Letters

In my childhood, a generation before Malcolm Gaskill’s, the difference between the weight attached to 31 October (barely noticed, if at all) and 5 November (eagerly anticipated weeks in advance) was probably even greater than it was for him (LRB, 7 November). The gradual acquisition of a personal hoard of fireworks was an essential part of preparation. Mine were all made by Standard Fireworks, a Huddersfield firm with a virtual monopoly of retail outlets in nearby Halifax, where I lived.

But, although we would have known what ‘Bonfire Night’ meant, the term was not used in Halifax. The fifth of November was ‘Plot Night’: the numerous pyres built and keenly protected on waste ground and unadopted streets were ‘plots’; the combustible materials that went into them were ‘plot’; and the process of accumulating these over the preceding weeks – whether through doorstep solicitation or raids on rival pyres – was ‘plotting’.

Carried out in small groups under cover of dark without adult involvement, plotting was a child-controlled activity. And even though the fire on the night would probably be ignited by someone’s dad and the ‘plot toffee’ and potatoes for baking in the embers produced by the mums, Plot Night fifty or more years ago was an occasion when the gratification of children was paramount; they effectively ran the show, and relished it all the more for that.

It’s a pity there was no space for men’s underpants in Clare Bucknell’s review of the Under/Wear show at the Rijksmuseum (LRB, 21 November). It’s true that they have always been an easier affair, with many men simply tying their undershirt between their legs, but there is still much to be said about the design and materials, the use of buttons, flaps, laces and so on. Over the centuries, as women’s underwear became ever more elaborate and punitive to support an expanding or subtracting silhouette, men’s lower garments became progressively simpler, and fitted more naturally and closely to the lower body. This had the effect of making breeches and then trousers socially charged garments, in more direct and revealing contact with the rear and genitals. The 19th-century vocabulary for trousers – the OED lists ‘inexpressibles’, ‘unmentionables’, ‘indescribables’, ‘ineffables’, ‘never-mention-’ems’, ‘unwhisperables’ and ‘unutterables’ – captures this, though it was more likely used in fun than out of prudery.

An example, to complement Bucknell’s more sensual quotation from Hardy’s The Well-Beloved, is Trollope’s short story ‘The Relics of General Chassé’, in which two English tourists, the narrator and the well-fed Reverend Horne, visit Antwerp and the private apartments recently inhabited by General Chassé (a real figure), who had valiantly but unsuccessfully held out against a French siege of the city in 1832. Wandering into the bedroom, Horne sights an abandoned pair of the general’s breeches – variously described as ‘respectable leathern articles’, a ‘virile habiliment’, ‘what’s-the-names’ and ‘regimentals’ – and determines to try them on. He takes off his own trousers and is in the middle of failing to wrestle his way into the general’s when a group of Englishwomen enter the room. He and the narrator are forced to hide themselves in a dressing room, where Horne, admitting defeat, casts aside the general’s breeches. Meanwhile, the ladies, mistaking Horne’s trousers for sacred relics of the general, cut them up into sections and strips, intending to use the cloth (judged very fine) for a bag, a needlecase, a pincushion, a pen-wiper and leggings for the winter months. All that’s left behind is a ‘melancholy skeleton of seams and buttons’.

Horne is eventually smuggled back to the hotel under a cloak, and re-emerges the next day dressed as normal above the waist, but below in ‘a pair of red plush’, ending an inch from the knee, with socks black silk to the calf and white cotton thereafter. The narrator, meeting the ladies a few days later, gleefully informs them of their mistake. The story ends without the word ‘trousers’ having been used once.

Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite writes that Jeremy Corbyn’s response to the EHRC report on antisemitism in the Labour Party showed he ‘still didn’t get it’ (LRB, 7 November). Perhaps it’s Sutcliffe-Braithwaite who doesn’t get it. It is entirely correct to say that the antisemitism problem in Labour was ‘dramatically overstated’, as evidenced by the Forde Report, which she seems to consider a footnote.

Sutcliffe-Braithwaite alleges that Corbyn ‘gave his support to a blatantly antisemitic mural’. This ‘support’ consisted of nothing more than a reply to a Facebook post stating the mural was to be removed: ‘Why? You are in good company. Rockerfeller [sic] destroyed Diego Viera’s [sic] mural because it includes a picture of Lenin.’ Corbyn evidently presumed it was being taken down for political reasons. Sutcliffe-Braithwaite insinuates that Corbyn was actively opposing the removal of a mural that he knew to be antisemitic.

A smear of this sort puts a person in a double bind. If they apologise, it implies that the accusation had merit, but a dismissal means that they do not take the accusation of antisemitism seriously. Their supporters are put in a similar position: ridiculed as blindly partisan if they reject the smear, forced to perpetuate it in order to appear judicious. Pundits who wish to avoid the fray can limit themselves to criticising the victim’s ‘handling’ of the smear.

