Letters

Patrick McGuinness quotes from Chris Jefferies’s statement to the Leveson Inquiry (LRB, 6 February). Leveson cited his treatment by newspapers as an instance in which the press had shown itself ‘indifferent to individual privacy and casual in its approach to truth, even when the stories were potentially extremely damaging for the individuals involved’. But what if Jefferies had been put on trial? The courts have repeatedly backed away from finding that the sort of coverage Jefferies received would make a trial unfair or a conviction unsafe. Abu Hamza, the trade unionists of the Shrewsbury 24, Rosemary West (coincidentally prosecuted by Leveson as a QC in 1995), and many other defendants, all presumptively innocent until proven guilty, were multiply convicted in advance by the media. The courts say it doesn’t matter. The justifications given – the impact fades because today’s newspaper is tomorrow’s chip wrapping, and in any case the jury can make up its own mind about the evidence – won’t wash when every ‘extremely damaging’ news report or ignorant and malevolent opinion on social media is available for ever. The more you say ‘Don’t mention the war!’ the harder it becomes not to mention the war.

Christopher Clark mentions that when Angela Merkel spoke at the Munich Security Conference in 2007 about the need for dialogue with Russia, Putin responded ‘by rejecting the notion of a “unipolar world … in which there is one master, one sovereign”, and went on to denounce the US, which had “overstepped its national boundaries in every way”’ (LRB, 20 February). Merkel, according to Clark, ‘was irritated by the self-righteousness and the hypocrisy’. But where is the hypocrisy? Despite its conflicts with former Soviet countries (Chechnya and Georgia), Russia at that time was not attempting to place itself at the head of a power bloc seeking global domination. The US, on the other hand, since the end of the Second World War, and particularly since the break-up of the power bloc centred on the Soviet Union, has consistently striven to extend its global political and economic hegemony, to make itself, in Obama’s words, into the ‘one indispensable nation’. Vincent Bevins’s article in the same issue provides several instances of this in Africa (Ghana and Congo) and South-East Asia. Trump’s plan to empty Gaza of its inhabitants and turn it into a prime piece of real estate is merely the most recent and unashamed example of this trend.

Colm Tóibín mention Patrick Joyce’s commentary on Josef Koudelka’s photograph Ireland 1972, a portrait of three pilgrims climbing Croagh Patrick (LRB, 20 February). ‘The men in the photograph are not named,’ Tóibín writes. ‘That would be to ruin the whole show.’ But as Tóibín goes on to say, Joyce does identify the men. In doing so he puts his finger in photography’s unhealed wound.

Koudelka began his career photographing in the theatre, and while Ireland 1972 is carefully composed and has plenty of drama, the image abstracts the men from the actuality of their daily lives and turns them into actors taking part in a scene. Unwittingly, the individual is pressed into the service of another’s aims. This is especially the case with images of working-class subjects. It is in the nature of photography that the individuals it depicts as archetypal figures are also recognisable people, in this case Séan Joyce, Paddy Kenny and Máirtín Maingín. Were photographers (and viewers) to be mindful that their subjects are individuals with lives that transcend the moment in which their image is captured, much of the class tourism and central-casting mindset of so much photography could be set aside.

Stefan Collini mentions Karl Polanyi’s wife, Ilona Duczyńska, only to say that she ‘spoke of how his years in Britain in the mid and late 1930s nourished [his] “abysmal hatred of the market system”’. Duczyńska, an intellectual and activist, had an immense impact on Polanyi. His critical stance on revolutionary communism and the explicitly non-Marxist structure of The Great Transformation, as well as his theory of class, came partly from their discussions.

I was in touch last year with Polanyi’s daughter, Kari, who is now 101. She contributed to numerous books, seminars and other projects on her father’s work, all while pursuing a distinguished career as a development economist.

