Letters

T.J. Clark, reviewing Adam Shatz’s Life of Frantz Fanon, teases out the fraught ambivalences in Fanon’s writing (LRB, 26 September). ‘The peculiar nature of this optimism-pessimism … makes his pastness contemporary,’ he writes, with particular reference to Frank Wilderson III and Afropessimism. When considering the genealogy of Fanon’s thinking, the influence of the novelist Richard Wright is often forgotten (though not by Shatz) in favour of his protégés James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison. In a remarkable letter from 1953, Fanon wrote to Wright:

I am working on a study bearing on the human breadth of your works. Of your work I have Native Son, Black Boy, Twelve Million Black Voices, Uncle Tom’s Children, which I have ordered (I do not know whether the book is available in France), two short stories published, one in Les Temps modernes, the other in Présence africaine. Eager to circumscribe in the most complete way the breadth of your message, I’d greatly appreciate your letting me know the title of those works I might be ignorant of. My name must be unknown to you. I have written an essay, Black Skin, White Masks, which has been published by Le Seuil, in which I intend to show the systematic misunderstanding between Whites and Blacks.

The optimism-pessimism that you can find in Fanon is present in Wright’s most famous novel, Native Son (1940). That includes the liberating qualities of decolonial violence (‘What I killed for must’ve been good!’ asserts the protagonist, Bigger Thomas, at the end of the novel) as well as the characterisation of blackness as perceptual non-being (‘He felt he had no physical existence at all right then; he was something he hated, the badge of shame which he knew was attached to a black skin’). Wright’s pessimism extended to political organisations, as he explains in his memoir Black Boy (1945), but he nonetheless felt that his fiction could act as a ‘common coin of communication’ between members of the black underclass and white communists.

T.J. Clark despairs at the difficulty of translating Eugène Pottier’s ‘great hymn’: ‘How can “Debout!” go into English (“Arise!” is dreadful)?’ Perhaps some of the agony might be alleviated by observing that in French ‘Debout!’ has a conventional military usage, meaning (the order to stand to) ‘Attention!’ The problem of scansion remains, though perhaps a subaltern reading might be adopted, as in ‘Ten-shun!’

Barbara Newman draws attention to Michael Psellus, whose treatment of gender as a spectrum ‘anticipated contemporary thought’ (LRB, 26 September). But even before the 11th century some models of reproduction preferred a spectrum to a binary. One medieval suggestion was a womb with seven chambers, producing everything from girly girls to macho boys, with tomboys and effeminate boys along the way and ‘androgynes’ being the result of the man’s seed landing in the central section. This in turn derives from the first book of the ‘Hippocratic’ treatise Regimen, dated perhaps to the early fourth century BCE, although there the various possible mixes of characteristics defined as masculine or feminine relate not to the position of the child in the womb but to the mixture of male and female ‘seeds’ forming each child.

Barbara Newman notes that most Byzantine depictions of the Ethiopian eunuch converted in Acts, Chapter 8 portray him as white. In the Northumbrian Salaberga Psalter, an eighth-century manuscript now in Berlin, he is portrayed as black, in what is probably the earliest depiction of a non-white figure in English art. If the image does not portray the eunuch, it certainly portrays an Ethiopian, whose conversion to Christianity at one extreme of the Latin world matched the conversion of the English peoples at the other.

Malin Hay doesn’t mention the theatre director and writer Arthur Laurents, who cast the unknown 19-year-old Streisand for the 50-year-old part of Miss Marmelstein in I Can Get It for You Wholesale on Broadway in 1962, despite strong opposition from the producer, David Merrick (LRB, 12 September). It was Laurents too who took his friend Stephen Sondheim to hear her sing at the Bon Soir in Greenwich Village; Laurents who sent her to Goddard Lieberson, who signed her for Columbia Records; and Laurents who wrote the screenplay for The Way We Were with Streisand in mind. Laurents tends to get overlooked, despite his immense contribution to 20th-century Broadway and Hollywood. I hope he isn’t forgotten in My Name Is Barbra.

Nicholas Penny is right that Angelica Kauffman’s drawing instrument is a porte-crayon (Letters, 26 September). Since the exhibition catalogue and wall text described it as a ‘stylus’, I chose to use that term, hoping to avoid confusion for readers. In English, a stylus more commonly refers to a pointed metal instrument used for drawing or incising, but it has been used in a more general sense in several recent exhibition catalogues of Kauffman’s work, perhaps as a result of translation from German scholarship into English.

