Letters

A few days before the publication of Dani Garavelli’s piece about the suicides of young people in state custody in Scotland, the Princess of Wales visited HMP Styal’s Mother and Baby Unit (LRB, 20 February). Styal is a prison and young offender institution for women near Wilmslow in Cheshire. A press release explained that the princess was there to ‘highlight the importance of strong, loving and consistent mother and baby relationships to a child’s development, even in the most challenging of environments’. She was filmed listening to staff, who spoke about the trauma inmates had suffered in their lives; behind her was a sign promoting the charity that runs the unit, its slogan ‘Safe and Happy Childhood’.

In June 2020 a baby, Brooke Powell, died at HMP Styal. The Prisons and Probation Ombudsman report into her death (categorised as a stillbirth) said there had been ‘missed opportunities to identify that her mother needed urgent clinical attention’. On 26 September 2019, Aisha Cleary was born at HMP Bronzefield in Surrey, run by Sodexo, but died hours later. The coroner concluded in 2023 that there had been serious operational and systemic failings. Aisha’s mother, Rianna, just eighteen at the time, had tried to apply for bail after being remanded to Bronzefield a month before, but was refused help getting a place in a bail hostel. Aisha was ‘delivered in a prison cell without medical assistance’ and had no ‘chance of resuscitation and survival’.

The NHS has categorised all pregnancies in prison as ‘high-risk’ because of the nature of the custodial environment. In April 2024 a new mitigating factor was introduced to Sentencing Council guidelines regarding pregnancy, childbirth and postnatal care. Yet pregnant women continue to be sent to prison, where they are seven times more likely to go through a stillbirth and almost twice as likely to have a premature birth.

Channel 4 recently screened an interview with a woman who described being shackled and restrained while in labour two years ago. This is, of course, against guidelines. The channel also reported that on 20 February this year a woman was subject to similar treatment after giving birth. United Nations rules for the treatment of women prisoners state that instruments of restraint shall never be used on women during labour, during birth or immediately after. But as Garavelli notes, unlike the police and the NHS, prisons across the UK currently have crown immunity from prosecution for breaches of the Health and Safety at Work Act. This creates an ‘institutional culture’ whereby the prison service, as she puts it, ‘knows it’s untouchable’.

Further to Joe Keaney’s letter about Ulysses being, in Joyce’s view, a picture of Dublin so complete it could be used to reconstruct the city should it disappear, and to Tom Stevenson’s article on Linear Elamite in the same issue, we can draw a satisfying line back to Adam Shatz’s piece on Messiaen (LRB, 20 February and 6 March). The composer’s organ cycle Méditations sur le Mystère de la Sainte Trinité contains excerpts from scripture, the Eucharist, and the words of Thomas Aquinas encoded in music such that they could be recovered if French ever died out.

The letters of the alphabet are assigned a given pitch with a certain duration. The letter C is a quaver of pitch middle C; a quaver of pitch one octave below middle C is Q, and so on. Verb cases, être, avoir and Dieu are assigned sequences of notes and durations. The 75-minute cycle also contains a number of birdcalls, though they are often ‘translated’ too. Because many birdcalls are microtonal, Messiaen had to ‘scale them up’ until their smallest melodic interval was playable on a keyboard, namely the minor second (a semitone). As such, his birdcalls share the contours of their avian forms, but sometimes imagination is needed to identify them. Helpfully, Messiaen usually cited his sources in the printed score, and their rhythms are unmistakable.

I was struck, reading Adam Shatz’s essay on Messiaen, by the similarities between the French composer and Alexander Scriabin, the mad monk of the late romantic period. Like Messiaen, Scriabin experienced music as colour. His later music is mystical, apocalyptic and erotic. He intended to bring about the end of the world by performing his Mysterium in the foothills of the Himalayas.

While studying in Vienna, my piano teacher abandoned Haydn for Scriabin. ‘When a student studies Scriabin,’ his professor remarked, ‘it’s a sure sign of the end.’ Perhaps, Scriabin and Messiaen would argue, the end is the point.

Adam Shatz notes that Messiaen’s acolytes were known as ‘les flèches’, explaining that this means ‘arrows’ in English. It does, but ‘une flèche’ in colloquial French also means someone sharp and quick-witted. Today, it is more usual to hear the term used in the negative (‘C’est pas une flèche’) to indicate someone slow on the uptake.

