Letters

Perry Anderson adduces two points in arguing that the left needs, and does not have, ‘a politically coherent, empirically detailed, candid answer’ to ‘the problem of immigration’ (LRB, 3 April). First, he writes, ‘it is not pure myth that business imports cheap labour from abroad … to depress wages and in some cases to take jobs from local workers.’ The evidence suggests that immigration can have a small, temporary, local, sectoral negative impact on wages in some areas and contexts, particularly in low-paid unskilled work, though often at the expense of previous groups of immigrants rather than the ‘indigenous’. But this is of course not the way such a formulation (‘depress wages … take jobs … local workers’) is widely understood, much less deployed, especially on the right. Instead, it is a sweeping jeremiad, a national story of immigration-provoked (wage) decline. And at this level, the claim is flatly false – precisely ‘pure myth’. (Anderson himself gestures at the deunionisation and austerity, ‘flexible’ labour regimes, lack of investment and wage repression in neoliberalism that have been so effective in keeping real wages in the UK stagnant for almost twenty years.) And no matter how it is hedged, such a zero-sum analysis of national economies and employment rates with regard to immigration – ‘taking jobs’ from ‘local workers’ – not only makes no theoretical sense but has been falsified empirically. (See, among many other sources, ‘The Labour Market Effects of Immigration’ by the Migration Observatory at Oxford, 2023.)

Second, Anderson says that voters have usually not been consulted about ‘either the arrival or the scale of labour from abroad’. But then, after decades of neoliberalism, what are voters usually consulted about? And on what policies do their opinions have an effect? There is no democratic mandate for almost anything: pouring shit into rivers; declining real wages; the financialisation of public goods; skyrocketing inequality; the destruction of the universities; the underfunding of hospitals; and so endlessly on. To demand that the left should concern itself with the lack of democratic accountability tout court would be welcome, if hardly innovative. But instead, it is only immigration that Anderson cites on this point. Why? To suggest that among all the instances of democratic deficit, the left – like the right – should focus particularly and urgently on this one speaks of a political unconscious (or consciousness) for which immigration is distinct from and more pressing than other concerns, and that its terminology – like ‘local’ and ‘migrant’, ‘national’ and ‘foreign’ – must be considered meaningful political grundnorms, rather than ideological tools.

On immigration, socialist demands should include full labour and civic rights for migrants, full entitlement to benefits, unionisation across the economy, and an undoing of vulnerabilities that contribute to the super-exploitation of migrants.

Clearly immigration is distinct insofar as it is a highly effective wedge issue for the right. And that is something the left must indeed diagnose and confront. But Anderson takes the framing of the ‘problem of immigration’ as a starting point. Which is either to tail the right, or to accept its propaganda.

Daniel Soar mentions that Renzo Piano consulted Jean Tinguely on the design and construction of the Pompidou Centre (LRB, 6 February). Richard Rogers, who worked with Piano on that project and for whom I worked in the 1980s, told a story of his quest to get Tinguely to design a public artwork for the new Lloyd’s building in the City. Lloyd’s was sceptical of modern public art, but after much discussion Rogers had convinced the building committee that it should commission a kinetic sculpture by Tinguely.

After many months with no agreement reached on what the sculpture would be, when it would be ready and how much it might cost, a meeting loomed at which the matter had to be decided. Beforehand, Rogers finally got a commitment from Tinguely: he would design a clock, and have it completed before the planned opening, at an acceptable cost. Rogers had achieved his goal. Then, as they were finishing the call, Tinguely added: ‘But of course, Richard, I must insist that the clock never tell the correct time.’

Julian Bell claims that my book Gauguin and Polynesia is guilty of a ‘category mistake’ (LRB, 26 December 2024). I argued that major paintings, including D’où venons-nous? Que sommes-nous? Où allons-nous? and Mana’o tupapa’u, were incoherent or contradictory; Bell says that ‘those canvases are as coherent as their size, priming and oil medium will allow.’ Criticism, he adds, ‘flits and flickers’, whereas the works themselves are ‘concrete entities’.

This is an odd literalism. My argument was not that any Gauguin painting was materially or compositionally incoherent. I said that D’où venons-nous? was ‘a success as a painting, but a failure as a work of art’: it is resplendent, awe-inspiring, even formally perfect; but it doesn’t make sense. Thadée Natanson, lawyer, publisher and art critic, observed in 1898 that the models were Tahitians, but that the title, the invitation to reflect on our destiny, was in French and ‘very general’. This anticipated more recent objections that Gauguin gratuitously burdened Polynesians with his own take on European theology. Since the title was inscribed on the canvas, the gap between an image of the Islanders’ spiritual world and the artist’s idiosyncratic pseudo-philosophy is present in the work – not some discrepancy attributed to it, after the fact, by flitting or flickering criticism.