Antisemitism has been widely instrumentalised for political purposes in recent years. Bernie Sanders was accused of antisemitism, despite being Jewish. As the UN struggles to mitigate Israel’s genocide, an acute problem with its own antisemitism has been identified, and the secretary-general held responsible. Somehow, since the right-wing’s recapture of the Labour Party, its antisemitism problem has dematerialised. Sutcliffe-Braithwaite says that the Forde Report saw ‘both sides’ of the party as weaponising antisemitism, but I struggle to recall any occasion on which a Labour right-winger suffered.

The smear campaign against Labour peaked in 2018 when Corbyn was forced to apologise for appearing at an event in 2010 with Hajo Meyer, a Jewish survivor of Auschwitz, who had compared Israel to Nazi Germany. On the BBC’s Today programme, a Labour MP declared that it ‘breaches any form of normal decency’ to appear with Meyer. This sort of thing trivialises antisemitism and makes people feel afraid to openly criticise Israel.

Adam Thirlwell, writing about Yoko Tawada’s novel Suggested in the Stars, remarks that Hiruko ‘seems to be an avatar of the Japanese sun goddess, Amaterasu’ (LRB, 21 November). It helps to know that Hiruko (usually interpreted as ‘leech child’) is actually the first imperfect product of the union of the creation deities Izanagi and Izanami, seen as a horror and abandoned to the sea in a boat made of reeds. The origin of the imperfection is that the female initially suggested the union; if the male is allowed to speak first, all is well. The name Hiruko therefore bespeaks rejection from the outset, but since footnotes are anathema in the world of translated novels, all this is missed.

Stephen Allen points to a malaise in British book manufacturing (Letters, 21 November). Books printed and bound in the UK have become damaged goods. Viewed from the side, one may see the edges of their pages forming waves. When a book is opened out and placed on a table, it will snap shut. No amount of good editing or brilliant design can hide these material defects. Allen is right to identify the crucial factor of paper grain direction: horizontal, rather than – as is proper – parallel with the spine. The other factor is the glue used to hold the pages: no longer thinly spread water-based glues, but now hot-melt adhesives applied in a thick layer. Hot-melt dries instantly and therefore saves money.

The reason for all this is economic rationalisation. Binding is now usually part of a total production process that starts with PDF files for pages being sent to the printer and ends a few days later with boxes of printed books leaving the same factory. The machines in a production line, once configured, cannot be changed. A binding process that produces books with the wrong direction of paper grain suggests that craft knowledge has lost out in the attempt to optimise machine disposition on the factory floor.

The rationalisation of British publishing – most older imprints are now owned by one of the ‘big five’ conglomerates – is paralleled by the rationalisation of the printing and binding companies. Venerable firms, such as Clays or William Clowes, are now also owned by cross-national conglomerates. The pressures on the employees of these larger entities inhibit any decision that isn’t purely economic. The only way out is to get your books printed and bound elsewhere in the world by firms that still understand the working of paper and glue.

Dave Morris writes that the concept of zero ‘dates back … to Indian mathematicians of the third century bce’ (Letters, 7 November). The earliest extant manuscript containing the use of a zero symbol is, I believe, the Bakhshali manuscript, written on birch bark and found in 1881 in a village near Peshawar in what is now Pakistan. For some portions, a carbon date of 224-383 ce is proposed, and for other portions a date as late as 885-993, though this dating has been criticised on methodological grounds. The manuscript is written in an early form of Sharada script, used mainly in the north-west of the Indian subcontinent for writing Sanskrit and Kashmiri from the 7th century ce onwards, but apparently influenced by local dialects. It is entirely possible, however, that the mathematical concept of zero was invented or discovered earlier than this, perhaps in the 5th century ce by the mathematician and astronomer Aryabhata (who was familiar with the value of pi as 3.14 and the formula for a right-angled triangle), or even earlier. The concept of shunyam/sunyam – the Sanskrit for ‘emptiness’ or ‘nothingness’ – dates back to the Vedas, a collection of sacred texts most likely composed between 1500 and 1200 bce.

Hugh Pennington thinks Tom Shippey should have questioned what Pennington believes to be exaggerated mortality statistics in James Belich’s The World the Plague Made – specifically the claim that the Black Death killed half of Europe’s population in the mid-14th century (Letters, 21 November). Pennington also dismisses the picture of death and devastation described in chronicles and letters as ramblings of ‘the medieval mind … prone to exaggeration’.

According to an earlier consensus, the Great Pestilence claimed between 20 and 30 per cent of Europe’s population, but these figures were based on limited empirical evidence. Since the 1960s, historians and demographers have examined a variety of local sources, including censuses, tax records and manorial registers. The Norwegian historian Ole Jørgen Benedictow synthesised these disparate studies in The Black Death, 1346-53 (2004) and reached a startling conclusion: the plague killed approximately 60 per cent of Europe’s inhabitants, about fifty million out of a population of eighty million.