Letters

James Butler, writing about the Grenfell Tower Inquiry, correctly acknowledges the ‘absurd’ ease with which inquiry recommendations can be ignored (LRB, 10 October). While there is a legal duty to respond to official reports and recommendations, there is no way of tracking what progress, if any, has been made. The attitude of some recipients is captured in a remark made by a ‘mid-ranking civil servant’ in response to recommendations from the coroner investigating the deaths of the six victims of the Lakanal House fire in 2009: ‘We only have a duty to respond to the coroner, not kiss her backside.’

At Inquest, a charity working with bereaved families following state-related deaths, we repeatedly see how the failure to enact recommendations from coroners and inquiries can have fatal consequences and lead to a loss of faith in the recommendation process. Yet we would caution against Butler’s suggestion that the way forward would be to create a ‘unit in the Cabinet Office’ responsible for monitoring and enforcing recommendations. We have been campaigning for the government to set up a ‘national oversight mechanism’, an independent public body that would collate, analyse and follow up actions taken in response to recommendations. Only a body independent of government can guarantee the level of scrutiny and accountability required.

Matthew Bevis writes astutely about Hardy’s complex relation to women (LRB, 10 October). However he overlooks Robert Gittings’s biography Young Thomas Hardy from 1975, which includes some fascinating detail about an experience the 16-year-old Hardy had that might have been the genesis of the intermingling of sex and death in his imagination. In Dorchester on 9 August 1856, he witnessed the public execution for murder of Elizabeth Martha Brown. He made sure he got close to the scaffold, so close that he could see her features through the rain-damp cloth over her face. The executioner had to reascend the scaffold to tie Brown’s dress so that she should not be exposed as she swung. Gittings quotes Hardy, writing in his eighties: ‘What a fine figure she showed against the sky as she hung in the misty rain, and how the tight black silk gown set off her shape as she wheeled half round and back.’

Adam Shatz, writing about the emergence of Hizbullah, skips over 1978 (LRB, 24 October). That year, in Operation Litani, the IDF captured Lebanese territory up to the Litani river. It was by far Israel’s largest military operation in the country since its first occupation of southern Lebanon in 1948-49. The creation of the UN Interim Force facilitated only a partial withdrawal of the Israeli military. The IDF remained in effective control of the 10-kilometre-deep border strip administered by a proxy militia, the South Lebanon Army. Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982 is justifiably remembered as the invasion – the one that had seismic regional consequences. But from the perspective of southern Lebanon, it was the second major invasion of the period. It cemented the Israeli military’s control over what became known as the security zone, which they retained, after their withdrawal from the rest of Lebanon in 1985, until 2000.

Katherine Harloe writes perceptively about Oswyn Murray’s essays (LRB, 10 October). One Oxford classical historian who doesn’t get a mention is G.E.M. de Ste Croix, who taught at New College between 1953 and 1977, perhaps because he was from an earlier generation (born in 1910) and took a path to academia different from that of the Balliol classicists, but also because his most notable work, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World (1981), has a very different historiographic lineage.

Unlike Murray et al, de Ste Croix did briefly become a household name – at least in our household, where my mum was a classics teacher. The schoolmaster who taught us ancient history told of trying to track down a copy of an earlier work, The Origins of the Peloponnesian War, in his local public library, with the librarian apparently flummoxed by the idiosyncratic indexing of G.E.M.’s surname. ‘De Sainte Croicks!!’ became something of a catchphrase for the lower sixth.

Katherine Harloe, referring to Oswyn Murray’s renunciation letter to Boris Johnson, writes: ‘This seems to me to say far more about Murray’s sense of self and the notion of Balliol as capital of the oikumene than it does about Johnson.’ To me it seems to say that Murray has a sense of humour.

Michael Hofmann’s review of the Chaïm Soutine retrospective at the Louisiana Museum in Denmark joins the slim minority of Soutine criticism – in both French and English – that is worthy of its subject (LRB, 24 October). A few minor clarifications. Hofmann writes that Soutine would cut up or otherwise make disappear any of his paintings if left alone with them by a careless owner. It’s true that he would seek out old paintings of his – almost always from his earliest period, painted in Céret between 1918 and 1920 – and destroy them if he’d decided he disapproved of them. The reason he went to the lengths of shredding (and burning) them is that thieves would notoriously root through Soutine’s bins for confiscated canvases, which they would patch up and sell as authentic works. But he only did this in rare cases and most of the paintings remain because he was proud of them.