The same is true of Gauguin’s most notorious painting, Mana’o tupapa’u, which reworked Manet’s Olympia in a Tahitian setting. Its sexual reference was therefore inescapable, yet Gauguin repeatedly asserted that it was not ‘indecent’ or erotic but concerned with Tahitian spirituality, and in particular the omnipresence and fear of the dead. Incoherence may or may not be the right word, but there is certainly a profound tension in this painting, which precedes the interpretation the artist tried and failed to pre-empt.

Such tensions or contradictions are not limited to the best-known paintings from the Pacific but are also prominent in earlier works from Brittany and elsewhere. Hence a portrait of a well-known Breton woman in customary dress (La Belle Angèle) has to include an odd, exotic idol (a Gauguin pot, inspired by pre-Columbian ceramics) – as gratuitous a work-within-a-work as one can find. The abusive and confrontational nature of Gauguin, as a person, has been a cliché since Somerset Maugham published The Moon and Sixpence in 1919. The artist’s propensity to stage confrontations in his painting, or his inability to refrain from doing so, is what makes the work rich, unresolved and rewarding, even now.

I must emend Colin Burrow’s entertaining reflections on the Grimms’ fairy tales in a few particulars (LRB, 20 March). First, the account of self-mutilation in Cinderella (‘Cinderella’s sisters cut off their toes in order to fit into her slipper’) is incomplete. One stepsister cuts off her big toe, while the other stepsister cuts off a chunk of her heel, in both cases coached by their mother, who provides a knife and says: ‘When you are queen, you will not need to walk.’ Second, Burrow describes the Grimms’ stories as set in ‘kingdoms amicably separated by forests, which might be full of wolves or witches or princes cursed to range around them in the form of a bear. Apart from the cursed bear-princes, that landscape does sound quite like the fissiparated Germany made up of many minor kingdoms in which the Grimms grew up.’ In fact there are no ‘kingdoms amicably separated’ in the tales, which describe a world of ceaseless war, or in history itself (shortly before the birth of the Grimms, the Hessian Palatinate was devastated in the Seven Years’ War and exported about sixteen thousand mercenaries to fight for England in America). What’s more, the Grimms presumably did grow up believing in cursed bear-princes in the woods. A core European value is to believe that, although humans can often be killed without compunction, especially if they belong to other groups, advanced furry predators such as wolves and bears are often divine and secretly human.

I don’t wish to dispute Daniel Soar’s assertion that Constance Garnett ‘didn’t know Russian well’, but her having ‘kept a dictionary by her deckchair’ seems to me scant evidence (LRB, 6 March). What writer would claim to know every sense and nuance of every word in a second language as well as in his native tongue? (Perhaps Nabokov.) As a French-to-English translator, I keep three well-used unabridged French dictionaries on my desk and frequently consult two online French dictionaries besides (Le Littré and the Trésor de la langue française informatisé). For that matter, I keep four English dictionaries within reach too.

Peter Geoghegan, in his profile of Paul Marshall, quotes someone’s remark that the ‘cancellation’ of Marshall’s son, Winston, ‘is a big part of why Paul is the way he is now’ (LRB, 6 March). Geoghegan isn’t the only journalist to have floated this narrative, but there were clear signs of Marshall’s far-right politics before Winston left Mumford and Sons in 2021. In April 2016, in the run-up to the EU referendum, Marshall appeared on Question Time and issued a long tirade about immigration: ‘The population forecast for the world for the next twenty to thirty years is to go from seven billion to ten billion, most of those extra people are going to be in Africa, they’re all going to have mobile phones, and they’re all going to be hearing about how great it is in the EU … and staying within the EU, with the current set of policies, you can’t do anything about it.’ A year later, on 5 June 2017 (as reported by Financial News), Marshall retweeted a link on Twitter from the extreme-right website Truthfeed alleging ‘close ties’ between Sadiq Khan and al-Qaida. The next day he followed up by tweeting at Khan directly: ‘Tell us about your brother-in-law.’ Winston Marshall didn’t turn his father to the reactionary right: he joined him there.

Colm Tóibín’s piece on Patrick Joyce has prompted some interesting letters about the ascent of Croagh Patrick, but they only address half the problem (Letters, 6 March and 3 April). In Galway last year I overheard three friends delighting in the discomfort of their friend Declan. He had been devout enough to climb the Reek barefoot but stupid enough to forget to bring any shoes with him for the journey back down. His feet understandably ‘were in pieces’. Speaking as someone who loves the mountain and whose family are all from Mayo, I should say that the people who ascend it barefoot or on their knees are not a representative sample.

Paul Taylor’s revelation that DeepSeek’s new AI model mutters ‘Wait, no, actually, no. Wait …’ while solving problems is oddly reassuring (LRB, 20 March). At last, a machine that mirrors my own decision-making process when choosing between pudding options at my local Spoons.