Letters

Jonathan Meades provides an eloquent excoriation of the gruesome architecture for which Surrey is now notorious (LRB, 23 May). Yet he doesn’t question why it was a sitting duck for so many ersatz and egregious buildings.

Meades quotes William Cobbett’s distaste for its ‘furzy hills and sandy trails’. Cobbett was a native, ‘bred at the plough-tail’, well acquainted with back-breaking work and the poverty of the land. What Cobbett hated was that this kind of land was so unproductive. While the heather makes Meades think of ‘north Britain’, Cobbett knew that heather loves nutrient-poor soil. Indeed, no county in south Britain is so nutrient-poor as Surrey. Almost its only fertility lies in the thin sliver of gault clay on which the main settlements sit, linked by the A25. North of the A25 is the escarpment of the North Downs, topped with clay and flint, unforgiving to plough, and beyond that, London clay. To the south rise the Surrey Hills, relentlessly sandy, followed even further south by the heavy clays of the Weald. The ‘ancient cart tracks’ to which Meades refers were far from ‘unplanned and haphazard meandering’: like many of the parish boundaries they ran deliberately north-south across these geological transitions, to ensure access to, and an equitable allocation of, the different unpromising soils. If these sunken lanes are picturesque, it is accidental. It was the railway-borne settlers who brought the newly discovered Asian rhododendron species that thrive in these soils, and which Meades rightly deplores.

No wonder infertile Surrey remained proportionately the most wooded but least populated county of southern England. It was a sitting duck for colonisation by Londoners, once the railway invaded its purlieus. It was perfect for commuters or holiday homes. Yet even during its period of rapid development, poverty still dominated this sparse countryside. In the 1890s George Sturt recorded seeing village women carrying heavy loads of gleaned firewood or fir cones ‘nearly double under them … toiling painfully along, with hats or bonnets awry and skirts dragging’. In the winter of 1889-90 Sturt’s gardener, Grover, prised potatoes out of the frozen ground for his starving neighbours. Gertrude Jekyll is another Surrey native not mentioned by Meades. Her Old West Surrey appeared in 1904, a guide to the way much of the county looked before it was colonised. She photographed timber-framed, mainly brick cottages and their inhabitants, some of them in ordinary peasant clothes: embroidered smocks or dresses in styles they had worn all their adult lives.

A few other locals tried to protect old Surrey. Reginald Bray, squire of Shere, one of Surrey’s loveliest villages, bought up cottages where he could to guarantee secure homes for indigenous working villagers in the face of suddenly rising prices. When he saw large new red brick villas going up in the Surrey Hills, he convened the neighbouring landlords and persuaded them to join him in a common policy of allowing development only where these mansions could be hidden in wooded valleys, so as not to disfigure the landscape. His thinking pre-empted the green belt. The policy has, on the whole, been successful. Despite the often very ugly villas despoiling the land, it was and still is possible to see an older Surrey.

Jonathan Meades identifies Nottingham’s Guildhall as part of a distinct ‘Wrenish’ group of interwar public buildings that he calls ‘stripped classical’. Both descriptors are apt – but they apply to the Council House that presides over the city’s Market Square, not the unloved Guildhall a quarter of a mile to the north. The Council House’s classicism may well be ‘stripped’ but it is nonetheless impeccably literate, its octostyle portico in antis a triumph. Its drum and dome are indeed virtual quotations from Wren, and the whole thing is built in his favoured Portland stone. It was designed by T.C. Howitt, Nottingham’s city architect in the late 1920s.

In taking aim at the obvious targets – John Major’s suburbanity, the parthenogenesis of Tudorbethan, the meretriciousness of oligarchitecture – I feel that Jonathan Meades does Surrey an injustice. There is more to it than golf courses and gated communities. He talks of ‘the fraternities centred on Haslemere’ suffering ‘the usual fate of being sundered by minute divergences of ideology and aspiration’. Yet if it weren’t for the pioneering Arts and Crafts antiquarianism of the instrument-maker Arnold Dolmetsch and the Haslemere Festival, historically informed performance practice wouldn’t have become so significant in international music.

At the other end of the county lies Limpsfield-Oxted, where I was born after the war. For all that it has now become the preserve of fat cats, it was then a progressive cultural environment, as expressed in the unpretentious Arts and Crafts legacy-vernacular of its day. It was home to May Harrison (the dedicatee of Elgar’s Violin Concerto) and her sister Beatrice, whose house is now shorn of the woods that nightingales once visited. Delius was buried in Limpsfield churchyard by my grandfather in the teeth of opposition from the Protestant Truth Society, followed by the conductors Thomas Beecham and Norman Del Mar. My other grandfather founded the Oxted Music Club, which still exists.

In my piece the architect Oliver Hill is described as a ‘versatile naturalist’. He may well have been. However, what I wrote was ‘versatile naturist’ – which he certainly was.