Matt Foot takes a familiar swipe at Lord Denning, citing the excruciating passage in Denning’s judgment in a civil appeal from the Birmingham Six, where he referred to an establishment cover-up being ‘such an appalling vista that every sensible person in the land would say: it cannot be right these actions should go any further’ (LRB, 23 January). That case was indeed far from Denning’s finest hour. It is worth noting, though, that he was only one of three judges who dismissed the action, and many other public officials must also share responsibility for the injustice. But by then Denning’s fame, as well as his unique style of judicial prose, meant that almost all the attention (and blame) was on him. In very old age, he made remarks at least as offensive about the Guildford Four. In both instances, Denning apologised and retracted his words when it was made clear to him that he was wrong.

Raymond N. MacKenzie describes Balzac’s gargantuan ambition, in his Comédie humaine, to capture a complete picture of France populated with ‘the two or three thousand conspicuous types of a period’ (LRB, 23 January). This recalls James Joyce’s helpful assistance to future town planners: he told Frank Budgen – as Budgen reports in James Joyce and the Making of ‘Ulysses’ (1934) – that he wished ‘to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book’.

Discussing the case of ‘Susan’, a young female patient who had received ECT and as a consequence lost ‘the sense of the reality of the world and of herself in the world’, Clair Wills claims that the psychoanalyst Marion Milner interpreted Susan’s drawing ‘in itself as a measure of mental wellbeing and adjustment’ (LRB, 20 February). This doesn’t do justice to the years of sessions in which Milner sat and thought with Susan about her ‘doodles’, interpreting them and helping her patient think about herself and her world. Wills underappreciates Milner’s depth of insight and her innovative use of her patients’ need for contact and connection. Far from being ‘an analyst floundering’ or a representative of ‘a whole analytical school in trouble’, Milner’s working life spanned a heyday of psychoanalysis. Not just in the consulting room but in general practice, specialist medical care, social services, schools, prisons, the army, management theory, community care and the arts, psychoanalytic thinking permeated society in the postwar decades.

T.J. Clark’s thinking about Trump and the spectacle can be extended to the conception of time (LRB, 23 January). One of the governing conceptions of time since the Enlightenment has been the spectacle of progress. Liberals always expect to start off slowly in a conflict, since their ‘humanity’ inhibits them and chokes their aggressive ‘animal’ instincts. Losing at first is an affirmation. ‘Togetherness’, the uniting of humanity, eventually stirs, rallies, then finally storms to victory. Every liberal drama follows this pattern, and politics is no exception. Losing to Trump, then winning in 2020, fitted the pattern – hence the complacency of the Biden presidency and the Democrats more generally. Trump making his own comeback in a third act is an ‘illiberal’ break in the timeline.

Though it was a joy for me to read Adam Shatz’s enthusiastic appreciation of Olivier Messiaen, I feel obliged to defend my teacher against the allegation of antisemitism (LRB, 20 February). No question, his remark that by sentencing Jesus Christ to death the Jews had committed deicide was lamentable, even though it sprang from a naive willingness to accept traditional Catholic teaching and not from malevolence or racism. Throughout his life Messiaen admired and befriended Jews, ranging from Paul Dukas, his beloved teacher at the Paris Conservatoire, to the contemporary composer he probably preferred above all others, György Ligeti. I too am Jewish, and can testify to Messiaen’s unstinting support and devotion over many years.

Robert Hunter recounts a 1977 meeting between President Jimmy Carter and the Grenadian prime minister Eric Gairy, who was known for his obsession with UFOs, during which Gairy presented Carter with an invitation to visit Saturn’s moon Titania, from its supreme leader (Letters, 20 February). ‘Carter did not react,’ Hunter writes, but he may have been more sympathetic than many. He himself had sighted an unidentified flying object in Georgia in 1969 and had even filed a report on the incident with the International UFO Bureau. During his presidential campaign in 1976, Carter had pledged: ‘I’ll never make fun of people who say they’ve seen unidentified objects in the sky.’