Penny also states that Nathaniel Hone depicts Kauffman as the admiring child standing at the magician’s knee in his painting The Conjurer, an elaborate satirical attack on Reynolds. This is a valid interpretation. But it is not the only one, nor necessarily the most important to Kauffman and her contemporaries. As I wrote in my piece, Kauffman’s public objection to the painting centred on the group of cavorting naked figures, among which she believed she was represented. This is supported by Hone’s own account of the scandal. After The Conjurer was rejected from the academy’s annual exhibition, Hone wrote to Kauffman and offered to change the offending figure to such a degree ‘that it would be impossible to suppose it to be a woman’ – he even (somewhat mischievously) suggested he could ‘put a beard’ on it. Although Kauffman refused to withdraw her objection, Hone made the changes anyway, before putting the painting on display at his own exhibition later the same year. In the accompanying catalogue, he explained the alterations: ‘The figure said to have been intended for Mrs A.K. is not only taken out, but all the other naked figures, lest they should be said to be likenesses of any particular gentlemen or ladies, which Mr Hone never meant.’ While it is possible that Kauffman also saw herself in the child at the conjuror’s knee, her association with the naked figures likely posed the greater threat to her reputation.

In his review of William Dalrymple’s latest book, Ferdinand Mount emphasises the idea that India was more involved than China in trade with Rome, and joins in the rejection of the idea of a ‘Silk Road’ which spanned Eurasia throughout the many centuries covered by Dalrymple (LRB, 12 September). Mount highlights a passage from Warwick Ball’s takedown of the concept as a myth that had become an ‘unquestioned academic fact’. Yet even at the time Ball was writing, in 1999, few serious historians of global economic relations or cultural exchanges, of the history of East Asia, Central Asia or any other region along the ‘Silk Road’, saw it as anything other than a convenient trope to lure unsuspecting undergrads into their classrooms. The role of maritime trade is widely recognised and taught, and the study of long-distance contacts across Afro-Eurasia has been a lively field of research and publishing. The yield of much of this research has been the recognition that the world was for many centuries multicentric, not dominated by a single power, neither China nor India, Rome or ‘the West’. Dalrymple’s new book should not displace a view of long-distance contacts as spanning Eurasia along a single path from China to Rome with one that places India as the ‘centre of the world’. As American global dominance wanes we should attend to the long history of a world made up of many centres sharing in a swirl of interactions, economic, spiritual and cultural.

David Bromwich hears an ‘echo of Dvořák’s New World Symphony’ in the Dies Irae played over the opening credits of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (LRB, 26 September). But it was surely taken from the ‘Witches’ Sabbath’ movement of Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique. I can’t hear any echoes of such sinister goings-on in the benign and nostalgic New World Symphony, but they do occur in several pieces by the ‘six-foot scowl’ Rachmaninov.

Michael Maxwell-Steer mentions his grandfather burying Sir Thomas Beecham (Letters, 20 June). As a schoolboy in Stratford, I had several encounters with Beecham’s first wife, Lady Utica, who lived at Clopton House. She was notorious for driving recklessly through Stratford in her Rolls, chauffeured by a major-domo, both yelling at pedestrians to get out of the way. I found her so fascinating, I forked out for the entrance fee to the house several times. Once, when I was clearly still a schoolboy, she mistook me for an art dealer and offered to sell me her ‘Raphaels’. My last visit was on a foggy morning in the mid-1950s. I was exploring the park when I heard the clink of chains and a figure ran past me followed by a man in pyjamas who shouted ‘Which way did he go?’ I learned later that Clopton House contained an equivalent of the Monster of Glamis, though I never discovered whether or how he was related to Lady B.

The story of Jane Ellen Harrison’s boldness on meeting Gladstone, as retold by Mary Beard, is all the more remarkable when contrasted with Bertrand Russell’s account of an encounter when not much younger (LRB, 12 September):

Far the most terrifying experience of my life was connected with Mr Gladstone. When I was seventeen, a very shy and awkward youth, he came to stay with my family for the weekend. I was the only ‘man’ in the house, and after dinner, when the ladies retired, I was left tête-à-tête with the ogre. I was too petrified to perform my duties as a host, and he did nothing to help me out. For a long time we sat in silence; at last, in his booming bass voice, he condescended to make his one and only remark: ‘This is very good port they’ve given me, but why have they given it me in a claret glass?’ Since then I have faced infuriated mobs, angry judges and hostile governments, but never again have I felt such terror as in that searing moment.