Ormond Simpson’s mention of an old Ghanaian newspaper having recourse to a mixture of typefaces to print a single word made me smile as I read it in a favourite Berlin bar, Zwiebelfisch (Letters, 20 February). On the bar’s sign the letter ‘b’ is in a font and colour very different from the rest of the word, which means ‘onionfish’. This was a printers’ term for a piece of type used in the wrong case. The Dutch writer Cees Nooteboom included a version of the bar in his novel All Souls’ Day (1998), changing its name to the Tintenmaus, or Inkmouse. The bar’s cat, Zappa, was famous for vomiting on tourists’ coats when they put them on the shelves above the radiators. I had free whiskies there for six months in exchange for an artwork which hung on the wall until it was stolen.

Daniel Soar discusses Jean Tinguely’s kinetic sculptures (LRB, 6 February). His influence seems clear, not least on the work of Peter Fischli and David Weiss. I am thinking particularly of the causal train of events they constructed in a disused factory, shown in an entrancing video, Der Lauf der Dinge (‘The Way Things Go’), from 1987. A few years later a television advertisement for Honda, ‘Cog’, featured a similar chain of events using car parts. Given Tinguely’s love of cars I think he might have approved, but Fischli and Weiss threatened to sue.

Daniel Soar mentions Jean Tinguely’s involvement with the Pompidou Centre in its early days, but not the Stravinsky Fountain, built in 1983 adjacent to the Pompidou, close to the centre for research into contemporary music. The sixteen sculptures created for the fountain basin by Tinguely and Niki de Saint Phalle are thematic homages to Stravinsky’s music. The fountain fell into neglect some years ago but has recently been restored by the Mairie de Paris. Mention should also be made of the Tinguely Museum in Basel, built with a magnificent zinc roof in 1996 by the Swiss architect Mario Botta; its collection includes 55 of Tinguely’s works, donated by Saint Phalle.

There don’t seem to be any gamers at the LRB. Thomas Jones, writing about Laurent Binet’s Perspectives, compares a fictional Benvenuto Cellini’s implausible claim that he made a death-defying leap ‘from the roof of the Palazzo della Signoria, landing unhurt in a conveniently parked hay cart below’ to the stunts of Errol Flynn and Buster Keaton (LRB, 6 March). I wonder if Binet was actually thinking of Ezio Auditore da Firenze, protagonist of the 2009 video game Assassins’ Creed II. The game includes digital reconstructions of various historical locations, including the Palazzo della Signoria in Florence, and, like Binet’s novel, has a far-fetched plot involving the Medici family. In it, the player spends much of the time bounding across the rooftops of Renaissance Italy and, if spotted by the guards, can evade capture by swan-diving into conveniently parked hay carts below.

Rosemary Hill relays Anne Higonnet’s suggestion that the death by drowning in heavy garments of the heroine in Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s Paul et Virginie (1788) makes her ‘literature’s first fashion victim’ (LRB, 6 March). But this distinction surely belongs to Ophelia, whose garments initially held her up but then, ‘heavy with their drink/Pulled the poor wretch from her melodious lay/To muddy death’.

Colm Tóibín refers to Luis Buñuel’s film from 1933, Las Hurdes: Tierra sin Pan (‘Land without Bread’), as a documentary on peasant life (LRB, 20 February). ‘The actual world of the peasant seemed scarcely credible to outsiders,’ he writes, but Buñuel’s film probably won’t help to bridge the gap. Brian Winston, in Claiming the Real (1995), describes it as a ‘parody of a travelogue’, with its strange juxtapositions, curious use of music and a commentary which, at times, seems at odds with the images. As Tóibín notes, the voiceover states that the people of Las Hurdes eat only those goats that have fallen to their deaths. On screen, a goat then obliges by doing just that. However, a puff of smoke, barely visible at the bottom of the frame, suggests that the poor creature has been shot.

Barry Goldman quotes Bertrand Russell’s account of his encounter, as a 17-year-old, with William Gladstone (Letters, 10 October 2024). Russell first told that story in an interview with John Anstey, recorded on four sides of an LP around 1959. At the time, I was responsible for the material in a syndicated weekly column titled ‘Pete Murray’s Record Review’. A few excellent recordings came my way among the mountains of tedious stuff. In the interview Russell was asked about his attitude to the two world wars. The cause of the First World War was, he said, the Kaiser’s desire ‘to have a bigger fleet than Grandmamma’s’. Hitler, though, was ‘a monster who had to be destroyed’.

Jessie Childs, writing about Simon Parkin’s The Forbidden Garden of Leningrad, captures the relentlessness of the Siege of Leningrad and its unpredictabilities, in particular the survival of the Institute of Plant Breeding (LRB, 6 February). Childs says that Parkin’s book is the first in English about the plant institute. The first historical account, perhaps, but I recommend Elise Blackwell’s novel Hunger (2008), which is about the plant institute, Vavilov and survival.