Hofmann is justly taken by Soutine’s still lifes of raw meat. ‘It is hard to know what they are for,’ he writes. ‘Not boasts, not for salivating.’ But we do know why Soutine chose to paint them – he was quoting. In the first instance, Flayed Beef was inspired by Rembrandt’s Le Boeuf écorché (1655), which Soutine visited ritualistically at the Louvre along with Chardin’s game paintings. Hofmann marvels at the quality of Soutine’s crimsons: the story of the buckets of blood he used to douse the strung-up beef corpse in his studio is notorious in Soutine lore.

Finally, Hofmann notes that Soutine’s violent and gorgeous brush is grounded in reality. He is right: Soutine only ever painted directly from life – never from imagination, memory or a photograph. When he was moved to repeat Rembrandt he had to go and buy a beef carcass and hang it from hooks in his studio. When the meat dried to brown he bought the blood.

Terry Eagleton quotes Lacan’s parody of Descartes’s ‘cogito, ergo sum’ as ‘I think where I am not, and I am not where I think’ (LRB, 10 October). Lacan did indeed suggest various substitutes for the Cogito, but the version cited by Eagleton wasn’t one of them. His most advanced revision, ‘Je pense où je ne suis pas, donc je suis où je ne pense pas,’ appeared in an essay from 1957, ‘L’instance de la lettre dans l’inconscient ou la raison depuis Freud’, which was also the first of his essays to be translated into English, for an issue of Yale French Studies on structuralism that appeared just before the celebrated Baltimore conference of October 1966. In his meticulous translation, Jan Miel rendered Lacan’s Cartesian permutation as ‘I think where I am not, therefore I am where I think not.’

Sheila Fitzpatrick describes Soviet dissidents as ‘determinedly apolitical’ (LRB, 24 October). But this wasn’t because they were uninterested in politics or had no idea of the kind of polity they would like to see. They simply saw that attempting to take part in Soviet politics at the time was a mug’s game. The Soviet system was unreformable, and calling for its destruction would also lead nowhere, except probably to a labour camp. So they stuck to the issue where they thought some modest results might be achievable, namely human rights.

Jonathan Rée, writing about Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, understands ‘deutsch und deutlich’ to mean ‘in plain German’, and ‘deutsch und derb’ to refer to ‘coarse and unclear’ German (LRB, 10 October). As a native speaker I have to disagree. In this context, both phrases are variations of ‘speaking the truth directly’. When the king uses the term ‘derb’, he is suggesting that Zarathustra speaks inconsiderately, even offensively (though the king doesn’t actually take offence).

Sophie Lewis describes an incident that took place in 2017 at an Imperial Oil refinery close to the Canadian border and the city of Sarnia, ‘a town of 70,000 people near Detroit’ (LRB, 1 August). Sarnia and the refinery are both on the Canadian side of the St Clair River, which forms part of the boundary between Ontario and Michigan. Some videos of the refinery fire were captured from the Michigan side of the river, and the story made the news in Detroit, but the event took place in Canada. It was the responsibility of the Ontario Ministry of the Environment – not the Canadian Ministry of the Environment, as Lewis has it – to investigate the incident. In 2019, the provincial ministry announced that its investigation had concluded and no charges could be laid. Politicians and residents on both sides of the Canada-US border regularly express concern about industrial incidents in Sarnia’s ‘Chemical Valley’.

Tom Johnson is right to say that the concept of zero reached Europe via Arab scholars, but its invention dates back considerably further, to Indian mathematicians of the third century BCE (LRB, 24 October).

Oliver Cussen notes that Malthus ‘had a very narrow appreciation of the ways people lived off the land’ (LRB, 26 September). It is not sufficiently recognised that until at least the 16th century, substantial numbers of people in the UK still lived what was in essence a hunter-gatherer existence, in the very large areas of commonly owned land that were rich in food and other resources. The enclosures of Elizabethan times led to a moral panic about ‘vagabonds’ which can be seen in the literature of the time: many people were left with nowhere to go except the roads. As You Like It becomes a different play once you realise that as it was being written, the actual Forest of Arden, which Shakespeare knew from childhood, was being enclosed and its inhabitants evicted.

I’m glad to hear that James Vincent’s family is making Alexa feel at home (LRB, 10 October). But I would caution them to address her very clearly. When I asked her ‘How long can I keep salmon in the freezer?’ her answer clearly implied she thought I’d said ‘someone’. I’ve been terrified of police car sirens ever since.