‘Novelists don’t usually care for screen adaptations of their work,’ Blake Morrison claims (LRB, 6 June). They should be so lucky. Films often improve the books on which they’re based. Robert Bloch’s novel Psycho is not generally taken to be better than Hitchcock’s film. Most people don’t know Pierre Boileau’s D’entre les morts, but they do know Vertigo. Orson Welles’s Magnificent Ambersons, even with its butchered ending, is far more memorable than Booth Tarkington’s original. Robert Harris adapted his own novel for Roman Polanski’s masterpiece about the Dreyfus case, An Officer and a Spy. Does anyone think Dreiser’s American Tragedy is a patch on George Stevens’s A Place in the Sun? As for The Zone of Interest … I rest my case.

‘In the absence of gravity,’ Andrew Gelman writes, an object in orbit ‘would move in a straight line at constant velocity’ (Letters, 23 May). That’s according to Newton. In Einstein’s account, an object in ‘free fall’ – moving under the exclusive influence of gravity, whether in orbit or as, say, a ball thrown on earth – is viewed as not accelerating at all, and does indeed move in a straight line, but through a space that has been curved by the presence of the planet. The observable effect is that the object returns to the spatial point it was at one orbit ago. Newton modelled all this by inventing a somewhat occult ‘gravitational force’ emanating from the centre of the planet, which grabs the orbiting object via a mechanism even he found unsatisfactory. Einstein starts from a different place, with different absolutes (that free fall is no-acceleration), and arrives at a place compatible with Newton by a radically different route.

Alexander Clapp’s article about Montenegro and its former president, Milo Đukanović, contains untruthful statements and wrong interpretations of events (LRB, 25 April). He also pays scant attention to the reputations of the witnesses he quotes. To take one example, Clapp presents a person he calls ‘a Bosnian Serb officer’ as a credible witness, even though it is generally known that this person has been pursuing revenge on former president Đukanović for years. He was arrested in Montenegro in 2005 and then deported to Bosnia and Herzegovina based on a warrant against him for fraud and embezzlement. Clapp does not mention that this person was proclaimed by the State Department to have been the key source of financing for Radovan Karadžić, that he has been a close associate of convicted war criminals and that he has in the last ten years circulated untrue statements about Montenegro and Mr Đukanović based on the instructions of the Serbian intelligence services, with which he is closely connected.

Clapp had the opportunity to ask Mr Đukanović about the matters he was interested in. Had he done so, at least some of his factual errors might have been avoided. But he did not. Montenegro is not a mobster state, as Clapp presents it. It restored its independence in 2006, became a candidate for membership of the EU in 2010 and joined Nato in 2017. Montenegro has made enormous progress, both in terms of the inflow of foreign direct investment from credible partners and in its development of a democratic society with respect for the heritage of the Euro-Atlantic partnership. All of this was achieved while Mr Đukanović was in office.

Martin Gorsky cites Bob Dylan’s 1964 song ‘With God on Our Side’ as evidence that Americans were aware of the Holocaust before the Six-Day War (Letters, 23 May). It’s true that the song mentions ‘the Germans’ and that ‘they murdered six million,’ although it doesn’t mention Jews. Dylan omitted these references when he recorded the song again for Bob Dylan Unplugged in 1995. The song itself isn’t really by Dylan. Its traditional Irish music is identical and its lyrics similar to ‘The Patriot Game’ by Brendan Behan’s brother Dominic. Behan called Dylan a plagiarist and a thief and berated him over the phone. Dylan, with characteristic integrity, told Behan: ‘My lawyers can speak with your lawyers.’ Behan replied: ‘I’ve got two lawyers, and they’re on the end of my wrists.’ That nothing came of the spat, not even a fistfight, is testament to the fact that Dylan’s ‘With God on Our Side’ was a dud. Nobody cared.

One of those present at the birth of the Village Voice, which Vivian Gornick writes about, was the Sheffield-born journalist John Wilcock (LRB, 6 June). Wilcock was active in setting up the paper, served as its first news editor and wrote a weekly column before falling out with everybody and departing for the more counter-cultural East Village Other in 1965, and thereafter, or so he complained in Manhattan Memories (2009), getting written out of the Voice’s history. Norman Mailer’s account of the Voice’s birth in Advertisements for Myself (1959) also failed to mention Wilcock. In 1983, somewhat belatedly getting wind of Wilcock’s displeasure at his omission, Mailer wrote him a mollifying letter, acknowledging Wilcock’s role in curbing his egotism and hailing Wilcock as a ‘stand-up guy … and generally speaking an asset to that curious community of the counter-culture’.

As I luxuriated in Hal Foster’s quest to discover the marvellous in the mundanity of Georges Bataille’s big toe, I wondered if Foster was aware of two of the meanings of the French substantive incarnation – the fact or assumption of God in Christ made flesh in human form, and an ingrowing toenail (LRB, 6 June).