a theory.

Mr Norbrook has some ingenious interpretations, over-ingenious in the case of Samson Agonistes, but his chain, two and a half columns long, touches on Milton at only one demonstrable point. He attaches it to Milton’s phrase, ‘an example set, the first in English, of ancient liberty recovered to Heroic Poem from the troublesome and modern bondage of rhyming’ – a phrase conceivably politically motivated, but perhaps only an instance of local bravado, a rhetorical flourish, a republican twitch, without a political aesthetic behind it. The chain is attached to an ambiguity – and, without it, you remove every supporting comment he has to make about Milton’s note.

Normally, I wouldn’t dream of suggesting that Mr Norbrook had erected a vast set of assumptions on insufficient, faintly wonky evidence – had I not recently had an unfortunate experience in these very columns. There, I described Milton’s 1668 note as, in its entirety, aesthetic, not political. Which it is. On the basis of this, Mr Norbrook has decided that I am a New Critic who denies poetry is political. I am, in fact, the editor who commissioned the Faber Book of Political Verse. Which brings me once more to the ‘actual status’ of blank verse.

Its essential neutrality is unaffected by how people regard it – just as I am not made a New Critic because Mr Norbrook chooses to regard me in that light. There is an objective reality which is unaffected by misinterpretation. To call the very metre of Paradise Lost assertively republican simplifies a clear ambiguity and then compounds Milton’s (possible) wishful thinking. The correct position is to say that the blank verse is neutral – however Milton may, or may not, have regarded it.

SIR: Andrew Gurr begins his paragraph on my book Such is my love: A Study of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (LRB, 6 February) by remarking the difficulty that arises when ‘fact is called upon to sustain interpretation,’ and accumulated ‘interpretation’ is used to support the ‘assumed fact’. Then he tries to make my readings of Shakespeare’s Sonnets exemplify this circularity. First I am supposed to assume that Annabel Patterson’s theory of the hermeneutics of censorship ‘justifies’ the readings. That theory is in no way applicable, however, for I say nothing at all about censorship – the idea is pure projection. Then I am supposed to have ‘faith’ in the ‘ “fact" ’ of the ‘poet’s homosexuality’. I establish rather, the poet’s bisexuality – one would never know from the review that his affair with the dark lady is considered at length – by proceeding not on faith but through reason to reach the conclusion inductively, and, far from presupposing ‘belief’ in my readers, seeking to convince them by the weight of copious evidence drawn from a text whose canonicity is an accepted fact nowhere put in question.

While failing utterly to make his charge of circularity stick, Professor Gurr dreams up an ‘interpretation’ of my book that has little relevance to what in fact is said. The effort to bring his comment on it into line with the rest of his argument was ill-conceived. Throughout he plays fast and loose with the term ‘fact’, does little better with ‘interpretation’, and is confused, confusing and naive about the difficult relationship between the two.

At one point he seems to subvert the very idea of interpretation, finding in the ‘Shakespeare canon … a complex polyvalency, a flexibility of word and signification in which interpretation flourishes mightily’ but where – to him ironically – ‘the insurmountable complexity of the question makes answers pointless.’ In that case all interpretative criticism should be worthless. It is a position that he does not consistently maintain. He neither provides nor can be depended on to follow coherent literary discourse, and he was well-advised in the case of his own book to shun a topic of criticism and instead to compile a compendium of the known historical facts of the Shakespearean theatre.

Gurr does, though, introduce a semblance of fact at the end of the paragraph, if only for the purpose of distortion. He quotes my explication of a line of Sonnet 33 apart from its contexts, which consist not only of the analysis of Sonnets 33-35, wherein the young man’s ‘sensual fault’ is at issue, but also of the demonstration in an earlier chapter of the sonneteer’s frequent use of words of homoerotic reference. Ben Jonson rightly took exception to being quoted ‘by pieces (which was an excellent way of malice), as if any man’s context might not seem dangerous, and offensive, if that which was knit to what went before were defrauded of his beginning’. This passage from Timber, which Patterson cites, articulates a ploy of censorship utilised by the reviewer. He is intent on dismissing the book and focuses on but one of its aspects: on its exposition of the sexual nature of the love between the poet and the friend. He obviously would conserve, by any means whatsoever, the professoriate’s traditional negation of homoeroticism in the Sonnets.

SIR: May I comment on A.J. Ayer’s piece about the World Cup (LRB, 24 July)? There is no green card in football: there are only yellow and red cards. The yellow card signifies that a player has had his name taken for a foul and serves as a warning that, if he fouls again, he will be shown the red card and dismissed from the field. A sufficiently bad foul, of course, warrants no warning, and the player is shown the red card and sent off, as happened to a Uruguayan in the game against Scotland. In the England v. Argentina game, Peter Reid was substituted by Waddle (not Barnes) and this hardly constituted a gamble on Bobby Robson’s part, as the Everton player began the game carrying an injury, and was then further disabled by a kick from Batista. Barnes came on later in the game for Steven (not Stephen). The ludicrous penalty shoot-out (and dreadful refereeing) put out two fine sides in Spain and the Soviet Union.

Those of us who support Northern teams and saw players like George Best, Jimmy Johnstone, Alex Young and Duncan McKenzie remain unimpressed by Hoddle’s ‘imaginative skills’. We are not surprised by his ‘apathy’. A.J. Ayer, being a Tottenham supporter, will know that Londoners call this condition ‘having no bottle’.

SIR: I should like to thank you for a temperate reply to what may have seemed a somewhat intemperate letter (Letters, 24 July). I am also grateful to Anthony Thwaite for revealing the source of the article in question, although his Japanese leaves a little to be desired (Eigo Seinen means ‘English Youth’, not ‘English Studies’). The explanation of your motives does, however, raise some interesting questions. The document was indeed ‘instructive’: it told us that the Japanese are not only interested in selling us electronic equipment but are fascinated by our culture and are willing to invest tremendous time and effort in an attempt to understand us. (That these two facts might actually be connected is something that British industry and commerce has yet to fully comprehend.) The Japanese even read the LRB! They know about post-structuralism and semiotics and can even pop in ‘piss off’ in the original in the secure knowledge that it will either be understood or carefully looked up.

The point at issue, however, is this: a knowledge of their knowledge seems to be rather uncomfortable for us to accept on its own terms; it can only be absorbed by leaving it safely untranslated and thus transforming it into ‘a kind of collage or art object’. A nice gesture, and I appreciated it, I really did: but I wonder if the gesture itself does not reveal an underlying inability or unwillingness to grapple with the fact that a text like this might actually have some meaning? I know it looks like barbed-wire but from what he wrote I would judge Professor Takahashi to be not only extremely well-informed (he refers with more than a little insouciance to what the ‘other Terry’ might think of all this) but quite a stylist in his own right. Is it not slightly insulting to take something of this calibre and play with it? Your ‘Rising Sun’ bit in particular had us all racking our brains, but now I find it to be no more than a schoolboy joke teetering on the brink of tasteless-ness. I wonder if there is really any difference between what you have done and the young lady I once observed in the Tokyo underground with a tee-shirt covered in what looked like English! Closer inspection revealed the word ‘Tampax’ beautifully printed all across her back. A real little objet d’art it was.

The misnaming of the publication in which the material appeared was due to a production error and owed nothing at all to any deplorable tendency to see foreigners as funny.